‘“Water is a burned substance.” This strange line comes from nowhere to conclude Honoré de Balzac’s “Gambara,” one of the real-est short stories I have ever read about art. And the line is made mystifying by what we call Balzac’s realism: the material descriptions, psychological observations, and sociological inventions that conspire to submerge the reader in a world with depth.
‘You might also call them “familiarizing conventions” because, as writers like Tom McCarthy often tell us, realism is merely the set of such maneuvers (rather than a way of tapping into the real). But the immersion of the reader into Balzac’s “world” of literary depth halts when you read this final line. Eventually, it’s intelligible: water is a product of the burning of hydrogen, and the man who speaks the line is crying. The tears in his eyes as he speaks, then, are a product of his inner burning. Still, the effect of the encounter with the sentence, the way it defamiliarizes the world Balzac has created, lingers after its romantic metaphor dies on the page.
‘The death of metaphors, the pruning or framing of ridiculous language: much of this marks the fiction of Diane Williams, one of our most persistent side-eyers of realism over the last twenty-five years. This to say that where Balzac or Dickens — those paradigmatic authors of 21st century TV realism — go deep, Williams instead lingers on surfaces. Where they work to build houses for the reader to enter into and reside in, Williams works alongside them, constructing an edifice that estranges the neighborhood, a home that only looks familiar insofar as it has one window and a doorknob.
‘But after reading Williams’ collection of 44 stories — titled Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine — much of my above description feels inadequate. Words like “strange” and “unfamiliar” and “weird” aren’t altogether strange or unfamiliar or weird; just as bad is the lightly academic “defamiliarizes,” which appears to lean on some literary-historical authority but doesn’t. This because Williams’ anti-realism, or whatever you want to call it, tends to deflect description and summary; compare this to the rise of “Golden Age TV,” where the “recap” has become a common form. This also proves why Jonathan Franzen, the godhead of televisual prose, describes Williams’ fiction like this: “Her fiction makes very familiar things very, very weird.” He can’t stop himself from transcribing her work into comfortable, realist terms, but when he can’t pay the word “weird” a high enough wage, he has to bring in “very” twice to finish the job.
‘Just take the epigraph to Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine: “How long will Harry Doe live?..Who will win the war?…Will Mary Jane Brown ultimately find a husband?” This reduction of lives to plots marks non-art narrative across decades. Later, in the story “Head of the Big Man” (there are lots of heads-as-totems in these stories), she puts the lie to this form of narrativizing altogether, whether it’s a BBC drama or A Little Life, by redescribing it into absurdity:
‘None of this would have been possible without the involvement of morally strong, intelligent people who were then spent. Young farmers and rural characters, obstetrical nurses, scholars, clergy — all the rest! — will have their great hopes realized more often than not — unless I decide to tell their stories.
‘“[U]nless I decide to tell their stories,” she writes. In Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Williams doesn’t avoid telling their stories; nor does she always shy away from shrinking her subjects into types (of emotion, of occupation). Here, though, it’s usually a matter of abstraction, of making room for shocks of exacting emotional description that are all the more exact because they don’t always aim to conjure up the emotion itself. How often is greed the result of longing for some emotional memory? In a story called “Greed,” a character who wants to keep her mother’s diamond-sapphire ring explains her impulse like this:
‘I had to have it. It was phantasmagoria. I selected it after my mother’s death, not because I liked it, but because it offers the memory of my mother and of the awkward, temporarily placed cold comfort that she gave me.
‘There is something here more artful than contemporary realism. The cold comfort of a memory, of a mother’s disposition, of a phantasm, of a diamond-sapphire ring: they’re equalized. Instead of Franzen’s realism, or even Bolaño or Knausgaard’s flat, anti-rhetorical prose, we’re dangerously close here to the pure rhetoric of fiction, which is to say that if you’re not careful, your entire notion of fiction as an art that rejects easy answers may come to resemble a Diane Williams story.’ — Jonathon Sturgeon
THE WHITE REVIEW — How do you strike a balance between capturing the freedom of the spoken sentence while honing the craft of writing a sentence?
DIANE WILLIAMS — Often the spoken sentence is filled with remarkable poetry. This is especially the case if the speaker is passionate about her subject. One is lucky to have access to a trove of voices – to listen in to oneself and to others during these inspired moments and to remember! More often, I must manufacture text. And that is the task of being a writer – composition.
THE WHITE REVIEW — This intimacy between the words in the sentences you create is most definitely present, but your characters’ pursuit of intimacy is persistently challenged and subverted. What does intimacy mean to you?
DIANE WILLIAMS — The pursuit of intimacy is relatively hopeless in life and is also dangerous. But, I think in literature, as in all art, there is the opportunity to be deeply in life. I am always dreaming of the ideal fiction. In this free realm any subject can be addressed. Shame must not intrude.
THE WHITE REVIEW — Many of your characters feel as though they can’t necessarily fully express themselves, alienated in these domestic settings that you put them in.
DIANE WILLIAMS — You’re right, it’s exhausting to mask and to mute ourselves.
THE WHITE REVIEW — Most of your stories are based in domestic locations – what’s so attractive about such a setting?
DIANE WILLIAMS — I am usually in a domestic setting – sitting here doing my work. I should get out more. It’s also my own insufficiency; I’m not good with maps or finding my way around. I guess I reside in my mind most of the time – it’s just my temperament.
THE WHITE REVIEW — There is a line from a story in SOME SEXUAL SUCCESS STORIES – ‘This is when Nature itself has been stripped bare of its cosy personality and we all feel homeless in our own natures as well.’ I think this accurately summarises one of the prevailing aspects of your stories: despite most of the action being set in domestic spaces most of the time, your subjects never feel quite ‘at home’.
DIANE WILLIAMS — I don’t think I’d be happy if I were clear about everything that ends up on the page. I’d like to get beyond what I know as far as I can. I have a sentimental idea of home – it’s friendly and familiar. In my fiction I like to provide some mystery, a place to meditate, where I might be nearing a new insight, if in fact I haven’t reached it.
THE WHITE REVIEW — Infidelity is a recurring theme in your stories – particularly in the novella ON SEXUAL STRENGTH – and I find it interesting that in ‘Adultery’, Laura Kipnis says, ‘It means imagining – as adulterers so often do – that you can do it differently, that you can engineer through sheer will, a different moral and affective universe.’
DIANE WILLIAMS — Infidelity has been an inescapable subject for me. The fantasy of security is difficult to relinquish, as are the notions of invincibility and recklessness.
THE WHITE REVIEW — The physical movements, positioning and intricacies of the culturally and morally assumed ‘private parts’ of the body are frequently explored in your stories – bowel movements, vaginas that can talk, dogs wearing condoms, penises that women wish were in them all of the time. What draws you to these details?
DIANE WILLIAMS — I write about what I can’t speak about.
THE WHITE REVIEW — There is a recurring fluidity between objects and subjects in your stories that I am very interested in – husbands going through the laundry to find their wives, children needing to be chopped down like branches from a tree and clouds being full of pride. How do you view these relationships in your stories?
DIANE WILLIAMS — You’re right, there is blurring. I remember very early in life going forward toward a chair like this easy chair (she pats the chair she is sitting on), putting my face into it, and embracing it, and getting the kind of consolation that a person might expect in a parent’s embrace – my chair, my mother. The confusion prevails in our speech, too – I have to get my coffee. I want my mother. People and things are being scrambled. My mind’s quite messy.
THE WHITE REVIEW — In some of your stories you also turn to dogs and animals, the best example being the stories ‘The Dog’, followed by ‘The Man’. What kind of role do animals play in your stories?
DIANE WILLIAMS — Well, I may not know too much about that. I like those two stories you cite very much, and have often read the pair of them publicly. I did have a dear pet when I was girl… I admired him so much – his out-sized zest and craziness that I didn’t see advanced by anyone else.
THE WHITE REVIEW — Does consumer culture have an influence on how you present the subject to the reader?
DIANE WILLIAMS — Yes, but I wouldn’t want to imply that the influence is entirely negative. Objects can save us. I might need a certain trinket, for instance, and it may save me for a day, a month… Objects obviously have power.
THE WHITE REVIEW — How do you feel about this sense of ‘zooming out’, this acknowledgement of the bigger picture, the world outside the characters’ window? How important is it to you to create a sense of elsewhere?
DIANE WILLIAMS — I’d like to go back and forth in time and place and thought – to change perspectives, but, nonetheless, maintain coherence. I try.
THE WHITE REVIEW — Use of the negative also creates the sense of a bigger picture. By listing aspects that are not present the reader is forced to imagine these aspects existing elsewhere – just not where we are right now. Would you say that a presence of absence is integral to your stories?
DIANE WILLIAMS — This is and was a tactic of mine, to refute or to undo the given. Let’s just see what this is like.
THE WHITE REVIEW — Where does your fascination with language, particularly rhyme, stem from and what do you think it achieves?
DIANE WILLIAMS — What it achieves? It’s pleasurable. It’s human nature, I think, to enjoy echoes and refrains.
THE WHITE REVIEW — You often use idiomatic phrasing in your stories, for example, ‘for all intents and purposes’, ‘I’m going to give credit where credit is due’, ‘I lay no claim’. Can you tell me a little more about this fascination with habitual language?
DIANE WILLIAMS — Ah, clichés. I try to be vigilant, to police for these. I hope there’s a fresh context, when they invade. On the other hand such phrases as ‘let me tell you’ and ‘at any rate’ and ‘at length she’… I love these. While moving along new terrain, it’s nice to have comforting pauses along the way and to hear a kind voice – ‘Don’t worry. I think you’ve been here before. You’ll be able to manage.’
