alexsarll | Return of the celebrity haiku

Sylvester McCoy!
Giles Coren. Ale Meat Cider.
Syllables all gone.

In advance, I hadn't been sure whether or not I was going on the Slutwalk. There just felt like too many potential pitfalls in the set-up. Too many cogent objections had been raised - in particular the artist formerly known as Belle de Jour seemed like someone worth taking seriously on the topic (though in the event I think her concerns were misplaced - I saw a couple of big contingents of sex workers, not getting any apparent gyp). And yes, the bloody Socialist Workers were out as usual, trying to hijack proceedings - but beautifully, many people were grabbing their NO MEANS NO placards and then stripping off the SWP identifiers. Which sums up why I'm glad I went - for the most part, people just seemed to Get It. It was OK to be dressed up, or undressed, or just dressed normally. Everyone was being really good-natured. It reminded me of the first time I went on a Reclaim the Streets in the mid-nineties, and they weren't being all Two Minute Hate about the protest, they were going Situationist-inspired and taking the approach 'What if you gave a party and everyone came?' Hence music and playfulness soundtracking proceedings as often as slogans. I've missed that. Even as I spent the noughties becoming increasingly convinced that most of the world's problems would be solved by a few (thousand) bullets in the right heads, it was good to be reminded of the nineties when we had the less glamorous, more systemic problems which came with the End of History, problems which seemed better transcended than directly opposed. That was all thoroughly incoherent, wasn't it? What I'm trying to say, in contravention of the obligatory Father Ted banner, is Up With This Sort Of Thing.
(Up too with Zoo Lates, probably the most classless event I've attended in London, with everyone from the Sloanes to the Essex stereotypes happily mingling and cooing at penguins. There were even a couple of furries out in public - I rather hoped the lion would get loose so they could experience the full spectrum of life as a zebra)

As regular readers will know, I love the films of Powell & Pressburger, and consider A Matter of Life and Death to be the single best film ever made by anyone, ever. But I haven't even watched all the films of theirs I own on DVD (because then there'd be none left to see!), and I only just got round to Powell's controversial solo outing Peeping Tom. And what a strange creature it is. It looks like a P&P film, in the depth of colour and the sheer Englishness, but you can tell from the off that something is very, very wrong. And that uncanny quality, the sense of a nasty stranger in a much-loved friend's clothes, must have been a factor in the damning critical reception it got. But if it hadn't been received with a level of anger and incomprehension that ended Powell's career, you almost suspect he'd have been disappointed. And where could he have gone? You'd only have something like Henry VIII, sat there awkwardly at the end of the Complete Works when Shakespeare has already said his grand farewell in The Tempest. But not said it so fondly, for this is a poison pen letter to cinema, a mea culpa, a prescient warning that "all this filming isn't good for you". Michael - that shy young man from the sample on St Etienne's So Tough, who always seemed so nice - is one of the most psychologically consistent psychos I've ever seen in a film, resisting that collapse into generic Evil Loony which they mostly make. It's very, very good, but I don't know that I ever want to watch it again.
(Addendum: I'd taped it from TV in 2005, and beforehand there was a fragment of Film 2005 in which Jonathan Ross was talking about promising child actor Dakota Fanning. Dakota Fanning whom I last saw having all the sex and drugs in The Runaways. What a difference six years make)