I so want this to be a great post. It would be so handy if this was a great post. But I’ve got no game tonight. I’ve had no game for approximately five months now, I’ve felt emotionally drained, creatively spent, like I just had to press on to this final post like a long-distance runner limping towards the finish line, long since lapped but determined to complete the race.
But here we are, regardless, at the end. And I cross. And it is done.
Hello, by the way. I’m Rob, and I set myself the goal of quitting boozing and writing a blog post about it every day for a year.
I set myself that goal 365 days ago today.
I wrote about addiction, and depression, and growing up with acne. I also wrote about eldritch cults, bank holidays, and the boss of Wetherspoons. I wrote essays about Apu from the Simpsons. I wrote dumb movie scenes. Dumb songs. Dumb I don't know whats. And I wrote one or two film reviews, as well.
Screw it, I’ll do a big old analysis/lessons to take away blog post sometime soon. I don’t have the energy tonight. I’ve made it over the line. Put a foil blanket round me, squirt Lucozade Sport into my mouth, hug me and tell me I did OK. Then take me to that big bed in Elrond’s house where everything is white and overexposed, and let me sleep for a month.
Yes, the Rivendell thing feels apt. I’ve pushed myself out of the comfort zone of my Shire, made it to the meeting spot that was arranged, ever pursued by Black Riders, and now I need to collapse.
But it will only be a rejuvenating stop off; there is a longer journey ahead. I’m going to get through the Snooker World Championship, the busiest fortnight in my pub, then I’m going to give myself a week to recover, to wander in the gardens of the world, taking photos, drinking coffee, reading, refilling the creative well - and then it’s back to work.
I’m going to redesign my blog. I’m going to continue writing every day, but move to posting only once or twice a week. Perhaps one film review, and one mental health/mindfulness/life musings piece. It’s been such an important exercise to be forced to post something loose and unfinished and often just plain bad every single day, and let it go, and move on - I needed to face the fear that sits at the root of my perfectionism, to show that the world doesn’t end and you aren’t run out of town on a rail just for making bad art. But having experienced that, Christ am I looking forward to having more time to actually sculpt my writing, rather than simply vomiting it onto the page and flinging it at the internet.
There are other things I need to do as well. It’s time I pushed myself further in my life. I need to start seeing a therapist, because I’m willing to admit I don’t have the strength to overcome my mental health issues on my own. And that is absolutely natural, and fine, and right. But I need to stop talking about it and get it arranged.
I need to learn to drive. It’s not like I can afford a car, or insurance, or petrol, or even those little furry dice - but it does feel like a mark of adulthood, a coming-of-age event, and if I’m being honest I’ve put it off for so long out of fear, and facing fear is the only way you can grow.
I need to sort out my skin. I’ve had acne since I was 14, and only the strongest drug you can take for it, Roaccutane, cleared me up when I was 24. But, as with the majority of patients, the spots eventually started to come back. I had five years completely clear, then the acne has been creeping back ever since. I’m using another treatment now, but it involves smearing cream all over my body every night, which is far from ideal. It’s not hugely efficacious, and it only masks rather than cures the spots; it’s like snipping up the biggest weeds in an overgrown flower bed every day, where Roaccutane is like altering the makeup of the soil.
All of which is to say I want to go through another course of the Roaccutane. It’s a horrible drug, and has a list of side effects long as your arm, but it was easily the right decision the first time, and most dermatologists seem to agree that a second course is no worse.
And what else? I want to get myself to a stage where I feel confident making money from writing and photography. Not all the money, and I’d be happy making none - but I don’t want to feel like what I create is too weird and insular and ugly to even try to sell to anyone, which is how I feel now. This is one of the things with which I think a therapist could help.
There are more, of course. And there is more to write. But it is late now, and I have work tomorrow, and it will be another tiring Snooker shift.
So it is goodnight, and goodbye, and, for just a little while, the end.
Stay lovely. And one last:
Hug xxx
Saturday 27 April 2019
Day 364: Lampglow
In bed with the wool blanket over the covers, the old covers from bottom of washing basket over the wool blanket, with my toes shivering. I've always had cold toes. The room is painted in lampglow and the rain is falling against the skylight. The rain falls and my toes shiver.
At Mike and Emerald's for curry and crumble this evening, joking literary jokes and spooning custard. Their stairs have fallen in. That house is sinking, ghastly terrace falling into itself. But they are happy, and loving, and that makes up for wonky walls and cheap wood laminate.
Meant to sleep hours ago, on the open tomorrow, but stayed up staring into the internet's abyss in a holding pattern with old dreary depression since 10pm, feeling glum and unlovable and alone. And it's the Big Day tomorrow - the end of my year of daily blogging, the completion of my challenge, and instead of riding in triumphant I'm limping to the line and tumbling over it, burned out and blank and lost for words.
But completion is completion, and don't let those negative voices say any different. May not feel proud right now but I should be.
Anyway, leave that for tomorrow. Sleep now. Rain a sporadic patter now. Toes: still cold.
At Mike and Emerald's for curry and crumble this evening, joking literary jokes and spooning custard. Their stairs have fallen in. That house is sinking, ghastly terrace falling into itself. But they are happy, and loving, and that makes up for wonky walls and cheap wood laminate.
Meant to sleep hours ago, on the open tomorrow, but stayed up staring into the internet's abyss in a holding pattern with old dreary depression since 10pm, feeling glum and unlovable and alone. And it's the Big Day tomorrow - the end of my year of daily blogging, the completion of my challenge, and instead of riding in triumphant I'm limping to the line and tumbling over it, burned out and blank and lost for words.
But completion is completion, and don't let those negative voices say any different. May not feel proud right now but I should be.
Anyway, leave that for tomorrow. Sleep now. Rain a sporadic patter now. Toes: still cold.
Friday 26 April 2019
Day 363: Golden light
OK well it is very late and I've felt beat to shit today, buttered over too much bread, and I refuse to stay up hours thinking about this, so you've got ten minutes, and then I'm out of here.
Wrecked from closes at work and snooker finals across the road and writing and no sleep and photographs and photo editing and ready meals and being 34 and running up and down cellar stairs shifting barrels for a decade. I'm old and I'm broken.
But I walked with my camera today and I went down streets I don't usually go down, and I looked up at buildings at weird angles and poked my lens between rails and got down low and got up high and it was good. You go the same roads your head hanging at the ground or in your phone and you're not alive. You go round that bar and you drink devil booze and you're numbed fugging stupid and you're not alive. You make the same jokes to the same dumb bartender hipsters and you're not alive.
But you take your lens and you watch for golden light hitting brick and for sun rays down dark alleys and you scramble round your city and that's a little bit alive. And you read old grappler Bukowski's letters in a coffee shop and that's good too. And you drink coffee, dark, strong coffee, and we're getting somewhere. Hell yes. You watch good cinema. You watch colour and texture in Rothko. You write your winding thoughts and day by day it accumulates, fighting back the blankness: thrumming vibrant life.
I don't know how it sustains, whether it wins, but there is life, and you have to remember. In the hollow times you have to remember. Life is here and it is good.
Wrecked from closes at work and snooker finals across the road and writing and no sleep and photographs and photo editing and ready meals and being 34 and running up and down cellar stairs shifting barrels for a decade. I'm old and I'm broken.
But I walked with my camera today and I went down streets I don't usually go down, and I looked up at buildings at weird angles and poked my lens between rails and got down low and got up high and it was good. You go the same roads your head hanging at the ground or in your phone and you're not alive. You go round that bar and you drink devil booze and you're numbed fugging stupid and you're not alive. You make the same jokes to the same dumb bartender hipsters and you're not alive.
But you take your lens and you watch for golden light hitting brick and for sun rays down dark alleys and you scramble round your city and that's a little bit alive. And you read old grappler Bukowski's letters in a coffee shop and that's good too. And you drink coffee, dark, strong coffee, and we're getting somewhere. Hell yes. You watch good cinema. You watch colour and texture in Rothko. You write your winding thoughts and day by day it accumulates, fighting back the blankness: thrumming vibrant life.
I don't know how it sustains, whether it wins, but there is life, and you have to remember. In the hollow times you have to remember. Life is here and it is good.
Thursday 25 April 2019
Day 362: Wednesday Reviews - On Chesil Beach
But in this instance it turns out he was bang on the money, because that’s exactly what On Chesil Beach is about. Adapted from the novel by Ian McEwan, with a screenplay by the same, and directed by theatrical stalwart Dominic Cooke, it is a lyrical and sorrowful examination of thwarted desire, sexual shame, and the folly of pride in the repressed England of the early 60s.
We follow young honeymooners Florence (Saoirse Ronan) and Edward (Billy Howle) on the night of their wedding in a seaside hotel in Devon overlooking the windswept pebble beach, the narrative creeping forwards over these integral few hours but spinning away in flashbacks at each locus of difficulty in the conjugal event - the two are still virgins - to explore the couple’s upbringings, their burgeoning relationship, and the decisions that lead to this point.
Florence is from a pompous upper-class family, Edward less well-to-do. She is a prim classical musician, he an intelligent but rumpled history graduate. Her parents are domineering and elitist, his mother is brain-damaged from a head injury, seemingly unable to make new memories, in need of constant care.
They are rich characters, pin-sharp in specificity, wide in universality. The script clearly benefits from its literary origins. The relationship is believable, the world of 60s Britain, on the cusp of change yet not there yet, is brought vividly to life, and the sense of the many lines of their lives converging on one mortifying moment in bed, then spreading out from it again afterwards, the feeling of life sometimes coming to a head in a single flash, the actions in that moment colouring and informing decades to come, is a powerful one.
If the story focus is on character, the filming is theatrical. Cooke’s background as a stage director (he was awarded CBE in 2014 for services to drama) gives scenes the feel of a play, the plot focusing on character interaction and dialogue more than visual event. It’s a good fit for the material, especially with central performances from Ronan and Howle so involved and complete. Ronan especially really inhabits her role, and a key event regarding Florence that explains much is only hinted at, handled deftly, the ambiguity and the uncertainty increasing the horror.
It’s a grand, sweeping film, about a single night but also about a whole life, with an ending crescendoing into such emotion that it is hard to hold back the sobs. To be honest, on paper it sounds like the kind of film I would despise - I have a prejudice against period dramas, I find them enervating; some voice in the back of my head huffs when it’s suggested I watch one - the cinematic equivalent of a bowl full of steamed broccoli. Boring! And anything with a whiff of worthiness or Oscar-baiting about it turns me off. And films that attempt to play on large, bold emotions I have a tendency to find false and manipulative.
On Chesil Beach is very nearly all of these things, but in the end is none. The characters are too well developed, for one. It looks fantastic for two: bunching graphite clouds, bobbing boats with peeling paint, tumble-down houses drowned in shadow, and a camera gliding through in measured movements as tightly controlled as the repressed emotional states. As you'd expect from a director of such theatrical calibre it has some wonderful staging, and much that matters unfolds through people talking to one another. But it is lively and vibrant as well, and certainly cinematic. And that ending is, yes, a touch cliched, and altered from the book, but it brings out the tears effectively as well.
Florence is from a pompous upper-class family, Edward less well-to-do. She is a prim classical musician, he an intelligent but rumpled history graduate. Her parents are domineering and elitist, his mother is brain-damaged from a head injury, seemingly unable to make new memories, in need of constant care.
They are rich characters, pin-sharp in specificity, wide in universality. The script clearly benefits from its literary origins. The relationship is believable, the world of 60s Britain, on the cusp of change yet not there yet, is brought vividly to life, and the sense of the many lines of their lives converging on one mortifying moment in bed, then spreading out from it again afterwards, the feeling of life sometimes coming to a head in a single flash, the actions in that moment colouring and informing decades to come, is a powerful one.
If the story focus is on character, the filming is theatrical. Cooke’s background as a stage director (he was awarded CBE in 2014 for services to drama) gives scenes the feel of a play, the plot focusing on character interaction and dialogue more than visual event. It’s a good fit for the material, especially with central performances from Ronan and Howle so involved and complete. Ronan especially really inhabits her role, and a key event regarding Florence that explains much is only hinted at, handled deftly, the ambiguity and the uncertainty increasing the horror.
