nighttime in the big city

Unsayable Things - Grief

2011-08-30T20:49:00.009+01:00

When someone is terminally ill what is there to say? Can language express everything we need it to? Some people have a stream of comforting words to offer, but of course the words ultimately can be of no real comfort. The language that does exist can become a torment in itself; people talking of false hopes, miracles that may occur but never will. Struggling with words of the future and the present, the inevitable language of the obituary hangs around the person each dying day; by the time it is actually time for the words of obituary they are so well worn that they no longer seem meaningful. It seems like we can bang on the door, but never find the words to open it and pass through.

Little wonder that I’ve always found myself quite tongue-tied in such situations. After losing someone, I’ve found myself worrying about whether I said enough and whether what I did say was the right thing to say - you can tell yourself not to dwell on such thoughts, but they’ll stalk you and leap out at some unsuspecting moment regardless. But unlike when someone is rude to you in the supermarket and you come out and think, ‘ah! I know what I should’ve said,’ no such moment of possible resolution ever presents itself.

As a sometime-writer I have often struggled and been troubled by my absolute failure to be able to find fitting words to describe the grief which has stalked me since my father died after a year and a half of progressively and painfully dying. Recently I had a bad dream which led me to thinking I didn’t say enough whilst he was still with us. But the reality is that I’m still no closer to having the words to make sense of it all than I was in the earliest days of the cancer taking hold.

The truth, I have come to accept (though find scant comfort from) is that there are no words available to me within our language which can express the feelings of my grief or adequately describe what cancer did to my father.

In this I am reminded of something Primo Levi said about his induction into Auschwitz. His group of Jewish Italians had just been delivered from the train to Auschwitz, taken from their homes and then separated from their ill-fated women and children at the camp. They had to hand over all their documents and personal items and had to strip naked and hand over their clothes, which were carried away by strange phantoms. Later their hair was shaved off. They looked at the figures in the mirror and realised that within hours...

“We [had been] transformed into the phantoms we glimpsed yesterday evening. Then for the first time we became aware that our language lacks words to express this offence, the demolition of a man. In a moment, with almost prophetic intuition, the reality was revealed to us: we had reached the bottom. It is not possible to sink lower than this, no human condition is more miserable than this, nor could it conceivably be so.” - Primo Levi, IF THIS IS A MAN

We bang on the door, and I suppose we must, but certain things remain impossible to adequately say with the language we have. There are no words to express the true realities of the demolition of a man.

And so, to those of us left in grief, we get on with our lives and as time goes by we are distracted more often from that grief but it never heals, never lessens, when it enters our minds. There is no tonic to be found in language to understand the trauma of seeing such misery and such lows of the human condition.

On the day that I had the bad dream, which brought the unanswerable spectre of grief back to my mind, I had witnessed something in the back garden - the paradise and sanctuary, where sparrows nibble on crumbs and collared doves flap heavily overhead. The sight gripped me and knotted my stomach - ah! the realities of nature are gruesome, I thought.

Here is a video I filmed of a Sparrow Hawk ripping a Blackbird to bit.

My dream had not featured any birds, but I woke up with the above images very much in my mind. It struck me... the Hawk is the grief and I’m the Blackbird; just as the Hawk was the cancer. You can not be released from its grip, it is too late anyway; and it just rips and rips at you inside. The Hawk doesn’t visit regularly, but what it does when it is here never leaves you no matter how many pleasant but forgettable days you watch the Sparrows nibbling on crumbs of cake you’ve dropped for them.

...ah, but the words have failed me and now I beat on the door with a Blackbird’s carcass!

The Original Wrapper

2011-03-19T18:43:00.001Z

Lou Reed does 80s rap, complete with roller-skate-girls!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMxyIs8MkmU

Streets Brought Alive By Chants

2010-12-12T14:48:00.006Z

It has been a remarkable month. Two big national demos in London and three local ones in Manchester. They've been full of energy, and full of young people. It has been truly exciting to look around a crowd and not recognise people - this is a new generation rising up against Tory ideology. Here are some of my favourite chants that have come from the mouths of kids previously written-off as apathetic;

A simple chant capturing so much feeling: 'TORY SCUM! TORY SCUM! TORY SCUM!' The Guardian had a line on it's front page after the first demo (Millbank);

"The ancient British roar of 'TORY SCUM' echoed once again across Westminster." A necessary chant and one that gained a lot of instant support from passers-by and builders etc.

Next, I'm in Parliament Square, kettled in by vicious riot cops. A group of teenage girls clap and chant in a tight and catchy rhythm. Raising their hands high in the air they point to each other and chant, 'This is what democracy looks like,' then jabbing their arms and fingers in rhythm towards the lines of riot police protecting parliament they chant, 'That is NOT what democracy looks like!'

Again a group of very young girls chant, 'The only cuts we want to see, are Tories on the guillotine.' It betrays the deep hurt that this failure of democracy has caused so many young people.

A small group of protesters trapped outside the kettle stumble on a vintage limousine carrying a Prince and Princess through the center of the City in which generations had just been robbed. They impulsively throw stuff at the car, hit it and chant, 'Off with their heads! Off with their heads!' Remarkable, and the mask behind which monarchy hides briefly slipped.

Protesters broke down the door to the Treasury chanting, 'we want our money back!'

I may add more to this list in the future, you will be aware of my interest in such folk traditions. But I'll leave you with my favourite little song that protesters have been singing;

Build a bonfire, build a bonfire,

and throw the Tories on the top,

put the Lid Dems in the middle,

and we'll burn the fucking lot!

Beyond Here Lies Nothin'

2010-12-11T15:53:00.003Z

I just stumbled on a video for Bob Dylan's Beyond Here Lies Nothin' which I'd only watched once when the Together Through Life album came out in 2009.

It is a remarkable video. I'm not sure what the remark is, but it is remarkable.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EDMCaGNtsu0

On the one hand the video seems oddly jarring with the border-town rhythm of the song; yet it somehow builds into a ballad of ultra-violence, each punch of the music providing a new assault. It provoked a visceral reaction, shock, horror, despair and then a truly weirdly conflicting tonic. For me, it's a good example of when something is so ugly that it's pretty much beautiful.

It's also interesting to see it as a response to the posturing violence celebrated in so many gangsta and even pop videos. This is real and desperate. (And genuinely violent!).

It is a desperate song; trapped within a cycle of no-hope, trying to break away but having no capacity or imagination to hope for any better a life. It's like breaking away from an abusive relationship and sitting staring at the horizon only to remember you can't escape demons of your past, so you return to the only love you've ever known. Indeed, it reminds me of the end of many a relationship, looking to future and seeing nothing, unable to remove the obstacles of the past. Naturally, it also reminds me of how we live under an abusive system like capitalism where we are expected to strike blow after blow on each other in order to be the one who survives, suffering because we do not yet have the collective imagination to see anything lying beyond capitalism.

I await the sequel, Beyond Here Lies Socialism. But for now this is a fitting display of ultra-violence to remind us of the desperation we so badly need to break away from.

Cow In A Field; 147 Break

2010-11-15T18:50:00.006Z

When I was a kid I wrote a song about how I wanted to be a cow in a field, not giving a damn about yesterday's ideals. I got thinking about it during this year's Snooker World Championship, in which old man Steve Davis had a really good run. But why shouldn't he? Why aren't older players capable of outdoing the youngsters? I think it was John Parrot who said that when you're an older player and you go down for a risky shot you are carrying the burden of the memories of every time you've missed such a shot in the past. The ever-increasing burden of remembering being the downfall of a man, perhaps even a whole culture... It made me think of Nietzsche...

Consider the cattle, grazing as they pass you by: they do not know what is meant by yesterday or today, they leap about, eat, rest, digest, leap about again, and so from morn till night and from day to day, neither melancholy nor bored. … A human being may well ask an animal: 'Why do you not speak to me of your happiness but only stand and gaze at me?' The animal would like to answer, and say: 'The reason is I always forget what I was going to say'- but then he forgot this answer too, and stayed silent: so that the human being was left wondering.

…Thus the animal lives unhistorically: for it is contained in the present, like a number without any awkward fraction left over; it does not know how to dissimulate, it conceals nothing and at every instant appears wholly as what it is; it can therefore never be anything but honest. Man, on the other hand, braces himself against the great and ever greater pressure of what is past: it pushes him down or bends him sideways, in encumbers his steps as a dark, invisible burden... (Nietzsche, section 1, On the uses and disadvantages of history for life)

What's Not Ironic is Dave Eggers

2010-11-12T16:10:00.005Z

Sample: Benji [the dog] was run over by a bus. Isn't that ironic?

NO: That is not ironic. That is unfortunate, but it is not ironic.

Sample: It it ironic that Benji was on way to the vet when he was run over by a bus.

Still: That is not irony. That is a coincidence that might be called eeire.

Sample: It is ironic that Benji was run over on the same day he misused the word ironic.

But see: This is, again, a coincidence. It is wonderfully appropriate that he was run over on this day, deserving as he was of punishment, but it is not ironic.

- Dave Eggers, unironic man.

Hoedown, Aaron Copland

2010-11-07T11:45:00.007Z

I woke up in the most delightful manner this morning: with Aaron Copland's 'Hoedown' playing through my mind.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LsReWx9XdNs

Hoedown is an exciting piece of music. I jumped up out of bed because upon hearing the music I have become conditioned to jump up to my feet. This is because on more than ten occasions I've been sat waiting in various grungy venues and the sudden burst of this music, accompanied by the strong whiff of nag champa, heralded the fact that Bob Dylan and his band were about to take to the stage.

After about 30 seconds or so the announcer's voice would begin over Hoedown... 'LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, please welcome the poet-laureate of rock and roll. The voice and promise of the 60s counterculture. The guy who forced folk into bed with rock. Who donned makeup in the 70s and disappeared into a haze of substance abuse. Who emerged to find JESUS! Who was written-off as a has-been by the end of the 80s, and suddenly shifted gears releasing some of the strongest material of his career beginning in the late 90s. Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome Columbia recording artist... BOB DYLAN.' Hilarious stuff! Some journalist had written a potted-history of Dylan in a review one night in 2002 and the next night Dylan had turned it into his stage introduction; delightful! (For those so minded to see this; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCaGuZARpAM)

After some years with Copland's Hoedown, I believe Dylan is currently showing a silent movie as his introduction, D.W. Griffith's 'Intolerance: Love's Struggle Throughout The Ages.'

Hoedown, though, is such a great piece of music to arrive to. It immediately puts you in mind of bands of brothers riding around the American West on horseback, dropping in town after town, staying a night or two at most, probably having to leave in a hurry. It seems so evocative of men who only know how to do one thing; Keep on keeping on.

But it is also complex. It isn't just a ye-haw giddy-up piece of music; there are complex counterpoints at play. It's a bold declaration of a life in motion.

I wish I could wake-up with this piece of music in my head every single morning! And off I go, galloping into another day...

Eulogy, A-Flat

2010-10-13T12:08:00.009+01:00

Sad.

Moving away from my big city flat. For the past year I lived in super-digs opposite Granada Studios on Quay Street. The balcony overlooked the end of Coronation Street where Dev's cornershop and the factory are located. When we first moved in we drank whiskey on the balcony whilst watching the knicker factory burn down. Last week we sat out until 1am waiting for a tram to crash and cause a massive explosion. KABOOM, it did not disappoint. In spring, Brown, Cameron and Clegg appeared for the first ever Leaders Debate, the whole area was like a TV set and totalitarian state.

I remember being woken up on a day off by a bitter argument breaking out amongst the queue for the Jeremy Kyle show.

Surely, though, my favourite memory is one of Night Time In The Big City...

On a mid-week night, at around 4am, I was awoken by drunks out in the street. Uniquely, this turned out to be a delight rather than a nuisance. I jumped up to my window and saw the group walking down the middle of the road singing at the top of their voices;

'Jeremy Kyle is a dick, is a dick, is a dick, Jerrremy Kyle is knob, is a knob, is a....' at which point the men ran and repeatedly shoulder CHARGED the front doors of Granada Studios and broke into a wild chant;

FREE FREE GAIL PLATT
FREE FREE GAIL PLATT
FREE FREE GAIL PLATT

(Gail Platt had just been wrongly locked up for murdering Joe McIntyre in Coronation Street. He had in fact died after being whacked on the head by the sail of his boat out on Lake Windermere in the middle of the night as he tried to fake his own death, against Gail's wishes.)

They continued charging the doors until a rotund Security Guard shouted the I'd-rather-not-catch-up warning shot, 'Oi!!!' and proceeded to give chase to the men down the middle of the road as they ran and continued to chant, FREE FREE GAIL PLATT.

Delightful.

Some of our neighbours were actors from Coronation Street, this felt strange in that usually city centre living involves ignoring each other in corridors and never becoming familiar with anyone's face. Even though I only knew their fictional characters, there was something mildly pleasant about having a few neighbours with familiar faces - which goes against my inner brutal-romanticism about the anonymity of city living.

The magnificent, iconic big red lights atop of Granada Studios read: GRANADA TV. The GRAN lit up my bedroom all night, the ADA lit up the living room. It was an honour and privledge to be lit up by such a brilliant Manchester landmark. I never expected to be the last to have this honour. Three weeks ago I woke up and looked out of my window to see workmen pulling those beacons of urban-excitement down. ITV has committed an act of asbsolute cultural-vandalism. I'm still too angry to say much more about the damage they've done to the city skyline at the moment. Maybe it is for the best that I leave now; as the nights draw in, it will undoubtedly be so much darker and duller this winter without that big city night-time glow of optimism.

So now it's time to leave the novelty behind, and the lush flat. The winter was cold and bitter, the snow and ice were extreme; I watched city blizzards from behind the veil of warm spirits and the red glare of an urban dream. The summer was warm and pleasant, I remember many afternoons watching the World Cup with cold beers as I duly noted the reflections in Granada's mirrored glass of a handsome nudist sunbathing on the balcony above; surely indicators of a good summer? A good place to live.

This big river keeps on rolling though.

New Blood's Fashion

2010-09-26T00:03:00.006+01:00

It's September again in the not-as-big-as-you'd-hope city, and tens of thousands of new residents have entered our great red city state; the 2010-2011 intake of students. Clogging up the buses, chattering their 'rah rah rah' stories about not-so-crazy boozy antics. Young and fresh, yet oddly identical to the last intake.

A comrade from another big city asked for my observations on the fashion trends that are doing the rounds, so from my vantage point I noted the following;

* a lot of girls in denim hotpants, black tights with a contrasting band around the thigh just below the cut of the of the hotpant. This is a marvelous look.

* an alarming take-up of the boy-blouse. Low-cut chest can be good, but not when too blousey. JLS need to go put their hands up for this one.

* some very naive haircuts, male and female. Likely to have been carried out by small-town hairdressers prior to their move to the big city.

* a handsome-boy look; polo shirt, tucked in behind a big belt buckle just at the front, hanging out round sides and back. Often accompanied with short cropped hair. Sometimes rocking an ear-piercing. It may be a bit 'off the peg' but whatevers.

* too many cardigans doing the rounds on lads.

* usual asortment of topshop looks knocking about.

* girls, lots of scarves. Already?! I like tight jeans and trainers though, that's good.

* girls wearing tights with no skirt or pants over the top. Remarkable. Who was the first girl to leave the house this way? A bold step.

* a fashion studies boy, predictably gay, wearing ugg boots, carrying a tote bag. Handsome, but a very daft look.

* a few boys rocking the american-nerd look - big thick black rimmed glasses (probably with non-script lenses), big cap at a tilt, cartoony tshirt maybe a wooly jumper.

* check-shirts and lumberjack shirts are popular. Still.

* every single one of them is strolling around with an iphone or blackberry in hand.

Nothing exciting, or surprising. Very uniformly commercial looks. I await excitement. Maybe next year.

Somebody Touched Me

2010-09-18T20:59:00.005+01:00

I first heard this song when Bob Dylan used it as a show-opener. What a delightful song. Ever since it has been a favourite sing-along on any car ride falling on a Sunday.

Bob did it most like (the amazing, staggering) Roy Acuff. Youtube fails to provide on that but it's along the lines of The Dillards bluegrass version, which led me to this Pentecostal Temple Choir recording... which led me to a quartet of seriously old skool men doing one a seriously uncool, and yet charming, version; The Blue Ridge Quartet, RIP (I assume).

