Black Flame

And when he heard and when he heard and I said yes. Mistakes steaming ahead and writhing in the sticky mud, I pushed it down and held you back up but did you hear it? The friction was the distance. It cradled the answers and advanced my hatred like a black flame that feeds on whatever it touches, it fattens and vomits and malfunctions and grows and spits and argues till no no no. It rolls away and magnifies and in the end I don’t know what I have.

The space was the killer. At least for you. Down with back to the side from the up past and it goes like GO behind you to I. You to I. From one end to the other and it keeps back again, water lily on the summer surface and I don’t know where I’m streaming will you help? Twisting round but the eyes are appearing and always, read, hurting me because I feel like I can see to the other end. Why can’t you throw yourself in? Is my gaze so repugnant to you, do you hurt because I remind you of the shame you buried when you sacrificed your mind?

Bubbling thrusting up violently the tip shards the skin and the rest will follow. Out far out so inconceivably out don’t pretend you don’t want it there. Don’t pretend here, the consequences are too dire and the pained answers you give will be held against you in the scorching craters of hell that is your smile.

I know what you’re thinking. 

234

Do you know what I felt on those jerky train rides? I stepped on the platform, my boots echoing on the dirty floor and my coat buttoned tightly. The fluorescent pink bag packed with artful inexperience, my clothes almost pushed out because I wanted strangers to see what I was carrying. The strangers mattered most of all, they mattered more than you or I ever realised. They counted the minutes, whispered when I wasn’t looking and ransacked my luggage. They provided the music. They told me when to stop, when to stride ahead though my desire was to go backwards; my words were fed through a funnel that I was desperate to imbibe because the illusions were sweet and acted like glue.

I picked up the closest crayon and coloured you in. Every brief glimpse of tangled hair, the hesitant smile and the ribbon around the wrist, all infused with a pulsating nostalgia that left you in its shadow as it assaulted every vacant opportunity. You drowned and it was my hand that held you under.

And I wanted to tell you which one was worse, but the truth is I wasn’t sure. She sat in the corner of the room with her back lining up against the wall, the sunlight coming through in a little patch that couldn’t reach her eyelids. I felt like there was a dagger somewhere thrust up, and my entrails were spilling out in a muddled heap on the floor staining the mahogany a sombre red. Amongst the blood and hope I tried to pick out all the things that were truly mine. I wanted to show it to you.

I wanted to give it all to you, shaped as it had been in my hand that sculpted it. I compressed it all, squeezed it down and forced it, I pushed my fingers in till the rubber released out through the gaps and I bit down, knowing my teeth could never pierce through without destroying what I had created. I made it all and I blamed you. I decorated it with trinkets and pendants, I threw in sand for good measure and I daubed it with my heart. I spread it all out and I perforated it, I let you handle something that loosened all over your hands. There it was, in a film that wouldn’t keep its hold as it ran faster and faster away from itself. It said yes then turned around and pushed you hard in the neck, it told you it was ok before crouching beneath you, sliding between your legs and slamming its elbow in the back of your knees. It told you go and keep going, but every second it was hurling itself against its jelly-like walls screaming at you, tearing its lungs apart screaming at you because nobody knew what was happening. The insides were straining and the outsides were pushing back in, it was all morphing and crashing and I didn’t know how to put it all. So I just said yes. Or nothing at all, they amounted to the same thing, didn’t they?

Of course neither of us was to blame. There’s a two faced with a three, but somehow we managed to make it equal four. And what’s so bad about that? When I stick my hands into the water I don’t know what I’m going to get. I’m no liar, but I’ll hold you to account. I will make you crawl through every detail, I’ll force you to relive and I’ll watch you tense. Rip you open, splinter by little splinter, and we’ll see who’s left on the lawn when the sun comes out. I’ll get you a gun and with my own face you. Twenty paces from each other I’ll align my eyes with yours, measure your shadow against mine and fire before the weight drags me down. The smile will handle the trigger.

And you and I know that is the only way. With fire I will combat more, and if you told me no I’d just pour more petrol till the flame hits the skyline and bursts back in on itself. Like a black flame that feeds on whatever it touches, it fattens and vomits and malfunctions and grows and spits and argues till no no no. It rolls away and magnifies and in the end I don’t know what I have.

