“Our lives are not our own. From womb to tomb, we are bound to other, past and present, and by each crime and every kindness, we birth our future.” –Cloud Atlas

Cloud Atlas proposes a romantic theory as to how reincarnation may procure itself, a theory bound to swell your heart with wonderment. In David Mitchell’s carefully crafted world, everything is connected. In six prima facie distinct but intricately woven stories, the characters of each story are reincarnations of one another, marked by a birthmark in the shape of a comet. Mitchell brings to bear the theme of eternal recurrence – just as fate may be held in the stars, the characters in the stories are destined to meet again and again in their many lifetimes, “crossing and re-crossing [their] old steps like figure skaters.”

The ending is perfect; the film comes a full circle in the eyes of an observant audience: the actors for Hae Joo and Somni 451 have also played Adam and Tilde Ewing, destined to live the same life again, in a diff erent time. Profoundly, “I believe there is another world waiting for us…a better world.”

The characters quest after the same things – love, hope, a sense of justice. These are all parts of the prophesied “natural order” that loops ironically throughout the various storylines. The vice of slavery recurs in the fabricants of neo-soul and so forth. There is something inherently sentimental about the common human struggle and our tendency to repeat the same mistakes, in a never-ending loop.

As the melodies of the Cloud Atlas sextet ring through every arc of the show, “I’ve heard this before, in another lifetime”. “Each solo is interrupted by its successor” – and the struggles of each lifetime ring on forever through the course of time.

There’s a pretty postcard pinned up on the drab beige board in front of my desk. An old friend sent it last month, scribbling on the back of a picture of some perfect gilded Burmese shrine: “Sailing down the Arawatty; not the worst way to welcome in the New Year! Lunch soon?” Getting a postcard is like taking a shot straight from a bottle of Ribena: sugary thrill of happiness, touch of cloying sickliness, something you’re unlikely to do every morning.

They’re cute, of course – but too smug, you think. All sincere-seeming with their physicality but super trite, kind of meaningless. The only thing more discomfort-inducingly clichéd than an ‘Oh I so wish you were here!’ is a tacky pink heart on Valentine’s Day, gently placed in your pidge by the guy you’ve been dating since primary school.

I mean, the closest thing to a Valentine I received this year was the fortune cookie a friend pidged me for Chinese New Year about a week beforehand. Perhaps this is just my various character/facial fl aws at play, or perhaps it’s that the sort of romance achieved in Friday night snogs at Plush isn’t super conducive to flowers and love letters the next morning.

But, to be frank, the only thing that’s worse in turn than Valentine’s Day is the self-deprecatory Valentine’s Day joke. At least that little paper heart and £2.50 Tesco rose I’m defi nitely not jealous of are a vaguely genuine gesture, are actual straightforward, real expressions of emotion. Sincerity seems gross, but that’s our problem.

It’s a cultural disease: terrible, terrible fear of sincerity, and an even greater terror of triteness. We’ve drowned in a postmodern scepticism of meta-narratives and ended up with an aestheticised, simplistic distrust of anything attempting to convey meaning. And irony is so easy: it – or at least an air of it – is the ultimate wall of defence, the absolute fi nest way to protect your self-esteem and ego.

Even lad culture has caught the bug. No more can we have that pile of refreshingly direct cockiness, even if it was really just a façade for all sorts of weird psychological knots. No, no, instead we’ve got this semiironic, not-really-ironic-but-we’re-all-kind-ofsignalling-like-it-is performance of competitive masculinity. There’s nothing wrong with a bit of mannish posturing, but surely it’s a little mad to put it through a fi lter of ‘irony’?

Scepticism of sincerity can be fantastic, of course it can – is there anything more juicy than brutal sarcasm, the waspish gay, Private Eye? The sort of person who doesn’t have a sense of irony will be dry, they’ll take themselves far too seriously and miss various little moments of cheap cheerfulness. But slapped on all over the place like a wannabe Instagrammer’s attempt at a contour it’s a dead end and a cheap trick, about as satisfying as an e-cigarette.

