Crusaders review on Bookgeeks: New URL

Purely for the purpose of one's private web archiving.

http://www.bookgeeks.co.uk/2008/10/10/simon-as-review-crusaders-by-richard-t-kelly/

Mumbai: Patrick Cockburn's not soft on Pakistan

Looking over the early analysis of the Mumbai atrocity I might have been overly keen to hear something original, in the hope that it would prove more discerning. But in today's Independent the very reputable Patrick Cockburn weighs in to argue that the truth, banal and horrible, is that Pakistan is to blame, and that the Western powers and media are deliberately "downplaying foreign involvement. Indian allegations about "external linkages" of the terrorists is wearily reported as an unfortunate resumption of Pakistani-Indian finger pointing."

Backing Cockburn's contention, Sky continues to report that 'a number of Indian officials' place the blame on Lashkar-e-Taiba. Cockburn raises the spectre of Bush's long and forlorn courtship of Musharraf, and presumably believes the West is still trying to make an ally of a scorpion. He goes on to take issue with what we might call the Tariq Ali position of a few days ago: "… supposed experts now emphasise the alienation of Indian Muslims and suggesting that the origin of the terrorist assault on Mumbai is home grown, the fruit of the radicalisation of Indian Muslims by systematic discrimination against them by the Indian state."
He concludes: "…It is self-defeating hypocrisy for the West to lecture the Indian government now about not over-reacting and not automatically blaming the Pakistani government or some part of its security apparatus for Mumbai… It may be that the monster the ISI created is no long under its control, but it is ultimately responsible for what has happened."

I wonder if Cockburn thinks there is any negotiating with Pakistan on these matters - by India or Western powers? He suggests a big headache is on its way for President Obama. But we already know from the campaign how Obama feels about Pakistan's terror-by-proxy, don't we?

Crusaders noted in the Independent's choice of 2008 fiction

The Independent was very good to my debut novel on more than one occasion in 2008, and literary editor Boyd Tonkin's generous mention in the paper's year-end round-up gives me a spot in the midst of more distinguished company:

"In Crusaders (Faber, £8.99), Richard T Kelly used Newcastle politics on the eve of the New Labour landslide as the action and ideas-packed stage for a chronicle of change."

Mumbai: another day for the jackals

The ever more resonant image of India as a 21st century superpower has also had its attendant shadows and ghosts: such as the off-putting strangeness of India's systems of class, caste and religion, and the grim disparities of wealth so evident in Mumbai (which provide the premise and backdrop to the new hit movie Slumdog Millionaire.) Moreover, BBC Newsnight reported tonight that India has been taking its share of the pain of the global economic crisis – the stock market 50% down on the year, the rupee down 20%, £13 billion worth of investment pulled out - even before yesterday’s atrocity, and the loathsome CCTV pictures from Mumbai of those ghouls in sweatshirts and jeans, their backpacks heaving with grenades and spare magazines for the AK-47, stalking the softest of soft targets in hotels and train stations.
If, as they liked to say in the 1970s, 'political terror' is a form of 'communication', what are these ratbags trying to tell us? The rumoured hunting down of British and American passport-holders proposes one horrible interpretation – that these were Islamist jackals, unleashed from Pakistan or Kashmir or recruited by al-Qaeda, taking their glorious stand against the glaring evils of modernity and pluralist poly-ethnic democracy.
Tariq Ali, characteristically, and in Counterpunch, has countered the rush to this judgement: ‘The Lashkar-e-Taiba, not usually shy of claiming its hits, has strongly denied any involvement with the Mumbai attacks.’ Ali also sets out a list of grievances among Indian Muslims – ‘the 2002 anti-Muslim pogrom in shining Gujarat… supported by the Chief Minister of the State and the local state apparatuses’ and ‘the continuing sore of Kashmir.’ In short, Ali is warning India to get ready for the national angst of learning that these were homegrown murdering scum.
Shuja Nawaz draws a similar conclusion in the Huffington Post: ‘Chances are that this is a homegrown outfit’, and that they are "communicating" on behalf of ‘the Muslims of India, who despite being close to 150 million strong have a disproportionately tiny share of India's burgeoning wealth.’ But the real message Nawaz believes is being sent out is one designed to throttle some promising political progress, by the arousal of hatred: ‘This incident may spell danger for India-Pakistan relations at a time when a much-needed thaw seems to be emerging… Just one day before the attack, at a meeting in Islamabad of the Home Secretaries of India and Pakistan, an agreement was reached on a wide range of measures aimed at combating terrorism.’
Here's to that spirit and those measures, then, and let's be having them.

