Barrie Briscoe
May 31, 1936 to August 23, 2010

To a funeral on a Cornish hillside in late summer sun with the smell of the sea, the rustle of leaf-heavy trees and the distant roar of the A30. It was for Barrie Briscoe, a nature-loving atheist who'd outrun his three score and ten and who'd lived at least four lives - roustabout, academic, architect, painter.

I didn't know him well. He was the head of the architectural practice which worked on a project with me. I don't know if he even liked the end result of the project. But I enjoyed his company the few times we met. And I think he felt the same. I like to think he did anyway.

I knew he’d been ill, very ill, of cancer. The last time I’d seen him he was in a bad way and that was last year. Then, I know, things had got worse. Yet his death still came as a shock. It always does, it seems.

I learned by email. I was away from home so I'd taken my laptop to the pub for its free and fast wi-fi. There, in my googlemail, was a message with his name in the subject field. It was from his wife, Petra - who I knew far better, through the project. 'I am sorry to tell you that Barrie died,' it began. Direct, clear and forthright. A language of friendship.

The funeral was in a vast, private garden just to the west of the Penzance that’s opened to the public now and again. I guess its owner was a friend of Barrie’s. The invitation was a flyer, with a picture of him at the top. Glass in left hand, held by the stem, right hand in a semi-fist, the point-making gesture of a lifelong teacher. He’s smiling. His eyes are twinkling. Usually that’s a lazy cliché but Barrie’s eyes really did twinkle.

‘No religious rite or cleric,’ said the invite. The ceremony was led by a friend, Richard Vanhinsbergh — I didn’t know Richard but his close personal knowledge of Barrie gave the affair a gut-felt pungency.

Bernie — who I do know, he was the builder on our project — was there, too. He dug the grave. I’ve carried, a coffin — my aunt’s, across rainy, muddy, flat, wintry Catholic ground north of Liverpool. That felt, well, primeval. What Bernie did, that felt even older.

The funeral crowd — a big one, a hundred or so — gathered on the top of a hill. There was fizzy wine to drink and fishy snacks to eat. A gathering of Penwith's great and, well not good perhaps, but good-intentioned at least — in the early evening, anyway.

The coffin was then taken down to the burial ground. We followed behind and stood round the grave, a gouge in the grass sentried by a rectangle of small olive trees. There were words said — warm and knowledgable of the man we were interring. Many of them drifted on the air, blurred by the sound of the wind-bothered leaves. Their half-absence, half-presence seemed right, somehow.

There was a harp playing. The coffin was let slip into the grave, by a half-dozen friends. There was a bit of crying, not a lot. People there knew enough about death not to indulge or fall into half-imaginary emotions. When it was over, Bernie hung back — he and his men had a friend's grave to fill in.



Then there was a party, at a gallery in town, by the sea. There were a few of his architectural models — simple, inspired, made of cardboard — and pictures of him on the wall. Over the years, this part of the country has attracted a lot of people whose lives elsewhere, well, didn’t work out. Many of them were artists or at least arty. They were pretty much all there to say goodbye to Barrie. They sat outside, in the late afternoon sun, drank beer and smoked roll-ups. A lot of them seemed to be called Bernie.

There was a lot of food, mostly provided by another friend, Freddy (a woman). So much food, in fact, that, wonderful as it was, there were doggy bags as you left. And that, too, had a sacramental aspect. Somehow, it felt like you were taking a bit of Barrie home with you. I had mine, a pasta dish, for lunch the following day. It tasted really good.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part five*

It’s possibly best to start reading earlier in the series but if you really can’t be bothered, all you really need to know is that I’ve been trying to figure out Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

PS1 In case you need telling, I don’t think all Americans are narcissists or that all America is narcissist. Or even that the invasion of Iraq was necessarily a totally bad thing or completely stupid idea. Just that narcissism and solipsism were big players in the badnesses and stupidities of the invasion and what came after.

PS2 Spending so many hours at the cinema with my sons and daughters gave me a deep appreciation for children’s films. Most of them are far better made, acted and plotted than adult films. Children’s passion for logic and consistency is so often worn down as they grow older, their own passion eclipsed by their wish to have their own thoughts supplanted by another’s withered hysterias. How else to explain the status of, say, Ken Loach or Mike Leigh?

