Hates

Terry Engleton, writing in Prospect magazine tells us who he hates..... Hold on. Terry Eagleton, that leftie professor whose latest book is called "Why Marx was Right" - perhaps he means Groucho - he's writing an article in that rightie magazine!!!! Those four exclamation marks no doubt would bring out the worst in Eagleton: "one is too many".
Anyway, he gives a list of people he'd like to see done away with or locked up with the key thrown away. These are Tom Cruise,Mel Gibson, Dick Cheney, Henry Kissinger, Tony Blair, Prince Andrew, Piers Morgan, Ben Brown (who's he?) and Robert Kilroy-Silk.
I have to agree with him on Mel Gibson but probably for different reasons. He doesn't give reasons but you can see where he's going can't you? Tom Cruise is Master (or some such thing) of Scientology, a religion based on the teachings of a science fiction writer named L. Ron Hubbard - I wonder what the L stands for if anything; maybe it's like the G in Edward G. Robinson which gives some distinction to an ordinary name but isn't actually a name at all. So Eagleton must be against stupid religions. That means most. Mel Gibson is a Jew-hating religious film maker and hopeless actor who makes religious films etc. Dick Cheney. Well nobody likes Dick Cheney except Dick Cheney and George Bush (maybe). Kissinger. Mmm. Yes I suppose so. A bit sinister and remember Vietnam.Tony Blair? Now I like Tony Blair but he is disliked by the right and the left for, wait for it, Iraq and the dodgy dossier. Blair made the Labour Party votable for; without Blair there wouldn't have been all those years of left-wing..... er..... liberal.... er.... OK, I hate him too. Prince Andrew. Agreed. What a shocker he is!!! (three exclamation marks to make sure he's noticed). Piers Morgan. I can't say I like or dislike him. He's a bit of a nonentity really. Ben Brown. Who's he? And Robert Kilroy-Silk. Not who's he but where's he?
The trouble with Eagleton is, like a lot of lefties (and rightees), he doesn't believe in freedom of the individual; he'll shut people up who don't agree with his ideas; he hates people he doesn't think worthy of his time; he writes books like "Why Marx was Right" when we all know now that Marx was wrong.
Wasn't he?

Chips

So Wallace McCain is dead. Who was Wallace McCain? Well, he's the man responsible for selling milliions of bags of oven-ready chips. He started the company that made them, turned it into a million dollar enterprise, became a billionaire before he was forced out of office by his brother - never mind why. The point is that he and afterwards his brother is responsible for flooding the markets with inferior goods. They are not chips at all. I think they must be made of reconstituted potatoes mashed up and fried. O yes, they're easy to cook; all you do is heat up the over and stick them in. You don't have to peel potatoes then chop them into chips then fry them, you just open the bag that's been in the freezer, tip out a quantity onto a tray and bung them in the oven. Easy for the harrassed housewife over the hot stove all day.... Rather the harrassed wife over a desk all day, coming home to get some ready-made food for dinner and simply opening the bag etc.
I don't like them. I think they are just dreadful. They don't taste like chips at all. They don't even taste like potatoe. They taste like cardboard. OK like I imagine cardboard tastes.
Chips are fine foods. They may not be what Jamie Oliver and his ilk think are fine foods but that's because they dabble in trivialities, make what's simple difficult. i.e show off.
I have come across two methods of cooking chips well. Fist from one of the Hairy Bikers. You fry the potatoe chips at about 140 degrees until they are cooked through but not brown; you then take them out of the pan and let them stand and dry. You then turn the heat up to 190 degrees and cook until they are brown. Another way, from the internet: boil the chips for about ten minutes, remove and dry, then fry at a high temperatuure until they are brown.
I've tried the second mothod and it works well.
But tonight I did my usual thing: just fried them once. Maybe not quite so good but certainly far better than McCain's hash.
There's a certain chef who fries them 3 times. He says they taste as good as lobster.
Good chef there; not one of your prima donnas.

