Jo takes a step too far

When Jo Swinson, leader of the LibDems, announced that should they win the next election they would cancel Brexit without even the recourse to a second referendum, I felt she made a serious error.

The LibDems have made major strides in recent months, constituting as they do one of the major bulwarks against the arch-right-wingers of the Brexit party. Many people voted for them rather than their usual fall-back position of Labour or Tory because of their ambiguous posture on Brexit. And they would, I believe, have made a terrific showing in the next election on that strength alone. Now, though, I’m not so sure.

I wish we’d never held a referendum in the first place. I wish David Cameron had held out against the Brexiteer ‘bastards’ in his own party in the same way as John Major did - basically by telling them to go and fuck themselves. But he didn’t, and 17 million people, 52% of the voters, voted leave. Certainly I would like to see a second vote- what’s wrong with testing public opinion again after a 3-4 year gap in a decision as important as this? But defying the wishes of those 17 million people altogether, ignoring them in fact, could have terrible consequences, for the nation, which might see not only the worst civil disorder this country has seen since the Civil War should such a thing come to pass, but to the LibDems themselves for even suggesting such a thing.

I foresee a dramatic downturn in their fortunes now because of it. Change your mind on this one, Jo, and do it quick, before you run your party onto the rocks.

Media review August 2019

BOOKS

THE DRAGON KEEPER, by Robin Hobb (Margaret Lindholm Ogden)

In a mythical world, there are humans, Riverwild folk, who have claws for toes and areas of scales where they should have skin, and Elderlings, who have evolved an intimate relationship with the dragons. I didn’t mention them? Perhaps I should have, because they lie at the heart of this fascinating little tale. These dragons can communicate telepathically with the humans (and ‘humanoids’), and can usually fly and breathe fire. Unfortunately, these ones can’t do either, because of some issue with their early lives as sea-serpents. In fact they’re a bit of a liability. Then some humans and Riverwild people get together to help them find their ancestral lands. Will they get there? We don’t know yet, because at the end of this entertaining romp, they’ve barely started on their journey. Don’t worry, there are 3 other books in the tetrad, enough scope to answer all questions.

Robin Hobb has chosen wisely to focus on dragon myths, considering the world-wide success of Game of Thrones. But she has created her own unique world, nothing like the Seven Kingdoms, and reading her is addictive. People I know can’t stop reading her books, of which there are many. Will I do the same? You know, I think I might...

HELTER SKELTER, By Vince Bugliosi and Curt Gentry

On August 8th 1969, a group of three women and one man burst into a Los Angeles townhouse and murdered five people who were unfortunate enough to be there at the time. One of them was Sharon Tate, wife of film director Roman Polanski, who by a lucky chance was in Europe at the time. The following night the same killers invaded another home and butchered a husband and wife. They then melted away into the Hollywood Hills. They might never have been caught, because they left virtually no clues, but then one of them was arrested on unrelated charges and blabbed to a cell mate about the terrible things she had done. 

Vince Bugliosi was the assistant DA assigned to prosecuting them, and once he began his investigations it began to emerge that the killings weren’t the idea of the killers themselves, but of a certain Mr Charles Manson. And he kept going on about something called “Helter Skelter”, his name for an apocalyptic war he foretold would take place between blacks and whites, which, hopefully, would be precipitated by the murders he planned. Crazy stuff? Damn right. Don’t expect a lot of cold hard logic from these people, either from the guru himself, or his followers, who saw Manson as the second coming of Jesus Christ. I kid you not. And where did Manson get his inspiration for all this bloodlust? From reading between the lines of Beatles songs, apparently, particularly the famous White Album, in which the song Helter Skelter is included.

Helter Skelter turned out to be the most successful nonfiction crime book in publishing history, partly because of the content, which is truly sensational, and partly because it is actually a very well written book. It’s all there; the investigation, the tracking down of witnesses, several of whom were threatened with murder if they spoke, the forensic evidence, and finally the extraordinary 6 month trial. 

I have made nonfiction books on the subject of murder something of a special interest over the years, probably read over 200 of them. This, in my opinion, is among the top three or four.

