Monday Nights at the Movies with Mark

June 30, 2024 / aggiemurch / 1 Comment

Written and read for you by Muriel Murch with WSM by my side

It’s a Monday evening for goodness sake, with an early opening of 6.30 pm. People have to rush from work, and – this being a youngish crowd – they do. The British Film Institute is hosting its 92nd MK3D monthly – Monday night at the Movies with Mark – Kermode that is – and the theatre is packed with a live audience of hundreds of film fanatics. Which is what they must be because Mark and his team never announce who his guests will be. For the past few months the BFI has been going through some serious renovations – we hear the new bar is not senior friendly – and this live event is the 4th to take place at the IMAX theatre in Waterloo – between the railway station and the bridge across the Thames River. Unless you really know where you are going it is very easy to get lost. Our driver had to be chased down by a runner, to turn around and take a dive under the river before we were led on foot through a labyrinth of latrine smelling tunnels. But we made it in time and were gathered up by Mark’s team of very efficient and kind women. And this may be one of the keys to his success. Mark surrounds himself with good people and because he is good, and passionate about cinema and its history good people want to be on his show, want to hear his show and want to work for him. This night Walter was to be one of the guests and as we all assembled in a discrete roped-off corner of the bar, gentle weavings of admiration stretched across the guests who gratefully sipped their beverages of choice but as elders, we were happy to refrain, before being locked into an auditorium.

After Mark’s news he introduced his first guest, Robbie Ryan, the director of Photography on ‘Poor Things’. Robbie was followed by Rachael Ramsay co-director of the documentary ‘Copa 71’ on the very successful Women’s Football World Cup that was erased from sporting history – until now. Then came Johnny Burn the sound designer on ‘The Zone of Interest,’ before the senior fellow, Walter gave a shout-out for the 50-year release of ‘The Conversation’ and his latest film ‘Her Name Was Moviola’ directed by Howard Berry.

Mark Kermode, WSM and Robbie Burn photo by MAM

Mark is deft in drawing out the information he wants from his guests and dropping in, like sweet strawberries, clips from the films they are talking about, for after all it is film that Mark and his audience are here for. But like all good hosts he also turns the questions a little more inward onto the guests. On a Literature program I might have asked a guest ‘What book is beside your bedside? Rose Grey, owner and chef of the River Cafe, asks her guests on the Podcast ‘Ruthies’ Table 4’ ‘what is the comfort food of your life’? Mark’s question is ‘What are the films that have influenced you?’ and then showed chosen clips.

Robbie Ryan picked ‘The Elephant Man’, and ‘Women in Love’. Rachael Ramsey a lesser-known work, ‘Bring It On’, Johnny Burn chose ‘Apocalypse Now’ and Walter picked the final scene of ‘2001’. The breadth of these films, the evolution of their styles and subjects left me – again – in awe of the art of Cinema.

Burlington Arcade Beadles outfitted by Joshua Kane

On Saturday – when London is given over completely to tourists – I am making my way down to Piccadilly for the last-minute errands before a real vacation, and I hurry as best I can through the streets. From New Bond Street I weave my way into the Burlington Arcade, now almost completely overtaken by boutiques with the bling of today. I see two old shops that remain – their windows filled with diamond brooches and rings laid out on black velvet, looking like small spinsters trying not to seem bold. Two young Beadles were stationed – one at each end of the arcade – but neither was wearing their beautiful Joshua Kane outfits, merely a routine heavy black with white piping livery coat and top-hat. Coming to the Piccadilly end of the arcade I slip into a gentleman’s summer sports shop and – because it is French – I buy my husband an elegant, and very expense pair of shorts. He will be furious but look great – he has good legs – and I’m smiling because he will – eventually – wear them.

