Someone fetch a priest

Should you re-watch films that seemed great to you when you were 15? In my experience, this is usually a bad idea. I say 15, but it could be 18, or 21 or even 30 –pieces of art that make a big impression initially can sometimes disappoint on later viewing/reading/listening. But if you don’t check them out again years later, you might be recommending absolute rubbish to people. Some things of course – like ‘The Maltese Falcon’ get better. But others – it’s not just that they disappoint – it’s that they make you wonder who you were, what kind of a shallow fool you must have been. They make you worry that maybe you’re still a fool now. Maybe you’re clapping your hands, this very minute, like a wind-up chimp, at some piece of mediocre nonsense. It’s unsettling.

Anyway I’ve done it twice recently. The first was ‘Wings of Desire’ which I hadn’t seen since it first came out, but didn’t even doubt for a second that I would find it equally great. And it wasn’t that it was terrible. It was still beautiful, and still a great idea. But something about the writing. After about 45 minutes I couldn’t take any more. Maybe it had been a long day. Maybe I was tired. But it was just noise. Noise that wouldn’t stop until I ejected the DVD. But I did feel very bad about this. Later, at Pete’s insistence, I watched the film with the director’s commentary – and this I would definitely recommend: a) because you don’t hear the script (b) because you get to hear Peter Falk discussing his scenes and (c) because you discover the original ‘custard pie fight’ ending – which is well…remarkable.

The second occasion was Jean Cocteau’s ‘La Belle et La Bete’. Again – it wasn’t terrible. Just whereas when I was 15 I thought it was a marvellous work of art, now I saw it more as a source of high comedy. ‘La Bete’ in particular (who is played by Bungle who went on to achieve great fame in Rainbow) and his way of hissing ‘Belle’, or spitting ‘chaque soir’, is very entertaining. I’m too scared to watch ‘Orphee’ now – I don’t think I could bear the disappointment if it turned out to be less great than I remembered it.

The exciting possibility exists that maybe this works in reverse too, and films or books that you originally thought were abysmal would maybe be amazing given a second chance.

Music Like Dirt

This is sad. I had a great fondness for Desmond – I liked the quavery, on the edge tone his voice had. And the frequent indecipherability of the lyrics was obviously a great thing. I considered it an act of generosity that he encouraged his listeners to interpret the songs as freely as they wished. My own interpretations of his lyrics always seemed to involve goats – I’m not sure if this was right, though I suspect not. One of the hard lessons that life has taught me is that it’s always better to avoid discovering the true lyrics to songs that you like. Back in those pre-internet days when being an obsessive fan demanded real effort and application, I wasted too much time lurking about in bookshops trying to track down lyrics, which when finally discovered, always seemed far more prosaic than the lines I’d been improvising.

Anyway the sudden death of Desmond, so soon after the sudden death of Gene (both of whom played their last gigs in the UK) would make me worry if my biggest hit included the name of a place. Glen Campbell might escape this curse by virtue of ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ being a bigger hit than ‘Galveston’ or ‘Wichita Lineman’ – but he should probably take care, and definitely avoid touring the UK in the near future.

Bite it, crunch it, chew it.

‘New Cadbury’s biscuit Boost’ – who could forget that shrill little jingle? It sticks in the mind not simply because of its non-tune, but also as being just about the last time a genuinely new chocolate bar was launched. Those crazy pioneer days are long gone. The fat (I’m assuming) controllers of the chocolate conglomerates don’t gamble on new brands now, but prefer instead to stretch existing brands into new and ever more mutated shapes. This is a sad thing for me, partly because we’ve lost the variety, but more importantly we’ve lost the strange little fictional backdrops unique to each chocolate bar that somehow imbued eating them with some exotic edge. To eat a ‘Country Style’ was to cross the wide open prairies on a covered wagon, to sample a ‘Mint Cracknel’ was a more authentic encounter with the piste than any mere skiing holiday.

Now we just have endless remixes of the Dairy Milk brand with its thrilling connotations of a glass and a half of milk. Not only have the small, gaily adorned foot soldiers of confectionery been erased, but for the big names, the relationship between name and product has been ruptured for ever. Who could begin to say what a Kit Kat is these days? Once it was a 2/4 finger choco-wafer treat, now, engorged and distorted as a Bernard Matthews Franken-turkey, it looks around baffled and a little ashamed with no idea of its place in the world.

I was wondering if there were any analogies with other risk averse industries like the music business. I guess the most naked attempt to create an ever-mutating brand was when S Club 7 spawned S Club Juniors, though sadly this didn’t seem to go any further. We never did get to see S Club New Wave– though of course that franchise does exist under various other names. I suppose the situation in the music industry rather than being the same as the confectionery business is actually the opposite. The chocolate industry innovates content all the time, but hides it behind the same names and packaging. The music business churns out the same bilge endlessly, but gives it new names. A glass and a half of Richard Ashcroft; a glass and a half of James Blunt; a glass and a half of Simon Webbe….

