I saw All White in Barking last night - the new film by Marc Isaacs, who’s a really intriguing filmmaker. I pretty much knew in advance I’d like it a lot, being fascinated by both the white working-class and counties just outside London like Essex.
I do realise that’s one of the most patronising sentences you’ll ever read, but I mean it in total honesty - I’ve been following Leeds United since I was 8, and for an experience of white working-class hope, frustration, glory and loss, you can’t better it as a masterclass. Plus I love Cheshunt for walking - it claims it’s in Hertfordshire but it’s so obviously in Essex. And it has the Lee Valley Park, one of the most beautiful secret places for animals wet and dry in the South.
Anyhow, the film was great, but for me, it wasn’t just about Essex worker whites, it was also about Jewish Essexites - like Monty the Holocaust survivor and his buddies and a man called Roger who wasn’t openly outed as Jewish but so obviously was. Their confusion about race and friendliness was very typical of our bredren, and the doc made one of its most poignant jabs when a dinner of Holocaust survivors featured a man stating that Jews must marry Jews because it was simply the right thing to do. It’s not knowing racism, but it is putting up barriers that, especially to outsiders, seemimplausible and cruel. The cycle of exclusion and prejudice, however benignly intended, carries on.
These are really important issues. In a more poetic moment, on the 243 home, I got happy because the doc really celebrated outsiders and non-conformists, albeit a bit unpalatable at time, which is very good indeed. People who say what they think and want the goodness of others to be proven to them rather than assume it. I mean, actually, that rarely works, because if you start suspicious, you’ll probably remain so, but I see nothing wrong with seeing every new person as a potential friend to woo and impress.
Anyhow in other news, my current film obsession is Frownland, about…well, it’s about so much, but the central character is a stuttering troll of a man who lives in a perpetual netherworld of crisis and disgust, in a city that seems to seep hatred. It’s funny, it’s scary and it’s also very very sad for anyone who identifies that yep, big cities are just like that - horrible, dirty and unfriendly. So, Frownland isn’t just one of the best, most unique, films of recent years, it’s also probably my favourite film title ever.
I wish I could show you a scan of the Jewish Telegraph front page this week - a picture of Stefan Ruzowitzky, who made the so-so film “The Counterfeiters”, with the tagline “Oscar win for Nazi’s Grandson”
It’s a film about Nazis, yes. And about Jews. But just because he’s the grandson of a Nazi doesn’t make him “Nazi’s Grandson”. I’m a “Jew’s Grandson” but I’d rather not be referred to that way. What a typically awful bit of press from an awful navel-gazing newspaper, maintaining that status quo that Jewish readers could only be interested in the Oscars for their Jewish content - by which of course I mean usually their Holocaust content, because that’s still the only acceptable story in town.
We’re a group of people most international and worldly-wise, most intellectually sharp. But now, it’s terrible - I wish Jewish people weren’t so easily led in paranoid insularity, a secret gang of death-related nods and winks.
Why are meetings so boring? Why do meetings exist? What ever gets decided at meetings apart from which is your favourite biscuit? When do meetings ever make you feel better apart from if the coffee is strong?
Why do I never talk in meetings? Why can’t I concentrate on something for more than 5 minutes before I’m taking my mind for a wander? Why do I fixate on one or two people and invent fantasy lives for them?
Simple morning pleasures - an analysis of La Isla Bonita from Wired - if only Madonna could have madness like that still rather than boring old lady disco
I went to the Serpentine Gallery for the Derek Jarman exhibition at the weekend. It’s an inspiration, I tells ya.
It’s a show to coincide with Isaac Julien’s new doc about Jarman which I have real reservations about, but you can forget about that anyway. The poetry speaks for itself in the show, and I’m glad (especially in light of the documentary’s canonising of Derek J) that nothing fake or reverent gets between you and the beautiful pictures, moving and still.
In fact, it’s a very personal experience in the gallery, which is amazing for the Serpentine, which always feels overcrowded and fussy. You can collapse on puffy cushions and watch Blue in a communal experience or, even better, be surrounded by about 10 screens of varying sizes on which Super 8 films play - and these are just stunning powerful films which overwhlem you with play and liberation and, oooooh, just a total feeling that 98% of other films have no soul and look like they were made by mindless cynics.
And you know what else? So many people there, all immersed in these romantic wonders, all silent but together, all declaring a love for someone the world seems to ignore apart from these retrospectives when he’s remembered again. You feel like you’re in a club of amazing people - people who’ve strolled as if by magic into a new zone of mystery and possibility.
It’s so ace. I love the attention he’s getting - as this nice little film (maybe a bit pointlessly but it don’t matter) says. Now can everyone please remember he’s still relevant for the next few years? And oi, sorry to carp on, but can we make the real tribute to him be a celebration of the free romantic spirits that we still have before they die or give up?
Look, I know I sound curmudgeonly, and I do hate complaining, but there’s actually easy practical stuff we can do - starting with celebrating and supporting good original stuff, and ignoring bad boring stuff. Otherwise, what’s the point? Shut the cinemas and turn off the TV signal. Can you ever imagine the literary equivalent of Jarman being so subject to the ebb and flow of chattering class opinion?
So this plan to play Premier League matches abroad - it makes me feel queasy, shocked and mainly repulsed at the greed, the arrogance, the desperate grab for bucks, and the total abandonment of community engagement.
