4 reasons to go see Joker

(No spoilers)

This is my first BAFTA viewing of the 2019-20 season and frankly it’s likely to be all downhill from here. This is a flawless performance in a pretty much flawless film (in contrast to Dark Knight which is a flawless performance in a slightly flawed, overlong film). It’s got an unusual pacing as it is, as the director Todd Phillips said in his intro at an Imax screen on Leicester Square, a “slow-burn”. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a slow-burn that doesn’t really work (much though I enjoyed the movie) – but this one you just have to go with and it winds itself out to a more than satisfying last third where the pace takes off. It’s a detailed character study in how Arthur Fleck became Joker. Once he fully transitions to the warped clown nemesis of Batman it’s a fabulous run for home. I can’t wait to go back and watch it again. I’m not too keen on comic book movies (much though I love the comics themselves) but this is, perhaps the first, maybe second, true classic in that genre.

A stairs scene to rival Battleship Potemkin and Rocky

1. A trip back to Hollywood’s golden age in the 70s

The movie has its roots and inspiration in 70s classics, movies I truly love. There’s Taxi Driver here, and King of Comedy, the anger and madness of Network and the crazy of Cuckoo’s Nest. And making the link is a superb performance from Robert DeNiro as a TV show host.

2. The Stairs scene

I just loved the scene on the stairs above – the music, the movement, the costumes. Joker is a character with music and elegance deep in him. But he has been beat to fuck by society and his horrendous background, crippled.

3. Joaquin Phoenix’s performance

Joaquin Phoenix & Todd Phillips at London screening 25th September 2019

He’s in pretty much every scene. He’s somehow simultaneously hideous and handsome. Todd Phillips referred to him as the actor of his generation which is certainly arguable. Once he’s donned his red suit, yellow waistcoat and green hair-matching shirt he is frankly irresistible.

4. The music and soundtrack

At the beginning of the stairs sequence we hear Rock and Roll Part 2 by Gary Glitter. A pretty controversial choice for sure – but appropriate to the context. And for all the shame of Paul Gadd/Gary Glitter it’s a helluva song. A bit later we get White Room by the great Cream. Another spot-on, dark choice.

I’ll wait in this place where the sun never shines
Wait in this place where the shadows run from themselves

The newly composed soundtrack by Hildur Gudnadottir (Sicario, The Revenant, Chernobyl), a classically trained cellist from Iceland, is highly original and effective/affective. She composed to the script rather than the cut film so some of the key scenes were shot performed to her music rather than the (usual) other way round.

The cat that got Cream (why so serious?)

Coincidence No. 288

To mark the 13th anniversary this week of Simple Pleasures Part 4 here is a top-class coincidence.

Last night I go with director Victoria Mapplebeck to a screening of shorts at Samsung KX in King’s Cross organised by Time Out and Shorts on Tap. The fifth of six films is The Night the Wind Blew, a very good mid-form drama written and directed by David Alamouti. It features two young Anglo-Turkish brothers played by non-professional actors, actual brothers.

I vaguely recognise David’s distinctive name. And his face rings faint bells. I look him up in my phone – his number is there, we met at Sheffield DocFest in 2014 when I sat on a panel he was producing. We chat after and walk back to the tube together.

This morning I go to do a talk on media careers at a London secondary school in Leytonstone (Hitchcock’s manor). I am talking to one of the students and as we finish I turn to my right and there is a young Anglo-Turkish teen who seems oddly familiar. “Were you in a short film?” “Err, yes – how do you know?!” “I saw it last night!” He plays the bullying older brother (his name is Mujahid Guven). About 15 hours separate seeing the short and meeting the young star of it.

 

 

The Collaboration Diary 5

Our first full-day writing session worked out really well. Doug bought me a copy of Eat That Frog! at Euston Station to add to a dozen other volumes he’d brought with as references. I brought along three tomes as rangefinders for format:

• Alchemy – by Rory Sutherland (which I am mid-way through reading)
• Unleash Your Creativity – by my friends/collaborators Tim Wright & Rob Bevan
• Damn Good Advice – by George Lois

They are all examples of books which are written in small units that can be read linearly or dipped into. We quickly found we both had the same kind of book in mind in the wake of Doug’s radical suggestion to take it this way.

