Robert McNamara: Long Time Going

The great American playwright David Rabe once protested the labelling of his magisterial Vietnam Plays (Streamers, Sticks and Bones, The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel) as ‘anti-war’, arguing that plays about unruly youth, for instance, were not considered ‘anti-youth’; and that war, like youth, was ‘permanently a part of the eternal human pageant.’ A medical corpsman in Vietnam, Rabe knew of what he spoke, albeit not so comprehensively as Robert McNamara, who has died at the age of 93. ‘I’m not so naive or simplistic to believe we can eliminate war’, McNamara told the filmmaker Errol Morris a few years ago. ‘We’re not going to change human nature anytime soon.’
McNamara lived long enough to revisit the byways of his awful career for a new generation perhaps less familiar with the name and face of the notorious cerebrate/’wonk’ who prosecuted the Vietnam War under Lyndon Johnson, thus developing the intentions of John F. Kennedy. But once propelled to the zenith of the Pentagon, McNamara’s celebrated intellect crashed, as anybody’s would in the face of a mission so wrong-headed as Vietnam.

Nearly 40 years later he would insist that he came to see that war as a hopeless endeavour before his Pentagon peers, but still insisted upon the seriousness of the high Cold War stakes of the age. The McNamara of the 21st century also showed an interest in counterfactual history that befitted both a scholar and a man with compendious causes for regret. (Naturally, he suggested that had Kennedy lived, the US would have smartly extricated itself from Vietnam.)
McNamara’s attempted rehabilitation also received a certain late-life boost from the Coalition occupation of Iraq, as he developed a critique of US unilateralism that was highly palatable to the critics of Bush’s war. ‘If we can’t persuade nations of comparable values of the merit of our cause’, he told Errol Morris, ‘then we’d better re-examine our reasons.’ McNamara himself, though, seemed to have done only a certain amount of self-re-examination and no more. In his 90s he was not, one sensed, a broken man, but rather someone who still believed that ‘tough choices’ – the tough consequences of which are felt by other people – are the unhappy lot of truly substantive individuals.

In Praise of A-Rod: Andy Roddick's Character, and his Destiny

'I can play some tennis sometimes...' Such was Andy Roddick's customary light touch at yesterday's post-match press conference, his humour maybe spiced with a mild urge to throw a jab at the monomaniacal British press. I was totally delighted by Roddick's semi-final win over Andy Murray, because Roddick is one of my favourite contemporary sportsmen.
He plays a powerful game with good aggression and energy, maybe lacking all the finesse and range that's needed to be one of the greats, but his best yesterday was certainly too much for Murray, who had clearly been expected to walk this particular match. Moreover, Roddick is a real guy - he has a foursquareness to him, as opposed to the perennial schoolboyishness that seems to be the defining characteristic of top British tennis players, be they from Oxford or Glasgow. And to top it all Roddick is really, really funny, capable of cracking up a room. (His immemorial remarks in 2005 about wanting to win Wimbledon primarily in order to check out what Maria Sharapova would wear to the champions' ball were the first I heard of this particular gift of his.)
Sadly I no more believe that Roddick can defeat Roger Federer tomorrow than I believed Alan Shearer could save Newcastle from relegation, despite their similar reserves of aggression, guyness and good humour. (Cockneys, of course, believe Shearer is entirely humourless, because they themselves are so effing hilarious...) But Federer has been awesome this past fortnight, and has got Roddick's measure of old, and (unlike Murray) won't be distracted for long by any variations of game that Roddick has to offer. Still, Roddick's progress gave me a lot of pleasure this Wimbledon and I will continue to root for him keenly.
As for Andy Murray, I tried to like him this time out but it just didn't happen, and I say that as someone who instinctively has always favoured Scotland over England in sport, unless the England in question contains substantial Northumbrian representation. With Murray, though, the elements just don't coalesce into a guy you could truly shout for. Or, as a mate of mine put it most pithily, 'It's his mam I can't stand'.
Anyhow, Roddick will get another runner's-up plate tomorrow and then I guess the summer is over. It's bad enough the Longest Day has come and gone, which always feels like the end to me, nights now drawing in and all that... (Not to sound like Daisy Buchanan in The Great Gatsby, who famously waited with bated breath for the Longest Day and then missed it.) But by the time Wimbledon fortnight is done then, really, to all intents and purposes, it's time to go out and get your new school uniform - same as last year but one size bigger, in grey...

