Happy Warriors

Evan Thomas, my ex-flatmate and longtime partner in the 'Mr Weinstein' pitching game, has been making a documentary film-poem about the wartime activities of the USAAF's 8th Air Force in Norfolk during the Second World War. He's been as far away as Florida collecting footage and testimony, but a lot of the work involves wandering about eerie Breckland airbases filming disused Nissen Huts. You can visit the film's website here (and pick apart my constructions in the introductory text).

March 2009: edited highlights

In lieu of an interesting new post (I've written 2,000 words of fiction, 500 words for a friend's website, and a long-ish lesson plan today), here's a rustle through the baggage of the Ides:

- The Spirit (n.) Film we saw and were enormously underwhelmed by. Samuel L. Jackson needs to sort it out, but not as much as Frank Miller does. I'm not sure the premise 'ghost flirts with women and Scarlett Johansson dresses up as Eva Braun' should have passed the 'Mr. Weinstein' pitching test.

- Walking (v.) Less of this in March, largely due to increased work commitments. The seasonally-affected Magyars have chinned up in the last week or two, according to my ambulatory researches, but I'm not covering five miles a day any more.

- Bankruptcy (n., abstract) Darlington FC have a month to find a buyer or they will cease to exist. Internet chat suggests that we'll have to pull together and reform as a 'Fans' Club' in the murky depths, where I would be - in all honesty - perfectly content.

- Politics (n.) Ferenc G. is gone but nobody seems to want his job. Corrupt, naive, and arrogant as Gyurcsány might have been, I feel rather sorry for him. When I saw him, he had stopped with his wife and daughter to buy some pre-cinema pic 'n' mix. Sights like this tend to humanise politics. In other 'humanising of politics' news, the godawful Jacqui Smith is all hot and bothered because her Guy Fawkes-a-like husband decided to get, well, hot and bothered on ministerial expenses. My inner schoolboy wants to use the phrase 'wank bank' here, and just has.

- Dream (n.) And a political one, at that. Last night I dreamt that I was crossing a big Budapesti boulevard with Gordon and Sarah Brown, and David and Samantha Cameron were crossing in the other direction.

- Clock change (n.) - 'Time-wasting bastard', more like.

- Badly-written (adj.) - I'm reading sci-fi novelist Brian Aldiss' autobiography at the moment. It's absolutely fascinating if you're interested in the currents of ideas which drove British postwar fiction. It's also terribly composed, and pays no attention to the potential tonal discrepancies between eulogistic descriptions of one's wife and throwaways like 'the water was gonad shrinking'. Full marks for attempts to posit a postwar avant-garde, though, even if this is mucked in with lengthy celebrations of (NO! NO! NO!) Kingsley Amis.

- Well-written (adj.) - I (re-)read Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction earlier this week. I need to write about the appropriation of the Sebaldian voice against Sebald's own arguments about style and kitsch. The decontextualisation of Sebald - only seven years after his death - is infuriating. For now I'll only remark on the wonderful Clive Scott's cautionary reminder, in his obituary for W.G.S., that the infinitely imitable nature of the style of a novel like Austerlitz was/ is a joke that flies in the face of the absolute alignment of form and content that Sebald achieved. For me, Sebald is a Beckett unashamed by the ultimate embededness of style within historical context. There is no superfluous melancholy in The Rings of Saturn; there is nothing whimsical or unearnedly peripatetic about Vertigo. Going back to On the Natural History of Destruction made me ask one or two severe questions of my thesis, I can tell you.

Anyway, that's for another day. I'm off to bed. Xx

Man, he used to be so cool....

Just trawling the internet, trying to recover from a mild hangover and avoid writing a lesson plan, when I came across this interview that I did for a guy in Sweden's hipsterish music website back in the olden, golden days of AHRC funding, no pressing deadlines, Truck Festival etc etc. In celebration, a few Teknikov highlights:

- Sharing a stage with DFA's occasionally excellent Prinzhorn Dance School. It wasn't the gig or the company that made this evening memorable, however: it was the post-show shenanigans which allowed our reputation as Norwich's most immature band to spread beyond the confines of the fine city. Yes, we had 'handbags'. Mat and I stole Tony's hat for the nth time that week. Retrospectively, I can understand why he was a bit annoyed. Anyway, he retrieved said item of clothing and started hitting me around the face with it, provoking an unsightly tussle from which no-one emerged with any credibility.

- The Art School gig. This was a great night. The support act was an American chap who none of us had ever met before and he turned up at the venue, guitar in hand, precisely half an hour after he was supposed to be on stage. Our set got really squeezed because we were on late. Naturally, we spent the intervening period drinking cheap Oranjeboom and getting more and more nervous about the delay, an anxiety which transformed into adrenalin the moment we went on. About halfway through the set, and midway through a song, someone figured out how to turn the hall lights down and the backlights came on completely unexpectedly, at which point everyone went mental. There was a moshpit! People were dancing!

- Truck 2006. This was amazing. We spent three or four nights in Abingdon prior to this show doing what we do best, namely going to the pub, arguing, telling each other ghost stories, talking about football, and failing to do any rehearsal whatsoever. Somehow, this cocktail of procrastination worked wonders. We were the first band on and the atmosphere was incredibly tight, as one of the biggest thunderstorms I have ever seen in the UK was half an hour from breaking. I had sweat running into my eyes before we started playing. The tent was absolutely packed as we were one of the first bands of the weekend and, from the stage, we could see more people running across the field to come and see us. We then spent the rest of the weekend getting drunk, arguing, telling each other ghost stories and talking about football...

