After the Rain (Calcutta)

The streets at every intersection around Chowringee are rivered up to the knees and long with water. This is not a time for shoes.

A girl in a freshly ironed school tunic raises hers neatly above her head as she wades through sensibly. A cyclist, bare feet lifted to his handlebars, sluices across a shallow lake nearby, clean and fast and free as a bird. I see their pleasure as they look down into the heavens, how they loom across a liquid mirror. Rain turning girl into woman and man into child at play.

The lake that has formed along Sudder Street is breathing, sucking in drops of air. Circles appear and disappear, light parting shots of drizzle after last night’s storm. The torrential downpour has slowed Calcutta down this morning, shutting it off into smaller pieces, distinguishing the pockets of neighbourhood life that make this place a wild jigsaw of villages bucketed together into a makeshift metropolis.

In the aftermath of the deluge, I amble around my own little tourist block with less and less determination, always to another watery dead-end.

A black and yellow taxi scuttles up and down and around the same streets with me, testing the depths, gears cranking forwards and reverse, like a drunken beetle trying to escape the inevitable. There is nowhere to go this morning, nothing to do but wait.

Families are reestablishing themselves on the sidewalk. Hoarding their lives under green sheets of plastic, using raggy strips of material for rope, attaching the plastic to the eaves of closed shopfronts, even a weary looking rickshaw, then securing their newly improved roofing to the ground using bricks and stones, whatever is around. So this is home: shelter for a day.

A young woman with five children gestures towards me with her hands, but I shake my head. No small change today. She nods at me and gestures again carelessly, starts to laugh. No harm in trying. Underneath the plastic she is cooking something in a small pot that steams out of the shadows while her children sleep off the morning and she pulls an ever-falling veil back onto her face, hiding her smile again and again from me.

‘Smoke?’

A young man in a cheap brown suit starts to make a sales pitch in my ear. ‘Very good quality sir. Excellent smoke.’

He flashes a small green parcel bullet bound in Glad Wrap. Gathers it back up into his sleeve again as if a hydraulic system is working his fingers invisibly from the cuff of his jacket. Quite the magician.

I shake my head at him but he won’t give up and starts hassling me all the way down the street. ‘The very best sir. Smoke. Excellent quality, I assure you sir!’

Finally I say ‘nahee!’ so sharply a few people look out from under their plastic homes to see what the fuss is all about. The young man stops and stares at me coldly, a who-the-fuck-do-you-think-you-are? look that makes me tremble. Everyone shrinks back under their coverings and evaporates. Suddenly there is just the two of us in the open, the bitty rain blotching his suit and adding to the aloneness between us.

I escape from the salesman down a side street that turns into an alley and yet another dead-end full of water. Some sodden rubbish stinks it out. This is the dark street I was staring into from my hotel window during last night’s power failure. There’s nothing here except silence. But in the human mania of India, silence moves on you with a distinct presence. It feels bad.

I backtrack my way out into the street again. The salesman is gone. A couple of boys are talking on the corner in Bengali. I point to the sky and smile. They nod, so I ask if it rains like this all the time in Calcutta? They freeze up and just smile back at me. Clearly they don’t understand what the hell I am saying, though one of them knows enough English to say, ‘Hey Shane Warne!’

I nod wearily to this perpetual Indian greeting. It that marks me out as an Australian tourist, forever associated with one of my country’s most famous cricketers, a man who openly detests India and is nonetheless revered across the sub-continent as a hero for his playing skill. His current piggish behaviour – demanding cans of baked beans be flown in for him rather than eat the local muck - makes me feel ashamed of where I am from. A perverse streak makes me feel like putting on an American accent just to escape the low burden of his fame.

A few rickshaw wallahs rap their bells on the wooden handles of their carts to get my attention. The unusually high chassis of their seat carriages makes them an effective means of transport in a flood. They know I have no way out of Sudder Street with my boots on. I’m an easy mark, a likely ride.

Again I say nahee, more happily this time. I’m surprised by the communication inside such exchanges, the humour. It’s a game.

A woman with a child in her arms is shouting at a man who is filling a jug from a street pump. She looks well dressed and walks on, speaking quickly to a parked taxi driver who leans out of his window and starts yelling abuse as well. The man at the pump is indifferent to their anger. He finishes his task and walks off with a huge cask of water pressing down over his shoulders.

