They Was Robbed

Oscar voters are mostly actors, who, famously, are not the sharpest tools in the shed. Demographically speaking they're also older and more conservative (while pretending to be liberal) than you'd think. Their choices when it comes to the Academy Awards are often embarrassing. And my God they've picked some clunkers as best picture over the years (Forrest Gump, Driving Miss Daisy, Titanic etc. etc.) But instead of sawing on that old violin again, I've come up with a list of films that in my own idiosyncratic opinion, should have won. I'm not a big film buff so my knowledge of older films is limited which is why I've made more substitutions in the last few decades.

1941: Citizen Kane instead of How Green Was My Valley.(This was also the year of The Maltese Falcon and Suspicion - not a bad year at the flicks).
1944: Double Indemnity over Going My Way
1951: A Street Car Named Desire over An American In Paris
1952: High Noon instead of The Greatest Show On Earth.
1958: Cat On A Hot Tin Roof over Gigi
1959: North By Northwest over Ben Hur
1961: Psycho over West Side Story
1964: Dr Strangelove over My Fair Lady
1967: The Graduate over In The Heat of the Night
1968: Point Blank over Oliver!
1969: 2001: A Space Odyssey over Midnight Cowboy
1974: Chinatown over The Godfather Part 2
(A little aside about the period 1974-1977: The greatest period in the history of American cinema? We had: Nashville, Jaws, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Dog Day Afternoon, Chinatown, The Conversation, Taxi Driver, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, A Woman Under The Influence, Star Wars, Close Encounters, Annie Hall, Slapshot, All The President's Men, Network...and from England, Elvis's favourite film: Monty Python and the Holy Grail) 
1976: Taxi Driver instead of Rocky
1979: Breaking Away or Apocalypse Now over Kramer Versus Kramer
1980: Alien over Ordinary People
1981: The Long Good Friday or Raiders of the Lost Ark over Chariots of Fire
1983: Blade Runner instead of Terms of Endearment
1984: Ghostbusters over Amadeus
1986: Hannah and Her Sisters over Platoon
1988: anything at all over Rain Man
1989: anything at all over Driving Miss Daisy
1990: Goodfellas over Dances With Wolves (Dances With Wolves beat Goodfellas?!...I mean, who can forget the famous steadicam shot?)
1991: Millers Crossing over The Silence of the Hams (sorry Lambs)
1994: Pulp Fiction over Forrest Gump
1995: anything at all over Braveheart
1996: Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch) over The English Patient
1997: Boogie Nights over Titanic
1998: The Thin Red Line over Shakespeare In Love
1999: The Matrix over American Beauty
2000: Ghost Dog over Gladiator
2001: Amelie over A Beautiful Mind
2003: Mystic River over The Lord of the Rings
2004: Sideways instead of Million Dollar Baby
2005: Brokeback Mountain over Crash
2006: The Queen over The Departed (Scorsese's worst film)
2007: Juno over No Country For Old Men
2008: Waltz With Bashir over Slumdog Millionaire
2010: Winter's Bone over The Kings Speech

Irish Poem of the Month - February

Derek Mahon was born in Belfast in 1941 and educated at Trinity College Dublin and the Sorbonne where he studied French literature. His poem A Disused Shed In County Wexford has been anthologised over a dozen times. Human Wishes is a translation of the tenth Satire of Juvenal.

