September 11th
September the 11th… ten years ago today I went into a Burger King in San
A walkman... my only way of receiving news on 9/11
Francisco and asked for a veggie burger. I was presented with a bun inside which was Iceberg lettuce combined with mayo and nothing else.
“You’ve forgotten the burger,” I told the server.
“No, you ask for veggie burger…” she replied.
I didn’t argue. It had been a long day.
I woke up at about 7am in a hotel room St. Louis Obispo, a strange town between LA and San Francisco. I was on what was to be the last holiday I would ever take with my parents and we were travelling around California. That day we had to travel by coach up to San Francisco. I turned on the radio, which I’d tuned the night before to a punk rock station and the two DJs, two stoner college kids, were talking about something happening at the World Trade Centre. I’d never heard of the Twin Towers. At first I thought this was a building in LA, where we’d just come from. It didn’t seem very serious at first but when we got on the coach the tour guide was crying.
All that day we travelled up the East Coast and I listened to the news on my cassette walkman – picking up, despite the bad reception, that something really bad had happened: a terrorist attack.
Terrorism isn’t totally foreign to me. I grew up near Warrington and not that far from Manchester. I remember sitting, that day, in a café in Monterrey, eating a cheese and avocado sandwich and telling my parents how America had funded the IRA for years so should we really be sympathetic? Of course, at that point I hadn’t seen the footage that I’ve seen hundreds of times since, of the planes hitting the building, the burst of fire, the jumpers, the towers falling, and the dust. But I still can’t get the image of Gerry Adams rattling his collection tin in New York out of my head.
All up the coast everything was shut, local branches of Saks closed because of the terrorist threat. We arrived in San Francisco and the city was in lock-down. Outside our hotel someone had written ‘Wake up’ in chalk on the pavement. All the restaurants were closed, so we had to go to Burger king.
That evening, despite being under-aged, I got drunk in the hotel bar with two US Marines. It felt like the end of the world, fin-de-siècle; it was I suppose.
One Day
I, like many others, read David Nicholls book, ‘One Day’ and loved it. It’s funny and tragic at the same time with brilliantly drawn characters. And then they announce they’re making a film… well done, Mr. Nicholls, I thought, for getting to write the screenplay of your own book.
So I trek to my local multiplex, harboring doubts that Ann Hathaway will be able to cope with the northern English accent and with a little bit of skepticism that this book, with it’s strange ‘every St. Swithern’s day over twenty years’ structure will work as a film, but ultimately looking forward to seeing how he’s translated it to the screen.
But my, God, I was not expecting it to be one of the worst films I’ve seen in the cinema for a LONG TIME… like since the 1990s, since when I used to get dragged along to things like ‘Three Men, A Little Lady and Dog’ or whatever the limping end of that franchise was called.
Why do I feel One Day doesn’t work as a film?
The structure – one July day each year for twenty years is obviously going to present a challenge and a huge risk of mass exposition. While exposition isn’t so much of a problem, the opening ten minutes of the film are like a series of trailer moments, flying by at such a pace that I would be surprised if those who haven’t read the book had a clue what was going on. Who are these two people? And why and how do they stay in touch? The rambling letters that Emma send to Dex whilst he travelling and getting his end away around the world, and the brash postcards he sends back to her which helped establish their relationship to one another, are absent from the film. It moves at such a pace that you barely have chance to understand how the characters have got where they are in each scene. It feels like everything is rushed through in order for us to get to [SPOILER ALERT] the big ‘finally they get it on’ moment and then Emma’s untimely death.
I thought Hathaway’s accent was actually OK, but the acting is pretty wooden. They seem to monotonously reciting lines from the book in bars and holiday resorts with no atmosphere… and some of the best lines are left out. In fact, all the humor that was in the book has been drained out of the screenplay. I read that Dexter’s character, who is rather boorish and arrogant in the book, had to be toned down, as has Emma’s political firebrand northerner, as no one likes Bolshie women in film do they? So ‘Em and Dex’ are rather bland.
The cinematography is dodgy and the film looks cheap. There’s a scene where they are skinning dipping in France that reminded me of the cinematography quality in the micro-budget horror ‘Open Water’ and to be honest, a few sharks might have spiced things up a bit. Obviously all the budget went on Hathaway’s salary, meaning all non-UK locations in the book where changed to France – in the book they are skinny dipping in Greece and other scenes were set in Italy and India, but they don’t even have the imagination to pretend they’re in any of these places. It’s just France. Even the credits looked cheap.
