Somewhere Over the Gasometer Skies are Blue

Having slipped and slithered my way on icy pavements back from town after a dental appointment I settled down with a cup of tea to watch bovine afternoon TV whilst the numbness wore off and I stopped dribbling down my chin. The Ten Commandments was on, Charlton Heston parting the Red Sea and a quick change of wig and beard to demonstrate years wandering in the wilderness. I love an old fashioned Hollywood epic no attempt at all to either be authentic or even nod in the direction of historical or even literary accuracy. I still have the voice of John Wayne in my head as the centurion saying’ Surely this man was the son of Gawwwwd’ in one such film. I can recall with relish Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra whilst in real life having an affair with Mark Anthony (Richard Burton) and never quite losing the refined Anglo American accent. Rex Harrison played Julius Caesar in that film ( pre Dr Doolittle and my Fair Lady talk singing days) uttering the immortal lines , often misheard, ‘Those baristas need dealing with send out a turtle !’

A cast of thousands was, in the fifties, sixties and even seventies, a sure fire way to get bums on seats in the cinema. These days we are a bit cynical as casts of thousands can be generated by CGI. Most of the Coliseum audience in the final scenes of Gladiator were generated by a computer they even managed to digitally place the dead Oliver Reed into some scenes. No doubt there may be a time coming when old films could be edited together seamlessly of some long gone great actor to make a whole new film. Paul Scofield could have turned up in an episode of the Tudors compiled of out-takes from a Man for All Seasons.

Gone are the days when a film director had a megaphone and thousands of extras to control and probably only two or three cameras to capture a scene that if not caught on film could not, without huge expense, be replicated. Just now as I watched the Ten Commandments directed by Cecil B de Mille I realised that there must be scores if not hundreds of Americans alive today who were in that film’s cast of thousands and perhaps also other epic films of that era as a child. There was one shot of a girl that sticks in my head, she could have been no more than four or five and she was driving geese before her with a stick. She was leaving Egypt walking just in front of Edward G Robinson as a n’er do well Jewish slave overseer. Where is she now? She must be about my age as the film was made in 1956. Does she have the film on DVD and fast forwards it to that scene with her appearing to show others who doubt her one claim to fame. Now and again does she catch a middle of the night re-run of it and remember the day Mr De Mille shouted action and all these people started moving and pretending to be something they weren’t? Does she even know she is in the film, did her family move from Hollywood to some small town in Iowa and open a shoe shop and never even see the film or think it best not to remember the time they were so hard-up they had to hire themselves out and their little girl as extras? Perhaps this little girl died young of drink and drugs trying to make it as a Hollywood starlet, fixated on achieving greatness in the media that claimed her so young? The life of the extras in those old epics could be fascinating, all stitched together into a backdrop patchwork of the old Hollywood that was. There is a short story or short stories in there somewhere, over and above Ricky Gervais’ take on the extra's life.

The American Film Institute a couple of years back produced a definitive list of the ten best films of all time in particular genres. Here is their list of the top ten for the epic genre.

1 Lawrence of Arabia 1962
2 Ben-Hur 1959
3 Schindler's List 1993
4 Gone with the Wind 1939
5 Spartacus 1960
6 Titanic 1997
7 All Quiet on the Western Front 1930
8 Saving Private Ryan 1998
9 Reds 1981
10 The Ten Commandments 1956

How did Reds get in at Number 9 when Dr Zhivago makes no appearance at all? That is a minor quibble or course, I have to say that looking at this list, the older films that I saw for the first time in the cinema; Lawrence of Arabia, Ben-Hur, Spartacus, The Ten Commandments, Gone with the Wind ( at a re-run show at the local flea-pit when I was ten years old) still remain in my head as moments of ‘wow’. The cast of thousands , the action scenes with real stunt men risking their lives ( I believe 2 at least died making the chariot scenes in Ben Hur), the pan across some vast army, sometimes a literal army, of extras, the attempt to show something on a grand scale, did inspire a particular state of awe in me.

