Spontaneous bop celluloid

 Listing my personal Top 10 jazz films in today’s arts section of The Australian, I write that this vital African-American music form “is about improvisation and spontaneity, while writing and filmmaking are usually long, slow and arduous affairs.” 

However this, I go on to observe, didn't stop Jack Kerouac from writing ‘spontaneous bop prose’ or directors such as John Cassavetes and Jean-Luc Godard from going for near-instantaneous composition in their radical approaches to filmmaking in the late 1950s and early 60s. 

The former's Husbands and the latter's Breathless are on the list, the latter rarely discussed in jazz terms but sharing much of the music's aesthetic fondness for spontaneity as well as featuring a jazz soundtrack by French musician Martial Solal.

I was pleased to find that two of the shorter films I listed are now available in their entirety on YouTube. I've embedded both of them below. First up is the incandescent 1944 short, Jammin' the Blues, with its startlingly cinematic treatment of the great saxophonists Lester Young and Illinois Jacquet...

...and then comes the hour-long 1957 CBS  television special, The Sound of Jazz, whose stellar line-up includes Billie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, Gerry Mulligan, Jo Jones and Thelonious Monk.

See here for the full story at The Australian.

 

It's about that time: Marclay's epic mash-up

The New Zealand Listener this month published my appreciation of Christian Marclay's 24-hour movie clip mash-up, The Clock. 

As you may have read elsewhere, this epic montage screening at Sydney's MCA functions as a gigantic time piece, its fragments gathered from a dizzying array of cinematic and televisual  sources while always displaying somewhere along the line the current time of day. 

If The Clock only looked at the time, and nothing else, it might have been of limited interest. What really gives it fascination are the wealth of differing cinematic contexts in which its chronological references are located, and the way they are interwoven to create endless juxtapositions of meaning and, overall, a complex set of patterning.

Many visitors are finding, as I did, that once you enter the screening room it's hard to tear yourself away - so quickly do you find yourself being sucked in by the work's hypnotic effect; its never-ending (literally , as it runs in a 24 hour loop with no start or end) sense of promise, and its sense of now-ness - its perptual heightening of our experience of the present tense.

I urge you firstly to read the whole piece here and secondly, to visit the MCA before June 3 (the museum's screening theatre opens throughout the night every Thursday/ Friday morning and in usual daytime hours on other days).

Extract: 

"Obviously, the theme of time and chronicity is central – most literally in the shots of clocks, digital timepieces, grandfather clocks, alarm clocks, fob watches, wrist-watches, public clocks (Big Ben is popular) and verbal references to the time of day, but also in sequences showing the internal workings of machinery, particularly clockwork. 

"Adding to the unity of all this disparate material are overlapping images such as passing trains, cars, someone worrying about being late followed by a clip in which another person is waiting. Sound and music often form a bridge between sequences.

"Sources of pleasure include guessing the film, especially with stars in obscure or forgotten roles; spotting correspondences; playing the game of spot the time reference; and catching the wittiness of many of the juxtapositions. 

"No specialist knowledge is required of the viewer; the clips go all the way from various James Bonds and TV series such as The Office (UK version) and Mission: Impossible to Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexandra. But the more you know about cinema, the more patterns emerge. I especially liked the rhyme between The Tin Drum (young boy Oskar’s scream shatters the glass in a grandfather clock) and a clip from another German classic that crops up at least an hour beforehand, Run Lola Run, where Franka Potenta’s piercing scream has a similar effect. Another time we see Orson Welles.

"A few minutes later, Vincent D’Onofrio, who played Welles in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, appears in a different role. This is surely not accidental. According to what time people enter, everyone will have a different experience. I only watched for about two-and-a-half hours. More viewing pleasure awaits."

My 1984 interview with the world's first rapper

Lynden Barber, Melody Maker, 13 October 1984 .
Thanks to Rock's Back Pages for the transcription.

Kidnapped heiress Patti Hearst is said to have listened to him incessantly during her captivity and the hip-hop crowd regard him as a guru. His name is Jalal, inspiration behind THE LAST POETS and the world's first rap artist.

A BRIEF rattle of hand-drums and pandemonium erupts: "I understand that time is running out (tick tock tick tock). I understand that time is running out (tick tock tick tock)..."

The voice, keen and belligerent, quickens to a panic...

"Running out on lifeless serpents reigning over a living kingdom (tick tock); Running out on talks, marches, tunes, chants and all kinds of prayers (tick tock); Running out like a bush fire in a dry forest..."

And rises to a crescendo of hysteria, taunting, shrill, abusive...

"RUN, NIGGER, RUN LIKE YOU RUN WHEN THE STORE'S CLOSING AND IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT..."

It's now 14 years since that devastating opening to the debut LP by The Last Poets was first heard, a decade and a half nearer to the brink. Time, as they warned us, is indeed running out of time.

