The pandas are safe

That's not a code phrase, in case you're wondering. I really do mean the pandas are safe. Last November, we were in Chengdu in Szechuan Province where the largest Panda sanctuary in the world is located and where I took this picture (lady, if you don't get out of my way, there's gonna be trouble...) There were quite a number of adults, loads of children and a couple of infants being hand-reared (the latter was, need I add, super-cute). We had a wonderful day there, despite the pretty weak museum — and the fact that my gastric system finally rebelled against the super-spicy food.

So, when we heard about the earthquake, we were naturally pretty worried for the pandas (we were worried for the people too, sure. But, come on: pandas). So it was a relief to read that they're doing well:

The earthquake killed four staff members and left a fifth seriously ill in hospital, officials said yesterday. Other workers risked their lives to fetch the tiniest cubs from the breeding centre and carry them to safety.

"When we saw the rock slides we were really worried," said Lu Yong, who has helped to care for the animals from birth and travelled to Beijing with them. "In a disaster the first thing we think of is the pandas and how to get them to safety. They were very scared and disturbed when the earthquake happened. They needed support from their keepers before they would eat again."

This picture was taking in the People's Park in Chengdu, the capital. It was an immensely beautiful place, incredibly civilised. Desperately sad to think of it in ruins.

Paul Morley on genres

Check out these unmissable docos on Radio 4, as Paul Morley interrogates the major players in some of the margins, hinterlands and outerzones of modern music. Last week, freak-folk. This week, post-punk, with contributions from Simon Reynolds, Robert Wyatt, Tim Friese-Green and Stuart Braithwaite from Mogwai. But why wouldn't Tim talk about Talk Talk?

Update: Radio 4? I meant Radio 2, obviously.

Damn: they found us

There was us thinking we were perfectly safe in our Hanwell redoubt. Little did we know...


More photos here.

Says she's gonna teach me how to swim

I do like this video. Spring magic? Drugged-up pagan psychedelia? It's Duran Duran for the freak-folk generation:

Ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts

News from what has the potential to be an awesome adaptation of one of the best books of the last decade, Cormac McCarthy's The Road. It stars Viggo Mortensen, who's yer basic go-to guy if grizzled intensity is called for . And there's a part for Michael Kenneth Williams, who you might know as the mighty Omar from The Wire. Heavens be praised! Not quite so happy about the idea that there's a "fleshed-out" part for Charlize Theron, who plays the wife. It's being made by the director of The Proposition, which was good but flawed (the voice-overs! The scenery-chewing English villain).

The Road is an absolute classic, a one-sitting read, and there's definitely a cinematic shape to the book — even if it is shockingly bleak. A film version would lose the quasi-biblical rhythm of the prose. On the other hand, the dialogue does a fair amount of the heavy lifting — think the conversation with the blind old man late in the book:

"What if I said that he's a god?" Ely replies: "I hope that's not true what you said because to be on the road with the last god would be a terrible thing so I hope it's not true." Ely suggests that it will be better when everybody has died. "Better for who?" asks the father. For everybody, says Ely, closing the scene with a rather lovely peroration, of the kind that gives this book its clear, deep sound: "When we're all gone at last then there'll be nobody here but death and his days will be numbered too. He'll be out in the road there with nothing to do and nobody to do it to. He'll say: where did everybody go? And that's how it will be. What's wrong with that?"

I'm rather less confident that Zak Snyder's going to pull off Watchmen, despite the attention to detail as evinced in his production blog. From a narrative point of view, it's just too nested, too self-recursive, and the ending is not exactly Hollywood gold. That said, 300 was vastly better than I'd been led to believe by critics who unaccountably found a movie of cartoonish slaughter and dubious ethnic stereotypes somehow offensive. Whatevs, Granpa:

Moore described the book as “unfilmable,” not least because of its narrative structure, with flashbacks, supplementary “research” and a comic-within-a-comic that serves to counterpoint events. In an interview with Amazon, Moore recounted his reaction to Terry Gilliam’s abortive 1989 attempt to turn “the War and Peace of graphic novels” into a film: “I had to tell [Gilliam] that I didn’t think it was filmable. I didn’t design it to show off the similarities between cinema and comics, which there are, but in my opinion are fairly unremarkable. It was designed to show off the things that comics could do that literature and cinema couldn’t.” In The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made, David Hughes quotes Gibbons making much the same point: “With a comic book the reader can back-track; you can reach page twenty and say, ‘Hey, that’s what that was all about on page three,’ and then nip back and have a look. We wanted to take advantage of that difference… We wanted to make a comic book that read as a straightforward story, but gradually you became aware that it had a symmetrical structure.”

I need to talk about we need to talk about Kevin

I finally got round to reading Lionel Shriver's We Need To Talk About Kevin.

First thoughts (excluding preambles such as, who calls their daughter Lionel?) are I'm annoyed I didn't read the damn thing sooner. As is so often the case, I buy vastly more books than I can read (Am I alone in this evil practice? Happily, no), and I bought this particular book over a year ago in Sydney, simply because it won the Orange Prize, which is good enough reason for me.

Anyway, after starting the book twice and being unable to get past the first two pages (more my fault than the book's), I finally persuaded Shana to read it. She loved it and wanted to talk about it. So I read it and my God if it isn't a brilliantly compulsive read.

17-year-old Kevin has slaughtered his fellow students and is now in prison. His mother, Eva, writes letters to her husband Franklin in an attempt to understand what made him do it. Was he driven to it by her inability to love him? Or was he simply born evil?

As we watch Kevin grow up and behave shockingly, we become the only other people in the universe who can see, along with Eva, the truth: that Kevin is a textbook sociopath... or is that just the self-justification of an unreliable narrator?

Shriver makes you turn the pages with that sort of righteous fury common to those novels or films where the protagonist is wrongly accused and can't prove their innocence; except in this case it's his guilt which she can't establish.

From forbidding beginning to appalled end, this is a wonderfully awful novel.

Shriver speaks to John Mullan about the book (but, as they say at the beginning, read the thing first)

More Bonny goodness

In honour of this man and his furious truth, I thought I'd post the following clip. I don't think I could wilfully underplay just how much that Friday's particular parade of reprobates, ne'erdowells and mediocrities stank up the Jools Holland that this clip's taken from.

But it all turned out alright in the end:

There's no words...

Chelsea denied

Barney Ronay in The Guardian:

Credit to the losers as well. In the build-up Petr Cech had advanced the view that "history only remembers winners". Chelsea deserve a little better than this. This has been a wonderfully bloody-minded and cussed pursuit by a team with genuine steel, a quality it draws from its core of indomitable spirits in key positions. Under both Avram Grant and José Mourinho Chelsea might not have played with a consistently thrilling, gung-ho commitment to attack. But football would be a poorer, less satisfying business all round if there was no reward for this type of cussed, physically resilient, attritional brand of excellence. It's not supposed to be basketball.

And there's always Moscow.

Norm on The Great Fire

Reading Norm's post about Shirley Hazzard's The Great Fire, I'm forced to agree. That book has been pushed on me more than once by people who are, in all other respects, lucid, literate and sane. I've picked it up at least three times, determined to give it a fair go; but, every time, I've been defeated by its stylistic quirks.

Now I'm also no stickler for, let's say, lexical exactitude, so I'm not sure why this particular book enrages me so. A novel like the wonderful Fugitive Pieces also made me stop and re-read its lyrical sentences. But that was an intensely rewarding experience. With Great Fire, the quirks seem perilously close to being just mistakes. I'm quite sure they're not: she's an award-winning novelist, after all, and I'm very much not.

But take this sentence from the very first page (I quote from memory): "The platform faces faded into the expression of those that remain". Every time I prepare to lower myself into what I've been led to believe is the warm bath of the book's sensual poetry, I'm slapped about the chops with cold fish sentence like that. I can see what it means if peer at it closely; but the sentence was hardly worth reading once, let alone twice.