QUOTATION MARKS - Friendship by David Whyte

"But no matter the medicinal virtues 
of being a true friend or sustaining a long,
close relationship with another,
the ultimate touchstone of friendship
is not improvement,
neither of the other nor of the self;
the ultimate touchstone of friendship is witness,
the privilege of having been seen by someone
and the equal privilege of being granted
the sight of the essence of another,
to have walked with them
and to have believed in them,
and sometimes
just to have accompanied them
for however brief a span,
on a journey impossible to accomplish alone."

Taken from the book Consolations by David Whyte,
Published by Canongate, 2015 

MY OWN WALKING - Journal Winterval 2024

Many bells rang with me whilst watching the film All of Us Strangers. One was a comment the central character Adam made about having become 'reconciled to living a lonely life'. I certainly held a view similar to that in the 1990's, when I was living in Diss, Norfolk. I might've be tempted to assign that view to history, as though it held no influence on how I am presently. It has, however, an air of being significant that there was still a residual relevance. 

During the mid 90's recession I was running my own art shop in Diss, and it wasn't going too well. All the effort I put into it appeared not to be resulting in any financial improvement, which was disheartening. I also wanted a relationship, but had yet to find one. After all, I'd moved from London to Norfolk, to a small conservative Norfolk market town, where there was no 'scene'. In this context being more reconciled to a solo lifestyle, perhaps then felt like a relatively sane response. Maybe it was just not the right place or time.

I was simply trying to be realistic, to save myself undue suffering by not continuing to hold out a hope for there being a life where I was not on my ownsome. As a strategy it limited emotional stress. Though it also alienated me to a degree from the truth of what I desired, by pretending I could be just hunky dory living on my own, when I clearly was not. This was a delusion I self perpetuated. But it is also one that our society encourages us to believe and follow. That our individuality is a primary need, over and above any collective relationship. 

Once I became a Buddhist, I spent a lot of time and energy opening up the psychological pits where I'd buried feelings in. Camouflaged behind noble sounding motivations, of being a person in full control of my independent destiny, a self directed lifestyle, willfully purposeful. Where 'override and move on' had become a survival mode whenever turbulent wilder emotions escaped their confinement. 

Buddhism itself is often misinterpreted on this issue. The Noble Truths states that our desires and attachments are the cause of our suffering and by ceasing those desires we can end the suffering. Though ultimately this is true, being completely submissive to your every desire is unhealthy, but so is suppressing or attempting to eradicate them. You are meant to closely observe how impermanent our desires are. Use them as means of insight via the constantly hungry nature of them, and how fleeting or elusive satisfaction can be. We have to be careful not to be premature in our renunciations.

Back in the 1990's my own premature renunciation proved not to be an effective one. Though it had a practical reasoning behind it. When you run a business on your own, you can't allow yourself to fall ill, let alone fall emotionally apart. It felt like there was neither the time nor the space for any of that. That was the frame I chose to look at it through. Meanwhile the undertow of discontent continued to rumble away.

Post that shop closing, these habits proved hard to let go of. Buddhist friends would often remind me that I was not now working on my own, I was not alone anymore. That there were other people to help, if I were to call upon them. After decades of having dealt with everything in my life myself, that way of behaving was totally hard wired. 

Unpicking habits is similar to when you go wrong in knitting a pattern. You often have to pull back many rows of intricately wrought stitch work to get to the ones that need correcting. Its slow work, can be tricky and not always completely resolved. So even to this day, much to my husbands occasional annoyance, I can still find myself slipping into operating as if I am working alone. It may be my northern upbringing plays its part, where not making yourself 'unduly beholden' to anyone was extolled. Habits often have origins that have wider and deeper roots than you remember.

I've been in a stable loving relationship for a long time now. Yet that 'lonely life' viewpoint lingers on in the recesses of my being. If I were feeling more charitable, maybe it has found another purpose after the  HA!  I have obviously been unsettled by experiencing a closer proximity to death. I sense an existential type of loneliness. Your significant other will not always be there, as likewise you won't always be there. All of our relationships, lovers, husbands, wives, partners, friends and acquaintances, might salve the basic existential loneliness and fragility of our general human condition. They do not solve it.

Certainly the experience of death appears to be a singular phenomena, even when surrounded by family, our last minutes will be experienced alone. And whatever the depth of your love and emotional attachment, no one else can ever fully know what you wiil be going through. Being separated by death from a partner you've loved and cherished for a substantial part of your life, must bring a very particular sense of loneliness to those left behind. Left alone with a solitary grief, that others might genuinely attempt to empathise with. But no one else can truly understand the specific nature of yours. That type of loneliness must cut real deep.

SCREEN SHOT - All of Us Strangers

At the beginning you meet Adam ( Andrew Scott ) he's living in a penthouse flat in a high, but largely empty new tower block. He's a script writer. The fire alarm goes off, its always going off. He goes down to the ground floor to see if its real or yet another false alarm. He notices there is a light from another flat and the shadow of a figure staring down. Later that evening Harry ( Paul Mescal ) the occupier of that flat, turns up at his door drunk, wants to come in, charmingly and casually propositions Adam. Adam, a bit taken aback, says no, which he later regrets saying. 

From these mundane unpromising incidents eventually blossoms, not only a romance, but a film that explores in purging emotional depth themes of childhood loss, death, grief and loneliness. Whilst on the surface this might appear, with its central gay romance, to be another queer relationship drama from writer and director Andrew Haigh, similar to his equally wonderful film Weekend from 2011. But All of Us Strangers themes are largely universal one's and will cut to the core of everyone's human experience. At one point Adam says that he's reconciled himself to living a lonely life and later on that he's done nothing of any significance with it either. Who hasn't thought either of those things at some time in their life? 

Its hard to write about the movie's story line without giving too much away. But let's just say there are more than a couple of surprise twists in it. I watched it first on my own and a day later with my husband. During the first viewing I was more emotionally distracted by trying to work out what was really going on here. During the second viewing, because you now know the lay of the narrative, you pick up on all the foreshadowing, premonitions and musical clues that are scattered across the movie. Speaking personally I found it packed even more of an emotional punch, because the second time you understood the reasons for certain aspects of it. They resonated more in a way that was gut wrenching. And whilst it has its universal themes, if you are gay, then this film has tons of things you will find deeply resonate with your specific experience. Also, as someone who had a heart attack this year, it has a lot to say about having a good life and a good death, with as few lingering regrets as possible.

