Castaway

There has been a steady stream of hideousness in the news, despite the media’s obsession with deflecting us away from the stories that matter, based around two wealthy people getting married. I’m steering clear of all that for now as there has been something that is so wonderful and life-affirming I am in a state of utter delight every day I sit at my desk.

BBC Radio 4, described, quite rightly, by Stephen Fry a few years back, as one of mankind’s greatest achievements, has released the last 500 Desert Island Discs, available to listen to on the computer whenever you like. I’m in heaven, the opening bars of the music alone (By the Sleepy Lagoon by Eric Coates) has me in a state of excited anticipation and total relaxation.

The perfection of radio, the intimacy, the privacy, the feeling of being in a special place, alone, listening to remarkable people who have lived remarkable lives, is pure joy. To be able to relive those I’ve adored and discover ones I’ve missed is wonderful.

The website says it is trying to sort out all of the recordings since the series began in 1942. I’m fervently hoping they do, I can’t wait to hear the thoughts and favourite music, the odd luxuries and the great books choices, of people such as Celia Johnson, Michael Redgrave, Guy Gibson, Alfred Hitchcock, Frankie Howerd, John Osbourne, Alan Bennett, Bill Shankly, anyway, you get the picture.

My fingers and toes are crossed.

It’s hard to explain my feelings about DID, maybe it’s a throw back to my pre-teen years, lying in bed with my head under the pillow, listening to my little red transistor radio, gripping the plastic handle as I heard of exotic locales, derring-do and the mysteries of the universe via scratchy voices that made the world seem so vast it was beyond comprehension. It felt like I was the only person listening, and at its best created an excitement and tension that no other medium can match.

One of my greatest hopes growing up was that one day I’d be on there, picking my tunes, dissecting my life, and discussing how I’d survive on a desert island. Such a simple concept, and yet it creates the most engaging portrait of those who participate, getting underneath the public persona, lifting the lid on what makes these people tick whilst making us think and smile and empathise.

To imagine something being created now that is still running, and as good as ever, in 60 years time is almost impossible to imagine, but DID will be that age next year. A remarkable feat that is a testament to it’s creator Roy Plombley and the simpler days of pitching ideas, where someone said ‘I’ve good idea’ and someone else said ‘let’s do it’, as opposed to the myriad bullshit of focus groups, test audiences and endless coffee drinking that surrounds the creation of ANYTHING artistic nowadays.

So I live in hope that it survives another 60 years and fills many more lives with joy and maybe, just maybe, if I work hard enough, get lucky enough and sell enough copies of my novels etc I will make it on the show to tell them I don’t want the bible, but do want a lifetime supply of pick n mix.

Well I’m off, I’ve been listening to Martin Pipe’s and Nick Hornby’s and Ricky Gervais’s and now it will be Morrissey’s.
Marvellous.

The world is not all doom and gloom afterall

, sometimes there’s simple genius.

Reading - The last testament of the holy bible by James Frey
Listening to - Live on the Sunset Strip - Otis Redding

How delicious is irony?

Andrew Marr has been a journalist for thirty years. Firstly with the Scotsman, then the Economist and the Independent, which he went on to edit for two years. He’s written for the Observer and the Express and has also become a familiar face on British television as the BBC’s political editor and the writer and presenter of fine BBC documentaries, that have also pulled in more income in book form.

Now I went to journalism school, got a degree in it in fact, and we had to write long-winded and often painfully dull essays on contempt of court, slander, libel, public interest and free speech.

It was perhaps the most distressing part of the whole three years, but we had to be taught, we needed to know, we couldn’t go out into the world of rat-like cunning that journalists inhabit without the knowledge of what we could and could not do.

Now, I’m sure Marr is a fine chap and he seems to have carried the sword and shield of truth and justice throughout his career higher and prouder than many who inhabit that slurry-pit of agenda-driving and misinformation. However, when I read that he was one of the people who had demanded, and received, a so-called ‘super-injuction’ from the high court lest we, the people who have been paying his salary very nicely for those thirty years, should discover the truth behind the jocular grin and the sticky out ears, I was a little perturbed.

