Dreaming is Free, mercifully, as I'm not sure I'd pay for it

'All that we see or seem', wrote Poe, 'Is but a dream within a dream.' Nope, you were wrong there, Edgar. Go easy on that laudanum. The hard-edged contours of our daily life may occasionally get a little blurry before our waking eyes, but rarely ever so warped as the stuff we see and seem while we're asleep. (Funnily enough Poe's poem was turned into a pop song by Propaganda, a band I liked a great deal back in 1985. And while tuning into the first couple reels of John Carpenter's The Fog on ITV4 the other night - something I must have done a million times - I realised I'd forgotten that Carpenter took the line cited above as his film's fancy epigraph.)

While I'm being scholastic, may we then contend that 'A dream is a wish your heart makes / When you're fast asleep?' I ask only because this Hal David tune is strongly featured in Disney's Cinderella, which I must have sat and watched with my daughter about a million times in the last week alone. But no, I have to be a blasted pedant and observe that when Cinders sings about 'a dream' she is referring in fact to what Dr Freud called a 'phantasy': a neurotic daydreaming or, if we are more generous, the imaginative activity that underlies all waking thought and feeling.

All this occurs to me because earlier this week I woke, rather troubled, from a dream in which I met someone I hadn't seen for maybe 15 years, the setting being a place much like that in which we last met, the person physically unchanged by the passage of those 15 years - and yet I in this dream was much the same person I am today, fully aged and weathered by said interim. It certainly wasn't the sort of encounter I would have bothered to daydream about, nor did it much resemble those that I have on a daily basis. Therefore I would venture that however one would best define it, pace Poe and Cinderella, would be the definition of what a dream is.

Thinking about the great enemies of Freud in our time puts me in mind of Vladimir Nabokov, whose writing I used to love. Apparently he explained his disdain to one interviewer like so: 'I think he’s crude, I think he’s medieval, and I don’t want an elderly gentleman from Vienna with an umbrella inflicting his dreams upon me... I don’t have the dreams that he discusses in his books.'

There's a bit in Transparent Things which, I think, suggests that Nabokov thought himself much too good for the sort of dreams Freud discussed... That said, I don't think I have 'those' dreams either. And yet, still, I feel 'the Viennese Quack' was onto something.
(That Nabokov's other great professed hate was Dostoyevsky is the decisive reason why I finally stopped reading VN's stuff. Because what could one think but 'Get over yourself, man'?)

WBA 2 Newcastle 3: Late Breaking News - P. Lovenkrands also Geordie...

I lived through a predictable range of emotions on Saturday afternoon, with the radio on and off while I was 'working'. It has been known for Newcastle to race into early leads, just as they find it easy to lose them, but a 3-1 first-half advantage, with a goal for new boy Lovenkrands and a couple of assists from new lad Ryan Taylor, was obviously a big boon. By the middle of the second half, and Albion's inevitable halving of the deficit leading to sphincter-tightening Final Stages, a lot had become clearer about the earlier skirmishes - namely that WBA were managing to defend even worse than us, and that our counterattacking game was not at its sharpest given the frontline resources at Chris Hughton's disposal.

Still, this is what the Toon will need to do more of if they're to survive - win games away from home against sides who are not significantly better than us, or else hardly much worse.

In general when seeking football wisdom, I only read NUFC blogs and fansites, of course - no other clubs' banter or bile concerns me. But I did stumble across a funny Baggies blog after the game, the author of which claimed to have been on the same post-match 'plane home' as Damian Duff. According to said author, Duff's considered view was that West Brom were 'sh*te', but when asked Duffer couldn't venture a specific opinion on the opposition player deployed to mark him that afternoon, because he'd never noticed the guy... Ought to be true, even if by any chance it's not.

Esquire (March 2009) now on stands: includes Sean Penn exclusive by Richard T Kelly

This month's Esquire is, in the journalistic sense, my first-ever cover-story, which feels like rather a special moment, to be frank. No-one who knows me has expressed the slightest surprise that the subject of said cover-story happens to be Sean Justin Penn, but then they know me too well. For the many readers who have never heard of me but are intrigued by SJP, I hope the piece proves useful, and - who knows? - might even lead them toward a spot of further reading, specifically Sean Penn: His Life and Times.

One snippet of Sean on Harvey: ‘It did strike me that there could never be a better actor to play Harvey Milk than Harvey Milk. That’s rarely the case: usually you figure you can create a more charismatic character, or else they’ll just cast someone better-looking than the real guy… But Harvey’s particular dear quality was very unusual.’

Need I add that there's plenty more great stuff within these covers this month, including a very useful piece on the '50 Funniest Books Ever Written'? It's a grand selection even though it doesn't have room for Flashman or The Rules of Attraction, and favours Summer Lightning over The Code of the Woosters for some odd reason best known to the literary agent Peter Straus.

The movie reviewed in my regular column is the wonderful Curious Case of Benjamin Button, for which my feelings grow yet more dear even as day by day the picture, most unhappily, is marked yet more woundingly with the stigma of Expected Loser at every Awards Ceremony still to be held in this long-drawn-out Awards Season...

No Child Left Behind...

Last week my wife and I were given a guided tour of a primary school at which we may want to try to seek a place for our daughter. And so I felt cold fingers close round my heart... Absolutely nothing to do with the school itself, which seemed an entirely first-rate establishment, full of well-behaved kids and lively teachers and fine facilities, a place any parent would be pleased to send their child in the hope that they'd be well educated and... 'happy'?

But there's the rub. It just seems to be a core existential moment, this: the dawn of the commencement of your child's formal schooling, following fairly hard on the heels of their getting the knack of talking. And whatever the ostensible merits of what you're presented with on your First School Tour, larger and more complicated thoughts are liable to obtrude, forcibly and perhaps for the first time - thoughts to do with your child's capacity for happiness or sadness, their willingness (and their ability) to function and to develop when separated from you, whether they will be liked and appreciated by their peers and teachers, whether they will struggle, socially and/or academically...

But there's no turning back or not facing it, is there?

'My mother groaned, my father wept / Into the dangerous world I leapt...'

John Updike 1932-2009

I have my Dad to thank for the fact that I've managed to read some Updike: a compendium of the Rabbit novels, plus the virtually cuboid reviews-and-essays collection Odd Jobs, are items on his shelves at home, and I ploughed through them all on some vacation past within the last ten years. As such, most of what I've read about Updike in terms of criticism (including the obituaries of the last two weeks) has felt quite familiar. Clearly a brilliant craftsman of mellifluous, well-minted prose; clearly a keen, shrewd, non-doctrinaire eye on American society and its politics; clearly someone who knew (or made it his business to learn) many useful things about the world, and incorporated them artfully into his fiction. And, clearly, someone much preoccupied with women and their most secret places...
Actually, strictly speaking, the first time I read anything of Updike's was by way of the extended extract from one of his lesser-known stories that is quoted, at length and admiringly, by Tim Madden, narrator of Norman Mailer's Tough Guys Don't Dance. The extract in question is a paean to the poetry and mystery of the female groin, as you might say... I'm coming over bashful here, as Updike clearly never did. But when I think about Updike and my chief feelings about his work and its ambience, the one image that comes to me repeatedly is that of a working man of midlife vintage, looking discreetly but firmly at his neighbour's wife, and - if not entirely coveting her - then certainly giving her provisional marks out of ten, and imagining how he might go about verifying his estimate.
My wife and I were talking about the Updike obituaries in the car the other day, and she mentioned that there was a seeming consensus around the view that post-WWII British fiction had no novelist quite comparable to him. Interesting. Of course the thing with Updike is that he was very clear about his attachment to bourgeois subject matter that might seem overly domestic and common-coin to some sophisticates; and yet clearly he scrutinised it and poeticised it in a style far surpassing most writers' attainments in the same area. Britain, of course, has no end of bourgeois novelists passionately attached to that segment of the class system that best suits them. But the difference here is that Updike's protagonists tended to do regular jobs (often of the sort imagined to induce 'quiet desperation') rather than being, say, writers or academics, which is a depressingly regular occupation for the protagonists of British literary novels. Not that Updike was any sort of 'common man' or fixated on same; but he always seemed happy to have his hands dirty with the raw stuff of life, albeit in a highly elegant sort of a way...

