Entertainment I have encountered

Why are children's films so much better than those for grownups? When I look at the cinema schedules, I groan with disappointment because there's just nothing to watch, but when I take the kids to the pictures, I often see something at least enjoyable. The other evening, we all watched The Fantastic Mr Fox on DVD. It was great. I'm a massive admirer of George Clooney and that colours my judgement, but Mr Fox was the kind of animal you wish you were yourself. He personified brio. Like most good children's stories, it ran quite deep: themes of the rise of the underdog (or underfox), inequity, the prodigal son and the desire for a father's love, the impulse to act according to one's nature. Was it a parable about working-class rebellion? Don't be silly, it's a bunch of animals getting up to high jinks. But still, among the fun was some thinking material.

It's not alone in its quality. Wall-E is a wonderful environmental parable that shows insight on love and the human condition that few Hollywood films can match. Shrek is much funnier than any comedy I have seen recently (although I don't watch many comedies because, frankly, I don't find sexual mores very rich material for laughter and most Hollywood actors are close to unwatchable).

While I was away, I also watched Heart of Darkness, the film version of the brilliant BBC series. Like State of Play, it took the original material and Hollywooded it (which, I'm sad to report, does mean dumbing it down), adding a star name. In State of Play, Russell Crowe mugged and grunted in a role John Simm had illuminated. He's an awful actor, with one tone and one expression. He always looks like he's straining to get out a difficult turd. In Robin Hood, he denuded Robin of humour and left him a lumpen boor who it was difficult to sympathise with. He wasn't helped by plainly lacking chemistry with Cate Blanchett. It was flatout impossible to believe that she even liked him, let alone felt any tenderness towards him. But don't get me started. Historical films infuriate me at the best of times because I have no ability to suspend disbelief. People need to at least approach acting in a way consonant with their times and capabilities for me to be able to buy the history.

Anyway, in Edge of darkness, Mel Gibson is the protagonist. I wasn't expecting much because he's such a terrible actor, but he didn't seem to be willing to make any effort at all. I lost count of the number of times his expression and behaviour didn't match what was going on. He was also unconvincing as a hard man. Compare with Liam Neeson in Taken, which made no pretence at being any good but provided what it promised: mindless thrills. Edge of Darkness wasn't dark enough or twisty enough to satisfy as a thriller, and it wasn't hard enough to satisfy as an actioner. Compare with Casino Royale, where Bond kicks people's arse hardcore.

I also saw The road, based on the Cormac McCarthy novel. I haven't read the book because I find McCarthy unnourishing. I suppose that's the point but how much of it do you need to read? Blood Meridian is a decent book, for instance, and the sense of place and characterisation are beautifully delivered, but it doesn't include any meaning. The same is true of The Road, if the film is at all faithful to the book. Viggo Mortensen is astoundingly noble and stoic (he's quite brilliant in the role in my view) but to no real purpose. McCarthy is not saying anything. Does he have to? I guess not, but it makes a two-hour film a bit of a grind if you don't have anything to take away from it. I'm quite conservative at heart, and I like films to have a moral core.

I watched In the loop too. It was quite funny in spots, like the show it derives from, The thick of it, without ever really reaching any great heights. When you've seen Malcolm Tucker once, I'm afraid, you've seen the whole joke. The hapless minister was fantastic though, and the slimy ladderclimber works for me soooo much because I've spent quite a lot of time in the company of similar people. And I don't need to tell any heterosexual male that anything with Gina McKee in is worth watching. She's also a very decent character actor.

The Steve Coogan thing with the wall is top class though. He has an unparalleled ability to inhabit the characters of men you would not allow in your house.

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I have also been reading some fiction for a change. While in the UK, I basically read only nonfiction, and not much of that, but I picked up Jhumpa Lahiri's much-feted The accustomed earth because it's a book club book that I haven't read for once.