All in all, it felt like this film had been rushed onto the screen; a scramble to make it on the back of the one million plus book sales, so all those one million odd readers will dutifully head down to their local multiplexes and pay out their hard-earned cash to watch it.
I think I’m going to have to watch two Michael Haneke films back to back this weekend to recover.
It’s National Vegetarian Week and, as I’ve been vegetarian for about 12 years, I thought I’d share some tried and tested veggie recipes with the world.
I decided to go vegetarian because I was disgusted by the farming practices that took place in the UK: pigs kept in enclosures so small they can barely move, cattle being fed offal, all sorts of creatures never seeing actual sun light. That was over a decade ago and it seems little has changed. Now, more than ever, supermarkets are forcing producers (farmers is too glorious a word to use on these people) to keep their prices down, so living conditions for these short-lived animals who are seen as nothing more than commodities are not high on producers’ priorities. I’ m sure you can find plenty of gory pictures from slaughter houses via Google. What gives us the right to treat other creatures like this?
Anyway, rant over. This is a recipe for a lentil bake with a garlic mushroom filling.
Lentil bake
1 onion, chopped
1 carrot, chopped
1 stick of celery, chopped
1 clove of garlic, crushed
250g of lentil (you can mix green and red)
1 pint of vegetable stock
1 tablespoon of soy source
Salt and pepper
The filling
25g butter/ margarine
250g flat mushrooms, sliced
2 cloves of garlic, crushed
3 tables spoons of chopped flat parsley
Salt and pepper
And 75g Cheddar cheese to finish
Fry the onions, carrots and celery in a little oil until the onions are soft. Add the lentils, stock, garlic, soy source and seasoning and simmer on a low heat until the lentils are soft and ‘sludgy’.
Meanwhile, melt the butter/ marg in a frying pan and fry the mushrooms for about 2 minutes, stirring. Turn off the heat and add the garlic, parsley, and seasoning.
In a large ovenproof dish place half the lentil mixture. Put the mushroom mixture over this, then top with the rest of the lentils. Sprinkle the cheese on the top. Cook for 25-30 mins at 190˚C/375˚F/ gas mark 5.
Goes lovely with crusty bread or new potatoes and salad.
Do Sheep Scream?
They were shown to a table by the window which offered a bracing view of the misty, green field-scape that stretched to infinity. It was a pristine, clear morning: perfect.
Greta swallowed back the lump that had formed in her throat at the sight of it and chastised herself for being so ridiculous: it was only a weekend in the Cotswolds. Against the gentle clatter of cutlery and crockery and the murmured conversations of the other hotel guests she smiled across the table at Will.
“Gorgeous view isn’t it?” she said, trying not to sound too over-enthusiastic. Will was still adjusting to being out the city.
He smiled thinly back, “yeah.”
She looked at the breakfast menu and noticed there were boiled eggs with soldiers. This made her think of Will’s Match profile and how under his ‘likes’ he’d put: ‘Sunday mornings with runny boiled eggs, and buttery doorstep soldiers.’ She wondered if the hotel’s boiled eggs would be up to scratch. The first time she had stayed over at Will’s, (the first time they’d slept together), after a drunken night out in Islington (their third date), he’d made her his famous boiled eggs in the morning and they were wonderful. But today, Will ordered scrambled eggs with mushrooms.
When the waiter took her order, she paused, debating whether to go for the kippers, which were what she really fancied, but instead ordering the same as Will. She worried the kippers would smell. It was not good to have kipper-breath for the first day of the first weekend away with your new boyfriend, your vegetarian new boyfriend.
“Fancy going to market in the town this morning?” Will asked as he buttered his wholemeal toast.
“Yes, we could have a walk through the fields en route. It’s such a …”
“Maybe we should drive. It finishes at lunchtime.”
“But it’s such a beautiful day. The country air will do you good.”
She touched his arm; he smiled nervously, “OK,”
His apparent fear of the countryside was endearing to her. It was strange – he’d grown up on the outskirts of the Peak District, but had spent all his adult life in cities. Most of the other guys on the dating site were adrenaline-junkies who went rock-climbing, surfing, or orienteering on the weekend, but here he who was better than any of them: Will, the sensitive, art-loving charity worker who had been an animal-rights activist in his student days (and who now subscribed to a more liberal-left political outlook), but who hated the great outdoors and the countryside.
She had been sceptical about meeting a man of boyfriend quality on a dating site, but all her friends had tried it and encouraged her to give it a go. The first few dates had been a parade of complete losers: the computer geek with the bad trainers, The Dwarf, Mr. Zero-Personality, The Misogynist. And then Will’s profile popped up: the picture of a smiling, dark-haired guy with the sensitive good-looks of a 90s film star, dressed in a tuxedo. She clicked on him, he clicked back, and the moment she set eyes on his physical incarnation she fell head over heels like a teenager. He was intelligent, amusing and so polite. He made her feel beautiful, sexy and funny.
