Indonesia executes Bali bombers by shooting

BBC News reports that "since they were sentenced, the bombers made several appeals for leniency. However, they also said they were keen to be "martyrs" for their dream of creating a South East Asian caliphate." By any standards of the faith that they professed, they ought to have made up their minds before their minds were made up (or rather, used up) for them. Isn't it often claimed that the suicide-murderer generally believes that s/he part-atones for the carnage they inflict by the righteous exchange of their own demise? Not that the wretched rat-bag life of a suicide-murderer amounts to the worth of one hair on the head of any of their victims - 202 individuals, in the case of the Kuta bombings for which these 3 have been duly despatched, under Indonesian law, to that same sorry hole in the ground to which, alas, we will all one day return.

Not today though, Alex.

Andy McSmith in an Independent blog notes that Gordon Brown "has good reason to cheer this morning. But there is a proviso. This is Scotland, where the main opposition is the SNP, whose leader, Alex Salmond, was until recently promising to take his country into an "arc of prosperity" with Iceland, fuelled largely by the apparent success of Scotland's two banks. The result is as much a setback for the SNP as an advance for the government."

5 wholly predictable things that got me a bit misty today

I went to bed last night around 1am, after Pennsylvania was called and Christopher Hitchens' just-vacated chair at the BBC roundtable looked to be filled by a slash of hair that I feared was Maureen Dowd. It wasn't just the deja vu aspect: I'd had a fair bit of wine to drink at a party earlier in the evening (not an election party neither). But as of this morning, I was ready to enjoy a little bit of the drama and mood music in immediate retrospect; and the slight vino-induced fug, added to my creeping sentimental middle years, made me prone to one or two watery-eyed moments, such as:

1. The cover of the Daily Mirror, much the best out of all the papers' choices, in getting not just Obama and his wife walking across the victory-night platform, but also their daughters Sasha and Malia, 10 and 7, who are now going to go live in the White House. There's never been any getting away from arguments about the négritude of any black man (or woman) seeking high office in America: the arguments have usually started, understandably, among African-Americans themselves. That Obama is not the descendent of slaves was, inevitably, soon remarked upon; and some who did not support him wondered nonetheless why he didn't make more of the white half of his parentage. But Obama's daughters are unquestionably two lovely little black-skinned girls.

2. The BBC evening rehash/highlights show replaying that money snippet of the 'I Have A Dream' speech: "... that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

3. Jesse Jackson's face, stricken, after the declaration from the networks came in. I don't think people remember too well the number of primaries he won in 1984 and 1988. Those were big deals. He wasn't up to it, finally, and he's said and done a load of stupid things since; Jeremy Paxman had a crack at him on Monday's night's Newsnight for the infamous off-mic 'cut his nuts off' remark. But Jackson replied sensibly, about the way Obama had at times 'talked down' to blacks, urging responsibility upon them as if everyone else in America was a paragon of austere propriety. Paxman didn't listen to the answer, just asked the question again, obviously interested only in the stuff about 'nuts', which, in fairness, is partly Jackson's own fault. But one suspects he sees his own faults a bit more clearly now, and surely did last night.

4. McCain tamping down the crowd when they booed Obama’s name during his concession speech. He's had to do a lot of that lately, and did it well. No wonder Obama described his phone call as 'extraordinarily gracious.'

5. McCain again, referring to 'the man who was my former opponent and will be my president.' That's McCain's gift, no question. The last six weeks were a long leavetaking for him, but he was at least prepped and ready to strike his plangent valedictory notes.

Where do politicians come from, daddy?

In other news today - Hazel Blears is going to tell the Hansard Society that all the wrong sort of people go into politics these days. I wonder if Hazel reckons she herself is on the side of the angels? Lower middle-class background, I suppose; Poly Law graduate, solicitor, local council lawyer, then local councillor, eventually the MP for Salford, from whence she comes.

It's an old saw for Blears to lament politics as "a career move rather than call to public service", and a political class "drawn from narrowing social base and range of experience." However she's obviously damning the PLP when she slags the idea of "a 'transmission belt' from university activist, MP's researcher, think-tank staffer, special adviser, to Member of Parliament and ultimately to the front bench." Apparently her clarion call is for future MPS to arise "from a range of backgrounds - business, the armed forces, scientists, teachers, the NHS, shopworkers..."