The Last Poets, on the Douglas label, eventually sold 800,000 copies and became a legendary, virtually unobtainable collector's item, a situation only recently rectified by Celluloid's wise re-issue. Not only is it the first ever rap record, but one of the most committed, uncompromisingly fierce collection of performances ever to find its way onto wax. It is also, by virtue of its bursts of acid mockery, sarcasm and irony, extremely amusing at times. "I'm gonna be free, free, free!" yells a junkie triumphantly after achieving his fix, the timing and inflection of the reply impeccable. "Really?!!!"

Rising from the burning embers of Black Power at a regular poetry workshop in Harlem, they took their name from a declaration by a visiting South African poet that this was the last age of poems and essays before guns and rifles took over. Legend has it that the first album was repeatedly played to the kidnapped newspaper heiress Patti Hearst before her Road To Damascus-like conversion to her captors' beliefs. "I don't think they was using it for brainwashing or indoctrination," Poet Jalal told Radio 1 recently. "They were using it to school her to what was happening on the other side of America that she was not aware of, because she grew up wealthy and rich and knew nothing about the ghetto."

 Four more albums followed – This Is Madness, Chastisement, At Last and Delights Of The Garden – and things quietened down, conga player Nilaja dying, Abiodun Oyewolfe and Omar Ben Hassen turning their skill with language towards the writing of plays.

Aided by the active interest and encouragement of Celluloid, The Last Poets have been re-activated by Jalal (aka Alafia Pudim aka Lightnin' Rod) and his current partner Suliman, with a new album due in December. Further re-issues are planned – This Is Madness, and Hustlers' Convention, an album cut by Jalal under his Lightnin' Rod appellation in 1973 with Kool & The Gang, King Curtis, Billy Preston and others. In addition Celluloid have released 'Doriella Du Fontaine', a 12-inch remix by Bill Laswell of a Lightnin' Rod/Jimi Hendrix collaboration and 'Mean Machine', a new electro version of an old Poets rap featuring Jalal and D.ST.

MEETING JALAL turns out to be a less intimidating experience than might be expected. When I arrive at the modern Islington house that serves as Celluloid's London base he is sitting at one end of a large sofa, the afternoon's non-stop stream of interviews taking its toll. His voice hovers around the audibility threshold, exudes fatigue. Despite fears aroused by the ferocity of his recorded invective, he seems amiable enough.

This is an intensely committed man nevertheless. Statements are issued with a steeled self-assurance, leavened with rap rhymes and exotic metaphors.

An impromptu set at the Wag Club the previous night hadn't been helped by the dire lack of rehearsal time for his ad hoc backing duo, a conga player and bassist; the constant squawking of the parrots out to compare plumage at the bar set up further obstacles. Beyond this rabble it was still possible to observe a magnetic performer, well-schooled jazz singing appearing alongside the expected torrent of rap-speak.

He acknowledges the influence of jazz (listen, if you can find it, to the airily cooool Delights Of The Garden for confirmation): "Well before there was hip-hop there was doo-wop, and before there was doo-wop there was be-bop. Simultaneous with be-bop was rhythm and blues, before rhythm and blues was just blues, before blues there was gospel, before gospel there was African. So that's the progression of black music."

The technical name for rapping, he explains, is "Spoeagraphics", meaning spoken pictures. "It's a phrase we coined to define what we were doing, and that's the technical name for our art form. The street name for the art form is spoetin (pronounced 'spoa-tn'), not rap.... spoken poetry. Or, speaking poetry rapidly – there's your rap."

The rappers that followed The Last Poets, the street strutters of Eighties hip-hop, do not find favour with Jalal: "The young rappers came in in the middle of the picture without bothering to find out what went down... We was rappin' when they was nappin', so you can't talk of 'rappers'."

This might sound like sour grapes, but I think not. There is less of a similarity between the Poets and new rappers than you would expect; virtuosos pouring the black tradition – including the talking blues – into a revolutionary funnel, compared to your novices with a great sense of fun but little direction. I'm reminded of the Poets' sneer about "niggers" wanting to do nothing but "party and bullshit and party and bullshit".

"They couldn't look at The Last Poets cos it was too real," says Jalal. "They wanted to use what we had without using us. But, in their haste to make money, they overlooked certain scientific principles and certain facts, and as a result, rap records today sound redundant. 'Cos they can only rap in one meter."

He doesn't seem overly impressed with more militant records like Brother D And His Collective Effort's 'How We Gonna Make The Black Nation Rise' or Grandmaster Flash's 'The Message' – "a re-phrasing of the original message that we delivered" – either. The name "Grandmaster" riles him, in particular. Lifted from Kung-Fu movies, it implies disrespect.

"In fact a Grandmaster is one who's a master of masters, and I'm not even a master of masters. I'm a young master, I'm not old enough yet to be a Grandmaster. Now if these young rappers get together and start being original and relevant then I can become a Grandmaster and they can become masters. And then when I die, they can become Grandmasters. That's the order of things."

