‘We are all in the gutter,’ said Wilde
‘But some of us look for the stars’
Yet the heavens are blank over London
Since light cancels out such a view
So I travelled to Travemünde
And I stood on the Strand after dark
Below pollarded trees in the cold
Ursa Minor winked down from above
The sight made me breathless with joy
And I wept with a new sense of life
• Image courtesy of Wikipedia
And since it involves a cat – and books – well, it was instantly ordered and arrived, very speedily yesterday morning, allowing a sense of perfect timing to offer a weekend of relief from the doom-scrolling.
Expertly translated by Louise Heal Kawai, the book tells the story of Rintaro Natsuki. After being orphaned when a very young child, he was taken in and looked after by his beloved grandfather, who ran a small, second-hand bookshop, Natsuki Books.
The novel opens with the teenage Rintaro at the funeral of his grandfather, who’s sudden (but apparently peaceful) death has left him in a void. A perfectly pleasant, but previously unknown aunt is going to give him a new home – away from this one – but he is having difficulty trying to sort out the emotions involved in all this.
To add to the complexity, the book-loving Rintaro is what the Japanese call hikikiomori – effectively, someone (largely male, but not exclusively) who has withdrawn from society and social engagement.
But shortly after the funeral, as Rintaro sits alone between all the books in the shop that is his grandfather’s legacy to him, an orange and yellow striped tabby appears in the shop and speaks to him.
The cat introduces itself as Tiger and explains that it (there is no pronoun for the character in the original Japanese) has come in order to recruit Rintaro to help him on a vital mission to save books.
And so they set off on their first adventure.
Japanese fiction involving cats is pretty much a genre in its own right – including, but not limited to, The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa, I am a Cat by Sōseki Natsume, If Cats Disappeared from the World by Genki Kawamura and Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.
These and others are on my own shelves – enough as to help me recognise the tone here.
This particular novel is Japanese magic realism – that’s a global concept, not just a Latin American one – and it is fascinating one.
On one level, it seems to have a naivety and, as countless reviewers have suggested, ‘charm’, that one could dismiss it quite easily. But it has some profoundly moving moments, together with an underlying quality that is faintly disturbing, in a way that you sense will live with you for some time.
And while the morality of Natsukawa’s tale is essentially simply, in other more philosophical ways, it is not.
It has a rather formal Japanese style, but is also deeply felt, though never mawkish.
I heartily recommend.
It was arguably a fortuitous coincidence that saw me pick up a copy of C+nto.
Having read a review of Joelle Taylor’s 2021 collection of poems in the Observer in mid-February, just after it had just won the TS Elliot award, less than a week later, I was on Broadway Market in Hackney – my local shopping street for over 30 years, in case you imagine I’m part of the more recent trendification – and, after getting incredibly tense about the lack of mask-wearing in shops, happened to walk past the Broadway Bookshop.
Glancing inside the wedged-open door (good ventilation), I could see that the owner was masked, behind a screen. I felt so absurdly grateful that someone was still taking COVID seriously that I went in, heading straight to the poetry shelves, which are not much more than a metre from the door.
And there was C+nto. So, what else to do but buy a copy? And since February is, in the UK, LGBT+ History Month, it also seemed apt.
It is a simply outstanding collection.
“There is no part of a butch lesbian that is welcome in this world”, says Taylor (pictured above) in her introduction.
“According to the Human Dignity Trust, it is illegal to be a lesbian in almost a quarter of the world’s countries.”
She goes on to cite how Brexit has led to a “nationalist confidence”, with “bigots from both sides emboldened to assault homosexual and trans people.
“The word ‘lesbian’ is synonymous with that hated epithet, ‘TERF’, and, as a community, we spend more time policing each other than protecting.”
Quite. And indeed, I am writing this a few days after reports in the LGBT+ press – and even appearing in Rupert Murdoch’s Sun – that the Russian forces currently waging war on Ukraine have drawn up lists of those to be murdered, and that those lists include known LGBT+ people. For the ‘crime’ of being LGBT+.
