SHERINGHAM DIARY No 85 - Fishing From The Remembrance Pond

Whilst at an outdoor food fair in Cromer ( it was excellent by the way, Yeh,! Second PokeNom in two weeks )  I came across a stall selling fancy food products for dogs with the great name of - Dog Only Nose

Saturday 27th May
Another weekend, another Bank Holiday. This week has more than usual, been emotionally a tough one. Both of us mentally tense, perhaps over sensitive, low in morale. I do wonder quite what state we'll be in by the end of the 2023 Summer season. As we move deeper into it, we work more days a week. Moving from five to six to seven. The latter starting in mid July and ending in mid Sept with the ridiculous pantomime that is The 1940's Weekend. From then it goes into rapid reverse moving from seven to six back to five days in short measure.

After that rather emotionally stressful week we've been talking about a short holiday before the peak season begins. This would not be great timing shop wise. There is an inbuilt tyranny to running a shop dependent on maximising sales in the summer. Would it be better to wait til Sept/Oct for our holiday is a genuine question? We haven't been able to afford a holiday for two years now. We've arranged to take money out of my pension pot simply in order to enable that to happen sometime this year. 

Oh, yeah, there is my pension. This begins to kick in from the end of June. Potentially, at least, this maybe be a game changer with regard to the shops viability. Moving us from just about scraping breaking even to ideally making money we put back into our bank account. We must wait and see how the reality pans out. With the government thinking that an itsy bitsy recession might be a price worth paying, if it stops inflationary profiteering in our food manufacturers and providers. Who knows where we will be by the Autumn? There is an argument to be made, to wait and see what circumstances have arisen. A holiday away from it all might needed should we be reconsidering our future direction by then.

Sunday 28th May
Now the miniature shrine for Our Lady of Walsingham is finished. I've set too on a larger scale shrine building project. When we recently re-organised the craft room it involved dismantling the shrine I had in there. So this has meant a major rethink. I've designed and started the construction of a shrine base to slip over a storage heater that we never use. It feels as though I've come full circle. This has echoes of my very first shrine, which I perched decorously on top of a lavatory cistern. Maybe I should have seen this as a portent. Beginning my meditative career with any spiritual merit I'd earned, literally going down the pan. 

Its worthy of note, that I've found immense amounts of enthusiasm and satisfaction from my shrine building. Something I've not experienced with craft making in quite some time. As was ever so, I cannot give this project sufficient time. But it is, nonetheless, making steady progress. As I complete a stage, what I'd like it to look like by the end keeps developing. I am hoping engaging with the making of this shrine may also help in reconnecting me with a daily meditation practice. This ceased about six months ago with no drama, in fact pretty much no fanfare at all. And considering how tricky my mental states have been lately, perhaps a rapprochement in that unforced separation, requires effort.

I've begun reading a Haruki Murakami novel - 1Q84. Originally published in Japan in three parts, I'm reading it in a trilogy compendium volume of over nine hundred pages. It does, as you can imagine require some heft. It is truly an unweildy book even in paperback. It was Hubby's originally, but he found it hard to complete as a novel. Getting eighty pages from completion before exasperation set in. Currently I'm about two hundred pages in and still enjoying it. But physically it is not a comfortable book to hold when reading. Its not for nothing I refer to it as 'The Brick'.

Having completed the Nico biography, I had a resurgence of interest in her distinctly sombre oeuvre. I once possesed a vinyl copy of her album The End. I think it fell prey to one evening in the 1980's which I spent with friends cathartically smashing my vinyl LP collection into tiny bits with hammers. I think at the time I was into purging my record collection of music I thought aberrant at the time. How my views have changed. From my view today, The End does have an apocalyptic sonic magnificence to it. But, do not listen to it if you are a bedsitter depressive, it will not at all help in cheering you up. It possess a form of beauty best appreciated briefly when you need to touch the depths a little, but not stay there long enough to drown.

