Braz1l

Brazeel, Brazeel … Day 7 of the World Cup; 16 games into the group stages; one cardigan; one headbutt; one smashed studio window; one England goal. But it’s not about England. Alright, it is a bit. If you’re new to my expert football writing, I do not profess – and never have done – to being a football fan in the sense of someone who lives for when Saturday comes and knows who scored what and when against whom and was transferred from where for how much. I do not follow club football, and I have no team (which is how come I was able to “support” Norwich City for a year or so when I was first on 6 Music, out of heartfelt allegiance to Gary, an ardent fan who worked on the show). The closest I get to such a thing is to feel a sort of vague geographical pull deep in my guts for England, and they make me pay for that sentimental weakness. We’ll come back to them presently.

If you are halfway interested in my previous football reports from World Cups, please put “World Cup” into the search engine above right. I re-read a few entries yesterday and was frankly impressed by the level of detail and observation. Was I really so blessed with free time in the summers of 2010 and 2006? Apparently so. Unlike most top football players, I appear to working harder and earning less. Ah well, let’s give this roundup a crack.

I  must admit, watching Brazil fail to be Brazil against Mexico last night, and thus seeing a team play for the second time, I started to feel a bit of context forming around my position as a well-meaning fairweather enthusiast running to stand still and then finding out that standing still is pointless and running again. As the group stages unfold, generalisations can be confidently made, themes and tropes harden into a narrative, and hairstyles and habits can be matched with men and their positions in teams.

Due to being in Northampton last week, I was able to experience the first night – ie. the interminable interpretative dance-based opening ceremony and speculative heel-kicking in advance of the tournament’s first nightmarishly late kickoff – at my sister’s house with three card-carrying male football fans: my brother-in-law Graham and two of their boys, Ben and William, both glued to iPads throughout, naturally. (Although this enabled Ben to find out if “Hulk”, “Fred” and “Oscar” were the actual names of the Brazilian players so listed – no, yes and yes.) Due to school and work in the morning, staying up until the final whistle was tricky, so I nipped home at half-time and continued watching at Mum and Dad’s, on my own. Beers were taken, as is traditional. I fear for my waistline over the next month. Last World Cup, I had to foreswear the hops and move to chilled tapwater, mid-tournament.

Once it eventually kicked off, Brazil Croatia was entertaining enough. With a welcome early-ish Brazilian goal – albeit on behalf of Croatia – the game and World Cup at least broke their duck at 11 minutes. Defender Marcelo – and not blameless, brilliantly-named keeper Julio Cesar – will have to live with the unwelcome accolade: Brazil’s first ever World Cup own goal. Although what his OG meant ultimately was that Brazil basically played themselves to 3-1. Incidentally, Marcelo is one of an alarming number of players with a “sleeve” tattoo. I respect them but don’t like them. And I won’t have to wake up to one when I’m 70 and they will.

Poster boy Neymar (who my Guardian World Cup Guide tells me plays for Barcelona, a city being homogenised by the holiday cruise ship trade, so I read elsewhere in the Guardian) scored two for his own team, once in each half, the first from 25 yards, the second from the penalty spot after “Fred” was fouled (sorry, Fred was “fouled”). I have little context beyond their World Cup performance in 2010 to help place their continued international brilliance, but I have learned that Neymar keeps scoring for them. (I have major trouble remembering previous World Cups and Euros. I can just about recall which countries they took place in; this is what happens when you take your eye off the ball for two-year stretches.)

I missed Chile beat Australia and Mexico beat Cameroon (I usually enjoy watching the African sides play, so I’ll remedy this), but the big goal haul came with Spain Netherlands, a decisive 5-1 dismantling of a once formidable team now in the doldrums. You could tell a lot had changed since I last saw Spain reign: when Torres was brought on in the last act, the BBC commentator wondered aloud why coach del Bosque had even bothered playing him. How the mighty are fallen, even when they’ve moved on from their Alice-band period. (Spain have not conceded five goals in a World Cup since 1950, stat fans.) Good to see some other old faces: non-too-shabby Xabi Alonso, who took the misleading penalty for Spain at the top of the shop; Holland’s statuesque Arjen Robben, who made it five at the other end; Robin van Persie, or RVP, who now seems now to be carrying the whole team on his shoulders, like Balotelli and Italy, or Messi and Argentina, or … cough … Rooney and England? (As we speak there is talk that Roy Hodgson might not even start Rooney against Uruguay as the owlish multilinguist seems to be all about the young players and I rather applaud him for that.)

