Wednesday, September 23, 2009
Hereafter and Now
Thinking of my last blog and its serpentine subject, I wonder whether the eel evolved from the same source as a snake or from a different fishy ancestor or from a reptilian, losing its legs as it found slithering quite acceptable, like those children who bump along on their rumps rather than crawling, until one day they stand up as homo erectus. Who knows? Probably Darwin did. Charles D. was a remarkable man and a national treasure to the British. He was one of those enlightened individuals who seemed to have been blessed with an original and deeply penetrative mind and applied it, like a blow torch, to the cobwebby dry leaves of the religious cant that held sway in his day – and still does in parts of the United States.
I noted with the stomach twisting resignation of déjà vu that a new film about his life has not found an American distributor as yet, because the religious Right regard him as a humanist pervert, blaspheming against the history of Man as recorded in the Bible. More or less at the same time as reading about the film’s lack of support, I discovered that there was an intriguing new book out by David Eagleman called Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives. It proves to be very funny, a mix of philosophical musing, surrealist burlesque and genuine challenge to all who have their own beliefs regarding what happens to us after we are gone. The story I read last night had a plot which suggested in its final sentence that we could be on a path of downward evolution, bound to be something less than human the next time round and that we began this spiral journey as highly intelligent aliens.
He’s an American nuclear physicist or somesuch scientist and the book has been published over there but has yet to fall on the desk of the fundamentalist belief-police who, apparently, cannot accept Darwin’s premise that we might have ape genes in our stock. But they are slow readers, Neanderthals all, and still live in the fantasy world of the caves of the Garden of Eden, resisting the eel’s exhortation to them to try a bite from the tree of knowledge.
Thinking of my last blog and its serpentine subject, I wonder whether the eel evolved from the same source as a snake or from a different fishy ancestor or from a reptilian, losing its legs as it found slithering quite acceptable, like those children who bump along on their rumps rather than crawling, until one day they stand up as homo erectus. Who knows? Probably Darwin did. Charles D. was a remarkable man and a national treasure to the British. He was one of those enlightened individuals who seemed to have been blessed with an original and deeply penetrative mind and applied it, like a blow torch, to the cobwebby dry leaves of the religious cant that held sway in his day – and still does in parts of the United States.
I noted with the stomach twisting resignation of déjà vu that a new film about his life has not found an American distributor as yet, because the religious Right regard him as a humanist pervert, blaspheming against the history of Man as recorded in the Bible. More or less at the same time as reading about the film’s lack of support, I discovered that there was an intriguing new book out by David Eagleman called Sum: Forty Tales of the Afterlives. It proves to be very funny, a mix of philosophical musing, surrealist burlesque and genuine challenge to all who have their own beliefs regarding what happens to us after we are gone. The story I read last night had a plot which suggested in its final sentence that we could be on a path of downward evolution, bound to be something less than human the next time round and that we began this spiral journey as highly intelligent aliens.
He’s an American nuclear physicist or somesuch scientist and the book has been published over there but has yet to fall on the desk of the fundamentalist belief-police who, apparently, cannot accept Darwin’s premise that we might have ape genes in our stock. But they are slow readers, Neanderthals all, and still live in the fantasy world of the caves of the Garden of Eden, resisting the eel’s exhortation to them to try a bite from the tree of knowledge.
Labels: Serpents. Garden of Eden. Charles Darwin. Sum by David Eagleman.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Slide ‘em down your throat like wonky wheels...
Name that tune as some old tv programme catch phrase went. Got it? Jellied eels. I experienced one of those coincidences that set in train a whole barrage of images,. I was watching TV in a Paris hotel and BBC World had an item about eels being yet another dying breed. Apparently 90% down on its population in the UK, the eel is on its way towards the same oblivion to which we all seem to be heading on Planet Earth: this, despite its bravely versatile habit of crossing untold miles of land, sea, river and lake in search of food and its lover in the wide Sargasso Sea, where it breeds. I caught a few of these serpentine savages in my youth and then, when I had sons, they, too, had that frisson of excitement crossed with horror, as they hooked the maniacally twisting creature, greedy for their worms. In the lochs of north east Scotland, where local fishermen would never cast their superior lines because of their obsession with trout and salmon in rivers, I taught the boys to spread a newspaper on the bank and drop the creature upon it before disgorging the barb; otherwise hands, line and fishing net would be covered in their noxious slime.
