Kanye West does "Art"!

I didn’t think I’d ever be inspired to write a review of a music video, but Kanye West’s “Runaway” (a 34:32 minute ‘film’ directed by and starring the man himself) was so rich in failures that I really had to put it down. Interestingly, I started out liking it, but the more I watch or think about it, the more I hate this awful thing. 

A delicious flow diagram synopsis of the video, for those who’ve not had the dubious pleasure of watching it:

• Kanye West runs along a road.
• Wow! Explosion! But wait; something’s falling out of that fire in the sky. It’s a “phoenix” (note: phoenix can be read as “hot girl covered in feathers”.)
• Kanye rescues fallen phoenix and takes her to his house, the garden of which seems to be infested with Disney woodland creatures.
• Heart-warming scene as Kanye and Miss Phoenix bond, he plays with his MPC 2000XL sampler (product placement, anyone?) and teaches her to dance/gyrate/twitch etc.
• Small child runs with a flare.
• Wow! Fireworks! And a big ol’ Michel Jackson parade, with red-clad Klansfolk and a marching band. Miss Phoenix seems very pleased with Kanye’s choice of first date.
• Miss P. is just as impressed with the second date, hanging out with his boring mates, watching the ballet, until...
• Eating a bland dinner of chicken, bread – SHOCK! – they serve phoenix! Miss Phoenix doesn’t like cannibalism, apparently.
• They both have time alone to reflect on this shitty date, have a chat on a hill about the birth and death of originality, and Miss Phoenix casually mentions that she’ll be dying soon.
• Obviously they have goodbye sex.
• Wow! Explosion!
• The next day, she’s gone to kill herself and Kanye does a bit of running through woods .
• Oh wow! She’s on fire. Miss Phoenix flaps around looking for Kanye for a while and then shoots off.
• Back to the beginning where Kanye is running along a road. END.
  

So where to begin?! 

I am not going to write about the music. Actually, I really love a lot of the music throughout this video. “Lost in the World” is a scrumptious piece of music, and “Gorgeous” was a nice surprise. So the music aside, let’s explore this little world Director West has created.

The video opens with an excerpt from Mozart’s unfinished “Requiem”, and this to me sums up the whole extravaganza perfectly: it’s trying to be something it’s not. The whole video viewed like a high school film project, with the depth of a bathtub and a budget bigger than the Atlantic. 

With enough in-references to make even the most cultured folk gag on their Kubrick, this video is difficult to watch without feeling a little sorry for Kanye. He just seems desperate to prove that he’s different, that he’s artsy, that he thinks about stuff, dad!

The awkward cuts between songs are not disguised or remedied but are left there, and dragged out. He uses the age-old technique of leaving enormous, loaded silences, which are very obviously loaded with absolutely nothing. About a third of the film consists of a variety of explosions in slow motion, and people looking vacantly at things. In short, it’s trying very hard to allude to having some deep, poignancy when it really has nothing to say. 

It’s sad that Kanye feels like his work is lacking, and needs to be so stuffed, because there are some stunning moments in this video. The ballet scene, which features dancers from The National Theatre, works so well with the music; it’s a shame that it was bracketed by some of the most atrocious dialogue imaginable.

On the topic of dialogue, let me sample some:

“Anything that is different you try to change, you try to tear it down. You rip the wings off the phoenix and they turn to stone. And if I don’t burn, I will turn to stone”.

I shouldn’t have to point out that the entirety of this moving conversation is totally out of context from the rest of the video, is appallingly performed and—what was that? Oh yes, it MAKES NO FUCKING SENSE. I am compelled to point it out regardless, because I am still baffled by how shit it is. 

So what was good about this half hour of gut-knotting pretention? The makeup, for one. The design was stunning, and implemented well (aside from one exceptional moment when Miss Phoenix shoots into the fire, and it looks like a still from a b-grade computer game). I was also entranced by Miss Phoenix’s dodgy breast implants; the fact that one is distinctly higher than the other. Actually, now that I mention them (her breasts, that is) I am glad that when she set on fire, they gave her a metal breast plate but no other armour. Obviously they realised that her breasts were the most dangerously flammable part of her.

My conclusion? The album is great, the ballet scene, perfect, and the rest of it? A desperate cry for approval by someone who doesn’t seem to realise that he’s pretty awesome without pretending to know things he doesn’t. And 34:32 minutes of pure bollocks. 

Please choose your books with dignity!

 

Trawling the internet for reviews of my favourite authors’ works, it has been brought to my attention that most internet reviews are written by tweens who have just learnt to spell “juxtapose” and don’t seem to realise the irony in their regular misuse of “irony”. Indeed, there seems to be an overall lacking of depth in most reviews; people clamour for superficial drama and tragedy without acknowledging that the true skills of an author are delicate, infinitely subtle, and very much hidden.