What's not to agree with? Sure, did the best and brightest and most honourable people you know go into politics? Or decide to do something more worthy, or that remunerated more handsomely? (If indeed they found work.)

BTW Blears also has a go at bloggers who ‘spreading corrosive cynicism’ in political discourse. Not me, Haze. But of course she’s actually referring to the newly prominent types whose updates run across the masthead of PoliticsHome. And - forgive my cynicism - I don’t think she has a clue what she’s talking about, but is cheerfully reading off the autocue prepared by some younger and doubtless blog-mad researcher.

Obama vs McCain: stick a fork in it - it's done?

When Frank Luntz called it for Obama in yesterday's News of the World, I mentally closed the book too. "I cannot foresee a scenario that John McCain is elected the President of the United States," Luntz told another source, using what Brits would call the Heseltine manner of hedged betting.

Pollsters with bigger ambitions such as Luntz (who made his name in the UK by predicting - and probably half-assisting - David Cameron's election from underdog as Tory leader) have reputations to defend. That said, John Zogby is still around and he was disastrously wrong in 2004, so it just goes to show how badly we seem to need polling, if only for conversational purposes rather than persuasive evidence of anyone's true feelings.

John Dickerson sounds a bit nervous too in the hugely pro-Obama Slate: "If he loses... it would mark the biggest collective error in the history of the media and political establishment." Apparently Springsteen opened for Obama in Cleveland last week. The Boss will be nervous too: the cheque he wrote for John Kerry through his vigorous efforts last time turned out to be a drop in the ocean.

The Slate blogger Mickey Kaus is a funny fish: he favoured Clinton for the Democrat pick, and has been trying to dampen the Obama-enthusiasms of flakier souls ever since. I was struck last week when Kaus chided the various Republicans who've endorsed Obama, for the sin of misstating McCain's actual positions ("Nor has McCain "spent the past four months running away" from his longstanding immigration position. He's spent the past two months reasserting it.") Kaus also thinks these turncoats have fallen prey to "some unstated, perhaps unconscious, pro-Obama imperative" encouraging them to depict the GOP candidate as a deteriorating disgrace.

BTW Kaus himself opposes "McCain's campaigns for illegal immigrant legalization--sorry, "comprehensive reform"" - that's not the problem - it's just all those flakes in the media from whom he defends his scrupulous distance.

Kaus also has one more try at raising the ill omen of the "Bradley effect", to wit, that the polls never favoured black businessman Ward Connerly's anti-affirmative-action drive Proposition 209 until the actual results were in - and then by some distance. "Barack Obama", says Kaus, "was one of those campaigning (in radio spots) for the respectable PC side that lost."

I don't know, and I haven't got a vote anyway. I'll finish with Peggy Noonan in the Wall Street Journal, who employs the ringing euphonious prose voice she once loaned to President Reagan in order to say that "something new is happening in America. It is the imminent arrival of a new liberal moment." But, like Mickey Kaus, she's worried, about the prospect of "a Democratic House with a bigger, more fervent Democratic majority; a Democratic Senate with the same, and possibly with a filibuster-breaking 60 seats". And she wants us to know about a chat she had with two former U.S. senators who had tangled with McCain before yet found him a marvellous man nonetheless: "He wants to help the country." The other added, with almost an air of wonder, "He wants to make America stronger, he really does." And then they spoke, these two men who'd been bruised by him, of John McCain's honest patriotism."

One last throw then, Peggy?

That's Better, then!

Yesterday's posting on Duane Hopkin's Better Things has brought some good news to my inbox, namely that the film (distributed by the estimable Soda Pictures) is now to get its much-deserved London outing, with a 2-week residence at the ICA from Friday January 23, and a split-screen booking from the same date at the Renoir in Bloomsbury. It's possible that the Screen International editorial and the strong quote therein from the film's lead producer Samm Haillay added some effective polemical energy to the case. At any rate, a fine result for Hopkins and his comrades. Mark that date and keep a look-out for screening times in your neighbourhood, all you cinephiles.