Monday 29th May
In complete contrast to Nico's joyless, but no doubt cathartic, dwelling on tragedy and loss,  Sparks have released a new album this weekend. I'll review it more fully at a later date. But a couple of listens through confirms it to be rather an exceptional one. The usual bright, witty, innovative songs, yet with quite a strong undertow of poignancy conjured up quite often out of sparse lyrical details.

This May Bank Holiday, the weather has cooled and clouded over. The chilly breeze, after a day or so of respite, has returned to slice the edge off any warmth. Takings so far have been muted, but OK.  Its also half term in the coming week. So if you are a holidaymaker you still have a few days left yet to eek your meagre funds over. There are a lot of folk here, but there's a cautiousness in the air, you can almost smell it. 

Wednesday 31st May

It's proved to be rather a good end of the month trading for us. May is 10% up on last year, very nearly back to our best May's takings in 2021. The additional Coronation Bank Holiday obviously helped, but I think we've also got a good range of stock at the right price point. The average spend going down by 13% whilst the number of sales increased by 26%. Which means we are broadly getting more sales of smaller value items. In the current economic climate I think this should probably be called an achievement. We'd do well to remember this in future moments when resilience begins to flag.

GNOSTIC OPTICS - The Creativity Of Your Self

'I am the one who conceals and then reveals your Self
But when you conceal your Self, I shall appear.
When you appear I'll hide.
Hold me to your Self from comprehension and regret.
Take me to your Self in ugly and ruined places.
Rob those who are good, even in their ugliness.
Ashamed, take me to your Self shamelessly;
scold my organs in yourself.

Advance, all that know me and my organs
establish high creatures amongst the lowly.
March onto childhood; don't hate that state
because it appears tiny.
Don't reject greatness in smallness.
My nature is peace; but war comes from me.
I am an exile and a subject;
I am substance and unsubstantial.

Those who do not cling to me are ignoramuses,
but those who dwell in my substance know me.
Those who are close do not know me.
When you are near I am distant.
On the day you are distant I am close.
I am within, in your heart;
I am your true nature,
the creativity of your Self.'

Taken from the chapter Thunder, The Gnostic Gospels
Translated by Alan Jacobs
Published by Watkins Media Ltd 2006

PEACEFUL PROTEST - Slogan No 7

 Apparently........

Documentary

Footage

Unearthed
Of

Unknown
Peaceful
Protest
Twenty
Years
Later

THE BEST BEFORE DATE - 1980 - The Friend Catcher by The Birthday Party

I appear to be mining my love for heavily feedbacked guitar with some recent posts in this series. Here is another one, this time from The Birthday Party's debut album - Hee Haw. Though the Birthday Party came to prominence in the post punk era, they were only loosely related to that. They certainly took some of its desire to explore the boundless musical extremities, similar to The Pop Group. Despite Nick Cave's youthful exploration of dissolute histrionics, he is also exploring the quirks of a number of his own literary interests. His liking for drawing dark, twisted folklorish characters in his songs is exemplified here in The Friend Catcher. Musically The Birthday Party had few references to traditional rock, preferring to amplify a perverted mix of fairground, music hall and nursery rhymes. Everything turned up to a high volume of unsettling weirdness.

You can see the stylistic trajectory of Nick Cave's early career stretching out from this one track. Blessed as he was with a talented band of fellow musical brothers on the fringes. Tracy Pew on bass, given to consuming alcohol and drugs to the excess, who would to die six years on from this moment. There is Roland S Howard owner of the wild despairing guitar sound. Leaving the band before they morphed into the Bad Seeds. Died at the age of 50 from chronic Hepatitis C. Leaving only Cave and Mick Harvey from that band. Cave appears always to need a close musical collaborator and Harvey provided that for a long time. Caves dominant creative urgency and drive is, I imagine, a satisfying wave to ride with for a while. Aligning your own momentum to it. But it might also cramp or suffocate one's own.

