Ashamed to Show Oneself: Beauties & Beasts

Yes, Darling Daughter's most recent Disney crush is the rambunctious Beauty and the Beast, and she seems as charmed by it as any of the more obvious Pretty Princess-oriented titles in the Walt canon - which would be a surprise only if one expected a Disney Beast to be genuinely scary, or properly melancholic.
The Disney version clearly owes a visual/poetic debt of sorts to Jean Cocteau's imperishable film of 1946, throughout the making of which Cocteau was tortured by impetigo, eczema, and assorted carbuncles that made him want to hide in the shadows - a punishing and yet fitting mindset for the work he had before him.
Disney stole a few decent strokes from Cocteau but needless to say they jettisoned Cocteau's crowning irony, namely that the restored Prince, in the preening form of Jean Marais, seemed a poor substitute even in Belle's eyes for the majestic, sad, wounded Beast (i.e. Marais under layers of furry make-up.)
What really marks the Disney film as a work of 1991 is how it goes merrily overboard in depicting Belle's boorish and spurned village suitor Gaston as a macho moron (who duly plummets to his death in standard Disney Villain fashion) - whereas the Beast learns how to be an absolute sweetheart, just in time for his revision to human form. John Wayne would not have approved. But then this was the early 1990s, and there was a certain vogue for masculine sensitivity: as John Buffalo Mailer evokes the era to his father Norman in the rambunctious dialogue book The Big Empty, 'Political correctness was at its height and the sensitive ponytailed guy was getting laid more than he should...'

NUFC: Incapacity = No Benefit

Ever since he took charge, and especially so as hope has dwindled, Alan Shearer has talked a first-rate game about what his team needed to do, indeed ought to do, to save themselves. And if only his starting XI could have performed in anything like the same spirit then Newcastle would have pulled themselves out of the hole they're in prior to today's final horror-show. Alas, it remains the case that Newcastle are one of the three worst teams in the top division over this season, and so deserve to go down however it plays out over 'Super Sunday'.
Bagging the extraordinary luck of a combination of results sufficient to squeak past Hull or Sunderland - both of whom beat NUFC on their own turf, and whom NUFC failed to beat at SJP - is in itself a fairly rancid karmic outcome, however avidly all Mags would seize upon it. But in any case NUFC go into this game without their two best, most consistent players, Beye and Bassong; with two strikers fettled and a third playing on one leg; and without a shred of pace or creativity in midfield. They go to 5th-placed Villa, a quality side, well-managed, keen to finish on a high. And you reckon NUFC are going to play their hearts out, defend like giants, nab one on the break and generally exhibit all the attributes missing ever since Keegan walked early last September? Gerraway, man. Sorrowfully I have to say I can't see how it's conceivable to imagine them doing anything of the sort.
So the crisis continues, rather than starting today, and only enormous structural remedies can begin to address it as of this summer. The ever-staunch NUFC.com have offered the following advice to fans as and when the axe has finally fallen this evening:
"Please do yourself and your club a favour and make sure the Sky cameras don't catch you snivelling into your scarf or blubbering into your best mate's shoulder. Show some dignity and don't bring this club into disrepute. We suggest you turn your back and make a hasty retreat for the exits. Once outside, walk straight past reporters and cameras in the streets and maintain your silence until you are well away from prying lenses."
Sounds like the sort of thing Shearer would say, if he accepted we were as far gone as everybody else believes. Not daft, though, our Alan. I trust he'll have his own dignified face prepared.
Howay the Lads! No shame in the Second Division, man, we've seen it all before, and the only way out of it is to play better.

