Kitchen Domain

I have long meant to come back to this subject because important things remained unsaid. The earlier postings were here, here, here, here and here, in that order, with an extra one here. What is missing is the time in England, but I will come back to that. Here I want to look at the end.

Why now? Because I have just been doing the washing up after dinner. I generally do it because C, the kitchen goddess, does the cooking. I did it for myself for three months in Dublin and it was OK if limited. She does wash up sometimes though, especially when I am not around.

Let me get technical here. When I wash up I put the various parts of cutlery into discrete parts of the plastic rack: the spoons in one, the forks in another etc, the principle being that when drying I pick up all the spoons in one go, then all the forks. It is not a matter of major importance but it seems logical and, in every sense, fitting. C, in her office as goddess, generally flings them in wherever she fancies, as is her perfect right.

There is nothing at stake here. She has never said to me: why not do it like this? or why do you do it like that? Nor do I ask her why she does it like she does and why she doesn't do it as I do. Who cares how it is done? But in any case, my principle is: never quarrel with a goddess when in her domain. Recall the case of Diana and Actaeon.

As a matter of fact I have never quarreled with women. It's not in my nature to do so, and my nature is, naturally, greatly formed by my mother and her domain. I don't mean I do as instructed, I mean I do as I do, while remaining as courteous, charming and obliging as I hope I can be. It's not an act: it's how I am. I never question how they go about things, or even think of ordering them about. We both have worlds to bear on our shoulders. The world is as it is and our shoulders are as they are.

*

My mother's last domain was the kitchen. The condition of her heart began to deteriorate and going to work was out of the question, as was house cleaning. She was on her own. My father was at work, sometimes travelling from building site to building site in various parts of the country; my brother was at school and when he came home was expected to practice at least four hours on the violin because the violin was to be his lifeline, as indeed it became; I came home from school and sat down to homework. I was also expected to practice the piano, which I did, though I was of very average talent and musicality. There wasn't much TV.

They were quite difficult years, filled with talk of euthanasia and depressions. After a while the council arranged for cleaners to come in. Or maybe they just helped with cost - I can't remember. This was the point at which resting actors and waiting-to-be singers called in to hoover and dust, one of them being Mr David Bowie-to-be. That is about 1965 or so. I am sixteen or so.

My mother was as she was - a furiously intent creature in a state of intermittent pain and exhaustion - who had always lived partly through her family. That was a legacy of her own circumstances and history. The house we were living in was the house she was determined to have, and it was the kitchen, the kitchen in the picture above, that truly mattered. As ever, she got her way. It was, after all, she who was going to be at home, her life that was going to be at the heart of the house, the kitchen being the heart.

Through the window she could see the back garden. We set up a small greenhouse and there she tended plants. This was a middling suburb of London. Lower management. It was relatively quiet and out of the way on a small Edwardian-period estate where the roads were named after poets: Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Wordsworth and Southey., We were Shelley.

The kitchen having become her domain she both did and didn't want us there. We would be called upon to help then summarily dismissed because we weren't doing things quite right. O,h get out of my way! You're more hindrance than help! My brother and I didn't know quite what to do. We wouldn't be let anywhere near the cooking even if we had asked. Domain meant authority. Domain gave her pride and justification. I may be a sickly woman, she might have thought, but here I am indispensible. Here things are under my control. Here my fury is my own.

The kitchen was where we generally ate, at the table where she is sitting in the photograph, unless there were visitors when we used the through-lounge. There is something about the whole house now that makes me shudder. The kitchen seems to me one of the possible models for a room in hell. I didn't like it then and looking at it now is troubling. If kitchen is self, this was an alien self to her. In the end, after I had gone, it became intolerable to her too. Whatever is intolerable is there in her face, in her very posture.

*

That is the trouble with domains. They come to dominate and then consume. I have to remember how she loved that kitchen and how important to her it was that we should have it, even at the cost of being gazumped at the last stage of purchase.