Vladimir Putin has form on this – not least in terms of Chechnya, which tells us that his support for genocide against LGBT+ people is not imaginary.
However, in terms of the book itself, let’s start with the title.
“Cunto
– inflection of CUNTARE
(third person singular past historic)
“Cuntare
– (transative) (obselete. literary)
To relate, tell, or recount (a story)”
This is an incredibly powerful selection of verse that centres around conveying a sense of a specifically butch lesbian history; of pubs and clubs now gone; of individual dykes now departed.
Taylor very powerfully explores the idea of having to work out not simply who you are, but how you authentically present to a world that does not, largely, want an authentic you – unless you conform to a hetero normative – and in a horrifying large number of cases, will murder you for daring to present as anything other than that.
And indeed, this also touches on what the very process of having to do all this actually does to the person having to do it.
Her idea of a symbiosis between one’s skin and suits of clothing is stunningly effective. As are her portraits of specific dykes that she has known: in particular, in Valentine, where she introduces us to a black dyke – or ‘stud’; a black, masculine presenting lesbian, according to the glossary.
But more widely, in her conjuring up a fictional lesbian club, Maryville, and an origin myth for butch dykes, she has given voice to a world that most people will not know exists.
It is a short, but utterly tragic and heart breaking and powerful representation of the brutal and dehumanising nature of homophobia, that is so very much more than the sum of its words.
Taylor – predominantly know as a performance poet (there are videos online and QR codes in the book for a couple of her performances) is from Lancashire and there are definite moments when you think of Jeanette Winterson and Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
But this is in terms of overlap of experiences – perhaps not least in both having made comments on fundamentalist Christianity.
In ROUND THREE – the body as trespass, Taylor writes of how “... three Pentecostal pastors hymning holy Nazi insignia break into your home [God is an atheist who no longer believes in Himself] they unscrew the lightbulbs slowly eyes fixed on the unfinished girl sobbing war on the corduroy settee & whisper a prayer for you to leave your family”.
Her use – and relish – of language is simply breath taking and astonishingly effective.
Sex, gender and so forth is complex – and as a bisexual who struggles even now, at the age of 59, to use the word ‘woman’ to describe themselves (it just really doesn’t seem to fit and never has), there was a vast amount in this collection that I could directly relate to – not least in terms of the ideas around one’s skin as a suit, and picking the ‘wrong’ one off the hanger.
And if there has ever been a better collective noun for butch dykes than “an insolence of leather jackets”, then I dare you to find it!
But I cannot recommend this enough. It is an absolutely incredible work and, I would suggest, as essential a piece of literature as one might wish to find.
But the Tate Modern’s new blockbuster, Surrealism Beyond Borders, nails on both of those counts.
Personally, I’ve long liked some Surrealism very much – and some considerably less so. But I’ve also seen it as a very European school, and indeed, a very masculine one. And the iconic status of Salvador Dalí as the popular leading Surrealist has also left me with a sense of it being a tad on the political right.
A perfect illustration of at least some of this is the one book about the school in my personal art library. Surrealism, written by Cathrin Klingsöhr-Leroy and edited by Ute Grosenick for Taschen, was first published in 2006. It is worth noting that the latter has worked on at least one title for Taschen specifically around women artists.
Now, it is a slender volume, made up of short pieces about specific, important works in the school.
So for instance, no Leonora Carrington or Dorothea Tanning.
Tate Modern has long been working to rectify some of this: its 2019 Tanning exhibition was excellent.
But however basic such Taschen guides are intended to be (and that basic nature does not mean that they are not good), this all feeds an idea of a movement that was almost entirely European – indeed, almost entirely centred on Paris, where poet André Breton penned the Manifeste du surréalisme in 1924 – and predominantly male.
Wrong. Wrong – and then wrong again. As this extraordinary exhibition makes quite clear.
