Posts Tagged 'Alphaville'

Confidential

Published January 21, 2012 Literature , research , Writing 2 Comments
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How much can you put yourself into the mind of another individual? It’s not a trick question: though I ask it a lot, I seem to do it a lot too.

My work on Marvell and Private Lives took up most of 2011, and it’s been a wonderful introspective process because the way I’ve symbiotically linked our biographies together has given me license to think as deeply and darkly as I please.

But now, just as I come to wrap this up, there’s something quite subtle which doesn’t add up.

Marvell almost always strikes the reader as the shy, demure sort. Occasionally women are abruptly visible, but otherwise they are teasingly distant, obscured, or absent. He weaves threads of complicated desire behind fastastical themes and layers of honeycombed language.

Honeycomb_FracFx

But perhaps that’s just his writing. After all, his publishing history is thin, and there’s little sign that Marvell placed a great deal of value on the majority of his own poems. Perhaps he’s even embarrassed by them. Why would that be?

Continue reading ‘Confidential’

Music: Between Minds, Between Friends

Published June 26, 2011 Music , research 3 Comments
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A difficult anniversary is approaching, which has made me think a lot about personal relationships. Thus, I turned, as many have seen recently, to the virtues of music: as a companion, as a friend, and as a saviour.

The Ambient Man

It’s not easy out there. I’m sure many people join me in feeling that we are always fighting battles: some of our own making and some that aren’t; some that we deserve and some that we don’t. And part of that, from my side, is the life I have set for myself, and what it has done to me. “Damaged goods”, as the expression came recently. I should feel ashamed for living. What’s a man to do?

I’ve witnessed friends working together this week in perfect synchronicity. I’ve witnessed so many personal relationships thriving. And yet, as usual, while I’m glad to be on the periphery of anything positive, I’m so used to solitude (and occasionally negativity) on a daily basis that I’ve always had to find other coping mechanisms.

Music has long been that foil. That is not to say, of course, that there aren’t the best of friends out there, but working in isolation so long requires something that is always there, always tolerant, and always constant.

Music, oddly, cannot know me, and yet knows me better than anyone. When it speaks to me, sometimes I listen, sometimes I more than listen, and sometimes I unwittingly ignore. It cannot judge me or fall out with me. It’s a relationship I need, and cannot do without.

[Mobile users: a lot of videos under the cut] Continue reading ‘Music: Between Minds, Between Friends’

The Second Anniversary: A Song For No-One

Published March 6, 2011 Music , Writing 4 Comments
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A happy second anniversary to RoyalArbor, or Writing Privacy as it became. There is plenty that could commemorate this, but there was only one winner. First, it’s time to take stock for a moment.

A Space for No-One?

I think a lot about what goes here. Writing privacy demands it. It’s an oxymoron of sorts: to write privacy is to publicize it. Andrew Marvell not only withheld his works from publication, but he also privately considered the role of the writer in the new public sphere of the seventeenth century. That someone capable of such lyric majesty was so determined not to share it gives a permanent awareness to what should be allowed to escape into public space.

As such, this place never needed to be about me. It has needed to be about pieces of research that tell a good story; about events or developments that have some form of interest extending beyond me; and about privacy as a wider interest. The reason I left my old space behind was because it had become for no-one but myself.

We all live intricate and complicated lives. Continue reading ‘The Second Anniversary: A Song For No-One’

Skimming Stones: An Epilogue, 2010

Published December 31, 2010 Literature , Music 12 Comments
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2010 has been, it seems, a sad year for many people. My own sad story has been punctuated with glimpses of light. End-of-year epilogues are so hard to write, but in the light of some illuminating and wistful hopes and dreams that have consumed me recently, I’d like to share some meaningful pieces.

I can be jealously protective of some of my favourite hidden treasures. It is part of what makes things appealing to me. But their allusions are telling, and stories can be built around them.

Continue reading ‘Skimming Stones: An Epilogue, 2010′

Private Party: Catching Rays on Giant (Alphaville), Berlin, 2010

Published November 23, 2010 Culture , Music 3 Comments
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Alphaville, Catching Rays on Giant (2010)

Alphaville, Catching Rays on Giant (2010), signed by Marian Gold

Alphaville’s 20th anniversary celebration in Berlin in 2004 marked the best week of my life. Meeting the Alphaville family, seeing the band live for the first time, the adrenalin rush at meeting my idols: these created a unique kind of euphoria that will be difficult to find again.

