Rose McGowan & the heartbreaking old cause

She has a look of the Irish, that Rose McGowan: she'd put me in mind of the girls one would see out on a big Friday night in Belfast or Dublin. She was born in Firenze, though, but her father's an Irishman. This all comes out because of the stew over her remarks about the IRA at a Toronto press conference held for the movie she's in that's adapted from the memoir by the Provo informer Martin McGartland. 'I imagine', said Rose, 'had I grown up in Belfast, I would 100 per cent have been in the IRA. My heart just broke for the cause.' McGartland doesn't sound too happy about the movie in any case, and he's definitely not pleased with Rose now ('Rose McGowan's comments were insulting to victims of IRA terrorism and she should apologise. It's easy to say this sort of thing when you live in LA.' Ouch.) Even the producers of the movie have had to distance themselves from their own talent. Whether the publicity helps or hinders the picture, I don't know: IRA touts are not the most promising commercial subject, and a right old moral thicket from which to try to pull out a genuinely good picture. I haven't read McGartland's book, but there have been some good accounts of informing on the 'Ra (Eamon Collins' Killing Rage) and others that are at least interesting (Sean O'Callaghan's The Informer). Yet they all tell the same essential story: 'My people were being oppressed and so I joined an organisation I considered revolutionary, so as to strike back. But to my horror this organisation also numbered among its members some rather disreputable characters...' It's a good yarn, and it works for people, but it could never be reckoned as the whole truth.

Sean Penn: Hayatı ve Zamanları...

My track-record with foreign-language editions of my books has been hit-and-miss, frankly, but some of the 'hits' give me amusement, such as the fact that there is a Turkish edition of the book I did with Sean Penn out there somewhere, though I've never held a copy of it in my hand. I assume, though, that Hayati is Turkish for 'Life' and Zamanlan stands for 'Times.' I could be wrong, though. When Sperling & Kupfer published the book in Italian they conferred on it the subtitle 'Un cattivo ragazzo', and I know no Italian but my wager is that that little phrase translates as 'A bad boy.' I'm not sure whether Crusaders will get rendered in many other languages (other than Geordie) in my lifetime, but I do believe there's an Indonesian version in the works. Which goes to show that we are the world.

Debt: formerly considered the best thing money could buy

Some naïve part of me has always supposed that when a bank died, the collapse/explosion would be something akin to the death of a star in the cosmos. No such phenomena attended the end of Lehman Brothers, though glancing across the covers of today’s papers (in some surprise, having seen/heard no news bulletins for 48 hours), I saw a lot of well-groomed and utterly gutted young professionals consoling one another after hasty clearings of desks.
What did Lehman reckon were its odds that Secretary Paulson would bail them out instead of ruling it were a better thing that the bank fell? That would be an interesting set of figures.
Meantime I have now caught up with the reportage and analysis, some of which is to the effect that Lehmann’s demise is a testament to functional capitalism and the survival of the fittest. This time, maybe. I won’t be celebrating, not least because for umpteen reasons I couldn’t be neutral about the state's efforts to keep Northern Rock afloat last year.
I suppose one silver lining is that, for a while at least, investment banking should now be seen as a career option roughly as hare-brained as putting your daughter on the stage, Mrs Worthington.

October Esquire on sale now.

Per yesterday's remarks: I know it's out there now, and I commend it to you warmly. I know it contains my piece on Jar City and also a serial extract from a book I oversaw editorially at Faber and Faber, which is a memoir by the movie producer Michael Deeley entitled Blade Runners, Deer Hunters & Blowing the Bloody Doors Off. I'll maybe say more when I've got my copy and paddled through it.

Mike Ashley's literary leavings

Kevin Keegan has never been considered a wordsmith, though I hear his autobiography is a decent read, and he may even have written some of it. But KK certainly is, as everyone knows, a highly effusive speaker. I'm not thinking of the 'I'd love it' outburst so much as his coming to the steps of St James's after he'd sold Andy Cole to Man U, just to tell the gathering of vexed fans what his logic had been.

