Curse of the Jade Scorpwned

A little late in the day, naturally, I thought I’d wade into the Jade affair. I haven’t watched much of it, but why should that stop me adding my tuppence-worth (note to commissioning editors, that is not an invoice). This is the story of how one young lady from Elephant and Castle made it as a star on Big Brother before – in a frankly quite brilliant move – returning on Celebrity Big Brother. What finer accolade than to return to the scene of your ennoblement, clad in your celebrity ermine robes? Of course it could only be downhill from there.

The papers have been focusing to a large extent on whether or not Jade and her two dim cohorts’ bullying of Bollywood star Shilpa is racist or not. Many commentators have suggested that class differences were more at play – which I would tend to agree with. Other people have reasonably pointed out that racist bullying is a lot like what they have been up to, whether or not the racism is explicit. But I would say that bullying is a big tent and a lot of racism fits snugly under it.

Racism is a thorny topic at the best of times and the reaction to Celebrity Big Brother just goes to show how potent even an accusation of racism is. I would have thought it was enough for them to be horrible bullies, but apparently they must be lanced with the hot blade of multiculturalism.

And what an outpouring of hatred towards Jade! I mean, come on! You’d almost think all these journalists turning out copy after copy of bile and venom had never liked her in the first place and were only forced belatedly to endure her because she was so genuinely popular with the general public. And you’d be right. But to read Tony Parsons going on about her as a fat, ugly pig with no talent or intelligence (Tony fucking Parsons!) is to wonder why fattism or povertyism or just general working-classism isn’t as much of a taboo as racism.

Jade is by no means stupid, despite her greviously uneducated gaffs, but from the minute I saw her I liked her. She is as genuine as they come, which means not 100% but quite a bit higher than most. And she is a survivor – her life story reads like the sort of thing that happens to Charles Bronson before he goes on the rampage. Now its taken another dramatic turn.

If there’s one good thing to come out of this, it’s that Russell Brand wrote a half-decent article in the Guardian. Alas I can’t link to it because the Guardian seem to be embarrassed about paying him and he doesn’t feature on their website in their list of writers, despite his weekly column. But it agreed with me wholeheartedly, only wasn’t as funny.

Keeley Hazell Sex Tape Shocker!!!

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New Years Eve 2007

I've enjoyed it heartily...
or is it hardly?

King Lear, Barbican

Recently, having spent much of my youth cultivating acute cultural ignorance, I decided that perhaps Shakespeare and all that kind of thing might actually be interesting after all. Although previous experiences have been a mixed bag, I don’t think you can really go wrong with a good tragedy. And of all Shakespeare’s major tragedies the only one of which I was completely ignorant – of plot, characters and type and magnitude of tragedy to unfold – was King Lear. So for sometime I had been waiting for a fairly traditional, unaffected production with which to gloriously lose my Lear innocence, free from the attentions of English teachers and the like. This production was poorly advertised and I felt very lucky to secure a seat near the front of the stalls at very late notice. So imagine my delight when, taking my seat in the plush and sparsely attended auditorium, I opened the programme to see that the play would be in Russian, with English subtitles.

Now the more savvy of you may be able to tell, at a glance, that a production by the Maly Drama Theatre of St Petersburg will certainly be in Russian, but I did not. I even read an entire article on the director, Lev Dodin, in a newspaper, without realising. But even though it did occur to me as I was waiting in the bar for the play to start, I made the tragically naïve assumption that if a theatre was to host a play in Russian, or indeed in any foreign language, especially a classic of English drama, they might put themselves out enough to actually explain this clearly on such publicity as they bothered to produce.

Paralysed by the imminent start of the play my girlfriend and I were unable to decide to make a quick dash for a refund and after I’d digested my disappointment at sullying my Lear tabla rasa, we decided to try it out and see just how great Shakespeare is in Russian, in a play that was apparently in rehearsal for three years. The first problem was that the subtitles were on a screen high over the stage and our fantastic stalls seats meant that it was either actors or subtitles. No amount of neck straining could bring the two into one viewpoint. On the other hand, of all the plays to watch in a foreign language, Shakespeare’s probably loses the least in comprehensibility, what with being generally unfathomable at the best of times. Even as the script flashed past me in large green letters, with Russian actors enunciating beautifully beneath, I was still hard-pressed to know exactly what was going on.

As for the production, the Russian flavour was evident even to me. The three daughters were in bright, white robes, set against a black stage, with only grey to liven it up. The Fool, dressed as a sort of Marcel Marceau type, spent much of the first act lounging at a bar-room piano, on which he and Lear played Russian ditties. I particularly enjoyed the piano-playing, partly as it gave me respite from trying to read the subtitles. And the Fool was great to watch in any language.

Towards the end of the first act one of the secondary characters, possibly an Edmund or Edgar or someone like that, unexpectedly ripped off all his clothes and skulked in the shadows of the stage, cock swinging like a bell-rope. My girlfriend perked up at this point. “I’m glad we stayed now,” she confided to me. "Oh, its nothing to do with that!" she said as she realised her profligate transparency. In fact this was just a softener, as early in the second act three more of the actors divested themselves of costume and cavorted about in the altogether. Trivia buffs should note that this may well be the only Shakespeare production in history to have stolen an old Young Ones joke – one with a naked Neil and a fortuitously placed flower pot.

In the interval we decided to swap seats for some further back, in the hope that we could watch the play and read the subtitles in one go. Of course life being what it is, we chose seats that still didn’t allow us to combine both, but yet were far enough away to make reading the subtitles a strain. This did not help me follow the action at all. By now I’d had a good read of the programme, which explained that the Russian translator had cut out lots of the more political parts of the play, along with most of the soliloquies, and was playing up the kitchen-sink drama, all fathers and daughters. Even I could tell that this left some very peculiar gaps in the plot, not least the fact that there was no battle with which to bring about Lear’s final tragedy. I was still hoping for a bit more of the Fool, before Lear callously dropped the news that he’d been hanged, without so much as a by-or-leave. As for the finale, it just sort of happened, without there being any real explanation for how or why. I assumed that I must have fallen asleep, but apparently not.

Swan Lake, Hackney Empire

It is a little known fact that the word ‘ballet’ actually derives from the French phrase ‘ball et chaine’ since men would only ever go to see it at the behest of their wives. I myself, seeking cultural enlightenment at any and every opportunity, was not exactly unwilling to go, but I did wonder whether it really was so much more cultured than staying in and watching Celebrity Big Brother.

This being Hackney, I managed to get myself offered out at the bar before the show had even begun but things looked up when I realised that I was allowed to take my pint with me to my seat.

I know no more about ballet than I do about the nocturnal habits of the Amazonian laughbeetle, and hence I am not really in a position to judge whether the Moscow State Ballet Team (or whatever they were calling themselves) were any cop or not. I am fairly sure that it was not the most avant-garde of performances. All the ballet clichés were employed liberally; plenty of girls on tip-toes and men literally prancing about in what looked like painted-on tights. It was noticeable how the men leapt around arses ahoy, whereas the women were all dressed in tutus - as though they’d been pushed through the centre of a satellite dish - which kept their pretty tuches more or less secret.

But nothing got up my nose so much as the way the dancers were so devilishly pleased with themselves. Every spin and leap and tip-toe was accompanied by a god-awful mile-wide grin on the face of the dancer. I would later realise that this was their idea of acting, but it remained gratuitously irritating.

It is true that the ubiquity of shows like Swan Lake makes these things clichés in the first place. When Swan Lake was first performed it was probably full of revolutionary techniques, but nowadays its a museum curio. As ignorant as I am, however, I did recognise quite a few of the dance moves, mainly from reading the karma sutra.

Having sat through assorted people prancing about differently-but-the-same for the best part of an hour I was shocked at the interval to be told that there was a story which I was supposed to be following. I had gleaned that a strange Crowleyesque man - who thankfully did not look pleased with himself but did remind me a bit of Robbie Williams – might not be a good guy but he was dressed all in black and grimacing at every opportunity. Beyond that the relevance of the king, queen, jester and ladies hopping around as though they were trying to look like swans was completely lost on me. Knowing a bit more about what was going on helped me enjoy the second act all the more, but I still managed to totally miss the tragic denouncement. In ballet it is not always clear whether someone is dying or just having a sit down.

Something as old and venerable as Swan Lake is supposedly timeless, but not when you are sitting through it.

I

I’m not purer than pure but I’m purer than not pure

Jah Wobble, 100 Club

Ah, Mr Wobble. Since his days as Johnny Lydon’s foil in the post-Pistols aftermath, Jah Wobble has cut a unique, diffident and always interesting figure in the world of just-successful-enough-to-keep-going musicians. With his unrepentant cockney roots, his self-taught, unconstrained musicality and his love of thudding basslines alongside warping echo he has cut a unfashionable, avant-gardeish path since he split from PiL after the seminal Metal Box LP. Widely recognised amongst those-that-know as an innovator, Wobble has survived on varieties of a fairly simple template – standard heavy sound-system bass and drums topped with, at different times, Arabic singing, tabla drumming, William Blake recitals and his own cockney ramblings. All of this, of course, long before anyone else you may have more recently heard of, (Timbaland or the Afro-Celts for example) had thought of it. His experimental attitude and individuality has drawn a host of music’s eclectics to his door, including Brian Eno, Bill Laswell, and Can’s Holger Czukay and Jaki Liebzeit. Wobble’s talent perhaps lies less in his virtuosity as in his knack for giving other musicians the space to express themselves within his parameters.

