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.
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)
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 Times ‘Bestseller’, 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.
‘Emerald Fennell and Sam Mendes are a scourge on British cinema’; this is the polemic expressed by my friend Jack in a Bethnal Green wine bar. We are a few pints and half a bottle of wine deep, and they are lamenting the state of contemporary British filmmaking. I had seen the stills leaked from the set of Fennell’s upcoming film adaptation of Wuthering Heights, in which 34-year-old Australian actress Margot Robbie plays 18-year-old Catherine Earnshaw alongside Jacob Elordi as the brooding Byronic figure of Heathcliff. Fennell’s casting is divisive – central to Emily Brontë’s novel is the violent, metaphysical romance between Cathy and her adopted brother Heathcliff, who is described in the book with ethnically ambiguous terms, referencing his ‘dark’ skin and ‘gipsy’ origins. Arguably, Heathcliff’s non-white racial identity is essential in fuelling the complicated and fraught dynamic between him and Cathy, pulsating with shame, subjugation, and an ineffably spiritual connection.
I’ll admit, I’m not too optimistic towards Fennell’s adaptation, particularly her handling of the class dimensions in Brontë’s text. Her last film, Saltburn (2023), offered a stylish, yet ultimately substance-less satire of the British aristocracy. What’s made clear, however, is Fennell’s commitment to provocation – mostly through blunt stabs at the erotic, which never really come to climax. Indeed, the promotional images for Wuthering Heights (2026) feature an illustration of one skeleton going down on another. While I’m not necessarily against an added psychosexual emphasis to the source material, the absence of sex in the novel was not merely a result of repressive Victorian morality, it was paramount in establishing the book’s extraordinary sadism – transcending bodies, surpassing death. The explicitly sexual ‘first looks’ at Fennell’s project might also invite audiences to interpret Cathy and Heathcliff’s relationship as romantic; let’s be clear, this is not a love story.
Much of the online discourse surrounding the film also concerns anxiety towards its historical accuracy. Daisy Jones, for British Vogue, defended Fennell’s inaccurate costume design – advocating for ‘fun’ and ‘whimsical’ approaches to period films because fiction is, after all, only fiction. Fennell’s casting director, Karmal Cochrane, offered a similarly shallow response to the backlash, saying that there is no need for accuracy because the original source material is ‘just a book’ and not based on real life. Of course, directors do not owe us an exact historical approximation. The intentional inclusion of anachronism in historical films is not always an inherently bad thing, it just has to be good. Interpretation is variable and cinema’s fecund ground produces endlessly diverse adaptations of original source material, prompted by the creative agency and artistic licence of directors. The criticism towards Fennell’s choices are not intended to dispute this fact, rather, the importance of interpretation rests, as ever, in its appreciation of source material, its generative, constructive element to the plot, and its execution. I’m dubious of Fennell’s commitment to these first two criteria, as for the third, we will have to wait and see.
A week after my conversation with Jack, we met at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, hidden just off the Mall by St James’ Park. They had invited me to a screening of Jacques Rivette’s Hurlevent (1985), a more stylistically classical, obscure film from the French New Wave director. It was the first time I’d seen a film on 35mm print, and while this made me feel enormously intellectual, it also created an elliptical, dreamlike atmosphere in which passions between Catherine and Roch (Rivette’s Heathcliff) oscillate like the tossing and turning of waking from a nightmare. Rivette loosely transposes the first half of Bronte’s novel onto the austere Cévennes countryside in 1930s France. Interior shots of the dark, stone farmhouse, functioning as a prison for its inhabitants, are contrasted with the barren plains of Southern France – recalling the bleak, untamed landscape of the Yorkshire Moors where Brontë sets her brutal novel. Rivette’s mise-en-scene is sparse and minimal, underscoring the isolation of his protagonists and their entrapment within an unforgiving rural microcosm of wider class stratification. His choice to set the film during the interwar period is also strangely effective; we can tell through the costuming that Hurlevent is set in a more recent past, but it feels so remote and gothic that it becomes impossible to comprehend the setting as modern. Grand sweeping shots of the landscape, accompanied by haunting Bulgarian choral music at epiphanic moments in the film’s narrative also serve as another anachronism that provides a new texture of alienation.
Most importantly, Hurlevent also demonstrates Rivette’s extremely faithful reading of Brontë’s text. Rivette, in an interview for Senses of Cinema, stated that he was struck by the fact that, at the time, nobody had made a film adaptation featuring actors that were actually the age of the characters in the novel. The youthful theatricality of the teenage actors Rivette casts creates the sense that they are play-acting an adulthood far beyond their years – their squabbling, teasing, and exceptional cruelty towards one another only amplifies the tragedy of their fates. Although some English Literature students may find Roch (Lucas Belvaux) too blonde and boyishly handsome, this is rectified by his return to Hurlevent as a newly affluent businessman, consumed by his desire for vengeance. Rivette’s Roch in the latter part of the film is cold, sadistic, and brutally violent – probably the most terrifying interpretation of Heathcliff that I’ve ever seen. Refreshingly, Hélène (Rivette’s Nelly, played by Sandra Montiagu) is age-adjusted too – she is only in her early twenties and forms the film’s most central, grounding figure.