It’s a grand, sweeping film, about a single night but also about a whole life, with an ending crescendoing into such emotion that it is hard to hold back the sobs. To be honest, on paper it sounds like the kind of film I would despise - I have a prejudice against period dramas, I find them enervating; some voice in the back of my head huffs when it’s suggested I watch one - the cinematic equivalent of a bowl full of steamed broccoli. Boring! And anything with a whiff of worthiness or Oscar-baiting about it turns me off. And films that attempt to play on large, bold emotions I have a tendency to find false and manipulative.
On Chesil Beach is very nearly all of these things, but in the end is none. The characters are too well developed, for one. It looks fantastic for two: bunching graphite clouds, bobbing boats with peeling paint, tumble-down houses drowned in shadow, and a camera gliding through in measured movements as tightly controlled as the repressed emotional states. As you'd expect from a director of such theatrical calibre it has some wonderful staging, and much that matters unfolds through people talking to one another. But it is lively and vibrant as well, and certainly cinematic. And that ending is, yes, a touch cliched, and altered from the book, but it brings out the tears effectively as well.
... I'm covered in grime and bin juice, again, from work, and I can't keep my eyes open, so that's it for tonight. On Chesil Beach is an admirable and deserving adaptation, an elegy to regret and clumsiness and tragedy. Much like my friend Michael. He picked well.
Wednesday 24 April 2019
Day 361: disgorging
I been watching film for tomorrow and pub working and such, only time for blog is now, in bed, eyes droopling. big struggle to get any words at all. Bin bags tonight. Bin bag night. Fifty bin bags to take out, piled to ceiling in bin store, some with ends untied, some roll and rip and disgorge contents across sodden floor. Dripping juices. Cocktails sticks and glass shards sticking outwards. Yellow vomit food splattered across my new shoes. But a job's a job.
Four days blogging after tonight, then my year is out. I'm running on fumes, skidding over finish line with tires blown and doors hanging off. Need some time recuperating when I'm done. Get through Snooker and then book a week off, sleep, read literature, take photos in afternoon light, see friends, bed early nights, remember how to be human and refill that creative well.
Last few posts, i can do this. No more now though. I sleeping as I type. Bubye. Going now. Sleeping. Bubyeee. x
Four days blogging after tonight, then my year is out. I'm running on fumes, skidding over finish line with tires blown and doors hanging off. Need some time recuperating when I'm done. Get through Snooker and then book a week off, sleep, read literature, take photos in afternoon light, see friends, bed early nights, remember how to be human and refill that creative well.
Last few posts, i can do this. No more now though. I sleeping as I type. Bubye. Going now. Sleeping. Bubyeee. x
Monday 22 April 2019
Day 360: Slime
In this coffee shop thinking about Art. Like the Buddha. Say my name and wash your mouth with soap. It's nothing. Words. Shut up thinking art or nirvana and get making and living now.
Old Bukowski had it right. You spew up what's in your gut and if it's bile and saliva you cheer the same and move on. Go down to the soil bed and create your pottery and then haul it in the trash. You don't snuffle around building a cathedral of poetry with perfect pillars and starched white walls polishing your marble pretending to be finding God in the blinding beauty. Just work with what's there. Worm guts and peat and slime. And if on occasion you find a glimmering opal, well, you kiss its sweetness - then fling it over your shoulder and move on. You move on and you move on and you move on.
This is art. This is life. Photography - you don't sit shining faces with radial dials and bringing down green saturation and making the perfect preset. Go fucking out and click that camera button. You look at light and you look at lines and you look at life. Keep clicking and failing and trying and going. Make bad art. Make it and make it. Love the making - not the having made.
Time for polishing, for sure. Polishing a jewel has its place. But that's 1% of your job. Don't do it all the day, as an excuse not to go down to the soil and get your hands dirty. Art is haggard lowly poverty work, it has to begin this way, or it'll never be worth anything at all. You have to love it when it's poverty work, have to be able to give yourself to it then fully, or you don't want to do it - only want the feeling of having done it. So roll sleeves and thrust hands in mud and don't ever dare speak of Art.
......
Hand Made in England, wall sign says. The light is coming in largely through those front windows. The burnished bronze backplate wall is shining and lamps hanging in front are just little lights hanging in space. It's all wonderful. The light is shining across her face as she watches yabbering on her phone, her friend sipping big coffee, handclasped, and they chat. Green sneakers. Silk shirt of mustard and coral and amber.
16 people in this coffee shop, 7 of them staring phones this very moment. 7 laptops screening out. Including this 1. And there I go a buzzing in my pocket and reaching before thinking for that smooth black obelisk of attention.
World happening away from our screens. Greenflies borning and dying in droves. Light filtering. Old patchy men in windowless rooms sipping beers in forlorn night. Heat coming off these city streets. Gentle music mumbling. Here's helical-striped drinking straws in jubilant bouncing reds and whites spinning static in moulded cases. Staid young lovers dancing motions saying you pick, no you pick, maybe we'll just order in. Lines a chimneys. Eggshell periwinkle sunset and smell of riping blossom and keys of Chopin tinkling out.
All to haze. Sun fading to one colour. Sad calling caterwauling duskset. Night belongs to insects now.
Day 359: powder sparks
Viscera perturbing deep bass tunes rumbling from within OHM, Vodka Revs, the meat-market bars of West Street. Girls squashed into starched denim mini skirts queuing outside, tottering on heels; lads coiffured and glam-muscled and broken. The world broken, cracked some place deep within and then hardened into plastic, congealed, stuck in a calcified state of material possession, accumulation, ego. Everyone trying to give themselves away, desperately burdened with existence, trying to lose it in the wild cackling haze of booze, coke, sex, chart music...
How I remember all that. How glad I am to be through that vortex, ambling on with my torn bag on my back, my straw hair, my words. I want to be lost to literature, lit by the lambent flames of poetry, of art, of pellucid passion and clear spring water love.
I want to not escape but countenance existence, stand and stare the menacing reaper in the face, slap daisies in the stifling heat…
... NO more of that for now. Had to go work, slugging down to the pub and sulphur crowds and slow stagnant hours. Round and round that damn bar. Beer in plastics. Money in till. Plastics in bin. Round an round an rou
It’s late night/early morning now. House is empty. Dancing keys in bed and hamstrings wailing and thinking am I gonna sleep through my day off tomorrow?
Or will I up and touch the crackle of existence seeing with present eyes not the ever opinions but the facts as they are - this is a tree, this is the hard ground, feel the sun warming my skin, here are my thoughts, emotions each with a valence, always in the Now don’t ever leave this one moment which is still the moment of being born - still coming into existence, still becoming, blossoming and blossoming a star eterna burning the universe all together in a state between breathing in and out?
Looser. Write looser. Let go of notions of good writing and correctness of wording and blabber catherine wheel powder sparks onto blackened page.
And on...
How I remember all that. How glad I am to be through that vortex, ambling on with my torn bag on my back, my straw hair, my words. I want to be lost to literature, lit by the lambent flames of poetry, of art, of pellucid passion and clear spring water love.
I want to not escape but countenance existence, stand and stare the menacing reaper in the face, slap daisies in the stifling heat…
... NO more of that for now. Had to go work, slugging down to the pub and sulphur crowds and slow stagnant hours. Round and round that damn bar. Beer in plastics. Money in till. Plastics in bin. Round an round an rou
It’s late night/early morning now. House is empty. Dancing keys in bed and hamstrings wailing and thinking am I gonna sleep through my day off tomorrow?
Or will I up and touch the crackle of existence seeing with present eyes not the ever opinions but the facts as they are - this is a tree, this is the hard ground, feel the sun warming my skin, here are my thoughts, emotions each with a valence, always in the Now don’t ever leave this one moment which is still the moment of being born - still coming into existence, still becoming, blossoming and blossoming a star eterna burning the universe all together in a state between breathing in and out?
Looser. Write looser. Let go of notions of good writing and correctness of wording and blabber catherine wheel powder sparks onto blackened page.
And on...
Sunday 21 April 2019
Day 358: Sapphire and Ruby
Oh bugger I’ve stayed up all night editing photos, and now it’s a million o’clock in the morning and I neeeed to be asleep and I haven’t done my blog. Here’s my blog. It’s here guys. It’s here.
Finished work half an hour early, because it was weirdly quiet for a bank holiday (the calm before the storm of tomorrow?), and so got to sit in the sun with Jake and Missy, who were in town drinking Prosecco and celebrating their five-year anniversary. What colour’s that? Tortoise shell? Mauve?
… I just looked it up online. 40th is Ruby Red. 45th is Sapphire. 50th is Gold. 55th Emerald Green. 60th Diamond White. 70th Black. 75th Sun and Moon. 80th Ultra Sun and Moon. 100th Sword and Shield. There’s a 90th, but that’s just the 40th remade with touch-screen controls and fancier graphics.
That’s a joke about Pokemon main entry naming conventions for you. I know what you like. You lap the Pokemon jokes up.
Anyway, I sat in the sun with OG Pokemon trainers Jake and Missy, bedecked in matching mustard yellow outfits, and Zoe and Joe and peeps joined us, and I took photos, and we lay on the faded grass and watched the sun go down. Jake and Missy got tiddly and yanked each other around, and acted like the cutest buttons in all the land.
I mean, look at these guys. I love these guys so freaking much.
And then Zoe and I bid them adieu and went on a mate date to the Indian round the corner, and laughed right through all the courses, and Zoe almost had an aneurysm that I was leaving a fiver tip, and she tried to steal it when I wasn’t looking, but I caught her, and then we came and hung out at mine a while, and then I remembered I had an apple turnover in the fridge, but only one, so I kicked Zoe out and ate my dessert and edited photos, and then it got really late, and then I started writing my blog, and then I got to this part of the blog, and then I just set myself on fire and jumped out of the window after that.
Wait, what did I just say?
Hmm, no time to go back and check. Just letting my subconscious unspool. It was probably nothing. Probably.
Anyway I need to go fall asleep and dream of catching Pokemon. In conclusion having friends is good. I like friends. That is all.
Loves ya x
Finished work half an hour early, because it was weirdly quiet for a bank holiday (the calm before the storm of tomorrow?), and so got to sit in the sun with Jake and Missy, who were in town drinking Prosecco and celebrating their five-year anniversary. What colour’s that? Tortoise shell? Mauve?
… I just looked it up online. 40th is Ruby Red. 45th is Sapphire. 50th is Gold. 55th Emerald Green. 60th Diamond White. 70th Black. 75th Sun and Moon. 80th Ultra Sun and Moon. 100th Sword and Shield. There’s a 90th, but that’s just the 40th remade with touch-screen controls and fancier graphics.
That’s a joke about Pokemon main entry naming conventions for you. I know what you like. You lap the Pokemon jokes up.
Anyway, I sat in the sun with OG Pokemon trainers Jake and Missy, bedecked in matching mustard yellow outfits, and Zoe and Joe and peeps joined us, and I took photos, and we lay on the faded grass and watched the sun go down. Jake and Missy got tiddly and yanked each other around, and acted like the cutest buttons in all the land.
I mean, look at these guys. I love these guys so freaking much.
And then Zoe and I bid them adieu and went on a mate date to the Indian round the corner, and laughed right through all the courses, and Zoe almost had an aneurysm that I was leaving a fiver tip, and she tried to steal it when I wasn’t looking, but I caught her, and then we came and hung out at mine a while, and then I remembered I had an apple turnover in the fridge, but only one, so I kicked Zoe out and ate my dessert and edited photos, and then it got really late, and then I started writing my blog, and then I got to this part of the blog, and then I just set myself on fire and jumped out of the window after that.
Wait, what did I just say?
Hmm, no time to go back and check. Just letting my subconscious unspool. It was probably nothing. Probably.
Anyway I need to go fall asleep and dream of catching Pokemon. In conclusion having friends is good. I like friends. That is all.