For this show Wobble is backed by the English Folk Band, who look suspiciously like his old backing band Deep Space, with a couple of new faces thrown in. So it seems that the topping du jour for his subwoofer-shaking adventures are plaintive English folk singing, some penny-whistling, a Frenchman playing apparently a party-box of oddly shaped pipes and a slightly reluctant-looking trumpeter. The Wobble rhythm section features his full, overbearing bass playing beside wah-wah, phaser and echo-drenched guitar, held together as tightly as close-stitching by the relentless, extraordinary drumming of Mark Sanders who, like all great drummers, appears to be doing the percussion work of three or four people.

For the most part things proceeded well enough, the songs varying in outlook or style but most of them eventually tending to meditative dub forays. Wobble, looking something like a lost member of Madness in cream suit and porkpie hat, sat to the side lazily fingering his bass, occasionally jumping up to direct the musicians in one direction or another. They vanished for a tea-break at one point – his words – and, on their return, built up to a nice crescendo. Then they disappeared again, before returning for an encore. Somehow, however, the second half seemed a bit short and it was too soon to ask for an encore, no matter how willing the crowd. Encores are an odd business at the best of times. I was left thinking ‘I’ve paid for the gig and now you want me to beg you to finish it’.

But finish it they did, slowing it down again, instead of aiming for another big climax. Which made me think, why stop at one, when you can have three or four, an attitude female readers may relate to. After George Clinton, of course, everyone else seems to be selling you a bit short. The other criticism, apart from a mix more suited to a casserole than a concert, was that Wobble and especially Sanders, rarely seemed to let up and allow the others to lead from the front occasionally. Especially with the delicacies of folk, it would have been nice to let the singers and players get heard a bit more.

Goodwill etc

I received my first charity Christmas present today. I missed out on the year of the goat, and my patron this year stretched as far as 100 school dinners for some African kids, courtesy of Oxfam. Although my initial reaction was disappointment at missing out on a book token, I was quick to bathe in the clear waters of self-righteousness. Only later did it dawn on me that effectively was has happened is that someone gave some money to charity and then told me about it. Far from the ingenious plan I’d been led to believe, for the recipient a charity gift seems like a bit of a double-loser. Not only do I not get a present, I don’t even get to feel good about giving my present away. Its hard to know exactly how to phrase a thank-you letter. “Dear Aunty, thanks very much for giving ten pounds to the poor.” Although, in fact, it has provided me with that most valuable gift at Christmas – an idea for what to get everyone else.

Oliver Twist

Polanski’s take on the Dickens stalwart rescues Fagin and Sykes from the music hall and returns them to the dark, stinking slums where they belong. At certain points in this tight, captivating film the pair genuinely appear to have been raised up from the depths of hell. Ben Kingsley so perfectly inhabits Fagin that it takes more than a while to remember that this is the same man who played Gandhi. A true character actor, he exposes the paucity of the talent which “graces” our screens most of the time. Of course he has the memory of Alec Guinness to contend with but of all today’s actors, probably only Kingsley could do it justice. Jamie Foreman, meanwhile, as Sykes, looking as pug-faced as his pitbull companion, provides a modern but effective take on the part and the film’s strengths are all on show when at one point he and the dog roam the countryside looking like a phantom apparition.

The beginning scenes are a little ponderous but everything comes together as soon as Oliver hits the city. Victorian London is portrayed in shabby magnificence, seemingly populated entirely by overly aged adults and thin children. The only person apparently between the ages of 15 and 60 is Sykes. The rest of the cast have a great time, laying on the cockney thicker than the mud on the London streets. But what starts out as an enjoyable romp soon veers off into darkness as the criminal screw slowly turns on Oliver.

Interesting, slightly luvvie, interview with Kingsley here.

Extras

Somewhat belated review of Ricky Gervais’ summer sitcom, brought about by my spending a few days as an extra on the set of a Hollywood blockbuster whose name by confidentiality contract I am not allowed to disclose but which is the film of the book The Da Vinci Code.

What is a nice if inconsequential series gets far more credit once you actually do extra-work yourself. Within about three hours I had adopted Ricky Gervais’ resigned slumping manner and was plotting, much as he does, dubious ways to get myself on the screen. In contrast to Gervais, however, I did not mingle with any celebrities at all, let alone ones flagellating themselves to prove their credentials as good sports. Even the director was nowhere near the film set, the job being left to a second or even third unit to get the completely unimportant shots.

We started at 5am from Paddington on the bus and got to our base camp at about 7. They’d set up huge tents held up by hydraulic poles and we straight away got in a queue for a English breakfast from the caterers, dishing it out like school dinners as rained lashed down all the tents. After we ate we got kitted out in our costume. Then they drove us to the set at the cathedral. Then we waited around. At one point one of the assistant directors came over to us and said “sorry but some of you guys have been eating the toasties. The toasties are for crew only I’m afraid. You have your station, yeah there it is,” he said pointed at a table with some hot water and tea bags on it. “Yeah that’s your station, and please we haven’t catered for background for the toasties.”

I wanted to know how, with braces holding my trousers up and my whole body sandwiched between two tightly linked plates, how I was going to be able to have a shit. He thought about it. “You’ll have to buddy up,” he told me.

After a while it was time for lunch. After we ate lunch they hurried us into the cathedral and 50 of us stood in a line getting swords tied to us. As we waited in line, costume people would come along and smarten us up, although often one would finish with you before another rearranged you differently. Once I got the sword attached I suddenly felt more balanced and I sat down to wait on a chair in the cathedral, propped up by the sword touching the ground. There we waited for three hours. I drifted in and out of dozing, resigned to being uncomfortable in the costume.

Finally they called us to be filmed. They lined us up in a small hall and gave the cardinals some scrolls to hand to us off of silver platters. We were to take them and then bow as they blessed us. I was the first person in the line, but furthest from the camera. After a few minutes they decided that the priests would start dishing out the scrolls from half-way down the line. They took a few shots of that, went in for a few close ups and I was nowhere near being in any shot at all. Despite this the make-up people continued to dab my face from time to time and costume came along and tightened me up. It occurred to me that London Underground is not the only place in the world where people are paid a lot of money to stand around doing very little.

Modern Proverb #1

A friend of mine was once selling LSD in the West End, outside a club on a summer night, high on the acid himself. A man came and bought a few trips off him and went away. A few minutes later he returned, robbed my friend of all his acid, along with some weed, ecstasy and most of his money. My friend, bereft and feeling very edgy, walked down the street into the arms of several policemen who stuck him in the back of their van, searched him thoroughly but, finding nothing, were forced to let him go. So it is said that your guardian angel can take any form, even that of a thief who robs you in the night.

Run Come Rally

How they had got there was a blur. But now they were here, a large wood-panelled lecture room. People sprawled on tables along the walls of the room, while the centre, where hundreds of chairs were laid out in rows, was left alone.

He began shooting infiltrators. “You can tell who they are,” he announced to the room, “you just look into their eyes,” and it was true. The securitars had a sly, wicked look, their eyes had this dull sparkle which was quite obvious once you knew what to look for. A lot of them had these studded sleeves as well. He circled the room, looking in everyone’s eyes and shooting all the infiltrators. There was no protest. He shot them quick and gave them no time to react.

At one point he looked at four kids sat on a table, one with red hair, dressed like a devil, the others in green boiler suits, clown masks pushed up on the top of their heads. He whispered to the priest behind him, “what do you think?” The priest looked and said under his breath, “red hair.” Mendy quickly walked up and shot them all. As he did so the priest started to protest. “No, only the…” he said, but his voice drifted off.

Mendy had a TV handset in his pocket and suddenly thought of turning on the news. It seemed the thing to do. He had wondered what they were going to make of it. The pictures were from helicopters, showing the building’s brutal, concrete exterior. Words sat at the bottom of the screen. HOSTAGE CRISIS, they read. MANY HOSTAGES SHOT. He could see battalions of black-armed agents advancing towards the tower, like spilled coffee spreading across a carpet. Won’t be long, he thought.

Now, with all the infiltrators shot, slumped haplessly against the walls, the rest of the group began to patrol, waiting for it to happen. They shuffled around the room in a big circle. As they walked they passed bullets along the line, the bullets they had filched from the infiltrators. As he took a few from the person behind him, Mendy thought to himself, “we’re going to need a lot of bullets if we’re going to get out of here.”

Dolly Daggers, Asylum

21 September 2005

I’m standing around on Charlotte Street, after a underwhelming set from once-were-hopefuls Jade Fox waiting, with no great expectations, a short set from the all-new Daggers and then the welcome embrace of my duvet. From within suddenly I hear the set start, pacey drums, bass and a Rhodes keyboard being played (complete with wah-wah pedal) to sound like an electric guitar. Straight away, and I mean straight away, I rush downstairs into the seedy basement, awoken from ennui by the definite presence of that all too rare musical commodity – Electricity. Ladies and gentlemen, the Dolly Daggers have got something good.