Better Things by Duane Hopkins: where's it on, then?

I'm a keen fan of the young British writer-director Duane Hopkins, whose excellent debut feature Better Things was selected for the Critics' Week at this year's Cannes Festival. Hopkins is a true picture-maker, equally skilled in his use of sound and editing, with immaculate taste in filmic influences (Bresson, Alan Clarke, Bruno Dumont), and a clear commitment to taking the artistic hard road of trying to capture and illuminate our everyday lives (as evinced by his gift and facility for casting his pictures with non-professional performers: a familiar hallmark of a first-rate filmmaker.)
So I'm vexed - if not nearly so much as Hopkins' producers - by the difficulty that Better Things seems to be having in getting itself before audiences in this country. Specifically: the last I heard rumoured, the film was not even slated to play on general release in a London cinema, only getting a tour of the regional theatres. Well, lucky old regions, then - and there's no more sworn enemy of the tired old Metropolitan Bias than your correspondent. But a lot happens in London arts-wise, and a lot of movie fans live there, so I can't see why a British film that played with honour in Cannes, and was the deserved recipient of production funding from the public purse, can't then enjoy the benefit of a week's engagement in some enlightened picture-house somewhere in the capital.
This article in Screen International laments the market conditions and perceptions that have made the question of exhibition such a depressing quandary for Better Things. Samm Haillay, lead producer of the picture, gives good quote therein: 'It's not that my film deserves an audience, but its audience deserves to see it." The Screen writer doesn't propose any practical alternative to the presenting problem of how Better Things can 'aggregate' a 'customer base', simply citing some of the underlying causes that beset the film industry - the great crushing race toward the mainstream, the fruitless chasing of commercial bandwagons already gone by.
I know a few exhibitors, discerning souls film-wise for sure, and I can see their side of things - it doesn't feel like anybody gets to elude the bottom-line in the cultural industries these days. Nonetheless: cultural production in this country is the recipient of generous public funding, and, as far as I'm aware, part of that funding is intended so that the work produced is then served up before an audience. I don't see why that process has been failing Better Things. And since the British press are so keen to report on the presence (or absence) of British films in the Official Selection at Cannes (and they are), I assume they're unhappy too about the subsequent struggles of Better Things - so I trust we'll be reading plenty more on this matter.

A Crusaders memento from New Writing North

I see that New Writing North have posted a lot of photos on Flickr related to their various events and stagings, and amid the general interest it's nice for me to see a selection of shots taken at the Crusaders reading group sessions they ran back in early March at the Living Room bar in Newcastle. A lot of useful conversations come flooding back to me now...

Reading groups are, of course, a big deal these days, and their ubiquity reflects not only the British public's commingled fondness for books, chat, an easy chair and a drink; but also, I think, the problem of how hard it is for working people to make time for recreational reading these days. The group creates a platform for same, a shared social duty and pleasure, and I guess the choice of book has to be carefully calibrated so as not to waste any member's time too egregiously.

It was a fascinating experience for me to get so many direct and varied readers' responses to Crusaders at the Living Room. I was also well aware that, ordinarily, per the aforementioned issue of time management, such groups would tend to be engaged with the likes of The Gathering or The Corrections, or No Country For Old Men or Revolutionary Road, i.e. best-selling or award-winning novels of proven interest; and that Crusaders was on the menu essentially because of the element of local interest and the generous patronage of New Writing North. But I was made to feel nothing but welcome by those groups, as the NWN photos remind me, and by god they had all dauntlessly made their way through Crusaders, even before they gave their informed responses, so in a sense I owed them all a big drink.

I don't remember what was going on in the 'pointing' shot though it's quite possible I was referring to some incident in Crusaders that took place in a real location about 50 yards from the pub door...

David Peace's The Damned United: coming to a theatre near you, young man

Joey Barton's long road to rehabilitation, starting when?

The text from my mate at St James's came in at 19:58. One word: 'Joey!'

