Hughes, Bermondsey, Tatchell's orientation an issue, shame on Hughes, shame on Hughes

by far the sharpest cookie yet on Munich is Zadie Smith,
thus
"If the reviewer is 'pro-Israeli', the review and the film can be dismissed by the reader who feels differently. If the reviewer is 'pro-Palestinian', the same can be done. As it happens, the film itself is neither, and as such, in the opinion of many American reviewers, is inherently aggressive towards Israel....
the nature of the argument - how it dehumanises and destroys those involved in it - and not the argument itself that Munich is interested in....
This film is about confusion and it comes at the right time. How many of us know what to do with these two competing, equally true facts we hear exchanged between Ephraim and Avner: 'Israelis will die if these men live. You know this is true!' says Ephraim. Avner replies, 'There is no peace at the end of this. You know this is true!'"

Michael Wharton, dead aged 92, had his satire praised to the highest in that morning’s Telegraph.
the columnist, it was pointed out, did not suffer anyone directly biting his style, although with Bron Waugh and arguably Chris Morris there are echoes.
Howse wrote that “he learned useless languages such as Irish”, and in a similarly distasteful vein it’s true that Wharton both supported the white Rhodesians and Franco, then applauded Slobodan Milosevic’s refusal, at trial, to recognise the Hague.
in the final analysis he was called a genius.
i may demur.

you can say one thing for Mark Oaten which is that, when he was Home Affairs brief - this in contrast to his Tory and Labour peers, plus a significant section of the UK press - he always discussed asylum seekers and economic migrants as if they were actually people

now there's a novelty

that said, it must be owned that this is the best Private Eye cover since the Hutton report

k-punk gets to the point

get well soon isaac
-down on yr luck, walking thru a dingy bus station, scrubby free papers and crap French/Polish restaurant adverts, mind on caffeine and Mexican food

fierce PA salvation in the form of a glorious blast of Steve Miller's 'The Joker'
yes that's right

this is quality

thanks to OC, we can now see -> Joan Didion = THIS

also just wanted to share this, it's rather tardy but a correspondent of the Sheffield label Discus had said
The first time I saw Derek Bailey was at Company Week at The Roundhouse in Camden maybe back in 1977; I remember an all-star big band of improvisers leaving the stage one by one until there remained only Bailey & the unsung (but equally significant) Terry Day, to whom Bailey called in his sonorous South Yorkshire brogue: 'There's only thee an' me!'
[their Martin Archer also reckons Chora are "a This Heat for the new century"]

my mother sang a basically perfect In The Midnight Hour this morning

---

later-
things with the Thames whale might be going distinctly unquality.
ah.

this is not the genocidal campaign of a government at the height of its ideological hubris, as the 1992 jihad against the Nuba was, or coldly determined to secure natural resources, as when it sought to clear the oilfields of southern Sudan of their troublesome inhabitants. This is the routine cruelty of a security cabal, its humanity withered by years in power: it is genocide by force of habit.

Alex de Waal, August 2004

And so it came to pass that Russia assumed presidency of the G8

[drawing all power - soon...]

someone teefed my mobile so txts etc are going unanswered (unless our tea leaf has a sense of humour)

yes it’s the [typically idiosyncratic if that’s not too arsey to note, and – this year – gruel-thin] 05 listing from this gaff

MUSIC
it’d be pretty absurd and cheeky to catalogue anything, part of me thinks, given the disgracefully anaemic mode into which this weblog has fallen in its sophomore years.
so let’s just give thanks for all the dancers, ravers, popists, jazzists, folkists, grimeists {& grimmists}, furrow-ploughers, and general loons out there, and the rockists too [tongue in cheek: i know how the lovely Jon feels about this word].

FILM
‘Moolaade’ was a satire that just seemed to eclipse everything else, in what has clearly been a decent year in most categories [there’ve certainly been plenty of good blockbusters, and as pure cinema].
not the biggest advertising budget to play with, but Ousmane Sembene is probably someone who we can describe as still being near the top of what he’s attempting to do.

EXHIBITIONS
Beauty and the Beast: New Swedish Design, at the Whitworth, Manchester (in association with the Swedish Institute, the Crafts Council and Swedish Embassy).
an awesome survey of just the diverse above, with lots of shade and thrilling spaces filled with fascinating textures, the straightforward and the fantastic.
the lips of glassworks that were suffused with coloured lights were exquisite.
the programmed breakdown into beauty areas, and beast areas, seemed to work.

Dan Flavin: A Retrospective, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (also at the NGA, Washington, D.C., and in Fort Worth iirc).
biggest retrospective to date of this minimal poet, a large scale look at prints and sketches and the like, but mainly filled with the wonderful fluorescents that people must have on the whole come for.
the very generous size of the space was a huge plus, and although it’s clear i’ve not the wit to paint a picture it seems that if James Joyce were still around and carrying his notebook for epiphanies, he’d have had cause for an entry in that afternoon we spent rapt at the MCA.

