Triptych Conversations

What happens when a young man battling Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy (Matts Steen aka Ibelin) meets Guy Montag in Fahrenheit 451 and the joy riders of Gertler's 1916 painting Merry-Go-Round...

The Masterpieces






1. GODRIC by Frederick Buechner (1981)






Frederick Buechner (1926-2022; pronounced ‘Beakner‘) was an American Presbyterian minister, theologian and, most notably for our purposes, writer. He was prolific in both fiction (15 novels), poetry and non-fiction. He was heralded in his lifetime for his brilliance and creativity, though inevitably, his books have perhaps not maintained their deserved popularity.
The novel for which he is best known is surprising! A relatively short work, Godric tells the semi-fictional story of an obscure figure from 12th century Northumberland. Godric of Finchale (apparently pronounced ‘finkle’ acc. to English Heritage!) was a hermit with a heavy conscience, a former Crusader who essentially withdrew from society to a cave on the River Wear, north of Durham. He longs to be left alone to seek God and avoid his past. But the Bishop of Durham was having none of it, and so the Abbot of Rievaulx Abbey sent a young monk, Reginald, to live with Godric in his very old age, to write up this holy man’s life. The result is a hagiography (literally writing about a saint). The word has since come to mean a biography primarily concerned to present the subject in the best light with all warts removed (with probably a few miracles thrown in). But Godric is infuriated by this, not least because he knows his past.
The result is an extraordinary, moving and compelling book, wrestling with the nature of good and evil, sin and righteousness, guilt and forgiveness; essentially it’s about how messed up we all are. It’s no surprise that it was a finalist for the 1981 Pulitzer Prize.
Buechner wrote:
I picked up a small book of saints and opened it, by accident, to the page that had Godric on it. I had never so much as heard of him before, but as I read about him, I knew he was for me, my saint.












2. INTO THE WILD (dir. by Sean Penn, 2007)












Chris McCandless was utterly disenchanted with the hypocrisies and platitudes of modern, especially suburban, American life, as exemplified by his parents. So in May 1990, freshly graduated from university, he leaves home without telling anyone to escape to the wilderness. He travels all over in his clapped out car until it’s wrecked in a flood. He hitchhikes, meeting various people with extraordinary stories of their own. He is aiming for Alaska, and he eventually finds an abandoned bus in the Alaskan wilderness in April 1992. He sets up his base there, naming it ‘The Magic Bus’, and all seems ideal. However, things start to go wrong, especially as the weather turns. He also comes to realise how much he desperately craves human company. But when he tries to retrace his steps, the stream he crossed before has become a lethal torrent, forcing him back.

He has to resort to foraging for food, and then becomes fatally ill after eating a poisonous plant. He keeps a journal as he slowly declines. Some weeks later, hunters find his body and the family are contacted.

Sean Penn’s film is a heart-breaking story adapted from the research of mountaineer and writer Jon Krakauer, whose book Into the Wild stayed at the top of bestseller lists for 2 years. It is beautifully shot and well-paced, with a superb performance by Emile Hirsch in particular. (Sadly, he seems not to have landed the productions or parts that enabled him to reach such heights since). To top it all, the soundtrack is simply stunning: Eddie Vedder (of Pearl Jam) wrote and sang the songs. I’ve had seasons over the years of keeping the album on repeat.

But the film is more than the sum of all these extraordinary parts and is one of those that stays with you long after viewing.













































3. Karl Jenkins' The Armed Man Peace Mass (2000)












Sir Karl Jenkins (1944- ) is a Welsh Composer who started out as a jazz-fusion multi-instrumentalist. He trained at Cardiff university and the Royal Academy of Music in London. You may think that his music is unfamiliar, but especially through its use in advertising, his compositions seem to get everywhere. They’re the sorts of familiar tunes that you can never place but instantly associate with banks or insurance or whatever! Composing such music is no mean feat, and requires a certain kind of genius
But he is the writer of far more than atmospheric mood music. He’s best known for Adiemus, and more recently the Armed Man mass for peace. There is a long mediaeval tradition of composing settings of the Catholic mass liturgy around popular melodies and one of the most used was from a folk song called ‘L’Homme Armé’ (or the Armed Man). Jenkins updates the concept at the Millennium,  describing the previous century as
the most war-torn and destructive century in human history
















Our very own Doodler, Sophie Killingley, with the great man himself (some time ago it should be said!)










