Martin Millar's Blog, page 10

The Runaways / Epictetetus

When a person does something really stupid, and their foolishness is pointed out to them, they sometimes say - All right, I might have got it wrong but it's not like I killed anyone.

Faced with this, some time around 100 AD, the Stoic Philosopher Epictetus made this reply - You didn't kill anyone because there was no one there to be killed. But the only thing you could get wrong, you did get wrong.

I think that's a fair point, and a good reply.

I'm not surprised that people used the familiar excuse - Well it's not like I killed anyone - as long ago as the first century. In ancient literature people often have the just the same sort of problems and attitudes as people do today.

After musing about this for some days, and thinking I must have something really interesting to say about people always being the same, I realise I don't. Hum. Oh well, I find it interesting anyway. And I like Epictetus. I admire him too. He was a slave when he was young, and then went on to be one the founders of Stoic philosophy.

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I watched The Runaways. I thought it was a good film. Kristen Stewart was excellent as Joan Jett. I liked her a lot. (I haven't seen any of the Twilight films however.) Dakota fanning was a good Cherie Currie too.

Kim Fowley, their manager, comes over as strange, and quite creepy, though I'm sure that the members of the band have said things about him far worse than portrayed in the film.

When the Runaways were around, in 1978 and 79, music journalists in Britain completely derided them. I don't think I ever saw a good word written about them. They were dismissed as just a bunch of young girls selling records by dressing in revealing corsets and so on. This was very unfair. They were a very good band. Their Live in Japan album is great, they could really play.

I looked at their page on Wikipedia and at the foot of the page, under the heading 'Use in media' it says 'In the 2008 novel Lonely Werewolf Girl, by Martin Millar, the main character's favorite band is The Runaways.' I was pleased about that. In the next book, Kalix will go and see the film.

Life's wisdom. Vacuum cleaners, bagless

Moving through life, you pick up pieces of wisdom and experience. And my current life-lesson, learned quite recently, is that it's a bad idea to buy a bagless vacuum cleaner.

There are attractions, of course. When you're about to buy a new vacuum cleaner, and you're looking through the Argos catalogue for instance, and you see the adverts for vacuum cleaners without bags, you think, 'Well that seems like a good idea.' Because the bags are quite annoying. When it gets full you have to change it, which means buying a new one, and that can be awkward. They don't sell these bags in that many shops. And when you find them, they all have complicated numbers, like '30005 XJB' And you look at the bag, and think - 'Will that fit my vacuum model 30005 XJA, or do I need a different one?' And then you probably arrive home with the wrong bags and it's just very frustrating.

So, given all that provocation by the bags, it's sort of natural to think 'To hell with it, I'm going to buy a bagless vacuum cleaner.' Which brings me back to looking through the Argos catalogue, and thinking - 'That looks fairly cheap, and it doesn't have a bag. I'll buy that one.'

But this, I now advance as a general theory, is a mistake. The bagless vacuum cleaner is fine at the start. Sucks up the dirt, and no bag to replace. The problem is when you try to empty it. Which is probably when it gets so full it just won't work anymore. And then you find out something they don't tell you in the catalogue - emptying a bagless vacuum cleaner is really disgusting. You open it up and instead of just whipping out one full bag and putting in another empty one, you actually have to clean out all this filth you've sucked up for the past six months. And it doesn't all come out easily. Some of it is all squashed up and compacted and you have to kind of scrape it out and it's really disgusting. I hate cleaning out this bagless vacuum cleaner. It's appalling. I regard the whole thing as a terrible mistake.

Note - none of this blog is applicable to fancy Dyson cleaners and other high-end devices. They may be completely different. All my experience of household appliances comes from the cheap end of the Argos catalogue.

Price Increase Scandal

I like this painting by Picasso, sold last week at auction for £25 million. It depicts Marie-Therese Walter, with whom Picasso had a long affair. Picasso met her at a tube station in Paris in 1927. She was 17 at the time and he approached her with the line 'I am Picasso. You and I are going to do great things together.' I couldn't help but be impressed with Picasso for this. What a rogue. Am now eager to try it out. There isn't a tube station nearby but there is a large bus station so I'm off to give it a try. What could go wrong? I can definitely see this working out well.

It's Valentine's day. This generally reminds me of the tragic scene in Buffy when Xander gives Cordelia a necklace as a Valentines present. She immediately breaks up with him, thereby crushing Xander's spirit. Cordelia was a wonderful character in Buffy. I was sorry when she left the show, and she was never so good in Angel.