Hurlevent is an unbearably emotional film; Rivette renders the dynamics of Brontë’s novel with such emotional intensity and affect that, at some points, it becomes difficult to watch. This is exactly how I feel in my reading of Wuthering Heights, a book so muscularly cruel and abusive that reading it feels nearly devastating. To me, this is at the heart of interpretation. An effective execution of a director’s artistic interpretation of source material and the intentions behind inaccuracies and anachronisms must culminate in constructing a powerful emotional response in the viewer that aligns with, or amplifies, the intention of the author or artist.
A director could stage source material in variously diverse and unexpected ways – think of the playful Beverly Hills setting of Clueless (1995), loosely adapted from Jane Austen’s 1815 novel Emma. It can only work effectively, however, if the viewer is transported to the emotional and thematic landscape painted by the original author. Wuthering Heights might be ‘just a book’, but any good adaptation appreciates the themes and dimensions that are essential to the original text, despite major or minor liberties.
T. S. Eliot and Earl Sweatshirt (real name Thebe Neruda Kgositsile) are both visionaries. This claim is contentious – many find Eliot’s writing frustrating or pretentious and Kgositsile’s abstract delivery and style of hip-hop alienating. Nevertheless, both artists redefined what their craft could be, pioneering a new lens for poetry in interwar and modern eras alike. This essay considers how Eliot’s The Waste Land and Kgositsile’s “solace”both use abstract form, language and structure to express feelings of aimlessness after loss: Eliot representing the ‘lost generation’ of young people following the First World War, and Kgositsile dealing with depression and addiction following the death of his grandmother. Today marks a decade since Kgositsile released the ten-minute “solace”on YouTube channel dar Qness, accompanied only by the caption ‘music from when i hit the bottom and found something’. No rollout, no marketing. Split into five distinct sections like The Waste Land, the song delves into Kgositsile’s struggles with addiction, depression and grief. “solace” seemingly has little in common with Eliot’s masterpiece, a poem which encapsulated the aimlessness of modern twentieth-century society and cemented Eliot as a seminal modernist writer. Although it may appear fruitless to draw comparison between a groundbreaking century-old epic poem and a relatively unknown song released solely on YouTube, analysis of Eliot’s The Waste Land and Kgositsile’s “solace” suggests the unique role that forward-thinking art plays in conveying perspectives from ‘the bottom’.
As Eliot uses disorienting form to display a frustration with post-war aimlessness as a member of the ‘lost generation’, Kgositsile breaks down traditional hip-hop structure in “solace”to depict his difficulty in dealing with the grief of his grandmother. “solace”is split into five distinct sections, each providing a snapshot of different experiences of depression in loss. Kgositsile’s five-act structure is not only reminiscent of Eliot, but of Aristotle’s Poetics and a dramatic framework which Aristotle influenced – a form which both Eliot and Kgositsile themselves distort. “solace” and The Waste Land thrive on this type of disruption. If Aristotle’s dénouement of the fourth act intended to build towards a climactic conclusion, Kgositsile’s fizzles into depressive ambiance and Eliot’s five acts laugh in the face of structure altogether. Attempting to draw a single narrative between the fragmented voices of the poem does a disservice to the deliberate disorientation of Eliot’s writing. Beyond form, inversion of tradition and the familiar is the foundation of The Waste Land. The poem’s opening line ‘April is the cruellest month’ twists the opening to the General Prologue of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which describes how ‘Aprille with his shoures soote’ … ‘engend[er] the flour’ (April with his showers sweet … grow flowers). What represented new life in the Middle Ages is twisted by the 1920s to be lifeless and ‘cruel’. Kgositsile similarly distorts the optimism of April. A sample of Ahmed Jamal’s “April in Paris”is skewed and repeated to sound eerie and unsettling. A celebration of the beauty of spring through jazz is inverted to soundtrack Kgositsile’s lament that he has ‘been alone for the longest’. The rebirth of spring hurts more when stuck in a cyclical pattern of depression.
Where Eliot is constrained to the page, Kgositsile is provided with more opportunities for expression. His slurred, depressed tone leaves the listener with a pit in their stomach; a feeling only accentuated by uses of repetition throughout. The mantra of ‘it’s me and my nibbling conscience … I’m fixin’ to give up’ structurally emphasises Kgositsile’s repeated failure to climb out of the pit of depression which he raps about. Cyclical despondency is at the core of “solace”, the song beginning with a warped voice repeating ‘I’ve been here before’. Depression is not foreign to Kgositsile. A wide emotional range is expressed through instruments alone. The third section of the song lacks vocals altogether, sounding almost optimistic, yet then quickly descends into the darkest section of the track after a brief moment of reprieve. The decision to leave the most up-tempo, brightest moment of the song without vocals is itself reflective of Kgositsile’s low self-esteem – the song’s auditory moment of optimism is saved for when his vocals are absent.