Conversely, Mike Ashley, the hoping-to-be-soon-ex-owner of Newcastle United, is not a man to speak his mind before a microphone or indeed on any public stage, but he and his cronies clearly love to write and circulate statements, screeds and rebuttals. Ashley put out a big fat one under his own name on Sunday night, just so that everyone understood he was looking to sell the club and that he and his money were feeling sorely unappreciated by all those Geordie tossers. In fairness, Martin Syed at the Times has taken Ashley's side on this one. So much for fairness.

The only point I feel is worth lingering over (beyond Ashley's refusal to address the fact that he either lied to Keegan about transfer policy or else reneged on a major pledge) is Ashley's bleat that he can't take his kids to SJP anymore, on police advice. I can't do better than the riposte of True Faith on this score: "Please. If he wants to go to the match – go in the bloody director’s box like every other football club owner, put on a proper shirt, blazer and a decent pair of strides and act your age."

Jar City now in cinemas; very good

A writer friend of mine ran into my wife at a party last week and told her I was 'on the poster' for Jar City, Baltasar Kormákur's Icelandic policier that has just been released into UK cinemas. (It's a couple of years old in its country of origin, where it's known as Myrin.) 'On the poster' in the sense that some line or other from my positive write-up of the movie for the October issue of Esquire has been pulled out and used for promotional purposes. I haven't seen the October Esquire yet. Have you? Nor have I seen any Jar City posters plastered around London yet, as opposed to those for Tropic Thunder, say, or Guy Ritchie's new one. But I hope the rumour is true. One likes to be of service when service has been freely given.

Norman Mailer's Spooky Art

Today, owing to an unfortunate necessity, I had to forsake my desk at home and go work in the local library, only 5 minutes' walk away, but a drag nonetheless. Waiting for some dogged daily newspaper scanner to give up one of the few writing tables with a plug-point adjacent, I wandered around the stacks awhile and was pleased to happen on a copy of Mailer's collection of thoughts on the writing process, The Spooky Art (2003). Browsing through it at least made the waste of time feel a good deal less vexing, even medicinal.

For a while I read from the index back and found Mailer very good on the affinities and disparities of the Russian masters: basically, that Dostoyevsky went down to depths that Tolstoy couldn't penetrate, but lacked Tolstoy’s panoptic sense of perspective and so tended toward hysteria; consequently from Dostoyevsky we come away with memorable individuals, and from Tolstoy entire societies.

Elsewhere: he's generally thoughtful about bad reviews, albeit occasionally desirous of knocking some picky little toerag's roof in.

He's bracingly self-critical about most of the books, as well as his much-advertised personal failings.

He sounds friendly enough about old Gore Vidal, to whom he is undoubtedly superior IMHO.

You get that sense that he wasn't ever as mad about The Executioner's Song as the book's ardent fans, for all that it's so alive to something fundamental in the big centre of American life, just because it was less his invention.

He makes a useful critique of Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections as a self-consciously big and well-upholstered novel that doesn't feel large or truly lived.
He expresses a touching love for the novel on the ground that it is 'the form best suited for developing our moral sensitivity - which is to say our depth of understanding rather than our rush to judgment.'
I nodded grimly in reading another version of his view that writers must discipline themselves 'to do a good day's work on a bad day.'

More grim nods when he volunteered that 'working on a book where the plot is already fully developed is like spending the rest of your life filling holes in rotten teeth when you have no skill as a dentist.'

Then there is the rub: ‘I remember saying in 1958, “I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time.” And I certainly failed, didn't I? At the time, I thought I had books in me that no one else did, and so soon as I was able to write them, society would be altered. Kind of grandiose…’

Still, searching around some reviews tonight I was satisfied that a fair few writers are properly sympathetic to Mailer's readiness to dare and risk failure.

Thomas E. Kennedy: ‘Perhaps the greatest works are inevitably flawed for they reach toward the unreachable in comparison to small works satisfied with small accomplishment.’

Richard Poirier: ‘At his best [Mailer] seeks contamination. He does so by adopting the roles, the styles, the sounds that will give him a measure of what it’s like to be alive in this country.’

Wilfrid Sheed: ‘Mailer follows the Chestertonian principle of exploring the psychosis proper to the group, the identifying madness, and letting it enter him, like an exorcist opening himself to the devil.’

