Russia, and a fresh fight for the anti-imperialists

Having lured Georgia’s foolish President into a little war he couldn’t afford, Russia are now playing Stage II of this great game and recognising the independence of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, with its plucky 70,000 populace. ‘If you hate us’, Russia says (in effect) to the UN, the US and EU, ‘we’re glad, and we don’t care. What are you going to do about it?’ Well, I hear Bush is sending Vice-President Cheney to the region, so that will doubtless raise the tone of the debate…
You will have seen/heard that Russia currently does have some really angry is-anyone-listening?-type Western apologists, who didn’t like the Kosovo war of 1999 and didn’t think Milosevic was unusually despicable, and do think that NATO sewed dragon’s teeth with that military action. An FT leader makes what I think is a (perhaps ‘the’) salient distinction: “The Abkhaz and Ossetian populations have not been threatened with anything remotely approaching “ethnic cleansing” or “genocide” by the Georgians. If anything, the danger is in the other direction, with ethnic Georgians fleeing both regions to escape the Russians and the Russian-armed secessionists.”
As the FT suggests, this flawed and dishonest logic of Russia’s might yet bite her back or otherwise embarrass her, encoraging “the restive republics of the north Caucasus, such as Ingushetia and Dagestan, as well as Chechnya, to determine their own destiny.” As books by Bob Woodward and Alistair Campbell have shown us, it was over his attempted crushing of Chechnya that Putin really reached out to the Western powers, in search of common cause against what he called as an Islamic menace; then after 9/11 Putin shook his head, reckoned he’d told ‘em so, and decided to focus his efforts entirely on never having to seek common cause with anyone ever again. As Christopher Hitchens writes in Slate, “overt Russian imperialism is back, after a very short absence from the scene, and it is no more amiable or benign from the many toxic resentments it acquired during its period of decline and impotence and eclipse.” Any statesman who quite fancies being a hated pariah - would indeed wear such status like a crown - is a tough opponent to weather.

Made in Heaven (US 1987, dir. Alan Rudolph)

Following on from my lament of a few nights ago about having failed to squeeze an entry on Tourneur's Build My Gallows High into Ten Bad Dates, I've been reminded of a commensurate failure to build a spot in the book for Made In Heaven, one of the movies I really love from the mid-1980s: an affection possibly enhanced by its unavailability on DVD, which left me clinging to vague, fond memories - until, that is, I found some lovely clips on YouTube, such as this trailer...

At the final reckoning Alan Rudolph's career will probably come to be seen as one founded on the cultiest of cult movies (obviously, with Dorothy Parker and Gordon Liddy among his diverse interests, and Keith Carradine and Kris Kristofferson his favoured leading men.) And bittersweet romance has always been one of Rudolph's strongest suits. So Choose Me (1984) may end up getting counted as his masterpiece. Whereas Made in Heaven is one of those movies that most critics considered a would-be-commercial misfire, and the release version was chopped about without Rudolph's consent. But it's definitely the picture of his that I'd take to my Crusoe island.

It's a celestial Love Story that moves from funny/rueful to unashamedly cute/winsome - and then abruptly becomes a Loss Story, with terribly wrenching effect. The excellence of the narrative and its structure is the power of its metaphor.

Lovelorn Tim Hutton dies before his time saving some kids from drowning and goes to an oddball but charming Heaven, where God is Debra Winger in drag (we might indeed all find this to be the case one day...) In Heaven Hutton meets and falls in love with Kelly McGillis, and she with him. Natural justice, the viewer might say. But McGillis was 'made in heaven' and is there only to be gone from there, en route to earth: 'I'm going to be somebody's baby.' Hutton appeals to God/Winger, and is told that's his hard luck: such is life, and death. (You can watch this bit actually.)

But, the rules have one loophole - Hutton can be sent back after McGillis, reborn as a babe himself. The catch is that he won't know where in the world he's going, or anything of why he willed this to be: he'll just be an average Schmo like we all are, stumbling around in the dark. If he can find (or rather, run into) McGillis within 30 years, their fine feelings for one another will be restored like magic - 'love at first sight', you might say. If not, then love will never find either of them: the rest of their lives will be doomed to sadness, and unfulfillable ache.