On paper, and for all I know on vinyl as well, a three-piece playing pretty much a London take on the Strokes doesn’t sound spectacular. But take that template, basically fast, up-beat and most importantly short rock’n’roll pop songs, add a dash of the Beach Boys – mostly harmony singing rather than any sunny disposition – and sprinkle in some Bowie and whoever are the latest effeminate stars to borrow his mantle and you still only have half the Daggers’ recipe. To this concoction you have to add tidy musicianship, in writing and playing, great rock riffs, reminiscent thankfully of sixties rock (before they all forgot about the ‘n’roll bit) and effective, confident vocals. Finally, and essentially, zip it up in the blender with Alexis’ drumming, the first drummer I have seen for a long time (Keith Moon springs to mind) who looks like he’s actually trying to smash the drums up with his sticks, at the same time as trying to attain the world record for speed drumming. Then shake vigorously, which is what you’ll be doing when you hear them.

In a room full of musicians, the only noise louder than the band was the sound of a bar being raised. If I had to criticise, when they slowed down for ballads (showing good sense of the need for variety) the paucity of the lyrics showed through a bit. I won’t be asking any of these kids for advice on nothing soon, but if I want to dose up my evening with a jack of 1000 volts, I could look in a lot of worse places. They will be playing Asylum on Wednesday nights regularly and I advise you to get down there soon, before fame ruins them.

Pride and Prejudice

The new film starring Keira “Twice” Knightley and Matthew “Who?” Macfadyen is played with a straight bat by director Joe Wright, in his debut feature film, the first film adaptation of the novel for 65 years. Although never going surpass the definitive nineties BBC adaptation, the film is a fair, if unadventurous, stab at the classic period romance. The comedy is certainly handled well, a superlative Brenda Blethyn as Mrs. Bennett - apparently her last role before retirement - by far the best thing in it. Anchored by nice parts for Donald Sutherland, seemingly doing his best Michael Gambon impression, and Judi Dench, donning her well-worn regal air as the Duchess, the film proceeds at a brisk pace through the various turmoils and travails, reaching its destination with a certain inevitability, rather like a train pulling into a station.

I did wonder if I was being churlish, however, in sensing a definite lack at the centre of things; while Knightley is good at the comedy, the forthrightness and the being pretty aspects of the part there is an unfortunate sense that she doesn’t actually fancy Mr Darcy very much at all. At times, as they to-and-fro between despising and adoring each other, you find yourself wondering what she actually sees in him, a fairly major fault in such a definitive romance. Macfadyen, though he handles the acting requirements well enough, just doesn’t seem to have it in him to make her swoon. Very rarely do they occupy they same screen and I wondered whether when they filmed her doing sultry, they didn't have to stick a cardboard cut-out of someone else in front of her.

George Clinton, Forum

Some critics seem to have written him off, but the star-child keeps rockin’ hard as ever. Old fans may have got blasé, but they have merely forgotten; no-one does it like this lot. It don’t matter; any style they want; soul, funk, rock, doo-wop, hip-hop, they put anyone to the test. Although known primarily for their late-seventies disco hits, Parliament-Funkadelic encompass so much more they practically have their own corner of music. Two of the band sported AC/DC t-shirts, clear evidence that good, hard, show-stopping rock’n’roll matters to these guys just as much as beautiful vocal harmonies, booty-shaking bass lines or multi-layered horn-lines. George, dressed in a patchwork silk dress-shirt and with his multi-coloured locks tied up to show a subtle union jack, still helms the proceedings, but they go on quite contently with or without him actually on the stage. With musical virtuosos like keyboardist Bernie Worrell and guitarist Michael Hampton and a host of absurdly talented youngsters, the sheer exuberance, as they ripped through a practically bottomless back-catalogue, was gobsmaking. No question, these guys show how it’s done.

Named Parliament-Funkadelic for the occasion, instead of the usual P-Funk All-Stars, (due to the presence of Bernie Worrell, the name’s copyright-holder) the extended band (10 members? 20? You can never tell) blasted Kentish Town for over three hours. Although the name change didn’t herald much change in the usual set, they’re still imaginative, a female violinist, for example, playing the classic Maggot Brain solo, note for screaming note. How much longer Clinton, 66 last Friday, sporting some serious bags under his eyes and looking occasionally like he might like to keel over, can continue is a fascinating question. On this evidence he’ll still be out there with zimmer frame and (atomic) guide dog, leading both band and crowd in a lesson in how to party y’all. Towards the end the band filled the stage with most of the prettiest girls from the crowd. They all vanished backstage where, in the hey-day, the party went on for days. George himself, though, looked more like he was going to bed.

A Night in Baghdad, Purcell Rooms

Not, fortunately, actually in Baghdad and neither was this part of the apparently on-going attempt to bring some Baghdad life to London via the medium of suicide bombers. Instead Iraqi ex-pat Ahmed Mukhtar, virtuoso musician, played the Oud, an eleven-string fretless lute. Wearing snazzy shoes and a suit that seemed to have been made out of Plaster of Paris, Mukhtar took at first to the stage alone. Once there, he conjured music from his instrument that, while neither especially hypnotic nor beautiful, seemed still to entrance me. I became aware of sudden shifts in my attention, almost as though I’d been smoking hashish. Despite arriving with a sore back, thoughts of pain, unhappiness and discontent were momentarily unable to intrude through the music’s comforting glaze. Mukhtar explained that many of the tunes were versions of songs dating back four or five thousand years. The tunes lay on you as softly as a feather; they were there, but you couldn’t pick them out. It was gently eye-opening, the plucked strings softly resonating within me. For a moment there was danger of an impending spirituality; it was only resisted when I considered the possibility that I was indulging in this effect to stop myself from getting bored.

Ah, the turmoils of the agnostic! I needn’t have feared, since Mukhtar seemed to have a sixth sense; each time I’d consider being bored he’d be about to finish the song he was playing. After a few songs, he introduced the first of his accompanying percussionists and there was no more chance of getting bored. This guy came out in full Ali Baba get-up and proceeded to tap and subtly jangle a tambourine in a way unfathomable if you’ve only ever seen the instrument as a sop to rock stars’ girlfriends. He was soon followed by Kurdish drummer, Hassain Zahawy, wearing a kind of Kurdish kung-fu suit with white shoes like a cow’s hoof. He proceeded to batter the daff, a Kurdish drum, his fingers somehow doing the work of three or four drummers. To round off the set a third came out, this one in full Arabian headdress. With his pale face and pencil moustache though he looked curiously like an impostor, though he played his drums well enough. The three drummers showed how syncopated rhythms should be done, displaying a control of both timing and touch that puts to shame the harsh, computerised fare we generally subsist on. They finished the half with a Sufi rhythm in 9/8. When there’s a drum’n’bass tune in 9/8, then we might be getting somewhere.

In the toilet at the interval the guy next to me said “I think Bill’s right, it has been rather thrown together.” Oops, I thought, as a critic I need to keep my wits about me, rather than drifting off into a dream. The second half confirmed that Bill was right, it was thrown together, but it seemed all the better for it, as the drummers showed an exceptional ability to keep complicated poly-rhythms while taking cues, sharing solos (at which Zahawy excelled, playing a big marching drum with what looked like an umbrella handle) and all the while complementing Mukhtar and his soft, gracious Oud-playing. In fact the three drummers appeared genuinely impressed with each other, lending an extra glow to an already grand performance.

The Arab-Israeli Cookbook, Tricycle Theatre

The Tricycle, currently vying for an unprecedented fifth year running as winner of the most uncomfortable theatre in London, plays host to this watchable blend of Amos Oz, Alan Bennett and Ready, Steady, Cook. An assortment of characters from both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict perform mainly monologues and some domestic scenes, interspersed with their favourite recipes. The gimmick is that they actually cook them live on stage, filling the theatre with smells of Middle East cuisine, while all the talk is of tear gas, gun shots and, of course, suicide bombings. The script is based on interviews with real people and casually drops in details of the appalling quality of life for all sides - but especially the Arabs - while you are struggling to remember their culinary secrets.

My own culinary prowess was exposed today when, after I put a watermelon in my fridge to chill, it came out tasting of my fridge.

The British Working Class, Channel 4

Michael Collins’ adaptation of his own polemic makes interesting, but frustrating, viewing. Following roughly the same course as the book, Collins aims to expose a new era of derision towards the white working class, exemplified by the rise of the ‘chav’, that social outcast providing the tabloids with so much of their fodder. Websites such as chavscum detail this particular sub-group with relish and Collins traces it back to the MacPherson inquiry into the Lawrence murder and the opprobrium heaped on the five accused, white working-class boys.

Beyond that, Collins investigates his family's life in Elephant and Castle in the last 150 years and turns up pretty much your average "gor blimey guvnor me rosy-tin'id specs are on and no mistake" view of the pre-sixties working-class.

Collins has a point, it does seem as though racism and prejudice sometimes becomes acceptable as long as its about the poor, white natives; its true that the working-class have always been down-trodden and remain ever more so, despite the best intentions of the do-gooders, city planners, demagogues, Thatcherites and whoever else has taken an interest. The demonisation of ‘chavs’ does make me uncomfortable. When I first came across the phrase, it was out of the mouths of people who were scared of youths I thought they should have smacked around a bit. But as the chavscum webmaster points out, the people most up in arms about ‘chavs’ are the people who have to live among them, ie. the ‘respectable’ working-class.