We put together an agenda in the classic way. Doug had brought 3 points, I added another 2 (made up on the spot) – all outputs for this session. We achieved all in a 6-hour session.

I drove the process, with Doug willingly coming along for the ride.

First, a couple of key questions I threw out:

• What have been your best experiences of Collaboration? Why?
• What have been your worst? Why?

We both listed what came to mind.

We discussed a few high-level ideas – like our core concept (codename DC) – before diving deeper into those questions. We individually drilled down into what characterised those experiences good and bad then shared the results to generate key topics in number.

I then went to the classic questions I learnt from Rudyard Kipling via Pat Mitchell (who Doug & I both worked with at Melrose Film Productions – we toasted him with coffee):

From the six core questions we developed six ‘buckets’ – a term borrowed from Tim Wright (the one referenced above) which we used when writing the interactive script of MindGym.

Doug was at Melrose when I made MindGym and he watched the process closely. By coincidence this tweet came in during our session, reminding me of how much positive impact our creative outputs can have:

Into the six buckets we dropped the topics we had generated. We then stepped through the Collaboration process – both when done voluntarily as an individual and ‘enforced’ within an organisation – and chucked those stages into the buckets. Finally we went back to the suggestions about What Makes a Good Collaborator? generated from online circles and added those too, leaving us with a set of topics divided into six main categories and in a roughly sensible order. All painlessly generated with plenty of interesting discussion in the process.

We concluded by deciding to write 5 pieces each initially to test the waters which we are to select from the list. We set a deadline for that, a date for the next day-long session and plotted a path to publication.

An all-round successful first collaborative writing session.

The Collaboration Diary 4

After an excellent weekend well clear of work (Open House days, Rugby World Cup, Underwire Film Festival, Hungry Hearts big night out at its centre) I am deliberately going in to our first joint writing day with an almost blank – or open – mind. I want to see where we get to together. So no specific preparation. No agenda. No plan.

I remain as excited about the prospect as ever. I’ll take along a couple of books to serve as potential models for the proposal Doug came back with – a less highly structured, more colourful, more narrative-centred book. I’ll take Rory Sutherland’s Alchemy and one or two books on creative thinking that I have vaguely in mind.

We’re meeting on the premises of the Royal College of GPs which is a space I regularly work in when I’m after somewhere on the informal side.

The Collaboration Diary 3

12/9/19

An email arrived from Doug with a radical rethink of our approach. Based on some successful books currently on the market in the business category and some previous work we did together inspired by Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, he suggested we create “a book that you can dip into or read cover to cover” constructed from smaller sections carefully organised, as opposed to one long coherent body of text. This strikes me as a way we can create a really energetic, genuinely readable book.

That email was at 04:43 – I really hope Doug is abroad somewhere in another time zone! It was preceded at 03:27. In that earlier email Doug agreed with my point about how to ensure our tome is distinctive: “I think we need to make sure to keep focus on the thing that will make this book distinctive from the competition – the idea of Dirty Collaboration over and above the rather sterile notions of teamwork that are the norm”

 

The Collaboration Diary

Day 2 – Monday 9th Sept

As I left the writing retreat and the island, the flow of documents and emails from my end ceased. I got up early to write a brief Audiences document to send to Doug and an even shorter Scope one, derived from yesterday’s workshop. That was the lot, the last outputs from five days intensive work. Then onto the boat back to the mainland.

So from intense action on my side, batted off as best possible by a busy Doug at the other, we went to radio silence all day. We both have significant other work so it will be interesting to see how stop&go the process will be. And who will fire off the next note…

The Collaboration Diary

Day 1 – Sun 8th Sept 2019

While out walking and talking with Jonathan Gosling, the leader of the writing retreat I was attending on Lambay Island, Co. Dublin, Ireland, I had the notion that to reflect the meta dimension of our book – Doug and I collaborating on a book about collaborating – we should each keep a diary of how the process looked from our side.

I got back to my desk in the library of the White House and fired off a short email to suggest the diary idea to Doug. He swiftly replied: “That diary idea is a superb one.”

