From nuclear looting to Annie Hall via Maggie Gyllenhaal’s bum

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Call me naive if you will (I suppose it’s at least better than being cynical), but I was astonished to read in the Guardian about the looting of radioactive material from nuclear facilities in Iraq as US troops stood aside. Given that it’s not quite as easy to do this as to nick a bag of rice from a food shop, isn’t this tantamount to just handing the stuff to the same terrorists the US is allegedly “at war” with? I suppose next we’ll be hearing that the Ministry of Oil was the only government department left intact after the bombing of Baghdad, or that Jack Straw and Donald Rumsfeld will say it doesn’t really matter if no weapons of mass destruction are discovered after all…

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To the Odeon for the second time this week, this time to see Secretary. Both my wife and I used to be secretaries in previous lives but neither of us remembered it being quite like this. Maggie Gyllenhaal was magnificent – a really gripping, intense performance; she sort of became the part, without taking herself seriously for a moment. Apart from that I can’t say I enjoyed the film exactly, but after the dazzling spectacle of Matrix Reloaded the other day, it was refreshing to see that small, intimate films about offbeat people and curious relationships can still do well at the box office. Plus, it was great to hear Leonard Cohen sneaking onto the soundtrack with the exquisite I’m Your Man (“If you want a lover, I’ll do anything you ask me to / And if you want another kind of love, I’ll wear a mask for you…”) It was also good to see James Spader again, who doesn’t seem to have aged a day since he made White Palace, one of my all-time favourite films, in 1990.

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Meanwhile, the Guardian reports on a new biography of Sylvia Plath by Anne Middleton, which will controversially claim that the poet was not “the downtrodden victim of feminist legend” after all. I’m glad to hear it; despite Ted Hughes’s reported philandering, which obviously didn’t help, it always seemed obvious to me from her writing that she was a very strong personality and character who was simply besieged by mental illness. There’s no rationalising with that, whether you’re a feminist or not.

Thinking about Plath put me in mind of this exchange in Annie Hall:

ALVY (picking up copy of “Ariel” in Annie’s flat): Ah, Sylvia Plath – the poetess whose tragic suicide was misinterpreted as romantic by the college-girl mentality.

ANNIE: Oh, I don’t know – I just think some of her poems are neat.

ALVY: Neat? I think “neat” went out sometime around the turn of the century…

From Larkin to Eurovision via The Matrix

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The Guardian reports on some newly-discovered jazz blues lyrics written by Philip Larkin in the early forties. Among these was “Fuel Form Blues”, which the Bard of the Spectacles casually tossed off while “bored in his first job as a clerk collating wartime fuel rationing forms at a coal depot in Warwick”:

I’d rather be a commando, or drive a railway train,
I’d rather be a commando, Lord! drive a railway train,
Than sort them Fuel Form Blues into streets again…

Fuckin’ Fuel Forms, gonna carry me to my grave, carry me to my grave.

It’s easy to see that the great poet was already laying the foundations for his later classics such as “Toads”, q.v.:

Why should I let the toad work

Squat on my life?

Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork

And drive the brute off?

…not to mention “This Be The Verse”.

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To the Odeon to see the distinctly unLarkinesque Matrix Reloaded. I attempted to brush up on the Matrix phenomenon last night by watching an old video of the first film… and was lost within the first twenty minutes. Nevertheless, it was a nice lostness, and I approached the sequel with interest. Like the original, I found it a bit cold and soulless (although that’s the whole point, I guess), and there were some dreadfully slow bits in the first hour, but the special effects didn’t disappoint and the whole thing was good fun. The car chase was my favourite scene, and the point where Trinity was riding against the flow of traffic startlingly realistic. According to the iMDB, the epic chase was shot on a highway specially built for the movie. Weirdly enough, shortly after we got home from seeing the film, Fifth Gear was on and had a feature about the scene. Keanu Reeves praised Carrie-Anne Moss for doing it sans stunt double or crash helmet, but I had to take this with a slight pinch of salt when it was revealed that the traffic she was pictured weaving around was all digitally superimposed afterwards. Boo!

The only thing I can never work out about The Matrix, incidentally, is, if the “real” world as perceived by humans is actually a digital creation of the machines, why didn’t the machines make the “real” world a bit more exciting? If it’s all virtual anyway, why not make the world absolutely wonderful for people instead of humdrum and everyday? That way, surely everybody would be happy and there’d be no need to have Agents to track down all the Neos and Morpheuses (Morphei?) because they’d be so serene they wouldn’t want to escape…

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I have to say that last Saturday was not spoilt for me at all by the UK receiving an unprecedented nul points in the Eurovision Song Contest. This piece in the Guardian today does a fair job of explaining why it happened.

