This is good

.. By which I mean it's great to be back...

The spell is broken : London Olympics closing catastro-f**k

A very long time ago I was a school kid entranced by the Montreal Olympics. I followed subsequent Olympics through Moscow and Los Angeles and Daly Thompson was my hero.

Slowly over the years the fuss and pomposity of track and field coverage has got in the way of our national gladiatorial soap opera (football) and the subsequent Olympics became an irritation to be avoided.

Then came London, and after the huge money lavished on the capital on a variety of different projects (millennium dome, wembley stadium etc etc) I was very against holding an Olympics here. It just seemed idiotic to lavish even more attention on a place already so detached from the rest of the UK.

That was, until Mitt Romney opened his mouth. Just for a moment I hesitated in my cynicism, cancelled my plans for the Friday night and watched Danny Boyle's opening ceremony. I was completely blown away. I couldn't sleep until 2.30am that night and was buzzing for days. It wasn't perfect but the intelligence, imagination and sheer bravery of staging just blew me away.

Then, caught in the spell, I fell in love with the Olympics again. I even appreciated the idea of it in the various venues in London. Beach volleyball and Benny Hill at Horseguards parade, Over The Moon equestrian jumps at Greenwich ... even knowing this was so magical only  because of the previous fortunes lavished on the capital could not take away the spectacle. It really was good.

Then I fell for the individual stories of Jess, Ennis,  Mo Farah (and training partner Galen Rupp getting an incredible silver in the 10K), and the boxers and swimmers. I spent one entire Thursday watching the Taekwondo and BMX from 10am to 10pm.

Not only the medals but also the general running of the event seem to go ahead flawlessly. It was surreal and serene. It was almost as if all the negatives of the Olympics were saving themselves to appear in some final disaster. Perhaps on the final day terrorists would nuke the marathon?

Well we can now say, in a moment of karmic and cosmic balancing that the closing ceremony, aka The Bonfire of Careers, was the diametric opposite of the opening ceremony. I am no huge patriot, but where Danny Boyle's Isles of Wonder was like finding on old photograph of yourself in your prime, the stage manager of Take That's attempt on the same thing for the closing ceremony was like catching yourself in the mirror looking old pathetic and lonely.

Perhaps my "favourite" moment from that excruciating car crash of garbage was the tribute to Bram Stoker's Dracula by ... Annie Lennox. I was half expecting a tribute to Frankenstein by Sheena Easton to follow.

I'm too depressed now to even think about the rest of it. I could spend all day taking it apart and actually I should have stayed up until 2.30am last night to get it out of my system but I have't got time for bile anymore.

Come back soon Olympics, I'm sorry for doubting you, and if the closing ceremony was cruel revenge on us cynics I will try to be less of a bitter idiot in future.


Sent from my iPhone

How was the Olympic opening ceremony for you?

Even if it had been crap I'd have been cheering it just for including NHS, Tim Berners Lee, Brunel, the dark satanic mills and Dizzy Rascal. I loved it and wasnt surprised it was great - I really admire Danny Boyle's films

But rooting for the creative teams and athletes and hoping generally all goes well doesn't disguise the fact it is still a nauseating corporate hand job in a location that gets a new enormous leisure facility built for it every year.

"London gets the games for an unprecedented third time" - how's that happened? Every other country has been smart enough to move the Olympics to other cities to spread the infrastructure spend around - here in Britain the power elites only travel out into the provinces to visit their holiday homes.

I'm still up at 2.30am buzzing after that opening ceremony and yet you could see the problem in the background even there in the stadium. Empty seats.. The sign at any sporting event of half interested corporate audiences given tickets for free. They turn up late and leave early, when they can be bothered to turn up at all.

I'll watch the Olympics now. 

(I was going to avoid it completely - until the new American Borat opened his mouth. I've spent all day contributing and reading #RomneyShambles)

Actually I'd be stupid to avoid it. If what we hear about the ratio of private/public partnership is true, my taxes have helped pay for 98% of it. As for the other 2%, well ... you barely notice the sponsors do you?

