“I adore simple pleasures. They are the last refuge of the complex.” -- Oscar Wilde
I've been thinking a lot about happiness recently (as anyone who read my brief paean to Twin Peaks a couple of weeks ago will know). But not Happiness in the sense of a Utopian impossible-to-attain Permanent State. More along the lines of little chunks of happiness dropped into the whiskey tumbler of my day kind of a way. (Although, ideally, I like to take my happiness neat).
Here are a few of the things which have given little upticks to my Joy levels lately:
Music
I spend the vast majority of my day plugged in, largely to drown out the inane burblings of anyone in my immediate orbit. (Sometimes, I remain plugged in even when nothing is filtering directly into my earholes, so that I can exude just the right amount of “Fuck off and leave me alone” vibes. But, shhh, don’t tell anyone).
I’m a voracious, eclectic listener, but it’s a very specific kind of music that always raises an unbidden smile. I don’t mean in terms of genre - I mean stylistically. Artists or (usually) bands with a sense of performance and theatricality and absurdity and fun. And, of course, some serious chops. To wit:
Earth, Wind & Fire
Ian Dury and the Blockheads
Morris Day and The Time
And then there is the ne plus ultra of third-eye-popping visual-sonic confections - George Clinton, Bootsy Collins and the many members of their Parliafunkidelicment Thang. I mean, damn, just Garry Shider, the Starchild himself, on stage in a nappy was a glorious thing to behold.
Scott Pilgrim vs The Prodigy
I’m a huge fan of Edgar Wright’s Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. I already loved Bryan Lee O’Malley’s books before I saw the movie, and I was excited when the first trailer appeared. Prominent in the trailer is the Prodigy’s Invaders Must Die, which made it Even Better Than I Could Have Possibly Hoped For. But here’s the thing - that track didn't end up in the movie. Fortunately for all of us, an obliging fan has cut together a video for the song consisting exclusively of footage from the movie. Prepare to feel the wrath of the League of the Evil Exes! Here is the epic Scott Pilgrim vs The Prodigy:
The Mr. Men
I never really stopped reading Roger Hargreaves’ Mr. Men books. I tend to rediscover them anew every couple of years, losing myself in their deceptive simplicity. (It still saddens me that I don’t live in a world where worms stick their heads out of the ground to say Hello.) A lot of the early Mr. Men animations seem to have popped up on YouTube in the last few years, giving me the opportunity to revel in the expressive, reassuringly avuncular narration of Arthur Lowe whilst humming the infectiously catchy theme tune by Joe Campbell and Tony Hymas.
Of course, all of these things are largely passive pursuits. I just sit back and let the entertainment splash against my pleasure centres. There is a raft of other things I actively do get serotonin sloshing through me, but this is starting to run long enough as it is. I’ll save all of that for some other time.
The only time in my life that I went to the cinema with my entire family (my father, my mother, my younger brother and me) was to see Back to the Future. I was thirteen-years-old.
When the film finished, I was so exhilarated by the experience and fizzing with excitement that I ran from the cinema to the carpark in ecstatic joy. Anybody who knows me now (or knew me then) would know how staggeringly uncharacteristic of me that is. I don’t really do running. Why run when walking still gets you to the same place, unruffled and sweat-free?
My father died the following year, so it was a once in a lifetime family outing. Jump into the DeLorean of my memories and arrive twenty-five years later. It is 2010, and Back to the Future has been re-released theatrically. My daughter was six-years old. She’d already seen all three Back to the Future films many, many times over at home. But never on a big screen. So we went.
Towards the end of the film, my daughter started awkwardly rocking back and forth. The apple juice she’d been guzzling for the last couple of hours had finally finished making its way through her. I leaned over and whispered:
“Do you need to go to the toilet?”
“Yes!”
“Well, come on then, I’ll take you.”
“No! Not yet!”
And so she sat there in a state of obvious discomfort, and rocked. But she wasn't going to let a full bladder stop her from hearing eight words that she really needed to hear. Not wanted. Needed.
“Roads? Where we're going, we don't need roads.”
And with that, she suddenly stood up and said that, Yes, we could go now.
That’s my girl.