So this is Day 1 my side, the day of that email. On this writing retreat I have been kicking the tyres of Doug’s original proposal. That process is largely recorded here in these blog posts which I used each day as a warm-up:

• Adventures in the Writing Trade: Day 1
• Adventures in the Writing Trade: Day 2
• Adventures in the Writing Trade: Day 3
• Adventures in the Writing Trade: Day 4

Following the one-to-one with Jonathan I decided to broaden things out after much concentrated attention on the Proposal and related documents to outside media in the form of a recommended video: Margaret Heffernan’s Super-chicken TED talk.

I did some more work on the Structure/Contents page, trying to come up with something I felt happier with, more convincing and consistent.

Then I read parts of Doug’s Collaborative Working Pocketbook to get a better grasp of those perspectives of his I found hardest to grasp from paper alone (the concise proposal).

In the afternoon we did a workshop on Readership from which I further developed my thinking on Audience and Scope.

But Doug’s response to the diary suggestion was the key event of the day: “That diary idea is a superb one. But could be a significant chunk of the book. An evolutionary process.”

I was delighted we felt the same about that. And delighted he pushed the idea further.

Adventures in the Writing Trade: Day 5

Monday morning. The boat’s coming from Malahide to collect us at 10. It’s like coming back from space or returning from some fantasy land through the mirror. A touch of tristesse but more, a sense of a jewel of an experience coming to a natural conclusion.

Yesterday I worked mainly on the structure and scope of the book. I took a break from writing to watch a video recommended to me by a friend I met through one of my oldest friends. The video was Margaret Heffernan’s Super-chicken TED talk.

Commercial Break: Coincidence No. 477

I ask my online circles for the answer to this question: “What makes a good Collaborator?” One friend sends a video recommendation via Facebook – Margaret Heffernan’s Super-chicken TED talk.

The day before Jonathan Gosling, the writing retreat leader, asks me if I know Margaret Heffernan? I say the name is familiar for some reason. (The video recommendation has come in earlier that same day). Jonathan asks because he and another participant both work with her at the Forward Institute.

After watching the video I go look at Margaret’s website and books and pick one I fancy reading. I go to Amazon to buy it. It says I ordered it in 2015.

This year I occasionally catch a glimpse of a red spine on my bookshelves and think what is that (Margaret Heffernan) book?

In 2015 my mentor, Roger Graef, recommends a book by Margaret Heffernan in relation to what I was thinking and writing about at the time – the role of collaboration and the collective, of openness and generosity, in human evolution. Put another way, the limitations of competition. That’s what Margaret’s book with the red spine is about.

For my one-to-one with Jonathan we opted for walk&talk – we wandered along the coast talking about publishers/publishing strategies and he gave me some really useful perspectives on getting the book I’ve already finished – When Sparks Fly (title stolen from my as yet unfinished book) on online creativity. I’d been in discussion with academic press but he persuaded me to go more commercial. While chatting I also had the idea of me and my co-writer keeping diaries of the making of our book to capture the meta dimension – collaborating to write a book about collaborating. How would that look from each side of the collaboration?

We stopped to observe the seals. Lambay has the largest colony on the East coast. I suddenly appreciated the contrast between the way they look like big fat maggots on land (I’m being a bit harsh) to being slick and nimble in water (and cute with those soft eyes). A seagull was pecking at a fat white dead pup. Feck, nature is tough. It was a great walky talky session and really interesting to find out a little more about him. He is looking at the world from the perspective of an imminent collapse and what would be needed for the species to survive it. That’s a heavy load. I think about that kind of shit when, for example, watching the first Terminator last week with Enfant Terrible No.1. Otherwise not so much. Unrealistically optimistic about the bald ape’s ability to pull himself out of the nose-dive. (Who am I kidding?)

The afternoon workshop was centred on readership. The pattern of workshops had some kind of psychoanalytical underpinning, establishing the system in which the text exists and all the people who interact with it working outwards from the writer. It was a useful session as I wrestled with the taxonomy of our readers / different ways to slice the audience. It also helped better define (slightly broaden) the scope of the book.

At the end of the day I donned my earphones and, as I was walking around the island, listened to a summary of Ed Catmull’s Creativity, Inc. which I bought from Audible yonks ago. My old boss recommended it highly and tried to implement some of the guidance at All4 e.g. sharing early cuts of films broadly among the team. I’m about five chapters in – so far, so banal. I’m sure the summarising and the flat voice of the reader isn’t helping any. I listened walking above the beaches of the North-West coast to the top left corner of the island. The landscape merited a better audiobook – or none at all.

The Last Supper with my six fellow participants was jolly – a lot of contrasting of US/UK language & culture as three were American, two Brits, one Finn. I haven’t written much about them but the whole experience afforded on this fabulous island revolved around having a harmonious, generous and bonding group of writers. I want to retain their privacy so let me capture them anonymously with the help of Tarrantino and Cluedo (as I’m a lover of colours)…

Mr Orange is from Wisconsin, a healthcare professional drawing to an end a ten-year writing project. We got on really well and he gave me a signed copy of one of his previous books, on meditation.

Mrs Plum hails from Oxford and is writing a PhD thesis on leadership in environmental groups. She says she doesn’t like writing – everyone else professes to love it. She was particularly helpful in the Readership workshop, highlighting our assumptions.

Ms Pink is from Maryland and was putting together a Fulbright Scholarship application to teach business at university in Surinam. I very much encouraged her to apply as she was wavering at the beginning. Her accent had an exotic touch of the Southern states.

She was with her friend Ms Peacock who was focused on studies of the dynamics of credit card transactions. She exuded considered and thoughtful in her speech.

Reverend Green is an elderly Finn, a psychoanalyst and academic. He observes calmly and expresses his thoughts slowly and deliberately. He may have thought half of us were crazy.

Last but not least, Mr Brown runs an Institute to help leaders become more responsible. He makes a habit of arriving last to everything but I think this is to throw us all off the scent. Turn your back for a moment and he is to be found half-way up a mountain with his noise-cancelling headphones propelling his running. He was writing mission statement type texts.

So lots of colours, lots of different forms of writing, all united by a single motto: “Crack on!” The Americans, particularly Ms Pink, were tickled pink by this exotic British turn of phrase. Is it anything to do with crack, the drug? No. But to add to the complexity, in Irish Craic means fun. “Crack on!” “Apple crumble!” “Jumper!?” “Posh!” “Marmite!” The craic was ninety. Fuelled by Baron Badassière wine and Lambay own brand Whiskey. “Crack on!”

The trips across the water were a key part of the experience. Arriving at the small stone harbour in bright autumnal sunshine was magical and welcoming. On board the big, sturdy Shamrock. We left bouncing across choppier seas on the Fionn Mac Cumhaill, a cheeky little RHIB, crashing into the waves, speeding just above the surface of the energetic September swell. We left full of energy to come back out of the mirror, re-emerge from the magical wardrobe, wake up from the loveliest of dreams. And then (after our concluding workshop on dry land) we drank Guinness before noon in Gibney’s pub in Malahide and blow me, it was not a dream after all.

Adventures in the Writing Trade: Day 4

Friday ended up as a frustrating feeling day. A lot of loose ends. Nothing finished. Including my relatively short To Do list. Saturday (yesterday) by contrast finished with me hitting send as a fired over three useful documents to my co-writer, Doug Miller. A mark-up of his outline. A set of notes collating the helpful, considered responses to my online call-out. And a response to Doug’s initial thoughts on how best to collaborate in practice. A satisfying, rounded-off feeling to conclude the day.

It’s important to live with mess, loose ends, even chaos in the writing process, indeed in all creative endeavour. It’s getting over that hump, bringing back some order in the face of the most out-of-control prospect, which usually marks where the creative achievement lies.

View from the summit down to the harbour

After lunch we headed up to the summit I had visited the day before. This time it was as a group, led by our hostess who is one of the two prime-movers on the island. I had a lovely chat with her on the way up, quite deep for a modest walk. At the triangulation point on the top there was a real sense of a cohort, a group bonded across very different experiences, backgrounds and personalities. Two of the Americans asked me to explain what we were looking at so I pointed out Howth Head as the North end of Dublin Bay and the Wicklow Mountains as the Southern limit; Rush and Malahide opposite; the small islands of Skerries looking North, and at the limits of our view the Mourne Mountains, faint in the distance, where my Other Half comes from. The panorama was epic, a beautiful subtle palette of blues and greys and delicate purples in the autumnal sunshine.