THE WHITE REVIEW — How important is it for you to make yourself known as the writer in your stories?
DIANE WILLIAMS — If I introduce my own name, this raises the stakes for me, causes a shudder. It’s frightening. Fright can be very productive. I work harder.
THE WHITE REVIEW — For a more experimental writer such as yourself, how do you find the current literary climate in America?
DIANE WILLIAMS — Marketers, sadly, need categories. I never use the term ‘experimental.’ I hate it. Literary art needs a more substantial welcome and protection in contemporary America. I founded the fiction annual NOON in 2000 to support serious writers. NOON is now flourishing and I am delighted.
___ Book
Diane Williams Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine McSweeneys
‘The very short stories of Diane Williams have been aptly called “folk tales that hammer like a nail gun,” and these forty new ones are sharper than ever. They are unsettling, yes, frequently revelatory, and more often than not downright funny.
‘Not a single moment here is what you might expect. While there is immense pleasure to be found in Williams’s spot-on observations about how we behave in our highest and lowest moments, the heart of the drama beats in the language of American short fiction’s grand master, whose originality, precision, and power bring the familiar into startling and enchanted relief.’ — McSweeneys
____ Excerpts
To Revive a Person Is No Slight Thing
People often wait a long time and then, like me, suddenly, they’re back in the news with a changed appearance.
Now I have fuzzy gray hair. I am pointing at it. It’s like baby
hair I am told.
Two people once said I had pretty feet.
I ripped off some leaves and clipped stem ends, with my new spouse, from a spray of fluorescent daisies he’d bought for me, and I asserted something unpleasant just then.
Yes, the flowers were cheerful with aggressive petals, but in a few days I’d hate them when they were spent.
The wrapping paper and a weedy mess had to be discarded, but first off thrust together. My job.
Who knows why the dog thought to follow me up the stairs.
Tufts of the dog’s fur, all around his head, serve to distinguish him. It’s as if he wears a military cap. He is dour sometimes and I have been deeply moved by what I take to be the dog’s deep concerns.
Often I pick him up — stop him mid-swagger. He didn’t like it today and he pitched himself out of my arms.
Drawers were open in the bedroom.
Many times I feel the prickle of a nearby, unseen force I ought to pay attention to.
I turned and saw my husband standing naked, with his clothes folded in his hands.
Unbudgeable — but finally springing into massive brightness — is how I prefer to think of him.
Actually, he said in these exact words: “I don’t like you very much and I don’t think you’re fascinating.” He put his clothes on, stepped out of the room.
I walked out, too, out onto the rim of our neighborhood — into the park where I saw a lifeless rabbit — ears askew. As if prompted, it became a small waste bag with its tied-up loose ends in the air.
A girl made a spectacle of herself, also, by stabbing at her front teeth with the tines of a plastic fork. Perhaps she was prodding dental wires and brackets, while an emaciated man at her side fed rice into his mouth from a white-foam square container, at top speed, crouched — swallowing at infrequent intervals.
In came my husband to say, “Diane?” when I went home.
“I am trying,” I said, “to think of you in a new way. I’m not sure what — how that is.”
A fire had been lighted, drinks had been set out. Raw fish had been dipped into egg and bread crumbs and then sautéed. A small can of shoe polish was still out on the kitchen counter. We both like to keep our shoes shiny.
How unlikely it was that our home was alight and that the dinner meal was served. I served it — our desideratum. The bread was dehydrated.
I planned my future — that is, what to eat first — but not yet next and last — tap, tapping.
My fork struck again lightly at several mounds of yellow vegetables.
The dog was upright, slowly turning in place, and then he settled down into the shape of a wreath — something, of course, he’d thought of himself, but the decision was never extraordinary.
And there is never any telling how long it will take my husband, if he will not hurry, to complete his dinner fare or to smooth out left-behind layers of it on the plate.
“Are you all right?” he asked me — “Finished?”
He loves spicy food, not this. My legs were stiff and my knees ached.
I gave him a nod, made no apologies. Where were his?
I didn’t cry some.
I must say that our behavior is continually under review and any one error alters our prestige, but there’ll be none of that lifting up mine eyes unto the hills.
Specialist
‘For a blue sky, that blue’s a bit dark, don’t you think? And the sea’s a bit too choppy,’ I said, ‘for that dog to be dashing into it.’
‘You mean the man threw something into the water?’ my son said, ‘–that’s why the dog jumped in?’
An hour passed. Why not say twenty years?
In the Green Room, I had fortunately ordered Frenched Chicken Breast – Chocolate Napoleon.
And at a great height – up on a balcony, as I readied to leave – a pianist began his version of Cole Porter’s ‘Katie Went to Haiti.’ I waved to him.
He nodded, likely pleased by the attention, but it was hard to tell – for only his radiant pate was made visible by a tiny ceiling light.
To my surprise, the air in the street was too hot to give pleasure and a cyclist was mistakenly on the sidewalk.
The cyclist hit me, and it’s vile after my life ends in the afterlife. Lots of incense, resin, apes, and giraffe-tails – all acquired tastes. I don’t like that kind of thing.
Beauty, Love, and Vanity Itself
As usual I’d hung myself with snappy necklaces, but otherwise had given my appearance no further thought, even though I anticipated the love of a dark person who will be my source of prosperity and emotional pleasure.
Mr. Morton arrived about 7 p.m. and I said, ‘I owe you an explanation.’
‘Excellent,’ he replied. But when my little explana- tion was completed, he refused the meal I offered, saying, ‘You probably don’t like the way I drink my soda or how I eat my olives with my fingers.’
He exited at a good clip and nothing further developed from that affiliation.
The real thing did come along. Bob—Tom spent several days in June with me and I keep up with books and magazines and go forward on the funny path pursuing my vocation.
I also went outside to enjoy the fragrant odor in an Illinois town and kept to the thoroughfare that swerved near the fence where yellow roses on a tawny back- ground are always faded out at the end of the season.
I never thought a big cloud hanging in the air would be crooked, but it was up there—gray and deranged.
Happily, in the near distance, the fence was making the most of its colonial post caps.
And isn’t looking into the near distance sometimes so quaint?—as if I am re-embarking on a large number of relations or recurrent jealousies.
Poolside at the Marriott Courtyard, I was wearing what others may laugh at—the knee-length black swim- suit and the black canvas shoes—but I don’t have actual belly fat, that’s just my stomach muscles gone slack.
I saw three women go into the pool and when they got to the rope, they kept on walking. One woman dis- appeared. The other two flapped their hands.
‘They don’t know what the rope is,’ the lifeguard said. ‘I mean everybody knows what a rope means.’
I said, ‘Why didn’t you tell them?’ and he said, ‘I don’t speak Chinese.’
I said, ‘They are drowning’ and the lifeguard said, ‘You know, I think you’re right.’
Our eyes were on the surface of the water—the wobbling patterns of diagonals. It was a hash—nothing to look at—much like my situation—if you’re not going to do anything about it.
