Day 358: Sapphire and Ruby

Oh bugger I’ve stayed up all night editing photos, and now it’s a million o’clock in the morning and I neeeed to be asleep and I haven’t done my blog. Here’s my blog. It’s here guys. It’s here.

Finished work half an hour early, because it was weirdly quiet for a bank holiday (the calm before the storm of tomorrow?), and so got to sit in the sun with Jake and Missy, who were in town drinking Prosecco and celebrating their five-year anniversary. What colour’s that? Tortoise shell? Mauve?

… I just looked it up online. 40th is Ruby Red. 45th is Sapphire. 50th is Gold. 55th Emerald Green. 60th Diamond White. 70th Black. 75th Sun and Moon. 80th Ultra Sun and Moon. 100th Sword and Shield. There’s a 90th, but that’s just the 40th remade with touch-screen controls and fancier graphics.

That’s a joke about Pokemon main entry naming conventions for you. I know what you like. You lap the Pokemon jokes up.

Anyway, I sat in the sun with OG Pokemon trainers Jake and Missy, bedecked in matching mustard yellow outfits, and Zoe and Joe and peeps joined us, and I took photos, and we lay on the faded grass and watched the sun go down. Jake and Missy got tiddly and yanked each other around, and acted like the cutest buttons in all the land.

I mean, look at these guys. I love these guys so freaking much.

And then Zoe and I bid them adieu and went on a mate date to the Indian round the corner, and laughed right through all the courses, and Zoe almost had an aneurysm that I was leaving a fiver tip, and she tried to steal it when I wasn’t looking, but I caught her, and then we came and hung out at mine a while, and then I remembered I had an apple turnover in the fridge, but only one, so I kicked Zoe out and ate my dessert and edited photos, and then it got really late, and then I started writing my blog, and then I got to this part of the blog, and then I just set myself on fire and jumped out of the window after that.

Wait, what did I just say?

Hmm, no time to go back and check. Just letting my subconscious unspool. It was probably nothing. Probably.

Anyway I need to go fall asleep and dream of catching Pokemon. In conclusion having friends is good. I like friends. That is all.

Loves ya x

Day 357: Football Fans

Pub packed with football fans. All chanting. Beginning of the bank holiday and sun is out and the fans, who have been drinking lager for hours, are chanting because it looks like Sheffield United are going up, and they’re doing so over their local rivals Leeds United.

What the fans are chanting is: “We all hate Leeds scum.” They are chanting this over and over again, slamming hands on tables, stamping feet, sloshing beer across the floor.

I’m so used to this emotion from childhood, from football grounds, from the school yard. The sweetest of feelings. We fucked you over. We succeeded, but what’s better, you failed. We succeeded because you failed. We are alive. You are dead. Fuck you. You’re scum.

It’s a weird way to live, no? A weird choice as the culmination of a season’s worth of consternation and heartache and hope. What was the zenith of your life this year, mate? When were you most authentically alive? When I was chanting about how much better some sports stars that work in my town were than the sports stars that work in the next town along.

Christ. I couldn’t give a shit about football, but I don’t mean to belittle it. The fact that you care about it is cool. The fact that you get a sense of self-worth from it is fine.

But having so little pride in yourself that you can only express happiness when others are dragged into the mud and destroyed is a sad and weird and crap way of existing, don’t you think? There’s no elegance to it, no magnanimity; your joy is sullied by what is correctly in all of the major religions referred to as sin.

Which word is an old archery term, by the way, and just means to miss the mark, to fail to hit the gold at the centre of the target.

You’re missing what is best about life. Not dragging others down, but building yourself up. Your players don’t live like you do. They get all the beauty from a victory, while swapping shirts and patting backs with the vanquished foes. Maybe it’s easier for them, being paid six-figure sums while you work for minimum wage in the sandwich packing factory in Worksop. But maybe I’d posit that’s part of why they earn so much, because they have dedicated themselves to something, because they don’t hang their hopes on others but strive to succeed, because they finish a day thinking about their own progress, not the failure of others.

But maybe that’s not fair. The world needs sandwich packers as much as star strikers. Far more so, in fact.

But do you ever think about these things, football fan? Do you worry at night sometimes about the malice and aggression and fear that infuses all of your joy?

Or am I utterly missing the mark?

