Review of "High Caucasus: A Mountain Quest in Russia’s Haunted Hinterland" by Tom Parfitt

I was expecting a sort of "Between the Wood and The Water" set in the Caucasus, but it turned out to be not so much of a posh-boy jaunt with heartwarming characters, and much more gruelling. Lots more fear (bears and wild boar, and the constant scanning for Islamist fighters), lots more unpleasantness - the food is shit much of the time, the accommodation terrible, the police and bureaucrats corrupt and menacing. From time to time he appreciates the beauty of his surroundings, but he also details the physical discomfort of lots of walking - feet, legs, hips...

And in the background there's his PTSD from his experiences in actual terrorist episodes in Beslan and elsewhere. 

So not an easy read, or a good one for night-time, but worth the time.

Review of American Fiction

Surprisingly thoughtful and interesting film, about the world of books and authors, but also about race and class in contemporary America. The central character is a Black professor who writes high-culture novels that don't sell very well, overshadowed by other writers who do "ghetto" novels even though they are no more out of the ghetto than he is. As a prank he writes a ghetto novel, and then...well, I don't have to spell it all out.

Definitely worth watching. We watched it on BBC iPlayer via our smart TV's native capabilities - i.e. not via casting from the smartphone app.

Review of "The Rose of Sebastopol" by Katherine McMahon

Not completely sure about this one. I didn't enjoy it all that much. It was a bit dull some of the time, and I found myself grinding through it very slowly, which is never a good sign. Some of the writing felt very clunky, like it could have done with a further edit.

And yet I kept going, partly because I wanted to find out what happened to the characters, and along the way I found a lot that I hadn't known about Victorian medicine, and battlefield medicine (apparently the Russians invented triage), and about the Crimean War - I hadn't appreciated quite how bloody that was, almost like a trial run for WW1.

Review of The Ballad of Wallis Island

Beautiful slow poignant movie, which nevertheless manages to be quite funny. It's about a folk duo who were lovers but broke up and stopped playing together, and a lottery-winner superfan who wants to get them together for a private concert, just for him, on a lonely island off the Welsh coast.

Watched via informal distribution and USB stick.

Review of O Brother Where Art Thou

Watched again in the Middle Floor at Springhill, from a DVD, and realised that though I had warm and fuzzy feelings about this film, I'd forgotten almost all of it.

Anyway, it was great, even after 25 years - fabulous music, sharp dialogue, a good and funny plot, and good politics. The set-piece with the KKK rally, the discovery that the "reform" anti-corruption candidate for governor is the Grand Wizard, all feels very topical.

Feeding the hand that bites us

Last weekend I attended some of the Festival of Commoning, held in Stroud. There were lots of interesting talks and discussions, but there was one particularly significant moment for me. Jem Bendell, famous as a guru of XR and Deep Adaption, was down to speak on “Great Reclamation”. In retrospect the title of his talk ought perhaps to have rung a few alarm bells, but it didn’t - one assumes that an event like this ought to be a relatively safe place. 

He didn’t talk about climate or deep adaptation at all - the focus of his talk was a call for restrictions on foreigners buying or owning land in Britain. I don’t have a very strong view on this. I’m aware that lots of other countries have such restrictions, and there’s room for a balanced, evidence-based discussion on what the impact might be on the affordability of homes in Britain.

The trouble was that the language that he used was very strongly reminiscent of that used by the far right. He talked about “globalists” and “international bankers”. He spoke about how these people were “sucking the life blood out of our country”, and he said that this was directly linked to “our” children deciding not to have babies. It was all rather “Great Replacement”, and the title may have been a deliberate referece - if it wasn’t, then it’s shocking that no-one noticed. (You can see a version of what he said on his blog here, and judge for yourself whether my reaction was justified).

So when it was time for questions and contributions, I stuck my hand up and pointed this out, saying that on a day when Tommy Robinson had brought 100.000 foot soldiers on to the streets of London, it was a bad day to be fooling around with economic nationalism. I said that “globalists” was often a dogwhistle for Jews, and that focusing on “foreign” ownership of property made it seem as if it was OK for the Duke of Westminster to own huge amounts of property in Britain because he was “one of us” - in Bendell’s word, a citizen.

It would have been easy for him to have agreed that the language was - on reflection - a bit unfortunate, and that it wasn’t his intention to align himself with the far right, but he didn’t. He doubled down, said that “globalists” were the source of the problem, and that the suggestion that he might be unconsciously echoing racist and antisemitic rhetoric was just the sort of thing he’d be expecting from “guilt-ridden Guardianistas”. 

Somebody else from the floor joined in, saying that his language was wrong and bad, and that it was of a piece with the sort of thing one heard from the US far right; rather wonderfully, that person turned out to be Carne Ross, the “accidental anarchist” and former diplomat who was one of the later celebrity speakers at the event. Someone else called out that next he would start talking about the Rothschilds. Still Bendell was having none of it; he was in sympathy with Black and Brown people who couldn’t afford housing, and that was down to the globalists.

The final contribution came from a local activist with whom I’ve had my disagreements who made a generous and kind closing remark about me personally, and about the importance of being careful about language.

