A lasting impression

Blog looks like a lady...

I forget the name of the minstrel who first uttered the immortal, haunting words:

"The very first time that I saw your brown eyes, your lips said hello and I said hi..."

My initial thoughts led me to Confucius, via Victor Hugo... or was it Shakespeare, Petrarch, Barlow?

For those of you looking smug, remembering back to your early 90's heyday, I can tell you that it wasn't even the twin forces of Brian Harvey's East 17 and Gabrielle (who first brought these beloved verses into the hearts of the nation in 1997) who actually wrote this lyrical ballad. In actually it was the great Carl Martin who penned this mastodon of melody.

What? Surely not THAT Carl Martin? Not the Carl Martin who was a member of 90's boy-band pan flashers Shai? Not Carl Martin, formerly of Howard University who formed the group aged 18 with college friends and who went on to submit the single "The Place Where You Belong" for the Beverly Hills Cop III soundtrack which placed at number 42 in the US charts? Yes, it was he, that very same songsmith who accomplished all the feats listed above, who also penned the thoughtful lines that open this blog.

Say what you want about Carl Martin (which I assume is absolutely nothing at all), he knew the value of making the right first impression. He knew this, apparently most acutely, when gurning in the general direction of a presumably startled, hazel eyed floozy who can only blither a startled "hello" before leaping in, breathlessly uttering bold and impassioned rhetoric, such as "Hi".

But Carl 'knew right from the start'. I too know the value of a great first impression, especially when I'm hanging around a wooded area, wearing my cut out cardboard Carl Martin mask over my own face and jumping out on dog walkers from behind a spruce and screaming "HIIIII" into their astonished faces, before making my escape to the chorus of rape alarms and hysterical screaming that usually signal the end of another successful date.

And it's not only woodland predators and chart botherers who can appreciate how important a good first impression can be. The recent Match.com adverts that have been plastered all over my tellybox espouse the benefits of instant attraction to the mating ritual (getting laid) and the importance of seizing upon that first chance meeting to snare your perfect partner. The fact that they do this by puzzlingly featuring a flaccid eyed, ukulele plucking tossbadger ("The girl on the platform smiled...") smugly serenading a stranger like he's a George Formby impersonator making a public information film warning commuters against dangerous stalkers, is beside the point.

Sadly not all first impressions go as smoothly as they do for the train stalker, whos' artless plucking (...I said 'plucking') eventually wins him a date and presumably the lifting of the restraining order. Most right thinking people would instantly assume that a man standing opposite them on a deserted railway platform and singing a song to himself about the colour of your hair is either an escaped convict, a dangerous sex pest or from Coventry.

Most first impressions are made within seconds of meeting, or even hearing the voice of, another person. It's depressing, but a fact that in my new job of sifting through CVs for suitable candidates to fill various teaching roles, the brutal reality is that my left wing champagne socialist ideas fly out the window quicker than a half eaten spam fritter from a bulimics' car.

I've become lost in a fog of requirements and mired in the soil of a lazy desire for an easy life, so I find myself taking less and less time considering each application especially if there is anything quirky or unexplained. Sometimes I find myself zoning out mere seconds into an interview because I already know that the person on the other end of the line didn't fulfil some mysterious wish list of 'needs', 'wants' and 'might possibly consider if I really can't be arseds'.

People have an in built 'kill switch' when it comes to new people that kicks in after the first 10 seconds of seeing someone. On one hand, it protects us from potentially dangerous liaisons with nutbars on train platforms, but it often leaves us perpetually afraid. I suppose this tendency towards making an instant judgement served as part of a long docile survival instinct, the same animal tendency that prevents lonely wildebeest shuffling up to lionesses, holding a tray of mixed canapes and making small talk about the state of the England team. Then again, as it's unlikely in most human encounters that a perfect stranger is sizing you up for a between meal snack and wondering how best to get that difficult but tasty meat from between the more fiddly bones in your spine, this instinct seems at best defunct and at worst totally isolating.

It's a sad part of our nature that so many people fear what they don't know, especially when it leads to more profound restrictions, cutting them off on an island of their own tastes, their own ideologies or perhaps their own company. Before we all start getting out our E17 back catalogue and heading for the nearest wood though, perhaps it is good to remember that privacy is one of the rights that makes us civilised. We don't have to like everybody, but being a miserable fucker is a different kettle of cod.

Unless you're carrying a ukulele, in which case you'd better get with the programme. Get a Carl Martin CD on and let the good times roll.

Night night cupcakes.

Daydreambelieverandahomecomingquee-eee-ee-eeeen

R.I.P Davy Jones.

Sleep queasy

Blogbeat, the word is on the street...

If I was to march into a room during a dinner party and declare at the top of my lungs that I was being hunted by a giant seal with the skin of a cactus and the voice of Martin Clunes, I'd be derided as an idiot, hauled into a separate room away from where the cheese course was being served and immediately be shot in the head with a crossbow, so that my pink brains were splattered across the walls like it was the inside of Bernard Matthews shed.

However, in the world of my dreams, my lunatic exclamation would be met with sorry acceptance from the assembled guests who would silently turn away to gaze apathetically out of the window across the salty planes and beyond the orange river running through the forest of guts.

Obviously, many people have dreams. Most of us in fact. Sometimes our dreams remember our 4 little children, sometimes they're interpreted by lengthy bearded hippies, or intellectual cigar chompers, preying on our insecurities. Sometimes our dreams scare us with their truth or simplicity, or because we don't like the thought of being chased by an army of plastic mannequin legs. In fact, most dreams are such a tornado of the personal and comforting, the unsettling and bizarre, that it's a wonder that we are ever able to sleep through them at all.

