Author: Liam

For very little reason at all I’ve added to the music links on the left of the page. Now you too have the unique opportunity to find out what kinds of noise Courtney is subjected to when we’re both in the apartment. For those with decent Flash support the Cinematic Orchestra’s website has a very pleasant swirly interactive logo on the front page. I must have spent all of thirty seconds playing with it.

I think I’m just working myself up for the Big Chill. Courtney and I booked our tickets yesterday. Three sun-soaked days of music and merrymaking on the Malvern Hills, you say? Oh yes. Yes indeedy.

I’ve been catching up on my reading recently. At long last I’ve done what I’ve been promising myself for a good long while by picking up Courtney’s copies of the His Dark Materials trilogy. Pullman is an absolutely spellbinding storyteller. I devoured the first two in about three or four days, but I underestimated how much reading I’d get done on holiday and left the Amber Spyglass at home. They’ve been reviewed and talked about so much that I’ve got nothing new to bring to the discussion, other than to say I was mightily pissed off at the end of the second book, and that I’d almost forgotten how satisfying non-realist, non-modernist, non-postmodern narratives can be.

Then I read another that everyone is talking about back home, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon. James brought it over for Courtney. It’s a quick read (a quiet Sunday should get you through the bulk of it). What struck me is that it’s essentially a kitchen-sink drama (and, yes, a detective story) transformed by being told through the eyes of a boy with Asperger’s syndrome. This is the book’s greatest achievement. By handing over the narration to the protagonist the illogic of his autistic behaviour is revealed to be very structured, patterned and motivated. The formalists aimed to create art that gave the spectator the chance to look at everyday life from a different perspective, and the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time does exactly that without feeling either gimmicky or worthy. If I were in a position to make such decisions I’d declare it required reading in high schools.

A good comprehensive review is onThe Modern Word, which is a thoroughly decent website.

Yesterday I read a novella by Mikhail Bulgakov called Heart of a Dog. A Russian scientist takes a stray dog and replaces his pituitary gland and seminary vesicles with those of a human. Over the course of a few days the perfectly adequate dog turns into an utterly deplorable man. Clearly it’s not a scientific record, but a work of political satire. I wonder what it is with political satire and anthropomorphism? Bulgakov wrote the book in 1925, but it wasn’t published in his native Russia until 1987. I don’t know when his work was translated into English and whether or not Bulgakov, who died in 1940, had any influence on George Orwell. Either way it’s an odd book, and feels a little like the Ibsen play the Wild Duck, which I found very odd and very satisfying. In fact, the two playwrights shared a creative milieu; both had works produced at the Moscow Arts Theatre by Stanislavsky, and Bulgakov spent time there as a producer. I think I’m starting to understand.

And tonight I’ll be cracking open the final volume of His Dark Materials. I already had a quick peek at the preface: an excerpt from a Robert Grant hymn, a few lines of Rainer Maria Rilke and a chunk of John Ashbery. Best of all the first page opens with a line of Blake. Honestly, the trash they give kids to read these days makes me sick.

I’ve really been neglecting this site for the last few weeks, but at least it’s because I’ve been doing stuff. James’ visit neatly co-incided with Courtney buying a digital camera, so here’s a snap from our first of two days in NYC. Yes, we went skating at the Rockefeller Centre. Shut up. It was cool. The hostel was a bit crap (never stay at “Jazz on the Town”, kids) but NYC was willing to perform its usual cabaret show for us. One of the highlights this time was seeing the dog enclosure in Washington Square Park, and then seeing the tiny dog enclosure for tiny dogs right next to it. I could happily live there. New York, that is, not the dog enclosure.

As is fast becoming habit we met up with Courtney’s cousin Meri and her fiance, Jason, who are outstandingly hospitable and lovely, and I didn’t embarrass myself too badly this time. I’m looking forward to our next NYC trip, whenever it may be.

Today I read Kelvin’s review of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I saw the film a couple of weeks ago, loved chunks of it, admired the rest, and left feeling warm and happy inside – so I don’t know if Kelvin saw the same film.

It wallowed in its cleverness, it wasn’t nearly as funny as it thought it was, and like so many films today (especially of the “independent” sort) it quite obviously subscribed to the Happy Endings Are Bad school of thought as it dragged the plot kicking and screaming not to its logical end, but to a more cynical climax more acceptable to goatee-stroking film students.

