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.

***

While Sidney Lumet (12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon) directs with requisite restraint and control, much of Network's success must be apportioned to Paddy Chayefsky's elegant, exemplary script, which, in a few deft manoeuvres, takes what could have been straightforward (if biting) commentary and raises it to the level of myth, finding the archetypal in its characters, turning its realm of approval ratings and cults of celebrity into a legend with all the hallmarks of Greek tragedy.

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.

Day 339: March in Blogging

Death to the patriarchy! Hail Hydra! Oh my God we’re having a fire… sale!

I just needed something to yell there as means of introduction. Hope one of those was all right. I can furnish you with more if not? No? OK, fine.

Hullo. It’s time for my monthly round-up of the more interesting posts from this blog. I mostly spent March: editing photos. I finally got round to buying a subscription to Adobe Lightroom, and with a few photography jobs for work, my daily socials pics, my own pics, and going back over older stuff to see what Lightroom can do to them, I’ve spent an inordinate portion of the last 31 days with my face buried in tone curves.

Which isn’t, I’m sad to report, any kind of a euphemism.

Anyway, the blog…

Day 308: Where he belongs - An ode to physical labour, and to my friend Steve. I couldn’t remember writing this, I think I did it at 2am slouched in bed after arriving home from a long day grafting. Vaguely recall feeling sleep twisting round me and desperately trying to get words out and not being sure if they even made sense. It turned out quite lovely for all that.

Day 311: Wetland - About depression being a quagmire, and joy and creativity being like soaring in the sky, and how tiredness affects that. The more you soar, the more momentum you have, and the easier it becomes. But once your feet start to catch on bristles and vines you slump into the mud, and then the mud sucks at your feet, and then suddenly you’re exerting all the energy you have and it’s going on simply struggling to not be swallowed. I like this analogy. I’ll elaborate on it at some point.

Day 312: Complex structures - Neuroplasticity! Positivity! Getting trains to Happy Town! Days like this, carving out space in my head to feel good, need to be remembered. Light them up. Paint signs to them. Lay down tracks. Go back the same way as often as possible. That /is/ how brains work!

Day 316: Orbit - And again, finding my way from negativity to love. I did that. Remember. Replicate. Move forwards.

Day 317: A garden without weeds is not enough - And again! About the importance of planting seeds of positivity as well as pulling up the weeds of negativity. These posts are the unglamourous work, down and dirty in the soil, but man are they important. They lay a framework so when I feel bleak and my soul crumbles - which happens all the bloody time - there is structure to catch me. And it works. I haven’t been feeling less broken this month, but I have been more able to grind out the things I’ve needed to do.

Day 321: Days off? What are those? - Sleaford Mods gig with Mike, photo editing, coping with writing stress. The photo here is nice, although it needs a stronger single subject, and I see now it is a touch underexposed. But nice light around the chandelier.

Day 322: Roaccutane - About my experience on the most hardcore of acne medications, when I was 24. Hate writing about this. Forcing myself to write about it. Need to plough right through self-consciousness and shame, because they are demons that guard the caves with the most interesting of treasure. It is known.

Day 323: But it is good - “Just because you can’t see the sky behind the clouds doesn’t mean the sky is not there.” More carving out positive space for myself. I did that a lot this month. Well done, me.

Day 324: Somewhere else - Mosque murderers, Instagram influencers, plastic piling up in the oceans. Depression stops me getting angry most of the time, but I got angry here. We should all be angry on days like that. Anger is appropriate.

Day 325: Smile at service workers - …And then I got empathetic. And I’m serious about this one. Look directly at people who are suffering, smile at them, and think about how you want them to be OK. There are dark forces in this world. Be a torchbearer for the light, or you will be subsumed by the shadow. Look at Trump and Bolsonaro and Salvini and Orban and Le Pen and Farage and Germany’s AfD and Poland’s Law and Justice - look at these and tell me we’re not in our most dangerous time for seventy years. You might yet end up fighting for your life. Are you going to be on the side of hatred, or love?

Day 328: A long slog - A few more photos, from a walk around Kelham Island with me mam.

Day 333: Our Nige - Having fun, here. There should always be room for a bit of fun. Summoning rituals and varifocal glasses circuitous routes through the suburbs of Hell. A Pratchett/Gaiman impression, and low-hanging fruit, but some nights that is all to the better.

Day 338: Negroni - Michael and Emerald got married! I had some red wine. I got anxious and self-conscious and afraid. Pat took me in his big strong arms and told me I was going to be OK. Pat’s great. I love Pat.

Wednesday Reviews:

• Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)
• Ghost in the Shell (2017)
• Ghost in the Shell (1995)
• Baby Driver

And I’m outtie. See you next month! Oh, wait. See you tomorrow. How much longer do I have to do this for?

26 days. Christ. 26 days and I’ll have been doing this a year. That’s… insane. Best get thinking what to write for that last one.

Nah just kidding I’ll do it at 3am on the last night like I’ve done for all the others.

Bubyeeeee x

Day 320: Wednesday Reviews - Ghost in the Shell (2017)

Questions of existentialism and identity abound in this big-budget American remake of the cult cyberpunk anime from 1995. Sadly, such questions relate not to the film’s narrative, but to the adaptation itself: can the weird and beautiful soul of the original tale survive when transplanted into the cold, robotic body of a mainstream Hollywood blockbuster?

No. No, it patently cannot. Despite the borrowed motifs, visual cues and supporting characters - ghosts of the previous incarnation - this is a plodding, uninspired and artless cinematic slog.

Scarlett Johansson plays Major, a slim and slinky robocop whose brain is transferred into a synthetic shell after an ostensible terrorist bombing in the opening moments. Reborn, in a trippy and arresting early sequence, as a machine with a human soul, Major goes to work as an agent for counter-terrorism initiative Section 9, investigating hacking crimes - which, in a megacity filled with cybernetically-enhanced humans, is serious business.

While responding to the assassination of a scientist working for Hanka Robotics - the shadowy corporation that designed Killian herself - she crosses paths with an imposing and messianic foe who leads her on a journey to uncover the truth of her creation and the meaning behind the “glitches” she has been experiencing in her consciousness.

Draw a Venn diagram of Blade Runner (the original and the sequel), Total Recall, Ex Machina, The Fifth Element, The Bourne Identity, and, of course, Robocop - and in that brown, undifferentiated mess where they all meet you will find this iteration of Ghost in the Shell.

It is derivative, borrowing all of its visual, audial and thematic identity from elsewhere. In fact, add the Matrix to that diagram. And John Wick, from which it unsuccessfully attempts to lift the measured, balletic gunplay.

It is artless, with a plot that flails from one narrative cliche to the next like a drowning sailor grasping for passing driftwood. Shadowy corporation with a hidden agenda? Check. CEO wanting to use a scientific breakthrough for military purposes? Check. Protagonist with amnesia? Antagonist who is the only one who can reveal the truth of the protagonist’s backstory? Antagonist with a plan that involves initially being captured? Protagonist framed for murder and forced to go rogue to reveal conspiracy? Check, check, check, check.

I imagine the screenwriters, like Major's creators, sewing the script together from existing pieces they had leftover from a million other projects. The result is that the story as a whole doesn’t hold together, it looks just about like a story if you don’t pay it too much attention, if you don’t watch it move - but as soon as you peer closely the cracks start to show. Plot points are taken up then unceremoniously dumped a few minutes later, and logic is left squarely at the door.

Here’s an example: the initial terrorist attack that introduces us to Major's unit and role. After an establishing shot swooping through a neo-noir cityscape at night (you know, neon billboards, holographic advertisements, gilded towers of darkened glass), we come to Major, stood resolutely on a rooftop, “On site, awaiting instructions.”

Her unit commander, a taciturn Takeshi Kitano (playing against type, ahem) orders her to “Review and report.” Major scans the building and finds there’s a Hanka scientist meeting a foreign dignitary, and that the meeting is being hacked.

But… but… If she only just found this out then what was she doing “on site” in the first place? What was her mission? Go to a random rooftop and start listening and see if there’s any craic?

Anyway, having luckily stumbled upon a potential crime, she stands and listens until terrorists break into the meeting below and start shooting. She asks on comms where her back-up is - two minutes out - and decides that is too long, and starts prepping her dive suit. The commander orders her to stop - I have no idea why, it just makes good drama when your protagonist disobeys orders - and Major leaps from the roof, and somehow through the window of the meeting room far below, and takes out the terrorists.

Some of the terrorists are men in black suits who break into the room, but some are the robot geisha who the Hanka scientist was (I think) showing off to the dignitary. In fact the men in black suits were robots as well. And the robots were hacked remotely and forced to become killers.

Major and her squadmates, who arrive as Major is finishing up with the last killer robot, don’t actually achieve anything - the scientist is killed, the hacker has done what he wanted - but the film plays it as if they’ve just saved the day.

To keep the engine of the plot in motion Major then discovers that she can meld her consciousness with one of the damaged geisha to attempt to learn who hacked into it. She is again ordered to refrain - it’s too dangerous - but she again disobeys and plugs herself in and dives into the robot’s primitive mind.

But uh oh - turns out the hacker has laid traps for her (exactly as was presumed), and she starts to be swallowed by a virus code. Her squadmate, watching her body fitting and squirming, like how Trinity watched Neo when he was plugged into the Matrix, starts yelling that they need to find a way to get her out, that she’s going to be lost, yada yada blah blah. Finally, right as Major is about to die, her squadmate leaps and yanks out the cable connecting her to the robot, and she wakes up, gasping.

So… umm. If pulling the plug out could have fixed everything all along then where was the tension?

But never mind that, because Major, gulping down air, visibly shaken, proclaims that she now knows where to find the hacker.

And that’s exciting, so now we’re off for another action scene (because obviously it’s a trap, and the hacker knows they’re coming) … and we just bound on in this way, a pinball bashed from here to there, no depth or meaning to any of it, just flashing lights and loud noises and distracting visuals.

… It’s late at night as I write this, and I’m exhausted, so perhaps I'm being harsher on Ghost in the Shell than it deserves. It’s not egregious. It does look slick and impressive, although maximalist, and lacking focus. It has a decent pace to it, and Scarlett Johansson, although undeniably a case of whitewashed casting to make the Japanese original more appealing for Western audiences, puts in a decent performance as the confused and isolated woman turned into a walking weapon.

But then don’t the antagonists of the narrative do to her character exactly what director Rupert Sanders, along with all the writers and producers, do to her, the actor, in this film? Take someone whole and real and complex and turn her into a skintight catsuit, an object for salacious shots, a sexualised walking weapon? That the filmmakers pay lip service to a plot in which such actions are called out as reprehensible in no way assuages this - in fact it is simply them having their cake and eating it too. They do the same with the whitewashing, baking a reason for it into the plot, as if the demands of the story called for a Caucasian actress, and not the concerns of money-hungry studio executives.

This could have been an interesting film, using the stylistic trappings of the original to explore themes of body autonomy, sexual objectification and shifting cultural identity. Or it could have stuck with the original’s meditations on the dehumanising effects of the encroachment of technology into the sphere of the soul.

As it is it does neither, instead choosing to fall back on worn Hollywood tropes to tell what is at heart a bland and uninteresting story. The dialogue is flat, expositional, and frequently asinine. Characters are underdeveloped. The plot is riddled with holes.

Less an acrobatic cyborg leaping into action, then, and more one of these hapless fellas. Time to call for a robot exorcist, methinks.

Day 313: Wednesday Reviews - Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

So. 2014's Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is vivacious. Bounding along to bebop rhythms, composed of long takes spliced together to give the appearance of one unbroken journey, the camera roving up and around and over and through the warren-like theatre of its setting, its characters effusing burstfire dialogue or exploding into paroxysms of emotion or wrestling one another maniacally across the floor, this film hums. It buzzes. It jumps.

The work of director Alejandro González Iñárritu, known previously for his multi-character non-linear pieces such as Amores Perros, 21 Grams, and Babel, Birdman is a different beast from these interwoven stories entirely.

Primarily the exploration of one man’s struggle against his ego, it features Michael Keaton as Riggan Thomson, the washed-up star of 90s superhero franchise Birdman - now staging a Broadway adaptation of Raymond Carver’s short story What We Talk About When We Talk About Love in a bid to find the validation and worth that, despite his Hollywood megabucks, have always eluded him.

The film chronicles the few days of rehearsals and previews leading up to the play’s opening night, as Riggan, increasingly beset by internal voices of self-loathing and -criticism and -doubt, lurches inexorably towards mental collapse. Riggan’s ego is personified in the figure of Birdman, who leers over him, in full feathered costume, gravel-voiced, purring that he’s a joke, a failure, that his aspirations of respectability are doomed and he should go back to the only thing he’s ever been good at - making popcorn thrillers adored by the slack-jawed masses.

It’s very funny. Partly because of the obvious parallels between Riggan and Keaton himself, who played Batman - on whom the brooding Birdman is clearly based - three decades ago. But the humour isn’t all self-referential, although there are plenty of sideswipes at blockbuster cinema and the cult of celebrity. It is a comedic film, playful, wry, deadpan; a comedy in the same way you might say Pulp Fiction is a comedy.

Keaton mines the part for all he’s worth, playing Riggan as vainglorious, desperate, monstrously self-pitying, and entirely relatable. His failures are our failures, too. And the supporting cast is terrific. Ed Norton is the critically adored method actor spilling his blood, and other bodily fluids, across the boards in pursuit of authenticity and truth. He is magnetic, impressive, and hilariously insecure. Naomi Watts is his on- and off-screen partner, her role smaller, her performance as mesmerising as ever. And Emma Stone plays Riggan’s drug-addicted daughter and PA, cynical, cutting through the pomp of the other characters, yet underneath the manufactured insouciance and thick eyeliner as broken and uncertain as the rest of them.

Everyone is superb, but it is Riggan that Iñárritu makes star of the show. He is a child, warped, kept brittle, by fame, battling enormously to be an adult, yet utterly incapable of taking the steps necessary to move beyond himself. All his energy is turned inwards. Where Ed Norton’s character pushes his struggles out into the world around him, Riggan withdraws, ruminates. He is being sucked into quicksand inside himself. No one in the film knows what they’re doing, what life is about; they are all lost and scared. And yet they get on with things. Live their lives. Riggan can’t do this. His ego is a black hole at the centre of his being, pulling him in.

It is a struggle with which I have experience, and I love how it is visualised and explored here.

This is as much down to Iñárritu’s directorial style as Keaton’s delivery. The camera is ever on the move, inquisitive, agitated, peering in at characters, searching for something it cannot find. The shots are mostly steadicam and handheld, with wide-angle lenses filming in close-up to create a dreamlike, claustrophobic feel. There’s an urgency and restlessness to it all, a jazz syncopation engendered through the camera and dialogue as much as through the persistent scattershot drumming pattering across the soundtrack.

And there is Riggan’s telekinesis - the opening shot shows him levitating in his dressing room in his baggy and faded Y-fronts, and in quiet moments alone he is prone to dragging, twirling and hurling inanimate objects - like Darth Vader, or perhaps Matilda - exerting his gargantuan movie star/superhero influence upon the external world… although in one telling scene we watch him godlike, wreaking havoc upon his dressing room, and then the camera spins as his agent (Zach Galifianakis, who again is very good, and funny) opens the door - the camera spins back, now implied as the agent’s point of view, to reveal Riggan stood in a pile of mess impotently tearing up shreds of newspaper - with his plain old human hands. It’s a fabulous moment, heightened by Riggan’s embarrassment once he realises he is being watched, perfectly capturing how vast and powerful and tragic we feel in our own heads, versus how small and shameful we feel when viewed from someone else’s.