Which is a long-winded way of saying that Back to the Future has always loomed large in my family history. From my father to the granddaughter he never got to meet. So, leaving aside how much I love it as a work of cinema, it also holds great nostalgic, personal, almost talismanic sway over me.
Maybe all of that goes some small way towards explaining why I've been so utterly charmed by Sydney Freeland’s short film Hoverboard. Partly because it’s about a little girl so deeply in love with Back to the Future Part II (which also happens to be my daughter’s favourite film in the trilogy). And partly because it is about conjuring up the things we love through invention, imagination and sheer passion. But don’t let me project my emotional attachments on to it too much - watch it yourself. Here you go:
Like Marty and Doc’s adventures in the many ages of Hill Valley, memories aren't linear, so let’s go back in time just once more. In 1989, four years after The One and Only Family Cinema Outing, I went to see Back to the Future Part II. It wasn't the same cinema, but it was half-way up the same road. It was a small screen and there was hardly anybody in there. I went with a school friend, and we sat sprawled out watching the film, munching on popcorn and passing a small bottle of vodka back and forth between us. As much as I enjoyed the film, it was a weekday afternoon that held none of the magic or allure of that evening four years earlier. I was a different person at a different time in my life. A seventeen-year-old idiot swigging neat vodka in a cinema. I preferred the thirteen-year-old Me. The one running to the car after going to the movies with his dad.
To this day, I've still never seen Back to the Future Part III on a large screen. This could fill me with regret but, if these films have ever taught me anything, it is that history (my story) can and does always change.
Trying something new, with the first in an occasional series listing some of the things I've tripped over on my online travels in recent weeks.
Nate Thayer’s A Day in the Life of a Freelance Journalist - 2013 popped at the beginning of last week, raising that perennial bugbear about writers getting paid for their work. Thayer made a reasonable point, although I felt that the force of his point was somewhat diluted by the fact that he sounded like a bit of a douchebag when he attacked rookie editor Olga Khazan of The Atlantic, just for asking a simple question.
Senior Editor at The Atlantic Alexis Madrigal fired back with A Day in the Life of a Digital Editor, 2013. Madrigal made some valid and interesting points about the realities of publishing economics. But, again, I think he missed his target and it doesn't really address the issue of fair remuneration for jobbing writers. Nevertheless, both sides of the argument had merit and raised various points worth debating. (I’d recommend scrolling down to the comments to read Clay Shirky’s contribution to the discussion).
But, hold on a minute! What’s this? The story took an unexpected swerve when Jeremy Duns joined the fray. A desire for payment in return for written work is all well and good...as long as you actually wrote the damn thing and didn't just brazenly plagiarise someone else’s work. In a pair of blog posts unambiguously titled Nate Thayer is a plagiarist and How Nate Thayer plagiarizes, Duns presented compelling and persuasive evidence to suggest that the original article by Thayer that The Atlantic wanted to run in a somewhat truncated form was, in fact, a work of plagiarism. Oh snap!
(The carousel hasn't stopped spinning just yet, bear with me.) It took Cord Jefferson at Gawker to pull all this distracting drama back to the central argument that kicked this all off in the first place, in the piece When People Write for Free, Who Pays? Lots of words had been written bouncing off this crucial point at slightly-off angles, but Jefferson nails it, boiling it all down to this: "What kind of writing community do we cultivate by not paying writers?"
On a related note, Tanner Colby analyses the journalistic ethics and biases of Bob Woodward with specific reference to his book Wired: The Short Life and Fast Times of John Belushi in a superb piece for Slate. All the President’s Men (co-written with Carl Bernstein) is now seen as a landmark in investigative journalism, but “Wired was so wrong, Belushi’s manager said, it made you think Nixon might be innocent.” Colby states “a lot of what Woodward writes comes off as being not quite right—some of it to the point where it can feel quite wrong.”
Some more quick hits of online goodness:
Coffitivity - the ambient sounds of a coffee shop because “the mix of calm and commotion in an environment like a coffee house is proven to be just what you need to get those creative juices flowing.”
Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac is almost upon us, and The Independent has an interview with one of its stars, Stacy Martin. Worth reading for the Stellan Skarsgård quote alone, stating that Nymphomaniac will be "sexually explicit but, believe me, it will be a very bad wanking movie".
"Diane, 11:30 am, February twenty-fourth. Entering the town of Twin Peaks."