The Last Poets used to be an angry, extreme group. Has he become less angry over the years, found his perspective has changed?

"Well, we was angry with good cause – and we still got good cause to be angry. I would say we're still angry, but now we're more appalled. It's not a self-destructive anger. As far as being extreme, our conditions we were living in were extreme; we've always been in an extreme, volatile situation.

"What we were able to do was to articulate the inner feelings, the gut feelings of the people. So they'd thank us for it because we were able to express what was on their minds... To some people it might be extreme. To others it was like waking up from the bad dream."

"Wake up niggers or you're all through," the Poets used to scream. "Niggers are scared of revolution." The revolution, as we know, never came.

"Yeah, because it was bought out. The people got used, 'Here's a revolutionary poster, five dollars'. They made it into a commercial venture. The resiliency of the United States is commercial enterprise – selling you yourself, selling your culture, taking a natural thing and turning it into an artificial thing and selling it back to you as a natural thing."

The last time Gil Scott-Heron was in the country I asked him how he managed to keep so optimistic in the face of such a depressing world. He replied that things weren't so bad, that there had been progress for blacks, with the majority of African countries now run by the people of those countries. What does Jalal think of this view?

"I disagree entirely. You know, I'm not a pessimist, but I'm not an optimist – I'm a realist. And the fact is, when the colonial powers left Africa they left the economy in a shambles. And the ones they've left behind have been trained by them, indoctrinated by them, so they impose similar types of governments. So everything has to be re-evaluated and you have to go back to Day One, check out what went wrong..."

THERE IS no time to ask Jalal about the sexism The Last Poets used to be guilty of (curiously, and offensively, they saw "bitches" as some kind of trick laid out to divert men from the struggle), or their racial sterotyping of Jews. The next interviewer is waiting to be ushered in.

Preparing to leave, I'm startled to hear Jalal offering me some free medical advice. Lay off the drink and that problem will clear up immediately, he says. Actually, I don't drink much, but never mind.

© Lynden Barber, 1984

As western box office declines, China's shoots skywards

Sorting through piles of dusty old film magazines dating back to the late 1980s as I cleared out the attic recently, I was struck by the number of articles predicting the imminent demise of the movies. Worse than expected years at the box office have clearly been prompting movie business pundits to wring their hands for a long time.

In the past 10-plus years, massive successes like Titanic, Avatar and the Harry Potter series have kept the corporate US business afloat, despite the prevalence of free downloading, pay TV and increasingly sophisticated televisions. The studios' Plan B - an eager, even cynically exploitative rush to 3D - has not lived up to the hype though.

This should not have been a surprise. Too many 3D films offered nothing but a cheap re-versioning of movies filmed shot using old 2D technology. Why would audiences keep cheerfully reaching deeper into their pockets for a degraded visual experience? 

As a result the long term trend at the box office in western economies is downwards - last year's earnings in the US for example were down by 4%, accounted for by the diminished performance of 3D.

  

That does not mean the power of the studios is over, it just means the way business is done, and where it is done, is changing. Chinese box office is heading skywards. According to Variety, the Asian tiger's box office surpassed $2.1 billion in 2011 and could grow to $5 billion by 2015, all thanks a massive cinema building program (eight screens a day are being opened), and loosened restrictions on Hollywood imports that now allow 14 films a year to play. 

Over the last four years, the number of screens in China has doubled to more than 6,200. That figure is projected to double again by 2015. How this will affect the kinds of films made remains to be seen, but we can confidently expect more co-productions, more movies that take into account Chinese tastes.    

More details at Indiewire, LA Times and Variety

Everything you need to know about Steve Earle

Photo: Scott Hansen, http://tinyurl.com/73mfzjm. (Will remove if requested)

I’ve been a fan of Steve Earle – soon to visit for a tour including Byron Bay's East Coast Blues and Roots fest  - ever since the mid-1980s. That fandom began with his glorious song Someday, about as perfect an encapsulation of the low horizons of small town life as has ever been written.

It kept on going through the irresistible hooks of his early country rock band The Dukes on his second album, Exit 0, and continued through the leather-jacketed, ballsy roots rock of Copperhead Road, the smokin’ bluegrass of The Mountain, and the mixed-up but always engaging blend of genre influences that have made up his albums ever since.

I remember interviewing him in Sydney’s Sebel Town House in the same room I once also chatted to filmmaker Todd Haynes and for that reason, and no other, often think of them as somehow related -  they have nothing else in common!. 

Since then the hotel’s been long demolished. Earle has served a jail term for drugs-related offences, and married for the seventh time, this time to country rock singer Alison Moorer – a union that this time seems to be lasting. 

He’s moved from Nashville to New York, with a weekender in upstate Woodstock not far from ex-The Band founder Levon Helm and the former Lovin’ Spoonful front man John Sebastian, and seen his first son, Justin Townes Earle, receive acclaim as a talented singer-songwriter in the folk-country vein in his own right.

