Kindle

I was walking through a car park the other day when I saw one of those blue Skodas.  As you know, most cars are silver these days – silver apples of the sun; that’s fair enough.  There’s no law prohibiting the driving of silver cars – everyone likes them, and that is that.  The blue Skoda is driven by a younger man who has deep-rooted security issues and doubts about his sexual ability.

As I walked through the car park I noticed an elderly gentleman dressed in a refined manner who had chosen to stop on a car park bench and pull out a book.  (On closer inspection, this transpired to be a copy of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – no, not the Michael Moorcock book or whatever his name is.)  The boy in the Skoda revved up his engine as he passed the old man.  The old man simply ignored him, and turned a page of his book.  For some reason this seemed to anger the boy in the Skoda, who suddenly drove full circle in front of him and started beeping his horn.  Then he skidded to a halt in front of the old man and rolled down his window.

“What the flip are you doing reading that piece of rubbish?” he yelled.

The elderly gentlemen took a sip of his Special Brew and placed it down beside him.  The book lay open on his lap.  ”What do you mean, young man?”

“I mean what you reading that thing for?  That flipping pamphlet?  That bundle of old yellow papers?  With little mites running up and down it?”

“I happen to enjoy reading,” the old man replied, calmly.

The young man pulled on his handbrake and leapt out of the car.  He pushed the old man’s forehead sharply backwards and snatched the book.  ”The only thing worth doing with this,” he said, tightly gripping the novel, “is this!”  He hurled it at the road ahead, and then leapt in the car.  He drove forwards so the tyres crushed the book flat and then reversed over it so it was crushed again.  Then he repeated this motion about ten times before driving away in a cloud of smoke and shouting the word: “KINDLE!”

The old man hurled his half empty can of strong lager at the car, but it failed to reach its target.  I would imagine that that word “KINDLE” meant nothing to the poor old man, but to us, gentle reader, that word speaks volumes.

The adverts for these things usually depicts a young man, who has no cares in the world, probably a good job working in design, a lot of money and a partiality for Top Shop.  He variously runs around with his Kindle in hand, dancing around Trafalgar Square, chatting over coffee with friends (with the book in hand), and in one advert, bizarrely, wandering over some hills at night and staring down at the city.  (Perhaps the last one has just buried a body and is feeling a bit bored.)  The point is, none of these obnoxious little upstarts can be reading.  They’re certainly not reading Karl Popper’s The Poverty of Historicism.  They are vapid fools.  The reader is a pale, solitary creature, who can only just muster strength to take a sip of coffee.  If he is an outgoing type, he will leave his Kindle, or his BOOK, at home.  And there is one advert in which a man simply shows off the number of books that he has in his virtual library.  All the while he talks the talk and shrugs his shoulders, we can see the truth and the pain in his eyes: he will never read them.  Why not create a list of titles that you quite like, and type them out on a word document?  Just as good.

My father is a wise man, and he told that I must always smell the book I am reading.  Smell it, feel it, fold the corners of the pages, ENJOY the artwork and the packaging, judge it by its cover, live with it all your life, crack the spine if you must, but the tangible book is a beautiful and irreplaceable thing.

On the other hand, I heartily applaud the Kindle, because when printers have forgotten how to print, and when people come running back to the real world, my library is going to be worth thousands.

(Apologies in advance to Jacques Miami, who has to resort to Kindles etc due to his peripatetic lifestyle, but whom I do not doubt would prefer a library in a mansion.)

 

Hastie Reads the Papers and Predictably Gets Annoyed.

Every time I think of the Guardian, I feel my gorge rising in my throat, and I break into a cold sweat at the inevitability of it all, so on Sunday I bought the Times. I don’t always get a paper, but I felt like I needed to last weekend – they all seemed so desperate for my attention, flaunting their inky pages with enticing stories of riots and death. The rioting, so it turned out, was little more than what we ex-criminal lawyers call ‘crime’ but this time given a hike-up by the media in its generous coverage and (let’s face it) encouragement. They needed something to look big so that we’d forget the hacking and suspicious deaths of whistle-blowers.

