Robert Altman's 3 Women, Peter Weir's The Last Wave, Francis Bacon's Landscape and a conversation in a hotel in 1978

“See the cliffs again, be again between the cliffs and the sea, reeling shrinking with your hands over your ears, headlong, innocent, suspect, noxious” - Beckett

Concierge: Good evening sir, how was tonight’s event?

Screenwriter: …

Concierge: Sir?

Screenwriter: I had the worst conversation with a woman at a party. Just the worst. The kind of conversation where things slip out of your control before you’ve even opened you mouth. You watch the words skip down out of reach like goats on a hillside. Your self so exposed and yet strange. Just the worst.

Concierge: I’m sorry to hear that sir, but I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as you’ve described, these things always sound worse to ourselves than to the other party.

Screenwriter: Yes sure, but this is different, this is important, this was at an industry party and things have a tendency to get around. No, things just do get around, you say something or do something at one of those things and it's like piss in the swimming pool, it’s everywhere, and you can’t get it back in the tube. The worst thing is, that wasn’t me last night. I don’t know what happened. I’m a writer, I control language and yet there I was talking to this girl and everything was totally, totally out of my control.

Concierge: I’m sorry to hear that sir, would you like to talk about it?

Screenwriter: Maybe. I said some stupid stuff though, I was trying to impress her, talk about the projects I was doing but then I realised that no one cares about these stupid little gigs, a scene here and a scene there on some useless studio-built production so I tried to bulk it out a bit, bring it somewhere unexpected and told her I was working on a radio play that I’m also directing.

Concierge: Well done sir that sounds like a fascinating project.

Screenwriter: But it isn’t! I mean, I’m not working on one! That’s really just the start of the problem too, I don’t know anything about these sorts of things either but this talking at the party was  just got out of hand. It continued to roll away from me down the hill and the words were coming from god knows where, but I started pitching this whole thing to this girl right then and there.

Concierge: Pitching the radio play which you haven’t written?

Screenwriter: Yes! It was about two characters from films last year, Altman’s 3 Women and The Last Wave directed by some Australian guy. I told her about how both of these films finished with the ending of the world in some manner, and some sort of direct transformation and obliteration of the characters.

Concierge: Obliteration sir?

Screenwriter: Yeah, they go up and out and change completely. There’s a guy in one and a girl in the other and the end of each film is a merging of the world around them into something alien and unearthly and they ascend to a higher plane but that wasn’t really the concern of my radio play, it was more like the run up. In my play these people, Chris and Willie are now in a place together, like everything else has merged together and it’s just them that bob up above it, like they both came up from a sinking ship or country and here they are, in this new space.

Concierge: In the water sir? In the sea?

Screenwriter: No, in a bar, like this one in this hotel and they’re here in a booth drinking whatever, drinking cokes and above them they realise is a painting and they have a conversation about this dumb painting and what it means to them and where they’re from and where they’ve been. That’s my radio play. Sounds utterly amazing and a money in the bank right! This aboriginal rock star and this lady that does sand paintings and hardly talks having a conversation about a painting!I’m probably ruined already!

Concierge: I’m sure its… oh… What was the painting of sir?

Screenwriter: It’s a painting I saw in a magazine the other day by Francis Bacon, it was shown in France. Usually, I don’t like his stuff, it’s so incredibly drab, but this I liked because its was really blue and looked modern, it was just called Landscape which is a really modern title so I put it in the story. I think. I’m not sure, it just wound up in the story, perhaps its the first painting I thought of, I should have put something better in but this was what came out. Like I said, those goats were frolicking and bounding down the hillside, I don’t know what was going on with my mouth. I just kept talking and this stuff kept coming and the girl, well the girl to her credit didn’t look as bored as she had every right to be. I mean, two stolen characters talking about a painting on the radio? That’s what I’m going to be know for, everyone’s going to think this is hilarious, utterly hilarious. The guys are going to get a lot of mileage out of that little story when its gets around, and it will get around soon if it hasn’t already, stories like that always do, with a few extra additions I imagine, everyone’s going to want to put their little flourish on my eulogy.

Concierge: What were they talking about?

Screenwriter: What? They’re talk about how I was trying to impress some girl in a bar with a pitch for an imaginary Swedish coffee advert that’s what they’ll say!

Concierge: No sir, I meant the two in the hotel bar drinking cokes, what did they say about the painting? You said they were talking about the painting, what did they say about it?

