About Mastermind and Kafka

I’ve taken part in several TV quiz shows over the years, but the one that inevitably prompts admiring (I think) oohs and aahs is Mastermind, on which I appeared twice, once with hair and once not. Maybe not my very proudest achievement, but something that might get mentioned at my funeral.

But on Monday my former sort-of boss Jerry Thackray aka Everett True became not a Mastermind contestant but a Mastermind question. I think I’ll just slink back into my cave.

That said, I do think I should retire from the fray anyway, as my memory is playing tricks on me with increasing frequency. I was watching Orson Welles’s 1962 version of The Trial, which always feels like a minimalist dry run for Brazil, when I started to wonder why David Lynch’s take on Kafka always gets forgotten in the discussion of his work. And then I couldn’t remember whether Kyle McLachlan plays K in it, with Jeremy Irons as one of his anonymous persecutors, or the other way round. So I went to IMDb and realised that the reason it always gets forgotten is that it doesn’t actually exist. There was an adaptation by Harold Pinter with McLachlan; and Steven Soderbergh made a low-budget movie called Kafka, with Irons. And they’d got kind of mushed and mangled together in my head and Lynch presumably showed up uninvited, as he so often does.

It’s The Unconsoled (which may or may not have been inspired by any or all of the above, including the one that didn’t happen) all over again.

About a reality check

I recently had the pleasure of attending a book launch for the new opus of a very dear friend, at which a great many photographs were taken. Over the next few days, Paul placed loads of them on Instagram, taking the trouble not only to namecheck all the miscreants who’d showed up, but to explain who they were and What Their Thing Was, as used to be said. Here’s his screed for me:

...the creator of the ultimate 3-word description of Donald Trump (and I quote - ‘witless f..king cocksplat’ - Scotland is claiming it, but it was really Tim). He does other stuff too, like writing books.

I think Paul, or the universe, or maybe just my own conscience, is telling me I need to get my arse back into gear with the writing thing, no?

About Matt Belloni

A few nights ago, I was in the edifice that I still insist on calling the National Film Theatre, where I picked up a leaflet claiming to be The Insiders’ Guide to the BFI London Film Festival. It’s produced by Puck, which is apparently “a news brand focused on the inside stories in entertainment, media, finance, politics, politics, artificial intelligence, the businesses of fashion and sports, and the art world”, which is nice. Included in the slim volume is a piece by one Matt Belloni, a founding partner of Puck and one of the brand’s “generationally talented journalists”, listing his “top 10 British films (and some TV) to see before you die”. And here it is.

Well, Matt, it clearly wasn’t impossible, because you did actually deliver a list. And it’s not really “across genres and decades” because there’s a distinct leaning towards Films About Men With Guns, and nothing in black and white or before 1962. But you are, as you said, forgetting some classics: no Ealing comedy or Hammer horror, nothing by Michael Powell or Danny Boyle, not even a Carry On. To be fair, you’ve chosen Guy Ritchie’s best movie, but that’s not exactly a high bar, is it? And you find space for two Bond films? Seriously?

Ultimately such lists can never be objectively right or wrong and exist merely to prompt and provoke discussion. Fine. But this is part of a tie-in with one of the world’s major film festivals. People who attend will probably have an above-average knowledge of film history and some strong opinions to go with that knowledge. And a hell of a lot of them will have seen all of these (before death, presumably) and will be wondering why the hell Matt Belloni presumes to recommend such dull, hackneyed choices as somehow relevant to their cinematic education.

PS: Also from the LFF, the trailer for Elsinore, about Ian Charleson’s (literally) death-defying Hamlet. “Was that Shakespeare?” does not bode well.

About Eva Marie Saint

Eva Marie Saint has died at the splendid age of 102 and I know I’m not the only person whose immediate thought on hearing the news was not of Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront, but rather the line “She looks like Eva Marie Saint in On The Waterfront” from Lloyd Cole’s song ‘Rattlesnakes’. And yes, I guess I’m a wee bit nostalgic for the days when a pop songwriter could casually toss in a reference to an actress from a golden age and not expect blank looks. That said, there were only 30 years between the release of On The Waterfront and the release of ‘Rattlesnakes’. If we were to make a similar excursion into the past, we might compare a cool girl to Kelly Macdonald in Trainspotting. Has anyone done that? Ms Saint’s Oscar-winning turn was 70 years ago and if Lloyd were to gaze that far back from the mid-1980s, he may well have been singing the praises of Mae Marsh in The Birth of a Nation, which would be all kinds of awkward, as well as making me feel very tired and old. As Mr Cole also remarked, “are you ready to be heartbroken?”