Birdman is a dazzling film. The technical accomplishments necessary to create the long and intricate takes, the abrupt changes of location, the unbroken transitions between POV, between dream and reality, beggar belief. Yet it does not feel like a technical film. Yes, occasionally it is showy, enamoured by its own wizardry, but mostly it services character and emotion, the craftsmanship of the continuous takes providing tension and excitement without drawing attention to itself.

I’m less certain about the film’s conclusion, though. It works, but feels dangerously close to a cop-out. In the end I’m not sure it quite knows what to say about, what to make of, the themes it brings up.

But as a portrait of a man grappling with his ego it is fresh, boisterous, and captivating, both tongue-in-cheek and sincere at the same time. Iñárritu has the wisdom to puncture his protagonist’s inflated sense of self-importance at every turn, yet the compassion to retain tenderness and pathos while he does it, mining the material for humour and poignancy in equal measure. Birdman is one of my favourite films of the decade. It soars.

Day 307: February in blogging

Hiya. Home from hotels and tool displays and pots of paint and heavy work boots, and ready to collect up the better stuff from the blog from the past month, before I go and pass out.

It’s been a steady month, writing-wise. I don’t think I’ve written a single piece I’ve loved, but there’s been plenty that was sufficient. 

... There I go with that wild self promotion again. Best make sure I keep that in check.

No, but it really hasn’t been a wonderful month. I’ve not had any serious depressive episodes, but I’ve felt about a foot underground, happiness wise, all month. Just been plodding along, doing my best to get words out, to do everything required of me at work, more recently to be on the road with Steve, and not to collapse or fall inside myself at all. If you’re going through hell, keep going. That’s been my mantra these past weeks.

Also, I turned 34 in February. That hit me pretty hard. I’ve achieved so little. But I’m still here. And I’m not giving up. It’s a long road, through hell, but I’m walking it. Step by step by step.

Here are the highlights of this month’s posts:

Day 283: The strange man - A fairly true little tale about a strange man on a bus. I liked this.

Day 284: Gesticulating - And another few paragraphs about a bus journey. I’m sitting on buses lost in thought a lot of late. The stuff about you in there and me in here is something I wanted to get right, will attempt again at some point. It’s something I think about a lot.

Day 288: Tenacity - About ingraining habits and staying positive. Hey, how I was feeling before writing that is how I am feeling now! Listen to me back then, me now! Me back then had some sensible things to say. Pay attention, me now. And that Rory Gallagher sure knew how to play blues guitar, too.

Day 290: Radicals - Some words about 90s punk rock, the thrill of freedom and grunginess and crunchy power chords and love.

Day 293: Facing your weaknesses - Starts off about picking the guitar up again, turns into thoughts on blogging and pushing yourself and overcoming weaknesses. Got a nice ending, this one.

Day 296: Decay - Nice descriptions of inner city dilapidation and decay, if a touch reliant on the rhythms of alliteration. But it was my birthday and I was tired, and it’s nice to just throw pretty words out, even if they’re a bit clumsy and gauche. That’s the exact sketchbook feel I wanted when starting this blogging challenge.

Day 298: Skin - A post about suffering from acne. I hate writing about this, and thus I must do it. I want to get to the same place with my skin as I am with my mental health - something that used to be hard to write about and now is easy as anything. Don’t look back! Keep going! Courage!

Day 304: Inchoate - I like the paragraphs about the early morning light in here. There have been more posts this month where I’ve written descriptively, perhaps a little floridly, about the external world, and I’ve enjoyed every one. More of this, then!

Wednesday Reviews - I’m going to link all four from this month. I’m enjoying writing these more than anything else at the moment. It’s becoming a wonderful weekly ritual, choosing a worthwhile film carefully, sitting down by myself with the lights low and a cup of Earl Grey steaming, and submerging myself in a world of cinema. And then spending a few hours at my desk, or in a coffee shop, gathering my thoughts, typing them out, communicating them as effectively as I can in the time available. In a period of my life when I’m otherwise struggling to switch off, when there’s much difficulty and anxiety and self-doubt, when I don’t have alcohol or drugs to assuage the psychic pain, it’s been so important to be able to concentrate on this. Distraction, but positive distraction. Losing yourself in something that matters to you. It’s what it’s all about.

• The Killing of a Sacred Deer

• Annihilation

• Green Book

• The Lobster

OK. Lovely. Read any of that if you want. I don’t know if the links work when you’re looking at this through Facebook’s browser, if not you can open it in Chrome. Phones and apps hate blogs. I might as well be writing these on scraps of paper and slipping them in bottles and dropping them in the ocean. But why not? That sounds like a marvellous thing to do.

Going to bed now.

Hugs x

Day 306: Wednesday Reviews - The Lobster

Well, I've predictably found no time for this until now. I'm currently sat on the bed in my hotel room after a day working with Steve, dog-tired, aching, flecked with paint. But I've got a cup of Douwe Egberts instant coffee, a Chromebook on full charge, and an hour or so free in which to gather my thoughts about The Lobster.

I liked it! Yorgos Lanthimos' English language debut, starring Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz, it was a surreal parable about dating and the strangling need to find a mate, told through the conceit of a near-future world in which anyone not in a relationship in The City is sent to a coastal hotel to spend 45 days attempting to pair with one of the other guests, after which time, if unsuccessful, they are turned into an animal. Singletons who refuse to comply run away to live in The Woods and dance alone to electronic music on portable Discmans (Discmen?), and are routinely hunted by hotel guests on excursions with dart rifles, who earn extra days at The Hotel for every singleton they capture.

Colin Farrell plays David, a podgy and taciturn middle-aged man recently broken up with, who must enter The Hotel along with his pet dog, who is actually his brother, who undertook and failed the programme a few years previously.

The animals don’t talk. They don’t have human features. They’re just animals. They’re not a major part of the narrative. Occasionally one wanders through a shot, looking non-plussed, disinterested.

As with The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Lanthimos blends the surreal and the real, the dreamlike and the mundane, in a way that draws out the former from the latter, and reminds you how the latter is always infused with the former. His tone can be Lynchian, at its best is even reminiscent of Kafka, but always is distinctly his own.

Dialogue is clipped, monotone, matter-of-fact. Shorn of their regular context, everyday objects and scenes become profoundly unsettling, the hotel corridors, the tangles of forest, the rows of discount store products in the City suddenly pointing not to their usual rich soup of meaning but standing only as themselves, objects of intense attention and uncanny creepiness. Echoes of Sartre’s nausea. In a way you can never place it all makes your skin crawl.

Yet it is funny, too. Uncanniness and humour can nestle so closely to one another, as with Lynch. Colin Farrell is hilarious in deadpan, but also lost and panicked and relatable, Lanthimos drawing depths out of him that we’ve seen before, but never as consistently. Rachel Weisz is good, too, as a forest loner to whom David is inexorably drawn. She also is here far more serious and honest than anything else I’ve seen her in, her face lined, her hair scraggly, the prim affectations of her late 90s period thankfully left far behind.

Her character is nearsighted. David also has trouble with his vision. This is important in the world of The Lobster. The potential validity of relationships is frequently measured by shared damage. Not just by authority figures but also by characters themselves. It matters to them that if, for example, they get nosebleeds, their partner also gets nosebleeds. They all tacitly understand this to be so.

There’s something childlike and naive about everyone here. As happens with its physical world, the distant tone separates behaviours and mores from the context in which we usually find them, showing them to be absurd and tragicomic. Desiring a partner to be broken in the ways in which you yourself are broken, or falling into petulant rage because of jealousy, or deciding to pretend to love someone for a lifetime rather than risk being alone - the patterns we play out in our heads day after day - here can be seen as ridiculous and fascinating, and unavoidable.

One more consequence of this measured detachment - I found the film to be shockingly violent. Lanthimos has an obsession with things-as-they-are, with looking at the world as a detached observer, and violence is an aspect of this. It is interesting and horrifying to Lanthimos’ lens that we are corporeal as well as mental, intangible beings, that we have physical biological form, and that we frequently enact violence and destruction upon the biological form of others.