Now, I’ll concede that I am/was a goatee-stroking film student (but without the goatee), and offer a justification for films that don’t end happily. Gus Van Sant, who has at times made baffling choices (shot-by-shot remake of Psycho? Finding Forrester?), was interviewed about his latest movie, Elephant, in Sight and Sound the other month, and a lot of what he said made sense, including this, which seemed so pertinent I wrote it down in my little blue book.

In daily life in America there is always discontinuity. If you wander around or even go to a cohesive interaction like a party everything is made up of non-sequitirs. Things don’t have beginnings and endings in our lives, and if you want to make storytelling lifelike, you have to play by the rules of reality, which is that nothing is connecting, nothing is making sense. It’s like a Hobbesian world of people striving to get their next meal.

I’ve never subscribed to the Happy Endings Are Bad school of thought any more than I’ve subscribed to the diktat Films Must End Happily Because First And Foremost They’re Entertainment. There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that what are generally held to be the most unmuddied of happy endings are much less stable than we think. And there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind didn’t end sadly.

If you’ve not seen the film and want to keep the ending a surprise, read no further.

If the “logical end” that Kelvin claims the plot was dragged past is Joel and Clementine’s meeting at Montauk Point, then I’d like to suggest that ending the film at that point would be cheating. When both Joel and Clementine’s friends eventually see them together the business of the memory erasure would be mentioned to one or the other, and their unfortunate discovery would still occur. Their ignorance would not be any kind of defence against tragedy. The way the film progresses beyond this point is not cheating, and it thankfully doesn’t waste time putting the audience through a soap opera style exposure of the truth.

It’s only logical that after a process that is “essentially brain-damage” the participants should be frightened and scared. People suffering from concussion often cry because they’re disoriented. Now imagine that someone you’ve just met, and are falling in love with, exposes you to a taped interview in which they are telling a stranger just how terrible a person you are. You’re not likely to leap into their arms declaiming “Oh darling, you’re so funny!” Of course you’d fall out, just like Joel and Clementine do. But The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind doesn’t end there. The film stops awkwardly outside Joel’s apartment where he and Clementine could either get back together and make new memories of each other or go their separate ways. It’s an Italian Job ending where everything hangs (figuratively rather than literally in this case) in the balance.

Of course, given what we’ve just seen there’s no guarantee that the “Happy Ending” promised by their reunion would be happy at all. It could be miserable: their relationship has already failed once. But this “ending” isn’t forced upon us. The film stops before the story ends and the viewer is left to decide how she wants everything to wind up. It’s a happy film or a sad film depending solely on your outlook.

While we all like to imagine that Michael Caine’s idea to right the bus works, and the lads get away with the gold, somewhere in our hearts we know it’s impossible; and that doesn’t make the Italian Job a sad film.

…and this happens in Somerset.

Could the two events be related? I think we should be told.

(Apologies to Kelvin and the bloke he nicked the link off before I nicked it off him)

Last night Courtney and I took our first steps towards becoming twinkle-toed dancers for the inevitable season of weddings which loom on the calendar’s horizon (sometime around June). Swing Dance for Beginners happened at the Twelve Corners Presbyterian Church in Rochester, and by God it’s a sprawling edifice. I have decided all dance classes are essentially alike, but with regional variations. American can claim rights to two in particular: the first is the ever-present name tag, although thankfully they weren’t pre-printed with “Hello, my name is.” The second is that the instructors wear the kind of obvious microphone headsets reminiscent of late eighties Madonna or twenty-first century call centre workers.

They also had one of those cool CD decks beloved of club DJs which allow you to slow down the speed of the recording. If I hadn’t been concentrating so hard on my feet I’d have been eyeing it enviously. And one, two, dou-ble-step, dou-ble-step.

They patiently took us through the basic step structure and I lost my way only once, although this did entail hopping around like Steve Martin in the Jerk with his honky rhythm deficiency, trying to get back on the beat. Still, no-one laughed. When I recovered I looked up and everyone else was doing the Steve Martin dance too. Several partners and a pair of moist armpits later (mostly from the stress of being watched by the more advanced class who had gathered at the back of the room) we were sent off into the night to argue with our partners about which of the other people we’d danced with we fancied. I got three hotties, Courtney just got old men.

Our Swing-themed night was rounded off with Belleville Rendez-Vous (or the Triplets of Belleville) at the Little. It’s an inventive animation with an eye for the absurd, stereotypical and grotesque. It takes a range of potent cultural myths and throws them into the blender. Its only flaw it that it outsmarts itself at the climax by dissolving into a hackneyed chase that does not suit the genre.