But in so many ways Collins wants to have his cake and eat it. For example the white working classes are both entitled to protest against enforced multiculturalism (and march for Enoch) and yet are the best racially integrated of all social strata. That these might be different people seems to have completely escaped him. And this sort of example shows precisely where Collins goes wrong, in his lazy and gratuitous lumping together of countless different types of people under essentially two banners – the salt-of-the-earth, misunderstood and downtrodden working-class and the pretentious, interfering, prejudiced and privileged middle-class.

Which raises a slightly ad hominem point - which of the two groups does a working-class born and bred yet now successful journalist and film-maker fit into? Much praise for this book from the likes of Julie Burchill, who's made much of her working-class roots despite never clocking on for work in her life.

Others have produced far better dissections of Collins’ book than me. Andrew Anthony, Mike Phillips and particularly Ed Barrett offer thorough and interesting rebuttals of the weak-points of his arguments while all agreeing that there is something to his complaint.

Irony Alert

Environmentalists today warned of an impending worldwide catastrophe brought about by the widespread overuse of irony.

“We’re using up irony at such a rate,” claimed Greenpeace spokesman, Pith Taka, “that very soon there won’t be any left for future generations.”

Fingers have been pointed especially at America, which produces irony-consuming statements at far above the worldwide rate. Mr Taka pointed to President Bush’s recent statement regarding the London bombs as a prime example of a wanton disregard for the potential irony shortage. Bush said, amongst other things, “On the one hand, we got people here who are working to alleviate poverty and to help rid the world of the pandemic of AIDS and that are working on ways to have a clean environment. And on the other hand, you've got people killing innocent people.”

Bush is well known for his belief that current reserves of irony are more than enough to maintain the US’s cavalier usage. And he is deeply sceptical about the well-researched claims that overuse of irony has devastating consequences for the political environment. It is generally accepted amongst scientists that overuse of irony will lead eventually to rising cynicism levels, more frequent and serious political storms and the endemic corruption of leading governments, also known as the Whitehouse Effect.

Taking the cannabiscuit

Something is awry in the cannabis world. The recent “down-grading” of cannabis from class B to class C (making possession no longer an arrestable offence, but perversely accompanied by increased penalties for trafficking) has barely been given a moment to get bedded in before a clamour has arisen. Cannabis, we are told, and especially a new potent, vigorous strain known as “skunk” is addling the minds of our youth, sending some mad and damaging the development of the brains of others. This sort of thing has been appearing in obvious places (the Daily Mail), less obvious (Trevor McDonald’s Tonight) and surprising (the New Statesmen), but it certainly suggests a co-ordinated campaign.

The relaxing of the cannabis laws was a typical New Labour fudge. It pleased absolutely no-one, with the possible exception of the police who got, in one fell swoop, both less work and more power. It left the government open to the charge of being soft on drugs without showing any signs of understanding the problems. In short they did the thing that was the least of all the things they could do, as though that would make any difference. All it has done is encourage the rabid anti-cannabis lobby to dust down any number of dubious scientific studies to get out the idea that cannabis is a deadly poison mind-mangling spirit – which it may be.

Some of what is being said has a grain of truth – there certainly are stronger strains of marijuana widely available nowadays and these strains are certainly implicated in mental distress for some people. Of course it has been known for many years that cannabis can complicate mental illness and should be, but often is not, avoided by sufferers. There is, however, a lot of hysteria being generated about “skunk weed” at present with some people even suggesting that crack addiction is preferable to habitual skunk consumption. But if anybody would seriously prefer their child to consume crack instead of skunk, then they need to learn more about crack.

The name “skunk” is a generic term for certain strains of marijuana with general but not essential characteristics in common. In actual fact “skunk” was one of the original hybrid strains successfully bred by growers in California but it is now an umbrella term for all marijuana engineered in this way. These hybrids differ somewhat from “traditional” cannabis. Firstly they are stronger in their effects, with the active chemical THC (tetrahydrocannabinol) present in higher proportions. Secondly they have frequently been bred to be ideal for indoor growing, under lights and often hydroponically – with water and chemicals instead of earth.

It is this indoor growing which has transformed the UK cannabis market. In the eighties UK-grown cannabis was poor quality and the market was dominated by North African hashish and African marijuana, alongside the better quality Indian hashish and Caribbean marijuana. The quality was variable and droughts were sporadic. Most of the marijuana which arrived here had been compressed into blocks to facilitate smuggling. Unless it was very high quality (known in the Caribbean as “sensimilla”) it would generally have been fertilised by the male cannabis plant and contain unsmokable seeds, which would have to be removed by hand. The hashish would frequently have been pressed and pressed again, allowing smugglers to add all manner of material to their produce to make it go further. This traditionally would include vast quantities of henna, the plant dye, but also even the less palatable motor oil could find its way into the bars. Quality marijuana and hashish were available, of course, but unreliably so.

At the start of the nineties developments in indoor growing technology allowed both huge warehouses and bedroom closets to be turned over to cannabis production. The cannabis produced – “skunk weed” – was not only reliably potent but more importantly reliably fresh and (due to the ease of the male plants being removed from the grow-chambers) unfertilised. For this reason almost all “skunk weed” is sensimilla.

Thus, the attraction of skunk was obvious and it rapidly over-ran the market. The staple poor quality Moroccan hash (“Rocky”) and African bush weed are still available but at absurdly low prices. In 1990 an ounce of Rocky would cost £80-£90. Nowadays it would be unlikely to fetch much more than £40. That there is still a market is in a large part due to the reluctance of many smokers to regularly use skunk, because although it has its attractions, it also has its problems.

When skunk was still very new I was told that some Jamaicans had taken to calling it “obeah weed”. “Obeah” is a term for the Jamaican occult, similar to Voodoo and was not being used as a compliment. Jamaicans could already access fresh sensimilla of traditional strains and were wary of this new-fangled variety. There was an important difference between the marijuana they were smoking and the marijuana produced by the skunk strains.

Cannabis is divided into two major varieties – sativa and indica. These varieties have different types of THC. Sativa has more THC and Indica more CBD (cannabidiol) and produce noticeably different types of cannabis. Indica strains generally produce cannabis with a heavier, physical effect compared with sativa’s lighter, more cerebral high. Cannabis indica also produces a more resinous plant and is the source of almost all the world’s hashish, grown in a swathe from southern India across Afghanistan, Pakistan, across the Middle East and into North Africa. Cannabis sativa does not produce enough resin to make large-scale hashish production feasible and so generally is processed as marijuana buds. Sativa grows across central and southern Africa, continental America, the Caribbean and also some parts of south-east Asia, notably Thailand.

Skunk weed, however, although grown, processed and sold like sativa, is never a 100% sativa strain. This is because only indica strains grow large enough and mature quickly enough to make indoor growing worthwhile. Over the years many strains have been developed with more sativa in their genes, because it is widely understood that sativa produces a more mellow high compared with indica, but almost never is a skunk strain less than 50% indica.

Over the years I have heard many cannabis smokers complain about the skunk weed which they consume. They say that it “mongs them out” and that, even in small doses, its strength is of a different order to ordinary marijuana. Often they also enjoy that increased strength. But they are forced into choosing skunk because high quality sensimilla is so hard to obtain in this country. Time and time again they have only a choice of skunk weed, poor quality “bush weed” or adulterated hashish. This skunk has frequently been grown in poor conditions, using fertiliser chemicals under unnatural lighting. The different effects all of this causes in the final product is very difficult to assess and differentiate from the increased potency of the indica strains. Street skunk weed is frequently known as “punk”, rhyming slang but also perhaps a comment on its quality.

Drug laws are not renowned for their rationality but the irony of anti-cannabis campaigners complaining about the potency of skunk is telling. It is the very drug laws they seek to reinforce which create the circumstances in which skunk weed is so prevalent.

Yet another irony is the call for more research into cannabis. Research is, of course, always welcome but there is evidence of the use of cannabis as an intoxicant stretching back at least 2000 years and countless research papers have been prepared on its effects – many suppressed after failing to come up with the desired negative results. Compare that with the widely prescribed Ritalin and consider whose youth are having their brain development damaged.

Mortal Luvbat

The sooner we recognise that we are all mortal, the better. I don't think one has to put a skull on one's desk as a memento mori as they did in the Middle Ages. But I've always felt there is no such thing as darkness: only the absence of light. There is no such thing as evil: only the absence of goodness. And one can accept death more easily if one doesn't think of it as an equal opposite but simply as no life.
Peter Brook

Abdullah Ibrahim, RFH

The 70-year-old South African pianist comes to grace the RFH with his sublime playing. And grace is the right word, because everything he does is imbued with a permeating peacefulness. A true jazz master, only very occasionally did anything as base as a tune sully proceedings. But somehow I felt I could listen to his playing and understand precisely what the song was about. The drummer and young bass player provided excellent support, although at times I felt the drummer was a little too busy, almost flashy, for the auspicious atmosphere.