This weekend was the pinnicle of their budding relationship so far. Will had suggested Paris, but Greta had petitioned for a weekend in a boutique hotel in the English countryside, and eventually Will had given in. What could possibly be so bad about the countryside? She was determined to convert Will, to make him realise what he was missing. She had been amused by the twitchiness that had afflicted him from the outset of the trip, his approaching of every task and action as if it was related to some impending disaster.
After breakfast they went up to their room and put on their outdoor clothes: Will, a black wool coat, jeans, trainers, Greta, her pink, fleece-lined cycling jacket, which she though looked a little bit sexier than her usual hiking gear.
She packed the map in her small rucksack.
“All set?” Will asked.
She put her arms round him and kissed him, “thanks for coming.”
“Come on, let’s get it over with,” he said.
Greta found a route on the map which would take them across the fields, through a small corpse and into the market town. They set out, through the kissing gate at the bottom of the hotel’s grounds. They strolled across the open field and Greta stopped to take a photograph of a Ragged Robin flower.
“It’s a rarity,” she said.
“I know,” nodded Will.
The air was so clean they drank it in like the purest water. Greta checked the map again. “The footpath goes over there,” she said, gesturing to a field where a herd of sheep silently grazed.
Will took a sharp intake of breath, “er…” he said.
“It won’t be far,”
“I…er…I don’t want to go that way,”
“Why ever not? It’s a marked path,”
“I just don’t”
She stood back and surveyed him, “what’s wrong?”
“I don’t want to go near them. Near the sheep.”
Greta let out an involuntary laugh.
“Are you joking?”
“No.”
“Will, honey, they won’t do anything.”
“It’s not that…it’s…oh Greta, you don’t understand. This is a disaster, I should never have come.”
He turned to run – yes, run – away, but she grabbed him and pulled him close.
“What are you doing? What’s the matter?”
There was fear in his eyes and he was breathing short and fast.
They were sitting a pub. Greta, after the previous half hour’s events, was drinking a glass of white wine. Will cradled a whiskey. He stared into the glass, a look on his face like he was mulling over all the problems in the world.
“I need to understand what happened back there,” she said finally.
He looked up from his whiskey, staring beyond her.
“When I was thirteen I went camping with two friends. Out in the Peaks. We were camping on top of a cliff edge, a sheer drop down to the valley below. We were drunk on cheap cider. We played this game…a stupid game of dare. They dared me. I was a stupid boy, never thought much about anything. I wanted to impress my mates.
“So I caught one, this poor young thing.”
His voice had become tight. He drank half his whiskey. Greta felt an unease crawling over her.
“They helped to drag it over. It was making such a noise I thought the farmer would come running…kind of hoped he would, but he didn’t. So I managed to get it to the edge of that fucking cliff, and I swear it must have sensed what was going to happen because it started shaking. ‘Go on’ my mates were saying, ‘do it’. So I give the wretched thing a shove.
“It looked up at me before it fell, eye to eye. And then it went, limbs flailing all over the place, off the edge of the cliff. God, Greta, it made this noise, this horrid, guttural bleating, almost a scream, if sheep scream. I can’t forget it.
“The next day we passed the corpse on our way home.”
He downed the rest of the whiskey and frowned. Greta had put her hand over her mouth in disgust, but she moved it and looked at her wine glass as he focused on her.
Neither of them spoke, until Will, composing himself, gave a little laugh.
“Do you think I’m a weirdo now?”
It was the kind of funny story you told your friends after you dumped someone. The boyfriend that had a thing with sheep. But she couldn’t dump Will, not over this.
“No, of course not.”
They ambled around the market town, Will putting on an air of joviality that was unwarranted by the over-priced, unfriendly market stalls, before lunching in a quaint tea room. It felt as though the dynamic had changed, though, and both of them knew it – as if Will was no longer the urban-loving aesthetist, as he had pretended to be, but was something else and now that she knew there was an assumption between them that he had betrayed her and she had a right to be off with him.
They returned to the hotel for dinner and then, in the king-sized bed in their boutique hotel room, he loomed above her, trying to make love as he had done the day before. But she found she could think of nothing but the sheep – the poor lamb he had chucked to its slaughter.
Afterwards, as she lay in his arms, she cursed herself, repeated the line in her head: ‘it was only a sheep’, but she had the sinking feeling that on Monday morning she would be logging onto Match.com again.
