Futilist's Lament

I doubt many people will have realised that my recent "Tischbein" piece was in fact a warmed-up and re-hashed post from 2008. Well, let's be honest, I doubt many people will have read either piece, and very few indeed will have read both. Probably about as many as realise that "Tischbein" means "table leg": a damned strange surname by any measure.

Anyway, looking for that post caused me to revisit some of my other earliest efforts; I have to say I was both impressed and deflated. I was banging them out more or less daily then, to a pretty high standard. Well, what else are you going to do, confined to your office by a rainy lunch-hour, or in need of a break from proof-checking the efforts of trainee cataloguers or debugging Perl scripts? If nothing else, it was a great way of looking busy.

But I reluctantly came to the conclusion that, like the Big Bang, I had more or less emptied the contents of my brain in those first months, and that the subsequent thirteen years of posts have merely been star- and planet-forming phases, when the bits and pieces flying around have been crashing into each other, with results of varying interest and significance. The rest is entropy...  (Yes, I've been watching Brian "professor" Cox doing his latest boy-band act, Universe: We're All Gonna Die [1]).

As you may or may not also have noticed, I do try to be amusing in these posts, and occasionally reach for full-on humour. This is not as easy as it might seem, and my admiration for laugh-on-demand writers like Marina Hyde of the Guardian, or prolific cartoonists like Zach Weinersmith (author of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and another very strange surname) is enormous. It must be both exhausting and terrifying to walk that high-wire so publicly, so often. I doff the chapeau idiotique to these master laughter-crafters! So, in a spirit of humble tribute, and to help fill the void before our planet is swallowed up by the sun, here is a little post from November 2008 that I found still nudged the amusometer needle just enough to be worth repeating.

Lighten Up, Erik
Jazz is screaming its sorrow in our faces and we don't give a damn about it.
Erik Satie, 1866-1925
Do you not hear that terrible screaming all around you, that men usually call silence? 
Georg Büchner, 1813-1837

Really? I'm like, whoah, lighten up, guys.

@ Erik: maybe if jazz backed off a touch and got out of our faces we might give a damn. Or recommend a therapist. What jazz are you listening to, anyway? A lot of people find Kind of Blue quite soothing. On the other hand, if we could just talk for a minute about Harrison Birtwistle... 

@Georg: Yes, I do, actually. My doctor tells me that they usually call it tinnitus, and there's nothing much to be done about it. It's nature's way of telling you that you have been to one too many VERY LOUD gigs.

I shouldn't be so flippant, I know, but there's a certain brand of doom-laden solemnity that has cast a pall over a lot of the artistic endeavour of the modern world. Someone (wish I could remember who) once referred to this as "heavy breathing", which is spot on: it's a rather humourless and creepy way of insisting on the significance of your work. "I have penetrated the veil of bourgeois hypocrisy to glimpse the Complete And Utter Futility of Life, and will now proceed to share my pain with you. No, please, don't put the phone down..."

It's a very adolescent, masculine worldview: Heavy Metal and its various hysterical variants are its crypt-kicking apotheosis. The word "screaming" is a bit of a signature: a voice turned up to 11, with nowhere further to go. And what better Heavy Metal album cover was ever painted than Edvard Munch's risible The Scream?

Talking of risible, you may have recognised the title of yesterday's post (Closing Time in the Gardens of the West). It comes from a famous passage by Cyril Connolly, written in the last issue of Horizon in 1950:

It is closing time in the gardens of the West and from now on an artist will be judged only by the resonance of his solitude or the quality of his despair.

You've got to admit that's funny: Eeyore in a tweed jacket fiddling portentously with his pipe. Of course, at the other extreme there is the infuriating equanimity of John Cage:

The first question I ask myself when something doesn't seem to be beautiful is why do I think it's not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.

I think I feel a scream coming on...

I admit I'm not averse to a bit of heavy-breathing, myself, either ...

(another of my recent six-page folding booklets)

1. It's actually pretty poor, unless you're into expensive special effects. As Lucy Mangan put it in her Guardian review: "Why they are so scared of putting his actual knowledge on show, I do not know. You have what is surely the rarest of beasts – a personable physicist unfazed by the idea of making his subject accessible on camera – and keep trying to use him as a poet? Why?" It's also hilarious, if you're a follower of the above-mentioned Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, as Cox is regularly filmed from a drone at a great height in some God-forsaken spot, just like Weinersmith's two girls endlessly wandering in a snowy landscape, pondering the Great Questions.

[BTW, you probably won't have recognised the title of today's post, which borrows the title of a track on the first High Tide album, Sea Shanties, which I once played to the entire school in a darkened hall as part of a morning assembly a bunch of us sixth-formers had been inveigled into presenting, causing the headmaster to storm out. Heh... Apparently copies of that album in good condition fetch high prices today. It has a great cover by Paul Whitehead, otherwise responsible for some of  the silliest album artwork of the prog era.]