current work details
Roles:
Writer, Director, Editor, Curator & Programmer.
Company:
Charlie Productions
Website:
http://www.charlieproductions.co.uk
Where I work:
I run my own company or organisation
Technical Skills:
FCP based editing, script factory trained reader.
Availability:
I am too busy
personal info
Films I wish I had made:
The Big Liebowski, Lone Star, The Third Man, Brighton Rock, though actually I wish I'd made it because it's such a great book and I bet I could do it more justice. On the same logic actually I wish that I'd made Josie And The Pussycats because I'd have done that better.
And I mean, I sort of wish that I'd made Burnt By The Sun because it's genius but I don't think I ever could have done that so I don't really wish for it. Oh Casablanca. I'd love to have done that. And the Asphalt Jungle. Loads actually.
Most of all I wish that I'd made Russell Square and Bernard better than I did...
I cried watching:
Burnt By The Sun, Lone Star, actually John Sayles always makes me cry. Actually I cry quite easily. I once cried whilst watching a yellow pages commerical in which a guy gets old cine footage transfered onto VHS so his aging mum can see her dead husband as a young man. "Oh he was a handsome chap your Dad", hell I'm welling up just writing this...
I left the cinema during:
Regeneration - but only because I'd been to the pub first and only decided to see it on a whim and I really needed the loo. I came back! It's a great film, the best thing Gilles McKinnon's ever done.
Other than that, actually no. I've never left the cinema during anything.
Directors I love:
John Sayles, The Coens kinda, Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson - oh, yeah actually stick the Royal Tennenbaums into the list of films I wish I'd made. That should almost be first. And I cried in that too. But I didn't leave the cinema.
Actors I admire:
Bob Dylan, though mainly as a musician. Kris Kristofferson, though mainly as an actor. Tom Baker. I can't help it.
My desert island discs:
Lay lady lay (Dylan), Ocean Rain (Echo and the bunnymen), Catfish Blues (Robert Petway), Girl Of The North Country Fair (Dylan,Cash), Magnificent Seven (Clash), Stick Around (Special Needs), Idiot Wind (Dylan),
Books I have given my friends:
The World Turned Upside Down (Christopher Hill) which I gave Chris years ago and he still hasn't given me back. I gave Kate "Deadkidsongs" by Toby Litt but only because I thought she might like it from a review I read in the LRB and I don't think she ever finished it. Oh and Zee's still got my copy of "Give The Anarchist A Cigarette" by Mick Farren.
My death row meal:
Pathetically it'd be pizza. I'm obsessed. It's not healthy. Though on death row this would hardly matter. Once, when we were shooting Chris and the crew stayed on set to rig for the last scene and I went off to get them all Pizza.
The day had been a bit tense and me and Chris were a little angry with each other and I'd ended up making a bit of a thing about how I wasn't going to eat (to show how dedicated I was, sad but you know...) safe in the knowledge that my then girlfriend was cooking a full sunday lunch for me back at home.
I got to the Pizza place, ordered for everyone else and then I was just gripped by this devasting and soul destroying urge to EAT PIZZA.
So I ordered a pizza for myself, just a simple Margheritta, nothing fancy, then walked back down the High Street to Nans' flat where we were shooting.
Knowing that I had to eat the pizza before I got there in order to maintain my image as the hardworking concientious one I ate as I walked, folding huge slabs of pizza into my mouth with a visceral satisfaction.
People crossed the road to avoid me - there I was, marching down the street clutching seven or eight pizzas to my chest whilst desperately eating a ninth. I must have looked like I was entering some sort of gluttonous competition like Nicely Nicely Johnson.
Still I finished the pizza, hid the evidence and was very noble.
I can't help it.
The best thing I own:
My guitar, but just because I'd be lost without it. It's not a nice guitar, it cost seventy quid. Actually no, the best thing I own is Tom's guitar which I don't own so that doesn't count. Er my shoes? I don't know, I don't really own that much. I've got Johnny Ball's autograph somewhere...
More:
You can't possibly want to know more about me. I can't imagine you want to know what I've told you, most of which is lies anyway.
