Credo / Mark Oliver

Listen in: Berlin

Interesting little film on VBS.TV about Teufelsberg, a listening station the Allies made on an artificial hill outside Berlin after the second world war.

Encounters at the End of the World

"I've explored many different lands of the mind, and explored many different ideas ... before I knew how to read and write my grandma was reading the Odyssey and the Iliad ... this place works almost as a natural selection for those people who want to jump off the map and we all meet here where all of the lines of the map converge ... there are many full-time travellers, part-time workers here ... professional dreamers", so says Stefan Pashov, philosopher and forklift driver. 

He is one of the interesting characters Werner Herzog meets in McMurdo station, this amazing town in Antarctica, home to scientists and, as Pashov says, travellers and dreamers, in Herzog's documentary Encounters at the End of the World.

McMurdo is reminiscent of some western frontier township but it has modern elements that disappoint Herzog - who hankers after a time when some of the world's map was still unknown - there are cash points and bio facilities where they can grow tomatoes. There are Yoga classes. The contrast with Shackleton's simple base are stark.

A fascinating place - not least in the period when there are four months without darkness - captured in part of Herzog's film where he walks around it at 1am in brilliant snowy sunshine, when most inhabitants are asleep. Other characters Herzog meets are a former Colorado banker who released there was more to life than money and drives the 'Ivan the Terra Bus'. There's a young guy from Grad school who tells us how it is the kind of place where guys with PHDs "doing the dishes". We meet a woman traveller who performs a stunt in a bar in which she contorts herself into a bag with only her arms sticking out, showing how you can be "human carry on baggage". We meet another traveller who always has his bag packed - including an inflatable raft and telescopic oar - so he is always ready to leave for the next adventure. 

Herzog though is keen to get out of McMurdo to explore Antarctica, meeting scientists researching single celled life beneath the ice, or studying seals or penguins, or volcanologists. More than one expert talks about how concerned they are about climate change; in one scene a group gather round to watch a vintage end of the world movie.

Herzog asks one penguin expert if the animals ever get suicidal and he says they can get disorientated; we see amazing footage of a penguin going the wrong way, towards the mountains and certain death. The expert also says he has seen a kind of penguin "prostitution" where a female will have sex with a male and then steal one of his rocks. 

The footage beneath the ice is stunning. Meeting some scientists who are working beneath the ice, Herzog says:

"I noticed that the divers in their routine were not talking at all, to me they were like priests preparing for mass. Under the ice the divers find themselves in a separate reality where space and time acquire a strange new dimension. Those few who have experienced the world under the frozen sky often describe it like going into the frozen cathedral."

'All the things in your head'

I was listening to a an old Guardian book club podcast with Hanif Kureishi about the Buddha of Suburbia and he said something which rang true with me, that a novel is about the writer trying to find a story which allows him to write about what is currently in his head (his interests and observations and curiosities).

I was listening to it as I went for a run around the dinosaurs in Crystal Palace park. This is my first blog posting with ScribeFire, a Firefoxplug in which lets you post to blogs quickly, within the browser.

'You never see the Taliban'

Interesting little film on Afghanistan by BBC's Ben Anderson, for VBS. A British squaddie tells him most of the guys he's with have not seen the Taliban even though they have had firefights with them for hours. During non-combat they have probably seen lots of Taliban because, as he says, they only need to "pick up a pitchfork and then they are Johnny farmer".

The most difficult thing is fighting against guys who don't fear death and are looking forward to "27 virgins or whatever". Anderson says some positions that are being fought over are now being administered by "Good Taliban", a scenario they could have reached six years ago with far less bloodshed.

Colours

My first blog from an iPhone

Berlin in July

 

 

 

 

We are now beginning our descent

By the end, this novel really got under my skin. It is former Guardian journalist James Meek's first book since his highly regarded, wonderful book The People's Act of Love. We Are Now Beginning our Descent is about a war reporter, Adam Kellas, and is partly set in Afghanistan, during the US-led invasion, partly set in the UK and the US, to where he travels to try and win the heart of a particularly complicated woman he falls in love with while in Afghanistan. There are lots of people who are pretty but who are 'only curators of their own beauty ... Astrid was one of those other ones, who inhabited her looks'.

Kellas's character has written a novel and the book is very good on journalists who want to write literature, which I found interesting. There's a couple of great scenes. SPOILER ALERT! One is where he trashes a London dinner party where his variously literary / media type friends are assembled and the second is in Afghanistan where he is with the Northern Alliance and his request for them to use a tank results in some enemy Taliban in a truck being incinerated (thus contravening a rather essential journalistic war reporting credo of non participation). 

At the dinner scene, there is this wonderful rant by Kellas. It is obviously informed by an anxiety that he and his friends, who were obviously quite left-wing in their youth are now somehow sellouts. Kellas tells them:

'... the price of caring is set so low. You just have to say you care and you've paid. You don't have to give anything up ... You can talk as radical as you like here on the island and you can live such a, such a comfortable life and people'll still call you a Marxist. When you're so safe. Your house is safe, your money is safe, your family is safe. Your reputation is safe, and so's your sanity. Your British passport's safe. Even your spare time is safe. How can you write about so many jeapordised people so self-importantly when you're so unjeapordised yourslef? When did it happen that the people who stand up for the losrs began to be so afraid to lose anything at all?

The novel does not quite have the inspired conceits of People's Act of Love (SPOILER ALERT! the castration cult and the lost Czech unit and the escape from Siberian prisons with another inmate to use as potential food). But it has a raw, and I'm guessing here - autobiographical? - true edge to it.

In an interview with the Independent, Meek, who is an amazing journalist and wrote wonderful articles for the Guardian, seems dismissive of all things hackery.

'By the time he was grown up, Meek decided he needed a real career. Journalism beckoned, but not for any glorious reasons. "I needed to eat," he explains matter of factly. "More than that though – I didn't want to be poor." He stills wonders, he says, whether such a demanding career delayed his writing success – but then without its experiences, perhaps his writing would lack its stirring worldliness.'

There's a rather great portrait of Meek, which you can see in full size on the article, by Mark Chilvers.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

I loved Drown, Junot Diaz's first book, a collection of short stories, published in 1996, which rippled with atmosphere and sadness; he's from the Dominican Republic and lives in New York. The stories were partly from his growing up and partly from his experience as an immigrant.

There's two bits I remember from it. One of the characters sleeps with an ex-girlfriend and wakes in the morning and she has gone and has rifled through his jeans and taken his money, leaving his pockets hanging outside the trousers "like elephant ears ... she didn't even other to put those fuckers back in". And then there's a bit where a guy is having an affair and takes his son with him to the woman's house and he has to wait in the living room while his dad is upstairs. In the family home the affair is this unmentioned phenomenon like a crater in the living room.

Diaz, so feted in places like the New Yorker, has taken 12 years to publish his next book, his first novel. I enjoyed The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, though it perhaps does not dazzle quite so much as his stories. It is funny and easy to read. I like the fuku, the curse that dooms Oscar's family, and the evils of Trujillo make a great backdrop to the book. Trujillo, as he Guardian describes him, was the 'kleptocrat and Rwanda-style génocidaire who ruled the country from 1930 to 1961'.

The book won a Pullitzer, so must be pretty good. And it got lots of good reviews. The Guardian notes Diaz manages the transition from the short to the long form: 'Happily, unlike some successful short-story writers, he seems comfortable with the impresario aspect of novel writing: making them laugh, making them cry, bringing on the dancing girls and so on.'

Chris Coekin

Knock Three Times

A very cool photographer. The second one is from his 'Hitcher' series, which I saw at the Photographers' Gallery earlier this year.

Coming of Age: American Art 1850s-1950s

Edward Hopper

 

Frederic Remington

This was an exhibition I saw a while ago at the Dulwich Picture Gallery, which has a nice cafe. I wondered about writing a blog about the cafe's in art galleries. I once had quite an embarrassing exchange with a guy in the lobby of the Met in New York.

Me: "Do I need to buy a ticket if I just want to go into the cafe?"

Guy on door: (frowns) "I guess not ... "