Nowadays I may be amazed at the technical trickery and accomplishments that generate some scenes as in Lord of the Rings, Gladiator etc but I have never again experienced that same sense of real wonder at the power of Hollywood to create something akin to celluloid magic on the grand scale as when I first saw these films. This of course may be because I saw some as a child or adolescent and I had not yet grown cynical or jaded about the moving picture show. It may be a function of the generation I come from. As a child I caught the last gasp flicker of the Hollywood ‘big pictures’, when the move to technicolour still seemed jaw droppingly vivid. In the grey Midland town I lived in then even the green of the grass and the red of a cloak in Spartacus seemed extraordinarily bright,it made you think that America held a whole palette of colours you could never experience anywhere else but there. Colour was so lacking in the fifties and that shift from black and white was still significant. The sudden change from black and white to colour in the film The Wizard of Oz somehow epitomizes it, somewhere over the rainbow or the gasometer at the back of my house and in Hollywood the sky always was truly azure blue. The story may have been important, the acting probably important but the dazzling colour of it all as a child was the most important thing of all. I have seen New York, walked around every corner expecting and sometimes finding familiar gritty backdrop locations of great American films I have seen and loved but I have never been to those locations where those big epics were filmed ( Italy, Spain, Monument valley, California ,etc). I expect that if I ever do go there it will take me back to those times as a child in the cinema soaking up all that colour as if it were a sunlit cure for some ailment I had no name for but today would probably call mind-numbing drabness.

I do hope you have a Happy Christmas and wonderful 2010 dear reader. I shall be back with you anon, probably after New Year.

Floods, The Comfort of Things and the Poet John Lyons' Cooking

A wet Sunday but nothing like Cumbria where people must view the rain, any rain now, as an enemy, a taker of homes, possessions, livelihood, lives. Our local river still remains within its banks but the floodplains near the town look sodden as if just another jugful of rain will tip them over the edge into fen mere where no dog walker can pass and the swans and Canada geese float on a memory of meadowland.

I have an 8 minute radio piece up on the Audiotheque website about water and the draining of the fens, it’s called Isle ( scroll down to find it, I can't guarentee this link will work after more updates have been added to the site). This is a experimental sound website run by De Montfort University which has some short play pieces like mine but also some interesting soundscapes etc. Having lived in the fens for many years and been fascinated by it’s history, water, its encroachment and its loss, has been at the core of its social and economic history and still is. There are attempts being made now to return areas back to its original mere and marshland state. Such projects are valuable but they only show you a gnat’s bite of how the area would have looked in the sixteenth century and earlier, pre-drainage. It was a huge undertaking to drain the fens and in fact was never truly successful until the steam engine’s invention that allowed water pumps to be more effective. Windmills were never really up to the job but for a while covered the countryside.

As you drive beside the dykes now the roads are raised up due to the shrinkage of the land once it was sucked dry of water. It always seems odd driving across the fens at night beside a raised drainage dyke on one side and a huge dark drop on the other down to the fields. Sometimes, as it did the other night as I drove back from Ely (The Isle of Eels), it feels as if the world is almost tilting as the camber of the road veers towards the drop. The road snakes across the landscape sometimes letting go its grip on the raised drainage dyke and meandering off to follow old sheep tracks and ways that existed through the meres long before they were drained. As you snake around late at night you can see headlights appearing and disappearing way ahead as they follow the road. The road does indeed resemble an eel more than a snake I feel. eels were once prolific in the fens; one medieval scribe noted that at times they were so plentiful you could almost walk on the backs of eels for three miles across one stretch of the fens. However whilst the snake has been turned into a verb the humble eel hasn’t , although 'to eel' sounds as if it ought to merit a verb especially in wet or sodden landscape. Even in a downpour in the city one has a sense of the mass of people on pavements twisting and turning like eels to avoid each other, shopping bags, umbrellas. They eel down the pavement sounds right to me, it also conjures up that knotted mass of eels and the flow of water. I must find out what the collective noun is for eels, I presume there is one.

I was driving back through the fens from Ely because I had been to the launch of John Lyons’ new book published by Peepal Tree, a great press for all Afro-Caribbean writing. Cook-Up in a Trini Kitchen is joy of a book if you like poetry and food, it contains great recipes for all kinds of Trinidadian dishes, many with a twist on them . John did the launch in a bookshop whilst also cooking some of the dishes. The smell was heavenly, although the smoke detector did have a moment when hit by a waft of steam from sizzling onions herbs and spices. The book contains some of John’s artwork ( he originally trained and continues to be a visual artist of some repute) as well as some prose pieces about his childhood in Trinidad and some poems that speak to the recipes. As John said Trinidadians take their pleasures very seriously and food and having fun is high on their agenda. I tried some of the dishes and can personally recommend the Christmas cake recipe but suggest you don’t eat too much as you may be well over the limit given the amount of rum, cherry brandy and port it contains. It was one of those joyous occasions when poetry nestled so easily into the other delights of the senses and the poems John read just added to the flavour of the evening.

