Category: Longform
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Farewell, My Lovely, 1944 - ★★★½
This appears as Murder, My Sweet, on Letterboxd, TMDB, and IMDb, but is actually Farewell, My Lovely. Apparently it was re-titled for the US market back in 1944, because there was a musical with the original name.
The original being, of course, one of Raymond Chandler's novels about the private detective Philip Marlowe. This is a really good adaptation, with what sounds like most of Chandler's dialogue (I mean, why would you change it?).
It's proper, classic noir. But/and there's a scene where Marlowe is captured by the bad guys, drugged, and interrogated, that feels more like the mind-control paranoia of sixties films like The Ipcress File. The visual ideas for suggesting that kind of thing go back a long way, obviously.
Books 2025, 12: The Age of Wire and String, by Ben Marcus
This is a strange wee beastie. The edition I have was published in 1998, and I must have bought it then or not long after. I vaguely remember reading a bit of it and finding it amazing, really powerful. And I obviously started it, because I had a bookmark in it, a few pages in.
But every time I’ve had a look at it since, it hasn’t really grabbed me. Until recently, when I started it again.
And… I’ve no idea what I saw in it back then. It’s a work of surrealism, but it’s just wilfully obscure. Every sentence is grammatically and syntactically sound, but semantically meaningless. It purports to be a catalogue or almanac of a society, with sections titled ‘Sleep’, ‘God’, ‘Food’, and so on. And within them chapters, or short stories, called ‘Sky Destroys Dog’,‘Ethics of Listening When Visiting Areas That Contain Him’, ‘Hidden Ball Inside a Song’.
It can be strangely compelling in places, almost reaching the level of poetry. But mostly it’s a bit of a chore to get through. If I hadn’t had it and kept it so long I probably wouldn’t have bothered.
A very curious work.
Books 2025, 11: Blitzkreig Bops, by Alli Patton
I picked this up at a stall at the local market a few weeks ago. It’s a slim volume, taking its title from the Ramones' song ‘Blitzkrieg Bop’, and subtitled, ‘A Brief History of Punks at War’. Alli Patton is a music journalist from the southern US and this slim book takes a look at how punk, from the 70s through to the 20210s, has been used to resist war, and call for peace and justice.
She starts with Stiff Little Fingers and the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and moves on through apartheid South Africa to Chile during Pinochet’s regime and punk bands in East Germany during the Cold War.
And then beyond that, decade by decade. There are always wars and oppression, and it seems there are always punk bands resisting and calling for peace.
Worth a read, and she includes a YouTube playlist of some of the artists she covers.
Waiting for Yellow Ribbons
Searching for the Man
The state of internet search these days is such that it can be hard to find things that — while you don’t know they’re there — you know must be there.
It’s as if the search engines give up after a bit and just show more links to the same videos. Or lyrics sites, in this case. I found myself at the Wikipedia page for answer songs, and idly scrolled through it. Mainly I wondered what they’d say about ‘Here Comes Your Man’, by the Pixies. If you’ve swum in the same pools of the indie/punk/post-punk floodwaters as me, you’ll have long realised that Black Francis must have written that song, in part at least, as an answer to The Velvet Underground’s ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’. (Note the formulation of the title from the first album; many people and versions characterise it as ‘Waiting for My Man’, since that’s what the lyrics say.)
There was no reference to the song on the page. Slightly odd, I thought. I looked at the song’s own page. No reference there to the Velvets or Lou Reed.
If you doubt the connection, just listen to the two songs. There’s the riff on the Pixies song, plus all the references to ‘waiting’ in it, as well as the obviousness of the title. Sure, it’s not only that, or even, really, about ‘I’m Waiting for the Man’ in any sense. But it’s unthinkable that the one didn’t inspire the other. Let’s not forget Black Francis wrote, in another song, ‘I wanna be a singer like Lou Reed/I like Lou Reed.’
Others must have written about this, I thought, and started googling around. Well, I use DuckDuckGo, but you know. And I even tried switching to Google. Nothing came up, except for the odd little Reddit post saying, ‘Hey, this song’s a bit like that song.’ Yet you’ve got to imagine — it’s hard not to imagine – people will have written about it. Music journalists, bloggers… hell, I’m surprised I haven’t mentioned it before now.
But nothing turned up. I’m sure those pages are out there, lost for now in the deep pools of the web. But the search engines just don’t want to go there anymore.
Tying Ribbons
I was looking into answer songs because I’d been reading the page on ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree’, and it mentioned there being an answer song.
I was looking at that page because we were talking about the origin of people tying yellow ribbons when they’re waiting for someone to come home. I thought it might have originated with the song. It was certainly the first time most of us here in the UK heard the expression. When Americans festooned buildings with yellow ribbons during the Iran hostage crisis, it seemed like a reference to the song.
But the page suggested the origin is much older, possibly going back to the US civil war. So much for that.
We were talking about yellow ribbons because people are displaying them again: waiting for the remaining hostages in Gaza to be freed.
Israel’s government is doubtless guilty of war crimes, probably crimes against humanity. And October the 7th was a crime against humanity. I’m all for freeing Palestine, but free the hostages too, and if you can get rid of Hamas too while you’re doing it, so much the better.
Free Palestine from Hamas.
Paddington in Peru, 2024 - ★★½
Has its moments, but let's face it. Paddington is inherently funny because he's a bear in London, out of what should be his native habitat. When you put him back into what should be his native habitat, it just loses something.
London Town, 2016 - ★★½
I'm not, honestly, sure this deserves even the two-and-a-half stars I'm giving it. It's a daft story, but it gets extra marks from me for its Clash connection.
It's 1978. A 14-year-old boy lives in Wanstead with his dad and six-year-old sister. Their mum has left and is living in London's squatting scene, trying to make it as a singer. She sends the boy a tape of the first Clash album. It somehow later becomes the record and has '(White Man) in Hammersmith Palais' on it, which it the first album didn't. (The US version might have, but that's not what he's got.)
That's far from the most absurd thing. After the dad gets injured by a piano (which isn't absurd, as he runs a music shop and was delivering it) the boy tries to keep things together for his sister.
In so doing he — and here is the real absurdity — learns to drive and starts driving his dad's black cab, taking fares and avoiding the cops.
Yeah, I know. He picks up Joe Strummer one night. Obviously.
Honestly, it's daft as a brush. I quite liked it, but mainly for the music.
Crucial Track for 11 May 2025: Walk on the Wild Side
"Walk on the Wild Side" by Lou Reed
I don't know whether I can honestly say this the song 'feels like home' to me, but I do recall once, long ago, arriving in Edinburgh from London, and walking up the Bridges with Transformer playing, and thinking it felt like coming home.
'Walk on the Wild Side' is the second track from Transformer to feature on Crucial Tracks, I note, but that's not surprising. I'd consider it a 'crucial album'.
Books 2025, 10: The White Album, by Joan Didion
I read one of the pieces from this, ‘At the Dam’, on my MA course. It didn’t make a huge impact on me at the time, but enough to keep Didion’s name in my mind, and eventually to stir up enough interest for me to get this.
It’s a set of personal essays covering various events around the end of the sixties and the early seventies. It struck me, reading this, she’s kind of a gonzo journalist, or at least gonzo-adjacent, in that the often puts herself in the narrative. Which is good and proper in my humble opinion. Not as intense as HST, but still.
There’s a lot of good, interesting stuff here, including one piece that involves her hanging out with The Doors, waiting for Jim Morrison to arrive. It’s not much about music, though, and I don’t know why she chose to call it The White Album.
One minor annoyance about at least this edition is, although the front matter credits the various publications the pieces originally appeared in (Life, The New York Review of Books, etc), it doesn’t tell us which piece appeared where.
But that doesn’t detract from the pieces themselves.
Crucial Track for 02 May 2025: Sit Down
"Sit Down" by James
Which song would you use to introduce yourself to someone new?
Not sure this is a thing I've ever done in the musical kind of sense, but I guess somebody might say, 'Tell me a song you love,' or something. I could answer with 'Sit Down' by James, for sure.
I saw them live a ton of times in the late eighties/early nineties. They're probably the band I've seen most, along with The Pogues and The Fall. Including on my 25th birthday, headlining the Reading Festival. Actually The Pogues were on that day, too. Or so my memory says, even if the Reading histories don't.
An interesting thing about 'Sit Down' is that they released it as a single and it didn't do much. I saw the video a load of times on the old ITV Chart Show on Saturday mornings back when I lived in Walthamstow.
But like a year or so later they didn't just rerelease it; they rerecorded it, with reordered verses, and a more upbeat performance. Here's the original video on YouTube.
The new version, of course, became a huge hit.
Crucial Track for 1 May 2025: Mario Y Maria
“Mario Y Maria” by Butch Hancock
It’s annoying that the song I want to use for the prompt, ‘Share a song that tells a great story,’ isn’t found on Apple Music. It’s sitting right there in my music library being fantastic, ever since I ripped it from a Cover CD from Uncut magazine, back in 2002.
It tells the tale of a pair of lovers that we might describe, in the clichéd form, as ‘star-crossed’. But it’s not a tale of young lovers. Rather, the titular pair are experienced, world-weary (certainly by the end), but they keep on keeping on.
I don’t know if creating this entry will even work with the song not found, but if it doesn’t, I’ll create the post manually. (It didn’t; I did.)