Now then - did you spot the metaphor? The sense in which this obvious whimsy actually throws a sharply slanting, possibly painful light onto what is a crushingly familiar romantic preoccupation to a great many human beings? That's the wonder of this lovely movie. And YouTube preservation aside I hope it's reincarnated in a proper home format one day.

This is the ending, and if it seems especially to make no sense I believe that's because it was one of the passages most aggressively recut against Rudolph's wishes so as to sweeten an otherwise downbeat end. Still quite gorgeous, though. Contains for me the most fabulous focus-pull-plus-slight-pan in any movie. The score is Mark Isham and the final song is Neil Young's 'We Never Danced', again laid on thick as they did in the 1980s, but such is the way to High Emotional Content.

Good Crusaders review in today's Observer by Robert Collins

Another good notice for the Crusaders paperback today, I'm very happy to report. The Observer's Robert Collins describes Crusaders as "big, boisterous and brazenly old-fashioned", likens me to "a Balzac of the pre-Blair era" (a nice touch that I will take in the spirit doubtless intended) and ends by saying that "for sheer scope and rambunctiousness, it's irresistible." Those are terrifically generous sentiments.
As have others (passim), Collins does point out my "hijacking the antiquated prose of the Victorian social novel", and says that he finds this has "mixed results." And as previous, I've absolutely no quarrel with that view: one makes one's choices in this manner at the outset, and lives with 'em thereafter, and I respect the way Robert Collins has expressed his opinion of same.

Newcastle United 1 (Owen 71) Bolton Wanderers 0

Paul Newman in The Color of Money remarks that money won is twice as sweet as money earned. Why aye Paul, and 3 points stolen are twice as nice as 3 won at a stroll. 'Steal' sounds like how it went at St James's today, even if it's doubtful that Bolton oozed class and attacking verve, since Given had to save a Bolton penalty and Owen's winner (another header!) came in the final quarter. But they all count, lads and lasses... I look forward to assessing what was the balance of play when we get shown, last as usual I expect, on Match on the Day.

Crusaders nicely reviewed in today's Times by Christina Koning

I'm really gratifying by this paperback review of Crusaders in today's Times by Christina Koning: she refers to "Kelly's accomplished debut", says the book is "intensely gripping" and "particularly good on the internecine wrangles of the Labour Party." (Hope that point proves sufficiently alluring to Times readers...)
And the one or two reservations she expresses are all perfectly reasoned too. To note that Crusaders "reads, at times, like a piece of sociological analysis, rather than a work of fiction" is more than fair in relation to a novel of this length, with so many leisurely digressions from the main dramatic through-line. There seems to have been a critical consensus from the get-go that Crusaders has a good strong plot, especially for an allegedly 'literary novel' - the main issue for individual taste is whether that plot is too much swaddled within reams and reams of big-canvas socio-political realism etc. As usual, I just think these arguments are well worth having, and frankly I can see both sides.
Having named Christina Koning I should also cite the other reviewers who have done me a good turn with considerate reviews of the Crusaders paperback: James Smart in the Guardian, Sally Cousins in the Sunday Telegraph, and Nick Rennison in the Sunday Times (not online, alas).

Obama v McCain: increasingly less interesting...

When America goes to the polls for a President, Europe quite properly doesn't have any say in the matter (despite the fact that we Euros generally end up getting 'taxed' for America's choice in some way or other...): that's why the Guardian were so foolish in trying to influence the voters of Cook County back in 2004. It's possible, though, that some supposedly sophisticated Democrats think that having a few cheerleaders for their candidate across the Atlantic is a big deal; and that may be a dangerous delusion, just as Willie Whitelaw used to warn Margaret Thatcher that electorally it was no good her being adored and feted in Washington while the streets of London were boiling with Poll Tax rioters.