What a strange crime in a flood: I can’t interpret it.

I find myself gravitating back to a coffee shop on the corner opposite the Fairlawn Hotel where Lisa and I are staying. She’s still asleep in our room, as if the cool smell of the rain has drugged her. I’ve been up and down all night, disturbed by the storm, writing, then waking at the crack of dawn to go wandering, well, not far at all.

As I take a bench and sit under the café awning, a few raindrops stroke me. Despite my run-in with the marijuana salesman, the morning is very tender.

I notice a sloppy European girl dressed in a sari is with a tight-looking young man, scalp shaved athletically. They exude a queer energy, one that makes you reluctant to breathe the air near them and catch whatever mood it is they relish. An erotic misanthropy, I suspect. Certain travellers can be so intense their physical being stains everything around them. How to escape them?

At the back of the café, an Indian businessman, or maybe just a well-dressed student, reads his newspaper quietly below an advertisement for Titanic. The film poster – an obviously new decoration – features Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet in a swoon that is Indianized like the swarthy, melodramatic images promoting Bombay musicals.

As Lisa and I travel the country and become aware of Titanic fever everywhere we go, these two actors emerge as fresh gods in the Indian landscape. Sitting in a packed cinema watching the film a few days later, we enjoy a crowd whose biggest laughs are reserved for jokes that involve class barriers and English table manners, such as the choice of knives and forks Leonardo struggles with over dinner. Despite the last gasps of the 20th Century, India’s memories of English colonialism are still fresh and influentially absurd, a thick paste over their own caste system. They laugh as if from inside another time when these things mattered and marked you. Perhaps here they still do.



The tight couple beside me pays up and departs and I am relieved to have the café and the street more or less to myself. A typically Western thought, when the street is so busy. I’m hardly alone here, just culturally distant. What makes me think of it as ‘mine’?

More people, bare foot or on bicycles, are now making their way through the floodwaters. Another taxi driver plunges his vehicle in and out of a narrow section of water, creating a tidal wave that laps over doorways and causes an explosion of words and raised, knotty fists. The driver quickly escapes around the next corner, honking his horn sluttishly.

One of the rickshaw wallahs from across the street hovers nearby, studying me. As I sip my steaming glass he finally approaches.

‘Good morning sir.’

‘Good morning.’

‘It rains very much tonight in Calcutta sir.’

‘Last night? Yes. The lightning was amazing.’

‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘Very good for business.’

He stands there before me, improbably optimistic in a grubby lunghi and a dirty, slightly torn singlet so sheer he must have been wearing it for years.

‘Tell me sir, how much is a glass of Nescafe in Australia?’

Here at the café I appear to be paying roughly US$ 0.40 for an espresso coffee. So I do the calculations, increasing them a little to emphasize how expensive it is for me to live back in Australia. In other words, to let him know I am not a rich man at home.

I finally say that the price is about five times what I am paying here, and go on to explain how this affects me in Sydney. But he is not interested in the excuses for my life. Merely astounded by the price of a cup of coffee. I suspect he already thinks the café is exploiting a ridiculous European indulgence as it is. The madness of the West when one can just drink chai!

He keeps staring at my glass like it might be a pot of gold, so I offer to buy him one. ‘No thank you, I cannot drink,’ he says, holding his stomach to indicate a vulnerability or illness. ‘Thank you for your kindness sir. But I was just curious to know this price.’

He jiggles his head side to side in that bobbing Indian way somewhere between a yes and a no. I look at how skinny he is. Too skinny to be pulling a rickshaw around Calcutta. I picture him straining every muscle to get people, sometimes very fat people and their luggage, from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’.

Yesterday I bargained a rickshaw wallah down from 80 to 60 rupees for a trip, the equivalent of quarrelling over a dollar. Once that was done Lisa and I climbed aboard and watched the rickshaw groan with our weight as the wallah lifted the handles to his waist. Bowing his head, he started to step forward, gaining momentum, sandals thudding down the road till we arrived at our destination some fifteen minutes later. By which time he was heaving with the need to breathe and so drenched in sweat I thought he might pass out. We gave him 100 rupees and ran away ashamed of ourselves for having beat down his asking price. Even our belated generosity made us feel like gluttons gorging ourselves on a false kindness.

