The Faversham Formulation

Another fine sunny day and hence another trip around the county of Kent. Popped over to Ashford this morning via Faversham.

In Faversham picked up a couple of books from chazzers -

Tom Wolfe “I Am Charlotte Simmons” (Picador)
David Mitchell “Cloud Atlas” (Sceptre)

The latter book I have already read, as it was on my fifty book challenge. One of the best novels I have read this year. I picked it originally from last years Book World Night, but is nice to have it again to read again. I gave the WBN version away.

On the way back from Ashford I stopped in Faversham to nip to the library and bought a couple of withdrawn books from there . I also bought an old 1949 hardback edition of a Charles Dickens book “A Tale of Two Cities” (Oxford University Press).in the alleyway from Preston Street towards the library.

I then took a bus over to Sheerness and picked up three rather literary paperbacks from the Demelza charity shop for a quid in total. Surprised to see such luminous items in a chazzer on the island, until cousin pointed out that people do take holidays there. I doubt much of the inbred residents on Sheppey could make much sense of Margaret Atwood or Milan Kundera for example. Anyway, the three books are -

Margaret Atwood “ Oryx and Crake” (Virago)
Milan Kundera “Immortality” (Faber)
Flann O'Brien “The Third Policeman” (Flamingo).

After dinner, and Eggheads, which clashes with the Meridian news, much to my cousin's annoyance, I retired upstairs to check my emails, add books on to the list and check my sales. Discogs sales have suddenly come back to life , after a few months in the doldrums. I have sold quite a stash of singles, 12” singles and albums recently. I even sold those odd looking AKG headphones for £15 on Ebay..

I also had a large problem with Firefox. It got into some kind of loop and not loading up properly as I entered the internet. In the end I had to delete it and reload it without all my favourites,bookmarks and cookies. Luckily I can remember all my passwords for sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, Dreamwidth,Play, Discogs, Paypal etc. It took awhile but now it is fixed. Infact, it is running better and faster, probably due to less bookmarks and toolbars.

I must admit I prefer Firefox to Internet Explorer or Google as my preferred platform.

My tweets

• Mon, 12:55: One of the 333 buses was late and had to wait almost an hour to get the one to Sittingbourne
• Mon, 12:57: Hence forth to the island of the inbreds
• Mon, 14:27: Done Sheerness now and on the way back to Chez Timmies
• Mon, 14:56: Picked up three paperbacks for a quid on the island and all literary ones so some of them must be able to read well
• Mon, 15:22: Yum a pint of King Goblin before the return
• Mon, 15:24: @spotonetwo who would want a holiday there !!
• Mon, 15:52: Well it has turned out to be a frabjous day
• Mon, 23:28: Sorted out problem with Firefox and now updating blog with word processor
• Mon, 23:43: The Faversham Formulation http://t.co/Oeu3M60M

That is A Fine Goatie

Another generally fine day, marred slightly by a few clouds late afternoon.

Posted some items off this morning, and finished off some reports.

This evening watched the film “The Men Who Stared At Goats” (2009).

A serendipitous marriage of talent in which all hearts seem to beat as one, "The Men Who Stare at Goats" takes Jon Ronson's book about "the apparent madness at the heart of U.S. military intelligence" and fashions a superbly written loony-tunes satire, played by a tony cast at the top of its game. Recalling many similar pics, from "Dr. Strangelove" to "Three Kings," and the screwy so-insane-it-could-be-true illogic of "Catch-22," this is irreverant liberal movie-making with a populist touch, in Coen brothers style.

Coming in at a tight, well-paced 93 minutes, Grant Heslov's second feature clearly benefits from his close working relationship with star George Clooney, following their writing collaboration on "Good Night, and Good Luck." It also benefits from the dense but pacey screenplay by Brit playwright Peter Straughan, whose credits include "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People" and "Mrs. Ratcliffe's Revolution."
"Goats" is officially "inspired" by Ronson's book, which accompanied a three-part documentary series, shown on Channel 4 in late 2004, called "Crazy Rulers of the World," tracing some of the U.S. military more outré ideas for policing the world, terrorism in particular. Straughan's screenplay takes many of the stories from the book -- apparently true, per Ronson, who's made a career from recounting "true tales of everyday craziness" -- and, as a way into the material, invents the character of a small-time, Ann Arbor, Mich.-based journalist, Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), who's desperate to get into Iraq at the time of the Bush invasion.

After a comically cautionary inter title ("More of this is true than you would believe") and an opening gag (repeated, with a variation, at the end) that immediately sets the tone, the first reel is thick with info and time shifts from the present (starting in fall 2002) back to the early '80s, which are a tad difficult to digest on first viewing.

In a nutshell, Wilton, assigned to interview Gus Lacey (Stephen Root), an apparent wacko who claims he has special psychic powers, stumbles across an even crazier story: Back in the '80s, the government had a top-secret unit of "psychic spies" who were trained to kill animals by staring at them. The most gifted of the group, says Lacey, was a certain Lyn Cassady.
Wilton heads for the Middle East in spring 2003, looking for a good war story. Stuck in Kuwait City, he bumps into "Skip" (Clooney), who initially claims to be an Arkansas trashcan salesman but is actually Cassady, who's been reactivated and is on a super-secret black-op mission to Iraq.

As the two bond, and Wilton persuades Cassady to take him along, it's clear Cassady's elevator stops well short of the top floor. Claiming to be a "remote viewer," "Jedi warrior" and several other things in between, Cassady fills Wilton in on the formation 20 years earlier of the New Earth Army, brainchild of a Vietnam vet-turned-New Age hippie, Bill Django (Jeff Bridges, with goatee and pigtail).
In one sequence straight out of the Joseph Heller play book, the U.S. military decided to adopt Django's New Earth manual, written with liberal doses of LSD, as a new template for ways of policing the globe. "We must be the first superpower to have super powers," exhorts Django, setting up a squad of psychics he dubs "warrior monks."

As the pic flip-flops between flashbacks illustrating Cassady's narrative and the present time, the pair get lost in the desert, kidnapped and traded by terrorists, and then lost again in the desert. Meanwhile, the backstory progresses to a point where one new member, Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey), tried to sabotage the NEA, prepping the movie for its acidly funny climax.

Incredibly dense screenplay traverses not only 20 years of U.S. military ambitions, starting in the Reagan era, but also provides its own riffs on such public scandals as Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. What saves it from getting dramatically tripped up by its own populist grandstanding are the leading performances, which motor the movie far more than the messages.

As the completely nuts Cassady, Clooney anchors the movie in a beautifully calibrated demo of comic timing and sheer physical presence. More than just his nebbish straight man, McGregor has some of the best lines, slicing through Clooney's utter self-conviction with a handful of well-chosen words. Bridges, channelling "The Big Lebowski," fits Django like a glove, and Spacey's appearance midway adds some welcome tartness to all the New Age weirdness.

Robert Elswit's beautifully composed widescreen lensing of New Mexico's deserts (standing in for Iraq) and Puerto Rico (repping Vietnam and other locations) is aces, without dominating the characters. Other technical credits, including Tatiana S. Riegel's smoothly succinct editing, are top drawer.

The end titles stresses that though some characters are based on real people (the New Earth Army was reportedly the idea of a certain Col. Jim Channon), the movie is a work of fiction. Yeah, right!