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It could be any city, but I've always thought of it as New York.
All it takes is a change in the weather for the worse, for you to lose your sense of direction, for street signs to be unhelpfully nowhere to be seen, and you could find yourself among them, living their lives. They burn bright, like mayflies, because no future means living life to the full. And that means dance and drink and trouble.
This is the quintessential United States experience; the American dream. The melting pot, in the flesh. They haven't made it yet; they're shoved and cramped into the dark places, the back alleys, the lower east sides, the tenements. Life is cheap but so, so vibrant.
Everyone is out to get something. No-one is to be trusted, least of all authority figures.
Do you think you could cope with this life, knowing there was no way out of it, that you couldn't go back to your comfy brownstone after the end of one day, that this was it, from now on forward? Are you cut out for this life?
Maybe better to watch from a distance. Dream that this could be you if you just quit that job, that you could blaze like they do. Watch from a passing train, glimpse it only briefly.
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I wrote this for Twitter's weekly Listening Club, on the week where it was my turn to choose an album everyone would have to listen to, and I chose Sufjan Stevens' challenging "The Age of Adz".
(as a side note, you should join in with Listening Club. Every Sunday at 8PM GMT we all start playing the same album, easily streamed from Mixcloud, and discuss it at length and with as much or as little seriousness as we can muster.)
In my list of genres in my musical library, I have entries for both "Chamber Pop" and "Baroque Pop". There's only one artist in each genre. They're both the same artist, actually, for different albums, and that artist is not the artist you'll be hearing tonight, but it's a useful demonstration that my musical tastes sometimes favour those who don't easily fit into obvious genres; those that straddle several, a lot of the time.
Tonight's artist is no exception. Here's the thing; I was going to go a bit easy on us all. I had something picked that was nice and upbeat, even dancey, and it evoked in me feelings that reminded me of Spring, so it was quite apropos, too. But Listening Club offers the opportunity of both exposing yourself to new things, and in my case, tonight, challenging an audience and showing them something you love.
So I chose this.
You don't get dancey. You don't get Spring. You don't get "nice" and "upbeat", either. You don't even get "easy". Or to be more accurate, you get all of those things at times… it's just not the whole package. Our artist contradicts himself. He is large. He contains multitudes.
So you get love. You get death. You get betrayal, breakups, you get Art, you get God, you get aliens, you get the end of the world. I hope you like brass, strings, and a bit of electronica. Even if you don't, it'll be an experience. Just wait for that last track. I hope it blows your head off like it did with me, and still does.
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Apparently I wrote this back in 2006. A fragment of a story which I never completed; seemed quite fitting to the season, so i reproduce it here. -- The Inner You I first noticed my shadow when I was twelve years old. My parents had gone out for the day - one of my uncles had committed suicide, though I knew nothing of this until years later - and with my brother away at college, there was no-one to babysit. I was left with the only dependable sitter my parents could find - television. The minutes stretched into hours as I sat there, near motionless, being lectured by the idiot box. As night drew near, so the shows I was watching became darker. It was during a late-night showing of John Carpenter's Halloween that I first began to notice the presence of somebody else in the room. This during the climactic final scene with the virginal babysitter versus the bogeyman. You can just imagine the impact it had on me. I was sat holding a cushion up to my face when I realised that I could sense a man behind me, doing the same. There was, of course, nothing behind me - our sofa facing the wall as it did at that time - but that did not dismiss the certainty that I felt. There was someone here besides me; a dark malavicence (I think I meant malevolence - Ed) toying with me for its own amusement. Those who have become certain, late at night, possibly in bed, more often than not in a heightened sense of awareness due to a scary movie, or book, or something on TV, of a another presence in the house, something unwanted, something logically not there, but there nonetheless, will know of what I speak when I try to explain that I stayed in that same position in that sofa for a full twenty minutes; frozen to the spot in that uselessly well-lit living room while on the screen in front of me, the cold killer with the devil's eyes made good his escape for another picture on another day. Yes, it was twenty minutes before I moved. I had not even the courage to make a noise or to look behind me. It was there; I knew it was there. It knew me, too. Eventually steeled for inevitable confrontation and with nerves and muscles creaking like an ill-oiled door, I coiled in my seat and leaped from my frozen spot, jumping into the centre of the room and turning behind me as I landed. Our living room was ill-stocked for encounters with monsters of the real or imaginary kind, and so there was no convenient rusty poker at hand to brandish in attack. All I had was my speed and my terror (the latter infinitely more useful, as history and urban legends have told us)... -- And that's where it ends. I like it though. Tags: fiction
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Highly enjoyable Friday night out with Liz, my sister Lucy and her husband/my brother-in-law Jamie. The plan for the evening had originally revolved around the mythical Digbeth Dining Club, themed food vans in a Digbeth Warehouse serving up gourmet fare. We decided to start the evening off with cocktails first, at the bar "Ginger's" on Newhall St.