Just so that no-one can accuse him of being a slack-arse, he’s also published his first book of short stories, and more recently, his debut novel, had a small part as a drugs counsellor in The Wire followed by a role in the New Orleans-based Treme under the same series producer, David Simon. Earle keeps rolling right along, never resting; always questioning (his songs have frequently embodied the early Dylan protest spirit), forever evolving.

Recently I got to catch up with him on a phone line for a piece that ran in The Australian last weekend and got to chat to him about the various directions his life has taken him in the years since we last spoke. After a brief period behind the paper’s new paywall, the feature is now for free here. A couple of tasters:

Extract 1

DURING the two and a half decades since his 1986 debut album Guitar Town was released to widespread acclaim, Steve Earle has morphed from country rocker to a kind of non-specific roots rocker, impossible to pin down to a single style.

He has traversed styles as diverse as Irish folk music, bluegrass and cajun, and on last year's Meet Me in the Alleyway - a highlight of his latest album, I'll Never Get Out of This World Alive - the voodoo swamp R&B of early Dr John.

"You know," Earle muses, "I'm a folk singer, I'm comfortable with that as much as I'm anything else. My job is the job that Bob Dylan invented, and he immediately took nearly all of the air in the room just by doing it. The rest of us have been struggling along in his wake ever since trying to do it. I'm perfectly OK with that…

Extract 2: 

Whether penning a classic such as Goodbye (covered by Emmylou Harris on her landmark Wrecking Ball album, on which he also played - see YouTube clip below, LB ), or engaging in Appalachian hoedowns with the Del McCoury Band on The Mountain, arguably his masterpiece, his music always sounds like Earle first and an example of a genre second. In that sense he's closer to the first great North American roots-rockers, The Band, and the music still being produced by its drummer and singer Levon Helm, than a country star.

Speaking from his home in New York - where he moved with his wife, singer Allison Moorer, last decade after years in Nashville - Earle says country music is simply where he comes from. "I was with a group of people that was in Nashville because Kris Kristofferson had been there before us and we thought that country music could be art. And it can be, but the business doesn't always stand still for it, so it's a struggle."

Clip: Steve Earle and Emmylou Harris perform the Earle-penned "Goodbye":

Berenice Bejo proves that modern style is rubbish

I confess to being a little taken aback by the sight of Berenice Bejo in leather jacket and modern hairstyle in this interview clip for THE ARTIST. (Less so Jean Dujardin, aka John Of The Garden - the difference between his screen persona in that movie and present day, 'real life' appearance is not so dramatic).

One of the pleasures of The ARTIST for many non-French viewers is the way it thrust in our faces two stars whom we have never seen before. Bejo is so perfect in the role of 1920s flapper cum movie star, Peppy Miller, that I found it hard to imagine she had ever lived in any other time. Irrational, I know, but movies perform strange tricks on our perception. 

I am convinced on the emotional level that 'Berenice-as-Peppy' is more real than Berenice-as-Herself. While undeniably still beautiful, the modern version looks so scruffy and casual, it's as if she has been designed by a committee to prove the notion that modern 'style' is rubbish.

Erykah Badu - betcha by golly by wow

Badu at SOH. (Photo: Prudence Upton)

I was lucky enough to be asked by The Australian to review Erikah Badu's February 21st at the Sydney Opera House recently. Lucky because...well, best you read the whole review (which is open to all, ie. not behind the paper's paywall). 

A taster:

"IT'S tempting to review US soul and R&B singer Erykah Badu with the single word "wow", followed by an exclamation mark. She comes across as a savvy, multi-talented artist who's determined to entertain but not to compromise. It's a hell of a performance. 

  

"There are many ways of projecting star quality on stage. Badu's method is not to shine brightly and obviously but to project a theatricalised cool, a sense of knowing hipness calculated down to the last gesture -- and no less captivating for that..."

While the clip below suffers from crap sound (as did the concert), it also captures something of the hedonistic atmosphere and Badu's charismatic projection of cool. (Note the tribute she sneaks in to Afrika Bambaata's 1980s hip-hop classic Planet Rock and its 1970s inspiration, Kraftwerk's Trans-Europe Express.)

Why it's normal to think your creative work is no good

If you're involved in any kind of creative work, be it filmmaking, writing, painting, whatever, it may may to watch this short clip from US radio  presenter Ira Glass (cousin of the composer Philip Glass).

Glass captures lucidly explains that familiar feeling we all have that what we're doing really doesn't measure up. It's so easy to admit defeat at this point and give up.

However, as Glass explains, if we're feeling this way it means something positive - our taste (ie. our sense of what a good piece of creative work should look and feel like) is still intact.

Feeling this way is just a staging post in creation and with perserverance you will get past it.