I've spent quite a lot of my twenties wrestling with the ticklish problem of getting to sleep. If you're lying in bed and start to think about doing it, you can't. If you're trying not to do it like while you're sitting in a church, driving on a motorway or attending a child's birth, nothing could come more easily.

I find that I need a failsafe; some kind of ludicrous drizzle of thought to think on in an attempt to 'trick' my brain into believing it's asleep and leaving my imagination take up the narrative automatically and drive the autopilot of my mind into sleepyville. My current favourite is to imagine I'm taking part in a massive competition to see how long I can stand on my head for. The ludicrous image of hundreds of people in row upon row of arse over titedness of set against the tedium of the endurance contest somehow combines the dreary and the ridiculous effectively enough to switch my mind on standby. It's a bit like imagining you're listening to a Newsnight debate on the colour of peanuts.

I'm not sure that it's a measure of my insomnia growing or a symptom of simply being too bored to sleep that I have to resort to waking dreams before slipping into an otherworldly coma. Perhaps it's a concealed desire to resurrect a part of my brain that becomes more and more underused the older I get - the simple, resuscitating power of imagination.

I'm envious of children who use dolls and action figures to construct elaborate worlds that exist in an imaginative universe. The power struggles of little green army men, facing an evil and tormenting plastic skeleton (won from a grizzly toothed carny in a ball throwing game) all the while controlled by my own omniscient and unflinching hand, were perpetual battles on my blue carpet when I was nipper. This followed an afternoon spent constructing impenetrable fortresses out of bedclothes and scaling the insurmountable mountain summit of my stairs using only tied together dressing gown belts.

The more I disappeared into whatever insane, nonsensical, misogynistic and derivative universe my friends and I had the care to recreate, the Z'ds followed as easily as cows up an abattoir conveyor belt. The more time I spend in my adult life, circumnavigating my own imagination and relying on TV, interweb, computer screens and staring at neighbours through my steamed up binoculars, the less I'm able to suspend the real world and wonder into snooze town.

Perhaps I'm a victim of my own desire to be switched on, alert and 'living in the real world'. A little suspension of disbelief could well be the remedy to induce narcolepsy.

Thank the lord there's still delicious rum to guide me into the abyss. Pirates are never wrong.

Later dudes. xx

IfyoustrikemedownIshallbecomemorepowerfulthanyoucouldpossiblyimagine.

Re-run Around #2

CHINATOWN

The private eye thriller is a well worn path, trodden by films since time was time and secrets were secrets. Vivid images come naturally to mind at the mention of the genre: incriminating photographs taken from unsecured rooftops. Trilby's shadowing grim faced ex-cops. Smokey eye'd, smouldering, cupid-bow lipped molls. Dirty fingered exchanges of cash, loot and threats.

All these cliches are present and incorrect in Roman Polanski's 1974 noir Chinatown, captured so perfectly that within the first ten minutes you feel comfortable inhabiting the offices of Jake Gittes's private detective agency as if you yourself have a wayward husband and you need a PI to snoop out the misdeeds.

Jack Nicholson lives, breathes and reclines in the role of Jake, showing his now customary combination of slick seduction and manic danger. Set during the chronic water shortages that blighted 1930's LA, Gittes is an ex-cop escaping the pressure and danger of working in Chinatown to take up more slippery work, uncovering private indiscretions for the highest bidder.

Jake is hired by the wife of a prominent water engineer Hollis Mulwray who is apparently playing away from home. With precision, Jake photographs and discredits Mulwray's reputation and soon Mulwray's body is found washed up in the reservoir. Nicholson is pitch perfect in his portrayal of the hardened ex-cop taking a sly relish in his work, enjoying operating on the fringes of the law he once upheld in Chinatown.

However the conventionality of the film begins to twist as, in the ensuing scandal, Jake becomes aware that he was hired by an impostor. Jake's incredulity is matched by a newly invigorated passion to discover who is responsible for fooling him and why. Soon it becomes clear that he has been dragged into a battle for control of the water supply to the city and must challenge sinister corporate faces with dark fingers lining the pockets of city officials, if he is to find the truth.

By resisting the urge to use a conventional voice over, Polanski draws his audience into the world of Jake, uncovering the clues as he does, taking each step alongside him and becoming just as emotionally entangled in the plot. Jake's profession is a paradox of uncovering what is hidden by exposing what is seen through the lens of a camera and we as an audience take the same journey to discover each delicious nugget of truth served up in tantalising portions on the screen.

Chinatown becomes a paradox in it's own right, a juxtaposition of horror and joy. The joy in the film lies in uncovering each mystery, of piecing together how Mulwray's true wife, played with understated regality by Faye Dunaway, fits into the schemes of her wealthy father who has vested interest in the water supply. The horror in the film comes when we realise that uncovering that which is hidden, leads Jake to face dark secrets and subversive lives.

The legacy of Chinatown is clear in its familiarity. The cliches are a flattery, the copy cats a homage. Such is it's influence that a second look at LA Confidential, Blade Runner (at least in the directors cut) or Who Framed Roger Rabbit are a deja-vu. However, the real legacy of Chinatown is as a pillar of storytelling without patronising or over indulging your audience with distractions and grandstanding. Polanski treats us as grown ups, capable of discovering the nature of people and being horrified by the consequences.

This is never truer than as Jake makes his final and brutally dark discovery. A discovery which subverts both the genre and most people's fundamental understanding of what people are capable of. Jake is forced to realise that sometimes the horror is just too great, justice no longer worth the sacrifice. So, just like Jake, the audience cannot help but look away as the edifice of slick PI's, corporate money men and finding redemption in truth are torn apart by the gruesome nature of the world we live in.

"Forget it Jake... it's Chinatown"

xx