Afterwards a few people spoke to me - some of the organisers of the festival, who said that I’d been right to bring it up, and that Jem Bendell didn’t really mean it, and we probably agreed. A couple of others said that they’d never heard that “globalist” and “cosmopolitan” were used code-words for Jew, and I perhaps unkindly replied that they ought to get out more.

I was pretty shaken by the experience, though the solidarity I received helped make it better. Reflecting later, I thought it would of course be easy for Jem Bendell to show that he wasn’t a racist. There’s no sign that he’s an antisemite either, in the sense of someone who hates Jews. Apart from a recent engagement with the cause of Palestine and Gaza, he’s not said or written anything touching on the subject.

I think that’s the point. Antisemitism isn’t a feeling (hate), it’s an ideology - one which puts Jews at the centre of explaining how the world works and what’s wrong with it. It’s possible, and even common, to spread this ideology without personally hating Jews, and even to do it in places where there aren’t many Jews. 

And what’s wrong with it isn’t only that it’s hurtful to actual Jewish people, but that it makes everyone else stupider, and less able to understand the world as it really is. That’s the point about the expression “the socialism of fools”. Antisemitism isn’t just something that is promoted by stupid people, but something that helps to make people stupider.

AFTERWORD: Jem Bendell wrote a response to this post, which is published here. Once again, I wish to make it clear that I am not accusing Jem Bendell of being an antisemite. You can judge for yourself whether the language he uses is helpful to other people who are.

Review of Martha

A sympathetic biopic of Martha Stewart, that makes her seem almost nice. The bad parts aren't ignored, but they are spun and glossed. So we sort of know that she's horrible to minions, but it's OK because she's just a perfectionist, and everyone who was getting at her (like the SEC and the FBI and the DA) did it because she was a successful woman, not because she'd done anything really wrong.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of The Heartbreak Agency

Not-very-good German romcom - a woman starts an agency to help people suffering from heartbreak after break-ups, a journalist writes a mean article about it. He gets sacked by his new young boss because he won't retract, and finds himself grovelling for his job back which means he has to write another, nicer article, which includes receiving the heartbreak therapy...and he and the agency woman end up falling for each other, obvs...

The best bit is the location, which includes some stunning Baltic coastline, and now I want to go there. Someone seems to have described this as the "worst film ever", and it's not quite that bad.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "Dreamland" by Kevin Baker

Wow, what a book. 

I bought this for my mum, in hardback, as a birthday present years ago - I looked at the subject matter, Jewish immigrants in New York City in the early C20th and thought she'd like it. I don't know if she ever read it, which is sad.

At some point I borrowed it from her, and put it in my bookshelf, and I didn't read it either, until now. And it's pretty amazing. A multi-threaded narrative with many characters, usually told in close third person but occasionally in first person. Many but not all of the characters are indeed Jewish immigrants, though not the pious, Americanising upwardly mobile ones that we are usually presented with in this sort of narrative. They're gangsters, prostitutes, union organisers, circus freaks...

It's very vivid in its descriptions of the city and its environs, especially Coney Island, the site of the eponymous theme park "Dreamland". 

I want to read the rest of the trilogy now, even though I had previously never heard of Kevin Baker. Disappointingly he's the same age as me, but he's written so much!

Review of "Silverview" by John le Carre

Not one of his best...perhaps because it's not entirely his. He died before he finished it, and his son completed it from extensive notes. It was a bit boring, with a not entirely believable ageing Polish  antifascist disappointed by Communism as the central character - the sort of ambivalent, ambiguous disappointed old guy that Le Carre usually does well, but not so interesting here.

Review of We Live in Time

A poignant romantic drama, made much more interesting by the unusual narrative structure - non-linear, so events are jumbled up in an out-of-sequence timeline. This allows for multiple dramatic crises, whereas if it had been linear we'd have expected it to build towards one. It's got a lot of domestic drama, hard to discuss without spoiling. But it's well acted and beautifully put together, well worth watching.

Unusual good film on Netflix.

Review of Kensuke's Kingdom

Nice, mainly gentle animated film, in which a young boy is storm-washed from the deck of his parents' sailing boat and (somewhat implausibly) finds himself on a tropical island paradise presided over by the eponymous Kensuke, a former Japanese sailor whose family were all killed in the Nagasaki nuclear bombing. 

Perhaps I missed it, but I had thought that when the storm hits the family sailing boat is still in the Atlantic Ocean, heading for South Africa, which makes the presence of a Japanese sailor hard to explain. The Wikipedia article about the book makes it clear that they are in the Pacific, which makes much more sense.

Despite the subject matter I didn't get too emotionally involved - not as much as I did in the The Wild Robot, another animated film which strangely I don't seem to have reviewed. 

Review of "Toussaint Louverture: The Story of the Only Successful Slave Revolt in History" by C.L.R. James Illustrated by Sakina Karimjee and Nic Watts

As I write here quite often, I'm not a big fan of graphic novels. I find them hard to read, distracting and non-linear- maybe I have an old-fashioned attention span. This one felt different, perhaps because it's adapted from a play, and it reads like the script of a good play. I am a big fan of CLR James, and his intelligence and his willingness to deal with difficult and contradictory elements (like the slave-owning planters' enthusiasm for the French Revolution) shines through.