But in the main scandal of the day, my local Sainsbury's supermarket is now charging £1 for a packet of hobnobs! My favourite biscuits - or cookies - have rocketed in price. I was staggered when I noticed this. No doubt using the recession as an excuse, Sainsbury's have whacked up the price. It's scandalous. Only a few weeks ago they were 85 pence, and in fact quite recently they were on sale for the reduced price of 45 pence. Now it's a pound for a packet! I'm completely outraged. Hobnobs are a large part of my staple diet. I depend on them. £1 for a packet of Hobnobs. It's just not right. May stage protest outside the shop, with an angry placard.

Recent Cultural Activities

It's been a big few days of culture here. Meaning culture I can do without moving from the couch, obviously. It's not like I'm going to make the effort to go to the opera or anything.

First I finished a large batch of Buffy comics. I'd fallen behind with the series. These comics counted as Buffy Season 8, a continuation of the TV show, and were overseen by Joss Whedon. I'm not really sure what to say about them. I don't love these comics, but I love Buffy and it's good to have more.

Next I watched Star Trek. This was fairly recent film, with new actors playing the young Spock and the young Captain Kirk. I've never been a huge Star Trek fan - apart from Voyager, which I liked purely because of the awesome beauty of 7 of 9 - but I quite enjoyed this film. The plot wasn't great but it all looked entertaining. And there was a green-skinned woman in a bikini. I liked her. Possibly my critical standards suffer when confronted by attractive alien women in bikinis. But I'm sure I'm not alone in that.

And this Star Trek film reminded me of an old record, from 1979 I think, Where's Captain Kirk by Spizzeneregi, which was a big post-punk favourite. You used to hear that at gigs and clubs all the time.

So I went and listened to it on YouTube, and when I was on YouTube, just browsing around, I happened across something by Eno, and I thought 'I haven't listened to Here Come the Warm Jets for a really long time.' So I listened to it and thought, as I have thought before, this is one of the greatest albums ever. It was Eno's first solo record after he left Roxy Music and it is brilliant.

I've always believed the title - Here Come the Warm Jets - was a reference to urination, and probably something to do with Eno's large collection of pornography, though Wikipedia suggests otherwise. But anyway it reminded me of a book I hadn't thought about for a long time, Story of the Eye, written by Georges Bataille in 1928. Which, as far as I remember, does contain a lot of sex with people pissing on each other. Although it is a very long time since I read this. (I seem to say that a lot these days.) I remember reading it when I was at school, right after I read The Story of O. I liked The Story of O much better than Story of the Eye. But my blog is now lurching off course into something like 'Fetish books I read furtively at school instead of concentrating in geography class,' so, getting back to my cultural achievements in the past few days, I also read The Diary of Lady Murasaki by Murasaki Shikibu in Japan around 1008. Its a diary of her time at the Imperial Palace. Murasaki also wrote The Tale of Genji, which is a Japanese classic. I've never read it, but I will have to read it now because her diary about her life at court was so interesting.

The Japanese court was really civilised around the year 1000. Much more civilised than court life in Britain, I'm sure. The King of England at the time was Ethelred the Unready, one of England's best-named Kings. The King of Scotland was Cináed mac Duib, or Kenneth III. His grand-daughter Gruoch was Lady Macbeth, as written about by Shakespeare.

Am now worn out with culture and will return to watching SpongeBob SquarePants for the rest of the week.

Romantic Comedy

I just watched a film called Suburban Girl because I thought it was going to be a romantic comedy. But it turned out not to be a comedy at all, just a romance. I persevered with it because it starred Sarah Michelle Gellar, who was of course Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I'm willing to give Buffy a chance in any film, even though I was fairly unimpressed by her career choice of Scooby-Doo movies.

I enjoyed Suburban Girl but once again felt thwarted in my efforts to find a good romantic comedy. I am starting to suspect that the genre may have peaked with When Harry Met Sally. Maybe there will never be another one as good as that again. Or one that reaches the heights of Annie Hall. Or even Four Weddings and a Funeral.