BOOKS ABOUT MUSIC {etc.}
Nik Cohn’s New Orleans rap tome started well, and carried on.
unfortunately i haven’t yet had the chance to read a certain chap on post-punk but am working on it…

DVDS WHAT HAD MUSIC-MAKERS IN THEM
two items here: that quality, quality short documentary that came with Roll Deep’s debut album. i especially love the bit where they’re in the studio, all messing about. Riko is magnetic. it’s excellent. i watch it endlessly on repeat, delighting, thrilling.
another big city though a different shaped ball was the New York that someone shot Ryan Adams and his Cardinals band in as they plugged away at their rootsy Jacksonville album. there’s one particularly great shot of a skyline but the most exciting bit for me is probably a scene with Adams in front of what looks like the most awesome wine shelf in Manhattan.
all plonk shops are created equal but some are more equal than others.

big up all the bloggers - i.e. pompous fannying about mates and assorted lovelies

the superb (eat your heart out Guardian arts coverage) and always fabulously attention-holding silverdollarcircle went bust [RIP] but then again the amazing WOEBOT came back, as did the very special worlds of possibility. hurei &c!
Penman too...
and Luka!!

Geeta’s final sentences here = floored the reader.

OBITUARY
not to get all Christopher Howse on you but to note Craner’s OTM conclusions while discussing Fahd.

AND FINALLY
- have your NYE, just have it.

P.S.
a personal beery year in passing at the tap here

Scott and Evans boss the show pretty well, but their ignorance about marching with animals is colossal.

Captain Oates

finally got to the end of the bonfire of the vanities for the first time. had had it on the go for ages, at least a good year or so and whilst finishing reading other books during this period never somehow managed to complete this one.
first impressions (a bit late, eh) are that this seems one of my favourite contemporary American novels.
Wolfe writes with a remarkable focus when describing acts of violence, all the little scuffles and shoves that mark his narrative that occur at political meetings, outside courthouses, inside holding pens, anywhere.
at the beginning someone from the mayor’s office drives his elbow into an unruly protestor’s solar plexus. near the end a chapter has the words “solar plexus” in its title.
the eye for detail, and capacity for insight, and appetite for (frequently outsized) satire is certainly astonishing.
his sketch of an aeroplane tycoon at the dinner table comes straight from Hogarth, really.
the most repellent major characters seem to be the hypocritical, buffoonish and vain ADA Larry Kramer, and the self-serving Maria.
in the Picador paperback here Wolfe writes a ferocious, well-researched, thrilling – but also wrong –
introductory editorial calling for novels of the city, literature as bearing witness to society, and a fiction of real life.
citing such quality as Dickens, Balzac, Zola, Sinclair Lewis, and Thackeray he pours a sort of mild scorn on fancy-schmancy “Neo-Fabulists” such as Kafka and Borges (whilst recognising their talents) and laments what he sees as a current problem: the best literature coming out of his own land each year as he writes most recently is non-fiction reportage, not any novel.
unfortunately, Wolfe’s principled attack comes off as a bit bollocks and falls apart under its own weight by its conclusion (whilst making plenty of reasonable points and ending with an admittedly rallying war cry), but good novel like.

You know what I noticed. When you run down the street on fire people get out of your way.
Richard Pryor

there’s this one busker who sets up a big keyboard on a couple of those big yellow buckets you drum up a dime on.
he’s blind as in he literally doesn’t appear to have eyes: like they’ve been plucked out, as if whisked away and drawn out on a wire. the set seared shut with hot poker treatment.
he sits in the subway and conjures up a storm of toasty standards, the occasional shout and a lot of soul.
he stops and sometimes he doesn’t, but there’s always this incredible holler.

a laugh out loud line from an aide to an oligarch on the documentary that screened earlier on BBC2 (and a lesson in conciseness),
Russia's woes are due to a fucked up ex-KGB agent

perhaps you might have read various letters to various newspapers on the subject yesterday but if you're arsed try putting the following words into a search engine

Irish
Ferries
Bolkestein
Directive

it might just be that - in terms of ensembles - the Seinfeld quartet were the best there was ["Fruit's a gamble. I know that going in"]

Hovis Presley was indeed a bit of a legend, all told

K-PUNK, THE RAMBLER AND THE mind BOYS KNOW THIS FEELING

utter utter panic grips my entire soul as i sit watching the bbc football live text to see the Alty (at Gravesend) and City games reciting 'shit shit we're gonna lose, we're gonna lose/we're not gonna beat blackburn, we're not gonna beat blackburn'

{please} SAVE GALES