The Brown Wedge
31 August 2003
Isn’t it a cliche about tradespersons homes being the worst places to see evidence of their skill? Electricians and plumbers are known for having death-trap exposed wires and dogdy pipes as much as they are for being tapped up by bored housewives when they’re on the job? Presume something similar holds for most trades in this respect; maybe bakers make crap bread at home, or just buy it from the supermarket. Bus drivers drive badly in their own cars. My dad took years to get a fence put around the back garden, whilst my mum always you to be far more slapdash when doing my hair than her customers. She also used to give me a clip round the ear if I didn’t keep my head still which was simply because she could, whereas the little darlings in her shop got a sweet smile for annoying behaviour.
Dave Boyle in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
I’ve just finished The Athenian Murders by Jose Carlos Somoza. I’d read a review in The Guardian which compared it to The Name of the Rose which is my favourite novel (currently read it 9 times) so I went out and bought it straight away. It was difficult to get into to begin with, so it remained on my bedside for a year before I bit the bullet and took it with me on a mini break to Dorset.
The story is interesting enough, but the really noodle-baking aspect is the dual story being told by the translator in the story who is working on an original Greek text and who produces the English text we read above. In English, I suspect that it has a greater effect, since the book was originally written in Spanish, so we’re reading a translation of a book which is about a translator and a text. As a result, it took me a few pages to work out that the translator referred to is a character, not a note from the actual translator of the English version.
As the story progresses, the translator’s notes become more involved leading to a novel way of reading; the flow of the Greek translation is broken by reading the notes. In some chapters, I read the footnote immediately; in others, I read the translation then went back and read the notes. It didn’t feel gimmicky though and led to an enthralling read, which it goes without saying I couldn’t put down*. There were plenty of gasps of surprise, and it’s a very good whodunnit too, not to mention whydunnit and whatthefucksgoingonandwhatsactuallybeenduninthefirstplace. Recommended.
* – Admittedly, Dorset seems a good place to get lost in a book, since rival distractions on Portland were few and far between.
Dave Boyle in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
(A better sense of the inside of West’s head could be gleaned from the photographs of the interior of 25 Cromwell Street, published in the Guardian colour supplement with an extract from Burn’s book, back when it was just coming out in 1998. As a professional builder, decorator and electrician, West was apparently in demand: but – to judge by these picture – the work he did on his own home, left for so long to his own designs, was a nightmare of unfinished, bodged bleakness. A choke of anti-sensual nothing, incapable of settling or reflecting, for fear of what might gaze back.)
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
There was a two-part doc on Channel 5 which made a claim about them I didn’t remember, so I picked up Gordon Burn’s Happy Like Murderers: the True Story of Fred and Rosemary West again. I quite quickly remembered why I disliked it so much the first time: Burn borrows the device Emlyn Williams used so effectively in his 1967 Moors Murderers book Beyond Belief, and re-uses it, badly. Williams’s book is a collage of fact, guesswork, the cliched speech of the locality (working-class Manchester, 40s-60s) and snatches from pop songs; Burn’s book, three times as long, is the same. Williams has an exceptional ear, for how a shared phrase can speak utterly differently in different mouths: Burn turns the whole region (rural working-class Gloucester and environs, 40s-90s) into a featureless mulch. Williams gives a sense of a community, lively as well as limited, and what the killers – self-declared hipsters – shared with it and did to it. You slog through Burn’s overlong, disastrously organised book feeling that the author can’t and won’t distinguish between the Wests and the entire West Country all round them: that he’s indicting everyone equally, the time, the place, the police, the poor, caravans, immigrants, fashion, pornography, mankind. One reason for the difference may be this: Brady was a voracious reader, and therefore never so distant – in one sense – from any writer imagining his inner life; West was functionally illiterate (he could write, but only barely, and didn’t read). Which may make West far more alien to the book-proud than any of his crimes. Another reason may just be that Burn isn’t that good.
pˆnk s lord sükråt cunctør in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
The best comic on the stands at the moment is THE LOSERS. Apologies to all the other best comics on the stands, but you should have come out as frequently as this does.
LOSERS I like especially because it confirms a long-standing theory of mine – that 2000AD work is the best comics training a writer can have, because the only way to get any kind of regular work in 2000AD is to learn to effectively and consistently tell a story in five pages or less. I have a terrible, awful feeling that I deeply offended famed writer/artist Midas Prolifico – names have been changed – at some con when I drunkenly suggested in his hearing that once you’ve learned to do five pages, yank comics are a doddle ’cause they’re just four stories in a row and an extra bit. He gave the most terrible snort of contempt, although it may have been mucus.
But then LOSERS #1 appeared. And who is right? IT IS ME because LOSERS has all the raw thrill-power of three lesser comics, contained in the pulse-pounding pages of one! If it was any better it would have to be SEALED IN THE VAULTS WHERE IT CANNOT HARM ANY HUMAN.
It’s a caper comic, as in Danny Ocean. ‘Caper’ being a theft/break-in/infiltration in the manner of Tom Cruise being dangled through a skylight by Jean Reno, and he can’t sneeze or the room will explode and he has to pretend to be a fireman. The first issue had three different capers in it and there’s been at least one in every issue since, this latest one involving a birdshit-firing gun, which is what Metal Gear‘s missing. It’s a fun comic with a wonderful mixture of serious hard-hitting topicalness and funky, funky spy-breakin’ schemes, and the ending to the latest issue will leave you reelin’ with a feelin’ not unlike having your head repeatedly thrust through a plate glass window made of stolchnaya frozen by science gone mad. And I should mention that Jock has the sheer pulsing life force of some oiled Elvis and must be contained now lest his art drive the world to a frenzy.
