Joker - The Movie

Are there two versions of this film? One that the American reviewers saw, and the one I saw recently at my local Cineworld?

This is not the Ultimate White Anger movie. That remains the remarkable 1993 movie Falling Down, directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Michael Douglas. “I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen?” Douglas’ character D-Fens is stone cold sane and sober. He knows exactly what he’s doing, which makes his anger and actions so much more significant. Want to know what Whitey looks like when he gets angry? He looks like D-Fens: it’s deliberate, it’s not pretty, and it’s not backstory.

Joker is backstory: of one of the most well-known baddies in cinema and comics. As that, it is excellent. Unrelenting, intense, gripping, sloshing between wince-making bathos and shocking violence, with a central performance the like of which comes along once a decade.

Joker starts out being a hopeless loser living with his invalided single mother. By the time he strikes out against the three White Boy oafs on the subway, he has a psychotic break. That’s where the touching sequences with the lovely Zazie Beetz come from. I’m not sure if psychotic breaks really work like that, but comic / movie convention says they do.

He has the psychosis because he can’t accept what he’s done. Only Big Bad People kill, and he’s not a Big Bad Person. He’s a loser who idolises Robert de Niro’s TV comedian - some reviewers got very carried away with The King of Comedy references, forgetting that large amounts of cultural appropriation is allowed in comics to ease the creative strain.

However, back in the movie, times are so bad that the majority of the population think that a man who kills three asshole Wall Street guys is pretty much a hero. People show up at protests wearing clown masks.

What do you get when you cross a mentally-ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? You get what you deserve...

Not quite. Most mentally-ill loners fade into oblivion, bumbling along under the influence of drugs so awful that there’s no secondary market for them. We’re very carefully told that due to budget cuts Joker can’t get his perfunctory counselling and the bottles of drugs he needs to stay doped-and-functional. He’s off his meds. Literally. His psychosis is over - no more hallucinations involving Zazie Beetz; he has literally killed the source of his dysfunctions (watch the movie to understand that remark); and he is now a conscious moral actor. He is only crazy like a fox.

I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but now I realize, it's a comedy

A comedy can be about laughs, but it can also be a play characterized by its humorous or satirical tone and its depiction of amusing people or incidents, in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity. Joker’s life is that kind of comedy: he triumphs over adversity by becoming a criminal without intent. Which is, of course, the conclusion the film has to reach.

Is there an action take-away from the movie for incels and the downtrodden, ignored and reviled?

If there is, it’s ditch the distractions, the meds, the cliched counselling and advice because those are hiding the real world from you, and you from the real world. Then strike back at those who hurt you. At that point you can see why SJWs would start to get worried. And then Drop out of the economy and live off illegal earnings. Which would get agreement from the Invisible Committee.

Is it me, or is it getting crazier out there?

It’s not you. It is getting crazier out there, and the Wokeful and the SJWs are the ones making it crazier.

However, that’s not why the Wokeful circled round Joker. They knew from the Venice Film Festival that Joker was going to be received as one of the best films of the decade. No matter what anyone said, it would make a profit. It would get audiences. So the Wokeful hitched on to Joker's star to get the publicity for their causes.

It’s a good comic-book movie. I’d put it right up there with Watchmen.

The Last Couple of Weeks

On Wednesday 18th September I told the boss I was fading fast and would take the laptop home. I spent the next six or so days sleeping badly, coughing compulsively and trying to blow my nose. On Monday 23rd I did my morning routine tasks and then told the boss I was signing off for the day. I didn’t really feel better until Thursday, when I worked at home, then went to the gym in the evening. I went back to work on Monday 30th and had an early evening. I went to the gym on Tuesday and to my meeting for the first time in three weeks on Wednesday.

On the way back, a gentleman from Bulgaria (from the format of his registration number) reversed his truck into my Fiat Punto’s front wing while doing a three-point turn. He ran into the front offside wing and also pushed the front tyre and suspension inwards. Car can’t be driven any distance. I parked up, we swapped details, and I walked the half-a-mile or so back home.

