"A serious house on serious earth"

I recommend Bruges (where Darling Wife & I just passed a very happy weekend) to anyone. Lovely hotels, fine museums and architecture, a pretty canal, great food and drink, and not one melancholy Irish assassin to be seen. To itemise the highlights? Well, I might speak of the Church of Our Lady (Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk) with its glorious marble Madonna and Child by Michelangelo, its rococo pulpit by Jan Antoon Garemijn, its bronze tomb sculpture of Mary of Burgundy, and the boxed-up stained-glass of George and the dragon (beside which an old geezer poses above…) But then whenever I wander round a really great old church, as was our pleasure in Bruges, I do always find myself wondering what finer thoughts Alan Bennett would be having were he in my shoes...

Richard Thompson: Holy Blues

I have been reading, with much interest, the estimable Greil Marcus’s Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010. On the cover is a quote from the San Francisco Chronicle – ‘Why read anyone else’s work on Dylan?’ Well, you would do so given the fact that such a figure as Dylan is liable at any time to inspire more than just one worthy interpreter; furthermore, because for every one sentence of Marcus’s that you might agree with, there’s liable to be another that will have you dropping your bacon sandwich. To take just one from the latter subset: Marcus’s Village Voice dismissal of Oh Mercy (1989) as ‘shapely and airless’, characterising Dylan as an actor who was merely hitting marks chalked by producer Daniel Lanois. Well... apart from any dissenting listeners’ views, Dylan’s Chronicles would seem to suggest otherwise.
I must digress, though, because really I want to say something about Richard Thompson. Bear with me...
The scholar-journalist/filmmaker/bon viveur Kevin Jackson is, among his many claims on artistry, the authorised biographer of writer-director Paul Schrader, and it was in this capacity that in 1991 he filed a set report from New York for Sight & Sound concerning Schrader’s movie Light Sleeper. One of the many fascinating cineaste-matters discussed between the two therein was Schrader’s quest to score his movie with a sequence of songs that would have both an authorial connection and a linking, pervading soulfulness to them. Schrader first called upon his friend Bob Dylan, for whom he’d once directed a promo clip. The hope was that Dylan would license a number of songs, chiefly from Oh Mercy. But Dylan wasn’t having it. Thus a short-order head-scratcher for Schrader, on which Jackson tried to be of some assistance in proposing alternatives. Who could deputise for Bob Dylan? Van Morrison? ‘Too Irish’ was Schrader’s understandable opinion. Richard Thompson? ‘Maybe too English’ was, if I remember right, the final Schrader ruling...
But just as it’s no shame for George Eliot to be compared with Tolstoy even she’s adjudged to suffer slightly by the match-up – it’s quite true that in Richard Thompson England has a musical treasure/songsmith-guitar hero to set by the finest the world might offer. Somehow I managed to miss that he was lately made an OBE. The Old Kit Bag is my favourite of his recent albums, 'Gethsemane' (below) my favourite song thereupon. Thompson is of course a practising Muslim, and his faith has never inflected his work quite as thoroughly as Dylan’s did his c. 1979-1981. But the cadences of the preacher are present always, nonetheless.

NUFC: Bugger-All Money

How are things in black and white then? 36 points on the board as February ends, right enough – a decent place to be. Personally I would want 43 for safekeeping, remembering what happened not so long ago to West Ham... But the main point is that this Newcastle team have shown plenty spirit in adversity. It’s not been a bad season yet, on balance, and that is quite something, given the sum of what’s been inflicted on supporters, again as before and always, by its repulsive present ownership.
Andy Carroll is gone and I must live with that, as must all black-and-white-eyed supporters, including those who actually believe that a shred of the £35 million we got for Carroll will be re-invested in the team. For the prosecution, though, I call Kevin Keegan, who talked to Gabby Logan at the BBC for a spot transmitted tonight and who cited his own thoughts when recently he heard Alan Pardew telling the press about his hopes for what he’d do with the Carroll money: “Alan – you ain’t gonna get any of that...”