DON QUIXOTE, by Miguel Cervantes

In late16th century Spain, a gentleman is obsessed by the idea of medieval chivalry and the idea of ‘Knights Errant’, those who wandered the land rescuing damsels in distress and righting wrongs wherever they find them. His library is filled with books on the subject, but then all rather goes to his head when he takes it upon himself to adopt just such a role for himself, taking on a squire to assist him, in the shape of one Sáncho Panza. The latter is offered the governorship of an island if he does his job well, and who’s going to turn their nose up at a carrot like that? Not Sancho, certainly, even though he, and indeed many others come to seriously doubt his master’s sanity.

But is he mad, or is he, like some renaissance vision of RD Laing, the only sane one in an insane world? You decide. Or don’t, and just let this incredible story wash over you, as the ‘ingenious gentleman’ sallies forth on one astonishing quest after another. Try not to get totally involved with him and his hapless assistant. Try to keep a straight face. You won’t be able to.

Don Quixote has been called the ‘first modern novel’, and it is true that despite its vintage, in the 2003 translation I read by the American Edith Grossman, it comes over as remarkably modern in its feel. And it is saying something that some of the foremost writers in history, Laurence Stern, Balzac, Proust and Joyce among them, all counted it among their favorite books.

I thought it would be hard to read this book. I was wrong. It was as easy and delightful as drinking fine champagne.

MOVIES

A STAR IS BORN (2018) P/D- Bradley Cooper

An entertainer (Bradley Cooper, who does just about everything in this movie, including singing and playing his own instruments, so we certainly know, as I like to say, who to blame) is on a slow downhill arc in his career when he meets another (Lady Gaga) whose star is very much on the rise. What can go wrong? Turns out, everything. And you’ll know that if you’ve seen either the original 1950s version of this story with James Mason and Judy Garland, or the remake in the 70s with Kris Kristopherson and Barbara Streisand.

Not content with these two perfectly acceptable efforts, apparently Bradley Cooper became obsessed with bringing his own take on an old story to the screen, and spent years persuading the money boys to play along. Eventually he won them round, and everybody made a lot of money and, to be fair, a pretty good film got made. Cooper is good, as is the good Lady, and also Sam Elliott as Cooper’s long time friend and manager. And the music’s great too. I’m just left wondering why he didn’t go for something completely original, rather than yet another remake.

THE ANGEL’S SHARE (2012) D- Ken Loach

A probation officer in Glasgow has the idea of taking his charges to a whisky tasting session as a change of pace from picking up litter. Surprisingly, they take to it and one of their number becomes something of an expert. Ah, but there’s a hidden agenda here. For these recidivists soon realize that some whiskies, if rare enough, can be worth a fortune. Now you see?

In this film Ken Loach spins a yarn which might be called “Once Upon a Time in Glasgow”, because what happens is far from the gritty, realistic tales he usually spins, and resembles a kind of fairy tale for the Gorbals. But it’s all done with Loach’s legendary skill, and his main protagonist Paul Brannigan makes us believe all this could really happen. Even though it couldn’t.

ONCE UPON A TIME... IN HOLLYWOOD (2019) D- Quentin Tarantino

A western movie star (Leo DiCaprio) who’s slightly past his sell-by date is given another chance to make his mark, this time in spaghetti westerns. But he can’t take his long-time stunt double and closest friend (Brad Pitt) along for the ride. It’s the end of an era... Brad, a very laid-back guy, tries not to get too upset as he finds little DIY jobs to do for his friends. But there’s something going on in the background of this movie (there always is with Tarantino), and we’re not sure it will be a McGuffin, that is something that’s bigged up but actually not the point of the movie at all, or whether it is going to turn into something really big.

I’m a little reluctant to spoil the plot of what is Tarantino’s best films for years, so I’ll just say this one is really worth seeing, for the acting, for the cleverness of the story, and for Tarantino’s quite extraordinary observational skills.

Why he really tried to buy Greenland

In my last blog I wrote about Trump’s ridiculous offer to buy Greenland from its owners, Denmark. I said that he’d heard how the ice cap is rapidly melting, exposing all manner of treasures, coal, copper, etc that lurk beneath its surface.

