Categories
Perspective

Grief and Meaninglessness in Asteroid City

By Matthew Dodd

Wes Anderson’s 2023 feature Asteroid City begins with a stark clarification: ‘Asteroid City does not exist’. A television presenter, played by Bryan Cranston, explains to us that, within the context of the film, ‘Asteroid City’ is a fictional play, the production of which has been dramatised for the purpose of a television programme on contemporary American theatre. Its characters are fictional, as are its actors, its writer and its director. As the audience, we fill in the implicit additional reminder: we are watching a film, this is not real. Wes Anderson has always toyed with the conscious artificiality of his films – The Royal Tenenbaums presenting itself as a novel, Rushmore as a play – but Asteroid City sees the director take this notion to its logical extreme. It is a film which plays on at least three narrative levels at any given time, revelling in the complexity of its construction. It’s easy to get lost along the way: we follow Augie Steenbeck, a recently widowed photographer who suddenly meets an alien at a junior stargazing event, as well as Jones Hall, the actor playing the part of Augie Steenbeck. At one point, Bryan Cranston’s television host erroneously appears within the play and questions ‘am I not in this?’ On a first watch, Asteroid City may appear a disorienting and ultimately pointless venture, wherein emotional truth is submerged in a mess of muddled narratives and overly quirky stylisation. Yet, it is precisely because of its deliberate artificiality that the film works so well and, in truth, bears such a sincere emotional heart.  

Throughout the film, characters hold the reality of their feelings at a strange, syntactical remove. Tilda Swinton’s Professor Hickenlooper remarks that ‘I never had children. Sometimes I wonder if I wish I should’ve.’ This kind of overwrought dialogue is typical for Asteroid City. In classically Anderson-ian style, lines of this sort are delivered in a macabre monotone, as though these Oscar-winning actors were amateurs in a small-town production. It is this register of unreality which imbues Asteroid City with its special strength. What could be read as overt quirkiness – something Anderson is regularly accused of – is in fact representative of something deeper, an emotional detachment which dogs the film as a whole. Characters hold their emotions at arm’s length, plays exist within films, nothing is quite what it seems and nobody quite says what they mean. 

Things happen in Asteroid City for no apparent reason. First, it’s a car exploding, then it’s an alien coming to steal an asteroid, and then that same alien coming back to return said asteroid. When faced with the unexplainable, humans are troubled. We like to rationalise and we like to understand. The other major event to take place in Asteroid City without a reason, prior to the events of the film itself, is the death of Augie Steenbeck’s wife, the mother of his four children. The alien’s pointless invasion becomes a symbol of her death, a moment in time with no motivation or purpose but which fundamentally alters life as we know it. Photographing it, Augie hopes to have some kind of closure, some elucidation of this bafflingly pointless event, but he doesn’t find it. 

Grief can be a destabilising force, rendering the world a soundstage and the rest of humanity actors. And so, when Augie Steenbeck, in the midst of the heady commotion on screen, turns to the camera and says ‘I still don’t understand the play’ before, quite literally, walking off the set, the layers of over-drawn hyperreality are levelled, and this moment of meta-theatricality becomes, instead, an intensely human moment of derealisation. In the face of grief, he becomes an actor in the play that is his life and, noticing this, decides to leave the stage. The audience’s confusion over what is actually happening – where in the film/play/television programme are we? – is mirrored by Augie’s confusion over what the play is actually about which, in turn, mirrors that deeper, nagging confusion that we all feel throughout our lives: why do things happen the way they do? The exchange between Augie/Jones and his director is, understandably, read as the central illuminating moment of the film. After 90 minutes of confused, deliberately ambiguous drama, our protagonist sits down with the director of his own story and asks the question that we, as audience, feel equally drawn to, what is actually going on? Except, this isn’t quite the question Augie ends up asking. Though he dwells on his confusion – ‘I still don’t understand the play’ – his real question is a much more direct one: ‘am I doing him right?’ 

By now the walls of meta-theatricality have collapsed into a central emotional truth. Jason Schwartzman’s role is, at this point, not quite Augie Steenbeck the character, or Jones Hall the actor, but rather a strange amalgam of the two. He asks his question, ostensibly, as an actor, but on a truer emotional level as a widower, a lost and frustrated man left to care for his children, alone. It is the genius of Asteroid City that these disparate roles are pressed together as one, setting the performance of an actor trying to convincingly play a role alongside the performance of a single father trying to behave as though everything is alright. We search for meaning in life how we search for meaning in a play; we want the alien to mean something just how we want death to mean something. As he walks through the backstage, Augie runs into the actor playing the alien – a magnificent cameo from Jeff Goldblum – explaining how he plays the alien as a metaphor. ‘Metaphor for what?’ Augie asks; ‘I don’t know yet’, the actor responds. Asteroid City very deliberately plays with its own apparent meaninglessness, a parody of a Wes Anderson film, dollhouses within dollhouses. Yet, it is precisely because Wes Anderson constructs Asteroid City so artificially that it is able to be so sincere. Raw human emotion is buried under an endless veneer of obfuscation and detachment. Asteroid City is confusing because the world is confusing. We are all actors in plays with no obvious themes. The question, therefore, isn’t what the play is about, but rather how good our performances are. The simple, revelatory answer that Asteroid City provides, through the animus of Adrien Brody’s role as director, is that it doesn’t matter, as long as you ‘keep telling the story’. 