*
p.s. Hey. ** Dominik, Hi!!! And hi to your brain cells!!! Welcome back. I think you’d like them: the Clarke films. No particulars, I just watch whatever pet rescue video shows up, even though they’re all exactly the same: find an abandoned puppy/kitten, take them to the vet, get them fixed up, plan to give them some animal rescue place but fall in love and keep them. Strange. I do have a big thing for acts of kindness. That really gets to me. Your into-ness with ‘Reservoir Dogs’ is highly understandable. And love has relieved you of your back pain by now, I would sure hope. Love wishing he could magically know how to play a cello, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, Yeah, why are Clarke’s films so offsite in the UK? Oscar down below just informed me that a lot of those imbeds to his full films are blocked in the UK. Weird. May Leeds United win all three games and get themselves and you your just rewards under the circumstances, ** Bernard Welt, Well, hello. Do I know you, ha ha? Oh, yes, I remember you did that Schuyler event. Every time I ever met Doug Crase he looked at me like he thought I was going to stab him. May 20th is practically tomorrow! Sabrina told me you were entering here/us. Great, obviously. Yeah, I think I’m obligated to do something at the Flanagan event too. Read an poem or two of his, I guess? Uh, I’m actually not very up on lit journals du jour, strangely, I guess. I don’t know if online is good enough for those arbiters, but online journals are most likely to get you out there quickly. You can use my name liberally and in whatever fashion you choose. And I’ll try to think about journal suggestions. Of course you can put work up here on the blog. We’d just have to do it in a way that makes it look and somewhat act like a blog post, which shouldn’t be hard at all. So, yes, of course. I’ve been approached to do something at that AWP, and I’m trying to figure out if I want to and can. I don’t think I qualify as any generation of New York School sadly, but I think you guys are definitely third generation. Coffee, guacamole, etc., etc., yes. I don’t know Kristoffer Borgli’s work, but I’m down to do a post about him/it, yes. Zac and I need to go to LA to show the film to the cast/crew. We were supposed to have done that by now, but our producers are hamstringing us on the literally last three days of work needed to finish it, so it’s possible that trip could occur during your stint here. So, I might have to dip away for a bit of your visit. I don’t know, we’ll see. Fun! Love, me. ** Minks, Hi, Minks! Lovely to meet you! I do know Kembra Pfahler’s work at least a bit. Mostly the ‘Voluptuous Horror’ work. And of course I like it mightily. I think she’s still doing her thing, so you could get lucky. I’m not sure if she’s still doing it at the same intensity. Anyway, hi. What’s up with you? ** Joseph, Ha ha. ‘I Saw The TV Glow’ is something like two weeks in the future for us over here. But it’s probably on my favorite illegal streaming site. I’ll check. If it is, shall I hook you up? That Publishing Genius book is of course of interest, and I’ll hunt info about it. Thanks, J. Have a better Monday than the Mamas and Papas apparently did. ** Tyler, Hi, Tyler. I’m okay, and you too, I hope. Thanks for the tip/link. That looks great! Everyone, Tyler tips us off to a new horror anthology called LIZARD BRAIN, published by the mighty tragickal, and featuring work by a bunch of writers beloved of this blog (and me) like Blake Butler, Sean Kilpatrick, Gary J. Shipley, David Kuhnlein, and others. Sounds like a must have. Check it out and get it here. Take care. ** Joe, Hey, man! Glad you caught it. In agreement with you about Clarke, naturally. I’m good. Our film is mere days from utter completion and is currently submitted to two big festivals, and we’ll see. Doing last things re: a little book of mine that’s coming out in July. Working in the new script. Like that there. And you, what’s up? ** Misanthrope, You should read him. Your and my tastes diverge often enough, so you could love his stuff. Well, glad Alex is deflating facially. Parents talking like a 1950s sitcom sounds kind of romantic to me only because mine certainly didn’t. I believe you about the low-carb cheesecake, but not about ‘Saltburn’. See, diverging tastes, what did I just say? xo. ** Steve, Hey. Here’s a message from Uday if you didn’t see it: ‘Steve: The movie is called Jesus, You Know. Link here‘. Indeed about old British TV as far as I can tell. Same story on French TV, I am told. ** Gaaah!, Hi. Oh, no, you’re Gaaah! again. Sorry. Although you seem totally like your old Harper self. I’m glad to hear you’re sane about in-process feedback. I wish I was sometimes. One time I made the mistake of reading part of a novel I was working on at an event, and people seemed to love it, and that freaked me out so much that I stopped working on the novel for a year. I doubt it will surprise you that I think you flummoxing and silencing the people in your class and your lecturer is only a very, very good sign. When you’re writing something new, that downsizing/categorising of what you do always happens at first, I think. It took me publishing two or three novels until people stopped saying I was a Burroughs or Genet knock-off. It’s frustrating, but don’t sweat it in other words. I don’t remember the last episode of ‘Berlin Alexanderplatz’. I need to watch ‘BA’ again. It’s been ages. Fassbinder, yeah, what can you say. Big up! ** Thomas H, Hi! I agree. How are you? What’s going on? ** Corey Heiferman, You made it back! Stuff’s fine here, no new news. Sounds like you maxed out what London is capable of providing to short term visitors at its best. Good. Cool: your film! I’ll hit when I’m not reading and responding to the comments with such concentration. Everyone, Corey made an experimental film clip called ‘Eurostar Sunset’, and I think you need to join me in imbibing it, yes? It’s only 33 seconds long, and it’s here. ** 🇨🇦 Guy, Hi, Guy aka Gol! I’m doing alright, what about you? I think I saw you’re reading somewhere? Missed you too! ** Justin D, Hi. Ace about your weekend. Mine was … lowkey for the most part, it seems. Uh, wow, you watched that ‘Frisk’ mess. I think you probably know I dislike it very much. When it was optioned? I was curious and excited at that point. I was promised it was going to be very different film than it turned out to be. Very different. So it was all a big plunge downhill from there. But at least I learned never to option my novels so naively again. Thanks for sorting out my cameo. Was your Monday promising? ** Bill, Hi. There’s a Collected Poems of Bob Flanagan book about to come out, and the event is the Paris launch of that book. Enjoy Omar. Give him a hug for me. ** Nicholas(Nick), Well, there you are! It’s been so less shimmery here without you. That new project of yours sounds and looks killer! Whoa! Eyes peeled. Let me … Everyone, Nicholas(Nick) has launched a fascinating looking/seeming project that I’ll let him describe. N(N): ‘I’ve been being hot and sane and working on idea this I’ve decided to market called MuseMenaceTV which will incorporate everything I love (art, gay porn, occult practice, and some cult recruitment and a lot more!)’ Sounds pretty seeable and doable, doesn’t it? Find it here. I’m just doing the last things on our film and prepping for a new book of mine and writing and enjoying the parts of the days when it isn’t raining which isn’t too often. xoxo. ** Uday, Thanks for the news to Steve. I passed it along to him in my re-comment up above. Me too: walking, stairs, … that’s it for me and movement. I remember Boston being beautifully gloomy the two times I was there. I don’t think my mind can conjure up that smell, but, gosh, I sure wish I could, it sounds very eventful. ** Oscar 🌀, Wow, an embarrassment of riches! Thank you! I’m shielding and peeling my eyes simultaneously. So weird about that blocking. But the UK is so weird, no? I’m sorry, but it seems pretty weird when watched from afar. I think France seems obnoxious and irritating from afar, but not weird. I guess ultimately that’s a kind of backhanded compliment to the UK. I always immediately wonder what animals are thinking. Always. Even pigeons. A bunch of pigeons live near my window, and they sit there for hours just turning their heads, and I always wonder they’re thinking because they must be thinking even if it’s just ‘yes’, ‘no’, ‘maybe’, ‘no’, etc. I just read the other day that fish can not only think, they also are self-aware about what they are. Apparently that’s a big discovery. Thank you, I might even have three coffees today. What about you? Do you drink tea? ** ellie, Hi, ellie! When I’m feeling very or overly emotional I always try to remember how much I wish I could feel emotional when I’m feeling bored and numb. I trust you’ll find the appropriate distance between yourself and that extremely bad news person. Great about affording the SAIC program! And your consequently fine weekend. Mine was sort of just time passing, I think. One big annoying incident with our film producers, but that was absolutely nothing new. Oh, I did see a great friend and collaborator for the first time in over a year, and we’d had kind of a falling out, and now we’re not fallen out anymore, so actually that was pretty good. xoxo. ** Right. Today I direct the blog’s spotlight at a wonderful book by the prose stylist maestro Diane Williams, and have a look, won’t you? See you tomorrow.
‘If you wanted a symbol of the strange, strained relationship between the British and film, try this: the most important British director of the late 20th century made barely anything for the cinema.
‘Among his peers, Alan Clarke was a role model. His most vocal admirers include Paul Greengrass, Danny Boyle — as a young man, the producer of Clarke’s 1989 film Elephant — and Stephen Frears, who once surveyed their shared generation and declared Clarke “the best of us all”. But from the 1960s until his early death in 1990, Clarke worked mostly and most brilliantly on TV. Which may be why his name remains less celebrated than those who celebrate him.
‘Usually, you can tell an Alan Clarke film in seconds. You’ll know it from the hot-blooded realism, all the touchy-feeliness of a porcupine, and a trademark shot of a character furiously walking, pursued by the camera. Yet his breadth was remarkable: one-off plays by new British writers; borstal shocker Scum (1979); adaptations of Solzhenitsyn and Brecht (1982’s Baal, starring David Bowie); a late run of stripped-down classics including Road, Christine (both 1987) and The Firm (1989), the scalding drama of English football hooliganism with a star turn from Gary Oldman. (Coaxing excellence from actors was another speciality: Tim Roth and Ray Winstone got their start with Clarke).
‘From later this month, his bruising visions of British life are to be showcased in a season at London’s BFI Southbank and, in May, a series of box sets collecting, for the first time, the many TV films he made for the BBC. Making up most of his career, the bulk has gone unseen for decades. Just a fraction of Clarke’s work has stayed in circulation, the rest marooned in the archives, some assumed lost. It’s an odd fate for such a talent. Lord knows, Britain never had enough great directors to be so careless.
‘Clarke was born on Merseyside, north-west England, in 1935, the son of a plasterer and customs officer. He trained in the theatre, coming of professional age in the 1960s. Despite a love of movies, TV was a natural home. It was somewhere a free spirit could kick at the establishment in front of audiences no theatre could match. The pact endured throughout his career. On TV, in a three- (later four-) channel Britain, Clarke’s fiercest, weirdest films went out to millions, rubbing shoulders in the schedules with quiz shows and sitcoms.
‘Why would he have wanted to work in the British movie business of the 1970s and 1980s, a grim landscape where nothing got made and, when it did, tended to involve Joan Collins? Yet if he had, it might not have taken 26 years to rescue him from the archives. Clarke’s era often found the British telling themselves they made the best TV in the world, but the self-congratulation came with a sniff and a smirk, the medium then considered to be on the wrong side of the divide between high and low culture. And, as such, disposable.
‘Clarke was drawn to the institutional, to tales of classrooms, barracks, psychiatric hospitals. Eventually, his style became radically spare. Scum and The Firm are his touchstones, but just as potent are two films he made in Northern Ireland: 1985’s Contact, a stark account of British troops in south Armagh, and Elephant, a wordless carousel of sectarian killings in Belfast made four years later. It was strong medicine: but Clarke could also be surreal, and very funny.
‘Even through the mists of nostalgia, we can’t pretend this stuff was mainstream. In Richard Kelly’s biography Alan Clarke, Made in Britain writer David Leland recalled the response to the 1983 film (broadcast on ITV), whose portrait of a delinquent skinhead played by a young Tim Roth left viewers wanting to “go round the back of the [TV] and see if it was plugged in properly”.
‘Inside his industry, Clarke provoked worse than disbelief. There was regular friction with the BBC. The brutal Scum — starring Ray Winstone — was banned by the corporation after it had commissioned it in 1977. (A cinema remake was one of Clarke’s handful of feature films.)