Screenwriter: What? Oh. Yes, I can’t remember. Something about space. No I remember now. I started with a discussion about the blue in the painting. The painting is mostly blue like I said, which is one of the reasons I like it, that guy’s paintings a normally a dirty yellow which I hate. Coincidentally, that is actually one of the reasons I didn’t like 3 Women very much either, I remember telling someone that about a month ago. I thought is looked like “a piss in the prairie”. The Last Wave though, I did like the cinematography on that. It was a bit more regular and looked a bit cheap, but there were some nice moments, and I loved the underwater shot at the end, all the rushing water and bubbles like a 60s surf movie. It made me think about how when a camera films under water it is enveloped. The camera doesn’t just look at something, it’s surrounded and it has this stuff all over it, not just the lens. It is effected. Held.

Concierge: Is this what the characters talked about sir?

Screenwriter: Yeah, no, a bit I think. No, really they were talking about the blue of the painting, how the blue is neither a solid depicted space or the empty space of the surface of the canvas, how it was both at once and something else entirely. I say they, but the way I pitched it to the girl, it was the girl in my story, Willie, that was saying all of this. She’s an artist in the Altman picture so it made sense to have her riff on Francis Bacon. Also I think I wanted to make her, the girl in the bar, aware that I’m all for strong intelligent female characters in my stories! Modern women! More modern than Altman’s women anyway! So she talks about this plane being a third space, neither the language of the painting ground nor the language of a pictorial space, another dimension. Then she starts talking about how this is like the film The Last Wave, which as you remember is the film that the other guy is from! I don’t know what happened there, I must have gotten confused or something but that’s where the story starting running so I just ran along side it trying desperately to keep the legs moving as fast as my body! Willie says this is like The Last Wave, that the “tribal space” of the aboriginal people in Sydney, that’s denied by the white population, is “just such a third space”.

Concierge: What does the other gentleman say about this sir?

Screenwriter: Good question! Well this guy agrees with her, he says that the whites can only comprehend there being two spaces, either the space of representation using of language of ideas, and a space of stuff, which he said was also a space of language anyway but that white people ignored that part too. I remember that at this point I nearly had him getting all righteous about the damage done to his people by the whites but I cooled it in time, I’m getting wary enough about that stuff, how it can come off ridiculous trying to write that sort of character. People are getting tired of it you know? So Chris, this aboriginal character, agrees that this third space is hidden, his explanation is that it is too large to be seen and regardless of this the whites have constructed a system for looking at the world that doesn't include it so they don’t see its there. He says they must know its there but they have an expression they use that sort of acknowledges something but then simultaneously negates it, puts it in a box to be dealt with… well the way I had this character say it in really calm tone it was as if this thing was never to be dealt with. The girl, the girl Willie that is, in my story, she pipes up here and starts talking again about the The Last Wave again. She says that this is just like the court room scene in the film. She says that the whites acknowledge the aborigine people, how they feel this guilt about displacing and killing them,but not enough to actually do anything different for them, so they make these verbal concessions that box up the problem, appearing to address it but effectively putting it into a void. She talks about how the whites can’t be seen to refute the aboriginal people’s beliefs publicly so they say that aboriginal law only applies to a certain kind of aboriginal person which they call “Tribal” and how this means an uncivilised exotic sort of person.

Concierge: Are the aborigines in that film not all “tribal” then?

Screenwriter: Not in the film no, and I had the character talk about this a bit more actually. In the film the whites can’t declare out and out that what the aborigines believe in is untrue so they have it only apply to these “Tribals”. What’s really important about the definition of a “Tribal” is that they are not here. The film takes place in Sydney and the story makes it clear that “Tribals” are always “other”, of rather, “doubly other” they are firstly not white and they are also not here. “There are no tribals in the city” is something that’s said a few times in The Last Wave, the tribal people live somewhere else. The aborigines are therefore something else and beholden to the rules that the whites put to them.

Concierge: Why is that important sir?

Screenwriter: Well this is a good bit! I’m pretty impressed with this myself, the girl Willie says something like “this is important because the aboriginal spirituality is not just a belief system but a metaphysics”. She goes on to explain that tribal people believe not just in abstracts but in physical, actual manifestations of things. They believe not just in a different ideology but in a different physical orchestration of the world. Willie talks us through a scene in the film where Chris describes how his family is able to contact him when they need his help by affecting his body. He gets asked by someone how this happens, and in response he pulls at the skin on his forearm and says it is like that.