Get the first issues while you can. Soon Diggle and Jock will be esconced in a gold palace and you’ll be lucky to find one on Ebay for less than the price of your firstborn child. Wiser men will stroll slowly past your suffering, weeping form, murmuring “Tut, tut. HE CANNOT BUY IT NOW.”
Or you could get the trade.
Vic Fluro in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
30 August 2003
Bank Holiday means no comics until Friday, so I’m late. And speaking of late… PLANETARY. I know people who disagree with me on this, but PLANETARY was a very, very good comic that had people itching for the next issue. However it would take a mutant superflea of the kind that Judge Dredd used to fight off so butchly to keep me itching for as many months as it’s been away. There are enough folk out there endlessly scrabbling and biting their own flanks like diseased dogs over the ins, outs, whys and wherefores of the PLANETARY hiatus, but we at Freaky Trigger are made of sterner stuff. We shall turn our backs on these fools and simply note that this patient has been in a coma the like of which few recover from. Is PLANETARY still alive?
Yes. It’s relying on people to have kept up with it, but on the other hand it isn’t the kind of thing you can really pick up halfway through. You wouldn’t start watching 24 at half-three in the afternoon and expect it to brim over with exposition. It picks up where it left off, moves the plot forward, points out a couple of mysteries that might keep readers interested, and Snow has half an issue to remind us what a fine character he is. All well and good. That’s the second half. The first half is taken up with what I can only describe as a welcome-back to John Cassaday, who was good before and has since become like unto some kind of God. It looks like Ellis examining martial arts through the pop-culture lens he uses for PLANETARY and coming out with a mixture of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Tekken, complete with a slow-motion ‘finishing move’. It lasts ten pages and if Rob Liefield had turned his hand to it he would have ended Ellis’ career for good, but Cassaday makes strong men weep as he illustrates new ways of expressing movement on paper. Ellis does a lot of action without using ‘action lines’; you may want to pick up RED – easily the best so far of his three-issue epics – if you want more of that.
Still, the days when PLANETARY was the best comic of the month may be over. There is a new king and that king has the hydra-like double head of Andy Diggle and Jock. Of which more later.
Vic Fluro in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
I’d heard glowing recommendations from a couple of friends, so had to try Lorrie Moore. It’s a long time since I’ve read a novel so satisfying on every scale and level.
Her use of words is bright and playful, her sentences sharp and sweet and often very funny, the ideas they make up are original and full of intelligence and feeling, an all too rare mix of qualities. She combines sharp wit with genuine emotion, mostly understated and often ironically or obliquely expressed, but still unmistakeably deep. The way she can write something that makes you sad and makes you laugh, not in separate sections but at the very same instant, is a particularly rare skill, needing the finest control and judgement – this reminded me a little of the undervalued (too popular, I think) Larry McMurtry, an old favourite.
I guess most of my favourite contemporary novelists are Postmodernists, especially those playing with form and notions of realism. This novel starts with four chapters, taking up a quarter of the book, that put a few characters through four permutations, shuffling and remixing their lives and relationships and jobs. The rest is one more mix – my guess (supported by the text to some extent, but never stated outright) is that this longer section is the novel’s ‘reality’, and the others are fantasies, thought-experiment life-anagrams composed by the protagonist Benna, often for comfort and consolation. This is a daring and fresh way of getting at the hopes and dreams and fears of your character, a way into her character that is incisive and new, an exciting and disorienting conceit.
Thrillingly, a quick bit of googling suggests that this, her first novel, which I found remaindered just a couple of weeks ago here in London, is far less well regarded than any of her other books. The others must be astonishing…
Martin Skidmore in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
29 August 2003
Weblog Response: To make up for the lack of a comments facility, if you’ve got something to say about The Brown Wedge and want to make it public, this is the thread to do it on. (We’ll be adding this as a permanent link somewhere prominent, as it’ll be a rolling thread.)
Tom in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
More Zenda action: the other thing that struck me reading it is how difficult the sexual codes now are to understand. Early on in the book the hero visits an inn and flirts with a lusty wench: there’s a bit of banter on the stairs and the hero says “so I gave her something of no value”. A kiss, thinks Tom. But then he and a friend return to the inn later and there’s much discussion of this girl’s charms and seductive abilities with the hero acting very knowing – perhaps it was more than just a kiss, hmm. One of the villains insults the hero by implying he’s shagged the Princess (who is pledged to his double!) and the hero flushes at a point well-scored, but then later the hero goes into paroxysms of thank-heaven-i-did-not-do-that-to-which-i-was-sore-tempted chestbeating. WHAT IS GOING ON!!! I’m assuming all this stuff would have been transparent to the Victorian reader but it’s baffling to me. At least with modern popular fiction you know that the wild mushroom risotto isn’t some kind of euphemism for bum sex.
Tom in The Brown Wedge • No Comments
I am A Boy Band-Benny Ramsay Menerofsky
Single Channel DVD
The concept here is insanely simple, a man dressed as a boy band sings a 16th century English Madigral. A love song then is a love song, the melodramtic heart break, the “i sigh, i die” lyrics, the melodic compexity, and a sense of theatrics are common to the form, and exist as much now as they did then.
He plays all four members of the band, the romantic one, the hot one, the atheltic one and the thug, the same four that you could find in the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, that came down with the latest crop, NKOTB gave birth to N Sync and Backstreet Boys, but bands often break up and there is rarely a break through artist…having one member play all four solves that problem.
As well by embodying all 4 members of boy bands he engenders sympthathies–this music is mocked by those who go to galleries as sappy, banal, boring or beneath them, in this space with this audience, using this music there may be a reconsidering.
The work is subtitled making matrons understand what little girls have always known, that having yr heart broken is so painful that only hyberbole will do.
Anthony Easton in The Brown Wedge • 2 Comments
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