Author: strokeofbadluck

As a brain damage sufferer/survivor, I’ve observed the same symptoms in Dominic Raab. The slowness of speech and the occasional sense that he has no idea what he’s actually saying. My heart bleeds for him – but it does raise the question: should he be Foreign Secretary? Esher and Walton, of which he is the MP, would of course vote in a brain-damaged man as long as he was a Tory. But still…

I wonder if they play rugby at Dr Challoner’s Grammar School, of which he is an alumnus? (Along with Roger Moore – I could see Raab fancying himself as James Bond material.) He DEFINITELY was a boxing blue at Oxford and captained the karate club there. Brain damage? That might explain how the son of a Jewish Czech, who came over in 1938, has allied himself with the pro-Brexit wing of the party. A man for whom the racist chant ‘send him back’ could have been invented. (Like Javid and Patel, as it happens.)

As Jodie Foster says in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore: WEIRD!

I told myself, aged 5 or so: Ah well, everybody else seems so sure of things; I’ll just keep quiet about my needs. Which were – primarily – to be loved.

I remember once being at home, aged slightly older than was thought appropriate (maybe – gasp – 6!). I was tired and I wanted to be carried upstairs to bed. Whether I said ‘carry me, carry me’ or I had it said for me, ‘carry me, carry me’ became a joke at my expense. So I lay there on the floor downstairs, wailing, and everybody else went upstairs and ‘laughed’ about it.

And eventually I stopped crying, picked myself up, went upstairs and to bed.

So, that established a pattern – a pattern of not having emotional needs, which finally reached its conclusion in 2014 in the woods outside Mistley…

I had not less needs but MORE, after the stroke, and that was inadmissible.

Had a sobering chat with a man on the bus up Lexden Road. He was homeless, living in a tent in Stanway. He was so depressed he’d pulled all his fingernails out. I’ve been depressed in my time but I’ve never done that. He was originally from Glasgow, had been in rehab in Plymouth and been resettled in Colchester because he had family here, he said. Whatever… It hadn’t been a great success. Evidently.

He was on universal credit, £250 a month, he said. Not a lot of people make me think: I’m glad I’m me.

But he did.

He said he was hungry. I gave him 16p in a Post Office see-thru plastic change bag – all I had in change. He took it, not gratefully but without complaining. Then a little while later he returned the empty change bag. You never know when it might come in handy.

Lots of his films are available on YouTube right now:
This Sporting Life (1963)
If…. (1968)
O Lucky Man! (1973)
Is That All There Is? (1992)

Plus:
O Dreamland
Wham In China
The Whales Of August
Glory Glory

I’ve watched the 1st 4.
If…. 5*
This Sporting Life 4*
O Lucky Man! 2*
Is That All There Is? 2*

If…. still works exactly as if it had been made today (the cinematography by Miroslav Ondricek is particularly good). I’ve watched it recently with a 14yo and he loved it too. It’s like Harry Potter for him; for me, having been at Westminster only 9 years later, very real.

I 1st saw If…. when I was 14, an English teacher having told us to watch it (it was on the BBC). While I don’t think I was of a mass-murdering persuasion, I rehearsed in my mind the massacre at the end whenever (3 times a week) I came out of ‘Abbey’, down the cloisters. I would have been Johnny (David Wood); Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell) would have been Tom Madge, the school rebel, who liked Millie Jackson at a time when we were just getting into New Wave, and who left Westminster to go to Pimlico for 6th form.

This Sporting Life is possibly the best British 1st feature ever made (tied with Sexy Beast?). Richard Harris is often criticised as being too Brando, but imagine if Brando had really been cast as Frank Machin, rugby league player? It would have been preposterous! So – at least in this film – Harris is so much better, surely? And Rachel Roberts is fantastic. But it is a bit long at 2 hours 14 minutes.

O Lucky Man has a few good bits but at 2 hours 58 minutes is MASSIVELY too long. Malcolm McDowell just grins his silly grin and Arthur Lowe wears blackface! Bizarrely, it gets 7.8 on IMDb while If…. gets 7.6! If anyone can explain this, please do.

I’ve also been reading Going Mad In Hollywood by David Sherwin, screenwriter of If…. An excellent and truthful If VERY depressing account of 30 years of scripting. What for? you may well ask. We have to do SOMETHING…

2 revelations: Jon Voight is barking mad; and Travis Bickle was named – Scorsese tells Sherwin – after Mick Travis.

Continuing the Anne Bancroft theme.

Dialogue by Harold Pinter, of course.

www.youtube.com/watch

‘Football is a fertility festival. Eleven sperm trying to get into the egg. I feel sorry for the goalkeepeer.’