Haigh makes great use of eighties music and sometimes puts the words of songs into the mouths of his characters, the song lyrics allowing them to speak what they really want to say. He also has assembled a fantastic ensemble cast. Aside from Scott and Mescal, he also has Jamie Bell and Claire Foy in career best form. I've not seen Paul Mescal's acting before, and he is quite a revelation. I want to see more.  A solid northern accent and eyes that speak of what is going on inside with such yearning and fleeting delicacy. And here he's paired with Andrew Scott so renown for being an actor of huge ability, playing this chronically damaged man with such affecting tenderness and gritty realness. He must have been so inspiring to act opposite.

Inspired by a novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, Andrew Haigh has woven lots of his own personal experience into the script which brings it this telling ring of authenticity to the painful truths being revealed. This is my favourite movie of the year, its just far too good on so many levels it could not fail to be anything else.

CARROT REVIEW - 8/8

READING ALOUD - Kae Tempest - Europe Is Lost

If any artist caught the zeitgeist of the UK in the time of 2016 - post financial crash, post Brexit, at the dawn of First Term Trump, the pandemic not even dreamed of yet, it was this poem by Kae Tempest. As ever, they write accessibly and yet at the same time surprise you with the sophistication of the imagery they use. It's both ancient and modern, both of the street and of a tradition. Tempest never forgets where the poetic form originated and where they want to take it now. Its political, personal and punchy.

This live recording on KEXP captures the ongoing rolling syllabic momentum of Tempest at their performing best. There is a central character, there is Tempest there too observing, there is the world outside barren, hostile and alienated from the humanity it houses. And then there is us watching, caught up in the listening of it too.

FAVE RAVE - Ben Maton - The Salisbury Organist.

I started watching the videos by Ben Maton earlier in the year. He travels around churches in the Salisbury diocese, the more out of the way or redundant the better. Playing whatever organ he finds. You get to see the long walks across hills and fields to these often very isolated village churches, little bits of chit chat about their history, interesting aspects of organ playing techniques, as well as at the end of them some really lovely organ playing.

He's a young chap in his twenties, who has got a youthful and enthusiastic charm to him. He has visibly grown in confidence in what he is doing in recent months. This hour long video he made for advent covers three church he visited. In it he plays music by Bach and Franck, advent hymns, as well as a rather lovely Christmas Lullaby composed by Maton himself. 

The highlight is the last church, where he plays The Coventry Carol on a Victorian harmonium in a 19th century Gothic revival chapel. Its in the village of Wooland and was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott. The harmonium is so moodily dark in tone, a feeling of ancient melancholy suffuses it. Surrounded by its evocative gothic architecture. It provoked bit of a musical buzz in me, I was strangely mesmerised. 

I recommend you watch the whole video, but if you want to just watch the Wooland Church section its about 42 minutes in. Its well worth watching either way..

WORDS WRITTEN AT THE POINT OF GRATITUDE - No 1

I've recently begun writing a gratitude journal. I'll post from time to time edited selections. Here's a few from recent weeks.

• I have to be aware of not turning gratefulness into a task list, that I must find a dozen things to be grateful for in one day, or I am failing. I am trying to be more open, as I write, to the gratitude journal being whatever it turns out to be on any one day. Imbued with an aura of gratefulness, where it moves in and out of states, of being more or less explicit. Gratefulness can be a demeanour, where gratitude is one quality implicit within it.

• Writing here forces you to be more aware of what is going on around you. At the moment I oscillate between looking for things to be grateful for and examining the process of gratefulness emerging. Awareness seems primary, which appreciation follows, and though it is part of what gratefulness is, it is not gratefulness, but a close cousin. Appreciation is more like an observation, done from a distance, not fully emotionally engaged with what it is seeing. Gratefulness appreciates and goes out to the thing observed to express gratitude, in a sense directly to it.

• Gratitude, at its purest, is given freely to the object or person. If the latter, it also has to be received. Any form of gratefulness is welcome, but it seems that there are differing degrees of it, depending upon how publicly it is being expressed. In this sense any gratefulness is an incomplete thing the more abstract it is. It is always a work in practice, one that is never finished like a task list. 
  
  
• To be fully grateful you have to be content. The rolling stones of discontent tending to drown out our more appreciative thoughts. Our society is at present going through a huge roistering amount of discontent with itself. So its hard to resist getting caught up in its whirlpools.

WATCHED - What Miracle Are You? - A Reflection on Life Video

I always find it inspiring when I find someone who is plainly just being themselves beyond all limitations. The woman in this video is one such person, and is consequently a real joy to listen to. But, as ever, at the core of who she now is, is a tragic incident and a decade or two of pain. As someone who has struggled pretty much all my life to be themselves in all its fullness, and that it's still a work in progress, she challenges me to go further than I currently can conceive of. 

Absolutely bleedin marvellous.

 .

RECORD REVIEW - Endless Rain by One True Pairing

Tom Fleming, was once a co-vocalist with Wild Beasts for several years. This is his second solo album under the moniker of One True Pairing. On this he has reconnected with the sonic adventurousness  and subject matter that made his former band such a captivating joy.

Post the demise of the Wild Beasts, Fleming has had to face a few personal demons. His very fine first album garnered a few critical plaudits, but didn't get much airplay nor wider attention. The crisis of confidence in himself as a musician that followed threatened to end his solo career before it had even begun. Thankfully he's stuck it out.

This experience has fed into songs on this album, which have a strong confessional edge to them. It was a good move on his record companies part to team him up with John 'Spud' Murphy. The music production auteur of the moment. Standout tracks of this album have a distinctive fizz in their soundscape as a result.  

