Floating in the Forth

When someone talks about suicide, you should believe them.

When someone sings about suicide, we bob our heads and hum along.

Scott Hutchison, lead singer and songwriter of Frightened Rabbit, was found dead last night near Edinburgh.

I met Scott Hutchison once. We’d bused into the tiny Scottish borders town of Selkirk to catch a show, and it was a revelation. The pounding drums and wailing guitars of Frightened Rabbit music ought really be heard in person in a tiny auditorium surrounded by Scottish kids with nothing else to do that night and no need to go to bed anytime soon. I can still hear the echoing call of The Loneliness and the Scream, oh ah oh oOOOOOOoooh, lifting off into the night as we left the theatre. Me and my drunk compatriots wandered away, intoxicated on the crowd that quickly dissipated. We’ll find a pub, we thought, as we stalked the streets of this quiet village. But we didn’t.

So we went back to the concert venue. Surely the roadies will know the best place near here to congregate, right? Roadies always know where to party.

And instead of roadies, we just found the band and a small group of friends. You, Scott, came up and introduced yourself, and invited us over for a drink (good whisky). You asked us about ourselves and spent five minutes with us before returning to your friends and your bandmates, and I felt 200 feet tall. 

A lot of Frightened Rabbit songs focus on suicide. Death Dream, Floating in the Forth,  Swim Until You Can’t See Land. The title of the last album Painting of a Panic Attack, is a reference to a suicide scene as a frieze of one terrible moment, one panic attack. Floating in the Forth tells the story of a heartbroken man jumping off, or deciding not to jump off, the Forth Road Bridge, just feet away from where your body, Scott, was found last night in Lothian. You spoke publicly about suicidal urges, and how much of that song is autobiographical:

“Floating in the Forth was a real tough one. It’s a real thing. It’s a real thought. It’s a thought that I’ve taken to a place that I’m far less comfortable with… I’ve gone 90 percent of the way through that song in real life. But at the same time it’s gratifying. It’s heartening to know that I’ve been through that, and I’m stood there performing that song, alive and feeling good about it.”

 

I’ve danced to that song. I’ve hummed it and screamed it and pressed “back” on my iPhone so I could hear it again. It feels now a little like I was dancing on your grave.

I always thought the songs focused on, or at least ended in, triumph. Someone rolls around in heartbreak, but ultimately decides to move on. Someone considers suicide, but doesn’t pull the trigger, take that step into thin air, swallow those pills.

The final lyric “I think I’ll save suicide for another year” sounds like a hopeful line when you hear it in the present tense. It sounds like a warning when you remember Scott wrote it twelve years ago.

How many self-fulfilling musical prophecies have we seen in recent years? Lil Peep, Chester Bennington, Chris Cornell. It’s a good reminder that great music about pain comes from real pain.

Frightened Rabbit is my favorite band. I first found them when one of my best friends played Good Arms vs. Bad Arms for me at the Amoeba music on Sunset Boulevard. The Twist made me feel less alone when trying not to attach happiness to Friday night benders in college. I remember laying on the ground in my dorm room with my first love, listening to one of their albums and fumbling through an explanation for how it made me feel. Things convinced me to throw out a bunch of old shit - books and clothes and dishes - that was tying me to an apartment that I hated. Holy was my anthem for getting over a break up.

But more than any concrete thing, their music brought me back to myself. I liked it, and I liked that I liked something with zero irony. Their concerts, I’ve been to five, were baths of oxytocin, and the closest I’ve felt to a religious experience.  

From the last FR concert I saw in Toronto.

And in all that time, all those thousands of listens, it never occurred to me that Scott might have been singing about demons he was currently facing rather than ones he conquered long ago. In retrospect, that’s downright dumb, but it’s easy to idolize the makers of art we love.

If there’s any good to be found in today’s terrible news, it’s the reminder that every remark, joke, or lyric about suicide should be treated seriously. Even the shitty memes and youtube comments. From the people you idolize, the people you work with, your friends, your family members, everyone.