I was stuck when they asked me to do this because part of me leapt at the chance at talking about myself endlessly but then I thought, what a twat to be that keen to write about yourself. But then I thought, well, since they've asked I can't really turn them down without being more of a twat than were I to do it. I mean, it's like accepting an Oscar is a twattish thing but not as much of a twattish thing as not accepting an Oscar. That gives it a credence it doesn't deserve.
Not that this is like accepting anything. Except my own egoism. But I am resigned to this fact as an integral part of whatever it is that makes me me.
But alright, so you want to know who I am?
What else is there to know about me anyway? I woke up this morning half asleep. I still feel tired now and the portentous unpleasantries of my nightly dreaming still lurk in the redish darkness behind my eyelids. Sometimes, on these desolate grey days that are so typically English, it is possible to doubt your very existence.
I'm using "your" in that sentence where I should, to be grammatically correct, use "ones" because this is an expression largely defunct in modern English. I think that's a shame really because if you ignore the overtones of class and oppresion that it seems to invoke in the minds of so many who will stare at you like a lah-dee-dah toff if you use it, the use of the word "one" to describe a generalness of being is a useful and direct way of talking about life without being personal or rude. "You always tend to make the same the mistake" is a personal attack prone to make someone's hackles rise whereas - "One always tends to make the same the mistake", whilst sounding like a stodgy opening gambit in a discussion with the vicar about his habitual and badly concealed sodomising of the younger male members of the chorestal society, has the openness of simultaneously neither accusing whomsoever you are talking to and including both of you, and indeed all the other inhabitants of the planet, equally in the blame for such follies. Obviously if you have to follow this up with a plea about how perhaps the right reverend should spend some time alone and think very carefully about the boundaries of his sexuality and the manner in which these boundaries might, like some deeply personal venn diagramm, clash with the boundaries of his religious duties and responsabilities as de facto moral leader of the local community, then it could well not only be necessary but vital that you turn to the much more personal "you" and stop fannying about with the non-commital "one" as if everyone was up to no good with the sopranos. "God, between fellacio and religion I've been on my knees all morning, any chance of more tea?"
I only mention this because I feel it necessary at this point to clarify my self. Purify, if not my self then at least my horrendous and endless verbage. I did not mean that it becomes possible on these days of skyless grey and sunless heat to doubt your very existence. It is always possible to doubt your very existence; and here I'm using your in the more classically correct sense of being an attribute of you my dear reader. I have no guarentee that you exist at all. I imagine not even my brother will bother to wade this deep into a text so dry and uninteresting in lay out and I don't blame either of you. Not that either you, the abstract reader, or you my abstract brother, will know that I don't blame either of you because you wont have read to this point. Sad really because I imagine that in some small way at least a great many of you, if indeed there ever are a great many of you, will look at this page, gulp, think of your phone bills and guiltily flick onto a more interesting page and then carry with you some small parcel of guilt at having not given due notice to something simply because it looked dull, a parcel of guilt which would, if you had bothered to read this far, be removed from your shoulders with this only semi-magnanimous offer of an amnesty on my behalf. You don't have to read this. It really is going to be very very dull.
Or may be this thought will not occour to you. May be you are a child of Thatcher, or Reagan if you prefer the transatlantic idiom, suckled on the sweet corrupting milk of consumerism and driven since a baby down the neon strip lit isles of super markets and shopping malls. May be you feel content in the knowledge that if I can't make the effort to draw you into my words, to wrap any meaning I might have in the sweet bait of humour or typography or spread-legged women from the orient, then I can just go and do the other thing quite frankly. Why should you feel in any way obligied to read this foggy nonsense when I haven't even put any good pictures or exploding headlines. Don't I know the first thing about how to interest people in a web page?
England is a country where the weather can change within the space of a cricket match. When you realise, and here that you can either be you or one which is probably where the start of the bluring of distinction which will lead to the eventual extinction of one first began to arise, that the outcome of our one time national sport can often depend upon the seemingly random and definitely uncontrollable fluctuations in atmospheric pressure, that through a crucial stage in a national development a great many people found their minds concentrated on a game where the result had at least as much to do with wether the weather would hold as it did to skill, you begin to gain an insight into why we were such a distinct people.