So when the fun ran out in the main paper I made the terrible mistake of looking in the Magazine. (Charlie Sheen was on the front cover – I think you can forgive me.) There was an appalling article by Daisy Waugh. I think she must be related to Evelyn. Evelyn is one of my heroes, so I’m inclined to be lenient towards her. Perhaps she was having a bad day writing this, but it was RIGHT AT THE START OF THE SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE. I couldn’t COULDN’T understand the point of it.

The title was ‘My house is worth an Olympic gold’: surely reason enough to put a stop on the article. Break it down to its components: My house – upon what did this writer choose to cast her critical and witty eye this week? Her house. And the second word: worth. As the article proceeds, we learn that this definitively means PRICE. It concerns how much money she is likely to make during the Olympics if she rents her house out. WHY do we need to know this? WHY is this the LEAD ARTICLE of the SUNDAY TIMES MAGAZINE? I suppose it may be informative for those people who will be living close enough to the Olympic games, i.e. London. Do I have to point out, as I did consistently when I lived there myself, that NOT EVERYONE LIVES IN LONDON, and some of us MOVE AROUND OUTSIDE OF LONDON SOMETIMES. If this was a paper entitled THE SUNDAY LONDON TIMES, I would understand BUT IT IS NOT.

The article doesn’t just delve straight into this slick world of upper-middle class Londoners who crack soulless in-jokes about the prices of houses – oh no, it begins with a now standard dig-at-the-French-stereotype-whilst-also-making-sure-everyone-knows-I-have-a-house-there. This, in my book, is completely unforgivable; a nasty little trend that has been churned up previous by the likes of Stephen “Year in the Merde” Clarke, who at least sometimes offers some kind of grudging admiration for People Who Happen To Be French. In fact, my next blog will continue this theme…

Daisy has a problem with a lady who works in her boulangerie. I say her boulangerie, but in fact, it is not hers. She has moved there, and quite frankly, if she is as dull and annoying as she seems to be, I would have probably have pelted her with stale croissants until she’d gone away. This boulangere does her usual Stepford-boulangere frosty-French, inflexibly polite smirk. Daisy tries to ask her what she thinks of losing the bid for the Olympic games and is disappointed when the boulangere doesn’t react. She finally leaves the country. Why does she leave the country? Because her brain is pre-conditioned into that state of rigid, morbid, money-fixated tedium that can only be created and appeased by a life-long residence in the capital city of this miserable island.

HOW much money was she paid to write this article? Or was it just a favour from the editor so that she could pass it around at dinner parties?

And they wonder why people are rioting…

Words on walls

I recently (I say ‘recently’…) watched a documentary with Mr Mark Lawson having an old chinwag with Messrs Gilbert & George.  I love them.  I love them so much I named my cats after them.  If you don’t love G&G, you must prefer a world which didn’t contain them, and in that case, you are (to quote Quentin Crisp in his foreward to a book on the Marchesa Casati) a TREMENDOUS BORE.

G&G made some bold assertions.  Firstly, that in countries where there are no art galleries, bodies litter the streets.  Secondly they mentioned graffiti as a form of expression, but one which has recently been dying out.  This is a shame.  There is much room in the medium of graffiti for great imagination, and you have to wonder what sociological phenomena would result in people feeling less need to mark the walls of their cities with their own (often strangely chosen) messages.  The Romans were scratching curses onto walls.  What can possibly have changed?  What is this terrible drought of culture that G&G have picked up on?

I don’t mean Banksy, by the way.  I’m long bored by this attention seeker.  Banksy is the toast of middle-England.  In some grotesquely ironic coup, he has become a coffee table artist, an Ikea lifestyle choice.  Everyone KNOWS why he’s done it.  Take four of my favourite examples I’ve noted over the years.  There is a strange enigma which stays with you afterwards.  It’s the equivalent of a stranger striding over to you in a bar and whispering something disturbing and devastating; transferring something from his mind to yours.  I’m enamoured by the irrelevance and pointlessness of some of these captions…

“Worms boil through screaming flesh” – circa 1994, The Four Bars, Cardiff (now Dempsey’s)

“Insert baby for refund” – on a condom machine – possible the same place as above

“I want the whole fucking cake shop” – something Jacques Miami found during a frazzled walk around the outskirts of Naples.

