Eight Word Horror Story

Another regular conversational pit stop during our calls was the guests I was interviewing on my radio show on any given week, especially if they were rock stars. Inevitably, John would have some spirited opinions to share about his competition. One time, for instance, I casually mentioned an upcoming booking with Mick Jagger.

“Why are you interviewing him?” John asked.

The truth was, I was interviewing Jagger because he was holding a concert in L.A. to raise money for victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua. (His wife, Bianca, was Nicaraguan.) But for some reason I foolishly blurted out, “Because the Rolling Stones are probably the greatest live touring band in the world.”

“Isn’t that what they used to say about us?” John coolly replied.

“But the Beatles aren’t touring anymore,” I said, stepping on a landmine. “The Beatles as a group don’t exist anymore. And the Rolling Stones are as important a presence as anybody in rock ’n’ roll.”

“The Rolling Stones followed us!” John shouted. “Just look at the albums! Their Satanic gobbledygook came right after Sgt. Pepper. We were there first. The only difference is that we got labeled as the mop tops and they were put out there as revolutionaries. Look, Ellie,” he went on, “I spent a lot of time with Mick. We palled around in London. We go way back. But the Beatles were the revolutionaries, not the Rolling Pebbles!”

Excerpt From, ‘We All Shine On’, Elliot Mintz

Hello to Berlin

On Saturday night BBC 2 broadcast a one-off feature length film based on Christopher Isherwood's biography of his early life in Berlin, the period that inspired Goodbye to Berlin. 'Christopher and his Kind, starring Dr Who's Matt Smith, followed the young Isherwood's sexual and political self-discovery in 1930s Berlin, against the backdrop of rising Nazi influence and power. It was an ambitious production, taking in Isherwood's exciting new gay relationships, his friendship with a drama-queen cabaret singer, his befriending of a prominent Jewish family and the continuing intrusion of politics into his life, despite his attempts to ignore the coming disaster.Smith's performance took a while to warm to - his no-doubt accurate rendition of Isherwood's camp voice was grating at the beginning, not helped by an opening scene involving a petulant row with his chilly mother (Rome's Lindsey Duncan), but once the action moved to Berlin, things picked up. In the company of friend and occasional lover WH Auden, Christopher throws himself into Berlin's gay scene, benefiting from the Weimar Republic's catastrophic inflation rate which lets him have his pick of handsome young men desperate for British money. The exploits of Isherwood and Auden with various German boys seem less like mutual self-discovery and more like sex tourism, especially, as Auden notes drily 'They're all rampant hetters, they only use our money to pay for cunt'. I've explored this theme of straight men from poorer countries performing gay sex acts on rich foreigners for money before, and it certainly casts a different, more economically driven light on Berlin's reputation as the gay capital of the world in the 30s. But that is literally another post.

Christopher falls quickly for Caspar, a young Polish man with limited English, and befriends the collection of eccentrics that occupy his boarding house. These include Jean Ross, a hyperactive young English cabaret singer who talks, smokes and drinks incessantly, and with whom Isherwood forms a friendship despite her tendency to tap him for money. Jean is somewhat over-played by Imogen Poots, but some little details ring true – her slightly-less-than cut glass accent indicates her middle-class origins, and her decidedly off-key but heartfelt singing captures the do-it-yourself appeal of cabaret. Christopher starts out amused by her but believes her to be vapid, only to be given an unexpected lesson on political awareness when he glibly announces he has been commissioned to write for Oswald Mosely’s magazine. Jean is just one example of a character who Christopher initially underestimates, only be to humbled by them. As Jean says 'I may wear green nail varnish, but I'm not completely vacuous'.

Christopher also gets to know Wilfrid Landauer, head of the German-Jewish department store range. Played to remote, mysterious perfection by Iddo Goldberg, Landauer is a man completely in control of his life at the beginning of the story, but by 1933 his stores are closed and ransacked and he is missing. Goldberg was underused in this role - in Goodbye to Berlin for example Landauer has a much more prominent role and provides much-needed political context. However he only appears for a handful of scenes in 'Christopher and his Kind' and his fate is left unresolved.

The key love story of the drama is between Christopher and Heinz, a young working-class boy who Christopher pursues after Caspar returns to his 'hetter' ways. Unlike the other boys, Heinz is not selling his body and seem genuinely to be in love with Christopher, but their relationship is complicated by Heinz's brother's antipathy to Christopher and to the nature of their relationship. This leads to a showdown when Gerhardt joins the Nazi party and demands Christopher leave. As the Nazis gain power, the British characters leave one by one, until finally Christopher persuades Heinz to join him in England. The attempt to keep Heinz out of Germany fails thanks to the obtuseness of the Home Office, but Heinz ends up surviving the war and marrying a woman who, as he puts it 'doesn't ask questions'. A postwar encounter with Heinz shows Christopher to have become hardened by his experiences - no longer is he willing to help his former love escape, leading his old friend Auden to damningly tell him "The only cause you really care about, Christopher, is yourself", ameliorating the sting with "But you've turned it into an art form."

But the character of Isherwood is less selfish in those early days in Berlin. True, he is not particularly politically engaged - but then how many people really are, even in times of upheaval? Like many people, he wants to be able to pursue his own literary and romantic interests uninterrupted, but despite himself he cannot but become caught up in the events of the day. The rise of Nazism in Germany is somewhat simplified for the purposes of the film, with some characters engaging in clunky 'background' dialogue describing the Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic. Urban working-class support for the Nazis (as personified by Gerhardt) is emphasised at the expense of the more politically powerful middle-class and clerical (both Protestant and Catholic) support the party enjoyed, giving the impression that the Nazis rose to power chiefly as a party representing the urban working classes when in fact it was often the opposite that was the case, particularly in Berlin.

Perhaps the nature of political change in the period is best summed up by Christopher’s philosophical landlady who said ‘The Kaiser, Herr von Baden, Herr Hitler… the names they change, life goes on’. This could well have been the viewpoint of many ordinary Germans who just wanted some kind of stability, and who, without necessarily supporting Hitler, just saw him as another name in a long list of leaders.

The production values were beautifully done, though an understandable reliance of interior shots didn’t give much of a feel for the city. But considering a set for 1930s Berlin would literally have to be built from scratch the interiors that were used seemed perfect for the period.

The necessity for Christopher to get out of Berlin due to the Nazi stance on homosexuality is made more urgent with Gerhardt’s threat ‘We don’t want your kind here’, the word 'kind' echoing the title. But the title perhaps refers less to homosexuality than to the type of people who inhabit the boarding-house – oddbods, eccentrics, people who could not find a home anywhere else but in the freewheeling, wild world of pre-war Berlin.

Aside from some clunky dialogue, over-acting and historical simplification, 'Christopher and His Kind' is a moving, affecting and intelligent drama. 

Beatles in Colour → John in BLACK For @sgt-revolver

Naming the city

Towards the end of Claire Kilroy’s 2009 novel All Names Have Been Changed, set in the mid 1980s, the narrator prepares for emigration with the damning speech: ‘There’s nothing for us in this country. It’s never going to change. It’s never going to get better.’ As Kilroy has said herself: ‘When I wrote that, we were still in the full throttle of the boom…There was no sense we were going back there.’

In a way it’s good that the novel’s prescience is accidental, since self-conscious ‘boom-to-bust’ novels are painful to read. I was drawn to the novel not so much for its subject matter (a group of mature students and their incestuous relationship with the famous novelist who teaches them creative writing in Trinity) but for its historical and geographical setting – Dublin in the 80s. By all accounts it was a pretty depressing place, though Kilroy’s narrator Declan lays on the misery a bit thick in places. Still, overall the city is beautifully, even lovingly evoked, with burnt-out corporation flats described as keenly as the rarified campus of Trinity.

Wisely, Kilroy avoids a too-broad geographical sweep, instead focusing in on a few key areas – Trinity and its surrounding nexus of College Green, Dame Street and Westmoreland Street,  Mountjoy Square and its decayinge environs, and a brief excursion to the southside suburbs. The Trinity campus is a haven for characters seeking to escape the sudden violence and unpredictability of the city, particularly the alcoholic novelist Glynn, but no-one can escape reality for too long, no matter how much they may try to through writing.

A wonderful set-piece follows Glynn, storming out of a pub on Westmoreland Street in a rage and heading back to Trinity. This is a walk of no more than five minutes, but it becomes an Odyssean journey of danger and wonder, as Glynn boosts his spirits by taking in the city he thinks he knows, before being attacked by a gang of youths and fleeing for safety into the protective arms of Trinity campus, where he still rebels against the college’s incongruous ownership of acres of valuable city land by kicking up the grass of its rugby pitch. Much is said about Ireland’s contradictions in that chapter, and said more effectively than in a later chapter in which Declan rages against the excesses of St Patrick’s Day.

Drink is a curse in the novel, as it is in so many Irish novels, but the other curse of working-class Dublin is brought to life by Declan’s accidental friendship with stoner-turned-junkie Giz who occupies the bottom floor of his building. It would be easy for this character to feel tacked-on, but Giz comes to life and in some ways seems more real than the main characters. It would also be easy to make him more sympathetic by adding a tragic backstory or imbuing him with a fake ‘salt-of-the-earth’ dependability, but Kilroy avoids the clichés.  Giz is violent, aggressive and untrustworthy; a real friendship between him and Declan is impossible due to their insurmountable differences in background, yet somehow he elicits sympathy. His decline mirrors that of the city, but he is not just a symbol. It can be very difficult for a writer who has not grown up poor to successfully evoke inner-city characters – descriptions tend to fall prey to dehumanising hatred or pity – but Kilroy’s observant eye sees the realness of the ‘scumbag’ without glossing over his unpleasantness.

It is these, almost peripheral aspects of the novel that interested me most. The main plot offers much of interest, but the opaqueness of the characters as seen through Declan’s eyes meant they took a while to come alive.  Glynn himself is despicable, yet like Giz, is oddly engaging and realised, but the four women who make up the rest of the class are hard to fathom. Kilroy has said:  ’At all times I know what the women are thinking in the novel and from there I had to guess at what he [Declan] was thinking.’  As the novel progresses it’s clear that there is a whole, untold aspect of the story that’s hidden from the male characters. Declan for the most part is well-drawn, except for a few brief instances where he thinks or behaves in a self-consciously ‘male’ way – the trap that female authors writing in a male voice must constantly try and avoid falling into, and vice versa. He’s not particularly sympathetic, yet he’s worth following nonetheless. Of the female characters, only Aisling the mentally unstable goth and Antonia the brittle, sharp-tongued divorcee convince. The pliant Guinevere appears to have no other function in the plot other than to be beautiful, which is perhaps the point, and the mumsy Faye barely registers. As seen from the point of view of Declan (and, vicariously, Glynn) this is perhaps an entirely accurate depiction of the group.

Unfortunately the group’s worship of Glynn in the first half of the novel is hard to fathom – his legacy is well-described, but they all seem so helpless and cringing before him as to be unbelievable. I read a comment somewhere that the friendship between the group seemed unconvincing because none of the epic conversations engaged in during their marathon drinking sessions with Glynn are described in any detail. Also, for a crowd who spend so much time drinking, they rarely seem to laugh or have any fun. Maybe that’s literary types for you! Or maybe Kilroy is making another point here – that a lot of the conversations we have while drunk are so much pointless nonsense. She’s an intelligent writer; I’d be inclined to think that the seeming flaws in the novel are intentional.

All Names Have Been Changed is worth reading once you get past the first few, somewhat turgid, chapters; though its occasional self-consciousness and elaborate language will not appeal to some. It certainly deserves a place among works of art that bring to life the psychogeography of Dublin, a city that continues to inspire, even at its bleakest.

from Paul's self-interview with the McCartney I release.

He had the first two lines of 'Every Night' for "a few years"? D: D:

For reference, those two lines are:

Every night, I just want to go out Get out of my head Every day, I don't want to get up Get out of my bed

Source: The Longest Cocktail Party by Richard diLello

How to write a historical novel

I recently read two books which could be handily placed on opposing sides of the ‘how to write historical fiction’ spectrum. They are The Map of Love by Adhaf Soueif and Brooklyn by Colm Toibín. One takes in the entire modern history of a particular country through the experiences of its characters, the other’s scope is limited to the point of provinicial. Yet, it is the small story, Toibín’s Brooklyn, that is infinitely more successful. Souief said of her leading male character, Sharif al-Baroudi, that she wanted to write a character one could fall in love with, using the appearance of a romantic hero in Egyptian cinema as her template. The story of the Map of Love is split across the 20th century, focusing on the romance and marriage between Lady Anna Winterbourne and al-Baroudi in Egypt in the 1900s and the discovery of her diaries by two of her female descendents, American Isabel and Egyptian Amal. Soueif had an admirable aim in the book – to tell the little-known story of the nascent Egyptian struggle for independence in the years before the First World War – and while the research is comprehensive and the historical details are fascinating, the characters utterly fail to convince, in my opinion. Lady Anna is too modern a woman to be believable as a character of her time, and her unquestioning, wholehearted adoption of her new husband’s family, culture and country come across as forced rather than romantic. From a secure position within conventional Victorian genteel society, she abruptly and without question pledges uncritical support for the cause of Egyptian independence. Even though she is portrayed as more thoughtful and historically aware than her peers, her decision just doesn’t feel believable. History shows us that the need for independence in former colonies was justified, but it seems implausible that someone like Lady Anna would take that position so quickly and easily in her place and time. The story isn’t helped by the fact that Lady Anna and her husband are too saintly to be true – apart from some minor cultural speedbumps they remain sickeningly in love, without any of the normal gripes and confusions that accompany even the happiest of marriages, let alone one across a cultural gulf. The two are like a cardboard cut-out couple, cloyingly devoted to each other and to the cause of independence with barely a question asked or a dissenting voice raised, and they are also implausibly modern in their attitudes to each other. Perhaps if they were not presented to the reader in the form of Anna’s diary entries a more convincing inner life might have arisen, but as it stands they don’t convince and it is hard to care about them. The modern Egyptian, Amal al-Ghamrawi, is more rounded, but again her edges seem to have been neatly rounded off to leave a character who, despite all her soul-searching, seems somewhat hollow. The main problem with The Map of Love is that the characters seem to have been designed to represent particular things and so perform a kind of wish-fulfilment for the author. Lady Anna is the contrite face of colonial Britain turning her back on her old life to embrace that of the people her nation is oppressing, Sharif al-Baroudi is an unusually enlightened 19th century man who disavows gender stereotypes and political violence and Amal’s brother Omar lives a successful, cosmopolitan life but remains loyal to his ethnic background. It is always obvious to the reader when a writer is using characters as a mouthpiece, and immediately interferes with any spontaneous enjoyment of the text. The Map of Love aims nobly to tell the story of modern Egypt, and does succeed to some extent, but it ultimately fails due to the lack of believable characters. Brooklyn, on the other hand, appears to be telling nothing more than the story of one unremarkable young woman, from an unremarkable town in Ireland, and her emigration to America. Eilis Lacey, the woman in question, is not even moving to New York as we know it from movies – the American sections of the book centre around a few streets of the Irish-American district of Brooklyn with its large Irish community, complete with an omnipresent parish priest. But prosaic though Eilis’ life and experiences may be, her inner world and small conflicts are rendered so thoughtfully and reverentially by Toibín they end up telling a larger story – that of the Irish emigrant experience. Eilis has never expected more than a life in Enniscorthy, working in an office until someone marries her and she devotes life to having his children, but events conspire to send her abroad to work in a department store and study bookkeeping. Initially Brooklyn is not much more exciting than Enniscorthy – Eilis lives in a Irish-run boarding house with a curfew, her days are spent wearily trekking across the shop floor and her free time taken up by evening classes and helping the priest with parish activities. But as time goes by the opportunities American life begin to open themselves up – from exposure to people of different races and cultures, to the excitement of the latest fashions. Toibín is a compassionate author who doesn’t sneer at the joy ordinary people find in ordinary things - in fact he accords these things the respect they deserve. Eilis even finds romance in America, but the slow tugs of obligation from the two sides of her life threaten to undo her when circumstances require to return home to Ireland. The premise of Brooklyn is the choice Eilis must take between her two worlds, and interestingly this choice is not presented as a clichéd split between home, obligation and repression and abroad, freedom and experimentation. On the contrary, Eilis faces potential nooses wherever she looks, and the ties that bind can take unexpected forms. Her mixture of engagement and passivity are wholly convincing as the experiences of an individual, yet also seem to encompass the thoughts and feelings of a whole generation that were put in her position. This novel has no overawed glimpses of the Manhattan skyline for the arriving immigrant, but a collection of moments – a parish hall dance, a trip to a bookshop, a day out in Coney island – to give us a truly authentic sense of the migrant experience. Brooklyn has been as carefully worked and polished as The Map of Love - the difference is the joins are not visible and the author has all but disappeared, and that is why it is the more successful work.

Veep style tv shows about the Beatles that I want

Veep style tv show about Apple in 1968

Veep style tv show about the staff at the Dakota

Chapter 1: Dead in the morning

Chapter 2: This cross is your heart, this line is your path

New fic: Under his carpet

Under his carpet: Linda Eastman McCartney reflects on the ups and downs her marriage to Paul in a series of snapshots between 1968 and 1990. Chapter 1 of 5 posted.

Plinda fans/Paul superfans dni (JOKING! No sugarcoating, but not a hatchet job on either. Most of it is based on fact, but plenty is invented - speculative fiction an' all that.)

While not shying away from the darker sides of the marriage, this story is primarily intended as a character study about flawed individuals, none of whom are villains. It also explores the tension between visually appearing liberated, as many Boomer women did, and the reality of their domestic lives. A tension which is still relevant today.