And got the worst night’s sleep I’ve had for a long, long time. I was wasted the next morning. Thursday morning I spent an hour on the phone to my insurance agent, repeating the same details again to the insurer, who said without a blink “his fault”. It seems it’s the job of people doing a three-point turn to watch what they are doing, not ours to watch out for them.

Thursday afternoon, I blew off the gym because I wasn’t feeling too hot. I had an uncomfortable train ride back, at one point needing to stand in the open doors to cool down. Yep. When I got home, I threw up. It wasn’t food poisoning, thank heaven, because that for me can be horrendous and involves going to hospital. I went to bed about half-past eight, if not earlier.

Friday I managed to do some work from home. I thought I was feeling okay. I had forgotten that my insurance is fully comprehensive and includes a hire car for the time between the accident and the insurance company making an offer, and a nice Chinese girl with an English good-school accent from Enterprise delivered a car on Friday morning.

Saturday I had all sorts of good intentions, which were abandoned when I felt queazy after breakfast. It was the most unproductive and ridiculous day I’ve had in ages. I think it was about some kind of recuperation.

I gave up on going into town because South West trains were doing maintenance work, and so was a lot of the District Line. My Higher Power intended that I rest.

Sunday has been better. I haven’t been out and about, but I haven’t been falling asleep on my couch every twenty minutes either. I went for a walk round my local Air Park, then ran up in the nice hire car to put the key in the exhaust of my Punto, so that the men from a garage with a Southampton (!) telephone number can come and collect it.

I bought the Punto in February 2010, so I’ve had it for nine and a half years. I’d prefer to have had it for another nine-and-a-half to be honest, but where would Western Capitalism be if we all did things like that? So I’ll be off to Car Giant in White City to get a replacement in about a week or so. There’s no question that the insurance company will write the Punto off. I’ll bet suspension units and coachwork cost more than the re-sale value of the car. Someone who knew what they were doing would probably fix it up for around a couple of hundred quid excluding labour.

I reckon I lose around 10%-15% of my life on colds and feeling poorly. Every year. I notice it more now I’m sober and do more with my days than I did when I was drinking.

I have no resolutions to deal with this. It’s just what happens, and I have at least one more cold between now and Christmas, usually just after half-term. Some of that is age: just as I lose the ability to recover fast, I lose the ability to carry on while not-feeling-my-best. But you call me and want to discuss something work-related and I’m on it during the call. Then I fall off again. It’s the self-starting bit I can’t do. Maybe I should schedule all my meetings for when I’m ill.

By The River

The Millennium Bridge and its view up and down the River Thames is just over a ten-minute walk from my office - once I have waited for however long for a lift to the ground floor. For a long time, it may as well as have been ten hours away. I haven’t been there for a long time. Last week I decided to walk there. Seeing “my London” - the river, the Tate Modern, Tower Bridge, the South Bank, the tourists - I could feel a tension I didn’t know was there starting to unwind. It helped that the sun was out and the sky was blue.

When I worked on Shaftesbury Avenue, I would cross the river every day. It made me feel like I was there, in London. I used to like walking to Holborn in the morning, until they closed it to incoming passengers because escalator works, exactly because it took me across the river.

Staircases; Barbican and White Lion Hill

Barbican

From Paul's Walk to White Lion Hill

Cigarette Break

A recent lunchtime around the Barbican.

Marc Myers' Why Jazz Happened

Marc Myers writes about jazz for the Wall Street Journal, which must be a heck of gig, considering that there really isn’t that much to write about, and hasn’t been for a long time. His own book stops dead at 1972, with no mention of Wynton Marsalis or ECM Euro-jazz, or of Weather Report, the Jazz Crusaders, or the rise of ‘electric jazz’ or ‘smooth jazz’, or the disgraceful jazz education industry. But then, he’s a journalist, and hand-feed-don’t-bite. Being rude about Wynton Marsalis is still not good for anyone’s career.

For all the music industry history, including a fascinating chapter on the effect of Los Angeles on West Coast Jazz, and the political history, Myers can’t get a coherent story going. It slips out of his grasp every time a new chapter starts. One reason is that he doesn’t engage with jazz as music, and see it as something with its own internal logic of development. He’s writing a purely externalist history, and those often feel dis-jointed.

