19 October 2004
WATCH WITH MOTHER : Heartbeat
mark s: heartbeat is just last of the summer wine except not funny – which means (tails off glumly)
mum s: it’s not been any good since nick berry left
*long pause, no canned laughter*
mark s: do you always watch it?
mum s (gleefully): YES!!
*lpncl*
mark s: who ARE all these people? everyone’s left. not just nick berry… oh look, one of those cars with wooden bars, half-timbered cars!
mum s: yes, your godfather always had one of those – shooting brakes
*lpncl*
mark s: oh no it’s midsomer murder is next, are we going going to watch that too?
mum s (gleefully, w.delighted evil look straight at me): YES!!!!!
[the ep ends, rather unexpectedly, with a likeable yet crooked former RAF war-hero killing himself by ditching his spitfire in the briny, to all kinds of noble uplifting music - tho the main plot-point was a hunt for a stolen fuschia]
hmmm didn’t the french literary avant garde in the 50s and 60s – m.duras et al – strive to dispense with narrative as the driving force in fiction?: i think the sunday night Channel Three mid-evening slot has succeeded where they failed, by using stories-as-readymades so feeble and perfunctory that no one sane can be watching to “find out what happens” ===> it is ALL ABOUT THE MISE-EN-SCENE ppl
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in Do You See • No Comments
FREAKY TRIGGER TOP 25 SCARIEST THINGS
14: Being Alone For The Last Third Of Your Life
The month of fear has started me thinking about my life. As these things sometimes do. I realised that I spend much of my life afraid, in tiny, almost insignificant, trivial little ways. I am afraid I’ll be late, or that my students or colleagues will expose me as a fraud. I’m afraid I’ll say the wrong thing, or forget something important. I’m afraid I neglect my friends, that I’m not grown-up enough, that I’m too grown up, that I’m too shy, too loud, drink too much, drink too little, eat the wrong things. But I also realised that these are a) pretty common anxieties so having them was not something to be afraid of; and that b) they never really get in the way of getting on with my life. Being consistently five or more minutes early for appointments or trains would be seen by some people as a virtue, not a failing. I also realised that these are all things which are more or less in my control: they’re things I can do something about. I can leave five minutes early to ensure I don’t miss my train.
What I don’t worry about are the big external things: I don’t fear terrorist attacks (although when i was at school the bomb attacks on London train stations did worry me, since both parents commuted to work through London Bridge and Victoria every day); I’m not afraid of crime beyond remembering to lock the door when I leave in the morning; I may despair over the state of the world, but I’m not afraid that it will destroy my life suddenly, brutally, horribly. (And I know I’ve been lucky in life, generally.) These are all things over which I can have no possible control, so somehow my anxious brain simply leaves them be. If my everyday fears seem like the products of a over-sensitive survival system, prodding me to do certain things, to not do others, these big fears seem slightly strange and out of proportion to me, and always have done. I’ve never been afraid of the end of the world.
There’s also a third category, I realised the other day. I fear for things which are in the control of people whom I care about. So I fear for the health of my friends. I worry about them. I’m afraid they will fall ill, live in pain, or discomfort, or even die before their time, leaving behind — not me in particular, since I know myself to be relatively stoical about things beyond my control — loved ones, family and friends who care about them. I fear these things because they could be sorted out. You can eat well, exercise a bit. Little things which can make you safer.
I’m not afraid of being alone for the last third of my life. Not just because I’m in a great relationship with someone I love very much, and I can’t imagine (or won’t imagine) that not being the case. (Perhaps I have no imagination: I’ve often wondered if that’s true, and I’ve always felt that both memory and dreams have a much stronger hold on me than imagination does.) But more because it seems so out of my control as to not be worth worrying about. It would after all depend on the actions of all the people you already know, and of all the people you might befriend or come to know in the future. (I assume of course that whoever came up with the suggestion meant ‘alone’ did not just mean ‘single’, without what we stupidly call a significant other, in the Sex In The City sense of ‘alone’ which really means having no-one with whom you can drop the hard ethics of friendship). I wouldn’t like to be in a nursing home for thirty years, with no-one coming to visit me, but one would live through it: that’s what people do. I’m certainly not going to spawn offspring simply as a safety net against future abandonment. Being alone would be sad. Being alone is sad. But scary? I’m not sure.
byebyepride in Blog 7 • No Comments
On the way to the gym (to go for today’s hat-trick of tedious anecdotes) at about 7.20 in the morning, I pass three pubs which are open (is this unusual? It seems so to me), and which almost always have folk drinking in them. I also pass two sandwich shops which always smell of bacon rolls. (Certainly not unusual.) So every time I go to the gym, as you might imagine, I really really really ask myself WHY LORD WHY??? Funnily enough, on the way back (at least when I’m working from home, and not catching the train to Glasgow), this never seems to be a problem.