PS3 My daughter’s current rave is Toy Story 3. She’s grown-up. She watched it on her laptop, a bootleg recorded on a phone from a mid-row seat in some American or Israeli multiplex. I can’t do that. I’m a grown-up grown-up. I’d love to see it at the cinema but I no longer have any children to take me. If I went by myself, they’d think I was a paedophile. And I had enough of those as a child myself, watching cartoons, alone, at long-defunct cartoons-only cinemas on Oxford Street and Victoria Station, moving seat about every five minutes so as to stay one step ahead of their hands. (And I wonder why I’ve just about given up on cinemas.)

Some entertainment?

The last government was always talking about things being ‘world class’. I never quite figured out how — on the Class Scale — that related to footballer’s ‘different class’. Which trumps which**. Oh well, here is a kind of international infant school guide to the world — where everyone is the best at something.

And here is someone who really was the best. Different class or world class or just class? All of them, I guess.

* Of five

** I have the same problem with the Load Scale. I’m never sure which is the greater, a shed-load, a shit-load or a fuck-load?

Next up I’m taking a break for a bit and will return at the start of the football season with — at last — my wonderings about who Freud would have supported in the World Cup. And the Premier League.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part four*

So I’m still finishing up my trawl through my thoughts about Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Having failed to make sense of the film’s surface, I looked for other readings of it which might explain what critics saw in it. I discussed the first possibility — that it was a film about the inherent paradoxes and limits of making a film like Vicky Cristina Barcelona. A social comedy about social comedies, that is. Now I move on to . . .

Two. The only other possible reading of the film to my mind is as an unknowing satire on unknowingness — completely naive in its composition but deeply sophisticated in its end-result. Most pointedly, the film can be read through the prism of the Iraq invasion. Or rather, as a metaphorical trope of the Iraq invasion. Not Rumsfeld’s unknown unknown** but an unknown known — a self-structured blind-spot. The inability to comprehend the other’s otherness — except as undifferentiated otherness***. Which brings us, of course, back to Freud and the unconscious.

By this light, Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the film Jean-Luc Godard would have made ‘about’ Iraq — much as Weekend was ‘about’ Vietnam. Well, not quite. That would have been a knowing satire on unknowingness.

It can, then, I guess, best be read as Woody Allen’s own, unknowingly made rumination on both Woody Allen’s strictly bounded conception of the world and his sad and rueful — though unknown to him — knowledge of those limitations and their significance as virtually unmediated reflections of American narcissism.

I hesitate before I write this but I’m coming to think of Vicky Cristina Barcelona as an inadvertent masterpiece, a kind of automatic writing which — quite unconsciously — creates and develops the most vivid and perceptive view both of the workings of the unconscious (in particular, the operation of projection) and of the myopias of an imperial state of mind.

* Of four. Plus postscripts

** Don’t get me wrong. I’m a big admirer of Rumsfeld’s riff about the limits of knowledge. I think it’s one of the smarter things I’ve heard a politician say in many years.

*** Hence, for example, early Rolling Stones records. To ‘love black music’ is to departicularise it, depersonalise it. To truly appreciate it — real, mature love, if you like — you have to acknowledge your wish to destroy it, too. Or, at least, your capacity for treating it with off-hand disdain. Hence the wonders of later Rolling Stones records****.

**** The psychoanalytically inclined might notice my larceny of Winnicott’s 1947 paper Hate in the Counter-transference*****.

***** The psychoanalytically inclined might also notice that my larceny and warping of Winnicott shows a true appreciation of his work******.

****** The non-psychoanalytically inclined have probably had enough. Even the psychoanalytically inclined, too, I reckon.

Next up The postscript. Well, postscripts, actually.

Meanwhile . . .

Les Them, a young woman called Gloria and . . . a donkey

The little known martial artistry of Red Bull cannery

Vicky Cristina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part three*

So? So I’m thinking and writing about the film that was meant to be Woody Allen’s return to form, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. I’m thinking about it not so much in terms of what it appears to be but sits behind that appearance. I’ve been thinking, given the contusions** of its surface (and my dilletante-ish readings of Zizek) of it as a representation rather than a film. Or, in Freudian terms, as a symptom or presentation of underlying neurosis.

I decided there were two alternative thoughts/diagnoses.

One, it is a satire about the making a film like Vicky Cristina Barcelona. There are Gaudi bits of the city. There are rich expatriate Americans — Henry Jamesian without the quality tailoring. There is Penelope Cruz playing ‘crazy Spanish woman’. There is Javier Bardem playing ‘crazy Spanish artist’***. There is lunch. There is Spanish sex — with two young American girls. So not so much Spanish sex then as Woody Allen sex.

