The Best Song The Beatles Never Wrote

There’s an ongoing discussion at work as to whether it’s possible to write a genuinely convincing Beatles song if you’re not a Fab. The Rutles have been considered and rejected, as Neil Innes was generally just swapping a couple of chords around and adding new lyrics to existing tunes.

There are plenty of bands that have made forays into the Cavern sound, and of course Merseybeat is an established pop genre. Crowded House get pretty close sometimes, as do sixties revivalists like The La’s. Noel Gallagher’s obsession with all things beat is pretty well known.

But I have a crush on Robert Pollard and the mighty Guided By Voices, and I don’t think it gets much better than this. Readership, to wake you up, shake your stuff and start your weekend right, X&HT gives you – Glad Girls!

+++UPDATE+++

On our Facebook page, Timothy P. Jones pointed out this little gem from Robyn Hitchcock. It’s not very Beatley, but it’s very solo Lennon.

Explain Yourself

While watching Channel Four’s new attempt to resurrect That Was The Week That Was, Ten O’Clock Live last night, I had a minor epiphany. Or a dose of meat sweats, but I think it was an epiphany. David Mitchell, one of those blokes that I’m certain Douglas Adams was thinking of when he coined the phrase “brain the size of a planet”, was interviewing David Willetts, Evil Bastard In Charge Of Destroying Further Education As We Know It.

Although David M slung out a few tough questions, you could see that he was struggling with the fact that he had to remain at least partly civil towards his interviewee. He also only had five minutes, which the hateful Willetts used to his advantage, throwing out great screeds of smokescreen, cant and bullpucky that served no decent purpose other than to use up time.

Politicians are trained to do this, of course. You’ll never get a straight answer out of them, and it’s a rare interviewee that’s able to cut through the fat and expose the meat. I’m thinking John Humphries and the brutal Jeremy Paxman. But they have to resort to an attack dog style, battering their opponent into submission. This leads to accusations of bias and bullying, and frankly a pitched argument is not the sort of nuanced political discussion I want to hear.

There is a better way. If the buggers want to talk, let em. My political slot would be called Explain Yourself. It would work like this. Say, for the sake of argument, I managed to talk George Osbourne onto the show. He would be asked:

“Mr Osbourne. You have asked the country to dig deep and pay extra tax. You claim that we are all in this together. And yet you quite happily use questionable methods to dodge £1.6 million in tax.”

There would be a second’s pause. And then the interviewer would simply say “Explain Yourself.”

The interviewer would not say another word. They would simply listen to Osbourne (or whatever moral void we managed to talk into appearing) as he exudes the usual fog of fibs, with a look on their face that suggests the appearance of a very bad smell in the studio. Osbourne (or another foul waste of valuable resources) would eventually tail off. The interviewer at this point is permitted one last sentence. “Is that it?” Depending on the previous response, this can be delivered in an air of intense boredom, astonished nausea or sheer unadulterated disbelief.

Then there would be silence again. And because politicians abhor a silence, especially when it can be filled with the sound of their own voices, Osbourne (or some other mouth-breather in a nice suit) would begin to talk again. From that point, all you have to do is watch as they dig themselves a bigger, wider and deeper hole. They’ll say something they don’t mean, contradict themselves and their policies. You might even get a hefty dose of racism, social prejudice or plain stupidity.

This will work, and it will work because you’re pitting a politician against their own worst enemy. Their big fat mouths.

I dunno about you, but I’d watch the hell out of something like that.

The Daily Grind

Commuting is horrible. Yes, I know, that one’s up there with gems of wisdom like “oranges are not the only fruit” or “poking oneself in the eye with a stick is a bad idea”, but it’s a truism that somehow packs some weight. I think we treat commuting as a task that we simply don’t think about. Getting to and from work is just something that has to happen. It becomes blank time, a zero point that we don’t think about unless it becomes more difficult than usual. I think that if we properly considered the time, effort and money that goes into the simple act of getting in and out of the workplace, then there would be a lot more people simply rethinking their lives and walking away.

If a train breaks down or if there’s a tube strike, then we are confronted with the true, mind-clawing horror that we have to deal with at the start and end of every day of our working lives. It becomes work on top of work, a trial to be completed before we can get on with all the other crap we have to sort out.

