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This evening said goodbyes to neighbours Yuri & June and their children Greta & Otto (not forgetting their dog, Emily) as they embark on a new life in Singapore. We will miss them.
And while on the subject of tropical islands, I watched Tabu, a rather obscure film from 1931, set in Tahiti. It was conceived by F W Murnau (Nosferatu, Faust, Sunrise etc) and Robert Flaherty (Nanook of the North, Moana etc - see this post) but they fell out and in the end Murnau directed it all, using mostly non-actors and non-professional crew. It has an innocent, doomed charm about it. And talking of doomed, Murnau died in a car accident the week before its premiere. It flopped.
Another slightly bleary day given last night's excesses, but Markus and I managed a stroll in the park and a couple of rides - something called Splash Mountain and a zoom around on a Segway. Great little things and actually fairly easy to get the hang of. I've always been envious of the Beijing Airport security guys as they whip around Departures.
Talking of which, Markus left in the afternoon for Shanghai which left me with the big job of catching up with photo albums. I'm six months behind and am beginning to wonder whether it's worth it. Needed a good three hours to at least get going on it, so decided to listen to the whole of Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach from start to finish. I've probably only done that once before (when I bought it, 30 years ago) and will probably never do it again. Certainly not when the family's around... That said, it remains surprisingly exhilarating.
Somehow, four hours sleep was enough. Lovely day, so Markus and I spent a chilled afternoon in 798 (which included a rare duff exhibition at UCCA), a visit to Bookworm, drinks in Sanlitun Village, and then on to The World of Suzie Wong.
I'm not one for clubs these days but the name was enough to tempt me, having read the book and seen the film years ago (though not the play - and there was even a ballet), and it's practically next door to where we live so no excuses.
There are a few things that put me off clubbing. First, I'm getting a bit old for it, and there's nothing worse than a middle-aged ex-pat oggling the young, beautiful people (who seemed to be a mix of Chinese and willowy Russian models). I'm also not that keen on the music which seems to still be predominantly techno or house and too loud. And of course there's the overpriced drinks. Thankfully Wong's wasn't too bad on all these counts. We didn't look too out of place, the music was OK and we could actually have a conversation. My mate Youdai was DJ-ing unbeknownst to me and he came up to congratulate me on the London Opening Ceremony, which was nice of him though I can't really claim credit for it. And we befriended another (Brit) DJ, so yes, it was a good night. Perhaps I'm not too old for it after all?
Well, it was fantastic.
It was also funny, overblown, touching, confused, subversive, exhilarating, irreverent, cool and very very creative. It was bonkers. And somehow, amazingly given the scale of it all, it managed to be human.
It ticked all the boxes but in a very natural, uncynical way. It presented Britain as youthful and multicultural. It celebrated the commoner. Yes, the Queen was there to open it, but she also jumped out of a helicopter with Bond. That was inspired. Which other global head of state would agree to something like that. Hats off to you Ma'am. It featured all the right people: from celebs to volunteers. It was a laugh (Bean), it was poignant (Ali). The music was good - as it should have been (we could hardly get that wrong) and the grassy Glastonbury Tor was genius. It managed to integrate the Olympic bits seamlessly and tastefully: the speeches on the hill, the lighting of the flame, the parade of the athletes (and one Indian student)... One could quibble about bits of it - the parochial Eastenders and something about a lost mobile phone for example - but overall it was an absolute triumph.
It's funny, what Danny Boyle did was essentially the same as what I'm trying to do day-in day-out at the British Council. I thought with UK Now in China we were really upping the ante, but Boyle managed to condense into four hours what UK Now is attempting to do in eight months and I have been trying to do in a career: project a positive, creative image of Britain to the world. I feel like (happily) throwing in the towel! But he did have £27 million to play with.
I must say, it did make me proud, I did have a tear or two in my eye, and as I switched the telly off at 8am China time, I wondered what Mum would have made of it all...
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| with Mike Summerbee |
Before all the excitement at London's Olympic stadium, I paid my first visit to the Bird's Nest... strangely enough to see two Premier League teams, Man City and Arsenal, vie for something called the Winoly Cup: a pre-season exhibition match which would have cost Winoly a small fortune.