I look at my domain now, which is essentially this desk, this room, this keyboard. I see the mass of papers on trays, the books not quite in order on the shelves. It looks unfinished but that is how I prefer it most of the time. I have another domain in language, in poetry. C has her studio and her office. She has her visual domain. The rest of the house is common ground. I know the danger of kitchens as domains and am glad our daughter is not forced into it, willy-nilly, because there is no other option. I also know the world is not a creature of our convenience, that it is as it is at any given moment, though it is open to change between such moments. Our shoulders are as they are, but we can always do a bit more . So we think and hope.

I think that kitchen explains something of me too. I think it is part of the poetry, pat of the demon that keeps things burning.

Monday Night is... Shoes and Evil

Losing track of the days of the week, so here, instead of Sunday...



It all begins with shoes, then moves to faces. The beginning of Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (1951). Robert Walker, nauseating yet plausible, plays one of the great evil roles opposite Farley Granger playing the clean cut tennis star. In terms of evil Walker's is a wonderful performance, rivalling Robert Mitchum in either in Night of the Hunter (1955) or Cape Fear (1962). But maybe Walker's Bruno Anthony is the best because he draws evil out of others.

Films the last three days. But the question of evil in the movies - I don't mean horror film evil, I mean proper nauseating, plausible evil - is an interesting question. Now who have I missed out?

Raymond Chandler, one of the two scriptwriters, for a start. And Patricia Highsmith, of course, who wrote the book. Thanks to Mark (in Comments). And I keep thinking that Walker looks like so much like a cross between Robert Vaughn and Bill Murray, that they might have been Walker split into two. Which then raises a further question about the typology of the iconic Hollywood face, male or female. One could move as on a spectrum from Cary Grant, Rock Hudson, Dean Martin through the Walker Three, or Monroe, Mansfield, Dors...etc. But that is not my agenda for Tuesday.

The Damned United...

I have already written about David Peace's book, so I didn't really fancy the film, but I think the film is better. Not that Peace is a bad writer, it's just that the mind that conceived the book, as evidenced by the book, seemed to be too keen to impress and sound tough. Sounding tough is no better than sounding fey, and I didn't feel I had any insight into either Brian Clough or into Peace's character ' BrianClough'. He was unbelievable as what he was supposed to be.

The film however does present the viewer with a believable human being. Some episodes in the book are wisely omitted -the smashing up of Revie's desk for example, which might have made a spectacular scene but which the director, Tom Hooper, and writer, Peter Morgan, presumably recognised for the melodramatic touch it was. On the other hand the omitting of the early book episode where the young Clough's career as a player is finished by injury did remove an important aspect of the character's development, and its replacement by the perceived snub of Clough by Revie doesn't quite serve as motivation. Yet Michael Sheen's 'Clough' is a human being, now petty, now grandiose, now magnetic, now lost, not merely the projection of an idea. The relationship with the Peter Taylor figure (the excellent Timothy Spall, naturally) is touching and funny, and while not necessarily representing the relationship between the real Clough and Taylor, it is believable (just about) on its own terms.

The film isn't sentimental tosh like Looking for Eric (see below) but I did wonder as C and I watched it, whether it was sufficiently interesting for her as a film. She likes football, watches it, genuinely appreciates it and has memories of Clough, but all the same I suspected that interest in the film as a representation of an actual Brian Clough was probably greater for me than for her. Women are generally off-stage in the film. We glimpse them as firm matriarchs but they have no effect on the action, which lies entirely outside their sphere. In Looking for Eric they were adored and idealised: here they are pretty well absent and the men are not even sexy. It is more biff, beef and boot than Posh and Becks.

