David Miliband: Not what you'd call an operator

Good grief… The ill tidings came by Twitter this afternoon: “Good news re Dianne. Thanks to my supporters who helped put her on ballot. Important day for debate and diversity in party.”

This blog wants David Miliband to win the Labour leadership contest, and hopes DM wants DM to win it too, because one could be forgiven for doubting as much, given his weird keenness to force an additional opponent onto the ballot paper.

DM’s nominating of Diane Abbott and urging of some of his own followers to do likewise seems to me a weirdly unimpressive stroke. If DM really believed Abbott had a deserved claim to lead the Party then I expect many supporters of his might reconsider their view of his own worthiness for the job. If DM believes Abbott will hive off first-preference votes from his brother and from Ed Balls, and/or that Abbott’s fan club will suddenly look on him favourably as a second choice then I wish him all the best with that manoeuvre, but find it somehow off-putting. And if DM believes that a female and/or non-white candidate is essential in any contest of this sort then I reckon he’s listening to the wrong sort of sanctimony, i.e. that of Labour NEC chair Ann Black (“If the choice is between three or four white male ex-ministers in their 40s, however able, it will be seen as lacking the full range of diversity which Labour seeks to reflect.”)
One wants Labour’s genuine diversity to be apparent, sure, but a leadership contest is not meant to be proportionally representative - leadership skills aren't distributed that way, and leaders aren't people who need a leg-up or a fix to get on the playing field. Your Party leader must emerge as someone who could impress the country at large as a potential Prime Minister, whether the job started tomorrow or in 2015. But then my troops may be overcommitted on this score, so to speak, as someone who admired David Miliband’s performance as Foreign Secretary, and who didn’t vote for Diane Abbot back in 1997 when she was my local MP. (She didn't seem to me the most socialistic candidate, only the most otiose.)

The fact that the Tories are loving this nonsense doesn’t stop them from making worthwhile points, the Spectator’s James Forsyth noting that Abbott ‘will spend the contest making jokes at the expense of the four white male Oxbridge special advisers turned politicians she is running against.’ That would be fine if we could trust that a commensurate number of gags will be had at Abbott’s expense – her career has been risible in some notable ways – and yet somehow I doubt any of them will have the nerve, stifled both by the rules of the game that allowed Abbott in and the fear of being seen to beat up on the media-friendly underdog.
Still, any ‘I Agree with Diane’ tendencies will, I hope, be resisted. For one thing, you will never be sure if Diane Abbott means what she says: the evidence to date is not good, but one also hopes that conclusive proof need never be furnished. For the meantime, though, I second Hopi Sen’s query about whether or not ‘ the chance to look noble on Twitter was really worth it.’

Cosmopolis (UEA): In academe's grey groves...

Good sport at the UEA Cosmopolis events last Saturday. I enjoyed my platform on fiction and politics with the eminent Giles Foden, chaired with some panache by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, author of What If Latin America Ruled the World? Giles said some especially intriguing things about thinking his way into Idi Amin's head for The Last King of Scotland. At Giles' prompting Oscar tasked both Giles and I to propose how we might fictionalise a) the Israeli Gaza flotilla debacle, and b) the BP oil-spill debacle. (My responses were, a) in the voice of a ghost, or else an IDF soldier slipping down a rope, and b) in the voice of a seagull...) Otherwise, I enjoyed expounding as always, on such beloved subjects as Mailer (his 'left conservatism'), George Steiner (poetry after Auschwitz, and Hitler depicted in his Portage to San Christobal of A.H.), and Brecht (the idea of pageant as 'illuminated history', offering a take on 'the truth behind it all.')
I also ended up chairing a fun session with the film/TV producer Judy Counihan, on the subject of how to pitch one's film script/idea to market, a concern on which I personally have begun to feel the pressing need for advice from someone of Judy's calibre...
Norwich itself struck me as a nice spot on my first visit. UEA is a campus college, and funnily enough I'd never been to a real campus before. But it was all very familiar. As the literary agent and novelist Derek Johns remarked to me and others in surveying its brute-concrete/dry-grassland aspect - 'Y'know, James Lasdun's dad did all of this...'