Some Europeans won’t take the rickshaws at all in Calcutta – it’s too much like indentured slavery. But the awful truth is they are just denying the poor a few rupees they desperately need. And these are men who are willing to work, who have struggled hard at the bottom of the heap to get this most menial of jobs. Forget the beggars if your conscience is strained by the poverty round here, these guys will give you their backs to ride on. I can’t help but acknowledge some pride, or at least determination, in their efforts. Maybe it’s not so bad to let them rip you off a little.

My new friend stands quietly beside me looking out at the street and the sky. Three more rickshaw wallahs cross the giant puddle to join us, leaving their carts lined and covered by the white walls of the Fairlawn. Most of their customers are shut away inside, still snoring their arses off. Business will be slow for the time being.

The wallahs are equally friendly so I offer to buy them all coffee. But I soon realize there is not the same warmth in their communication - and that they are understandably milking me for whatever I might be willing to give. The Indian café proprietor gives them the evil eye, tolerating, just, their presence outside his door.

As they crowd in around me asking questions about Shane Warne (oh no, not him again) and who my favourite Indian cricketer is (I always say ‘Srinath’ because I love the sound of his name) they push my friend to the back of their huddle. Eventually he saunters away to his rickshaw and sits quietly inside it as the rain continues to sprinkle down. I see that they are much harder, physically and mentally, and it pains my heart to think of him as someone lower on the pecking order.

I start drinking my coffee quickly despite its scalding heat. I don’t like being king of the rickshaw wallahs this morning in a flooded Chowringee street. I am able to step outside this scene and look at it from across the way as if through the eyes of a floating stranger - and I do not like the man I see big-timing himself with a few cheap coffees. So I burn my tongue and refuse entreaties for ‘a tourist ride’ through their watery world. And I walk back to my hotel and a security that threatens to defeat me once more, grieving for a friend I barely know. Praying Lisa will be awake to hold me and help me feel human on a foreign morning. Hand bells jangling in the rain, calling to me in vague hope despite all my refusals. Nahee, nahee.

- Mark Mordue

* Story first published in Dastgah: Diary of a Headtrip.

+ Colour image of rickshaw and Ambassador taxi in Calcutta by Ran Chakrabarti
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ran_chakrabarti/201709680/

+ Black and white image of Calcutta in 1945 sourced from Brajeshwar
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brajeshwar/

War without Frontiers

Vietnam invades me. I don't know how old I am exactly, just that I'm young and I haven't really seen this before: a soldier ecstatically killing people in a place that is not nearly so far away as it should feel. I'm only a kid and I am sick and frightened. The television is on.

It's no surprise in a story about war and how journalists negotiate it that I should find myself pulled back towards this moment in a reading of Michael Herr's magnificently sick Dispatches, diary notes from his time as a correspondent in Vietnam that resound with all the riffing energy of Jimi Hendrix playing 'The Star Spangled Banner'.




"You know how it is," Herr recalls, "you want to look and you don't want to look. I can remember the strange feelings I had when I was a kid looking at war photographs in Life, the ones that showed dead people or lots of dead lying close together in a field or a street, often touching, seeming to hold each other. Even when the picture was sharp and cleanly defined, something wasn't clear at all, something repressed that monitored the images and withheld their essential information. It may have legitimised my fascination, letting me look for as long as I wanted; I didn't have a language for it then, but I remember now the shame I felt, like looking at first porn, all the porn in the world."

This distress and shame in the face of such information serves as a base note for what is happening again today. For what Martin Amis once defined as the primal nature of our morality: a feeling that rises from the gut and won't go away.

The media is currently awash with metaphors comparing the situation in Iraq with the Vietnam War, likening the troubles in Fallujah to the Tet Offensive and the sordid torture scenes from Abu Ghraib prison to the My Lai massacre.

Various academics and pro-occupation exponents deplore such slovenly historical parallels. But there is one crucial element they cannot dispute: that Vietnam became a war of disenchantment with war, and that the media's part in propagating this disenchantment destroyed the will to continue. As has so-often been said, Vietnam was 'the first television war' and 'the war that was lost in the lounge room'. When it comes to the reporting from Iraq, it may well be that the media tide has already shifted the possibility of America and its allies sustaining their course.