The emotional linchpin of Asteroid City lies just beyond this moment, however, in the immediately succeeding scene. The actor Jones Hall, having gone for the fresh air his director assures him he won’t find, runs into the actor cast in the absent role of his deceased wife. ‘It’s you’, he says, ‘the wife who played my actress.’ By this point there is no illusion of specificity in the players at hand – both characters are at once the actors and their roles. Whether this is an actress playing a wife or a wife playing an actress is of little relevance, the lines read the same. The two exchange a few words before the actress/wife, played by Margot Robbie, delivers her lines, cut from the play. Robbie, simultaneously the actress and the wife, announces the central emotional torment at the heart of the film in a strange, surreal soliloquy about alien planets and the secrets of the universe: ‘maybe I think you’ll need to replace me’. We know Asteroid City isn’t real, we know the characters are illusory, we know these are just lines being read by actors, and yet none of this makes any difference. This moment is as emotionally direct as they come, a wife giving her husband permission to move on. ‘I can’t’, Jones/Steenbeck responds, to which the actress/wife replies, ‘maybe I think you’ll need to try.’ The camera, having held both characters in a balanced side-on shot now cuts brusquely to Robbie’s face. ‘I’m not coming back Augie.’ This focal exchange is held at a distance, both by the myriad of meta-narratives and the dialogue’s own modality of detachment: the truth – ‘you’ll need to try’ – is qualified by these separations – ‘maybe I think’. There is a desensitisation, an alienation from reality which pervades all the characters and their interior lives. The painful, shameful, impossible decision to journey through one’s grief, to allow oneself to move on, is hidden beneath this labyrinth of confusion. The exchange is, textually, just a recitation of some lines by two actors, and yet it transcends the layers of meaning becoming, out of something wholly artificial, something wholly earnest. Augie Steenbeck, like so many of us, buries his grief deep within and so it only follows that the truth of his feeling should be buried so similarly in this narrative sprawl. Asteroid City is unreal because grief, pain and life are unreal. The effect of the meeting on Jones Hall, the actor, is unclear, but that doesn’t really matter, its relevance is clear, the heart of Asteroid City unlocked.

Asteroid City – the city itself – takes on allegorical relevance as a kind of purgatory for its residents. Every character, excepting perhaps Steve Carrell’s motel owner, is there visiting, and yet none are able to leave. It is a neutral zone in which to deal with traumas unseen. Midge Campbell bears pretend bruises which become an avatar for the implied abuses suffered at the hands of her second-ex-husband. As she runs lines with Augie, she works through the pains of a failed marriage held at the remove of dramatic artifice. As it does throughout the film, art becomes a useful intermediary between ourselves and our emotions. Both her and Augie are afraid to move on from the events which have scarred them: as long as they are stuck in Asteroid City, they are stuck with them. To move past their unexplainable traumas, they can’t just sit with and try to analyse them, they must acknowledge them and let them go. You can’t expect to overcome your pain if you don’t first accept it. Or, more simply, as Willem Defoe’s drama teacher endlessly chants, you can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep. Visually, Anderson employs a register of oversaturated detachment, evoking the paintings of Edward Hopper, the preeminent visual documenter of mid-century American alienation, trapping characters in frames-within-frames, focally positioning the endless flatlands that surround each of these characters. In the end, the characters leave Asteroid City overnight, with little ceremony. Our final image is of that unending desert into which our heroes recede, as an upbeat skiffle cover of Elizabeth Cotten’s Freight Train plays us out. There’s no true conclusion to Asteroid City in the same way there’s no real conclusion to the desert as it drifts on endlessly, in the same way there’s no true conclusion to grief and no true answer to life.

The characters in Asteroid City are lost, bursting out of the seams of their text to find some answers to the grand mysteries of life. We might imagine ourselves as characters in plays: wouldn’t we want to walk offstage and ask our directors what the central theme of our existence is? Asteroid City understands and sympathises with such a desire but knows all too well that these sorts of questions don’t matter. We’re all playing characters just how they were written, and there’s no point trying to fight that. There is no scholarly consensus on the thematic relevance of death and loneliness. For much of his career Wes Anderson has placed real characters inside doll-house existences, drawing out the rich humanity that can only be truly realised in these hyperreal scenarios. In Asteroid City, he takes the characters out, plays with the fakeness of their existences, before returning them to the dollhouse, accepting after all that life is an incomprehensible play, devoid of morals and structure, but that this is no reason to give up on it. 

Categories
Reviews

The Army, The Navy live at Colours Hoxton

By Edward Clark

The Army, The Navy shine brilliantly live. In the cozy Colours Hoxton, the American two-piece showcased their unique style, which centres the detailed vocal harmonies of singers Sasha Goldberg and Maia Ciambriello. After growing in popularity last year, with the release of projects Fruit for Flies and Sugar for Bugs, the pair cemented themselves onstage as effortlessly talented performers, the audience in the palm of their hands.

The Army, The Navy’s Spotify Bio credits the pair’s ‘consonance’ to their being ‘childhood friends who shared a singing coach’. Live, this consonance was apparent from the moment they stepped onstage. Opening song Gentle Hellraiser – the namesake of the tour itself, of which the London date was the final gig – displayed the pair’s easy harmony. Mics were turned up to amplify Goldberg and Ciambriello’s gentle vocals. Although soft, the pair had absolute control of the room. Vocal lines were not the only thing working in tandem: both lead singers underscored themselves with detailed fingerpicking patterns played alongside one another. The pair excelled in these moments of quiet control. Songs where emphasis was placed on vocal harmony, such as Bookend and Persimmon, were exceptional.

These moments, alongside almost every number in the setlist, were supported by multi-instrumentalist Jess Kallen. Kallen’s addition provided the necessary range which The Army, The Navy’s catalogue demands. Shifting seamlessly from delicate keyboard accompaniment to heavy slide-guitar and shoegazey drone, their accompaniment elevated the live performance throughout. These heavier moments did sometimes drown out Ciambriello and Goldberg’s vocal nuance, an issue more apparent with their performance of unreleased material, where lyrics and melodies were lost. Nonetheless, heavier moments were well paced in the setlist, providing moments of reprieve which kept delicate harmonies fresh and exciting. Akin to their albums, The Army, The Navy had a clear vision for the flow of their performance, balancing subdued tracks with energetic ones and maintaining energy in the room. As the set began with captivating, quieter songs, it ended with the upbeat and dynamic Wild Again, leaving the audience wanting more.