Quite. Like the demon of his last wondrous production The Castle in the Forest, Mailer gave himself the right to inhabit men's minds. Spooky indeed.

NUFC: Take this ticket, go to hell and stick it

The excellent nufc.com reports that this Saturday there will be a protest march comprised both of Toon fans intended to boycott the Hull game and those intending to enter St James's Park but only after the 3pm kickoff. The plan is to meet opposite Tilleys Bar on Westgate Road for a 3pm march, to finish up outside of Shearer's Bar. There is also due to be a pure protest gathering outside Old Milburn Reception from 2pm, and one imagines that will be one long howl. Desperate times, but entirely justifiable actions.

Sebastian Barry: Booker Prize Contender, naturellement

Many congratulations to the man whom I hope I can get away with calling 'my fellow Faber novelist', Sebastian Barry, on his being shortlisted for the 2008 Man Booker Prize for his latest novel The Secret Scripture. From this point onward I don't suppose anyone can guess the outcome of the judging, it will all come down to five people in a room something like a month from now; but Sebastian Barry has been to this dance before in 2005 with A Long, Long Way, so one trusts he will be braced at least for the suspense that lies ahead, and able just for the moment to savour another richly-deserved recognition of his gifts.

Hunter S Thompson: Nothing Vicarious

At some point soon I hope to write properly and at length about Alex Gibney's documentary Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, which I saw this evening. For the moment I would only say that it sure stirred up some ghosts for me. The final credits run to the tune of Warren Zevon's 'Lawyers, Guns and Money'. The moment in my sluggish adolescence when I first made the connection between what these two men were up to as artists, and liked to in common and indeed together - sometime around the publication of Thompson's The Curse of Lono and the release of Zevon's Sentimental Hygiene - was a fairly vital one for me. Zevon, too, has been gone for some years now. And men like Thompson and Zevon, they really shouldn't die. And on another level, they clearly should. Not by fading away neither.

Newcastle United: Milner did indeed gan...

... in spite of my previous and heartfelt appeal, which, you know, I'm not sure reached him - did he happen to mention it last time you spoke?
Anyhow, today Milner told the Mirror - while no doubt breathing out a great blasting sigh of relief - "What is going on now at Newcastle showed what was going on behind the scenes at the club."
In other news: NUFC itself continues to try to deny it is an effing shambles by sending out pompous pseudo-tough-talking press releases, the latest purporting to be a point-by-point rebuttal of Kevin Keegan's expressed complaints, but failing utterly and risibly on the basis of previous on-the-record comments made by Ashley and Wise.

Richard T Kelly & Ten Bad Dates podcast on CBC Radio

I did a bit for Ten Bad Dates with De Niro on a Canadian radio show today, CBC Radio (Canada)'s Q arts and entertainment digest, hosted by Jian Ghomeshi. Needless to say I went onto the airwaves live from a boxy central London studio. For a while at least you can hear the podcast here, and for my bit you need to fast-forward about 20 minutes into the show from start.

I have done this shtick on this book a good many times now, albeit not so much in the last twelve months, and so Jian Ghomeshi had some comebacks to my glib patter that I wasn't used to hearing necessarily. For instance, a lot of people blithely accept my contention that there is something fishy about the supremacy of Citizen Kane across All-Time Greatest Movie polls of the last 50 (50!) years. Yet I think Jian thought I was being hard on this poor great movie; certainly as opposed to my now-standard encomium of praise to Ishtar... At any rate, a fun show to do, and some amusing exchanges, at least as it seemed to me.

Manchester: So Much to Answer For, Except New Order

More telly for me: for the second or third time I'm watching the BBC4 documentary on Factory Records, only one of umpteen studies of Manchester and post-punk that I've noted over the last 5 years -though it has horse's-mouth commentary from all the main players, but only like all the others do... Still, it's a great human story, a great northern English story, a great art/rock 'n' roll story.
Nonetheless I still feel the way I always felt about most Factory/Manchester music, which is, couldn't give much of a toss. Except for New Order. I love New Order. And I still think it a small marvel that they ever existed.
But I know it to be so because I saw them play live at Queen's University, Belfast, in January 1986, and that's still the best gig I ever saw. They played most of the Low Life album that night, one of their best. They also played 'Love Will Tear Us Apart' that night, and with all due respect it sounded better than when Joy Division played it - just like most of what New Order did.