The Rounds of Dublin

I’m just returned from 24 hours in Dublin, a city that holds a fair few memories for me down its crooked streets and behind its great grey facades. (Joyce got it dead right when he wrote in That Big Book of His about Trinity's 'surly front' and the 'gaunt quay walls' abutting the Liffey.)
And yet by my reckoning this was only my second visit to Dubs in the last 20 years, and the first since around 2002. This being May, it did, of course, piss down with rain; and yet cheerfulness reigned through my short stay – for me, anyhow.
Back in London this afternoon I switched on BBC News 24 and found that Dublin had followed me home, albeit most sorrowfully, for I was greeted by live coverage of the statement given by Mr Justice Sean Ryan, head of the Commission that has just published the results of its ten-year investigation of systematic child abuse in Ireland's Catholic institutions. Clearly the whole horrendous story begins in the 1930s (‘De Valera’s decade’, by the end of which the awful Eamon De Valera, a quintessential Christian Brothers boy, had somehow managed to remake Ireland more or less in his own grim image.)
Of the contents of the Commission’s 2600-page report, few will need to know more than what they no doubt would have guessed: that across six decades Catholic church leaders knew that sexual abuse was ‘endemic’ in boys’ institutions, and that physical and emotional abuse and neglect were hallmarks of how these cesspits were run by miserable, evil men in long black dresses. Well, what can you say to this towering iniquity? As Shane MacGowan once sang on a very different subject, ‘May the judged be their judges when they rot down in hell.’
On what is a relatively lighter note: there’s hardly a lamppost in all of Dublin that isn’t plastered with portraits of politicians now seeking election to the European Parliament in the upcoming polls. These headshots are hilariously fancily posed and lit, even if the candidate is some ruby-cheeked old codger called Gay or Mannix. (The women, though, look uniformly fresh from the salon, not least a Sinn Fein candidate called Mary Lou, would you believe?)
Interestingly some of the parties keep a very low 10-point-type profile on said posters, not least De Valera’s old mob Fianna Fail, still the perennial party of government. Yesterday I watched Taoiseach Brian Cowen on television refusing media prompts to apologise for failing to foresee the economic crash, which has of course torn an especially gaping and ruinous hole in the Irish economy. I haven’t followed Cowen’s career much to date, but he may well feel that contrition doesn’t become a Fianna Fail Taoiseach, not when the office has been held by scoundrels of the order of Charles Haughey and (to what can only be a lesser extent if compared to 'The Chief') Bertie Ahern.
One man with his face all over town for reasons given above is Irish Labour MEP for Dublin Proinsias De Rossa, a personable fellow whom I met last night as part of my business in the city, which was to give a talk at the Irish Film Centre in Temple Bar after a screening of Ken Loach’s brilliant The Navigators, part of a larger season on the topic of Film & Work. Though Loach’s film to me is very specifically about privatisation in the UK, De Rossa gave an introduction to the audience in which he took care to relate its concerns to our current global crisis as it’s specifically afflicting Ireland. And the audience members to whom I talked thereafter seemed to have responded particularly to the film’s central narrative of ordinary working people being driven to do bad and self-abasing things on account of having little or no money. Today's paper reports that the Bank of Ireland reckons no less than 12,200 of its mortgage holders are now languishing in negative equity; so this story is going to run and run, like hopes and dreams and plans down a drain…
An interesting face among De Rossa’s Labour Party colleagues also standing for election is Nessa Childers, a psychoanalyst by trade, granddaughter of the infamous republican/espionage writer Erskine Childers and daughter of a former Fianna Fail Tanaiste. Apparently she recently defected to Labour from the Greens. Well, no-one ever quite figured out what transformed her granddad from a British imperialist to a livid Irish nationalist, so unexpected turnabouts on her part might be considered to have a genetic basis.
My 2002-ish Dublin trip had been my first since 1988, so I was well-placed at that stage to gauge the scale of the transformation wrought upon the place by economic boom. Actually, beneath a certain new veneer glaze, it didn’t seem so far removed from the dirty old town I had known. More steel and glass and public art about the place, for sure, especially on the waterfront. No more piteous child beggars on Grafton Street, but a great deal of conspicuous consumption, shopfronts 'gay with housed awnings' (Ulysses again.) And of course, tower after tower of luxury flats, a mark of progress that turned out to contain its own negation.
Still, what makes the Place is the People, you know. Some of them, any road. For me the best thing about the trip was catching up with my mate Damien O’Donnell, a top man who directs great fillums for a living: East Is East, Inside I’m Dancing, and my great personal fave, Heartlands, a neglected treasure that ought really to be better known not least in light of the ever-growing cult of Michael Sheen.

