The Ministry Of Truth

“Tarkovsky is for me the greatest, the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film as it captures life as a reflection, life as a dream.”

- Ingmar Bergman

I first came across Andrei Tarkovsky when I was 15, reading a review in The Radio Times of a film called Rosie Dixon – Night Nurse (Justin Cartwright, 1978). The quote which caught my eye was that this film made “Carry on Doctor look like a Tarkovsky movie”. I had no idea at the time who Tarkovsky was, but because of this quote, I wanted to find out. Shortly after this, I went to live in France, where luckily for me, Tarkovsky’s films are shown on the telly.

Whilst not a member of any avant-garde movement, Tarkovsky was without question experimental, non-linear and defiantly elliptical in his approach to film-making. How one reacts to a Tarkovsky film depends for the most part on whether the viewer is “willing or ready to consider the meaning and aim of their existence in any higher sense” when going to the cinema. For him, an unwillingness to do so “is often masked by the vulgarly simplistic cry, ‘I don’t like it!’ ‘It’s boring!’ - like the utterance of a man born blind who is being told about a rainbow. He simply remains deaf to the pain undergone by the artist in order to share with others the truth he has reached.”

Right. So having established, therefore, that we’re not in Ron Howard territory, what of the films themselves? Well what one cannot sensibly deny, is Tarkovsky’s mastery and invention in terms of the creation of imagery – the language of Cinema. Each sequence of a Tarkovsky film may resonate with many other art forms, such as painting, poetry, theatre and ballet, but it also differentiates itself and distinguishes itself from them. His use of timing, movement, camerawork and the integration of sound to create images that remain unforgettable is beyond doubt - whether they mean anything to you, unaccompanied as they are by conventional plotting, characterization or dialogue, is for you to find out.

Tarkovsky’s breakthrough film (and his most accessible) was a moving account of the life of the tortured 15th Century Russian artist Andrey Rublyov (1966), unveiled this week as one of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s two favourite films*. He followed this with his most popular film, Solyaris (1972) based on a short story by science fiction writer Stanislaw Lem. Both pictures marked him out as a filmmaker who believed utterly in the primacy of the image (or the sequence of images) to communicate with the viewer, over the script. This appeared entirely excusable in the case of Solyaris, a genre film, but the long takes, lack of cutting, variable pacing and cavernous silences, punctuated by occasional, disquietingly disconnected bursts of classical music, came to characterise his entire body of work, which later dealt only with humanity at its rawest.

The impact of Tarkovsky’s films at first was one of massive polarization of interest: between those who were interested and those who weren’t. On the one hand leading European critics recognised and hailed a modern master; on the other hand came a massive, baffled shrug of shoulders from cinemagoers. It was never going to be a money-spinner. Tarkovsky once said that he “loathe[d] the concept of ‘entertainment’ in the Cinema, as it degrades the author and the viewer”. You don’t say, Andrei.

What Tarkovsky saw as the meaning of Cinema was “juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, relating a person to the whole world.” The last image of Solyaris, with the camera drawing back into the sky, revealing the principal character’s house and the wasteland around it, to be merely a tiny island in a world otherwise entirely underwater, illustrates this vision rather well. Silence, solitude, but also simplicity, abound in his work.

Like many other filmmakers, Tarkovsky was evangelical in his belief that the genius of an artist is revealed not in the absolute perfection of his work, but in absolute fidelity to himself and in commitment to his own passion. We often say we prefer a film-maker’s ‘personal films’, but for Tarkovsky, there could be no other kind.

Of the later films he completed before his premature death of lung cancer in a Parisian hospital in 1986, three are now acknowledged masterpieces of 20th Century Cinema: Stalker (1979), Nostalghia (1983) and Offret (The Sacrifice, 1986). The SMIC comes from my own personal favourite, Zerkalo (The Mirror, 1975). In Zerkalo, a writer who is dying seeks to conjure up images from his childhood. Insodoing, his memory becomes like a camera and plays the tricks a camera plays, heightening certain details which otherwise appear irrelevant and interspersing the images with precise sounds. The images that he conjures up are of course always striking (or they would have been forgotten) and they may be accurate or may not: they reside half way between a dream and an eyewitness account.

I urge anyone with an open mind who hasn’t already done so, to devote 120 minutes of their time to a Tarkovsky film. As the man himself would have it:

“Touched by a masterpiece, a person begins to hear in himself that same call of truth which prompted the artist to his creative act. When a link is established between the work and its beholder, the latter experiences a sublime, purging trauma. Within that aura which unites masterpieces and audience, the best sides of our souls are made known, and we long for them to be freed. In those moments we recognize and discover ourselves, the unfathomable depths of our own potential, and the furthest reaches of our emotions.”

