alien corn

I’m in Zennor for a few days, a small village near St Ives in Cornwall. With a mountain of leave to use and a reluctance to spend all of it bumming around London, I’ve come somewhere I’ve wanted to visit for about 30 years. I don’t think my significant other is terribly happy that I’ve taken myself off (given where I’ll be going in a few weeks and for how long) but there’s that whole empty spaces, clear mind thing going on. And the pub next door to the hostel is absolutely perfect.

I’ve also discovered that I can actually walk. As in, walking for pleasure, not just to get from A to B. I never really got into that side of things when I was growing up (and with the Lake District in my backyard, it was kind of expected), but tramping along the coastal path has been a revelation. I clambered over Gurnard’s Head (fanboys and girls: it’s a bit like being in The Sontaran Experiment), watched marines training on a cliff face (complete with real helicopter rescue for an injured soldier) and got wet feet.

Here’s something odd: having not seen anyone for hours, I glanced behind to see a spritely senior on my tail. Every time I looked back, he was closing the gap between us and I was nervous about what would happen when he caught up. I’ve read too many M R James stories not to be unnerved (I came over all Peter Vaughan in A Warning To The Curious), being persued by an unknown entity in the wilderness. But he just said hello and pointed out how muddy his trousers were. Which was something of a letdown.

I did a lot of reading over Christmas. After spending several months being way down on my usual reading levels, I chewed through several books in a few days, but then in a Cumbrian winter there’s not much else to do. One I read, even though I knew it would get me angry (which it did) was Not on the Label by Felicity Lawrence. I’ve been eyeing up the various supermarket exposes for a while but only just got round to reading one. It was the anger I wasn’t looking forward to and, as I said, it didn’t disappoint.

I already knew a lot of it – the exploitation of immigrant workers in this country and others, the outrageous demands supermarkets make of farmers and producers, not to mention the environmental cost – but there were still a few nuggets of new info to make my blood boil. One of which was an account of how Marks & Spencer sold green beans and baby corn grown in Kenya – I knew the stuff was air-freighted in but what I hadn’t realised was the packaging was air-frieghted out from the UK along with chives to tie bundles of veg together.

Which makes yesterday’s news that M&S will pull out all the stops to be greener than thou highly interesting. True, they’ve been doing some great stuff in various areas, especially fish, but they’ve still got a looooong way to go on things like packaging and food miles. Their new plan appear to address much of this and while they’ll still be flying food in, it will be clearly labelled, maybe with a ‘this product could be bad for the planet’ sticker. Or maybe not.

And there are lots of other boxes ticked – using waste food to as biomass for fuel, reducing energy consumption, offsetting as a last resort, eradicating plastic packaging in favour of corn starch materials… So, good on paper but I hope they follow through. To be fair, they do tend to put their money where their mouth is (£200m in this case) and with green policies now a key marketing tactic, hopefully their new policies will trickle down into the rest of the industry. Are you listening, Tesco?

One way to beat the winter blues (and they were in evidence last night for both the mister and myself) is with a good chuckle. Even better is when they come for free, and happily the BBC are only too happy to give away tickets to their comedy shows. I don’t bother with TV recordings – they’re long, dull and usually need many, many retakes. We did QI a while ago which was a sorry disappointment. Stephen Fry glittered, Alan Davies only spoke occasionally (and was hysterical when he did) but John Sessions and Jeremy Clarkson droned on incessantly about inter-war athletics and Boer War field marshals. Yawn.

No, it’s radio or nothing for me. Retakes are kept to a minimum, you get two shows in each sitting and (best of all) there’s a bar. Stick that in your TV Centre and suck it. I’ve seen some great stuff – The Consultants, The News Quiz – and some really miserable efforts – Not Today, Thank You says everything you need to know. But the golden ticket has to be Just a Minute and it was to the Puddle Dock theatre we trolled last night, fortified by a couple of zombies (cocktails, not the living dead).

We were in luck – no second rate guests this time round, with Paul Merton, Clement Freud, Graham Norton (so much more palatable than on TV) and Chris Addison, who I was mildly disturbed to discover is 34. As new kid, he was given the benefit of the doubt by Nicholas Parsons but he also demonstrated a vicious competitive streak. Twice when other contestants were in full flow, Parsons indicated not to challenge them but trying to prove his colours, Addison insisted on picking them up on technicalities. But in a game of technicalities, he was only doing the right thing.

More controversial was the frisson between Parsons and whistle-blower Charlotte. A minor dispute over the timekeeping perhaps spoke volumes about their working relationship and for a few moments her uncontrollable laughter became somewhat restrained. Still, I’m sure they’ll edit that out.

One thing wrong about living in London (apart from all the other things) is that the NFT is a bit of an arse to get to. That’s a lie – not one but two buses go direct from Waterloo Bridge to Stamford Hill, but the programmes always seem to start just that little bit too early to get there in time from work. As a result, I don’t go nearly as often as I’d like to.

However, I did make the effort this evening but failed to persuade my significant other that a double bill of quota quickies (which I’d read about in Matthew Sweet’s excellent Shepperton Babylon last year and been intrigued about ever since) would make for a fun evening out. Just as well really, as I misread the programme and arrived two hours early. Idiot. I hastily changed my ticket to the next film starting and an hour and a half later I’d realised it was one of the better mistakes I’ve made of late.

The film I did end up seeing was Stand In, part of the Humphrey Bogart season but he only had third billing. Pretty much a riot from start to finish, it’s the improbable tale of a mathematically-obsessed accountant sent to Hollywood to salvage a studio under threat of take-over. A satire not only on the starlets and dictatorial directors but also the money men, it’s pretty much a riot from start to finish. Highlights include a monstrous moppet trying to out-lollypop Shirley Temple, and the raving director of the board who looks unnervingly like Ronald Reagan’s Spitting Image puppet. Leslie Howard is the accountant (his cut-glass British accent slicing through the LA drawls), starry-eyed Joan Blondell his sparky love interest and Bogart… It’s very odd. As one of the studio’s producers, he walks around with a Scottie dog under his arm and if he wasn’t chasing after Marla Shelton throughout, I’d say he was leading with the left foot. But then maybe that stereotype hadn’t been invented by that point. In any case, one well worth chasing down if you can find it.

But then I tried watching Paycheck last night and gave up after ten minutes. Tosh that looks dated even now.

It’s been all work, work, work up until now but thankfully Christmas has arrived like the sherry-drenched monstrosity that it is. One early festive treat was seeing Jarvis Cocker at the Roundhouse last night (well, the night before now).

An amazing performance by a consummate showman, he’s still doing the angular dancing from his Pulp front man days, like a coat hanger bent out of shape. I haven’t even heard the album yet but the highlights shone out, but pick of the pops has to be the donner und blitzen of Silver Machine, a veritable wall of sound. Who knew Hawkwind could be such fun? And it looks like Running the World has lost the provocative prefix it had when I first came across it on MySpace.
One gripe about the Roundhouse though, and that’s the smell of burnt cheese that pervade near the pizza stand. I know, don’t stand there, but it’s like dressing to the left or the right – you always stand to the same side of the stage. Can’t be helped.

I missed Ben Bradshaw’s initial advocation of direct action at the checkout, but the Guardian proves just how easy it is to do. I’ve heard of others (even the mighty Germaine Greer) getting in on the action but never had the gumption to do it myself, and sounds like an excellent camapign for the WI to champion. Perhaps if we all do it, supermarkets will actually know what their customers think, rather than the vacuous focus group research they currently rely on.

This from David Thair on BBC Collective about a very strange press trip he went on:

“Setting foot inside the real Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, it’s easy to understand why S.T.A.L.K.E.R.’s Ukrainian developers, GSC Game World, would find inspiration there. The 30km forbidden wasteland of field, forest, abandoned residential buildings and otherworldly industrial facilities must be an ever-present source of fascination and myth…

“Radioactivity still contaminates the real-life Zone – something that gamers will be accustomed to encountering as a dangerous green glow whose damage can be repaired with a medkit. In real life, though, radioactivity is a lingering invisible threat whose effects may not be so immediate, but are no less deadly.”

