Monthly Archives: June 2016

Poetry

Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven (1845)

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The Raven is a narrative poem by Edgar Allan Poe, published in 1845, famous for its dramatic, Gothic quality. The scene is set from the beginning: the unnamed narrator is in a lonely apartment on a “bleak December” night, with little more than a dying fire to light the room, when he hears an eerie tapping from outside his chamber door. Into the darkness he whispers, “Lenore,” hoping his lost love has come back, but all that could be heard was “an echo [that] murmured back the word ‘Lenore!'”. The tapping persisting, he opens the window whereupon the mysterious raven enters the room and perches atop a sculptured bust above his door.

The man asks the raven for his name, and surprisingly it answers, croaking “Nevermore.” The man knows that the bird does not speak from reason, but has been taught by “some unhappy master,” and that the word “nevermore” is its only response. Thus, he asks a series of questions, all eliciting the stock response at the end of each stanza.

Poe was very interested in expressing melancholy in poetic form. As he wrote in Graham’s Magazine in 1846: “Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” – the answer, of course, Death. And when is Death most poetical? “When it most closely allies itself to beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world”. Hence, the poem is about the despair of a bereaved lover, and Poe’s use of the raven – that bird of ill-omen – does little to suggest that a happy outcome is forthcoming! Perhaps the raven stands for the narrator’s subconscious as he struggles with the concepts of death and finality.

There is a lilting rhythm in play; it’s melodic as well as dramatic (and since you ask, it’s in trochaic octameter, with eight stressed-unstressed two-syllable feet per lines). There is frequent use of internal rhyme, and much repetition of rhyming around the “or” sound (Lenore, door, lore, nevermore).

Who better to narrate this great poem than the prince of horror himself, Vincent Price? Here he is in wonderful Gothic form, narrating, indeed acting, this dark classic…superb.

Edgar Allan Poe
Music

The Who’s Substitute (1966)

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London in the Sixties was, famously, “swinging”, with much of the music and fashion influenced by the Mod subculture. Mods had their roots in the London of the late Fifties where a small group of fashionable young guns came to be known as modernists because of their penchant for modern jazz. By the Sixties, the movement had become the dominant, and now pluralist, cultural force of the times, had broadened its horizons, and had accumulated certain identifying symbols such as the tailored suit, the Parka, and the motor scooter. Mod music, meanwhile, had become a diverse mix of soul, R&B, ska, and blues-rooted British rock.

The early sixties had seen a clash of this new culture with the so-called “rockers”, a rival subculture centred on motorcycling, leather and 1950s rock and roll, which led to the infamous South Coast brawls of “mods and rockers”, and the ensuing “moral panic” of the Establishment. But by the mid-sixties, British rock bands, such as the Small Faces and the Who, were adopting mod fashion and attitude.

This week, I give you a sublime dose of mod sound in the form of the Who’s Substitute. Natty threads, swanky attitude, and above all a killer song from the band’s one true songwriter, guitarist Pete Townshend. Townshend wrote the song having being inspired by a line in Smokey Robinson’s Tracks of my Tears: “Although she may be cute, She’s just a substitute”.

The song has a great bassline, amply supplied by John Entwhistle and assisted on drums by amiable loon Keith Moon, guitar chops courtesy of Townshend and a suitably louche vocal from Roger Daltrey. The lyrics are cleverly wrought, though it’s no surprise that the line “I look all white but my dad was black” was altered for the more racially sensitive American market (to “I try walking forward but my feet walk back”, which was presumably thrown together at the last minute to cries of “yeah, that’ll do”).

Whatever, the finished product is a great example of stylish mod sound from the original “cool Britannia”…enjoy!

You think we look pretty good together
You think my shoes are made of leather

But I’m a substitute for another guy
I look pretty tall but my heels are high
The simple things you see are all complicated
I look pretty young, but I’m just back-dated, yeah

Substitute your lies for fact
I can see right through your plastic mac
I look all white, but my dad was black
My fine-looking suit is really made out of sack

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth
The north side of my town faced east, and the east was facing south
And now you dare to look me in the eye
Those crocodile tears are what you cry
It’s a genuine problem, you won’t try
To work it out at all you just pass it by, pass it by

Substitute me for him
Substitute my coke for gin
Substitute you for my mum
At least I’ll get my washing done

But I’m a substitute for another guy
I look pretty tall but my heels are high
The simple things you see are all complicated
I look pretty young, but I’m just backdated, yeah

I was born with a plastic spoon in my mouth
The north side of my town faced east, and the east was facing south
And now you dare to look me in the eye
Those crocodile tears are what you cry
It’s a genuine problem, you won’t try
To work it out at all you just pass it by, pass it by

Substitute me for him
Substitute my coke for gin
Substitute you for my mum
At least I’ll get my washing done

Substitute your lies for fact
I can see right through your plastic mac
I look all white, but my dad was black
My fine-looking suit is really made out of sack

The Who in 1966

Art

Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942)

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If I ever get to Chicago, one of the first things on my list will be to see the iconic masterpiece of American art that is Edward Hopper’s oil on canvas, Nighthawks, housed at the Art Institute of Chicago. It has been there ever since the Institute bought the piece from the artist, for the sum of $3000, just a few months after its completion in 1942.

The picture shows a late-night, sparsely populated downtown diner, somewhere in New York. Many people have speculated and tried to work out where the diner actually was but it is far more likely to be a composite of various joints from around the artist’s home patch of Greenwich Village, Manhattan, cobbled together in Hopper’s imagination.

Hopper and his wife Jo kept meticulous notes about his work, and they provide a rare glimpse into this oft-unconsidered aspect of the artist’s life: the planning and thought behind a planned work. This excerpt, in Jo’s handwriting, describes Nighthawks:

“Night + brilliant interior of cheap restaurant. Bright items: cherry wood counter + tops of surrounding stools; light on metal tanks at rear right; brilliant streak of jade green tiles 3/4 across canvas–at base of glass of window curving at corner. Light walls, dull yellow ocre [sic] door into kitchen right.

Very good looking blond boy in white (coat, cap) inside counter. Girl in red blouse, brown hair eating sandwich. Man night hawk (beak) in dark suit, steel grey hat, black band, blue shirt (clean) holding cigarette. Other figure dark sinister back–at left. Light side walk outside pale greenish. Darkish red brick houses opposite. Sign across top of restaurant, dark–Phillies 5c cigar. Picture of cigar. Outside of shop dark, green. Note: bit of bright ceiling inside shop against dark of outside street–at edge of stretch of top of window”

The picture was clearly not thrown together, and indeed for all this attention to detail, the finished artwork adds up to more than the sum of its parts. It exudes a sense of loneliness, of separation, of eery silence and thus disquiet. Who are these people? What stories of quiet desperation (since we somehow suspect that the protagonists are not of a happy and stable disposition) have brought them to this late-night rendezvous? Nighthawks allows the viewer’s imagination to fill in the blanks.

 

Edward Hopper 1941