None of it was mine. It was all stolen, forced and borrowed. The red, the black, the shirt, they’re all landmarks I use to remind me of a time that never existed. You told me yes they did. You soothed my cut and you enveloped my cheeks with your hands, you handed me water and warmed me. But through everything, through the knuckles and sandy backs, the sustenance, the music, the morning sun, you told me the wrong time. Printed in black as it stared out at me from the palm of my hand, I understood what had been stamped long before I came on the scene. Like waking up in the soft, constructed haven, I heard the relentless traffic noises stream through a cavity in the well-positioned window. A fishing rod was poked through the hole, nudging me in the hip and reminding me of the wet concrete and the sharp breeze that awaited my return. But you see what the trouble is, don’t you? I saw it so much faster than you did. I saw it so quickly I didn’t even register what had happened, it flitted past my consciousness but left its imprint to be revisited at leisure on the dankness of my wooden floor some time later. It passed me the answers and left back the way it came, but that was enough. That was the reason for my desperate plastering, for my entreaties and countless silences: I knew it had finished before it began.

Remember the things I’ve said when things get difficult. But best of all when they’re easy. Know that the great machine was set in motion in a way totally unconnected. I had no part in this; no part in me and no part in you. Like a rain daisy looking up and forever rooted to its position, dependent on the clemency of the heavens and praying that another doesn’t grow bigger and crumple its light. But  you never stretched far enough to see that when this flower dies, it spreads. 

I want you to sit in a corner

I want you to sit in a corner and think for a little bit. Tie your hands up and block the holes, admit no-one and act dead if you have to. Just because the mouth is silent doesn’t mean the thoughts are, but I never believed you to be stupid enough to think otherwise. Unless of course, you are, in which case stop reading because I’m not sure how much you’ll get out of it. Or if you’re a little bit sadistic then please carry on, it’s nice to be reminded where we fit every now and again. Actually what am I saying, do what you feel like. I don’t know who you are and I don’t know what I’m writing, but maybe you like that, yes? Capriciousness only hurts those who like their angles fixed.

He sat me down on the bed and asked me which I preferred out of lofty suffering and easy happiness.  I said I didn’t know what the difference was. He told me yes I did, or I wouldn’t have put the question to him. Stop playing with me, I said. You think you’re clever but you’re just capitalising on a smoky film, I know your game, I’ve had it tried on me enough times and that filth doesn’t wash. The dirt would be sufficiently thick to bury me in. And he slapped me round the face and poured shot glasses of water into my mouth, and told me that stains come out.

Did you know that? Head bent over the toilet, vomiting all the foulness that’s been poisoning my bloodstream since I took the first bite. All the bilious yellow gunk, all the insults, all the dog hairs and all the lies, all the pretty little kisses and the awkward barriers, all avalanching out whilst you hold back my hair and do all the things you should have done whilst the rice was still warm and the water was draining.

But, of course, there’s a time and place for it all. The hands don’t work out like they used to and the cycle is malfunctioning. But that’s a good thing, if we’re going to get all sentimental about it. It means there’s a little tadpole swimming around under the surface, tickled by the spring sun as it fights its way across something it doesn’t even know it’s in.

There’s a glow softening the wings, but it can only go so far before needing to refuel to reach further the next time. Each step is a better escape from the chain of no’s and suppressed anxieties, from the guessworks and the eardrums that were open to bursting.  Each one is an underformed yes in a jelly that releases its hold when the legs kick and the mouth bites, when the eyes are open wide enough and the thread is cut. When I stamp the envelope and send it with the pieces enclosed.

And you were right after all when you said I knew what the answer was. It turns out that one hurts and the other one doesn’t.

The dude with the awesome beard, right?

The very same.  Facial hair based achievements aside, the Irish playwright and literary critic wrote for 65 years, and became a titan of literary, public and political life along the way.

So what’s he most famous for?

He was a dedicated Socialist, and founding member of the both the Fabian Society and the Labour Party. Of more general interest, he never once slept with his wife in their entire 45 year marriage, but was still very keen on other men’s wives.

And the plays?

Were mostly just extensions of his political ideas.  They were about class divisions, villainous landlords and the failure of government, all presented in a darkly comic way that made them a hit with London audiences.Sounds like a real radical.Exactly    He  opposed  the  First  World War, and helped to found the New Statesmen and the London School of Economics.  On the other hand, he believed eugenics should be used to create a race of superhumans that would one day rule the world.  But his plays were very funny, so we normally just turn a blind eye to that.