For as another dirty war envelops an occupying force, and the idea of a frontline as we once understood it continues to dissolve - both within Iraq and internationally with the larger 'War on Terrorism' – notions like 'shock and awe' and the imperatives for a stable and democratic solution are no longer visible. The news is 'messy', the situation degenerate. We feel lost.

With such consistently troubling and confusing news comes renewed concern for war reporters and the kind of stories they tell.

The fact over a third of journalists killed across the world in the last year were in Iraq accentuates this focus. According to the committee to protect journalists (CPJ), 25 journalists have died there since March 2003, out of a total of 55 worldwide since the start of that year.

The CPJ recently announced the risks in Iraq are "unprecedented", calling it "the most dangerous place in the world to work as a journalist". This is especially the case for the independent reporters known as 'unilaterals', who first chose to work outside of the restrictions of being 'embedded' and continue to be active outside of a military safety net.

Clearly local insurgents and rebel forces no longer respect rules of war or the notion that journalists are non-combatants. Many see journalists as yet another example of Western infiltration and domination, someone to be wiped out or used as a bargaining chip. Their 'fixers', local Iraqi journalists, translators and drivers who work with them, are being murdered in 'shark attacks' and run even greater risks for far less reward, let alone story credit.

That many in Iraq have been wounded or killed by 'friendly fire' only adds to concerns. The International Press Institute (IPI) lists seven journalists killed by US forces in the conflict.

Nik Gowing from BBC International, in an article called 'Aiming to stop the story?' (written in the wake of the 2003 shelling of the Hotel Palestine that housed all the independent journalists in Baghdad) spoke of "a growing fear in our business that some governments...are sanctioning the active targeting of journalists in war zones in order to shut down what we are there to do."

Not everyone, however, feels quite so conspiratorial about rising mortality rates in the profession. In a story for The Age last year, the Canadian journalist Declan Hill spoke of the way Iraq had become like an overcrowded building site, with large numbers of journalists wandering around an unstable situation, under ever-increasing pressure to produce news, and lots of it.




The demands of cable channels like CNN (whose worldwide success was born out of the first Gulf War) and new competitors like Fox and MSNBC, alongside rapid advances in the instantaneousness nature of supporting information technology - faster, lighter satellite phones and laptops, digital cameras, night vision goggles and alike - fuels this pressure for "real time" war reporting and a highly competitive environment across the journalistic spectrum. News as entertainment, news as product, but, more rarely, news that has meaning - and news we genuinely care about. We are, simply, using up the world faster than we used to.

Independent English cameraman Max Stahl - who has won two international awards for the footage he took of the Dili massacre at Santa Cruz in 1991 and of people attempting to flee the UN compound in Dili in 1999 - speaks of the way technology and product-oriented attitudes are destroying journalistic depth. "I know for a fact in Afghanistan many of the reporters were reading back to their audiences what they had been told by offices back in London," he says. "The guy in the hillside in Afghanistan didn't know what was going on."

"But there is nothing else you can do if you set up this requirement that news must be instant, that news is defined as something that happened a moment ago. There is a kind of illusion that if you get it now then you are getting the truth; nothing could be further from the truth if you want to understand what has happened, you need to understand what goes on behind it, underneath it. For that you need time. In other words, the instant news machine is the enemy of truth and of real communications, but right now the instant is absolutely, oppressively, crushingly dominant."

Issues of censorship, particularly in America, only increase the indifference of such consumption patterns and homogenized views of war that fail to engage, let alone outrage, the public. No coffins of dead soldiers arriving at military bases to be shown on the American news, minimized use of extreme images of war violence or suffering. In this way a sterilized media is kept in check, as much through self-censorship as any external pressure. The grim sights in Fallujah and now Abu Ghraib serve as sudden, disillusioning punctuation.



Labouring through this analytically devalued climate on the Right and the Left, the author and war correspondent David Rieff (Susan Sontag's son) observes that, "A journalist's role is to puncture euphemisms and denounce the kind of thinking that is based on meaningless or obfuscatory language. I think writers and photographers should be as unconstructive as possible. I don't think we should become servants of our hopes either. We are their to be critical, to tell the truth insofar as one can know it."

