Saturday, August 29, 2009
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Escape to Nowhere
A linguist must invent a word to describe the icicle of horror which slides down your back the moment you realise you have been betrayed by your SatNav.
I was in the wilds of the West Country, hoping to get to Bristol Airport when mine chirped: “You have reached your destination.”
No I hadn’t. And when it recalculated the route it happily informed me I was 35 minutes in the wrong direction.
With 120 seconds to go before check-in closed, I hurtled through the airport doors and resolved to pay greater attention to road signage in the future.
I bought a bottle of water and some newspapers, joined the queue for the plane and tried to get into holiday mode. As I approached the precise point where last year my bag burst open, a sensation of refreshment spilled down me.
Yikes! The cap on the bottle was not completely open, but nor was it completely shut, and the plastic bag in which it dangled had been transformed into a watering can; specifically, it was watering my leg.
With soggy papers by my side, I squeezed onto the bus to the plane.
Budget airlines may have no interest in recapturing the romance of flight, but they create visions of purgatory with a mastery that eclipses anything in the Divine Comedy.
And yet, even though the conscience is nagging at the thought of carbon emissions and the child several rows down is making a noise which might crack the cockpit windows, the escape into the clouds is a moment of sunlight and liberation when the mayhem of the airport seems very far away.
The capsule of an airplane remains, mercifully, a mobile phone-free zone. And when the ground disappears from view and is replaced by mountains of cloud, you could be above anywhere in the world.
It is hard to enter a Zen state when someone is trying to sell you a sandwich that costs more than the tail of a champion racehorse, but air travel can give a flash of objectivity and freedom.
Rowan Williams, the Welsh poet-theologian-turned-Archbishop of Canterbury, relishes these moments.
He recently said: “I do find plane journeys very good for writing poems, or polishing poems or thinking through, because in a plane you're nowhere in particular for a while. And it quite helps when you're doing that sort of writing to be nowhere in particular.”
The days of oil-based aviation will come to an end when a new era of energy storage dawns, and the technology which could power such a future is already in development.
If cleaner and cheaper flight becomes a reality, perhaps the act of travel will again be a pleasure which rivals the moment of arrival. We can go sightseeing on Google Earth at our desks, but to be “nowhere in particular” is precious.
I was in the wilds of the West Country, hoping to get to Bristol Airport when mine chirped: “You have reached your destination.”
No I hadn’t. And when it recalculated the route it happily informed me I was 35 minutes in the wrong direction.
With 120 seconds to go before check-in closed, I hurtled through the airport doors and resolved to pay greater attention to road signage in the future.
I bought a bottle of water and some newspapers, joined the queue for the plane and tried to get into holiday mode. As I approached the precise point where last year my bag burst open, a sensation of refreshment spilled down me.
Yikes! The cap on the bottle was not completely open, but nor was it completely shut, and the plastic bag in which it dangled had been transformed into a watering can; specifically, it was watering my leg.
With soggy papers by my side, I squeezed onto the bus to the plane.
Budget airlines may have no interest in recapturing the romance of flight, but they create visions of purgatory with a mastery that eclipses anything in the Divine Comedy.
And yet, even though the conscience is nagging at the thought of carbon emissions and the child several rows down is making a noise which might crack the cockpit windows, the escape into the clouds is a moment of sunlight and liberation when the mayhem of the airport seems very far away.
The capsule of an airplane remains, mercifully, a mobile phone-free zone. And when the ground disappears from view and is replaced by mountains of cloud, you could be above anywhere in the world.
It is hard to enter a Zen state when someone is trying to sell you a sandwich that costs more than the tail of a champion racehorse, but air travel can give a flash of objectivity and freedom.
Rowan Williams, the Welsh poet-theologian-turned-Archbishop of Canterbury, relishes these moments.
He recently said: “I do find plane journeys very good for writing poems, or polishing poems or thinking through, because in a plane you're nowhere in particular for a while. And it quite helps when you're doing that sort of writing to be nowhere in particular.”
The days of oil-based aviation will come to an end when a new era of energy storage dawns, and the technology which could power such a future is already in development.
If cleaner and cheaper flight becomes a reality, perhaps the act of travel will again be a pleasure which rivals the moment of arrival. We can go sightseeing on Google Earth at our desks, but to be “nowhere in particular” is precious.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Close Encounters of the Italian and Irish Kind
The Welsh August has been as wet as a scuba-diving sponge. So it was with great excitement that I clambered onto a plane to Pisa.
