The So-Called “Happy World” Exposed

The So-Called “Happy World” Exposed aka “Must we throw this filth at our sweet-toothed kids?”. The phrase “kids and adults love it so” takes on a new and sinister meaning.

Tom in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments

Night Time Milk

Night Time Milk: maybe this should be on PROVEN BY SCIENCE as it is the subject of an experiment! My colleague has just bought me a carton of Night Time Milk which will help me sleep easily. Apparently. I don’t know whether or not it will work but I intend to try – tonight! To be honest I sleep like a log anyway so my melatonin levels are clearly pretty high anyway but I love the fact that the science behind this product is seemingly based on milking cows at night. Either this is totally preposterous or the best science ever – stay tuned for which. Meanwhile I can report that the carton is a lovely shade of deep blue and is very attractive, I almost can’t wait to drink the nummy yet soporific contents.

Tom in Pumpkin Publog • 5 Comments

One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest – Edinburgh Festival

One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest – Edinburgh Festival

The Scottish tabloids were full of Christian Slater’s 35th birthday. Big Daddy O’s lap dancing club had thrown him out for ‘swearing’. ‘Hellraiser’ Slater wasn’t about to apologise, suggesting Trainspotting also included the odd profanity. Perhaps this explained the huge queue outside the Assembly Rooms.

For tabloid tittle-tattle he may be barrel scraping, but as a sane man in a mad world, he was excellent. As much Jack Nicholson (whom he physically resembles) as RP McMurphy, Slater came across as an actor approaching middle age and angry at the thought of it.

Nurse Ratched was less of a success. Part of the delight of the story is the ambiguity of her motivation. Frances Barber plays her too straight, too rigid. The audience took an instant dislike and uneasy empathy is everything that makes her fascinating. She didn’t earn it here.

Mackenzie Crook has arguably the hardest role. Billy is a difficult character to get right. The stutter has to be spot on or it sounds trite. And he is the most typecast of the actors. He seemed to struggle at first, but shined in more structured scenes. Physically he looks the part. No make-up required.

The other key role is The Chief. The play loses a little by employing The Chief to push the narrative along, adding between-scene monologues of tribal reflections “Big waterfall, Indian land.” When McMurphy penetrates his deaf and dumb ‘wall’, it’s not the plot pivot of the original and less of a revelation.

At one point Nurse Ratched rails against McMurphy’s lifestyle, “all your women and drink and immorality.” He must have been tempted to wink but played a straight bat, firmly in the role of McMurphy, not Christian Slater. He’s looking good for 35 and I’ve never really considered it before, but he can act too.

Mike in The Brown Wedge • No Comments

This Ain’t A Library

This Ain’t A Library

Expensive comics are killing the comics biz. Well, duh, no great analysis there. But the spiralling prices – as well as putting kids and casual readers out of the market – have an effect on my perceptions of stories, too. I like a lot of highbrow comix but it’s no secret that my comics weaning was on fast, cheap, naff superhero mags. Pulp dialogue, big ideas, and tartrazine at 40 pence a pop. I still like those things. It helps if the comics are good, but ‘good’ isn’t necessarily all I’m looking for from a comics experience. Problem is, at two quid each I feel it should be.

That’s why I gave up comics, because they priced me out of the market for gaudy crap and it turned out I needed the crap to sustain much of an interest in the good stuff. The last time I read them with any regularity was when I worked in a comic shop and could read a bunch of the new issues over a few beers at lunchtime. That was ’96-’98 – the Bob Harras era at Marvel, the post-Image implosion, electric Superman, Heroes Reborn… I don’t think anyone would claim those were great times for mainstream comics but I remember them with some fondness because I was reading all this stuff for free. Since then I’ve only bought the odd trade paperback, often Marvel’s black and white cheapo Essentials collections, but there’s a limit to the amount of Silver Age romps I can take (bloody Roy Thomas).