Much was made of the more affordable cocktail choices (until 8 PM anyway); for my part I consumed quite a few, including "Johnny Cash", which leant heavily on the Maker's Mark. Some time after 8, we all jumped in a cab to Digbeth, arriving at the Dining venue only to find that every van had run out of food already. This was a little disappointing, as we'd assumed that a dining club which advertised itself as open from "5 til late" might reasonably be relied upon to serve food for most of that time, but we skedaddled off to Jamie's Italian up the road in Spiceal Street/The Bullring, to make the most of it.
More cocktails were consumed. There was a Gin and Earl Grey Martini, a special Mojito, a Negroni. It was probably too many, but at least this time we had food to accompany it. I was very pleased with my choice of the Beef Shin: delicious, tender, and full of flavour.
When we finished up dinner, it was knocking on 11PM, surprisingly. Home was just a short train ride away. Conversation for the evening had swerved towards the topic of drunken adolescent misdeeds, of which between me and my sister, we had quite a few. It was nice talking two-to-two with my sister and brother-in-law in a drinking setting; not something we do often. I largely escaped from feeling like the bad son, for a change, or otherwise guilty of one thing or another; and no awkward arguments broke out about the military. A success, even if my head on Saturday morning may have disagreed.
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So let's just imagine that December brought with it several insightful blog entries from me about Christmas, because I meant to write them - honestly, I did - but I guess I was having too much fun actually enjoying the month to get down to it. Or I was too lazy. Yeah, there is that. This Christmas was meant to be spent in New York City. We bailed on that, for one reason and for another and a few minor ones, and the upshot was that *suddenly* we weren't going and so it was going to be Christmas here after all. In this way the festival and the season snuck up on us. It still felt like Halloween for me; I wasn't ready for it to be Christmas. But it was coming whether or not I liked it (I do like it) so I had to prepare for it. We've done a great job at it. I said over on ZuckerBook that one of the things that Christmas means to me is reconnecting with friends both old and new, and commonly seen and not commonly seen alike. And from that prism Christmas has been a grand success. We've seen quite a few friends, but it hasn't felt like a chore we didn't want to do and/or couldn't get out of. An excellent upside to not going on holiday is by the time we finally decided not to, the holiday for the break had already been booked and approved by our respective workplaces (Liz doesn't really need her holiday approved. She calls the shots. I need to raise an electronic form and mail three people just to sneeze). It's a lot of holiday. I don't think I'd realised until the day I broke up from work when I looked at how long I was off and it was, in fact, until the second week of January (like, 7th or 8th?). That's pretty awesome. I am a dick about taking lots of time off for Christmas anyway but this really takes the biscuit. So we're at the point now where in most years, I'd be getting ready to go back into work for a day or two (during which nothing productive would get done, but I would be at work) before having a few days off more for the New Year. Instead, this year, I'm still in holiday mode. And when New Year's Eve is over, I'll still be holiday mode for a few days yet. Great stuff. Today I'm off to give blood. Hopefully we can fit in a coffee trip afterwards/before. Fuck the sales. Current Location: Under the Magic Quilt
Current Music: She and Him - The Christmas Waltz
Current Mood: upbeat
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Liz wanted us to go and see The Iron Lady. There's nothing wrong with a film existing about a person you don't admire, after all, is there? Hitler's been in loads of films, and the most recently prominent, Downfall, was really popular and led to a humourous Youtube meme. There's nothing saying that the film is going to come down pro-Thatcher and her policies, right? There's no reason why lefties and righties alike shouldn't be seeing it. Perhaps it being from the same director as "Mamma Mia!" should be far more of a sticking point as to whether it's worthwhile seeing. After all, "Mamma Mia!" is already responsible for the crime against celluloid that is Pierce Brosnan singing "S.O.S" - what could another film by the same director unleash upon the world? As it turns out, the scariest we get is a bomb-befuddled