Category: Miscellaneous

…and very compelling. Nagl, over at Falling Sky points the way to some fantastic Polish movie posters. From the look of this one for David Cronenberg’s the Fly, the artist who created it saw the same things in the film as I did. There’s a really sexy one for Dirty Dancing too, sexier than the actual movie by about 20° C.

I decided the old design of the weblog was starting to creak a bit – it was nearly two years old, dang it! So I tinkered a bit today. I hope it all works well and looks good. If you spot any problems, let me know.

The comments will now be handled nice and elegantly by Blogger, so to comment on posts in the future, click on "comments." I’ll be disabling the old comments system in a couple of weeks, so don’t click "respond" to leave comments. OK?

Just a quick post to keep things bubbling while I work on the turkey frying pictures. Another Park Ave shot, the house across the road has dollar bills glued to the pavement (sidewalk) out front. I’ve not seen a single person fooled in six months.

The official period of mourning is now over, but everything was still at half-mast on Friday when Courtney and I visited the Port of Rochester Ferry Terminal. Everything that looks like a flag, at least. While checking the place out we caught sight of this:

I can just about understand a large number of Americans wanting to mourn Ronald Reagan, the ketchup-loving ones especially, but I’m doubtful that Canadians give two hoots that the old fool kicked the bucket.

Then again, the Maple Leaf appears to be flying at somewhat less than half-mast. Perhaps there’s some law which dictates that no flag of a foreign nation on US soil is permitted to fly higher than the Stars and Stripes. I wouldn’t be surprised.

…that people do to celebrate American Independence Day, this deserves some kind of prize. Courtney’s parents have decided to investigate the worrying trend that is sweeping the States: the deep-fried turkey. I am terrified at the prospect. What next? Deep-fried cow?

What’s wrong with a nice bit of battered haddock?

Worst thing is, if the turkey isn’t properly defrosted the deep fryer will launch it into orbit, or so I’m told. I’ll try to get pictures.

During my last visit back to the Shire, Dom noted that I had changed from being plain-and-simple “Liam” to “Porky Liam.” Much as I like the idea of this as my superhero alter-ego, I don’t fancy it as my normal human state.

There are plenty of things to blame my spare tyre on: American sized portions and the fact that as a child I had to clear my plate before leaving the table; the cold, cold winter; the six months forced unemployment that kept me indoors. Oh, there are many sad, pallid, bloated excuses I can make for my increasing girth, none of which cut the mustard – or my weight.

Courtney has noticed a similar ballooning around her waistline, which started with my arrival and her switch away from a toast-only diet. Now, with the arrival of summer, and the moderate certainty we’ll be able to leave the house without getting snowed on, she has decided we’re to start running off the fat. Tonight I expect we’ll raid the wardrobe to find a semblance of a jogging outfit for me. I don’t do sports clothing, so the results should be interesting, and probably bloggable.

But right now it’s time for lunch. A 14″ Italian sub sandwich with lettuce, black olives, Swiss cheese, spicy mustard and hot peppers from Wegmans should just about sort me out…

I took the camera out today on a little image-harvesting session. As Courtney and I are leaving the environs of Park Avenue and Rochester for good at the end of July, I thought I’d get a few snaps of the places that make the street for me. Here’s my favourite piece of street art. Book-nerd cool!

There are movies that you love because of their bravado, their “Sod-you!” accomplishment; movies like Citizen Kane, A Clockwork Orange, The Royal Tenenbaums. There are movies you love because of their heartfelt authenticity and conviction; movies like Kes, Wild Strawberries and The Son’s Room. There are movies you love because they’re breathtakingly fun and stylish; movies like North by Northwest, Fight Club and Pulp Fiction.

And there are movies like Anaconda, which are generic, uninspired, ersatz and leaden. I saw Anaconda at the age of 17, drunk and lairy, with a bunch of mates in the Worcester Odeon and I loved every minute. What made me fall so deeply in love with this piece of trash, this celluloid swindle? It wasn’t the spectacle of Jennifer Lopez asking “Is it just me, or does the jungle make you really horny?”. It wasn’t the sight of Jon Voigt’s dirty-old-man leer. It wasn’t Ice Cube bellowing “We don’t know shit about the shit we’re in!”. It wasn’t even the comedy Englishman dispatching a baddie with a 9-iron and the war-cry “There’s an arsehole in one!” It was all these moments and more. A cornucopia of hyper-real movie logic, sketchy exposition and bad special effects, Anaconda will live unsullied in my memory as the most unintentionally, gloriously silly movie I’ve ever seen.

On June 7th, James sent me an email. How I managed to avoid reading it for a month I don’t know, but today I did, and this is what it said.

Just when you thought it was safe to venture back to the b-movies…

http://www.sonypictures.com/movies/anacondas/index.html

Leering; bad puns; atrocious acting – all guaranteed!

Seven years later – a sequel! No matter that the original was a stinking pile of dung that sank without trace. Presumably the executives behind this are hoping that the law of dimishing returns will somehow be turned on its head by this re-run in which scientists travel to the depths of the Borneo jungle in search of – oh! – a mysterious orchid which holds the secret of eternal youth. I only hope it’s out in the UK when Courtney and I are back in August so I can return to the scene of the crime to see its sequel.

I especially like that it’s called Anacondas. You can almost hear the studio execs: “Ah yes, it worked for Alien and Aliens, and they were good movies, so why can’t it work for us?”

