All badged up

The overarching message from today’s exercise in re-badging my leather jacket, now returned from the cleaners, seems to have been that you can make statements without appearing to do so.

I started badging it some years ago, seeing it as a very personal form of ‘rock chic’ and absolutely refusing to add any obviously ‘political’ badges.

Over the last few years, it’s attracted plenty of comment and enquiry. Perhaps counter-intuitively, I think it says more about me and what I believe in than if I’d dressed the jacket in rather more obvious pins.

Loosely, there are themes. And as Thomas Mann once said: “Everything is politics”.

So here’s a guide to my newly badged jacket.

From top left (approximately) – travel is good. We start with a flag pin representing Lübeck. This was my destination as a 50th birthday ‘thang’: I’d never been out of the UK on my own before this and it was a (long overdue) rite of passage to prove I could travel to ‘Abroadland’ all on my own.

I chose Lübeck because of Mann and Günter Grass and because I’d spent around 10 years teaching myself a bit of German so felt a certain confidence in the idea that I might be able to communicate at a basic level.

It was a fabulous and seminal trip.

Füssen? More German stuff – Bavaria; the Alps; simply gorgeous. Ties in with the edelweiss pin.

Then Thomas Mann – I have spares ope this pin; that’s how important it is to me. I loved Buddenbrooks … but then I read Death in Venice and my mind was well and truly blown.

The travel section includes Collioure – of course – plus Vienna, Sorrento and Sicily: all are special to me.

Beethoven is crucial: I love classical music and Ludwig in particular. And his 250th birthday is next year, so it would be poor tom leave him out.

That Concorde? A lovely pin, bought in Folkstone, together with a Spitfire pin. But at present, wearing a Spitfire could send out all the wrong signals, while this suggests European co-operation.

The Royal Opera House? Well, if you read this blog regularly, you’ll know why.

The Haring ‘resist’ pin? Haring at Tate Liverpool was my art revelation this year and resisting the Establishment and racism and bigotry in general is good.

The birds? Well, I saw a kingfisher this year and interacted with a raven (my absolute top bird). I love corvids in general, including those beauties, magpies. Red squirrels – only seen in Germany and Austria – but wonderful nonetheless.

Stephen Sondheim is a god, Star Wars is a big part of my cultural life, along with The Wizard of Oz (and as some of you will know, I’m a ‘friend of Dorothy’), while Captain Haddock represents comics and cartoons, and Shakespeare … well, I ‘dig’ The Bard big time.

This is how to make comments about yourself but leave others imply enjoying the colour!

A tin drum signifying nothing very much

Günter Grass’s Nobel-cited 1959 debut novel, The Tin Drum, is a sprawling monster of a book – published as three books in one and in reality, pretty much two books. By turns epic, tragic and comic, disturbing and fantastical, anyone hoping to stage something under its name will have their work cut out.

Carl Grose decided to attempt precisely that for Cornish theatre company, Kneehigh. Staged in conjunction with the West Yorkshire Playhouse and Liverpool’s Everyman, it has been touring since October and, on the final leg of that tour, is playing at Shoreditch Town Hall in Hackney until this Saturday.

It would be as absurd to imagine that anyone could cram the entire book into a show of under three hours as to expect to see a literalist interpretation. It’s easy to realise that a range of performance styles – puppetry, song, dance, burlesqueue, cabaret etc – could be employed in such an Herculean task.

Perhaps precisely because one can see the potential, it’s particularly disappointing that this misses the mark by some considerable way.

The obvious problems are clear – and have been evident (and noted) since it opened in a different venue, but have not apparently taken on board. Many of the lyrics cannot be heard because the music is far too loud – it’s amped up to a ridiculous level. And since there so much ‘music,’ it would have been nice if Charles Hazlewood’s score had at least some variety or discernible quality. As things stand, it is largely an exercise in homogenised noise with a thumping bass.

