Postmodern Idiosyncrasies

“Untitled” (1935)

Thom Dicomidis — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 23:01:03 +0000

I saw a city in my sleep,

some vast and ancient Babylon

where great ships moored

against rusted copper skies.

And the people looked to them,

through electric smog, in awe,

and said prayers

that our tongues could not bear to hold.

I found this as an inscription on the frontispiece of a copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners which I picked up in a charity shop.

Iron Man 3: The Tech and the Tale

Thom Dicomidis — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 23:01:29 +0000

I have nothing to say about Iron Man 3. That is, I have nothing important to say. It’s hard, sometimes, to argue that a film as seemingly frivolous as one concerning the exploits of a futuristic red & yellow tech-knight can have a human story that feels as though it suits the manner in which it is being told. It’s an understandable prejudice, borne out by the execrable quality of any number of abdominal CGI blockbusters whose contents are secondary to their projected gross (e.g. Transformers, Star Trek, Green Lantern, Battleship etc. & etc.), but fortunately there are those few exceptions which go some way to justify the frankly obscene amounts of money spent on them.

It’s not, of course, that the core idea of Iron Man 3 -hubris begetting tragedy- couldn’t be told on a smaller scale; literature and history are replete with versions of that story, but when the genius and flaws of the hero burn as bright as that of modern-day da Vinci Tony Stark and his only slightly more ostentatious alter-ego the monsters created in the wake of their arrogance have to be equally spectacular in opposition: equal and opposite to the hero. Fortunately the film’s director/co-writer Shane Black has form in disguising heart with bombast -in the cult hit Kiss Kiss Bang Bang- and Iron Man 3 marries the narrative focus of the first film with the sheer spectacle of its sequel.

Other than that I have nothing to say about Iron Man 3. That is, I have nothing important to say.

Olympus Has Fallen: a scared, childish America?

Thom Dicomidis — Wed, 24 Apr 2013 23:01:02 +0000

If Olympus Has Fallen is any sort of indicator at all then Conservative America is clearly suffering something of an ego crisis. The all-American (and, most importantly for the audience the film is clearly looking to engaged, Caucasian (Morgan Freeman only gets to be the acting-president) ) Aaron Eckhart plays the President during an entirely unbelievable attack on the White House by an officially unofficial Northern Korean terrorist group, and has the most absurdly hyper-masculine and jingoistic introduction I can recall. First seen boxing against Gerard Butler, the film’s actual star, and showing that he can take a punch to the face without being phased by it, he’s then casually congratulated on curing America’s dependence on foreign oil before being referred to by his Secret Service codename “The Full Package”…

All of this goes by so quickly it’s almost hard to believe that someone could have had the audacity to write such a ham-fisted attempt at characterisation, let alone that anyone would film it, but it’s really all there. It’s also, essentially, the entire thematic content of the film, one message writ block-capital large in red, white and blue crayons. The taking of the White House seemed to have more in common with COBRA’s plan in G.I. Joe: Retaliation, both in conception and execution, than anything that could actually come to pass. Men, women and children are mown down throughout but the American flag is detailed almost pornographically in slow motion as it is shot to pieces then tossed from the roof of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Indeed the capitol’s most priapic landmark, the Washington monument, is literally blunted by the shock of the attack, the nation’s potency called into question and further threatened as their nuclear arsenal is held hostage. But America has, as one General puts it in the film, “the toughest fucking guys in the world”, albeit that they’ve again outsourced to the UK for an action hero, who’s running around in a set-up that feels lazily reminiscent of Die Hard. Except that the hero gets to torture and kill people in the Oval Office, including one person he bludgeons to death with a bust of Abraham Lincoln… Olympus Has Fallen, taken seriously, would be unwatchable, but if you can appreciate how utterly ridiculous it is, and roll your eyes at the nationalism, then you still shouldn’t watch it

Alice: Jan Švankmajer’s Adventures in Wonderland

Thom Dicomidis — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 23:01:21 +0000

Baroque dolls and stuffed animals, given stop-motion animus behind uncanny glass eyes, evoke the more sinister aspects of Lewis Carroll’s often nightmarish and grotesquely non sequitur Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland than either Disney’s original adaptation or even their more recent, Tim Burton-helmed adaptation could muster, or rather, could be allowed to muster, as an implacable and largely impassive Alice (Kristýna Kohoutová) sleepwalks through the liminal space between Morpheus and Thanatos and her changing relationship to them as she grows towards an age where the latter increasingly influences the former, although this particular instantiation of the character is young enough that the points made are illustrated more for the benefit of the audience than the protagonist.