Just as bottles of bleach, hotel corridors, trappings of ego become discrete subjects of attention, so too does violence. It is just there. We just see it. Take it in. And yet, without the cathartic role of surrounding emotion and context, we are denied the journey to process this violence, to understand it, deal with it, ultimately let it go. It stays there, stark, monolithic, terrible.

The Lobster is not a gratuitous or gory film, and yet in many places it made me squirm, churned my stomach, unsettled me on a visceral level.

It is, however, gorgeous. Dark and moody, with sumptuous, velvety textures and glassy black folds of water and the intricate play of shadow through trees, and filmed regularly in slow-motion, it provides a sensuality contrasting boldly with the deadpan emotional detachment of the tone.

Yet the film is not without its faults. As most critics have noted, it severely loses pace halfway through. The initial premise feels so full of potential, and yet it never really moves beyond this early promise, never develops out into much more than it first posits. Or, rather, the development falls back to being only an extrapolation of and investigation into the ramifications of the plot, a working through of the narrative tangle, rather than speaking to anything further and deeper in ourselves. The ending is exceptional, perfectly judged, but from the halfway point to these final scenes the film really sags, feeling drained of meaning. I think the worth of the thing is actually a story 45 minutes in length, and stretching it to two hours has left it thin in the middle.

Apart from this, however, it is a dazzling success. As an exploration of selfishness and self-sacrifice in romantic relationships, whether these two opposites are inherent in our natures, whether they are at odds, or compatible, it is perspicacious, troubling, and profound. As an impenetrable Kafkaesque vision rising from depths beyond logic and sense it is fittingly obscure. And as a piece of cinema it is mesmerising.

Day 299: Wednesday Reviews - Green Book

Green Book is a film deeply rooted in formula, but this is no bad thing.

Loosely based on true events, it stars Viggo Mortensen as Tony Lip, a fast-talking Italian American bouncer, fixer, family man, and local hot-dog eating legend, who, in need of rent money in New York in 1962, takes a job driving a sophisticated African American musician on his tour of the heavily segregated Deep South. The musician, jazz pianist Don Shirley, has had his people ask around, and Lip is the name that comes back as someone who can handle whatever is thrown at him, which Shirley knows will be important for the tour. Lip is racist - casually, and not so casually - but he is a professional, in loose terms, when the money is right, and for this one the money is decidedly right.

Cue a road trip in the company of the two, with Shirley, played by Mahershala Ali, as the apollonion picture of reserve, restraint, elegance, and logic, and Lip the dionysian "bullshit artist" chomping down fast food, smoking, belching, telling crude jokes - and protecting Shirley from local rednecks who object to what they see as an uppity negro with ideas above his station.

Odd couple buddy pic, road movie, journey of redemption, feel-good comedy - the film aims for familiar grooves, but it rolls right into these grooves nicely, hitting every cue where it needs to. There's a reason formulas become codified. Like jazz standards, they provide the framework within which artists can experiment. Like driving trips, they offer a roadmap showing the destination, the route you'll be taking, the structure allowing you to have fun along the way.

Green Book is bags of fun. Director Peter Farrelly, better known as half of the Farrelly brothers, the duo behind raucous 90s gross-out comedies Dumb and Dumber and There's Something About Mary et al, here brings colour and verve to the picture, breaking out from an opening that feels more 60s pastiche (if your first scene involves a fight between mafia hoodlums on a lively night at the Copa, let's be honest, you're only ever inviting unfavourable comparisons to Goodfellas) to eventually feel more embedded, and embodied.

Farrelly's comedic pedigree means the gentle humour, which could easily have fallen as a clumsy attempt to lighten the mood, here is baked into the piece, giving the film a confident tone - primarily dramatic rather than comedic, but with comedy and warmth, or at least their memory, always evident, even in the darkest scenes.

So Farrelly is a conductor, directing proceedings with an assured yet light touch. But it is the two leads who truly shine. Mortensen has a grand time with Lip, his obscene gut hanging out over his belt, his gait uninhibited yet purposeful, one hand perennially raising the end of a fag to his mouth while the other bums more smokes, or caresses a steering wheel, or clenches into a fist. The performance, treading close to pitfalls of caricature, ends up more nuanced, more whole - affectionate, yes, and big and broad, but full of depth.

Mahershala Ali, so great in everything in which I've seen him, has the quieter part here, but one with no less impact. He plays Don Shirley with the poise and principle and self-control befitting a world-renowned musician, every action deliberate, every movement seemingly drilled through long and disciplined training. Ali's Shirley is educated, erudite, perhaps a genius in his field. And yet he is lonely, his efforts separating him from his fellow man, his discipline distancing him from the simple pleasures of the world that the crude and coarse Lip has no problem enjoying daily.

And Shirley is black. Through herculean effort, and by playing the entertainer for affluent white audiences, he has won a renown that allows him in some way to transcend the barriers of race of the age. In one scene a row of poor black field workers stand and stare, amazed, at the broken down Cadillac that pulls into the side of the road and disgorges an overweight white guy in rolled up sleeves to work on the engine as, cool and calm in the back, a nattily dressed black man waits with legs crossed for the journey to resume.

And yet he is black. And this simple fact alone means that, despite every other fact about him, he cannot stay in the same hotels as his chauffeur, use the same toilets, eat in the same restaurants. In fact he must take a guidebook with him - the Green Book of the title - that offers tips on how to travel the southern states as a negro.

How Shirley approaches such gargantuan inequalities, whether all the poise in the world means a damn in the face of such endemic racism, provides a major theme for the film.

As a comment on racial injustice it is an unsubtle, albeit effective, piece of rhetoric. But I guess we need rhetoric for just causes, because heaven knows there is enough whispering to us for unjust ones. Stories let you step into the shoes of a person other than yourself and walk around for a while, experience another's joys, wince at the evils enacted upon them. There is no better way to engender empathy than with stories. And there are still so many people in the world who need more empathy. It is the accumulation of simple yet relatable stories, about people who on the surface appear different from us, and yet are not, that slowly changes the world.

So I can't fault Green Book for being broad, unsubtle. And what could have been mere didacticism, worthy yet uninspiring, through the strength of the two main performances grows into something warmer and richer. Within Farrelly's world, Ali's Shirley and Mortensen's Lip come to life, you feel them bond, you grow to love them, and you believe in them. More than black and white, African and Italian, the two characters end up as simply human: two flawed yet intriguing melodies, at first playing in different keys, slowly beginning to align.

Yes, as with a musical standard, we have heard the melodies, the overall tune, before. But it's difficult to not appreciate notes played with such gusto. As with Apollo and Dionysus, it is through the enjoining of the two sides of the dichotomy that a fullness of life is reached. You hear two individual voices, and then the space between the two lines up, and there is harmony.

Kurt Vonnegut once said that it is a plausible mission of artists to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I feel that the makers of Green Book would agree.

Day 298: Skin

My acne has been worse again recently. Not bad enough to make me anxious, but enough to chip away at the edges of my self-esteem. 

It’s a weird one with acne. There’s a very clear point at which it transitions from annoying to actually traumatic. It’s like string bending on guitar (I’ve been playing guitar a lot today): you are playing one note, which you are bending upwards, and upwards, but it feels like the same sound, albeit modified - and then suddenly the pitch rolls over, and it becomes a new note entirely.

I don’t mind having a few spots. I always have a few, at the corners of my lips, under my beard, around my temples. Blotchy cheeks where I sleep against my pillow. Smatterings on my forehead if I have the audacity to wear a hat for even the half hour walk to work. I don’t love it - like a string bend, you can feel the note, in this case your sense of physical self, being stretched, becoming taut - but it holds. You don’t want a picture of yourself on a billboard fifty feet high, you get nervous when people stand right in your personal space, but mostly you’re fine.