Human Wishes

Derek Mahon

from the Latin of Juvenal (Decimus Junius Juvenalis),

c.AD 50-c.127, Satires X

No one in his right mind would want to be
a big fish gobbling up the smaller fry;
it’s the big fish who attract hostility
like Seneca and the rest in Nero’s day.
You’re better off to sit tight in your room
than be conspiring in the rising steam
among the towels of the baths and gym;
take change if you go out walking after dark,
avoid the war zones and the periphery
and keep your wits about you in the park
where a knife gleams behind each shadowy tree.
All pursue riches in our modern Rome,
gardens, a coach-house and a second home
bought with the revenue from untaxed income
at Capua, Aquinum, Trevignano or Tivoli;
but poison’s seldom served in the wooden cups.
Beware the crystal glass and the golden bowl,
be careful when you raise wine to your lips
dining with colleagues on the Palatine Hill
or old friends in the Caffè Giovenal’
or swan and flamingo, antelope and stuff.
So which philosopher would we rather know
- the one who, staring from his portico,
laughs, or the one who weeps? Easy to laugh,
if we started weeping there’d be no end to it.
Democritus would shake with continual mirth,
even in his primitive times, at life on earth
and showed that stoicism spiced up with wit,
some candour and good sense, can mitigate
even the thick air of a provincial city.
Binge sex and fiscal heroin, discreet
turpitude flickering in a brazier light –
all anyone does now is fuck and shit;
instant gratification, entertainment, celebrity
we ask, but mumbling age comes even so,
the striking profile thick and stricken now,
the lazy tackle like a broken bough,
the simian features and the impatient heir.
What else can you expect from your white hair,
your voice like cinders under a kitchen door?
What use to you the glittering cleavages,
the best box in the house above the stage
when blind and deaf? Now fever and disease
run riot through our waste anatomies,
the old mind dithering in its anecdotage,
the joints all seizing up with rheumatism,
seek guidance of the heavenly gods who treasure
our lives more than we do ourselves. Subdued
by protocol and the fear of solitude,
you wed in haste and now repent at leisure
even as your hands shake in their final spasm.
Ask for a sound mind in a sound body
unfrightened of the grave and not demented
by grief at natural declension; study
acceptance in the face of fate; and if
you want to worship mere materialism,
that modern god we have ourselves invented,
I leave you to the delights of modern life.

No, This Is How You Make Porridge Mr Bittman

"I have seen wicked men and fools,
very many of both,
and they both get paid in the end,
but the fools first." 

In a quaint, old fashioned article in The New York Times Mark Bittman the food critic goes after that softest of soft targets McDonalds, for daring to include oatmeal in their restaurants. Basically he hates the ingredients in their oatmeal which include sugar and preservatives. (I may be wrong but I dont think he actually ate the stuff). He tells us that McDonalds should serve simple oats and water and he links to some lunatic who prepares his own instant oatmeal with coffee mate and dried cranberries. This is what New York Times readers like to hear. Boo! McDonalds is evil. Boo, boo, hiss. We're so much better than those scumbags we see eating in there. Yes, this article is very much preaching to the choir.

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I do like Mark Bittman though, I've got a signed copy of one of his cookbooks and I've worked with his daughter Kate, but his critique of McDonalds is ironic and very much the pot calling the kettle black. His own recipe for oatmeal in How To Cook Everything is absurd (boil oats and water and add butter!) I've tried the Bittman way and it tastes terrible. I also read the first 75 comments (out of an amazing 550) under the Bittman article and no one provided a good oatmeal recipe. So how do you cook oatmeal? Read on, MacDuff...

1. First of all, its called porridge. Oatmeal is the stuff that you buy in a packet or a box or a can, but when its cooked its called porridge. Porridge, ok? I know the word is used in America because I've used it often and nobody has ever looked askance. 
2. Not oats and water. No, no, no. Never oats and water. This is it the secret to good porridge and its real simple: a mug of oats, a mug of water, a mug of full cream milk. Ok? Got that? Add to a pot, light the gas, lets move on. 
3. Cook on a low heat stirring all the time. If you're not prepared to do that then forget it. It's only going to take five minutes of your life and if you want you can listen to the radio or meditate or whatever. If you're in a real hurry put it on a higher heat and stir faster, but do not put that bowl of oats anywhere near a goddamn microwave!
4. Add a pinch of salt.
5. Stir until nice and thick.
6. Serve with your favourite sweetener (honey, molasses, brown sugar, maple syrup) and/or cream to taste. 
7. No bananas, cranberries, nuts, butter or anything like that.
8. Leave on shelf to cool. Go for walk in woods. Leave front door open so local miscreant girl with blonde hair can enter, eat and cause mayhem.

Canadian Folk Messiah Created In Lab

Mumford and Sons, Monsters of Folk, Flight of the Conchords, The Imagined Village...these are the superstars of the New Folk Movement. They sell lots of albums, they pack the halls, they even have groupies: folk music is well and truly back! But what about the next generation? What's going to happen fifteen, sixteen years down the line when Britney Spears is considered to be a classic? Don't worry my pungent, hummus eating, bearded friends (you know who you are ladies) Rufus Wainright has been working on the problem....

In a brief post on his blog Wainwright has said that he and Lorca Cohen, Leonard Cohen's daughter, have become the parents to a baby girl:

"Darling daughter Viva Katherine Wainwright Cohen was born on February 2, 2011 in Los Angeles, California to proud parents Lorca Cohen, Rufus Wainwright and Deputy Dad Jorn Weisbrodt. The little angel is evidently healthy, presumably happy and certainly very, very beautiful."