Barton had just converted the early penalty that, one might say, made the difference tonight in Newcastle's first win since August, a shaky 2-1 over West Brom.

A non-football-following friend who was a guest at ours for dinner last Saturday night couldn't quite recall 'Joey''s name, but he did want reminding of who was that awful thug at NUFC who had just crept out of prison and had form for horrendously beating up teenagers and stubbing out cigars in people's faces.

My season-ticket mate at SJP has a keen sense of irony, so I'm not losing any sleep over that 'Joey!'. It's possible I have cheered on worse people who have worn black-and-white shirts - cheered them on after the fact, that is - after they've done the business for the Toon. Until then I reserve the right to stick wor nose in the air and say it's all going to hell in a handcart - football, manners, morals, you name it. But then I'm just your common-or-garden breed of English hypocrite.

Tonight was 'Joey''s second successfully converted penalty for NUFC, so who's to say how I'd react if, one fine day, he scored from open play - at Wembley, for example, against Man United, after 89 minutes of dogged stalemate...

Paddy Considine, BAFTA (and me)

BAFTA is now promoting an upcoming event at the Encounters Film Festival hosted by The Watershed in Bristol, scheduled for Friday November 21. "The Academy is proud to present an evening with Paddy Considine, BAFTA-winning short film director (Dog Altogether) and award-winning actor (Dead Man's Shoes, Hot Fuzz, A Room for Romeo Brass and The Bourne Ultimatum). In an on-stage interview with Richard T Kelly, we will explore Paddy's career so far using clips from his films to illustrate." The actual ticket-buying link is this one, I think.

Andrew Sullivan, model blogger

I was never too impressed by Andrew Sullivan back in the mid-1990s when he was editor of The New Republic, a position that tended to bring out the worst in people if they were not already the very worst sort of people, and for which Sullivan (the Surrey-born Oxford-&-Harvard gay Catholic conservative) was an 'offbeat' and yet, in retrospect, predictable choice (given the era in question, when Camille Paglia was considered a hot thing.)

I've found Sullivan a lot more interesting and engaging and provocative in his subsequent career as a keen and forthright blogger, one whose assiduity has done much to promote the blog form among published writers and to encourage useful connections around the blogosphere. In the new Atlantic Sullivan ruminates at length on blogging, what it means and has meant to him, and where it might be going.

A lot of his comments are relevant only to those bloggers lucky enough to be read by people with whom they are not on first-name terms. And I don't think the jury should waste a moment's time on his attempts to draw Pascal, Montaigne and Karl Kraus into the discussion as proto-bloggers. Still, he makes many observations that struck me as pertinent. For one:

"On the Web, one-sentence links are as legitimate as thousand-word diatribes—in fact, they are often valued more. And, as Matt Drudge told me when I sought advice from the master in 2001, the key to understanding a blog is to realize that it’s a broadcast, not a publication. If it stops moving, it dies. If it stops paddling, it sinks."

This shark-like zeal, I suppose, is how a man like Matt Drudge gets to be reckoned a 'master'. But the point is surely correct.

For another:

"... the most pleasant surprise of blogging has been the number of people working in law or government or academia or rearing kids at home who have real literary talent and real knowledge, and who had no outlet—until now."

Yes, yes, we've all run into hundreds of bores and lunatics online too, but they vanish from memory even before you've clicked away, whereas the surprisingly interesting voices stay with you.

Welcome Back Department - Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler; Axl Rose's Chinese Democracy

On Thursday night I went to see Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler, which took the Golden Lion at Venice this year and is attracting an awful lot of heat (affirmed by the ram-jam attendance at the first London press screening) in terms of a possible award-season run for its leading man, Mickey Rourke, for whom this picture may constitute the most substantive career-comeback moment since he started to destroy his professional reputation round the end of the 1980s. I think I may be writing more about The Wrestler and Rourke in print soon.

That same Thursday the free papers told me that Guns 'n' Roses' 13-years-in-the-making Chinese Democracy album is now ready for stores on November 24. I was quite pleased, though I will soon be returning to my Metallica Dilemma in terms of what sort of rock 'n' roll records a fellow of my age really ought to be buying/listening to. But then Axl will have aged and matured a little bit in the interim too, right?