About radio

In common with anyone else too old to seriously contemplate a mid-life crisis, I often find myself grumbling at BBC radio’s faintly risible efforts to lure a younger audience. So it was rather comforting today to hear the Desert Island Discs of Parveen Kumar, whose operatic lollipops (Mascagni, Verdi, Offenbach, Richard Strauss) could have fitted unobtrusively into a Plomley-era show. Even better, over on 6 Music’s Radcliffe and Maconie, there was a spontaneous F.R. Leavis gag. The old farts aren’t dead, we just look that way.

PS: My favourite Leavis quote: “They say I have persecution mania. Comes of being persecuted, you know.”

About clubbing

It’s been many decades since I set foot in a nightclub but this description, from Boy Parts by Eliza Clark,  of people dancing to the Smiths sounds painfully familiar:

I know I’m white, but there’s just a lot of white people White People-ing in a very small area, like it’s just some very, very densely packed mayo, you know? Densely packed mayo, jiggling about, doesn’t know what to do with its arms, doesn’t know what to do with its feet, undulating loosely, barely in time to the rhythm.

About exceedingly wide paintings

I recently returned from Madrid, which is full of excellent food and splendid dogs and pedestrian crossings that make pee-yooooo noises like Ring My Bell by Anita Ward.

There is also, of course, art. Since 1992, Picasso’s Guernica has resided at the Reina Sofia museum, its monochrome depiction of man-made hell as powerful as ever. At least, I think it is; it’s difficult to tell, under the scrum of selfie-takers, even though its proportions (more than twice as wide as it’s tall) don’t easily fit the iPhone lens. I guess as long as you’ve got a screaming woman or a melting horse sprouting from your ear or shoulder, you don’t need the whole thing. Your proximity to great art has been recorded and that’s what matters.

Over at the more staid Prado, cameras are still forbidden, which is possibly why my two favourite paintings there (like Anish Kapoor’s works), define themselves by their dimensional awkwardness. I give you Goya’s Witches’ Sabbath, from the Black Paintings

and The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist and Herod’s Banquet by Bartholomeus Strobel

neither of which would look great on Instagram and to be honest they look pretty rubbish on Blogger as well. Which is a good thing, obviously.

PS: And I’ve just returned from seeing something even wider. And again, photos were verboten. Not, I think, something that was even considered when I first clapped eyes on it (gulp) 45 years ago.

About literacy (the end of)

From James Marriott’s The New Dark Ages, reminding us that the current state of illiteracy may just be a norm to which we are reverting:

A world in which everyone can read seems obvious to us now but it is an astonishingly recent phenomenon. Much of the history of reading might be characterised less as a story of social and cultural change and more as the progress of an esoteric secret passed down by elites.

It’s an eagerly anticipated book and everyone seems to be talking about it, by which I mean that people who are worried about the decline in reading (as evidenced by the latest PISA statistics) are talking about it by which I mean very few people at all give a toss. And as John Harris has suggested, the fact that it runs to little more than 200 pages might be an acknowledgement that some battles have already been lost. 

Much of the narrative focuses on the distractions offered by TikTok and doomscrolling, and some governments are actively attempting to encourage their citizens back to books. Singapore is even paying its people (a very small sum) to read. My own experience as a teacher is that AI is an even bigger threat, leaching critical intelligence and the need for creativity from young minds. It’s a happy coincidence for Marriott that his book appears at the same time that AI bosses themselves are urging a coordinated application of brakes to the process, although the fact that the most bibliophobic US president in history is telling them they don’t know what they’re talking about makes its own point. I mean, what sort of political leader would want a population lacking in critical intelligence? Oh, right.

PS: That time when Trump talked about his favourite books.

PPS: Two more from Marriott. First, via Gurwinder Bhogal, the notion that our bingeing on junk info has created an “intellectual obesity crisis”. And then, less happily, his contention that

...no actor on earth can show with his or her face what Jane Austen can show us about the human heart in half a paragraph.

to which I ask, “really?”