All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney

A little while ago I had the good fortune of reading a marvellous new novel in manuscript, and I see that it's now forthcoming from Faber in a paperback original this August. It's the debut of a young writer called Liam McIlvanney, and it's entitled All The Colours of the Town.
Its protagonist is a grafting Glasgow-based political journalist called Gerry Conway who covers the waterfront of the Scottish Parliament, and is always quids-in for a good tip-off from a fictional Holyrood Justice Minister by the name of Peter Lyons. The complications and the drama really get going when Conway realises there's a big story submerged in Lyons' own unsavoury past, the hunting down of which will require him to get on a plane across the Irish Sea to Belfast (an unlovely and yet highly evocative journey, with which I'm highly familiar.) And in Belfast, that city under a black mountain, all the dirty secrets are there for Conway to dislodge with the toe of his boot.
To my eye, McIlvanney holds all the aces of a really vital young novelist: he tells a story with a sure hand, his recording eye is vividly precise, and he has his boots planted firmly in the moral mire of real life. All The Colours... offers the reader not only all the pleasures of a page-turner with compelling crime elements; but also a brilliant study in the harsh, pawky affinity between those two majestic cities, Glasgow and Belfast. Leading us to and fro across the Irish Sea on the trail of political/paramilitary skulduggery, McIlvanney manages both to keep us in his grip and to capture exactly what he calls the ‘fearsome Prod foursquareness’ of Ulster-Scots manners and mindsets. In short, and on the strength of all the elements sketched above, this is a book I'd very much like to hear the great Tom Paulin talk about on the Newsnight review show, to which Tom now seems to have returned after a much-lamented hiatus...

Tori Amos, Maria McKee, and a Dream Soundtrack for Lucie Gunn

At work this morning on my screenplay Lucie Gunn I start to feel the need for mood-musical accompaniment. Too much of that aggressive masculine guitar in the house lately. What about the women? Lucie Gunn is a Code: Female sort of a script, for sure. And I think I know the kind of souls I need to help this one to sing...
Maria, for certain. It's now become a truism that her 1996 album Life Is Sweet, the one that severed her relations with Geffen (see Peter Case, below) is one of the great 'lost' rock albums of its decade. It still sounds disturbing to me today, though I understand Maria's rather more content these days. This live performance clip reminds me of seeing her at the Shepherd's Bush Empire that same year. She wore the same dress, made the same brilliantly anguished noises on guitar.
Now then, Tori... When she first became a Hot Thing c. 1992 I couldn't quite follow her, and not just because of her vocal stylings - or maybe it was her fanbase that was deterring. But she certainly kept going her own way - for all her imitators there is no-one quite like her - and To Venus And Back (1999) is unquestionably one of my favourite records. The new one, Abnormally Attracted to Sin, looks fairly enticing too, as does this live performance of one of its cuts.