It never occurred to me to cook it. Back it was despatched to continue its relentless journey. Being a northern boy from a pit village, eels weren’t on my menu. I stretched a point for the bony pike, a decent dace and whatever fed off the end of the sewer pipes on the Tyne, baking them on a make-shift fire, but eels did not inspire the savage imagination in me, unlike southerners.
It was rather late in life that I bought eel from a north Norfolk smokehouse and discovered its delightful taste and texture. Slightly herring-like and yet more fulsomely reminiscent of shark, I ate it when I could get it. Then there was a great hiatus and none was offered by shop or restaurant.
Until this lunch time.
Then, in St Germain, at a delightful fish restaurant called La Poissonerie where we have eaten several times, smoked eel was miraculously on the menu. Served on a little stack of marinated carrot, a meaty slice perched with a round of fresh cream atop, like a chef’s hat and surrounded by a circle of pale green gooseberry juice producing an exact simulation of a loch’s surface, with the hills beyond, it captured the entire history of my relationship with the wild creature.
Name that tune as some old tv programme catch phrase went. Got it? Jellied eels. I experienced one of those coincidences that set in train a whole barrage of images,. I was watching TV in a Paris hotel and BBC World had an item about eels being yet another dying breed. Apparently 90% down on its population in the UK, the eel is on its way towards the same oblivion to which we all seem to be heading on Planet Earth: this, despite its bravely versatile habit of crossing untold miles of land, sea, river and lake in search of food and its lover in the wide Sargasso Sea, where it breeds. I caught a few of these serpentine savages in my youth and then, when I had sons, they, too, had that frisson of excitement crossed with horror, as they hooked the maniacally twisting creature, greedy for their worms. In the lochs of north east Scotland, where local fishermen would never cast their superior lines because of their obsession with trout and salmon in rivers, I taught the boys to spread a newspaper on the bank and drop the creature upon it before disgorging the barb; otherwise hands, line and fishing net would be covered in their noxious slime.
It never occurred to me to cook it. Back it was despatched to continue its relentless journey. Being a northern boy from a pit village, eels weren’t on my menu. I stretched a point for the bony pike, a decent dace and whatever fed off the end of the sewer pipes on the Tyne, baking them on a make-shift fire, but eels did not inspire the savage imagination in me, unlike southerners.
It was rather late in life that I bought eel from a north Norfolk smokehouse and discovered its delightful taste and texture. Slightly herring-like and yet more fulsomely reminiscent of shark, I ate it when I could get it. Then there was a great hiatus and none was offered by shop or restaurant.
Until this lunch time.
Then, in St Germain, at a delightful fish restaurant called La Poissonerie where we have eaten several times, smoked eel was miraculously on the menu. Served on a little stack of marinated carrot, a meaty slice perched with a round of fresh cream atop, like a chef’s hat and surrounded by a circle of pale green gooseberry juice producing an exact simulation of a loch’s surface, with the hills beyond, it captured the entire history of my relationship with the wild creature.
Labels: Eels. Paris. Ecology.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
The Moor not Merrier
Comedians can be paradoxical individuals. Many are insular and introverted yet force themselves to face an empty stage and a baying audience as though it is a cold turkey treatment for life itself. They can be depressives, hypochondriacs, vertically challenged, self-hating gays, cross-dressers, cleanliness fetishists and any combination of these and a myriad other traits and imbalances. Some, of course, are relatively unfettered by psychological problems and have found an early career in the medium of humour. But, I would wager, among the very best there is often a problematic core that gives their performances a tragicomic quality that appeals to our own sorrows and conflicts.
Whether there is a sizeable element of the population which would like to experience life through the eyes of personalities that are complete opposites to their own, I don’t know but I suspect that a majority would take it if offered, if only for a day: men wanting to try out being women, timid wishing to be bold, losers desiring that winning feeling, the ageing wanting to be young again and the poor wanting to be rich (forever!).
In this world of potential contrasts, one that has always fascinated me is the funny man or woman who wants to go straight. You don’t have to click the digital control too far to see those radical young stand-ups from the Edinburgh Festival;, sporting their Perrier awards all the way into a tv series or film, where the real money is. These days, most comics don’t stay that way very long. The dying of the light in the comedian’s career is unlikely to be a lonely dressing room on a pier in some resort with drugs or alcohol as the sole companion. More likely it is a comfortable existence in some sunny expat colony by a warm sea.
