In addition to the yesterdays post: Owen drag my attention to this article, about a completely contemporary Ukrainian music scene, that emerged around Orange Revolution (here), focusing on a band called Fotomoto, singing in French, that were the darlings of the late John Peel. Peel wasn't exactly right saying that they were completely isolated from the Western sound ("strange things happen to pop in isolation"). What allured him was the singing in French and dream-poppy atmosphere. The idea the East lives in isolation is another stereotype that is attractive for the West I guess. The musicians themselves say they feel a part of the global world, im sure that around 2004-5 all of them were highly networked! But a strange situation: you cant get their cds anywhere, for people who were capitvated by them via Peel, they remained an air-only ethereal phenomenon. But isn't it sound great, actually?
But another thing Peel says there seems fairly typical: 'Most music I get from eastern Europe tends to be rather grim metal stuff, not awfully good, and when you see the bands live - of course this is a gross generalisation - there's always a kind of cabaret approach. There's always someone in the band dressed as a clown or a monk, and the vocals are always terribly theatrical.' But what is bad about Theatrical exactly? Of course, I'm perfectly aware how bad in general metal bands may be, but that also complicated my thesis from yesterday, the singing in English/in your native speech thing. Because precisely, just think about all those very bad metal bands, or just the absolutely horrible/fascinating form of commercial pop everywhere (be it mutation of Europop - remember Eurodance? etc). they mostly sing in their respective languages.
here more spectacular examples.
She (they?) are singing in Russian (I envy you seeing it for the first time):
and she is singing in Polish (although I'd give a lot not to understand what about)
Doda, performing with her "band" elegantly called Virgin, is a proud Katie Price of Poland. Funnily enough she's a couple with a leader of the internationally known metal superband, Behemoth, maybe one of those John Peel was talking about. Also, you'd be curious to know, there's a massive form-content discrepancy, usually. I mean, what she sings about has nothing to do with the entourage. you'd think it's all porn & all, but what's probably even worse, these are attempts at lyrical poetry. yes.
and she is singing in French
eugh....
Also, one of the strangest phenomena of the beginning of 21st century: TaTu
All of them just wanted to be Madonna (rather re In Bed With Madonna than to focus her fine pop moments), or later, Lady Gaga, or emulate old times divas (P. Kass committs an unforgivable profanation of any idea of Edith Piaf, or Francoise Hardy, whenever she opens her mouth), but who actually knows what people responsible for Nikita had in mind.
It's not exactly how do you imagine national bards, is it? Nikita & Doda sing in Russian/ Polish, because there's a massive audience for that, which emerged in the strange post-capitalism times in UKR/PL, in a culture where even baring your tits in a Reality Tv seems simply not enough & being a criminalist is a cool & accepted way of life.
Some people like to watch celebrity shows or reality TV, others - read biographies of famous people or aristocratic families, others think that reading Kolakowski or the late pope JP2 will save them from all the atrocities of the world. In a way, there're no big differences between them.
Reading this interview with Piper Kaplan, from Puro Instinct (via Pop Jukebox) (the only reason I know about her is because she is from the Ariel Pink constellation), I found out about the story of this amazing compilation, containing four Leningrad bands, that was the first ever presentation of the Russian punk in the West. Released in 1986, well into the Glasnost era, it still had to be smuggled. However some of her statements sound a bit naive ("I also think that Russia is really cool, because Russia is on the outside what America is on the inside. It's really seedy, and fucked up, and corrupt. It's like the innards are exposed. I like that. They’re proud of it, and wear it on their sleeve. I think that’s pretty cool. My idea of Russia is kind’ve this weird apocalypse, Troma version of America."), I think there's a lot to it, much more than Miss Kaplan can imagine.
When in the post on Pulp few days ago I was writing about the inability of Polish bands to fully emancipate from the influence of the West (at the same time being trapped within history, that made them either be journalistic, or completely nihilistic, and no wonder why - later will elaborate on this subject), the silent premise of those statements was that of course, there were nations that had it worse as far as social and political history goes and most definitely I feel that despite being exposed to this music & culture for years, my research on this matters barely started. There's a lot to be found out. But to better imagine this entrapment of the rock/punk bands under the Warsaw Pact, it is worth to imagine how it is to sing to a music invented by English-speaking lads. I guess that the fact now everybody sings in English, what wasn't the case 30 years ago, is a sign not only of the culture's globalisation and homogenisation, but speaks about the cultural limitations of the genre itself. I know it may sound funny after so many has happened to "rock" music we can't recognise it as a genre anymore, but the mediocrity of teh current "indie", this sort of stagnation in a form set decades ago & its selling well speaks volumes about the conservatism of the current era and proves either there's still a public space generated by music to take over or that we are in a state of a total, total bankrupcy. You decide. Or that, coming back to the linguistical thing, there are always two parallel 'scenes' in the countries: one of the English singing more or less West-copyists, and another, that still struggles with the real singing-songwriting, that occurs, I think, in your Muttersprache. (Writing in English, which scene's part should I feel?)
Some of the Punk on the other side of the Curtain story I mention in the review in the current Wire magazine where I reviewed much anticipated by me alternative history of Polish punk, Generacja by Michal Wasaznik & Robert Jarosz, telling how things were especially before the introduction of the Martial Law in 1981, which I heartily recommend to you. And if I ever said that there was no more than the system vs. the youth thing, that would be an unforgiven simplification. The quasi capitalist consumption at the end of the 1970s was in a full blow and the society obviously knew numerous ways how to obtain the desired goods or lifestyles, be it smuggled clothes, food or Western records. And definitely, from the late 1970s on, the communist system was so rotten, old, flaking off, being a parody of itself more than ever before, and if the economy is a joke and the reality you live in is a joke, what do you have to lose?
The story of how the West mingled/mirrored/copied the East and vice versa has a funny reflection in a story of a "rebelled" American female punk, who was so attracted by the Russian roughness & brutality, she went there, got together with the bands and released the 1st LP of their music on this side of the curtain, and had relationships with the members of the scene, which is a funny episode of the erotic relationship between USA & USSR. So as the new generations of American girls are seduced by the Communist Chic, we can only look forward to the fruits of this love.