Elaine May: Largely Unsung, Yet So Sing-able

Back in the mid-1990s I worked a while at the British Film Institute on a number of documentaries about great filmmakers, and there I got to know many very talented and knowledgeable people, among them Mary Albert, a trained film editor who was also engaged part-time in a doctoral thesis on slow motion. So she and I used to have plenty of good chats about finessing matters of cinema, but I don’t think anything quite topped the day when we realised we were both avid fans of Elaine May’s Ishtar and – in the course of our animated conversation, and much to the consternation of the rest of the office – began to sing aloud snatches of the movie’s many musical numbers – ‘Telling the Truth Can Be Dangerous Business’, ‘The Lawnmower Song’, ‘Hot Fudge Love (Cherry Ripple Kisses)’ etc etc.
This is how we the anointed feel about Ishtar in particular, and May’s stuff in general. It would be more socio-culturally acceptable to say one were mainly a fan of the classic Nichols/May material c. 1950s/60s and, of course, The Heartbreak Kid (1972), which is probably rated as her greatest cinematic success. But for me you have to start out by defending the work that clearly served to terminate May’s directorial career, and not just on account of its commercial failure. If you read Peter Biskind’s recent biography of Warren Beatty you will be treated to the view – advanced chiefly by Ishtar’s genius production designer Richard Sylbert, but supported by significant others – that May ‘can’t direct.’ That's funny, and may be true on some level, but there really aren't that many movies I love more than Ishtar. I wrote the following in Ten Bad Dates with De Niro:

I like to imagine a parallel universe wherein May’s comedy is considered an endlessly quotable classic, hailed by the worthier critics for its accurate reflection of US foreign policy in the Middle East, MP3 files of its adeptly terrible songbook keenly swapped. None of that is ever going to happen on this planet; but such are the virtues discussed on rare occasions when two or more Ishtar fans are gathered. The rest of the world believes that May wasted Columbia’s money on some imbecile script allowing Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty to insult the audience as klutzy New York songwriters who dream of being Simon and Garfunkel. The duo wind up in Morocco, buffeted between leftist guerrilla Isabelle Adjani and CIA man Charles Grodin. This colossal commercial failure, funnily enough, is a heartening comedy about failure. Watch Beatty trying earnestly to talk Hoffman out of a suicide jump: ‘It takes a lotta nerve to have nothing at your age… Most guys would be ashamed. But you've got the guts to just say, ‘To hell with it.’ You say you’d rather have nothing than settle for less.’ The stricken look of dawning love on Hoffman’s face upon hearing this is worth your money alone.

A prominent member of the Elaine May Defence League is my pal Ryan Gilbey, first-rate film critic at the New Statesman. A few weeks ago I posted some YouTube clips of May on Facebook, just in a whimsical late-night spirit, but happily these prompted Ryan to devote an entire blog column to his May-love, which you can read here. One of Ryan’s specialist subjects is the ‘golden age’ of American moviemaking between, roughly speaking, Bonnie and Clyde and Raging Bull, and he places May adroitly in that moment, praising her ‘prickly sensibility’ as ‘consistent with the kind of downbeat, morally penetrating US cinema that was prevalent in the 1970s.’
If you don’t know her work, you’re wondering by now – is she actually funny? Decide for yourself. I shouldn’t say this but on YouTube you can watch the entirety of her wonderful A New Leaf (1971), which she not only directed but also shines in as a performer, playing – as Ryan thumbnails it – ‘a wealthy botanist earmarked for marriage and murder by a penniless former socialite (Walter Matthau).’
I also respectfully offer the following evidence. On the page, let’s start with her Vanity Fair Proust Questionnaire circa 2009. Turning to YouTube, let's have her tribute to Mike Nichols at an AFI Lifetime Achievement gala, one of the bits that got Ryan writing; her in her beautiful youth, cracking up the Emmys with Nichols in 1959; and some choice cuts from the opening reel of Ishtar.

Frankenstein's Remains...