Concierge: Like a pinch?

Screenwriter: more like a tic in the muscle. I liked that scene in the film so I had Willie talk about it some more, and so she elaborates. She says that this is like the blue space in the painting, its neither the language of representation or the language of the physical thing. Its something else entirely which isn’t language, it is the Real. She goes on a bit about The Last Wave, how it’s a development of Lovecraft’s stories but better, and how the power underneath everything, the power that’s indescribable is always this immense things beyond language of all kinds, how its too big for the words to wrap around it so they just can’t. She says we just walk around what she describes as a “huge sleeping tiger” oblivious because it’s too big for us to acknowledge it, we can’t find it’s edges. It is really quite a monologue that she launches into here, I think with the right actress it could be real award material. At one point she sticks her fingers in her Coke and dribbles the liquid on the table top and it’s a really visceral scene. Willie talks about water surface tension in order to describe the blue plane in Bacon’s painting, how it it pulls tight to the edges of everything else, rather then existing behind or in front of it. Willie says that it is a plane which can’t be broken and that actions at one point directly affect all the other edges. She says this is just like the plane which exists between Chris and his family. She says this is just like the plane that exists between all things past and future and how they all meet now.

Concierge: You don’t have the other chap talk very much in this script do you sir?

Screenwriter: No, you’re right, he doesn’t talk much. I liked the idea of this girl who doesn’t say word one in her own film, having all this stuff to say after the film’s over, I mean after 3 Women is over. It's like she spent that Robert Altman movie in the margins of the story as an object working something out that had nothing much to do with the other characters, and then in my radio play it’s ready to be articulated, with this other guy and with the Francis Bacon painting. One point of the triangle of 3 Women also forms another triangle in a different dimension, like a repeating pattern. That’s quite nice actually, I’ll remember that.

Concierge: So was that the end of your pitch sir?

Screenwriter: Yes. No actually, there’s a sort of coda at the end. They sit slulping their cokes for a bit longer. They play a Jimi Hendrix cover of Ray Charles’ What’d I Say on the jukebox and talk about its importance in the history of Rock and Roll along with some other things I can't remember. Old jokes mainly, they laugh a lot and it’s cozy. Then after a pause the Chris character looks at the painting again and says the pampas grass looking landscape in the centre is a figure, but not a representation of a figure made out of the land, he says it is a figure as a gesture, an “ever changing roster of forces in a state of hyper-chaos”. He says this is a bit like the instability of character in 3 Women, how no one character is able to keep their “self” constant and how they all begin to collapse and grow and merge in a non-linear manner both through misleading stories told about one character by another but also through the film’s direction which fragments the identities of the characters, leaving them uncertain by exploiting the cracks in the medium itself. He says this is what makes that film great. He finishes by saying that the use and merging of the crack in the medium and cracks within the narrative are what make Robert Altman such an important director. He says the same could be said for Bacon, and probably sometimes for the Australian guy that did The Last Wave too.

Concierge:…

Screenwriter: …

Concierge: Is there anything I can get you sir?

Screenwriter: No, nothing thanks, I’ll go up to my room now I think. Good night.

Concierge: See you in the morning sir, sleep well.

Wall Of Voodoo

"Magic persists. Repeatedly driven underground, it repeatedly surfaces to become part of events - in the early modern witch-mania, in the magnetism-spiritualism-theosophy of the 19th century. It is dismissed as superstition, anachronism, survival, subcultural idiosyncrasy, deviance and lag. But today magic flares up so insistently that it commands attention from a surprised intelligentsia which had not noticed that the occult underground has been seething for 150 years….Magic is probably more than cultural lag. It even goes beyond persistence of occult elements in the person category and the ego……Perhaps the occult is the natural expression of a society in which we live surrounded by machines, bureaucracies, technologies and planning systems made by human rationality but unfathomable to us personally."

Daniel O’Keefe "Stolen Lightning"

One of the interesting aspects of that strain of popular music that can be broadly called counter-cultural rock, by which I mean the left-field popular musics that stretched from the beat groups of the mid-60’s to the New Pop of the early-80’s, is that there has never been an attempt to really understand what kind of collective project it really was. Although it is usually seen as a kind of generational relief-valve, or as an attempt at escapism through the formation of subcultures, these explanations don’t really explain its most striking phenomena, which are its depravity and its appalling rates of death and mental illness.

