NUFC: It is Accomplished

Tonight's title-clinching win at Plymouth was strikingly similar to the previous 28 we've enjoyed in this friendly old Division 2 c. 2009-10, but particularly of a piece with the last six that have come on the trot from a team now easing through the gears. A big part of the story from Home Park seems to have been the touchingly good sportsmanship of now-relegated Argyle, offering Toon fans a congratulatory banner on the pitch beforehand, plus some choice musical selections over the tannoy, 'Blaydon Races' among them, once all was squared away. Accordingly come the final whistle some of the Mags were on the pitch, thinking it all over, and it is now. A close season's work begins properly for Chris Hughton from this point, the gaffer now set the recurrent task of figuring out how we're going to beat Stoke, Blackburn, Wigan and the Mackems. Through Andy Carroll 'rising high to power home a header' as he did tonight and has done throughout the Fizzy Pop campaign? I wish...

Election Fever: a mild sweat

I didn’t watch Thursday night’s party leaders debate on ITV. I was down the pub, with two of my oldest mates, and, god knows, such opportunities crop up rarely at this time of life. Plus, I already know how I’m voting and why; and I know very well what I think of the Liberal Democrat party and of Nick Clegg, who nonetheless appears all of a sudden to be striking great swathes of the British people not as some mere potential kingmaker but, rather, the straight-talking force of common sense incarnate.
Seeking the upside... I suppose it makes a change from noting the main parties’ discreet wrangles over how to plug that £167 billion deficit in public finances. By contrast, for some voters, Clegg must indeed seem like a much-needed blast of honesty. And I have to admit that The Swing to Clegg is a more novel and welcome staging post in the course of this election than the previous week’s bleatings from all those Tory shopkeepers who (surprise!) don’t want to pay an extra 1% in National Insurance.
For me, the deficit is still the top story. The Treasury cannot be run in the manner of a private household, not is government a limited company, and so it still seems important to nail the Tories on their nonsense about efficiency savings, as did the excellent Oliver Kamm, quoting Nigel Lawson’s memoirs (‘Incoming Conservative Governments usually tend to be overoptimistic about the scope for ‘eliminating waste’ - a pledge which is always more popular than specific spending cuts...’)

John Rentoul also put it well last week in rubbishing Cameron’s 'Big Society' waffle:

"I am as opposed to the nanny state as the next person. I do not like Gordon Brown's statist assumptions on the economy and public services. But the helium at the heart of the [Tory] flying pig manifesto is the idea that if the Government stops doing stuff, people will organise themselves to fill the gap in ways that are equitable, fulfilling and tax-saving."

"Sean Penn has a biography...?!?"

Several kind friends mailed the other day to tell me that my Sean Book had made an unlikely, half-glimpsed cameo on Jon Stewart's Daily Show last week. (I'd never have known, as I've found the Show a pretty tiring watch just on the strength of a few past viewings.) All that happened (per the last 10-15 seconds of the clip below) is that some guesting actor mocked up a joke autobiography of himself by wrapping a homemade cover around the Canongate US hardback edition of Sean Penn: His Life and Times, and Stewart, unravelling said mock-up, seemed momentarily diverted by the contents of the actual book. His reaction - 'Sean Penn has a biography...?!?' is one that I could take as wounding proof of the book's utter anonymity in the US market, even though its subject is a sizeable public figure and double Oscar-winner, also a substantive humanitarian recently seen (as pictured) putting his money and his efforts where his mouth is on the crisis issue of the Haitian earthquake.
But, really, I can't complain. Some of Sean's most wonderful movies are productions that scarcely any Americans seem to have heard of either, and that neglect is rather more worthy of protest...

New Esquire (May 2010): RTK on Polanski's The Ghost

The new Esquire has on its cover Jay-Z, which is good news, as I might now find out just who that guy is and what he’s all about. Within, my film column is about Roman Polanski’s movie of Robert Harris’s The Ghost, in which I found much to enjoy while also finding myself unable to get past one mountainous error, namely the drama’s daft imagining of a Blairesque Prime Minister played by Pierce Brosnan – 'Adam Lang', as Harris calls him, an international statesman shown to be utterly devoid of qualities. As I write in the mag:
"Pierce Brosnan unsurprisingly flounders in trying to fill this cursory outline of a person. In Harris’s novel, the ‘Ghost’ decides finally that Lang is just ‘not a psychologically credible character.’ Quite. But while Harris intends us to read Lang as a pliable phoney, all that comes across is Harris’s consuming hatred of Tony Blair, whom Lang resembles in every respect but for the ones that actually matter..."
Admiring John Rentoul’s political writings as I do, and finding myself mostly in agreement with him about the rationale for and legality of Britain’s involvement in the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, I suspect he would not be taken with my piece were he to read it, since he’s been vocal in his criticism of The Ghost and its makers (without having seen the movie); whereas I devote a fair few lines to my admiration of Polanski as a filmmaker, and attribute my overall liking for the film to it being so recognisably un film de Polanski.
As I say in the piece, it has ‘the quite inimitable Polanskian mood: a sense of creeping unease, of the slow-but-steady workings of fate, the unfussy, commonplace presence of evil in the world.’ Moreover, Ewan McGregor in the lead is ‘a classic Polanski hero in distress, naïvely courting trouble and yet, on some level, asking for it.’ And like so much of Polanski, The Ghost plays on the menacing theme of ‘the double’ – two men sharing a moral/physical resemblance and, possibly, a fate. Location-wise Polanski makes the North Sea island of Sylt ‘double’ as Martha's Vineyard, and it’s a great swap, because scenically the film has that mood evoked by Norman Mailer in his New England-set thriller Tough Guys Don’t Dance: the ‘cold sea air filled with the bottomless chill that lies at the cloistered heart of ghost stories.’ Those who treasure how Polanski shot the island of Lindisfarne in Cul-de-Sac will feel those embers warmed by The Ghost.
I must say, I don’t think Polanski undertook the filming of Harris’s novel on the grounds that he wanted to play his own part in dragging Blair up before The Hague. Rather, Polanski had been at work with Harris on a movie of one of the author’s earlier successes, Pompeii, but then the funding collapsed. As Harris tells it (or as reported by Michael White the other week) he then “offered [The Ghost] as an alternative to Polanski, who is not interested in politics. ‘This Gordon Brown, he’s schmuck, yes?’ was the limit of [Polanski’s] conversation.” That certainly sounds like Polanski’s diction, at least as Martin Amis once aped it in a famous appraising interview piece.

