beastly pets

Primary School Reading Corner bulletin (I am a community volunteer and I want you to know):

One of the reading scheme books, Healthy Snacks, runs through - in words of mostly one syllable - a series of procedures for putting grated carrot onto Ryvita and things like that (though the rather hard word, 'Ryvita', a hard word for a sad reality, did not itself occur). 

 

None of this feels calculated to engage a seven year old's interest or enthusiasm or, indeed, mine (though I tried: valiantly I tried).

"I don't need an adult's help to do that!" one reader commented scornfully a propos of one kitchen procedure and I believed him.

 

Other reading scheme books are cleverer - one (Beastly Pets by Adrian Bradbury, helped by David Rodriguez Lorenzo's fun, characterful illustrations) explores a young girl's daydreams during a visit to the zoo about acquiring, successively, a tiger, a wolf, an eagle and a shark as pets. 

 

Foreseeing the possible negative consequences belied by these fierce animals' persuasive imagined rhetoric, she instead opts for a goldfish.

faulty smart meters

 

precious moments

"So she tells him she must go out for the evening

to comfort an old friend who's feelin' down.."

- Eagles, Lyin' Eyes.

The 'old friend who's feelin' down' is an aspect of herself and so not wholly a fiction.

This mid-1970s soft-rock classic which gestures at the psychogeography of deceit (“the cheatin’ side of town”) also tells us a psychological truth, that outer relationships with persons in our lives are often filtered through inner relationships amongst 'parts of self' which themselves may be in part a residue of our earliest family-of-origin experiences.

This is also a song about what we both know and don't know, say and don't say, a song which takes a cool yet compassionate view of its protagonists, both of whom have made compromise-decisions (themselves involving some not-quite-knowing and not-quite-acknowledging) that they now look back upon some years later with regret.

Lyin’ Eyes is a much better song than Hotel California (a leaden piece of work whose otherwise inexplicable popularity may be due to you can check out any time you like but you can never leave’s portability as metaphor) but nowhere near as good at the Three Degrees’ When Will I See You Again?, a song composed entirely on questions (‘when will…?’, ‘will I…?’, ‘are we…?’ etc) and interjections (‘oo-ooh!', 'aa-aah!’ and of course ‘precious moments!’). Ludwig Wittgenstein would surely have approved – this is to speak of the Investigations and not of the Tractatus.

michael portillo’s gastric juices

While you can say something in 27 words, you can’t even begin to try saying everything – to strive for the achievement of such a balance may inculcate a wholesome discipline. 

(Doesn't William Empson, in Seven Types of Ambiguity, throw out the observation that, logarithmically speaking, an afternoon is about midway between a moment and a lifetime?).

So let’s do this (one more time, aiming for similar quarterly updates in future if only as aides-memoire): here are some twenty-seven word reviews of films and television I’ve watched and books I've listened to or read recently. 

(This blog also has an index: click here)

Films

Rollerball (1975, dir. Norman Jewison, screenplay by William Harrison adapting his short story 'Rollerball Murder' first published in 1973 in Esquire, starring James Caan) – post-Watergate corporate dystopia about (i) an eponymous futuresport which combines roller disco, pinball, baseball, boxing, motorcycling etc and (ii) anomie (use of Albinoni’s Adagio quoting Orson Welles’‘The Trial’).

Death Race 2000 (1975, dir. Paul Bartel, produced by Roger Corman, screenplay by Robert Thom and Charles B. Griffiths based by Ib Melchior's 1956 short story 'The Racer', starring David Carradine) – cheap, tasteless, intermittently fun self-parodying knock-off of the above: corporate dystopia and murderous sports again, cartoon-ish or sketch show aesthetic (Wacky Races meets Sam Peckinpah’s Salad Days)  

The History Boys (2006, dir. Nicholas Hytner, written by Alan Bennett, starring Richard Griffiths, Frances de la Tour) – Strangely likeable, tonally odd (Hector’s surely a predatory paedophile, however one slices it?) set simultaneously in Leeds, Sheffield, the eighties, and the fifties. Reworks ‘Forty Years On’?

Beatriz at Dinner (2017, dir. Miguel Arteta, written by Mike White, starring Salma Hayek) - A heartfelt parable of a movie, about so much that matters: race, gender, class, money, entitlement, extractive capitalism, healing, revenge, and the lies that we tell ourselves.