“Bell-end” – succinctly and inscrutably scrawled across the bottom of a lamp-post on Buarth Road, Aberystwyth.  Why?  Just because it was their particular favourite phrase?  Or did someone believe they were being witty, but mistook a bell for a lamp-post?

PLEASE comment if you are the scatter-brained genius behind any of these….

Snow Breeding

I’m snowbound….

Not that it makes much difference; I’m too scared to leave the house anyway.

Society has broken down, regardless of the snow.  Some cosmic Someone has draped a cold white veil over this town in a half-baked attempt at trying to exercise control over its wayward residents, but it has just encouraged them.  My neighbour asked for my help yesterday with a suitcase.  She’s going to exotic climes and is hoping that the aeroplane is still going to be able to take off.  I’m sorry, but I have landed in an aeroplane in Helsinki and there didn’t seem to be too many problems … apart from the unnatural prospect of 200 people sitting on a metal flying carpet.  It’s ironic that man has learned the secret of flight and still struggles with iced water.  And, incidentally, Helsinki is the place to go in Winter – not South Africa.  I suspect that it’s the same kind of person who likes only one season all year round that only listens to Chris Moyles and eats in Nando’s.  They, as Howard Devoto put it, ‘live a straight, straight line’.  Anyway, that’s not the point!

So I took to the streets.  Someone had etched a swastika in the snow on my car.  In a way I’m glad.  This town has finally learned to be open about its political leanings.  It’s a start.  Two girls, talking non-U then hurled a snowball casually at a car that was struggling to drive in a straight line, and then at me. They missed, but I took great pleasure in proffering up a large v-shaped gesture on my way back past them.  Yes, I swear at teenage girls now.

Then, back home again, whilst wrestling with some cleaning work, I unearthed my beautiful old Moog synthesizer, it resides under my bed in relative safety.  It is a relic of a finer age; a precious thing; an apex of the meeting point between science and art – and the dust wrapper had slipped so the machine was covered in dust.  Dust is as fascinating as snow.  It’s the revenge of tiny particles which believe in strength in numbers.  A particle of dust; a snowflake – they teem up with thousands of others and synthesizers go dumb and runways close down.  The fragility of the universe.  Looking at my poor Moog, I was reminded of Man Ray photograph Dust Breeding which depicts one of Duchamp’s works befuddled with dust: if you leave it long enough, the stuff forms very natural and very ephemeral miniature lunar landscapes.  So I cleaned it thoroughly in case it copulated and had babies.  I believe Quentin Crisp never vacuumed his New York home; the whole place must have been unearthly.  What a fine balance it is between cleanliness and civilisation.  For Hastie, however, it must always be civilisation, although I do bathe daily.  I gave up my housework and fixed myself a Martini.  It is Christmas after all.

 

On Giving Up

It’s a well-known fact that watching The Apprentice or the X-Factor is more nauseating than chewing cotton wool.  Such competitive vigour being lauded so highly is amusing, considering that this is probably put out by the same television companies who compile the list programmes which declare the 1980s so risible because of the emphasis on money and success.  The conclusion I have come to: nothing has changed since 1980.  Except the music has got worse.  Why does everyone have to be powerful and frightening these days?

Well, the truth is, they don’t.

In Milan Kundera’s gargantuan-minded Immortality there is a section which devotes itself to a curious emotion in the main character Agnes’s father: ‘On a sinking ship, where it was necessary to fight in order to board a lifeboat, Father would have been condemned in advance.’  I am not sure if the posturing figures of dubious authority who bombard our television each evening would be able to comprehend this; that there exist a set of individuals who cannot think of anything worse than scrabbling through a set of meaningless and humiliating competitions just for the sake of it.

Why do they do it?  I want to think that they are not doing it just so they can impress their friends.  I want to think that successful and ambitious individuals don’t do it only because they want a detached house within commuting distance of London, with a modern kitchen for ‘entertaining’.  (In truth, there is very little that is entertaining about watching you cook some food.  If you want to entertain me as I sit abandoned and empty-plated in your kitchen, perhaps consider dancing, juggling, or performing an accomplished and innovative sex act.)  Oh, and they’ve also got one of those metallic islands in the kitchen, too.