Heartlands? Anne McElvoy on the Tories and the North

The political journalist Anne McElvoy is from Durham, it turns out, and for the BBC she has been thinking hard about the Conservative Party’s long quest to win votes and seats in the North of England, which for our purposes might be defined as anything below Scotland and above the M62 motorway (the trans-Pennine route that links Liverpool and Hull, passing Manchester, Bradford and Leeds – Yorkshire poet Simon Armitage calls this road ‘a belt drawn tightly across the waistline of Britain.’)
In a text that accompanies her short Radio 4 documentaries on this topic, McElvoy writes: ‘David Cameron's troops, in open-necked shirts rather than cloth caps, are making the first serious attempt in decades to woo the North: something that would have been impossible amid the bitterness and division of the Thatcher years, when deindustrialisation hit the region hard.’
Apparently William Hague now heads the Tories' 'Northern Board', and does a lot of stumping around the Pennines, where he’s fairly popular – a local lad and all that, born in Rotherham, having his seat in Richmond. And of course there are votes for the taking for the Tories in the common-sense market towns of James Herriot country.
But more northerly still, in the North East, like, it's a different barrel of biscuits. Even in Labour’s Euro/local poll debacle of last month, you’ll have noted the North East portion of the electoral map still managed to end up looking quite scarlet. Alan Duncan, apparently, is Cameron’s 'North East envoy'. I’d like to see Duncan on the stump in Scotswood. Just a photo would paint a thousand words.
McElvoy focuses more on the North West because that’s where she thinks Cameron’s focusing too, pragmatically. It’s a coming area for the Tories, and if the best Labour can put up is Hazel Blears, then you’d have to suppose Cameron fancies the fight. Blears has told McElvoy, ‘The danger is if we're not careful, we lose the aspirational voters on the one hand, and the poor people in our communities who are tempted to go to the far Right.’ Old news, Hazel, and that 'if we're not careful' is a desperate choice of words.
So, trouble in the heartlands of Labour, eh? One has to say that a Labour voter lost to the BNP was scarcely a voter worth keeping, if that was the sum of what they had on their minds. But if you consider that Labour has lost Scotland to the SNP, and Newcastle upon Tyne to the Lib Dems… At the next general election there will be people voting for the first time who weren’t born when Margaret Thatcher left office, and that could mark a shift of sorts; for, as justly reviled as Thatcher still is by northern people whose livelihoods and communities she destroyed, some of those new-minted voters will be on Tyneside.
Moreover, it's no accident that Northumberland could bring forth a man such as Sir John Hall, who claimed that his heroes were Thatcher and Mao. Hall was clearly one Geordie waiting for Thatcherism to happen, so deeply did it speak to his own sense of get-ahead wits-about-you resourcefulness. He’s the sort of Geordie Alan Duncan is presumably hoping to meet on Cameron’s behalf. (As a mouthy businessman tells Martin Pallister in Crusaders, ‘People care about the north-east. Top people. Get ‘em up here and they love Geordies. The Tories admire us, they do. Not as a job lot, mind you. But they’re on the side of any have got initiative.’)
And then there is a deep decades-old disillusion with Labour in the North East, something I felt very forcibly back in late 2007 when I was up in Walker by the Tyne, writing a long piece for Prospect, and met a spirited woman called Betty Cheetham who, in her sixties, had got herself actively involved in local housing issues and regeneration schemes. ‘I’ve no faith in the Labour Party now’, Betty told me, ‘for the way they’ve tret the North East.’
There’s perhaps another wrinkle to consider in terms of how votes can come and go. The northern Leftism that I feel I know fairly well contains a particular strain of social conservatism that isn’t always so far removed from the Tory view, though it certainly doesn’t sit too close to the Islington-style identity-politics Leftism that evolved in the 1980s while Labour were out of power. That social conservatism is embodied in Crusaders by the pension-age Geordie electrician/carpenter Jack Ridley: someone for whom socialism is all responsibilities rather than rights, dutiful adults working hard and expecting their neighbours to do likewise, so spreading good order in the society. For that reason, such men are as tough on ‘benefit cheats’ and ‘idle youths’ as any Tory. And however tough Labour talks on this matter, people may choose to feel that other parties exhibit greater and deeper conviction…

Michael Jackson & the Porcelain Monkey

I'm just old enough to have a fairly strong visual/sensory recall of the day that Elvis died, and the attendant mournfulness of that day's media coverage. I had only seen one or two of his movies on telly, but let's face it, one had never seen anything quite like Elvis, (and that, of course, includes his legion of professional 'imitators'.)
Still, even at my tender age in 1977, I'm pretty sure I had already picked up on the feeling that there was something sad, creepy and even sinister that had settled like a grim black pall over the image and reputation of the Late, Great & Beloved Entertainer. A few years later in the early 1980s I heard Alan Bleasdale talking on the radio about his utterly passionate adoration of Elvis, and I struggled with this reverence from the author of Boys From the Blackstuff toward the slobbish junkie who offered himself as a narcotics czar to Richard Nixon. Later, in 1989, came Chuck D... But I suppose that when it comes to the Great Ones then you hold on to the memory you prefer.
Today I'm remembering buying Michael Jackson's Thriller in Woolworth's on the day it was released in 1982. The lead-off single, the Paul McCartney duet 'The Girl Is Mine', had been wretched beyond belief, of course, but I was just a pop music fan and I reckoned Thriller had to have at least some stuff on it similar to 'Don't Stop Til You Get Enough' or the Jacksons' monumental 'Can You Feel It?' And indeed it did.
Doesn't the legend have it that Thriller was near as dammit recorded and mixed and ready to go when a perturbed Quincy Jones sent Jackson back to the drawing board to come up with a couple of much-needed floor-filler hits? And Jackson came back with 'Billie Jean' and 'Beat It'...?
Jackson circa 1982 is how I (and I suspect millions of others) would prefer to think of him, in the video for 'Billie Jean' or his celebrated performance of same at the Motown tribute concert that same year: an amazing-looking young black man with talent just pouring out of his fingers and toes. Not very long after that, it all turned sad and creepy and even sinister.
Of all the hundreds of songs written about Elvis,the one I think cuts hardest is 'Porcelain Monkey' by Warren Zevon, and its lyrics ran round my head again this morning as soon as I heard that Jackson was dead:
Hip-shakin' shoutin' in gold lame,
That's how he earned his regal sobriquet,
Then he threw it all away
For a porcelain monkey...

Loops: Writing Music

1. When did the vogue for people writing essays in numbered strophes die off? Or when did it start?

2. I think of it mainly as a 1980s fashion in style-magazine journalism, the more distinguished influence emanating from the works of Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, Penguin Classic editions of Nietzsche, Futurist manifestos, and the whole oeuvre of Jean-Luc Godard.

3. The purpose of it seemed to be to add a sense of coherence and sequence to an otherwise rag-bag, promiscuous collection of musings. ‘Notes on X’ was the standard title. It's a form well suited to such ephemerals as the record sleeve and the contemporary art gallery catalogue.
4. Susan Sontag's 'Notes on 'Camp'' (1964) is clearly a key text in this lineage, and the whole of it can be found online here.

5. It so happens, and not surprisingly, that I was thinking about Sontag's essay the other day while writing about a new film by Pedro Almodovar.