Klaus (2019, co-written, co-produced and directed by Sergio Pablos, featuring the voice of J.K. Simmons as Santa) – Beautifully animated film charting its protagonist’s journey from privileged idleness to something more grounded; also Santa’s origin story and a disquisition on myth creation and enlightened self-interest.

Playground (Un Monde) (2021, dir. Laura Wandel) – Unsparing, extraordinarily well-acted portrayal of (one experience of) primary school, small moments of joy amidst an overall culture of fear, brutality and bullying, adults powerless to help.

Red One (2024, dir. Jake Kasdan, starring Dwayne 'the Rock' Johnson of course, Lucy Liu, and again J.K. 'at risk of typecasting' Simmons as Santa) – Undemanding ‘action-comedy to wrap presents to’. Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson - playing Santa’s long-serving security detail – utters the words ‘Level Four Naughty Lister’ with a straight face.

Books

C.S. Lewis, The Magician’s Nephew – as Milton re-narrated Genesis, deploying scientific knowledge & terminology (Paradise Lost as proto-SF?), so Lewis re-inscribes Christian theodicy within a quasi-Wellsian temporal schema (multiverse, not linear timeline)

C.S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – superlative storytelling (is Aslan Jesus, do you reckon?), and a worthwhile experience (bearing in mind the dedication) to re-encounter this in the second half of one’s life.

C.S. Lewis's dediction to LWW: "My Dear Lucy, I wrote this story for you, but when I began it I had not realised that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales, and by the time it is printed and bound you will be older still. But some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again. You can then take it down from some upper shelf, dust it, and tell me what you think of it. I shall probably be too deaf to hear, and too old to understand, a word you say, but I shall still be - your affectionate Godfather, C.S. Lewis"

Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism – Intelligent, aphoristic account of the genesis and development of ‘the nation state’ (a recent formation which claims antiquity), conducted in dialogue with, inter alia, Hobsbawm, Tom Nairn.

Andy Beckett, The Searchers: Five Rebels, Their Dream of a Different Britain, and Their Many Enemies  -  a cheering group biography of Benn, Livingstone, Corbyn, McDonnell and Abbott; an exposition of how much good they (and the 1980s Labour left) were able to do

(is Tony Benn Jesus, do you reckon?)

(Andy Beckett talks about his book and 'how movements succeed or fail' here). 

Jarvis Cocker, Good Pop, Bad Pop: An Inventory – colourful (literally and metaphorically), full of pictures and conversations, a life re-told more or less chronologically (to the cusp of fame) through the medium of ‘found objects’

(is Jarvis Cocker Jesus, do you reckon?)

Raphael Samuel, The Lost World of British Communism– auto-ethnographic account – readable, aphoristic, humane – of CPGB membership and all that it meant (cf Gornick/ CPUSA), with wider observations about sociopolitical belonging and the British 1950s more generally 

(was Harry Pollitt Jesus?)

Iris Murdoch’s Bruno’s Dream – the title references Bruno’s specific dreamlife and the dreamlike quality of any life remembered in bed-bound old age and infirmity; we’re midway between Beckett and naturalism here 

(was Iris Murdoch Jesus?)

(is Meryl Streep going to be Jesus?)

Now reading/ watching

I'm currently reading Andrew M Butler's detailed, intelligent, compendious Solar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s (and I like the well-chosen cover image, a contemporary publicity photo for the original Star Wars movie in which those other 1970s icons, an Angus Steak House and a pair of flared trousers somehow contrive to be in the background). This may shape some of my reading and viewing in future months. 

I'm on, and still loving, Season 3 of The Expanse – a good old-fashioned lived-in future, with Earth Mars and the Belt (roughly) parallelling the USA, the Soviet Union and the non-aligned states/ ‘Third World’ in the 1960s or so, with sufficiently good characterisation and plotting to hold the attention over many seasons.

And I loved Stranger Things until I suddenly didn’t.

(There’s something here about plotting, format, and a sufficiently rigorous internal logic, physics even – and about consistently delivering well-plotted 45 minute episodes versus doing whatever the money people will allow. So while I found a lot to enjoy and even love about Stranger Things – likeable characters! arcades! spot the 1970s and 1980s cinema referencing! think of Mark Fisher and wonder middle-agedly how we inadvertently lost the future! - that Series 4 finale was the final straw for me.)