Loves ya x
Saturday 20 April 2019
Day 357: Football Fans
Pub packed with football fans. All chanting. Beginning of the bank holiday and sun is out and the fans, who have been drinking lager for hours, are chanting because it looks like Sheffield United are going up, and they’re doing so over their local rivals Leeds United.
I’m curious.
What the fans are chanting is: “We all hate Leeds scum.” They are chanting this over and over again, slamming hands on tables, stamping feet, sloshing beer across the floor.
I’m so used to this emotion from childhood, from football grounds, from the school yard. The sweetest of feelings. We fucked you over. We succeeded, but what’s better, you failed. We succeeded because you failed. We are alive. You are dead. Fuck you. You’re scum.
It’s a weird way to live, no? A weird choice as the culmination of a season’s worth of consternation and heartache and hope. What was the zenith of your life this year, mate? When were you most authentically alive? When I was chanting about how much better some sports stars that work in my town were than the sports stars that work in the next town along.
Christ. I couldn’t give a shit about football, but I don’t mean to belittle it. The fact that you care about it is cool. The fact that you get a sense of self-worth from it is fine.
But having so little pride in yourself that you can only express happiness when others are dragged into the mud and destroyed is a sad and weird and crap way of existing, don’t you think? There’s no elegance to it, no magnanimity; your joy is sullied by what is correctly in all of the major religions referred to as sin.
Which word is an old archery term, by the way, and just means to miss the mark, to fail to hit the gold at the centre of the target.
You’re missing what is best about life. Not dragging others down, but building yourself up. Your players don’t live like you do. They get all the beauty from a victory, while swapping shirts and patting backs with the vanquished foes. Maybe it’s easier for them, being paid six-figure sums while you work for minimum wage in the sandwich packing factory in Worksop. But maybe I’d posit that’s part of why they earn so much, because they have dedicated themselves to something, because they don’t hang their hopes on others but strive to succeed, because they finish a day thinking about their own progress, not the failure of others.
But maybe that’s not fair. The world needs sandwich packers as much as star strikers. Far more so, in fact.
But do you ever think about these things, football fan? Do you worry at night sometimes about the malice and aggression and fear that infuses all of your joy?
I’m so used to this emotion from childhood, from football grounds, from the school yard. The sweetest of feelings. We fucked you over. We succeeded, but what’s better, you failed. We succeeded because you failed. We are alive. You are dead. Fuck you. You’re scum.
It’s a weird way to live, no? A weird choice as the culmination of a season’s worth of consternation and heartache and hope. What was the zenith of your life this year, mate? When were you most authentically alive? When I was chanting about how much better some sports stars that work in my town were than the sports stars that work in the next town along.
Christ. I couldn’t give a shit about football, but I don’t mean to belittle it. The fact that you care about it is cool. The fact that you get a sense of self-worth from it is fine.
But having so little pride in yourself that you can only express happiness when others are dragged into the mud and destroyed is a sad and weird and crap way of existing, don’t you think? There’s no elegance to it, no magnanimity; your joy is sullied by what is correctly in all of the major religions referred to as sin.
Which word is an old archery term, by the way, and just means to miss the mark, to fail to hit the gold at the centre of the target.
You’re missing what is best about life. Not dragging others down, but building yourself up. Your players don’t live like you do. They get all the beauty from a victory, while swapping shirts and patting backs with the vanquished foes. Maybe it’s easier for them, being paid six-figure sums while you work for minimum wage in the sandwich packing factory in Worksop. But maybe I’d posit that’s part of why they earn so much, because they have dedicated themselves to something, because they don’t hang their hopes on others but strive to succeed, because they finish a day thinking about their own progress, not the failure of others.
But maybe that’s not fair. The world needs sandwich packers as much as star strikers. Far more so, in fact.
But do you ever think about these things, football fan? Do you worry at night sometimes about the malice and aggression and fear that infuses all of your joy?
Or am I utterly missing the mark?
I’m curious.
Friday 19 April 2019
Day 356: Fix you
I’ve been watching Bodyguard. Everyone was talking about Bodyguard last year, you couldn’t turn on a radio - which happened a lot when I was doing man work with Steve - without some twat banging on about Bodyguard, and how incredible it was, and how you just had to see it.
Well bugger that, I thought. I wouldn’t watch it. Not with all those people recommending it. People like Coldplay, and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people.
But then one night I was sat in bed, and I’d done all my chores, and I had nothing better to do than think about how weird it is to have a skeleton, and how I wasn’t alive for all of eternity before I was born, and that my brain is just some impersonal lump of matter to you, just part of the vast Other of the world, like traffic cones and Domino’s boxes and Cher CDs, but in here, to me, it’s the very central wellspring of the universe, and it’s your brain, out there, that is just some lumpy tangle of whateverness.
And I didn’t like thinking about any of this at all, so I opened my Chromebook and searched on Netflix for something loud and exciting to watch to distract me from the existential dread that seeps in whenever it’s quiet, and I stumbled across Bodyguard.
And I tell you what, they may have made a mistake with Chris Martin - and to a lesser extent Hitler - but the people were bang on the money about Bodyguard.
It’s fabulous. It’s ever so thrilling. It’s like 24, but greyer, and instead of Jack Bauer you get Robb Stark from Game of Thrones, and he’s got PTSD.
It’s, OK, a little dumb. But not as dumb as I’m making it sound. It may be manipulative of plot, but not of emotion. It’s sensitive and nuanced, and Richard Madden, aka poor old Robb Stark, is spectacular, the perfectly damaged hero, so very full of humanity when he’s talking to a scared potential suicide bomber in the opening episode, so very capable in combat situations, so very flawed the rest of the time. And those moments of action are utterly gripping, and really, you just really do really just have to see it.
There you are. I’m one of you now. Throw the Sieg Heils. March in lockstep. And sing after me:
When you try your best but you don’t succeed...
Well bugger that, I thought. I wouldn’t watch it. Not with all those people recommending it. People like Coldplay, and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people.
But then one night I was sat in bed, and I’d done all my chores, and I had nothing better to do than think about how weird it is to have a skeleton, and how I wasn’t alive for all of eternity before I was born, and that my brain is just some impersonal lump of matter to you, just part of the vast Other of the world, like traffic cones and Domino’s boxes and Cher CDs, but in here, to me, it’s the very central wellspring of the universe, and it’s your brain, out there, that is just some lumpy tangle of whateverness.
And I didn’t like thinking about any of this at all, so I opened my Chromebook and searched on Netflix for something loud and exciting to watch to distract me from the existential dread that seeps in whenever it’s quiet, and I stumbled across Bodyguard.
And I tell you what, they may have made a mistake with Chris Martin - and to a lesser extent Hitler - but the people were bang on the money about Bodyguard.
It’s fabulous. It’s ever so thrilling. It’s like 24, but greyer, and instead of Jack Bauer you get Robb Stark from Game of Thrones, and he’s got PTSD.
It’s, OK, a little dumb. But not as dumb as I’m making it sound. It may be manipulative of plot, but not of emotion. It’s sensitive and nuanced, and Richard Madden, aka poor old Robb Stark, is spectacular, the perfectly damaged hero, so very full of humanity when he’s talking to a scared potential suicide bomber in the opening episode, so very capable in combat situations, so very flawed the rest of the time. And those moments of action are utterly gripping, and really, you just really do really just have to see it.
There you are. I’m one of you now. Throw the Sieg Heils. March in lockstep. And sing after me:
When you try your best but you don’t succeed...
Wednesday 17 April 2019
Day 355: Wednesday Reviews - The Hateful Eight
But what's this? Upon reaching the cabin the group find that Minnie is peculiarly absent - gone to visit family on the other side of the mountain, says the not exactly trustworthy looking Mexican stranger Bob, who claims to have been left in charge. Inside are a disparate bunch of characters also seeking shelter from the storm - among them Tim Roth's outlandish hangman Oswaldo Mobray, and Michael Madsen's monosyllabic loner Joe Gage.
Are all these travellers who they say they are? Can they all be trusted? And what's with that jellybean stuck between the floorboards that Warren notices as he comes in?
The Hateful Eight is a solid story, with narrative tropes old as time, a firm genre flick from a director who basically makes the apotheosis of genre flicks - taking pulpy conventions and raising them to the level of, perhaps, fine art.
But I have to say, Tarantino has lacked vitality, for me, ever since 1997's Jackie Brown. You can see his early zestiness sprout through Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Natural Born Killers, really come to bloom in Pulp Fiction, and already by Jackie Brown be wilting somewhat. Jackie is maybe my favourite of his films, still lively, yet deeper, more mature than his previous work - but I do think you can sense the zenith of his creativity having been reached, and his cinematic virility cooling into middle-aged filmmaking formula.
Pulp Fiction was the most exciting, Jackie Brown the strongest, and after that he's never been quite the same. I've very much enjoyed every one of his films since, and they've all contained moments of brilliance. But his talent, world-class as it is, has always felt like it's been searching for a spark.
He's worked hard, he's just not been as inspired as he was in those early years.
Anyway, The Hateful Eight doesn't reverse this trend - it's not a Goodfellas-era-Scorsese revival - but it is my favourite since Kill Bill Vol. 2. If we're doing the Scorsese thing then it's all least The Departed, or maybe Wolf of Wall Street.
All his tics are present and correct - the rhythms of the exchanges, the repetitions of the dialogue, the broken linearity of the narrative, the anachronisms of style, the self-awareness. At his worst Tarantino can be like a pastiche of himself, and Hateful Eight perhaps slips once or twice into this realm - when you feel the style is overtaking the content, when he's using jarring techniques because he can't help himself, or because he doesn't know what else to do, rather than because the material demands it. Sometimes you sense a posturing that masks the emptiness of the material beneath - like he's using the template of that carpool conversation from Pulp Fiction over and over, with less and less inside the template that he has to say. Or a scenario that doesn't rise above genre cliche, yet he gets away with it, just, because of the style of the presentation.
But Death Proof through Django were worse for it than this. Mostly The Hateful Eight is appropriately judged, and there's a strong enough story to warrant the stylistic approach. The characters feel alive and human, if larger than life, and there's an emotional core - and an indelicate yet appropriately bold simmering of racial tensions - that gives the film its depth.
Sam Jackson is superb, with eyes bulging and burning with fury, yet also showing hurt and shock, a poignancy at the centre of the story that it needs.
Tim Roth has all the fun with the preposterous Mobray, and Walter Goggins is very good as a racist redneck sheriff, Tarantino once again taking an experienced character actor and allowing him to shine.
And it's all filmed in magnificent 70mm - a wide format offering far more detail than most film, reserved when it was used for Ben-Hur like epics. Tarantino gets an obvious thrill from subverting expectations, opening with the expansive, humanity-dwarfing vistas that are a requisite for the approach, before crushing the narrative down to his cramped one-room play.
Yet he knows what he's doing - the 70mm stock brings a grandeur but also a claustrophobia to the haberdashery, with often the entire cabin visible at once, and the cast spread about as in a painting - two of them perhaps involved in some drama in the foreground, with groups of ones or twos spread out at the corners of the shot.
And because of the proportions and the available detail in the format, Tarantino and regular cinematographer Robert Richardson can leave us in a wide shot of characters, with plenty of surrounding scenery, while still showing us the kind of emotion in the eyes that would normally require a close-up.
It's thrilling stuff, really benefiting the story - in the parlour-game nature of the narrative it's important we keep the players in our minds, where they're situated, the moves they're making - and 70mm is perfect for this.
What else? I was ambivalent about the violence, as usual with Tarantino. Mostly it was shocking for the right reasons, visually beguiling at the same time as being morally repellent, refusing to shy away from the sometimes bloody nature of our world. But at times it crossed into sadism, I thought.
The look of the film was strong, a colour palette of deep reds and browns, blues and burnished golds. You feel the warmth of the cabin compared to the biting cold outside, but it is an eerie warmth, a malevolence hiding within it.
And so, too, the score by Ennio Morricone, who was coaxed into writing one last Western theme. It races ever forwards, like that opening stagecoach, while a threat of malice weaves in and out over the top - like those stormclouds amassing above.
