David Peace, Novelist

::hugs own proof copy like a miser::

(But not in Waterstone's.)

So much for hipsters.

I am with NRQ: the book looks interesting to me.

I've only so far read the first of the West Riding Quartet; 1974. A very effective, bleak style; all short, harsh sentences, and a great sense of the journalist character's mind working through the first person style. I think perhaps that once some answers had to be produced late on in the novel, it lost a little bit of the haunting quality, but it still worked. It was overall a very disturbing portrayal of the north, and specifically West Yorkshire... and I look forward to reading the other 3 books. And GB84 indeed; it sounds very interesting. The Miner's Strike could well be even more effective a setting as the Yorkshire Ripper killings [though admittedly '1974' doesn't specifically reference this, iirc] and police corruption.

I'm not a hipster, I'm a literary editor...

http://redriding.channel4.com/

that looks good.

I liked Tokyo Year Zero -- only thing I've read by him so far.

heard about this dude on, ulp, k-punk, sounds really interesting

I started Tokyo Year Zero but I couldn't figure out what the heck was going on. Maybe I'll give it another try.

Not only is GB84 epic and important; it is also now available, in large trade paperback format, for £2 by the counter in Fopp at Cambridge Circus.

Love this author, would take GB84 over The Damned Utd on balance, although still stoked for the TDU movie.

I'd love to have been able to read The Damned Utd from the persepctive of having no knowledge of football or who Brian Clough was, wonder how it would read

I hope we can have a really benign, benevolent fiction soon about Nigel Clough's harmonious future as coach at Derby County.

I didn't get on with Tokyo Year Zero either (incredibly bleak and very stylised), but I want to read his other stuff.

no knowledge of football

That'll be me, then. I've read, and loved, 1974, so maybe I'll give The Damned Utd a go next.

Oh good, let us know what you think!

from what I've read of Tokyo Year Zero so far, it practically starts off as intricate and confusing as the Red Riding ones get at the end when shit is getting real

The only concern I have about Peace: is he some Momus-level Wapanese fuck or what?

I mean after he writes his gritty Yorkshire tales, does he spend the evening being fed pocky by giggling prostitutes dressed as schoolgirls?

that would be about .4 on the Momus scale, presumably

he still comes across as more obsessed with Yorkshire than anything

maybe he should do a CROSSOVER

I think he has a wife and a couple of young children to support, in Tokyo; I don't see him living it up.

psh, probably talking about him supporting the wife is daft: whoever she is, she probably has a steadier income than he does. It's true about the bairns though, I think.

Picked up that £2 outsize GB84. The trouble with such cheapness, everywhere, is that it now has to take its place in a pile of about two hundred similar unread acquisitions

Timely revive - someone gave me The Damned United for Christmas, I was going to ask ILE about it. So it's good, then?

I'd love to have been able to read The Damned Utd from the persepctive of having no knowledge of football or who Brian Clough was, wonder how it would read

― Vicious Cop Kills Gentle Fool (Tom D.), Thursday, 8 January 2009 12:07 (29 minutes ago) Bookmark

I did this as much as is humanly possible and loved it. Bought it for my mum for Xmas and she loved it too.

I've only read GB84; it was brutally perfect. I have Tokyo Year Zero but haven't ever felt in the mood to begin it ...

I'd love to have been able to read The Damned Utd from the persepctive of having no knowledge of football or who Brian Clough was, wonder how it would read

... having only the vaguest and sketchiest knowledge of Brian Clough, and caring so little about football that I can't actually think of a suitably dismissive metaphor, I'm obviously an ideal case study! A pal did suggest to me that lack of football knowledge wouldn't matter at all; that said, it's a book that obviously doesn't have immediate appeal for me.

Anyway. Intrigued by the RR books being made into TV. Anyone read them?

Timely revive - someone gave me The Damned United for Christmas, I was going to ask ILE about it. So it's good, then?

― Matt DC, Thursday, 8 January 2009 12:52 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Yeah, I'd suggest reading it followed by http://www.amazon.co.uk/Provided-You-Dont-Kiss-Me/dp/0007247109, kinda like when TV stations bookend a movie with a documentary about the issues discussed.

I had Brian Clough's voice (or rather David Peace's Brian Clough's voice) as my interior monologue for about 2 months after reading The Damned Utd. Might explain why I did so badly at those job interviews last summer.

After Clough & Scargill, who could he do next? Bernard Manning? Mark E Smith?

Compo

Damned Utd isn't exactly heavy on the intricacies of football tactics, it's just well-observed northern swearing transplanted into sport instead of the Yorkshire underworld. It's so psychologically believable that I found it a bit hard to not just assume it was all straight fact, down to the desk smashing incident. It was drawn from a ridiculously wide range of sources, mind

Recall Marcello saying that the RR books do tend to degenerate into Tales From The Crypt a bit in their last quarters; the end of the second one (77) is one of the most disturbing things I've ever read, but also very faintly ridiculous

After Clough & Scargill, who could he do next? Bernard Manning? Mark E Smith?

Lancashire bastids.

Obv. Sean Bean is next on the list.

http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2007/05_01/warnockDM1205_468x356.jpg

But seriously though, Geoffrey Boycott

Michael Parkinson. Who knows what goes on beneath that suave exterior?

In the morning I get out of bed.
Right out of the bed.
Not half out of bed.
Right out of bed.

I look at the bed and I try to get as far away from it as possible.

Boycott has potential, that 100th century scenario was pretty dramatic

Potential for a David Peace spoof, at any rate

Leeds United FC: Their Decline And Fall

WHAT I'VE LEARNED THIS WEEK

The learning.
The doing.
The week.
The football. Always the football.

He was learning. Teaching. Learning -

HOW TO MANAGE.

His Wiki entry says that he's planning a book about Geoffrey Boycott next.

good, Geoff's one of the most enduring and weirdly engaging characters in post-war British sport

To be entitled "The Corridor of Uncertainty", hopefully.

Ha ha, no way, you're joking?!??!?

No that was from my own brane.

No, I meant about him writing a book about Geoffrey Boycott!

I briefly considered writing a "The Damned Rovers" parody, detailing Roy Race's brief stay as a player at Melborough. Someone else can steal that idea if they have any joeks.

"The Damned Rangers", detailing Paul le Guen's tenure at Ibrox could certainly work

x-post I really hope it's true too that would be amazing.

btw speaking of things that are incredibly Yorkshire, check this

the actual Roy of the Rovers went a bit bleak and gritty on its unsuccessful relaunch

Louis, that is fucking top.

Also check out this one for a) a moment of hilarious racist commentary and b) a line about two female darts-players that makes Alan Partridge seem dignified

HAHA HAHAHAHA HAHAHAHAH HAHAHAH HAHAHAHAHAHAH AHAHHAH AHHAHAHA ... god. Yorkshire. The seventies. Yorkshire in the seventies. (NB: as a Lancashire twat, I'm certainly not saying Lancashire was any fucking better.)

Sometimes the 70s actually were like "the 70s"

That IS hilarious - new display name ahoy.