(First: the length, 2h20m, a feature length episode and then some. Fine if you’re doing something with it – or if you’re Lynch, or Tarkovsky - setting the bar high there, I know - but this was just peril, comic relief, peril, comic relief, rinse and repeat, there was no special reason for the runtime, it was too long, I got bored. I hate being bored when the world's in such peril. Did anyone else get bored? Or AITA?).  
 
I've been watching Michael Portillo’s Channel 5 series about Portugal, because I plan to visit Portugal and it’s fun to look at it. I wouldn’t watch any television in which Michael Portillo wears red chinos as though born to them or references his own ‘gastric juices’ (yes, he utters this phrase) for any other reason. Fun fact: he was a politician once, during the last decades of the former century. 

Audio books for coach journeys and skiving off work pretending to have the flu (joke: my work ethic is just fine, thank you) have included Mere Christianity, Andrew Roberts’ long biography of Winston Churchill - NB (i) I’m becoming or always was Mark Corrigan from Peep Show, and (ii) Tariq Ali tells the same story differently - and Tallis’s Mortal Secrets: Freud, Vienna and the Discovery of the Modern Mind which, situating Freud as the product of early twentieth century Vienna as much as he was ‘of all time and for all time’, consciously steers a middle-way between hagiography and hatchet-job.

Podcast-wise, there’s Our Opinions Are Correct as always, the Iris Murdoch Podcast as usual, and Assaad Razzouk a.k.a. Angry Clean Energy Guy for a change.

Musically, there’s been Peggy Lee’s rendition of Is That All There Is? (Leiber/Stoller) - having experienced a major bereavement during the past several months (during any bereavement, we also grieve for ourselves I think – or, again, AITA?), not that there has to be a special reason for this extraordinary song - plus clipping.'s Dead Channel Sky (see also band interview in recent Our Opinions episode) and also Bad Indian by Dead Pioneers because it’s the most righteously angry thing I’ve heard in years and these are those times.

During this past several few months (mindful of Timothy Synder’s helpful checklist), I have practised corporeal politics and subsidised investigative journalism by subscribing to print media. I even made small talk.

 

kate bush's 'wuthering heights': some context

It's great that Kate Bush has been building a whole new fanbase amongst the under-30s in recent years, helped by the use of 'Running Up That Hill' in popular television drama, Stranger Things.

This means that a whole new generation will have marvelled at her interpretation of 'Wuthering Heights' - the unearthliness of Emily Bronte's vision of tormented, forbidden love compressed into a haunting four and a half minutes of pop magnificence. 

 

What these younger fans may not appreciate is that, during the 1970s, because of a set of arcane regulations enforced by the Musicians' Union, the Department of Education and a still-Reithian broadcasting establishment, *all* acts hoping to be approved for mainstream radio or TV airplay had first to record a 'pop' version of one of the acknowledged masterpieces of Victorian literature. This would then be assessed by an Associated Examining Board (AEB) panel for minimum standards of textual fidelity and coherence. 

 

Much of this work, aside from 'Wuthering Heights', is now justly forgotten - but, for afiocandos, Subway Sect's 'The Mayor of Casterbridge', Steel Pulse's 'Bleak House' and, of course, The Wurzels' 'Walter Bagehot's 'The English Constitution'' still bear repeated listening (though the TOTP audience who were in the house for the last of these performances do look a little mystified, as well they might).

yesterday in working class history

On 12 January 1989, the punk subculture was identified as the primary problem in a "youth analysis" produced by the East German (DDR) government.

In the early 1980s authorities estimated there were around 1,000 punks in the country, and around 10,000 visibly identifiable punk sympathisers, who had developed a national network to exchange information and ideas, and had links with left wing and anarchist punks in West Germany.

For more about this from the Working Class History website (highly recommended as an addition to any conscious social media feed), click here.

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If you dig into the subcultural history of the former Soviet Bloc in the few years leading up to 1989, you'll find that punks, some ecologists and some Christians (very few people were all three - and yet: Venn diagrams etc) were amongst those resisting and coming up against the regime(s). 

 

Asserting a right to make, or just to like, the music that you like was also important in Czech dissident circles during the 1970s (shall we talk about Charter 77 and also about the Helsinki Accords?), though Havel and his associates were more into Frank Zappa, the Velvets, prog rock sounds etc.

(One of my best ever gigs: seeing Domácí kapela - who had Plastic People of the Universe DNA - in Prague in 1992, with my friend N.)