Denis Thatcher shouting about his shoes. It could have been so much worse. Overall I'd say The Iron Lady is worth a watch regardless of your political affiliations. If you honestly think you'll be unable to watch a depiction of Thatcher onscreen without shouting, or throwing things, you should perhaps ask why you don't feel the same (assuming you don't) about Hitler, real life serial killers, Kim Jong-il in Team America: World Police, and so on. It's fair to say that Streep gives a brilliant performance as Thatcher, over and above an uncanny impersonation, although she manages that as well. We are invited - and do, despite everything - to feel sorry for Thatcher, to feel happy for her, to share her elation and success and paranoia at various points. Jim Broadbent is reliably brilliant as Denis, and it was a nice surprise to see Olivia Colman (avec daft fake nose) as Carol (though no mention of golliwogs! Probably for the best, eh?). I suspect half the fun of the film is in seeing who will turn up as who - there's some nice cameos in there, both of prominent actors and of (to me) unknowns playing prominent figures (look! There's Michael Foot!). Giles/Anthony Stewart Head - for some reason going by "Anthony Head" in the credits, rather than "Giles" - has a far more prominent role than I would have imagined. The other half of fun in the film seems to just be in seeing an edited highlight reel of events that happened and stuff in real life, in Britain, (largely) in the sixties, seventies and eighties. There's nothing wrong with going to see a film in which things you remember living through are depicted onscreen. In and of itself though, such a film doesn't seem like much of an achievement or all that interesting. Something I was worried about - taking sides - never really comes to pass. It seemed to me that Thatcher's reign in office was covered quite well, all the highlights, things she is known for, but (crucially) without the film coming out on Thatcher's side. It is quite clear that there is a constantly-present element that strongly disagree with what she is doing, and they are not depicted as being wrong. You could say that some of the effects of what Thatcher did are not shown - but why should they be? This isn't a sober account of Thatcher's time and office, whether what she did was right or not, her impact on history and on what was to come. It's about her. The one part of the highlight reel that rang a bit strange to me was the run-up to the Falklands war. It was very jingoistic, full of bluster and overly patriotic - and by most accounts, so was the war - but I felt like the film came down on the side of this, that it was saying "surely nobody could disagree that this was the right thing to do at the time", and that there could be no dissent. This may have just been me though; I don't think Liz had similar problems with that element. If you go into the film expecting the bulk of it to be about Thatcher and her rise to power, Thatcher, and her time in office, Thatcher and her successes, Thatcher, and her toppling, the night when knives came out, you might be disappointed - or surprised at least. I haven't mentioned it until now, but the film largely takes place in the modern day. The highlight reel we see is just what that implies - it is Thatcher's own recollections of her past, and Thatcher is no longer really in her right mind, so I am unsure that her recollections can even be that trusted (there are hints of this when her flashbacks occasionally get a bit dreamlike, funny angles, speech coming from figures onscreen that are not talking when we see them, and so on). I don't mean to say that the depiction of history is inaccurate, but rather that Thatcher is only recalling the moments that most left an impact on her, or even, that she is jolted into recalling in the modern day. But it is this modern setting - the framework to the film, really - that I have the most issue with, that becomes the real problem with the film for me. After everything, it wasn't whether I'd agree with the way the film paints her achievements or otherwise that got to me. It was that they used her mental illness - the mental illness, remember, of a woman who is still alive and is really dealing with this day to day (regardless of what you think of her) - as a plot device, as a structure to the film. The film certainly doesn't make fun of her condition, but Christ, does it take liberties. I find myself in the unenviable position of feeling sorry for Margaret Thatcher - not the fake version on film but the real woman. It is exploitative. Imagine if Tony Blair was going through a horrible cancer ordeal, and that this was public knowledge. Now imagine a film made