Coincidences No.s 266, 267 and 268

Coincidence No. 266: Cold War

16.4.24 I go to a development meeting, for the sci-fi TV drama I am currently working on, with a highly experienced script editor/scriptwriter. (We first crossed paths by chance 11 years ago in a jungle in Zimbabwe). She mentioned her current personal project is a drama around the Cold War.

16.4.47 I happened to know (and mentioned) that this day of our meeting was the anniversary of the term “cold war” being coined. The first use of the term to describe the post-WW2 geopolitical confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union was in a speech by Bernard Baruch, an influential advisor to Democratic presidents, on 16th April 1947.

 

Coincidence No. 267: Nina Simone’s Gum

7.3.24 I finish the book ‘Nina Simone’s Gum’ by Warren Ellis, Nick Cave’s music partner, on this day.

7.3.22 I notice on the final page that Ellis completed the book on “7th March 2022, Los Angeles” which is the final line of the volume.

Coincidence No. 268: Red Pencil

16/17.4.24 I dream about a red pencil, quite well used and with black stripes, a very specific pencil.

17.4.24 I go out to read on the balcony and put an anorak from the back of my bedroom door on over my night clothes as it looks a bit blowy. I put my hand in the coat pocket – I haven’t worn this coat for a few weeks – and I pull out a red and black Staedler HB pencil exactly like the dream one. 

The 44th London Critics’ Circle Film Awards

The ‘For people in trouble’ team :: Adam Gee, Giannina Rodriguez Rico, Sam Brain, Alex Lawther

 

The 44^th London Critics’ Circle Film Awards last night was a refreshing event, friendly and unpretentious, but also distinguished by the wise decisions its voters made. Not least by voting ‘The Zone of Interest’ Film of the Year and Jonathan Glazer Director of the Year, ahead of the likes of Martin Scorsese, Christopher Nolan and Yorgos Lanthimos. I mentioned in a recent post that the movie is “by a country mile the best movie of the year”, in a really vintage year which saw people coming back to the cinema in big numbers for films of substance. It is released in the UK this week.

I had the pleasure of having a conversation with Jonathan Glazer in the bar after the ceremony and wishing him all the best at the BAFTAs and Oscars (as well as discussing the Auschwitz-related documentary I am currently working on). I also had a chat with Mica Levi who composed the extraordinary music in the film. Mica and Johnnie Burn (Sound) won the award for Technical Achievement, a category which puts everything from Visual FX to Casting in one pot. Their achievement was the subject of my recent post ‘Let’s Hear It for Audio’.

Whether the timing of the LCC Film Awards, the week the final round of BAFTA voting closes and in the run-up to the Oscars on 10^th March, means they will predict the winners or even influence them is difficult to say, but hopefully they will as the winners were spot on – from Emma Stone as Actress of the Year for her brilliant portrayal in ‘Poor Things’ to the important ‘20 Days in Mariupol’ as Documentary of the Year. I was lucky enough to meet its modest director Mstyslav Chernov in the drinks before the ceremony and said I was certain his brave film would triumph.

It was enjoyable to meet with critics known to me and not. I was telling Mark Kermode, the entertaining MC for the evening (who I have known since we were teenagers and who shares my deep love of music), about the documentary I currently have in the edit about protest songs and mentioned that we had used a Nina Simone song to explore issues around Black Lives Matter – he started fishing around under his dress shirt and pulled out a small silver pendant. “Funny you should mention her because this is her chewing gum, taken from the bottom of her piano by Warren Ellis and cast in silver by him – there are only 25 of these in existence.”

Warren, Nick Cave’s genius musical partner, wrote an excellent book about it, ‘Nina Simone’s Gum’, which highlights how seemingly insignificant objects can form beautiful connections between people. There were many warm connections made at the event, very well put together by Chair Rich Cline and his bijou team. The Guardian’s Pete Bradshaw introduced me to Paul Mescal. I was delighted to have chats with the likes of the lovely Andrew Scott (who won Actor of the Year – bizarrely overlooked by BAFTA’s Best Actor category as ‘The Zone of Interest’ was in Best Film), Molly Manning Walker (winner of The Philip French Award for Breakthrough British/Irish Filmmaker for her film ‘How To Have Sex’, which is just opening in the USA) and photographer/filmmaker Misan Harriman (Chair of London’s South Bank Centre) who collected the inaugural Derek Malcolm Award for Innovation on behalf of the brilliant Colman Domingo and with whom I will be working this year on a great documentary film project.

 

Paul Mescal & Andrew Scott

Jonathan Glazer & his wife Rachel Penfold

Misan Harriman & Andrew Haigh (All of Us Strangers)

The row in front of Barbie and behind The Zone of Interest

Mark Kermode and Pete Bradshaw

Coincidences No.s 291 & 292 – A London Boy

No. 291 All Things Must Pass

I go for my last run (of hundreds) in St Pancras & Islington cemetery. It’s only open on weekends at the moment due to Lockdown/Covid so this Sunday is my last opportunity. I am due to move house on Tuesday. I know every inch of this huge cemetery-cum-nature reserve and have deeply enjoyed the hours I have spent here running, walking and meditating. I jog listening to a BBC Radio programme (‘Archive on 4‘) about George Harrison’s first solo record ‘All Things Must Pass’. 

As I reach the gate coming out for the last time the narrator, Nitin Sawhney, reminds us that the record first came out in the UK 50 years ago on 30th November. This is 29th November. On the 30th I am packing up the house and home office of ArkAngel to move out. 

As I reach the side gate of the house at the end of the run George says (referring to the long recording process):

“…and it’s finished.”

