WATCHING SUFFRAGETTE

The cinema-goer remembers his late mother, a laundry worker, as he watches the film SUFFRAGETTE.

It's the hard-hitting tale of a struggle for equality; a meditation on violence and non-violence; a set of family dramas and a major historical story very well told by the film-makers.

The cameo role for Meryl Streep as Emmeline Pankhurst gives her some famous lines, including the one that raised controversial publicity for the film.

I would rather be a rebel than a slave

Rebellion and (wage-)slavery, both manifestations of oppression and discrimination, are very well shown by the film-makers in their choice of a laundry worker and her colleagues as the main protagonists of the film. When Mrs. Pankhurst calls for civil disobedience from the balcony of a fine middle class London house

Deeds not words

the cinema-goer knows it is the women on the street who will face the violence of the police riot that ensues. It is they who then enact the violence Mrs. Pankhurst's words proffer. The women on the street blow up letter boxes, cut telephone wires and bomb the country home of Lloyd George, the parliamentarian they consider to have let them down.

It is the Special Branch police man, Inspector Arthur Steed, ably played by Brendan Gleeson, who delivers the reality-check when he insists that Lloyd George didn't lie to the suffragettes. He didn't promise them anything. So up goes the ante and the post-boxes and the second home in the country.

The family relationships of the day (and of today?) are ably captured by the Branch man

Don't bother arresting them. Let their husbands deal with them.

But those forms of social and cultural control are weakening as the women, agitating on many fronts and in many ways, complicating the given norms, questioning and challenging them, bring pressure to bear for change.

The film is driven by the terrific performances of the two laundry worker leads, Maud Watts (Carey Mulligan) and Violet Miller (Anne-Marie Duff). They are presented as forthright and capable, with complicated lives and conflicting aspirations in regard to their work, their politics and their families. The chemist and bomb-maker Edith Ellyn is played by Helena Bonham Carter, whose great-grandfather, H.H. Asquith, was the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1908 to 1916, during the height of the suffrage movement. He was a staunch opponent of votes for women.

The frantic ferment of anti-state activity underway by the women is set in the context by other militancy by Fenians and anarchists. The indirect violence of poverty, discrimination, imperialism and oppression leads to direct violence by state forces and by their opponents There are many tragedies. The Branch man, Inspector Arthur Steed, predicts that Maud Watts could lose her life. The scene in which Maud Watts replies is one of the most telling in the film.

The law means nothing to me. I've had no say in making the law.

Notably The Inspector becomes increasingly less voluble from then on, as even his stake in the society becomes more fragile. He is speechless by the final tragedy.

It is Emily Wilding Davison, played by Natalie Press, not Maud Watts, who dies, mown down by the King's horse at the Epsom Derby.

The scenes at Epsom are shot magnificently, with the camera never very far from the action and the individuals living it. It is rarely out of the crowd, offering the cinema-goer full immersion in the action. Similar work is used during the police riot scenes, to very good effect.

The screenwriter, Abi Morgan, has harnessed a sweeping historical tale by writing a period in the lives of young working women, facing challenges and decisions of their time and place, that find them finally walking in the funeral of one of their friends and comrades. Their deeds and words contribute to a degree of emancipation that presents further challenges and decisions to people living now.

Abi Morgan also writes the TV cop and mental health drama, RIVER, now on BBC. Like SUFFRAGETTE, the cinema-goer considers it worth a look.

The cinema-goer is reminded of a t-shirt a friend brought back from early Sandinista days in Nicaragua. It bore the slogan

La lucha continua.

The Suffragettes held to

Never surrender. Never give up the fight.

The film ably underlines that. It does not shirk the cost. It brings before us the challenge of achieving social change in a world of direct and indirect violence. And it does so by means of an engaging and exciting film.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3077214/?ref_=nv_sr_5

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WATCHING RICKI AND THE FLASH

Can't you just call in sick and skip therapy?