Postcards are the last vestige of sincerity in an ironically ironic world, where self-referentiality is a cliché and even sarcastic clichés are passé. Everything is constructed, performative, hollow, fi ne. But we’ve already done nihilism to death and anti-art has about as much life left in it as the Church of England. Chic Parisians on chic holidays may not be sending oneeuro scraps of printed card back to their Yves Saint Laurent-clad friends or beautiful lovers, but they’re possibly also spending more on cigarettes than food. Is that safe feeling of trendiness really worth it?

There’s a practice in traditional Japanese court poetry: learned poets or lovers would exchange notes in the form of short poems, tanka or similar haiku-like forms, instead of writing love notes or prose letters. Or they’d sit in conversation, like that game where you go round a circle of friends to create a story sentence by sentence, composing a haiku in turn, each of which delicately drew out a theme from the previous person’s.

Postcards are the haiku of the stationery world. They’re direct, pithy, often surprisingly emotionally charged for what they are. Both come across as eff ortless expressions, and something created by completely deliberate action.

It seems like a paradox, but that’s the magic of a postcard: short-form friendliness in something you can hold, that has the literal imprint of someone who’s close to you. Postcards don’t pretend. Letters, phone calls, Skype, Facebook Messenger, all of these things are approximations of real life communication. Postcards don’t even try: they say, ‘We’re apart, but that’s alright – and here’s a bit of my excitement.’ Those lovers swapping notes were doing just the same thing, sending an image and a few words in a physical object. Humans put so much meaning into physical objects; just think of how much we scorn the idea of an ‘e-card’.

And what even is this worry about triteness, about cliché? There’s a poem by the famous Matsuo Basho:

in the capital:

ninety-nine thousand people

blossom viewing

It’s of no importance how many people are seeing the spring flowers, and it’s of no importance for how many years they’ve been looking at them. Lover meets lover and eventually they end up together. You’ve seen that chick fl ick a thousand times, but nothing gets worn out. Every movie is a little diff erent, just as every interaction, every postcard will be diff erent. A formula is just as powerful as something completely ‘new’, if not more powerful – even those ‘Make It New!’ modernists knew that nothing can be really, totally new.

It’s a cliché to ‘stop and smell the flowers’ and people have been looking at them since time immemorial, but no one’s ever truly looked at an apple tree in bloom and dismissed it as ‘trite’. Keep sending postcards, and unapologetically pidge someone a Valentine next year. Sincerity is only as lame as viewing the blossoms in spring.

I would take a postcard over a poster any day. Free from the facile exhibitionism of the poster, postcards are not just a glaring statement which imposes on or entertains a viewer, they are windows onto something or somewhere. The size of this window also determines its power; they represent something bigger, partly because they are, indeed, smaller. A postcard on the wall draws you in, the viewer becomes like Lewis Carrol’s Alice looking into Wonderland: ‘she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head through the doorway; “and even if my head would go through,” thought poor Alice, “it would be of very little use without my shoulders. Oh, how I wish I could shut up like a telescope!”’ Like Alice, we are tantalized, already half-seduced by something so small with the power to encompass so much. The experience is like looking through a window onto an entire culture which we can look through and admire but not step into ourselves. Alice’s desire to “shut up like a telescope” is understandable, the desire to shut off the division, so we are no longer tele, at a distance, from the enticements of the garden beyond.   

George Orwell was fascinated by postcards, and their potential to reveal something of cultural identity. In his essay ‘the Art of Donald McGill’ he discusses the particular genre of saucy seaside postcards.  He is interested in the postcards not particularly for their art or humour, which he characterizes as falling into recurring categories such as sex jokes and drunkenness (‘both drunkenness and teetotalism are ipso facto funny.’) It is rather his belief that they offer an insight into a counter-cultural subversive statement against hegemonic cultural systems of law and virtue which drives his admiration for this particular genre of postcard. He posits that they would function in a similarly subversive role if England’s political and social system was fundamentally changed: “in a society which is still basically Christian they naturally concentrate on sex jokes; in a totalitarian society, if they had any freedom of expression at all, they would probably concentrate on laziness or cowardice, but at any rate on the unheroic in one form or another. It will not do to condemn them on the ground that they are vulgar and ugly. That is exactly what they are meant to be. Their whole meaning and virtue is in their unredeemed low-ness, not only in the sense of obscenity, but lowness of outlook in every direction whatever.” Obviously this point is articulated in Orwell’s typically problematic relation to his socialist ideology – that working class culture is something to be celebrated and embraced with class equality, but that he feels it is also essentially ‘low’ and dirty. Yet, his point about the subversive appeal of the postcards is valid – the viewer enjoys the jokes because “A dirty joke is not, of course, a serious attack upon morality, but it is a sort of mental rebellion, a momentary wish that things were otherwise. So also with all other jokes, which always centre round cowardice, laziness, dishonesty or some other quality which society cannot afford to encourage.”