Commissioned by the Royal Armouries Museum to mark its move from London to Leeds at the Millennium, Jenkins combines the original form with texts from the Bible, the Islamic call to prayer, and the Hindu epic the Mahabharata. But just as Benjamin Britten did with his War Requiem after the Second World War, Jenkins throws in more contemporary poetry for good measure.

“The Armed Man” – 6:25

“The Call to Prayers (Adhaan)” – 2:04

“Kyrie” – 8:12

“Save Me from Bloody Men” – 1:42

“Sanctus” – 7:00

“Hymn Before Action” – 2:38

“Charge!” – 7:26

“Angry Flames” – 4:44

“Torches” – 2:58

“Agnus Dei” – 3:39

“Now the Guns Have Stopped” – 3:25

“Benedictus” – 7:36

“Better Is Peace” – 9:33















Other Mentions






Artistic discoveries during the break:

Joel: Brandon Sanderson’s The Way of Kings

Sophie: Donna Tartt’s The Secret History

Mark: Arvind Ethan David’s audiobook Douglas Adams: The Ends of the Earth

The Masterpieces














1. The Yellow Wallpaper (1890)









Charlotte Perkins Gilman (as she became after her second marriage) suffered intolerable hardships in the lead-up and aftermath of giving birth in 1885 to her only child, Katherine. Today, she would be swiftly diagnosed with severe postpartum depression, but of course in the 1880s and 90s, the concept was light years from a medic’s vocabulary. She was given a ‘rest cure’, a strictly policed form enforced solitude and passivity: confined to bed, barred from social interactions, limited diet, minimal mental stimulation (so little or no reading or writing). If anything was guaranteed to aggravate mental illness, this was it.

Highly unusual for the time, she finally divorced her husband Charles Stetson in 1894, although both had recognised that would be necessary as early as 1888.

She wrote what would become her most famous  short story, The Yellow Wallpaper, in 1890, about a young mother’s ghastly plummet into madness in circumstances that clearly echoed her own. It is brilliantly paced but utterly chilling in its artful, unreliable narrative that manages to speak with piercing clarity. It’s easy to see why it became a staple of feminist literature, but it shouldn’t be confined to such labels. 












Charlotte Perkins Gilman (r) with her daughter, Katherine Beecher Stetson, ca 1897 (Schlesinger Library, Harvard)




































It is astonishingly good writing, pure and simple. Here are some relevant links:

Read The Yellow Wallpaper (in various e-formats)

Gothic Fiction

The doctor who devised ‘rest cure’ therapy, Silas Weir Mitchell.

Including women in Clinical trials before 1993.

Mentioned in passing:

Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca

M. R. James’ Ghost Stories (complied 1931)

Aimee Byrd’s Recovering from Biblical Manhood and Womanhood (NB cover!)















2. I am a Rock, by Simon & Garfunkel (1965)









Paul Simon is one of the true greats of American popular music. I mean, who else living has both his creative range and longevity? A brief ChatGPT query offers only Willie Nelson and Dick van Dyke (!?, though he is 100 this year). Both great folks – but IMHO not a patch on Paul Simon. You mention Bob Dylan, Herbie Hancock, or Johnny Mathis? But their careers are marginally shorter, believe it or not.

He first came to global fame (as well as Sophie’s obsession) through his 10-year partnership with fellow New Yorker, Art Garfunkel.  It was hugely successful, but towards the end, became highly fraught; they formally split in 1970. This song, I am a Rock, was first released in 1965 but only in the UK. It would gain a global hearing when included in their 1966 album Sounds of Silence.














































Simon and Garfunkel, 25th Anniversary Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Concert, Madison Square Garden 2009. (Kevin Kane/WireImage)











Paul Simon’s official site

In Passing:

Meditation XVII (No man is an island) by John Donne





















3. Local Hero (dir. Bill Forsyth) (1983)






In an earlier episode, we shared our artistic proselytising failures: those things we loved that failed to impress anyone else. Mine was Local Hero. So we put it under the Triptych microscope, with interesting results!