I watched Twin Peaks when it first aired on BBC2 in 1990. One episode a week. One episode at a time. Right up until the end. And, like so many others, I was in its thrall from the very beginning. And yet...
I have resisted revisiting Twin Peaks since that very first time. Sure, sometimes I weaken and I’ll dip into an episode or catch a clip on YouTube, but I try not to. As much as I love it (and I love it a lot), I sort of don’t want to watch it ever again. For some reason I can’t really articulate, I feel like repeated exposure to that magnificent place will somehow dilute its potency and mystery.
I've been thinking about Twin Peaks a lot in the last couple of weeks. Recently, I've been feeling particularly tired (even by my standards) and burnt-out and I’m struggling to shake it. But, whenever it hits me, I recall one of the many highpoints that I still remember vividly from my all-too-brief stay in that unusual lumber town in the Pacific Northwest, and it always gives me a little lift. It goes like this:
"Harry, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Every day, once a day, give yourself a present. Don’t plan it, don’t wait for it, just let it happen. It could be a new shirt at the men's store, a catnap in your office chair or two cups of good hot black coffee. Like this."
One last morsel from that zen detective. Smart fella, that Dale Cooper:
"All things considered, being shot is not as bad as I always thought it might be. As long as you can keep the fear from your mind. But I guess you can say that about almost anything in life. Its not so bad as long as you can keep the fear from your mind."
On Tuesday evening, after being disgorged from the gaping maw of the Tottenham Court Road Station Construction Site, I settled down at Foyles to infect myself with a concentrated dose of Warren Ellis. Here are just a few of the best bits:
Following on from the “experiment” of his first novel Crooked Little Vein (“an exercise in discovering whether I could write a book”), Gun Machine was borne out of a desire to write about “old, weird America” and to show that “history is leaking up through the streets of New York as well”. (After all, publishers “don’t really care much for things set in Southend”). Ellis finds America “endlessly fascinating", referring to the idea of “the American Experiment” and observing that: “When you have a country that big full of that many people with that kind of cultural and financial pressure-cooker, you’re going to get some very strange chemical reactions happening.”
“It was definitely always going to be a book. The things that I wanted to do with this story were not going to work in a comic, not least because I knew I wanted to write a protagonist that was very internal, which can be quite difficult to do in any depth in comics, not least because it means you’re asking your artist (who you have to be aware of at all times) to draw eighteen pages of headshots.”
"Prose is almost like a theatre of the mind - it doesn't come alive for you until you're given the freedom to imagine the pictures yourself."
“If you walk around London with any kind of awareness of where you are and what’s around you, you do get the sense that everything is built on something else, and there are maps superimposed on maps all over the city, and you’re walking through several histories at once.”
“The most loathsome characters I've written are the ones that people want to see again. I've had twelve years of 'When are you going to bring Spider Jerusalem back?' I wouldn't give that bastard house room.”
“I grew up reading 2000AD and that taught me that the job of a writer is to generate new stories all the time, finding things to say and respond to time as it progresses...The idea of bending all my output to service, of all things, company-owned mythologies just seems weird to me.”
“Dad would buy me Superman comics and so forth, but it just didn’t compare to opening the first issue of 2000AD and seeing a fucking great dinosaur showing you a mouth full of chewed-up cowboy and a ray-gun dangling from a severed arm. American comics were all over for me at that point. I was nine...this was like giving me a full crack pipe.”
“Predictions, in general, are a mug’s game. It’s one of the reasons why people have such a downer on science fiction these days, because most science fiction has failed to predict the present day. Surprise surprise. 'Science fiction, that’s a bit shit, isn't it? Where were you five years before the mobile phone was everywhere, you and your rocket ships?' I don't think of science fiction as a predictive genre and I really try and avoid prediction, not least because it will help me look less stupid. I tell you what, though, the Apple iWatch is gonna be crap.”
On writing:
“Get it out in front of you so that you can have a good look at it. You've got to write and write and write, and then read it. Write something and then literally put it in a drawer for a month in a sealed envelope and set a reminder. Look at it with enough distance and see what you did wrong. And then repeat and repeat and eventually you’ll get all the bad words out and you’ll get to the good words.”
