Yurt16

Synecdoche, New York

I’ve been looking forward to Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut since I first heard about it. Kaufman’s scripts so far, whilst a little erratic, have shown flashes of genius, and the cast for this film was fantastic. (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton)

Luckily, although it was only in town for three days, one of those days was post OU exam, so I wouldn’t be neglecting my revision to see it,  and set off for the local college / Uni to see the movie.

It’s weird. It’s more than a little weird. Hoffman is a theatre producer, stuck in a loveless marriage, and paralysed by fears of dying having achieved nothing. As his marriage breaks down, he is awarded a Genius Grant with the purpose of creating a piece of work is challenging, powerful, and truthful.

And naturally he comes up with a genius idea and then gets bogged down in the complexity of it and the pressure to come up with something worthwhile. It’s a bonkers film. It’s got moments of madness and moments of laugh-out-loud hilarity.

It’s got a lead character who seems to have no sense of chronology. At one point he mentions that his wife has only been on vacation for a week, and Samantha Morton’s character replies that she’s been gone for a year and she really should buy him a diary. It’s not the only exchange like this, but the beauty is that it doesn’t really matter because it all seems to make sense in the contained universe of the film, and even if, by the end, you aren’t sure exactly who is who any more, it’s all a bit beautiful.

I loved it. I think I loved it. I need to see it again to double check.

I had an OU exam last Wednesday, which is my reason for not being around here much lately. Not because I was studying hard for the exam - but because I should have been studying hard for the exam and not blogging.

But the exam is done now, and although there are lots of other things that I should probably be doing, I’ll see if I can spend a bit of time around here as well.

How are you all doing?

I wanted to see if I could find the Replacements doing ‘Skyway’ on YT, but there’s a lot of live versions of variable quality. It’s from ‘Pleased to Meet Me’, one of those albums that I’d keep seeing in Spinadisc but never get round to buying cos the sleeve was rubbish compared to stuff on 4AD. Pretentious, moi?

Which was a shame, because it’s a bloody good album, holding onto some of the ramshackle rock charm of their earlier material but with a little more care and a little more sheen. When I did get into this material with the release of ‘All For Nothing / Nothing For All’, ‘Skyway’ was the song that I’d keep coming back to.

It’s a tender little love song, and Bill Janovitz explains it far better than I can. “… the melancholy atmosphere of the track serves to underpin the aching desire in Westerberg’s remarkably expressive voice.”

I adore this song. The video I’ve grabbed is a solo performance featured on the DVD of ‘Come Feel Me Tremble’, but if you like this, seek out the original. You won’t be disappointed.

Listening to one of my old CDs last week, I suggested to E that I could put it up as a revival MP3 of the week. The CD was surely deleted, and CDs are much easier to rip from than vinyl. In fact, you’re more likely to find my old vinyl on ebay than you are on my turntable.

But even then, why MP3 when you can normally find what you are looking for on Youtube?

Tribe were a band from Boston at the start of the 90s, and I would imagine that I read about them in Lime Lizard and bought their album because

a) they came from Boston

b) they were on the same label as Grant Lee Buffalo

c) their album was produced by Pixies producer Gil Norton

Listening to the CD 20 years later, although it sounds very much of its time and maybe a little over-produced, it’s still one of those CDs that begs for the volume to be turned up. There’s lots of live stuff on youtube, but there is also the video for the lead single from the album ‘Abort’ : “Joyride (I Saw The Film)”

We dragged the lad out to a car boot sale at the weekend, not cos we wanted to buy anything but cos I wanted to see if there would be a market from the acres of tat I’m storing across my estate.

There was an awful lot of people selling tat, and an awful lot of people looking at it. Just not sure that anybody was buying, but we’ll see.

Anyway. There was one old fella who had a couple of piles of Marvel Comics. Unable to resist, I started to leaf through them. Loads of shitty Marvels from the mid-nineties, oddly interspersed with lots of Spider-Woman issues from the late-seventies, and at least one random Captain Marvel. None of it in especially good condition.

Bloke clocks me. “£1.50 each they are today,” he says. “All of them collectable.”

Instead of just laughing at him and walking off, I wish I’d had the wit to offer him £1.50 for the lot.

When I first heard that Martin Clunes was starring in a ‘Reggie Perrin’ remake I was filled with dread. The original series wasn’t perfect, but it’s one of those shows where it’s impossible to divorce the character from the actor who played him. So what’s the value in a remake?

However, I saw the trailers and found myself quite looking forward to it, although I admit this may be because it had the music from the 70s.

So we watched the first episode. And I enjoyed it, but with mixed feelings. At one point Reggie came into the office and told his PA his reason for being late. And I laughed, and the canned audience laughed. But I knew I was laughing because it’s a joke from the original, and without the original show, and the knowledge that Reggie makes a similar excuse every day, it’s not that funny.

Ditto CJ. From the minute the character popped up, it was just a matter of time until he came out with the ‘I didn’t get where I am today…’ line. We laugh because we remember the original.