Were. Should that be are? Do I intend to suggest here that we no longer are? I think perhaps I do. Not only us. A cleverer man than I once pointed out to me that airports are the same the world over. England to Nigeria to Singapore and then America. A bitter anglophile might spit out sourly that the architecture is single-mindedly North American this, however, is not the case; I once heard a man from the South bemoaning the fact that his home has been devoured from beneath his feet - that the true yankee is a dying breed, a figure who exists more in the imagination, on screen and in paper, than in the numerous housing projects that litter the hot dry ground from which this figment sprang. Airports are a piece of nowhere. The real new land in which you as passenger have just arrived does not truly start until you step out of the airport itself. They are like the airlocks of a space craft - neither inside the space ship or out, an area where you can prepare yourself for departure or entry. However this nowhere, this aclimatising area, expands with the growth of tourism. Few tourists wish to step off a plane directly into a new world and so as the tourists arrive a thin seam of nowhere spreads across the city with them. Buger bars and chain stores, posters for cigarette brands identical the world over all seep out from the airports and transform a foreign place into something familar - not quite home, not quite abroad - a bland generic space that could be anywhere. It is as if the fabric of a country had been ripped to reveal a vacancy it was sewn to cover. Airports remind us that not only are we all the same as each other we are all nothing at all.
Apes are meant to be genetically different from humans by a mere handful of percentage points. Imagine then the tiny difference that distinguishes me from my ex-lover. A scant selection of x's and y's and the indentations left on us by the differing pressures of our pasts. If we were photographs then the differences would be so small that many people would probably confuse us for the same image reproduced. We are two frames of film, a ball breaking a window, one of us infinitesimally more shattered than the other. A letter full of whys and ended in a row of x's is a love letter for more reasons than you might think.
Waiters are surly in every country beneath the sun. Banking conglomerates are internationally unhelpful. These are not the impositions of a greater American culutral expansion but the cold impressions of our true vacancy. If nationality is an unconcious back catalouge of quirks, a series of inherited personality traits that help to draw the line between one group of people and another in the same manner as a childhood obsession with Doctor Who distinguishes one group of cells from another who might have had ballet lessons from the age of two and now might regret giving them up to persue a hobby in nicotene, then these supranational organsiations are things outside of personality. They strip away all the soft detail of our lives and leave us as single units of human life. It is not, afterall, you who they are interested in - it is one, a sense of being devoid of identity.
Although you might not believe it from the rather all encompassing orbit of the previous paragraphs I do, at least try, to stay clear from sweeping statements. I fear that this is probably an action of the mind that tends not to translate into reality. However we are not in reality are we? Supposedly you find these thoughts inscribed virtually in non-exisitence, a no time, no place space outside the bounds of the normal world. Funny because it feels just like it always does when I touch type.
Typing is quite a natural feeling for me. With the rise of personal computers and with more typing entering our daily routines more people are self taught typists like me. The first word I ever wrote was slug and it was contained in a random selection letters hammered out with gay abandon on a battered type writer at a very early age. I didn't know at the time that I had written a bizarre dadaist anthem of glory to this otherwise unregarded garden mollusc, I didn't even know that I had written the word slug until someone pointed it out to me. However the pride of this has stayed with me unto this day, as you can tell other wise I wouldn't bother to retell the story here. I think I might have also accidentally hammered out the complete works of Shakespeare one dull afternoon when I was three but I can't for the life of me remember for sure (I might just have written slug again). One day I imagine the manner in which you type will be as thought of and analysed as the manner in which you handwrite. I tend to put most of the work on my first two fingers (the bad habbits of the self taught) and then rattle off a couple of the more far reaching letters with the remaing three fingers of each hand (although more often my left than might right) leaving my thumbs free to hit the space bar. The preponderance of my left hand could be a result of my guitar playing or alternatively a consequence of my crosslateralism which, an educational therapist once told me, has reversed my brain functions and makes me bad at maths.
Still all of this is by the by. I am trying to avoid a sweeping statement but I think I shall give up. Whilst hedged with an entire ornamental garden's worth of caveates (actually, thinking about it I think a garden is a rather nice collective noun for caveates, I shall, if the occassion arises, make certain that I use this more often) it is my personal contention that the various distinguishable national characteristics, those which usually get exaggerated into stereotypes, not only are more than a figment of a racists joke book but, on the whole, spring largely from the weather. Or maybe I just mean the English.