There’s a line of ideas to be traced from the simultaneous improvisations of Dixieland to the group improvisations of Ascension


and the avant-garde jazz groups working today. That line goes through small bands - trios to nonets - in which soloing is an intrinsic part of the music.

There’s another line to be traced from dance-orchestras playing composed waltzes to the jazz dance bands, to Basie's and Ellington’s bands, which comes to an end in the mid-1960’s. Though solos were played, and often had to be offered to retain good players, these were add-ons: the tune would work perfectly well without the solo.

A small-band piece starts by stating a theme or tune, maybe twice, proceeds to divert by way of three or four solos of varying length, which may or may not refer fleetingly to the opening theme, and finishes with a re-statement of the theme. Big-band pieces are all about the written tune and arrangement, and the solos are at most twelve bars, and only one, and that close to the one on the record.

The more composed more of it is, the less it’s jazz, but if there’s no theme, chord sequence, or mood, then it’s avant-garde. Flamenco Sketches is a mood created by a pace and a sequence of changes, some from one mode to another with the same notes, and some from one key to another. It’s jazz, and can only be played by instrumentalists who are also musicians and of the highest quality.

That’s why West Coast jazz, and the jazz-y music of film and TV soundtracks, is only marginally jazz. Myers explains that this music had to be made quickly and cheaply, and therefore by technically skilled, sight-reading players who could nail the tune first time round. A lot of those men had been through one music college or another on the GI Bill, and could sight-read fluently, transpose effortlessly, and knew their C#7/5dim9 from their Emaj7dim4add13, without having to think about it. Nerds, the lot of them. They could play solos, but it wasn’t what they spent their time doing, when they weren’t in the studios. When they weren’t in the studios, they were driving to another studio, playing golf with music producers, or playing softball with their kids in the gardens of their ranch houses in the LA suburbs. That where Steely Dan and Joni Mitchell found all those effortlessly competent studio musicians in the 1970’s.

And let’s not go near the jazz-fusion thing of the early 1970’s. (Myers does, for a whole chapter.) I was there in the audience. It was not a pretty sight. Only four bands ever did it well: Miles Davis, Weather Report, The Crusaders, and Steely Dan. (Steely Dan was seen as a hip rock band at the time: looking back it’s clear they were really jazz composers who could cut a rock tune now and again.) The rest were, for all the technical virtuosity of the players, a mess. Some of the worst music ever played by superb instrumentalists came out of the jazz-rock / fusion years of the early 1970’s. If the band didn’t have Joe Zawinul or Larry Carlton in it, it wasn’t going to work.

(Digression: Guitarists and post-1969 jazz have never gone well together. Miles Davis remains the only bandleader who ever got genuine feeling and music out of the young John McLaughlin. Most big-name jazz guitarists since have lacked finesse and musicality. Except Larry Carlton, who understood that the guitar is a slow instrument and its notes should be given time to make themselves felt. Listening to his solo on Chain Reaction


I wonder how much Larry Carlton learned from the legendary Steve Cropper?)

So core-jazz is a chamber music based on recognisable tunes, themes or changes, in which extemporised soloing is an integral part, and which has a tinge of the blues, a hint or more of swing in the rhythm, and uses four-note seventh-chord based harmonies, as opposed to classical music, which uses three-note fifth-chord based harmonies. That last bit of music nerdery is suggestive rather than definitive: the point is that hard-core jazz has a distinctive style of harmony which when played anywhere else sounds ‘jazzy’.

Now add in the Romantic artistic ideal of creativity as novelty and genre-busting, rather than creative ingenuity within a genre (at which the Baroque composers excelled, for instance), and a certain amount of good old-fashioned manly competition - in other words, the twentieth-century artistic temperament - and we have a motive for continuous change. It took Jean-Luc Godard less than eight years to go from Breathless to the fin du cinema of Week-end. It’s not surprising that John Coltrane could go from bebop, through the reductio ad absurdum of bebop that is Giant Steps, and one of the most popular albums in jazz, A Love Supreme, to the free jazz of Ascension, in a mere ten years. And what the hey did anyone do after that? Miles Davis provided one answer, with time-no-changes, and then with the `electric’ period, but that was after he had tried to figure out what the rock bands were doing.

