Alphaville - Jean-Luc Godard

 ALPHAVILLE - JEAN-LUC GODARD

I've seen the film and now I've read the book but I'm still at a loss as to what Alphaville is actually about. The film was scripted and directed by Jean-Luc Godard so it was never going to be run-of-the-mill and based on his oeuvre was always going to be stylish - which it is, but almost to the point of distraction. Perhaps that's the point?

Set some time in the future, Alphaville is the name of a city where society is run by a gigantic super-computer called Alpha 60, where life is based on pure logic and technocracy. All emotion has been eradicated and all words pertaining to emotions are no longer in use. Bibles have been replaced by dictionaries that are continuously being updated not with new words but with words being deleted. Language, in fact, seems to no longer have any meaning and words just go round in circles as illustrated by when receptionists for example, instead of saying "You're welcome" say "I'm very well, thank you, not at all."

According to Alpha 60 via its piped broadcasts 'The present is the form of all life, and there are no means by which this can be avoided. Time is a circle which is endlessly revolving. Everything has been said. Nothing existed here before us. No one. We are absolutely alone here. We are unique, dreadfully unique. The meaning of words and of expressions is no longer grasped. One isolated word or an isolated detail in a drawing can be understood but the comprehension of the whole escapes us.'

Which sounds rather similar to how our present day Facebook and social media is.

Into this dystopia enters Lemmy Caution, a sort of secret agent/gumshoe detective posing as a newspaper journalist whose mission - like Willard's in Apocalypse Now regarding Colonel Kurtz - is to terminate with extreme prejudice the architect of Alpha 60, Professor von Braun. After much chasing around and thwarting of assassination attempts upon his own life, Caution succeeds in his mission and kills von Braun and destroys Alpha 60, escaping Alphaville with von Braun's daughter (in the film played by Anna Karina) who, emerging from her oppressed mind-state tells Caution she loves him. 

And that's it.

It's to be presumed Alphaville as in the city is a metaphor for totalitarianism though whether it's aimed at the Russian or the Western model is down to the reader/viewer to decide? What is clear, however, is that if anything Alphaville as in the story and the film is an exercise in Pop Art and is essentially a Lichtenstein-style comic strip captured on celluloid. If viewed this way and read this way then it starts to make some kind of sense. Though what it's actually about is still somewhat open to question.

John Serpico

Pic - Jack Kerouac

 PIC - JACK KEROUAC

Jack Kerouac's last novel, completed just weeks before his death and what springs to mind on reading it is the 10000 Maniacs song Hey Jack Kerouac from their In My Tribe album, and the lines: "Hey Jack Kerouac, I think of your mother and the tears she cried for none other, than her little boy lost in our little world that hated and then dared to drag him down. Her little boy courageous who chose his words from mouths of babes got lost in the wood." And that, essentially, is the story of Jack Kerouac and the story also of Pictorial Review Jackson, the ten-year-old narrator of Pic.

In many ways this is On The Road but through the eyes of an orphaned black child, told and written phonetically in a patoi-like North Carolina dialect. It's the story of that child as he travels across America with his elder brother, first to New York and then to California, with him describing the places he sees and the people he meets in a wide-eyed manner brimful of innocence and wonder. Pictorial, or 'Pic' for short, is the proverbial 'little boy lost' searching for a place he might call a home in a world daring to drag him down.

As might be expected and even hoped for, there are a lot of familiar Kerouac traits within these pages as in the sense of forward motion through the act of travelling, descriptions of places and people encountered, the celebration of jazz, the sense of adventure, and the sense of enthusiasm unbound. As exclaimed by Pic's elder brother at the start of their travels: 'Boy! You and me's hittin that old road for the WAY-yonder. Hey, look out everybody, here we come.' And it very much continues in that vein from there on, even when dealing with poverty, hunger, exhaustion and despair.

An interesting part of the story is when they cross the Mason Dixie line when travelling on a bus and on being told this by his brother, Pic is confused as he hadn't seen any kind of line at all so can only presume he must have been asleep when they crossed it.