She, by my chinny chin.chin.
Eee-oh Eee-oh
Like a zippo smokes the way
Hope, around
You and your lungs and your wrists
They throb like trains
Choo choo choose
It's a prison of sound
I poke around...

Whatever this is all about, it doesn't come across as remotely healthy. Painting a heightened picture of the darker side of humanity. A malign gothic gremlin emerging from the shadow side of our murky collective psyche.

 

FILM CLUB - The Battle of the River Plate

The Powell & Pressburger Season - 1956

During the early years of their professional partnership, Powell and Pressburger between them created a style of war film making that felt like 'cinema verite' even though it wasn't.  One Of Our Aircraft Is Missing was one such film, Frequently they used an actual event as the basis for it eg Ill Met By Moonlight. With The Battle of the River Plate they were using accounts of a pivotal incident in World War 2, and reconstructing in film a version that presents it as though it were a page by page reenactment. This is not a constructed drama with an essentially made up storyline. This is what happened. Their role in the making of this film, is to extract the drama from that event, and not build in some sort of artificial highly romanticised facsimile.

The film revolves around the activity of The Graf Spee, a German 'pocket' battleship which had gone to ground. Emerging to trap, capture and destroy cargo vessels bringing much needed supplies to the UK. Captain Longsdorf ( Peter Finch ) the German commander, is not at all your classic Nazi baddie, he's actually quite kind and understanding, a bit of a gentleman. Treating his captured crews with such dignity and respect that they hold him in high regard. But he has a job to do, to blow up supply vessels, so the Allies have to put a stop to his activity. The ships The Ajax, Achilles and Exeter, lead by Commodore Harwood ( Anthoy Quayle ) are the first to catch up with the Graf Spee and engage it in battle. The Exeter becomes severely damaged and is forced to retreat to the Falkland Islands. 

The Graf Spee limping away to Montevideo for repairs. Uruguay as a neutral country, permits the German pocket battleship only to stay for a couple of days for basic repairs. If it were to stay any longer the ship will be impounded. The British need her to stay, for the longer she remains in dock the more Allied ships will be arriving in the vicinity. When the deadline arrives, what will the Graf Spee do - make a run for it - engage in a suicidal confrontation? In the end Captain Longsdorf, realising he is facing a no win situation, takes his ship out of harbour, evacuates his crew and destroys the ship. 

The Battle of the River Plate is filmed in glorious technicolour that is beautifully sharp and so clean edged. As ever, Powell and Pressburger find a subject matter that suits their desire to subtly subvert your expectations. Yes, the battle sequences have guns, explosions and heroic endeavour, but this has a much grittier and slower paced realism than that. A real battle at sea being as much about the tactics and skills in out maneuvering. Getting as close as you can, without grievously endangering your own ship. The actual conflict and conflagrations are these brief intense clashes. The character of Capt Longsdorf is allowed to have some nobility and an ability to self sacrifice. He cares about the well being of his men, almost above and beyond the act of winning a sea battle. Ten years after the end of the war, it feels odd that in their last two films they returned to wartime subject matter. Perhaps they felt they could extract more from it, now they were in peacetime. But it is an odd trajectory to take after the richly colourful imaginatve films they'd produced during the forties. Maybe this was a sign that the partnership was beginning to run out of steam.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

CAVE NOTES - An Imperiled Life

 

'Each life is precarious,
and some of us understand it and some don't.
But certainly everyone
will understand it in time.
And because of that,
I feel a kind of empathy with people
that I never felt before.
It feels urgent and new and fundamental.
For the predicament
we have all found ourselves in
- the predicament of an imperiled life.'

Taken from Faith, Hope & Carnage
a series of conversations between Nick Cave & Sean O'Hagan
Published by Canongate.

PEACEFUL PROTEST - Slogan No 6

 Apparently..........