But in what previous historical milieu would we find male-bonding, internecine power struggles, reckless drug-taking, excessive horseplay, ritualistic ecstasies and bouts of madness? Uncomfortably enough, there is only one: the province of magic. However, in the mature magics of well-established contemporary tribal groups, magic is surrounded by numerous taboos to protect the tribal members. Magic is restricted to an appointed shaman or witchdoctor; consciousness-altering drugs are reserved for special, infrequent ceremonies; magical "appeal" structures are created to ensure magical disputes are settled without disrupting tribal harmony. Conversely, counter-cultural rock groups, with their retinues of roadies, dealers, favoured engineers and producers, and assorted hangers-on, recall the earlier, more dangerous stages of experimental magic, especially that of the all-male initiation lodges of the Neolithic period, when ambitious young men rejected the mechanical solidarity of the clan system and withdrew from the tribe in order to expropriate the sacred for themselves and their own self-empowerment.



In addressing the idea of rock music being primarily a magical phenomenon, we must first define the concept of "mana". The term originates in the studies of the Melanesian Islanders of the South Pacific conducted by the anthropologist Robert Codrington in the 19th century. "Mana" was the term the islanders themselves gave to that curious frisson that manifests itself when humans enact with one another socially. Nowadays we have any number of terms for it - "charisma", "spirit", "empathy" etc., but Codrington’s insight was that when it is first noticed, it is given a general term. The French sociologists of the early 20th century used the "mana" concept to construct a theory that posited that the realisation of mana was the origin of religion, in that primitive man realises that mana is increased through ritualised, sacred ceremonies, and these in themselves give birth to both his conception of society, and that the efficacy of that society’s actions are increased by increased codification of the mana rituals. "Magic" is then a secondary phenomenon that appropriates the resulting sacred rituals, objects and texts for personal or group efficacy i.e. it is an expropriation of the sacred.

Life in the late twentieth century western world, with the organic solidarity of its social structures, buttressed with the solid ego protectors of the civic institutions, was frequently bereft of mana. Capitalism, with its obsession with individualism is particularly mana-repellant, but even Socialism with its Marxist distrust of religious opium, sees the mana-affect of collective action as at best merely coincidental. In many ways contemporary western man’s position is unenviable, because if his social structures collapse, he has almost no personal magics with which to combat social super-ego pressures. This is why Emile Durkheim considered that modern "anomic" suicide was closely linked to the group-induced "voodoo death" of primitive man.

We can then see that what truly attracted post-war English musicians to black American musics, was not pre-eminently their rhythmic innovations or "soulful" emotional frankness (although these were important), but rather that they crackled with magical mana. The soul of Sam Cooke or Ray Charles or Motown still radiated the spiritual aura of Gospel. The Blues, with its hellhound-on-my-tail fatalism, still had its spidery roots dug firmly into voodoo. It is easy to understand how such hedonistic depressives as Eric Clapton, John Lennon and Brian Jones could become obsessed with them. The beat groups’ adoption and promulgation of this mana was so successful that their ambitions turned to the most daring project of all - to assault the objective social frame of reality and de-rationalise western society. This change in purpose can be accurately dated - it was the moment that John Lennon pronounced that The Beatles were bigger than Jesus. Jesus Christ was, of course, the greatest magician in history.



As the Sixties progressed, the leading rock groups almost entered into an arms race with each other in adopting ever more exotic and far-flung magics. The Beatles and The Who adopted eastern mysticism and had their own gurus. The Doors adopted Native American shamanism. Hendrix invoked voodoo. The Rolling Stones dabbled with the occultism of Aleister Crowley, whereas Led Zeppelin immersed themselves in it. Drug ingestion became epidemic, with the trend being to harder and harder substances. Even the appearance of the bands became more wizard-like, with ever-longer hair, flowing robes, and even the occasional adoption of face paint. To become the biggest band in the world meant becoming the most magical band in the world.

Another focus of the original initiation lodges’ work was in the crafts, such as pottery, woodwork, and smithing (swordsmithing was the original "black art") which were mired in sacred lore. Similarly, soundsmiths like Page, Hendrix, Townshend, Gilmour and Blackmore spent enormous effort not only on the mastery of their instruments, but also eventually in their mastery of the studio. This was not (as is commonly understood) an attempt at proficiency for proficiency’s sake, but simply an attempt to (literally) cover their tracks, to mystify and obscure how they did it - to amplify the sense that what they did was truly magical.