That’s not to say I don’t appreciate successful individuals.  Some of them are splendid, shining, magnificent, life-affirming alchemists of the soul.  Picasso, Dali, Serge Gainsbourg, Ian Dury, Bryan Ferry, Vladimir Nabokov, Leon Theremin, Lee Miller, Beatrice Dalle, Sophie Howard, the person who invented the Samosa.  There is an endless list which I may publish one day for no-one to read.  (Possibly just before the end of the world.)  However, they have all created beauty, and they have all created something that sends a ripple of excitement through my skin.  The grinning, self-satisfied death-heads of the aforementioned television programmes are merely facilitators.  Ostensibly they purport to control the meagre talent which is broadcast, when in reality they barricade talent from the populace, creating a wall behind which the real, joyous, luminous talent of the world is kept invisible and undiscovered.  Do the public really want another carbon copy pop singer with no visible defects?  With no eccentricities?  Cultural revolution is needed now more than ever before.

The by-product of this mass Machiavellianism is that the corollary is practically taboo.  The direct opposite of achievement in life is failure.  Even suicide is somehow more acceptable than an unemployed person sitting in a council flat without food or even the motivation to buy food.  Imagine attending a dinner party somewhere in Kensington.  The guests are aged 30-45.  They are IT managers, design consultants, legal partners, and when asked the inevitable question by a blonde-haired beauty in a Vivienne Westwood dress:

“So what do you do, Hastie?”

The answer comes: “Madam, I have given up.”

Observe as her fair skin turns ashen, and the scallop trembles on her fork.  She apologises to the table and excuses herself.  Hastie, feeling dejected, as he watches her masterfully designed haunches fading into the distance, helps himself to the rest of the Valpolicella while he can, because he can’t afford this in his own home.  And for this, he is universally despised.

In today’s climate when non-work is nigh on a criminal offence, is this even possible?  When one gives up, must one necessarily die?  Of course not.  We should be mindful of Camus’s conclusions in The Myth of Sisyphus, that one must realise the absurdity of the situation to surmount it.  ”At each of those moments when he leaves the heights and gradually sinks to the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate.”  You do not have to give up on life, you can give up on the competition, or even better, find another way round.  But for God’s sake, stand aside when the stampede comes, and watch the others (for they’re all doomed anyway) run for the lifeboats in their Vivienne Westwood dresses.  We’re all going the same way.  It is a noble gesture; perhaps the noblest.

Expressing the Inexpressible: Polar Bear live at Cheltenham Jazz Festival May 2010, & Julien Temple’s “Oil City International”

The two most inspirational things that happened to me in May 2010.

I strolled down Bath Road in Cheltenham to gather with an awful lot of people to see the avant-jazz band Polar Bear play their bewildering array of noises in a big tent.  Things rarely seem to happen in this lonely Spa town, so perhaps that would explain why so many normal-looking middle-aged people attended.  Or perhaps there was a feature in the Telegraph.  I noticed the notorious local boy sax-abuser Chris Cundy sitting not too far away.

The lights dimmed, and on came the band.  There were two saxophone players in jazz rags; a double-bassist in tweed suit, glasses and closely cropped hair with a large beard, evidently some kind of 1960s intellectual dissident; a man on drums with a tall thatch of hair and ponderous voice; and a very thin and edgy man on guitar and laptop called Leafcutter John.  I was enthralled.

The music was deep, warm, oaky and punchy, interspersed with Leafcutter John’s forays on the balloon (spectacular), some kind of food mixer (distracting), and a series of electronic squelches controlled by some kind of Playstation console (energising), all played through banks of virtual effects.  I enjoyed it thoroughly.  The saxophone and double bass was often sampled and looped, then ‘tampered with’ in a very Eno-esque way, leaving the drummer to puzzle out the strange haphazard rhythms that were created, and lead the band through whatever serendipitous tune it had just accidentally created.  The drummer is in fact their leader, and his strange, dissipated non-stories which he whispered between the songs added to the fractured experience.

There was great energy, discipline and musicianship, and moreover I felt that they had really entertained us – in a way that Rihanna probably couldn’t.

