Making sense of it all

We're back! Truth to tell we've been back almost a week now but Israel doesn't leave your consciousness easily and I still feel too conflicted to state anything categorically. Actually that's not strictly true (you see I can't even state I can't state anything categorically categorically) - there is one bald statement I'm pretty sure of - it was a trip that I'll never forget.

The holy land is a mess of contradictions, factions, violent reactions, victims and bullies, peacemakers and prophets. A powder keg of a country guarded by kids with machine guns. How can a place so inspiring be fractured so utterly by hatred? Why is it that something special must be carved up into bloody chunks so that everyone can have their piece rather than sharing the whole? That's simplistic and misguided and misses the point but every argument I come up with, every theoretical construct I create to explain to myself the situation seems woefully incomplete and naive. There is faith here, and when there is faith there is no need for doubt or fear or the merest hint of a whisper that you might not be right. And there is faith here, faith that a solution can be found, that the children of Abraham can live together side by side, that ultimately grace will prevail through the haze of flying shrapnel, criss-crossed by concrete slabs and coils of barbed wire. I sit before you and I feel humbled and powerless and inspired and nauseas, from the green slopes of the Galilee to the bulls-eye dead centre of the quarters of Old Jerusalem, there's work to be done and no clear way of doing it.

I can't finish this post, I can't decide whether to end on a positive or a negative. A note of succour or the grim status quo. Neither is wholly appropriate, one breeds apathy, the other denies hope. Perhaps it's best to leave it incomplete. Because it's by no means finished ...

Review of Blood Diamond

'People back home wouldn’t buy a ring if they knew it cost someone their hand.'

In the 80s you could get away with heroes dancing unscathed thorough fire fights, dispatching bad guys one handed with semi-automatic weapons and driving vehicles off buildings for a laugh. Nowadays audience have begun to demand a little realism with their action. Bullets tear out chunks where previously they made tidy holes, violence shatters limbs and lives and people rarely get up and walk away. This new found lust for realism even extends to character motivations and has implications for the political arena in which a film is set, thus we have Bond villains who’d rather make a bit of money than destroy the world, government spies in the pocket of the oil industry in Syriana and now we have Edward Zwick’s Blood Diamond. In younger, simpler times, Leo DeCaprio’s Danny Archer would have been a gimlet eyed charmer, a smuggler with a quick tongue, quicker fists and a nice line in self-deprecating one liners. Solomon Vandy, the African fisherman who finds the eponymous rock that kicks off the plot, would have been played by an upcoming black comedian fresh from the set of Saturday Night Live. The two would bicker hilariously for a bit, get into a few scrapes with disgruntled mercenaries and eventually escape Sierra Leone with the diamond and a pair of colour coded beauties who’d lost most of their clothes in the excitement. No more however, instead we get a fascinating performance of dignity and fury from Djimon Hounsou as Vandy, a fallible, unstable protagonist of questionable virtue in Archer and a script which uses the chase movie structure to ask uncomfortable questions about Western civilisation’s casual ravishment of the African continent. Yes there’s still guns, car chases and things going Bang! in exciting ways but mindless escapism this is not. If anything the opposite is true – here is a film that forces you to think rather more than you’re comfortable with. A message movie in genre clothing that despite the glossy trappings has something valuable to shout above the noise of its explosions.

Not myself

Skip back a few years and I’m working in the cinema. The trendy end of London, customers in Gucci and artful smart but casual, casual but casual, dragged through a hedge backwards and sprayed silver but casual. But for us it’s all the same, the whispered impact of cardboard against stale popcorn, the watered down Coke with 60% ice (minimum) and the sensation of not really being there at all. Cogs in a machine, we twist and turn as the hot dogs roll up and down the heated plate behind us and we mouth along to the RomCom trailer for the fifteenth time. And I write poems and hide them in people’s napkins, fill the backs of frozen food logs with black biro sketches, snatch kisses from ushers in fire safety emergency drills; hiding beneath my navy blue cap and yellow T-shirt the colour of nacho cheese. My badge says ‘Hi my name is Ahmed’.

Fast forward and it’s stock taking night at the music store and the door is barred and the lights are bright and I’m sailing between the aisles looking for the magic spot to put Moby’s Play. I have Bill Hicks on the PA system and I’m smiling to myself and laughing out loud a bit which is unusual. Around me everything is imploring me to buy anything, tokens, stickers, posters proclaiming discounts, free gifts savings, BOGOF, membership deals. But I’m broke and I’m rimy eyed and desperate for change. There’s a Persian girl with thick eye make-up, a pretty face, a mono-brow and a deep monotone voice to match. She’s obsessed with Nick Drake and she dances now through the shop to music that plays only in her head. And I look at her a split second too long and she notices and holds my stare a moment longer in solidarity. I still have Moby in my hand and I’m standing in Easy Listening.

Earlier today I’m told the play is cancelled due to a bomb scare. The roads are deserted in the centre of town and the policeman and I stand in the middle of Broad Street with blue tape stretched between us. I’m so angry, I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks. But this is our world now, for whatever reason this set of people are trying to blow my set of people up. I can’t believe it, that such a theoretical conflict could have a physical impact on my life. I’m so bitterly disappointed. Then on the way home I hear on the latest NewsPod – real bombs in Baghdad, detonated in a busy market, they’re still finding body parts. Then I’m disgusted with myself.