I do understand why stuff like this gets hyped. There is a real dearth of decent American literature at the moment. It's hardly a golden age: if the best you can manage is Safran Foer or Eggers, you are up shit creek culturally. So some nice chamber writing, understated and tasteful, that's what we need, right? Well, I don't know. Lahiri's characterisation is excellent but her stories are so dreary. Compare Dubliners, a benchmark for short stories of this type. Lahiri just doesn't have the mastery of tone and theme that Joyce does, not to mention that she is not a great stylist. Her writing has been talked up, but it's not that good to read. It's quite plain. I know you'll be thinking, Dr Zen, you like plain writing, but what I like is writing that is unadorned. That is a different matter from plainness. Hemingway eschews adverbs but his writing has a unique power because you do not feel there's a word out of place. Lahiri doesn't have too much filler but her writing doesn't have the prettiness of the best. It's quite flat and there are some places where her phrasing is not particularly elegant. That may not matter to you though, so you may enjoy the gentle realisations of place and person that her stories include.

I am currently reading Freedom, the very much hyped Great American Novel by Jonathan Franzen. Now we all know that Americans feel a sense of inferiority because we have Shakespeare and Dickens and they don't, and they suspect that Moby-Dick is no Hard Times. There have been some great American novels: Sabbath's Theater, Harlot's ghost, Thin red line, Gravity's rainbow spring to mind, but there's always that lurking doubt that there's more to give. It's not like those guys weren't trying! So is Freedom it? Hmmm, well you'd have to say no. It's a wonderful read, and Franzen captures our America in a vivid, colourful tableau with bags of insight and characterisation that is stunningly detailed and accurate. But it's floppy, sometimes overwritten and not quite as good as it wants to be. It's not far off, don't get me wrong, I would unhesitatingly recommend it to anyone who likes to read. But it won't make you come and that's where the bar is. Roth, for instance, has made me come twice. Sabbath's Theater is genius, and American Pastoral, though flawed, is truly brilliant. He remains for me America's finest writer, although I don't love him as intimately as I do Pynchon.

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Also a bit thin is new music. There aren't too many releases that I am thinking, oooh yes, must have that. I mean, it's great that Mogwai have a new album, but I don't like live albums on the whole. It's a good live album, sure, but live music is really about being there. Not that I go there much. I rarely feel my age as much as I do when watching bands.

So there's a new Interpol album, and that has had much better reviews than Our love to admire. But it's not very good. That's really an understatement because it's pretty bad, all in all. Where OLTA was mostly bad but had some great songs, this one is just mostly bad. I can't find even one song that moves or delights me. It's all plodding strained rock, more Editors than Joy Division, and it would be generous to suggest it's as good as the Editors.

There's also new Arcade Fire, much beloved of the critics, who didn't adore the previous one, whose name I can't recall. I didn't adore it either but I felt it was at least going in the right direction. The new album is entirely bland. Nothing stands out. It's all nicely put together but I'm not feeling it at all. I've played it twice and I didn't find anything in it that made me want to play it again.

A host of 10/10s and the promise that it "reinvents pop music" had me slavering at the chops for a piece of Janelle Monae's The ArchAndroid. I think I may have the wrong album though, because what I have is utterly uninspiring tuneless and ordinary indie R&B. Monae is associated with the equally overrated Outkast, but unlike them, she forgot at least to include one or two belters. I should have known better. When music critics are raving about a concept album about space and future lifeforms etc, which begins with an overture, for fuck's sake, you should know you're going to be listening to something turgid. I didn't get all the way through, so my apologies if there is something good in the last couple of songs.

Dueting with Monae is Kevin Barnes, known to the world as Of Montreal (she returns the favour on his new album). I am a huge fan of Barnes, so I was delighted to see he has a new album, False Priest. Given the fractured weirdness of Skeletal lamping, I wasn't sure what I'd get, but Barnes is a truly gifted songwriter, and I can easily make mixtapes full of his pop songs that better any dozen by just about anyone else. So do we get psychedelic pop, indie, banging rockers, funk strutters or dreary directionless meanderings into his subconscious? Yes! We get all of that. Compared with Skeletal, it's all good clean fun. Okay, who am I kidding? It's no such thing. It's mostly uptempo bouncers about shagging. He sounds a bit more cheerful though. I'm slightly disappointed at the good song/rubbish quotient (his albums do always feature both) and I suppose it's something of a pity that it's unlikely he'll ever write much pop again, and it's true that this will not gain him the wider audience so much of his stuff deserves, but it's still engaging, mad and often funny (the spoken word about banging his gf's cousin because he wanted to feel closer to her is LOL hilarious). I never feel happier with the world than driving along in the sunshine with Of Montreal jerking, humping and blasting on the stereo.