Here's Bishop Azeal giving a nice reading of the song; oh Oh OH OOOOH....

And some little girls down at the Missouri banjo contest...

A versatile song. A song of faith, a song of fate, a song of celebration, a song of comfort, and on top of it all, whether sung by straight-laced men of the church, or by hicks at the county banjo contest... a song of joy.

Le refuge

2010-08-18T18:56:00.007+01:00

Dir. François Ozon, 2009

When there's a new Ozon film on I tend to go and see it. Usually there is something solid-enough about them, perhaps 'French enough' too, to warrant a viewing. Le refuge is... ok. It has its moments.

It begins with some awesome shots of central Paris, Metro trains squealing their way from place to place. Cuts to a couple submerged in a heroin addiction in Mother's fancy bourgeois apartment. The sexy drug-dealer arrives via Metro and gives them some heroin that turns out to be cut with shit. The man of the couple wakes up before the girl, injects (graphically, and squirm-inducingly) another shot into his neck. He wakes up dead. Or doesn't wake up alive. Whatever. He's a goner. She lives, but wonders why, assuming they both had the same amount of the same dodgy heroin. Oh, by the way, the Doctor says, your fella is dead and you're pregnant. The posh family tell her to get rid, she does one and we meet her again heavily preggers at a stunning little house in the countryside that belongs to an old squeeze we never see (& who we're told doesn't know she's preggers because he's blind).

Gay brother of dead bloke turns up to stay. She's still dead miserable, but ya know... she starts to get the hots for him but he's gay and he ends up fucking her green grocer in her house. What a rude guest!

The main theme of this film begins around this point - the other stuff being typical Ozon kind of stuff - and that seems to be something half saucy about pregnant women. First of all there's a woman on the beach who comes up and proclaims how wonderful being pregnant is and can she touch the bump. The woman turns evangelical and starts going on about the great pain that must rightfully be suffered for this baby, etc. It comes across like she may be some kind of pro-life nut-job ridden by her own guilt or something - but I suppose she could also act as an apparition. Which is all too much for Mousse and makes her storm off.

As the gay brother is still knocking around with her green grocer, she decides to go off to a cafe where a strange middle-aged man buys her a drink and comes on to her. 'You're into pregnant women?' she asks, 'Oui,' he replies and they go back to his apartment. When his wife was pregnant he couldn't touch her for 9 months, he was repulsed. Ever since that he's got a bonk-on for the preggers. She can't do it facing him and gets him to sit behind her and let his hands come exploring forward. She has a massive, quiet, dreamy orgasm within about ten seconds. The old perv's face is hilarious - it's a good moment, a turning of the tables on the idea that men frequently orgasm before satisfying women, and on the notion that this man has picked her up to use her for his own specific erotic desires and she's ended up using him and spitting him back out.

She feels a bit better after this. Goes along to a disco with the two gay men. While they're making out, she dances with a hot young man who is really into her and is getting turned-on. His hands soon stray onto her pregnant belly, which gives him a cob-on but really narks her off. She pushes him away and does one.

Eventually the gay brother comes home off his head on pills or something and she undresses him and they have sex, which seems like pretty good sex in that heavy, off-your-head, kind of way. During the sex he seems quite into fondling the pregnant belly and all that. Next morning she declares the night before beautiful, he goes along with it but you can sense he's not all that impressed with the woman aspect, but seems moved by having been intimate with the pregnant belly. Perhaps Ozon is saying this is something erotically appealing to gay men as it is an impossibility within their world; it is the taboo of the not-possible? Maybe.

He leaves. Months later, he visits her in hospital after she's had the baby. She nips outside for a cigarette, thinks about it, then legs it. The film is rounded off with her on the Metro writing a letter to the gay brother about how she knows he loves the baby and will always be there for it. But she's off. She may be back at some point, who knows.

Throughout the film she is on morphine because you can't come off heroin when you're pregnant without risking a miscarriage.

I've done the rare thing of writing out the story. But that's mostly because I'd find it hard to boil down. It has many familiar themes from Ozon (and a lot of French) films, especially around bourgeois standards and behaviour.

Mousse at one point wonders whether her partner took an overdose to escape from the responsibility of becoming a father. Her morphine is surely an escape from pain. The mother of the posh family instructs her to have an abortion to escape the responsibility of her son having a descendant (she wanted an end to the social embarrassment of his death (and life)). Le refuge.

A lot going on behind the modest action. Not necessarily an enthralling film all the same.

Shenandoah

2010-08-07T23:31:00.008+01:00

Oh Shenandoah, I long to see you, away you rolling river...

One of my favourite songs, an old river shanty, it could've been sung about an Indian Chief's daughter, or someone else's daughter, or the land, or something else entirely. Well, it was sung about all, and a lot of other stuff too. A river song, the Missouri River is a boundary between this world and another. Each voyage between the two means leaving something beloved behind in the other. A most beautiful folk song.

Tennessee Ernie Ford - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khxx3sCVhtE

Silhouettes against a ship's mast. Beautiful, sparse and sombre arrangement. Tennessee Ernie Ford, a man with the kind of moustache that could win poker games on a weak hand, could probably sell you a broken down Chevrolet without you thinking you'd been had. A voice you have to believe. Sat leaning on a bar table, singing as though running over the same sad memories that haunt him every time he drinks whisky.

Arlo Guthrie did it like this -

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zWgfzGq5g

Emmylou Harris did it like this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Veyl_s1Y-x4

A song that travels, and is sung by little angelic boys in the Cologne Cathedral Boys' Choir - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj1qUGKXKog

A song that would come to represent the displacement and longing of Civil War Bands - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb3Pak0uwwA

Of course, Paul Robeson did this song in that way he had of really doing songs - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gtJkeXAMt0

A song that haunts me always.

Photographs by Dorothy Bohm

2010-07-13T18:34:00.005+01:00

Manchester Art Gallery rarely impresses, but A World Observed 1940 - 2010: Photographs by Dorothy Bohm, which is on until the end of August, is a very good exhibition.

I won't bore you with descriptions of photographs, it would surely be futile. Instead I just wish to share a thought that occurred to me.

I had trudged around the city for hours with a young Twink from Stone near Stoke-on-Trent, who was wearing a Port Vale shirt, as far as I recall, and as we entered the exhibition I felt tired and decided to perch for a few moments on a nearby chair. (Oddly; an exhibit of the kind of chair you perch on when having your photo taken, but not a chair of actual note).

I was really feeling the ten years I've put on since being a skinny, up-all-night-without-trouble, kind of seventeen year old.

I gazed up and into a photograph of a young woman from the past. I imagine she was of my grandmother's generation.

She looked radiant and alien.

Radiant, as though she had firmly mastered being who she was. Alien, because she was undoubtedly younger in the photograph than I am now. Yet, she was a woman. A real, fully-realised woman. And I am just a boy. A boy with no real idea or intention of ever leading a man's life.

It's not just me though, I'm not sure I know any men or women like the ones in those early portraits, they're all gone. There's good and there's bad to the leisured neo-liberals we have become, politically mostly bad. We're a bunch of big kids who take for granted the weight of the world that was carried on our grandparents' shoulders.

Most of all, at that moment, I was struck by the woman's radiance and how it is a radiance I haven't seen very many people with in my lifetime.

Of course, I expressed this to my peer, to the young Twink, in the terms of; 'I can't imagine ever dating this woman, I'm just not man enough for her.'

Cob-a-Coaling

2010-06-09T11:23:00.004+01:00

When I was a child my band of friends used to engage in a practice called 'Cob-a-Coaling.' This was during the lead-up to Bonfire Night, which was one of the biggest events of our calendar. Cob-a-Coaling involved packs of kids going round the area knocking on door after door, singing a song, begging for wood to burn, money for fireworks and coal - though coal was a bit old hat by my generation.

As with all folk songs, the version we sung was a fusion of older versions that our various parents had sung before us and our own understandings and misunderstandings. Sometimes old-timers would answer their doors, listen to the whole song and then offer their corrections, it was slow progress to say the least. Other times people would stop you right away and throw a few coins at you to get rid.

When they built a new housing development nearby we added it to our route but very few people would give anything to you, more often they would pretend not to be in; we saw the coming of the commuter homes, housing commuters who thought our local ways to be most unusual. I remember this leading to us holding such streets in contempt, occasionally leading to high-speed BMX rampages in which we'd cycle up and down people's drives out of disrespect. Another time it led to 'North Nook' being used as a target for a mud-slingshot we developed on top of the quarry above. The siege lasted for days before we had to out-run a chubby policeman. I digress.

The song my crew of friends would sing went like this:

We come a cob-a-coaling
For bonfire night
Your coal or your money
We hope you provide
Follow dee, follow die,
Follow diddle I dough dee
And down in the cellar
There's an old umbrella
And up in the kitchen
There's an old pepper pot
Pepper pot, Pepper pot
Morning til night
If you give us nowt
We'll steal nowt
God Bless and Good Night

Guy Guy Guy
Poke him in the eye
Tie him to a lamppost
And never let him die

Christmas is coming
The goose is getting fat
So please put a penny
In the old man's hat

If you haven't got a penny
A ha'penny will do
If you haven't got an ha'penny
God Bless you!

Figaro, Figaro
Morning til night
If you give us nowt
We'll steal nowt
God Bless and Good Night.

The versions we heard from older generations used to have more antiquated references, but I struggle to remember them now. A 'Ha'penny' ['hape-knee'], for those a few years younger than me, was an antiquated version of the now antiquated half-penny. We really liked half-pennies because it was the price of a sweet at the corner shop. The corner shop closed down not long after half-pennies were scrapped, I suspect it must've been kept afloat by our sweet money, the perfect child's currency. I wonder if there's anything now that schools kids in the value of money as well as half-pennies did? I digress. And isn't that the way with such stories?

As far as I know, we were the very last generation to carry out Cob-a-Coaling. We had rival gangs at the time, but as we retired and became grouchy 15 year olds it was notable that the kids below us didn't continue the line. Instead 'Trick or Treating' came in from Hollywood and took off. It involved kids going door to door saying "trick or treat," we always held this lack of effort in contempt.

Another note on that; back then kids would wear masks and costumes to Trick or Treat, a few years ago I opened the door and there were six teenagers standing on the doorstep in their everyday street clothes. Their leader said expectantly 'trick or treat,' not even inflicting the words as he did it. They were going round begging like we did; but the absence of imagination, song and cultural weight just made it seem vulgar and unpleasant. They had, however, learned the lessons of their own culture and stuck their most handsome member at the front. They probably earned more than we did back in the day. I digress into cynicism now, and perhaps romanticism about the days when ugly children like me sang confusing folk songs on doorsteps.

This post is a reflection, I know not if there is any conclusion to draw from it. Perhaps other than, 'Oh well. Times change.'

Oh well. Times change.

Austere Land Of The Past/Future

2010-06-03T16:14:00.002+01:00

Last week I headed out of the city back to the hills from which I begat. I grew up on the edge of a decayed mill town, Oldham, and also on the edge of the green and pleasant valley of Saddleworth.

I come from an area called Austerlands, which lies just below Scouthead. Arriving at Austerlands once involved crossing the border between Lancashire and the West Ridings of Yorkshire. Essentially it is something, or nothing, of a no-man's land on a former trade route through the Pennines.

As a child someone very, very old told me a little bit about the history of the area dating back to the War of the Roses and how it was called Austerlands after the word austere. Nearly all those old timers have died off now.

My visit unintentionally coincided with Whit Friday and the annual Austerlands & Scouthead Band Contest. Such celebration and ceremony isn't widely known about in Greater Manchester; people look at you like you're a weirdo from the Middle Ages if you ever mention that such events are still going on just ten miles out of the city centre.

Years ago I embraced urbanism and fell in love with the city with such single-mindedness that recently I've found myself musing over the place where I grew up with bemusement, as though it is an alien world.

I was born on the borderline between two places, also I was born between two times. A time of Whitsun, Cob-Coaling and Wakes, but also a time when computers first entered the home, when the internet first started to make everything much closer together.

I shall shortly post a few entries on the customs of yesteryear, as experienced by a child version of me.

SNOW AWAY

2010-01-15T16:14:00.007Z

First the Snow fell...
And of course, I have to link to this wonderful little film about trains and workers in the snow:

SNOW - by Geoffrey Jones

*
Then it stopped, but there was so much of the stuff that it stayed around for weeks...

Check out the Grandmother of Gospel, wonderful song, he'll wash you whiter than snow:

Alex Bradford & Sallie Martin: He'll Wash You Whiter

The snow is so filthy on the city sidewalks that it seems like a modest promise, but there's nothing middle of the road about the performance.

*
Finally today it started raining, it made me sing this song the Little Richard way!...

Didn't It Rain - Little Richard

Open the floodgates of heaven! *I* *SMELL* *RAAAAAAIN*

LET IT RAIN - Bishop Paul S. Morton

A city where it rarely doesn't rain... how we pray for rain now! To wash away all the filth... Some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the street...

Red Angel Dragnet - The Clash

Until then, keep looking up. I'm looking up above my head, I hear music in the air...

Up Above My Head - Sister Rosetta Tharpe

***

Alicia Keys - Empire State Of Mind (Part II)

2010-01-12T14:11:00.003Z

Empire State Of Mind (Part II) is off Alica Keys' new album, The Element Of Freedom. It is an amazing worldly love song to and about New York.

The song captures the passion and beauty of the urban dream so well; well you know Alicia Keys... when I think of her I can't keep from crying, there's nothing I don't like about Alicia Keys!

The dream of New York, place of movie scenes, is something I owe pretty much everything to; something bit me as a teenager and pulled me away from the countryside down into the city. The city, even if it ain't all that it seems - and Manchester frequently isn't - is still the place to be ALIVE with a pocket full of dreams! I'm so pleased Alicia has reminded me in such an anthemic way....

Even if it ain't all it seems / I got a pocket full of dreams / Baby, I'm from New York!
Concrete jungle where dreams are made of / there's nothing you can't do / Now you're in New York

These streets will make you feel brand new,
Bright lights will inspire you
Hear it for New York, New York, New York!

2009-12-25T16:04:00.002Z

"At that moment the orchestra broke into a Charleston. As if somebody had stuck a finger up their ass, all the the dancers gave a leap: they bent their knees slightly, standing on their toes, and began to fling their bottoms from side to side, wildly." - Pier Paolo Pasolini, A Violent Life.

Land Of Promise

2009-10-02T16:48:00.004+01:00

I've recently concluded watching the 4 DVD boxset Land Of Promise that comprises of British documentary films spanning from 1930 to 1950; quite a time was had by all.

What struck me most of all is how close and real the people of the early 1930s films feel in comparison with people of the later films.

The films of 1930s miners may belong to an age of Britain that I am too young to have ever known, but the values and intrinsic brotherly and sisterly understanding of those portrayed reminds me at all times why I am a socialist. These are my brothers and sisters - not my great grandparents. What comes over time and time again is that the working class of Britain were coming to popularly demand socialism. There seems such an expectation that the problems of their day and the injustices of their past will be overcome by the socialism of tomorrow. And that is the promise in the Land Of Promise.

Then war comes. The war-time films are often tedious to watch because they do not seem to represent the humanity of the people they portray - yet the central message of many of them is about how wonderful Britain's democracy is at respecting and recognising each individual's humanity. My brothers and sisters are replaced from the films by cardboard cut-out phonies spouting on about how things are done in a democracy and why their methods ultimately mean the dictatorships will inevitably fail. It all comes across feeling hollow.

Far from being on the brink of eliminating social injustice via working class solidarity and strength, the British are now fed the image of themselves as green field-wandering, level-headed but plucky no-nonsense individuals who come together to fight the crass modernism of the dictators. Under-dogs who will stand up to fight for the survival of 'ways of the past'.

It is striking that the propaganda designed to inspire Britain to fight in the war perpetuates an image of the British as a mediocre people. What a curious people the British must be, that they develop a lump of patriotic pride in their throats when told that despite their absolute mediocrity they are prepared to die defending their mediocre land.