[a slightly changed version of an article I've written a year ago and published in a Polish magazine called Lampa (issue 1/2/2010), inspired by this piece, of course. So now, when Owen publishes his book, no one will tell I nicked my ideas from him]
Polish pop & punk bands were journalistic, Polish bands were not excelling in great lyrics. This text seeks to overcome this general opinion, and maybe come up with some new views. In the history of popular music of single countries there’s their history written, social, political, intellectual, it conserves the cultural momentum, the language, style, views, customs, morals and consciousness. I initially started writing this text in a reaction to Owen’s two part essay on Pulp - where he was overtly stating this was the best UK band of the 90s and why it was so special – but it was probably the article’s cheekiness and general flamboyancy that made me to rethink whether and why my country, Poland, never had its version of Jarvis Cocker. Because it was probably this band who captured, better than anything from that period, the zeitgeist, drowned in the Brit-pop’s crassness and cockiness, and left victorious this embarrassment that Brit pop was, without fraternization with Blair or participating in the Blur vs. Oasis thing, still topping the UK charts with Common People in 1995.
Through they style-jangling, eclectic, nonchalant (I thought at that time!), but very accessible music they were the most exciting and moving band at the time, touching upon the themes of the class war, patriarchy, inequalities, and managed to do so through very private and idiosyncratic obsessions of its frontman and lyricist, the one and only Mr Cocker. Because really, the lyrics were the most important in this band, although all of us were dancing to the ‘hits’ from Different Class.
Because there they were – and I remember very well when I bought my first of their albums, it was Common People of course, and it was a cassette, and I was thirteen, 1996, initially prompted to buy it allured by the cover and the artwork of it, pictures of the family events, weddings, communal life and this whole ridiculous slogan ‘We just want to be different’ – wondered, why exactly did they mean? I remember the initial awkwardness of my acquaintance with Pulp very well. For a girl who at that time just started reading music press – and it was a good time for the press in the still freshly free Poland, just a year before a first real popcultural magazine started, called “Machina”, a mixture of Face, I-D and Melody Maker, where I first read about William S. Burroughs, Afrika Bambataa and pop art probably – it was quite something. Don’t remember whether I even read a review of Pulp, just there they were, and I remember just being seduced by the title – Different Class. At that time I already knew and was listening to, among others, Portishead, Bjork, Blur, had few important soundtracks, like (forgive me) Trainspotting, after which I started listening to Joy Division and New Order, and at that time, in Poland, believe me, listening to (Whats the Story?) Morning Glory didn’t condemn you to the social inexistence. Au contraire, no one were interested in this music in my school or among my friends. There were just me and tons of cassettes in my room.
After that there was dozens of British bands in my life, discovered and rediscovered. The moment when I realised how much a context of a place from where the band was was decisive. If you’re from Sheffield you don’t play like guys from Glasgow, and definitely not like blokes from Liverpool or Manchester. Pulp were from Sheffield, famous for its industry and brutalist architecture, with the great social experiment that was the Park Hill complex at its front. It was to be the city of the future, there the dreams about the final industrialization were supposed to fulfill, it was a fine transposition of futurist ideas into the every day life. Cabaret Voltaire, Human League (who first performed as the Future!) or Comsat Angels were from there, among others. But Pulp does not wear significant traces of an influence of the local scene. Cocker founded Pulp aged 15, and his natural references were Roxy Music and (I guess) some influences of Bowie, with a vision of a sexy, feminized but not gay, vocalist, inclination to frocks and luxury, and refined pop.
Who is usually founding bands? Funnily enough, unlike Britain, in Poland it was rather kids from intelligentsia, with an access to family libraries and at least small financial security. Not in UK, as we know. But Cocker was hardly a working class hero. He had it written on his face he was a good student, a well read teacher’s favorite, who attended music lessons and were active in the school theatre. But he clearly wanted a success. And where the hell is a success and the access to the ladies if not in the realm of rock music. If you watch the very early videos of Pulp with Jarvis, included on the post-split Hits dvd, what you see is an incredibly tall, eccentric, quirky, nonchalant, black-humoured but perfectly aware of his uniqueness pretty boy in oversized glasses, whose every gesture, every whim on his face, seem to be perfectly directed, so perfectly it suggest his fragile and embittered ego. He desperately wants to be different, fucking Andy Warhol, combined with Bowie, and more Scott Walker than Bryan Ferry, and what not, and he will be restless and ruthlessly focused where he only wants to. He is like Cary Grant in Bringing Up a Baby – but whereas there only we, the audience knew he may be clumsy, but he’s pretty fucking hot, he’s a bloody Cary Grant after all! – this boy already is perfectly aware how bloody charismatic and special he is and how he will use it to his advantage in the music world. And what a spectacle of a man he is - and he knows it, even when he’s doing his grocery shopping. But look at him again, and then look at him a few years later. Jarvis wasn't a typical frontman, with his carefully staged video and gig persona, with his ridiculous height, thinness, overly long arms and legs...it may have appeared as even grotesque. (then we learned there was some heroine involved to this thinnes later). He looks like a Daddy Long Legs, isnt he, so fragile he would be thrown with a slight blow of a wind. If you look like that, you feel uneasy, uncomfortable, you stand out. There's no easy option for sexiness for you, you have to invent yourself. Hence the queer-but-straight, peculiar stage motion of Jarvis, his cabaret, theatrical characteristic "pointing" hands gestures, his studied as-if drunken/stoned manner of dancing, that seem like a parody of conventional male sexiness, but delivered together with this deep, baritone voice becomes Ueber-sexy... On the Sheffield Band video, sitting together with his band mates, he seems very uncomfortable. They all, the band, love Sheffield, they really do – isn’t Sheffield a beautiful place? he asks rhetorically, equally rhetorically admitting he will never move to London. Ha bloody ha. His mind is already nowhere else.