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"They're livin' it up at the Hotel Diodati.." Mary Shelley the play, Robert Harris's Fear Index

 I like a bit of theatre and really make an effort to get friends out to good theatre events. On my birthday in the past we've all had a lot of fun (post pub) at great London nights out such as Woman in Black and Shockheaded Peter.

I've had a bad run on this in the last couple of years though. I thought the highly rated Jerusalem (to be used as the basis for the Olympic ceremony I understand) was just about the most over-rated live event I've ever seen in any form. As someone who has lived on Exmoor for about 15 years, I found Jerusalem's depiction of rural England ludicrous, with some truly repellant characters that showcase some of the worst aspects of modern England while remaining farcically niave about others. Fantastic acting performances but I hated it with a passion.

Last year I finally worked up the enthusiam again for another play but unfortunately chose Chicago (the musical). I blame too much time on the tube system, passing posters that suggest a kind of theatrical Sin City set to Cotton Club era music. Instead I found myself in something that was more like "Graham Norton's Bugsy Malone XXX". I've never been more embarrassed to be in an audience in my life.

So, for live drama, it has been a while. Luckly, Helen Edmundon's Mary Shelley, which I saw last Saturday night at the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn, has broken the duck.

It was a impulse decision. as it was only walking distance from where I'm staying. I txted a friend, "It had better have drugs and at least one monster in it" It didn't have either but is well worth seeing anyway.

Compared to other dramatisations of the era this is more straight biopic and it benefits from a more sober approach. The lives of the Godwins and the Shelley's, two generations of radical rock star thinkers of their era, hardly needs exaggeration. The lives of these people glow with such creativity that their actual living reality seems like an extreme plot from a Bronte/Thomas Hardy parody.

Still recovering from the death of the suicide of their proto-feminist mother Mary Wollstonecraft, the three teenage daughters of radical thinker William Godwin find themselves playing host and falling in love with Percy Bysshe Shelley, Godwin's spiritual air. Enormous schandal follows. Eventually two of the three will find themselves on the shores of Lake Geneva at the Villa Diodati taking laudanam with Lord Byron, in a famous ghost story writing competition which will inspire some of the greatest monsters of literary history.
One of the sisters will commit suicide.
Mary, as a teenage single mother, will write Frankenstein. (Also, less well known, The Last Man, the first post apocalypse novel).

Ken Russell's Gothic covers the Villa Diodati part of the saga as if loaded on laudanam itself. I've seen this movie (I was at the London Prem at the Adelphi actually) in all states of disrepair, and disrepair is definately the best way to see it. Sadly missed Natasha Richardson is excellent as Mary but it probably it does the epochal late-niter no favours as a serious subject.

Helen Edmundonsons current play, which has been running for some time up North, very sensibly restricts iself to events from the Home Front, the Godwin's home in Skinner Street in London, stopping before the publication of Frankenstien.

Kilburn walk back from Tricycle

There is enough soap opera incident in these characters to fill three series of HBO saga. It doesn't need to cover the work of the Godwins, The Shelley's and Byron in any detail and wisely restricts itself to the effects of the ideas themselves. From the perspective of the poor parents Shelley is more like a cult leader, a David Koresh or Jim Jones, spiriting half of their family away to become part of his 'community' (along with the children of his other conquests) while leaving poor Fanny trapped in a prison of her own social responsibility.

Lord Byron and the Ken Russell events of Switzerland are kept completely completely off stage leaving a a tragic Thomas Hardy-esque saga to unfold before us. The actresses covering the daughters, Kristin Atherton as Mary, Shannon Tarbet as Jane and Flora Nicholson as Fanny are all convincing, funny and heartbreaking when they need to be. (Flora Nicholson particularly). Direction is tight and design is involving without being a distraction.