So what’s the point? I really don’t know.

Pondering this at the weekend, I mentioned to E that rather than abandoning his clothes at the beach, maybe the new Reggie would sail off to Panama in a canoe, ala John Darwin. Having just googled it, it seems that this was indeed the trigger for the revival.

It’s a sad lack of imagination. Rather than encourage something genuinely new and creative, the commissioning department have gone for a tired retread of a landmark show from the 70s. Oh, and they’ve mixed in the chap who wrote ‘Men Behaving Badly’, so occasionally, to bring the show bang up to date, we have Reggie uttering typical Simon Nye vulgarisms.

Is it symptomatic of our short attention-span culture that, rather than the delicious ‘The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin’, the new series is simply ‘Reggie Perrin’?

Whatever - Reggie isn’t Reggie without Sunshine Desserts, and you could do a lot worse than buy the DVD with the original three series, at least two of which are brilliant.

365 Nights

We’re thinking about putting out a response book where we make a commitment that for 365 nights we will find a unique excuse every night for not having sex.

Although as it’s a response book, we should get cracking on it straight away but I’m tired after a day of minding the child and I’ve got a bit of a headache, and oh look, The Apprentice is on…

There was an announcement in March that Egmont and WH Smith were going to revive the concept of the Summer Special - the bumper comics that our parents would grudgingly let us buy in an attempt to keep us quiet on the journey to Cornwall in those distant 80s summers.

Further more, they’re going to revive it with some charmingly retro titles, Roy of the Rovers, Misty…

I so want this to be a fantastic idea but, having read the first title, I suspect it’s doomed to failure.

When I was a kid, it wasn’t just American comics that I’d read. I’d read any comics. If I went to a school bring-and-buy sale, I’d leave with loads of comics, all costing a couple of pence each. Back issues of Tiger with Billy’s Boots, or TV Comic with Doctor Who, or Look & Learn with The Trigan Empire. You’d never get a very good run of them, so you’d have 6 pages of a story, and then a month’s gap, and nobody would ever refer to the stuff that was in the earlier strip.

Years later, faced with parental disapproval of my American comics habit, I ended up getting Roy of the Rovers weekly. I never loved the comic, but it hit two of my childhood obsessions (comics & footy) so I enjoyed it, and it kept the parents happy.

So this Roy of the Rovers Special, promising ‘Genuine 1980s Comic Strips’ should be a happy trip down memory lane?

Yes and No. First things first - who exactly is this comic aimed at? If it’s aimed at kids and they enjoy it, where do they go as a follow-up? There’s no information in there about any other material available (I know there was a TPB last year) and I guess comics from the 80s don’t appear in school jumble sales in 2009, so they’d read this issue, and then nip back to the Nickelodeon magazine.

And if it’s aimed at adults? Well, firstly, rack it with the grown up comics then. Not next to Peppa Pig or Ben 10. And why not spend ten minutes to provide a little bit of info about the strips that have been reprinted - for example, when do they date from? It’s a veritable ragbag of strips with no supporting information at all.

I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy it. I did, and it reminded me how I never liked ‘The Mighty Mouse’ or ‘The Hard Man’. But, with a little more thought, it could have been a lot better.

Parts of the Doctor Who Special today that I thought were good : The bits with Lee Evans.

Parts that I cringed at : The rest of it.

The cashier at Waitrose complimented my t-shirt the other day, and then asked me where I’d bought it. I have no idea. I’ve had it for years. It may have been in America.

But it set me to thinking. I can think of exactly three occasions in which strangers have complimented the t-shirt I was wearing, and I think this is enough of a sampling that I can draw some firm conclusions.

1 - Vegas. I bought a Star Wars t-shirt with some Ralph McQuarrie concept art on it. It’s decidedly retro, from the artwork to the faded colour of the shirt. Walking down the strip, an American chap who I think may have had a few to drink, clocked my shirt, and attempted to high-five me with a cry of ‘Nice shirt dude’ or something similar. Being British, I naturally dodged the high-five and offered to shake his hand.

2 - London. I have a t-shirt that is a sort of cross between Star Wars and Pez. It has the Pez logo writ large, and a huge picture of a hand operating a Darth Vader Pez dispenser. Whilst waiting for the Belle & Sebastian gig at the Hammersmith Odeon, a European chap came over to say how great my t-shirt was and to ask where I had bought in. He looked like he wanted to cry when I told him it was from ‘Urban Outfitters’

3 - Northampton - Waitrose, as previously discussed. And the t-shirt? A simple red shirt with the Pez logo dead centre.

So what have we learnt, apart from wondering whether one person really does need to own 2 t-shirts with the Pez logo?

Obviously, if you want to find yourselves overwhelmed by strangers asking you where you got your t-shirt, go retro. I have precisely four shirts that I would count as retro, and have roughly several hundred shirts in total. None of the other ’several hundred minus four’ shirts have ever been commented on.