So che non riguarda strettamente la musica dei Franz,o meglio,vi è solo un piccolo riferimento generale (quello sottolineato),però vorrei segnalarvi ugualmente l'ultimo post di Bob su Myspace perché l'ho trovato molto interessante
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Tony Parker
A while back we were on the BBC's Culture Show talking about various things that have inspired us and shaped us creatively. I talked a bit about a writer called Tony Parker who in the 1960's began interviewing prisoners and recently released prisoners about their crimes and how they ended up in the position they found themselves. I discovered him through a short of anthology of his writings called 'Criminal Conversations'. The book totally fascinated me and led me to hunt down the rest of his work; I now have a shelf containing first editions of all his books and I enjoy dipping into them from time to time. (Criminal Conversations is out of print now and goes for £20 or more on Abe Books which is a shame because mine only cost about £7)
Parker didn't limit himself to exclusively talking to criminals. In his later books he would often immerse himself in a specific community (mining towns, council estates, army barracks) and interview the same people regularly for a period of weeks. By doing this he was able to become a confidant to these people and managed to get some amazingly frank and fascinating stories from their lives.
Parker edits himself out of the interviews and the result is a block of prose that contains only the interviewee's voice, sometimes reading like an Alan Bennett monologue from his Talking Heads series, but not fictional in the slightest. Indeed, in the 1960's a series of television plays were made featuring actresses playing out the parts of young women offenders that are similar to Bennett's Talking Heads films. The quality of the programmes is low and the fact that actors were telling the stories rather than the actual person, whilst understandable given the nature of the content, disappointed me.
A modern version of the concept is much easier to imagine given the rise of reality television and the apparent willingness of anybody to bare their darkest secrets for even the briefest taste of celebrity. But this desperation for 15 minutes of fame would undoubtedly taint the stories. One of the fascinating things about Parker is his ability to make people from a previous era, unfamiliar with the reality TV phenomenon and much closer to the prudish British approach of previous generations of keeping personal trials and traumas inside the family, reveal truths and secrets that traditionally would not have been spoken about. A modern version seems doomed to offer no more than surface deep confessions of strife to an audience with empathy lethargy, an entirely pointless exercise.
The most important thing that I got from reading Tony Parker was the notion that everybody has an interesting story to tell. Often during the first interviews the subjects would say things such as, 'I don't know why you're interviewing me, nobody would be interested in what I have to say, my life is boring', and then over the course of the following interviews, go on to tell fascinating stories of their triumphs and struggles. Reading his work certainly led me to approach people in a new way and gave me a greater respect for the lives and stories of others that as a younger man I may have dismissed instantly. This promotes behaviour conducive to a happier planet and a more tolerant and supportive society. It also makes riding on a bus or tube a potential delight for the imagination when considering what the other passengers might have been through in the past to be sitting on that bus today.
When we first got our band together we had discussions about the kinds of things we'd like our songs to be about. A recurring idea was trying to look for the exceptional, extraordinary and epic in the everyday lives of others that may be overlooked by the individuals themselves, the world around them or both. This is something that Parker achieves seemingly effortlessly in his interviews.
Wonderfully some of Parker's books are shelved in the travel section of bookstores. Foyles on Charring Cross road in London had copies of his book 'The People of Providence', a book about the lives of people on a South London housing estate, in the travel section alongside books chronicling exploration of Africa and Antarctica. As we are collectively being asked to curb our long-haul air travel by holidaying more locally, perhaps more books in the travel section at bookstores should feature a more inward looking theme in case we continue to miss all the excitement that is right under our noses.