Postmodern Idiosyncrasies

I don’t know about you, but I’m sick of strong bloody violence. If you’ve seen the news or read a history book at any point you’ll know that the world exists and has existed in a state of strong bloody violence for as long as there have been creatures on it capable of strong bloody violence. There’s a fucking pandemic of strong bloody violence, cutting swathes of strong bloody violence throughout the world which, incidentally, will likely end due a particularly virulent outburst of strong bloody violence which will be both horrifically strongly bloody and horrifically strongly violent, the almost inevitable capstone to a history of imaginative varieties of strong bloody violence.

And I’m sick of it, sick of being expected to watch and enjoy strong bloody violence in crap exploitative films and sick of having to endure strong bloody violence as part of films which I actually want to see, excepting their aforementioned strong bloody violence. I’m sick of strong bloody violence even though I have mercifully little experience of it, or especially since I have so little experience because I’m sick of it being marketed to people like me, who seldom have much direct experience of it as something to revel in in video games, or with the propensity to inflict strong bloody violence on others as an admirable or desirable trait, as though we actually understand strong bloody violence.

It’s not so much that I’m ideologically a pacifist, or that I’m particularly uncomfortable with blood, gore or viscera in an abstract way, but the foregrounding of strong bloody violence is seldom less than celebratory, particularly in film, if only to showcase the special effects that so much of the budget has been spent on. Even when the brutality of said strong bloody violence is dramatically or thematically appropriate, I’m tired of it seeing it given such lavish, loving and rapt attention by actors and filmmakers for whom, for the most part, strong bloody violence is also mostly an abstract, brought out for its entertainment value alone.

So I didn’t see and won’t be reviewing Ralph Fiennes new film adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus because I couldn’t stomach the promise of strong bloody violence, because as unforgivingly violent as some of Shakespeare’s work is (“Out vile, jelly!” anyone?), I’d rather take the poetry of his words and the performances of actors like Ralph Fiennes, Gerard Butler and Brian Cox without the gratuity of strong bloody violence, apropos as it might be. Frankly, there’s more than enough strong bloody violence to go around, and I need a break from it, or at least from all the fictitious or celebratory iterations of it.

Posted in Just... Stuff
Tags: Coriolanus, Pacifism, Strong Bloody Violence, Tiger Cub

or; things it’s madness to attempt.

Like trying to turn a germ of a Lovecraftian horror story idea into an animation within 24 hours with a fraction of the necessary resources and an even smaller fraction of the necessary talent… Still, they say that God loves a try-er, and since I have yet to feel any kind of love from any manner of deity you’d think or care to bend a knee to (elder gods included), I tried. That this animation (air-quotes all the way, btw) took all and more of the time I had to make, runs to about 41 seconds and still feels overlong makes me want to cry a bit… There was meant to be music too, but I can’t get the mic on the laptop to work.

Enjoy?

PS: This is what my floor looks like now…

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PPS: I used The Watchtower to make sure I didn’t leave marker pen stains or scalpel scratches on the tables. There may be a reason gods dislike me…

Posted in Fictitious Stuff, Just... Stuff
Tags: The Horror, Tentacles, Lovecraft, Chthuloid Fiends, "Animation"

The weight of her hand in mine is more than I had hoped, her fingers gripping across my palm more tightly, more desperately, than she ever has before. I squeeze back, eyes fixed ahead, and start to sing to her as we walk. The shades and shadows, the wraiths and ghouls of all the less-fortunate dead, gather to watch us jealously. All their torments and miseries gather about them, sparing neither lash nor barb, as the song I sing cuts a path through the greys of lifelessness.

They, the dead, cannot lay hands on me, but the chill of their presence as they pass around and about trying to steal some meagre scraps of my essence is nauseating. My wife is not so fortunate, her promised respite not protecting her from their cruelty and as dread hands and stiff fingers grasp and claw at her I can hear her muffled gasps and stifled cries. I harden my heart and fight the need to look back, knowing that it would damn us both.