The problem for the critic, when reviewing such an established great, is that any criticisms he may have more about him than the criticised. Once an artist has been playing at this level for over 50 years, they become, more or less, beyond criticism – it’s a take it or leave it situation. But if I was to be honest, I’d say that it was perhaps too peaceful, and I may have dozed off towards the end. Luckily any residue of stillness I might have reserved was rapidly wiped away by a quick visit to the late showing of Star Wars : Revenge of the Utter Shite.

Writing

The beautiful thing about writing is that you don’t need anything. In order to write, all you need is to write.

The writer continuously needs to say everything twice, to repeat himself, but say it differently the second time. This means he needs to have two phrases for everything he wishes to say, which is a pain, but it at least doubles the chance that he’ll be understood.

Writing, like most things, is an escape. Momentarily engaged with putting mind to pen to paper the writer loses touch with those torments which bedevil his ordinary existence, his doubts, worries, fears, pains and, for a brief moment of forgetfulness – of lost attention – he becomes as he is.

Of course worries and concerns are not imaginary and will therefore reinstitute themselves in due course, if they can. The writer gains relief from them, a moment to breathe fresh air, a reminder that the most pressing of problems has its limits, although he is not able to transcend them.

At least writing fills his time, gives him at least the illusion of a purpose. Aha, he looks up from the page – a few more minutes have been spent fitfully. Despite the fact that even the finest fruit will wither and rot, it is still considered better to be fruitful than to be barren. Fruit, of course, never outlives a tree – only the stone, the hard unyielding nut, has that chance. But just like a tree can be strangled by weeds, so can a writer choke on his own over-grown metaphor and resign to start afresh.

Degradiation Sickness

The "happy slapz" craze had barely scathed my consciousness until I came across this (zipped files of .3gp files - open them from QuickTime player) assortment of downloaded films which show that "happy slapz" are neither slaps, nor particularly happy. There is an odd fascination is watching them, but mostly it is incredibly depressing and quite a few border on the unwell, to my obviously ageing temperament. Be warned, the youth of today are by turns violent, sick, nasty and only occasionally very funny. And definitely not as funny as they think they are. Mostly it is run-of-the-mill teenager-on-teenager bullying and degredation but the mobile phone also takes us into a council estate world where drug dealers tie up and slap up their indebted customers and teenagers film their mates having sex on the stairwell.

On a related, and slightly more amusing theme armed police arrested a load of A Level media studies students filming a mock gun fight in Barkingside.

Semantics #2

Idiosyncronicity - when being wrong is too much of a coincidence.

Family

"The great thing about family life is that it introduces you to people you'd otherwise never meet."
Christopher Hitchens

18 Stones of Idiot, Channel 4

aka 60 Minutes of Shite.

Johnny Vegas' new show, a Chris Evans-produced rehash of "Don't Forget Your Toothbrush" (other possible names may have included "Don't Forget Why You Left TV") is hopeful but suffers on too many levels. Although sporadically funny, Johnny's new found TV confidence finds him in hectoring, arrogant mood - but if I wanted to see 18 Stones of Yelling Alcoholic I could pop down to any number of pubs. It strikes me that a morbidly obese Northerner, no matter how quick-witted, is always going to have a problem cast as an obnoxious cunt, but Johnny perseveres, casting off his previous sympathetic, somewhat downtrodden persona for a character modelled roughly on a cross between Julie Burchill and Vyvian out the Young Ones' with a massive pile of cocaine. At this point I'd tend to seek solace in the Bible, where I'm sure it says "let he who is without man-tits cast the first stone", but the trendy young do-as-they're-told audience lap it up. In fact, considering the diabolical stste of TV nowadays, the show was more than passable. Ray Winstone made a fairly uninspiring guest and getting some doofus off the shopping channel to act as foil for JV's rapier spittle was also uninspiring - so much so that I couldnt think of another word. "Celebrity Lock-in", where 80's b-list slebs - Rusty Lee (!), Roland out of Grange Hill - sat in 90s-uber-pub the Good Mixer showed that TV is the best at parodying itself, but also failed to live up even to its own half-arsed joke. And letting Neil Hamilton on was just cruel.

Overall, 50/50. Meaning I wouldn't turn it on, but I wouldn't turn it off.

First Wanking, Now This

Viagra makes you blind

Whats next? Doggy Style? Blow jobs? Blindfolds?

Theatre of Blood, National Theatre

Lavish romp, based on seventies cult film, in which a deranged old ham murders a gaggle of critics after they murder his season of Shakespeare. Each murder is a twist on a famous Shakespearean death scene - Shylock gets his pound of flesh, Joan of Arc gets frizzled alive in a hairdressing salon, to mention just two. The subject matter obviously makes it hard for an uninhibited judgement, but luckily the play, and especially the performances, are spot on. Jim Broadbent, as the murderer is fantastic, spouting amateur-dramatic Shakespeare endlessly but still garnering sympathy. The critics are nicely judged in their seventies get up, each one's character faintly representing the paper they work for. The set, the proscenium arch of a delapidated theatre, sited in the austere Lyttleton, is a nice touch. Overall, its great fun and the added self-referential element - how the about-to-open National Theatre will ruin/save theatre - made it more involving than a straight black farce. That the point they may have been making was lost to those of us lacking theatrical pedigree, didnt matter.

Cannabis March

Surprised myself by stumbling upon this demo, gearing up in leafy Russell Square for a short trod to that concrete sun box, Trafalgar Square. The turnout wasn’t great and no-one I knew had heard about it either. The poor advertising was explained to me to be due to problems getting a licence to march from the authorities. Apparently the organisers had to stump up £1800 for the ‘security’ (presumably plod) and the licence wasn’t awarded until three weeks ago. The march was ostensibly about medical cannabis, presumably being the best route for the grievances to get a hearing and there were a few wheel-chaired bods about the place but it was mostly that studenty crowd that you’d expect. The march itself was OK, quite a bit of media around and samba drummers and pretty girls. Then everybody congregated in sunstroke hell under Nelson to listen to a variety of speakers including Caroline Coon, the lady who started Release. She started badly - "The campaign for the end of prohibition is often pejoratively stigmatised as silly, hippie, white and 'middle-class'" - and then got worse - choice out of context quotes include "Most dealers of cannabis are black" and "Black youth is drawn into the criminal gang culture because cannabis is a sellers market". You can read her somewhat controversial speech here. It is of course actually well-meaning and, listening closely, she may even have a point. But it somehow didnt seem right. Luckily the wind blew the sound all over the place.

I was thinking about how the government keeps drugs illegal because they can make more money out of them that way. The criminalisation of weed is such bad grace that only conspiracy theories really do it justice.

Ong Bak

Much hyped Thai contribution to the martial arts revival of late, involving extraordinary stunt-work from the lead Tony Jaa reminiscent of Jackie Chan in his heyday. He leaps over, under, around, between moving cars, vats of boiling oil, panes of glass and countless other people - in one shot he escapes a legion of baddies by jumping up and running from shoulder to shoulder over them. Tbe opening scene, featuring 20 Thai schoolkids fighting to be first to the top of a tree - up and down the tree - was fantastic and original. The fight scenes, where he employs Muay Thai against a variety of western and oriental opponents, were dramatic and believable. Unfortunately the film commits the common error of using up all its big fights too early, so that the finale is just more of the same. Also the realism of the Muay Thai is at the expense of the delight and variation seen in the Hong Kong flicks. By the final fights it had almost lost my unforgivably jaded attention.

The just

He said to me, “you’ll sleep like a baby”
I said, “yeah I will. Wake up every two hours and cry.”

Henry IV Part 2

Shakespeare, according to popular wisdom, invented countless words we still use today. One word he should have invented is "superfluous", because it comes in handy summing up the dialogue in this drawn-out parade of insignifica. This play could well have been Kafka's inspiration for a labourious bureaucratic nightmare. It seems to me that if you are going to have to listen to three hours of esoteric verbal gerrymandering, you should at least get a few murders and a ghost, like in Scooby Doo. Watching this, in some vain attempt to up my cultural capacity, meant I turned down a ticket to see Arsenal. Luckily, they only won 7-0. Culture has not come out showered in glory.

Too Good To Be True

If something's too good to be true, they often say, it is. Alternatively, I have come to realise, it may just not be that good.

Love

Bill : He was murdered by a spurned lover
Nige : It could happen. Not to me, but it could happen.

Pope Idol

The new pope will be elected by votes from the cardinals. All the wannabes will have to do a turn or two. Could they televise it and call it "Pope Idol"? or maybe "The Cross Factor"

Dave Allen RIP

A great comedian whose enduring gags were those pointing up unnoticed absurdities in ordinary life. My personal favourite, which I remember watching as a very small boy, was one about a sign he had seen saying "Are you Illiterate? If you have trouble reading and writing, contact this address!" Others are here

In memorium, I'll offer my own. On the back of a credit card I saw a small notice saying "If your card is lost or stolen phone 0898xxxxxxxx". Handy, I suppose, if you've just stolen one.

Raison d'être

Within this life I find
that I'm craven
I could have been wine
but instead of that I'm
a raison

All of the time
I find I need a haven
I should have been wine
but I'm
a raison

The good doctor

"In America, childhood is a disease. Spontaneity is a symptom."
Oliver Sacks

Thinking is a Mindfield

Cheap Self-Help Phrase of the Week

"Your Wish Is Your Command"

Drugs damage the capacity for reason

The drugs debate takes another of its ponderous turns with the reaction to the new Met Police chief’s ludicrous attack on middle-class drugs users. Ekow Eshun makes a few valid points, but misses (or denies) the truly glaring inconsistency in the argument that the moral middle-classes should forgo cocaine because of its connection to global terrorism and crime. If ever an argument begged the point this is the one – is it the affluent user who creates the crime with their demand or is it the ass of a law which puts the control into the hands of gangsters.