*[...the other favourite being The Muppet Christmas Carol (Brian Henson, 1992) , which erodes the prelate’s credibility somewhat – surely The Muppets Take Manhattan (Frank Oz, 1984) is superior?].

I awoke this Friday morning with a metaphorical spring in my step - I had a day’s leave from work.  My mood quickly slumped when I realised today was also my 37th birthday.  To cheer myself up I dragged my Motown t-shirt over my head.

Pottered around, did a bit of this and that, had a relaxing and nice enough day, went to the movies this afternoon with the Minster’s Wife.  Saw Burn After Reading - not one of the Coens’ finest but watchable enough and funny in places.  (And incidentally “Pete” Bradshaw, your comment “Exasperatingly, the fundamental plot-point of how Cox’s CD finds its way into the gym is fudged” is complete bollocks.  It slipped from Cox’s wife’s lawyer’s secretary’s gymbag - there was a whole scene about it.  Duh!  You get paid to watch movies: why don’t you actually watch them, dipshit?)

Got home, switched on the 6pm Radio 4 news to learn that Levi Stubbs, the lead singer of The Four Tops, died in his sleep this morning at his home in Detroit.

Now it’s obviously not up there with the loss of a family member but it’s taken the edge off this particular birthday, I can tell you.

I still don’t really know what I want to say, except that for me Levi Stubbs stands with Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and Aretha Franklin as one of the four definitive soul voices.

There are many other phenomenal singers who play a large part in my life, but those are the four to whom I have returned time and again in my 37 years and 18 hours on the planet to date.  Whatever else I may regret about my words, thoughts and deeds over that time, I don’t regret a single second spent listening to those four singers.

Perhaps I just want to say what I hope someone will say about me when I’m no longer here: thank you, Mr. Stubbs - your life has made my life a better experience.

The Four Tops in 1966
(L to R: Abdul Fakir, Levi Stubbs, Lawrence Payton and Renaldo Benson)

I had deliberately not said anything about Paul Newman’s passing for various reasons.

I was, for one thing, conscious that this blog has turned of late into something like an anthology of eulogies to a succession of towering cultural figures who have sadly passed way over recent weeks and months.

And while I can rattle off a bunch of Newman movies I have enjoyed enormously, it would be dishonest of me to claim I am any kind of expert in his career.  Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid is one of the best movies of the past 50 years - one of those rare films in which everything just works; The Sting was almost as good; he was colossal in The Verdict (how he didn’t win an Oscar for that I’ll never understand - Ghandi was good but…); The Hustler, Cool Hand Luke, The Long, Hot Summer, Hud and The Color Of Money are all immensely watchable and The Towering Inferno remains a universal guilty pleasure.

But he was a great actor and, by all accounts, a mightily decent man: we all know that Newman’s profits from the Newman’s Own food range went to charity - perhaps not so many of us knew until we read the obituaries that those profits had totalled $250 million in the company’s 25-year existence.

At 83, Newman literally was almost the last of his generation: of that stature, only Clint Eastwood, at 78, remains and we should treasure him while we can.

Last night, though, I watched two interviews from the BBC’s archive that reminded me of what we have lost - both in terms of Newman and his like, and the way in which the experiences of such individuals are captured for posterity.

BBC Four is having a week-long season called The Art Of Arts TV, looking back at the way in which television documentaries have tackled the subject of art and culture.  As part of this season, the channel has screened some exerpts of interviews conducted by Huw Wheldon as part of the landmark Monitor series of the Fifties and Sixties (of which he was editor) including a 1960 interview with Orson Welles and a 1965 interview with Alfred Hitchcock.

Sadly neither interview ran its full course (it’s entirely possible the full recordings no longer survive) but for 30 glorious minutes (15 minutes apiece) we were treated to unhurried, intelligent conversation about the art and craft of film-making, the stories that inspired their plots, their aims and intentions, and the techniques they employed.

(The Hitchcock interview sadly is not online, but the Welles interview can be seen on BBC iPlayer for the next four days.)

Newman was not, of course, as great a director as either Welles or Hitch but he was certainly a Hollywood legend: as well as, I dare say, some fantastic anecdotes about nights on the tiles with Brando, Redford, McQueen et al, the experience he accumulated over his 50-year career could have provided a valuable resource both to students and historians of modern popular culture and to aspiring actors.

I can’t remember the last time I saw on British television someone other than a politician interviewed for more than 10 minutes at a stretch in a studio, by an intelligent, knowledgeable and articulate interviewer interested in more than simply plugging the subject’s latest product.  And yet you hop on a Eurostar and you can barely navigate the French TV schedules for serious (and some not-so-serious) talk programmes.

It must have happened since but I’m struggling to think of any such interviews since the demise of programmes such as Wogan and Des O’Connor Tonight, both of which would sometimes devote entire 45-60 minute shows to one guest.

I can’t imagine Wheldon spent the unaired parts of the interviews quizzing Welles or Hitch about their private lives, searching for the quote or revelation that would make the following day’s tabloid front pages - and perhaps that’s why true legends were prepared to appear: they knew they would only be talking about their art.

Only Bravo’s Inside The Actors Studio (shown in the UK on Sky Arts) comes anywhere close these days - and even then it is a rushed affair because it is as much about the ego of the host, the insufferable James Lipton, as it is about his guest.  Both Newman and Eastwood have appeared on that programme, as has almost every other American actor and director of note.  Oh, and Ben Affleck.

To the best of my knowledge, Paul Newman wrote no autobiography: it’s sad to think that he may have taken the bulk of his experience with him to the racetrack in the sky.  May he race in peace.

1. Max Bygraves is still alive.

2. Mélissa Theuriau has got married and is pregnant (six months, a boy).

Initially on learning this news I resolved to kill either myself or her husband.

Then I discovered she’s married actor and comedian Jamel Debouzze, who was very good in Amélie, and I can therefore just about forgive them both.

Seriously, though, just one more time for the road……

3. No Country For Old Men is really very good indeed.

4. The Dark Knight is really not.

5. They’re making a sort-of-sequel to Streets Of Fire. Holy shit!

6. I am in love. Please allow me to introduce Pilar López de Ayala.

The Minister’s Wife’s biggest disappointment is the Minister’s predictability - cf. #1 on the Minister’s Laminated List for the past 17 years:

7. I hate being so predictable.

8. No matter how vapid, insane and unimaginably pathetic the Republican Party seems, it can always get vapider, insaner and patheticer.

9. No matter how vapid, insane and unimaginably pathetic the Labour Party seems, it can always get vapider, insaner and patheticer.

10. No matter how vapid, insane and unimaginably pathetic the Premier League seems, it can always get vapider, insaner and patheticer.

It’s good to be back.

But enough about me.  How are you?

The hardest thing about writing about Martin Scorsese (particularly bearing in mind the Minister’s admiration for the man) is finding something new to say about him. Since the death of Stanley Kubrick in 1999 it is difficult to think of a more respected filmmaker alive. What is more, Scorsese himself is such a scholar of Cinema that if there is anything that hasn’t been said about his work by his many admirers in the critical establishment, it has probably been said by Scorsese himself.

It struck me after selecting this SMIC that if one were to try and draw up a short list of contenders for sublime moments in Scorsese’s films, about half a dozen would have one thing in common: they would involve a soliloquy, and more often than not, it would be delivered by Robert De Niro. For a director who appears to love the use of the camera, this is perhaps surprising, but it reveals a lot about what makes Scorsese a great filmmaker.

Whether it be the edgy, childlike, improvised repartee of Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976), in front of his mirror (”you talkin’ to me?”), the edgy, childlike, fantasy banter of Rupert Pupkin in The King of Comedy (1979) (again in front of the mirror) (”Six weeks? It’s impossible!”), or Johnny Boy’s edgy, childlike protestations in Mean Streets (1974) (”I’m gonna pay ‘im next week. I’m gonna PAY HIM!”) there is a fascination in Scorsese’s work with letting the protagonist lay himself bare through talking, uninterrupted, at length…and eventually talking himself out.

No-one has ever better captured the combination of danger and pathos of that most complex of species: Scorsese is the great director of the American male. And De Niro, like Brando before him, was its finest prototype on screen. What the “physical” tradition of male actors (Cagney, Brando, Dean, De Niro, Kinski, Depardieu) brought to Cinema, apart from the absence of any artifice whatsoever, was the sometimes painful experience of watching an actor appearing to genuinely undergo an emotional experience as he acted.

But it isn’t as simple as De Niro the actor being the mouthpiece of Scorsese the tortured male. Both Taxi Driver and Raging Bull were written by the venerable angry beast of 70s cinema, Paul Schrader, who also collaborated with Scorsese on The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) (where the prime De Niro role of Judas was taken by Harvey Keitel, presumably for fear that Willem Dafoe might be lost in the flames if De Niro were cast).

