FILM CLUB - 49th Parallel - One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing

Powell & Pressburger Season

With each new movie released P & P gained further confidence as film makers. Storylines became more adventurous in not following conventions. Until with One of Our Aircraft is Missing they created the effect of watching something happen in time, without any over arching storyline, or romantic interest crowbarred into it.

49th Parallel - 1941
At the beginning of WW2 there was huge concern over German U boat activity cutting the UK's supply lines in the Atlantic. So here we have another film beginning with a German submarine U37  destroying a supply ship hide in the Hudson Bay area. The Canadian air force finds them and destroys the sub. Though five Germans have already been sent out on a mission. The film follows their journey trying to reach and cross the 49th Parallel into the US in order to escape capture and internment. Powell and Pressburger use this simple narrative journey to juxtapose differing views of belief, conviction and freedom, between democracies and authoritarianism.

Finley Currie, Raymond Massey, Trevor Howard, Eric Portman, the inestimable Anton Walbrook and Glynis John in only her fourth film, they're all here. And then there's Laurence Olivier with a frankly bizzare beast of a French Canadian accent. This, along with his tendency to wildly overact, almost unbalances the the early parts of the movie. Fortunately the relaxed easy style of the likes of Portman, Walbrook and Howard, act as an anchor and balances the production. Stylistically Powell made the most of the background drama of the Canadian landscape itself. The beautifully expressionistic camera work by Freddie Young, is smartly edited by David Lean, later to be an acclaimed filmmaker himself.

One of Our Aircraft is Missing - 1942
The first Powell and Pressburger film made under The Archers production company. And you can tell, there is a distinct qualitative difference in style and approach to the three wartime films that preceded it. No longer composed like a filmed play, One of our Aircraft is Missing is a fully fledged film experience. Everything is done to appear as if though its happening in real time. There is no melodramatic music at any point in the movie. Its mostly a film that relies on incidental sound for its heightened drama. The film follows what happens to a plane crew that crashes in Nazi occupied Netherlands. Showing you how they escape with the help of the Dutch underground network, led by brave women such as Else Meertens ( Pamela Brown ) and Jo de Vries (Googie Withers)   

The aircraft bombing raid of Stuttgard is realistically filmed, giving you a vivid sense of what it was like cooped up in a small aircraft on such a dangerous raid. The realism also extends to the acting, which is quite ordinary, downplayed and believable. We have an impression, these days,that the RAF was full of upper class airmen, but that is because most movies about the RAF are stuffed with actors with posh accents. In actuality they only accounted for 30%, the rest being drawn from all areas and levels of society. P & P get that balance right here, with Suffolk, Yorkshire and Welsh accents to be heard just in the one plane crew. Many stalwarts of P & P films are here Eric Portman sporting his real Halifax accent, Bernard Miles, Hugh Williams and a very young Peter Ustinov in his first film role. One of Our Aircraft is Missing is by far and away the best made and performed wartime film, not succumbing to broad caricature or overtly propagandizing. Its a deceptively simple human movie about bravery and camaraderie in a perilous situation. But it's also a great one/ It also marks the true beginning of  Powell & Pressburger's golden era.

WINDOW VIEWS - Murder as a Cultural Reference

Given time I thought, things are bound to pick up, they'll improve.  I was mistaken. And not just in my mind. It was a commonly held notion, that we would always be going someplace, heading somewhere, reaching for where ever more of more was to be found. It never remotely crossed anyone's mind that civilisation might go into reverse, and could do so rapidly. Decline was more than feasible. But to lose our entire grasp on economic progress and decent civility? Impulses became coarsened, natures turned unfiltered, the raw and the prejudicial began to rule. To permeate everything and everyone with an authoritarian stridency. I tried to tell myself that I would not, could not, respond in such a way. That such a regressive change may indeed be happening, but not to me. 

Yet I too harboured intolerant, murderous feelings. I thought badly of my neighbours without good cause, even loathed my closest oldest friends, was highly judgemental of family members. If anything, how I was, well this was way worse, simply because I affected a surface facade, that not an ounce of malign prejudice was there. Until of course it was, very much there. Fully formed and vicious. When I acted, I acted with an unearned impunity, a lack of remorse, brutal in intent. Too late now, as it was then, for regret. The worst cruelty was in my cold heartedness, indifferent to any opprobrium of my killing spree. For goodness sake, I took the time to chalk a white line around the slaughtered bodies of my victims. Circled, numbered and named the important clues. I meant it as a joke, a knowing reference to the cliches of detective fiction. But what does that tell you? Murder had become just a cultural reference for me. I wanted to take an active part not just in the crime, but in its discovery and the catching of the perpetrator, that was me.  I wanted to be in charge of how this whole storyline was framed and unfolded. From the puritanical vigilante finally purging society of its self evident delinquents and defective minds. To the inevitability of the detective catching and putting me away for a very long time. Posting photos on social media standing by corpses grinning with the pleasure and infamy of it all.