“solace’s” shifts between tones are reminiscent of Eliot’s poetic voice. In part one, The Burial of the Dead, Eliot uses enjambment to quickly change the meaning of his lines. The romantic image of ‘the hyacinth girl’ with ‘arms full’ and ‘hair wet’ turns sour as Eliot writes ‘I could not / Speak, and my ears failed’. Similarly, enjambment is employed at the beginning of part two, A Game of Chess, to create a flowing, confused and overwhelming body of text, reflective of the ‘synthetic perfumes’ Eliot describes. The abstract perspective of the poem disorientates the reader, placing them in Eliot’s aimless shoes. The words ‘troubled, confused’ are initially read as adjectives, leading on from the image of ‘perfumes’, yet as one follows onto the next line it becomes clear that they are intended as verbs. As optimism and pessimism are opposed in The Waste Land and “solace”, so are youth and death. Part one of The Waste Land questions a man, and by proxy the reader, as to whether the ‘corpse … in your garden’ will ‘bloom this year’. Rebirth is juxtaposed with the legacy of conflict and the First World War. How can new life flourish against a backdrop of violence? Kgositsile’s depression prevents him from disconnecting his physical body from his grief: ‘I got my grandmama hands, I start to cry when I see ‘em / ‘Cause they remind me of seein’ her’. At twenty-one, depression and grief lead him to despair, with seemingly no solacein sight. The final lines of the song are hopeless: ‘I’m the youngest old man that ya know’.
Years after The Waste Land’s publishing, Eliot described it as nothing but ‘a piece of rhythmical grumbling’. An untuned ear may describe Kgositsile’s solace in the same way. Both works represent the disgruntled voices of their generations a century apart. As The Waste Land instantly became a classic, its ominous tone connecting with those who connected themselves to a ‘lost generation’, “solace” has connected with thousands of fans around the world who relate to Kgositsile’s potent, free-flowing, faded depression. Yet it gets better. Eliot found happiness and connection in a second marriage later in his life, and Kgositsile is now a father and sober. Both artists pushed their art forms to convey their aimlessness and came out on the other side. Perhaps we can find solace in The Waste Land.
It seems a long way away now, but for a little while the rhythm was clave. Life then was verdant, thronged with vistas burgeoning with delicate blossoms. Flaxen sands and purled, fizzing oceans gasped under the creaseless sky’s allure, as rays of sun slunk louche cross chestnut skin, laid out in listless, sultry bliss. This was the languorous pulse of Ipanema beach, where I was first seduced by the elemental disjunctures of Clarice Lispector.
A true original, Lispector was at once a peerless wordsmith, a quixotic bohemian, and a figure of sheer tropical chic. Resoundingly international yet recognised only in the felicitous stupor of Brazil’s remarkable climates, her conceptualisation of literature nonetheless rings out distinct to me even now. Hers is a writing that is almost uninfluenced, a curiously profound game with the very parameters of character and narrative that glimmers with beauty and insight.
Under the influence of a strong caipirinha, a camel yellow and a brandished sunset, her final and most famous novel The Hour of the Star, absolved me of reality. Even today the memory of this strange divinity, this complete luxation, still teases some awe from my mind stuck in dim days of drab and drizzle.
Born in Ukraine but raised in Northern Brazil, Lispector created an oeuvre unlike any I had and have since encountered. Sprawled across the sand, browned, blonde and careless, the delicate wisps of a revelation were conjured. As the gorgeous world promenaded before me, and as I gazed gently out across the décolletage of the bay, I was dazzled by a piece of writing I could not have comprehended had it not been in my very hand, rifling through my mind. I was utterly beguiled, transfixed by the gentle sway of the palms and the swirled, daring questioning of Lispector’s fresh formulation of language. That pearled sand enveloped my draped figure in a citrus, sun kissed lacuna; a fresh vision of what it means to live and to write.
Make no mistake however, The Hour of the Star itself is in many ways reluctant to be beautiful. A psychological account of a disturbed writer struggling to tell the tale of a plain, poor Northern Brazilian girl living in Rio, our unorthodox narrator Rodrigo S.M. does his best to condescend and dismiss the subject he has been enraptured by, almost as Breton was with Nadja. The beauty and implicit value of Macabea and the life she leads is stammered out nonetheless, wavering with an oddly authentic charm, replete with the hopes and heartaches that constitute living.
It is a surreal enchantment then – The Hour of the Star – a strange sort of disconcertion, a swooning detachment from accepted reality. Akin almost to how I felt in a far flung corner of Ipanema beach, charmingly aware how very far I was from home. For a fleeting week my concepts of literature as well as the means by which I ought to live were inveigled.
Now distance is inevitable in literature, and it’s implicit in the very word ‘holiday’. No matter how profound, penetrating or encompassing a story is, it cannot replicate lived experience. Irrespective of the enlightening, revelatory, or otherwise wondrous qualities of a holiday, it cannot be a life. They are not however facile, a great holiday and a great book linger for a long time precisely because of their distance.