Like Max Stahl, David Rieff's words leap from the pages of Bearing Witness - The Lives of War Correspondents and Photojournalists (Random House Australia) with bracing effect at a time when we know too much and yet nothing at all. Edited by Denise Leith, who teaches Politics and International Relations at Macquarie University, Bearing Witness adopts a first-person structure with conversational reflections from Stahl, Rieff, CNN's Peter Arnett, the ABC's Monica Attard, British Middle-East veteran Robert Fisk and Australian cameraman David Brill among others, offering up their experiences in the field along with insights into their profession and the personal costs of what they see.

Leith says she wanted "to look beyond the stories and pictures to the people who do these things and ask, 'Who are these people? Why do they do it? What is the cost?' It's about levels of bearing witness, really... There are just layers upon layers."

Time and again Vietnam emerges in Bearing Witness as a galvanizing moment for these journalists. Certainly, the American military was stung by what it saw as a media-propelled defeat in Vietnam. It was a major reason for the conduct of the secret or covert wars in Latin America - and for the continued isolation of the media during the First Gulf War, where it attempted to dazzle reporters and the public with aerial bombardments, exaggerated statistics and highly restricted on-the-ground reporting.

The shift in this current war to 'embedding' journalists with troops was not about an opening; rather it was more a strategic response to the internet and advanced communications, which forced a reconsideration of the media and how to control it.

Former journalist and media historian David McKnight, from the University of Technology, Sydney, speaks of the way "you can be captured by your sources, in this case the soldiers who defend, feed and sleep beside you."

"Against that," McKnight says, "any war still allows for a very old fashioned style of journalism: eye witness reporting of what happens in front of you without any filters. A good thing," he adds sardonically, "if you know what you are seeing. There's an old adage that war is a continuation of politics by other means. But in the piling up of event after event after event we start to ask what does it all mean? We see the war, but not the politics that lead up to or continue it."




It's no accident the most important revelations from the war have come from Seymour M. Hersh, an investigative reporter patiently working in Washington to uncover the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib. Hersh was also the man who brought the My Lai massacre in Vietnam to the attention of the American public. Hersh told PBS Radio that the current Bush administration, “don’t believe in bad information… not even bad news that can prevent a lot of trouble.” “It’s not that they’re cover-up artists,” he explained to PBS Radio, ‘they’re self-deception artists… and if you disagree you’re a traitor.”

This is why the independent journalist, the freelancer or 'unilateral' as they are lately called in Iraq, is so crucial to our interpretive and critical view of war, and of news from other forgotten fronts unsupported by network ratings and pack-like media attention.

In a sense what we are really witnessing in Iraq - and in the entire wake of September 11 - is the collapse of those divided notions of a First and Third World. It's certainly interesting to hear the American photographer James Nachtwey's thoughts as he clicked away at the falling towers of the World Trade Centre after covering so many wars in the Middle East and Africa. "This idea crystallised that I had been working on the same story all the time."



One of the great photographers of the era, Nachtwey has a crusading vision for his work as anti-war. Though it's impossible to dispute the power of his images, fellow photographer Chris Morris says: "I almost feel like you have got to say a prayer before you open up Jim Nachtwey's book Inferno. I find there is so much evil that comes out of it. I told Jim, 'I need some voodoo candle lights to keep safe.' It is a very heavy book. Do you think your mind can go through that book, the whole book, in one sitting?"

It may be that the search for truth still lies with the technology that is corrupting our news intake and fragmenting our ability to see the bigger picture. The rise of so much available and portable communications has allowed for dissenting individuals and news services to flourish, notably Al-Jazeera, the Fox network of the Arab world. Bloggers like Salam Pax who kept a web-diary of his experiences as a citizen during the attack on Baghdad have also attracted enormous interest.

In the end, however, it's the recognition of those secondary figures working alongside Western journalists that mark the next vital stage: the de-colonization of the media. Dith Pran is known to the world through a film like The Killing Fields, but there are many like him who with added training, support and due credit have much to tell us. In Bearing Witness the Sierra Leone journalist and documentary maker, Sorious Samura, asks why this is taking so long: "What are you guys so afraid of?"


- Mark Mordue

* This essay first appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum 'The Essay' pages under the title 'A War with no frontline', May 22-23, 2004.