Harry Enfield: This is Hardcore

My favourite show is back on telly. In saying it's my favourite, it seems that I reveal my age, because a lot of the preview write-ups in the papers would lead you to suppose that said show is awfully tired on arrival. And yet it seems to me that Harry Enfield's and Paul Whitehouse's comedy is more current and observational and clued-in than any other comedy I've seen on telly lately (admittedly, there's so much obvious brainless crap I just don't bother with.)
Anyhow: glad to see so many characters returning in this series from the (much-derided) first series of Harry & Paul: the lordly surgeons, the Notting Hill shyster knick-knack seller (pictured), the too-nice bloke forlornly in love with the Polish barista... I just hope we'll see the return of the gormless American tourists who are very keen on gay men and hijab-wearing ladies ('Isn't she probably pretty...?')

Gordon Brown: The Big Fightback (Postponed)

The Prime Minister has told the Scottish CBI that the current economic downturn is “the first, great financial crisis of the global age”, and that “Britain cannot insulate itself” from said crisis, being part of said joined-up globe. There is an upside, though, to do with ‘long-term resilience and underlying strengths’ in the British economy. I like the sound of that, as Brown surely hopes we all will, but while I was born at night it wasn't last night.

Brown also had a catchy line about freeing Britain from the ‘dictatorship of oil’, a cause that George Bush was espousing for the US a few years back too, having been frustrated in previous efforts to shore up said dictatorship. But Brown’s vision has a lot to do with our being energy-efficient in the home, and helping subsidise the electric car. These are tough sells in a downturn, so I wish him good luck on that one.
The PM also stuck up for the Union, since he was in Glasgow, but sadly he’s a Scot in an age when the loudest Scots voices in politics say otherwise. Good luck there, too.
All this, by the way, forms part of Brown’s ‘relaunch.’

Steve Richards of the Independent is sounding rather more in sorrow than anger about Brown, saying ‘These days it is the fashion to rubbish his tenure at the Treasury, but even his harshest critics must acknowledge the political skills that accompanied the policies.’ Wait, though: this is how Richards talks up the Brown legacy: ‘Over a lengthy period he managed to put up taxes, redistribute some cash, increase public spending, and remain popular.’ I’m a great admirer of Richards’ columns but I’m sure that come the morning after, he would want to think again about that crowded, confused sentence. All I hear is a summary of how Brown sold his most inept moves to Labour's most lemming-like voters. It's exactly how and when he made his moves on tax-hikes, redistribution and public sector handouts (so making himself the darling of so many voters who think themselves the Soul of Labour) that is the key; and the reason why he's been rubbished ever since.

Richards also laments the falling-off in Brown from his Treasury days of obsessive policy ground-laying; but you don’t get that luxury as PM, which is the job Brown thought he wanted and was made for. And again we must ask – just run that Treasury Legacy past us one more time?

Still, Brown can be reassured by the latest, newly incoherent and choleric attempt to murder him made by Charles Clarke in the New Statesman. I admire Clarke too, and liked him a lot as Home Secretary. But since he and fellow Blairites couldn’t find anyone to Stop Gordon in 2007 and so lined up behind Brown instead, all this ongoing acrimony is a waste of space.

Fukuyama in the Financial Times: History/My Story

In the FT Francis Fukuyama has pointed out a few tough truths that he assumes both candidates in the US election have taken onboard: namely that ‘the past two US administrations could assume American hegemony in both economics and security. The next administration cannot’; and that the task of the next Administration will be ‘to gracefully manage an adversely shifting global power balance and significantly diminished US influence.’

