Emotional Trapdoors


My friend Paul once said to me that if you know enough about a subject you can relate it back to absolutely anything. He’d been talking about Mike Patton too much, you see, and I’d told him so.

Have you ever heard about the conversation between Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius? Two big, pioneering composers of the 20th century. They disagreed about what a symphony should be. Sibelius said a symphony should be about one distilled thing - purified and whittled. Mahler said it should be about everything - your whole life. Don’t tuck your trousers into your socks, so to speak. But if you’re on a bike you’ll need to tuck your socks in, or they’ll get caught in the gears. Didn’t think of that, did you Gustav?

My brother said he was going to be in Paris in a month to sell little books and zines, and maybe I could flog something there. I thought OH I’LL WRITE TWELVE ESSAYS, that will be fun, thanks Michael! Then I thought: No. I haven’t got time. I’ll just do one. Which one? Prince, I thought. He pops into my head just about every day. Good. That’s settled. I’ll write an essay called ‘every thought I’ve ever had about Prince’. It will be funny and wide-ranging. Oh - but what about DH Lawrence? I prefer thinking about him. And two essays would be fairly easy to do. And they might make a nice contrast. Or comparison. Actually, they would make an ideal pairing, I’ll just do one combined essay! These were my thoughts.

But then Chantal Akerman and Axl Rose bubbled to mind. A more fascinating pair you couldn’t hope to find. But wait: will I be saying the same things in all four of these little essays? I think I will be. Perhaps the interesting thing about these odd couplings is the fact that I’ve noticed the same, particular thing in all of their work. That’s not normal, surely? What have those four got in common?

This all reminds me of the time I tried to film a dangling spider with my phone. The spider was about three inches from a white wall, and as I filmed it the flash on my phone cast a shadow of the spider - just to one side of it. As I moved the phone above and around, the shadow moved too - obviously. A very odd sight of an elongating, warping shadow moving in relation to the position of my phone. This will make a cracking little film, I thought. I’ll pop it online and be the king of Instagram for an hour. But when I looked at the film on my phone- TO MY HORROR there was no such variation! The shadow did not move. Not one jot. Not left. Not right. Not bigger. Not smaller. No zigzagging. This absolutely perplexed me. Frightened me, you might say.

Then it dawned on me: because the angle of the flash wasn’t moving in relation to the angle of the camera lens, the shadow of the spider ACCORDING TO THE PHONE doesn’t move. No matter what crazy stunts I might pull. As far as the camera lens is concerned, the spider is only ever lit from the left of itself, since the lens and the flash are built into the phone.

Maybe this is why I see the same thing in Prince, DH Lawrence, Chantal Ackerman, and Guns n’ Roses. I am my own combined light source and lens - doomed to witness everything from one fixed perspective. No matter how many other viewpoints I might learn or acknowledge. You can’t detach your own shadow by merely jigging about.


•Prince: If I Was Your Girlfriend•

There was always something weird about this song. Not because of the fact that ‘girlfriend’ has a different connotation to an American audience than to an English one - it’s obvious straight away what he means in that sense. He is addressing a female lover. He means “Imagine if I was a girl. Would that mean that we could we be closer as friends than we are now as lovers?”

It’s an amazing idea, I think. Totally original in a song, as far as I know. It sort of comes up in the screwball comedy film Some Like It Hot, where a gender swap makes an unlikely friendship between members of the opposite sex possible. But it’s not a screwball comedy song, it’s deadly serious.

The thing that always got on my nerves about that song was that Prince completely destroys his own point at the end of it. His point seems to be that eliminating the chance of a sexual relationship could allow a couple to be closer than lovers. They could develop a deeper sense of trust and a more playful intimacy.

"If I was your girlfriend
Would you let me take care of you
And do all the things
That only a best friend can?

Would you let me dress you?
I mean, help you pick out your clothes
Before we go out
Not that you're helpless..."

He practically, in his doting deference, apologises for implying that his partner can’t dress herself. Taking care of somebody, cooking, cleaning, going to the pictures - these are all day-to-day things, nothing exotic or bizarre. Just tender, commonplace and real.

"Would you let me wash your hair?
Could I make you breakfast sometime?
Could we just hang out, I mean,
Go to a movie and cry together?"