With such a concise catalogue, I walked into Colours wondering whether Goldberg and Ciambriello actually had enough music to properly fill a setlist. I once saw a newly-popular artist play at a festival where they were forced to play all of their released songs twice, and hoped the case would not be the same here. By the third song, I realised I had nothing to worry about. Hits from their two LP’s were supported by unreleased material and personable audience interaction. Fan-favourite 40% smoothly transitioned into an acutely unique cover of Destiny’s Child’s Say My Name, 40%’s catchy hook ‘Say my name, say it again’ transforming into the R&B pop banger; the result was endearing. ‘Tricked ya’’, Goldberg joked. Whether the ‘trick’ was the surprise cover itself, or a clever way to avoid having to deal with the heavy breakdown of the song’s final moments, it nonetheless entertained. Sugar for Bugs cut Rascal was transformed into an anthemic moment, as Goldberg directed the audience to sing along with the repeated vocal riffs. The pit’s quiet admiration of the pair’s harmonies seamlessly shifted into audience involvement. Goldberg and Ciambriello’s musicianship was elevated through performance.

Goldberg and Ciambriello’s performance thrives on their chemistry. As human touch in music is no longer guaranteed – the use of Artificial Intelligence in production and vocal ‘cloning’ has received endless discussion online over the past two years – The Army, The Navy offer an enchanting, human response. Moments of light choreography, laughter and connection between Ciambriello and Goldberg placed the two singers’ chemistry and consonance at centre-stage. During one unreleased song, sung a cappella with the two singers in complete unison, you could hear a pin drop in the audience. As the two friends celebrated the final moments of their sold-out first headline tour, I could only wonder as to when they will return to Europe, and doubted that it would be in a venue this intimate again. The Army, The Navy is one to watch.

Categories
Poetry

The Ammonite

By Rohan Scott

 

Over the rump of the windswept moor,

Shale crags kiss the sea.

Petrified within: the stone ghosts.

 

Along the cobbled shore

Cliffs crumble,

Amongst the cut pastry scree

These relics emerge.

 

I remember turning stones,

Plucking, discarding.

Excitement, disappointment.

 

At first, a fragmentary trace,

Shattered by chisel and mace.

Wonder and dismay draw like the tide,

Who recedes to reveal

 

I know what I’m looking for —

The perfect specimen, a galaxy like spiral.

 

Like a wading avian,

Sifting for stone cradles

On the shifting sands.

Time falls away

And light professes dusk.

 

I remember turning stones,

Plucking, discarding.

Excitement, disappointment.

 

Here! It must be this one.

 

I level the iron edge atop this stone,

I raise the hickory in an arc,

One fell swoop, cleaves it in half.

The perfect specimen, a galaxy like spiral —

An ammonite.

Categories
Perspective

Queer Paper Trails: Love in the Victorian Queer Archive

By May Thomson

There remains an oddly enduring idea that queerness – and particularly Sapphism – came bursting into existence with all its rainbow ribbons at the precise turn of the nineteenth century. With the exception of Wilde, Victorian LGBT literature seems utterly elusive – lost, if it is there at all. 

This is, of course, a myth. And manifold factors work to mystify, omit, and  revise queer literary history. Saliently, many pieces of literature were never actually written, with the queer Victorian fearing the consequences of inhabiting a space beyond contemporary notions of virtue. That said, the Victorian era saw the beginnings of a movement towards sexual emancipation and, despite the dominant current of sexual repression, nineteenth-century sexologists like Havelock Ellis became pioneers in gender and sexuality studies. 

Victorian queer invisibility also arises from modern impressions in the enduring critical hesitance when interpreting literature and primary sources as in any way LGBT. This is an idea Susan Koppelman articulates compellingly in the preface to Two Friends, a brilliant collection of nineteenth-century lesbian short stories by American women. In opposition to queer denialists, who claim that queer identity is being retroactively imposed, she writes: ‘if we read about a man and a woman loving each other in the way… that Abby loves Sarah in “Two Friends” … we would not wonder what the story was about or quarrel about how to label the relationship. We would know.’ Her frustration is clear, and her stance invites a shift in reading practice. She later says, of the stories in the collection, that they were chosen because ‘they feel like lesbian stories to [her]’, encouraging readers to trust their own affective responses – an approach that borders on a reader-response, even phenomenological, reading of literature, with meanings emerging from lived experience and perception rather than rigid taxonomies. 

As a result of both the uneasiness with calling texts queer and the underrepresentation of explicitly queer voices in the historical record, the practice of archiving becomes crucial for the preservation and restoration of this overlooked part of literary history. Creating and engaging with banks of primary sources is essential to the work of LGBT literary recovery, offering the possibility not just of uncovering lost texts, but of contextualising, interpreting, and learning from them. Rooted specifically in the Dickinson College archive, this article will trace some forgotten queer literary fragments and ask what it means to remember that we have always existed – loving, creating, and leaving traces where we were not meant to. Queer love and identity were not absent from the Victorian world but rendered illegible by dominant moral standards. The practice of queer archival recovery, as exemplified by this archive, offers not just historical restoration but a radical reimagining of how we read, remember, and recognise love.

‘The world was on us, pressing sore;
My Love and I took hands and swore,
     Against the world, to be
Poets and lovers evermore’

Written in the shadow of Victorian respectability, these lines declare an unwavering commitment to authentic love in a world that refuses to see it. They honour devotion and literary vision seemingly powerful enough to fuse two beings into one: indeed, the vow above belonged to Michael Field, the shared pseudonym of lovers and writers Edith Cooper and Katharine Bradley. The pair, though now largely obscure, were acclaimed by contemporaries Robert Browning, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and George Meredith, with Field deemed a promising talent before ‘his’ womanness was erroneously revealed. Whilst analysis of the literature of Michael Field could (and, in my view, should) fill thousands of pages on its own, this fragment is just one of tens of documents in Dickinson College’s Victorian Queer Archive. The archive, established by Professor Joanna Swafford, Professor Sarah Kersh, and teams of their respective students, aims to address the lack of publications of queer texts and to contribute to a fuller picture of Victorian literature. Accessible to anyone and fully digitised, it is one of the very few archives that seek to document and celebrate the often overlooked but certainly extant records of homoerotic desire, love, and identity. 

