The curse of the zoom lens

There is a shot in Chinatown, as I remember it, a very long  and continuous shot, which does not trouble the eye so much as soothe it, by not altering the camera angles, but following the action. You don’t get this very much – not in an age in which Baz Luhrmann has taken over where Nic Roeg left off, and encouraged us to see cinema as snap, crackle, pop, snap, crackle, pop and so on – the Rice Krispie method of making a  movie, which ensures that you come out dizzy. And of course, we survivors of the 1960s were brought up on a diet of cameramen who had just been given some hand-held gadgets and a box of tricks. Music was imposible to watch in the 1960s. The camera men made the colour bleed from the screen, or turned it to silhouette or negative, or imposed on image on another, or turned the camera up and down – just because they could. A favourite trick was to target a lead singer and then to zoom in and out at frantic speed.

I’m mot arguing that they were trying to imitate the effects of LSD. I’m not arguing, because, in a cack-handed way, they were. The zoom lens was a kind of auto-hallucinogenic in the hands of the camera-happy. The lens would not sit still.

The trouble is that, as amateur photographers, we are roughly fifty years behind the professionals. I’ve been watching (part of the archiving project which is now taking over my life) a great deal of video taken by my brother, my sister, my sister-in-law, my son, and also, I admit, by me. We have one thing in common: at some point in the videoing, we get bored, and start zooming in and out, just like they did on the telly. The result is some tragically inept film, film which a future generation may not look on with the kindliness we might expect of them (‘that’s my great-grandfather as a baby!’). They are likely to think, ‘What did they think they were doing?’

Still, there’s nothing quite as tragic as the bit of video copied (without being watched, I would hazard) for me by my brother-in-law, in which he and my sister, who died in 2001, manage to leave the video-camera on, and pointing at a pile of towels. Just out of shot, apart from the odd elbow, you can hear my sister talking. I did not actually know I had this recording of her, so it is of course a hypnotic, distressing and wonderful experience. Her laugh is suddenly at the forefront of my memory. I feel I could reach out and touch her.

But all I can see is a tub of towels (and she nevr had very special taste in towels, either). Tantalising beyond belief …

First things first

It’s an odd thing, preference (or taste, if you like). Most of the things I like are something to do with first encounters. So, to take two random examples, I’ve taught creative writing on three systems (VLEs, they’re called, or ‘virtial learning environments’, which is a mouthful or three), but the one I like best was the first one, which was WebCT before it was taken over by Blackboard. Change is a frightening thing, perhaps. Or perhaps that if you learn in one way, learn anything, I mean, you never get over it. It is a good job my first record wasn’t a 78, or I’d (a) still be bemoaning the impossibility of recording my own and (b) have a pile of snapped shellac.

The first time I read a play in anything like a serious way (it was at school, and the syllabus must have been quite forward-thinking, at least in this single respect), it was Pinter’s The Caretaker. And here I am over 40 years later, and I still think it’s the best play I’ve ever come across. I am not a great fan of the theatre, to be honest, and I prefer the film and video versions – although you can’t get the Warren Mitchell performance from the 1980s on DVD or video, just as you can’t get a great deal of Pinter’s work, for some very strange reason. You can’t get The Basement, you can’t get almost any of the TV plays. I have some very dodgy off-air recordings. There will be a Pinter TV festival at some stage, but there’s a lot to choose from.

It may be that The Caretaker springs to mind because my house currently resembles its set: a series of discarded boxes, overflowing piles of rubbish, all waiting the immiment Big Move. I’ve had the DVD recorder running for about a month now, and there’s just one crate of videos left: and a messy tape of The Caretaker is currently transferring itself. Impossible not to snatch a glimpse of some of its brilliant lines. ‘Everything you say is open to any number of different interpretations’: it’s as if Pinter was writing about his way of working as well as writing a play. I can’t think of a single play, even by Pinter, in which so much is going on. Everyone is telling very devious stories in it, perpetually. It is flooded with irony, too.

But what if the first serious play I’d come across was by Ibsen? Would I now be a diehard Ibsen fan? Do I like Lowry’s novel Under the Volcano most because I read it at an impressionable age? Very hard to tell.