In addition, Scorsese had with him on these films the considerable talents of editor Thelma Schoonmaker and above all, director of photography Michael Chapman. Chapman had cut his teeth as Gordon Willis’s camera operator on the not insignificant The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972) and also held the camera for Spielberg on Jaws (1975), before lighting Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. There is no element of luck in this: Welles was lucky on Citizen Kane (1941) that RKO designated Gregg Toland to look after him, but Scorsese is ruthless and meticulous in his selection of only the finest available talent to work on his pictures, all of whom must share his scholarly cinematic sensibility.

It is the importance of this collaboration which makes Scorsese a “Hollywood” auteur – a director of great artists, like Griffith or DeMille before him, but every bit a European-style auteur like Rossellini or Bergman, whose films he had secretly admired whilst growing up in the tough New York district of Queens.

So whilst this artistry is what helps make the SMIC sublime - consider the mise-en-scene and editing of what would otherwise be a simple shot of a man in his dressing room - the icing on the cake is the substance of the scene itself: the perfect use of an apposite cinematic reference to exemplify the state of La Motta’s life, the legendary car scene in On The Watefront (Elia Kazan, 1954) where Terry Molloy (Brando) upbraids his brother Charlie (Rod Steiger) for having ended his career in its prime by forcing him to take a dive.

And this is where De Niro’s performance in Raging Bull goes beyond anything else in Scorsese’s work and beyond almost anything else besides. La Motta is certainly a Terry Molloy, a washed-up boxer, firmly ensconced in ‘Palookaville’, but one who has transferred his meagre celebrity to showbusiness – delivering monologues from theatre and film to cabaret audiences. And naturally, he is a mediocre speaker. Just as to see a magnificent athlete reduced to a pathetic hulk of a man, to see one of the most demonstrative actors of his generation monotonously mumbling mistiming and misquoting classic lines of dialogue delivered by his predecessor 30 years before, piles pathos upon pathos. Ambitious, courageous, devastating filmmaking. Oh, and as Mark Kermode might say, men are permitted to cry.

And the original version of the speech from On The Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954):

I wonder whether the Minister’s enthusiasm and support for the works of Martin Scorsese will extend to his purchasing a ticket for his local picturehouse’s showing of The Rolling Stones: Shine A Light?

Now that’s a dilemma Euthypro would be proud of.

I won’t attempt an obituary of Charlton Heston, who died yesterday aged 84, as this should be left to proper film historians and scholars, but I will simply, if I may, make the following observations.

Heston was an actor of immense stature and gravitas who brought an effortless dignity to his roles and deserves substantial recognition for his body of work and influence.

He belonged to what we might call the ‘ancient tradition’ of the American leading man, along with the likes of John Wayne, Henry Fonda, Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford, who eschewed the theatrical mannerisms (Cagney) and methods (Brando) of more (justly) celebrated actors and who remained consistent in this approach throughout their careers*.

These actors did precisely nothing to move the medium on, save only to the extent that with both their popularity and skill they first enabled, then collaborated with, the greatest directors (Wyler, Ford, Capra, Welles, Leone, Hitchcock, Polanski, Eastwood, Spielberg) to make wonderful pictures. They were hired for their ability to make the films great through their acting, not to produce ‘great performances’.

What the likes of Wayne and Heston did was to capture the basic essence of screen acting and ground it, providing a historical testament and a lesson to that vast majority of aspiring film actors who don’t have the innovative genius of a Cagney, Brando or DeNiro: ‘less is more’. Some of today’s most watchable and effective leading men have clearly benefited from the Wayne-Heston tradition (think Mark Ruffalo in Zodiac (David Fincher, 2006), or Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007)). They don’t draw attention to their performances, but without their performances, these superb films wouldn’t work.

If only for his influence in getting Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) made, we have a lot to be grateful to Charlton Heston for. But generations of actors will want to mark his passing, for being an actor who rose above the tide as it turned this way and that, and showed that in film acting, if you’ve got something that really works, it will always work.

*[The temptation to identify a strong pattern of conservative politics in the ‘ancient tradition’ is worth indulging but I think ultimately unhelpful, certainly in the case of both Eastwood, a humanist whose body of directorial work alone obliterates any attempt to associate his personal stance with that of Dirty Harry, and Heston, who loudly campaigned in support of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Wayne, Fonda and Ford are harder to defend on this ground.]