6. Somebody else who's been thinking about Sontag and Camp, in relation to hip-hop (of all things), is one of the contributors to the excellent new music journal Loops from Faber and Faber and Domino Records, which clearly endeavours to offer a sumptuous home for long-form writing about good music of all colours and genres. In Issue 01 you will find some fine contributions from luminaries such as Nick Cave, Simon Armitage, Jon Savage, Richard Milward, Nick Kent, Hari Kunzru and Simon Reynolds. My personal favourites are Amanda Petrusich writing on collectors of old blues 78s, Matthew Ingram addressing the technology of electronic music-making (and making an important case for the importance of music writing that is informed about the actual creation/production of the music itself), Anwyn Crawford on the teenage female consumer of pop music, and Maggoty Lamb offering extracts from his pseudonymous journal about the decline of the British music press.

7. Loops the Website is getting off the ground here.

8. That is all.

Iran: The People vs The Monkey & His Organ-Grinders

The Iranian revolution of 1979 was, I daresay, the first time a major event in global current affairs marked itself on my then-juvenile mind. No surprise, really. The street-level tumult of a revolution always looks powerful on TV (whatever Gil Scott-Heron was thinking when he wrote his rap about such happenings never being televised.) And above the fray of the streets, of course, was the indelibly black-browed, baleful gaze of the Ayatollah Khomeini. These things stick in a 9-year-old’s mind.
I was dimly conscious, too, that the Rise of the Mullahs was grim news for the USA, and later I was made aware that Reagan’s victory over Carter in the following year’s US presidential poll was a lot to do with how America wished to be seen in relation to the newly-minted Islamic Republic of Iran.
Ten years on… 1989, and Khomeini issues his death warrant on Salman Rushdie. A noticeable number of sniffy British authors, Conservative politicians and newspaper pundits say that, basically, we shouldn’t meddle in Iran’s business, that Rushdie had caused great offence to Islam & its faithful, and that, anyway, Rushdie was an arrogant dark-skinned troublemaker and a Labour voter to boot…
By 1999 I had come to the view that globalisation (read: Americanisation) of the planet was a regrettable trend that ought to be resisted wherever possible. Within a couple more years, though, I had to admit an important qualifier – namely, that while natural diversity and difference should always be respected there were certain corners of the globe where, clearly, a little bit of Americanisation would be exactly what the doctor ordered, for the betterment of the state in question and its people who clamoured for change. To speak of only one example, the increasingly frightful Islamic Republic of Iran.
Like a lot of slovenly westerners, perhaps foolishly or gullibly, I’ve been very taken in recent years with photo-journalism of the Iranian street depicting young men and (more importantly) women, smoking cigarettes, wearing earrings or make-up, and showing off haircuts clearly modelled on those of Western pop stars and footballers. Yes, true, I love to imagine all these dynamic youths reading Lolita in Tehran, and voting for an outward-looking, pluralist democracy that favours freedom of speech and the rule of law. I like to think that's what Iran's brave national football XI had in mind the other night when sporting those green armbands (pictured).
At the same time I’ve been conscious that Iran is one of those places proving the anarchist maxim that if voting changed anything then it would be made illegal. And one doesn’t want to be swayed on serious matters by the slightest and most ephemeral fashion. Moreover, being on America's side in the matter is, in effect, to say that the notion of the mullahs acquiring a nuclear weapons capability makes one sick (for all that it may be impossible to stop now.) This is a double standard, of course, but one that's fine by me, I confess.
It feels necessary to support the fight against the smelly little orthodoxies, of which one could find no more pungent exemplar than the diminutive Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But I suppose one should look past the monkey to the organ grinder, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Today this rat-bag calmly states that Iran’s enemies ‘are targeting the Islamic establishment’s legitimacy by questioning the election and its authenticity before and after’ the vote. But there was no realistic 'before' to the vote, man! Its result was preordained.
Yes, of course, the Monkey may indeed have won a useful majority. The other day I heard an expatriate Iranian woman on the radio saying wearily that a lot of these young protestors had voted for the first time, and had yet to appreciate that one’s preferred candidate sometimes loses. And I know Ahmadinejad is the champion of the urban and rural poor. But a landslide? Get away, man.
Khamenei is being such a loathesome idiot that one hardly wants to dwell on the obvious problems for President Obama in calibrating his response: America's perennial double standards in respect of Egypt or Saudi Arabia, the poisoned option of regime change (Iran has to be a popular overthrow or nothing), and the unproven qualities of Mirhossein Mousavi, who seems – to be fair – a fairly mediocre and dubious figure to be the focus of such vehement feeling.
Still, one hopes the Iranian people won’t calm down or do as they're told, but keep on facing down their sinister discredited rulers, and so make it finally impossible for Western governments to do anything but take their side.

Adam Thorpe reviewed in FT by RTK

Thorpe is, of course, the author of the acclaimed Ulverton and many other acclaimed novels since. My write-up on his latest, Hodd, appeared in Monday's Financial Times, beginning like so:
"There’s a special thrill to be had from the meeting of a good novelist with a historical figure of mythical proportion. Such was the pleasure in Peter Carey’s reinvention of Ned Kelly in True History of the Kelly Gang, which was “true” only if you believe, as did Picasso, that “art is the lie that tells the truth”. Now we have the encounter of Adam Thorpe and Robin Hood, or “Robert Hodd” as he is known in the stylised Middle English of Thorpe’s beguiling new novel..."