Pinter repeats himself in the most astonishing fashion, without ever becoming tedious. I expect countless theses have been written on the number of times people in his plays have said ‘What’s your name?’ It is a positive obsession of his: and I don’t mind at all. He makes it interesting over and over. No other playwright, with the possible exception of Caryl Churchill, has ever interested me so completely. And yet, as a man, how unapproachable Pinter seems to have been. As likely to tear strips off you as to look at you. He seems to be all his own characters rolled into one – disturbed, angry, vulnerable when you least expect it.

Mind you, I also love acid-drop Spangles, and they disappeared from the sweet counters two decades or more ago.

Divorced fathers and bad language

There was a thing on the radio this morning about a survey somewhere which said that 1 in 3 (I think it was) fathers lose touch with their children after divorce. This is a staistic that is often cited (not always the same percentage is cited – this seems to vary considerably), and I often wonder just how reliable it is. The figure is supposed to have ‘grown’ over the last 20 years. But where is the empirical evidence from before that?

I am a divorced father, and I do see my children (although they are now neither of them children any more, of course). This was managed without the help of solicitors, to a large extent. However, the bit that made me perk up was when they had a lawyer on to talk about the problem of access to parents and, what she actually said – really and truly – was that the relationship between father and children was

“polluted by prejudicial input by a residential mother”.

I think this is a clear nomination for the award for appalling use of language, which I think is actually offered by the Plain English Society. You hear that, and you wonder how in hell the language could ever be taken by the scruff of the neck and shaken so violently. I would have driven off the road, were it not that I was sitting in a traffic jam, or, as the speaker might have said, vehicularly transfixed in a manner injurious to on-board steering.

So this is not a posting about Dads4Justice (or whatever) and their foul mouths, but another regrettable instance of the English language being garrotted.

What I’ve hung on to longest/ hoarding

The boxes are still stacking up. It is hard to get rid of things at first, and then something goes in a bin by accident, and you think ‘Oh well.’ This happened to my father’s flat cap yesterday, He was taller than me by three inches and you might have thought he would have had a larger head and larger feet: but life’s not like that. He was smaller in the head and foot departments, so why I was hanging on to it, I cannot begin to tell you. Raw sentiment. And now another wet item in the rubbish.

I haven’t really been very surprised at what I have come across. But it has started me thinking about what has been with me for the longest period of time. It could be said to be my baptism certificate, I suppose, which is framed, and which has been around, and visble (why?) for a good bit. But I obviously can’t recall being baptised. And I was refusenik when it came to being comfirmed, much to the spiritual outrage of the various chaplains etc who inhabited my school. It was almost unheard of. Single white Protestant refuses to participate in a religious ceremony! Shock horror. I was sent for a serious chat about my soul.

My explanation was pobably not very convincing, but it was very long-winded. I am perfectly prepared to talk for several hours if my tongue is unleashed, and I talked my way out of – bored my way out of – confirmation. I explained that I was a very very spiritual person (to have revealed that I was already a total atheist would have been a punishable offence, I suspect). To prove this, I talked rather gaily about pictures of St. Veronica which I had once been shown (a bit Roman Catholic for the authorities), and also my particular interest in the works of Leonard Cohen (‘Jesus was a sailor/ And he walked upon the water/ And he spent a look time watching/From his lonely wooden tower’ – Suzanne). A few hours of this kind of ‘I am unorthdox but I am more interested in religion than you’ stuff got me off the hook. I suspect that my parents were informed, and my father – for some absurd reason, one of my godfathers – wouldn’t have cared. He never set foot in a church except for events which were followed by the consumption of much alcohol, and his standard remark about funerals was to comments on the size of ‘the gate’.

My father had a cousin who had no sons but two daughters, and who also owed my father money, which he never repaid. But he (the cousin) did come round one day with all his toys, since he thought they should go to a good home. Ha. They were military things like tanks and planes, and they had the air of having been put together, with skill, by the said uncle (as he was of course known). I had no skill in using Airfix, and I think I treated the toys with due lack of care and attention as a result. I never got the hang of glue and plastic.

I see I haven’t yet said what I have had longest, which was the aim, and I think it must be the cowboy fort I was given when I was six or seven and with which I played on what I can only call a daily basis. It was readymade, as were the plastic figures I also acquired (and I still have them). In defiance of history, I teamed up the Union and Confederate soldiers and the musketeers, and set them against the Indians, who always won. All the battles, which were knockout affairs, came down to an Indian with a large head and a tomahawk, and a man with a battered cowboy hat and a whip (possibly a lasso, originally) who had come out of a packet of Frosties. They – and a donkey – always survived the carnage.