But then the acne accumulates past a certain threshold, or you get a breakout of large swollen spots, or a nodule right on the end of your nose, and suddenly you’re in new territory. Suddenly it’s difficult to look people in the eye. Suddenly you sense the world noticing, you walk down the street and you have warning signals flashing in your head, you feel on edge, you sense that you stand out from the crowd. You get on a bus and you feel strangers doing almost imperceptible double-takes, or more likely holding themselves just slightly more composed than usual - the same tension you yourself feel when you have an interaction with someone who has a stammer, or a burn down their face, or a congenital hand deformity, or the like. Some straining in the present moment between you and them, some information you are both aware of and yet cannot state. This is what you feel from everyone when your acne is bad enough, that your skin stands revolting and seeping and pustulating out there in the space between the two of you, that it is a wall that blocks off even the gentle intimacy that may otherwise arise between strangers.

Or else you imagine this, from past traumatic experiences, from moments of adolescent social failure; you assume people notice more than they do. Certainly you yourself only pay brief attention to people you see with deformities, before going back to thinking about yourself. It’s safe to assume others are the same. But you can’t help that stress, that jaggedness. You tell yourself anything you want, it’s still there when you set off out of your house. 

When my skin is bad enough there’s no pep talk I have yet found that can make me confident in facing the world.

Perhaps it is something unique to acne. There are far worse deformities, to be sure, but they tend to be fixed. You are born deformed, and have a fixed image of yourself, or else you become deformed, and you readjust. Like putting a capo on your guitar and playing two frets up. The change is permanent.

Of course every deformity brings its own struggles, obstacles, suffering, pain. But the thing with acne is that your image of self becomes a note bent up and down continuously, the string pulled out of shape, sometimes close to one note, sometimes another, then back down to near where it started, then back up again. It is ever shifting. You adjust, and it changes, and you adjust, and it changes again. Maybe the best analogy I can think of is if you go to bed slim and healthy, and then you wake up having put on fifty pounds in the night. That weight falls slowly off you over the next two or three weeks, until you're back around where you were, and then another day you're ten pounds heavier, then twenty the next day, then forty the next, until a week later when you're severely obese. You stay that way for a week, then it falls right off, and you're back to being relatively thin - until a month later, when you balloon again.

Imagine that happening consistently from adolescence into your thirties.

My skin isn’t terrible at the moment, but it’s far from perfect. I’ve spent close to 20 years struggling with acne, I’ve tried every cream, wash, pill, and diet. It looks to be something that isn’t going away. I will be pushed into that altered state of anxiety by it again in the future. So I guess what I should focus on is getting better at talking about it, being more open about it, bringing the suffering out into the light - and in that way attempt to decrease its power over me.

......

Music: Crosscut Saw, by Albert King. I'm all about that classic blues at the moment. Just listen to that guitar. Sumptuous.

Day 294: New gods

Go to work, keep busy, do what’s in front of me to the best of my ability (or the best of my motivation and energy, which is part of ability), feel good about that. Take photographs. Post photographs to social media. Finish work. Go for a haircut. Ignore neurotic thoughts about how out of place and shambling and strange I feel among the kids with their muscles and fade cuts and tattoos at the barbers’. Get my beard cut shorter for the first time in years, just to try something different. Go home, stop at the shop on the way to buy moisturiser to soothe the skin around my neck, the back of my head, my cheeks, the areas that always get spotty and irritated and inflamed after being shaved. Ignore thoughts about how alien and ugly my skin is; just do what I have to do. Get in the house, do press-ups, run the shower, get in the shower, get out, pat my skin dry gently. Apply moisturiser. Get dressed. Drink water. Reheat a portion of the vegetable curry I made and tubbed up for myself yesterday. Play guitar. Run through the exercises I’m currently working on. Begin learning the notes on the stave on sheet music, where to find the notes on the guitar. Change away from and back to chords with which I have difficulty. Learn a few simple blues licks. Ignore the voice roaring that after all these years owning a guitar I’m still a complete novice. Switch from guitar work to writing work. Do some free-writing. Write my blog post. Ignore the voice roaring that I haven’t had any poetry in me, haven’t been able to write anything of beauty, for as long as I can remember. Ignore the voice roaring that I gave the writer thing a try but I don’t have what it takes, that I should quit and stop fooling myself. Brush my teeth. Drink more water. Get into bed. Ignore the voice roaring that I will never get to sleep, that I can’t do any of this any more, that it’s so goddamned hard and it hurts so much and I have no idea who I am or where I’m going or what any of this is for.

Ignore all that. Those are the old gods. I have new gods now. Perseverance, patience, humility, compassion.

Every day there are ten thousand opportunities to worship old or new gods. Every day there are ten thousand opportunities to improve.

Head down. Keep going. The grooves of good habit will wear themselves in.

......

Music: It's My Own Fault, by B.B. King. 

Day 293: Facing your weaknesses

Day recharging, sipping coffee, playing guitar.

It's interesting coming back to the guitar after years away, seeing with more perspective the areas in which I am competent, and the areas in which I definitely am not.

I've owned a guitar for something like 18 years, but only spent a few of those really playing. And the majority of even those years was not spent productively, but mostly thrashing around with the same old power chords and palm-muted rhythms I could run through without thinking.

I learnt that punk stuff early, found a comfort zone, and stayed there. I picked up technique: plucking, fretting, forming chords, strumming rhythmic patterns, bends and vibrato, hammer-ons and pull-offs - anything I could acquire through rote learning, practice absentmindedly while watching boxed sets or waiting for World of Warcraft groups to form. Running chromatic exercises up and down the neck, chugging through the same 1-4-5 chord progressions, was an outlet for nervous energy, an idling routine, a way to pass the time. Like cruising the streets on Grand Theft Auto. Like rolling a spliff.

But I was always naturally inept when it came to musicality. I can't sing a note. I never studied music theory. I didn't have much sense of rhythm. That whole side of things was a foreign language I fundamentally did not understand.

So when it came to transcribing songs, knowing the chords you can play in a key, understanding chord progressions, playing to a backing track, playing with another guitarist, any of the actual useful skills, I didn't have a clue. I could follow tabs and drill instructions into my fingers, deploy them robotically, but I didn't know how to feel the music, flow with it, play it. If music is a language, a form of communication, then I had memorised the letters of the alphabet, some simple words, but I didn't know how to speak.

And I was aware of this. And I hated it. Sensing that there was a skill that you had to feel your way through, that you couldn't pick up from a book, a skill some people seemed to just innately have, and I evidently did not, filled me with feelings of inadequacy. I have always had trouble processing inadequacy. Even as a pipsqueak child I was a perfectionist - I held myself to impossibly high standards; if I was good at something I was not good enough, and if I was bad at something then it was the end of the world.

I'm not sure exactly what it was, slight ADHD or OCD tendencies, anger management issues, executive function problems, neuroticism, the early seeds of depression - but when I was young if things didn't go my way, if I felt myself to be lacking at all, I would fly off the handle, fill with rage, fall into the depths of despondency. I threw tantrums a lot, felt an exquisite wounding from the world, had a heightened sensitivity to injustice. "It's not fair!" I would yell, ten years old, flinging my paints across the room after a picture hadn't turned out the way I wanted. "It's not fair! I can't do it!"

And although as I grew I learnt not to vocalise my frustrations, they would still arise when I picked up the guitar. And so rather than face the areas in which I was weak and work out how to improve, I instead put them in a room that I refused to enter, and went off to play Basket Case with the gain turned all the way up once again.

* * *

What I'm starting to comprehend about this year of daily blogging is that much of it is about altering my automatic responses to life. Through genes, through development, responses to life events, myriad factors, I have built up many responses to life that are incredibly harmful. Procrastination, addiction, learned helplessness, perfectionism, rumination.

But none of these behaviours are set in stone. They are automatic because they were learnt, and then left to run beneath the level of conscious attention. Like bad habits on the guitar, racing through scales out of time, holding tension in the fingers, pressing too hard on the strings, they may have seemed right or easy at one time, and then through repetition become ingrained into routine.

But they can be altered. How? Just as with the guitar, you slow right down, you break it into manageable tasks, you get those right, and you repeat, in small amounts, day after day after day after day.