So this is the story of the time I felt furthest from home, more than physically – when the strict tempo of artistic preconceptions was loosened. The green and pleasant land seemed a wasteland to me for that week – I could hear the bells of Elysian fields tolling through my mind to a different lilt. Jolted out of my slightly stale conceptions of life and literature, my venerations fluttered fickle. Out flew my Graham Greenes and Virginia Woolfs – my freewheeling love of Kerouac and Faulkner gone – Lispector had a greater enlightenment. I desperately wanted to learn Portuguese.
But I hope this is more than just the tale of an exotic holiday where I read a genius but esoteric book. In many ways it is, as nothing changes really. I remain convinced that Lispector exists beyond the realm of genre and that it is impossible to write like her, and I can speak no more Portuguese than ‘obrigado’,and ‘bom dia’, so I shan’t be moving to Brazil anytime soon. Lispector’s reverence is worthy, found in her enchanting toying in what fortifies the constitution of ‘the novel’, her narrative skipping and flowing, gamboling in a new patter of life. That week I spent sitting on Ipanema beach with a dear friend, drinking, smoking, and listening to this new patter unfold around me will surely be one of the most wonderful weeks I had the fortune of passing through.
And that moment smoulders, flickering to a foreign pace in the richly coloured swirls of the irises. It’s a delightfully compulsive cavity, a refuge in the mind; the moment you peer above your sunglasses and your eyes drink in the fumes of discovery. Refreshing as a crisply inebriating drink, it thickens your blood with a rich and smokey dew. So brief but so potent, it is the insouciant rapture of a great holiday.
Life beats on, but in these moments still the rhythm swings slow and asymmetric. Hear it drum as you unpack your bag after a trip and sand pours to the floor, feel it echo in the fresh creased spine of an enthralling book now dustless on your shelf. Your bag’s contents then are almost identical and you barely notice an addition to your shelf, but something has changed. Now some sand will long languish in the carpet beneath your bed, now an inflection will forever sway through your perception – that is the faint thrum of a ravished dislocation.
As a footnote, a slightly less ravished dislocation was the woman whose leg I watched unfortunately get bitten off by a shark as I was reading on Ipanema.
Cinema Paradiso spills across the screen like the golden dust of a distant, sun-soaked summer in Italy. I find myself almost anticipating the yellow, looping cursive of Guadagnino to unfurl across the landscape. Released in 1988 and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, it begins in the glow of memory, weaving a tapestry of nostalgia that lingers long after the credits roll. Tornatore’s direction unearths the way cinema represented joy in post-war Sicily, where the screen was not just an escape but a vital thread in the fabric of community life. This was a time when cinema demanded presence, when a moment on screen was unrepeatable, and each viewing was a communal act of devotion. Tornatore captures this with an aching sincerity. Cinema Paradiso revels in the sentimental power of recollection. It insists that even when you leave a place, the past remains, so fulfilling, so irrevocably tied to who you are. The heart, it seems, is always anchored to the place it first beat.
For a brief time, Italian cinema had wandered from its post-Fellini heyday of the 1960s, leaving the world with a quiet longing for the flamboyance and creativity that once buzzed through its film industry. But Cinema Paradiso, in all its dusty nostalgia and unflinching emotion, allowed the world to witness not just a return but a reawakening. This film, a heartfelt love letter to the magic of cinema, clinched the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, reopening the door to Italian cinema.
Cinema Paradiso tells the story of Salvatore “Toto” Di Vita, a successful filmmaker who returns to his childhood village in Sicily after the death of Alfredo, the local cinema’s projectionist. The film moves between Toto’s present-day life and flashbacks to his youth in the 1940s and 50s, when he formed a close bond with Alfredo. As a young boy, Toto was fascinated by the magic of cinema and spent much of his time at the Paradiso Theatre, learning from Alfredo and becoming involved in the projectionist’s work. Cinema Paradiso explores the interplay between memory, personal growth, and the transformative power of film, echoing the ways in which cinema shapes both personal identities and collective histories.
Yet, beneath its surface, this is also a film steeped in the ache of unrequited love – not merely the romantic strain that pulses through Ennio Morricone’s exquisite score, but the quieter, more elusive yearning for places and people we are fated never to return to. It is a love that resides in fragments, in the unsaid and unfinished, much like the stolen kisses from the film reels – those moments deemed too passionate, too indulgent, and ultimately cut from the frame, yet kept hidden away by Alfredo, locked in secrecy for Toto’s eyes alone. These excised pieces of desire mirror a generation ravaged by war, deprived not only of their romance but of the very space to express them, casualties not just of conflict, but of sacrifice’s quiet brutality. The concept of erasing all that is romantic, of removing the fullness of feeling, is turned on its head in another of Tornatore’s works, Malèna (2000). In this film, the societal gaze reduces the figure of Malèna to mere fragments of desire and shame, as though the censored moments from Cinema Paradiso have been resurrected, now thrust into the limelight of this secondary narrative, their absence in one film becoming the entire essence of another.
