C#m7 … c sharp minor seventh

DeLillo, is, in case you’re unfamiliar, the greatest living American writer (no, not Chuck Palanhniuk). His opus, Underworld is one of the few great novels that is in fact not only readable, but brilliant. Falling Man isn’t exactly as good as Underworld, but then nothing coming out of the US these days is likely to be.

I’m not going to waste time writing about the story, suffice to say it’s about a survivor of the World Trade Center disaster. What I love about DeLillo is the way he approaches every single sentence as if it was the opening line of a two page short story; he never overuses words, but writes in a lyrical but hard-hitting style as a narrator, then colloquially when presenting speech. I don’t think there’s anyone else writing who can do speech as well as DeLillo. His writing makes you realise how stilted an unrealistic a lot of speech is in fiction. His genius is not only to write the usual, everyday conversations, but to write about people discussing big topics like politics, religion, linguistics, philosophy, art, September the 11th, in a way that feels authentic. His characters talk about these topics in the way people do in real life, a mixture of profundity and extraneous detail.

My personal favourite scene in the book is when the main character is walking through the streets of NYC, after having walked out of the WTC tower. DeLillo describes him as having “glass in his hair and face, marbles bolls of blood and light”. What DeLillo does masterfully is take everyday moments, even horrific ones, and imbue them with beauty and comedy.

Not to make this blog a repository of things I hate, but sometimes you read or watch something which is so awful and yet so overpraised…

The Great Fire taught me several things about reading and the publishing industry. The main thing was that American book clubs must be some kind of nest of sentimental, nostalgic Anglophiles. That’s the only reason I can see why anyone would enjoy this terrible, terrible book.

Shirley Hazzard has a spectacular name, and this book, supposedly about the aftermath of the bombing of Tokyo, sounded promising. Sadly, you can’t judge a book by it’s over, or indeed it’s jacket, title, name of the author and, above all, recommendations from American book club associations.

Hazzard is some kind of relic of a pre-sexual revolution world. From her picture she looks like a nice old lady, but she’s no Doris Lessing. Instead of writing about the bombing of Tokyo, in fact she has written a book about romance which gives every appearance of being written in, by and for the 1950s. One main character is some kind of horrific wartime British stereotype, an explorer and officer in the RAF. The other is the daughter of an Australian army officer posted to sort out the mess after the allied victory in the Pacific. Although the girl is in fact 17, I found myself constantly forgetting this, as she behaves, and in presented, as a prepubescent child. This makes the RAF captain’s infatuation with her more than little bit disgusting, and totally incomprehensible.

However what made me hate this book so virulently are two things - the ridiculous, painstaking overwrite, and Hazzard’s strange hatred of Australasians (Hazzard is herself Australian, but from what I understand has lived in America for a long time.

Every second word in this book seems to have gone through two or three different thesauruses, each more exact and less passionate than the last, to the point when any immediacy the novel might have had is stripped away. In fact, some of the words she uses are so obscure it’s doubtful most readers even understand them Hazzard has apparently been chipping away at this book for 20 years or so, and it definitely shows.

Throughout the book, Hazzard steps in to insult Australians for their sense of humour, and New Zealanders for their provincialisms. She seems to particular hate the way Australians tend to laugh at themselves for pretentiousnesses. Understandable, I suppose, considering Hazzard’s dreary Anglophilia.

I’ve never really understood Anglophilia, primarily because the things Americans seem to phil are either dead or dying in British culture (sorry, ‘English’ culture), and good fucking riddance. Reserve. Stilted conversation. Class apartheid. Spelling words in illogical ways. What made me dislike this book was the thought of book clubs in Missouri or somewhere sitting down and revelling in this imaginary, over-nostalgised vision of ‘England’. This makes Hazzard’s frequent lapses into American idiom all the more funny. Here’s an example:

“Oh, my darling, how could you possibly leave me!”

“My dear! I must go, but, I will write you!”*

I made this part up, by the way, but it’s pretty accurate.

Hazzard has done well, in a sense, in managing to distill pretty much everything I could potentially despise about American fiction into one book; Anglophila without any real cultural knowledge, pretentiousness, overuse of the thesaurus, sentimentally, sexism, nostalgia and of course having the nerve to have a name like Shriley Hazzard and not write hard-boiled crime fiction.