Otherwise, it’s a journey that’s erased as soon as it’s over. There are days when I have walked into my suite and stopped dead, realising that I have no recollection of the steps I took to get there. The bike ride to the station, the train journey, the tube, walk or bike ride to Soho – all gone. Dropped out of short term memory like veg peelings into a bin. Scraped off the brain and composted without a second thought.

I’ve often talked about the virtues of my morning commute as valuable writing time, and that’s still true. But time spent on the netbook has a second, and almost as important benefit. It kills time, compressing the half-hour spent on the fast train from Reading into an eye-blink. On the odd occasions where the batteries on my devices have drained, and I have nothing to read, that 30 minutes stretches out to something like three days. It drags interminably, and I begrudge every wasted moment.

And I consider myself lucky. My shift pattern means that I have to do this trip fourteen times in any given fortnight. An ordinary 9-to-fiver has to do it twenty times. And if you’re driving, or if you have to stand on a bus or a train, that really is time in which you can’t do anything else. The very thought of it fills me with the fear. It feels more like a punishment then a task that we willingly impose on ourselves. It’s not surprising that we wipe it as soon as it’s done.

Catching The Buzz – X&HT Reviews The Green Hornet

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The fun of The Green Hornet lies in its familiarity. A millionaire tools around The Big City, fighting crime by night as a masked vigilante, in a souped-up super car, faithful sidekick at his … side. Holy ho-hum!

But let’s not forget, the radio serial in which Britt Reid and Kato first stung crime predates everyone’s favourite Caped Crusader by three years. The hidden lair and funky weapons that would become a staple of the crime-fighter’s armoury also made their first appearances here. As an urban version of the Lone Ranger, and a testing ground for all kinds of superhero tropes that included the mask’s uncomfortable relationship to the law, the Hornet was popular for decades.

The new film version has been a long time coming. Kevin Smith’s original scripts for a version that came close to shooting in 2006 have popped up as comics (Smith has form with heroes of the verdant hue, starting his comic career with a sterling run on Green Arrow. I’m sure there’s a Green Lantern script kicking around his hard drive somewhere). The Seth Rogan script that finally went before cameras helmed by French lo-fi wizard Michel Gondry was sat on by Sony for the best part of a year, and suffered innumerable reshoots. But it’s here now, and to my mind works as a fitting tribute to the gleeful silliness at the heart of all superhero fiction.

The film plays out as dumb, loud comedy, but it’s honest to its sources and to the shows and films they influenced in their stead. There’s a house-wrecking fight scene straight out of the Pink Panther movies (Blake Edwards loved the Kato character so much that the closest he came to disguising Inspector Clouseau’s sidekick’s origins was to change a consonant in his name). The irreverent tone and slapstick are nods to the William Dozier/Greenway Productions stable that sired both the Green Hornet and Batman shows in 1966. There’s a (possibly) clever skew here too though, as The Green Hornet was played straight, with little of the camp humour that made the Adam West show so popular. Nice to see the propulsive Billy May/Al Hirt theme tune popping up towards the end too.*

The neat twist to the Green Hornet story is that the true hero of the partnership is the sidekick. The Green Hornet show famously made a star out of Bruce Lee, and it’s a dynamic that, while hardly original these days, still has comedy and dramatic value. While I don’t think the new Kato, Taiwanese pop star Jay Chou, has the charisma of The Dragon, he has the moves. His masked counterpart Seth Rogen handles the many fight scenes with aplomb, floundering around after his black-clad buddy and getting in a couple of good hits … purely by accident, of course.

Whether you buy him as the hero of the piece depends on how you like him in general, because there’s no great artistic stretches in the acting. Rogan plays the same affable stoner he’s always played, giving Britt Reid the air of a low-rent Tony Stark (playboy crimefighters with daddy issues. The genre’s full of ’em). Christophe Waltz plays the Eurotrash bad guy Chudnovsky with flair, nailing the ridiculousness of the themed villain when he changes his name from one unpronouncable syllable salad to another. Cameron Diaz appears to be in it so that she can prance around in short-shorts at one point. Tom Wilkinson and Edward James Olmos add gravitas.