A critic, in their wisdom, once claimed that Cinema Paradiso is a movie you show people to highlight ‘why you love film’. It is as if Tornatore carved the very essence of cinema into this story – a love for its power and the bittersweet ache of its passing. Watching it, I am filled with a strange, distant longing, jealousy, perhaps, of the Italian ability to not just feel but to display it so openly, so freely. There they are, whole rows of people, tears cascading, without a trace of the British restraint or shame that so often clouds our own expressions. No uncomfortable irony to dull the sincerity of the moment. It is this unabashed expressiveness that allows connection to others. The emotional depth on screen, uncensored and real, is a power I envy and admire.
Tornatore suggests, through his filmmaking, that great art is a product of rupture. The need to move away, to feel fear, to be uncertain, is essential for creation. Comfort, it seems, is a poor progenitor of greatness. It cannot coax the soul into the wild, restless pursuit of true artistry. To me, this begs the question, is it possible to produce something of significance, something that resonates deeply, without a devotion to something larger than the self? As Toto ventures out into the world, seeking greatness and adventure, he leaves behind a part of himself – a piece of his heart still in the village, still in that cinema.
On paper, Cinema Paradiso could easily be dismissed as another coming-of-age tale, but to do so is to miss the very heart of it. This is not merely a boy’s journey from innocence to experience, nor a bittersweet meditation on the passing of time. It is a film about film itself—a metacinematic reflection on the art form that has both shaped and been shaped by generations of dreamers. As I watch Cinema Paradiso today, do we, the Netflix generation, feel removed from the magic of a packed cinema, its seats filled with an entire community feeling together? Are we too comfortable now to understand that collective pulse? Have we lost something in our relentless individualism, the constant hum of distraction at our fingertips? Cinema Paradiso is not just a film but a testament to the undying love for storytelling, for those darkened rooms where emotions were felt in unison, where stories were imprinted on the soul.
“Heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: So far so good… so far so good… so far so good. How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land!”
If La Haine were a religion, it would be the fire and brimstone reality: the kind that doesn’t deal in salvation but in cold unflinching truths. It is The French film (capital T). If you’re an admirer of international cinema or a committed francophile, the chances are you’ve heard its name. A raw portrayal of the activities of three disenfranchised Parisian men – Vinz, Saïd and Hubert – the film simmers in themes of anger, violence and loathing.
Through a Buddhist lens, the film takes on an even deeper resonance. One of Karmic significance, etched into the very walls of the Parisian suburbs. First, consider the bleak black and white colour grading – an intentional choice, one that would leave viewers with questions as to why it was undertaken. The absence of colour strips the film of distractions; it makes both the film and the message it conveys feel timeless. Like the Buddhist concept of Samsara, the struggles of the banlieue aren’t just a moment in history, they are cyclical and repeating. As we follow the lives of the three protagonists, it is clear that their experiences are bound to be repeated eternally.
The camera work, excellently done by Pierre Aïm, re-affirms this idea. The slow, controlled tracking shots act out as if observing the film with a sense of detachment that mirrors Buddhist observation. The film doesn’t run towards its destination. It instead meanders slowly, leaving the viewer to question everything they’re watching. There is a sense of karmic inevitability as the film subtly drags our characters towards their deaths.
This idea of “Karma” has become so common that it would be easy to assume it as part of the English lexicon. In its true Buddhist form, the philosophy aims to explore the cause and effect that surround our everyday lives. It’s a rigorous system – a cosmic chain reaction where deeds, good or bad, come right back at you. La Haine is rife with the theme, most notably through Vinz and the repeated image of the ever present, ominous gun.
Vinz represents the inherent violence found in the forgotten parts of Paris. His constant obsession to kill a police officer exhibits the restless anger of an individual left behind by society. The gun, found by Vinz, becomes a symbol of contention throughout the film. He parades it like an amulet of power, convinced that it will give him the control he desperately seeks “with this, I feel like a real tough guy”. Vinz believes it bestows upon him respect and masculinity, something he is denied by the crushing weight of French society. It gives him the illusion that through violence comes control. His fantasies of killing a police officer, his casual threats, his violent posture reinforce these ideas deep within the audience. In the final scene, it is all but confirmed that Vinz will act on his anger and kill. Yet in his final moments, Vinz reconsiders the cycle of violence he perpetuates, and he spares a police officer. Alas, his karmic retribution is already set in motion. When he tries to break free from the cyclical Buddhist universe, he is killed. His obsession with violence attracts it back to him. The chain reaction commits its final act.
Vinz and Saïd’s characters also explore Buddhists concepts of Annatta or self, specifically the idea of a lack of self. Vinz constructs himself around violence and anger, emblematic in his idealisation of Tony Montana. Yet his final scene reveals his true self: he is not a killer. His entire sense of self is not real – it is hollow, a construct. In a different vein, Saïd’s sense of self is imposed externally: the racial prejudices of French society create both his external and internal image. His name alone indicates how he will be treated. Both characters ultimately highlight the Buddhist notion that the self is not a fixed notion, but a fragile construct imposed upon the receiver.
Unlike Vinz, who is trapped by his own self-gratifying violent attitudes, Hubert makes his own attempt to escape the tragic samsaric cycle, though it ends in tragedy. His aspirations to run his own athletic club are stripped away as the building burns down, in an event that symbolizes how external forces pull the individual back into suffering. Try as he might to avoid the ills of the material world, without true enlightenment he is pulled back into it. At the end of the film, he finds himself caught in the same cycle of violence and retribution. His death affirms the cyclical message at the heart of the film. It is proof the wheel keeps turning, no matter who tries to step off.
