Before my mom and I went out to see "Topsy-Turvy" in ... January 2000? ... I never went to the movies, but afterwards I finally realized both that people were still making things worth watching and that other people's attempts to sort through it all could be of serious help to me in deliberation, not just to follow what was going on. Even if I hadn't remembered it clearly I would have remembered it very fondly. Therefore, having seen in the Journal that Criterion was putting out a sparkly new disc, h&I checked it out some time ago. I loved it when I first saw it, but I got a lot more out of it this time. More than ten years have passed, and I did not remember the sequence of events; but the scenes and themes I remembered were subtler and much more closely integrated than I had first experienced. I've only seen one other Mike Leigh film, because I can't deal with depressing movies, which seems to be his forte, but both of these are special, individual, wonderful movies, and I'll have to take the plunge into the harsher works some time.
What "Topsy-Turvy" gets right is double.
(1) In re: William Schwenk Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan, it forgives them individually their unpleasantness and -- harder in narrative art -- their unhappiness, and it convincingly depicts a relationship between two men who as people could hardly be less in sympathy, who don't much like or -- except qua artists -- respect each other, yet whose tense and volatile working relationship produces works (leaving aside entirely their very high quality) of miraculous collaborative coherence.
(2) With regard to everyone else, it accepts them. It is clear and harsh on their failings -- Grossmith and ... whichever character plays the Mikado (the actor's named Timothy Spall, I think. Oh, the character's Richard Temple) sarcastically wave away Durward Lely's anti-imperialist comments, Lely throws a fit when asked to perform without a corset under his Japanese robe,* Jessie Bond and Leonora Braham date as cynically as a Caitlin Flanagan nightmare, practically everyone is using alcohol or drugs and showing other signs of not quite keeping it together, there are the usual prigs and sycophants. They aren't exemplars of Victorian hypocrisy and they aren't emblems of universal human character types. They're just people we recognize well enough that we only need a few glimpses of each.
As to G&S ... Sullivan is the very type of the anguished Victorian hypocrite. He courts respectability and the aura of high art with an energy and insecurity second only to that he exhausts on gambling, lewd music hall entertainments, prostitutes, and occasionally but vigorously his girlfriend. The only things that rouse him from his harrumphing fog are a woman on the couch and a good review in the paper. Gilbert is a quiet, bourgeois family man, in love with his wife but unable to be satisfied with love, any more than he is satisfied with his success. The outstandingly good reviews of "The Mikado"'s premiere, which send Sullivan into a frenzy of delight, seem only to confirm his mistrust of others' opinions. He is workmanlike and Sullivan acts like a Romantic artistic genius, even though it is Gilbert who recognizes that the work they are producing will last; Sullivan's anxiety to be recognized for his "serious" work still permits him an ecstatic satisfaction in popular acclaim, but Gilbert is like a lifelong astronaut whose tickertape parade only highlights his hollowness when not working. Sullivan lives with the atemporal, unplanned intensity and volatility of a child; Gilbert with a caretaker's weary wariness.
All their interactions are awkward. Each thinks he is constantly sacrificing his own ideas upon the altar of the other's genius. Except that when Gilbert reads his new manuscript to Sullivan -- with a furrowed brow and a dark, dry tone -- Sullivan is overtaken by innocent joy. His pretentious side is far enough in check that the child laughs and laughs at the adult's pretensions skewered, gleeful to see arbitrary conventions exposed as unworthy the attention that in his ordinary life he lovingly and anxiously bestows. When he is by himself it is not obvious that Sullivan would enjoy Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, or if he was inclined to enjoy them that he would allow or admit it. When he is laughing at Gilbert's jokes we can suddenly see that his perennially last-minute inspirations come late because he is just that type of person, but come as inspirations because Gilbert brings to him something he loves and can't find in himself without help.
Of course Gilbert comes across as more sympathetic. Gilbert is more sympathetic. He lived soberly and responsibly and lovingly to his wife (not to his estranged mother), without buying into the particular moral and social system of his time and place. A shockingly high proportion of his wit remains clever, and, more shockingly still, some decent proportion passes the further test of -- well -- saying something. He's endlessly quotable and really something of a philosopher -- anyway, a brilliantly attractive formulator of unsound arguments (see: the entire plot of "Patience"). Sullivan is harder. We don't have his words, and by all the evidence he wasn't that great a person. (Who is?) It's hard to come to see them as people making evitable decisions amongst alternative possibilities. At three or four I was horrified to learn that Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers hadn't actually been in love. When we get past that, the next step is to focus on the bitterness and failure below the surface -- to treat every pretty face as a mask. It's common enough to stop there. The power of "Topsy-Turvy" grows from its rejection of that dichotomy.