Below is another inspiring clip: "29 ways to stay creative." I you're ever feeling blocked, or just don't know where to start (and who doesn't at some point?) just play it. Then take action.

If you're involved in any kind of creative work, be it filmmaking, writing, painting, whatever, it may may to watch this short clip from US radio  presenter Ira Glass (cousin of the composer Philip Glass).

Glass captures lucidly explains that familiar feeling we all have that what we're doing really doesn't measure up. It's so easy to admit defeat at this point and give up.

However, as Glass explains, if we're feeling this way it means something positive - our taste (ie. our sense of what a good piece of creative work should look and feel like) is still intact.

Feeling this way is just a staging post in creation and with perserverance you will get past it.

Below is another inspiring clip: "29 ways to stay creative." I you're ever feeling blocked, or just don't know where to start (and who doesn't at some point?) just play it. Then take action.

How not to blend genres

 

My assessment of R-rated British horror-thriller Kill List, an attempt at blending an ultra-violent hit-man thriller with suburban drama  and The Wicker Man-style horror, is up at SBS Film.

Extract:

"It takes ambition to try to convincingly blend two genres, let alone three (social drama, crime thriller and horror). Unfortunately, it also takes the kind of craft skill and ingenuity that Ben Wheatley, the film’s director and co-writer, and his screenwriting partner, Amy Jump, fail to display. Instead, they deliver a film in which each of the three acts inhabits a different genre. That’s not a blend. It’s a list. But at least the film is well named."

Eyeswired reviews The Clash in Brixton, 1984

Joe Strummer

British punk rock in its classic form lasted at best three years - 1976-1979 - before the bands started getting tired of the limitations of short, sharp three chords songs with anthemic choruses and started looking over the horizon.

The Clash were one of the first to break away, surprising many, myself included, with their third album, London Calling  - a double set ranging across a broader range of styles - and the following, patchy three album set, Sandinista!, which included nods to funk and hip-hop.

The loss of the band's second guitarist and singer, Mick Jones - Joe Strummer and Paul Simenon sacked him in 1983 - produced an odd reaction. The pair, apparently having decided they'd moved too far away from their roots, re-launched the band with three new members, returning to the fists-aloft image of their earlier days in a way that appeared just a bit too retro and desperate to convince.

Rock's Back Pages has just posted my scathing review of the first London show by this  "greatest hits" style version of the band in Brixton, South London. I wouldn't have written this the same day today. After viewing Julien Temple's revealing 2007 documentary, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, I saw a different side to Strummer - a vulnerable guy who, after The Clash finally disbanded in 1986, spent several long years in the wilderness looking for ways to get his musical life back on track.

I guess many of us veterans from that time still feel saddened by his shockingly early death in 2002. That means I find the snotty tone I adapted back here, while not entirely unjustified, a bit cruel and over the top. Still, it captures something of the attitudes of the time. Mine, anyway.

Lynden Barber, Melody Maker, 17 March 1984 

ONCE UPON a time when we were a little more naive than we like to admit, The Clash seemed pretty important, like they were the fuel to the fires of creative rebellion. But now we've grown older, seen promises broken, lyrics mocked, times-a-changed and poses struck, we take them with pinch of salt. RIGHT?
 

Poor old Joe Strummer. It's 1977 all 
over again up there on stage and he 
desperately wants us to believe in it, 
moreover desperately needs us to 
believe in him because it ain't too nice
 when people get cynical and think you
 don't mean anything any more,
especially when you realise privately 
that they've probably got good 
reason.

I got the Big Chill watching The
 Clash at Brixton tonight; found it even
 pathetic watching the spectacle of a
 whole bunch of people trying to feel
 the moment of ignition again – as if
 the punk rock explosion had been 
placed inside a bottle for several years 
and let out again without anything 
having changed.

Up there on stage Joe's got his microphone stand slung over his shoulder like a weapon and he still seems to think he can shoot Margaret Thatcher dead by commanding one of his guitarists to thrum an "E" chord like a machine gun in the direction of the Houses of Parliament on a weekday.

Perhaps he doesn't even realise that the most he can hope to achieve is a grand old reunion party where he plays the role of the host, poised over the turntable and yelling ceaselessly, "Hey, anybody remember this one?" But then acumen never was one of his strong points, even if his heart was (and is?) in the right place, bless the old sod.

It's a farce because the current Clash show is nothing more than a reactionary surrender to the forces of nostalgia, Punks-On-45, a greatest hits run through, let's-all-pretend-we're-Still-wearing-Pogo-On-A-Nazi-badges-and-head off-down-to-Lewisham, because, let's face it, those were the good old clays and we could actually believe that The Clash were some kind of radical force.