* (For future reference. It’s write TO you)

A Righteous Kill.

The movie opens with Pacino and DeNiro, blasting away with various guns at a firing range. There’s something so execrably smug about this that very nearly made me give up on this movie right away. It’s a shot of DeNiro, panning to Pacino. The message here is - look, two famous people! Together! This is great.

Of course it’s not, in fact it’s a piece of shit.

A big shock for me recently has been the sudden realisation that Pacino CANNOT act. He has no ability at all. In fact, what he’s been doing for the past thirty odd years is shouting.  I’m guessing he imagines something really annoying, like forgetting to bring his shopping list with him to the grocery store, and lets rip. The rest of the time he shambles around mumbling like a hobo.

DeNiro, frankly, isn’t a whole lot better. He certainly can act, especially when he’s given decent roles with stage directions other than ‘grimace here’, and ‘more grimace’. Sadly this is one of those movies. Most of the time he looks like he’s just backed into someone’s Hum-Vee and is trying to work out how much the damage is going to set him back. Nasty scrape, Bob.

My favourite scene for unintentional comedy is when he, Pacino and some other cops and in the ‘rec’ room, pumping iron. DeNiro looks like he’s about to do his back in and would much rather be at home with a nice cup of tea. The problem here isn’t that these two actors are too old for the part, and no longer have the drive they once had to engage the audience… Actually, that is exactly the problem.

The script is also nonsense, of course. Much like Pacino’s last awful thriller, 89 Minutes or whatever the hell it was called (a title apparently designed to make you realise how much of your life you’ve wasted watching it), the plot trundles along, but the general feeling is very detached, like no one really cares what’s has happened. Boxes are ticked, and the story progresses, but nothing really happens.

Reviewers have praised the ‘interplay’ between the leads. What interplay? It’s like watching your vaguely-amusing uncle talking to his neighbour about his new driveway. You might stop and listen for a couple minutes, but it’s not exactly, well, Lethal Weapon III even. At least that was entertaining.

As an alternative, if you have illegally downloaded this movie, I recommend watching it with the badly-transcribed subtitles, available from subscene.com. Here’s a small sample:

DeNiro: What?
Pacino: He cleans the objective.
DeNiro:I joust in the eyes.
Pacino: Fuera.
DeNiro: What?
Pacino: Fue quieto.
DeNiro: Fue out. Touché fell down so.
Pacino: Ho, we go, it is enough. Not I want to listen to other word.
DeNiro: My grandmother him could do more good.
Pacino: I once saw playing 10 games at the same time. There were 5 or 6 people on each table.
DeNiro: I could have been the champion world cup.
Pacino: But he lost the head. He became crazy and paranoiac. And I attacked anyone.

DeNiro: My noun is David Fisk.

Not much of an expert on American degree systems, somehow I guess 102 doesn’t come after 101, but either way I feel I’m past the basics.

So far I’ve written five more or less complete songs I’m happy with.  One thing I’ve found  very helpful in finding cohrds and progressions is the concept of relative minor and major. A great deal of songs, I’ve noticed, use a relative minor in the chorus to give contrast to the major in the verse, or vice a versa. It’s like changing key, only not, because the chords you’re playing fit into two major and minor keys.

For example, in Am, the relative major is C, which works both ways so in C, Am is the relative minor. Play C F G in the verse, then Am C D in the chorus, for example. To find the relative major, just play the third of the minor chord - so the third of Am is C, second string first fret, the third of Em is G, and so on. The find the relative minor, simply play a minor chord whose 3rd is the same as your root - so if you have a song in A major, you’ll play an F#m because the 3rd is A, same as your root.

This also works the other way. I’m not sure of the exact name, but take a major chord and play the 3rd note as minor. So the third is C is E, which becomes Em. In the key of C, a piece in Em makes a nice bridge.

Here’s an example: I wrote a song with chords C G Em F not exactly revolutionary but any songwriter quickly comes to realise most songs are no more complex than this. I wanted something a little different for the verse, so I changed to the relative minor key, Am.  The root is C, and the 3rd of Am is C, so I just changed the first chord to Am. Next we have a G chord, and Em has a G as its 3rd. The Em in the original song goes into its relative major, which is G. Then the F becomes Dm. So we have Am, Em, G, Dm. It works as kind of a negative image of the original progression.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relative_minor