A Political Propapagandist's View Of My Childhood

Well. The UK Election is done with.
The Conservatives have slipped up and Labour have got their voters in. Onward and upward.

One thing I have noticed ... one thing that has been puzzling me ... is when, exactly, did the word "socialist" become a term of deep abuse in the UK? It may not be your flavour of politics but to some so-called pundits it seems to have become a politics "beyond the pale". Link it to the term Marxist and apparently we should all be running around in circles and checking under the bed for bugaboos.

The recent Labour Party Manifesto kicked this off, talk of getting rid of student loans, perhaps re-nationalising part of the transport grid.. government energy companies and so forth. This... they have been saying... is Marxism.

Did my conservative father realise he was living in a Marxist state during my 1950s childhood, I wonder? As he duly voted for Churchill, Eden, Macmillan? Under whose Conservative governments we continued to enjoy in the main Labour's free schooling, free healthcare, public transport, government owned utility companies? The post-war consensus?

We obviously did not see that these apparent pillars of Conservative Government were being manipulated by Uncle Joe from behind Winnie's "Iron Curtain".

I wonder ... how did my family escape the gulags? What with all those Ladies Nights down at the Lodge? Surely that was punishable under a Marxist regime?
Perhaps I was too traumatised and mistook the gulags for the leafy suburbs of Kent.

Graphic Passions: "Blacksad" by Canales and Guarnido

I do ask The Old Man to get me a copy of  Blacksad for Christmas. I am very pleased to have it.
The Old Man scolds me for reading it too quick... but there are times when he is an old spoil-sport.... and...actually.... the artwork and writing is so good that it encourages you to linger on the pages.

This trilogy of 1950s-set Noir Crime tales by artists Juan Diaz Canales and Juanjo Guarnido proves to be a dream for such a crime fiction/graphics novel fan like I.

Animal-headed (and tailed) characters inhabit the dark streets of an American city. The central character is a black and white-faced cat-man and private eye, John Blacksad... complete with trench-coat and gun.... and this volume, published in 2010, is made up of three stories: Somewhere within the Shadows, Arctic Nation, and Red Soul. Murder, corruption, and themes of racism and America's McCarthy period Communist witch hunt are visited in turn.
But the artist/authors are not American. They are Spanish... with the comics first being published in French by French publisher Dargaud - starting back in 2000. So we have had to wait some time for an English translation.

I think it has all been worth waiting for: wonderfully detailed artwork, good writing, mystery and politics... I likes it. Alright, there are some complaints at the depiction of the female characters but I have to disagree... they are not simply "passion madams" and those that are.... well this is in the spirit of hard-boiled crime noir and I can accept it in exchange for the other political themes embraced in the writing.
And as for those who say they do not like anthropomorphism in graphic novel characters ... I do say....What are you doing reading this series in the first place? Read something else and stop belly-aching!

I am so definitely searching for the next volume.... published by Dark Horse in October 2014....Blacksad: Amarillo HC .

Listening To.... Horace Silver's "Blowin' The Blues Away"

Feeling retro....
Horace Silver... RIP in June this year.




1959 Blue Note recording "Blowin' The Blues Away" .... re-released on CD.

BBC4 "Crimes Of Passion" - How Was It For You?

BBC4's new Swedish crime series "Crimes of Passion" came to UK screens on Saturday (30th Aug). I be so looking forward to it for many reasons. I remember Ola Rapace as being good as "Stefan Lindman" in the first series of "Wallander". I've not been happy with BBC4's Saturday night reprise of a-a-all those Montalbanos and so have been waiting eagerly for something fresh.... and of course.... I do like a Scand-crime series.

In this first episode a group of academics and creative types arrive at their host's home on an idyllic Swedish island to celebrate Midsummer's Eve. Much drinking and smoking and flirting and angst-ing do go on. But come morning... a walk in the woods finds one of the group dead. This will be followed by the arrival of Homicide Inspector Christer Wijk (Rapace)..... and several more deaths.