Eric

You won't know Eric but there was a time when he was, well, "known" for a while. Saw him today on the bus going into Cardiff. Looked a lot older than when he used to go to the local pub quite a few years ago. Older but not frail; a bit bandy now and a bit wobbly perhaps. Knew who he was straight away but I don't think he remembers me.
Claim to fame? He used to be a singing partner to Shirley Bassey in one of the clubs she sang at in Tiger Bay, Cardiff - where policemen went in two's at least. Pretty rough area then. Not now: it's been transformed into The Cardiff Bay with a great body of water like a large lake held back from the sea by a sort of lock so that ships can enter and leave at various times of day. Boats on the lake and, surrounding it, cafes and restaraunts, all good ones, some classy, some quite cheap but not "cheapy" or "greasy spoon". A few clubs there still but none, I believe, like the one/s Miss Bassey used to sing in.
She was good then and I suppose she got better. According to Mark Steyn, who writes a daily blog which covers politics and show business, she was the best singer of the James Bond films' opening songs. She did more than one I believe.
I nearly got to interview her once a long time ago but her agent (or somebody in charge) said no.
I should have tried earlier in her career when she was singing in that club in Cardiff. With Eric
Saw him later in the day in Cardiff; he was with a very attractive woman not as old as him, who is eighhtyish; she was about fifty eight I guess. No wonder he was wearing his best jacket. Maybe, later on, he'd serenade her with some of the old Perry Como numbers he was so fond of.

Fair Game

The film stars Sean Penn and Naomi Watts, both fine actors (though sometimes I find it hard to understand Penn - he mumbles), and is about how Bush and Cheney tried to deceive the American public about the Iraq war. Maybe they did and maybe they didn't but this film believes they did and in a way that was totally immoral. They heard, from British intelligence, that Sadam Hussein was going to obtain nuclear material from Niger in Africa; to substantiate this piece of news they sent a man, who had previously been an American ambassador to that country, to find out if the news was true. He found no evidence to prove it; in fact, he was positive that Niger was not in a position to do so. His report was ignored and the war went ahead. The man, played by Sean Penn, wrote an article in The New York Times saying what he knew and this resulted in a leak from the CIA naming the man's wife as a CIA agaent, which she was. This resulted in her world contacts being exposed and in some cases killed.
If I had know all this before I saw the film I might have been more entertained than I was. The film is made in such a "hand-held-camera" style - even when the camera is not being hand-held - that the story is a confusing and confused mess. Only at the end did it seem to work - in retrospect.
Sometimes I wonder if some of the modern American film makers don't know the first thing about story telling: they throw action scenes in to demonstrate how clever they are and they lose the story line. A good dose of Ozu would do them good I feel - he hardly moves the camera at all.
Anyway, I don't believe that America went to war in Iraq on the one detail of the build-up to it that this film highlighted; there were heaps of things that pointed to Hussein's wish to make WOMD. Maybe they were all matters of intelligence failure. But everyone believed tham at the time.
Another film maker some of these whiz-kids of American cinema ought to study is Woody Allen. Now there's a guy who knows how to make films; he puts a story together brilliantly. I have recently seen "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger" and it is brilliant. And no one in it or making it is trying to push a political point down your throat as "Fair Game" does - and not very successfully either.

Royal Music

Someone once, long ago. asked me why I had, when in London for a week, on holiday, attended the ceremony at the cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday. I said because of the music chiefly though I did find the marching etc. rather moving. I love Walford's "Solemn Melody" (I suppose he must have written other pieces of music but this is the only work of his I have ever heard). It was played by massed brass bands which is always thrilling.
This came to mind when I found myself, against my will, watching the Royal Wedding: the music would perhaps balance the sentimentality of the occasion. Actually, there was little sentimentallity to experience: the English do these occasions so well, with military precision and effectiveness such that there's no room for tears or shows of public sentiment. I enjoyed it. All of it. I liked the bride - she is a real beauty with a smile that could melt the heart of a knave. The prince is quite likeable too, much more so than some of The Firm. But it was the music that thrilled.
I read somewhere that the music was chosen by Prince Charles and the bride, Kate Middleton herself. Another mark up for the young woman and a great leap up in my estimation for the prince, her father-in-law to be. Obviously the guy has taste. Of course he has taste: doesn't he always get seven eggs boiled for him for breakfast for different periods of time so that he can choose the one done just right for him (the other six probably go in the bin).
So there was no pop music played in spite of Elton John being present (no "Candle in the Wind" thank God!); no light music at all; nothing to make you think "here we have a real, great, modern marriage". No. We heard Hubert Parry, a choral work, Cwm Rhondda and Jerusalem sung with spirit (as if it's a patriotic song, which it isn't), then a short choral work by John Rutter (safe hands there) and at the end when the married couple were leaving, walking the length of Westminster Abbey - which is some walk, especially in the clobber they both had on - William Walton's magnificent march "Crown Imperial". I almost stood up and saluted.
Why was William Walton not made Master of the Queen's Music? He could turn that stuff out like nobody's business: Crown Imperial, Spitfire Prelude and Fugue, Orb and Sceptre etc. All great stuff. Good as Elgar.... why wasn't he too made Master of the King's Music? One of his Pomp and Circumstance marches has practically become the National Anthem.
Ah! I see. Now I know. Elgar was a Catholic.
Just a guess.
Poor Max Whats-his-name, who is Master of the Queen's Music wasn't even invited to write something. He was hurt. He said "I'm not even going to watch it."

