So, hello again. Mixed news from Planet Dissertation today: on the plus side, I’ve got a much better (working) title (more on this in a bit), and I’ve got nudging up to 3k of first draft done already; less rosy, I’ve bogged down badly over the last two days or so.

Reasons for this are potentially manifold. For a start, I think I may be coming down with some sort of plague. I woke up on Monday feeling like my lower back had been pummelled with a socket wrench while I slept; experience dictates that this either means I drank way too much the day before or am undergoing some sort of viral assault, and I had maybe two beers all of Sunday. That said, Saturday was a bit more drinky, and involved lots of walking and sitting on awkwardly made pub benches… but I’ve felt rum as hell all day today also, which I’m also trying to put down to other environmental factors, in a kind of desperate attempt at coercing reality itself by barraging it with evidence in favour of my preferred conclusion… so, yeah. Maybe I’m ill, or just a bit run down. No biggie, but, well, schedules – and quality material is hard to come by when my body’s shouting too loud for the brain to work. Slow progress, like ploughing a concrete field with a toy tractor.

Also: I have continued to read Burroughs, to the point where I have decided to stop for a while. Like so many drug-centric writers, he attained something of the same power as the drug that obsessed him. I’d forgotten how much you sink into Burroughs’ writing, like a warm clean bath taken in the bathroom of a filthy squat paved with used needles and empty wraps… and once you’re in there, the prospect of getting out looks very unappealing. And in your own local consensus reality (should you venture there, as I must from time to time), you notice something newly chitinous about your fellow pedestrians, a horrible mechanical grace, a speeding-up of action and urgency like something out of a wartime newsreel, herky-jerky every limb and grinding jaw, Max Schreck lurches and the leers of cornered foxes… Burroughs gets into every cell, tries to make you into him, a colony, your DNA rewriting itself before starting on your body from the inside out, a nanofactory that consumes itself to produce its one and only possible product. What you read can definitely affect you physically — I remember taking two sick-days running off one of my old factory jobs after reading Primo Levi’s If This Is A Man, which I spent laying in bed, exhausted and weepy, battering my mind with cheap soapbar hash in the hope of being able to sleep without dreams. Perhaps I’ve overdone it on Burroughs, cooked a grain too many for the comeback spike. If I turkey off immediately after this binge, though, I might just get away without and further ill effects…

… unless that assumption is in and of itself one of said effects, in which case the mugwumps are probably disembarking at Sloane Square as I type. Point being, I’m headed up to Sheffield for work on Thursday afternoon, and I could really do with not getting ill right now. Selah.

Now, yeah, titles. I really liked the original working title I had for this… thing I’m writing, for the sake of the word itself and also because it sums up one of the dominant motifs of the fictional world in question. Regrettably for me, a certain Charlie Stross and a certain Catherynne Valente have both written very well-received (and well remembered) stories with the title Palimpsest in the last fistful of years, so I can’t use that, and have know it from the start. (OK, technically I could use it, there’s nothing to stop me, but it would haunt me forever, because that’s the way my brain works. Selah.) But in a serendipitous fashion, an alternative just rolled on out of my Twitter timestream this afternoon, courtesy Gary Gibson.

A paracosm is, apparently, the elaborate fictional world people often create when they’re young. Had no idea such a word existed. I like it.

— Gary Gibson (@garygibsonsf) May 8, 2012

A definition of paracosm:

A paracosm is a detailed imaginary world involving humans and/or animals, or perhaps even fantasy or alien creations. Often having its own geography, history, and language, it is an experience that is developed during childhood and continues over a long period of time: months or even years.

Now, any genre writer or critic will recognise that as being either a fully-fledged secondary world, or something that would wander toward the liminal fantasies of Farah Mendleshohn’s deliberately provocative taxonomy of fantastic literature: fantasies where the demarcation between the ‘real’ world and the fantastical elements in play – not to mention the actuality of their fantastic-ness (fantasticality?) – is elusive for the reader, and very often for the narrators too. (I’m probably mangling that definition a bit, but I plan to go back and re-read that chapter sometime soon, so I’ll leave it for now.) But the suggestion of childhood and immaturity around paracosm as a term fits nicely, because I’ve realised that what I’m really doing with this novella is exorcising a whole load of mental baggage associated with Portsmouth and the years I spent there, flailing my way through adolescence and a succession of rewritten selfs/identities.