Wow.  Were his plays that good?

He was (until Al Gore) the only person to win both a Nobel Prize and an Oscar.  He became extremely wealthy, and subsequently left a portion of his estate to the invention of a new phonetic alphabet, known today as Shavian.

Catch  your interest?  Be ‘Shaw’ to see these:  Pygmalion, Heartbreak House, Man and Superman, Major Barbara

The rise, reign and fall of the Nazi party is, and always will be, fertile ground for theatre that aims to leave a lasting impression on its audience, and Killing Hitler is a worthy addition to this genre.  It tells the story of the July plot to assassinate Hitler (a plot familiar to film goers from Valkyrie), but from the perspective of Adam von Trott (Chris Williams), an Oxford alumnus with and equal love for the German nation and Oxford’s dreaming spires.

Williams’ first scene left me somewhat doubting his performance as the central character; I expected von Trott to be a charismatic force of nature, driving the whole production forward.  I came to realise however that that is not the case; Williams’ von Trott is the mild mannered, principled, gentlemanly Oxford scholar.  He is an honourable aristocrat, hopelessly outgunned by the modern world – the scene where, awaiting arrest, he tries to dictate a letter to The Times as a parting shot captures perfectly the noble futility of his character,

It is in such scenes that the wealth of thought and research put into the script shines through. Watching Clarita von Trott (Hannah Gliksten) read her husband’s final letter (gifted to the production by the von Trott family) is genuinely heartbreaking.  Not every scene reaches these heights, however.  Not content with the fascinating story they are  dramatising, the cast have pumped some scenes full of entirely unnecessary melodrama: Bishop Bell ‘s(Miles Lawrence) argument with Anthony Eden (Frederick Bowerman, a striking resemblance to the man himself) is nothing more than a display of blustering gestures, table banging, and exasperated gasps. 

Similarly, the interaction between an Oxford tutor and von Trott contains no quiet understatement, no unsaid feelings; just frustrated shouting. These scenes all share the characteristic of being ones of exposition, simply explaining the politics and rationale of appeasement: as such, the speeches made tend to read like GCSE history essays, perhaps explaining why such an exaggerated attempt has been made to enliven them.

They should, however, be helped greatly by the innovative staging planned by Lucie Dawkins – set in the Keble O’Reilly, the staging will consist of a series of rooms, each representing a different timeand place in the life of Adam von Trott, enveloped by the audience for what promises to be a hugely intimate performance.  Such a staging will hopefully lift the poorer scenes that I saw from being dire to, at very least, mediocre.

Nevertheless, a few poor performances should not spoil what otherwise looks to be a spectacular production.  When it is good, Killing Hitler is  unbelievably  good.    At its best, this play will elicit genuine emotion, as every scene builds on the last to create a sublime, moving, emotional portrait of an extraordinary man’s life.   And a little unwanted melodrama won’t spoil that.   

FOUR STARS

The first CD I ever bought was the soundtrack to Titanic. I bought all three Lord of the Rings soundtracks, and I will argue for hours with anyone who doesn’t agree that Nicholas Hooper didn’t produce the best Harry Potter score. And when I heard that Dario Marianelli was coming to Oxford, I took out my dancing shoes and skipped down to the Holywell Music Room. Marianelli – in case you’ve been living under a rock for the last seven years, or tend not to wait in the cinema after the film until the score credits come on – is the composer of period film. He wrote the score for I Capture the Castle (2001), achieved major recognition with Pride & Prejudice (2005), won an Oscar with Atonement (2007), and continued with Jane Eyre (2011). He’s been astoundingly prolific, finishing up to six projects in an eight month period, and scoring popular films like Eat Pray Love and the currently showing Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.  

His scores are lush, lyrical, neo-Romantic, and poignant. Marianelli takes a narrow and even repetitive melodic sequence and extends it symphonically. Pride & Prejudice is a matutinal, contemplative, arpeggiated piano-driven score. In contrast, the Atonement score arrests attention immediately with the percussive use of a typewriter in the opening sequence, immediately setting off a revolving rhythmic sequence which Marianelli likened to the ‘mechanical, but a bit deranged’ mind of Briony Tallis, the central character. Jack Liebeck’s violin in Jane Eyre is suitably expansive and desperately interior. This is music to have nestled in your ear, or played generously on massive speakers.