And it was a real delight to meet up with family. Around the time this picture was taken a horde of mosquitoes were also having a lot of fun.
We went to the village of Cortina where there was a grand thunderclap.
It could have given Noah flashbacks.
Fascinatingly, the great Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins had an art exhibition around the corner. This is one of his rather fine paintings of Margam.
It then got very hot indeed. Enough to make a chilli melt.
In such moments there is nothing to do but experiment with beverages the colour of Jupiter.
When the days are scorching, the evening becomes a moment of clarity when it's possible to think and see straight. During such a moment we had an encounter with a ridiculously friendly sheepdog.
What you cannot tell from this photograph is that the man below is riding rollerblades.
Ah, it was lovely to loll for a few days, catch up, eat, life, walk and swim.
But I've never been able to cope with the speed at which hellos become goodbyes.
However, through a happy coincidence, Ru and Heather would be in Cardiff the very next weekend to investigate a strange contraption which had landed in the Millennium Stadium.
An atmosphere of uncertain anticipation crackled as the realisation dawned that this thing was about to spring into life.
The sky darkened, a David Bowie track played, and then...
Boom!
In a world in which rock and roll exists, it is a happy surprise that the most ubiquitous example of the genre consists of four men who recognise that joy beats at the heart of the universe. Magnificent.
And it was a real delight to meet up with family. Around the time this picture was taken a horde of mosquitoes were also having a lot of fun.
We went to the village of Cortina where there was a grand thunderclap.
It could have given Noah flashbacks.
Fascinatingly, the great Welsh actor Anthony Hopkins had an art exhibition around the corner. This is one of his rather fine paintings of Margam.
It then got very hot indeed. Enough to make a chilli melt.
In such moments there is nothing to do but experiment with beverages the colour of Jupiter.
When the days are scorching, the evening becomes a moment of clarity when it's possible to think and see straight. During such a moment we had an encounter with a ridiculously friendly sheepdog.
What you cannot tell from this photograph is that the man below is riding rollerblades.
Ah, it was lovely to loll for a few days, catch up, eat, life, walk and swim.
But I've never been able to cope with the speed at which hellos become goodbyes.
However, through a happy coincidence, Ru and Heather would be in Cardiff the very next weekend to investigate a strange contraption which had landed in the Millennium Stadium.
An atmosphere of uncertain anticipation crackled as the realisation dawned that this thing was about to spring into life.
The sky darkened, a David Bowie track played, and then...
Boom!
In a world in which rock and roll exists, it is a happy surprise that the most ubiquitous example of the genre consists of four men who recognise that joy beats at the heart of the universe. Magnificent.
U2 Between Hamlet and Lear
Musicians who have stormed up the charts often face the dilemma of the DSA – the Difficult Second Album.
Just as New Labour knew they could no longer play their 1997 campaign anthem Things Can Only get Better in 2001, artists risk being thrown off their pedestal unless they can dream up another album with the power to enthral.
This Saturday, thousands of U2 fans will cram into the Millennium Stadium to watch an Irish quartet wrestle with just as mighty a challenge; can a rock band enter middle age without becoming a pastiche of their younger selves?
Lyricist Bono has regularly spoken of his admiration for filmmakers and novelists who produce great work late in life. Where is pop’s Martin Scorsese?
Are the themes of fatherhood, ageing and other adult experiences not as valid inspiration for a three-minute song as the agonies of an adolescent at a Saturday night disco?
The difficulty is that rock music is about much more than writing poetry.
Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s greatest poet, wrote:
Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.
Poets and novelists spend their lives working in the dark, just as grandfather directors stay behind the lens as actors are illuminated.
But musicians are both creators and performers. They need to stand on a stage where light does cascade and fuse lyrical insight with the athleticism and theatricality of showmanship.
Plenty of young rock stars have bared youthful indecision with the poignancy and power of neo-Hamlets, but too many have burned out long before they have had the chance to play Lear.
As a mid-career band, U2 are in a position to do neither. But if they look at their own traumatic second album they will find the tensions which have sustained their career this far and can guarantee a relevance in the future.
The album October is the sound of a band in which three members were deeply engaged in charismatic Christianity and wrestling with the question of how the demands of faith, the desire for fame, and the love of music could be reconciled.
With the honesty of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, this wrestling – a potent display of joy and fury – continued over subsequent albums.
This was not religious art as kitsch propaganda, but it was an engagement with some of life’s deepest questions which chimed with the experiences of a colossal audience.
