My “Best” from 2013 – part 4 Bubbling under

“You will lose the ones you love…  …Head is all heart has.”

                                                        Lydia Davis, Varieties of Disturbance

Despite the recent and ongoing crisis when most of us have been affected, and not only economically, and in a world that seems to generate more and more tat, it’s reassuring to realise just how much nourishment for the soul continues to be produced, discovered, re-discovered and made available to us in mostly digestible and affordable packages.

There may also be a huge crisis, mostly, I suspect, of confidence among the purveyors of culture, but there doesn’t appear to be much a crisis in the generation of it, in the broadest sense. On the contrary, as I put together my list the problem is always, and increasingly, what to leave out. Hence my ‘Bubbling under’ addendum:

 

Bubbling under films

Still Life is an affecting film that in some ways recalled the novel Stoner, in that it was about a man trying to work his way through life; a life that had not always gone as he might have hoped. A very English setting and story, it is directed by an Italian, Umberto Pasolini (no relation to the proletarian Pier Paolo but, funnily enough, a former investment banker and direct descendent of the aristocratic Luchino Visconti!).

One of the most engaging films of the year was The Lunch Box. Set in teeming Mumbai, it is the story of a widowed office worker and a woman who is trying to win her cold and distracted husband back by appealing to his stomach. Some women will try anything and fight. But it doesn’t work, also because, exceptionally, the food she prepares ends up on the desk of the widower. There ensues an exchange that keeps you hoping until the very end.

OK, now for the anorak stuff. Like so many of my friends, I grew up absorbing not only music but the minutiae of the whole rigmarole of recording; the names of producers, session musicians, engineers, backing singers and the studios where the records were made. Totally useless information, but, boys will be boys.

Two fascinating documentaries released this year pandered to the nerd in me; both about studios where great albums have been recorded: Muscle Shoals and Sound City.

Both these films tell quite different but remarkable stories about visionary producers, lost investments and extraordinary successes. And, of course, great music. But I realise its niche stuff.

Bubbling under music

Laura Marling is as English a rose as you’re likely to find. Maybe that’s why she decided she needed to get away. Having re-located to Los Angeles Once I Was An Eagle is the first product of her new lifestyle, and pretty damn good it is, too. All references to Joni Mitchell are, frankly, silly. Give the girl a break. Just listen to the album.

Late Night Tales is a series of ‘celebrity’ compilation albums that have been appearing over recent years and this is one of the best. I don’t actually know who Bonobo are, but the selection of music on this album, which can be listened to singly or as a combined single track, is brilliant.

I was only vaguely aware of Daft Punk, the cannily reclusive French duo, until this year when you couldn’t escape them. I also have a son who produces EDM (it stands for Electronic Dance Music, no, I didn’t either), and when he asked me if I’d ever heard of Giorgio Moroder I nearly fell off my chair. That encouraged me to listen to the album and, apart form anything else, you can’t not recognise and move to the guitar sound of Nile Rodgers. I’m not sure Daft Punk deserve to be quite as big as they are, there’s a fair amount of smart marketing going on, but Random Access Memories was unquestionably one of the albums of 2013.

Bubbling under books

It’s a weakness, I know, but Bob Dylan continues to fascinate and so I read yet another biography. But though Ian Bell’s attempt is highly readable and the bare bones of the story I already knew, there is a sense of the law of diminishing returns kicking in, the more we know, the less we understand! Only for the afflicted!

In a year in which the short story triumphed thanks to the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature to Alice Munro, I finally got round to reading another female, North American writer of short (sometimes very short) stories. Lydia Davis does not, perhaps have the range, or humanity, of Alice Munro, but these often dark tales of emotional struggle and personal ineptness are striking in their capacity to identify types and types of behaviour that, however odd and incomprehensible, we have all seen around us.

In a foreign land (sort of)

Where is home?

Peter Doig (1959- )

Tim Parks’ latest book is ostensibly about Italian trains and what they say about the country where he has made his home for some thirty-two years, just two more than me. In fact it is more about himself and his relationship with the country, as well as with his country of origin; i.e. England, where he feels more and more of a stranger.

Tim Parks, Italian Ways 2013

Switch the place of origin from London, England to Edinburgh, Scotland and I would say much the same. You get to a stage where you feel protective of your adopted country and mystified by aspects of the place you came from.

So spare a thought for the artist Peter Doig (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Doig). He was born in Scotland (always a good start) but moved when very young first to Trinidad and then to Canada, where he grew up. He studied art in London before moving back to Trinidad where much of the inspiration for his work over recent years comes from.

Doig is the star artist of this year’s Edinburgh Festival, and it’s not hard to see why. Of course Scotland has a claim on him, but it is the work and its place in a tradition that makes this, No Foreign Lands (http://www.nationalgalleries.org/whatson/exhibitions/peter-doig), an unmissable exhibition.

Originality is much overrated in all arts, and, in truth, very rare, if not unfeasible. In music ideas that feed off themselves dry up pretty quickly, whereas when you can feel that something is aware of its past, and this can extend from composer John Adams to U2 to Daft Punk, it easily falls within our terms of reference. Much the same applies to fiction, poetry or film. The visual arts are a bit more complicated, also because there is a hunger for the new with artists prepared to mutilate themselves in order to make a splash. Much of such art is, and is intended to be, incomprehensible and is produced and promoted in a process that was wonderfully described way back in 1975 by Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word; i.e. dealers, clients and artists in cahoots to make themselves rich while deriding the ignorance of the general public. But such work doesn’t last, precisely because it is not related to anything else.

Tom Wolfe The Painted Word, 1975

Doig is clearly a modern artist, but looking at his work you can’t not see Gaugin, Matisse, the Abstract Expressionists, Whistler, Hockney and much more besides. You can sense that he has absorbed the art of the past, as indeed had those that he cites, but offers us a new look that is unique and familiar. Perhaps that is why he has become so successful in recent years and why his popularity, also thanks to this exhibition, is likely to grow significantly.

I first saw a much smaller exhibition of his work at the Tate some years ago, but this show is much more comprehensive and includes many studies for the bigger pictures that demonstrate how much he is not just making it up as he goes along.

Peter Doig Lapyrouse Wall, 2004

Especially memorable for me were Lapyrouse Wall, 2004, the subject of which, based on a photograph, is a man with a pink umbrella under an obviously intense sun walking alongside a wall, the other side of which, so the notes tell us, is the biggest cemetery in Port of Spain. Then there is Cricket Painting (Paragrand), 2006-2012, which was striking in its evocation of Gaugin’s Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel), which lives in the National Gallery of Scotland, just a stone’s throw away from this painting. Finally there is Mal d’Estomac which is the clearest homage to the Abstract Expressionists, albeit with differ colours, with the same blocking technique.

Peter Doig Mal d’Estomac, 2008

Peter Doig Cricket Painting (Paragrand), 2006-2012

Paul Gaugin Vision of the Sermon (Jacob Wrestling with the Angel) 1888

After seeing the show I wondered about Doig himself and where he feels at home. Or, better, how he relates to the different places that have influenced his work. A clue probably lies in the title of the exhibition which comes from another notable Scotsman who travelled the world:

“There are no foreign lands.

It is the traveller who is foreign.”

Robert Louis Stevenson, The Silverado Squatters

So perhaps it is the place that you call home, in the here and now, that makes the difference. And anywhere else you find yourself you are a foreigner.