Do you think I will be taking them with me to my new home?

Don’t be silly. It’s got a loft.

Getting things fixed

‘Did you put this together yourself?’ he said. His eyes eyes gave nothing away at all: not a flicker of interest, or disdain, no sign of the complete and utter sense of despair he must have felt, as I showed him the lawnmower. The landscape gardener who lives across the road said that there was no problem with the mower that a service wouldn’t fix, and why not go to the next village?

It went badly. I stopped to ask an elderly lady with too much shopping wher the lawnmower repair shop was. She balanced her various purchases carefully, and said, ‘Don’t ask in there’ – she nodded at the new mini-mart – ‘but they’ll know in the corner shop’. I said thank you very politely, and as he moved, I saw the sign saying GARDENING SUPPLIES behind her head.

‘Do you fix lawnmowers?’ I asked, politely. He looked at me as if to ask whether, looking around the shop, I noticed that it consisted principally of lawnmowers in various states of disrepair.

‘You want your lawmower fixed,’ he replied, monotonously. After a pause, he added ‘Have you got it with you?’ It was true, I looked the sort of idiot who might have failed to bring it. I said Yes. He disappeared through a door and nodded me back through the entrance to the shop. We met in the car park, and he extracted the mower from the back seat. ‘I don’t know how you got it in here,’ he said. Looking at it, neither did I. Especially when the car was full to the gunwales with dead videos on their way to the dump.

This was the point when he asked me whether I had put it together. I stalled him, by saying I couldn’t remember. (Yes I had.) ‘These things her are supposed to be on the outside, not the inside,’ he said, indicating some wing-nuts. Oh. Still, I thought, it has cut the grass a fair few times. It took me back in one horrible flash to the last, the very last time I went camping, in France. It was somewhere south of Paris, I had been driving for two hours looking for a site, and the one I found was about to close. I hurried in and put the tent up. As I did so, a voice from the next camping-space said ‘I think you’ll find that that bit is supposed to be inside, not outside.’ The owner of the voice then stripped my tent down and put it back up, adding ‘No charge.’ Bastard. And the next day, I went to a camping shop after the lantern went kaput, and disgraced myself further by asking ‘Avez-vous un lit?’

Well I think it’s an easy mistake to make.

‘What sort of engine does it have?’ asked the lawnmower man. ‘It says Briggs & Stratton,’ I said helpfully.

‘Oh yes, very good make’ – was it? it was in a B&Q sale ten years ago – ‘but what sort of engine?’ I gave a colossal shrug, and he had a look. ‘Also,’ he said, ‘when you put it in the car, you broke the cable. That’ll take some finding.’ And off he went, sucking his teeth, I bet, only not showing it. Machines. I was not born to own them.

At the disco

I went to a sixtieth birthday party over the weekend, and very enjoyable it was, too. I have now reached the stage where my life is sufficiently settled for me to be going to all the sixtieths of those to whose fiftieths I went.

What is interesting is that the sixtieths are, in essence, almost exact replicas of the fiftieths: buffet, bar and disco. Everyone looks the same because you don’t notice them changing, with the single exception of yourself, the only individual who appears to have aged by ten years since the last one. The same records are playing, more or less: mostly a run of Tamla hits from the 1960s, with a few old stagers like ‘Dancing Queen’, which I would suggest is the most popular piece of music produced in the twentieth century. I once read an exceptionally complex musical analysis of the song, which I didn’t understand in the slightest (something about sophisticated chord changes), but what the song does is to put some slightly ungrammatical or at any rate odd English (‘watch that scene’) to an almost luscious mix of piano strings, and to add in some catchphrases (‘You can dance, having the time of your life’), and a crisis which is lifted from a Mamas and Papas song (‘Dedicated To The One I Love’).

It is a matter of some wonder that people are still dancing to the music of their teenage years, sometimes with something approaching recklessness. Will these records outlive us (we certainly won’t outlive them)? You don’t find anyone dancing to songs from the fifties: Al Martino, who died recently, is not celebrated on the dance floor and neither are Johnny Ray and Alma Cogan and Frankie Laine. It is only about thirty years till recorded popular music has its 1918 moment, and the last people alive who bought an Otis Redding record while he was still with us, perish themselves.