'What did the line look like?' Pic asks him, to which his brother replies that he didn't know because he hadn't seen it either. 'But there is such a line,' he tells Pic 'Only thing is it ain't on the ground, and it ain't in the air neither, it's jess in the head of Mason and Dixie, jess like all other lines, state lines, parallel thirty-eight lines and iron Europe curtain lines is all jess 'maginery lines in people's heads and don't have nothing to do with the ground. Yes sir, that's all it is.'

And then there's the old man they meet along the road past the Susquehanna River who tells them he's heading to Canada, who doesn't stop talking and doesn't stop walking. Pic and his brother follow him for some miles until they realise he's probably crazy and so leave him to forge ahead alone until he's gone like a ghost. And then it dawns upon Pic's brother that it probably was a ghost, doomed to walk the highways and byways of America forever, always looking to find Canada but never getting there because he's going the wrong way all the time. And you wonder: Was this Jack Kerouac himself? And in fact, are all the characters in Pic aspects or depictions of how Kerouac saw himself?

At the age of 47 Jack Kerouac died from an abdominal hemorrhage brought about by a lifetime of alcohol abuse. He left behind him, however, numerous books and poems that have influenced generations of readers, his crowning glory being On The Road. The thing is, it's actually debatable as to whether On The Road is Kerouac's best book or not? It's the most influential, without any doubt, but for a fuller and better understanding and appreciation of him and the whole Beat Generation 'explosion' it's advisable to read his other books as well, Pic being just one of them.

John Serpico

Amsterdam - Ian McEwan

 AMSTERDAM - IAN MCEWAN

I was an Ian McEwan virgin. Never read anything by him before in my life but being tri-curious I thought I'd take the big plunge and give him a go. It was the title of his 1998 Booker Prize winner, Amsterdam, that attracted me as I wanted to know what it might be about and with that I entered blindly. I tell you: It was like entering Pan's labyrinth.

Essentially, Amsterdam turns out to be a morality play centring upon two men. One, a newspaper editor and the second a composer commissioned to write a concerto to mark the approaching millennium. Binding them together is the fact of them both being ex-lovers of a socialite who has suddenly passed away from an unspecified illness. Following her funeral, her husband approaches the newspaper editor with some photographs taken by his late wife of the current British Foreign Secretary dressed in women's clothes.

Knowing that by publishing the photographs the circulation figures of his newspaper will be boosted ten-fold and reverse it's decline, the editor is all for it although the composer objects to their publication on the grounds of it being a betrayal of their ex-lover's private life. Apart from reviving the fortunes of his newspaper, the editor also knows that if published the photos will lead to the immediate ruin of the Foreign Secretary, therefore saving the country from him being the next Prime Minister.

It all makes for a good, liberal argument. Should a person's private life be used to expose hypocrisy? The Foreign Secretary is of the hang 'em and flog 'em brigade; a family values man and scourge of immigrants, asylum seekers and travellers; openly talking about the reintroduction of national service and of taking the country out of Europe. Does it matter that in his private life he likes to dress up as a woman? The composer argues not: "If it's OK to be a transvestite," he says "then it's OK for a racist to be one. What's not OK is to be a racist."

It's a good point well made. Is it right to court and pander to prejudice in a bid to counter prejudice? Is 'by any means necessary' really always as clear cut as that? 

Years ago there were rumours of a set of photographs floating around of Margaret Thatcher's husband, Dennis, backscuttling a call girl. If it's true these photos existed then why were they never published and if they had been published would it have led to the downfall of Thatcher? Being an avowed advocate of Victorian, Christian family values they would surely have damaged Thatcher irrecoverably but what would that have said about British society? That war crimes are okay, that the wholesale destruction of mining communities is fine, that taking a wrecking ball to civil society is acceptable? Let your husband be caught indulging his extramarital peccadillos, however, then you're for the high jump and no question about it.

In more recent times, following accusations of under-age child abuse and publication of the photo showing Prince Andrew with his arm around the accuser, though his reputation has been damaged the prince seems to have got away with it. Following the CCTV footage of Matt Hancock snogging his aide, the Health Secretary was forced to resign though not before being defended by the Prime Minister. Give it a year or so and it can be almost guaranteed that Hancock will be back in politics.