Turns out there was another agenda, which explains why he cancelled his planned visit to Denmark, apparently in a fit of pique. As it happens, Barack Obama is due to visit Denmark next month, and can expect a joyous reception there, as he does almost wherever he goes. You can imagine the contrast with Trump’s reception when he arrives. Talk about a stark contrast... And faced with this contrast, Trump simply decided to find a reason not to go.

Why don’t you go to Russia instead, Donald. You’d get a much more positive reaction there, with rentacrowd out in force. Or North Korea. They’re all over you too, I understand. Or are they? No, wait. It’s got to be Brazil. There, President Bolsonaro has taken several sheets from your playbook to justify his burning of the Amazon rainforest, all in the name of progress. Apparently even among local landowners, who stand to make a great deal of cash out of exploiting the forest, there is disquiet about the rate of pillage. Never mind. This pres, like the other one, has his base, and we now know they’ll both do almost anything to keep them loyal- even raping their own most precious resource. Hey! Haven’t you worked it out yet? It’s about power, stupid.

Psst! Wanna sell your island? I give good price

Who says Donald Trump is ignorant about the effects of global warming? Not a bit of it. He’s heard that Greenland has just ‘enjoyed’ its warmest summer since the end of the last Ice Age. The extraordinary July heat wave in Europe extended far into the Arctic, leading to temperatures of 30 degrees being recorded in Thule, high above the Arctic Circle. 12 billion gallons of meltwater a day have been draining off the rapidly dwindling ice cap in Greenland’s interior. And Donald’s heard about it.

Well informed guy that he is, he’s also heard that Greenland is a source of all kinds of mineral wealth; copper, molybdenum and to him perhaps, most importantly, huge coal deposits. He doesn’t care that the rest of the world is moving away from coal as an energy source, that using it is accelerating the retreat of the ice fields that sooner or later, and now it seems sooner, will lead to a catastrophic rise in sea levels. If all the ice melts from Greenland, sea levels will rise by 9 metres. That’s enough to put most of the ports of America, New York, Washington DC, San Francisco and the rest, under water. We used to think melting off Greenland's ice would take hundreds of years. No longer. Already changes are being seen that were not predicted to occur until 2070. As the Yanks like to say, you do the math.

So, no wonder an opportunist like Trump seeks to take Greenland off Denmark’s hands. What would he give for it? A trillion dollars? More? It sounds like a lot, but remember it’s less than a month of America’s GDP. Thank goodness the Danes are a sensible people, and are well aware that as Mark Twain pointed out, land is the one thing they’ve stopped making. So they are not about to let nearly 900,000 square miles of real estate fall into his hands, ice covered or not. Thank God.

July 2019 film review

CRAZY RICH ASIANS (2018) D- John Chu
A perky New Yorker travels to Singapore to meet her BF Nick, not realizing till she gets there that he’s actually the scion of one of the richest (and most snobbish) families in Singapore. She’s an accomplished academic, but that doesn’t cut much ice with these guys. What they admire is money and the courage to spend it big. Chief among her critics is Eleanor, Nick’s mum (played by the only class act in the film, Michelle Yeoh), who doesn't think she’s got the right stuff and isn’t backward about coming forward in telling her so. Much complication ensues, with these and other related billionaires until, like some far-eastern fairy tale, it all comes right in the end.
          I’d say more, but I’m feeling a bit nauseous. Despite the film’s popularity (it cost $30 million and made nearly $300 million) I became annoyed early and it got worse. Sure, it looks good, full of gaudy colours and evidence of extravagant wealth, but, sorry, I found it a thin, vapid exercise in wealth-envy. However, as I say, I am clearly in the minority.

