Stanley Spencer's "Looking to Heaven: Vol. 1": Book Review

Two million words from this English artist's manuscripts fill notebooks and diaries at the Tate. Stanley Spencer's grandson, John, edits what he confesses to be "an almost impossible task." His forebear kept starting and stopping attempts to create his definitive account of himself. "I don't want a tidy book," the senior Spencer''s cited here, for "life is not tidy." This statement may surprise those who visit the well-preserved (if far more trafficked today) Berkshire village of Cookham, site of his birth. There a small museum displays many of his skewed depictions of his neighbors placed into biblical or visionary scenes, alongside his accomplished pastoral paintings of the place where he spent most of his life. That hamlet remains neatly preserved in its heart. There many of Spencer's landscapes remain recognizable to the careful viewer over a century after Stanley began his storied and odd career.

John Spencer observes that his grandfather "has been variously presented as a village simpleton, an eccentric, haunted by the erotic, a recluse, an egoist, a victim of circumstance--and also a visionary, a complete original, and one of the greatest British artists of the twentieth century." Finally, readers can begin to judge for themselves, from Stanley's diligent letters and lists, the first stages of his British success.

Volume one commences with Spencer's recollections of his youth. Born in 1891, his sketches from his teens appear gracing the margins of this handsome publication. Already a command of line draws one's attention. At fifteen, he began watercolor lessons. These prepared him for matriculation at the premier Slade School of Fine Art, from 1908 to 1912. He commuted to London and back each day.

Tellingly, his classmates nicknamed him "Cookham." Yet he admits that what he "felt" in his village could not be expressed at the Slade. "My knowledge developed by the experience of a series of drunken experiences," unrelated to each other. The key adjective here denotes not inebriation from alcohol, but elevation from his environment, and what he calls an oracular sense of contact with the "Grand Vision." This encompassed his work and his life's perspective, as an alchemy stirring up the quotidian into the mystical. Although a Christian, his faith remained peculiar, generated from within.

His canvas, "John Donne Arriving in Heaven," by 1911 confirms his direction. The Pre-Raphaelites and Giotto combined with modernist elements and foreshortened angles at this formative juncture. The characteristics evident early on would motivate him for a half-century. His return from Slade to his "earthly paradise" back in Berkshire inspired him to create "Apple Gatherers." The wide-eyed or off-handed depiction of faces and gestures looms out of the surface. Limbs distend; bodies contort.

These contortions prefigured his entry into a war that would end this idyll. Stanley's older brothers enlisted. He with a younger sibling joined a Home Hospital Service in the Royal Medical Corps. But he confides to his close friend, Henry Lamb, also now in uniform, that he himself fears being called a slacker. Returning to Cookham, those "wounded are always quiet and never say a word about our not joining." Reading Dostoevsky's The Possessed and hearing a Beethoven movement that portended to Stanley the end of the world reveal his troubled conscience. He tries to align his resistance to brutality with the need to be "a manly man" as a stereotypical loyal young zealot ready to march off.

By his mid-twenties, already known by poet-soldier Rupert Brooke and patron Lady Ottoline Morrell, Stanley felt pressured to do more for patriotism. In mid-1915 he followed his younger brother Gil into the St. John's Ambulance Corps. Assigned to the Beaufort Lunatic Asylum serving as a War Hospital. Stanley survives its "crushing atmosphere" bu "means of my own creative feelings." At this point, John's edition lacks illustrations. Instead, a few facsimiles of letters under a YMCA letterhead appear. Stanley longed to flee the "beastliness" of serving as an orderly. He volunteered for a Field Ambulance as Britain mobilized for the "big push" on the Somme, the massive offensive mid-1916.

That September, Spencer landed in Macedonia. In its mountainous terrain north of Salonica, he yearns for "something findable." For two-and-a-half years, this region "became the goal and place wherein spiritually I wanted to find the redeeming and delivering of myself in all the activities the unexpressed me had lived through and in." The verbiage of this phrasing does not belie its sincerity.

Pencil sketches and ink and wash appear in the margins of John's compilation, signalling Stanley's productivity between his duties. His inspiration comes "by praying for the Power to live purely and absolutely you get that power." He acclaims the intense "feelings" resulting as necessary for an artist.

Shakespeare and Hardy, Chaucer and Milton, music and poetry pepper his letters. Despite hospitalization for malaria, Stanley Spencer sustains his cheer. He requests Robert Louis Stevenson and a little book on Raphael. He misses hot cross buns. He envisions martial splendor from the Book of Joshua. He paints his comrades scrubbing shirts in the overflow from torrents. He compares this to "how the old Greek women do their washing." His imagination fired, he writes to Henry Lamb. "I am a thousand times more determined to do something a thousand times greater than anything when I get home, and am storing up energy all the time." Whether betraying a touch of Orientalism or merely expressing his drive to create and to incorporate thus the Other, he tells another recipient: "Yesterday I drew the head of an Asiatic man. It was nearly as exciting as Columbus discovering America."

Early in 1918 he transfers into the Royal Berkshire Regiment. Their foe, "the Bulgars," moves him typically, as Stanley "got the impression of them as beings which came from an essential and permanent night, and that each night we approached their dark abode as midnight drew near and as the morning descended and came away with it." This sentence shifts from echoes of verse to cadences of the Bible, and given Spencer's immersion into literature then, reflects his own mystical reactions.

After he quotes Paradise Lost to a correspondent, he adds: "That's the sort of thing I live on, along with Army rations." He goes on digging, loving God, and reading Milton as his main occupations. This retreat for introspection ended when in May Spencer applied for a War Memorial promotion "scheme" and to be employed by the Ministry of Information to "paint pictures relating to the war."

Then, an extended passage from Stanley's later recollections is inserted in the chronicle by John. This narrates a bivouac, a long march away from battle, and a sense of dreaminess as distance brings peace. Suddenly, scouting a gradient, Stanley met an armed officer who "wished me well out of the way." He was in the British Army. "No wonder they were still annoyed to see that I still existed."

Soon, combat commences. After, Spencer carries blankets to camp. His Regimental Sergeant Major passes by: "I expect you'd rather be painting, wouldn't you, Spencer?" He might have, given malaria again laid up Stanley back in Salonica. There he reads "the Testament nearly all day," in spite of "paganistic sentiments" in "many things." Looking back twenty years later on his Army treatment, Spencer acknowledges the right and wrong issues. But he laments how the "last war was exploited and used as a means of abusing people in their professions so as to be able to give vent to their jealousy of distinguished persons." Parsed in context, by implication, Stanley declaims that artists in the ranks "did not (AS THEY THOUGHT) serve in any way the immediate needs of the country."

The army's "anti-intellectual prejudice" rankles him. Around 1936, he looks askance at his fellow citizens who refuse to accept that Stanley aspires rather to a "true spiritual life." Therewith he strives towards "the model of essential humanness." While imperfect, he nonetheless insists on being treated fairly. Stanley Spencer's humanity, emphasized as this compendium closes, reminds his audience of the aims he would continue to seek through another war and into another stretch of partial peace.

His 1914 self-portrait takes up the cover of this elegant edition. A dark-haired man with dark eyes. A bold, confident, subtly defiant look. He captured himself well.

The final sentence from this manuscript edited by his grandson sums up much to come for Stanley. "I wish always to stress my own redemption from all that I have been made to suffer." His subsequent life, which it is to be hoped will be documented in the next installment(s) of this series, attests to Stanley Spencer's prickly pride, his dogged individuality, and his spiritual transformation through art.
(Spectrum Culture 4/24/17; Amazon US 5/9/17)

Randal Doane's "Stealing All Transmissions": Book Review

 
How did the late '70s arrival of The Clash to a nation they loved and who loved them, in Randal Doane's phrase, jostle the privileged perch granted FM free-form radio and long-form rock journalism in American popular culture? Doane attempts to answer this complex topic in a few pages. He matches an affection for what was pitched as "the only band that matters" with a professor's determination to apply theory and scholarship about popular culture to the band's American impact.

FM radio crackled with battles between disco and new wave, Steely Dan or the Eagles. Guitar heroes Van Halen threatened Boston and Kansas. Pre-packaged rock radio in syndication, and then MTV, took advantage of alternative rock trends. The Clash and other punks rallied to break down barriers on air. Doane's examines, circa 1978-81, a brief success by the underdogs against the suits. Even if The Clash was signed to CBS. That band marketed its message as widely as possible. The result (as this reviewer can attest) is that many younger listeners picked up guitars and books, inspired by not only the "molten" noise of early import singles, but the Clash's lyrical range and cultural references.