I’m curious.

Day 356: Fix you

I’ve been watching Bodyguard. Everyone was talking about Bodyguard last year, you couldn’t turn on a radio - which happened a lot when I was doing man work with Steve - without some twat banging on about Bodyguard, and how incredible it was, and how you just had to see it.

Well bugger that, I thought. I wouldn’t watch it. Not with all those people recommending it. People like Coldplay, and voted for the Nazis. You can’t trust people.

But then one night I was sat in bed, and I’d done all my chores, and I had nothing better to do than think about how weird it is to have a skeleton, and how I wasn’t alive for all of eternity before I was born, and that my brain is just some impersonal lump of matter to you, just part of the vast Other of the world, like traffic cones and Domino’s boxes and Cher CDs, but in here, to me, it’s the very central wellspring of the universe, and it’s your brain, out there, that is just some lumpy tangle of whateverness.

And I didn’t like thinking about any of this at all, so I opened my Chromebook and searched on Netflix for something loud and exciting to watch to distract me from the existential dread that seeps in whenever it’s quiet, and I stumbled across Bodyguard.

And I tell you what, they may have made a mistake with Chris Martin - and to a lesser extent Hitler - but the people were bang on the money about Bodyguard.

It’s fabulous. It’s ever so thrilling. It’s like 24, but greyer, and instead of Jack Bauer you get Robb Stark from Game of Thrones, and he’s got PTSD.

It’s, OK, a little dumb. But not as dumb as I’m making it sound. It may be manipulative of plot, but not of emotion. It’s sensitive and nuanced, and Richard Madden, aka poor old Robb Stark, is spectacular, the perfectly damaged hero, so very full of humanity when he’s talking to a scared potential suicide bomber in the opening episode, so very capable in combat situations, so very flawed the rest of the time. And those moments of action are utterly gripping, and really, you just really do really just have to see it.

There you are. I’m one of you now. Throw the Sieg Heils. March in lockstep. And sing after me:

When you try your best but you don’t succeed...

Day 355: Wednesday Reviews - The Hateful Eight

Today I've been watching The Hateful Eight - yer boy Quentin Tarantino's eighth film, a one-room drama of deceit and the promise of violence, set in the decades following the American Civil War. Kurt Russel is the bounty hunter John Ruth, bringing his captive, Jennifer Jason Leigh's uncouth outlaw Daisy Domergue, into town to be hung. On their journey by stagecoach they pick up Samuel L. Jackson's ex cavalryman Major Marquis Warren, and then are forced by an approaching blizzard to seek refuge in Minnie's Haberdashery - a log cabin store and stop-over run by an amiable woman known to Ruth and Warren.

But what's this? Upon reaching the cabin the group find that Minnie is peculiarly absent - gone to visit family on the other side of the mountain, says the not exactly trustworthy looking Mexican stranger Bob, who claims to have been left in charge. Inside are a disparate bunch of characters also seeking shelter from the storm - among them Tim Roth's outlandish hangman Oswaldo Mobray, and Michael Madsen's monosyllabic loner Joe Gage.

Are all these travellers who they say they are? Can they all be trusted? And what's with that jellybean stuck between the floorboards that Warren notices as he comes in?

The Hateful Eight is a solid story, with narrative tropes old as time, a firm genre flick from a director who basically makes the apotheosis of genre flicks - taking pulpy conventions and raising them to the level of, perhaps, fine art.

But I have to say, Tarantino has lacked vitality, for me, ever since 1997's Jackie Brown. You can see his early zestiness sprout through Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Natural Born Killers, really come to bloom in Pulp Fiction, and already by Jackie Brown be wilting somewhat. Jackie is maybe my favourite of his films, still lively, yet deeper, more mature than his previous work - but I do think you can sense the zenith of his creativity having been reached, and his cinematic virility cooling into middle-aged filmmaking formula.

Pulp Fiction was the most exciting, Jackie Brown the strongest, and after that he's never been quite the same. I've very much enjoyed every one of his films since, and they've all contained moments of brilliance. But his talent, world-class as it is, has always felt like it's been searching for a spark.

He's worked hard, he's just not been as inspired as he was in those early years.

