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Freak out in a moonage daydream: Sean M Whelan on Liner Notes
The Liner Notes spoken word event (run by Babble) is always a festival highlight for me, and this year a bunch of writers, poets et al are set to rock our worlds with an interpretation of David Bowie’s album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. *Excitement!* Previous Liner Notes have included Michael Jackson’s Thriller, INXS’ Kick and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours. Liner Notes has actually been running a lot longer than it has been part of MWF, and I got in touch with Babble/Liner Notes founder and regular performer Sean M Whelan to ask him some questions about the event:
Sean, can you tell us how Babble and Liner Notes came to be? What was the first album that was ‘interpreted’?
Liner Notes literally came to me in a dream. I was half asleep one night and the concept of it all just kind of materialised in my head. I remember shooting up in bed and searching for a pen and paper to write it down because I’ve had those experiences before where I’ve had a great idea in the middle of the night then gone back to sleep and in the morning I’ve remembered I HAD a good idea but can’t for the life of me remember what it actually was! This time I secured it safely in writing before going back to sleep. I’ve always been a big fan of music and poetry so this seemed the perfect way to combine those two great loves. I loved the idea of it being vaguely built around the model of a tribute night, but unlike other tribute shows all this original material comes out of it.
The first album we interpreted was actually David Bowie’s Hunky Dory! With coming to Bowie again after ten years it feels like we’ve come full circle. Also Liner Notes has developed a lot since our first show at Bar Open in Fitzroy. We were still figuring things out back then. For example, we didn’t have a full band for the first show, Michael Nolan performed with just a solo guitarist. Since then we have had a full band play at every Liner Notes event and for the last three years we’ve performed sold out shows in conjunction with the Melbourne Writers Festival. This year we’re also very proud to be taking the show interstate for the first time. We’ll be appearing at the Brisbane Writers Festival at the Powerhouse on Sept 8. I’ve always thought the show was perfect for touring as it’s very easy to source the performers at whichever location you take it to. Taking it internationally is just a matter of time, we already have two copycat events in North America, we might as well take it over and show them the real thing!
Why Ziggy Stardust? (So many of his albums are classics, after all.)
Well, you’re right, there are SO many great David Bowie albums to choose from. Which is one reason why we wanted to revisit Bowie. There is also the fact that this year marks the 40th anniversary of Ziggy Stardust, so that seemed like a good enough reason to choose Ziggy above the rest. There’s so much glamour and showmanship around that album too, which is naturally appealing to the tiny little rock stars living in all our hearts.
Michael Nolan has been doing an excellent job as MC for Liner Notes over the years, researching the band, the album and each track before the night (not to mention being able to sing). Can you ever imagine doing it without him?
Michael Nolan pretty much IS Liner Notes. I came up with the original concept for the show but right from the start it’s been a joint effort between myself and co-producers Emilie Zoey Baker and Michael Nolan. But Nolan is such a crucial part of the show, from liaising with the Melbourne Writers Festival to source the performers, to the amazing amount of research he does on every album, to singing with the band on the night; he really is indispensable. Now that the model has been built I can easily imagine Liner Notes going on without me but it would be a very different show and much poorer for it without the mighty Michael Nolan at the helm.
The performers at Liner Notes are usually a mix of poets, authors, comedians and musical types—faces both familiar and new. How do you go about selecting the artists for the show?
When Liner Notes first started it was strictly poets who made up the performers for the night, as one of the reasons it was started was as a way to bring wider audiences to poetry events. Ten years later we have expanded it to nearly anybody that we think will have something interesting to offer. For example this year we have Tim Flannery, environmentalist and First Dog on the Moon, cartoonist, both who don’t fit into any of the categories above.
The only brief for our guests is that we hope they will bring something engaging to the stage. Some people think they need to be a fan of whatever album is being highlighted to contribute but that’s not the case at all. The songs, that each guest are asked to provide a response to, are only meant to act as kicking off points for inspiration. Right from the start we have never intended Liner Notes to be a serious literary dissection of popular music, which some fans might expect. Some of our guests are hearing the albums we present to them for the first time. Irreverence is really the name of the game, but so is to expect the unexpected. Part of the thrill of Liner Notes as producers is that we don’t vet any of the work beforehand, so, along with the audience, we see everything for the first time on the night.