Bookhugger column #3: Fit to Wear the Shirt

Newly posted on Bookhugger, with the World Cup coming down the pipe at us, this month's literary musing of mine is on the very serious matter of books about football. Let me say straight up, there are too bloody many of them, and most of them are bloody rubbish. But the good ones are really, really good. In the piece I reiterate my admiration for the gifts of such artists as Gordon Burn, Ian Hamilton, Richard Williams, Leopoldo Luque, Kenny Dalglish and Zinedine Zidane; and I rehash my by-now-even-to-me-tiresome dislike of the English national team - an antipathy that would be dissolved instantly (if but temporarily) were Fabio Capello sufficiently distracted to pick Bensham's Andy Carroll up front and put Steve Harper from Easington in nets.

Dennis Hopper 1936-2010

Adios then, Dennis. Back when I heard the sad news of his terminal illness I had already written what was, I suppose, a sort of obituary. Tonight, learning he was gone, just a couple of other things occurred to me. One is a funny opinion given me once by Los Angeles policeman Dennis Fanning, who was technical advisor to Hopper on his LA gang movie Colors:

"I didn’t think I was going to get along with Hopper. I figured Hop’s a drunk, a druggie, a sixties radical – all that shit... Well, I got along ****ing famously with Dennis. Because we had the same stories, we just came from different sides of the fence. But we played in the same ballpark - dopers, cops, crooks - we play the same game. It’s the ****ing civilians who are outside the arena..."

Quite. And then Hopper in his own words, after I asked him once about whether he felt an artist was in some sense obliged to spend time on the dark side of life, or of their own self. His reply:

"Well, I think anybody who looks at our society and decides they want to be an artist, they have to go down that path - I think. I don’t see another path. I’m sure there are others. But if you start with Edgar Allan Poe and go to Norman Mailer, or you start with Vincent Van Gogh and you go through Jackson Pollock, or you start with Dylan Thomas and you end up with Bob Dylan – it seems that the dark journey is for the young, and in some way they feel they have to purge themselves, like the artists of the generations before purged themselves. Looking for that perfect yellow… I always thought Van Gogh was too drunk to find the yellow. Couldn’t even find the tube, man. [Whereupon Hopper laughed his famous laugh.] Maybe he was mixing the yellow with absinthe..."

In short, life was too short to be a civilian... Hopper wound up wearing v-necks and playing a fair bit of golf, sure, but his 'dark journey' was longer and stranger and more venturesome than most would dare undertake, and so it was a good thing he came back. He walks on somewhere still, I hope...

The photo above is, of course, by Warhol.

The Strangely Familiar Case of David Laws

I’m not one of those Labour voters sitting about waiting for this Government to collapse under the weight of its own hyperbole and sanctimony, bearing down as these must on the jerry-built foundations of the Coalition. We are in a deep economic morass, and 'strong and stable' governance is indeed needed, by whatever constitutional means and political talents can be found. David Laws was, evidently, more than competent for a posting as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, but it’s now clear that circumstances should never have conspired in his favour, and for reasons further to those that first seemed obvious (i.e. those arising from the outlandish notion of Liberal Democrats in government.) No, what’s got Laws – as he must have expected, right up to his recent ramrod posturing for cameras and at the despatch box – is that paying out of public money in rent to a long-time companion, albeit in a relationship that Laws would otherwise have denied to the world if pressed to, in the strange conviction that this was his entitlement.
I’ve never understood why those 'Orange Book' Lib Dems didn’t just flounce off and sign up to the Tories, of whom they were natural kinsmen. The Coalition showed me, at least, that the ‘National Interest’ offered them a convenient cover to make that furtive dash across the floor. Laws, of course, was among the fleetest of foot in that respect. Now we learn that Section 28 was always a huge barrier for him in reconciling to the Tories. Well, not so big, as it turned out.
I expect Laws will get another ministerial job in time, if he wants it – that’s the usual way. Otherwise he could go back to the City, from whence he came. No-one ever asked him to serve the public weal, and had he applied for the job then most of us would have said ‘Obviously, first up, don’t join the Liberal Democrats.’
There seems to be a lot of sympathy about for the 44-year-old Laws’ sad, self-inhibiting refusal to let his family know about his sexuality; in any event, since everyone else in his life and around Westminster seem to have known Laws was gay he will, one trusts, feel better soon, not having to lie and fiddle around this key part of his identity. And maybe the risible Nick Clegg will now keep his pompous mouth shut for a while about the 'New Politics' (?!), and the Liberal Democrats’ crusading embodiment of same. Tonight that fundamentally white, well-heeled, curiously self-repressive shower of a party look older than ever, as if it were 1963...