Had I remembered that the movie Deja Vu brought together the unholy trinity of Tony Scott, Jerry Bruckheimer and Val Kilmer, it would not have made it onto my Lovefilm DVD rental list.

I say “remembered” because I suspect I read and heard reviews on its theatrical release in December 2006, made a mental note to avoid it at all costs and consequently didn’t cough up good money to see it.

I cannot recall witnessing such a grotesque waste of money for some time.  Shite, shite, shite, shite, shite, shite, shite.

Two hours of my life wasted.  Well, not entirely wasted - I drank a nice bottle of red and ate some Easter chocolate.

Inexplicably the Minister’s Wife wouldn’t let me eject the damned DVD after 30 minutes, as I suggested, but fulsomely agreed with me as the final credits rolled that the debacle we had just witnessed was indeed inexcusably bad on every level.  (If I’d known the aim of the evening was to expose ourselves to poor dialogue, predictable scripts, patchy acting and pedestrian directing I could have cut out the middle man, saved myself a couple of quid and just left ITV1 playing.)

Depending on which website one chooses to believe, the production budget for Deja Vu was either $75,000,000 or $80,000,000.

If Hollywood wants to produce and release such unadulterated fanny, why don’t they just point a digital camera at a random minge for two hours, project that onto a 40 foot high screen and donate the other $74,999,000 to charity?

Deja Vu grossed $181,000,000 in cinemas across the globe and another $40,000,000 in DVD sales in the US alone.  The Minister and his wife have five degrees between them, so what the fuck do we know?

While I’m spitting venom, it seems it may now be time to confess to my preposterous loathing of Diane Ernestine Earle Ross and everything she stands for.

Don’t get me wrong - I like a lot of music with which Diane Ross has been involved.  I Hear A Symphony, You Can’t Hurry Love, You Keep Me Hangin’ On, Love Child, Someday We’ll Be Together, Upside Down, Chain Reaction - these are seriously good pop records and there are at least another dozen Supremes/Ross tracks almost as good.

And yet, and yet.  Ross is at best a serviceable singer with limited range and a relatively weak voice - Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson were both technically much more proficient and could actually “do” emotion.  The only reason Diane Ross ended up front and centre as Diva Diana is because she was “do”-ing Berry Gordy.

The merest mention of Diane Ross on the TV or radio can send me into an involuntary Tourette’s-style rant that is both irrational and Pavlovian.

The reason for mentioning this is that one of my favourite websites, Popdose, this week published an article that helped me realise that I was not alone.

Berry Gordy is a powerful man. Not only did he found Motown Records, building a musical empire that allowed blacks to crossover into what had pretty much been a white-controlled music industry, but almost as amazing, he was able to convince a young Diana Ross that her crap doesn’t stink, and she has not deviated from that belief one iota over the past 45 or so years. In an industry of big egos, the one belonging to Miss Ross (remember, she must be addressed as such or you will be thrown out — and don’t you dare look her in the eyes!) is likely the biggest, and she has wielded it to not only obtain her huge success, but to build herself into a prick so immense that it would make porn stars gasp.

Now that, my friends, is what you call an opening paragraph.

While neither the best singer nor most attractive member of The Supremes, Ross did have one important thing up her sleeve, namely, Mr. Gordy’s penis. After unsuccessfully pursuing Smokey Robinson, Ross set her sights on (the married and 15 years older) Gordy. As the mistress of Motown’s founder, she was able to gain full power over the group, becoming its lead singer, getting its name changed to Diana Ross and the Supremes, and upstaging the other members, eventually leaving and employing the full power of the Motown promotional machine behind her solo career, while The Supremes were left to sputter out slowly over the course of the ’70s. Ross, meanwhile, ended up bearing Gordy’s child in 1971, but did not publicly acknowledge who the real father was for 22 years, until she released and was promoting her autobiography.

Bravo, Matthew Bolin!  I didn’t need anyone else to confirm what I’ve always thought (though I’ve always planned to be among the first to buy the long-since-written, honest-for-the-first-time Ross biographies that will emerge shortly after her death and she can’t sue anymore) but - on the grounds that there is safety in numbers and that it’s always nice to be proven right - genuinely, thank you.

The first notable use of ironic juxtaposition between a scene and its soundtrack was in the final scene of the James Cagney film Public Enemy (William Wellman, 1931) wherein Cagney winds up his gramophone and selects an instrumental version of John Kellette’s Broadway classic I’m Forever Blowing Bubbles, which then continues to play out during his unexpectedly violent death. The shock of the scene (and the subsequent notoriety of the film) was as much due to the jarring contrast with the traditional emotions associated with a showtune as it was to the brutality of the character’s execution (and consequent downbeat ending). Since then, the technique has been deployed with alacrity by many a director and with mixed results.