I was waiting for someone to do that. You win the SPECIAL PRIZE: a half-drunk pint of mild with a dollop of Fred Trueman's pipe-baccy-flavoured spit floating on top (NB: spit may not be authentic Trueman slobber; flavour may be B&H).

I'll see tha'

Thee

Actually what does he say at the beginning? "Now then"?

If so, that is how i am going to open all my conversations from now on.

Actually what does he say at the beginning? "Now then"?

That's Jimmy Saville, another possible subject for the pen of David Peace

Guy on Facebook sez Haines' memoir has Peace foreword where Peace claims to have listened to loads of Auteurs records to get himself in a murder-book-writin' frame of mind

always kind of assumed given Peace's stern i-hate-films-and-comedy stance that Haines' admiration/writing of bad songs about Leeds would of been unwelcome

GB84. Read it now. Oh, you can't - it's not out for another fortnight.

::hugs own proof copy like a miser::

― suzy (suzy), Friday, 27 February 2004 16:54 (4 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is the worst post ever btw

I'd love to have been able to read The Damned Utd from the persepctive of having no knowledge of football or who Brian Clough was, wonder how it would read

― Vicious Cop Kills Gentle Fool (Tom D.), Thursday, January 8, 2009 1:07 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

dyou reckon it would work? i have the vaguest idea of who clough was -- soundbitey football manager -- but this is basically me; would i like the book?

(fucking five years since i started this thread and still haven't turned page one of a peace book. fuck this phd imo.)

xpost

ye gods

love thread's first reply it is perfect well only when followed by the second

But such a great set up for the follow-ups.

Just ordered the Quartet on Amazon. Am gonna try to read 'em quickly, though "The Rest is Noise" is still on the go after six months so we'll see.

Enrique, I know about as much about football as you and I got along fine.

xp

my non-thesis reading is 'homicide: a year on the killing streets', to be followed by haines, as it goes, so it is a logical progression. the quartet does look tasty.

i'm waiting to see Homocide cheap enough somewhere to be an impulse buy. Same with the Haines really. Even though I can't stand the guy's music.

i bought n/homicide not long after starting this thread - cheaper but uglier object. it's very good.

‘A compelling read, part Oswald Spengler, part Spike Milligan, and very, very funny.‘ - David Peace

Peace channeling Alison Graham

Just ordered the Quartet on Amazon. Am gonna try to read 'em quickly, though "The Rest is Noise" is still on the go after six months so we'll see.

― Enrique (Raw Patrick), Friday, 9 January 2009 11:52 (1 week ago) Bookmark

I finished the lot in a week. Feel kinda weird now.

Am starting GB84 tomorrow.

Dude could do with a new author photo though. The current one looks a bit A A Gill.

Tokyo Year Zero is really good but typically bewildering towards the end

Understating wildly.

The other D. Peace thread gets at his sometimes confusing endings. It has spoilers though, don't look if you haven't read the books:

David Peace

The quartet are being sold for £4 each on amazon, so I got them and a book about Stalin for £20, bargain. I've wanted to read Peace since I saw a documentary about him a good few years ago (was really taken with the idea him researching Yorkshire in a Tokyo library) but never got round to it.

i read 1974 last night in one insomniac sitting. Thought it was excellent and quite unrelentingly violent and grim and can't help but think the TV adaptation is going to pull a few punches and ruin it. Going to start on 1977 after I do a bit of hoovering and make some bolognese.

Peace writing in Observer Sport Mag yesterday.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/2009/feb/01/rio-ferdinand-world-club-championship

im reassured that rebecca hall is in the tv show.

Before xmas when I was back in Newcastle they had cheap copies of Tokyo: Year Zero everywhere but now I'm back in London I haven't seen one anywhere.

finished the quartet today, definitely going to check some of his other books soon. Although the style did get sort of start sliding in to self-parody after a while through the sheer repetition of, well, repetition.

x and y
y and x
x
y
and
x
and
y

I was kinda surprised how many song lyrics he worked into the quartet, not as direct quotes but assimilated into the prose. I like how dude reps for early-80s anarcho-punk too.

What happens to the journalist, Eddie, out of the first book? We never find out right, or am I being dense?

I don't think we ever find out. But as I read the books in 3 or 4 hour spells in the early hours of the morning and some of it is a bit oblique I may be being dense.

I'm pretty sure we're never told but I fucking raced through them all four in a week so I thought maybe it was in a single sentence that I never caught somewhere.

I keep seeing people and thinking Bad Fucking Bowie.

can lend you T:YZ if you promise not to abscond to Sheff with it etc

I like that the antagonist journalist in the first book just acts like a cunt to Eddie the whole time, but then becomes the protagonist in the second book and is clearly obsessed with and horrified by whatever happened to him

the books have reconfirmed and strengthened my impression, gleaned from one night spent there, that Leeds is a fucking hellhole.

the first time I ever visited Leeds, within two minutes of leaving the train station an unkempt man drinking white lightning threatened to kill me and another member of this forum for being gays who spread AIDS

i was in a taxi and the driver said we shouldn't go where we were going because there were going to be darkies there. Then two junkies were in the street in front of us and one of them swung a punch at the other causing him to fall in front of the taxi which swerved last minute to avoid running him over and nearly crashed us in to a lightpost. He then dropped us off outside two pubs, one of which he said he really liked and frequented and which was called "the queens's something or other" and had a large Union Jack outside it. So we went to the other pub. This was called the Pointer Bar and on a Friday night had a clientele of, excluding our group, four, all old, all Irish. We put the Irish rebel songs on the jukebox and played pool with them.

Nothing else bad happened but Chapeltown is a dump of truly Glaswegian proportions. I was impressed (in a bad way).

When I went to Leeds I saw Darren Hayman. It weren't that terrifying.

The switchover of characters between the books is really well done.

I'll grab T:Y0 sometime MPx4A.

DP really put me off Leeds. It was OK when I visited in 2002 but I don't think I'd feel happy going back now.

'Leeds' is an unusually horrible name for a town or city

Leeds United are an unusually horrible football club

in a sense, Leeds could be the worst place in Britain.

yes, in a sense, a very strange sense were we judge the merits of a place on its football club, how its name sounds and its portrayals in crime fiction.

I like Leeds. Good sushi there!

The names of the coppers in the 4tet are VERY similar to those that actually worked on the case considering what he has them do.

TV adaptation is brilliant.

how much does it pull punches. i mean, first two books have protagonists anal raping.

Leeds can't be worse than E16. ^That Observer article^ is very amusing

nah it probably isn't. Read numerous reports that call parts of London and parts of Glasgow the most deprived areas in Britain and I can believe it.

When is the TV adaption broadcast?

Tokyo Year Zero was really the last straw. Peace's style is so irritating. That book could have been like four pages long. And yes, ha ha, I know it's about repetition. But there's good repetition and then there's charmless, dull repetition.

It's been a while since I've read the books so can't recall specifics (there's no anal rape [who does that to who?], unless it is alluded to so subtly I missed it, which wouldn't be impossible), but it really captures the spirit of bleakness, misery and corruption, even the repetition (?! - xpost) of Peace's style. It couldn't be much darker without becoming completely unwatchable - ie, it's the right side of Catherine Breillat.