Kevin Nolan is a Geordie; Craig Bellamy isn't.

Can it be 7 years ago tonight that I was sitting in White Hart Lane, ecstatic (for a change), as Bobby Robson's Toon turned it round and beat Spurs 3-1? Already it seems like a sepia-tinted bygone age... We could have been more than one behind at the break, but Bobby’s introduction of the tempestuous £9.5 million signing Laurent Robert 'changed the game.' Bellamy got us a free kick, Robert crossed, Clarence Acuña nodded in the leveller. Then Bellamy hared down the left and laid it across the box for a newly-interested Shearer to slam home. (At this point, having sat politely among home fans for 70 minutes, I got off my backside and bloody well cheered.) And then Bellamy helped himself to a third with ten minutes left.
That was the team that brought Champions League football back to Tyneside after the previous season (2000-2001) had been as mediocre as any NUFC had managed in the so-called Premier League. 2008-2009, however, has been much, much worse, and relegation rather than Europe is the matter at hand today.
Wednesday's unsurprising defeat at Man City was rubbed home with Bellamy’s second goal in successive games against us for different clubs. He must have an issue... Bellamy was and is a canny player, but a mean little piece of work, and any lad who referred to himself in the third person before he'd won anything in the game was never going to be content at Newcastle while Alan Shearer was there too. Actually, back in 2001-02 a significant body of Toon fans were just as endeared to little no-necked Craig as they were to the increasingly immobile Shearer. But where Shearer’s commitment to the cause was endlessly tested and found to be staunch, Bellamy ended his Toon career feigning injuries so as not to play, and making risible defences of his conduct directly to Sky cameras. End of story.
Generally the City game was a dreadful night. Injuries to Owen and Barton, 6-8 weeks out for the former, 10 for the latter. It wouldn’t matter so bad if we didn’t already have Beye and Martins on the sickbed, the most vital of our many current casualties. If Shay Given is now off to City then good luck to him and no hard feelings but it’s a strange old mob he’ll be joining. At least we have Steve Harper in nets now, and he’s from Easington, y’knaa.
The flighty Charles N'Zogbia looks to be off somewhere too, or one hopes. ‘Having been insulted by Joe Kinnear,' said high-minded CNZ, 'I will never play for him again while he remains Newcastle manager.’ (Kinnear called him ‘Insomnia’ in an interview, you see.) I’d like to think JFK was being sardonic but his way with words is, well, a not-good way. (‘You can see why a lot of big names out there didn't have the a*sehole to take this job’, Kinnear remarked elsewhere this week.) Well, any road, au revoir N’Zogbia. Happily the staunch Micky Quinn has said all that needs saying of Charlie: 'He’s got the heart the size of a peanut and no respect for anybody, including the fans.'
Today I hear we’ve bagged the Scouse Bolton midfielder Kevin Nolan for £4m. Good signing, good grafter. He’s said the right thing already: ‘I can't wait to play in front of these fans every week.’ Ryan Taylor, the Wigan fullback whose name I’ve taken in vain all four times that he’s scored against us, might yet follow Nolan. It would be nice if he could make it in time for this weekend’s 141st Tyne-Wear Derby, a game that, if it goes the wrong way and other results follow suit, could plunge us into drop-zone damnation from which we’d struggle to recover, in terms of morale alone.

Bruce Springsteen: Life Itself

I had a fairly ho-hum response to the first two singles that came off the new Springsteen album, formally released tomorrow - but the third (promo clip above) is much, much more like it, indeed wondrous, I think.
I've always been agnostic when it comes to the whole fraught business of faith and disillusion that seems to attend the release of every new Springsteen long-player. For instance I thought Lucky Town and Human Touch got a bad rap back in 1992... But I couldn't see why people were so keen on Magic - and was that in 2006 or 2007? Whereas Devils and Dust (2005) was clearly criminally underrated. The Rising (2002) was a solid, solid piece of work, but I do remember the official Springsteen site's bulletin board having to play host to a terribly uppity and sneering dismissal of the record, posted up on its very first day of release, by a supposed longterm fan who declared himself sick and tired of waiting for a return to form. 'Well, sod off then' was my feeling toward said poster, but then I'm someone who doesn't much care for Born To Run...
Over on Counterpunch Harry Browne, a regular commentator in these matters, isn't too keen on the new LP, but he hasn't lost faith either. Of 'Life Itself' he's not willing to say anything much more heady than that it's 'probably as close to a truly interesting lyric as there is on the album...' Once then, again, I'll be reduced to the tricky business of having to make up my own mind...

Hobbesian War of All Against All, Coming Soon!?

It's been quite the week for the mass forecasting of fighting in the streets among angry peasants with pitchforks. To set the tumbrils rolling, in the first instance will the UK really go bankrupt, asks Camilla Cavendish of the Times? She reprints the charming Jim Rogers’ assertion that sterling is 'finished' and we Brits should all learn Mandarin and head for China, or maybe Singapore, Rogers’ chosen bolthole. She adds pointedly that we can be quite sure Rogers and other outspokenly apocalypic hedge funders are ‘profiting handsomely by shorting sterling.’ ‘But’, she laments, ‘the nervy media gave their words considerable prominence, partly because a British bankruptcy is a ghoulishly fascinating possibility...’
Well, not just 'the nervy media', Ms Cavendish, but you too, it seems. (Perhaps she’d rather be thought of as a ghoul than a nervous wreck.)
Cavendish then expresses concern that ‘a vicious circle has taken hold in which sterling falls in value, amplifying liabilities, and bank share prices fall as liabilities mount.’ Yes, troublesome indeed, so one might want to refrain from abetting the flight out of sterling that Rogers & Co are so keen upon...
What, then, is to be done? ‘Technically’, writes Cavendish, in her view the government ‘has mostly made the right moves on the banks… The only thing that could push Britain into bankruptcy would be a full-scale panic. So it is strange - and exasperating - that the Government keeps inadvertently fanning the flames of panic.’
And how do they do so? ‘First, the bailout announcement was overshadowed by reports of Mr Brown's populist “anger” with the banks. This helped to spook investors into fearing that full-scale nationalisation is on the cards…’
No, no, this is getting us nowhere, surely we’re back to the fault of that nervous media, who have now gone and reported the wrong blasted thing?
Cavenish eventually winds round to blasting ‘Mr Brown's spending spree as Chancellor, and the remarkably lax regulation by the tripartite system he put in place’ and observing that ‘it is surely not long before Gordon Brown (Titanic) Enterprises are bought out by Cameron Inc.’ So we see where she's coming from, but not whether we're supposed to feel better...
Okay then, so ‘the pound is plummeting, the once booming financial services sector has never been weaker and some investors are losing confidence in the UK.’ Ross Walker of the Royal Bank of Scotland warns that ‘The credit boom went a long way to disguising the mediocrity of the UK.’ (One could say it went a fair old way to disguising the mediocrity of the RBS too.) But actively trying to make us feel better, and in the course of the same piece from which I took those two quotes above – a piece entitled ‘New look UK economy to emerge from gloom’ – is the FT’s Economics Editor Chris Giles.
The FT’s experts suggest that some of the elements of that ‘new look’ will be ‘a slimmer financial services industry, lower house prices [and hence consumption], higher borrowing costs, fewer migrants and lower growth rates.’ The ‘big losers’ of the current crisis will be ‘those who bought property at the height of the market or are close to retirement without final salary pensions, the newly unemployed and the very rich, whose incomes tend to be correlated with the stock market.’ So on that basis I would feel not so very terrible, but that I bought in early 2006. But then you gotta go when you gotta go...
Giles has found a particular booster for the piece's general tack in ‘Britain’s chief cheerleader abroad’, Sir Andrew Cahn, chief executive of UK Trade & Investment. ‘The most important benefit [of the sterling slump] is that our exports are more competitive’, says Sir Andrew, ‘and we are continuing to attract inward investment as [UK] assets are cheaper to buy.’
But what are Britain’s major exports? Aren’t we in a real poke here too, because of the sorry state to which Thatcher reduced our manufacturing base? Well, Sir Andrew mentions some ‘unlikely sectors’ to be cheerful about, chiefly security – ‘a growth area.’ He insists that security is ‘not just defence equipment but airport protection systems, protective clothing, and security advice and services at sporting venues…’
Oh Jesus, so much for the good cheer. What we have arrived at, then, the sum of all our hopes, lies in the silver lining to the global jihad...? I need a drink.

