Can we call him Al?

I received the following text message from my good friend and erstwhile comics collaborator Phil Walsh at 7.11am on 28th January 2008:

3.38am. Weighing in at 7.7. Alfred John Vincent Walsh was hurled into our plane of existence by emergency C-section after fifteen of the most terrifying minutes of my life. Beth and our son are both well, in the pink in fact, and resting comfortably. Thank you for all your thoughts and prayers. I'm going for a long lie down now, good night.

Congratulations to Phil and Beth - this was great news to wake up to! I know you'll both make brilliant parents.

The Blog of Dave

My pal Dave Metcalfe now has a proper, non-MySpace blog called 'Fast Broads'. I imagine that must be a quaint North Yorkshire colloquialism for a reliable Internet connection.

This is Dave:

Davey was raised on a diet of netto white cider, wotsits and comics in the darkest depths of north yorkshire. he escaped and hid in the bradford underground until he decided to see the sights of the uk by moving around for no other reason than he fancies it. he has a severe aversion to capital letters correct punctuation and the font comic sans. he currently resides in birmingham where he lives off a diet of netto white cider, wotsits, comics and salad - well, you've got to do your five a day haven't you?

You can find it here.

As you were, soldier.

I found a pair of old Docs...

I watched a couple of vintage documentaries about two of my favourite writers on Ye Olde Interwebs this week that I haven't seen for bloody years. I guess it says a lot about my particular strain of temperament that [a] I can get genuinely excited about watching vintage documentaries I haven't seen in bloody years and, [b] I never previously thought of checking the likes of YouTube or GoogleVideo for hot-damn, good-shit examples of the aforementioned [a] that I didn't bother videotaping when they were first broadcast. Proof if proof were needed, then, that I'm still an analogue man living in a digital world.

Anyhow, the first was an BBC Arena doc from 1994 about SF author Philip K Dick called A Day in the Afterlife. I was 23 when I last saw it and, until then, the only PKD book I'd read was Do Androids Dream Electric Sheep in my capacity as a dutiful fan of the film Blade Runner. After watching the doc, I greedily devoured every PKD book I could lay my badly-manicured mitts on.

This is it:



Worth watching for the fake, Ubik-style PKD commercials presented by two of my heroes, fellow PKD fans Terry Gilliam & Elvis Costello.

The other vintage doc I revisited this week was brought to my attention that sage of online omniscience, Gentleman Pete Ashton. Called Monsters, Maniacs and Moore it's about the Bard of Northampton himself, comics writer extraordinaire Alan Moore [who, as Pop Will Eat Itself once astutely observed, "Knows the score"]. The last time I saw this one was when it was first broadcast in 1987. I was even younger then.

Unlike the PKD doc, this didn't turn me onto the works of the Bearded One: it was more a case of preaching to the converted. Watching it now, two decades later, reminds me of how exciting comics were back then. This was the period of Moore's Watchmen and Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns - of Barefoot Gen and Maus - when even Marvel Comics were publishing English language editions of Moebius albums. To put it another way, this was a period when comics seemed to grow up just as I was supposed to be growing out of them.

Part 1 is below [parts 2-4 are here]:



Monsters, Maniacs and Moore was part of an 80s documentary series called England, Their England which was broadcast by what we used to call Central TV. That's right, this brilliant and thoughtful documentary about a staggeringly brilliant writer working in a widely despised medium was broadcast on ITV. Possibly at prime-time.

Times have certainly changed.

Heath Ledger 1979-2008

I heard about Heath Ledger's death just before I went to bed last night and it floored me. Sad, sad news. This was a formidable talent who was at his prime and, I'm certain, would have gone from strength to strength.

He also played The Joker in the forthcoming The Dark Knight, the sequel to my all-time favourite superhero flick, 2005's Batman Begins. From what I've seen of this performance already it looks as though Ledger more than nailed it. Dark Knight co-star Michael Caine recently had this to say about his performance:

“I tell you the big surprise in the new ‘Batman’ — Heath Ledger as the Joker,” Caine told reporters in New York Tuesday. “He’s fantastic. He’s gone in a different direction than Jack (Nicholson) … Jack was like a really scary old, nasty old uncle with a funny face. Heath is like the most murderous psychopath you’ve ever seen on the screen,” Caine said.

I'm still struggling to process this news. It's so out of the blue. This is a sad loss to Cinema, but let's remember it's a greater loss to his family. They have my deepest sympathies.

Brum Tig: I'm "It" Now

I've been tagged by my new pal, the smart and feisty local Blogging journo Joanna Geary. I suppose I should explain what the Hell that means.

Jon Bounds of the excellent Birmingham: It's Not Shit website (they of the recent Spotted Dog Pub Landlord John Tighe-winning Brummie of the Year Awards) has come up with a novel way to help promote this fine city's thriving community of bloggers. It's called Brum Blog Tig and Jon's rules are as follows:

• Each player starts with an odd, but fun, fact about Brum and one odd, but fun, fact about their blog.
• At the end of your blog, you need to choose two people to get tagged and list their names.
• Tag your post “birminghamUK” and “brumblogtig” (the second one is a memetag).
• People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (with their version of the post) and post these rules (or link to them here). They can tie it in with their particular subject if they so wish.
• Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.
  