Delving deeper did nothing to quell the uncomfortable feeling that Mr. Marr was having his cake and eating it too.

Having held him up to be a man of integrity and objectivity it did not sit well with me that one of the very journalist’s who has made a decent living (no mean feat) from journalism he must have harried and hassled the truth out of many a sticky corner. Always, no doubt quoting the inalienable right for the public to be told what is going on in the lives of those who have outstripped our meagre achievements. How we love to read or listen or watch as politicians, actors, sportspeople and the other celebrity Gods fall from grace as their unwise liaisons, sexual peccadilloes and nefarious dealings are spread out in front of us under the banner ‘public interest’.

Where do interest and mere titillation separate? I’m not sure any of us really know.
But surely the fact that Andrew Marr, respected voice, objective, fair, balanced, was giving us some of this information whilst having an extramarital affair, scrabbling to discover paternity issues over a small child and generally carrying on like a Tory backbencher from the Major years sits a little crooked.

Now I couldn’t care less if a politician or any other public figure gets off by dry-humping Louis Quinze furniture as long at it doesn’t affect the way they do their job. In fact for some artists to do their job they HAVE to do certain things the rest of us find distasteful or downright bizarre.
So what? Hump away!

What is harder to stomach is the idea that a journalist, who has made a life out of winkling the truth out of others, and presenting these truths to us for our delectation, might feel he deserves to be treated differently when he’s caught with his trousers down.

His admittance of embarrassment and uneasiness at gagging his own kind is something which only partially excuses his actions. I wonder if next time one of his sources tips him off to an unsavoury story concerning two families, a small child and questions of ‘who’s the Daddy?’ he might lay off.

Call me cynical but I went to journalism school; of course he wont. Saying one thing and doing another is the cornerstone of the hypocrite. Maybe he’ll move into politics, I’m sure he’d find the water warm and welcoming.

Reading: A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
Listening to: Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death by the Dead Kennedys

Dark shadows in the East

So another friend falls from the bachelor tree amidst the sound of creaking limbs and ‘one night only’ wildness. This time with a farewell to single-dom that took place in Slovenia. To be precise the rather wonderful and beautiful capital of Slovenia: Ljubljana.

Now I have never been anywhere without a guidebook since my childhood but there was something very relaxing about going somewhere and not feeling the need to know everything, go everywhere, see everything. It’s something I may take on board the next time I visit somewhere new with the future Mrs. L. It would be a most agreeable change for her I’m sure.

Banter, badinage and japes aside I was still struck by the wholesome nature of the city, small, pretty, sleepy, even the punks were apologetic. There was one thing that did shock though. Something which we have been putting to bed for at least a generation, but something that other parts of the world are unwilling to even contemplate. That is that we are all the same, regardless of colour, ethnicity, creed or sexuality (I’m including religion, you’re ALL crazy).

Seemingly the racist chants of crowds in Italy, Spain and other parts of Europe are not only for the fervent football fanatic. It runs deeper. I’ve heard casual racism in Thailand and other places but was shocked to be out in a modern European capital and have our guide (female, 21, travelled, decent education) happily declare ‘we don’t have black people here, we don’t like them, they are sleazy and disgusting.’ This was such a jolt, so out of leftfield, I wasn’t sure how to react. In fact I hadn’t given a reaction by the time she made her next statement.
‘Do you prefer asians or blacks?’
Still stunned I tried to point out that individual people can be awful or nice, trustworthy or vile, regardless of the colour of their skin. She talked over me by explaining that in Slovenia they don’t mind Asians as much as blacks because at least they work hard.

This wasn’t said for effect, it wasn’t said out of a youthful need to show off, it was so bald, so ingrained and so effortless. I didn’t know what to say.
Later as the poor Stag (now a poor married man) Will wandered the rather hip, cool ‘city within a city’, where graffiti is king and cheap green shots flow like brackish water, another shock.