In any event, for various thematic reasons and nudges in the dialogue, the spirit of Rose rather hangs over one's viewing experience of The Wrestler, even before one reaches the point in the movie that showcases a highly unexpected licensed usage of 'Sweet Child o' Mine'. The end credits duly express a deep gratitude to Axl W. These are the moments in life when it all makes sense: when, as Tracy Walter says in Repo Man, you're sitting there thinking about a plate of shrimp, then someone says 'plate' or 'shrimp' or 'plate of shrimp'...

Keynes Resurgens!

Hang on to your hats: ideologies are back, and they’re crashing up against one another like not-so-ignorant armies in the night! It’s all the fault of the Global Financial Crisis, of course, and in terms of the chorus of conflicting op-ed commentary perhaps the most interesting development has been a vigorous revisiting of the legacy of Keynes.
When I was a boy Britain was stalked by 'stagflation': 26% inflation, the country near bankrupt, the IMF called in and demanding monetary targets and cuts in public spending. In 1976 Prime Minister Callaghan (how odd that sounds now!) read out Peter Jay's speech to Labour conference declaring that no-one, least of all him, was going to spend their way out of a recession again.
Come 1979 a zealous new Tory government was confirmed in the view that the rate of inflation, not the level of unemployment, was our chief enemy and obstacle to economical wellbeing, to be fought by sado-monetarism. (Actually the monetarist experiment didn’t last long: the Tories were soon in real trouble c. 1981-2, and they would need fortuitous events in the shape of General Galtieri and North Sea Oil coming on-stream to get them out of a hole.)
Anyhow, back to the present: Brown and Darling are going to spend their way out of a recession! The plan is to increase spending on public sector capital projects to compensate for the ‘shrinkage’ in the banking system. Seasoned observers had seized on this Keynesian dimension of Labour intentions well before Alistair Darling pronounced that the resemblance was intentional.
Now Keynes’ biographer Lord Skidelsky weighs mildly into the fray in today’s Times. He does a nice tour of the fragile peace we enjoyed until late 2007, what Mervyn King apparently termed a ‘nice’ environment (strong growth in big economies, downward pressure on prices thanks to globalization), the main item of policy thus being an occasional mild tweak of interest rates. No surprise, then, how long most people agreed that the market should be given its head, its inherently sound judgment respected. But as of September 2008 no-one in the world believes that markets are 'inherently stable.’ Thus Skidelsky's summary of our plight and what he rates the rightness of the British government's response:
‘When panic sets in there is a flight into cash. But while this may be rational for the individual, it is disastrous for the economy. If everyone wants cash, no one will lend. As Keynes tellingly reminded us “there is no such thing as liquidity... for the community as a whole”. And that means that there may be no automatic barrier to the slide into depression, unless a government intervenes to offset extreme reluctance to lend by huge injections of cash into the economy.'
Over at the Spectator, though, Tim Congdon wants us to know 'there is nothing magic about this Keynesian fad.' Congdon, I gather from the FT, is 'an economist and businessman, who served on the UK’s Treasury Panel (the so-called ‘wise men’) between 1992 and 1997.' And he's fuming like David Cameron at yesterday's PMQ: Don’t let this gloomy, chippy, hammer-and-sickle Scot off the ropes where I had him just a few weeks ago!. (Congdon refers to Brown and Darling as "notorious left-wingers" in an earlier life, which is an amusing designation of 'notoriety'.)

Brown’s bank recapitalisation exercise, Congdon argues, “is not intellectually original, it will not be fully implemented in practice and, to the extent that it is implemented, it will be a disaster. Further, no other country is copying Brown’s plan or behaving as vindictively as Britain towards its financial system.” Rather, it is "a policy of economic and financial sado-masochism in one country." (So what's the difference between what we're doing and what the US is doing? "The interest rate charged by the US government will be 5 per cent, much less than the 12 per cent imposed by Mr Brown." Does that sound sadistic to you? Depends on how you feel about banks right now, whether you're a 'wise man', etc etc)
It really irks Congdon that the government pressured the banks into the new money-raising arrangements by the THREAT that otherwise "the Bank of England would stop lending to that bank and so force its nationalisation." This 'THREAT', he believes, will not be forgotten: he sees a time when "internationally mobile parts of British banking will relocate to other jurisdictions and possible foreign entrants into British banking will hesitate to invest here.’

(This is only to speak of another form of THREAT that we have always lived with in my lifetime, i.e. let capital and big wealth creators do exactly as they wish, whatever the situation, or else they will run off and seek their safest bolthole in another far pleasanter country. Thus the thrusting City of London of which Britain is supposed to be so proud.)

It irks Congdon further that the mainstream media and people like you and me don't understand preference capital, and thus he revisits its role in the US after the Great Crash of 29 (if only to affirm its usefulness.) But he also wants us to be aware that what we've got isn't ‘nationalisation’ - so don't celebrate yet, you Lefties!:
"What the Brown plan proposes is that if the banks’ current shareholders do not wish to take up the shares offered in the rights issue, the government will take their place. However, if the banks’ current shareholders do subscribe in full to the rights issue, the government has no equity stake and the banks are not nationalised."

(If our ignorance is so much Congdon's concern he should have a word with his Spectator labelmate Richard Northedge who's fulminating in the very same issue about 'socialism seizing the city', how “suddenly the state has its hands on the economy’s real levers of power.")

When Congdon calms down, he basically says that his dream role for government is that it offer lender-of-last-resort loans and impose nothing on solvent and profitable banks. If he's so vexed then by what just actually happened, he presumably knows better about the fitness of the banks than Mervyn King, who said only this week that they were all looking like dead meat before the bailout. Lenders of last resort? I think everyone agrees the government should have moved quicker on this score. Even so, could they have averted the panic and pain we've all been having? The ever-vigilant enemies of socialism, Keynesianism and every other form of 'ism' other than neoliberalism say 'Yes'. So ideologies are back, comrades, and they're fit and tanned and ready for service...

A Letter to the London Times...

What exquisite inner point was touched upon so sharply that Nathaniel Rothschild (the putative Fifth Baron, if one cares for such things) decided to blow his old Bullingdon Club chum George Osborne clean out of the water? A letter to the London Times, good lord! Talk about a swift slosh to the upper maxillary. And from Klosters, no less, just to blow some more rarefied air into these vexed exchanges of which us riff-raff have become such eager eavesdroppers.
This, as the Times has cheerily sought to remind us since, is a ‘spectacular falling-out’ between a Conservative Shadow Chancellor and a dynasty with, let’s say, a fair bit of form in Conservative circles.
When I was in Birmingham for the Tory conference earlier this month – Jesus, was it only three weeks ago? – I spent a bit of one early evening in a hotel lobby, torn between two tellies, one offering live reporting of the collapsed US bank bailout, the other the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary that was trying to hammer Cameron’s fundraising endeavours: not that these sounded much more than over-zealous in the standard manner, and entirely as one would expect from Lord Ashcroft – but then I may have got distracted by Washington, specifically Barney Frank and his bring-me-coffee-and-doughnuts style of rhetoric.
I suppose one thing we can say for sure about the Putative Fifth Baron’s intervention is that it proves that Peter Mandelson really has got friends. I can’t yet say the same for Oleg Deripaska based on what little I know of him, but one can say he certainly has allies, which is just as important in his line of work.