Orwell comments that these lewd jokes would never be acceptable on the news, or in other print media, ‘the comic post cards are… the only medium in which really ‘low’ humour is considered to be printable. Only in post cards and on the variety stage can the stuck-out behind, dog and lamp-post, baby’s nappy type of joke be freely exploited.’ The form of the postcard itself seems to lend itself to cultural subversion.  Presumably rude postcards are considered less of an outrage than obscene jokes appearing in national papers because the presumption is that they are for private use, for an individual’s keepsake or to function as a letter to a friend.  Yet, the form of postcards is essentially disruptive of this private/public division. Sending a postcard to an individual is like having a seemingly private phone conversation on a crowded train – there is no envelope and therefore no boundary preventing whoever comes into contact with the dialogue from overhearing, or overseeing as it were. Perhaps this almost cavalier lack of privacy which is bound up in sending a postcard is linked to the text content as well as their front matter. Just as McGill’s mass-produced seaside postcards show trends in the stock figures they reel out and types of jokes they employ, there are also discernible formulaic patterns in what we write on the reverse. Not that every postcard is the same, yet even the most interesting people seem to feel the need to relate anecdotes from their holidays, which often conform to the standard wish-you-were-here banal format. The reverse of the postcard then also reveals norms, culturally sanctioned discourses which seem to lurk in our collective consciousness – windows do not, after all, only offer a one-way view.

On another note, contemporary postcards tend to offer a window onto what our culture aspires to, or obsesses over. Of course, museums do an excellent trade in postcards which capture objects of historical and cultural importance.  These are sold because they are better than the photos museum goers can take themselves (if they are allowed to), but they are also more interesting, and relate to (you guessed it) windows.  In fact, they become a kind of window within a window – the postcard shows the cultural moment that say, the Mona Lisa represents, but also has the marketing of the Louvre – revealing the present culture which wishes to preserve this and continues to assign it value.  Actually postcards in themselves have become an essentially ideological demonstration of which aspects of culture we consider worthy of preservation.  I’m quite a fan of the Penguin books postcards, for instance, or postcards with excerpts from novels (I do English in case you haven’t realised.) I guess we would like to think of these as a window onto the soul, a wish-you-were-here not for a place but for the transportation into the literary world that the book provided.  In looking at these postcards you are drawn into so many windows with their corresponding views that it’s like a figurative glasshouse – the author’s culture, and that of the reader, and also their experience of looking through that window too.  In these more than ever I think we’re trying to squeeze into the tiny doorway, to the wonderland (or indeed window-land) on the other side.              

Sam Peckinpah’s career was filled with great Westerns: we all know of Ride the High Country (1962), The Wild Bunch (1969) and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973). He revitalised the genre, helping forge a fresh perspective on the Western in its twilight phase. However, this overview omits the flawed, fascinating Major Dundee (1965), an underrated, thought-provoking vision of Unionist-Confederate tensions and private wars.

Charlton Heston plays the titular martinet, running a prisoner-of-war camp full of Confederates during the American Civil War. After a family of ranchers are killed by a band of Apaches, Dundee assembles a rag-bag troop of soldiers, prisoners and scouts in an attempt to redeem himself after prior misdemeanours and gain glory. Within this party is a run-down of some of the finest actors of the 1960s: Richard Harris as a proud Southern captain, James Coburn playing a wily scout, Brock Peters, an African-American soldier, along with Jim Hutton, Mario Adorf, Warren Oates, Ben Johnson, R.G. Armstrong, L.Q. Jones, Slim Pickens… The list of great character actors swells the ensemble, creating a vivid patchwork of performances. Combined with the dialogue written by Harry Julian Fink, Oscar Saul and Peckinpah, it comes together to form a salty, tough piece of cinema.