Malcolm McLaren 1946-2010

I only met him once – about 13-14 years ago, at London’s Café de Paris, aptly enough, it being some event in honour of his son Joe – so I won’t pretend any deeper understanding; but old McLaren certainly helped to liven up my youth. His best testaments, I reckon, are Julien Temple’s The Great Rock and Roll Swindle (1980), in which he was very funny (‘Helen, never trust a hippie…’), so revealing his own distinctive performative streak; and Duck Rock, the fabulous record he made with Trevor Horn in 1982-83. Horn told some very bemusedly funny tales around that time, about sitting in one of New York’s priciest studios watching McLaren hopping about, them both listening to hours of African drumming, dollars draining away with every second… He’d already heard Malcolm’s efforts at ‘singing’, so even a genius of Horn’s stature must have wondered if this record was going to work... Well, it did, it was a beaut – witness 'Soweto' – and not thanks to McLaren’s musical 'talents', but his gift for bringing good things together and joining them up, which used to be called 'sampling' and which we all now do with our computers and what have you.
On last night’s Newsnight Jeremy Paxman, who’s paid to scoff at everybody and possibly scoffs at his own kids, scoffed through an obituary in which the most patently ludicrous detail seemed to be McLaren’s championing of something called ‘hip-hop’. Well, one glance at the video for 'Buffalo Gals' and it all comes back - just how clever McLaren was in that department. He was, in the spirit of the age, an impresario and packager of ‘the street’ and what we learned to call its ‘subcultures.’ When he was knocking around Hollywood in the mid-80s, dating Lauren Hutton and trying to produce movies, his major project was said to be called 'Surf Nazis Must Die.' Good grief, I thought then. Having since learned a lot more about the hardcore Malibu surfing scene, from Sean Penn and others, I think McLaren’s instincts were as bang-on as ever. But he wasn’t cut out for America. He was very English, and somewhat European. And like a lot of ostensibly shocking and edgy artistic types, he wound up looking and sounding a bit stuffy and high-flown at times, but they do do that, don’t they? ‘Sex Pistols’ - that’s what he chose to call that mob of surly, spotty delinquents, and such blatant cheek should always be cherished.

Masters 2010: Watson walks in the sun

I’ve never been to Augusta National, Georgia, and I don’t reckon I’ll be going. They’re sniffy about membership, as is the right of any club, but they also have a special history of offensive racist arrogance. Moreover, their current chairman, this pompous windbag called Billy Something-or-Other, seems to think he can pronounce formidably on Tiger Woods’ failures as a husband and professional. As Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star puts it unimprovably, ‘Who knew God made a high horse low enough for Billy [Something-or-Other] to saddle?’

(The Woods Affair shows that America still retains a weird Puritan streak – a need to confess, to parade conscience, an inability to recognise its own fallen state, smell its own BS, and just live with that, however imperfectly.)
Where was I? Oh yeah, Augusta. Yes, wouldn’t want to go there, but whenever I see it on telly it looks like a Disney matte painting of a dream golf course – lush turf, white sands, stone bridges over glass-like ponds, dappling sunlight and shadow…
I first watched the Masters in 1979, when the winner was 'Fuzzy' Zoeller, one of the tour’s 'characters', who in 1997 celebrated the historic victory of Tiger Woods by joking freely about fried chicken and collard greens on the champion’s dinner menu. In 1980 Seve Ballesteros, whose swashbuckling looks were as improbable in their own way as Augusta itself, won it by a country mile. In 1981 the winner was my main man, Tom Watson.
This morning’s first round Masters leaderboard sees Watson vying up there with Fred Couples, Sandy Lyle, Bernhard Langer in touch too… Hold on, what freakin’ year are we in, 1985? How come Craig Stadler and Ben Crenshaw are so far back?
It appears Watson is graciously trying to leave us, his avid fans, with a better memory than the bitter blow of his final-hurdle failure at last year’s Open. This time, he really can’t hope to stay in the hunt – yesterday the pins were kindly placed, the ball sat up invitingly on the fairways, the wind and rain stayed away, and all that can’t last – but it would have a certain elegance if Watson could stick around the upper echelon of the board this week.
BTW I don’t know what Watson thinks about the smelly hypocrisy of Billy Something-or-Other but in 1990 he did resign his 20-year membership of Kansas City (Mo.) Country Club, the place where he learned the game, because the club refused the application of a Jewish businessman. Billy, there are indeed some people out there with principles, and you could learn some yet.

Dennis Hopper: Ragged Glory

Sad to read of the apparently terminal illness of Dennis Hopper: the Man from Dodge City, one of the most edgy and compelling figures in post-war American cinema, both as a quite inimitable actor/artiste and an occasional, thwarted director. (The recent picture to my left of Hopper and Jack Nicholson is (c) Harrison/Getty.)
I do believe I first caught sight of Hopper as the cannily cast philosophical-drunk father to Mickey Rourke and Matt Dillon in Rumblefish (1983.) But it might have been in Out of the Blue (1980), which he also directed – a simply, shatteringly brilliant picture about punk rock, nihilism and dysfunctional family life. This early 1980s moment was the point where Hopper finally got sober and career-minded after decades of terrifying bad craziness – the lost years of Taos, New Mexico, the elopements, the heavy dope, the blowing oneself out of a chair with dynamite. As a veteran of that era once began a story to me (and, really, one need say no more) – ‘Dennis Hopper came by the house, raving mad...’
By 1985 Hopper was, in the words of a Hollywood friend of mine, ‘not the same gunslinger’, his tortuous sobriety so tightly maintained as to give offence to Charles Bukowski when the two met to discuss Hopper’s directing Bukowski’s script Barfly. Then came Blue Velvet (1986), in which Hopper acted out a beautifully stylised, vicariously thrilling version of his former lunacy as refracted through the dark glass of David Lynch. Career-wise, Hop was back: ahead lay Speed, Waterworld and what have you. But we shall not forget Rebel Without a Cause, The Last Movie, The American Friend, Tracks, Apocalypse Now, River’s Edge et al.
I’ve had the privilege of talking to Hopper on a couple of occasions, first in 2002 for the sake of my book about his friend Sean Penn. and then in New York in 2006 (when he was accompanied by his wife Victoria Duffy) – that discussion in respect of an autobiography he was minded to write, subsequently acquired for the US by Little, Brown and for the UK by Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The provisional title was Out Takes. I wonder now if we can still hope to see this book, at least in part if not in whole?
The tome Hopper was contemplating was not some chronological plod through the annals but, rather, a memoir galvanised by especially charged moments and meaningful scenes from his life – some of them already the stuff of notoriety/legend, others previously personal. It was all set to be a classic American Life & Times: Hopper and I talked about Dylan’s Chronicles, and his admiration for the deftness of Dylan’s prose in conjuring time and place as well as his own creative process. I suppose we must now see if the fates are kind, and what Hopper has in mind to leave behind as testament.
One memory that I personally will always treasure: Hopper, on learning that I was published by Faber and Faber, leaned close to me, eyes shining as they do in his greatest movie moments, or – once in a while – in post-rehab interviews where he fondly recalled the demonic power of Amanita muscaria. But what Hopper wished to share with me in New York that day was how deeply he admired the work of Faber’s founding father, T.S. Eliot. ‘I should have been a pair of ragged claws’ – Hopper recited precisely, with low-burning fervour – ‘scuttling across the floors of silent seas...’ Now there’s an audio-book I’d buy in a second. Long may you rave on and on, Senor Dennis.

NUFC back to Sky Sports Div 1: Get in, you bassa

Gareth Harrison puts it unimprovably over at True Faith: "You know that when Nolan is able to compose himself for a perfectly placed overhead kick in the opposition’s area that things really are going your way but it was a poetic way to put the cap on our promotion. The chances of him being able to stop, light a tab and spank a goal like this in against the likes of Vidic and Vermalean are reasonably limited but hey, let’s enjoy it while it lasts."
Pragmatic musings, too, from NUFC.com: "Rather than the scenes of mass jubilation that were reported by TV and press sources though, our take on proceedings was more one of quiet satisfaction... Let's not forget that the blow we have recovered from was self-inflicted. To sum it up in one word, relief."