"I hate everything I've written ten minutes after I've written it"
"You're only as good as the available you on that day. If the available you on that day only got five hours sleep with a cat sat on your head, then that limits how good you’re going to be that day.”
On structure: “Don’t live and die by the skeleton, give yourself space to freestyle because you may end up going somewhere better.”
Last Friday, I attended The Story, London’s annual one-day conference about stories and storytelling at Conway Hall in Holborn. After taking my seat, armed with a bag of Witches’ Brews courtesy of the Ministry of Stories and Hoxton Street Monster Supplies, I noticed the words above the stage: “To thine own self be true”, the advice that Polonious gives his son Laertes in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet. (Took me a while to get the gag...the line from Hamlet begins “this above all: to thine own self be true”. This. Above All. Geddit?)
Those words hold special significance for me, as it was the motto of a man who was like a second father to me. He strived and succeeded to live by those words. Those six words could similarly apply to the speakers who took the stage throughout the day at The Story. In a whirl of dense twenty minute chunks, the whole day was rammed with information that has only just finished percolating through my headmeat three days later. Here is a random smattering of my personal highlights of a day that was full of ‘em:
Producer Rebecca O'Brien spoke of her most recent collaboration with director Ken Loach, the forthcoming part archive footage, part talking heads documentary The Spirit of ‘45. Somewhat inspired by Terence Davies’s Of Time and the City and conceived as a way of keeping Loach “out of trouble”, the film documents life in post-war Britain, with O'Brien wrapping up with the killer line: “Kids learn about the war, but they don't learn about the peace”. So much interview footage didn't make it to the finished film, but will find a home at the film’s website.
Laura Dockrill gave a relentlessly passionate, ebullient and energetic performance of an excerpt from her first Darcy Burdock novel (to be published on Thursday 28 February), complete with a convincing portrayal of an octopus. (The octopus was going to have an Australian accent, but her husband told her that would be too distracting). She then went on to discuss her discovery that many of the children she meets are convinced that a career in writing is something that is unattainable to them. She is dedicated to proving to them that (and I’m paraphrasing here) writing isn't the sole preserve of lesbians, vegetarians and old people. She likes to remind them: “If you can talk, you can write.”
Artist Molly Crabapple gave a rousing speech full of eminently quotable soundbites. Here are just a few of them: “Nothing makes you think about money and power more than posing naked in jam for dentists with cameras.” “Artists are blue-collar workers with pretensions to the sublime.” And, as a closing statement and a call to arms: “Use what you love to interrogate the world”.
Ben Bocquelet is the man behind the Greatest Show on Television. The Amazing World of Gumball. Yes, The Amazing World of Gumball is even better than Breaking Bad. I've known this for quite some time now. And by the time his twenty minutes were up, everyone seated in the auditorium knew it too. For some people, it was the breathtaking and insanely detailed denouement of the wonderful episode The Job that sealed the deal. For others, it might have been the dancing banana:
Without a doubt, The Amazing World of Gumball must be an incredibly complex and time-intensive show to make, which is why Bocquelet exhorted us all to "please make sure you do something you love, that way you know it will turn out good". And on the subject of time...
Stop-motion animator Mikey Please discussed the way in which “we experience time as a fraction". He pointed out that stop-motion animation is a fine metaphor for this. He works on something for ages, just to end up with a few seconds of footage, “like running through treacle.” But the jumping off point for this train of thought was his fourth birthday party: “When I was four, I was told I had to wait a year for my next birthday party – a quarter of my life at the time. I flipped out.” All of his thoughts about the relative passage of time were poured into his short film The Eagleman Stag which you can watch here.
Fiona Romeo gave a fascinating talk about something that I hadn't ever really thought about before: the way in which museums think about narrative and story to propel people through exhibits in a compelling and engaging way, with particular reference to the High Arctic installation at the National Maritime Museum, and The Science of Spying which appeared at the Science Museum in 2007. The creation and gestation of these projects in turn inspired some of the individuals involved to create further narratives based on their work, such as Cory Doctorow’s novel Little Brother. It was also interesting to hear Romeo talking about adopting the Walt Disney theme park idea of “plussing” - finding ways to improve upon an idea even when you think you've done everything you can with it. (There's a great write-up of Fiona's speech by David Cornish for Wired here.)