Consider the musical heritage involved here. The baby's mother is Canadian writer and photographer Lorca Cohen, her grandfather on the mother's side is folk icon/genius Leonard Cohen. Her father is glamfolk god Rufus Wainwright, her auntie on her father's side is indy rock superstar Martha Wainwright. Her paternal grandfather is cult folk legend Loudon Wainwright III (currently having a revival with his recording of Carrickfergus in Boardwalk Empire) and his paternal grandmother is the late folk singer Kate McGarrigle, who passed away in January 2010. The baby was born on Groundhog Day which will always be associated in my mind with the hit You've Got Me Babe by Sonny and Cher. It's also the birthday of James Joyce...


Someone get that child a guitar.

Werner Herzog and Errol Morris Talk Books

And its utterly compelling stuff:

The Sea Shepherd Flag

When I visited Hobart last year I took a tour of the Sea Shepherd vessel the MY Steve Irwin which is registered under a Dutch flag but which flies the Jolly Roger (right). I was quite irked by the ship's Skull and Crossbones ensign and I confronted the nice young man giving me the tour. "Isn't that a pirate flag?" I asked him. "It is," he replied happily. "Oh, so I suppose you consider yourselves pirates then," I said somewhat annoyed. Why was I irked by a silly flag? Well, I come from a Royal Navy family: my dad was in the navy for twenty five years, I had a great uncle at Dunkirk and my brother is currently an officer in the Royal Navy. Piracy is a huge problem in the Indian and Pacific Oceans and ships sailing under the Black Flag are not cool in my book. But the young man had an answer for me. "We fly the Jolly Roger because we have sunk enemy boats," he explained. This completely disarmed me. I knew that since World War I Royal Navy submarines that have sunk vessels in combat are allowed to fly the Jolly Roger on the day that they return to their home port. It began as a goof (because the First Sea Lord had called the submarine service "piratical and damned un-British") and quickly became a tradition. The Jolly Roger was last flown - somewhat controversialy - in 1982 by the returning submarine HMS Conqueror after the Falklands War. The Sea Shepherds have embraced this tradition and when their vessels collide with whaling ships (the Shepherds claim that they do not deliberately ram ships) and the whaling ship is forced to be scuttled then that's another ship sunk.

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Morally this is all pretty dodgy. On the one hand they say they are not terrorists or pirates because every ship they have sunk has been an "accident" but on the other hand they embrace the Jolly Roger and its connotations with piratical glee. The flag of course isn't a true skull and crossbones: a shepherd's crook is crossed with (presumably) Poseidon's trident under the skull and there are three dolphin motifs, but basically its the same. (For more on the history of the Jolly Roger, click here.)
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I was thinking about all this yesterday when I read in the New York Times that under pressure from the Sea Shepherd ships the MY Steve Irwin and the MY Bob Barker the Japanese Whaling Fleet has completely abandoned their Antarctic whale hunt for 2011, has steamed back to Japan, and has said that they may never return because of the Sea Shepherds "dangerous tactics". It therefore looks like the Sea Shepherds and their aggressive methods have triumphed where governments and more pacifist groups like Greenpeace have largely failed. Even today it seems the Black Flag can be intimidating.  

The King of Limbs

Gonna try an experiment here. I'll listen to the new Radiohead album King of Limbs and give a stream of consciousness review as I hear each track. No editing, no spelling corrections so beware: 

1. Bloom: tinkly piano sounds good...oh no bleeps and snare repeating Kid A fashion. Bleeps going on and on. Thom Yorke begins to sing: "open your mouth wide" he seems to say. Doctor heal thyself, Yorkie, I can't really understand what you're saying. Something about an ocean. Violins kicking in - they sound a bit Eygptian. Organ now. A bit Day in the Life here as everything builds to a crescendo...Back to the bleeping again...this is getting tiresome. Yorke likes to hear himself howl (like a girl I used to know but that's another story). Merciful heaven track 1 is over. Nope. More ticking noises now. Finally. 

2. Morning Mr Magpie: nice jaunty start...Yorke singing "you've got some nerve, coming in here, you've got some nerve, coming here, you stole an ox?! give it back. you stole an ox? give it back. good morning mister magpie how are we today..."[he stole an ox? thats one powerful magpie]. Yorke howling again. Its more of a low key moan like he scuffed his knee or something. OK Computer like ambience for a second there. More singing "you know you shouldn't pull your pants down?" Certainly not. Even magpies must respect the social niceties. I understand why Yorke is depressed, he only saw one magpie and its one for sorrow, isn't it?