Eshun makes an interesting point about Pete Doherty, the shambolic pop star, whose pictures – looking decidedly worse for wear - graced the tabloids throughout the week and who spent the weekend in prison after allegedly assaulting a photographer and stealing his money. Doherty, Eshun says, is feted by the broadsheets whilst being condemned by the tabloids. He thinks it's because Doherty is from a middle-class family, but it strikes me that drug-crushing rock stars were always working-class in the old days and were feted just the same. Well, not quite the same, since Doherty was – extraordinarily - interviewed by Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark, but it's just a matter of degree. It’s easy to say that if Doherty was in a Burberry suit he’d be ignored but history disagrees. Talent will out, generally, given the chance. (This is not to express an opinion on Doherty's talent which I have yet to actually witness, despite occasionally trying to listen to the Libertines.)

In fact the point about the tabloids points up something else, which is the way that the working-class often have stricter morals than the middle-class (which the tabloids reflect with their lurid and condemnatory coverage). They need them, because they can end up so much worse than the poor rich kids. So the problem with middle-class drug users becomes that because they have the leisure, money and space in which to indulge their drug use they encourage society as a whole to accept drug use, the results of which are far worse once they become endemic on poor council estates amongst people with none of these luxuries.

But this is really an argument long overtaken by events. It seems to be a constant one step forward two steps back. A study comes out showing that heroin, removed from its criminal snare and simply prescribed to addicts is actually basically manageable and causes little strain on the addict’s body, certainly far less than alcohol. I remember reading a report of a Swiss study which showed this in the seventies. The reaction to this sensible study is entirely predictable – a cacophony of condemnation for suggesting that people can take heroin safely. The fact that it appears they can is lost. Again it comes down to the same old point. The drug laws create more problems than they solve.


Looking through newspaper reports this morning you see the same words coming up over and over again. “Feted”, “shambles”, “worse for wear”. Luckily I’ve managed to avoid using them myself.

Rather brilliant headline here ’I chased Pete Doherty with a claw hammer’ in the Telegraph of all places.

Tree tops

Space cadets. We sat at the corner of the park, waiting for the sun to go down far enough to make it too cold to sit there any more. The wind picked up and the light trailed across the grass in long, stalactite-like rays. The sun glistened at the top of the trees, like a diver waiting to plunge off a high board. The grass rustled in the wind, spelling out the wind’s impetus, as though two invisible people were having a wrestling match. We was high.

It was inevitable, nowadays, but in a car crash you’d prefer an airbag and so, living in a society of car crashes, I’d come to prefer a cushion or two. It blew up in my face, and smothered me, just as I was getting worried. Sometimes I worried that I couldn’t breathe, but that went away.

My friend, who was restless by nature, had gone off and was considering the higher branches of a tree. Mentally, of course, all things are possible. And as the mind and the body are one, that means that physically all things are possible. It is just a matter of bending physics to will, I suppose. Not necessarily to will, of course, but perhaps more to intention. These subtle differences meant nothing to me, but they provided us with a great deal of idle chat.

I looked up in time to see my friend skirting those same upper branches with the agility of a small monkey. “Its still warm up here,” he told me, as a blast of wind stung my face.

I turned around and looked at the tree, which seemed to be still growing out of the ground as I stared, a gigantic thing of constant motion, which I suppose it actually is. The trunk seemed to be straining to get away from the roots, just as the roots seemed to be snaking out of the ground. The intention of a tree is plain – to go upwards – but does it have a will?

Climbing a tree is as natural – perhaps more natural – than walking, but it requires a certain lack of attention, a forgetfulness, which is the forgetfulness of down. Your body carries you upwards quite happily, but your mind will remain on the ground if you let it, and constantly interfere. Only when you have to return to the ground do you appreciate what it was going on about.

We sat up in the branches, smoking weed and staring into the sun. Suddenly a wave of dissatisfaction came over me. “This is all very twee,” it said, “we want more about the car crashes.” I turned to look at my friend who had nestled between the branches like he was on a sofa, but his eyes were shut. I realised I was both in the tree and on the ground at the same time. If I made a wrong move, it occurred to me, something very wrong could happen. I could either fall out of the tree or, possibly, fall back into it.

The branches seemed to constrict me now, full of intention. I realised that my arms and legs were not in their usual place, that is somewhere to the left and right of me, but instead appeared to be all around me, in front, behind, above, in places in which you’d never think they’d get to. I stretched my leg out and began felt a long hard stab in my back which ran up my spine and past my head. Air rushed past my ears, whistling a favourite tune. Branches bounced off me, as though a whole gang of schoolkids were attacking me. I grabbed one as it went past and held on tight to it, hoping to use it as protection. It spoke to me.

It said, “Hold tight.” The other branches stopped hitting me and I dangled in the air listening to the movement of the tree. I thought I’d open my eyes at this point. When I did I realised that I was above my friend in the tree, and not below him, as I had thought I would be. This gave me a powerful shock as I realised the tree had actually been attacking me, instead of the whole thing being a cosy hallucination as I tumbled downwards.

Later on we repaired to my house and sat around staring at the ceiling.

I took acid with Groucho Marx

here

Requiem For A Dream

Stunningly shot and crafted film, portraying the shocking decline of three junkies and one pill-popping mum. Consummate film-making slightly let down in the event by a rather melodramatic and un-nuanced ending which casts all four protagonists into separate lonely hells. There is something somehow very American, (and slightly childish) about the ending, which seems to have set upon being an unhappy-ever-after. Certainly there is no trace of irony. Haunting visuals and music linger long, long afterwards.

Gherkin

The favourite building du jour the Swiss Re Gherkin needs a little merchandising. My mind cannot help, unfortunately, turning in the direction of sex. So I propose the Gherkin dildo. And the Gherkin condom, coloured in the manner of the building and also possibly tasting of gherkin. It's Gherkin Great! it could say. Then you could have a little calender with aphorisms on it such as "Drink is the ruin of the Gherkin classes" or something.

No one is taken

Iraq

(through the bottom of a glass darkly)

Life - a test to see if you will kill yourself before it kills you

Primo, National Theatre

The set is stark. A plain, cold set with a doorway at the back which frames another smaller doorway behind which is a light. The bare, square, grey look is like that of a prison but has an unworldly, unnerving effect. There is a sense of the cleanliness of German architecture, the lines of Bauhaus and the austerity of Zen. On stage there is a sole plain wooden chair, which somehow implies a Buddhist flower blossom. It is a very beautiful set, and sets the tone precisely.

The lights darken and suddenly come up and Sher is there, framed in the doorway. He quickly takes to the stage and, dressed in a plain suit with glasses and speaking in a unaffected tone, he effectively embodies the scientific, the matter-of-factness of Primo Levi. Yet, there is a certain staginess. Although Sher is Levi telling the story, somehow he remains Sher. The character doesn’t quite absorb him. This is because they have kept a certain distance from the audience. He tells the story but there is little sense that he is telling us personally, in the way of a storyteller. In some way, he doesn’t engage the audience. He remains stiff and calm and the unrelenting nature of the monologue challenges you alone to make the engagement. You feel uncomfortable and don’t forget yourself in the performance, but it is impossible to resent it while he is telling you a story of genuine suffering.

(And what suffering. That, he gets across. When we hear about so much suffering in the world, does Levi’s story not represent the apex? Although others suffer as much, surely no-one has suffered more.)

Presumably the disconnected effect is entirely deliberate, but it is hard to tell. In any case watching Sher there is a sense of watching acting royalty. You settle purely to observe how he chooses to do it, rather than judging critically. Even if one might do it differently, it remains completely acceptable. In acting terms, Sher displays his mastery. Relating the entire story in the Levi’s unadorned manner, he allows himself only one moment of ‘ordinary’ acting, one glimmer of emotion as he tells the story of the man who prayed with thanks for avoiding the selection. The emotions are anger, disgust, sadness and Sher conveys them all with only a hint, barely a touch upon the wheel before immediately returning to the prevailing restraint. You feel he could have brought a hurricane with a switch in the tone of his voice.

Your Bed is Your Enemy

My grandmother once told me, while talking about depression, “your bed is your enemy.” It is true to say that nothing seems as bad as it does when you are lying in the dark on your own. Just the act of getting up seems to alleviate depression, although it may be that you just swap some for wanting to go back to bed. It strikes me that the best thing you can do with depression is to sublimate it, by doing something you don’t want to do. It appears that the brain only has so many receptors for pain and that these fire off more or less whatever is going on; therefore you may as well feel your existential agony related to something tangible instead of it simply torturing you unmitigated as you lie in bed. Perhaps its because you’ve so recently left the happy world of sleep, wherein you prove the truth of ignorant bliss; perhaps it’s the jarring transition. Perhaps its just me. Suddenly I feel terrible.