Oscar Nominees: Good Work, Fellas

Not Oscar's nominees, no, per the photo - but then I know that AMPAS are protective of any and all reproductions of their famous statuette, whereas I do hope Sesame Street are happy to see Oscar the Grouch show up anywhere, as I certainly am and as I imagine those two tourists were too...
No, ordinarily this blog finds it best to yank down the earmuffs and the eyeshades round Oscar Nominations time - an announcement that only marks the end of one round of Drivel being talked across All Media, prior to the commencement of a fresh Drivel festival. But, having glanced at this year's noms list, with a special interest in one or two parties, I have to say I can't remember a year when so many of the Good Guys seem to have won (if you consider the taking-part as winning, which sadly most people don't...)
One can't but be pleased, for example, to see Werner Herzog and Peter Gabriel both getting recognised. Will they both go to the ceremony? They should ride in the limo together, talk about some stuff on the way... Elsewhere, good to see two pictures highly praised at Cannes - the gentlemanly Laurent Cantet's The Class, and Waltz With Bashir - go into the Best Foreign Film pot. I would imagine Danny Boyle, Simon Beaufoy and Anthony Dod Mantle will be a gang for the night as part of the Slumdog Millionaire set, and it seems to me they deserve all the praise in the world for their respective inspired inputs to that picture. This blog need say little more on the subject of Sean Penn and Milk save an extra hearty congrats to Gus Van Sant, who served a long stint on this project, and to Focus Features. And I imagine the 13 nominations for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button must be close to some kind of record? I'll be writing about that picture at length elsewhere, but as with the others above, I think in this case the recognition and applause for the quality of the filmmaking is deeply, deeply deserved. As it so often isn't...

ITV: Taking us all for muppets, as well they might

Part of what makes the current 'social mobility'' debate so wearisome are the tired old carrier-bag categories employed in any discussion of social class in Britain. It seems damnably hard for commentators to be serious and insightful about this supposedly perennially Burning Issue, and sometimes I do suspect that it's beyond them, or beneath them, or makes them too personally edgy and defensive. (Not for nothing did Richard Sennett title his great American study The Hidden Injuries of Class - that captures the furtive tone of things perfectly.)

The French do it far better, strange to say. Where would we be in this mess without the unimprovable terms déclassé (as in 'winter suntan' or 'electronic goods') or petit bourgeois (in its modern sneering usage)? After all, while it would be ludicrous in this day and age to conduct a conversation about the British class system solely within the Marxian categories of 'bourgeoisie' (petit or haute) and 'proletariat', it would be no less ludicrous to assert of all parties to said conversation that 'We're all middle-class now...' - as if society were some fat bell-curve of solid bourgeois burghers, with a smidgen of upper-crust toffs to the right of the curve and an intractable lump of lower-class scum to the left.

All the above being said, I don't pretend expertise in the sociology of the class debate but I feel confident that I'm a few steps clear of its usual torpor just from having read Pierre Bourdieu's classic Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (the French again!), from which it became clear to me that assessment of any individual's true class status must be made on a graph that employs an x axis of 'cultural' capital as well as a y-axis of material wealth and social status. In Bourdieu’s famous formulation, ‘Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier.’ Taste is socially constructed, and so reflects on the individual and serves to situate him or her within what Bourdieu called habitus, ‘systems of dispositions characteristic of the different classes and class fractions’ - systems, in other words, that are harder to read than a bank statement, or an entry in Debretts, or indeed a court judgement. Having read that much of Bourdieu, I mentally closed the book on the matter; in fairness it's probably time for me to read him again.

Anyhow, last night ITV broadcast a sensationalising schoolboyish hour-long doco called Too Posh To Pay about the supposed corruption and hypocrisy of 'the middle classes' and their seeming behind-the-curtain addiction to acts of white-collar crime. Fair enough as telly, it was a neat compilation of the sorts of true-life 's/he lied to me and stole my money' tales that fill the tabloids. But as to the definition of 'middle class' - well, there wasn't one, not even the barest attempt at one. And from the hard-hitting Crimewatch tone of the voiceover, you'd think we viewers would want to know how to identify all these middle-class scumbags who are pilfering our savings and cash-tills and conning the council or the taxman, just so we can see them coming in future, like shuffling zombies over a hill...

Nope, the real problem was all there in the title - specifically the word 'Posh', a term that was decisively hollowed of meaning back in 1994 (or whenever) as soon it was applied by Simon Fuller to Victoria Adams - you know, Jacqui Adams's girl from Harlow, now worth probably around £120 million, but still - just like all of us - proudly 'branded on the tongue', to borrow Wyndham Lewis's formulation. Or to put it another way, as James Baldwin put it in an essay of 1979 entitled 'If Black English Isn't a Language, then Tell Me What It Is':

To open your mouth in England is (if I may use black English) to "put your business in the street": You have confessed your parents, your youth, your school, your salary, your self-esteem, and, alas, your future...

In defence of social mobility, one should say that Baldwin was certainly wrong about the 'future' bit: clearly he never spent enough time on this 'damp little island' to run into any Bradford millionaires wearing silk hats, and he didn't live long enough to consider the case of Victoria Beckham. But, to return to Too Posh To Pay - most of the penitent 'middle class' wrongdoers interviewed weren't really 'middle class', but rather a bit to the left or the right of the curve. And I knew as much because of their accents...

The effect of this demonising little entertainment was to make me feel sorry for the poor slandered middle classes. Maybe I should start taking the Mail. ITV must reckon we're all a bunch of muppets; but then, fair do's, they've got grounds for it, in that there seem to be a lot of Brits out there who think Martina Cole is gritty realism, and the singers on X Factor are brilliant, and Victoria Beckham is posh.

Paddy Considine plus RTK, in words and/or pictures...

Well, it's beyond my bloody powers of computing non-prowess but I daresay some of you might be able to follow this link here and so use Quicktime Player to view the videorecording of the Paddy Considine BAFTA career interview conducted by yours truly at the Bristol Watershed back on November 21 of last year, and allegedly now available to the casual browser. I can get the audio track, but it's not the same, is it?

