Romanzo Criminale: La Serie 1 – a review

To judge from the credits alone - brief glimpses of shades-wearing men having seedy conversations; shots of wads of lira; guns - RC is either a shitty cheesy crime drama set in the 70s in the vein of the Professionals, or a cool Goodfellas-style fast-paced anthropological study of Italian crime in Italy. Even the promo photo looks shit. Happily, this story of the real-life Banda della Magliana is neither; fortuitously, it is the greatest TV programme maybe ever.

It is a bildungsroman of a gang, centring on its leader, small-time hood Lebanese, who lives in a small caravan by the Tiber. Inevitably, he forges alliances with local hoods and runs risks with dogged determination as they come up against better-connected foes and the sinister Camorra. So far so Scarface. But we who know little about the Banda in advance of its screening are never given the sense that their rise to power will be inevitable in the same sense as a Hollywood gangster epic. Limited by their running time, the big screen bildungsroman defaults to vignettes, presenting the trajectory of character in a single unvarying gradient, always seeming like an abridged biography retold by an omniscient narrator. Romanzo Criminale's format, whilst conforming to type with its 12 intriguing introductions and 12 cliff-hanger endings, allows many twists and set-backs and seems much closer to a geniune thriller than a morality tale, which is effectively what Scarface, Goodfellas, et al. are. In fact, the gang's transition from small-time hoodlumry to the big stage establishes once and for all supremacy of the novel and the TV series over story, film and stage in matters of exposition.

Most interesting is the fact that RC is set during Italy's anno di piombi. This is the most triumphant detail in the series. The historical gravitas of Italy's torrid recent past elevates Criminale way, way above run-of-the-mill crime dramas and makes HBO centrepieces like the Sopranos look like a dreary soap-opera and Life on Mars like the fantasy it is (people with no historical sense have compared it to both). The series begins like the flashbacks in Godfather Part 2 and hits another level when Aldo Moro is kidnapped by the Red Brigades. It is the crucially-important historical backdrop which makes the Italian state itself - in the form of the shady secret service, the identity of whose acolytes we see interspersed throughout the series, is only very slowly revealed - complicit in breaking the rule of law in exactly the same way as the Banda did. They are morally equivalent, these murdering thieves from the poor part of Rome and the security service, the writers tell us. The facts bear out the claim.

BP wasn’t alive to experience the 1970s in Italy, so we will refrain from posturing about its historical authenticity, but it looks and feels like a different, grubbier, less technologically sophisticated era and one familiar from archive footage. We know that the 1970s in Western Europe saw serious threats to the established order in the form of Communism, trade unionism, terrorism (Red, Black and anti-colonial) and, perhaps most of all, the Yom Kippur War and the resulting oil crisis of 1973. The piece of the pie seemed to get smaller across the West. A new, grubbier realism set in after the optimism of the 60s. It even saturated Hollywood. Watergate happened. Baader-Meinhof were running crazy across West Germany. The British army were shooting civilians in Ulster. Men were dressing up as women and pretending to be space aliens with 1950s’ licks. The US pulled out of ‘Nam, unable to defeat a determined army of peasants with AKs. Were the liberal values of the West falling apart? Was Communism going to take over?

The Years of Lead as presented in Criminale show the audience that Italy, far from being the land of fashion, pasta and football familiar to English-speaking contemporaries, was - is - an intensely political nation divided, like much of Europe, into three camps by its reaction to Anglo-capitalism. Firstly, the left, the Red Brigades and Anarchists, who kidnapped and murdered the Prime Minister of Italy, Aldo Moro in 1978 (we are given a glimpse of this through Inspector Scaiola's relationship with his Red sister); then the right, the fascists and Mussolini revivalists, whom we see when the fascist adventurer Nero (brilliantly played by an Iggy Pop lookalike) needs someone to launder his money; and finally, the centre, the dominant party of acquiescent capitalists after the fall of Mussolini, typified by Berlusconi. It is in the centre where the Banda (in spite of its links to NAR) and their nemesis Inspector Scaiola exist. The Banda believe in money, Scaiola in reason, together the two values uniting the centre faction: capital and law, the means of enforcing capital. By contrast, the secret service seem like out-of-control puppet masters, unsure which marionette to play with more. According to the producers, they played the Banda over Scaiola and the Right over the Left. But they don’t want more money and, as far as we can tell, they don’t want a second Duce.