Bill Forsyth wrote and directed (on the back of his success with Gregory’s Girl), David Puttnam produced (fresh from Chariots of Fire Oscar glory). The film’s scale is simultaneously tiny and global. Its tone is light and quirky, almost absurd at times, but manages also to prompt serious questions. It’s nostalgic certainly, and perhaps trades in caricatures of a long-past Scotland. But it is a film with heart that really grows on you (though only perhaps, as Joel says in the discussion, once you have an idea of what to expect!). 













The premise is simple. US megacorp oil company wants to buy remote fishing village on Western Highlands coast to turn it into a massive refinery. Agent sent from Houston to soften the inhabitants up for the deal. That’s it. But nothing goes smoothly. And that’s the joy of the whole. A wonderful cast (including Burt Lancaster in one of his last big roles; the great Fulton Mackay, Denis Lawson, not to mention Peter Capaldi in his very first etc), brilliant script, and dollops of wonder and natural beauty. Oh and Mark Knopfler’s gorgeous soundtrack.

As several critics have pointed out, it is effectively a modern fairy tale.

Lovely tribute to the film and to Pennan (where some of the filming took place), 40 years on. Oh, and I was wrong – they DID have, and STILL have a red phone box!

The Bechdel-Wallace Test: a simple (and therefore not uncontroversial) means of analysing the portrayal of women in fiction (esp. film): does the work feature at least two women in conversation about something other than a man, and do they both have names?

The legacy of Monty Python‘s absurdism?

10 fun facts about the movie!


















































































Other Mentions






Our childhood artistic joys:

The Doodler: The Poetry of Lord Byron.

The Scribbler: Mr Benn.

The Crooner: Drawing horses.














I can’t quite believe it. What started as a minute little thought-seed, during one insomniac night back in mid-2024, then evolved into an actual thing with a real-live team. Joel and Sophie were in pretty quickly after the thought was shared, and then Owen came up trumps as our techie.

Now look! We have reached the 8th, and  final, episode of Triptych Season 1!  What a ride it’s been. But before delving into this week’s  show-notes, we would LOVE to hear from YOU.

So here’s a link to a brief TRIPTYCH Listener Survey (it should only take 5-10 minutes, max) to help us develop and grow Triptych for Season 2 and even beyond!

But for now, back to the show… We decided to take the masterpieces in chronological order this time.

The Masterpieces






1. Black Mirror 3:5 "Men Against Fire" (2016)






Black Mirror is both a phenomenon and an outlier, one that has gained cult status in some quarters (though perhaps there’s a generational divide there? You’ll need to ask our producer Owen for more on that. He has views…). It started life on the UK’s once quite edgy and adventurous Channel 4, the brainchild of journalist, arch-satirist and presenter, Charlie Brooker. He has either written, or prompted creative discussions for each episode, working with his producer Annabel Jones.

Stripe’s commander Medina, played by the one and only Shiv Roy (aka Sarah Snook!!)
But what makes it incredibly unusual is that it is an anthology show; in other words, one made up of a series of unrelated, stand-alone episodes. This is obviously much more expensive than a regular show because new sets, casts, designs etc are needed every time. The common thread is the impact of technology, socially, relationally, economically, and politically. Some gripe that it often piggy-backs on ideas that are developed at greater length elsewhere, but that does seem nit-picky when the production values are so high and the provocations so thoughtful. If that was not the case, it’s unlikely Netflix would have thrown huge budgets at it or so many A-list stars given their right arms to be in it. 

That said, it is rarely comfortable viewing and sometimes incredibly dark. As this episode is… the discussion we had was very ‘interesting’!