I raise my voice, pushing back against the tide with a joyous ode to my wife’s return, and any of the dead who retain a scrap of their former humanity are shamed into returning to their rest. My wife’s grip relaxes, her cries cease, and we quicken our pace. The path is clearer now, but all the more horrible for not being obscured. The colour of my vitality bleeds away only inches in any direction revealing a nightmare more horrible for being rendered in brutal monochrome.

The souls toiling and suffering under Hades’ hand are knelt in penance, fearful over the retaliation for Persephone’s scant mercy. A storm of mirrored glass bursts upwards, flaying them over and over again as their skin knits together almost instantaneously, just so they might be slashed again. Their eyes are open, glassy, dulled somewhat to the familiarity of pain and lost in the more subtle tortures that play out in waking dreams. I exhort my wife to close her eyes and increase my pace again.

We walk for what could be forever, or no time at all, until the gate comes into sight. Cerberus stands poised at his post, affixed by chains as thick as tree trunks. Three heads glare balefully at me as I continue to sing, acutely and accusatorially aware of his shame at having been circumvented. Three tongues loll around fierce teeth as three mouths breath clouds of acrid breath and I grip my wife tighter than ever. Cerberus snarls and stirs and we move faster, my wife slips.

I can’t help it, I turn to stop her fall.

I feel her hand fade like smoke from mine, and just like that, she’s gone.

Posted in Fictitious Stuff, Just... Stuff
Tags: Cerberus, Eurydice, Hades, Orpheus, Persephone

If I say that I love Sherlock it must be noted that it’s almost in spite of myself. There are only six episodes to date in Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s interpretation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, of which I have major structural/thematic problems with no less than three, and more minor issues with the others, but still, I find myself enjoying it almost more than I can understand, justify or explain. I’m not overly precious about the sanctity of the original books, though I have read and enjoyed some of them, but any adaptation of something much beloved and well known runs into some predictable issues.

There are some problems with the series, typified in The Hounds of Baskerville, stemming from the volume of pre-existing adaptations. Anyone with even a passing interest or knowledge of Sherlock Holmes retains some basic facts about the books, and in order to avoid merely retreading the mysteries offered by Conan Doyle’s work Moffat et al. are forced to adapt within the plot. The drawing-room mystery of the past is too cliché to countenance, and so the mystery falls more to the how than the why, the motive less interesting than the mechanism, which becomes increasingly baroque and labyrinthine to compensate.

In The Hounds of Baskerville then the original titular hound, a dog covered in phosphorus to create an unearthly spectral glow, cannot be reused, and the misleads about genetically-engineered monsters would drag the series too far from its, broadly-speaking, grounded setting. While the specifics then still might elude, a viewer with a passing familiarity with the tropes of television and the original work has a fair chance of guessing that the terror of the hound is [SPOILER] drug-induced. [END SPOILER] In fact from the first episode onwards the strictures and semiotics of television have been the undoing of most of the programme’s mysteries.

And yet… There’s a sense of genuine excitement, of unbridled glee in establishing the mysteries and in watching John Watson struggle to deal with such an awkward and unsocialised friend. All the overindulged and overused stylistic flourishes, all the repeated tics and insinuations about Sherlock and John’s cohabitation, cannot detract from the spark of the interactions between the leads and the unfortunates caught in their orbit, fodder for Sherlock to impress and irritate and offend as he stretches his prodigious brain. The tension and over-familiar familial frustrations in evidence between Mycroft and Sherlock, particularly in the second series, managed to suggest the whole of their history in a few short exchanges.

The manic energy of James “Jim” Moriarty is the sticking point for me, the offbeat juvenilia of his Bee Gees ringtone at the top of the second series being particularly irksome. Admittedly it’s an amusing way to undercut the tension of the overlapping cliffhanger, but does it fit? If Sherlock is a slave to the demands of feeding his intellect and Mycroft the man who turned his to impersonal duty then Sherlock’s Moriarty could almost be the hedonic extreme, the man for whom intelligence is a tool to achieve the maximum personal pleasure. Still, the foregrounding of the rivalry, an excellent showcase for the malice of Andrew Scott’s Moriarty, is not without its victims.