‘The Firm, too, ran into trouble, with scenes cut before its transmission on BBC2. Long memories may half explain why Clarke still seems to be outside the BBC’s embrace. It’s hard to see Clarke as part of the national broadcaster’s brand, the feral Bex Bissell of The Firm lined up with Stephen Fry and Joanna Lumley. Harder still to picture a film such as Contact anywhere now on avidly non-confrontational British TV. That really would have people checking the back of their screens.
‘Clarke always confounded British culture. As a working-class director whose projects were sometimes about the working class, there were attempts to box him up as another Ken Loach, a poet of the kitchen sink. But Clarke’s worldview was too singular for that. His politics were leftwing, but unruly. Danny Boyle remembered Clarke advising him to read The Sun rather than The Guardian (with the latter, “you always know what they’re gonna say”). His real obsession was psychology: power, compliance, the dynamics of men and women.
‘Visually too, he was a triumphant sore thumb. Where British film always leans to the stagey, Clarke was kinetic. A watershed came with the invention of the Steadicam, the kit used to smoothly follow actors in motion that became his signature. Famously, it was also loved by Stanley Kubrick, who employed it to chilling effect in The Shining. With Clarke, Britain had a director who didn’t fade into irrelevance if mentioned alongside Kubrick. For him to die from cancer at 54 was a tragedy, but at least we have the work: the films of a giant from an occasionally small country.’ — Danny Leigh
Walking into Film History: Alan Clarke’s Steadicam Shots
The Late Show – Alan Clarke
Alan Clarke: His Own Man
BFI’s Dissent & Disruption: Alan Clarke at the BBC (1969-1989) Blu-ray Set Unboxing
_______ Interview about Alan Clarke with Ben Wheatley and Jim O’Rourke from There’s No Place Like Home
When did you first become aware of his work?
Ben Wheatley: I think it would have been when I was at school and it would have been Scum (1979). At the school I went to in London there was a lot of talk of people hitting people with pool balls in socks and that had actually happened in an incident at my school so that’s kind of how I heard about Scum. Then I actually came to see it when I was about 12 or 13 at school. Whenever there was bad weather we’d get the video decks out and watch things like Enter the Dragon (1973), the Rambo movies, hardcore karate movies or early Jackie Chan stuff. In my school they would show Clarke stuff and I saw Contact (1984) at school as part of a history course about Northern Ireland. Then I had to try to remember what it was called and try to track it down later. I think that’s a brilliant movie and I remember watching that and just sitting there sweating, terrified by it. I also would have seen Rita, Sue and Bob Too (1987) and also Road (1987) because I remember having seen one of the original theatrical productions of Road at the Royal Court when I was a kid. So I was interested in seeing what they did with that and then when I saw it was Clarke, it was like fucking hell! I saw the version with Jane Horrocks, Ian Glen and Ian Dury. It was pretty amazing. A friend’s mum worked at the Royal Court and we were basically just this load of oiks. She said she’d give us free tickets for whatever we wanted, so I saw quite a lot of stuff around that period. I also saw Carol Churchill’s Serious Money, Bennet’s Kafka’s Dick and The Emperor, so all that sort of thing. But yeah Road, blew my mind at the time.
Jim O’Rourke: If I remember correctly, it was Made in Britain (1983) that I saw first, and at the time I probably associated it with other films I saw at the time like Quadrophenia (1979) and the like. Although I spent a good deal of my childhood in Ireland and London, I never saw any of his films as they happened on TV, and they really weren’t readily available in the States. I had read a lot about Elephant (1989), and was definitely looking for that. Around ten years ago when the first commercially available DVD’s were released, I became quite ravenous about finding his stuff. I even bugged someone I knew who had a friend who worked at the BBC to copy anything they could, and it worked!
Clarke was a master of the “social realism” drama and not afraid to show violence at often it’s most brutal, a statement that could easily be leveled at your own work, Ben.
BW: Yeah I think that the thing about his stuff that always struck me was that I didn’t ever feel the same kind of way about any other kind of film. I mean other stuff around like The Wild Geese (1978) and Star Wars (1977) and all these kind of things. There was plenty of stuff that was violent but there was nothing that made you feel so sickened and guilty about it as his stuff. It felt like it was really happening to you and you felt afraid by it. I think the only other time I had seen that was maybe Scorsese’s stuff or maybe Ghosts of the Civil Dead (1988).
Like Mean Streets (1973)?
BW: Well I was thinking more like Taxi Driver (1976) or Who’s That Knocking At My Door (1967) and that really affected me but that’s what its supposed to be about where you’re portraying it in a way that isn’t realistic and I recognise that from life, where I’ve either seen violence or been involved in it and it didn’t feel like movie violence. That’s why I felt it was a type of filmmaking that made more sense. I suppose Cathy Come Home (1966) has that kind of element to it and things like Ladybird Ladybird (1994) made me feel like that. There’s something more sensational but less polite about Clarke, he wants you to feel it as well as understand it. A lot of the films are just a warning not to get caught in the cogs of society or you’ll get ground up. It seems to be a recurring theme, that the machine was uncaring and that there may be these people full of faults and problems but they were still human.
At the time, Clarke’s work was often criticised for looking too much like a documentary (Scum, Christine, Contact in particular). What is your opinion on this?
BW: It depends where the criticism comes from, does it come from people who are worried about people tuning in half way through thinking it was real? I don’t think it’s a criticism that stands up now, I mean if it was for purely aesthetic reasons then it’s down to different tastes. Its like all the asinine comments by people saying that films shouldn’t be shot handheld because its amateur. It depends from what perspective they are saying that, because films look very different from each other all the time. I mean its like The Battle of Algiers (1966), is that a shit film because its shot like a documentary?
People’s experience of real life is through handheld devices like news cameras, camcorders and phones. So if you shoot stuff in that mode then the people believe its more real and a way into the drama as opposed to sitting back and thinking its like a Hollywood film. I understand why he shot in the way that he did because he was trying to make you believe and get rid of that controlled artificial feeling.
JO: I am actually surprised to hear that, at that point there’d been a considerable amount of film and TV that adapted that ethos, you could even look to The French Connection (1971) to see that it had become part of mainstream filming. Maybe there was a backlash against that that I am unaware of, but of course also Mr. Clarke was making films for the BBC, and i can’t pretend to be knowledgeable enough of all BBC productions in the 70’s to get a picture of the standard operating procedure, but it seems like the criticism of someone just looking for a criticism. It definitely would make most viewers unsettled, as there is nothing to fall back on, so to speak. Christine (1987) and Contact could see how he was really pushing into an almost rarefied hyper-reality, those films, like Elephant, really don’t put off a documentary like feel, but much more like an aestheticised quality. The hand held camera of his earlier films implies a cameraman, but the steadicam implies omniscience.
Personally I think the comment about them looking more like a documentary is a compliment to Clarke’s ability as a director to make his dramas look “real”.
BW: Exactly. All that people want, and who are these people? They set themselves up as judge, jury and executioner of art. Who are they and what have they done? It’s like bring me the shame-faced people who gave bad reviews to Nic Roeg’s films throughout his career.
In 1972 Clarke directed “To Encourage The Others” and “Under the Age” both for the BBC. TETO was based on the book and play by David Yallop and the evidence it contains twice forced governments to re-open a murder case long since closed and finally in 1993 lead to the granting of a posthumous Royal pardon to Derek Bentley. Under the Age features a transgender barmaid and openly touches on the subject of homosexuality (decriminalised only a few years earlier). Clearly both groundbreaking and challenging works at the time.
JO: I would imagine so. To Encourage The Others is actually one of my favorites of Clarke’s films. Not being subject to British laws, but being there a lot at the time, I was unaware of such barbaric laws, so it is all the more fascinating how much of it I saw in the British films and TV shows I knew at the time. There is definitely a kind of “problems picture” quality to Under the Age, but I didn’t know it was as radical as it was.
BW: It was all risky that stuff and if you look at what goes on now; where’s Alan Clarke, where’s Dennis Potter – they don’t exist in our modern world at all. It’s such a sad state of affairs when you look back to that period and they were so adventurous. We’ve got plenty of other types of TV from that period we’ve got game shows and talent shows, we still have all that but we haven’t got any of that sort of agit-prop theatre stuff. I guess because at the time and because of the focus, there were fewer channels so you really were speaking to the nation and addressing those issues but you could make that stuff now and people wouldn’t watch it.
Because there’s too many channels so too much choice?
BW: It’s not too much choice, you’ve got choice but if you don’t like bad news you can turn over and watch sport. You don’t have to watch theatre on TV anymore but back then it was like, what else are we going to do? Plus you had to get up out of your seat and turn it over!
Do you think it is just a sign of the times that everything seems to be reality television and is that really what people want? Although arguably in the US that’s where some of the best TV drama is being made like BREAKING BAD, HOMELAND and HBO dramas.
BW: I wonder, I mean television in the US is different but if you’re talking about mainstream cinema that goes on national release you’re right but it’s a bigger thing than that isn’t it? American Independent cinema is pumping out like 500 movies a year, which we’re never ever going to get to see outside of film festivals. Then there’s Festivals like Karlovy Vary where you see all the European stuff that you’re even less likely to get to see. I mean there could be masterpiece after masterpiece being made out there.
Even with the really good HBO stuff, its still all genre stuff like DEADWOOD is still a cowboy show and THE SOPRANOS is still a gangster show.
Although we’ve got film directors like Soderbergh and Campion going back to making drama for television, nothing as yet still seems as edgy as the type of dramas that Clarke was making.
