Spurs: Abject in Victory

Everything was set for a perfect afternoon: the sun was shining, the air cold and clear, the pitch in fine shape. The crowd applauded the five returning former Spurs players in the Sunderland team [they even applauded Steed Malbranque heartily when he was substituted in the second half]. They clapped loud and long for a contingent from the 2nd Battalion The Rifles, who had just returned from a six month deployment in Afghanistan, and were respectful during the one minute silence for Remembrance Day that followed. All it needed was for the team to perform.

They were dreadful. Slow, largely witless, unable, for much of the afternoon, to string two passes together – indeed, Palacios, who looked cumbersome in the extremis, found it almost impossible to pass to someone on his own side at all. It’s the first time in quite a while I’ve heard the home team booed off at half time.

Much of the trouble was down to the manager’s selection [I'd always thought Rednap more of a wheeler-dealer than a technician]. Choosing a 4-3-3 formation, with Robbie Keane playing ‘in the hole’ behind Crouch and Defoe, did none of them any favours; Keane, his scrambled goal aside, was largely ineffectual, Crouch inept and Defoe anonymous. It was only with the long delayed introduction of Niko Kranjcar for Keane midway through the second half that Tottenham woke up. Though neither as deft nor as quick-sighted as his injured compatriot, Modric, Kranjcar, playing mostly wide left, ran with an enthusiasm and sense of purpose that had been sadly lacking, played several near-perfect through balls to Defoe, and had a major hand in setting up the second goal – a terrific strike by Tom Huddlestone.

Sunderland should have had a penalty in the first half when Gomes brought down Darren Bent and were awarded one in the second for the same scenario, except that this time Bent was already falling when Gomes touched him. Bent took the penalty – badly – and Gomes saved. Justice sort of done. And Gomes had a fine game throughout. But Tottenham …

Lionel Davidson

I once had the pleasure of sharing a table at a Crime Writers’ Association awards dinner with the thriller writer, Lionel Davidson, who has died at the age of 87. It would have coincided with the publication of Kolymsky Heights in 1994, his first book after a lengthy interval. He had already won three Gold Daggers – The Night of Wenceslas in 1960, A Long Way to Shiloh [my personal favourite] in ‘66 and The Chelsea Murders [rather a disappointment] in 1978. Back in the 90s, the awards were sponsored by the whisky firm, Macallan, and a full bottle of the good stuff was on each table – as it happened, of the ten or so people on our table, Lionel and I were the only whisky drinkers present. By the end of a long and increasingly pleasant and talkative evening, the bottle sat empty and I have no clear knowledge of whether Lionel was called to the podium to add to his list of Daggers or not. Nor, too precisely, of how I made my way home, though I do recall turning down an invitation to go dancing with Stella Duffy and Val McDermid – which would doubtless have been another story altogether.

Last Dozen Movies I Saw

1. Home/Ursula Meler
2. The Hurt Locker/Kathryn Bigelow
3. Broken Embraces/Almodovar
4. Accident/Joseph Losey
5. Mesrine: Public Enemy No 1/Jean-François Richet
6. Fish Tank/Andrea Arnold
7. Army of Crime/Robert Guediguian
8. Katalin Varga/Peter Strickland
9. The Maverick Queen/Joseph Kane
10. The Conformist/Bertolucci
11. Julie & Julia/Nora Ephron
12. An Education/Lone Sherfig

Roy DeCarava: Slipping Into The Breaks

There’s a 1949 photograph called Graduation, New York I’ve been familiar with for some time: it shows a stretch of desolate inner city street – it could be Harlem, I guess, the Bronx or Queens – deserted except for the figure of a black girl wearing a white graduation dress walking left to right along the sidewalk; she is way over the left of frame, moving from an area of bright light into one of shadow that is marked off  by a clear diagonal running across the picture,  her own shadow slender and sharply defined. Behind and above her head are two smaller areas of enclosed dark and light, rhyming with those in the foreground. On the wall, to the far right, is a poster advertising a Chevrolet Bel Air saloon – “Style Star of an All-Star Line”; below this, adjacent to the kerb, is an upturned, abandoned handcart and, in front of that, a pile of old newspaper and trash. The photograph is by Roy DeCarava, who died on October, 27th, aged 89. The photo contains many of the basic elements of DeCarava’s style and concerns: the use of dark and light, both as elements of composition and texture and as metaphor; the architectural design of the image; the social commentary inherent in both the setting and the chosen moment.