View of Howth Head from Lambay

On returning to the white house we did our second writing workshop with Jonathan (Gosling) on Style. Clarity; Pace; Engagement were the factors we considered. I focused on the opening of my as yet unfinished book When Sparks Fly, on the creative rewards of openness and generosity – a subject closely allied, it turns out, to the book on Collaboration Doug approached me about (the focus of my efforts this week). It was a helpful exercise and I could see at least a couple of things to improve – too long sentences in a quest for fluency/flow and questionable assumptions about how Digital Culture is perceived by many people.

The day before our first workshop was on our relationship to Writing. By using two observers as we spoke concisely about writing’s role in our lives, one recording facts, the other emotions, we quickly got some real insights into our work and ambitions. A really useful technique I hope to deploy in some other context soon. Probably starting with the MDes course on Story-telling I am teaching at the end of the year at Ravensbourne university/film school.

After the workshop I made a bee-line to the harbour to take advantage of the strong late afternoon sun. Donning my new Finisterre swimming trunks I strode into the September sea and dived in. It was …fresh. Envigorating.

Commercial Break: Coincidence No. 477

I am out for a walk in St Agnes, Cornwall during my summer break a few weeks ago. It’s a bit rainy so I head up from the cliff top inland towards where I’ve been told (by Joya & Lucy of Surf Girls Jamaica, both locals, hence my choice of St Agnes to sojourn in) there is a small business estate where there’s the HQ of a great surf clothing retailer called Finisterre. I eventually come across it, go in and buy some swimming trunks, shirts and a lime green recycled plastic water bottle. As the shop assistant is wrapping up my stuff he explains a bit about the business, how well it is doing, where the branches are, there’s even one up in London. Oh, where’s that? Earlham Street.

I work at Red Bull at 42 Earlham Street. I’ve never noticed Finisterre.

I have the harbour to myself, except for sharing it for a few moments with a black Labrador. The tide is out, the sand is smooth, the water cold (colder than Donegal a couple of weeks ago) but bearable, soon really refreshing. After the swim I feel amazing. I chat to a couple of Dubs from Howth over for a nature walk day trip. The wife shows me on her phone a photo of their view of Lambay from Howth village.

I finish the day tying those loose ends on the lawn, my spot du choix. I also connect the lady-boss of the island to an old colleague & friend of mine who lives on the Isle of Eigg. Eigg has done an amazing job pioneering green energy & sustainable living, and my friend Lucy has been enthusiastically involved in driving those efforts. The Lambay Trust has similar ambitions. I’m glad I made the connection during our walk&talk.

Creativity, in my view, revolves around Connections. This includes the people connections offered by a writing retreat like this. And the factual/conceptual connections such as Lambay is a proto Eigg.

I bought myself a book from the island on Friday – it was my birthday present to myself. From my family, I asked for a new walk as a gift.  The book is In Praise of Walking by Shane O’Mara. Mara is Irish for sea. John of the Sea. It explores the science of walking and why it is good for us. I am convinced it is very good for Creativity, hence my early morning walks every day on Lambay. Here are a couple of quotations on Walking I recently gathered.

“Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.”

Steven Wright (US comedian)

Adventures in the Writing Trade: Day 3

I had a momentary fear of death experience this morning. Quite sobering.

I was out for an early walk on the North-East corner of the island. When I reached the 30 minutes from base point, on a narrow path above sea cliffs teaming with bird life, I sat on a small rock facing the sea/edge/void and did my short daily meditation which I almost never do daily (two days in succession on Lambay is a good run for me). Then turned for home. As I was approaching the green stile for the cross-fields path for home I noticed a small track on my right, the sea side, towards the furthest headland. I felt compelled to take it, while I was there to take a few minutes to get to the farthest point, suppress my vertigo tendencies, carefully take the muddy trail and get onto that land’s end. I was glad when I got there as the view of the cliffs was better and, more importantly, you suddenly felt among the birdlife as gulls suddenly appeared rising above the cliff edge straight in front and silhouetted geese cut across the small bay. Uplifted by these creatures I turned to go home. As i walked over a ridge between me and the path home, suddenly there was a deep gully there. I felt like I somehow had got lost on a solitary rock cut off from the mainland. Where had the path gone? How would I get back to the mainland of the island? I tried to quell the panic. I stopped thinking about the writing I was going to be doing (now) and brought my attention fully into the present. I concentrated. I considered options. I backtracked to try to figure out where the path I had taken onto the headland was. Needless to say I figured it out, hence me sitting now in front of A General Map of Ireland to accompany the report of the Railway Commissioners shewing the Principle Physical Features and Geological Structure of the Country (constructed in 1836, engraved in 1837/38).

