This...

is what deserves a 'hell, yeah!', Sarah.

Safe behind the curve: that Tori Amos review at last...

On some level, I've never forgiven Tori Amos for getting married. Not because she didn't marry me, you understand (well, okay, maybe slightly...), but because I was afraid that domestic bliss might interfere with her creativity - 'happiness writes white' and all that. I might have taken the album that came immediately after that marriage, From the Choirgirl Hotel, as proof that I was wrong, if I didn't know that many of the songs on that record were occassioned by the trauma of Tori's miscarriage. But the album that followed 'Choirgirl', To Venus and Back , was a much weaker proposition than any of her previous works. There were good tracks on there - '1,000 Oceans', 'Concertina', 'Glory of the 80s'; but there was an awful lot of filler, too. The experiments in using electronic production that added so much emotional content to Choirgirl degenerated, on Venus, into noodling gimmickry. Tellingly, the record company packaged it with a disc of Tori's fantastic live performances - the best reason to buy the package, and a tacit admission that without it the record would be of little interest even for completists.

There followed the time-honoured artistic holding action of releasing a covers album, though admittedly the album in question, Strange Little Girls , was brilliant. Tori's version of 'Raining Blood', for example, is much scarier than Slayer's original, the flashes of beautiful colour added by Tori's voice performing something of the same function as the touches of painterly brilliance in Francis Bacon's works - accentuating the horror by contrast. But a doubt remained in my mind: was this it? Was it covers from now on? Would the last original Tori Album be the mediocre disc they'd had to package with a concert?

And then September the 11th happened.

Actually, I'm messing with chronology here somewhat - I only heard Strange Little Girls after the attack, indeed it was one of the three albums I took with me on my trip to London the week after, a strange and memorable time to be in that city - flags at half-mast, an air of paranoia, every random event charged with significance like a novel by Burroughs or Iain Sinclair. On the last day of my stay they pulled a torso from the Thames just opposite Tate Modern - if I'd booked a later train I'd have been on the scene to see them do it. Nothing to do with me officer, we're Reform Houngans in my voudoun temple. But I digress...

Tori's response to what Stockhausen rather overexcitedly called 'the biggest work of art there's ever been' (over-excitedly, but not wrongly: the purpose of the attacks looks, at this distance, more like an overblown piece in the immature, shock-happy idiom of the Viennese Actionists than any meaningful act of warfare - and we should note that Stockhausen pointedly didn't say it was the best work of art, just 'the biggest') was to make the excellent Scarlet's Walk . I can't think of an unnecessary track on that album. It's the sound, musically and lyrically, of Tori grappling with a host of big issues: terrorism, religious fundamentalism, colonialism, her Native American heritage, racism, homophobia, sexuality, US history and politics - and, far from being overwhelmed, coming out decisively on top. The lyrics are masterpieces of compression, fitting multi-layered references and big concepts into tightly-packed lines, and musically it has the clear, plangent emotion of a work like Choirgirl or Little Earthquakes. Here was that rock journalist cliche, the 'return to form', for real.

And then she went and blew it again, with The Beekeeper . Described by Entertainment Weekly as 'the Tori Amos album for those normally freaked out by Tori Amos', which I suppose at least makes it useful for profiling purposes , The Beekeeper sounded, on paper, like an interesting proposition: a melding of the ideas in Buxton's The Shamanic Way of the Bee with an excavation of the suppressed feminine currents in Christianity, as represented by the figure of Mary Magdalene , it would be a kind of companion piece to Scarlet's Walk, exploring the Christian side of Tori's heritage. As so often, however, the engagement with the religion of the oppressor failed to result in good writing, not least because it coincided with the emergence of another, more populist take on the Magdalene myth: Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code. A good rule for artists is to move on when the recondite becomes the mundane. When the masses take over what was terra incognita, the Invisible College decamps.

Sometimes into seemingly more quotidian areas. Tori's next record was American Doll Posse , a more conventionally politicised record which criticised the policies of the Bush administration while deep-mining Tori's history for a range of disparate sexual personae to adopt in writing. It was also more of a conventional rock album than her previous work - some tracks were even out-and-out pop - but look beneath the conventional structure and darker notions are to be found.

So, Tori's record so far, in this writer's opinion, is seven wins (every album up to and including Choirgirl, plus Girls, Scarlet and Posse), and one loss (Beekeeper) with Venus edging through as a draw on account of having a few good tracks and that live disc to salvage it. So, what to make of her new offering, Abnormally Attracted to Sin ?

