LETTER FROM BRITAIN

LETTER FROM BRITAIN

TROUBLE, STRIFE & THE GLAMOROUS LIFE

Cynthia Rose

As I sit down to write this, a national newspaperwoman is taking her turn on TV’s What The Papers Say. In theory, the show is a review of the week’s hottest items and how they were handled by the press. Lou Grant this prime-time program ain’t. Basically it exists for something rather sinister: to explain the real meaning behind what obtuse Joe Public has heard and seen. The idea it all boils down to at bottom is a staunch belief that you or 1 or George O’Dowd’s Dad could never spontaneously doubt anything we’re shown.

What The Papers Say is considered a “liberal” program. After all, it does question the news, and, in Britain, that amounts to messing with government property. What it never gets around to questioning is how an audience might feel about just sitting back and being told how things are. Being told there’s been a “surge back to work” of striking miners, when five men have been arduously hustled through 4,000 angry pickets. Being told that Boy George Concorded back exclusively to make a recording session of Band Aid, the group of concerned superstars who are cutting a disc “in aid of Ethiopia.” (The truth being perhaps more connected to the disastrous ticket deficit George left behind in America.) Being told over and over how much you want to see Princess Diana’s latest ’do, when in fact you’re 16 and languishing for anything to DO.

In this respect a Nylon Curtain has descended over Britain in the last few years — and it’s not unlike its Iron predecessor in the East. Both have a million devices to buy you away from the facts, ranging from fear to allure. And both encourage whole new “alternative” ways of seeing the world. Curtains may be beloved as a British fetish, but they also keep people from seeing each other. The educated can no longer always find the untaught; North and South can barely visualize each other clearly, and speaking the same words no longer ensures that you communicate anything of importance. What, indeed, do the papers say these days?

Well—they don’t say that nearly a million people under 25 in today’s U.K. have never held a real job since leaving school—and yet don’t figure in the unemployment statistics. They don’t reveal that the BBC funds its prestigious film and drama departments from American cable TV bucks. They won’t tell you that Richard Branson’s Virgin Airlines is comprised of one plane. They aren’t gonna tell you the white socks Bob Marley wears in those photos advertising his latest posthumous release were airbrushed into his Doc Martens at the behest of Island supremo Chris Blackwell.

Many things our papers do relentlessly say however, work at distracting the public’s atfrom unemployment, rising prices and darkening days. And last week when the Christmas lights were lit around town, they added a new spark of plausibility to that pervasive chimera which possesses a stranglehold on our media: The Rock Lifestyle.

The Rock Lifestyle personifies the thinking person’s presumptions. About what to do with whatever money he has got. About how to dress, how to cut his hair, how to conduct his sex life. About what he should be hearing, what he “should” like. About how, of course, he’s miserable now: misery being an expected quantity if you aren’t (for whatever reason) in on the In.

But is that music we’re fed by The Tube and The Old Grey Whistle Test and the great God radio really much to do with our lives? Our loves? Our hopes? DO Wham and Duran Duran and the Jesus & Mary Chain and Everything But The Girl and Tracey Ullman and Shee Hee really give voice to something deep but inarticulated within us? Does Jimmy Somerville’s scream actually shape a new soundtrack of adolescent angst—or is somebody just saying it’s so?

What I wonder is: are we all scrambling towards some common, if murky, goal? Or do we all just happen to be scrambled up together right now, happenstance constituents of that nebulous thing known as “today?”

Today!, or “what’s happening” defines the very heart of The Rock Lifestyle. You know how professional pundits often point out that the “most important rock movies” are not about rock at all. How Repo Man's humor and hip hardiness does somehow capture the essence of hardcore; how Stranger Than Paradise corners the corn of Manhattan’s post-punk posiness? Well, this week the London Film Festival premiered a film called Full Moon In Paris and its heroine, played by Pascale Ogier, epitomizes the Euro-Rock Lifestyle.

Beautiful, hip and hard-working, Pascale’s Louise inhabits an immaculately up-to-date world. Her job is absolutely modern (if rather vague), her boyfriend’s flat a miracle of Minalese design, the parties that she attends utterly vie Parisienne. When practical logistics start to slow her down,

Pascale purchases her own apartment and turns it into an indulgent, colorful toyshop in which to play house.

Constantly in motion, Ogier gives viewers a satisfying gander at an ever-changing wardrobe of couture costumes. And, even when she sheds them, Pascale is perfect. No one could be thinner, no one could have sex with less unglamorous sweat. The film (whose end is also fashionably downbeat) is hip and neat: “a little gem.”

Only one small catch—last week Pascale Ogier died in the shower of a heart attack at age 24. Some say the fatal cocaine and mandrax cocktail which saw her off was exacerbated by anorexia; some say it was “just” the drugs. But in the context of her ultimate Me Generation movie, the terrible thing is it hardly came as any surprise. Because more than die-young-stay-pretty is at stake here; achieve the epitome of The Rock Lifestyle and where exactly are you? Apparently, all dressed up with everywhere to go. Actually, at the center of a perpetual motion which self-consumes.

As Full Moon In Paris, Ogier’s Louise is slinking out into the grey dawn to board a train. The movie itself was meant to finish in a metaphorical date with fate—but if Ogier had simply vaporized it would have come as no suprise. Is it ever possible, though, to architect such a thing as absolute event—the thing for which Louise fruitlessly searches? Certainly rock stars, performance artists and folks who make horror films hope so. And last week, in a suburban library, I heard some proof positive it could be done. This took the form of nearly two hours’ worth of improvised music and (since I was inveigled along by a colleague) caught me completely by suprise.

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The performers in question were the taciturn, sticklike guitarist Derek Bailey and his horn-player partner Evan Parker. A steelyhaired man of few words who played with such concentrated percussive power he snapped strings along the way, Bailey was putting out for the second of three separate gigs, each to be held with a different sidekick. Parker, an unassuming chap who later commented he’d love to be physically invisible while playing, managed to maintain a truly awe-inspiring plateau of sound through neo-superhuman circular breathing. (That’s breathing in and blowing out to play at the same time).

Neither was prepossessing as such and neither was young, but both—unbeknownst to me—are highly regarded internationally, both by followers of improvised music and by the straightahead jazz set. Primarily, I discovered, their improvising sessions occur at home. But I hardly needed such info to realize that what I heard was something perfectly primary, absolute in its immediacy. Palpably at ease and in synch with each other, these two musicians built and destroyed, built and destroyed a sound of undeniable musical purity: incredibly energetic yet neither cerebral nor visceral. Just sheer music—of a sort I’d probably never heard before and, since it existed only during those moments it stung the air, would never hear again.-

In contrast to the laborious strivings required by The Rock Lifestyle (which, if you’re in rock here, you must fight to avoid even if you disclaim them) Bailey and Parker struck me as separate possessors of a musical spirit which is truly free. This theory was further enhanced by a trip home on the subway...Coming up for air at my home stop, I noted that busker famed over the past two years for his renditions of “Here Comes The Sun” had abandoned his trustworthy material. “Heaven knows I’m miserable now,” he was warbling whilst passers-by elbowed each other to get out of his way. Behind him, Bob Marley beamed from the wall—apparently quite comfortable in those socks, his real-life self disdained. ^