Pete Townshend: Sound and Fury, Signifying Plenty

If we're talking Things rather than People, then I can't think of much that brings me more joy in this world than Pete Townshend's guitar-playing (taken in tandem, of course, with his imperishable songwriting and, on occasion, his plaintive/urgent vocals, on those occasions when he's not letting Roger Daltrey be his full-throated interpreter.)
In terms of the guitar alone, it's all about his dynamism and his artistry, isn't it? Re. the former - a few weeks back I had a really enjoyable chat with the musician-turned-filmmaker Simon Fellowes - about film and music, as it happens - during which he revealed that he had attended the Oo's famous Charlton FC stadium gig of 1976, and he and his mates were already feeling fairly excited before the band hit the stage, at which point Pete, in the act of striking the opening chords of the first number, slid to the front of the stages on his knees...
The artistry? The other night I finally watched the authorised Who documentary Amazing Journey, given to me as a birthday gift by my wife in 2007, and it was all very fine, along with a bonus DVD offering the expected extras, but the gems on that second disc to my eye are four mini-films devoted to each band member. The ones on Townshend, Moon and Entwistle offer brilliant musical analysis, and really confirm my feeling about the stunning redundancy of most rock ‘n’ roll journalism - a form that still abounds and yet hardly deserves to exist. No sort of writing about rock music by non-musicians can properly instruct a sincere pilgrim on the true nature of the creative decision-making behind musical composition and performance. But good audiovisual documentary-making certainly can.
For instance: I’m not a massive U2 fan, though I certainly like ‘em; and The Edge’s distinctive guitar stylings aren’t among my favourite sounds; but I must say he’s brilliant on the Amazing Journey films in terms of his comments on (and impromptu demonstrations of) the flamenco influence in Townshend’s acoustic playing. As for the electric side of business, both The Edge and Pete’s brother Simon are also highly insightful about Pete's signature ‘crash chord’, and Simon also offers a useful illustration of his brother's distinctive dropping of 'the third' from regular chords. What documentary film can add to all this, and so set the seal on the excellence of the lesson, is by cutting to the subject in action, and the filmmakers do this well. I should do likewise, in the spirit of underlining that Pete hasn't lost it, in fact in some ways he's getting better.

Blackburn 3 Newcastle 0: For God's sake

Full marks to the True Faith sight for an editorial that offers the correct analysis, and the appropriately despairing and vitriolic tone, in respect of Saturday's dreadful Championship-beckoning defeat, and the comments before and after the game from Joe Kinnear:

'Until now Kinnear has been tolerated by supporters - but if this is going to be a permanent arrangement then the future is postponed… Joe - do yourself a favour, bank the loot you’ve already had off Ashley and go back to pruning the roses.'
'[Kinnear says], 'Our biggest problem is a lack of strength in depth. Why wasn't it addressed by the previous two managers? I am carrying the can for it.' No Joe, the last two managers operated wholly under Ashley and were not given funds to buy the players required. Had [Keegan] been given modest funds you would still be down the f**king bowls club… You do realise why you ended up with the job in the first place, don’t you? It was because no-one decent would touch it with a f**king bargepole and you have made a t**t of yourself sticking up for Ashley, proving your lack of credibility. [Keegan] wasn’t perfect but he worked for Newcastle United whereas you work for Mike Ashley. And that is the nub.'

Social mobility: a 'national crusade'

This blog naturally takes an interest in the Government's new proposals aimed at increasing social mobility in the UK, and in Gordon Brown's assertion that the cause of improving people's life chances ought to be a "national crusade". Fair do's, but be careful you match your deed to your word, bold Crusader...

As we know, and the FT neatly summarises it, ‘The UK has particular issues with a lack of access to some of its elites, and it is poor at helping the poor to escape entrenched poverty.’ The Conservatives still like to see themselves as the Party of Opportunity, and Labour liked the sound of that title well enough to pinch it from them. So I trust there won’t be any political argument about the principle that people with talents and ambitions but impoverished means ought to be assisted by the state toward the achievements of which they are capable – achievements in fields where the better-off get a significant headstart. Since our particular estate in life was not ordained by God, there ought to be periodic and vigorous human adjustment of the apparent order of things. ‘Some people will always be dealt tough hands’ is how the FT puts it. ‘They must be helped to play their cards as well as possible.’

On the other hand, I firmly endorse Will Self’s sentiment that ‘in order that poorer but more able kids should be able to succeed it's important that richer and thicker ones should be encouraged to fail.’ I would modify that only to say that a goodly number of the Thick Rich will fail quite naturally, if permitted to, and they could then be usefully advised (as, periodically, are the less academically gifted children of the proletariat) on the worth and dignity of labour and apprenticeship, as opposed to the more frivolous career path upon which Marlborough and Oxford would have set them had they been more deserving of it.

So far, so worthy. I can see, though, that the Government’s plans to formally outlaw ‘class discrimination’ are a pointless gift to the Daily Mail (as is the sadly enduring career of the terrible Harriet Harman, a common-coin hypocrite and as big a walking joke as ever held high office in the Labour Party and Government.)
That said, Cameron’s Tories have been trying to take ownership of the issues of poverty alleviation and social mobility, despite the natural scepticism of their harder-headed supporters, such as the Mail. I have been impressed by the shadow Work and Pensions secretary Chris Grayling, a seemingly reasonable and thoughtful man who speaks well on the subject of ‘appalling worklessness’ and how we’ve allowed failed estates to become ‘separate worlds.’ I think he’s on the right track, but I’m less convinced when he starts pushing the party line about 'family breakdown' (appalling marriagelessness?) being such a vital factor in all this. And when he says ‘This is all about Gordon Brown fighting class wars and internal Labour political manoeuvring’, he’s merely being trivial. For better or worse, Brown and Labour are genuinely vexed by 'all this'.

A measure of Brown's intent? Well, Alan Milburn is back... As Brown’s 'social mobility czar', no less. To Milburn's credit he’s sounding serious, as he tends to, about the hidden barriers obstructing ambitious children from poorer backgrounds. As the council estate-raised son of a single mum from Tow Law (etc etc), this is a personal matter for Milburn, but he does the standard key-note speech on the issue pretty well.
Just the other day I was asked, not the first time – and on this occasion by a scholarly researcher from the North East, who’d read Crusaders very closely – whether the novel’s Dr Martin Pallister MP was ‘really meant to be’ Milburn? He isn’t, though the fictional Pallister has the typical mindset of the modernizing, northern ex-lefty-turned-Blairite Labour MP – a type of which Milburn is a glaring example.
Per the Crusaders affinities, though, I had to laugh in reading the self-proclaimed sand-dancer Kevin Maguire going after Milburn in the Mirror for what he gets paid in consultancies – ‘raking in the cash’, indeed, from Pepsi, Lloyds Pharmacy, ‘investors profiting from NHS privatisation’, and his own firm, the magnificently named AM Strategy. Late on in Crusaders Martin Pallister gets a similar roasting to his face from a local journalist in the course of a public debate in Newcastle:

‘I’ve a question for you, Martin, I’m wanting to know if there’s a price on every word comes out of your mouth. I’ve been looking into this man, see. Do you know even half what this honourable gentleman gets up to?’
Todd was brandishing a wad of paper, A4 pages in scarlet, waving them before him.
‘Take a sheet and pass it on there. Have a look. Some of it’s Register of Interests – not all, mind. No, he’s not doing badly for an opposition man. Consultant to TronTech Computer Systems. Where are they from, eh? Crooksville, Ohio, how about that? Twenty-five grand a year he gets for that… Now, what do you suppose TronTech get for their money? You think they won’t come knocking if
he’s ever in office? ‘Computer in every classroom’, indeed. I’ll bet they’ve a
fancy for a nice fat contract in Crooksville.’
‘Then you see he gets ten grand off Hart-McGrain oil, you know that Mr Salter, don’t you? Another ten off Hook Millard lobbyists in London. And – oh yeah – his researcher’s a lad on secondment from Hook Millard and all. How’s that work? Well, you might want to look at who he speaks up for, when he bothers to speak – all his early day motions, whose interests concern him... Aye, I tell you, they all want a piece of this man. They’re buying shares in him.’