Hang The DJ: Now In Stores & Collectable

Hang The DJ: An Alternative Book of Music Lists is now in shops, and editor Angus Cargill blogs here. Last Saturday night Angus and I did a phone interview for the Irish radio show Cultureshock. I don’t know what was going on round Angus’s homestead that night, but for my part I kept cupping the receiver to muffle the Noises Off of a very tired little girl whose mummy was trying to entice her into the Land of Nod.
The presenter Fionn Davenport also had a female rock writer in the studio with him, and in the back-chat for my list of Top Power Ballads this scribe rather stunned me by endorsing my #6 pick of 'Alone' by Heart as her own personal All-Time Top Tune, albeit with the qualifier that it is ‘ridiculous’. It's not a record I feel the need to own or even hear too often, but I think it's great and reflects my general feeling that I'd rather overhear music (e.g. on the radio) than consume and collect it. As I say in the book, '[Alone'] was playing in Woolworth’s just the other day as I was buying my daughter some sweets, and I found myself loitering in the aisles long enough to hear Ann [Wilson]’s unearthly howl of frustration that launches the second chorus.'
Talk later turned to Alexandra Heminsley's list of 'Songs for the Dumped', and I gave a shout to Lloyd Cole whose unexpectedly delightful Don’t Get Weird On Me Babe album has two peerless pieces of solace in that department, 'There For Her' and 'Margo’s Waltz'. The marvelous 'Like Lovers Do' from his Love Story album is also a witty, wise retrospective on the whole fraught business, just right for the age you get to when you can see your romantic history as an interesting sequence rather than anything more painful or disappointing.
Then we discussed John Williams' list about great ‘Rehab’ records, where the hopelessly soused/doped artist nonetheless did far better work than he/she would ever accomplish while clean and sober. I’m not entirely behind this thesis but I see its appeal, and as an 'Oo fanatic it reminds me to stick up for the oft-maligned Who By Numbers, for which Keith Moon was often incapable/nearing the sorry end, and Pete Townshend was steeped in brandy (cf. the self-hating 'However Much I Booze'.) Yet plenty of this record is brilliantly barbed and rocks hard, and it also contains the inimitable brass-and-ukelele of 'Blue, Red and Grey' one of Townshend’s loveliest songs, not about eros but, rather, the unconditional love of this world, a tune to which I was happy to introduce my darling wife, and which we played (not very loud, mind you) at our wedding.

"Crafting the story of Sarah"

The New Yorker is usually a wee bit too Uptown New York for my taste, culturally speaking, but I was interested today by Jane Mayer's piece on the back-story of the rise of Sarah Palin to the Republican ticket. Mayer proposes that Palin had plenty ambition from the get-go of her political career and never shrank from thinking big, to the point that once she had engineered local meets with a string of conservative pundits who liked the click of her heels and the cut of her jib, she encouraged them and accepted and capitalised on the momentum they offered her, not least the smitten William Kristol.
So much for the rise. Mayer inevitably also predicts the fall:
"The selection of Palin thrilled the Republican base, and the pundits who met with her in Juneau have remained unflagging in their support. But a surprising number of conservative thinkers have declared her unfit for the Vice-Presidency. Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal columnist, recently wrote, “The Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It’s no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain.” David Brooks, the Times columnist, has called Palin “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party.” Christopher Buckley, the son of National Review’s late founder, defected to the Obama camp two weeks ago, in part because of his dismay over Palin. Matthew Dowd, the former Bush campaign strategist turned critic of the President, said recently that McCain “knows in his gut” that Palin isn’t qualified for the job, “and when this race is over, that is something he will have to live with... He put the country at risk.”"
This is the kind of early obituary note one has seen quite a bit of this week, but as long as Obama's key-state poll leads skulk around in the margin of error I would say the retrospective tone is premature.

Colombiage: Celebrating Contemporary Colombian Arts

I can warmly recommend that culture-seekers get themselves along to the second annual Colombiage Festival in London this weekend, where new Colombian film, literature, music and culture in general are curated and celebrated in super-lively fashion. Last night I chaired a discussion with the novelist Mario Mendoza at the Odeon Covent Garden about the film version of his much-admired novel Satanas, a work that was inspired by a terrible killing spree in Bogota c. 1986, the murderer (a 52 year-old enthusiast of Stevenson's Jekyll & Hyde who had served with the US army in Vietnam) having been a fellow literature student with the much younger Mendoza at Bogota's Jesuit University. I found Mario's views on the darkness of current Colombian narrative art, and on the immanence of evil in the world generally, to be highly fascinating, while also being delighted by the size of the largely Spanish-speaking audience, who also made their way in numbers to an excellent launch party thereafter at the Soho Revue.