A dean at Oberlin College, Doane combines academic critique (and its concomitant tendency to lapse into seminar-speak) with livelier glimpses from his formative years as a fan growing up in Stockton, California. He enriches these youthful reminiscences with an imaginative journey. He invents a quest narrative, following the figures narrated over four sides of London Calling as that album's storyline follows dreamers and schemers from the band's hometown across the sea to success or failure in Manhattan. (I note as an aside that the first box-set retrospective issued by the band is called Clash on Broadway, a location which fits both London and New York City, even as it emphasizes the latter.)

Doane straddles the boundaries between fan and critic throughout this study. He analyzes the music industry as a Clash historian, and as an often discrete investigation into the state of American rock radio in the 1970s. He documents the struggle on FM stations between AOR, disco, hard rock, and the new wave upstarts. These were often marketed by Sire Records and eager labels, some indie, some subsidiaries of the majors, who allied with the bands which claimed to challenge the system. Of course, they also aspired to chart success and lucrative tours. This bifurcated presentation, by not only the bands in their clash of ambitions but Doane's staggered structure of his chapters between those on The Clash and those on radio, weakens this as a cohesive thesis. However, considering particular chapters apart from this diffused presentation, Doane's attempt to analyze The Clash within an American moment as the 70s leapt into the 80s provides a useful perspective of the band's impact. It draws upon books by Clayton Heylin and Jon Savage, integrating their research with his own predilection for New York City area rock stations. This case study looks into how they did or did not play the Clash, and rivals or colleagues from both local and British punk and new wave scenes.

This book is enhanced by backline roadie Barry "The Baker" Auguste's introduction. He conveys the changing fortunes of a band gradually if seemingly suddenly, for one behind the scenes, lifted from clubs to theaters to arenas by its third album, London Calling. This book does not delve very far into the mid-1980s phase of the line-up. Instead, Doane sticks to the first three albums, and he shows what worked and what did not on the various domestic and import versions of their incendiary self-titled debut, and the more, uh, diverse, follow-up, Give 'Em Enough Rope, produced by Blue Oyster Cult associate Sandy Pearlman. As for the sprawling triple disc, the what to me felt the never-ending experiments of Sandinista!, brisk coverage is given. Doane marvels at it, as diehard fans tend to do.

Tellingly, he offers no real attention to their more mainstream album, the last one with their steadiest line-up, Combat Rock, and none to the album made by Joe Strummer, Paul Simenon, and new recruits to replace Mick Jones and Topper Headon, the widely disdained Cut the Crap. It would have been intriguing to follow the fortunes of the band: their tours, their radio play, and their LP sales. Certainly one wonders how The Clash, once they topped the charts, dealt with their long-term prospects. It's a relevant example of the music industry's own determination to encourage or ignore a band. Yes, the band's saga during their global roller coaster of the 1980s has been covered before. But Doane stops the story early on, preferring to end while the band anticipated greater fame in the U.S. and beyond.

Given this wistful denouement, Doane's study offers a muted celebration and a cautionary tale of how rock radio and promotion U.S. markets tried to fend off, ignore, or embrace us, then-scattered and once few, fans of punk and new wave. Even if the academic tone slows his pace, Doane places The Clash within their attempt to break into the American market. Best of all, his diligence and scrutiny  reminds readers about when such inventive music, combative attitudes, and intelligent lyrics (well, some of the time) mattered for millions of fans growing up then. Today, the hit-and-miss history of the one punk band which made it big as arena rockers endures. And, professors grow up to be fans, or in my case, reviewers. For, the Clash were the first "real" band I ever saw, in March, 1980, at the Santa Monica Civic. They arrived hours late, but nobody (except for punctual me) seemed to mind. (Spectrum Culture 9-7-14)

Dave Laing's "One Chord Wonders": Book Review

How punk was deployed as a reaction against what Dave Laing calls the "gigantism" of AOR, pop and progressive rock is familiar. Laing, an English researcher, chooses a more academic approach. He scrutinizes how late-1970s British punk applies to cultural critique. He incorporates insights from Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault and Julia Kristeva. This reprint of Laing's 1985 semiological analysis precedes Jon Savage's first-hand account, England's Dreaming (1991). Introduced briefly by The Adverts' guitarist-singer, T.V. Smith, One Chord Wonders: Power and Meaning in Punk Rock  takes its title from that band's song, a tribute to D.I.Y. spunk.

Unlike Savage or Smith, Laing distances himself as a scholar. He finds predecessors for punk's nexus within pop culture. In its collision of the authentic with the commercial, punk's predicament echoes that of British folksong proponents in 1899 and London pub-rockers in the earlier 1970s. Movements seeking a return or revival of "basic" music confront those who capitalize on its inherent potential for profit. Craving exposure, musicians often must capitulate to the system. Rejecting one tradition, innovators resurrect another, back-to-basics. Johnny Ramone, cited here, embodies this choice. "We're playing pure rock'n'roll with no blues or folk or any of that stuff in it." 

Instead, punk promoted "artiface, exaggeration, and outrage." One chord wonders turned an insult into a celebration. Distorted sounds and mangled meanings created a "frontal assault" on triple-disc or concept albums of the mid-1970s. However, Laing reports how this music reworked old lyrical themes. Us vs. The Man repeated. Narcissism remained along with protest. Lacking a danceable element, punk stressed exclusivity and negativity. Failing to break out in 1977-1978, punk, Laing asserts, faded rapidly. He notes how broadcasters resisted its disruption and preferred easier listening.

In chapters titled "Formation," "Naming," "Looking," "Listening" and "Framing," Laing dissects the  strategies claimed by punk. Drier at times, if supplemented by data, the middle section of his book muddles along. Ivory tower jargon slows its pace. It revives in its later stages, where a short "picture section" shows how punks adopted their public roles to what Laing defines as the movement's "provisional discursive formation." That is, punk offered positions to adopt, roles to play and rules to adhere to. Laing presents publicity shots, professional photographs taken in concert, and vamping  poses as proof. The last category portrayed one trap punk fell into. Originally seeking to provoke or to subvert, earnestly posing punks "allow themselves to be consumed as pin-ups of sex objects." 

The final chapter, "After," adds an intriguing analogy. Laing notes that prior to punk, new bands felt making an album was equivalent to making a full-length film. Such an artistic effort seemed to overwhelm. Therefore, professional producers and studios had to be recruited and funded. By contrast, Laing reasons, punk was akin to creating a magazine or a paperback. Cassettes around 1980 began to change the way music by amateurs was distributed. Laing contrasts the cost of a hardcover book to that of a photocopy, as fans began to join with musicians to reproduce their efforts cheaply. 

Enriching this study, Laing refutes the claim that most punks came from a working-class background. He compares their class and education to that of beat groups between 1963-1967. He finds little difference in these categories. Such statistics deepen the value of this compact book. It may serve well in seminars or by scholars accordingly, as a critical contribution to Popular Music Studies. 

Finally, Laing places punk within intellectual contexts. Benjamin and Adorno looked at Dada and at the "shock-effects" of radical art, as predecessors to punk, in Laing's estimation. Similarly, he ends with Barthes and Kristeva. They located within the avant-garde "the site of the return of the repressed." Some punks embraced mid-1970s semiotic possibilities of confusion. Fragmenting, discontents chose other fashions, sartorial and musical, to emulate by the decade's end. Diehards chose "anchored meanings" of mohawks, Oi and slogans embroidered across leather jackets. 

What united punk, for one or two years in the later 1970s, was the tension between realistic lyrics decrying conformity and repression and the sonic jolt that undermines musical predictability. Full of paradox, punk in Laing's judgment produced a problem. It set out as a rock alternative, but it had to stay recognizable as rock, to bring in an audience, to sustain a career and to meet industry demands. (Spectrum Culture + Amazon US 5/4/15)

R.H. Tawney's "Religion and the Rise of Capitalism": Book Review

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The phrase “Protestant work ethic” may have been invented by German sociologist Max Weber over a century ago, but economic historian R. H. Tawney (1880-1962) adapted it to British culture before and after the Reformation. In his 1926 book Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, Tawney, a lecturer at the London School of Economics, surveys late medieval and early modern justifications that reconciled a pious livelihood with financial gains.

Catholic teachings narrowed the scope of one’s earthly ambitions, according to God’s plan: “The meek shall inherit the earth.” Bound by morality, this medieval influence continued into the 16th and 17th centuries. Despite the Reformation, profits allowed for the merchant or worker remained narrow and constrained by doctrine. Yet this restraint withered within the post-Reformation momentum unleashing individual ambition.