I'm still not sure what Barack Obama thought he was doing grandstanding in Berlin earlier this summer, and in my eyes he certainly extended his record of not having said anything interesting in his candidancy other than a few well-aimed shots at Mrs Clinton. On the whole the Euro tour looked to me like his version of the standard Democrat delusion, last displayed by that Boston brahmin John Kerry, who started off on the stump touting his admirable grasp of foreign languages (indeed of American-English, compared to the incumbent), then wound up being photographed out duck-hunting with buddies, while promising to 'fight and kill' the 'terrorists' overseas. Americans don't find these flip-flops too convincing on the whole.

Has Obama said anything useful lately about Russia, or Iran? I've only hearsay of what McCain's been saying, but the impression I have is that he says more of what a majority of swing-state American voters want to hear, and says it quicker and without palaver. So that's a problem for Obama right there. This is looking like a tight election, which I always imagined it would be, but the final calculus could be very boring and predictable indeed.

Oh, and now Obama has picked Joe Biden for VP. I really hope Biden's reputation in the US is based on a good deal more than the main reason why we know of him in the UK: a reason intimately related to the oratory skills of Neil Kinnock, a man who realised too late that, when in search of the highest political office, you can't afford to change your mind in public on a host of key issues and burning convictions.

Larn Yer'sel Geordie (Man): Volume XIII

Earlier tonight I got wrong off my 2½ year-old daughter after I – abruptly, because a bit irritated – called her ‘man’: to wit, ‘Aw pack it in, Cordi man.’

‘I’m not a man, Daddy’ is (roughly) how Cordelia replied to me, in her 2½ year-old way, a bit vexed and perplexed. And she was quite in the right. After all, what did I think I was doing passing down to my daughter a slovenly colloquial habit, liable to obscure for her the very concept of gender difference?
The simple answer is, of course, that it’s a Geordie thing: one to which I paid no real mind until about 6 years ago when Dick Clement’s and Ian LaFrenais’s Auf Weidersehen Pet came back on the BBC, and I persuaded My Darling Wife to watch it with me. In an early episode Neville (Kevin Whateley) was arguing with his wife Brenda (Julia Tobin) in their patented manner; and when, exasperated, he addressed her as ‘Brenda, man’, my Darling Wife seemed to find this one of the oddest and funniest things she’d heard all week. And, suddenly, I saw it in the same light, even though beforehand it had seemed to me as natural as rain.
Such stuff is on my mind because this week I happen to be writing about the north-east and its literary lineage, at the invitation of the excellent New Writing North. Consequently I’m thinking again about the linguistic habits and rich and varied dialects of the region – or what Alan Plater calls ‘the notoriously tricky accents of the north-east, where speech patterns change almost street by street.’
For a different part of the same purpose I’ve also been revisiting the north-east bits of coverage of Crusaders, including this very early interview for the Journal, which suffers from a few mis-transcribed errors of fact but was a great boon to get at the time, and got me off to a good start in trying to express my particular debt to “this fantastically rich and dynamic region that has nevertheless suffered economically, so it has this grandeur to it but also this background of problems…”

Ten Bad Dates with De Niro in Flak magazine

Very interesting and eloquently engaged response to the film list book just posted here by Matt Hanson for Flak. Really enters into the spirit of the enterprise. And I will have to tell Nev Pierce that he has a fan.
I don't know if I've had a single film-list-related thought since the book was completed 18 months ago, but maybe that just means it's time to get started again. Only this morning I found myself scouring YouTube for clips from Out of the Past a.k.a. Build My Gallows High (1947, dir. Jacques Tourneur)... And now I think of it, I can't believe nobody managed to smuggle a single mention of that film noir beauty into Ten Bad Dates.

Edinburgh Book Festival: Richard T Kelly & Nick Harkaway

I had a splendid time up in Edinburgh, thanks for asking. The Book Festival's set-up in Charlotte Square is really handsome and well-organised, the team first-rate, the hospitality lovely (streams of single malt...), and they draw great big crowds of curious book lovers.

I did my event with Nick Harkaway, author of The Gone-Away World, who is a top man and also blogs here. Festival director Catherine Lockerbie took the time to greet Nick and I before we went onstage, on a Saturday when a lot was going on for her, which was a touch of class. I was also pleased to make the acquaintance of Stuart Kelly, literary editor of Scotland on Sunday, who chairs various EIBF events and wrote very generously (not to say wittily) of Crusaders here.