I wandered out into the twilight for a beer in the Gardens as rain started to fall, feeling that I had just been to the future.

Sitting around, feeling a little miserable and a total loose end on a Friday night led to a desperate act of plumbing the depths of the world of Television.  Usually this is the decisive moment which will push a weak man over the edge (and I am a weak man, you should see me try and lift my cat), however, tonight I was wandering through the relative safety zone of BBC4.  What was on but a documentary of a band of whom I had never heard, from (dear God) the Seventies…  Doctor Feelgood.

Now, I thought these were the sickly criminals who had perpetrated the atrocity “When You’re in Love with a Beautiful Woman”, a song which incidentally had been stuck in my head from a very impressionable age, and which may have ruined a few of my relationships / friendships.

I wanted to see these bastards.

However, what followed was very different.  Here was a very pale ex-punk type, wearing only black, jerking his face all over the screen as he talked about the mysteries of the universe from his rooftop balcony.  Then, abruptly, a jolt of live footage from one of their early gigs.  A spiky band playing electrifying old-fashioned rhythm and blues at tremendous pace, a sweat-stained lead singer, who looked like he was barely capable of standing up and a bowl-haired skeletal boy in black psychopathically strutting his guitar all over the place.  Cut to the bald thug again.  He’s quoting Piers Plowman.

He is Wilko Johnson; someone I had never heard of before this night, and suddenly I am discovering him all over the place.  His life story unfolds, and he talks of the past with surprising warmth which is wonderfully at odds with his manic stare.  With a heart-rending passion for poetry, bolstered by LSD experimentation, he was a teacher who decided to drop out and travel the world with a couple of quid.  He was apparently one of the greatest guitarists of our time, and he lives in a room which he calls his ‘spaceship’.  He quotes Shakespeare at the drop of a hat.  He is a kind of Rimbaud for Canvey Island.  Jump forward to one scene where the band is playing pool in a local pub, discussing frontman Lee Brilleaux’s untimely passing away: ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I,’ he sighs, referring to their parting on bad terms, ‘Tis not alone my inky cloak, good mother, Nor customary suits of solemn black…’  Director Julien Temple has wisely and understandably focussed in on this amazing character, and I was unable to turn away from this moving documentary of essentially a glorious but doomed rock and roll band.

I was left feeling exhilarated, inspired, topped up again.  In a sometimes soul-destroying culture of manufactured celebrity types who wallow in their own ignorance, and a government filled with backward-looking politicians, it’s just good to know that there are still plenty of Great People out there.

Strange Dreams

I’ve been plagued by strange dreams.  Maybe it’s because I’m reading some Kafka short shorts – what they’d now refer to as ‘Flash Fiction’.  I’ve been reading Mr _ K for many years, but I’ve never stumbled across the really short ones.  You reach a stage in life sometimes when you think you can discover nothing new, and then you come across something like The Sandman by ETA Hoffman.  I came across Odradek, and I couldn’t believe I’d never read it or heard of it before.  It is the story of a small star-shaped object, like a spool for thread, with a right-angled rod sticking out of it which acts as a leg.  This thing wanders through the house and doesn’t engage well in conversation, and that’s about it – well, what do more do you need?  It’s called The Cares of a Family Man. I adore that title.  It reminds me of Tuxedomoon’s Special Treatment for the Family Man.  I wonder if they are connected?  They are now….

Short   shor   sho   sh   s

D   dr   dre   drea   dream   dreams

The dreams.  I have had three intense dreams of stunning clarity:

Firstly, I dreamt I met my mother in Paris, outside some sort of wooden arena.  She’d booked tickets to see Joe Pasquale.  I’d never wanted to see Joe Pasquale, live or otherwise, and I sat in the rows feeling apprehensive.  It seemed he had many Parisian fans.  As I turned to my mother, who was now my wife, I realised that Joe Pasquale was as desperately unfunny as I had anticipated.  I made my excuses and we went to get a baguette.  Sorry Joe.