By playing a song like 'We Are The Clash' you are committing all the errors that your generation were supposed to have steered away from – brandishing your name as a fetishistic object, hoping we'll swallow the symbol before getting a taste of what it means. You are nearer to the current John Lydon than you realise – a pantomime for pogo-ers but at least Lydon had the sense to maintain some ironic distance between himself and his new Public Image, or at least an aura of ambiguity, just to keep us guessing as to what he was really up to. But then irony was never a strength of The Clash.

I find it saddening that the things about punk that are still celebrated and scorned are in every single case the wrong things. The easy-to-grasp slogans, the songs themselves, the dogmas, all these are sacrosanct, and woe behold anyone who dares to use an elaborate light show, like Siouxsie, even if it does advance their craft, jolt them out of some stultifying rut.

If The Clash had opened with 'The Magnificent Seven' and 'Overpowered By Funk' instead of 'London Calling' and 'Safe European Home', or at least acknowledged their existence, it would have been easier to respect Strummer and Simenon and would have shown their feet to be placed in 1984. Instead – like some casually tossed token to the video age – we get nine TV screens flashing
 various images; in a hall the size of the 
Academy it's difficult to see exactly 
what's flickering away up there.

And the new members – Sheppard, Howard and White? They played well, and I wish them no ill. If the music sounded like one giant heavy metal thrash it's no fault of theirs – the sound of the early Clash has been copied so many times that it will never make the impact it once did.

Sure, there were new songs. Same as the old songs. I guess Strummer reckoned he had to make this "back-to-the-roots" move or risk losing the old Clash audience entirely. The "softer" side was always Mick Jones anyway.

"We Are The Clash"?

Ya boo.

Golly gee and aw, shucks....the Crikey profile

Luke Buckmaster, who writes the Cinetology blog at Crikey, recently started what will eventually be an extensive series of a interviews with Australian film critics, one a week. Buckmaster spoke with me over the phone from Melbourne for the third installment, which he's kindly given me permission to re-publish below in full (though I urge you to check out Cinetology for updates in this series and film reviews).

A brief note: the intro is flattering enough to make some readers people wonder  if he's doing a favour for a mate. Not so. We've never met. I will say this: given my rambling interview (which I was half-dreading appearing), this reads surprisingly well. That's largely because the original conversation has been edited so astutely. Gone are all my ums and ahhs, unfinished or borderline incoherent thoughts and conversational dead ends. A reminder that even interviews in the Q&A format often require the strict application of the editor's blue pencil.

Meet the Critics: Lynden Barber — film reviewer for The Oz and SBS, prolific tweeter and net-a-holic

February 3, 2012 – 10:07 am, by Luke Buckmaster

Few veteran film critics are as internet savvy as The Australian and SBS online reviewer Lynden Barber. Barber worked as a staff writer for newspapers and magazines in the 80s and 90s, banging away on stories during the days when “Google” still sounded like something you might use to shield your eyes, but has had no trouble evolving with the times.

In addition to his duties as a critic Barber is a website curator for the National Film and Sound Archive, runs a blog called Eyes Wired Open and is a social media hound, prolific on Twitter and a daily user of Facebook. His approach to blogging demonstrates how Barber uses the online world as a tool for research and organisation.

“In some ways I regard my blog as my personal note book,” he says. “Sometimes I put things up there that I find are really interesting. I can put in keywords which can help me pinpoint things — like a quote in an interview I might later want to turn into a story. The private notebook that’s open to the public.”

Born in the UK, Barber migrated to Australia in 1985. He was the staff film writer at The Australian between 1994-2004 and before that senior film critic at The Sydney Morning Herald for five years. He has also written for Rolling Stone Australia, Meanjin, NME and Lumina. A man of many reels, Barber served as Artist Director of the Sydney Film Festival for 2005 and 2006 and this year begins teaching film studies at Sydney Film School.

Like most critics, Barber likes to go into the cinema “cold,” not having fell privy to the whims of PR or even having read a synopsis.

“I love going into a film without knowing much about it, which is kind of ironic when you earn a living partly through describing films,” he says.
Barber knows he has a much sought after job — or jobs — but also acknowledges what every critic will tell you if prodded: that it isn’t always beer and skittles.

“When the general public ask what you do and you respond they immediately say something like ‘I wish I could do that job!’ I love my job, I love writing about films, I love going to see films, but there is always a downside to any professional work. The moment you turn a passion into work, there will be some part of it that will be extremely difficult.”

Barber is the third participant – after the ABC’s Margaret Pomeranz and The Age’s Jake Wilson – in Cinetology’s Meet the Critics series, which examines the viewing habits and philosophies of the country’s leading film reviewers.

Klaus Kinski in Aguirre: Wrath of God

Do you read much film criticism? If so, what publications and writers do you recommend?
I used to subscribe to Sight and Sound for many years, probably 20 years or so. I read it more or less cover to cover. Plus I’d buy other magazines like Film Comment and occasionally Empire or Filmink, the more pop culture mags, which can have some lively stuff in them too. I stopped subscribing to Sight and Sound because I found I wasn’t actually reading it. I got out of the habit of reading print magazines and I am just starting to re-assess that because I sort of miss it, and feel that so much of my life is spent on the internet.