I’ve tended to imagine myself tough on Milburn and the causes of Milburn, but I should confess that this Times article of his about Newcastle regeneration seemed to me an unusually articulate and felt contribution to the debate – from a politician, at any rate.

Northern Lights Film Festival 2008: affable discussions of horrendous subjects

The Northern Lights Film Festival have posted some nice photos from this year's bash up onto a Facebook page, and already these bring back some funny memories - most particularly of the slightly surreal and riotous final night at the Baltic when the 'Big Pitch' talent competition was decided, and a substantive cash prize awarded to some suitably delirious young talent, followed by the compulsory elbow-raising beer 'n' wine frenzy at the bar next door.
Rewind about 4 or 5 hours and you get the tranquil scene here pictured: myself chairing a discussion on low-budget horror filmmaking in the Digital Lounge of the Tyneside Cinema; to the left of frame, the director Steven Sheil and his producer Lisa (they of the much-lauded Mum and Dad); to the right, the short filmmaker David Pope (and by that I mean a director of - very fine -short films, and not someone who's no taller than, say, Tom Cruise.)
Of course, the real horror of this scene was only to unfold a few minutes after I stepped off the platform and got on the phone, to learn that effing Stoke City had got their last-minute equaliser at Saint James's (see passim.) I won't bloody be forgetting that either...

'Vaz "very surprised" that Prince thinks "Sooty" a term of endearment'

Can't really improve on the manner (above) in which Politicshome.com chose to bullet-point the comments of Keith Vaz, MP and Home Affairs Select Committee Chairman, on the topic of the Windsor lad and what he likes to call his duskier 'friends' (who are of course at liberty to tell the Prince to f*ck off - I mean, what could it possibly cost them...?)
This 'friend' is Cirencester Polo Club member and 'millionaire property developer' Kolin Dhillon. Apparently Sooty has been his 'affectionate nickname' for assorted royals and polo associates for 'at least 15 years'. I can't improve on the rest of what is online at the Evening Standard, so here are the gems:
- Mr Dillon 'is said to be close to other members of the royal family who also refer to him by the name.'
- "Neighbours near Mr Dhillon's home in Coates, near Cirencester, said no one outside the polo fraternity called him 'Sooty'..."
- "A member of the CPC, who asked not to be named, said the name Sooty had been introduced to put "two fingers up" to political correctness... [This source] said of the royal family: "They are no more racists than I am"...

Newcastle 2 West Ham 2: what yuh done to yer heid, Andrew?

Cornrow hair-dos on rock stars, I can just about allow to pass. (Basically I can't think of any to mention, beyond the one sported by Axl W. Rose, and this blog uses and keenly endorses Chinese Democracy, also being of the view that Axl's long locks back in his G'n'R heyday were basically those of a big girl.)
But in general I would be on the side of those who think that cornrows look fairly peculiar on white males. On black guys - I rather think they're best carried off if you happen to be a hip-hop MC or R&B vocalist. On black footballers, well... Rio Ferdinand's used to crack me up, and I guess it must have cracked up his teammates and eventually old Rio too. (David James's imitation-Rio was just James doing what he does best, i.e. worst.)
And Newcastle United's contribution to this key masculine grooming issue? I'm thinking back, and until today only Carl Cort, the makeshift 'striker' bought from Wimbledon by Bobby Robson for £7 million, sprung to mind. That was before Andrew Carroll of Bensham took to the field for today's home game against the Irons...
I am unreservedly delighted that the lad who's been banging them in for the stiffs all season has now notched his first top-flight goal, and by all accounts he put himself about for 90 minutes and proved a proper handful and salvaged a valuable point - for all that the result feels like a slight stumble back into the relegation mire, exacerbated by Stoke's point against the same Liverpool side who stuffed us over Christmas. I would love it, love it if Andy Carroll led the line with honours for Newcastle United in seasons to come.
Still, but. Sort your hair out, bonny lad. I know you think you've just sorted it but you've not. Never mind 'the stick' you'll have had off the teammates already. Listen to Alan Shearer on MOTD, who liked the barnet about as much as the direction on that header that found the side-netting when we were 1-0 in the first half...

Esquire (February 2009) now on stands: includes former junior senator from Illinois + Mickey Rourke

This would be Esquire's inauguration issue then. The inimitable Andrew O'Hagan writes about Obama therein. Elsewhere, the excellent Miranda Collinge interviews Michael Sheen. My contribution is a short consideration of The Wrestler, now in UK cinemas. The bits that are taken for pull-out quotes in these cases are usually a wager on what is the reader's likely interest. In this particular case:

"In The Wrestler’s first reel Aronofsky keeps his camera on The Ram’s shoulder, as if the film were hard-edged docu-drama. But in fact he’s just shooting his star, teasing us before revealing Rourke’s face – the complexion tandooried and tenderised, the lips like waxen fruit."

Call me hypocrite, lecteur, but I go on to say that I do wish people could stop writing about the tragic case of this actor's former handsomeness - it's a little bit unseemly - but then The Wrestler makes this impossible: the movie is just such a big untrammelled load of Rourke.

For the sake of full disclosure I should admit that back in late 1986, while Rourke was rumoured to be in Belfast researching an accent for a movie role with the help of the playwright Martin Lynch, I undertook a most unwise night of underage drinking in some unsuitable pubs he was (no doubt wrongly) rumoured to be frequenting. Why? Well, no doubt the touching hope of bumping into him and striking up an instant rapport. I lost it at the movies, indeed...
Currently one notes that Rourke is really putting himself out there for the awards season, and much is getting written about his Early Life and Later Lost Years, including an interview piece in the New York Times by Pat Jordan about which, one supposes, the subject may have mixed feelings.

Correlli Barnett and the pointless horror of raining down death from above

I haven't heard (or rather, paid much attention to) the name of Correlli Barnett since I was a sixth-former, which was back in the 1980s, at which time a high proportion of the Thatcher Cabinet appeared keen to summon Barnett as ballast for their argument that Labour's policy backwardness was entirely responsible for Britain's post-war decline, and that the Tories would not sit back and be mere managers of same.
Naturally this esteemed Fellow of Churchill, Cambridge and author of The Collapse of British Power has not been letting his sword rust in its scabbard while I was looking elsewhere. Yesterday in the Times he gave a timely and well-seasoned blast on the old horn about Israel's latest failure:

"The Israeli leadership (including Mr Barak, a soldier who ought to know better) have yet again been deluded by the seductive fallacy that air power (especially air power in today's hi-tech form) can win wars all on its own, and at no cost to those flying the bombers or directing the drones on TV from remote “PlayStations”... So the task of rescue falls to Israel's own ground troops - conducting a messy struggle with hate-fuelled guerrillas amid close-packed slums."

Worse Than Barbie

This Christmas my younger sister-in-law made me a rather inspired present of the 'Hillary Nutcracker' (pictured), which offers a decent likeness of La Clinton as well as some funny copy on the box ('What'd You Expect -- A Teddy Bear?').

So far, so amusing. Here's the problem: my daughter has now started playing with the toy Hillary, talking to it ('I like your necklace') and - horrors! - kissing it!

I am starting to consider making a necklace of my own, out of garlic, as protection against this clearly evil charm. A stake to the heart would be the next grave step. But I fear it will be to no avail...

