Robert Forster. The Evangelist

‘Goin’ No Place’ Photograph by Soffia Gisladottir

”Its real theme is loss and the idea that things happen in life that you have no explanation for. The story is made up of memories and fragments of memories, and the feeling I got from it is that you can never figure out what they all mean until you stop trying, and then you just remember the essences of people — and of the time when they were suddenly gone and how it changed everything.”

Sofia Coppola talking about her movie adaptation of The Virgin Suicides

While Grant McLennan’s family was packing up his possessions, after his death, Robert Forster asked if he could have Grant’s song-writing notebook. “We had started on our 10th album,” Robert wrote in The Times of London. “It had begun the same way as all the others. I went over to his place during the day and we’d play the songs each of us had written. I’d find him in either of two locations: pottering around the kitchen or lying on his bed, reading. The first 10 minutes would always be a little tetchy. Although we’d known each other for almost 30 years and worked closely together for a good half of that time, he’d be a little gruff; it was as if, each time I saw him, he had to get to know me again. So, he’d make coffee and I’d sit in a chair in the kitchen and pepper him with questions in an attempt to bring him around to good humour. This is where having known him for such a long time helped, because I knew the buttons to push, the silly things to say, the cheeky remark about an album he liked, the films of a certain actor I’d know he’d trash, a bit of local rock-scene gossip. Anything really, and after 10 minutes, he’d be the person I’d always known. Then we’d play guitar together: his new songs and mine, which built a world we’d then shape, record and send out to those who loved or liked what we did. It was the 10th album we were shooting for. We were just two months into it, eight songs written, when he died.”

Robert found fragments for ‘Demon Days’, ‘Let Your Light In, Babe’ and ‘It Ain’t Easy’ in the notebook, and he finished and recorded them for his new solo album, The Evangelist. “The reason The Evangelist exists is partly due to my determination to record ‘Demon Days’ and bring it to the world,” Robert wrote. “There were other great songs he had, two of which I took for the album. Our collaboration went on after his passing in that he had not finished the lyrics to any of those three songs. ‘Demon Days’ was the most complete, with a chorus and five lines written of the first verse; the other two songs, ‘Let Your Light In, Babe’ and ‘It Ain’t Easy‘, had chorus lyrics only. ‘For Let Your Light In‘, I constructed a narrative that had come to me after reading a 19th-century poem of erotic romance set in a church. ‘It Ain’t Easy’ was harder to write. I settled on a portrait of him, something detailed that played off against the quick pop feel of the melody. I wrote eight verses before I hit one that started ‘And a river ran, and a train ran, and a dream ran through everything that he did‘. I liked this. So I started the song with it.”

Robert went to London with Glenn Thompson and Adele Pickvance, who’d been in the last line-up of the Go Betweens, and recorded The Evangelist in the same studio where their previous album, Oceans Away, had been recorded in 2005. “That decision worked,” wrote Robert. “We recorded together knowing a piece was missing, but that we were all happy working together on the thing that happened after the piece went missing. Grant’s ghost was there, but there weren’t too many sad moments. Process, and the day-to-day work that goes into making an album, robbed us of too much reflection. His amp was set up and a guitar of his stood on a stand. We all had to work a bit faster because Grant’s turn to sing or play never came around. Through it all, though, we knew we were honouring him by making a great record in a place that he knew.”

When Grant had first played ‘Demon Days’ to Robert he mentioned asking Audrey Riley, who’d done the string arrangements for the fourth Go Betweens album, Liberty Belle and the Black Diamond Express, recorded in 1985. “Three of the quartet (including Audrey) had played on Liberty Belle 22 years ago. Circles were being completed. Grant had been close and then far away through the recording. As we heard the gorgeous flowing lines that Audrey had written, at that moment, bows on strings, strings on wood, he was right there in the room.”

More News From Nowhere

Q: You believe that there are areas where epic and tragic forms intersect?

Robert Fagles: Yes. I and others like to read the Iliad as the first tragedy we have.

Q: And the Odyssey as its comedic counterpart?

RF: Comedic, but not necessarily in the funny sense, though the poem has its sneezes, puns, and fools. Rather in Dante’s sense of a commedia, a struggle against adversity to reach a state of equilibrium and harmony.

Robert Fagles. Translator of Homer and Virgil.