And Sean Bean is great.

Only seen the first mind, so it could go downhill.

anal rape: Eddie Dunford to Paula what's her face in the first one (tells her he loves her and is then having sex with her, then forces anal sex on her).

the cop Bob Fraser to a prostitute when he's looking for Janice after she disappears in the second one.

Damned Utd could have done with an anal rape scene.

lol

I thought he alluded to a pretty close working relationship between Clough and Taylor ...

I've now lived in Leeds for about four and a half years and I think it is delightful so nyer.

the first time I ever visited Leeds, within two minutes of leaving the train station an unkempt man drinking white lightning threatened to kill me and another member of this forum for being gays who spread AIDS

a) it was at least 15 minutes

b) it was in a can, so I think it was either Carlsberg or Strongbow

Read the first two of the quartet one recent weekend while I was ill. Not necessary the Norman Cousins choice of sickbed reading material, but there was some kind of weird synergy between my illness and the seedy atmosphere. Now that I've recovered I'm afraid to read the third one lest I fall ill again.

I'd love to have been able to read The Damned Utd from the persepctive of having no knowledge of football or who Brian Clough was, wonder how it would read

I did this. It reads very well.

caveat - I do know what the sport of football is, have dimly heard of Brian Clough (but would have been able to tell you nothing about him before picking up the book), and remember people in school hating Leeds United back in the 1970s.

The trailer for the film makes it look a bit suckass.

I think Peace should stick to football novels, actually.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/feb/22/fiction-david-peace-the-damned-utd

Red Riding on Four tonight!

K-Punk compares it to, err, post-punk.

"attain an expressionist naturalism that exceeds practically anything British cinema has achieved in the past 30 years"

the fuck does "expressionist naturalism" mean?

final par pretty much encapsulates state-of-play chez k-punk/other theoryheadz. such-and-such is good because it doesn't do x, y, and z; in this case provide closure or catharsis or whatever. which may be true, but perhaps one needs to explain all over again why these things are bad before saying that avoiding them is a virtue in itself.

this is going to be great. psyched!

i absolutely love Andrew Garfield. i'd watch any old shite if he was in it and, in fact, i have: i watched "Lions For Lambs" two nights ago.

that last line is a serious cringe. "it's like a piece of post punk music, AND I LOVE THAT I DO"

"it's like a piece of CHOCOLATE"

"it's almost like a good tv programme which I feel is good"

also psyched

love me some andrew garfield too

the fuck does "expressionist naturalism" mean?

and why 30 years? did he just pluck that out of the air or is he marking the release of the last (proper) carry on film "Carry on Emmanuelle"?

no, pretty sure he means radio on.

TS:
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o183/getshirtless/whishaw/ben_whishaw6.jpg Vs. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01182/arts-graphics-2007_1182337a.gif

i absolutely love Andrew Garfield rebecca hall. i'd watch any old shite if she was in it and, in fact, i have: i watched "Lions For Lambs frost/nixon" two weeks ago.

wishaw out there, doing it for skinny dudes. i approve.

no, pretty sure he means radio on.

of course!

Apart from "cunt", I can barely understand a word Sean Bean says.

eh, lol, only thing I'd actually planned to watch on the telly this year and I've missed it. Probably just wait until it's finished and torrent it tbh.

expressionist naturalism is a lol.

not really feeling it. im imagining the novel is a lot more complex and loose-endy. maybe i missed something, but did they really make the evil property developer a child-killer? who was then pinning the child murders on gypsies? so he could build a mall? didn't think it terrible but still.

it's pretty terrifying to think that that was toned down compared to the book

been a while since I read 1974; did they conflate Derek Box and John Dawson into the one Bean guy? Also there was no mutilated underground serial killer and wife, dog torture or rape

pretty sure in the book the child killer was a swan-obsessed aspie who was making nice swan-related patterns for the Bean character's shopping mall, no shit

Dunford finds him mutilated underground and buries him alive with his insane wife

I don't think he rams any Police at the end though he just sits in his car waiting for them

i think this was pretty great but it's hard to say because i couldn't hear the dialogue and i couldn't understand the plot, was that just me? i'm not really used to following that sort of thing on TV so maybe that's it. or maybe it was all just too condensed or subtle.

the acting was amazing though and it looked incredible.

yeah captured the mood of the novel beautifully, but also captured the batshit plot intricacy

hope the greasy twat rival journalist's character isn't marginalised in the next one, he wasn't in the preview very much but the way 1977 handles the switch to his perspective is great

i'm guessing this will bomb if even us smart-arses couldn't understand what the hell was happening.

xpost 1977 is the one that wasn't filmed i think?

orite I thought they'd condensed four books into three programmes

oh no, wait, that's wrong.

yr right, i think.

the plot was classic noir ish:

- children are being killed
- evil developer in cahoots with police and local press wants to pin it on the gypises and irish who are squatting on the land he's bought to build a mall on
- young buck reporter back from london, investigates
- gets hardsonned by police
- encounters femme fatale (mother of adducted kiddie) whom he wants to save but
- she is 'difficult', and shagging aforesaid developer
- shose wife is mad and hints developer himself is a paedo or something?
- femme fatale disappears
- reporter gets done over so bad he decides to take revenge

is that right?

I dunno, I think Eddie shoots him for being so flippant about the killer's, like "pfft he kills kids, we've all got our vices huh" but I don't have my copy of the book to check if I'm wrong and I don't know if they were trying to convey the same thing in this adaptation

Classic James Elroy yes.
xpost

also, the reporter was in BRIGHTON dummy

it's all down south to me

This adaptation did explain stuff that's never explained in the book (and in a ridiculously off the cuff way), and also explained stuff that's explained in the book a lot quicker. You don't know why there's been the (frankly fucking terrifying) attack on the gypsy camp in the book till about 200 pages later, it initially seems to just be massive police spite and hatred. Maurice Jobson being an obviously malign guy straight away is a big example of the TV show straightening out the source material.

As a reverse to this there were a couple of added refs to things in the first book that weren't at all explained in the show, principal among them the decor at Dawson's party, which makes me think that some of that will be in later episodes.

MP4xA is right about Box and Dawson being conflated in this adaption.

Biggest disappointment was the lack of anyone being called "bad fucking Bowie".

The biggest change in style was the stillness of some of the shots in the TV version. The novels have no respite with people waking from horrific dreams to even more horrific reality. Dude's kinda like the 70s Northern HP Lovecraft or something.

Despite everything I'm still hyped for next week.

apart from some impressive location scouting, costume design, set dressing and mise en scene, thought this was a REAL let-down - haven't read the novs, but all the Ellroy comparisons only highlight the failure of this a whodunnit/thriller. the characters (and lots of the plotting) were total cliches - the ambitious journo, the damaged femme fatale, the banally evil criminal mastermind, the corrupt cops, complacent/drunken reporters etc etc. far too many 'dream sequences' and slo-mo sex scenes; a final half hour that was melodramatic beyond belief; no surprises or excitement, and nothing gained by, or said about, the historical setting. will watch next week in the hope of much better things (but will be amazed if it can match either the gordon burns or michael bilton bks abt sutcliffe and abt the police's incredible mishandling of the case)

the plot was classic noir ish:

- children are being killed
- evil developer in cahoots with police and local press wants to pin it on the gypises and irish who are squatting on the land he's bought to build a mall on
- young buck reporter back from london, investigates
- gets hardsonned by police
- encounters femme fatale (mother of adducted kiddie) whom he wants to save but
- she is 'difficult', and shagging aforesaid developer
- shose wife is mad and hints developer himself is a paedo or something?
- femme fatale disappears
- reporter gets done over so bad he decides to take revenge

is that right?

― FREE DOM AND ETHAN (special guest stars mark bronson), Thursday, 5 March 2009 23:21 (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

this is spot on but makes it sound clearer than it actually was on screen. why were they mumbling too? had to mute the adverts and their mad compression we had the volume up so loud.

beautifully shot, but when was that ever going to be in dispute, but I had no idea what was going on half the time and I wasn't even idly browsing during

Pretty disappointed overall. Think the conflating of characters from the book didn't work at all and actually made it more confusing. I mean it was fairly ridiculous just having Dawson offhandedly admit to being the killer. Although apparently Sean Bean and Rebecca Hall are in the third one, so it might all be explained in due course?

had to mute the adverts and their mad compression we had the volume up so loud.

same here. i don't think i've ever had my TV up that loud and i still couldn't understand half of what was said. then the ads came screaming in and i'd mute the volume and miss that it had come back on.

also, i have to say, a lot of the financial end of this seems to be riding on the possibility of selling it abroad or even releasing it in cinemas overseas which seems a vain hope. it might work in non english speaking countries right enough: i even tried watching it with the subtitles on!

I thought it looked absolutely fantastic, with so much fucking terrific cinematography, and started well, continued well, and then absolutely bottled the ending worse than Chris Waddle bottled that penalty many, many years ago. I don't think I've ever been more disappointed with an ending. I assume that's Peace's fault (not having read the books). I got the plot; Bean's a serial paedo and developer, fucked Sir Peter Hall's daughter when she was a kid, carried on fucking her, fucked her daughter too later on, who was probably his own daughter as well (and her husband finding that out is what caused him to commit suicide, on top of her abduction), in with police cos of enormous building yields etc, in with paper editor, flash parties, wife driven mental by his affairs with both women, men, and kids, and his general nastiness, etc etc etc. Then Andrew Garfield goes all Punisher and bob's yer uncle. Silly.

Also I had no problem understanding anything at all, but my family's from Yorkshire, so that probably explains it...

Also, Andrew Garfield is not an attractive man, and inside 40 minutes he'd bedded two attractive women. With that underbite! How?

It was the 70s, that was a hot look.

It felt like a cross between Chinatown and the Beiderbecke Affair.

The ending of the novel is pretty ridiculous as well tbh but in a different way from the TV show. In the novels there is no confession from Dawson and he isn't even one of the people shot in the club in the book. The whole child murder plot sprawls through the four books and even by the end of the last one there's no real explanation for some of it. The TV version tries to get at the elliptical nature of the books sometimes, then blew it with lines like Bean's final one.

(x-p coz I went in a meeting in the middle of writing that).

Stevie T sooo OTM! this morning i was thinking how much this was like CHINATOWN, w/ Towne’s original ‘happy’ ending restored – ie the murder of the evil paedo figure – rather than Polanski’s (to me more persuasive) triumph of power/corruption. So many other similarities – cynical investigator rediscovering integrity, love affair w/ a deeply damaged victim, historical/geographic specificity etc. etc. But again, RED RIDING comes off v. poorly in comparison.

Also, Andrew Garfield is not an attractive man

i find this incomprehensible.

It reminded me of Get Carter a fair bit- developers colluding with corrupt police and local authorities, along with a strong whiff of 60s permissiveness gone horribly wrong. Also a lot of brutalist 60s architecture.

I loved Sean Bean's car. Anyone know what it was? Some kind of Jag?

sean bean was very good in this.

It reminded me of Get Carter a fair bit- developers colluding with corrupt police and local authorities, along with a strong whiff of 60s permissiveness gone horribly wrong. Also a lot of brutalist 60s architecture.

Yes, couldn't help thinking about Poulson/T.Dan Smith when watching this. Favourite moment, Sean Bean crushing the model tree with his finger. Something very comic about it but also told a lot about the guys character i.e brutal vulgarian.

Also, Andrew Garfield is not an attractive man

Of course he is, he looks like Gareth! I think this overdid the "It's the 70s and it's really really grim" bit, I mean what are they going to do in the 80s when things are even grimmer?

Some things were grimmer in the 1980s, some weren't?

Chris Waddle did not 'bottle' a penalty: he had the 'bottle' to go up and take it, and he missed.

Radio On is a terrible film. It's OK until you actually see it.

I've read DP but wasn't around to watch this; to be honest I probably wouldn't have enjoyed it anyway. Stevie T's Morleyesque description sounds true except wasn't Beiderbecke a rather jolly programme?

I thought this was pretty bad - it looked fantastic but it laid on the whole noirish atmosphere so thick it ruined basic things like pacing and tension and characterisation and the viewer actually giving a shit who the killer was. It somehow managed to seem both understated and overwrought at the same time.

That said I stopped watching 2/3rds of the way through because I actually want to read the book at some point and didn't want to blow the ending.

Also the dialogue was so hushed in places it was impossible to work out what was going on. Haven't they heard of dynamic range compression?

a lot of people had trouble hearing what they were saying. i didn't coz i listen to the tv through headphones. i hadn't reflected on how weird that is till now.

with the cinematography, which a lot of people have praised, i kind of think: there was certainly a lot of it. had a similar response to 'hunger', in a way -- slight artiness about individual shots, but, as matt says, getting bogged down in that. im sure they'll win awards.

(also: it wasn't exactly a radical re-imagning of the grimy mid-70s. it looked exactly how you thought it would, brown and smoky. it isn't actually a million miles from life on mars, just a bit browner and smokier.)

Aahh, I meant to keep an eye open for something by this guy when I was out today but was just like "uhhh, his name was...Daniel...something, shit...what was the name of the book I read about...One Thousand Japanese..umm...ah fuck it".

Thanks, ILX.

I think the characterisation of the gay guy was the bit that finally made me give up on this fwiw.

http://blog.wired.com/music/images/2008/06/30/conversation_hackman.jpg
Enrique enjoying the latest episode of Skins, yesterday.

"enjoying"

Can't believe so many people didn't like it. For those wondering about how it ends, remember it's only one of three.

problems:

-lead actor looked like lead singer from the kooks/ex hollyoaks cast member, didn't work as a destructive personality even for a second, no matter how many cigarettes he smoked.

-bad use of music. nothing especially wrong with the songs but at no point did any of them lift a scene or make it work on a different level.

-overkill with the dramatic arty shots, felt very unnatural.