3. Little By Little: Ok, I like this. Greenwood's guitars and a frisky samba beat. Yorke "you're such a flirt, little by little," something something. Hints of oh Jesus whats the name of that big Indian guitar? Nora Jones's father plays it? Come on. George Harrison played it. Ravi Shankar whats the instrument? I'm blanking...Sitar! Yes, sitar on this one.

4. Feral: more bleeps and sample repeats. Heavy breathing. Wow this is really crap. Fragments of music and disjointed sounds. Like that Roger Waters album Music From The Body. Yorke determined to prove that he doesnt do "tunes" or "dad rock". Point proven Thom, you're way cooler than Oasis or U2. Ok this one wont be going on the iPod.

5. Lotus Flower: Shite, more of this. I don't who the drummer is in Radiohead(that bald guy) but he doesnt get much of a work out with this material. Yorke singing in a high register "I'll set you free..." Perhaps this will be a song about Abraham Lincoln the Great Emancipator....Something about pirates? the moon...Nope this isn't a Lincoln song. Where are you Wilkes Booth? Ah, the words Lotus and Flower get a mention. Ok I get it, I think, its a song about the Buddha. Right? The Buddha sets us free from earthly desire.

6. Codex: A piano! Slightly out of tune of course. Weird jangly noises. Yorke howling softly. "Jump off the edge into a clearing...oh...just drive very far?...Fanta is my favourite drink. Dont doze off. [none of this can be right]" Howling. "The water's clear" I think he's saying. I don't really believe him though, not with all that Fanta in it. Nice piano bit at the end...

7. Give Up The Ghost: Birdsong. A tennis match? "Gather up the lasting song. Gimme a rock. Gather up the pebbles? Gimme a rock? Gimme me a rock. Gimme a rock." This is a plantive cry about the lonely lives of geologists I think. Jesus it goes on. Gloomy, naval gazing, spoiled, boring tosh.

8. Separator: another snary little backbeat. Can't understand a word which is ok, but boy this is dismal dreary stuff. Tight repetitive guitar riff. This is music for men of a certain age to read the Guardian Saturday Magazine to. "Wake me up, wake me up, wake me up" Yorke cries. Ah, he has not got much of a sense of humor but he understands irony I think for surely we'll all be saying the same thing soon...WAIT A MINUTE, this is more like it. This is great! This is...oh wait hold on. No the CD ended and iTuens is playing Good Times Bad Times from Led Zeppelin I.

For All You Budding Henry Higginses Out There

When I was a kid Northern Ireland was such an insular and static society that you could easily tell where someone was from by their accent. Where I grew up, Carrickfergus, I could spot someone from West Belfast, South Belfast, Larne, Ballymena etc. as soon as they opened their mouth even though these places are geographically only a few miles apart. It was also not difficult to spot someone from Derry, Armagh, North Down etc. Northern Ireland then had half a dozen regional accents and I was familiar with at least three different Scottish accents and maybe a dozen English ones. Society has gotten a lot more fluid since the 70's and 80's and regional accents have somewhat faded, but not completely.
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In this little clip legendary UTV newsman Julian Simmons shows how to change Northern Irish accents in the blink of an eye. At about 22 seconds in he switches from a South Belfast received pronunciation to a broad, camp West Belfast drawl. I dont know if anyone outside of Northern Ireland will notice the difference but it is quite striking.
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I dug this clip up because I mentioned Julian doing the recorded airport announcements at Belfast International Airport (which he used to do in the 80's) in my new novel Falling Glass. Gerard Doyle (the audiobook reader) wanted to do know what Simmons sounded like and hey presto the internet came to my rescue. Whether Doyle will be able to do both of Simmons's accents or even one of them remains to be seen, but his little preview for me on Skype was impressive.

George McFly Day

Eldridge Pope Thomas Hardy's Ale 2001 Vintage

Had a little celebration at the weekend and I decided to break out the last remaining bottle of Thomas Hardy's Ale that I stored away in 2001. Its a bottle conditioned live ale that gets better as it ages. The label explains where the idea for a Thomas Hardy ale came from:

"In 'The Trumpet Major' Hardy wrote of Dorchester strong beer 'It was of the most beautiful colour that the eye of an artist in beer could desire; full in body, yet brisk as a volcano; piquant, yet without a twang; luminous as an autumn sunset; free from streakiness of taste, but, finally, rather heady".