And the areas in which you particularly struggle? These aren't to be avoided. They're to be welcomed. Faced. Embraced. Again, you find the smallest thing that you can learn to do - hear the difference between major and minor chords, write a paragraph in your diary, walk your overweight arse to the front door and back - whatever your personal fight is - and you do that again and again. And build slowly up.

You don't have to be anyone but yourself. The demons of the world attack each of us in unique ways. All you have to do is go to bed having gone to that area inside yourself that you fear to tread, and having pushed yourself an inch further than you did yesterday. Make this into a habit and you will be surprised where you end up.

It is in accepting our weaknesses that we overcome them. Along with acceptance of our strengths, which can be equally difficult. And it is here, in a process never completed, that we begin to become ourselves.

Day 292: Wednesday Reviews - Annihilation

Alex Garland writes, and more recently also directs, solid four-star films. By this I mean he makes genre pictures that aspire to transcend their genres, fresher and more experimental than films in the middle of the pack, yet never quite reaching the heights of true cinematic art.

His better works - 28 Days Later, Ex Machina - nudge enthusiastically at the boundary between commercial escapism and intriguing art house, while his less successful pieces - Sunshine, Dredd - fall clumsily between the two.

I wanted to like Annihilation, Garland’s recently written-and-directed addition to the straight-to-Netflix film library, but unfortunately it was another one that was too odd for mainstream enjoyment and too simplistic as a work of art.

It is an existential sci-fi horror film starring Natalie Portman as Lena, a scientist who joins a research expedition into a mysterious zone that has arisen around a meteor crash. Within this zone strange phenomena occur, the usual rules of biology are warped, and every team that has previously entered has vanished without a trace.

A central problem for me is the similarity here with Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 meditative masterpiece Stalker. Annihilation, mirroring its protagonists, wades clumsily into territory marked out by that beautiful film, and then falls back on ungainly and simplistic techniques to make it through.

It is a film exploring themes of structure and mutation in nature, of the delicate balance between order and chaos in which life on Earth exists, and the ego’s fear at being housed within impermanent and disintegrating houses of flesh. The sense of unease that it wants to develop would benefit I think from a surreal or dreamlike filmmaking technique - and Garland provides moments of this - but on the whole the film is stolid and workmanlike where it should be unnerving and otherworldly.

The script is heavy on exposition, always directly telling us what we should know rather than showing us the way to figure out ourselves. Dialogue is clunky, inelegant, forcing the characters to spell out what would be better hinted at - “We’re all damaged goods here”; “You’re saying we get out by going deeper in?” - dictating the tone rather than engendering it.

The central relationship is between Lena and her husband, a soldier, played by Oscar Isaac, who was sent into the zone on the last expedition. Portman and Isaac don’t have much chemistry, unfortunately, and the dynamic between the two of them, though it aims for a blending of the personal and cosmic, in a similar way to Interstellar, never quite ties the whole together. I didn’t like Interstellar either, by the way, but at least you knew, you felt how much Matthew McConaughey’s character loved his daughter. Like all of Nolan’s films it fitted together like an intricately carved puzzle, even if it was schmaltzy and ludicrous.

Annihilation doesn’t coalesce in the same way. It’s a prosaic sci-fi horror, most reminiscent, unfortunately, of Ridley Scott’s lacklustre Alien Covenant and Prometheus - for all the cerebral ambition it still clings limpet-like to hoary genre tropes - exposition told through video logs from previous teams, side characters picked off one by one, an ending that inexpertly visualises the protagonist’s struggle as an action scene featuring a trick with a grenade.

There are moments of tension and unease. The sound design is excellent. It looks sporadically good, with splodges of neon fungal growths and shimmering lights contrasting with verdant foliage and desolate beaches - though it often puts you in mind more of expensive television than cinema. Portman and the rest of the team of female scientists are strong.

It touches on some frightening truths, and I wouldn’t like to watch it if I was feeling particularly on-edge or isolated - the body horror successfully gives out to more existential horror as it goes on - but in essence I found the impersonal and disconcerting atmosphere undermined by the leaden plot beats and dialogue.

It isn’t bad, but for a film about mutation and chaos it is all a touch too staid. Reportedly offloaded to Netflix after test-audiences found the film too “intellectual” and “complicated”, I in fact thought it didn’t go anywhere near far enough in these directions. But maybe that’s the problem - too complicated for the mainstream, yet too simple for art house. At one pole you’ve got the schlocky unbridled joy of Aliens, at the other the contemplative meandering of Stalker. Annihilation can’t decide which direction to go in, so eventually ends up shooting for both, and scoring direct hits on neither.

Worth a watch if you're low on Netflix inspiration, but not essential viewing. 

Day 291: Cook off

Been a busy old day today. Down to the station this morning for a train to Leeds for the cook-off for the new menu, clumsy shuffling me taking photos of the dishes for the spec sheets, someone has obviously mistaken me for a competent photographer - so day in Headingley trying to remember to take my lens cap off, not to set fire to my camera, also eating all the burgers and pizzas and mac ‘n’ cheese, then a quick stop in the Leeds city centre site, then a rammed rush-hour train back to Sheffield to go and work the close in our pub.

I am spangled now. I was doing all right and then I went up to the cellar at half ten and found three beers that needed cleaning, a load of empties that needed taking out before the delivery in the morning, a lift with the previous morning’s delivery that hadn’t been unloaded, and more empties in the lift room downstairs. And I hadn’t brought up the Belgian crates from downstairs yet, like I’d promised. And then cleaning one of the lines I splashed line cleaner all up my new jumper, bleaching the colour out of the wool and ruining it. I’d so liked that jumper the only two times I’d worn it.

And now tomorrow I need to spend a couple of hours of my day off editing the photos to send them across, which isn’t ideal. But on the other hand I’m being paid for it, and I wanted to do it, and said I would, and I got some nice shots of the bar for their and our social media, and as much free food as I could eat, and a day away in Leeds.

OK, maybe it’s tough being grateful for spending a day in Leeds. But the rest of it is all good.

Going bed now. Just realised it’s Wednesday tomorrow and I haven’t watched a film to review yet or done any work for it or even found a film that is available somewhere to watch.

That’s fine. Not a problem. I got this. I always got this.

...... 

Peter Brady, by Screeching Weasel. Perfect pop punk: wry, wild, and raw. BOY, I've really learned a lot today. One: You act your age. Two: Don't try to be something you're not. Three: You find out in advance what restaurant your mom and dad are going to, and go someplace else!

Day 290: Radicals

Uhhh. Any words? I mean. No. Not really. What about these? These are words. I feel all gummed up. That’s fine. Be gummed then buddy. You be good and gummed. What’s true is right. What’s right is true.

Sat at the top of this empty house listening to punk rock, Social Distortion, Screeching Weasel, Rancid; all lightly crunching treble-heavy guitar and rigid mohawks, the promise of California. Faded black denim, the rhythmic thunk of skateboard wheels spinning on their bearings. Tattoos old as time. Party piercings. Taco stands and tartan. Snarling masculinity swirling into vulnerable femininity. Docs pointed inwards. Les Pauls slung way low. The unrefined energy, loose, ricocheting off crumbling apartment walls, in those endless summer years before the archetypes were honed, processed, packaged and sold, before people with haircuts who work in advertising and don’t know how to love figured the code to translate the scene into money. Before Tom and Mark. Before New Found Glory. Before I’m just a kid and life is a nightmare. Before the skin was stripped and the meat scooped out and the carcass flung in the bushes to rot. And out came the wolves.

But those riffs spat from the 90s still whisper something beneath their distortion to me, something about freedom and authenticity and joy. On cold nights sat at the top of an empty house sometimes all you want is three chords and the truth.

With the music execution and the talk of revolution, it bleeds in me, and it goes...

......

Music: Roots Radicals, Rancid.