   ‘There was a very nice pretty young lady, who I (a girl) was going to be married to! (the very idea!). I loved her and even now love her very much.’    

This extract, from 1844, comes from the diary of ten-year-old Emily Pepys, recounting a dream she had the night before. It is an extraordinary little artifact – seemingly unremarkable, yet brimming with emotional and historical complexity. Notably, Pepys recounts her engagement not with shame, but with curiosity and warmth. However, she also makes a specific note of her gender (‘I (a girl)’) in a parenthetical aside, as if trying to reconcile the dream self with the waking self. This seems a moment of cognitive dissonance – a flicker of questioning that complicates gender identity and desire alike. This demonstrates that queer feelings do not emerge from cultural indoctrination or some ‘modern ideology.’ They are – they always have been. But, instead, are often complicated or diminished by the world of heterosexual norms and expectations. Indeed, she later describes hoping she will be ‘let off’  for her dreamy, forbidden affection. 

Whilst from a constitutional perspective the story of Queen Victoria refusing to criminalise sexual relations between women as they ‘did not do such things’ is impossible, lesbianism has been particularly overlooked throughout modern history. This text is a study in the consequences of ignoring queer love and existence, serving as a time capsule of a world that could not conceive of love between women.

‘THE VOICE OF SALOME: Ah! I have kissed thy mouth, Iokannan, I have kissed thy mouth. There was a bitter taste on thy lips. Was it the taste of blood? . . . Nay; but perchance it was the taste of love. . . . They say love hath a bitter taste. . . . But what matter? what matter? I have kissed thy mouth, Iokannan, I have kissed thy mouth.’

In this brilliant fragment, Oscar Wilde offers us a different but equally rich example of queer desire, existence, and resistance in the nineteenth century. Wilde is a central figure in the gay literary canon, not simply because of his sexuality, but because queerness permeates his work. Although Salome’s desire here appears heterosexual, Wilde saturates his play with queer longing and aesthetics: gender inversion, camp excess, and erotic obsession. Her desire – exemplified through her stream of excitable interrogatives – is excessive, theatrical, and repetitive, even bordering on self-parody in its sheer sensuality. Salome has also been reclaimed in queer readings as a gender-transgressive figure for unapologetically commanding male attention, sharply refusing passivity, and ultimately dominating the male body. Indeed, Wilde’s rendering of Salome was deemed scandalous at the time for disrupting Victorian gender roles and sexual decorum. This is an excellent example of Koppelman’s idea about the ‘feel’ of text. Whilst not explicitly describing a queer relationship, this text exudes the flamboyance and theatricality often integral to gay culture. One example of Salome being viewed through a queer gaze is Richard Bruce Nugent’s artwork. Nugent, a gay writer and painter, depicted Salome as a queer symbol of sexual defiance. Ellen McBreen argues that he was influenced by a ‘widespread gay understanding’ of Wilde’s version, further evidence of the value of perception and queer readings.

To trace queerness into the Victorian archive is not to impose modern, anachronistic categories, but to recognise what has long been obscured, silenced, and missed out of history. These texts, however veiled or fragmented, do not simply gesture towards queer existence but assert it, often with more clarity and courage than they have been appreciated for. 

The art of queer archiving is about both recovery and reanimation, making visible that which dominant histories have rendered unreadable. In reading these fragments, we not only challenge a heterosexual canon but honour the reality that queer people have always been here. This archive isn’t quiet. It hums with coded longing, risk, beauty, and defiance. To read – and, indeed, to create – archives of this sort is to remember that queer people were not just present: they were passionate, prolific, and determined to write themselves into eternity.

Categories
Culture

Dear Darling Voyeur

By Emilia Brookfield-Pertusini

When the moon slivers right in silver, and the cloud crowd around, expect to see the silhouette etch its away on the window. The gas hue of the lamp dances around the curtains, flirting with the supersonic glow of the TV. Mugs jingle. A smile creeps out. Rows of books, obscured by trinkets, memories, and the private and confidential. And all of this transmutes from your night-in by the fire side, to the kick inside of the footsteps, that stop momentarily, tying a shoe or checking their phone?, and feed off that light. The eyes that widen and feast whilst hands remain in pockets and lips blister in the chill, take the tableau in delight. You are being watched. Let us feast on your existence.

Inventory taken of your surface existence, let’s turn those eyes up, give them a real wedding breakfast. If those eyes were to take their shoes off by the door, weerily sigh as the keys clatter in the dish, and yawn and stretch towards the kettle, where do you expect them to go? A quick rummage through the notes on the fridge, a glance at the calendar, a poke through the medicine cabinet. But you curated your quarters so well, and wouldn’t you rather they dine on the print you choose to hang just there, or even at the way you placed the fruit in the bowl. How could these eyes be so cutting, so searching for clues in an investigation only Kafka could decipher, rifle through your home, your heart, your legacy of objects. Why, they delight in this seeing the mudnade objectivity of your existence, how perverse! But I gave you things to look at, some entertainment here and there, why must you devour all of me now – slurping the last drops of the tea from the pot like that gruesome teatime tiger expecting to be satiated from the stewed embers. Please, dear eyes, leave. Bolt the door behind you, and please, don’t come back here, just look at the way the window sill changes for you, and be content with that.


5th of February, 2025. My 21st birthday. And what better present, for a girl like me, to receive the news that Joan Didion’s therapy notes could soon belong to me. Isn’t this the news we have all wanted since her death? Finally, a chance to take stock of this brilliant mind, to really understand her. The literary community yelped.

Joan Didion is one of the US’s most defining writers. With needle-like precision she dissected America’s later 20th century. Her unrelenting commitment to journalism has rendered her with a wry, poignant voice, even its novelistic utterances. However, whilst she captured the world around her in her words, preserving the cultural offshoots and fascinations of America for us to gawk and examine like limbs in formaldehyde, Didion never quite captured herself. Her essays and articles harbour an essence, fleeting and distinct; like a stranger’s perfume as they walk past, we know it’s there but what is it, and where did it come from? From the Sharon Tate murders to the LSD shrouded Haight-Ashbury district, we locate a vision of Didion from the cultural landmarks she fashions herself around. This highly curated double-exposure of both author and object has enshrined Didion as the defining figure of a generation and that ‘California belongs to Didion’ without actually revealing the intricacies of being the woman who keenly observed the West Coast zeitgeist .

