I meant to write this ages ago, back when I went to visit the exhibition, but life got in the way. It was a raw December day, I was tired and angsty from too much red wine the night before and had arranged to meet a friend in Islington in the afternoon, but as soon as I got the paper and saw that there was a new show of paintings by Mamma Andersson I knew I had to just get my act together, get on the train and fight my way through the crowds of Christmas shoppers around Oxford Circus to go to the Stephen Friedman gallery. I have the place to myself and it’s heaven in there, to feel the strain of my swollen hangover brain easing as the nurofen finally kicks in, and to know i have time to walk around slowly and write. When I went to the large show at the Camden Arts Centre last year I filled pages with feverish ramblings about how her paintings made me feel. My notes this time were a little more restrained, but no less infatuated. I might dig them out and see if there’s anything worth transcribing here – but for now, here’s this. Something else that leapt out at me from a Saturday paper – a poem by Kathleen Raine that I loved on first sight and though bits of it almost make me cringe, it still hits a note I like a lot – sums up a feeling I know well.
I believe nothing – what need
Surrounded as I am with marvels of what is,
This familiar room, books, shabby carpet on the floor,
Autumn yellow jasmine, chrysanthemums, my mother’s flower,
Earth-scent of memories, daily miracles,
Yet media-people ask, “Is there a God?”
What does the word mean
To the fish in his ocean, birds
In his skies, and stars?
I only know that when I turn in sleep
Into the invisible, it seems
I am upheld by love, and what seems is
Inexplicable here and now of joy and sorrow,
This inexhaustible, untidy world -
I would not have it otherwise.
· From The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine (Golgonoonza, £20)
My friend N came round for tea. It had that nice air of a spontaneous pop round (rare for us since he moved down south to Camberwell). He’d had to drop some equipment he’d borrowed from a friend back at his place in Homerton. Swinging by here to hang out for an hour or so before it was time to get ready for our respective Friday nights was easy.
When he arrived we immediately wished we had cake to go with our tea. It was all wild wind and dark outside and we debated going out in his car to find some, but Dalston’s not great for cake. There are whole shops full of baklava and it’s variants…but that wasn’t what we fancied. We wanted chocolate.
Nick spotted the ‘My learn to cook book’ on the kitchen table. That book is some kind of powerful Proustian madeleine for people with 70′s childhoods. Memories of making mess with mother flood back as the sticky pages fall open, releasing that special musky smell children’s hardback books seem to have…( Richard Scarry books have it too – something slightly rancid about it – comforting and addictive to sniff… Like the smell from poking around in your bellybutton, or on your finger after you’ve been digging for wax in your ears.)
Of course with that book and our sugar cravings, we had to make chocolate cornflake cakes. I told N to put on a record and he plumped for John Cale’s Paris 1912. The trees thrashed around outside in the dark and it felt good to be inside with warm music on, melting butter, mixing golden syrup, sugar and cocoa with it, stirring in cornflakes and putting big dollops of it into rinky dink little paper cases. We made tea and tried to wait for them to cool like you’re supposed to, but failed – ate 3 each and then felt sick but good and giddy from sugar rush.
here is the recipe (if only i could upload the smell of that book for you too) and some of the soundtrack to making it.
John Cale: Hanky Panky No How
Ok – I wrote this so long ago and didn’t post it. And then, the other day, on a strangely autumnal June day we were tired and blue and wanted something sweet to go with tea and watching a dvd (the wondrous ‘Mother Joan of the Angels’) and we made a batch. Finally I have visuals to go with this piece (I digitised the John Cale long ago but never got round to scanning everything else…here’s a still from Mother Joan too a photo of the carnage in the kitchen :
it’s was a grey day today and there was very little to be excited about, but cycling down a sidestreet in Dalston I saw this little house that always cheers me up.
That shade of blue is so unusual for London somehow – it looks a little like Mexico to me – the way the whole thing’s just been painted with coat after coat of thick blue gloss. I guess it was shop once, but now seems to be someone’s house. I like the font – number 48, and the mystery of what lies behind that mesh all over the downstairs window, but best of all is the model boat in the upstairs window.
can you see it? That, and the nautical colour scheme, make me imagine a captain haddock style character holed up in here. A retired skipper, back from the sea to live out his last days by the miniature playground just off Kingsland Road, near a tree that’s weighted down with elderflower blossom at this time of year and smells so sweet. A tiny tiny thing on a grey day that makes it better.
