Look at those silly men

As befits a good book, I’m having a hard time categorising On the Road. It defies easy rating; it’s good literature that was no doubt ground breaking for the time, yet time has not treated the movement well. When I think of the beat generation, I think of the dated patois, of Jerry Lewis or numerous other parodies; and in my less forgiving moments I found myself weighing whether this wasn’t a fetid existentialism; less ‘on the road’, more ‘on the turn’.

There are some great moments; I particularly liked the description of roads being widened and laws abated to make way for one of Dean’s visits. The latter stages in general, the trip to Mexico and the slow unravelling of Sal’s sometime companion prove to be more sympathetic. There were a number of genuinely moving occasions where I felt Kerouac really got ‘it’, and his observations of friends worked well too, even occasionally of fellow travellers:

…because her heart was not glad when she said it I knew there was nothing in it but the idea of what one should do.

There’s nothing particularly revelatory in this observation, but it works. Most supporting characters however fair less well. For example when Sal finds himself...

... wishing I could exchange worlds with the happy, true-hearted, ecstatic negroes of America.

Oh dear, the last time I read something that patronising was a Guardian account of the working class. Unfortunately this isn’t isolated either; the otherwise excellent trip to “Mehico” has a wince-inducing indigenous population who supposedly speak ‘a leetle like theees’ and descriptions of women that wouldn’t be out of place in an airport novel. “We don’t understand our women”, says Sal, that much was obvious; men are predators and most women exist to be nailed; the 1950’s expression for this is to “work” or “make”, but let’s not argue terminology.

Camus wrote “it is not a matter of explaining and solving, but of experiencing and describing", appreciation doesn’t require empathy; the question is whether these slight descriptions are a failure of Sal or the author. Since it is a largely autobiographical work I tend toward the latter view; on the Camus test, Kerouac scores highly on one criterion but has mixed success - and some notable failures - on the other.

Yet here I am, over a week later and still I think of “On the Road”. For a large part, even after I had finished, I found the central friendship of the two frustrating; Dean is a horrible character, less shaman, more charlatan; but in this, bizarrely, lay my hope. Sal knows who Dean is but loves him just the same.

Smurfing hell

Somehow I contrived to raise my hopes, and suffered the consequences; The Smurfs was terrible. It only took a few comments of 'exceeded low expectations' for me to take leave of my senses; it might prove to be a guilty pleasure or a hidden gem... well maybe not that far, but I'd thought there might be something to enjoy, beyond a flimsy excuse to post a picture of Katy Perry.

And in eye-popping - I mean that literally - 3D too. I have only seen one film done well in 3D, though from a sample of four it’s hardly scientific. Coraline managed to make it part of the story; its use restrained in her ‘normal’ world, it’s only in the ‘other’ world that we get the full effect. In the other three films, which it occurs to me would have been crap in any dimension, it was full-on, all the time. This has two immediate side-effects; the first is the eye-wrenching alluded to earlier; the second is that you notice the limitations. I could distinguish layers, but with the result that each seemed more flat than if I’d been watching something ‘normally’; it reminded me of those cheap cartoons of the past, with a few overlaid backgrounds to give a sense of depth. Perhaps it’s a drawback pertaining to films converted to, rather than made in 3D. Hence I’ve not given up altogether, despite the film industry’s seemingly suicidal tendencies with this technology. I’ll have to be a little more discerning instead; not easy when you have a ten year old.

Rambling

Once, there used to be a wide old footpath at the top of the embankment running the entire length of that side of town. It was known as the ‘old railway line’. Though the last remnants were removed when I was a child, you could still, walking the length, cross a couple of stone bridges to remind you of the past. The embankment has long since gone, flattened and brought down to our level to accommodate housing, business and a bypass to the small industrial estate. It stays the ‘old railway line’, though all that remains is a thin tarmacked path between old and new.

It’s still used for the walk to the shops, and the bridges are still there, though barely noticeable; where there were fields on one side there are now estates and an office. On one occasion my mother, having noticed the rubbish over several such walks, the small plastic cups and empty sweet wrappers from vending machines, took action with a large bin bag and deposited the results in reception. I used to think that mildly embarrassing, now I cheer; that’s mums for you.

Poor eyesight, not nearly as fast as she used to be - I no longer have to run to keep up – and a catholic; I figure religious enough to make up for those in the family who aren’t. In mass last week she stopped to appreciate a stylish top. At the end of the service, a young member of the congregation sitting behind, put their arms around my mother and gave her a kiss on the cheek before leaving. It was only when my mother stood up that she realised she had a new cardigan draped around her shoulders.