Many people who have seen it have commented “I’ve never seen anything like it before. It’s nothing like Disney!” This is true, but whoever said all animation had to be like Disney? There’s a long tradition (more so, I think, in Europe) of animation and absurdism. Animated precedents for Belleville Rendez-Vous include the surrealist animation of Jan Svankmajer, Gosciny and Uderzo’s Asterix and – possibly – the Brothers Quay. It also draws on the live-action exploits of Jacques Tati (did anyone spot the M. Houlot poster in the Triplets’ apartment?) and adopts and absurdist tone throughout.

The music, like the visuals, are a heady hodge-podge, blending swing, blues, hot club (there’s a brief appearance by an animated Django Reinhardt, whose hands are those of Mickey Mouse – a fantastic joke if you know anything about the reduced finger count of both characters), musique concrete and club music. I think it won an Oscar for best song, and quite right too.

I’m calling it Belleville Rendez-Vous because of the three official titles, that’s the one that suits it best. The triplets are accomplices, not the main characters. I don’t think that counts as a spoiler.

Courtney and I – in what must count as a shocking display of un-Americanism – went to see Bertolucci’s The Dreamers last night. An intelligent and provocative film, the responses it squeezed out of the audience of twenty or so offered what I think is an insight into the collective consciousness of the nation.

Without spoiling the film for anyone who intends to watch it (and by all means do) it deals with the political scene in Paris in 1968, cinema, sex, and incestuous relationships through the eyes of three students. During one beautifully edgy disrobing I caught a nervous cough firing out from behind me. It was a mellow, deep, throaty cough; the kind of cough your Dad coughs. You’d expect the owner of this cough to have seen a thing or two. One would presume (he was there with a woman of similar age) he’d been married for many years and is no stranger to the sight of naked female flesh. He had also sought out an art house cinema and an NC-17 rated film. Why, then, was he unnerved by a little post-pubescent petting?

The Dreamers is not a comedy, but it has its comic moments. Courtney and I were the only ones laughing. Did people just not get it, or didn’t they find it funny? No-one walked out in disgust, but the cinema drained pretty quickly as soon as the credits rolled. All of which leaves me wondering: is sex a taboo outside Los Angeles and New York?

In comparison, when Pasolini’s Salo was re-released in the UK a couple of years ago I saw it in a packed cinema. Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom is far more graphic and very disturbing. It features killing, sexual humiliation, shit eating and torture. Certainly many sat in shocked silence through much of the film, but there was no awkward coughing. The audience stayed riveted until almost the final credit had rolled, and while they didn’t leave the cinema in a jovial mood, they were talking animatedly. Clumps of them hung around in the cafe to dicuss it some more. There were many criticisms of the film, but no-one was unable to deal with what they’d just seen. There is a stark comparison between that audience of two years ago and the audience of last night.

I am waiting to be proved wrong, but right now I get the impression that the mainstream American attitude to depictions and discussions of sexual matters is analagous to that of a five year-old who blushes and covers his eyes when the couple in the old movie he’s watching start to smooch.

Britons ‘spend more on alcohol than fruit and veg’ claims the Money section of the Guardian. What terrible news! We must be a nation of dispomaniacs!

1kg carrots = 60p, 1kg onions = 67p, 1 cucumber = 58p, total = 185p

1pt draught lager = 228p

(All average prices from some office in Jersey)

If we were to spend more on fruit and veg than we do alcohol I estimate we’d need to eat an average of roughly three kilos of vegetable matter for every pint we drink.

I finally watched The King of Comedy by Martin Scorsese last night. At the beginning of the 80’s he directed two black comedies: this and After Hours. Judging by the comments on the Internet Movie Database they’re pretty widely misunderstood and underappreciated. Too many people fixate on Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino and Taxi Driver. They expect every Scorsese movie to be about tough men doing tough things. It’s true that a lot of Scorsese’s movies are about male-dominated social structures: the Mafia (obviously), Jazz bands, sports and organised religion (Catholicism and Buddhism), but people who watch Scorsese films in lieu of getting a testosterone injection are missing out.