The trouble for me was that the real figure behind the film actually dominates it. We never see what made Clough successful nor why his relationship with his players worked, and without some treatment of this the figure must remain a little thin. What is a leader? What is it to be led? What is a team? What is team-spirit? What inspires? What is the blend of rhetoric, example, intimacy and distance that produces something extraordinary and coherent out of the ordinary and incoherent. These are political and military matters and, historically, more in the masculine than in the feminine realm. It is not so much a matter of empathy or even character: it is a matter of mechanism, that which works, which is like a machine. The sheer curiosity of it. I missed that.

That may be too much to hope for. Each medium creates its own reality, and one has to let go of the thing represented and concentrate on the presentation. The reality is that Clough would have been just an interesting but unimportant man if he had not succeeded spectacularly as a manager. The presentation was of an interesting man who happened to be successful at something that was not interesting as a mechanism, which resulted in a good, edge-of-anorak film. But it wasn't the anorak, it was the boiler suit I wanted. And I suspect there would have been real dramatic potential in it.

The Cantona Mask

Michael Brown's pastiche of Piero della Francesca's 'Resurrection': 'King Eric' (1997)

Knowing fondness for football, son T's present was two DVDs, Looking for Eric and The Damned United. I hadn't seen either of them at the cinema, so C suggested we sit down and watch them - one last night, one this afternoon.

Looking for Eric is sentimental tosh. I say that with regret because there was much to like in it and I wanted it to be good. It isn't terrible sentimental tosh, in fact it is quite decent sentimental tosh but the term 'sentimental tosh' does seem to be recurring. It sentimentalises and intantilises the working class men it wants to promote. The postmen / supporters at the core of the story are really the mechanicals from A Midsummer Night's Dream in modern terms. They all have hearts of gold, but are comically inept in their attempts to declare their souls. They have no knowledge of themselves. They are, as all true working class men are apparently, supporters of Castro and Mandela, but they are, inevitably, fat and balding with bulging castrato (beer) bellies. They are the male sex gone to seed. As for central character, postie Eric, he has never got over over his dad jabbing his finger at him at his wedding. He is a ruined man from then on. He is thin. The others are fat. Blame the patriarchy, I say.

The ladies? The ladies are quite different of course. They are 'nurturing' out of every pore of their bodies, entirely adult and lovely and idealised, and darn clever too, going to university while being single mothers. Not like the blokes, who are either thick as planks and wholly inarticulate or thoroughly bad vicious bastards. The two sons of the central character (who is clearly related not only by occupation but by appearance to Il Postino) are both wasters who come good. The males in other words are ridiculous gormless dwarves waiting to be redeemed by a word of wisdom or an act of courage from mummy/Snow White..

...but then along comes Cantona.

Cantona is interesting in this respect. He is deeply French and talks in French half the time while mumbling in English the other half. He is, however, straight-backed (very straight-backed), has no beer paunch, is proud and clever, unafraid to be enigmatic, and takes no shit from anyone. And he wears his collar turned up. When men put on the Cantona mask they become a proud class dealing blows to the evil. Men recover their self-respect when wearing the Cantona mask.

So the solution to paunch, castration, gormlessness, gun crime, panic attacks, impotence, cowardice and infantilism is to act like Cantona. A little touch of Eric in the night. Go on, you can do it. Turn your collar up, be enigmatic, keep your back straight, take no shit.

Cantona is at the centre of the painting above. There he stands for something between sainthood and military pride. He is still, in most United fans' estimation, the greatest ever. The fact that he was not above kicking opponents or treading on them, or of drop-kicking a spectator, is part of the spell of wish-fulfilment. The weak want to be strong, the conformist wants to be a rebel. In that respect Loach gets it right.

Nevertheless, there is something patronising and sentimental in Loach's film. In A Midsummer Night's Dream we know the hierarchy. In Il Postino the postman is inspired by Neruda (another foreigner). Here the Cantona model is offered far too easily to a class that is far too easily sentimentalised. And the men - all the men - are pitiful infants until they put on their Cantona masks, which only proves how infantile they really are. Unless they're Cantona they're nothing but a sentimental, impotent haze.