The dichotomy between rifht and left resolved itself and the Years of Lead ended, but not before 85 people were blown up in Bologna. So, what of the era hinted at by the end of the first series of Romanzo? Governments calmed down, or got better at covering themselves up. The populace was tired of terrorism and pacified by the financial boom of the 1980s. Liberal markets triumphed across most of the world in 1991; Kojeve’s end of history thesis came to fruition. Francis Fukuyama updated it with an audacious piece of backwards clairvoyance. Markets opened up to freer trade. Governments trusted each other to be more predictable than in the 70s and real political choice between Red, Black and Centre was replaced with consumer choice. Companies, too, reacting to legislation to better secure national income, sought to make revenues more predictable, employing Black-Scholes and the personal computer to master the future and conquer risk (suggested further reading: Galbraith’s Affluent Society).

We live in a world a start-up Banda would have dreamed of – the approval and promotion of crass materialism, the ability to get-rich-quick and the chaos of globalisation as a smoke screen for their underworld activity. If the NAR or the CPI had got into power, they would have been toast.

More on the Banda:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banda_della_Magliana

Change.org: coming to a protest near you, UK

Link.

Commentators will be quick to assess the importance and the magnificence of an online petition system which can – and has – drummed up support for initiatives as diverse as opposing Bank of America, obtaining support from Apple for its Chinese workforce and ensuring that lynchmob justice prevails in the bizarre Trayvon Martin case.



Yes, the selfsame commentators who laud the arrival of the phenomenon on these shores I doubt will like to see the millions of signatures appended to populist petitions for member states to quit the EU (now inevitable), for death sentences to be handed out to child killers and for immigration to be stopped dead.


Democracy – genuine democracy, i.e., populism – is a rollercoaster and must not be confused with our current staid system of politics. I’m talking about managed democracy, with its quinquennially-elected professional politicians, who are under no obligation to vote how their constituents want them to, which is like a centrally-planned version of democracy in a similar way that ‘managerial capitalism’is the centrally-planned version of entrepreneurial capitalism.
 
As the internet is a threat to managerial capitalism, so change.org could be a threat to managed democracy.



But if they think they can waltz into China they’ve another thing coming.

The New Arcades Project

Burning Pyre is sick of the serviette badinage which passes for trench warfare between modern media talking heads. We’ve read of the time when men would beat and shoot each other to death over their opinions, viz. 1919:

 

What are we trying to say, ever so clumsily? That the cultural commentator and artist should stop whispering behind his napkin, embarrassed by a ballsy opinion, and say something real.

The New Arcades Project is an attempt to understand – hell: appreciate – art, politics, philosophy, history, economics, etc, etc, within a fragmented narrative context which is not history, but nevertheless seems like history. The rise of new media means that a new understanding can be developed which is not based in the art gallery or in the venerable book (which we continue to venerate, Amazon’s space-saving toy be damned) and, thanks to its brevity, need not be monotonically classicist or Marxist or fascist or capitalist or –ist at all. It can interweave competing, fragmented narratives to present a mosaic-like picture of events. It is the theory of history for an over-intellectualised, over-stimulated, over-fed generation who do not know what war or political rioting is, but who wish to understand the past more viscerally and without regard to political correctness or narrative structure than a million History Channel reconstructions, based on a phenomenological bootstrapping of personal experience to general, 'public' experience.

What the fuck does this mean?

We all remember the time, however distantly, a great record was released; an artwork seized the headlines; a terrorist event gripped our attention and our pity; a magnificent moment which was greater than our own personal agendas and felt, yes, like the Zeitgeist itself! This is the New Arcades Project.

Glam decadence: 1970s Britain and fin-de-siecle Paris

This is a continuation of our retronauting back to the 70s with Bernhard’s Correction (’75), Eno’s Ambient 1 (’78) with the glam roots of the decade.

This is what really kicked it off:

Men wearing makeup? Do well to note that this is what life in the early 70s was like:

While glam rock just looks old-fashioned and silly to most people now, underlying its outward daftness is the desire not even twenty years after the creation of rock n roll to lionise stardom and to play with the concept of it. It wasn’t enough simply to be the star, to play the music, to sell out Shea Stadium – you had to differentiate yourself from the ordinary people and give vent to their (supposedly) subconscious desires to break free and live as if you had the money to do it. Like this:

So glam was born, the next rebellion of the slightly-younger of the same generation (Bolan and Bowie were only 7 years younger than Lennon). T-Rex were the first and best and Bolan even did the courtesy of dying before he was thirty, cementing his legend as the leader of his pack, but Ziggy Stardust is the real hero of glam rock, and his roots are much, much older than rock n roll.

The writers J-K Husymans, Octave Mirbeau and Wilde had long satirised the hedonistic bent of fin-de-siècle France and Victorian Britain; glam was a recrudescence of this kind of flared-cuff-and-top-hats approach to aesthetics and desire, indulging as far as possible in all the bad taste glitter and glitz that could be found in a still-industrial Britain. Bowie/ Ziggy’s Rock n Roll Suicide even incorporated the same moral resolution that Wilde adopted in The Portrait of Dorian Gray - a debauched Ziggy is torn to pieces by his fans - although admittedly Jones/Bowie/Ziggy’s influence was a melange inspired by the youthful demise of Buddy Holly, Brian Jones, Morrison, Joplin and Hendrix. And the Americans landing on the moon. And Vince Taylor.

That glam was a revival of older music there can be no doubt: listen to the blues and 50s rock n roll riffs in T-Rex, cribbed from the States and cranked up to 10, and songs like Cadillac and Thunderwing (these aren’t British cars), they’re all poses (Bolan couldn’t even drive). The smooth ballading of Ziggy, cribbed from Sinatra and the 60s (and the 30s’ Wizard of Oz, in the case of Starman) and his rockers, which sound like Hendrix wrapped in foil and without the wah-wah and fuzzbox pyrotechnics, hark back to a simpler, purer era, stripped down to an essence bottled in prior decades.

The point here isn’t that pop will eat itself; glam was original, for all its references to aesthetic history. It’s that it was the first successful ‘heroising’ sub-genre of music, to permit a coinage. The rock n roll star as hero, as alien. Recall Baudelaire’s casting the role of poet in L’Albatross from the Flowers of Evil:

Often, to amuse themselves, the men of a crew
Catch albatrosses, those vast sea birds
That indolently follow a ship
As it glides over the deep, briny sea.

Scarcely have they placed them on the deck
Than these kings of the sky, clumsy, ashamed,
Pathetically let their great white wings
Drag beside them like oars.


That winged voyager, how weak and gauche he is,
So beautiful before, now comic and ugly!
One man worries his beak with a stubby clay pipe;
Another limps, mimics the cripple who once flew!

The poet resembles this prince of cloud and sky
Who frequents the tempest and laughs at the bowman;
When exiled on the earth, the butt of hoots and jeers,
His giant wings prevent him from walking.

The poet as self-conscious outsider, raised above the common mass by his idealism and his sensitivity, alienated by the crude materialism of an increasingly affluent everyday life (the ahistorical amongst our readers will be shocked to read that pockets of Western Europeans in the 1860s thought their civilisation 'too affluent' prior to mass electrification, pre-radio, pre-TV, pre-Space Invaders, pre-Xbox, pre-Iphone, pre-Google glasses, but there it is). The sidereal hero of Bowie’s Starman, who instructs Ziggy to spread the message of love and hope on earth, is glam rock's classic exemplar. It is not the same kind of peace and love spread in the 60s, by a generation who thought they were changing the world:

Admittedly, Jim Morrison was of the same ilk, and the influence of Rimbaud and the Imagists is less oblique in his lyrics than in glam. The Doors were literary, to be sure, but they differ ideologically from glam in that Morrison wasn't interested in the idea of the rock star; he was interested in the idea of the mage, the writer and the dark poet, but happened to be a rock star in a rock band.