It's still bloody confusing though, and hard to keep track of all the currents - the revolting slaves loyal to the kings of France and Spain, the interventions of the British and the Americans, the shifting loyalties of the mulattoes and the free blacks. I'm glad there was a list of dramatis personae at the beginning, and I referred back to it more than once.

Still hard to read of Toussaint's betrayal and death without a lump in the throat, and the graphic novel removes many of the details that are in James's book The Black Jacobins.

A great introduction to the Haitian revolution though, with a good bibliography. 

Review of "Spies" by Michael Frayn

A beautiful, clever book, mostly told through the eyes of an eight-year-old boy in wartime England, though with a frame first person narrative told by the same person in his old age. It touches on everything about England - class, race, town and country (and new suburb), manners, sexuality.  Two boys who are uncertain friends play lots of fantasy-based games around their newly built suburb, which still shades into rough rural at its edges, and they create a scenario around the idea that one of their mothers is a German spy. It's hard to say more without spoiling. 

Review of The Blue Caftan

Sad, slow but engrossing Moroccan film about a man who works as a maker of embroidered kaftans, and his wife who is dying of cancer. Their business is struggling, the wife suspects their new apprentice of stealing from them, and the husband is secretly gay and goes to the hamam for casual sex with men.

Why this is described as a comedy completely escapes me. There are no laughs, though the couple laugh at something once in the film. It's about death, grief, deception, love and sex, and also about craft skill. Along the way I learned something about Moroccan society and customs, especially death and funeral customs.

This was on Channel 4, but we watched it on an old fashioned hard disc recorder at Minnie's rather than on catch-up.

Review of Deep Cover

A fun comedy-thriller that actually has some laughs. Three improv comedians (well, one is a class tutor and one has just walked in off the street by mistake) get suckered by a rogue policeman into going undercover to investigate a cigarette smuggling racket, but stumble into a much bigger and scarier drug smuggling gang war. 

It's genuinely suspenseful and funny, though don't watch it if you can't take violence.

Watched via informal distribution and a USB drive.

Review of "Veteranhood" by Joe Glenton

Interesting and thoughtful book about the politics of veterans - both the politics of the veterans themselves and the way they are used by politicians, including mainstream and far right politicians. Glenton is a good writer and he says a lot that has wider relevance, especially in terms of how the cultural left relates to actual working class people.

Review of "The Western Wind" by Samantha Harvey

Remarkable book by the author of "Orbital", and almost nothing like that. It's a first-person narrative set in the late C15th, in which the narrator is the parish priest in a not-very-prosperous west country village. It's of course embedded in the world of medieval Christianity, a mixture of theology and folk-superstitions and lots in between (how would you characterise the belief that someone who dies "un-shriven" cannot enter heaven?). There's a suspicious death that's being investigated by an outsider, a rural dean who is in effect the narrator's boss. 

What makes it quite so special is the narrative structure. It takes place over four days, but as readers we experience them in reverse order, so that the narrative really unfolds, but in an unexpected way - we learn gradually that what we think we have "seen" is actually something very different. 

Definitely worth a read. We listened to it as an audio book first, and I didn't get the structure properly until I actually read a paper copy.

Review of The End of The Tour

A very unusual film - about how David Lipsky (a journalist for Rolling Stone) goes to interview the writer David Foster Wallace by joining his writer's book tour, and the relationship that develops between them. In between it's about what goes on between writers and their subjects, and the business of book tours, and what integrity demands of reporters, and so on.

It's slow, and not so beautiful to look at, but really interesting. And now I want to read more of David Lipsky.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian" by Marina Lewycka

Everyone loved this book when it came out, didn't they? I didn't like it so much. First there's the picaresque humour - the old man acting stupidly and irrationally over the obvious exploitative and semi-crooked "tart-ish" woman, who is also what would be called by many an illegal immigrant. The first-person narrator is politically wise to the nastiness of the stereotype, but she's really having her cake and eating it - managing to have a narrative that's a bit racist and sexist while also maintaining a distance from it. And picaresque - laughing at the stupidity of an old man - doesn't sit well with me. I never understood how anyone could find Don Quixote funny.

And the Ukrainian nationalism too. The book was written before the "Orange Revolution" and all of the stuff that followed, though after the break-up of the USSR. In the post-invasion period many progressives have become a lot less critical about the darker side of Ukrainian nationalism, and the people who bang on about it tend to be "Red-Brown" stooges for Putin. But it's there, and the book mentions in passing Stephan Bandera, and Symon Petliura, as Ukrainian nationalists without even alluding to their Nazi and pogromist histories. I can't believe that most readers of the book will know who they were, and won't learn that about them.

Review of "Lessons in Chemistry" by Bonnie Garmus

Another really enjoyable novel. I watched the TV series first, which was also great, and then when it finished I was missing the characters so I read the novel. Which turned out to be a little different from the series - the Afro-American characters and the anti-racist theme of the series isn't really a thing in the book, though the main character Elizabeth Zott is a supporter of civil rights and racial equality, just as she's a feminist - probably a premature feminist, because she's between the two waves of feminism.