Which sounds absurdly pretentious, of course, and makes it little different from much of my writing to date, but this story is much more explicitly set in a recognisable Portsmouth, and isn’t going to be a ‘proper’ science fiction or fantasy story. It’s a slipstreamy kind of thing, and the metafictional aspects make that even more slippery; I’m deep into unknown territory, here, and kinda making it up as I go along. Which is why it’s incredibly frustrating to get bogged down – if I can make anything happen, why can’t I get myself out of this transition?

The obvious answer is that I can get myself out of it, and that I just haven’t found the right route yet… and it occurs to me that thinking about paracosms might help me find it. (As might reading less Burroughs.) So, that’s the plan: pick something new to read, read it, and head back to the cliff-face tomorrow with my pickaxe all shone up and sharpened.

And that, ladies and gents, is how you publicly pep-talk yourself out of a writing funk.

Can’t believe I never tried it before.

[ Physician's note: all optimism herein should be considered retrospectively null and void in the event of poor progress tomorrow. The patient must not be unduly encouraged in these grotesque performative ramblings. ]

So, welcome to the first of hell knows how many (or how few) Dissertation Diary entries. Analysis of our creative work is an important component of the grade, with an emphasis on analysing process, inspiration and sources. This means some sort of documentation of the process is necessary; I’ll need to mine it heavily for the ‘rationale’ piece, so I can demonstrate what I was trying to do, and what I did to achieve that. It’s a surprisingly difficult way to think about my own work, even though it’s a component of the ‘critical mode’ that I apply to everything else I read. An odd little ego-firewall built into the brain, there; like a Dunning-Kruger prophylactic.

Now, the way I write means I kinda end up self-documenting as I go; it’s a by-product of the process. When I have a question about what needs to happen next, or where a character wants to go, or even just which compass-point I should be pointing the plot-jalopy toward, I tend to just literally ask myself that question and answer it on the page in front of me (screen, notebook, whatever). I picked this method up from reading John Berlyne’s mammoth work of obsessive fan-scholarship, Powers: Secret Histories, which includes images of pages from Powers’ original scripts and notebooks, where you can see him doing just that[1]. “So, maybe Harry’s just lost his job? That could be good — but no, he needs to keep the job a bit longer because Sally will meet him there, but not until after her courtcase, which hasn’t happened at this point (though we could have the courtcase scene earlier on as a false flag)…” (I’m not paraphrasing there so much as showing you how it works out on the page when I do it.)

This leaves me with a bunch of metadata chunks that describe how I came up with the chunk of text-proper that follows it. The transition from one to the other can happen mid-sentence, and often does (techniques that get the words coming out are the ones that get kept). While it’s not common for me to argue about technique in these braindumps, they stand as a window into my own mindset as I wrote them, and that will make the storying of the stylistic choices I make during writing and editing far easier, as well as sounding more self-reflective than saying “that’s just how it looked like it should be written, y’know?”(which, if I’m honest, is about as much as I can ever recall of the process of writing immediately after the process has ceased… assuming, of course, that the true fugue-state of Actual Writing has happened; by contrast, I can recall every single second spent in the more easily-accessed state of Trying To Write, in horrible and vivid detail.)

All of which is a rambling way of explaining that whatever gets posted here will be like the next layer of meta-ness out from those raw notes. I will probably do some kicking around of the bigger questions that crop up in the writing processs here, not least because – beyond the initial concept and character and a few ideas for set-pieces – I’m making it up as I go along. This is a deliberate choice, and a chance to push against a long-held personal hang-up, the “you can’t start writing the story until you can see the whole of its shape in your mind” fallacy. The first half of the course has convinced me this isn’t the case (or at least isn’t a cast-iron Law), and writing in a different way will make me more conscious of process, which in turn will make the documentation of said process easier. That’s the theory, anyway. Yeah.

