shuttle 20: singing (faith & peaches)

'A song ain't nothin' in the world but a story just wrote with music to it' (Hank Williams, 1952)
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Rebecca Solnit: - ' ... there is no adequate response in our vernacular to this landscape, nothing can touch the authenticity around it - thus the neon of Vegas, the motels of Flagstaff, the diners of Elko, the pink flamingos on the banks of a river named after a German who never saw it [the Humboldt].

At the most breathtaking landscapes of the West, people usually say something profoundly banal or trivial, not so much because they are not impressed, but because they know their words can't measure up to it, and it is more respectful not to try. In some way, banality becomes a refuge from fear of the sublime, overwhelming scale of the land.

Only the splenetics of country music seems to describe it: The eternal story of country songs is about someone who took refuge in the house of love, only the house fell apart, and so the singer is lost in the vastness again, and alone. Never mind their obsessive boy-girl front - they're songs about the pain of freedom, the loneliness of independence, about aftermath, irretrievable loss, fall from grace. If you don't believe the lyrics, the violins and guitars will tell you so.

Like pastoral poetry, country music (before positive thinking ruined it in recent years) is usually about the past, though the past seen more through bitterness than pastoral nostalgia. The singer is leaving, being left, or looking back, and the lyrics are full of midnight trains and lost highways, rambling men, walking after midnight, coming back to see their sweetheart wed another. A passionate love for geography is buried in all this bile, so that the songs of loss are rich too, rich in place names, travels, and atmospheres ...

The basic gesture of American society is a kind of atomisation, an expansion into what was always imagined as an expanding universe. That expansion was tragic in all Old World narratives, and America was settled by outcasts for whom tragedy became opportunity. Even framed as 'progress' and 'manifest destiny', that gesture is one of loneliness, and of conflict resolved by space rather than society - room to swing your arm. Tragedy, our ability to fall out of society and into the landscape, has been the content of American optimism'.

Extract from Rebecca Solnit, 'The Name of the Snake', in Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Landscape Wars of the American West, Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 199, 184-5
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For today's driving music, the  14-minute looping heartbeat and visionary minimalism of Gillian Welch's 'I Dream A Highway' (from Time: The Revelator), listen here. For lyrics, see here

Gillian Welch: - 'Our palette is so minimal. We have four microphones, two voices and two guitars. That's how we make records and it freaks people out. I've come to believe that there's this other element, which is the sum of its parts - things like the air, the room, the atmosphere. These things enable us to make these little landscapes and soundscapes, which is interesting to us. Once your frame of reference adjusts to the fact that there's so little going on, the music can become very rich and panoramic, at least that's the hope'.

On driving across the USA: 'We were watching the road signs go by, which is a beautiful lesson in American poetry. You forget how beautiful the place names and the words are that you see when you're driving around. It's a great crash course in language'.

On her diverse audience: 'Those guys [hippies, country folk, hardcore rock & punk enthusiasts] say ours is the only folk music because they see the kind of gnarly, dark shit in there ... We sent the lyrics for this record [The Harrow and the Harvest] to the artist who did the cover - he's a metal artist, quite well known, and his covers usually have decomposing skulls and stuff, and he was like, "Man, this shit is dark!"'
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Photographs below: William Egglestone

worthy farm

For music critic Paul Morley's hilarious and perceptive account of his first ever visit to Glastonbury Festival this year - a 'mash-up of humanity and tent ... the offspring of Woodstock and Butlins, with mobile companies, falafel stalls, BBC live coverage and Tuborg lager as the godparents' - see his Observer article here

All photographs by David Williams, except for the grooving Liz Beech - by Stephen Clarke.

Bands at Glastonbury Festival 2010, from the top: Matt Frazier and Taylor Rice of Local Natives, Hypnotic Brass Ensemble, the xx, Devendra Banhart, Candi Staton, Bassekou Kouyate, Laura Marling, Stevie Wonder

dama dama ruminate

'To look at [animals in dreams] from an underworld perspective means to regard them as carriers of soul, perhaps totem carriers of our own free soul or death soul, there to help us see in the dark. To find out who they are and what they are doing there in the dream, we must first of all watch the image and pay less attention to our own reactions to it' (James Hillman).

My first class in a new job in a new university on the edges of the city. Six hours in a studio exploring the topic of animals. We talk of animal encounters, fears, dreams. I tell the students about Joseph Beuys and the coyote, Marcus Coates' Dawn Chorus, Val Plumwood's crocodile attack in Australia, James Hillman's Dream Animals. They talk about cats and bugs and worms and arachnophobia, dog attacks, collisions with deers on the roads.

We look at some of Sam Easterson's short films about animal locomotion, in which he attaches tiny video cameras to the heads of wolves, bison, armadillos, sheep etc. We watch an episode of Creature Comforts about the circus, and our discussion hovers around the pros and cons of anthropomorphism.

Later, after a warm-up and some impromptu collective barking, I ask the students to work in small groups to make an animal appear in the studio.

During a short break I drink a coffee and smoke on a bench amongst trees at the back of the theatre building, about 40 metres from the thundering A road into central London. As I sit there immobile, thinking about the class, a young male deer approaches, limping badly. With its brown coat mottled with white spots, and its short antlers, it looks like an adolescent fallow buck - dama dama.

On its left rear haunch it has the grey scar tissue of a serious wound, a car accident or attack of some sort. It doesn't see me, and hobbles to within 5 or 6 metres, its left side towards me. It sniffs the air, and lowers its head to eat the grass. I can hear it chewing evenly, like a pony. Ruminant. It has extraordinarily beautiful eyes - much older than its body somehow - and a velvet top lip beneath its moist black nose.

Two terriers in a neighbouring garden have heard something and bark incessantly behind the fence; the deer ignores them completely, it's been here before and knows they can't get out.

With wide eyes and shallow breath I watch it closely, wanting its peacefulness in this rural/urban context to continue uninterrupted by fear. It munches the grass for a while, shakes its head, then turns its head to look me in the eye for a full 10 seconds without seeming to see me for anything like what I am, before walking off towards the trees, its head bobbing up and down as it limps. Then it's gone, and the traffic moves on relentlessly.

I go back into the studio wondering quite how we have conjured up this visitation, and what else the students will bring into appearance.

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Some hours later, mid evening in a suburban London street. I sit in my car making a phone call, and a fox ambles up the road, thick tail horizontal, and stops beside my car. It sits in the road, scratches, watches, its ears focused on a point up ahead like antennae. It doesn't see me at all. When it stands up to move off up the road, I see that it has a limp in its right rear leg. It disappears silently, as discreet as a cat, a shadow blending into the shadows in someone's front garden.

The animals are out in force in London.
Some of them are limping.
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Postscript - two weeks later: Another week, another class. After watching a longish section of Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, we pause for a break after Herzog has listened to the sounds of Timothy Treadwell and his girlfriend being killed by the bear.

Outside the door of the studio, some of the students find a dying pigeon. They come and tell me, and I go outside with them. A pigeon on the stones of the courtyard, a couple of yards from the door, with the back of its head severely and inexplicably damaged - shot away, or sliced somehow, or perhaps torn open by a bird of prey. It is silent and barely moving, thick red blood stiffening on its feathers. It's close to death, but we don't know what to do. T and I stand there shocked but unable to act: 'I can't do this', T says, 'I'm too much of a pussy'.

J quietly says he can 'dispatch' it, he knows how to do it. I pick it up in a ball of paper, and take it to a concrete kerb by a skip. J places it on the lip of the kerb, and calmly but decisively steps on its head. Crushes it. The body spasms. J says it's normal, the death throes, it's what they always do. He places the body in the skip, and wipes his shoe on the tarmac.


Photo at top: still from a Sam Easterson video - a bison's reflection of itself in water as it drinks

innocence & experience

An overcast Saturday morning in October. At home in rural Devon, with a cup of tea in hand, a fire alight, today’s newspaper scattered on the carpet. A cat who sometimes visits unannounced for a game, a snack or a snooze licks her paws by the sports pages, then in a flash turns her head towards the window. Both of us inside, looking out. The garden. The apple trees losing their leaves. The edge of Dartmoor barely visible through the mist, like the back of a whale caught at the moment it breaches the surface. The sound of crows cutting across the muffled insistence of traffic in the distance, busy shouts over a steady grey current. A raven or is it a jackdaw, so black that it’s blue like Elvis’s hair, pecks into an apple, looks back at us, then wipes its beak on a branch. The blur of wings, then empty bouncing branch. After a moment of stillness the cat looks back down at the football headlines, seems to read for a moment. ‘Beckham right for England, says Wenger’. ‘McLaren era in danger of spinning out of control’. The murmur of the world out there.

