Finding Joe.

I couldn’t find anything on the telly worth watching last night, so I went on Youtube and found a very interesting film called Finding Joe which I watched all the way through. It was a documentary style film based on the work of somebody I had never heard of before called Joseph Campbell. He was an American professor of literature who worked in the field of comparative religions and mythology. His most famous book was called The Hero With A Thousand Faces (1949) in which he discussed the archetypal hero in world mythology’s which he called the Monomyth. He was saying that all the great stories from various countries around the world were basically telling the same story. The Odyssey, King Arthur & The Knights Of The Round Table, The Legend Of Gilgamesh were all similar. Even in the more modern era tales like Moby Dick or The Wizard Of Oz are the same story of a hero or heroine leaving home, going on a journey, fighting a dragon, and returning home. George Lucas has said that he based Star Wars on the ideas of Joseph Campbell. The term Monomyth Campbell actually borrowed from James Joyce.  Ulysses by Joyce was based  on The Odyssey. The work of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud was also a big influence on Campbell. Purely by chance in 1924 onboard a ship from Europe to America he met and talked with Jiddu Krishnamurti which gave him an interest in Indian wisdom.

The message of the film was that people should go on their own journeys and defeat their own dragons. The dragon in mythology is symbolic of fear. The film said that too many people are just a bundle of conditioned reflexes living in a society that is like mass hypnosis. People just do what they are told and trudge through life for the sake of security. Life should be a call to adventure. One of Campbell’s best-known sayings was ‘Follow your bliss’. That means that people should find out what they really enjoy doing and follow their dreams and do it. Don’t be a tiger living like a sheep. As Nietzsche said,’ The snake that cannot shed it’s skin will perish’. 

There were some famous people in the film talking about how they followed their dreams, such as Mick Fleetwood who said that all he wanted to do as a kid was play the drums, so he did, and became world famous. There was also a skateboarder called Tony Hawks talking about overcoming his fears to do things on a skateboard that nobody had ever done before. These people didn’t set out to be world famous, they did things because they enjoyed it. The message is that if people overcome the fear of the unknown then the universe will open doors where previously there were just walls. There were some great sayings in the film, such as,’ Every – is a + waiting for vertical awareness’. Anyway, I enjoyed the film and I think it is the sort of film they should show to children to inspire them to follow their dreams. If you want to see it, just go on Youtube, search for Finding Joe. 

Sandy Denny & Fairport Convention, Matty Groves.

Elizabeth Cotten - Freight Train (Rare Live Performance)

Fotheringhay.

I never left the house yesterday, there was no need, and the weather was bad anyway. I don’t think I’ll be going out today either. I watched a film from 2018 on the telly last night called Mary Queen Of Scots. I didn’t think it was that great, but I watched it to the end. The performances of Saoirse Ronan as Mary and Margot Robbie as Elizabeth 1 of England were very good, and David Tennant was quite fearsome as John Knox, but overall, I thought it was a bit tedious. It was full of historical inaccuracies as well. There is one scene where Mary meets Elizabeth. There is no historical evidence that they ever met. Also, Mary had spent most of her life since early childhood in France. She had been married to Francis the Dauphin Of France until his death in 1560, so she would have had a French accent, but in the film she had a Scottish accent. Another thing I thought was a bit silly is that the director Josie Rourke insisted on some of the roles being played by black actors. I totally agree with diversity and equality, and acting roles should reflect society, but to have black actors playing white people just to be politically correct is patronising in my opinion. It is as silly as white actors playing roles that should be given to black people.

Od Scarlett

I watched it to the end is because I have always felt a kind of link to Mary Queen Of Scots. The reason for that is because she met her tragic end in 1587 when she was executed at Fotheringhay which is a little village near my hometown of Peterborough. She was buried in Peterborough Cathedral until her son James 1 had her reburied in Westminster Abbey in 1612 after he ascended to the throne. The sexton who buried her in Peterborough was known as Old Scarlett and he also buried another Queen Of England in Peterborough Cathedral, who was Catherine Of Aragon the first wife of Henry V111. There is a portrait of Old Scarlett by the West door of the cathedral. legend has it that he was the inspiration for the gravedigger in Hamlet by William Shakespeare. There is no proof of that, but Shakespeare did collaborate with another playwright John Fletcher whose father had been Dean of Peterborough Cathedral. Fletcher would have known Old Scarlett because he attended the Kings School Peterborough which in those days was located at the cathedral. I also went to Kings School, but that was from 1963 to 1970. Incidentally, a good friend of mine gave me an antique print of the picture of Old Scarlett which I framed and is now on my wall at home.