‘you’re friend’ said one harmless looking pot-smoker as I said hello to his dog, ‘is he a faggot?’
Again I was stunned into silence, as my brain raced to come up with something, anything, that may answer this question.

Do eastern European homophobes honestly think that all gay men dress in a giant afro wig and polyester disco outfits? On the evidence of his question it seems they might.

Staggering.

(For the record Will is not gay, despite same sex boarding school)
So as we continue to shrug off the shackles of our recent Empirical past and deal with the fall-out and the repercussions and the guilt and try to find a place in our Country, and our heart, for the plethora of peoples and cultures that we so happily took from, before deigning to allow them to come here to do the jobs we couldn’t possibly do ourselves (help people, serve people, clean up after people) bear one thing in mind.

We are doing something right, we are doing something righteous, we, who come generations after the Raj and the rubber plantations and the slavery have, at least, shown that tolerance is not only everyone’s right, regardless of any prejudice that may still lurk within. We are able to let it go and allow people the freedoms they deserve.

As for Slovenia, if you want to be in the EU and be included in our gang for protection and financial support, you may want to try and understand the irony of a small nation, trying to find it’s feet, being allowed to do that by the bigger boys and girls. Please join us in the present and leave your past behind.

Just read: The True History Of The Kelly Gang – Peter Carey
Listening to: Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness – Smashing Pumpkins

Libya, or Operation Blind-Eye

Libya, oh Libya, that encyclopaedia, oh Libya the tattooed lady. (Almost © Groucho Marx ‘At The Circus 1939)

So the UN had got it’s panties in a bunch over another oil-rich nation. Funny that. The axis of evil, or the axis of ‘people the American government can’t do business with because they want to do what they wont rather than what we tell them to do’ has fallen foul of the international community once more. And suddenly fighter jets are covering a no-fly zone, hurried meetings and proclamations from the mouths of politicians fill the airwaves. Words like democracy and despot and nutter are flung about as the western media moguls line their ducks up alongside those they put into power, here and in the U.S.

Is Gadaffi any more power-crazed than George Bush Jnr with his direct link to God, or Tony Blair who was on Libyan soil pretty recently (2004) where he declared we must ‘move on’ from the pain of the past (PC. Yvonne Fletcher, Lockerbie etc), could that have had anything to do with the other thing that was happening there at the time (As Mr Blair met Mr Gaddafi, it was announced Anglo-Dutch oil giant Shell had signed a deal worth up to £550m for gas exploration rights off the Libyan coast (BBC News)) surely not, and you would be a ‘nutter’ to suggest it.

The attitude of the west to these dictators is so mind-numbingly hypocritical as to leave one breathless.

The arrogance and sheer barefacedness should be shocking but cause nothing more than another world-weary shrug around the world.

Iraq – here have some weapons. Oh look he’s got weapons, destroy him!
Burma – Burma, erm, Myanmar, erm, where? democracy, dictatorship, civil liberty, erm, do they have anything apart from suffering people, like oil and stuff? No? right, moving on.

Iran – nuclear power? Right, let’s get into there. But you’ve got nuclear power, yes, but we are non-violent and serene and worldly. You are just the cradle of civilisation.
Zimbabwe – oh, yes, tricky one, come back to us when everyone’s starving to death.
Niger – never heard of it, next.
Rwanda – no words to describe that vile colonial-ethnic abortion.
Fiji – oh yes, nice water, erm, beaches? Next.

Obviously solutions to these horrific humanitarian catastrophes are well beyond the mind of most of us, there are no neat and tidy answers to any of them, but stopping a military junta from controlling its people by policing with the military of a few select OTHER countries through the UN (the picture of Colin Powell holding up a vial of clear liquid in the UN before invading Iraq still haunts) is ludicrous.

Put it this way, if you’re a poor, average, working citizen and the skies above your country buzz with bombers and the ground rumbles with approaching tanks I would be wondering a) whose side are they on? b) whose side shall I say I’m on? And c) I wish we weren’t the 9th largest oil producer in the world? Or maybe we could see some benefit from OUR country’s riches.