Michel Gondry finds himself in the same boat as any other cinematic stylist that takes on the Hollwood suitcase full of dollars. There’s little there to tell you that the director of Eternal Sunshine and The Science Of Sleep is behind the camera at all. The much-touted games he wanted to play with the 3D format aren’t really obvious. The action is frenetically comic-booky without going the extra yard or so that might have made it really interesting. I have the feeling that the director’s cut, should we ever see it, would be a very different film to the one I saw.

I wanted a 2D screening, but my local Vue couldn’t accommodate me. I had no option but to splash out for a 3D screening, and spent it popping the glasses on and off to see the differences. I found for the most part I didn’t really need them, and subsequently left the cinema without my usual stereoscopy-derived headache. The end titles looked nice in 3D though, and I was pleased to see that just about every Blambot font made an appearance in a crazed Lichtensteiny Benday-dot frenzy of OTT typography.

I enjoyed The Green Hornet quite a bit. It’s stupid, loud and nonsensical. But then so were the radio, movie serial and TV shows based on the character that came before. In that sense, the new version is carrying on the tradition admirably.

*Pop Quiz: an X&HTrophy to the first person to answer this in the comments: in which Quentin Tarantino film did the Green Hornet theme make an appearance?

Let Me Take You By The Hand: X&HT Reviews Ob’owa

Let’s get the disclaimers out of the way before I start. Last week’s Friday Play on Radio Four was directed and based on early childhood experiences by Christiana Ebohon, who’s an old college friend of mine. She let me know about it in her Christmas card to X&HTowers. It’s almost certain that if she hadn’t told me it was on, I wouldn’t have tuned in. I barely listen to radio any more, least of all drama.

That, it would appear, is my loss, because if Ob’owa is any indicator of quality, there’s a lot of good work simply flying under my radar.

Ob’owa tells the story of Francesca and her younger brother Joseph. We first meet them in Peckham, sometime in the 70’s. They’re good kids, smart, funny, obsessed with the Bay City Rollers. They live with their mum, a divorcee. Dad still has visitation rights, which he uses to kidnap the two kids, whisking them off to Nigeria to live with his family. Their grandfather, his three wives, and their many children.

Ob’owa works on many levels. It’s a story about belonging, home and family. But it’s also a fish-out-of-water tale. Francesca and Joseph struggle to cope in a world where if you want meat for dinner, you have to go out in the yard and kill something. The wives react in horror when Joseph tries to help in the kitchen (“women’s work!”). School is tough, and worst of all there’s no telly.

The story could be unrelentingly grim. There are scenes of spousal abuse, musings on racism on both sides of the fence (ob’owa means “white”, a term that is used to taunt the two English kids both in the playground and the family compound) and a teeth-gritting moment where Francesca bravely submits to ritual scarring. But Christiana and writer Moya O’Shea have a light touch with the material, and the funny and sweet moments are a nice balance to the drama. The 70’s references come thick and fast (I snorted particularly hard at the jab at the truly dreadful Love Thy Neighbour), and the play is both pacy and absorbing. It’s also very well acted, with the kids in particular, Rhiannon Baccus and Jayden Jean-Paul-Denis giving sterling performances. Aural texture, recorded partly on location in Nigeria gives the whole thing the weight and heft of reality.

Ob’owa is a sharp and fearless look at the serious subject of child abduction. It would be easy to slip into hysterical pontification or cheap drama when telling a tale like this. Christiana and Moya do neither, treading a precise line, seeing both the humour and the heartbreak in the situation into which Francesca and Joseph are dropped. It’s great storytelling, and a very worthwhile excuse to simply switch off the telly for a bit and be told a story.

 

Ob’owa is available on the BBC iPlayer until 10pm this Friday. Do yourself a favour and cock an ear at it here.

 

The Clock Is Ticking: One Month Before Heartbreak

I wrote yesterday about the importance of simplicity, patience and compassion in our daily lives. Sometimes, decisions are made that make it very difficult to keep my peace or feel anything but revulsion for those that are imposing them.

It’s already become clear that the financial measures that are being put in place by the government will directly and adversely affect our poorest and most vulnerable. But when they start gleefully and spitefully kicking people when they are down, something has to be done.

