The insoluble pancake

Rewind. It’s 1989 and I am in Deansgate, Manchester and I’m standing in the street looking up at the ancient bulk of the John Rylands Library. Grey clouds pass overhead in a grey sky. This library seemed to be the oldest building I had ever seen in my life, although it was only constructed at the end of the 19th century. It just looked very old; all ancient brickwork and tiny bottle-green windows buried in thick sandstone walls. Half church and half library. On my walkman (remember this is 1989) I am listening to a cassette tape of Joy Division’s “Decades”, the last song on their last album. Those long echoey notes reverberating off to infinity and Mr. Curtis mournful voice intoning over and over again “here are the young men … but where have they been, where have they been?”. Hm!

If there was a every a music which is so strongly linked to a time and place for me it would have had to be Joy Division (leading purveyor of what a music journalist once called “undertaker rock”) and Manchester. It was years after I left Manchester (where I lived for three years) before I could listen to any of that music again. In Canada in the soft blue-green light of the not-too distant pacific ocean, or in Marseille with its hard Mediterranean light, lead singer Ian Curtis’ words could not survive, drowned out by the light. I could not imagine this kind of music ever originating in these kinds of places and even to listen to it there seemed wrong.

But I am back in northern latitudes now, although still far from the grey of Manchester. Far enough north to be interested to see photographer Anton Corbijn’s film about Curtis and Joy Division, “Control”, which has just been released here in France. The film follows Curtis from his childhood years in Macclesfield to his suicide in 1980 at the age of 23. The film is shot in a beautiful, slightly saturated silvery black and white, a masterstroke, and each scene is carefully framed with a careful photographers eye: many scenes are almost Antonioninen in their simplicity and cadrage. Cast members actually play their respective instruments during the film (they all learned the songs during months of practice beforehand) and Sam Riley bears and incredible, uncanny resemblance to Curtis.

The film recounts faithfully the story of Curtis’ rapid ascent to fame and his subsequent inability to cope with all the commitments and responsibilities which that entailed. Having married at a very early age, he found himself locked into a relationship he couldn’t escape whilst at the same time he was already seeing another woman, a belgian journalist he’d met at a concert. He saw no way to resolve all this other than by exiting, stage left.

Of course fans know this story in infinite detail. And it is hard to listen to the music without applying the filter of what is to come. It seems in the film that the end comes almost too quickly (as it did in real life I suppose): we only gain a partial insight into Mr. Curtis and his personality and motivation. Some explanations seem straightforward enough; a string of errors leading into an inescapable dead-end. But I felt that somehow early in the film there is only a small hint of what is to come; Curtis doesn’t seem to be nearly the mass of contradictions one would need to be in order to lead one to suicide. In the end the film of his life could never be as suffocating and bleak as the music he helped create, I think (which is probably a good thing), even though the music plays a very important part in the film.

Technorati Tags: Anton Corbijn, Control, Ian Curtis

I’m back in Paris now. I have been back for a week now. At last I can actually see the posts I wrote whilst in China. Although I was able to upload my posts from Beijing and Xining I could not actually to see them – blogspot.com is blocked, as well as a few other sites. Their filtering mechanism is quite sophisticated: some sites just time out (like bbcnews.com), whilst for others (like the wikipedia page on ‘Lhasa’ for instance) one is presented with a brutal ‘network connection lost’.

But total control of information is a Chinese speciality. We visited the site of Ganden monastery on the last day of our organised tour. The chinese tour guide reluctantly admitted that the monastery was ‘slightly’ damaged during the Cultural revolution; while he told us this I was reading in my Guide routard that they had blocked the exit roads of the monastery with tanks, bombarded the buildings with cannons and aeroplanes, and machine-gunned any monks trying to escape. Hm! A slight discrepancy. When I asked our tour guide, “So, this place is full of Tibetan separatists is it?” he replied cooly, “You will have to ask the chinese government that”.