Secondly, I was onboard an ancient galleon, below deck, eating some hearty fare with someone or other.  Across the way sat Ernest Hemingway, enjoying some heartier fare with his wife who sat opposite.  Suddenly there was a crash.  The ship had been hit by some cannon or iceberg or something.  The captain appeared: it was OK, it was going to be alright, just a minor hitch.  Then I heard a scream from the other table.  I turned around to see the last of Hemingway leap from the window into the ocean.  He’d panicked, I suppose.

Finally, I was in a dancing competition.  This was an involved dream of some duration, which required great effort and concentration in my sleep.  I was alone on a stage, dancing for the benefit of a small audience.  I was throwing some pretty good shapes, I believe.

There we have it.  Three dreams over three nights.  Nothing before and since.  I suppose dreams are the remnants of the imagination’s feasting.  Mr Freud, Ms Jung, whoever you may be, roll up and interpret!

Et plus du fromage….

Mr Dostoyevsky: An Apology of Sorts

I seem to have upset some big names with my last month’s Dostoyevsky skit; big names in the world of publishing who will make sure I will never work as a writer in this world at all.  Ah well.  What has been playing on my conscience more is the fact that I may have unduly insulted Mr Dostoyevsky himself without realising it.  But Fyodor – I was just making a point – that’s all: a work like The Brothers Karamazov would just not be tolerated in today’s target-driven unit-shifting DSO-ruled market.  I wonder myself if the book had been written by, say, Toby Litt, and had been published in hardback, say, yesterday, and sported a display jacket of, say, a dilapidated russian Dacha Photoshopped with a Gaussian Blur, I wonder if I would be bothered to pick it up, spend money on it, and give up 900 pages worth of time (and by God I am a slow reader.)  I often wonder how on earth he got it published?  Even more frightening: am I reading it just because the author is universally respected and dead?  Yes, probably.  But he is respected because he wrote great things, as only time and hindsight can explain.

Dostoyevsky remains as a litmus test of good writing.  I was once told by an eminent … um … probation officer that he had given up writing when he realised he’d never be nearly as good as the great Russian author.  This is distressing in many ways; but the most important is that writers who read the Proper Shit are both impressed and daunted simultaneously, which leads to a freezing of creative juices, and production of superior literature dries up.  HOWEVER, those dangerous individuals who don’t read the Proper Shit, are overjoyed to pump out any turgid rubbish they feel like and consequently, the shelves of Waterstones are filled with dire romances, badly written crime, and desperate, ghost-written biographies for simpletons.

The lesson we learn is: read the Proper Shit, be inspired, and go and do thou likewise, as best you can.  People: snap out of this cultural malaise!

I aim to finish reading my big Russian book by 2011.

Ever yours,

An eye-aching Hastie.

Mr Dostoyevsky receives some Rejection Letters

INT:

A small flat in St Petersburg; faded wallpaper, mahogany furniture.  Mr Dostoyevsky sits at his desk, half-way through his tea and toast, crumbs caught in his long beard, when he hears the post arrive.  He rushes like an excited boy to the doormat.   With trembling hands he tears open the envelopes.

_______________________

Dear Fyodor,

Thank you for sending us “The Brothers Kazaromov”.  Our reader found it excellent in places, but inconsistent.  She liked the character of Alyosha very much, but felt that Ivan and Mitri seemed thinly developed in comparison.

I’m afraid it’s not a book for our list.

With best wishes

Fran Danklin

_________________

Dear Mr Dustoyevski,

Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider your work.

We are very sorry to disappoint you, but unfortunately it is not right for us.  
We are taking on very few authors a year and only when we are 100% convinced of their 
potential in today’s competitive market.

Good luck with finding it a suitable home for it elsewhere.

Best wishes

Loretta Belly

______________________

Dear Fyodor Mikhaylovich,

Thank you for sending me an excerpt of your book “The Brothers Karahazov”.  It seems a very literary and studied work, but I am afraid it is not for our list.

By way of constructive criticism, it is a good idea to open with an attention-grabbing scene, such as a murder, which sets the tone of the story from the start.  Our reader found that too much time was spent describing a rather uneventful family gathering in a monastery.

Other than stories which describe murders, we are also looking for romantic novels geared towards ladies.  Perhaps also I could suggest a non-de-plume that is more in keeping with our current list of chick-lit writers – such as ‘Jessica Reid’?