Of course, the story the Ministry of Information developed for the British people is informed by the social conditions of the earlier films : How could they have claimed Britain as an anything other than mediocre when so many people still had to live in horrendous Victorian slum housing? The tragedy for Britain, and perhaps a tragedy for socialism globally, is that this image of the British as a mediocre people turned into a national celebration of mediocrity when victory was finally won.

We all know that some socialistic advances were made after the war; and conventional wisdom is that such things as the NHS were brought about because the working class had sacrificed so much in the war. I think these films portray a slightly different version of history, the demand and movement for social housing and universal healthcare etc belonged to the people of the 1930s. Had there been no war (i.e. no rise of fascism), if you forgive me pulling stuff out of my arse, it may well have been the case that far greater socialist advancements could have been made.

Instead mediocrity became Britain's great badge of honour. In the face of modernity, this plucky Victorian dinosaur had won the war despite no longer being what it once was. And that became the British story, and remains so to this day. Of course, Britain never really won the war, they just survived it. The Russians won the war, but unfortunately they were no longer Communists, they were Stalinists.

The most notable post-war film is the title film itself, Land Of Promise. It is a brilliant film, the various voices of the day thrash out their arguments about how Britain should rebuild and it ends with an impassioned call for Britain to adopt a planned economy.

Instead the Land Of Promise would die a slow death; finally put to a bloody end in 1984's Miners Strikes. All we have left of it are films like these from the 1930s which remind us of a promise that, to the cost of all the workers of the world, went unfulfilled.

On Turning 27

2009-09-24T13:10:00.004+01:00

I used to imagine I was the next great poet of the gutter,
that one day I'd lift the filth up from the gutter in my cupped hands,
and when I offered it to the world they'd see the beauty in it.

Then I sat down at a desk, and four years of admin later I'm nothing,
no poet, no writer,
I never learned how to play my instruments - I'm still playing like a five year old.

The electricity must've escaped my mind,
leaked from my head,
look inside my head and there's nothing but Cumberland sausage,
it's all tangled up in a big fatty pink knot.

In some places the skin has ruptured,
there's sausage meat leaking out,
soon there'll be nothing left but collapsed sausage skin.

I shouldn't have sniffed those poppers,
I shouldn't have done those sexual things -
nobody ever warned me;
that one sausage leads to another
sausage
until eventually you've had so much sausage,
it all starts turning into one homogeneous blob of meat.

When I was 17 years old I smoked crack cocaine,
I drank mushed up magic mushrooms -
though most the time it made me puke.

I was stoned by the noon,
drunk by tea,
and by supper I was bouncing off the walls on E.

I thought it was wild,
I thought it was my duty -
when you're stuck somewhere backwards you do what you can to escape.

Well, I did escape,
but many got trapped.

What a bore all those drugs are!
What a trap all those drugs set! -
they say come this way, this is your way out of this place,
they do it everyday and everyday you wake up in the same place,
the same place and the same age.

17 forever!
Some dream!
I had a lucky escape,
and I was thankful to age.

But now...

27.

I remember the first time I made love,
but I felt nothing because of the drugs.

I remember the last time I made love,
but I felt nothing because of...
I don't know,
what?

Somewhere in-between,
things made sense,
for awhile,
but ten years later...
I've come full circle,
in the place of drugs,
I have work,
the effects are just the same;
'can't I go to sleep now,
I don't feel a thing,
maybe in the morning,
I'll feel something,
anything...
17?'

Ah,
it all seemed so exciting,
even though I couldn't feel a thing!

What hope is there now,
the writer lost,
the poet found... to be a fraud.

A prick is just a prick,
a cunt is just a cunt,
that's all I've learnt,
from growing up.

A love is just a love.

A death is just a death.

The prick and the cunt and the love turned out to be far less than I imagined,
The death, far more than I could ever imagine.

Why I Don't Write Such Good Books

2009-09-22T12:08:00.002+01:00

In the creative state a man is taken out of himself. He lets down as it were a bucket into his subconscious, and draws up something which is normally beyond his reach.
- E. M. Forster

I've been thinking about madness today. Not medical madness; divine madness. Plato spoke of 4 divine madnesses:

Prophetic madness (represented by Apollo);
Ritual madness (by Dionysus);
Poetic madness (inspired by the Muses) and everyone's favourite madness;
Erotic madness (whoopeed by Aphrodite and Eros).

For most people Erotic madness is the most clear example of a divine madness; most people have lost themselves in sexual anticipation, excitement and intercourse at some point. Some people several times a day. The idea of it being a 'madness' is illustrated when we get really horny about something and then later, after ejaculation, struggle to comprehend what the big deal was.

And Ritual madness too is easy to illustrate on these same terms; anyone who has woken up after drinking cheap spirits and sniffing poppers only to discover themselves by someone's side and thought, 'what the hell did I do this for?!' can tell you. Perhaps they are then suddenly consumed by Erotic morning madness nonetheless. Before chucking up.

Manchester is once again filled by tens of thousands of students and they're all consumed by madness. They house themselves in great Halls of madness and lose themselves in Ritualistic and Erotic MADNESS. Sounds like hooter-tooting fun? Aphrodite and Eros may drunkenly be making out tonight, but by November they will pass awkwardly in their Halls corridors trying to avoid eye contact with each other.

...As for me? Sounding like a bitter and ageing man once again... we all know that I'm supposed to be completely lost to the Poetic madness until I return with a novel. But every time I see my Muse in my mind's eye I start to undress her! Every time I try to lose myself to the Prophetic madness, that will surely lead me from being chained to a desk 9 til 5, I find myself on the wrong side of 10 pints of Ritual madness!

And then I make wild Ritual drunken whoopee with my very saucy Muse... but I can't satisfy her! I can't! My prick mustn't be big enough! My belly has grown Ritually mad! My balls are full of bad ideas! Anyway, as she lies there smoking a cigarette, so what? I have poked her now... she was just another piece of meat! Some Muse!

I am alone when I think this. I walk awkwardly past mirrors trying to avoid eye contact with myself.

Plato... Ah, Plato I don't talk to you so often any more!... Plato, my aristocratic ballsucking fuckbuddy, you surely missed out the 5th and final divine madness...

WHY I DON'T WRITE SUCH GOOD BOOKS.

Fish Tank

2009-09-16T11:11:00.003+01:00

directed & written by Andrea Arnold

Fish Tank is a brilliant film. Despite an odd spell where it seems to drag its feet a little, it is a film of complexities and shades which makes the bum-ache well worthwhile.

The film follows Mia, a teenage girl from an estate who headbutts other girls and swigs from two-litre bottles of cider. One of her only pleasures is to dance and when her mother's new boyfriend catches her doing this he encourages in her a dream of dancing professionally and he rubbishes the defeatism so ingrained in her poverty-stricken way of thinking. Over the course of the film I developed a worry that we were heading towards some terrible American Dream ending, but I was wrong. And in fact this film was a brilliant antidote to Billy Elliot and the brainless neoliberalism it promotes. This film is a whole lot more real than that.

Katie Jarvis was apparently 'discovered' when she was having a bawling match with her boyfriend from opposite sides of a railway platform. Such an anecdote makes perfect sense when you see her onscreen as Mia because she is so believable and genuine that it's heart-breaking, heart-warming and everything in-between.

There are numerous plot lines interweaving and we're left with a deep and textured film that is also rough and raw. Ultimately though it is an anti-coming of age film, a film that follows Mia as she is curious about the world around her but is unable to show it because of the society in which she lives, in which the only way to survive is to appear hard and reject all feelings of empathy to other human beings. Her mother's new boyfriend initially brings tenderness into her life, and she begins to let her guard down a little, she starts to experience hope when her whole life has been without hope. But in the end the reasons she has spent so long being so guarded are validated, and the hope that has been fostered is cruelly smashed.

The underbelly of British society really is hopeless, the only thing you can do is get out... but to what? There is no promise of a bright future when Mia leaves. It's simply the last thing she can do.

Fish Tank shows very well the hopelessness of being on the wrong end of a capitalist society, the trapped lives and the unfulfilled potential. The risk of being exploited by the self-absorbed middle class is also a clear theme, and it reduces Mia to the point that all she can do is urinate on it. This film makes me empathise with her position on that a great deal.

Awesome film.

Broken Embraces

2009-09-16T10:16:00.001+01:00

The advertisements for Broken Embraces promise that Penelope Cruz is as 'beguiling as ever'. In fact her character is really neither here nor there and has none of the beguiling quality as the role she played in Volver.

However, we get to see her naked breasts. It's the high point of the film. Not just because she has lovely naked breasts, but also because it is the only segment of the film that feels like Almodóvar remembers that there's an audience watching his vanity project. The (intended) viewer stops breathing the moment Penelope Cruz's breasts appear on the screen but, just as this viewer is drawn into a dreamy state of desire, she pukes up after having sex with her creepy old lover, sex she's only having for the sake of her career. You, the viewer, are that creepy old man exploiting your position to indulge in someone else's beauty. It's a real moment, from the yearning and tender feeling of desire to the violent wave of revulsion. Two sackfuls of beauty.

Otherwise I found the film very dull, and the 'funny' segment towards the end seemed completely off-key. Almodóvar, his women come spilling out of the screen, but I just don't believe him, he's a liar.

Rising Cost Of My Life Around MMU

2009-05-13T17:05:00.003+01:00

The current pay offer for Higher Education staff for this year is 0.3%, this is an insulting offer and will be seriously damaging to many low paid workers in this time of economic recession.

Below I have noted some price increases that have hit me since the last instalment of the previous Higher Education pay deal.

Salad for lunch from Marriot Cafe : was £2.00, now £2.20 = +10%
Can of pop from newsagent : was 55p, now 60p = +9%
Bottle of Erdinger Dunkel in Sandbar (drunk after work) : was £3.00, now £3.50 = +17%
FirstDay bus ticket : was £3.70, now £4.00 = +8%
Evening Cornerhouse cinema ticket : was £5.50, now £7.00 = +27%

This isn't intended as anything other than an anecdotal measure, but going off these items my daily costs incurred around MMU have risen by over 14% on average.

Of course, a lot of these costs seem superfluous compared to the increases in our fuel bills and everyday baskets of shopping but what I hope this highlights is that in our everyday lives we are experiencing increases in the costs of living that I believe need to be addressed in our pay agreement. The employers' offer of 0.3% this year is very disappointing and damaging. UNISON and the joint trade unions were right to reject the offer of 0.3%, in real terms this amounts to a significant pay cut for some of the lowest paid workers in the public sector.

The private sector screwed up, low paid workers in the public sector should not be paying for it.

Dumpling Monday #1

2009-04-15T09:42:00.007+01:00

[7 animals died for our dining pleasure. (Mince was used, so maybe more).]

Introduction
Me and my comrade Tony Jones love dim sum and boy! do we love dumplings. I have been particularly interested in making dumplings ever since seeing the film Dumplings by Fruit Chan. The atmosphere of the film really got under my skin and made me want to cook dumplings. In a similar way the novel In The Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami sent me wild for miso. People get chopped up Ryu's novel, and aborted babies are chopped into the youth-giving dumplings of Fruit's film. We're going for pork and prawn this time though:

Pork and Prawn Dumplings
i - With Chive and Garlic
ii - With Coriander, Ginger, Spring Onion and Garlic

We got the recipes off the back of the special Dumpling Flour we bought down China Town, otherwise our process was guess-work. If you know better than us, please pass on your tips!

We don't know, by the way, what is special about Dumpling Flour. We could've used ordinary flour which is cheaper, but given that we were in China Town it seemed like a reasonable idea to pick up the Dumpling Flour. The question is... can a man use Dumpling Flour for any other purpose than making dumplings? It's quite nice to have prescriptivist ingredients sometimes and we'll be sure this flour is never used outside the context of dumplings.

Pastry
- flour and water (with a grinding of salt mixed in the water for taste)

We used a ratio of 16:5 flour to water; mixing just a spoonful of the water at a time. Don't rush it, mix the dough until it is doughy.

We chucked flour down on a worktop and kneaded the dough. Newton's law suggests the dough kneads us as much as we knead the dough, which is nice to know. We stretched and pulled at it and finally rolled it into a sausage shape, wrapped it in clingfilm and put it in the fridge to settle.

Fillings
Pork and prawn mix : we used king prawns, decapitating them and cutting their prawn socks off as we went along. Also we removed prawn poo as we chopped them up. We assume it was poo, it was brown and something stunk, if it wasn't poo.. something was.

We made up two different bowls to create fillings:

i - We chopped some chives up in bawdy and rough manner. To this we pressed and added a clove of garlic.

ii - We took a knife to some coriander and monstered it. We added grated ginger and chopped spring onion. Finally we added a couple of pressed cloves of garlic.

We then mixed each with the pork and prawn, adding a splash of sesame oil as we squeezed the meat. We covered and put both fillings in the fridge with the pastry.

Who Put The Dump In Dumpling?
We rolled out small balls of pastry until as thin as we could handle with our clumsy hands. We inserted a dollop of our filling and sealed up the pastry around it - adopting the Cornish Pasty stylee. And we steamed our little dumplings for 10 minutes.

Sauce
Meanwhile we knocked up some sauce to use with the dumplings. We chopped a couple of spring onions and a handful of coriander. In a bowl, we poured soy sauce and added several teaspoons of chilli oil. You have sauce.

And we had Dumplings.

Conclusion

Excellent dumplings! Far better than we could imagine a first attempt coming out. Whilst it is true that the pastry was thicker than you expect in a Dim Sum restaurant, it is hard to imagine being able to roll it and handle it any thinner.

We will be returning to dumplings in the future, but for now WE put the DUMP in DUMPlings! Or maybe it was the prawns.

Macbeth, Royal Exchange

2009-04-04T20:50:00.006+01:00

I went to see the Royal Exchange production of Macbeth on 30/03/09. Ack, Macbeth!

The problem, really, is that any production of Macbeth has SO much to live up to. It is undoubtedly one of the greatest Shakespeare plays, and I guess that makes it one of the GREATEST PLAYS IN THE WORLD.. EVER!!!

It certainly blew the door off the bunker of my teenage world the first time I read it. A play of remarkable depths, of such darkness and energy. A story of untamed ambition and desires, of rape, greed, lust, murder; of the self-sought degradation of the human soul for the sake of power over others. But we know about the greatness of Macbeth!

This production was uneven. Some aspects were really good, such as the three weird sisters actually being the victims of brutal and visceral war crimes right at the beginning of the play and coming back to haunt the characters and us throughout. They appear in the guise of contemporary but violated young girls. They dance to Girls Aloud, Pink and Katy Perry for coins! I love Katy Perry!
In another scene Macduff's little son is brutally drowned in a kitchen sink whilst the Ting Tings blurts out of the radio. All incidents are filmed, and the footage of the murder of the son and mother is communicated to Macduff via video message to a mobile phone.

And we arrive at a problem. The drastic 'new life' the director seeks to inject into the play doesn't really seem of a psychologically deep enough consideration. I'm not a conservative about these things – it may be valid to say the reason we are still going to Macbeth is because it stands up as it is after all this time, we don't need a director saying bluntly 'this is like Kosovo!!! and they're filming it, it's like NOW!!!', but if done well I don't mind interventions. And as I say some were very promising in this production. Ultimately though it ends with Malcolm rehearsing his inauguration speech.. as he dresses and looks just like Barak Obama. GET IT? the director is shouting at us, 'DID YOU GET THAT BIT?!' ...yeah, it's like that thing Shakespeare wrote isn't it, you know.. Macbeth?

Power corrupts, desire for power makes you mad. Macbeth is one of the deepest and greatest plays there's ever been.. I just wish this production didn't resort to a director POINTING AT THINGS.

The final note, whilst the three little girl/weird sister were pretty awesome, the character of Lady Macbeth was diminished into a role which was neither here nor there, which is itself a damning and major failure of this production.