Marianelli appeared at the Holywell Music Room in conversation with Michael White, the Telegraph music critic, attended by Jack Liebeck, the young concert violinist who played on the Jane Eyre soundtrack. Despite his intuitive and very feeling scores, Marianelli betrayed little sentiment when describing how he was chosen to score a film. Atonement and Pride & Prejudice attracted attention and he’s subsequently been branded as a period composer – ‘That’s what they offer to me’, he said. Composing for film is a tricky business: most directors hand composers the finished product and expect a score as icing on the cake. Marianelli’s partnership with Joe Wright, director of Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, and the upcoming Anna Karenina (also, lamentably, starring Keira Knightly), has offered him something more generous, the opportunity to be in contact with the developing film, to start in advance, and to work alongside the director. 

White played several clips which featured key moments of Marianelli’s score. The first was the scene in Pride & Prejudice when Knightley stands on the edge of the cliff in the Peak district and Jean Thibaudeaut’s rendition of Marianellis’ score cascades all around, counterpointed by homophonous strings. Marianelli admitted he’d attempted the music several times before he got it right. It was like ‘a very big bird’ which runs fast and has to take off. 

White prodded Marianelli several times about the disparity between composing for film and composing for the concert hall. He asked if Marianelli felt a distinct lack of status, if he always envisioned making a transition, if there was something less glamorous about the commercial aspect of film-composing. Marianelli didn’t take the bait. Film composition ‘is not a sub-brand,’ Marianelli argued, ‘Music I write is used.’ Later, as the question continued to come up, Marianelli said, ‘Don’t think I’m diminished as a composer because there are people who need music to do certain things.’  He aptly compared his writing for film – a job which is recompensed by money and which might not be considered ‘pure art’ – to Bach’s composition of cantatas for the weekly Sunday mass, a job which required deadlines and an immediate sense of being set aside for the next week. ‘It’s not for the composer to judge its staying power,’ he said.

It was very clear that White felt that such a hierarchy existed and Marianelli did not. Instead of viewing the film composer’s role as subservient to the director’s vision – liable to the sword of Damocles which the producers and financiers of films hold – Marianelli sees the composer’s role as a part of the narrative or as a character in the film itself. Like opera, film scores tell stories, enlighten, engage, and move, said Marianelli. His ambition is to write music which has ‘integrity and a life’ which can ‘stand on its own’. 

Contrary to what you might think,  young, insecure directors cling very tightly to their power and would have written the music themselves if they could. Mature directors, said Marianelli, are more relaxed. Should the director exercise his brutal editing power, Marianelli is satisfied by still getting an album, which he conceptualizes as ideally offering a narrative experience analogous to watching the film.

I met Marianelli after the conversation with White, wearied from his talk and from the queue of impassioned American fans who stayed behind to have him sign their piano scores. When I asked Marianelli about the life habits of a composer, he admitted to drinking lots of coffee. ‘I’m very messy,’ he said, ‘I go a bit to the piano or the computer, watch the movie millions of times, and then the main habit is just to sit on that chair and work until something comes out and not let go. When I find something I hold onto it like a dog with a bone and try to make something out of it.’ When he’s actively composing, Marianelli finds music ‘almost unbearable. Going out for a meal is excruciating, because there’s music in the restaurant, and I can’t eat.’ 

It struck me that Marianelli’s interpretation of the period of the film he works with is very intuitive. When I asked whether he thinks periods have particular ‘sounds’, he admitted there’s an ‘English sound’ but said he was unable to elaborate much further, as it would merit a ‘very long conversation about the surface sound of the style and of the place’.  

Marianelli is currently deeply  into composition of the score for Anna Karenina, and I wondered if his composition found any distinct roots in Russian music. Marianelli said that he found Russian folk music important, ‘Especially the kind of folk music that started the five (Mily Balakirev, Cesar Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Borodin). Especially Balakirev. At some point he went off in the 1860s and went collecting folk music. He had this clear idea that he wanted a national Russian music based on folk tunes. And they’re very interesting, they have certain preferred intervals and idiomatic tone of phrases. I tried to listen as much as I could to them, more than the music of Mussorsky or Rimsky-Korsakov or even Tchaikovsky. I was more interested in what inspired them to come up with the Russian music that they invented, because Russian national classical music is a bit of an invention.’ 