No, mom, I am sick, that's why I'm in therapy.

The cinema-goer gets it. Ricki and the Flash is a film-allegory about the sick state of family life in the USA, and maybe even in the world, today. Yet the cinema-goer finds nothing to care about. Not the down-at-heel pub rocker, Ricki, played thoroughly well by Meryl Streep. Or the recently jilted daughter, played by Ms. Streep's own natural daughter, Mamie Gummer. There is such a forced confection of family relations that the cinema-goer experiences not interest or complexity but apathy.

Then there's Kevin Kline, who played the mercurial Otto in A Fish Called Wanda, lazing through his role like a satrap in his opulent mansion, while being told by his first wife that he always worked too hard. The cinema-goer doesn't see him do a tap or break a sweat. He organises a disastrous family reunion dinner in an overly-lit high-end restaurant, with packed neighbouring tables crowded about. Petulance and immaturity, rather than comedy, are the dominant vibes in the scene. Is Dad missing something? He doesn't even offer Ricki a cup of coffee on arriving at his house, in response to their daughter's collapse. And he asked her to come from her L.A. scrape-a-life, in the first place.

The cinema-goer resorts to wondering how the animal wranglers got the big, white poodle to do the many things s/he does without seeming to be acting. S/he's as effortless as Brando.

There is a good band on view, doing covers of rock and roll Americana, including the works of Tom Petty, Edgar Winter, Bruce Springsteen and others. As soon as a wedding is mentioned, the cinema-goer knows the finale will include the band on stage as Mom (Meryl Steep) gains some redemption though rock and roll lyrics of love in place of actually doing some loving. She is as selfish as an amoeba. Her guitar-playing lover sells his prized instrument to fund the wedding trip. The cinema-goer considers him a love-struck schmuck, for martyring himself on Ricki the Narcissist, who, despite her protestations, is not looking for love but simply for attention.

The moral seems to be that some of us follow our dreams into family and business and make a great success of things, others follow our dreams into rock and roll and perdition, but what matters is following your dream, each one an approved version of the American Dream, while you keep the flag wrapped around you at all times. In order to give the Meryl Streep character some depth, she's presented as a blue-collar food-store worker, with a Stars and Stripes tattoo on her back and an altar at home to her brother who was killed in Viet Nam. The film opens with the band doing Tom Petty's American Girl, a classic of aspirations and dreams crashed into oblivion, given a marvellous rock treatment, that makes everything pathetically alright and allows Ricki to be mildly jingoistic about America. Is she being ironic? Doubtful.

There is a bounteous African-American second wife, a gay son who looks even more preppy than his straight brother, affronted in-laws, and a loveable, dotty mother-in-law, all of whom look like they stepped out of the window of a Tommy Hilfiger shop.

The effect is not 'feel-good' but rather 'feel-nothing'.

The cinema-goer experiences ennui and dismay. Is this it? Is this the best that industrial film-making on a grand scale, coming out of Hollywood, can produce? The cinema-goer’s companion notes there is no story, never any sense of drama, nor of something being at stake in the lives of the characters on the screen. Both cinema-goers burst out laughing, not the intended effect sought by the film-makers, when Mom says 'walk on' to the tear-filled daughter on the trip up the aisle at her brother's wedding. It sounded like Johnny Cash enforcedly crossed with Val Doonican.

On leaving the cinema both agree they made a mistake in choosing to see Ricki and the Flash. The chill in the air reminds them of a great Autumn film they once saw. The conversation tests the cast list, the film title and the outline of the story. All tests are passed with flying colours: glorious golds, flaming reds, searing pinks and sumptuous ochres. The film is Far from Heaven, with Julianne Moore, Denis Quaid and Denis Haysbert and a lush orchestral score by Elmer Bernstein. It might be time to view it again. A decent story. Fine acting and cinematography. Something at stake.

The music is good in both films, but in Far from Heaven there is more than cover versions. That's it. Watching Ricki and the Flash, the cinema-goer is left with the feeling of watching a cover version of something that wasn't very good in the first place.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3623726/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXkblbJqwn0

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HOUNSLOW IS AN EASTERN CITY

Arrive at Heathrow airport, in the London Borough of Hillingdon, follow the exit signs, then the signs for the Underground, trains, taxis and buses, until you emerge into the diesel-tinged air, where the red buses – 111, 120, 190 – huff, turn, park, load and pull off. You are on the eastern frontier.

A large hoarding shows a Beefeater, Crawford Butler, who welcomes you to London. But Crawford and the London of Beefeaters, towers, bridges, museums and sights are miles to the east. Ironically, you are in West London, set to enter Hounslow, an Eastern city.

Visually it is the women’s dress that tells. There are many forms of elegant head coverings and costumes over shop uniforms, café scrubs, airline uniforms and formal wear, all of which include the ubiquitous round-the-neck plastic identity photo id tag. Skin colour is another tell. Wonderful shades of light cream melt to latte then chocolate and on to ebony colouring the human palette in the bus queues. Rough stubbled pink-fleshed men, just off night shifts as handlers, cleaners, movers and lifters stare bleary-eyed at timetables on bus-stops, in the global pursuit of the next bus home.

Amidst the ferment are people pulling suitcases and carrying bags, including young couples lugging rucksacks stamped with flags and regional badges. A tidy troupe of Japanese tourists assembles behind a leader, seeking assurance that they have indeed landed in London, one of the western world's urban marvels and not in the travel hub of a way-station on the ancient Silk Road, somewhere east and south of Dushanbe.

Aurally the languages are a further tell. The rolling way English weaves among them creates a motif rather than a lead melody. The harmony and chorus are Hindi, Urdu, Russian, Bengali, Latvian, Polish, Dari and others, occasionally sparked with Anglo soundbites such as 'the next one five minutes now' and 'over here, this stop' and 'not see you tomorrow. I'm on a late”.

On board bus 111, the driver and the voice-over announcer are native English speakers. Both are welcoming, informative and professional. The driver helps a couple, seventy year olds dressed in dapper Mod-Oldie clothes, negotiate the complex bus network that will connect them with a second bus to take them home. He then swings the bus into the hair-raising pell-mell of the local road system, exiting the airport complex, past a model aeroplane sponsored by Emirates. Planes descend to the right. Cars, lorries, vans, trucks and more buses career past, on the other carriageway of the Great West Road, the A4, as it leaves the metropolis. Ours is a great east route.

Passengers board and alight and the sense of being in an eastern city is confirmed by the dress, skin colour, languages and demeanours of the people. Two old men with snow white beards, wearing pristine gowns, get on, nod together, murmuring quietly in Pashto and get off one stop along. A west African woman pulls a wheeled shopping trolley, clothed in a tartan that seems muted in comparison to her own flowing robes, and finds a seat. A young Afghan man in a white gown pulls another trolley, this time topped with a plastic bag badged Iceland, yet we are far from the north. We push further into the east. He leans against a pole, holding on.

The bus passes a small parade of shops, where one is signed Grocery and Wine. Graffiti wipes out the word wine. A young woman, an elegantly simple, black gown covering her, apart from an angelic face, gets on with a toddler at heel and a buggy bearing an infant in front. The bus is now somewhere between Addis Ababa and Khartoum, perhaps in the city of Keren or even across the gulf in Sana'a. The woman smiles, while declining the offer of a seat. She gestures and speaks gently to the toddler who has dashed to the rear. She plays her long, immaculate fingers along the chubby cheeks of the boy in the buggy, who smiles his best new teeth. The rest are coming.

In a hotel lobby an Indian cricket team, a tumble of athletic men strewn across sofas and kit-bags, wait for their bus to the airport. A carnival troupe, freshly painted and costumed, all set for Notting Hill, load two vans, laughing and joshing, sociable and chipper as dolphins. The reception staff are courteous, welcoming, professional and eastern – Asian and European.