Chief amongst them is Irene Adler, Sherlock’s equal in the books, reduced with a few lines of dialogue to a simpering adjunct to Sherlock and Moriarty’s intellectual cockstrutting. It was the most disappointing moment of the whole affair, more so than the source of her power being refocused on her sexuality, since that highlighted an area of naivety and inexperience in Sherlock himself, a lacking Mycroft draws attention to in a particularly nasty barb, but to defang the only female character in the series with a degree of agency anywhere near that of Sherlock and Moriarty seemed a rather chronic misstep.

Still, as the finale played out in ludicrous excess I again found myself forgiving the weaknesses of Sherlock, carried along by a story which made more emotional than logical sense and willing to overlook a fair amount that was either arbitrary or just plain senseless. But isn’t that what love is, the willingness to overlook faults in appreciation of some deeper, more essential quality? Given how little of modern cinema manages to hold my attention for ninety minutes that Sherlock can whilst bringing comedy, intelligence and pathos together without jarring horribly, I’m prepared to overlook a lot. Part of me hopes it’s done now, gone for good, because to bring Sherlock back would be to undermine the way it ends, to indulge a call for an encore that even Arthur Conan Doyle could not resist.

Posted in Review Stuff
Tags: Andrew Scott, Benedict Cumberbatch, Irene Adler, James Moriarty, Lara Pulver, Louise Brealey, Martin Freeman, Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock, Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Una Stubbs

We have an understanding, Paul Giamatti and I, which is that if he’s in a film I’ll watch it. I make no guarantees about enjoying all the films he’s in, because some of them are terrible (The Hangover: Part II, anyone?), but I’ll give them a shot. It’s not like I’m pathological about it; I don’t trawl IMDB to check that I’ve seen everything Paul Giamatti’s been even tangentially involved in, I just think he’s a really good actor. Go watch American Splendor then try and argue with me. So when I saw his face peering out from a nest of Russian dolls modelled after his own head, I’m willing to take that as a sign. It worked out particularly well in the case of Cold Souls, since Paul Giamatti plays an actor called Paul Giamatti, so I didn’t even have to worry about learning his character’s name.

For all that its plot is centred on the extraction of souls and their trading, Cold Souls is not particularly concerned with the subject of identity, at least not to the extent that a synopsis or a précis of the core concept might suggest. Tortured by the strain of bringing his portrayal of the titular Uncle Vanya to the stage, and absent the steadying presence of his wife, Emily Watson as Claire Giamatti, Paul Giamatti decides to have his soul removed and stored until the play is upon him. Without a soul to weigh him down he becomes more detached and tactless, less introspective, but is broadly the same person, driven by the same motivations and habits. Later, with the soul of a Russian poet transplanted in place of his own his outlook is more maudlin but still recognisably his own.

In this film then, the soul is more the motive spark, or the seed from which a person’s character grows rather than its totality. Still, I’m not sure that my character was in a place conducive to receiving the film as it has been received elsewhere, the comedy that most of the quotes on the cover speak of and which the trailer seems cut to emphasise only materialising in a few spare, if rather wonderful, outbursts of the farcical. Instead I was immersed in the tragic; Cold Souls as a commentary on pain and suffering and the manner in which we bear it as essential elements of the human experience. The souls which people in the film are desperate to remove are the mediums by which we feel these things, and the empathy they engender, the strain they bear shown by their dull and unremarkable outward appearances.