Nevertheless, I wish you every success with your future projects.

Randy Tellspoon

___________________

Dear Theodora Dostoyevsky,

Many thanks for sending me the first chapters of your novel “The Karamozov Brothers”.  It’s an inventive and gritty piece of writing but I’m sorry to say it was rather too literary for my taste and I couldn’t see it as something for the Harvill Secker list.

Thanks nevertheless for the chance  to consider this and best wishes in finding a suitable house for your work.

Stewart Williamson

___________________

Dear Tosspot,

Are you a celebrity?  No.  Please do not send us any more of your dreary and depressing work.  I do hope this marks the end of your doom-laden career.

Up your hole,

Jonathan Penguin

__________________

Mr Dostoyevsky drops the letters into a dwindling fire, wipes a tear from his cold cheek, and fills in an application form to be an accountant.

“Dear Mr Price, Mr Waterhouse, Mr Cooper…”

Under the Volcano

For some reason on this miserable Sunday afternoon, I had become apoplectic with rage.  Perhaps it was the coffee, perhaps it was the alcohol, perhaps it was the malfunctioning Mac computer which refuses to let me see the Apple Support page – I DON’T KNOW!  But I had to drag myself away from the eternally loading blank screen, pour a cup of tea and look at a great big book on Dada while the rain lashed the windows.  Filthy weather.  Then I remembered that I hadn’t seen the DVD that had come through the (delayed) post.  ’Under the Volcano’, directed by John Huston, starring Albert Finney, Jacqueline Bisset, and ‘plummy’ Anthony Andrews.  Not one of my priority titles on LoveFilm, but since I can’t even get the website to load, I get what I’m given and that’s fine by me thank you very much.  Buggers, my friends, can’t be choosers.

I stuffed that on my swag-bag-sized list during that honeymoon period with LoveFilm when you scour around for all the films you never thought you’d see, and which have finally (mostly) suddenly become available.  One tends to look for film adaptations of one’s library.  I haven’t read Malcolm Lowry’s book, but I bought it second hand, and it has a grotesquely fascinating cover.

The film begins with music as disjointed as the dancing skeletons of the Day of the Dead festival.  The first scenes are sumptuous, decadent, surreal.  I adored it.  Albert Finney, resplendently fucked in tuxedo and shades, ambling through scenes worthy of Hieronymous Bosch or Ensor at night.  He wanders into a bar, talking to a thin dog, drinking frantic shots of gin, whisky, tequila with his doctor, while a Peter Lorre film grins and cowers in a darkened cinematic room.  Hooked, I was.

The setting was gorgeous, exotic (to a dead white European male, which I suppose is the point), furious explosions of sunlight and flowers.  And then, of all things, the gorgeous, sparkling Jacqueline Bisset arrives to mix up that heady brew.  At some point during the middle of the film, I wanted to be there.  I wanted to feel the sun on my face, hear the enervating cries of the festival crowd, drink with Albert Finney and the chirpy Anthony ‘Sebastian Flyte’ Andrews, rip open that minx Bisset’s tight dress, and delve into the debauchery.

However, it soon turned nasty when the dwarf pimp shows up and it starts to rain.  A couple of guys dressed as death pick up their scythes and pop into the bar to keep warm.

Mr Finny is on the Mescal.

He speaks to an elderly lady, who explains that the chicken that stands on the table before her is also a donkey.  An over-persuasive gaggle of whores take advantage of Mr Finney, and give him a dose of the clap.  Not that he has much time to enjoy it, as he’s soon being distressingly intimidated by a group of Nazi-funded bandits who take exception to him talking to their horse.

Am I allowed to give away the very ending?  Surely you know?  Well, all I will say is that the film ends in the same manner as that with which the story is told – there is a sense of glorification in the absurdity of the situation.  Not just the situation of being an unemployed, alcoholic dignitary in Mexico, but (dare I say it?) the Human Situation.  We are left feeling that life itself is absurd, and tragedy only helps to re-inforce the fact.  But on what better canvas than to paint that existentialist message?

A hard lesson to learn indeed, but the perfect hang-over cure.