All the fine things - CATCH UP

2009-01-25T21:13:00.006Z

As I intend resuming this blog I thought I'd catch you up on some of the things that I've been doing whilst not updating. Not a complete list, just what springs to mind :

Right back on July 27th, I saw Tom Waits play at the Playhouse in Edinburgh. The gig was the most expensive ticket I've ever paid for and, even though it was a delight to get to see someone who so rarely plays gigs, there was perhaps too high an expectation. But ultimately it is that Tom is an actor that provides the biggest obstacle. It means that you can really only enjoy the show as a SHOW, and not quite ever get on the inside of any of the material the same way as you can when you're not in the same room as the actor (ie when listening to Tom's amazing albums, without having him in front of you reminding you that he's acting). On its own terms however it was surely brilliant; it just left me a little empty after having been to such heartfelt gigs as Mavis Staples, Bruce Springsteen and Public Enemy earlier in the year.

October 29th, I saw Dr John playing in Blackburn following the release of his latest record The City That Care Forgot. It was nothing on seeing him the year before in Holmfirth, and I feel the Lower 911 (his backing band) sometimes produce too stodgy a sound. However there were some truly great moments, especially the gospel finale. The venue was full of Blackburn locals though, which resulted in it being one of the strangest concerts I've been to!

5th November, I saw a production of Antigone at the Royal Exchange. It was far from perfect, for example Dionysus appeared to dance in a slow eastern martial-artsy kind of way, restraint and controlled : ie Dionysus was VERY Apollonian! But overall it was enjoyable and worthwhile. Surprisingly the school kids in the theatre seemed to go wild for it!

17th November I saw Kayne West on his Glow in the Dark tour at the M.E.N. Arena. There was some unfulfilled bluster, and it would've been nice seeing him sharing the stage with his musicains rather than them playing from the pit; but Kayne is brilliant. It all ended in a truly awesome extended version of Love Lockdown off Kayne's new offbeat album 808 & Heartbreak. An album that I don't think anybody could've ever seen coming... and a very interesting and heartfelt conceptual record from a heartbroken iconoclast.

2008, Liverpool was the European 'Capital of Culture'. It was mostly pretty embarrassing sadly. I paid my last visit of the year on November 30th to visit the Le Corbusier exhibition in the crypt of the great modernist Catholic Cathedral (one of my favourite buildings in the world). Unfortunately they'd managed to make the fascinating Le Corbusier seem somewhat dull, largely due to over egging his paintings etc, which are really no match for his urban visions and architecture, which the exhibition was shockingly light on.

18th January 2009, Last Sunday I saw Richard Thompson at the Lowry in Salford. He was performing his 1000 years of popular song material, dating back to the 1100s and coming right up to Nelly Furtado's fantastic disco-stomp Maneater. There was a good ole song about people who scab on striking workers, The Blackleg Miner. Here performed by Steeleye Span : http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=X7pnRgBan7c - Thompson did an awesome version of this 19th century folk song from the north-east, really capturing the anger and distate for those who cross pickets. One of the two women he had backing him was a bit theatrical and distracting, and I'dve loved some additional folk songs where a village beheads a child because they suspect it is possessed by the demon spirit of a neighbouring village etc, but conceptually a great event nonetheless.

Last Friday I went to see a dark comedy about Burma at the Contact Theatre. It was like having Burma's Wikipedia entry read out in your face by Giles Brandreth. It really didn't work for me.

I'll leave you with another song from Richard Thompson's 1000 year-old canon; here performed by four old people in a lobby of somewhere or other : JAVA JIVE

Tell Tale Signs, Bob Dylan

2008-09-30T20:20:00.003+01:00

Hear the whole 2 disc version for free here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95047293

Unmatched, unmatchable. If we needed a reminder of the genius of Bob Dylan, other than the hundreds of shows, the radio shows and the legacy - here lies 2008's reminder that we still live in the time of an extraordinary talent and man.

Collecting together out-takes, alternative versions and a few live bootlegs, this documents some of the stuff we haven't heard from Bob over the last 20 years.

Contained within this exceptional collection is an unheard song left out of 1997's Time Out Of Mind. This is one of the greatest songs I've ever heard. Red River Shore - A man living in the ghost of a past love; it rips to the core in the way that only Bob can.

I'm off to listen more, weep, and feel the joy of having a reason to live.

Joan Baez, Turn Me Around

2008-09-28T18:13:00.002+01:00

I am very excited to be going seeing Joan Baez this Wednesday, here's a clip of her singing the song that Mavis Staples so recently blew me away with...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uX6gsXCgZlg&NR=1

On Turning 26

2008-09-27T13:03:00.002+01:00

I used to be blind to the woman in a suit,
Now she drives me wild,
Whit-woo, whit-woo
Woop woop.

President Bush Doing Jokes

2008-09-24T21:41:00.000+01:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dii3mzMQ3SQ

Angel

2008-09-11T18:19:00.007+01:00

dir. Francois Ozon 2007

It was dreadful, good and ok. In some parts intentionally dreadful and in some parts unintentionally good. What a confusing mess of a film Francois Ozon. I liked it and I didn't like it, but one thing I know is that there was a potentially really great film somewhere in there.

I'm guessing one of the ideas here is : can you make a schlock period drama that has to bow to genre conventions and still convey some kind of insight into the human condition / reveal something to us in a cinematic-artistic manner. There are parts of this film when it looks like bad made-for-tv melodrama and they tended to make me squirm in my seat. But I quite enjoyed that. It was very deliberate, but the fact that the film seems to then be a 'serious' melodrama elsewhere means that it doesn't come over as being 'too knowing'.

One of the biggest thematic moments seems to be when Angel is introduced to a woman who is a devoted fan of her writing and who bows and shows her love on first sight. Angel and the viewer are left feeling this is strange, of course, and then this woman's brother appears and is the first person to be rude to Angel and to criticise her taste etc. Angel naturally falls in love with this man on first sight. Later the sister becomes Angel's maid so she can get into her brother... who becomes her husband. I hate talking about plots like this! Anyway, really Angel is someone unable to accept reality and lives entirely by her own fiction, and so she does not see her husband as the cheating boozer, but being of grand romantic virtue. It's only after he comes back from the war (that Angel refuses to confront as she's a Peter Pan figure, young and unreal) minus one of his legs, comes home after boozing with scum and his mistress, rapes Angel, leaves for good but returns because his mistress has a man friend, Angel welcomes him as if he's gallant and returning to foreverness and beyond in her arms, then he hangs himself... that the truth outs and Angel has to accept that he was not the man, not the 'eternal love' that she had written him as in her own mind. And this sends her nuts, and she is on her deathbed and says to the sister, 'the only person who has ever loved me... is you.' Gives her a peck on the head, dies.

Take a breath. It's actually pretty good stuff about the fiction we all create around ourselves and how we don't always see others in any kind of true light. It is also pretty good on showing us that strange force of *attraction* - the woman who shows her devotion and eternal unquestioning love is looked at as though pitiable, the man who is cruel to her is seen as alluring. When it comes to love, sex and attraction... we often don't see things as they are but how we want them to be; but in the end there is one truth that frames all our fictions: death.

The biggest fault is that it is simply too long. Condensed down I think I could've really enjoyed it and recommended it. It just went on and on, carried a bit too much baggage.

The biggest plus of the film is Romola Garai's lead performance as fantastist novelist Angel. Though Angel is very obnoxious and outrageously uninterested in the world as it is... I ended up wanting to love her. It is a great performance, but I suppose it has to be coupled with her beauty onscreen. Her eyes have utterly beguiled me today.

Leonard Cohen

2008-07-20T13:05:00.002+01:00

This week I was lucky enough to see Leonard Cohen at Edinburgh Castle and at the O2 Arena in London.

I have no words.

Other than;

Thank you, Leonard.

& Truth & Beauty live.

NX540

2008-07-09T21:28:00.016+01:00

The NX540 is an inter-city bus route, Manchester to London, London to Manchester. Calling at a couple of places along the way. What follows is about a trip I made early on Sunday morning two weeks ago, heading from Manchester to London.

There's something about travelling long distance by bus; all my train journeys melt into a haze of memory, but bus journeys tend to be experiences I'll always remember. The majority of the time the memories are distinct and terrible, the experiences themselves seeming to be a never ending nightmare. I remember the nightbuses I've travelled on in painful real-time.

So many people on so many buses; cokeheads using the toilet to do coke, pissheads drinking cheap special brew from a carrier bag of tinnies mid-route from Belfast, the old mill-towners onboard amazed by the ordinary sights that pass by, speaking with a ratio of 95% croak and wheeze, 4% sandwich, 1% audible voice. The appalling six hour journey with a cockney hockey team - and their opinions on everything.

As the bus pulled along Baker Street one time the Mill-Towners behind me had the delightful exchange;
'Oooooo Baker Street'
'Isn't this where Sherlock Holmes lived?'
'Well, supposedly.'

I remember one time my lover and I passed a note to someone we thought looked like he might have a spark in his eyes. We corresponded with the stranger for awhile after.

What an ordeal it is compared to the train... yet... you know me, I can not help but to romanticise about such experiences. I tend to travel by train now I work and don't have much free time. £11 or so, 2hr 15mins.. pretty impressive compared to over 5 hours on a bus. But two weekends ago the rail network wasn't working on Sunday, so I travelled by the NX540 once more...

I boarded the bus with a terrible hangover and just four hours sleep. I hoped to just snooze my way to the big smoke. But as soon as we pulled out I realised it was going to be a potentially dreadful journey; behind me a man sat sideways (back to window) talking to his mate sat in the same manner but on the opposite side of the coach. And wow could they not leave a moment silent. They spoke very loudly to each other, exchanging nothing but gruellingly banal chit-chat. At one point I asked them to pipe down, the result of which was that they just switched the language they were speaking to one I did not understand.

They went on and on all the way to Stoke-on-Trent. As there were no empty seats I had a plan that if someone came to sit on the one next to me I'd turn round and suggest the two lads sit together and let the person have their own seat. Pulling into such a hell-hole really sent me under. As the slagheaps passed me by my head pounded and I felt like crying, such was my discomfort. The bus pulled in to let other people on. I was sinking... I sank my face down into my hands...

...as I looked up I saw her walking towards me, directly towards me, past several other seats next to strangers and straight to me. I forgot about ever having any kind of plot or scheme, and she sat besides me.

Green velour tracksuit top and bottoms, golden curls, red lips; just as pretty as that old pretty picture they all speak of. Green velor tracksuit! Mind blowing.

I don't recall ever hearing those annoying loud voices again. The following four hours... they're like some kind of lovely heroin dream. Not long after setting off she kind of angled her legs towards me, just subtly, and I thought, hmm there's a risk of contact here - but this is the NX540, my legs are pretty much locked in position due to the lack of leg-room and so I decided not to try and avoid it as my legs were technically just about in my half.

And as we both grew sleepy, the impossible moment, the dream, the green velour angel gently came to let her thigh rest against mine. We drifted from dream to dream. She came to move and I thought, yes, yes this was just a divine mistake... but as she turned to angle herself the other way she rested her buttock on my thigh! My head spun as she slept. And this went on for many hours.

By the time we drew near to the north west of the big smoke her head was resting upon my shoulder. It just happened that way.

And we pulled into Victoria coach station, everyone readied themselves to leave. I knew we'd part without ever speaking. But just as she got up to leave... as she got up to leave!... she leaned over to me, our eyes meeting for the first time... and she kissed me gently on the cheek, turned and walked away.

The Angel in the Green Velour Tracksuit, who touched me so deeply. It may be the nicest thing anyone has ever done for me. Who was she? She was an Angel. You think Angels have wings? NO!, they have Green Velour! You think the Angels flew to earth and revealed themselves? No, Angels were always abstractions of earthly people. There's no magic up there... the only magic is right here, right here on earth, on the NX540, in a shit-hole like Stoke-on-Trent, in the smoke of the big city; Beauty is human, Beauty is man-made. The sacred is human. Everything worth living for is in you and in the Other; is in the society we've built, is in our shared dream. Our shared dream!

This Angel and I, we knew of truth and beauty and we BECAME it; for just a few hours on this earth we shared Truth and Beauty. Had we spoken, had we made our encounter banal; two people met on a bus and introduced themselves to each other. We shared more than that. What is art? What is religion? Those hours of amazing grace, of truth and beauty, shared on the NX540 between an Angel in green velour, and me... the humble butcher's son.

That night, I cried myself to sleep, weeping tears of happiness, tears of faith...

Drawn Blank Series, Bob Dylan

2008-07-06T10:15:00.012+01:00

Exhibition at the Halycon Gallery, Mayfair, London til July 29th.

Before going to see Bob Dylan's paintings I had in mind that he hasn't gone out of his way to be considered a visual artist, it was just something he had done over the years for sake of it. This being the case I entered and didn't consider the art world for the whole time I viewed the paintings. I had no interest in trying to place Dylan in any kind of category; and that is ultimately why I enjoyed viewing these paintings more than I've enjoyed any exhibition since the Chapmans' retrospective in Liverpool.

Many of the pictures originate from Dylan's sketches from the road. These originals have been blown up and Dylan has treated them with colour - often in series to bring out certain things or affect the image differently somehow.
Another title for the series may have been I WAS There, because far from the Todd Haynes post-modern treatment of the mystique which considers the Dylan p.o.v. to be ultimately unattainable, we are here looking *through* Dylan's p.o.v. And what really comes shining through in this exhibition is what I think the film I'm Not There really misses; he is a transitory man, never still for long, but he is just a man within that moment. Anyone who has been to one of his concerts and been moved can tell you he's right there at that moment.
There's a humble humanity about these pictures. But most of all is Bob's sheer enthusiasm. It calls to mind the clip in Martin Scorsese's film No Direction Home (a far more apt title) where Dylan is stood outside a shop that offers multiple services in 1960s England and he is caught up just firing off as many hilarious combinations of the services and words as he can - he's almost falling over, such is his delight in his play with words. This exhibition is a great reminder about Bob Dylan - you can stroke your beard as much as you want to, he's just out there to delight himself in whatever way he can. And it so happens that he delighted me...

Enthusiasm and clear delight in treating each image, so far so good - and enjoyable to see. But the thing that really hooked me was his paintings of women.
His wild enthusiasm is a delight! I smiled so much looking at his pictures of women. He loves them. He's really really taken by them. We knew that from the songs... 'I need something strong to distract my mind, I'm gonna look at you until my eyes turn blind' - testify Bob.

I don't care to try and tell you where these paintings stand in terms of the art world; because you simply can't break the tie between Author and Text, and there's no need... you are invited to check out some of the sketches Bob Dylan has knocked up whilst on the road, consider them for what they are and don't project theory on to them. Living by that rule I find it hard to see anyone not enjoying looking at them.

But for me this was great. It reconfirmed something about Bob Dylan - whose art changed me and my whole life - he refuses to be bored, he refuses to be made banal, he refuses to live without colour; he brings drastic washes of vibrant colour. The effect on me of these paintings? Inspirational on their own terms.

Lou Reed's Berlin

2008-06-30T19:59:00.006+01:00

Dir. Julian Schnabel (2007)

Lou Reed recorded the album Berlin in 1973.
It was a commercial failure.
Over the next 33 years, he never performed the album live.

For five nights in December 2006 at St. Ann's Warehouse Brooklyn,
Lou Reed performed his masterwork about love's dark sisters;
jealousy, rage and loss.

-Julian Schnabel

Last night I attended the film Premier of Lou Reed's Berlin. Last night I saw one of the most awesome things I've ever seen. It took place at the Curzon cinema down in Mayfair and featured a Q&A session with Lou Reed after the screening.

I first discovered Berlin in 2001. I went to so many parties where people were playing the glorious popular cult classic Transformer. I went and looked for other Lou Reed albums; I found Berlin in the bargain bin. Whenever I asked people if they'd ever heard it I was met by absolute unfamiliarity, they hadn't heard it, they hadn't even had OF it. I plugged and plugged it to people and on my old blog... because of one thing I am convinced: Berlin is one of the true masterpieces of the 20th Century. Now, thanks to time passing and Lou revisiting it, it's being recognised more.

The art form of popular music, and of the album in particular, has rarely reached the remarkable depths Berlin reaches. It is a sequential narrative of the destruction of a relationship, of love turning bad. It is one of the darkest journeys documented by popular art. Agony, abuse, screaming children, suicide... and we are left on a tonic note that burns our throats as we drink it, 'I'm gonna stop wasting my time / Somebody else would have broken both of her arms.' Berlin stands with the great Picassos, Chaplins and Dylans - the masterworks of the 20th Century.