On the now defunct website (the Eldridge Pope brewery went bankrupt largely through horrible mismanagement in 2003) they explain what happened next:

The refurbishment of the Trumpet Major pub in Dorchester was the catalyst for the fledgling Thomas Hardy's Ale. 1968 was the 40th anniversary of the authors' death and what better way to commemorate it than by attempting to bring fiction to life and creating the brew that Hardy imagined. This was to be no ordinary ale. Matured in oak sherry casks for nine months and corked in decorative pint and half pint bottles. The strength was a whopping 12% and it was bottle conditioned. Thus the legend began and bottles were laid down with the expectation of improvement as the beer matured.

Thomas Hardy's Ale is legendary in beer drinking circles. It's up there with the mighty Westvleteren as the holy grail of ales. I put my four pack in storage several years ago and I felt it was time to tackle the last remaining one. So what did I think? Was it worth the wait? Here's my review in the somewhat florid style of Beer Advocate and Beer Rater: 

Pours light brown with little carbonation, an immediate aroma of caramel, rust, wet cardboard, apple, dandelion. Looks dangerous, like James Bond in a dinner jacket with a hint of scuba peeking out the collar (Sean Connery of course). At first sip I can taste malt, more apple, acidity on the roof of the mouth, no alcohol, which is scary considering that this is a barley wine. The velvety aura in the back of my throat has hints of caramel, cider, wildflowers and nettles. There are layers upon layers of texture - this beer does more flavours than Meryl does accents (and both under a slightly chilly demeanor). The aftertaste is that of a half remembered kiss in a dark cinema or a shot of moonshine at a country shabeen or the smell of grass as you touchdown after a brilliant breakaway try from the heart of the pack. This is a comfortable, easy going, powerful drink. Opium is like must be like this. The afternotes are of a leather sofa that's been sitting in the Reform Club since 1832, ship's biscuit from HMS Victory, a mysterious, delicious cake that you might find in the fridge of the Tardis. It's really quite spectacular. An amazingly drinkable beer for the style with a gravity defying Kardashian-like behind. Little lace to speak of. No residue in bottle. And of course this beer should be sipped not gulped. A+

Our Kind Of Traitor - John Le Carre

Our Kind of Traitor moves like clockwork, i.e. slowly, mechanically and all too predictably. There are few surprises in the book and the frequent flash backs and iterations of scenes that we struggled through the first time do nothing to help with the glacial pacing. Le Carre is obviously fascinated by his characters (dim witted British public school boys on the one side and heavy drinking boisterous Russians on the other) but I doubt that anyone else will be. We've seen these people before in every other Le Carre novel and perhaps they were intriguing once, but that once was at least five or six books ago. 
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Basically the story centers around a posh lecturer who meets a Russian mafia chieftain at a posh tennis resort in the Caribbean, and the Russian is so impressed by the lecturer's Hugh Grant act that he decides he wants to defect to Blighty because he likes the "English sense of fair play" (no, I'm not kidding.)
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There are only a few flashes of the old JLC brilliance in Traitor (some nice similes, a wonderful agent handler called Hector, and a sly attack on Harry Potter) but depressingly it looks like Le Carre's glory days of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley's People are far behind him. Reading JLC one is reminded of the Henry James critic who said that James was oddly obsessed by the tittle tattle and gossip at English tea parties while completely missing the rise of America on the other side of the Atlantic. Le Carre is still obsessed by Russian spies and Russian defectors while Russia slips down the great power rankings year after year so that now (in terms of GDP) it is at #10 in the world behind Canada. The rise of China of course has been the big story of the last decade but Le Carre has hardly noticed. In any case he has already done a Chinese novel, The Honourable Schoolboy, his worst book, set in Hong Kong (but actually still, drearily, all about Russia).
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President Obama picked this as the second of the two novels he took on his Hawaiian vacation. The other was The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet which has everything this book doesn't: intrigue, drama, experimentation and a left field craziness that keeps you on your toes. Our Kind of Traitor, I'm sorry to say, is strictly for Le Carre completists and perhaps for people (you know who you are) who really enjoy long sweaty descriptions of tennis matches.

Are You Giving Me The High Hat? The Coen Brothers Rated

I've done this before on the blog with Alfred Hitchcock and Woody Allen and a couple of other film-makers who are or were (in the case of Allen) important to me. I've been a fan of the Coen Brothers since high school when I caught Blood Simple at the Queens Film Theatre in Belfast, and I've seen every one since; here therefore is my attempt at a rating of their filmography in the standard A,B,C,D,E,F format. A is a classic. B is very good. C is good. D and E are sometimes watchable. F is basically unwatchable. And remember this is just, like, my opinion, man...