Tawney crafts vivid images throughout his book to enrich its style. “Into commerce, industry and agriculture, the revolution in prices … injected a virus of hitherto unsuspected potency, at once a stimulant to feverish enterprise and an acid dissolving away all customary relationships.” As both a scholar and Christian Socialist activist, Tawney here echoes Marx, who in The Communist Manifesto noted the frenzied and fearful rush of capitalist growth following feudalism during this transformed era.

By the time of the Puritans, a shift away from Christian social teaching regarding usury and cupidity occurred. Tawney credits this to increasing lay involvement against the clerics of the Church of England. Puritan and Dissenter factions, who resented ministerial needling, instigated a lay revolt.

The Anglicans lost their royal role “as an independent standard of values,” and Puritans helped overthrow King Charles I in the English Civil War. This populist revolt weakened hidebound aspersions against the benefits of monetary accrual. Traditions reinforcing hierarchical relationships between the laity, clergy and rulers gave way to mercantile expansion and invention. Puritans elevated the value of hard labor and honest enterprise, if judiciously and ethically pursued, to further the service of God himself.

“Few tricks of the unsophisticated intellect are more curious than the naive psychology of the business man,” Tawney observes, “who ascribes his achievements to his unaided efforts, in bland unconsciousness of a social order without whose continuous support and vigilant protection he would be as a lamb bleating in the desert.” Modern readers may find his prose musty, but Tawney’s donnish tone sparkles with moral power. He analyzes the learned arguments of centuries past and never hesitates to add his own views.
 
Before the Industrial Revolution, Tawney concludes, the spiritual and the economic spheres reversed. Perhaps this turnabout was necessary to enable the British to break out of a stodgy mindset. The clerical control of free enterprise that dominated the previous centuries was weakened, and the rise of the individual worker and the power corporate culture combined to push the Church aside. While preachers continued to castigate the evils of avarice and greed, their lay congregants increasingly minded their own business. Whatever discipline that Christian teachings had exerted was torn away by the modernizing impulse to enrich one’s self — and one’s investors. It was reasoned that a businessman’s success might well demonstrate God’s reward for energy and wise investments, no matter that the clergy counseled frugality, modesty and self-effacement. The British thus compartmentalized faith from profit.

The new Verso edition is reprinted from a 1938 Pelican Books imprint and does not offer any editorial updates. It reproduces Tawney’s 1937 preface in which he critiques Max Weber’s theory, but lacks any attempt to place the work in a modern context. This is an unfortunate oversight in an age when clashes over the role of religion within morality and the economy are as relevant as ever, a time when Pope Francis addresses Congress and the United Nations. (Spectrum Culture 10-2-15)

Mark Blake's "Pretend You're in a War: The Who & The Sixties": Book Review

While Mods and The Who inevitably join together, the band's ties to modernism, in art and culture, have not received the in-depth attention they merit. Mark Blake incorporates many years of interviews with Pete Townshend, John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey, adding material gleaned from multimedia and previous books on the band. As an editor at both Q and Mojo magazines, and a biographer of Queen and Pink Floyd, Blake presents a solid study. While thwarted by the tendency of Townshend to tell one story to one journalist and another to another scribe a few years later, and while complicated by the reticence of Entwistle, the demise of Keith Moon and the determination of Daltrey to get his side of the record straight (all four sometimes at odds with other bandmates and witnesses) the band members invigorate Blake's narrative. They were a fractious four who insisted on autonomy even as they combined their talents to make rousing music. This offers a readable and accessible consideration of the band's origins, its tensions early on and its struggles as fame took over.

Blake treats the formative years of the band, their early musical ambitions before the band and their early members, especially drummer Doug Sandow, who were edged out before Moon was recruited. The detail here surpasses other treatments I have read, so those less obsessed by history may find the research too meticulous. Fans may argue for its necessity; it exposes the Who's deep London roots.

Townshend's tutelage at Ealing Art School under Gustav Metzger, known for action painting, and Roy Ascott, known for cybermetrics and confrontation, earns welcome inclusion; I wish more had been given over to these impacts on the guitarist's formative years. Pete embraced a liberating lifestyle along with the music. He plunged into London's swirl of art, books, and films as part of this cultural upheaval. Again, his prescient immersion into home taping and mechanical recording techniques is notable, and deserved more depth here; Pete mastered intricacies of production rapidly.

Despite some production oversight being left to the band's managers, the spirited pair of East End-bred Chris Stamp and Oxbridge-tutored scion and heir to a classical music pedigree, Kit Lambert, Townshend took much of the band's control away from Daltrey. Relegated to the mike, as his confidence grew, Roger became a powerful, more nuanced vocalist. This took years, as his wish to guide the band competed against Townshend's technical skills and formidable ego. But Daltrey by decade's end channeled Pete's lyrical gifts and vulnerable sensibility into his own cocky, strutting and preening presence. The book's title comes from Pete's attitude when the Mod models took the stage.

While their managers contended, while the guitarist and singer bickered and fought for leadership, so the stoic bassist, John, and the manic drummer Keith, sought their share of the Who's spotlight. The band ascended quickly into the top ranks, but preceded by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Kinks, The Who had to catch up to talented peers and rivals. The Kinks especially competed with The Who sonically and lyrically from the mid-1960s on, and Blake documents this contest well.

The mythic Mod connection was pushed more by management and media, as Townshend longed to speak to his fans from that cohort, but the Mods themselves never lasted very long. "'A powerful, aggressive little army' with its mysterious dress code, music, dances and semiotics" sums up the unity of The Who and Mods. Yet equally crucial were the art school lessons Pete learned from modernism.

Mentors such as Ascott, Metzger and Helmut Gorden (the most eccentric of many contenders) merit mention, and Blake notes their suggestions to an eager student. Pete merged pop art into the classical tastes of Lambert. He integrated Henry Purcell and music-hall into three-minute ditties, often singles, which conveyed "black humour and sexual perversion" as "cameos, essays of human experience."

The "visual gimmick" accidentally invented at Harrow's Railway Hotel (evoked lovingly) when Pete smashed his guitar led to a routine. Keith destroyed his kit, Roger lassoed his microphone, John stood stock still on the side. Pete loved and hated this. His frustration at rock-star poses led to his own changes, in his lyrics, his music, and then his attire, as he chose before decade's end his workmanlike white boiler suit and Doc Martens as onstage fashion, contrasting with his three colorful bandmates.

Keith, under Lambert's sway, found pills, expensive champagne and excess inviting. John succumbed to drink and drugs, if in a quiet, self-critical manner. His musical talents shone in the band, but not enough compared to the main songwriter. John longed for his ideas to be accepted more by the band, which under Pete's dominance roused Roger's understandable resistance. Unlike The Beatles circa 1966, one senses The Who did not close ranks out of friendship  so much as necessity, when songs had to be assembled, and tours had to be endured, to pay the bills that the lavish lifestyles of the band required. Blake leaps from the band members getting by in flats or living with their parents to mansions, luxury autos (more than one meeting a quick demise), and conspicuous consumption with barely any transition. Perhaps the band's entry into the upper ranks of British rock happened that fast.

What wearied The Who, barely into their career, was the pace they had to keep to stay on the charts, on tour, in the studio. 1965-1966 as recounted here resembles the last stages of The Beatles. At least, unlike that foursome or the Stones, the machinations of Allen Klein to take over The Who's finances were fended off by Lambert, Stamp and Townshend. Yet, the band by the close of 1966 lacked continuity or consistency in their releases; the experimentation of Jimi Hendrix, Cream and Pink Floyd signaled an era far from Mods vs. Rockers. Pete's "story-songs" struggled at times to chart.

By then, the drug culture which consumed the Mods had soured for Pete. He distanced himself from the scene, even as he loved spending money and acting out his artistic ambitions. This bifurcation helped his music, however. His decision to turn to Meher Baba is well-known, but it did, as Blake shows, ease Pete's egotistical compulsion. He appreciated the awareness of the damage done by his insistence on pushing limits and refusing to listen to the wisdom of his comrades. That drive enabled Townshend to rise above his peers and to reign as a young eminence, but it also aroused his disgust with the contradictions a rock celebrity's career represented, if that star spoke for pure intentions.

Meanwhile, John Entwistle connived, sometimes with a Keith bent on hotel-room smashing, while Roger gave up Dippity-Do. He groomed a leonine mane atop his buckskin vest and rugged, tanned physique. Among a homely band, Roger stood out. Despite or due to his short stature, he grew into the role that Pete and he had worked out, as the confident voice for Pete's torments and triumphs.

