Can you hear it?

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

Life’s too busy; London’s too noisy; there’s always far too much going on. I never have time to…; I can’t see you until…; I haven’t had the chance to…

If city life is so bad, why do so many people live there? Why do city draw people so helplessly, relentlessly if they cause nothing but strain and stress and misery and disappointment and illness to those who live there? It’s self-evident, surely, that there’s good and bad about everything and city life shouldn’t be immune to that. There’s plenty that’s wrong with what goes on there.

But who, apart from those who make money from their existence, celebrates cities now? That seems somewhat contradictory to me; cities are growing effortlessly, continually; and they will always do so. Why?

I’ve always lived in or near cities – the last 10 and a half years in a variety of parts of London; I’ve never dreamt of living apart from them. I’ve always trotted out clichés along the lines of: the diversity, the opportunity, the ease of getting places. But there’s something more – walk with eyes open in the city, and you might say you are never more than the glance of an eye from a miracle, from the beautiful and the echo of eternity.

Jon McGregror spends a whole, breathtakingly beautiful book examining this in “If nobody speaks of remarkable things”; a novel, yes, but also a breathless hymn to the endless beauty, the everyday moments of transcendence of city life. It’s a plea to open eyes, to listen, to stop – to all city-dwellers to become archivists, interacting with the things, the places, the people all around.

There are many who bemoan cities – London especially – as places of darkness. But when did you last listen?


If you listen, you can hear it.
The city, it sings.
If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house.
It’s clearest at night, when the sound cuts more sharply across the surface fo things, when the song reaches out to a place inside you.
It’s a wordless song, for the most, but it’s a song all the same, and nobody hearing it could doubt what it sings. And the song sings the loudest when you pick out each note.

(Jon McGregor: If Nobody Speaks Of Remarkable Things. Pub. Bloomsbury, 2002. Page 1)

Holier Than Thou

"Really quite clever".

So goes the latest advertising slogan for British TV channel More4. It's a big claim for a station that seeks to both intelligent and entertaining. This week the channel broadcast the feature length comedy drama "The Trial Of Tony Blair", subsequently airing on Thursday on parent station Channel 4. Set in the near future after a belated hand over of power from Blair to Gordon Brown, it charts Blair's new life after power and the slow subsequent build-up to a prosecution for war crimes in Iraq.

It's a bleak piece, with a lightly black comic tone; Blair is a figure of fun, to be equally pitied and despised. Skillful as some of the performances are, though, this is not a clever piece of television. On the contray, it's a deeply unpleasant work. Smugly self-righteous, it's about as appealing as spending Christmas afternoon listening to a drunk uncle hold forth at great length on the blindingly obvious.

It's not the politics of the piece that's such a turn-off; it's just the smug tone of self-righteous wish-fulfillment that is so off-putting. In addition, the fact is that it is difficult to watch for 90 minutes when there's not a single character presented as route into the drama for the audience; there's no-one to sympathise with, no-one to act as the moral conscience, no-one to like.

The writers evidently consider themselves and the audience to be that conscience or that moral centre; but all that leaves is a bad taste in the mouth, that has the unmistakable sense of the moral judgementalism of 'reality' television.All the programme does is replace debate with caricature, hard work with lazy generalisations. Instead of adding to the debate, it trivialises issues by making one man a figure of fun and an object for moral superiority. Such an approach honours no-one and not unlike the war in Iraq, leaves us all worse off.

The Run

It is like this every Saturday. The same route, the same scenery, the same time. The people are a mixture – some she knows or recognises, others she sees once and then never again. She stops in the same place every week too – at the end of a long, straight section, just before the path curves round to the left and on, past the pub with canopies and chairs outside, on past the church and beyond. This is always a point of decision – turn around and go home, or carry on; push herself that little bit harder, go that little bit further, feel that little bit more.

So, as always, here she stops. Bent over, hands resting on knees, her top drenched through, hugging her back through the dampness of the sweat. Her lungs gasping, dry and rasping like sandpaper. As always, she turns and looks, still bent over. The path is still empty – but for an early morning dog walker – alive most of all with the still fresh memory of her footsteps. As she does so, she considers: I must be the advertiser’s dream. An aspirational young woman, free and unencumbered, on the road.

That doesn’t matter, she tells herself. It doesn’t matter that someone like her, doing something like this, someplace like this, the same time every week; it doesn’t matter that every week the profile of someone like her sits in front of the advertisers and brand managers of the biggest sportswear firms and they consider: how do we reach her? How do we connect to her? What is she thinking and feeling? Why is she running? Where is she going? And where is she going back to?

Today she so nearly sets off and runs further, but she knows she shouldn’t. She has run for nearly half an hour already and must of course repeat that to get back. She has things she must do today; the friend to see for lunch, the presents to buy for the party tonight, the phone calls to make and emails to send. All of which stretches out in front of her, the usual rhythm of her Saturdays, as predictable and as varied as the path that she now turns on and, slowly at first, starts to head home on.

The dog walker is a way off in the distance still, the dog ambling aimlessly by the bank of the canal just to her left. She picks up speed slowly and steadily; it’s always hard to restart, but inside a minute the strength returns, the adrenaline recommences its course through her body. The dog walker doesn’t notice her as she passes, too intent on his phone call, talking slightly too loudly about where he will meet the listener before the game this afternoon. She carries on, under the bridges, past the houseboats, back towards the city as it slowly stretches and yawns into the weekend.