The Hateful Eight is an excitingly told tale, a classic storytelling scenario stretched by a filmmaking grandmaster into a huge and bold piece of cinema. It isn't Tarantino's best work, but it is the best he's been in a while, and despite a few faults it is absolutely worth your time. He may not be the hippest young firebrand on the block anymore, but boy has he still got some moves!
Tuesday 16 April 2019
Day 354: Swoosh
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| Image source |
I'm in my usual coffee shop, watching the kids come and go. The Chinese students. The fashionistas. The revolving brands.
Maybe I’ve just been reading too much Naomi Klein, but the logo is a uniquely insane idea, don’t you think?
Like, I want to buy a shirt. With sleeves, a collar, maybe a nice pattern. This is what I’m paying for. I don’t want to pay for the burden of advertising your shirt for you. To carry the emblem of your company around with me and show it to people. To be a walking billboard for you. Mother. Fuck. that.
And yet the brands have us so brainwashed that not only are we willing to do this, we’ll actually pay astronomical amounts for the opportunity to do so. Trainers with a Nike Swoosh on the side are in far greater demand than trainers with no Swoosh. The price of a Gucci bag is not predominantly informed by the quality of that sack in which you put stuff.
Because we do not only want the thing. The material. The craftsmanship. The use. We want a shorthand indicator of status. This is a Barbour jacket and that means I belong to this set of people. I scroll meaninglessly down Apple phones, and so the hijacking by social media companies of my ill-equipped dopaminergic system is not pathetic but effortlessly cool. I shade UV radiation from my eyes with Ray-Ban sunglasses, so know that I am Someone Who Matters, affluent and desirable and important.
I’m not saying we are aware of this choice, not up here in the leafy tips of our cerebral pathways, in the realm of conscious thought. But it’s what’s happening in us, down under the shaded canopy of the subconscious.
You’ve maybe never considered this. Or if you have, there’s a high likelihood you’ve created a complex set of ex post facto rationalisations to cover your cognitive dissonance, to lie to yourself that you decided to be this way, rather than admit to having your subconscious needs manipulated by large companies who want your money for themselves. “I just buy Nike trainers because they’re the best," perhaps you say.
I understand. No one likes being someone’s bitch.
But it’s bullshit. You’re bullshitting yourself. You had the seeds of aspirational desire planted in you long before you could make rational decisions, and these seeds are watered, nurtured, doused in Miracle Grow every day by the continuous bombardment of marketing to which we are subjected in our modern world.
Nike pay spies to ingratiate themselves within underprivileged yet exciting youth communities - with black kids on the streets of New York ghettos, for example - and to listen to and report back on what these youths find hip and worthwhile. They then fill their marketing with these messages, and affluent yet boring middle-class shoppers buy Nike products to steal some of the excitement from those lifestyles of the New York streets. Minus the heroin addiction, gang violence, lack of education, and life expectancy in the 30s, of course.
Being a banker is boring, yet easy. Being Omar from The Wire is thrilling, yet impossibly hard. So what the major brands have done is find a way to sell the romanticised notion of street life to the bankers, who get to do drive-bys on their downtown Pret a Mangers and hang with their crew at LAN parties, then fall asleep soundly ensconced in John Lewis sheets, all for the reasonable price of double or triple or quadruple what the trainers are worth before you put the Swoosh on them.
And for the street kids? Well, you market their style right back at them, which now becomes self-mythologising, and they cling to these totems as the one thing in their life that makes them feel important. Or you sell them Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, the WASPy Ivy League yachting brands that to these inner-city kids seem so alien and out of reach. Then you get pictures of the black guys wearing Tommy Hilfiger, and sell /that/ image back to the preppy suburban children. One big circle of manipulation, everyone thinking they’re getting to be someone they’re not, all the money from them all being channelled upwards into the pockets of Phil Knight and the other company heads.
And there’s the infantilisation aspect, as well. Remember how stressful buying trainers was when you were twelve?
Adolescents are the group most concerned with how they’re viewed by their peers, life-threatening as it feels, and truly is, to fit in with their social group, before they've found what makes them valuable that is natural and unique about themselves. They spend a great deal of time editing their self-image, planning and preening, and a lot of their sense of worth comes from the validation they receive when they get this right.
But it’s a stage of development. A stop-off on the journey towards becoming. Yet it’s one that our culture does everything it can to keep us suspended within, because it is at this stage that we are most susceptible to brand marketing, the stage at which we can have the most revenue extracted from us.
So, like domestic cats that remain in a perpetual state of kittenhood, kept cute and helpless by the human parents they never leave, we are a society of teenagers, spending our wages on toys, on fashion, on easy entertainment.
I understand. No one likes being someone’s bitch.
But it’s bullshit. You’re bullshitting yourself. You had the seeds of aspirational desire planted in you long before you could make rational decisions, and these seeds are watered, nurtured, doused in Miracle Grow every day by the continuous bombardment of marketing to which we are subjected in our modern world.
Nike pay spies to ingratiate themselves within underprivileged yet exciting youth communities - with black kids on the streets of New York ghettos, for example - and to listen to and report back on what these youths find hip and worthwhile. They then fill their marketing with these messages, and affluent yet boring middle-class shoppers buy Nike products to steal some of the excitement from those lifestyles of the New York streets. Minus the heroin addiction, gang violence, lack of education, and life expectancy in the 30s, of course.
Being a banker is boring, yet easy. Being Omar from The Wire is thrilling, yet impossibly hard. So what the major brands have done is find a way to sell the romanticised notion of street life to the bankers, who get to do drive-bys on their downtown Pret a Mangers and hang with their crew at LAN parties, then fall asleep soundly ensconced in John Lewis sheets, all for the reasonable price of double or triple or quadruple what the trainers are worth before you put the Swoosh on them.
And for the street kids? Well, you market their style right back at them, which now becomes self-mythologising, and they cling to these totems as the one thing in their life that makes them feel important. Or you sell them Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, the WASPy Ivy League yachting brands that to these inner-city kids seem so alien and out of reach. Then you get pictures of the black guys wearing Tommy Hilfiger, and sell /that/ image back to the preppy suburban children. One big circle of manipulation, everyone thinking they’re getting to be someone they’re not, all the money from them all being channelled upwards into the pockets of Phil Knight and the other company heads.
And there’s the infantilisation aspect, as well. Remember how stressful buying trainers was when you were twelve?
Adolescents are the group most concerned with how they’re viewed by their peers, life-threatening as it feels, and truly is, to fit in with their social group, before they've found what makes them valuable that is natural and unique about themselves. They spend a great deal of time editing their self-image, planning and preening, and a lot of their sense of worth comes from the validation they receive when they get this right.
But it’s a stage of development. A stop-off on the journey towards becoming. Yet it’s one that our culture does everything it can to keep us suspended within, because it is at this stage that we are most susceptible to brand marketing, the stage at which we can have the most revenue extracted from us.
So, like domestic cats that remain in a perpetual state of kittenhood, kept cute and helpless by the human parents they never leave, we are a society of teenagers, spending our wages on toys, on fashion, on easy entertainment.
No one is going to tell you off for this. No one is going to suggest you move on. You’re going to be encouraged to be this way at every turn. Expensive adverts on television, the force of culture pressing from the top down, is designed to persuade you that everything is as it should be, that you’re doing great. They want your money. They do not love you, they simply want your money.
Which all is fine. The forces of the world are the forces of the world. But it’s your job, as a being in the world, to truly face these forces, to act appropriately against them. If you want to stay thirteen, with your hi-tops and your Beats by Dre buds and your iPhone, then go right ahead. You’ll get the warm feelings that you associate with these brands, with displaying these logos, and you’ll pay the price. You’ll pay monetarily, and you’ll pay through the hollowness of worshipping false idols of corporate deities. Fallen gods that take your prayers, take your offerings of gold, and give you back only things. Cold, loveless things.
Which all is fine. The forces of the world are the forces of the world. But it’s your job, as a being in the world, to truly face these forces, to act appropriately against them. If you want to stay thirteen, with your hi-tops and your Beats by Dre buds and your iPhone, then go right ahead. You’ll get the warm feelings that you associate with these brands, with displaying these logos, and you’ll pay the price. You’ll pay monetarily, and you’ll pay through the hollowness of worshipping false idols of corporate deities. Fallen gods that take your prayers, take your offerings of gold, and give you back only things. Cold, loveless things.
Worshipping the true gods, commitment, creativity, civic duty, charity - this is harder, it’s not sexy, no luxuriously filmed adverts are going to put the idea in your head. But the more you do it, the more reward there will be. And you get to fall asleep at night feeling honest, alive, a full and adult human being facing the unvarnished reality of this world.
And that’s the kind of authenticity that no Swooshed trainers I’ve yet seen can bring you near.
Bear it in mind.
And that’s the kind of authenticity that no Swooshed trainers I’ve yet seen can bring you near.
Bear it in mind.
Day 353: Stoics
Skin update: The Differin is yet to have an effect. If anything, it's making my acne worse. My face is tight and a touch waxy, more red than usual. My cheeks are blotchy, I'm getting the odd small lump under the surface around my nose. My chest is as bad as ever.
But it's only been three weeks or so. The cream is supposed to take up to eight weeks to even start making positive progress, so, although frustrating, it's entirely expected.
And I'm trying to take advice from the philosophy of the Stoics, passed on in a video I stumbled across recently from Sean Tucker, a photographer and YouTuber I greatly admire. That advice is:
You can only change what you can change.
One of those truisms that turns out to not be so obvious, or so easy, when you try to live by it - although the truth of it certainly runs deep.
You can only change what you can change.
There are things I can control, and things that I cannot. What I can control are my thoughts about events, and my actions leading from those thoughts. There is personal responsibility, there is free-will, and this is where it pivots.
But pretty much everything outside of that small locus of responsibility is out of my control. It is up to the fates.
I can't control whether the sun rises tomorrow, whether it will be hidden behind cloud. I can't control the vastness of the socio-economic system in which we live, the fact that everyone wants money for goods and I have to do things I don't feel like doing in order to earn that money to pay for goods. I can't control taxes. Donald Trump. Death.
And falling within that remit is the acne with which I have suffered since I was fourteen.
I can control my diet, but that seems to have a negligible effect. I can take the strongest drug, and only potential cure, that Western medicine has fallen upon for people in my situation. I did that, a decade ago, and my skin was clear for five or six years, and then started getting worse again. And I can try out this Differin cream at the insistence of my GP, using it as preventative maintenance every night, although it's a hassle and reports suggest it is only moderately useful.
But I can do these things. I can also work on the emotions that arise when I think about having damaged skin, do CBT exercises to more correctly place and play out the worries of social failure and ugliness that I have in my head.
And although that, certainly, can be hard, what's great is that I don't have to worry about the rest. It's out of my control, and therefore not appropriate to waste time ruminating over.
Put on the cream, try to feel lovable and worthwhile despite scarred skin, and forget about everything else. Go to sleep, get rest, wake up and get on with the things I want to do.
There is only this. Everything else will take care of itself.
But it's only been three weeks or so. The cream is supposed to take up to eight weeks to even start making positive progress, so, although frustrating, it's entirely expected.
And I'm trying to take advice from the philosophy of the Stoics, passed on in a video I stumbled across recently from Sean Tucker, a photographer and YouTuber I greatly admire. That advice is:
You can only change what you can change.
One of those truisms that turns out to not be so obvious, or so easy, when you try to live by it - although the truth of it certainly runs deep.
You can only change what you can change.
There are things I can control, and things that I cannot. What I can control are my thoughts about events, and my actions leading from those thoughts. There is personal responsibility, there is free-will, and this is where it pivots.
But pretty much everything outside of that small locus of responsibility is out of my control. It is up to the fates.
I can't control whether the sun rises tomorrow, whether it will be hidden behind cloud. I can't control the vastness of the socio-economic system in which we live, the fact that everyone wants money for goods and I have to do things I don't feel like doing in order to earn that money to pay for goods. I can't control taxes. Donald Trump. Death.