I ended up here, in this sparse miniscule room, with a sink, a bed, a bucket to shit and pee in. My creature comforts. The only view an obstructed one of the roofs of the prison block opposite, through a window striped with iron bars. I scrawl on the wall feelings of injustice, so defiant am I not to be ignored in my ignominy.  I wanted my public fame to continue.  Speedily removed from general society and my phone. I was incarcerated here in the hope of minimising copycat murders. When the riots kicked off, they didn't happen in the prison, but erupted in the ordinary streets and houses of suburbia. The days of middle class reserve and politely modulated dissent suddenly collapsed. There was a war on for food, heat, resources, general survival going on. Our prison guards left in a hurry, in order to barricade and defend their homes, never to return. Leaving myself, and a handful of others, boxes of Snickers bars and tap water to survive on, til both of those ran dry. One day, very soon, I'll go to sleep, never to reawaken. Maybe it's for the best they didn't leave the keys. For who knows what further atrocity a middle aged hedge fund manager might perpetrate, as it all comes tumbling down.

GNOSTIC OPTICS - He Who Has No Root

'He who has no root has no shoot,
and although he imagines
he has come into existence,
he will cease.
For he who doesn't truly exist
can never come into fullness
of flawless Being.

How then did he regard himself?
As one who comes into existence
like night-time shadows and ghosts.

But when the Light shines on his fright
he sees that he is as nothing.'

Taken from The Gospel of Truth
Translated by Alan Jacobs
Published by Watkins Media Ltd 2006

THE BEST BEFORE DATE - 1978 - I Can't Stand Myself - James Chance & The Contortions

James Chance & The Contortions emerged from the late 70's No Wave scene in New York, the US version of post punk. Out of it came some interesting hybrids - The Swans, Lydia Lunch, The Lounge Lizards, DNA, Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Theoretical Girls to name a few of note. Brian Eno was brought in to produce a compilation album in 1978 to capture the nascent flowers of this moment, before they succumbed to the short livedness of their own trash aesthetic. For most of these bands operated on a fatal cutting edge. An art infused wallowing in the primal joy of dissonance and screaming into a microphone as a vocal style.

And so that brings us to Mr James Chance, channelling a mutated form of James Brown, with a voice ravaged by too much coarse cut hand rolled nicotine. He was never going to be a poster boy in a teenagers bedroom. Because this was a musical career that had car crash written all over it. To say I Can't Stand Myself is edgy punk funk would be to understate what is really going on here. This man is audibly on self destruct, pushing himself right over a wall topped with inserts of cut glass. Then picking his bloody form off the floor gives you the most blistering siren of a saxophone solo. As if imitating the death wail of a goose being strangled.  The sound captured here has intensity and excitement in every disheveled groove. With a virus of tawdry sex running through it. Its punk mixed with jazz cocktail, lethally exploding in the gutter.

James Chance, despite all the opportunities he's no doubt given himself to abuse his body to death, is alive and still working at the age of 70. Most of his output from the 1970's onwards has been live albums. These perhaps best capture the febrile nervy wired beast that is him. A man quite happy to be forgotten on the fringes of popular music, because that is where he's been able to do what the hell he liked, to the hilt.

LISTENING TO - Squid

Originally Brighton based they now hang out in Bristol, the streets of which feature in one of these videos. I originally came across Squid during the pandemic during my early Post Rock explorations. Squid are, along with Black Country New Road a favourite of the band from then. They are a much more sophisticated version of Black Midi and, thankfully, far less arche. They too have wildly veering time signatures and stylistic variances that they blend together with finese, exhileratingly well. Their lead singer and drummer Ollie Judge has completely mastered the half spoken half screamed vocalism of James Chance, but better controlled and modulated. In less proximity to the edge of insanity. Their first album Bright Green Fields was really good. The best of many fabulous tracks is Peel St which opens this session for KEXP which demonstrates just how tight they are in live performance.

Their second album O Monolith is due out at the beginning of June. As is the case these days single tracks are being posted on You Tube as a taster. So far its been Swing (In a Dream) and the latest this week Undergrowth. These reveal a continuing dexterity in the handling and melding of their unique style, so bodes well for the full album when it finally lands. These two tracks are pretty excellent.

FILM CLUB - The Spy In Black - Contraband

Powell & Pressburger Season
Powell and Pressburger launched their movie partnership during the war. Brought  together by Alexander Korda in 1939. They went on to make eight wartime themed movies finishing with A Matter of Life & Death in 1946. Their wartime films took on the tricky task of producing intelligent impactful films that both were and were not wartime propaganda. What links them visually as movies is the boundaries between black and white are frequently dramatically sharp. Figures often emerging in or out of theatrical shadows into patchy shafts of light. A metaphor perhaps for the fascist menace then darkening European liberty.

The Spy In Black - 1939

Its WW1 and 1917, a German U boat is sent on a special mission to Scapa Flow to blow up some of the British fleet. They are lead by charmingly debonair Captain Hardt ( Conrad Veidt ) He is to rendezvous with a German spy who is doubling as a teacher on the island - Anne Burnett ( Valerie Hobson). A tightly written script keeps you in the dark about what is really going on, with lots of double bluffs going on. It daringly shows you most of the operation entirely from the German point of view. Made at the beginning of the WW2, The Spy in Black cleverly echoes an incident at the end of the last war, everyone at the time would know of. The entire German High Seas Fleet having been scuttled at Scapa Flow in June 1919. It also features the first appearance in a Powell & Pressburger film of Marius Goring.