As an example, let’s look at the reviews that are being considered for the Disability Living Allowance. The DLA is a necessary safeguard, allowing those of us unlucky enough to be unable to work through ill-health to carry on, funding mobility allowance and help with care. I see no problem with this. You’d like to think that, should you need it, the state would give you the funds you need to continue functioning as a useful member of society. To contribute, rather than be stuck in a hospital or care home. To have a life rather than an existence. Lisa Elwood on the UKUncut blog puts a contemporary spin on a very old saying when she points out

“The moral health of a society can be judged by how it treats its most vulnerable members.”

If that’s the case, then modern British society must be very sick indeed. The poisonous attitude spread by the government and certain media outlets (I’ll leave you to figure out which ones I’m talking about) is that claimants are scroungers, layabouts and leeches on the state. Worse, that a lot of “them” (notice the anonymous, amorphous terms that begin to be used in arguments like this, taking away the individuality and humanity of the people concerned) are fakers, plain and simple. In an interview in the Sun on the 1st of December, Iain Duncan Smith went so far as to try to partly blame claimants for the fiscal deficit.

What a horrible way to think. What a STUPID way to think. The changes to the current system are rushed, flawed and un-necessary. Worse, they’re invasive and upsetting, forcing people into needless reassessments and retests, even for chronic or untreatable conditions, conducted by private healthcare assessors, not doctors. And of course, there is the insistence of cuts to the caseload of the new service. The figure of 20% has been bounced around, with no clear method or reasoning as to what the new guidelines might be, or what constitutes a pass or a fail.

It is clear that the changes that are being considered for the DLA will force more people under the poverty line, and make it more likely that an greater number of disabled people will be unable to fend for themselves. This is desperately wrong. No-one chooses to be disabled, and to have further indignities and ill-informed spite piled up on top of everything else you have to deal with on a daily basis must be close to unbearable.

A Nanowrimo mate, Emma, has launched One Month Before Heartbreak, a blog that tells the stories behind the lying headlines and snarky commentary. It lets the people that will be directly affected by the cuts tell their story. It’s an absolute must-read. I’d like to quote from one poster, who makes the point:

David Cameron has claimed that “we’re all in this together”, but these cuts won’t affect him in the slightest. He is not relying on friends or family to enable him to live from day to day. He is not facing the prospect of having his care funding cut, and being left to lie in his own urine and faeces all night, because his carer has been replaced with an incontinence pad, nor is he looking at spending every day of his life within a respite home, because the removal of his mobility Disability Living Allowance component has been withdrawn and he can no longer afford an electric wheelchair. He will not be a working person, taking over from the agency carer the local council can longer fund. He won’t feel suicidal because he is being made to feel that he doesn’t deserve to live, or because he simply does not have to means to to. These are real issues being faced by people with disabilities.

So please, the next time you see a story about the ConDems cuts on benefits in the newspapers and you tut about these disabled people draining the state, please remember three things:

1) Disabled people aren’t spongers, they are people who truly need the money, and desperately wish they didn’t.

2) When you go to bed tonight, you won’t need someone to dress you, or clean your bottom, and you won’t be left to lie in your own defecate. You will be free to do as you please.

3) Not all disabled people are born that way, and many are disabled due to accidents and illness, and you may find yourself in their dependent shoes one day.

One Month Before Heartbreak was envisaged as a weekend campaign to highlight the issue, but I see no reason why it should not carry on to be a vital resource. Certainly, Emma has now opened up the submission deadlines, so if you have a story to tell contact the website.

Further work? Right then. Here’s a link to a petition asking for a recall on the consultation work being done. There is still time to stop this, and to make sure that the people that most need our support to lead meaningful and fulfilled lives can continue to do so.

 

The Sunday Lao Tzu: Three Things

“I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.”

I think I’m at my happiest when I’m doing simple things. Reading, writing, cooking. A life lived quietly and without fuss. Today’s teaching strikes me as not just true, but directly applicable to the way I live my life. Simplicity, patience and compassion are all interconnected, and when you start to live with these three things in mind, then you are on your way towards a more contented existence.