Britain Decides 2010: Trouble in Mind...

The polls open in less than six weeks and the odd, nervy, queasily fractious tone of our politics persists. I have read clever men in both the left/liberal and centre-right press saying this is an election that both main parties deserve to lose... Well, my vote is already in the bank, so to speak, but if I did need electronic help in my decision then I might take John Rentoul's steer toward the diverting game of VoteMatch.
Meanwhile Anatole Kaletsky said a few things with which I agreed in today's Times:
As Tory leaders become increasingly desperate and fill the airwaves with exaggerated denunciations of public debt, combined with hand-on-heart vows to protect every spending programme they mention and firm commitments to reduce taxes, what will voters conclude? That the Tories are Janus-faced on the most important issue facing the nation — the need to set responsible priorities for debt reduction through tax increases and spending cuts. And being two-faced translates into untrustworthy and contemptuous of the voters’ intelligence... The Tories want to present themselves as potential saviours for a nation that, under Mr Brown’s leadership, has suffered the economic equivalent of Dunkirk. But if they genuinely believe that Britain has suffered 13 years of shocking economic mismanagement since 1997, that reducing debt is an overriding moral obligation and that the country is now on the brink of bankruptcy, then Dunkirk-style sacrifices must be demanded. In that case — which might be described as the Greek scenario — the Tories are grossly irresponsible to promise tax cuts or protect spending programmes such as the NHS, not to mention foreign aid, bus passes and winter fuel payments...

Fenham Eusebio: Incredible Hulk?

Listening to this affable, decent, thoroughly professional, dishwater-dull post-match interview with NUFC’s top homegrown striker… whey, it could be wor Alan Shearer talking, back in his prime. But no, it’s Shola Ameobi, restored to the side after a frustrating break for injury, and back where he left off, scoring goals for fun in Division 2.
Is Shola about to get another shot at being a top-flight striker, a Toon #9 even? He seems to have held off the challenge of young Nile Ranger, very much a bench-warmer of late, sad to say; also that of Leon Best, who was bought as Shola-cover just as 'Marlene' Harewood was borrowed, and now seems to be struggling to get in the squad. Well, as Shola points out, there’s team spirit about NUFC these days, of a sort not seen since the Robson years. (When Souness was boss Shola was at times deployed on the left-wing, to little effect i.e. the occasional prolonged, gangling, aimless dribble.) The forging of a good team means competition for places, and exclusion. You need to earn your place, and in Shola, Carroll and Lovenkrands NUFC have had three proper notching strikers this season. Next season? Hmm. Even Wolves, as pundit Shearer pointed out recently, could score for fun when in the Fizzy Pop League…
A final Shola/Shearer point: it looks to me like Ameobi has used his convalescence to hit the weight-pile. His upper body has, to my eye, a newly rock-like aspect, reminiscent of how Shearer came back from his ankle break c.1998, shorter of pace but strategically self-reinvented as a serious tough nut. Some might say that with Carroll we have our bruising/eye-watering striker already in place, nee further applications, thanks. But aggression was a quality Shola always needed more of, and a bit more muscle will help with that.

First Bookhugger column: Gothic - The Beast That Will Not Die

As 'promised' last week, my first Bookhugger column is now posted up here and trailered like so:
The Richard T. Kelly Column: Gothic, The Beast That Will Not Die
For the first of his exclusive monthly columns for Bookhugger, novelist and screenwriter Richard T. Kelly explores the enduring popularity of the Gothic in literature and film – from Bram Stoker to Stephanie Meyer.
May you find something of interest therein...

RTK online column at Bookhugger.co.uk

As of next week I'll be writing a monthly column for the excellent Bookhugger online literary magazine, this to address various matters literary, writers and their books, the publishing business and all what have you. Bookhugger is a splendid platform for book fans, and I'm looking forward to being part of it and having this outlet for expression. In advance of the first column going up I've filled in the site's regular writer's questionnaire, which they call 'The Book That...', a little listing of tomes (Dostoyevsky, Mailer, Mishima et al) that have meant something to me in years gone by, and indeed still do. My responses are here.

Division 1 crunch-time: Play up, the Arsenal!

This site is Black & White, right? My 'second team' is Glasgow Rangers, for reasons too tired and obvious to rehearse here. But I suppose my third team - though I would never formally sport the colours - is probably Arsenal. In fairness, I have now lived in North London longer than anywhere else in my life. Moreover, as any fule know, Wenger's Arsenal at their best play the loveliest-looking football in England.
At my elder daughter's nursery I sometimes have the crack about sporting matters with a Gooner Dad, and when a month or so again I casually tipped his men for the title, he groaned. 'Nah, nah, not the Geordie curse...' Presumably he meant that any mission that's been blessed by a Mag is doomed thereafter to ignominious failure. Or sunnink like that. At any rate, spankings by Man United and Chelsea followed hard upon my bit of clear-eyed punditry and most of us reckoned that was that for the Arsenal this year, can't win owt with kids, blighted by injury, too fancy for their own good etc. And yet Prof Wenger's lads have not laid down. They're still in it, by jove.
It's the improbability of it all that so delights: Van Persie crocked; the initally heavy-footed return of the perplexing Sol Campbell; poor young Ramsay's horror injury; Bendtner's natural arrogance seeming to extend to a disdain for hitting the target; Wenger's one-eyed vantage on the rules given some credence by some shocking refereeing... And still they rise, leading one to feel that perhaps indeed truth and beauty will out, perhaps indeed it's meant to be, as it usually isn't. The joy of Cesc indeed...

Ratzinger: "the stench of evil"

Olenka Frenkiel's report for Newsnight last week on the general failure of Ireland's Garda Siochana - consequent to the findings of the Murphy Report into clerical abuse - to pursue and prosecute Catholic priests who raped children; and on the specific case of the paedophile ex-priest Bill Carney - who was paid off by the Church to make himself scarce, and still takes his holidays in the Canary Islands - was as upsetting as anything I've seen on television this decade. That this morass of turpitude, hypocrisy and lies is one to which Catholicism makes a distinctive contribution by dint of its own backward nature - its granting of near-divine authority on earth to human men made out of the paltriest and most rancid physical/moral material - is proven in the grim and creepy personage of the current Pope, who was propelled to office by the widespread feeling that what the Vatican really needed was 'a sound man', after years of presumably lackadaisical liberalism under the profoundly conservative Pole Karol Wojtyla. Christopher Hitchens, God bless him, says what needs saying about Ratzinger in Slate today:
"The Roman Catholic Church is headed by a mediocre Bavarian bureaucrat once tasked with the concealment of the foulest iniquity, whose ineptitude in that job now shows him to us as a man personally and professionally responsible for enabling a filthy wave of crime. Ratzinger himself may be banal, but his whole career has the stench of evil—a clinging and systematic evil that is beyond the power of exorcism to dispel. What is needed is not medieval incantation but the application of justice—and speedily at that."

Esquire (April 2010) now on stands

Leo DiCaprio is the cover star, looking like a swinging kind of guy. Inside is a rare sighting of Chris Morris, also a spot of erotic finesse courtesy of Rankin. My column is about Paul Greengrass's Green Zone, of which I say:
"One can imagine a great Greengrass movie shot at the eye-level of one soldier amid the fog of the Iraq war, trying to see his way through the morass. But the visual signature of Green Zone is a grand aerial shot across Baghdad, signifying that Greengrass and his writer Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential, Mystic River) have an overarching theory about the invasion of Iraq – one that tends heavily toward conspiracy..."
John Rentoul, who hasn't seen Green Zone, is nevertheless on the right track with his suspicions of it...