- The MacBeth. Our pre-Christmas 2007 jaunt to Hoxton was probably my favourite of our London gigs. Once again, we were incredibly late onstage thanks to the previous band, who took ONE BLOODY HOUR to get their equipment offstage. The gig organiser, who gave the impression of just having escaped from rehab (probably not uncommon in a known haunt of Amy Winehouse and Peter Doherty) had to plead with the stern barlady to let us play at all, and he only did this because we were all devoting energy to being conspicuously angry and walking around kicking our amplifiers like Ian Brown on the Late Show. Anyway, we got on and all of our instruments went absolutely mad. The Roland sounded as if it had fallen victim to some antagonistic nanotechnology and (as so often happens) my guitar string snapped during the very first song, meaning that I had to play the atrocious spare guitar for the entire gig. When we finally got going, though, we were ace, albeit in a frighteningly distorted, No Wave kind of a way.

Obviously, I won't go into all the times we were crap, or apathetic. Can you tell that, contrary to what I've gone on and on and on about in the past, I'm missing Teknikov rather a lot?

Half-arsed, putting off going to work, news digest

HOT!




Ferenc Gyurcsany resigns as Hungarian PM, but not before deploying some ever-so-slightly emotionally manipulative language (he's such a Blairite). Actually, it all seems to be a ploy to prevent President Sólyom calling an early general election, but let's allow the almost completely unmourned (and, lest we forget, multi-millionaire 'socialist') Gyurcsany have his moment of spurious dignity. Here's a quick flashback of his career highlights:

Saudi 'terrorists' (Feri's cracking wheeze about the supposed extracurricular activities of the Saudi national football team.)

A moment of unguarded honesty brings a major European capital to a standstill.

OFF!



On the subject of people who can't be trusted to be left alone with a microphone for five minutes, Chris Moyles is in hot water again/ Chris Moyles has been a dick again/ Chris Moyles is still not funny.

I hate to say it, but I frequently feel as if Moyles is the embodiment of the noughties British zeitgeist.




THE PRESS!




And, carrying on the theme of zeitgeist-embodying loudmouths, The Damned United, Tom Hooper's adaptation of David Peace's novelisation of Brian Clough's scarcely believable 44 days in charge of Dirty Leeds (made more dirty by their being Moyles's team of choice) is out this weekend. The BBC's Pat Murphy interviews Martin O'Neill, manager of Aston Villa and former Clough underling, about it here. O'Neill is, as ever, an eloquent interviewee (he studied law at Queen's University prior to joining Forest, and is an avid amateur criminologist in his spare time), and I was surprised by the uncanny resemblance of his diction - close, spare, precise - to my dad's.

'Woman met alien near Norwich'

Yes, it's true. It's in the Evening News, so it must be.

Ferencváros - Newcastle, 1996

I remember the hype around this game really distinctly, for some reason. I also remember absolutely despising Newcastle at the time and really, really wanting Fradi to win. All the attention before the game focused on the home team's prodigiously talented young midfielder Krisztián Lisztes, who some pundits were painting as the great new hope for Hungarian football. Sadly, Lisztes's career has been dogged by a series of injuries and, while he's won plenty of trophies in the Bundesliga with VFB Stuttgart and Werder Bremen, there seems to be a sense that he might have become a real star. As is sometimes the case, the Czechs ended up with publicity at the expense of the Hungarians, and the most famous midfielder to come out of Central Europe in the mid-1990s was the great Pavel Nedvěd, who is still going strong at 36 for Juventus.

A few things came out of this video for me. Firstly, the extent to which Hungarian football has declined over the last decade. When FTC's name came out of the hat as Newcastle's draw, they were genuinely considered a threat to Shearer et al's chance of progressing. Nowadays, Huungarian sides are looked upon as soft touches: when Zalaegerszeg-based ZTE sneaked a 1-0 first leg victory against Manchester United in a 2002 Champions League qualifier (before being thumped 5-0 in the return at Old Trafford) it was considered an upset of almost implausible magnitude. The result was so unusual that, according to some of my (non-football-loving, female) students, Béla Koplárovics, scorer of the winning goal in Zalaegerszeg, attained overnight fame throughout the country.

Secondly, of course, is the decline of Newcastle over a similar period. Given some of the players they've fielded since the unpleasant sacking of Bobby Robson in 2004 (not to mention some of those that Robson himself chose to deploy) it's probably surprising that they've lasted this long without being relegated. This year, their number might well be up, and my guess is that it's only the plight of semi-local rivals Middlesborough, the subject of internet rumours regarding imminent administration (rumours, I'd best stress, on the internet), that's acting as any kind of comfort for them at the moment. Just seeing the short clip above brought back memories of how good that Albert - Lee - Ginola (left on the bench that night in Budapest) - Ferdinand - Shearer side could be. Srnicek's early error, however, is an augury of how the next thirteen years were to turn out.

Thirdly, there's a lovely moment in the video where Rob Lee sees a slightly-scuffed shot hit the post and then trickle teasingly along the line before the Fradi goalkeeper comes to his senses and jumps on it. Various Newcastle forwards raise their hands as if they're about to begin celebrating, but as soon as the referee signals 'no goal' they're back to business. There's no John Terry-esque referee-harrassing here. Have we really got this bad this quickly?

'Writers are lampposts, critics are dogs': Paulo Coelho Opiating the People

Yeah, well I'd rather be a dog than a lamppost, you dirty old hippy.

You can barely move in Hungary for people reading Paulo Coelho's, er, 'books'. It seems that the fall of communism facilitated not only the eastward surge of capitalism but a concurrent (and, if you ask me, related) influx of pseudo-spiritual bullshit.

It also fits the tendency of mainland Europeans to be far more susceptible to earnestness than the snarky British. It's almost disappointing to be out here knowing that you will never, ever be able to see the point of Bono, Depeche Mode, or the Smashing Pumpkins in the way that a Frenchman, an Italian, or a Hungarian can...