Bravo, Danielle Hope

It's rare enough on these TV 'talent' shows that the most interesting and authentically promising talent should make it through to the final rounds, much less be successful in the final reckoning - hence three cheers for Danielle Hope.

Esquire (June 2010) and the Bill Hicks story...

The June 2010 'Sports' issue of Esquire has been on stands a fortnight, and includes my penultimate film column for the mag, a write-up of the new documentary American: The Bill Hicks Story. I'm a big fan of Hicks, honest Injun - yet it occurs to me that anyone reading the Esquire piece might not believe it. I daresay I sound a bit iffy, a bit niggly. In part that's what an 800-word ceiling does to you: the nuance is sometimes lost, other times a great swathe of what you might really want to say simply doesn't fit. But on reflection I think I spent too many of those 800 words having a mild and pointless dig at the cult of Hicks. I do think his work has inspired too many glowing estate-approved documentary products, too many bad rock songs, too many slackly-assembled biographies. And he is one of those comics who are so great that they can leave their admirers parroting the material like scripture... But, whoah, whoah, what am I saying? There I go again... The main fact is, Hicks was a genius comic, and he died too soon - they shouldn't die, people like that. End of story.
David Letterman is quite a funny man too, if a rum cove at times, and he made himself something of a villain in the Hicks legend, by cutting (on grounds of 'taste' and network sensitivities) what would have been Hicks' final TV stand-up spot from his Late Night show in 1993. In 2009, Letterman invited Hicks' mother Mary onto the show, to apologise for his original misjudgement and loss of nerve, and to debut and showcase the previously excised Hicks performance. It's on YouTube, and is of course hilarious. But below is Letterman's opening apology, which I find very moving, in spite of the audience's uncomprehending chuckles.

How Impress the Working Classes of England?

I spent the daylight hours of Election Day just gone doing a little bit of footwork on behalf of my brother David’s attempt to be elected a local councillor under the Liberal Democrat banner in Holloway ward, Islington. (En route to the morning shift I’d called into my elder daughter’s school and voted Labour across the board for Hornsey & Wood Green, so I felt I had both my family-over-party principles and my general karmic wellbeing in good order.) The photo above is a small souvenir of an interesting day, David and I with another of his friendly volunteers of the day, Kenny.
David polled an excellent 1940 votes, every one of them earned by his own hand and, evidently, on account of his good works in the locality over recent years. But in the end – and this became clear during the day – Labour had got its usual vote out with extreme efficiency, and their three councillors were returned, as was their local MP Emily Thornberry – one of the night’s dearly-fought prizes for Labour. In fact, this was rated one of the party’s model campaigns of Election 2010, as evinced by much post-mortem analysis, such as this from Jessica Asato at LabourList:

“In Islington South, voters weren’t swayed by the Cleggmania which was expected to grip the seat. Instead, the years of community campaigning by Emily Thornberry paid off, combined by assiduous door to door contact - the mountains of literature which the Lib Dems used failed to sway the electorate… There are other explanations for the victories in these seats - not least because most of them were metropolitan, and some of them had larger than usual ethnic minority populations. But we can't underestimate the impact of full time campaigning which they embraced.”

Interesting, as always, that 'metropolitan' and 'ethnic minority' remain coded Labour still. Moving on, Chris Smith made this bolder assertion on the New Statesman blog:

“Labour London… has created a formidable fighting machine and is buoyed by election results thought impossible a year ago. It is the kingmaker that will decide if David Miliband will take over… The political map of the capital now has a solid core of red. It controls eight more Labour councils, having gained more than 180 councillors. Westminster seats were secured despite Ashcroft cash; the party held Hammersmith - home of the Conservative easyCouncil project – plus Westminster North and Tooting. And it won the marginals of Harrow North and Enfield.”

London, maybe... but the South East is back to being a big headache for Labour, indeed Southern England more generally. John Rentoul offered the following dose of salts:
‘A correspondent emails with the numbers. Total number of seats in Southern England excluding inner London: 220. Total number of Labour wins: 12 (5 per cent)..."