The question of morality, hypocrisy and ethics is what McEwan's book spins on then, and in his well-written dance of words leads to the answer to 'who will survive and what will be left of them?' The title of the book - Amsterdam - comes into it because that's where the editor and the composer end up, at the Concertgebouw for a rehearsal of the millennial symphony and where the moral conundrum is resolved.

According to various literary critics, Amsterdam is 'brilliant' and 'chilling' whilst according to A S Byatt it's 'shocking'. Are these people somehow bribed to laud such plaudits upon these books they review, I wonder? Ian McEwan is a professional writer so you would of course expect Amsterdam to be deftly written and finely executed but I'd say it falls very short of being 'brilliant'. It maintains your attention until the end, it's entertaining, it's slick and not overly complicated but at best I'd call it 'interesting'. It's a modern day black comedy going over some very old ground. How it won the Booker Prize in 1998 is a mystery and the real conundrum.

John Serpico

Banga - Patti Smith

 BANGA - PATTI SMITH

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a cd? Is it a book? Whatever you might call it, Banga by Patti Smith is surely confusing for the anally retentive and the fastidious librarian. How to categorise it is the question? And where to keep it? Well, first and foremost as it's in book form the only place to keep it is obviously on your bookshelf even though it is as well Patti Smith's eleventh album released/published in 2012 as both a cd with a book and a book with a cd. More importantly than all this, however: Is it any good?

The first thing to acknowledge is that just about anything created by Patti Smith is going to be of interest due to it simply being by Patti Smith, which means it's almost guaranteed to be a work of art. Banga is no exception. Written over a period of three years, the twelve compositions (including a version of Neil Young's 'After The Goldrush') work equally well as both poems and lyrics. Not that this should come as a surprise, of course.

The subject matter of the compositions are in many ways typical Patti Smith fare, reflecting her current travels, concerns and meditations. The featured characters and scenarios ranging from Mikel Bulgakov, Nikolai Gogol, Andrei Tarkovsky, Amerigo Vespucci, Maria Schneider, Johnny Depp, and Amy Winehouse, to the discovery of America, the Tohoku earthquake, the stations of Saint Francis of Assisi's life, and the threat of environmental devastation.

One of the problems Patti Smith has always had to contend with is that her debut album, Horses, has always been her masterpiece and so has been near impossible to surpass. Not that she hasn't tried and often come close, it should be said. How do you follow what is, in fact, one of the greatest albums of all time? The poem/song 'Amerigo' in/on Banga is quite possibly one of the best things she's ever written and that's obviously no mean feat, and for this alone makes Banga an important addition to her canon. It concerns the exploits of the navigator Amerigo Vespucci, from whom America got its name, and him coming to the New World with the intention of baptizing and bringing salvation to the natives. "Ah the salvation of souls," writes/sings Patti "But wisdom we had not. For these people had neither king nor lord and bowed to no one, for they have lived in their own liberty." Come the end, rather than converting the natives, Amerigo himself is transformed. "And the sky opened, and we laid down our armour. And we danced naked as they, baptized in the rain of the New World." In its depth of subject matter and its ambitious scope - it works. As does the whole collection.  With its beautiful design and its array of accompanying black and white photographs taken by Patti on her old polaroid camera, Banga is without doubt a work of art from one of the world's true artists. 

And whilst on the subject of Patti Smith, it's interesting that she's one of the very few artists who has been with me throughout almost the whole of my life. From my very first introduction to her via a cassette tape of Horses at the age of seventeen whilst living on the southeast coast of Crete through to the present day and being given a copy of Banga as a present. I've seen her playing live a number of times and though we've never spoken our paths have crossed, from backstage at the Glastonbury festival, to the Van Gogh museum, to the streets of Amsterdam with us passing each other by, looking straight at each other almost as if to see who would blink first.

A thing to appreciate about her, I've always thought, is her lack of pretension which of all things might appear to be a strange thing to say given her penchant for namedropping and her range of oft-cited influences? What should be remembered, however, is that essentially Patti Smith is of working class origin and that what elevated her to renowned artist level was and still is her love of reading. She's an autodidact. She's the living proof of how by simply reading, the world becomes a much more wondrous place and life becomes a much more fascinating and beautiful experience.