Well, it isn't The Beekeeper, thankfully. I don't hate it. But then I don't have much of a strong positive reaction to it either. It's a competent album: sonically there are some interesting experiments in terms of production, and it has a sort of intriguing overall tone that reminds me, weirdly, of spy movies or Batman Returns , but the record as a whole seems to lack the sense of urgency of a Choirgirl or Boys for Pele, it's as if the need to make a record has dictated the project, not the need to say anything specific.

Don't get me wrong, there are quite a few good tracks:'Strong Black Vine', 'Police Me' and 'Starling' stand out, on this first couple of listens, as the kind of beautiful yet disturbing fare we've come to expect from Tori, 'That Guy' is a beautiful song in the political vein of Posse (or at least that's how this guy interprets its reference to a guy who 'swears he will walk' and 'carries a chip the size of New York'), and 'Not Dying Today' is a jaunty little number which rocks along at a fair-old clip and also presents the obligatory shout-out to Neil Gaiman . But overall it falls into the Venus category, and doesn't have a live disc to redeem it. That said, I can't quite bring myself to chalk it up as a loss, but I can't in all conscience put it in the company of records like Choirgirl or Scarlet's Walk. So: seven wins, one loss, two draws. Not a bad record, all things considered. But I still think it might have been better if she hadn't settled down...

Wow. Just...wow.

So I saw the news about Sarah Palin resigning, and was dimly aware that one potential reason for this act of what we can only hope was political seppuku was a recently-published Vanity Fair profile of the winkin' wolf-killer. What I didn't know - because I didn't get 'round to reading that profile until today - was that the profile makes clear that when McCain/Palin didn't get elected, America didn't just dodge a bullet, it dodged an ICBM . A choice quote follows - click on it for more details of the Madness of Queen Sarah:

'More than once in my travels in Alaska, people brought up, without prompting, the question of Palin’s extravagant self-regard. Several told me, independently of one another, that they had consulted the definition of “narcissistic personality disorder” in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—“a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration, and lack of empathy”—and thought it fit her perfectly. When Trig was born, Palin wrote an e-mail letter to friends and relatives, describing the belated news of her pregnancy and detailing Trig’s condition; she wrote the e-mail not in her own name but in God’s, and signed it “Trig’s Creator, Your Heavenly Father.” '

Jauntiness goeth before a tumble

It wasn't a big step, all things considered. Maybe two inches high. And it wasn't on a really big slope, either. I figured I could tackle it without a problem. The sun was shining through a canopy of trees, the birds were singing, Christopher Hitchens was accusing all religions of being child abusers on my headphones...I'd covered a lot of ground in forty-five minutes and could easily get home in another hour to sit down to breakfast with my wife. I felt a wave of good cheer spreading through my very being, so I stepped onto the step with a jaunty little leap, like Gene Kelly skipping away at the end of the Singing in the Rain routine...

and I missed it. Tumbled over. Fell on my arse. My ankle throbbed with pain but I had no phone, and therefore no choice but to hobble home. I hoped that it would recover overnight, but this morning it was even worse.

There was no choice but to go to hospital, to be told that I've torn a ligament in my right ankle and need to rest it for a couple of days and, if I must get up to use the toilet to hobble about on crutches. So now I'm stuck in the house, the wife is down in Birmingham on union business, I'm bored to death and my ankle hurts like buggery.

It was only a small step, only a mild slope, only a slight fall: but it fucked me up but good.

Ecclestone, NOOOO! You MUPPET!

You know, I don't mean for these entries to descend into being ill-tempered hate rants. Truly, I don't. I have things I want to try and cover in this blog. I've got the new Tori Amos album to get around to reviewing, for one thing, and I'm also thrashing around an article dealing with my ambiguous feelings about Velvet Goldmine , which, ten years ago, was probably one of my favourite movies of all time but which, as I was forced to conclude after watching it again the other day, is in fact a deeply flawed piece of cinema: dreamlike and beautiful in parts but in other places indulgent and even, frankly, boring. It would have been a good article, that: I would have linked back to my review of Fire Walk With Me below and talked about how some films can still get us even after we've grown up while others remain the guilty pleasures of our wasted youth (though, like Jim Steinman , I will concede that a wasted youth is better, or at least more fun, than a wise and productive old age).

But then I noticed that motor-racing midget Bernie Ecclestone has took it on himself to defend that much-misunderstood figure, Adolf Hitler .


Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggggghhhhhhh.

Everything needs everything else. Doesn't it?

Mekhtoub, they say. 'It is written.' Well. When I say 'they', I mean King Mob in the second volume of Grant Morrison's The Invisibles , when he kisses Ragged Robin .

It is written - isn't it weird how those words unspool so easily in the mind? How quickly the contingent, the chaotic, becomes the way it's always been? How quickly the facts on the ground are established?