Today I’m going to the Kings Cross library to borrow the Robert Fagles translation of Homer’s Odyssey.  He died in March of this year and the New York Times obituary attributed the success of his translations to the vividness of his writing. “While faithful to the spirit and intent of the original, his translations were remarkable for their narrative energy and verve. His “Iliad” and “Odyssey” had a Homeric swagger, said the poet Paul Muldoon, a colleague at Princeton, who also compared Mr. Fagles’s epic vision to that of film directors like Sergio Leone and Sam Peckinpah.”

There are references to the Odyssey running all the way through the new Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds single, “More News From Nowhere”, and I don’t know what to make of this. I’ve picked up enough of the highlights enough to recognise them in the song: The “friends in high places” might be the Gods who intervened to allow Odysseus to escape from the clutches of the “nubian princess” Calypso, who imprisoned Odysseus. Nick is tempted by sirens. There’s a detour into Hades. And Nick has already visited the Land of the Lotus Eaters in an earlier song on DIG!!! LAZARUS, DIG!!! He battles the Cyclops, blinds him, and escapes disguised in a sheepskin, telling the Cyclops that “nobody” has wounded him.

Timeless stories maintain their power by being retold in the language of each new generation. Nick’s Odyssey comes twelve years after the publication of the Robert Fagles translation. Fagles  “…was not an exactingly literal translator but rather one who sought to reinterpret the classics in a contemporary idiom,” said the New York Times. “He once compared his job to writing Braille for the blind, and said that he imagined in a generation or two that someone would have to come along and re-Braille it.” The Odyssey is being used today by an American psychologist to help soldiers readjust to civilian life after the psychological traumas they suffered in Iraq, but I wonder if Nick might be alluding to another aspect of the Odyssey. As a musician he spends much of his life on journeys away from his wife and sons and the refrain of “More News From Nowhere” is “don’t it make you want to get right on home.” Maybe it feels, sometimes, that Nick has been away so long that everyone gives him up for dead, but Nick’s wife and sons never give up on him and know he’ll always return. Robert Fagles described the Odyssey as  “… a poem about family values, and where families are of value, and the families don’t always get along so well. There’s a lot of irritation and abrasion, as well as deep affiliation and affection that finally wins out.” 

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Please read something for us.

ROBERT FAGLES: I’d love to. This is the reunion of Odysseus and Penelope after 20 years of warfaring and wayfaring. “He wept as he held the wife he loved, the soul of loyalty, in his arms at last. Joy, warm as the joy that shipwrecked sailors feel when they catch sight of land. Poseidon has struck their well rigged ship on the open sea, with gale winds and crushing walls of waves, and only a few escape, swimming, struggling out of the frothing surf to reach the shores; their bodies crusted with salt, but buoyed up with joy as they planted their feet on solid ground again, spared a deadly fate. So joyous now to her, the sight of her husband vivid in her gaze, that her white arms embracing his neck would never for a moment let him go.”

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: It’s beautiful. What kind of problems did you face in translating this passage? And how were you different from other translators?

ROBERT FAGLES: I can’t quote the other translators, but I’ll tell you one problem that came to mind immediately. The line “would never for a moment let him go”–in Greek that’s opo pompon–which is an awkward kind of phrase. It means “not yet completely would she let him go.” And I wanted a phrase that could remind us that it took 20 years of longing for each other, and finally in one embrace, that one moment of embrace, their remarriage is sealed, and from it comes a kind of long life and, indeed, the longest kind of life because we’re still reading about these people. The sight of her husband vivid in her gaze, that her arms embracing his neck would never for a moment let him go. That’s just one of many.

There’s a book by William Morris called News From Nowhere. I know that the cover for the More News From Nowhere single is a schematic for an electronic sign by Sue Webster and Tim Noble, but the drawing looks a little like a map of a park to me, a natural domain, the territory of Morris’s book, rather than something electronic.

News from Nowhere (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science fiction written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris. In the book, the narrator, WIlliam Guest, falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership and democratic control of the means of production. In this society there is no private property, no big cities, no authority, no monetary system, no divorce, no courts, no prisons, and no class systems. This agrarian society functions simply because the people find pleasure in nature, and therefore they find pleasure in their work.

From Wikipedia

In his personal history of the communications revolution, Arthur C. Clarke noted that William Morris, who he described as “the leader of the romantic back-to-the-Middle-Ages revival” lived in a house that was once occupied by Sir Francis Ronald, the creator of a telegraphy system that pre-dated Samuel Morse’s. Morris “could hardly have felt a great deal of sympathy for an invention which was to do so much to sweep mankind into a strange and tumultuous future,” wrote Clarke.  

Interview Puts Media Back On The Rails

Glenn O’Brien and Fabien Baron have become the editorial directors of Interview Magazine and Art in America and Antiques. Twenty years ago they had a dress-rehearsal, Fabien Baron designing and Glenn co-editing (with Ingrid Sischy) about a year’s worth of issues of Interview that were the most effervescent things I’d ever seen on a newsstand. The editorial perspective was dazzling and sly, with a hip sense of sharp wordplay. There was something heart-warming about Fabien Baron’s design; the photos and typographical assemblages were silent sight-gags running along beside the conversations that were audacious, but sweet, in the way that Harpo Marx had been. Then it was all over, for complex managerial reasons. Their first new issue of Interview is on the newsstands and online at the moment, but that’s just the beginning and I’m hugely optimistic about the life they’ll breathe back into the magazine world.

Online media is becoming technically and philosophically refined: the self-publishing platform and toolkit being invented and constantly finessed by WordPress, the aggregation of city desks everywhere being pinned to dynamic maps on Outside.in, the thoughtful examination of the impact and quality of the media messages by Ken Goldberg (now director of the Berkeley Center for New Media), Peter Lunenfeld and Outside.in co-founder Steven Johnson, and the dreaming-out-loud being done by Venture Capitalist Fred Wilson (and his company Union Square Ventures) which have helped incubate the bookmarking system de.licio.us and the comments organising platform Disqus, as well as Outside.in. But the link to the old world, the traditions and innovations of the print world was missing. And now it’s arrived. In a conversational age there’s a lot of blather: ranting on blogs, awkward writing from amateurs and the declining standards in the large media organisations who keep firing editors and subs. Glenn has a grasp of the big picture, a wild, and deep ability to juxtapose, link and pare-down ideas to their essence, and a great sense of humour. I think his manner and style will bring order to conversations – online and on paper – without destroying spontenaiety and naturalness of expression.

Interview, Traditions and History

In the editor’s letter in the magazine and under the ‘about’ tab on the website Glenn writes about Andy Warhol’s artistic vision of business as art, and building the magazine around transcripts of conversations at a time when tape recorders were beginning to shrink in size and become truly portable. Blogs and their comments are based on a conversational model, but it isn’t always, or often, or maybe even ever, art. The templates that are offered with blogging platforms may be good design, but they aren’t profound. I’ll bet that Glenn and Fabien Baron will be able to make art out of Interview’s history and the opportunities the internet offers for wide-ranging conversations.

Sonny Rollins and William Gibson and Music Writing

^{When Sonny Rollins puts down his saxophone and stops playing, for me, a large measure of what makes music great will disappear. That will be a terrible, terrible moment — a moment I don’t care to even think about.}

^{Gary Giddins. 2002}

 

^{Sonny Rollins is playing in Sydney for the first time ever in about a month. Ornette Coleman played here for the first time a month ago, and Dave Holland made his first Australian appearance last year. I’d been continually listening to Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters (a setting of songs by Joni Mitchell, which Dave Holland plays bass on) and the Grinderman album at that time and I was sorry to have missed Dave Holland’s concert but I’m sure he’ll be back, or I can see him play somewhere else in the world sometime. But Ornette Coleman? That might be another matter. It’s a delicate issue with the elderly jazz guys. The advertising doesn’t come right out and say it but there’s the inference that God’s the promoter on these tours, letting these guys have the chance to perform places they’ve never been before whisking them off to the great Birdland in the sky. But a Sonny Rollins or Ornette Coleman performance isn’t something dutiful, to check off a list of 1,000 musicians to see before they die. You have to see them because there’s hardly anybody as alive as them!}

^{In 2000 Gary Giddins wrote: We are witnessing something new in jazz: the triumph of the AARP (American Association of Retired People) musician. Through most of jazz history, elder statesmen were valued for continuing to play well, while the main focus was on younger players whose energy opened new channels. But who today plays with more energy, originality, and purpose than Cecil Taylor, Max Roach, Ornette Coleman, John Lewis, Roy Haynes, Lee Konitz, Sam Rivers, and Sonny Rollins? And which young tenor terror will make an album as strong as This Is What I Do [ by Sonny Rollins, released in 2000].}

^{Village Voice. 21 November 2000.}

 

^{The same is true for rock and roll. While short-sighted mainstream critics are agog and marvel that musicians they consider Methuselah’s are still able to lift a guitar, the astonishing, vital records I’m hearing are by musicians in their third decade of recording. It’s got to the point where I won’t pick up a rock and roll album unless the musician is at least fifty years old.}