Netflix movie racks up over 33 million views – but not everyone is convinced
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Spectator
6 hours ago
- Spectator
The rise of cringe
No one wrote programme notes quite like the English experimentalist John White. 'This music is top-quality trash,' proclaims his 1993 album Fashion Music. 'We kindly ask the users of this CD to play it at the volume of a suburban Paris soundmachine or a London underground discman earphone as used by the kid next door.' Track titles included 'Epaulette' and 'Latin Flutes'. From what I remember – my copy vanished a long time ago – the music was cheap and very funny: tinny and dumb. I was reminded of White recently because trash is back. Everywhere I go, I find composers producing shamefully terrible music. Some deliberately, some inadvertently. What flavour of terrible? Not ugly or discordant. Not camp. More tonal and naff: works woven from the worn-out and iffy. No bad thing necessarily. The history of classical music is a history of the absorption of trash – the reclamation of forms and sounds once considered stale, embarrassing or wrong. Junk is fuel. And the greatest advances in the artform are often its most bathetic. Take the entry of the dinky, farty Turkish band in Beethoven's Ninth. It should still stop you: this ludicrous sound gatecrashing a world-historical event just as it edges towards transcendence. An outrageous compositional decision – and a clear sign of genius. So we should rein in our instinct to dismiss compositions that have us holding our nose. But the crucial thing with bad music – whether you're the composer, an audience member, performer or critic – is to be in on the joke. Otherwise, you probably are the joke. I'm not sure that composers Tom Coult or Mark Simpson realise their new commissions for the Proms sounded like a joke. They certainly affect a certain seriousness. A certain honesty and sincerity. Qualities that can be a fast-track to cringe. Simpson's Zebra also had a third crucial ingredient: a total lack of inhibition. The work is a prog-adjacent concerto for electric guitar so it comes with the territory. It's also an attempt to paint a drug-induced hallucination, one that Philip K. Dick had in real life in 1974, in which he received 'messages from the Roman empire' and 'visitations from three-eyed invaders'. And as we all know there's little more embarrassing than being high. That the piece came across as one big overexcited overshare, an exercise in premature ejaculation, splooshing and splurging uncontrollably, was perhaps not inappropriate. But the sounds were the musical equivalent not so much of being on a trip but something far worse: someone describing their trip. Then, in the final seconds, a genuinely hallucinatory moment: the sound of a disembodied woman's voice intoning something incomprehensible but sinister over the Tannoy. Incomprehensible by accident. On Radio 3 the words are clear – and the worse off for it. Trips are tricky. But the perils of evoking a bygone age and going full Werther's Original are even more acute. Tom Coult's Monologues for the Curious lay somewhere between Alan Bennett and the John Lewis Christmas ads on the Richter scale of twee. Melodicas, harmonicas, the ghost of a brass band, the slink of a slow dance: all that was missing was a ukulele. The men of a certain age depicted in these four portraits for tenor and orchestra amble around, dewy-eyed with nostalgia, kindly and cloying. Nothing wrong in wanting to conjure up the insufferable – but you ought to do it without being insufferable yourself. Allan Clayton channels Purcell's stuttering Cold Genius in the second movement and the quirky mood briefly lifts but the tenor – looking, as usual, like a homeless Brian Blessed – was soon singing of his fondness for owls and I wanted to run. Award for real wrong-'un behaviour, however, goes to young composer Max Syedtollan. His Prynhawn Da! – which opened at Cafe Oto with some magnificent mummering from a man with a doily covering his face – verges on the evil: a criminal collision of Bavarian oompah, house hits recomposed contrapuntally, a reggae version of the Willliam Tell overture, bagpipes, klezmer, Balkan brass, carols, 1980s TV theme tunes, all sped up then slowed down 'so as not to cause a stitch'. Arranged and performed in a ripely revolting way by the Listening Project, the half-hour work is calculated to cause maximum offence. It had me pained, confused, frequently bursting into laughter, feeling that maybe I would never truly understand the world. Feeling also that Syedtollan – who knew exactly what he was doing – is a force to be reckoned with. Syedtollan is perfectly capable of writing actual good music. Horo povera – stomped out at the start of the night with infectious energy by Search Engine Quartet – is a memorable slice of aggro-minimalism. To risk it all by tipping out a barrel of muck in the second half, however, was a sign of a true artist. The MIDI recording of Prynhawn Da!, by the way, is even better. By which, of course, I mean much worse.
