Footfalls echo in the memory

January 27, 2014, 5:04 am

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TS Eliot: portrait by Gerald Kelly ‘Time present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future’: the instantly-recognisable opening lines from TS Eliot’s Four Quartets have surfaced and re-surfaced in my conciousness this past couple of weeks.  They occurred to me while reading Stephen King’s recent gripping novel 11.22.63, which is but the latest […]

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Pete Seeger: he surrounded hate and forced it to surrender

January 28, 2014, 3:26 am

≫ Next: The Missing of the Somme: Have you forgotten yet?

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‘He’s gonna look like your granddad if your granddad can kick your ass.’ Four years ago, Pete Seeger celebrated his 90th birthday party with a sell-out concert at Madison Square Garden.  Characteristically, it was a fundraiser for a campaign to which he’d dedicated years of his life: cleaning up New York’s Hudson River.  That night, […]

The Missing of the Somme: Have you forgotten yet?

February 1, 2014, 11:55 am

≫ Next: Inside Llewyn Davis: a complete unknown

≪ Previous: Pete Seeger: he surrounded hate and forced it to surrender

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At the going down of the sun: Ernest Brooks’ iconic image of a British soldier beside the grave of a comrade Isn’t this the way back to the Great War for all of us in succeeding generations: we enter the labyrinth of time and  follow the thread of the memory of someone in the family […]

Inside Llewyn Davis: a complete unknown

February 2, 2014, 4:56 am

≫ Next: The Bridge: one hell of a psycho-drama

≪ Previous: The Missing of the Somme: Have you forgotten yet?

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Llewyn Davis: he ain’t no Bob Dylan Inside Llewyn Davis is one of the Coen brothers’ bleakest films, a tragicomedy which places most of the emphasis on the tragedy.  Against the backdrop of the Greenwich Village folk scene of early 1960s New York, it presents glimpses from a week in the sorry life of a […]

The Bridge: one hell of a psycho-drama

February 4, 2014, 7:29 am

≫ Next: History and war in the 20th century: a storm blowing from Paradise

≪ Previous: Inside Llewyn Davis: a complete unknown

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The Bridge: Sofia Helin as Saga and Kim Bodnia as Martin The plot was preposterous and convoluted, but the second series of BBC Four’s Scandinavian cops drama The Bridge gripped us through January Saturday evenings and was top quality TV. The acting, photography, and character development were what made this first class entertainment: the totally […]

History and war in the 20th century: a storm blowing from Paradise

February 5, 2014, 9:00 am

≫ Next: Wildness on the edge of town: an Edgelands encounter with Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts

≪ Previous: The Bridge: one hell of a psycho-drama

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Paul Klee’s ‘Angelus Ovus’, and photograph of Walter Benjamin With the centenary of the onset of World War One approaching (as we are reminded daily), I’m thinking a great deal and reading about the war. Michael Gove knows what he is doing when he sets his sights on ‘left-wing academics … happy to feed myths’ […]

Wildness on the edge of town: an Edgelands encounter with Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts

February 9, 2014, 8:29 am

≫ Next: Remembering Stuart Hall and The Unfinished Conversation

≪ Previous: History and war in the 20th century: a storm blowing from Paradise

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Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts I went to the Bluecoat on Thursday evening to hear Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts, authors of Edgelands, talk about how their book took shape, read extracts and answer questions from the audience that had packed out the performance space.  They form a great double act, these two […]

Remembering Stuart Hall and The Unfinished Conversation

February 10, 2014, 7:05 am

≫ Next: Through the edgelands of north Wirral: ‘complicated, unexamined places that thrive on disregard’

≪ Previous: Wildness on the edge of town: an Edgelands encounter with Paul Farley and Michael Symmons Roberts

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Stuart Hall Sad news today of the death of Staurt Hall, a giant force in post-war intellectual life on the left in Britain.  Born in Kingston into an aspiring Jamaican family, Hall received a classical English education in Kingston before winning a Rhodes scholarship to study at Oxford University. Hall arrived in Britain in 1951, […]

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Through the edgelands of north Wirral: ‘complicated, unexamined places that thrive on disregard’

February 11, 2014, 5:05 am

≫ Next: Paul Lamb and Chad Strentz: Hootin’ And Tootin’

≪ Previous: Remembering Stuart Hall and The Unfinished Conversation

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‘A place as difficult to pin down and define as poetry, but like poetry you’d know it when you saw it. … Decay and stasis, but … also dynamic and mysterious’. Who in their right mind would want to spend a wet and windy Saturday tramping the edgelands along the fringes of Birkenhead’s north end? […]

Paul Lamb and Chad Strentz: Hootin’ And Tootin’

February 12, 2014, 1:38 am

≫ Next: For Jesse: Defying Gravity

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Hootin’ And Tootin’: Paul Lamb According to his Wikipedia entry, Newcastle-born blues harmonica player Paul Lamb ‘has had a four decade long career … with fans around the world’ so I must apologise for never having heard of him before seeing him perform a blistering set last Saturday night at the Philharmonic’s Rodewald Suite. The […]