The TV series seems to have put some more complexity in, but also left out some of the scratchiness that's in the book - hard to write about without spoilers, but in some ways it's more critical of conservative and conventional America.

Review of "North Woods" by Daniel Mason

 Really enjoyable novel made up of different stories set in the same place through history.  I feel there ought to be a name for that but I can't think of it. In this case it's a rural local in Western Massachusetts, on the boundaries of forested wilderness. It gradually becomes more tame over the various stories, but not evenly - it goes from wilderness, to orchards, to farmland and then back to holiday-home wilderness. 

It works as a prism for American history - racism, colonial expropriation, slavery - the lot. There's a bit of a supernatural theme running through it too, with ghosts and fake mediums who turn out to have real experiences with ghosts. As with Cloud Atlas, the different episodes are told in different styles, and there are fragments of songs and poems and some pictures scattered through.

A joy - I was sorry when it finished.

Review of "Popular Resistance in Palestine A History of Hope and Empowerment" by Mazin B. Qumsiyeh

I was disappointed and upset by this book. It's not specially well written, and it feels poorly edited too - sometimes the same episode is described twice, or the same point made, within a few pages. 

But that's not the main thing that's wrong with it. Its politics and its account of history are often really bad. The first four or so chapters are a "discussion" of the role of violence in struggles of resistance, but there's nothing remotely analytical about it. Sometimes the resistance (wherever) uses violence, and sometimes it doesn't. He's obviously keen not to be seen as criticising armed struggle, whether or not it's appropriate or effective. 

Worse, there's really no distinction between different kinds of armed-struggle tactics or strategies. Sure, the South African regime and its supporters called the ANC "terrorists", but for the most part its armed wing stayed away from indiscriminate attacks on civilians, focusing instead on infrastructure. Whereas the Palestinian armed struggle focused on soft Israeli targets, with lots of attacks on civilians - kidnappings, hostage taking, and exactly the kind of bombings and shootings that had earlier been deployed by the Irgun against Palestinians in Mandate Palestine. The question here is not the abstract "do Palestinians have the right to use violence" but what kind of violence should they use. For both Fatah and later Hamas, the rhetoric was revolutionary but the tactics were those of fascism.

After this there's a long chronological account of Palestinian resistance, beginning with the Ottoman period.  The Zionists start to arrive, but there's absolutely nothing about where they are coming from or why.  As with other Palestinian and Arab Nationalist accounts of "the Zionists" they are presented as pith-helmeted colonialists. There's no indication or reflection at all as to why Jews were leaving the Russian empire. Of course the Palestinians of the time can be forgiven for not thinking about that so much - something bad was beginning to happen to them, and they correctly understood that it was going to get worse. But someone now writing a history owes their readers something better.

This tendency is exacerbated in the history of the Mandate. By the time the book reaches the 1930s it acknowledges that the flow of Zionist immigrants is increasing, but there's absolutely no account as to why. The author manages to talk about the history of this period without mentioning antisemitism or the Nazis. The only mention of the Holocaust in the book is to illustrate a point about the bad education that Jewish children in Israel receive. There's nothing at all about who made up the wave of Jewish immigrants in the immediate post-WW2 period, or about the mass emigration of Jews from Arab countries that came after that. Again, it would contradict the view that "the Zionists" were all European and American colons.

When it gets to 1967 there's a brief mention of Ahmed Shukeiri, the Egyptian-backed first head of the PLO, though no mention of his call to throw the Jews into the sea or his promise that no Jews would survive the coming war.

Overall the history in the book is like a mirror image of the bad history that I received from my Zionist education. There's lots about the pro-Zionist sympathies of the British (we were only told about the bad period in which the British tried to restrict Zionist immigration, not the preceding 16 years in which they had enabled it), and then the Americans. There is of course nothing about the way in which the USSR and the international Communist movement acted as midwives for the birth of Israel, because that would contradict the narrative that Israel was a creation of imperialism. 

It's a shame, because somewhere in there there's a better book struggling and failing to get out.  There's a lot of good documentation about the popular non-violent struggle. The account of the post-1948 and then post-1967 resistance is informative and told me lots I didn't know. Somewhere in this period some good Israelis begin to appear, though without any discussion or reflection as to what that might mean. There's a little bit of an account of Palestinians who are prepared to accept a permanent presence for Israelis, though usually in terms of them being sell-outs. At one point he does actually quote with approval that "there's no place for a second nation in Palestine", though he is far from consistent about this.

I read this on a Kindle, so it's harder to illustrate this with quotes and excerpts. In a way I'd like to write more, because this is an important juncture in the evolution of my perspective on Israel-Palestine...listening to Palestinian voices, but then not finding them easy to listen to.

Review of "The Jazz Scene" by Francis Newton

This has sat on my shelf for more than a year. Someone was clearing out his Jazz books collection, and I took this one, mainly because I remember that "Francis Newton" was a pseudonym for the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote Jazz reviews for various left wing publications.