The Rant Begins

Never let it be said that I was hindered by the lack of technological accoutrements – I am able, if not to write as fast as I think, then at least to think as slowly as I write, which amounts to much the same thing. At least it allows me the luxury of being able to fill acres of electronic pixels with my ill-formed ramblings, a skill and pleasure which I little indulged in over the years, fearing that I would be some sort of pretentious weirdo, making up for his lack of social skills by sitting at home battering a typewriter to no good end.

Ah, now I am able, if only I could generate some thoughts with which to relay. I can easily act as conduit, but the lightning is lacklustre, merely scraping the grass instead of carving great craters out of the earth. If I sit here long enough translating electrical impulses into rapid finger movements, surely something will happen. Like the way radio interference is occasionally livened up by the odd alien transmission, similarly, the more words that I concoct from my internal conversation, the more likely I am to hit upon something worth all the jabbering. With this confidence in my mind, I shall attempt to say one thing per paragraph.

Luck is not something that I have close acquaintance with; my brain is apparently too slow to fully appreciate the opportunities that do come along, and luck is mainly, I would say, the ability to appreciate opportunities. That is how you make your own luck. Of course, you could say that you have to be lucky enough to appreciate those opportunities, which would also be true, if a little (here the word escapes me, but I know that its one my mother would use about me).

If I sit here in communion, utterly undisciplined muttering, scattering the blank page, with occasional bursts of poetry falling in accidentally, if I sit here long enough perhaps they will pay me. The thing about luck I have noticed is that its not enough for it to ignore you, it has to kind of shuffle alongside you, look you up and down, make you fully conversant of its locality and only then turn up its nose and scoot off as though to say “Ha! Made you look!” “Its not the despair,” John Cleese says in Clockwise, “it’s the hope.”

I did think, previously, that a good idea would be to extinguish all hope, in the hope (ha!) of finding some kind of peace and happiness, only it didn’t turn out that way. Perhaps I failed to utterly extinguish all hope. In fact, looking back, that is exactly what I failed to do, because I failed to extinguish the hope that I could be happy. This Hindu chap I was reading was criticising the Buddhists with their “extinguish desire” teachings, on the grounds that it was impossible and would only give you a complex. He, on the other hand, suggests that you extinguish all likes and dislikes, which seems to me to be equally as unlikely. Can you extinguish all likes and dislikes? Doesn’t one like being happy, and dislike being unhappy?

Oops, I seem to be slipping, as I used to in the past, into writing about philosophy, as though that was the only thing in the world that is important. How to live a good life, that is probably important. What else should we be thinking about?

Blair's heckler

Richard Ingrams pointed out, in yesterdays Observer, and Rory Bremner also noted on his show, talking about Blair’s heckler at the party conference, that as Blair wisecracked (not for the first time) that the protestor was lucky to live in a democracy where he could protest all he liked, that self-same protestor was being frog-marched out of the hall by goons. It's self-evidently ridiculous, and quite galling, for Blair to speak about the merits of our truncated democracy while smothering it with a huge fat arse. Of course Blair’s point is not that the man is allowed to interrupt his speech, but that at least he will not be murdered for his opinions, which is true, but it doesn’t say much about the level of politics in this country if we pat ourselves on the back for not being a tyranny. Is Saddam Hussein the benchmark now?

Luck

Not having any of it. Or in actual fact, having lots of it, but all of it bad. Firstly, my Ibizan trip was wrenched apart by a spine which made the unilateral decision to lead a battle against the forces of gravity. Instead of enjoying the relaxing atmosphere of hippies and sunshine I hobbled about like a broken weather vane flapping in a gale. Still, if the main purpose of the holiday was crushed under karma's stilleto, the secondary purpose, to drink sangria all day and eat inordinate amounts of seafood, was a runaway success. So it wasn’t in such a bad frame of mind that I inched my way back up my stairs at home. And the puddle of water which I spied in the middle of the floor didn’t instantly make me panic. In fact, in a leisurely manner did I decide to follow the still water back not from the bathroom where I had assumed some water had spilt the week before but towards the washing machine where I could see a lot more water had poured out, soaking the floor boards and (it later transpired) fusing the downstairs neighbour’s lights.

After I’d established that even this was not a terrible situation (at least not for me who didn’t have to cook with a torch) and that there was nothing much we could do except wait for it to dry out I turned on my TV and after a while it did what it had been threatening to do for some months, pop and transform the rich tapestry of modern culture into a momentary white glimmer and then a funereal black nothingness.

Bad luck is hanging over me like my own personal cloud. Luckily, however, with my worldview pitched exactly at this level, I am in my element. Pessimism is a much under-rated characteristic and rarely pays many dividends. Just occasionally, though, when the world does turn around and wipe its arse with you, you can sit back (lie down awkwardly in my case) and allow yourself a small grin for being proved right.

Anniversary

Cell Blog H

Jons in Jail

Groundblog Day

the story of a man who finds that everyday in the blog world is the same. Driven to cut his wrists, he dies. And gets buried. Hence the ground bit.

Circus Oz, Royal Festival Hall

This decent Australian circus troupe have taken over the somewhat incongruous surrounds of the royal festival hall for their summertime stint. Given tickets and overhearing that it was the Jerry Sadowitz of circus, I’d expected some kind of adult circus – perhaps with dominatrix and lewd gymnastics – but the gaggle of noisy kids soon put paid to that theory. What we got was a fairly traditional, even bare-bones circus in an inappropriate theatrical environment. This resulted in a lack of the atmosphere fostered by a big top and a somewhat limited view for those of us stuck high up in the balcony, which was not helped by their propensity for doing much of the act dimly lit for one reason or another.

Led by some rather plain-spoken Australians, who introduced things much as they might have told you which bus to get on, things cavorted on amiably but lacked any sense of menace – the sort of thing Papa Lazarus would bring, for instance. Also missing was any sort of story element to most of the set pieces. Certainly people are getting blasé in this day and age and having just spent a week watching gymnastics at the Olympics probably didn’t help but a bit of human interest would have gone a long way.

The opening scene, with the clown walking about on the ceiling was great and where the circus used its imagination it really excelled. After a first act which slightly dragged the second started with acrobats whose simple expedience of dressing up as cockatoos made the whole thing seem infinitely more worthwhile. The contortionist provided a bit of plot as we followed his attempt to get his doubled-jointed body through two tennis rackets.

Having said that, the human cannonball set was rather spoiled by a rather cack-handed political head-graft, references to the coalition of the willing and the razor wire of oppression a bit pointless. They got the second row up on stage for that one. A couple of them were wearing suits. “Is that the right get-up for the circus” cackled the ring-mistress, but it was the RFH.

Australians appear to slip into two categories, the boorish idiots and the PC loons (I know this isn’t true, but bear with me). These lot were definitely in the PC category, for which I suppose we should be grateful, although the dedication at the last to “diversity, friendship and human kindness” went some way over the top. Not a big top, of course.

Soul Chicken

When I was boy we used to call up the devil at séance type evenings. The theory was that, even though in all likelihood nothing at all would happen, there was a chance that something terrible would. We called it “Chicken for the Soul”

The Meaning of Life

I said to him, “do you think when we die we’ll get to see the meaning of life?”

He asked me, “What answer would satisfy you?”

Jon Gaunt

The phone-in jock has a difficult balancing act to achieve. He needs to accomplish the “provoke and stroke” manoeuvre, by which he irritates his listeners enough to phone in, but not so much that they switch off in disgust. Caesar the Geezer, back in the days of LBC, was a master at this, alternately sympathizing with put upon east enders, before berating them for casual racism or taking some vegan student to task before agreeing on animal testing. Jon "not at all" Gaunt, on the other hand, utterly fails at this complicated endeavour, settling instead for a flurry of right-of-centre opinions dressed up as common sense. Let us remember that common sense, for all its virtues, would have us believe that the world is flat.

None of this puts off Gaunty, as he is known by his loving audience of bitter cabbies. He adds in the irritating feature of claiming to be even handed, all the while sharply cutting off those who he doesn’t agree with and letting those he does ramble away like a whisky-soaked pub bore. Not content with that, Gaunt has dreamt up the brilliant gimmick of gratuitously interrupting people, exclaiming “if you’ll just let me finish!”. The man then complains bitterly if anyone tries to stop him when he’s in mid-flow which is, for a show ostensibly for the public to have their say, more often than you would hope.

Like many people enjoying success nowadays, Gaunt is a overly reconstructed leftie and at the start of the Afghan War he got on his old hero John Pilger to debate the rights and wrongs of the bombing campaign. Pilger, who sounded like he’d rather be in Afghanistan than talking to Gaunt, lasted about a minute before Gaunt, unable to stop himself even for such an illustrious guest, jumped in while Pilger was in mid-sentence and Pilger responded by hanging up. Gaunt’s face was a picture – and this is on the radio - and he spent the rest of the show asking his operator to “keep a line open for John” in case he’d been cut off and wondering if he’d phoned back yet.

Writers

Writers are either like reptiles or like mammals. Some nurture their works, returning to them nightly, keeping them warm. Others have their works gestate inside until one day they emerge fully formed, through a short burst of agony, screaming.

Me? I'm a sort of platypus. Funny looking and hate Australians.

Punishments and Rewards

We met in the café. He seemed to look out at me, as though he’d stayed at home. I felt very far away. He took a deep breath.