The enigmatic James Purnell develops this thought in the Times today:
“Labour’s voters showed [their] party a lot of love on May 6. Despite everything, the core vote came out. People voted Labour in inner cities. There was even a swing to Labour from the Tories among ABs. But there’s bad news too: an 18 per cent swing to the Tories among C2s. The list of lost seats reads like a weekend supplement on holidaying in Middle England — Hastings, South Ribble, Worcester…”
I find myself a bit troubled by the pat-ness of this 'C2' thing (the 'A' and 'B' thing too.) Liam Byrne was going on about it in the Guardian the other day too, and some commenting reader asked if he calls people ‘C2s’ to their faces? It was only this morning that I decided to check out for myself how these famous social grades are properly defined. I found the following on Wikipedia, based on ‘Chief Income Earner's Occupation’ (though ‘living on benefit’ is counted at the bottom of the scale, while the upper end doesn’t factor in that layer of the upper class who don’t actually need to earn by dint of inherited wealth.)

A, upper middle class: Higher managerial, administrative or professional.
B, middle class: Intermediate managerial, administrative or professional
C1, lower middle class: Supervisory or clerical and junior managerial, administrative or professional
C2, skilled working class: Skilled manual workers
D, working class: Semi and unskilled manual workers
E, Those at the lowest levels of subsistence: Casual or lowest grade workers, pensioners and others who depend on the welfare state for their income
You don't hear politicians using those D and E terms too often, do you? And there's a lesson there. Were I a skilled manual worker (indeed, a skilled anything...) I think I’d be fairly narked to hear my political convictions and voting intentions being bundled into some tacky plastic carrier bag marked 'C2'. Purnell, of course, is not standing, cannot stand, for the Labour leadership, and Byrne is said to be making up his mind, but any serious candidates need to get this part of the rhetoric right, I reckon.

Waking up to the ConDemNation

A dear and erudite friend texted me this morning with his customary wit and wisdom: 'I haven’t felt that sick seeing those two public school ****s standing in that garden since sometime around 1989… Cromwell would be ****ing outraged.'

True, and I do like to feel a bit of loathing and fury myself, it’s good for the soul in the right measure. And yet, over the whole comical Con/Lib business I think I could keep my shirt on - were it not for this outrageous fixed-term stitch-up. 2015 before we get a chance to return a verdict on these jokers? Unless there’s a 55% no confidence vote? C’mon you Con/Lib ****s - you're having a laugh. Jack Straw called in right on this morning’s R4 Today: "completely undemocratic and totally unworkable."
"Let's say this rule was passed where you require 55 per cent of the Commons vote to have an election. What if 51 per cent of the Commons was against any confidence in the government and was refusing to pass legislation? You then get into the extraordinary position where parliament could not be dissolved...but government would be completely unworkable."

To my mind Jack Straw hit quite a vein of form in the latter years of New Labour, and he writes well in today’s Times about the present and future dilemmas:

"Our overall result was not good — the second-lowest share of our postwar vote. But expectations had been so low that there is real relief that we did better than anyone expected even three weeks ago, when polls put us in the low 20s, below the Liberal Democrats. Palpable relief, too, among so many colleagues in marginal seats who never expected to be back… Above all, relief that we have to stand on our own, sort out our future without being engulfed in the miasma of a coalition deal with the Lib Dems… [A]lliances are not, in the end, a matter of calculus but of chemistry. It doesn’t work between Labour (new or old) and the Liberal Democrats... So what of our future?... First Labour must take the lead in defining its record, and in honouring Tony Blair and Gordon Brown’s legacy. If we don’t, our opponents will seek to do so in a pejorative way… Second, we must avoid the visceral divisions that followed our 1979 defeat, putting us out of power for 18 years… Third, we must look carefully at the message of the election. It was broadly good in Scotland and Wales, not bad in conurbations and towns such as mine, but in what the psephologist Peter Kellner describes as the motorway corridors in England, it was far from good. Getting back the vote of “decent hard-working families” is imperative... The good news is that all of the potential candidates get this…"

I hope so, Jack, I really do.

Lib-Labbery: The Eve of Destruction

On occasion this blog is as guilty as any of clinging to certain comforting delusions as though they were nursery blankets. Moreover, it delights to see Rupert Murdoch (inter alia) in an impotent rage, and his Sun newspaper groping around on the toilet floor trying to relocate its famous sense of ‘humour’.
But the unhappy truth remains that Lib-Labbery cannot work, or certainly not in this curious moment that we’re living through. The British people won’t wear it, not based on this arithmetic. It’s said that coalitions can grievously wound the smaller party, and here I wouldn’t mind so much, but I can only see the larger party getting gored in the process too. I do believe Labour has to regroup around a bit of the forward thinking and reforming instincts that Tony Blair first advanced and then got utterly distracted from while he was PM. I also think that process will be much assisted by Miliband or Johnson as leader. But I can’t see it being conducted anywhere other than in Opposition. If Labour and the Lib Dems have so much in common, let them work that out together fruitfully in a time and place when the people aren’t waiting for a government to get formed in the midst of an economic horrorshow. I was never too keen on David Blunkett or John Reid while they held high office, but I must concede they’ve talked a few truths in their time while I was finding certain lies more consoling. They’re both right on the present issue, I’d say: I can't see that Labour will be forgiven for this particular effort to retain office - if, by whatever crazy contortions, it actually comes off. The Con/Lib notion at least makes sense by dint of numbers, though Clegg must see the ruin that will await his party then. But it seems to me, however glumly, that the proper course is Cameron now rolling up those much-vaunted sleeves of his and forming a minority government. On a purely tribal level, I think this will also, in the long run, prove the least worst option for Labour.
The photo above is (c) PA/Getty.

Crusaders for the telly?

From The North, 'the blog of author/journalist/broadcaster Keith Topping' reports (you'll have to scroll down, like) that Ruby Films has "lined up the writer of An Englishman in New York to adapt acclaimed state-of-the-nation novel Crusaders for a potential Channel 4 drama. Brian Fillis, whose credits also include the BBC4 biographical dramas The Curse Of Steptoe and Fear Of Fanny, is developing a script based on the 2008 book, the fiction debut of biographer and screenwriter Richard T Kelly. Crusaders follows a young clergyman who attempts to build a new church in a run-down area of Newcastle upon Tyne. His plans are complicated by battles with an ex-bouncer, an MP and a former classmate at his theological college who questions his faith."

The key word is 'potential', of course, we can only see what we shall see. But you can bet I wish the excellent Brian Fillis all the very best with that script he's developing...

Cosmopolis: UEA, June 5 2010

In a month's time the University of East Anglia will play host to Cosmopolis: The International Gathering of Storymakers (first annual...), billed as 'a festival of words, images and sounds to celebrate and explore the universal human practice of making stories.' Well, I'm up for that. In fact, I'm booked as a speaker. The event in which I'm participating is billed like so:

"The Politics of Storymaking (Lecture Theatre 2, 11:10): With electioneering voices now hoarse and politicians dizzy from spin, the novelists Giles Foden (The Last King of Scotland, Turbulence), Richard T Kelly (Crusaders, Sean Penn: His Life and Times), and the editor of New Statesman magazine, Jason Cowley along with a special guest, will discuss how stories and successful politics are inextricably linked."

Of course, stories and unsuccessful politics are pretty solidly linked too (I write as a Labour voter...), so I expect that side of the coin will also get an airing in what I hope will be a lively discussion. Pleased to see the Norwich Evening News have picked it up too...

Bookhugger column #2: What is to be Done?

The second of my regular monthly essays on literary themes is now up at Bookhuggers: What is to be Done? On political arguments in book-form. The strapline is: 'With one week to go until the culmination of a fascinating General Election, Richard T. Kelly considers the art of the political argument in book form.' The theme of the piece, I suppose, is this (in light of the choices available to the voter): 'The differences are certainly there, in the party manifestoes and the much-vaunted leaders’ debates on TV. But for those of us who fancy a longer mull over matters, wouldn’t our deliberations be enriched by some fiery polemical writing, from all quarters and factions?' The title is of course pinched from Lenin (who pinched it himself), and by happy coincidence the excellent Oliver Kamm of the Times put the same title on his blog post of yesterday explaining (in somewhat heavy-hearted tones) why he will be voting Labour next Thursday...

Vote Labour, all ye penitent sinners...

Gordon Brown’s determination to behave as though he were a character invented by Dostoyevsky – rather than forged at the foot of a stern Scots kirk, the personal back-story Brown prefers – is the big news again. Yesterday’s carnival of reaction had me thinking back to the moment 20-odd years ago when I discovered Dostoyevsky as my ‘favourite writer’, a status he’s more or less retained. One of the scholars whose writings were helpful to my discovery of his work was Professor John Jones of Oxford, who also introduced me to Kafka’s defence of the typical Dostoyevsky hero as a man not utterly deranged but merely ‘incidentally mad’ – in the same manner as the rest of us. Jones was certainly with Kafka on this point, arguing that we all mutter to ourselves when we think we’re alone, cursing under our breath, ‘F**k me!’ or ‘I’ve got him!’ or suchlike. ‘We all do it!’, Jones insisted.
Well, ‘I’ve got him!’ would certainly sum up the current, gleeful view of the Tory commentariat in respect of Gordon Brown, following his inadvertently 'on-mic' dismissal of the woman he met in Rochdale. It’s schadenfreude, of course, but, even if we do indeed ‘all do it’, it’s fair to say that only three of us are currently running for the office of Prime Minister. We are back in ‘psychologically flawed’ land again.
This PM is an unlucky general, for sure. But we do make our own luck in life to a large extent, and Gordon Brown has been stumbling through a veritable thicket of bad karma for years now. His apology was pulpit language – ‘a penitent sinner’, indeed – but the forced grin on his face as he pronounced himself ‘mortified’ was indeed worthy of one of Dostoevsky’s internally divided anti-heroes. Or, to summon another literary spirit – ‘I went on sinning every hour, and all the while most strenuously warring against sin...’ Thus Robert Wringhim, he of James Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), the classic text of Gothic Scottish Calvinism.
All I would say to Brown’s happy detractors is: beware that karmic redress, for it is certainly coming down the pipe at us all. We all say hard words when we think no-one’s listening - sometimes even for the amusement of other ears, if we're sure the company is entirely congenial. Had I the misfortune (say, on election night…) to step into some room populated wholly by the Tory commentariat – say, the likes of Benedict Brogan, Fraser Nelson, the guy who calls himself Guido Fawkes, etc, etc – I do suspect the air in the room could probably be condensed down into a draught fit to turn the noble Dr Jekyll into the gloating Mr Hyde.
In any event, this blog is voting Labour on May 6. It will be a ‘lost vote’ in my case, as Hornsey and Wood Green – captured by the Lib Dems in 2005 in a wave of protest against the ousting of Saddam – is not looking remotely likely to change its mind this time. (This likelihood, though, has not converted me to electoral reform…)
I can’t say I’m hungry for 5 more years of Gordon Brown in Number 10: I have for some time wanted Alan Johnson or David Miliband in that job. I do, however - and for my sins - prefer Mr Brown to the other contenders. More pointedly, in the short-term, I want Alastair Darling to stay Chancellor, Miliband to stay Foreign Secretary, Johnson to stay at the Home Office. Anyone who wants Osborne, Hague and Grayling in those jobs has my very best wishes for a swift recovery. (I couldn’t actually tell you whom the Lib Dems would put up for those positions, but I don’t feel a great loss.)

The Golden Palominos Ride Again

Your level of interest in rock ‘n’ roll 'supergroups' will likely depend on how you define 'super' in musical terms. The phrase doesn't quite pack the punch it did back in the early 1970s, circa Crosby Stills & Nash (& Young), when an outfit such as Blind Faith could make substantive claims for its collective prowess. Last year I did mean to check out Them Crooked Vultures, but the moment just passed...

Late last week I found myself listening with great pleasure to my fuzzy old tapes of The Golden Palominos, a New York ensemble directed by the drummer Anton Fier, first associated with master producer Bill Laswell and his Celluloid label, whose recordings spanned the 1980s and 1990s but who for me will always stay gold indeed on account of two particular LPs, Visions of Excess (1985) and Blast of Silence/Axed My Baby for a Nickel (1986) whereupon the principal vocalist is the wondrous Syd Straw but guest performers include John Lydon, Michael Stipe, Jack Bruce, Matthew Sweet, T-Bone Burnett, and (briefly) Dennis Hopper.

So, what do you know? Next week, I learn, the Palominos will in New York City play their first gig in 23 years (i.e. since I bought Blast of Silence on cassette in the branch of HMV on Northumberland Street, Newcastle.) Fier has explained the reformation online thus:

"...there were five different versions of the golden palominos. this gig represents version two which spanned the years 1985-1987.....with a bit of cross-over into 1988. most people remember this version and these years as the syd straw era. this version made two records, "visions of excess", and "blast of silence". this was also the only version of the golden palominos that attempted to be a live, touring rock band....this is where we cut to the present......i am generally not the nostalgic type or one to look back......and in the past 23 years since the last golden palominos live gig i have never before considered reviving a past version, but recently i heard syd sing and i was struck by the beauty of it... and wanted to work with her again......so we're giving this a try here and if it's fun and exciting for us we might consider doing it again on a more full time basis in the fall......so this is an experiment......to see if it is possible to go back in order to go forward......"