However, I am no longer able to indulge my own dance-floor sensation, which involved dancing (alone – they cleared the floor) to the live version of Santana’s ‘Soul Sacrifice’, the one from Woodstock with the very long drum solo. I have been known to do it in private, but the possible damage to crockery etc at home (where I was indulging) meant I had to pack it in. It’s a pity, really: it is about the one way I might lose all this weight. Other than dieting, of course.

Valedictions

So long. Farewell. Auf Wiedersehn. Gooodbye. No, I’m not taking leave of the world or my senses or the blog. But I have noticed that a phrase I thought was a North-Eastern one, traceable to the South Shields area in particular, is in fact a great deal more endemic than I thought. And it is going to become even more widespread.

I first noticed it when I was in Sunderland last year, when every other person, as I left their vicinity (vicinity – not a word one hears much outside the police station and the courts), or came to the end of a phone call, seemed to say, not Goodbye or Adios or Ciao or On your bike but ‘See you later’, sometimes in a formal fashion, as in ‘I’ll see you later’. A little while later, I caught my brother saying it at the end of a phone call – but then it says Sunderland on his birth certificate too (until last week, I had never actually seen my birth certificate, the long version, when it dropped out of my father’s papers).

But I see now that, as you leave Morrison’s, the Northern supermarket chain which has now spread right across the south by gobbling up Safeway and other enterprises (they have nobbled, thank goodness, the local Somerfield), there is a big sign at the exit, as there doubtless is at every exit from Morrison’s. It says ‘See you later!’ So it has now become, or is on the way to becoming, a national phrase. Some said it on a phone-in the other day, and they were Northern: but perhaps it’s come from somewhere else. (I know Bill Haley and many others sang ‘See you later, alligator’, but they didn’t mean ‘Goodbye’.)

And I can add to that, that the phrase used in the North-East for ‘All right’, which is a bit of an old chestnut, but one back in vogue, if an old chestnut can be in vogue without seeming to be a mixed metaphor, which is ‘Hoaky-coaky’, is also becoming a national pandemic.

See you later.

The videos

Ah, the videos. Ten crates of them. Do I really want to transport them to the North-East, just to stick them in a loft? Am I ever going to watch their contents again?

This is a really hard one, because there was a period in my teaching life when I rose early – this was in the days when the paper was delivered, long a thing of the past – to read the TV schedules before going to work, because there was nearly always some useful snippet on in the afternoon that would fit a lesson that was brewing in my head. Some of my best nuggets came from afternoon TV, as recorded when I was out, including Oprah’s interview with six of the twelve men who’d walked on the moon.

Among the gems I have – I see I have mentioned this before – is the first episode (1955) of ‘Double Your Money’. Hughie Green – the Michael Barrymore of his day, I suppose you might say – was on top form, but the interesting people were the contestants. There were six – one man, one ‘oldest married couple in the audience’, one woman, and one ‘most recently married couple in the audience’. The man and the young couple declined to give their first names: none of that matey malarkey we have now. The couple were Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, and she was a former Miss Thompson. The (single) woman, who was a physiotherapist (cue round of applause) admitted to being Polly (possibly Holly) Matthews, but looked fantastically uncertain about being asked to stand next to Green. He eventually stuck an arm out and edged her closer, but she didn’t feel any more comfortable.

Hughie in early action

The elderly couple were, by back-counting, born in the 1880s, and married in 1910, after meeting in the Mile End Road (their name – the sound recording is none too good) was something like Whalley. They were tiny, a really remarkable example of the way average height has grown. Oddly enough, Mr. Whalley was the only one who was anything like a modern participant, in that he alone acknowledged the audience and waved to it. He was helped up to £4 (the third question) by Green assisting him. He picked music-hall as his subject, and was asked who the great escape artist of the early part of the century was, and came up with an H, but nothing more, even when given the -ou to follow it. Green wasn’t allowed to give him £8. He let them off with £6, which would have bought several pints – possibly a hundred - in those days. Let’s say, on this poor excuse for a calculation, that he won about £250 in today’s terms. That would be a cause of mass depression on almost all game-shows now.