As Fast As I Can Go, is hard to beat as an album opener. The kinetic movement powering this song along, is somewhere between a horse drawn carriage and a motorway. It's quickly turned into my favourite track of the year. Along with Doubt, Tunnelling, Endless Rain and Prince of Darkness it possess an expansive, cinematic quality of painting a mood or picture. Into which Fleming's rich resonant vocals flicker. On the other hand tracks like Landlords Death, Be Strong, Mid Life Crisis can somehow feel too heavily weighted down by the lumpen earnestness of their subject matter. Whilst Frozen Food Centre stands alone as one beaut of a song, about a mother trapped in straightened circumstances. The stronger semi-autobiographical nature of it making this all the more deeply affecting.

Fleming is not your typical singer songwriter, which must make his record label unsure how best to promote him. There are the soul bearing songs, but there's also the desire to musically push beyond the starkness of just his beautiful voice and a guitar standing alone. There are a broad range of production approaches on show here, of the many ways to embellish a song. Perhaps too many. If I were to have any criticism of the album, it's that it falls short of creating a completely cohesive overall soundscape. Instead it eclectically and energetically dashes all over the territory available, which does give it its own enervating, if slightly uneven, quality. As it stands three quarters of this album remains an absolute corker.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

200 WORDS ON - Atheism

The word atheism originally meant 'another theism', another form of religious belief. For once upon a time not believing in God was inconceivable. And indeed, Atheism can present itself with a declamatory aloofness similar to that of a Pentecostal Preacher. The urge to brow beat you into submission can feel unrelenting.

Modern atheism’s raison d'etre depends on the eradication of a belief in God. Theism and Atheism facing off against each other, like two bookends back to back in an unedifying duel for supremacy. Atheism finds itself unable to stand alone, unsupported by what it is in opposition to. That it cannot offer us a broader more compelling vision for humanity than that, is fundamentally the problem with it. It’s like being on a stringent diet, without being able to envisage what we’re hoping to achieve through it, we’re unlikely to stick with it.

That we might be much better off without a God, overlooks what an unbridled human nature is capable of without guide rails. Nietsche's declaration that ‘God is dead’ preceded a century of brutal atrocities. The worst of which entirely political in causation. If you turn off the light, it's alarming how quickly the dark sets in.

FINISHED READING - A History of Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch

Diarmaid Mac Cullough is a historian not unfamiliar with the magisterial all encompassing epic. Winning prizes for his previous substantial biographies of Thomas Cranmer and Thomas Cromwell, and his history of the Reformation. So this history of Christianity rattles along at a pace through all three thousand years of the colourful diversity of its offspring. It has a lot of ground to cover.

It begins in the immediate aftermath of the death of its founder and ends in the mixed message of a post world war religious disillusionment on the one hand, against the extravagant, if not histrionic populism of fundamentalism in both East and West. Revealing how science and rationalism has both undermined and revived Christianity's fortunes.

Early Christianity,  though undoubtedly thriving, was a real ragbag of counter cultural movements with differing interpretations of their source materials. Of which The Bible and New Testament were only two. Things were unquestionably much wilder and on occasions uncontrollable. Paul's letters portray for us his attempts to keep control and direct his sometimes willfully errant followers.

Constantine's adoption of Christianity was the exemplar for what a potent force political and religious power being brought together could provide Christianity. Prior to this it's followers, who would never shut up bragging about their newfound faith, were continually hounded and persecuted. Progress to becoming a world wide universal religion, has been achieved on the back of a history of such adoptions and alliances with various emperors, kings, dukes and autocratic potentates. But also there's the misjudged and notable silences where moral clarity might have been expected.

Though establishment has provided an undoubted constitutional stability it has provoked upheavals galore - reformations, revolts and internal schisms, each attempting to meet the need for a specific theological adjunct or moral renewal. Establishment, though it provided access to power and influence in high places, it has frequently been one that would ultimately corrupt the actions of its practitioners and sew the seeds for further reformation.

McCullough expertly recounts theological disputes such as who the person of Jesus was a manifestation of - God, man or a synthesis of both. The meaning of The Bible is flexible, and can indeed be made to support many contradictory, inhumane and morally dubious things, should you wish it to.  It's clear whenever MacCulloch reaches a period which is one of his own specialisms. The text begins to fizz with a more vividly colouring and feeling for the detail.

Attempting any such comprehensive and inclusive coverage of the development of Christianity over millennia, cannot help but feel occasionally like its quickly skipping over the bare facts of the matter. No one can be a specialist in a minor cult's manners of practice. That MacCulloch largely manages to keep you on track and engaged over its thousand pages, is a Testament, not just to his scholarship, but also his feeling for the texture of this history and his undoubted skill as a writer of it.

CARROT REVIEW  - 6/8

FEATURE - EARWORMS OF 2024

It's interesting how my perspective changed as the year progressed. I raved about Yard Act in the early months, but whilst still good I don't think it's worn as well in my heart. Whilst Playing Robots Into Heaven by James Blake has recently returned to being played an awful lot and my fondness for it has grown immensely over the months.

. 

So, as ever these favoured tracks of 2024 are really only of this moment, not forever. 

But here they are - Just click on the link to play

Kylie Minogue - Lights, Camera, Action,That's It.- Oh My Oh My

Kylie continues to have her very own little renaissance on the back of the success of Padam Padam. Here are two addictive little numbers from Tension 2, which prove just how much she has still got it.

Kylie Lights Camera Action

Kylie Oh My Oh My

James Blake - Loading

I simply love this track. its James Blake at his simplest melodically, with its uncertain churchy keyboard and mysterious lyrical obsession. Its the sort of thing I save the word ravishing for. Runs One True Pairing a pretty close second for favourite track of the year.

James Blake Loading

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Conversion

The album Wild God marked yet another career high point and shift in musical emphasis for Nick Cave. This is by far the best track on the whole album, channeling a bit of the agony and the ecstasy of a burgeoning faith.

Nick Cave Conversion

One True Pairing - As Fast As I Can Go

My favourite track of the year. Light percussive rhythms propel this track along as it builds in intensity. Whilst Tom Fleming sings warmly, extolling the excitement of driving home to see his lover.  Everything I love musically condensed into three minutes plus.

O T P As Fast As I Can Go

Godspeed You Black Emperor - Broken Spires At Dead Kapital

I chose this to represent the album, it is simply the shortest track. Its an album that is pretty impossible to define. Provoked by the war in Gaza, the band came up with probably their best album in ages. Unsparingly bleak landscapes painted in sound.

