Category: Longform
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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.)
Masked and Anonymous, 2003 - ★★★½
I'd give it five stars for the soundtrack: all Dylan songs. The story is also all Dylan. And the lead actor: Dylan too.
Yes, in 2003, Bob Dylan wrote and starred in this film. In a country in state of constant revolution and war, with the dictator-president dying, a singer is released from prison to play a benefit concert. It's not clear why, but 'The Network' wants to broadcast it.
And Uncle Sweetheart, played by John Goodman, is hoping to get rich from it. It can't end well, and Jeff Bridges, as a journalist who talks a lot more than he writes, listens, or observes, is supposed to be uncovering the corruption.
It can't end well, and frankly it's a bit incoherent. Enjoyable enough though, and certainly interesting to the Dylan fan.
Incredible Story About the Smallpox Vaccine
Astonishing story in The Atlantic, about the smallpox vaccine:
At the heart of history’s most successful eradication campaign is a mystery. The smallpox vaccine—now also being deployed against monkeypox—contains a live virus that confers immunity against multiple poxviruses. But it is not smallpox or a weakened version thereof. Nor is it monkeypox. Nor is it cowpox, as suggested by the vaccine’s famous origin story involving pus taken from an infected milkmaid to immunize an 8-year-old boy.
The vaccine predates systematic, controlled manufacture, so several or many versions were made from various sources. And they were transferred by sending infected children around the world! I do seem to recall hearing that last part before, but not the fact that its true origin is shrouded in mystery.
Well worth a read. Via Kottke
Crucial Track for 30 April 2025: Death or Glory
"Death or Glory" by The Clash
I don't know if this song always makes me feel better, exactly, but I love it to bits and want it played at my funeral. So there's that.
Crucial Track for 29 April 2025: Hungry Heart
"Hungry Heart" by Bruce Springsteen
As far as representing my current mood goes, I'm actually just hungry. But Springsteen's 'Hungry Heart' is always a good choice. The story goes he wrote it for The Ramones, or at least was going to offer it to them. But he decided to keep it, and of course put it on The River.
That album — and most of his gigs since — wouldn't have been the same without it. But I'd still love to have heard The Ramones do it.