The puppet Oskar has much going for it – an eerie quality, certainly – but the use of different actors to voice the boy who won’t grow up, miked and often from quite a physical distance, doesn’t help. This also ensures that he comes across as a sort of demon child who is utterly unsympathetic. But being able to have sympathy with Oskar is important, because it draws us in. It is part of showing us how easy it is to fall for the extremism – how easy it is to become complicit – and how we must take responsibility.

Without that, Grass’s lesson is nowhere near as powerful.

Grose decided to strip the story away from its time and place, telling us at the start that this could be about “any war”. So what is acted out before us could be the Balkans, it could be Syria, it could be Yemen. His text emphasises the idea of tribalism creating conflict and that we’re really all both different and the same – ‘viva complexity’. That’s all well and good, yet in having Sigismund Markus, the kindly Jewish toymaker, be targeted for being a Pole rather than a Jew, he rids what is served up of any specific comment on anti-semitism.

In a world where a far-right poster boy like Nigel Farage can feel confident enough to use his LBC radio show to talk of a “Jewish lobby” in the US, this is not a matter of polite semantics.

When Alfred Matzerath dies, it is no longer by swallowing his Nazi badge in an effort to avoid detection by Soviet troops – as clear a metaphor for falling for extremist rhetoric as anyone could come up with – but in gunfire. 

The Nazis have here become the ‘Order’ and could have dropped straight out of something by Mel Brooks – ‘Hitler’ is a Lady Gagaesque figure whose salute becomes a sort of voguing as she belts out something or other to more of Hazelwood’s monotone faux rock.

Grose was always going to have to substantially trim his source material, but in the context of the apparent aim of highlighting current global tensions and making a general anti-racist statement, his concentration of such a vast amount of stage time on the love triangle that is Oskar’s family background seems oddly unbalanced – not least as decisions noted above mean that the Nazi threat is frankly reduced.

If the music is rather one note, then the pace of the performance feels the same. There are good ideas on display (the chase Oskar’s grandfather leads the police is very clever) and some good performances from the ensemble cast, but greater variety of pace might also help move this from being a whirling – wearying – experience to one that actually engages the emotions.

At the present, it singularly fails to do that. This is a tin drum beating nothing more than sound and fury, signifying nothing very much at all.

shoreditchtownhall.com

Forget the snobbery: comics are no con

If you can’t choose one, get the set

There’s little as irritating as snobbery – in oh so many walks of life.

Now to be absolutely fair, there’s also a form of reverse snobbery – or relativism, as it’s known – that asserts, for instance, that EastEnders is just as good as Shakespeare, NWA are genuinely the equal of Wagner, and Minions is as good a film as The Enigma of Kasper Hauser.

Now: time for the declaration.

I watch no soaps. I love Bill the Bard. I do listen to and enjoy some ‘popular’ music – but not NWA. I increasingly believe that Wagner wrote the most stunning music ever. I love Minions – AND I love The Enigma of Kasper Hauser.

Both are possible, without my remotely pretending that that means that the former is equal to the latter in critical terms.
 

I also like comics. And Thomas Mann. (And Günter Grass. And Gabriel García Márquez). 

That doesn’t mean a Superman story is the same as a Thomas Mann novella. But then again, what is? And indeed, few comics (well, certainly not the ones I read) are like a Superman story.

My introduction to comics as an adult came in 1990, when I was handed a copy of Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta to review, and had my mind well and truly blown.

There have been graphic novels on my shelves ever since.

Anyway, this weekend has been special: because yesterday morning, the first issue of William’s Gibson’s first ever comic slid through my letter box.

And Archangel is every bit as slyly engaging as you would expect from the founding father of cuberpunk.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Gibson is a superb and very grow-up sci-fi writer, whose dystopian novels gave rise to the label of ‘cyberpunk’. They’re literate and philosophically interesting.

So, what do we get from issue one of Archangel? Twenty pages in, I’m fully engaged. We have a tale of scientists from a dying 2016 Earth attempting to change history by sending people back to 1945.