But a particular thread still survives. This is the stand-up who wants to do straight theatre. I remember seeing Lee Evans in Becket recently, Max Wall also in Becket, Frankie Howard in Midsummer Night’s Dream, albeit in a comic part and – last night – Lenny Henry in Othello. I am in London, as you might guess and saw the nation’s favourite take on possibly his biggest challenge as the Moor.
He did well enough for me not to find my bum going in and out in dreadful anticipation of lines being blanked or choreographic gaffes. His stage presence is dominating if, at times, in need of sharper direction to ease out occasional woodenness. His real identification with the dark racial heart of the play gave some of his speeches an angry pathos that spiked my heart and made me conjecture how much he had suffered from prejudice as he climbed his comedy career ladder. Was that why he wanted to take on the part? Some kind of exorcism of dreadful days?
There was a relief mixed with delight in his adoring audience last night as they gave him a number of enthusiastic encores. He had done it! Pretty good for one of our favourite black sons playing the ultimate black man’s part.
Comedians can be paradoxical individuals. Many are insular and introverted yet force themselves to face an empty stage and a baying audience as though it is a cold turkey treatment for life itself. They can be depressives, hypochondriacs, vertically challenged, self-hating gays, cross-dressers, cleanliness fetishists and any combination of these and a myriad other traits and imbalances. Some, of course, are relatively unfettered by psychological problems and have found an early career in the medium of humour. But, I would wager, among the very best there is often a problematic core that gives their performances a tragicomic quality that appeals to our own sorrows and conflicts.
Whether there is a sizeable element of the population which would like to experience life through the eyes of personalities that are complete opposites to their own, I don’t know but I suspect that a majority would take it if offered, if only for a day: men wanting to try out being women, timid wishing to be bold, losers desiring that winning feeling, the ageing wanting to be young again and the poor wanting to be rich (forever!).
In this world of potential contrasts, one that has always fascinated me is the funny man or woman who wants to go straight. You don’t have to click the digital control too far to see those radical young stand-ups from the Edinburgh Festival;, sporting their Perrier awards all the way into a tv series or film, where the real money is. These days, most comics don’t stay that way very long. The dying of the light in the comedian’s career is unlikely to be a lonely dressing room on a pier in some resort with drugs or alcohol as the sole companion. More likely it is a comfortable existence in some sunny expat colony by a warm sea.
But a particular thread still survives. This is the stand-up who wants to do straight theatre. I remember seeing Lee Evans in Becket recently, Max Wall also in Becket, Frankie Howard in Midsummer Night’s Dream, albeit in a comic part and – last night – Lenny Henry in Othello. I am in London, as you might guess and saw the nation’s favourite take on possibly his biggest challenge as the Moor.
He did well enough for me not to find my bum going in and out in dreadful anticipation of lines being blanked or choreographic gaffes. His stage presence is dominating if, at times, in need of sharper direction to ease out occasional woodenness. His real identification with the dark racial heart of the play gave some of his speeches an angry pathos that spiked my heart and made me conjecture how much he had suffered from prejudice as he climbed his comedy career ladder. Was that why he wanted to take on the part? Some kind of exorcism of dreadful days?
There was a relief mixed with delight in his adoring audience last night as they gave him a number of enthusiastic encores. He had done it! Pretty good for one of our favourite black sons playing the ultimate black man’s part.
Sunday, September 06, 2009
Death in the Public Eye
I was induced to ponder on the curious rise in the notion of celebrity the other day when I received an email from one of my oldest friends who now lives in Canada. She writes exceptionally pithy emails and should be supplying articles for the Guardian about the idiosyncrasies of life in that country. Anyway, her tale involved a child with Asberger’s staying at her house, on holiday. He managed to cut himself and had staples inserted. The doctor told him how to remove them when the wound had healed and gave him some device to do this. The primary school aged boy was excited and said he would delay the removal of the staples for an extra week. Why was this? He wanted to do it in front of his class in the Show and Tell session…
Now if we take a graph of normal distribution, a bell curve, where one end is where an individual tells no-one anything and defends his privacy like Harold Pinter or a true hermit friend of a friend in the Pyrenees, I suppose the boy is a bit over half way on the curve towards what we find at the other end. Towards this final graph point we have various sad, sycophantic individuals who only exist as flickering realities in the media and have no worthwhile contributions to make to society beyond their stints in the stocks of public derision. At the very end are those who want, despite their lack of talent and grace, to make one Big Bang in the steady state universe of every day life. Here we have the two boys who intended to reignite the Columbine tragedy in the UK but were caught with the means to do it, just before the anniversary of that American nightmare. Some months earlier, one of these boys did an involuntary Show and Tell in an essay in which he forecast his role in his forthcoming attempted re-enactment.