Mishima's Madame de Sade: Blood & Roses

First things first, the image to my left is by and (c) Eikoh Hosoe: 'Portrait of Yukio Mishima', 1963.
Now then: one of the problems I have with going to the theatre is the tendency of audiences to laugh aloud at things that aren’t especially funny – as in, for example, quite a few of Shakespeare’s comedies. But, fair play, sometimes I do it myself, in that it’s a simple way to encourage the performers and assist the production on its way, just as one cheers the lads on the pitch even if a few early passes go astray.
However, it makes for a larger problem when laughter, even of that encouraging variety, serves to set up the wrong sort of mood for a dramatic production; and a larger problem still, artistically speaking, if the performers were purposely directed to seek those sorts of easy laughs.
This was going through my mind at the Wyndham Theatre last night as I watched Madame de Sade, the only play other than Hamlet that I've seen performed more than twice - so I can claim a bit of familiarity with it, as with its author, the phenomenal Mishima, a writer I’ve admired passionately for just as long as I’ve been reading good books.
The specific problem of the giggles and snickers during last night’s show seemed to me part of the tiresome, age-old English problem with sex: the furtive, embarrassed, vicarious interest in rudeness, naughtiness, smuttiness. No Sex Please, We’re British. 'That Freud, sex-mad he was...' The obsessive prurient interest in what other people do in bedrooms, the inability to behold oneself truly in the mirror. To wit, my companion for the evening pointed out that the woman two rows in front kept turning to her friend and emitting a little ‘Ooh!’, as in:
Judi Dench: It wasn’t only blood he cleansed with his tongue...
Audience Woman: Ooh!
Now, there is a certain existential flipside to the English view of sex, or what George Orwell called our ‘lowness of outlook’: because sexual urges can indeed be low-down, dirty and comical. And since all sexual desire tends finally towards dysfunction and failure, like everything else in life, we shouldn’t miss the joke in that falling-off from urgency and vitality, in that gap between fantasy and reality.
Nevertheless: English literature has no equivalent to Sade, or Georges Bataille, or Jean Genet or even Anais Nin. So English theatre audiences may be poorly equipped for a play that refracts Sade’s philosophy of the boudoir through the measured, well-turned perversity of a Japanese genius who was both a Spartan classicist and an occasional pornographer.
I first saw Madame de Sade in August of 1990 at the Royal Academy in Glasgow: a production directed by Ingmar Bergman, played in Swedish. The whole audience were issued with wand-like electronic ear trumpets for the purpose of simultaneous translation. The elderly blazer-clad Scot in the seat beside me thought this wheeze hilarious, and expected me too to find it much more interesting than the foreign nonsense on stage that his wife had clearly dragged him to.
But I digress: Bergman’s stage was red, en hommage perhaps to his own Cries and Whispers, but also to the driving blood-and-roses theme of the play. When the lights came up on the elegantly debauched Madame Saint-Fond (Agneta Ekmanner) in riding gear avec swishing crop, there was a sharp intake of breath round the house; and an interesting tension developed in the subsequent exchanges between her and the pious Baroness de Simiane (Margaretha Byström.) Thus, it seemed to me, was a good mood established.
The same effect is certainly not achieved – or, rather, not sought – between Frances Barber and Deborah Findlay in Michael Grandage’s new West End production. In fairness, Mishima himself makes room in the text for a lot of the mock-scandalising effect. (Marguerite Yourcenar, an admirer of Mishima and of this play, wrote of Saint-Fond’s ‘cynical monologues written, it seems, to impress the spectator.’) But once the audience starts tittering over the same, because the actors are really selling it, the effect is to counteract the later dramatic force of the piece: ‘the joy of profanation’, the interplay of ‘holiness and shame.’
Still, I should say the great achievement of Grandage’s production to my little eyes is that this force had never seemed more apparent to me than last night, once the show got into its stride.
Mishima’s play is in the Racinian mode, a listening play. Mishima himself wrote that he wanted none of ‘the usual, trivial stage effects’ but, rather, action controlled exclusively by dialogue, the ‘collisions of ideas’ making the drama. It’s a tough thing to do. (I speak as an amateur who once fecklessly mounted a production of Britannicus in a black box above a pub in Islington.) So one has to admire the excellence of Grandage and his cast and crew.
The text was astutely cut down to make an evening of 105 minutes without interval. There was a pronounced tendency to dramatise with light and sound the play's long speeches about Sade’s depravities, either experienced or witnessed or overheard, and their effects upon these women. But that high style did produce some fine effects. Dench did her stuff superbly. As Renee, Madame de Sade herself, Rosamund Pike rather set off at one pitch that she maintained, but her best moments {‘Alphonse is myself…) were spine-tinglingly good. She also made a wonderful job of articulating the play’s great recurrent theme of the rose and its redness, its allure and banality: ‘the usual roses’ of kitsch, prettified life, as opposed to the rose that grows snake-scales under cover of darkness...
This production really brought out the hidden bond between the depraved Renee and the pious Simiane: both find that exposure to Sade helps them see past the arrogance of ego, toward the world at its darkest. Both get themselves to a nunnery, but Simiane with less fuss. ‘You to the right and I to the left’, as Svidrigaylov says to his soul brother Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. The audience laughed, of course, when Deborah Findlay made her final entrance in a nun’s habit, and so be it. But I found I was thinking of Satoko taking the veil in Mishima’s Spring Snow, the first volume of his Sea of Fertility; and her later reappearance as the abbess in the last volume, The Decay of the Angel. Mishima wasn’t big on religion but he had a refined vision of the void.
The great Luis Bunuel was never troubled by the worst things he could think of; he spoke of ‘the perfect innocence of the imagination.’ But in Mishima’s play Renee believes she is a properly evil companion to her husband until she meets his mind on the page, reading his Justine. Then she sees they have no bond if it is based only on ‘the emptiness of acts of the flesh.’ He has built a ‘cathedral of vice’ with words, one from which she is excluded.
The theme of the dutiful, devoted wife is more intriguing in the light of Mishima’s own marriage to Yoko Sugiyama, a very public affair about which Mishima, typically, wrote a treatise prior to the ceremony. Yoko conducted herself very carefully before ‘The Incident’ of his suicide in 1970, and after that she was a diligent keeper of his flame. Mishima’s friend and biographer John Nathan was of the view that Yoko ‘perfectly learned her husband’s manner’ once she was in charge of his estate, and turned from being a highly personable young woman to quite a formidable cookie. Once, reviewing some gossipy press clippings with Nathan as he prepared his book, Yoko remarked to him as if in bemusement that ‘a few of them even wrote that Mishima was queer!’ Nathan was given to understand that this was the beginning and the end of that subject between them. And when Paul Schrader made an intricate deal with Madame Mishima for the film rights to her husband’s life, she was careful to deny him dramatisation rights to the one novel preoccupied with homosexuality, Forbidden Colours...
In all, quite a life, Mishima’s, you have to say.