1984 Blood Simple B  
1987 Raising Arizona A
1990 Miller's Crossing A 
1991 Barton Fink  A
1994 The Hudsucker Proxy E
1996 Fargo A
1998 The Big Lebowski A
2000 O Brother, Where Art Thou? E
2001 The Man Who Wasn't There  F
2003 Intolerable Cruelty  F
2004 The Ladykillers  F
2007 No Country for Old Men B
2008 Burn After Reading  D
2009 A Serious Man C
2010 True Grit B

Is there a pattern here? Yeah I think so. If you were to draw a Venn diagram with John Turturro, Steve Buscemi and John Goodman as the sets then the intersection of these sets usually represents the higher rated films.

The Lady In The Lake

I have just finished The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler. It's been a long time since I read this book, high school in fact, and I remembered nothing of the story. (Somewhere deep down I knew that Marlowe drove a Chrysler and that info may have come from here (although I didn't catch the particular make I'm guessing it was a Chrysler Imperial.)) I liked The Lady in the Lake very much, in fact, it might be my favourite Marlowe story after The Big Sleep. I also liked some of the more meta-fiction aspects to the novel which I definitely missed the first time. When you read hundreds of noir novels sometimes you get a bit jaded. Raymond Chandler obviously felt the same. Take this particular example from chapter 31:

"I never liked this scene," I said. "Detective confronts murderer. Murderer produces gun, points same at detective. Murderer tells detective the whole sad story with the idea of shooting him at the end of it...Only murderer never does. Something always happens to prevent it. The gods don't like this scene either. They always manage to spoil it."   

The only thing I thought was absent from the novel was a development of the Arthurian promise of the title. Maybe its in there but if so I missed it. "The Big Sleep" gets better the more you think about it, but once we see that there is an actual lady in an actual lake, "The Lady in the Lake" comes across as a bit hasty, even if it was based on a story of the same name.  
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Incidentally I'm still waiting for the Colin Bateman novels "The Big Sheep," "The Long Good Fry-Up," and that cross-over into classic 70's TV sitcom territory "The Brady in the Lake."

Mad Men Sucks?

For four years Mad Men haters have been sitting in their decidedly non Danish Modern armchairs waiting patiently for the backlash to begin. That is not a long time, and they should consider themselves lucky, I've been waiting for the Harry Potter backlash for a decade and it still hasn't arrived. Fortunately for the Mad Men heretics their time may be now. In a well argued piece in the New York Review of Books Daniel Mendelsohn attempts to demolish Mad Men using the Karl Rove method of attack - going after the show via its strongest bastions by hurling ballista at the writing, the directing and the acting. Mendelsohn got in my bad books almost immediately in his article by talking snarkily about "popular entertainments," here we go I thought he's going to go on for a couple of thousand words about how Mad Men isn't as deep as novel, because of course he's writing in the New York Review of Books, after all, not Entertainment Weekly; but then he had the wit to defuse that bomb by mentioning the TV shows he does like:

shows as different as the now-iconic crime dramas The Sopranos and The Wire, with their darkly glinting, almost Aeschylean moral textures; the philosophically provocative, unexpectedly moving sci-fi hit Battlestar Galactica, a kind of futuristic retelling of the Aeneid;

which are the ones I like too (obviously he must not have seen the final episode of Galactica which catastrophically ruined the entire mythology). Mendelsohn continues: 

With these standouts (and there are many more), Mad Men shares virtually no significant qualities except its design. The writing is extremely weak, the plotting haphazard and often preposterous, the characterizations shallow and sometimes incoherent; its attitude toward the past is glib and its self-positioning in the present is unattractively smug; the acting is, almost without exception, bland and sometimes amateurish. Worst of all—in a drama with aspirations to treating social and historical “issues”—the show is melodramatic rather than dramatic. By this I mean that it proceeds, for the most part, like a soap opera, serially (and often unbelievably) generating, and then resolving, successive personal crises (adulteries, abortions, premarital pregnancies, interracial affairs, alcoholism and drug addiction, etc.), rather than exploring, by means of believable conflicts between personality and situation, the contemporary social and cultural phenomena it regards with such fascination: sexism, misogyny, social hypocrisy, racism, the counterculture, and so forth.

That a soap opera decked out in high-end clothes (and concepts) should have received so much acclaim and is taken so seriously reminds you that fads depend as much on the willingness of the public to believe as on the cleverness of the people who invent them; as with many fads that take the form of infatuations with certain moments in the past, the Mad Men craze tells us far more about today than it does about yesterday. But just what in the world of the show do we want to possess? The clothes and furniture? The wicked behavior? The unpunished crassness? To my mind, it’s something else entirely, something unexpected and, in a way, almost touching.