Marianelli’s association with period films made me wonder if he responded to the novels upon which the films were based. ‘Yes and no,’ said Marianelli. ‘I did on Atonement because I started to work before the script was finished. Some ideas come from the novel, from knowing the characters better than I could have known if it was just a script. Sometimes it’s a hindrance to know too much because the film condenses or concentrates certain elements of the story.’

Marianelli divulged the fact that there’s a lot of liberty in Wright’s version of Anna Karenina because of a central conceit of an opera theatre.  ‘Most of the story happens within the theatre almost as if it were an opera itself,’ said Marianelli, ‘The whole story is almost like it were an opera or puppet show. So the music goes in very strange places sometimes.’

Before the end of their conversation, White played a clip of the scene of the evacuation of Dunkirk from Atonement, in which the riotous carnival and destructive mayhem of the beach is movingly contradicted by a slow cello and a building elegiac counterpoint which slowly grows towards a climax, in which soldiers on the beach resolutely sing a Hubert Parry hymn, then eases away. Marianelli doesn’t watch the screen, but looks at his feet. There is a taut attitude of concentration in his posture, as though he is feeling the music, as Wordsworth writes, ‘moving through the heart and along the blood’. When White asks Marianelli why he chose that particular realisation, Marianelli answers with feeling, ‘What music do you expect? It is a great pity…we feel a compassion for the loss and waste. It is not the hellish but the heavenly part which is missing.’ 

It is this ability to underscore or to contradict the visual dimension of the film, commenting on the narrative in a way which immerses the viewer in the experience, which will ensure Marianelli’s prominent place in film composition for years to come. 

There’s been a lot of good stuff coming out of the US recently as the new guard of rap and hip hop artists have really begun picking up both steam and mainstream attention.  These new artists come from a range of hard to define genres from ‘cloud rap’ to ‘swag-hop’, hence the title that sounds like a BBC4 documentary or the title of Newsnight segment.  Although a Newsnight segment isn’t exactly beyond the realms of belief (I would advise anyone who hasn’t seen Odd Future’s appearance on the show to head to youtube A$AP).

Oldie is a song by the group Odd Future, and works as one of the best showcases of theircollective talent that they’ve released so far.  Anyone with even a cursory interest in the genre will have heard of them, but the song demonstrates their different styles and even features a verse from Earl, who’s finally been freed from Samoa, and Frank Ocean forsaking his usual croon for a more aggressive rap, behind a beat that repeats through the song’s ten minutes. 

Schoolboy Q, A$AP Rocky, SpaceGhostPurrp and Main Attrakionz are all derivatives of the ‘chopped and screwed’ style of rap which sees slowed down vocals mixed with woozy beats.  There’s a lot of overlap between these artists, A$AP Rocky guests with Schoolboy Q and Theophilus London, on his rework of the classic ‘Big Spender’, while SpaceGhostPurrp has produced and guested on a number of A$AP Rocky’s songs.  These songs have roots in the work of DJ Screw, who pioneered the screw music genre by slowing records and adding smooth cuts and slurred vocals to the mixes, before dying from an overdose of codeine caused from drinking cough syrup, a drug that is closely intertwined with the genre and the origin of the numerous references to ‘purple’, after the purple liquid.

Closer to the style of Odd Future, although his flow is a lot faster and possibly even more aggressive, is Joey Bada$$, who at only 17 has already released his first few tracks and has a mixtape, 1999, arriving imminently.  A final inclusion is Mac Miller, who is relatively established with a Billboard Number One album under his belt, but this cut comes from his earlier mixtape K.I.D.S. which I personally think is much better than his album, which ditched a lot of what made him distinctive.  The sun drenched video and the vibes from this song mean that, if the sun ever does come out, this song is a perfect soundtrack to a lazy afternoon in the park.

Tracklist: Oldie – Odd Future

Hands on the Wheel (feat. A$AP Rocky) – Schoolboy Q

Peso – A$AP Rocky

Survival Tactics – Joey BADA$$

No Evidence – SpaceGhostPurrp

Legion of Doom – Main Attrakionz

Big Spender (feat. A$AP Rocky) – Theophilus London

Kool Aid & Frozen Pizza – Mac Miller

Click here for the accompanying 8tracks playlist.