I imagine audiences at the time did not warm to Scorsese’s comedies, and this explains why he hasn’t made any since 1985. The blame should rest not only with the Scorsese=macho crew, but also with those who eschew delicate, sad and sometimes surreal and disturbing comedy for Adam Sandler pratfalls. I won’t be taking Courtney to the cinema for 50 First Dates on Valentine’s day, for purely selfish (and probably elitist) reasons.

Up til now this immigration business has been pretty daunting, but this is surely one deterrent too far. I went to get my Social Security number from the City Hall the other day. There are some windows and a waiting room which are about as threatening as a bank. There’s a ticket dispenser which is about as threatening as a normal deli-counter. But all this is a cunning ruse to calm your suspicions, for when you take your ticket – that’s when they catch you unawares!

David Kay, the recently resigned head of the US weapons inspections team in Iraq went in front of a Senate hearing yesterday.

Mr Kay blamed a lack of human agents inside Iraq and inadequate intelligence that Iraq had chemical or biological weapons stockpiles. Source: The Guardian.

Can we take this to mean that the UN should have been allowed to finish their inspections before any action was taken? That’s the way I’m reading into it.

[cough] Oil! [cough]

Ah, that would be the Hutton report.

Further proof that American comedy is in a bit of a hole right now. The last “all new” episode of Friends I saw was five minutes of new jokes and a long trawl through the archives. Will & Grace is poor and there are plenty more where that came from. The only worthwhile US comedy I’ve seen is Curb Your Enthusiasm, which in Bush’s America pushes the envelope too far to be honoured with gongs. Thing is, it’s the same style of comedy as The Office, but The Office is “ethnic” (yes, I’m finally part of an ethnic minority), and so over here it’s worthy as well as funny.

I’m not allowed to get a job right now. So with all this wonderful free time I’ve been trying to do something worthwhile. A bunch of people I know quite fancy having their own blog, but don’t think they’ve got enough to write about. Well, having thought for a while, I’ve made a group blog, and people seem to be using it. Lovely. It’s called One Thing I Learned Today and it might be worth a look.

It has snowed here every day this month. You don’t so much walk down the street as walk down a chasm of snow. There’s enough snow in our back yard to build an igloo. I might well do so.

OK, I promised. I’ll deliver.

A great director once said (and I’m paraphrasing here) “All I’ve ever done is re-make the same film over and over.” I can’t remember who the director was, and I can’t look it up because all my film books are back in England. But trust me on this one. He was a director, and he said something similar to the words above.

This stunningly badly-remembered passage can be very appropriately applied to the career arc of Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu. His latest film glides into the showroom very much like a mk. II Amores Perros. It’s more refined, shorter, more disciplined, lingers longer and strikes deeper than his much-lauded debut feature.

21 Grams is set in the US. (As an aside, I hope that this doesn’t mean that Hollywood has already devoured the main practitioners behind the Mexican new wave and that Innaritu will follow a similar path to his compatriot Alfonso Cauron, who has so far managed to dodge back and forth between Hollywood and his indigenous cinema with Great Expectations, Y Tu Mama Tambien and the imminent third installment of the Harry Potter series.) It employs a similar disjointed narrative technique to Amores Perros as we skip backwards and forwards through time catching glimpses of the principal three characters’ stories. Early on we see blood, we see the angry and wounded faces of the leads, played by Benicio Del Toro, Naomi Watts and Sean Penn, and we wonder what twists of fate could conspire to bring them here. 21 Grams is essentially a puzzle, a puzzle with a strong symmetry and, thankfully, a puzzle that solves itself before our eyes.

Late in the film, Benicio Del Toro’s character, Jack Jordan, is drunkenly staring at a cheap print of a tiger on the wall of his flyblown motel room. It is a brief moment which conjures up the lines:

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

21 Grams is essentially a fatalistic film. The characters are locked into this string of events, and this means that its gaze is dispassionate. Addiction, extreme religion, terminal illness, emotional breakdowns are all observed with the same cool eye. No judgments are cast because the fates of all the films protagonists are set. Is it right that Naomi Watts’ character uses cocaine to escape her pain? Is it right if Benicio Del Toro’s character’s parenting will bring up another man who makes the same mistakes? Is it right that Sean Penn’s character leaves his wife? In 21 Grams there is no right and wrong, only the fearful symmetry of fate.

These people have too much time on their hands. Scroll down to the “Weird Scoreboards” part of the article for walruses and turbots.

Courtney called in sick today so we can go sledging, or sledding, or tobogganing, or whatever you want to call it. Maybe we’ll build a snowman too.