byebyepride in Pumpkin Publog • No Comments
Gym Life
Everytime I throw up, I think of Julia Kristeva. (This sentence is not, luckily, reversible.) All down to an encounter with her description of the abject at an impressionable age. By way of comparison, in five months of going to the gym, I feel like I’ve been getting more intimate with Deleuze. Firstly, based on my distant memories of his book on Masochism, I have to say that I’ve never been as masochistic a relationship as I am with my instructor. The basis of masochism for Deleuze is not abjection, or humiliation, nor even bondage, submission or pain, but the contract. This is formal, but internalised. So when I force myself to do something I really don’t feel like doing, out of a sense of obligation to an instructor I have only met twice, but with whom I now have an agreement, filed on a bit of paper in a drawer at the back of the room, I feel like I know what masochism is. Of course, I’ve probably mangled the concepts horribly. Apologies to k-punk and his chums. Secondly, I think I have found a way to understand Deleuze and Guattari’s machines and assemblages stuff. It’s not so much that I go into the gym and use the rowing machine which sits there. It’s more that the rowing machine isn’t a rowing machine until it’s completed by being combined with my, equally incomplete, body machine. Together we are one sort of machine, apart other sorts of machines. I like this one better, but again, I’m happy to admit this is based on passing acquaintance with Thousand Plateaux and I’m sure our learned friends will put me right if I’m wrong.
byebyepride in TMFD • No Comments
TV without the words
About four times a week I go to the gym on my way to work. In the gym I use various machines. Many of them face towards a row of large TV screens, which hang from the ceiling. These TV screens show a variety of channels, usually including BBC1, ITV, Channel 4, MTV Hits, and either Sky News, or, more recently, some Sky sports channel. Being fussy about what goes into my ears, I bring my own music-making machine — OK, OK, it’s an ipod — and headphones. But it’s hard not to be drawn to the flickering lights of the screens, when you’re pounding away on some tedious cross-trainer programme. So I spend more time than I would like watching TV without the words.
I remember reading The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat at school. If my memory is correct, one of the essays involves a patient who cannot understand / hear what is being said on TV by a prominent US politician, but who is convinced from his looks that he is lying. As a result of my gym time, that is pretty how I feel about all TV now.
Without the words, and with the ability to pan across a couple of news channels, and some entertainment shows at once, what is most striking are the grotesque smiles which seem to be compulsory. If the early morning magazine shows can trip lightly from the latest movie release, to bombings in the middle east, to what you should or should not be wearing, it’s only because all the presenters have to show no emotion at all about anything: only the gift-wrapped grins of the gormless. To pretend that all this stuff is the same is just lying about it.
That the news agenda is driven by what footage is available is a cliche. It’s also obviously true. More insidious, however, are the way shots are framed. Day in, day out, I see bombed-out cars, houses or general wreckage. Filling the frame, even the smallest attack can seem like monumental carnage. The fleeting moments in which a camera pans, or before the zoom in, are far more telling, and far more evocative. Because they show us everyday life in what could be a European country going on around, they strip the report of the exoticism routinely attached to the warzone, to the disaster area, to the mysterious and veiled East. Then we’re back to the twerps on the sofa.
It also means there are shows which I’ve only ever seen without the words. King of Queens, I can report, is about a fat bloke with a menial job and an enormous house, and the two sluttish women who seem to harass him for no particular reason. It has George from Seinfeld‘s screen dad in it. It has no jokes. Obviously. It comes on after Everybody Loves Raymond. At least in this case, I think I’m benefiting from not being able to hear what’s going on. And oh yes, the same chuckling fools are on here as on the news channels, the same hooker-aesthetic for sitcom women as for the ones on the music videos.
Recently we’ve had the wrestling on a lot. Everything about it is fake, from mock news-reports and tearful hospital-bed weep-a-thons to the ludicrous preening of the muscle men, and the repetitive pseudo-violence, — with the possible exception of the apparent enjoyment of the craven, braying audiences — but here no-one cares, and no-one pretends otherwise. (So perhaps the joke’s on me, for even expecting there to be truth on TV?) Made for idiots, and with storylines that are easy to follow even without the sound, this is probably the most honest show of the lot.
byebyepride in Do You See • No Comments
Brazzaville Beach is the William Boyd book I have most wanted to read since drifting into his work. Moreover it is the book most other people have wanted me to read. So they at least will be pleased to hear that I loved it. What concerns me is why they thought I would.
I fear it may be for the bonkers mathematician character in it. Cheers, I do not do the maths anymore (though I am actually reading that cognitive psychology book about maths that Alan leant me and am really rather enjoying it). What strikes me most forcibly about Brazzaville Beach is how, for a book which is fundamentally about jealousy, how much window dressing there is. Firstly envy is never directly identified as the source of all this conflict, where even in the chimpanzee war it quite clearly is. But in his attempts to stop us discovering this too soon (or at all) Boyd runs through a crash course in degree level mathematics, primate biology, hedgerow botany and African civil wars. It is not unlike the ragbag of clever and fascinating detail in his longer, faux autobiographies, but in this more taut novel the stakes seem higher. Dual narratives are always difficult to pull off, and here we can compare groundbreaking science in exotic Africa with low key failed romance and maths in the UK. And yet both stories compliment each other and you never feel you are with one too long without visiting the other. Boyd gives you at lot to look at in the book, but never tells you what to think. Combining this with a theme which crystallizes as the book finally unfolds, it is a rare piece where the components (research, narrative, structure) contribute to a greater whole.