Anyway, The Hateful Eight doesn't reverse this trend - it's not a Goodfellas-era-Scorsese revival - but it is my favourite since Kill Bill Vol. 2. If we're doing the Scorsese thing then it's all least The Departed, or maybe Wolf of Wall Street.

All his tics are present and correct - the rhythms of the exchanges, the repetitions of the dialogue, the broken linearity of the narrative, the anachronisms of style, the self-awareness. At his worst Tarantino can be like a pastiche of himself, and Hateful Eight perhaps slips once or twice into this realm - when you feel the style is overtaking the content, when he's using jarring techniques because he can't help himself, or because he doesn't know what else to do, rather than because the material demands it. Sometimes you sense a posturing that masks the emptiness of the material beneath - like he's using the template of that carpool conversation from Pulp Fiction over and over, with less and less inside the template that he has to say. Or a scenario that doesn't rise above genre cliche, yet he gets away with it, just, because of the style of the presentation.

But Death Proof through Django were worse for it than this. Mostly The Hateful Eight is appropriately judged, and there's a strong enough story to warrant the stylistic approach. The characters feel alive and human, if larger than life, and there's an emotional core - and an indelicate yet appropriately bold simmering of racial tensions - that gives the film its depth.

Sam Jackson is superb, with eyes bulging and burning with fury, yet also showing hurt and shock, a poignancy at the centre of the story that it needs.

Tim Roth has all the fun with the preposterous Mobray, and Walter Goggins is very good as a racist redneck sheriff, Tarantino once again taking an experienced character actor and allowing him to shine.

And it's all filmed in magnificent 70mm - a wide format offering far more detail than most film, reserved when it was used for Ben-Hur like epics. Tarantino gets an obvious thrill from subverting expectations, opening with the expansive, humanity-dwarfing vistas that are a requisite for the approach, before crushing the narrative down to his cramped one-room play.

Yet he knows what he's doing - the 70mm stock brings a grandeur but also a claustrophobia to the haberdashery, with often the entire cabin visible at once, and the cast spread about as in a painting - two of them perhaps involved in some drama in the foreground, with groups of ones or twos spread out at the corners of the shot.

And because of the proportions and the available detail in the format, Tarantino and regular cinematographer Robert Richardson can leave us in a wide shot of characters, with plenty of surrounding scenery, while still showing us the kind of emotion in the eyes that would normally require a close-up.

It's thrilling stuff, really benefiting the story - in the parlour-game nature of the narrative it's important we keep the players in our minds, where they're situated, the moves they're making - and 70mm is perfect for this.

What else? I was ambivalent about the violence, as usual with Tarantino. Mostly it was shocking for the right reasons, visually beguiling at the same time as being morally repellent, refusing to shy away from the sometimes bloody nature of our world. But at times it crossed into sadism, I thought.

The look of the film was strong, a colour palette of deep reds and browns, blues and burnished golds. You feel the warmth of the cabin compared to the biting cold outside, but it is an eerie warmth, a malevolence hiding within it.

And so, too, the score by Ennio Morricone, who was coaxed into writing one last Western theme. It races ever forwards, like that opening stagecoach, while a threat of malice weaves in and out over the top - like those stormclouds amassing above.

The Hateful Eight is an excitingly told tale, a classic storytelling scenario stretched by a filmmaking grandmaster into a huge and bold piece of cinema. It isn't Tarantino's best work, but it is the best he's been in a while, and despite a few faults it is absolutely worth your time. He may not be the hippest young firebrand on the block anymore, but boy has he still got some moves!

Day 354: Swoosh

Image source

I'm in my usual coffee shop, watching the kids come and go. The Chinese students. The fashionistas. The revolving brands.

Maybe I’ve just been reading too much Naomi Klein, but the logo is a uniquely insane idea, don’t you think?

Like, I want to buy a shirt. With sleeves, a collar, maybe a nice pattern. This is what I’m paying for. I don’t want to pay for the burden of advertising your shirt for you. To carry the emblem of your company around with me and show it to people. To be a walking billboard for you. Mother. Fuck. that.

And yet the brands have us so brainwashed that not only are we willing to do this, we’ll actually pay astronomical amounts for the opportunity to do so. Trainers with a Nike Swoosh on the side are in far greater demand than trainers with no Swoosh. The price of a Gucci bag is not predominantly informed by the quality of that sack in which you put stuff.

Because we do not only want the thing. The material. The craftsmanship. The use. We want a shorthand indicator of status. This is a Barbour jacket and that means I belong to this set of people. I scroll meaninglessly down Apple phones, and so the hijacking by social media companies of my ill-equipped dopaminergic system is not pathetic but effortlessly cool. I shade UV radiation from my eyes with Ray-Ban sunglasses, so know that I am Someone Who Matters, affluent and desirable and important.

I’m not saying we are aware of this choice, not up here in the leafy tips of our cerebral pathways, in the realm of conscious thought. But it’s what’s happening in us, down under the shaded canopy of the subconscious.

You’ve maybe never considered this. Or if you have, there’s a high likelihood you’ve created a complex set of ex post facto rationalisations to cover your cognitive dissonance, to lie to yourself that you decided to be this way, rather than admit to having your subconscious needs manipulated by large companies who want your money for themselves. “I just buy Nike trainers because they’re the best," perhaps you say.

I understand. No one likes being someone’s bitch.

But it’s bullshit. You’re bullshitting yourself. You had the seeds of aspirational desire planted in you long before you could make rational decisions, and these seeds are watered, nurtured, doused in Miracle Grow every day by the continuous bombardment of marketing to which we are subjected in our modern world.

Nike pay spies to ingratiate themselves within underprivileged yet exciting youth communities - with black kids on the streets of New York ghettos, for example - and to listen to and report back on what these youths find hip and worthwhile. They then fill their marketing with these messages, and affluent yet boring middle-class shoppers buy Nike products to steal some of the excitement from those lifestyles of the New York streets. Minus the heroin addiction, gang violence, lack of education, and life expectancy in the 30s, of course.

Being a banker is boring, yet easy. Being Omar from The Wire is thrilling, yet impossibly hard. So what the major brands have done is find a way to sell the romanticised notion of street life to the bankers, who get to do drive-bys on their downtown Pret a Mangers and hang with their crew at LAN parties, then fall asleep soundly ensconced in John Lewis sheets, all for the reasonable price of double or triple or quadruple what the trainers are worth before you put the Swoosh on them.

And for the street kids? Well, you market their style right back at them, which now becomes self-mythologising, and they cling to these totems as the one thing in their life that makes them feel important. Or you sell them Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, the WASPy Ivy League yachting brands that to these inner-city kids seem so alien and out of reach. Then you get pictures of the black guys wearing Tommy Hilfiger, and sell /that/ image back to the preppy suburban children. One big circle of manipulation, everyone thinking they’re getting to be someone they’re not, all the money from them all being channelled upwards into the pockets of Phil Knight and the other company heads.

And there’s the infantilisation aspect, as well. Remember how stressful buying trainers was when you were twelve?

Adolescents are the group most concerned with how they’re viewed by their peers, life-threatening as it feels, and truly is, to fit in with their social group, before they've found what makes them valuable that is natural and unique about themselves. They spend a great deal of time editing their self-image, planning and preening, and a lot of their sense of worth comes from the validation they receive when they get this right.

But it’s a stage of development. A stop-off on the journey towards becoming. Yet it’s one that our culture does everything it can to keep us suspended within, because it is at this stage that we are most susceptible to brand marketing, the stage at which we can have the most revenue extracted from us.

So, like domestic cats that remain in a perpetual state of kittenhood, kept cute and helpless by the human parents they never leave, we are a society of teenagers, spending our wages on toys, on fashion, on easy entertainment. 

No one is going to tell you off for this. No one is going to suggest you move on. You’re going to be encouraged to be this way at every turn. Expensive adverts on television, the force of culture pressing from the top down, is designed to persuade you that everything is as it should be, that you’re doing great. They want your money. They do not love you, they simply want your money.

Which all is fine. The forces of the world are the forces of the world. But it’s your job, as a being in the world, to truly face these forces, to act appropriately against them. If you want to stay thirteen, with your hi-tops and your Beats by Dre buds and your iPhone, then go right ahead. You’ll get the warm feelings that you associate with these brands, with displaying these logos, and you’ll pay the price. You’ll pay monetarily, and you’ll pay through the hollowness of worshipping false idols of corporate deities. Fallen gods that take your prayers, take your offerings of gold, and give you back only things. Cold, loveless things.

Worshipping the true gods, commitment, creativity, civic duty, charity - this is harder, it’s not sexy, no luxuriously filmed adverts are going to put the idea in your head. But the more you do it, the more reward there will be. And you get to fall asleep at night feeling honest, alive, a full and adult human being facing the unvarnished reality of this world.

And that’s the kind of authenticity that no Swooshed trainers I’ve yet seen can bring you near.

Bear it in mind.

Day 353: Stoics

Skin update: The Differin is yet to have an effect. If anything, it's making my acne worse. My face is tight and a touch waxy, more red than usual. My cheeks are blotchy, I'm getting the odd small lump under the surface around my nose. My chest is as bad as ever.

But it's only been three weeks or so. The cream is supposed to take up to eight weeks to even start making positive progress, so, although frustrating, it's entirely expected.

And I'm trying to take advice from the philosophy of the Stoics, passed on in a video I stumbled across recently from Sean Tucker, a photographer and YouTuber I greatly admire. That advice is:

You can only change what you can change.

One of those truisms that turns out to not be so obvious, or so easy, when you try to live by it - although the truth of it certainly runs deep.

You can only change what you can change.

There are things I can control, and things that I cannot. What I can control are my thoughts about events, and my actions leading from those thoughts. There is personal responsibility, there is free-will, and this is where it pivots.

But pretty much everything outside of that small locus of responsibility is out of my control. It is up to the fates.

I can't control whether the sun rises tomorrow, whether it will be hidden behind cloud. I can't control the vastness of the socio-economic system in which we live, the fact that everyone wants money for goods and I have to do things I don't feel like doing in order to earn that money to pay for goods. I can't control taxes. Donald Trump. Death.

And falling within that remit is the acne with which I have suffered since I was fourteen.

I can control my diet, but that seems to have a negligible effect. I can take the strongest drug, and only potential cure, that Western medicine has fallen upon for people in my situation. I did that, a decade ago, and my skin was clear for five or six years, and then started getting worse again. And I can try out this Differin cream at the insistence of my GP, using it as preventative maintenance every night, although it's a hassle and reports suggest it is only moderately useful.

But I can do these things. I can also work on the emotions that arise when I think about having damaged skin, do CBT exercises to more correctly place and play out the worries of social failure and ugliness that I have in my head.

And although that, certainly, can be hard, what's great is that I don't have to worry about the rest. It's out of my control, and therefore not appropriate to waste time ruminating over.

Put on the cream, try to feel lovable and worthwhile despite scarred skin, and forget about everything else. Go to sleep, get rest, wake up and get on with the things I want to do.

There is only this. Everything else will take care of itself.

Day 352: Townships

It is warm here. In this coffee shop. The afternoon light streaming through the large windows, caressing counters, then failing, retreating, as the deepening shadows grasp out from the back of the room.

Deepening shadows across the varnished wood of these tables, across the little sugar pots with their little tops... the blue ceramic mugs and saucers, the mugs smudged with stains of coffee. Polished cutlery coruscating. Flanged steel girders bearing the weight of the room, shining under black paint. Hanging lights. Customers congregated in small groups, voices susurrating gently, hair flicked back, mugs brought to lips, hats removed, hats kept on.... Or customers by themselves, plugged into screens that shine in bursts of colour and behind the colour reflect vaguely back the self. Headphones. Wireless buds. Notebooks opened, notebooks closed. Phones picked up, just for a moment, just to check this one tiny thi...

The textured grey of the sky still bright, but the sun, somewhere behind, arcing inexorably lower, the remembered promise of dusk. Evening approaching, creeping into the edges of awareness, as of a task you are not yet starting but know you'll be getting round to soon.

Store fronts across the road emptying, or already closed. Taxis rolling by with less frequency now. The drinkers spilling from their bars, the forty-somethings from the surrounding villages, from Kiveton Park, Shireoaks, from Mexborough, from Rotherham, from Worksop and the splayed tangle of the Mosborough townships. The women thick with makeup, the men large of bicep and belly. Disgorging themselves from Lloyds and Yates's, clomping and swaying on heels, raising Barbour collars over crisp Ben Shermans, winding in spread-thin packs towards the station, the caterwauling voices unable to fully distract from the thought of the darkening sadness of home.