What else have I done this week, well I’ve started reading a wonderful book given to me by a friend written by a social anthropologist who just writes so well that his material jumps off the page at you and some pieces almost make you want to cry at their poignancy and insight into peoples lives.. It is called The Comfort of Things by Daniel Miller. It is book that investigates the things 100 people in an ordinary London street surround themselves with in their homes and what significance these things have for who they are and how these things give meaning to their lives. It is so glib to say materialism is a bad thing, this book shows how stuff or even the absence of stuff can be heartbreakingly meaningful and is not simply an indicator of how a person rates their standing by possessions. The first chapter contains a piece called ‘Empty’ and shows a man 74 years of age who lives in a flat surrounded only by furniture and items that have a functional necessity. The sterility of his surroundings is so marked that when he is asked questions about his past life it is no surprise that his story is quietly desperate and devoid of any real human contact and warmth that began for him from birth. I started to cry as a read it.
The next piece in the book is called ‘Full’ and gives the chaos of an extended family whose possessions are simply an extension of their love and warm contact with each other. The description of their house and all its many decorations at Christmas and all the laughter and stories each decoration and bauble held for the family may seem like some sugary Dickensian Christmas card. However I was left with permission to gaze round my house full of books and objects that many would deem ready for the jumble or Charity shop, from whence some of them actually came, and feel absolutely ok about it (not that I have ever felt not ok but now and then moments of life laundry do creep up on me).

It is that time of year so I have baubled up the willow canes I keep in a pot of sand in the living room and have hung gold and red bunches of grapes and extra cherry red Christmas lights to go with the ones that bedeck it all the year round plus other ornaments that are old friends at Christmas. I have a feeling, as the cherry red lights look so warm and comforting, they may stay up there now past Christmas and add to the stuff of my life. That’s ok. I’m not going anywhere and the Boo will have to clamber over all this when I go or am shuffled off into accommodation for the bewildered and dazed. I have however promised not to collect old newspapers and milk bottles or anything that might attract rats a la Miss Haversham. The Boo is equally squirrelish about some stuff, as was my mother, so this genetic trait may be passed down through the generations. I can travel light when needs be but home for the past twenty-eight always has a sense of people and warmth about it that some stuff of mine signifies. It may be an age thing but I think it is a stuff thing. Ask many of those who have lost things in the floods in Cumbria and on their faces you will see it is not always about the monetary value of possessions it is about all those things that gave home its meaning.

Birthdays, Age and Tightrope Walking with Larkin

I had a birthday this week-end, I have no problem with birthdays they roll by whether you want them to or not so I like to embrace them as an increasingly familiar old friend. Twenty was wonderful, thirty was wonderful, forty was fine, fifty was interesting, sixty my next one I shall encounter with a zero will bring a bus pass, heating allowances and best of all I anticipate the feeling of empowerment that I have earned the right to not bother about what people think about me. If truth were told ( and truth is not always best told but probably less damaging that untruths told in the long term) I feel that at fifty –eight ( pause whilst I have to recalculate from last year). It would be a lie to say I did not care how others perceive me, that way lies slight madness and those blouses you find in shops that cater for ladies of a certain age. You know the ones I mean, tiny paisley patterns, maybe with trailing things that can be tied in bows at the neck. I still squeeze myself into jeans that are a triumph of corsetry over breathing and have T-Shirts that have slogans on. I was once told by a very glamorous perfumed and couturier bedecked lady that no woman should ever wear T-Shirts saying anything past twenty-five, unless it is a small discreet designer logo and then only if the designer is expensive enough. This woman was obviously wrapped in silk pashmina as she exited the birth canal and her mother probably only broke into a slight glow throughout labour.

I have little dress sense, no glamour ( as defined by afore mentioned designer woman), I often manage to achieve an effect through sheer serendipity, sometimes in the tumble of the drawers and wardrobe an outfit comes together by some strange law of permutations of what is nearest to hand. It must be a bit like the probability of winning the lottery, now and again you may win a tenner ( a near decent outfit) which makes you feel that a jackpot win( bloody great) is not totally impossible. At 6’ 3”( I’ve lost an inch along the way somewhere) you tend to get noticed when you enter a room, if you then add to that clashing colours and items of clothing from various decades that would make the words ‘an interesting mix of styles’ seem overly generous….. then you have a statement but in my case more of a exclamation ( probably best described by an exclamation mark).