The narcissism of Matthew Parris

For me, Times columnist Matthew Parris will always be the prize Thatcherite prat who decided (c.1983, for the benefit of ITV's World in Action) that he would be setting a moral example by living on the dole for a week in Scotswood - where, by his estimation, the local people (whose livelihoods Parris's Government was busily serving to destroy) were, surely, protesting too much about their privations.

For that week on Tyneside, of course, Parris lived miserably, and couldn't afford to keep his lights on by the end; but, unlike the proper residents of the area, he was free to check out of that particular hotel and wash his hands of that particular slice of life, while trying, post facto, to sound awfully wise about it. All in all, a bit of a sponger, that Mr Parris.

Parris is older now, ostensibly more chary of making a sanctimonious charlie of himself, for all the temptations a newspaper column offers in that line. But hark at his latest effort in the Times. (I won't link.) Yes, we do already know that Nick Clegg hates Gordon Brown, and that the contempt is mutual. This was clear last Thursday, as Parris notes. If Clegg should be kingmaker, Brown is finished, for sure. Some of us Labour voters could imagine worse scenarios... But, really, you have to be a Tory blusterer like Mr Parris in order to a) give Clegg huge credit for that paltry animosity, and b) project yourself into Clegg's shoes and so come up with the following pseudo-dialectical explanation for the Lib Dem leader's feelings on the matter:
"Mr Clegg, I believe, sees no reasons other than historical ones why the modern Labour Party should even exist. He thinks Labour has traduced and betrayed progressive politics and that there are strands in its DNA — the old Left, the trade union links, the inborn, knee-jerk collectivism, the State-authoritarianism and the suspicion of individual liberty — that condemn it for ever to lead Britain’s centre-left astray. Ideologically, Mr Brown embodies that genetic inheritance. Personally, Mr Clegg can’t stand him. That’s my take on Mr Clegg. It’s only a guess, but I would put my laptop into the Magimix if — Labour having lost its overall majority — he did anything to put Gordon Brown back into Downing Street."
I'm already gut-sick of hearing Tories like Parris talk as if they had the slightest interest or stake in principles of 'progressive politics.' If they want to drivel on about the 'betrayal' of same, they ought really to have done time in some sanctimonious Troyskist groupuscule, rather than grafting for Rupert Murdoch. Memo to Parris: sure, keep peering into the mirror on this matter, but don't presume to pronounce on anything but your own wan reflection therein.

(The picture above, BTW, is of your correspondent in Scotswood c.2007. If that seems narcissistic, please excuse: I just didn't fancy putting a pic of Matthew Parris up instead...)

C4/Coming Up: 'Jennifer' undergoes 'Eclipse'

In entertainment news just in: that 30-minute telly script of mine that went before cameras back in February under the title of Jennifer has, in the final stroke of the post-production process, got itself a brand new title: Eclipse. It will be screened, among all 7 of this year's Channel 4/Coming Up films, at the Edinburgh Film Festival in June, and presumably it will air on Channel 4 in the summer - such were the windows afforded last year's Coming Up batch.
Eclipse is, of course, a title with some form behind it, and I do hope that youthful movie fans currently waiting keenly for the next filmed instalment of the Twilight saga (Twilight: Eclipse, due in cinemas this July) don't get themselves confused by this renaming of our little piece, or suspect us of trying to steal a bit of that vampiric thunder.
For me, in movie terms, Eclipse will always mean Antonioni, L'Eclisse being one of the maestro's prime pieces of melancholic urban beauty. Needless to say, it looks to have been posted in entirety on YouTube. Eclipse is, in any case, a perfectly good replacement title on poetic grounds for the film that used to be Jennifer. The little veiled tip of the hat to a director I always venerated is a pleasing bonus. In fact I don't think Zoe Tapper or Andrew Buchan would have looked at all out of place in any work by Signor Antonioni made during his golden years of the 1950s/60s.

NUFC: It is Accomplished

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

Election Fever: a mild sweat

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

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

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

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

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