Another little link I have with Mary is that one of my favourite bands Fairport Convention recorded a fabulous song about her called Fotheringay on their second album What We Did On Our Holidays. (They slightly misspelled the name) I have shared it below if you want to hear it, I think you should.  It was written by the great Sandy Denny, and when Sandy left the band she formed another group which she also called Fotheringay. So, that is partly why I watched the film last night. I can’t think of anything else to say about it now. See you tomorrow.

Peterborough Cathedral.

  

Ed Sheeran & Joy Crookes - Raglan Road.

Slouching Towards 2022.

I haven’t written anything for a few days, so I thought I would pass the time on this grey windy Thursday afternoon by writing something. Although the weather is quite miserable here, it is ridiculously mild for the time of year, 14 degrees C at the moment. I hope you have had a good Christmas. It has been very quiet for me. I have avoided the pub this week because of Omicron sweeping through the country. I think you would almost certainly catch it in crowded pubs.

I saw on the BBC News just before Christmas that the American writer Joan Didion has died aged 87. I heard the news with a feeling of sadness and regret. The regret was that although I have owned two of her books, I didn't read them. When I said on my blog page a couple of years ago that I had found a first edition of her book South And West, From A Notebook, a good friend of mine recommended that I read The Year Of Magical Thinking which was a Pulitzer Prize winning book inspired by the death of her husband John Gregory Dunne and the severe illness of her daughter Quintana. I never got around to reading it unfortunately.

However, to try and make amends, three days ago I found my paperback copy of Slouching Towards Bethlehem and because there wasn’t anything on the TV worth watching I started to read it. It is her first nonfiction book, published in 1968 and is a collection of essays that she had written for various magazines such as Vogue and The Saturday Evening Post. I was pleased to see that the title of the book comes from a poem The Second Coming by W.B. Yeats. (That poem also mentions a rough beast which is where I think Van Morrison might have got the song title Rough God Goes Riding from, but that is by the by) The book is divided into three sections, and so far I have read the first section called Life Styles In The Golden Land which is mainly about the authors experiences in California in the 1960s. The first essay concerns her coverage of the murder trial of a woman called Lucille Miller who was found guilty of killing her husband when he was asleep in a car. Her motive was the double indemnity insurance if death appears to be an accident. The wife of the man she was having an affair with also died in strange circumstances, but no action was taken against her lover. The article was originally published in 1966, so there is no account of what happened to Lucille Miller subsequently. The story intrigued me, so thanks to google and Wikipedia I found out that Lucille was released after seven years and died in 1986. 

The next essay is called John Wayne, A Love Song and concerns her observations of John Wayne and Dean Martin filming The Sons Of Katie Elder. Joan said in her article in the September 15, 1965, edition of Vogue magazine, “This is an old-fashioned action Western. Very old-fashioned... In fact, I have a good time at movies like Katie Elder. I like the country and I like John Wayne and I like Dean Martin and I like gunfights. If you don’t, don’t bother”. Where The Kissing Never Stops is a story about Joan Baez and a school which she founded in California called The Institute for Non-Violence. Comrade Laski is about the American Communist Party. 7,000 Romaine, Los Angeles 38 is about Howard Hughes and what he represents. I think Joan Didion found these subjects interesting because by observing them she is wondering what they say about American society, or all western societies. Marrying Absurd looks at the crazy wedding chapels in places like Las Vegas and Reno Nevada. The title story Slouching Towards Bethlehem Joan Didion saw as the most important in this collection. She became acquainted with the kids of the counterculture of Haight-Ashbury San Francisco in 1967. 

It is not a rosy picture that she paints. In the introduction she says that meeting these people proved that ‘things fall apart’. I wonder if she changed her view in later years. I know there were some really bad things that happened, such as when she witnessed a five-year-old child that had been given LSD, and then there was heroin and people like Charles Manson. I think despite the bad stuff, some good things did evolve from the hippy movement, such as Greenpeace, Friends Of The Earth, spiritual growth, vegetarianism, many other things and don’t forget, some great music. I have read 110 pages so far and have two sections of the book still to read, called Personals and Seven Places Of The Mind. I’ll try and finish the book in the next few days. I’m only sorry that it took the death of Joan Didion to prompt me to read her work. Happy New Year.

Bill Nighy. Wild Mountain Thyme.