I admit it, I have a nostalgic view of what a football club means to its local area. I come from a place with one team for miles around, a team that dominates local identity and is intimately tied with the perceived fortunes of the city. To me, a football club is nothing without its community - of course, there is a displaced diaspora who follow it too (like me) but we radiate from the original location and are drawn to a specific home where our dedication flows to. It’s a place of catharsis and worship. It’s a place. It’s not a concept.
So this makes me really sad - because it will happen, and the fans who live nearby will be ignored and the final source of community for our identikit urban areas will be destroyed. I’ve heard a lot of apocalyptic talk about this, and for once, we do need to be shrill. Society has been worn down over the last 50 years in this country. This is the latest kick to the balls.
And you see amazing scenes today at Old Trafford (I won’t digress to talk about the 0% chance of Leeds fans doing something as moving as that sadly) and you see right there on the screen what we’re losing. Our kids will look back and hate us for making them paranoid individuals, possessive apes, horrible beasts who suspect their neighbours.
Total irony too that the team who I hate for many reasons, one of which is their representation of all that’s wrong with hyper-Capitalist arrogance in football, can be responsible for a beautiful moment of tender community and respect at just the moment when fat men in suits want to kill such things in football.
What can I do to stop this? I mean, really, what can I do? Tell me, and I’ll do it.
Well, sort of. It’s for the I’m-unsure-about-it new movie Juno. This is a very sweet, if really weird shy, performance, though heavily proves that Kimya D is a zillion times more cool than Adam D.
That’s a real cottage in a real (remote) part of West Wales. I tell you that not to gloat over a nice time, but because it’s simply a total excitement that a place like that exists and hasn’t been destroyed by the march of glass and boring crotch-thrusting architecture.
All made of old branches and twigs, with a big fire, a secret loft bed, birds going wild, sheep staring, dirty bath, bobbly yellow walls made of ancient Earth, it’s a place with a personality. Just like being an owl. Owls have it good - everywhere they live is like that.
It was fun reading the guest book, with its competition to be the most bourgeois possible - how many kids did you conceive there? What did your food at the faraway gastropub cost? Just how friendly were you with the publican nearby? How closely did you align yourself with the local dolphins? Spectacular and beautiful - and I really mean this - not just as a place to stay, but also in the way the guest bookers feel like they need to justify their fun, and have instant self-analysis.
And guilt too. Everyone feels ashamed about their normal lives. And so did I. I’ve never had that before. I always feel guilty, but about specific things, not all of me. But you know, it is a totally different attitude when you live slower and you take heed from the limitations weather imposes on you and the wanders of field creatures, and I love that. London gives you everything all the time and it means you’re always occupied but always so bored every second, so distracted, restless.
So what to do?….be a rabbit or a dog probably. I had a great dream last night I was a rabbit bombing Tesco - I was so small, no-one suspected me.
Final thought - why did everyone in the book apart from us drive? Don’t you want to abandon all of your control? Isn’t that what fairytale cottages are for? They’re not for driving or for killing machines.
…what should I do? I wanted to go to Birmingham but I’ve ended up in Crewe.
I went to neither but I think of that song a lot when I’m waiting at train stations. Today I went to Sheffield, to speak to some young people (because of course, I am fine with being 27 - I really am, actually, I like it) about films and how to make a community of amazing DIY-ing people, and passed through Doncaster. Doncaster is quite a place - I only know the train station, but it’s got a great air of mystery - it has a very large amount of train-spotters (a group I admire - I unironically adore public transport and train mechanics [aka their faces and personalities]), multiple cafes with depressed servers, and a very lot of routes running through.
I study the timetables and construct imagined journeys through the regions. Can you believe you can get a direct train to Totnes from Doncaster? Wow! We went to Totnes a couple of years back. We live in Stoke Newington so it was in effect coming out the other side of the wardrobe into the same place but with slight changes.
Trains are where I do my best mental work and here’s what I processed:
- I sat across a table from Newcastle fans, drinking on their way to see their team almost certainly die a tedious death at Arsenal. Here were representatives of a major theme in my mind - change of manager at my beloved team - surrounding me. But of course I couldn’t say anything. I was in work facepaint and it wouldn’t be right. And whilst I happily traveled to Luton on Saturday to see Leeds whilst drinking a can of ale (it really was ale by the way) and soaking the dirty looks, I found it so strange that they each had bulging bags of lager cans to drink for the next hour and a half, getting ever more…not drunk, just strange and melancholy. It’s the North you see - it’s my heritage and I understand the mood when you’re a boy traveling South on a midweek afternoon and within a few minutes, sadness envelopes you…
- Then on the 73, I wondered about the woman and her daughter sharing the headphones of an ipod. They shared the same haughty dismissive look and subjected me to the usual staring sesh. The Mother had two sets of glasses - one around the neck, and one around the head - neither of which she actually wore on her face - why would you do that? I think it’s a way of asserting your all-seeing gaze and so deterring people like me from actually knowing why people like her irritate me so much. I suppose it’s because they remind me of home and a vague sense of what I left behind once, but that is so non-specific, it’s totally meaningless.
- Then I smelled a strange scent whilst staring at (another) grumpy-looking woman’s scarf, and worked out I was smelling the peculiar green drink Sonja’s Oma (grandma) gave us in Holland, and then I was confused by whether what I was seeing and smelling was totally real. And then I really recognised that I was tired.
Which brings me to the end. I did notice more, but I need to do some work on into the night and get even more tired.