Heston delivers one of his best performances, sparring against Harris, and offering a view not of a paragon of army know-how, but a dictatorial glory-hunter. Peckinpah’s direction is also remarkably assured, juggling the large cast ably and in first half, providing a relentless, thrilling momentum. So why is the film less well know within his filmography?

Sadly, it is due to the film having no second half. The script bogs down in a Mexican village and never recovers coherence; Peckinpah fell out with the studio and the producers leading to the picture being taken away from him, resulting in savage cutting, particularly to the latter half of the film. Even the restored version from 2005 only improves things slightly. The fundamental problem was that Peckinpah, unlike with his next film The Wild Bunch, never figured out how to resolve the character of Dundee himself. Only with the final, climactic confrontation between the colonial French army and Dundee’s men at the U.S.-Mexican border does the movie regain its spirit, but it’s too late to provide a satisfying finale.

It ends on an uncertain note, perhaps appropriately for a film which grapples with the thorny issues of military hubris and intervention, the complex themes contained within the film reflected by the behind the cameras drama. This results in the film being consistently intriguing even if it never congeals into a coherent whole. Peckinpah had a strong, unique vision of the American West, mixing nostalgia with penetrating insights into the U.S. in the nineteenth-century, facing up to the often poisonous brew of tensions within the nation. When combined with an intuitive sense of creating mesmerising cinema, even Peckinpah’s lesser films reward keen attent.

★★★½

Hail, Caesar! has been marketed as the Coen Brothers’ homecoming, as a return to their distinctive style of surreal and dark comedy that brought them such acclaim in The Big Lebowski and Fargo. Hollywood’s A-listers dominate the cast, which includes Clooney, Brolin, Johansson, Swinton, Fiennes and many more. It’s no wonder dedicated fans of the Coens have been eagerly awaiting its release. But despite overflowing with potential, there are many reasons why it doesn’t live up to the expectation.

Filmgoers will immediately identify this as a “Coen Brothers’ movie”, that oft-used but apt cliché, as it bears all the hallmarks of the Coenesque. Their screenplay, as ever, is brilliantly funny and believably real. This is enhanced again by their liberal use of reverse shots, allowing the viewer to feel present in all conversations, and faultless editing to maintain their distinctive rhythm. Their unique characters don’t fail to amuse, such as Fiennes’ thespian director Laurence Laurentz – channelling David Lean and Laurence Olivier – who is perhaps underused, or Johansson’s slick-talking New Yorker Deanna Morgan. The Coen brothers’ tradition of directing, writing, producing and editing their films position them as the closest thing to American auteurs – Hail, Caesar is no exception, and definitely showcases their characteristic style.

But while the Coens usually find success critically and commercially, their films bridging the gap between independent and mainstream audiences, Hail, Caesar is undoubtedly a film aimed primarily at cinephiles. It’s heavy use of cinematic in-jokes and self-references are at best rather self-indulgent, and at worst shroud the film’s enjoyment in exclusivity. Their use of lengthy dance and choreographed swimming scenes unnecessarily disrupt the narrative in an attempt to reference Busby Berkeley’s kaleidoscopic dance sequences of the 1930s, as well as their own previous use of these in The Big Lebowski – only they fail to incorporate them as cleverly and it feels disjointed. The evocation of 1940s noir in the final third seems like an afterthought, out of step with the overall mood: the Coens appear only to be showing off their famous admiration for film noir.