Writer and academic Alice Bell has always been fascinated with the history of poo in children’s books. Which led to the observation that “we call it ‘kid’s media’, but it's made and designed by adults”, arguing that performers like Timmy Mallett are taking part in a kind of “generational drag” - adults who dress up and behave like children in a way that children never actually do. The revelation for me was discovering that Don Cheadle appeared as Captain Planet in a series of Funny or Die videos. Like this one (which has embedding disabled. Damn you, Captain Planet!)
The day ended with a blistering and very funny rant from B3ta co-founder Rob Manuel on that pernicious phrase “the bottom half of the internet”. As in “ignore the bottom half of the internet” or “don’t read the comments”. In an all-too compelling, excoriating tirade (in addition to adding the word “commentard” to my vocabulary), Manuel tossed out the following: “The 'bottom half of the Internet' is like the servants' quarters below the house.” "The word troll is the equivalent of chav for cyberspace. It's a loaded term, used to demonise those without power" "The bottom half of the Internet is the people!" "Media, don't kick down, kick up. The work could disappear and you could end up at the bottom of the Internet" “Lob word bombs at the top of the page” "Fight back: Don't retweet the top half of the Internet."
But that doesn't do him justice and certainly doesn't capture his vitriolic energy. Click here to read his “Open Letter to Columnists” on the same subject.
I've barely scratched the surface. I haven’t even written about how great it was to see Edwyn Collins singing and talking and recalling how he found his way back after his stroke in 2005, which led him to last year’s album Losing Sleep and the work-in-progress documentary In Your Voice, In Your Heart. But it’s impossible to capture everything from that day in one blogpost. You had to be there. The countdown to The Story 2014 starts here...
"While you’re waiting at the bus-stop (expect five minutes between vehicles, according to the flickering sign - more like ten if you account for traffic jams) you put on your specs and log in to the daily news flow.”
Today’s desirable technological innovation rapidly becomes the unremarkable accessory of tomorrow’s everyday drudgery. Science fiction becomes science fact in the space of a few swift revolutions of the news cycle. If you’re reading this on the screen of something the size of a cigarette packet that you just pulled out of your pocket then, on some level, you already understand this. Which is both incredibly exciting and a real shame all at the same time.
Having one of those weeks where everything is much, much harder than it should be. Instead of fighting it, I’m leaning into the curve. Which is how I find myself poking through some old files and excavating stuff that I clipped for future reference. I guess that future must have arrived, because I’m hurling some of the more interesting chunks up here. Let the Copy-And-Paste Fun Begin!
"We’re deathly afraid of that stabbing word “pretentious,” the word that students use to curse each other’s ambition. It’s a young person’s word, a shortcut-to-thinking word. I’m a big fan of pretension. It means “an aspiration or intention that may or may not reach fulfillment.” It doesn't mean failing upward. It means trying to exceed your grasp. Which is how things grow." Warren Ellis
"In film, because you know where the ending is, characters can change, but in television, you substitute revelation for change and that can be hard to pull off." Hugh Laurie on Gregory House
"Most directors make films with their eyes; I make films with my testicles." Alejandro Jodorowsky
"He’s a sperm-filled waxwork with the eyes of a masturbator." Federico Fellini on why Donald Sutherland was his perfect choice for the role of Casanova.
"When I write, I must not censor my own imagery or connections. I must not worry about what critics will say, what leftists will say, what environmentalists will say. I must ignore all that. If I listen to all those voices I will be paralyzed, because none of this can be resolved. I have to go back to the voice that spoke before all these structures were imposed on it, and let it speak these terrible truths. By being irresponsible I will be responsible." David Cronenberg
"Tomorrow’s Sam Fuller won’t emerge via Sundance: he/she’ll be shooting porn in Rio or Rotterdam for obscure satellite channels." Chris Petit
"Quality is the best business plan." John Lasseter
"It’s not the job of fiction to present people with whom one might like to be friends." Zoë Heller
"Actually, I jade very quickly. Once is usually enough. Either once only, or every day. If you do something once it’s exciting, and if you do it every day it’s exciting. But if you do it, say, twice or just almost every day, it’s not good any more.” Andy Warhol
You know that thing when, if you’re looking directly at something, you just can’t see it? Well, my hindbrain is ticking away trying to put some bits and pieces together whilst I hurl fistfuls of Haribo into my mouth. To distract myself and stop me from paying too much attention to what’s going on back there, my forebrain thought I should do something completely different - which is why I'm chucking down some brief impressions of the films I’ve seen this year so far.
Don Siegel made a slew of my favourite movies of all time: Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dirty Harry. Escape From Alcatraz. Charley Varrick. The Shootist. But this minor, early B-movie was made long before any of those, back in his journeyman director days, before the legend “A Siegel Film” really meant something.
The tagline pretty much says it all: “Mitchum is HOT! - HOT...off location in the heart of Mexico...HOT...after a girl with a million-dollar figure!...HOT...at the nation's boxoffices...HOT...in his newest picture!”
The selling point is Bob Mitchum tossing off one-liners on a location shoot in Mexico. The entire plot is a MacGuffin. Something about money and thieves and guns and chases. That’s all that really matters. Mitchum drawls and charms just the way we like it, William Bendix snarls and chews the scenery as the Heavy, and Ramon Novarro almosts steals the picture away from both of them as a pragmatic, self-serving Mexican police inspector. Fluffy, forgettablefun.
If you stripped away the non-linear storytelling and this played out chronologically, it would reveal that this isn’t quite as interesting as it thinks it is. And I’d guess that the most fascinating elements probably only pay-off if you have some rudimentary knowledge of the Manson Family and their modus operandi. That makes it sound like I didn’t like it. I did - there’s something quietly menacing that permeates the whole thing that I liked a lot. And, yes, John Hawkes is great. He is always great.
There were enough bizarre, unusual and grisly set-pieces in this Australian slasher to keep my interest, but I couldn’t help feeling that it didn’t add up to a great deal by the time the end credits rolled. It almost feels like they deliberately set out to make a particularly quirky, kitsch chapter in the Saw series.
Asia Argento gives a fantastically committed and supremely watchable performance in a film that just doesn’t deserve it. Frustratingly enough, there is the kernel of something worthwhile here - how people, money and information are moved around the world, illicitly or otherwise, all wrapped up in the superficial trappings of a psychosexual thriller - but the execution destroys it. Michael Madsen sleepwalks through his scenes with a very odd, detached energy about his performance. Too many scenes are hobbled by weird, counterintuitive camera placement and staging, doused with sterile soap-opera lighting and choked by ponderous, ultimately fruitless conversations that don’t do the film any favours. (Having said all that, I heartily recommend Steven Shaviro’s robust defence of the film. He almost convinced me that I’d badly misjudged it. And, to be fair, Boarding Gate is better than Assayas’ next feature, the noodling middle-class navel-gazing of L'heure d'été.)
As much as I'd like to avoid using a hackneyed, overused and abused word like “masterpiece”, there’s really just no point. This is a masterpiece. My first big-screen outing of the year - a 35mm presentation at London’s Prince Charles Cinema, complete with Intermission. And it was phenomenal. It was the sound that really got me. I could feel it vibrating right through me towards the end. Co-writer Arthur C. Clarke once commented, "If you understand 2001 completely, we failed. We wanted to raise far more questions than we answered." Don’t worry, Arthur, 2001 is still sufficiently opaque, and dazzling with it.
Almost perfect. Lumet behind the camera. Sean Connery bold enough to dispense with a toupee for the first time on screen. A spiky, beautiful turn from Dyan Cannon. The score by Quincy Jones bounces between the dissonant bleeps of obsolete telecommunications kit and upbeat, funky jazz appropriate for a great heist movie. “And introducing Christopher Walken”.
I said “almost perfect”. Perfection would be a double-bill of The Anderson Tapes and The Hot Rock.
It doesn’t bother me that this breaks with the format of the series and isn’t part of the continuing saga of Michael Myers. What bugs me is that this should be scary, or funny, or both. And it’s none of those things. At one point, it could have been blessed with the credits: Written by Nigel Kneale and directed by Joe Dante. That could have been something very special indeed. Instead, we have this stinker. And I still can’t get that excruciatingly irritating “Silver Shamrock” jingle out of my head. (I nearly posted a YouTube clip of it here, but that would just be cruel).