And so, all this time on and finally people are starting to more widely understand the significance and greatness of Berlin. Now we have been gifted a film that will stand as a great document to Lou Reed's greatest work.

One of the first notable things is that the quality of the film is stunning, digital finally achieving what it ought to. The sound quality was exceptional. And Schnabel's visuals and directing managed to compliment the performances extraordinarily well. Many of the images are projected on to the set behind the musicians, but we also have other layers of film that melt in over the top, and sometimes the performers melting back in over the top of those images. It all works, and adds to the texture of the performances. It is also filmed without any recognition of the audience being 'out there', and really manages to stay existing in a cinematic world. Great achievement.

The album affects me greatly as it is - but this was a new experience for me; to be sat in a cinema shivering all over with goosebumps for the entire duration of the performance. It appears that finally the cinema has managed to contain some of the special intensity that only music can achieve. In terms of artistic experience, this is undoubtedly the greatest live performance film I've seen.

There is one big flaw: They've added three encore songs AFTER Berlin concludes, I hope this is just because it would otherwise be deemed 'too short' for theatrical release and will be fixed into extras on the DVD. Three awesome performances, including the filthy as f*ck Rock Minuet (see below), but NO... you can't add them to end! But, judging it on what it is, Berlin - just freakin' sensational.

OK - the Q&A session. Following such an exhilarating experience came one of the most excruciating things I've ever had to sit through. The problem was not the unhelpful, bad tempered Lou Reed - you wouldn't want him to be otherwise - it was that the man chosen to ask the questions was Paul f*cking Morley. Morley conducted a car crash of an interview and asked a small handful of censored questions from the audience.

The only moments of interest were Lou telling someone who tried to interrupt a couple of times to 'Shut the f*ck up. Or get the f*ck out of here. Just shut the f*ck up, or why don't some people throw that guy the f*ck out of here?' - The man, with an absurd haircut, left at that moment.

But Morley seemed utterly incapable of saying anything that was not thackingly mundane. As the banalities and everyday questions kept coming I had a real urge to leap on stage and lunge at Paul Morley. When he mounts the stage he does so weighted down by his outrageous ego, then he's there in the spotlight... and nothing. Nothing. He's a complete void of charisma and he doesn't even have anything to say. Worst of all was that he was repeating his banal questions after they'd already been answered previously! And if Lou Reed did try and make a reference that wasn't an everyday banality Paul Morley would sit and stare at him silently for a few seconds then ask another banal question, completely failing to follow Lou Reed down a single interesting alleyway. If I'd been somebody else I'd have broken both his arms.

An amazing film. An amazing album. Lou Reed's performance is for real, he's no has-been. Paul Morley, a never-was-been.

Rock Minuet by Lou Reed

2008-06-30T19:26:00.004+01:00

Feast your eyes on Lou Reed being a filthy f*cker;

Rock Minuet by Lou Reed

The man is astounding.
& here are the words;

Paralyzed by hatred and a piss ugly soul
if he murdered his father, he thought he'd become whole
While listening at night to an old radio
where they danced to the rock minuet

In the gay bars in the back of the bar
he consummated hatred on a cold sawdust floor
While the jukebox played backbeats, he sniffed coke off a jar
while they danced to a rock minuet

School was a waste, he was meant for the street
but school was the only way, the army could be beat
The two whores sucked his nipples 'til he came on their feet
as they danced to the rock minuet

He dreamt that his father was sunk to his knees
his leather belt tied so tight that it was hard to breathe
And the studs from his jacket were as cold as a breeze
as he danced to a rock minuet

He pictured the bedroom where he heard the first cry
his mother on all fours, ah, with his father behind
And her yell hurt so much, he had wished he'd gone blind
and rocked to a rock minuet

In the back of the warehouse were a couple of guys
they had tied someone up and sewn up their eyes
And he got so excited he came on his thighs
when they danced to the rock minuet

On Avenue B, someone cruised him one night
he took him in an alley and then pulled a knife
And thought of his father, as he cut his windpipe
and finally danced to the rock minuet

In the curse of the alley, the thrill of the street
on the bitter cold docks where the outlaws all meet
In euphoria drug in euphoria heat
you could dance to the rock minuet

In the thrill of the needle and anonymous sex
you could dance to the rock minuet

So when you dance hard, slow dancing
when you dance hard, slow dancing
When you dance hard, slow dancing
when you dance to the rock minuet

Adventures in Babysitting

2008-06-19T23:05:00.002+01:00

'How could a righteous babe like you be lonely?'
'That's the sweetest thing anyone has ever said to me.'
'Yeah?'
'Wanna go to bed?'

Harlold + Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

2008-06-17T09:25:00.010+01:00

Dir Jon Hurwitz & Hayden Schlossberg (2008)

Last night I just might have seen The Film of 2008. On Saturday me and my comrade Tony Jones bought the DVD of Harold + Kumar Get The Munchies, it was awesome. We didn't realise at the time that it so happens the sequel is at the cinema right NOW. Go and see it already!

I've been on a journey recently; I began to feel slightly fatigued with the 'deep' and 'artistic' cinema I was watching, and disillusioned with the stream of recent shite that's been hitting the arthouse. Watching The Savages and seeing it roundly praised by blowhards... hmm, I could've laid my head on the rail and had old steam train Bill come roll on over my neck a time or two. So, I got to thinking about the kind of films that seemed magical to me as a child. And more than the nice fantastical films soon grown out of, it was films like Porkies that really stuck with me. Watching them as a child was so exciting; outrageously funny, getting to see rude things and feeling excited about the prospect of being a teenager, having friends, drinking, getting stoned and up to mischief.

As a grow-ed man, I left Harlold + Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay with that same kind of childhood glee and enthusiasm, wanting badly to go on a wild road trip across America.

This film has many elements of the great teen comedies of my youth. It has the hilarious cameo of a world leader (George W Bush, who the boys smoke dope with), red necks (with a twist), corrupt and very racist cops, the Ku Klux Klan... a cameo by a minor celebrity crazed on mushrooms branding whores at a whorehouse with a monographed branding iron. And Guantanamo bay, where inmates have to eat Cock Meat Sandwiches. Oh, and a child cyclops and a giant living bag of weed that gets fisted. & so much more! AWESOME movie.

I spoke recently about blowhards trying to link everything to 9/11 - well this film deals with America post-9/11 far more than any chinstroker could. It all starts when Kumar smuggles a BONG onto an aeroplane...

Hilarious film, hits everything you could want it to. And ya know... sometimes the lowbrow is worth more than the highbrow. You could make a long aching meditation on how mixed up and racist America is, and viewers could discuss it round a dinner table, or laugh your balls off in the face of the racists, toke up and go on an awesome roadtrip, get laid and have a riot along the way. The lead characters from minority groups are normal everyday Americans, the racists are freakin' insane, crazy and violent - it's a premise I can ride with.

I can't wait til I'm a teenager, I'm gonna have so much freakin' fun and make good friends who stick by me, no matter how many Cock Meat Sandwiches we have to eat along the way. Road Triiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiip!!!

Masked and Anonymous

2008-06-15T20:23:00.004+01:00

An old lover: You gave it all away didn't you Jack?
Jack Fate: Yeah I gave it all away. Gave it to sons of bitches either too unwilling or too unable to accept it.

The Revenger's Tragedy

2008-06-10T14:07:00.008+01:00

09/06/08, Royal Exchange.

Went to see The Revenger's Tragedy at the Royal Exchange last night. It has received generally bad reviews. I really enjoyed it.

GO READ ABOUT IT

"A vivid and often violent portrayal of lust and ambition." Quite an odd production, slightly mad. I mean, actually mad. But fun for it. With some bizarre contemporary dance interludes, two men dancing with a corpse, two actual NAKED old people having sex in a shower, people dressed as court jesters dancing around stabbing people, fallen women, a woman who was a VIRGIN, men motivated by madness and rationality at once, an old order dying by the incestuous dagger... it was entertaining enough for my £4 theatre ticket!

A couple of STINK moments - post-modern additions, such as a jester coming on stage and the director running out going, 'no, no.. your part has been cut', 'what??', 'its been cut, see?' [she shows a clipboard to the audience], 'I can't believe this, I've spent twenty minutes putting this costume on!!' - It was lazy, and unfunny. 'F**king Genius!!' as a tedious student may say. He could've at least got his PART out and she cut it with a dagger while we all sat watching it bleed on to the stage. That'd be something.

Secondly, the lead character and his brother were adjusting a corpse and a soundman was making creaking noises to coincide with the movements. After they stopped adjusting the body the soundman did an extra big creak. The two characters on stage look up at the soundman and go, 'Alright! Leave it out.' Lazy, not executed in a funny way. The JOKE in this case would have been that the *body* creaks after they stopped adjusting it and the characters get the willies - executed well it would be amusing and wouldn't have taken the audience out of the onstage world, that they'd otherwise worked hard to create. PoMo seems like such a lazy route to go for a little laugh. Get bent PoMo!

Some AWESOME things: lots of stabbings and some grizzly executions. A Duke having his tongue cut off (and slapped down centre stage, blood oozing out of it). And perhaps the best throat-slitting I've ever seen.

Apparently some critics deem this bad taste 'in the current climate'. Speaking of internet beheadings, BEHEAD THAT CRITIC! Or at least cut his chin off so he has nothing to stroke! Even more lazy than the PoMo jokes are critics who constantly strain themselves to try and make the current art world subject to obvious global real world events. How many times per episode is the term 9/11 used on an arts show like Newsnight Review?

'Such-a-body has just released a sculpture that reinterprets the famous classical bust of Socrates'
'I feel this really responds to the world as it is post-9/11.'
'Yes I think this is really an expression of our post-9/11 anxiety.'
'I just think, yeah 9/11.'

Make some effort! And by that I mean get some freakin' IDEAS already. You lazy beardo-chin-strokers! The world POST 9/11 is the same as PRE 9/11 in all but the media and the superficial post-modernists who are quite titillated by the scale of the spectacle and take *that* as being somehow meaningful in itself. It isn't. YOU isn't.

Anyway, as I was saying... I was quite taken by The Duchess's 3rd son, Juniour Brother. Nice trainers, white shiny hi-tops. Well dressed. Juniour Brother, hmm, I even like the name. Met a bloody end though.

Mill Towns on Sunny Days

2008-06-08T18:22:00.010+01:00

Ah, what a lovely day. I headed back to the Mill Towns, to Oldham. Had a lovely little bit of banter with a gaunt and toothless corpse:

'That's a f*cking girl's bag!'
'No it's not, it's my MUM's bag.'
'F*cking f*ggot!'

I'm not sure if it was girls he hated, me he hated, or just the bag.

On the train into Manchester Victoria four other Mill Towners were on their way to meet friends at the Crown and Anchour by the Oyster Bar. As the train pulled into the city URBIS popped into view and one of the Mill Towners exclaimed loudly;

'F*ck me! Look at that bloody ski slope! When'd they build a bloody ski slope?'

The train pulled into Victora Station which is conjoined with the M.E.N. Arena and as we arrived metres away from the doors to said venue one of the Mill Towners asked;

'Is that M.. E.. N.. Arena somewhere near here?'
'NOOoooh,' pipes up a lady Mill Towner, 'No, it's nowhere near here, you're miles out.'

Cafe Marriot

2008-06-03T11:00:00.005+01:00

Dear Proprietor,

I have sketched the flow of traffic in your shop whenever it is busy:

As I’m sure any rational person would agree – the layout of your shop is nuts! No it not nuts; it crazzzzzzy!!

Yours,
Stu Kimble

RIP Bo Diddley

2008-06-02T20:09:00.005+01:00

Bo Diddley died today, aged 79. RIP Bo Diddley, may he rest in a square coffin. Another great man has gone.
Thank you Bo Diddley

One of the most awesome performances I've ever seen.. CLICK RIGHT HERE, a remarkable man with a remarkable guitar.

HEY BO DIDDLEY, HEYYY BO DIDDLEY, awesome signature tune.

On TV 1
On TV 2

Introduced by James Brown, another great man gone. Near the end of the song Bo Diddley does some high kicks to the beat of the drum... puts Van Morrison in the Last Waltz to shame!

Bo Diddley... he was a MAN.

EXPLORE BO DIDDLEY.

Me... another one of these great icons passes away; it is the twilight of my idols.

I'm so grateful the world had Bo Diddley.

I'm going to burn some hell-money for you Bo, you ought to have a swell afterlife. You brought me JOY in this life; you brought millions of people JOY. Bo Diddley, a man with a square guitar, he played it like he meant it, and he meant it like he played it... Bo Diddley.

Girls Aloud

2008-06-02T13:37:00.012+01:00

01/06/08, M.E.N. Arena.

A facebooker was trying to get rid of a spare ticket to see Girls Aloud - I thought hmm, why not? I had no other plans, and I guessed it would be an entertaining show.
One of the disco chicks in Detroit Rock City gives the rockers/stoners a really good little sermon on how she doesn't care about the idea of disco against rock or any of that kind of nonsense, she just likes good songs no matter what genre they are in. Testify sister, testicle! I feel her... I'm with her; and to an extent I'm with Girls Aloud - they are entertaining, fun, have some pretty good pop songs. They descended to the stage on strings wearing silver capes, a flash of fire engulfed them and the first song kicked in.

It was quite a funny feeling to walk into the M.E.N. Arena and be struck by how *small* it is! It just so happens that the concert I went to four days before was five times bigger. This perhaps diminished some of the spectacle of the M.E.N. show, and really hammered home just how amazing Bruce Springsteen is for making everyone connect in such a massive venue as Old Trafford whilst also being engaged in genuine performance of art. Of course, Girls Aloud never set out to be anything more than just performance, and on the terms of performance it was pretty good. Lots of dance routines, costumes and fireworks.

There's one key to the show though: It'd be rubbish if the girls weren't sexy. There's nothing mesmerising about the show, it isn't like Cirque Du Soleil, or like Kiss. It is a spectacle that operates by pulling different strings. It's all about those bottoms that sexy girls have. And clothes they squeeze them into, obviously. Lots of amazing flashy dresses. Sparkle-sparkle. I've never seen so much Alfie since Saturday night down Deansgate.
The key audience seems to be girls who want to be 'glamorous' and gays who want to be 'fabulous'. And that's what a lot of straight men don't understand about girls like this... they aren't dressing up to have you perve on their breasts, that's just a by-product of the image sold to them. The image is what matters to them, not the fact that it happens to be sexually provocative to men. It's full-on consumer identity politics and they are fully consumed by it. Which is hot. As Paris Hilton would say.

Halfway through the gig a big walkway lowers down from the ceiling to give the girls access to a sub-stage in the middle of the arena. Standing just metres from this walkway, I had quite a moment with Nicola Roberts. She stopped and looked right into my eyes; such an odd expression riding across her face. I didn't know what to do, I guess she would expect me to scream and wave, but instead I just stood there smiling into her eyes and she did the same back. I quite like the thought that the WEIRD one from Girls Aloud probably thought I was a weirdo; neither a little girl or a parent nor a screaming homosexual. I find her somewhat beguiling. I only wish I'd mouthed this to her, 'I find you somewhat beguiling.'

Song highlights: Push It, a cover of Salt-N-Pepa. Walk This Way, a Run DMC cover. The usual big singles were all enjoyable.
Fling is a notable song, a terrible influence on all the little girls (dressed like grown-up late-at-night girls);

//Chorus:
It's just a fling baby, fling baby
Nothing more than a fling baby, fling baby
Just a bit of ding-a-ling baby, bling baby
Don't want relationships so swing baby, swing baby! //

Who's that hottie over there?
Big bad boy with big bad hair
I can feel instinctively
He'll be riding up on me

Who's that with that big fat dame?
Come give me love, come keep me sane
But don't be getting soft on me
Just give me something casually

So come closer to me
Cuz I wanna feel the heat
You're fine and that's okay
That's all that you need to be

Chorus... then,

Who's that hottie in the dark?
Body like a work of art
Feel your eyes undressing me
Strip me of my modesty

Hey you with that sexy smile
Come give me loving kinky style
But don't be talking love and things
Cuz baby I aint listening ...&c

...well, I guess you could call them Feminists. They certainly have lovely bottoms enough to be Feminists!

