Bloody students

(via Mike Arnzen)

The quick and the dead

(Adopts Cyril Fletcher voice.) I am indebted to my old schoolchum Diccon Bewes (author of a forthcoming tome about all things Swiss), who alerted me to the Write Badly Well site, which may give some amusement to anybody who followed my Chasms of the Earth blog:

He slowly walked the slow, winding path towards the crooked, run-down old house. With one slow, hesitant hand he bravely, resolutely knocked on the dusty, pock-marked, ancient and frightening door. Slowly, it opened slowly. He slowly poked his brave head through the narrow, foreboding gap.
‘Hello?’ he slowly said, bravely.

Dear Nick Griffin...

Half of my ancestry is of the sort of Anglo-Saxon stock that you revere (possibly with a small dash of Celt, the sort of thing you mention to reinforce the notion that yours is a British rather than English party). The other half is Polish Jewish, a rag-tag bunch that came over in about 1900, economic migrants and asylum seekers.

Should I send my legs back to where they came from?

Meanwhile...

Thinking about Cohen and e-books at Rock's Back Pages; and it’s been a week of Stephen Fry and annoying choppers at the Noughties blog.

Kinda sounds like prison's better than Dunder Mifflin...

Just when you think you're almost home on a nicely uneventful day, someone starts caressing you on the train.

I'd just gotten caught up on Project Runway only to find out fucking adorable hometown girl Shirin lost to some wankface moron whose name I still haven't bothered to learn, so you know, I was already not in the mood for bullshit.

Even when he sat down next to me, it was weird; the train wasn't all that full and my stuff was oozing onto the next seat. He was oozing weird vibe, so I discreetly moved closer to the END when we stopped.

And you know, I wasn't even sure. Maybe I was being paranoid, right? I gave him the benefit of the doubt, but his hand (which I even LOOKED DOWN at) was clearly over his leg and kept brushing/caressing my leg. (I was wearing a dress but it covered my legs plenty, whew.) I figured, if he does it again...

And he did.

So I turned from my shoulders and LOOKED. AT. HIM. Now if someone turns to you on the train, you're going to look back. Out of surprise or confusion if nothing else. Yeah, not only did this guy not look at me, I could feel him not looking at me and pretty much praying I wasn't going to start screaming at him there on the train (there can be more than one crazy, you know) but basically, you could just see the waves of shame coming off this dude.

And then he made a big point of using both his hands to play with his ipod and phone. Just a coincidence, I'm sure...

We could be heroes

Ah, the London Film Festival, a chance to star-spot (Steven Soderbergh and, er... Nigel Havers) and to feel smug because you’ve seen a movie about a fortnight before your friends get a chance. A few titles tickle my postmodern bone, as they turn in on the film-making process, and ultimately themselves.

Johan Grimonprez’s Double Take comes from the Adam Curtis school of using archive footage, smartly juxtaposed with talking heads. Alfred Hitchcock finds himself introducing not his TV show in the 1950s and 60s, but broadcasters and politicians nervously assessing the Soviets' lead in the space race, and Nixon’s ‘kitchen debate’ with Krushchev. Via a plot borrowed from Borges, the focus shifts to Hitchcock himself, and a weird encounter that may or may not have occurred during the filming of The Birds. We never forget we’re watching a movie, as we’re shown Hitchcock’s body double and vocal impersonator getting into their stride; were Dick and Nikita playing their parts as well?

L'Enfer d'Henri-Georges Clouzot appears to be a more straightforward proposition. It’s a documentary about the efforts of Clouzot (best known for The Wages of Fear and Les Diaboliques) to make a movie about paranoia and jealousy within an apparently happy marriage. The 1964 shoot was a catalogue of disasters: Clouzot didn’t get on with the female lead, Romy Schneider; his habit of waking up his colleagues in the middle of the night with new ideas alienated the technicians; the fact that the artificial lake that was central to the story was due to be drained 20 days after shooting started only added to the pressures. Things got so bad that the leading man, Serge Reggiani, walked away from the film; his replacement lasted a matter of hours; and then while he was filming a Sapphic dream sequence on a boat, Clouzot suffered a coronary, and the whole project was put on ice. The film was eventually made by Claude Chabrol, 30 years later.

