Wave 1*

Wave goodbye?

At my place we’re having a major restructure. It’s one of those where we’re not only changing what we do, but the number of analysts at my band won’t fit into the number the organisation has decided it will need, by 15.

It’s dragged on for months, a bit like Lost in the sense that the decision makers seem not to know any more than the audience about where the story is going to go. Cue myriad “wave 1” meetings

I was going to Edinburgh on Friday morning, not back until Tuesday; our stuff was all getting moved on Monday. Obviously, I’d have to put all my stuff away so someone (probably also me) could move it to the new office.

Also on Monday, we were going to find out our fates: had we been successful in reapplying for our jobs, or would we be considered “at risk”? As I wouldn’t be in the office on results day, I asked them to email my personal account. I wasn’t about to log into my work emails while on holiday.

With that Damoclean sword dangling precariously over my noggin, there was a chilling finality as I cleared my desk. I knew I would be back, at least in the short term, but the sense of departure was in the air.

As it was, I was “successful”. To what end, I don’t know. I received a letter of congratulation, but unlike the usual missives of that type, there was no accompanying promotion or new role. “You will receive information of your new assignment in the new year”, it proclaimed. Forgive me if I don’t hold my breath. All I really know is this: I don’t get the payout, but I do have something in the way of security.

We’ll see if this was a positive result in the fullness of time.

* There will be three waves in all, in which the organisation expects to lose ~500 people.

_iris

Just a quick note to say I am enjoying – if “enjoy” is an appropriate word – the Altars of Grief album, Iris. Google, and the band itself, describes its music as blackened doom! I get the doom, but not the blackened aspect. There are fast drums, but not really monotonous blastbeats. The prevailing mood, I would say, is one of mournful doom.

Mournful doom! There’s a category for the Grammies, hey. Your music in this subgenre would be slow, heavy, but most of all very sad. But mournful more than merely sad. It’s like the Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in “the Weeping Song”:

Father, why are all the children weeping?
They are merely crying son
O, are they merely crying, father?
Yes, true weeping is yet to come

I would imagine that such a style of music is not everyone’s cup of tea. However, while walking in the Pennines yesterday in the gloaming, fingers freezing as a heavy fog descended, I found there are few more appropriate soundtracks to such a walk.

The guitars are heavy and melodic, and the vocals a mix of deathy bellows and very heroic melodic fare. It’s not the kind of thing you’d listen to every day, unless you were of a very robust constitution, but it’s edifying once in a while.

Love, by Gaspar Noé

_love-gaspar-noeI wasn’t sure Noe was going to make another film. He shot to prominence with Irreversible, a shattering backwards narrative that forced the audience to confront the grim reality of brutal vengeance before knowing what had led the protagonist to that point, while a woozy disembodied camera floated us uncertainly through Paris from scene to scene, back in time.

Emboldened, and fattened with the gold of investment, Noe made his epic: Enter the Void. It cost a few million, and it made rather fewer million. A four hour journey into the life and afterlife of a lost soul in the seedier areas of Tokyo. It was a bad trip for people afraid of actually having a bad trip. We went backwards again, but also forwards, and into fantasy worlds, memories, nightmares and the nightmare that reality is when one can view events without being able to have an effect on them. A financial sinkhole, it apparently led to Noé vanishing for a number of years.

Love was his reemergence. I tried not to approach it as though it was merely his version of Lars Von Trier’s pretty much contemporary Nymphomaniac Parts I and II, even though that similarly represented a grim, grizzly, melancholic artist deciding to try sex in as much detail as he could get away with.

Where Nymphomaniac features self aware characters cod-philosophising while flashing back to every sexual conquest and humiliation the 4-6 hour running time will allow, Love is ignorant, hypocritical – but human – characters bumbling and fucking their way through life, making and breaking promises for every cum shot in the film. And there are a fair few.

Maybe this was a palette cleanser after Void cleaned out the coffers; a way for Gaspar to show that he can still actually make films. In my head, he had a lengthy series of dark nights of the soul after his big project made back about a tenth of its cost. Though I admired it greatly, it must have stung, not only in terms of finding financiers, but because he must have been expecting great things from what was in a funny way a masterpiece of cinematic vision, simulating hallucinogens through a purely visual and sonic medium, melding the visual and sonic so well (it does have pretty much the greatest opening credits sequence ever, thanks in no small part to the late, great Loiner Mark “LFO” Bell), and meditating very effectively on the nature of mortality and what the physical plane represents.

Love, despite its characters’ protestations, is not so high-minded. You’ve once again got the non-linear narrative, questions answered through flashback and fantasy. But our lead man Murphy (Karl Glusman) is a would-be film maker, who wants to make films about the sentiment of sex, and wants to call any kid he plans to have Gaspar. He realises eventually that he’s not such a great artist.

