Day 202: Clip Show Special #1

I've been writing a blog post every day for over 200 days now. More than half a year.

Seems like a good opportunity to pause and look back at what I've done, and to collect up some of the better pieces here. Because even I have to admit that, after flinging mud at a wall 202 times, some of it is bound to have stuck.

Really getting the hang of this self-promotion these days, don't know if you can tell.

Dumb Stuff

I've written a lot of dumb stuff. And I don't mean that to be disparaging at all. I love dumb stuff. I like to think that if I wasn't so depressed all the time, all my blog posts would be touched with at least a dash of this kind of silliness and sense of fun. But the truth is I'm probably just not that creative. Anyway, here are my favourite dumb posts:

How to gain mainstream appeal - a list article about the cliches of being a bartender that totally doesn't turn into an eldritch horror story halfway through.

Bank holiday fun - in which I imagine, roguish scamp that I am, that a bank holiday is when all our banks go on holiday to visit their families the Caymen Island banks, and without our banks' watchful gazes keeping us in check we descend into a Purge-style weekend of orgiastic abandonment. And then I spend the rest of the post making fun of being working class, because I'm an awful person.

How not to cook an aubergine - a post detailing my attempts, at 8pm, after a tiring day fighting depression, to cook a ragoût. I still don't know what a ragoût is. That might give you a clue as to how it went.

A weekend in the village parts 1, 2, and 3 - three days relaxing in the countryside near Holmfirth that totally doesn't turn into an eldritch horror story. There's no through-line to it, annoyingly, you can see me considering an idea in the first, not managing to develop it in the second, then doing something different in a rush in the third. But still, it makes me laugh.

Making small talk - my friend Mike and I went to a live podcast recording, then talked to a woman in the bar afterwards. And you won't believe what happened next! Actually you will. I pretty obviously got socially anxious.

Miffed Matt parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 - a parody of Mad Max about an irradiated desolate wasteland, called Worksop, the heinous overseer Timmartin who presides over the only business left after the Great Divide, the bar turned barter fortress, Spoon Town, and the plucky hero Miffed Matt, who I gave no discernible characteristics to at all. I like the Wetherspoons/Brexit stuff, less so the Thunderdome parody "fives" that I included because the initial inspiration came from a cryptic crossword I was finishing on the bus with Mike. Mostly I think I just wanted to prove I knew how to format a script correctly. I also still need to write the final part, which I will do someday, God, quit hassling me.

Stroopwafel - I've written a lot of posts where I had nothing at all to write and I was out of time and any old gibberish just came out of my fingers onto the page. This post about ghost ships is a good example of that.

Just when you think you're out - Just a regular day in the life of the actor Ray Winstone. If you've not seen the film Sexy Beast then this post will make no sense to you. But you should have seen the film Sexy Beast. You really should.

It came from under the boardwalk - a wholesome song about what exactly you might find under the boardwalk. Totally doesn't turn into an eldritch horror story.

Who taught you meteorology - along with the bartender post and Miffed Matt, one of the most fun to write. No idea what I was on, I was just trying to make myself laugh. My friend Mike came up with some of the scenarios in here. Which ones? The better ones? I'll never tell.

...I'll cut here because I've got a banging migraine coming on and I can't focus on the screen any more. Tomorrow I'll collect up my favourites of the more serious pieces, the posts about mental health, mindfulness, films and games and storytelling, all of that. Toodles!

Day 201: Breaking

Fran and I are breaking up. It feels so awful writing those words, as if typing them out makes it all suddenly more true.

I don’t know how much I want to say. How much it is fair to Fran to say. I love her, and she is one of the most precious people in my life, and I want to always know her and always try to make her feel good, but we’ve become more like close friends as our relationship has developed, and for a long time now we’ve been coasting, pretending something was there when it wasn’t.

I think we both agree on this. I think I agree on this. I don’t know. Life is so messy and hard, and the right path in such important decisions is never clear. We have tried over recent weeks to work at it, to find what wasn’t there, but it hasn’t worked, and neither of us wants to stay together and end up resenting the other for the rest of our lives. I don’t want that.

But the alternative is this, which sucks so hard.

“I wish one of us had been a twat and was obviously in the wrong and the other could get angry and storm out,” Fran said. “It would make this all so much easier.”

She’s right. It’s good that the decision is mutual, that there’s no ill-will, no animosity. But it doesn’t make it easier. It just means there’s no anger or indignation to distract from the heartbreak.

There is so much heartbreak.

I’ve had this document open in front of me for hours now, and I’ve still got nothing. I can hear myself putting on a writer’s tone. Making it all sound tragic and sad, but distant, explained, written out, because that’s what I do, that’s how I cope. But it’s bullshit.

I don’t want to write it out now. I want to go and feel it.

Day 200: Socks

Having a bad time, not got anything for today. But I’ll still come here and write this, I’ll still at least check in.

Day 200 as well. I’d planned to do a recap post collecting some of the better posts of the last 200 days. I've done some of it. Maybe I’ll finish that tomorrow, or the day after. I can't now.

For now I’m going to bed. Got the delivery to be in for first thing tomorrow. Need sleep.

I washed some socks today. At least I did that.

Day 199: On being LOST

Home from another dull, interminable Monday close. Serve customers, sort breaks, post social media events, count the tills, take out the bins. On and on it swirls. The back of the bin store, reaching for bags wedged between the taps of the outdoor bar shoved in there because there’s nowhere else for it to go. The bin bag catching on the tap, tearing, disgorging its soggy viscera slopping onto the floor. The warm, vegetal aroma hitting the back of my nose...

I straighten. Haven’t I been here before? Wasn’t I just doing this?

I always take out the bins, but there are always bins needing to be taken out. I always count the tills, but the tills are never counted.

Why is it always nighttime?

Why are these customers always asking for the same three drinks, wearing the same slack-jawed expressions, making the same one and only joke they seem to know?

How long have I worked in this bar? Now I think about it, I can’t remember a time I didn’t work in this bar.

Has it always been like this?

FLASHBACK!

I’m dressed in an expensive suit, working at a law firm in the city. Everything is smart and well-lit. My partner, whose name is probably Jason, or Brett, wants me to come in on a scheme he has been cooking up to embezzle funds from a charity drive we have been overseeing. I know the scheme is morally wrong, but I’ve got my kid to look after, and he’s going to be kicked out of school if I can’t make payments on his education fees...

END FLASHBACK!

OK, I know this. I know what’s going on.

“I know what’s going on,” I shout. “I’ve figured it out.”

The scene pauses. Customers freeze, glasses halfway to lips. The young bartender, leaning back on a stool in boredom, stops in midair, hovering on two stool legs completely still.

A man dressed all in white, with a neat beard, looking avuncular, wise, steps out from behind a bottle display.

“We’ve been waiting for you to arrive,” he says. “We’ve been waiting a long time.”

“I’m here now.”

“So you’ve figured it out?”

“I think so. It took me a while, but I think I know, now. I’m... “

“Yes?”

“I’m trapped in a long-running glossy American television series, aren’t I? One where the characters find themselves in some sort of non-denominational purgatory after a terrible disaster in the first episode, and in which they now must spend each subsequent episode with their backstories explored in flashback as we learn of the emotional baggage they carry, while they simultaneously deal with parallel plots in the present day that draw out that emotional baggage and allow some minor closure to be found while still providing enough of a resetting of status quo to keep the show running for six to ten seasons. That’s why everything around here is so SYMBOLIC and METAPHORICAL. Why I always see the same recurring faces week after week. Why that smoke monster has been chasing me around the cellar for the past three years.”

“Well,” the man in white says. “No. Actually we’re here to clean the extractor fans in the kitchen.”

His two colleagues, also in white overalls, step out from the corridor. They’re carrying bags of cleaning supplies.

“We’ve been waiting ages for you to let us into the kitchen,” one of them says.