I started losing interest in Mad Men in Season 3 and while I'm not quite in the haters camp I think Mendelsohn makes a lot of decent points. However TV, like cinema, is a visual medium, and it doesnt hurt that Mad Men cast several beautiful actresses in leading roles. Is it all about the visuals then? You can read the rest of Mendelsohn's piece at NYRB, here.

Three Weeks In Cairo

Back in 1999 Leah and I spent three weeks in Cairo staying at our friend Jonathan's place on the west bank of the Nile. We weren't planning to spend that long crashing at his pad but the day we were supposed to leave on the bus back to Jerusalem the khamseen (the annual desert sandstorm) hit and we ended up spending another week there. I liked Cairo very much. The people were friendly, the sights were spectacular and we ate very very well. Pigeon stuffed with lamb I remember as well felafel, tabbouleh, hummus and my favourite dish of all: fuul medames. We mostly walked places but I do remember a few hair raising taxi rides that ended in - fortunately - minor collisions. Obviously as a tourist you have to take in the pyramids, which we did so early in the morning that there was no one else around at all. (There had been a fairly recent terrorist attack at Luxor which also deterred the crowds). We had been warned in advance that the taxi driver would tell us that "today was a holiday and that the pyramids were closed but his cousin could get us in the back way for a small fee" which he did indeed say or words to that effect. This well known, uhm, pyramid scheme, was a popular con at the time. Jonathan had written down something in Arabic to tell him and I said it and it did the trick because he then took us straight to the pyramids.

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The other highlight of our trip was the Egyptian Museum which contains a spectacular collection of Egyptiana. We ended up going there twice and still barely covered everything it had to offer. We mostly had the place to ourselves because another recent terrorist attack had been on German tourists at the museum and the resulting headlines were still keeping people away. I suppose even then there was a feeling in Cairo that violence was just under the surface and the city was ready to explode. Certainly the Egyptians we spoke to felt that and were completely disillusioned with the Mubarak regime. (One day we visited the tomb of the last Shah of Iran who is buried in a Cairo mosque and you'd think that his death in exile would be a useful momento mori for the current govt.)

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Come an evening we would eat out cheaply (and well) and then go down to the local tea shop and smoke sheesha pipes until late - which was a very pleasant way to unwind. Women weren't supposed to smoke in tea shops but no one seemed to mind Leah being there and no one ever hassled us. On one occasion after we had gone to see Sufi dancers we took a walk in a part of town we didn't know that well and I got a pipe that contained something a good bit stronger than apple tobacco. I'm not sure if it was hashish or opium but whatever it was I was baked out of my mind and barely made it home.

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Eventually it came time for us to leave town and we took the bus across the Sinai from Cairo to Jerusalem. I haven't been back to Egypt since but I would like to go again and I hope that the current drama being played out in the streets results in a government that satisfies the people and is stable enough to encourage visitors to return to this great city.
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Christopher Hitchens, who I'm happy to say is still alive and kicking, has an interesting piece on Egypt in Slate, here.

Mondo Telly

Because we're in Australia we get TV seasons a little bit later than other places which means that I've been doing some catching up in the last few weeks. I have some questions:

1. Has Modern Family always been this funny? Sure I knew Ed O'Neill was funny but I'd heard that MF was a rip off of Arrested Development and wasn't any good. That was a lie. It is good. Maybe a little schmaltzy in the last two minutes but generally funny throughout. The dog butler episode had me rolling in the aisles (especially the seemingly improvised doggy dialogue at the end) and the one with the clown...Seinfeldian. 

2. How in the name of all that's holy did Mondo lose Project Runway Season 8? Yes Gretchen Jones is a talented designer, but talent hits the target that others miss while genius hits the target others can't even see. Gretchen's designs came from Portland while Mondo's from some kind of alternative gay-Mexican-gothic universe. Michael Kors complained that Mondo's clothes were too young while all season long he was telling the designers not to be frumpy and matronly. What gives?

3. They cancelled Caprica already? I didn't even get to see one episode. Was it that bad?

4. And speaking of BSG alumni, Grace Park is really in Hawaii Five O? I watched nearly ten minutes of one of those and didn't see her at all but she is on the giant posters Channel 10 have hung up all over town. I would have watched more of H5O but I think I may have slipped into a boredom induced coma or something.