It is a view of Barcelona which gloriously reflects the maker’s own projections — because that is the stuff from which it is made. The city, the characters, their actions, these are all things which have no independent life outside Woody Allen’s head. They are thin, substance-less, one-dimensional — almost heroically so. The director’s singularity of vision peers inwards to what he already knows — or, rather, thinks he knows but actually doesn’t. That’s its deliciousness. Henry James again: it’s as if Daisy Miller had written Daisy Miller.

So, taken as a whole, all these elements of cliché, pastiche, reductionism and seemingly unfiltered symbolism combine to produce a film which is an accurate and enjoyable parody of an imaginary Woody Allen movie set in Barcelona. It’s the film that you or I would make if we wanted to make a comic reflection of the film we’d imagine that Woody Allen would make about Barcelona.

Read that way, it’s possible to pass a passable ninety minutes or so. And thank Woody Allen for giving us a late flowering of a new found capacity for self-reflection (as opposed to his earlier self-regard, self-fascination even).

So: Vicky Cristina Barcelona as a wry comedy of manners about a film-maker’s id-fuelled myopias and fabulously ignorant cultural prejudices. Attractive young girls! Spanish artists! Flouncing Spanish women! Gaudi bits and bobs! Barcelona, mi amigo! Las Ramblas! Tapas! Attractive young girls! Etc etc.

The second possibility? Wait till tomorrow.

* How many parts? Well, it’s currently looking like four, with a postscript (or two).

** Yes, I did mean contusions.

*** Who seems to have a private jet licence, too. Not to get too literal and picky about this, but I know a Barcelona-based artist, successful enough to have had a piece in MoMa. He runs bars to survive. He’s rich as rich by Barcelona artist standards.

Meanwhile . . . Tourists to London (and admirers of Tessa Jowell) might be interested in this.

Vicky Christina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part two*

Like everyone, I lost Woody Allen somewhere along the way. Can’t remember when. Probably in the early/mid-1990s, maybe earlier. That apart, I remember seeing a bit — on cable — of the one about Wimbledon. There was a murder in it, I think. It was so bad that, well, I can’t even be bothered to summon the will-power to finish that comparison.

So to his Vicky Christina Barcelona. I’d read and heard that it was a return to form. Yes, I know it’s a couple of years old, at least but . . . see above. I saw it was on cable. I missed it half a dozen times or so. Then I told myself: no, you must watch it. So, for once, I made myself sit down at the start and stay there till the credits.

Well?

Not well.

To understand what I write next, you probably need to have seen it or have me provide you with at least an outline description of it. Again, I can’t be bothered. Work it out yourself from the title: two girls, Americans, Spain. Add what you know of Woody Allen’s work and you’ve got a good idea.

So . . . there are only two possible explanations/readings of this film** . . . Which I will start explaining/reading in the next post.

* How many parts exactly? Well, more than two, it seems. I’ll keep you posted.

** I’d been reading*** a certain amount of Zizek and so found myself somewhat influenced by his stand-up philosophy.

*** When I write about ‘reading’ Zizek, I don’t, of course, mean reading in the sense of opening a book, studying it, finishing it. No, I mean reading newspaper interviews with him, glancing at the cover of a photocopy of his 1989 essay Which Subject of the Real? that’s on top of a Really Useful box in my office and rewatching his wonderful Channel 4 documentary, The Pervert’s Guide to the Cinema. Well, some of it.

Towards a future post . . . Go here, paste in some text (your own, mine, a writer you like) and it’ll tell you which famous writer’s style it’s closest to. I’ve done mine. Hence the forthcoming post. Only not till I’ve finished with Woody Allen and Freud on football.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part one*

I rarely go to the cinema these days. Partly because of the smell — damp carpets in ‘heritage’ ones, popcorn in multiplexes. Partly because I go to the theatre a lot and, what with having to watch a publicly acceptable and democratically accountable amount of football, time is short. Mostly, though, I just forget to go. At least, that’s the way it feels.

When my children were young I’d go all the time. My daughter, in particular, loved seeing every new children’s films. Sometimes several times. Once, we found ourselves the only customers in Swiss Cottage Odeon for Mrs Doubtfire. It was like being in your own sitting room. If it was the world’s biggest sitting room.

My younger son loved cartoons — a taste I share with him and was happy to indulge, with Saturday mornings spent at Bugs Bunny retrospectives and Fritz Freling symposiums. (Some day, I’ll share with you my thesis that all cinema aspires to cartoondom and that CGI is a step in that direction — only counter-productively complex and expensive.) Sadly, my son’s true favourite cartoons were Japanese — Digimon etc. If you’ve never seen one, keep it that way. Sitting beside him in the dark, I’d find myself weighing up the merits of suicide.