Can you tell us what track you’re interpreting from Ziggy, and maybe even give us a small preview?
My challenge this year is to provide a response to Track 3. Side A. Moonage Daydream. Definitely one of my favourite tracks from the album. I wish I could give you a small preview but I seem to be on track for doing what I do every year, and that is to leave it to the last minute and have a total panic attack about it in the few days remaining before the show. The only preview I could possibly provide at this stage is that in the spirit of the song I will most likely ‘Freak out in a moonage daydream oh yeah!’
Liner Notes: Ziggy Stardust is on Saturday 25 August at 8pm. View the full list of performers and ticket details here.
MWF 2010 authors on… listening
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
The film Morvern Callar by Lynne Ramsay is based on a book by Alan Warner (although the film has a completely different tone and aesthetic). The title character is a young woman whose boyfriend has committed suicide as the film opens, leaving behind the manuscript of a novel, which Morvern then submits to publishers under her own name, successfully, as it eventually turns out.
This is the final scene. It may not be apparent that Morvern is actually wearing earphones connected to a Walkman (this is pre-iPod), which provides an implied diegetic source for the soundtrack, even if the version we hear is obviously overdubbed. This theory is subsequently confirmed by the final few seconds of the clip, in which the sound is ‘overheard’ through earphones turned up too loud, although by that point there is no accompanying image, so that the sound only becomes literally diegetic after it has ceased to make sense in diegetic terms.
Clearly there is something else at stake besides narrative logic by the time we get to the black screen.
I remember going to a concert with friends when I was a teenager, when one of our group also insisted on wearing a Walkman, through which he listened to heavy metal, to register his disgust at the sappy Christian folk being performed on stage. This has always struck me as a peculiarly eloquent and perverse gesture, which expresses both the need to belong to a group and the inability to reconcile oneself to that need. I think that this same gesture, whose perversity goes unremarked in the clip, except insofar as its eloquence is amplified by the sound design, means something more in Morvern Callar.
The sequence also works visually of course. It is not merely moving bodies filmed under a strobe. Rather, it is a tour-de-force of choreography and editing, in which a series of jump cuts disguise abrupt focal shifts as well as changes in the lighting.
DEDICATED TO THE ONE I LOVE.
David Bowie. Preferably Hunky Dory, Pin Ups or The Man Who Sold the World.
We talk a great deal in Australia about the ‘right’ to free speech. Much less is said about the right to be heard, to be listened to. Susan Bickford has interesting things to say about this in The dissonance of democracy: listening, conflict and citizenship (Cornell University Press 1996). In my own work (with Joan Eveline) I’ve been exploring the concept of ‘deep listening’, developed among transcultural mental health practitioners (Gabb and McDermott 2007: 5), who describe deep listening as entailing ‘an obligation to contemplate in real time, everything that you hear – to self-reflect as you listen, and then, tellingly, to act on what you’ve registered’. These ideas and references can be pursued in Mainstreaming Politics (Bacchi and Eveline, University of Adelaide Press, 2010), available as a free download at http://www.adelaide.edu.au/press.
Angela says…
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
MWF 2010 authors on… time
I’ve given MWF guests a list of 15 random topics to respond to. The idea is to entertain and introduce you, the reader, to other sides of the MWF authors and their work, which may not be revealed on festival panels. The authors were allowed to respond in any way they liked, and were given no word limits. To learn more about the authors and what they’re doing at the festival, click their names through to their MWF bios.
Summer tends to do strange things to time, but in Finland the effect is breathtaking. Nights—in that old sense of those dark interludes during which you slept–are a brief, odd joke. At first, I especially found the birdsong around midnight disconcerting, like the sneaky onset of a subtle insanity. But the mind or the body adjusts. And then time seems to have become so generous, childhood-holiday elastic…
‘He flexes like a whore, falls wanking to the floor.’ (David Bowie.)