In La Haine, there is no neat redemption arc, no Hollywood ending. There is only how you fall, and the landing.
Howard Kanovitz, The New Yorkers (1967) Image credit: Stair galleries
Frank O’Hara, Sensitivity, and American Art
By Harry Laventure
Ah nuts! It’s boring reading French newspapers in New York as if I were a Colonial waiting for my gin somewhere beyond this roof a jet is making a sketch of the sky where is Gary Snyder I wonder if he’s reading under a dwarf pine stretched out so his book and his head fit under the lowest branch while the sun of the Orient rolls calmly not getting through to him not caring particularly because the light in Japan respects poets
Les Luths, 1959
Frank O’Hara. Somewhere between the consonants and the syllable count and the ink, there is always a lining of jazz. This retains its tuning on and off the page. Cinematic close-ups dripping with cigarette smoke, darting from object to still and place to space with the flicker of a Red-Spotted Purple Admiral’s wing-blink. The poet, tethered by personality to an infinite ricochet of cocktail parties, New York intellectuals, lovers, and the avant-garde. “Les Luths” epitomises the rarer alleles in O’Hara, those that permitted the most microscopic of attentions to encounters with people and things that most would not endow with profundity beyond the happenstance. An effortless habit of admiration that comes when the reservoir of an ardent spirit laps over the brim and spills itself on an outside no longer collateral. More morbid – he would himself remark that the slightest loss of attention leads to death.
O’Hara’s sprezzatura of the soul flaneurs through the arteries of his corpus with an insouciance which never loses its natural ancestry from the heart. Indeed, it is this love and elevation of the quotidian which elicited poet Ron Padgett to choose his “A Step Away From Them” for the Library of Congress as an encapsulation of American Identity. Written shortly after his friend Jackson Pollock’s death, O’Hara opts for no grandiose lament, no hagiography, no tender confessions. Instead, he choreographs a historical record of his experiences during a lunch-break trundle. From yellow hats, to cats playing in sawdust, to a cheeseburger at JULIET’S CORNER, the parade of the random betrays circumlocution of the most dazzling sadness – these are not distractions, but elements of grief incarnate in the places he’s left to inherit without those he’s lost. First Bunny died, then John Latouche, then Jackson Pollock. But is the earth as full as life was full, of them?
Riotous in his energies and replete with artistic force, it is no surprise that this attentive, charismatic socialite would exert a particular magnetism on the cultural elite of the New York intelligentsia. One privilege of being so close to so many artists is that one garners an innovative, thoughtful armoury of compliments across dozens of different media. Jane Freilicher and Elaine de Kooning executed portraits that projected their respective styles onto O’Hara, carving out his idiosyncrasies amidst great slashes of the palette knife in tropical technicolour. Grace Hartigan attempted to translate his 1953 poem cycle of Oranges onto the canvas, even embedding his words in their abstractions. Alfred Leslie would personally request subtitles and translations for his short film from O’Hara. We cut to Frank, drinking again, bumbling into yet another atelier, in “Why Am I Not A Painter?”
for instance, Mike Goldberg is starting a painting. I drop in. “Sit down and have a drink” he says. I drink; we drink. I look up. “You have SARDINES in it.” “Yes, it needed something there.” “Oh.” I go and the days go by and I drop in again. The painting is going on, and I go, and the days go by. I drop in. The painting is finished. “Where’s SARDINES?” All that’s left is just letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.
But me? One day I am thinking of a color: orange.
To consider the perpetual stimulation proffered between these individuals, whether in the New York School or the Abstract Expressionists or any other self-nomination, is to learn the currency of O’Hara’s central, artistic voltage. The exchange rate is as generous as a drunken handshake. Guston recalls being air-lifted from a creative pit after a brief poking in of the head and a few suggestions. In this gauze of compliments, we must deliberate how much of Frank seeped into the art itself. On numerous occasions, we hear of spontaneous collaborations in the litter of summer afternoons. My favourite anecdote comes from Norman Bluhm: the pair sat in the velvet of October 1960 and listened to a Prokofiev sonata in chatter together. What begins as Bluhm attempting to demonstrate his understanding of the musical theory employed culminates in a moment of cerebral confluence, and – music still playing – him and O’Hara conduct an improvised set of sketches, complete with poetry composed entirely off the cuff.
It is this fashion in which he is to be remembered by those he is most loved by. Not in the poetry that he hid in his drawers only to be lauded for now, nor the grand exhibitions he facilitated as Assistant Curator of the MoMA (a position which he’d attained having been promoted all the way from the front desk), but as the charmed, sparkling artistic intoxication with which he seemed to adorn the dance in his footprints. For all the compliments paid to him in his lifetime, 1999 saw a posthumous congregation of a most fitting collaboration. Brought together by the meticulously fervent work of Russell Ferguson and the Museum of Contemporary Art, In Memory Of My Feelings wove the literal personal effects of O’Hara and his clans into something that was simultaneously biographical, panegyric, and aesthetically instructive. Between many of the artists already mentioned and other titans such as Jasper Johns and Jackson Pollock, there lies the inexorable inability to amputate O’Hara’s life from the story of his generation’s artistic trajectory. Artist and poet, friend and critic. Those four nouns can be reconfigured as adjectives or adverbs to each other in any number of iterations without any loss in accuracy of expression. A tip of the hat in malleability.