RTK review of The Glass Room (Mawer) in today's Financial Times

To be found here. Looking through it as it appears online, I realise that one extra sentence was excised for length from the proofed version that I checked a couple of weeks ago. For my own completist's sake, the sentence in question ran: "Somewhat akin to Swann’s lament over Odette, Viktor rues that the sum of his passion should be expended on ‘a half-educated, part-time tart.’" But then we all feel that at times, don't we?

The Observer's literary map of Britain: Includes me! Part 2

These were the handful of things that struck me on reading Kate Kellaway's very interesting piece:

1. KK describes the general perception of the "Hampstead novel" as “a middle-class morality novel - probably involving adultery and shallow-masquerading-as-deep.” Yes, that was my prejudice too. The thing is, a fair bit of my forthcoming second novel is set in Hampstead. Will I get away with saying it's an in-joke?
2. KK writes, “(A)lthough British novelists now spread their nets more widely, there is still a paucity of state-of-the-nation novelists, writers able to move freely across the map and get an aerial view. Hanif Kureishi puts it like this: "Dickens had a sense of the whole society, from prisoner to home secretary. No writer has that now." I recognise the condition Hanif K is lamenting but I don't agree with the general prognosis. It may be that fewer writers have Dickens' ambitions and/or interests, and that fewer readers want to be bothered with big Dickensian novels, so affecting the supply of same. But any good writer has what Norman Mailer called 'the power to inhabit men's minds', and women's minds too. I don't for one minute rate myself up in the big league writing-wise, but I know that, were I so inclined, I would have the power to get into Jacqui Smith's head, or Karen Matthews', say, without too much fuss.
3. KK asserts that P.D. James has the best policy on the liberties a novelist must take with place, per this prefacing quote from Devices and Desires: "This story is set on an imaginary headland on the north-east coast of Norfolk. Lovers of this remote and fascinating part of East Anglia will place it between Cromer and Great Yarmouth but they must not expect to recognise its topography nor to find Larksoken nuclear power station, Lydsett village or Larksoken Mill. Other names are genuine, but this is merely the novelist's cunning device to add authenticity to fictitious characters and events." Yes, I agree entirely, as KK knows. I remember her enthusiasm when I quoted this very same passage to her on the telephone. And the 'Author's Note' at the front of Crusaders is a homage to the wisdom in these matters of Baroness James of Holland Park.
4. KK writes, “(T)here are hardly any novelists living in NW3 any more - the place is indecently expensive. In that sense, Crouch End – where mum’s lit flourishes and where many novelists now live - might be the place to watch." This, like #1 above, makes me feel uneasy, albeit for a slightly different reason...

Shay Given: too much for the keeper to handle

Given's agent has presented Seamus's feelings to the media in unusually and sharply eloquent fashion: "Shay is very despondent following the very poor performance of the team against Liverpool last weekend. It was the lowest point of his football career and a performance that he would not wish to be repeated. When he signed a new five-year contract in 2006 it was on the basis that the club would challenge for major honours, but on the present evidence all that he can see ahead, with the turmoil on and off the pitch, is a battle for survival."

Given is one of those great players who came to Tyneside and picked up the Geordie disease, God bless him, which is why he's stuck through bad times to put himself in spitting distance of an appearance record without a medal to his name. As Michael Walker of the Independent comments, Given "regards himself as a naturalised Geordie and his children have been born in Newcastle." Well, in this matter I endorse and second the comments of NUFC.com: "Like the departure of Peter Beardsley to Liverpool in 1987, we would struggle to blame Given if he left. It certainly wouldn't be for the money and any anger felt would be aimed at the club, rather than the individual."

"Good evening Mr Waldheim / And Pontiff, how are you?"

"... You have so much in common / in the things you do." Apologies to Lou Reed, but this interesting number from the New York album has been running through my head ever since that old Hitler Youth alumnus Joseph Ratzinger, who now gets to call himself Pope Benedict XVI, made his touching pre-Christmas pronouncement about the human race dying out because of homosexuality and 'gender theory', and the need to preserve 'God's creation' just as zealously as we protect (or talk about protecting) the rainforests.

Clearly, obviously, there are no homosexual people whatsoever in the Roman Catholic Church, closeted or repressed or otherwise. But other gay Christians have gamely engaged with Ratzinger on his own toxic terms, arguing (from the Bible? You tell me...) that people in this world with homosexual inclinations are also part of 'God's creation'. That all seems a bit too polite to me, but whatever: I do believe you should let people go to Hell in their own sweet way, even if they condemn themselves so out of their very own mouths.

To speak of one such, after Ratzinger's verbal excretion BBC News 24 gave airtime to one of his UK apologists, Joanna Bogle - I say 'apologist', but she appeared very proud of herself and her faith and of God's vicar in the Vatican, while also clearly feeling herself the member of a brave and persecuted minority of staunch moralists out there. So the BBC's blonde female newsreader got quite an earful from Bogle, as well as being patronised royally (and inexplicably) over her grasp on the provenance of birds and bees. Hey, let all voices be heard and debated in this world, but people who believe the stars are God's daisy chain should be very careful about patronising anybody. That such belief should also lead one into the conviction that the sole purpose (and attendant worth) of human sexuality is vested entirely in the making of babies is a shocking ignorance too; and an equally great big shame.

The Observer's literary map of Britain: Includes me!

Kate Kellaway filed this very interesting piece on the contemporary English novel and its vexed relation to place and 'region' in the Observer last Sunday. As I recall, I talked to Kate on the phone for this very purpose about six months ago, so it's nice to see the finished piece finally appear, especially since it's so packed with good discursive meat. More generally I'm also glad of the consideration, of course, and that my efforts should be considered in such distinguished literary company; and, just as last week, I appreciate the Observer's continued support of Crusaders (and it brings particular amusement since their main book critic had one of his deeply characteristic hissy fits about the novel when it first appeared back in January 2008.)
It's looking like bedtime now, but I hope to write a bit more in respect of the various issues raised in the Kellaway piece tomorrow. But these are the quotes concerning me and my stuff:
"At a south London all-blokes bookclub, [Blake Morrison's] South of the River was read with territorial interest. "Would they have read a book called 'North of the River'?" Morrison wonders. It is his belief that people feel a "strange gratitude", that they are "validated" when they are put on the map through fiction. Richard T Kelly, author of Crusaders, an epic first novel set in Newcastle, has had a similar reaction from readers who have felt energised by "a long and detailed book about their locality and recent history".
Crusaders is set in the 1990s and describes the changing face of north-east England - a time of urban regeneration. Newcastle was natural terrain for Kelly because he grew up in the region but also because he feels there is "something epic, magisterial about the North-East in general and Newcastle in particular". It is "a love letter to the North-East", he says, reflecting that he is glad to have had a positive response because "love letters are often returned to sender". Kelly is also quick to say that he would be "hanged from a tree" if he tried to pose as the sole Newcastle novelist - mentioning Julia Darling, Andrea Badenoch, Jonathan Tulloch, David Almond.
Kelly makes the point that "regional literature" is often treated with "condescension" and the literary map is far too London-centric. It is hardly a new complaint. But I am not sure that he is right. Irish and Scottish voices often seem to have more clout than their southern counterparts. Think of James Kelman writing about Glasgow. Think of Roddy Doyle, or of Anne Enright's Dublin-based novel, The Gathering, which won last year's Man Booker Prize.
Yet Scottish novelist AL Kennedy, who was born in Dundee, agrees with Kelly. She implies writers outside London need to try and resist feeling marginalised..."
BTW I'm very pleased to find that Alison Kennedy agrees with me. She's the sort of person whose side you want to be on.