No. 292 A New Dawn

I just received the following message (30 seconds ago via Facebook):

“Listening to it myself. Dedicating Nina to you. Xx”

It refers to this playlist, ‘Weekend at Home‘, created by my Best Man, and the track ‘Feeling Good’ (by Nina Simone). I’ve been listening to the playlist all morning on the first Saturday in my new home, where I’m sitting at my new ArkAngel desk.

About two minutes before the message arrived I got an email from a colleague/friend at Little Dot Studios. It was about somebody pirating ‘Surf Girls Jamaica‘ and at the end he asked

“How’s the new place?”

Exactly as I read the email these were the very words I heard from Spotify…

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life for me

Yeah, it’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life for me

And I’m feelin’ good

‘Feeling Good’ was actually written by two Londoners – Anthony Newley (Hackney) & Leslie Bricusse (Pinner) for a musical, ‘The Roar of the Greasepaint’ . As I finish off this post, on the ‘Weekend at Home’ playlist I’ve reached the track ‘The London Boys‘ by David Bowie. It was a 1966 B-side on Deram records which put out his early work. He sings it in a very Anthony Newley London style as Newley was a huge influence on Bowie when he was starting out. My move takes me back to my native postcode: London NW7

It’s a new dawn

The Commonplace Book – Inspiration and Perspiration

6/8/13

Inspiration

Simple Pleasures part 4 was inspired partly by an Ian Dury song (via my first blog Simple Pleasures) and partly by an article from the pen of the poet Andrew Motion. In that line of heritage, I was reading Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From and was much taken with his thoughts on the ‘commonplace book’, the practice of keeping a scrapbook of quotes and thoughts which he traces from John Locke in the late 17th century through to Erasmus Darwin (grandfather of Charles), ultimately linking it to Tim Berners-Lee’s inspiration for the World Wide Web. I’ve kept these kinds of notebooks and notes for any years but being reminded of their value in creative thinking, the repository for the ‘slow hunch’ and the petri dish in which disparate but related thoughts grow together, makes me feel encouraged to write here more often and in smaller bursts. Here’s one I wrote a couple of days ago after reading about the Commonplace Book and then chatting to an old friend of mine from the Universite de Savoie, year of 83…

Narration

4/8/13 Mangskog, Sweden: Sitting on the deck outside Bjorksuset (whispering of the birches), my friend Hanna’s house, this afternoon overlooking Mangen lake I was thinking a bit about Swedish neutrality in the War before Hanna told me a story from a documentary she made recently for NRK, the Norwegian state broadcaster. It was about so-called ‘war children’ in Norway (the off-spring of Norwegian women and German soldiers) and the on-going impact of the Second World War on Norwegians. Hanna filmed a woman who recently discovered her father was in fact a German bureaucrat of the Occupation, not the Norwegian man whom she had called daddy all her life, father of what had been her two brothers up to the point of this discovery in her advancing years. When she told her mother she had acted on some bothersome doubts from her childhood and uncovered her true parentage through a specialist agency her mother went nuts with her, majorly upset by having her secret unburied. And the brothers went crazy too, especially the older one who runs a big well-known Oslo-based shopping mall (he threatened to sue). In revealing her discovery the family imploded and she lost mother, (half-)siblings and extended family at a stroke. Although she acquired some half-brothers in Germany in the process. So seventy years after the occupation of Norway the dark forces still swirl, much as in France, like molten lava beneath the crust busting out when cracks appear.

Transpiration

6/3/13 I’m sitting on that same deck behind Bjorksuset, listening to the wind in the canopies of the silver birches. My grandparents had silver birches which fascinated me as a child in their inappropriately named street Cyprus Avenue. Their shiny trunks punctuated the way to the red postbox twenty yards down from their house, which at the age I am recalling seemed a major journey to be let loose on alone. The sound of the rustling leaves is a constant in this beautiful place in the West of Sweden. I think ‘suset’ in Swedish must be related to ‘susurration’ in English. The whispering sea-like sound made me think of the soundtrack of Antonioni’s Blow-Up – the mysterious breeze in the trees of the South London park where the ‘corpse’ lies worked its magic on me big time. And my train of thought then headed off down the line of the sound of wind in films and pulled in to these three stops:

Blow-Up (1966): the wind in the trees makes the park where the photographer (David Hemmings) accidentally photographs a dead body weird&wonderful – I always meant to visit that location, I’ll have to rewatch the movie then make the trip this autumn

Ryan’s Daughter (1970): The eponymous Irish colleen and the English captain make illicit love among the bluebells in the West of Ireland and what David Lean shows us is the strong breeze shaking the treetops above them

Black Narcissus (1947): Michael Powell set nerves on edge in this English Romantic Technicolor tale by having the Himalayan wind blow constantly through the mountain-top convent in which a nun gradually succumbs to an irreligious magic

In all three (the last one in too sparse a landscape for leaves to accompany moving air) the whispering of the wind brings the magical and mystical to the scene.

Susurration

At the nadir of my teenage years, when I retired to a room with David Bowie and Jane Austen to see me through, just like Renton prepares the room for going cold turkey in Trainspotting, Wild is the Wind struck me as a uniquely Romantic song a bit apart from his others, with a touch of epic, majestic magic.

Aspiration

The song was actually written for a film of the same name made in 1957 and recorded by Johnny Mathis. Bowie was inspired to cover it by Nina Simone’s version. It is to be found on his 1976 LP Station to Station which neatly brings this thought-train to its terminus.

Like the leaf clings to the tree
Oh, my darling, cling to me
For we’re like creatures of the wind
Wild is the wind, wild is the wind