As always the second half is slower than the first; the path is slightly uphill in places, there is a greater chance of having to wait at crossings and, of course, she is wearier. She is home, entering the code to the front door in a breathless blur; she is into the flat quickly, not bothering to turn on lights; she leaves the fridge open, giving her enough light to see by as she pours the juice she had squeezed before she went out. She stands against the work-surface, a normal pace of breath slowly returning, and drinks. Two long mouthfuls, she pours again, and this time drinks more slowly. She caresses the fridge door closed, turns the taps in the bathroom and flicks her bedroom stereo on; the music fits appropriately with the soundtrack in the mind of the advertising executive as she allows the bath to fill before relaxing into it, letting the warmth of the water envelop her tired muscles and ligaments.


She plans her outfit for the evening in her mind, and decides she needs new make-up to complement it; the day taking shape as closes her eyes, sips almost apologetically at her drink and sinks low enough to let the foam lap round her chin. She is refreshed enough in the space of half an hour to give her the momentum to dress, to shop and take part in the rest of the day as fully as she wished to. But with every step climbed or bag lifted, every conversation and brief dance that evening, there will be a dull ache in her muscles, like the smallest of stones in her shoe, reminding her of the exertion and escape of the morning. The ache will remain, in her body or in her mind, all week long; and it will lead her back to the same path, the same time, hands on her knees, lungs like sandpaper.

Blockbusters: The Good News

Blockbusters are bad news. That’s the received critical wisdom. Star Wars, while undoubtedly an iconic movie, is credited with inventing the modern summer event movie that dominates the high concept world of the packed summer (and other holiday) schedules that we now live with. Blockbusters are effects dominated, money driven and are at best the cinematic equivalent of a roller-coaster; exhilarating while you’re on it, but pointless as soon as you’ve finished.

However there’s another side to it. Consider this: Jurassic Park – perhaps the definition of a 90s blockbuster – enabled the production of one of the 90s’ masterpieces, Schindler’s List. This was, as now well recorded, the project Spielberg waited years to make after acquiring the rights to Thomas Keneally’s book. When he finally felt ready to do so, he took his proposal for a three hour black and white documentary style film to MCA president Sid Sheinberg who agreed with one condition – that Spielberg make Jurassic Park too. He obliged, and the fact that he worked on the special effects for the latter while shooting the former in Poland is the bizarre truth. That one financially guaranteed the other is clear; that it maintained the director’s emotional sanity is possibly a reasonable assumption.

It’s said by many that Schindler’s List is beyond criticism because of its subject matter. However, as I approached the DVD re-issue, ‘appropriate’ criticism lurked in my memory. Don’t I remember being told that the film makes Schindler too simplistic and one-dimensional? Isn’t the girl in the red coat a touch too far? Isn’t it just a little, well, sentimental?

These questions remained unanswered on viewing the film itself. I was angry and tearful at times, yes. But it wasn’t the devastating experience I remember as a student. It’s good, of course, but I left thinking time had played a trick on me and that the few critical voices that had remained in my head had something to say.

Then we come to the main extra on the DVD. It’s a compilation of accounts from survivors. As you listen, you realise you’re hearing the film in the first person. There’s the boy who escapes the ghetto liquidation by telling the SS he’s been ordered to clear the road of debris. There’s Goethe’s servant girl, saying she knew how many people he would kill that day by the hat he chose. Here are the women who huddled into a large room, waiting to see if they’d be gassed or showered. You realise as you listen, that Spielberg simply put memory on film as faithfully as appropriate.

What you realise next is that the masterstroke is indeed the black and white documentary style of the film. One survivor describes the concentration camp as having “no colour”. This, then, was more than an artistic choice. He simply recorded what he heard. Some of it - you hear words in this documentary from survivors that make it clear that Spielberg left out some things that should never be put on film. Some things, he realised, we don’t need to see. We should only hear some things first person, because, to be honest, we just wouldn’t believe it. What he gave us is enough.

So the DVD package, while light in the number of extras, gives us enough to remind us that what we’re seeing is indeed more than a film; in a sense, it should be beyond criticism. On reflection, the choices that Spielberg made seem appropriate, helping us to absorb all that we need to. Who in their right mind can talk about this the same way we do about American Beauty or Casablanca, however great they are? – one of the survivors talks of the importance of individual names going on the list, being called out and singled out. The film shows us lives, with names and histories and (in the haunting colour epilogue) futures. Without Jurassic Park’s money, millions of people may never have heard them.

One last thing came to me after pressing stop on this DVD. My father’s mother was a Jew who converted to Christianity. She and her young family escaped invading German forces by the skin of their teeth. As a child, when my father told me this, I often had a dream. I heard boots racing upstairs. Silence. Then shooting. I survived because I was secured to the bottom of a mattress, out of sight. There’s a boy like that in this film. I don’t recall right now if he survived, and I can’t bring myself to check.

These are lives. With names and histories. And thanks to one man, with futures.

(This article first appeared on http://www.joyofmovies.com )