WATCHED - Bo Burnham - Inside

I'd not come across him myself till this popped up on my radar via a Guardian review. The set up here is that he's working on a new show, as something to do whilst in lockdown. But as the lockdown goes on and on all his own personal demons come out of the woodwork, creeping into his songs, poems and monologues. 

Much of Inside captures something of the particular flavour of personal distress many have encountered during the pandemic. If you tend to deal with your problems by getting out of your head, sensory hedonism, or simply just going out. Then being forced to stay in and not meeting folk one to one can become like an unwanted meeting with the Dark Lord in a side alley. 

A lot of care is taken here over the staging, so its hard to tell how much here is genuine verite footage or carefully curated artifice.  But there are times when you sense that he is really freaking out a bit here, and not in a good way. Everyone, myself included, have had moments when you wonder quite why you are putting any of this stuff out there, what personal need is this post serving? Is this healthy self expression or just indulging in a narcissistic sense of self importance?

The song White Woman On Instagram caused a bit of controversy. Pointing fun at the superficiality of whats posted on Instagram, is in a way an easy target. Particularly for a man to take the mickey out of women. Whilst the casual sexism/rascism is certainly one way to view this, it also has the ring of truth too. Otherwise the arrow would have nowhere to land, its just not one gender or race that is necessarily prone to this. I've seen universally the type of things listed in the lyrics posted on Instagram. The carefully crafted perfect image and lifestyle that influencers, celebrities and wanna bees, put out there. It is all a bit of an unreal fantasy that is being peddled.

What you get from Inside, is an performer reflecting on his own work whilst it's in progress of being made. There is a telling segment where you view one monologue to camera, that you then see him commenting on, then another version comments on the comment until the cacophony eventually drowns out everything. Burnham's humour works best when it glancingly hits the target on the head, particularly of his own internet obsessed generation. Asking if you aren't performing online then what are you?

Currently available to stream on Netflix

STREAMING FAVE RAVE - Baumgartner Restoration

My love of watching craft makers at work cannot currently be sated by The Repair Shop.  I've watched them all. I've searched further afield for my fix, eventually coming across Julian Baumgartner on You Tube. Currently I can't quite get enough of watching his working process. I am in awe.

The work demands someone who is methodical and patient. Lots of scraping away, thoughtful slow careful preparation, the time he takes over this is simply astounding. These are obviously edited videos, often speeded up filming to fit into a half hour or hours running time. Then there is the cleaning, executed in rhythmic circular motions taking off just the dirt and varnish, but no more. If it won't come off with gentle solvents, then its stronger ones, and if these are ineffective then he scratches the residual old varnish off bit by tiny bit with a scalpel. All of these processes cannot be hurried and may take hours and hours and hours.

All the while he's not getting into a flap. His tables, unlike mine, never get messy or disorganised. He makes sure he takes regular breaks from the tediousness of some tasks. He knows how to look after his mental health. Loves the restoration part but is used to delaying his gratification sometimes for days. Then there are the decisions he has to make about what he is or isn't going to conserve, how far he is going to take his restoration, what his client wants and what he can deliver.

Here is one just so you get the feeling for its fascinating minimalism. Be warned its addictive and some of his videos have several sequences to be watched.

FINISHED READING - Luckenbooth by Jenni Fagan

As this novel opens we find ourselves on a boat with a woman who has devilish horns. Its 1910 and she's heading for Edinburgh and 10, Luckenbooth Close. She's desperate, she's a surrogate mother with child, reluctantly going there to deliver it to the brutal Mr Udnam. The Close, is a ramshackle of flats in a dank dark tenement block. It inhabits the place of a central character for the entire novel.

Each Chapter heading has a different year, flat number, persons name and short introductory sentence. You move backwards and forwards in time, gradually progressing forward towards the millennium. Initially I was under a misapprehension that each chapter was a separate discrete character in a different era, and the novel a collage of the life and times of those who'd lived in 10, Luckenbooth Close. A hundred pages or so in I suddenly realised that there were now repeating characters. Oh, there is some sort of story going on? Whilst remaining a collage of tales as well? I became still more baffled when the writer William Burroughs turns up to live temporarily in one of the flats. Was there meant to be an actively meaningful link here ? The zeitgeist of this novel is seriously all over the place,I found it more than a tad confusing. Throwing your attention away with every abrupt change of character, period and continuity.