Anyway, it turns out that it is a very good book, intelligent, informed and very sensible about Jazz, its audience, its players, and its history. The author (whatever we want to call him) situates Jazz in its historical and social context, without resorting to vulgar Marxism or daft economic determinism. Really great, well worth reading. 

Review of Benedetta

A Paul Verhoeven historical drama with heresy, blasphemy, lurid visions and lesbian nuns. Not ridiculously over the top like Ken Russel's "The Devils", this nevertheless managed to be quite salacious, but also anticlerical and anti-religious in a good way.

Benedetta is given to a convent as a quite young child, but almost immediately begins to have visions. These become progressively more lurid, but she's also doing miracles - bleeding wounds of Christ, that sort of thing. The local clerics decide to believe her (good for the pilgrimage trade), others are not so sure but she sees them off. Then the Papal Nuncio gets involved, and it's torture and burning at the stake...

Watched on Channel 4's app via Chromecast.

Review of Lots of Kids, a Monkey and a Castle

A disappointing, ramshackle, often boring film, with occasional glints of interest. It's a fly-on-the-wall documentary - no narrative or narrator - made by a son about his eighty-year-old mother.  She's not an obvious choice for a film. She's overweight, unattractive, and she doesn't stop talking. She has not much interest in other people, and little insight into her own life.

The title comes from her own declaration of what she wanted from life. The film rather glosses over how it came about that her and her husband were wealthy enough to buy the castle. It seems that money was inherited, but it's not entirely clear from who. The family were Falangists, and some members were executed "by the Reds" during the Civil War. The woman (Julita) talks about her own membership of the Falangist youth, the uniform she wore and so on; but later on she criticises Franco for abolishing the Republic, because her present-day political views extend to disapproval of the Spanish monarchy and monarchies in general.

Much of the film centres on the amount of crap that she has accumulated and preserved. The castle, and the now abandoned engineering factory that her husband once operated, are absolutely rammed full of junk - broken objects, tattered remnants of clothes that might one day be mended, and many small and labelled boxes with dolls house furniture, pins, stationary, and so on. 

That's sort of poignant, because I can't help feeling that my own life is full of crap that I am holding on to and shouldn't. The film is inter-cut with footage from home movies of the family when the children were younger, and they look to have had a fun, happy childhood - beach holidays and so on. Again, I look at that and wonder what the arc of my own life would like if it were made into a film like this.

But most of the time it's boring and depressing, and I missed some of it when I fell asleep. Ruth missed almost all of it, but still saw enough to remember how much she didn't like it.

Watched at Jane Opher's house - the old Co-op on Horns Road - as part of an ongoing series of Spanish films. The occasion was enjoyable even if the film wasn't.

Review of The Umbrellas of Cherbourg

I watched this as part of my birthday celebrations. A few months ago I found myself - unusually - listening to Radio 4, and there was a program about musicals where they raved about this as one of the best musicals ever. And then it was scheduled to be on the Stroud Film Festival, but I missed it.

So I obtained it and put it on in the Middle Floor at Springhill Cohousing - a bit of a challenge because the file was too big to copy on to a USB, and my mini PC sometimes forgets how to produce sound output from its earphone jack. But all sorted, and the showing was a success; quite a few people came, and they - like me - enjoyed it.

But it's a weird musical. Apart from the fact that there's no spoken dialogue at all, everything is sung - it's an anti-romantic romance. Sorry for the spoiler, but the main story line is that the young woman does not wait for her lover to return from the Algerian War, but marries someone else instead, because she is forgetting her absent lover even though she is carrying his child.

He comes back, marries someone else (the woman who had cared unceasingly for the dying aunt who raised him), and when the original pair meet again the moment of love has passed. There is no sense that they might yet get back together, just a feeling of a future that didn't happen.

The beautiful theme song for the film, performed by many artists, is "I Will Wait For You", but she doesn't.

Review of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

I've belated become a John Le Carre fan. I think this film captures the atmosphere of the books, especially the shabby interiors of the intelligence agency premises and safe houses. I liked the acting, but somehow I literally lost the plot - I couldn't figure out what was happening. I read the Wikipedia article about it, and realised that I'd fallen asleep and missed a major section, which might have made it easier to follow.

Watched on BBC iPlayer

Review of "L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City" by John Buntin

The ratings and reviews of this book seem to be overwhelmingly positive, and I see it's been turned into a TV series. Still, I wasn't all that impressed, though it was something to read in the small hours to help me go back to sleep. 

The central conceit is that it's a dual biography of mobster Mickey Cohen and LA Police Chief William H Parker. But Cohen is a lesser figure, and his biography and career are not all that interesting. Parker bestrode the city as it grew, and dominated its politics and its policing, and it's hard to avoid the conclusion that Buntin really wanted to write a biography of him, or should have anyway. 

The author has had a lot of help from the LAPD and various Parker-related foundations and organisations, so though it's pretty obvious from reading the book that the man was a megalomaniac and a racist, and a right-wing operator who couldn't get on with other right-wing operators (especially J Edgar Hoover), the author doesn't want to say so. The book almost ends with Parker's death, though there's a longish epilogue that covers the 1991 riots. It's not clear whether it wants to say that the riots were Parker's legacy, or that if he'd been in charge they would have been crushed more effectively - I think it wanted to have it both ways, which makes it confusing and unsatisfactory.