In my version of the story, jazz killed itself by using John Coltrane, Ornette Coleman, Eric Dolphy and others to work itself to its logical conclusion (Hegel would be so proud). The economic and social changes didn’t help, but weren’t the main reason.

In the usual version, the changing economics and demographics of American towns reduced the audience for jazz. The blatant racism of many American policemen didn’t help. And then the British invaded America in 1963 and the Beatles killed jazz.

Well, not quite.

Any form of art grows and develops with an audience, often mostly from one birth cohort, and when that cohort dies, the music vanishes, to be re-discovered a hundred years later (as happened to Bach. And Shakespeare, for that matter). Lesser talents may have to wait for the development of an entire industry devoted to re-discovering them (as has happened with the `early / period music’ movement).

Jazz always did have a small audience. White women just don’t like chamber jazz, though your grandmother might have liked Bing Crosby. (Everybody likes Bing Crosby.) From bebop onwards jazz has been adopted by people who don’t feel part of the mainstream of society. The easiest way for a white boy to show he was hipper than the average square, and could put some effortless effort into his entertainment, was to listen to hard-core jazz.

Out there somewhere was a huge audience of mainstream squares, just waiting for something that spoke to them, and that they could adopt without marking themselves as outsiders. Or worse, in America, as intellectuals.

They found it in The Beatles rather than in Chuck Berry and Bill Haley, because Lennon and McCartney simply wrote better music than almost everyone else, including Burt Bacharach. Bacharach and David wrote clever, complicated and sad music.


All the time.

Lennon and McCartney wrote songs that were more memorable-emotional-danceable-repeat-listenable and all-round entertaining. What music is after all supposed to be. And often showing a little flash of high-grade sophistication, like the incomprehensible opening chord of Hard Day’s Night, or the Palestrina-like harmonies in If I Needed Someone. Not enough to be difficult, but enough to re-assure everyone that this was not disposable Teen Pan Alley stuff.


That mainstream audience descended on pop and rock music. Record companies exist to make money, and the returns on capital from pop / rock were way higher than on jazz. When the kids who wanted to be dissenters found Bob Dylan and the `protest’ singers, jazz was robbed of most of its second-generation-dissenter audience.

Then it turned out that the Beatles and The Who and quite a few others really were pop-artists who worked in music rather than painting, and so the intellectual and the cultured could get on the pop / rock bandwagon as well. So the only young white boys digging jazz were those who came into it through the electric music of Miles Davis, or an interest in the avant-garde, or through their father's record collection.

But. But most of it was recorded, and most of those recordings were digitised, and so can be stored at a very low cost. Streaming music services create a huge demand for all sorts of sounds, and a lot of hard-core 1950’s and early 1960’s jazz is used to replace the dreaded ‘muzak’ in public places. To modern ears, it is pleasant, has a good but not obtrusive rhythm, and the solos provide a more textured background. Starbucks is never going to programme Ascension. Or even A Love Supreme. There are limits.

Jazz did what so many art forms do: it ran itself out and was replaced by something else. Now it exists in an archive, to be played when the mood is right.

One thing I do agree with Myers about: jazz played itself out in or around 1972. Take the release of On The Corner as the symbolic date. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that gets filed in the ‘jazz’ section in the record stores, but it ain’t jazz. It’s something else. Though his job may depend on him not saying so, I suspect Myers agrees with me.

Now That's What I Call A Kitchen Utensil Draw!

Yep. My cleaned-out, throw-away-the-stuff-I-haven't-used-for-a-year utensil draw.

Left to right: cheese-slicer, grater, hand whisk, tongs, strainer, egg-decapitator, soup ladle, big spoon with holes for taking stuff out of water, whisks for electric mixer, spatula, peeler, de-corer, can opener.

These things matter.

Your utensil draw says a lot about you.

Especially if you don't have one. Or it's dirty in the corners.

Which I do, and it isn't.

Just so you know.