I watched a couple of programmes on TV this week designed to cater to the over sixties. Gok Wan managed to persuade a lady over seventy to wear only iced buns for a photograph by calling her angel and ‘my darling’ every other sentence. In the other programme some doctors revealed the joys of the older body falling apart. Age is a bit of a bugger; it gives with one hand and takes with the other. Of course life is always about balance; the balancing act just gets a little more difficult as you get older, the wire a little thinner, you have to put your glasses on to see where you are going and the drop is a tad more daunting and you wonder if that slight twinge as you walk across the abyss signals a future hip replacement.. Of course I wouldn’t say I was as pessimistic as Larkin though and birthdays, any birthdays should be fun.

PS, The photograph at the top of the page was taken by my friend Martin Figura, a professional photographer and poet. I asked him to take photographs of my mother's bungalow a week after she died and then a few months later after it has been cleared. This may seem macabre but the photographs I knew would be strangely beautiful and continue to remain very poignant for me. You can see more here at his web site with a shortextract from an explanatory text I wrote to accompany the work.

Philip Levine, Seagulls and Keats

I don’t seem to have posted for a while dear reader, events have rushed at me like a herd of stampeding wildebeest ( I am imaging that scene from The Lion King when computer generated animals populated the screen). Aldeburgh Poetry festival threw up a lot to be savoured most of all Philip Levine who has been a poetry hero of mine since I was 16 years old. Someone showed me his poem The Horse and I had this epiphany about what poetry can do in the world.

Philip Levine was interviewed about his life and that session alone would have been worth the price of the weekend. He was taught by Lowell and Berryman. Lowell he said was a terrible teacher whilst Berryman never turned up drunk to a lecture and was a brilliant teacher. He recounted a tale of an incident when he and Berryman had gotten very drunk together and fell asleep on Berryman’s bed. In the morning they were awakened by a telegram boy announcing he had a telegram for a 'Mr John Berryman'. Berryman sat up in bed and stared at Levine, “Are you John Berryman?” he asked with no hint of joke in his voice. “No” replied Levine, “In that case the telegram must be for me,” Berryman told the puzzled telegram boy. “I hope it’s from Saul Bellow,” he said, “He has money these days and I need to keep in with him.”

There was an interesting discussion with a panel of the great and the good about whether all poetry is ultimately about sex and death and another one about whether there is anything that could be deemed the female poem. The general answer seemed to be yes and no, which is the usual answer you get from such discussions. Jo Shapcott the chair of the second discussion wrote about this in an article in the Guardian some days later.

I spent a great deal of time watching the gulls wondering if they were engaged in poet spotting, trying to guess by their plumage which walkers along the strand of beach would be looking at them in a poetic way. There were a number who seemed to have been extras in The Hitchcock film the birds as they had obviously engaged in a few method acting lessons and could do menace quite well, digging deep into their inner vulture maybe. The sight of someone with fish and chips sent them into a whirling feeding frenzy and I didn’t help much by hurling them the odd chip which they could take on the wing, like a dog I once had that specialized in grabbing a Frisby in mid air.

So what will I remember from Aldeburgh 2009 .

• Crying after Philip Levine had finished his reading on the Sunday afternoon, as I knew that this would probably be the first and last time I would hear him read. Over forty years since I read The Horse sitting on a bus on the way back from school and suddenly all the noise and yelling on the top deck drifted away and I was somewhere else.
• Being impressed by the enormity and agility of the seagulls
• Tom Paulin giving such a close reading of some poems that it was at an almost sub atomic level, I could almost hear the sound of the rhymes, half rhymes and vowel forming in the movement of the air.
• The people at the quiz who got such high scores that it revealed an almost unhealthy level of poetry knowledge.
• The poor woman who trapped her toe in the chair in front in the hall where the reading were held and let out the most primal of screams that caused everyone in the place to freeze and stare.
• This year making sure I had enough time just to sit and look at the sea without having to rush between events

Since returning from Aldeburgh I have been to a great reading by Roddy Lumsden and Tom Warner

I think I need time to digest all the poetry I have accumulated in my head over the past couple of weeks. There is such a thing as poetry constipation, when so much has been consumed it can cause a blockage. On top of all this I went to see Bright Star, the film about Keats and Fanny, so much angst, so much longing, so much coughing.