Spectator
6 hours ago
- Spectator
Culture clash: Sympathy Tokyo Tower, by Rie Qudan, reviewed
Language, it has been said, is the only true democracy – changed by the people that use it. But as with any democracy, there is plenty of disagreement about what alterations are either possible or permissible. Japanese uses three distinct writing systems – kanji, hiragana and katakana – and the relationship between two of them, kanji and katakana, is a key theme of last year's prizewinning speculative fiction Sympathy Tower Tokyo by Rie Qudan – a lyrical, witty, satirical but meditative and meticulous text, now published in Jesse Kirkwood's vibrant and faithful English translation. We are in the sprawling metropolis of Tokyo in the lightly altered mid-2020s. The Olympics took place in 2021, a year late as a result of the pandemic, but one curious difference has occurred: Zaha Hadid's futuristic national stadium, which in our reality was cancelled at the last minute, was in fact built. This minor change seems to have ushered in other more widespread shifts in politics and culture. Notably, a huge new skyscraper in the middle of the city is to house criminals in comfort and luxury, as part of society's debt to these unfortunate beings. A glimpse into a potential near future (which might be a dystopia or a utopia, depending on your point of view), Sympathy Tower Tokyo has some connections with Yoko Ogawa's excellent dreamlike science fiction The Memory Police (1994), as well as more distant echoes of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Huxley's Brave New World (1932). Yet this is a wholly distinctive novel, alarmingly prescient and up to date. Controversy arose – and still seems to infest chatter about the book – when Qudan divulged that she used AI to write part of it. She later clarified that AI was employed only to generate specific responses in the text when a character consults a chatbot – a creative touch which, rather than representing laxity or deception, surely carries a Joycean level of authenticity. Sara Machina, a celebrated architect, is to design the building, which is to be officially called 'Sympathy Tower Tokyo' – a name which irks Sara, since it uses katakana characters to approximate the English words, a common trend in modern Japanese, rather than the more difficult, but established, kanji script. Kanji are the thousands of intricately complex Chinese-origin characters children (and foreigners) struggle to learn. The more straightforward, phonetic katakana is for loanwords, buzzwords, commercial jargon and the like. Qudan uses this issue to explore how kanji might transmit tradition and certainty, katakana flexibility and ambiguity – but might kanji not also carry prejudice and the burdens of the past, which could be swept away by the invigorating, outward-looking torrent of contemporary katakana, especially when it comes to shifting socio-sexual topics such as global warming, crime and gender? Yet, if the Japanese are to change their language, will they not also lose the distinctiveness of their national identity? Readers who know Japanese will naturally get more out of this than those unfamiliar with the language, but the ideas discussed will stimulate anyone. This is a book which raises profound and ever-pressing questions about the elusive nature of words, their symbolic status, and their multi-faceted, convoluted relationship with geography, history and culture. It explores the relationship between the urban, built environment and our fabricated world of words, between social and linguistic developments, between the kaleidoscopic vogues of language, society and philosophy. And it examines the way architecture, like words, can be destructive as well as creative, while criminals can be victims, too, worthy of love and reward just as much as hatred and punishment. Told from ever-shifting verbal and textual perspectives, with playful nods to contemporary controversies (AI; the Hadid stadium hullabaloo; cancel culture; Covid; Twitter's name change), this is a spirited novel that asks profound questions, impishly worrying about the potentially flavourless future of humanity. The tower itself can re-assimilate persecuted delinquents, making society more equal, more just, (more boring?) – just as AI threatens to steal everyone's jobs and turn vibrant global languages into one bland gloopy soup: harmless but meaningless, safe but insipid. Sympathy Tower Tokyo feels so über-zeitgeisty that it might have been written this morning, and it is alive with all the tools (and fools) of modernity. Yet it is far more than merely topical or trendy, as deep moral, political, social, cultural, architectural and lingual problems collide, merge and inform each other throughout this relatively short novel. A contemporary gem.
Spectator
6 hours ago
- Spectator
2716: Cluelessness
Eight entries – only four of which comprise one word – possess titular properties. Across 11 Playful killer whales swimming, not terribly well, lacking energy (7) 12 Former parking cut in safe English city (6) 13 Question in National Curriculum test exercises (6) 14 Section of relatively revolutionary musical (5) 15 Wheels finally augmented by auxiliary spoke (4) 17 Drive, say, sport from the east (4) 21 Consult on standard Persian dialect (6) 23 This, cradled in one's hands, breathed spasmodically (9) 26 Drinks case of alcohol with ease, oddly enough (4) 28 Half of alphabet – the smallest part? (4) 30 Airlifted cast in festival (3,2-4) 36 Suppressing anger, bore having shock? (6) 39 Curl up, withdrawing both hands (4) 40 Old does spot leader of hinds (4) 41 Open University linked to Northern Energy (5) 42 How you might thus have tea? (3,3) 43 Saint working final lyrical poem (6) 44 Insert aged airmen in English force (7) Down 2 Racial shifts around heart of arable Italian region (8) 3 Papal family contributing to investors in industry (6) 4 Animosity over tense card game (6) 5 Supplant American referee's intro on high tackles (5) 6 Exhausted elders assemble, standing for respect (6) 7 Tranquillity that's occasionally needed when one goes to pot (4) 9 Captured in vendetta, saving skin, crumbling (6) 18 King I now see meets large Jewish community (5) 19 Lost slave messenger periodically missing (4) 20 Mafia dons run away from island (4) 24 Brown gong buried in ancient city (5) 25 Essentially, man's idea upset woman (4) 27 Layer in ground at first unknown (8) 29 Most of rubbish in skip (4) 32 Big gun shot on table? (6) 33 Strong effect starts to influence mutual agreement (6) 34 Whale's flap almost covering ear (6) 35 Acknowledgement of A&E perhaps picked up (6) 37 BBC North holds up tips for later? (5) 38 Take out chum (4) Download a printable version here. A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on 1 September. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@ or post to: Crossword 2716, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP.