Contraband -1940

With the success of The Spy in Black, Powell and Pressburg's next film stuck with the same central actors, Veidt and Hobson. Whereas the romantic inclination had been hinted at in its predecessor, here it is allowed to fully blossom. The only thing standing in its way is that Conrad Veidt is far too old to play the dashing romantic lead. Also there is zero chemistry between them. Veidt's accent is so clearly German, that him pretending to be Danish stretches credibility. There is a theatrical stageiness about these early P & P films, formed around a particular dramatically structured format. There are early indications though of their future films, in the diversity of types of voices you hear. You get a broader picture painted of wartime London through the fleeting presence of noticeably working class characters.

Contraband pivots around the character of Captain Anderson (Conrad Veidt), in charge of a boat crossing the Atlantic. Carrying both passengers and cargo. Acting on a tip off the Royal Navy intercept to check it for contraband. Pulled into dock while the manifest is checked, two passes are issued so the Captain and his second in command can go onshore. These passes get stolen by two passengers, one of whomever is Mrs Sorenson (Valerie Hobson). The Captain sets off in pursuit of them, becoming embroiled in espionage and Nazi sympathisers in the UK. 

Of their early wartime films this is probably the weakest, with a clunky storyline that never quite convinces. Nonetheless Powell & Pressburger are beginning to establish a production team of people they will work with repeatedly, here they use the superb cinematographer Freddie Young for the first time.

FINISHED READING - Scattered All Over The Earth by Yoko Tawada

In a gentle dystopian future entire countries disappear, Japan has vanished into the sea. How this has happened, it does not tell you. Hiruko is, however, a refugee, a survivor working and living in Denmark. She still longs to meet a fellow countryman or woman. To speak her own language once more. In the meantime she speaks Panksa a hybrid abbreviated language she's made up.

We are introduced to a number of characters all of whom are dispossessed, or misaligned in someway. A general air of dislocation permeates what is left of the world, which tries to carry on as if nothing has really changed at all. Meanwhile lost cultures, in an attempt to keep them alive, are being misremembered or reduced to a travesty of their original meaning or purpose. A bit like Chinese Whispers the further they are away from a lived way of being, the more it diverts from cultural fidelity.

There is Tenzo/Nanook, in reality a man born in Greenland, who by some quirk of fate, and conscious misrepresentation, has become a renowned sushi chef in Norway. His Eskimo features being mistaken for Japanese. Though the name Eskimo itself could be construed as an insult, he prefers it to Inuit, which is a specific tribe he doesn't belong to. So he finds himself constantly perpetrating a fictitious persona on one level or another.

Akash, originates from India. Once a boy, but now lives in Denmark as a woman. Living very much on her street wise wits in order to survive. Afraid of being discovered for who she is or was, and thrown out of the country. Indian food in Denmark has in one restaurant become an odd fusion of Indian and Italian, producing Lotus Pizzas etc. Eventually these two characters encounter Hiruko, and they set off on a mission to locate another person, reputedly a surviving Japanese speaker - Susanoo.

Like many a contemporary Japanese writer Yoko Tamara wears her authorial eccentricities lightly. This maybe a translation issue, but modern Japanese authors have a slightly plain, if not bland character to their writing style. There is little by way of an authors presence. It is all in the content, the story. Similar to traditional Japanese block printing that has a flattened picture plane, however richly decoratived. Devoid of perspective or depth, its all about a play of shapes and patterns moving across a surface. 

Yet beneath this stories emotional coolness, the context of it, is an exterior world, a civilisation that is in crisis. Its soft cheerfully undramatic nature explores what the nature of identity is, and how language relates to it. How much can we artificially tangle our sense of ourselves up in the nationalism of a specific place and the language spoken there? What we see as our identity is often quite arbitrary and  changeable. What happens to cultural authenticity when it no longer has a homeland? How then do we present our sense of our selves to the world, when we become dispossessed?. Its a book which obviously has a lot to say, and does so delicately and entertainingly. But it can, at times, be a bit devoid of feeling and passion, which I found tested my engagement. I wanted more emotionally from it, each time it successfully repressed its own expressive range. Ah! those Japanese.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8

LISTENING TO - Veronica Lake by Sparks

In the drip feeding of tracks from their new album due at the end of May, we are served this beautifully tempting morsel. Veronica Lake reveals another facet of this new albums soundscape, a subtly stripped back aesthetic. Here we are presented with the merest whisper of a background rhythm, over which Russ sings a song about a wartime manufacturer opining over the bad influence of Veronica Lake's peek-a-boo-y hair style on safety and productivity. Veronica Lake did indeed tour the US in a war time awareness campaign about women's long hair being caught in machinery. Brilliantly simple satirical wit as ever.

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 82 - Pending Spring

This second week of the Easter holidays has been challenging. We were set to open for our first Monday of 2023, but torrential rain meant that never happened. The rest of the week trade swung about like a pendulum. One quite good day followed by a day where we struggled to take literally a tenth of that amount, followed by another good day, then a bad, then an OK considering. In terms of our emotional engagement its been exhausting. 