Lest we take anyone else’s word for it, let us return to O’Hara’s own work. I hope that he would not find it too offensive to suggest that, for all its brilliance, Frank never really saw his poetry as anything beyond another outlet. But what an outlet. He had been immensely experimental in his time as a Harvard student. I won’t try to rival Ferguson in eloquence of catalogue:
… a striking diversity of forms that includes ballads, songs, a blues (so-called), a madrigal, musical exercises such as a gavotte, a dirge (complete with strophe, antistrophe, and epode), and even more exotic forms such as the French triolet. There are also an imitation of Wallace Stevens (with a touch of Marianne Moore) titled “A Procession for Peacocks”; a strict sonnet; a litany; poems in quatrains; couplets, and heroic couplets; poems with faithful rhyme patterns; and various prose poems.
Left in the company of such technical virtuosity, it is touching and telling to witness the consistency of his voice in the bare, casual, and sentimental tones of his main corpus. Drawing on the lesser-known greats of Reverdy and Apollinare, there is something confessional in O’Hara’s declared objectivity, and an unmatched sensitivity to the theme in the random or circumstantial. It sounds blisteringly blatant, but his poetry possesses a curation of contingencies which is almost musical in its cadence. Now That I am in Madrid And Can Think//I think of you. Such thoughts could only balloon to bloom at this very moment, in this very place, under these very auspices. The American air is only to be enjoyed because his lover is sharing [his] share, and the lungs that do so have sonorously subside[d] to greet him each morning with the flutter of your brown lashes. We then move to Toledo, where the olive groves’ soft blue look at the hills with silver like glasses like an old lady’s hair. The apprehension of the sheer number of happenstances that lead to the moment of observation is disarmingly beautiful in its appreciation. Even in his agony, O’Hara sounds grateful just to soak it up. This Personalism is immensely difficult to pin down or define, precisely because of the vast swathes of experience that the poet can cram into a matter of lines. In but one, then, his capacity to seek objects and scenes for what they meant rather than what they were retains a complexity which borders on abstraction only elsewhere found in music. Rothko gunned for the same in his colour-fields; Pater had previously observed all art’s aspirations to ‘the condition of music’. It makes sense that O’Hara was an exceptional pianist before he ever picked up the pen. Oversaturation by example to the point of the universal; when enough ostensibly random facets are showcased together, it is their key centre that is transmitted to us over the material. For this reason, we cannot trust O’Hara in his assertion that My eyes, like millions of glassy squares, merely reflect. It is not reflection, it is not projection – it is appreciation by address rather than praise. William Carlos Williams conjured no ideas but in things, Ferguson refined it to no ideas but in people, the obvious truth is that O’Hara is both. A kind of ventriloquist, bound to autonomous puppets. They are inseparable by their strings, the themes, though they still operate independently. It is a demonstration that the act of creation and the finished creation are the same, to poach from Ashbery. All this written down whilst sneaking out from the MoMA to type a few thoughts in the Olivietti showrooms. That is true sensitivity – or rather, Feldman would say, the dialectic of the heart.
So poetic a life could only come to an end on a similar theme. Tragically, O’Hara was struck by a jeep just off the Fire Island beach in the wee small hours of 24th July, 1966. He was 40. I daresay the absurdity would have made him chortle. Profound exactly because it was engulfed by the everyday. In Larry Rivers’ funeral speech, he observed that at least sixty people would have known him to be their best friend. I do not think there is a better testament to O’Hara, in all his tenderness and personability, than Jasper Johns’ Memory Piece. In 1961, Johns made a plaster cast of Frank’s left foot. Two years later, in a poem dedicated to Johns, O’Hara wrote When I think of you in South Carolina I think of my foot in the sand. I leave it to Ferguson to close: In 1970, four years after O’Hara’s death (…) Johns completed the sculpture he had envisaged making. The cast is attached to the lid of a box that contains a layer of sand. Each time the lid is closed, a fresh footprint is impressed into it. The sculpture makes an intimate kind of memorial, keeping O’Hara’s physical footprint in the world in an echo of the way his poetry lives on in the minds of his readers. Rather,
oh god it’s wonderful to get out of bed and drink too much coffee and smoke too many cigarettes and love you so much
Believe me, I am not a fan of Instagram. It’s the closest fit I can think of to a ‘Babylon machine’, except maybe something like a credit score, but who the fuck really knows what that is. The strange thing is though, when examined honestly, Instagram’s Babylonian currents have been a powerful force for moulding who I am today, how we all exist in this strange new age, and where we all think we’re going. I’m not quite sure that’s the tragedy everyone would have you believe.
