Not tonight, Josephine

[alexsarll]

Does anybody happen to have a copy of Children of the Revolution? It's one of those offbeat comedies the Australians do so well, featuring several of the usual suspects - Rachel Griffiths, Sam Neill, Geoffrey Rush - and concerning Stalin's secret son growing up in Cold War Australia. I taped it off TV a couple of weeks back and, watching it on Monday, was really getting into it when the tape cut out; further investigation showed that the film had been pushed back by (what else?) sportism.

I like Richmond. Not its slightly provincial clone high street, but once you get even a little off that, you get theatres and libraries and cheap but not nasty pubs around greens where the kids disporting themselves are all sufficiently middle-class not to be threatening, only endearingly Skins-esque, and where bluff old gents stomp past with their beards, pipes and fisherman's caps, looking for all the world like they could have helped Jerome K Jerome out of a spot of comic difficulty that very afternoon. Not perhaps the first place one would expect to find Philip Jeays playing, but if he hadn't been I wouldn't have been there, so can't complain, eh?

Am still attempting to process Mervyn Peake's Mr Pye. It's no kin to Gormenghast, that's for sure; it lacks the Dickensian squalor, the dustiness, the constriction. Nor does it seem to me a simple 'christian allegory', one popular assessment; I suppose for a time it is, but apart from anything else every 40 pages or so it seems to become a totally different story, and all this without leaving the strange, tiny and very real island of Sark. At one point it seemed to me like Iris Murdoch attempting to complete a book from an outline left by PG Wodehouse; later like one of the South American magic realists had taken a holiday to the Channel Islands. Strangest of all, for all its marriage of lightheartedness to the deep power of faith, not once did it remind me of GK Chesterton. Perhaps I should simply accept it as a good read from the days before the genre walls went up.

Taped Channel 4's Life After People on Monday, but that review was enough to convince me that I don't need to watch it. I'm reading The World Without Us at the moment, and as much as I find the idea of the post-human world both fascinating and soothing, I'm not sufficiently obsessed with it to watch one of those bad CGI pseudo-documentaries about it. Maybe the one being adapted from the book will be sufficiently well-done for me to make an exception. It's not like films can never manage the same elegiac sense of our exit; Children of Men did a pretty good job of it. Of course, on some level I'm not daydreaming about the world without all humans, so much as the world without all the ones who are just cluttering the place up; ideally there should still be enough unspecified tech and supplies for me and mine to be comfortable in between wandering around appreciating the quiet decay. In the meantime, even an empty street can have something of the same piquancy - witness Woodrow Phoenix's Rumble Strip*, a haunting, damning commentary on car culture in which the art consists entirely of pictures of empty roads and carparks, street furniture, lane markings - for these streets no longer welcome people, and like most monsters the automobiles work better as unseen menaces. Even out among the bustle, it sounds as though ghost bikes have something of the same eloquence of absence.

*For the record, another fine 'graphic novel' which is clearly not a novel.

Comments

[kenix.livejournal.com]

Last time I was in Richmond I saw two young people with exactly the same arm amputation within minutes of each other.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Dear me. Are you sure you didn't accidentally end up in Sierra Leone instead? The transport can get a bit hazy around there.

[kenix.livejournal.com]

I did wonder if it was a very specific Amputees Convention.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I will often see lots of blind people on particular days - once in Finsbury Park, I even saw the old phrase given literal form, as one blind man led another. Asking a chum who works at the RNIB if there was any particular reason for this, he took the piss.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Graphic novel...well, it can be used in a precise format term, to mean a comic with a spine which wasn't previously serialised (except you still end up calling a load of essays and autobiographies and histories 'novels' so WTF?). But then you still get a load of collections being described as graphic novels. Fundamentally, it's a marketing term, or a way for culturally cringing creators to make out that they're doing something much more important than silly old comics. It is a term I disdain. And fortunately, I have since learned that Alan Moore agrees with me.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Almost exactly. Except imagine that on the first book, the adult's cover had been kind of awesome.

[msdaccxx.livejournal.com]

Life After People was as dull as ditchwater.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

This seems to be a pretty universal consensus. And it's a shame, because without being the least sensationalist, the book is wonderful. C4 seem really to have lost the knack when it comes to documentaries.

[msdaccxx.livejournal.com]

Well, it was clearly a co-production of some sort because all the speculation was about what woud happen to London, Paris, New York, DC and Chigago and, tediously, each of these cities had to get equal time as the various iconic whatyoucallits crumbled into dust. So, yup, it was all Europe and North America. You'd think over an hour and a half they might manage to mention the rest of the world even a weeny bit, but no.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Problem is, most of the iconic stuff elsewhere is older - and that generally means it's going to last better. Angkor Wat or Macchu Picchu already went through this whole business once.

[msdaccxx.livejournal.com]

Well, in these sort of shows, it's always South East London that bites it first, so I tend to lose interest once my flat is under water. About two years ago, me and Alex P had quite a heated discussion about whose flat would flood first in the event of the flood barrier going tits up - his Holloway Road basement or my 5th floor flat in Borough. Now I'm ground floor in Borough, I am definitely toast once that barrier goes. Soggy toast.

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

I didn't make a deliberate decision to live in one of London's more raised areas, but nowadays it's definitely a point I quote during the regular 'my hood's better than yours' rows.

life after people

[missbeatrice.livejournal.com]

Did anyone watch it? I did, trapped on a sofa as i was, i turned my attentions to my cup of tea for a brief moment and when i looked back it seemed to me that they suggested that kitties would evolve to learn to fly?! Perhaps it was just a badly cut juxtapose of pictures of cats on the scamp and pictures of some kind flying squirrel things. Hmmmm. Still, perhaps i'll read the book - is there a chapter about flying cats?!

Re: life after people

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Bear in mind that AFAIK there's no formal connection between the book and this show - though I imagine at the very least the former's chances did well for the latter with the commissioning editors. But so far, the book has been fairly restrained about that sort of thing; it mentions that baboons would be a candidate to pick up where we left off, say, or that brussel sprouts and cabbage would not long survive us (was there ever a better argument for exterminating humanity?). For bonkers post-human evolution, the TV show to beat is still The Future is Wild (http://www.thefutureiswild.com/) (squids in trees!), itself an entertainingly trashy derivative of Dougal Dixon's After Man.

Re: life after people

[missbeatrice.livejournal.com]

Squids in trees – good lord. That probably does beat flying cats ( I suspect they fly already, unbeknownst to us, and cook and vote, tho why kitties would have voted for a mayor who looks like a Labrador is beyond me). Sir, I think I danced in your vicinity on Saturday night at Gloomy, tho livejournal etiquette confuses me and I am never sure if its okay to greet in the real world!

Re: life after people

[barrysarll.livejournal.com]

Oh, you should have said hi! It was a bit odd the first few times it happened but I'm used to it now.

[missbeatrice.livejournal.com]

K, i shall grin and wave at you next time!