On the Friday night I took in an LRB panel on The Novel wherein Andrew O'Hagan made some perfectly familiar and reasoned critical comments about our literary culture and its commercial obsessions, comments that were then reported Everywhere.

Archived Richard T Kelly film reviews for Sight & Sound

I first started reviewing movies for Sight & Sound magazine in the Autumn of 1998, just after my first book Alan Clarke was published. Actually I'd never much fancied the idea of reviewing: I just wanted to write a long piece about Warren Beatty's movie Bulworth which was due for release around then too. In order to do so at S&S (no other outlet would have me at that point) I had to first earn my spurs by synopsizing and commenting on a few other new releases that I was less keen on. So I did that, got to do my Bulworth piece (it was less than I hoped...), and carried on reviewing duties there for a further 9 years. As they say on CBBC's Me Too, where did the time go?
I see that some of those old reviews have been archived at the BFI site, and some of them still read ok. I include links as follows so you can decide for yourself. I speak of ones I did on the Brad Pitt version of The Iliad, Troy, Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday, Michael Winterbottom's In This World, Le Fils by the Dardenne brothers, and Like Father by Newcastle's Amber collective. Above all I'm glad I got to write about The Darkest Light by Simon Beaufoy and Bille Eltringham, which is an absolute treasure of a movie that ought to be far better known and celebrated.

Newcastle United: Full of Surprises

YouTube is a great platform for enthusiasms and I see many of my own reflected in this black-and-white compendium that was evidently put together after Sunday's massively unlikely point at Old Trafford. Keegan may be onto something if he signs more Argentines with hairdos akin to his own c.1978. That year, after all, was when a pretty good Argentina side won the World Cup.

Review of From A To X (Berger) in Financial Times

Yup, I filed this review of John Berger's new and Booker-longlisted novel for the Financial Times this weekend past. I had the pleasure of picking up a gratis copy of said FT on Saturday morning as I checked into the excellent Channings Hotel of Edinburgh. You have to respect an establishment for which the FT is the staple side-table giveaway. For some the FT will always be the paper that serves as the punchline to the immortal quip, 'What's pink and hard in the morning?' For others, me included, it is the only newsheet of this day and age where everything therein feels truly serious - even the bits that happen to be funny.

MP3 of Crusaders reading at Writloud 11.08.08

You can follow this link to hear me reading a selection of shortish bits from Crusaders at RADA this Monday night past. The MP3 starts with an explanatory preamble, but you can skip that if I hereby explain that what I read was 4 chunks from the 'back-story' of Stevie Coulson, concerning his bitter childhood and bullying stepfather, his discovery of 'the iron' that will make a behemoth of him, and the forging of his mettle on his first night as a professional doorman at a Gateshead disco-pub. There are 4 main characters in Crusaders but on the face of it if you had to say one was the protagonist, based upon word-count alone, it would likely be the Rev. John Gore. However an early review in the Tatler alerted me to a viewpoint held by a good few other readers subsequent, namely that in terms of the level of drama and the gravity of actions and consequences then Crusaders is really The Steve Coulson Story. So there you go. You write something and then a year later, if you're lucky, somebody tells you what you actually wrote.

September Esquire now on stands. Includes Adam Sandler.

Yes, that's James Corden on the cover of the new Esquire. Much other fine stuff within, de rigueur. My contribution is a review of You Don't Mess With The Zohan, in cinemas across the UK as of this Friday. Decide for yourself if that constitutes a correct use of available media space in which to comment on the state of the Seventh Art. But I am unashamedly a fan of Adam Sandler's, if not of all The Work in equal measure. Still, friends and acquaintances give me a lot of stick nonetheless. I don't think I can make the Case For Sandler any more extensively or straight-facedly than I have in this month's Esquire - my wife, in any event, has heard and watched enough, and that includes Mr Deeds and Reign Over Me. So this be my final word on the subject. For this year.