It might be remembered in all the easy Rooney-bashing that he set up England’s only goal of the tournament. England’s first game against Italy (get the toughest of their group out of the way first) was, initially, a revelation. Revelations are all relative, but “our boys” – and some of them are boys – seemed to be playing as a unit, pushing forward, creating chances, passing to each other. If you followed England during the friendlies here and in unfriendly Miami, you’ll already have a handle on their current form, but I didn’t. (Adrian Chiles made a remark last night about the general disdain for “soccer” among the Floridian camera operators he spoke to, who can’t get to grips with all the amateur-dramatic rolling around in pain involved in the game – they probably can’t understand why we don’t wear armour either, or split the matches up into tiny chunks to accommodate the advertisers.) I’m excited not to know so many of the England squad: Phil Jones? Luke Shaw? Raheem Sterling? Adam Lallana? Ross Barkley? Daniel Sturridge? I know who Sturridge is now, of course. His cool equaliser at 37 minutes, so soon after Marchisio’s goal for Italy, acted as a symbol for our raised hopes and dampened fears. I, for one, approached the second half with optimism, which duly evaporated like a line of that squirty cream the refs now carry on their utility belts. So we’re left with England in third place in Group D and Costa Rica first. It’s not over ’till it’s over, of course, but it’s started, hasn’t it?

Mexico were “accomplished” against Brazeel last night, according to Jonathan Pearce (a man still confused by the goal-line technology: “NO GOAL!”). Free-flowing football was expected from Brazil; in actual fact, it was flowing-free. As I say, after witnessing two below-par Brazilian matches, I can now say with confidence that the team could provide a serviceable Kajagoogoo tribute act, or at least two Sideshow Bob lookalikes, should the bottom fall out of their football careers. I don’t know if he actually was the man of the match, but the man of the match was Guillermo Ochoa, the Mexican keeper, who’s definitely a “keeper”. Every time a Brazilian goal looked likely, there he was, with his supermop of hair bouncing behind his headband, in front of the ball: fists, chest, stomach, whichever part of him was nearest, as as graceless as it may have looked. (As Mark Lawrenson wryly commented, “You get no marks for artistic impression.”) It was enjoyable to see Fred replaced by Jo, who has even less letters in his full name.

If Brazil and Spain can cock up on the world stage, England are in good company.

What Brazil need to do is bottle the unity and spirit that was actually free-flowing during the singing of their massive national anthem, from the tortuously long intro to the a capella final verse. Tremendous. Accomplished. Total anthem singing.

 

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I hate you, butler

I feel I ought to do the Oscar movies. I haven’t seen all of the big hitters yet, but I’m well on the way; pretty much, one Llewyn Davis short of a full house. First up: Northup. Steve McQueen’s third film, 12 Years A Slave, seemed poised to sweep all boards this season, having picked up a number of accolades at various prizegivings decided by circles, guilds and associations (for instance, from where I’m sitting, it seems to have beaten every other film to every award at the Florida Film Critics Circle in December, and you can replace “Florida” with “Iowa” or “Las Vegas” and get the same comprehensive result). And then the Golden Globes were distributed two weeks ago and 12 Years squeaked only one award out of seven nominations. True, it was for best motion picture (drama) and meant that McQueen and crew got to fill the stage as the TV credits rolled, but I can’t have been alone in expecting a clean sweep.

Having seen 12 Years just days before, I have to say I was glad that the Globes were so evenly distributed among the big players: American Hustle, Dallas Buyers Club, Wolf Of Wall Street, Blue Jasmine, Gravity, Her, Mandela and even the criminally overlooked All Is Lost, which picked up best score. In any year, I cross my fingers for a mixed bag of winners. I don’t like it when one film wins everything, whatever that film may be. I like surprises. I like upsets. I dislike sure things.

There’s no doubting the quality and ambition of 12 Years, but if it wins everything at the Oscars (and the Golden Globes at least hint that this might not be the case), my fear would be that it’s not the film but the abolition of slavery that’s being voted for.

As you may know or remember, Hunger, McQueen’s debut, was my film of the year in 2008. I found much to applaud in his follow-up, Shame. And I take my hat off to him for moving so much further into conventional narrative cinema for 12 Years. As a black, London-born Briton of Grenadian blood who grew up at a time of great racial tension in the 70s and 80s, it’s not hard to see why it’s a personal film for him, even though it is a story about southern American slavery in the 1840s and 50s. And, like his previous work, it’s beautifully, artistically framed and confidently and movingly staged. It is a work of great power and adds another fine performance to Chiwetel Ejiofor’s CV. We hold these truths to be self-evident. And yet … it has unequivocal moral certainty on its side, and as such seems a slam-dunk with a modern, liberal audience, especially a white, liberal audience, and especially a white American liberal audience. I’m not saying it was an easy option – its depictions of unbearable, sadistic cruelty of an institutional, almost industrial kind are not for eating your dinner off a plate in front of a TV to – but it’s difficult to imagine anyone coming away from the experience wishing it had been less fair on the white plantation owners. Like the white apartheid South Africans in Mandela – another film whose morality comes in black and white – it wouldn’t be out of place to boo the screen at them.

I was fortunate enough to grow up with Roots on TV in the 70s. Regardless of the veracity of Alex Haley’s tale, its compelling narrative which took us from Africa to America, told a major historical truth. I was 12; I learned a lot. This is not to say I don’t need another fictionalised drama to tell me the same thing. But 12 Years A Slave tells the story of an educated, cultured freeman who is kidnapped and sold as a slave, which I felt we were supposed to be more indignant about than an African snatched from his homeland and shipped over. It veered towards those films set in Africa which always have a white protagonist so that, subliminally, white audiences will have someone to root for. Was Solomon Northup’s ordeal worse than the other slaves’ because he could play the violin, had visited Canada and used to wear a nice suit? The fact that the title reassured us throughout that after 12 years he would be free again took some of the sting out of it, for me.

What, then, of American Hustle? I have always enjoyed the work of David O’Russell and can claim to have been in quite near the ground floor, having eyed his talent in Flirting With Disaster in 1996, his second feature. I’ll never hold him as dear as I do his contemporaries Alexander Payne, Paul Thomas Anderson or Wes Anderson, but Silver Linings Playbook was entertaining, and so is American Hustle. Is it an Oscar movie? That’s my question. Playing the 70s for cheap laughs – it opens with Christian Bale painstakingly glueing down his preposterous combover – is a fairly tired old sport now. It’s hard to imagine anyone topping Boogie Nights on that particular playing field. But in fictionalising a true story of private-sector confidence tricksters and an FBI sting, Hustle does boast a bit of content, a bit of story, to go with its hairstyles.

It’s hard to fault the sporting work by the principal cast: Bale, Bradley Cooper, Amy Adams, Jennifer Lawrence (all logged with the Academy) and Jeremy Renner. You will enjoy seeing Louis CK in a meaty supporting part, too, plus an uncredited Robert De Niro atoning somewhat for his facile schtick parts, and Boardwalk Empire fans will be as chuffed to see Shea Whigham in a wig as they will be to see him in a boat captain’s whites in The Wolf Of Wall Street. The screenplay by O’Russell and Eric Warren Singer smart-mouths through some pretty complex grifting and triple-crossing, but at the end of the day, it’s a caper movie. So was The Sting, I know, and that was Oscar-approved, but I’m just a little bit niggled by the blanket adoration Hustle is getting from juries. Is life so bad in 2013-14 that we can only bear to watch films set in other eras, whether ones we remember or not?

The Wolf Of Wall Street is Martin Scorsese’s first all-out comedy. (The King Of Comedy was about comedy, but closer to a tragedy?) Based on the real life of fraudulent “penny stock” trader Jordan Belfort and set during his rise and fall in the late 80s and 90s, it takes a fairly reprehensible individual working in an institutionally unsavoury sector and, through a winning (maybe even Oscar-winning) turn by Leonardo DiCaprio, turns him into if not exactly a hero, certainly someone you find yourself rooting for, against your better judgement. In this, and over a potentially wearisome three-hour running time, it cannot be faulted for holding its nerve. Talking to camera when he’s not rallying his white-collar troops like a cross between Gordon Gekko and Tom Cruise’s motivational speaker Frank T.J. “Respect the cock!” Mackey from Magnolia, DiCaprio somehow puts meat onto the bones of an appalling man doing appalling things with his even more appalling wingman Jonah Hill.

Foul-mouthed, misogynist, self-serving, dishonest, drug-addled, amoral, scheming, brutish, mercenary and at the very least seedy, these financial whizz-kids are no less confidence tricksters than Bale’s American hustlers and yet, working under the regulatory radar, they are almost Robin Hood figures in Scorsese and writer Terence Winter’s version of events. Theirs is a male business, and they behave in the most appallingly male ways. Women – and good luck being an actress in this movie – are commodities: whores, essentially, to be bought and sold and discarded. Sure, Belfort gets his comeuppance – they all do – with Kyle Chandler’s subway-riding CIA man constantly encircling with his friendly, squinty eyes and “sweaty balls”, but what makes Wolf Of Wall Street so compelling is that very eventuality. You know, just as you know Solomon Northup will soon not be a slave, the orgy cannot last. But you will it to carry on, such is the velocity of Scorsese’s film.

It’s pointless to have a favourite, but of the best picture nominees, I’m currently divided between Nebraska, Gravity and Wall Street. Gravity is what I call “pure cinema”. Nebraska is Alexander Payne revisiting his home state for an austerity comedy drama that tilts at The Last Picture Show for profundity and epic sweep. Wall Street dares to lionise the sort of casino-banker who arrogantly manhandled us into this recession and may forfeit Academy votes as a result. But it’s so rare to see a rollicking comedy duking it out with drama’s big boys. There are elements of comedy in Nebraska, Hustle, Philomena and – I detect – Her (another omission on my dance card), but none are all out. Wall Street is.

Can I say a few words of support for this year’s great lost Oscar movie? All Is Lost, from JC Chandor, whose debut was the outstanding financial-crash fable Margin Call, is as “pure” as Gravity, and also about human beings adrift. In place of Sandra Bullock in space, we have Robert Redford’s solo sailor in the middle of the Indian Ocean. For both, all seems lost. I won’t confirm the outcome; needless to say, with a screenplay of few words, Chandor and Redford tell a tale that resonates down the ages: man versus the elements. Beginning with the unnamed captain’s message in a bottle, it works backwards eight days and walks us through his deteriorating pickle.

That All Is Lost was recognised with one Oscar nomination for best sound editing, and two Globe nominations for actor and score (the second of which it won), is a disgrace. Bafta ignored it altogether in its haste to garland American Hustle. (All hail the New York Film Critics Circle, which spotted that Redford was the year’s best actor.)

Gravity has digital spectacle on its side, and Alfonso Cuarón may well deserve best director for what he has achieved within the strictures of that job description – I saw the film in 3D and 2D, and it works in both. But while Gravity pushes forward to infinity and beyond, in a sense All Is Lost delves backwards into analogue action spectacle. Robert Redford, the old man, and the sea, thrown together in the water tank built for Titanic, and, er, that’s it. I was gripped from one end to the other, with no notion of how it would play out. It’s probably just a coincidence that Captain Philips, more conventional still, should depict those in peril on the sea.

Again, I was gripped. And it should be noted that the cinema showing I attended was potentially scuppered by a row of four disgraceful young kids who had bought their tickets with no intention of respecting the film and kept talking and changing seats throughout, destroying any mood skilfully constructed by Paul Greengrass, Tom Hanks and the crew. Staff were called to the screen on three occasions, the third by me, and at no point were these kids dissuaded of their approach, or threatened with expulsion; we complained afterward, for what it was worth. Captain Phillips‘ towering achievement was to grip and involve with all that shit going on. Bravo.

The thing about Nebraska is that I knew what it was going to be like from the first stills, never mind the trailer. I am attuned to Payne’s melancholia and his penchant for men walking along by the sides of roads, and although I knew I’d love his hymn to the wide open spaces of the Cornhusker State, this does not diminish that love. I’d be more than happy if Bruce Dern – at 77 the same age as the snubbed Robert Redford – took best actor and made DiCaprio wait another year. It’s a Henry Fonda or a Katharine Hepburn in On Golden Pond, a Christopher Plummer in Beginners, a Richard Farnsworth in The Straight Story, a John Wayne in True Grit, an Emmanuelle Riva in Amour … hey, a Jack Nicholson in Payne’s About Schmidt – the kind of part you have to earn.

I have yet to see Dallas Buyers Club, although I have been enjoying Matthew McConaughey’s renaissance and felt his energy in a cameo in Wall Street, so there’s little reason to doubt he’s on award-winning form as the HIV-positive Texan. Of the best actresses, Cate Blanchett is the best thing about Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, so my hopes are on her, with a soft spot too for Sally Hawkins are best supporting actress in the same, rich film. If Somalian limo driver Barkhad Abdi got best supporting actor for Captain Phillips, his first film, we could all go home happy: he’s electrifying.

There’s a grumpy line that says we shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about who wins the Oscars, or indeed any of the other statuettes and perspex doorstops. “When was the last time the best film of the year won the Oscar?”, the naysayers say, when not saying “nay”. As stated, I know for a fact that one of my favourite films of 2013 won’t win any of the major awards, because it is All Is Lost. Same goes for Inside Llewyn Davis, which is also locked out of the love-in and yet looks for all the world to be the best thing the Coens have done, if you like a bit of bleak medicine, and I do. I haven’t said much about Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, because it’s a pretty unremarkable film about a remarkable man, the least anyone could do with his lifestory, just as Ordinary Love is the least U2 could do for a theme tune. But for the song to earn a nomination and Idris Elba not is typical of the seemingly random nature of it all.

Hey, it’s my job to worry about the Oscars and to second-guess the proclivities of an organisation that, as of 2012, was 94% white, 77% male and with a median age of 62. Also, it’s quite good fun, isn’t it?

And at least they ignored The Butler.

Day One

Inspired, belatedly, by Richard Herring’s daily blog Warming Up – which, if you don’t follow, you should: it’s truly mindbending that he’s kept it up without fail since Monday November 25, 2002 and it is simultaneously revealing, pithy and hilarious – I thought I’d try and write a blog entry every day for five whole consecutive days about my daily working life. I might look back on it in ten years’ time, when I am still going about my self-employed business, writing a bit, talking on the radio a bit, reading the New Yorker on public transport and having a few meetings, and think, “Wow, my life hasn’t changed a bit in ten years!”

Day One: my daily working life involves moving about a lot. I used to spend a lot more of my days in coffee shops but I am currently on a sensible economy drive, which means avoiding coffee shops and spending more time in libraries and other people’s offices, or the coffee shop of the Curzon cinema in Soho where, as a member, I feel comfortable just sitting with my laptop on my lap. (By the way, as it’s only five days, I will make no attempt to jazz this up and make it profound or sexy. This is my life as it occurs to me, as it were.) So, my first refreshment of the day was the free glass of mineral water I was given at my hairdresser’s. I could have had a free tea or coffee, but I know it would be disappointing, and also, I assume it will have hair in it by the time I finish it.

I spent my childhood having my hair cut by Mum and Dad’s friend Carol who lived up the road. In my teens, I visited my first ever ladies’ hairdresser, because I had become a preening ninny. However, my hair was mostly cut by friends’ girlfriends-who-were-hairdressers. In the 80s, in Northampton, a hairdresser was just about the coolest girlfriend you could have. I think I went out with a trainee hairdresser once, but not for long, and in any case among my circle of friends in the sixth form, there was always one who was going out with a hairdresser. When, during my college years, I literally grew out of stupid haystack hair, and having it cut for free by fellow students, I graduated to visiting an old-fashioned barber, firstly one in Parson’s Green, then one in Brixton. These haircuts were short, manly and cheap. I loved them.