Recession: Hitting You Where You Live

The excellent nufc.com today reports that Newcastle will be passing on the imminent reduction in the VAT rate to supporters buying match tickets. Cheapest adult admission now £29 - alright, it's not back to what your Da used to pay, but it's summat. Meanwhile, my bittersweet experience of buying the Guns n' Roses album at Woolies on Monday, reported at extravagant length below, has got a bit more bitter, with Woolworths today entering administration - presumably the end for 100s of stores and 1000s of jobs. My local store is 50 yards away, has been a huge boon for me and my family, and I'm really sad about what I fear will be its fate.

Chinese Democracy: one more for the old record collection, then

I went into a record shop today and bought a newly released record: a treat I used to give myself about three or four times a week back in my adolescence, and which I now do roughly once a year. To be strictly accurate, I went into Woolworth's (still there, at time of writing...) and bought a compact disc - that increasingly forlorn and discredited format that even in 1987 was being slated as 'the rich man's eight-track tape.'

Given this was my once-a-year musical treat, and the 'record' in question a much-anticipated collection by a bestselling artist, I was rather hoping to pluck a gleaming shrink-wrapped CD from some conspicuous cardboard tower right at front of store, then join a lively queue at the counter while the instore stereo blared out the opening track... But, no, I had to really search to find a display copy of Chinese Democracy in the humdrum racks of the CD section, a long way behind the top sellers from Pink and Dido, and the new one from the girl who won Strictly Come Dancing last year. Still, the 50-ish lady at the counter gave me a friendly smile: 'Guns and Roses', she murmured uncomprehendingly as she went to exchange my dummy case for the real goods.

Funnily enough, if I'd been listening to the Today programme this morning (though frankly I'd rather give myself an Axl-esque tattoo with a razor blade) I could have heard a discussion of the merits of said record by two 'rock critics' (scroll down) - no doubt some light sandwich filler between keen anticipation of the PBR (see entries passim).

Instead, when the time permitted, I had a look round the web and found quite a few droll and touching testimonies from American rock writers/fans who had wistful experiences much like my own Woolies moment at branches of the US retailer Best Buy, where Chinese Democracy went on sale exclusively on Sunday. Best Buy doesn't go in for 'midnight madness', so no excited queues there either... I've lost track of the funniest bit of writing I read in that vein, but this MTV report captures the general mood.

It should be said that Chuck Klosterman's review for The Onion has done the hard thinking for all of us oldsters on the preceding issue: "Chinese Democracy is (pretty much) the last Old Media album... the last album that will be marketed as a collection of autonomous-but-connected songs, the last album that will be absorbed as a static manifestation of who the band supposedly is, and the last album that will matter more as a physical object than as an Internet sound file. This is the end of that."

How many more trips to Woolies for this old stager then? In the meantime, I like my new record a great deal and look forward to that all-important second play. Today I think the track I liked best was 'Better'.

Pre-Budget Report: Mark the Sequel

How do you like that fine old Tory campaigning poster (left) c. 1929?

Meanwhile, curious... Looking around the news sites this evening I learn that the BBC's online 'live text' coverage of the PBR was punctuated by citations of assorted bloggers, and that at 15:26 they edited together (rather sloppily) a chunk from my earlier post of today and stuck it up, amid comments from MPs and more regular/zealous political bloggers.
It's curious, too, to see the way this BBC coverage has since been combed by blogosphere invigilators, conspicuously Conservative (and calling their soul their own, one hopes) - one of whom I take to be the Mike Rouse who added a comment to that earlier post of mine, asserting that Cameron's 'bashing' in the polls was actually no such thing. It just goes to show that Cameron's Tories really boss the web these days when it comes to its coverage of politics.

I daresay it also goes to show why I'm not to be counted as a regular/zealous political blogger in the modern-day manner: namely, I don't belong to any party and I don't look at polls every day. I understand the latest from ICM has the Tories back up to 11 points in front? Over the last week I saw other polls had them variously in front by 3 or 5. But back at the start of October, weren't there Tory leads of 19 or 20?

Yeah, so I think I'll stand by my story - Cameron's lead has, on the whole, taken a bit of a bashing in the last eight weeks, so disturbing his composure somewhat, and hastened the striking of a few postures that he surely wouldn't have struck if matters had kept proceeding effortlessly in his favour post-Conference.

Meanwhile, the FT's sad verdict on the day's Big Question: "The route back to financial sustainability was unconvincing – both as individual measures and taken as a whole."