The Wedding

If I were a young woman - I'm not a woman or young, by the way - I wouldn't like to be in Kate Middleton's shoes, metaphorically speaking. No wonder she's supposedly not eating these days. God! She'll be joining The Firm is a few days' time and there's no bigger firm - or soap opera - than that. Those palaces where people live! Those large dining rooms where the knives, forks and spoons are laid out military style. The corridors you have to walk to get from one room to another. All those flunkies about the place bowing and scraping to you with, possibly, pervy little smiles on their mouths that tells you that you really are not fine enough to be in this hallowed place with these hallowed people.... and so on.
She seems a nice girl but will she stay a nice girl living the sort of life she will have to live soon. If she decides to continue "being herself" she'll suffer - "we don't want royalty to be anything other than royal, old boy". She's a commoner but she can't stay a commoner because a commoner to some of those soon to be around her is to be common.
Will she survive in the airless atnmosphere of the royal households?
One of two things will occur I believe: she will either start the beginning of a new kind of royalty, the sort that survives in some of the European countries, or she will unconciously wreck it. There are forces in and around The Firm that will not like "the likes of her" to break into the extended family of the whole artificial set-up: flunkies who like to flunk to the aristocrats; the remains of "the debutants" who still linger on the outskirts of royal events like those girls in "Dracula" who wish to suck your blood - sexily; the Duke - enough said; his daughter, Princess Anne, who seems to be more of a robot rather than a human being. They'll probably all play the game for a while but they'll bide their time before they strike with upper-class venom. In the immortal words of Gerry Adams: "We haven't gone away".
Maybe.
Or maybe not. Maybe they won't be allowed to by the British public. Maybe it will be as Matthew D'Ancona puts it in the Sunday Telegraph: "So relaxed, loving and straightforward are Prince William and his bride-to-be that it is easy to forget that the monarchy is about to embark on the greatest experiment in social mobility in its modern history. But it is the Palace that is on trial, not the new princess: the public will not take kindly to the slightest whiff of snobbery."
I'm with them there even if I'm not with them on much else besides regarding royalty.

Fantasy

I have seen a couple of strange films recently: "Unmissable" and "Source Code". Both are fantasies. In "Unmissable" a down-and-out writer who can't get on with the novel he's been commissioned to do, is given a tablet by a man he once knew who is working for a chemical company on a secret formula. Which should have told the hero not to take the pill; but he was desperate so he does. Almost instantly he becomes a sort of high-powered, over-intelligent monster: we are told that the average person uses only about 20% of his brain (didn't know that before) but that the pill he has taken will make available to him 100% of his b rain. So he writes his novel which is great - so his agent believes - and it gets published. Then he finds he can wiz-kid things like helping firms to make money. But people are after him, they want the pill of course. It's all rather unbelieveable. But it's fun. "Source Code" is fantasy made so assuredly and seriously that you almost believe it could take place. A man wakes up on a train and, gradually, in eight minutes, finds he not the man he thinks he is. He is dead but certain brain parts of his have been saved and it is these that inhabit the other man. Get it? No, I didn't either. But again, it was fun though even more violent than "Unmissable". While waiting for the film to start I had to put up with reviews of films to come. They were all fantasies. A man becomes a "green man" who can perform great feats of strength and possesses extraordinary powers etc. Another couple of films were also fantasies. They were all spectacularly full of "special effects" which I find rather boring in that, well, you know they are "special effects" don't you?. I prefer a film to be grounded in reality like "Sideways" which had no special effects. Neither did "The King's Speech" which was an excellent film with three, at least, superb performances. Is this fantasy-film-making anything to do with the general public's dispensing with "old forms" of fantasy like religion? Are people now non-believers but still have a secret desire to want to believe something? As G.K.Chesterton put it: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything."