Metaphysical Policemen

There’s always a metaphysical element to detectives - an investigation going on behind the investigation. That’s true for TV cops as much as for fictional ones. You wouldn’t assume Columbo had a pretext, but then, is it a coincidence that Columbo villains are always part of an elite - an intellectual, financial or social elite? Colombo represents the working man - rough hewn, unintellectual, but underestimate him at your peril. Columbo represents the forces of democratisation in American society. The worst crime in the US is to believe that you are better than everybody else. Colombo proves that. The villains in Columbo demonstrate that if you go around thinking you’re better than everyone else, it’s only a matter of time before you actually commit a murder. It’s also no coincidence that it’s often British or European actors playing the villain. Europe is elitist, effete, decadent.: Ricardo Montalban; Patrick McGoohan. America is manly, pragmatic. In Columbo, you know who the killer is, because you see the Crime at the beginning of the show. It’s not so much a detective show, as a blood sport. It’s watching the ritual humiliation of a public monster. 

What is the metaphysical element of Inspector Montalbano (no relation to Ricardo), currently on BBC iPlayer? Inspector Montalbano demonstrates all the qualities of Italianicity that an Italian man should posess: boisterously heterosexual, a gastronome, yet cuts a bella figura despite all that pasta. To a British person, Montalbano seems to play fast and loose with the code of professional conduct which you would expect from an officer of the law. He is more interested in Justice, than law, and doesn’t believe in observing every little regulation, because he sees the bigger picture. He frequently exercises a worldly discretion in the course of his duty, as opposed to sticking to the letter of the law. Montalbano whines like a baby when his superiors threaten to promote him. A promotion would mean a desk job, and more responsibility. Montalbano isn’t interested in worldly position. He’s interested in staying proletarian, because authority is for buffoons. How can Montalbano buck authority if he is one? Despite resembling the love child of Karl Pilkington and Ross Kemp to a precise degree, Montalbano is a hit with the ladies, another Italian manly requisite. I’m learning Italian hand gestures. Two hands held in an inverted steeple at waist level seems to mean ‘you’re fucking joking’ or ‘give me a break’. The hands can be pulled apart then for an imploring gesture ‘have mercy’. Montalbano may be a good and honest cop, but the virtues he displays are arguably the biggest problem with Italy’s political and judicial system. If you believe that a cop should be allowed to exercise personal discretion (“you understand these things” says an aged mafia boss in one episode), then you are subordinating the law to another code: the code of mercy, the code of criminals, the code of ‘decency’. In practice, I would place little reliance on such codes to regulate society. Am I a conservative? I only ever saw Columbo let someone off once: she had alzheimers, and had forgotten she committed the crime. If I were a murderer, I would want Montalbano to arrest me. I think he’s quite bribable.

Safehouse with Denzel Washington and Ryan Reynolds

Even dumb Hollywood movies are noticeably smarter these days.

Whilst it is still true that a computer can’t create a piece of art, the current prevalence of scriptwriting programs  mean that, even if you are watching the worst kind of cinematic pabulum, in which the only object seems to be to create enough plausibility to move from one action set-piece to another, you can be certain that a spurious thematic depth lurks in the background: each character has their own backstory and motivation, however half-heartedly it is developed.


Welcome to the 90s

In Safehouse, a film in which the only unpredictable element is just how predictable it is, we are invited to a mid-nineties action-movie retro party. The plot is reminiscent of every straight-to-video action movie you’ve ever seen, from the 90s. It looks like it was directed by Tony Scott, in the 90s, but wasn’t, but has his penchant for shaky cameras and pointless captions like “11:43am, Washington”, which I thought Team America: World Police would have put a stop to. It even stars, alongside the charisma-free Ryan Reynolds, that old 90s action standby, Denzel Washington.


Who the hell is Ryan Reynolds anyway? I sure as hell didn't order him. He's another one of those pre-packaged stars that come up every couple of years, seemingly already famous before they have done a decent movie. Before long, you can't move without hearing about who they are dating, or how much they are making per movie, but you still, for the life of you, can't name one decent movie they have made. It's like Brad Pitt. He's a walking advertisement for Brad Pitt, but no good at anything else. 

The first 30 minutes or so of Safehouse are actually pretty good. Denzel Washington is one of the best actors on the action circuit. He actually reminds us that 'action' has the verb 'act' in it. He has 3 or 4 facial expressions to Ryan Reynolds 1.   Sadly, it is in these 30 minutes that the film runs through its entire premise and out the other side. That premise is that Ryan Reynolds (CIA, first job) finds himself guarding Denzel Washington (veteran, ex CIA) in a Safehouse in Johannesburg. But the safehouse is compromised, and soon they are under siege from armed hitmen. It’s no surprise that the heroes escape somehow, but, like Wile E. Coyote bursting through a door conveniently placed on the top of an Arizona mesa, the film finds itself running on thin air from that point, and, once it realises this, it takes a sharp plummet to a  foreseeable conclusion.

It's dire, it's cliched, but what annoyed me most was, as I suggested at the outset, the cynical attempt to bring depth into an otherwise shallow film, by implying there was more going on between the characters than there actually was. In Safehouse, Reynold’s character, “Matt” has an elder mentor in the CIA, Brendan Gleeson.

Now I like Brendan Gleeson. Good guy. But you’ve heard of good actors ‘phoning in’ a performance; when I say that here, I don’t just mean he’s hacking it. I also mean that Gleeson is literally on the phone for the whole of this movie, saying things like, “don’t worry, we’re coming to get you”. I'd really like to know what he got paid for this. Just out of interest.  

A piece of backstory about Matt is casually dropped early in the movie. You gotta love action films: they can just provide background for a character by a CIA boss shouting: “What have you got on X?” and then an underling, with a headset on, goes: “born 1981, raised by penguins in the wild, scored off the charts in blubbing like a baby and smashing up cars.” (So many people score ‘off the charts’ in CIA-themed action movies that you can’t help thinking, "Why don’t they have bigger charts?")

Matt’s father, we learn, died when he was young. Drink driving. Hmm, absent and irresponsible. Could Matt be in need of a father figure? What about Brendan Gleeson? or wait a minute, what about Denzel Washington? It was at this sort of quandary that the writers of Safehouse parked the script, deciding that was about enough depth to fool the audience into thinking this was somehow meaningful subtext. But, and this is just an idea, in order for Brendan Gleeson to have been a plausible father figure, he and Reynolds would probably have had to share a scene or two, perhaps even in the same room, rather than on the phone. Merely because of his physical proximity, there was distinctly more potential in Denzel Washington as father figure, and what an irony that would be, because he's supposed to be the one Matt is taking into custody. I think that this could have been the whole point of the movie, but the director missed it.

Sadly, Matt and Denzel are too busy being shot at and driving like crazy to take up the offer of a surrogate father/son relationship. Besides, that would kind of remind the audience that Denzel is Getting Too Old for this Shit. Despite the fact that neither of these relationships is implied in any meaningful way, in the end, it is annoying that, like a drunk absent father that tries to make up for the childhood he missed, the film tries in the end to cram the replacement father theme into the last two minutes, in some desperate bid for the audience's affection. But the audience instinctively rejects this late attempts to play on affections. Instead it laments: “Where were you when I needed you?” 

Writing comics

I recently met up with Oscar Zarate for coffee. Oscar is the author of several graphic novels, most famously , his collaboration with Alan Moore on A Small Killing, back in the early nineties. He's also illustrated a lot of stuff. Back in October last year, I did a workshop with Oscar at the French Institute. There were about 10 of us, and we were supposed to produce a 4 page comic about London over the weekend. I had no problem producing a story - I find coming up with any number of stories quite easy - it's the bit about refining them and making them any good that takes time, I find. Many authors leave this last stage out, which makes the whole process very economical, I imagine. Whenever I watch Doctor Who, it always seems to me like the first draft of a story that has accidentally been filmed, whilst the real script, in which characters are acting under proper motivation, is gathering dust under a photocopier somewhere. I digress. I did some drafts for a story, and showed my drawings to Oscar. He made some helpful suggestions, like, stop moralising so much. My tendency to moralise probably comes from reading 1950s EC comics, which are like 'war is bad, man', 'human life is precious, man'... For their time, they were quite advanced, for comics anyway. Most comics at that time had the message, "Take that, Mr Hitler!!" or "Eat some of this, dirty Koreans!". So Harvey Kurtzman's comics which actually had a message that maybe, at best, the war was a dirty job but somebody had to do it, was quite different. But hold on. This is the 1950s  - thirty years after Ulysses had been published. That means post Wasteland, post Faulkner, post Auden, post Steinbeck. In the context of fiction, or even movies, which were lagging behind fiction, EC comics look about as experimental as an Edwardian watercolour in a cubist exhibition. Comics in the 1950s were still mass produced articles for kids and servicemen, so they weren't going to push any real boundaries. The real advances for EC comics were in storytelling and cinematic use of pictures etc.