And falling within that remit is the acne with which I have suffered since I was fourteen.
I can control my diet, but that seems to have a negligible effect. I can take the strongest drug, and only potential cure, that Western medicine has fallen upon for people in my situation. I did that, a decade ago, and my skin was clear for five or six years, and then started getting worse again. And I can try out this Differin cream at the insistence of my GP, using it as preventative maintenance every night, although it's a hassle and reports suggest it is only moderately useful.
But I can do these things. I can also work on the emotions that arise when I think about having damaged skin, do CBT exercises to more correctly place and play out the worries of social failure and ugliness that I have in my head.
And although that, certainly, can be hard, what's great is that I don't have to worry about the rest. It's out of my control, and therefore not appropriate to waste time ruminating over.
Put on the cream, try to feel lovable and worthwhile despite scarred skin, and forget about everything else. Go to sleep, get rest, wake up and get on with the things I want to do.
There is only this. Everything else will take care of itself.
Sunday 14 April 2019
Day 352: Townships
It is warm here. In this coffee shop. The afternoon light streaming through the large windows, caressing counters, then failing, retreating, as the deepening shadows grasp out from the back of the room.
Deepening shadows across the varnished wood of these tables, across the little sugar pots with their little tops... the blue ceramic mugs and saucers, the mugs smudged with stains of coffee. Polished cutlery coruscating. Flanged steel girders bearing the weight of the room, shining under black paint. Hanging lights. Customers congregated in small groups, voices susurrating gently, hair flicked back, mugs brought to lips, hats removed, hats kept on.... Or customers by themselves, plugged into screens that shine in bursts of colour and behind the colour reflect vaguely back the self. Headphones. Wireless buds. Notebooks opened, notebooks closed. Phones picked up, just for a moment, just to check this one tiny thi...
The textured grey of the sky still bright, but the sun, somewhere behind, arcing inexorably lower, the remembered promise of dusk. Evening approaching, creeping into the edges of awareness, as of a task you are not yet starting but know you'll be getting round to soon.
Store fronts across the road emptying, or already closed. Taxis rolling by with less frequency now. The drinkers spilling from their bars, the forty-somethings from the surrounding villages, from Kiveton Park, Shireoaks, from Mexborough, from Rotherham, from Worksop and the splayed tangle of the Mosborough townships. The women thick with makeup, the men large of bicep and belly. Disgorging themselves from Lloyds and Yates's, clomping and swaying on heels, raising Barbour collars over crisp Ben Shermans, winding in spread-thin packs towards the station, the caterwauling voices unable to fully distract from the thought of the darkening sadness of home.
Deepening shadows across the varnished wood of these tables, across the little sugar pots with their little tops... the blue ceramic mugs and saucers, the mugs smudged with stains of coffee. Polished cutlery coruscating. Flanged steel girders bearing the weight of the room, shining under black paint. Hanging lights. Customers congregated in small groups, voices susurrating gently, hair flicked back, mugs brought to lips, hats removed, hats kept on.... Or customers by themselves, plugged into screens that shine in bursts of colour and behind the colour reflect vaguely back the self. Headphones. Wireless buds. Notebooks opened, notebooks closed. Phones picked up, just for a moment, just to check this one tiny thi...
The textured grey of the sky still bright, but the sun, somewhere behind, arcing inexorably lower, the remembered promise of dusk. Evening approaching, creeping into the edges of awareness, as of a task you are not yet starting but know you'll be getting round to soon.
Store fronts across the road emptying, or already closed. Taxis rolling by with less frequency now. The drinkers spilling from their bars, the forty-somethings from the surrounding villages, from Kiveton Park, Shireoaks, from Mexborough, from Rotherham, from Worksop and the splayed tangle of the Mosborough townships. The women thick with makeup, the men large of bicep and belly. Disgorging themselves from Lloyds and Yates's, clomping and swaying on heels, raising Barbour collars over crisp Ben Shermans, winding in spread-thin packs towards the station, the caterwauling voices unable to fully distract from the thought of the darkening sadness of home.
Day 351: The 400 Blows
Directed by François Truffaut, and starring Jean-Pierre Léaud as the young Antoine Doinel, it is filled with wonderfully and subtly observed moments - Antoine lazily going through his mother's possessions while she is out, pretending to be asleep when his parents come through the room in which he sleeps at night, listening to his parents arguing in the next room.
It's got a beautiful pace to it, as the gentle rhythms and quotidian repetitions lead Antoine organically down a path of truancy and rebellion. Léaud is so natural, spellbinding, and the directing is peppy, spritely, joyous.
It's the unfolding of the thing that most impressed me though. I recently heard Tarantino talking about his film writing process, saying that if you look at popular films so many of them are not stories but scenarios - you know exactly what is going to happen, and when it is going to happen, and you're paying to be given that thing that you have seen before and that you like. But real stories, in Tarantino's eyes, unfold. The writer doesn't know where they'll go as they're writing them, nor does the audience watching. Real stories surprise you. They unfold, as a living process, the play of order and chaos, and you couldn't have said from the beginning where you would end up, but when you get there, you look back, and it all followed a pattern.
The 400 Blows made me think of this. There's a lot of tenderness in it, and a lot of truth, and it truly develops, moves on - you never know where it's going, but it's always right that it goes where it does.
A lovely film. Rightfully regarded as a classic.
It's the unfolding of the thing that most impressed me though. I recently heard Tarantino talking about his film writing process, saying that if you look at popular films so many of them are not stories but scenarios - you know exactly what is going to happen, and when it is going to happen, and you're paying to be given that thing that you have seen before and that you like. But real stories, in Tarantino's eyes, unfold. The writer doesn't know where they'll go as they're writing them, nor does the audience watching. Real stories surprise you. They unfold, as a living process, the play of order and chaos, and you couldn't have said from the beginning where you would end up, but when you get there, you look back, and it all followed a pattern.
The 400 Blows made me think of this. There's a lot of tenderness in it, and a lot of truth, and it truly develops, moves on - you never know where it's going, but it's always right that it goes where it does.
A lovely film. Rightfully regarded as a classic.
Saturday 13 April 2019
Day 350: Galactica
Thinking about some things I want in my life. I have liked having cinema in my life more this past week doing film reviews. Spending all my free time watching cinematic art has been better than spending it scrolling on social media, slumping in front of YouTube videos, bingeing mindless Netflix, playing videogames that infantilise you and manipulate your dopaminergic system into thinking you’re making progress simply because invented numbers are going up.
So I want to keep cinema in my life. And literature - I haven’t been reading nearly enough recently. Literature and poetry make me feel alive like almost nothing else. And music. I’ve fallen behind on guitar again, it’s been squeezed out of my life - but practising once a week, not noodling, but practising, directed, making progress, is something I want to do.
I love photography, but I’m spending so much time at the moment taking and editing photos for work, and always feeling behind with it - I need to organise my time better with it.
Writing. Once this year is up I want to redesign my blog, pay someone to create a more professional looking site for me, perhaps, and go to posting twice a week. Work towards those two pieces, an hour after work on pub days, from 9-5 (with breaks) on my days off. And the rest of the time have free - close the document and shut the laptop and forget about it. Go spend time with friends. Visit galleries. Eat out. Not have this albatross of needing to post something every day hanging round my neck.
Is that what the analogy of the albatross is about? Or am I thinking of the Sword of Damocles? It’s not a Gordian knot, I know that. It's not a curate's egg. It’s not Occam’s razor.
I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like the first episode (not the pilot) of the 2004 Battlestar Galactica, where we open in medias res on the titular starship with its crew haggard, unkempt, their eyes ringed and their cheeks stubbled. A clock is ticking down from thirty-three minutes (or something) to zero. The crew are all at their stations making frantic preparations, performing the system checks and calculations needed for a hyperspace jump. They’re a well-oiled machine by now, it has all become a working routine, but clearly high pressure; they're clearly exhausted.
They get done just as the clock hits zero. They wait. Someone says, “Hey, maybe this time they won’t-” and then the antagonist alien race appears with their fleet just off Galactica’s bow. Aliens prime to fire weapons. Galactica crew sigh, captain flicks switch, the ship jumps through hyperspace.
They land in empty space. Blackness. Crew member resets clock to thirty-three minutes. Clock begins ticking down. Crew go back to their stations, start procedures anew.
They don’t know why, but every time they leap somewhere new the alien race find them within thirty-three minutes. They’ll be destroyed if they stay. So they leap away again. But their fuel resources are dwindling. They all have to push themselves to get the ship ready to jump in time. They might have a spy on board. They need to figure out the mystery, win their freedom, but every thirty-three minutes, wherever they go, the aliens find them. Over and over. They can’t give up. But they don’t know how long they can maintain this for, either.
And that is what this goddamn blog has felt like. Feel the day ticking away. Have no idea what to write. Go through the procedure. Make notes. Arrive on some subject or idea. Dodge the anxiety, the feelings of inadequacy, the panic that this time I’ll simply have nothing to write, that this time I’ll fail. Get something written. Find a way to end it, to close it off. Tidy it up. Make it as neat as possible. Copy it to Blogger. Post it up. Share it to Facebook. 2am. Sigh. Collapse.
And then reset the clock.
The clock is ticking.
Begin again.
So I want to keep cinema in my life. And literature - I haven’t been reading nearly enough recently. Literature and poetry make me feel alive like almost nothing else. And music. I’ve fallen behind on guitar again, it’s been squeezed out of my life - but practising once a week, not noodling, but practising, directed, making progress, is something I want to do.
I love photography, but I’m spending so much time at the moment taking and editing photos for work, and always feeling behind with it - I need to organise my time better with it.
Writing. Once this year is up I want to redesign my blog, pay someone to create a more professional looking site for me, perhaps, and go to posting twice a week. Work towards those two pieces, an hour after work on pub days, from 9-5 (with breaks) on my days off. And the rest of the time have free - close the document and shut the laptop and forget about it. Go spend time with friends. Visit galleries. Eat out. Not have this albatross of needing to post something every day hanging round my neck.
Is that what the analogy of the albatross is about? Or am I thinking of the Sword of Damocles? It’s not a Gordian knot, I know that. It's not a curate's egg. It’s not Occam’s razor.
I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like the first episode (not the pilot) of the 2004 Battlestar Galactica, where we open in medias res on the titular starship with its crew haggard, unkempt, their eyes ringed and their cheeks stubbled. A clock is ticking down from thirty-three minutes (or something) to zero. The crew are all at their stations making frantic preparations, performing the system checks and calculations needed for a hyperspace jump. They’re a well-oiled machine by now, it has all become a working routine, but clearly high pressure; they're clearly exhausted.
They get done just as the clock hits zero. They wait. Someone says, “Hey, maybe this time they won’t-” and then the antagonist alien race appears with their fleet just off Galactica’s bow. Aliens prime to fire weapons. Galactica crew sigh, captain flicks switch, the ship jumps through hyperspace.
They land in empty space. Blackness. Crew member resets clock to thirty-three minutes. Clock begins ticking down. Crew go back to their stations, start procedures anew.
They don’t know why, but every time they leap somewhere new the alien race find them within thirty-three minutes. They’ll be destroyed if they stay. So they leap away again. But their fuel resources are dwindling. They all have to push themselves to get the ship ready to jump in time. They might have a spy on board. They need to figure out the mystery, win their freedom, but every thirty-three minutes, wherever they go, the aliens find them. Over and over. They can’t give up. But they don’t know how long they can maintain this for, either.
And that is what this goddamn blog has felt like. Feel the day ticking away. Have no idea what to write. Go through the procedure. Make notes. Arrive on some subject or idea. Dodge the anxiety, the feelings of inadequacy, the panic that this time I’ll simply have nothing to write, that this time I’ll fail. Get something written. Find a way to end it, to close it off. Tidy it up. Make it as neat as possible. Copy it to Blogger. Post it up. Share it to Facebook. 2am. Sigh. Collapse.
And then reset the clock.
The clock is ticking.
Begin again.