My heart goes out to them one and all, normal people ripped off, downtrodden and coerced by their own people, and the people coming as their ‘saviours’.
From some nightmares there is no escape.

Reading – Tintin and the Red Sea Sharks
Listening to – Creedance Clearwater Revival – At The Movies

HBO

Home Box Office. A TV station started in the 60’s, that showed the ‘Thriller in Manilla’ in the 70’s, started making their own films in the 80’s, a pioneering cable channel, the first satellite channel and for me the finest example of television available in the 21st Century.

The list of remarkable HBO television is long, from The Sopranos, Deadwood, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Band of Brothers and The Pacific. Generation Kill, Flight of the Conchords, The Wire and Six Feet Under. The Larry Saunders Show, Entourage, The Life and Times Of Tim, Boardwalk Empire, Treme, and my new fave Eastbound and Down, the quality, audacity and envelope-pushing displayed by the little company from Manhattan, that grew into an independent monster, is astounding.

(The list is huge and I wont list everything but take a look, it’s mind-blowing)
And the reasons behind this extraordinary programming? It’s simple. It’s the reason Larry David pitched up there for Curb, the reason The Wire was so vast, all-consuming and sprawling, the reason David Chase felt his ending of the Sopranos was THE ending, and that reason is that HBO trust the writer, they trust the creator, they are a bastion of creative protection. They give the creator/writer the ball and say run with it, allow your characters to breathe, allow your story to unwind organically, we trust you, you are the best, do what you like.

What an incredible feeling that must be, what empowerment, what fulfilment.

Anyone who saw the patchy but often spot on ‘Episodes’ recently, or any of the other shows that lay out the experience of writers within film and television, has some understanding of the head scratching, the bullshit, the lies and sheer monstrous power of studio execs when it comes to making TV for the masses. I pity the writer who, having sat through a meeting with 12 people, none of whom get what you’re trying to achieve, each hand you a script covered in red pen, most of it contradictory, and tell you to come back it 2 days with it all changed.

Test audience scores, advertising pressures, the bible-bashing lunatics, the share-holders, the high-ups who are desperate to cover their ‘ass’. And the subsequent crap that rolls downhill smothering the creative process will kill a good idea dead, as surely as if the writer has been taken down a side alley and had their imagination shot.

HBO doesn’t have that. HBO you pay up front and by doing so you are trusting them to deliver often brilliant adult comedy and drama, without the soul-searching, hand-wringing and moral panic attached to swearing, violence and sexual content stifling the output.

In this context HBO are a shining beacon of hope. Brilliant people given free rein to create and execute what they feel is right, treating the audience as grown-ups, exploring themes and characters to provide life-altering viewer experience.
Thank you HBO and long may you continue to stand up for all of us who want to see life as it is, not through a studio filter with all the edges shaved off.
To paraphrase Kenny Powers, you’re fucking out, HBO are fucking in.
Peace out.

Reading – The True History Of The Kelly Gang – Peter Carey
Listening to – The Boston Baseball Band – Go Red Sox!

Is there anybody out there?

Watching Professor Cox on the rather magical 'wonders of the universe' two things occur to me.

One, how did someone so interesting and intelligent have anything to do with a song so execrable as 'Things can only get better'?

Two, how can we take life seriously when we (by we I do, of course, mean incredibly smart chaps like Cox) know virtually nothing about the universe in which we live?

Certainly the mindbending knowledge already in human possession is a laudable feat; space time, relativity, quarks, gravity, atoms and the rest, but the shortfall is astounding. For example our galaxy revolves around a black hole and everything in existence will eventually be sucked into it, or not, or we will never get close to the event horizen to find out, or we will, or we'll be destroyed by something hitting the planet, or not, or the planet will get rid of these beastly upstart human beings, who've only been around for a few hundred thousand years, and continue happily on it's life journey (over four a half billion years and counting) with barely a moment's hesitation.

I'm beginning to see why some people believe in a invisible man in the sky who threw it all together for his own amusement in 6 days (the 7th was presumably used to catch up on his Sky Plus recordings).