So - without any further ado - here's My fact about Brum:

The Digbeth area has long been known as the spiritual home to the city's Irish community, but did you know that one of Ireland's most famous literary sons - a certain James Augustine Aloysius Joyce - once resided there?

James Joyce and his lover Nora Barnacle arrived in Birmingham in 1920. They were about to embark on a new life in Paris after their lengthy self-imposed exile in Trieste, and in those days Digbeth's Coach & Horse Station was a common stopover point for journeys between the the former Austro-Hungarian Empire and France. This involved a time-consuming 1,300 mile detour, which was - at the time - a common feature of short-haul European travel, despite the fact that SatNavs had not been invented yet.

Joyce - an Irish emigre with a fondness for booze, lock-ins and a thriving live music scene - immediately felt at home in Digbeth. Nora, by contrast, instantly despised the area. After years of living in impoverished exile she longed for the style, sophistication and readily available boeuf bourguignon of the fashionable Parisian scene. According to contemporary eyewitness reports, she tried to drag her suitcases onto a Paris-bound coach and insisted that Joyce should get her "the Hell away from this fecking shithole". Joyce stubbornly refused, and tried to drag her suitcases out of the Coach Station and into a nearby pub. This luggage-based tug-of-war soon escalated into characteristically violent confrontation between the hot-tempered lovers which lasted just over a fortnight. According to Richard Ellmann, the row only ended after Joyce - who by this stage was suffering from a cut lip and broken spectacles - hastily composed a conciliatory lyrical poem to Nora entitled "In the Coach Station at Digbeth":

O cracked lookingglass
The flesh of lip now parted
By repeated blows to my skull
From your suitcase

Following the fight, Joyce and Nora left the coach station and found lodgings at a nearby public house called The Dislocated Arms, and it was there that Joyce set about forming his first and last band. According to Joyce scholar Hugh Jenner's definitive study of this period (C'mon Feel The Joyze, 1988), the resulting band - 'Molly and Her Bloomers' - were pioneers of the interwar industrial music scene. Unfortunately, their bulky musical instruments - which included heavyweight manufacturing equipment like conveyor belts, steel rolling mills and even a viaduct - prevented them from getting booked into adequately sized venues and made touring prohibitively expensive.

Frustrated by these setbacks to his fledgling musical career, Joyce submitted to Nora's persistent demands and decided to leave Birmingham and resume their journey to Paris. Before they left, though, Joyce indulged himself in a mammoth pub-crawl of the area. This event was recorded in his personal journals and - according to Ellmann and others - formed the basis of his masterpiece Finnegans Wake:

Riverrun, past the Adam and Eve, from Pershore Street to bend of Rea, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Ceol Castle and environs.

That's my Brum Fact. Here's my Blog Fact:

Not everything I write here is absolutely true.


I'm tagging Pete Ashton and Dave Metcalfe.

Neologism: Generation X-Wing

Generation X-Wing noun A generation of people born between the mid 1960s and the mid 1970s who's childhood and adult life can be characterised by a fanatical devotion to George Lucas' original Star Wars Trilogy.


Disillucased adj An extreme, specific form of mid-life crisis common amongst members of Generation X-Wing [see above]. Characteristics of this psychological disorder include an overwhelming sense of betrayal, regrets for wasting so much of one's youth watching low-grade space opera and a firmly-held conviction that - whatever anyone else might say - "Han shot first". First identified in 1997, cases of Disillucasism reached epidemic proportions in the weeks following the theatrical release of The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones.

Blurt at the Curate's Egg this Thursday

For the benefit of those who live in and around Birmingham, Al Hutchins and the Courtesy Group are hosting a Curate's Egg night with Blurt at the Hare & Hounds this Thursday. Here's the flyer:



I hadn't heard of Blurt before, but their Wikipedia entry intrigues me:

Blurt's compositions are based around repetitive minimalistic guitar and/or saxophone phrases with relentless, machine-like drum beats, over which Ted Milton orates his lyrics in a variety of "voices" that betray his days as a puppeteer. The overall effect is hypnotising, compelling and sometimes even unsettling.

Blurt have a very strong live reputation due to the extra-ordinary
theatrical talents of Ted Milton.

Blurt's music is featured on the soundtrack of the German movie
"Abendland."

Sounds good to me.


Al should be commended for continuing to offer an alternative to what you'd expect from an alternative music night. If that makes sense. I went to several Curate's Egg nights last year and enjoyed them immensely. One of them (with Damo Suzuki in August) made it into my Top 10 Gigs of 2007 and another one (with Gallon Drunk in November) that probably should have. I wrote about the former here, but never got 'round to writing about the latter, which is a shame as it was bloody fantastic.