Did Didion pre-empt the sudden urge we would have to dissect, to own, that voice presented to us, thus her careful consideration of what she wanted us to know. She was a keen follower of Hemmingway, learning to structure sentences to the same acute precion by laboriously studying the very syntax and rhythm of them and synthesising this with her own literary vision. Everything she did was careful, precise, and exactly how she wanted to say it. Therefore, to leave something out in Didion world is not merely forgetfulness, or not being able to work it in, or being embarrassed, but a clear message about what she does and does not want us to see. Noli me tangere, for Didion’s I am. Her two most autobiographical works, My Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, continue to approximate Didion in relation to what is around her. As her world becomes swallowed by the shock of her husband’s sudden death, the continual murmuring anxiety of her daughter’s life and upbringing, the beeping of heart monitors, the gare of x-ray prints, the calendar squares with the sames of different hospitals and departments, we see Didion reconfigure her world on these terms, showing us her life in the truest forms, unsensational and unsympathetic.

The word raw enjoys being thrown around the confessional, personal writing scene. This piece was raw as when I cut into it all that came out were tears, and blood, and guts, and juice. Maybe Didion saw that the rawest piece is the one that submits to be cut into and exposes a fleshy marbling, the blood shocked still in the veins. This craving for the ‘raw’ – the supposed real – voice behind the author has led to the letters and diaries of most of the canon to be available. Reading another’s diary no longer feels like sneaking about into another’s bedroom, searching under the bed, the dresser, the piles of clothes, and cracking the code, but a right we expect to receive; why write and not publish it for us, your peanut crunching crowd. The harrowing entries of the Plath journals show one of the fiercest writers of the 20th century at her most fragile. She speaks of an immeasurable, unrelenting pain, that she attempted to make sense of through her nightly writing campaigns to her ferocious psyche. The readiness we are to access them leaves a sour taste in the mouth, as we realise the perverse voyeurism on display as we are delivered an author’s life on a slab.

I am by no means a literary critic, no less one who believes in the autonomy of the text and the death of the author. Life informs art, afterall. But, when reading Plath’s diaries do I really get a better sense of the pain trapped between her lines? Does knowing that Woolf ate an egg or some beef or a trifle on the same day she began to pen Orlando help us unlock the text? Probably not… The ownership of the diary is a grab to owning the author; we hold their lives in our hands and scrutinise the mundane details they flourish poetically attempting to figure them out. Didion was a mother and wife as well as the writer and icon that emerges in her writings. Her careful curation of self to ensure her other selves only appeared under her watch, her direction, her discretion, was an attempt to assert herself as a public writer with an enchanting capability to fascinate and entertain with her pen, not a public figure whose life fascinates us. The intimacy of Notes to John goes against the constructed self that Didion intended.

Anais Nin, storing her diaries in a bank vault (supposedly). The holy relic of the author’s diary is pestered by prying eyes.

Categories
Culture

Raw Over Refined: Why Demos Hit Harder than Studio Albums

By Nathan Gellman

Art is often described as a window into the mind and soul of the artist. Whether on paper, sheet music, or canvas, the true emotion and meaning behind pieces of art are on full display. Music is no different; at its best it captures not just a perfect performance but a moment of emotional truth.

However, in a time when overproduction is sucking the life out of modern music, we the listeners are flocking to live shows to feel a connection with the artist that used to project through sitting rooms on vinyl, cassette and CDs. 

I’m not suggesting that I have found a substitute for seeing your favorite artist live but through my discovery of my favorite artist’s early takes and demos, I have a newfound appreciation for his work and process. Demos provide an unexpected intimacy and emotional experience of hearing a stripped-down, natural take of your favorite songs. Therefore, I challenge you, the reader and listener, to embrace demos and take in the rawness, vulnerability, and authenticity within them.

Demos are a rough, often first take of a song used to capture an initial musical idea, contrasted to a studio single it is dirty, unproduced, and not aiming for commercial perfection, merely expressing the artists’ viscerality. Demos preserve the artists’ creative spark before it is extinguished during production. 

My personal affection towards demos came upon my discovery of George Harrison’s ‘Early Takes Volume 1’ which was released in 2012. It compiles demos, the majority of which were recorded during the ‘All Things Must Pass’ sessions. I fell in love with the album as a result of Harrison’s unfiltered voice, emotional closeness and the offhand remarks that bookend some tracks which made me feel like a fly on the wall during the recording sessions, privy to the secret moments most listeners never hear.

A couple of tracks stand out as prime examples of the unique strengths’ demos have to offer. Awaiting on You All is one of my favorite Harrison songs, with it being one of his most religious and spiritual. The master recording of the song is busy and vibrant with an all-star personnel of Harrison, Eric Clapton and Klaus Voormann to name a few. However, the heavy use of reverb really melts the sound into a buzz with it difficult to hear the individual instruments throughout the song. The early take strips this all back and sounds almost unrecognizable compared to the master. You are no longer listening to a catchy pop-rock song but a man expressing his devotion to God with the help of his guitar.

Among Harrison’s most spiritual songs is My Sweet Lord, his debut single and biggest chart hit. A song in my eyes which is perfect, an exposed cry to God, presenting himself as one of the most famous and accomplished people in the world – simply, a vulnerable devotee. While there is nothing to improve on, in my opinion the demo really highlights the devotion Harrison had through the tenderness of his voice accompanied by his acoustic guitar. 

But why do these distinctions matter, why should you care about these mostly subtle differences? 

I believe demos and early takes allow for more emotional honesty, making the artist, someone who themself is followed and loved more human, through presenting their truth to the listener with no interference from middlemen. Demos feel like a discovery, something you find in your attic that you weren’t supposed to hear. It is an artist’s raw talent that separates them from you and I, and demos through showcasing their natural talent demonstrate this fact.