Just as politicians on Labour’s left counsel that the only way to renew the party is not by aping the competition but by returning to core values in the current day, U2 do not need to pretend to be the Killers or Coldplay.
Instead, they should grow old in a confident pursuit of grace. And under the aurora glow of stadium lights, they might paint that masterpiece.
Just as New Labour knew they could no longer play their 1997 campaign anthem Things Can Only get Better in 2001, artists risk being thrown off their pedestal unless they can dream up another album with the power to enthral.
This Saturday, thousands of U2 fans will cram into the Millennium Stadium to watch an Irish quartet wrestle with just as mighty a challenge; can a rock band enter middle age without becoming a pastiche of their younger selves?
Lyricist Bono has regularly spoken of his admiration for filmmakers and novelists who produce great work late in life. Where is pop’s Martin Scorsese?
Are the themes of fatherhood, ageing and other adult experiences not as valid inspiration for a three-minute song as the agonies of an adolescent at a Saturday night disco?
The difficulty is that rock music is about much more than writing poetry.
Seamus Heaney, Ireland’s greatest poet, wrote:
Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray
but no cascade of light.
Poets and novelists spend their lives working in the dark, just as grandfather directors stay behind the lens as actors are illuminated.
But musicians are both creators and performers. They need to stand on a stage where light does cascade and fuse lyrical insight with the athleticism and theatricality of showmanship.
Plenty of young rock stars have bared youthful indecision with the poignancy and power of neo-Hamlets, but too many have burned out long before they have had the chance to play Lear.
As a mid-career band, U2 are in a position to do neither. But if they look at their own traumatic second album they will find the tensions which have sustained their career this far and can guarantee a relevance in the future.
The album October is the sound of a band in which three members were deeply engaged in charismatic Christianity and wrestling with the question of how the demands of faith, the desire for fame, and the love of music could be reconciled.
With the honesty of Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, this wrestling – a potent display of joy and fury – continued over subsequent albums.
This was not religious art as kitsch propaganda, but it was an engagement with some of life’s deepest questions which chimed with the experiences of a colossal audience.
Just as politicians on Labour’s left counsel that the only way to renew the party is not by aping the competition but by returning to core values in the current day, U2 do not need to pretend to be the Killers or Coldplay.
Instead, they should grow old in a confident pursuit of grace. And under the aurora glow of stadium lights, they might paint that masterpiece.
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Films for the Head and Heart
If Hollywood movies are electric guitars, arthouse films are three-stringed instruments played by a tribe of bedouin who only speak to outsiders if they appear bearing an especially rare frogs.
I say this as someone who has spent some of the happiest afternoons of his life in cinemas which specialise in films with lots of subtitles and not that many exploding helicopters.
There is a grand magic which a film can weave once the house lights go down and you are in the grasp of an auteur’s imagination for the next two hours.
David Lynch allows you to see the eerie beauty of a traffic light dangling above an intersections. Jim Jarmusch enables you to experience taxi rides in five strange cities in a single sitting.
At a recent Hay Festival, Terry Gilliam bemoaned the fact that nobody was making films that were hard to watch anymore.
Don’t you want to see a film that challenges you and forces you to see the world from a different angle?
Heads nodded, including mine, even though his finest film, the Fisher King a heartwarming marvel.
But I share his horror of blockbusters in which you know there will be action scenes and wisecracks yet nothing that will make you yelp in laughter or shock.
When someone powerful has invested $150m in a movie, you need to appeal to the broadest possible audience so the common denominator is set pretty low.
But I’m now regularly wondering if the greatest act of filmic genius is not making a black-and-white drama which appeals to scarf-wearing 21-year-olds who like to name-check Bergman but actually fashioning a blockbuster which somehow entertains the heart and head spectacularly.
Alfred Hitchcock was the definitive showman, even making cameo appearances in his own films. Yet are Vertigo and Psycho not somehow simultaneously crowd pleasers and psychoanalytic masterpieces?
Just as the electric guitar is used to create many a racket but in the hands of a master in can make a stadium’s worth of spirits soar, so a director like Victor Fleming shot a musical with a singing lion and a tin man that to this day takes audiences on a journey through the depths of their subconscious.
Perhaps the greatest tricks a filmmaker can pull are (1) suspending the disbelief of an audience, (2) making people laugh out loud and (3) telling a story remembered decades later.
A quarter of a century ago, this hat-trick was pulled off in Ghostbusters. It is the ultimate special effects-driven popcorn movie, but it also manages to play on the conceits of New Yorkers, with Bill Murray delivering one of the wryest performances in the history of celluloid
Ultimately, it delivers a modern myth with its story of scientists confronting ghosts.