Indeed, the very title of the exhibition, Surrealism Beyond Borders, makes that point – that this is not just about geo-political borders, but about sex and gender ones too.
With Surrealist groups in Japan, South America and Egypt, it can hardly be seen as exclusively ‘European’. And it is most certainly not a predominantly male thing.
It is both of and painted on wardrobe doors – complete with real keyholes – and has an impossible double landscape behind those parts of it that are open. It is classic trompe-l’œil, stunningly executed; a real mind messer and arguably precisely the sort of thing that I have most relished about Surrealism for years – superb technique in a super-realistic approach, married with a dreamlike subject.
On the same themes, it’s why I have loved Giorgio de Chirico’s works since studying art for A’ level. And Magritte too, though I have had very few chances to see works by either of them in real life and away from the printed page or digital image.
Here, we have de Chirico’s Le rêve de Tobie (The Dream of Tobias) 1917 (see final picture in this post) and Magritte’s La durée poignardée (Time Transfixed) 1938, both of which are wonderfully, gloriously executed.
Incidentally, as the Magritte is framed and under glass, you can get very up close and personal to it at this exhibition – and it is worth doing so, because the brush work is absolutely sensational.
These were personal highlights because they were works not seen before ‘live’ by artists I personally love, but there were plenty of new discoveries that were highlights too.
It is fantastical – and (as observed by The Other Half) harks back to Bosch and Bruegel, yet is utterly different from anything we’d seen previously of their work.
The exhibition also includes Fantomerne by Danish artist Rita Kernn-Larsen (second picture from the top), which she created after the shock of witnessing a drowning.
Then there is the anti-colonialism of Malangatanta Ngwenya’s Untitled from 1967.
Perhaps the major revelation is of Surrealism in Japan – Kikuji Yamashita’s The Deification of a Soldier, from 1967 (see below), is astonishing; a visceral response to the artist’s own experience as a Japanese soldier in WWII. There are other works by Japanese artists using Surrealism to express the horror of the war. All of them are absolutely worthy of inclusion in this exhibition – they are not present for the sake of it.
Then there is Laurent Marcel Salinas’s Naissance (Birth) from 1944. Born in Egypt – that there was a Surrealist group based in Cairo is just another revelation here – he signed a 1938 group manifesto, Yajya al-fann al-munhatt/Vive l’art dégénéré (Long Live Degenerate Art).
As only a slight aside, I was delighted – albeit rather surprised – that, at this point, the curators didn’t feel the need to point out the ‘degenerate art’ was a Nazi description for any art that didn’t fit their rather limited view of the world.
And in keeping with moving away from a very limited idea of Surrealism, in this exhibition, there is just one work by Dalí – his lobster telephone, while both Carrington and Tanning have works included.
There are two works by Picasso – it's difficult to see how Les Trois Danseuses (The Three Dancers) 1925 really fits, but Composition au Gant (Composition with Glove) 1930, certainly does.
However, even if the former doesn’t really ‘fit’, its inclusion still raises an interesting question of the overlaps and similarities between Surrealism and Cubism. Similarly, de Chirico never identified as a Surrealist, yet it’s difficult for any viewer looking at his works not to see him as one.
And Tanning has in other places (indeed, another Taschen book), been categorised as producing “fantastic art”. But what is Surrealism if not ‘fantastic’?
And here you have a perfect illustration of why this exhibition, is not simply called Surrealism Beyond Borders, but genuinely goes beyond the previous borders erected around the school, whether formally or informally.
The last time that The Other Half and I visited an exhibition was in May 2021, but the Tate Modern’s Making of Rodin was a tad disappointing. However, it had felt safe – timed entries so no overwhelming crowds and, of course, face covering.
This still felt safe, with continued timed entry and at least half people wearing a face covering. What it also did was succeed in being a really excellent exhibition.
• Surrealism Beyond Borders is at Tate Modern in London until 29 August 2022.