For Jesse: Defying Gravity

April 14, 2014, 8:22 am

≫ Next: Michael Morpurgo, Blackadder and Oh! What a Lovely War

≪ Previous: Paul Lamb and Chad Strentz: Hootin’ And Tootin’

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Jesse Winchester in 2011 In 1967, opposed to the Vietnam War, Jesse Winchester boarded an plane for Montreal instead, rather than join the military and fight in Vietnam. He spent the next 35 years in Canada, an exile of conscience and citizen of a new country.  This morning I opened the Guardian to read that he had […]

Michael Morpurgo, Blackadder and Oh! What a Lovely War

April 16, 2014, 11:08 am

≫ Next: All Is Lost: getting to grips with mortality

≪ Previous: For Jesse: Defying Gravity

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‘Oh! What a Lovely War’:  the ‘cricket’ scoreboard showing the number of dead and the ground gained On Newsnight this week, Michael Morpurgo, the author of War Horse (the stage version was discussed here recently), spoke with Jeremy Paxman about how the First World War is remembered in British art and literature. Paxman asked him to respond to the case – […]

All Is Lost: getting to grips with mortality

April 17, 2014, 10:05 am

≫ Next: ‘True Detective’, ‘Southland’ and long-form TV

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Redford in ‘All Is Lost’: a modern day Sisyphus The other night I found myself adrift with Robert Redford somewhere in the Indian Ocean, catching up with All Is Lost, the film written and directed by JC Chandor about a lone mariner’s attempts to keep his stricken yacht afloat after it has collided with a shipping […]

‘True Detective’, ‘Southland’ and long-form TV

April 22, 2014, 10:45 am

≫ Next: Strands: ‘the tide-line is an open book, an account of what the world desires, and then wishes to be rid of.’

≪ Previous: All Is Lost: getting to grips with mortality

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Louisiana landscape in ‘True Detective’: swamps, abandoned churches and oil refineries  This month we’ve seen the first season of True Detective, and watched the last episode of  the final season of Southland. We’ve been fans of the under-rated and overlooked Southland ever since it first appeared on our TV screens, while True Detective held us in its stylish grip through recent […]

Strands: ‘the tide-line is an open book, an account of what the world desires, and then wishes to be rid of.’

April 27, 2014, 12:10 pm

≫ Next: Matisse: his last resting place and resurrection

≪ Previous: ‘True Detective’, ‘Southland’ and long-form TV

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Regular readers of these posts will now that one of our favourite places is the coastline north of Liverpool, stretching from Formby Point up to Ainsdale, with many walks along strand and through dunes in a place that feels so wild and so distant, yet within sight of the city skyline.  Jean Sprackland once walked here for twenty […]

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Matisse: his last resting place and resurrection

May 11, 2014, 11:44 am

≫ Next: Another fine salade Nicoise

≪ Previous: Strands: ‘the tide-line is an open book, an account of what the world desires, and then wishes to be rid of.’

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Back in Nice again, we headed up to Cimiez to wander in the tranquil gardens of the monastery and, of course, revisit the Matisse Museum.  First, though, there was something I wanted to see that I had overlooked on previous visits: the artist’s last resting place. To find it, you must first weave a way through […]

Another fine salade Nicoise

May 12, 2014, 1:31 am

≫ Next: Walking in Nietzsche’s footsteps

≪ Previous: Matisse: his last resting place and resurrection

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 The roof tops of Nice from our apartment in the Old Town When we last visited Nice – on the occasion, last September, of my 65th birthday – I posted a celebration of the city under the title A new state pensioner’s salade Nicoise.  We’re just back from another few days in Nice, so here’s […]

Walking in Nietzsche’s footsteps

May 14, 2014, 3:03 am

≫ Next: Nice: a river runs through it

≪ Previous: Another fine salade Nicoise

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Walking in Nietzsche’s footsteps The last time we were in Nice – last September – a summer-long celebration of Matisse was just drawing to a close, so we spent a lot of time in galleries.  This time was different: armed with John and Pat Underwood’s sublimely-titled Walk and Eat around Nice we spent a good part […]

Nice: a river runs through it

May 16, 2014, 3:13 am

≫ Next: Hope Place: history, false memory and truth

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The inauguration of the Promenade de Paillon in October 2013 Many towns have grown up around rivers which have later been covered in (Liverpool and London included). Beneath the city streets, waterways continue on their ancient courses in underground culverts. Nice was once such place, where the Paillon, a river fed by mountain streams that flood […]

Hope Place: history, false memory and truth

May 19, 2014, 2:16 am

≫ Next: Under Milk Wood: from where you are, you can hear their dreams

≪ Previous: Nice: a river runs through it

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Hope Place: the Byrnes tuck into scouse and artisan bread ‘We were fine until he came along. With his history this and history that.’ Sarah and I saw the Everyman’s new production Hope Place on the same day that the European Union’s court of justice ruled against Google in favour of the ‘right to be forgotten‘ […]