petercampbell

Me:

"What do you want for your birthday?"

"What do you want for your birthday?"

"What do you want for your birthday?"

Douglas:

"What do you want for your birthday?"

"What do you want for your birthday?"

"What do you want for your birthday?"

We're like a pair of persistent, attention starved children.

Yes, it's that time of that year in which all our friends and relative's birthdays cluster together in the space of a month. It's as though the spermatezoa and ova of our friend and family's parents connived to produce their squalling offspring within such a narrow timespan that inspiration and finances can't but help be taxed.

Which doesn't help, of course. But more importantly, what DOES Douglas want for his birthday? Nothing, really. And nor do I. We already have everything we need, within reason.

Still, I'll buy him presents, ones he probably doesn't want. He'll buy me presents which I also don't want or need. And at the last moment (two days seperates our birthdays) we'll think dear god, what if he's bought more presents/spent more money than me? I'd better buy more! More!

It's silly really, an altruistic verson of nuclear escalation, and each year we swear to reign in, to hold back, and each year we end up spending an absurd amount of money.

This knowledge doesn't help. I'll still trawl the net, and our local, increasingly sparse shops, and end up buying something, anything, that represents some sort of physical representation of affection.

At the end of it all, all that will be left will be discarded wrapping paper, and thanks yous that are sincere only in that they're intended to prevent hurt feelings. And then the presents will make a token appearance, before being secreted away to the local charity shop, at the first possible opportunity.

Here comes the summer! exclaims the banner in a shop window. Below, a photograph of lounging sunbathers (impossibly beautiful women – no sagging tummies or cellulite-ridden bottoms here) gaze up  at something glaringly bright but unseen. This is presumably the sun and not a detonating nuclear weapon   Surrounding the poster: a selection of sun block creams, unpriced, which almost certainly means they’ll be toe-curlingly expensive.
 
How optimistic.  In reality, the rain slats down, the wind is chill enough to turn hands an unsavoury shade of blue.  A few flurries of snow even make an appearance to remind you that summer is not here yet, even though the trees and shrubs are springing leaves, and daylight  bleeds towards midnight. In the fields, lambs make shelter against their mother’s bulk.  I swear, it was warmer in March than it is now. In the morning, walking to work, I’ve taken to wearing a woolly hat and a thick winter coat again.
 
Still, there are signs:  last night, the sun came out for an hour and, in the sun, a pair of swooping swifts appeared.  At night, there’s a solitary owl’s cry, whit whit whit (but no answering whoooo).  Primroses are in bloom beneath the garden hedge, fighting against an advancing phalanx of wild garlic. The pond is alive with countless tadpoles and, sometimes, very vocal frogs who don’t seem to have realised the mating season has long passed.
 
It’s getting there, slowly.

London may have been hectic, and time limited, but I did have time to pop into the cinema to see Avengers Assemble, aka The Avengers to  the rest of the world.  The chance to see a film on the big screen being is a rare treat since our local cinema closed a few years back. It was a 3D showing, alas, with all its attendant drawbacks (silly glasses, a screen dimmed to  murky incomprehensibility in places, inflated ticket prices). I’ve never been convinced 3D is anything more than a needless gimmick, and I’m still not convinced.  Does the sight of an object thrown out of the screen directly towards you really add anything to the work?  It
hindered,  rather than enhanced,  enjoyment. Still,  it was enjoyable, if in places flawed, carried by Joss Whedon’s sharp, witty script, and a welcome amount of characterisation to overcome the necessary amount of exposition.  For what is clearly a corporate franchise, it’s about as good as you could hope for.
 
Still, that doesn’t explain its phenomenal success. 700 million in a 10 days period?  A possible billion before a fortnight’s passed? When something reaches this level of cultural critical mass, there’s evidently something working for it, something far beyond a slick marketing campaign and a crowd pleasing mentality. And there’s the rapturous reception from critics and audience alike to take into account too.
 
What does it mean, when the dominant cultural phenomenon is a bunch of bickering superheroes who are facing  a villain that is pleasingly attractive (and who manages to sneak the insult “mewling quim” into a 12A movie). Is it escapism? (the world’s a hard environment at the moment).  A reversion to childhood? (fond memories of comics book read for the adults, and for the children...well, they probably don’t even read comic books these days. Or read much at all, come to that. But they’ll know
the characters from bedspreads and Halloween costumes and decals on lunch boxes).
 
Or is it something else? There are sociologists better qualified to  answer these questions than I ever will.
 
What’s unquestionable though is that Whedon’s serious in his intent. The Avengers may be populist, but a) he loves the source material and b) there are certain themes (the nature of reality, feminism, alienation and the need to belong) that recur throughout his work.  It’s a pleasing demonstration of using a big, populist canvas to talk directly to a large audience.
 
