Look! Silver jump suits and everything. My favourite is the “i-foot”: “a two-legged mountable robot like device that can be controlled with a joystick.” JOYSTICK?? Take this seriously and plug it directly into the BRANE. That way when the process goes wrong (because of the psychomological pressures of being a cyborg obv) and the controlling brane goes BERZERK we have everything needed for a proper robots v dinosaurs showdown.
No trip to Finland is complete without a visit to Santa’s village in Lapland. It was September outside but in a tiny corner of Lapland it is Christmas all year round. The ‘village’ is a mix of log-cabin chintz and blocky granite souvenir shops with a small plastic Santa statue outside (which would suit your local auto repair shop but underwhelms as an advert for the ‘real thing’). As well as Santa’s grotto – which we’ll come to – the village includes
- some reindeer in a paddock. We thought these were stuffed! But no, they were just very very slow moving.
- a tower you can climb to get a view (of the Roivaniemi arterial road).
- a sign saying where the Arctic Circle is. This was exciting and we took some photographs. They’ve painted a line across the car park so you know at any point whether you’re in the Arctic or not.
- a plastic and extremely ugly sledge on a pillar.
Despite the overwhelming evidence that this was all hastily tacked-together tat there was still something enchanting about Santa’s Village. The Arctic Circle thing helped of course and our sentimental will to believe in the magic of Christmas. This was only slightly diminished when we went into Santa’s Grotto by the wrong door and saw the great man beardless and talking angrily on a mobile.
Tom in Blog 7 • No Comments
Usually Christmas films have the bonhomie of the season coupled with the goodwill-to-all-men message pushed to the fore. This is the meaning of Christmas to these films and thus are more than able to hang saccharine, feel-good fairy tales on the Yuletide hook. Bad Santa’s relationship to Christmas is more complex. Christmas creates the opportunity for the heist, Christmas – and its hiring of temporary department store Santas (and most importantly their elves) gives the bad guy an opportunity for theft.
The problem with Bad Santa is that this is not Christmassy enough. So running parallel to this our Bad (Tempered) Santa is also shown the meaning of Christmas. That he does not capitulate at the first hint of cheer is to the credit of the film. That he does eventually capitulate is its undoing.
Well actually its obvious add on ending is its undoing. The ridiculous final scenes as a man who has cared for no-one in his life (and cod-psychologists will be happy to hear that is becoz he was never cared for himself) near kills himself to deliver a present could be better. Namely if the film end when clearly it was meant to. A few homilies about consumerism aside, Bad Santa is dark fun, but is only dark when you consider it as a Christmas film. Its half a NutraSweet rather than a pack of icing sugar. But its still sweet.
Pete Baran in Blog 7 • 1 Comment
Two docs in shaky-cam.
1: Mondovino, in cinemas today, arguably the best of this year’s documentary explosion. Like The Corporation it’s an investigation of global capitalism, but rooted in a concrete analysis of one product: wine, opening out from an immediate symptom — an Bove-via-Ealing-style counteroffensive against a giant Napa Valley combine in a corner of France — to reveal the massive number of contradictory factors in play. The ‘amateur’ camerawork (with the lensman concentrating mainly on the interviewees’ pets) actually pays off: better this than the blank ‘talking head’ style that makes everyone an equivalent voice.
2: Don’t Look Back (1965): a famous ‘direct cinema’ piece following the still-acoustic Bob Dylan on his May 1965 tour of England. Bob ends up playing the Albert Hall, but before doing so asks a hanger-on whether England has any poets like Allen Ginsberg. The answer comes in the negative. Just a month later saw the Albert Hall Incarnation (at which Ginsberg performed, along with a plethora of transatlantic beats), usually seen as the ‘year zero’ of the English underground, and which provided the material for the first work of English cinema-verite: Peter Whitehead’s Wholly Communion. Alas, Bob leaves with the impression that this is an island of bible-bashing, adulating know-nothings — so much for ‘synchronicity’, that watchword of the ’60s.
HKM in Do You See • No Comments
“Some of them are believed to have overindulged in alcohol…”
The Advent Calendar Of Comics: Dec 10
Tom in Blog 7 • No Comments
Pub Science Experiment #1
Pub 6: The Railway, Station Rise, SE27
Category: Railway
There’s no mistaking the Railwayness of this place. It’s a hop, step and stumble from the side door to the front of Tulse Hill station.
What’s more at issue is whether this is really a pub. Walking up Station Rise I thought I was going to be faced with a rough old boozer’s boozer, all frayed carpet and manky looking dogs staring insolently at you from the ripped-up seats you’re too scared to shoo them off. How wrong I was! This is a place which was obviously blond-wood-and-identikit-gastropubnoshified some time ago, very sub All Bar One.
I often think, when I see such places open, that the passage of time will make them more acceptable, knock a bit of character into them. Certainly some of the smooth edges have been roughed here, but The Railway looks a bit shabby and uncared-for. And the place is more or less a student common room. Draped over every available chair and table, and horizontal on the fashionably scuffed leather sofas, are students. The bar stools are mostly free. Do students sit at the bar? I suppose not…
This needn’t be a bad thing. I’m no hater of students. This lot are friendly, talkative and enjoying themselves. The football’s on and there’s no sense of associated lairiness (this isn’t the case in every pub around here – the match, after all, is the Palace-Charlton South London derby). There is only the slightest of hints of the air of unjustified arrogance which large groups of students sometimes generate.