The premise of Men against Fire: soldiers are given neural implants that affects their perceptions, especially of enemies, so that they appear as lethal grotesques, or ‘roaches’. However nothing is as it seems. But what is interesting is that none of the ethical issues are as straightforward as they first seem. In this clip, psychiatrist Arquette (played by the brilliant Michael Kelly) explains the ethos behind the implants to protagonist Stripe (Malachi Kirby).





























Brooker was initially inspired to focus on propaganda by a British John-Pilger-made documentary about the Iraq war called The War You Don’t See.

But his thinking was subsequently shaped by Men Against Fire: The Problem of Battle Command by military historian S L A Marshall, and Dave Grossman’s On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society.

An intro to the concept of ‘Othering’

Finally, a flavour of Brooker’s less intense work (apols for some of the NSFW language)

















2. Love after Love by Derek Walcott (1976)













The total population of the 16 Caribbean nations comes to only around 44 million (so 0.54% of the world’s population). But just stop for a moment to think of its cultural impact: this is a region punching well above its weight:

in music (eg mambo, calypso, dancehall, ska, reggae

in international cuisine with the joys of things like jerk cooking or rum

in sport (cricket and athletics especially)

on many other cultures via its diasporas

through its joyful festival and carnival culture

in intellectual clout with the likes of CLR James (Trinidad) and Frantz Fanon (Martinique); not to forget the Nobel-winners: Sir Arthur Lewis (St Lucia) for Economics; V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad & Tobago) and Sir Derek Walcott (St Lucia) for Literature. [Plus I’ve not even MENTIONED our very own Carib genius, The Crooner — just a matter of time, surely — let alone anything to do with pirates]































So it’s to Derek Walcott that we turn now (1930-2017). He won the Nobel in 1992 for his varied writing (plays, short poems, epic poetry, criticism), work that bridged all kinds of different influences making him one of the leading post-colonial writers of his generation.

In this episode we discuss his beautiful, Love after Love, which was his publisher’s Poem of the Week only the other day.










Receiving his Nobel in 1992

























Some other connections

George Herbert’s LOVE III

Timothy Keller’s short book (based on a talk he often gave) The Freedom of Self-Forgetfulness.

Joel even mentioned Calvin’s Institutes, so more on them here.















3. Making Do by Lake Street Dive (2021)












Lake Street Dive is a highly talented and versatile band made up originally of friends who met at music college over 20 years ago (the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston). Since then, they have successfully experimented with different genres while the line-up has changed slightly. There is so much to love about their music, with its invention, virtuosity, flexibility and joie-de-vivre. This song, Making Do, is deceptively straightforward at first listen, though – and prompted a very interesting discussion.

The core line-up on this 2021 album, Obviously, was:














Rachael Price (original line-up) – vocals, writing

Bridget Kearney (original line-up) – vocals, background vocals, bass, synthesizer, writing

Michael Calabrese (original line-up) – drums, writing, background vocals, percussion

Akie Bermiss (joined 2017) – vocals, keyboards, synthesizer, piano, background vocals, writing

Mike “McDuck” Olson (original line-up, last album) – guitar, mandolin, strings, trumpet, writing




































Other Mentions






The Guilty Pleasures (we were prepared to admit to…)

Sophie the Doodler Killingley: Lloyd-Webber & Stilgoe’s Starlight Express

Joel the Crooner Bain: Jerry Zucker’s Rat Race (mainly for Rowan Atkinson)

Mark the Scribbler Meynell: Chris de Burgh’s 1975 album Spanish Train and Other Stories

The Masterpieces






1. Musée des Beaux Arts by W.H. Auden (1938)






Wystan Auden (1908-1973) was British-American and one of the most celebrated poets of his generation. He would emigrate from the UK to the USA in 1939 on the eve of the Second World War (something for which many in the British establishment never forgave him). But before he crossed the Atlantic, he saw his role as a form of literary journalist. After witnessing something of the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, he travelled around Europe as many increasingly felt the inevitability of renewed conflict, a mere twenty years or so after the Armistice ending the previous war.

