City Jitters 20

Every dog has its day,
and a good dog
just might have two days

City Jitters has been a pretty good running dog here on WT, with almost 10 years under its collar now, but I think it has pretty much had its day. I’m not sure much new ground has been broken in many of those years. I’m a creature of habit, photographically as in so much else, endlessly returning to the same old places, taking the same old pictures. Perhaps the ever-decreasing frequency of CJ posts reflects that. But whether that’s true or not, I’m calling time on this thing that was never even intended to be a project in the first place. Time to do something else.

Too Short

I seem to have got slightly more into the habit of walking out of films, despite going to too few of late. More in the last three weeks than the preceding 20 years, I think.

But really, Assassin’s Creed doesn’t deserve 20 minutes of any viewer’s time; nor Lego Batman, at least when said viewer is a grownup without half term brats in tow. The latter is mawkish, smug and tiresome where its predecessor was charming and sharp; the former just another shit videogame flick in a population that is unimodally shit with near-zero variance.

Why would any sensible person go to either? You might reasonably ask. I’d say the choices have been underwhelming since Rogue One, but it turns out Hidden Figures was released the same week as Lego B, so there’s really no excuse. And I haven’t even seen La La Land yet.

Roadmarks was excellent, by the way. Literally everything I remembered and more. Someone should republish it. And Masurca Fogo. That was excellent too. And I’m a computer scientist now. Perhaps I should’ve mentioned that. I’ve been writing shader code and everything. That’s science, right?

Right?

Nobody Watching

Dance like there’s…

So goes the platitude. Thing is, these days it’s not so much an exhortation to uninhibited joy as a prescription for the opposite. Almost always, now, at my age, at your age, at my age, at your age, young man! Almost always, now, I dance when there literally is no one watching. And only then.

But not tonight, strictly speaking. Not that anyone was watching, particularly, but it wasn’t the usual enforced seclusion. 2016 ended. I wasn’t the only one it ended for.

There was, peripherally, dancing. There were others present. Quite a few. I guess, peripherally, they saw the dancing happen, not that they had any particular reason to notice.

Noticing isn’t the point.

Pointlessly, I danced. The world didn’t end, only the year.

And what a year it’s been. May we never see its dreadful like again.

I can’t tell, through tears, whether the same should be said of the dancing.

Double Jeopardy

It must be 30 years since I saw Billy Wilder’s movie version of Witness for the Prosecution, with Charles Laughton and Marlene Dietrich. Many of the details are now vague, but the main twist isn’t one you forget. So the new BBC adaptation suffered from a lack of surprise in that particular respect. In most other ways, though, it was pretty startling. In particular by being so harsh.

Nobody cares about the fucking maid.

Period thriller trappings and cosy Agatha Christie branding notwithstanding, this was brutal, unforgiving stuff. Its dismal nicotine-stained world of post-slaughter generational despair, the sneering prurient hypocrisy of the courtroom, oozing and dripping with malevolent righteousness, the frumpy innocent punished while the beautiful guilty frolic. In such a place, in such a time, having witnessed up close the most massive betrayal imaginable of the ostensible values of ostensible civilisation, why wouldn’t someone plot and scheme to get rich from one or two more local terrible acts? And why shouldn’t he or she live as happily ever after as those who organised that larger, more fruitless catastrophe?

You men. You fucking men.

Adaptrix Sarah Phelps, also responsible for last year’s steely And Then There Were None, has argued repeatedly that Dame Agatha was a gimlet-eyed radical, surgically dissecting social mores and hypocrisy under the cloak of middlebrow pulp. Which wasn’t really my impression when I read a few of her books many years ago, but maybe that was me. Maybe it was sampling error — Christie is another of those authors who churned out so many boatloads of popular fiction that it would be easy to pick half a dozen misrepresentative examples. Or maybe the hard edge Phelps currently champions is actually her own invention imposed on the soft clay of Christie’s easy reading schlock.

Who knows? More importantly, given how searingly well it works, who cares?

Suffice to say that if next Christmas brings a Phelps-scripted version of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, or Death on the Nile, or even notorious West End squatter The Mousetrap, I’ll be watching.