I wrote a long piece for the Guardian that ran yesterday, on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, its context and legacy, and the new stage version at the National Theatre adapted by Nick Dear and directed by Danny Boyle.
The essay took up a healthy double-page spread in the paper, but obviously even with 2000 words to spare you end up cutting out a fair when you’re discussing a subject with this much, ahem, life in it.
In respect of what message(s) Frankenstein carries for the wisdom and ethics of scientific/medical exploration – naturally I would have liked to say a few words about Mary Shelley’s framing device of Robert Walton, the polar adventurer-navigator leading a full ship’s crew in search of the Northern Passage when, his way obstructed by ice, he alights upon a frostbitten man chasing a half-glimpsed giant across the arctic terrain...
Walton is seeking paradise, he dreams of conferring ‘inestimable benefit...on all mankind to the last generation, by discovering a passage near the pole...or by ascertaining the secret of the magnet’. Of course he is also endangering his crew. As such Victor Frankenstein is a man he ought to meet. They are two masculine loners, obsessed by their own brilliance and taken by surprise when their great trespasses redound upon them. Frankenstein has enough dearly-bought wisdom to tell Walton to learn from his example, to see ‘how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge’, how wrong-headed is ‘he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.’
And yet at the death Frankenstein is back in dangerous self-delusion, excoriating Walton’s crew as they turn mutinous: ‘You were hereafter to be hailed as the benefactors of your species… And now, behold, with the first… mighty and terrific trial of your courage, you shrink away…’
Then his dying words: ‘I have myself been blasted in these hopes, yet another may succeed.’
So Frankenstein is seen to be in two minds as to how far and boldly a man should go in the spirit of discovery – and as I say in the piece I think Mary Shelley felt the same.
In his adaptation Nick Dear gets rid of Walton and starts proceedings fifty pages into Shelley. As he told me, he was very keen on the Walton material but found that it ‘didn’t get us swiftly into something that was meaty and bold.’ And the latter is how a play ought to be. Dear certainly does frame the debate for the audience through Victor’s refrain throughout the play: ‘We can only go forward. We can never go back.’ The ironies are there for us to mull over.
Nick Dear also offered some very interesting thoughts on the special challenge of adapting iconic often-done material: ‘I don’t really want to know what anyone else has done, ever’, he told me, saying that he hadn’t read any of the previous Frankenstein play-scripts. Danny Boyle was equally mindful of the cinematic heritage. According to Dear he first wrote his opening scene with ‘the creature lying horizontally on a slab, as in the movies. And one of Danny’s first notes was, ‘No, I want to have him upright on a frame, so it looks different...’
In respect of the movies: of course there is not a great deal of Mary Shelley in the famous Hollywood version of 1931, in which Boris Karloff – gaunt, hulking, square of skull, bolted at the neck but resolutely mute – sealed the iconography of Frankenstein (see below #1). Kenneth Branagh dug a ditch for himself by directing and starring in the 1994 movie entitled Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, though his honourable try (even retaining the Walton figure) was gratuitously maligned, and had at least the virtue of a characteristically noble performance by Robert De Niro as the Creature (see below #2). Christopher Isherwood was bold enough to entitle his 1973 2-part television adaptation Frankenstein: The True Story, an amusing conceit given that Isherwood turns the tale into one of super-aesthetic homo-eroticism. I must say, though, that I’m a huge fan of Isherwood’s version, in which Michael Sarrazin is both movingly pitiable and ghoulishly malevolent (see below #3).
On that note, a last word from Nick Dear on one of his key departures from Shelley, namely the Creature’s realising of his chilling threat to be with Victor on his wedding night:
“... I thought, in a Victorian sense, [the creature] wreaking revenge on Victor Frankenstein by terrifying everybody and showing up and looking horrible might have been sufficient. But I suppose I was looking for ‘What’s the worst thing he can do to Victor, the really worst thing...?’