BW: It’s different though because the turnover was a lot faster, Play for Today’s were ephemera so you’d bang it out and it was done and then move on to the next one. You didn’t have any of the risks, any of the pressures of returning characters and storylines. You’d make it then move on.
It’s dangerous to broadly say we live in terrible times but the shame of it is that the way BBC should be run is that if something is a commercial success then it should become an ITV show. If you look at it in broad strokes and what they should be doing is making stuff that no one else will make but as soon as they do that they get criticised for making stuff that no one watches and wasting the licence payer’s money, so they cant win.
I really liked it when they got rid of people like Dave Lee Travis and others from Radio 1 and brought in all this fresh new blood. But everybody was like, why are you doing this? It’s not what its for, its not about being popular, its about certain types of music for certain types of people and I think its the same for the Television side, they should get back to taking risks because they are in the privileged position to take those risks. I mean I watch Strictly Come Dancing, I’m not ashamed to admit I watch it with my family and enjoy it, so I’m not snobby about these things. They just don’t balance it out with the other stuff. A big brassy show like that should be on ITV.
JO: But, to some degree, at least in the States now, like you mentioned Soderbergh, I think part of the reason is because these are the only outlets for them to make something that is even somewhat close to the kind of films they want to make. There was definitely a stigma to working in television in the past, I mean for instance, people would speak badly of someone like Curtis Harrington because he moved into television, but that was the only work he could get as the economics change. And the economics are directly tied to the kind of work you can make, whether we like it or not.
TO ENCOURAGE THE OTHERS was shot on multi-camera colour video for the court scenes, colour 35mm for the re-enactment of the crime that opens the film and then uses a rapid montage of B&W stills to illustrate and differentiate evidential re-enactments. This has been compared to Peter Watkins forensic style documentary approach, another director you have recently been compared to yourself with your film A Field in England (2013).
BW: I think both Clarke and Watkins are kind of influences but I’d say that both are more precise political filmmakers than I am. I like their stuff and I use elements of it, but its a different era and different to the kind of thing that I’m involved in. We’re interested at coming at it from slightly different positions.
A year after The Wicker Man (1973), Penda’s Fen was screened by the BBC in 1974. David Rudkin’s script tackled subjects as diverse as religion, politics, censorship, homosexuality and paganism. It’s hard to contemplate what the impact must have been when this was first broadcast nearly 40 years ago. I’m interested to hear your own thoughts on Penda’s Fen.
JO: Penda’s Fen was startling for me when I saw it, because it was about the twelfth or so Clarke film I’d seen, and was the first, that I had seen to use, for lack of a better world, a representation of fantasy. I guess I had been swept up in my idea of Clarke-auterism to overlook that, just like a lot of other great directors, working within a genre can be bent, twisted, and reshaped to your own means, and this was the first time I had seen Clarke do that from the “inside” of the image, as opposed to how he approached the image.
BW: It’s less nuts than the Stars of the Roller State Disco (1984) or Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1985)! They’re just fuckin’ crazy! That’s the good side of all that stuff is that they can make something as crazy as all that and then just go out and say alright!
I saw Penda’s Fen quite late, what I liked about it when I read up on it is that Clarke said he didn’t know what the script meant either. I loved the fact that he said that as well. It is a film that you can see that he just went with it and he came to terms with it afterwards didn’t he? He started to understand it more afterwards and I watched it, thought about it a few more times and it resonated. It would have blew your mind watching it back then in 1974. I mean I’ve been watching old Dr Who episodes from that time and they’re like bad enough! It’s like that old Nigel Kneale stuff, you have to forgive it a bit when you watch it but its like going to the theatre and the framing and pacing of it are very slow and difficult and some of the acting is a little bit quirky but once you get in the door you’re alright.
Three years later Clarke made SCUM for the BBC, which they promptly banned then two year’s later in 1979 with writer Roy Minton, a film version was made with a few different scenes to the original TV version.
JO: Seeing the BBC version of Scum finally was a real treat. As much as I like the film version, I much prefer the BBC version. I feel it is a stronger cast as well. I actually wasn’t aware of the conflict with the Home Office, but what’s surprising anymore? One of the things I liked about Scum was the lack of sentimentality, with no escape route that films like this, or “issue films” in general offer. I remember in particular the scenes involving the slightly more nuanced boy who feels he has gotten through to one of his keepers. That’s a hard balancing act to achieve, these kind of scenes always risk having the words from the characters turn into a direct megaphone for the writer, especially in the case of the boy who seems to be a bit more philosophical about his situation. This is a nuance I think Clarke really excels at. I’ve never once felt preached to by one of his films, it’s a really rare gift.
BW: I don’t remember it being banned at the time; all I know about is the film. I only found out about the TV version during the “Banned” season on Channel 4 and The War Game (1965) etc.
Scum was originally pitched to the BBC as a trilogy of dramas focusing on Police training, Army Training and Borstal.
BW: I’d like to have seen all of those. That’s interesting because isn’t that how Elephant was commissioned as well? It was to be three films and involving Danny Boyle. He directed one and produced another, and then there was a third one. I remember them being on TV. Scum was the film that made me feel afraid. Scum and Made in Britain are both kind of similar in that way in the pulling away of the scales to children, they’re like the Brothers Grimm – in like this is what will happen to you if you fuck about and you’ll end up in these institutions. It’s like a kind of unglamorous version of A Clockwork Orange (1971) isn’t it? I think in Scum its more that he goes in to borstal and they offer him the opportunity of becoming a monster to fit in with the system and he takes it, and then he rebels against that as well because he’s just too wild and then they beat the shit out of him. That’s the Carlin story and then there’s the character Archer, his story is more like the voice of the writer. It’s also like a cowboy movie isn’t it? I mean its Shane (1953) isn’t it? They push him and they push him and then he fights back.
JO: The thing I took from both Scum and Made in Britain, well most of Clarke’s films, is his interest in showing the circle of how the violence is institutionalized and self-sustaining. Despite the sense that someone might have that they are rebelling, they are rebelling in relation to a world they are no longer a part of, they are now part of a world that feeds upon it’s consumption and expulsion of violence, and how someone defines themselves by it.
Psy-Warriors (1981), Elephant and Contact all deal with the subject of the troubles in Northern Ireland a very hot topic in Britain at the time. It would be unfair to label Clarke a political filmmaker but he did not shy away from filming important issues of the day, which perhaps could be argued courted controversy.
JO: Psy-Warriors is an especially interesting film I think, unlike Elephant and Contact, they offer some way in for the casual viewer, which most of his viewers were most likely. I’m actually curious if there were “fans” of particular directors for Play for Today or shows like that. I can understand how writers grew in fame because of most likely stage productions and the like, but I wonder how many people thought they were seeing “the new Alan Clarke”. Anyways, Psy-Warriors on first viewing strongly brought up memories of Peter Watkins’ Evening Land (1977) and The Seventies People (1975), if I’m remembering correctly. I guess it would still be a little off-center for most television films at the time, but I really like the, for Clarke, almost off putting coldness of it. I need to see that one again…
BW: He wasn’t afraid of being a political filmmaker and that’s the thing where most people don’t fucking go! The bombings were still going on when these were being filmed and when they were filming Elephant in Belfast. These people can find out where you are and where you live, everyone can. It’s like its both sides and the secret service, so perhaps he didn’t give a shit, but that’s how I would think about it now.
Imagine going to BBC and trying to get that commissioned now.
BW: No, but then maybe the commission was about that. It wasn’t that he had an idea and took it to them, they may have said they want stuff like this, what have you got? So he went “well what about this?” Fine, then I’ll do it. When you see it, you can feel your hair on the back of your neck going up and then you come out the other side.
Do you find that as the film goes on you almost become desensitised to the violence/killings, which was perhaps part of the point of the film?
BW: It’s not so much that, its more that we are designed for narrative, so we look for stories in everything and its how you understand what people are thinking by looking at faces because you make up a story about it. But there’s no story in this. You’re desperately trying to find a story but there isn’t one, because there is no narrative. It’s that tit for tat stuff that is beyond understanding, its like you’re watching it and then it ends and you are like, what?! There is no punishment, like where is Inspector Morse?! It doesn’t get tied up and it never gets set up so that’s much more like a real thing.
JO: Yes, that is the key element, and sort of relates to what I was saying earlier, in that you’re using a certain set of rules, ways of watching, and when it doesn’t follow them, or give the desired results, hopefully the reaction should be an awareness of those expectations and a new way of seeing, which is what I think is really effective in Clarke’s steadicam films. Even with Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire, the disconnect is invigorating.
It could be said that as we watch Elephant and as the scenes of the senseless killings continue we become less shocked by them, could be leveled at the characters of Jay and Gal in Kill List (2011) and the impact on us of their continual killing spree.
BW: I think its a different thing, I think you’d be more on it if you had used Scum as an example than Elephant, because you are so far back you are like an angel following or floating behind him and its a very different feeling from Kill List which is because its showing as a socio-realist documentary style you’re drawn into their story and you have protagonists. Its a different thing because you are with the protagonists and you spend time with them, so you sympathise with them and they do appalling things and then you feel bad about that. Elephant you don’t know who these people are, you never really see their faces. It’s a different set up. Carlin is more of a Kill List character because you follow him, you get to know him, you get to understand what his motivations are then he does appalling things and its kind of cool and the whole “I’m the Daddy now” scene.
There’s that weird structure within it, in the film, which doesn’t happen in the TV version; you’ve got that horrible rape involving characters you’ve never seen before. They up the ante and the horribleness of it but with nothing to do with the main plot.