I’m unfortunately not patient enough with describing frocks and style, if you want this, go to Jon Savage and England’s Dreaming – let me then release my inclination for sublimation and focus on the message. The message was truly ambivalent. It is hard just to put Jarvis strivings into the box of a prole resentment, because it was so much more. Pulp is a band of oppositions. Yes, of course, he was perfectly interested in making a career and fucking other bands’ chicks, but show me a 90s frontman actually more interested in the destinies of women? And with an equivalent of the quiet, but assured presence of Candida Doyle on the keyboards (somewhat a balance to the Jarvis’s flamboyancy). Another paradox is of course the nostalgia. Cheap nylon outfits, general atmosphere of tawdriness, that later was changed for the more expensive, but still far from luxurious 1930s-meet-1970s colorful shirts, velvet suits and pencil skirts. Nostalgic salubrious sound vs the epic rock, mechanical motorik referring to the Sheffield bands tradition and the sentimental balladry; cockiness and shyness. The sentimentalism, self obsessed and sexy, reeking with boredom, disappointment, resentment, inequalities, decadence, ennui, deviations, alienation, hedonism, despair. And compassion. All those girls and women dwelling those songs, from the early Little Girl, repeating the theme of a young woman, pushed into a marriage & children, and then deteriorating in a house in the suburbs. My favorite song from the early underrated 1987 Freaks album is I want you, with a metaphor of an old lover, who wants to “keep her and throw himself away” (is there a more beautiful metaphor of love?). “You could look like anyone else, If that’s what you want to do”, but she cant, he can’t look at her in any other way. Guilt, frustration, sick love, fear of love, are leitmotivs of the early Pulp. In Life must be so wonderful Jarvis continues over the sad destiny of his ex, who left the town and didn’t quite gain the success elsewhere, who he is mocking, bored to the degree he need not to even pretend anymore.
I have a quite unexplainable liking for Freaks, which are relentlessly bleak, one-note, monotonous album on boredom, unsatisfying sex and title’s “death of emotions”. Unlike other Pulp albums, there’s no playfulness, nearly no skips (apart from I Want You and What You See maybe) toward any other form or other kind of human interaction. There’re certainly pieces of art that doesn’t bring any hope, but the songs on Freaks are also badly written and produced and there’s perhaps no forgiving for that. Still, I can’t fully recover after subsequent listenings of Life must so wonderful, where there’s clear there’s something genuinely wrong with the world and our relationships. There must be a difference between sheer wallowing in our unhappiness and real unhappiness, which is total and absolute shiteness. There’s certainly a difference between acknowledging that your relationship or lack thereof is shit and eg., that people are cruel, and eg. rape and kill each other. Because one can just leave said relationship, paying probably with a few months of feeling shit or having a depression, but surely, things like politics fucking over generations after generations or mass murder are worse.
But the catastrophe of relationships in Cocker’s lyrics are not only a fault of the imperfect nature of an individual, not only of the male desire, which in the end must say “goodbye” even to a nicest and most sympathetic girl and look for another conquest, to avoid the suffocating emptiness. Or rather this emptiness takes place in a specific space: in cage-like, stuffy flats, without perspectives, among stupid and insignificant dreams, among passive women and frustrated men. The characters are usually from the lower social classes, who had a chance to have/taste some of a “better life”, which often ends in a total failure. All this is filtered through an openly misogynistic, self-ironic, monologueing hero, who is mocking his own pretension to grandeur and megalomania, which is also a side effect of a class-induced resentment. There’s no, apart from the Freaks, real misogyny in Jarvis’ lyrics, who was raised by and surrounded by women, the father left the house, and Jarvis frequently admitted he’s actually more interested in a woman’s psychic life. The misery, lack of chances and helplessness of women is a frequent theme there.
Jarvis also were fascinated by Scott Walker, who produced finally the We Love Life, album “nobody bought”, as Jarvis later said, and the whim, mysteriousness, grandiosity of his music is definitely present there, if not the most in the fragmented, whining, painful baritone of the frontman, nonchalant and full of authentic despair. These are lyrics about sex in a smaller city, like all that joyful forgetfulness of Razzmatazz or Babies. But no irony – irony was a clichéd du rigeur of the past few decades and enough of that. Jarvis’ hero may be truly a bastard, when he’s blagueing that “I wanna give you children and you might be my girlfriend”, but aren’t the alternative destinies of those girls actually much, much worse? All those stupid things, they don’t work anymore, leave hope you who cross the line of growing up & entering the society. The thing is all that is raconted from a proper perspective of time (“well it happened years ago”), and is actually told by a slightly lecherous thirty year old man, who really probably doesn’t give a fuck since a long time. Sweetness is still there though, and real sympathy.
My favorite album or rather group of songs come from This Is Hardcore recorded after the astonishing success of the Different Class. This is one of the saddest albums ever, also an album of the lost chances – made more commercial than intended, it has become a spectacular band’s suicide. Its really like in this Frederic Beigbeder book, 99 Francs, the peak of the celebrity culture, this is a nightmare of a fulfilled dream of money and fame, drowned in drugs and alcohol, with incredible 30 minutes opera (masterpiece!) of the title song and written as if from the other side, hilariously funny Help the Aged, with Jarvis flying on a wheelchair to another galactic, like in Tarkovsky's Solaris mixed with Monty Python Flying Circus. Fetishism, crime, suicide, hardcore pornography, drugs (there was heroine around, so did Jarvis get a near-death overdose or a nasty trip?), jokes about death (but you're dead already, aren't you?). Yikes indeed. This is hardcore is a post coital, post sexual, post libido, post mortem pure dreadness, that gives me shivers & a serious twist in my stomach.
Moreover, it's everything Freaks wanted to be but could never become. This is an album of an unmatched power, a hangover & existential haze encapsulated, it’s freak Hollywood drama, Billy Wilder’s Sunset Blvd, Hitchcockian thriller with his women fixation (the projection of desire specifically Hitchcockian here!), cinema noir, showered with modern decadence, vanity, emptiness that can only come with a career in show business. This is a depiction of Jarvis Cocker’s state of mind after a year or two of taking advantage of finally getting on the top, of constant shagging anything that moves and partying hard. It nearly killed him, psychically, but there’s something great in the way he’s subliming it. Interesting, how eg. Bowie was embracing it (although it nearly killed him too, as we know at the end of the Station to Station there's nothing short of a goodbye-to-life declaration) and found himself much more inclined to hedonist pleasures, and actually never produced anything as dread-invoking as This is Hardcore - there's never such a menace, such desire-turned-something-terrible thing. It’s truly spectacular, pushed to the utmost degree, Twin Peaks/Mulholland Drive luxurious atmosphere of dread, like you were on a Eyes Wide Shut party, going straight to hell.
Truth is that is has to come to that, and it requires shitloads of hard work just as much as partying and immense self confidence, which comes after years of giving way too much fuck. And then you realize it doesn’t matter.
Then Cocker got married, left for Paris, had a child, recorded a weak solo album, got divorced, produced among other things, Charlotte Gainsbourg album, recorded another solo album, whose highlight song is called I Never Said I Was Deep. Slightly disappointed by the first one, I actually begun to find the joyful embitterment of the second one fun. Well, he didn’t lose the classiness or sense of humor, naturlich, but the erotic neuroticism of Pulp is long passé.
So if I mourn something lacking within Polish (music) culture, is its not enough of literacy. The lack of striving to express their frustrations in an enough of a literate way. We limited ourselves to one-dimensional punk screaming/whining how special-but-nobody-knows-about-it songs that mostly sounded like cheap plagiarism over the Western bands. We seemed condemned to the music secondariness, so what about some lyrics experimentation? Sure there were frustrations, tons of them, but no one cared to put them into an artistic, poetic way. Yes, Im more than furious with how things went in Poland, because we have such a wonderful poetic tradition, such original literature, especially after 1945. What has happened with it, why it didint infiltrate the popular music?
Do we need and why, a Polish Jarvis? why do I miss such a figure in Polish cultural landscape? Why don’t we have equally nonchalant, whimsical, eclectic music, non-stripped of emotions? I’ll pass the general esthetical dependency of Polish popular music from the foreign, which condemns us to be eternal epigones. Lets focus on the layer of expression, ideology even. All music has its own esthetical ideology, Jarvis’ ideology was some projects from the past, filtered through his personal obsessions. Well, it is better not to mention our ideology. Polish bands, in result of those, and not the other, historical conditioning, had to, first of all, fight with the mythological SYSTEM, ‘komuna’, and didn’t have time or possibility to develop the esthetical or lyrical issues.
There’s also too big difference between our perception of socialism, obviously. Big assemblies, tradition of militancy, “classlessness” of the 30 years of the after-war period in UK, and then Thatcherism, strikes, when the industry was being destroyed are quite a different thing than the assemblies in Poland, under a quite different flag, or a general atmosphere of hopelessness, bleakness and greyness, especially of the last two decades of Peoples Republic. Maybe comparing the histories of our countries is idiotic in general. But hey, when I listen to Pulp, I still regret not having this chance. That the most popular songs in Poland have to necessary be bloody protest songs; and that we always, as a nation, preferred Clash to Sex Pistols. [well, a book called Generacja by Robert Jarosz, dismantles this image, but it came out a year after I’ve written this]. Class war, well, was something completely different here, was incorporated within the rotten ideology of late communism. Polish artist just couldn’t look at the socialist equality with hope. We also do not have a strong working class artist tradition, very few of the artists, maybe more among writers, belonged to the working class, art always being a domain of intelligentsia, who had privileged access to knowledge, books, education.
Funnily enough, when another self-proclaimed dandy, Paul Weller of the Style Council, wanted to show the bleakness of Thatcherism, he came nowhere else than to the grey Warsaw and shot Walls came tumbling down there in 1985. Now we watch this clip on youtube and proudly show it to our foreign friends, because Warsaw has become this really hip place. To me Warsaw is real, true punk. Ian Curtis knew what he was doing (although he probably meant Bowie’s Warszawa more). But funny that there’s no a Bowie song called “Berlin”, but there’s Warszawa. Still, people treat us as a living museum of communism (but people, go to neighbouring Ukraine for this purpose), whereas an ideal of contemporary Poland is a fucking small entrepreneur. Because maybe one of the problems of the culture in Poland under communism is that obviously it wasn’t socialist enough, and was basically as divided as anywhere else. Also dandyism as a way of life never actually found its way or tradition in Poland and died with the romantic poets.
Another thing is our level of consciousness. Young people coming to the festivals like Jarocin dreamed mostly of getting pissed and having sex in the bushes, they thought of the freedom and emancipation as well, but not knowing how it actually should’ve looked like. Punk in Poland was still v much about filth and vomiting, there were Solidarity, but all that was immersed in the omnipresent Polish Catholicism, and the progressive or anarchic circles already were seeing it all going toward right winged nationalism and capitalism. If we had lyrics about love, sex, unfulfillment, maybe paradoxically it only happened in the texts of one band, simple Teenage Love Alternative, then T.Love, whose frontman, Muniek, born in the same year as Jarvis (1963), is one of little working class born musicians in PL, who wasn’t ashamed to write about love. Muniek emancipated himself and gained a success comparable to Jarvis. Some also say that the more contemporary, 00s band, Cool Kids of Death (named after St Etienne song, of course!) was a late heir of Pulp. Their songs are fulfilled with similar resentment, unfulfilment, aspirationism. But whenever Pulp wanted to get there (and was getting there), CKOD were singing somngs of self-hating slackers. T. Love and CKOD sung a wish ablout collectivity, that never really happened, failed youth collectivities, refusal, hopelessness – CKOD coming from Lodz, a fallen working class city, no wonder etc etc.