Unfortunately, Scott’s not going to be making any more of that art. I suppose we should be grateful that he left us with such a large discography. Frightened Rabbit, of course, but also Owl John and Mastersystem. If you haven’t heard their music, you may want to check them out today: https://open.spotify.com/user/spotify/playlist/37i9dQZF1DX5speZs1JuCj?si=zOJgQVCXTvurTzS0EtLa9Q

And if you’re feeling generous, or thinking about someone else that’s been lost to suicide, an artist or friend or loved one, please consider giving a bit to the American Society for Suicide Prevention as I am doing today: https://afsp.org/take-action/give-a-gift/in-memory-of/

Thanks Scott. Thanks Grant, Billy, Andy, and Simon. Thanks to the friends and loved ones of the Frightened Rabbit bandmates, because of course this is your loss more than it could ever be ours. “You’re the shit, and I’m knee deep in it."

Focus on a Photograph: Andre Kertesz’s Fork

This is a great photograph.

Yes, the fork on the table is one of photography’s first masterworks in great composition.

La Fourchette, photographed by Hungarian artist Andre Kertesz, is a perfect opportunity to meditate on strong composition and what makes it so.

What is “good” composition? Many books and beginner’s art classes will give you metrics and tests that turn analyzing composition a checklist. Rule of thirds? Leading lines? Golden ratio? All extremely useful for throwing out jargon terms to show you’ve been paying attention (or for showing off).

But art isn’t a standardized test. There is no rubric.

100 MFA candidates will give you 102 different definitions for the purpose of art, so I’m going to stray into the personal rather than the absolute here. I especially appreciate art that elicits strong feeling. Does this?

It does for me, and now I’m going to try to put into words why, but the piece is successful because it managed to create that feeling, not because it checked enough boxes on someone’s composition rubric.

“Good” Composition

One of the most misleading concepts in photography is the premise of “good” composition. It implies that there’s one good, right, correct way to compose an image and everything else is broken. Not only is there very little evidence that there are hard rules about what make images good or bad, but visual artists have been using “bad” composition techniques deliberately for hundreds of years to create different emotional responses — like unease and confusion.

So I call La Fourchette a great example of strong composition . It’s secure, stable, solid. As unshakable as granite slab. Staring at it feels like giving my eyes a break from the disorder and chaos of daily life, and I can look at it every day (as I have been for the past two weeks) without ever feeling weariness or discomfort. There’s three reasons for this.

Banal Subject Matter

Yup, it’s a fork on a plate. It’s an intentionally boring subject in a setting that you’d expect to see it in. Unlike most works in photojournalism, then, I know that this photograph isn’t calling my attention to the subject. There’s no extra baggage, nothing being said about forks and their relation to plates. There is only…

Lights and Darks

Check out the histogram for La Fourchette:

Big spikes at the two ends, almost no mid tones. It is light and dark. Take another look at the photograph and notice how the whole thing can be split into something near white and something near black.

So, unlike many photographs, even those in black in white, there’s very little in the way of gradient. The forms are stark and easy to spot. That makes it easy for me to sense that they’re…

Balanced

Thanks to the stark lighting in the photograph, the subject matter is split into four components that are split right down the horizontal line of the image — a fork, a fork shadow, a bowl, and a bowl shadow. But neither is the symmetry so absolutely perfect that it looks unnatural.

One of the components that really fascinates me about this image is the thin black line at the top of the image. It’s a tiny detail, but it’s one that stands out to me because it seems like it’d be so easy to remove. I’d be tempted to crop it out if I had taken this shot myself (“It’s distracting,” I’d tell myself).

But then I look at the result of such a crop:

And I feel anxious. Especially because of the shallow focus plane, the background at the top of the frame seems to float away, taking away perspective and understanding of the environment. The light overwhelms the dark and, suddenly, the stability and balance disappear.

Why it Matters

We are living through the great age of banal photographs. Banal doesn’t necessarily mean boring in this case, but mild subject matter doesn’t help an image that’s missing special composition, color, or context. In this age of selfies, food pics, and backyard photographers, it’s easy to forget that a photo of something commonplace can be great, and what makes it so. When you find an image that meets that lofty standard, it’s worth sitting for a moment to dig deep and ask yourself why you like it, without relying on the cliches of art critique 101.

Then, the real test: can you do it yourself?