-it felt like a movie made in 2009 about Britain in the 70s, and yet critics are lauding it as if it was the kind of British TV that was made in the 70s/80s. it's odd how these movies have to strain and stretch to escape Americanisation and reach for the sort of natural effortless Britishness that work made in those eras has. odd and disappointing.

all that said I enjoyed it on a cursory level, will watch the rest for sure.

I mean, I think I expected this to feel ultra British and it still was filled with Hollywood tropes.

Looking forward to Paddy onsidine in tonight's episode, he's always worth watching.

Considine!

lol yeah kinda.

Shoulda got Sting in it then.

i always get sad when considine dies because it means no more considine :(

much more reasonable than last week, even if the lover angle didn't quite mesh

this shit is such a massive downer; I'm actually kind of relieved they skipped over '77 cos the ending of that is uh

This is all a bit ponderous; frozen by the weight of being quality with a capital Fulfilling Channel 4 Remit. I think part one maybe seemed better to me coz I drank rum thru it.

Considering the amount of Actors in it they don't seem to be doing much good Acting, marooned as they are in separate frames, the camera slooowly panning forth then back across them. Peter Mullan is the only one with a bit of life.

The score was some particularly boring churn.

I wonder if they're gonna bring in any 1977 ending type stuff next week? I hope so.

interesting that he was briefly questioned by a non-lobotomised Jack Whitehead at the start

BJ scenes didn't really work for me

^^^lol ilx taken out of context lol!!

This was vastly better than last week's. Considine ftw (except for him ending up dead, of course).

BJ dressed better in the books.

at least last week the fact that Rebecca Hall is ridiculously hot lightened the mood a bit though

if they'd done 77 they could of got round the bland soudntrack problem by having the last scene just actually be a man smashing another man's brain with a nail with the sex pistols playing

Haven't read the fourth book so I don't know how much tying up of the previous loose ends to expect

t'ripper looked kind of like playing days martin o'neill

I thot the hooker deserved to die, no question, no question

I'm delighted to'uv smashed her with a claw hammer

sorry that's like custenan tribute thread or something

Can't believe you haven't read the 4th book!

I think I must of had some Viz back issues to get through at the time or something

I missed it for a second time.

Why?

I was out listening to ARTHUR SCARGILL.

On a PANEL with some other people.

The President.
The Men -
The President's Men.

Thought the 2nd episode was good, liked the way it tied in with the 1st. I kept expecting Considine to pull his Dead Man's Shoes psycho act, which never really happened, which on reflection was probably a good thing.

I didn't bother to watch this. Instead we watched .Rec, which was pretty good fun.

thought it was pretty cowardly that they used a fictional first name for peter sutcliffe's wife, presumably because sonia sutcliffe is notoriously writ-happy

I think last night the Y.R. never got called anything more than Peter.

The names of the cops involved in the Ripper enquiry and the names used in the books/show are v v close.

this will sound like a retarded question, but how much of the original Peace novels is based on 'real'/rumoured actualities?

Punishing the Saab, Huntsbotham nick to Brighouse.

Thinking M621, M62, n minus 1, A1 murders and P45s. Radio on:

Love you baby love
Sugar baby love

Sugar fucking baby love.
Never meant to make you black and blue.

Think, think fucking quickly,

Detective Chief Inspector Bob Nasty, The Carp, in the study with the lead piping.

Here lies Phlebas, a fortnight dead

At the Fixby roundabout, ghosts with orchids in their mouths: LUFC. KELLY SUCKS TRAMPS COCKS. FUCK OFF MANU SHIT.

There where the tower was traced against the night
Of Michael Peternoster Royal, red and white.

HELL YOU EFF SEE.

There are books about some of the Ripper murders being actually commited by other people. I know nowt about the Ripper murders though so I don't know how compelling the arguments are, or how the police are involved.

Peter Hunter is obviously based on John Stalker to a large extent.

The Polish kid getting fitted up for the murder of the children is based on this.

thought it was pretty cowardly that they used a fictional first name for peter sutcliffe's wife, presumably because sonia sutcliffe is notoriously writ-happy

That's taken straight from the books.

Always vaguely wondered whether the surname Williams was meant to insinuate some connection with Michael Williams, the 'Exorcist' killer of Jack Whitehead's ex-wife (not in the films, unless it gets shoehorned into next week's).

There are books about some of the Ripper murders being actually commited by other people. I know nowt about the Ripper murders though so I don't know how compelling the arguments are, or how the police are involved.

Peace has written about some of these here: http://www.newstatesman.com/200303240036, which points out the real-life connections between Stefan Kiszko and YR, although I'm guessing it doesn't quite go as far as Peace takes it.

Whoever asked about Sean Bean's car in 1974, many moons ago, it was a Jensen Interceptor.

That was me. Thanks!

Roger Windsor = Terry Winters

it's odd how some fictional names have different connotations from the real names. Somehow the GB84 renaming of Peter Heathfield as Paul [something] made him sound younger.

Pretty bad this 2nd one. Not as easy to make the 80s look like the 80s as it is to make the 70s look like the 70s, of course, altho Sutcliffe's horrific jumper was good.

The problem with this series is that Channel 4 made such a song and dance about it that it was set up to disappoint

Judged on its own terms, rather than they hype, I think it has thus far been a qualified success, though.

They should have done a three part version of one book really.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7951333.stm

Slightly worried that the film of The Damned Utd isn't going to be like the book now. Cuddly affectionate rejigging isn't what I want from it.

(have only skimmed this thread, as I haven't seen any of Red Riding yet, and haven't read them either, apologies if this has been touched on already)

i wish people would stop putting Michael Sheen in things.

yeah the trailer for Damned United looks awful

http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/7951484.stm

17 minute long Martin O'Neill review of Damned Utd film...

17 minutes? Jesus.

it's an interview with Pat Murphy so 2 of those minutes are questions and 8 of those minutes are "I would....I...y...no question, no question...."

"Martin Sheen... I've seen him in... theatre..."

i wish people would stop putting Michael Sheen in things.

^^^^^^^^ truthbomb

Bring back Yarwood.

Martin O'Neill is Classic from minute one of that interview.
"Well, I don't know whether...I'm advantaged or disadvantaged...having watched the film....and from that viewpoint I...I mean this..."

Sheen must surely play him one day

he will eventually play everyone

wow O'Neill sounds like the best ever!

Given how much they simplified the various evil men down into a few compound characters, I'm surprised they didn't signpost the shifts in chronology a bit more in the last one

i thought that episode was the best by far.

although was quite confused that Piggott's father didn't actually feature in the earlier episodes as far as i could remember.

i was confused by more than that, right enough.

also, sakia reeves is v hot.

ok I just also read the last 30 pages of the book.

they did a bit of a blade runner on that

there was something magnificently grotesque about Mark Addy's bloated curry swilling turn in this

I was like how jealous of how fat he was

That was the best episode for sure, partially coz the acting was better. Mark Addy was great and really caught the smoking-pot-with-northern-girls-too-young-for-you vibe to a tee.

The ending was nothing like the ending to the quartet. I don't think I'm spoilering anything for anyone saying that.