In an infinite universe amongst infinite universes it seems unlikely, why bother? However, I can see that having a nice little delusion to hide behind rather than go through the head-scrambling alternative as us athiests have to might give some relief, whatever gets you through eh?

Now, as a man whose grasp of astrophysics is chiefly made up of watching Red Dwarf I love the fact that Professor Cox and his ilk hand us this information in easily digestible chunks. What I don't enjoy is the nagging feeling in my mind that occurs at least twice daily that all in all nothing is important, nothing has consequence, there is no great scheme and we are adrift with nothing but hope, bizarre belief systems and fledgling space exploration for chums.

A feeling that is only intensified after watching a clever bloke tell me that indeed we are doomed, the planet is doomed, the whole of human history will one day soon mean absolutely zip, nada, nothing.

I guess that means I can have another beer...


Listening to: The Galaxy Song - Monty Python
Reading: K-Pax - Gene Brewer

Obsession

We're a curious bunch us men. What is about us that makes us so prone to obsession?

Sure, women can be capable of the same proclivities, try Valentino, The Beatles, Take That, shoes, but ultimately women have a stronger grasp on the ridiculousness that true obsession brings. Maybe it's the fact that they can grow new people inside them or something. No, to truly grasp the horror of obsession we need to look to the male.

Certainly many men avoid the curse of the obsession too, wisely continuing on with their lives as if unimportant transient things were just that, but for the rest of us? Forget about it.

The soon-to-be Mrs. L will gladly tell you of the months spent eating Italian food, drinking Italian wine and trawling Bristol for cannollis during my Sopranos phase and my recent trip to LA was marred somewhat by my need to tick off 'Entourage' locations.

I wont even begin on Liverpool, That is for a whole blog of it's own (once and only once I promise).

For those of us with the curse there is nothing to be done, whether it's Dylan, Zappa or Neil Young, a sports team or sport itself (cyling, mountain biking, snowboarding, climbing, you get the idea), traction engines or the complete works of Alan Moore, once gripped a man stays gripped.

My formative years had a few: Spiderman, The Smiths, The Doors, 2000 AD, alongside the aforementioned Liverpool, but I thought in my later years I would be free, or at least able to free myself.

Apparently not.

My new obsession is all-consuming, ludicrous, wonderful, exhilarating. It has taken over. It is baseball. Major League Baseball. A new world designed perfectly for an obsessive.

RBI's, the bullpen, pinch hitting, strikes and balls and bunts and grand slams. ERA, boxwrap, National league, American league, relievers and closers, fly balls, pop ups, ground outs, double plays, wild cards and walks, bench clearing rucks and reversing the curse.
There are no end to the rules, the history, the rivalries, the players and coaches, the wonderful ballparks, and the not-so-wonderful (Tropicana Field anyone?).It's the obsession that keeps on giving.

I know it's daft, I know it's ridiculous, I don't care. Sure, you can trace this new obsession back to me getting a Blackberry for the first time, with its built in MLB app, or you can point to the future Mrs. L letting me keep ESPN America on the Sky package. You might even, if you knew me well, see that the pain, consternation and utter contempt in which I hold my old true love, football, has left a chink, a door ajar, in need of exploration. My obsessive nature needed somewhere to go. Whatever. I am hooked and the very fact it is slightly mad only adds to the joy.

Obsession should be unfathomable to everyone else, that's the point, that's one of the best things about it. Only those obsessed with the same thing get it. It's a club, a secret society, something of our own.

And as for Fenway, the Green Monster, Yawkey Way, Pesky's pole, Sweet Caroline and Dirty Water, the Curse of the Bambino, winning it all after an 86 year wait, Schilling's sock and Manny being Manny, staying faithful, and everything else Red Sox: I'm in.

Someone once said, love the game and it will love you back, I agree unconditionally, whole-heartedly and without reservation. Take me baseball and do with me as you will.

Listening to: Neil Young - Le Noise
Reading:Bright Shiny Morning - James Frey