I really want to know what happens next, complaining loudly upon reaching the end of the story after 20 pages. This is actually what you’d expect – and largely why the majority of my comic reading is done from trades (collections of several individual issues).

But then this is a comic Event.

Of course, as with Gibson’s novels, there’s far more subtlety involved than such bare phrases suggest. The characters are already clearly beyond mere symbols.

The art – by Butch Guice – is seriously good. Plus there’s a choice of covers for the first issue, just to increase the pleasure (and possible torture) for collectors.

A page of Jaques Tardi's work

And that’s all I can really tell you at this point. But beyond the opening of the actual story, the first issue has much to offer, with sketchbook pages of character development, as well as pages through the processes (both fascinating) and notes from Gibson himself.

That’s not, however, the end of this review. 

In recent weeks, my comic reading has also included the newly-published second volume of the trade of Descender by Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen.

This is good stuff, taking us forward in a story about a sentient robot child, Tim, who is struggling to stay alive in a world where all androids have been outlawed and bounty hunters are constantly hunting for them.

It was pre-ordered for the simple reason that the first volume made me care about Tim, while Nguyen’s unusual (for a comic) art is also hugely appealing.

Also entered into the recently-read list is the first part of Jaques Tardi’s The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec – Pterror Over Paris (which forms the basis of a Luc Besson film, in French with English subtitles, which is also worth watching).

Featuring the eponymous heroine – an archeologist and feisty creation of delightfully dubious morality – there are currently four stories available in English, so these are rare and great fun. 

It’s always worth pointing out to any snobs that the French regard comic books as the ninth art. 

Trees, by Warren Ellis and Jason Howard is another trade first volume (the second is out this summer), and is a complex interweaving of different stories from across the world, a decade after vast, alien ‘trees’ suddenly arrived and ‘planted’ themselves across the Earth – and then did nothing.

Another fascinating story that gives few clues as to where it is going to go, Ellis’s character and plot development are strong and the art from Howard is equally memorable.

A page from Fables 2

Rather older is Fables, a long series by Bill Willingham, working with various artists.

The overarching story deals with characters from myth, folktale, fairytale and fantasy literature, who are driven from their home lands by the violent Adversary and become refugees in New York, staying hidden from humans and running their own society.

The second issue, Animal Farm, with art by Mark Buckingham, Steve Leiloha and Daniel Vozzo, largely takes place in the community’s out-of-town hideaway for those who cannot maintain a human form or otherwise pass unnoticed among humankind.

And yes, those familiar with George Orwell’s novel of the same name will find links between the plots and ideas.

With an approach that owes more to the darker origins of folk and fairytales than Disney, Willingham’s series is a good illustration of just how grown-up comics can be and would be a candidate for any list of best graphic novel reads.

Volume one of The Autumnlands, by Kurt Busiek and Benjamin Dewey, is another rollicking read: a brilliantly envisaged anthropomorphic world where magic is dying and the elite are trying to save their society.

Unfortunately for them, the secret efforts of a group of wizards to save the situation plunges them all – literally – into serious danger.

Another that’s rated ‘M’ for ‘mature’, Busiek’s story unfolds darkly and brutally. Dewey’s artwork is simply brilliant.

I have no personal axe to grind about comicbook superheroes – I’m rather fond of Wonder Woman – but if you believe that the worlds of Marvel and DC are the only ones in the comic universe, then think again. 

• Archangel issue 1 is out now from idwpublishing.com. 

Descender, Trees and The Autumnlands are all from imagecomics.com. 

The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec is published by Fantagraphics Books. 

Fables is available from vertigocomics.com.

An epic, green fairy tale for the here and now

Illustration by Günter Grass

Just over a year ago, on my first trip to Lübeck, a little mystery confronted me on a visit to Günter Grass-Haus – why was one of Grass’s sculptures of a rat displayed alongside a trio of Smurfs?