GSYBE - Broken Spires

Aurora - When The Dark Dresses Lightly

Such a talented songwriter, I was seriously spoilt for choice with her album Whatever Happened To The Heart, there are just so many great tracks. I chose this because it was the first track to hook me and I have played it to death.

Aurora When The Dark Dresses Lightly

Beth Gibbons - Burden of Life

Beth Gibbons doesn't release a solo album very often Loves Outgrown being only the second. How many tracks I could have picked ? Well, pretty near all of them. But this mournful little ditty captured something of our world weary zeitgeist.

Beth Gibbons Burden of Life

Aroof Aftab - Aey Nehin

The opening track of her latest album Night Reigns, this silky smooth song sung over a backing that is as light as air. This is wonderfully stripped to the bone and stylish. 

Aroof Aftab Aey Nehin

Laura Marling - Caroline

It's not just the rare tone and expressiveness of her voice but the songwriting quality. Here an older man struggles to remember the break up song he once wrote, prompted by the lover who was the cause of it re-emerging into his later life.

Laura Marling Caroline

Little Simz - Mood Swings

It appears there is never a year off for Little Simz, her EP from which Mood Swings is taken fizzes with ideas and fabulously complex grooves. Makes you anticipate the next full album all the more.

Little Simz Mood Swings

Low- Monkey

A track from several years ago, that caught the attention of my ear holes. My goodness we miss Mimi Parker's voice.

Low Monkey

St Vincent - Broken Man

This is one stonker of a song from her recent album All Born Screaming. This track hits you so hard you are literally physically stunned by it. Terrific stuff roared in your ear drum til it bursts.

St Vincent Broken Man

Arab Strap - Bliss

Very much a continuation of their return to form, great electronic backing whilst Aidan Moffat intones his characteristicly poetic misery and mischief over the top. 

Arab Strap Bliss

Fat Dog - All The Same.

They appeared on Jools Holland's Later performing this song and stole the show, with its energy and punch. Unfortunately the debut album its from doesn't quite live up to the promise of this track. 

Fat Dog All The Same

WATCHED - Freedom of Less - a Reflections on Life video

This guy has a lot to teach us all. Living without a permanent home and wandering from one casual job to the next. There is a lightness to him that's inspirational. Though I can't quite see someone of my age wanting to do it, I imagine you do need to be robustly healthy. but then maybe that limitation is all in my head.

READING ALOUD - David Whyte - Everything Is Waiting For You

 

Good poetry often misses its point with deliberate ease. Modern poets can tend to disguise their meaning behind an artifice of obscurity and erudition. It maybe clever, but its rarely wise. You often find, like the tombs of Muslim heroes of old, that there maybe an elaborately wrought coffin to view on the surface, but there is no body to be found within. It's symbolism is an empty one, an echo without a resonant chamber.

David Whyte's poetry, at its best, will never be found empty of meaning or potency. But neither is it weighed down in a clumsy, portentous or leaden way, nor by expressing itself within the easy understanding of a flowery sentiment. It is the embodiment of its depths that strikes you about Whyte's poetry. One that is never so obvious, that its understood in the moment, you grasp it and quickly move on. There is still an air of mystery in the elucidation to draw your return to it. Here poetry encapsulates, it strikes a vein of recognition like a vestigial bell.  

Gaston Bachlard once described poetry as being like throwing a pebble into a deep pond - that it touches the depths before the ripples of it break the surface.

MY OWN WALKING - Journal December 2024

Having passed the fifth month since the HA! I am still being very dutiful in taking my medications. But also notice that it is slipping my mind to take them at the allotted times more frequently. Also, those morning physical exercises, confession time - I hardly ever do them anymore, I've come to dislike them so much. I can sense my inner sub conscious world is in a mild mannered rebellion, not sweary or cussing, but it is seeping into the conscious world outside.

I've become so accustomed to the medications. I no longer have a lived sense of whether they are meeting my needs or not. However much I might want to beg to differ, all these chemical additives are still contributing to keeping me alive. I feel immensely grateful for what they are doing, however silently in the background. 

I ceased doing the physical exercises because I had no felt sense of them being of much benefit. I was not aware of feeling better, fitter or looser for doing them. But in the world of the HA! who am I to judge? After all, left to my own judgement about what to eat I ended up with a blocked heart artery.  So you know, life lessons.

Whilst on holiday in Derbyshire, I bought myself a notebook, with the intention of writing a daily gratitude journal. So far this is going well. I'm being deliberately loose around how or what I write about within it. If I am not careful, it can end up being all about clocking up an impressive list of things I claim to feel gratitude for. So I also write about gratitude, what it is and isn't. How appreciation is near to, but not quite it. Plus the odd poem by David Whyte, quotes from Brother David Steindl Rast the guru of gratefulness as a spiritual practice. The journal within my first week of using it, is  taking on its own life and direction, which I'm enjoying seeing unfold.

I'm realising I often need to do a bit more excavating. That underneath most things there is something to be grateful for, you just need to discover the strata on which it lies. That it cannot be just about being grateful for those virtuous, obviously nice things. It's worth noting the things you think are beyond the pale of feeling gratitude for. It's a bit like the Buddhist practice of Metta Bhavana, where you cultivate, loving kindness towards oneself, a good friend, a person you don't know, a person you dislike and then all four subjects combined spreading outwards in an interconnected net to hold the whole world and universe within it. Gratitude, ultimately at least, should aim to be as all encompassing as that.

But then I still allow myself to have my doubts and reservations, these keep me on my toes. I've become particularly aware of the different gradations that gratitude has. There is awareness of gratitude, the noticing that there is something you could be grateful for, there is writing down that you are grateful for something or someone, there is the direct expression of your gratitude to someone, there is the feeling of being grateful, and being grateful. 

All of these, whatever the attributed level, are better than not being grateful at all. It is, however, always worth noting to what depth these things go. Whilst also being wary of not giving yourself a hard time when inevitably you feel a bit shallow and skim the surface for a while. It's a cultivation thing, you are dragging gratitude into the fore ground of your attention, and this can all feel a bit too contrived. Until it's not anymore.