Setting the record straight on masked palm civets

thoughtcat,

The Guardian reports that the masked palm civet may be responsible for the Sars virus. When I first read this I wasn’t sure whether a masked palm civet was a tree, a kind of party or a herb used in south-east asian cooking. This of course does nothing for my feline credentials whatsoever, but now we know that it is, in fact, a cat, or a “small cat-like mammal” as the article puts it. It seems to me civets have had a bad press – it wasn’t they who were responsible for spreading the virus after all, but people who killed them and ate them – often illegally.

Anyway, I had a surprisingly difficult time finding much information about civets on the internet. The picture I found was deceptive, making me think someone had mistaken the poor creature for a badger. (But then, perhaps badgers are small cat-like mammals too?) The only decent snippet of information I found came from Tiscali’s reference site sourced from the Hutchinson Encyclopaedia. Even the estimable World Wildlife Fund had nothing on the story. However, I emailed them about the issue and received this response:

Thank you for taking the time to contact us for our view on recent claims that eating the masked palm civet could have caused the outbreak of SARS in China.

We do not believe enough scientific research has been carried out to support this claim and therefore we cannot comment on this issue.

You may be interested to know that although national laws may vary, international trade in the masked palm civet is strictly regulated.

International trade may be authorized by the granting an export permit or re-export certificate; no import permit is necessary. Permits or certificates should only be granted if the relevant authorities are satisfied that certain conditions are met, above all that trade will not be detrimental to the survival of the species in the wild.

Stuff in the news

thoughtcat

Painful as it is to see anyone in agony, as he fractures his scaphoid it’s good to see “ace haircut with quite a good footballer attached” David Beckham once again doing service to linguistics by bringing another unusual word into popular usage, as he did last time with the Great Metatarsal Affair. Anthony Burgess, eat your heart out!

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Thoughtcat’s (wo)Man in West Drayton strikes again with an interesting report from the BBC that scientists in the US have found “proof” that Buddhist meditation helps you feel more serene. It’s a nice story, but surely Buddhists have known that for some time. Who says science is slow on the uptake?

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I have finally finished the first entry for thoughtcat’s nine lives page, an occasional series of random memoirs from a less-than-auspicious CV, starting with a job I had in a burger bar with an interestingly-decorated table. Hope you enjoy it…

The benefits of home-working

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The Guardian’s Saturday magazine has a column called “Things you only know if you’re not at work”. Being a home”worker” myself, so far one thing I haven’t seen mentioned in that column is the fact that during the daytime, Channel 5 turns into a kind of shopping channel. I turned on the TV to watch a video of last night’s ER while I ate my lunch but didn’t even get to put the video on because I was so fixated by a five-minute advert by TimeLife for a new series of dramatisations of Bible stories, collectively called – wait for it – The Bible. “These films are not available in the shops,” announced the gravelly-voiced narrator, which is always a bad sign. The first film available is called Jesus.  “Buy Jesus for £9.99 and get Joseph free!” went the offer. A lot of very good British character actors, including Gary Oldman (Pontius Pilate), Ben Kingsley (Moses), Dame Diana Rigg (Delilah) and Michael Gambon (er, Samson?) were shown looking serious in robes against dusty backgrounds while we were told over and over about how the offer of the films was exclusive, exclusive and exclusively exclusive. A phone number for emergency ordering of the films was given, but even more bizarrely an alternative phone number with an Italian flag next to it was also displayed in smaller print at the bottom of the screen…

Even worse, when the advert for The Bible was over, Starsky and Hutch came on. I used to love that when I was a kid – I had a toy car with the white flash down the side and everything – but, not having seen it for 20 years, I couldn’t believe the utter cheesiness of it. That’s the thing about Seventies retro – the revivalists retain the haircuts and the flares and the cool music, but they conveniently edit out the fact that about 75% of that era was given over to naff jokes about Starsky ripping his jacket or spilling his chilli dog on his trousers, while Hutch spent less time fighting crime than fighting off women. Give me The Professionals any day. Or check out They Fight Crime!, a brilliant site which generates random crime-fighting duos, such as: “He’s // a bookish gay // boxer // on his last day in the job. She’s // a transdimensional // nymphomaniac politician // looking for love in all the wrong places. They fight crime!”