5. Top Gear went to Iraq? When? How? Did Clarkson say something offensive about camel jockeys?

6. Ok so I watched episode 1 of Boardwalk Empire. The one that was directed by Martin Scorsese. My question is this: is this the same Martin Scorsese that directed the Copacabana sequence and the helicopter/guns/pasta sauce climax in Goodfellas? If so what the hell happened to that guy?

7. Has the new season of Breaking Bad started? If not why not? What do chemistry teachers watch when Breaking Bad isn't on? You can't watch Mythbusters all the time can you? 

8. Has anyone seen that Jason Schwartzman detective show on HBO? Am I wrong or are they aiming squarely at the wanker/hipster/asshole market with that one?

9. Glenn Beck? A) Crazy B) Crazy like a fox C) Crazy like someone who listened to the Mormon missionaries at his front door and thought, yeah, sure, that sounds reasonable, the Archangel Gabriel appeared in upstate New York with some golden tablets written in hyroglyphics and warned Joseph Smith about the dangers of drinking tea and having only one wife and then after he told a bunch of people the tablets went missing, yeah, I buy that.

10. No, really, Mondo lost? But he was from Denver, probably from Federal BVD by the looks of his house. Jessica Simpson liked his stuff better. Heidi liked his stuff better (and she wore HIS dress to the Black Swan premiere). At one point Nina suggested they make it a tie. Thats 3 to 1 in favour of the kid. Giving it to Gretchen is madder than having a World Cup Final in Qatar! So what happened?!!

North by Northwest

(Because its Groundhog Day I'm recycling an old post from two years ago. Hey its my blog and I'll do what I want)
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A few years ago I was at a party and I found myself talking to a fashion journalist about men's suits. I was saying that to my uneducated eye men's fashions hadn't changed that much over the years. With a kind of despair he agreed that most men wanted to look like Sean Connery as 007 and then, more thoughtfully, he said that the men's suit had probably peaked anyway in 1959 with Cary Grant's classic Madison Avenue Grey Flannel job in the film North By Northwest. My eyes lit up. I knew exactly what he was talking about. I had recently seen that suit on the big screen at Bryant Park in New York and in the course of two and a half hours it takes one hell of battering - surviving car wrecks, crop dusting planes, machine gun attacks and rough housing from security guards, hench men and cops. The suit and Cary Grant come through with admirable sang froid and elegance.
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North By Northwest is a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock at the height of his powers. It's a mistaken identity caper, with Cary Grant's ad man accused of a murder he did not commit at the UN and then chased across America by police officers and agents of a foreign power. There's something in it about a microfilm but Hitchcock only saw that as a McGuffin on which to hang his tale. Eva Marie Saint plays, Eve, the girl who seduces Grant on the train to Chicago and who isn't quite so innocent as she first appears. NBNW is fast, funny, light, charming, beautifully filmed (the overhead shot where he runs out of the UN building is breathtaking) and impeccably scored by Bernard Hermann. It's one of Hitchcock's very best films, pipped only slightly, I think, by Rear Window and The 39 Steps.
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I watched NBNW last month and the picture is so fresh, lively and delicious it both seems incredibly modern and also terribly dated. Every character in the film is three dimensional: Cary Grant's sardonic mother Jessie Royce Landis gives a master class in withering looks, James Mason's villain is arch and sarcastic ("you're using real bullets - how unsporting"), there's the wonderful fogeyish joint intelligence committee, and even an unseen taxi driver (who exists only as a voice) seems to live and breathe beyond the screen. (In a Hollywood film of today, the taxi driver would be played by Chris Tucker in a nauseating cameo). NBNW world's premiere took place fifty years ago this summer at the San Sebastian International Film Festival and I would be very surprised that any of the films debuting at this year festival (or any other festival) have the longevity of this Hitchcock classic. Yes the plot is bonkers and Eva Marie Saint isn't quite the goddess that Grace Kelly is in Hitchcock's films of this period, but it's got Cary Grant and James Mason and Martin Landau and a crop dusting sequence so famous it's been given homages in The Simpsons, Family Guy and dozens of other places I can't be bothered to look up. It's a great family film too with just enough innuendo (visual and spoken) to make you raise your eyebrows. What more do I need to say to convince you? If you haven't seen it yet, boy are you lucky, you're in for a real treat.
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BTW, for an interesting blog post on why the suit worked so well, check out this guy's theory. And also BTW, there's some dispute as to whether North By Northwest is an actual compass bearing. There's Nor Nor West or Northwest By North, but no North by Northwest on a 32 point compass rose, however Wikipedia claims that some ancient mariners did in fact say NBNW.