The week after Easter has been a slightly better week than its predecessor. The weather has been sunnier, but often pretty cold in the persistent East to North Easterly winds we've been enduring for some weeks now. If only they would drop a way we'd probably feel like spring was actually here, rather than pending.

On Sunday, to change the energy, we took ourselves over to Aylsham, for a Mind Body & Spirit Fayre and a walk to Blickling Hall. The Fay-re had a scattering of  readers of palms, tarot , crystal or paint splodges. Mostly middle aged  psychic ladies dressed in voluminous florid maxi dress concoctions. Plus a gong bath, which looked like a huge babies play pen. The band, one presumed, were out the back having a crafty fag whilst we were visiting. Surrounded by the worst sort of tenuously related handmade alternative tat. Rank smelling soaps, signs and stuff made out of resin, hyper expensive crystals, bees wax candles, a stall pushing Slimmers World, and a guy boasting about becoming some sort of gold four star level gong bather supremo. It was either fraudulent or self deceiving, but either way a blatant rip off. We left with a deep sense of distaste for how unethical it all was. At least entry was free, as was leaving.

The walk to Blickling followed part of the Weavers Way, crossing at diagonals across wheat fields and bisecting neatly in half fields of rapeseed, but it was a nice way to approach the Hall. Once there, it was coffee and cake, then an instructive visit to a exhibition of various eras of printing machines. Checked out the second hand bookstore, where nothing grabbed my attention. 

We went upstairs to view the Creative Creations Craft Fair on the floors above the National Trust shop. We've seen this craft selection there many times and it is always an intensely annoying, if not dispiriting, experience. So many craft makers selling blousy country floral appliqué home ware bla bla bla. Plus the sort of thing that confuses novelty with originality, usually involving making lamps out of unusual things, such as cameras or brass musical instruments. To which I respond by saying - there's a good reason why we've never seen this before - most folk, if they thought of it at all, thought again. This time it also contained the ugliest standard lamp shades I have ever seen in all my born days. I couldn't for the life of me imagine what sort of interior they might suit, but maybe its the gothic boudoir of a drag artist who specialises in Bette Davis - Baby Jane impressions.

CAVE NOTES ,- A Truthful Line

'It is very hard to sing something,
night after night,
that has no emotional value. 
A dishonest line tends to deteriorate somehow
after repeated singing;
a truthful line collects meaning.'

Taken from Faith, Hope and Carnage
conversations between Nick Cave & Sean O'Hagan
Published by Canongate, 2022

GNOSTIC OPTICS - Seven Renunciations

"At the first,
he renounces getting and letting go;
At the second,
evil inclination.
At the third,
illusion and delusion.
At the fourth,
his usurping, cardinal, egoistic arrogance.
At the fifth,
wilful presumption and jeopardising bravado.
At the sixth,
greed, avarice, miserliness,springing from passion
for wealth and perishable possession.
At the seventh,
all deceit betrayal, guile and calumny
lurking in ambush.
Then stripped naked of the old man,
he enters the sphere of Sophia,
Divine Wisdom.'

Taken from Poimandres, in the Gnostic Gospels
Translated by Alan Jacobs
Published by Watkins Media Ltd 2006

A HIGHLIGHT OF MY WEEK - Designing The Hebrides

There is still someone at the BBC who has got their head screwed on right. Whoever decided to commission this programme, giving Banjo Beale, last years brilliant winner of Interior Design Challenge, his own makeover show, well, they should be given some sort of award. Banjo is such a gift to the nation, a natural TV presence. Someone who its very easy to spend half an hour with. Whilst he tries to convince himself as much as his clients, that he should proceed with his adventurous design ideas.

Banjo is that rare thing in modern television, a genuinely nice guy.  Its encouraging to see how such a lovely man, struggling so much with his self confidence, can nonetheless be such a bold designer. Watch him cope so assuredly and resourcefully, when everything does not go according to plan. Whether he's thousands to spend upgrading a smokehouse or hundreds smartening up a bothy. He's such an ordinary humble bod, that we all can identify with and feel inspired by. 

The programmes are set on his home turf of the Hebrides, which will provide a huge boost to the Hebridean tourist industry. With those ¡sweeping picturesque shots over its islands. Panoramic landscapes set against the blue of its summer skies. You just find yourself longing to go stay there for a while. The place looks stunning. As are Banjo's design interiors. Undoubtedly this will give his career a huge boost as a designer, but also one certainly hopes as a TV presence.

MY OWN WALKING - 2nd Journal April 2022

Though I'm much more resilient than when I was younger. I still have days when holding it all together proves difficult. But these times are invariably moments which reveal what is languishing beneath it. If depression pops up, then I need to pay more attention. Something needs to be acknowledged, or responded to. It may take a while to put my finger on quite what that is. I have to be emotionally more observant, willing to be truthful, and not habitually reactive.

Obviously times are still hard with our business, and the stresses and strains of that are ever present. I have had a few instances lately where I've been definitely been struggling with that more. It manifests in losing motivation. I find it hard to emotionally engage with anything I'm doing. As I often use activity and doing as a way of negotiating myself through difficult emotional times. Not feeling able to even do anything, feels like a double loss. I think my psyche knows how to put me on the spot. Just pull the plug on those usual escape routes. 

