Poem of the day

W.B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Only one of the best ever written:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Film review - Looking For Eric

First off, I know nothing about film. I have friends who can talk and reference film like I can music. Secondly, I'm pretty sure I have never seen a Ken Loach film (a few Mike Leigh ones I can recall seeing, but no Loach). So film review isn't really my thang, more Peter Bradshaw's (allegedly): http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jun/12/film-review-looking-for-eric-cantona-ken-loach

I really enjoyed Looking For Eric. From the little I had gleaned from reading the papers, Loach is known more for his social realism (a la Leigh) than what is on offer here: an intoxicating mixture of farce, twee comedy and extreme drama. It's good fun and doesn't take itself seriously. If you're looking for real-life truism, this is not the film for you - steer the fuck clear. It'll piss you off.

The film follows the (mis)fortunes of Eric Bishop (Steve Evets), a down and out postman and die-hard Man United fan, jaded from two failed marriages, saddled by two step-sons who do Northern shit like steal cement mixers, watch porn, and hide guns for small town crims. Eric is still in love with his first wife Lily (Stephanie Bishop), whom he left some years previously for reasons which are rather unclear at first. He hallucinates images of his hero, Eric 'King' Cantona, under the influence of weed and his fellow posties (one of whom is actually played by John Henshaw, the geezer from the Post Office ads - see readers, Loach does irony). King Eric helps get pathetic Eric back on track, complete with typically ambiguous (roughly translated as 'often complete bollocks') Cantona-isms.

The eventual solutions to Eric's tribulations - both his relationship with Lily and his elder stepson's forays into gun-crime - are, on the surface, plainly ridiculous. Similarly, when Cantona first appears on screen, you cannot help double-taking. Yet ultimately I came to revel in this ridiculousness. It is a tribute to Loach that these bald betrayals of realism do not matter, because the film triumphs as a beautifully written farce. I did not care for one moment that the events unfurling before me had very little ground in reality.

This is not to say that Looking For Eric ignores straight drama entirely. What I love about this film is that it is warm and cuddly, but shot through at key moments by raw, naked terror. There is one particular moment that is ingrained in my mind, armed police gatecrashing a family roast dinner, the sugar-sweet traditions and polite banter dissipated, replaced by incoherence and unravelled emotion.

It is possible to pick holes in the film: certainly the dalliances in crime felt a little cliched. But this would be nitpicking. Like I said earlier, the film is good enough to by-pass the questioning 'what the fuck?' part of the brain.

Steve Evet's performance is an absolute triumph, really capturing the fragility and blind optimism of a man who has lost everything. And, the cherry on the cake, we get Cantona himself. Smoking weed! And glorious archive footage of his greatest moments, the upturned colour resplendent on red, black, white, and yellow-green shirts.

Poem of the day

I love this one, a bit of Plath to chill a warm June afternoon:

Sylvia Plath, Conversation Among The Ruins

http://www.angelfire.com/tn/plath/catr.html

Poem of the day

Simon Armitage, About His Person

http://poemhunter.com/poem/about-his-person/

Poem of the day

Philip Larkin, Going.

There is an evening coming in
Across the fields, one never seen before,
That lights no lamps.

Silken it seems at a distance, yet
When it is drawn up over the knees and breast
It brings no comfort.

Where has the tree gone, that locked
Earth to the sky? What is under my hands,
That I cannot feel?

What loads my hands down?

Poem of the day

 http://www.beatrice.com/archives/000351.html

Bring me my high horse

Right. Time to talk politics without sounding preachy. Not gonna happen is it.

So the BNP winning seats in last week's elections is annoying me, but not only for the obvious reasons. The reaction amongst the political elite and general public is baffling/angering me in equal measure.

Politics in this country is fucked at the moment - there can be no doubt about that; expenses rows, an economic crisis (which incidentally I don't think Brown exactly helped while he was Chancellor, deregulating everything to the nth degree), blind former cabinet ministers being attacked by discerning cattle - it's all gone tits up, yeah? This is a given. But my point is that we can't attribute this political decline as the sole reason for the BNP's success.

About 35% of people eligible to vote did so. And for this reason we deserve the BNP. It's like when lefties moan about Berlesconi - why? The Italian people have elected him. I have no idea how to heal, or even quantify, the apathy which seems to prevent British people going out to exercise such a basic democratic right.

It's impossible to estimate, but the media often talks about a politically educated elite that refuse to vote because no mainstream political party reflects their views. I think that this is broadly true, but there is also a similarly sized chunk of the electorate who simply do not give a fuck. It's frustrating, and may possibly always be a problem. And yes, it is the responsibility of the political system to try and get people interested in politics, but its also our responsibility.

OK, I'm done...someone put padding on the floor, I'm jumping down from the pedestal.

Poem of the day

Emily Dickinson, It Was Not Death

http://www.poetseers.org/early_american_poets/emily_dickinson/emily_dickinsons_poetry/it_was_not_death

The Horrors, Camden Electric Ballroom, Friday 5th June

Not only can I feel the sound bouncing in and out of my ears, but the floor is vibrating and throbbing. On stage The Horrors are still goth, but no longer cartoon goth, more an early Cure, Mary Chain type of goth. Barring Faris, their hair no longer resembles a crow's nest in a force-ten gale. The bass player even wears a shirt that isn't black and dances hypnotically using only his shoulders (you had to be there). Certain gimmicks of the old days linger, the keyboard player as pale, bowl-cutted and quietly frightening as an Addam's family extra.

There was a problem, but I'm yet to work out if this was the band's fault. Their new album, 'Primary Colours' has not left my CD player and iPod for a month, and as a result I know every nuance, every colourful glimmer, every vocal flourish. I didn't expect them to replicate the sound of the record live (a naive hope when going to see any band), but I did expect more than simply a relentless wall of noise, which is what I got.

That's not to say that I didn't enjoy the gig. Their playing was far better than when I saw them at Reading in 2007, and they had that synergy that some bands can almost magically muster, a glorious racket which sounds greater than the sum of its parts. 'Scarlet Fields' sounded wonderful, exploding into a cacophany of colourful synth, 'Do You Remember' drenched in baggy charm. But Faris's vocal could only just be discerned, buried beneath pounding guitar, bass and drums. You could hear that his voice was on the money, but you could barely grasp or hold it in your hearing, like sensing something sinister out of the corner of your eye without being able to see it.

I admired their refusal to dwell on the songs that initially brought them attention: none of the 8 songs they played pre-encore were from the 1st album, though they did pay knowing homage to them at the gig's climax, rattling off 'Count In Fives', 'Sheena Is A Parasite', and 'Gloves' in frenetic succession, Faris shining a lantern into the crowd, tall and wiry, an undertaker on leave.

I felt incredibly old when the lights came on to reveal teens in their fertility-restricting jeans and Topman starter-kits. But to go to Camden expecting anything else would be another act of naivety.