The inevitable comparison is with Lost in La Mancha, about Terry Gilliam's doomed attempt to film the Don Quixote story. But the footage here has added resonance, because many involved in the project – including Schneider, Reggiani and Clouzot himself – are dead, adding an extra layer of poignancy to the sense of missed opportunities. And, great as my regard is for Gilliam, he never used blue lipstick as shorthand for a dream sequence, did he?

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s comeback, Micmacs, is less obviously *about* film, although there are numerous nods and winks: the hero Bazil (Dany Boon) is seen mouthing along to the (French dubbed) soundtrack of The Big Sleep; a security guard does an excruciating De Niro impression; there’s a neat reference to Jeunet’s own Delicatessen, and even to Micmacs itself (via film posters).

But there’s also an implicit reproach to modern Hollywood. Micmacs is essentially a warped superhero movie, in which a band of outsiders pool their talents (contortionism; arithmetic; making stuff out of junk) for the common good. They’re not really freaks; but, because this is Jeunet, they look far uglier – far more like us – than the ravishingly beautiful mutants of the X-Men franchise.

Micmacs is essentially the story of how Bazil, who lost his father to a landmine, and very nearly his own life to a bullet, takes revenge on the rival arms manufacturers he holds responsible. The immediate comparison is with another comic book adaptation, Iron Man, which essentially comes down to a final battle between a good arms dealer and a bad arms dealer (see Chris Morris’s Good & Bad AIDS sketch); whereas Jeunet damns them both. Which may be politically naïve (think Boy George’s analysis of military malfeasance) but does make for better cinema.

J'ai une âme solitaire.

A friend of mine (technically D's, and also Mob's best friend, but I really adored this guy) killed himself Monday night. I rarely got to see him but I was still happy knowing he was there, and it goes without saying I wish we'd been able to see him more often.



I was so happy to still have this picture with me, rather than back in Texas. He loathed having his picture taken, but he was being a very good sport here at Mob's wedding (he was also meeting me in person for the first time so maybe he was going easy on me). You may have seen his blog in the past (it may be invite-only, I don't recall) and comments here--he ("MacGuffin") always had great comments.



I don't know much, but simply that the years of sickness and depression took their toll.

We hadn't emailed in a while, but I was looking back at some of our past correspondence and I hope it's not totally inappropriate, but I wanted to reprint one that, while perhaps not uplifting, I still found moving. We were discussing the recent death of his dog, whom he'd owned during some of the hardest times in his life. This was about two years ago, maybe a little less.

Yeah, the passage of time helps but it doesn't make the pain go away, grief simply changes you. My brother **** committed suicide in 2002 and to this day I think of him every single day but it's become bearable somehow. [My dog] was with me through so much pain and misery (I've had cancer twice), we formed an unusually strong bond that I simply cannot begin to describe. He's been my constant companion and joy and now I feel so damn bereft... I've been sobbing and carrying on to such an extent, it's even surprised me.

I'll muddle through somehow or I won't... either way I'm not the same person I was two weeks ago. Nothing can change that now. Thanks for the kind words and take care.

You are sincerely missed.

Dead Kennedy

From the Telegraph obituary of Ludovic Kennedy:

Indeed he never really lost a certain aristocratic contempt for television and dismissed as ludicrously self-important the views of those television executives who believed that “a thing said simultaneously to 15 million people will carry more influence than something said privately at a pub or dinner party or picked up elsewhere in the course of the day.”

I suspect he never got the hang of Twitter.

It’s real but it ain’t exactly there

Caught me a bit by surprise, as it’s not meant to be out till next month, but my new Leonard Cohen biography appears to be available from Amazon UK.

Feasting on Stephen

...and the next time someone suggests that poorly argued, badly written, self-indulgent blogs are debasing culture and making it harder for conscientious, thoroughly researched journalism to get a look-in, just refer them to this.

Jondrytay, Anton Vowl, Charlie Brooker and Michael Deacon weigh in, as do many others.

Eventually, Moir apologises, but misses the point. Her worst sin isn’t the snide fag-bashing that’s been a staple of the right-wing tabloids for decades. It’s the standard of her journalism that stinks; and it took the derided Twitterati to point it out.

PS: Another angle.