Tim Roth and Gary Oldman would go on to direct films of their own, still only one a piece, which both seem very Clarke-influenced – The War Zone (1999) and Nil by Mouth (1997) respectively.
JO: I wish they would make more! I can only imagine how difficult it must be for them, despite the respect they have, to put together the kind of films they want to make. You can’t underestimate having someone in your life who not only teaches you about your craft, but instills in you the strength to hold to your convictions, which Clarke so obviously had. It is one of the greatest gifts someone can give you, that peek into the good and the bad that is to come, which is reflected in both their experience and in their character. I can only imagine what an inspirational man Clarke must have been, but as there are people all over the world held captivated by his work, and the feeling that they must share that with others, that’s as much evidence as you need of his strength.
BW: I think I remember reading Tim Roth saying that he went to America because he couldn’t find any directors like Clarke in the UK and that was it. There’s nobody else doing that kind of edgy stuff.
Christine, Diane (1975) and Horace (1972) all focus on varying aspects of troubled youths from drug dealing to incest to mental illness. All these are still every day issues today and yet, rarely topics openly discussed and certainly less so back at the time that Clarke was making them.
JO: Even if everyone who caused these problems tuned in and saw these films, or films like them, we’d still have these problems in the world unfortunately. It’s a slow process, and in any endeavor, the hope is you get a few people to realize these things in their own life, the life of others. Even for Clarke, most likely, these films were his own way of starting to find a way to make these questions a concrete presence in his life. Christine is a particularly strong case, I never felt that Clarke was showing me this girl’s life, but also trying to make sense of it himself. This is a quality of his films that has never lost it’s energy, regardless of time and place. Technically, the steadicam really helps this, that lack of “author’s movement” really frees the viewer to become the author, in a sense.
The Firm (1989) is as much a film about football hooliganism and violence as it is about families and tribes.
BW: There’s usually a cooler system underpinning Clarke’s stuff; there’s a machine that moves the characters around. There’s coldness in there. He’s always saying something. He worked within genre sometimes and then sometimes he just goes off and is very formalist and does his own thing. You look at Christine, as soon as he gets hold of the steadicam it’s almost like an art film in the same way that Elephant is.
JO: It might just be because I saw The Firm after I knew Gary Oldman, but I found it a bit more of a performance driven film than his others, even more so than Made in Britain. In this way, I read it more on a personal level, the Oldman character not just as indicative of the problems, but an insight into why those problems exist. The dynamic with his family, friends, work, the insecurity that underlies it all spoke to me more as England finding it’s footing in the world; the big family, after the 70’s when it had changed so much. So it is about family, but reaching out even more so, I think.
Clarke’ became almost synonymous with his use of the steadicam.
BW: Isn’t there a steadicam shot in Scum? There are some very long shots that travel up and down stairs or it might have been something like an easy-rig. An easy-rig is like a rucksack basically with a harness, which has got an iron bar that comes over the top and then it’s got a hook on it. All our films are shot on that, so Laurie (Rose) always uses that. Actually Down Terrace (2009) isn’t shot on that but everything subsequently was on easy-rigs, so it’s like a poor man’s steadicam. You can do quite long shots, they’re not hand held and they’re not as silky like the steadicams. Clarke’s work has some of the best use of steadicam ever.
JO: Clarke’s steadicam work is still second to none. I am especially fond of Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire, that is really remarkable. Technically, of course, Stars of the Roller State Disco is astounding, but in a way the opposite of that is what I find so remarkable about his use of camera, especially when it was in it’s infancy. With most steadicam shots, and crane shots for that matter, either highlight their disassociated omniscient stance, or worse, “hit the spots” showing small details for diegetic purposes, one after another, you can even sense the continuity person checking off the list as it goes, and this is a particular bane in films of the last 10-15 years for me, The fluidity of Clarke’s steadicam work is not the liquidity of it, but the fact that it never draws attention to it, which allows you as a viewer to fill the vessel yourself. Truly remarkable, and very much a political decision, I think.
A director who picked up on issues of the day.
BW: It’s kind of like Corman, it’s taken from the headlines and it’s turned into them, or like Sam Fuller. To make a film like Elephant at the height of the troubles is so unbelievably ballsy. I don’t think there was anyone who was making movies that political or in the mainstream at that time except maybe Loach. The closest you get to it now is maybe Paul Greengrass United 93 (2006) is from the headlines and it has that feel to it. He’s a kind of cross over documentary/filmmaker and Bloody Sunday (2002) is very Clarke-ian.
JO: You had a lot of that in Japanese cinema in the 70’s, not so much now unfortunately, despite it being even easier and cheaper to make a film now more than ever before. That’s what sort of befuddles me, I’m looking for the Fuller’s of today. There seems to be quite a good deal of work like that coming out of Australia right now, and I like the way Philipe Grandrieux is making an active effort to engage with the here and now. In some odd way, he seems to have taken Clarke’s ideas to a new level.
As well as being a pioneer of the steadicam, he was fond of using varying lengths of camera lens, the close-up etc. As a director can you speak about the technical side of Clarke’s work?
BW: He also did the stuff which splits into two beats, because there’s other types of things like Baal (1982) and Psy Warriors which are both very theatrical. They’re shot very flat and like on a tableau. So he’s a very hard guy to quantify. He’s like that and its like Nic Roeg or Ken Russell, they are not people who you can really pick their styles apart and mimic them really. Maybe in bits but you never really get underneath the skin of what it actually is that he’s doing because there are too many elements to it and his choices are varied, like his political choices, they’re not always aesthetic choices.
In a way that Loach and Leigh’s styles are kind of an invisible style where characters almost disappear into the background of the film but Roeg and Clarke were more visible. In Loach and Leigh an edit is invisible and filmmaking is something you should never notice, you should be drawn in by the characters, where with like Russell or Roeg it’s like really in your face. Here it is, this is the story and this is the feeling and I think that Clarke kind of falls between those two.
What Clarke was doing back then technically was totally revolutionary, I mean its revolutionary still now. It’s a singular moment. From like Christine on it’s totally modern.
I see a parallel in your own film Down Terrace with The Firm, a crime film very much about gangsters and violence, but intrinsically about families.
BW: The thing that really surprised me about The Firm is when you realise he’s an estate agent and the arguments he has with his wife are much more violent than any of the rest of the film for me. That’s just horrible.
Drunken blokes bashing each other up over football, I mean who cares, but when you see that scene with the kid who has his mouth slashed open with the blade, its just horrible.
Then you see Oldman going back to his mum’s and up to his bedroom and smashing the bed up with the weapon. That’s when you feel the real ferocity of it, also its one of the greatest Oldman performances.
With the Down Terrace thing, the psychological violence is as important as the physical violence in it but we also knew we were never going to do like a shoot out in a spaghetti house like in The Godfather (1971) or something like that. It had to be about the violence that the people in the family does to each other and with their chums and that’s much grimmer and more affecting. The thing about Down Terrace and with Kill List is that a lot of stuff revolves around how you can relate to it. So when someone gets shot, you’ve no reference, you don’t care because it’s a TV thing or a film thing, but when someone who gets shouted at by their dad, you know what it is because it happens, Its happened to you.
Down Terrace was originally a script we’d written in the 90’s called Robin and Robert and it was for Rob (Hill) and Bob (Hill) to play the characters. Amy (Jump) and I had written it and it was about contemporary artists, it was like Gilbert and George. The family went back in history back to like medieval times like crofters or something but whenever the son had a child the father would have to retire and then there would always be a father and son, so that’s the story. So by the time we get to Down Terrace it had all got changed around but the core of the story is that the father is replaced because the son becomes the father and then when a new child is introduced the whole balance of power has to change because there’ll no longer be a baby anymore. The mother is the same, like fuck, we’re out, we’ll have to be retired and that’s why they fight against it. Its like the line “I much preferred it when it was just the two of us” and its partly to do with growing up and maturity. That was another thing about that film it was a small business and they just happened to do something else because you never really knew what they do. Its never really said what they do. Nefarious, but enough for them to kill people over it.