“Gina visited,” he told me. “She told me that she loves me.”

There are times when a sentence is so at variance with its setting that you doubt firstly that you heard it right, and, if so, that you are going mad. I looked at a bleak, defeated man, and heard the words that I knew he’d spent his entire adult life waiting for. Obviously there was some kind of catch.

“You remember Deborah?” he asked. I did. I met her about a year before. Strictly on-the-side material, a girl he’d barely wanted to introduce to me but who he’d kept on through dry times. “Got her pregnant,” he said, flatter than Kansas.

Grey eyes. He seemed to have built himself one particular facial expression and cemented it in place. A kind of pensive, downcast look, like that of someone who’s still waiting for a bus even though he’s missed the job interview. Not so bad that old ladies would stop him in the street, but the kind of guy to whom you’d say, “might never happen” and he could reply, “already has.”

So Deborah was pregnant. That was a minor disaster, although of course it wasn’t at all, and he knew it. In fact, he went on to say, he was quite happy about it. But then Gina had turned up, the cheetah among the pigeons. “She told me that she loves me.”

Another deep breath. He was moving air the way Sisyphus moves rocks, slowly, without enthusiasm. I was beginning to join in. I could see the problem. If you loved someone and you continued to love them, over years and years and you gave up, you moved on – although moving on implies somewhere to go – and then, when the die has been cast, when the window has shut, they come back, and tap on the glass…

“The worst thing,” he said, as though at a funeral, “is that I can’t even kill myself, because of the kid.”

There was a short pause while we digested that little statement.

Punishment and rewards. If only you were punished immediately for your transgressions, then nobody would ever do any. It’s the waiting around for your karma that does it, you never know which of your doings you’re being punished for.

Rosewater Ketamine

I was told a good story the other day. When ketamine was first becoming popular, in those dark days between the shit Es and the shit coke, it was easy to buy in India. I don’t know if it still is or not, but at that time you could easily buy it in any Indian chemist. Then you’d dissolve it in water (or it came ready dissolved) and send it back off to England. The most popular way was in bottles of rosewater. So this one canny Indian, he looks at all these English people buying rosewater, day after day, buying bottles of rosewater and sending them back to England. So he thinks, “This is very strange. I’ve never heard of a white man’s craze for rosewater, despite my many cousins in Southall and Birmingham. Perhaps they are not aware of it.” So he asks them, “have you heard about a craze for Indian rosewater?” and they think about it and they tell him no, never. So it seems simple. Lets import the rosewater ourselves. The market is there for us, at our mercy. All we have to do is strike.

And so it came about that ten years later, a lot of Indian shops carry a lot of tatty looking rosewater.

The banging

Banging went on about me. The TV was still on, mumbling in the background. The light overwhelmed the shoddy blinds and saturated the sweaty room. I woke up three times before I gave up trying to sleep, each time less and less sleepy and correspondingly more and more tired. The sweat had clung to me and made itself into almost complete suit, a suit stained with shame. I got up. Things couldn’t be this bad.

At first they improved, but gradually my eyes and head felt more and more pressured by their duties, and they began to complain bitterly. My belly called for food while sharply warning that nothing could be guaranteed secure tenancy. My skin crawled with its perspiration, which seemed to have developed an acidic property. I slumped in a chair and waited for things to change.

The TV continued its irritating mutter, like a man whose confidence is not up to the speech he wishes to make. Incapacitated by the light I was forced to leave it, temples pressing now, teeth calling for redeeming.

There is the banging. It comes from above and below me, in concert, around me, beside me. It follows me around as I swivel my head in blind malaise. It stops, mercifully, long enough to remind me of silence then is restored with even greater vigour.

I try to cry, but the effort defeats me. Instead I sink into myself, retracting as much as possible away from the sources of pain – the light, the noise, the shame. Each one prods me in its own manner, one after the other, like bullying cousins gathering for their daily fun. Emboldened by the success, they redouble their effort, seeking any uncharted angle from which to attack. My head vibrates with their symphony. My body hungers and contorts simultaneously. I consider vacating my body altogether, but they are too clever for me, deliberately containing their assault to within ordinary excesses. There will be no spiritual redemption from this, only an eventual withdrawal, once the enemy has plundered all that it desires.

Knowing this, I feel comforted, despite the savage rage that continues about me. This will come to an end, I think. This will finish, it shall not be the end of me. As if by magic a missive arrives from my guardian. ‘Water,’ it says, and no more. I grab the chance. Hauling my corpse from its coffin, I make my way to the kitchen where the light is worst of all. But now, with my chance in front of me, I am not derailed. I grab at the tap, half-blind, and crack my skull on it as I dive for the flushing water. More pain rings my head, yet the banging quietens, and more water dissolves it entirely. Through wretchedness I savour my windfall.

Cyclists

I'm sitting at the traffic lights in my car when a cyclist jumps the red lights, narrowly missing a pedestrian. So I see where he's going, then I follow him down a side street, knock him off the bike and run him over. And I'm the one that gets arrested!

Mobile Phone Accessory Corner

1) Blocking numbers. Someone bothering you? Set their number on block and they'll just go straight to answerphone. So simple I bet its been done already.

2) Mobile phones for your keys. And your remote control. Remember that terrible whistling keyring thing? Well that was shite, but nowadays you could attach a tiny mobile phone to your keyring and when you lose them ring it. Thats all. Thats a fucking great idea. Obviously I've copywritten it already but get in touch if you want to give me loads of money to make it.

Great Cocaine Excuses Of Our Time #1

"I need to have some to remind me why I shouldnt do it"

Archway Bridge, London

This spans the apparently artificially created valley of Archway Road, which was cut into Highgate Hill in the ice age, as locals needed a less slippery way of getting from East Finchley. The quick deflection of a passing glacier et voilá. The bridge itself is famed as a popular suicide spot, its notoriety greatly enhanced by its close proximity to a well established mental institute. Emblazened on the side is the number 1897, which many assume is the year it was built (which was actually 1821) but is in fact a throwback to the days when the Canon of Highgate would keep a count of the suicides for his popular Morbid Society. This slightly notorious practise was stopped when a five man fight over who would get to be the 1900th suicide spilled into Lauderdale House and upturned Lord Lauderdale's fine collection of watercolours. The 1898th to jump was actually the Canon himself, giving lie to the oft-stated opinion that the Morbid Society were just voyeurs with no empathy for the suicidal.

Gas

The gas man came around to fix the boiler this morning and told me a interesting tale. He said that OFWAT, the water watchdog, told the local water board to reduce their leakages by 50% in two years. Instead of fixing the leaks the water board reduced their average water pressure from 4 bar to 2 bar, saving 50% of water lost to leaks in a stroke. Is this not the brilliance that made Britain great (again)? The knock-on effect, however, is that combination heaters, ascot boilers and electric showers sited above about the third floor are all fucking up. How's that for joined-up thinking?

Diet Bill

A Lo-Cal drink for Lo-Cal people

Coetzee

I've been reading Coetzee, the writer who recently won the Nobel Peace Prize for Literature (or something). Not having read many works of literature I feel distinctly ill-equipped to write about them when I do read them, but Coetzee is a writer, rather like Kapuscinski - but for different reasons - that I would quite happily read endlessly. He is not flashy, like my first love Julie Burchill whose writing crackles with the crunch of a hundred wraps of amphetamine. He does not draw any particular attention to the writing, but he conjures something distinctly ineffable, a kind of music, out of the words, and it is not at all clear how he does this. (This would be the meaning of conjure, but I'll make the point twice anyway). His words seem to come out of a peacefulness, slightly reminiscent of the peace that the Hindus claim, somewhat against the odds, is our true self. He tells his stories economically. You could often almost forget about him, which is the true art of the writer, I guess, and diametrically opposed to the self-absorbed hacks that I have got so used to reading. Perhaps to Coetzee the reader is more important than the writer. It is a refreshing sensation to have someone's skill used for your benefit, instead of their self-aggrandisement; nothing is greater than the great being humble, and Coetzee is both great and humble.

Getting my head down/ doing my birds

Commentary commentary

watched Lokomotiv Moscow v Arsenal today but the novelty of an afternoon kick-off and being able to watch in the comfort of my armchair were soon wiped out when I realised I'd not be spared the grimmest commentary since Dan Maskell used to regularly force me to watch Wimbledon with the sound down. Peter Drury and particularly Jim Beglin' Belief spouted nonsense endlessly, criticising Arsenal players for moves that didnt come off (thrown into stark relief as I considered Beglin's skill-laden playing career) and at the nadir having a pop at K-Lo for being offside. "Oh he was offside from very early in the play" intoned Drudgery and Beglin fell over himself to agree just as the replay showed Kolo precisely onside.

Commentary is one area of English football that is resolutely stuck in the seventies. These guys have stuck to the template for what feels like hundreds of years. At worst football commentary is reminiscent of those magnetic poetry fridge stickers which you rearrange to make a new phrase, only this lot rearrange stock phrases with only a rough approximation of the game. If we've imported all these continental stars why cant we get some of those foreign commentators with their "GOOOOOOAAAAAAAALLLLLLLLLL" and overeffusion, instead of this dour banality where a couple of dull nobodies get to criticise decent footballers for not playing perfectly all the time.