Why I think ‘The Social Network’ should win best screenplay
I FINALLY got round to seeing ‘The Social Network’ last night. I was intrigued to see if the screenplay was a great as people claim it is….and I wasn’t disappointed. The razor-sharp dialogue from the outset immediately pulls you into the hierarchical, tribal world of Harvard. Even before the fade in, you get a sense of what a pedantic geek Mark Zuckerburg is, as he rattles off lines about the number of geniuses (genei?) in China.
The film is a great example of how to introduce characters. When we first see Eduardo (Andrew Garfield), he comes into Mark’s dorm offering commiseration after he’s read Mark has been dumped – the only character to seemingly offer sympathy. ”I’m here for you”, he says, mistaking Mark’s “I need you” for a request for emotional support, not, as it actually is, a request for coding help. So we immediately understand that Eduardo is concerned for Mark’s well-being.
I loved the way Justin Timberlake’s character, Sean Parker, is introduced. Waking up with a one night stand and having her work out your identity – a great plot device for showing some background info about the character, whilst also perfectly demonstrating his hedonistic nature.
In the version of the script I read (thank you Wiscreen Writers Forum for this version), Aaron Sorkin has a Paul Young song playing over the opening scene, but in the film there are industrial, electronic thuds and screeches played over the first few scenes and throughout…well it is scored by Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails. I personally love the ‘Nails so I really, really liked the soundtrack. I’d be interested to know if others did though, or whether you found it a bit too much? I thought it gave the film a darker edge. Anyway, Sorkin for best adapted screenplay at the Oscars, I say!
Darcy Padilla: The Julie Project
As usual I was bored at work today, and so as usual was browsing The Guardian’s website when I came across an article on photographer Darcy Padilla. She was awarded the W Eugene Smith award for humanistic photography in 2010, and a key piece of work which earned her this was The Julie Project. Padilla followed an American woman, Julie Baird, for 18 years, beginning in 1993. Julie was a sometime smack-head, sometime alcoholic, who sired five children, all but one of whom were taken into care. Oh, and she was HIV positive, and the project ceased when she died of an AIDS-related illness.
The pictures, sometimes accompanied with the artists notes, captions or transcripts of calls and sometimes left to speak for themselves, can be seen on Padilla’s website and it’s one of the most amazing, tragic and courageous photography projects I have seen for ages.
The vile squalor of a life at the scrag-end of a ruthlessly capitalist society is laid bare as we glimpse Julie, and her various children and men, living in chaotically grim hostel rooms which are, we’re told, infested with fleas and lacking in basic facilities. I found some of the most poignant pictures were taken in the aftermath of Julie being briefly reunited with her now-adopted son. And then there are the pictures of Julie slowly dying are almost unbearable to look at.
What I find interesting about this project is that the photographer found herself becoming part of Julie’s life, and her notes accompanying some of the photos suggest a strong emotional attachment. Though you do wonder how much Julie consented to the ‘dying’ photographs…not that I think the photographer was wrong to take them – the project wouldn’t be so touching without them.
I was reminded of the work of photographers such as Helen Levitt and Walker Evans who photographed the down-and-outs of New York in the 1930s, though many of their pictures were taken covertly and the photographer had no relationship with the subject, save for the detached compassion that the images demonstrated. But the subject matter is the same – people who have comprehensively failed to live the American Dream. It’s extremely sad that around eighty years on, in a supposedly developed, Western country human beings still exist like this. And it made me a bit more grateful that I have a job, however boring it is.
I am an architect, they call me a butcher
Last night I went to see the Manic Street Preachers at Brixton Academy. By my reckoning, this was the 14th time I’ve seen them. I wouldn’t say I was once obsessed with this band, but I do have a line from their song ‘Faster’ inscribed in eternally lasting ink on my hip.
For some, a keen devotion to the band signified the presence of mental illness in a person. Certainly, there were plenty of fans who idolised missing guitar Richey Edwards, a notorious depressive, a self-harmer, an anorexic and an alcoholic. Well, I myself was still dealing with a Bell-Jar-type adolescence at this point, and typical night out usually involved dressing up in a second-hand nightie, putting on a heap of eyeliner and blood-red lipstick, going to the student union indie night, getting drunk on snakebite and black, crying, then going home and slashing my arms with a broken safety razor or whatever was at hand. So it’s no wonder the abrasive, bleak vibe of the Manic’s ’The Holy Bible’ spoke to me, and it’s still my favourite album of all time.