Such admiration rises to adoration in their representation of Hollywood, the film being almost an ode to its Golden Age in the 1940s-50s. Light hearted mockery aside, Hail, Caesar views Hollywood with rose-tinted nostalgia, ignoring how stifling the studio system was for directors attempting even minimal artistic innovation. They get around this by basing the resurrected image more on how popular culture views Hollywood’s Golden Age than how it actually was; the underground Communism, the homosexual nepotism, the studio’s fear of tabloid scandal, all are borrowed from pop culture and portray the period as rather quaint. But perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising, as all the Coens’ films are profoundly indebted to the classical genres of Hollywood – such as their “stoner noir” The Big Lebowski, and neo-western No Country For Old Men to name just two. Their new release continues this trend, and while not being as clever or ambitious as their previous projects, it is undoubtedly a postmodern pastiche of deep affection, not a parody. Their reverence for classical Hollywood is measurable in the choice of protagonist, the studio ‘fixer’ Eddie Mannix who, though he can’t quite explain why, proclaims the studio system “just feels right”.

As far as the comedy is concerned, the sharp dialogue certainly gained a few laughs. Yet one could sense the over-reliance on high profile actors. Tatum’s tap-dancing Burt Gurney, the Communist and alluded-to homosexual, was an unsuccessful attempt to extract comedy from a tired stereotype by casting a celebrity; Clooney’s gullible numbskull Baird Whitlock, the kidnapped Hollywood star, was funny primarily because it was Clooney, the usually smooth Nespresso man playing the fool. The narrative itself, which follows Mannix trying to ensure the smooth running of the studio, is rather half-baked – always seeming secondary to the Coen’s desire to resurrect Hollywood’s Golden Age – and leaves the viewer unsatisfied upon its resolution.

I must say that on a personal level I enjoyed the film; I was entertained, I laughed, and being a Coen Brothers fan I could understand enough of the cinematic self-references to feel like I was part of one big inside joke. But when I left the cinema I couldn’t help but feel disappointed, which I apparently shared with the audience based on the audible grumbles of complaint. I suspect die-hard cinephiles will feel their appetites for the Coenesque satisfied for a few years, but for me it felt like something was missing. It’s a fine line between self-referencing and self-indulgence, and I fear, this time, the Coens may have slipped over it.

★★★☆☆

A sunny guitar intro and vague, confused lyrics sung to a nostalgic 60s beat: Living Hour’s ‘Summer Smog’ illustrates quite accurately what its title and the album cover both evoke, the inevitably contemplative mood of anyone who has been sitting at the beach for a little too long. Whether any of the words are more sophisticated than “ooh”, though, I find difficult to tell.

The first track slowly becomes less fuzzy, picking up a sweet tempo similar to many holiday songs, which is always very welcome in February. Immediately afterwards, ‘Seagull’ stagnates in the same musical and thematic region, its effortlessness temporarily broken by a short but energetic solo.

It seems brave for a first production to have most of its tracks over rather than under the four-minute line, but Living Hour manages to stay on the right side of the limit between the long and the unnecessarily diluted, settling for a few ballads like ‘There Is No Substance Between’ which pulls the band away from slightly weak pop to more experimental psychedelia as in ‘Mind Goodbyes’.

Originally from one of the sunnier cities of Canada, Winnipeg, the band’s debut album recreates a dreamy atmosphere with no surprises, tracing the outlines of a world still marked by adolescence where the boundaries between different elements are blurred.

This term’s OUPhil concert is dedicated to modern music, with two pieces from giants Bartók and Mahler being performed in a very full Sheldonian. Starting with Bartók’s Viola Concerto with the talented Rachel Maxey playing the solo part, the programme requires that the audience be entirely open to the Hungarian composer’s intriguing mix of voiced sensitivity and lack of spontaneity due to a complex score.

The concerto challenges our expectations by articulating melodic themes which are then more or less successfully superimposed on a fragmented, yet expansive orchestral accompaniment. The tense atmosphere is very clearly set as soon as the first notes are echoed by the violins, creating a sense of anguish. Rachel Maxey goes along confi dently with the ambitiously “notey” viola part, in turns fading in with the orchestra and suddenly springing back to the musical forefront with focused ease. However, there seems to be no straightforward aspect to this piece, since even the tempo is as elusive and changing as the alternation between the mostly aggressive beginnings of phrases and the underlying introspection.