To go with it – a tiny song by Ivor Cutler (also a fan of small things that make you smile. My friend who runs the cafe in the Photographer’s Gallery said he used to go in there often and hand out stickers. He gave me one that said ‘find a full stop, and climb inside’. I stuck it on my wall by the bedside light (it was the size of a school uniform name tag, font size 10, no fancy design – just plain arial or something). It made me smile a little even after the most hideous day. This is a one minute long song he did for the lp ‘Miniatures’:
So I was looking for this particular 10″ by Barbara Morgenstern and found that the whole pile of this neglected, let’s face it, pretty obsolete format was full of some forgotten gems. I was always particularly pleased if a band I liked released something on 10″. It’s such a cute size – a 7″ is always the dinkiest little treat – however poor I’ve been I’d feel I could treat myself to a few 7″s… getting lps and 12″s is always more of an investment of course – in the amount of space they swallow up in my increasingly overstuffed tiny living space…but a 10″ seems just right. The artwork always seems to be pitched perfectly and look it’s best this size…
Anyway: Got busy digitising and scanning (thanks to the rabbit for showing me a much quicker way to join up the two scans super quickly in Photoshop) Here’s the first installment in a random trawl through the 10″ pile:
Yma Sumac: Virgin of the Sun God
You probably know Yma Sumac as the increasingly overused soundtrack to many an ad (I think that filthy Lynx cinema ad used her – the one with all the girls in bikinis running in slow motion / swimming through the sea, fighting with each other to get to some berk covered in stink on the beach). I first heard of her back in the early 90′s I think. S had gotten fascinated by this obscure underground label called Twisted Village. Most of their stuff was pretty unlistenable (although of course Julian Cope would disagree: http://www.headheritage.co.uk/unsung/review/710)
They had very intriguing, slightly scary covers, one of which, ‘Spirit of Yma’ by Vermonster had a girl slumped on the floor with her legs spread, her face covered up by pictures of this heavily made up, exotic lady…Yma Sumac. The back cover explained that there were rumours that Yma, far from being a Peruvian princess, worshipped by locals as a goddess as her record company would blurb on the covers and biogs released about her in the 50′s and 60′s was in fact a housewife from Brooklyn called Amy Camus. She happened to have this unearthly (8 octave range?) voice…was discovered by some canny record exec and was whisked away to record strange records, dressed up and marketed as an other worldly creature from the mysterious depths of South America.
Either way, I knew I had to hear her. She looked so great and this little mystery was delicious. This was, of course, before I could just google her to find out more. I simply had to wait. Luckily I worked in a second hand record shop at the time… Having little obsessions like this – things I was hunting for, for myself or friends or regulars – made the sometimes crushingly slow days go by with a little more zip. Maybe one of the punters struggling up to the desk with a box of records to sell would have that first Neu lp, an early Josef K single that I didn’t have…Yma….
In the end I found this 10″ in the most unlikely place. There was a tumbledown little second hand shop in Goldsmith’s Row then. Mostly house clearance crap. There was a very nice eggshell blue 50′s kitchen unit and a dog on wheels in the window (the only two things not for sale of course) and, sometimes, on sagging trestle tables outside the shop on fine days, boxes of mouldy old records from the attics of the recently deceased. I rarely bothered looking. I knew it’d all be Andy Williams and Straus Waltzes, Mrs.Mills’ Piano Party and Gilbert and Sullivan. But I was with DC, who would rifle through even the grubbiest poor old tramps’ stack on the peripheries of Brick Lane and we were pretty competitive about outdoing each other with our finds (he’d found some amazing things – Esquivel, Martin Denny – all that lounge exotica that was being exhumed and championed in hipster bars in LA then…or so we heard and read in Incredibly Strange Music.). So, I started flipping through the box of rotting old records and. There. She. Was. ! Yma Sumac – no picture, just this dusty grey blue cover: Hearing her was no disapointment. Like Diamanda Galas in a Hollywood movie from the 50′s- crazy swooping voice from an almost painful reedy high note to gravelly growling lows…and cocooned in this Les Baxter swoony orchestral backing…Pure nostalgia for an age I didn’t even live through. I went on to get lots more of her stuff. Full colour covers, normal sized LPs…but this first find and the high of hearing it the first time remains a thrill.