I enjoyed the setting and retro cool of the whole thing but I am not sure it hits the spot for me. It is too Agatha Christie. Hers is not the kind of crime writing that I enjoy.... too much puzzle/plot and not enough character. But.... BIG BUT... many crime readers adore her and many crime writers of all sorts of genre's adore her also.
More disappointing is that there seemed to be some.... pointless suspense dangles... or rather at least one. Because what is it with all those shots through the shrubbery of the lady lead... accompanied by heavy breathing? It didn't seem to figure in the killings at all.
Or did I miss something?
I mean, The Old Man be getting restless and chatting quite a bit... And you see this is the fatal flaw in subtitled puzzle/plot crime. Take you eyes off the subtitles whilst the detective is explaining to the assembled guests who killed who and for why.... and you are sunk.

Guilty Pleasures: Film Music

I do admit that sometimes I like to listen to film music.
I have the odd CD of such....(Ennio Morricone)
Why is this a guilty pleasure? Because The Old Man do not approve of such a thing. Despite his own passion for  Badalamenti's "Twin Peaks" music. Well...like many, including myself, our own passions are the exceptions that prove the rule... He do sneer at the genre as a whole.... 'cos it is not proper stuff.
But if I like it. I love it.

So there I be on Saturday afternoon.... minding my own business... when Radio 3's "Sound of Cinema" pops up. This episode is not a mixed one, but a programme dedicated to the music of Nino Rota... (Zeffirelli, Visconti, Coppola's "The Godfather"...) I'd already missed Part One last week... but I be able to listen to this one - dedicated to his work with Fellini.
I be transported to the world of Italian film. Sunglasses on, I bop around a bit. Oh, I enjoyed it, me.

Brit-based listeners can catch this episode over the next few days til about 23rd August - here.

Travels With My Film-Life: Italy - The Grand Tour - De Sica in Miraculous Milan

The last stage of our film-life tour of Italy. We are in post-war Milan amongst the destitute and homeless who are about to participate in a miracle.
Cos this is..... Vittorio De Sica's "Miracle in Milan".
And me I do think I will visit a gritty piece of Italian Neo-realism like his famous "Bicycle Thieves"... but no.....
With this film we are whisked into a social satire, a fantasy that starts with a baby found in an old woman's cabbage patch and which then takes us through the founding of a Utopian shanty-town.... its demolition through greed.... and its inhabitants' transportation through the miracle of a magic dove... what is that? The Holy Spirit? Love?

I don't rightly know but it was a surprising fantastic journey... both bitingly realistic and  optimistic... or was that a desperate resort to magic?

Ha-ha! magical Neo-realism that's what it be.

BBC 4: Serving One's Past As a Cultural Stew

One of the unexpected side effects of being elder is to find one's lived past regurgitated as edutainment  in a garbled form.

So it be for me when I do settle down to BBC 4's "Fabric of Britain: The Golden Age of Knitting" the other evening.

All is smooth going until we reach my own lifespan's experience - the 1950s onwards - and I admit to gagging a bit as 1950s home knitting culture is fed to me purely as some kind of desire to "make things for one's loved ones"....

Let me see now.... my recollection is that money is still tight post-war and into the mid-1950s at least. New "manufactured" clothes are considered expensive by many, hence... you make your own because that is all you can afford. To paraphrase The Old Man's grandmother ... "They's can't schemy must lowster." (If you can't be brainy you have to do physical work) or in terms of my argument..."if you ain't got the money you have to make it yourself."

By the time the "documentary" hits the 1960s my eyes are revolving in their sockets. Showing clips of young girls grooving in lacy mini dresses. Just to be pedantic. This is not knitting. This is crochet. I know. My big sis do crochet just such a dress for me at the time, white cotton.... And where does that fashion come from, I ask? Most likely the same street-savvy of "make because you can't afford to buy". Paris fashion of the 1960s features hand-crafted lace mini dresses and the nearest us plebs can manage as substitute is crochet. Voila! The crochet mini- dress.