Earthday March with Bird on Piccadilly. Photo by MAM

On Piccadilly, a long march is going past and I think for a moment: it is for Palestine or Ukraine? But no, the colours are too soft and the energy too high. No one is silently angry, this is a peaceful Earth Day Summer Solstice parade march. There are human butterflies and bees and birds and placards and the spirits lifted. Their music makes me happy. I walk between them, all smiling and waving and slip into the last shops I need to go to.

For a moment I am able to forget the horrible wars that continue and the utter utter stupidity of the English Political General election that is happening next week. Now a row has erupted and – like a festering boil – causing swelling in all the body politic. Apparently a ‘few’, shall we say five, politicians have gone to the races – this being Ascot week after all – and as they say, ‘Put on a bob or two’ betting on the date and maybe the outcome of the General election. And in classic English fashion the security policeman who joined in this gamble has been arrested. The politicians have yet to have their knuckles rapped. This has taken over any talk about National Health patients waiting lists, education, or crime, or anything that the country really needs to think about.

I stick with the Earth Day marchers and pop into the teashop and the bookshop for more gifts and memories. Bookshops will do that.

A week earlier at a dinner party, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s name had come up and Walter mentioned that when we had visited Cuba in 1989 and while strolling awhile after a long latin luncheon, Gabriel and I had made a connection. The dinner guests were eager to hear what that was and I quietly said that after we had spent some time together Gabriel had asked me to write to him.

“And did you?” was the breathless question. “Oh No. I was afraid of being collected.” and I could tell they were disappointed at the possibilities I had rejected.

Back at home as I pack up the gifts, I think again about Gabriel Marquez and all his books that I had not got around to reading. During one of those ’It’s 2 am and I’m still awake’ moments I find ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ on our study bookshelf and put it by my bedside. But it is at the local library that I find the one book I have read. ‘Love in the Time of Cholera’ published in 1985. An old friend and lover – of literature – and I had read it at the same time. Our friend died earlier this month and sitting under ancient olive trees overlooking hills and lakes of this corner of Italy this seems the right book, the right time to turn those pages and say farewell to over 60 years of friendship.

And always supported by Beatrice @ murchstudio.com

Female Complaints

September 9, 2021 / aggiemurch / 2 Comments

Recorded and Knit together by WSM

September mornings, and the sun is finally shining in London. The first flurry of falling leaves are swept up and the pavements look just a little bit fresher, gardens are tidied for winter and their last autumnal blooms wave at us before the summer light fades. Children are back to school and there is a bustle of work, increased traffic on public transport and Boris had some questions to answer in Parliament on Monday afternoon. Which he did, with his hair combed softly – he knew it would be a difficult day – and a promise to fulfill one election pledge by breaking another. Taxes in one form or another must to go up, to pay for the increased health care needs of the country. It is not all the fault of the elderly for living longer – though that could be where to focus some attention. But after the afternoon session in parliament, it is onto the ‘Let’s all have a drink together and get along’ cocktail party hosted by Johnson, and paid for by us, as he tries to keep his friends close and his enemies closer. The Right Honorable Jacob Rees Mogg gave a weak smile before turning his back on the reporters and, with double-vented jacket not showing him to advantage, entering number 10 Downing Street. The Right Honorable Michael Gove may still be in Aberdeen. Luckily Domonic Raab is nowhere to be seen having slipped off to Pakistan trying to find safe passage for those afghans left behind after the British evacuation of Afghanistan. There is no certainty that Raab can return with the needed free pass tickets on his shopping list.

The Right Honorable Jacob Rees Mogg on the bench

We hear less from Afghanistan, but the news stories that do come through are of cruelty and despair, such as the pregnant police woman, Banu Negar, killed in front of her family. There will be no ‘good news’ coming from Kabul until the Taliban control the media outlets and feed news to the Western world. How it is that Secunder Kermani and Lyse Doucet can continue to report for the BBC from Kabul and other parts of Afghanistan is hard to fathom. With a new government not yet formed, and young men on the streets all eager to do something, the Taliban’s promise of ‘No grudges, no revenge’ is proving messy to follow. We hear little of how other countries faired getting their personal out during the Taliban take over and may hear even less about how they might return.