Demos such as Harrison’s ‘Early Takes Volume 1’ remove the layers of master recordings and remind us that sometimes the first take says it best. In an age of overproduced music, demos stand as a stark reminder that sometimes less is more.  

Categories
Poetry

Hair

By Esme Bell


At first we might think kindly: 

a warm sort of self-knowing 

collective, paintable, obedient

to wind and errant sunbeams. 

But it’s slippery still – unanswerable

really like a head tossed away – 

and in midnight swathes might 

creep pillow-wise and set to 

its own knotted cartography, 

using the stars to see. 


Despite all best efforts, 

nobody has caught it growing. 

Scissors can work well 

as a countermeasure –

although I’ve found 

they won’t hold it for long.

Categories
Culture

Interview: Dan Richter, Kubrick’s Main Man-Ape

By Edward Bayliss

Dan Richter arrived in the UK in the mid-1960s as ‘a 28-year-old, starving, mime teacher’, ready to absorb all that London, ‘the centre of everything new’, had to offer. Upon his arrival, he edited the avant-garde poetry review Residu, and performed in the 1965 International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall amongst Beat Generation poets William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. On October 24th, 1966 Richter first met Stanley Kubrick, the man who would select him for the role of Moonwatcher, the central ape in 2OO1: A Space Odyssey’s ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence (and ask him to choreograph it). From 1969-1973, Richter would become personal assistant to John Lennon and Yoko Ono, helping shoot the video for ‘Imagine’ at Tittenhurst Park, and later work with the Rolling Stones to produce their concert film, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones. Richter has since worked with production companies in LA, continued to teach mime, and has climbed over 600 North American peaks. 

I met him on Zoom for a 45 minute discussion of his time from 1966-1968, and working with Stanley Kubrick on what many consider to be the most influential film ever made, 2OO1: A Space Odyssey. 

It’s 10:00am LA time and the morning sunlight is coming across Dan’s sitting room, lighting his face kindly. He is 85 years old and undergoing chemotherapy for T-Cell Lymphoma. These facts do not show. His warm temperament and strong constitution translate easily through my laptop screen. I begin by asking him about his experience at the American Mime Theatre, his decision to travel to England, and how he came to be involved in 2OO1. Richter tells me he had ‘studied ballet’ and could ‘dance easily’ – he was a ‘natural, and could just do it’ – so that when he arrived at the American Mime Theatre under the tutelage of Paul Curtis, he was ‘the lead performer’ within a year. After four years, and having seemingly exhausted the potential that the AMT offered, Richter ‘wanted more’ and notes how ‘mime wasn’t as big in the States as it was in Europe’. Working in mime in the US  had become a tireless exercise of going to ‘cocktail parties to flatter rich people so you could get grants […] There’s gotta be more!’, says Dan. Subsequently, he took a leave of absence to study ‘mimetic forms’ around the world, travelling to Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, India, and Japan, where he made friends with Yoko Ono, who exposed Richter to ‘conceptual art’. ‘I did not want to go back to the States again, I wanted freedom […] to experiment, and live’, Dan adds triumphantly. After ‘falling in love with a woman who claimed to be a Russian princess in India’, he ‘followed her to Athens’ and ‘met all these poets’ which led him eventually to London where he began editing a poetry review, Residu, with his then wife Jill while beginning to teach acting classes. During his poetry reading with ‘Allen [Ginsberg] and all these crazy people’ at the Albert Hall, he met producer and poet Johnny Esam  (who ‘was friends with a friend of Sir Arthur Clarke’). ‘Arthur [who co-wrote the screenplay of 2OO1] and Stanley Kubrick had realised they didn’t have the opening of the movie – they had shot all the live action, and they had tried all kinds of things […] and nothing worked’, Dan recalls. They hadn’t, as Richter explains, explored the possibility of using a mime to choreograph the now famous ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence. Johnny, a mutual friend of Dan and Arthur’s, knew that ‘Stanley was looking for a mime’, and set into motion the next two years of Dan’s life: ‘I know the best mime around, it’s Dan Richter.’

 

Waiting to go on stage at the White Barn Playhouse, 1959/60 (via Dan Richter)

When Dan met Stanley soon after, he says that he ‘asked for a stage, a leotard, and a couple of towels to stuff in my shoulders and he [Stanley] was very impressed’, having witnessed an improvised ape performance from Richter. ‘I was offered the job on the spot. That’s how I got the job.’ Dan’s process of mime acting is very particular: ‘my training was that we developed movement from the acting process first – you start with the motivations and characters and feelings, and you extend those.’ For Richter, the objective of the character informs the activities of the character. This was the basis of Richter’s approach to embodying Moonwatcher. 

The ‘Dawn of Man’ sequence is set in the Pleistocene epoch, about three million years ago; I ask him how he went about realising a time and place so far from him. Dan reminds me that archaeological discovery has come a long way since the 1960s: ‘In those days, very little was known […] I researched as much as I could, but I realised I had to make living creatures.’ Kubrick had located his ape species as the Australopithecine (discovered by Raymond Dart in the 1920s) who existed in South Africa at the time of the ‘Dawn of Man’s’ setting. Richter tells me that he ‘endlessly watched footage of Jane Goodall’s chimps and read about Diane Fossey’s gorillas and did piles of research.’ In his book, Moonwatcher’s Memoir, Dan goes into great detail of his interactions with ethologists, museums, the Royal Geographical Society and other bodies of information that would inform his understanding of the Australopithecine ape. Dan tells me that he ‘had to have a costume that would allow us to be expressive, not just the Michelin man with black hair all over you, all stuffed and puffed up.’ It was only with the assistance of now legendary make-up artist Stuart Freeborn (who would design and fabricate many key characters in the Star Wars franchise, including Yoda and Chewbacca), that they could realise a realistic costume that could function under dynamic movement. 