I imagine the more gratitude is actively outwardly expressed the more trans-formative it can potentially be. To not permit it to remain something entirely theoretical or abstracted from real life. If something is really touching you at great depth, then how could this not spill out into your everyday interactions and encounters?

FEATURE - David Whyte - The Conversational Nature of Reality

I found this You Tube conversation between David Whyte and Tim Feriss. It's over two hours long, but it does go deep and broad into Whyte's writing and philosophy. I found it it an invigorating and frequently inspiring listen. Give it some time, if you will.

SHERINGHAM DIARY No 121- Life Lessons For Infants

As we were travelling home from a recent visit to Norwich I spotted a van ahead of us. It was for a painting and decorating company based in North Walsham. Further investigation found, as I suspected, that it is owned and run by a female director.  The company is called - Hard As Males.

I've taken to frequently doing a circular walk around Sheringham Park. On this day it was freezing with a cold raw wind blowing across it down coast. Encouraging me to keep up my pace, more than the usual 'moderate pace', as the fitness app dubs it. Fortunately there is the reward halfway of coffee and tea cake in the park cafe. A place where one lone female blackbird can be seen working the tables. Hopping under them the moment  humans vacate the area to scavenge crumbs.

On the way back I encountered a walk organised by the park rangers for families with young infants. Where the kids had to find toy animals hidden in the bushes. The children screamed with delight as they spotted yet another fluffy being, placed conveniently at kid height. Stuffed rabbits, foxes, bats, giraffes were tossed with great enthusiasm into a collective wheelbarrow. Though no doubt a great way to get children to interact and observe nature closer. I couldn't help but ponder on how mortified they're going to be when they discover not every wood has a fluffy pink elephant in it. Ah, there's a life lesson in everything.

1

Having reached emotional states of feeling more than a bit overwhelmed and stressed, we took ourselves off for a short break in Derbyshire. Just to get away from the familiar demands of the usual stuff and surroundings. It was a relatively relaxed holiday. The worst thing in modern life is to replace one hyper busy working lifestyle with a holiday planned down to the last minute of each waking day.

We stayed in a small farm cottage near Matlock. Taking in the delights of Matlock Bath, Buxton, Bakewell and one evening we went up to the Heights of Abraham to see the light illuminations. The illuminations were really good and we thoroughly enjoyed them. I took so many photos my hands became bitterly cold and this somewhat shocked my post HA! medicated body. 

You get to the Heights via cable cars, travelling upwards slowly for ten minutes. During the day the views from these are spectacular. At night all you can see are spots of lights from houses and the A6 snaking underneath, cloaked in a 360 degree all encompassing darkness. Your sensations being so limited, as the cable cars creep upwards you are palpable aware of how much they swing and lurch like a bell. Going up and coming down was quite the most unnerving experience of not feeling entirely safe. Something I'm unlikely to want to encounter again any time soon.

*************************************

Whilst on this six day break away, there is always the gift that keeps on giving of the overheard conversation. We were leaving a fine little cafe called Butterfingers. Two middle aged women were cackling uproariously at a table by the door. As we left one of them guffawed and said :- ' what I need is a handyman' after which another round of screeching laughter ensued, with more than a hint of innuendo to it.

As we were walking through the park in Matlock one frosty morning. A young woman probably in her thirties, dressed in a fake fur pink coat, in a terrible hurry. She was having a conversation on her matchy-matchy pink phone as she scurried along. It went something like this. ( Imagine a Derbyshire accent )

" well, it's not having a dog that I object too, it's the name. She has to change the name. I mean who wants to shout 'heel Mr Juicy' in the middle of the street?"

FINISHED READING - Monsters by Claire Dederer.

There are numerous instances referenced in this book to people who infringed contemporary values, or broke semi sacred shibboleths. And we all will be aware of our own, often very mixed responses to these instances where one disapproves of or are appalled by a celebrities behaviour, whom we once loved. Falling out of rapturous love straight into despising hate.

One of the fascinating aspects of this book is that Claire Dederer doesn't just reflect and reinforce any justified rightness in the opprobrium. There is a huge amount of exploration of the nuances surrounding it, and her own very conflicted responses to any so called 'bad behaviour.' And lets be honest it is largely bad boy behaviour. Male morality and psyche, is frequently what they can or cannot get away with. With terms like 'genius' tending to give errant males a free pass to overlook gross misdemeanors.

In many ways it can seem more straightforwardly simple, not to say less emotionally fraught, to abandon ones liking for the art of a once lauded individual. But what if you really still like the paintings, music, books or films by them? She delves deep into the whole idea of 'a stain' seeping into an entire lifetime of creative work. Not even to be able to compartmentalise their work, as before or after the reprehensible event.

In our age of the online puritan, it is extraordinarily easy to just close down or cut someone out of your life, or culture. Is this response proportionate ? Can you not separate the work from the individual? Can someone make wonderful beautiful art and yet be an immoral person? Nick Cave suggests you could view artistic work as coming from a side of the individual that strives to be the best of them. The bad behaviour often representing a separate, damaged shadow in their personality.  Could we not continue to love the best of them, but not see this as endorsing the worst? 

She goes into fandom, our obsessive love of particular individuals, and what that might entail emotionally. As an extension of who we see ourselves to be, a much lauded person cannot sit easily in our catalogue of those we appreciate, if they indulged in sex with a minor. Is this self censorship needed if say the films the person makes do not reflect or promulgate their predilection? By watching their movies we are not endorsing the bad behaviour. She explores Woody Allen's output with differing conclusions, depending on what films you are looking at.

She explores later in the book, the severe way 'bad mothers' are treated, and how the artistic impulse in a woman can be thwarted or judged unfavourably on all fronts, simply by having or not having children. The moral disapproval towards women inevitably takes on a distinct character all its own. Disapproval though this may be, its rarely quite the outright wiping them off the face of history, that happens to men. Because to be honest, women are still in the mode of struggling to be even noticed artistically.There is, however, something about the fall from grace of 'great men' that is entirely do with the abuse of their position of power. It's an historically gendered power given only to men, so when this is misused public perdition descends weightily upon them.