There’s something life-boosting about such experiences however minor. I had another one yesterday. A bit less intense but the same underlying primal feelings. I surprised myself (usually a good navigator) by getting lost on a solo lunchtime walk to the summit of the island, the trig point a.k.a. The Nipple. After enjoying the spectacular view from Lambay Island’s highest point I started down but soon realised I wasn’t getting back onto the track I had arrived by. I was going down a gorge which was narrowing – I wasn’t sure I could get out of it, whether there was a cleared way through to the foothills. My rising panic was witnessed by wallabies, silhouetted on ridges against the darkening sky, like they were the ones in control of the situation. I had encountered my first Lambay wallaby on the way up, bouncing away as I disturbed its peace. Eventually I saw a more chilled one up close in the ferns. Lovely looking creature. Lambay started with just three wallabies as an exotic pet of the current custodian’s grandfather. In the 80s Dublin zoo was getting rid of its wallabies and asked if he’d take seven more, all female. He did but it turned out there was a rogue male in the batch. There are now between 400 and 800 wallabies on the island, depending on whose estimate you go for. I eventually found another route down and the moment of fear passed, again leaving a certain aliveness in its wake.

Where’s Wally?

Yesterday’s early morning walk was flatter and safer. As I rounded the South-West corner of the island I walked past a large group of seals slumbering on the beach. Some took to the water as I approached, while others were shaking themselves from their slumber. Curious eyes and dog-like snouts started appearing from the waves as the bolder ones checked out the red North Face jacket (kindly donated by Enfant Terrible No. 1 for my trip to the Gaeltacht in South Donegal last month).

I noticed after a while how much plastic had washed up on the shore. First an unidentifiable moulded shape that looked like a piece of our kitchen bin at home. Then small plastic water and drink bottles, many of them. Gallon bottles. Fishing detritus. A child’s toy. Footballs. Tennis balls (apparently a container load had fallen into the sea a while back). A slider type shoe. I thought it would be cool to come back and organise a beach clean. Probably quite a few bags would quickly fill. What would they do with them on an island? I asked our host back at breakfast – Do you ever pick the plastic off the beaches? It just comes back the next day. Sometimes our guests come back and present us with bags of rubbish they’ve kindly collected. Her eyes roll. Oh yes, how foolish of them! I try to convey non-verbally. What could they be thinking? Note to self: scratch the beach litter pick.

After warning up with yesterday’s Simple Pleasures post, I began the research on the Collaboration book project I am doing with my old colleague and friend, Doug Miller. The most interesting part of that session was using my online network to start to triangulate the areas of most interest. I put out this question into social media – Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter:

I used an image by Rockwell Kent which its Russian owners, the Hermitage, love for its depiction of working men collaborating. It’s set on the other side of Ireland, on the West coast in Donegal near Glencolmcille. The neighbours have come to help Dan Ward build his haystack, something he can’t do alone and effort he will reciprocate in a place where for the individual to survive (the isolated valley of Glenlough) he must collaborate with his fellow beings in the hood.

The ideas and thoughts coming back from the online call-out were considered, generous and informed, with a nice sprinkling of humour. After lunch I took advantage of a touch of sun for that wallaby walk. Then another afternoon sunshine session in the grassy yard between the wings. The day passed quickly. I felt vaguely disappointed not to have cracked through more but I had worked consistently and with focus so back off self, have a bit of patience!

At the end of the day I spotted a beautiful burst of evening sunshine, threw on my petty criminal Nikes, and trotted down to the harbour. All to myself. At the end of the harbour wall, French Lieutenant’s Woman style, I had some moments standing on the ledge at the foot of the solid wall contemplating the waves. Then a stroll along the short beach, turning back to catch that perfect moment of light…