fieldus

Andy Gill: ‘Why I hate Coldplay’ - Features, Music - The Independent

In the event, the album is almost exactly as I expected, if a tad shorter on Big Anthems than the previous three. The rhythms are a bit busier, and a bit more ethnic, and Chris Martin’s little falsetto catch – one of modern music’s most irritating tropes – has been rationed out more parsimoniously. (Thanks, Eno!) Pop’s favourite Brianiac has ensured the sonic prerequisites are all in good order. And in a few cases, the songs do seem to be about things, rather than just anaemic expressions of emotional indulgence and limp consolation, like X & Y. Things like death, and war, and power. It’s… not much, really, but not so little as to be completely worthless. It’s the new Gold Standard of Average Music. And given the competition currently battling for that dubious honour, this is no mean feat. Almost an achievement, in fact.

and this one - without knowing the back catalogue, I would guess there are scores to choose from:

By 2005’s X & Y, the band had shifted slightly from outright self-pity to broader misgivings, a move marked by the shift from first-person to second-person in songs like “Fix You” and “A Message”, cunningly enlisting their audience as co-mopers through songs of solace articulating vague, windy concerns – “I’m scared about the future and I want to talk to you”, “When you feel so tired and you can’t sleep/Stuck in reverse”, etc – invariably resolved in mealy-mouthed platitudes like “I will try to fix you” and “You don’t have to be alone”.

There’s no real sense of grappling with the social or political causes of the problems, just a bland emotional poultice applied to the wound. They’ve become the sonic security-blanket for millions of fans, their tracks sweeping by with the epic solemnity of state funerals, their huge, heartbreaking chord changes sucker-punching you with emotional logic while sapping any anger or political engagement – in the existential sense – that you might otherwise experience. Instead, Chris Martin offers a consoling arm around the shoulder and a nice cup of tea. But rarely can a claim have been less borne out by circumstance than “I will fix you”: with Coldplay, it’s never more than cold comfort.

In this respect, the band’s name is one of the most appropriate in rock. It’s redolent of pale complexions and dead emotions: whenever I hear it, it always evokes a glassy-eyed fish on a fishmonger’s slab, ice melting from its scales. Ironically, it was coined by Tim Rice-Oxley, who had stopped using it for his own band as he considered it “too depressing”. Rice-Oxley was apparently invited to join Coldplay, but instead chose Keane, which suggests a serious frying pan/fire interface. Still, at least it wasn’t Snow Patrol or Athlete, the weediest of the Coldplay copyists trailing in the band’s wake.

I posted on The Times website when Coldplay last released an album. I’d been lassooed by the catchiness of the tune for ‘Fix You’, but felt aggrieved that the lyrics were that feeble:

‘Lights will guide you home and ignite your bones’
from ‘Fix You’

It’s easy to pick holes in pop lyrics, but surely an intelligent UCL grad like Chris Martin could come up with something better than this? For all their fastidiousness in the studio it’s clear that Coldplay aren’t above lazy, hack work where it matters most.

Despite its anthemic karaoke-ready tunefulness, it was inevitable that someone was going to have a pop some point. It’s like Tibor Fischer’s famous mauling of Martin Amis’s novel Yellow Dog. Sooner or later someone is going to point out that the emperor’s au naturel.

In fact, the New York Times critic was measured: he made explicit the influence of Radiohead and U2 and noted the wheedling tenor/falsetto that Chris Martin uses to emote the limited and self indulgent ‘Coldplay’ palette of emotions.

Chris Martin told the New York Post that he was devastated by New York Times’ review. I’m not suprised - selling millions of records, winning the hand of a Hollywood princess and scruffy/expensive Hoxton styling might be enough to inflate a bubble of grandiousity around any of us.

Not that the ever so ‘right on’ Martin would recognise any of this. Sensitivity and stadium rock may have served the band well up till now, but I think its sell-by date is fast approaching.

Technorati Tags: coldplay, review, bad,

High spirits | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

Outside its quotation marks, Baudelaire’s argument is nowadays almost impossible to make publicly. But before the statisticians and their nannies eclipse all possibility of praising drunkenness - beyond the prim encomiums to the health benefits of an occasional glass of red wine - it is worth pausing to remember that alcohol is one of increasingly few psychological resources for the vital but often overlooked experience of excess.