Negatives? Mrs Godwin character grates badly (the writing, not the actress I think). Also the atempt at the end to tie up the effects of the radical thought on the family seems contrived. The one thing Gothic got right was a chilling ending showing the morbid, tragic fates of those involved. I wish Mary Shelley had tied things up as neatly, but overall I would regard it a big success.

While appreciating the novelty of this story being told from the Godwin's perspective I was still a bit childishly dissapointed that all the interesting stuff with Lord Byron and the Villa Diodati happened off stage.

By a coincidence I'm just coming to the end of Robert Harris's The Fear Index , which IS set in Geneva Switzerland, a near future Switzerland were the souless high finance equivalent of Skynet and the Forbin Project is about to crash the world.

The power of the Fear Index is that it is not near future however, and the algorithmic tradiing system which is manipulating the worlds financial markets to clean up on bets made against the chaos is actually happening all around us now. And if the AI Gordon Gecko's in Harris's novel i not alarming enough perhaps the knowledge that human beings are doing the same thing as I'm writing this is even worse than Harris's fiction.

Fear Index is a thrilling read you will likely devour, horrfied, in record time. It will tell you more about the Darwinistic forces in modern finance than you want to know, and like the Villa Diodati experience of Mary Shelley and co it reminds us that beneath the surface of Geneva swim some very dark creatures of the human subconscious. Harris knows he is swimming in the same chilled lake water as the Shelley's, Polidori and Byron as he includes his own Dr Polidori character, and the seedy Geneva hotel where main character meets his own monster called 'Hotel Diodati'.

Thoughts on A Punk Tale Of Two Cities

Like punk itself, this contains a lot of self promotional BS, produced like disjointed schizo cut up  immediately at war with its own nature. By the time the self congratulatory nostalgia gets to one hit wonder Neneh Cherry you might be wanting to start a radical nihilist anarchist movement yourself. I hope that's the point.

Best quotes
"Ian Dury was everything Lou Reed wanted to be"    Chrissie Hynde

"It only lasted six months because that all started on speed, and then the Heartbreakers came over and brought smack. And then it ended"   Hynde again

Re: John Lydon vs The Ramones, Someone needs to tell John Lydon that the more bollocks he talks the more he sounds like Malcom McClaren

Overplaying the 1970s IRA bombing campaign to make it sound like the Blitz is laughable. (During the IRA's twenty-five year campaign in England, there were 115 deaths, in six months in 1940 the Blitz killed 40,000 people)

London punk scene had no equivalent Andy Warhol like art scene to the New York punk scene so one of the 'London' artists, Linder Sterling, is included despite being a Scouser working in Manchester (for Buzzcocks)

Punk Britannia : Cosmic Justice 1977 Style

 
1977 - The message from humanity for alien civilisations attached to the
Voyager space probes includes a speach by the then UN Secretary
General Kurt Waldheim. Waldheim has since been revealed as an
ex-member of the Waffen SS.

NASA had originially asked for permission to include "Here Comes the Sun" from the Beatles' album Abbey Road. While the Beatles favoured it, EMI opposed it and the song was not included.

1977 -  EMI executives (briefly) sign the new music sensation.
"Following the end of the tour in December 1976, EMI arranged a series
of concerts for January 1977 at the Paradiso in Amsterdam. But before
boarding the plane at London Heathrow Airport, the band reportedly
spat on each other and verbally abused airport staff. "One witness
claimed the Sex Pistols were doing something so disgusting that she
could not repeat it for publication . . . it became generally believed
Jones had been vomiting on old ladies in the preflight lounge,"
reported Rolling Stone. EMI released the band from their contract two
days later.
"I don't understand it," Rotten remarked at the time. "All
we're trying to do is destroy everything."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_Pistols
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_Golden_Record
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Waldheim

Ennio Morricone special on 6music

If you've had enough of Punk Britannia and need a cool start to a wet spring week

This is good
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01jl8ts

and highlights available on the freakzone podcast
http://www.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/series/freakzone