Now comes a lifeline, though it comes at an ethical price. It turns out you can file-share comics which some mentalist fan has painstakingly scanned in and then encoded in .cbr format, to be read with a bit of software called CDisplay. Soulseek is full-ish of these things. Yesterday morning I finally bit the bullet and downloaded it. By yesterday evening I was swimming in trash again.

Of course reading a comic on a screen isn’t ideal, but fuck it. They’re disposable anyway. At last I can once more treat comics like the junk they are! And by doing so enjoy them a whole lot more. The only problem is that I’m blatantly freeloading. Now comics have always been a shared medium, before the collector mentality set in they would be passed around many a pair of grubby paws, but this is a bit different – nobody has ever seen a penny from a .cbr file. You could argue that with its short-termism, gimmickry and history of apalling creator treatment the comics biz deserves to get shafted. Not to mention that during the good times it’s been happy to milk the consumer until the teat bleeds. But the comics industry has already got the shaft and is on the brink of doom anyway.

I’ve never felt too guilty about music file-sharing and downloading because I know I spend a lot of money on CDs and it’s increased since MP3s. So file-shared comics will be an interesting test: this is a medium I currently spend next to nothing on. If I start buying comics again on even a semi-regular basis then it will suggest (to me at least) that .cbr works as a promotional tool. If not, then when the first .cbr series I read gets axed I will feel like a low, crawling thing.

Tom in The Brown Wedge • 2 Comments

Bye bye Bobby

Bye bye Bobby
“We’re in a dog-fight, so the fight in the dog will get us through – and we’ll fight.” – Sir Bobby Robson

I knew Sir Bobby’s days were numbered on Saturday when he left St Alan of the Gallowgate on the bench for the game against Aston Villa.

Poor, muddle-headed old fella. Didn’t he know his Newcastle United history?

The faithful had seen it all before. Wednesday 25 August 1999. Sunderland v Newcastle United. Magpies’ manager Ruud Gullit, attempting to settle a score with Alan Shearer, leaves the St James’ Park icon out of the first XI for this bitter match against their local rivals. Newcastle lose 2-1 in the pouring rain. Three days later, Gullit is resigned from his post.

Five years and two days on, we’re looking for another new manager.

“What he found out on Wednesday night was that football is chalk and cheese, and it will be the same on Sunday. I don’t know whether it will be chalk or whether it will be cheese.” Bobby on Kieron Dyer.

Things have been going pear-shaped at NUFC for some time. The bad start to the season (two points from four games), the string of poor results that goes back much further, the rows between Bobby and Alan, Bobby and Dyer, Bobby and Robert, Bobby and Bellamy. The bizarre outbreak of conjunctivitis in pre-season. The sale of the club’s only top-flight centre half. The ludicrous chase for Wayne Rooney, a trophy player, sure, but not one who’d stop the leak of goals at the back, something that amounts to a betrayal of our world-class goalkeeper.

And the chubby chairman, Freddy Shepherd (remember him?), a loathsome man who models himself on Ken Bates and Doug Ellis, and fancies himself as being the real boss of the team. That’s Bobby’s real downfall. That’s where the real story lies.

“Robert said I was picking the wrong team. At the time I was – because he was in it.”

For all the fact that we’ve never been anything other than a top-six also-ran during his time, Bobby was loved by the fans.

We were able to forgive him the odd miscalculated South American purchase, the inability to remember his own players’ names, the lack of any silverware during his reign. Because he was Sir Bobby. Probably our biggest failing, but one that I was happy to live with – at least for the time being, til the end of his last season, so long as we were safe.

Usually there’s some sense of closure – often even joy – when a failing manager is sacked by one’s club: Dalglish and Gullit being the two most recent examples for the Gallowgate faithful.

Not this time. Not surprise, either. Just emptiness.

It’s probably best for the club. The new man will get the chance to buy a couple of players, offload a couple of deadweights, maybe even string a few results together. Who knows, we could even win a trophy – something that’s never been done in my lifetime.

Whatever happens, I’ve no doubt that however successful Newcastle is in the future, Bobby will be missed and fans will look back on his tenure as a happy time.

Maybe he had to go now, maybe this time he wouldn’t have been able to turn round our traditional poor start, maybe we’d be struggling to stay in the big time come season’s end. We’ll never find out.

But this much I do know: the grand old man of English football deserved better.

“It’s over, forget about it, it’s gone. We’ve enjoyed the ride, brilliant. We’ve paid the money, got the ride, got off the tramcar – let’s go again.”

Wise words.

Ben in TMFD • No Comments

So we all know that Pong was the first video game. Well, now it can be played for the first time … using MIND CONTROL …

So we all know that Pong was the first video game. Well, now it can be played for the first time … using MIND CONTROL … link

It blows my mind that such things are possible. What’s more, MRI techniques are bound to keep getting more and more precise, so I suspect we’ll be hearing about a lot more of these fMRI experiments.

Of course, there is a massive gap between such science and workable, everyday technology. Subjects must learn how to control the proper areas of the brain, which requires training and practice. Therefore, using these techniques for possible treatments for mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia (as suggested in the article) is just a pie-in-the-sky suggestion (for now). But that’s likely the sort of “big picture” discussion they feel obligated to include when spicing up their scientific grant proposals.

Barry in Proven By Science • No Comments

THE HIDDEN FORTRESS

THE HIDDEN FORTRESS
dir. Akira Kurosawa

STAR WARS (original cut)
dir. George Lucas

It was all down to luck. On Thursday a friend gave me a copy of what appears to be the most elaborate (on disc) DVD bootleg I’ve yet seen, a copy of the original cut of Star Wars apparently taken from an earlier laserdisc version of the film, pre-special edition. On Saturday, rummaging through used DVDs at a local store, I found the Critierion release of The Hidden Fortress, a film I knew about but hadn’t yet seen, and which I also knew was one of Lucas’s inspirations for his film — and lo and behold, he was interviewed on the disc as one of the bonus features. So I didn’t hesitate, and as I had a bit more time to kill on the weekend than I expected, I watched both discs, The Hidden Fortress first.

Saying something about a director and a film that’s had plenty to say about it is always initially disconcerting, but what the hey — suffice to say that yes, The Hidden Fortress is indeed ridiculously great. The use of widescreen (Kurosawa’s first feature in that form), the breathless flow of the film, the wide variety of editing choices applied, from quick cuts to moments of long, seemingly static contemplation, the simple but not stupid core story, the on-the-money casting (Mifune of course, but Misa Uehara as Princess Yukihime, Minoru Chiaki as Tahei and Kamatari Fujiwara as Matakishi make the film an ensemble piece even when the characters themselves are only a team by necessity), the list goes on. Striking in black and white, it might have been even more so in color but there’s no point in quibbling over shots like the princess and her general looking with anguish on the distant burning of their hiding place or their over-the-hilltop first sight of their final goal. The swirling of the fire festival, the charge of the prisoners down the staircase, these are moments that stand as fine honing of the collective art of filmmaking.

But it’s the beautiful venality of Tahei and Matakishi that makes the film the winner. For all the moments of reflection on the meaning of honor and the need to sacrifice in order to hold on to hope — no disquisitions thankfully, except perhaps the climactic confrontation scene in the border jail and even there it’s no sermon — it’s the two fish out of water, farmers turned soldiers for a lark, eternally bickering but still close friends, which get the first and last word. Lucas himself obviously transformed the types into C3PO and R2D2 for Star Wars but while there’s plenty to connect the two duos, especially in terms of humor and frustration with their situation, Tahei and Matakishi aren’t ‘good’ characters as such. They care about their situations to the extent that it benefits themselves; once they discover gold it’s all a question of how they can get all or part of it, and when it comes down to it at the end, they quite happily agree to turn in the princess and general for a reward. Rebuffed on that front, they slouch across the border to bemoan their fate — whereas a Hollywood variant would probably have them do something ‘heroic’ to rescue their comrades, Tahei and Matakishi shrug it all off. Everything turns out all right, of course, but that’s nothing to do with them, and if it had, little of their roles would have made sense.