The general feeling tone this time is - that life has become all about making things for the shop. A cycle of the same things over and over. Insufficient creative space for my own artwork. I feel as if I am running on empty. Though my own creative process is an issue. There are two other things to note - moving here to Sheringham and my leaving the Triratna Order. Both things removed me from a network of friends and connections built up over many years of working and living with other Buddhists  We've lived in Upper Sheringham six years.  But I've not made any friends here. I do feel lonely at times.

Hubby and I are a good team, able to support each other well. Effective as our relationship is, it is like being tuned to the same radio station all the time. There is a need to hear a diversity of approaches and points of view. Find something that is more my own, outside of the shop and my marriage. I need friends generally and male ones specifically.

I've been thinking of getting involved with a few local groups for a while, but done nothing to take that idea forward. It would be a way to break out of a habitual self reliance and containedness, to make new friends and acquaintances. Doing anything new can revive ones spirits. What I notice initially is that awareness of the shy more reticent side of my nature becomes more apparent. I usually have to find a way round that, or succumb to my introvert reserve.

I've made a start by joining a local men's group called The Exchange that meets fortnightly. There's a diverse age range who attend, which was good. I enjoyed the first meeting. I have a few other things I want to try out. You'll no doubt hear of them at a later date. These activities are going to be all mine.

THE BEST BEFORE DATE - 1981 - Papa's Gotta A Brand New Pigbag - Pigbag

 

Pigbag were a large band, eight musicians based in Cheltenham. Only Simon Underwood had any previous music career, once being a member of the post punk outfit The Pop Group. They'd been highly influential, but too innovative to ever be commercially successful. In many ways Pigbag drew on a very similar rag bag of sources, combining funk, punk, ska, reggae and afro beat, to them, similar to Rip Rig & Panic, but with a much lighter hearted tone. Papa's Gotta A Brand New Pigbag's played on its James Brown antecedent and was a huge crowd pleaser at gigs and was a shoe in for their first single release in May 1981. Reaching No 3 in the charts, things were looking good. The album that followed in 1982 Dr Heckle & Mr Jive went straight to No 1. But they never seemed to be able to overcome the template that first tune laid down. In 1983 after releasing three albums within one year, the band split, all of them unhappy with the direction their music had taken.

But Papa's Gotta Brand New Pigbag was a highlight of the early eighties post punk boom. And rose to fame around the time the British Ska revival reached its peak. In many ways bands like Madness stole a lot of Pigbag's thunder in the large eccentric band slot , but were able to broaden and develop their style and transcend the ska revival they rose to fame on. Pigbag could never quite work out how to do that. So they became another addition to the long list of one hit wonders.

CAVE NOTES - Spirituality With Rigour

'The word 'spirituality' is a little amorphous for my taste. It can mean almost anything, whereas the word 'religious' is just more specific, perhaps even conservative, has a little more to do with tradition.

Religion is spirituality with rigour, I guess, and, yes, it makes demands on us. For me, it involves some wrestling with the idea of faith - that seam of doubt that runs through most credible religions. It's that struggle with the notion of the divine that is at the heart of my creativity.'

Taken from Faith, Hope and Carnage
conversations between Nick Cave & Sean O'Hagan
Published by Canongate, 2022.

GNOSTIC OPTICS - Self Knowledge

'He who understands all
but lacks Self Knowledge
lacks all.'

Taken from The Gospel of Thomas
Translated by Alan Jacobs,
Published by Watkins Media Ltd 2006

FINISHED READING - Faith, Hope & Carnage

A book of conversations between Nick Cave & Sean O'Hagan.

This book is full of constant surprises. Astonishing insights into a persons creative process. A revelatory journey through one man's grieving, the pain of it, and what he has done as a result of it. The person you see here is someone undergoing some sort of transformation. Being turned inside out, by the loss of his son Arthur. 

As a skilled songwriter you would expect him to be an adept word smith. And he his clear and lucid here even about his doubts and vagueness. Cave is never any less than honest and articulate. Yet the man you meet here is in the middle of a revolution in how he works and creates. He's throwing much of his previous way of working out the window and starting again. With the help of his chief collaborator Warren Ellis. All of these changes in one way or another a response or a ricochet with their origins in profound loss. There is no time to waste anymore. Nick Cave has always been a creative whirlwind, restlessly driven on to find fresh areas to musically explore. But now he's operating on steroids.

You don't have to be a fan of his musical output to appreciate this book. If you are it does make it all the more absorbing to read.  What comes out of these conversations is mostly just very human, and because of its universality understandable to anyone. I found his exploration of what his belief in god might consist of, the dynamic between doubt and faith, that these are really the focus of it all. When something traumatic happened, instead of being thrown out of his faith, he went deeper in. In a search for meaning, but also purpose. For him belief in god can be an effective coping strategy for dealing with tragedy.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 81 - Men & Black

We'd been preparing ourselves all the previous week. Making additional stock, and gathering our craft market accessories together. Saturday was to be our first craft market of the year. We were apprehensive anyway, because this one was a bit of a punt.  Being convinced by the organiser that a stall on the Sheringham Viking Festival site on Beeston Common could work for us - a stall full of items covered in Mid Century modern fabrics, perfumed candles and soaps etc. As long as there were other stalls like us we said, we'd be prepared to give it a go. Even though the other stalls sold things like Anglo Saxon mead and trumpets made from rams horn. The stall holders dressed in smelly furs, hank plated hair and chain mail. Both of us were, nonetheless, tense and sleeping badly, simply from apprehension.