WE never loved life, or ourselves, for that matter. Pity. Because this comparison between cultures and histories shouldn’t go towards revengeful or regretful jealousy really. But there was and are cultural complexes in us Poles that we unsuccesfully are trying to heal through similarly inept methods, like shock capitalism, privatisation, self denial or denying that the previous system had anything worthwhile in itself.
This is a far more complicated story and I'm not going to finish it right now, the story continues…
This is a book that was certainly the most important for me in 2010, read extensively and excessively, many times, in long bath lies, in bed, on my way to various places, as if I didn’t want to separate from it for too long. It was supposed to be unpublished until the 2023, but the heirs decided differently, and it was published in German in 2008 and then Polish and English in 2010. I have bought copies in three languages.
This is a testimony of great love between Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann, two poets I rate among the most important for me, if not the most important, really; a two orientation points as long as the post war poetry or writing as such is concerned (Bachmann important for me rather as a prose author), examining the limits of the language, testing the very possibilities of what can be said. This all sounds very Wittgensteinian, and no wonder that in a film adaptation from 1990 by Werner Schroeter of the final, astonishing novel by Bachmann, Malina, published in 1971, in which she’s paying a homage to her lover, dead of 1 year ( Celan chosen “the loneliest of deaths” in 1970 by throwing himself to the Seine after years of struggle with mental illnesses and personal crisis), the heroine, played by the very Isabelle Huppert, is attending a course on Wittgenstein’s philosophy in Vienna. How very proto Haneke's The Piano Teacher (Elfriede Jelinek's Klavierspielerin appeared in 1983), probably my favorite film ever – where again, Huppert played a desperate and lonely to the bone woman with artistic aspirations, which were brutally diminished, displaying her usual indefinable charm and aura of sexual complexity.
In both those cases, adaptations of books written by Austrian female authors, we have a woman, who eventually finds it impossible to live after a one way or another unrequited or failed love for a man. In Bachmann’s novel, at the end the heroine says: “I loved him more than my life. He was my life.” – whereas her lover, the title’s Malina, is believed to have died in mysterious circumstances, just as did Celan. In this unfinished novel, stopped by her tragic death after the fire appeared in her flat in Rome only at the age of 47, she finally closes their lifetime long, incessant relationship, love, friendship, correspondence, that sometimes muted for years, included few attempts of getting back together, always paid for by even greater pain and bitterness. But first, why should we care about it at all?
Because what it gives you an inquiry into is to what kind of depths of despair and intensity can love lead and especially if you were lucky enough to experience it in your own life, it is a proof that all this really is possible to put on paper, within a letter. Being in a relationship that lead me to frequent separations with the person I love, I also frequently have to rely on letters, and sometimes have nothing but letters, although we can't escape the fact we live in the era of internet. But even in the times of a quick internet connection one can still experience all kinds of doubt, longing, waiting, anticipation, desperation and loneliness. And this collection of letters is dearer to me than anything published in years, and it leaves me speechless and even more in love, because it helps me to name what love actually is about, although I couldn’t possibly explain it to you.
Celan has become everyone’s darling now, Libeskind channeling his Radix, Matrix poem to his drawings, songs cycles being composed to his Todesfuge (Death Fugue), him being a model tormented 20th century poet. He inspired a Polish poet Andrzej Sosnowski in his seminal long poem After the Rainbow and many uncountable others. I cant possibly write about Celan’s poetry in a piece of a blogpost space. It overwhelms me, although I strongly believe, that Celan, a poet of notorious obscurity, was rather a poet of an absolute lucidity, clearness and quite impossible distillation. He was a poet, he could only be a poet, and this is what he was doing for all his life.
Born as Paul Antschel (1920), a survivor of Holocaust, of course – but you know all this story already, do I really have to tell this again – a native of Czernowitz, Bukovina in Romania, born only few years after the dismantling of the Austrian-Hungarian empire, of which it was a part, he was invariably a product of its culture and politics. Member of Jewish diaspora there, he spoke Romanian at school, and a high literary German at home, mainly because his mother, Fritzi, was in love of German literature and was keen of passing her son the same passion. She is frequently referred to in his poems, tragically killed, in a Nazi camp, shot in her head, as he later found out, but the father, a more orthodox Jew, remains a dark and obscure figure. He insisted on the Talmudic education of his son, and therefore Celan spoke Hebraic also at a quite early age, so the inheritance of Jewish culture was quite strong in him. This whole constellation of languages, plus Yiddish, which he got as well, created the rich polyglot ambiance, in which the poetic mind of Celan matured and flourished – although probably it wouldn’t mature but for the inevitable, tremendous Jewish fate. He was a poet of this fate, of the civilization after 1945, who, as much as Bachmann, was trying to remap the world anew, to see the possibilities of saying something. And one will see, that his poems, after a brief initial period of quasi-surrealist stylization, strive to describe actually real situations, although it happens in the most condensed, reduced, dense way. There was not and there wont be any poet like him, ever, because the situation, in which he wrote and that made him write, is unique and uniquely tragic.
I can really only recommend jumping into his poems now, immediately, as you read this post. I remember studying his poetry in the University Library in Warsaw, transcribing his poems, as I couldn’t afford to pay for the Xerox, also, because I wanted to memorize its lines. I wrote in German and in Polish (had a bilingual translation) and although I didn’t know the German, I could read them, deciphering his cryptic, words overloaded with layers and layers of meaning. They are incredibly personal, in fact, and much has been written (Szondi, Gadamer) about the meaning of the Celanesque “Du”, that is “You”. “Du” appears there hundreds of times, testifying about the despaired attempt to link or to find this other being, and this “Du” was very frequently Ingeborg Bachmann herself.
Because the reason those letters are so tremendous is mostly due to Bachmann. Who was always investing more in this affair, and then difficult friendship, who was endlessly patient, careful, delicate, human, ready to give. This book show her as someone, who maybe recognized the weight of this love way too late, and then for the rest of her life was trying to recover from it.