Jenni Fagan's writing style is undoubtedly fecund and fired up with imaginative possibilities. Rough and robust, with a lot of verbal energy on the page to propel the eye onward. Luckenbooth has visual power a plenty too, that could leave viral traces infecting your imagination. It has this bleak underbelly of corruption, violence, murder of the Victorian melodrama type, tinged with Gothic occultism. However, this all left me feeling disappointed, that it really ought to have been more captivating and absorbing than it was, often infuriatingly opaque rather than intriguing with its cloak of mystery. The episodic flip flopping through time causes you to wonder - where the hell are we going? and do I care anymore? Oddly, I decided quite early on that I didn't, whilst still waiting to be shown the error of my ways.

So quite a disappointing reading experience. Was it worth the effort of hauling oneself through to the end? Sadly, No.

CARROT REVIEW 3/8

LISTENING TO - For The First Time by Black Country, New Road

For The First Time - Cambridge based band Black Country, New Road's debut album emerged during the last lockdown garnering a huge amount of positive praise and hype. Mostly of 'the best new band in the world' variety, not that helpful for any band, let alone a seven piece still finding its feet. One can only hope they maintain as firm a grip on their assured sound and compositional style as is evidenced on this album. It opens with Instrumental, which is a very jaunty and upbeat track, which seriously misleads you about what will be following it. Some of this album can be a lot more unhinged and discomforting than this.

Whatever their main singer and lyricist Issac Wood is channelling, it is coming at you from a particularly obtuse angle. Whilst you may not always be able too follow the angular poeticism of his lyrical drift, you can feel what he means.  Fraught with all types of social awkwardness and angst, the world and him seem out if sync. His solipsistic preoccupation and the music behind it all do strangely fall together into a mighty and often moving force. His vocal emoting having the quality of a cracked vessel, that at any moment might completely fall apart

The music lives in its own odd little world. A realm where a klezmer style knees up can dissolve into a mournful guitar or song phrase. Move from a nostalgic feeling for an optimistic world built in the past, to a huge racket of distressed distended sounds in the present. One where Woods raucously declaims  repeatedly ' I am more than adequate, leave Kanye out of it'. This is 'Opus' a gripping ten minutes that takes you on an emotional journey into one person's despair.

On 'Science Fair' any idea that the band might lack musical balls is well and truly dispelled. Crackling along with menacing unease, as if actively following a man who is some type of unhinged stalker, living with his mum, who can only feel positive and in control of himself when he's out running. Guitar feedback, sliding strings and horns, a rumbling keyboard bring to this an out of control shamble, a drug fueled sense for his headspace and movement.

The version of 'Sunglasses' on For The First Time is an altogether more grungier affair than the EP version released a year before. It demonstrates the ongoing maturity and growing confidence of the band that they're happy to completely reformulate a previous release to better reflect the bands current approach and tone. Once again we have a frail man at the centre who only when he wears sunglasses can face and engage with the outside world 

Even the music on this album is unrepresentative of where the band is currently at, its out if date, its over a year old, being mostly recorded prior to the pandemic. Not even toured this stuff because of that. They are currently at work on completing their second album. On this splendid outing I wonder where they'll venture next. Their debut wonderfully blends elements of fire and sophistication, that whilst perhaps not yet achieving greatness, is a superb first grab at it.

CARROT REVIEW 6/8

 

ARTICLE - The Gods of Boredom

Boredom is a god bearing many faces. 

They inhabit realms we want to escape or find relief from. They hang around crossroads where a change in direction is required, a shift in the paradigm of our thinking, beliefs or feelings.

Sometimes we are living unkindly with ourselves, we have become the pain we are in. In such threadbare conditions we cannot sleep well, struggle to function, find our general engagement with life difficult. The world and ourselves becomes that little bit bleaker. No nostalgic sepia toned photographs, just starkly contrasting black and white. The state of boredom sits as this gremlin, party pooping upon our general joie de vivre.

The landscape of boredom is surrounded by bleak horizons, distracting us from seeing what is directly beneath our feet.