As nine-year-old Buddy returns home one summer evening, brandishing a wooden sword and a dustbin lid shield, playing at being the knight of his daydreams, the streets are full of children playing – ‘were there really so many children?’ you might think – while adults hang around chatting.
But just as you might be thinking that, a masked gang arrives to start a riot and things turn seriously nasty. They don’t care if children, women, the elderly – Protestant or Catholic – gets in the way.
Because this is August 1969, and the aim of the violence is really quite simple: to create a climate of fear that tells the Catholic residents on this mixed street that they must leave. Or terrorism, as we might call it.
The film shows a series of episodes in Buddy’s life at this time. His Pa (Jamie Dornan) is working in England as a joiner and can only visit every few weeks, so the family of Buddy (Jude Hill) and his older brother Will (Lewis McAskie) is held together by Ma (Caitríona Balfe), with help from grandparents Pop (Ciarán Hinds) and Granny (Judi Dench).
The character of Pa can feel like a bit of a type at times – he likes the horses to the detriment of the family finances, but he does also have greater complexity.
The family is Protestant but not particularly religious and gets along perfectly fine with its Catholic neighbours. However, as Pa continues to refuse the increasing threats of the local Protestant gang leader Billy Clanton (Colin Morgan) to get involved in their sectarian ‘improvement’ of the area, the danger for the family, as to the community as a whole, grows.
And while it seems fanciful when Pa tries to suggest emigration to Australia or Canada to Ma, when he is offered permanent employment in England, with the prospect of better pay and better housing, the increasing threat moves them closer to a decision.
But for Ma – and for Buddy – the prospect of leaving their home, families, friends and much more is terrifying.
While Branagh’s film has already garnered awards and much praise, it has also been criticised in some quarters for being overly sentimental and for downplaying The Troubles.
I’m long enough in the tooth to remember reports from Northern Ireland – and of bombings in England. I remember bomb hoaxes at my girls’ grammar school on the outskirts of Manchester in the 1970s, when we would stand for ages in the cold while the fire brigade checked the building. Because you couldn’t afford to be casual.
I remember too, the revived IRA campaign – the bombs in the City of London, one of which rattled the windows of the flat that The Other Half and I shared, one evening when I was home alone. It was terrifying. And another on a morning when I looked out from our bedroom window and saw the cloud from the explosion rising around the Nat-West building, less than a mile away. The south-west of traditionally working-class Hackney is a stone’s throw from the City.
In other words, I most certainly would not play down the history of what happened.
But back to Branagh’s film specifically. It makes clear, for instance, that the British troops sent to Belfast to stop the violence seemed remarkably forgetful about who they were supposed to be protecting. It is full of the menace as it shows thugs taking over neighbourhoods and, tragically, dividing communities.
It nods to the role Protestant clergy played in the demonisation of their Catholic neighbours (and the hellfire-and-damnation sermon rings absolutely true for this daughter of an evangelical minister).
No, it is not some sort of Ken Loach take on Northern Ireland, but I suggest that, if it was, it would have fewer viewers overall, with the potential for less education of more general and less obviously politicised audiences. Perhaps some will actually go and read TA Jackson’s Ireland Her Own after seeing this?
Wikipedia describes it as a “comedy-drama”, but while there are some laughs, I think this completely downplays what Branagh has achieved. The Troubles are still raw – see Brexit and the Good Friday Agreement – and I think that this opens up the possibility for a wider audience to perhaps see it differently.
Plus, sectarianism and bigotry is as big a problem as ever, across the world. Just as Taika Waititi’s 2019 comedy-drama Jojo Rabbit viewed Nazism from a child’s perspective, and pointed up how children are taught – groomed – into intolerance, so this views the situation in Northern Ireland through a child’s eyes. Yet in avoiding adult sophistication, it makes similar points very clearly. And one could add that, for many English audiences in particular, it might be a slight surprise to see who the thugs are.
But back to this film. The cinematography from Haris Zambarloukos is wonderful. The use of music from Van Morrison works perfectly, the decisions on the use of occasional colour are interesting and Branagh’s use of pop cultural references works well.