Every week it seems, punters reveal their grisly intentions or life-culminations on YouTube. I recall, for example, one man goaded by his Watchers to top himself. There have been mobile-phone recorded killings and beatings posted for everyone’s delectation.
When I was a young feller, the most publicity you could get was among your mates in the village or class at school and it lasted maybe a day or two. Despite your wish to become notorious, somehow everyone conspired to snuff out your little fantasies. So you grew up a little circumspect about revealing your inner bits and pieces.
The truly serious stuff remained like a canker in the apple of the local community. I don’t mean the grim, perverse behaviours now related every evening on the news but, for example, the slashing of competitors’ leeks in the annual competition in the North East of England. The act would, like a Shakespearean curse, be carried by blood from generation to generation. Thus, in my village, there was a leek-slasher’s grandson! The poor boy never did anything wrong in his life but people were always suspicious of him and his potential for agricultural crime.
I suppose incidents of media-broadcast acts of destruction, depravation, defamation and the like will continue to rise as those among us who feel aggrieved that they have been left in the long grass beside the highway of the public’s appetite for the macabre, work themselves up into a state of pathological obsession and try to catch our eyes by flinging themselves into the unseeing traffic.
I was induced to ponder on the curious rise in the notion of celebrity the other day when I received an email from one of my oldest friends who now lives in Canada. She writes exceptionally pithy emails and should be supplying articles for the Guardian about the idiosyncrasies of life in that country. Anyway, her tale involved a child with Asberger’s staying at her house, on holiday. He managed to cut himself and had staples inserted. The doctor told him how to remove them when the wound had healed and gave him some device to do this. The primary school aged boy was excited and said he would delay the removal of the staples for an extra week. Why was this? He wanted to do it in front of his class in the Show and Tell session…
Now if we take a graph of normal distribution, a bell curve, where one end is where an individual tells no-one anything and defends his privacy like Harold Pinter or a true hermit friend of a friend in the Pyrenees, I suppose the boy is a bit over half way on the curve towards what we find at the other end. Towards this final graph point we have various sad, sycophantic individuals who only exist as flickering realities in the media and have no worthwhile contributions to make to society beyond their stints in the stocks of public derision. At the very end are those who want, despite their lack of talent and grace, to make one Big Bang in the steady state universe of every day life. Here we have the two boys who intended to reignite the Columbine tragedy in the UK but were caught with the means to do it, just before the anniversary of that American nightmare. Some months earlier, one of these boys did an involuntary Show and Tell in an essay in which he forecast his role in his forthcoming attempted re-enactment.
Every week it seems, punters reveal their grisly intentions or life-culminations on YouTube. I recall, for example, one man goaded by his Watchers to top himself. There have been mobile-phone recorded killings and beatings posted for everyone’s delectation.
When I was a young feller, the most publicity you could get was among your mates in the village or class at school and it lasted maybe a day or two. Despite your wish to become notorious, somehow everyone conspired to snuff out your little fantasies. So you grew up a little circumspect about revealing your inner bits and pieces.
The truly serious stuff remained like a canker in the apple of the local community. I don’t mean the grim, perverse behaviours now related every evening on the news but, for example, the slashing of competitors’ leeks in the annual competition in the North East of England. The act would, like a Shakespearean curse, be carried by blood from generation to generation. Thus, in my village, there was a leek-slasher’s grandson! The poor boy never did anything wrong in his life but people were always suspicious of him and his potential for agricultural crime.
I suppose incidents of media-broadcast acts of destruction, depravation, defamation and the like will continue to rise as those among us who feel aggrieved that they have been left in the long grass beside the highway of the public’s appetite for the macabre, work themselves up into a state of pathological obsession and try to catch our eyes by flinging themselves into the unseeing traffic.