For one of the best examples of ironic juxtaposition, we have to turn to film makers who have made the confusion of genres and audience expectations into their own personal hallmark: the Coen Brothers. Their films might appear on their face to be firmly placed in clearly definable categories, whether it be film noir (Blood Simple (1984), Fargo (1996)) comedy (Raising Arizona (1987), The Big Lebowski (1998)) or period fresco (Barton Fink (1991), The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)) but to lovers of their work, their voice is so unique (and so richly varied) as to be uncategorisable. None of the abovementioned films can be so easily nailed down. They play with audiences’ preconceptions of genres within all their films and continually mix and match different dramatic impulses to create a fully sensurramic experience for the viewer.

But this isn’t all playful nonsense or overt artistry. There is a deeply uncomfortable scene in the Coen’s latest, highly-decorated and engaged film No Country for Old Men (2007) wherein the psycopathic Anton Chigurh toys with an elderly gas station attendant and invites him to toss a coin for what the audience knows to be his life. The scene is satisfying because it provides the thrill of danger (the fear of death) with the quotidien humour of misunderstanding and the sadness intrinsic in the film’s title: the audience finds itself genuinely laughing, genuinely frightened and genuinely sad. The mix of emotions intended for the entire duration of the film is thus brought down to a micro-level.

But lest we forget ourselves, back to the SMIC. In the Coen’s uber-stylish Irish gangster film Miller’s Crossing (1990) Leo O’Bannon (Albert Finney) is a wanted man, and two men are despatched to dispose of him, but O’Bannon, who has just put on folk classic ‘Danny Boy’ and settled into bed with a cigar, is having none of it. A moment of pure pleasure and indulgence, quite apart from its virtuosic mise-en-scene, the sequence has suspense, slapstick humour, pathos and what amounts to ultraviolence, all underscored with the purest, sweetest of tunes. Enjoy.

A few random and entirely unconnected thoughts.

Top banana: Jonathan Coulton has sold out his London gig on Thursday night.

“If you don’t make to this one I’ll be back soon. Apparently there’s an audience over there. Who knew?“

The full judgment in the McCartney-Mills divorce is fascinating for the glimpse it gives into the lives of phenomenally wealthy people.  I have read it all unlike, I suspect, most of the “commentators” whoring themselves around the meeja today.  Mr Justice Bennett’s ruling is not only well reasoned and well written, he bent over backwards to be seen to be fair to both parties and achieved his aim with adroitness.

I don’t intend to rake over the ashes of this ghastly spectacle but I was impressed by the fact that though Bennett J pointed out some of Ms. Mills’ more lavish financial demands:

“She claims… £30,000 p.a. for equestrian activities (she no longer rides), £39,000 p.a. for wine (she does not drink alcohol)…”

even he felt it unnecessary to comment on one particular assertion:

“She says she helped him write songs.”

I’ve also caught up today with a couple of Joe Queenan’s recent The Vinyl Word columns for The Guardian, which are rarely less than excellent reads.  I loved one passage in his recent column about Otis Redding:

“Dock of the Bay, one of the only pop tunes of the 60s that has a significant whistling component, was co-written by Steve Cropper, one of the few living legends whose legend derives from something other than having been around for a long time.  Lead guitarist with the equally admired Booker T & The M-Gs, Cropper wrote Dock of the Bay with Redding, Knock on Wood with Eddie Floyd, and In the Midnight Hour with Wilson Pickett.  He is often identified as one of the greatest living guitarists, raising the question: if Steve Cropper is such a fabulous songwriter and one of the greatest living guitarists, how come Lenny Kravitz has all the money?”

Finally, how genuinely very sad it is to learn of Anthony Minghella’s sudden death at the terribly early age of 54.

I greatly liked David Puttnam’s tribute:

“He started as a writer, he was not a stylist as a director. He saw himself as a storyteller and his films were very well told, beautifully made and beautifully acted.”

One of the best writer-directors has gone and we just don’t have enough to lose a talent like Minghella’s so young.  My respects to his wife and children.

There are times when traditional hostilities should be put temporarily aside; this is such a time, as Peter Bradshaw’s conclusion deserves to be highlighted:

“With his passing, cultural life in this country has descended one or two IQ points.”

Spot on.