Golo Mann criticised AJP Taylor's idea of the inevitability of the second world war for committing this fallacy. The Second World War needn't have happened. The Third Reich needn't have happened. Hitler needn't have happened. Things could have been totally different. This is what history is: the record of all the things that need never have happened.

But isn't it odd how things, in retrospect, take on the mask of inevitability? Take the Williams Sisters : playing each other in yet another Wimbledon final. Doesn't that, these days, seem somehow inevitable? Yet it needn't have been. You can trace the chain of causality all the way back from this particular tournament to their father's decision to train them as tennis pros. At any number of points on the way, things could have turned out differently.

There is a fossilised organism in the Burgess Shale called Pikaia . It may - there is some doubt - be the first chordate, or vertebrate, creature in the fossil record - our earliest ancestor. And it, too, need never have existed. Stephen Jay Gould believes that, if Pikaia had not survived, if it had not been an evolutionary relative success, then none of us would be here. Never mind Hitler, the Williams Sisters or whether you should have danced with that girl at the prom: if something had gone wrong during Pikaia's time, you wouldn't be around to regret these things.

Yet we act as if all this was inevitable. And the concomitant result of this is that we assume that the things we take for granted in our lives are inevitable, too. Our house, our job, our marriage, our physical health, our overdraft limit, our sanity. Sadly, it ain't necessarily so. Everything we have can change in an instant. In the moment when a decision is made, when a thing is said, we can find ourselves living in worlds of which we never even dreamed. Nothing is inevitable: everything is contingent.

It's a lesson we need to learn again and again and again, and I'm getting a painful refresher course now. Things which, for a long time, I took for granted are changing in ways I could never have anticipated. What was written is being erased: a new hand writes now, and while it may not exactly scrawl Mene, Mene, Tekel Upharsin it's a bit too close for comfort. The die is cast, but hasn't landed yet: and, if anyone feels like praying for me, now may well be the time.

A high heel in the right place can change the world...

An interesting piece on the legacy of the Stonewall Riots by Johann Hari .

What annoys me is this line, about Jacob Zuma , the current South African president (incidentally, you'll note Zuma is bald - I've got Withnail and I on in the background here and, at the exact point when I set up the link to Zuma's picture, Danny the Dealer was holding forth on the uptightness of bald men): 'Jacob Zuma...brags about beating up gay men in his youth.'

I have to say here: I hate Jacob Zuma. He has been accused of corruption. He has been charged with rape. Now, out of his own liar's mouth, he boasts of the fact that, if a gay man stood in front of him, he would 'knock him out' ( I suppose we have to credit Zuma with this, that unlike many other homophobes, he doesn't suggest that this putative homosexual would be behind him...). The man is a thug. A smug, grinning political operator who knows he's positioned himself to be irremovable, no matter how vile his conduct or opinions. How does he get away with this?

Because South Africa is essentially a one-party state. The ANC went, in the blink of an eye, from being a Marxist revolutionary party to being handmaidens for capital in seconds flat, like New Labour on crystal meth. Like New Labour, they're obsessed only with power. As Zuma proves, the 'revolutionary' party he heads doesn't even dislike the Afrikaaners - the people who oppressed South Africa in the first place.

I don't propose to go into a detailed account of the ANC's failure in South Africa here. For that, I would point the reader in the direction of John Pilger's excellent book, Freedom Next Time , which contains a fine essay on the ease with which the ANC has adapted itself to the country's predominantly white cultural elite.

I celebrated when Mandela was released from prison. But his successors, first Thabo Mbeki and now the vile Zuma have been an insult to Mandela and the global struggle to release him: not least because their policies have been disproportionately harsh to the country's black population. Did Mbeki feel that rich whites, eminently able to afford the AIDS medication the country's government denied a wider public, would not take the medicine he decried as a poisonous western conspiracy from which he had to protect his fellow indigenous South Africans? Does Zuma believe that it is white homosexuals who will be most inconvenienced by his homophobic attitudes? I doubt it. And even if they did believe it, it would make no difference - it's the AIDS victims and gay people (and I do not mean to conflate those groups) in the townships who will suffer from this cynical populism.

The problem of South Africa is that it is not yet a true democracy. Because of the country's shameful prior government, there is as yet no credible opposition to the ANC. There is some hope, in groups like the Democratic Alliance and the Congress of the People , but at present the ANC are unstoppable, and the country's politics have inevitably been corrupted by this untrammelled power. Perhaps, in the end, someone like Zuma coming along is a good thing: with any luck his behaviour will revolt enough of the electorate that another party could take power, and South Africa could experience truly democratic politics, in all its compromise and inefficiency and shambling freedom, for the first time in its existence. It would, inevitably, be a disappointment, but it would at least be a start.