of his time in office and rise to power, in which a frail and sick modern-day Tony is startled into remembering moments from his highlight reel by the sight of his chemo-induced hair-loss in the mirror, by the sight of his gaunt body, by radiotherapy visits. It's not a nice image and I'm sorry for mentioning it, if it offends (if the imaginary condition of Tony Blair, offends, yes, I know, but it feels wrong laying it out somehow anyway). But why, then, should Maggie Thatcher's illness - mental, yes, but very real, and happening right now in real life - be any different to a "physical" illness? The framing device isn't even that good; it's clunky, it's too obvious, it makes you roll your eyes, and the climax to the film was almost laughable. I don't know whether it's established in real life that Thatcher constantly imagines her dead husband still alive, and talks to him, but whether or not it is true, it felt deeply wrong to see it being used onscreen for something so cheap as the entertainment of the cinema masses. So go and see it, by all means - look, it's an accurate representation of a real person's accent and mannerisms! (Oscar-bait) Look, here's some things I remember happening in real life! - but don't expect to come out without a bad taste in your mouth. Post-scripts - 1) Perhaps my sensitivity to the exploitation of mental illness issue is down to my nan, who suffered greatly from Alzheimer's disease and lived with us for quite a few years while in the grip of the condition. I don't like seeing it used as a clunky way of framing a film, even more so when the subject of the film is still with us. 2) This is not to say Alzheimer's shouldn't be depicted onscreen, of course, and I welcome more awareness about mental illness, dementia and the like in books, on TV, and in film. Just, like, maybe, try not to use an old lady's suffering as popcorn entertainment. 3) I gather there was some debate in the media and online over whether it was right to make such a film while Thatcher was still alive. Some were saying it was worse still for people to be saying "we should be waiting until Thatcher is dead to do this". Well, it may be brutal but here it is - yes, they should have waited until she was dead if they were going to do the film this way. If they were going to do it at all. Tags: films, movies, politics, reviews, thatcher
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I sit here in one of Birmingham's independent coffee-shops. This one has WiFi, and so I have brought along my laptop to which I occasionally pay attention between moves of almost-Scrabble on my phone device and ploughing through the stack of newspapers to my right (it has been a newspaper-heavy week for me. I tend to buy one newspaper a week normally, and that takes me a few days to get through because I try to read everything. Well, not the Financial Section or the Sports Supplement, obviously. Time is short, my friends. Sometimes we buy a Sunday newspaper too - last weekend I did so as a simultaneous reward to the Guardian Media Group for their efforts on the phone-hacking scandal, and a protest against the final issue of the News of the World, which sold like gold-dust. What with papers and magazines and comics and the internet - Twitter especially - books rarely get a look-in in my life nowadays. This must change. Perhaps if the news could stop being so damned interesting and important?).
I am here alone. Liz is off seeing a film with a friend. This doesn't happen very often and she'll probably need picking up soon. I hope she enjoyed the film. Meanwhile I am here alone and so laptops and newspapers and Grant Morrison's The Filth and everyone on the internet are my exclusive company.
This independent coffee-shop trapped and teased us aurally, the last time we were here. I think they tend to play Absolute Radio and the music on there varies. Last time we visited, the music lured us in with an excellent set of songs by admirable artists, before all the bilge started. I tweeted about the whole thing and included the coffee-shop in on the tweets, so the ensuing narrative would appear on the coffee-shop's Twitter-wall that they have in the corner. I drew parallels with reparations and the Treaty of Versailles. It seemed to make sense at the time.
Someone here is discussing M Night Shyamalan. Must tune it out...
I've mostly zoned out from the music they've been playing today. If I did nothing but paid attention to the music, my paper-reading would take a hit. But I recognised something they were playing and I tuned in over the sound of the refrigerator purring and the caffeine apparatus chuntering away in the background.
It was Amy Winehouse's "Tears Dry On Their Own".