Now I am not a psychologist or a sociologist, in fact I can sometimes be a bit suspicious of those more abstract sciences, so this is not one of those tiresome researched or sourced papers. As an insufferable arts student, I much prefer to triangulate my sense of self and reality with the medium of other people’s creative expression. The other week then, as the clock on my phone taunted me with the grandiose digits of the evening, through midnight’s crescendo of zeros and onward to the meek little numbers of the pre-dawn morning, I stumbled upon something genuinely interesting. Amidst the chintzy buzz of the search feature, trapped in the gaudy mosaic, between tiles of hideous car crash videos, offensive memes and plastic surgery was a strange post that genuinely struck me.
What I had stumbled upon, in the suitably unpalatable hours of the morning, was a collection of ten paintings by Egon Schiele. These were like nothing I had ever seen before – piercingly raw, expressive, and tormented in their vivid simplicity. A protege of fellow Austrian Gustave Klimt – Schiele led a suitably troubled, bohemian existence. Dead by twenty-eight following a twisted, reckless life – pursuing an incestuous relationship with his sister and having a less than healthy relationship with alcohol, he bore well the stereotypes of a troubled artistic genius. This however is not an article about such a blackened bolt of lightning – this is an article about me, and hopefully about you too.
To start, what I think is so interesting about this unlikely discovery is the way in which it speaks to the power of art to occasionally triumph over the patter of the mundane. I certainly did not search for this, or any other kind of artistic revelation, and I’m certain my dastardly algorithm is not skewed to present me with anything so profound. Yet when I glimpsed it amongst the discards of empty degradation I was affected deeply, enraptured with the power of a few lines.
Those lines, those bewildered, tortured faces Schiele summoned, were strangely prescient to my online experience. I feel those wailing lines, sketched in a kind of visceral flow that would often see him fix his manic pencil to his paper for the duration of the piece, can be traced onto the minds of the digital age. There seems to smoulder in the singe of those brandished pen strokes, a very strange kind of symbiosis. Between those warped, shrewd sketches and the pale flame of our minds that flicker so fickle at every swipe, burning to the pace of the digital age.
There’s a desperate kind of compulsion lurking in our digital presence that, when considered, is fundamental to our conceptualisation of ourselves. That kind of stupefied, arresting gaze that we fix to our screens for interminable periods lingers in Schiele’s lucid, striking faces. I suspect Schiele’s inspirations stemmed seldom from contented individuals or joyous experiences, heaven knows he wasn’t a beacon of certitude. But he had the cogency to articulate a particular facet of those prosaic lives, to reveal the swirling mire of darkness that beckons us, that we have always escaped into.
I, for one, have never desired any relations with any of my family, nor do I have such a harrowing relationship with substances, but all of us I think remain ghastly consumptives. Instagram is often referred to as addictive, but I think the connotations of that word constitute a slight misunderstanding. We know that Instagram works almost exclusively to our detriment, yet we cannot resist complicity. We are not helpless to the ravages of addiction, we are engaged in creating our own snare. We not only consume but contribute. There is a darkness implicit in that, and that twisted human agency is written with crushing lucidity across these seemingly regular, strangely devastated faces. Like any true piece of art they are an accompaniment, a mirror in which looms a charmed derangement – the frantic consumption of our lives.
The elevation of beauty is scrawled over all of our Instagram feeds, and it sucks us into a strange semi-reality, ogling the embellished truth of lives. We too cannot help but project a vision of a life in its most favourable terms, but the depth lies in our desire to do this, which Instagram feeds off. What is so striking in these works then is their undressing – their candid presentation of our sparser, but more emotionally complex minds. Something that lies not in our mere projections onto Instagram, rather in a far more layered embodiment of our interaction with it. What I read in those warped lines of lives is far more complete than a post – it is the murmurs of all live’s choruses, crushing us and contenting us. In our age those strange figures, leering so tormented from the page, are more than glossy holiday posts or a ‘chronicling of memory’ , they also gape for our mindless hours of swiping. They know of the strange curse of existence, of our idle, ivory desires.
Schiele’s paintings, particularly those portraits that I first discovered, are exercises in that damnation, quantified in the digital age. They are portraits of the humdrum, of the menial and the uninspired, but they throb with a macabre revelation, one fuelled by the hopeless forces of consumption. They sing for the looming twilight churn we are so often ensnared in, scrolling to the conclusion of our wits, right out to the precipice of our contact with reality.
So whisper it, but maybe there’s something true in the Babylon machine. Maybe it has moments of brilliance, where the hard swing of the numbed chisel unearths a little vein of gold that courses through our minds, when the miasma is illumined by an eerie brilliance. I am aware Zuckerberg has actually managed to get worse recently, as though he were in some fiendish race to the base of man’s ineptitude. Would the world be a better place if he had kept his churlish woman rating creation in his virginal notepad? Probably. Does there remain however glimmers of creativity’s timeless capacity to reflect personhood and inflect reality even there? I think there may well be.
As a footnote, Instagram can’t be too terrible, chances are that it is the means by which you found this pretentious crap!