Back to my story, which was about a guy that trails around London picking up scraps of other people's lives because he doesn't have a life. In my first version of an ending, he breaks into a house, and encounters an older, sadder version of himself, and is so horrified by what he could become, that he throws out his collection, and attempts to reform himself. Oscar didn't like this, and suggested a much more elegant ending, where the protagonist breaks into an apartment, and realises, gradually, that it is his own apartment, which is so alien to him because he hardly ever goes there. 

Early On-Set Alzheimer's

I haven’t seen Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but I have seen the trailer. Judging from the trailer, the plot goes something like this:

Scientists are working on a cure for Alzheimer’s disease and stumble across a drug which causes the human brain to repair itself. Great. Naturally, they try it out on chimpanzees first, and wow! - imagine their surprise when their star test chimp actually starts getting smarter. And smarter. In fact, pretty soon the monkey starts getting able to do pretty much everything a human can, and forms a close bond with its scientist owners. One of these guys, played by John Lithgow, actually has Alzheimer's, so there is a nicely poignant moment of ships passing in opposite directions as the chimp gets smarter, whilst the human is actually losing his faculties. I think I’m going to cry at that point. Anyway, for one reason or another, the drug doesn’t get approval. It’s possibly something to do with aggression caused in animal subjects. When our hero chimp violently intervenes in an argument and kills a human, he is locked back up in the lab, and the plug is pulled on the whole project. Enter some Stupid Humans who love taunting animals and want to show them who’s boss. Their recklessness causes the clever chimp to escape, and he administers the smart drug to all the other chimps, who then escape and proceed to take over the world.

Close enough? I’d be surprised if I have veered from the plot in any significant way. The relatively new trend of cutting trailers so that they not only give you a taster of the film, but also give you a taste of acts one, two and three, in that order, before hinting at an inevitable conclusion, all but makes going to see the actual film a mere formality, and a predictable one at that. The only way I'm now going to enjoy Planet of the Apes is if I get Alzheimer's before it comes out, and forget what I saw in the trailer. Needless to say, that will mar my enjoyment somewhat. People used to say “I hope the movie is as good as the trailer.” Now, it’s more relevant to say: “I hope the movie isn’t just a longer version of the trailer, but not as good, like with Iron Man 2 and several other releases in the last year or so.” 

Persona Non Grata

And another one. I see from Wikipedia that Heywood Isham died in 2009 and has officially become a footnote in history, just as he would have wanted, I’m sure. Sheila has a website. 

Sheila and Heywood Isham were staying at the Angleterre Hotel, which is next to the Astoria in St Isaac’s Square. “We find the Astoria so stuck up,” complained Sheila, her nut brown face scowling. Her skin was tanned to the condition of leather after years in hot climates – Haiti, the United States. Her husband, whom she called “Hey!” was a retired US ambassador. She was an artist. For fifty years the couple had travelled the globe, meeting the rich and famous, and now they were back in Russia, “our favourite place of all,” to promote a retrospective exhibition of her work at the Mikhailovsky Castle. I had come early, dressed pretty tidily, because I was aware I was mixing with high-flyers.

I was sneaked up on in the foyer by a venerable old man, mostly bald, but smartly dressed, this was Hey!, who led me to their table, where they were just finishing up their breakfast. They boxed me in and started asking me questions. My first impression was quite positive. Sheila Isham had strong blue eyes and brown highlights in her hair. I took her for around her mid-fifties (she was seventy-six, I learned later.) They told me how pleased they were to be back in Russia and I politely asked questions about their interesting lives. Almost as if I had pressed a button, Hey launched into an anecdote about his early career. He had obviously told it so many times, that he couldn’t remember what the point of it was. Sitting alongside Hey, I had a better chance to examine him. He was definitely getting old. He had the trembling jaw of the third age, and heavily liver spotted, like a piece of corned beef. The story neither gathered pace nor stimulated interest, and I wasn’t sure it was supposed to. Looking at Hey’s misted-over expression, I realised I had been transformed into dinner party guest, strategically placed beside him at the table and listening to the old Russia hand unlock his file-index of dusty anecdotes. It was a dull tale, which I listened to with increasing incredulity – not because I didn’t believe it happened, but because I couldn’t believe that someone could consider it worth repeating. Hey was saying, “ 'and he said, ‘Do you speak any German?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I do,’ and he said, ‘You’re hired.’ ” Hey began laughing gently, and I realised, with sudden horror, that that had been the punchline, and that I had missed it. I belatedly joined in, but felt I lacked conviction. 