This sort of thing used to be unfashionable for a large number of years: the presiding image of an artist was of someone who was anguished, certainly eccentric, possibly a little dangerous, creating cutting edge work that could and should only be appreciated by a very few.
 
And there are artists whose work I love that fall into this very category. That doesn’t mean it’s the only way of working. Some highly regarded movies are beautifully shot, carefully scripted, exquisitely acted. And fantastically dreary, with all the intellectual content of a spent light bulb (I'm looking at you, Eyes Wide Shut).   Obscure isn’t necessarily good. Popular isn’t ecessarily bad.
 
That’s hardly an original observation, but its pleasing to see it in practice.  There’s been half a century of people insisting that there’s no high or low art any longer, only good and bad, and the boundaries are gradually being chipped chipped  chipped away.  And the best thing is,  you can see this cross-fertilisation everywhere: in music (classical steals from pop, pop steals from classical. That is, if you can differentiate between the two, which is  sometimes hard these days). Popular novelists are studied in university. Complex, difficult novels become mainstream in their appeal. Graffiti artists are displayed in galleries. Painters create canvases featuring lurid cultural icons.  Pop stars write operas. Opera singers become multimillion selling pop stars.
 
It’s a mix and match world we live in. the Avengers may not be great art, but it’s good art, and its success  says something, on many levels, about the world we live in.
 
Plus, it was really cool at the end when Hulk punched Thor and the whole cinema laughed and applauded.

Aside from that, I didn't have much opportunity to see London, which is a city I rather like (and this from a log time cityphobe).
I love its diversity, and its clamour, even the novelty of its dirt that clogs your hair and sinuses and leaves a black residue every time you blow your nose.

Most of my time seemed to be spent underground, in the tube's crowded and airless confines, wondering at its obvious geographical distinctions (central line - well tended. Northern line - more than a little seedy in places). Everyone follows the same ritual here: the last minute dash down the stairwells on hearing the trains arrival, culminating in the inevitable sardine pack into the first available carriage, trying to avoid pressing the more vulnerable parts of your body into the person in front of you.

I like the tube, not just for its convenience and occasional hazard, but for the aura of mythology that hangs around its tunnels. This fascination goes back to a documentary about the Angel station that Bibette Kidron produced for the BBC many years back, one that caught the underground system at its most archaic (you can see it on You Tube if you're interested). At night, workers ventured down into the tunnels to clean and repair, and the conditons they worked in hadn't changed much since Victorian times. The station staff were straight out of Beckett. It invested the place with a seedy sort of glamour, which is the sort that Britain does best: there's so much resonance when this country grapples nostalgically with its past and reveals all the cracks in the process.

And then there's the urban legends that tell of the supposed inhabitants of the tunnels (revenents, the forgotten, the disenfranchised). The ghost stations that you're dimly aware of as the trains lumber through the tunnels - brief blinks between the arcing electricity. The fact that the tube was a refuge during the war. Who can resist those attractions?

Oh you can, London commuter, harried and half asleep and with a couple of hours to go before reaching your home and a few hours of rest before repeating the process all over again.

I can sympathise. I wouldn't want to live there. would be driven to distraction, would long for green, open, unoccupied spaces. But to visit, to experience in moderation, yes, I'll admit to more than a grudged admiration.

Last weekend, I finally had the chance to see Einstein on the Beach staged. It involved a long trip to London (15 hours travelling time), and an alarming amount of money, but I've waited half my life to see this, and I was damned if I going to pass up on the opportunity.

Anyway, it was shite.

No, I jest. It was astounding, far beyond my expectations - and my expectations were very, very high.

Fot the uninitiated, Einstein is a five hour long, abtract opera. Due to its cost and complexity, it's seldom staged, and has attained a legendary reputation, perhaps in part because of the scarcity of its performances. A collaboration between Robert Wilson and Philip Glass, it was written at a time when opera was a moribund form. It revitalised the medium, made Glass and Wilson famous, and brought a new, younger audience to opera. The libretto is mostly written by Christopher Knowles, an autisic poet, or is made up of solfege and chanted numbers. Abandon all notions of storyline or characterisation for you'll find none here: it's a work that's made up of ideas and images, with the audience's interpretation binding them together.

It's being staged at the notoriously unlovely Barbican Centre (unlovely from the outside, that is). I attended the Saturday night performance, something about which I'm very glad, as the Friday night premier was, apparently, something of a disaster, from a technical point of view. This time there were no hitches, beyond a bit of a delay in the transition between one of the scenes to the next. No wonder the stage hands, called onstage for the curtain call, looked so pleased and relieved.

Preparation: don't drink beforehand, not for several hours, not if you want to see the entire performance, although the audience are invited to wander in and out at will. Several succumbed. I crossed legs and practiced bladder control.

And will power is needed for a work of this length. Dances aside, the staging moves very, very slowly, and requires a steely precision. Performers stand immobile for five, ten, fifteen minutes, in uncomfortable poses (I really felt for the dancer playing a businessman, posed unwaveringly on one leg for what seemed a interminable length of time). Something odd happens to your perception in these sorts of timescales. You start focussing on the very small details, and the stage, far from seeming immobile, suddenly seems alive with movement, and you're almost hypnotised. Time's passing, but you're not aware of its passage.

The same description can be applied to Glass' score. I've been familiar with the  music for a good thirty years, but was still surprised at how theatrical it was in context, and how visceral the effect on the audience (there was a visible shudder in people's bodies when the music switched from a slow to hyperactive section). Having experienced it myself, it's a bit like a chiroporacter taking hold of your body and making a sudden and not always comfortable twist to your spine.

Surprises: the humour, which in places was pure Mack Sennett (or, more accurately perhaps, pure Beckett). The sheer theatricality of the event in which the audience seemed to have a real emotional investment (I imagine many of them would, like me, never expected to have the opportunity to see this performed). The sheer stamina required of the performers - they more than deserved their fifteen minute standing ovation at the end.

Leaving the theatre, the same words kept on cropping up again and again from the audience: "Amazing", "Astounding", "Remarkable" And it was, it really was.

And how pleasing that it still has the power to wind up the more conservative opera critics, nearly 40 years after its premier:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/opera/9250317/Einstein-on-the-Beach-Barbican-review.html

How the weekend was spent: cleaning out kitchen cupboards, as we’ve had a new pantry fitted (easier for Douglas to access, less opportunity for him to fall). It’s like a geological excavation, finding fooodstuffs long unused, long forgotten, long inedible.
 
Those pine nuts? Best before 2011.
 
That tub of ghee? Best before 2009.
 
That tin of drinking chocolate? Dear lord! Best before 2001.
 
On no account  even attempt to open that tub of paprika. Best before 1995.
 
And are the tins breeding? How else to explain 15 cans of tomatoes and a similar number of kidney beans. Which is maybe understandable, those being the sort of items that you throw in to the supermarket trolley, thinking :”Have we got?...well let’s get a couple, they never go wrong.” But 10 tins of coconut milk?  And why on earth would we have bought a dozen jars of chutney?
 
Of course, the majority of these items would still be edible, even the paprika, but you think: better not. Just in case. And it’s yet another excuse to declutter, to downsize, and try to bring the house into some semblance of order.

 
*

 
It’s not all been work. There’s also been time to mindlessly browse the internet where, somehow, I came across a long circulated blacklist of celebrity exposes. These may be untrue, and are certainly cruel. Still, there’s a certain guilty pleasure to be had in reading the likes of this:
 
(name of well known Hollywood actor) Hygienically challenged. Hard to work with; was horrible on the set of xxxxxxx. Used to wear a chicken suit for El Pollo Loco. Reportedly broke up with xxxxxxxx over her refusal to service him orally. Reported heavy drug use. Plays both sides of the field. Has herpes. Has wandering eyes (and other body parts). Was arrested in 1989 for exposing himself to drivers in Malibu.  
 
These types of stories  have circulated for decades of course, the coy suggestions and carefully worded rumousr that are decipherable to those in the know, but they’ve seldom been so easily accessible. They play on people's love of gossip, and uncovered secrets, and delight in taking the stars (botoxed, air brushed, nipped and tucked) and bringing them down to our level, shorn of their glamour. Although excess exudes its own sort of glamour. which may be the real fascination, after all..

Praise be to the great god You Tube. Without it I'd probably never have had the opportunity to rewatch this: the BBC Play For Today adaption of Alan Garner's Red Shift.



I have vague memories of watching this when it was first broadcast back in the 1970s. The reviews at the time professed bafflement, and it's easy to see why. It's not as elliptical as its source material - surely the most complex book ever marketed as a teenage novel - but it's still difficult, even by the "challenging" standards of Play For Today: notorious in its time for its boundary stretching themes, and a constant source of ire for Mary Whitehouse.

The TV adaption was scripted in part by Garner himself.  Perhaps out of necessity, it makes the novel's stucture, which shifts continually backwards and forwards in time, more evident. The book is told primarily through clipped dialogue, and is supported by the barest of description. The TV adaption fills in those blanks, something that makes the narrative easier to follow, but its meaning, emerging from the scenes that collide and spark against each other, remains as elusive as ever.

It still suffers though. Those threadbare sets! Those Roman soldiers sporting 1970s haircuts! Where it especially suffers though is in making concrete what in thenovel remains elusive: Garner's prose strips everything out, but the TV adaption puts it all back in again.

It's an interesting offshoot of the novel, and worth watching, but its the novel that remains the essential item (as time passes, I think more and more it may be Garner's greatest).


And praise be for possibly illegal blu-ray player hacks, which allowed me to view the Criterion edition of Night of the Hunter, presented in its proper aspect ratio, for the first time. I love this film, for all the reasons that others have already articulated more lucidly that I dare attempt. I especially love it for the central riverboat scenes, which sit at the film's core, and marks its shift from gothic noir to outright fairytale.



And praise be to You Tube once more, and to the person that uploaded this startling staging of Glass's Satyagraha. It's a fine mental preparation for its predecessor Einstein on the Beach (which I'll be seeing in three weeks time, after a long, LONG, trip down to London, especially for the occasion)



What all this mainly passive consumption is down to is avoiding the revision of the latest section of This time we go down to the green together. It sits there and stares me down whenever I open the document up, wilfully opaque. This isn't unusual. There's always a cooling off period when, having written a first draft, there's the need to gain some sort of objectivity before attacking it and straightening out its inconsisencies and poorly written passages and stilted characterisation. And all the time mentally bewailing my creative abilities and the shortfall between vision and the lumpen, ugly actuality. I always think of it as cracking a clam with a knife, something that's brutal but necessary, in order to get the meat that lies within and (possibly, always possibly), that rarest of occurances, an actual pearl.

There are two kinds of easter holiday weekends. The sort where the sun shines and everyone migrates out into the garden. The other sort is characterised by incessent, ground drilling rain that forces you to do all those jobs around the house you've been ignoring, in some sort of springtime equivalent of cabin fever.

I had the latter sort of easter weekend. Cue much decluttering and painting. Decluttering especially.

Douglas is a hoarder. I'm a thrower-outer. He accumulates objects as quickly as I can dispose of them. Those little pill cups? "They've got to be good for something."

"No they're not - throw them out!"

But still I find them stashed away, in an untidy pile, behind a mound of other, equally useless, objects

I know why he does it, quite apart from his jackdaw eye. All those objects around about induce a feeling of safety, it's a defence mechanism.  "My mum used to have a dish like that", he'll say, or, "My grandad used to sing that song" (from some long unloved CD he's picked up in a charity shop somewhere).

I'm the opposite. If a thing has outlived its usefulness, out in the bin it goes. No point even in putting it to one side for the charity shop, because it'll just sit there, forgotten, and get subsumed by the detritus we accumulate. Books: will I ever read that particular title again? No. Out it goes. Clothes? Too little storage to accomodate them all. Into the bin. DVDs? CDs? The discs take up so much less space if you discard the covers and slip them into a CD wallet.

Though it strikes me that this is also type of defence mechanism. If you don't possess anything, how can you miss it or mourn  if, for some reason, you lose it? When my mother died at the turn of the century, one I the first things I did was dispose of most of her belongings. "How could you bear to even touch them so early on?" my cousin asked. But it was easy. Discard. Abandon. Move on. Move on. Move on.

These impulses complement each other of course, they cancel out our more extremist tendencies. Otherwise Douglas in his dotage would be like one of those people you see featured in TV programmes, cocooned in their house amid barricades of cardboard boxes and towers of newspapers. And I'd be doing my best trappist monk imitation in a house reduced to stripped bare walls and uncovered, untreated floorboards.

In the meantime we circle and argue, and reach unsteady compromise, and argue again, and the contents of the house grows, then lessens, and then grows again. It's what relationships are all about really, accomodating each other's extremes, finding compromise, some middle ground we can both inhabit.

...was today, actually. As he stood in the queue at in Tesco, on a busy day, so that a multitude of shoppers had full view of his lurid red briefs and a fair amount of body flesh as well. He didn't even have the decency to blush. At least he wasn't wearing the briefs that read "Closed for business" across the buttocks.

Weight loss is to blame. During the long period of his foot infection, the diabetic nurses kept increasing his insulin, which in turn increased his weight. The enforced inactivity didn't help. Now he's more active, and the insulin lowered to a quarter of the amount he was once on, so the weight is falling off. He's at that awkward stage - old clothes don't yet fit, and the newer clothes sag and droop and, yes, fall down. Though never before quite so publicly.

And yes, of course I convulsed with laughter. Such sympathy for my dearly beloved.

"My chest sounds like a basketful of kittens" says Douglas, a phrase so poetic I might just steal it.

And it's true: his chest squeals and mews and meowls. He has The Bug That Is Flooring Everyone. He also has a huge boil on his stomach, probably caused when he was injecting himself with insulin. By his disaster prone standards, things are actually going pretty well.

But now the bugger has passed his cold on to me too, just in  time for the weekend. I know, share and share alike, but there are limits, there really are. Sniffle. Snotter. Snort.

I'm going off now to feel sorry for myself, and accumulate improbable amounts of snot-encrusted hankies.