The FT also offers some succour for all those Tory watchmen who fear the slightest misunderstanding of their Party's no-doubt coherent, principled and undyingly popular (cf. ICM) stand in opposition to that shower of Scots taxers-and-spenders in government: "It is clear that the current strangeness in British politics of Labour proposing tax cuts while the Tories oppose them will be short-lived. The battle lines for the next election will again see Labour accused of increasing taxes to pay for its profligacy, despite the restraint implied in yesterday’s figures, while the Conservatives will face charges of slashing public services."

There you go then - business as usual. Now I'm just going to write a quick something about Guns n' Roses, which - with a bit of luck - might even provoke some Heavy Metal blogger/master of blogs out there to stick up a Comment in rebuttal, insisting that the best track on the album is actually 'Shackler's Revenge'...

Hey Hey, it’s Pre-Budget Report Day!

I have a distinctive recollection of what I felt, sitting in the big auditorium at last month’s Tory Conference, as George Osborne made that indigestive ‘grave’ face of his and asserted that Cameron’s (and his) Tory Party was committed to the principle of ‘sound money.’ I was thinking this was a very old-fashioned tune for a moderniser to be singing, but that presumably its cadences would delight the Tory faithful, and also play well on the news during a week when money, like many other allegedly solid objects, looked to be melting into air.
This week that tune is sounding creakier still, and yet at the same time no more ancient than the regime of John Major, when any weakness in sterling was held to be a mortal sin and a national disgrace. Today the present weakness of sterling is generally reckoned to be a necessary evil, per the Bank of England’s swingeing rate cuts. A weak pound offers a road to salvation. The Tories as a party seem to find this proposition terminally indigestible.
That Conference week, of course, was the last encouraging one (to date) that the Tories have enjoyed this Autumn, and even that was a rather nervy and rain-soaked affair that got pushed off the front pages by other Events. Today, incredibly, finds Brown and Darling riding a (shaky, treacherous) wave of momentum. ‘It is all very odd’, says today’s FT leader. ‘Here is a Labour government wanting to cut taxes, and a Conservative opposition braying nay… The government is taking a gamble but, on the face of it, it looks like the Tory gambit is riskier.’
I don’t believe Cameron believed any of this before his poll lead took a bashing… but it seems he’s now prepared to argue only for ‘fully funded’ tax cuts. Who can afford to wait around for that day that never comes? Meanwhile the Darling/Brown prescription seems to be a short, sharp fiscal stimulus to boost consumption (a cut in VAT, more income tax ‘allowance’ for the lower paid.) The sceptics will naturally ask what provisions this newly whizkid-like PM and Chancellor are making for our pathway back to fiscal prudence. As the Sun and many others are warning today, we the people are going to pay for all of this, fairly soon too. It’s all a bit too dramatic, really; a good job that it’s only our lives and livelihoods that are at risk here.

Paddy Considine: Winshill's Finest

Effin' top-of-the-range man, that Paddy Considine. I really, really enjoyed the onstage interview I did with him at the Encounters Festival in Bristol on Friday night - enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I rather messed up the running time of the evening by letting the conversation gan on a bit too long in-between the copious clips. But I don't think anybody really minded: you can get a drink in Bristol until quite late, after all.
Perhaps my only real infringement was to suggest to the audience near the end that, in light of the late finish, we needn't bother to look at a prepared clip of Paddy's work in Hot Fuzz... Well, they shouted that suggestion right down, so up went the clip and they laughed like gurgling drains all the way through it, followed by a huge ovation. There's a lesson for me, then: Never underestimate the size of the Pegg/Frost/Wright cult.
Paddy's own cult, of which I suppose I'm a keen member now, is pretty considerable too - lots of very young mad-keen people in the audience, all wanting autographs and arm-round-the-shoulder photos at the end, which is great, and Paddy was extremely gracious on that score. He was already up in the pantheon for me, having taken the time over dinner to say that he'd read my book on Alan Clarke a couple of times. That was exactly the purpose it was intended for.

Chelsea 0 Newcastle 0: Cakes all round!

The Telegraph subs are rather looking at matters through blue goggles to be titling their match report "Newcastle United cause Chelsea to lose two points with spoiling tactics", but then 'Paddy' Barclay's actual write-up is an even-handed affair that probably sums up what Toon fans will have taken from the game by way of encouragement. I can't agree with Barclay that "Newcastle’s 10th point in eight matches" constitutes grounds to say that "the threat of relegation, though still present, has receded." Stoke and Bolton won yesterday, Fulham drew with Liverpool. So, a nice and welcome point for NUFC then, but sadly worth no more than the one taken at home against Wigan, and it'll be fast forgotten should we get turned over at the Burra next weekend.