I can paint the past in nostalgic hues. The world was different then. Bigger, safer, softer. No one categorically wanted me dead. The weatherman said that at four o’clock this morning, in two hours time, it will start to snow and it won’t stop for a very long time.

We’ll all wake up tomorrow and we won’t recognise where we are.

UPDATE:



The weathermen are clever.

The reason why I got my bike fixed

Now I'm a mild mannered kind of fellow. I wouldn't say boo to a goose. Unless the goose had specifically asked me to (perhaps to cure a fit of hiccups). But if there was going to be one thing, one insidious, pointless, idiotic cultural tic that would one day see me snap like an atrophied elastic band, grab the nearest blunt/sharp/radioactive object and start swinging away like Babe Ruth in a cloud of bees, it's this - people on public transport who play their music through mobile phone speakers.

Where do I start? How do I begin to vent this tumour of pent-up hatred, this blood-boiling, gut-churning tidal wave of vitriol I have backed up inside me? What do I want to say to you, denizen of the back seat, ensconced inside your tattered hoodie, pustulant boils flung carelessly across your face with the lackadaisical air I have no doubt is applied to every area of your worthless, irritating life?

Well firstly I want to say, get some semblance of musical appreciation. If we have to listen to your music, if it truly is our sad lot in life to watch you play the moronic DJ to your toxic-looking mate in the seat opposite you, then at least let that music be vibrant or thoughtful or experimental or life-affirming. What we don't want to hear is querulous, mewling cretins spewing the musical equivalent of the Ebola virus over our quivering ear holes. We'd rather not listen to the preschool ramblings of a bigoted, closed-minded, no talent, bottom feeding Nazi Media Whore just because it has a semi-rhythmic beat behind it, thank you very much.

Of course such considerations are rendered null and void because you're playing the aforementioned musical aberration on POSSIBLY THE SINGLE WORST AUDIO PLAYBACK DEVICE IN THE UNIVERSE. When I was 4 years old I had a plastic record player made by Tomy that had better fidelity than that carcinogenic box of wires you clutch in your grubby paw. Seriously, dude, it sounds like a group of crickets are conducting a rave in a match box. And just because you're mindlessly bobbing your head along to the white noise like a life-sized meat marionette whose operator is having a seizure, it doesn't mean we're suddenly going to recognise it as music.

You dead-eyed, unthinking, arrogant, attention-seeking, TURBO GIT.

Thank-you. That's put off the stroke for another few years I reckon.

Video killed the text format star

Here's the link for those of you reading from an rss feed.

Cruising for a bruising....

So:

Wide and I are about to head off into the roiling cauldron of Israel and the OPTs, in less than a week. 2006 was, quite rightly, designated a year of crisis for the region by UK governmental reports and the media alike. And over the past few days, a further addition to the already pitiable situation of the OPTs has re-surfaced; the very real prospect of an inter factional civil meltdown of the two Palestinian political parties- Hamas and Fateh. Hopefully the talks brokered by Egypt will diffuse the situation; but it's difficult to know exactly how much use either party will be in easing the suffering of other Palestinian civilians.

As an organisation, the governing body has the right to administer education, health care, environmental protection and other essential civil functions. And yet, whoever rolls out on top of this scrum (democratically elected or not), they may not be able to carry out even these most basic of duties- tax revenues for this being currently withheld by the occupying power. So the doctors, policemen, teachers and dustbin men have not received a salary since March 2006. Amazingly, the strikes and closures only started a few months ago.

How does a nation function when it has no legitimate source of income? When the goodwill of its citizens inevitably runs out, who will step up act as the banker? What allegiances will be made? Who else will the state become beholden to? Who, exactly, is the current financial stranglehold targeted at- and do they really have the power to make it stop?

It's a far cry from the countries I visited when I was younger.

I remember Israel/Palestine through a series of flashbulb memories. The view between my father's arms as he swung me over his shoulders, walking down the Via Dolorosa away from a heated bartering session. The stinging sensation of foolhardily entering the Dead Sea with fresh grazes down my legs, and the acrid, unspeakable taste of the water. The coolness of the Church of the Nativity and its damp darkness after the heat of the sun outside. The unmistakable perfume of oranges in the dappled orchards, and the tanned, dusty width of the roads on the crossing to Jordan.

It seems that as we get older, more and more of the layers of comfort are stripped away from our worlds. We become aware of the political maps of areas, a painful palimpsest over natural beauty or architectural splendour. Here is your workplace-where you cannot work. This road is where the school run feels like a gauntlet. Here are the fields that your family can no longer farm. On that hill, someone was killed.

I think the next fortnight will be, for me, a negotiation: internally, with my own idealism, memories and guilt- and externally, with people whose opinions challenge mine- some times diametrically. I'm glad Wide will be with me- so at least I know I'll win some of the arguments!
-my secret strangulation method works every time....