Sounds like something Chris Morris would have nightmares about…

Saturday was the long-anticipated (in eco-circles) and quite frankly impressive Stop Climate Chaos rally in Trafalgar Square. Apparently 25,000 or so people turned up to stamp their little feet in the direction of Parliament, although I stopped counting after I got to 10. I was to be found lurking on a street corner sporting a fetching blue fleece and clipboard, checking off entrants for the grand competition we’ve been running on the website and getting cold feet so I didn’t see much of the rally itself (other than a mass of people descending on the Square) but the several hours I spent in the pub afterwards was extremely welcome. I didn’t have a camera but there are plenty of photos already on Flickr.

What I get a kick out of from the London Film Festival (or any festival for that matter) is the lucky dip nature of things. As I’ll otherwise spend hours poring over the programme, agonising what I should spend my shekels on and in the end leaving it too late to choose anything, I’ve lately come up with a better solution. Pick out films with cool names that have eye-catching pictures with their listing and go for it. As a result, I’ve seen some interesting stuff this year, to whit:

The first film I caught also had the most impact – Black Gold, a documentary about the global coffee trade and, in particular, the fortunes of one farmers’ co-operative in Ethiopia, struggling to get a fair price for their crops through the Fairtrade system. I’ve read done some research on this in the past and it makes for fascinating if unsettling reading. But who’d have thought I’d have to queue for returns for any hour?
Whether it will be the Super Size Me for the hot beverages market remains to be seen, but the stark simplicity of the film-making belied some very intelligent observations – the barking manager of the very first Starbucks branch in Seattle, whittering on about how she gets such a kick out of her job because it allows her to ‘connect’ with people is shown hard up against scenes of farmers uprooting their coffee shrubs because they just don’t pay the rent, and the difference in attitudes towards the little black beans couldn’t be more apparent. In the South, they’re a vital source of income while in the North, they’re marketed as a lifestyle accessory. By the way, two books to recommend on the subject are the excellent The Devil’s Cup by Stewart Lee Allen and a tome called Black Gold (no connection as far as I know) by Anthony Wild who spends a bit too much time going on about Napoleon in exile).

Wild Tigers I Have Known was pretty to look at, lots of saturated colour and wacky production design, but ultimately it was the same old pretentious indie twaddle that’s been peddled as innovative film-making for years. Repeated shots of pre-pubescent boys wanking doesn’t an art film make.

I’ve already blabbed about Buenos Aires 1977 but even better was Shane Meadow’s belting This Is England. The first half was the most surprising and unexpected treat I’ve seen in the cinema for a long time – a 12-year-old lad hooks up with a gang of skinheads who instead of being neo-Nazi hardcases are instead lovable mates who just fancy a bit of a laff. Then halfway through the real neo-Nazis turn up and it takes a much more sinister turn. My expectations were completely subverted although I made an arse of myself being interviewed for MySpace Film channel on the way in. Hopefully that never made it off the cutting room floor.

Half Nelson was okay, a great role for Ryan Gosling (who looks far too boyish to be a crack-addicted teacher) but the film wanders halfway through and loses sight of where it’s going. The relationship between Ryan’s character and his young ward is well-handled though and doesn’t fall into any of the obvious traps of inappropriate teacher behaviour. And Hollywoodland was also just okay, but with much more of a showbiz sheen about it. Ben Affleck was surprisingly charming as George Reeves but it was just the kind of film La-La Land likes to make to marvel at its own dark underbelly but in examining how it can crush people between its celluloid reels, it learns none of the lessons of the past. And besides, it just got dull and although the film doesn’t offer any hard answers as to what fate befell Reeves, it certainly makes its sympathies plain. This makes the ending somewhat futile, and made me wonder why I’d bothered. Still, interesting to see how Bob Hoskins is fossilising into a sub-Don Corleone figure.

Oh, and I saw Tim Burton being interviewed as well. He’s not nearly as barking as I’d expected. Or hoped for that matter.

So I take a week off work and this is what happens. (I haven’t got the ‘about’ page sorted yet, or anything else from the site – CSS is taking longer than I thought – but I work for Greenpeace. No doubt there will be much more on this later.) From this pic on the moblog, it looks like they’re planning to stay there for some time. It’s going to be cold up there tonight – ironic, really, as all that waste heat the plant would otherwise have been generating could have kept them warm.