When I created this webpage, way back whenever, I did it for two reasons:

1) I was trying to find ways of keeping amused that weren’t going out to the Cardinal’s Hat, the Three Kings, the Apple Tree or the Swan with Two Nicks, and that would keep me writing, even if it was just a line or two here and there about formalist films by dead Russians.

2) I knew I would be leaving the country, and I wanted something on the web which would, at the very least, remind my family and friends of what I look like.

It turns out that this weblog had a third reason for being, which at the time was known only to the Fates.

I spent the first twenty-four years of my life not knowing my biological father. The events surrounding my birth would make a perfect Thomas Hardy plot, and so for various, tragically avoidable reasons Duncan was not around when I was born.

Mum had told me about him since I was old enough to speak and listen, and while I grew up happy and content knowing that I had one father who loved me and provided for me, I knew that there was another father in another town, maybe another country, whose blood I shared. I often wondered what else I shared with him. Did we look alike? Behave alike? Did I have his smile, his laugh?

When I was eighteen my parents told me that, as an adult, I was legally able to search for Duncan and make contact. Mum knew his parents – my grandparents – lived in the same house as they had when she knew him. All I needed to do was walk up to their gate, but for the past seven years I couldn’t bring myself to do it. What if Duncan didn’t want to know me? What if he was married to a woman who didn’t know his past? I thought about the meeting many times, running it over in my head, but I hesitated at the point of action. Who knows what kind of an incident I could have caused?

About two months ago the twenty-four years of silence were broken. On the last day of our holiday in Florida I checked my email. Among the usual offers of free money from Nigerian businessmen, Vicodin, weight loss and penis gain tablets, was an email from a girl called Cate Graham with the subject “Half Brother?”

A couple of stiff drinks later I replied to her email. The things she knew about me were correct. Out of nowhere I had a half-sister. I hoped it wasn’t a cruel hoax or a practical joke. The next day, back at our apartment in Rochester, I hooked up the laptop and checked my email again. Another email from Cate. If I was happy to correspond with her, would I mind if my other sisters wrote too?

Other sisters? Yes, there are two, Sinead and Rhianon. Cate, do your parents know you’ve been in touch? Yes.

A couple of days later, the expected email from Duncan arrived. A few days after that the subject of meeting up was broached. On June 3rd I stepped off a plane at Heathrow terminal 4 into the arms of my lost-and-found family. It’s been a very strange, exciting and fulfilling few weeks. I was an only child from a small family. Now I have an extra father, a kind-of-stepmother, three half-sisters, a set of grandparents and a host of aunts, uncles and cousins, all of whom I’m sure will be mentioned here eventually. And, in a certain mood, under the right light, my biological father and I do have the same smile.

From left to right: Lynne, Rhianon, Caitlin, Sinead, Duncan.

So, how did Duncan eventually find me? After years of calling various organisations, searching through records, asking friends of friends who lived in the town where I was born, and checking Friends Reunited and making no progress the solution was deceptively simple: on a whim he googled my name and found this site. OK, so there aren’t millions of Liam Creightons, but there are quite a few. Try this: go to Google, type my name into the little box and click on “I’m Feeling Lucky.” You’ll get this website. The only reason that happens is because more people have read this page than any other that contain the words “Liam Creighton”.

So, who is to thank for this happy ending? Lots of people, but right now I want to thank everyone who’s ever looked at this silly little website. Those hits made everything easier. Hurrah for the internet. Hurrah for blogging. Hurrah for my conviction that what I write is worth reading. And hurrah to you for reading it!

Cheers.

Time for a correction and a clarification. After posting my diatribe against these silly Yanks and their appropriation of foreign national holidays, Meg and Kelvin sent me this link to information about the Cinco di Mayo.

So it’s a kind of independence day, but not really. It’s a repelling the French day, and is important to people all over the Americas. Apologies for not doing enough research, etc. I shall try harder in the future not to be a whingeing killjoy, honest.

However, I can still say without fear of contradiction that St. Patrick’s Day in Rochester was a surreal experience.

Yesterday was apparently Mexican Independence Day. The first I knew about it was when the girl who does my hair asked me what I was doing for “Cinco de Mayo,” which Americans celebrate as the day Mexico rejected Spanish rule.

Why Americans celebrate another country’s independence is perplexing in the first place, but even odder is that they haven’t even got the right date. Mexican Independence day is actually 16th September. I suspect the merrymaking and sombrero-wearing of last night was merely a cynical plot to offload a few bottles of Corona, and little else.

A little over a month ago there was St. Patrick’s Day (or, as everyone here calls it, St. Patty’s Day – who knew Patricia was a saint?). When I tried to order a Guinness the barman mistook my English accent and said “Hey, straight off the boat! I like that!” There was no point in correcting him (most Americans don’t know the difference between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and think that the whole island is part of the UK). People were selling dyed-green carnations, which to my knowledge were symbols of the aesthetic movement, most notably Oscar Wilde, and have never been a symbol of Irish nationalism. Why is America so keen to appropriate other people’s cultures if it is only going to make a mockery of them?

I can’t wait to see what happens here for Bastille Day, which may be marked here on 14th July, or possibly some time in November, and will probably feature such authentic French specialities as French Fries and French Toast.

(With apologies to the makers of Better Off Dead)

On the Ball, City!

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]