Thursday 11 April 2019
Day 349: Dust
Well, I’ve had all the fun writing film reviews this week. It’s been great. Exhausting, but great. I’m going to carry it on when I can, furthering my education in cinema, cutting my teeth on criticism, practising writing complete little articles.
But not tonight.
Tonight I’m editing photos, cooking pasta, then climbing into bed to watch an episode of Bodyguard and fall asleep - ten hour bar shift tomorrow, dreary.
Umm. I need something else to say. I need a few more words. Umm. Crepuscular. Fidget. Somnambulist. Oaken. Greying. Lamb chops. Yoghurt pot. Dirigible. Ordnance. Gulag. Golf course. Gershwin.
Will that do? Will those do? Please let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to like and subscribe, because that is what this all is about, make no mistake. Amassing lists of strangers who are not your friends, maneuvering yourself into popularity, proving to the universe that you are important, that you matter.
And Universe shrugs, pauses, then crumbles you and your entire planet to dust.
But the dust lives on, in new forms. And Universe crumbles those, too. And then the dust looks at itself and remembers, hey, it IS Universe. Dichotomy was in its dusty head, all along. In its dusty atoms, at its dusty core, ain’t nothing powering that micro star furnace but Universe. All is all is all. So I’ll crumble me up, turn me inside out, torch me dusty toes to fingertips. Can’t lose what I am, which is not only the surface form but also the eternal living potential that moves the form, breathes the dance into these vanishing shapes.
And that ain’t got any damn thing to do with number of likes on your Instagram post.
So shut your trap and get to living. This dust got patterns to swirl.
But not tonight.
Tonight I’m editing photos, cooking pasta, then climbing into bed to watch an episode of Bodyguard and fall asleep - ten hour bar shift tomorrow, dreary.
Umm. I need something else to say. I need a few more words. Umm. Crepuscular. Fidget. Somnambulist. Oaken. Greying. Lamb chops. Yoghurt pot. Dirigible. Ordnance. Gulag. Golf course. Gershwin.
Will that do? Will those do? Please let me know in the comments, and don’t forget to like and subscribe, because that is what this all is about, make no mistake. Amassing lists of strangers who are not your friends, maneuvering yourself into popularity, proving to the universe that you are important, that you matter.
And Universe shrugs, pauses, then crumbles you and your entire planet to dust.
But the dust lives on, in new forms. And Universe crumbles those, too. And then the dust looks at itself and remembers, hey, it IS Universe. Dichotomy was in its dusty head, all along. In its dusty atoms, at its dusty core, ain’t nothing powering that micro star furnace but Universe. All is all is all. So I’ll crumble me up, turn me inside out, torch me dusty toes to fingertips. Can’t lose what I am, which is not only the surface form but also the eternal living potential that moves the form, breathes the dance into these vanishing shapes.
And that ain’t got any damn thing to do with number of likes on your Instagram post.
So shut your trap and get to living. This dust got patterns to swirl.
x
Day 348: Wednesday Reviews - Taxi Driver
Released in 1976, with Scorsese still a precocious young director full of promise, and De Niro a rangy, sinewy actor fresh from his breakout roles in Mean Streets and The Godfather Part II, the film was an immediate sensation. With a blistering script by Paul Schrader, cinematography by Michael Chapman, and a jazz score equal parts mournful and menacing by Bernard Hermmann, Taxi Driver is sublime.
Perhaps the best character study put to screen, it is the story of Travis Bickle, a disaffected Vietnam vet who, unable to sleep at night, takes a job as a cabbie. His is a lurid world of porn parlours and street hustlers, and Travis folds into it fully, a shadow slinking along streets bristling with darker shadows still.
Early in the film he meets Betsy (Cybill Shepherd, never better than here), a political campaign aide, and he invites her for coffee and pie, and then to a movie. Betsy doesn’t know what to think of Travis, he is unlike anyone she has ever met, an animal creeping in from the cold, wild, coiled - and, despite herself, she is intrigued.
But it quickly becomes clear precisely how unsocialised Travis is, how far from the frequency of polite, and safe, society he vibrates. Betsy’s radar goes haywire - as does ours - and she runs away.
And thus begins Travis’s inexorable decline into isolation and paranoia and violence.
De Niro is so natural. He utterly embodies the lost loner, every cell in his body existing as Travis, reclusive, searching for but unable to find connection, wounded, inept, stuck. He is stuck in his thoughts, stuck in his conceptions, stuck in his ruminative loops circling what he attaches to as the causes for his malaise. Travis is a study in mental illness and derangement, yet through De Niro’s masterful work he is as human and easy to follow through the narrative as any character in film.
Scorsese’s camera, too, brings Travis and his environment to life. Shots are erratic, spasmodic, filled with an urgency of movement, yet delicate and even sensual when they need to be too. Watch when Travis is on the phone failing to communicate with Betsy, and the camera gently leaves his side, comes to rest peering sadly down an empty corridor, Travis’s mind and future splayed out in peeling paintwork for all to see.
And then there is that crescendo of violence, as shocking and distressing on the fifth viewing as the first. It is captivating, sure, but we are repulsed even as we are drawn to it, provided no space to which to turn away.
And then the final scenes, making an ironic comment, as many have ventured, about the simplistic and sanctimonious nature of the media, or about how in the sickness of 70s New York, it turns out Travis’s deeds are entirely normal.
But there’s more to it than that, I think. Travis, in the end, is a true hero. Not in the moral sense, but beyond good and evil - he is a man willing to wrestle with the universe and accept the consequences whole of heart.
In the bourgeois world of Betsy and the rest, men like Travis are initially seen as dangerous, whereas the pimps and teenage prostitutes are fine, so long as they stay in their allotted areas. Travis is terrifying precisely because he does not see, or refuses to abide by, societal rules. Harvey Keitel’s pimp Sport (Christ, Keitel is good), for all his deplorability, moves to the same tune as Betsy and the prim uptown aides. He knows what is allowed and what is not. There is a tacit order to the universe, and it carries every other character along. But Travis is an iconoclast; he glides between the currents, makes up his own steps.
This initially puts him at odds with the rest of mankind, and spirals him into chaos. But ultimately he does not compromise, and in his last meeting with Betsy we can see that he has become a master of both worlds, no longer held in sway, free to come and go as he pleases - even if, as that final skipped-frame glance in the mirror hints, his future will not necessarily be one of peace and contentment.
Taxi Driver is a complex and thematically rich work of pulp art, technically accomplished and easy to appreciate on the surface, but with so very much shifting and grinding way down below. A film to watch every five years for the rest of your life.
Perhaps the best character study put to screen, it is the story of Travis Bickle, a disaffected Vietnam vet who, unable to sleep at night, takes a job as a cabbie. His is a lurid world of porn parlours and street hustlers, and Travis folds into it fully, a shadow slinking along streets bristling with darker shadows still.
Early in the film he meets Betsy (Cybill Shepherd, never better than here), a political campaign aide, and he invites her for coffee and pie, and then to a movie. Betsy doesn’t know what to think of Travis, he is unlike anyone she has ever met, an animal creeping in from the cold, wild, coiled - and, despite herself, she is intrigued.
But it quickly becomes clear precisely how unsocialised Travis is, how far from the frequency of polite, and safe, society he vibrates. Betsy’s radar goes haywire - as does ours - and she runs away.
And thus begins Travis’s inexorable decline into isolation and paranoia and violence.
De Niro is so natural. He utterly embodies the lost loner, every cell in his body existing as Travis, reclusive, searching for but unable to find connection, wounded, inept, stuck. He is stuck in his thoughts, stuck in his conceptions, stuck in his ruminative loops circling what he attaches to as the causes for his malaise. Travis is a study in mental illness and derangement, yet through De Niro’s masterful work he is as human and easy to follow through the narrative as any character in film.
Scorsese’s camera, too, brings Travis and his environment to life. Shots are erratic, spasmodic, filled with an urgency of movement, yet delicate and even sensual when they need to be too. Watch when Travis is on the phone failing to communicate with Betsy, and the camera gently leaves his side, comes to rest peering sadly down an empty corridor, Travis’s mind and future splayed out in peeling paintwork for all to see.
And then there is that crescendo of violence, as shocking and distressing on the fifth viewing as the first. It is captivating, sure, but we are repulsed even as we are drawn to it, provided no space to which to turn away.
And then the final scenes, making an ironic comment, as many have ventured, about the simplistic and sanctimonious nature of the media, or about how in the sickness of 70s New York, it turns out Travis’s deeds are entirely normal.
But there’s more to it than that, I think. Travis, in the end, is a true hero. Not in the moral sense, but beyond good and evil - he is a man willing to wrestle with the universe and accept the consequences whole of heart.
In the bourgeois world of Betsy and the rest, men like Travis are initially seen as dangerous, whereas the pimps and teenage prostitutes are fine, so long as they stay in their allotted areas. Travis is terrifying precisely because he does not see, or refuses to abide by, societal rules. Harvey Keitel’s pimp Sport (Christ, Keitel is good), for all his deplorability, moves to the same tune as Betsy and the prim uptown aides. He knows what is allowed and what is not. There is a tacit order to the universe, and it carries every other character along. But Travis is an iconoclast; he glides between the currents, makes up his own steps.
This initially puts him at odds with the rest of mankind, and spirals him into chaos. But ultimately he does not compromise, and in his last meeting with Betsy we can see that he has become a master of both worlds, no longer held in sway, free to come and go as he pleases - even if, as that final skipped-frame glance in the mirror hints, his future will not necessarily be one of peace and contentment.
Taxi Driver is a complex and thematically rich work of pulp art, technically accomplished and easy to appreciate on the surface, but with so very much shifting and grinding way down below. A film to watch every five years for the rest of your life.
Wednesday 10 April 2019
Day 347: Tuesday Reviews - Stranger Than Paradise
Its trio of characters - young Hungarian immigrant Eva (Eszter Balint), her deadbeat Americanised cousin Willie (John Lurie), and his dopey friend Eddie (Richard Edson) - have very little to say, and even less to do. We follow them from New York, where Eva has recently landed from Europe, to Cleveland, where the cousins have an aunt living, and eventually to the sandy beaches of Florida - and we wait around, them and us, for something to happen. And we wait. And wait.
Jarmusch has carved out a career from this kind of measured torpor, and it is handled as deftly here as in any of his later work. Eschewing traditions of narrative, yet adhering to some invisible sense of structure, Stranger Than Paradise trades in a solitary and soporific vision of American life, one seen through a glacially-paced swirl of TV dinners, ashtrays filled with smoking Chesterfields, cards played with creased old decks, and motel rooms bedecked with rickety cots and lonely lampshades hanging by curtained windows.
It looks gorgeous in black and white, filmed in long takes with a mostly static camera, and it is deadpan, melancholic, and at its very edges, always just out of direct sight, rich in emotion.
There is so little in the way of story events that to say anything more of the plot would spoil the film. What's important is that the three characters are never happy where they find themselves. They decide to go someplace new, and they discover it is much the same as where they just left. Restless, transient, yet filled with lethargy, they are, in the end, whatever their country of origin, utterly and irrevocably American.
Tuesday 9 April 2019
Day 346: Monday Reviews - She's Gotta Have It
It is the story of Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns), a young woman living in Brooklyn who refuses to be pinned down, labelled, or made to commit to any single sexual partner. She shares her bed freely and openly with a number of suitors, chief among them the older, ever-serious Jamie (Tommy Redmond Hicks), the fast-talking joker Mars (Spike Lee himself), and the vain, preening, but beautiful Greer (John Canada Terrell).
Each man is initially painted as decidedly flawed, rather hopeless, and yet each, in their own way, offers Nola something valuable and wonderful. Jamie is devoted, dedicated, passionate. Mars is silly and playful and childlike. And Greer is successful, sharp, going places, and happy to take Nola with him.
Nola has different aspects of her personality touched and enlivened by each of them, and she will not choose any over the other. She is always upfront about this. She is a free-spirit, she is enjoying the fullness of life, and any man, or woman, who can’t deal with this is free to go their own way, in peace. And of course this unattainability makes her even more special in the eyes of her partners, and they each want to be the one to capture her, to lasso her spirit and prove to her, to themselves, to the universe, that they are worthy.