On a completely different tip, lurking in a plain white slip cover near Yma was this:
Evil Superstars: It’s a sad sad planet
I knew the song and loved it because me and AS used to watch Alternative Nation late on Tuesday nights on MTV (this was mid to late 90′s?) It was a favourite. The video had them doing a cute little dance to the chorus (like Ok Go before they were a twinkle in Youtube’s eyue) and – I think I still like this track a lot. I remembered it having something of the weary / cheery fatalism of Gilbert O’Sullivan’s classic tearjerker ‘Alone Again, Naturally’. We also thought it sounded like Ben Folds – that classic FM sound… I love the line ‘you’re a wrinkled mutant, before you get it…’. And now, more than ever, it’s true. It really is a sad, sad planet.
I’m uploading this to go with it instead, as there’s no cover. Isn’t it gorgeous? I found it in a flea market somewhere…Not in Denmark (I think it’s Danish? Please correct me if I’m wrong) …maybe in Berlin. I love the random-ness. A deer, a rabbit..elephant and monkey playing…erm..some mosquitos…and…a ghost! With a trumpet, of course! The record’s pretty unremarkable though – mainly spoken word stories for little-uns said in that sing-song-y voice that I’m sure even 2 years olds find patronising, but I’m uploading one of the more musical tracks from it just so you don’t have to take my word for it…and because, delightfully, this was written by one Viggo Bitch. (I know, it’s not funny at all in Denmark (or wherever)…but what a great name.). Here it is anyway. If you can understand it and fancy sending a translation please do!
Kom Her, Min Lille Kipkalv (from the 10″ ‘Noget for BØrn vol.2″
Back to the pile. I’d forgotten about this lot entirely. Thinking Fellers Union Local – there were lumped in with Pavement and Rodan and other clever, slightly dour American indie boys then. When I heard Giordini di Miro in Germany for the first time a few years ago, I couldn’t remember what it reminded me of…I said maybe Slint (and there is that, of course) but now I realised it also exhumed the memory of this angst ridden dirge (don’t get me wrong, I love a good dirge).
Thinking Fellers Union Local 282: Hurricane
Giordini di Miro: The Swimming Season
Also on in a melancholy mood, one of my favourite bits of forgotten 80′s pop. Souvenir by OMD. This wasn’t one of their big hits – Joan of Arc and Enola Gay were more grandiose, had more of a spring in their step, despite the weighty subject matter…and the vocals have something of a strident air – you can feel he’s trying to…emote… whereas here there’s something so neutral and restrained in the way the lyrics are delivered. It sounds like a typical Monday afternoon’s existential despair, sung like a shopping list…but surrounded by this luscious electronic ooze of layers and layers of shimmering minor chords. I always think of it when I hear Zoetrope by Boards of Canada. It has a similar feel. I’m sure someone out there will know that’s because they used the same keyboards. I don’t know about that. I just love how both tracks make me feel something like regret, but not the nasty vicious stabbing king – a kind of tenderness swells with the music. I’ll stop trying to describe it and just put the links in now:
When I first thought of doing this I had no idea what I’d call it. Then last weekend I was reading Janet Malcolm’s book about the biography industry that’s grown up around Sylvia Plath (The Silent Woman) and in amongst many of Janet’s typical gems of beautifully concise prose was this, about the correspondence between herself and Olwyn Hughes:
“..I never received a reply to this letter – or expected one – since I never sent it. After reading it over, I marked it “Letter not sent” and put it away in a folder.