Detroit Rock City

2008-05-31T13:59:00.006+01:00

Me and my comrade Tony Jones watched Detroit Rock City last night. It was nice to see my good friend James Mansfield in his first leading role;
In the film James has a very religious mother who burns the boys' prized tickets to go and see Kiss in concert - because Kiss are evil, she preaches. Thus begins teenage hi-jinx on the road to see Kiss whatever-it-takes. It has everything a teenage boy needs in order to enjoy a film : the nerds beat up the jocks, pick up the jocks' dissillusioned disco girlfriend. James loses his virginity in a confessional booth with the girl he's been too shy to hit on all term - ah James! And so on, until they get to see Kiss! The Fun-Factor is high, you'd have to wear Fun-block not to enjoy it.

Take us home James...

Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band

2008-05-29T11:09:00.004+01:00

28/05/08, Old Trafford

"Is there anybody alive out there??" The Boss asked as he walked up to the microphone in front of 50,000 last night. He made them alive.

Setlist:
No Surrender
Radio Nowhere
Night
Lonesome Day
The Promised Land
Magic
Trapped
Adam Raised a Cain
Darlington County
It's Hard to Be a Saint in the City
Because the Night
She's the One
Livin' in the Future
Mary's Place
I'll Work for Your Love
Devil's Arcade
The Rising
Last to Die
Long Walk Home
Badlands
* * *
Growin' Up
Tenth Avenue Freeze-out
Born to Run
Rosalita
Dancing in the Dark
American Land

FREAKIN' AWESOME!!!

Of many great highlights, The Rising was my moment of the night. I Freakin' Love Goosebumps!

Public Enemy

2008-05-27T11:44:00.004+01:00

26/05/08 - Manchester Academy 1

Two things made me anxious about going to this gig:
a) it was a legacy gig, performing an album from the past - would that make it no more than a nod in the direction of former glory?
b) Flavor Flav has become a bit wayward, not done himself justice in recent years.

a) & b) got blown right out of the water. Public Enemy were AWESOME last night. A speeding locomotion train - wild but firmly on tracks leading directly to their destination, Rebels Without A Pause!

Chuck D spoke in between songs with his simple eloquence and absolute authority, without a hint of preaching or machismo - he's simply a man who knows what time it is and knows he knows what time it is and knows that because he knows the time when plenty of people out there don't know the time he has an OBLIGATION, a RESPONSIBILITY to tell people what time it really is.

They performed the entire It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back album as though it was something they'd written just yesterday and just couldn't wait to share with people. Flavor Flav has an amazing connection with the audience, and he and Chuck D just bounce off each other with searing energy - 'My partner Chuck D gonna tell ya all a story, tell em Chuck!'

During a song Chuck D saw someone wearing a clock in the audience and pointed at them. The man threw his clock up on stage and Chuck D put it on. When Flavor Flav noticed this he almost fell right over - he was blown away. At the end of the song Flavor Flav told us that it was the first time in twenty years he's seen his partner Chuck D wearing a clock. Chuck D told us he used to wear a clock but took it off years ago when everything went crazy and they briefly lost what time it was. So we witnessed a great and momentous moment last night, Chuck D wore a clock along with Flavor Flav - it felt like a genuine and real moment. A great symbolic moment.

When they reached the end of the album tracks Chuck D announced that they wouldn't be leaving us yet - and they ripped on til after the curfew. Then Chuck D handed over to Flavor Flav to pull the whole audience together and leave them with a message of Peace and Togetherness equals Power, and we must use this power to resist War, and we must use this power to fight Racism.

For another fifteen minutes after the curfew and as many people filed out of the venue Flavor Flav remained on stage talking to the audience - he spotted a little child and his mother and asked the child up on to the stage. He hugged the kid and told everyone that this is who we have got to go out there and fight for - it starts with us right now, we fight for the kids, don't leave it too late. And he took off his tshirt and put it on the little boy - who looked like he was in the middle of a moment that would change the direction of his whole life. It was real, genuine and moving.

Public Enemy took hip hop to places it had never been before and has never been since. True pioneers, innovators, and probably right at the top of the league for connecting with their audiences. But what it is that truly makes Public Enemy Great is that they are vital, they are necessary. You hear it in everything they do... they do it because it is NECESSARY. And that passion, that commitment and raw energy will always cut through the shitfest of sound and smoke that is out there and take people that little bit higher, give people that vital inspiration to keep them going. But the message is clear: you've got to fight. You've got to stand up and fight and be counted and you've got to be politically smart and committed. Fail to do so and some people somewhere will be enslaved, and one of these days it's gonna be you too.

I've said for years that music provides all I need that religion does for some people. I'm careful about who I go and see, what I listen to - this is my greatest passion and the main reason I am able to live... Public Enemy, like Mavis Staples, like Kris Kristofferson, have just topped up my well of inspiration til it's overflowing. For some music is no more than entertainment, for me it is my whole spiritual being, it is my soul. Chuck D, Flavor Flav, Soul Brothers.

As Flav told us to remember, we are ALL brothers and sisters.

"Aló, presidente"

2008-05-17T15:47:00.008+01:00

I was reading about Hugo Chavez in today's The Guardian, got me to watching some footage on youtube I thought I'd share with yars.

I can't see Boris Johnson inviting Hugo Chavez to speak in London and sharing a platform with him. Check it out. He pulls a piece of paper to his chest and declares the rather amusing line: 'Let us wear a label: I am a socialist, come close and I will infect you.'

I'm quite amused by this interview: Barbara Walters interviews Hugo Chavez. 'I have a beating heart here,' he charms her whilst drinking her cold coffee.

Check out the imfamous rant against President Bush in which he refers to him as Mr Danger, the coward and donkey!

And now to Hugo's chatshow, on which he talks about situations, reads from books, explains theories, flirts and sings! That's quite a TV show, he's South America's answer to Bruce Forsyth.

"I a-wanta say-a Condoleezz-ah. I a-wanta say-a You Condoleezz-ah."

And he sings,

I don't know what he's saying but I like watching him say it. Check out the title sequence and start to episode #265 of "Aló, presidente".

Over to the UN, here's a classic case of someone playing 'the voice of reason', also translates as 'I disagree with fascists but I'd die for their right to be fascists.' Hugo calls bullshit on that - I'm with Hugo!

Rangers Fans Riot in Manchester

2008-05-16T00:33:00.009+01:00

As it happens I ended up walking right into the centre of a riot last night. I say a riot… but the police were trapped round the corner not venturing out of reasonably safe areas. I just walked into Glasgow Rangers fans dashing through the streets trashing whatever they could. Two young men ran and drop-kicked an already overflowing bin and screamed at me that they were going to wreck Manchester.

The big screen in Piccadilly Gardens failed 15 minutes before kick-off. When the engineers approached the screen to fix it they were bombarded with bottles. As a result they quite rightly fled and refused to return to the screen. The city council started a back-up plan of bussing people up to an alternative screen at the Velodrome, others were directed to said location and Albert Square. I came across fans running down Aytoun Street towards Whitworth Street believing they were running towards Albert Square – and I believe this lack of ability to follow directions was widespread due to how drunk they all were. This evening was never going to end well.

At times like these people bend over backwards to say that everything was fine apart from a small minority who ruined it for all. This was not the case here. It may be a small minority who decide to attack police, but there was a very clear majority of people who decided to treat Manchester with absolute disrespect. The city was absolutely trashed this morning. Thanks a lot, city to city, thanks a lot you goddam sectarians.

Leader of the city council Richard Leese popped up on TV to say that alcohol wasn't the problem, 'the other 100,000 people had enjoyed a lovely carnival atmosphere'. I'm not sure if men punching each other, drunken arguments, p*ssing everywhere you looked and being foul from morning til next morning is quite the kind of carnival this city needs. The council of course know full well that they saw great big £££pound signs£££ in their eyes and just went for it. Went for it like a needy whore – which is kind of in keeping with the planning permission they give to all these foul buildings and the destruction of Manchester's urban culture. 'Give give give', they say, jumping at notes dangling from the hands of any old corporate interest.

8am the day of the UEFA cup final, I walk to work in the beautiful clear morning sunshine. Shirtless men begin to appear; crates of beer on one shoulder, open can in their free hands. They step in front of the morning buses and jeer at the city's working people. They start to p*ss all over the streets as soon as they arrive. I can't help but feel like the city's policy was that they knew there was going to be damage, but don't increase costs of policing it... so much money will come in that the damages in the morning will be economically sustainable. Never mind the people of Manchester, imagine all the money flooding into the city. (And p*ssed right back out all over the city!!). The clean-up this morning was of such a scale that it seemed the level of damage was about what was expected - I believe the city council topped up their street cleaning staff with up to 50 city council admin staff! Having worked for a Local Authority I can well imagine the blue words used towards management as they were washing wee off Albert Square!

There were *too many* fans in the city to have a 'light touch policy' and to suspend public drinking laws. It would've been more appropriate for a different match with fewer travelling fans. But this is Rangers and they have notoriously nasty sectarian fans. It was simply not a good idea to allow drinking on the streets from dawn – and I saw people p*ssed out of their heads AT dawn, god only knows what state they were in by match time.

A man dissed my friend for wearing the colour green. Seriously, just f*ck off you sectarian dimwit! Today a man in the train station had a Manchester City shirt with the words 'We Wrecked Your City 08' on the back. What an attitude.

I call bullshit on all the usual talk about small minorities spoiling a nice event for all – the atmosphere was just ugly and unpleasant all day long. I always thought Glasgow was a Big city, but it's hard to imagine if they have over 100,000 people like this to spare!

'WHAT WENT WRONG' the media quite politely ask. Hmm. Hundreds of thousands of drunk Rangers fans with free access to the whole city all day long, the suspension of drinking laws, the promotion of cheap booze – Pat Karney stormed Tesco and demanded they stopped selling cheap booze near their door, fine if the council hadn't brought in three tankers of Carling themselves I guess. The fact that the police were hardly seen all day, they seemed very overstretched… and the fact that they are Greater Manchester Police, who themselves are quite notoriously erratic and bastardly. The locations of fans in areas that were not really manageable once full – and everywhere was far fuller than ought to have been the case. …really the answer is simple to the question, EVERYTHING WENT WRONG. The most goddam awful event I've ever known in Manchester.

Over 24 hours later and I can't go to sleep because there are scottish voices down in the street playing african drums shouting things about how nobody will sleep tonight, the waft of urine still blows in through the seams of my closed windows. I can't even find words...

I'm obviously way angry about my city being treated in this way. I'll shut up and leave you with a load of video clips I've looked up.

VIDEOS

CCTV footage - of Rangers fans attacking the Police.

Pic Gardens1 - A Rangers fan gets knocked stone-cold out by a Rangers fan (at 27secs)

Pic Gardens2 - Pre-riot-proper, sense the atmosphere, horrible - but somewhat amusing when people think they've scored.. which of course they never did.

Police Charges1 - having faced baton charges from these very same dibble myself, it seems pretty clear in the footage they are out of their depth and somewhat disorganised. Would you agree Larry?

Police Charges2 - Seen here also. Here the Police incite other fans by giving one particular isolated fan a good beating - this is something I've seen Greater Manchester Police do many times; the difference here is they aren't doing it to people on a political protest, they're doing it to drunk thugs - thus the lack of confidence in their lines, thus injuries incurred back. This seems needless and lazy, lucky there are not many Rangers fans in the area.

Police Charges3 - This is the 'clear the area now or batons will be used' warning.
Police Charges4 - Police line up and charge met station / Market Street. Police Charges5 - The TAU storm down to Market Street, regulars section off met station - I've never in my life seen Greater Manchester Police push people ONTO Market Street! We managed to storm it just once during the Iraq war and that was because the school kids came out that day and outran the filth. Ignoring the Chelsea fan or whoever commentating on these videos, here's another: Police Charges6 - a lad gets a battering against a wall by regular police. Pretty standard over-pumped up police action, riles everyone. But then in this video you hear the faulty reasoning of those on the receiving end: a lad outraged that riot police smashed his hand with a baton because he had a plastic bag in his hand, 'there was no reason to do that at all!' he blubs as bottles rain down all around him, the dumbass.

Sounds of the City - This gives a pretty good impression of what I heard from my flat all last night.

From the Helicopter - Rangers Fans Attacking a car.

More fighting but shots of the AFTERMATH too.

It's night time in the big city.

Hazy City Beer Walk

2008-05-11T01:10:00.006+01:00

This morning I met up with my comrade Tony Jones and we ate breakfast in the new Trof; Deaf and Dumber, Grovesner Street. A nice place to eat breakfast - lets face it here, the times when your breakfast is £1-something and has toasted bread rather than ciabatta are over. The staff are robotically sexy, which I quite like. Man of the times, turn up for the books eh! (Ciabatta, by the way, translates as Carpet Slipper. You go look at one and think that and have a little giggle on me.)

Mid-day turns, city is hazy and clammy.

We headed up to the Lotus Blossom store under New Samsi restaurant on Whitworth Street and bought some Japanese beer. I used the toilets which are lit only by ultraviolet light. My 3d skeleton tshirt amused me greatly in the tropical heat; the blowhard behind the counter proclaiming 'the aircon is broke, I'm waiting for a component from Korea.' Get over it mister, you already own a Japanese supermarket, buy a component from Wales already. Asalisi is a lovely beer. Our tacit was to buy 330ml cans so we wouldn't get arrested, as oddly enough it's illegal to drink in the streets here - ah I long to be drinking Jagermeister on the u-bahn!

Up to Chinatown and some funky shops, none of which had aircon. But we did find some lovely and cheap 330ml Chinese beer. Tony Jones was very impressed with my wonderful Chinese pronunciation of Tsingtao. Two years working with a Cantonese speaker comes in handy. A nice enough beer.

I bought some Hell Money, Tony Jones bought a lucky cat. I bought some chocolate cigarettes and considered buying a set of Chinese warrior keyrings just because, despite the law, I could - featuring many blades way over the 2 'inch' threshold. I never get that guideline, I'm a metric man... imperial measurements can't kill me.

Hell Money is an artificial currency that is used in China to burn in a ceremony of offering to those in the afterworld. They need some goddam money right? You know what prices are like in the afterlife, £3.80 a freaking pint!! Well I bought a load of eight billion pound notes. Some afterlife! As I understand it: I need to keep the hell money out of sight as it is bad luck to see it & I should not give it to a living person, to do so is to wish death & I should take it to the hills with me and get pissed whilst respectfully burning it for those who have left me and my world. This is a ceremony I can embrace and will embrace. To the hills soon. And if you receive Hell Money off me you know I want you dead. Tony Jones saw his hairdresser at the Sandbar back on Grovesner Street (Sans as it's known to rotters) and almost gifted him an eight billion pound Hell Money tip. That's quite some death wish! I never thought his haircut was so bad myself...

Back in Trof they played a turgid number off a famous album by The Beatles, me and Tony Jones were talking about popular fallacy - or at least untruths. One such untruth is the idea often repeated that 'The Beatles invented the concept album' - anybody who says that has never listened to any jazz. Never listened to Woody Guthrie's songs about the Columbia River. I mean, SPOOK, they've never even heard a pre-mid-1960s Christmas album!

A good freewheelin' day.

Rufus Thomas

2008-05-08T23:54:00.008+01:00

I ate some funky chicken at a wedding on Saturday. As a result I have discovered Rufus Thomas! He's fantastic. Here's the amazing video that I found when I entered 'funky chicken' into the internet whilst sick the morning after...

Rufus Thomas - The Funky Chicken

I've been reading up on Rufus and it somehow seems fitting that I should've discovered him through eating funky chicken, a man with a great sense of humour, what a way to get into someone;

Rufus Thomas - Walking The Dog
and one in 1965

This stuff is bringing me so much joy, a real dionysian disco outfreakage. Check out the brothers and sisters in this amazing video:

Rufus Thomas - Breakdown

Here's a couple of extra songs:
The Preacher and The Bear
&
The Memphis Train

He was the father of soul-singer Carla Thomas, Pick Up The Pieces

There aren't any men like Rufus anymore. Buddy Guy is playing dinners in the US. Most of them are dead. And what a unique moment they lived through in popular music. I'm so glad to share in it now... I just wish... obviously, I just wish... ah nevermind.