Yes, I have transferred it to DVD, and watched it, and thrown out the videotape, which looks increasingly ridiculous. Expect more tales of salvage in the days to come.

Will I watch it again? That’s the thousand-pound question.

Music reports

I suspect I’ve said this somewhere, but my parents had to pay extra for me to learn the piano when I was eight (nine, ten, eleven, twelve), because it was an ‘extra’. I did not understand this at the time, and was discovered sobbing one day by both of them. They presumably thought I was still upset that Gaitskell wasn’t prime minister.

‘What’s the problem?’

Sniff. ‘I want to learn the piano, but it’s an EXTRA.’

‘Oh for crying out loud!’ (Very apposite.)

What I had forgotten was that the music teacher (already commended in this blog) was obliged to write reports on those who were opted in, some return for the extra cash presumably being sought. I was just chucking out another box-full this afternoon, when – for no reason – out popped my music reports, carefully labelled by my father, as ever, but somehow mixed in with some material for a creative writing evening class. They paint a picture of a long-suffering man, struggling with an idiot.

Easter 1961: ‘His playing of notes is entirely separate in action and thought.’

Summer 1961: ‘His hands are becoming able to do as they ought.’

Christmas 1961: ‘He tends to be careless in looking after his music books… Previously I did not know he could sing so well.’

Easter 1962: ‘He is beginning to be able to coordinate his hand and his hearing.’

Summer 1962: ‘He is an enthusiast in general but not for piano practice.’

Winter 1962: ‘Many of the difficulties in his playing are self-imposed.’

Easter 1963: ‘His playing has begun to grow in confidence.’

Summer 1963: ‘He loves his music amd has put some polish on his playing.’

Christmas 1963: ‘Musical expression is hard for him at the keyboard where his fingers and feet are apt to get in the way. He is very keen.’

Spring 1964: ‘His playing is still a little too much based on guesswork.’

Summer 1964: ‘His music-making remains regrettably mechanical.’

Autumn 1964 (a different hand here): ‘He is interested in all kind of music but should remember that the best pleasure comes from playing the finest music really well.’

Spring 1965 (another new hand): ‘He is very keen on “popular” music and this does not help him to develop sensitive playing.’

Summer 1965 (same as Spring 1965): ‘In his own slapdash way he has learnt a good deal about the grammar of music … he particularly enjoys “folk music” played in the popular manner.’

Winter 1965 (final comment from the original teacher): ‘His technique is very limited and too cramped and rigid. In addition his appreciation of music is somewhat primitive …’

These tragic excerpts (for the poor men were obliged to write much more) do not reveal that, in the five years, I never actually reached the stage where it was considered even remotely sensible to enter me for Grade 1 in piano. Is this a record?

Still, they spotted my musical tastes.

Nick Griffin and Question Time

Well, I did watch it, although I hate the Question Time format, and the slightly unctuous David Dimbleby approach to audience participation. Give me Kilroy! (Only joking.)

Nick Griffin, so the panel insisted, was ‘exposed’. He was certainly jeered (I would have jeered him), but I am not convinced his supporters, who are sufficient to have garnered the BNP two members of the European parliament, will have been unimpressed. The BNP will probably rise in the polls. Enoch Powell was mentioned, and it is worth remembering that, despite his expulsion from the shadow cabinet, he continued to be elected, first as a Conservative, and later as a member of the UUP in Northern Ireland, on hefty majorities (he was asked to leave the Tory Party because he suggested that people vote Labour rather than Conservative, not because of his racist views). There will always be Nick Griffins on the margin. It’s a waste of enrgy thinking about him too much, though: he should just be allowed to say what he thinks, and prosecuted if he breaks the law.

What I think would be really good would be if there was an edition of the genealogical programme Who Do You Think You Are?, in which Griffin was found to have a variety of strains in his ancestry (and it would be odd if he didn’t). He talked about the English, Irish, Scots and Welsh have lived here for 17000 years, since ‘time immemorial’, in fact. His education is a bit lacking.

But still. perhaps the Daily Mail will run some history lesssons about the way we are essentially of European stock, and that many of us should be repatriated to Norway, Denmark, Germany and France.

Mr. Griffin is dangerous. But his organisation at least allows us to see where the dangerous people live, and to hear them confess their prejudices in public. That is, I think, quite useful.