Hey ho! Christmas time has passed, and though I never quite managed to put together the deathly Christmas medley I'd promised myself, I've still been enjoying a fairly constant immersion in global jazz thanks to my brand new wifi radio, a stonking contraption that allows me to tune in to more or less any radio station in the world that transmits via the internet. Purchased in a bout of yule-tide homesickness, I thought that being able to listen to leaden adaptations of Victorian novels on BBC Radio 4 would somehow satisfy the frequent sensation of cultural displacement. Lo! a single day of one-act dramas and unfunny news quizes was all it took to rehydrate the horrible claustrophobia and writhing discomfort of youth that had made me promise myself that one day I would winkle out of that gritty, parochial hell, and flee to a newer, altogether more stupid, world. So, here I am, subjecting myself to British radio in small doses, including the unbearably arch but oddly-lovable Resonance FM, London arts radio whose Boxing Day programming more than summed it up, by offering a full reading of Christopher Smart's long and crazy poem "Jubilate Agno," and following it with two hours of bumbling hipster arseholes playing the theme-tunes to 70s children's programs (the music to the long-forgotten "Screen Test" - one of the countless hours of shit I regularly watched after school - made me scream inside.) Stepping onto less psychologically sensitive ground, I've also been enjoying pop from Tanzania on Bongo and, of course, a wide variety of jazz stations, including those based in Argentina and Berlin, and a swing station from Switzerland.
Santa brought a couple of CDs too - Joe Pass' Portraits of Duke Ellington and Jim Hall's Jazz Guitar, a Japanese import of straight-ahead tunes in which you can really hear (deliberately, I think) the extent of Charlie Christian's influence. Novelty jazz cd of the year goes to Fellini Jazz, a jazzed-up selection of tunes from the great man's movies played by monster players - Charlie Haden (bass), Kenny Wheeler (trumpet), Chris Potter (saxes), and Paul Motian (drums).
Inspired by this performance, here is my holiday gift to you -- all the ingredients you need for your own Fellini film, in no particular order:
1. An amazing party, packed to the gills. Setting: a well-appointed apartment in Rome. Everyone dressed cocktail dresses and dinner jackets and looking far too old to be drinking so heavily. Add a couple of European models - Anita Ekberg and Nico will do - and some misogynist intellectual types with thoughts on the novel and rebarbative glasses. Drunk and lascivious behaviour must be given a free hand. Bacchanal should be emphasized through the liberal use of close-ups of gaping mouths in the act of debauched laughter or spilling over with half-chewed food. Dress the set with a couple of wasted sailors cuddling beneath the chaise longue, and another groping some primitivist art. Fast, poppy jazz should be playing, punctuated by the occasional guitar twang that suggests the unstoppable march of rock n'roll.
2. A religious festival that takes place on what appears to be waste land.
The dangerous throng of the crowd, their tears, lamentations, and intense piety, combined the
dead-eyed woodenness of the saints they worship and the geriatric crustiness of the priests, are all intended to align Catholicism with voodoo. Juxtapose fevered religiosity
with some obvious symbol of modernity, eg. a helicopter.
3. An empty nightclub with a fantastic band and culturally-confused decor,
part Mayan, part South Sea Islands. A pair of grass-skirted African
women dance to slow and unsettling bongo music. A smattering of fat pimps drink in
the show while the bouncers look really hard.
4. Circus or carnival: bearded ladies, dancing horses, an alcoholic strongman, small dogs in ruffs - basically anything that suggests the tinsel and wonder of fantasy torn away to reveal seedy reality, human dereliction and fabrics that will give you a rash.
5. Depending on where you are in Fellini's career: a) Staring into the sea at Rimini, studying the train timetable and getting all hot and bothered about Mama; b) Driving around flat, fly-blown landscapes dotted by hovels, looking to fleece some poor peasant weeping over a dead donkey; c) a dream sequence featuring elephants in togas and elaborate technicolour tableaux.
6. Adventure at night. Choose from: a drunken jaunt around an abandoned castle; randomly arriving at a film star's house; your neighbour's cocktail party, passing from room to room discovering couples in spastic trysts; an attack of impotence that finally proves all those things you've been trying to deny; trawling through the squares of Rome and happening upon a poet, a visionary, and a matronly tart with forgiving breasts.
7. A missed opportunity: affluent, depressed professionals smoke heavily until eventually confessing something profound at the exact moment their partner is distracted and has stopped listening. Think "fuck it" and ravish her in the condemned latrine of a social housing project, then ride home on Beppe the window-cleaner's moped with nerry a thought for how he's supposed to get to work in the morning.
8. A theatrical performance: symbolically speaking, not that far away from the carnival, although it should feature one of your main characters actually appearing on the stage (where up-close the tinsel and wonder are revealed to be seedy, dilapidated, etc.), thereby placing them within the proscenium frame as a means of demonstrating that life is just another performance and our "characters" merely the product of an on-going attempt to shield ourselves from the scrutiny of the world (aka "the audience").
9. The hangover - the most rancid, hateful, cut-off-my-head-to-stop-my-thoughts, kill-me-now-to-spare-my-embarrassment, hangover anyone has ever had, ever. Having staggered from the detritus of the night before, brushing the confetti from your stained lapels and blinking into the Roman sun, you should probably light a fag while staring emptily into the eyes of a deformed beggar or rotting squid and wondering why the hell you feel so bleak even though you just spent a raunchy evening with that hot dancer from the tiki joint downtown.
10. Eventually, it all gets too much and it's time to roll around in the mud or gravel. We're way past talking at this point. Have a really good roll. Get lots of filth in your hair, mulch on your clothes, and leaf-mould between the teeth. Continue with hysterics for a good ten minutes while the camaraman goes off for a canole. Conclude scene by either dying or dissolving nervous breakdown into epiphanic burst of laughter than says: "Ecco - the redemptive absurdity of my life." Walk off into sunset (more probably, sunrise), followed by dog in ruff, matronly tart, and a mime on a bicycle, smiling wryly to oneself safe in the knowledge that you are destined to marry virginal heiress and have a wonderful career in public relations, while continuing to go enormous weekend benders that she can't do anything about (this is Italy, after all.) Link arms with tarts, mimes, jack russells, characters from various flashbacks (including a pissy old uncle from Ravenna with huge pantomime hands), and dance in a circle of jubilant ecstasy beneath the vast fuselage of a satisfyingly tumescent rocket.
11. FINI.