Elections/Leaders: Tessa Blackstone keeps it real

With a great swathe of the press and all of the Tory blogs now on Governmental Deathwatch, Tessa Blackstone has just used the Evening Standard to make most of the points that need making about the purported necessity of a General Election in the event of Captain Brown getting himself hoyed off the deck of the Titanic. To wit:
1. 'British general elections are not presidential.' (In other words, the Prime Minister is only the leader of the largest party in parliament.)
2. 'The power to call an election lies with the prime minister alone. A new leader could exert this power but would be wiser to bring in a Bill for fixed-term parliaments, with the election fixed for May 2010. It would remove uncertainty, speculation and the party of government having an advantage.'
There's a lot to be said for the proposed Bill. The feverish, gleeful insincerity of so many who claim to want their change of government right now and for the good of our poor ailing Nation would be seen for so much over-excited babble if only these same boosters were asked to say whether the Nation really, badly needed to go to the polls after the Falklands War, say, or in the middle of Nigel Lawson's boom (rather than, say, in the midst of its bust six months later - the first time I got to personally witness the spectacle of employees of the City of London staring down into pints of beer as though someone had urinated therein)?

Esquire (July 2009) now on stands: on a sporting theme

This month's Esquire is much preoccupied with sport, as clearly it ought to be every now and then; and especially when we're on the cusp of summer and its own special set of games, foremost among them cricket, and all looking forward to watching England trounce the likes of the Netherlands in 20/20...
Anyhow, July's Esquire. Cover star Amir Khan is interviewed by Bill Borrows, Man Citeh fan and biographer of Alex Higgins, who usually writes a regular sports column (in which had a gratuitous go at NUFC fans a while back, but then such is his right...) That nice young Theo Walcott talks to Sue Mott. There's even a piece about whether a man can not like sport one bit and yet still count himself manly; akin, perhaps, to Andrew O'Hagan's well-liked LRB essay of a few years back on the subject of hating football. Modestly tucked away elsewhere, The Rachel Cooke Interview is with Tony Blair, whom some of you might remember. Ms Cooke's conclusion is that the whole experience was like talking to a bar of soap.
I have chipped in something on a sporting theme too, albeit entirely by accident: a piece about a pair of very good and very different sports movies released this month, Rudo Y Cursi and Sugar. The first is a bitter black comedy about football's corruption by money. The latter is a quite wistful character study set in American minor league baseball. But, as I write:
...the real affinity between these two pictures is their shared sense of how pitiless is professional sport’s chewing up and spitting out of young talent. Jesus had the right idea when he declared that many are called but few are chosen...

‘I’m all for the donkey, in spite of everything.’

Brecht is said to have kept a small stuffed-toy donkey on his work-desk; around its neck a hand-lettered sign saying, ‘I, too, must understand.’ Quite often, I feel like I am that donkey.

‘I’m all for the donkey, in spite of everything.’ Thus Prince Myshkin enthuses to the giggly Yepanchin girls in The Idiot. Such is the Prince’s idea of sitting-room small-talk with young ladies. Kafka had to persuade Max Brod that Dostoyevsky's characters were not all lunatics but merely ‘incidentally mad’; and Myshkin is perhaps the maddest, if only because of his purity. I imagine readers like myself who love Myshkin and The Idiot do so in much the same way as the Prince was ‘awfully fond’ of the ‘good-natured and useful’ donkey.

Robert Bresson, too, was very good on the ‘exquisite sensitivity’ of certain animals, and so was very taken with The Idiot, in particular the profound communication that Myshkin claims to hear in a donkey’s braying. ‘Absolutely admirable’, Bresson declared, ‘to have an idiot informed by an animal, to have him see life through an animal, who passes for an idiot but is of an intelligence.’ He went on to take the novel as his template for Au Hasard Balthazar.

My daughter spent much of last week puzzling over Disney’s Pinocchio, a fine bit of work, if a tad perplexing (also a tad unsettling) for a 3-year-old, in respect of its complicated fantasy-morality: one of the high points of which is the forced metamorphosis of a pack of juvenile delinquents into a herd of pack-mules, carted off to a life of hard labour for their sins. Yes, a donkey’s lot can be a source of great pathos. One would like to think that at least some of Pinocchio’s mates ended up on sandy beaches wearing straw hats and giving pleasure rides to little kids.

MPs' Expenses/New Speaker: Crusading Time Again

For most of my twenties and a bit of my thirties I held the peculiar view that being a Member of Parliament was a higher calling: one that bestowed an honour but also placed one in a certain tradition of service; and that accordingly MPs ought to be paid a decent but modest middle-class wage, their real reward being precisely that honourable service to the public weal.
In this belief, clearly, I was naïve and impractical, and time and experience have eroded its shaky basis in me. For what is an MP but a human man or woman doing a job? I suppose a bit of my thinking on same is vested in the character of Dr Martin Pallister MP in Crusaders. But certainly I saw enough of my contemporaries take a direct route from student politics through lobbying firms to seats in the Commons, just as one might steer a certain pre-set course to be an accountant or a barrister, or a graphic designer or a personnel manager, or any other sort of white-collar gig. Politics is a profession, requiring a particular set of skills, and one might seek admission to it based on the desire to improve the lots of others than oneself - or one might not. At any rate, you have to do something to make a living, and since one wouldn’t wish British politics to regress once more into the form of a rich man’s idle hobby, the basic salary of an MP mustn’t be a deterrent to attracting clever/capable people.
That’s all fine then. The problem, though, for me and the rest of the country, is this business of the perks, and who defines them, and who pays for them.
Put it this way: I’m thinking of buying a new rug for my gaff, and because of the non-standard dimensions of the ‘heavy traffic flooring area’ I need said rug to cover, I’m thinking of getting it made bespoke: a slightly pricier-than-usual undertaking, but certainly a household necessity, and a more economical choice to get a rug than a new floor. Still, I’m mulling over the cost a bit before plunging in, like most of us who buy our stuff according to the dictates of what we earn.
If, however, I were an MP... well, then obviously I’d stop wasting my precious mental energy and let you buy that rug for me, dear reader – you, that is, and your fellow taxpayers.
Vernon Bogdanor addressed the matter very eloquently in the Times a fortnight or so ago:
“The cost of furniture, gardening, swimming pools and horse manure should be paid by MPs from their salaries. This would mean, until Sir Christopher [Kelly] reports, a fall in the standard of living of many MPs. That, perhaps, is no bad thing when so many of the public have to confront the consequences of recession. It will put MPs in a stronger position to empathise with constituents facing hard times without tax concessions or an additional costs allowance...”