You are Jarvis Cocker from Pulp.
“I think people who think they’re sexy have
got problems.”

What gloomy rock musician are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

I am Jarvis from Pulp. It must be all that time I’ve spent with my cheeks exposed.

Lovely little article on the Guardian website. More reasons to despise mainstream TV and tabloid journalism, if you ever needed any.

Two weeks in and already we’re settling into familiar routines. I’ve noticed that Courtney and I only really nag each other about two things (one each), apart from TV. I complain about her eating habits; without me around to cook for her she’d eat nothing but toast and takeaway. On the other hand she is dumbfounded by the way I happily wash my face with hand soap, or whatever’s close to the basin, or just cold water. She tells me that there’s a programme on TV in which gay men do lifestyle make-overs to straight men. One of the first things the gay blokes do (before they redecorate the straight bloke’s house and throw out his clothes) is run into the bathroom and shriek about the lack of facial scrub.

It strikes me that our nagging of each other might reveal the root of the difference between European and American schools of thought. I, being European, think that all problems can be solved with food and a sensible approach to eating. Courtney, being American, thinks that all problems can be solved with the correct soap and a good amount of scrubbing. Guts vs face; Insides vs Exteriors; Digest vs purge. Stop me when you’re bored, or if you think I’m spouting gibberish.

It’s -10 Fahrenheit outside again today. That’s 42 degrees Fahrenheit below freezing. When I finally convert these numbers into Celsius I’ll be horrified, I’m sure.

I just did. It’s -23 degrees Celsius. I knew it felt cold out there.

This snow thing is still a novelty. It stopped snowing in the early hours of the morning and now the light breeze is knocking powdery flurries from the branches of the trees. It’s distractingly pretty, and if it weren’t below freezing outside I’d be wandering around gawping at it all.

Courtney and I saw the excellent 21 Grams at the Little last night. I’ll post some thoughts about it later. I also picked up a job application form. I wonder if they’d be willing to train me up as a projectionist? Ever since seeing Tyler Duerden’s approach to projecting film in Fight Club I’ve quite fancied having a go myself.

I was glad to read today that Norwich fans are still the bunch of good eggs I always knew they were. Hopefully I shouldn’t even need to cross my fingers for tomorrow’s clash against 20th place Bradford.

Other news? There’s a good few inches of snow on the ground, which is still a novelty for me.

Main differences between US and UK supermarkets (that I’ve noticed so far):

1) They sell beer, but not wine or spirits. In some states (Massachusetts) they don’t sell any booze at all.
2) There is a huge aisle in the freezer section specialising in ice cream, frozen yoghurt, etc. but the only frozen meat available is leftover turkeys from Thanksgiving.
3) Single cream and double cream are “Cream” and “Heavy Cream” respectively and are sold in handy measures of either half a pint or four pints.
4) Regular battery chicken eggs are bleached white, just like in Israel.
5) The only bacon on offer is streaky bacon. It’s almost impossible to get hold of back bacon and to do so you have to ask for “Canadian Bacon.”

Bizarrely, in the European cheese fridge I found a combination of Stilton and Double Gloucester (it’s done in layers) called “Stilchester”. Even more bizarrely, it’s made in England.

As a Brit you also have to contend with the fact that certain foods reached America through different routes and will not necessarily have the same names. For example, what I call coriander was brought to the Americas by the Spanish and so everyone here calls it cilantro. Still, a keen eye, a good nose and the readiness to ask silly questions will just about see you through.

Apoologies to everyone for lack of email. I’ve written a whole bunch, but I’m having trouble getting my email program to send mail, even though it recieves perfectly. Go figure.

…that’s me!

It looks like someone else has passed through immigration at JFK recently. The United States’ relations with the rest of the world get stranger and stranger.

I hope this is just selective reporting of a minor incident. Norwich isn’t exactly the most cosmopolitan of cities, but the fans did enthusiastically embrace the “Kick Racism Out of Football” campaign, so I’m a bit surprised that this should happen. Something definitely does need to be done about the “We Shoot Burglars” chant, though. I’ve heard it far too often (about twice in both matches I’ve been to this year) and it’s not the kind of thing a good family club’s supporters should chant.

It’s all to do with psychotic Norfolk farmer, Tony Martin. Here’s the Mirror’s tabloid take on him and here’s the Grauniad’s.

Clearly the man’s a national hero, just like the Krays, Nicholas van Hoogstraten and Jeffrey Archer.