I have always been a patient person, to the point where it becomes something of a kink. My favourite part of Christmas is the anticipation. Waiting to see how the dinner will turn out, what gifts are under the tree. As I tend to know what TLC has bought me beforehand (with the exception of The Pot, which came as a genuine, delightful surprise) the wait until I can get my mitts on the new loveliness becomes part of the pleasure of the whole experience. It’s an exquisite torture. See, told you. Kinky.

But patience also comes out of care and preparation. It’s pointless rushing a loaf of bread while it’s proving, or a slow-cooked stew while it bubbles fragrantly on the stove top. Is it a coincidence that my favourite meals are the ones that take a bit of time to prepare and cook, filling the house with delicious smells, allowing the expectancy of the meal to become part of the whole experience? I don’t think so. And of course, the food I like tends to be simple, hearty, rustic fare. I’m not a big fan of fussy over-done stuff. Although Heston Blumenthal always makes me laugh.

Compassion is a no-brainer. If you don’t live a life filled with understanding and empathy towards everyone else, if you lose your patience, then your time on the planet becomes much more complicated. People can be vain, stupid and cruel. That doesn’t mean you have to be. For the most part, getting angry with an obstacle of any kind doesn’t help matters. In fact, it can frequently make things worse. Basil Fawlty thrashing his broken down car with a tree branch is an image that springs to mind. I’ve never seen the boys at Kwik-Ft do that. Treating the people around you with a little patience, understanding and humour works wonders. Call it a charm offensive if you like, but it works a hell of a lot better than yelling and screaming.

Now, I know this is all making me sound like some sort of annoying zen guru, answering questions with yet more questions or gnomic statements, floating smugly through life. That’s not the case. The idiot in the modded Peugeot who cut me up on the way into work yesterday got the finger and a robust curse. I get angry and pissed off. I rush stuff and grumble about it. But I try to remember that simplicity, patience and compassion do work, and that sometimes all you need to do to solve a problem is to take a breath, step back and look at it differently. Sometimes, the answer really can be simpler than you think.

Spend Spend Spend: Early Impressions of the Mac App Store

It’s been just over a week since OS 10.6.6 dropped for desktop and portable Macs, and with my usual early adopter flair, it’s taken me about that to update. So I’ve only just started to play with the big woop of the rollout – the big brother to the App Store, the feature that has turned iOS devices into such customisable, adaptable street computers.

The Mac App Store has a clean, clear interface that’s a lot like the iTunes version, complete with a front page showing the heavy hitters and featured products. Installed apps are clearly marked, which can serve as a handy reminder for what you have cluttering up your hard drive. It’s easy to browse and search, and each app has it’s own page complete with screen shots and customer reviews.

As with iTunes, the App Store hooks seamlessly into your Apple ID account, which turns the purchase of an app into a disturbingly easy one-click process. A flip-and-drop animation puts your shiny new thing straight into the Dock.

Pricing has been a major factor in early news coverage of the Store. Apple have cleverly broken up their iWork and iLife suites so that it’s now possible to just get what you want. I jumped at the chance to upgrade my copy of GarageBand to the latest version for under a tenner. The whole iLife package is normally four times that. Similarly, Aperture, Apple’s pro photography app is now priced at £44.99. That’s quite a drop from last weeks box tag of £170.

Of course, the speed at which the App Store appeared seems to have taken some developers by surprise. Pixelmator, Smith Micro’s brilliant Photoshop-buster, is front and centre on the home page, at a very tempting £17.99. But subscriber mailouts a day or so after the new OS dropped offered it at $29.99 – a couple of quid more expensive. Granted, the mail also makes the point that Pixelmator is cross-platform compatible, but a bit of a heads up about their prominent place on the new outlet couldn’t have hurt.

There are also a lot of big names that don’t have a presence on the store. No Final Cut Pro. No Final Draft, Scrivener, VLC or Toast. But it’s early days yet, and as at least one developer has already stated, the accelerated timeframe of getting the App Store up has meant a lot of product simply wasn’t ready for the launch. I’ll be very interested to see how the product lines grow over time.

For now, though, the App Store looks like a solid and easy way for me to blow money. Apart from GarageBand, I’ve upgraded Xtralean’s lovely little graphics app ImageWell to version 4, and started playing with the free SketchBook Express from Autodesk, which is the best free drawing program I’ve seen in a while.