But Nola will not be captured, the more people want to pin her down, the more she goes to liquid and slips through their fingers. A Holly Golightly for the Fort Greene neighbourhood. And as her suitors’ impotence grows they lash out, shout at her that she must have something broken inside her to not be able to settle or to choose, for wanting it all, when life, and love, do not work that way. And they’re not wrong, but it’s not their call.
The film’s treatment of sex and relationships and love is mature, refreshing, and liberating. The honesty gives the piece a liveliness, a lot of its humour (it is very funny), and a real vein of sadness.
It is such ebullient filmmaking from Lee as well, shot in lovely black and white under a zesty jazz soundtrack, obviously reminiscent of Woody Allen’s Manhattan - it shares with that seven-year-older film an exuberance and intimacy of space, and an ability to collapse the romantic, the staged and the realistic into one encompassing moment. And, again like Allen, Lee embraces the artifice of film, with characters addressing the camera directly, inserts of still photographs, musical numbers, and sometimes characters interrupting or sharing fourth-wall-breaking monologues. It’s all fair game. The camera is the storyteller’s pen, and may go anywhere within the story - through time, space, into characters’ heads - to say whatever the storyteller’s impulse tells them should be said.
She’s Gotta Have It was a sensation upon release, low-budget and DIY and original, yet clearly earning its place within the milieu of 20th century cinema. It kickstarted the American indie movement of the 80s, inspiring countless filmmakers to tell their own personal stories, and showed the white establishment that black cinema could be urbane, complex, witty, and emotionally available, while still being hip and authentic as hell.
As Lee states in the credits, his film contains “no jheri curls! And no drugs!” Instead it has a thoughtful exploration of the fears and joys of sex - the lusts, the passions, the resentments, and the emotional core of humanity towards which even the most carnal of desires point.
It is superb, a wonderful debut for a truly vital filmmaker. An updated television adaptation, by Lee himself, is currently streaming on Netflix; but do yourself a favour and check the original out first. It's fabulous.
Monday 8 April 2019
Day 345: Sunday Reviews - Nocturnal Animals
Adapted from Austin Wright’s novel Tony and Susan, it is a story within a story, following art gallery owner Susan Morrow, played by the ever sublime Amy Adams, reading from a manuscript that her ex-husband Edward (Jake Gyllenhaal) has sent her in the post. Edward has dedicated his soon-to-be-published book to Susan, and as she reads, and is gripped by the story, she finds that it stirs painful memories from her past.
Her life now is one of staid minimalism and materialistic beauty, of designer dresses, crisp suits, liquid black sports cars, and opulent yet lonely interiors. Her husband, the creamy skinned and gorgeous Hutton (Armie Hammer) is probably cheating on her. She is in stasis.
Ford films these sections in blues and blacks and cool reds, slightly underexposed, with deep poolings of shadows. It is a fixed world, and Susan is isolated within it.
But as she reads the manuscript - also entitled Nocturnal Animals - its own world comes alive, and roils the calm waters of her life to turn them turbid, and dredge up shapes she thought long buried.
This second narrative concerns Tony (also Jake Gyllenhaal), on a road trip with his flame-haired wife and their daughter. The family have a run-in with a gang of vicious Texas locals on a backroad in the middle of nowhere, and Tony’s life is plunged into chaos and violence.
It is a tempestuous and gritty and raw story, filmed in sienna and burnt ochre and burnished gold, and it is clear that through its protagonist the writer Edward is exorcising demons, many of which concern Susan, and the manner of their breakup 20 years prior. Susan chokes at the recognition, and reads, and reads, and reads.
It’s a strong film. Both narratives are gripping, although they don’t quite reflect each other to the extent I would have liked. The manuscript is a vengeance thriller, and it starts tense and effective, but doesn’t have very far to develop after that, playing off the fears of the socialised man realising none of his skills can protect his family from aggressive intruders in a way we’ve seen many times before. It would make an adequate but hardly great film in its own right.
Yet as a counterpoint to Susan’s story it is powerful. Susan's world is less intense, yet also filled with pain, and though the dialogue is a touch expositional, the characters of her current husband and her mother a touch overdone, it is still well-observed, and another exceptional performance from Adams carries it over the top.
Nocturnal Animals has interesting and oftentimes moving things to say about love, commitment, courage, masculinity, and wounds that do not heal. That it never quite hits a crescendo where all these elements combine together is a disappointment, but there is still so much here to love. Visually slick, mature in its understanding of relationships, and in the end appropriately enigmatic, it is definitely worth a watch.
Sunday 7 April 2019
Day 344: Saturday Reviews - Gangs of New York
Taking Scorsese 20 years to bring to fruition, and with a production plagued by arguments between egos, stars dropping out, and an ever inflating budget, one rather wishes the acclaimed director had taken a few years more to get the thing right.
But such is the way of blockbuster filmmaking, where you enter a deal to deliver a commercial product at the same time as tease out a creative work. Where very rich people entrust you with very large sums of money to bring them a return on investment. Where your film isn’t happening for a long time, and then it looks like it could happen, and then suddenly it is happening, and all the forces, the loans, the actors, the producers, the sets, all coalesce, and here you are, and you have to make it work.
Gangs of New York isn’t a great film. But it is a testament to Scorsese that he manages to salvage something watchable - and a hit; it made lots of money - from what is so clearly not a natural winner.
You can feel him struggling at every turn with the thing. Creativity comes and goes, ebbs and flows, and sometimes the muse isn’t there. Essentially it seems to me that when it came to it the film didn’t come together, Scorsese didn’t have the inspiration at the time to make it succeed, but he had too much talent to let it fail. He clings on, tenaciously, sweats out every shot, and the result is… gargantuan, wild, intriguing, often enjoyable, but saggy, lacking cohesion, and it ultimately does not coalesce to explore the themes or impulses that set Scorsese on the path to production.
The sets are lavish, but also clearly sets. It reminded me, especially in the opening, of Pirates of the Caribbean, Thunderdome Mad Max, and Spielberg’s Hook. This is not a good thing.
But my main problem is with the screenplay, and with the characters. The film is positioned as a sweeping conflict between two great men: Daniel Day-Lewis’s ruthless established crime boss, Bill the Butcher, and Leonardo DiCaprio’s young upstart Amsterdam.
Amsterdam is our protagonist; he is on a crusade of vengeance after Bill kills his father, Liam Neeson, in the film’s opening. But take away Day-Lewis’s grandiloquent performance, and Bill isn’t a very villainous villain. He kills Neeson in fair combat, puts him out of his misery kindly, lets his son mourn him, commands his body to not be desecrated, and that his son be paid through school.
All through the film Day-Lewis chews scenery, and his Bill has a glass eye, he throws knives and uses hatchets, he’s meant to be a big bad film character, but his actions, on the page, are always entirely understandable.
Thus Amsterdam's motivations are hard to relate to, and as a character he doesn't draw us through the tale. Later on the film moves towards the idea of shifting morality, a crime world where no one is innocent, where men are drawn to violence despite knowing it will destroy them - a la so much of Scorsese’s work - but where in Goodfellas we empathise with, maybe root for, or at least enjoy the company of, Henry Hill, here there is scant little for us to attach to. DiCaprio acts his socks off, clearly making enough of an impression to inspire Scorsese to cast him in pieces for another decade, and Day-Lewis is exactly as ridiculous as the part requires - but the truth is that neither character in the script is interesting enough.
And it’s not about anything, either. The central struggle is not reflective of the themes presented by the film’s ending, the two characters and their story are not a microcosm for the world, it is simply an extended rivalry (which in fact takes two hours to begin - Christ it's a long film) happening to the backdrop of burgeoning democracy and conscription for the Civil War. When Amsterdam narrates over scenes of Irish immigrants being pulled off the boats, given citizenship and draft cards and Union uniforms, sent back onto boats for the battlefield as coffins are unloaded on the other side, it could be from another film - it has nothing to do with the core plot. You want the themes to be given life through the events of the film, through the characters, the dialogue, the shot choices, through everything. You want your film to always push in the same direction, to be a fractal pattern in which every element reflects and embodies every other.
And it’s not about anything, either. The central struggle is not reflective of the themes presented by the film’s ending, the two characters and their story are not a microcosm for the world, it is simply an extended rivalry (which in fact takes two hours to begin - Christ it's a long film) happening to the backdrop of burgeoning democracy and conscription for the Civil War. When Amsterdam narrates over scenes of Irish immigrants being pulled off the boats, given citizenship and draft cards and Union uniforms, sent back onto boats for the battlefield as coffins are unloaded on the other side, it could be from another film - it has nothing to do with the core plot. You want the themes to be given life through the events of the film, through the characters, the dialogue, the shot choices, through everything. You want your film to always push in the same direction, to be a fractal pattern in which every element reflects and embodies every other.
You don't sense that here. There is lots of showy filmmaking, but scattershot, techniques being abandoned, momentum building then being forgotten.
Like I said, it is not a failure. The performances are all strong. It's a lavish production, and past a certain point, although there isn't enough depth, the sheer width of it all surges over your defences, much like the gathering gang hordes of the enormous battle scenes, and you find that despite yourself, you are being overrun.
Like I said, it is not a failure. The performances are all strong. It's a lavish production, and past a certain point, although there isn't enough depth, the sheer width of it all surges over your defences, much like the gathering gang hordes of the enormous battle scenes, and you find that despite yourself, you are being overrun.
But you look at the numbers, the size of that budget, and you are left with the thought: if this is a victory for Scorsese, it is a Pyrrhic one; the cost for such mediocre success is high.
Friday 5 April 2019
Day 343: Friday Reviews - Hard Eight
But let us suppose you knew those things already. Well, then, the word I would choose would be "lagoonal".
It's murky, is Hard Eight, melancholic; a whisky-soaked late-night sojourn around a Reno of faded casinos and cut-rate motels, in the company of a cast of sorry hustlers, the kinds of people you'd find left slouching and shuffling across the threadbare carpets once all the highflyers had moved on through.
There's a wonderful sense of life sprouting in interstitial spaces, as if PTA is taking his camera and zooming in from the Reno skyline, past the glamour and noise, into the cracks, the 3am streets, the freeway diners, the deserted bars, and waiting, waiting, for something, anything, to occur.
What occurs is that Sydney, an ageing gambler played with rumpled poise by Philip Baker Hall, meets a young man (John C. Reilly) sat forlornly outside a diner, and offers to take him inside for coffee and cigarettes. After showing the man how to scam a casino for a free room and some food, the two become partners. They grow fond of one another, develop a father-son relationship, but then the young man becomes embroiled with cocktail waitress Clementine (a very good Gwyneth Paltrow) and two-bit hoodlum Jimmy (Samuel L. Jackson), and Sydney, protecting his naive protege, is forced into a world he wanted to have left behind.
The focus is on character, on letting moments organically grow. It's a full hour before the plot really grinds up, but all the hanging out we do up to that point really grounds the film, really makes us care about its cast - and it is beautiful, riveting stuff.
PTA, in his first feature film, is a thrilling director, assured, original, as intriguing in coffee shop two-shots as crucial points of tension. That early casino swindle could be so sedentary, and yet in PTA's hands it is elegantly explained and utterly engrossing - a kind of Ocean's Eleven to bag a bed for the night and a sandwich or two. And this perfectly sets up the world these characters inhabit, their motivations, their desires. Sydney is playing for scraps, but he is playing well, noble and professional, and we wonder what has happened to him to wind him up here.
It looks gorgeous as well. A colour palette of greens and reds and underwater blues. Lenses up close, isolating subjects, racking focus, softening backgrounds. Lots of night shots. Lots of neon.
It is a dreamy world, yet a lifelike one, also. Many of the characters, scenarios, and stretches of dialogue are reminiscent of Tarantino, yet a vibration away, from a quieter universe, more low-key, more sombre, more tender.