Crusaders blogged in style on Kauderstuff

This blog commentary on Crusaders, by an "English/cultural studies professor", has come to my attention belatedly, and is one of the most interesting and considered that I've seen. Obviously that means he hasn't said anything I'm mortally offended by...

The author is very attentive to the novel's intended marriage of 'classic realism' and 'the modern thriller', and seems not unsympathetic to it, though he echoes Sean O'Brien's TLS review in proposing that Crusaders resorts "increasingly as it goes on, to genre-fiction conventions, and excitements provide it with formal constraint (and perhaps a readership) in lieu of more experimental or literary devices."

That said, he's also very alert to a problem I've encountered in the novel's reception and the general lit-crit debate around it, namely that of "how to represent characters and a social sector with little or no connection to the literary and intellectual world that the novel and its readers belong to." In other words, to those people who thought it risible that a yob like Stevie Coulson could experience a feeling of tristesse.

The author has certainly got a handle on the novel's view of the governmental War on Poverty, a topic that just gets sadder even as the Tories make an undertaking to continue the waging of that war if returned to office. As he puts it: "The novel is especially insightful about black-market/crim capitalism and its deep connections into the economic life of poor communities. At the end, it becomes clear that neither New Labour nor the Church have the capacity to reach into communities such as this."
And I certainly wouldn't take issue with the measured but generous final analysis: "Perhaps this is not one of the great literary novels, although its dialogue is stunning and its characterization wonderfully unsentimental and finely tuned to its major argument (it's a novel which does have an argument). But then to write a great literary novel about the lives of the poor has not so far been possible in the capitalist epoch."
Fair dinkum. One point I can correct the author on, happily: he reckons it's "not available in Australian bookshops", but even as of May it ought to have been. Indeed I think it was reviewed in one Australian paper of note. But then I suppose it depends on the individual bookshop...

Michael Owen's gaff in Portugal: I suppose he's earned it...

He plays off 8, I understand, if you're interested. Golf handicap, that is. And this is his place in the Algarve, overlooking one of Portugal's prime courses. Still needs a lick and a promise to the exterior as far as I can see. Can't speak for the insides, as I refrained from shinning over the perimeter fence. But I decided to inspect the place from a distance on the day it transpired that Mr Owen wouldn't be signing his newly offered Newcastle contract. He's been at pains to say he's not a disloyal sort, and frankly I believe him: the whole issue of his loyalty to NUFC was threadbare from Day 1 when he admitted (and it was generally accepted) that he ought to have been at a different club. So we can't say we weren't warned. Any road, I hope he finishes his house one day and stays fit enough to play the occasional 18 holes, because history will certainly record that he was fettled for the greater part of his NUFC career.

Wigan 2 Newcastle 1; Newcastle 1 Liverpool 5: Happy Bloody Xmas

Sunday was the wrong day for several papers to run their 'Black and Whites United Under JFK' interview pieces; and a pretty poor one for Mike Ashley to make another of his man-of-the-people bids in taking the For Sale sign off the club. God, but when Newcastle are bad they're the worst in the league. They simply can't take the loss of Bassong and Beye as was inflicted by the Wigan game, with a measure of blame falling on the referee. Coloccini had one of his stinkers against Liverpool, and Taylor nearly succeeded in getting himself sent off for nowt - this a lad who once seemed to think the club captaincy was his by birthright. And they can't do without Martins in the forward line either - Ameobi and Carroll aren't going to do it, and Viduka seems to be wanting his bed again. A suitably rotten note on which to end an amazingly rotten NUFC yearbook.

Crusaders in the Observer's top paperbacks of 2008

I'm delighted and grateful today to see Crusaders feature among the Observer's paperback picks of 2008, with a citation taken from Robert Collins' review earlier in the year:

"Big, boisterous and brazenly old-fashioned, Kelly's debut is a sweeping Tyneside epic set in the decades leading to New Labour's accession to power. For sheer scope and rambunctiousness, it's irresistible."

Always loved that "brazenly old-fashioned": a label to be worn with honour, I feel...

Newcastle 2 Spurs 1: the joy of mid-table

My old mate Duane has been proved correct, then - it only takes a couple of wins... Fatalistic Mags of my acquaintance had money on Jermaine Jenas inflicting a last-minute points-stealer on us today, a la old boys Bramble and Faye in weeks gone by. But wouldn't you know with that Lady Luck? It was Damian Duff of all people who pinched the full quota for us in injury time. Duff has been Missing in Action for pretty much as long as he's worn black-and-white, so it's nice to see him finally repaying the faith. Roll on the mighty Wigan, then - they're still ahead of us in the table, just as a reality-check.

Ten Bad Dates blogs on...

This 20-something Kiwi blogger rates Ten Bad Dates among 2008's top reads, which is nice in itself, but especially delightful for me is to appear on this list alongside a writer who was key to my formative-years discovery of reading for pleasure - and that writer's not Naomi Klein or Jon Stewart, but rather Terrance Dicks, the author of seemingly hundreds of novelisations of Doctor Who episodes, and presumably still going too...

NUFC: Cup Winners, in black and white...

NUFC.com has been running its customary top-notch advent calendar since December 1, and this year it's been devoted to classic team photos (the 'classic' not always reflecting the actual playing quality of the ensemble, you understand...)
But it's hard not to get a bit misty about the 1951 line-up pictured here: them 'uns who brought home the FA Cup with a 2-0 win over Blackpool.
Front and centre in this picture, of course, the scorer of a brace at Wembley: Jackie Milburn. At the start of his Toon career Jackie was also a part-time employee of Hazelrigg Colliery, who generally took the bus to games from Ashington having done his pit shift on Saturday morning. Eventually, I think, he got himself a motorbike; then trouble in one ear led him to quit the pit and throw in his lot with the Toon for £12 a week.
To Milburn's left is another canny goalscorer, George Robledo; the 'gangling' Tommy Walker on the far right had goals in him too. In general you look at these 11 lads and you just wouldn't mess with them, would you? Of course one could say the same of Joey Barton today; and yet the sentiment would be -how can I say it? - different.

'The Double Life of Tony Blair'

It sounds like a high-concept literary novel, doesn't it? In fact it's just the title Newsweek have stuck on this interesting interview-based report by Lisa Miller on the course in 'Faith and Globalisation' that Blair has now begun to teach at Yale. Therein Miller neatly rehearses all the contortions of Blair's public and private positions on what he believed while PM. Her best moment is the assertion that 'in a way, Blair's foundation is the culmination of his life as a double agent' - so making him sound rather like a character out of Kipling or Conrad.

Blair is certainly a character in my Crusaders, for which he also furnishes an epigraph, and he also has a 'double' in the figure of the book's young Anglican priest John Gore - though Gore resists the imputation, as in the following edgy exchanges with Labour MP Martin Pallister:

‘One thing you should know, John – he’s sincere is Tony. His faith is solid, really, it’s what he’s all about.’
Gore was pondering. ‘His wife, she’s Catholic, right?’
‘Cherie? Aye, I think so. What of it?’
‘Just, I don’t know if I recognise his particular brand. Of the faith. And I should say, I don’t know that the public care for politicians who wear that stuff on their
sleeve.’
‘Oh no, not a bit. That’s your job. And that’s what Tony says and all.’ Pallister wore his own thoughtful look. ‘You know what, you’d put me in mind of him a bit. Tony.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Don’t blow a gasket there. No, I think you’d get on, the two of you. What with the faith in common. And you’re both Durham lads, right...?

Anyhow... back to Lisa Miller's interview, Blair's main quotes are humdrum, indeed they might make jaundiced students of Labour history groan and try to amuse themselves by substituting 'The Labour Party' for the 'spiritual faith'/'faith area' bits in the following:

"We have an obligation to present spiritual faith as something that is positive and progressive and solves problems and does good, rather than something that people only read about because people are killing in the name of it."