The genre of the unsent letter might reward study. We have allcontributed to it, and the literary archives are full of specimens. In the Plath archive at the Lilly Library, for example, there are several of Aurelia Plath’s unsent letters to Hughes – letters in which she permitted herself to say what she finally decided she couldn’t permit herself to say. But she carefully preserved the letters, and included them in the material she turned over to the archive. The preservation of the unsent letter is its arresting feature. Neither the writing nor the not sending is remarkable (we often make drafts of letters and discard them), but the gesture of keeping the message we have no intention of sending is. By saving the letter, we are in some sense “sending” it after all. We are not relinquishing our idea or dismissing it as foolish or unworthy (as we do when we tear up a letter); on the contrary, we are giving it an extra vote of confidence. We are, in effect, saying that our idea is too precious to be entrusted to the gaze of the actual addressee, who may not grasp its worth, so we “send” it to his equivalent in fantasy, on whom we can absolutely count for an understanding and appreciative reading. “
I read most of the book on a train – between London and Windermere. Reading the book and seeing ‘Control’ at the cinema in Ambleside village seemed to jolt my thoughts out of the morbid turn they’d taken as autumn’s darkness seemed to swallow up London…that and the long walk all the way up and then down a hill, eating blackberries from the hedgerows, drinking whisky from the bottle…I was tired but happy to be back in London and to go straight to a party nearby. Immediately met this girl that’s just started going out with a our friend N. She’s very pretty and at ease with it. Bright and sharp as a new pin. Coincidentally, when we were telling each other the stories of our year, she mentioned that she’d written a lot of letters she hadn’t sent. She has them still and thinks she’ll probably keep them. I told her about this book I’d been reading.
Sometimes you have to write and keep it, whether it’s for anyone to read or not. So it seemed as good a name as any to give this…outlet. It’s just stuff I have to write for no other reason than it feels better out than in.
The other thing I’m going to do here is share my record collection and some other things I come across that I think are interesting.
So, at the top there’s this picture by Mama Andersson. I went to see an exhibition of her paintings at the Camden Arts Centre last week. I’d been consumed with anxiety all day – being out of work and in that state where you have to get away from your computer or you’ll check your emails literally every 2 minutes, like an insane budgie, pecking at the feed button in its cage despite it clearly being empty and unlikely to be refilled.
I got on the Silverlink train and 20 minutes later stepped out into the late afternoon’s deep golden light and knew I’d done the right thing. The exhibition had the most powerful effect on me – making me write a flurry of messy scribble about what it seemed to evoke. I might see if I can read any of my terrible handwriting in that notebook and if any of it’s worth putting in here – but to summarise, there was a world of women in her pictures – inscrutable, often absorbed in their own activities, turned away from us – apart from this one example reproduced here where they’re all turned to look at us: this picture makes me think of being at college – the intense friendships you share with fellow female students or flatmates before you all pair off and live with men and eventually, maybe have babies. In the show at Camden Arts Centre there was a painting next to it called ‘Leftovers’ I think, showing various girls spread around a flat – one in the shower, one dressing…a couple in the kitchen…a few still asleep on the floor under duvets or blankets. It looked like the aftermath of a party. There were also a lot of sombre landscapes – grey skie-d, with leaf-less trees… One was called something gorgeous like ‘Where my dreams live’. And suddenly I couldn’t get these two tracks by Barbara Morgenstern out of my head. I guess, partially because the cover of the 10″ I was thinkingt of has a similarly overcast landscape on it. But also the music is deliciously stark and glum in a comforting way. It feels like the perfect soundtrack for the kind of slate grey day we’ve had a string of here lately. That kind of winter loneliness which is almost pleasurable – you know it will pass.
I had to dig through the most neglected part of my record collection to find it -the 10″s…all on their own at the end of the 7″ section, gathering dust. Digging out that pile I found it was a treasure trove. I’m going to upload a bunch more mp3s culled from a random selection of 10″s, but first, Barbara Morgenstern’s lovely instrumentals:
Fjorden
Eine Verabredung
Here’s the cover. Nothing like Mama Andersson’s landscapes in execution really…but the same sort of atmosphere of desolate beauty. And funnily enough, though, I know Fjords are Norwegian, and Mama’s Swedish.. it does seem like the Scandinavian thing was chiming somewhere when I thought of this music while looking at those pictures, as one of the instrumentals is called Fjorden. I could go on and on about how Scandinavia seems to have some kind of hold on my imagination at the moment (don’t get me started on Tove Jansson and open sandwiches) but that’s for another day. More 10″s soon…