I genuinely can’t remember the last time I went, or to which cinema. The last film I can actually recall seeing at a cinema was a Lord of the Rings thing. Maybe the first. Maybe the second. It was that younger son who took me — as in, got me to take him and his friends. I fell asleep. I was ravished by the New Zealand landscapes, though.

I do watch movies, of course, but on TV. Mostly on cable movie channels — because I pay for them so it seems churlish not to watch them, like an anorexic woman leaving half her restaurant meal on the plate. So I watch a lot of bits of movies — I’m not good at figuring out and remembering when what starts. I watch movies I’ve seen before — it’s not only small children who like to hear the same story over and over. I also tape movies I haven’t seen — and sometimes even watch those. Sometimes, I even watch whole movies, from the start to the end.

What this means, though, is I’m always behind in my movie watching. I’ve never seen the latest hit — or the one before or the one before that, generally. I could, I know, catch them on DVD — but that involves Amazoning them and, frankly, my house already has enough unread books and unwatched CDs and unplayed DVDs in it to keep me occupied and engaged well beyond my likely death.

Also, I could watch them online etc. But I already spend enough time on the computer and don’t feel I should watch pirate torrents. That’s a young people thing, inappropriate and unbecoming — unglamorous, even — in grown-ups.

So there are always movies I wanted to see but never got round to. In particular, the ones at the less populist end of the range. Cable movie channels are good on romcoms — so I get to appreciate Russell Brand’s updating of Spinal Tap in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But I don’t often see the kind of movies I used to always see on first release at my local, the Screen on the Hill in Belsize Park. (I think it’s changed its name now. Shows how much attention I pay, right.)

Which leads to what I was getting to, divergently, right from the beginning: Woody Allen. Well, it will in the next posting.

* This was originally one long posting. Then it got very long. Then I showed it to my wife who said: it’s very long and it doesn’t read like a blog, it’s like an article. So I cut it in bits and will post one a day over the week. How many bits? Well, at least one more. I’ll let you know when I’ve figured it out.

Meantime . . . a touch of French expertise

Next up Vicky Cristina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? Part two

Freud: wrong, right, wrong-headed? The fourth and final part*

A while ago now, I was taken to task about Freud etc by an old friend who has spent many years working as a mental health professional. I, of course, have no such experience. He challenged me to defend the old fella against a 4-D attack, the last of which is . . .

Divination

‘Perhaps I mean divine guidance,’ wrote my friend, adding that he sees Freudian theory as impossible to test or disprove. ‘There’s the impression of depth of insight – but that could be illusory.’

The result of this, he says, is that it ‘tempts practitioners to think they know much better than their clients what’s wrong, while human qualities such as trust and respect can get dissolved away. I’ve seen it happen. Worse, I’ve inflicted it.’

Well, I think there are two questions there — though they are linked. One is about science and knowledge, the other about professionalism and humanity. Deep Freudians would — perhaps defensively — claim that it is only psychoanalytic thought and insight which is capable of resolving the conundrum about handling actual patients, as opposed to just mouthing off about the brain and mind and people (ie what I do).

So, the first question. Again, I can divide this into two answers.

One, yes, there is a tendency for therapists and psychoanalyticisers to worship at their own altar. Or, at least, by worshipping at Freud’s altar, hanging on his every word, use the perceived glories of his thought as mirrors reflecting and focussing their own perceived originality and wisdom.

(During the Freud units of my course, I sometimes felt like I was in a psychoanalytic version of Talmudic exegesis — studying and turning over every word of God’s given texts in search of new levels of meaning. That was on good days. On bad days, I sometimes felt like I was in the ‘meaning of the dropped sandal’ scene in The Life of Brian. Sometimes, I’d point out that this was how I felt. This did not always go down well.)

Actually, to tell the truth, there can be more than a tendency for therapists to worship blindly at their own altar, particularly in the academic world. Research shows — consistently and surprisingly unequivocally — that therapy (of whatever kind) works. (That is, the patients get better/feel better/are more capable of running and enjoying their lives.) But . . . that ‘whatever kind’ is the crucial phrase. The research is quite clear that the therapist’s training background or theoretical stance seems of surprising unimportance.

What does help patients to get ‘better’ is the human relationship with the therapist. (The ‘better’ is in quotes not for any silly, naive relativist reason but to indicate how wide a range of outcomes I am using it to encompass.)