Day 289: Middling

Day has been fine. Fair. Middling. Absolutely acceptable. Head was gooped up and mushy this morning, but slurped coffee and slouched around until I came awake. Played a bit of a new free-to-play PlayStation shooter that everyone is raving about with Alex and Mike, we got shot accurately and often, which was impressive to say how much the three of us were flailing around madly. I imagine it was like having to hit a gaggle of burning piglets. Charging every which way, bumping into walls, flinging ourselves off ledges. Still, the enemy players managed to repeatedly make short work of us. Well done, enemy players, well done.

Spent the evening editing photos for work’s social media, after filling my camera with shots over quiet shifts last week. I put my kit lens back on, mostly at 18-24mm ish, after months shooting with only my 50mm prime, and it was great to experiment with the wider angles. My camera, as I think with all DSLRs cheaper than about a grand, is a cropped sensor, so it only captures the centre of the image - so with a 50mm lens you’re really zoomed in. It’s great for a can of beer at work, a close-up of someone’s face, but for anything wider you have to stand down the other end of the pub, which isn’t ideal. There were some nice pictures came out of it all, and it’s always good to know I’ve got the next week or so’s posts lined up. It’s just another stress when everything is getting on top of me to know I’m going to have to take time out of an already busy shift to figure out something to photograph, line it up, edit it, fiddle with computers and phones. Everyone in the company, friends of bar staff, have been saying how good the pics are, but how my brain takes that is now there’s an expectation that I have to consistently live up to, which expectation is obviously unfounded and it’s only a matter of time before they all discover what a revolting fraud I am.

Idiot brain. But anyway, good to have a load of pics on my Google Drive and for that pressure to recede for a week or two.

Other than that, had a day of chores, washing and the like. Played guitar, did the exercises I am currently working on, little 1-2-3. 2-3-4 patterns up and down the major scale, outside and inside string picking, strumming specific numbers of strings, that sort of thing. Basic, boring stuff, but it’s my homework, so I’m doing it. And then a bit of improvising over a blues shuffle with the minor pentatonic in positions one and two, which I’m too embarrassed to do with the amp on lest my neighbours hear how much of a beginner I am, but it’s still lots of fun.

Work early tomorrow, best get off now. Ta ra.

……

Music: Nothing’s Real but Love, by Rebecca Ferguson. You know what, I didn’t know this was a song by an X-Factor finalist. That’s because I’m not a complete loser, like you are. I don’t waste my time with that rubbish. I just play videogames inexpertly against teenagers and work in a pub. But this song is good! Nothing is real but love. Cups. Shoes. Payment protection insurance. It’s all made up. In our heads. But love is what moves the cosmos beneath its shifting illusory forms. Maybe a shame it takes a reality television star to remind us of that, but whatever. Take grace where you find it, I say. Byeee!

Day 288: Tenacity

Woah pickle. Let’s just pause a second. It’s 2am and I’m just home from work, run down, grumpy, feeling broken. But let’s just pause. This is my two-hundred-and-eighty-eighth day consecutively posting on this blog. What’s that in months? 288, divide by 12, times by 31, minus a leap year, carry the BODMAS...

It’s quite a few months.

I keep catching myself feeling worthless because the quality of the posts isn’t anywhere near where I want them to be. Occasionally I write something that I’m proud of, and it feels great, but mostly it’s just some random words scraped off the inside of my brain at 2am, some squidgy residue, gimpy and festering, scraped off and slung online, not sounding writerly, not saying anything vital, not being honest or poetic or entertaining, just doing it, doing something, doing anything.

But even that, if I pause, if I judge it the way I’d judge it if a friend was doing it, someone I cared about… Even that is incredible.

It’s setting down a habit. Ingraining the routine. It’s personifying diligence and perseverance, tenacity. These are not traits commonly associated with me. Not for so many years lost in the wilderness, assuaging pain with drink or drugs, feeling overwhelmed, procrastinating, giving up.

It was that learned helplessness stuff of depression that I wrote about before. That stuff is so hard to come back from. It infects everything.

And this is not that. For 288 days I have quietly and steadily fought against that, one little post at a time. I have come here and I have said to that inner critic “I am doing this”, over and over again.

Even if every single post was shit - and they’re not, not nearly - but even if they were it would still be such an achievement, if I was able to see it that way. And I can see it that way. I just have to turn away from the ways the old me would have viewed the situation, the negatives he would have picked out, like finding the worms in a field of roses - I just have to turn away from that and turn towards another way of thinking, another way of being. There are roses everywhere, and there are always going to be worms, too. It’s just changing your perception to not get caught up focusing on the worms, honing in on them, staring at them until you can’t see anything else. Because the roses really are everywhere. And if you stop to look, you will notice them more and more.

OK. Good. That’s all very rambling, but good. Going sleep now. Bubyeeee.

……

Music: Send Me a Postcard by Shocking Blue. Oh yeaaaah. Late 60s Dutch psychedelic rock. I mean, just look at that album cover. If you had to invent the album cover for a late 60s Dutch psychedelic rock outfit, you'd come up with exactly that. I love it. It's Jefferson Airplane but even more so. Awesome.

Day 287: Jostling

Woke up out of suffocating stress dreams with the mother of all migraines today. Thought I was going to vomit swinging myself up out of bed, the pain rolling around in my head like cannonballs in a ship’s hull on stormy seas. Get these headaches in the morning sometimes, usually I can rise through them, they recede after drinking water and splashing my face and making coffee (maybe caffeine withdrawal if I’m late getting up is starting in?). But I did all these things today and the migraine only got worse. Showered and dressed. Migraine got worse. Ate. Migraine worse. Couldn’t see. Thoughts were heavy objects, crowding my mind, jostling, churning my stomach. Eventually had to take paracetamol and codeine and lie back in bed. Even that - codeine is normally the only thing that’ll cut through a migraine for me - but even that barely worked. After hours in bed I could get up and gingerly plod through my day off - I’d wanted a rest day, which I guess this was, but not in the way I’d hoped - and even now the migraine is hovering off in the background somewhere.

Stupid brain. I think my brain was just set up too tightly at the factory. I could do with a replacement. A new body would be great as well.

So yes, not had a productive day. Played guitar a little later on, I’ve got blisters on my first and third fingers coming up already, so mostly ran through some picking hand exercises and some beginner one-finger solo things, tested myself on notes on the neck.

Headache is coming back concentrating on this screen, better go. At work on the close tomorrow, so at least I get a lie in. Cool.

……

Music: Off the Handle by Rory Gallagher.

Day 286: Strings

Restrung my electric guitar tonight, my old Strat, old ramshackle Fat Strat, humbuckered and notched and dusty between the machine heads. My fingers rusty and ungainly. Remembering clunky bits of riffs, old C and G and D, old A minor, old chugging power chords, not a lot else.

At 15 I wanted to sound like Billie Joe Armstrong and Tom DeLonge. Memorised some tabs, ingrained them deep, till they were chiselled roads. But no avenues between them, no knowledge of landscape, no room for musical life to build and develop. I was not naturally talented and it made me feel like a failure and so, after years getting nowhere, I gave up.

But trying at things at which we are not naturally talented is often where we meet ourselves, where we transform ourselves. Methodically practising at weaknesses can be so rewarding. I picked the guitar back up a few years ago, went through an online beginner’s course, and though much of it seemed so simple to be unworthy of my attention, plenty of it was not, and I did it all anyway, forced myself not to skip whatever was either boring or hard.

There’s a correct pace at which everything happens. You could call it the Tao of the universe. I didn’t want to go at that pace at 15, I wanted to leap to chugging punk rhythms and lightning riffs, to get the reward without the effort. Learning notes on the neck and lackadaisical country western strumming patterns and arcane modal shapes was too dull, too uncool. So I skipped what I hated, avoided what I couldn’t do, and instead laid down these fragile thin roads of knowledge that linked to nothing - roads over which I could run back and forth, but from which I could never deviate.

I fell away from guitar again after the beginner’s course a few years ago. But I think I’d like to get back into it now. When I’m not working or writing it’s a nice hobby, learning a new skill, that does not come easily to me, and thus is probably worthwhile. Going slowly, assiduously, enjoying the difficulty and the glacial sense of progress, enjoying it for its own sake. And it sure beats videogames, YouTube videos, phone scrolling, as something to add structure to an evening.

……

Music: Strange Brew, by Cream. Bit of psychedelic blues rock, just what my guitar-awoken ears are craving. Oh yes.

Day 285: Wednesday Reviews - The Killing of a Sacred Deer

The atmosphere is so taut in The Killing of a Sacred Deer - Yorgos Lanthimos’ most recent film before his current award-magnet The Favourite - that it is like a metal cable stretched through the narrative, yowling under the tension, threatening to snap and tear the picture in two at any moment.

Filmed in eerie and sometimes fish-eyed perspectives that push subjects into the distance, or into the depths inside us, this modern day thriller is at times deadpan suburban drama, at others otherworldly psychological fable.

Colin Farrell, star of Lanthimos’ previous hit Lobster, here plays Steven, a heart surgeon with his life carefully structured, clinically empty. Nicole Kidman is his wife Anna. They have a teenage daughter, a younger son, live in an expansive, and expensive house, exquisite, perfectly tended. They are the vision of order. Praising her son’s long hair, Anna turns to her daughter. “You have lovely hair, too. We all have lovely hair.”

At work Steven cuts away at revoltingly realised hearts that pulse and squirm, their corporeal fleshiness standing in shocking contrast to the lugubrious corridors and polished dining tables that make up the meat, so to speak, of the film’s images. But after surgery Steven strips off his blood-stained gloves and discards them, back to tidiness, in a move that is mirrored in his stripping of Anna’s underwear at night, as she poses perfectly still on their bed in an act of marital roleplay they term “general anaesthetic”.

Sex, desire, craving (Steven, we learn, is an ex-alcoholic), all are overt in the opening by way of their lack - the film is shaped out of the negative space carved by their absence. Dialogue is colourless and flat. Colours are cold. The camera moves as smooth as a hearse. Steven and Anna’s life is controlled, staged, unnerving.

But into this order comes Martin, played in a standout performance by the young Barry Keoghan. Steven meets regularly with Martin in a diner, drives out with him in his car, buys him an expensive watch. Martin feels a bond, and a debt, to the teenage boy, although we are not immediately sure why. As the answer forms, Steven’s tidy life begins to unravel.

The film initially feels like a classic thriller, Martin ingratiating himself into a family in which he doesn’t belong, at first charming, then increasingly dangerous. But there is much more to it than this.

Lanthimos, with scriptwriter Efthymis Filippou, blends, crosses at will between, the real and surreal; Steven’s son and daughter begin to fall strangely ill, apparently due to a curse Martin is invoking. Or is the kid merely unhinged? Are there rational explanations? Are we within Steven’s disintegrating mind? That Lanthimos refuses to provide answers, plays all avenues at once, will no doubt confound and frustrate some, but I found it to be a powerful approach.

Our lives are filled with secrets, regrets, hidden horrors, that, like our bodily organs, beat and thrash beneath the surface. Steven has crafted an existence out of carefully excising the aspects that do not align, arranging his surface reality to mask what he cannot control - and Martin represents the dark forces rising up between the cracks to reclaim what they have been denied.

It is a disquieting, deeply unsettling tale. It looks incredible, rich folds in fabric, thick texture, Kubrick-esque corridors - emptily expressive artifice, and the wailing, screeching soundtrack is ominous, brooding, and jarring. Farrell and Kidman are powerhouses, and Keoghan is a creepy, malevolent, awkward, and unfathomable presence throughout.

Rather than look for literal meaning, it is best to feel your way through the themes. The Killing of a Sacred Deer speaks of sacrifice, yes, and revenge, but also guilt, loss, love, masculinity, not to mention our relationship with the subconscious.

It is dense, complex, yet surprisingly approachable; desolate yet invigorating. I appreciated it a great deal.

Day 284: Gesticulating

Waiting at the bus stop in the evening fog, the line of commuters weaving ahead and behind. Heads bobbing. Weight shifting from one foot to the next. Breath in puffs in a long line.

The bus pulls in and the line wobbles, lurches to life. Front few swallowed, further back heads crane behind from experience, watching for the second bus, the later bus, that could arrive any time, the adjustments and optimisations of the accomplished commuter, a professional peel from mid-queue and dart onto the empty deck, bench to yourself, pulling away while the earlier arrival remains bogged down by the masses. A last minute win, after a day of drudgery.

But no second bus tonight. We all press forwards, are swallowed into the steamy maw. The driver slumped in some unremarked suffering, eyes the colour of wet cardboard, sliding back into his skull, collar too tight, dumpy and acne scarred and skewered in his seat. He grimaces, prods his ticket machine, stares through us towards the end of his shift.

We hustle into seats, squeeze in next to one another, sweltering in the many-bodied heat. Gloves come off. Scarves are unwound. Bags are opened, breakfast bars come out, left over from lunch. Books. Headphones. Screens. A corner that is mine in the crowded din.

We inch through traffic. Pavements bathed in neon pass by behind clouded glass. Kebab shops and discount offies reflected in the shimmer of traffic. Store fronts repeat.

People sigh, lean back, cough once or three times. We can’t cope one more second. We must wrench up seats and riot. This quotidian pain. These coats and bags and flasks and sandwich boxes. This fucking life. Oh, but oh. Swallow misery, sigh again, let eyes go glazed.

We pass an ambulance driver gesticulating in front of hospital side doors. A wave goodbye? A problem? A game? There is too much distance between us, selves separated by skull and glass and empty air and skull again. The central impossibility of comprehending another life. All these lives, the breadth and depth, all rich and convoluted and labyrinthine. How can you be in there and me in here? My self is made up of your other. My other is made up of your self.

The bus climbs forwards. My lids start to drop. I conserve my energy. There is a long journey ahead.

Day 283: The strange man

There was a strange man got on our bus. The bus was loud but the strange man was louder. He was swaying at the bus stop, he swayed up the step, in water, in whisky, in dance. He was singing to Irish music on his phone. He had on an old waxed cotton jacket, smelling of fishing boats and cigarettes and rope. He tried to take a seat but he fell down and he didn't seem concerned and he pulled himself up and adjusted his threadbare hat and carried right on singing.

No one paid attention. We looked out of the windows. We were tired from offices and libraries and long shifts shouldering burdens and we thought, collectively, Go right on. Be that way. We don't care.

The strange man looked around, he asked some people how they were doing, they nodded and turned away. He looked at two girls, and we clenched our teeth, but he told them only It's a good night, then his eyes went roving on.

He talked to himself. We were tired from long shifts and we mostly looked at phones, out of windows, but we half watched when someone new got on the bus, the vague sport of what would happen. Everyone new was being tested; everyone sitting down was the old guard. We wanted to see the moment the new people discovered, whether they would sit beside him without realising, how that would play out. We were tired but we half watched for this.

Or we half watched the strange man himself, squinted a little, tutted just a little, silently to ourselves. We were doing badly, we were lonely and disappointed and lost, but we weren't the strange man. We all had at least that.

The strange man coughed a hacking cough and swayed and sang to his Irish song. The bus moved on up the hill. A middle-aged couple in matching felt coats and scarves sat down opposite the strange man. The strange man watched the couple a long time, started talking, and the couple stared ahead.

The bus got full and the strange man stood up to offer a woman his seat. The woman said No, don't be, and the strange man said Hey, it was, all was, come, all come - he said some strange thing, the woman said some flushed thing, moved off to stand down the bus. The strange man shook his head, shook in offence or disbelief, sat himself back in his swaying lagoonal glow.

We looked at phones, out of windows.

I'm sorry. That's what the strange man said to the couple. I'm sorry it's like this. I've lost... my. I've lost my... son. How do you carry on. How do you carry on when you've lost your son.

He said more, but we couldn't hear, no one could hear save the couple, and they weren't in the mood for talking. The bus moved on.