One of the people I look to most commonly who I really enjoy — who’s a great appreciator of cinema and a fantastic, deceptively good writer — is Roger Ebert. He is the most well known film critic in America because of his TV show, which I’ve actually never seen. He has so much command of the writing craft of film criticism and I find him totally satisfying even if, of course, I don’t always agree with him.

The most important thing about criticism is the reasoning people use — the knowledge they bring to explaining how they feel about a film. I think Ebert understands that and I am often in awe when I read his stuff, how it seems to jut drip off the pen. I think he’s been particularly good since he had his illness. He can’t speak now, lost his voice entirely, and I think he has one of those Stephen Hawking type throat devices. I think that’s intensified his need to write.

Someone else I think is very good who is only online is Jim Emerson, from the Scanners blog. Scanners is really good. Emerson is not an academic critic but he could be, and he’s obviously read quite a lot of David Bordwell. One of the things I like about Bordwell is that he’s an academic but he doesn’t write in an academic style. He represents quite a fresh approach to other traditional film theorists, coming from a school known as ‘formalists’ or ‘neo formalists’ which essentially means he’s less interested in grand theorizing and more interested in breaking down what is actually happening on the screen: logging it, noting it, looking at the way film works in its mechanics, in its editing, in the way shots are set up, etcetera. What I really like about that approach is there’s an element of objectivity. I think a lot of film theory is about setting up a theory and then using a film to justify it.

What if anything is wrong with the current state of film criticism and/or attitudes towards film critics?

I don’t have any major bug bears about film criticism. I think there is so much stuff out there, so many bloggers and people who have one foot in professional writing and one foot in blogging. The internet has enabled a huge amount of writing. It might be that 80% of it is pure rubbish — maybe even 95% — but that’s true for the internet in general, not just criticism. But once you know where to look that extra 5% presents a huge amount of great material.


I was going to ask next about your thoughts regarding the impact internet writers have had on film criticism, but I think you’ve already answered that.
I think there is something else going on, which is the amount of commenting, particularly on mainstream columns and websites. I’m thinking particularly about some of the discussion about Australian film that have been on The Drum and Jim Schembri’s blog on The Age. There was a period over about a couple of years when Schembri would do a think piece or a provocative piece on the state of Australian cinema. I read all of those comments and found them very interesting. Then I tired of them very quickly, because you realise that an awful lot of people have opinions that are based on prejudice. For example they’ll call all Australian films crap because they saw a bad one many years ago. I find that really dispiriting.



How did you become a film critic and when did you know you wanted to be one?


My background was as a music critic. I started writing film reviews when I worked on the London rock paper The Melody Maker in the early 80s and was living in London in my late teens, early 20s. It was only when I discovered foreign and independent cinemas in London that I really got the film bug. I can actually remember of the key incidents: I was on my way to see a gig by The Fall at The Marquee, this legendary club that was actually a horrible dive. I was walking down Wardour street and I walked past one of those micro-sized boutique cinemas and Werner Herzogs’s Aguirre: The Wrath of God was playing. I stood there, read one of the reviews outside and decided to see that instead of the gig. It amazed me. Blew me away. I had similar experiences watching Tarkovsky films in tiny cinemas, like the sort of theatrettes journalists get invited to. That then ignited a much keener interest in Hollywood cinema. Growing up I was not a mad film buff.


The general public love to munch away while watching a movie. What are your eating habits in the cinema? Are you addicted to popcorn, sneak in the occasional choc-top, or there strictly to watch the film?
A choc-top, maybe. Popcorn I have done in the past. I remember about ten years ago going to see a documentary about Sam Fuller at the Sydney Film Festival. I’d been going to several films in a row and it was my third or fourth film and I hadn’t eaten. You know what it’s like at a festival when you’re dashing around — you don’t get time to eat. I grabbed a tub of popcorn. I was sitting there as quiet as possible, trying to put the pieces in my mouth and not make any noise, and this woman in front of me turned around and glared. You get a few nutters at festivals. I said to her: “lady, you are sitting in a cinema. People eat popcorn in cinemas!”

Do you take notes in the cinema? If so, how extensive are they?
I do take notes and often they are very hard to read back because you end up writing on top of your lines. When I get a point I think is really key, or a I’ve come up with a point that really crystallises what I’m thinking about a film, or even a specific line, I put a big tick next to it. Then I can go back and transcribe the ticks or re-read passages I’ve ticked. Only in films I know I am going to be reviewing, though. If it’s a film I’m watching for pleasure or out of general interest I generally won’t take notes, because that turns it into work. I don’t like taking notes but it does help jog the memory. Ideally after I’ve seen a film I should write up my notes or even write up the review straight away. I always find it is much easier when you do that. But in practice, I often leave it to the deadline. A journalistic sin, I know.