The crucial thing is that the patient likes/respects the therapist. And the crucial thing about that liking/respecting is not abstract. It’s clear and concrete: it facilitates the patient’s capacity to take ‘criticism’. That is, interpretations which, in whatever way, challenge the patient’s view of the world/themselves. In effect, we trust the judgment of those we like**.

The second part of the first-question and answer is about whether Freudian theory is provable or testable. Well, actually and contrary to most statements on the subject, it is. The best comparison is with Darwin’s theory of evolution. To all but religious fundamentalists, it’s clearly true — or, at least, it provides a superior explanation for the world than any alternative. In particular, one that enables predictions to be made. But is it testable or provable in the way chemistry is? No.

Psychoanalytic theory has a similar status. Potentially, at least. Many, if not most, of its supporters are of a non-scientific bent, quite without interest in testing or proving it. They just accept it — the way, say, Othello accepted Iago’s description of reality. (See below for another tragic Shakespearean allusion/illusion.)

That doesn’t mean you can’t demonstrate some elements of psychoanalytic supposition through experiments. Ramachandran’s famous work on stroke patients, for example, can be mined for significance in terms of Freudian conceptions of unconscious processes. A stroke-inflicted patient says her paralysed left hand is not her own but her mother’s. Yet, when asked to touch her left hand against her nose, she uses her right hand to lift her left hand — the one that she says is her mother’s — to her nose. The unconscious and the process of denial seem — to me, anyway — the clearest and cleanest explanation.

The second question is about psychoanalysts’ (and, by extension, all therapists’) essential humanity. Well, that is not easy to answer. My personal experience has been essentially positive. With one obvious exception, therapists I’ve consulted*** have been intelligent, thoughtful and considerate — perhaps overly so, viewed through my tough-hearted view of life.

Yet I’ve heard many horror stories from other people — some, though not all, of which I believe. Therapists often cross boundaries. A 1990 north American study found 'sexual abuse of female patients by roughly 7-10% of male therapists of every stripe and level of experience'. The second husband of the first wife of Freud’s grandson had a quite terrible experience at the hands and couch of one of the eminences of British psychoanalysis. He died recently. I might write about him sometime — in particular, how the psychoanalytic establishment dealt with his story.

Mostly, though, therapists and analysts are in denial about the range, extent and meaning of these failures and failings. Which brings me back to Ramachandran’s stroke-begotten woman. And the tentative suggestion that this also perhaps indicates that psychoanalytic theory can be used, reflectively, to examine psychoanalytic practice. Denial is a human constant, it seems.

It also leads to one of my current obsessions, the Dunning-Kruger Effect. That is, the sad fact that the incompetent are doubly cursed by their incompetence. They are not just incompetent but incapable of recognising their incompetence. They simply can’t see how badly they do things — so they can’t take the steps necessary to improve. The competent, by contrast, are more likely to understate their competence — not out of false modesty but because they compare themselves to the really competent.

A notable study of this phenomenon is of medical students so . . . one, we’re not talking just society’s least able, two, that really makes me worry about an impending routine visit to the doctor.

If you want to read more about this, I suggest a visit here (http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/the-anosognosics-dilemma-1/). It’s a piece in the New York Times Opinionator by the documentary film-maker Errol Morris. It taught me loads of interesting stuff about Woodrow Wilson, bank-robbers and the strangenesses of the goings-on in the neurology department of Salpetriere in the late 19th century. It’s not a short piece. In fact, it’s five pieces. Set aside an hour or two to make your way through them all.

An extract . . . Errol Morris is talking to Ramachandran. He asks: ‘Do we live in a cloud of belief that is separate from the reality of our circumstances?’

Ramachandran replies: ‘Absolutely, and overall, fortunately, it's a positive cloud in most of us. If we knew about the real facts and statistics of mortality, we'd be terrified.’

Happy reading.

* The first three parts were Determination, Distance and Denseness.

** This is, of course, one of the main motors of life’s tragedies. Macbeth, for example, chose to believe that the judgment of the object of his sexual desire was fully equivalent to an accurate, independent, peer-reviewed, chi-square-tested assessment of the realities of late mediaeval Scottish political interests and alignments.

*** That sentence poses a variant on the Nick Clegg question about sexual experience, doesn’t it. How many analysts/therapists’ couches (or chairs) have you been on? In my case, more than five but less than ten. Being more precise would involve defining what is meant by ‘therapist’. And, of course, by ‘I’.

Ameuses-yeux?

Icelandic politics part one

Icelandic politics part two

Outside Rod

Next up Vicky Christina Barcelona: what’s that all about, eh? And: who would Freud have supported in the World Cup?