But this is what I like, as noted by Barclay: "What a player (Jose) Bosingwa is; with (Habib) Beye on the other side, it was arguable that we were watching the top two right-backs in the country. Beye’s display was described as ‘’magnificent’’ by Kinnear, who also lauded the centre-backs Sebastien Bassong (Taylor’s replacement) and Fabricio Coloccini."

Could this be the makings of a proper solid NUFC back-four? I've also liked Jose Enrique on the left, at times... though some say he's not got the grit for England's first division. But Bassong is looking pretty good, and Coloccini's really good games make you forget his occasional lapses. As for the man known as 'Whitley' Beye, it was my dream that he would boss it for the Toon as he used to do for Marseilles, and maybe now the hour hath come.

Penn biog sighted/cited in San Francisco

A short piece on Sean in relation to Milk appeared in the San Fran Chronicle this weekend, by one Steven Winn, and it made nice reference to my authorised biography of SJP, the US publication of which passed away like breath off a razor-blade back in 2005. "I guess if there's any responsibility that anybody in film or any of the arts has," Penn told Kelly, "it's being aware of the times you live in and making things that address them, whether you're making a statement or just shining a light on it. Or questioning it for yourself." I did always rather hope that the book would serve as a database for journalists looking to profile Sean without the usual cliches and hearsays and inconsistencies - though inevitably a lot of 'entertainment journalists' would rather persist with that mouldy old stuff than to try getting at the truth.
Steven Winn also quotes the following: "Sean has no limitations as an actor," Jack Nicholson once said of his friend and colleague (they worked together on the 2001 film "The Pledge"). "I always say, 'Really good actors, if the time came, they could play their own grandmother.' And Sean's one of those."" Were I a pedantic sort of a sod I would point out that in fact Nicholson said that to me, and it's just one of many such jewels of insight contained in Sean Penn: His Life and Times, blah blah, etc...

Paddy Considine, Watershed (Bristol), Nov 21: Last Call

Gosh, I certainly hope I get on with him a bit better than this...
Oh it's only a movie, Ingrid...

Carbon/Silicon: "The News" (Caroline Records)

I was just a shade too young to have an opinion on The Clash in their active heyday, though I was just in time for the hit-laden Combat Rock (1982). Subsequently a good friend of mine who’d actually spent a lot of time On the Road with the Boys c. 1977 (kipping on the floors of their hotel rooms with a zillion other fans etc) always tried to urge the impress of their mythic status on me. I liked a good few Clash tunes, and was impressed by the way Strummer/Jones/Simonon looked when photographed slouching around in alleyways, but I remained largely agnostic on the bigger issue.
Still, by 1985, having got my basic diploma in Clash Studies, I was sufficiently interested in hip-hop, sampling, and quotable cult movies to be quite excited by the idea of the first album by Mick Jones’ successor outfit, Big Audio Dynamite. Aforementioned Clash-Fan-Mate swiftly declared it piss-poor, and indeed I could see it was patchy: one of those 8-track LPs with 4 or 5 duff ones. But like a lot of people (not all of them into Nic Roeg or Sergio Leone) I was keen on ‘E=MC2’ and ‘Medicine Show’ , and those tunes still sound dandy to me today.
Twice I saw B.A.D. play live in Belfast – the first time in 1986 supported by Schooly D, when they encored with Prince’s ‘1999’. Jones always seemed to need his B.A.D. baseball hat so as to cover his male pattern baldness, but the band made a good lively noise. It was the spirit of the age: white ex-punks embracing DIY urban dance music, the new demotic of beats and rhymes.
That same 1986, however, I couldn’t see anything appealing about Sigue Sigue Sputnik, a painfully strained effort at a second wind by Generation X guitarist Tony James. Fair enough, he conned some big wedge of a deal out of EMI, and got himself and his band tarted up like pineapple-head Bladerunner extras, but the music sounded like it was programmed on and played out of an Atari game system, and the singer was a terrible po-faced ponce who made Mick Jones's strangled-cat vocal stylings sound like Scott Walker.
Anyhow, time goes by. I wasn’t paying attention, but recently I learned that Mick and Tony have got another combo together and are doing it all by download, bless 'em. Thankfully (1) they’ve both quit trying to wear street fashion, and look more like a pair of 50-year-olds suited and booted for a night out down the Dog ‘n’ Duck. Thankfully (2) Carbon/Silicon sound more like B.A.D. than Sigue Sigue Sputnik, and the lyrics of ‘The News’ also exhibit the same kind of cheerful lefty/party spirit that led Jones to title B.A.D.’s second album Number 10 Upping Street.