Millions now living

In a cold room in a castle, in files entitled ‘Ancestors’, are hundreds of sepia photo portraits of anonymous people from the past. Most have lost their moorings on the page and have slipped down into a slush of moustaches and frowns. In another room in a damp bookshop is a tabletop piled high with magazines and journals on everything from motorcycle maintenance to the Kennedy dynasty. In the corner – towers of detailed instructional paperbacks on obsolete technologies. All these forgotten people and words – what can you think about except death? Or in fact worse than death, the utter futility of everything in the face of death?

Hurray – welcome to Hay on Wye.

I don’t know, in the past it’s always been a pleasant way to spend an afternoon, browsing around the various bookshops – but this time it was just a slow slide into despair. I couldn’t work out why this was so – then I realised it was the disorder. If the magazines had been sorted by genre and date and piled neatly…..if the ancestors had been stuck down properly and all the moustached men put in one file, the milky eyed women in another…then it would have felt like a triumph over oblivion. That was when I realised that the first weapon in the ‘War on Death’ is tidiness. Our parents obviously knew this – this is why they went so crazy when they saw the state of our bedrooms – it wasn’t crayons and Beano annuals they saw on the floor – it was the abyss.

Channel Zero

There’s a very old TV set in the staff room where I work, it’s one with a big sliding knob for volume control. It was made in a time when they allowed people to have direct influence over the volume, brightness and contrast of their TV feed. I don’t like these days of predetermined increments – I’m always yearning for the hidden volume between the clicks – I think they may be broadcasting secret messages at those frequencies. Anyway I’ve discovered that the afternoon is where TV schedulers hide all the films, so I keep catching little fragments of films on my lunch hour. Never seeing the start or the end of a story becomes quite disorienting after a while – all the fragments bleed into one undifferentiated narrative and this starts to corrupt my own memory, so I get to the point where I think I’ve actually experienced these things directly.

This week I have seen or done some or all of the following:

Worn a frock coat and tricorn hat whilst lowering a young boy down a well to find a jewel hidden behind a marked brick.

Worked as a hard-bitten newspaper reporter initially sceptical of a man’s innocence.

Had a nasty attack of claustrophobia after being miniaturised, put in a nuclear submarine and injected into somebody’s arterial system.

Found a man’s hat with his name sewn inside at a murder scene.

Driven along a freeway in the US with a live pigeon stuck to my head.

Run rabbit.

Am I alone in finding this story terrifying? Seems to me that this throws serious doubt on the alleged weight-loss properties of lettuce. But let me ask you this Newsround…whatever happened to Roberto?? The world of jumbo rabbits is clearly a fickle place – but some of us remember.

What is this insatiable desire to find bigger and bigger rabbits? I fear that behind it all is John Craven, with a napkin round his neck and traces of rabbit pie on his chin.

Werner’s last blues

Grizzly Man looks very good indeed. I had to watch a video entitled ‘Are you bear aware?’ before I was allowed to stay in Yosemite National Park (needless to say there was no similar awareness raising of the squirrel peril). It showed lots of bears committing car crime – smashing windows in a desperate search for Lion bars and cheese and onion crisps, I don’t think there was any joy riding though. It’s a well documented fact, but no animal in the annals of car crime will ever match the chimpanzees of the West Midlands Safari Park. Sadly they were all rounded up and shot when foot and mouth broke out – which certainly sends a message to the criminal underclass.

I once described Werner Herzog’s voice as my favourite sound (above even the melancholy chimes of distant ice-cream vans) – which of course sounds horribly pretentious, but something about his lugubrious vowel sounds which match exactly his lugubrious face gives me great joy. I’m sure anyone who heard him saying ‘That’s not an opponent’ about a plastic dustbin in Julien Donkey Boy, would agree.

Anyway nobody ever seems to ask ‘What’s your favourite documentary?’ which is a shame – because I have lots – so in the spirit of time-wasting…

Wings of Hope – Werner Herzog
My Best Fiend – Werner Herzog
Chronique d’un Ete – Jean Rouch
Ongka’s Big Moka – Disappearing World
One Day in September – Kevin Macdonald
Awake and in Pain – no idea who. It was about when the anaesthetic fails in surgery which I watched at a very impressionable age – I have no memory if it was any good, but the title stays with me almost as a motto

 

What are squirrels up to?

I’ve been thinking about squirrels a lot recently. Working in the middle of a park, as I do, my awareness of them is at an all-time high.

I see them everyday, doing that thing they do – fevered activity and then momentary motionlessness – like they’re playing musical statues but only they can hear the music.

At first I didn’t see it, but after a few days I started to get a strong sense that I was seeing the same squirrels in exactly the same locations as the previous day. The same key positions always occupied by the same little faces, avidly munching, if I’m not very much mistaken, the very same ‘nuts’ (perhaps not even nuts – I don’t claim to be an expert).

Just the occasional deviation, the odd change of stance might have thrown me off the scent – but I fear the squirrels have got a little sloppy.

I’ve just been out for a circuit now for my lunchbreak. I walked down the usual path and there they were insulting my intelligence with their pretence. As I walked on I spun around to try and see what they got up to once I passed. I’m not sure what I expected, maybe a couple of them lugging a big radio transmitter across the path, whilst the others did stretching and flexing exercises. Anyway – I’d underestimated them – they were there inscrutably nibbling.

Now I’m not sure….