(There may be a music-as-potential-dissidence trail here leading off into Plato's suspicion of the arts generally in The Republic).

(For "of course I wouldn't have liked to grow up there" with reference to ABBA - no, really - and the brand-new shiny 2020s, click here).

 

 

fifty years ago today (a spasm of technophobic and psychotic violence)

During the (in)famous first few moments of this series, we meet Nicky, aged fourteen, doing her homework at the kitchen table. Mum and Dad are also present, she knitting, perhaps something for the baby (we soon find out that she’s expecting), he smoking a pipe and reading the paper. When Nicky complains that she’s finding it hard to concentrate, Dad reassures her that: “You always do well in English.”

So far, so ordinary – though we might momentarily wonder about the ram’s skull on one shelf and an ornamental set of scales on another. What disasters are being foreshadowed, and what exactly is about to be weighed in the balance?

As the scene develops, all three family members fret about the strangely close and oppressive weather – it’s this that’s been hampering Nicky’s concentration and it’s not doing much for the grown-ups either. The television, which has been on, has been playing silent black and white images of small children playing. (This may make us think of John Wyndham's The Midwich Cuckoos and other uncanny depictions of children in genre fiction). Nicky asks for the volume to be turned up. Briefly, before static kills both the picture and sound, we hear fragments of a news bulletin: abnormal weather conditions, the Welsh borders, thunderstorms, and see images of flash flooding.

An unearthly noise then makes itself felt (“Twelve different layers of thrashing, awful sounds,” Paddy Kingsland of the BBC RadiophonicWorkshop later recalled) and Dad, face contorted, starts smashing the television with a candlestick. Sheila and Nicky look momentarily aghast before they too are possessed with an urge to destroy all technological gadgets. We then see street scenes of ordinary middle-class householders smashing bicycles and cars, intercut with stock footage of burning tube trains and exploding bridges. This footage is perhaps crudely put together by modern standards but this brief montage, showing us that this spasm of technophobic and psychotic violence is now nationwide, remains unsettling to watch.   

It's 6th January 1975, and we’re now exactly three minutes into The Changes. Britain’s youngsters – because it’s tea-time, and this is children’s programming – have just watched the world end. Soon, the BBC’s telephone switchboard will be jammed with parents calling in to complain..

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To read more, you'll need to get hold of an article I wrote about this landmark television series in the British Science Fiction Association's writers' magazine, Focus (#78, Summer 2024), in a trilogy of articles on 1970s British genre TV that also looks at Nigel Kneale's Beasts in #77, and Terry Nation's Survivors in the current issue, #79. 

(Trilogy? Arguably, it's a four-parter if we include an earlier piece which reads James Herbert’s landmark 1974 horror novel The Rats in the light of punk rock and other alternative cultures).

To sample both the 'initial montage' mentioned in the excerpt above and also Paddy Kingsland's/ the BBC Radiophonic Workshop music, watch the British Film Institute's DVD trailer (that'd be one way to watch, the other is to purchase on Amazon Prime, scroll down for links to both). 

It was watching this trailer on repeat (once something gets under the skin..) which told me that I had to get hold of the series - and, of the three series I've written about, it's 'The Changes' that'd be the one I'd take to the proverbial desert island and also the article which I feel is the strongest. 

I'm grateful to Dev Agarwal, Focus editor, that I was able to 'run a little long' with this one, compared to the initial wordcount guideline - this allowed me to note that the series re-unites a number of actors with significant prior reputations in Indian and Pakistani cinema who had also worked together on Insaaf [1971], an intriguing Urdu-language film, half-drama, half-extended infomercial, made by the UK Government’s Central Office for Information in order to promote employment rights under the 1968 Race Relations Act and given a limited cinematic release in British towns with significant South Asian populations. It also allowed me to reference two mid-1970s polemics by, respectively, E.P. Thompson and Michael Moorcock which deserve to be better known and more widely read..

One line of exposition I'd have developed given even another few hundred words on 'The Changes' would've been about how this series would be an important reference point for anyone wishing to talk about the life, career and almost wholly positive societal influence - in respect of creating children's television which respects, educates and entertains young minds and (as an integral part of that necessarily transformative project) in respect of the politics of representation, broadly conceived - of producer and executive Anna Home. Here's to you, Anna..!

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Other site content

Buy 'The Changes' (digital, £9.49)

Buy 'The Changes' (DVD, £15.10)

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