A decade in the life of

On one trip to the Cribbs Causeway cinema, the whole complex - cinema, bowling rink, restaurants and all - suffered a power cut moments before the film was due to start. We were there to watch the Disney/Pixar film Up - which I was looking forward to, and on a subsequent visit I really enjoyed - so we were a little disappointed. If there is any balance in the world I hope for a similar fate tomorrow, when I will be taking Little Miss R to see the new Smurfs film, may God have mercy on my soul. I’ve tried - I’ve really tried - to get out of this one, but I fear there’s to be no escape.

We are celebrating her tenth birthday which falls this week, and hasn’t the time just flown by? Well, no actually, though I typically rue having wasted so much. I can clearly remember, and will never forget, holding her for the first time, the moment when her eyes opened and... maybe she couldn’t see me, but I could see her. Likewise a year later; a visit to Bristol Zoo, or a few weeks ago and her first swim in the sea; I love those moments. One day, if I’ve done a good job, I will need her more than she needs me, and those moments will be all I have. So I shall smile loudly with the time I have left, endeavour to make better use of the next ten years and smile when I fail. There’s the teenager to come, bothersome boys, exams to fret over, university perhaps? To think I worry about enduring a group of small blue fictional creatures - I shall save my wishes for later.

A touch of ordinary

A shop, a walk, exercise (either that or I have to stop eating), two good films later - Il Postino and Garage - and a sudden realisation that I can use Blogger to create a basic “online business card”, as various services such as flavors.me and about.me are sometimes described, or a home page. Curiosity (vanity?) persuaded me to buy a custom domain when setting up my blog; so I could create another and assign the “www” subdomain, and since it’s Blogger it would also (unlike Google Sites) be able to handle naked domains.

Specify the favicon, hide the navbar with a bit of CSS and hack/edit away at the Template HTML to hide almost everything else and I had a blank canvas to work with. The trickiest part was remembering my login credentials for changing the DNS settings - mine were buried away in Google Apps - then undo an existing mapping for “www”, change the CNAME and add some A records. The result is admittedly light on functionality and I only needed to cough up a measly $20 for a whole set of features, but where’s the fun in that?

Concern for the unfortunate

Nonsense - even in politics - can also make you laugh. Take today’s example:

Of course what Tories really think is that there *is* a correlation between poverty and the riots. They think the poor are subhuman scum.

In isolation, your typically silly comment, but when followed up with...

The riots are in large part caused by inequality and poverty. Not because poor are inferior people.

...it becomes unintentionally amusing. But just in case you were unsure, there was this beauty - the unquestioned cornerstone of so many arguments - a few moments later:

...origins of Conservatism lie in hating poor.

What a tweet. That a party would be identified as openly antagonistic to a large section of the electorate - whose votes it requires - shall remain one of the great mysteries, and all the more remarkable for being the view of someone with a first-rate (well, far better than mine) education. To believe that good and (for want of a better word) evil, can be so neatly aligned with left and right-wing ideology is astonishingly simple and self-serving. There is, I’m sure, a larger debate around the correlation (or lack of) between education, politics and morality; for now I shall confine myself to wondering how someone so intelligent can say something so foolish, and elude the inconvenient truth of Hubert Humphrey:

Compassion is not weakness, and concern for the unfortunate is not socialism.

Fix you

So I went on holiday and everyone - a “lost generation” no-less - stared rioting... for four days. Well thank you, but this post isn’t really about me. By the time I returned the “rampage” had stopped and I had to suffer - am still suffering - the various current affair “specials” on why and who’s to blame. Panorama, for example, used some lovely background music.

Some idiot blamed the previous government; more idiots blamed the existing government. Some thought it black culture innit - whatever that is - others, something to do with the poor, or being poor. If I were one of the less fortunate (and who knows, there’s plenty of time) I’d be getting slightly pissed off at the constant suggestions of my inevitable anti-social behaviour. There was a legitimate seed for protest - a Police shooting a few days earlier - but it was quickly consumed by our more thuggish members.

Besides, our moral grounding is hardly a rock in the knowledge there’s more to lose when you step out of line. And therein lies the problem; it’s not so much the violence, more our naive - and potentially dangerous - belief that no matter what, there is a solution to making us all behave better, all the time; and the lengths some will go to achieve this desired result. It’s as if we’ve learnt nothing from the past or even future portrayals of attempts to “fix” the population.