Dan testing costumes (via Dan Richter)

The ape that Richter plays, Moonwatcher, acts as a kind of proto-representative of the Biblical Cain figure, becoming a symbol of the evolution of human nature through violence. This evolutionary movement across millions of years is delivered through the most famous match cut in film history, from Moonwatcher’s bone to the weapons satellite. I ask Dan if he was conscious of the gravity of this moment within the context of the film. ‘The script was very sparse, very sparse’, Dan reiterates. He adds that ‘Stanley rarely talked about the big stuff, the big ideas – he didn’t want to put ideas into your head that would get you trying to do stuff, he was always concerned with each beat at a time.’ Though this may have been the case, Richter does acknowledge that Kubrick and Clarke were aware of a ‘Killer Ape Theory’ developed by Robert Ardrey in 1961, which postulated the idea that ‘early man started to progress when he started killing, and set us on an evolutionary path that would lead to modern man […] that was a big idea in those days.’ In spite of my original question, Richter declares that ‘my concern is not to tell the story, my job is to have a character who has got an objective, who uses an activity to achieve that objective, and has what we call an adjustment which is how he feels doing that – you don’t want to get sucked into conceptual stuff.’ There must exist a ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ upon the consciousness of the audience, Richter advises, ‘and if you don’t have it, the chair becomes very uncomfortable.’

In his memoir, Dan describes the setting of the MGM studios at Elstree as being akin to Alice in Wonderland, or like a ‘great cathedral’, with elfish and pixyish characters working in and around the sets. I ask him why the studios, at first, had such an impression of mysticism about them. He tells me that ‘the MGM studios were built in the ‘30s, they had this classic, beautiful quality; it felt like you were visiting Orson Welles. There were all these people who were so good at so many things all going around – there were nine or eleven stages […] it was big.’ Dan pauses for a second, ‘it was just like being in a dream.’ With the words DAN RICHTER – DAWN OF MAN emblazoned across his new office door, he remembers thinking, ‘suddenly I had all this power […] everyone would be like, whataya think Dan?’ The incredible technical innovation that the production of 2001 provoked also contributed to the atmosphere of otherworldliness in Elstree Studios at the time. Dan mentions special effects supervisors Doug Trumbull and Con Pederson, saying of them, ‘it was just amazing; one of the things about 2001, was we actually invented new ways of doing things and technologies to do it.’ You don’t have to look far to identify such innovations; from front screen projection to centrifuge sets and zero gravity effects, the production behind 2001 really was pioneering.

Dan and make-up artist Stuart Freeborn with masks (via Dan Richter)

Like the studio setting, it appears that at some moments Kubrick also impressed an aura of enchantment upon Dan. In his memoir, Richter draws attention to ‘the alchemy of Stanley’s art and process’ and describes the director as a ‘merlin’-like figure who ‘conjured’ this ‘wonderful, majestic film.’ Richter writes that Stanley has a ‘quality of otherness’. I have always been sceptical reading articles about Stanley which designate him, for example, as the ‘recluse’, the ‘phobic’, the ‘paranoid’, or the ‘museum piece’, so I ask Dan to expand on this comment. Dan says that Stanley’s office was a ‘teeny room’ and in it were ‘books, papers, drawings, and photographs piled to the ceiling, it was total chaos’. Despite all of this, Dan remembers seeing Stanley for the first time, a ‘frumpy little guy with a Bronx accent’, who was ‘very relaxed and immediately interested – I hear you know Allen Ginsberg’. Even though, as Richter tells me, ‘Kubrick is always the smartest guy in the room’, and often it feels as though ‘you’re playing checkers and he’s playing three-dimensional chess’, he had a casual manner about him with ‘a great sense of humour’ regularly ‘bumming cigarettes because Christiane [his wife] wouldn’t let him smoke.’ Kubrick surrounded himself with a young team who were willing to break their backs to support his vision: ‘If you could go along with it, it was an amazing ride, you know, on your way to eternity.’ However, Dan says grinning,  ‘a lot of the older technicians had some issues with him, saying, we can’t do that guv, and, well, they wouldn’t be round for long – he didn’t suffer fools easily’, but adds urgently that ‘there were a lot of us in our twenties saying sure, let’s do it, let’s try to figure it out.’ For instance, Dan says, ‘Stanley’s assistant Tony Frewin was only sixteen or seventeen years old – Kubrick was surrounded by young people who wouldn’t question him.’ It is far from the truth  to say that the director was exercising tyranny on set; in his memoir, Richter says that ‘Stanley’s behaviour wasn’t about control’, indeed, it is ‘people who don’t know him [who] portray him as a compulsive control freak’. Rather, Dan stresses that Kubrick would surround himself with people who offered ideas; he was ever-listening. Dan closes his assessment of Kubrick with the words, ‘he was a normal guy, but just happened to be a massive genius.’

On the waterhole set at Elstree Studios (via Dan Richter)

After filming wrapped on 2001, Dan had very little to do with Stanley. I recall reading that Malcolm McDowell was a little hurt by this sharp cut-off of communications after the production of A Clockwork Orange was over. Indeed, Dan tells me that ‘you think you’re his best friend when you’re working with him, and then all of a sudden it seems like he doesn’t know you anymore.’ Dan would see Kubrick once more in his life. He looks up above his camera smiling: ‘I had designed and built a three-headed editing table for John and Yoko which I loaned to Stanley while he was shooting A Clockwork Orange in 1971 – I actually spent the day with him’, and in typical Kubrick character, ‘we talked about what kind of paper shredders we were using.’

 

Dan (via Dan Richter / photograph by Mischa Richter)

Categories
Culture

Interview: Katy Hessel 

By Lydia Firth 


In March, I was fortunate enough to catch Katy Hessel for a chat. If you’re not familiar with Hessel she is an art historian, Guardian columnist and curator, known for authoring The Story of Art Without Men and running the Instagram account and podcast The Great Women Artists. The Story of Art Without Men does exactly what it says on the tin: Hessel leads us through the history of art from the 1500s to 2020s exclusively from the perspective of women artists. The book takes its name from E H Gombrich’s canonical text, The Story of Art, which included absolutely no women when first published in 1950, and now, in its 16th edition, compensates for its erasure of female artists by including just one. Hessel’s antidote to this exclusionary tale is an invaluable compendium; an essential contribution to the art history canon.