Obviously he wants a more profound connection, something that goes further than lust, sex or even physical attraction. There is no lavishing of praise on the woman’s looks, or any conventional flattery. Washing somebody’s hair (if you’ve ever had yours done at the hairdresser by a complete stranger) can be one of the most tantalising, intimate experiences possible. But this image of ritual hair-washing doesn’t get any ruder than that - his next thought is of making breakfast. What a gent! It’s all about respect with this guy.

But no! What does he come out with next?

"For you naked I would dance a ballet
Would that get you off?
Then tell me what will..."

Funny, where’s this come from? Oh, and there’s more!

"Would you let me kiss you there
You know down there where it counts
I'll do it so good I swear I'll drink every ounce..."

And he’s ruined it. He started with the best intentions, the holiest ambition, but he has frothed off in a completely different direction. He’s chucked all the subtlety out of the tinted sunroof. Now it’s just another dirty song, complete with a list of sexual fantasies.

For a minute we had something that reached way beyond convention: imagining oneself as another being, in order to escape the prison of gender roles that prevent us from loving and being loved wholly. There’s a thought worth having. Did Schubert ever compose music to a Goethe poem with a more interesting concept? No, he didn’t.

As it appears on any Greatest Hits collections 'If I Was Your Girlfriend' fades out before the song takes its sexual turn. The edited version may retain its dignity but this is Prince we’re talking about: dignity is never a priority.

The song doesn’t annoy me anymore: I love its contradictions. Chaste adoration and boasting about performing oral sex were all part of the same thing for Prince. He couldn’t help himself, and nor should he have. So what if he misunderstands his own point? He still made it in the first place.


•DH Lawrence: Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine•

This is a dull statement, but: there are many facets to DH Lawrence’s writing (Zzzzzz.) He noted this himself in a heated rejection of Benjamin Franklin’s famous list of ‘virtues’(which were Temperance, Silence, Order, Frugality, Industry, Moderation, Cleanliness, Chastity, Humility ETC). Lawrence wrote “The soul of a man is a vast forest, and all Franklin intended was a neat back garden.” Sick burn.

If you are willing to put your true, unweeded self in full view of the public, you risk having your least pleasant offshoots eyeballed in perpetuity. Most people at least attempt to prune their tantrums and irrationalities. Not Lawrence. He douses his weeds in Miracle-Gro. He often changed his persona according to the form he was working in, so the essays, poems, novels, reviews and letters can all show him differently. But it’s all him.

He can be:
cosmic + earthbound
Christian + polytheistic
sexist + feminist
funny + boring
prejudiced + egalitarian
sexy + prudish

He is always evangelistic, and often scolds with the wagging finger of a puritan. He knew he contradicted himself.

“But Lawrence”, said his wife Frieda, “last week you said exactly the opposite of what you are saying now.”

“And why shouldn’t I? Last week I felt like that, now like this. Why shouldn’t I?”

He fertilises his fullest forest in the essays and letters, I reckon. More than in the novels, definitely. One essay in particular encompasses more of Lawrence than any other.

The essay looks like this, if you strip it down:

Lawrence spots a huge porcupine waddling in the moonlight on his ranch in Taos, New Mexico. Despite local tradition, Lawrence decides not to kill it. The next day Susan (Lawrence’s favourite cow) was hiding because a dog with a strange beard had appeared, looking lost. The ‘beard’ is made of porcupine quills, sticking out of the dog’s bloodied muzzle. Lawrence tries to pull them out, but after two hours he has to stop because the dog is in too much pain. The dog won’t let him get the small ones out that are embedded deepest. Lawrence tries to shoo the dog away with a stick, but accidentally hits it right on the snout. Off it goes, whimpering back to wherever it came from.

Later Lawrence comes across the porcupine again. Frieda tells him to shoot it. He dutifully gets a rifle. The gun won’t fire at first but he ends up killing and burying it. He reflects on how much of a creature, any creature, is made up of intestines which are merely apparatus for living on other organisms. Then he talks about his cat, Timsy - how she plays with chipmunks and brings them into the sitting-room for ‘gladiatorial displays’. He talks about Timsy springing out of nowhere to attack his big toe under the bedclothes in the mornings. I love it when Lawrence talks about his cat. This leads him to a grand theory about the Hierarchy of Beings. Timsy the cat is above an ant, for example, which is above a pine tree. I grin at the silliness of it all, but I don’t exactly deny it.

"Life is more vivid in a snake than in a butterfly.
Life is more vivid in a wren than in an alligator.
Life is more vivid in a cat than in an ostrich..."

I’m really not sure about the ostrich one, but I’m just enjoying myself until:

"Life is more vivid in the Mexican who drives the wagon, than in the two horses in the wagon.