10 Bad Dates praised at PopMatters

This is a lovely US review of 10 Bad Dates With De Niro by Rodger Jacobs for PopMatters.com. The book is described as one "to obtain and keep on one’s nightstand or easy-to-reach shelves for years to come." Naturally I am also flattered to hear I've done anything 'masterfully', knowing all too well where my limitations lie. And I'm extra pleased that so many of the book's top-ranking contributors have had their work singled out, including Matt Thorne for his list of movie drunks, and in particular the selection of Sterling Hayden (shown here, through a glass darkly) as Roger Wade in Altman's The Long Goodbye - still the very model of a cult movie, one that rightly got several citations in the book, and a picture I could sit and watch straight through anytime.

Crusaders at Wigtown Festival 05.10.08

I'm in Edinburgh this weekend and looking forward to it greatly, but it's now online that come Sunday 5 October I will be back in Scotland, this time for the Wigtown Festival: an event set for 15:00 pm at County Buildings and costing£6.00. Programme details are here. I've heard fine things about Wigtown and look forward to the craic.

The Times extols Wigtown as "a small, friendly festival in Scotland’s official Book Town – which has about 20 bookshops... in rolling countryside by the sea, near salt marshes and Britain’s largest local RSPB bird reserve. It is also the only book festival with a local whisky distillery, Bladnoch." Trebles all round then.

Yes, Crusaders paperback review in the Sunday Times...

My publisher thoughtfully sent along the quotable bit from the Sunday Times, so I will make do with that, and leave the rest to fond imagination:
"Kelly succeeds in making the story of a troubled Anglican priest struggling with the problems of a sink estate the unlikely focus for an ambitious and absorbing state-of-the-nation novel."
That said, I do rather wonder who was the author of this short review... Perhaps a trip to the library after all, then.

My Breton Holiday, As Foreseen By Somebody Else

This lovely still of the beach at Val Andre taken from Flickr represents the composite dream/reverie version of how me and my family spent the last week... My Cybershot camera is broken at the moment, so how nice that the web allows one to whistle up instant holiday snaps, however unpeopled! But in fairness ours did involve a good deal of sand-castles and ice-creams, so the spirit is there.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, little did I know how bloody awful things were getting while I was filling those buckets with sand...

Crusaders paperback reviews in the Guardian, Telegraph... and Sunday Times?

I was on holiday in France all of last week but heard from one or two kind friends that the Sunday Times of August 3 wrote kindly of Crusaders in their paperback round-ups. It's not online so I'll have to go a-hunting in the library, most like... Today, though, I'm very pleased to see that the Guardian and the Sunday Telegraph (scroll down) have also printed positive Crusaders reviews. In one of those funny-peculiar bits of timing, the Saturday Telegraph ran a negative write-up yesterday, one that slightly suspiciously echoed one or two others from the past by complaining of one noun in particular, i.e. my attributing to Steve Coulson a feeling of 'tristesse'. But then you will see this sort of thing from a certain caste of English book reviewer: the certainty that proletarian characters in books (and life?) can't possibly have complex or profound emotions. Which is interesting stuff, in its own way...

This Is My Brain. But Which Is My Good Side?

The week before last I had the intriguing experience of calling on a neuroscientist at her Bloomsbury laboratory, and having my brain scanned by an fMRI machine, the results of which you may see herewith.
Yes, just like in the movies, I removed all metal about my person, including my wedding ring, lay on a gurney to which I was then strapped, and was then rolled slowly by remote control into a dark and confined tubular space that consumed me as far as my chest. Then, to muted sounds rather like the pulse of monotonous machine-made 'dance' music, my brain was laboriously imaged by magnetic resonance. It was a fairly peaceful 12-minute experience, as pensive a time as I've been allowed in recent months... Admittedly my thoughts turned once or twice to William Hurt as Eddie Jessup in the movie Altered States but it was all over much quicker, and I didn't regress to a primordial state.
So what is there to be said of my brain, relatively speaking? Hardly anything. I'm told it's a fairly normal boring brain, albeit with less space in the skull cavity than a man younger than I would have - apparently that's another aspect of ageing that can't be avoided, but can also prove useful in the event of serious head injury...
Still, all in all an interesting evening's pastime, free of charge.