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Here's my hope that we all find our Shangri-La
Boris scrapped his first bendy buses today. His reign has now justified itself, and anything else is just a bonus.
If you ever find yourself having a terrible moment of clarity about the gigging scene, wondering whether it isn't just a terrible parade of narcissists and special needs cases taking the name of art in vain - seriously, go see an open mic poetry night and your worries will vanish in an instant.
The band-based elements of the evening worked rather better (OK, shambolically - but entertainingly so, particularly the version of 'Unity Mitford' which, courtesy of a clown's guitar, ended up somewhere between Slash and 'My Lovely Horse'), and one of the Indelicates-affiliated poets (plays god in The Book of Job - The Musical, apparently) had his moments. And afterwards, after one of my occasional forays into roadieing (roadying?), we met some very generous but totally lost fruit thieves. But the open mic stuff...OK, if you do take the advice in the first paragraph, be aware that you do so at your own risk.
There's an art exhibition underway in the 'phone boxes behind the Royal Academy - because apparently that's where rejected pictures for the Summer Exhibition get left. It's pseudonymous, perhaps for legal reasons, but...well, some of the booths are quite shiney on the inside, shall we say. I like the postcard reading 'email mum' in among the tart cards, but possibly the most powerful contribution is the way that one of the booths has an overwhelming smell of stale urine - undoubtedly a comment on the degree to which Marcel Duchamp's urinal has at once defined and limited so much modern art. Right?
A lot of people have suggested - I hope in jest - that unemployment would see me getting into daytime TV. Even before the age of the DVD box set, I had quite enough reading and wandering to catch up on that this was never going to happen, but I was looking forward to some classic "films so sad they're only shown when the country's at work", and until this week I'd been disappointed. Sure, there were some Powell & Pressburgers, but I already have those on DVD (having got into them, if memory serves, through a screening of A Matter of Life and Death last time I was dole scum, a decade back), some Miyazaki I've already seen on Film4, but this week there was finally something new (well, old, obviously, but new to me). First, Jimmy Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. My policy of attempting any film which has given the Flaming Stars a title doesn't always work out - I think the only real great I ever found that way was The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and plenty were abandoned in short order - but this is a nice, nasty little gangster flick of the old school, all greed and brutality and innocence led astray in a world where, Production Code or no, it's clear there was no other choice. And then on Thursday, Frank Capra's Lost Horizon, the original Shangri-La story, which influenced everything from Iron Fist to Neal Stephenson's Anathem but has a tragic, terribly real escapism all its own, Ronald Colman the great diplomat who finds an earthly paradise away from all the struggle of the outside world - but can he bear to stay there, and if he does, what will it cost him? So seductive, and so much more topical than whichever catchpenny nonsense is being shown in primetime about the State of Things, with the inhabitants of the happy valley perplexed by the pointless avarice of the outside world: "Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! What unintelligent leadership! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity, crashing headlong against each other, propelled by an orgy of greed and brutality."
If you ever find yourself having a terrible moment of clarity about the gigging scene, wondering whether it isn't just a terrible parade of narcissists and special needs cases taking the name of art in vain - seriously, go see an open mic poetry night and your worries will vanish in an instant.
The band-based elements of the evening worked rather better (OK, shambolically - but entertainingly so, particularly the version of 'Unity Mitford' which, courtesy of a clown's guitar, ended up somewhere between Slash and 'My Lovely Horse'), and one of the Indelicates-affiliated poets (plays god in The Book of Job - The Musical, apparently) had his moments. And afterwards, after one of my occasional forays into roadieing (roadying?), we met some very generous but totally lost fruit thieves. But the open mic stuff...OK, if you do take the advice in the first paragraph, be aware that you do so at your own risk.
There's an art exhibition underway in the 'phone boxes behind the Royal Academy - because apparently that's where rejected pictures for the Summer Exhibition get left. It's pseudonymous, perhaps for legal reasons, but...well, some of the booths are quite shiney on the inside, shall we say. I like the postcard reading 'email mum' in among the tart cards, but possibly the most powerful contribution is the way that one of the booths has an overwhelming smell of stale urine - undoubtedly a comment on the degree to which Marcel Duchamp's urinal has at once defined and limited so much modern art. Right?
A lot of people have suggested - I hope in jest - that unemployment would see me getting into daytime TV. Even before the age of the DVD box set, I had quite enough reading and wandering to catch up on that this was never going to happen, but I was looking forward to some classic "films so sad they're only shown when the country's at work", and until this week I'd been disappointed. Sure, there were some Powell & Pressburgers, but I already have those on DVD (having got into them, if memory serves, through a screening of A Matter of Life and Death last time I was dole scum, a decade back), some Miyazaki I've already seen on Film4, but this week there was finally something new (well, old, obviously, but new to me). First, Jimmy Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye. My policy of attempting any film which has given the Flaming Stars a title doesn't always work out - I think the only real great I ever found that way was The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and plenty were abandoned in short order - but this is a nice, nasty little gangster flick of the old school, all greed and brutality and innocence led astray in a world where, Production Code or no, it's clear there was no other choice. And then on Thursday, Frank Capra's Lost Horizon, the original Shangri-La story, which influenced everything from Iron Fist to Neal Stephenson's Anathem but has a tragic, terribly real escapism all its own, Ronald Colman the great diplomat who finds an earthly paradise away from all the struggle of the outside world - but can he bear to stay there, and if he does, what will it cost him? So seductive, and so much more topical than whichever catchpenny nonsense is being shown in primetime about the State of Things, with the inhabitants of the happy valley perplexed by the pointless avarice of the outside world: "Look at the world today. Is there anything more pitiful? What madness there is! What blindness! What unintelligent leadership! A scurrying mass of bewildered humanity, crashing headlong against each other, propelled by an orgy of greed and brutality."