Ah, 'gracefully'… and so the sun sets (and the blood dries) on the US imperium. All empires must perish, by overstretch if not stagnation: I have had my 'issues' with the American version, though I prefer it still to any of the rival candidates now vying for succession.
Of course Fukuyama has got Russia on his mind and argues that the US were too brusque and bumptious through those early post-Cold War years when the Russian Bear was mangy and down on its knees. He clearly reckons Iraq as an irredeemable disaster, because he says that ‘one of the chief ways that US power has been diminished in this decade is in its moral credibility.’ And he’s also one of those who wants to throw the Nato Kosovo action back at Britain and the US too, for setting ‘an unhappy precedent of legitimising separatism.’ (But being separated from people who want you dead is a powerful driver. All I can say is that it’s all very well for wonks and scholars to favour the why-can’t-you-all-just-stick-together? option.)
Still, Fukuyama also manages to squeeze in the call-me-civilised qualifier (‘I do not want to be seen as apologising for Moscow’s behaviour… That Russian feelings of resentment are understandable does not make them morally right.’) And I daresay the strongest point he has is that the push for Nato membership for Georgia and Ukraine does look like nothing but an American game, and only Angela Merkel seems to have the seriousness to make this understood.
BTW why should one pay attention to Fukuyama? Not sure. But then, you know, this guy once forecast the End of History - a bold call, albeit completely wrong and wronger every day. Still, with such a brass neck maybe there’s a chance that one day he’ll call it right.

Keegan/Ashley: Whose psychological flaws?

Talk is cheap, as we all know, and I'm writing from London, among the southrons, so I defer to my honourable friends at nufc.com and true faith in terms of the smartest and most felt on-site reportage of today's hateful bloody shambles at Newcastle United. I'm not interested in what the national press have to say, unless they have more luck in getting either Keegan or Ashley/a crony of this on the line tonight. The Mail, though, says Keegan has been in heavy session with m'learned friends.

The nationals will give Keegan a good few digs, of course, some sharper than others. There's a certain crying-on-the-inside aspect to KK's personality that is like fresh meat to the ravening pack. But unlike a lot of NUFC fans I don't think there's a southron vendetta against the club: it's just the natural born schadenfreude of football fans, most of whom spend a lot of their time depressed over a lot of nonsense and need to get a laugh out of some other lot who appear worse off. And we do give 'em no end of material to work with.

Five words, but: 'Dennis Wise', 'dugout', 'next match.' No way. I hereby endorse any strategy of supporter-driven resistance to this skin-crawling prospect. If Ashley has the slightest understanding of that kind of broad-based sentiment, then he should get his effing jumbo-sized black-and-white shirt on and go explain his rationale over a pint to any fan he can find who doesn't feel like nutting him.

Xisco is a Geordie

Well, someone on the Barrack Road was listening to me because apparently they just put out an announcement, for Xisco and Gonzalez both. And I'll just say this for the Xisco lad right now - he doesn't need to get his bloody hair cut, and these days that's a blessed relief to see in a young player. Good proper short haircuts mean bags of goals, in my lengthy experience.

Late Transfer Window Drama: fans yawn, scratch heads, gloomily...

I was definitely cheerier this morning: I thought we had this guy Xisco from Deportivo. And there's a name to make headlines and t-shirts out of. But if we had him this morning, why did midnight pass without confirmation? Hell's teeth. And everyone thinks we have this Gonzalez on loan, but again, it's not official as of 00:15. Other names have vanished like breath off a razor-blade. Meanwhile texters report desperate Toon bids for defenders at Sheffield and Derby, both knocked back. It's not what it said in the brochure, no sir. But I see Antoine Sibierski's off to another club - good luck to him, he was the butt of great Mag frustration on Window day in January 2 or 3 years back. As they always say, it's the hope that kills you.

Poem for the Day: Briggflatts (Bunting)

Since he's been on my mind for the purpose of an essay I'm currently writing, perhaps I might set down a stave or so from his most famous work - this eminent Northumbrian, who refused that he was a Geordie since he was actually born in Scotswood...
"A mason times his mallet
to a lark’s twitter,
listening while the marble rests,
lays his rule
at a letter’s edge,
fingertips checking,
till the stone spells a name
naming none,
a man abolished.
Painful lark, labouring to rise!
The solemn mallet says:
In the grave’s slot
he lies. We rot."