posted by Dr Zen @ 12:59 pm 1 comments

Two cats

On the road to Ouagadougou I saw an elephant through the trees at the side of the road. Just the merest hint of elephant, so you couldn't be quite sure that he was there. But he was there. A couple of weeks later we saw a herd in a national park in Ghana. We could hear them moving around on the first night we slept there, and the next day we saw them by a waterhole. I felt inexplicably moved in a way you can't put into words. There just aren't any. Words do not describe what we feel about anything; they talk only about the impressions feelings give us, the reflections of what we felt in the broader world. I mean, that we can only talk about resonances because the things we feel are not part of us.

My cat, Ouagadougou, died in my arms on 9th Avenue. A hoon knocked him over and there was nothing I could do but watch him die. I was listening to Mogwai, Come on die young, at the time. I've barely been able to listen to it since. I have always been squeamish. I don't like seeing other beings in pain. I feel it in my self. It is the only way I can feel empathy. When I think about dying, and it upsets me, I realise that it is at least in part because I empathise with the future me.

When I was in Ziguinchor, I was sitting in a doorway with Mrs Zen, drinking a can of fizzy. Some small boys begged us to buy them some fizzy. At first, we were like, no fuck off, because you are begged for things all the time, and it's hard to want to give. I can't really explain why. It's not a lack of sympathy. It's a feeling of hurt at the diminishment of yourself as a person: that all you are is a source of money and goods. It comes and goes. When people have wanted to know you, to know who are you and what there is about you, you feel a greater generosity. But when you have successive conversations that inevitably turn to demands for money or stuff, you feel abused. Objectively, I don't feel bad about Africans who see me in that way. They are entitled. But at the time, it feels sour. But Mrs Zen, who is not on the whole a generous person*, said, they probably don't get much fizzy, poor sods. So we bought them a can of I think it was Fanta. Something orange anyway. I have never seen people enjoy a fizzy drink so much. They relished every drop. Afterwards we laughed about their enjoyment of it. We were delighted with ourselves for bringing that pleasure into their lives, that momentary piece of magic even.

I left my cat, Ziguinchor, with my inlaws when I went back to England. They mistreated him and he went feral. He was a very soft cat and I expect he did not survive for long. I do not blame them for it. I knew that they had no love for animals and would not allow him a life that would be comfortable for him. I feel guilty about it whenever I think of it, which is quite often. I will never allow myself another pet because that act of selfishness haunts me. I have a strong sense of responsibility, of the need for me to be reliable, and I abandoned it as far as Ziggy was concerned. I don't know why I chose to do that. I know that a reason was that I did not have a place to live in the UK, so I couldn't be sure that I could house him when he left quarantine (they still had quarantine then). Another was that he would not enjoy quarantine at all, and I wanted to spare him that. But when I realised that no one who would love him would take him, I should have set those reasons aside. I have never forgiven myself for allowing Ziggy to die and I never will.

posted by Dr Zen @ 1:03 pm 1 comments

The fun of it

Sometimes the days stretch before you and they are empty, you know, because you are putting nothing into them, just marching up and down on the spot. But you can't do anything with a vague feeling of wanting more than this.

Some things of course I can put a name on. I want more work, so that I have money and don't have to walk a thin wire the other side of which is destitution. I want love that's for me and not just for the person who says they are loving me. I want to stop feeling I am the only person who cares what happens to me. I want to feel worthwhile. I know it's a character flaw that I need other people to make me feel it. But I don't wish to be perfect. I can live with being flawed.

When I was younger, I wished I had a brother. But in time I realised that what I wanted was another me. Sometimes I think about that, and I wonder, would I even like him? Then I think, yes of course I would. I'm not a harsh judge. I like everyone until they really don't deserve it, and even then I wish I could still like them.

I'm feeling a bit downcast because my girlfriend dumped me. I'm not entirely sure why. We seemed fairly happy together. We disagreed about some stuff, but nothing that couldn't be worked out, and it sort of spiralled into bullshit. I guess that's how people are though. There doesn't have to be a good reason for anything.

What's the point of this? Of any of it? My life is just like this blog. Some people look out of idle curiosity but no one really wants it. Not even me.

posted by Dr Zen @ 10:50 pm 6 comments