The book tends to lose focus and edge about two thirds of the way through. But nonetheless it is a thought provoking book. It's a major dilemma of our present age, so confused and lost morally, but also in meaning. How can you hold two contradictory views, of loving the work, whilst disliking the individual?  It seriously unsettles our moral compass. But in the end is the response to expunge or 'cancel' them anything other than our attitude toward our own internal shadow side, reflected in an external cultural mirror. Where we project infamy onto famous individuals and give them a hard time about their failings. Thus morally distancing us from any behaviour we would never ever do ourselves - would we?

CARROT REVIEW  - 6/8

WATCHED - Buy Now - The Shopping Conspiracy

If any documentary could be a wake up call to us all, then this ought to be one. Explaining with stark simplicity how online marketing keeps us spending. Hiding the true environmental cost of our conspicuous consumption from us. Making us believe that these companys are leaders of environmental change, when they really are not. These false gods and charlatans infecting both our economy and politics.

We are increasingly witness to the 'greenwashing' going on. I certainly wasn't that aware quite how literally poisonous to our perceptions of what an online business it is. We have a knee jerk distrust of politics, the media and religions, but apparently not online business. These companies are the gift that keeps on benevolently giving, without ever falling into abberant sinfulness. I spend therefore I am.

As a business model they looked to the fast fashion industry to find an operational set up they could apply more widely. When once fashion used to have two design seasons a year, it now turns over pretty much monthly. Thousands upon thousands of clothes get worn but a few times and then thoughtfully recycled. But no one quite realised that recycling just meant dumping them on the coastline of a country like Ghana. Ditto the majority of things we very dutifully recycle. Recycling is being reduced to as a means of cleansing our guilt over buying so much useless stuff.

Apple employs this production model to all its electronic gadgetry. Every year your present ground breaking phone model being made obsolete by the latest one. Have you ever thought about what happens to the left over old models? Well, they are literally dumped in Thailand, where the toxicity of their internal contents can be blithely ignored.

The only true solution to our over consumption and addiction, to the planned obsolescence, would be to stop buying things we don't truly need. Perpetuating this endless desire to shop and have new things. Even if we believe we're are being conscientious consumers, we are still contributing to a whole mountain of unrecyclable rubbish that pollutes our own and other people's lands and seas.

But faced with the sly pernicious nature of these business models, I think the moment of peak consumer disillusionment feels like its still a long way off. Its still 'keep shopping for tomorrow we die.' There is something built into us that needs this 'consumerist' self view. It's like an addiction, a drug that is literally self consuming. What would people be if they were not a consumer? Would an existential void opening up, into which we might all psychologically collapse?  That and civilisation with it.

CARROT REVIEW  - 7/8

Available to stream on Netflix

WATCHED - On Awe Of Beauty - A Reflection on Life Video.

This is such a moving video, of a woman who has such a tender sense of both the beauty and the fragility of her life. Born in part out of the loss of her young son. She talks about starting a gratitude journal in order to appreciate her life more, and the need in later life to prioritise what you focus your attention and love upon. So, needless to say, it spoke to me.

WATCHED - Watcher

In our Upper Sheringham household we are having a spontaneous Miaka Munroe film season. Having seen her in the films Longlegs, then Tau, and this bleakly filmed wonder Watcher all within a week of each other.

Munroe plays a woman Julia who comes to Bucharest because her husband Francis (Karl Glusman) has a new job taking him home to Romania. She feels like a spare part. With little to do but wander the streets and lounge around the flat, she stares out of its wide picture windows. Opposite is a grey rain stained apartment block, where she notices a figure always standing seemingly looking at her. Her husband treats her fear of being watched, as if this were an entirely female neurosis best not given much credence. But there is a serial killer out there, who is decapitating their victims. So is it not unreasonable for her to be fearful?

There is not a huge amount of dialogue in this film. You are frequently shown only Munroe's face and it's growing unease and distress. This imagery is surrounded by a soundtrack acoustic that amplifies any trace of ambient sound around her, with a consequent heightening effect of something ill defined and sinister broaching. The most static of camera shots will be panning in or zooming out, ever so slowly. Building tension into apparently the most innocent of scenes. The director, Chloe Okuno, skilfully composes these taught frightening senario out of such very simple elements. Sparseness in this movie is it's most effectively utilised quality.

Munroe's ability to dial down her acting, as was most evident in Longlegs, means when she does break into a fury, when her husband admits he can no longer indulge in believing her, it is all the more alarming. Burn Gorman as the killer, finally gets to play a full on twisted murderer, rather than the nerdy or neurotic genius scientist. 

The Watcher is a masterclass in how to subtly create unease and suspense. It also beautifully exploits that classic wavering uncertainty of - is she mad, deluded or really being persued by a mass murderer? Compelling stuff. I highly recommend this. It's a cut above some of the so called 'smart' horror movies around.

CARROT REVIEW  - 7/8

Available to stream on Netflix

MY OWN WALKING - 2nd Journal November 2024

Along with better health and mobility, comes a more changeable mood. I have recently had moments of despondency, and the unhelpful dwelling on thereof. This has reoccurred in the last few weeks since the information about being pre-diabetic. On the surface a relatively minor thing, but it's somehow got to me in a way the HA! never did. Is there anything else where my body is out of whack I need to know about? I'm tired with cossetting my body into behaving better, like its this petulant self destructive child.

Though I can, and do, respond in positive ways, making lifestyle and dietary changes, these do not alter the fact that this body of mine's health and functioning has deteriorated. And that deterioration, in the longer term, I can can do very very little about. It goes with the territory of being mortal. So am I just indulging in feeling helplessly morose about all this? Is this self pitying worth the time that I give it? Or is it that the whole subject of our own demise is something we must allow ourselves to be in touch with and allow ourselves to grieve for.

A deeper recognition of the finite nature of life, has made time and what I do with it, feel increasingly a valuable priceless thing. One not to be squandered, wasted on fripperies, or focused on things that seem neither important nor life enhancing. What to make of my retirement, of the time I have left before I no longer have the capacity to care one way or another? It appears the more anxious and tightly I hold on to counting the beats of time, the more life itself slips through these expectant fingers of mine. 