As Patti puts it in a final sign-off at the end of Banga: Believe or Explode                                                                                                                                                             John Serpico    

What Happened, Miss Simone? - Alan Light

 WHAT HAPPENED, MISS SIMONE? - ALAN LIGHT

The things you learn. Nina Simone wasn't her real name. She was actually born Eunice Kathleen Waymon and only changed her name to prevent her mother who was a devout preacher finding out her daughter had taken up playing 'the devil's music' in a nightclub. Apparently, 'Nina' was taken from a nickname given to her by an ex-boyfriend and 'Simone' was taken from the French actress Simone Signoret. The things you learn.

When thinking of Nina Simone you tend to think of three things: her voice, her piano playing, and her politics; sometimes you think of all these three things at once and it's at these times that her stature as an artist morphs from the beautiful to the sublime. Her rich contralto, her classically-trained piano playing and her black liberation politics made for a heady brew that to this day echoes down the ages attracting generation upon generation of new listeners.

According to Alan Light in his Nina Simone biography What Happened, Miss Simone? the first time Simone met Martin Luther King Jnr she said to him "I'm not nonviolent" to which King replied "Okay, I'm glad to meet you." She then extended her hand and said "I'm so glad to meet you too."

Growing up as a black woman in America at that time Simone of course was aware of discrimination and segregation but it was the killing of four young black girls by a bomb exploding while they were attending bible class at a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 that for her put into full glare the evil and injustice of American racism. "When they killed the little girls in Alabama," she's quoted as saying "that's when I changed."

The first thing Simone did was to write a song with the title 'Mississippi Goddam' that for its lyrical directness and undisguised anger is somewhat startling even to this day. This song, according to Light, marked a dividing line in Simone's career and when she premiered it at the Carnegie Hall in 1964, introduced a level of outrage and immediacy unlike anything else in the black civil rights protest movement. Come the summer of 1969 Simone was on stage asking her audience "Are you ready, black people? Are you ready to smash white things? Burn buildings? Are you ready? Are you ready to build black things?"

Nina Simone was an inspiration to black people everywhere, no more acutely realised than in such songs as her 'Ain't Got No/I Got Life' medley and 'To Be Young, Gifted And Black'; the latter of which when playing live would introduce it by saying "It is not addressed to white people primarily. Though it doesn't put you down in any way... it simply ignores you. For my people need all the inspiration and love that they can get." The flipside of this, however, was that Nina Simone needed all the inspiration and love she could get also and though there were plenty who loved her dearly it seemed never to be enough and she would always end up hurting those who loved her the most.

Alan Light's book depicts Simone as an extremely formidable woman who could clearly be more than a handful, not suffering fools for a moment yet suffering from her own personal demons. Interestingly, some of Simone's behaviour and antics are remindful of Adam Ant who was eventually diagnosed as being bipolar, subsequently explaining a lot of things about him and his career. It isn't, however, until near to the end of Light's book that the words 'manic depressive' and 'bipolar' are mentioned in regard to Simone and then from her daughter, Lisa, who in 1984 began hearing these words being mentioned although the terms stopped short of being an official diagnosis. For Lisa, a possible clinical explanation for her mother's behaviour meant reconsidering her mother's whole life and actions.

"Would you say you were an angry black woman?" Simone was once asked in an interview. "No," she shot back "I'm an intelligent black woman. I sing from intelligence. Anger has its place, anger has fire and fire moves things but I sing from intelligence." And therein lies a significant point. Attempts at defining Nina Simone and attempts at explaining her through a mental health condition/chemical imbalance are attempts at corralling and boxing her in. She would, however, have none of it, presenting herself instead as royalty - a Queen - who demanded respect and particularly in regard to money who demanded she be paid her dues. Her dignity, her demeanour, her belligerence and her behaviour frightened people; all backed-up by a gun she allegedly kept in her handbag and her willingness to even chase with a knife an audience member who'd annoyed her.

Come 1999 and at the age of sixty-six though her participation in civil rights activities had long ended ("Active in civil rights? Motherfucker, I am civil rights!") Nina Simone's formidability was still very much intact as evidenced by her backstage rider reportedly asked for at that year's Nick Cave-hosted Meltdown Festival in London - that rider consisting of champagne, sausages, and cocaine. A rider fit for a Queen.

Nina Simone passed away in 2003 at the age of seventy and with her death went the passing of a legend the like of which the world will probably never see again.

John Serpico

Chomsky And Globalisation - Jeremy Fox

 CHOMSKY AND GLOBALISATION - JEREMY FOX

I eat Noam Chomsky books for breakfast. I chew them up and then spit them out. I gorge on them. This one, however - Chomsky And Globalisation - written by Jeremy Fox is but a snack, a nibble, a morsel and because of this it's not enough and after reading it I'm still hungry.

Chomsky is known as the 'Einstein of modern linguistics' and was once arguably the most important intellectual alive although whether that accolade still holds today is debatable due entirely to how old he is now. He is still to this day regularly interviewed, however, popping up more recently on YouTube zoom-talks where his views are sought on various geo-political and environmental issues.

For most, Chomsky's major work has been around the manufacturing of consent, American hegemony and globalisation; the driving force behind it being what Bakunin once called an 'instinct for freedom' and an objection on principle to unjustified claims of authority over people. 'Any form of authority requires justification' Chomsky once wrote 'And any time you find a form of authority illegitimate, you ought to challenge it.' Which, once you start looking is practically all authority.

Jeremy Fox's book is about globalisation and the way it's presented and the way it's perceived as opposed to the reality of it as explained by Chomsky. Economic globalisation in all its supposed grandeur is meant to be the path to universal prosperity and the solution to the Third World's economic problems. It is, however, nothing of the kind and is instead the arbiter of social, political and economic decline for the many and vast profit and consolidation of power for the few. It's the legitimization of inequality being normal, natural and even desirable. As Fox puts it: '70 per cent of global economic activity is nowadays speculation and in the windowless bunkers in which fortunes are made, nothing is actually produced. Nothing, that is, except wealth.'

And to whom and to where does this wealth go? Who actually profits? According to the established wisdom as declared by all those in positions of security and advantage we all ultimately benefit. And of course, the system isn't rigged and of course it's only right and proper that the winners should end up enormously rich. And as for the losers? Well, they end up on the breadline but that's their own fault for being losers.

It's the philosophy and language of Donald Trump. Remember him? Except that Trump was just being open about it because it's also the philosophy and language of every cut-throat, Ayn Rand-influenced, middle-of-the-road, so-called reasonable, sensible, neo-liberal advocate of the democratic free-enterprise system that ever crawled over the bodies both physically and theoretically of every dead child refugee washed-up upon the shore, portrayed in your daily newspaper tabloid as a threat to the national standard of living.

The thing about Jeremy Fox's book is that, as I said, it's not enough. It's important to state where problems lie, of course, and it's important to recognise them but beyond that things start to get a little vague specifically in regard to the question of what is to be done about the problem? According to Fox we have two choices: We either acquiesce in global injustice and tyranny or we join in the struggle for justice, democracy and freedom. 

So what to do? When all political Parties support free enterprise, globalisation, the private ownership of property and the profit motive then who do you turn to? Where do you go? What to do?

What to do...?

John Serpico

Drugs Of Hallucination - Sidney Cohen

 DRUGS OF HALLUCINATION - SIDNEY COHEN

To have or not to have? To have or have not? When it comes to the Covid-19 vaccination that is the question and whilst for most it might well be a no-brainer, for some it's an issue of procrastination. It's not for me to advise what to do but as it's one of the most important questions of the age it demands some consideration at least. Which brings us in a very roundabout way to Drugs Of Hallucination, written by Sidney Cohen and first published in 1965.

To give it its subtitle, Cohen's book is 'The LSD Story' and though any link between lysergic acid diethylamide and the Covid-19 vaccination might be non-existent, a similarity on the point as to whether the drug should be taken or not is there. There are differences, of course, but it's all to do with the reasons why some people say yes, do it, take it, have it, whilst others advocate caution and some even outright condemnation and rejection.

The thing about imbibing LSD - as with almost anything - is that once you've taken it there's no turning back. It's too late. It's in you. Which means whatever effect it might have upon you be it physically or psychologically is going to be there potentially forever. It's going to leave a footprint. Might your whole outlook and perception of life be any different to how it was before the drug was taken? There's just no way of knowing.

Cohen's book touches upon and explores a good many salient points in telling its story, many of which can be interpreted and translated so as to apply to circumstances other than the imbibing of a drug. The similarities between a model psychosis and a visionary state for example are discussed and whether the taking of LSD can lead to either? It's an obvious question, of course, and one most famously cited by Aldous Huxley's Heaven or Hell quote.

There is also the subject of mind control and whether psychochemicals can lead to robotization and a kind of dictatorship without tears? It's a fear shared by a lot of Covid-19 anti-vaxxers who seem to think vaccination will lead to them being controlled by Bill Gates. It's certainly possible that drugs can be used for mind control, says Cohen, though there is probably more to fear from a television advertisement or even from your own parents when it comes to such manipulation of the mind.

When it comes to the question of LSD and whether to take it or not, Cohen comes firmly down on the side of caution citing not only examples and testimonies from those who have benefited incredibly from the drug both psychologically and even spiritually but also from those who have been permanently damaged by it to the point of death by misadventure or even suicide.

Not surprisingly there is no love lost between Cohen and the likes of Timothy Leary and other advocates of free use of the drug for all. In his condemnation of Leary there is, however, a whiff of elitism on his part particularly when talking about the availability of the drug to 'the lower classes'.

At one point when talking about marijuana, Cohen tells us that in Western cities it's 'the marginally adjusted' who smoke it either for ''kicks' or to work up enough courage to commit a felony'. Which is plainly wrong and even somewhat ludicrous. He then goes on to say 'some 300 million (worldwide) are supposed to use hashish regularly, almost as many as those who take opium'. These are figures that I suspect need to be verified and quantified but if true then following Cohen's logic that's an awful lot of felony.

There are similar clues dotted throughout the book that suggest Cohen isn't learning from his own insights and that his judgement and evaluation is being guided by his own prejudices and academic elitism. He's very good at capturing the effects of LSD as in 'the breathing of flowers, the undulation of walls' as he is in capturing its power and profound impact: 'I have just come back from seeing the world for the first time' and 'How do you describe red to a person who was born blind?'

His more complex insights, however, hang glibly upon coat hangers like suit jackets bought but never worn: 'It is important to realise that the world as we see it is far from an exact image of the physical world. Perception is variable and often quite erroneous. One limiting factor is that we perceive only what we can conceive; knowing is prerequisite to seeing and strongly determines what is seen. We tend to see what can be incorporated into our established frame of reference and try to reject that which does not fit.'

Hence Cohen's comments about 'the lower classes' and 'the marginally adjusted'?

'A map stands in the same relationship to the territory it covers as our idea of reality stands to reality', he tells us. And that's it. Cohen's revelations, points of view and insights are maps; some leading to where you might wish to go, others leading to the back of beyond, some detailed and precise, some clearly very wrong as if drawn with crayons. Cohen's book is a map. Some of it being very useful in regards to drug culture, some of it being less than useless.

As to the question about whether drugs (or vaccines, even) should be taken or not, if applying the same Cohen map analogy then it depends on which map you're reading. If anti-drugs (and anti-vax) then you can only wait and see where that gets you - which is probably nowhere. If reading only your official, government sanctioned ordnance survey map then again you can only wait and see where that leads you - along a very straight and narrow path.

As to my own personal opinion, I would never advocate the use of drugs but I would never condemn it either. As for the Covid-19 vaccination, yes, I've had mine and had no qualms about it either, if only for the very simple reason that against some of the dangerous stuff that in the past I've willingly and very happily put into my body, up my nose and in my veins well, I feel it just doesn't compare. As Danny, the purveyor of rare herbs and prescribed chemicals in Withnail And I said: 'Why trust one drug and not the other? That's politics, isn't it?''

John Serpico