Hitchens: the kind of endorsement of which Obama will see more

Round about this time four years ago, with America poised once again to Decide, Christopher Hitchens bade a decisive farewell to one more segment of his former fan club when he declared that he 'slightly preferred' the idea of the re-election of the incumbent, and on an essentially single-issue stand, which was the prosecution of the war in Iraq in particular, and on what had come to be known as Islamofascism in general.

This year he's for Obama, albeit in about the most lukewarm tones one could imagine. I know of this because I read Hitchens' stuff now with more or less the same keenness I've always felt, tempered only by the appreciation that we all get older and more disappointed as the world seems forever to get worse.

Hitchens, who evidently admires McCain in several important ways, nevertheless speaks now in pitying fashion of a man 'suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical... the train-wreck sentences, the whistlings in the pipes, the alarming and bewildered handhold phrases—"My friends"—to get him through the next 10 seconds.' And Hitchens is utterly scathing of the Republican VP candidate as someone propelled far beyond her abilities for 'the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing.'

What, then, of the Democrat hope? 'Overrated' is probably Hitchens' most felt adjective. And yet, his revisiting of the Iraq war vote notwithstanding, Obama has passed Hitchens' single-issue test, and that should give pause to those who are on the side of Change because it suits their self-image and they believe Change to mean whatever they fancy it means, rather than something related to anything Obama has actually said on the stump.

As Hitchens puts it, 'The Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience.' I take 'experience' to mean Obama's wish to take the War into Pakistan and to continue to hunt and kill The Terrorists, a cause to which John Kerry cottoned rather too late in 2004. Kerry must be wishing he'd had a chunk of Obama's luck.

Mark Shivas 1938-2008

This morning I just happened to be re-reading the wise and witty contributions given to my book about Alan Clarke by the greatly-esteemed film and TV producer Mark Shivas. And I was thinking of how really good it had been to see Mark again for the first time in some years when we were both attendees of a really enjoyable BBC Films function back on the last day of July.
Moments ago I learned that it has just been announced that Mark died from cancer last Saturday night, aged 70.
The obituaries will no doubt testify that he was someone with a refined understanding of drama and the moving image, an Oxford graduate and precocious cinephile who was rightly recruited into the great flourishing of British television in the 1960s, and immediately got down to work with some of the foremost talents of that moment, at Granada and then the BBC.
Apart from Alan Clarke (with whom he made Horace, To Encourage The Others and Funny Farm among others) his major associations, one supposes, were with Frederic Raphael, Alan Bennett, Stephen Frears, and Anthony Minghella, though there were many more, and probably others just as significant. He was the ideal Head of Drama for the BBC from 1988, and similarly the very man to initiate the project of BBC Films in the early 1990s.
In more recent years he was the chief of the production outfit Headline Pictures, at whose offices I had a very congenial and interesting meeting back in early 2008 when the prospect of a Crusaders TV adaptation was being mooted by one or two parties. Mark had had to send his apologies that day; I hadn’t seen him since he graciously attended a Clarke tribute I organised at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Hence the pleasure of his company this July, when he spoke with characteristically mild modesty of several fascinating and hugely ambitious projects he had afoot. He remained graciously interested in how Crusaders was going, and over dinner was generally full of astute and completely considered observations about film and life in general.
In my few dealings with him he always struck me as formidably serious while managing the enviably trick of wearing it all rather lightly. I remember when I first talked to him about his work with Alan Clarke, and began to unpack my excited theory about the Golden Age of the BBC’s Play for Today. ‘Well, it depends on what you consider to be golden’, he replied with a small smile, several steps ahead of me. ‘A lot of terrible stuff was done in the sixties and seventies too, bad studio plays – I know, I did some of them myself. The golden age is always the one before last. And I don’t remember who said this, but in any golden age there’s always somebody sitting around saying, ‘Don’t you think it’s a bit too yellow…?’
The day of that interview when I called on him at his mews house in London I happened to be more or less crippled by a lower back injury, albeit trying vainly to mask it, and his solicitude and all-round concern for my comfort that day was downright affecting. I will be glad to remember moments such as this as readily as all those brilliant films and dramas the making of which he boldly enabled.