I read this on kindle, so I'm not putting up a cover picture. 

Review of Shoshana

 

This is a film about Shoshana Borochov, a real person who was the daughter of Dov Ber Borochov, a "Marxist Zionist". There's lots to say about his ideas and his politics, which were in my lifetime influential in a retro sort of way about young Jews with contradictory ideas about Zionism and revolutionary socialism - but the film doesn't say much about his, though it alludes to the way he would have liked Zionism to have turned out nice. 

The film is about Shoshana's relationship with a British policeman, who is part of the Mandate authority trying to fight against the Irgun and its breakaway faction Lehi. This troubled love story is the centre of the film

The Irgun suspended hostilities against the British for the duration of WW2, Lehi didn't, and famously tried to develop a relationship with the Nazis on the basis of common hostility to the British Empire.

The film does make some efforts to show the different currents within the Palestinian-Jewish community in Palestine, but it's pretty cartoon-ish. We see that the mainstream Zionists (Labour Zionists, though it doesn't really say so) don't like the Revisionist Zionists (Irgun, and then Lehi) much, but there's not all that much substance to the disagreement - though the mainstream Zionists do call the Irgun fascists, which is justified. There are occasional Palestinian-Arab victims depicted (an Irgun attack on a bus, and then bombs in marketplaces) but there are no voices from the Arab community, no Arab characters...apart from one scene where the Mandatory Police carry out frightening round-ups in a village.

The Revisionist Zionists want to proclaim a Jewish (or rather a Hebrew) state right now, even though there's nothing like a Jewish majority. The mainstream Zionists are gradualists, and believe that continued Jewish immigration will eventually produce a Jewish majority, at which point the locals will accept a Jewish state. I can't help wondering when they thought this was going to be - the 1950s? The 1960s? With the British providing the umbrella under which this demographic and political shift would take place?

The film ends with the very beginning of what Israelis call the War of Independence and Palestinian Arabs the Nakhba...but all that's shown is a group of disorganised Arab fighters running to attack a group of Haganah fighters, lying in wait with machine guns. There's no refugees, no displacement...nothing of the civil war between the Haganah and the Irgun either. 

A few details are worth noting. We see the Irgunists flyposting their posters, with the emblem of a fist holding a rifle over a map including both Palestine and Transjordan, and the slogan (in Ivrit) "Rak Kach" - that is, "Only Thus". Until this point I hadn't really appreciated the continuity between the Irgun and the Kahanist party, which was of course called "Kach".

Also, Shoshana and her mother seem to be speaking to each other in Russian - presumably this was much more common in the Yishuv than we are given to understand, though Dov Ber Borochov was a Yiddishist as well as a Zionist, and the party he founded (Left Poalei Zion) was also pro-Yiddish. 

At one point in the film some bright-eyed young Zionists say that they have recently arrived from Kiev - was this ever possible in the 1930s?

Watched via informal distribution.

Review of "Altered Carbon" by Richard Morgan

The hardest science fiction I've read for a long time, and a mashup of cyberpunk and hard boiled detective noir. I really loved it. It's been on my Kindle for years, but somehow I never got round to reading it. I must say that I couldn't follow every twist and turn of the plot - the fact that characters can die and be restored most of the time, and that they slip in and out of each other's bodies - sorry, "sleeves" - makes this harder. I couldn't explain who turned out to have done it if any of my lives depended on it. Still, it was good if not great, and I will be back for more. I have a feeling that I started to watch the TV series once, and I might even have another look at that.

Review of Radical Love: The Life and Legacy of Satish Kumar

I watched this in the company of about a hundred people who were devotees of Kumar and thought he was perhaps literally God's gift to humanity. Some of these people were friends whom I admire, and others were fascist-adjacent woo lovers, so perhaps he is some sort of Rorschach inkblot on to who you can project whatever you want. 

I was depressed and bored by the film, which at just over an hour felt way too long. Lots of spiritual practices and pilgrimages, described as if they were effective political actions. A long section with Vananda Shiva, which brought to mind the film about her watched in the same place, and which left me with the same uncomfortable feeling. 

So yeah, watched at Hawkwood as part of Stroud Film Festival. Based on the venue I had an expectation about what the film would be like, which was not disappointed. However, Ruth and I walked there across the fields and through the woods by moonlight, and that was wonderful.

Review of Conclave

A papal election thriller, with lots of twists as the various candidates are revealed to have things in their past, or even in their presents, that don't look good in a putative Pope.

Very lush to look at, but not that much actually happens - unsurprisingly, because the cardinals doing the voting are locked in to the Vatican, so all that we can really see are side conversations and voting procedures.

Sort of tense without being actually interesting, though it held our attention.

Watched via USB and informal distribution.