He’s married and has a kid and isn’t life such a drag, because he’s imprisoned, and it’s not so long ago that he was being sexy and sensual and free with Electra (Aomi Muyock). Electra was also an artist, but the crux of the tale is that her mum has left a message saying she’s not seen Electra in a couple of months. Electra had been having suicidal thoughts. Cue guilt-driven flashback as Murphy tries to piece together where it all went wrong.

Where it all went wrong for him, of course! Forget the poor girl who might be dead. He wants nookie! I don’t know the director’s intention around whether he wanted Murphy to appear sympathetic, but he’s not. He’s flawed and stupid, which I guess makes him a person. He likes sharing fantasies with Electra, as long as they’re fantasies that he enjoys and don’t gross him out or make him jealous. He may have sex with other women, but heaven forbid Electra carries on in a similar manner.

Electra even has a relationship with a fellow called Noe (I’m sure there is some subtext about how Murphy’s toddler son Gaspar is the embodiment of innocence in this particular world, whereas Noe is the worldly-wise businessman who does what he wants, and maybe that’s what I want to say by making this film. I want to recapture the real me. The kid who wants to create rather than the gross, old businessman I have become. But people will only pick on such nuance if I name two characters after myself), which leads to jealous Murphy bottling him, getting arrested and telling the interviewing officer how much he can’t stand France. Maybe that’s a microcosm of current US politics abroad.

I won’t tell you whether Electra is dead or not, but for a sentimental, sexual film it is pretty bleak. Not quite as cold and grim as Nymphomaniac at least, and while I’m not really one for watching people have sex, such scenes are generally very well communicated, both visually and sonically. The soundtrack is fucking brilliant (and long term Noé fans will recognise a few pieces), and the use of colour is pretty staggering at times. But it can all too often seem like Tumblr porn made for the big screen; one of those early Weeknd songs from when he was good, stretched out to two hours. An American Apparel advert without the apparel. And we get a return of the penis cam from Enter The Void – joy.

So it’s good but not amazing. It’s a strangely touching (hush you) look at mortality, how time – and place – pass you by, and asks questions about what we mean by love. Or by promises, for that matter. Maybe it’s a classic, and I’m just envious because I didn’t live like that in my 20s. I just hope that Gaspar and Lars have now got this out of their system, and they have had their fill of cocks and jizz. When you find yourself longing for Antichrist and Irreversible, you know something is wrong…

Ageing

Migos-MAG-0517-GQ-FAMI01-01

There’s currently an issue regarding nostalgia. I don’t mean nostalgia in the social-cultural sense, where all pop music and fashion are currently residing in some imagined early 1990s. I mean personal nostalgia.

I’m now sufficiently insecure that I regularly question my own opinions. Example: we all know hip-hop is not as good as it was. The beats are soft and ill-defined, there is no flow outside Kendrick bars – it’s all a bit… on spice. It’s all auto-tune; a genre almost entirely built on a Kanye West album from a decade ago that wasn’t even very good at the time (though it did inspire an excellent article here, from Simon Reynolds). It was interesting, and well produced, but it was very navel-gazey and soppy for such a large-living rapper. (Let me guess – that’s why it’s so good!) Was he still the Louis Vuitton Don at that point?

Anyway, as right as I am about all of the above, and even though I’m as opinionated as I always was, I’m now old. And I therefore worry about whether  I am now saying this stuff because I’m old and left behind by modern culture.

I didn’t care before. I just thought “fuck this noise – it’s blah blah blah and a pile of rubbish”. And when I was in my teens and 20s it was fine, because I was young and pretty much exactly who this shit was for. So if I rejected it, I was right.

Now I’m in my late 30s, and pop music and fashion and girls with Liam Gallagher eyebrows aren’t intended for me. So if I think they’re shit, maybe I’m just old and they’re not for old people.

I love Fact Magazine. Well, I did. It’s still fine, no beef here, I just don’t read it as much as I used to. But I remember reading an article of theirs where they talked about a rap album and were all “don’t complain that they can’t rhyme and there are no decent beats – that’s not what rap is about now”.

But instead of thinking “that’s me told”, the result was the perception they were desperately trying to convince themselves that they were keeping up, trying to dampen down their own instinctual reaction to the music in question.

So anyway, I’m going to keep tabs on ageing. I had some people agree with me on Twitter the other day, but they’re around my age. I may start reviewing the top-streamed songs on Spotify, or writing about some plonkers on YouTube who poke corpses while on holiday in Japan. But I’ll do something, probably while doubting myself too much.