I remember Bjork saying that and it provoked thought. Imagine a village 5000 years ago: 50 ppl and a VERY LIMITED gene pool. You interbreed – not a great result in terms of the generations. Or the successful village is the one which goes out to other villages and gets its hands on other women. That was what the Rape of the Sabines was about, or any Viking raid.

As time went by, this becomes more of a ritual: a village team goes to an opposing village and plays a ritual game – football. The team who gets the most balls into the net – ie fertilises the most women – ‘wins’ and they’d take the allotted women back to marry and procreate. And the women are given a name which often shows what village they come from now.

This explains the ferocity of football fans’ feelings: the future of our village is at stake!

And it explains why the Women’s World Cup (specifically England v Scotland last night) was so poorly attended. Women are the GOAL, surely?

I’ve been thinking about Charlie and his progress from community jazz worker in the 80s to manager in the 90s (The Afghan Whigs!) to ME sufferer in the next decade to university lecturer in the next. That year, when he worked at Community Music, I must have asked is he knew any drummers. He suggested a teenager called Jan Kincaid. We (singer/guitarist, bassist – and me on my Wurlitzer electric piano) ‘auditioned’ him at a rehearsal place in Wapping. It didn’t take long. He was about 16 – and a thousand times better than us.
Someone asked him what he liked.
He said: Jazz funk.
We scratched our heads and said goodbye. (And soon split up.) But I always remembered his name. He was GOOD.
About 5 years later, I saw the Brand New Heavies on Top Of The Pops and recognised him. And went: Aha…
By then I’d given up music. I knew it was no use…

Not much to report, really. Farrar was excellent in:
The Small Back Room (1949)
Black Narcissus (1947)

A good villain in:
Gone To Earth (1950), as the country squire who lusts after Jennifer Jones

He’s just about memorable in:
Went The Day Well? (1942)
Frieda (1947)
The 300 Spartans (1962), playing Darius, Emperor Of The Persians – testament to Hollywood’s ‘if it’s a period villain, cast a Brit’ mentality

Other films I’ve seen, his name appears in the cast list, but he’s gone from my memory. Without Powell and Pressburger, it seems, he was easily bored. He retired to South Africa, before it was ok to do so.

The only revelation from IMDb is I Vinti (1953), which is – allegedly – by Michelangelo Antonioni! David Farrar as a precursor to Jack Nicholson? It should be investigated – or it’s a practical joke by a very recherché contributor…

As far as I’m concerned, the practice of the ‘married name’ doesn’t apply anymore. Clara (married 1986), Claire (m1988), Katy (m1996), Katie Webb, Amanda etc ALL didn’t take their husband’s name.
Lizzie went double-barrelled.
Only Sarah Kafala took her husband’s name, because (I think) it’s more exotic than her surname. (I don’t know what…)
Other people – even when they had kids – chose not to get married at all.
End of story…
But in the country, it’s different. Chloe Chancellor, Laura Fawcett, Eva Shepherd – among Tattingstone parents – all, despite London origins, chose the traditional route.
And now, at the Heart Failure clinic on Friday, another generation. I happened to comment that the Heart Failure Specialist Nurse, Geraldine (a modern woman, 30s) had an interesting name, read off her name badge: Springett. She wasn’t enthusiastic. Tho her maiden surname was Polish and began with S (and she came from Scotland, natch) she took her husband’s name to avoid her father-in-law making a fuss (big in Halstead, apparently). She thought it sounded like a type of dog.
I turned to the other Heart Failure Specialist Nurse (30s). Surely Andrews was her maiden name?
No, she confessed, a little shamefacedly. She took her husband’s name as well.
What does this show us? Maybe that a more traditional sort of man lives in the country?

Just seen on Talking Pictures, this is the first British B movie I’ve seen that’s actually BETTER than Detour (1945) and other classics of the US genre.
It’s directed by Vernon Sewell, a pioneer of British B movies. He started out as a production assistant on Michael Powell’s The Edge Of The World (1937). The only other film of his I’ve seen – and his only A movie – is The Silver Fleet (1943), produced by P&P. (Not so hot, despite the presence of Kathleen Byron…)
Strongroom’s written by a duo: Richard Harris – who on tv was creator of the timeless Shoestring (1979-80) with Trevor Eve and for the movies wrote Lewis Gilbert’s Stepping Out (1991) and English dialogue on – a new one on me – Lady In The Car With Glasses And A Gun (1970) with Oliver Reed and Samantha Eggar! I definitely want to see that…
And Max Marquis, whose only movie this was, but on tv wrote Z-Cars and (under a pseudonym) Crossroads (and also operated as a pulp fiction writer).
Last but not least, the cast is headed by Derren Nesbitt, who ALMOST got famous in Where Eagles Dare (1968) as the Nazi Von Hapen.
Watch it next time it’s on. It’s only 80 minutes. You won’t regret it!