The weather forecast at the beginning of the week for Saturday was not looking good. Bucketing it down all day, with a strong cold gale wind, nine degrees feeling like three. By the day before, this had reduced to a 50% chance of rain. In the early hours of Saturday morning it was fluctuating quite wildly, on a seemingly half hourly basis, from torrential to a mild drizzle. As we had to set off just after 8am, if we were to call it off, we'd have to do it soon. The moment we saw horizontal rain across the field opposite, we knew we wouldn't be sitting on Beeston Common trying to stop our gazebo from blowing into the village pond. 

We sent a polite text and email saying we were pulling out. Friends of ours who were due to pitch their waffle making van on the common, inspected the water logged ground and pulled out too. So we were not alone. In fact most of the non Viking related stallholders did. Customers who'd been up there told us it was like Glastonbury, slippery mud underfoot, dejected looking stallholders, all a bit yuck. Suddenly we felt an immense relief, we'd made the right decision.  Our shop, considering the day was such a total wash out, did OK.

The next day, our shop was closed anyway. We took ourselves off on a round trip. Taking in the monthly Holt Makers Market which was full of familiar stalls, a bit smaller than usual, but it was the first of the new season. Stocked up on Kimchi, Cortado and Lemon & Dill Sauerkraut from our favourite Le Digestif stall. We then progressed to Fakenham and The North Norfolk Artisan Fair which is held two or three times a year at Fakenham Racecourse. Primarily to see if we'd want to exhibit there. You paid a £6 entry fee! After this visit I'd say probably not. Calling it an Artizan Fair misrepresents what that means, and what was actually there. There was lot of bought in stuff, repackaged truckles of the same range of cheeses, manufactured cosmetics, mixed in with what was too frequently frankly a Church Fete level of craft making. There were some real artisan makers but few and far between. Artizan this was not, to portray it as such was indulging in a bit of 'craftwashing'. 

We had at least hoped there would be a good cafe with homemade cakes, but only found a couple of trailers, with a feeble offering. So we took off for Stiffkey Stores and had a decent Latte and one of their superlative peanut blondies. Whilst we were there, a little girl dressed in a pink gauze tutu with multi coloured pom poms on the fringe was trying to eat a chocolate brownie. Not sure whether she liked it or not, it appeared to be accumulating in her mouth until it reached a point where she could hold no more. Then a chocolaty river dribbled out, down her top, onto her dress. 

Dad and Grandad, left in sole charge, suddenly went into panic mode, unclear quite what you did in such circumstances. They tried to clear the mess up. But in the end the dress had to come off. 'What happened there' the Dad asked, 'Seepage' replied the child. 'Have you got chocolate anywhere else on you!' to which she replied from from out her chocolate smeared mouth a confident 'Nope' 'I thought we were going to have a truth day today' to which the Mother smirked and said 'Some hope' Dad and Grandad sat down with the stress of it all, as though they'd just survived a life threatening event.

March proved to be almost the same takings in the shop as last year. Which we happily accept with something of a thumbs up. Drawing a veil over the increased running costs and stock costs, which means this of course is falling short. But the dreadful Winter months are we hope coming to a close, with Easter being early this year we are expecting a better April. The weather is, however, not yet totally convinced and we keep slipping into perishing cold winds etc. As if a fondness for frost is this years favourite Spring accessory.

On our visits to craft and artizan fairs we are always on the look out for new suppliers or ideas for new lines. But a lot of the time it is just disheartening or annoying what folk think is a good idea. There is a difference between novelty and genuinely inventive. At the North Norfolk Artisan Fair there was one stall selling Man Soap, just man soap. Their marketing     was to have all the packaging and even the soaps themselves coloured black. I found this particularly patronising, to the point of being an insult. Making cliched assumptions about men's aesthetics preferences vis a vie soap perfumes, that they'd only find it palatable if it were packaged in black. They might just as well have called the perfumes Motor Oil or Boot Polish or Grease & Sweat. Now, there's an idea!

FEATURE - Ryuichi Sakamoto

Sad to hear of the death of Ryuichi Sakamoto who finally succumbed to the cancer he'd been living with since 2014. My first real encounter with his work was with the song Forbidden Colours in 1983.

I never really understood the appeal of the Yellow Magic Orchestra. And in his career, though electro-pop was his opening into many things, this was not where his real heartfelt interest lay. It is notable that his return to experimental collaborative work which preceded his cancer diagnosis, appeared to take on an even more diverse wide ranging musical forms afterwards. His output of work increasing phenomenally. Particularly his electronic work with Alva Noto. My personal favourite from his recent work includes Glass, a performance piece with Noto from 2018. 