Boredom is a place that, paradoxically, we escape too, it diverts our attention away from even more discomforting feelings. Things not yet fully conscious. These initiate a pause in the progress of our desires, with a bardo where nothing else can happen, everything is frozen unable to move. Boredom has the quality of quicksand, the more you struggle the deeper into it you sink.  Frustrating as this may be, there is no point in being angry or pissed off with boredom. That just stokes the fires of it. Be still and let it pass in its own time.

So, in one twist of a moment, we turn around to face boredom once again. That void, always, it seems, worthy of staring deeply into from time to time. When it next happens be more curious about what lies beneath. Boredom might seem just this latest bit of sediment to settle into our conscious awareness. But once you sit with it a while you may detect an aura surrounding it. This isn't a heavenly radiance but the radioactive emanation, agitated, with the toxicity of a dark angel. For you this aura is likely to have a different ombre to mine.

Boredom languishes upon an uncomfortable old mattress sprung with pure panic. 

Now, on this occasion my lack of ease arose close to home in the retail environment of our shop. After weeks of reassuringly good trading, in mid May it all went spookily quiet, deathly quiet. Tumbleweed rolled through the frontier seaside town. My response, was inwardly to despair, as though I were awaiting the arrival of doomsday. This was surprising, because I know retail, Ive survived the closure of my own business in 1997, lived through the demise of Windhorse in 2015. Things do come to a halt, I recognise that things reach their end. Sometimes they naturally running out of energy, or the mental proliferation of purpose running ahead stops. Even in this place of seemingly greatest stagnation, movement is already impatient to be present. Though it never ever feels like that.

But that isn't what is going on here at all. These were just a quiet few days in Cottonwood Home, surrounded by weeks where sales have been more than encouraging. Later in the month, one Bank Holiday Sunday, we had our best days take since we opened two years ago. My response then, was also to panic, but this time about being unable to keep up our making to match any continuous uplift in sales. Both these panics were over reactions, unwarranted responses to an event.  Panic usually appears when we are overwhelmed by something, of a situation seemingly beyond our ability to control it.  Panic bubbles up from underground, it releases the breath of Hades, from a much deeper place than surface conditions might themselves reveal to you.

Beneath this panic of mine lay the cadaver of an old old story. This one goes - everything you attempt will inevitably fail, bound to go wrong because fate decreed this course, fundamentally there is existentially something wrong with you. Boredom disguises my panic over this view reasserting its 'truth'. A self alerting mechanism to failure being near bye, maybe in the next room. It's just waiting to open the door fully so it can walk right in and take over the proceedings. So, that is the usual scenario. Not a great script, rather repetitious and lacking in originality as a film, but frequently being re-released to a cinema near me, none the less.

Boredom is that person wandering in a desert desperate to find the direction of water. 

Our usual sense of purpose, direction and meaning comes from the intermittent, illusory notion that we can be in charge and bring whatever we want to our lives. Yet 'Who is it that is saying this?', 'where are they?' 'What planet do they live on?' Can you locate that 'me' , find its source, one you're so confident is the answer to 'who is it that is saying this?'  'Me' can be such a trickster. You know your arse exists even though you've never seen it face on. Even as we look for 'me' it becomes far too embroiled in the shifty nature of its own self regarding views to reveal where they are coming from. Its like looking for water in a desert. Us you say, they come from Us, well describe what Us is, please do? Us is essentially the homeless hobo kicking sand in your face, then running away.

Our creation stories, perform an important function. They self define, however encouraging or crippling the book category we put them under. Were you to step out of your self-definitions what would you step into - a space of meaninglessness, completely emptied of a sense of oneself?  Unlikely. Without our self views what would we spiritually be or become? Of course we over identify with what we feel, think or believe. Its impossible, perhaps even undesirable, to fully decouple ourselves from them. They are hard wired. When we simply ask 'who is it that is saying this' it is to non-plusse, not just our thinking or emotions, but our self awareness. Where 'We' can be, seems to us to be a bit of a no brainer, we believe we know, but also don't know. Recognising a self deception is important, even whilst we continue to perpetrate it 

Are we tiring of a particular version of ourselves when we become bored ?

Someone once said that in a state of confusion we are in a creative space, a place of possibilities. We all want to be different in some significant way to how we have turned out. So maybe one purpose behind asking the question 'who is it that is saying this?'is to disorient, to kick us off our usual rail track towards a more open ended way of being. Because its an open ended question, not required to even have a definitive answer. There are many answers, like many ways of being. Boredom reveals a vacant space behind the phrase 'Who is it that is saying this?'. 