Moving onto the subject of eye moistening: when if ever was the last time you cried while watching a film and what was it?
Well, I didn’t cry during War Horse. But the moment with the barbed wire — and I’m trying to phrase this so it doesn’t give anything away — was quite shocking. I thought any kid would be traumatized by that. It’s not like the scene in Bambi where the mother is shot. It’s much more vivid and real.
We had a family viewing of The Sound of Music this Christmas. My son had never seen it and decided to get it out and screen it for us after our family Christmas dinner. After The Lonely Goatherd I started tearing up. I thought, how ridiculous! The Lonely Goatherd is a happy song!

Who are your five favourite living directors?
I don’t know that I can even answer this question. Five is far too many for me. I know this is not a very film critic-y kind of answer, but I don’t really think in those terms. There are very few living directors who I so admire, whose whole body of work is so great, that I want to rush out to see their new films. I find some of the greatest directors can also produce shockers. One of my favourite films of the last year has been Melancholia, but some of Lars von Triers films I’ve barely been able to sit through. Probably the most consistent for me in terms of having a fascinating style — creating his own world, technique and philosophy of making films that is absolutely unlike anybody else — is Mike Leigh. He would come close to being one of my favourite directors. Herzog, yes, generally, but going back to some of his earlier films.

What are your five favourite Australian films of the last ten years?
Ten Canoes, Animal Kingdom, Boxing Day, The Square and Three Blind Mice. Close runners-up would be Balibo, Mrs Carey’s Concert, The Tracker, Samson & Delilah and Kenny.

What is your first memory of the cinema?
Sleeping Beauty, the Disney film. I was probably about four years old when I saw it and I remember being taken to the cinema by one of my mum’s friends. That obviously made an impact on me. I remember I used to go and see a lot of Hayley Mills films, which shows how old I am. She was John Mills’ daughter, a child star of the early 60s. I loved the original 101 Dalmatians, Jungle Book, the Disney animations. I just adored them as a kid and I assume everybody else did as well. Particularly the King of the Swingers scene in Jungle Book, I just adored that. I grew up to be a jazz fan; I don’t know if that had any influence or not.

Can you describe the strangest experience at the cinema you’ve ever had?
I remember one day at the Sydney Film Festival, preparing for a film, with the audience sitting in the State Theatre. I’d been told to make sure to look after the director because it was the first time her film had been screened in public. But there was a problem: a piano was being delivered to the theatre, and the State Theatre doesn’t have proper back stage facilities — nor does it have proper backstage doors. Things actually have to come in through the roof. This piano, which should have come in at eight o’ clock in the morning but turned up eight hours late, was hovering in the air behind the curtain, behind the screen, up at roof level, very slowly coming down on wires. When it finally came down the delivery person said to me “now we just have to take it out in into the audience to assemble it, put the pedals on.” I said “you’re not doing that!” and the crisis was eventually resolved. It was very surreal.

Looking back over your filmic life, what is the cinematic experience you recall most fondly?
One of my fondest memories is going to see the world premiere of Pulp Fiction at Cannes. There were more people trying to get in then there were seats, but I finally squeezed myself in, and that was a buzz. Particularly going along to interview some of the cast and (Quentin) Tarantino the next day, including (John) Travolta. Travolta was basking in the fact that he’d just been rediscovered. He was charming and lovely. Bruce Willis was bad tempered. He was immediately defensive and aggressive and I thought wow, he has a chip on his shoulder.

There’s a common assumption that critics have a very large home collection of films. Is that true for you?
I’ve got quite a few DVDs but I’m generally much more obsessed in finding films I haven’t watched before. I just don’t feel like I have to have a big collection. You can usually find titles you want to watch in stores or online. The other thing is, I have so many bloody books taking over the house, and a large vinyl collection too. I like to actually have some space to live in as well.

With regards to philosophy re: sitting in the cinema, are you a back row sitter? A front row sitter? Why?
Usually I like to sit somewhere around the middle of the cinema but lately I’ve been sitting near the front, because I’ve had an eye problem, an acute case of dry eye. I was getting to the point that I felt if I sat further back I would have to strain my eyes more. I quite enjoyed sitting up the front. Too close to the front can be disorienting, though, if you can’t see the whole screen.

Finally, what advice would you provide to a) aspiring filmmakers and b) aspiring film critics?
I suspect the best advice to aspiring filmmakers comes from other filmmakers. For starters, watch lots of films and think about them.  You don’t have to shy away from watching bad films, because you can learn a lot from them too.
In terms of film critics, I answered that quite recently on my blog. I wrote a few points, including not to run with the crowd. You don’t have to follow sheepishly; the best critics are leaders. At the same time don’t go to the opposite extreme and be perverse. An opinion doesn’t become validated just because it’s widely held. Going to either of those extremes I think are real traps.