I was never that big a fan of Amy; I didn't think the booze and the drugs were funny, neither did I consider so the UK tabloids' eagle-eye concentration on the issue, all too often exacerbating the problem. Liz bought her first album and I tried listening to it a few times when it came out, but it wasn't really my bag. When her second album (Back to Black) hit like a neutron-bomb I stayed away to begin with, a natural instinctive reflex to shy away from everything everyone else can't get enough of taking over my normal curiosity (and Liz's recommendations). Ask me sometime about what I think of Gavin and Stacey. Better yet, do not.
I thought "good on her" when she seemed to make an impressive stab at taking America, traditionally the hurdle over which many UK top artists stumble and collapse upon like a sacrificial lamb before returning to Britain and licking their wounds. There aren't many that took America. You can count them on one hand if you've lost a few fingers.
Eventually the radioactive half-life of popularity wore off a little with me and I listened a bit more. I never managed to become the hugest fan - maybe I still will, maybe I won't - but you can't deny the brilliance of that second album in places. Much of that may be down to Mark Ronson but he can't take all the credit, even he wanted to. But it's out there now, this work of brilliance, this legacy, untainted by whatever else she chose to do in her life or things that were done to her.
It felt important to listen after hearing about her unnaturally young death yesterday, at this time still unexplained but assumed by most (probably correctly) to be drink and/or drug-related. The song was a black echo in the air, like some last trace of her hanging around for a few minutes to remind people of the things she had done before she departed.
I heard recently that The Verve owe a lot of their continued success with the Urban Hymns album to the death of Princess Diana. For a few months (though it seemed a lot longer), the whole country descended into mass hysteria and what seemed at the time like almost unanimous grief (a few columnists, in fact, have drawn parallels between then and now; then, we were as hired mourners, beating our breasts and tearing our hair at the graveside of someone none of us had ever known, who did not ask for this affection - now, we are a TwitterRage writ large, demanding more and more resignations, admittances of guilt, endless coverage of the phone-hacking scandal). We needed sad, slow, appropriately respectful music on the radio. Anything else, it would appear, would be an insult. So it was that The Verve's "The Drugs Don't Work" was deemed fitting, just mournful enough, unintrusive, at least a blessed break from Elton John's Candle In The Wind Redux (another who benefitted). So the story went, the success of the song - so needed after Bittersweet Symphony, which nicked a gimmick from an existing band - was in no insignificant part helped by the passing of this princess.
What we see now is a microcosm of that; for a few days, we must all occasionally pay tribute to Amy, in both the songs we choose to play on the radio and those we do not (massmarket songs that address Norway being mercifully thin on the ground).
It is a respectful silence as the coffin goes by.
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The next couple of weekends are busy for us. Next weekend we're off down south to see Liz's family (and possibly some other friends, if we have any spare time). The weekend after that we have other friends coming to stay with us and we may be out shopping with them in Birmingham. The weekend after that (the last before Christmas), we may be having our good friends David and Michelle (and their daughters, Mabel and Daisy) coming to stay.
Often, as it gets closer to Christmas, I'll use some holiday at work to take a day off in early December during the week to do some Christmas shopping. That isn't really an option this year - the double-whammy of holidays and many weddings this year has left me with few days left to take off, so I'll be using them for Christmas week.
We decided it would be wise, therefore, to try and get a lot of Christmas shopping done this morning, as early as possible before the crowds converged on Solihull. We made it into town quite early and after some coffee and breakfast, we got stuck in quickly. After a good walk around town we came away with quite a haul - Christmas shopping is done for my Mum and both of Liz's parents, as well as our niece and sister-in-law as well as a few others. We were home by 1 pm; earlier than we would be on a standard Saturday, in fact.
Since then we've done some Christmas shopping online and relaxed a little. I think we deserve it; it's been a productive morning.
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In other news, we had our first snow of the season overnight/this morning. It's been a bit of a cold snap in the UK in the last week or so, and Scotland, Wales, and Northern England have already been "blessed" with lots of snow in the last few days. Our level was more or less perfect, nothing to foul up the roads but just enough to render everything picturesque. Not quite "Painter of Light" but that's probably best for everyone, isn't it?
So even though it's not yet December I started listening to some Christmas music this morning (Phil Spector's "A Christmas Gift To You", distorted in the car due to the cold). I'd already broken our self-imposed policy on Mince Pies (not to tuck into any before the 1st December). What the hell. Tis the season.
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