It is only in the last 15 or so years that I have returned to ladies’ hairdressers. I must admit, I quite like the pampering aspect. I trust my current hairstylist (yes, my hair is styled, not cut), although it’s best not to get too attached, as they’re always moving or being promoted to a new, more expensive grade. Anyway, it’s a two- or three-monthly pleasure to have my hair cut, and that’s how I began my day, having first sent through a list of records I fancy playing this week while I fill in for Steve Lamacq on 6 Music. What fun! For the record, I have suggested songs by Tom Waits, Solomon Burke, Baby D, Cud, Bauhaus, the Ohio Players, Killah Priest and The Move. (The trick is to introduce records or artists into the show that aren’t already likely to be in the pile. This is actually quite difficult on 6 Music, as the pool of old music is so deep.)

I always feel my age in the hairdresser’s. I am literally twice as old as my regular stylist. When he asks me if I am busy – his traditional opening gambit – I often wonder if this means he actually remembers me, and that I am self-employed, or if, in fact, it’s a safe, homogenous question that he can ask anybody. (I don’t flatter myself: it’s the latter, isn’t it?) I remember lots about him, but he is the only hairdresser I ever talk to, and I am one of about 200 people with hair that he talks to over the course of a couple of months. He told me about his 23rd birthday party last time, which had taken place in a club in King’s Cross which opens at midnight, and at which he and his friends had stayed until about 5am. It would have been sad if I’d envied his life, and his youthful stamina at that point. Luckily, I didn’t.

The picture at the top of this entry was taken while I took the train from South London to King’s Cross, where the British Library is. The picture above was taken in a coffee shop at St Pancras station, because I had a completed loyalty card and was able to buy a coffee without spending any money. There is something romantic about the Eurostar announcements in the background, and the constant turnover of travellers with suitcases coming in and out while I sit here and observe them, going nowhere.

Actually, I have decided to go to the Curzon to see the Japanese film Norwegian Wood. This will be my “lunch hour” – it’s two hours long, but since I am working until 7pm, and won’t be home until 8pm, I am taking an extra hour in lieu. This is what being self-employed is all about. I can actually guarantee five days’ worth of income this week, which, for instance, I couldn’t last week, and can’t next week, so I am feeling more relaxed than I might be about paying for food and utilities.

If I was rich I would spend all day in coffee shops. (Having recently read and enjoyed Stuart Murdoch’s diary Celestial Cafe, published by Pomona, it seems that he does spend all day, every day, in coffee shops. Mind you, he is mostly in Glasgow where perhaps the cost of living is cheaper than it is in stupid London.) Also, if I was rich, I would not have to worry about where the next job is coming from. Now that Mr Blue Sky has been recorded, the project that has dominated my thoughts and my waking days since September has receded into the background. Nothing that big or that personal has filled the vacuum, so it’s back to doing bitty things, and hoping 6 Music presenters will get the flu, go on holiday or fall pregnant.

By the way, my main writing task today is to write an extra scene for Mr Blue Sky – an important linking/establishing exchange between two of the main characters whose absence has become apparent during editing – so that’s what I’m doing now. Or will be, when I am not doing this. Fortunately, the actors required, Mark Benton and Michael Legge, are available to come in and record this scene on Thursday. I’ll write about that on Thursday.

They were playing Florence and the Machine in the hairdresser’s. I did not find it relaxing, and I suspect it undid all the good work of the head massage. (I asked my stylist if the music was the same in all branches of the chain, but he said it wasn’t, and that it was from an iPod playlist on shuffle. I wonder who decided to put Florence and the Machine onto this playlist. There was also a song by Arctic Monkeys, one of the more useless recent ones, and the rest was modern R&B, apart from Ride On Time by Black Box, which was my favourite song.)

I do not promise that this will be an exciting week. The ridiculously long piece I am currently reading in the New Yorker is about the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It is 24 pages long – exhaustive even for the New Yorker! I am halfway through it. They have just started using chemicals to disperse the oil to stop it reaching the Louisiana coastline, and a scaremongering marine toxicologist has gone on CNN warning of chemical effects on the human population, saying that one shrimp fisherman had started “bleeding from the rectum.”

I have just had a Direct Message on Twitter from the comedian John Moloney. And my neck is itchy from the haircut. Will write again tomorrow.