* Top image is of Phan Thị Kim Phúc: born 1963 (and now a Vietnamese-Canadian)she was the subject of one of the most famous photos from the Vietnam War. It shows her at about age nine running naked on the street after being severely burned on her back by a U.S.-coordinated napalm attack on 8th June, 1972. The photo was taken by AP photographer Nick Út.


Next black and white image is of AP photographer Huynh Thanh My covering a Vietnamese battalion pinned down in a Mekong Delta rice paddy about a month before he was killed in combat on 10 October 1965. RIP. Sourced from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/picture_gallery/05/in_pictures_the_vietnam_war_/html/4.stm

Other images freely available via internet sources and usual suspects.

Tom Waits + Real Gone

TOM WAITS
Real Gone
(Anti)

Did ya come from outer space? Did ya kill that bird in the coop? Ooh there be a guitar like old Barney Kessell and something dirty going on, murder rag, going on and on. Sink the song in the blood, bring someone over, bring 'em over, play drums in your own bathroom. Tie rope round a friend's finger for oaths, rope round a neck, throw 'em off the pier. America. America! America someone has disappeared. America let's have a beer. Pretty girl in a bottle, you find her on a beach, she ain't got a soul you can reach. What this? Like exorcism music man, like at a wake: it a party or it a crying shame? Someone here got the spookies, that for sure! So one minute you're dancing, then it's go-slows for every man and his barking dog. Is he wearing a yellow shirt or hanging from inside it like a scarecrow in reverse? We don't know. Answer is in the harmonica. Secrets are in the freaky barn. Chain gang sign says "ghosts at work." Sins is on sand another place now. Sometimes I think they won't be comin' home at all. Boss says God. It's a curse! What's an old piano player to do? I lay down in the bones of his ear. Sounds like rain on an old tin roof fall. Then stomp. Like someone smashing them Japanese robots up. Maracas. And some crooning too. Crackles like an old vinyl record. Beefheart is in the grooves. Oh my voodoo. Drive an old Ford down a country road. 'Tend you're running to Puerto Rico too. Trees rustle, moon appears. It drips. A rooster crows three for you. Hear him slide his feet on wood. Scratch! Devil is grunting for tequila. Oh Lord. Bim bam bang, it's true. Woooooo hoooooooooo. Wooooooooooooooooooooo hooooooooooooooooooooooo. Wooooooooooooooooo hoooooooo00000oooooo000000000ooooo000000000000000.

- Mark Mordue





* First published at Neumu (USA)
http://neumu.net/fortyfour/2004/2004-00195/2004-00195_fortyfour.shtml

The Electrified Journalist

When I think about rock 'n' roll and my life trying to write about it, my trying to get inside rock 'n' roll through words and stories, it seems to me all I ever cared about was this thing called "the truth," or being able to celebrate, activate, animate a moment, good or bad, to put it there on the page — rock 'n' roll as a lived experience.

To create a riot or a love story or a sadness or even a divide — the unplugged and distant as much as the switched-on, up-close and electrical — to remake the event and the encounter: these seemed to me to be the absolute goals.

So that when someone read my "stuff" they might get as shaken up or inspired or confused as I was in relation to these people and songs and places and happenings that were moving me.

Rock 'n' roll, yeah.

Not so long ago I was invited to talk to a group of tertiary-degree music students about rock 'n' roll writing. In the course of my trying to explain myself, and the alchemy I believe in, their teacher interrupted me and said, "Isn't it true most rock journalists are just frustrated musicians?"

I'd heard that one a million times before. It's the kind of statement that pisses you off when you're a rock journalist. It's meant to piss you off too, to put you in your place — to let you know your art form is essentially parasitic, second-rate, a pastiche based on things you can't do. I'm sure you know the clichés: "Those who can, do! Those who can't, write about it." "Action speaks louder than words." Blah blah blah…

Without thinking too much about it I turned to the music teacher and said, "Maybe that's true. But then I think most musicians are also just frustrated musicians too."



Over the years I've come to see there are times when there is a struggle between musicians and writers for what you might call the "soul" of rock 'n' roll.

Of course writing can't get at the communal heat, the group energy, the sheer physical decibels of rock 'n' roll. But it can work in other ways, in another form, and be just as vital and equal to the feelings and ideas rock 'n' roll represents. It can even be better. Sure.