When another day passes without achieving much, with little but the practicalities of my health dealt with. I question myself whether I'm making the most of my days. My mood becomes bleaker and more overshadowed. Indeed, there ought to be more time for artistic endeavours, but that seems to either fritter itself away in my hands or find I'm never in the mood for it. Despite the best laid plans. I have to acknowledge, it has forever been thus. I've often been found running scared of my own artistic self expression.

It may be beneficial to reflect on how things are, or have been. Though if you are looking positively forward, however provisionally, at some point you need to act, to make changes, or life will only serve up more of the same. Things feel worse because of all the perceived dilly dallying. As soon as I actually put ideas to paper, any mood or trough of despond immediately lifts.

Looking back at life, I catch the drift of its achievements, it's joys, its best bits, its mistakes, its missed opportunities, the significant ommissions. Why did I do that and not this? I inherited through my upbringing a primarily practical focus to life. To deal with these before anything else, be self motivated, keep yourself afloat. If I have any regrets it's that I often let practical considerations continually overrule the more spontaneous artistic desires for self expression I had. I repeatedly let that part of my character down. Quite often because I felt the risk, I felt scared of failure, of the bottom being knocked out of my misplaced confidence.

Not providing creative urges with sufficient time or expression, is a type of self betrayal. In those moment of despondency I'm put in touch with the rubbed raw emotional cost of that. Though it bears the bruises, self betrayal will always hit back. After all, it's been kept isolated in a locked room for months on end, its in a stroppy mood. How else could it respond? Wouldn't you be depressed?

Without an artistic project on the go of some sort I do overtime become like a dried out leaf, curled up and brittle. My soul shriveling up inside. That I am only partially retired, has its benefits and it's demerits with regard to keeping busy and engaged. There is theoretically more time for artistic pursuits, but it is just as easy to let my days be consumed by the practical day to day concerns as it was when I worked full time. The demands of the intray that never quite gets empty enough for artistic self expression to find space.

I used to think when I retired then there would be all time in the world. Then I could devote time to all the things I love doing but rarely found the time for. Say not so sir. Retirement is not a time to reinvent yourself in, but to be more generously kind towards what has become hardwired in you, there are always limits, there are still external constraints. The range of what is possible, may no longer have the breadth and scope of ones youth. But, nonetheless, you work with whatever you find there is. And there is also the need to pare back what you expect yourself to do. Without the constraints of daily work there really should be time for being more fully soulful.

I find the need to step back, to hold even creativity lightly. If I want it to be always stunningly successful then I have not understand the territory I am in. You have to be open to it failing to launch, to create an absolute mess. Sometimes the creative ideas you have will be rubbish ones, and this will be revealed only at the precise moment you put paint to paper. One's artistic imagination is a beautifully pure thing only when its left unsullied by contact with the reality of expression. Creativity at its best, is to enjoy the encounters with the unexpected surprises and modes of expression. To take all the delight you can in giving them an earthly form. Withholding from engaging with this, has never been a choice that has ever been consequence free. You just have to do it and find out if it will float or sink this time. Its a rare artist who doesn't have a phase where everything turns out crap. And if they say they don't, then check their dustbins or fire grates..

Whilst I say this to myself, and oh how drearily familiar it all is, I often wonder whether I'm really listening. In the past, these difficult conflicted turbulence's in my responses to being creative, led to a view that maybe it would be better for all concerned if I left them entirely alone. Not touch them with a barge pole. That perhaps I'd be more content with myself and life, if I never allowed my imagination to go anywhere near being expressed. It was as though by refraining from touching an old sore, it all would heal up. Such are the sort of delusions I've sometimes chosen to live by.

FINISHED READING - Dead End Memories by Banana Yoshimoto

Dead End Memories is a group of short stories which on the surface appear to have no linking theme. But once you are engrossed in the world Yoshimoto conjures, there are clearly repeated tones of regret, lost love, betrayal and relationships that literally do come to a dead end.

There is the ongoing search for a compatible love. Unresolved or unfound love that can have no closure. Love of a person who once seemed ideal, who's now proved themselves clumsily, cruelly fallable. Some times love reaches a dead end, and yet though dead, the relationship lingers on in an emotionally tricky inability to disentangle the good from the bad memories.

The opening story has a man who lives in the house of his grandparents, though they continue to exist there as mute ghosts. The dead couple are the spectral embodiment of a Japanese romantic ideal. One the young lovers initially react against. Each feels the obligation to continue with the family business. Do they break away or go with the momentum of that legacy?

There is a simple beauty in all these stories. Sometimes wistful, sometimes more aggrieved. The titular story Dead End Memories finds a woman talking about her relationship with Takanashi. A relationship that slowly evaporates without her ever realising it was finished. There's a lot of unresolved business that she tries to process through her conversations with Nishiyama, who she works with. There is admiration between these two, and the hint of more should they both wish to persue it.

Yoshimoto's signature themes of the difficulty of finding and keeping love, of things left unsaid, all are here given poignant focus in her uniquely sparse yet touchingly effective writing style.

CARROT REVIEW  - 6/8

SCREEN SHOT - Rebel Moon Parts 1 & 2

It begins in a simple homestead village on the moon Veldt. Looking like somewhere between 1930's Kansas and Tolkien's Shire. Nasty men in tyrannically tight boots turn up in a spaceship, demanding a percentage of the villages corn. Kora, who has lived in the village for two years, unbeknownst to the villagers can kick ass with the best of them. Along with Gunner from the village she sets off to put together an elite team. One that can defend the village from the authoritarian space gents in neat uniforms.

This is a not an unfamiliar story line, essentially a direct steal from Kurosawa's epic Seven Samurai. Throw in the gothic steam punk styling of David Lynch's Dune, the throbbing blazing swords of Star Wars via Chinese martial arts and there you have it. A veritable smorgasbord of references to chew on. and find hard to digest.

Zack Snyder never knowingly under cooks his films. So Part One clocks in at two hours, with a three hour Directors Cut if you could bare it. Part Two is two hours, or two and a half when uncut. The thing is longer is not what you really needed here. Snyder appears to not understand less can be more. Because in his book, more requires MORE but with huge roaring exclamation marks MORE!!!!  What happens in the directors cuts? There is just grotesque amounts of bloody violence, and if there is a suggestion of a sexual encounter in the cut version, in the uncut it gets explicitly raunchy, apparently. So he didn't edit out the subtle more nuanced bits after all.

As it stands Part One just about holds its own as a film. It's quite a passable, if very derivative, science fiction romp. Part Two could realistically be over in an hour and a half. But it decides to luxuriate in its first hour with scenes of folksy tweeness and soul searching. Followed by an hours worth of the battle for the village which just goes on and on and on and on. The thing is, that the battle is directed at only one pace, which is intensely furious, so after half an hour you are utterly exhausted with it. You remove your active emotional engagement and endure its constant overreaching for meaning with a stoical heart. Light and shade here is a basic description of a lamp stand. 

CARROT REVIEW - 4/8

WATCHED - Grounded In Realness - A Reflections on Life Video

I recent came across this, I think South African based film makers Justine and Micheal. They run a video company called Reflections on Life. They edit fifteen to twenty minute vignettes, that each presents an insight into an alternative lifestyle or the thoughts of a person who has a particularly unique or notably thoughtful outlook on life. I have found many of them have spoken to me deeply, which I've really appreciated. I'm going to repost a short selection of them here. But you can find a whole lot more on their You Tube site.

This one, Grounded In Realness, features a guy who found during Covid lockdown that he loved the simpler life it brought him, that he has made a huge effort to continue its more contemplative slower paced nature afterwards.

WATCHED - Then I Will Kill You

We binge watched the four episodes of Then I Will Kill You on ITVX in one evening. I don't necessarily recommend that, as it is a tough watch. But this is the sort of drama where once you're launched into it you really do have to see it through. So be prepared. That this is based on a true story is deeply shocking. What one woman is put through first by her psycopathic partner and then by the insensitivity and inept handling of the criminal justice system. Well, that beggars belief.

Delia Barmer is a self confessed ' free spirit'. Independently minded, who loves travelling. She lives her life how she wants, she speaks her mind plainly. She comes across as a bit of an odd ball, that others tend to ridicule or snigger at. But underneath it all she has kind caring instincts.

In a pub, after work one evening, she meets John Sweeney for the first time. For a while their relationship progresses well. She asks him to move in with her. Over the four years they are together, it becomes clear Sweeney is not entirely right in the head. And this only gets worse when, out of sheer exasperation, she asks him repeatedly to move out. I won't detail how he responds, just watch the first two episodes it's all there.

Delia Barmer, as played by Anna Maxwell Martin is a complex individual, not always likeable, but always relatable. It's a powerhouse of a performance, for which I would not be at all surprised if awards come her way. Ably supported by Shaun Evans as John Sweeney, the initially charming rogue, with a dark side. With few hints where his twisted pathology comes from. Something previously has fucked him up mentally, we know not what.

The second half of Then I Will Kill You takes you into the criminal justice system. One that Delia is forced to comply with, but repeatedly fails her. She does not want to play the victim, she just wants justice and then to be allowed to move on. Her endurance of how the system then treats her and catastrophically fails her, is if anything more painful to watch. A compelling gutsy piece of drama, that leaves you dwelling on it afterwards.

CARROT REVIEW  -8/8

SCREEN SHOT - Shadow in the Cloud

Shadow in the Cloud is a late World War 2 drama set around the Japanese conflict. It crow bars into it the idea of real gremlins sabotaging the airforce. It is clearly conceived as a vehicle for Chloe Grace Moretz, who ably holds the thing together emotionally and in its action sequences.

It's another example of contemporary film making that attempts to turn the tables on your expectations of what a female led drama can be. Whereas war films would once have beeen well written with heroically competent male characters with the female parts, if there are any at all, grossly underwritten clichés, mere ciphers of femininity. This film lazily swaps those gender tropes around, with a heroically competent central female character surrounded by a group of thinly written masculine caricatures. Male bimbos all, who are hopelessly inadequate.This makes it just as insulting and untruthful as it's misogynistic predecessors.

Despite it being tautly filmed and well acted, the essential incongruity of its essential premises drags it down. It's also unable to really get behind the many things it appears to want to be. Is it a World War 2 drama, a feminist subversion of role expectations or a comic book war fantasy?  Never entirely succeeding in being any of them.

All of which feels a bit of a shame, as Moretz does more than demonstrate she has the acting chops to hold this patently ludicrous film scenario together. Let's hope no one thinks this worthy of a sequel. But as it was produced by the Fast & Furious franchise, that maybe a faint hope.

CARROT REVIEW  - 3/8

FINISHED READING - Space Crone by Ursula K Le Guin

As much as you might greatly admire a writer and their work, this doesn't mean everything they've ever written is brilliant, nor essential reading. This is particularly so when the book you are reading is a publisher's edited compilation of essays, short stories, articles, public talks and incomplete ruminations. The sense that they are mopping up the tad ends of their stash of Le Guin's output cannot be avoided.

Much of what is contained within Space Crone tells you little that appears fresh or enlightening, in the sense of blowing the dust of a topic. The short stories are largely insubstantial ones. The essays, articles and talks are mostly explorations of the differing constraints, biases and prejudices at play in science fiction, in the assessment of women writers. That a lot of these issues still feel prescient is a statement in itself. Though I could not escape the feeing that some were quite dated in content or style. Mainly because the arguements, though true, are now well trodden ones and have not been that effective.. Though these do chronicle Le Guin's own contribution and exploration of the pressures and prejudices applied to, or felt by, female writers. Cutting edge feminism these no longer are.

Another thing these post death assembled books cannot escape is the lack of a clear overarching theme to link them together. Due entirely to them never being never thought of as likely bedmates. So the subject matter and accompanying tonal shifts here can be jarring. Even though they have the mind and imagination of Le Guin in common, they were conceived to be read or heard in widely different contexts. How you speak upon any subject matter can vary depending who you are speaking too. Talks are delivered to specific gatherings of people, for whom the talk was formed to be heard by, and hence with a distinct purpose in mind.

 

So, this book was a disappointment. I became particularly vexed by my desire to skip things, which gathered in intensity and pace as I progressed.

CARROT REVIEW  - 2/8