Blake regales readers with many familiar stories. Pete's versions, whether set down in his 2012 autobiography or as venerable, conversational anecdotes, can differ with each other as well as with bandmates. Roger gets his own words in, with similar contradictions now and then. The truth of Keith's legendary Holiday Inn debacle in Flint, Michigan, or what song Jimmy Page did or did not play on, may never be known, but it's fun following the narratives as these moments enter rock star lore. Blake strives to keep straight who said what to whom and when. This accuracy enhances this book's value. (A valuable archive, although it may have appeared too late in 2014 for consultation, is not cited: Mike Segretto's The Who FAQ. Otherwise, Blake blends smoothly many standard sources.)

The albums themselves gain short shrift; track-by-track commentary is not Blake's intent. He emphasizes the band's nature more than their recordings, although Lambert's suggestions get due credit, as does the input of Roger, John and Keith to what seems soon after the start Pete's band.  Blake depicts vivid scenes: touring with Herman's Hermits, sparring at Monterey with Jimi Hendrix, making money from and losing even more for Track Records. The "financial profligacy" of the Who grew as troubled, feckless Lambert gave in to the addictions which would eventually consume first Keith and much later John. This hedonism met with Roger's disdain and Pete's ambivalence. Amidst hippie excess, the guitarist "felt like a workman in a lunatic asylum, come to fix the plumbing." But both Pete and Roger celebrated the onstage energy of the band, which reached its peak, in the studio and in concert, as ornamented productions on Tommy warped into massive assaults, performed live.

Even muddy Woodstock worked, despite three-quarters of the band accidentally on acid. Shunted aside to open their set at 4 a.m., luck came their way. They started "See Me, Feel Me" as dawn broke.

Blake ducks out as the story gets good, for the decade ended before the band sustained or perhaps surpassed its 1969-1970 breakthroughs in albums and on tours. Blake provides a brief coda summing up the next decade, but one closes this narrative hoping for the author to return, and to follow this with a complete look at the next seven or eight years. The book ends in 1970, not 1969. But as many claim along with the author, "The Sixties" did not begin until nearly mid-decade. That period of creativity and chaos arguably ended nearly ten years after The Who as we know them assembled, to make their unsteady climb to near or at the top of British rock. There, they won their war, amid very strong competition, during what remain the best years of that music, and more, as this book proves. (In edited form, to Spectrum Culture; as is above, to Amazon US 3-1-15.)

Pete Townshend's "Who I Am"" Audiobook Review

I heard this all the way through the acknowledgements, where Pete thanks his editors for assisting in cutting this down from 750 to 450 pages. As it is, it certainly abounds in tiny detail, drawn from Townshend's archives and journals kept for many years, as well as, I am sure, anecdotes with which he has regaled many fans for decades. I liked his genial presence, and listening to his London accent energizes what can be at times a slow narrative. He tends to chuckle or chortle a lot as he tells his tale. This can annoy sometimes, as when one sounds self-satisfied for being clever, but it also can be endearing. Over 17+ hours spent in Pete Townshend's company, not only The Who come alive, but his childhood, art school in Ealing, his schoolboy friendship with John Entwistle, and the hidden truths behind a troubled upbringing and his parents' own discontent. All this looms in his adulthood.

It's rousing to hear of Keith Moon's "liquid drumming" and John's "loquacious bass" driving the band in their Maximum R+B period, capped by Roger Daltrey's "howling like a black prisoner." Certainly, Pete loves his bandmates, and those who preceded The Who get their fair mention too. So do hundreds of others, as mentors, rivals, managers, staff, engineers, producers, friends, lovers, and fans, as Pete takes pains to credit many who made him and the band able to pursue "the best day job ever."

He shares the stories one expects. But some of the albums with the original lineup get but passing mention, such as "Sell Out" and "Who By Numbers;" much attention on the other hand is expended unsurprisingly on "Tommy" and "Quadrophrenia" in their best-known as well as subsequent iterations in concert, in film, and as musical theatre. In fact, I lost track of their variations, as on these and other solo and band projects, Townshend keeps returning to them as his skill and the technical equipment evolve, and he immerses himself perhaps like none of his peers into the possibilities of computing.

This leads him into one well-publicized run-in with the police, and he explains his side carefully. You will come away more clearly understanding what Pete set out to investigate, and the mistake he made. He also is forthright about his long addictions, his troubled marriage and affairs, family life,  and his determination to assist those less fortunate by charities and performances. This material again can weigh the telling down in its pace, but it's only fair to him that he balances his most famous period with his later life. Still, for all his enthusiasm about boats, he offers a lot of minute description.

All in all, I enjoyed hearing this, and I probably would not have if another reader recited this book. You get a truer sense of the intellectual, irascible, and introverted sides of this performer, who out of the limelight appears to have relished solitude (in his many homes), but who for the sake of his band mates and his fans (and perhaps The Who's accountants and labels), made the shows and tours go on. (Amazon US 4-21-15 and 6-26-15 to Audible.)

John Lydon's "Anger is an Energy": Book Review

"In fact, I changed music twice." So claims John Lydon early in these five-hundred-plus pages of recollections. He later boasts that "I changed history." At fifty-seven, living in Malibu, the punk provocateur enjoys sailing and loafing, far from the "dustbin" he came from in London, a son among many in an Irish immigrant family. As he explains the title of his second memoir, Anger is an Energy, Lydon reminds readers that he channels anger for neither hatred nor violence, but to motivate principled, sensible change.

As he covered his upbringing and his career with the Sex Pistols in Rotten: No Dogs, No Blacks, No Irish (1994), Lydon may repeat tales of his formative years here. He attempts to get the record straight; he castigates Jon Savage's England's Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (1991) for its distortions. Lydon's reminiscences, which may provide less insight than expected to audiences who have scoured Savage's book and other chronicles of punk's heyday, nonetheless capture his playful, wry voice.

This book, set down by journalist Andrew Perry, does capture many moments when Lydon enriches our understanding. He speculates on what "a bitter, twisted fuck" he must have appeared at Malcolm McLaren and Vivianne Westwood's SEX boutique as the band was formed. He explains why safety pins were sported. "It was about fallout, having an instant repair kit for when Viv's goods fell apart."

Later, he judges that her "aesthetic counted more to her than the actual physicality of a human being." At ground zero for the punk boom, Lydon narrates McLaren's manipulation of him and his bandmates. He struggled against his wishes, and the other Pistols. He articulates that "my songs don't lecture, they give you freedom of thought, inside of the agenda I'm pushing." He makes enemies. But these are not people, but institutions. Placing no faith in political parties or armed resistance, he instead urges his audience to follow his lead. He forges, in his estimation, a daily struggle with "integrity" to banish a "witch-hunt" against dissenters, freaks, and those the system crushes or hates.

Lydon challenges "punk as a standardized uniform" worn by those with no insights into non-conformity. When it comes to punk, "there are no rules." His disgust with the "Boo Nazis" who replaced the movement's open-mindedness with "rules and regulations" led him to Public Image Ltd.

As for music and the message: "If you're not doing this for the poor old biddy that lives next door and can't afford the heating in the winter, then you don't count at all. Studded leather jackets for all is not a creed I can endorse." Here, you hear Lydon's humanism, the commonsense beneath his sly stance.

He also offers insights into fellow musicians and singers caught up in the spotlight. Not only towards his friends, humble or famous, and his rancorous bandmates, but to such figures as Joe Strummer. Lydon contrasts the isolation of the Clash, who sought fame and big-label success, with the purported socialism and sloganeering that, in his opinion, made them a caricature of the values they mouthed.

Breaking with such contradictions, PiL sought to reform the way bands made music. This is the second of the changes Lydon promoted. He attempted collaboration with Jah Wobble and Keith Levine, two strong-willed individuals. Drugs, egos, and drink worsened the communal situation soon. But the band's second album, Metal Box (1979), issued by musicians barely out of their teens, "is a stunningly beautiful tapestry of high anxiety." They never reached this peak again, and soon, despite what in Lydon's terms appears to be a misunderstanding of their mission, PiL soon became a series of musicians backing whatever the singer felt he wanted to do in the studio and live. Lydon worked with some stunning talent, such as guitarist John McGeoch, but the band never recaptured its first spark.

Like this autobiography and like some of PiL's eclectic earlier music, this narrative resists linear fluidity through italicized interspersions. These deal with his wife Nora (whose daughter, Ari Up, was a founding member of the Slits), Shakespeare, celebrity woes, and bad teeth among other topics. These short excursions lighten the weight of so much detail from Lydon, who appears to have kept journals and archives well in order to draw upon, decades later, in the preparation of this account.

As he admits halfway through: "But I digress here, Sorry, it's the way my brain works." By the mid-80s, Lydon warily suns himself in Venice Beach, determined to leave London for Los Angeles. Working with Ginger Baker, Steve Vai, Bill Laswell, and his band now consisting of Allan Dias, Lu Edmonds, Bruce Smith and McGeoch, Album (1986) defied its generic title and packaging. This line-up persisted until near the end of the decade, when again, PiL splintered and lost its direction.

While Lydon acknowledges the difficulties of funding and handling a fractious lot of musicians, he appears to judge PiL's later music as worthy of acclaim as its earlier recordings. To me, as a fan, I find Lydon faces a blind spot. The band's music after Wobble and Wardle fit more into eclectic rock, but it no longer felt as unclassifiable or as alien as Metal Box, despite that album's humble budget.

However, Lydon understands the challenge. He muses: do people want the "scandal-mongering of a nineteen-year-old? Or do they want to go on a journey of self-discovery?" PiL contributes to the soundtrack of Point Break, Lydon tries out for the cast of the film adaptation of Quadrophenia, and he announces on the inevitable Filthy Lucre reunion tour of the Pistols: "I'm fat, forty and back."

He contributes ads for Schlitz, Mountain Dew and English butter. He appears on a brief-lived Rotten TV on MTV.  He also graces I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here, and Judge Judy. He likes making nature documentaries: Megabugs, Shark Attack and Goes Ape. He roams about, doing what he likes in and out of music. Unfortunately, the production of Jesus Christ Superstar with him as Herod is cancelled just before it opens. He displays a likeable wit, and learns to handle his fame with grace.

Lydon sums up his legacy. "My songs were echoes of revolution and empathy for people, and certainly not the work of some sneery, selfish little toad." He ends this genial, if garrulous, tale by praising his family, insisting on privacy and celebrating his "hobby" of PiL. In the end, he seeks "nothing but joy to the world." Happy on the beach, caring for Nora's grandchildren, John Lydon lives as he pleases, and as fifty-odd years ago in North London tenements, as he had dreamed. (In slightly altered form to Spectrum Culture 7-30-15; with one word censored, to Amazon US 8-1-15)

The Kinks' "Anthology: 1964-1971": Music Review

My favorite period of the Kinks begins around 1966 and ends in 1971. So, I was eager to hear this. After their initial hits, a 1965 union dispute barred this fractious band from touring the U.S. for over four years. So, they had to content themselves during this momentous decade crafting assured albums which expanded their lyrical range and musical ambition in deft and literate manner. They left behind their rawer R&B roots, as they blended pop with hard rock, country, music-hall, pub-jazz, and  Appalachian styles. Most of these gain welcome coverage on this box set. Adding twenty-five unreleased songs to total over a hundred tracks, these five discs mark the Kinks' fiftieth anniversary.

On disc one, their first efforts capture well the charm of the British Invasion, but often sound generic, even if pleasing. "You Really Got Me" erupts as the eighth inclusion, with Dave Davies' memorable riff and Ray Davies' growl leaping out. A bit later, a subdued "Stop Your Sobbing" reveals Ray's mastery of the gentler delivery of emotion. Other songs shift from a Beatles to a Yardbirds influence, but the band has yet to leave its own impression on these competent blues-based covers and homages.

"Tired of Waiting for You," in 1965, slows down the speed; it lets Ray's melody find its weary pace. "Everybody's Going to Be Happy" revs up the energy, combining the Beatles' joy with the Kinks' stutter and shuffle, as the band begins to find its own delivery. "Who'll Be the Next in Line" continues this direction, as a slightly sour note, thickened by Pete Quaife's bass, slips into the jaunty rhythms. A wistful "Set Me Free" shines, but "I Need You" recycles their first hit, signalling a need for a re-think.

This arrives as disc two opens with "See My Friends." Its subdued mood hints at Eastern modal melody, amid prescient tinges of psychedelia. The moodier piano and guitar, during a few hushed demos on such as "There's a New World Just Opening for Me," prepare for familiar album cuts like "Well-Respected Man," "Till the End of the Day," and "Where Have All the Good Times Gone." This young ensemble turns to social commentary, melancholy, wit, and nostalgia. This continues as the Kinks enter their reflective period. Suitably, disc three commences with "Sunny Afternoon." Many standout tracks from their first mature set of songs, 1966's Face to Face, complement this transition. Those from the next year's Something Else, mingled with alternate mixes and singles (many of which have been appended to the long overdue re-releases of the band's albums happening the past few years), deepen the Kinks' commitment to record the ambiance when youth fades and regrets increase.

All the same, given disc four starts with the yammer of "Autumn Almanac," its studied stance goes a long way in one or two marathon sittings. That twee song has annoyed me ever since I heard it on a distant predecessor to this anthology, the double-LP The Kinks Chronicles. But that is a quibble. The abundance of inventive riffs, harmonies and poise  dominates as the band, by 1966, learns what it does best. They pursued beauty, and sometimes pain, for the next five years, and they found its articulation in two or three minutes at a time. The albums Village Green Preservation Society, Arthur, Lola and Muswell Hillbillies (the last was issued after the end of this compilation) pay tribute to the band's talents, with some of the best music of the later 1960s and the start of the 1970s, no small feat. "This Is Where I Belong" sums up the band's vision, and their preference, as they realized the satisfaction in the quotidian. The bleariness of Dave's "Death of a Clown," the kick of "Village Green," the drama of "Two Sisters," the send-up of "David Watts," the gender-bending of "Lola," the silliness of "Apeman" sustained the band's wry message, rivaling that of novelists, stylists or filmmakers who exploited this era of sudden change, spirited satire, and a flurry of trends and be-ins.

As for the hackneyed subject of a musician's laments from the road, when success exacts its cost, the band managed to create an insightful first-person plural narrative on the concept LP Lola vs. Powerman and the Moneygoround. Sampled on disc five, following the lesser-known and equally intriguing TV series soundtrack Arthur, this 1970 album shakes up the music more, critiquing that industry. "This Time Tomorrow" sums up the excitement and bewilderment of what a rock star's life might be like. "Powerman" finds Dave Davies amplified, supported by Mick Avory's drums, as the band begins to get restive and rowdy, after four years of mostly acoustic and subdued songs. They kept fighting the system which gave to them and took away, and made their frustrations tuneful. The Kinks watched as well as participated, and noted what many of their peers rushed past or paraded as.

Taken as a few songs at a time, the band's determination to convey the happy moments and gloomy times of life satisfies best. Ray's nasal tone, and increasingly affected delivery during this period, as his approach became more theatrical, may distinguish him from certain of his strutting peers in the major rock bands of the later 1960s. It also may have labeled the band's songs from this stretch of their long career as an acquired taste, a set of English oddities, aural curios set on a shelf to dust off and contemplate. Compare this effect to the global tour breakthroughs afforded the Beatles, Stones, Who and Yardbirds. Perhaps forced exile from American concerts hastened the band's insularity. But it also challenged the Kinks to concentrate on their skills, and to examine their homeland closely and honestly. They may have turned older than their comrades, somehow, not in chronology than in outlook, and certainly their words and music attest to a rapid progress into self- and social analysis.

Since then, musicians and songwriters better appreciated the Kinks' achievement. Everyone from Van Halen to The Fall, the Pretenders to Quiet Riot, Yo La Tengo to 2 Live Crew has covered these songs. In this initial stage, covered exhaustively here at last, the Kinks merit acclaim. After this, in the 1970s, they returned to big venues and big hits, when they toured the world (and America) in what evolved after more concept albums on stage into a less ornamented, streamlined arena-rock manifestation. They earned their stadium crowds, but for me, I keep replaying the quieter years after the Invasion and before the megatours and blunt hits. This intelligent, searching and poignant legacy merits this abundant manifestation. These elegant results, first as a series of intricate albums and singles evoking life cycles, villages, the Great War and Australian emigration, musical careerism, local London, and love gained and lost and never had, have pleased listeners like me, all these years.
(Spectrum Culture 12-2-14)

Clan Committment: Armenia + Ireland, 100 years on

 

This photo, "Remnants of an Armenian Family," reminds me of photos taken from An Gorta Mór, the Great Hunger, known popularly if not exactly correctly, according to many, as the Irish Famine. Change the costumes or headgear, and these five could be an evicted family from a stone cottage far northwest.

Nothing to Celebrate in ANZAC in Solidarity Net criticizes those who from colonies and dominions were encouraged to fight in useless battles for capitalism, imperialism, warlords, and false ideals. It questions the tributes to troops at Gallipoli. About 88,000 for the Ottoman and 44,000 for the British Empire died there. This slaughter and that in Armenia echo, as death returns in a region today. Small nations hunted and hated by armed fanatics, hunted for their allegiance, their clan, their religion.