"To me what is important is that the whole faith area gets some what I would call muscularity, and certainly strategy."

Dullsville, eh? But as usual with Blair the interesting part is trying to figure out what he actually thinks and means, (and intends to do), under the polished patter.

Portsmouth 0 Newcastle 3: We're watching MoTD II then...

'All it takes is a couple of wins', remarked Duane Hopkins, rather too nonchalantly I felt, when he and I and Samm Haillay were picking over the grim 2-2 capitulation at home to Stoke last Saturday. An inspired time, then, for The Lads to lodge the first away win of the season; and at Pompey, where the epic journey for travelling fans is usually worsened by on-the-pitch cruelties to boot.
An open game, by most accounts, and their lively strike duo could have put them clean away in the first half. Instead it was Owen and Martins who registered again, plus a late strike from young Guthrie. I slightly wish the mighty Oba's had been the one from 30 yards that thumped back off the post, rather than a tap past a floundering David James, as Oba is by nature a born scorer of smacking great goals. And Owen is clearly doing his best for us in advance of the long goodbye...
But it's all still so sticky in that league, what with the Irons getting a point at Chelsea and Sun'lun's flabbergasting result yesterday. No-one is acting like the drop is their designated lot, though as of tonight, for the first time this season, there's a couple of sides falling slightly adrift; one of them, inevitably, already came away from SJP with 3 points...

Hey! 10 Bad Dates fan spotted.

The film lists book finds itself amid some intriguing company on this reader's list. But then it was always my intention to try to tap the Jane Austen-admiring/Zoe Heller-querying demographic.
In fact I bumped into another 10 Bad Dates fan, a filmmaker, at the bar of the Vermont Hotel in Newcastle last weekend. It was 2am at the time so I may be remembering this over-fondly, but I think this chap keeps the book in his bathroom and finds it a great laugh - the book, that is - but as I say, the ales may have meant I got this wrong...

Davy Hammond 1928-2008

David Hammond passed away near the end of August. I heard so a few weeks after the event, and it's only today that I was properly put in mind to have a look about at some of the obituaries. I see the BBC ran a good obituary and a collection of tributes, and at the foot of both of those pages is a lovely little video that offers glimpses of his singing and filmmaking and a remembrance from Seamus Heaney. Another of the friends remembering him therein comments that essentially Davy was all about taking time when time otherwise moved too fast: this is why Hammond was such a great man for noticing things, seeing their value, passing that on.

I was introduced to Davy by his friend the great Matthew Evans, subsequently Lord Evans of Temple-Guiting - the kind of distinction in life about which Davy was very wry. The one occasion Davy and I spent good time together in Belfast, round 2000, we managed to drink a bottle of Irish whiskey right down to 'the heel', as he called it, and I've used that fine expression of good near-drunk bottles in honour of him even since.

Anyone can look at film or recordings of Davy Hammond and see that he was beautifully gifted and wise and a life-affirming presence in this world. He could pick up a guitar very casually and charm a packed room, but in that charm he was instructive - he was incredibly canny under the avuncular exterior, could cut to the core of things with a slight remark, which must be part of why the likes of Seamus Deane and Tom Paulin treasured his friendship - and the sharpness under the warmth didn't seem to me any kind of a ruse on his part, in fact it's a quality intrinsic to the very best of Belfastmen, as Davy Hammond was and will always be.

Esquire (January) now on stands: includes RTK on HST

Plenty good meat inside the new issue. (BTW there's also a female on the cover this month, which is always welcome, periodically.) I'm looking forward to settling down with a long piece about the so-called 'Natwest Three'. Elsewhere my own contribution is a review of the previously mentioned Hunter Thompson documentary Gonzo by Alex Gibney, which I recommend wholeheartedly. I suppose my chief feeling about it is in the following extracts:

'Gibney shows great footage of Thompson on the stump [during his run for sheriff of Pitkin County], repaying his debt of love to the ‘long fine flash’ of generational energy he’d found in the 1960s; also living out his profound conviction that if one has a serious beef with politicians then one has to get actively involved in politics...'

And yet...:

'In a way, Thompson was too pure for workaday politics. (Gary Hart dismisses him as ‘infantile’.) His drug intake too, however awe-inspiring, clearly generated stores of fear and loathing in him that he couldn’t wholly process...'

Northern Lights Film Festival 2008

Had a good laugh and a decent drink on Tyneside last Saturday, at my favourite festival in the whole wide world, where I've done a turn every year since its inception back in 2003. In the afternoon I conducted what felt like an interesting public discussion with Steven Sheil, the smart and talented director of the deeply unsettling low-budget horror film Mum and Dad, which gets an all-windows release on Boxing Day. Also on the panel, a great guy called David Pope who makes inspired horror/comedy shorts, including Gasoline Blood. In the evening at the closing do hosted in some style by the Baltic Gallery I handed over a Script Development Award, the jury of which I had been part, to a clearly outstanding young writer/director, Deola Folarin. The runner-up Simon Fellowes was also on hand, and I had the pleasure of telling Simon I own a few 'records' he made back when he recorded as Intaferon. Other good, good people it was great to see up there by the broad majestic Tyne included the Better Things team of Samm Haillay and Duane Hopkins, the playwright Fiona Evans, critic Jason Solomons, distributor Eve Gabereau, and the festival's stalwarts Patrick Collerton, Mark Dobson and Melanie Iredale. To 2009, then...

Sean Penn's 'Mountain of Snakes'

Sean Penn's reportage of visits to Venezuela and Cuba, and encounters there with Hugo Chavez and Raul Castro, was published in two parts a fortnight ago on the Huffington Post under the title 'Mountain of Snakes': here are Part 1 and Part 2. I'm rather surprised there hasn't been more media attention paid to these, though the blogosphere seems to have been buzzing at a low level. For a while I had the impression that Sean was minded to make this material into the stuff of something larger, between covers, but I'm glad they've surfaced now for our attention in any case.

Hang the DJ: some Willie on Willie action

Over on Hang the DJ's blog they just began a week of guest entries devoted to Musical Moments of 2008, with one post a day from five of the book's esteemed contributors: Peter Murphy, Richard Milward, Willy Vlautin, Laura Barton and Tom McRae. The justly celebrated Mr Vlautin is first up today, talking about Willie Nelson, dontcha know?

Newcastle United 2 Stoke City 2: living the nightmare still...

How long, o Lord, how long? As nufc.com notes quite rightly, "the Stoke fans captured the true story of the game when they sang, "2-0 and you f***ed it up.""

Richard T. Kelly's 'Lucie Gunn' - Coming Soon to a Theatre Near You...

...in my dreams. And yet there have been crazier notions, and this one at least is acquiring a certain substance. For one thing, today I made it into the industry bible Variety for the first time in relation to the fiction-writing side of my activities - in this case, an original screenplay of mine that's just been earmarked for Film Council backing, much to my delight and all-round gratitude:

"Public funding body the U.K. Film Council has unveiled 18 debut pics that will receive a total of £297,750 ($445,000) from its development fund. Pics include scribe Bola Agbaje’s bigscreen adaptation of her coming-of-age play Gone Too Far!... Other projects include Catherine Shepherd's Like a Virgin, Natasha Wood’s Rolling With Laughter, Richard Milward's Apples and Richard T. Kelly’s Lucie Gunn."

The still herewith is from Looking For Mr Goodbar (1977), a whimsical choice but not totally inapposite, given that Lucie Gunn is described in the UKFC's press notes as "an intense and seductive drama exploring the power games that men and women play in and out of the bedroom."

Here's to Lucie then. A hell of a girl.