Nice stadium, and very exciting to see our short video about UK Now (plus another on the Olympics and a video message from the Ambassador) up on the giant screen before the match. Another minor thrill was meeting Mike Summerbee who played for City in their former glory years of the late 60s/early 70s.
And the match itself? A game of two halves: two goals in the first, torrential rain in the second... it remained 2:0 the City. Any other day this would have been the highlight, but the real action was about to take place in the other stadium.
I went to a black tie dinner tonight, except it wasn't black tie and there was no dinner. It was a sort of charity auction in connection with the upcoming Arsenal v Man City game. Arsene Wenger and Roberto Mancini turned up halfway through, bringing with them a few players, two of whom did some live scribbling which went for £3,000. There were the inevitable signed shirts & footballs, a replica Princess Di handbag, a VIP box at the Bird's Nest etc, and we contributed a set of the London Olympics posters by some real artists which went for £1,500.
Anyway, the invitation said 'black tie & gowns' so I duly donned a DJ and dicky-bird, only to find out that no-one else had. Well, not quite true - one other guy did. He came up to me halfway through and we commiserated with each other.
Dinner turned out to be a few canapes, nibbled in armchairs while we watched the proceedings, which also included a song by a small throng of smiling children and a weepy video of some unsmiling orphans. All very weird. However, I did get to meet referee Howard Webb, famous for issuing 14 yellow cards and one red in the 2010 World Cup Final. Nice guy. He introduced me - if I got this right - to his manager and assistant. Since when did referees have managers and assistants?
I got home and had baked beans on toast.
Bit of a gap since the last installment, but here's a fave list from my first real decade of movie-watching, which would have been at The Granada in Chichester, forays with my older siblings to cinemas in London, and finally graduating to the Duke of Yorks in Brighton and the holy grail of independent cinema, The Scala in London. But if I'm honest, many of these would have been after the event, on VHS or DVD.
Let's get the big Hollywoods over with first: Jaws, Star Wars, Superman, Saturday Night Fever, The Deer Hunter, Grease, Alien, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I & II, Towering Inferno, and I suppose I'd have to include the overrated Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
The 70s also introduced some of the greatest cop/crime/mafia movies: Mean Streets, Serpico, Shaft, Chinatown, The French Connection, Dirty Harry, The Taking of Pelham One Two Three... And some great comedies: all of Mel Brooks' 70s output: Blazing Saddles, Silent Movie, Young Frankenstein, High Anxiety...; Woody Allen's 'early funny films': Bananas, Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), Sleeper, Play it Again Sam, Love and Death, Annie Hall and Manhattan; Steve Martin's debut The Jerk; National Lampon's Animal House...
And there was plenty more besides: M*A*S*H, Woodstock, Spielberg's debut Duel, Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man, Papillon, Marathon Man and Kramer vs Kramer; Klute, Network, The Last Picture Show (which felt like a 50s film), Cabaret, The Sting, Being There, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and - getting edgier - Play Misty for Me, Taxi Driver, The Exorcist, Straw Dogs...
On the cuddlier side, Disney limped through the 70s with The Aristocats, Robin Hood and The Rescuers. And on the weirder side there were animated versions of The Lord of the Rings and Watership Down.
It was a reasonable decade for Brit films, aesthetically if not commercially. The grim Get Carter and grimmer A Clockwork Orange (which of course I didn't see at the time - you couldn't); Nic Roeg's Performance, Don't Look Now, Walkabout and The Man Who Fell to Earth; The Wicker Man, That'll be the Day, Ryan's Daughter, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Monty Python & the Holy Grail & The Life of Brian, Midnight Express... And then there was Bond, James Bond, which saw Sean Connery (Diamonds are Forever) give way to Roger Moore (Live & Let Die, The Man with the Golden Gun, The Spy who Loved Me and Moonraker), all of which are guilty pleasures.