For a minute I thought Sean Bean was still alive in the TV adaption!

yes, you had to look out for david morrissey's very subtly different glasses to know whether you were in the 70s or the 80s.

I think that the photoshopping here (with the alt-text Brian Clough gives a seminar) might be way better than the Damned United flick.

Also presence of Warren Clarke = 1974.

I wonder how Peace feels about the newly chipper ending tacked onto his masterpiece, particularly given his express distrust/hatred of all visual media

having not read the quartet (thouh have read gb84, which was impressive but hard work), is there any spoiler-free way of explaining how the book ending differs?

Take any happiness out for starters.

It's pretty much diametrically opposed. Martin Laws still dies but somebody else kills him.

Also a guy who was mostly ignored in the films reappears for a creepy/redemptive moment with Maurice

Also in the books Martin Laws is just the string puller/ringleader; the people who actually do the murders in the book aren't in the films at all

yikes... well, something to look forward to when i read the books, anyway. is the role of piggott's father explained any clearer? and, in fact, are the circumstances clearer in the book than, say, GB84, which lost me a couple of times.

GB84 is a model of clarity compared to the twisted mess at the end of the quartet.

I was thinking of doing a flowcahrt of all the connections between people in the books. Seeing how messy it would get.

was going over some of it in my head earlier and realising I will never be explain it to anyone ever and gave up

re: cheerful ending, the book also hammers home the impending doom of 1983 increased Tory majority while all the bad things are happening, in case you might be tempted to think that people outside Yorkshire were probably doing fine

weird, david peace had a poem in the guardian earlier but now i can't find it.

saw the rest of the trilogy 1980 was good. 1983 was shite.

A Prediction for the Year 2009

One fine and awful day, thirty years too late, in a full and empty Abbey, to a society that is no society, a great and stupid man, he says:

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out her coffin, let the mourners come -

For Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message She is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves -

For Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead.

She was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song:
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong -

For Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good -

For Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead.

Now suddenly, as if by magick, the doors of the Abbey swing open wide and a corpse down the aisle he strides, followed by another, and another, and another; the great British people resurrected, they shout:

Start all the clocks, re-nationalize the phones,
Give back to us dogs our juicy bones,
Strike the piano and bang the drum
Scatter her bones and let the morning come -

Now Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead.

Let yer aeroplanes circle cheering overhead
Scribbling on the sky their message She is Dead,
But there'll be crepe nooses round the necks of all you leaders,
For our gloves are off and so now you will heed us -

Now Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead.

For WE are your North, your South, your East and West,
A once working week for your Sunday rest,
Your noon, your midnight, your talk, your song:
You thought hate would last for ever: you were wrong -

Now Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead.

And the stars are here now, but they are every one,
So stop all this mooning and bring back the sun,
Pour away our tears and mop up our blood;
For nothing now can ever stop The Good -

Now Maggie, Maggie, Maggie is dead, dead, dead,
Maggie! Dead! Maggie! Dead!
Maggie, Maggie, Maggie - she is dead, dead, dead.

'shite' is a bit harsh: the lawyer was good.

but for all the hype, and there was a lot of hype, it was not significantly better than (say) that ciaran hinds/kelly reilly thing earlier this year that the prime suspect woman wrote.

been reading '1977' and though the adaptation argument is never-ending and usually tedious, it's fair to say they didn't catch peace's tone in any of these films. up to a point: good, he overdoes it a bit. but i don't think any of the directors 'got it' and went for the pretty safe option of being 'classy'.

I'd love to have been able to read The Damned Utd from the persepctive of having no knowledge of football or who Brian Clough was, wonder how it would read

― Vicious Cop Kills Gentle Fool (Tom D.), Thursday, January 8, 2009 7:07 AM

I fact, I still don't know how to pronounce the guy's name. Today I'm assuming it's "Cluff" in order to rhyme with "enough."

Right. Think of him as the Mark E. Smith of Association Football.

Because of his accent or because of his leadership style?

The latter.

And Peter Taylor is the Brix?

Nah, there's not really an equivalent of Peter Taylor. Craig Scanlon is John McGovern though.

To be honest, not knowing anything about the story made it better it some ways. I couldn't figure out how exactly he was going to get from Derby to Leeds.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o_EHlzd63R8

There is one scene in the book where he tells a story about Frank Sinatra and he says something like "I don't want to namedrop but he met me once, you know."

So, Occupied City is out now. Haven't read it myself, but Mark Sanderson has reviewed it for the Telegraph. I'm guessing this is the first David Peace book he's dipped into:

"Fans of David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet will be hugely disappointed[...]What really sinks the novel, though, is the endless repetition. 'I am falling, I am falling, I am falling,/I am falling, I am falling,/I am falling’, bleats a survivor, but the words could equally apply to Peace himself."

The repetition can get wearying, and definitely approaches self-parody at times (the "Guilty feet got no rhythm. Guilty feet got no rhythm." bit in GB84 took me straight out of the book), but at this stage - eight books in - you kinda know what you're getting with Peace. "Endless repetition" is part of the deal, for better or worse.

He does ramp it up a lot in the Tokyo ones to the point where you can't really bring yourself to read over a page of the same phrase repeated just to let it have whatever awesome effect he thinks it'll have on you.

Amazon reviews for Peace's book are frequently funny, like housewives going "I was led to expect some quality crime thriller but this is just an excuse for foul language!!! Disgraceful", like they saw an advert for it on the tube and expected some mildly edgy Patricia Cornwell shit.

There's a long review in the new LRB that has some good points but you need to be a subscriber to see it online.

BAD FUCKING BOWIE

i don't think i like him much, got one and a half books into red riding and gave them away. but whenever i am reminded of him the phrase 'bad fucking bowie' pops into my mind, and i am so pointlessly amused that i can't bring myself to actually dislike david peace

I've only read 1974, is this repetition thing something he developed later on or am I just that oblivious?

In the very beginning of that one there is a kind of repetition when Eddie Dunford is mentallly writing his article about the family's "emotional plea."

I like what MPx4A has to say. I just don't find the repetition particularly well done, let alone effective "voices" for his narrators. I think he actually works best when he's tackling something more mundane and less crimey like Damned Utd. I'd like to see him do a Houellebecq-style novella about a bored computer programmer, rather than read about a detective or other crime-solver or committer who seems impossibly driven on every page to vaguely plow forward through some kind of murky affect and vague illness. It sometimes reads less like a character's mind going in loops than an author kind of ostentatiously talking over his own characters' voices.

Red Riding films will be playing NY Film Fest. First I've heard of em.

I thought this was going to be an RIP Gordon Burn revive.

I just read a Joyce Carol Oates book called Beasts and for a while near the end it turned into a David Peace novel. I starting hearing the phrase "B. F. Bowie" in the back of my head. It was really kind of chilling to think that he had reappeared yet again, this time in college town New England.

Heavy manners coming down
Heavy manners coming down
Heavy country matters coming down

Or something like that.

PROSTITUTE MURDER SQUAD

so red riding is good or what? have a chance to go see a press screening next week and it sounds right up my alley

I found them a massive disappointment in the end, but might have felt differently if I'd never read the books, or if I was a US dude who wanted to see how massively grim Northern England could be in the 70s.