Speaking of theory, though, the novella-to-be is already veering hard into metafictional territory (which wasn’t unexpected), so I figure a record of contextual guff might be useful, or at least interesting (to me). Especially as I’m planning to do some cut-up stuff in the text. Which brings me (finally, elliptically) to the title of this post. Now, as I’m doing cut-ups, I need to be going to some good primary sources, and who’s the man for cut-ups? Ol’ Bill Burroughs, of course. So I got myself Word Virus, the Burroughs ‘reader’ anthology, and dug up his original article on the method (which is now manifold, with dozens of re-annotated or re-introduced examples scattered all over the intertubes).

Now, Burroughs is a sychronicity trigger, perhaps because of his own fascination with sychronicity. I’ve also heard this called the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon – a phenomenon whereby shortly after first encountering a concept or idea or person, you subsequently run into loads of things that connect back to it or them in really obvious ways. Think of it as a more paranoid version of “6 degrees of Kevin Bacon”, if you like; it’s a pattern-making mind connecting three dots and calling it an elephant, perhaps. Whatever the cause, it happens, and it always feels odd, like a mild deja vu that rings on for weeks with occasional spikes of volume or intesity, like the chime of a temple gong.

Today’s example, for your delectation (or for posterity, or to kill the time while I wait for them to finally announce whether BoJo gets to keep his crown for another four years). While doin’ my Inbox Zero, I find an email from a guy telling me about the piece he wrote for the LA Review Of Books for the A E van Vogt’s centenary. So I click through, and there’s a page of all his van Vogt pieces all linked in a row. Scroll down to the World of Null-A review, encounter reference to Alfred Korzybski and his theory of general semantics. Look up Korzybski on Wikipedia… discover footnote to the effect that Burroughs went to one of Korzybski’s workshops. See?

So I took things to Twitter, as I am wont to do. My reasons for including the results should become clear upon reading them:

The sphincter of Theory

While bleating about the inevitable synchronicities attendant on reading Bill Burroughs…

Storified by Paul Graham Raven · Fri, May 04 2012 18:46:41

@BrendanCByrne Semicolon, Shirley? Paul Graham Raven

Hmm. Well, I guess when you’re doing cut-ups, everything’s literally grist for the mill.

And that’s probably enough DD for now, as I’ve put in about the same wordcount on it as I have today’s fiction output. There may be more of this to come. Hell, at some point I might even get around to explaining the concept, explaining why that concept led inevitably to metafiction, and explaining (to myself, in increasing panic) why I thought any of it was a good idea when I started.

[ 1 - The great irony is that I have yet to read a Powers novel in published form. ]

I’ve known of 253 (a.k.a. Tube Theatre) for quite some time, but I’ve only just read it, after stumbling across the (Philip K Dick Award-winning) “print remix“ in the dealer’s room at Eastercon. Its original incarnation was as a website – which still exists, seemingly untouched and untweaked since it was built in 1996. Wikipedia would have me believe that Robert Arellano’s Sunshine 69 was “the World Wide Web’s first interactive novel”, published in June 1996; I can’t find an accurate date for 253‘s launch, but it seems reasonable to say that even if it came out after Arellano’s work, it was still very much in the vanguard of web-native hypertext fictions. I used to read Wired in ’96 – dead-tree editions, of course, imported from the States – and remember the repeated pre-emptive obituaries for print media, and announcements of the imminence of the hypertext novel as the primary literary form of The Future. The former looks more likely now than it ever did, but still a long way off, while the latter – but for a small fringe scene – has remained resolutely below the radar, for reasons that are more obvious in hindsight. (I’m not going to waffle on about the paucity of viable business models for online fiction at this point; I’ve done enough of that at Futurismic over the years.) Continue reading “253 (Print Remix) by Geoff Ryman”

So, that was Eastercon. My [stops to count old badges on lanyard] fifth, and my favourite so far. Well-organised, good fun; a great balance of the familiar and the new; old friends and fresh acquaintances…

… and some dramatic props. [Thanks to Chad Dixon for the photo.]