Cynicism

2008-05-04T23:20:00.004+01:00

I thought this was a reasonably interesting piece in today's The Observer:

Time To Put An End To This Age Of Cynicism

I've been working in this area for awhile now; my novel is largely about overcoming nihilism. Cynicism in its original form blew the door off the stable and the horses bolted. The kind of generalised scoffing you see so widespread in popular culture on the other hand is stifling, counter-revolutionary and ultimately in opposition to human happiness. The greatest danger is when it stops having an ideology or point behind it and becomes just the standard way people deal with things. That seems to be the life-denying place we're in, cynicism has replaced our religion in terms of halting our ability to affirm life and to change the world around us (backed by a faith in human beings).

It occurs to me that if Charlie Chaplin released a movie like City Lights - such a beautiful film that it is - now... it would be savaged and derided as 'sentimental', people would just scoff at it. We have gotten ourselves in a position where we are too scornful to be able to embrace the most honest of human emotions being shown to us. I know, I've dated people who didn't and couldn't 'believe in love' because their minds were so bound up to our zeitgeist. It's a sorry situation.

Nietzsche shot thunderbolts at the life-haters of old but he also warned us about the nihilism to follow. It is something that we must shake off. Reach out your hand to me...

The Funky Chicken

2008-05-04T08:52:00.002+01:00

I just woke up feeling grotty and thought I'd write a blog entry about the wedding reception I went to last night. I ate some funky chicken. When I logged on the internet I thought hmm, I wonder what comes up when you enter 'funky chicken' into youtube. I now declare the following video clip to be one of the greatest things I've seen in a long time. If you want to know me after this point I INSIST you watch this clip - AND WATCH TO THE VERY END: there's something wonderful there. It was quite a way to start the day - tears of joy and laughter filled my eyes, Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you:

Rufus Thomas - The Funky Chicken

The Lady Of Musashino

2008-05-01T20:26:00.007+01:00

Dir. Kenji Mizoguchi (1951)

It's weird when you randomly pick films to watch and they seem to fit the same theme. From Peckinpah to Mizoguchi, from the new-Old West to post-war Japan, times are changing. I suppose it's not such a great leap, times are changing everywhere. Most of the time. Things aren't what they were. But in this film and in - to my knowledge - all Peckinpah films... things aren't as clear, aren't as black and white as to be better or worse; it's not about times, it's about the values given to them by the people who live in those times.

Here the leading female is married but her husband intends to be unfaithful; she is in love with another man but can not break her vow to her husband. So instead she takes out another vow, a sexless vow, with the man she loves. She won't put out but she will vow her love and her unhappiness, but she will not break her vow to her husband.

Her belief is that if they make a vow and stick to it society will change. If their morality is wrong, morality will be changed by keeping to their word.

Whilst contemporary liberalism washes into the society around her, she is guided by this simple principle. Contemporary society sees it as outdated, conservative and something that will no longer guide their actions. But what comes in the place of this guide? The devaluation of relationships amongst all people? For what is a relationship worth if each other's word means nothing?

The woman in this film is an absolutist and it inevitably ends in tragedy; in her suicide.

The value of a man's word is a theme I vividly recall visited in The Wild Bunch:
Pike: It's his word!
Dutch: That ain't what counts - it's who you give it to!

In that case it is about a man who has given his word to the Railroad (to the new society) and as a result is now acting as bounty hunter aiming to kill his former comrades (of the old society).

The point I'm blustering at is that these two things are things well worth combining and thinking about deeply - a man's word MUST mean something (therefore he must be true to it and stick to his word) but he must also be constantly testing the ethics of his own word.

So for the contemporary people out there... if you say you'll do something do it and if you don't do it feel bad about it because you're damaging society amongst people. Test yourself, ask questions of yourself every step of the way, who is paying you and what for and do you fulfil YOUR part in society? These are great concerns of mine. I don't do enough, surely, but you can damn bet your life on my word because I give it only to those I think are capable of giving it back. Tragedy to me huh!

Score: 2.2

Ride The High Country

2008-04-30T21:23:00.004+01:00

It's so simple, yet nothing is simple. It's just like a man.

The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid may be considered the masterpieces of Peckinpah's six westerns, but here lies an overlooked gem. An inspirational film.

The final shot appeared, a tear rolled down my cheek, the words 'THE END' appeared. A beautiful, sad, moving moment.

Steve Judd: I want to know if you red-necked peckerwoods are too chicken-gutted to finish this thing in the open

***
I shall be returning to Peckinpah in the coming weeks. When I say Wong Kar-Wai sure knows what it is to be lonely, I think also I can say Sam Peckinpah sure knows what it is to be a man. And he certainly knows about comradeship and how men interact. He makes films that mean the world to me, they visualise the metaphysical struggle I live through.

Score: 3.3

The Ballad of Cable Hogue

2008-04-27T19:39:00.010+01:00

Dir. Sam Peckinpah (1970)

Read the plot here.

Read the cowboy's prayer here.

Sam Peckinpah was my first 'favourite' director, but I only saw The Ballad of Cable Hogue for the first time today. It is an absolute delight.

Cable Hogue is man. Cable's cathedral is the desert under the blue sky. As the Rev. Joshua Douglas Sloan says at Hogue's funeral - that Hogue insists is begun whilst he's still alive to hear what people say - Cable Hogue was not a good man. He was not a bad man. But he was a man.

And that is the spirit of this film. Peckinpah is famed for much violence - here we are treated to Peckinpah being very funny and tender. Tender, for Pekinpah. But one of the most moving things about this film is highlighted in the film poster here. Do unto others.. that's what this film is about. And when Cable falls in love with the the whore from the nearest town we see unfurled a lovely and touching relationship; and an equal one. Hildy scrubs a pound of dirt off Cable, and later Cable tenderly scrubs Hildy. A simple glowing beauty.

This is offset by the fantastically naughty Rev. Joshua Douglas Sloan. He sees a woman in distress;
Reverend Joshua Sloan: Come child, together we shall purge this grief from your soul and release your true spirit as we search a path to righteousness.
...and he comforts her by fondling her breasts and laying her on the bed... it seems to work very well, then her husband comes in and Rev. Joshua Douglas Sloan runs face-first into the backdoor (in sped-up film!) and the woman asks the Reverend: 'Won't you comfort my husband the same way that you done comfort me?'

Rev. Joshua Douglas Sloan is a nomadic minister of the church of his own revelation. He brings with him great themes of theology and religion, but it is all made wonderfully enjoyable by his bawdy thoughts getting the better of him. For example:

Reverend Joshua Sloan: Did it ever occur to you, Cable, how wise and bountiful God was to put breasts on a woman? Just the right number in just the right place. Did you ever notice that, Cable?
Cable Hogue: Well, where in the hell would he put 'em? On their backside?
Reverend Joshua Sloan: It's a thought.

This is a film about the passing of times - as many Peckinpah films are. The stagecoach is about to be replaced by the automobile and Cable knows it. That's for the next man to deal with, he thinks. In the end he is literally killed by the inevitable and unstoppable changing of the times : an automobile's breaks are knocked off and he jumps in front of it to save the life of one of the men who had left him to die in the desert. He lays his hands on the grill and tries to halt the automobile, but the machine rolls forward - no one man strong enough to stop it.

Cable Hogue isn't yellow, he can and does kill. But he honours a code that is as simple as they come, and yet... perhaps the most wise ethical test the ancient world gave to the world of human beings: Do unto others as you'd have them do unto you.

Hildy: You've been awful nice to me, Hogue. Never bothered you none what I am?
Cable Hogue: Hell no, it never bothered me. I enjoyed it. Now, what the hell are you? Human being. Try the best you can. We all got our own ways of living.
Hildy: And loving?
Cable Hogue: Gets mighty lonesome without it.

Score: 3.3

Shine A Light

2008-04-26T01:09:00.002+01:00

Nevermind being the biggest screen I've ever seen; it was the biggest wall I've ever seen. It was my first experience of IMAX and I'm now forever scarred by seeing Mick Jagger's giant face projected onto the biggest wall I've ever seen. Erm… it's too big. And too loud. And too high-quality film. You can make people and things in the background out so vividly… it's like some weird hyper-reality. It's all so vivid and real that it is nothing like reality at all. I am unconvinced by IMAX- I'm all for fun, but it kind of doesn't feel like the cinema but some bizarre haze of sound and light that is designed to derange the brain into thinking it is really having a mind-blowing experience. It doesn't touch the mind, it just rattles your bowels – someone really dropped a bastard in there – and allows you to see right up Mick Jagger's nose.

I also find it a bit deranging that when, say, Keith Richard walks through the shot the volume of his guitar suddenly jumps up. I don't want this idea of 'interactivity', I just want a nice solid sound mix. BTW: a very guitar-centric mix all round, you hardly notice the piano, horns or backing singers.

That's IMAX, this is the Film: Yes Hmm No Hmm.

Some nutshells:
Martin Scorsese should stick to making music documentaries, he's much better at it than making movies.

The Rolling Stones were a truly amazing band in the 60s and early 70s; and they are now a bit pathetic. NOT because of their age, but because they don't seem for real anymore. They are a business and a brand and their creative days are long gone, but they fill places for extortionate prices and all those people give them nothing but loving… so they exist in a fantasy with no integrity and that's something you hear.

The Cameos are excellent: Buddy Guy is magnificent. Jack White looks delighted and does well. And Christina Aguilera really has a pair of lungs on her.

Martin Scorsese pulls out just about every trick a director can think of. Every little camera trick, every angle, everything I can think possible in filming a gig. Most of it works. There are some remarkable shots.

It doesn't matter. That's the BIG BANG here. It just doesn't matter. The event is neither here nor there – it has no cultural significance. This isn't something that will live on and on in musical and cultural history like The Last Waltz does. This is The Rolling Stones filmed playing cloud cuckoo land.

THE BEST THING : Martin Scorsese's cameos! In particular the one at the end of the film is hilarious. I greatly enjoyed watching him trying to act at the start of the film too. He was goofy… but he had the demeanour of someone I'd quite like to see in a very funny film indeed. I'd love him to make a film about himself directing a film, it would be wonderful and preposterous fun!

In The Mood For Love

2008-04-21T20:25:00.006+01:00

Dir. Wong Kar-Wai (2000)

This is art - the ability to stop time. I intended to pause the film soon after the beginning to make myself a cup of tea. 90 minutes later the film ended and I became aware once more of the empty cup that had been in my hand the whole time. My cup was not half full, it was not half empty: it was empty.

One of my most used phrases is, 'Wong Kar-Wai sure knows loneliness.' Oh yes he does. He really does. And so do I. So do I.

The exquisite thing about this film, and many of Wong Kar-Wai's films is how they radiate mood in the aching space they create. There are many discussions about the technical elements of his films but I find it quite soul-destroying when people get wrapped up in technicality. There are 'rules' that he breaks that he probably doesn't even know exist in the first place - yet people beardstroke over them. The thing is... I feel it. And he feels it. There seems little doubt he feels it. And he gets that mood, that melancholy yearning feeling, from all who appear onscreen.

Beauty is everywhere you look in this Romance story. The cheong-san dress - or is it the Qi Pao? - is one of my favourite items of clothing. Not that I wear them. But they certainly are beautiful. Maggie Cheung wears over forty different dresses in this film - a very beautiful and a very dear lady.

And lets not forget Christopher Doyle. He is an exceptional cinematographer. With Wong Kar-Wai he manages to make every shot a shot that resonates so deeply down inside. This is the aesthetic beauty. The stirring of the soul and the affect on the viewer that comes about via the interactions between characters onscreen is the artistic beauty. And that is one of the things I love about Wong Kar-Wai - the aesthetic is always the necessary servant of the artistic... and it hits home so goddam hard.
Score: 3.3

Sunday Morning Comin' Down

2008-04-20T20:36:00.006+01:00

I Direct You Click & Listen: Kris Kristofferson - Sunday Morning Comin' Down

Last night I attended Baldfest 2008 and smoked my brains out on cocktails provided by a generous host, the good Doctor Bald E Locks.

Here are the cocktails he made for me:
Whiskey Sour - bourbon whiskey, lemon juice and sugar.
The White Lady - gin, cointreau, lemon juice.
Mojito - rum, sugar, lime juice, mint and club soda.
Daiquiri - rum, lime juice.

Inbetween I was cleaning the palate with a crisp San Miguel lager and chasing it down with shots of Jagermeister. When the clock struck midnight something stirred within me. I have never vomited on the same night as drinking before - if it happens it is always the next morning. But things aren't like they used to be. 25 years old isn't 17 anymore. It was a rough night. And morning too. And as we were about to leave I was sick in the kitchen sink too. They'd been such good hosts, I was such a bad guest!

My biggest mistake was that I'd taken a two week break from alcohol after destroying myself on potent White Russians. I hadn't considered that using cream instead of milk would result in me filling the glasses with so much more alcohol. I took a break, but if you stop drinking you can't go straight back into heavy drinking, you have to work your way there. At least, that's how it seems the older I get.

The White Russian - kahlua, vodka, single cream, a sprinkle of coffee.

We walked out and met the day, a grey wet Sunday. I was holding on by the tips of my fingers as we walked down Barlow Moor Road towards Didsbury village to have fried breakfasts at Saints & Scholars - owned by an old man, staffed by hot young women. And there's something in the wet Sunday morning sidewalks that makes a man feel so alone. I had no way to hold my head that did not hurt.

On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
'Cos there's something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel alone.
And there's nothin' short of dyin',
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin' city sidewalks:
Sunday mornin' comin' down.

In the park I saw a daddy,
With a laughin' little girl who he was swingin'.
And I stopped beside a Sunday school,
And listened to the song they were singin'.
Then I headed back for home,
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin'.
And it echoed through the canyons,
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.

On the Sunday morning sidewalk,
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.
'Cos there's something in a Sunday,
Makes a body feel alone.
And there's nothin' short of dyin',
Half as lonesome as the sound,
On the sleepin' city sidewalks:
Sunday mornin' comin' down.

Night Time In The Big City

2008-04-16T08:00:00.003+01:00

As I am now inviting people to read this blog, I thought I'd briefly greet you from the other side. Night Time In The Big City is my blog, the blog of a bastard, of Patriq Allyn - and it'll cry if it wants to. I intend to use this blog to say a few simple things about events I attend around the city, films I watch and general art and cultural interests that I feel like sharing. I have no intention of telling you what I had for lunch. Having said that, I had a can of Bird's Nest in Chinatown yesterday and I may at some point wish to discuss it; either here or in therapy.

The ingredients of Bird's Nest:
Water,
Sugar,
Bird's Nest,
White Jew.

I kept a blog a long time ago and it ran for many years. I don't think it left much out, you'd read it and you'd know what colour underpants I had on. One of the reasons I quit writing a blog was because I was starting a Creative Writing MA and I thought I ought to concentrate my writing on the course. I'm sure the course works out well for some but, having reached the far side of it, I feel that it was wrong for me. I have never written so little as when on the course, and I felt the hand of conservatism stroking my matted hair. I never wrote anything that ever seemed to affect anyone. Perhaps in part it's because everyone else on such a course is a writer and they are there for their own writing more than anything. Before the course... I'll never forget how it made me feel when I wrote something that one-by-one made everyone who read it cry. I'll never forget the soft and emotional hugs of grown men, moved by something I'd written. It felt like something wonderful and worthwhile I and just wanted to write and write and write.

The course stopped me dead in my tracks. It neither seemed to embrace creativity or academia. I still have no idea what it is that I was supposed to do; all I know is that it seemed like a good idea to go and do it as a writer but it worked out to be detrimental to me. My recommendation for writers would be to avoid writing courses, you don't need to develop with peers of writers... you need to develop with readers. You need to put yourself out there and see what you can do; other writers are not the people that matter - it is the people you reach that matter. And I greet you from the other side. And all of a sudden I feel like I can write again.

So I've started this blog simply as a worthwhile ritual to get into and also because it is useful to note a few things about, for example, a film after watching it. Useful to me, and I hope anyone who is interested will like to read it and either be interested in talking about it or perhaps best of all go out and find things they haven't found before. That's how a person becomes. I got into Bob Dylan years ago and I'm still following the branches and roots of that tree in so many inspiring directions. I just want to share some of those roots and branches with you, the leaves and the dirt too. Perhaps not the dirt - I am a modest and lovely man really.