1/60 of a second, Piazza San Marco, Venice, 2003
The photograph above is part of a sequence at www.letusburnthegondolas.com. I took it in Piazza San Marco, in Venice. It reminds me of a portrait by Josef Sudek (reproduced below), in which, as Ian Jeffrey explains, ‘the man is accompanied by his shadow … and by his reflection …. [I]t is a portrayal of a subject reduced and simplified almost out of existence’. There’s a paradox at the heart of this quotation, because in Sudek’s photograph the man is reduced by multiplication. Not only that, but his doppelgangers – a broken black shadow and a will o’ the wisp white reflection – are unrecognisable reproductions. By contrast, the doppelgangers of folklore were indistinguishable from their originals: except for the fact that they cast no shadow and left no reflection.
Josef Sudek, Portrait of a Man, 1938
The subject of my photograph is also a waiter (or rather, one of the two subjects is a waiter), but it is difficult to make sense of what is happening without recounting the precise circumstances under which the photograph was taken. So: I am sitting in front of a bar in an overpriced café. A waiter is standing behind the bar. Half of his bisected torso is visible at the extreme right edge of the frame. At frame centre there’s an espresso machine and a rack of upturned coffee cups. There’s a mirror above the cups, in which the reflection of the waiter’s back is visible. All of these elements are out-of-focus.
Behind me, over my right shoulder, is a plate-glass window which opens out onto the street. A reflection of a small part of this window, framed by drapes, is also visible in the mirror above the espresso machine. Because it’s dark outside, a faint image of the waiter’s face bounces back off the plate glass window into the café interior. That image is also visible in the mirror: the reflection of a reflection.
People walking past the café always look in. They can’t help it. It’s a reflex. So, I think, if I preset the focal point of my lens manually ‘inside’ the reflection in the mirror, I can capture someone looking through the glass from outside at the precise moment that their reflection passes the faint outline of the waiter, projected onto the glass from inside.
Because I am left-handed, I hold the viewfinder up to my left eye, and I have to pull it down and away in order to get enough space to flip the lever that advances the film. As I do so, I expel the air I have been holding in to keep the camera steady. So each exposure on a 35mm film represents a single breath and a discrete perception, both of which have a finite duration: in this case, 1/60s.
This particular image, which exists as a hypothesis in my head before I am able to test it experimentally, is doubly singular, because I know that I’ll only get one chance at it. The experiment can’t be repeated, because I’ll have to bring the camera up fast and shove it right in the waiter’s face, with no warning. I’m willing to do this once – I’ll take my chances and apologise afterwards – but I won’t get away with it twice.
The footsteps outside reach a particular pitch when someone is approximately two seconds away from the right location, before they actually appear in the mirror, so I’ll have to start moving the camera up to my eye when I hear that cue, before the image has presented itself to my eye.
Click.
1/60 of a second is – just, barely – long enough to distinguish the sound of the shutter opening from that of it closing, an interval during which I cannot in fact see anything, during which I am conscious of nothing: except duration itself.
What is the resulting photograph ‘about’? It includes three versions of the waiter. In one sense the bisected mannequin in the foreground at frame right is most real. It’s closest to the camera and is undeniably there, physically present. But that version of the waiter is an amorphous blob: half a white tuxedo, half a black tie, a quarter of a grey jawbone, an icon of the idea of the costume of a waiter, ‘reduced and simplified almost out of existence’. The man’s back, visible as a reflection in the mirror above the espresso machine, is further away, but clearer, more recognisable as an actual human being. Still, it’s turned away from us, expressionless by definition.
It’s only in the second-degree reflection bounced back from the plate glass that the man acquires a personality, but this minute, barely visible face floats uneasily next to that of an outsider peering in, whose naked, grainy curiosity is unbound by the blank protocols of service. Together, these two faces make up less than five per cent of the negative. They’re the only parts of the photograph in focus, but they never coincided or connected in reality.
But perhaps the most important thing about this photograph is what it doesn’t show. No-one ever asks the right question, the most puzzling question, the most important question: ‘How did you keep yourself out of the mirror?’
Feel free to share your own responses to the topic, or to the authors’ responses, in the comments.
Melbourne Writers Festival blog 