Star Wars would have been a different and potentially quite interesting film if Lucas had taken that approach with the droids, but would it have been better? Probably not, but then again some films, some works of art, are pretty damned hard to view with a critical lens if you’ve lived in them near constantly for most of your life. I’d actually not seen it for a few years, since a little while before The Phantom Menace came out; it had been even longer since I’d seen the original version, so on the one hand knowing every line by heart, every sound practically, got balanced against a chance to see things with perhaps fresher eyes.

It’s weird to realize how many jokes and moments and references and more in Star Wars surely had to have passed me by when I was six and first watching it. I caught the basics, I caught the spectacle, I knew and soon focused in intensely on the story as familiarity set in. Time and then time again makes more of the film work even better for me than before, and seeing it in a self-contained form like the original cut — allusions to many things never directly shown or discussed, miniature episodes held together with a minimum of exposition, the absolutely flat out brilliant editing Lucas’s then wife Marcia helped oversee (it may be that her falling out and leaving Lucas was perhaps the greatest setback for the whole cycle, even more so than the break with the shrewd, thoughtful producer Gary Kurtz) — is almost a revelation.

I remember being intensely thrilled with the ending when I last saw it on a big screen when the special edition came out, as if I’d never seen it before, and once again on TV it worked, visual and sound and music and cuts wound up to the tightest pitch and then resolved in a moment. Closest thing to that I’ve seen in recent years was the ending of The Fellowship of the Ring, the audience cheering every time whenever Aragorn beheaded Lurtz in the final duel, but even then that was a mere minute or so sequence where the Death Star battle is nearly a quarter of an hour of build and release. Some friends of mine think that Lucas should have just stopped there and done other work, or even none at all, and let Star Wars stand on its own — I’d disagree for a number of reasons (the delicious agony I suffered for three years before, then after The Empire Strikes Back came out was worth it in the end, Ewoks or not), but it’s easy to see why they would say that after watching the original cut.

In his commentary for The Hidden Fortress, Lucas speaks with his usual straightforward-while-reserved tone about what he did and didn’t borrow for Star Wars. Sometimes he seems not to appreciate what is otherwise surely obvious — there’s when he weirdly suggests that Leia’s character wasn’t like Yukihime in that Leia was more a ‘stand and fight’ person, when it’s perfectly clear that had the character been in a different situation Yukihime would be fighting with the best of them — her hilarious frustration of the two farmers by means of tripping them up and slamming branches in their faces as they walk through the woods in open pursuit of her may be as close as it gets but had she been in Lucas’s world, she probably wouldn’t have been happy until she had killed all the Stormtroopers on the Death Star one by one.

But in the end Lucas’s point that it isn’t just Kurosawa that’s a source is well taken — the Joseph Campbell reference at the end of the interview may seem overfamiliar now but inasmuch as Kurosawa took inspiration from John Ford but not just Ford, so Lucas took further inspiration from both and even more, and so forth. The two films are related but not clones, both are individual hotwiring of settings and characters then translated in company with those working for their creators. And both are pretty damned great fun to watch.

Ned Raggett in Do You See • No Comments

Now I know more about 23 than ever before, I guess

Now I know more about 23 than ever before, I guess — by chance, as with the best of my library discoveries, I stumbled across Simon Ford’s 1999 book Wreckers of Civilization, his story of the folks behind COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle. TG have always been one of those groups I’ve appreciated more than loved, though I have four of their CDs; however, I admit there was something weird and fascinating about their story, or what little I knew of it — the mentions in Jon Savage’s writing, the story about how Robert Hilburn hyped them to hell for their LA show and apparently received so much negative feedback that he firmly retreated into the chickenshit Boss/U2/Beck hype and sterility camp from that point forward.

So this was a fortunate find and a pretty good read. The subject matter by default steered away from a rock bio as such, as it became first and foremost the story of Genesis P. Orridge and the series of obsessions and (if the story of COUM’s origin is taken at face value) revelations which led him to first form a none-more-extreme performance art group and then something musical out of that. It’s an illustration of a Britain I’m not as familiar with as well, one of art and life defiantly well out of a mainstream for the early to mid-seventies, of art and politics (each in many different senses of the word) slamming into each other with varying results. It’s as an art history that I probably learned the most from the book — modern art however considered in general just isn’t a strong point or an overriding interest. There’s no question a lot of what I read was downright queasy — I feel no moralistic horror over the various installations described (a number sound just plain playful), but when P. Orridge and Peter Christophersen start in with the knives on their flesh, I had to skim ahead.

And then again it’s the story of relationships not quite working as planned, of P. Orridge and Cosey Fani Tutti’s personal partnership turning into one of Tutti and Chris Carter. It’s a collection of little details I had never heard about that were of particular interest (Ian Curtis was a massive TG fan, I learned, and apparently P. Orridge spoke to him the night of Curtis’s death). It’s a collection of a lot of photographs and recording details and descriptions and contradictions. And then there’s Christophersen, of the four the one least portrayed, a continual presence but outside of the intense triangle, and also holding down a specific regular job at the Hipgnosis design firm the whole time. It’s a split he maintains to the present day — design and video directing and commercials as the day job, the continual unfolding slow motion unease of Coil and affiliated bands elsewhere. In my own small way I have this gentle split in my work — library work on the one hand, writing and commenting on the other — and so I sympathize with this approach more than one which in its dedication to ‘nothing short of total war’ becomes its own entrapping siege mentality. Maybe if I had grown up as Neil Megson before he took on the Genesis name, I would think differently.

Ned Raggett in The Brown Wedge • No Comments

Terror alert: Gin in peril

Terror alert: Gin in peril

Gin drinkers of the world unite.

The juniper bush is in sharp decline across Britain. No juniper, no gin.

People are being encouraged to look for remaining bushes. Their reward? Free gin.

Think not of what your gin can do for you, but what you can do for your gin.

Future drinkers are counting on us.

Ben in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments

Copybooks

Copybooks

Browsing idly in WH Smiths on Friday a couple of new books caught my eye. One was by Vivian Cook, called Accomodating Broccoli In The Cemetary. This unpleasantly unwieldy title turns out to be a book about spelling, subtitled “Why can’t anyone spell anymore?”.

The publishing world is fad-driven like everything else. But for some reason its fads annoy me more. Maybe my expectations of books are higher than my expectations of, say, the pop biz, where if a band hits big then of course a half-ton of identikit ones will surely follow: I take that as part of the landscape and it never bothers me. Maybe it’s the time the cycle takes – in films a surprise hit may take a few years for other people to copy, so it’s harder to become sick of things.

Vivian Cook’s book does not come with a blurb saying “If you loved Eats, Shoots And Leaves you’ll just adore this!”. It hardly needs to: plainly there is no way it would be in WH Smiths’ Top 10 without Lynne Truss’ pedants’ charter breaking this particular path. I also just know that it’s the start of a flood – just think how many Miscellany books are on the shelves now. In a business where the margins are presumably pretty stinking every successful title will generate a mass of imitators – further along the Smiths’ shelves was the latest in the flourishing women-like-kinky-sex!!! subgenre, this time about a teenage BSDM enthusiast. It at least put “Move over Catherine M!” on its cover.

My irritation over this kind of marketing is rather self-defeating: it can work in the readers’ favour. Longitude was a bit of fluff whose popularity was bizarre, but it did break open an entire new popular history genre. It allowed people whose good social history work would have been footnoted to death in unread journals to actually write a bit and tell a few stories: many of the post-Longitude cash-ins were considerably better than their genre-mother. Similarly Lynne Truss may allow a few linguists to earn an honest bob – the write-up of the Cook book suggests it casts its net intriguingly wide. But I won’t be reading it: my quixotic stand against copycat books is not going to be weakened by mere quality.

Tom in The Brown Wedge • No Comments