Distracted by punk: reading Ian Penman's Fassbinder book

"It all comes down to this / Fragments ..." - Herman Düne

Anyone who's gone to the trouble of watching all 783 hours (or thereabouts) of the manic filmic and televisual output of semi-infamous German anti-auteur Rainer Werner Fassbinder probably deserves better than a dashed-off blog which mostly ignores all the stuff about er, the films, and instead seizes on a few bits and pieces in the book about music. Yep, welcome to my post about Ian Penman's Fassbinder Thousands Of Mirrors, which I've just motored through in the past week. As a former NME writer during the paper's punk/post-punk heyday, I guess you could say Penman's fair game for my super-reductive music-only approach and, in any case, it's my blog and I'll do what the fuck I like ... (ahem). 

Penman's anti-book: no tacky stills from the films on this cover

So, diving right in - what does Penman have to say about music in this book? For one thing, it seems that the turmoil of punk and its aftermath is a key signifier, a sort of totem. Fassbinder's amazing just-get-on-with-it productivity - 43 films in 13 years, plus sprawing TV series and other projects (he's a "monster of productivity", a "one-man revolution") - is seen as Fassbinder having the "do-it-quick ethos that punk and the best of hippie had in common". In August 1978, when Penman moves from hated Norfolk to the gloomy swirl of a London that was run-down but lively, Penman says that the "haunted sci-fi/Victorian smash-up language of Mark E Smith" felt well-suited to the time, in pretty much the same way he feels that Fassbinder fitted the moment. Meanwhile, Fassbinder's profile in West Germany during the 1970s was apparently such that he was a "tabloid figure", what Penman calls a "scarcely conceivable amalgam of Bertolt Brecht, Joe Orton, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Sid Vicious and Orson Wells". Er, right. There's more along these lines. He mentions (seemingly with a tinge of lifelong regret) how he swerved away from going to art school and how, "distracted by punk", he fell into the business of hacking out high-browish pieces for the NME, competing with Paul Morley and Barney Hoskyns to see who could pack their reviews with the most terms borrowed from Walter Benjman, Saussure, Genet, Derrida, Gramsci or André Breton. (Pity the poor NME reader of the time, just trying to find out if the new Swell Maps or Mekons LP was any good). In the end his art education, says Penman, actually came in the form of studying the art work on the sleeves of "Pere Ubu's first few import singles" or being swayed by images like "three or four photographs of post-Pistols John Lydon", the "vividly apocalyptic artwork on a number of Rasta reggae albums", and various post-punk appropriations of John Heartfield, Dada and its associated forms. Yeah man, I can relate.  

All well and good, and I appreciate (and largely agree with) Penman's low-key reference points and remarks. Wire get a mention, as do Suicide, the Birthday Party's Junkyard album and a little constellation he (tentatively) refers to as the key post-punk outputs from the 77/post-77 period: Iggy Pop's The Idiot, PiL's Metal Box, Marianne Faithfull's Broken English, Tim Buckley's Greetings From LA, Robert Wyatt's Rock Bottom and Ruth Is Stranger Than Richard, and a few others. German stuff - Neu!, Faust, David Bowie's Low - is also deemed important for getting under the skin of the era, or at least the potential appeal of a director like Fassbinder to a young artistically-inclined person living through this time. But in my opinion Penman also undersells the music of the period, including badly undervaluing punk, a cutural artform with huge - and ongoing - impact. On the so-called shock tactics of early punk, Penman says:

"Around punk there was much talk of shaking people out of their complacency ... Confrontation. Getting in their faces. Shock tactics, up to and including swastika armbands, RAF badges, rapist masks. Did such bratty overheated teenage posturing ever really cause anyone to see life anew?"

To which the answer is surely yes. Huge numbers of people from that era "saw life anew" after witnessing Steve Jones calling Bill Grundy "a dirty fucker" live on on television, or reading about it in the Daily Mirror the next day or - perhaps just as impactfully - hearing their parents tut-tutting about "foul-mouthed" punk rockers. These were surely very charged symbolic moments in the lives of 13/14/15/16-year-olds from that time. And there were surely thousands of associated moments of distinctly "punkish" aftershocks taking place whenever someone put the needle down on a Clash or Undertones or Buzzcocks record (or even, just about, a Killing Joke, Theatre Of Hate or Danse Society record a few years later). To this day, if I hear a song like the Undertones' Emergency Cases or PiL's Flowers Of Romance or Stiff Little Fingers' Alternative Ulster I get a distinct ... rush. And it's a meaningful rush, a tiny reaffirmation of something deep and important (about my identifty? my entire world outlook? ...). So no, I don't follow Penman down some of these tracks. This might come down to a fundamentally different aesthetic-neurological set-up. "Decades on", says Penman, "I still recall the disconcerting power of certain films seen in the cinema. Something close to epiphany". It seems that seeing a Fassbinder film at somewhere like the Everyman Cinema in Hampstead is what has truly moved Penman during his life, not music. Maybe he's just a strongly visual person? Seeing films like Truffaut's The 400 Blows or Bresson's The Diary Of A Country Priest (a film also mentioned by Penman) have definitely made their mark in my own sad little life, but I reckon - for all that I really like films - it's been music that's truly struck home. Sometimes, though only very rarely, the two (cinema and music) can come together and ... work. 

RWF, no! Please don't shoot the piano player just because he's in a punk band

So Penman's musings on music don't move me? No, they don't, not quite. More broadly though, his expansive meditations on Fassbinder are rather wonderful. With numbered paragraphs (some just quotes from other writers and critics) running from 1-450, and a seemingly determined attempt to resist sustained argument in favour of thoughtful - usually terse, non-gushy and sometimes quite moving - reflections on life (Fassbinder's, his own, everyone else's), Penman's book is almost an anti-book. Something like Warhol's Philosophy book, but actually far less structured than that. Penman has a clear distaste for anything savouring of academic writing and though his own book is peppered with quotes from academics/near-academics like Derrida, Barthes, Simone Weil or Patrick Wright, his own prose is entertainingly readable while serious and almost scholarly (in fact I like the way he repeatedly cites Wikipedia as part of his research for the book, something no academic would dare say they'd done). And his admiration for Fassbinder is a mile away from hero-worship, even if he'd been a "complete Fassbinder nut" in his late teens/early twenties. For what it's worth, I share his basic admiration for Fassbinder's film-making - and have (so far!) watched Chinese Routlette (one of Penman's most-mentioned of Fassbinder's films) twice this year and think it's more or less brilliant in an icy sort of way. And Love Is Colder Than Death is a little better - in my humble non-Fassbinder-specialist opinion - than Penman appears to think it is. I also rate Fox And His Friends and Fear Eats The Soul (a big Penman favourite). But I digress - this is a music blog. To conclude: I greatly enjoyed Penman's excellent book. I occasionally thought his observations on music were a little questionable/insubstantial (maybe we could have had some discussion of Fassbinder's use of music in his films for example?), but this aside I think this is a book belonging in the same bracket as Nik Cohn's mighty Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom or Tony Wilson's 24 Hour Party People or, for that matter, The Philosophy Of Andy Warhol (or maybe even his diary). Whatever else, Penman is certainly king of the nicely-chosen quote. And to end this post here's a nice one from Rebecca West he includes in his book on Fassbinder's thousands of mirrors, thousands of fragments:

"Only part of us is sane, the other half of us is nearly mad ... and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations."