Cocktails and Records

If you spend your evenings in front of the TV engaged in excessive hand wringing over the current state of ‘popular entertainment’, then I’d like to cheerfully and annoyingly remind you that it was ever thus.

Yesterday I was at the British Library enjoying the 19th century’s version of mass novelty entertainment thanks to Professor Heard’s Peerless Magic Lantern Show. There, in the dowdy atmosphere-less BL conference centre, Professor Heard enthralled us with some of the most popular (and beautifully hand-painted) magic lantern slides of the day:

1. skulls and phantoms blinking their eyes and grinning menacingly
2. a tree taking revenge on its role as firewood by coming alive and attacking a human with an axe
3. a monkey throwing a live cat onto a fire
4. a boy starving to death whilst his sister dies of cold
5. a series of drunks falling to their death
6. some particularly gruesome, blood spurting battle scenes
7. a man lying in bed, amusingly eating a succession of rats

Of course, there were other lantern slides and shows – fables, bible stories, morality plays, nice scenery from around the world and the like – but who wants to see those when you can watch someone eating vermin…

In some strange turn of events, I recently decided to shun my usual non-fiction and French textbooks and read a novel. I chose The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – a book I have been thinking about reading for ooh, 15 years.

Now Huckleberry Finn is ‘the first of the Great American Novels’ and people have undoubtedly been deconstructing Mark Twain’s tale of a runaway boy and an escaped slave ever since it was published in 1884. Indeed, the debates you could have about racism and slavery are endless – but apart from that what most struck me about the book was its sense of freedom.

By freedom, I don’t mean the obvious type of freedom that inevitably results from escaping slavery or an abusive father for a life of hi-jinks on a raft floating down the Mississippi. I mean the freedom that Huckleberry Finn, a young teenage boy, could actually approach complete and utter strangers, have a chat with them and perhaps stay around for a bit. i.e. freedom from the thought that they might look at him weirdly and tell him to piss off; freedom from the idea that all strangers are potential murderers, rapists, thieves, con-artists and psychos; freedom to believe that people are, by and large, quite nice.

Obviously this is a made-up book in a different place and time, and I’m sure that late 1800s Illinois had its fair share of untrustworthy tossers, but I wish I had it in me to be like Huck Finn and less suspicious of strangers.

My folks have been visiting recently. This means that I have been busy over the past few weeks entertaining them with the sights of London. And because they have been here quite a few times in the past, this is no mean feat.

However, my trusty standby for the jaded visitor to London has delivered once again. Postman’s Park, tucked away in a small green corner of the City of London, is one man’s tiled tribute to the forgotten heroes of 19th century London.

If  haven’t already been there, then go and have your heartstrings pulled right now.

On my more intolerant days, I wish I could see a few more signs like these around my busy commuter train…

From the National Railway Museum in York.

Whilst we’re enjoying our egg and chips down the local caff, we may as well do a spot of shopping.

This short made by the Rank organisation in the 60s features professional lad Sid James showing off London’s markets.

Covent Garden, Portobello Road, Petticoat Lane, Berwick Street, the new supermarkets – they’re all there. You just wouldn’t necessarily recognise them…

‘The Market Place’ from Look at Life

I live a sheltered life. I know very few people who think that the Daily Mail is a credible newspaper, I am quite frankly shocked when I meet someone who still likes Oasis and I don’t actually know anyone between the ages of 5 and 25.

So my session this morning with our work experience person was a bit of an eye-opener. We were meant to be talking about my job and ‘career’, but as soon as I discovered her interest in music we seemed to spend most of the time talking about that instead. Doing untold damage to the image of our organisation, I found myself lapsing into the role of incredulous eldery aunt type, gently quizzing her about ‘the young people of today’ as though I had been living in a box in some remote outpost for the past 10 years, rather than in the centre of groovy London town.

She is 15. She likes a wide range of music (doesn’t everyone), but her favourites are The Cure, The Smiths, Joy Division, Bauhaus, the Sex Pistols, Bowie, Nirvana and Bob Dylan, she loves Bob Dylan and is desparate to see him live. How did she come to hear these fine examples of ‘rebellious youth music’? Her Dad bought them for her.

And she buys vinyl, second hand stuff from the markets and record-exchange. Does she buy LPs on spec? How does she know what to buy? Easy, her Step-Dad advises her on classic albums she needs to have in her collection.

Does she listen to any new music? No, because it’s all rubbish (apart from the Arctic Monkeys). She and her Dads agree on this.

Does she read the music press? No, she used to read the NME but grew out of it. Dad said it used to be good in the 70s and 80s though. She wishes it was still the 80s, it seemed so much better then.

How old are her Dads? Really old. How old is really old? 42 or 43.

I imagine that this is hardly news for regular readers who have any contact whatsoever with the outside world, but as I said, I live a sheltered life. And a naive one. What do you rebel against when your parents have got excellent music taste and they’re your own personal walking version of the Melody Maker album review section?

The recent spate of shows on BBC4 about both prog rock and the history of fashion has had the unintended effect of bringing that most unique item of fashion, the cape, to the front of my mind. Stuck in the midst of history, folklore and comic books, can anyone other than Rick Wakeman and Superman possibly carry the cape off? Possibly not – the only other person I’ve ever known to wear one was our university wizard.

Clearly appointed as a student union jape in the late 60s, the official university wizard was still hanging around when I was there in the early 1990s. His job appeared to be meandering around campus flourishing his cape, waving his staff and generally annoying my cynical slacker generation with his tales of cosmology, magic and ‘alternative’ lifestyles.

We thought he was a boring old hippy. He probably went home feeling sorry for us and our miserable capitalist lives. Wonder if he’s still there and what he thinks now.

Here’s a word you don’t hear very often – ‘wicked’*. I realised this when I was watching the excellent film Tiger Bay (from 1959) last week and Hayley Mills said something like ‘But he’s such a terribly wicked man’.

The thought occurred to me again the next day as I spent a pleasant morning at the Charles Dickens Museum. Dickens’ characters regularly accused others or berated themselves for being wicked. Even trees could have wicked thoughts – you probably wouldn’t get an author writing this these days:

‘As the elms bent to one another, like giants who were whispering secrets, and after a few seconds of such repose, fell into a violent flurry, tossing their wild arms about, as if their late confidences were really too wicked for their peace of mind . . . ‘ (from David Copperfield)

A quick search of IMDB reveals that although there have been a number of movies with wicked in the title in recent decades, there was a glut of them in the early years of cinema – A Wicked Bounder (1906), His Wicked Eyes (1919), The Wicked City (1916, 1926), The Wicked Cat (1922), Wild and Wicked (1923), Wicked Kashmir (1928), and my favourite Winky Waggles the Wicked Widow (1914), to name but a few. Again, blockbuster musicals not withstanding, you’re not getting many films about wicked bounders at the moment.

Based on this spurious research, it seems that the use of the word ‘wicked’ to describe the evil and the morally suspect has fallen into decline. Perhaps this is due to the decreasing influence of religion. Or perhaps people just aren’t wicked anymore. They’re just b*stards.

*Obviously, that’s wicked meaning ‘bad’ rather than wicked meaning ‘good’, although even that’s pretty passé now.

I spent last night at one of my very favourite London cinemas, the NFT, watching one of their archive screenings. Last night’s offering was on sex education and how it has been presented on screen this past century.

This can be summed in two ways:

1. It is your moral duty to your country to control yourself (or else you’ll bring everyone else down with your nasty diseases)

My favourite example of this was a 1938 film called The Road of Health. This is essentially an animated warning of what happens when you stray off the Road of Health onto the paths of Prostitution and Immorality. Yes, you end up in the hell of Veneral Disease where flames of misery lap at your feet and make your life a continuous nightmare of torture and statistics on syphilius. But don’t worry, help is at hand – you can drag yourself out of the cesspit by crossing the Government services and treatment centres bridge back to the Road of Health. Hooray!

2. The human sexual act is best explained by reference to flowers, birds, rabbits, cows chickens, spiders and even mould; anything but humans.

Did you know that mould is looking for a perfect partner too? Well, it is and it likes to find the right mould, get married and then um… do whatever mould does. Anyway, it’s similar to what people do and we can all learn from it.

Despite most films being impenetrably euphemistic, we did see one brave exception – A New Approach to Sex Education: Growing Up, a very progressive film from 1971. When you think of sex education films from the 70s and 80s you think of carefully discreet diagrams of fallopian tubes etc. Not this one though – not only did you get to see a couple actually at it, but graphic depictions of erect penises and hairy 70s people wanking. You could feel the audience’s collective jaw dropping. Much to the disappointment of the film makers, Growing Up was promptly attacked by Mary Whitehouse and banned under the Obscene Publications Act before making it into classrooms. I wonder why…