Near the beginning of Uninvited Guests’ It is like it ought to be: a pastoral, the performers playfully construct a rural refuge: an imaginary spring in an imaginary village in an imaginary valley. A perfect (too perfect) English May is fabricated through a proliferatively layered soundscape of whinnies and moos and quacks and oinks and woofs; and a lyrical and abundant utopia materialises, outside of history. Here nature is ‘soft’ and ‘kind’, and there is no place for crows and ravens and the monstrous machinery of industry in this genteel bucolic fantasy. For we are in an idealised (and parodic) place of innocence, the ‘country’ - from the Latin contra, meaning ‘against’: the place that lies in opposition to the city, the (imagined) critical ‘other’ of urban chaos and anomie. All shout YES to the birds that sing, YES to the sky and clouds and sun. Later, as an approaching storm gathers momentum, Richard calls out from the top of a nearby hill, reporting back from the encroaching world he sees outside the valley. Like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, he is confronted with fragmentation, the debris of a ‘storm in paradise’, the storm of ‘progress’. In Benjamin’s narrative, the winds of this storm blow the angel backwards into the future; here an apocalyptic whirlwind passes through the valley, and for a moment it is caught in the epicentre of the storm. From the garden of Eden to the Book of Revelations. Eventually light returns to the village, but this new dawn is no longer sentimental and idealised. Tempered by experience (of cruelty, chaos, contingency, modernity, mortality, history), weathered and fragile, the village has become more complex and contradictory. The lingering refrain of the final song - ‘it is like it ought to be, but it is not’ – suggests an uneasy tension between yearning for what’s ‘lost’ (the fiction of an imaginary innocence) and a desire for what ‘could be’ (an imperfect otherwise still to come, to be invented). The song itself rides on the ambiguities between lament and celebration, and bridges the axis between them through an acceptance of paradox. In turn, this is allied with a critical perception that what we lack is that which demands our present and future energies. In other words, rather than a naïve utopianism founded on nostalgia and escapist retreat, the performance stages another kind of utopianism - something perhaps closer to a measured, creative, play-ful collectivism that one might characterise as a practice of hope.

Viewed from a particular angle, the narrative trajectory of the performance resembles a myth or fable. For example, it tells a story of a Blakean innocence contoured and grained by experience; we witness a soul’s journey through a seasonal cycle whose winter is the tempestuous dis-illusion of a ‘night sea crossing’ en route to what Jung called ‘individuation’. The performance also speaks of the permeability of boundaries, territories and ‘islands’ - the valley, say, or England - as the ‘outside’ crashes in to become part of the ‘inside’ (where it always was anyway). In addition, it articulates the contradictions of history and post-modernity, and the impossibility of absolute withdrawal from their complex dynamics. In its forms and imagery, the performance draws on disparate British folk forms - ancient, emergent, re-invented, imagined – to ask what forms a contemporary community celebration might take. What might an English folk or pastoral theatre look like now, and what kinds of stories could it tell? What kinds of meetings and interactions with an audience might feed and reconfigure the event itself (the audience another conventional ‘outside’, like the weather, to be encouraged in here)? What are the relations between imagination, a yearning for celebration and an active critical intelligence?

The performance also references other cultural practices that seek to address loss and continuity, renewal and re-invention, the paradox of change as the only constant, the possibility of economies of inter-connection and exchange. For example, the Joseph Beuys of How to explain pictures to a dead hare (1965), his head covered with honey and gold leaf as he cradled and stroked a dead animal and whispered in its ear. Or Jeremy Deller and Allan Kane’s Folk Archive (2005), with its inclusive revaluing of the vernacular and the ephemeral. Or Lone Twin’s playfully celebratory invitations to walk with them, dance with them, sing with them, in performances conceived as mechanisms for ‘meeting people’. All of these practices are social and political as well as aesthetic in their concerns. Like Uninvited Guests in this performance, they seek to explore and rehearse ways in which we might affirm the complexity of our lives in relation to others, while continuously re-imagining and reconfiguring our identities and traditions, and the stories we tell about ourselves in the light of this complexity.

Another raven, or is it a jackdaw, at the window. The cat slips outside. My tea is cold. It starts to rain. David Beckham smiles out at the world, ignoring the front page headline beside him: ‘Plot to hit UK with dirty bomb and exploding limo’. The murmur of the world in here.

In all of our valleys, it is like it ought to be, but it is not.





('Songs of innocence and experience', originally published in tour programme for Uninvited Guests' It Is Like It Ought To Be: A Pastoral, 2006 - © David Williams. Photo © Uninvited Guests)