Haringey: what is to be done

Steve Richards’ piece in the Independent on the dismal PMQs that followed this week’s dreadful news from Haringey at least raised one or two interesting points about politics - which are worth thinking about insofar as they propose some scope for useful endeavour, whereas thinking too much about the depravity of troglodytic child-killers can leave you in misery about more or less everything. Anyhow, those comments by Richards:
1. ‘Even those that despair the two parties are very similar must accept they have a choice between two incomparably different leaders who loathe each other.’
2. ‘The instant reaction from political bloggers and from parts of the BBC was that Brown had shown a tin ear in relation to the tragedy… The influence of some Conservative bloggers on the tactics of the Tory leadership is particularly interesting, worthy of a longer study.’
3. ‘The political fashion is for localism, especially in the Conservative Party. Central government should keep out of local matters even if things go wrong! ... [Here] Cameron leapt in and demanded that the government acted. Within hours the government did act.’

Newcastle United: No use taking 1 from a 6-pointer...

It was unglamorous Wigan Athletic who burst the brief bubble of Graeme Souness's tenure at St James's Park, beating us in both league and league cup at their JJB stadium during 2004-05, and proving that the long tail-off of Bobby Robson's final season was about far more than Bobby's declining energies. Such quality players as we had didn't perform when they had to; the poor ones (including one Titus Bramble) were too numerous as well as generally not up to it; and the truculent, tactically backward Souness wouldn't be digging us out of that hole. All of this, Wigan served to made clear: NUFC were back firmly among the mediocre, and looking behind them nervously.
Still, Souness didn't take us down, and nor did Glenn Roeder. Allardyce and Keegan didn't last as long as a full season. We'd never have guessed at that succession back in 2004-05, much less that Joe Kinnear would be in charge at the point this evening when we simply have to be a bookmaker's favourite to go down as one of three set for the old League Division Two come 2009-2010.
And what was the crowning misery of today's 2-2 draw with Wigan at SJP? I refer you to what I wrote back on August 30 after Arsenal (0-3 away), what now seems like halcyon days: 'That's the Toon for you, forever freely handing out good vibes to opposing teams and their fans - e.g. your ropiest striker who hasn't scored in two-dozen starts is nailed on for a brace against Newcastle, as is that hamstrung ex-NUFC player you have on your books...'
Titus Bramble, though? Last minute equaliser? Titus effing Bramble? This can only be the Devil's work. I see His dreadful handiwork all over it.

UK Recession: Escape Routes Sealed

My paper of choice, the Financial Times, has undertaken a region-by-region prognosis of how old England is faring or liable to fare in this recession of ours. By the by, it serves to remind one of what we actually do for our livings in this country now – or rather, what we soon might not be doing.
This week, 1.82 million British people are officially unemployed. I’m old enough to remember two lurches past the 3 million mark, in 1981 and 1991. But it’s no time for complacency. One David Frost from the Chamber of Commerce recalls what the devastation of the early 1980s claimed on a more or less weekly basis (“It was 4,000 jobs here, 5,000 there”): this because those losses were in manufacturing, where there was so much to be lost. As the Tory economist Ruth Lea said elsewhere today, we don’t do so much of that anymore. The impact this time will be more – how shall I say it? – generously spread around the occupations. Still, you have to worry in particular about the car-makers. As of today even Germany is in recession, even though most people like a Mercedes when they see it. So one can foresee the English making do with whatever is their current ride for a while longer, maybe just giving the old banger a slightly more regular lather-and-vacuum.
London, where I live, ‘has the grimmest prospects of all’ based on its ‘heavy exposure to financial services and to the troubled property market.’ And without a regular diet of property transactions, what do accountants and lawyers and bankers do for their gravy? Clearly London bankers have already stopped buying great swathes of all that flashy shit that they base their lives around, with the inevitable knock-on effect. Meanwhile, Londoners are feeling less enthused – is that possible? – about the 2012 Olympics.
What of the two regions I know best: the North East of England and Northern Ireland? Both essentially sustained by the public sector, as it happens, ‘which gives them a degree of insulation from the turmoil’ according to Alan Wilson, senior man at the Oxford Economics consultancy. ‘That protection may, however, be short-term, as pressure on public spending grows...’ And a lot of ticky-tacky ‘luxury waterside’ box-flats in Newcastle and in Belfast are going to stay eerily empty for a good while longer.

