That David Bowie's let himself go a bit.



Still, nice to see him at the Silifke Festival on Saturday.

I have an article in a local magazine. (A magazine for local people...)

It's the first edition of an art and history mag one of the local associations we are involved with has just set up.

Here's the piece.

Yes, it's in Turkish, what did you expect? No, I didn't write it in Turkish, Lutfiye translated it.

The original, in English, is below the cut.

1958

Playback, the last Philip Marlowe novel by Raymond Chandler, is published.

 
Marlowe - ''As honest as you can expect a man to be in a world where its going out of style''.

I have just tried to imagine what the books and films I enjoy today would be like if Raymond Chandler hadn’t written the Philip Marlowe books.

I can’t.

Chandler didn’t invent pulp fiction, film noir or the private eye. Marlowe wasn’t the first ‘knight in tarnished armour’, the laconic loner walking ‘these mean streets’.

Look how difficult it is to write about him without quoting him? I am tempted to point you at his essay ‘The Simple Art of Murder’ (http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html)
and let him explain everything, but that’s just being lazy. Which I am. So…

Only joking. You don’t get off that easy.

Chandler may not be the first, and he won’t be the last, but he was the best.  You know how sometimes it is depressing to think that the best has passed and it won’t ever be that good again? Well that doesn’t apply here because the books are so good that you can just pick them up and start again. (Well I can, thanks to a gift of a boxed set a few years ago from runmentionable.)

Why is he so good? Again I am not a good enough writer to explain it better than he can:

‘’My theory was that [the readers] just thought they cared about . . . the action; that really, although they didn’t know it, they cared very little about the action. The things that they really cared about, and that I cared about, were the creation of emotion through dialogue and description; the things they remembered, that haunted them, were not for example that a man got killed, but that in the moment of death he was trying to pick a paper clip up off the polished surface of a desk, and it kept slipping away from him, so that there was a look of strain of his face and his mouth was half opened in a kind of tormented grin, and the last thing in the world he thought about was death. He didn’t even hear death knock at the door. That damn paper clip kept slipping away from his fingers and he just wouldn’t push it to the edge of the desk and catch it as it fell.’’

So there you are. If you don’t want to write like Chandler who the hell do you want to write like? And if you don’t want to be Philip Marlowe then you have been reading the wrong books and watching the wrong films.


Raymond Chandler. Creating emotion through dialogue and description. While smoking a pipe.

1956

Hancock’s Half Hour transfers to television.

 “Stone me, what a life!”  

Hancock, and Galton and Simpson the writers, created the archetypal character of British television comedy.

Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock is a shallowly unhappy, desperate soul who wants to be someone life has cruelly decided he can never be.

From Hancock you can trace a direct line through Steptoe Jnr. (Steptoe and Son), Captain Mainwaring (Dad’s Army), Rigsby (Rising Damp), Basil Fawlty (FawltyTowers), Reggie Perrin (The Rise and Fall of…), Del Boy (Only Fools and Horses), Edwina Monsoon (Ab Fab), Ted Crilly (Father Ted) and Brian Potter (Phoenix Nights) to David Brent (The Office) and beyond. These are all self-deluded people. They see themselves in a totally different way to the way the rest of the world sees them.

They don’t adjust their view, though. They set about adjusting the world's instead.

It’s no surprise they are frequently voted the most loved of all British TV characters. After all 'living lives of quiet desperation is the English way'. It’s not because they are doomed to fail (which they are) but because they dare to try.

I grew up watching these people. I am quite content to grow old watching them and their successors.

Of course none of that would matter if they weren’t also funny. Forget timing. Being funny is the true secret of comedy.

And Hancock’s Half Hour is (still) funny.

1955

Chelsea win the League

 The Greatest Football Team of the 20th Century.

Your football team should be like your name. You shouldn’t have to think about it. You should just know it. Choosing your own team is a bit unnatural if you ask me, and it should be as unusual as choosing your own name. Only done in exceptional circumstances.

One of those exceptional circumstances is when you move to a new country, to a new life. That’s what my dad did. He moved from rural Cork in a football-less forties Ireland to urban London in a football-full fifties England.

Even then I don’t think he choose his team. He had older brothers who has already come to England and I think they choose Chelsea and he was presented with it as a fait accomplı. He moved to London and became a navvy and a Chelsea fan.

I grew up supporting Chelsea. I can’t remember not knowing I was a Chelsea fan, just like I can’t remember not knowing my own name. We won League Divison One in 1955. For most of my life that was more like a millstone than an honour. We'd done it once and it was before I was born. ‘Have you seen Chelsea win the League? No, noooo.’  Why couldn’t we do it again? We were a one hit wonder.

This story will develop, trust me. But not for a few years yet.

 Chelsea in 1955 training, practising the ball levitation techniques that contributed to their League Championship.

1954

That’s All Right by Elvis Presley is released. It's his first single.

 What the present looked like in the past.

From the vantage point of this bright, shiny new millennium it is easy to both under and over estimate Elvis Presley’s influence. Just looking at the people who cite him as an influence, though, and it’s difficult to argue with the fact he is the greatest rock/pop star ever. So don’t. Just leave it. You won’t win.

Having said that I didn’t go for him much, personally. So why include him in this list then?

Part of it is the fact that, when I spent far too much of yesterday reading up on Marlon Brando after the 1953 entry, I found this quote by Clive James ‘’Like Elvis Presley’s, Brando’s face was chiselled by Greeks’’.  So the universe told me to. Man.

And also the man himself and the song have both had a direct impact on me.

The song was covered on a record called Live Adventures of Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper, a cassette copy of which found its way into my possession at some point in the early seventies. God alone knows how, and he doesn’t exist so he won't be letting on any time soon. I cannot think of anybody around me (which, let’s face it, was only family and school) who would have had such a thing. I vividly remember listening to it though, over and over, and loving That’s All Right in particular. It is a cracking tune.

(There was also a track called Her Holy Modal Highness which I don’t remember anything about except the title. It has become one of those phrases that runs through my head every now and then for no discernible reason.)

Elvis’s made his biggest mark on me by dying. I got up one morning and stumbled down to the kitchen to find my dad having a cup of tea, listening to the radio. This was before breakfast tele if you can imagine such a time. Dad had just heard Elvis had left the planet. He handed me a cup of tea and told me to bring it up to my brother, Shaun, and break the news to him. Shaun was ten or eleven and obsessed with Elvis. He even had a radio in the shape of Elvis. I can still feel the astonishment that hit me at my Dad’s abject cowardice in making me tell him.

And as an aside look at the statistics for the record in question;

That's All Right *
Blue Moon Of Kentucky *
(US) SUN 209 (78/45)
Released: July 19, 1954
* Recorded: Sun Studios, Memphis, July 5, 1954

Recorded on the 5th, released on the 19th. And we think that modern technology has made it quicker for an artist to get stuff out to an audience.