“Oh,” I say. “But… what about the smoke monster?”

“That’ll be the extractor fans, I expect. We’ve not been down to do ‘em in yonks.”

“And everyone freezing?”

“Ahem,” the customer nearest me says. “We were just a bit shocked, is all. You shouting that you knew what was going on like that. It really was rather loud.”

“Oh. Right. I see.

I let the workmen into the kitchen. I show them around. And then, in back of the storeroom, I find a strange hatch, sealed shut, with some sort of bizarre code scratched into the…

“That’ll be the fuse box,” one of the workmen shouts.

Dammit. I just cannot catch a break round here.

Day 198: Carrots

Home from a dull, interminable Sunday close, another shift tomorrow night the same. Serve customers, count the tills, do the bins. On and on it swirls. Only time of day I feel alive are these moonlit minutes, this moment snatched from the jaws of sleep, a steaming mug of tea by my side, my lamp blaring an amber glow out into the darkness of this lonely room perched at the top of this house.

The Uber driver was from Leeds, smiled apologetically. "I from not here. I know only sat-nav, or way you tell me." I said that the sat-nav would do fine, put my head back down, let the wheels roll on.

The bin bags were heavy and a wet thickness within slopped against my legs as I carried them out. Some of the bags had been pierced by cocktail sticks, still poking from the stretched polyethylene, or by bits of glass, and were leaking unidentified juice onto the mudied floor. I felt the warm, vegetal aroma hitting my nostrils, exhaled, picked up the bags, hoisted them dripping onto the street.

Fran's leg was coiled under her on the sofa as I left this afternoon. She had a chopping board balanced on the pouffe and was chopping carrots and onions for the evening stew. The tug of familial feelings as I left, memories of weekend evenings long gone, my father peeling potatoes on his lap in front of the football scores on Ceefax, the light outside failing, the pages scrolling into the weeds of the lower Scottish leagues, the rounded, lyrical team names - Airdrieonians, Dumbarton, Stenhousemuir - comforting me, signalling the drawing in of the day. Now, twenty-five years later, lost, confused, wanting only to stay in this warm front room with the television blaring and Fran and Chris and the dog for company. But instead turning, pulling up my coat collar, sloping off alone into the night.

Day 197: Blade Runner's nuts and bolts

More stuff about Blade Runner that wouldn't fit into the post last night...

There's some great nuts and bolts filmmaking, simple elegance in the deployment of the film's grammar and punctuation, that I can't help but appreciate.

While the plot itself is hokey in ways - that opening where Bryant has Deckard "arrested" because he wouldn't have just come if asked; Deckard finding the snake scale and the photographs in Leon's apartment; doing that zoom and enhance on one of the photos to somehow pivot round into an area that shouldn't be visible; finding Zhora from the snake scale and talking his way into her changing room... it's hackneyed gumshoe stuff - but it's also only the frame upon which the more important emotional themes of the film may be entwined to blossom and to grow.

And while the plot beats aren't super exciting, the way Ridley Scott visualises them, the way he tells his story through the medium of film, is masterly.

Let's pick the transition between two scenes as an example. In the first scene Deckard, who has been tasked with chasing down a group of rogue replicants, is searching the apartment of Leon, the replicant who shot the detective first assigned to the case in the film's opening scene. In the next scene Roy Batty, the leader of the rogue replicants, is taking Leon to break into Eye World, a laboratory that manufactures synthetic eyes, on a quest to "meet his maker" and to demand a longer lifespan.

How Scott moves between these scenes, and the information he manages to impart, is a lesson in the fundamentals of mainstream narrative filmmaking.

So we're with Deckard in Leon's apartment as Deckard hunts for clues. The POV is firmly with Deckard, who has been established as the film's protagonist. The story unfolds through him.

But now we cut to an external shot of the street outside, the camera high, as if we're hovering at the apartment window, looking down. A subtle pan as we follow a figure on the street, who we recognise as Leon - the only of the replicants we've yet met, and the resident of this apartment - who stops and skulks in a doorway, staring up.

Do we assume Deckard has spotted Leon? We were with Deckard's POV, so strictly speaking that's what we'd think. But there's no reverse shot of Deckard by the window, no reaction, and next we see of Deckard he's still busy; he doesn't know he's being watched.

POV in film is sticky, the audience wants to emotionally attach to a character, and once attached we imprint, we're glued, and it takes some filmmaking skill to pry us off.

Scott does this delicately. Our perspective moves in physical space only a few steps from Deckard, to show us Leon in the long shot watching him. We realise we're being treated to information our protagonist does not have - the prey our hero is hunting is himself watching our hero from the shadows - and this creates suspense.

Then we're back to Deckard to finish his scene, as he finds the clue he's been looking for, a stack of photographs hidden in a drawer of clothes. Scott signifies this clue's importance with a change of soundtrack, the score becomes mysterious and enticing - and is in fact the Moroccan-inspired theme used for the Arabic district and the club in which Zhora dances later in the film. A thematic bond is created.

And now we're opening the next scene with an establishing shot of a different street - a different place, later, the shot a kind of palette cleanser to help separate us from Deckard's POV. We were momentarily distanced from Deckard with the insert of Leon, and now we're fully severed and brought to the POV of a new character.

... A clenched hand. A few lines of dramatic monologue. And we see the hand belongs to Roy Batty, who we've only seen before as a mug-shot in Deckard's briefing from his captain, but now he is living and positively radiating power and charisma in a phone booth on this street.

Batty comes out of the phone booth to greet Leon, who has walked up, we can infer from his previous place outside the apartment, spying on Deckard. The two have an exchange, and then walk together down the street, to the entrance to Eye World, to begin the scene.

Batty is the chief antagonist, the shadow self to Deckard's hero, the yin to his yang (or the yang to his yin?). But Scott doesn't simply cut from hero to villain. He uses Leon as a bridge. We're with Deckard, then hovering just away from him, noticing Leon, then we're with Batty as Leon shuffles up to report to him.

Notice we're not with Leon shuffling up to Batty. We're with Batty as Leon shuffles up. Leon, as the instrument of transition, is seen only in long shot from Deckard's POV (though Deckard himself doesn't notice), and then seen arriving from the POV of Batty. Leon is less important; it is Deckard and Batty who stand in prime importance facing one another.

Of course there is so much else that works to tell us this. The score, the performances, how Batty interrogates Leon, how Leon is deferential, Batty's terse, controlling tone ("Men? Policemen?"). But the simple building of shots, and who they favour, lays so much groundwork upon which the rest is built.

And all this is really only the transition into the Eye World scene, which is a scene filled with tension and malice, propelling the plot forwards, a scene you initially notice far more consciously than the passage moment that leads into it. And it's no coincidence that it comes right after the scene in the apartment. In the first the protagonist finds a vital clue (the photographs). In the second the antagonist finds a vital clue (the name J.F. Sebastian). There is an intended symmetry, and the two men are set up as equally important, their journeys running parallel, with the character of Leon used to transition from one to the other.

In contrast, the Eye World scene ends much more abruptly, with a close shot on Batty's glowing face as he intones to the technician freezing to death off-screen: "Now... where... would we find... this... J... F... Sebastian?" And we cut away.

The apartment and the Eye World scenes are linked together in meaning via their transition, and at the end of the second scene this storytelling moment has come to a close. We've been introduced to the antagonist, we've learnt of his goal, we are in no doubt as to his next step, and we're now free to return POV to Deckard, and continue his story, knowing that later on we'll see the replicants finding J.F. Sebastian, and all that that entails.

Like I said, it's not glamourous stuff. It's the bread and butter of filmmaking. But Scott does it so well, he shunts the audience exactly where he needs them to go, in a way that is a little different to the norm, and looks great, and has not one frame more than is necessary.

Blade Runner is a film about high-minded concepts - what it means to be conscious, etc etc, blah blah blah - but that stuff can only arise if the basic building blocks are firmly in place. Pulling POV from the protagonist and then back again is like the foundations upon which glittering spires of atmosphere and theme may rest - and these basics have, I think, an unvarnished, structural beauty of their own, one of girders and beams and supports, and I love getting right down into the guts of a film and shining a light on them.

The girders in Blade Runner are more beautiful than most.

Day 196: Blade Runner

It's been a good day off. I've been watching Blade Runner, for like four hours now, pausing the film every time something occurs to me that I have to write down, which happens about sixty times a scene. It's slow going.

Film is gorgeous, though. Every frame resonates beauty, the delicate play of light and shadow, depth, texture, colour, contrast. From the first moments you fall forwards into the celluloid dreamscape, drawn in by Vangelis' neon-lullaby of a score. Everything works to evoke the strangeness and sadness and madness of being alive, this sort of ur-emotion of what it is to be human and conscious in the world.

So many of the important moments are the interstitial ones - hovercar rides and snoozes in apartments and late night sighs on balconies staring out at the pulsing city below. The film sits in these moments, rests in them, allows them to develop and to breathe. Light is constantly glimmering, coruscating, being scattered and spread across the scene. Darkness pools, glowers, clutches to the sides of characters' faces. There is a preternatural beauty, larger than life, that provides the landscape from which similarly bold emotions may arise.

Look at Deckard's hero's journey, from the status quo of a cynical, world-weary detective archetype, into a realm of shifting forms, of compassion and searing sadness and love, manifested in Rachel and, in a different way, the killer replicant Roy Batty. Look at the electricity in Deckard and Rachel's relationship, how the capable and confident secretary so quickly becomes the vulnerable young girl, how she's flirting with Deckard probably before she realises, and he's drawn to her despite himself. The dynamic is problematic today, no question - him grabbing her to stop her from leaving, forcing her to kiss him - but within the context of this one narrative, not including the subconscious assumptions it puts onto relationships in the real world - for just these two characters, it makes sense. Deckard is pretty much taking advantage of a grieving and dying and lost young woman, but they are lost together, they have only each other, and ... I don't know, it's problematic, I can't say it's not. But it's big and powerful and emotionally charged.

Look at the violence, shocking, distressing, sometimes elegant, a dance of choreography and blaster fire across the screen. Zhora dying badly yet exquisitely through all those sheets of glass. Triss convulsing wildly against the wall like a thrashing spider beast.

And look at Roy Batty, growing from primitive hunter-wolf to empathetic human in the space of the film's final act. Breaking Deckard's fingers then telling him he'll give him a headstart, a carnivore enjoying the play of the chase. Hearing Deckard scream as he snaps his fingers back into place, Batty pausing for a moment, perhaps as the two men's shared existence occurs to him for the first time, blinking, and then letting forth a guttural moon-howl in reply. Finally on the rooftop darting an arm out with his dying lifeforce to rescue Deckard from falling, a primordial cry of "kinship" escaping his failing lips.

It's embarrassing and lame to spell out this stuff, of course, to say it in plodding linear words. They did it with the added voice-over in the theatrical cut, and it was horrendous. Which is why in this intended Final Cut the film reverts to saying it in flickering light, in billowing smoke, in framing and camera movement and in that transcendent score. Or, rather, it uses these things to weave its spell, to put you into the right mindstate, one in which these truisms are no longer thought of as hoary, but simply felt to be true.

This is the biggest departure from the novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which is far more complex and uncertain and thorny and difficult in the ideas it presents. Blade Runner, the film, puts forward simple, universal themes, in an emotive way, which is perhaps the biggest strength of cinema as a medium. It is like an opera, with more emphasis on the visual. A song of light and shadow. A cry across neo-noir rooftops, like Batty, howling out into the night. Emotions that are simple to state, yet far more resonant to be actually felt.

And that's about all I've got for now. Take care, loves yas, and I'll be back tomorrow. Bye bye bye x