In some ways, it is even possible to turn up the writing, which might be one of the signposts for what rock 'n' roll writing is: the volume level of the adjectives, the unhinged energy, the wild connections and amplification of emotions. In forms normally given over to the rationalistic and the analytical — in journalism and criticism — rock 'n' roll writing still has a place for love and poetry, for metaphysical associations that really do believe in taking you — along with the writer — that much higher than you might have been before.

Maybe something was sparked during my own early efforts to write poetry, mostly inspired by the lyrics of Marc Bolan of T-Rex. As a budding 13-year-old writer I reamed off efforts about white lines on mirrors, lounging in jet airplanes and drowning in swimming pools full of lions and naked women. I didn't really know what it was all about, but it sounded fantastic, and the influence of a drug-indulged, globe-hopping hippie-mystic English pop star definitely had its positive side. I dreamt. Ridiculously, wildly. But I dreamt.



When I was a teenager in the '70s, magazines like RAM (Rock Australia Magazine) and the NME (New Musical Express) from England further articulated the sounds and activities, the style and language of a culture completely alternative, or beyond where I was as a suburban boy in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia.

As much as through the sounds, and of course the lyrics that I studied so carefully, I fell deeper into music because of these magazines and the people who wrote for them. At the NME it was the writings of Paul Morley in particular who first awakened me to the fact a magazine article could have all the grace and intelligence of a fine short story or theatre piece.

In Australia, where I live, Andrew McMillan's stories in RAM got me interested in Tom Waits and Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac, which dovetailed, I would discover, with Bob Dylan's links with the Allen Ginsberg and the whole Beat scene, as well as French poets like Arthur Rimbaud, who, I saw, inspired Van Morrison as well as Dylan, and even someone as punk as Patti Smith.

Much later I realized there was an argument that the 19th-century Rimbaud was the first true punk, not '60s American garage bands, not singers like Richard Hell, not Johnny Rotten at all.

By this stage of my teens I was already heavily into Joseph Heller's Catch 22 and Something Happened; into the twists and shouts of Hamlet (surely Shakespeare's most rock 'n' roll play), as well as the comic-book existentialism of the Marvel super heroes; into actors like Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico, and books like Catcher in the Rye (which seemed to inspire all kinds of assassins, including Mark Chapman, the killer of John Lennon), as well as records like On the Beach and Tonight's the Night , in which Neil Young sang about bad heroin, Charles Manson and, funnily enough, how much rock critics pissed him off ("Walk On"); into Albert Camus (who later inspired The Cure to write "Killing An Arab"), sci-fi books, UFO cover-up conspiracy theories, vampire novels, Elvis Presley movies on midday TV, the cinematic obsession with Americana in most of Bernie Taupin's lyrics for prime-time Elton John; into David Bowie and how alien and drug-fucked he seemed when they screened the "Cracked Actor" doco on ABC (when he uttered the words "there's a fly in my milk" as he sat staring into a carton, clearly out of it, in the back of a limousine, he may as well been speaking some revolutionary form of Sanskrit to me) and how weirdly he danced to "Golden Years" on "Soul Train."

It all made sense to me; it all felt connected.

You could say by the time punk arrived, and what was later called "New Wave," I was ripe for further development. Punk's DIY spirit and the intellectual, arty pretensions of the New Wave — along with the rock magazines I was reading — fed a sense that I could actually get involved.

In magazine interviews this somewhat disparate movement's main stars, figures like Johnny Rotten (Sex Pistols), Paul Weller (The Jam), Joe Strummer (The Clash) and Howard Devoto (The Buzzcocks) in the UK, and Chris Bailey (The Saints), Nick Cave (The Birthday Party) and Sean Kelly (Models) here, spoke of influences that opened up a cultural history I'd never known of, often dark and certainly obscure. The Velvet Underground, the MC5 and The New York Dolls, Marxist politics, German expressionism film and art, William Faulkner, W.B. Yeats, Celine, reggae and French cultural theory all came tumbling through the hole they punched in my life.



Maybe there was also something in the fundamental ethos that this music wasn't entirely above or beyond me — in the brute democracies of punk, and the art-house exoticism and experimentation, even the uncomfortable superiority of New Wave that appealed to me as an adolescent boy. Whatever the answer to that mystery, I was launched as a writer.