In Brussels, he visited Belgium’s fine art museum, and found himself gripped by several works in the gallery’s Brueghel room.  Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c1525-1569) was a Dutch Old Master who specialised in complex group scenes and landscapes, often setting biblical or mythological narratives in the world of his contemporaries. In the course of his poem, Auden alludes to three such paintings, although it is the 3rd (Landscape with the Fall of Icarus) which held his primary focus.

























For follow up:

The official website for the Brussels Old Masters museum

Good engagement with the poem by Oliver Tearle (his Interesting Literature site is great)

I enjoyed this discussion on the great Poetry for All about the poem (although I am not sure I completely chimed with Shankar Vendantam’s take)

The W. H. Auden Society

The relevant section of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in prose translation (Book VIII: 183-235)




















Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c.1555) detail















2. Kandinsky's Color Study: Squares with Concentric Circles (1913)






















Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a pioneering Russian-born artist and theorist who emigrated to France in the 1930s after living in Germany (including a decade teaching at the famous Bauhaus). He was committed to finding ways to create ‘pure’ art through use of abstraction and colour especially.

His first career was in academic law, and he was very successful, being offered a professorship in Estonia before he was 30. But he turned his back on it to concentrate on painting, beginning his studies in Munich in 1896. He moved back and forth between Central Europe and Russia even after the 1917 Russian Revolution, but he soon realised that his outlook was worlds apart from that of the new regime.

Quite what his beliefs were is hard to pin down, but at the very least he was influenced by a unique cocktail of Russian Orthodoxy, Theosophy, Wagnerian theories of total art, and much besides. He was famously synaesthesic (as Sophie explains in the episode) which features in his extraordinary 1910, Concerning the Spiritual in Art. 
















Color Study: Squares with Concentric Circles (1913)











Kandinsky's journey to abstraction (clockwise from top left)















I (Mark) absolutely loved Amor Towles’ wonderful 2016 book, A Gentleman in Moscow, not least because of a rather ghoulish fascination with the early years of the Russian Revolution.

When I heard about its TV adaptation with Ewan McGregor, I was nervous, to say the least. Thankfully, I thought they did a really good job of it in the end. But I became totally obsessed with the Opening Titles, which clearly owe no little inspiration from Kandinsky! Simply beautiful…
















3. Lingus by Snarky Puppy (2014)












Snarky Puppy is a jazz fusion collective started by the legend that is bassist Michael League (right) in 2004. Since then over 40 musicians have played with them at various points, though they usually feature 10-15 players at a time in the studio or live.

Their 2014 album We Like It Here was made while the band was doing a huge European tour, and was recorded before a live audience in Utrecht, Netherlands on four consecutive nights.

The final track, Lingus, apparently got its title from the fact that League was jotting down parts for the different musicians while on an Aer Lingus flight!






























League explained the group’s membership ethos to All About Jazz. If a player could earn more for a gig outside the band

… we’d get a substitute and if the substitute played well, then it felt like, ‘Well, they learned the music and played great, what a waste for them to learn all that for one gig…’ so we would kind of just keep them in the Rolodex, so to speak, and rotate them in and out. Then it became a thing where we started touring so much that guys couldn’t do all the dates, or didn’t want to, or whatever.

That would change the way that they played the music. And then even when that new person left, that memory of that new relationship with the music would remain. So really we just kept building on the personalities of the new people that would come in, brick by brick. …in general, the guys understand what the band is – a rotating cast…

But I don’t really think of Snarky Puppy as a collective. It’s just a large band and sometimes people aren’t there. It doesn’t feel like a revolving door, it doesn’t feel anonymous at all. The guys who have played gigs with us the least have still played several hundred gigs. That’s more than most people play with their own bands. So it’s very much a tight, familial unit. Everyone feels very, very close and very essential, also.

Photos (r) ©Andrea Rotili (at the Fano Jazz Network)



































Also mentioned












The episode’s opening gambit was our pet peeves: artistic endeavours that completely failed to convince.

From Joel: dramatic song miming in churches!

From Sophie: The Rings of Power

From Mark: Carl André’s pile of bricks: aka Equivalent VIII which the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones called “the most boring controversial artwork ever”!