On the strip of shops opposite the hotel, there is a Chinese restaurant, a halal butcher, an off-licence featuring a special offer on Zywiec beer, a grocers and an undertaker. A family group - women in saris, men in slacks and good shirts - come out and make for the cars parked kerbside. One young woman says to another.

“He looks like he should sit up and give off to us.”

Next morning, Chinese tourists have fun with room numbers, calling translations to one another in their group, then calling them to the maitre d', who records them in the breakfast register. Two oh nine. One six four. Eight two four.

Hounslow is global. Hounslow is an eastern city.

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PANDA-SEX OBSESSION

A panda gives birth to twin cubs and we obsess.

What is it about pandas and sex? We scour the globe for mates for lone pandas. We strive to create matching pairs. We salivate, like porn-junkies, waiting for them to mate. Their coitus is a world spectacle, as fraught as a moon-landing.

Why don't we just let them get on with it?

They're endangered. Of course. But so are black-footed ferrets and bonobos and we don't pore over their sexual gropings. Is it because pandas are big and bulky and we're intrigued, as a form of perverse Attenborough-voyeurism in our obesity-damned age, about how they actually do it?

Or is it simply that pandas are, broadly-speaking, Chinese and we're all obsessed with China now? Consider the hysteria at recent falls in prices on the Chinese stock market. It is more inflamed than the hysteria around the advance of Jeremy Corbyn's temerity. TV pundits, low-rent economists, fiscal fixers and dodgy dealers tell us these are matters of huge importance.

An endangered woman sits in the waiting area of clinic 4 at Altnagelvin Hospital, the pain of illness evident on her lined face. She stares blankly at two economists acting out on the BBC TV news. It's not clear if the story is the panda births or the China stock-market collapse. She waits her turn.

Pundits tell us the Chinese economy is changing from one of production to one of consumption. The year-on-year (dread phrase) rise in economic growth is slowing, maybe even stalling. Of course it is. There is only so much natural resource and human labour you can burn up before its done.

The Chinese won't get it together. Corporations want to sell them technologies, values and practices. And then get consumers to buy their tat. Corporate shareholders don't care that millions of people have moved from rural areas to half-built cities in order to produce the over-priced digital tat their corporations flog. Now, like the pandas, the corporations, their banks and hedge-funds are playing hard to get.

There's shrinking demand, the currency is cheapened, the country people – peasants, if you don't mind – can't go back to the country to grow food, make love, have children and leisure. It's worse than the pandas. They lost the bamboo forests. The country people have lost the whole eco-caboodle; fields, rivers, lakes, mountains, ways of life and social relations. That's progress. And the great continent of Africa is next.

So what’s to be done? Straight up? Stop gambling on currencies and stocks as if they were chips in a vain casino, which is actually mostly what they are these days. If investments are only to make a bigger bang for the bucks of shareholders, without any thought for the products or the producers involved, it's like obsessing about panda sex without any consideration for their well-being or their world.

Leave the pandas alone. If they want to get into it, they will. Stop feeding them viagra-laced bamboo love-shoots. Let them feel safe and happy and they'll get it on. Wouldn't we all?

Save the quiet, safe places of the panda boudoir.

Spare us the videos and the images of glum-faced stock-market floor-traders.

Can the casino. Make love not cash.

She still waits her turn.

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SHARKS. DOLPHINS. CARS.

The sharks bask. The dolphins lope. The cars park. Across the bay.

What a beautiful thing is a sunny day!

The air is serene after a storm,

The air is so fresh that it already feels like a celebration.

What a beautiful thing is a sunny day!

The sea is cerulean and violet. There are bands of tungsten, pewter and aquamarine. When the sharks turn, their fins flash mercury.