It was Sheila who did most of the talking after that. She told me how they had come to Russia for the first time in the mid-fifties. She had studied International Relations but had changed to Art when she met Heyward. He would cover the international relations from there on, as a young diplomat. When he was in Germany (where his anecdote had deposited him, young, smart, and groomed for a great career), she was studying at a famous school there ( I knew it was famous, because of the significance with which she pronounced the name I had never heard of.) “Boy, did they work us hard there. But I learned a lot. I learned an awful lot.” If he was in anecdote mode, she was very definitely in interview mode: no incident was isolated, but was as if neatly labelled for magazine consumption, “influences”, “education”...

“That was where I learned my craft. I had to work hard, but I had talent,” she was saying. (“I’ll be the judge of that”, I thought.) But perhaps this was the first inkling I had that, for those that fame has taken under her wing, or even for those, like Sheila Isham, who are merely clinging to its tail feathers, approbation is already a given, and individual approval can only gloss what is already there, which is a cast iron self-assurance of one’s own ability. Sheila explained how, when they first came to Moscow, they were followed around. “I got into a lot of trouble from drawing bridges. You weren’t allowed to draw anything in those days, and there were a lot of amateur policemen who would inform the authorities if they thought you looked suspicious.”

She was harmlessly patronising: “...but you know that already,” she would add, after telling me something that I knew already. You had the impression that she thought you were flattered when she said this. “I know I know that already”, I kept feeling like saying.

Hey! had been silent for quite a while, but the mention of Khruschev in connection with painting seemed to activate transistor relays in his analogue brain, and he briefly flickered to life, like a fairground fortune teller’s head when you put a coin in the slot, with an anecdote about a telephone call in which dropping the name of a high up member of the KGB to an intransigent lackey had obtained a desired result. We chuckled appreciatively at his savoir faire. His Russian was partially intact: at least he could say 'so l'dom' (with ice) perfectly.

“We were persona non grata here for a while,” said Sheila. “That means we weren’t welcome,” she added helpfully, “...but you know that already”.

They were a remarkable old couple. He was the worldly half of their relationship, discussing international politics at the very highest level, from the horse’s mouth. She, by contrast, took care of the rest of existence: its metaphysical manifestations, in art and the world of the imagination. She spoke of her art, her “work” as if it were something she had no control over, but merely tended, as if it were a garden she were the curator of, or a strange creature such as a dragon, that she was the guardian of. “A couple of years after Haiti, my work became really mythic” she told me.

I would have been happy to leave it at this, but unfortunately, I had been ‘hired’ as some kind of tour guide, translator and gopher before the exhibition. Sheila was beside herself with the lack of preparation by the Russian organisers of the event. It was on the way to the gallery that I found out how old she was, by letting her fall in the snow. If anyone over sixty falls over and you are near them, it’s your responsibility, by the way, for not throwing yourself underneath their collapsing body like an airbag. At the gallery, an hour or two later, Sheila revealed herself to be a true primadonna, with whistles and bells, not to mention a typical American abroad. If she had left the practical side of existence to Hey!, how completely she had accomplished it! Now she was incapable of the slightest improvisation in the material realm. She made the simplest task, that of allocating some thirty or so paintings to five rooms according to some instructions, nearly impossible.

”Which room is this?” she would ask, not revealing to her interlocutors, except through a slow and painful process of trial and error, that she in fact had an invisible soundproof bubble around her head and could not hear a word you said. Paintings would be brought in, “That one goes there. That one goes there. No. Sorry. This is the wrong sheet. Let me get the right sheet. This is the right sheet. That one goes there. That one goes there. Oh. No, this is the wrong room. YOU’VE GOT THE WRONG ROOM!” Three hours later, the job was half done. Hey! had arrived, and when he thought he was unobserved, discreetly loosened his clothing. The public hanging went on. It should have taken twenty minutes. I was in awe of this ancient, brown, wrinkled powerhouse of creativity and incompetence. She was fantastic at pushing people around, and she made people feel it was it was an honour to be pushed around by her. Her steely blue eyes, hardened, no doubt by years of living, and getting things done in difficult-to-live-and-get-things-done places, brooked no dissent. I understood the awesome charismatic power of the catastrophic generals of history. The Somme suddenly made sense.