The documentary then goes on about the "sweater dress" that all the "girls were crazy for". I don't remember that craze, and believe me I do have my eye on fashion even if I be too plump, rural and un-wealthy to get my hands on it. But I do remember the "skinny rib sweater" that everyone does want .... but is not mentioned in this piece.

So... by the time the doc have disposed of knitting in the 1980s without mention of Patricia Roberts but instead with a display of Gyles Brandreth's awful novelty items, I be weeping. Apparently there be no knitted fashion in the 1990s. But I do remember my black fine-knit Nicole Farhi dress as the clothes-love-of-me life at that time. Apparently I be buying and wearing knits in the 1990s in some alternate future/past.

The recent resurgence of "knitting groups" as tackled by the programme's pundits is something else. But it is glossed over. Perhaps it is nostalgia .... or a backlash against manufactured clothes? I dunno. But the fact which is unmentioned in this TV analysis of the "Golden Age of Knitting" - is that present day fashion/clothing industry economics is the very opposite of that of the 1950s. Then, hand-knitting was done with standardised woollen  and cotton yarns in various forms and the clothing manufacture industry was still largely a British affair. The designed, synthetic yarns of recent years, by contrast, cost a fortune. Buying enough yarn to make a fashionable garment - always bespoke patterns for these yarns because they are so individualised - is an expensive project. On the other hand the manufactured knitted clothes now available from high street and supermarkets... courtesy of the sweat shops of south-east Asia... cost a few pounds and are bought and chucked at whim.

All in all... a sloppy bit of documentary. And by the way... I never met anyone in the 1950s who do actually have one of they knitted toilet-roll covers shaped like a crinolined lady that the programme delights in displaying and smirking over.

Plainly... my entire life have been spent in an alternate fashion past.

For uplift and real inspiration on fashion and the older generation I do recommend taking a look at Channel 4's "Fabulous Fashionistas" repeated.....  Marvel and Enjoy. (OOPs my mistake on original post. Correct time and channel is Sunday 22nd September 20.00 hrs. on Channel 4-7) 

In Which The Old Man Takes Comfort In A Ken Loach Documentary

What with "The Funeral" and the upcoming local elections at which we have no candidate we can vote for .... The Old Man do grow increasing apoplectic.

Last night he do take comfort in his Ken Loach documentary - "The Spirit of '45" ... and do nearly weep he be so moved about it all.

Tis our generation that basked in the welfare state, I know. And what a fine thing it was. What a shame it is being buried as we speak ... and without benefit of a ceremonial "do" like the woman what broke it. There. Colours to the mast. Nailed.
For myself I shall be following columnist Owen Jones with close attention.

Travels With My Film Life: France... A Visit to "Mon Oncle"

Here I be in France.... 1958 and watching the half-mime world of Jacques Tati as he bumbles through his struggle with the modern world... on his bicycle... trailing his delighted "nephew" and a string of dogs and street characters. He be bewildered by his brother-in-law's modern house a la mode: all robotic, automated, geometric steel and plastic. And Bro-in-law is being chivvied by his wife to find her brother (Tati/Mon Oncle) a job in his plastic tubing factory. Tati's attempts at attending an interview and a day at work be much cause for Keatonesque mayhem.

I am a late convert to Tati and we do really enjoy this one. "Mon Oncle" is a satire on the craze for the modern and at the same time a fond farewell to a way of life disappearing under the bulldozers.

Jacques Tati's "Mon Oncle": Trailer

Travels With My Film Life: Paris 1959 "Les Quatre Cent Coups"

Alors! Here we be, The Old Man and myself... in these gritty, smoky old streets of Paris. I do bring The Old Man here because he adores a bit of a Truffaut film. But amazingly he has never partaken of "The 400 Blows".

So we do watch 12 year old Antoine Doinel racket around the streets of Paris, skiving off school, sneaking into cinemas, getting hell from his parents, bein' a runaway... trying to steal a typewriter for heavens' sake.... getting nicked. Aaah poor Antoine.

The Old Man do not as I expect react with full enthusiasm. He do seem in fact... puzzled by the film.