There is also a superb video series from 2021 available on You Tube called - Incomplete. Short pieces of musical collaborations accompanied by rather beautiful black and white visuals.

Click here to watch - Incomplete

GNOSTIC OPTICS - Mysteries Beyond Mortal Sight

'Come unto me, and I will teach you
about mysteries beyond mortal sight.
There is a magnificent kingdom, infinite,
whose limits no angel has ever reached.
Inside dwells the Great Invisible Spirit.
No angelic eye has seen,
nor heartfelt intuition grasped,
its immensity,
nor can it ever be Named.'

Taken from The Gospel of Judas
Translated by Alan Jacobs
Published by Watkins Media Ltd 2006

MY OWN WALKING - Journal April 2023

I'm currently reading a book of conversations with Nick Cave called - Faith, Hope & Carnage. He has a loose nuanced approach to the whole issue of belief in God, a mixture of doubt and relaxed openness. He also seems in no hurry to tidy up his beliefs into neat ideological statements. God, may or may not exist, but he can see that belief in a deity could still be a helpful life strategy. 

Since I resigned from the Triratna Order five years ago, there has been, and still is, a process of quiet and slow reassessment of where I stand on some issues. I have to let go of habit and sense what is buried beneath. And sometimes I have to prompt or provoke by reading material that is not within my usual Buddhist bubble. So these things lie in pending trays. I practice within loosely and imprecise parameters. Though I've been a practicing Buddhist for over thirty years, I find that, actually, I don't have a clearly defined standpoint on God, to exist or not to exist? And in the greater picture does that really matter?

The value of something should probably not be judged through the lens of its institutional framework or past actions. Religions, Science, Politics - bad things are frequently done in their name. The fruit of anything will go rotten eventually. Just look at our present government. The speed of decline depending upon its internal or external ethical health. Things naturally lean towards arche decrepitude over time. Which is why there is often the urgency to instigate a revival or reform. Things become perverted through the imposition of doctrinal orthodoxy. What do you find if you return to a religion's first principles, and avoid getting caught up in these pre-established doctrinal standpoints or the rigidity of a dogma frozen into certainty of belief? What is it that they originaly put there faith in?

Atheism, it seems to me, simply replaces one self congratulatory and self righteous religious certainty, with another more secularly based one. Factual rectitude used as a blunt and dogmatic instrument of imposing a conformity. To be rational god damn you! As if putting your faith in anything should be based on the expert analysis of data. When there is insufficient data on anything, it doesn't necessarily mean you must infer its not true. There is simply not enough known to say one way or another. In science things are being inferred from absence all the time, particularly on a theoretical micro level. Whether one responds to lack of data by saying it does or does not exist, is at this point, and in both these cases, entirely a matter of what you put your faith in. Where and how will you find an ultimate answer that will satisfy you? In the meantime you act provisionally, continue to practice and experiment.

If you want life to existentially conform to precise predictable formulas then so be it. But, if anything sets my ears to a beware alarm its the crowing triumphalism of a prominent atheist. As if belief in divinity was just some autumnal detritus that should easily be swept away to make way for the crisp pure white snow of winter's rationale. There can be coldheartedness in this messaging. Like the school bully who snatches your ball away from you, using size or strength of view to taunt and tease. I don't appreciate the delivery of the message, because it comes wrapped in an egotistical conceit, of an obsession with the certainty of certainty itself. 

The message has so much more value than its messenger. My not liking the way the postman delivers the letters does not change what is contained within its envelopes. Is my not liking the messenger really about my not liking the message? But an unpalatable message presented unpalatably, does that ever convince anybody?  Is it that I find dogmatic certainty inherently unconvincing, whether that comes spoken in a religious, scientific or political tongue. I don't buy into that certainty. The sweeping nature of it feels misplaced. Where is the place for doubt, for uncertainty, for the unknown wrapped around in the humble cloth of faith?

Unknowing, should not be thought of as empty. What is unknowable is potent, filled with ideas, images, inspirations, feelings, impulses and intuitions. Its not a void, but a place where certainty is avoided. The place of not knowing can be an invigorating creative space to stand in. Full as it is with an overwhelming number of potentialities. If we start snatching at them, trying to capture them in prose, a poem, a piece of music, or in paint, the excitement diminishes the more we turn that unknowing into a known entity. The best poetry hovers in the space between unknowing and knowing, leaving our imaginations unsettled and questions unanswered. We capture only glimmers. Faith is a practice of how you live positively within that state of unknowing.

Nick Cave suggests that whether you are in search of a divinity or awakening - 'it may actually be the doubt, the uncertainty and the mystery that animates the whole thing'. So wondering where I am with all of this, is not some personal failing, it may be just the point of it. Its not about pinning yourself down to firmly concrete and immovable beliefs, but being willing to simultaneously inhabit absence and presence, belief and disbelief, of knowing surrounded by a mist of not knowing, of god looked at through a mirror where no god can be seen. As Dogen expresser it - Realisation is the state of ambiguity itself.'  ? The vagueness is where everything settles in the end 

FINISHED READING - The Gnostic Gospels

The discovery of the Nag Hammadhi texts in 1945 seems single handedly to have recreated the modern interest in Gnosticism. It provided other or more complete versions of texts, as well as ones unknown or known about but no text previously existed. Since then a series of translations have surfaced, including this one by Alan Jacobs. His stated aim was to make the texts more readily accessible and understandable. In order to do this he has consciously removed their more esoteric impenetrable aspects. It is probably safe to say this translation should more accurately be called a rendering. Perhaps I held an expectation of what these texts should be like. But I couldn't escape a neutered feeling about this translation I could not quite shake off. Something of their essential character having been stripped from them. Robbed of their full range of linguistic richness, the metaphors impoverished, the imagery dulled.