Hard Eight is a stunning debut from a magnificent director; a gem gleaming out from beneath nebulous waters. In a word: lagoonal. Give it a watch.
Thursday 4 April 2019
Day 342: Thursday Reviews - Children of Men
CHILDREN OF MEN
Try not to get yourself in a tizz or anything, but I don’t like Children of Men as much as everyone else. I remember it leaving me cold on its release, and a second viewing has it confirmed.
Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, it’s filled with bravura long takes, exquisitely staged action scenes, beautiful plays of light and shadow - but as a screenplay it is riddled with weaknesses, and thus as a story it is decidedly mediocre.
It labours so inelegantly in the first act to hammer in its central premise - that in its near future the human race has become inexplicably infertile, the youngest person alive is now 18 years old, and, without hope of a future, mankind limps onwards, through habit, down the inexorable path towards despair, chaos, and eventual extinction.
It’s a powerful premise, but one artlessly communicated to us through expositional dialogue, scrawled graffiti, newspaper clippings, television reports - there’s always a goddamned television playing somewhere declaring to us with the most diaphanous narrative veil exactly the information that is pertinent to that scene.
But where a better film would have the confidence to allow us to discover this information organically, and thus make us feel respected - give our intelligence and imagination something to do, bring us alive - here we’re perpetually told rather than shown, front-loaded with the details we wish to find for ourselves.
I’d rather have an opening monologue/text crawl to be honest. At least that’d get the clumsy stuff out of the way in twenty seconds, rather than twenty minutes pretending to be in the film when really it’s saying, “OK, this is what you need to know before we begin.”
So that set me off on the wrong foot. And from there I was looking for issues. A terrorist group kidnap protagonist Theo (Clive Owen) - bag over head, thrust into van - and he comes to in a tiny cell, bright light shining in his face, hooded figures commanding him to not do anything stupid, etc. And a voice behind the figures, hidden in the light: “Hello, Theo.” And, surprise, it’s his ex-wife (“It’s me, it’s Julian”, she says, expositorily), an activist/resistance fighter, wanting to recruit Theo into a scheme, and she’s “sorry for the theatrics, but the police have been a pain in the…”
Uhh, wait. Are the police in this tiny cell here? Were they in the apartment housing the cell when Theo was brought in? The stairwell? The street?
It’s a red herring meant to be exciting for the audience, but it makes no sense within the film’s world. Nor, it transpires, does much of the plot.
It’s one long chase sequence, really, with Theo becoming embroiled - without much agency on his part for like the first hour - in a plan to smuggle a young woman, Kee (Clare-Hope Ashitey) out of the dystopian future UK and to freedom. And Kee - big reveal - is the miracle the human race needs. She is pregnant.
But the pregnancy, and Kee, must be kept secret - because reasons! - so Theo falls into the role of guardian, ushering Kee through one thrilling set-piece after another, all filmed in continuous wide angle takes, the camera catching the edges of action, important characters hit with bullets but we are away running for our lives and the camera swings back but we can’t see and then forwards again and we’re clambering over a gate and ducking behind a wall and OH SHIT HERE’S ONE OF THE BAD GUYS - he raises a gun, but POW, he’s hit by a soldier as another faction joins the fray and we see our opportunity and leap the wall as bullets fly on either side…
They’re all breathless, and impressive, scenes - Cuarón excels at this - but Theo is a dull character, Kee has no characteristics at all - Michael Caine plays a cliched older mentor role that I found too obvious. Character motivations are often hazy. There are no interesting character arcs. They sort of aim for Theo being an ex-activist fallen to cynicism who has his hope reignited by Kee and her baby, finds something larger than himself to believe in, but they don’t hit the necessary marks, they don’t find the heart of their story.
And nor do they manage the primal immediacy of something like The Road. They could have stripped back character and the trappings of social existence, gone darker, but the (occasionally excellent) bleakness is forever undercut by attempts at brevity, by making Theo into a laissez-faire hero full of quips - like when a kidnapper leans in close to threaten Theo and as way of retort Theo comments that the kidnapper has terrible breath.
There’s too much exposition, too much material for the left-hemisphere, for the film to be a haunting melancholic emotional piece. It wants to be a story reliant on plot. But the plot is just not good enough. And without really discovering its characters, the themes don't have vessels through which they may develop. "If there were no more children then the world would go to shit" is pretty much all the film ultimately manages to eke from its premise.
The climactic battle, and its poignant ending, is stellar stuff, one of its decade’s finest moments of cinema, but what comes before is too stodgy, leaden, clumsy, in every regard except visually.
Children of Men, then, is an exciting ride, but when it comes down to it, just not adult enough.
Wednesday 3 April 2019
Day 341: Wednesday Reviews - Network
Everyone, on three. One, two, three:
I'M AS MAD AS HELL AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!
The film from which these lines are drawn, Network, is an acerbic and sardonic satire of the world of news anchors, media executives, and television celebrity. Prescient and ever-pertinent, switch out its cast of associate producers, production assistants and head writers for YouTube vloggers and Instagram influencers, and its themes are as apposite today as they were upon the film's release in 1976.
And yet, despite the persistent popularity on social media of its central speech, it is a film somewhat misunderstood, with layers of depth above and beyond that one iconic call to anger, which call is, in fact, only a small facet of the greater and more terrible truth posited come the end credits.
***
It's there from the opening lines, a burst of expositional narration so sublime as to have become paradigmatic:
“In his time, Howard Beale had been a mandarin of television, the grand old man of news, with a HUT rating of 16 and a 28 audience share. In 1969, however, he fell to a 22 share, and by 1972, he was down to a 15 share. In 1973, his wife died, and he was left a childless widower with an 8 rating and a 12 share. He became morose and isolated, began to drink heavily, and, on September 22, 1975, he was fired, effective in two weeks…”
In one succinct stanza we are given the premise of our story, introduced to its pivotal character, and taught about the values of this world, where death and depression, and everything else, have meaning only insofar as they affect the two vital pillars of worship: the HUT rating, and the audience share figures. Beautiful!
***
And so, then, we begin to follow Howard Beale, the booze-hound newscaster, played by booze-hound actor Peter Finch. Beale, in the grip of a breakdown and facing imminent job loss, informs the public during his nightly broadcast that in one week's time, on-air, he will blow his brains out.
The response at his station is one of disbelief and fury, but is mitigated by Max Schumacher, president of the news division and one of Beale's oldest friends. Max convinces the station to give Beale the opportunity to go back on air the following night to apologise for his outburst and to bow out gracefully, saving face for all involved.
Beale, however, after a drink and despair-fuelled spiritual awakening/complete breakdown, instead uses his timeslot to again go off-piste, railing vociferously and decisively against the world's "bullshit" and proclaiming the emptiness of modern life.
Surprisingly - or perhaps not - the show's ratings go through the roof, and studio executives at the ailing network find themselves with an unexpected hit on their hands.
What follows is a caustic, haunting, and hellishly funny journey through a realm of egos positioning for power, old white men hawkishly watching the bottom line, and slack-jawed hordes primed for a prophet to lead them from their supine positions on couches across the nation and towards freedom, wherever that may lie.
***
Max, played by William Holden, worries for his friend, but everyone else seeks to exploit him. Faye Dunaway plays the ambitious and cynical Diane, head of the network's programming department, who sees an opportunity to market Beale as a messianic figure, and to "develop" his news show with the addition of fortune tellers, vox populi boxes, bank heists of the week, and other elements that in truth appear rather staid in comparison to the regular content paraded today on Fox News and its ilk, but which I'm sure seemed ludicrous back in 1976.
There is also Robert Duvall's Executive Senior Vice President of the network, writhing above the viper's nest of producers and presidents and public relations managers, a newer breed of executive contriving to sweep away the remnants of the older establishment and usher in his own agenda.
And, at the centre of it all, Beale, increasingly separated from reality, frequently overcome with fits of religious fervour - or DTs seizures, perhaps - believing himself to have heard the voice of God, passing on the message to the people, cutting through all the artifice and emptiness and greed with words beginning as authentic roar and eventually becoming catchphrase:
"I'm as mad as hell and-" well, you know the rest.
***
It is a perspicacious script, rich in theme, profound in meaning. Chayefsky - an esteemed writer known for leading the "kitchen sink realism" movement in American television in the 50s, gets to the heart of his characters, writes stunning dialogue, but most of all has a sharp instinct for story.
Network is folklore, legend. It correctly posits that television and fame belong to a realm created from dreams and desires, a land that trades in the symbolic and is presided over by the living embodiment of gods.
I love this. The subconscious is, after all, real. Its depths, though mostly hidden from us, are there. Network's premise is that we bestow celebrities, ratings, shows with mythical importance because these things are the visible representations of aspects important to the subconscious world, the tails cresting the surface, as we paddle about up here, of dark things that churn the waters far below.
Beale, in the throes of suicidal despair, ceases to care about the trivial distractions of the surface world. In a moment of freedom he looks down, and with clarity spies glittering pearls coruscating in the usually turbid depths. He reaches down and yanks them up. These pearls he shares with people back on the surface - in the form of his visionary speeches - and the people worship and celebrate him for it.
Yet myths do not allow boons to be taken lightly; the subconscious world is predicated upon ancient and immutable laws. Beale, in transgressing against societal norms, speaking what no one else dares, has meddled with forces he does not comprehend.
We, along with Beale, may think of television stars as gods. But one of Network's ultimate thrusts is that stars are but a cast of heroes and villains, plucky adventurers bestowed with power and riches by the true gods so long as they play the game.
And who are these true gods? In Network they are personified in Arthur Jensen, chairman of the communications conglomerate that owns Beale's network. Jensen, unforgettably played by Ned Beatty, is an omnipotent corporate deity who speaks for the forces of profit and stock, for the "vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multi-variete, multi-national dominion of dollars." And with our uppity promethean Howard Beale he is, to put it lightly, displeased.
By trading in the archetypal in this way, Chayefsky and Lumet are able to take their satire to the level of monomyth. Beale is a tragic hero who, through the warped courage that comes when deciding to kill yourself, is able to descend rapidly to the mystical centre of the hero's journey, to the meeting with the goddess and the winning of the ultimate boon. But such boons are never unguarded, and Beale's spirit, lacking the sane part of him that in successful heroes' journeys must consciously agree to cross the threshold of adventure, and lacking preparation from the road of trials, is frail and unprepared to battle the dragons that his boon-theft awakens. Such a story can only end one way.
So much of Hollywood, and television, and comics, really corrupts the hero's journey, putting all the emphasis on the prizes, and none on the responsibility, the price that in reality is paid by staring down the universe. That Network is able to understand this, in a story actually about Hollywood and television, is, I think, crazy cool.
***
There are things I don't like. Some of the filmmaking is clunky by today's standards - the odd wobbly camera, blood that is obviously red paint. And its attitudes to gender roles is... very 70s, most troublingly in its depiction of the relationship between the avuncular Max and the tenacious Diane. Max is drawn to the alluring (and perpetually bra-less) Diane, and finds himself pulled into an affair with her, despite himself.
Diane is, as Max himself points out, "television incarnate... indifferent to suffering, insensitive to joy". She is a monster, though humanised by the script and Dunaway's perfect performance. The story demands her. And yet something sticks in my craw. Perhaps it's the subtle implication that any woman who is driven and self-reliant must also be ruthless, carved out on the inside, desperate for yet utterly incapable of receiving the love from a man that would save her.
Her knowing cynicism is an astute comment on the behaviour of so many of us sneering our way towards destruction in these waning years of modern Western civilisation. But I don't like how the film portrays Max as the conscience of the piece, despite him cheating on his wife, choosing desire over commitment, and then going back to patch things up when he's bored - while Diane is scolded for her inability to love.
***
Yet in all other regards Network is a masterpiece. Sharp, sagacious, funny, with career-high performances, eminently quotable passages, and a script that finds the mythical in the mundane, and the spiritual in the secular, it is truly a tale for the ages. Sit your kids down and tell them the story of Howard Beale, who in his time had been a mandarin of television, the grand old man of news...
It's one everyone should hear.
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