Actually, I sort of lost the inspiration to look for good romantic comedies around 2003 when I went to see The Sweetest Thing at the cinema. This was meant to be a romantic comedy but it was such a bad film I walked out half way through. At some point in the film, the main characters - one of whom was Cameron Diaz, who might have known better - were all sitting in a restaurant when for no apparent reason they all broke into a 'raunchy' song and dance. The film wasn't actually a musical, but despite this the director apparantly thought it would help things along if the women started singing something called 'the penis song.' This was so bad, and so inappropriate, that I was staggered when it happened. I still regard it as one of the worst scenes I've ever seen in any film.

I was so fed up I left the cinema. When I was walking out I grunted in the direction of the women at the cashier's office, saying something like "This is the worst film ever made." And this woman, who turned out to be the manageress, said "Well perhaps it's not your sort of film…"

I understood why she said that. Before venturing out to the cinema I'd probably been sitting round writing for four or five days and had forgotten to get shaved, or changed, and possibly did not look like the sort of person who enjoyed a good romantic comedy. In fact I may have looked like a tramp who wandered in off the street.

So I said to her that I was a fan of romantic comedies but this one had just been really terrible, and was a disgrace to the genre. And then the manageress smiled in a friendly manner and gave me a voucher to come back to the cinema for free, because I'd hated the film so much. I thought that was good customer service from the Streatham Odeon. I liked that they gave me a free voucher. But the whole incident did make me lose heart about finding romantic comedies I enjoyed.

Beat / French Books

I've just read an interview with Neal Cassady's wife on the Guardian website. She sounded nice, but it reminded me that I've never liked any of these famous beat generation people - Jack Kerouac, Alan Ginsberg and so on. I've always found them annoying. I mean, riding around on a bus, listening to bebop and taking drugs, what's so great about that? Sounds terrible to me.

Hmmm. Why don't I like these people? I'm not certain. It's so long since I read On the Road I can't remember why I didn't like it. Maybe it's just an irrational prejudice, of which I have my share. It may possibly be because they all had exciting adventures which I would not be able to manage. Yes, that may be the real reason. Damn them for having interesting lives.

I'm right about bebop however. Surely it was always unlistenable. If you wanted great music in the 50s then R&B was much more entertaining. As long ago as 1946, there were great records like Roy Brown's Good Rockin' Tonight, and then of course the epic Rocket 88, written by Ike Turner in 1951.

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After offering some free copies of the French edition of Lonely Werewolf Girl in my last blog, I realised, sadly, that I had made the mistake of getting involved in an activity which would require me to think. Having no idea of who to give the books to, I finally wrote down a number for each reply left then stuck a pin in the sheet of paper. This competition may not have satisfied the high standards required by the local gaming commission. Nonetheless, my winners are -

1 Simon Anderson

2 Marjorie

So if these people would like to email me via my website at www.martinmillar.com to give me their addresses, I'll post you the books.

Free signed copies of Kalix, la Loup-Garou Solitaire

A box arrives from my French publisher, Editions Intervalles, containing copies of Kalix, la loup-garou solitaire, the French edition of Lonely Werewolf Girl. This book is huge! It's an enormous volume. After reading about Kalix, you could easily use it for fighting off burglars, or clearing space on a crowded train. Or if you were at some sporting event you could stand on it, and get a much better view.

Rather than leaving this box of books cluttering up the place, I'll give away two signed copies, in a small competition. To enter my small book competition, just leave a comment below telling me you'd like the book. Anyone can enter. After a few days I'll select two winners somehow or other. At random, probably. Unless someone leaves a comment which is so entertaining that it has to be a winner.

Big Eyed Beans From Venus

I was saddened by the recent death of Captain Beefheart, or Don Van Vliet, to give him his proper name. I've listened to his records very often over the years. People mostly mention his experimental music such as Trout Mask Replica, but to be honest, I liked Captain Beefheart best when he was less experimental. My favourite record of his was Clear Spot, and there were other really fine albums, like Safe as Milk and Strictly Personal. All containing a unique sort of blend of growling desert blues and jagged rock. Maybe with some dadaism thrown in, if I actually knew what dadaism meant. Not being that great at writing about music, I can't really describe what these records are like. But anyway, Captain Beefheart was a great singer, he wrote a lot of fine songs, and he played with a lot of good musicians.

I saw Captain Beefheart play in Glasgow in the 70s, twice. Looking back, I'm slightly surprised that this happened. It seems somehow unlikely that the Captain ever arrived in Scotland. However, at the time, Glasgow was a big destination for rock bands, and everybody came there as part of their UK tour.