Tories: 'A Little Child Shall Lead Them...'!?

On last week’s BBC1 Question Time Boris Johnson made one remarkably graceful and responsible intervention on the issue of the anonymity of Jon Venables and its impact on the public purse. He correctly cited the case of Mary Bell in arguing that the justice system should run its course. (In doing so he left sadly isolated his supposed co-thinker, the ridiculous Carol Vorderman, who was once fancied to be clever in a country clearly poor at maths, then became a TV-ad shill for ‘secured loans’, and now seems to have exposed herself conclusively as a shrill nitwit.)
That Johnson made his point succinctly was a miracle in itself, because for the remainder of the programme he talked his usual blustering, waffling, would-be-endearing nonsense and was quite often allowed to get away with it. But on the issue of defence spending a spirited young woman in the audience told Boris that if he didn’t know what he was talking about then perhaps he should shut up. And Dimbleby had him squirming ineffectually in the effort to deny that he has not, at times, through public utterances at odds to the party line, ‘undermined’ his party leader and fellow Etonian/Bullingdon alumnus Dave Cameron.
Anyhow Boris is rumbled again, and by his own utterances – surprise! – in this month’s astute Vanity Fair profile of Cameron by Michael Wolff:
"Cameron “alchemized a position of more or less glutinous consensus,” says Boris Johnson, whose own relationship with Cameron tiptoes a fine line between admiration for his evident electability and doubtfulness about his intellectual bona fides… “The lion lies down with a lamb, calf, and fatling together, and a little child shall lead them,” says Johnson dryly…"
Yes, comrades, this man still wants to be Prime Minister - nay, truly, madly, deeply believes he should be. On BBCQT he claimed frothingly that he could hardly countenance why on earth the British public might even consider plumping for Gordon Brown on May 6. That would indeed be the world turned upside down and God turfed out of his Heav'n, Boris old bean, what what?
(Vanity Fair's portrait of Cameron reproduced above without permission is, of course, by David Bailey.)

Jonás Gutiérrez's Spidey eye for goal

The Spiderman mask secreted by Jonás Gutiérrez snugly inside his jockstrap, to be produced and worn only for goalscoring celebrations, was one of the many grim jokes of Newcastle's relegation season of 08-09, mainly because we never saw the beggar once all bliddy year. Such was the Argentine's failure to deliver 'end product.' All smiles, though, after Saturday's tonking of Barnsley, Jonas's wonder strike for the fourth goal, and the SJP debut of The Mask, which, Jonas freely admitted, had been smelling a bit rank after all that time spent down south. Worth the wait, though. NUFC is the sort of club that deserves its own mercurial/erratic South American midfield wizard, capable, at moments of inspiration, of resembling a skinny Mexican superhero-wrestler. Fair play to Nicky, Kevin, Alan and all the northern lads but you do want a spot of 'Julio Geordio'-like diversity in your Magpie squad.
Photo (c) ACTION IMAGES

Ian Paisley: The Preacher Wearies...

Thanks to the mighty Tom Paulin and his 1982 essay for the London Review of Books entitled Paisley’s Progress, I learned that one of the Reverend Ian Paisley’s major sermons - published in his pomp at the helm of the Martyrs Memorial Church on Ravenhill Road, Belfast - made a great symbol out of the unpassable divide wrought by the sea. ‘Nothing separates like the sea’, Paisley preached. ‘What a terrible barrier the sea makes. Separation...’ Such sentiments were part of what led Paulin to read Paisley as one Ulster 'Unionist' determined to release Ulster from its bondage to both the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom - while, of course, ensuring that Ulster retained its special and peculiar six-county majesty…
In 1970 Paisley became a Westminster MP for North Antrim. Next month he will be 84 years old. This week he finally gave up on his Westminster seat, and so renounced the need for all those flights across the Irish Sea from Antrim to London and the Mother of Parliaments. But he will still be a figure at the semi-devolved Northern Irish Assembly at Stormont, where, amazingly, he became First Minister, in 2007 leading the DUP, the party he founded, into coalition government with the party he called ‘Sinn Fein/IRA.’ Tony Blair and the Irish taoiseach Ahern stood by and blessed this marriage. Afterward Paisley joked for the TV cameras with Blair, remarking, ‘I wonder why people hate me so much, as I’m such a nice man...’
A few weeks ago I sat watching TV news with an Ulsterman of pension age when Paisley came on, trying to be charming in his dotage. ‘That’s a bad rascal right there’, muttered my friend, unbidden - an opinion I wouldn’t have predicted from him, and yet was unsurprised by. For such a populist vote-winner, such a ‘nice man’, so many of Paisley's admirers have been furtive and embarrassed, and so many of his critics left to feel surreal and lonely in pointing out what a cheerleader for thuggery he has so often been in the course of his quite inimitable career.

The Jennifer Connection(s)

Zoe Tapper, Jennifer's esteemed female lead, has a deservedly large and devoted following out there, and of course there are dedicated websites that track the progress of her career. I see that one such, zoetapper.net, has noticed my last post and added a few lines on Jennifer among their listing of Zoe’s current projects. They must have checked out my other Jennifer-related postings on here and, not unreasonably, took away the notion that Zoe might be playing the late Jennifer Jones in the film. I ought to confirm, then, that Jennifer is not a Hollywood true story but an entirely fictional tale, set in present-day London. One doesn’t want to spill too much about the plot; however it’s simple enough to reiterate that for me the titling of Jennifer was a sort of cinephile tip of the hat to William Dieterle’s Portrait of Jennie (1948) and to Jennifer Jones’ luminous performance therein. But really that amounts to nothing more than a little movie-lover’s in-joke – you’d never suppose the connection from watching the film, even if you know the Dieterle picture inside out.
What’s for sure, though, is that Jennifer borrows (or steals…) some of the thematics of a certain family of Romantic film stories – Jennie being one, but Hitchcock’s Vertigo (with Kim Novak, pictured) undoubtedly the most admired – in which female beauty is shown to exert a near-mesmeric hold over a man, and could even, in a certain light, be imagined to derive from some supernatural origin. (I’m sure all fans of Zoe Tapper will have no difficulty envisaging her in just such a role.) There is a great Romantic line uttered by Jones in Jennie that could also, in my idle fancy, adorn some imaginary poster for Jennifer: ‘Of all the people who lived from world’s end to world’s end, there is just one you must love, and you must seek until you find him...’ (or, in this case, her.) But of course there are two ways to take such a sentiment: one as proof of a towering, heartfelt, quasi-religious love, the other as evidence of a disturbed mind...

On location with 'Jennifer'

‘How do you like your 'Jennifer'?’ Thus did director Michael Lennox greet me shortly after I stepped onto his set for the first time, this on the final day of the Channel 4/Touchpaper TV ‘Coming Up’ shoot, based at a centre for student medics within King’s College, London. Mike might have been referring to the industrious hum of activity all around the location, or simply to the immaculately dark and beguiling manner in which Hair & Make-Up had prepped actress Zoe Tapper for her day’s graft in the role of the film’s titular heroine. At any rate, ‘Very much’ was my feeling either way.
Of course I can’t really envisage how Jennifer will look and feel and function once it’s all cut into shape (though I’ll find out soon enough...) But what I saw on the shoot was hugely heart-lifting and compelling, thanks to the commitment and cares of Mike and his producers and crew, and to the work in front of camera by Zoe Tapper and Andrew Buchan, stupendously gifted young professionals whose combined presence and calibre have given a huge boon to this project. Observing Andrew’s and Zoe’s easy, astute shifts into and through the gears of performance, the well-turned smartness of their acting choices from moment to moment - it was easy for me to forget that I had scripted this drama. The only moments that pulled me out of this agreeable reverie were the occasions when it was clear I’d written some line that was not really sayable, or some piece of business that actually served no purpose.
I’ve been on enough film sets before as an observer, but this was my first time watching something I’d written get raised up onto its feet and shot. Once one’s head is screwed on thus, it’s fascinating to watch a crew, get the feel of its unique division of labour, and the lively personalities inhabiting the various specialisations. I’ll say this for starters: film crews always have the best active-wear jackets, combat trews and boots, not to speak of those techie tool-belts bristling with gear and lucky charms. Where do they shop for this stuff? Moreover: film crews still seem to chomp through cigarettes more (or more vigorously) than any other profession I know - this periodicy somewhat dictated by the incidence through the working day of clouds across the sun or droning aeroplanes overhead. The crew’s rhythms are many and various, but the chief one comes after ‘Action’, when a lot of diverse activity swiftly resolves itself then falls still, and 40-odd pairs of eyes are suddenly trained on a 15-inch monitor. But then that’s where the action is.
Anyhow, more on Jennifer to come, de rigueur...

Nic Roeg, iTunes and me

My iPod fix has stayed fairly true of late, for all that I use it mainly to hear Sweet Emotion or No Quarter as I'm headed down into the London underground. Still, last week I used the silvery machine so as to take in all of Bartok's string quartets while sat writing parts of a novel - so, in short, I don't say I'm a complete clod. Podcasts, of course, remain another source of possible self-improvement. On that note, if not quite in the right spirit - I see BAFTA are making available free podcast downloads of most of their film-personality event recordings, including the two sessions I was part of last year in honour of Nicolas Roeg: the truly star-studded (no, not me) 'Magician with a Movie Camera' night at BAFTA Piccadilly in March (no. 28 on the menu), and also a little chat Nic and I did for an audience at Somerset House in August (no. 12), this before an open-air screening of Don't Look Now, and also about 24 hours before my daughter Lucy was born...

Channel 4 'Coming Up' 2010: Jennifer

Jennifer, the 30-or-so-minute teleplay I've written for this year's Channel 4 Coming Up scheme, goes before the cameras this week - starting tomorrow morning, in fact... I await the outcome with great interest, of course, but first of all I'm just hoping that the rain stays away south of the Thames tomorrow, ideally from 7am, and at least until 6-7pm... I hope to drop by the Jennifer set at some point before it all wraps, if only to stand about in a down-filled coat, clutching a styrofoam cup of coffee, as I've often seen folk do in pictures... Still, if so, I will be blogging my observations in due course. Meanwhile, here's another picture of the late Jennifer Jones in Portrait of Jennie, one of the presiding spirits of this project...

Building a Party, when not demolishing it

I have often wondered what a serious British party of the Left (i.e. ideologically to the left of the old Labour Party, but non-dogmatic in its 'analysis' of Marx and his inheritors; its membership founded on organised labour; free of the self-hating bourgeois; and determined to be a party of action rather than a debating society) might look like. And I still wonder, since no serious candidate has ever emerged, within my lifetime or previously. Listening to that well-known 'political' actress Vanessa Redgrave on the radio tonight, I was reminded fleetingly of her comrade Gerry Healy and what was essentially 'his' Workers Revolutionary Party - this before the moment passed like a minor stomach cramp. Meanwhile: the risible Socialist Workers Party is going through one of its seemingly perennial convulsions, this time with the loss of comrade Lindsay German, who, to her credit, has got her chosen cause onto television in the last 6-7 years more than any other member of an inconsequential groupuscule one could think of, barring her ex-comrade George Galloway, of course, whose rating is boosted on account of his principled appearance on Celebrity Big Brother. What web sources are running as German's own account of her resignation says nearly all that needs saying about the hopeless narcissism of small differences that has characterised the self-styled Trotskyist parties of these islands:

I resigned on Wednesday on my way to a Stop the War public meeting in Newcastle which I had been asked not to attend by the Central Committee. I was first phoned about this two days before by a CC member who told me this wasn't a proper STW meeting, that it was organised by ex members hostile to the party, and that most STW members in Newcastle knew nothing about it. This turned out not to be true, as two sets of minutes of meetings (in the public domain) make clear... I believe the CC was wrong in the particulars of this case, but that this reflected a more general political error. The meeting itself was a success, with 35 people including a number of Muslims attending. There were unfortunately no SWP members (two paper sellers didn't come into the meeting) and only a handful of ex members...

Once upon a Time in Newcastle...

A Tokyo-based Geordie by the name of Michael who runs a blog called Dolphin Hotel (stick that lot in your pipe) has just made my day with the following post about Crusaders, which I am strangely impelled to reproduce in full. In particular, his analogies with a hot bag of chips, and with a Proustian gangster film that I've loved since it came out, are such stuff as the novelist dreams of in a reader's response. Reassuring to know that he's also well aware of what are the canonical Newcastle texts. I should say that Michael's posts on other, more substantive matters around his blog seem to me even better...

"We're a small city, true enough, but there still isn't much in the way of good literature about Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There was Kiddar's Luck, of course, Jack Common's masterpiece - "one of the two best working-class novels of the 20th century" - Robert Westall's The Machine Gunners, and the poems that came out of Bloodaxe Books. Jack's Return Home - set in Scunthorpe and written by a Mancunian - feels like it's really about the Toon, but that's only because of the film (which really was a classic, by the way). And then there's Catherine Cookson, who I always suspected was a bit crap but haven't actually read.

I found Richard T. Kelly's The Crusaders in the Edinburgh branch of Fopp, drawn to the arch of the Tyne Bridge on the cover (ok, and the two quid price tag), and devoured the 540 pages like a bag of chips after a Saturday night out. Set in a semi-factional West End in the mid-1990s, with flashbacks to the early-80s, regeneration schemes and several cameos from the black-and-whites themselves, it has the kind of broad, generational sweep you find in the Victorian novelists. If it was a film, it'd be called Once Upon A Time in Newcastle - and Jimmy Woods and De Niro would be queueing up for the starring roles."

New Esquire (March 2010) on stands: The State of Man

An extraordinary cornucopia in the new Esquire, ranging from a photo gallery of British servicemen returned from Afghanistan, through interviews with Ryan Giggs and Ayrton Senna's nephew, to the rather revealing results of a reader's poll - how much we earn, how much we owe, what we spend weekly on alcohol... Oh and there's a spread featuring the actress Talulah Riley, of the sort the red-tops call 'sizzling.' Riley is also the cover star for the subscribers' special edition. The newsstand buyers get Robert De Niro, who is celebrated at length within, including tributes from Neil LaBute and DBC Pierre and a longish think-piece from your correspondent, in which I say... Actually, I don't - the following paragraph is one that had to be cut for space, following on from a quote by Sean Penn likening De Niro's preparatory rigours to those of a trained dancer:
"The discipline in which De Niro was himself steeped as a training actor was the famous and much-misunderstood ‘Method’, devised in Russia by Konstantin Stanislavsky, immortalised on American soil by such gurus as De Niro’s own acting coach, Stella Adler, who also taught Brando among many others. Most laymen assume The Method is an obsessive, interior mission to ‘stay in character’ at all costs, but Adler urged her students to cultivate life experience, observe the world outside their windows, and always respect the writer’s vision. ‘Don’t drag it down to your small self’ was an Adler mantra, one to which De Niro apparently subscribes..."
Yes, a little over-technical, that, I think you'll agree. Elsewhere my film column this month is on Clint Eastwood's Invictus, of which I say:
"The erstwhile Man with No Name remains deeply absorbed by classic western themes: the new lawman in town, the town as a fractious community on the brink of frontier wildness. Eastwood is famously obsessed by revenge, especially when contemplated by a once-violent man who has since sworn to beat his sword into a ploughshare. And he can’t resist the image of the lone hero standing up to make his case before a gathering of townsfolk, then demanding of the assembled, ‘Who’s with me?’ All these elements may be found in Invictus too, even though its hero – Mandela, in the shape of Morgan Freeman – is a septuagenarian with a smile and a kindly word for everyone."

Superbowl overkill: The Tebow Case

I was wittering on about The Who below but there's another and bigger media sideshow story at this year's Superbowl, namely the $2.5 million TV commercial that will air at some suitable break featuring boyish heartthrob football star Tim Tebow, 2007 winner of the Heisman trophy for best collegiate ballplayer, and his devoutly Christian mother Pam, who refused medical advice to abort the birth of Tim back in the mid-1980s, and is thus doubly convinced of the utter wrongness of abortion.
William Saletan of Slate offers this punchy rebuttal:
"Pam's story certainly is moving. But as a guide to making abortion decisions, it's misleading. Doctors are right to worry about continuing pregnancies like hers. Placental abruption has killed thousands of women and fetuses. No doubt some of these women trusted in God and said no to abortion, as she did. But they didn't end up with Heisman-winning sons. They ended up dead. Being dead is just the first problem with dying in pregnancy. Another problem is that the fetus you were trying to save dies with you. A third problem is that your existing kids lose their mother. A fourth problem is that if you had aborted the pregnancy, you might have gotten pregnant again and brought a new baby into the world, but now you can't. And now the Tebows have exposed a fifth problem: You can't make a TV ad."

Clare Short & the BBC: Endless Love

I guess on the whole I've been able to live in peace with 13 years of New Labour - there have been peaks and nadirs, to be frank - but it does still irk me that Clare Short ever got to sit at a cabinet table; and this solely, like Prescott, because Blair thought he was playing nice, palliating that useless/sanctimonious side of the Party in which he privately had no interest. Well, good work there, Tone - you wound up letting Short become the public face of the pseudo-sacred principle of 'cabinet government', i.e. the utterly unpersuasive voice that won't shut up ought by definition to be heeded. Having somehow attained the status of Minister, Clare Short was not going to be ignored - and her being her, who could expect otherwise?
Stolidly populist, Short has been the most easily quoted critic of the decision to topple Saddam. But her performance when it came to giving up that ministerial office is all one needs to know about her political gifts. (As the Telegraph heard one minister say, "better to have her as an unprincipled laughing stock rather than a principled martyr.") As for the value of her purported service to the cause of the Left, George Monbiot made a rather stark case for the prosecution back in 2003, in the Guardian, no less.
And yet, and yet... our state broadcaster takes Short very seriously, for what one supposes are personal reasons. Nicholas Witchell of the BBC has been awfully keen that we know who gets applause from the discerning gallery at Chilcot, and today we understand that Short finally gave those people just what they wanted to hear and more. It was truly painful to watch even the slightest fragment of her 'It's My Turn' efforts as played on the news bulletins - that scarf gaily trailing from her neck, those awful, chatty dismissals of top people and major matters to whom and to which she should never have been in the remotest proximity. Jim Pickard in the FT and Paul Waugh in the Standard have got the tone just about right in their reporting.

NUFC: Trouble, man?

If you see the football season as a 5-act play – I do at any rate, Act I being August-September (the pitches still splashed by summer sun, six weeks of clean new strips and surprise results), through the dramatic meat of autumn and winter, to the business end of April-May that constitutes Act V, and what Sir Alex Ferguson famously calls 'squeaky bum time' – well, if you’re still with me, then you see that we stand now on the threshold of Act IV: the passage of play that determines just how squeaky will be those derrieres.
What we of Division 2 have learned in Act III is that, sadly, this flight contains three sides of fairly consistent footballing ability – the Toon, WBA and Notts Forest – and so, with only two automatic promotion places to spare, then fatalistic Toon fans such as I are now envisaging a play-off spot... Moreover, with nothing to remember of Toon visits to Wembley in the lifetime other than capitulation, anti-climax and a general failure to show up, I can’t help feeling in my pessimistic bones that we will back to Barnsley and Doncaster next season.
The real concern is that the last half-dozen league games, while extending an unbeaten run, have been a plodding set of performances. We have been found out at this level, to take loan of the cliché. Injuries and opposition pace expose the defence. Pace of any kind troubles our 'senior-pro'-comprised midfield. Upfront even the disagreeable Marleen Harewood begins to be missed. No fan would have failed to jump at the offer of where we are now, 4 points clear with a game to spare, but there’s going to have to be a rising to the occasion for the big games of Act IV, the visits of Cardiff and Forest, the trip to Swansea, not forgetting all the rest...
This transfer window just gone has seen the completion of the retooling of the NUFC squad to high-end Division 2 standard: if it was hard to see the mob we started with doing any better in Div 1 (hypothetically) than they’d managed in 2009-09, the best XI we have at present would be fairing no better in the six-pointers with Burnley, Hull and Bolton. Still, this is our lot, and it has been rightly said in his favour that Ashley backed the club appropriately in the transfer dealings: cover at the left and centre of defence, some pace and wiles for the midfield, and another striker (Leon Best, pictured.) Perhaps a little competition for places, plus a bit more of what Kevin Nolan was saying back when he was scoring, about actually wanting to bag that Division 2 title… these things could only help.
Roll on this Friday then, and the visit of the 'soul crew'. Always liked that Aretha Franklin, myself.

Superbowl XLIV: The Who dares, wins?

This Sunday, Superbowl 44, Colts v Saints, and the bookies say Colts by 4. I haven't a clue myself, and if the Pittsburgh Steelers aren't in it then I have no-one to shout for. The half-time show, though, that's a different matter. For this year the Dolphin Stadium in South Florida, and a few hundred million TV viewers worldwide, will welcome to the stage the 'Orrible 'Oo.

The half-time entertainment is a Superbowl perennial, but looking back at its history one could be surprised at how long the organisers persisted in mounting tame little Disney-like family spectacles for 10 minutes or so, seemingly unaware that when you've got thousands of sports freaks crammed into a stadium, and folks at home getting rowdy and beery, the chief thing they'll want to do is rock.

Michael Jackson (XXVII) and Diana Ross (XXX) were gestures toward superstar power, but, again, whoever imagined that a significant portion of the fanbase wanted to hear La Ross do Ain't No Mountain High Enough or I'm Coming Out? Even Aerosmith were made to share the slot with N-Sync and Britney Spears. Finally, in the decade just past, some genius figured it out - U2, the Stones, Springsteen, unalloyed and no support act - that's what the boys want.

There is something self-defeating about the 10-minute format: I didn't much enjoy Springsteen's set, for instance, not just because the songs were edited but because of the songs themselves - obvious, middle-ground, crowd-pleasing choices from The Boss. With The Who, however, advance word suggests that they will cram in versions of Baba O'Riley, Pinball Wizard, Tommy, Can You Hear Me?, Who Are You, and Won't Get Fooled Again. And let it be said, brothers and sisters, you could not possibly get a better mini-setlist than that, not in the entire annals of rock's lost highway...

The Chilcot Inquiry: if you are so drawn to it...

An increasingly nervy, impulsive, hair-trigger atmosphere surrounds the Chilcot Inquiry and reportage of same, as the media and the ticket-possessing public await Tony Blair’s appearance on Friday. The last few days have offered rich pickings on the legal aspect of the matter. I should say that it used to be one of my (innumerable) gripes against New Labour that there were far too many bloody lawyers sat round its top table. But then I’m not aware that anyone ever claimed these people were any good at being lawyers. (Cherie Blair has her claims in this department, of course, but nobody ever elected her, perhaps to her chagrin.)
What an assured legal performance we have had, though, from Jack Straw! Not just in his testimony to Chilcott but in the documents under discussion, such as his 6-page rejoinder to Lord Goldsmith. The BBC, who nurse a private and wholly personal wound over Iraq, are currently headlining that Straw is ‘defiant over ignored legal advice’ on the illegality of the war, which is, I suppose, one way of saying that Straw considered one piece of advice from the Attorney General to be more salient than another (differing) one from the FO’s man.
Similarly it seems to be headline news to some outlets that Lord Goldsmith ‘changed his mind’ on illegality, or that he had admitted such - something we were aware of, also of Goldsmith’s reasons for same, many moons and Inquiries ago; just as we know the unshakeable anti-war line that he only reviewed his options once the Yanks leaned on him. At any rate Goldsmith put it this way today: the question to his mind was ‘‘Which side of the argument do you want to be on?’ And I took the view I would prefer to be on the side of the argument that a second resolution wasn't necessary.’ That’s politics. As Paul Waugh of the Evening Standard has it, more sceptically than would I:
‘I'm sure many will seize on 'Goldsmith's Law' as proof of his wrong-headed approach to the law: make up your mind first where you want to end up and then design your verdict accordingly. Not exactly what some expect of an Attorney General. But maybe that's unfair, maybe he was simply reflecting the political realities of the consequence of his decision…’
Yesterday the principled Elizabeth Wilmshurst said her piece in cool and calm fashion, and Nick Witchell on the BBC 10 O’Clock News made sure we were told that members of the public in the hearing room applauded the end of her testimony. Not to defame these spectators en masse but I suspect a fair few of them are the sort who have made BBC1’s Question Time such a drizzle of loud nonsense whenever Iraq is discussed.
Ms Wilmshurst also got in her shot at Mr Straw and his ‘ignoring’ of the Foreign Office legal view: ‘He’s not an international lawyer.’ So, by implication, he lacks that rigour, that basis on such an universally esteemed and binding body of case law? Sure, Ms Wilmhurst and Sir Michael Wood may have been more fastidiously following the letter of law in making sure their opinions genuflected toward the legally clear primacy of that peculiar body called the UN Security Council - for all that this was to defer to the polluted world of politics. If only the membership of said Council were as pure and rigorous in their legal assessment of a case as Wilmhurst and Wood! But then maybe the proud French former imperium, the wounded and bristling Russian imperium, and the quietly confident Chinese imperium were all entirely principled and law-abiding in their considered opinion that the tyrant Saddam Hussein would not be overthrown by any imperial warmongering US/UK-led coalition, at least not on their watch. Or as Kafka's thuggish doorkeeper tells the Man from the Country who seeks admission to The Law: 'If you are so drawn to it, just try to go in despite my veto. But take note: I am powerful...'
The illustration above comes from the online petition site Ban Blair Baiting.

Mad Max in Midlife

My dear daughter #1, newly 4 years old, is in a phase where Her Absolute Indispensable Favourite Film has passed seamlessly from Mary Poppins to The Sound of Music. As such, her cinematic tastes have reached 1965, and she has learned why Julie Andrews – nee Julia Wells of Walton-on-Thames – was in her heyday the world’s biggest box-office draw: namely, because she was clean-limbed and fresh-faced, apparently unsullied, she sang well, and could even manage to act a bit while singing. Perhaps one day I will be forced to explain to Cordelia why Julia from Walton-on-Thames then married the increasingly vulgar Blake Edwards, watched her career decline none too gracefully, and felt the strange need to disrobe in a dismal picture called S.O.B. Eh bien, I guess that Cordi and I might yet manage to sit together through a viewing of Julie's one other hit, Thoroughly Modern Millie...
Before Cordi met Julie, i.e. last summer, she had a big thing for Babe The Pig, and this Christmas she seemed to approve of Mumbles the Penguin in Happy Feet. It was with great surprise that I discovered these works to be the brainchildren of Australian director George Miller, the affable and cerebral ex-doctor who did the boys a big favour by packing in medicine, getting some mates together in 1979 and making Mad Max.
Now then, when I was 10 years old my own Absolute Indispensable Favourite Film was Mad Max, and by the time I turned 11 it was Mad Max 2 (or The Road Warrior, as it was known in the US where few people outside of drive-ins had turned out for Mad Max.) Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome duly followed in 1985, a let-down that showed Miller was a mite too inclined to the Jungian analysis of mythology popularised by Joseph Campbell.
Now the internet churns daily with reports of progress on Miller’s fourth Max picture, Fury Road, due for our screens in 2011, Tom Hardy taking the wheel from that villainous old soak Mel Gibson. Is Miller too old for this sort of thing now? Am I?

Stewart Lee: Theatre of Hate

Last Saturday my wife and I managed to get out of the house for the night a deux, yes, quite unaccompanied, and initially I was so fazed by the shock of the new that it was only as the lights went up on Stewart Lee at the Leicester Square Theatre that I remembered what had been the ostensible, entertainment-oriented purpose of the evening. (I had already drunk a pint of beer, in a glass - albeit a plastic one - so I was mildly euphoric - albeit clear-eyed about what the morning would bring, not to say what was owed the babysitter, and this after a £4 pint of beer...)
At any rate, I got over my initial stupefaction, because Stewart Lee was very funny, and gradually I remembered that this had been my confident expectation, based on my admiration for last year's BBC2 Stewart Lee Comedy Vehicle, an admiration I'd expressed loudly enough for my wife to take a punt on these tickets. On Saturday night Lee made at least one gag about the low audience figures that series attracted, which may have been just an appealing mode of self-deprecation, or maybe a sign that his comedy lies on the cusp of the mainstream as it currently stands. Lee is a sort of anti-comedian: he certainly makes enough disparaging comments about lesser comedians; but more especially he does That Thing of deconstructing his act a little in the course of delivering it, such that the deconstruction almost seems to be the act itself - until, invariably, he exposes what is the actual essence of his comedic schtick, which is a form of moral disgust, a palpable sense that the world is simply not good enough, its faults both disguised and aggravated by certain popular loudmouth charlatans, some of them comedians. Part of this weltschmerz, Lee makes plain, comes from being a 41-year-old man, with 20 years in the job behind him, physically marked (on top of the usual dissipation) by being the father of a 2-year-old boy who, I imagine, gives Lee the runaround but also the impetus to keep protesting the inadequate state of the world...

10 Bad Dates With De Niro: The Softcover is Nigh (US Only)

My brother, currently on loan to Los Angeles, CA, sends the photographic evidence (above) that Overlook Press have indeed unleashed a paperback of Ten Bad Dates With De Niro upon the famously fickle North American book-buying market. If it has already landed in LA's delightful and legendary Book Soup store then we are sitting pretty. Good luck to the little fella. I will rest my case for its merits on the verdict of Richard Schickel in the Los Angeles Times: "A stimulating, necessary volume - and virtually alone amongst cinematic studies in the wit of its arguments and the seductiveness of its style."

Esquire (February 2010) now on stands, noticeably Female

I'm proud to be a contributing editor to a men's-interests magazine that doesn't feel the need to chase circulation through cover shots of ephemeral girly models in their scanties. No sir, when Esquire does feel the urge to put a beauteous woman up on its front, they always do so with plenty class: to wit, the quite stupendous image of actress Rachel Weisz by Greg Williams (left) that adorns the new issue. (Weisz is interviewed within by my mate Nev Pierce. Elsewhere the 'Rachel Cooke Interview', which a few months back was with Tony Blair, is this month with Peter Mandelson. Rachel Cooke gets some lovely gigs. As does Nev.)

I met Rachel Weisz once, in 1995, on the location (just outside Siena) of Bernardo Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty. With the rest of the cast and crew she was hanging out somewhat languidly in the Tuscan villa that was the movie's chief location - waiting for the Muse of the Next Set-up to descend on Bernardo and his DoP. In particular, she was hanging out with Liv Tyler, with whom she seemed to have as nice a rapport as they were meant to have in the movie (where Weisz played the sexually experienced young female to Tyler's over-ripe virgin.) As in that movie, Tyler in the flesh looked marginally more like the Hollywood movie star (at least to my gauche eye), and Weisz slightly more like the smart/gifted product of a Hampstead upbringing and a Cambridge education. Ms Tyler has done very well since, of course, but Weisz has really shot the works, with Hollywood franchise hits and an Academy Award. Now, apparently, she's polled as the woman most Esquire readers would like to marry - which, based on her CV and that cover shot, is setting the bar rather high.

Oh yes, my film column this month is on the film of Cormac McCarthy's The Road, of which I say:

"Post-apocalypse movies tend to excel in the poignantly desecrated landmark, and ever since Planet of the Apes Hollywood has routinely knocked the head off the Statue of Liberty. The beauty of The Road lies in the melancholy of an abandoned freeway bridge, a mighty and improving work of mankind turned to a reproach now that civilisation has receded. Across that bridge Man and Boy trudge, toward a jack-knifed eighteen-wheel truck; and ‘round the decay of that colossal wreck’, as the poet wrote, desolation stretches far away..."

Another round-up...

You'll have noticed I do, for my sins, take seriously any regard that's exhibited for my stuff out there in Blogville; also that I have an amateur interest in the art of top tens anyway... so I'm pleased to see Crusaders on another personal-best-read-of-2009 list, this one from blogger Nick Lacey (scroll down), where I'm in the esteemed company of Misha Glenny, Joe Sacco, Anne Tyler et al. Better yet, since David Peace and The Unthanks (pictured) rank high in Mr Lacey's 'Film' and 'Music' lists too, then I get the additional warm feeling of being part of a certain culture that's rattling around out there somewhere...

The Robinsons: Paint an Inch Thick

Mulling the possible fall-out of the Peter & Iris Robinson Debacle on Newsnight last week, scholar Paul (Lord) Bew warned viewers to be aware first of all that ‘there is no-one to the left of Peter Robinson in the DUP.’ Now, there’s a thought to make you gulp: Bew is right, of course, and it’s been that way for a while, and yet the plain statement of the truth does chill the blood somewhat. (The excellent David McKittrick summarises the state of things well in today’s Independent.)
The abrupt termination of Iris Robinson’s ludicrous political career is, of course, to be warmly welcomed. One always assumed that she was a contemptible hypocrite, but never that she would end up trumpeting the fact to us all with such fanfare. No further attempt on her part to show off the contortions of her Protestant conscience could afford her the slightest pathos – truly this is the sort of woman (cf. Wilde) whose hair would turn quite gold from grief. But she had a good run, absolutely maximised her limited abilities in life, and was able to carry on in the grandest manner. Now, as Hamlet instructs Yorick’s skull, ‘Get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come; make her laugh at that.’
What of ‘Peter’, as McKittrick calls him with, one assumes, some sort of friendly regard? He looks to be on the out, for sure. He appeared red-eyed on television the other day, though his legendarily pinched and sour persona of the 1980s and 1990s makes him another hard fellow to feel sorry for. 'In all of my public life', he insists, 'I have acted in the most professional and ethical way.' That goddamned self-advertising Protestant conscience again. Says who, Peter?

I will always remember him as the would-be DUP autocrat trapped in the mountainous shadow of Ian Paisley: a chap with a decent mind who nonetheless affected a trench coat and tinted glasses, a nerd trying to be a thug, as when, notoriously, in 1986, he led a Loyalist mob to the little Monaghan town of Clontibret, in protest at the Anglo-Irish Agreement. What idea of Ulster those eejits thought they were upholding by breaking windows and daubing graffiti on schools, the Lord only knows, but Robinson watched over the cudgel wielders and pronounced that this was Good. His subsequent attempts to squirm out of the legal consequences of his actions ought to have been the moment he learned to stop acting the tough guy.
The funniest twist in Robinson’s career was his adoption c. 1990s of a spiked, moussed hair-do, this coiffure perched above a pasty face that has always seemed about as cheerful as a kicked-in fridge door. Clearly Iris was urging him to play his proper part in the power couple they had become. And yet in the big stakes game it seemed Peter could never usurp Big Ian. Rather like Prince Charles, you might say, he aged and wearied and grew stale in the long wait to succeed. And yet, materially he prospered, his well-upholstered little empire in Castlereagh expanding indefatigably, with Iris ordering in the fancy curtains.
Moreover, as the mid-90s ‘peace process’ trained a new international spotlight on Northern Ireland Robinson proved himself to possess a decent set of political smarts, to be able to master a brief, exhibit a forensic mastery of detail. In his entirely auto-didactic way he was more impressive than the condescending ex-law lecturer David Trimble.
As Trimble’s UUP fell apart, Robinson’s utterly strange party gained, and Paisley's authority waned - Robinson himself seemed a bit more sensible, a bit more likeable, and distinctly atypical of that party of his. As he said in 2001, ‘Unless we have a structure that can enjoy the support of unionists and nationalists alike, it is not going to last.’ This observation remains true, and Robinson came round to it quicker than some of the other aspirant stormtroopers on his side. But if he’s now about to exit the field, then Paul Bew’s observation is the ominously correct one.