Life is more vivid in me, than in the Mexican who drives the wagon for me."

The wheel of his logic has hit a stone in the road and he careens onto a weird path. Oh shit. He lays out his logic again:

"The snake can devour the fiercest insect.
The fierce bird can destroy the greatest reptile.
The great cat can destroy the greatest bird.
The man can destroy the horse, or any animal.
One race of man can subjugate and rule another race..."

“One race of man can subjugate and rule another race.” !?

I mean, looking at the horrors of history, he’s right. They can and they do. But he never makes the point that they shouldn’t. That failure is a pity. He simply claims that he is somehow ‘higher’ than Mexicans. Perhaps he only meant one particular Mexican. He doesn’t clear it up, and I can’t give him the benefit of the doubt. It’s tempting to defend your favourites with invented intentions. He claims a natural hierarchy among the human race, as in the food chain among different species of animal. Christmas drunken logic.

After this worrying turn, he goes on to discuss the fourth dimension. He then discusses Plato. He then discusses The Holy Ghost. He then goes full-pelt into fuck-knows-where:

"Dance harder! Oh, wrestle you two, like wonderful wrestlers, neither of which can win. So sun-in-the-seed and the death returner, who is earthy, dance faster and the leaves rising greener begin to dance in a ring above ground, fiercely overwhelming any outsider, in a whirl of swords and lions’ teeth."

High on the fumes of his own fulmination. There is no stopping him.

"The earthy one wrestles the sun-in-the-seed, so the long roots reach down like arms of a fighter gripping the power of earth, and strangles all intruders. Till the two fall in one strange embrace, and from the centre the long flower stem lifts like a phallus, budded with a bud. And out of the bud the Holy Ghost is heard crying."

Quite mad, in the old sense. But what has that got to do with a massive porcupine in the moonlight? Or with Timsy the cat? He closes the bizarre essay with a characteristically brilliant tirade against money and never bothers to go back and tie up all the loose ends like everyone else does.


•Chantal Akerman: Je, Tu, Il, Elle (English: "I, You, He, She")•

I saw this film years ago and loved it. It starts with the typically frustrating Art House refusal to do anything at what you might call ‘entertainment speed’. Slowness is a virtue here, so you have to join in. Chantal films herself (I knew she was the director and actor, somehow) in a room eating caster sugar and narrates her own thought processes. After the first five minutes you think maybe this is it? Surely this can’t be it for another hour and a half? Twenty-five minutes later nothing much has happened. She’s been clothed, she’s been naked, we’ve seen her at night and during the day. We just watch her. I admire her bloody-mindedness and wish I could be so stubborn, as an artist. The film is casually beautiful, too.

Then she’s suddenly off! She grabs her coat! Leaves the house and goes hitch hiking. Praise be. But it’s not ‘fun’ hitch hiking on a sunny day by a dirt track in the countryside. She’s on a motorway and it’s raining. The miles-away-carera highlights her isolation and vulnerability. She gets in a truck with a man (close up shot, low light) and they very gingerly build up a rapport. He drives to a cheap little transit café. They eat in silence and look at a TV in the corner. They get back in the truck and he talks about his kids. She wanks him off and then she watches him shave. That’s it. End of film.

When it was over I thought it was one of the most surprising, refreshing films I’d ever seen. Wildly unpredictable, but never self-consciously odd or (dreaded word) ‘wacky’. Just a collection of events and non-events, sometimes shot artfully, sometimes scrappily done.

Years after that I saw some still images of the film and thought “Oh what a classic!” But I didn’t recognise all of the stills. As well as Chantal in her room and in the truck and in the café and watching the man shave there were also images of two naked women in another space, having sex. What was this all about? I downloaded it and watched it again. Obviously the first time I’d seen an edited version, with the final graphic sex scene lopped off.

In the REAL ending she goes to her friend’s house, who is reluctant to see her. She forces her to prepare some food and drink and they end up in bed together, writhing around, biting, licking and kissing each other. And there it ends. Properly ends.

How about that, then? This was suddenly a very different film from the one I thought I loved. Was it better? Was it worse? It felt like I had had a favourite painting in my house for years only to have the artist come round and say “you’ve got it upside down, mate.” Humiliating.

The sex itself is a kind of frustrated double masturbation, with the desires of neither partner seemingly specified or fulfilled. You might argue that it’s totally in-keeping with the rest of the film, which is a kind of thwarted exploration, without discoveries or revelations. As a matter of fact, the sex scene is a bit like the wrestling that Lawrence was on about, where no one can win.