Christmas Eve

So, like ghosts of Christmas Eve, we go to Midnight Mass at the Abbey, which is literally round the corner and looks like this inside, only candle-lit and packed....



And from the outside, like this...



...just less ghostly. Being High it is smells and bells and the full articulation of Anglican vowels. It sings, it processes, it prays, it sermons (it even quotes Oscar Wilde), and eventually it takes the sacrament, which is an altogether serious matter and we sit that part out. It would, after all, be strange to drop in, have a quick nip of blood and flesh, then be off again. A serious house on serious earth it is. We don't wear cycle clips, and are not ruin-bibbers, randy for antique, though those Norman arches remind us that just this sort of thing has been going on here for nine hundred years. And this midnight is what the faith is about, because without the next day, nobody would be going through any of this, nor would these Norman arches with their lozenges and diapers be curving over us.

Besides, I find these services moving, or rather a peculiar, almost incomprehensible, mixture of the moving and the mannerly, like a tea party at God's, with nice china and biscuits delicate as doilies. But God is there in the tea or in the cup, or in the pot, along with the blood of the martyrs and the idea - the core idea after all - that the God being worshipped is, in his own poets' mouths, "begotten not created".

But no, I am not of this or any religion's party, nor indeed of what Parliament refers to as 'the party opposite' by which I don't mean the party of the devil but of the great atheist evangelists. I am of the puzzled party who is astonished to be alive at all, because living is astonishing and not quite credible. Nor does it go on for ever, so, eventually, naturally, I am of the dead party, the Party of the Dear Departed too.

Maybe a small but thunderous Methodist Chapel in, say, Leeds or Wigan, might be fun. Perhaps a brass band. And a bit of subsistence-level pro-wrestling straight after, down at the corn exchange.

Sophie Tucker as... and Harry Langdon as...

Today has been family Christmas Part 1 with the next generation. A full day of preparation, then Christmas dinner, big, grand, the lighting of the pudding, the chocolates, the games ('Chronology'), then the young males of the species set to assembling C's new desk which comes in 2,000 separate pieces with 20,000 screws and dowels, complete with instructions that bear as much resemblance to the actual process as Mickey Mouse does to Marilyn Monroe, but they, being ingenious and energetic representatives of their gender, put it together in about 90 minutes. In the meantime, food-obsessed extrovert cat (Pearl, as played by Sophie Tucker)...


Sophie Tucker as 'Pearl'

....hangs around making darts and squeaks, and is occasionally satisfied, while paranoid, smaller cat Lily (as played by Harry Langdon)...


Harry Langdon as 'Lily'

...hides, creeps, shudders and tries to make herself even smaller than she already is.

Then a cold supper and the departure of R and H to their new home about twenty minutes away. T stays the night. He is off to gig in Brazil in a few days, including his own birthday, which is New Year's Eve.

So now Lily creeps out and even prances about in a ginger kind of way. (Langdon gives a very good impression of Lily smiling). Tomorrow quieter. Christmas Day quieter still. Then we go visiting and become the younger generation.

Note on tesknota to follow, but for now...

Too late back from the emerald city of Norwich, where son, daughter and son-in-law were gathered. From there to a bar/cafe called The Workshop which looks like something out of Paris or Amsterdam in about 1972. I say this in full approval. In any case it is full of young things, or youngish things, and a screen in the downstairs back room is showing Au Bout de Souffle on a loop so Jean Seberg's beautiful face comes round again and again (I was one of many millions who fell in love with her, then fell in love with any girl who looked even vaguely like her), and Jean-Paul Belmondo keeps stroking his lips, Humphrey Bogart fashion. Meanwhile I notice there is some truly execrable poetry in the dialogue, probably just execrably translated. The Workshop serves pizzas that barely fit through the door, so the five of us share one, then have another half by way of afters. Downed with Guinness.

That is why I am sleepy now. All significance remains on hold.