The cars range aggressively, penned in rows, angled awry, bullying each other for space. They are ranks of redundant solar cells, absorbing rays uselessly. They dream of sun-stroke.

Abroad the bay, dolphins breast the still surface. News of the sighting spreads. People gather, point and wonder. A woman says “I walk this beach everyday of my life.” Her scrawny dog bows his head in mute assent.

Boats manoeuvre in the vicinity of the sharks. Still their fins flash mercury. The dolphins move off, making for the open sea, rounding the headland, looming purple, flanked with green, above them.

The waves curl quietly into surf and toddle up the beach. Toddlers shriek and toddle after them. Teenagers try their body-boards but the tide is serene. They stand about in the dripping black of their wetsuits, sleek as seals, pert as mermaids. They point at the sharks and cast their eyes in the wake of the dolphins.

Zephyrs of barbecued meat rise from rocky coves. An extended family extends across the sand, the matriarch in a deck-chair at the centre, a tartan rug across her lap, a floral hat so floppy on her head, seagulls squawk and veer away.

The blue flag rests limply against the white flag post. The ice-cream van tootles 'o sole mio' and sells 99s as luscious as nectar. The ice-cream glides down the cones. The tongues lick and relish.

Two boisterous bull terriers bounce on their leads, wrenching their captors forward. A shaggy hound, loose and on the run, snuffles through the marram grass, convinced of hidden treasure. Two Yorkshire terriers yap animosities at each other, under the deadpan gazes of their owners who seem to mouth "it's not my fella's fault.”

Snails – so spiralled, so coloured – ease up and down fronds and blades, feeling the sun roast the innards under their shells. Already the underpants that will be forgotten is nestling in a cleft in the rocks now festooned with towels, shopping bags, t-shirts, swimsuits and a raincoat that sweats to realise it is not needed today. Nearby two socks – baby-small, squirm-folded – seethe in the sunlight. The child will go home unshod and the call "where's the wean's socks?" will sound briefly.

A man and a woman walk the beach. She links her arm to his and lies in close. He offers support. In her other hand, she bears a stick, more pointer than prop. They reach an open stretch of damp, ochre sand, a canvas the sea has readied for them. The woman writes, in bold capitals, the name of her home place, 'FEAR MANACH', as resolutely as an imperialist plants a flag on a planet.

Gannets dive, Exocet-sharp, into the blue, stunning sprats too near the surface.

The cars park, angry in the sun.

Che bella cosa è na jurnata ’e sole,

n’aria serena dopo na tempesta!


Pe’ ll’aria fresca para già na festa...


Che bella cosa na jurnata ’e sole.

O Sole Mio: song; Giovanni Capurro and Eduardo di Capua; Naples; 1898

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-a8e1hIcosk

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THE RELIEF OF DERRY, CITY WALLS' PARADE, 2015

A trio of blue-jacketed marshals come up the passageway of the city's defensive walls at an easy pace. Two groups of tourists are ushered to the sides by their guides. Very soon the first group of Apprentice Boys, marching behind banners of the association, appear. They are mainly middle-aged men, dressed in suits and wearing crimson collarettes. They are members of the General Committee of The Apprentice Boys of Derry. They strike solemn poses as they parade forward.

They are followed by alternating bands and lodges of Apprentice Boys, named for the foundation clubs that form the basis of this commemorative organisation in the colonised city, Londonderry (54 degrees North, 7 degrees West).

Press photographers try to wave the marshals, the tourists and on-lookers out of the way, keen to get a clear image of the head of the parade as it approaches.

The marchers advance at a steady pace, climbing the slope of the walls towards Double Bastion. The first group passes, the General Committee, followed by a band, combining fifes, side-drums, cymbals, triangles and a bass drum in recognisably military formation and rhythm. The tune is high-pitched, melodious and martial. The side-drums snarl and the big drums boom. Further bands and lodges follow. The performances are stirring and frightening in equal measure. The band uniforms are Imperial Army mock-heroic, echoing the uniforms of grenadiers, dragoons, fusiliers, corps of engineers and household cavalry.