But the Taliban and the new Afghanistan leadership need money. Europe recognizes this and Germany appears to be leading by a nose, sniffing out what opportunities there are still in this land-locked country. Where can a foothold be found that will ensure a western presence to plug the hole of a ship-side leak open to the seas of Russian and Chinese advances?

The Taliban say that women and girls will have full rights ‘under Islamic law’ but Islamic law, like any other law, is subject to interpretation and already new rules about dress and education leave many women and their families fearful. Such strict laws preclude many women from the problems that beset women from other countries and, as has been recently seen – states such as Texas.

The new laws in Texas, banning abortion for whatever reason beyond 6 weeks of gestation, brings fear to this generation of fecund women and some hash memories back to those way past their prime. Seeing the protests in Texas of young women dressed in the red cloak of Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” was as chilling as anything we have seen in America since the beginning of this year. Margaret Atwood says of her 1985 novel “I didn’t put in anything that we haven’t already done, we’re not already doing, we’re seriously trying to do, coupled with trends that are already in progress… So all of these things are real, and therefore the amount of pure invention is close to nil.” It is as if the men of Texas and beyond have said to themselves, ‘Yeah. This is how it should be.’

And that can be the burping misfiring of art, rather like ‘Apocalypse Now’ conceived as the ultimate antiwar film only ofttimes used as a training tool to those young men and women heading out to the deserts and beyond.

“I tried gin, hot baths, the lot” said my mother recounting her reaction when learning she was pregnant – with me. Not necessarily how one wants to feel welcomed into the world, but no less true because of it. Documented in the Egyptian Ebers Papyrus 1850 BC, ways to prevent an unwanted pregnancy have been sought out and used to various degrees of dissatisfaction, despair, disease and death. Fighting for legal methods of birth control have consumed women, and some men, during the past two centuries, and remains contentious to this day. Those of us who ‘came of age’, in the mid-1960’s still remember the fear of unwanted pregnancies.

A little box of little pills. From the Welcome Trust Museum.

For nurses there were various paths open within hospital systems: volunteering to take patients to the X-ray department, before the mandatory introduction of lead aprons was one; a somewhat-drunken date with a maintenance supervisor who was as handy as any Vera Drake in his day another. And then there were Widow Welch’s Pills. Containing high doses of iron, pennyroyal and juniper and advertised as being very effective in curing ‘Female Obstruction’ they were freely obtainable from Boots the Chemists.

And if prayer, that first and last resort, was also tried and failed, there may be a rushed marriage and definitely expulsion from nursing school. For pregnancy and even marriage made one unsuitable for the profession. Meanwhile those impregnating young doctors graduated into their lives carrying only their memories that faded over time.

This has been A letter from A. Broad

Written and read for you by Muriel Murch

First Aired on Swimming Upstream KWMR.org

Web support by murchstudio.com

The Mound

August 27, 2021 / aggiemurch

Recorded and Knit together by WS

Walking across Hyde Park from Knightsbridge, clocking in those steps to bring me close to my allotted healthy number, I reached Marble Arch and for a moment couldn’t find it.

Hyde Park is comfortably London, full of geese and people but that is not enough for the hop-on and hop-off tourist busses that wait – not too hopefully – by the roadside at Marble Arch. The Arch, long ago dumped here, has now been squashed by The Mound that has been built beside it and sits like a giant turd making the poor Arch look quite tiny and shabby. Marble Arch was built to be a state entrance to Buckingham Palace but didn’t fit and so was moved to its place at the junction of Edgware Road and Oxford Street, close to Speaker’s Corner in Hyde Park. The the best thing about ‘Marble Arch Mound’ is that it is a temporary ‘pop-up’ though no-one is saying when it will pop-down. Like any pop-up the goal is to encourage the now non-existent tourists to pay up, climb up, look down and empty their pockets in the shops below. The cost to build the mound ballooned from 2.5 million pounds to over six million. “I resign!” said a Westminster City Council deputy minister, but that isn’t going to help The Mound go away.

