You Had to Be There …

Bit of a strange thing to say about a 0-0 draw, but Saturday’s encounter between County and Aldershot was genuinely enjoyable: a terrific game of football. The Shots defended well and were threatening on the break, especially in the second half, and although Notts pressed through0ut they just couldn’t squeeze the ball past the goalkeeper or over the line. Almost entirely a different team from last season, the home side are benefitting not just from new personnel, but a new approach: gone is the hopeful boot up front for a hapless striker to run on to, instead this is proper football played on the deck, the ball being moved through the midfield [Davies from Shrewsbury and Jackson from Tottenham, outstanding] out to the wings or up into the area for men to run onto. There just remained, on this occasion, the small problem of putting the ball in the net. Not something that bothered my other team the following day .

To be amongst the 36,000 plus at White Hart Lane on Sunday was to bear witness to something joyous and remarkable. And it will, I imagine, become one of those occasions where the numbers claiming to have been present would have filled the stadium umpteen times over. In case you’ve missed the headlines, Spurs beat Wigan 9-1, Jermaine Defoe scoring five.

The first half was a curi0us mixture; Spurs were so fast and skilful for the first fifteen or twenty minutes, it looked as if Wigan might get overrun, but then, somehow, the home side took their foot off the pedal, lost focus and concentration, and let the visitors back into the game;  by the half-time whistle we were fortunate to be a single goal ahead. During the interval, Harry Redknapp must have had a quiet word in his players’ ears. The effect was electric. Three goals for Defoe within seven minutes, Lennon running at the Wigan defence at speed and, on the other flank, Niko Kranjcar  challenging hard and then playing neatly threaded passes and long, curving through-balls that were sublime. As the goal after goal went in, a sort of half-dazed, half-crazed euphoria spread around the stands; this couldn’t be happening, except that it was, right before our eyes. “We want six!” ‘We want seven!” “We want eight, nine, ten …” We were there: a day to remember for sure.

A Marriage of Styles

To the new Nottingham Contemporary with my son, Tom, on Saturday, to try out the lunchtime grub and take a peek at the David Hockneys before shooting off to see Notts County at Meadow Lane.

The café/bar is on the lowest level of the three floors that follow the natural fall of land down from Weekday Cross, and by the time we arrive it’s pretty heaving – couples with small kids in tow looking for places to park their buggies between the tables, mums and daughters laden with shopping, little family clusters, and a sprinkling of vaguely arty types looking just a touch disdainful. We’re none of those, well, not quite, though I might aspire to the latter. Somehow we manage to snag a table without hanging about and our waitress, moonlighting from her studies, I’m sure, brings the menus with a smile and suitable speed and tells us it will take a good 20 minutes to get served. In the circumstances, fair does, they’ve only been open two weeks and the kitchen’s probably still sorting itself out. When the food arrives it’s top notch: lamb with some kind of gnocchi for Tom and slow roasted pork belly on cassoulet for me. Decidedly tasty and half the price they’d be down in the smoke.

Back to level one and just time for a bit of a race round the Hockneys [I already know I'm returning for a longer look early in the new year] before hurrying off to the match. A rush, of course, doesn’t do the work, or the gallery, justice. It’s a great show and there are lots of folk here taking it in. What’s obvious from the first room is the extent to which, at the very beginning of his career, Hockney was sticking two fingers up to the establishment both in the form of his paintings, his refusal to obey the normative rules, and his deliberate espousing of homosexuality. And in room two we’re face to face with the first flowering of his brilliance – literally, in the luminous blues and greens of his celebrations of Californian swimming pools and lawns, and then the lovingly observed and rendered  young men’s backs and backsides. I’ve known some of these pieces – “A Lawn Sprinkler”, “Peter Getting Out of Nick’s Pool”, “A Bigger Splash” – for years as reproductions, but the difference between seeing them as postcards and as they really are, large and brilliant, on these white walls, is immense.

Wonderful stuff, but down the road a 0-0 draw with Aldershot awaits …

White Ribbon

Michael Haneke’s new film, The White Ribbon, won the Palme D’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and, yes, it’s that good or better. For one thing, it looks superb: cold, bright and dazzling in what I assume to be high-definition video. For a while, I wondered where that look came from, the way the characters stand and move against those defined backgrounds and then, reading an interview with Haneke in Sight and Sound, I realised – it’s the photographs of August Sander, which I remember seeing some little time back. [At the National Portrait Gallery?] Set in Northern Germany immediately before the start of the First World War and looking towards the Second, Haneke suggests that what we are about to see might go in some way towards explaining what happened to that country. A feudal, patriarchal society worshipping a Lutheran God, founded upon prohibition and guilt, its children the repressed offspring of repressed parents, already in their secret way seeking revenge against the rigidity of their upbringing. National Socialism here we come.