In between each band march lodges, the core groups of the Apprentice Boys, largely men aged 40 and over. The band members, including women and girls, are noticeably younger. Do male members of the bands move into the lodges as they age? And the women? The progress of the parade is steady, low-key, but never po-faced. There is the jollity of a spree on a bright morning. No alcohol is consumed. No barriers are yet erected on side-streets. They will come later. The city is functioning, if early-morning drowsy.

The parade completes the 1km circuit of the city walls, which are unbroken except for a small dip on Newmarket Street, between the civic theatre and a bookie's shop. From another vantage point, tucked up against the low wall on the inside of the walkway between Butcher Gate and Castle Gate, the bands are close. Marchers wave or nod. A number smile and say 'hello'. An MP passes and grins a greeting. Sweat glistens on the arms of the bass drummers. Their substitutes march beside them, ready to take over as the day progresses. They slap their pompom-headed drumsticks in their palms or on their thighs.

The marchers leave the walls and make for the war memorial on The Diamond. This brutalist, graphic WW1 war sculpture dominates the city's highest square. The marchers, bands and lodges encircle the memorial in quiet and good order. Wreaths are laid. The Last Post, Abide with Me, God Save the Queen are played. The mood is reverential, earnest and calm.

Then the lodges and the bands move off, in preparation for the main parade, a much larger event, involving thousands of people from outside the city and held on the streets rather than on the walls.

Police vehicles move in and officers begin erecting barriers.

Latent questions of timing, scale, civic disruption, abuse of alcohol and drinking regulations are added to existing questions of exclusion and sectarianism.

A shift from commemoration to triumph, from reverence to bawd, from an historical spectacle to an anti-social rally is underway.

http://www.apprenticeboys.co.uk

http://www.wkmfb.co.uk/events_reports/relief_of_derry_parade_-_08082015

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MARCHES, PARADES AND FUNERALS

The writer lives in a State where marches, parades and sometimes funerals are highly militarised events. Most citizens are comfortable with this. The State is not unique. All over the world, state and anti-state groups militarise their marches, parades and sometimes their funerals.

March on, join bravely, let us to't pell-mell

If not to heaven, then hand in hand to hell.

Sometimes attempts are made to assign the words 'carnival' and 'festival' to events which, at their core, are exclusive and sectarian, sometimes threatening and violent, both implicitly and explicitly.

March on, my fellows:

Make good this ostentation

Band members dress in military-style uniforms. Ranks of men and women walk in march time to the beat of drums or the calls of a leader.

Now, Mars, I prithee, make us quick in work,

That we with smoking swords may march from hence,

To help our fielded friends! Come, blow thy blast.

There is evident support for all these forms of public display. They are presented as cultural expression, commemorations of historical events and manifestations of respect for the dead.

Our army shall

In solemn show attend this funeral

People who do not support them either acquiesce or resent them, mostly quietly.

His funerals shall not be in our camp,

Lest it discomfort us.

The State is divided on sectarian grounds in regards to religion, educational provision, housing allocation and cultural manifestation. The State's response to marches, parades and funerals is complex and considered partial and opaque by many people.

And let thy misty vapours march so thick,

That in their smoky ranks his smother'd light

May set at noon and make perpetual night.

No writer who lives in the State is unaffected by these public displays. Responses from writers vary, as they do in the general population.

But then more 'why?'; why have they dared to march

So many miles upon her peaceful bosom,

Frighting her pale-faced villages with war

And ostentation of despised arms?

Might writers have something to say about the generation and evolution of cultural forms devoid of militarism?

Any more than any other citizen?

Exeunt marching; after the which a peal of ordnance are shot off.

Orange parade, July 2015:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ul5EaTD_H08

Peggy O'Hara's funeral, July 2015: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQkNYDUtR3I

http://www.opensourceshakespeare.org

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