In my second to last day I actually met a plain-clothes monk, a friendly man on his way to Nepal who wrote for me in my notebook in Tibetan, “I like tibetan tea” (he spoke quite good English). On my last day in Lhasa I made an epic hike into the hills around the city and visited two remote monasteries. The people I met were very friendly, even thought we had very few words in common. At the second, I showed the words written for me in my notebook, and bam! I didn’t get out of there until I had drunk at least four our five cups of yak butter tea! Yum! I confess I like the stuff, but after four cups I started to feel a little queasy. The descent down to Lhasa however, in the clear mountain area, soon calmed my stomach.

Some of my photographs of my trip to Tibet are here.
Technorati Tags: China, Tibet, voyages

I left Lhasa this morning. In the street outside my room, the hotel porter traced in sooty water droplets on the cab roof how much it would cost me to get to the airport. OK! And then we were speeding off through the rainy streets of Lhasa, past the imposing bulk of the Potala, down broad avenues and out into the countryside.

It wasn’t clear to me where one could construct an airport in Tibet; there are so many steep ravines and mountains. After an almost hour of speeding down narrow roads snaking past valleys and mountains it was still not clear just where exactly the airport was hidden. Then suddenly we passed into a long tunnel drilled through the hillside, over a bridge and then another bridge and the airport was there. More incredible Chinese feats of civil engineering. A few hours later, as the aeroplane pulled very steeply away from the runway, I could see we were flying along a vast flood plain. Lakes and rivers far below glittered in the oblique morning light. Steep mountains crowded the cabin windows on each side of the aeroplane. In another half an hour or so, the Tibetan plateau had vanished beneath the clouds.

But returning to Lhasa: once we were free from our Chinese tour guide, I had three days to explore the city. As I said, I changed hotel to one in the centre of the old Tibetan town, and not the new Chinese city, which is utterly without interest. Although our tour guide had warned us about ‘tall handsome Tibetan men’ as they were apparently the most dangerous and avaricious, I was not frightened! I spent the good part of two afternoons walking around the narrow streets and looking into the shops, visiting the occasional temple.

Of course the main feature of Lhasa is the barkour, a series of concentric circles pilgrims make around the city’s most important temple. A great mass of people circles around and around, ebbing and flowing throughout day’s passage. Most of these are pilgrims, old faces tanned to a deep, heavily wrinkled brown by the plateau’s harsh ultraviolet radiation, twirling prayer wheels in one hand and counting beads in the other. Softly chanting under their breath. The women wear long skirts patterned with the traditional Tibetan colours, often with white cloth hats to protect against the sun’s rays. The men are dressed in dark suits. There is not the slightest hint of modernity, there is no location in time. If I were to fade to monochrome the pictures I made and airbrush away the tourists, they could have been taken at any time this century. The churning crowd at times is enveloped by blue clouds of burning incense. Most of these pilgrims are old, but the monks in their red robes seemed to be much younger. I imagined that this is what it must have been like in the crypt of St. Denis in the middle ages, when the relentless and unending flux of the faithful led Abbe Suger to invent gothic architecture…

Everything in the city centres around the barkour, from the countless souvenir stands which line its route to the markets in the streets around. Nearby, I found a shop specialising in prayer wheels. A small weight is attached to a metal cylinder mounted on a wooden pole. Inside the cylinder, prayers are written on a tightly coiled spiral of paper. A slight circular motion of the hand is enough to spin the wheel and prayers are emitted towards heaven. Modifications on demand! When I passed the shop, pilgrims were crowded around the owner who was shortening one prayer wheel whose pole was slightly too long.

Towards the periphery, the streets become slightly more frayed, the pavements more uneven, the buildings slightly less well maintained. Streets too narrow for any kind of motorised vehicle. One can see all manner of things. On the ground here, the bloodied carcass of a yak, for sale; against a building over there, monks chanting in prayer. And asking for money! I suspected that there not real monks. A faint whiff of unpurified sewage hanging in the air. In the markets, every imaginable type of produce is offered, many of them unidentifiable to western eyes. I suppose all of this is what the streets of European cities might have been like a hundred, two hundred years ago.
Technorati Tags: China, Lhasa, Tibet, voyages