As we prepared for this spring’s trip to Schleswig-Holstein, this question popped into view of the little grey cells once more.

Now I knew that Grass had penned a book called, simply The Rat – his art has frequenyl been directly connected to his writing – so I looked it up and, having found it to be out of print, bought myself a second-hand copy.

Thus it was that it accompanied me on the journey to Travemünde. And on the evening on 2 May, as we lounged in our railway cabin, heading from Paris to the German border, I let out a yelp.

For there in the pages of the novel were not only to be found plenty of Rattus rattus (not forgetting Rattus norvegicus and others), but myriad Smurfus smurfus too.

The Rat was first published in German in 1986, at around the time that Grass himself settled in Lübeck.

But while knowing this connection, I hadn’t realised that the book would itself be partly set in Lübeck and Travemünde, and encompassing the wider Baltic.

If last year’s trip had had, quite deliberately placed at its heart, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, then it became clear that this year was going to have a literary theme too – whether I’d planned it that way or not.

Grass brings so many strands together into a coherent whole – he weaves together the Brothers Grimm and their fairy tale characters, the infamous German painter-forger Lothar Malskat, who repainted the frescoes of the Marienkirche in Lübeck after WWII, and industrialists and corrupt politicians and bishops.

We also get the chance to catch up with characters from his first novel, The Tin Drum, and from the later The Flounder – it helps to be familiar with at least the first of these.

The overarching theme here, though, is an environmental one – of humanity’s crazed destruction and despoliation of the planet.

Early on, he gives an idea of the scale of the garbage that humans leave behind them – the endless mountains of trash – but in this apocalyptic novel, what eventually kills of humankind is a nuclear accident.

And who would be the natural replacement for humans once the dust has died down?

Here, it is the rats, one of whom talks constantly to the author in his dreams, relating rat history as well as what has happened since “Doomadosh”, because the author is now only a figment of ratty imagination.

Or is he?

It’s rather easy to feel that, with the end of the Cold War, the nuclear threat has died away – although most of the missiles are still around and there are still plenty of  ‘rogue states’ that might not be trusted not to use such a weapon. And that’s without mentioning the threat of chemical weaponary.

But even if readers falls into that camp, the environmental concerns are every single bit as relevant.

In the 1980s, Germans had just started to comprehend the scale of death that was visiting the country’s forests.

It was a vital wake-up call. And just a fortnight or so ago, on a cloudy Sunday, the country produced 74% of its energy needs from renewables in an illustration of how domestic policy has moved since then.

That rather makes a nonsense of the objections of those who oppose, say, the generation of wind power. But then one is reminded of Grass’s industrialists and their political and religious apologists in the novel.

The threat to the forests has not ceased, due to climate change, but action has helped to stabilise the situation.

And while the book only really touches on the pollution of seas and rivers, its references to the rubbish generated by human existence bring to mind recent reports about our trash being found in the deepest parts of the oceans, thousands of kilometers from land.

Similarly, a recently-unveiled study from Havard Universityhas shown that the frequently-reported threat to bees is a direct consequenceof certain classes of insecticides.

Yet the corporations that produce these poisons are reluctant to stop – evidence, were it needed, that just as Grass’s fictional industrialists are motivated only by short-sighted greed, so too are the non-fictional ones.

All is finally clear

In neither of these cases do you have to be a dyed-in-the-organic-wool eco warrior to see trouble ahead if such things are simply allowed to continue unabated.

So Grass’s novel continues to be every bit as topical as it was when written.

Quite apart from it being shameful, on the grounds of its continuing topicality, that it’s out of print (in at least some countries) it’s well near criminal on a literary basis too.

However gloomy it sounds, it somehow avoids that and is often funny and frequently endowed with a great warmth.

Yet however much control there is to the entire piece, it’s also a massive howl of rage against the prevailing insanity.

The frequent use of poetry within the text reminds one that Grass is not ‘just’ a novelist (and a sculptor and artist etc), while the tone, the language and the characterisation are simply first rate.