Boredom is emptied of our habitual refuges. Where you travel to from there is the koan of everyday life.  Do you return to those refuges or venture out into unknown territory?

As a man now approaching his 64th birthday, the sense of my mortality forms its own particular frame to the discussion about boredom, meaning and purpose. What can the search for such things be for, when the ultimately finite nature of your life is coming into ever closer and sharper focus? Every day you start knitting a jumper you cannot be sure you'll ever get to finish. Any notion of leaving something behind as some sort of sedimentary legacy, is a self conceit - that a life working in retail matters in the greater scheme of things. Mistaking our occupation as actualisation.

Most people see their legacy, their gift to the future as their children. For myself, as a gay man, that sort of genetic legacy, surrogacy and adoption aside, is just not going to happen.  A heightened dependence upon sexual identity, career or quite often blind hedonism, are three alternative ways of filling in the blank spaces around meaning and purpose in anyone's CV.  Self indulgence in such situations tends to win out, lives becoming centred around the self regarding, self satisfaction, self pleasuring, self success, the fun and frolics of the self in what happens day to day. So in a simple quiet day in the shop, the feelings of boredom, of things not quite working out as usual or as expected, can rattle that particular delusional cage. Boredom points us towards the vacuity of our notions, lecturing us on the dementia of all self-made things.

Boredom is a state where memory fails us.

We can no longer remember what it is we are meant to be doing with our lives. Boredom is where a sense of loss is alive, we live and breathe a feeling of bereavement, of grieving over what is lifelessly laid out before you. It is a mental space where we cannot connect with who we believe we were, are, or could be, and this is frightening. Floating in this ocean of forgetfulness, we panic.

Boredom is a bit of a grim reaper.

We can become so desperate when we are bored, to get back, to return, to escape its prison, to be that positive person we once were, perhaps only a moment of a day ago. In boredom a version of you wants to expire, but only for a short while.  We feel ourselves to be the product of memory, in both in its movement and in its stasis. If we were to experience our life as an impermanent phenomena, this might more resemble the life of a library book - constantly loaned out, expired, returned, loaned out.  Self awareness as a borrowed book.

Boredom as the rehearsal, for being forgotten. 

In boredom we find ourselves self forgetting, giving up on our history. History forgets all the time what cannot be re-formulated into the cliches of hagiography or myth.  Human history tells us that who we really were ,what we were like when we were alive, will ultimately be forgotten. We will all be forgotten. 

Every single piece of human activity and ingenuity, the daily search for , and assertion of, meaning and purpose is another way of writing - Someone Remember Me Please! - into already shifting sands.

Can any of us live calmly and at peace with knowing we will be forgotten?

As soon as we subliminally sense panic, do we become bored ?

LISTENING TO ~ Love & Hate in a Different Time by Gabriels

 My current favourite ear worm track, since I saw this video on Jools Holland on I Player. This superbly slick modern reworking of the 1970's Philly Sound has all the hallmarks of a Summer hit, if it gets the airplay it deserves. Is the singer one of the brethren? Highly likely.

FEATURE - The Making of a 'Reliquary'

A few years ago Hubby and I were walking the Pilgrim Way back from our first visit to the The Slipper Chapel in Walsingham. At the side of the road we passed a discarded wheel hub. Having walked on I was suddenly struck by an idea for it, so popped back to pick it up. Having seen a few reliquaries of saints and the great catholic good in the Slipper Chapel, I thought I'd make one.

Once home, I primed and painted it a dark red base colour. I ordered ten miniature glass vials from E bay, Thinking they might make suitable receptacles for 'reliquary' objects, whatever they turned out to be. I created a long collage artwork out of painted wood off-cuts to form a suitable background support. Everything then hung about in my workshop draped in plastic, as other events interrupted the creative flow and I lost sight of how I intended to take it forward. So it stayed awaiting the return of time and inspiration, for what turned out to be a number of years.