But what about her paintings? The different ‘phases’ and ‘periods’ of the artist are supposed to denote the restlessness of the imagination, the constant drive to experiment. Sheila Isham’s pictures were the kind that would provoke a Sunday supplement panegyrist to call them a ‘series of departures.’ They were departures, all right, but in the sense of a British railway timetable: none of them actually arrived anywhere. Unlike most artists, who tend to begin with the figurative, and gradually unshackle themselves from the slavish adherence to established forms, Isham had developed in the opposite direction, beginning with abstract expressionist circles and wavy lines, moving through a sort of primitivism to end up at a kind of simple expressionism, or, to put it crudely, pictures of animals in dynamic brush strokes. There might have been three or four different artists on display, so it was difficult not to suspect a touch of wilfulness in all this. Still, whereof on cannot speak, one should remain silent. I was just the hired help (although I never got paid.) 

I used to live in St. Petersburg. In order to 'make ends meet', I ended up doing a lot of 'khaltura' - weird odd-jobs, usually translation based, for just about anybody. I recently discovered a diary entry for one meeting, and thought it would be interesting to post it. I sound a bit Edwardian, which makes me wonder what I was reading at the time. Anyway, here it is...

Elena Beresentsova met me in the meeting room of the Russo-American Chamber of Commerce. A primly dressed small woman, on the cusp of being elderly, with a beaming smile and light brownish hair, there was something amateurish about her which put one immediately at one’s ease. It quickly became apparent that this lady liked to do all the talking. I detected a certain pride in her position and her responsibilities as she saw them that caused her to adopt a slightly false, overly officious manner. I was from England? She loved England so much. She went there every year. She regarded it as a second home. She laughed delightedly. Well, not quite delightedly, but rather, she laughed as if she thought that was a place where a person who laughed delightedly might be expected to laugh. She told me the kind of work she would expect me to be doing. They had a man, Andrei ( I had met him at the door; young, black-suited, side parting, strangely patronising, possibly an android) who wrote letters etc. in English, but it was really…such rubbish! Elena laughed at how preposterous his written English was. Her own English was not bad – heavily accented, but mostly correct- but again one detected this anxiety, really a form of snobbery, that caused her to constantly correct herself and find overly colloquial ways of expressing herself. 


She handed me a letter – an invitation to the head of 'Independent Media' – and asked me to look – just look - at the first paragraph. I was prepared for something pretty atrocious, but nothing could have prepared me for the shock which I got then. There was nothing wrong with it. Nothing. Uncertain what to say, I tentatively nodded and said that it could perhaps, on reflection, stand some improvement (first rule of freelancing). After all, everything can, I reasoned. My horror deepened as she then asked me what I would write, if I were to write the same letter. I had no idea. Did I have a pen? Yes, I have one here. “Don’t look at it!” she laughed, referring to poor Andrei’s attempt. “Just tell me what you would write.” 


I was beginning to think this would come to a nasty conclusion and began to stutter something about changing the word order, when she came to my rescue. “I would put it this way,” she said, “though of course I don’t know anything.” It was clear that she thought she did know something, and regarded this as a good opportunity to show me how much. She gleefully butchered Andrei’s English, whilst I hesitatingly offered solemn assent to her changes. “My daughter (she was educated in England, you know, in Oxford), had to do English lessons there. She asked the tutor how to use ‘and’ and ‘the’. He replied, “that’s easy, you just need to live in England for two generations!” A long, drawn out laugh now, which I jogged to keep up with. We finished with the letter, eventually, and she seemed very pleased with my suggestions, though I couldn’t remember having made any. “Andrei is good, but he has been here six months and I just feel his English isn’t good enough…” Was I really hearing this? Was she telling me, who had just walked in the door, that Andrei was heading for the chop? I felt obliged to stick up for him. “Well you know, the letter was perfectly understandable for an English person…” I began. She shook her head resolutely, “…but not good enough. That is our problem, I know,” she finished, misconstruing the intention of my statement. She rhapsodized about England again. She wondered aloud how I could get into her office, since, as part of the American consulate ( a fact of which she tried to appear nonchalant, but was obviously and inexplicably proud) she thought it might present difficulties. She seemed to inflate my worth, strangely, along with the worth of everything else that touched her existence. I felt myself, in her imagination, to be a linguistical expert, or a cultural attaché. I felt that this was a woman whose self-deceptions were too intrinsically linked with her personality to make dismantling them a non-injurious process. We parted on good terms, and I bid Andrei goodbye with more sympathy than I would have imagined on the way in, but with cameras in every part of the building I made sure I didn’t make a face until I was out on the street. 

Hackney Wicked

Went to the Hackney Wicked festival today. Thought I might do some sketching, which I haven't done in a long time, but need to get in the habit of again. The A5 books I use are too small, really, and I bought a charcoal pencil in the shop this morning by mistake, which made a mess. Oh well, it's a start.