* His prettyboy affect is especially amusing to those of us who, looking back, recognize the actor, Kevin McKidd, as the rough, angular, temperamental soldier struggling towards the middle class that he played in the blood-and-sandals-and-camp-and-soap HBO series "Rome," the pattern for subsequent TV historical melodrama series stuffed and overstuffed with blood and nudity -- a further amusement by contrast with Leigh's technical restraint and imaginative interest in bringing us to the Victorians, rather than showing us the Romans as ourselves.
Thursday, July 7, 2011
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
On the customs of country (music).
I've been listening to a fair bit of country music lately, including not only long-time favorites like the Carter Family, the Everly Brothers, Patsy Cline, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, and the alt-country I'd begun to learn about in the past couple of years (Miranda Lambert, Shelby Lynne ...), but for the first time some contemporary pop country: the ones you see in commercials or gossip pages, Brad Paisley and Shania Twain and those. Now, I claim no expertise on this. Zero. I've barely begun to delve; all I have is one boxed set (here's the track listing). But two traits have fascinated me: the musical indistinguishability (often) of country pop from "mainstream" pop, and the utterly distinct rhyming patterns of contemporary country pop lyrics.
About the first I haven't much to say. I'm sure it's been said: Sugaland sounds like the easy-listening music I heard when accompanying my mother to get a haircut when I was a kid, Martina McBride sounds like remastered seventies hits. The very idea of "a country beat so strong" (Jasmine Rae, "Country Singer") came as a shock to me. That's not there in the country I'm used to, which is mostly from before it had crystallized as a genre -- so really, regional folk music -- and from the late sixties country-rock boomlet. The heavy, often slick, production is unfamiliar, too -- since I don't even listen to the pop music it's drawn from. Yet half the songs explicitly self-identify as country, and most of the singers sing with a Southern accent. Explicit self-reference returns with an obsession barely heard in rock and roll since the Beatles and no longer a focus in hip-hop for many, many years. The titles alone: "Country Singer," "Little Miss Honky Tonk," "Planet Country," "Where I Come From," "Maybe It Was Memphis," "Giddy On Up," "Chasin' Rodeo," "Redneck Woman" ... I don't know whether it's defensiveness, or acknowledgment that the division between country and "mainstream" popular music is sociological and commercial rather than musical; and that even the divided intermingle closely. I'm not really sure what qualifies Brenda Lee ("I'm Sorry" -- that song from the diaper commercials) or Ryan Adams as country even sociologically.
So that's one thing. It prompts me to comment also that some of this is wonderful music. Almost all of these people are technically accomplished performers, some with charisma that survives delocation. Some of them are exceptionally talented singers and a few appear to be exceptionally talented songwriters. Most of them have probably deserved their success in one way or another, insofar as people can be said to deserve success. No attacks here. (Speaking of defensiveness ... )
The second thing, about the rhyme: I've never heard other kinds of pop so thoroughly embrace such loose, assonance-based rhyme patterns. "Commitment/ Someone who'll go the distance" and "Commitment/ And everything that goes with it" aren't rhymes if Gaga or Britney or -- perhaps more likely -- Beyonce sings them. They just aren't. But Leann Rimes takes them seriously as rhymes. "All of my life I've spent hoping/ That I could give someone-a such devotion" isn't a rhyme except when Kenny Chesney sings it.
Of course hip-hop has a long and illustrious tradition of stretching rhyme -- but that's because the extraordinary rhyme density demanded wouldn't be possible without it, and further the performers make a lot of effort to make things rhyme. "Stepped out the house and stopped short -- oh no! Went back in, I forgot my Kangol" wouldn't rhyme if it were me saying it, but Slick Rick doesn't say it, he raps it, and there you have it. Compare further:
Take a little trip, hater, pack up your mind
Look forward not behind, then you'll see what you find
I caught a sucker dyin' 'cause he thought could rhyme
Now if his momma is a quarter, daughter must be a dime
I gotta meet her, don't take no shorts. I don't use abbrevi-
-ation, I don't even play the radio neither,
Only if I need to know the sports or the weather
(yes, fine, I also only know old and famous hip-hop) with
Heads Carolina, tails California
Somewhere greener, somewhere warmer
Up in the mountains, down by the ocean
Where it don't matter, long as we're goin'
Somewhere together -- I've got a quarter
Heads Carolina, tails California.
"Quarter"/"daughter" isn't a perfect rhyme, but it's a lot closer than "quarter"/"fornia." Besides which, obviously, Andre 3000 is propelled forward by the rhymes, unevenly and in unforeseen directions, whereas Jo Dee Messina uses them to circle back to her opening line. They're both trying to say something more complicated than can be easily done with "When the moon hits your eye/ Like a big pizza pie"-style rhyming; so JDM takes some liberty with bourgeois rhyming conventions, and Andre takes some liberty with bourgeois conventions of linear speech. Really interesting.
Just one more example of the creativity of country rhyming:
I was chasin' sun on 101 somewhere around Ventura
I lost a universal joint and I had to use my finger
This tall lady stopped and asked if I had plans for dinner
Said, "No, thanks, ma'am, back home we like the girls that sing soprano."
