So I went to see A Prophet at the Richmond Filmhouse Sunday lunchtime. On my way back to the car, I was greeted by this sight on the south bank...
.... which made me wonder what I was going to see on the north bank.
Ooops! My car way further down the road. Which there was no way of getting too right then (3:30pm) because the pavement is under water. By the time it had receded, about 4:00pm, and I got back, it looked like this...
And that's after the water has receded. I opened the door and found about three inches of water inside - the level must have come above the sill. The engine started and I drove home with water sloshing from side to side when I turned and from front to back whenever I accelerated or braked. That's not covered in the Driving Test. And no, the water doesn't fall out the bottom of the car once you reach dry land, because in modern cars the underpan is pretty much waterproof. So I spent a good hour scooping out water, pressing the carpet, scooping out more water and getting frozen hands. All of which I took in reasonable spirits - unlike the way I'm going to take the insurance company's handling of it. To judge from the clueless questions and comments I got, no-one has ever claimed on some minor flooding before. But that's for another day.
When you pass through those pointless security checks at the airport, do you think you're owed an apology when they find out that, no, in fact, you weren't carrying explosives? Probably not, but you are and here's why. Let's start with a less emotional example. Suppose your house is carpeted throughout in white. Naturally, when guests visit, you ask them to take their shoes off to save the carpet, and you've got a couple of little phrases to make a joke or a little ritual of it. What you don't do is say "Remove your shoes immediately, I know you have deliberately walked through smelly mud before you got here and intend to make my carpet filthy." That would be rude beyond belief. But that's exactly what British Airports Authority are saying to you. They are searching you because they think you are carrying a bomb - just as you are asking people to remove their shoes because, intentionally or not, outdoor shoes will make your carpet dirty. But whereas my outdoor shoes do have dirt and so you are making a reasonable request, neither you nor I are carrying a bomb and no reasonable person could suppose we were, so BAA are not making a reasonable request. You're itching to make excuses for them, aren't you? Like how they can't take a chance with safety (they aren't, you're not a bomber, remember?), or that they have to be seen to be doing something (for your benefit? not for mine), or that if they didn't there would be bombers going through for every flight. Well, let's take that last point first: the only two forms of transport on which people have been killed are the Tube and London Buses. Strangely, no-one asks you to remove your shoes before boarding a bus or entering the London Underground, and by some miracle there hasn't been another bombing on either since 2005. There are no excuses. Either their checks are sincere and so they think we're all bombers, or they don't think we're all bombers and their checks are an empty gesture. What the checks are really about is liability protection - it's for BAA's financial benefit, not our safety. Uh-huh. It's corporate arrogance of the highest order. They owe us an apology.
It's not that I don't have anything to say, it's just that I haven't had the time to settle down and say it. I'm still wading through Solomon's book on Hegel's Phenomenology and there's a whole mass of stuff I want to talk about round that. So here are two more shots from last summer, both taken on the South Bank of the Thames.
There's a phrase I use: "I wound up learning more than I really wanted to know about ....". Recently I have had to write some code in VBA for Powerpoint. I regard all presentation programs as if not abominations then certainly not something a Real Man would use. Real Men speak clearly, from memory, without visual aids and for no more than three minutes. But here I was this week, searching the Internet for some code that would break links between a workbook and a presentation. My excuse is that I didn't have time to read about the Powerpoint object model and work it out for myself. I know I can record a macro, but macros have a habit of referring to "ActiveWhatever" and what you really need is the name of the object and it collection so you can loop through all the text boxes on all the slides - or whatever.
The real point isn't about Powerpoint, it's about the manager who told everyone I could automate a presentation with about fifty links to different graphs and tables in a workbook. So that someone else could just press a couple of buttons and what used to take two guys two weeks would now take one guy a couple of days (there's some unavoidable manual fiddling involved). I had a rough idea it could be done, but with Office you never know if you're going to be tripped up by some arcane detail in the object model, forcing you to a complete re-design. I didn't know it could be done. The manager believed that if it could be done, I could do it. When someone has that kind of faith in you, it's very motivating. And it's the first time that's happened at The Bank.