To save my sanity I have had to simply decide that I still loved the film and that what was previously a gentle, subdued film of stillness self discovery is now a gentle, subdued film of stillness and self discovery with a big shag at the end.

UNRELATED: As a heterosexual man it’s difficult to rave about a film that ends with an extended lesbian sex scene without looking like a full-on perv. And I just realised that her most famous film has a better example of what might be called a 'narrative spike’*, as opposed to a 'narrative arc’, but it’s too late now, isn’t it!?

*Pretty sure I've just invented this term.


•Axl Rose: Rocket Queen•

I’ve noticed that more than half of Guns n Roses' songs have false endings. It might not be more than half, actually. I haven’t counted. A lot, though. A noteworthy amount. It’s as if the songwriters (let’s call them Slash and Axl Rose) can’t bear to let go of their babies. A little extra idea will often get tagged on at the end, once the music appears to have made its exit. Like a piss-head who’s just been barred from a pub, but sticks their head back through the window to shout some final disjointed nonsense.

Sometimes it’s a drifty instrumental section that doesn’t relate to the rest of the song. Sometimes it’s an aggressive, dramatic heightening of what we’ve already heard. But best of all is when the tag-on bit is the antithesis of the bulk of the song.

In the album ‘Appetite for Destruction’ contradictory attitudes to women abound. From 'Sweet Child o' Mine':

"Her hair reminds me of a warm safe place
Where as a child I’d hide
And pray for the thunder and the rain
To quietly pass me by..."

Incredible image of Axl Rose hiding in a hay barn as a young boy, waiting for a storm to subside and relating that feeling of safety to a woman he is in love with in later life.

From 'It’s So Easy':

"Turn around bitch I got a use for you
Besides you ain't got nothin' better to do
And I'm bored..."

Axl, what are you doing? Trying to impress your thick mates on the bus? But these are lyrics from separate songs, so there’s really no need for me to mention them. The most glorious example of a proper false ending is in the song 'Rocket Queen', where the music and the lyrics begin in woefully abusive mode:

"You'll do whatever I like
Honey you're a bit obscene
You better turn me on tonight..."

Axl (to compound the chauvinism), reportedly recorded himself having sex with his friend’s girlfriend in the studio and overdubbed the resulting sounds (against the woman’s wishes) onto the song. Which is probably a sex crime. The song makes thretening stance clear, but then comes the emotional trapdoor, when the spirit of the music changes from sneering and craven into something anthemic and joyous. The lyrics turn on their snakeskin heels:

"Don't chastise me
Or think I mean you harm

Don’t ever leave me
Say you’ll always be there

All I ever wanted
Was for you
To know that I care..."

As poetry they are banal in the extreme, but the sentiment has shifted so abruptly you’re left wondering what the fuck has happened. Who on earth uses the word ‘chastise’? Is this the real Axl? The one that tried to stay quiet, but had to blurt out his feelings at the last possible moment? Like saying goodbye to an old friend on a ferry, and as you pull away you freely scream a private confession into the harbour, with no immediate repercussions.

Maybe the false endings of Guns n Roses songs aren’t false? Maybe the main chunk of the song is the false bit. The main bit of the songs are the pose, and the endings are the ferry confessions?

My friend Ron used to do the sound at a little venue in Nottingham. Young lads in punky guitar bands, mainly. She would tear her hair out in frustration at the sheer mindless predictability of the endings of every gig. The lads would finish their last song, lean their guitars against their amps and storm off- letting the feedback ring out in a chaotic, deafening din. Every band. Every time. Same thing.

Silly as that display was, I had the got the feeling that those lads actually preferred the direct, blistering noise at the end. They might have wished they had the courage to start their gigs with that unrestrained racket, instead of having to chug through their boring rehearsed stuff. What expresses rage more, a verse/chorus/verse song in G, or a freeform flood of feral noise that eats itself in a never-ending cycle of angry decay? Probably a leading question.

Axl Rose once reportedly proposed to his girlfriend at gunpoint. The gun was pointed at himself. He was threatening to commit suicide if she said no. He insisted they got married that same day.

This is deliberately unrelated to anything else I've been saying- which is why it is very much related. My point, I think, is that there is a certain honesty in committing to foiled plans. And doing-what-you-thought-you-were-going-to-do shows a lack of creativity.