And what a massive cliche "massively grim Northern England in 70s" has become. The 80s were grimmer.

just watched the first one--wayyyy over the top w/ all the "grittiness" signifiers, felt pretty self-parodic at times. the fairly well-trodden storyline was actually a plus since it allowed me to follow the movie despite understanding 60% of the dialogue at best.

even so--camerawork was beautiful and ill watch sean bean in anything

so senile david thomson says it's better than the godfather, because he's a fucking moron, in the NYRB. and now that quote adorns the ads.

the third one was so far beyond bad. in the meantime i've read some peace and wasn't super-impressed by that even, but the films didn't catch his, um, apocalyptic worldview.

it has a great cast (ie rebecca hall) and it looks p good mostly (they overdo it, artiness-wise, as old thomson once would have spotted).

2nd one is by a long shot the best

photography is quite pretty but the scripts are really... eugh

yep. paddy considine is great. the ending is still ridic imho.

xp

i watched them three nights in a row at christmas. was a real slog after the first one tbh.

looked rabishing though, as max says. loved the indian restaurant in particular. felt a lot like my first curry in bradford c.1986, without the shootout, obv.

Crashing disappointment to realise that, despite all the political intrigue and police corruption, it all came down to that old standby, the paedo ring.

Bugger, I should have SPOILER WARNINGed that. Mods feel free to delete.

despite all the political intrigue and police corruption, it all came down to that old standby, the paedo ring.

not mutually exclusive iirc. the bad guys are REALLY BAD.

The fat guy from The Full Monty was the best thing about this.

They should have made it super-trashy really. The endless signifiers of 'quality drama' really did it in. It was static where it should have been squirming.

alan bennett:

13 March. Red Riding is much talked of and applauded, and it is powerful and sometimes hard to watch. Whether it’s feasible or the assumptions about the police entirely plausible I’m inclined to doubt. ‘The Leeds police kick mainly in the teeth’ is the gist of it, plus an assumption that the force in the 1970s was thoroughly corrupt.

Though the circumstances were hardly as lurid, this was very much the assumption when I was a boy. Rationing offered increased opportunities for peculation and my father, a butcher, who was both Conservative and conservative, nevertheless always assumed that most policemen were ‘on the take’ and the magistrates, too. Still, though the police get away with extreme violence and even murder, I find it hard to credit (if I understand the plot) that masked bobbies could shoot up a club or beat up and rape a reporter on the Yorkshire Post without there being some sort of repercussions. Comically, since in my memory the Yorkshire Post was always rather a genteel newspaper, I’d find it easier to believe if the reporter had been from the Yorkshire Evening Post – the newspaper Keith Waterhouse first worked on as a reporter.

So while Red Riding seems like gritty realism it is in this respect quite romantic, as romantic and fanciful as the stories told at the other end of the social and geographical scale in Midsomer Murders. In Midsomer the murders average three or four per episode but never seem to incur any comment in the press or ruffle the calm surface of the community. It takes more than the discovery of a mere body to stop the garden fête. Midsomer and Red Riding are not very different in this and alike, too, in that they’re both, Midsomer particularly, a boon to actors.

I really love Midsomer Murders. The plots are nuts.

raw patrick otm. i think the series was very confused w/r/t quality. maybe people are generally. it's not just about seeing that there are "virtues in pulp", but also that these are different virtues from what you look for in yer proverbial high art. doing pulp-as-art-movie -- im not saying it's never a good idea. but you have to know what you're doing.

xpost

what's the alan bennett thing from? is that the whole thing or an extract?

really wanted to like these but i couldn't make any sense of it at all and was unable to decipher more than a third or so of the dialogue. btu great acting nonetheless and, yes, it looked rabishing.

LRB, they publish extracts from his diaries at xmas and that was one entry.

ok, cheers.

d thomson part of a sinister critics ring - along w/ the editor of sight and sight (whose mrs worked on the series!) and senile old k-punk - to seriously overpraise these progs

[controversial self-edit] yeah basically sight and sound contributor k-punk was presumably sucking up to his editor? idk what's in it for thomson – is he still trading on "being british"? it might be that.

I can reveal as well as being part of an over-praising ring they are also paedos and will kick you in teeth whilst down. They will probably scuttle me for telling you this though.

Occupied City is. . . good (first book of his I've read). Writing sometimes get a bit too much for me. I'd heard nothing about this particular case (the Teigin Bank Murders) before reading it either and wow what an off-the-wall one it is.

Not strictly relevant but has anyone here read 'Heartland' by Anthony Cartwright? Picked it up on a whim the other day and I'm only about 50 pages in but it's very David Peace - football, declining post-industrial towns, grass roots politics, etc etc.

It seems to be all based around the England-Argentina game in World Cup 2002, very enjoyable so far. Got the feeling it's building up to some very nasty racial tension stuff though.

Okay I've now finished 1/2 the Red Riding Quartet (had to skip 1980 cuz the library didn't have) and am reading 1983 right now. These are undeniably great books. Very much of the LA Quartet, but frankly better written and less repetitive. Having trouble keeping track of what happen in 1974 in 1983 though. Also read Tokyo Year Zero which was good... but I wish like Occupied City it had been a little less dense and exhausting. Setting and the crimes alone makes both of those worth a read.

Curious to read Damned Utd and GB84 although neither seems to have received an American press so I guess I'll have to buy 'em.

watched red riding 1974 a couple weeks ago and thought it was good but nonsensical in a way the novel wasn't i.e. dunford didn't seem to actually discover anything of great importance, it was like an incompetent james bond running around not being very good at his job, and the villains growing bored and kidnapping him in order to have a cathartic showdown and tell him they were the ones he was looking for, leading to big reveals and lots of blood. still good imo. 1980 was a lot better, mainly because the story was more smoothly told and paddy considine was a superior lead character and actor. 1983 coming up next. this shit is so OTT it's ridiculous but i'm "enjoying" it.

GB84 is maybe half way to being a great book... the stream of consciousness ground-level strike action material that's constantly running in the background is fantastic, insighful, atmospheric. The bits about the CEO aren't bad.

The bits about The Jew fall flat because he can't empathise with him enough to make him anything other than a mildly fleshed-out pantomime villain. The neo-Nazi gangster subplot is ridiculous and has no dramatic tension whatsoever for something with such a high body and betrayal count.

I feel like some sort of scabs-eye perspective was missing and it was a big oversight.

I was really disappointed with the series: I lost interest with each episode.

'1983' was pretty good but for some reason the filmmakers decided to not answer 99% of the questions left over from '1980.' oh well.

1974 film is quite ludicrous. As for Andrew Garfield, never send a boy to do a star's job.

GB84. Read it now. Oh, you can't - it's not out for another fortnight.

::hugs own proof copy like a miser::

― suzy (suzy), Friday, 27 February 2004 16:54 (6 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink
Erm, I saw it in Waterstone's window this very lunch break...