A Sunday Times and New York TimesBestseller’, a Trustee at Charleston Trust, an alumna of Forbes 30 under 30, I’d go as far as to say she defines the art history zeitgeist. Her dedication to educating others about female artists is demonstrated by her willingness to speak to me, the humble undergraduate, albeit over the phone as she dashes about the streets of London to buy a pancake pan to host some friends (it was Shrove Tuesday, after all). 

In The Story of Art Without Men, Hessel’s zeal for art is clear. I ask her how she first got into art. Growing up in London, she benefited from the various free galleries, visiting on Saturday afternoons with her sister. She recalls the Tate Modern opening when she was six: being in awe of Louise Bourgeois’ spider sculpture, Maman, and the expansive turbine hall, ‘how could you not be entranced by that’ as a child she questions. Going on to study art, the extent of the sidelining of women artists only dawned on her aged 21, when visiting an art fair and realising, out of the thousands of artworks before her, not a single one was by a woman. She asked herself whether she could name twenty women artists, ten pre-1950, any pre-1850. Despite her degree in art history, the answer was no. She tells me, ‘it’s not like these women didn’t exist. They existed, and they were incredible… you’re just actually missing out on having really interesting conversations about really interesting artworks.’ She hopes the book acts as an entry point into art history, the kind of book ‘on the first floor of the bookshop, that sort of made art mainstream’. Having received my copy for Christmas, purchased by my parents from Waterstones first floor (it was their book of the year in 2022), she has managed to do exactly that. 

Without The Story of Art Without Men, both myself and many others wouldn’t be familiar with the dazzling concentric paintings of Hilma Af Klint who produced some of the first major abstract works, before the likes of Kandinsky and Mondrian; the psychologically acute portraits of Alice Neel; the 18th century pioneer Angelica Kauffman. I tell her there are now art enthusiasts who may be more clued up on women artists than men. She says there’s a David Caspar Friedrich show at The Met which she might have to give a chance: we jokingly share a moment of misandry. I lament Durham not offering a degree in art history and Hessel suggests ‘there’s much more hunger’ for the discipline than ‘institutions actually have food for’. As a humanities student who has mourned the crumbling arts and humanities building juxtaposed against sparkly new facades of business schools and STEM buildings, these words resonate. 

I urge you to check out Hessel’s work: her podcast guests have included the likes of Tracey Emin and Marina Abramović. Ali Smith claims ‘her retake on the canon has changed it forever’: Katy Hessel is quite literally at the forefront of the art world, and changing the game with her passionate and palatable positive discrimination.

Categories
Creative Writing

Mayflower

By Lenna Suminski

I grew up around forests, things change when time passes and people get older and muddier. To the right of my house that my mother’s mother built on top of her mother’s bones, there used to be a road that led to nowhere. I learned to bike down that dead end, howling like wolves, armed with pink plush handlebars and not-so-flashy training wheels. They built a bridge across that 

valley and unrooted all my grandfather’s bamboos. Now teenagers do motorcycle tricks down my street and they had to build up a higher fence on the bridge because people kept taking their leaps of faith. Courage and solitude comes in many forms. I used to swim in the creek they decomposed in. 

I am not allowed to run barefoot across dandelions anymore. 

But before all this death, there had to be life. This is not a story about growing up, I’ve hardly ever grown. 

I want to tell you about a tree, before the bridge, before the fences. The tree was tall, expansive, wise, and giving. Just across from my window, it sprung white flowers over and over again every spring. My mother could not bake but she’d make tea from the fancy rose Earl Grey we’d get from the city every other Saturday. I made daisy chains and swung from its branches. The day before it was cut down–this older-than-any-bridge tree–I saw my mother and my father kiss for the very last time. 

Tree-climbing was a talent of mine, my first and only nickname was ‘xiao monkey’ (small monkey). I have never fallen. My feet will forever be rough and tough from my refusal to wear shoes. 

My ama, my mother’s mother, taught me everything I knew. She’d seen more death than me. The house across from ours used to be a pond to catch frogs and catfish in. Her tiny frame grew stubbornly, like the pink flower weeds she taught me how to peel and eat, when nothing but tea came from the red dirt of her mountain land. 

My agong, my mother’s father, was more like me than anyone would like to admit. He died when I was too young to understand his empathy. I used to detest holding his rough, tough hands. He planted a tree – well, many other trees too. But he planted a tree for my mother, Mayflower Tree. It was taller than my window. I’d learn to climb its ridges down and over the fence to see my high school boyfriend at a party many bridges away. 

He planted it for her, it’s been seven years since he was suffocated by cancer and the tube but his tree snowed white flowers across my home-built-on-bones for eternity. Only in May, he gave us

remembrance. In second grade we read a poem about mayflowers and I picked the most pristine ones from my yard and brought it to school. I’d never been more proud. 

These are my flowers. It came from my mother’s tree. Inhale their loveliness. 

I did not cry when he died, slowly and disgustingly. But I wallowed in agony the winter following the buddhist lotus-flower that we made and burned for him, when ama and mama cut down the Mayflower tree, and all the other trees. 

They will grow back, Lenna. 

No, it will never be the same. 

When I was nine, my classmates presented in excitement a dying baby black crow that had fallen from our school yard’s tree. They herded around it like vultures, gawking, squawking, overwhelmed by our pure biological voyeurism. Ponytails and buzzed heads and scraped knees crowding the crows body. When they all left I held the baby bird in my lavender-printed white dress. I banged on every door and skipped my classes, nobody really had the time to entertain my silliness of trying to save a dying thing. 

I laid against the tree of its nest and we looked at each other until it died. I whispered some lullaby, I’d never been a good singer so I told it the story of trees. Then I laid with its body, its hair as black as mine, listening to the tea trees and the red dirt that was never rich enough to grow anything but bamboo and weeds. 

It was the closest I’d ever been to death. I’ve hardly grown since. I talked about the mayflowers and crossed my heart like it was a prayer. In the name of memory and belief, the closest I’d ever been to God.