Esquire (June 2009) now on stands: includes Christian Bale and Cannes

I've always liked Christian Bale as an actor, especially in that dragon film. He's the subject of an excellent frank interview in the new Esquire, which is chockfull of other fine stuff as always. (There's also a new Esquire website/blog which is shaping up nicely.) My contribution to the new print issue is a piece reflecting on the Cannes Film Festival, the 62nd installment of which opens for business next Wednesday. I won't be there, which is a source of relief rather than ruefulness, as I say like so in the piece:

"It was the sacred aura of great cinema that first lured me to Cannes in 1988, aged 17. And, for sure, there is no finer place to watch a film than the cathedral-like munificence of the 2,500-seater Salle Lumiere in the main Festival Palais. But otherwise, the hectic, histrionic air of Cannes made me feel a bit like Bunyan’s pilgrim stumbling into Vanity Fair. To my horror, people were doing deals, making money, dining out in ostentatious fashion even as the arty movies were screening across the street. Such is the Cannes described by a director friend of mine (fondly, I should say) as ‘a big, colourful cornucopia of lies, bullshit, bragging and seafood.’"

Peter Case: Real Rollicking Force

Great Gigs I Have Been At, Part 17. Peter Case, in what I remember as a little conference suite with rush seating in the back of a quite posh hotel near the sea in Dun Laoghaire, Eire; either some time around the year-end of 1986, or the Spring of 1987, though I do suspect the former. At any rate, I was 16.
My Dad, staunch as ever, drove me out there, and was – fortunately for all of us – able to leave me in the company of two older muso friends of mine whom we encountered in the bar over pre-match Guinness: James Thompson, an absolutely magnificent human being and friend to the arts & all righteous causes; and James Tweed, who was as much of a roving arts journalist as the North of Ireland could support in those days.
I remember that Case in the flesh looked a good deal more bohemian (specs, scraggy hair, rumpled suit) than the highly styled troubadour on the cover of his then recently released eponymous debut album from Geffen Records. But he played those songs that I already loved, and some I didn’t know. He encored with Shane MacGowan’s 'A Pair of Brown Eyes', and even stepped off the stage with his acoustic guitar to walk up and down a row of empty seats, cheered all the way.
Afterward I lingered backstage in the company of those older friends, and shuffled and eavesdropped as they chatted with Case himself. ‘How’s T-Bone’s family doing, do you know?’ asked Mr Tweed at one point. He was speaking of Case’s revered producer on the Geffen record, someone whom even I had figured as a musical legend, present at the Rolling Thunder Revue and the making of Heaven’s Gate, producer of Elvis Costello’s King of America, one of my other great favourite long players of 1986...
This is all coming back to me now because of my belated recent efforts to catch up with Case’s wayward subsequent career. The 2007 collection Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John has brought me great pleasure. No surprise that Richard Thompson contributes guitar and vocals to one cut, or that Stan Ridgway (another of my great favourites etc etc) is thanked in the notes. And at times I do feel like I’m back in 1986, enjoying that first album. And yet I see from Case’s website that the ‘styled’ nature of his first record is something he rues somewhat, though he pays great respect to his producer, who has of course only kept on to greater things (and whose unmistakable tall black-suited figure I once bumped into at a Hollywood premiere party in 2002...) Anyhow, this is what Case has to say:
Q: How much did T-Bone Burnett shape your sound?
A: T-Bone's a great producer. I came to him with this whole vision of the songs I was doing, and we talked about it and came up with the idea of tribal folk, meaning using acoustic guitars with a huge groove in the back, which only made it to the record on songs like ‘Three Days Straight.’ But the fact is that I was deemed by the record company, and T-Bone, as being too primitive to even play on my first record.
Q: Does that go back to you being a rock 'n' roll folk singer, a real rollicking force?
A: On the first record, there are a lot of slick arrangements. There are even a couple of cuts that I don't even play on, I just sing…
Like I said about Bob Mould the other day, the things you have to do to make a musical career can be strange and taxing. Maybe it was especially so in the mid-1980s... Mould and Case seem to have made the right choice to stay out of the mainstream and keep to their own terms, 'right' in the sense that their music has stayed absolutely true and top-notch. So it's hard to imagine the mainstream could possibly have made it any better...