Patriq Allyn

Mavis Staples II

2008-04-14T22:34:00.006+01:00

Manchester Bridgewater Hall 14/04/08

I can't recall a better use of a Monday evening. After seeing Mavis in Liverpool last Friday I felt a compulsion to see her again. And I'm so glad, so glad I did.

The Manchester crowd was a lot better than the one in Liverpool, the venue & sound was better too. Mavis was having to fight Satan in Liverpool, in Manchester she was here just for us. A remarkable, remarkable woman. The guitarist in the band also excelled with a mind blowing spiritual instrumental Folsom Prison Blues.

I lost count of how many goosebump moments I had. I will spare the full review. I just wanted to tell you how uplifted I feel tonight, and how empowered Mavis Staples made me feel. I'm so glad she's still out there, I'm so glad somebody knows about our struggle and still cares for us and understands that music can truly strike the deepest.
Score 3.4

Check out an article about Mavis in Tuesday's the Guardian

The Steamroller and the Violin

2008-04-14T13:50:00.001+01:00

Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky 1961

Touching, evocative, meaningful. A beautiful film.

Symbolism is combined with atmosphere is combined with remarkable child acting. The story is one of friendship - comradeship more to the point - between a steamroller driver and a seven year old violinist. It begins when the driver stops some rowdy kids from picking on the little violinist. Next the kid is at music class, whilst waiting to go and see his teacher he and a little girl have a bit of the old eyeball going on. He attempts to seduce her by leaving her with an apple. At first she does not eat the apple; she eats it when she hears him playing music. His teacher is not so impressed and stamps down on him when he plays the music the way he feels it rather than how it technically ought to be - banging a metronome down on the desk in the process.

The rest of the 46 minute film is dedicated to the young boy and the worker hanging together. There's a particularly mesmerising scene where they stand watching an old building being demolished in a downpour of rain and once the wrecking ball takes its final swing a new building is revealed shining in sunlight behind the old one.

This film undoubtedly fulfils the requirements of the men running the Soviet; but its message seems to exceed the Soviet and to reach out to all. Everyone has a role to play in society. When the child plays his violin to the working man, the man has tears rolling down his cheeks. We all need beauty, we all need friendship, we all need each other. When the pair pass a tiny boy being bullied by a bigger boy the man allows his new friend to intervene on behalf of the tiny boy - just as the worker had done for his new friend. For this act he takes a beating off the bigger boy. We all need to watch out for each other, and we must be prepared to take a beating for it - it isn't ever going to be easy, but it is the necessary thing to do for society. The sentimentality is at this point hardened and pointed, and it gets to you! Everyone is responsible for the society we live in and must be proactive when we see unfairness.

This is also an aesthetically beautiful film. The dialogue is quite minimal yet the film continues to speak to the viewer at all times. I could sit and talk about every single loaded event and image we're shown, instead I'll just say that this is a very fine film and represents the potential hope of the Soviet - which by this time was corrupted beyond any recognition.

Score 3.1

Poetry

2008-04-13T19:45:00.004+01:00

There is an article in today's The Observer about the Queen's English Society mounting opposition to poetry that they do not believe is poetry. They believe that if it doesn't have rhyme or metre and doesn't scan it isn't poetry. One of the people they singled out is Michael Schmidt. (Read the article and Schmidt's offending poem)

So I texted Michael:

If your poems did rhyme they would be fine,
but you write prose and everybody knows.
CC: Queen's English Society.

He sent me a lovely bit of prose back:

My poems rhyme some of the time.
If fine rhymed with rhyme it would be too facile.
Any asshole could claim the name.

-Testify brother, I told him, testify.

Mavis Staples

2008-04-12T12:40:00.006+01:00

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic 11/04/08

Sometimes real highlights are things that never meant to be. Of my many Bob Dylan highlights I will always highly regard the moment in Cardiff 2006 when Bob picked up his harmonica to jump into an instrumental verse, blew a few notes and realised it was the wrong key harmonica, put it down and proceeded to play the rest of the solo via expressions and contortions of his face. He may be playing old stony face on stage these days, but it was as good as Charlie Chaplin being up there pulling funny faces at me. A real joy and everlasting highlight for me.

So it was that during Mavis Staples' set the rolly-polly old lady repeatedly came close to falling over. After getting her balance she'd swing round and look accusingly at the bare stage unable to see what was causing her trouble. Later on it got her at the very climax of a song and, as though the words had always been written, she started singing about how Satan was trying to make her fall but she would not fall, and she grabbed Satan with both her hands and she threw him out of the concert hall. She never fell after this point! - (For the encore she took her shoes off; there was something lovely about seeing Mavis Staples taking her shoes off to sing to us.)

Apart from the terror and relief of witnessing Mavis Staples being attacked by and overcoming Satan live on stage - it was a very uplifting gig. Her support act was Jhelisa Anderson, and she turned out to be very good. Her own songs all built up into something good, and then she absolutely treated us with a superb performance of Nina Simone's Mississippi Goddam. A remarkable song, and yes she did it justice - which is very impressive. The lady done gone give me goosebumps and I don't mind telling yar a tear in mine eye! Thank You Thank You Thank You!

Mavis Staples came on and greeted Liverpool with the words, 'It's so nice to be here in Manchester.' Very funny. Though later on it became hard to tell when she was joking and when she was being a bit of a dotty old lady. Either way, she was a joy to share a room with.

She performed a remarkable version of The Weight by The Band and eulogised each member of The Band afterwards, giving special affection to Garth Hudson. Her own band was very gifted, only occasionally straying - especially at the start of an instrumental segment; but this soon turned into a stomp through spiritual standards which was very enjoyable. Eyes On The Prize was kickass. Wade In The Water, a remarkable negro spiritual, performed wonderfully. Down In Mississippi from her latest album was truly moving. Mavis tells a story (in the middle of the song) about how when she was a little girl she went to drink water from a fountain and was stopped by her grandmother and told she had to use the well over yonder. That well had a sign on it which read 'Coloured Only'. But she lived, and thank the Lord Dr King lived, to see the day every single one of those signs came down... down, down, down in Mississippi. Speaking of Dr King, Mavis played his favourite song, the song that he used to request the Staples Singers sing before he made his famous speeches: Why Am I Treated So Bad? Pretty wonderful! As was their big hit record, Respect Yourself. What a positive gospel these soulful Staples Singers brought to us and still bring to us.

Yvonne Staples completed a trio of backing singers, she wobbled off with Mavis during the final song of the evening and left two amazing young singers searching higher and higher on the refrain of Turn Me Around. 'Ain't gonna let discrimination turn me around, turn me around, turn me around, ain't going to let discrimination turn me around, I'm going to keep on walking, keep on talking, keep on marching to freedom land.' Also in the encore, a striking version of We Shall Not Be Moved. Mavis told us of an incident when The Staples had been asked to leave a restaurant because of the colour of their skin and the whole family all linked arms and began singing this song - that's quite something; I'd like to think it melted even a racist heart, though sometimes things don't work out like that. But the value of songs like these is always clear and, so long as there's injustice in the world, songs like these will strike the deepest chord in the soul.

Mavis Staples - Down In Mississippi (live)
Mavis Staples - Eyes On The Prize

The Staples Singers - Why Am I Treated So Bad
The Staples Singers - Respect Yourself

Ever wondered what Judy Henske, beatnik sweatheart and potential influence on Woody Allen's Annie Hall, singing a negro spiritual at the circus would look like? Check it out
A black vocal group doing it with police academy style funny noises: Check it out

Score: 3.0

Cloverfield

2008-04-08T21:52:00.006+01:00

On the one hand, a good no-brain monster film. On the other hand, I'd rather have spent time in the company of the monster than any of the characters.

I felt the same level of empathy with the beast as with any of the charmless leads; which isn't all that much. But I suppose that isn't the aim of a movie like Cloverfield, and I can live with that - even though it seems slightly bizarre to have no empathy whilst watching human beings in a state of torment. But entertainment.. is the idea.

And it works as a throw-away monster movie. To an extent. I can't decide whether I found the fact that the monster just 'is' - ie that it does not develop or change in anyway, it just kind of appears and walks round mindlessly like a Monster attack on SIMCITY - to be a detrimental element or the strength of the movie.

I suppose I'll never be fully satisfied having been brought up on horror films in the 80s... I missed the jocks in sports shorts who you rooted to meet a nasty end, I missed the monster getting a bit tender with the saucy broad. Ultimately the characters in Cloverfield prevent it being a much better hit of monster flick than it is - there's no human interest, there's just annoying vacuous people who you kind of don't care about when they get gobbled by the monster. You're riding with them, but you're never WITH them.

The final note is the obvious thing to note about this film: 9/11 Porn. Some people don't like this. It depends on your perspective. If we are not to charge the makers of entertainment films with the same responsibilities as other film-makers, then we have here the events being used simply as Spectacle and that is that. And that's what the post-modernists saw 9/11 as; filling their beard-stroke theories with talk of how, due to the prevalence of Hollywood-American culture, 9/11 itself appeared as no more than a television event itself - that the images of 9/11 were themselves potentially straight from a movie. It was inevitable that those images were regurgitated and thrown back up by a film like Cloverfield. Post-Modernists don't really have anything to say but they say it anyway!

In the end I can accept no-brain movies on their own terms. I've managed to enjoy the deeply ethically flawed frat-pack genre of films. And I accept Cloverfield on its own terms and kind of enjoyed watching it - I just wish the camera had been held by someone else at a different party.

SCORE: 0.6

Sans Soleil

2008-04-07T22:31:00.002+01:00

Dir. Chris Marker (1983)

A series of video and narrative rememberings, evocative and poetic. It is both dated and timeless; though you feel the time it was made imbedded within it it is captured outside linear time progression.

You have what a film is ABOUT and you have what a film DOES, and this film DOES what it is ABOUT and is ABOUT what it DOES. It is the real deal, commits to being film-as-art. It affects the viewer, does things to them. Gooses them, lulls them, says things to them that they don't quite catch but feel the meaning of on account of what they are seeing/experience.

Things I will remember vividly - the shooting of a giraffe in the heart, Tokyo teenagers doing takenoko-zoku dance in the streets, the remarkable computerised images, the absolute alienation and otherworldliness of watching society through this film-maker's direction.

Also though - it brings to mind a time when people believed the future was NOW. After the second world war people believed in The Future, they dreamed it up and prepared for it to come. By the 1980s there was a confidence that the future was being realised right there and then. We live quite a long time after the future now and we have no dreams of it any longer.

Score: 3.0 - attainment of beauty.

The Exterminating Angel

2008-04-07T16:01:00.003+01:00

Dir. Luis Buñuel (1962)

I'm not going to muck around talking in detail about films by Luis Buñuel; the only result of that would be me getting ambushed by a bunch of bearded crusts committing a goddam flame war on my sorry ass blog box. He's brilliant, but I already knew that from Un Chien Andalou. What is exciting for me is that I have seen so few of his films, they are all ahead of me.

The Exterminating Angel came free with this Sunday's The Independent, The Independent On Sunday. Score. Big time score actually... it is a very funny film. It gave me the squeals a couple of times. Lampooning the bourgeois is such a wonderful, enjoyable and above all, necessary thing to do. This is a great lampoon. It is the Christmas Vaction of Lampoons in fact.

So I'll give it you in a nutshell, a broken Monkey-nutshell maybe, but a nutshell. A bunch of toffs get together for a dinner party and when it comes to the end of the evening they mysteriously break social etiquette, unable to understand this the guests find that they are unable to leave the room. Trapped in this situation they remain for days on end, maybe longer, who knows. They fall apart, their pretenses are brought crashing down by their sometimes surprisingly keen fall into living like animals. Eventually they chance upon an exact replication of the moment at which they failed to leave the room and by reenacting it they are able to break the spell and leave. The last scene of the film - I'm chuckling heartily to myself thinking about it, rar har har - starts the whole cycle all over again.

Who cares about calling it Surrealism or anything else, there's a monkey, flock of sheep, wee and poo... it's just how it is, and it is a very good and very funny film.

Score: 2.2

Children Of Glory

2008-04-07T10:38:00.002+01:00

'I may not be objective since I'm a Hungarian and a patriot,' starts the first review I came to on imdb.com. I don't expect anyone to be objective, but I would like them to be less presumptuous. From the outside, this film does not function - the motivation behind the characters and their actions is an invisible force. The force is supposed to be what is inside them... it is the overwhelming power of their nationality. The voice that talks to me in my head was going, 'yeah.. but why?' 'er, yeah.. but why?' I'm not Hungarian though, I don't have that proud and pure Magyar blood running through me. As a result, this whole film was like totally munging a Hungarian women with a bristly moustache.

The characters are very unappealing, every one of them. One of the lowest moments of the film is when the two lead characters get naked with each other, real gut-turning stuff. The characters also exhibit a real lack of depth. The lead female character is initially seen as a campus radical, innately knowing the injustice of the nation's situation. Later she meets the utterly charmless water polo player who ends up dating her because he says so and she kind of goes all wavy in the fanny for him. When around him she becomes a bit of a silly little woman.

She is also alarmingly naive, but not in an everyman sense of the word so it doesn't offer us much to think about as viewers. Instead she listens to whatever voice speaks to her from whatever source, the assembly hall optimist bent on destruction, the various radio stations broadcasting their differing propaganda. The girl is anyone's. All of which leaves you rather unmoved by her execution at the end of the film. Asked to name triators by Uncle Ernie, the mean-spirited AVO small-dick, she writes Lenin, Stalin, Khruschev, Uncle Ernie on a piece of paper and gives it back to Uncle Ernie... You gonna die sister! You gonna DIE!

Her internment and execution is all juxtaposed with the Hungarian water polo team overcoming the odds far away in the Melbourne Olympics, the little lady's man taking a bit of a nick to the cheek by a frustrated Russian player for the team, team H U N G A R Y. In the pool, pride in their people will overcome anything - shame about Budapest being blown to shit. The crowd in Australia all seem to be dressed like inbred Hungarian village-folk, and they chant Russians go home and all that, and it's all supposed to be somehow moving but because I'm not pure of their blood it all just looks a bit dimwitted.

One of the moments that made me realise the overwhelming shitness of this film was how much I found myself willing the return of the oppressor's tanks when the Russians have retreated after suffering a bit of guerilla warfare and everyone thinks Hungary is to be an independent nation. It is a great relief when, as the water polo team are leaving the country for the Olympics, hundreds of tanks roll past them on their way to blitz Budapest. How the lead polo player chest-beats, he wants off of the bus to go and punch a tank or something, so his teammates have to punch him to calm him down, goddam hothead!

At least the end should be near. Except it isn't that near. First you have to suffer an almost real-time re-enactment of a water polo game. Just end goddam, just end!

The smug nationalistic players lift the gold medal, the woman gets led away to her execution.. a rubbish nationalistic poem pops up on screen, I dash out of the cinema hoping nobody notices which film I've been to see.

*
What is for sure is that this sure ain't DOWNFALL, or SOPHIE SCHOLL. I'm supposing it is in the same genre, but it does none of the great things those films do. It is all lost to nationalism. And that's scary, a nation dealing with its past via assumed nationalistic glory is quite dangerous. And it fits with Hungary, it fits with what is going on there. When I was there on Independence Day this year I witnessed fascist gangs rioting in the street, a fascist motorcycle gang ripping up the roads, a 'Terror Museum' that seems to let Hitler off lightly, but most depressing of all I witnessed the political far-right being given a platform on which to speak by the authorities. In the face of poverty, in the face of raw capitalism eating at what flesh remains on their bones after such a bloody history, perhaps now is not the time to try and make a film like this. In the end it is empty-headed nationalism that fails to reach a wider human community.

The one interest for me was seeing sights like a derelict building which I myself had recently gained access to used as a film set. They have nationalism, I have my fallen-apart building, the human community gains nothing. Any film depicting a 'revolution' against oppression that leaves you unconcerned about the fate of the oppressed has to be seen as an outright failure.

/// This film failed to score 0, and is therefore graded simply as 'I just fucking wouldn't' ///