Bachmann is now renowned mostly as a novelist, but she was an astonishing poet as well, her poetry being an examination of damages of war on the culture and possibility of speaking, of expressing human emotions. After becoming a successful writer in the 50s, she disrupted this image, publishing various experimental novels & short stories, and radio plays, that included strong inspiration by Celan. They’ve met when she was nearly 22 and him 28, in a post-war, divided Vienna in 1948, and almost immediately, well, just fell in love with each other (but my hand hesitated whether I can use such a bland expression to describe it). Her a daughter of a Nazi officer, born in 1926 in a very "brown" Klagenfurt, was studying philosophy there, preparing a very critical, as it was to occur, doctoral thesis on Heidegger. He was a man without a land, feeling increasingly alienated and haunted in a former Nazi country.
He leaves quickly for Paris, she stays. They try to meet again, but for some reasons, it doesn’t work out. Their attempt of mutual life end up “a la Strindberg”, in her words. As it occurs quite often, two very individualistic creative personalities are better in tragic loving that in the everyday routine. But there’s something more: he cant forgive her belonging to the culture, who killed his parents, she desperately tries to fulfill his expectations all her life, and finally fails. What is striking sometimes is Celan being demanding to the extremes to see the impossibility of his situation, and at the same time his lack of sensitivity, frequent blindness to anyone else’s traumas or problems than his own, whereas it is Bachmann, who is careful with every word she writes to him. Poverty stricken, she has to devote her time to non-intellectual jobs, starts to write excessively, he, married to a rich family, can mostly devote to the writing. Both of them suffer from numerous breakdowns, with, mostly Bachmann’s, constant trials to sort out their relation. Also, even when he appreciates her poetry, it is always connected with her person, his love to her, her charm etc., as if he was incapable of seeing her as a poet, a writer.
Their relationship was becoming more and more difficult with the years. Celan was suffering increasingly from his illness (it is difficult to say was it a mounting schizophrenia or recurring depression) and one’s own demons can be very possessive sometimes, to the degree they overwhelm and makes us blind to the suffering of the others. After another outburst of feelings and unsuccessful attempt to be together again around 1957, they embarked on a rather dry relation, as far as the letters go. Bachmann was changing, she was experimenting with writing, she published various novels, a cycle called Todesarte, The Arts of Dying, where she was among other things, settling accounts with Holocaust’s legacy in Austria. Also, her attempt to settle after Celan, was always doom-stricken. It seems that she just couldn’t be happy after him. Her white relationship with a gay composer Carl Werner Henze, although the lack of sexual tensions made her very happy, obviously wasn’t a solution, then she started to be with a renowned Swiss writer Max Frisch, an ex-architect, some may be interested to know (the exchange between him and Celan, also included in the tome, gives an incredibly funny tragicomic image of impossible dialogue between harmed, obsessed Jewish poet, seeking consolation after attacks, and a bit humourless, still crazily jealous, overly indulgent with his ego Frisch), who only left her four years later, after what she had to be hospitalized. Relation with Celan was even more harmful, as he was only capable of demanding from her and accepting only total agreement. He never was a help for her. He was too much obsessed with his demons, as Bachmann said, he was always a victim and died as one.
The peak of his deterioration was of course the so called Goll-Affair, when Celan, an increasingly renowned translator, after translating some of Ivan Goll poetry, is accused by his wife of plagiarizing her husband in his own poems. Then there were hostile reviews of his poetry in Germany, where, especially in the infamous Blocker review, he finds strong anti-Semitic undertones. He seeks consolation, mainly from Bachmann’s, she does whatever she can, but the distrust is there and after that Celan does not recover anymore. After several attempts to kill his wife and son put into an institution (what the letters are not saying), then released, he finally commits suicide. “Every day is a burden, what can be called my “health” will never come back, it seems, the damage reaches the very core of my existence…I can be cured only in pieces.” he written briefly before his death to his Israeli friend, an old, late rediscovered youth friend from Czernowitz, Ileana Shmueli (their moving correspondence was published several years ago in French).
This is an excrutiatingly beautiful testimony of few people loving each other. Because there was also Gisele, Celan’s French wife, who did almost everything for him one can do. Her letters to Bachmann, in which she confirms that “she understands” her relation with her husband, are heart breaking. This leads to the most touching letter Bachmann ever wrote to Celan, which remained unsent (like many others), where she concludes: “You are everything to her with your suffering, but she with her suffering would never be enough for you. What injustice.” Read this one and then the real letter that she’d sent to him instead. This captures her infinite delicacy, her turmoil and her consciousness of the delicate balance between them, that, at some point, just didn’t resist. “Je n’ai pas su l’aider come je l’aurais voulu”, “I couldn’t help him the way I wanted”, concluded Gisele informing Bachmann about Celan’s death. This is also a testimony of women whose love is terribly betrayed by the men's egos. And everything fades in a horrible, deadly silence.
I quite often read readers' reviews on imdb.com. Unlike reviews on Amazon or pretty much everywhere else, they are not exclusively dull, there happens little hilarious eruptions of insight and they present much greater variety of approaches. Having a Sunday of procrastination, as it is, between cooking and reading Dostoyevsky's Devils, not being able to decide, what way of losing the time for working is better, whether to watch Haynes "Safe" (too depressing) or Trotta's Rosa Luxemburg on Youtube (Youtube quality), I suddenly realised that what I should do is to find some japanese-website quality example of no matter which example of my truly favorite genre of cinema, in the guilty pleasure sense: French comedy of manners where they do a fuckin lot of pseudointellectual babble (in French) and occasionally screw. My choice were cast on Arnaud Desplechin's My Sexual Life (Or how I got into an Argument) with wonderfully ugly-handsome and utterly pissing off Mathieu Amalric.
There was (and still exists to some measure) this wonderful genre in French cinema, started probably by New Wave directors - contemporary comedy about over-(usually pseudo, but that's tautology)-intellectualized young people, mainly and not surprisingly - young men, celebrating their immaturity, which is, in wider sense, we are told, supposedly a sign of something more general, the cultural climate, the society, in which they live etc.