Getting drunk, in which the quotidiadrn economies of intention and expression, perception and reaction, are turned topsy-turvy, temporarily levels the creeping walls of propriety with which the rampant public sphere bears down upon the dwindling private domain. The chance to see things differently for a time - a chance given away so cheaply with a few pints in the pub - is often the only thing separating life as a broken cog from life as a full person, giddy with emotion, hiccupping from gulping down the sweet air of human freedom.

No one should pretend that alcohol addiction is in some way better than other kinds of addiction. Nor should there be any doubt that our society’s fondness for binge drinking is related to the spreading epidemic of extreme casual violence. “Booze Britain” is both real and ugly. But it seems to me that the more we publicly condemn the private practice of getting slightly pie-eyed as a quiet, usually fairly harmless way of subverting the hideous, alienated, hypercommodified obliteration of significance that is contemporary existence, the more likely it seems to me that those with a private fondness for the bottle may become alcoholics, as well as becoming publicly diagnosed as such.

Technorati Tags: drinking, boundaries, moderation

Last Night’s TV:
Imagine…Doris Lessing – The Hostess And The Alien, BBC1

I approached the film a little warily, nervous that it might settle for the clichés of formidable old age, indifferent to social and cultural convention. I’d reckoned without Doris Lessing, whose entire life seems to have been conducted with a wild daring, and Jill Nicholls, the director, who crafted a compelling, even challenging, portrait of a completely original artist.

“I despise people who don’t experiment with their lives,” Lessing once wrote, and she unquestionably lived up to her own credo. You can’t do such a thing, of course, without also experimenting with the lives of those attached to you, which in Lessing’s case included the young children she abandoned when she walked out of her first marriage. Lessing got edgy when questioned about this, but it says something about the film that you felt persuaded of the necessity of her flight. And if you wanted proof of her poetic power as a fabulist, it came right at the end when she described a childhood memory of luring moths out of the African night with a hand smeared with honey, as good an image of the writer’s talent for drawing things out of obscurity as you could want.

Salon review
Diary - in the LRB
Observer review
New York Times review
Bookslut review
Lasdun interview @ identitytheory.com

Review by Scarlett Thomas in The Independent:

Nothing in this haunting novel is there by accident, just as no human behaviour, according to Freud, is truly “accidental” either. There is a reference to Freud’s notion of parapraxis (errors and slips created by the unconscious) on the very first page, and then the narrative unfolds like a shape emerging in a kaleidoscope.

The protagonist Lawrence Miller teaches Gender Studies and serves on his university’s Sexual Harassment committee. The novel begins as he loses his place in a book and, as a result, begins to notice odd changes occurring in his office. He then starts to suspect that he isn’t the only person using the room - that an insane sexual predator and misogynist, Bogomil Trumilcik, may be sleeping there at night. A lot of the mysterious goings- on in this novel occur at night, as though they were parts of a dream. And the novel is - in the truest, psychoanalytic sense of the term - dreamlike. We can learn from psychoanalysis that dreams are manifestations of unconscious thought and have their own poetic language of metaphor, metonymy and juxtaposition. This is a novel written in that language, almost geometrically so.

At one point in the novel Miller throws away a glass eye. His attempted disposal of this object (the eye/I) is a failure: “I took Mr Kurwen’s eye from my pocket and hurled it into the half-frozen lake. Instead of landing in the water, it embedded itself in a floating island of ice, staring skyward.” It is not enough to read this as a metaphor for attempted repression; the reader will also want to ask (but perhaps not want to know) what exactly the narrator is trying to repress.

This novel is so creepy because it is so clever. Only in the last few pages do you realise, or begin to realise, what you’ve read, and even then you’re not sure. Images from the book flicker in your mind like images from a forgotten, disturbing dream. And this isn’t even your own dream but someone else’s. You suddenly feel that you - and he - have been engaged in an act of vast, mutual misreading. It would take another book to explain the symbolism, coincidences and symmetries within this narrative. A brilliant novel that must be reread at least once, this is easy to follow, with clear, spare prose but the ultimate effect is a vast enigma, a puzzle with a troubling, instinctive conclusion.

Book Review - ‘The Drunkard’s Walk,’ by Leonard Mlodinow - Review - NYTimes.com

When statistics are used in a court of law the effect can be just as misleading. Mlodinow recalls the O. J. Simpson trial, in which the prosecution depicted the defendant as an inveterate wife abuser. One of Simpson’s lawyers, Alan Dershowitz, countered with statistics: in the United States, four million women are battered every year by their male partners, yet only one in 2,500 is ultimately murdered by her partner.