Cold in Hand at Christmas

Just as you were despairing about what to give that awkward friend or relative this Christmas, along comes – perhaps – the perfect answer. Those nice people at Whole Story Audio Books are offering Cold in Hand for less than £20 [and that's quite a bit less than usual] as part of their Christmas promotion. Check it out here!

London Jazz Festival

One big, one small: Thomasz Stanko at the Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Hans Koller Biggish Band at The Oxford, Kentish Town. Stanko sounds like mid- to late-period Miles and wears that hat [plus the pork-pie he affected all evening] very well. The quartet supporting him are fine, too, and the first fifteen, twenty minutes are an almost unalloyed pleasure; then gradually I realise my attention has drifted away and I’m not certain if this is a new tune I’m listening to or the old one – and then I realise it doesn’t matter because, slight tempo changes aside, it’s all much the same sound. And that’s a problem, the lack of variety – for me, at least, but not so much, I think, for most of the people around me, though a few slide surreptitiously into their coats and steal away. The programme suggests some of the music was written for a Swedish play, Terminal 7, which makes a sort of sense – it’s music for something that isn’t happening. But since nobody announces or explains anything, it’s hard to know. Only the encore – “Rosemary’s Baby”, according to the 5-star review in The Guardian – brings, too late for me, a welcome change. As we leave, most everyone else is on their feet, cheering. My loss, I’m sure.

The following night at The Oxford, it’s the Hans Koller Band. Last time they played there the audience were hanging off the flocked wallpaper and this is no different. It’s a 10-piece band, plus Koller himself on keyboards; brass-heavy – two trumpets, two trombones, french horn, two reeds, guitar, bass and drums – and the textures on the slower pieces bring the Miles Davis “Birth of the Cool” sound to mind, that and maybe Mike Gibbs, Carla Bley; on the more up-tempo pieces there’s a hint of Mingus, but that might just be in my mind and not the leader’s. Comparisons aside, this is an excellent aggregation and there’s something thrilling about listening to them in a small, packed room at close hand. It’s a bit invidious to single people out, but there are notably fine solos from Phil Robson on guitar and Julian Siegel on tenor. Drummer Jeff Williams blows up a wonderful storm behind Siegel on his feature, recalling to my mind the occasion Eric Delaney celebrated his 75th birthday by playing with the London Jazz Big Band at the 100 Club. I don’t know if that’s a comparison Jeff will wear well, but it’s meant kindly and I think he should. Oh, and a great part of the enjoyment comes from Koller’s soft and quietly diffident announcements, shot through as they are with off-key accents and sudden shafts of enthusiasm. A bit like the band.

In the interval, incidentally, I ran into Bob Cornwell, crime reviewer for CADS, Tangled Web and (occasionally) Crime Time, and we passed a pleasant ten minutes or so mulling over the big bands of yore. Never knew Bob was a big jazz fan, but perhaps I should have guessed. Not sure what it is about the affinity between jazz and crime writing, but it seems to be there.

Liberace – Queer Before His Time

So, I finally got around to cracking the Kleinzahler book on music, only to find that it starts with Liberace. A few lines about whom sent me scurrying back to those Sunday evenings [I think they were Sundays] when my parents and I sat round our newly acquired black and white television, watching the weekly concoction of candelabras, frills and furbelows, dimpled cheeks and pudgy, beringed fingers flourishing over the keys that was the Liberace show.

“For some reason,” Kleinzahler reminds us, “older matrons and teeny-boppers found him mesmerizing,” and my mother certainly came into the former category. How she rationalised Liberace’s extravagant campness I have no idea, nor how she would have responded to Kleinzahler’s revelation that he was “an aggressive, predatory homosexual who cruised the parking lots of L.A.”

Not that she was all that good, my mum, at reading people’s personalities and sexual proclivities from what they revealed on the TV. Michael Foot, who was probably, within his lights, one of the most honourable politicians who ever lived, she loathed with a vengeance, whereas plummy-voiced Bob Boothby, with his fruity patrician version of common sense, she all but idealised. What she would have thought had she been told that he was a bi-orientated homosexual who was fucking the prime minister’s wife, I can’t imagine. Except that she would never have believed it.

Days Alone … Grace Hartigan

Now my days alone have a certain shape to them  – I wake about nine, turn on the symphony and have juice, fruit and a pot of black coffee. Read a bit (still Gide’s Journal), talk on the phone – to Richard [Miller], or Frank [O'Hara] – sometimes Mike [Goldberg], or others. The three or four, sometimes five hours on this canvas – it hasn’t begun to come yet, but I keep thinking of things to do.

Then a few d0mestic chores for myself, a cold shower, a cold hard boiled egg and one or two rums with Rose’s lime, more reading, more records. Tonight I meet Frank at the Cedar for dinner, then to the late showing of “East of Eden”.

The Journals of Grace Hartigan, July 1st 1955

Whisky for rum and cut out the cold shower, doesn’t seem too bad to me.

Nottingham Contemporary

This week sees the opening of Nottingham Contemporary, a brand new art gallery on Weekday Cross in the centre of the city. So far I’ve only seen it from the outside [for some reason I didn't make the invitation list for the official opening and my suggestion to the BBC that I review it on Front Row fell of deaf ears] but it looks really impressive. And director, Alex Farquharson, has come up with a truly impressive opening bill – the first major retrospective of David Hockney’s early work for yonks – all the well-known LA stuff – and, alongside that, the collages of a contemporary LA artist, Frances Stark.

Hockney’s a brilliant choice, I think, genuinely popular as well as highly thought of in critical circles, and he’ll both get the gallery publicity and bring in folk from far and wide – and, most importantly, from near at hand.

To celebrate the opening, this week’s The Culture Show [BBC2 - Thursday at 7.00pm] comes from Nottingham and will show us around. There’s also a crime fiction segment, but no, it’s not Charlie Resnick, it’s James Ellroy talking about LA. Well, it all fits.

Swingin’ at the Oxford Tavern

Actually, I think it’s just the plain Oxford, but Tavern somehow sounds better. Either way, there’s jazz upstairs most Tuesday evenings, organised by the Loop Collective and yesterday it was Alan Barnes, with Jim Hart on vibes and Paul Clarvis on drums. “Nice room,’ Barnes said, somewhat tartly. “Like to see what it’s like with people in it.” Well, there were 25 of us. Almost. Publicity not perhaps the Loop Collective’s strong point.

For those of us who were there, mostly taking advantage of the well-stuffed settees and arm chairs, it was a bit of a treat. Barnes stuck mostly to clarinet, which he played without resort to a mike, and Clarvis – as often the case – used a small kit, snare, tom-tom, high hat, top cymbal and a small bass drum he said came from Woolworth’s, and used brushes on the majority of tunes.

They started off with “Airmail Special’, followed that with Charlie Christian’s “A Smooth One” and later in the first set there was a lightning “Crazy Rhythm”. Numbers associated with Benny Goodman predominated, with a fine “Rachel’s Dream” in part two, some near-New Orleans lower register clarinet on Barnes’ “Humph” [closely related to Mezz Mezzrow's "Revolutionary Blues"] and a fierce “After You’ve Gone” on which both Clarvis and Hart sparkled.

Next week, on Monday for a change, it’s the Hans Koller band, whom I’ve heard there before and they are terrific. Sadly, I shall be in Crawley, along with my friend, Mark Billingham, pretending to be interested in crime fiction, but I hope there’s a good turn out. They deserve it.

Barbed Hula

Just back from my Birkbeck class on Women Artists from 1950 to the Present, held, less than fortunately in an airless room lacking any natural light, that feels as if it were underground though actually it isn’t. Two hours in the middle of the afternoon, it’s sometimes difficult, despite the latté and Snickers bar I rush off to get in the five minute break, to keep wide awake. No fault of our lecturer, Marion Arnold, who’s clear and cogent and occasionally provocative. Today we were looking at the work of Eva Hesse – ’soft’ sculptures, differing materials, strong relationship to minimalism, died of a brain tumour at 30 – and Louise Bourgeois – probably most famous for her giant spiders, but also a sculptress and painter with an interest in tapestry and genetalia; still active in her 90s. The recent Bourgeois show at Tate Modern was fascinating and more than slightly creepy, with threatening images of imprisonment and castration, and there’s a Hesse retrospective starting at Camden Arts Centre in December.

As my first assignment for this particular module, I have chosen to make an analysis of Israeli artist, Sigalit Landau’s video Barbed Hula, which shows Landau, naked on a beach between Jaffa and Tel Aviv, head out of shot, using a circle of barbed wire as a hula hoop, the camera slowly zooming in to show the gouges on her body. In real life, I would turn away, possibly even attempt to intervene, but because this is an art work, presented in an art space [and because I have this assignment] I continue to stand and watch. The piece is compelling, carrying with it ideas of international politics – Israel/Gaza/Palestine – and of gender politics – the woman imprisoned  by her sex, by her beauty, by the camera and the loop of video tape that allow no respite, and by the viewer, the [male] gaze. By me.

There are other connotations, too. The idea of someone being “made to go through hoops”, being made to undergo a difficult test or ordeal. Is that what it is like to be a woman in what might be construed still as a man’s world, where some find [male constructed] ideas of the norm difficult to attain? And which can lead to living without a sense of one’s own worth, without self-respect, and so from there to the phenomenon of self-harm, which affects women more than men, young women in particular.

The work is on show at the Rollo Contemporary Art gallery, in Cleveland Street [near the now-demolished Middlesex hospital] until November 20th, as part of The Body in Women’s Art Now, Part 1, which will be at New Hall, Cambridge from January 31st until February 28th next year.