"Saving a Relegated Newcastle" - Gabrielle Marcotti

"Would it really be such a tragedy for Newcastle fans if the club went down? I don't think so, not if you believe that the club can only go forward once Mike Ashley sells the club..."

Shearer, if you're planning on staying on then you might want to give this man Marcotti a job, or at least try to keep him close by and friendly, because he knows football and he seems, strangely, indeed miraculously, to care a bit about the fate of Newcastle United - enough to have written out and costed a careful plan for the management of the squad after relegation. I don't think I quibble with any of it, bar the absence of a mention for Ranger and LuaLua as striking options next season. Good man, Gabrielle. This in the Times too, where some toe-rag who's supposedly a 'multi-award-winning' sportswriter pens a semi-regular Saturday morning bit willing Newcastle to lose and so 'slither' further into the relegation maw...

Jung at Heart: Sleeping Beauty

Round about this time last year I vowed here to blog my regular readings of Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers in diligent instalments. Can you guess what happened to that good new season's resolution? Instead, here are some more prattlings on the latest of the canonical Disney animated films that I now watch ad nauseam with my little daughter.
When you watch an old movie - if you’re old enough to have lived through, say, about half-a-dozen changes of government - then there’s a certain code or aura the movie holds or exudes that will telegraph to you more or less precisely what point in the twentieth century the movie was made – and this even before you reach up to get the Old Movies reference book off your shelf. Paul Schrader was the first person I heard making this shrewd point, and though he is quite the connoisseur I do believe that pretty well anyone of a certain vintage can play this game. It’s mainly a study in changing fashions.
Per Disney, the game is often elementary. Snow White is clearly a product of the late 1930s just on the basis of the Wicked Queen’s vampish curling-lip looks. The Jungle Book is similarly simple – mid-1960s – because it features a group of vultures with mop-top hair and Scouse accents.
Sleeping Beauty, my daughter’s latest crush, puzzled me for a while, though. In a way, the picture has hardly dated. The artwork (largely imagined by Eyvind Earle, one of whose production paintings appears above) has a certain imprssively dedicated medieval/Flemish feel to it. Some of the musical stings are lifted from Tchaikovsky. But let’s not make it sound too complicated. It had to have been made between 1950-1970. The Princess Aurora at times resembles the animated Elizabeth Montgomery in TV’s Bewitched, which aired in the mid-1960s. But who ripped off who?
I finally made my decision thanks to a spooky scene where Aurora is hypnotised by the evil Maleficent in the form of an unearthly light that bathes the room in a greenish glow and seems to turn Aurora’s skin blue. Jimmy Stewart! Kim Novak! Vertigo! At that point Earle’s way of drawing flowers even started to remind me of the blooms in Stewart’s ‘Carlotta’ nightmare in the Hitchcock picture. Vertigo was 1958, a good year at the movies. So down comes my Old Movies reference book and there it is: Sleeping Beauty, 1959.
With her horned raiment, yellow eyes and pointed chin, Maleficent is a fairly sinister villainess, albeit played for more comedy than Snow White’s Wicked Queen. But both are perfectly unproblematic viewing for my little girl. I’m not sure I’d take her anywhere near Henry Selick’s Coraline, now in cinemas, and being pitched as an unmissable entertainment for kids even though it contains a strong undercurrent of frightening, nightmarish, sadistic villainy. It’s also highly in debt to Hitchcock, specifically the ‘Gingerbread Gothic’ of Psycho. But a wonderful picture, nonetheless.
In the land of the vivid imagination it's hard to say what’s best for kids, and what’s best for adults. I’m fairly sure that people over 18 years of age shouldn’t be reading 'Harry Potter and the Tower of Nothing' (as I heard Stewart Lee call in on telly recently.) But per my recent musings on Angela Carter, I do think fantasy material that is created first and foremost for the tender of years and innocent of heart is more truly compelling for an adult to eavesdrop upon than more self-conscious mature-reader reworkings of fairytale and myth.
To wit: the aforementioned Paul Schrader once remade the old RKO horror picture Cat People with a script rich in Jungian archetypes, decors by the genius Italian designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, and Nastassja Kinski – the It Girl of 1981 – dangerously exposed in the lead role. The poster described the movie as ‘An Erotic Fantasy’. Pauline Kael was mean-spirited but not far wrong when she said that every shot looked like the cover of an album you’d never want to buy.