The jury may have found that persuasive, but it’s a spurious argument. Nicole Brown Simpson was already dead. The relevant question was what percentage of all battered women who are murdered are killed by their abusers. The answer, Mlodinow notes, didn’t come up in the trial. It was 90 percent.

Lawyers, it seems, are no better than doctors at this kind of math. But juries are even worse.

Excellent example. The first statistic, prima facie, has some relevance. The scales fall from our eyes only when the question is formulated in the correct way. Salutary.Technorati Tags: statistics, law, dershowitz, mlodinow

Catherine Townsend: Sleeping Around - Catherine Townsend, Columnists - The Independent

…my passion for British men was reignited this week after I agreed to a blind date with an American. “This guy is a writer too, and he’s really emotionally aware,” my friend Victoria said.

I should have known that this would be the death knell for our date. Much as I love dissecting my feelings over cocktails, I want to be fantasising about leaping into bed on a first date, not lying on a therapist’s couch.

But Ben was handsome and fit, and within 20 minutes he had clasped my hands in his. “So, Cat, tell me something you’ve never told anyone.”

Of course, this is really shorthand for, “Tell me a mildly embarrassing story that makes you look cute in the end,” so I told him a funny childhood anecdote and said, “Over to you.”

“Well, when I was a boy, I used to dress up as a little girl, and my dad would beat me with a wooden spoon until I bled.”

I looked for a punchline, but there wasn’t one, so I panicked, reached for the bar snacks and smiled. “Peanut?” I was trying to defuse an awkward situation with humour, which is probably why British men and I get along so well.

Ben probably would have been Canadian journalist Leah McLaren’s dream date. I read this week that she is cashing in on the portrayal of English men as drunk women-haters who are too polite and repressed ever to make a move by turning one of her pieces, headlined “The Tragic Ineptitude of the English Male”, into a television drama in Canada.

Maybe I’m the one with the problem. Ben understands intimacy and had no problem giving me his attention, but for me, it was too much, too soon.

John Lichfield: Our Man In Paris - John Lichfield, Commentators - The Independent

Interesting report from the Paris known to us from La Haine and Caché. I guess the North Circular could be looked at in the same way, although a lot of the deprived areas in London are within its bounds.

Armando Iannucci: Want to be mildly rich? Read on | Comment is free | The Observer

‘The Willpower Pathway to How to Get Absolutely Something of What You Want’

Adopts a new psychological approach to material goal-setting, using a methodology known as ‘transformative goal adjustments’ whereby the individual is taught by means of a number of sophisticated breathing exercises and bladder control techniques to convince him or herself that their material ambitions are set slightly too high. They are then given 10 days in which to experience for themselves how they have no money anyway and therefore that it’s just as well they downgraded their ambitions.

Noel Edmonds says: ‘This method is great. I always wanted to own 50 helicopters by the time I was 63, but, by using the Transformative Goal Adjustments breathing apparatus and prostate clamps I have retrained my material self to demand from me only three or maybe four helicopters at a push. Since I already own these due to my quiz show success, I have instantly achieved all my goals.’

What Nabokov said about Chekhov, quoted with salience and commitment by the Chicago-based Bosnian writer Aleksandar Hemon in the course of an interview published on the Other Voices website.

Some interesting things to say about ‘imperial fiction’ - he’s not a big fan of Ian McEwan. Not having read McEwan since ENDURING LOVE, I’m not in a good position to judge. CHESIL BEACH didn’t sound overly ambitious or monumental, though. Despite the imperial label, he still admires Bellow and Nabokov ardently.

He proposes a sentence writing course for those interested in the descriptive mode of writing fiction (he contrasts this with the confessional mode)

where paying attention to language suggests artifice, and artifice prevents truthfulness, so it’s rattling and rambling with lazy syntax and punctuation and where tag-words like “you know,” “I guess,” “you guys” suggests sincerity.

He dislikes sloppiness so much that he proposes the foundation of a sentence writing course:

I taught a course for writing students, “Reading Russian Writers”—because many of them had not read many foreign writers. We spent an hour and a half on a paragraph in Lolita. The point was not to get them to love it, but to isolate it. It’s the one that describes the death of his mother: “Picnic, lightning.” So beautiful. We paused on the paragraph—syntactical analysis and everything…

Doesn’t like a bad idea.

Interesting man.

Opposite Temple tube, a group of friendly London fishermen: