Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You @ The Junction

It’s not a show about a déjà vu victim experiencing an explosion again and again. Honestly. The title might make it sound like that, but honestly, Molly Naylor’s Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You is a richer performance than that. Strictly speaking, it’s a spoken word performance, but so much emphasis is there on the performance aspect that it feels much more like a one-woman play than anything else.

Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You is a story about being blown up, certainly. In fact, that’s pretty much all you get. The staging is stripped back so far that you’ve only got that story on stage – barely any clutter, one performer and maybe three projections. So the story is paramount, and its environment lends itself to the art of listening, the art of really paying attention to the words (perhaps not surprising for a poem presented as drama).

Molly Naylor, speaking those words, tells her audience about the seventh day in July, 2005, when she got blown up on the Tube at Aldgate station. She was actually relatively unscathed – physically – and instead picked up the glamour of the survivor, the terrorist victim who walked away. Frankly, it’s the glamour she’d been craving up until that point, and maybe this is representative of a generation; not deliberately perhaps, but this idea of a generation seeking the glamour of Hollywood, then allowing a traumatic event to serve as scapegoat for all that’s wrong in their lives, certainly strikes a chord.

Alright, so ‘scapegoat’ is perhaps a little unfair. It’s not as though Naylor blames all her failings (lack of ambition, apathy, selfishness) on the bombings of July 7th. Rather, the bombing becomes a filter through which she (and we) can see things differently. The bombing shines light on aspects of her life that we could already see, but maybe not clearly. So, sure, she’s drifting through life in a happy-go-lucky way before the bombing, but this is only really obvious once the ‘happy’ has been removed and we can all question the ‘lucky’. Her lack of ambition comes strikingly forward when she flees London to rural Wales, but her dead-end jobs before then should have been giveaways.

But what I came back to time and again in Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You was those words. Molly Naylor keeps up a steady stream of them and they fill the black box space. Maybe she doesn’t need the projections to set her locations; the words are enough. This script (really a poem) sings with the rhythmic power of poetry, it’s highly lyrical and sometimes self-consciously so. The fact that it’s a poem being performed like a monologue (it’s not staged like a spoken word performance) means that Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You suffers slightly in a theatre – these words have to spoken in a certain way for the poetry to work – because there’s a certain lack of spontaneity. Naylor’s easy-going, improvised opening few words of greeting (and closing words, to plug her book of the show) serve only to make her rehearsed, scripted tone of voice even more obvious.

Whenever I Get Blown Up I Think Of You is a self-consciously theatrical staging of a highly lyrical rendition of the July 7th bombings and their aftermath. It’s touching, certainly, occasionally funny, sometimes awkward but always poetic and heartfelt.

Howl [film review]

What is great art? How are you going to define literary merit? What things do you look for to decide that a piece of art is good, great, indifferent or simply bad? You had better be ready with a least an idea of answers to those questions.

Rob Epstein’s and Jeffrey Friedman’s film Howl focuses on and takes its title from Allen Ginsberg’s four part poem, Howl, in which Ginsberg articulates his vision of the world in 1955. It’s not an especially positive vision, following the travels of Carl Solomon, whom Ginsberg met when both men were patients in a mental health institute. You should probably read it yourself, but in Allen Ginsberg’s nasal, drawn-out voice with its curious cadences; it sounds better that way, and Ginsberg’s poetry is very aural. A lot of poetry works best when performed rather than read silently (some might say a poem stands or falls on its performance – and maybe that’s a way of defining great art in poetry), but this is especially true of Ginsberg’s work.

Howl brought Ginsberg to public attention, and even more so when it landed the publisher in court two years later for breaching obscenity laws. It was Howl that launched Ginsberg onto his journey to becoming, as the film Howl claims, one of the most celebrated poets of the Twentieth Century.

Obscenity trials are great for getting the debating juices flowing. The arguments involved are usually much bigger than the works of art that initially sparked them off. The trial – perhaps very publicly – becomes a verbal battlefield for two sides in wars between conservative and liberal thinking, between upholding moral standards and freedom of speech, between adult seriousness and youthful artistic expression.

The film Howl documents the poem Howl’s trial on grounds of obscenity, interspersed with an interview with Allen Ginsberg (James Franco) and animated renderings of the poem itself. Jon Hamm (he of Mad Men fame) defends the literary merit of Ginsberg’s poem (as well as arguing over what constitutes literary merit) accusations that the poem is puerile and lacks the redeeming qualities found in ‘great’ art.

I put it to you that great art creates its own form and is original in that respect. It should have no precursor, no obvious inspiration that has been altered to suit the writer’s purpose (we’re talking about literature, even though we say ‘art’).

But doesn’t that view overlook the fact that great art is often great because it nods to the formal rules, then breaks or twists them, and experiments with them creatively? Isn’t it true that individual works of art are rarely entirely unique, but often borrow from others? And isn’t literary merit fairly subjective anyway? Isn’t art something that can be appreciated by one person even if not by the next? Answers on a postcard please.



Poetry – and I don’t just mean Allen Ginsberg’s poetry – is all about the words creating images for an audience (of readers or listeners). It’s painting pictures with sound , rhythm and cadence, in a way that prose can’t quite manage (as one of Howl’s advocates explains in the trial). By animating Ginsberg’s words, Howl the film seems to miss the point of poetry. Epstein and Friedman imply that Ginsberg’s words alone – ably performed by Franco – aren’t enough to conjure images of the god Moloch, or of the thousand blind windows of his eyes, or of the best minds of Ginsberg’s generation drifting through life and reeling from the effects of World War Two. It seems only animation can convey the epic scope of Ginsberg’s Howl. The sexual exploits of his friend (the cocksman, the Adonis of Denver) and the cosmic search for meaning undergone by Solomon and humanity can apparently not be appreciated in words without us having them visualised for us. Stunning as the animation is, it is reductive and undermines the power of Ginsberg’s howl.

I leave you with another question: is the literary critic a better judge of whether art is obscene, or is the average reader (whoever that is) a better judge? That’s a question thrown up late on in Howl, and not really covered.

One more: is a film a great piece of art if it raises more questions than it answers, eloquently defends free speech, probes at our definitions of what constitutes ‘merit’ and ‘great’ and also fires up the imagination through poetry and imagery? That’s Howl, helped out by Allen Ginsberg – make up your own mind (it’d be in line with Ginsberg’s approval of free thought and individual expression).