Genius is rare, and in this case it came painted in primary colours.
I say this as someone who has spent some of the happiest afternoons of his life in cinemas which specialise in films with lots of subtitles and not that many exploding helicopters.
There is a grand magic which a film can weave once the house lights go down and you are in the grasp of an auteur’s imagination for the next two hours.
David Lynch allows you to see the eerie beauty of a traffic light dangling above an intersections. Jim Jarmusch enables you to experience taxi rides in five strange cities in a single sitting.
At a recent Hay Festival, Terry Gilliam bemoaned the fact that nobody was making films that were hard to watch anymore.
Don’t you want to see a film that challenges you and forces you to see the world from a different angle?
Heads nodded, including mine, even though his finest film, the Fisher King a heartwarming marvel.
But I share his horror of blockbusters in which you know there will be action scenes and wisecracks yet nothing that will make you yelp in laughter or shock.
When someone powerful has invested $150m in a movie, you need to appeal to the broadest possible audience so the common denominator is set pretty low.
But I’m now regularly wondering if the greatest act of filmic genius is not making a black-and-white drama which appeals to scarf-wearing 21-year-olds who like to name-check Bergman but actually fashioning a blockbuster which somehow entertains the heart and head spectacularly.
Alfred Hitchcock was the definitive showman, even making cameo appearances in his own films. Yet are Vertigo and Psycho not somehow simultaneously crowd pleasers and psychoanalytic masterpieces?
Just as the electric guitar is used to create many a racket but in the hands of a master in can make a stadium’s worth of spirits soar, so a director like Victor Fleming shot a musical with a singing lion and a tin man that to this day takes audiences on a journey through the depths of their subconscious.
Perhaps the greatest tricks a filmmaker can pull are (1) suspending the disbelief of an audience, (2) making people laugh out loud and (3) telling a story remembered decades later.
A quarter of a century ago, this hat-trick was pulled off in Ghostbusters. It is the ultimate special effects-driven popcorn movie, but it also manages to play on the conceits of New Yorkers, with Bill Murray delivering one of the wryest performances in the history of celluloid
Ultimately, it delivers a modern myth with its story of scientists confronting ghosts.
Genius is rare, and in this case it came painted in primary colours.
Thursday, August 06, 2009
Matrimony and the Recovery of the Universe
One of the most astounding speeches of the 21st century was delivered not by Barack Obama but by Cardiff Doctor Who expert and beard connoisseur Caleb Woodbridge at his recent wedding to the spectacular Beverley.
If you don't yet have the delight of knowing this fine pair, I nonetheless recommend you read his speech for it is a freewheeling surf through a torrent of love, hope and imagination which is absolutely invigorating.
An excerpt:
If you don't yet have the delight of knowing this fine pair, I nonetheless recommend you read his speech for it is a freewheeling surf through a torrent of love, hope and imagination which is absolutely invigorating.
An excerpt:
Beverley and I have high ambitions for our marriage. For example, Bev is determined that our house will be spotlessly clean and tidy - unlike, say, certain previous houses we may have lived in, where the levels of cleanliness just might possibly have fallen just a tiny bit short of that ideal! A Perfectly Clean and Tidy House is one of those ideas that's wonderful in principle, rather like Communism, but in practice leads to wars, revolutions, purges and gulags. But I must be true to the Cause, unless I want to find myself in the marital equivalent of Siberia.Of course, reading a speech is a radically different thing from hearing it delivered. And it is a wonderful thing to experience Caleb with the dial set to 11, like a wildfire racing through acres of dry brush. It's like encountering a fusion of Jim Carrey, John Piper, Slavoj Žižek and the toastmaster from a Tolkein feast.
After all, you are fighting the very forces of Entropy, which if certain scientists are to be believed, will one day bring the entire universe to the point of heat death. Heat death will be rather like the cold layer of gunk at the bottom of the sink after everything has drained away, only on a universal scale. This rather puts making sure the bed sheets are on straight into perspective...
The brief moment I will share with Bev between "I do" and when "death us do part" is not a diversion or a distraction in the face of ultimate meaninglessness. The small ways we try and bring order and happiness into the world - a tidy kitchen, putting my Doctor Who videos in chronological order, having friends round for dinner, writing novels, raising a family - are less a cosmic joke, and more an affirmation of hope, hope grounded in God's promise of resurrection and redemption.