Which brings me back to that song, ‘Faster’, and the chorus of which name-checks Plath, Pinter, Henry Miller and Norman Mailer. Not really surprising from a band who on their debut album’ Generation Terrorists’ added a literary quote to the sleeve notes for each song – this included lines from Rimbaud, Philip Larkin, ee cummings, Orwell, Ibsen…to name but a few. In interviews they referenced JG Ballard and Bret Easton Ellis.
And so, when I discovered the band as a teenager, I also discovered a fantastic reading list. I really embraced literature in school, but picking up books like Crash, when I was 17 or 18, just because my favourite rock stars had mentioned them, I suddenly realised that literature could be a daring, as dark as you wanted it to be. There were books out there that, like rock music, talked about alienation, the sickness of modern culture and loneliness, and these happened, in my opinion, to be some of the best books ever written. I really don’t think I would have written my novel, ‘The Vanity Project’, had it not been for this formative education in left-field literature. The novel is a satire on celebrity culture, and is in part influenced by the Situationist concept of ‘the spectacle’. It was the Manics who turned me onto Guy Debord and the like. So thank you Manic Street Preachers, and you still rock!
Speaking my language
I’ve been thinking recently about dialects and accents, specifically that of a much underrated linguistic region: The Lake District. My mum grew up in a remote farmhouse on a windswept moor in Cumbria in the 1940s. They had no electricity and eeked a pretty basic existence as farmers. When I was a child, growing up in an industrialised new town in the conurbation of Merseyside she used to mesmerise me with stories of keeping orphaned fox cubs as pets, of walking miles through fields to get to the neighbours, of a horse that had to be shot because it was drowning in mud and her memory of a pig’s scream when it’s throat was being cut.
Aside from growing up to be staunchly anti-hunting and vegetarian, I also found that my plastic-Scouse accent was furnished with a number of wonderful words that have baffled my friends from primary school onwards. These are words that are deep-rooted in the Lake District’s customs and history. You can clearly hear the Germanic/ Viking sounds. None can be described as deviations from standard English, from what I can see and they conjure up a landscape and lifestyle that was not always easy. I don’t have any links to that region now, apart form a few long lost aunts and cousins, so I have no idea if any of these words are still used, but I thought I would write them down for prosperity:
Howk (n), howking (v) : for something to be difficult, to struggle with something,
e.g It was a right howk getting the bull into the pen,
What are you howking about at in the barn yonder?
Ratching (v): Similar to ‘howk’, to describe someone or something that is difficult to control
e.g I had to grab the sheep by it’s horns ‘cos it was rathcing about and would’n be dipped.
Clarting (v), clart (n): Making a mess, a mess
e.g the bairn was clarting about wi’it’s food,
What a clart the bairn’s made!
A scrow (n): a mess, general untidiness
e.g ‘What a scrow in here’
Flarching, to flarch (v): to try to win back favour by being over-complimentary/ over-affectionate after you have previously slighted someone/wronged them in some way.
e.g “You needn’t come flatching to me after what you said to her”
Kessent/ kessened (adj): to be stuck on one’s back, unable to get up – usually applied to sheep.
e.g “We’ve got ten sheep kessened down in yon beck” (a ‘beck’ is a word used to describe a stream.)
Siding/ side-up (v): to clean up, to tidy
“I’ll just go and side up the tools”
These are all I can remember for now…unfortunately my mum developed frontal-loble dementia and her speech gradually dwindled away to nothing, leaving just a shell, and what scant spirit that remained was not really a life a such, so it’s hard to say that what happened last year was her death…she didn’t really die, just faded away. Like a word does really, that slowly stops being used and before you know it you can’t remember the last time you heard it. I want to keep these words forever. Maybe one day I’ll write a story with them.
I’m really keen to get my hands on a copy of the (likely long-out-of-print) Westmorland and Cumbrian Dialect: Dialogues, poems and ballards by John Russell Smith. Needless to say, that’s probably not coming to a ‘i-pad’ or whatever near you anytime soon!
World, hello
Ok, so first post. I’m a writer (stories, poetry) I’m a concerned citizen (the environment, working-class politcs, Palestine), so I wanted to create this blog to write and sometimes bitch about the creative writing process and also as a space for the occational rant.
The Uses of Literacy is a book by Richard Hoggart, published in 1957 which talks about mass culture, and how it has eroded some of the more postive aspects of UK working class life. It was also the title of an exhibition by British artist Jeremy Deller which comprised of art work made by fans of the Welsh band the Manic Stree Preachers. The Manics are my favourite band of all time, incidentally, but that isn’t real important. Anyway, soon I’ll be posting useful creative writing tips, links to great writing magazines and various angry rants. I hope people like!