Meanwhile: this blog is hopeful that Frank Field will stand for election as Speaker of the Commons, even though this preference puts me in dubious company, including that of Simon Heffer. Clearly a rigorous fellow, with a strong conception of what is the right thing, the worst that can be said of Field, seemingly, is that he doesn’t tow the line, won't be bought and sold and, as a late-life bachelor free of dependents, has a slightly otherwordly conception of how to conduct oneself properly. Well, all that’s fine by me. Nothing wrong with high standards, eh? The job could benefit from an honest man: someone who's a bit of a -oh, what's the word? - a crusader.

Ashamed to Show Oneself: Beauties & Beasts

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

NUFC: Incapacity = No Benefit

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

The Rounds of Dublin

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

All the Colours of the Town by Liam McIlvanney

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

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

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

Mishima's Madame de Sade: Blood & Roses

First things first, the image to my left is by and (c) Eikoh Hosoe: 'Portrait of Yukio Mishima', 1963.

Now then: one of the problems I have with going to the theatre is the tendency of audiences to laugh aloud at things that aren’t especially funny – as in, for example, quite a few of Shakespeare’s comedies. But, fair play, sometimes I do it myself, in that it’s a simple way to encourage the performers and assist the production on its way, just as one cheers the lads on the pitch even if a few early passes go astray.

However, it makes for a larger problem when laughter, even of that encouraging variety, serves to set up the wrong sort of mood for a dramatic production; and a larger problem still, artistically speaking, if the performers were purposely directed to seek those sorts of easy laughs.

This was going through my mind at the Wyndham Theatre last night as I watched Madame de Sade, the only play other than Hamlet that I've seen performed more than twice - so I can claim a bit of familiarity with it, as with its author, the phenomenal Mishima, a writer I’ve admired passionately for just as long as I’ve been reading good books.

The specific problem of the giggles and snickers during last night’s show seemed to me part of the tiresome, age-old English problem with sex: the furtive, embarrassed, vicarious interest in rudeness, naughtiness, smuttiness. No Sex Please, We’re British. 'That Freud, sex-mad he was...' The obsessive prurient interest in what other people do in bedrooms, the inability to behold oneself truly in the mirror. To wit, my companion for the evening pointed out that the woman two rows in front kept turning to her friend and emitting a little ‘Ooh!’, as in: 

Judi Dench: It wasn’t only blood he cleansed with his tongue...
Audience Woman: Ooh!

Now, there is a certain existential flipside to the English view of sex, or what George Orwell called our ‘lowness of outlook’: because sexual urges can indeed be low-down, dirty and comical. And since all sexual desire tends finally towards dysfunction and failure, like everything else in life, we shouldn’t miss the joke in that falling-off from urgency and vitality, in that gap between fantasy and reality.

Nevertheless: English literature has no equivalent to Sade, or Georges Bataille, or Jean Genet or even Anais Nin. So English theatre audiences may be poorly equipped for a play that refracts Sade’s philosophy of the boudoir through the measured, well-turned perversity of a Japanese genius who was both a Spartan classicist and an occasional pornographer.

I first saw Madame de Sade in August of 1990 at the Royal Academy in Glasgow: a production directed by Ingmar Bergman, played in Swedish. The whole audience were issued with wand-like electronic ear trumpets for the purpose of simultaneous translation. The elderly blazer-clad Scot in the seat beside me thought this wheeze hilarious, and expected me too to find it much more interesting than the foreign nonsense on stage that his wife had clearly dragged him to.

But I digress: Bergman’s stage was red, en hommage perhaps to his own Cries and Whispers, but also to the driving blood-and-roses theme of the play. When the lights came up on the elegantly debauched Madame Saint-Fond (Agneta Ekmanner) in riding gear avec swishing crop, there was a sharp intake of breath round the house; and an interesting tension developed in the subsequent exchanges between her and the pious Baroness de Simiane (Margaretha Byström.) Thus, it seemed to me, was a good mood established.

The same effect is certainly not achieved – or, rather, not sought – between Frances Barber and Deborah Findlay in Michael Grandage’s new West End production. In fairness, Mishima himself makes room in the text for a lot of the mock-scandalising effect. (Marguerite Yourcenar, an admirer of Mishima and of this play, wrote of Saint-Fond’s ‘cynical monologues written, it seems, to impress the spectator.’) But once the audience starts tittering over the same, because the actors are really selling it, the effect is to counteract the later dramatic force of the piece: ‘the joy of profanation’, the interplay of ‘holiness and shame.’

Still, I should say the great achievement of Grandage’s production to my little eyes is that this force had never seemed more apparent to me than last night, once the show got into its stride.

Mishima’s play is in the Racinian mode, a listening play. Mishima himself wrote that he wanted none of ‘the usual, trivial stage effects’ but, rather, action controlled exclusively by dialogue, the ‘collisions of ideas’ making the drama. It’s a tough thing to do. (I speak as an amateur who once  mounted a production of Britannicus in a black box over a pub in Islington.) So one has to admire the excellence of Grandage and his cast and crew.

The text was astutely cut to make an evening of 105 minutes without interval. There was a pronounced tendency to dramatise with light and sound the play's long speeches about Sade’s depravities, either experienced or witnessed or overheard, and their effects upon these women. But that high style did produce some fine effects. Dench did her stuff superbly. As Renee, Madame de Sade herself, Rosamund Pike rather set off at one pitch that she maintained, but her best moments {‘Alphonse is myself…) were spine-tinglingly good. She also made a wonderful job of articulating the play’s great recurrent theme of the rose and its redness, its allure and banality: ‘the usual roses’ of kitsch, prettified life, as opposed to the rose that grows snake-scales under cover of darkness...