The Good Vibration: Now Postponed...

... contra to yesterday's posting, as I've just been telt. So ye's'll need to find summat else cultural to dee in Newcastle come November 27. Unavoidable circumstances, apparently, but happily the whole shebang and the same billing will all just move to a date TBC in the new year. Which is great.
In the meantime, for those seeking alternative cultural entertainment of a North Eastern variety, on that evening or indeed any other, may I recommend the recorded output of Mr Robert Thompson, known in certain quarters as The Little Waster, no less?

Newcastle, City of Culture: The Good Vibration / The Northern Lights Film Festival

When Mike Hodges made Get Carter in 1971, he could have been reasonably sure the watching world would believe that the 'cultural offer' of Newcastle upon Tyne extended not much further than the Pelaw Hussars Juvenile Jazz Band. Of course, even then, NE1 had Morden Tower, the Hatton Gallery, Alan Plater, Sid Chaplin, Lindisfarne, and plenty more besides - though Sting still hadn't quite got himself going, career-wise, and the Sage and Baltic were not quite conceivable.
But, any road... a bit like that Jack Carter (only in fondness, mind you - nowt bitter), I've got a spot or two of business in Newcastle over the next couple of weeks: business that will see us on the train from King's Cross to Central Station and back more than once. (Used to be my very favourite journey, that, until National Express succeeded in making me miss Great North Eastern Railways... Still, unlike Carter, I trust at least that I'll make it back hyem okay.)
Them spots of business, then: I'm reading, (from wuh buke, Crusaders, y'knaa) - and alongside the Burra's Richard Milward and Hartlepool's Michael Smith - at a charitable music/books event called The Good Vibration on Thursday November 27 (large-file PDF flyer here); these literary bits being scheduled between performances by various popular beat combos. A new challenge for me, this - quite a thrill, and I hope I can manage to charm the popular-music-loving crowd without getting plastic bottles of urine tossed at wor head, or otherwise going down about as well as old man Lawrence Ferlinghetti at The Last Waltz.
And then on Saturday December 6 I'm doing a bit for the Northern Lights Film Festival, which I've been pleased to use and endorse since its founding in 2003. In that case I'll be chairing a panel called Shock Horror: How to make a low-budget genre film (3.30 – 4.30pm, Tyneside Cinema), the key text under discussion being the movie Mum & Dad, represented by Steven Sheil and Lisa Trnovski, its director and producer.
All welcome, as they say.

Harvey Milk, Sean Penn, politics and good practice

This blog has an unalloyed positive view of the life and works of Sean Justin Penn, based on wisdom dearly bought. So there’s not much point in my discussing the quality of performance, say, in Gus Van Sant’s new bio-pic of the slain San Francisco gay activist/politician Harvey Milk, which I saw last week, and in which SJP plays the lead. I would say, though, that you learn a lot about Harvey Milk and about San Francisco, and Milk is also very interesting about politics in general, and the issue of what political power could do for homosexuals in particular.

Milk was a true grassroots pol: he helped make the Castro ‘the Castro’, and made the pink pound work for the gay community there and not for anti-gay business. He was militant about the issue of being unabashedly ‘out’. Once Milk had consolidated San Francisco’s gay vote and got himself elected supervisor, the city mayor Moscone really needed him, and he could then make things happen. But he also positioned the gay movement as part of a broader progressive cause.

He was nice to lesbians. He was a passionate but unfussy and inclusive speaker. He had a good eye for a public interest photo-op, evinced by an unlikely campaign against dogs fouling pavements (which would get him elected in London too). And he got the Teamsters behind him – this stunned me, actually – by aiding a boycott of the non-union Coors beer company, and persuaded Coors to hire gay truckers in return. This is what you might call audaciously hopeful stuff. So you can see the usefulness of this movie getting itself released this month…

December Esquire on sale. Includes David Peace, Gordon Burn, Lewis Hamilton, your humble servant

This month's Esquire is now available, and includes the long interview that I did earlier this year with David Peace and Gordon Burn, to which I have alluded previously, and in which I ask these two great English writers whether or not they believe in evil. (Can you anticipate what were their - markedly different - responses?) Elsewhere, my monthly film column is about La Silence de Lorna by the Dardenne brothers, Julia by Erick Zonca, and the previously mentioned Better Things by Duane Hopkins - three pictures that are worth anyone's time.