Who You Gonna Call?
The atmospheric pressure in the flight cabin of the plane in which Bill Clinton and the recovered US journalists jetted from North Korea back to the States this week must have been set to ecstatic.
Hollywood delights in stories in which grizzled prizefighters and desperados are called out of retirement to go on one more adventure at a time of peril and crisis.
It will warm the cockles of the ex-president to know that the answer to the question “Who you gonna call when two Americans reporters are held captive by an erratic despot armed with nuclear weapons?” is “Bill Clinton”.
This was a personal drama which even a Malibu scriptwriter might have considered too audacious.
The North Korean leadership had flung spectacular insults at Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State.
She was described by the Foreign Ministry as a “funny lady” who sometimes “looks like a primary-school girl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping”.
In medieval times such a denigration of one’s wife would have prompted a baron to fight a duel. But now Mr Clinton – a man famed for his “purple rages” – was on a mission in which he needed to treat Kim Jong-il with nodding respect.
Further spice is dropped into this vindaloo of an adventure because in securing the release of the reporters he has lifted President Obama out of a sticky mess.
This is the man who shredded Ms Clinton’s presidential ambitions in a contest in which the saxophone-playing Rhodes Scholar from Arkansas and his wife were suddenly re-cast as icons of a grouchy old order.
A further twist is that the reporters were working for Current TV, a project co-founded by Mr Clinton’s former Vice President Al Gore. Their relations soured when Mr Gore largely shunned his old master during his own 2000 bid for the presidency.
But Mr Clinton’s 20-hour escapade has demonstrated he still has the panache and skill which enabled him to twice leap into the White House over obstacles of scandal and suspicion.
Every mythical gunslinger needs a sidekick and Mr Clinton brought former chief of staff John Podesta along on this remarkable ride. Mr Podesta is known for his devotion to the X-Files – so much so that the cast of the science-fiction series allegedly sang Happy Birthday for him when he turned 50.
But even a UFO obsessive would admit that the plot-line of the past few days has been quite extraordinary.
We are in an era of comebacks. Clint Eastwood, 79, scored the greatest commercial hit of his career with the recent Gran Torino, a film in which he proves he can out-macho hoodlums less than a third his age.
Clinton’s diplomatic success will have tasted as sweet as Eastwood’s box-office bonanza. He may be in the mood for a sequel.
Hollywood delights in stories in which grizzled prizefighters and desperados are called out of retirement to go on one more adventure at a time of peril and crisis.
It will warm the cockles of the ex-president to know that the answer to the question “Who you gonna call when two Americans reporters are held captive by an erratic despot armed with nuclear weapons?” is “Bill Clinton”.
This was a personal drama which even a Malibu scriptwriter might have considered too audacious.
The North Korean leadership had flung spectacular insults at Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State.
She was described by the Foreign Ministry as a “funny lady” who sometimes “looks like a primary-school girl and sometimes a pensioner going shopping”.
In medieval times such a denigration of one’s wife would have prompted a baron to fight a duel. But now Mr Clinton – a man famed for his “purple rages” – was on a mission in which he needed to treat Kim Jong-il with nodding respect.
Further spice is dropped into this vindaloo of an adventure because in securing the release of the reporters he has lifted President Obama out of a sticky mess.
This is the man who shredded Ms Clinton’s presidential ambitions in a contest in which the saxophone-playing Rhodes Scholar from Arkansas and his wife were suddenly re-cast as icons of a grouchy old order.
A further twist is that the reporters were working for Current TV, a project co-founded by Mr Clinton’s former Vice President Al Gore. Their relations soured when Mr Gore largely shunned his old master during his own 2000 bid for the presidency.
But Mr Clinton’s 20-hour escapade has demonstrated he still has the panache and skill which enabled him to twice leap into the White House over obstacles of scandal and suspicion.
Every mythical gunslinger needs a sidekick and Mr Clinton brought former chief of staff John Podesta along on this remarkable ride. Mr Podesta is known for his devotion to the X-Files – so much so that the cast of the science-fiction series allegedly sang Happy Birthday for him when he turned 50.
But even a UFO obsessive would admit that the plot-line of the past few days has been quite extraordinary.
We are in an era of comebacks. Clint Eastwood, 79, scored the greatest commercial hit of his career with the recent Gran Torino, a film in which he proves he can out-macho hoodlums less than a third his age.
Clinton’s diplomatic success will have tasted as sweet as Eastwood’s box-office bonanza. He may be in the mood for a sequel.
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