Those three, are they, you know,
posts interesting only to me
Meet on the Ledge
Richard Thompson talking about writing Meet on the Ledge as quoted in Andrew Hickey’s podcast about Fairport convention:
It’s a fairly vague song open to a lot of interpretations, I’m proud people can find different things in it. I certainly don’t know what I was thinking when I wrote it – a 19-year-old trying to take on big subjects, like transition, youth, old age, friendship, blah blah blah. Sometimes you just hit something. Being young sometimes means you’ve experienced nothing, but in moments you see everything.
That struck me, listening to the podcast on the commute back from work today. It has long been a song full of meaning to me, from the first time I heard it on What We Did On Our Holidays a decade and a half ago. For me it’s always been about grief, mourning and remembering absent friends and family. That I first heard it when my wife was in hospital, where she would eventually die, may played a part.
Sandy Denny dying at the tragically young age of 31, or the tragic accident that happened to Fairport Convention just after recording their next albume may have also played a role. The band after all, almost sixty years on, still use it to close out their annual Cropredy Convention.
It’s a song that’s aged as fine wine, a defiant remembrance of those who went before us into the great unknown and it never fails to gives me goosebumps. Seeing Richard Thompson, who wrote it when he was nineteen, still singing it at age 71 in the clip above, all that history behind him even more so.
Sophie turned twenty
It’s twenty years since this kitten first came into my life, here in a picture taken in 2007:
These days she’s looking a bit more disheveled, but on the whole she’s still in good nick. She survived two other cats, Monty and Hector; the first the cat we got her to be a companion to, the second her ‘brother’ who took out of the asylum at the same time. When we first got her she was Sandra’s cat, but as Sandra got ill and was stuck in hospital, she gravitated towards me instead. Ever since, especially since I started working from home during the Covid pandemic, she’s been the most needy, constantly needing to be near or on top of me cat I’ve ever known.
Two years we moved from a tiny apartment in Amsterdam to a proper house with actual stairs in my hometown and I was worried she wouldn’t be able to cope, but nothing’s further from the truth. She climbs them as if she’s done so all her life, even if she doesn’t want to move too much these days anymore. As long as she can claim a spot near me, she’s happy to sleep the day away and just wake up long enough to get her food, drink or do her business.
Happy birthday Sophie!
Fifteen Years Ago Today
Videostore Nostalgia
At the end of an article in Vulture about the restoration and rerelease of a whole host of Hong Kong cinema classics, Bilge Ebiri engages in a bit of nostalgia for the time when he first discovered them:
Rewatching these films today, in all their restored glory, I can’t help but get nostalgic twinges about this period. It was an intoxicating time to be a young cinephile. While kung-fu films and other genre movies from Hong Kong had for decades fed the grind-house circuit and the growing network of Chinatown cinemas in North America catering to the diaspora community, the work of directors like Woo, Tsui, Ringo Lam, Sammo Hung, Ching Siu-tung, and others broke through among audiences, especially young film buffs, in dramatic fashion during the late ’80s and early ’90s.
A nostalgia I share, having been in my early twenties when these movies started hitting my local video store in the early nineties. I grew up in a sleepy provincial town in the Netherlands; if there was the kind of grind house circuit he mentions anywhere here, it was in cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam. My own town for years didn’t even have a cinema, and when it did it showed worthy ‘eat your spinach’ documentaries and arty films, not kung fu. As for television, there were only two over the air channels, no cable, until the late eighties. Dutch television did show movies, but again rarely the sort of cult fare talked about here. It was either the usual sort of family friendly blockbuster like The Sound of Music or kiddie friendly olden Age of Hollywood fare we got on a Sunday morning, Burt Lancaster pirate movies and the like. Which means I wasn’t much of a movie watcher until we finally got a video recorder, again sometimes in the late eighties.
Luckily we had a very good video store nearby, one that still exists though it now only sells tobacco. An independent store, at first I mostly rented all the big science fiction movies I’d read about but never seen, or only seen once on tv: the Star Wars Trilogy, Alien/Aliens, Terminator, Predator etc. But it also had a cult section where I found some of the weirder movies like Videodrome, Kevin Smith’s Clerks and Mallrats and documentaries about cyberpunk. And at some point it started an anime section, using Manga UK imports which is how I first watched Akira and Bubblegum Crisis.
Then, as Quentin Tarantino had made crime movies stylish again with Reservoir Dogs, the store also started carrying some Hong Kong action thrillers, again imported from the UK. The ones I remember are all by John Woo: The Killer and Hard Boiled, movies Tarantino referred to in interviews. That whole period, from roughly 1988 to 1996 or so was really formative for my tastes in movies, even though I spent years not watching much. I’ve never been a cinema goer, preferring to watch them on video and later DVD/bluray. It’s now easier than ever to do so, but I still sometimes miss heading out on a Friday night to select the movies to watch for the weekend, three for five from the bargain bucket and deciding whether it’ll all be Star Wars again or gambling on some weird looking cult offering.