Fast forward to the most recent lock down. Once we started our regular Art Club day, completing the Reliquary Project resurfaced. I decided what each of the ten vials would contain - things that in some way represented me, my interests and enthusiasms. These turned out to be:~

1) Writing - a poem written by me
2) DNA - beard shavings
3) Gay/Camp -a strip of cut gems in the colour of the gay rainbow flag.
4) Painting - a strip painted in gouache in a geometric design
5) Music - a playlist for my funeral *** (links at bottom of this post )
6) North Norfolk - filled with sand from Sheringham Beach
7) Churches & Architecture - a painting of a pointed arch window
8) Buddhism - a stick of incense
9) Dogen - a written extract from the Genjo Koan
10) Craft Making - a cabled string of yarn

I was surprised how quickly everything came together in the end. It was as if all that time elapsing had narrowed down all the options about how best to complete it. So now its mounted on its background and forms part of my shrine in the craft room / shrine space / spare room.

Reliquary Playlist *** ( with You Tube Links )

1) T Rex - 20th Century Boy 2) Talking Heads - Once in a Lifetime 3) David Bowie - Aladdin Sane 4) A Certain Ratio - Flight 5) Elbow - One Day Like This 6) Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Wonderful Life 7) Sparks - The Decline & Fall of Me 8) Cocteau Twins - Musette & Drums 9) Wild Beasts - End Come Too Soon 10) Strauss - "Beim Schlafengehen" Four Last Songs ( Jesse Norman )

SHERINGHAM DIARY 49 - Everyday Life With Audio Description

As a chronic insomniac I've got used to waking at two in the morning unable to rekindle slumber. So in those early morning arisings, I watch many a boxed set. I've had my Friends phase, my Star Treck derivatives phase, My Schitt's Creek phase, my Vera phase.  In recent weeks, at the same time as working my way through each series of Midnight Diner ( see a previous post ) I've been catching up on a few episodes of the Repair Shop I appear to have missed first time around.

I find it calmly absorbing to watch the skill of a craftmaker at work. Their unhurried careful working methods I emulate only in my dreams. By comparison mine start off being well tidy and ordered but gradually descends into a pile of mess. The enotional tone behind much of my work as if I'm undergoing a productivity review. Its an area of practice just to stay calm and rest easy with taking whatever time is required. 

Many of the older Repair Shop series are audio described. These fill in audible space, where it may be unclear what exactly is happening if your sight is poor on non existent  At present I am non of those things.

This reminded me of going home to stay with my Dad, he was in his late eighties by then. At some point he must have accidentally pressed the audio described button on his TV remote. He complained vociferously about how the BBC were now putting this chap talking over the top of all the programmes, all the time, and how annoying that was. He rarely wore his hearing aids, even though he was a tad deaf, so the TV was on incredibly loud. The audio description bellowed out. Needless to say I switched it off. 

I've unexpectedly been taking huge and unexpected joy from these audio descriptions.  Sometimes the scripts go very flowery and poetic, at other times they have a perhaps unintended humour, or assume the feeling of having been written as a piece of magic realism. 

If you couldn't see what was actually going on, how might you interpret some of these?

- A pigeon perches on a wooden post, as Dom takes his mechanism to Steve.

- At her workstation Julie spoons something from her mug into her mouth.

- Sparks fly as another crafter sharpens a piece of metal.

- The sun rises over the idyllic countryside, a fine mist settles over the trees and drops of morning dew cling to tall blades of grass. Two of the crafter's walk along the gravel path to the barn.

- Jay gives Hannah a friendly pat as he passes her work bench.

- The branches of trees are blown by a gentle breeze, and a bird waddles across the repair shop's thatched roof. Suzie is on the home straight in her work.

- A wren ruffles its feathers, then the craftspeople arrive at the workshop.                                                                                 

Just think how much better life would be if everyday life had a voice constantly explaining what the hell was going on. On second thoughts maybe not.

Lately I've been processing a deeper understanding of the nature and consequences of one self view I've held. One result has been being easily irritated by the smallest thing not going according to plan. A recent re-jigging of the shop layout was a case in point. All was well until I'd made three different attempts at getting a re-hang on one section of wall sorted out. Each time it didn't work, stick on hooks fell off walls, things pranged or fell onto the floor. Though I did eventually succeed, it was done at great cost to my overall quality of equanimity. I'd progressively dug myself deeper into a funk of frustration, then anger.  I returned home so physically tense that my back just went, to be nursed for the next few weeks. Some times I wish that prattitya samutpada wasn't so blatantly co--produced.

On another tack I've been adopting a more lassez faire approach to boredom in the shop. I realised that although 'if all else fails, distract yourself ' can work, it cannot be your first and only port of call. I now get on with some craft making task, but don't necessarily do it to the background accompaniment of music, radio, a film or You Tube video.  All those things, though there to alleviate your response to the boredom, are also a prolongation of it. As you flip from one sound or visual form to another, each one failing to really transform the mood or satisfy the hunger for presence or purpose. Such distractions can simply intensify the connection with the state of boredom. Maybe it is just better to let it be. To stop scratching the itch.

A friend of ours Sam, knowing my liking for things Japanese, bought me a Japanese Stab Bookbinding kit for me to try out. I found I really enjoyed painting the watercolour paper covers and making them up into a little notebook. The process is a relatively simple one, skill wise, but I find it very satisfying. I am already looking into further developing my nascent skills with books about Japanese Bookbinding being sourced, and improving my book binding tools. I can feel a few new stationery lines for the shop will be coming along soon.  I've also bought an introductory set to try out marbling paper or fabric, which might just end up featuring on book covers. Just a few lines of craft inquiry I want to pursue over the next year, along with seeking to improve my general level of upholstery skills.

Oh joy of joys its Eurovision once more. By turns batty, bizarre and bombastic, I love it. This year some contributors having been so deprived of their performance fix last year, have gone all out surreal weird. The Norway entrant has a song about wrestling with his demons. Guess what he's dressed in? A glittery jump suit with a long white fur cost and angel wings, chained to four dark devilish demons who try constantly to pull him off his pedestal. 

And just why are Latvia's three back up singers all dressed in emerald green with black visors like extras escaped from robo cop, whilst the singer is a vampish Egyptian queen?  

There was a song from Denmark which unfortunately didn't make the final, like many of this years entrants channeling mid 80's electro. With an Andy Bell like lead singer whose posturing was seemingly choreographed by an out of work bricklayer - and now shoot your arm up high then push your left hip to one side, and hold. Then grab half a microphone stand in your hand and run around the stage set with it, stop, jump and do air splits, spread your legs. One couldn't help but feel the wardrobe combo of string vest and tiny cerise jacket made for a much smaller man, was not their only mistake.

There are also the attempts at profundity. In these days of worldwide pandemic no self respecting frivolous entertainment can avoid at least attempting to make a pigs ear of sensitive artistic credibility. Mostly this comes down to dance routines to fill out the void between voting and results. In the second semi-final we were presented with an ambitious piece of tosh, reportedly about relationships across boundaries. This consisted of a handsomely bare chested gentleman, dressed in a floor length silver metallic skirt and his hots for a young man. who does acrobatic tricks on a bicycle. I was moved!

One song favourite this year is Moldova's, a country with a well earned reputation these days for putting on a memorable stage routine. This years entrant Sugar did not disappoint, channelling mid period 'kitten' Kylie. Probably the campest thing of the 2021 show. The promo video is actually even better with additional dancing ice cream cones! But be warned she does rip the face off her boyfriend and eat it at the end. I kid you not.

Trends this year - the obligatory borrowing from - everything that Queen Bey has ever done - Lady Gaga lookalikes and soundalikes ( yes someone still does that ) - the shrill melodramatic braying of Florence ( of the Machine ) - and the Bulgarian entrant doing a spookily perfect impersonation of Billie Eillish - without irony. Plagiarism thy name is Eurovision. Claims for music copyright infringement are in the post.

FINISHED READING - The Fall of the Imam by Nawal El Saadawi

I'm not usually one to re-read a novel, even one's I greatly enjoyed the first time around. But when the great Egyptian novelist and feminist campaigner Nawal El Saadawi died a few weeks back I had the urge to re-read The Fall of the Imam. I read this shortly after it was first published in translation in the late 1980's, and remember being mightily impressed by it.

What I remembered from the first time was present still.  Its looping mesmeric narrative that keeps returning to one point in the story - the female protagonist Bint Allah stabbed in the back whilst trying to escape murderous unnamed pursuers. Each time approached from another different angle, background or person's perspective. You hear of this world expressed through the perceptions of a variety of characters - the Imam, his legal wives, his mistresses, his childhood friend The Great Writer, the Official Leader of the Opposition. In some way they all become blurred into the many facets and satellites of the one omnipotent Imam.

Saadawi's great achievement is in creating the feeling of eyes watching you everywhere. The narrative slips from third to first person and back without note. One might say dreamlike in its logic, but this is like inhabiting a oppressive nightmare, where no one, not even the Imam, is who they make themselves out to be. The Imam, whatever he actually is,  has this controlling force upon everyone's lives.

The subservient role allotted to women is justified by a cyclical theological logic. Women cannot be trusted to think nor act for themselves, because they are always to be considered as the instruments of Satan.  From the point of view of the many women he beds, the Imam they know is a sin riddln fallen man. They just cannot reveal that because there would be fatal consequences for them. 

You could murder the Imam, but the Imam is not really one person, he's a constructed demagogue of the imagination, an icon representing eternal religious truths and prohibitions. The incumbent is merely the vessel through whom those are presently enacted. And, of course, the world and power structures upholding the Imam are entirely male dominated ones. No one can win when faced with them, least of all a woman.

The Fall of the Imam, is not then a straightforward nor comfortable novel to read. It has thematic links drawn from The Thousand and One Nights. A magic realist quality of returning to tell the reformulated tale yet again.  I can imagine it testing the patience of anyone looking for a more linear form of writing. I remain touched by the dense dark poetry and imagery. It portrays this unreal reality, a world completely in its own bubble separated and deliberately cut off from ours, cultish, dangerously deluded and cruel. It was certainly worthy of re-reading, sad and brutish as it is, there is some hope there too struggling to break out and be heard, to breath freely with a liberated mind.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8

POEM - Here, To Be

Here he discovered it 

because he was ready, prepared
to wear the right hat, to hear
the small smut blackened dragon, seeking revenge
for the cave
and its forced incarceration, within the
pitch dark, loveless stone, home to no one
but itself, wrong and wronged
for a lifetime or more, scorching the pink insides of itself
self-immolating 
within its own heat and moisture
to a crisp charcoaled dust

He decides here, to be

to allow its anger to proceed unchecked
for grief to be expectorated, the betrayal and 
despondent rage, to simmer
and boil, spit and spill out
magma like pools upon the earth, 
before becoming absorbed unseen, 
for dragons, 
must cry out or cry within
for an eternity of sulphur, jaundiced
without sunlight, nothing will evaporate
when there are no clouds, no rain, no rivers, no ocean, no life
everything kettled within a cavern
no way to dissolve, to absolve
no where to fly too or from

Here to place

the suffering, tender it
upon a new bed of grass, 
to rest easy with what is there
harder to remember
when it is all over, that 
that place of despair, that that past time
can have any future purpose
at all.

written April 2021
Stephen Lumb

FEATURE - The Return of Eurovision

 My personal favourites from this years batch. One of these should win, one has already failed to qualify, but which will it be of those remaining? 

Iceland - Nerdy but very knowing, a perfectly judged oddity of a song 

Lithuania - Every song troop needs some silly Dad dancing.

Latvia - The green goddess hits the stage with her three blind minders.

Ukraine - So folksy and insane it does everything but bark like a dog with mange..

Moldova - A camp homage to all the sex kittens of the world.

Switzerland - A really lovely little song sung by a sweet tubby angel.

WATCHED - Oxygene

 

The film opens with a body contained in some sort of shroud like covering, its struggling to breath. A woman gradually forces herself out. She's still restrained by tubes and belts that are holding her inside a high tech pod of some kind. What is unclear, even to her, is whether she is there voluntarily or is imprisoned, but if so where, for what reason and by whom? There has been some type of system failure, oxygen supply is gradually diminishing as the woman simultaneously tries to rebuild her memories of who she is and understand what her real predicament is. But time is running out, and fast.

Though you can sometimes foresee some of the plot developments coming, this feature is nonetheless a very engaging and gripping affair. it has a central very physical performance from Melanie Laurent, which is convincingly maintained. If you are looking for a high concept sci-fi film well acted and realised Oxygene is probably the one for a Saturday night in.

CARROT REVIEW 5/8

FINISHED READING - Dream Work by Mary Oliver

'And now I understand 
something so frightening, and wonderful -
how the mind clings to the road it knows, rushing
through crossroads, sticking
like lint to the familiar.'
from the poem Robert Schumann

Mary Oliver's poetry has kept being introduced to my conscious awareness. She was referenced frequently, along with Kathleen Raine,in the Post-Jungian 'world soul' of Hillman etc at The London Convivium for Archetypal Studies in the late 1980's that I attended. Then much later on in the 'noughties' she appeared to have her moment of being the go to poet for artistic reflection in Triratna Buddhism, before that mantle was handed on to David Whyte. These days extracts from her work crop up regularly as posts on Facebook etc. 

'Sometimes what's wrong does not hurt at all, but rather
shines like a new moon.' 
from the poem Consequences

So I've had many an opportunity to read her poetry and mostly passed it by unconsidered. Don't ask me why, just not ready, not receptive enough yet. Her work undoubtedly is infused with subtler undertows than a casual glance will reveal. Its a bit like crossing a stream, so easy to walk across yet entirely miss the direction and purpose of its flow. So focused can we be on directing our own movement, we neglect what we feel, how we respond, as we walk our nature through nature. As Dogen once expressed it ' If we do not know the walking of the mountains, We do not yet know our own walking'. If there is no larger picture, destination overrides the universal as both our origin and destiny.

All night
the dark buds of dreams
open
richly.
In the centre
of every petal
is a letter,
and you imagine
if you could only remember
and string them all together
they would spell the answer.
from Dreams

Oliver's poetry in Dream Work, first published in 1986, repeatedly touches on an experience of an intimacy and closeness to nature and in particular to landscape. This simultaneously echoes in our humanity, pricks up our psychological ears, reminds us we are part of something that, spiritually speaking, is much greater than our little grey self. Threads of interconnectivity are left lying around in all her work to be lifted up, followed and treasured, or of course we could just walk on by actively intent on some goal or other 

'But who,
not under disaster's seal,
can understand what life is like
when it begins to crumble?'
from Storm in Massachusetts, September 1982.

One can easily forget the potency of the telling image, the resonances of a unique vision that reverberate through us, powered by our recognition of it. It is part of the oblique skill of the remarkable poet, to surprise us by jumping out from behind a concealed curtain unexpectedly. Rationality deliberately misdirected by a line of poetry, towards a deeper level of truth not entirely subservient to logic or the matter of fact. Mary Oliver's poetry can often do that, using the most ordinary of language and inference.

'You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
from Wild Geese

CARROT REVIEW - 7/8

STREAMING FAVE RAVE - Midnight Diner

In the opening title sequence your in a car driving through the neon lit flashy wonderland that are the main streets of modern Tokyo. Then you are taken behind all that flash and trash, into a typically scruffy and ramshackle narrow backstreet populated with brothels, gay clubs, karaoke bars and late night cafes. Here is an unassuming small diner, open from midnight till seven in the morning. Its run by a man with a facial scar, the owner and chef only ever referred to as Master, whose real name we never get to know. In each twenty four minute episode he tells you all he knows about a whole range of his regular customers. These stories are mostly quietly understated, but on occasions become quirkily cartoonish, but always non judgemental. All the full diversity of Japanese life can walk into this diner.

In one story a radio DJ customer discovers that a female taxi driver was once an actress who played his favourite ninja character, who was his first love as a teenager.  Another is about the odd couple relationship that develops between the trans owner of a gay club and a yakuza (gangster). Or there's the Ochazuke Sisters, three women who've vowed to keep loyal to the ideal of waiting for their true love to appear. To never go on a marriage interview or to date a much older man. Their friendship shattering as each of their resolve weakens, but one by one they return disillusioned but wiser, bound together even
more securely.

 .

A carefully modulated emotional tone is the defining feature here. Touching and recognisably human, occasionally teetering on the fringes of sentiment or folksy homily without falling all the way in. It tells you a whole bunch of details about the desires and pressures on ordinary people, or of being an outsider, in contemporary Japanese society.  Each fighting to just be who they are, in an individualistic extravagant manner or in a more traditionally muted minor key. Along the way you get recipe tips about the best way to make some of the diner's menu staples. So, win win.

Its quickly becoming favourite TV viewing in the early hours of the morning as I wake up, make porridge, drink coffee and bring myself gradually into fuller consciousness. Bracing myself for whatever the new day will bring. It is Fabulous!

Konnichiwa!

All the series of Midnight Diner & Midnight Diner (Tokyo Stories) are available to stream on Netflix.

CARROT REVIEW - 6//8