This genre exists everywhere, and produced films as different as Francois Truffaut's saga about Antoine Doinel, Jerzy Skolimowski's Trilogy on Andrzej Leszczyc or Keith Waterstone's Billy Liar; Mike Leigh's Naked's eloquent Johnny is their younger brother, of course. Young-ish males engaging into endless disputations and imaginary lives, by the way screwing up lives, theirs and the people around them, whose pursuing the truth may be at the same time pure blague and pure sincerity & authenticism, but it's hard to tell, if at their most authentic they are the most hypocrytical and mendacious, or vice versa. Phd students, bluebirds, pseudeintellectuals, posing, babbling & escaping every form of responsibility - or to the contrary, those, who by their posing uncover the true rottenness of the society around them, maintaining in fact a real, moral and other, purity and innocence?
The cinema and literature is full of them, and they are always young males. If i think about the American cinema, there were few attempts to give them a woman repersentation, but I guess everybody will agree that Winona Ryder weren't very convincing in this role. Hamlet is a man - always a man, and Ophelia must just die. Full stop. There can't be a reversal of those eternal rules. Women are not convincingly depicted as intllectualls or even slackers, in the movies. The best you can get is fucking Juno, but she's a 16 year old in the "smuggest film of all time", as Mark K-Punk once put it. Now Juno's Ellen Page plays parts like utterly flat Ariadne, a labyrinth designer (sic!) in a Christopher Nolan's superproduction Inception, where she helps Leo DiCaprio to get to his blond haired children and a ghost of crazy French wife. apart from her, she's the only female character in this quite populated movie.
But my argument weren't supposed to be in this vein. Sure, there's also no, or very little, great depictions of, say, women's depression in cinema (vide Baumbach's ultra-boring Greenberg), but let's be honest: it's because there's very little, main woman characters in movies as such. Coming back again to so praised in blogger's circles Inception, and incredibly silly business class hi-tech pseudo-Freudian babble, women in this movie can be either desexualised part of the gang or they are crazy, irrational French, cliched beauties.
But this is something every child knows and yawns at. My argument here really weren't supposed to be as dull as pointing out the sexism in world cinema, but the aforementioned French comedy of manners.
In Desplechin's movie, the lovely Paul Dedalus (yes, really), a phd candidate in a subirban university in Paris, engages in one big succession of talking, drinking, flirting, breaking up with girls, messing up with his life, messing up with the lives of others, with his career, talking & talking. For three hours. literally. 173 minutes. Im a conaisseur of reading then the mentioned mixed reviews in imdb.com my favorite fragment is: "Like Stephen, his problems with writing are linked to his problems with sex. This is a key film of the Young French Cinema, which favours the flat filming of dozens of bright charmless young things drinking coffee and talking about Wittgenstein. Great."
In this case it is exactly how the reviews are saying - all my critique above doesn't change the fact that IT IS very truthful about the young people and IT IS extremely annoying and in places, boring. and probably most of the contemporary, politically aware, intelligent readers of these words, if they have seen the film or even at the sheer description of it, would argue they dont find themselves in a portrait of the 25/35 generation and find it endlessly shallow, vacuous and boring. and who they are, privileged, quite well off, secured, compared to many people, to us even, having the luxury of talking bullshit in Parisian Cafes, while we have crisis, cuts and unemployment, allowing themselves to make problems out of some stupid, vacuous romances and dull dependency between the sexes.
fine. fair enough. but what will you tell me after seeing scenes like this:
or this
dont you find yourself in them, at least in a tiny bit? very tiny? our ridiculousness, the ridiculousness and pointlessnes of our relationships, full of poses, hipocrisy and insincerity? but always, always with a true need to reject all those masks, with a possibility of it lurking somewhere. no, as you can see, the whole thing above was not supposed to put them into derision and through the psychoanalysis or class critique machine.
my favorite commentary is the one under the breaking up fragment: "Wow, French people sure are emotional!!!!!! Wore me out just watching it, can't imagine living like that everyday! Neurotic nonsense!" well, exactly, so what??
because the grandness of those young smug pathetic people is that they are also capable of greatness and that we are great in our weaknesses etc. or something. at least I want to believe it this evening, when I'm watching them.
Past may be a foreign country, but what if it is a foreign country within a foreign country? Imagine you happen to change your life thoroughly, and you decide to take a huge risk; and then the risk happens to be worth it. I guess then everyone live happily ever after? Not necessarily. When I came to London already as a “girlfriend”, with a plan set that we will visit each other month by month, it felt doubly like having a new start in life. No dry knowledge on England, no studies or reading, made me prepared enough to feel familiar. Suddenly the language I thought I know very well seemed utterly foreign; the conversations blurred, the small details were running away. Used to master and control the reality around me I felt suddenly lost.
I’m not sure how it had started; I was irritatingly impatient, asking questions about everything and losing my temper 50 times a day. O’s stories all seemed rather elusive. Sometimes I wasn’t even asking and the stories were coming out, sometimes I wanted to ask, very, very much, but was too shy to do it or was afraid of his reaction. And when I was listening I had a feeling that a lot stays in between, somehow lost, dressed in lighthearted statements that may cover something of much more heaviness. I realized that even with all the details the stories wouldn’t seem any more real or true to me because this is how memory works. He insisted he was not nostalgic about his past. So can one become nostalgic about the places someone else seems nostalgic about?
Yes, very much so. The fact that we knew each other before from writing paradoxically didn’t help much, because it was a bit one way – I was reading his blog, thinking that in this way I will know things better, but the more I knew, the more lost I felt. Words were alienating me from the experiences I couldn’t share, as if, despite this is how we’ve met each other, internet wasn’t this mystic space of meta-community, or of real sharing. Going from ethereal space of the internet into the real places before I was only reading about was suddenly a bit shocking. Language creates its own reality, that doesn’t have to relate to the flesh and blood reality. Places about which we read don’t necessarily have to really exist. And the detailed descriptions of the places O likes only made me realize more that I’m a stranger to all this.