Contrast is key from the opening of the evening onwards. Silences are filled with expectation, enabling the musicians to trace the outline of the current theme more precisely and mark it without losing too much coherence. Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, dubbed the “Resurrection”, proposes a more accessible take on similar sonorities. The repetitive motif played by the strings at the beginning of the first movement, an “allegro maestoso”, evolves through a series of variations during which the entire orchestra progressively gains amplitude until the booming last minutes of grand but confused unison with the choir and two female soloists.

The sheer volume of sound reflects the large numbers of musicians on stage, with a rare duo of harps, five percussionists and an impressive total of eleven French horns, although this appears to fluctuate throughout the performance. Groups of three or four leave the room only to return to their seats at the centre of the Sheldonian moments after, inevitably distracting the audience on their way. The reason for this traffic becomes clearer when distant horns are heard calling triumphantly from the corridors, an interesting device which is not entirely justified, especially considering the existence of mutes.

At times solemn and rarely light, the OUPhil’s programme is carefully interpreted and juggles with the composers’ attraction for opposites. The orchestra’s rounded, full sound responds to the successive soloists in sometimes brutal, but mostly adequately phrased echoes ranging from a sharp pizzicato to disconcerting legatos.

The winds howl, the bells chime and the rain falls.

It’s rain on a gloomy night, a storm in pitch-black darkness. But then “it’s alright.” The shadows start to dissipate, vanishing away in wisps.

More Rain, M. Ward’s eighth solo album, isn’t really about rain at all. It’s about the comfort of the hearth, confessional and well, other people. It’s a record that is – dare I say it? – upbeat and warm. Who knew that M. Ward had it in him?

M. Ward has always been an artist obsessed: obsessed with timelessness, perfection, the crispness of blending boundaries. More Rain was initially intended as an ode to doowop, easy-going and easy-listening.

But then as he put it to Glide, the creation process started to snowball. Peter Buck of R.E.M., Neko Case and k.d. lang feature; the doo-wop became M. Ward’s trademark mix of blues and folk and a bit of rock’n’roll.

Yet here’s the difference between More Rain and M. Ward’s earlier work. Transfiguration of Vincent makes its mark with the one-two gut punch of ‘Vincent O’Brien’ and ‘Sad, Sad Song’ – “He only laughs when he’s sad, and he’s sad all the time so he laughs the whole night through.”

But the strongest track pairing on More Rain? The tremendous ‘Confession’ – “There’s a place you can hide when they’re conspiring against you: confession” and its reassuring counterpoise, ‘I’m Listening’.

“Listening,” because on these tracks, for this half hour, the roles of artist and listener are switched. M. Ward is listening to you, not you him. The album doesn’t give, it takes. Resentment trickles away, so does anger. Even the odd ache of loneliness begins to fade. Which is the problem. Sadness and loneliness and ache are what M. Ward does best. He’s no Pretty Pimpin’ Kurt Vile. He’s got a sneer and a guitar, a piano and a raspy, melodic voice. His is music produced by Christianity, but not faith.

That long road we’ve been stumbling down all these years is not supposed to end with internal peace. M. Ward’s albums are best as reflections, and hence questionings, of happiness. More Rain almost seems as if it takes comfort as a given, as good.

The album has a few real gems. The wistful ones are best: ‘Girl From Conejo Valley’ is a beautiful rerecording of a decades-old blues hit (except the song is actually a new one). And ‘Slow Driving Man’ is a plain and honest – clean – tale of a loner just like us.

But the cover of The Beach Boys’ ‘You’re So Good to Me’ doesn’t have the happy beat of the original; and without that, c’est perdu. Nor does the contribution from Neko Case on ‘Time Won’t Wait Up’ – why use a singer with Neko Case’s moonbeam of a voice, then drown her out anyway? – resonate, its potential unforgivably wasted.

And although ‘Phenomenon’ and ‘Temptation’, where Buck lets loose with mandolin and guitar, are better, they are nonetheless emblematic of an album second half in which weariness wins its battle over introspection. They’re perfect, like M. Ward’s songs always are, just not that good.

Real rain doesn’t pitter patter, it cascades. Thunderstorms are the crush, not the kiss.

Don’t be deceived by its first track, More Rain is a drizzle, not a storm.