I started going to see gigs at the Greens' Playhouse - which later became the Apollo - in the early 70s, while I was 14 I think. Making a list, just off the top of my head, by the time I was 17 I'd seen these bands play live -

Led Zeppelin (best thing ever)
Captain Beefheart
Mott the Hoople
Deep Purple
Black Sabbath (Iron Man!)
Hawkwind (space ritual!)
Black Oak Arkansas
Emerson Lake and Palmer
The Groundhogs
Family
The Who (floodlights, smashed guitars)
Roxy Music (Eno in silver feathered jacket)
King Crimson
Fairport Convention
Wishbone Ash
Yes
Sensational Alex Harvey Band (Big Glasgow favourite)
Uriah Heep
Lou Reed (in his brief 'blond-haired' period)
Dr Feelgood (? maybe that was later)

And I'm sure there were others that have escaped my memory at the moment. I had a ticket to see David Bowie, just before he became Ziggy Stardust, but the gig was cancelled on the night, leaving us cold and frustrated at the door. Anyway, that's not a bad list of rock music at the time, in these distant pre-punk days.

It was good to see all these bands, at a young age. I wasn't the only person to do this, by any means. Plenty of people I was at school with would have seen all these gigs too.

My big regret is not going to see T Rex. I was put off by the thought of all the screaming girls. When I was 15 I didn't think it would be very good to be surrounded by screaming girls. Because at that age I was stupid. Arrrghhhhh. What a mistake. Marc Bolan was one of the great talents and icons of 20 century music. I can't believe I didn't go and see him when I had the chance. If a time portal was to open up now in London, offering the chance to go and see Marc Bolan and T Rex in 1973, I'd be leading the stampede to get there.

The main venue in Glasgow, the Greens' Playhouse, was an old cinema, capacity about 2,500 I think, so it was quite a small place to see some of these bands. Led Zeppelin were playing in stadiums around the world, but I saw them in that small cinema. It was great.

* and you can read more about this in my fine novel 'Suzy, Led Zeppelin and Me' *

I saw Captain Beefheart play twice. For some reason, my memory of these gigs isn't as sharp as some others, but I do remember being quite disappointed at the first concert, which was at the Kelvin Hall. And then the second gig, a year or so after at the Greens' Playhouse, was brilliant. The captain and his Magic Band were on good form and it was a great night.

New British edition of The Good Fairies of New York

Piatkus will be publishing their edition of The Good Fairies of New York on the 10th January. Although this book has been available here as an import from America, it's quite a while since it actually had a publisher in Britain. Waterstone's are promoting the book in January and February, so I hope to see bundles of the book lying around on tables in their shops. It's good if you can get your books lying around in bundles on these tables near the front of the stores, but it can be a difficult thing to achieve.

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My heart raced as I read that Scarlett Johansson's marriage has come to an end. The poor woman will definitely be in need of some comforting. It's time to relaunch my plan of hanging round in hotels looking forlorn, in the hope that I can meet the beautiful Scarlett and establish some sort of Lost in Translation-type relationship. I have the camouflage t-shirt ready and everything, and can do the Bill Murray ageing desperation part no problem at all. I have Just Like Honey ready to play in a big final scene. As long as Scarlett has the pink wig with her, everything will be just perfect.

Ice and Snow

I've been shivering in the cold as London disappeared beneath the snow. My flat can take a while to heat up, leading to some muttering and cursing while I'm waiting to get warm. Once fully heated, I find it difficult to move from the couch, just in case it's not so cosy anywhere else.

However I have been carrying on with the long walk to the shops which I do everyday, because otherwise I'd never go anywhere. This long walk has proved hazardous. The roads were gritted but not the pavements, which became quite dangerous, with compacted snow and ice.

We had a milder day yesterday and a lot of the snow disappeared, but the temperature has dropped again so I think we might get more. I can't help feeling a bad accident is just around the corner. I may soon be discovered unconscious under a snowdrift, still clutching a box of tea bags and a packet of hobnobs.

The only thing getting me through the freezing misery is football, and I watched a lot over the weekend, much of it involving shouting and shaking my fist at the TV. It ended well for Arsenal, due mainly to the overwhelming brilliance of Samir Nasri.

Am now attempting to plug up some of the draughts in this flat, and stop the cold air seeping in. Unfortunately I'm useless at this, as I'm completely hopeless at anything practical. I should have learned how to do practical household tasks some time, but unfortunately I never seem to have managed.