Inquisitive, informed readers are battling what I can only call the “Picoult Generation”. Here is a group of people who really believe that the factory-churned, breath-takingly banal novels they are reading are honestly well written. I take no issue with people reading the likes of Jodi Picoult or Dan Brown; we all need to ingest our fair share of mindless bile every now and then. My issue arises when these “authors” are compared in any way with people who can actually write.

Reading a book by Jodi Picoult is the literary equivalent of watching porn and eating donuts. Her writing is indulgent, prosaic and predictable. Let us take “My Sister’s Keeper” for example. Unconvincing and mawkish characters aside, the plot is a veritable minefield of laughably obvious heartstring-tugging. I would normally write “spoiler alert”, but to be frank, I don’t really think that’s necessary with a book like this. It spoils itself from the first tragic leukaemia diagnosis, right up to the last chapter, where – oh the unexpected tragedy – little Anna dies. There are spectacular moments throughout Picoult’s books where she really does surprise you; how is it possible, you ask yourself, for the trash that I am reading to get so popular?

This all comes back to my point about subtlety, porn and donuts. Dan Brown, Stephanie Meyer, Paulo Coelho (although I must confess a soft spot for his overly sentimentalised preaching), and the ghastly Jodi Picoult have all won the adulation of the masses by stuffing horror, tragedy and suffering down their throats until they collectively gag their praise.

Sadly, the truth is that people like horror. We have a human taste for voyeurism, especially if it involves being a fly on the wall for the darkest side of human nature. Jodi Picoult writes incessantly about child abuse, and it is atrocious how she panders to this clawing desire for detail. I was confident that she had surely written her last, when “Handle With Care” came out. The title alone is enough to make me well up with hate. Let me make myself clear to anyone who is under the impression that “Jodi Picoult touched on a sensitive subject and wrote it well”, as the very aptly named Fairy-Whispers201 seems to believe: It is not hard to write about wicked people doing wicked things. It is not good writing, nor is it evocative, intelligent, or thought provoking, to play up to people’s desire for that thrill of perversion.

Child abuse, rape, paedophilia, murder, prostitution, suicide; all these are topics surrounded in our contemporary society by a dark glamour. They are “black and white” topics, considered so breathtakingly horrific that an author cannot go wrong by condemning them. It doesn’t take a good author to evoke an emotional response to a 5 year old being molested, that’s just prying out a basic human response. A true author, a real artist, would never be so blunt.

So we come to subtlety, and true tragedy. The tragedy that exists in our every day lives is not so easy to write about because of its immediacy and the fact that it tends to lack the magnitude of the topics aforementioned. It’s not socially acceptable to care that much about these things, or to admit how they affect you. The utter horror of being alone on the first day at a new school, a family member who is just slightly too embarrassing to talk to anyone about, the death of a pet, and the stifling loneliness of growing up, or growing old, these are all real human agonies. The most beautiful and interesting things to read about, the topics that require the most delicacy and skill, are the most insignificant-seeming. An author who uses her words like a surgeon wielding a scalpel to perform such tender examinations on the human psyche should not ever be compared to the likes of Picoult, who charge into the operation room with a pick axe and a timer.

I could not think of a finer example of this gentle writing ability than that of Patrick Süskind’s in “The Story of Mr Sommer”. I admire Süskind’s writing at any time, but there is an effortless beauty to “The Story of Mr Sommer”. There is an almost fable-esque quality to his writing in this book, one which is not present in “Perfume: the Story of a Murderer”, and only slightly in “The Pigeon”, and yet he never descends into patronisation or assuming that his readers are idiots (something which I must say Coelho has a tendency to do).

My plea is this: I know it’s a hard book to find a copy of (to my knowledge only one edition was ever printed, in hard and paper back), but this is a must-read for any lover of true literature, and the illustrations are just stunning, so go bribe your local second hand bookstore staff with cake and bookplates and forged signatures of eccentric Finnish poets and get yourself a copy. I promise you won’t regret it, and if you do, you can always go binge on some Dan Brown, I hear they’re selling it by the kilo now.

Today's diagram:

Today’s diagram is fairly self-explanatory. This humble scientific sketch from the late 1800s depicting the various parts of a unicorn may seem simple –child, be not fooled! Its uses are to my mind incalculable. I am glad that I have not found this diagram too late in life for it to come in handy for you, and I am confident that come in handy it will.

Should tomorrow find you cornered by a raging stallion of the species, you may now feel equipped to diagnose your major injuries as likely to be inflicted by part “z”, the horn. Interestingly, the hoofs are also labelled “z”. This could lead one to deduce that the ingenious artist has used a system of “Danger Labels”, wherein “a” represents the part least threatening in attack through to “z”, the most. It can therefore be concluded that the part of a unicorn least threatening to a human would be “a”, the nostrils, followed by “b”, the cheeks (this could be because said cheeks appear to be full of golf balls).

Today’s advice will be, in light of this information,

When charged by a unicorn

When breath is fast and knees are weak

Fear not the nostril or the cheek

From “a” to “z” it’s all been warned:

Be sure to avoid both hoof and horn.

Sound advice, methinks.