Famously no man is an island however the English, mentally at least, do seem to get pretty close. A race grown up at ramble pace on lump of rock just close enough to the rest of civilisation to be part of it and yet distant enough to be untrusting of it, battered by storm, drenched by rain, softened by sunshine, chilled by snow and generally pissed about with fogs, mists, sleets, hails, winds, breezes, gales, hurricanes and the occasional blistering heatwave. One part curved and celtic, one part straight and germanic the pure bred white stock of this country is a dogeral mixture of imigrants from the world over. Scandinavians rub shoulders with Italians, French, Germans, Welsh, Dutch, Scotts more Germans, Irish, africans and all manner of jews and arabs and because they're now all called Brown and talk like football commentors about the price of petrol they imagine that they are in some way of one nation. How do you forge a single, or at least recognisable identity, as many would claim there is, from such a mass of sources, distant as they may be? What could possibly have changed the Romans who stayed in this dingy green island from those who buggered off back to sunny Italy to be overun by Visigoths and Vandals?
"Aha! Octavius my brother in arms at last! At last I have you once again within mine sight - I give praise and benediction to thine head! Let me take your hand but what? Is it so long since we fought shoulder to should against the rampages of the Briton and the Pict? Aye, indeed like a very pair of Titans - can this still be the same two men now standing still and breathing yet awhile? The Gods are indeed merciful are they not? But soft I talk of air and soil when these things are around us for all to see! What a fool am I to waste words on what is known when all the while I see you pull at the chains of my prevaracation as if animal again you could by break them with an impatient glare and leap with ferecious speed upon my throat and rip from my bosom the the news I bring from Rome. What a very knave am I to stand here full of import and yet still to hoard it within the store house of my head when it is ripe that I should open the door of my mouth and engorge my long lost warrior brother of such food of knowledge as would keep him bellyfull till ere I return to the sun soaked shores of our great home and the Senate house from whence some two month I did depart. Oh but my news comes from the Senate and is so full of the gravitas of their position and their imposition upon the scale of the world that it hangs around my neck like the weight of Atlas. Let us not talk of such things yet awhile, think yourself the hunter of a great whale - a levathian creature that well embodies the slow dark nature of the minds I would, at their own bequest, pour out to the ocean depth to you. Come, draw me to the surface with some small fry of your own - Octavius, my brother, how goes life in England?"
"Oh you know. Mustn't grumble."
"Indeed you must not, for to grumble is to toy with the patience of the Gods, but have you nothing to impart. Why you are the brother to the whale, the giant crab; for it is true that at the deeps all the ocean is no deeper than twice the tallest mountain, aye tis seven pyramid in parts and yet for all it's downward height or depth it contains no more life than the shallows I have been born o'er in my own journey to this place - no not by a fish, for the creatures of these dark spaces do grow to equally fill them, so as your crab which we would pluck from the water at the size of a hand grows until it is crab that plucks boat to devour as easy you might eat a grape or tell me of nothing. The fellow who led me to your table was barnacle to a man of a Rome and yet I prised from him that still the Britons attack and the Celts do come in swarm and disrupt the movements of the army in training - would you now deny me such news and crab like slide sideways into some dark corner to grow huge and converse with whales in tounge too deep for the understanding of a minnow like myself?"
"Oh the Celts? Don't talk to me about the Celts! I've sent apistle's to the council of Londinum to do something about it but will they listen? Will they buggery! I don't know why we bother really. Do you know it's rained for three days solid? Still, shouldn't complain I suppose the garden's loving it. Besides the Soothsayers say that it could be warm for the weekend, not that you can trust what they say about it! I don't know, still we were lucky for the festival of Lamas, there was a bit of a northeasterly but at least the sun did actually put in an appearance, which makes a change these days!"
"I'm going to go home now Octavius."