Review of No Other Land

Absolutely relentless documentation of the way that first the Israeli army, and then settlers, try to evict a group of Palestinian villagers from their land in the West Hebron hills. It's crushing to watch, and there's no Hollywood-style redemption. One of the film makers is a Jewish Israeli, and the villagers are suspicious of him - not unreasonably, as we see him leaving the West Bank via the Israelis-only road back into Israel. 

There's been a lot of controversy over the film, which won an Oscar for best foreign film. Unsurprisingly many Israelis think it's propaganda, but some Palestinians also condemned it because the Israeli-Palestinian team that made it didn't use the right words to denounce Israel's occupation and genocide, and were therefore guilty of "normalisation". Fortunately other Palestinians, including the villagers most directly affected, were wiser.

Watched via informal distribution, even though it was available for free on Channel 4...mainly because I wanted to show it from a USB stick on the DVD player in the Springhill Common House. Only it wouldn't play there, even though it worked fine at home.

Review of "Falling Angels" by Tracy Chevalier

It's been a long time since I read any Tracy Chevalier - so long that there aren't any reviews of the books that I did read in my blog. I had a sort of feeling that I didn't like her all that much, that "Girl With A Pearl Earring", which I did like, had been a one-off.

But this - about the English way of death, and the transition from the Victorian to the Edwardian period, is really great. Told through multiple narrators, including children and adults, and with multiple perspectives on the same events, with a background of the emerging suffragette movement. Just great.

Review of "Where The Crawdads Sing" by Delia Owens

I really enjoyed the movie a few years ago, and reading the book I see that it was really faithful to the text. I enjoyed the book too - the nature writing is lovely, the plot carried me along - shame that I couldn't enjoy the ending twist, having seen the film.

Review of Love, Divided

Spanish rom-com about two introverted people living in adjoining apartments who develop a relationship without actually meeting- he's an extremely introverted game designer, she's a wannabe classical pianist/singer. After some initial conflict about noise the film becomes about the relationship between the two, and their other relationships - she with her ex-husband and imperfect mentor, he with his business partner and friend.

It's contrived but not too bad. I was pleased that I understood a lot of the Spanish.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Leave No Trace

Sad but nicely executed film about a young girl and her dad living rough in the woods in an effort to avoid contact with authority and bureaucracy. He's a traumatised ex-veteran, she's a bright girl who appreciates what she has with her dad, but also what she's missing. 

Watched on Netflix.

Review of Triangle of Sadness

Heavy handed buy enjoyable satire about wealth and power. Young bloke model Carl is in a relationship with model-influencer Yaya, who is narcissistic and exploits him. The depiction of this, which makes up the first part of the film along with various gruesome auditions for Carl, is skin-crawlingly awful but compelling. Then she blags a trip on a luxury cruise with rich and powerful people, all of whom are horrible in different ways...and then there's a pirate attack and a shipwreck. 

Bits of it are horrible slapstick - lots of vomit as the ship hits a storm, for example - but the film carried me along.

Watched on BBC iPlayer.

Review of Baby Girl

Well, that was quite hot. Not my kind of erotic fantasy, but still quite sexy. Nicole Kidman is the CEO of a warehouse automation company, and has an affair with a young intern who gives her what she needs, which turns out to be humiliation and domination. She has a kind, loving husband, but it's not what she needs in bed. She's already been masturbating over that kind of porn while he sleeps next to her, but the intern guy is the real thing.

There's a certain amount of exploration of the issues - nothing too clever or deep, but enough to be interesting. Lots of gloomy and seedy hotel interiors, and some glossy ones too. Nicole Kidman gets to wear some nice clothes too.

And there's a treatment of the overall nastiness of corporate politics, with several people trying to blackmail Kidman's character as they find out about the affair.

Watched at the Vue Cinema.

Review of A Complete Unknown

That Bob Dylan film, which everyone has seen and everyone has liked. Not surprising, because it's very good...the acting, the cinematography, the singing - all the actors sing the tunes themselves, and do it very well. It reminded me very strongly of the days when we all had a different relationship to music, when it felt like you had found something special to you - even if you had taped it off someone else's vinyl, it felt like you had in some sense co-created it. Whereas now it just comes out of a tap in the wall, and the issue is more about how to discover or filter what's out there. 

I had a strong sense of Dylan as a genius (even though we rarely see him actually doing any writing work, just performing or jamming with others) but also as a thoroughly selfish narcissist. It's hard to feel that the politics ever really meant anything to him except as a stepping stone to a career. On the other hand seeing this film inspired me to obtain and watch "I am a noise", the Joan Baez biopic, and that has footage of the two of them singing at the 1963 March on Washington, and it's hard not to believe that must have meant something, at least at the time.

We watched this at the cinema, and I'm glad that I did. Everyone else in the cinema was of a certain age and was a fan, and I really felt a connection with tehm.

Review of Citizen Ashe

Tennis biopic of Arthur Ashe. I've watched a few tennis films lately, and I think this was the least interesting. Although the film says that Ashe was in the forefront of the struggle for Black liberation, he mainly seems to have fulfilled this role by winning at tennis. I remember that he played in South Africa and thought that had been a bad thing, but Nelson Mandela sought Ashe out when he came to the US for the first time, so maybe not.