Beyond the interest that the souls garner for their lack of visual aplomb –Giamatti is distraught to discover how meagre and pathetic his looks, as an aesthetic reflection of its quality– there’s an almost-incidental sideswipe at the commodification of the ineffable and intangible, with the technology that enables the extraction of souls also spawning a grey market in second-hand “artistic” souls from Russia, smuggled into the States in mules who have had their own souls removed. The evidence of this and the implied suffering at the relatively impoverished end of the trade is obvious, but it isn’t until his own soul gets caught up in these less-than licit dealings that Paul Giomatti’s character really begins to care. His doctor, played by David Strathairn, remains pragmatically disconnected from the ethics of the marketplace in which he conducts his work, a cold comment on the normalisation that the once remarkable undergoes before it can be packaged and sold absent a context of human cost.

The writer/director Sophie Barthes, from whom Cold Souls remains the only full length film, is talented in both disciplines; with the cinematography and blocking handled adeptly and drawn to the direct attention of the viewer only when apt and always with the result that it is admired. There are no revolutionary advances in technique, no unique stylistic flourishes the likes of which I, or a more learned film scholar, couldn’t point to another example of, but the film exhibits a confidence in every element of its construction which is just satisfying to experience. Her script juggles a fair number of actor in limited time, keeping the focus on Paul Giamatti whilst bringing in supporting characters like Dina Korzun’s Nina, a soul mule, and trusting to the actors to flesh out roles which could have tended more towards stereotypes rather than archetypes.

If you take Cold Souls as a comedy, which even its own marketing seems to intend, then it falls flat, some way short of being uproarious or hilarious or any of the standardised jargon terms that attach themselves like increasingly meaningless limpets to any film which raised so much as a smile among focus groups. Come to it instead as an accomplished piece of filmmaking with real-life defining its multiply varied tones and you’ll find something much more striking; a not-quite tragedy which can raise a smile, a cast of talented actors wringing effortless nuance from their tribulations and an awareness of the absurdities that the world throws up every day and their value as relief. I’m very glad that I give anything Paul Giamatti is in a chance, and I’m gladder still to be able to extent the same anticipation to whatever Sophie Barthes does next.

Posted in Review Stuff
Tags: American Splendor, Chekhov, Cold Souls, Commodification, Dina Korzun, Emily Watson, Identity, Paul Giamatti, Sophie Barthes, The Hangover: Part II, Uncle Vanya

I dreamt that I had a PA. The variously patchy and arguable legality of the work I did and the circles in which it required me to move didn’t really need or allow for that type of role, and within the dream I had no idea what my business was supposed to be, or to what end I had hired this vestigial employee. I remember sitting in a palatial office, this is in the dream of course, and panicking as a total absence of purpose dawned on me. As I rummaged and rifled through my desk, finding only sheaves of printed pages filled with incomprehensible technical information, complex mathematical equations and extended quotations of unpronounceable latinesque expressions of a professional idiom I’d never had cause to learn, the intercom on my desk would buzz intermittently with offers of help and requests for instructions which began as kindly before passing through politely frosty and ending up at brute insistence. The pressure and the interruptions made even my meagre, vaguely holistic appreciation of my role vanish in the rising swell of adrenaline. And then the pounding on the door began. I left my desk and ran to check that the doors to my office, thick and baroquely carved ebony, were locked. Next, the hammering from without growing more frenzied, I hauled a large antique bureau in front of the door, pushing and pulling its settled weight with a strength spurred by terror. Having barred the door to the best of my abilities I retreated, the word is appropriate, behind my desk as the increasing force of my PA’s blows caused the door to begin to crack and splinter. I cowered down as the crack became a split and then a breach, sure that I was about to be discovered and dismissed. It was a certainty and a fear that held the potency of unwavering commitment to an idea, which ought to have spoken to its unconscious provenance but didn’t, at the time. Anyway, as the door finally gave way, splintering into an unfeasible number of pieces with a crashing noise which sounded like creation being split in two, my office’s huge window shattered inwards, adding to the furore. Outside the cityscape, previously unnoticed and so, I suppose, previously not there, was a painted matte backdrop, a crude impression of stone towers and a slate sky set no more than two-dozen feet from the frame of shattered glass. I climbed out onto the ledge, it felt like escape, and as the clamour of my PA’s shouts grew louder I turned to wave a triumphant goodbye, intending to jump. I felt a shadow passing over me and when I looked up I could see the broad base of a zeppelin hovering overhead. A rope-ladder dropped down in front of me, it felt like salvation, and I reached out and grabbed a hold of it before stepping onto the lowest rung. I swung out into the chasm between the building and the backdrop, which suddenly seemed vast, and span in the air. My PA, now crossing my office like a snarling beast, faceless but fanged, howled out in rage, but as taloned hands reached out for me the airship ascended, lifting me out of reach and into the blinding light of the sun.