But it was German films - alongside Krautrock and the Bundesliga - that took my interest. It was probably Herzog's Aguirre, Wrath of God (soundtracked of course by Popol Vuh) that started it, quickly followed by Nosferatu, Stroszek and Woyzeck before backtracking to The Enigma of Kasper Hauser and the very early, very weird Even Dwarves Started Small. Oddly, even though it's one of my fave Popol Vuh soundtracks, I didn't see Heart of Glass until much later, and it was only very recently that I watched Fata Morgana for the first time (which I didn't like). And then there was Fassbinder's Fear Eats the Soul (which made a big impression on me), Effi Briest, Chinese Roulette and The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (all of which I would have seen on late night TV), and The Marriage of Maria Braun and Berlin Alexanderplatz which I think I saw at the cinema. And then I think there were three Wim Wenders' films in the 70s: The Goalkeeper's Fear of the Penalty, Alice in the Cities and Kings of the Road. Oh, and Schlondorff's The Tin Drum.
French cinema in the 70s rather passed me by, but I remember seeing Truffaut's The Story of Adele H (Isabelle Adjani's debut), L'Enfant Sauvage, The Man Who Loved Women and Day for Night; also I particularly liked Tacchella's Cousin Cousine (probably because of Marie-France Pisier) and Marcel Ophul's 4.5hr marathon, The Sorrow and the Pity.
Other European, Australian and Etceteras would have to include Bunuel's last decade of film-making: Tristana, The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Phantom of Liberty and That Obscure Object of Desire; Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive, Fellini's Roma and Amarcord, Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo, Tarkovsky's Solaris and Stalker, Dario Argento's Suspiria; The Tree of Wooden Clogs, Polanski's The Tenant & Tess, Bergman's Autumn Sonata, Sergio Leone's A Fistful of Dynamite. Further afield, I'd have to include Ozzy films Picnic at Hanging Rock and Mad Max; Kurosawa's Derzu Uzala (set in Siberia), Oshima's Ai No Corrida (which I remember watching at The Everyman in Hampstead), the silly but influential Enter the Dragon...
And last but not least, major mentions must be made of the weird & wonderful: Lynch's Eraserhead (a major influence); lo-budget slashers: Texas Chainsaw Massacre (which I watched for the first and only time with members of Throbbing Gristle!) and George Romero's Dawn of the Dead; the first X-rated animation: Fritz the Cat; sleazy sexploitation: Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls; just plain trashy: Divine in Pink Flamingos and Female Trouble; soft-core: Emmanuelle, The Story of O and other European fare masquerading as art-house; and of course I never watched Deep Throat.
It's really difficult to list a Top 15. I could go for the ones that influenced me at the time, or that I rediscovered a lot later, or withstand repeated viewings, but anyway, then here goes:
- Blazing Saddles
- Young Frankenstein
- Fear Eats the Soul
- Eraserhead
- Nosferatu
- The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
- The Life of Brian
- Stalker
- The Man with the Golden Gun
- Annie Hall
- Alien
- Day for Night
- The Whicker Man
- The Godfather
- The French Connection
There are a few things that put me off clubbing. First, I'm getting a bit old for it, and there's nothing worse than a middle-aged ex-pat oggling the young, beautiful people (who seemed to be a mix of Chinese and willowy Russian models). I'm also not that keen on the music which seems to still be predominantly techno or house and too loud. And of course there's the overpriced drinks. Thankfully Wong's wasn't too bad on all these counts. We didn't look too out of place, the music was OK and we could actually have a conversation. My mate Youdai was DJ-ing unbeknownst to me and he came up to congratulate me on the London Opening Ceremony, which was nice of him though I can't really claim credit for it. And we befriended another (Brit) DJ, so yes, it was a good night. Perhaps I'm not too old for it after all?
And there was plenty more besides: M*A*S*H, Woodstock, Spielberg's debut Duel, Dustin Hoffman in Little Big Man, Papillon, Marathon Man and Kramer vs Kramer; Klute, Network, The Last Picture Show (which felt like a 50s film), Cabaret, The Sting, Being There, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and - getting edgier - Play Misty for Me, Taxi Driver, The Exorcist, Straw Dogs... 