Stuff in the news

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Looks like we’re going to be in for a Dylan moviefest in the coming months. First it was Todd Haynes’s Bob Dylan biopic (see TC 21st February), and now Martin Scorsese announces he’s working on a film about Dylan. Haynes famously said he’s casting seven different actors to play Dylan over the various periods of his career, including a woman. Maybe Scorsese could get Leonardo DiCaprio to play the young Bob, Daniel Day-Lewis for the middle years, Robert “Bob” De Niro for the present “grizzly” version and Cameron Diaz for everything else.

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As poor old Jean-Pierre Garnier sobs to the Telegraph that he’s “not Mother Teresa”, Richard Adams outlines in the Guardian’s City Diary the definitive reasons why the Glaxo Fat Cat is not the Angel of Calcutta.

What’s in a name?

thoughtcat,

George Monbiot writes an excellent piece today about an attempt by a Belgian lawyer to try General Tommy Franks for war crimes in Iraq. Belgium is the only country in the world which has, or had until now anyway, a law allowing people to be tried for such crimes even if they were committed outside Belgium or didn’t involve the country. It’s a great story, especially since it “outraged” the US, but sadly the Belgian authorities rushed to amend the law to avoid international embarrassment.

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The Times reports on the incredible feat of endurance that “old Harrovian” Pen Hadow, or Rupert Nigel Pendrill Hadow to give him his full name, has performed by walking solo to the North Pole. The print version of the story also lists some other (ant)arctic explorers including Sir Ranulph Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes and Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton. It’s a fantastic result for the guy, no question, and I wouldn’t’ve been able to do it myself, but surely a true world record for a British explorer would be to get to the North Pole with only a name like Dave Grubb or something?

Merton and Hislop on their way out?

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Have I Got News For You has always been one of my favourite TV shows, and Paul Merton has consistently been one of the best people on TV. But watching HIGNFY last night all but convinced me the show has finally flown up its own arse. Merton has sat there for the past few shows of the current series looking as if he doesn’t really want to be there, barely speaking for the first ten minutes and only then to parody his trademark surreal free-association to such an extent that last night he suddenly broke off mid-stream and asked rhetorically, “What on earth am I talking about?” which got a bigger laugh than anything he’d been saying. Ian Hislop launched into a savage five-minute rant against Valery Giscard-d’Estaing, EU bureaucracy and Italian corruption, unprecedented even by his standards, ending by saying (I’m paraphrasing) “I know I’m sounding more and more like the Daily Mail, but it does actually make some good points now and then.” I mean, come on, Ian, especially after your own magazine Private Eye has spent so long pointing up the hypocrisy of that reviled paper (the Mail, not the Eye). When this rant itself was then parodied by his team-mate, comedian Mark Steel (“Those bleeding French and their fucking baguettes!”) Hislop’s face went even more po as he accused “the left-wing comedian” of  resorting to a cheap laugh by saying “fuck” a lot (which the BBC bleeped out anyway) and for putting words in his mouth (because Hislop didn’t say anything about baguettes). Merton may have run out of steam, but only because the show no longer inspires him, and I really hope he’ll quit while he’s ahead and concentrate on something new. Merton will always be a genius, and is therefore infinitely adaptable, but Hislop isn’t, and although I agree that we need people like him to expose corruption and hypocrisy at the highest levels, if he just ends up losing his sense of humour completely (he made a good start on Angus Deayton’s final show) and turns into the sort of self-righteous vicar he lampoons Blair for being in Private Eye then it’ll be a terrible shame. On top of all that, the show was hosted this week by some totally anonymous character who only proved the sad fact that as long as there’s a script, even the most chinless wonder can read an autocue and get a laugh. TV doctor Phil Hammond all but saved the day. Let’s hope it’s better next week…

Second Best is a winner

thoughtcat,

A lovely film on BBC2 last night called Second Best. Made in 1994, it starred William Hurt, improbably enough, in the role of a lonely, red-haired sub-postmaster of a tiny Welsh village who wants to adopt a troubled ten-year-old, played perfectly by Nathan Yapp (who, according to his IMDb entry, has done nothing since). Keith Allen also did a good turn as the boy’s vagrant father. Hurt’s accent oscillated wildly between Ireland and Somerset without touching Wales for more than a few syllables at a time, but otherwise he was utterly believable. Even though it was made nearly 10 years ago and shown on the channel’s graveyard shift, its simplicity, tenderness and quietness, as well as the excellence of the writing (by David Cook) and acting, reassured me a little that TV stations aren’t just obsessed with ratings and “dumbing down”. Things still ain’t what they used to be however – I remember in the eighties Channel 4 showing a great art-house movie every Thursday night. (Thanks must go to Metro Life‘s film critic Neil Norman for writing an enthusiastic review of Second Best, without which I might not have bothered staying up for it.)