Even those blue and white smurfs play more than a passing role, as the book also explores the creation of religion, the death of fairy tales, rampant commercialism and the question of what is real and what is not.

For all the seriousness of its message, this is never dull or difficult, but rattles along at a cracking pace, and leaving you unsure of the eventual outcome until the very last.

In terms of scale, imagination, organisation and the sheer complexity of vision, The Rat is a staggering achievement, and one that illustrates, yet again, Grass’s genius in general, and more specifically, his command of magic realism and his gift as a storyteller.

Indeed, it’s a reminder of the power of stories too.

That I had not expected it to be directly related to the area we were visiting simply served to increase its impact.

That reading it also fell at a time of local and Europe-wide elections, where we saw widespread revealed large levels of dissatisfaction and a general misunderstanding of the key problems, while the same industrialists and their friends in big finance continue to fiddle, gave a further layer of significance to the experience.

Twenty-eight years on from its original publication, The Rat’s message is as clear and as important as ever. And in literary terms, it’s a reminder – were that needed – of the genius of Grass.

Into the woods it's time to go

Greener than last year – 'my' little Travemünde wood

The woods, the woods; trees soaring up to meet the sky and undergrowth straining to catch what light permeates the swaying canopy.

On the floor, a blackbird rootles through last year’s crackling debris, while flowers, pale and delicate, offer white, yellow and purple contrast with the blanketing greens.

Last year when I made the short trip from Lübeck to Travemünde, there was three weeks less tree cover – and that after a mercilessly long winter. Purple crocuses showed an almost brazen deep colour by the edges of the footpath.

All around - or to be more accurate, all above - was filled with the sound of crows cawing.

When we stepped off the train at Travemünde in the mid morning of 3 May, it was the first noise to assail the ears. The little wood butts right up to the equally little station and the crows were already out in force.

Delicate apple blossom

But underlying that raucous sound was birdsong, and once in the wood itself, it seems as though there are layers of sound; the smallest birds first, nearest to the ear, then the wood pigeons billing and cooing, a little farther off, and then the crows, high above.

And all with the faint echo that gives it such a haunting quality.

It's only a small wood, but just a few steps inside and you are divorced from the sights and sounds of the modern world, and half expecting to round the next turn and see a gingerbread house before you.

All this is just a few hundred metres from the beach and the shore.

Where the Baltic waters meet the silver sands were lying vast numbers of seaweed and mussels, ripped free of their moorings by the tide and left high and dry.

The crows were having a banquet, strutting along, testing shells with sharp beaks and wolfing any remaining meat.

Along the coast

That little wood – my little wood, or so I find myself thinking of it since I experienced it with some awe a year ago – is far from unique.

On the Sunday morning, we set off along the promenade before taking a footpath up into the mass of trees that rose all the way up to the cliff edge.

The walk to Niendorf is around 7.5km along the coast, taking in more than one small wood. Footpaths are well maintained and leave no need for scrambling – as I remember from the last time I did a UK coastal walk, some years ago, in Yorkshire.

The way was dotted with a series of charming metal sculptures of wildlife – some forming part of seats – by Guillermo Steinbrüggen, which were created and put in place as part of ‘Land-Art-Projekt’ in 2010.

Two memorials also stand alongside the path, with neat flowers alongside: one is ‘in memory of the deceased who found their eternal rest in the Bay of Lübeck’, which may mean those who have died at sea in peacetime, but could also include the many who died in the bay during WWII.

Owl sculpture bench

Those included concentration camp inmates who were being transported by the SS aboard the Cap Arcona, which was then bombed by the RAF.

The path runs alongside farm land in places and, in keeping with a country where cigarette machines hang, un-vandalised, on exterior walls – even in cities – there are no barriers between public footpath and private agricultural land.

It is assumed that you will have enough brains and enough general decency that any physical barrier would be superfluous.

But back to all those trees.

As I touched on last year, the forest occupies an important place in the German psyche.