Shearer: Work in Progress...?

I yield to no-one (well, one or two...) in my admiration for Alan Shearer, and so mates of mine were knocked back a bit on April Fool's Day of 2005 when I queried Al's decision to reverse his planned retirement and so play on another season for NUFC: this in the belief that the club was 'going places' under Graeme Souness and that he had a bit more to give to the effort. 'Were he a horse', I actually opined in one rash moment at the time, 'he'd have been shot by now'... As it happened, he shouldered on under Souness, suffering strangely-fated defeats in an FA Cup semi and a UEFA last eight. Then, with Owen crocked as usual for most of 2005-06, he often played as our main striker in his supposed twilight season, a much-dulled threat overall, though overhauling the Milburn scoring record and chipping in some vital goals to get what was now Glenn Roeder's team into an Intertoto-qualifying 7th place.

So, what does the jury make of Al's most recent hopeful/faithful punt on behalf of the Toon, made, like the last one, on All Fool's Day? It seems to me, as it did decisively about 6 weeks ago, that we're going down, and we deserve to, because we're largely rubbish and barely half of a proper team. Still, the Portsmouth draw, a massive but not unexpected anti-climax, immediately had fans yet more cynical than me getting out their calculators again and redefining what might be sufficient. Shearer declared that it might yet be 'a good point', which tells you everything about his current responsibility for dressing-room morale.

Morale, plus discipline and 'heart', are the things that he has surely brought into the set-up. The team's few good players - Beye, Bassong - have said as much. But the sheer headless awfulness of the first hour at Tottenham, and the hopeless nervy 'finishing' versus Pompey, are death-knell sounds to me. They look like a side who'd need to be doomed before they could start to play again. Defeat against Liverpool this Sunday will certainly take them to that very brink. If they won their last three, which might be the least they can do, then they could at least 'deserve' to stay up.

But really, see, I'm thinking now about Nile Ranger and Andy Carroll trying to score the team out of the second division. I'm one of those dreaming of a cleansing of the Augean stables, if the club doesn't go into administration first. Will Shearer be around for any of this?

John Martyn: Addendum

On the subject of John Martyn, the Life and the Work and the interrelation thereof, consider the snippet above from a Scottish-produced documentary about the emotional content of music, made in 2007 and presented by Phil Cunningham.
Consider also the rather furious debate that developed below the clip on the YouTube comments space, where a few pronouncements about Martyn's personal conduct (some related to his treatment of his second wife) drew a hail of ripostes from those who clearly think this domestic matter is neither here nor there when you speak of a genius.
Another aspect worth a thought is Martyn's heavy Glaswegian accent here. Glasgow was part of his early life and I understand he returned there for his last years, during which this doc was filmed. Yet in the BBC 2004 doc, and in every other clip I've heard of him speaking, Martyn's accent was indeed more or less RP, with the odd joke-foray into mockney geezerdom.
Now those of us who have spent time in assorted corners of the country, or even the globe, do tend to have an array of accents for special occasions, and that's especially true of performing types; and, I think, doubly true of Martyn, also a lot to do with an artistic temperament inclined to conceal even as it supposedly reveals. That's what I get anyway from Martyn talking here about the blues as 'greetin', whingin', givin' out' etc, because it's 'good for the heid'. Rather than the 'intrinsic sadness in any creature', let's say...