Me? I do love it. I could see "400 Blows" 400 times. I can smell those streets.. I do know that Antoine don't wash much. Poor Antoine... he don't know what to do with himself. He do only want to "raise hell" a little...
Did you know that "Raising Hell" is the meaning of the phrase "faire les 400 coups"? Me neither.
You can find the trailer here on YouTube.

Graphic Passions: RIP Ronald Searle 1920-2011

For a girl like I... and of my particular generation... Ronald Searle was an all pervading influence on humour and drawing style.. And to all those younger things out there...which includes just about everybody... maybe you don't realise how far Searle's "Style and Zeitgeist" reached. I think that Searle fed into Scarfe, John Lennon, maybe into Monty Python even. In Britain, there was a generation who came through after WWII to create a surreal world of humour that fed the following generation (Think "The Goon Show" with Sellers, Milligan, Bentine, Secombe.. the wonderful Gerard Hoffnung with his own cartoons and anarchic music festival. Rowland Emett and his crazy kinetic sculptures.) A lot of this stuff caught fire and led into the anarchy and satire of 1960s humour, which has maybe blasted it's 1950s parent generation out of the fame it deserves.

Searle was a serious artist whose recording of his own experiences in a Japanese POW camp led to the doubtless forbidden act of drawing. That's just how necessary drawing was for Searle. But today everyone thinks of Searle and St Trinian's... (And I really could not begin to cope with the 2007 film of St Trinian's.... It's the 1950s you see, you just had to be there.) I was brought up with his boys' skool equivalent, St. Custard's - a collaboration with Geoffrey Willans. As I peer into my copy of "Down with Skool", I realise how much of everything I laughed at as a skool-girl was down to Searle and his generation of artists: my own doodles.. the line... the characters that look out from the page at you....

There's a Ronald Searle Tribute site here. Click through and acquaint yourself with more of Searle's work. His really was a great contribution to cartoons, drawing and illustration.

Animated Discussions: My Dog Tulip

So we sits down and watches a DVD of "My Dog Tulip"which The Old Man is most insistant gets purchased.

"My Dog Tulip", released earlier this year in UK, is an animated tale based on J.R. Ackerley's memoir of his long relationship with his German Shepherd, Queenie (Tulip). It took Paul Fierlinger & Sandra Fierlinger six years to animate using what they call "paperless" animation (drawn and painted straight into the computer.)

I love it. Laughing out loud and really enjoying The Fierlingers' chosen style which reminds me of magazine caricature of the period (1950s). But in some sequences, usually when Ackerley (voiced by Christopher Plummer) is musing on Tulip's inner life, this morphs into animated line drawings depicting Tulip as a dog -headed human in a dress. Sucker for that touch, me.

Be warned that this is not a cute film about a cute dog. Although in her own way Tulip is cute, she is most certainly DOG. And it is this that seems to divide critical opinion. It seems that Tulip is just too basic in her vital expressions, pee, crap, reproduction, etc - and that J.R. Ackerly appears to be too fascinated by her habits to be quite respectable.

But I think it's a truthful, loving, detailed observation of the dog and her solitary human companion. So I say... bravo for "My Dog Tulip".... not a dry eye in the house... thoroughly moved I be. See it if you can.

Travels with my Film-Life: Still in Japan

Mmmn... we's still here. This time it's 1959 and we are visiting the tight world of a neighbourhood on the outskirts of Tokyo - with all that implies.

It's Yasujiro Ozu's "Good Morning". And I think it's very funny. I love the photography in this one. And sometimes the music reminds me of an Italian film of this period.

The plot very much revolves around two young boys' desire for television; whilst the film itself observes the manners and formalities of neighbourly life - as in the greeting of the title. For one character - polite small talk is the oil that smooths the running of daily life. Certainly, for others, its absence ... causes gossip and suspicion. The film is a delight.

I can't point you to a very good clip with English translation. But try this one here for a flavour of the film.

And if you would like to check my post about Ozu's "Late Spring" - click here.

"Good-bye" or should I say - "Sore dewa".