Watched on BBC iPlayer, eventually, after several false starts.

Review of Timestalker

Embarrassingly bad. Gave up after 40 minutes

Watched via informal distribution...at least we didn't pay money to see this.

Review of Number 24

A film about the Norwegian resistance during WW2, with all the familiar themes of betrayal, collaboration, etc. It's a fairly conventional treatment - the resistance are all brave heroes, the collaborators are all monsters. It's not at all like "Black Book", the film about the Dutch resistance, which emphasises the blurred lines between resistance and collaboration.

It's gripping and well made, but not much stayed with me. Ruth on the other hand was overwhelmed by it...maybe I watch more war films than her.

On the other hand, I've just read the Wikipedia article about how collaborators were treated after the war ended, and I can't help thinking that would have made a much more interesting film.

Watched on Netflix.

Review of "The Flaming Corsage" by William Kennedy

I can't remember what happened between me and William Kennedy. I really liked his books, and then I stopped reading them. This has sat on the shelf for twenty years unread. I had a feeling that I'd started it and hadn't liked it, but I don't remember actually doing that.

Anyway I read it, and it was great. It's set in Albany around the beginning of the C20th, and it tells the story of a talented Irish-descended man who makes it...into the educated, cultured Protestant elite. He ascends from journalism on a local paper to play writing, and he marries into wealth and privilege too. There's lots about sex, and relations between rich and poor, Catholic and Protestants, men and women. The plot is quite complex...towards the end I lost it a bit, even though I was still enjoying it. It's quite a complex narrative structure too, with some switches of time-period and of narrative form...some "found" material, including fragments of the character's plays, reviews and newspaper articles, and so on.

Anyway great, and good to have rediscovered Kennedy.

Review of "Trumpet" by Jackie Kay

A striking book about a Jazz trumpeter, told through the eyes of the people who are affected by the trumpeter's death...The trumpeter presented as a man, but was actually a woman. His "wife" (were they legally married?) knew, and loved them all the same; but the son did not know, until told by the undertaker, who also had had no previous warning until he begins to prepare the body. The trumpeter's mother, still alive in a care home in Scotland, does not know that her daughter who left home but still writes to her, has spent a life as a man. There's a horrible tabloid reporter after a story, who seduces the son in an effort to get an inside track. 

It sounds creepy, but it's sort of beautiful. There's not a lot about trumpet playing, but it's enough of the story to be of interest to me as a trumpet aspirer.

Review of I am a noise

Fantastic biopic of Joan Baez. I wanted to watch this because I'd just watched "A Complete Unknown", about Bob Dylan, in which Joan Baez is just one of several women that he has brief relationships with. 

I was expecting another music biopic, but it turned out to be a heart-rending documentary about Baez's really quite sad life - broken relationships with friends, family and lovers, and mental illness. This is clearly someone who talent (extending beyond music, her drawing is really good too) and success have not made at all happy. And this despite a genuine commitment to political struggle, that gave her a sense of purpose, but still didn't make up for the sadness that has haunted her since childhood.

I was struck also by the talent of her less well known sister, Mimi Farina, who lost the lover of her life at 21 and died of cancer at 56 - Mimi is responsible for the tune of "Bread and Roses", one of my favourites.

Watching the footage of her and Dylan singing at the March on Washington in 1963 it's hard not to be affected by the hope that's present in that huge multiracial crowd, and also hard not to feel that the hope was betrayed - look at America now.

Review of To Leslie

Decent film about alcoholism. The eponymous Leslie is broken by drink and can't hold anything together, but she finds life and meaning at an out of town motel where she takes up residence, and a job cleaning. To her (and our) surprise the manager gives her one chance after another as she repeatedly fucks up. We gradually learn his back story as well as hers. Yeah, this is one is described as "heartwarming" but there's a lot of pain to go through before you get to that.

Review of "Orbital" by Samantha Harvey

A beautiful gem of a book...very short, barely even a novella, but I couldn't read it quickly because it was so beautiful. It's set in the International Space Station, more or less as it is now, though there's another moon mission in progress - the only thing in the book that makes it speculative fiction rather than just naturalistic fiction. 

It describes the back stories and inner lives of the occupants - Russians, Americans, Japanese - but also their sensuous experiences of the space station, and the physical sensations of being in weightless, and the impact on time perception of living through so many dawns in each 24 hour period. 

So well done, it's hard to believe that she hasn't been there.

And of course it's also about Earth, and what it looks like from the space station (humans largely invisible except at night), and there's the tiniest brush with climate turmoil - bigger, more unpredictable storms, changing seasons on the ground.

Review of "The Axeman's Jazz" by Ray Celestin

Nicely paced historical thriller/crime novel, set in an atmospheric New Orleans in the early 20th century, with lots of Jazz (one of the protagonists is a young Lewis Armstrong, not yet Louis) and sleaze and graft. A narrative that swaps between viewpoints - it's "close third" person narrative but the person swaps around, and it's well done. Actually based on a true story, so sprinkled with occasional genuine newspaper articles.

I hadn't previously heard of Ray Celestin, who doesn't seem to have written any other novels, but I will keep an eye out for him.