The six years following have been very different: much darker and sadder than I could have imagined. Time spent living in Switzerland to try and grow as a person served only to burn away the core of my being, and left me a shadow of what I knew before. It became increasingly difficult to engage with the Alphaville crowd, and to be reminded of the euphoria that only ever seemed further away.

Returning after a long illness and months of recovery made travel abroad a real struggle. Prague last December seemed impossible. It is so easy to fall into dark behaviour that becomes increasingly hard to break. What could provide Miracle Healing? The late announcement (offering little time to ponder) of a small intimate event in the soulful city of Berlin made the opportunity of echoing that ineffable time of 2004 great enough to overcome the darkest of demons.

Continue reading ‘Private Party: Catching Rays on Giant (Alphaville), Berlin, 2010′

Private Pursuits: The Difficulty of Writing

Published November 15, 2010 Knightmare , Music , research , Writing 4 Comments
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Autograph from Dr. Adam Fox

Writing is hard. It is harder still when fighting battles with yourself.

Yet this is trampled on completely when November’s fad of eleven years, NaNoWriMo: National Novel Writing Month, comes around. The idea is to write a 50,000 word novel by November 30th.

Like many other things around me at the moment, it is an alien existence. It has taken me three years to come close to 50,000 words for my thesis. Writers will be soon be surpassing that toil in less than 3% of the time.

NaNoWriMo has received a lot of strong opinion, largely because it encourages quantity over quality. The official page freely concedes, ‘Make no mistake: you will be writing a lot of crap’.

Sometimes I have sympathy for the freedom, precisely because adding 500 words of quality to my doctoral thesis seems like a colossal achievement. It is also something that, for better or worse, the world of academia has contemplated itself. But I also loathe it for the way it can disregard the graft that goes into a small amount.

Writing often delves into dark, private pursuits. Continue reading ‘Private Pursuits: The Difficulty of Writing’

Editor

Published September 8, 2010 Writing Leave a Comment
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More silence. I am becoming my own PhD subject. Privacy, unfortunately, is multi-faceted. On the one hand, a fascinating subject, but on the other, also a rather uncomfortable mindset. It is like a form of writing anorexia (and I know how loaded that term is); there is more pleasure in the discipline I take from choosing not to write. Perhaps it is the vulnerability or fear of betrayal. Perhaps it is the protection, away from the uncomfortable places that writing invariably reaches. I continue to believe I am doing the right thing in keeping emotional charges locked up.

But this is just it. How many tabloid stories continue to roll out at the expense of private lives? What they uncover tends to be mischief and skullduggery,  just about enough to justify the intrusion in the majority of eyes. I don’t want my private life uncovering. I read a fascinating piece earlier about editorial decisions, which suggests that all good intentions do yield to become the paving stones towards hell.

Continue reading ‘Editor’

Wasted Talent

Published January 20, 2010 Culture , Geneva , Politics 2 Comments
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If I am following the destiny of Andrew Marvell so well, chances are that, thanks to biographical hints from John Aubrey, I will have to develop a taste for the grapevine.

He kept bottles of wine at his lodgeing, and many times he would drink liberally by himselfe to refresh his spirits and exalt his muse.

Though [Marvell] loved wine he would never drink hard in company, and was won’t to say that he would not play the goodfellow in any man’s company in whose hands he would not trust his life.

But this development probably took place near the end of Marvell’s life when he had more powerful enemies in London than trusty friends. We are not surprised then to see one of those enemies call him, after his death, a drunken buffoon, ‘temulentus scurra’.

Pierre Leguois, Andrew Marvell: Poet, Puritan, Patriot (1968), 98.

It is not surprising that a man obsessed with privacy who was eventually elected as an MP at least had an understanding of public impressions. In the context of the slanderous and wide-reaching seventeenth-century print culture, this limited trail of evidence suggests that Marvell’s vice was, by and large, a private one. In the context of what is to come, I share a modicum of my own private life: Friday night.

Continue reading ‘Wasted Talent’

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