DeCarava’s two best known books of photographs are The Sweet Flypaper of Life, which has a text by Langston Hughes, and The Sound I Saw, a book about jazz musicians and the life they come from, for which DeCarvara wrote his own commentary– though it’s not quite that. Completed in 1962, The Sound I Saw was not published, by Phaidon, until 2001.

There’s an interesting essay by Richard Ings in a recent book edited by Graham Lock and David Murray, The Hearing Eye – a title which could, itself, be applied to DeCarava and his work. The essay – “‘And You Slip Into the Breaks and Look Around’: Jazz and Everyday Life in the Photographs of Roy DeCarava” – takes its title from a passage in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which provides, Ing suggests, an apt description of the way in which DeCarava works.

Invisibility … gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes you’re behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of it nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around.

DeCarava himself said:

If you don’t capture it at that moment, all you get is a transitory particular. When you find it at the right moment, it is not only particular, it is universal. The only way to do this is to be in tune, to have the same sense of time that the subject has. This means that you have to give yourself to the subject, accept their sense of time.

And …

The story, ideas and incidents related are expressed as a stream of images as seen and felt through the eyes and mind of a jazz musician on a stage. Everything that happens takes place on stage, between sets, between smiles, or an interval between a man’s facial expressions. It is a moment, a lifetime or a set, the time that elapses is not important.

It’s almost like physics; there’s an arc of being. There’s a beginning, then the peak is reached and then there’s the end … At the peak there is no movement … It is that moment I wait for … The moment when all the forces fuse, when all is in equilibrium, that’s the eternal … that’s jazz … and that’s life.

iPod Shuffle, November 1st 2009

1. West End Blues: Louis Armstrong Hot Five
2. Rocking Chair: Roy Eldridge
3. Blood Count: Stan Getz
4. Raincheck: Joe Temperley
5. Pissing in the Wind: Jerry Jeff Walker
6. To Lick Your Boots: Eels
7. Little Girl Blue: Chet Baker
8. Rolling & Tumbling: Bob Dylan
9. Musical Key: Cowboy Junkies
10. Making Whoopie: Frank Sinatra

What’s Cooking?

Against a good few odds and expectations, Nora Ephron’s Julie & Julia – half of a Sunday afternoon double bill [remember double bills?] at the Phoenix, East Finchley – proved to be a true delight. Clunky and obvious in its set up – cutting between Julia Child’s 50s obsession with French cooking and Julie Powell’s blogged efforts years later to make all the recipes in Child’s cookbook within a twelve month – the movie is smart, funny and full of good-looking grub. Meryl Streep’s comic star turn holds the movie together, ably supported by a sweet Stanely Tucci as her husband, while, as Julie, Amy Adams is engaging and contrives to look about as normal as most Hollywood actresses can manage. It’s quite a while since I sat in the midst of an audience that, to judge from the frequent laughter and gasps of astonished pleasure, was having such a good time. And not only that, my daughter was inspired to come home and make seriously good chocolate truffles.

Bottling It

Friend, fellow writer and jazz drummer, Bill Moody, sends news from the West Coast of the US that the good folk at the North Coast Brewing Co. [one of whom is his brother, Doug] had come up with a taste of [their words] bottle bebop – the Brother Thelonious Belgian-style Abbey Ale, now the official beer, I believe, of the Monterey Jazz Festival.