Posted in Fictitious Stuff, Just... Stuff
Tags: Dream, PA, Rescue, Zeppelin

A stand-out work in any medium must, almost by definition, be tied to the form in which it is conceived, there being something singular about it by which it speaks not only of its subject but of itself as a piece of art. To hew too closely, too faithfully, to that quality when adapting a book into a film or a poem into a play is to lose something ineffable, is to mistake the surface for the depths and to risk creating something essentially hollow.

Tony Takitani, based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, is an example of a film adaptation which is clearly and fatally too enamoured of its source material. The presence of a narrator is an early warning sign of a careless, if not an outright lazy adaptation, and the fact that it never goes away quickly cues the viewer in as to the film’s pedigree as a piece of cinema. It’s not that surprising that, given source material by a respected name, many adaptations choose to stick perilously close to their original, but the result can be stilted, caught between serving two purposes whilst fit for neither.

It’s an easy trap to fall into: I myself, for instance, greeted the news that James Joyce’s work had passed into the public domain by beginning work on a series of films adapting Ulysses into stop-motion animations using clothes peg dolls as actors… (A hint of future reviews; initially diverting but ultimately frustrating and facile…) But unless something unique to the new medium can be unearthed there seems little point and, whilst striking, Jun Ichikawa’s strong sense of the visual aesthetic is essentially static, each composition better suited to stillness than an attempt to force the story and attendant pictures together in film.

As was seen when Zack Snyder brought Alan Moore’s Watchmen, a book celebrated as a living deconstruction of the comics medium’s critical and aesthetic history, to the screens in 2009, an adaptation can only really stand up when it kills the sacred cows of its forebears, in that case by reworking the ending into something more internally logical when treating the film as an end-in-itself. But even this late departure was not enough to save Watchmen, and both it and Tony Takitani are too rooted in their earlier forms to indulge themselves as visual feast, either as all-out spectacle or refined splendour.

Other adaptations, such as that of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness into Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, slip the noose entirely, stripping the original idea back to its core components whilst keeping enough of the trappings and surface details to harken back to the work which is being adapted without being tied down to it. This, alongside the troubled, quasi-legendary creation story which sprung up around the production’s troubled birth, lends the film a freedom that more faithful adaptations lack.

Apocalypse Now’s story owes much to Heart of Darkness, but proves its right to exist as its own entity through the struggles and the birth pangs that bore it. Adaptation is not, in itself, a negative process, but rather than a like-for-like transposition ought to play up those aspects of an original work which were least suited to its native medium or which can be approached anew in another.

If the central idea behind any great work is a multi-faceted thing which the original showcases from one angle, its adaptation ought to examine it from another, giving us a fuller understanding of it, rather than presenting a hidebound copy, crushed to fit another medium’s strictures. If art is a culmination of idea and execution then an adaptation, to be respected, must showcase the significance of a re-appropriated idea with an equivalent skill in its execution. An adaptation ought not to be easy, even if it seems effortless. An adaptation has to bare the marks of transformation, of something alchemical having taken place, for it to mean anything at all.

Posted in Essay-Type Stuff, Just... Stuff
Tags: Alan Moore, Apocalypse Now, Dave Gibbons, Francis Ford Coppola, Haruki Murakami, Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad, Jun Ichikawa, Tony Takitani, Watchmen, Zack Snyder

There aren’t only two kinds of music, but if there were, and if I were to choose those two kinds of music now, I think I’d arbitrarily subdivide the medium into… good and bad. I’m willing to accept a restrained use of superlatives, and the tone of the voice offering judgement would play an even more important role in the pronouncement of quality than it does now, but essentially “good” and “bad” would be the basis of any discussion of music.