On the performances, there is not a bad one to be seen, but perhaps the big plaudits go to Hill who is remarkable in the central role, and Balfe, who gives a powerhouse turn. Hinds and Dench offer the sort of support grounded in their vast experience and abilities that one would expect.
All in all, very much worth seeing.
The Other Half and I, for instance, had one streaming service beforehand (Amazon, as a by-product of other things) and now we have ... well, at least three more than I’m aware of, all of which are for the screening of films or TV and not as a by-product of lower delivery charges.
In general terms, I’d say they’re pretty good value, but it strikes me that, in terms of cinema, that they could be seen as a very positive development.
Between 2016 and the start of the pandemic, the OH and I had developed a big cinema-going habit. For instance, we managed 21 cinema visits in 2018, with 19 the following year.
Of course, 2020 was the first year of the pandemic and we managed just five, of which Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (which we’ve seen in two different National Theatre stage productions) we streamed just before Christmas that year, which came at additional cost, since we'd just lost our wifi service after a big blow-out that lasted into February, and streamed it, therefore, by linking a 4G phone to the TV.
Last year, remarkably – and in spite of the very best efforts of COVID – we managed 12 cinema visits and one streaming of a just-released film (Green Knight, which was on nowhere near us in sensible terms).
For instance, on my birthday late last year – Saturday 11 December – we went to see Stephen Spielberg’s West Side Story on our nearest Vue’s biggest screen, with approximately 30 people occupying the 430 seats. How safe can you feel these days, in an indoor space, outside your home? We felt perfectly safe that afternoon.
But streaming has also meant that we have caught films that we might not have pencilled in for cinema attendance. Just over a week ago, with Ormicron case numbers finally falling in London, we saw Spider-Man: No Way Home at the cinema. And thoroughly enjoyed it.
The day after, we got around to streaming Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog.
Wow. Just wow. I’m not sure that, even in a pandemic-free world, I’d have gone to a cinema to see that (which rather makes a fool of me), but a paid-for streaming service ensures that (presumably) the producers get a cut of the takings, rather earlier and presumably at a greater level than if one had to wait a year or more to watch it at home.
And presumably such a mixed release also increases the number of people who see the film.
But back to The Power of the Dog specifically. It is a simply stunning film: performances, visuals, music, themes ... all utterly superb. Over a week later, I simply can’t get it out of my head.
And similarly today, when the OH and I watched the Apple TV+-produced The Tragedy of Macbeth.
It has had a limited cinema release – however minimum a cinema release, that is what is needed in order to ensure that a film qualifies to be considered for the Oscars – but it’s mainstream release was, in effect, on Apple TV+ on Friday and we had signed up to AppleTV+ primarily because we wanted to see it.
This is another superb film. I have seen some comments suggesting that the two central performances are somehow ‘underplayed’. These seem to be put about by people who apparently imagine that Shakespeare must be performed in an histrionic manner and can’t imagine it not being so.
Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand as the Macbeths are simply superb. These are controlled performances – no hysterics, sure, but the control helps ensure that the descent into madness in both of them is utterly believable.
And Kathryn Hunter as the trio of witches is creepy beyond belief.
The cinematography – it was shot entirely on stage, entirely in B&W – is simply stunning. This is a visual masterclass. Some have suggested that it echoes Fritz Lang, but it’s much more a case of being influenced by German Expressionist cinema in general, with a nod to Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, plus a big dollop of the lonely, alienating nature of the paintings of Giorgio de Chrico.
The reality is that Joel Coen has created possibly the finest cinematic telling yet of Macbeth – and yes, that includes Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood – while having to work in a world where the cinema was not, physically, easy. And streaming almost certainly means that more people will view the film now, early in its release, than would have done so if its release was limited to a few cinemas, as many ‘arthouse’ films are.
We will only really find out in time how this all pans out, but perhaps streaming and cinema can live alongside each and, indeed, actually benefit each other. I very much hope so.
