Incoming

1. George Clinton is playing in the TriPod place on the 4th of July. I have long thought that Funkadelic's 'One Nation Under A Groove' should become the US national anthem, so I am hoping for bonkers Americana at this, so long as the Hootieship does not accidentally descend.

2. The Gate is showing a production of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd: the Demon Barber of Fleet Street, the famous musical about a murderous barber and the nearby pie shop that assists in the disposal of his victims. I have long been fascinated by this gothic masterpiece of bloody and indiscriminate revenge, and longed for it to be performed in Dublin. And now it is here! The director is Selina Cartmell, who did Titus Andronicus in the Project recently, so I am expecting good things from this.

World's Strangest Railway Found!

It is Volk's Brighton to Rottingdean Seashore Electric railway, looking oddly like something from a Kevin Mills illustration of the Gothic Empire.


Check out the Abandoned Lines and Railways website for more abandoned railway line action. If you have ever been to the Bowlie Weekender or the All Tomorrow's Parties festival (when it was in Camber Sands), you might be interested by the Camber Station, Rye and Camber tramway, a line which once took people from Rye to Camber Sands. Apparently the railway line is now a walk way, possibly the route I took when I walked from Camber Sands to Rye last year.

Alan Johnston

I am not aware of my having an extensive readership among sulky Palestinian factions, but just in case, here is a picture of Alan Johnston, this kidnapped BBC journalist and a link to stuff about his case:

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Film: The Last Kind of Scotland

This is about this guy who goes to recently independent Uganda to work as a doctor in a rural clinic. As soon as he arrives the country experiences a coup, and the new leader is a charismatic fellow with whose path the doctor unexpectedly crosses. The doctor finds himself becoming the President's personal physician and confidant. He gradually comes to register that the dictator is not merely charismatic – he is also a raving maniac. And so it goes.

I liked this film well enough. It evoked the African setting well, while Forest Whitaker turned in a superb performance as Idi Amin. Amin's cronies look just like photos I have seen of Amin's cronies. The guy who plays the doctor does a good job of playing a twunt in vastly over his depth. And lovely Gillian Anderson is great in a minor role. The film nevertheless has problematic elements. The romance element between the doctor and one of Amin's wives seems so patently incredible and tacked on for form's sake that you would have to wonder why they bothered. Some also felt that the doctor is so venal, stupid, and fatuously self-serving that it is very hard to get worked up when things turn bad for him. Still, I feel that the good aspects of the film outweighed the bad.

Interesting, maybe, to compare the film with the book. From memory, the doctor in the book is less venal but maybe more stupid, in that it takes him much longer to register what a maniac Amin is. They also left out all the stuff about the Israelis (the book mentions how they helped Amin in the early years, eventually turned against him, and then raided his airport to bust out their hostages). And in the book the doctor stays in Uganda right up to the end of Amin's regime. But you know, books and films are different, and the film was already long enough.

One final great thing about the film is that manages to look very 1970s. A lot of this is down to the slightly bleached look of the film stock. I am not sure whether it looks like the actual 1970s or just like representations of them. But it is still great.

Things I did in Cork: ate food

The other totally G*R*A*T*E thing my beloved and I did in Cork was eat dinner in the Café Paradiso, Ireland's greatest restaurant. I can't remember what I had, but it was very tasty. Given that we basically went to Cork to eat in the Café Paradiso, it would want to have been.

This finishes my series of entries on my no longer so recent visit to Cork.

Things I did in Cork: bought records

I also bought some records. It seemed like a good idea to get a CD of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' first album, so I could put it on my iPod and listen to it when I am meant to be working. Deadly. More of a surprise, though, was the album by Simian. You may remember me mentioning these chaps previously, as they appear on the Pop!Justice album with Justice, doing the awesome 'WE! ARE! YOUR FRIENDS!' song. This album by Simian has the original version, 'Never Be Alone', from which that was remixed. And it is lamer indie rubbish. I am as disappointed by Simian as my old mate Andrew Blackmore was when, on the strength of 'Loaded', he bought the second Primal Scream album. This is one record that will not be troubling my iPod and may well find itself being given away by Oxfam in the near future. Simian are not my friends.

Blogs are rubbish...

... or so claims Victor Keegan in The Guardian: To the average Joe, blogs aren't cutting it

He has a point. Unless you are a superstar blogger like Momus, you probably have no readers other than your friends, and even they probably don't like your blog that much. I am also struck by the point about blogs v. social networking sites. Yesterday I posted about the World Bank on my other blog, and expect a tiny number of people to read that; if I had posted the same thing on a message board it might have been read by, I don't know, a dozen people? This is life.

Things I did in Cork: Visiting Fota Wildlife Park

It's true. We had a confirmed sighting of a red squirrel (you can definitively differentiate them from the often surprisingly rusty grey squirrels by looking at the ears – if they sport tufts of hair, it's a red). Red squirrels are well known for their being on the way out, largely because the skanger grey squirrels out-compete them. So it was nice to see this little fellow foraging for nuts, but less nice to witness some Cork urchins shout "A squirrel! Get him!" before chasing him up a tree to shouts of "We'll get you next time!". I would love to say that the fuckers were then kicked to death by the park's free roaming wallabies, but that would not be accurate.

We also saw some Capybaras hiding on an island from unruly children.

More Fota action

Massimo Bellardinelli

Reports are coming in that comics artist Massimo Bellardinelli has died. He will be fondly remembered for his work in 2000 AD on "Meltdown Man" and "Flesh". I remember reading somewhere that he also drew "Judge Dredd" occasionally, and once drew Dredd without his helmet... though Tharg then put a "censored" mark over his face.

Things I did in Cork: Seeing A Film called "Black Book"

I had a gap in my espionage schedule in February, so my beloved and I paid a trip to Cork. We got to catch up with our old pals Myles and Sammywol and their delightful daughter. We also went to the cinema, and saw the film Black Book, by that Paul Verhoeven fellow, you know, the guy who made Robocop and Starship Troopers. Unlike those two, this film was made in his native Netherlands and is set in the later stages of the Second World War rather than the future. The story follows this Jewish woman as she tries to survive until the end of the war. It is all very exciting and stylish, and works well as a thriller. But there were things about it I was not so fond of, notably the film's whodunit element (over which one of the resistance group is secretly in league with TEH NAZIS). I do not like whodunits, as they make you approach a film as a puzzle rather than a story. In most whodunits, the culprit is always pretty obvious. In this film, the villain is obvious in retrospect, though the film misdirects you almost up until the end. Still, it is like a Hollywood film in that the identity of the informer makes narrative sense, rather than just being some buy who sat at the back all the time and never said anything.

I would not, however, want to let my gripes against the whodunit genre give anyone the impression that that I did not enjoy this film. It is a masterpiece of well-made character driven drama, and a worthy film to see on my first trip to the Kino, Cork's art house cinema. I recommend this to anyone who wants to get a sense of the nastiness and moral corruption from which a society under occupation suffers, and the self-righteous vindictiveness that erupts when it is released from its bondage.