We, having deforested this island centuries ago, don’t find that easy to understand, but step inside such a wood for even just a few minutes and you can feel it working on you.

Historically, one could do worse than start by considering Hermann the German.

Wolf sculpture

A Cherusci chieftain’s son, he was given the Latin name of Arminius and a military training in Rome after being taken hostage on one attempt at subjugating the Germanic peoples and lands.

But in 9AD, in the Teutoburg Forest, he handed out a serious smacking to the Romans, when the various Germanic tribes he’d pulled into a coalition destroyed three Imperial legions under Publius Varus, having lured them there with talk of suppressing a rebellion.

It was one of Rome’s most devastating defeats and intended annexations of western Germany and Bohemia were postponed – and as it turned out, never did happen.

In the first part of his excellent three-part documentary on German art, Andrew Graham Dixon highlighted the place of the forest within that art - seen in a number of ways, but not least through the carvings found throughout the country, including in old churches.

Wolpertinger, after Dürer

Then there are all the folkloric creatures that inhabit those forests.

There’s the elwedritsche, a mythical, flightless bird living in the Palatinate, and the rasselbock in Thuringia, which is essentially a large rabbit with antlers, making it sound rather similar to the Bavarian wolpertinger, a creature made up of bits of various animals and birds, which lives in the Alpine forests.

It’s something that makes me wonder how many similarly mythical captures can one think of from the British Isles.

Personally, I know of the northern boggart and I know of the Cornish piskie, but for anything else, I’d have to start searching. Folklore does not seem to exist much more in the UK.

And such folklore overlaps with German art.

The German renaissance painter Matthias Grünewald (1470-1528) didn’t merely include the woods in his scenes, including St John in the Forest (1515), but the fantastical occurs in his paintings, including his most famous work, the Isenheim Altarpiece.

The Temptation of St Anthony, Matthias Grünewald

It’s easy to think of the creatures that occur in the Temptation of St Anthony section of that masterpiece as Bosch-like, but they also have that sense of the frightening forest and the hybrids of folklore that live among the trees.

As only a slight aside, take away the umlaut from Grünewald’s name and you get ‘green wood’.

And then, of course, there are the fairy tales.

Remove the Disneyfication, and you’re left with dark tales that, in many cases, feature forests – and corvids. Hansel and Gretel is one the most famous, but many others feature getting lost in a forest as a key ingredient.

My reading matter for the trip was The Rat, by Günter Grass – largely because, having remembered seeing the sculptured rat alongside some Smurfs when I’d visited Günter Grass-Haus during last year’s visit to Lübeck and thought to look it up.

The book – how on earth can anything by a novelist such as Grass be out of print – turned out, unexpectedly, to be partly set around the area, which Grass moved to in 1986, the year of publication.

Overlooking Lübeck Bay

Its central theme is the environmental desecration wrought by humankind, and part of Grass’s way of highlighting this is to write of the forests dying and, with them, the fairy tale characters who live within, a theme that he returned to in Totes Holz (1990), which combined art and prose.

Even if the accidental nuclear apocalypse of The Rat may seem a little dated, since it was so much of the Cold War era, the potential for an environmental apocalypse remains very much with us.

Grass’s concerns were far from lacking a foundation in reality: in the 1980s, in Bavaria alone, 2.5 million hectares of woodland showed the signs of pollution damage, while vast numbers of trees in the fabled Black Forest of Baden-Wuerttemburg were under threat.

The Germans have a word for it: ‘Waldsterben,’ or forest death.

Since then, much has changed. Problems remain – not least due to climate change – but there are reasons that Germany has become a global leader in wind and solar energy.

As we sat waiting for the first train of the morning to take us from Travemünde to Lübeck on our way back to London via Hamburg, the crows in the little wood alongside the track were already about their business.

But long after we’d passed beyond the Baltic resort, it was clear that the cawing had imprinted itself on my mind, together with just a hint of the thrill and the mystery of the forest.