Not just a case [even a four-pack] of North Coast leaning on Monk’s name for a little kudos – the company are one of the sponsors of the Thelonious Monk Institute of Jazz, which runs jazz education programmes for young musicians. There’s also a great little CD by the Brother Thelonious Quintet, who are all graduates from the institute, though I’m not sure how widely available that is.

There’s more information about the ale on the North Coast web site.

Bill Moody’s jazz-based crime novels are well worth tracking down – my personal favourites being The Sound of the Trumpet and Looking for Chet Baker, and not solely as the latter includes my little Chet Baker poem as a kind of epigraph.

The Real Musical McCoy

Look, one of my friends said the other evening, it’s all very well showing off the eclecticism of your collection by posting the results of whatever your iPod Shuffle turns up by chance at the beginning to each month, but what do you really choose to listen to?

On the iPod?

Okay, this is the current, just-picked playlist, the one we’ll be listening to on the drive down to Cornwall at the weekend and for some time after.

1. Amy Rigby: Keep it To Yourself
2. Augustus Pablo: King Tubby Meets the Rockers Uptown
3. Bill Withers: Ain’t No Sunshine
4. Billie Holiday: I Cried For You
5. Boz Scaggs: Sierra
6. Chris Barber: Magnolia’s Wedding Day
7. Diana Krall: Narrow Daylight
8. Dusty Springfield: I‘d Rather Leave While I’m In Love
9. Fats Waller: Viper’s Drag
10. Ian Tyson: Alberta’s Child
11. Jaymay: Grey or Blue
12. Jimmy Noone: Blues Jumped a Rabbit
13. Joe Temperley & Wycliff Gordon: Double Duke
14. John Lewis: Afternoon in Paris
15. John Stewart: The Runaway Fool of Love
16. Josh Ritter: Girl in War
17. Louis Armstrong & Oscar Peterson: Just One of Those Things
18. Louis Armstrong All Stars: Atlanta Blues
19. Mississippi John Hurt: My Creole Belle
20. Nancy Griffith: Cold Hearts/Closed Minds
21. Neil Young: Till the Morning Comes
22. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott: Richland Woman Blues
23. Ronnie Lane: Roll on Babe
24. Sandie Shaw: Girl Don’t Come
25. Stan Tracey: Nutty
26. Talking Heads: Don’t Worry About the Government
27. Thelonious Monk: This is My Story, This is My Song
28. Thelonious Monk & Coleman Hawkins: Ruby, My Dear
29. Youssou N’Dour: Useless Weapons
30. Zoot Sims: Slingin’ Hash

Novel Beginnings …

• They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.

Toni Morrison: Paradise

• The first girl dead, there wasn’t any choice.

John Harvey: Ash & Bone

• They break down the door at the end of December and carry the body away.

Jon McGregor: Even the Dogs

Hiss! Boo! [Villians We Have Known]

Great British Villains, edited by the worthy and hard-working Russell James, and a foreword by myself, slacker that I am, has now been published by Pen & Sword Books Ltd. of Barnsley [well,why not?] and could be yours for a trifling 25 nicker, to slip into the old vernacular. It’s a handsome volume, with entries ranging from Shylock and Bill Sykes, Moll Cutpurse and Professor Moriarty to Rebus’ nemeseis, Big Ger Cafferty, and Ronald Merrick from Paul Scott’s marvellous Raj Quartet. If you don’t fancy splashing out, urge your library – assuming they still deal with books, rather than IT facilities and a children’s creche – to obtain a copy for reference.

My foreword, bulked out by a colour photograph showing me modelling a rather fetching piece of my daughter’s current range of jewellry, touches on Macbeth, Magwitch and the Duchess of Malfi, with deft references to Duke Ellington, Morrisey, Throbbing Gristle, The Blue Lamp, Brighton Rock and Marcus Harvey’s [no relation] hand-printed portrait of Myra Hindley. Hard to resist, huh?