― ENRQ (Enrique), Friday, 27 February 2004 16:59 (6 years ago) Bookmark

i'm still totally confused by 1983's insistence on not answering any of the leftover questions from 1980 other than 'what's the deal with the creepy priest?' they could have never made 1980 and the two bookend films would have existed just fine without it.

I can't even remember what the leftover questions from 1980 were??!?! The books only made a marginal amount of sense so I guess it's not too surprising that a series that removed one of them altogether would also be a mess.

SPOILERS

- the crew of crooked cops killed paddy considine for discovering their secrets: orchestrating the copycat murder of some girl, murdering everyone who was in the club after andrew garfield killed sean bean, toasting to the north 45 times
- i don't think they ever really addressed why they killed the people in the club, why they killed the girl (though maybe it was to protect sean bean's rep and their own interests?), and while i don't demand that the villains be brought to justice in films, the fact that the third film seemed to completely ignore the events of the second was just bizarre

I don't remember why they kill everyone in the club, but I thought they had to kill the girl because she had seen them kill everyone in the club.

honestly i lost track of a lot of threads; the third film just made it out like there was a cop/rich-dude/asshole northern illuminati behind everything the whole time, rather than different groups like cops or developers or w/e

oh yeah that's right. xpost

din't like the film of 'the damned united'

suspect it's not much like the novel, coz it's so calm

so weirdly it needed to be more peace-like, which i wouldn't usually say

was he trying for a kind of wes anderson look or what, with all these big, simple, stylized compositions? anyway, it never caught fire, it had no feeling for the period, and the music cues were insipid

There's not enough bitterness, fury or brooding resentment in Michael Sheen's Clough. Not by a long shot.

I thought the film was mostly fine in its own right but seemed to have very little to do with Peace

as if Notting Hill was supposed to be an adaptation of Amis!

I thought the film Clough just didn't seem strong enough, at some level - he seemed thin, weak, feeble, brittle, in a way that I don't think the real Clough did (but then my sense of Clough is 1980s / 90s, when he was physically bigger etc, which may explain it a bit)

At home, at Anfield.

Another football manager book huh.

At least now I finally know who one of the people mentioned in "Dig It" is.

Don't worry, when he does stuff like this, it is "occult history" not mere fiction. Again.

I'd like to read this new one. Anything to do with shankly,busby, or stein is interesting to me, and I enjoy peace's pop-beckett quite a bit. looks like it'll be quite the slog admittedly. 700 odd pages of repetition and

Pages,
700 odd of fucking pages
Religious pages.
700 of them.
Page
Page
Page
700 pages
pages
pages
pages

Repetitious. Damn you autocorrect.

Jim Smith next.

Someone on my facebook was ripping into Peace for the repetition and it immediately made me go back to the Red Riding books and enjoy them more

It's very rare for that intense, slashing repetition to translate into a book you can actually read

About 50 pages into the new one and thoroughly enjoying it.theres something very comforting about the long strings of results.

i finished it already. Seems like the book his repetition was made for. The tension from the cumulative effect of fixtures after fixtures after fixtures.the pressure,the remorselessness of the season are so well conveyed.and how even victory provides no respite as the next season needs to be prepared for immediately.

and shankly's monomaniacal interest in liverpool and football,and his extreme will to always accommodate fans,always respond to them and engage with them.his almost saintly asceticism and dedication.

Just finished Red Or Dead. Absolutely loved it. Remarkable how DP sets up Shankly to be more or less the polar opposite of Clough in The Damned Utd and the second (post-retirement) half is simultaneously very funny and painfully moving; see the chapter "On Watering The Garden."

Looking forward to it but it is not really available in the US yet. Wondering if I should finally get around to reading GB84 or the Tokyo books while I am waiting.

I've been on the fence about reading this, how reverential is it? Shankly's such a sainted individual and I'm not sure how interested I am in reading Peace's take on that.

It's as reverential as it needs to be but is not blind to the commitment that finally did for him. He knows he is slowly killing himself but never really thinks of himself. Above all it's about Liverpool and socialism and life and death. Beautifully written prose poetry; if I could write a hundredth as well as DP does I'd be more than happy.

Shankly's such a sainted individual and I'm not sure how interested I am in reading Peace's take on that.

Hmmmmmm, or Liverpool FC and Liverpool in general. Someone will undoubtedly get me it for my Christmas!

Jimmy Saville, another possible subject for the pen of David Peace

― Vicious Cop Kills Gentle Fool (Tom D.), Thursday, 8 January 2009 17:59 (4 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...errrrrrrrrr

Actually I think that would be brilliant but it's way too soon and he'd be pilloried.

A sequel about Bob Paisley would be nice.

Let's just throw in Roy Evans and be done with it.

Still waiting on the Geoffrey Boycott one

I went to a d peace q&a and iirc he has done some early work on a Savile story but a completed novel is way, way off. He was really enthusiastic about a boycott book. The only thing he definitely doesn't want to do ever is Hillsborough.

yeah boycott i would read

holy shit red riding

the TV one I mean

everyone otm up thread about the flaws but still p superior stuff IMO despite not hearing any dialogue nor knowing why 1980 was even made tbh nor why nothing was explained and wait are we meant to be cheering for David Morrissey now cos fuck that

but still really enjoyed anyway.

David Morrissey is good.

oh yeah agreed but the character like

ah i can't remember who he was really. totally weird that i followed about 30% of this but still liked it.

just finished GB84 (it only hit US bookshops a few months ago a bit after red or dead's release here). arguably his hardest book to follow aside from nineteen eighty-three but completely worth it. I'd call it his bleakest book, but also arguably his best written.

I've now read all his books except the football ones, bc like GB84 they weren't available easily in the states till recently. are they worth a look? hearing v mixed stuff about red or dead, especially due to its style.

Adaptation(s) of red riding probably deserve more longstanding recognition

i didn't like them very much.

stoked for peace's plans on a novel about geoffrey boycott

red or dead is peace's masterwork for me. but you have to enjoy reading long passages of succinct football results

Hey.
I know I need a late-pass, but I'm 3/4 through the Red Riding novels and am enjoying them, if one can enjoy something so unremittingly bleak. the unanswered questions from book to book and the introduction of a new protagonist with each novel were pretty neat in that they were frustrating at first but I also find the unknown qualities and contexts pretty compelling too.

should i watch the films? opinions seem mixed with most upthread finding them a bit of a drag.

I thought they were brilliant

I've been watching the films, now. They are pretty good! Bordering on very good, but still borderline incomprehsible.

good to see he finally finished the tokyo trilogy. very good ending imo though will likely be incomprehensible to those who weren’t already fans of his style

Red Riding trilogy films are easily watched within the month of free BritBox subscription offer.

red riding movies are good though they definitely feel more like tv movies than movie movies (i know they were produced as tv movies but also shown cinematically). i actually like 1980 the best even though it's a deviation from the "main" plot because i like paddy considine more than the other leads and it has the most sean harris, ie the creepiest creep ever.

guess i should read some david peace

The Robert Sheehan character BJ is Peace’s shout to one of my closest friends, JB. He and Dave grew up together.

oh i might have read tokyo year zero