The last time I talked about Boyd (Any Human Heart) I wondered if I had got used to him, and the law of diminishing returns would set in. The answer is happily no. The secret, as mooted in that piece is that Hope Clearwater as a lead is a much more flawed character (or perhaps a much more self critical lead) than in many of his others. Roll on The Blue Afternoon.
Pete Baran in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
Bubba Ho-Tep is not really a comic horror movie. Oh it has its gags, and occasionally throws stuff at the screen to make you jump. But at its heart, it is actually a film about the way society relates to the older generation. Okay that older generation in this case is Elvis and someone who may or may not be JFK. And granted they are battling a mummy that sucks peoples souls out of their arseholes. But by far and away the strongest sensation garnered from this very strange movie is one of melancholy. The melancholy of a man who man never see his daughter again, may never have an erection again, may never live his life as well as he did. Like Shaun Of The Dead, this manages to smuggle in some really rather touching moments around its end of the world trappings to make you genuinely care about its characters.
The performance as Elvis of Bruce Campbell is nothing short of astounding. Playing a man twenty years older with some rudimentary ageing make-up, he manages to convince as someone who was the worlds prettiest man – once. Considering the film was not allowed to use any Elvis music at all, you can see how this could be a near impossible task. And yet the script, with its crude sadness allows Campbell just enough material to be both funny and deeply sad.
It is strange when two of the most emotionally affecting films of the year turn out to be low budget horror comedies.
Pete Baran in Do You See • No Comments
Derrida watch
Reading obituaries; comment pieces; jokey, dismissive jibes; personal tributes; and public commemorations: it’s still clear that pretty much no-one knows what to say about JD. About JD the man there’s a consensus, from those who had met him at least, that he was modest, self-effacing, serious about thought, but very much human. All of which can be gathered from his books too, of course. If there’s a need for more robust defenses of his thought, like this one from Terry Eagleton in The Guardian, it might be for this reason: ask the British ‘intelligentsia’, by and large celebrity opinion-mongers and little more, what they think of Derrida, and they’re faced with two options. Admit that they don’t really get Derrida, and look stupid in front of everyone who has no pretensions to have read or understood him, and in comparison with their less modest colleagues; or make some comments about what they think Derrida might be about, or about what it’s generally agreed that Derrida’s about — and look stupid only in front of those who actually know better. It being Britain, those who know better are by and large not in a position to point this out. And probably despise the chatterati anyway. I’ve had my own go at explaining deconstruction in basic terms, on its way to publication in here. I’m sure there are other ways to do it though, possibly better, more accurate, more convincing and persuasive ones. Boiled down to platitudes (deconstruction says ‘yes’; deconstruction says ‘be open’; deconstruction says ‘don’t be sure about being sure’) there’s pretty much nothing left: but this makes Derrida like any philosopher worth reading, i.e. only worth reading slowly.
byebyepride in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
An Occurrence on Territorial Road
1983, junior year, and I have recently been accepted into the ranks of the pretty-cool-high-school-kid group. Not the top echelon, mind you, but doing okay for myself, thanks to success in sports and a pretty and accomplished 12th-grade girlfriend. I am taking said girlfriend to a surprise party at the home of one of our friends, so we park my car way the hell down at the end of the block and start walking all the way back to the guy’s house.
He lived down near Territorial Road, which at that point was just filling in with houses but still had plenty of farmland. His side of the street was all typical rural Oregon split-level ranch houses, the other side was a cornfield. I walked along holding hands with my girlfriend, watching the way the moonlight played on the cornstalks.
AND THEN THREE MOTHERFUCKERS RAN OUT OF THE CORNFIELD AFTER US.
I often wonder about my panic reaction and what it meant. What I did was: a) drop her hand; b) run straight at the guys; c) start yelling at them. Screaming, really, with rage and fear and all the primacy I could muster. Strangely, my voice actually kind of disappeared, but I was yelling nonetheless, ready like Black Bolt to end the world with just one word.
Of course, it turned out to be three of my friends, including the guy throwing the party for our mutual friend. Even when I realized this, I couldn’t stop myself from making little kung fu chop hand motions all over his chest: my hands wanted to hit him, and were moving like they needed to attack, but I was able to use mental power to pull back the blows so they were non-lethal. Haha “power.”
And, of course, the girlfriend was upset that I dropped her hand. I was supposed to stay with her, right? To protect her, right? Well, as I tried to point out, I thought I was protecting her by attacking these guys. I didn’t know who they were, I said, I thought if I could go after them and clear a path, I’d grab you and we’d move together.
Actually, I was making all that shit up, and she knew it. What I did was turn mindless ape, and there was neither rhyme nor reason why I did what I did. I was just scared, man, terrified that it was all going to be over, right there near the cornfield, just a block from where we were supposed to go. I think about that night sometimes, but mostly just because I wonder where she is now, and whether or not that night played any part in her dumping me later for Rich Johnson.
Matt in Blog 7 • No Comments
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