Apart from this sense of being too far removed from its original source, what else did I find? Well, the texts are mostly very different in character to the accepted Gospels of the Bible. Some phrases by Christ re-emerge in slightly different form or contexts. Most of these 'gospels' are not gospels in the traditional sense, but collections of reputed sayings or dialogues by Jesus or a disciple. Some resemble later commentaries or poetic evocations. There are no stories or parables. When I read them it seemed quite obvious why these would be left out of the official gospel selections. The metaphysical theology beneath them diverges significantly from the considered norm. The central idea being that we learn to become one with the Godhead, reborn as the Son or Daughter of the divine. Which gives a whole new slant to what the epithet Son of God is meant to infer. It may not be a literal, but a spiritual state.

Their outsider status, is as much to do with the Gnostic in Gospel's use of language tone, metaphorical language, symbolism and imagery of the spiritual path, which sets them apart from the New Testament texts. Without commentary or explications these would be basically indecipherable to the casual layman. These are not parables or teaching stories. They require quite a bit of unpacking. If these really are a whole other set of teachings by Jesus ( and I do say If ) then they were probably for his close and more experienced disciples only. One of whom, Mary Magdalene, has the honour of being the only female disciple of Jesus to have her own gospel, via this 'Gnostic' tradition.

Similar to the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Nag Hammadhi texts are texts written for a particular sect of early Christianity which no longer exists. These sects are randomly grouped together under the Gnostic banner. Though it appears there was no one singular identifiable stream of  Gnostic Christianity.  There were just a bunch of unorthodox traditions, one offs so to speak, that gradually declined before history could capture their essence, or establish what teachings they may have held in common. Leaving a cache of apparently disconnected texts in pots in caves etc. The nearest living relative to these early sects is the Coptic Church in Egypt.

Gnosticism as we currently know it, is a modern reconstruction of  a tradition that most likely never existed in the form it has now been given. Which is why modern Gnosticism can appear to be such a hotch potch of Christian Esotericism, Spiritualism, the Alchemical, Occultism with a fringe of New Age mysticism, and Uncle Tom Cobbly and all and all. Perhaps they never did hang together as a coherent religious philosophy. But they do show how the early sects of Christianity absorbed a broad range of influences and were wildly eclectic with non conformist tendencies.

CARROT REVIEW - 4/8

FILM CLUB - A Matter of Life and Death

Powell and Pressburger Film - 1946

You enter the film through a voice, as a misty blue fog clears and we realise we are looking out at the expanse of the universe. As he talks, the camera scans across it until we reach our moon and an indistinct muddy coloured Earth. As we zoom in closer we start to hear radio conversation emerging from the planet's atmosphere. Then its a specific interaction between an aircraft pilot Peter (David Niven ) and a female operative June (Kim Hunter ). His plane is hit and he has no parachute, so he's decided simply to bale out rather than crash and burn to death. But before he does, he engages in a long and occasionally poetic discourse with the operative. At the end of which they both realise, were he not about to die, they could have fallen in love with each other. The pilot falls, but wakes up on a beach, thinking he's arrived in heaven. But really he has fallen back to earth near to where June lives. They meet and fall instantly in love. But he knows something is not right, he should be dead and in heaven. Can he really have cheated death?

Emerging immediately at the end of the war, A Matter of Life and Death touches on the subject of loss during wartime and creates a big what if. What if one man were to refuse to die and plead to be able to continue his life, and to fulfill his need for love?  It embraces this idea in the sort of visually bizzare way one might expect from Powell and Pressburger. You are never quite sure if the realm Peter is appealing to, is Heaven, or simply a place his own consciousness has created. Whichever it is, this realm has noted his absconding and wants him back. They send Controller 71 ( Marius Goering ) a French 18th century fop, to try to trick him into returning up a very long escalating staircase.

There is a lot of flippant wit, verbally and visually, with many a spectacular set piece. Powell and Pressburger do, as usual, pull out all the stops. Earth is against type, notably vivid in Technicolour and the heavenly realm monochromatic in black and white. That escalating staircase, that moves between, cost them £3,000 to make, and that is 1940's war prices. So this was not cheap for what was essentially a one off prop. The opening dialogue between Peter and June is certainly affecting. But after that, the films emotional heart diminishes as the movie becomes more enraptured by its own playful conceit. I began to find all that a bit tiresome. It utilises a lot of superb cinematic tricks to great effect, but I've seen the film twice now, and each time it has left me feeling a bit nonplussed. There is a coolness as it turns the wheels of its increasingly cranky fantasy storyline. .

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8