_____________ 14 of Alan Clarke’s 31 productions
_____________ Achilles Heel (1973) ‘Alan Clarke’s film of a day in the life of a professional footballer makes for fascinating viewing today. Knowing Clarke’s passion for Everton FC, producer Lambert attached him to Brian Clark’s 1973 script, which captures the moment where money, glamour and celebrity begin to enter the world of football.’— rarefilmm
the entire thing
_____________ Penda’s Fen (1974) ‘The film is a passionate deconstruction of conservative myths about nationhood. At a critical point, the formerly hidebound Stephen cries out: “No, no! I am nothing pure! My race is mixed. My sex is mixed. I am woman and man, light with darkness, nothing pure! I am mud and flame!” Rather than hewing to a belief in tradition, continuity or stability, Rudkin champions hybridity and what Salman Rushdie would later term cultural “mongrelisation”. A while before it became fashionable for historians to talk about the inseparability of “nation and narration” or “the invention of tradition”, Rudkin was arguing that English Christianity was a violently imposed ideology. The family, heterosexuality, militarised manhood: all these pillars of patriotism take a tumble. What makes Penda’s Fen particularly prescient is that it locates these hybrid transformations in the English countryside. The 1970s saw a number of artists offering new versions of pastoral – Philip Trevelyan’s The Moon and the Sledgehammer (1971) was a creepy documentary about a family living without electricity in a wood; Richard Mabey’s The Unofficial Countryside (1973) introduced readers to what would later be known as edgelands; Jeremy Sandford’s Tomorrow’s People (1974) portrayed the Dionysian longings of free-festival revellers. Rudkin shows rural England to be a place of struggles and heresies, of antagonisms and anguish. The film even turns to etymology, arguing that “pagan”, which originally meant “belonging to the village”, referred to the politics of local governance as much as it did to theological doctrine.’— The Guardian
Excerpt
the entire film
___________ Bukovsky (1977) ‘Alan Clarke’s documentary about Soviet writer and dissident Vladimir Bukovsky, who had left the Soviet Union in 1976 after years spent in their prisons and psychiatric wards. The film was completed in 1977 but never broadcast, subject only to private screenings.’— Letterboxd
the entire film
_________ Scum (1979) ‘Alan Clarke’s Scum, originally made for the BBC’s Play for Today series in 1977, has become a cause célèbre in the history of film censorship. Although the film had already been scheduled, it was eventually banned and only broadcast in 1991, a year after the director’s death. How the decision was reached remains unclear but there is no denying that the film was deemed too controversial both by the Home Office and the newly-appointed BBC One controller Bill Cotton. Scum is set in a borstal, the name given to institutions for young offenders (a system that was to be abolished in 1982), and depicts life under a daily regimen of violence, bullying and racism. In response to the censoring of the original TV version, director Alan Clarke and screenwriter Roy Minton decided to re-shoot the film two years later for cinema release. Starting with a comparison between the two versions we will examine the different modalities of production and reception related to the two different media (television and cinema). Then we will analyse what makes the representation of a sensitive question such as living conditions in a borstal acceptable or not, considering the degrees of fictionalisation of the representation.’— Revue LISA
Trailer
Excerpt
the entire film
_____________ Beloved Enemy (1981) ‘A cool hard study of ‘the art of the deal’ on a global scale. Sir Peter, the chillingly affable chief exec of big British multi-national UKM, learns that the Soviet Union’s chief scientists are in London with government credit to spend. He’s keen to flog them a tyre-production plant. based in the Ukraine, which will unshackle UKM from bothersome unions at home. But at the negotiating table, it fast becomes apparent that the Soviets are more interested in the laser technology UKM employs to vulcanise their tyres; and Peter starts to foresee a new future in military aerospace for his ever fiexible firm.’— letterboxd
Excerpt
the entirety
__________ Baal (1982) ‘According to Willett, Alan Clarke’s first choice to play Baal was Steven Berkoff (‘I thought it was a mistake’), and he claims the credit for suggesting Bowie, who had been playing in The Elephant Man in New York and who had a strong interest in German Expressionist painters of the 1930s. Unsurprisingly, Bowie appears on screen in the very first shot, as the adaptation plunges the viewer into the action with no preliminary titles and no sense of introduction to either the setting or the central character. Baal is standing in mid-shot against a plain background, looking directly into the camera. ‘At the time of the flood,’ he says, mysteriously, ‘they all went into the ark..’ Split-screen in BaalSet in the years before the Great War, the minimal narrative is a succession of scenes in which the young poet alienates everyone he encounters, whether at a smart dinner party or in a low-life tavern. He sleeps with women, sings, drinks, abandons an unborn child, drinks, sings, and goes wandering in the mountains where he dies in a hut after the wood-cutters who live there have gone to work. There is little sense of character development but Baal is used largely as a foil to expose the hypocrises of society at all levels. Between the vignettes, Baal stares into the screen and sings, often in a split-screen shot which pairs him either with one of the other characters or with a caption.’— SCREEN PLAYS
______________ Made in Britain (1982) ‘Made in Britain is extraordinary television. The sheer quality of writing in David Leland’s script was rare even for its time but seems completely absent from TV today. Leland never tries to make Trevor likeable, but by giving him such a powerful voice he forces us to listen to viewpoints that we are deliberately made to feel uncomfortable by. Rarely does a film of any description dare to take on its audience on such difficult terms, feeding them with one hand and slapping them in the face with the other. It remains a difficult and confrontational work, but for all the right reasons. Similarly uncompromising is Tim Roth’s central performance as Trevor. Roth famously only got seen at all through a chance incident – a cycle tyre puncture led him to a youth theatre in which he had previously worked to borrow a pump, only to discover that auditions for the film were being held there the next day. He met Alan Clarke and sold himself for the part. It’s genuinely impossible now to imagine the film without Roth at its centre – his performance as Trevor is nothing short of astonishing and is without doubt the key reason for Trevor’s enigmatic screen presence. Everything is just right here, the snarled anger, the sarcastic sneering, the nitro-powered physicality – Roth plays Trevor as a ball of furious energy looking for a direction in which to explode, a missile with a message and a haphazard targeting system. There are times when you really, really want someone to slap some sense into him, but there is not one solitary second that you can take your eyes off him. When that slap finally comes, you’re genuinely unsure about how to react to it. Alan Clarke was the ideal director to commit Leland’s words to film, investing in the visuals and actors the same energy and intelligence that roars through the script. Made in Britain is an Alan Clarke film every bit as much as it is a David Leland film and a Tim Roth film and a Chris Menges film. It is that collaborative process that Clarke seemed to savour, and at his best it is not just Clarke’s voice we hear but all of the voices in the film. Made in Britain – tough, smart, angry, difficult, electrifying and without peer to this day, is just such a work.’— Cine Outsider
Excerpt
the entire film
______________ Billy the Kid and the Green Baize Vampire (1985) ‘Once regarded as something of an oddity, if not a misstep, in the career of Alan Clarke, Billy the Kid is undoubtedly the only vampire snooker musical in cinema history and a genuine cult artefact destined for rediscovery. One of the legendary television director’s few forays into features, Clarke collaborated with screenwriter Trevor Preston for the story of a duel between backstreet snooker player Billy Kid (Phil Daniels) and world champion Maxwell Randall (Alun Armstrong). The film was made at the height of snooker’s improbably success on British television, and Preston was inspired to write the tale from watching a showdown between young pretender Jimmy White and veteran Ray Reardon (nicknamed ‘Dracula). Clarke’s contrasting of ostentatious musical numbers with claustrophobic and sterile locations betray his longstanding interest in the work of Bertholt Brecht, and composer George Fenton (a recent Oscar-winner for Gandhi at the time) supplies the wonderful score with its eccentric songs and diverse switches of style. One of the strangest films to emerge from 1980s Britain (in a decade that offered a fair few contenders); Billy the Kid is a delightful slice of eccentricity from one of the UK’s most uncompromising filmmakers.’— bfi
Trailer
the entire film
______________ Contact (1985) ‘Alan Clarke’s Contact is a starkly stripped back film about British paratroopers on patrol in Northern Ireland. It is pared to the very bone, where dialogue has been jettisoned, action appears without context and the cinematic grammar is one of long takes, steadi-cams and opaque ambiguity, rather than realism. Contact is a visceral, tense film, that ignores the politics of Northern Ireland, but focuses on the really bleak sense of terror. The British soldiers are characterless, unsympathetic, but not villianess, while the Irish combatants are only seen at distance, almost presented as the other. Clarke ratchets the tension through his camera movement, his willingness to have the camera follow the action, rather than precede it. It feels like a film about being a soldier; the boredom, the oddities, the terror. Contact is a tough, terse 65 minutes, that reminds me of Samuel Fuller, without the melodrama, or Ingmar Bergman’s Shame, without the philosophy.’— Wilson
AFN CLARKE on “CONTACT”
_______________ Christine (1987) ‘Christine hews close to the Clarke we know—he’s discovered the steadicam and camera operator/collaborator John Ward at this point, and has perfected the long walking shots that had become a signature of his. (Long before the Dardenne Brothers established a bonding aesthetic based on tagging along directly behind their protagonists, Clarke had colonized the conceptual territory and planted a Union Jack flag.) We start off trailing the titular 13-year-old character (Vicky Murdock) as she walks down a pathway behind apartment buildings in what appears to be a middle-class neighborhood; a music box tinkles away over the soundtrack. Entering a house, the girl banters with another kid, who’s trying on a grown-up’s suits. Eventually, they both calmly take out syringes and shoot up heroin. You know those Hallmark cards featuring children in baggy adult clothes? Imagine those prepubescents put down their color-tinted roses and started doing horse in front of you. This is not your usual shock-cinema horrorshow of drug addiction. In fact, as this scene repeats itself numerous times over the next 50 minutes, it’s the sheer banality of the scenario that hits you like a brick to the face. There is no statistics-filled disclaimer about where, how, and why this epidemic of underage narcotics usage is happening, no dead babies crawling on the ceiling, no do-you-know-where-your-children-are moralizing. Christine merely traipses from one plain household to the next and then small talk, shoot up, rinse, repeat. Murdock’s spare, Mouchette-like performance gives the film both its impact and a timeless sense of watching a numbed-out nightmare—she’s caught in a looped Afterschool Special running on smack time. The use of repetition and a complete lack of context make it feel like a dry run for Clarke’s Elephant two years later, in which boiling down a complex social problem (in the later film’s case, the Troubles in Northern Ireland) to nothing but activity—all effect, no cause—cuts away the chatter. Action is character here; when he got around to Elephant, he had dispensed with character altogether and gone straight to action.’— Film Comment
the entire film