The colour TV - introduced into Britain in 1967- helped glam's cause immensely, as it had the psychedelic movement. Ziggy Stardust in monochrome would have looked like a bird shat on him, like a bad character from Dr Who; that would confuse the public, not enrage and inspire it:

Within a year, Roxy Music's Brian Eno had chinned Bowie sonically with Here Come the Warm Jets, at times redolent of Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band and their Carollian whimsy, in fact awash with clues about the aural horizon and the invention of ambient music (see previous posts). But Ziggy played guitar, and the kids saw it – and that’s what counted, in this decade of oil crises, failure of the greatest Western power to bring down a nation of peasant-communists and growing social unrest. Tune in, turn on and drop out had failed, apparently stabbed to death at Altamont in December '69 and vapourised in Britain by increasingly virulent bombings by the IRA. The communal hippy dream had faded; the decadent dream of glamour rock n roll heroism is what replaced it. Baudelaire would have approved.

Thomas Bernard's Correction: a review

 

1931-1989

 

He looked a bit like James May, but Bernhard wrote dark shit nothing to do with cars or Jeremy Clarkson.

This novel, two long paragraphs recounting the work, life and death of a scientist-writer-architect-philosopher loosely based on Wittgenstein and written in 1975, is firmly within the dark (post)modernist wave of post-WWII art; a quintessentially unfilmable novel which escapes into the dark interstices where the writer melts into his subject matter as if he himself were a palimpsest and then breaches the overlay - be it reminiscences of youth or Roithamer's recondite script on his life, his family, the sister whom he loved and the mysterious edifice, the Cone - and surfaces again to remind us that this is a novel with an apparently reliable narrator.

The subject of the story is Roithamer. The nameless narrator and Hoeller, the childhood friend in whose garret Roithamer found the courage to complete the Cone, are merely wallpaper, Hoeller interesting wallpaper, whose pleasure is to stuff birds late at night in his workshop - or is it? Roithamer is no pointy-headed mentalist-genius in the Hollywood style (Shine, A Beautiful Mind, Pollock), but a man whose genius we are told to accept through his accomplishing the apparently impossible feat of building a cone-shaped structure in the middle of the Kobernausser Forest. And accept it we do, because - there is nothing else to grasp in this novel.

If the narrator is a palimpsest, ever abrading his will from the narrative, then Roithamer is a vessel for Bernhard's reflections on inevitability.

Napoleon said that the ancient concept of fate is replaced in the modern era with policy. Bernhard reminds us here that policy is determined fatefully - by quirks (by being born in Altensam), by predispositions (to over-analyse), by family ('the Erdfing woman'); that is, inescapably.



So far so bleak. Possibly more popular, but not as funny as Celine (but then Bernhard wasn't right-wing), Bernhard falls into the trap of all classically depressed/ dark artists - if he ever played a practical joke in his life his credibility would be over, instantly. Think Beckett (all turtle necks and fierce stares from that vulture-like visage), Robert Smith, Van Gogh, Schiele, etc., po-faced artists (and others) who, if they ever cracked a joke to their public, I mean a really funny, possibly even crass joke, they would be done. It wasn't ever inevitable that Bernhard would step outside of the aesthetic world he had created for himself and tell such a joke. After all, he stayed within his slightly abstract, nihilistic milieu right to the end.

This novel is beautiful like a plastic room designed by H.R. Geiger would be beautiful; but you wouldn't want to sit in it for long.

Neither Celine nor Bernhard had children. They didn't believe in humanity enough.

'The nights, Roithamer said, are always the worst. Everything is blown up out of all proportion, no matter how insignificant, at night it becomes monstrous, the most insignificant, the most harmless thing there is grows monstrous at night and won't let a man like me or Roithamer or Hoeller sleep.'



Some materials:

http://www.thomasbernhard.org/

http://moreintelligentlife.com/node/852