James Connolly, when asked "What Should Irish People Do During the War?", after denouncing cooperation with the Crown to defend its Empire and admitting if Germany could free Ireland from Britain, that would not be rejected, finally rallied against Kaiser or King. "Should the working class of Europe rather than slaughter each other for the benefit of kings and financiers, proceed tomorrow to erect barricades all over Europe, to break up bridges and destroy the transport service that war might be abolished, we should be perfectly justified in following such a glorious example and contributing our aid to the final dethronement of the vulture classes that rule and rob the world."

Reflecting this May Day on an Irish history full of invective against its nearest and oldest enemy, I wonder about the psychic cost of raising generations a century later on what riled and inspired our families' desperation: to rage against rulers, to take up arms, to revenge eras culminating in ravaged decades filled with famine, rape, emigration, rack-rent, landlords, conscription, death fast or slow. 

While for years much of my reading and writing focused on The Cause, I find the past few years, and after all nearing two decades since truces were called and arms decommissioned and dumped in Ireland, I'm a bit weary of a sustained diet of study of these events. How, I mulled over as I studied Judaism, can people craft careers in analyzing the records of the Shoah, or literature of the Armenian genocide? It reminds me off hand somehow of the professor of Hitler Studies in White Noise, but no parody is intended by me. Primo Levi's books are being retranslated this autumn and reissued, and the publisher has to remind the press and audience he's not only a survivor-testifier from the deathcamps. 

Watching the shows that John Walsh produces as his son was killed years ago and led him to produce America's Most Wanted as the first of many successful get-tough programs on t.v., my wife and I muse over what that career must do to one's spirit. How far do you capitalize, however well-intended, on death or harm caused to you or your family? Does that market or brand you always? Levi wrote fables like his fellow storyteller Italo Calvino; he dramatized the life of workers, he crafted stories, and he told some of his best tales set before the war, in The Periodic Table, as when he hiked with his little dog. Those moments tend to get subsumed into the great drama. Some veterans never get over the most vivid and harrowing moments of their service, and I suppose for prisoners, hostages, those freed from slavery or torment, kidnapping or disaster, the life after can never create the same energy. 

Meline Toumani, an Armenian-American writer originally from Iran, warns in the New York Times: "Armenians Shouldn't Let Genocide Define Us." She speaks of how Jews are accused of self-hatred if they take issue with the prevailing notion that one must conform to the narrative of what I borrow from the saga of the Irish as "Most Oppressed People Ever." (MOPE: I don't agree with much of that last link's writer, but it's for ease of cyber-reference for this acronym.) Historian Alvin Jackson, a more reliable source, cites colleague Paul Bew who reminds us of the dubious claim "that the most oppressed people in Europe in the 1940s were to be found in Ireland." (671; Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish History.) It's almost, but not quite given the fatal lack some carry now, superfluous to say that this was a decade which few countrymen and fellow sufferers who were interned with Primo Levi survived. So, that takes us back to Toumani. Noting Kim Kardashian's support of the centennial, Toumani submits her thesis: "Watching the dubious intersection of celebrity worship and genocide commemoration, I couldn’t help but reflect on some of the less obvious things Armenians have lost since 1915: not just people and property, but a kind of existential confidence. The genocide recognition campaign itself, in the name of restoring Armenia’s losses, has been so all-consuming as to stand in the way of other kinds of development--in Armenia and in the diaspora." It should not be all Armenians, admittedly a long time away from this event, should focus on for their identity.

She argues that it's too limiting to expect members of small ethnicities and their diasporas should or must conform to a narrow range of banal exhortations to carry on or insistent dehumanization of the enemy nation or empire which committed the violence. She went to Turkey to try to learn from the other side's intransigence and denial. Therefore, in her estimation, she has been accused of "self-hatred." She defines this: "The idea is that you are embarrassed by your true nature — your ethnic nature — and so you mock it or speak out against it. The label is used not to engage in meaningful criticism, but to dismiss such criticism by chalking it up to shame. And yet the behavior labeled self-hating often reflects the opposite of shame; it reflects confidence." Comparing the plight of Armenians to that of the Jews, she continues: "The common phrase, 'Is it good for the Jews?' is implicitly present, too, for Armenians: but what does it mean to be 'good' for the Armenians, if survival means blocking out uncomfortable ideas and clinging to simplistic symbols?"

No, neither she nor I are denying horrors perpetuated. Turkey's refusal to take responsibility, Britain's collusion to worsen the potato blight's devastating impacts by pushing millions off the land and on the emigration boats if not the sides of the road to starve, or the black whirlwind of the Shoah all stand as blots on the record of what we do to each other. But how long do we stand in as "survivors"? 

Back to Ireland, similar questions can be raised. I am no great fan of the revisionists who try, as one wag put it, to tidy it all over, as if the English had a small misunderstanding with their subjects. Yet,  as the commemoration of the Easter Rising's centennial looms and politicians and pundits bicker over whether to invite the British, this drawn-out fracas, to some apart from the scrum, appears very petty.

Toumani concludes, for her small ancestral nation (one that like Ireland has clung long to an ideal of an embattled faith, a bastion of learning amid idiocy, an outpost of beauty and tradition and language apart from its brutish neighbors far greater in power, greed, and cunning): "But the question of what healing looks like beyond the use of a single word; of how children can be taught about their histories in a way that does not leave them hating the descendants of their ancestors’ killers. Of how a country can grow in meaningful ways so that there won’t be a Kardashian-size gap in its national confidence. Taking positions that don’t track with your ethnic group’s orthodoxies, or indeed living your life in a way that is not defined by clan commitment, are not signs of self-hatred but rather an indication of learning to value oneself. And this is at the heart of what it means to be not erased but fully alive."

My friends in Ireland are learning slowly how to learn a more inclusive history, as that nation itself becomes more diverse than any other time, rapidly, ever before. Some like me one generation apart from the homeland grapple with that old language, not easy to learn at home, but far more difficult pverseas, at least from my struggle. Many at home and abroad begin to drift from from clerical orthodoxies, and those who do not feel emboldened to speak out against ecclesiastical abuse. Those of us in the diaspora, passing on our heritage to our children, grapple with how much to pass on about past wrongs, and whether so much of our identity consists of commemorating ancestral pain. Clan commitment remains. But our pride does not overshadow an awareness of nuance or honesty.

The British Library's "London: A Literary Anthology": Book Review

Although the handsome cover and many familiar authors may tempt browsers to judge this compilation as a pleasant holiday gift or congenial night-table companion, the contents reveal a complex presentation. Some treat London as did Daniel Defoe, as "the greatest, the finest, the richest city in the world" but as many talented writers and artists gathered within concur, this megapolis has long stood for poverty, congestion, pollution, and degradation. From medieval poets John Lydgate and William Dunbar to current observers Benjamin Zephaniah and Zadie Smith, Londoners whether native or newcomers regard its vast crowds and tall towers with dread, dreariness, and delight.

Arranged thematically by Richard Fairman, thirteen chapters begin at dawn, moving into the reactions of those entering its sprawl for the first time, then exploring its mews and squares. "In dim-lit streets, war-tired people moved slowly/ like dark-coated bears in a snowy region." So recalls James Berry, as he views"Beginning in a City, 1948" from a Caribbean immigrant's perspective.

Although the weather requires both rich and poor to bundle up, beneath this comparison, differences endure. Contrasts between the high and low life have long fascinated visitors. Consider Charlotte Brontë's protagonist from her novel Villette: "I like the spirit of this great London which I feel around me. Who but a coward would pass his whole life in hamlets; and forever abandon his faculties to the eating rust of obscurity?" This lure draws millions, over centuries, from all over. Amazing diversity endures, noted by William Blake as by Hanif Kureishi. London's narrow streets never seem to empty.

The febrile tension from crowds connects Hugh Walpole's story set on The Strand, Katherine Mansfield's depiction of "The Tiredness of Rosabel" as she comes home from work to climb four flights up to a humdrum night out of the rain, and Doris Lessing's excerpt from The Four-Gated City. This finds Martha out after dark, fearing exposure she risks passing through a red-light district on her way from Oxford Street to Bayswater Road, along Queensway towards Notting Hill. The drama of a pedestrian's passage from one district to another, subtle or dramatic, and the warren of diversions or temptations in dim side streets, recur in many of these sixty-six entries from nearly as many writers.

On first perusal, the lack of an introduction or any editorial context for the selections or authors puzzled me. It seemed a shortcoming. A small flaw is the near-absence of those who live away from the historic core of The City or the few miles near the north side of the Thames. Only Angela Carter's Wise Children speaks up for those beyond the south bank. But, the presentation of period illustrations and literary reflections, if attentively read, invites audiences to study dozens of reactions in pen and pastel to the domination of The City over one's own mental landscape. For those who have visited or who live in London, it will remind them of why many want to return there, or why some never will.

As Evelyn Waugh's satire sums it up: "all that succession and repetition of massed humanity...Those vile bodies..." A bitterness clouds many sights seen by those who record them honestly. Charles Dickens' Bleak House dramatizes a tale from a mother so poor she wishes her son had never survived his birth. Virginia Woolf's far-better off Mrs. Ambrose, in The Voyage Out, observes from Waterloo Bridge: "When one gave up seeing the beauty that clothed things, this was the skeleton beneath."

Clad in rags or cradled in finery, people never stop arriving. Jewish, Australian, Scots, and Pakistani immigrants all find their voices in these pages. Israel Zangwill and Zadie Smith may have lived a century apart. But they agree in their stories that chaotic city streets spark tension. Classes must mix, and their failure to cope with relentless demands strains relationships, in passing or permanently.

Overcrowding and inequality, worsened by the weather and the conditions which made this city for many centuries one of the world's largest also generate disease and decay. Juxtaposed chapters on disgust, plagues and fires, wartime devastation, and apocalyptic depictions of the city's downfall remind readers of the reactions writers amass to London's perpetual pride, and how it tempts fate.

Peter Ackroyd's Hawksmoor brutally conveys how the plague dissolved family ties. Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Poison Belt" and H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, as to doom, join Richard Jeffries' stoic description in his suitably titled portion from After London. Even less cataclysmic scenarios in The City show its force exacted upon nature. Dickens' Dombey and Son charts the immense digs that built the railroads, and if the holdouts of Stagg's Garden defy the iron horse, they may not last long.

On a thoroughfare half a century or more later, Amy Lowell at two in the morning imagines the results of a transformed London. "I stand in the window and watch the moon./ She is thin and lustreless,/ But I love her./ I know the moon,/ And this is an alien city." What has changed is constant light. Juxtaposed memorably, in the last chapter documenting London after dark, the photos and illustrations, many chosen well from the British Library's holdings, suggest a nuanced reaction to the coming of electricity. This transformed London from a few candlelit circles within foggy shadows.

"Electric lighting in the City" from The Graphic, April 1881, may cause you to beg to differ with Lowell from 1914. It shows walkers halted by the wonder of seeing what had long evaded sight. Complementing these engravings, another from the same publication evokes a supremely detailed "Bird's-eye view from a balloon" in May 1884. The attention to precision, over Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament next to the sweep of the Thames, astonishes the careful eye. The people and cabs are so far away they appear as dots, and this elevation, after all, removes one from the jostle, the smells, the unpredictability of whatever the streets bring the rich and the poor. Above, one sees only a city made beautiful, from so high up that clouds float down below, over the serpentine river.

The fact that these clouds emanate from factories does not detract, somehow, from their wonder. That too, may be what makes London a place that impels immigrants to remain as residents, and which fills those same streets and attractions as it has for hundreds of years, as a destination that compels.
(PopMatters + Amazon US 12-19-14)

The Who's "Quadrophenia Live in London": Music Review

"They are no longer kids, but they have not forgotten." So Ellen Willis, the late cultural critic and pop music reviewer, mused about The Who. Back in 1969. Having finally achieved American success with "Tommy", they had more than one rock opera in them. So Pete Townshend sought to prove.

After his "Lifehouse" project floundered in the early 1970s, Townshend chose to adapt the band's four personalities into another double-LP rock opera. This time, the characteristics of The Who, with Roger Daltrey as the "helpless dancer", John Entwistle as the romantic, and Keith Moon as the "bloody lunatic", contended with Pete, "a beggar, a hypocrite", as various leitmotifs dramatized. At the time, quadrophonic speakers were the audiophile's innovation; these combined and contrasted with the schizophrenic nature of one Mod's attempt to reconcile his fractured self, set more or less a decade earlier, when The Who emerged (if briefly) as the premier Mod ensemble. About ten years into their career, Quadrophenia found the godfathers of arena rock squaring off against the punks.

The original 1973 vinyl has been fussed over and remastered and reissued already. The 1979 film adaptation found Entwistle manipulating some of the songs for new mixes. The album has been played live more than once, originally with poor results. This may account for it being toured less often than "Tommy", which perhaps outlived by its own cinematic version its initially fresh impact.

Quadrophenia benefits by comparison, with Jimmy's less outlandish story (enriched in the original gatefold LP by a narrative booklet of photographs, here available in a deluxe edition version), a more sophisticated integration of orchestral elements as Townshend mastered the synthesizer, and a more relevant storyline set in London when music mattered and fans proclaimed allegiance to their faction, their fashion, and their bands. Issued at what may have been a low point for mainstream rock music, it signaled a revitalized band at its creative peak, eager to take on the challenge of staying so, after so many years at the top, alongside The Rolling Stones and The Beatles as Britain's most famed bands.

Forty years later, this double-CD live concert from London's Wembley Arena on July 8, 2013, about two hours long, proclaims that sprawling, complicated album. Daltrey moves his voice down a peg from the high notes he can no longer attain, but on "Love Reign O'er Me" and "Helpless Dancer", both demanding challenging vocal range, he manages fine. The former song also slows down in its opening, allowing Townshend to tinker with the arrangement slightly. He integrates deft touches on guitar often, as on an extended "5:15" closing the first disc. He sprinkles updates into the synthesized voices and effects throughout which thickened the original album, as when he fiddles with which voice chimes into the overture "I Am the Sea". It's now a female, and she's a haunting touch that gently enhances the earlier version.

For a live concert, it marches along with additional instrumental support. Pino Palladino on bass, Scott Devours on drums, and Pete's younger brother Simon on second guitar deliver solid backing; Simon sings lead on "The Dirty Jobs" in a thinner voice than Roger. Frank Simes, John Corey, and Loren Gold earn keyboard credit and backing vocals; Dylan Hart and Reggie Gresham fill in on horns. Veteran listeners to this album will realize neither Keith Moon nor John Entwistle are present in person, but they emerge. Entwistle's bass solo remains on "5:15" "via video recording" while Moon's "Bell Boy" vocal from the original studio album is wisely incorporated. The subtler 2013 differences highlight rather than detract from the respectable, solid, if at times workmanlike, delivery.

Some of the band's big hits fill out the rest of the concert. "Who Are You" and "You Better You Bet" catch Roger a bit winded. The keyboards continue to hold up well, but the playing of the guitar, bass, and drums doesn't lift later songs up much from their earlier renditions, live or on record. "Pinball Wizard", "Baba O'Riley" and "Won't Get Fooled Again" offer competent versions of these warhorses. A song from another partial song cycle, "Endless Wire" (2006), a "Tea and Theatre" which recalls The Kinks in style if not voice, closes this live album in a more acoustic, reflective manner.

Fans of the original may enjoy a chance to hear how Pete and Roger meet the onstage task of reining in operatic material so as to focus on both its orchestral heights and its rock foundation. This may not replace the 1973 album in any collection, but like the 1979 soundtrack, it merits recognition for its own insights into its enduring appeal, long after Mods or Rockers themselves mattered. The band continues to strive to do justice to melodic and intelligent material. The Who, however it survives, repeats that that youthful concerns and ideals matter, no matter how long the band or we endure. (PopMatters 8/19/14)

Travis Elborough + Nick Rennison's "A London Year": Book Review

This clever book celebrates diarists, letter-writers, and journal-keepers who, day by day as chronicled here, add over two hundred of their famous and humble voices to the eight million who currently crowd this city. (Not counting the tourists.) Fittingly, where Samuel Pepys pioneered the diary as a record of an individual's reactions to the collective crush. the variety of stimulation, irritation, and celebration comprises a novel way to roam London. Editors Travis Elborough and Nick Rennison also work as booksellers, and the handsome presentation (graced by a pale blue ribbon sewn into the hardcover binding as a marker) enhances this big volume.

The opening endpaper maps London from 1574 as drawn by a Flemish cartographer. The closing endpaper charts Twitter and Flickr feeds from the sprawl that extends ten-fold, centuries later from the core glowing with electronic transmission. What in Shakespeare's times comprised the City of London and a less congested stretch down along the Thames to Westminster's royal enclave spreads today into distant suburbs. But the ancient turns of the serpentine city's northern course, considerably larger but still identifiable as a concentration along the north shore of the river, twists on, near giant blocks discernible as parks that have been plotted out.

This combination of streets and space, planned after the Great Fire which Pepys described so well, allowed his successors to note their ability, frustrated or eased, to escape the loos for the lawns. One will benefit from a map of one's own to plot one's route for instruction or orientation, or an A-Z guidebook. The intricacy of networks and referents becomes to those acquainted with the labyrinth at the city's heart somewhat more familiar, but as any visitor or native agrees, its name-maze endures.

The editors note how certain tropes repeat down the decades: "The impossibility of getting around the place. The dirtiness of London's streets. The unpredictability of the weather. The expensiveness of food and lodgings. The snootiness of shopkeepers, restauranteurs and/or publicans." Consistently, complaints repeat, notably the "difficulty of finding somewhere decent to live and, interrelatedly, the worry about whether the price of X and Y neighborhood will go up or go down." Finally, as Charles Lamb summed up in 1829, the old place isn't what it once was.

In a short review, five-hundred pages of extracted narratives defy summation. Yet, patterns emerge. They share often the nostalgia of Lamb (not included), but they reveal many emotions. I opened the book at random, as many readers may (once they check their birthday or today's date to see how the mood or the clime correspond or not to their own wherever they peruse this, in whichever borough or suburb wherever), at 28 May. "A Man Vomiting Blood" in St. James's Street, observed by William Windham and his colleague, detains them from their entrance into the House. Parliamentary affairs, it transpires, can wait, as the two statesmen repaired to a club instead in 1760, according to his diary.

Mary Berry's journal commemorates that same date the visit of the King and Queen of the Sandwich Islands to the capital. "Her savage majesty appeared much more occupied by the red-plumed hats of the musicians than the music." Berry notes how the Hawaiian ladies, encumbered by the folds of their voluminous "European dress", walked awkwardly; "there was nothing of the free step of the savage".

"All are caged birds; the only difference is the size of the cage." So muses Thomas Hardy, in characteristically epigrammatic style, after waiting that day in 1885 at the Marble Arch to watch the people pass in their finery. "Hurry, speech, laughter, moans, cries of little children" enliven for Hardy the human "tragedy" along this "hum of the wheel -- the roar of London!"

Most dates offer an equivalent sampling of entries, from as diverse a cast. Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West, but also Nils Stevenson from the punk era in 1977 and Aaron Burr from 1808. Lord Byron and Lindsay Anderson; Michael Palin and Keshub Chandra Sen, a Bengali philosopher in 1870; emancipated slave Ignatius Sancho from the Georgian period and Emily Shore, who after her visits in 1830 as a girl would die of consumption a few years later. These are the people through which we see London, those often who have come to stay for a short time or a lifetime after being born elsewhere. Along with natives (ranking far fewer, as in many cosmopolitan cities, it seems) such as Charlton F.C. fan Russ Wilkins, nearly unknown Victorian clerk Rafe Neville Leychester, or late nineteenth-century minister's daughter Helen G. McKenny, we see from the recognizable names and the obscure bylines the range of perspectives and persuasions drawn by tellers who put down on paper their reactions to the London they occupy, for a surprise or a memory, as a souvenir of their passing moment day by day and year by year. (2-24-14 to Amazon US and 2-20-14 to PopMatters)

"To End All Wars: the Graphic Anthology of the Great War": Review

Harry Patch, World War One's last surviving British veteran, was asked what he would tell young people. Defining war as "organised murder", he responded: "Don't join the army." Pat Mills in his introduction adds that this comment was scrubbed from the finished version of Patch's interview. This graphic collection opens with the greatest of such cover-ups; Brick's "The Iron Dice" sketches how millions were sent to slaughter, by imperial cabals protecting profits and peddling patriotism. This anthology's website sums up the consequences: "The so-called ‘Great War’ was the first truly multinational war, the first heavily mechanised war, the first oil war, the first fought to the benefit of capitalists on both sides, the first to murder millions of civilians and the last orchestrated by kings, barons and lords as if it were a ripping game of polo." 
  
26 contributions by 53 artists and writers from 13 nations represent the global impact of this subject. Depicted over four continents are the four theaters of war: land, sea, air, and the home front. A century later, few graphic novels have depicted these early horrors (and heroics, deluded, desperate, or gallant as they may be judged in sober retrospect), compared with the media attention devoted to its successor, WWII. This stark, chiaroscuro, thick compilation begins to redress this deficit. It promotes a humanitarian view of the worldwide conflict as witnessed by not only famous and everyday men and women, but also by a diligent elephant, hounds, purported angels, and an Alpine cat. (A share of U.S. and British profits go to Médecins Sans Frontières/ Doctors Without Borders.) 

Familiar names such as Winston Churchill, Rasputin, Baron Von Richthofen, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Mata Hari appear, but most entries feature unheralded men and women. Mostly inspired by true accounts, those who volunteered talents to script and illustrate these boldly drawn or softly delineated stories share sympathy for the plight of those cajoled, conscripted, or, as in Colm Regan's "No More Than Cattle", among hundreds of thousands of Africans under German or British colonialism forced to participate as porters or combatants. While the full list of over two dozen selections cannot be covered in a brief review, a few examples reveal its range of concerns, biographies, and approaches. 

Clode's "The Coward's War" takes up a topic which remains controversial today. "If an army is the reflection of the society for which it was created, Thomas Highgate was the first crack in its mirror." Executed for desertion in 1914, he was one of over three hundred Commonwealth soldiers who met that fate, in a time when very little was understood about stress, shell-shock, and fragility under fire. Clode's dramatic shading (here as in his other inclusion, "The Black Chair" about the Welsh bardic poet Hedd Wyn) deepens the ambiguity of this tribute. It portrays uncertainty. when those leaders ordered to force troops into battle no matter their condition were also victims of this era's ignorance. Prejudice persists. Clode reports how Highgate's hometown in 1999 refused to let his name be added to that feature of many towns, schools, and village squares among the Allies, its local war memorial.

"Il Gatto" saddened me. It follows an intrepid cat who crosses Italian to Austrian lines during the bitter war in the Alps. At one point, Stuart Richards places the feline facing the frozen front, its head above the icy trench, alongside a long line of helmeted soldiers, dug in with rifles drawn for assault.

Sean Michael Wilson's "Live and Let Live" cheered me. It narrates the stand-offs arranged tacitly on the front, so neither German nor Allied troops would fire on each other, as long as no mortal threat was raised. This sensible compromise allowed many soldiers to survive, and affirms common sense.

Yet, that solution could never be published during the war. The plight of journalists, whom the British would shoot as spies, meant that front-line, honest reporting would not emerge for those on the home front. "Truth Be Told" in Pippa Hennessy's unsparing words and Danos Philopoulos' scorching illustrations claw at the page. These convey the quest of one bold correspondent who fought to live.

Survival, in Dan Hill's take on solidarity, "Where Others Follow", educates readers. It explains how sheep have evolved to protect their pacifism. Watch-sheep emerge to guard the flock. Although a single herd rallies against predators, the group recognizes individuals and remembers each one's presence, If in a flock as with troops a single member is subsumed into a collective, an evolving balance endures which meets individual needs and demands of the group. It's a clever lesson, or fable.

But crammed together, endurance drags many down, crushed by the pressures of killing. A U-Boat commander succumbs. After a series of Allied sinkings, he lets his submarine be rammed by a British destroyer. Similarly, elite aces in planes give in after one too many dogfight victories, once the cost to their psyche has been tallied. Tanks explode and bodies shatter across wastelands. Many German versions of testimonies wallow in mud and grime. Dark pages overwhelm the light in  acrid, gloomy evocations of bomb craters and gray hell. "Poppies" depicts the artist Otto Dix, whose engravings acidly commemorate the searing visions he could not escape, as deftly rendered by Kate Houghton.

After such tales sink in, the reader reflects on the legacy left for us a hundred years later. Growing up, I heard very few scattered memories from WWI veterans, rambling anecdotes passed down from two old men. Fewer seem to understand today (with few films let alone novels or testimonies taught in schools today) this fatal march to a war that wiped out, disproportionately, about ten million young men in uniform, along with seven million civilians who never signed up or resigned themselves to fight for empires. The anthologists rouse readers to resist seductive, sinister calls for yet more war.

While a few entries dithered about despite their brevity, dissipating their force by narratives revealing gaps or leaps in time or space, most succeed very well at teaching this persistent lesson of peace. "Perhaps the decision to go to war should never be decided by men in wood paneled offices of state, but by a committee of mothers on both sides, advised by those who have seen war and what it does to soft human bodies, to the fragile mind and very soul." So Joe Gordon concludes this collection with his "Memorial to the Mothers". He reflects on a Royal Scots gravestone he passes often; the father buried beneath died on a 1918 battlefield. There, his son rests too, suffering the same fate in 1940. Gordon wonders about the unheralded mothers left to grieve. He speculates on these women's sorrow and anger and loss, as our inheritance during every war erupting after WWI. "And then perhaps we might finally learn to stop, for what mother really, truly believes anything was worth her bonny boy?"
(Amazon 9-15-14; Pop Matters 8-25-14; Author's website)