_________ Road (1987) ‘Best you end your Clarkeology 101 tour with Road (87). Made for the Screenplay series, his adaptation of Jim Cartwright’s stylized play about Northern no-hopers features plenty of virtuoso Steadicam shots, a show-stopping apocalyptic monologue by Lesley Sharp, and the best use of music in any of Clarke’s works. Eventually, the two brothers and two women out on the town we’ve been following end up at in a dilapidated building, desperate to make a physical connection but unable to break through their malaise. Then one of them suggests something: “You drink, you listen to Otis [Redding], and you get to the bottom of things!” Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness” plays almost en toto as the men vibrate with excitement. The hopes, fears, and frustrations of this quartet, all of which might be shared with Britain then, or all of us now, pour forth. A connection is made. The movie ends with its characters chanting: “If I keep shouting, I might escape.” It’s a transmission of hope, yelled up at the sky. Then the sound dies down and Clarke holds on a silent overhead shot of these folks for seconds on end. Hope screams eternal. Fade out.’— Film Comment
Excerpt
Excerpt
the entire film
____________ Rita, Sue and Bob Too! (1987) ‘Trading as ribald comedy, this film reflects a cruel and widespread reality, yet maintains an unnerving distance from its own implications. Neighbours on the rough side of a run-down Bradford estate, Rita and Sue (Finneran and Holmes, grittily authentic) are best buddies nearing school-leaving age. They babysit for nouveau riche sleazeball Bob (Costigan) and his wife Michelle (Sharp), whose disaffection with sex becomes her husband’s justification for getting it any which way he can – one way being on the reclining front seat of his flash car, taking Rita and Sue, incredibly, in quick succession. It’s all fun and games until Michelle finds out: Rita becomes pregnant, moves in with Bob, and has a miscarriage; and Sue opts for a haphazard shack-up with a bully of an Asian boy. Thereafter director Clarke’s keenly observed ‘naff’ character nuances, never a comfortable laugh, really begin to stick in the throat, and his persistent rib-tickling in the face of the girls’ desperation provokes a moral dilemma which the ludicrous ‘Carry On Coupling’ finale simply aggravates. Humour in the worst possible taste.’— Time Out (London)
Excerpt
the entire film
_____________ The Firm (1989) ‘One of Clarke’s most acclaimed and controversial films, The Firm shocked television audiences in 1989 with its unflinching depiction of football hooliganism. In one of his earliest starring roles, Gary Oldman plays Bex Bissell, the ‘top boy’ in a London firm. A symbol of Thatcher’s Britain and a product of his time, Bex is an estate agent addicted to the buzz of being a football hooligan. The violent subculture is ingrained into his lifestyle. Clarke once stated that the character was a response to how he saw the Tory government’s complete misunderstanding of the neoliberal society they had created. Clarke’s prerogative wasn’t to make a shocking exposé, but to show how these types of firms operated “in a ritualistic kind of way.” Shortly it becomes apparent that the violence doesn’t actually revolve around football, but has everything to do with the hooligans’ machismo behaviour. Clarke himself was a avid Everton FC supporter and stressed that the main point of the film is that the problem is not football, but the people who use the sport as an excuse to exercise their hooliganism. The Firm stresses this notion throughout to the extent that an extra directly addresses the television cameras, stating that the firm would be causing riots even if they were associated with snooker, tennis or darts. To this day, there’s never been a football hooligan film quite like it.’— Little White Lies
Excerpt
Excerpt
the entire film
_______________ Elephant (1989) ‘There is a remarkable cadence to Alan Clarke’s Elephant (1989) that makes it difficult to define as a television drama, extended short, short-form feature or artist’s moving image piece. In differing contexts it could be read alongside films such as Culloden, Partie de Campagne or Meshes of the Afternoon. The film, a circle of violence, near silent with no thematic context provided, other than three lines of dialogue spoken in a Northern Irish accent, provided Clarke an opportunity to focus his camera in a manner akin to his more conventional roots in social-realist docu-drama. Produced for BBC Northern Ireland and originally broadcast on BBC2 in January 1989, at a time when the corporation had been recently forced by Thatcher’s government to impose a blanket broadcast ban on loyalist and republican organisations with supposed links to the IRA, Elephant makes no attempt to explain, contextualise, glorify or denounce the succession of eighteen murders, played one after another, the only recurring feature a lingering single shot of the murdered man at the end of every sequence. By shooting almost entirely on a steadicam on the streets of a Belfast free of passers-by and stacked along with empty buildings, gives Clarke the opportunity to determine the pace of the film by its characters and allows it to unfold as if it were a documentary. Clarke’s narrative arc is episodic and its beats are natural. We follow, literally, each assailant or victim as they go about their daily business, playing football or taking a stroll in the park, at work in factories and offices, even chatting with friends in their own homes. Our field of vision is as limited as the man which we trail. Every area we are led towards, indoor or out, feels claustrophobic, inescapable of violence that we are aware is imminent, that we will to stop but are never given the respite.’— Ajay Hothi
Excerpt
the entire film
*
p.s. Hey. ** jay, Hi. Funny how the simplest seeming decision can work such wonders, yeah. Of course I love Louise Bourgeois. I’m honored that you see an association. Glad you’re great. I’m pretty okay, a few complaints, not so bad, working, etc. Thanks. Have a whatever-you-hope weekend. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. When I was searching for bed art, that Emin piece was everywhere and inescapable, so, doing my usual eschewing of the overly familiar, I avoided it. But it does seem to be ‘the’ bed art piece in a million opinions. Understandably. A new Seidel! I like him too. Cool, I’ll hunt it down. Thank you, pal. ** Steve, Hey. Yeah, there are interesting rock entities in the US too, like, to my taste, Water From Your Eyes, for instance. But, yeah, hardly anything in that realm sounds like it’s breaking ground whether it is or not. A lot of restyling getting called newness. Envy on that festival. ‘I Saw the TV Glow’ is one of the movies I most want to see right now. Everyone, Steve has reviewed the new film ‘I Saw the TV Glow’, which one hears great things about, and let’s go see what Steve thinks of it, shall we? Meet you here. I’ll ask Uday about that film when I get to them. ** ellie, Hi, ellie! I think complicated settles for nothing less than odd friends, acquaintances, and lovers, so I suspect you’re set. Me too. Oh, shit, about the hospital stint. I hope you’re A-okay now. That Whiteread piece is nice. I’ve never seen it before. Thanks! Everyone, ellie adds a swell bed to the array yesterday, by Rachel Whiteread, and visible here. I hope you have/had a nice weekend. Anything extra special pop up, or did it provide pleasurable usualness? No problem, on the multi-posts. I like repetition. xo. ** Harper, Howdy. Mine neither. I too try not to read other writers when I’m writing, except for when I stall out whence sometimes dipping into exciting fiction can adrenaline me and wake my stuff up again. It’s hard to identify your own voice. In some cases, I think it can be even dangerous in the sense that a writer will decide what their voice is and then just kind of stick to that and not let it mutate and grow. I do also think it can be counterproductive sometimes to worry about your work showing signs of influence. I can only speak from my situation, but I’ve found that if I’m learning from a particular writer’s style, that influence is actually sufficiently homogenised by my own voice in my writing. It’s easier to see the earmarks of others sometimes than see what’s yours and original, if that makes any sense. I guess I’m saying maybe try not to be overly concerned with that seeming danger when you’re writing? I’m big on extensive revising and editing, and I always know I can refine out anything in the writing that’s not fully mine once I get a good draft down. My work is extremely revised and polished and fiddled with, but no one’s ever said my work’s too artificial that I know of. Do you show your work to trusted others to get their thoughts?I used to, but once I felt sure enough about my work I stopped doing that until I was positive it was finished or very close. Sorry, I’m kind of rambling. I don’t know if that helps. It’s true, sadly, I haven’t seen a copy of that Padgett edited anthology anywhere for less than $150. Nor a pdf anywhere. I guess maybe you could borrow it from a library. It really should be reprinted, seriously. Hm, understated … I’m guessing you know all the biggies. You know Bernadette Mayer? Joseph Ceravolo is really good and not so well known. Kenward Elmslie is great. Charles North. Barbara Guest is very good, not always, but often. Lots, I guess. Ha, great photo of Stephen Tennant. I like him a lot too. Everyone, You oughta check out this photo of the great Stephen Tennant lying oh so stylishly on his bed, courtesy of Harper. Have a fine, fine weekend! ** Justin D, Thank you, J. You can usually smell a Kienholz piece from rooms away. My week was alright, reasonably productive, sufficiently friend-filled, not excessively rainy. How was your Saturday/Sunday combo? ** 🤦♂️Darby, Jesus, that’s like a real piano! Schlepping that, yikes. And Frankie is just as charismatic as my brain was picturing if not, no, definitely, more so. Nice pix. Piano masturbation could become a viral fetish maybe. Copyright that! Have a super swell weekend. ** Uday, First, Steve wonders what the name of that Romanian film you mentioned is, if you know. I think I look more smiley in person than in my photos. Oh, shit, hold on … Okay, I just removed this weekend’s planned Gymnasium Day and replaced it with something less taxing for you. Good thing you caught me in time. xo. ** Oscar 🌀, Always so nice to see your lustrously blue spiral. And you yourself, even more so, of course. Nice, I haven’t slept until 7:30 in ages. I think maybe in person the odor of that moss bed might kill your taste buds? Mm, broccoli, yum. Haha, that’s hilarious: the soothing picture and quote. Oh my goodness, that’s so reassuring to know. Thank you for lightening my spirit. I will endeavor to make the weekend a future memory of value. And you must do the same with yours, sir. ** Okay. Are you familiar with the exciting films and TV work of Alan Clarke? I thought I might introduce you to his stuff if you don’t already know it and/or make you go ‘ah!’ if you do. See you on Monday.
Diane Williams Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine, Fine
Now available in North America 