The
Shocking
Truth
Of
A
Peaceful
Protest
That
Upset
No
One

FAVE RAVE - Annika

 At the beginning of every episode Annika ( Nicola Walker ) will speak into camera confidingly, usually about a subject, so far its been Captain Ahab, the Valkyre and Ibsen. And somewhere in the middle of this ramble through mythology or drama will emerge a theme to the crime she will be investigating this time. The 'to camera' confessional continue throughout each episode,as she ruminates about ideally the best things she could do to better support her daughter Morgan, just before she ploughs into it with all the subtlety of a bulldozer. The dialogue is snappy, constantly full of these little verbal quips and literary witticisms. Combined with a really solid crime drama I just love this show.

I also renew my love and devotion to the work of Nicola Walker. An actress who is just the bees knees as far as I'm concerned, I can't see anyone else doing what she does with the character of Annika. Its magical to behold, able to emotionally turn on the head of a pin, with just an intake of breath, or a sly look. Its a masterclass in how to break up phrasing and silences within sentences to tell you so much more than what she is often speaking. She is supported by a very solid crew of actors in the background, including the inestimable Kate Dikie, who so far has only had about five minutes screen time but has already communicated that Annika's boss, is a bit of a stern mischievous minx. Think Michelle Gomez in Green Wing. 

All six episodes available on BBC I Player

GNOSTIC OPTICS - Unfathomable Silence

' I am the unfathomable silence
and the thought that comes often,
the voice of many sounds,
and the word that appears frequently.'

Taken from the chapter - Thunder, The Gnostic Gospels
Translated by Alan Jacobs
Published by Watkins Media Ltd 2006

FILM CLUB - Ill Met By Moonlight

 Powell & Pressburger Season - 1957

Almost as though they were wishing to complete the circle, Powell & Pressburger returned to making wartime themed movies, having had great critical and commercial success with The Battle of the River Plate. Ill Met By Moonlight was there last movie working together, under a one off contract with the Rank Organisation. Difficulties over the script, with that contract with Rank itself, brought out tensions in their collaboration. Dissolving their Archers working partnership quite amicably. And so came to an end a golden era for British film making of over twenty years and as many films. They briefly reunited in 1966 and 1972 to make two films, but the magic in how they worked together had gone.

Powell had very little good to say about Ill Met By Moonlight, he didn't like the script, he didn't like the casting, he didn't even like his own direction. And for an Archers movie it is a little lack lustre, and tends to turn real life events into a bit of a cliched Boy's Own adventure yarn. The Cretan population become these overly jovial backslapping, heroic cheering eccentric peasant caricatures. Its based on a book by W Stanley Moss of wartime activities in Crete that he was part of.  Patrick Leigh Fermer (Dirk Bogarde) is in charge of a daring plan to kidnap General Kreipe (Marius Goring ) and export him to Egypt. Quite why they need to do this I don't remember being fully explained.

Patrick Leigh Fermer was renowned for his charismatic leadership skills and courageousness. Whilst Bogarde is as always a captivating screen presence, there is an essential lack of rough physicality to him that means the part feels ill-fitting. Goring's portrayal of Kreipe has all the wily bosh cunning one might expect him to have, his acting dominating the screen every time he is given the opportunity. The easy naturalism of Bogarde's performance style when it meets Goring's more broadly sketched character is one example of how the film has an uneasy inconsistency of tone. 

Powell, as ever makes great dramatic use of his setting, the spectacular panoramas of the mountainous landscape of Crete. Its a definite choice to film in black and white, not just an economic one. It lends a wartime period quality to it. As most of the action takes place under moonlight, black and white brings starker and more atmospheric qualities, which colour would only have distracted you from. The controversies and tensions surrounding this production appear to have unsettled the usual sure footed nature of their working ethos and method. Its not a bad film, but not great one either. I'm sure, if they'd had the choice they'd have wanted to go out on a slightly better film than this. Ill Met By Moonlight is very middling and uncharacteristic of a Powell and Pressburger movie.

CARROT REVIEW - 4/8

PEACEFUL PROTEST - Slogan No 5

 Apparently......

Peaceful
Protest 
Permitted
Because
They
All
Had
Really
Tidy
Hair

QUOTATION MARKS - Nico versus The Whole World

'Jim Morrison tells me
that people are looking at the streets,
while I am looking at the moon.
I do not feel connected enough with the issues
to throw stones at a policeman.
I want to throw stones at the whole world.'

Nico

THE BEST BEFORE DATE - 1974 - You Forget To Answer by Nico

In 1974 Nico found herself on the same record label as friend and former Velvet Underground member John Cale, who'd produced and played on earlier albums. Together they performed a concert at London's Rainbow Theatre, along with Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera and Kevin Ayers. Edited down it made the album titled - June 1 1974. This was the album that introduced me to Nico's distinctly enigmatic, melancholic music. She only sang one song on the June 1 !974 album, a rather daring nine minute plus version of The Doors song The End.  Eno, Manzenera and Cale were all subsequently to appear on her fourth album The End later that year. You Forget To Answer is from that LP.

Nico, John Cale & Brian Eno 1974

Listened to now that album is remarkable for its emotional range and musical versatility. Previous Nico albums tended to sound quite dourly uniform, with just Nico, on her harmonium, and sparse musical accompaniment. Here the music has more of an expansive breadth, almost a lushness to it, whilst still remaining intrinsically a romantically bleak view of the world. Its brim full of her sadness and references to Nico's life and loves. There is real pain here, and I find You Forget To Answer is particularly touching. At this time she was in the middle of ten years in a rather dependent, and occasionally abusive relationship, with the French avant garde film maker Phillipe Garrel. When it came to falling in love, Nico knew how to pick em.

Nico & Jim Morrison

You Forget To Answer, however, concerns a much earlier besotted love affair with the late Jim Morrison. The only lover, so she said, who truly made her happy and appeared to understand her. But he was already married, and eventually returned to his wife. It was during that relationship with Morrison she'd begun her serious experimentation with drugs and resulting dependency on heroin. You Forget To Answer is about a particularly distressing memory, of her misery at having phoned Morrison and being unable to reach him, on the day that he died. The song is filled with tender longing, a sense of regret at the fate of their relationship, and how unbearable the loss of him still felt to her three years later. It is a somber yet beautiful elegy to Morrison, it encapsulates the overall musical tone and theme of the entire album - death and bereavement. It opens with a gorgeous descending synthesizer from Eno, falling in immense emotionally mournful waves. Cale's guitar plangently pulls rills and rings out across the track. Whilst Nico intones in her characteristic manner -When I remember what to say, You will know me again. And you forget to answer.  

You Forget To Answer is classic Nico, brave, open, uncompromising, morbid certainly, yet daring to go deeper. As ever, The End received a mixed reception. The mostly male music reviewers being pretty negative, essentially hanging their misogyny on her and effectively saying - cheer up love, get off the smack and get a life - oh, and maybe stop making this dreary music while you at it.. Which sort of entirely misses the point of the album really. She was, unbeknownst to her, preparing the way for a whole host of adventurous female artists as diverse as Patti Smith, Bjork, Karin Dreijer and Anna Von Hassewolff, to follow in her wake.

FINISHED READING - You Are Beautiful & You Are Alone by Jennifer Otter Bickerdike

 A Biography of Nico

You Are Beautiful & You Are Alone, is a line drawn from a Nico song, self revealing as her songs often were. It's an existential metaphor for Nico's whole life. If Jennifer Otter Bickerdike has one aim in this biography its to salvage the real Nico from being permanently buried beneath her own self constructed mystique. Christa Paffgen turned herself into the Nico persona, early on in her life. That name Nico protected her, but also imprisoned. Becoming this coldly aloof presence, that she could hide all her pain beneath.

Nico fought her whole life to be taken seriously as a genuinely creative artist, often having to deal with being ridiculed. Reduced to a figure of fun, someone regularly chastised and lampooned in the music papers  In her time she was hardly taken at all seriously. If you listen to her albums however, these are not easy pieces of music to listen to. These are seriously challenging pieces of music, sometimes mesmeric. They're uncomfortable, they don't sit easily on the ears. They provoke a visceral internal response that often turns into abject rejection, because they are so distinct, so hard to accept. You could never have Nico's music played as aural wallpaper.

She suffered, as many beautiful women do, from being primarily judged on her external appearance. It was true, she was a stunning looking woman who attracted huge amounts of attention simply by entering a room. But not just because of her self evident beauty, but because there was a sense that here was a person in full self possession of who she was. Her early adult life as a successful model set the template for how she would be viewed for most of her life, Much as she hated it, she was often reduced to exploiting it simply to survive. She understood all too well what the world thought her USP's were, however self betraying it felt to use them.

Her scene stealing appearance in Fellini's La Dolce Vita, gave her the idea she might have a career as an actor. This helped eventually to extricate herself from a soulless dissatisfying  modelling career. Ending up in New York, she became one of a succession of female Superstar's in Warhol's art films. Warhol proved to be only one of the many men she allowed to steal agency over the direction of her life. Once Warhol adopted The Velvet Underground as his house band he announced that they needed a more charismatic lead singer upfront than Lou Reed, and proceeded to crow bar Nico into the band. Never a welcome move with the band, as you can imagine. It is discomforting to note, that even in 1996 when the The Velvet Underground were installed into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame, no mention was made of Nico, of her ever having been part of the band. But by then she was dead and easily cut out of the story. Had she been alive she'd have stormed the stage demanding her place be acknowledged. Her exclusion being nothing short of inexcusable and retrospectively vindictive.

Nico's deep, mordant vocal style on those very few tracks she sang on the first Velvet's album, became so captivating and iconic. Filled as they are by the qualities of her voice with its shadowy languorous tone, as though lost in mournfulness and existential melancholy. Lou Reed may not have liked giving her his songs, but she made something of them he was incapable of. Her life was dominated, and so frequently exploited, by the men in her life who were supposed to be her lovers or friends. The only man who comes out of this with even a morsel of respect left is John Cale.

Her self penned songs are weighty affairs, often given titles that bear down on you with the immensity of their portentousness - Frozen Warnings - Janitor of Lunacy - Fearfully in Danger. Nico in later life struck this truculently defiant yet very sad figure, striding around 1980's Manchester. Being feted by all these young bands who owed her so much. Her influence continues to this day, clearing the space for the music of Bjork and Anna Von Hasselwolff.

That brief time of legendary musical involvement in The Velvet Underground was something she was forced to live off in later life. Endlessly touring to fund her heroin habit. making the occasional album, both often to a critical pasting. Rarely to be invited back. This became her travail. Moving around the world to perform, carrying just the travel bag she kept all her possessions in and her trusty harmonium. The persistent pain of her separation from Ari, her son. and that Alain Delon his Father wouldn't acknowledge paternity of. All of these are covered in quite forensic detail by Bickerdike. She pushes at the stories and the myths surrounding Nico, searching for the truth about notorious incidents. She gets multiple views in an attempt to excavate what really might have happened. Nothing is ever as it first appears. 

Some of what Nico does, can on the surface seem reprehensible, encouraging her own son's heroin habit, the wildly erratic behaviour, the rudeness, the insults, the racial slurs. Most of them Bickerdike places at the door of a lonely, permanently stressed out woman. The unrepresentative behaviour of decades spent as a heroin addict. The actions of a woman attempting to speak directly, plainly and uncensored in order to be true to herself. A woman whose darkly tragic family upbringing in the latter years of the Nazi era, haunted everything she subsequently did. Right up until she died at the age of 49, just when she felt finally free of drugs, men, and opprobrium. Always to be beautiful, yet always to be alone.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8