I woke up alone and beyond the yellow frame of my window the sky was so perfectly nothing that it could well have not been there at all. Personality is like vision. Vision is a simple trick of the light. You can feel a thing but all you will ever see of it is the light that it reflects. Personality is a picture of the world reflected in a distorting mirror. . Waking up with no one next to me and nothing above me it can be hard to retain in my mind the clues as to whom I might be. The sky wears a sullen blankness so completely full of nothing that it might as well have 'normal service will soon be resumed, in the meantime we apologise for any inconvienance caused by the lack of weather' written across it in big red letters.In England the world can change in the space of an afternoon and a day that begins as a possible success by an innings disappates into the rain clouds of a draw
What is there in this world for me to mirror? Striped pyjamas. Yellow ceilling. A mess of hair. Pain in my feet. Not enough for an entire person. So I take refuge in the hollow notions of nationhood that were already dead when most people believed in them. I decide to be English and drink tea at four in much the same manner as one might decide to be an African or a Jew. People who as children were simply droplets of their parents turn to their history and seek something solid onto which they can cling, some identity that they can call their own. It is all, however, a sham. The Northern Irish only feel the weight of their history so heavily upon their shoulders because at some subconcious level this is how they choose to live. History only exists in the mind and as such it is so close to a fantasy that the two would be indisintuishable if laid side by side. Hamlet says "Alas poor Yorrick I knew him well" and the Tsarina remarked "Let them eat cake", except that neither of them ever did. For most people the misquotion of the words of a fictional man are much more real than anything that a real person might or might not have said. Lemmings do not jump off cliffs they were driven off by the camera crew.
On these desolate days it is possible to doubt ones very existence. Especially when one can so cleary remember the various stages that one went through to construct this existence. Each painstaking thought, each callous apropriation of something someone else said or did. I am a reconstructed man. A new man every day, if I wish to be. Being born under the unfortunate stars that brough a tyrant to power in my homeland I have grown up detached from all sense of past or identity. Children of my generation are not truly English, or British or anything. We are vacuums from the nosociety, we are islands and airports. Like all dictators Thatcher sought to destroy the past that had gone before her and redraw it in her own image like Nero burning Rome; my contemporaries and I am part of the product of this redrawing, we are the new architecture of the new state.
A collection of album sleeves and film posters scatter images into the mind of my lover and she grows around them until the lines between what she is and what she chose to be are indistinct. My brother is an imaginary person, almost totally unreal, hardly my brother at all he has pieced his personality together from between advertising breaks and movies and I am Tom Baker in 1976. We live in an unreal world, we live a virtual existance not through our own personal typing patterns but through the unconcious electronic impulses that dance across our synapsys. We create in our heads the world we wish our personalities to mirror and so each day lived in reality is a constant and miniscule disappointment, a day in which who we would like to be is not reflected from the life we do live through. We are disappointed because we do not try to change reality we simply change our minds and try to believe that reality has caught us up as if conducting plastic surgery by painting over our own reflections.
The England in which I imagine I live ceased to be, as a real place, before I was born. I don't know when - I wasn't there to watch it happen. Now the country that bares its name walks on toward a different personality, like an old friend who suffered appalling trauma and was never really the same again and I cling to a series of gestures and reactions that no longer fit into the world in which I place them, as I were trying to fight off Roman invaders whilst I stood on the escalator leading up to the Hatfield Galleria. Partly this can make me sad, as I am sure it makes the Northern Irish sad to see the world move away from the personality that they have chosen for themselfs. However there is no point in mourning the death of something as fluid and insubstantial as a nation. The English as I know them exist only in my imagination and in my past, which might as well be the same thing, and even then it is only for a comparatively tiny period of our history. The English of fifty years ago are only sort of the English of five hundred years ago who are hardly the English of five thousand years ago. May be we shall vanish from the face of the planet. It wouldn't be that much of a shame would it now. If the American's vanished it'd be an outright sucess. If I stop wearing a pin stripe it will be just as much of a change as when I stopped shouting along to the Levellers. Nationality must change as nations grow older in the same way that personality must change as people age. I wish to be English and I have my own private definition of what this is but personally I would drop all barriers to immigration because the only thing that made this island race I love so dearly what it has been the in the past is the continual influx of strangers bringing new and contrasting modes of existence which then get warped into something new by the constant battering of dull weather and sunny spells.
The sky above me is cold and grey and gathering dark. All this tells me is that I am a different person to whomsoever it was who started writing this and you, my dear faithful friend, you are different person to. Except as you wont have read this far you might not have noticed this yet. I hope you haven't bothered to read all of this. I quite like the bit about x's and y's and the airports are a tear in the fabric of reality line is a real peach. Not so sure about the Romans though, and the meaning all gets rather foggy and over induldged in this last bit doesn't it. Never as clever as I thought I was. I could put that on my grave stone.
All the best.