The knowledge came to me through walking: views, smells, tastes, proven to be much more telling than stories. Already highly mediated through what I’ve read and what I was told, I was trying to forget all that knowledge and subjugate to the sheer specificity of the place. Which, given the aesthetics of the places O was taking me has already become a part of certain cultural industry, could easily transform in its parody. Luckily it didn’t. it seems that the aura, or some kind of black energy may emerge even when we resist it.
London is a mystery to me, a mystery that I know won’t reveal itself any time soon, it will only get worse. I was warned: there’s no chance to fully get to know this city, even after many years. This is probably a part of the charm I should accept and drown myself into rather than feel anxious about. But mixed emotions is my specialty, so I couldn’t resist that.
The irregular rhythm of my visits didn’t help much in getting any stable opinion of a city, which I’m getting to know from a very characteristic perspective, the South East. We live in Greenwich – well, not exactly Greenwich, O would say he lives in Westcombe Park, but the sheer sounding of “Greenwich Peninsula”, a half insular, half land-ish dimension of this piece of ground appeals more to my imagination. In my mind we live in a strange, joli-laid, beautiful-ugly place, which transcends the real official borders of Greenwich, where the park is a wilderness, river is a sea and the fortress of Canary Wharf, the financial centre built on the Isle of Dogs (sic!) is a somber citadel. It is simply a place, where you can be pretty sure you will stumble upon something uncanny. I can imagine that every day I could find there something that would be suitable for this new site, collecting haunted curiosities.
Greenwich, apt to its name is a space with lots of greenery, that is being suddenly interrupted by industrial trash and pollution. Where classic beauty of Wren’s Royal Naval Hospital clashes with the futurism of Millenium Dome area, and where the splendours of the royal park is a neighbour to the ordinariness of Blackheath. No wonder, we are in London, after all. Finally and metaphysically enough, it’s a “zero point of time”, as it were, a Greenwich Meridian space, with the elegant silhouette of the observatory, interestingly used by Conrad in his Secret Agent as a symbolic place of modern terrorism, where an anarchist revolution is to be started and a perfect place to embody “perverse unreason”, as Conrad described it, which “has its own logical processes”. His story was based on a real event of a French anarchist, who was carrying explosives, that accidentally detonated around Observatory:
“But that outrage could not be laid hold of mentally in any sort of way, so that one remained faced by the fact of a man blown to bits for nothing even most remotely resembling an idea, anarchistic or other. As to the outer wall of the Observatory it did not show as much as the faintest crack. I pointed all this out to my friend who remained silent for a while and then remarked in his characteristically casual and omniscient manner: "Oh, that fellow was half an idiot. His sister committed suicide afterwards."
Funnily enough, that was – the park, the hill, the observatory – my very first acquaintance with Greenwich, when I went for a walk there, last Summer. That was as far as I could go not knowing any inhabitant who could take my by the hand and take somewhere more interesting.
Greenwich is not a proper suburbia, it used to be a town, a port, wit a rich history. Not until the end of 19th century it has become a proper part of London. One can feel the independence of this place, that still didn’t assimilate. Being there, I tend not to assimilate too and stick to the place. As a person who spent all her life in a Eastern Bloc concrete city, I crave water: and here I am, gazing at the Thames, that starts to look like a sea. Sitting at the Cutty Sark pub and drinking my pint, I stare at the water, imagining the whole microcosm of the lives lead here. I listen to people. Different on the weekdays, different on the weekends. On the weekdays, in the work hours especially, I like to imagine, that people like me come there: temporarily out of place, in suspension, as if on vacation. If only for an hour or two. I imagine the conversations, not just trying overhear them. I plot the criminal stories. I gaze at the incredible, fantastical figures of gas holders, I scan silos that are to be demolished, one by one. I look at the ancient Woolwich ferry, planning a trip. I imagine one day everything here will be drowning, naturally (won't be calling JG Ballard here, oh no), but Greenwich already looks like it has regressed to some ancient geologic period, after reemerging from the deluge of some sorts in a degraded form, whose the shiny, cold, metallic and ruthless opposite shore of Canary Wharf is also a part of.
For a short while I thought I want to have an “esthetic” blog, in which I could write/put pictures of my current interests/fascinations, but that proved to be a bummer. I didn’t really feel this, I wasn’t engaging, and first of all I felt that my English wasn’t good enough, and I was too chimerical. And too lazy. First of all I was too lazy.
I’m still a lazy and very melancholic person, but between January, when I last put any “content” to this blog and the present moment, an important thing had happened. This, among other things, makes me to commute a lot to London, where my boyfriend lives. This experience, of staying for weeks in a place that is so different from Warsaw, where I live, turned out to be very intense and highly transformative. For the first time I was somewhere else than home that wasn’t just a place of my vacation; yes, it was a space of temporary existence, but also with certain traces of “stability”; but it wasn’t a place of actually “living” either, because it remains undecided whether we’ll be living together and I still didn’t make a decision of moving from Poland. But exactly because of that, of London being this space infinitely “in between”, a place of non-decision about what it exactly means to me, a non-place of staying and non-staying, of living that is not entirely a “living”, made this experience so powerful. I don’t know for how long I will (or rather we will) continue this mode of being, but the longer it happens, the more it occurs to transform both spaces: my sense of Warsaw and my sense of London – as two intersecting, hybrid spaces of domesticating.
While staying in London, I also discovered, to what extent the space I’m in determines my way of being and thinking. This space being South East London, precisely – Greenwich and few other places, that constitute it. Gradually over the last few months we’ve been exploring this space together. Owen’s impressions can be found on his fantastic blog here. As I was reading his impressions of places I thought I knew so well, they suddenly seemed strangely foreign to me. Little by little it was clarifying for me, that the curious impressions I was collecting over my visits in London also start to constitute certain whole, that is revealing itself for me. What will hopefully follow on this blog will be a very modest try on telling the bits of this ongoing, hybrid, sometimes alienating, sometimes fascinating experience of the attempts to domesticate/get to know/intellectually colonize a space that still remains quite obscure and foreign, but already with traces of familiarity to it.