That's from Allan Jackson, "Where I Come From," and he really is doing what Andre (and Big Boi; not so much Killer Mike) and Slick Rick did in the cited songs. He's taking words whose assonances and consonances you wouldn't even notice -- Ventura, finger, dinner, soprano (pronounced "sopranner") -- and stringing them into a loosely told story whose point is the perspective of the singer more than any particular tale being told. He's using delivery to create rhyme, and from those rhymes emerges a character. Good stuff.
About the first I haven't much to say. I'm sure it's been said: Sugaland sounds like the easy-listening music I heard when accompanying my mother to get a haircut when I was a kid, Martina McBride sounds like remastered seventies hits. The very idea of "a country beat so strong" (Jasmine Rae, "Country Singer") came as a shock to me. That's not there in the country I'm used to, which is mostly from before it had crystallized as a genre -- so really, regional folk music -- and from the late sixties country-rock boomlet. The heavy, often slick, production is unfamiliar, too -- since I don't even listen to the pop music it's drawn from. Yet half the songs explicitly self-identify as country, and most of the singers sing with a Southern accent. Explicit self-reference returns with an obsession barely heard in rock and roll since the Beatles and no longer a focus in hip-hop for many, many years. The titles alone: "Country Singer," "Little Miss Honky Tonk," "Planet Country," "Where I Come From," "Maybe It Was Memphis," "Giddy On Up," "Chasin' Rodeo," "Redneck Woman" ... I don't know whether it's defensiveness, or acknowledgment that the division between country and "mainstream" popular music is sociological and commercial rather than musical; and that even the divided intermingle closely. I'm not really sure what qualifies Brenda Lee ("I'm Sorry" -- that song from the diaper commercials) or Ryan Adams as country even sociologically.
So that's one thing. It prompts me to comment also that some of this is wonderful music. Almost all of these people are technically accomplished performers, some with charisma that survives delocation. Some of them are exceptionally talented singers and a few appear to be exceptionally talented songwriters. Most of them have probably deserved their success in one way or another, insofar as people can be said to deserve success. No attacks here. (Speaking of defensiveness ... )
The second thing, about the rhyme: I've never heard other kinds of pop so thoroughly embrace such loose, assonance-based rhyme patterns. "Commitment/ Someone who'll go the distance" and "Commitment/ And everything that goes with it" aren't rhymes if Gaga or Britney or -- perhaps more likely -- Beyonce sings them. They just aren't. But Leann Rimes takes them seriously as rhymes. "All of my life I've spent hoping/ That I could give someone-a such devotion" isn't a rhyme except when Kenny Chesney sings it.
Of course hip-hop has a long and illustrious tradition of stretching rhyme -- but that's because the extraordinary rhyme density demanded wouldn't be possible without it, and further the performers make a lot of effort to make things rhyme. "Stepped out the house and stopped short -- oh no! Went back in, I forgot my Kangol" wouldn't rhyme if it were me saying it, but Slick Rick doesn't say it, he raps it, and there you have it. Compare further:
Take a little trip, hater, pack up your mind
Look forward not behind, then you'll see what you find
I caught a sucker dyin' 'cause he thought could rhyme
Now if his momma is a quarter, daughter must be a dime
I gotta meet her, don't take no shorts. I don't use abbrevi-
-ation, I don't even play the radio neither,
Only if I need to know the sports or the weather
(yes, fine, I also only know old and famous hip-hop) with
Heads Carolina, tails California
Somewhere greener, somewhere warmer
Up in the mountains, down by the ocean
Where it don't matter, long as we're goin'
Somewhere together -- I've got a quarter
Heads Carolina, tails California.
"Quarter"/"daughter" isn't a perfect rhyme, but it's a lot closer than "quarter"/"fornia." Besides which, obviously, Andre 3000 is propelled forward by the rhymes, unevenly and in unforeseen directions, whereas Jo Dee Messina uses them to circle back to her opening line. They're both trying to say something more complicated than can be easily done with "When the moon hits your eye/ Like a big pizza pie"-style rhyming; so JDM takes some liberty with bourgeois rhyming conventions, and Andre takes some liberty with bourgeois conventions of linear speech. Really interesting.
Just one more example of the creativity of country rhyming:
I was chasin' sun on 101 somewhere around Ventura
I lost a universal joint and I had to use my finger
This tall lady stopped and asked if I had plans for dinner
Said, "No, thanks, ma'am, back home we like the girls that sing soprano."
That's from Allan Jackson, "Where I Come From," and he really is doing what Andre (and Big Boi; not so much Killer Mike) and Slick Rick did in the cited songs. He's taking words whose assonances and consonances you wouldn't even notice -- Ventura, finger, dinner, soprano (pronounced "sopranner") -- and stringing them into a loosely told story whose point is the perspective of the singer more than any particular tale being told. He's using delivery to create rhyme, and from those rhymes emerges a character. Good stuff.
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