One Battle After Another

I went into this film not knowing a great deal about it, other than it was this year's Oscar winner. It opens with an audacious raid by a rag tag left wing revolutionary group on an immigration camp on the Mexican border to free prisoners being held there. Whilst Pat (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is seemingly in charge of little more than letting off some celebratory fireworks his partner, the marvellously named Perfida Beverley Hills (Teyanna Taylor) sexually humiliates the camp commandant Col. Lockjaw (Sean Penn). 

After an attempted bombing, Perfida is intercepted by Lockjaw who it seems has a fetishistic obsession with her and blackmails her into meeting for sex. She winds up pregnant, but this doesn't seem to quench her revolutionary fervour (one striking shot shows her heavily pregnant and joyfully firing an automatic rifle), and after giving birth to a daughter she returns to the fight and is finally arrested during a bank raid. 

Cut to 16 years later. Pat is now living off grid under an alias as Bob with daughter Willa (played by Chase Infiniti). Lockjaw has been invited to join a secretive White Supremacist group called the Christmas Adventurers Club so determines to hunt down Willa to hide any evidence that he might once have had an interracial relationship. Hijinks and ultra violence ensue.

I'm still not sure quite what to make of this film. There are obvious parallels with the current situation with right wing racist paramilitaries hunting down immigrants and carrying out summary executions of undesirables. However, the revolutionaries seem to be more rooted in the radical chic of the 1970s than contemporary movements like Antifa. The film was adapted from the novel Vineland by Thomas Pynchon which was set between the late 60s and 1984, which might explain this though.

There is an uneasy tension between the truly vile politics of the Christmas Adventurers and almost farcical/slapstick humour as acid casualty Pat tries and fails to remember his identifying passcodes, worries about charging his phone, and then falls off a roof to be tasered by the police whilst on the run. 

The film is also on the long side at over two and half hours, cramming an awful lot of stuff in there with some great action sequences and car chases that feel almost grafted in from a classic 70s style thriller. The score by Johnny Greenwood of Radiohead is also worthy of note and underpins the action nicely.

Not what I was expecting, but worth a watch.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

Stella Gibbons began her writing career as a journalist in the late 1920s with spells at the Evening Standard and The Lady, reviewing books for the latter and getting something of a reputation as a snarky reviewer. One genre that seemed to particularly irritate her were the then fashionable rural romances, known as 'loam and lovechild' stories, featuring purple prose and overblown plots about love amidst the harsh lives of the simple working folk down on the farm.

For her first (and best known) novel, she created the character of Flora Poste an infuriatingly chipper young gel from London, recently orphaned and wondering what to do with her life given that she is possessed "of every art and grace save that of earning her own living". She writes to all of her various relatives, before settling on visiting the Starkadders of Cold Comfort Farm, who seem to have owed an unspecified obligation to her late father.


The initial impressions are not promising - the farmhouse is as bleak as the name and the labour is back breaking and barely profitable. The Starkadders are an eccentric family, to say the least, from Judith (Flora's cousin) and husband Amos (a hellfire preacher), their sons Seth and Reuben (who one imagines spend their live striding around shirtless), Elfine (who lives up to her name) and various other half-brothers, distant relatives and aged farm hands. Most ominous of all is the rarely seen family matriarch Ada Doom, who spends most of her time hidden away in her room complaining of once having seen 'something nasty in the woodshed' that has evidently left her scarred for life. All of them seem to relish the misery of living on the farm scratching a living by scranletting two hundred furrows or clettering the dirty dishes with a twig.

Flora soon settles in and briskly sets about interfering in their lives with a view to improving their respective lots and maybe finding out what the debt incurred to her father might have been. This ranges from offering unsolicited advice on contraception to fecund farm maids, buying a dish mop to make washing up easier than using twigs, attending a hellfire sermon, to arranging a suitable wedding match for Elfine instead of the unpromising sounding cousin Urk. It becomes clear that she is doing this out of a kind hearted nature rather than any ulterior motive, without any thought for her own gain.

Gibbons writes in a nicely observed parody of the florid style of writers like DH Lawrence with scarcely hidden sexual undertones - to quote a passage:

The land, the iron furrows of frosted earth under the rain-lust, the fecund spears of rain, the swelling, slow burst of seed-sheaths, the slow smell of cows and cry of cows, the trampling bride-pride of the bull in his hour. All his, his …

She also invents many fictitious terms for rural matters - scranletting, clettering (with a clettering stick), the ubiquitous weed sukebind and the salacious sounding activity of mollocking which usually results in the unplanned pregnancy of some or other unfortunate maiden. Most of the rural characters speak in the sort of accent described by Archers script writers as 'Mummerset' and I imagine that such comedy stalwarts as Joe Grundy and Walter Gabriel would have felt right at home down on Cold Comfort Farm.

The overall effect is generally very funny, albeit occasionally hard going to read involving checking odd looking words with the kindle dictionary to see if they are real or not. Oddly enough this book is technically science fiction - written in 1932 but set some years in the future from that point with personal planes and video phones. 

Long Day

Awake with the dawn
Prepare the dojo for class
Settle in seiza

Spring Grass

Lawn care tips for Spring 
Extend No Mow May from March
To the end of June

Equinox

Vernal equinox
When the winter months give way
To the right of spring

Odessa by Bee Gees

Everyone knows the Bee Gees for their cheesy 70s disco records, sung in impeccable falsetto harmonies by three brothers with bouffant hair and impressive gnashers, but today I was surprised to find that they actually started as a band in 1958 and released five albums before this wildly ambitious concept project, originally titled An America Opera.

This opens with the title track which deals with the aftermath of a shipwreck in 1899. From that point it’s all over the place thematically and musically (ranging from orchestral to country to Sgt Peppers influences), and apparently led to the band breaking up for over a year as no one could agree on how it should be produced or what singles to release. Even the album cover caused problems - it was originally released as a double LP with gold embossed lettering and a red flock coating that caused record plant employees to suffer allergic reactions.

Robin Gibb eventually rejoined his brothers in August 1970 and they went on to record another concept album, this time about the battle of Trafalgar. Eventually they discovered tight white suits and disco and the rest is history, much like this album.

File under ‘What the heck were they thinking when they recorded this?’

https://album.link/gb/i/1467020922

High Violet by The National

I have something of an aversion to listening to bands if the first thing I hear of them is that they’ve been nominated for a Brit award or a Grammy or whatever. Chances are high that they’ll be some johnny-come-lately trendy band that have caught the zeitgeist because one of their tracks was on an advert or a movie soundtrack. 

I think in the case of The National, I might have been unfair. They had been going for 12 years or so before hitting the big time and seem to have had a solid track record of albums up to that point. The music is very much in the indie vein, with droning guitars and solid, repeating drum patterns with a bit of piano thrown in on some tracks for variety. 

I wasn’t immediately hooked on first listening, but I think I’m intrigued enough to give it another listen, which is always a positive sign. 

https://album.link/gb/i/401440905