This production really brought out the hidden bond between the depraved Renee and the pious Simiane: both find that exposure to Sade helps them see past the arrogance of ego, toward the world at its darkest. Both get themselves to a nunnery, but Simiane with less fuss. ‘You to the right and I to the left’, as Svidrigaylov says to his soul brother Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. The audience laughed, of course, when Deborah Findlay made her final entrance in a nun’s habit, and so be it. But I found I was thinking of Satoko taking the veil in Mishima’s Spring Snow, the first volume of his Sea of Fertility; and her later reappearance as the abbess in the last volume, The Decay of the Angel. Mishima wasn’t big on religion but he had a refined vision of the void.

The great Luis Bunuel was never troubled by the worst things he could think of; he spoke of ‘the perfect innocence of the imagination.’ But in Mishima’s play Renee believes she is a properly evil companion to her husband until she meets his mind on the page, reading his Justine. Then she sees they have no bond if it is based only on ‘the emptiness of acts of the flesh.’ He has built a ‘cathedral of vice’ with words, one from which she is excluded.

The theme of the dutiful, devoted wife is more intriguing in the light of Mishima’s own marriage to Yoko Sugiyama, a very public affair about which Mishima, typically, wrote a treatise prior to the ceremony. Yoko conducted herself very carefully before ‘The Incident’ of his suicide in 1970, and after that she was a diligent keeper of his flame. Mishima’s friend and biographer John Nathan was of the view that Yoko ‘perfectly learned her husband’s manner’ once she was in charge of his estate, and turned from being a highly personable young woman to quite a formidable cookie.

Once, reviewing some gossipy press clippings with Nathan as he prepared his book, Yoko remarked to him as if in bemusement that ‘a few of them even wrote that Mishima was queer!’ Nathan was given to understand that this was the beginning and the end of that subject between them. And when Paul Schrader made an intricate deal with Madame Mishima for the film rights to her husband’s life, she was careful to deny him dramatisation rights to the one novel preoccupied with homosexuality, Forbidden Colours. Life and art, words and the world: few artists addressed themselves to these divides as diligently as Mishima.

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

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

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

Peter Case: Real Rollicking Force

Great Gigs I Have Been At, #17.

Peter Case: in what I remember as a little conference suite with rush seating in the back of a quite posh hotel near the sea in Dun Laoghaire, Eire. It was either some time around the year-end of 1986, or the spring of 1987, though I do suspect the former. At any rate, I was 16.


I recall that Case in the flesh looked a good deal more bohemian (specs, scraggy hair, rumpled suit) than the highly styled troubadour on the cover of his newly released and eponymous debut album from Geffen Records. But, unaccompanied, he played those songs that I already loved - 'Echo Wars', 'More Than Curious', 'Three Days Straight' - and a few I didn’t know. He encored with his own take on Shane MacGowan’s 'A Pair of Brown Eyes', and even stepped off the stage with his acoustic guitar to pace up and down atop a row of spare chairs, cheered at every step.

Afterward I lingered backstage (which was a hotel corridor, basically), shuffling and eavesdropping as some more seasoned individuals managed to engage Case in conversation. ‘How’s T-Bone’s family doing, do you know?’ asked one. He was speaking of Case’s revered producer on the Geffen record, someone whom even I had figured as a musical legend, present at the Rolling Thunder Revue and the making of Heaven’s Gate, producer of Elvis Costello’s King of America, one of my other great favourite long players of 1986...

This is all coming back to me now because of belated efforts to catch up with Case’s subsequent career. The 2007 collection Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John has brought great pleasure. No surprise that Richard Thompson contributes guitar and vocals to one cut, or that Stan Ridgway (another of my great favourites etc etc) is thanked in the notes. And at times I do feel like I’m back in 1986, enjoying that first album.

And yet I see from Case’s website that the ‘styled’ nature of his first record is something he rues somewhat, though he pays great respect to his producer, who kept on to greater things (and whose unmistakably long black-suited figure I bumped into once at a Hollywood function circa 2002.)

This is what Peter Case has to say about 'Peter Case':

Q: How much did T-Bone Burnett shape your sound?
A: T-Bone's a great producer. I came to him with this whole vision of the songs I was doing, and we talked about it and came up with the idea of tribal folk, meaning using acoustic guitars with a huge groove in the back, which only made it to the record on songs like ‘Three Days Straight.’ But the fact is that I was deemed by the record company, and T-Bone, as being too primitive to even play on my first record.
Q: Does that go back to you being a rock 'n' roll folk singer, a real rollicking force?
A: On the first record, there are a lot of slick arrangements. There are even a couple of cuts that I don't even play on, I just sing…

Clearly the things you have to do to forge a viable musical career can be strange and taxing, maybe even infuriating. Maybe it was especially so in the mid-1980s... Case seems to have made the right choice to stay out of the mainstream and keep to his own terms, 'right' in the sense that the music has stayed true and top-notch. It's hard to imagine the mainstream could have made it any better.

"Saving a Relegated Newcastle" - Gabrielle Marcotti

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

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

Jung at Heart: Sleeping Beauty

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

Shearer: Work in Progress...?