I think there is a vaguely religious quality to all this, that writing about music and writing inspired by music leads to songs of innocence and experience on the page as much as between the ears. It's a devotional act, a real love thing, which is why it can be an angry and hateful and messy thing too. I often think the best rock 'n' roll magazines and writers have a reach-for-the-stars touch of anarchy about them, a sense of risk that inevitably involves failure as much as moments of white-light wonder. It depresses me to look at most rock 'n' roll magazines today by comparison: the Pepsi Cola cool they promote; the tame and stylized rebellion; the often dull, hypey and self-satisfied writing. The awful truth in today's over-designed media world is that if Hunter S. Thompson or Lester Bangs turned up today at the doors of Rolling Stone writing at their peak of their powers, they'd be turned away because they did not fit the format. Sorry guys, too passionate, too wild, too weird. I hope the zine scene and the Internet are the places where that honesty and talent can find a better voice.

An American rock critic like Lester Bangs understood the need for this energy, in columns and interviews and reviews, that rampaged through his relationship with rock 'n' roll and its music stars. Perhaps better than anyone, Bangs at his best (and Bangs was not always at his best) could evoke the actual feelings of listening to music, the way you heard it, in words. Alternatively, an English writer as fine as Nick Kent exuded a more elegant discipline in stories largely fascinated with the self-destructive and exiling impulses that would also exert their own pull upon him. Bangs would eventually die of his own excessive lifestyle and later be immortalized in "Almost Famous" as the mentor to the young lead character ("People like us aren't cool") while Nick Kent would find himself, for a brief moment, the singer of an unknown group called the Sex Pistols before Johnny Rotten got the job and he was unceremoniously booted out. That a sadness, a hurt, plagues both Bangs and Kent — who seems to have faded off the scene — for all their talent does not detract from just how good they are as writers. Nor does the fact that they tried to sing, to play. They just wanted to live it all.

Funnily enough a lot of the contemporary rock 'n' roll scene seems to be looking towards the literary world to enliven it. At events in London, performance poets like John Cooper Clarke and Linton Kwesi Johnson, both of whom emerged in the wake of punk and dub, have ranked alongside Will Self, Sadie Smith and Jarvis Cocker of Pulp in evenings of musical and literary dialogue in the past few years. Poetry, it seems, is becoming hip, cool. Apart from the longtime notable work of the Nuyorican Café scene in the U.S.A., there is now also the annual 215 Festival in Philadelphia, organized by Dave Eggers and his team from the McSweeney's Web site, featuring the likes of Zadie Smith, Jeffrey Eugenides and Jonathan Ames alongside groups like They Might Be Giants.

This bridge-building between writers and musicians is hardly new. It's how Patti Smith emerged as an artist. It's what gave Dylan so much artistic credibility. But certainly since the advent of rock 'n' roll one can see an ongoing and developing body of work that details something larger, which we might call the cultural history of our rock 'n' roll lives, from On the Road to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Less Than Zero, The Ice Storm, Twelve, The Fight Club, He Died With a Felafel In His Hand… the list, like the beat, goes on!

So when it finally comes down to it, I sincerely believe French poetry and the Beats are just as important to modern rock 'n' roll as the blues and Woody Guthrie. The same way we couldn't have had the outburst of New Journalism in the 1960s and the radical subjectivity of so much literary non-fiction today without rock 'n' roll opening people's minds alongside it.

Artists like Brett Whiteley and Tracey Emin, poets like Allen Ginsberg and Robert Adamson, rock journalists like Lester Bangs and Nick Kent, are just as much a part of rock 'n' roll as Lou Reed or the Rolling Stones or even Eminem. That's the truly wild and mutable thing about rock 'n' roll — it's an energy that can't be held and chained up or robbed of its magic and dissent. It begs in the end for trouble and divinity and sex and whatever ruptures we can celebrate it with. It's escaped into our entire culture, our dreams, our unconscious life, and a musician or even a crap magazine doesn't own it, any more than a couple speeding out of town to the sounds of You Am I, M Ward and Kings of Leon on the radio.

- Mark Mordue



*First published at Neumu (USA) on November 29th, 2004.
http://www.neumu.net/needledrops/data/00090_needledrops.shtml