For the typography spods among you

By Tom Gabor.

Do you know where I can get, like, a really great dress?

So the other day my sister and I were on the train trying to get from my apartment to downtown. Out of nowhere, this crazy old man (odder still, I don’t think he was intoxicated) proceeds to ask us (more than once since we did not understand), “Do you know how much better Boston would be without the colleges?”

Obviously I had nothing to say to this. I mean, I do, but this man was not someone I really wanted to have a conversation with. “Oh, is this South Station?” I suddenly said, getting us off the train. (So what if we wanted Park Station?) No big deal.

Today. I’m leaving school around 4 and for the second day in a row as I hit the platform, my train is just pulling up. Considering my train comes every other train, this was pretty fucking cool. There was a man next to me waiting to get on, and he pushed himself in front to be first, then slowly turned around…and it was the same fucking guy. “Do you know how much better Boston would be without the colleges?”

I immediately ran away to a separate car.

It was totally alarming and freaky, I don’t care how small Boston is. I was worried it might turn into a Drag Me to Hell-type scenario where I’m perpetually haunted by a crazy fucker…though admittedly I don’t think he’ll try biting my face off. I hope.

And it was also less cool than being trapped in a This Is Ponderous moment--you know, "Hey, aren't you supposed to be at work?" It was just all sorts of wrong and unwelcome.

So that was the weirdest part of my day. I'm glad there wasn't something else competing, at least.

On a completely separate note, I’m totally sad I have to miss a book launch party in two weeks hosted by Dennis Lehane. It’s the same night as a school function and though I’ll probably end up being pretty unsocial, I should at least make the attempt. The book launch is noir-themed and part of the Boston Book Fest, it sounds very cool. Balls.

Breaking glass

I’m not a big jazz person. But I heard Ornette. I couldn’t afford to go in, but I heard him through the window.
–Lou Reed in this month’s Wire

But isn’t that the best way to hear him? And I mean that in a good way.

No, I’d never heard of Trafigura either

The Guardian has been prevented from reporting parliamentary proceedings on legal grounds which appear to call into question privileges guaranteeing free speech established under the 1688 Bill of Rights... The Guardian is also forbidden from telling its readers why the paper is prevented – for the first time in memory – from reporting parliament...

But for how long can such an injunction be effective these days? Go here. And please pass this on. Carter Ruck can’t sue the entire blogosphere. Although the idea doubtless gives the buggers a collective erection.

PS: It’s gone Stateside.

Turn me on, dead man

To Tate Britain, to see the Turner brand of conceptualism. No, not the eager foursome vying for the eponymous prize (Roger Hiorns offers processed cubes of cow brain - has molecular gastronomy at last found the artistic kudos it has always craved?) but that other Turner. You know, dead bloke, bit splodgy. Good at sea, couldn’t do trees, clouds a bit hit and miss.

Apparently, in 1832, Turner asked his friend George Jones what subject he’d chosen for a forthcoming exhibition. Jones said he was depicting the Biblical story of the Burning Fiery Furnace; Turner then asked for the dimensions and materials. And with the same subject matter, the same medium (oil on mahogany), even the same size of board as Jones had used, he came up with something better:


Arrogant? Obviously. A stunt? Yes. Remind you of anyone?

Gore blimey

More YT fun: an old friend’s plug for his book, Way of the Barefoot Zombie. Reminds me of my favourite joke when I was about nine (“Mummy, I hate Granny’s guts...”) Wonder if I should do something similar for The Noughties. But what?

Happy Friday

Recent posts have been a bit dyspeptic. For the weekend, two things that made me smile:

The value of nothing

If you were to mention to grown-ups: ‘I’ve seen a beautiful house with pink bricks, with geraniums on the windowsills and doves on the roof...’ they would not be able to imagine such a house. You would have to say to them: ‘I saw a house worth a hundred thousand pounds.’ Then they would exclaim: ‘Oh! How lovely!’
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince (1943)

The accident happened in full view of other parents dropping off children at the £8,775-a-year Russell House School and Day Nursery in the village of Otford, near Sevenoaks, Kent.
—Daily Mail report on the death of a three-year-old, 7 Oct, 2009

Tepid

The CoolBrands 2009/10 supplement that came with yesterday’s Observer does seem utterly self-defeating. For a start, there has to be a variant of the Groucho Marx rule; any cool adhering to a brand would surely be stripped away by appearing on such a list. And even if that weren’t the case, would you accept the findings of an ‘Expert Council’ including the likes of Trevor Nelson, Sadie Frost and someone who describes himself as “an impassioned digital media visonary”?

