First Post

I was watching Cinema Paridiso yesterday. It got to the bit where Alfredo tells Toto not to bother returning to his hometown and it struck a chord. This is a conversation I've had many times over the years- mostly with people from outside of the Black Country- who find it hard to see why so many people have an utter dedication to this place if it has no strict boundaries.

There are many reasons, but the one that preyed upon me for most of yesterday was plain old nostalgia. Everybody is trapped inside of it. I don't doubt that there are those of us who are incredibly progressive and who launch themselves into the future, but I can't help but feel that life is a continual running-away-from or running-towards. It smacks of Heidegger, I know, but I see it more in Bergman's films than anywhere else- and that's precisely the reason why they have such power behind them. Look at Summer With Monica; the whole thing centres around the utter bliss of losing the past and future in a single moment (the summer away with the girl the protagonist falls in love with). However, once it's done, that moment becomes a point of reference- an anchor that everything else is tethered to. Everything is an attempted return to that point, or an attempt to flee from it. What was initially a breaking-free from social restraint became a constant source of agony for people who then had to return to the ordinary lives of pregnancy, debt and housework.

A lot of his films work in the same way, I think. So many of those works up until the work he did on faith (Seventh Seal onwards, as an estimate) are tied up with characters who do things as an escape or as an attempt to return to something in memory (Wild Strawberries being the best case- not only as an example of the theme, but of Bergman as a film maker in general).

As for the Black Country, we're haunted by the fact that we were the centre of the British Empire for quite a while and then became forgotten when industry was no longer needed. Even when people do givc credit, it's normally to Birmingham and that stings a little. (In fact, there is an old Black Country phrase quoted in a book by Carl Chinn that sums it up. Translated from the dialect it states "Make it in the Black Country, assemble it in Birmingham, sell it in Solihull". A clear local divide between the miners and forgers, the assembly workers in factories, and those privelaged enough to deal with the paperwork).

I guess that's partly what wound me up when Terry Christian and some local bloke were on that god awful TV show The Farm. The local bloke (a footballer from Birmingham) boasted that Birmingham was known as the "factory of England", then Terry Christian went off on a rant about how the world was built in Manchester (a particularly Manc trait). Apparently the iron industry was born there (forgetting that cast iron was first made in Staffordshire, without which we wouldn't have any of the mass structures that we have today) and computers were first made in Manchester (forgetting that mechanical computers can be traced back to the medieval Middle East, as well as being worked on in England by Alan Turing et al down south). It's not that we want ownership, but credit.

Plus, Terry Christian gets very little work these days. There is some justice.


Thought for the day: Fall Out Boy's single "I Don't Care" sounds like Spirit In The Sky, thus rendering all of their listeners "cunts".