Credit to the bollards and windows of London

The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz (2000)
Dir. Ben Hopkins

Ah, what a compliment to be recommended a film like this.

‘I saw this – thing – this odd thing – and it made me think of you.’

The loved one in question backing slowly away.

Humm. I read up. A low budget curio, barely seen. Baffled praise from Bradshaw in the Graun. I was half sold, but it was chancing across a couple of references in London Orbital that finally sold me. A buy-in from Iain Sinclair means a lot in my book (a heck of an odd book, I can tell you).

So what do we have? Well, there’s the punky verve of the first time flick, covering the cracks in a truly am-dram budget. There’s a bundle of Dutch angles, some noirish shadows and a side stab of Pythonesque oddity (‘a smegma trumpet passing south from Stamford Hill’). There’s also not much of a plot, but you don’t really come to a thing like this expecting the old A-to-B. No, it’s the ride that counts. Not without a bump or seven. Something about the end of the world, the ministry of fisheries, and a blind detective doing battle with a shape-shifting, pointy nosed gent. Like I say, the plot’s not the business, it’s the air of general befuddlement that holds it all together.

The jumbled cast (a holding cell for the almost familiar) and washes of weird choral singing reminded me of Jarman’s The Last of England, albeit with a clearer line in comic bumbling. The whole disjointed affair has a very late-20^th century feel. I found myself reminiscing about when I used to wander Camden with a fresh copy of the first Invisibles trades, stirring all sorts of threads together and casting sigils into the canal. Compendium books was breathing its last and I snagged a couple of truly odd books from the remainders (the confessions of Zodiac Mindwarp and a thesis on Kenneth Anger) before it went under. Oh, how my adolescent mind was pickled. I can’t help but feel this would have been the perfect cinematic accompaniment to all that mystic fumbling.

More anon

I know, I know

I've been crap but, kids, it's been a helluva week.

Handed in me notice and zipped around and the country and started, just started, to think about what on earth I'll do next and how in the heck I might do it. So. Ghosts, echoes and others have fallen a little by the wayside. Apols, apols, again apols.

If you're in Manchester, 'll be reading at Bad Language on Weds. It's the night's first birthday and my last turn there for the foreseeable. I may shed a tear. I just bloody may.

Meanwhile, I've posts in the line-up on Losey, Lovecraft and The Archers (Powell + Pressburger, not the inbred radio soap). Keep sitting on those hands. It's in the trees, it's coming.

Witchcraft in England

I picked up this gem on Sunday in Didsbury's marvellous Art of Tea bookshop. Saucy as heck, it is. The bookseller there is a wrinkled Geordie with a touch of the Ben Kingsley about him. When he saw the book in my hands, he started singing Frank Sinatra at me. You don't get that in Waterstones, dears. As a welcome bonus, my edition comes with a raft of inky Mervyn Peake illustrations, which I'm tempted to recast as some kind of kharmic payoff given the vile, thick clots of hangover that were afflicting me at the time.

Re:Tale

In case you’re not one of the anointed Manchester iliterati - or at least, don’t follow any of them on Twitter – you might not have heard about an event I’m taking part in next Thursday. It’s called Re:Tale, a one off story-telling gig taking place in a city centre branch of Jigsaw (?!) after dark.

Six stories told by six writers, each riffing off the location. I can promise you, the results are varied.

Tickets are limited and yes, there's a bar, so should you want to know more, the site’s here.

At last

The sort of weather that leads solitary gloves to abandon themselves at crossroads. Snakes of frost. Bitter-faced busmen breathing smoke into their plastic cabins. Yes, I approve.

Transport transcript

On the underground this weekend, a woman climbed on at Victoria and sat opposite me. She was wearing a buttoned up mac and hat a thick layer of make up on her face. A couple of stops later a guy got on speaking into a walkie-talkie. He marched down the aisle checking the seats.

He drew parallel to the woman.

'I can see her,' he said. So much make-up on she looks like she's fake'.

There was an uneasy silence (isn't there always on the tube?) and then he got off at the next stop.

Odd.