I often compare Eastercon to my experiences of Glastonbury back in my twenties: it costs me a fortune, I overindulge in my usual vices, I see less than a third of the stuff I vaguely planned to see, but yet I roll away with a warm glow that comes from sharing a highly specific chunk of space-time with a community of people who share one of the greatest passions of my life, inspired to do new things.

Granted, I’ve never left Eastercon coated in mud, wrapped in a space blanket and trying to chew my own left ear, so the analogy isn’t perfect. I’m pretty sure I never came back from Glasto carrying approximately a third of my own bodyweight in books, either. But hey, I need the exercise… and my Bruce Sterling collection draws nearer to Stage One completion^[1].

Olympus was not utterly devoid of controversy and upset, however, and I find myself wanting to talk about that. After the initial heat-of-the-moment furore, what would really have helped would have been a good solid apology and admission of error from the primary source, but… well, this ain’t one.

So, look: you can watch what actually happened right here, and whatever side you take I think that’s gotta be the absolute entry level for having an opinion on this, unless you were actually at the BSFA Awards ceremony. And here’s a record of the Twitter backchannel as it happened.

I was in the audience. Things went from cringeworthy to worse; it was the sort of thing the “trainwreck” metaphor was made for. I was sat a few seats from Lavie Tidhar at the time. That was a very uncomfortable moment for me, as a straight white male British person who just happens to be Lavie’s friend. I can’t imagine how he felt… especially given that early in the day an audience member from the Non-Anglophone SF panel had breezed up to inform him that, despite English being Lavie’s second language, he spoke it very well indeed. Condescending, much?

The common factor here is that both cases of offence were not intended to offend – quite the opposite, in fact. But that doesn’t negate the offence.

The sad thing about this, for me at least, is that Olympus felt very diverse and inclusive with respect to its roster of guests, panel topics and panel composition; a real step forward, even within the short timeframe of my own involvement with fandom. The con committee and the BSFA worked damned hard to make that happen, and as much as I believe it’s important that the failures are acknowledged, I think the good stuff needs to be remembered, too; the sheer scale of effort and passion needed to make these things happen is staggering, and to overlook that energy and commitment would be grossly unfair, no matter what may have gone wrong along the way. So, for the record, let me congratulate the BSFA and the Olypus con committee, the gophers and techs and the folk behind the scenes: I wouldn’t even know where to start, and there was oodles of great stuff over the weekend for which praise is rightly due. There’s a tendency for the baby to go the same way as the bathwater in these situations, and in terms of the grand project – making fandom a space where everyone can feel safe, valued and included, regardless of gender, nationality, skin colour, sexuality or anything else – I feel that it would help to acknowledge that, as a community, we’re “working on our shit”, as the saying goes.

But that’s my privilege speaking, and I know it. It’s easy for me to sit here and hand-wring, rehearse weak or global versions of a The Tone Argument, and recruit for the Cult Of Nice. I’m a white able-bodied just-about-heterosexual cis-male British person, and as such it’s incredibly rare that anyone gets a platform to give my culture a proper kicking, deserved or otherwise. (And hell knows it’s deserved more often than not.)

It’s never pleasurable to have worked damned hard on something, only to have someone pull out the flaws and wave them in your face. But in the context of, say, writing fiction and subbing it to editors for publication, it’s widely acknowledged that that’s how you get better. Yeah, it hurts. Emotional growth, at least in my experience, always does. If the choice is pain or stasis, though, then pain it has to be.

One final thing: I am not holding myself up as an exemplar, here. I owe what personal politicisation I’ve achieved over the last decade to fandom – to debates and discussions (yes, and slapfights) just like this one. Hell knows that I’ve said countless dumb or offensive things over the years, secure and comfortable in my ignorance and privilege, and my unwarranted opinion of myself as a pretty progressive liberal kinda guy, thankyouverymuch. You could probably trawl through the archives right here at VCTB and find enough material to throw me right into the same sin-bin as Meaney, in fact, if not even a deeper one with sharper spikes. Perhaps you could even say that my invisibility was an added layer of privilege; it’s easy to get away with being thoughtless when thoughtlessness is ubiquitous, just one more voice in the crowd.

It is not for me to stand in judgement atop the mountain of the gods.

But this is my community, too, so nor is it for me to ignore or dismiss the hurt I see expressed by others less privileged than I, especially when some of them are people I count as good friends… and there’s a significant amount of it floating around on the intertubes today. (If you’ve not seen any, then perhaps it’s time for you to go look for it.)

I honestly believe the vast majority of us want fandom to be inclusive and welcoming to everyone, even if we aren’t quite as far along with that project as we’d like to think we are. So if I could have one wish, it’s that we keep to the inclusive spirit with which Olympus was put together and executed, and listen to those who are telling us that the story we tell each other (and ourselves) about our community has flaws that still need editing out.

Redrafting sucks. But it’s the only way to make the story better.

[ 1 - Stage One completion involves acquiring one copy of all extant titles, in or out of print; Stage Two will involve trading up all titles to the best editions available, preferably signed hardback firsts. I did a lot of collecting of various things as a kid, and nowadays I realise the best way to get lasting value from assembling a collection is to delimit the set and pick a completion goal with very low likelihood; non-set-limited collections soon lose their appeal for me (because how will you ever know when you're done?), and completion means you have to find a new thing to collect. Think of it as a sort of vice management strategy; accept the inevitability of the vice, then steer it as safely and cheaply as possible into a cul-de-sac that you think you could live in for a good long time.

Yes, this is how I think about my hobbies. No, I don't know why. It works for me. Selah. ]

So, Easter rolls around once more. Continue reading “Moveable feast”

Yesterday afternoon, the ever-lovely @littlemoog dropped me a line to see if I fancied catching a screening of the classic silent movie Nosferatu at the Prince Charles Cinema, just off Leicester Square. We’d discovered the Charlie a few weeks back, thanks to Sophie Meyer – tutor of the just-about-finished Short Form module of my Masters – suggesting that we all go and see Silent Running as an end-of-semester class outing*.

The Charlie is primarily a “second-run” theatre, specialising in screenings of cult movies with an assortment of twists on the usual sit-down-and-shut-up format; their sing-along-a-screenings seem to be consistently popular, for instance. The main screen has comfy seats with a lot of leg-room, and the prices are generally pretty decent too.

Sing-along-a-Nosferatu wouldn’t work, of course, given that it’s a classic of the silent era. But what we got was even better: the film was accompanied by a soundtrack performed live by post-rock outfit Minima. Apparently this isn’t an entirely new phenomenon – the guys from Minima told me they’ve been doing similar stuff since the mid-Noughties – but it was a new experience for me, and one I’ll definitely be looking to repeat. For a start, the traditional tones of post-rock – effected and echo-drenched guitar for melody and texture-drones; effected cello and electric bass; untreated drumkit – are eminently suited to soundtrack work (witness the only-now-fading ubiquity of Sigur Rós tunes in nature documentaries, for instance). But rather than kludging existing tunes to fit the film, Minima have developed their soundtrack from the ground up, fitting everything neatly to the happenings on screen, bringing the scenes to life. Much of the magic comes from their willingness to have fun at the right moments… I won’t spoil it for you, but the scene in which the disguised Count gives Hutter a ride to the castle on his funereal carriage was LOLtastic.

I’d never seen Nosferatu before, though I was vaguely familiar with it thanks to countless riffs and references to it in other media. Given it was made in 1922, I was impressed by its cinematic maturity… or perhaps surprised at how many film-making techniques and strategies have persisted over that ninety year period (I often describe myself as “cinematically challenged”; I’ve always been more of a books person.). The visual atmosphere is what will stay with me the longest, I suspect: the bleak and lonely locations, especially. The shot near the end with the coffins being carried down the main street of the town during the plague was very affecting… though that may be partly due to the contrast with the rambunctious chase-scene that follows it.

All in all, a great evening out, and I’m very glad @littlemoog dragged me out of my garret for it. If you’re London based and love classic movies, you could do far worse than keep a close eye on the Charlie’s listings page. And if you get the opportunity to see Minima do one of their live soundtrack performances, you’d be mad to pass it up. All the best bits of a movie screening and a live gig in one package; A-double-plus recommend.

[ * Silent Running is an oddly charming little film, given the fundamental bleakness of its premise. Much like Nosferatu, it has moments of laugh-out-loud comedy, though I expect they were intended as such, whereas many of the comedic moments in Nosferatu are more a function of audience unfamiliarity with the 'language' of the silent film (e.g. exaggerated emotional face-pulling, slapsticky body-comedy). Here's Al Reynolds on why Silent Running is one of his favourites. ]

Big fuck-off Hollywood /
and the paradox of tolerance /
the engineering of consent /
an America for Americans /
preserved in amber /
like genes for dinosaurs /
and dreams of the powerless.

[Death to Hollywood... ]

#

There’s a big fuck-off Hollywood /
in a church built by slaves /
where all glitters and twinkles /
and hungry are all the poor that you made.
Where the weather’s fine /
dark clouds all gather /
trusting and faceless…

[Death to Hollywood... /

... let's put an end to Hollywood.]

–> “Oscar Night” lyrics copyright Amplifier, from the album The Octopus; please contact for immediate takedown if required. You can listen to the song here.

Posted here and now because, well, just look at the bloody news: plastic-faced glitterati patting themselves hard on the back while the world falls apart around them.

The great tragedy of the internet isn’t that it’ll destroy Hollywood’s business model; it’s that it hasn’t achieved it yet.

So, the last three weeks have been busy.

This is an understatement. Continue reading “A postcard from Chelsea”

When I was at college back in 1992, there was a guy in my tutor group who played trumpet and was bang into his classic funk – James Brown, Parliament, Funkadelic, all that stuff. I remember him explaining one of the core structural components of the genre, which applies to a lot of other musical forms as well, most notably anything dance-orientated: it is called, simply enough, “The One”.

The One is that moment where a whole bunch of repeating riffs and figures of different lengths – a one-bar bass hook, a four-bar drum pattern, an eight-bar bridge, a sixteen-bar solo – all reach their loop point at the same moment within the tune. The One is the sound of something cohering, of an emergent higher order. It’s the point in the tune where everything comes together, that single first-beat-of-a-bar where everything strikes together, the moment when even the most grooveless of listeners feel the urge to to move.

I think I just hit The One in my life.

Most of you already know that I’ve just started my Masters degree in Creative Writing; my first seminar is this evening, in fact. In the last year I’ve sold pieces of writing to magazines that I’ve been reading since before I even considered writing as a career choice; I’ve just started writing a proper column at LitReactor, and other commissions are fluttering around in my in-tray. But not only that: today also sees me starting a new job with a title so cool you’ll think I’m making it up. As of this morning, I’m a telecommuting employee of the University of Sheffield’s Civil Engineering department — a Research Assistant in the Future of Infrastructure.

I’ve put a post over at Futurismic that goes into a little more detail about the job and what it means to me. Here, I’m just going to remark on the weird way my life has suddenly cohered into something strange and exciting and new, like I finally found a path I never realised I was looking for. These moments of synchronicity aren’t without their negative threads, of course; my uncle died the weekend before last after a few years of declining into dementia, and thanks to the timing of my first seminar this evening, I’m missing the funeral. I don’t feel great about that; the guilt is compounded by the knowledge that funerals are horrible things to have to attend at the best of times*, and that this one occurs at the same place we buried my old man back in 2002. I wish I was going, but I’m also quite glad I’m not, while simultaneously resentful of that spark of personal relief. Such are the contradictions of the heart that keep us awake at night, I suppose.

One of the great novelistic fallacies of the human condition is born of our instinctive need to stitch a narrative out of the cloth of experience and chance. We often speak of fate, or simply feeling that something was meant to be, even though we know that nothing is determined, and that even history shifts its meaning depending on where you stand to look back at it. Caught in the fragmentary slice of silence before the bass bounces back to the root note and the horn section stabs out a fat major chord, I find myself glancing back and wondering how I got here from there. In some respects it seems almost beyond belief, a daft tall story that a teenaged me would have scoffed at; in other ways it seems like a fortunate yet inevitable confluence of all the things I’ve been doing for the last decade, if not my entire life. Both stories are equally valid; neither of them are strictly true. The truth is in the telling, maybe. Or in the reading, or the ending.

Either which way, the page turns; one chapter ends, another begins, and a new act begins to play out. In the orchestra pit, feet and fingers twitch in an anticipation of rhythm; the audience, small as it may be, waits patiently for events to unfold.

Let the beat drop; bring on The One.

[ * I've come to the conclusion that funerals are a little like placebos, in that an understanding of their true function lessens said function's effect. Funerals are for the living, not the dead; I don't need to be there to make peace with my own mortality, but I wish I could be there to support the rest of my family. And so it goes. ]

So, me and a bunch of musician buddies trundled down to Gunwharf last night to see Twenty, Cameron Crowe’s documentary celebrating the twentieth anniversary of Pearl Jam’s seminal album Ten.

It was pretty decent, though there was a general sense that it wasn’t quite what any of us were hoping it would be. With hindsight, however, it’s not entirely surprising that Twenty is a work of mild hagiography. For a start, Crowe was the guy behind the movie Singles, and a major booster for the Seattle scene in its infancy; secondly (and as highlighted by the film itself) Pearl Jam made the decision early in their career to say “no” to doing music industry stuff that they didn’t want to do or couldn’t maintain control over, so they were hardly going to sign up for deep surgery (let alone a hatchet-job) after twenty years of refusing to be dragged over the coals of music journalism. This way, they get to stand in the carefully stage-directed light of the two-decade anniversary of grunge, but on their own terms; a chance to tell the story in their own words, to own their own narrative to some extent.

A few snippets of period interview footage featuring one Kurt Cobain are a pointed reminder that said narrative control is denied to those whose pieces got taken off the gameboard: Twenty may be hagiographic in a folksy sort of way, but poor Kurt was elevated to an uneasy sainthood when the ink on Pearl Jam’s press buzz was still fresh, much like his own. The true tragedy of Cobain’s suicide is that he never got to show the world he’d licked his demons, and – by extension – the world itself. But the mythology of rock can’t pass up the easy meat of those who burn out rather than fading away, and Cobain will remain among its pantheon of pietà for as long as there’s money in selling his image, broken on the wheel of fame, a martyr to the alienation of a generation. Pearl Jam’s sainthood is different, a quieter litany of honesty and penitence; there is little mass-marketable glory in their refusal to participate in the music industry’s increasingly desperate circus of amplified personality and public pain.

That’s not to portray them as noble mendicants, of course; while they may not be living the Hollywood rock-star lifestyle, their survival as a band that continues to release new music and tours off the back of such must look enviable to today’s young musicians, and the contemporary interview footage suggests that none of them are living the hand-to-mouth grind of the fallen star. Pearl Jam have made what looks to be a comfortable living by doing things on their own terms, though lurking beneath the narrative surface of Twenty is the suggestion that it was not always an easy journey to make (and a persistent undercurrent of reminders that being a proper musician is just as much a job of work as any other artistic vocation). But with the exception of a few minutes taken to dwell on the tragedy at Roskilde and the personal aftermath of such (which, to be fair, would be hard to treat in greater depth without seeming tacky, self-aggrandising or both), the band’s post-Ticketmaster travails are painted with broad strokes, their second decade handwaved across the border with an alacrity born (one assumes) of Crowe knowing his target audience: the serious but unromantic business of a mature band writing new material and organising their own global tours lacks the tragic mystique of their origin story.

And so the lion’s share of the movie covers the formation of Mother Love Bone from the ashes of Green River, the tragic-but-inevitable death of frontman Andrew Wood, , the forming of the band that became Pearl Jam, and the gradual apotheosis of a shy and earnest Eddie Vedder, some handsome kid from beyond Seattle who sent in a demo tape featuring a voice to die for. Twenty‘s greatest triumph is perhaps the way it captures Vedder’s transition from promising young frontman to self-appointed voice-of-the-underdog; there’s an amazing bit of footage from an early Pearl Jam set in Vancouver (a support slot for Alice In Chains, if I remember correctly) where, midway through their set, Vedder witnesses the sort of heavy-handed security procedures that were a big feature of the era. After dropping a handful of lines from a song to mutter – over the mic, but almost more to himself than anyone else – about how fucked-up a thing it is for some bull-necked guy in a bomber jacket to beat some kid up for the sin of rocking out at a show, there’s a sudden shift; the to-this-point mellow and shy Vedder undergoes an astonishing phase change, the rapid and unexpected flourishing of righteous anger channelled almost immediately into his performance. It’s genuinely incredible; you can see the guy age maybe five years in a few seconds, and within the space of a few lines that earnest young man becomes the snarling channeller of inner turmoil whose frontmanship turned a skilled but otherwise unremarkable hard rock band into one of the pillars of a generational movement. That transformational trigger has its tragic echo in the Roskilde disaster; if you asked me to novelise Pearl Jam’s story, that would probably be the thematic spine I’d use to hold the work together. (It would be, unsurprisingly, a darker story than Crowe’s telling, though I like to think it would have a more transcendent ending as a result. What that says about my relationship to Pearl Jam’s music by comparison with Crowe’s is left as an exercise for the reader.)

I don’t know if it happens to everyone, but I find that reliving my youth through media output like this makes me feel very old. Naturally enough, a big part of that comes from seeing one’s teen heroes age twenty years within the compressed temporal frame of a few hours, going from daftly-dressed kids in their early twenties goofing off and having fun on noise-fuzzed camcorder footage or home-cloned VHS scrapings from MTV, to serious musicians in middle age, their eyes haunted sporadically by the ghosts of their pasts. (Though it should be noted, with a degree of envy mixed with admiration, that Vedder remains youthfully handsome and clear-skinned by comparison to his band-mates, despite still being a smoker, and his voice – spoken and sung alike – has become deeper and broader in terms of its range for a fairly minimal sacrifice in its raw power; a modest charm flows off the guy in waves, and – much as one of my friends said as we walked back into town in the drizzle – one likes to imagine him shrugging off formality and inviting you to “just call me Ed, man”.

But I think the real reason Twenty makes me feel old is because, in the terms of the outlook on life I had when the most important events it portrays took place, I am old – almost unimaginably so, in fact. It sounds laughably overdramatic and emo of me to say so, but when I was fifteen I really didn’t think I’d make it out of my twenties alive, let alone sane… and with that remembered alienation and restless nihilism still as fresh in my mind as they ever were (or so it feels), it’s hard to reconcile those feelings with the fact that I’m now the sort of person whose formative favourite bands have serious and worthy documentaries made about them. Twenty, then, says as much about how its audience have grown up and come to terms with the world as it says about the band’s own struggle to make peace with itself.

I guess I can live with that. (Like I get a choice, right?)

**

This is one of my favourite Pearl Jam tunes. Yes, I’m fully aware that it’s one of their most simple and obviously anthemic the-kids-are-all-right numbers, but frankly I don’t really care; it said what I felt at the time, I can still remember that feeling, and that’s enough for me. Pipe up with your own favourites in the comments, if you like.

“Will myself to find a home / a home within myself… “