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

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

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

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

John Martyn: Addendum

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

Bob Mould: Addendum

Still haven't picked up Bob's record. And he's playing in my manor next week too - sold out, happily, though I rather wish I could be there - but then that in itself isn't 'true fan' talk anyway, is it?
Scouting around today I read this Spin magazine interview snippet from last year:
SPIN: Both you and Grant Hart were gay, but no one ever spoke about that while Hüsker Dü were active. Looking back, do you wish you had been more open? Would that have even been possible?
MOULD: We never talked about it that much. As an artist, writing at the time gender-neutral songs, I wanted everyone to be included, and had the band been labeled as 'gay music', no one would have listened. Fast-forward a few years to 1994: Spin sends Dennis Cooper to spend two days with me in Austin, saying that if I didn't come out, they were going to out me. So I capitulated, and now everything's good, but I came from a very small town and they had to deal with that. One of my friends from high school who was also gay went away and then got killed when he came back. At this point in my life, I feel assured and centered and whole, but to get here? Jesus.
It was only a few years after Husker Du split that I figured out Bob was homosexual, and this in the pre-internet days (c. 1989-90?) when news travelled a little slower, after someone or other in the music press remarked (perhaps indiscreetly) that 'they'd never heard a gay man make music like that.' (Hardcore rock 'n' roll music, to be precise.) But Mould's comments are illuminating, and prove how much dogged thought has to go into all of this when an artist wants a real career - 'gender neutral' songs, indeed. Listening to Warehouse: Songs and Stories back in 1987 I absolutely felt like he was writing and singing about me and how I felt about the Girl down the street, or up on Heaven Hill or wherever. But then that's artistry for you.

Angela Carter, the Wicked Queen, Sadean Women etc

The latest 'classic' from the Disney canon that my daughter has discovered and seized upon is Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, so I’ve watched it about a zillion times over the last seven days. Still, unlike Cinderella, this one is more or less a pleasure: clearly, all things considered, a great movie, hugely innovative for its time, with intricately shaded passages that still startle – all of these the ‘scary ones’ concerning the Wicked Queen, of course, rather than the eponymous heroine and the titular 'little men'.

The boldness of the picture is all there in how it opens, with the black castle, the Queen and the superbly animated Magic Mirror. The Queen’s later transformation into the Old Hag is still a tour de force in a subsequently crowded field. The picture takes obvious and age-old mythopoeic elements and makes them newly beautiful and forceful, just as did Cocteau (albeit more archly and richly) in his rightly adored Belle et la Bete and Orphee.
The Queen was but the first of Disney’s appalling stepmothers, and the first villain to suffer the standard Disney villain fate of death by a nasty fall. Watching her haughty/gleeful malovelence this time I was reminded of Anne Sexton’s description in her Snow White poem: ‘Pride pumped in her like poison.’
The other eminent female writer summoned to mind when one thinks about the rich reworking of fairytale is of course Angela Carter, whom I began to read with huge enthusiasm back in the mid-1980s after the release of Neil Jordan’s film The Company of Wolves and the near-simultaneous publication of what seemed to be her most successful novel, Nights at the Circus. Helen Simpson writes interestingly here about The Bloody Chamber, the story collection that inspired the Jordan film and which also includes Carter's warped mirror-image of Snow White, The Snow Child.
I was flicking through some of Carter’s books only a few weeks ago, for the first time in twenty years. She was brilliant, and her best sentences are stinging, sensual images that lodge in the memory, though she could also inflict page after page of overdressed fancy on the reader. Simpson quotes Carter to the effect that she insisted she was only using the ‘latent content’ of ‘traditional stories’, content she believed to be ‘violently sexual.’She was right, though there’s part of me that feels that fairytale or myth played straight is more stark and suggestive and involving than any sophisticated post-Freud/Jung re-imagining. One doesn’t want to spend too much time in the dream world, behind the mirror... But then, it might be different for girls.
A novelist who was taught by Carter at one of her many Creative Writing perches once told me a funny story about how he went on a fell-walking/pot-holing excursion in the company of her and some other students, only to take a bad fall and injure his ankle. He remembers Carter being a useful part of the rescue/relief effort, but also that she spent a certain amount of time gazing thoughtfully at him during his plight. He later understood that she had been recording the details of the accident mentally, in case she needed to draw upon it later for fictional purposes. Ah, the writer, and the chip of ice in his or her heart…

Bob Mould: Life and Times now in stores

As every couple of years in this particular passage of life, the question comes round: should I buy Bob's new one? My story on this score is only much the same as that of a million other hardcore rock adherents. For the adolescent me, Husker Du were unquestionably the most vital contemporary band in Christendom c. 1985-87 (when they threw out about 3 albums a year, some of them doubles, unlike Bob's more stately output these days, at the age of 47...) The Fraught First Solo Period (Workbook, Black Sheets of Rain) was in time for my late-teenage 'transition' moment; then The Sugar Years were more or less contemporary with my College Years; and I was around for the start of the Second Solo Stint, but this was also the point where I stopped going into shops and buying music...
Bob's previous, District Line, I was given as a gift, and I've been playing it today while writing. And looking round the web (as above) there are some stirring glimpses of the new material. So, yeah... I think I'll get myself to a record shop next week and buy me Life and Times. Not Woolworths anymore, sad to say etc, as I did for my last purchase, the mighty Chinese Democracy (see passim). But then Woolies never stocked Bob's stuff anyhow, I'm fairly sure.
I hear Bob is even writing his autobiography now, for the editor Michael Pietsch at Little, Brown, NY, a guy I met once in very fraught circumstances and liked a great deal. Maybe I can persuade him to send me a free copy down the line. Le Crunch, bien sur...

Alistair Darling: Do You Really Want To Hurt Him?

I looked at all the headlines today for the first time in about a fortnight, and everybody's pretty well sick of the government. Those who aren't, seem to be grasping for something else to talk about, to waste the jury's time. PoliticsHome offers the 'first poll since the Budget' and it suggests that most people found most of the measures reasonable, but they don't believe anything the Government predicts, and the biggest issue on their minds is the stupefying scale of our debt. Hence, the return of a 20-point Tory poll lead is cantering up to the horizon.
The public don't seem to bear too much of a personal grudge against Darling, though. Perhaps they find him largely pitiable, soon to be out of a job like so many of us. Perhaps they're just relieved it's not Fred Goodwin who's keeper of our nation's purse-strings.
Anatole Kaletsky in the Times has defended Brown once or twice in the last 12 months, a form of seppuku in certain social circles, so I read a piece of his deriding the Budget from top to bottom with great interest. Somewhere near the top, he tossed away the merest notion that Cameron didn't have any better ideas, and one was slightly interested to see that all the comments his piece had attracted were from a gaggle of little Tory-Boy online invigilators crying 'How dare you? Prove it!' etc etc.