Does its conception, its construction, speak in a oblique way of England today? Covering something that is not fit for purpose, The Marble Arch itself, that eventually found a happy placement, is now surrounded by detritus and foolishness – rather similar to what we see at the other end of town in Westminster.

Now that everyone has returned from their holidays to watch over the evacuation of foreign nations and afghans from Kabul the Prime Minister has slid off to the G7 Summit leaving the British Ambassador Sir Laurie Bristow to ‘carry on’.

The lucky few, those who can afford it, tripped off to Spain where the sun was scorching and the mosquitoes bit, much like England’s Foreign Minister, Dominic Raab, who was found sunning himself in fashionable Crete and not picking up the brought-to-your-lounger telephone to answer a call from his Afgan counterpart. The quickly put-together photo shoot of Raab behind his big desk, English and Chinese flags flying, one hand gripping the big chair, the other holding his telephone, looking earnestly at the computer screen are fooling no-one.

Ambassador Sir Laurie Bristow was ordered to stay in Kabul while the rest of the UK embassy staff and their families left on Friday night. We see and hear only the English and American struggles but there are other countries whose presence in Afganistan is no longer welcome and they too are trying to get their people out.

“I want my men out of there. Now.” Says Kilgore in Apocalypse Now. Raab is no Kilgore.

The implosion of western forces in Afghanistan, the walk-through of the Taliban takeover of their country’s government, remains a debortle of immense proportions. So many stories of terror render most of us sick with helpless heartache at this moment of suffering caused by each and every one of us. No wonder there was a full house when Boris recalled the government last week. More ruffled than usual – not quite taking in that everyone was really calling for his blood – his bluster could not cover his bemusement. And when the past Prime Minister, Teresa May, stood up to speak she was heard, even as some of us blinked at her dress of bright Conservative Blue caped in Mourning black. But there were others, retired but young military men now serving their country in another way, ashamed of their government. For a moment I felt a glimmer of hope that maybe one of them could step forward and possibly lead this country into some new beginnings.

Where are the hyenas hiding in those benches? But here comes Tony Blair, wearing the wise elder-statesman look with slightly too-long silver hair as he shakes his head smiling ruefully, ‘Why can’t you pull yourselves out of the hole I dug for you?’

Holes for whole countries are one thing, traps for individuals are another. The Weekend Financial Times newspaper has a weekly column, “Lunch with the FT.” which during COVID has all been virtual. But this weeks interview took place in Warsaw, Poland where journalist Magdalena Miecznicka met with the defected sprinter Krystsina Tsimanouskaya and her husband. Because poison is a weapon of choice for Russian and therefore Belarusian authorities only Magdalena was eating. The story that 24 year-old Krystsina tells is harrowing, from her first realization that someone is trying to remove her from Tokyo and return her to a mental hospital in Minsk. Her grandmother tells her not to return to Belarus and her husband escaped to the Ukraine before Poland. She was escorted from the Olympic Village by a psychiatrist and a Belarusian committee official to Tokyo’s Haneda airport where she was saved by an app on her phone. Typing in ‘I need help they are trying to take me out of the country by force.’ and translating it from Russian to Japanese, she reached an airport policeman who took her to safety. Magdalena’s article is quietly compelling, mixing Borsch soup with Poland and Belarus and all that it means to suddenly leave your country, your home with as many of your family as are able. Krystsina’s parents escaped but what will happen to her grandmother? We go from one story to many as in these Afghan days, another wave of desperate immigration carries fearful repercussions for the families left behind.

This has been A letter from A. Broad

Written and read for you by Muriel Murch

First Aired on Swimming Upstream KWMR.org

Web support by murchstudio.com