Of Time and The city review
I’ve never been to Liverpool, but my knowledge is a short pop culture potpourri of the Beatles, KKevinKeegan, Harry Enfield and a bloke being arrested in a documentary shouting ‘MOIRDER!’ in the trailers. It was on BBC2. Born and raised in London, I have spent most of my life buoyed with the ego of being raised in the capital. I have moved to other cities. Paris and Edinburgh, respectively. I know I’m a city dweller, but I have only realised the incident of that capital privilege in recent years.
My folks met in Glasgow for a start in the 60s. Even before then, my mum came to England via Ireland as a teenager, arriving in Liverpool and bringing her sense of church duty like many others. At this point, Terence’s narration comes into effect as I can’t help but think what other life may have been for her and myself. Or my ‘more typical’ self.
Mainly made of archive footage denoting the lifetime of Terence, from his early formative years and yearnings for himself against the teaching of the church, right up to contemporary Liverpool, right down to shopping centres, forbidden Planet bags, and the young 20seomthings of the city getting ready to go out in bere their dresses and every present yellow jacket of security.
It’s a fascinating use of editing in cinema. The soundtrack primarily focuses on Terence’s human and classical music passions, but his voice is very frail.
He loves his city at once, but you can feel the bitter heart beating in his verbs. Damned by the church and the state, he regales us his furtive fumblings while launching himself into the elaborate and sardonic musings typical of the radio he listens to.
With a brother listening to football, a sense of jam sandwiches, and working-class life. It’s a stern voice to trust. On one level, he is light and detached; on the other, there is a sense of superiority over his working-class peers, as is often the case with an individual who discovers or gains some mobility to at once be harsh with more criticism than those of a middle-class background.
It’s done with consistent aplomb; his notions come from entertainment. The brutalist archetcutrue is not shied from.
But childhood is not just one that makes me think of Mum. As we see the world and, as a consequence, our narrator grows, we slowly move to the colour world of my brother. Ostensibly to take us to 1973, when Terence left. My brother was born in ‘69, and the children in the features could have been him or me, over-wrapped in anoraks n the summertime and giddying through life with no sense of the work and cost our parents put into us.
Even during our stop in the cave with john paul George and Ringo, they are not the patron saints of Liverpudlian youth; Terence spurns them for his need for classics. Also, drawing the question, he could not be modern and thus more self-accepting now.
It’s a meditation and melancholic as much a portrait with actions of a man and a lovely way to spend an afternoon as one can question. Is it the city that shapes a man? Or our needs that can mould and progress it.
Seek it out and visit a mindscape of quality, legacy and heritage that you won’t find crafting in a mine.
The Irish Indian Times. 