Story Snippet: Harrison

Three of us are having a late night summer wander around the backstreets of Hampstead. We come to St John-at-Hampstead church. As we walk through the churchyard there are two winos sitting on the bench in the yard. I acknowledge them and keep moving round the side of the church – I have something I want to show my two companions. As we walk down the side path between the building and some graves there are three teenagers sitting on a bench smoking weed. I acknowledge them and move past. Just beyond them is the object of the diversion – the tomb of John Harrison, a key contributor to the measurement of time, the inventor of the marine chronometer, and a self-taught clock maker and repairer. Born in 1693, his claim to fame is that he worked out how to measure longitude at sea, vital to global navigation. He won a £20,000 prize for his efforts, although getting the Board of Longitude and Parliament to honour the award proved difficult and drawn out. We read the lengthy inscription which tells Harrison’s story as best we can by phone light. 

We head back to our main course past the weed-smokers and back into the church yard. There one of the winos asks, to our surprise, “Did you see the Harrison grave?” I confirm we have, taken back a bit by the fact he has any knowledge of or interest in the relatively anonymous tomb. The other one pipes up that he is actually George Harrison. (18th century John  Harrison was also, as it happens, expert in the technicalities of music, given his mathematical genius.) The jolt from the first one’s question reminds us once again that winos, street people, addicts, burn-outs, bums and the like are human sons/daughters, maybe parents, friends, certainly relatives. Too easy to lose sight of. 

One of the nominees in this year’s inaugural SMART film festival, our international Smartphone film festival, helps underline this same realisation – José Rocha Pinto’s ‘In the Depths of the City’

And on the subject of addiction and drinking, our Amy Winehouse film for MTV and Paramount was announced this week. ‘Amy Winehouse and Me: Dionne’s Story’ plays on the 10th anniversary of Amy’s trip to the great stage in the sky (23rd July 2011 – in the UK it TXs  Mon 26th July at 10pm on MTV):

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Billboard

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Variety

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Daily Mirror

 

In contrast to the predictably grim Mirror piece, our film (on which my focus was story and script) is constructive and substantial, showing a process of grief over a decade finally coming to its crux. It centres on Amy’s godaughter, singer Dionne Bromfield.

Here’s the trailer: play

 

SMART – The London International Smartphone Film Festival

The launch of SMART – the London International Smartphone Film Festival – set up by Adam Gee & Victoria Mapplebeck was covered in this week’s Observer in a piece by Arts & Media Correspondent Vanessa Thorpe:

 

The full article is here

4 highlights of Geneva

Following on from the last post (All Souls’ Day) I have spent much of today reading most of Patti Smith’s new book, Year of the Monkey. It’s put me in the mood to write (which is always the sign of a special writer – her friend Allen Ginsberg has much the same effect from my experience).

I am in Geneva on a flying visit to the Geneva International Film Festival. Late last night – after returning home from my second viewing of the brilliant Joker at Warner Bros., where I bumped into my old Channel 4 colleague John Yorke and chewed the story fat with him – I managed to find the old tobacco tin at home where I keep my Swiss money. It turned out I had quite a lot – I haven’t been to Switzerland for a few years and it has appreciated markedly in the wake of the disastrous Brexit referendum (I hear they are a bit better at referenda here).

So I shifted the Swiss francs to my Euro purse, a suede purse from California my grandmother gave me as a boy – it says something like Gold Nuggets on it, long since worn away. I notice in Year of the Monkey how attached Patti Smith is to particular (not monetarily valuable) objects in her life, attributing meaning through memory to them.

I decided to blow as much of my purseload as possible – this is what I spunked it on…

1) Soup

I love soup – it’s a top food and generally healthy. In Year of the Monkey Patti has chicken soup, decorated with egg yolks (not sure which came first the chicken or the eggs), with her ailing friend Sam Shepherd on his ranch in Kentucky. This is pumpkin soup – I don’t normally like it, often too sweet, but this was delicious. I ate it outside Le Perron restaurant at the foot of the hill in the old town – I ate under the tree at that restaurant years ago with my younger brother. We did a sudoku outside another cafe in the old quarter that time too – I hate puzzles and crosswords but on that occasion it was fun. Patti seems much attracted to numbers both in dates (in which she sees magical coincidences – see All Souls’ Day) and in books of geometry. The fly leaves of Year of the Monkey have some kind of algebraic-geometric sketch and scribblings. I think it’s what she describes herself drawing on a white bedsheet in a moment of inspiration.