You can point out that Sex and Drugs and Rock 'N Roll isn't a movie about music, it's a movie about a pop star - after all, why else would we be watching it? But why would we watch a film about a pop star? Because they made love to more and better-looking women than we did, or that they took more and better drugs, or that they had rows in big houses with swimming pools? Because we didn't already know they were screw-ups? Uh-huh. Their lives are interesting because they wrote Reasons To Be Cheerful, or Like A Rolling Stone or Love Will Tear Us Apart or even, for that matter, Always On Time.
I understand how philosophers can philosophise, mathematicians can produce creative mathematics, how J S Bach wrote his music and John Coltrane improvised. I know what it's like to have stories appear in my head from a sudden burst of sunshine. I get how painters can paint, though I can't do it, and I get how photographers can see a photograph. I can "pick up my guitar and play" in a kind of baroque-y improvisational style.
But I have no idea, not the slightest glimpse of an insight, into how someone can sit down and write Please Please Me, or Summertime, or Big Yellow Taxi, or Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, let alone how Jam and Lewis wrote those songs for the SOS Band. I have never, ever had a tune and a lyric drift through my head. Not once. I don't even understand how it's possible. And neither, I'm guessing, do you. I bet there are respected composers who have never had a possible chart-topper pass through their heads. Don't you want to know how Stepping Out happened?
Songwriters often don't do anything else, as if it is such a different use of the mind and personality that it won't let them be programmers or advertising creatives or tax inspectors before or afterwards. With a handful of exceptions they don't write songs for long either: they are more like athletes than, say, physicists. Like Auden said about poets, they burn bright and not for long, unlike novelists or conventional composers.
In a similar vein, The Damned United wasn't only nothing like the real life of Brian Clough, it was also a bad film about football - at the end of it you had no idea why or how he could take two medium-level sides to the very top of the game. The best film about football I've seen was Zidane, eighty minutes during which the camera just follows Zidane and you barely see the rest of the match. It was utterly riveting and informative.
The best movie about music (that isn't a straightforward bio) is Godard's Sympathy For The Devil, which is about equal amounts of the Rolling Stones trying out the song in the studio and classic Godardian agit-prop. What's surprising the first time you see this movie is that the song started its life as a blues jam going nowhere: it's only half-way through that we return to the studio to find the congas going and Nicky Hopkins going full-bore on the piano, in the arrangement that made it a classic. The moment that happens is not on film, but there's the sense of work, of trial-and-error, that even the greatest rock 'n roll band sometimes goes for a stretch with no clue of what a song needs.
I saw Sex And Drugs And Rock 'N Roll yesterday: it's supposed to be about Ian Dury. You can look up the details of his life here. You'd better do, because you won't learn anything about it from the film. It opens with him rehearsing while Olivia Williams is giving birth upstairs - that's to let you know he's a self-obsessed screw-up and it pretty much carries on from there in the same vein. You will not find out that he studied at the Royal College of Art under Peter Blake (there's a scene where his bullied son asks if they are "posh", Dury says "we're Arts and Crafts". Not from the RCA he isn't - he's posh.) He was an art teacher married with a young daughter who decides to get into rock 'n roll. Way too late in life. There's no attempt to explain that, it's just a given, and the man remains therefore a total mystery or a bag of bad behaviour.
The Blockheads are appallingly treated by the film - depicted as a bunch of no-hopers when they were in fact one of the tightest British bands that ever performed (right up there with the Average White Band) and they performed music that was closer to jazz-funk than rock 'n roll. Check this out.
Where did these guys come from and how did they stay in such good musical shape? Chas Jankel, who is a songwriter good enough to have Quincy Jones cover one of his songs and get an international hit with it (Ai No Corrida), appears from nowhere, gets hired and disappears into a back room to churn out hit after hit to Dury's lyrics. Like they didn't already know who he was before they hired him. To see the movie, you'd think no-one ever rehearsed or discussed arrangements - and yet they must have done. A song as good as Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick does nto appear like Venus from the head of Jupiter.
The movie addresses none of this. Instead we get a decent forty minutes or so of Andy Serkis with a band performing Dury's songs - and doing a damn good job of it - and the usual tales of, well, sex and drugs and rock 'n roll. It's a good a way of passing Sunday afternoon at the movies, but it ain't about the life of a musician.