THE BREAKFAST CLUB (1984) D- John Hughes
A crew of high school kids are stuck in detention on a Saturday when they’d really rather be out having their adolescent fun. Well, they shouldn’t have been naughty, should they? It’s a mixed bag, the cool kid, the Goth, the geeky one, the misfit girl. Etcetera. The film is bravely shot almost entirely in this one classroom, the miscreants presided over by a teacher (Paul Gleason) who is in a kind of detention himself, as he has to stay there all day too.
          What follows is an essay in adolescent alienation as one pupil after another describes their life, in engaging, and sometimes heartbreaking detail.
          This film marked the debut of a number of stars who came to be known collectively as the ‘Brat Pack’, including Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Emilio Estevez and Ally Sheedy. John Hughes, who wrote as well as directed the film, struck gold. Costing barely $1 million dollars to make, it grossed more than $50 million, ensuring his place as a Hollywood Player. I for one say he deserved it.

PRETTY IN PINK (1986) D- Howard Deutsch
A somewhat socially outcast Milly Ringwald finds herself dating a boy from the right side of the tracks, but soon finds trans-class relationships are not without their problems... Fortunately she has one true anchor in her life - her dad (Harry Dean Stanton, perfect as always), who is always there for her, no matter what.
         Written by John Hughes (see above), apparently in just 2 days, this was perhaps the high-water mark of the Brat Pack era, and like The Breakfast Club, featured excellent writing and some fine acting from its young stars. Some of them, like James Spader went on to even greater things; others, such as Molly Ringwald seemed almost to disappear from the screen altogether. Strange how that happens...

I KNOW WHERE I’M GOING! (1945) P/D- Powell and Pressburger
A feisty young woman travels from London to the outer Hebrides to marry her (much older) millionaire fiancée, who has rented an island for the occasion. But inclement weather prevents her from making the last leg of the journey and she finds herself stranded in a highland village until the wind drops. And there she meets Roger Livesy, the local laird, who despite all the land he owns (including the island in question) is, like everyone else in the village, little richer than a church mouse. There’s a key moment in the film when he says of one of his friends:
“She isn’t poor, she just doesn’t have any money.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?”
“Oh no, not at all.”
Our gold digger doesn’t get this at all, or at least she has to go through a number of formative and quite scary experiences before she does.
          A lot of people hold this film in very high regard. Martin Scorsese, for example, rates this among the ten best films he’s ever seen, and it is true that there is something very special about the atmosphere it creates, despite its low budget and limited material. I think it’s called cinematic magic, and in this film Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger takes that to its very highest level. Wonderful.

July 2019 book review

THE FATAL ENGLISHMAN, by Sebastian Foulks
Being three brief lives of Englishmen whose lives were cut short in their prime, their perhaps enormous potential never realized. Faulks’s book begins with the story of Christopher (“Kit”) Wood, who threatened at one point to be Britain’s foremost painter of the 20th century before opium and inner demons swept him away, in his case under the wheels of a train. No less a figure than Picasso saw his pictures when he was living in Paris in the years before the Great War, and surprising for a man more used to damning with faint praise, told Wood he had a touch of greatness about him.
             Unfortunately, he also got caught up with a playboy count who liked to smoke opium, and decided to travel around Europe in luxury with him rather than concentrate on his art. A series of women tried to save him, but it was a task doomed to failure. Only a few paintings survive (some of which are illustrated in the book), but it is clear from them that Wood had indeed discovered something new, something unique. Had he lived, he might have eclipsed Augustus John, but fate determined a different path...
            Faulks’s next portrait is of Richard Hillary, who as a Spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain was shot down, surviving but horribly burned in the process. He went on to write one of the key books of WW2, The Last Battle, which chronicles his slow, agonising recovery. But he too had some kind of death wish and pulled every string he knew to get back into the air. But perhaps I shouldn’t spoil this story...
           Finally, Faulks turns to Jeremy Wolfenden, a man once described as ‘the cleverest young man in England’. At Eton he finished top of year apparently without any effort on his part, and the same thing happened at Oxford. But Wolfenden was gay in an era when that was a crime, not that that prevented him flaunting his sexuality in sometimes outrageous fashion. But his life took a radical new direction when he was recruited by MI6 and sent to Moscow, where the KGB soon heard about him and tried to turn him for their own purposes. Once again I shouldn’t spoil the story, but here again we see how a great future was blighted by inner demons, and in particular in Wolfenden’s case, alcohol.
           Sebastian Faulks is a fine writer of nonfiction and tells his stories with considerable compassion and insight. Highly recommended.