The ABBA songbook

In recent weeks my elder girl’s Favourite Film pick has become the ‘ABBA musical’ Mamma Mia, which I’ve now watched about 36 times, more times than I’ve seen Au Hasard Balthazar, The Conformist or Viridiana (put together...) So, yeah, I know Mamma Mia pretty well now, and can even admire its vigour, its dramatic construction and canny appeal towards every imaginable audience demographic (except maybe Males between 28-34.) It’s no easy feat to be that popular, though the storytelling choices are just a bit easier in the genre of the wish-fulfilment Musical than they are in your standard Drama. (I was interested recently to read a hymn of praise on some creative/script-writing site to the supposedly exemplary narrative design of The Sound of Music, my elder girl’s Former Favourite Film. Yes, all very well, it moves along nicely, but I would say that when it comes to handing out the big plaudits and anointing the role models it’s not solely about how a story was told but why it was told, and with what ambition...) Sticking with what’s problematic about the creeping cultural dominance of the mass-popular form, I’ve been reading David Mamet’s Theatre, and had to laugh at his terse lament for the way all theatre on Broadway must now be tailored to the taste of the spectacle-&-star-loving Tourist: “No adult resident in London”, says Mamet, “would go to see the Crown Jewels, and no adult resident in New York went to see Mamma Mia, for to do so would have been culturally repugnant, branding him as a tourist, or dufus...”
Anyway, so, in a few weeks I’m due to go with the kids to see Mamma Mia in the West End...
Moving on – obviously I now have ABBA songs in my head morning, noon and night, which leads me to wonder: exactly how good were they? Better than Lady Gaga, whose ‘I Like It Rough’ has been ringing between my ears for the last 24 hours after one chance hearing? I suspect ABBA do deserve a fair bit of respect, especially for how their song-writing grew from foot-tapping pop tunes about falling in love to rather more wistfully melodic songs about getting divorced – which, of course, the two singer/songwriter couples that comprised the group famously did, in the late 1970s-early 1980s.
Of course there is in pop-musical appreciation this funny business of ‘credibility’ but then ABBA pretty much had that even when I was a lad. I seem to remember Neil Tennant of the Pet Shop Boys hymning the ‘Bergman-esque’ period of the Divorcing Songs, which is maybe not so surprising, but better yet I recall the moody Ian McCulloch of Echo & The Bunnymen picking ‘The Winner Takes It All’ as one of his Top Ten Tunes on a Radio 1 show of the mid-1980s. The presenter asked him rather sarkily to say why, and he said in heavy and resolute Scouse, ‘It’s just a great song’...
My favourite, though, is this ‘un.

Gordon Burn on Gordon Brown

The other day I had occasion to revisit the original transcript of the long interview I did with Gordon Burn and David Peace back in April 2008, set up by and written up for Esquire. Gordon died 18 months ago, not long before my younger daughter was born, and he's still very much missed, but I believe there are plans in the works to make a considered tribute/memorial to him later this year. Meantime, reading again his fascinating reflections on his work, in particular those grimly essential studies of murderers, I was relieved to be reminded of some simpler musings he had to offer on the then-Prime Minister, which to me show once again his great adeptness at seeing the story behind 'The Story':

"[Brown's] ineptitude in terms of being naïve about how the real world works is amazing, really. I think his lack of adeptness with the media and 'spin' - all the stuff he was supposed to stand for, and which for three or four months looked like a good thing - has just become an embarrassment. It indicates his lack of connection with the world, with people. He’s been living in Westminster since 1983, even before then when he was living in the manse and into student politics, he just seems like a total f***-up as a person. When he says he likes the Arctic Monkeys or his favourite programme is Strictly Come Dancing... you know it’s utter crap."

L'Affaire 'Andy' Carroll...

... et les cons 'Gros Mike' Ashley et 'Degsy Llambias'... Eh bien, plus ca change... mais l'homme le plus sage est M. Keegan...
The 'disco' in the clip below, BTW, is at 02:15: 'Mike Ashley doesn't know anything about football... Derek Llambias knows even less.' But to be fair, Mike knows a lot about fizzy lager and can sell you a cheap pair of elasticated shorts, while Degsy is just the man for you if you happen to own a casino and are seeking some insufferable little big-mouth to run it.