I think it would be a great leveller, unlike The Levellers, who, whilst admittedly fair levellers, mostly made bad music, because the idea of two ardently opposed orators opining on the classification of a band whilst forced to rely on the most basic of adjectives is amusingly limiting. Also, it would stop music reviews from having to expand into the tortured metaphors they’re sometimes known for, and the NME could just go away and be on twitter rather than killing trees for it’s garbage.

It would, of course, render music criticism as a whole somewhat muted, but then maybe we’d get less middle-of-the-road music in every genre, since the utterance of “good” paired with a shrug would be the most damning response anyone could give when approached for comment. But I digress, in as much as I think I intended to be writing about Warpaint and I’ve instead managed to write myself into a hypothetical corner where I only have recourse to a single word…

More digression then.

I seldom dance, and that’s because when I dance I look like, or am conscious of possibly looking like, something somewhere between a moron and a person whose mental illness is being exhibited in intermittently arrhythmic paroxysms of movement. To music. I detract from the music, essentially, if I attempt anything more complex than swaying or nodding in time. The advantage of that, as an outer limit for the physical exuberance one can offer up to dance, is that it can be achieved whilst supine.

So when Warpaint were on Later with Jules Holland way back in May of 2011, now colloquially known as last year, and playing Elephants I didn’t even have to stand to realise quite how much I was enjoying the song. But then I fell asleep and had a dream about going to a zoo where the animals wore masks of unrelated species to confound their keepers and the general public (whom they referred to as “the peepers”), and I forgot all about Jules Holland and Warpaint and Elephants.

Much later, but still in the frankly absurd year they numbered 2011, and for reasons unknown but possibly linked to my listening to Stealing Sheep, who are the Twister to Warpaint’s Mousetrap, I suddenly remembered that, hey, I’d liked those guys, what was their name again?, and tracked down the performance of Elephants I’d seen before. Which was lucky. A few associated links later I landed at the video for Undertow, from their album The Fool, which made me go as far as standing.

So, after wearing a hole in Spotify through overuse, I bought both The Fool and the preceding release, the Exquisite Corpse EP, and set to work wearing those out too, until I came to the sticking point, a song I played more than was strictly healthy. That song was Beetles, and buoyed by over-familiarity, I put this on a playlist for a New Year’s Eve party I was at, and proceeded to dance. To attempt to dance, at any rate. And I was magnificent.

So, to sum up in the constrained language of music criticism I outlined earlier, Warpaint make good music.

Posted in Essay-Type Stuff, Fictitious Stuff, Just... Stuff, Review Stuff
Tags: Beetles, Elephants, Exquisite Corpse EP, Stealing Sheep, The Fool, Undertow, Warpaint

I hope it goes without saying that I’m not actually sat at a computer posting this live and am in fact enjoying the company of people not forged in the fires of my own madness.

But whether you believe me or not, hope you enjoy the (brief) attached extract of the new thing I’m working on.

Happy New Year and all that. x

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“Like many children, my biography was begun with an act of whimsy on the part of my father which ruined my life. Tasked with the registration of my birth he, having always liked the stilted formulation of alphabetised lists wherein the definite article is suffixed as “, [comma] THE”, decided to immortalise the agreed-upon name of Thomas Andreas Dicomidis as DICOMIDIS COMMA THOM, my given name shortened out of a prosaic prosody and the entirety rendered in block capitals to lend the whole thing a further air of quasi-industrial utility, my intended middle name, previously belonging to some beloved uncle of my mother’s, was omitted entirely. Needless to say, I loathe my father.”

Posted in Fictitious Stuff, Just... Stuff
Tags: Fiction, Fiction (no, Not Autobiographical, really), Thom Dicomidis (fictional)