But no, I’m still not tempted by Angry Birds.

Start Choppin’: X&HT Reviews 127 Hours

it took me ages to figure out that the pic here is an hourglass...

Bottle
films are notoriously hard to carry off. Putting all of your action
in one cramped, isolated place, with a limited cast of characters
could be the recipe for a tense, claustrophobic thriller. Rodrigo
Cortés’ sweatily effective Buried springs to mind as the most
extreme recent example.

If you’re going to hem in your
actor to that kind of degree, then you’d better be sure that you’ve
got someone bloody good in front of the camera. Ryan Reynolds is
brilliant in Buried, and I’d have been interested to see him cast
as Aron Ralston in Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours. He has the proper sense
of physicality and goofy charm for the role. Instead, the face that
we see in a hole in the rock is James Franco. It’s a testament to
Franco’s skills as an actor, and of Boyle’s as a director, that
we’re convinced from the get-go of his capability, energy, skill
and knowledge of the desert that very nearly kills him.

We all know the story by now.
Aron Ralson, crag-hopper, mountain biker, all-round super-confident
hardbody makes a split second mistake while out on a weekend jaunt
in the deserts near Moab, Utah and ends up in a crevasse, his hand
mashed between the rock wall and a huge piece of
chalkstone.

His story, and what he has to do
to get back to civilisation, is the stuff of legend. In fact, there
were times when I found myself scoffing at the preposterous nature
of his escape. “There’s no way he could rappel down that cliff,” I
chuckled at one point. “He’s half-starved, desperately dehydrated
and quite possibly in shock. What do the writers take me for?”
Aron’s story is mind-boggling because you have to keep telling
yourself that all this actually happened, that he did free himself
from a predicament that would have 99.99% of us forming an
attractively spooky display of bleached bones in a cave somewhere.
He survived, and continues to do the things he used to, only now
with a rather cool looking climbing tool replacing his left hand.
Very post-human.

The trick to keeping a bottle
film interesting is to keep your viewpoint fluid. In Buried, the
director does this by exploring every nook and cranny of the set,
and cleverly by changing the size of the coffin to enable his
camera to get into places where there simply shouldn’t be room. in
127 Hours, Danny Boyle takes a different approach, and a lot of the
film isn’t in the canyon where Ralston is trapped at all.

With the use of flashbacks,
hallucinatory episodes and gorgeous tracking shots over the desert
terrain, I felt like I was on a guided tour of the trapped
climber’s interior geography. It’s cleverly done, and although you
lose something of the isolation and claustrophobia that he must
have felt, the end result is a dazzling, eye-popping feast. The
cinematography is wonderful, and every format from yummy 35mm to
grainy 2003-era DV is thrown into the mix. Kudos to Enrique Chediak
and Anthony Dod Mantle especially for the beautiful macro work,
slipping cameras into water bottles, the guts of cameras and
tracking the path of ants and insects through the cave.

Danny Boyle is one of the few
directors out there that loves colour, and uses it to it’s full
advantage on the big screen. I’m tired of the limited palettes that
are the thing in film these days, and heartily sick of the dreaded
cyan/orange cliche that makes modern films look underlit and boring
to watch. 127 Hours is a hard dose of pure sunshine after all that
drabness, and I felt like Aron, dipping my toe in blissful relief
into warmth and light, if only for a little while.

As for THAT moment: well, I’m a
horror film fan, so I’ve seen significantly worse. It’s nicely
done, and everyone around me seemed to be squirming. I loved the
way the arm breaks were accompanied by an almost subliminal flash
of light. As I watched, though, I realised that no matter how much
gore or screechy sound effects Boyle threw at us, there would be no
way of conveying more than a hundredth of what Aron Ralston went
through that day, in his cave, alone and close to death.

127 Hours is a worthy testament
to an astonishing feat of human endurance, but it doesn’t come near
to showing us what it must have been like. That’s a good thing.
It’s a remarkably positive movie, filled with light and colour and
life, and a happy ending. As a lesson in what we can survive and
achieve, 127 Hours is a triumph.