THE CHARTERHOUSE OF PARMA, by Stendhal.
A young man in a hurry would fight for his beloved Napoleon, but his first battle is Napoleon’s last: Waterloo. Fabrice, for lo that is his name, then finds himself in the complex political jigsaw that was northern Italy in the early 19th century. A good-looking young fellow, he is favoured by various well placed and gorgeous ladies, one of whom is his aunt. Are her intentions towards him entirely honourable? Even he is not completely sure, and she’s far too intelligent to reveal her hand until she’s ready. Then he manages to upset the prince of Parma, who, exercising his absolute power, imprisons him in the impregnable Farnese Tower. But even there he finds another beautiful woman to comfort him, albeit at a distance. Can she somehow help him to escape from a prison cell no one has escaped from before? Read on...
            Stendhal is best known for just 2 books, this one and The Scarlet and the Black. Each book has its adherents, but regardless of which they believe is the greater of the two, all are agreed they represent two of the finest novels of the 19th century. They both read like contemporary thrillers, and both demonstrate a deep understanding of the human soul. Read ‘em both, I say.

THE JOY LUCK CLUB, by Amy Tan.
Every week a group of four Chinese ladies in San Francisco get together to play Mah Jong and reminisce. The stories they tell are often of their old life in the home country, and are redolent of the exploitation they experienced at the hands of a patriarchal society and their menfolk in particular. Each has a daughter, and they too are given the opportunity to tell their stories, in their case of their lives in the Land of the Free. Four mothers, four daughters, their stories interweave like a game of Mah Jong (which was the author’s clever design) and in the process we gain a very special insight into the Chinese mind - not so different from ours in its fundamentals: they want to prosper, do better than their ancestors, and find some happiness along the way. If they can...
          A fascinating little book, well written and containing a host of intriguing, and sometimes heartbreaking tales.


   

We did it!

I was an eighteen year-old lad, waiting to take my place at Liverpool University medical school in just a few week’s time, when at around 4 o’clock in the morning of 21st July 1969, I watched the grainy images of Neil Armstrong making his way down the ladder of the LEM (Lunar Excursion Module). As he “stepped off the LEM”, I heard his immortal words “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”, badly garbled by static but still intelligible, and I knew my life, and the life of humanity, would never be the same again. A few minutes later I went outside into the early dawn, and there was the moon, just past half-full, and thought to myself: My God! There are people walking around on that thing! To me that moment marked a fundamental step forward in the progress of human kind. To develop the technology to visit our neighbouring world, across the terrible, airless void of space, remains the most significant event of the 68 years I have lived on this planet.

I wasn’t alone. Much later I heard Buzz Aldrin being interviewed about the world tour the Moonmen undertook in the months following their landing, and he said that everywhere people would say the same thing to him: “We did it!” OK, it was an American flag that was planted in the Sea of Tranquillity, and let’s face it, if we’d done it there would be a Union Flag there now. But the point Aldrin was making was that everyone felt it to be an achievement of the whole human race, not just the Yanks. They just led the way.

Yet not everyone was a fan of the Apollo project, and I’m not referring to the idiots who continue to insist that the whole thing was a movie made by Stanley Kubrick. A number of people felt the money, and to be fair it was an enormous sum, could have been better used to help end world poverty, or something else more relevant to humanity here at home. Trouble is, you can’t solve poverty simply by throwing money at it. Most poverty and hunger is politically based, famines especially so. I’m not saying we shouldn’t try to end poverty, hunger and famine, of course we should, but we should explore space too.

Human beings have been saying “I wonder what’s out there. Let’s go and find out” ever since the time of Cro Magnon. The Phoenicians regularly set sail to parts unknown in search of new trading routes way before the pyramids were built. The Vikings sailed right across the Atlantic Ocean and discovered the New World hundreds of years before Columbus tried the same thing. And what we did in 1969 was in the same spirit, even if it was a fortuitous consequence of the arms race and the Cold War. It’ll be the same when we finally set foot on Mars, then Titan, then Triton, as Arthur C Clarke predicted we one day will. The burning desire to find out what’s out there is as strong now as it ever was.