By the mid-70’s the counter-culture had pretty much burnt itself out through an inevitable wave of death, madness and exhaustion. The original viziers, mostly semi-retired to home counties mansions or extended tax exile, only emerged infrequently for bloated stadium tours with accompanying live albums. The sense of magical insurrection was only kept vaguely alive by the simulacra musics of glam and glitter, until the next generation’s magical wave, intensely jealous of the "achievements" of those who came before them, had their chance to assault the objective social frame.

Punk, or more specifically the "post-punk" that was to follow in its wake, resumed the magical project, resurrecting Crowley-esque occultism (via the Industrial Records stable), Primitivism (The Pop Group, The Slits), Spiritualism (The Fall), death-cult voodoo-ism (Siouxsie, most Goth) and Eastern mysticism (Cabaret Voltaire’s mantras). Post-punk even had its own esoteric/occultist generalists in Killing Joke and Joy Division, very much the equivalents of Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath. In coining these new musics, post-punk also had the magical new black musics of funk and reggae to plunder. Dub reggae was particularly irresistible for two reasons; firstly it embodied the kind of Spenglerian depth-space effects that are so vital to Western man’s sense of himself. Secondly, being essentially the Rastafarian religious music, it was drenched in mana.



In socio-cultural terms, Joy Division have always been an enigma. Why are they so perplexing? Why are they so compelling? In magical terms, however, they make perfect sense. Ian Curtis was, like Jim Morrison before him, basically a failed shaman. The original shamen of northern Europe and trans-Russia were frequently chosen for their odd appearance, and epilepsy was seen as an advantage for the head start it gave into altered states of consciousness (remarkably Curtis seems to have induced himself into gaining such a condition). The initiation of the shaman was the ritual of death and rebirth. Entering a state of trance-possession, he would ritually "die" before his audience, and then travel to the chthonic underworld and commune with the darkest spirits, then rise to the heavens to meet the angels. Finally, his broken spirit would be put back together and be "reborn" in his physical body, his spiritual immortality a ward against psychic death. What Curtis was attempting was almost unbelievably reckless and dangerous, but it wasn’t suicidal. Quite the opposite in fact - it was an attempt to achieve psychic invulnerability. His mistake was perhaps to attempt it outside a properly constituted order. As a secondary effect, Joy Division left behind perhaps the most magical music of them all, a mesmerising record of the psychic battles that mark the first stage of the shamanic initiate’s journey. Following his death, the re-membering of the cultural body had to be attempted by the bands that were left behind, and hence the inevitable, necessary vitality of New Pop. The likes of "New Gold Dream" are an attempt to create a "wholeness" to fill the void opened by "Closer".

If anything, the punks had been even more reckless than the hippies, and had burnt themselves out even sooner. If the death of Curtis seems like a milestone, it is because there was a subconscious recognition that this kind of behaviour could not go on any more. Certainly there would be excessive behaviour and tragic deaths after post-punk, but these would be outliers, ultra-narcissists too self-absorbed to realise that the game was over, rather than being connected to any musical-historical thread. Mirroring the great ethical religions like Christianity and Islam which marginalise magic, rock music was to enter its managerial, bureaucratic stage, in which innovation was to give way to the patternwork of the endless repetition of approved forms or "genres". What little magic that was still practiced in rock was the coarsest of all - the black magic of Death Metal and its sub-genres, often coming from lands outside the Anglo-American rock mainstream.

In hindsight it is no surprise that the "best" music, the most vital, the most mana-infused, is that made in the crucial periods 1966-1971, and 1977-1981, as these were the most magical periods, the moments when the counter-culture most threatened to tear the objective social frame of reality asunder. However, that threat always appeared more promising to those making the threat than the "threatened", who, witnessing a mainstream culture that had barely changed, largely didn’t even deign to notice the threat at all. For the neolithic magicians, the enormous risks of playing with the fire of raw magic were worth it because the result could be the opportunity to overthrow the tribal order, and remake the world in their own image. Although a few counter-cultural musicians could accumulate enormous personal wealth and prestige, ultimately the strong, defensible egos of modern man ensured that they were to some extent always confined to the margins. Dangerous and reckless, the great project of counter-cultural rock was always destined to end in failure.