Africa Alive nr. Southwold...

... is a pretty good spot for a family day-out. Rhino, zebras, giraffes, gazelles, monkeys. Lemurs. And, of course, the kings of the jungle, less disgruntled than most lions I've seen in safari parks, even on a day when the breeze was a tad brisk. My Darling Wife and I even had a nice cup of tea. The intrepid little girl in the purple coat is of course our Dear Daughter.

Esquire (May 2009) now on stands: includes vampires

I haven't yet been able to prise my copy of this month's Esquire away from my wife, but I'm very much looking forward to it, because I know it contains an essay by my friend Dan Davies about the Hillsborough disaster, at which he was present; and on the basis of previous discussions with him on this very subject I strongly suspect that what he has written, 20 years on from the tragedy, will be extremely powerful and enlightening.

My own contribution to this ish is a review of the newly released Swedish vampire movie Let The Right One In, which I thought was generally terrific. But the money sentence in the write-up runs like so:

"At heart we know that the best fairytales are not about under-age wish-fulfilment but, rather, the getting of wisdom: the sorcerer’s apprentice makes a devil’s pact, and there’s a price to pay for a wish to come true."

This sentiment is certainly hinted at in the movie, but finally it comes down on the side of under-age wish fulfilment, and who wouldn't, these days?

Run DMC, right and exact

In the early spring of 1985 I bought RUN DMC's long-playing record King of Rock at my local record emporium, brought it home and listened to it in a state of uncontainable excitement. So much so that I called up a schoolfriend, someone with whom I'd talked casually about 'maybe forming a band', and played the title-cut of the album down the phone to him. He didn't seem to like it too much. Hard to fully appreciate rap music down the phone, to be fair, but then I don't think the chap in question would have come round to that sound if he'd spend ten years poring over the master-tapes in Abbey Road.
That said, it was only 18 months later that their cover of 'Walk This Way' made RUN DMC a household name, but in a way it was a shame that the heavy metal aspect of their particular fusion had to be made so explicit and radio-friendly. And nothing they did thereafter was embraced by the mainstream, which possibly hurt them, though they were hurt by other things too.
Anyhow, I say all of this in contented reminiscence because RUN DMC are now formally installed in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, and their eulogist, eloquent as only he can be, was Marshall Mathers.

James Lasdun reviewed in FT by RTK

I am, in footballing parlance, a massive, massive fan of James Lasdun, so it was a deeply satisfying assignment for me to be asked to review his latest collection of short stories, It's Beginning To Hurt, for the Financial Times, who have now run the write-up in today's 'Weekend' edition, online here. On a personal note, this is the first time I've written about Lasdun since I reviewed his previous collection Three Evenings for my college paper back in 1992... He gave a reading in the college bookstore not long thereafter, at which I was really pleased to chat with him, and yet more pleased that he had read and appreciated my 'notice'. He was already a highly-rated writer then, and has become only more so in the intervening years: unquestionably one of the finest in contemporary English fiction.

PMQs by RTK

A friend kindly invited me up to the Gods of the press gallery for yesterday afternoon's Prime Minister's Questions, and so I took the rarefied air of the Mother of Parliaments for the first time in 6 or 7 years. Not much changes, of course. This is England. The halls of the palace still have the feel of those uppercrust-if-slightly-faded European hotels. And the chamber remains an august bear-pit created for boorish 'adversarial' behaviour.

I should stress that I am no Hercules, and no Adonis, no Einstein neither, nor am I anyone's spring chicken; yet it does still seem to me that Commons debates and exchanges are a setting that permits a staggering number of paunchy, purple-faced, intellectually vapid specimens of manhood to hoot and bray scornfully from their seats as if they were ready for a principled punch-up in the street that very moment. When, in fact, it seems obvious that most of them could neither argue or fight their way out of the proverbial soggy paper bag.

It's still a bit surprising to my fragile ears how much noise gets made when people, such as the Prime Minister, are speaking. But this is what MPs have to get hardened to, and you see why women and other people with manners usually need a while to get habituated. I'm reminded though of what Christopher Hitchens habitually said when facing a tough anti-war crowd: if only you could hear how foolish you sound when you boo...

Gordon Brown is a seasoned and robust performer at the despatch box, and his scornful smiles toward the Opposition benches when on top are clearly deeply felt. But he's not nimble on his feet in any respect, and utterly rubbish at a number of the things that Blair carried off in his sleep, notably running away with the Leader of the Opposition's last question of PMQs, so as to rally his own benches. That said, Blair was never down so low in the polls, a fact that is possibly Cameron's strongest debating point. Cameron too is a very assured performer, though he's looking noticeably older all of a sudden: most likely this is the toll of grief for his son.

Alan Shearer: Banzai!

Opposing fans rather than Mags got to me first with the great and terrible news of late Tuesday, so I'm still wiping the spit off my face, figuratively speaking. It's a good job Shearer has broad shoulders and a stern face in adversity, as he'll need to summon both these qualities as and when we're relegated. But, fair's fair, it will now officially be recorded in the Book of Time that whenever Newcastle called then Alan Shearer always answered. If I were him, I'd have had the missus say I was out creosoting the fence and couldn't come to the phone, like. But that's why he's the fella who scored about 500 goals in his career, and I'm the fella who stood by, usually intoxicated, and watched him score most of them... Good luck then, Al. Or should I say, 'Banzai!'?