PS: Elsewhere in the paper, one of Ms Frost’s former husbands is quoted as saying, 30 years ago:

A cultural identity is a great outlet for people's frustrations. Kids have always spent what little they have on records and haircuts. They’ve never spent it on books by Karl Marx.

I mean, who gives a crap if they're socialists? They could be fascist anarchists, it still doesn't change the fact that I don't own a car.

Pleasedon'tsuckpleasedon'tsuckpleasedon'tsuck!



In anyone else's hands, this could be so terrible. But I totally trust Peter Jackson to get it right. I thought I had read the book but in retrospect, I don't think I have. I have to go read it now so I still have a little time between the two and I don't judge too harshly. Here's hoping it's awesome.

(And of course, living in Boston now means rooting for hometown actor Mark Walhberg, which I pretty much did anyway. And of course, I choose not to extend this rule to Ben Affleck. So there.)

Speaking of socialism, though, last night I saw Capitalism: A Love Story. I'd heard it was one of Moore's weaker efforts, but I didn't think so at all. It's not as openly controversial as some of his past works, and yet "socialism" is such a hot button issues these days. For some reason I always remember this library in North Carolina where Veloute and Douglas used to live. Someone had scrawled "Socialism here!" in terrified chicken-scratch on the book drop door. I remember being a little confused, like, "Yeah...and?"

Anyway, the movie has all the Moore staples you've come to expect, starting with a handful of somewhat in-depth true stories from people whose homes are being foreclosed and people who have lost spouses and come to find out these companies for whom their spouses worked take out life insurance on their employees, collecting big time when they die (meaning of course, that the employee is usually worth more to them dead than alive). I really didn't know much about the latter, and it was really appalling.

Moore also does his in-your-face schtick, which I've never been too fond of, though I can certainly appreciate the need for it, I suppose. It's always humorous to see numerous security people walking out of whatever corporate headquarters Moore's approaching before he's even at the door (shit, at GM he wasn't even on the stairs before they came out). And not surprisingly, all the Congress representatives who speak with him are Democrats. Shocker.

But it was enjoyable, and I hope a lot of people see it (particularly those who don't already agree with the views, but the odds of that are always slim). But who knows...when I left the theater, I heard someone ask, "Did you just come from the new Michael Moore movie?" (I was rocking the peasant look, apparently.) Especially since it was opening weekend, I thought maybe someone was looking for an argument, but I turned around anyway.

"Yes," I say.

"Did you like it?"

(Mild apprehension.) "Yes."

"Oh, well, here, you might like to read this, then..." and I was handed materials for meetings discussing the film, marches in Quincy and some other panel discussions on--gasp!--socialism! Holy shit, I'm not in Texas anymore.

Lager shouting

I’m looking at one of those promotional things that’s bigger than a leaflet, but smaller than a magazine – any marketing people out there will be able to advise on the approved name for them – intended in this instance to educate us in the all-round loveliness of San Miguel beer. There’s a distinctly Hispanic flavour about it: a competition to win a trip to Valencia; a few tapas recipes; and, just in case we don’t get the message, a reminder that San Miguel will help us to “take some time to sit and appreciate the taste of modern Spain.” Spain, of course, being shorthand for a certain flavour of laid-back sophistication; city breaks rather than package fortnights in Benidorm.

Except that San Miguel isn’t really Spanish. It comes from the Philippines, which in the British, lager-swilling consciousness is more about domestic servants, corruption and shoes. Moreover, if one considers the memories the Filipinos have of the times when Spain ran their affairs, selling a beer from the Philippines under Spanish colours is a bit like selling the glories of Guinness by using images of Tower Bridge and Buckingham Palace.

Noughties media overload

Not only does The Noughties now have its own blog, it’s also invaded Facebook and Twitter as well. Roll up, roll up.

We discussed MySpace, but... naaah.