2) Perch

Fillet of perch is a speciality of Geneva – they get the poor little critters from Lac Leman. So I sat outside Le Perron – the only person to do so – but the weather was mild. The owner found it amusing but conceded the weather was soft. “Il faut en profiter” I told him – I’ve really enjoyed exercising my French today. Patti references Rimbaud’s Illuminations in the bit I just read – I made a mental commitment to read it soon. He wrote those prose-poems in London around 1873-75.

8 Royal College Street, Camden Town

3) Steak Frites

The Cafe de Paris was a recommendation by the lugubrious hotel night receptionist – it is a stone’s throw from Hotel Cristal. It turned out to be a carbon copy of Le Relais de Venise in London’s Soho and Marylebone. A restaurant that just does one meal but one meal really well – a great idea. The meal is green salad followed by steak and French fries aka steak frites. There must be a model for this kind of restaurant I thought – checked it out, there is – Le Relais de Venise established in Paris in 1959. Of course the meal demands red wine so I had a couple of little glasses. Patti is always eating and drinking in this new book as well as the last, M Train. It’s like join the cafes.

4) Cherries

Cherries drenched in cognac. Frankly it’s one of the BEST THINGS I’VE EVER TASTED.

I love cherries. I’ve not really engaged with cognac. Perfect combo. Highlight of the highlights.

The old town

Patti Smith – like myself – is an inveterate flâneur. I wandered over to the digital outpost of the Festival where the VR projects were on display. As usual, underwhelming. I contend that factual programming is not the strong point of what is a very important new technology. Games, health, retail, architecture, training – all no-brainers. Documentary – my jury’s out. The cobbled streets, small squares, narrow lanes and flowing fountains of the old town are charming – in stark contrast to the banks and luxury goods shops.

When I lived just over the border in Savoie (Savoy, SE France) there was an outbreak of graffiti that year in Geneva. At the end of the year they caught the culprit – a psychologist who contended that the place was too clean and boring for the citizens’ mental health. The thing is someone somewhere pays for these watch shops and luxury brands to be here – they pay in poverty and hardship. Le reverse de la medaille. Every coin has another side.

Cycle of Life

Norwich

I heard one of those stories the day before yesterday that makes you despair of mankind. I was in Norwich to deliver a lecture on online video at NUA (Norwich University of the Arts). Actor John Hurt served proudly as its first Chancellor until his sad passing at the beginning of the year. The course leader (Film & Moving Image Production) who lead me through the charming city was telling me about the new yellow bikes that have appeared in the city recently as one crossed our path outside the lecture hall building. It is a city scheme which the students are testing out enthusiastically. He told me a new bank of bikes had appeared outside his house the day before. But when he came down that morning they were gone. He found them soon submerged in the river, chucked over the wall. Why would anyone do that?

As it happens, I’m working on a documentary about cycling, cyclists & bikes at Little Dot Studios which includes the story of a university cycle scheme. With a bit of luck the tapestry of stories will be nearer the uplifting end of the scale.

I’m writing this at Venue No.2 of the Aesthetica Short Film Festival in York (a multistorey bar), killing time before Evensong at York Minster. I went yesterday afternoon too – it’s pretty uplifting even if religion is not particularly your bag.

I served on the jury of this year’s festival, judging the Documentary category among others. I’m just out of one of the Docs screenings which concluded with a short entitled Dial-a-Ride about a minibus service for the elderly and remote of Brecon. It was the other side of the human coin, propelled by a caring driver who appreciated the rich mix of stories of his mainly elderly passengers.

And so the wheels of life turn…

York Minster