The remarkably relaxed atmosphere almost wins me over to the place. It’s just that, if I wanted to go to a smoky hole stuffed full of our NUS-affiliated friends, I’d probably go up SOAS and drink better beer at a lower price.
So why’s it not a pub? Well, it is really. I could try some line about the furnishings and the food making it into a bar, or the monocultural clientele making it a social club, but I know I’d be clutching at straws in a drowning argument. Fundamentally, and for the various reasons noted above, this Railway doesn’t feel like a pub to me and, although I’ve spent afternoons in far less convivial places, I don’t much like it in here.
Overall mark: (out of 10): 4
Tim in Pumpkin Publog • 1 Comment
THE DADDINO FAMILY TREASURY OF CHRISTMASES PAST
Christmas 1974
One Christmas (not sure which) I received the General Electric Show ‘N Tell, a filmstrip-viewer/turntable that looked like a bright red television set. One time when I was bored, I remembered my parents had other filmstrips in their closet, and when I finally found ones that could fit into the Show ‘N Tell, I could see pictures of my brothers in formal clothing — but the colors were all wrong and it made everybody look like monsters, so I never did that again.
I scanned this image from a color negative as a place-holder for me to write about before I got the negative developed. Then I lost the negative. Then I found the negative again and decided I liked it better than what it would probably look like developed, with the years of damage (sadly, all our color negatives are that dirty) and the odd color balance, almost like super-vivid afterimages from closing your eyes too hard. The above .jpg still doesn’t really look much like the negative does when I hold it up to a light source — even with the dust and fading, the lines and colors on the negative actually look very well-defined — but a massive amount of fiddling with the saturation and contrast turned this mass of browns and greens into something vaguely recognizable as me, in the den, playing with Tinkertoys. You can even recognize the lump in the hallway as our family dog in sleep mode: the diagonal white strip is her crown, the black triangle to the right her head, the rest is the rest.
I can’t think of much else to say about the above, so this is as good time as any to review the schedule for the typical Daddino family Christmas. To wit:
Stage I. Christmas Stockings. Early morning. The opening of ephemeral Christmas gifts.
Stage II. Intercalary Christmas Moment I: Morning. The adults prepare meals while the kids play with toys.
Stage III. Entertaining: Midday. Small talk, finger food, spiked punch.
Stage IV. Christmas Presents: Afternoon until dusk. The obscene selfishness of bourgeois children.
Stage V. Intercalary Christmas Moment II: Dusk. The kids play with toys while the adults prepare meals.
Stage VI. Dinner and Dessert: Early evening. Lobster or Roast. Cake and espresso.’
Stage VII. The Rosy Afterglow: Evening. People leave, the parents clean up while the kids play with toys.
The “canonical” Daddino Christmases — meaning the ones we all mentally refer to as the Christmases all other Christmases will have to stand or fall (invariably fall) by — follow the above template very very strictly. These stages are all present in their recognizable forms some time before I’m born, when my family stop celebrating Christmas at our relatives’ homes, and die a protracted death throughout the eighties. In 1982, faced with the reality that we’re all too big for coloring books and candy, my mom fills our stockings with office supplies (I got stamp hinges, a hole-punch and a mini-stapler with extra staples, among other things), and faced with that kind of unromantic factualness we all silently concluded that this tradition had become largely redundant and never bothered with Stage I again. Furthermore, as us kids evolved beyond treating Christmas as a toy-based experience and started actually helping out with the festivities rather than squirreling ourselves away with our stuff, Stages II, V and VII begin to lose their distinctiveness.’Finally, by Christmas 1987, my mom, too exhausted from the demands of work to prepare meals, takes us all to the Garden City Hotel for dinner, forcing the system to reach complete collapse even though Stage IV is still present. There is rallying, even peaky highs in subsequent years (XMASY2K comes to mind), but 1987 marks the end of the classic Daddino Christmas era. Yet there is hope the magic can begin again with the grandchildren.
This may be terrible to admit but I really could’ve done without Stage III; as an obstacle to Stage IV, it was INTERMINABLE. I couldn’t understand why my parents couldn’t see the logic of combining Stages III and IV, but Mom insisted on it being something of a formal occasion. Odd, really, since it meant dressing up and making nice small talk with people I already saw every single day.’Oh, and yes, clearly Stage III was put on Earth to heighten the feelings of expectation for Stage IV, as if months and months of waiting had only succeeded in making us completely apathetic about getting more presents than any child will ever deserve. So Stage III largely saw a lot of my pacing, whining and clock-watching. When I got a little older I tried salving the boredom a little by helping my mother with the food, such as preparing a spectacularly failed fondue one year, but eventually I get so fed up with the hours of stilted conversation and aimless wandering around the den that during Christmas 1986 (or maybe ’85) I don’t even bother coming downstairs, choosing instead to listen to R.E.M.’s Murmur on my stereo verrry closely.
Today’s photo shows me during Stage VII, finally allowed to play with my toys in a moment of peace before I was sent to bed. In contrast to Stage III, Stage VII was sometimes actually and truly full of family feeling. When we were older, we’d just go straight to our rooms, but in Christmas ’76, we all found ourselves in the den with our parents, staying up very late at night (for us) playing with our toys, playing with each other’s toys, and completely transfixed by the Magnavox Odyssey we got that year…which can’t at all be right since they stopped production on the Odyssey in ’74. Hmm.
By the way, I forgot to link to this photo in the last post, so enjoy.
Michael in Blog 7 • No Comments