Whilst the repeated visual elements of the writing desk, which takes Alice deeper into the unreality of Wonderland each time she encounters it, and the use of a bottle of India ink as the unlabelled analogues for the book’s “drink me” size-altering potions indicate the authorial hand behind even this story, seemingly born inchoate from the chaos of childhood detritus, the question of intent is made almost moot by the tight close-ups of a narrating mouth: Most likely the small girl seen bored at the beginning of the film but perhaps even Alice herself, recounting the events in the third-person as some post-Wonderland therapeutic.

There are other recurring motifs in the film; a childish predilection for the increased tactile sensitivity of the tongue abutting a fear of solid and savoury foods which repeatedly turn out to be soured or spoiled, or polluted with pins and screws, or riddled with insects, a similarly juvenile element of repetition, rules learnt and performed by rote until the surety of madness takes hold. The aesthetic, at least as far as the film’s more mundane aspects are concerned, and more generally the cinematography, resemble a more opulently filled film by Werner Herzog, with the animated style that had influenced Terry Gilliam already fully realised, the absurdity and the horror each alive and spurring the other on.

‘Marvel: Avengers Alliance’: How Social Gaming Ruined my Life/April

Thom Dicomidis — Thu, 18 Apr 2013 23:01:25 +0000

Whilst my recent hiatus has had nothing to do with-

-my current addiction to Marvel’s addictively tedious Facebook opus, an RPG with more grinding than all the phallic and oversized pepper mills in all the Italian restaurants in all the world, has definitely impacted on other areas of my-

-life. These line breaks, for instance, are being used to mark the points at which my attention wanders to the other half of my screen as even now I fail-

-to turn my attention to matters of greater import or substance-

-than a game I don’t even enjoy.

G.I. Joe: Retaliation

Thom Dicomidis — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 23:01:50 +0000

A headache-inducing morass of tedium, testosterone and phallic imagery that telegraphs it’s gods-awful machismo in both the dialogue and action, G.I. Joe: Retaliation is fit only for mockery, opprobrium and as a cruel and unusual punishment.

- Thom Dicomidis (09/04/13)

Teratogenesis

Thom Dicomidis — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 23:01:42 +0000

Michael had truly loved Emma, so that the product of their union had been born a skinless mewling thing with a haphazardly arranged crown of spikey bone outgrowths was, to him, an even greater tragedy. Nonetheless his distress was, as much as such things are quantifiable, outstripped by Emma’s; a prior, though ostensibly lapsed, religious conviction renewed through sheer horror and the child’s gruesome evocation of a raw, bloody and sexless Christ-figure such that her mind simply shut down. With this protective and prophylactic fugue holding fast the hospital’s chief psychiatrist, herself an expert in the presence and effect of religious iconography in dissociative psychological disorders, ordered that mother and child be kept apart while a regime of treatment (which, said course, tacitly assumed the imminent death of the malformed and medically unfeasible baby) could be brought into effect. As days passed and the baby, still unnamed even by a staff whose shorthand sobriquets for patients were generally known to cut mercilessly close to the knuckle, held determined to its hard won half-life, Emma’s condition remained unchanged. Michael, by this point cast in the role of doomsayer, foreswore the visits of both doting and dutiful friends and family alike, keeping a constant vigil beside the oxygen enriched but otherwise undisturbed airs in which the baby cried, almost incessantly, in a pitch which cleaved close to the phlegmatic rumble of boulders grinding together, with occasional breaks to splutter and cough from the ruinous slit which vaguely occupied the place of a mouth. It took no food, and no vein could be found by which to administer even the most basic sustenance, but it persisted in its raucous distress, perhaps in an entirely reasonable protest to whichever such force or entity had seen fit, consciously or unconsciously, to allow its birth. On the eighth such day, with Emma no better and the baby still shrieking with an unflagging commitment to communicating and thereby sharing its pain, Michael tore the incubator apart and snapped the baby’s neck.

It was some months later, spent wandering aimless and anonymous, before Michael, now divorced from his real surname and all ties to a life which had ended with the crunch and crack of a twisted spinal column being broken, came to something resembling his senses. Resembling, that is, in much the same way as one’s reflection in a battered brass mirror, seen through dents and nicks and the patina of passing years, would resemble oneself. In practicality the change amounted to a resurgence of agency just sufficient to understand and deny culpability for the fate that had befallen his family, enough will to obsess. His hand-to-mouth itinerancy, cribbed from stories written when the prospects for such subsistence survivalists were apparently far better, adapted to his new resolve, took in larger towns, edged the outskirts of cities with public libraries which could be raided for “materials”. This ever-growing horde, torn-out pages from books too cumbersome to steal and complete copies of less-lucky works, had begun as work of questionable scientific integrity; the more current works on genetics, heredity and consanguinity mingled with redundant or wrong-headed works, but was soon further diluted by prophecies and paranormal texts which ranged from mainstream manias to even more outré and insubstantial gibberish. He began to construct a new ontology around those specifics which would absolve him, building in justifications upon justifications until the tangled knots of irrational rationalising were unintelligible to their creator and sole purveyor, until the arguments he ran through catechistically were changing on a weekly, a daily, an hourly basis. Eventually Michael could argue not only that the baby was provably from genetic stock which did not taint his familial line in an ad hoc genealogy which extended to a prelapsarian paradise, but that the murder was the predetermined and inevitable conclusion of some formula written in the quantum mechanics of the physical universe, and that he had not, in fact, been there or seen anything at all.

Iain Banks: a tribute and a celebration

Thom Dicomidis — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:01:01 +0000

Earlier today the internet, at least the portion of it which I regularly peruse, was awash with sadness after one of Scotland’s best and most popular authors Iain (M.) Banks issued the following, very upsetting statement:

I am officially Very Poorly. After a couple of surgical procedures, I am gradually recovering from jaundice caused by a blocked bile duct, but that – it turns out – is the least of my problems.

I first thought something might be wrong when I developed a sore back in late January, but put this down to the fact I’d started writing at the beginning of the month and so was crouched over a keyboard all day. When it hadn’t gone away by mid February, I went to my GP, who spotted that I had jaundice. Blood tests, an ultrasound scan and then a CT scan revealed the full extent of the grisly truth by the start of March.

I have cancer. It started in my gall bladder, has infected both lobes of my
liver and probably also my pancreas and some lymph nodes, plus one tumour is massed around a group of major blood vessels in the same volume, effectively ruling out any chance of surgery to remove the tumours either in the short or long term.

The bottom line, now, I’m afraid, is that as a late stage gall bladder cancer patient, I’m expected to live for ‘several months’ and it’s extremely unlikely I’ll live beyond a year. So it looks like my latest novel, The Quarry, will be my last.

As a result, I’ve withdrawn from all planned public engagements and I’ve asked my partner Adele if she will do me the honour of becoming my widow (sorry – but we find ghoulish humour helps). By the time this goes out we’ll be married and on a short honeymoon. We intend to spend however much quality time I have left seeing family. and relations and visiting places that have meant a lot to us. Meanwhile my heroic publishers are doing all they can to bring the publication date of my new novel forward by as much as four months, to give me a better chance of being around when it hits the shelves.

There is a possibility that it might be worth undergoing a course of chemotherapy to extend the amount of time available. However that is still something we’re balancing the pros and cons of, and is anyway out of the question until my jaundice has further, and significantly, reduced.

Lastly, I’d like to add that from my GP onwards, the professionalism of the medics involved – and the speed with which the resources of the NHS in Scotland have been deployed – has been exemplary, and the standard of care deeply impressive. We’re all just sorry the outcome hasn’t been more cheerful.

As the outpouring of affection, admiration and earnest gratitude in response to this demonstrates, Banks’ work has been of immense importance and inspiration to his many, many fans throughout the entirety of a career which began more than twenty-nine years ago with the publication of The Wasp Factory. To the news of his illness, to the grace and macabre humour in which he writes about it, there seems no response appropriate in scale and sincerity, no fitting way to encapsulate what Banks’ work has meant to his audience en masse or to myself in particular. Nonetheless, given that Iain Banks is one of the authors who still made me want to write, whose work still influences the way I approach a blank page, I feel I should at least attempt to express what his books meant to me.

I started with, of course, The Wasp Factory; a pre-adolescent first foray into the books my parents read and which I still find impossible to detach from the pre-Cronenberg terrors the book’s more visceral body horrors nurtured. The reveal of the incident which effectively broke the mind of the narrator’s brother in twain remains a shock that haunts me with its macabre cruelty to this day whilst the gothic elements and bleak darkness in its humour spurred me on the read those classics from which two such seemingly disparate threads were drawn. More than all this though, I shared my experience of reading the book with two peers, who became two good friends, who remain two of my closest friends, due in no small part to sharing our favourite books, music et al. with one another.

What followed was gluttony, reading as much of Banks’ work as I could lay my hands on, stopping only to re-read The Player of Games two or three times with a speed that my age-addled brain can barely remember and has no hope of replicating. Just before The Business came out I went to the Hay Festival where Iain Banks was booked for a reading and a Q&A; his performance as the recently dentally-challenged Mike and his unsympathetic boss being one of the most enjoyable events of the weekend. Since then, alongside anticipating each new book, I’ve sought out interviews in print and elsewhere, with Banks remaining one of the few constants throughout my capricious phases and changes in tastes. For almost as long as I’ve been reading books for grown-ups Iain Banks’ work has been amongst my favourites, my most often returned to, and I am truly saddened to hear such a terrible illness has befallen him.

Transformers: ‘More than Meets the Eye’ & ‘Robots in Disguise’

Thom Dicomidis — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 23:01:17 +0000

There is absolutely no way to discuss any of the various incarnations of the Transformers franchise without sounding like an antisocial nebbish, but when one bypasses the most recent films and sidesteps even the original 1984 cartoon to talk instead about the comics versions/adaptations of the Transformers… well at that point you’ve committed (anti)social seppuku. There are levels within even this disgrace, of course, though these are more comparable to Dante’s segregated Hell; a lower level for each increment of shut-in obscurity, the alternate realities of limited issue runs and convention specials… I’d actually prefer to focus on the latter metric though, since an attention to either or both of the current on-going comics series from IDW: More than Meets the Eye and Robots in Disguise, will only condemn me to the foyer of the aforementioned and very specialised Inferno.

So, as more of a comics buff than a fan of the Transformers, nostalgia for the first series and the undeniable kitsch appeal of 1986’s animated film The Transformers: The Movie, you might ask what it took for me to be dragged into contact with the cultural black hole which has a mess of continuity that looks like this:

the illustration of which morass can be found on the Transformers Wiki, itself something of a work of art in places, annotated with the following statement:

Now you put all that in a blender and you get the Japanese continuity. Note: This chart was quickly out-of-date shortly after its publication, and has only gotten more so over the years. Fun!

The answer to which is the somewhat review/overview spoiling truth; I kept hearing good things about both series from aging fans and neophytes alike.

Nonetheless I approached the paired series of comics, set after the war between Autobots and Decepticons has ostensibly ended in a peace treaty and a joint resettlement of the war-ravaged Cybertron with a healthy degree of scepticism that they had much to offer someone with so little vested interest in the characters. The first of the two books, More than Meets the Eye (written by James Roberts with Alex Milne as the regular artist), concerns a group led by the infamously named Rodimus Prime who strike out from their newly settled planet in search of a robotic holy grail while its sister title Robots in Disguise (written by John Barber with Andrew Griffith as the regular artist) details the backbiting, infighting and political machinations (no, pun intended) of a provisional government formed by two ancient enemies and the formerly neutral factions they both seem to resent equally.

Now while the first seems like a fairly sane setting for an insane concept the latter is less-obviously so: one might imagine it being difficult to take a more violent version of the West Wing starring robots who turn into cars, but it’s actually as good as the notices it has received. Where More than Meets the Eye is a surprisingly witty and dramatically satisfying read with a large cast of protagonists whose personalities are well-differentiated from one another and a story which respects what came before but doesn’t rely on the audience’s familiarity with it to be compelling, Robots in Disguise pulls off the same slew of tricks with the additional twist of having even more emotional heft; exploring the difficulties of a nascent and unsteady political authority that is internally divided by extremes in a way that allows for metaphor without a wearying shame of its own premise and pedigree.

Taking away everything else, any preconceptions one could bring to the idea of these books as linked to some childish remembrance of toys, cartoons and hair-metal soundtracks, and approaching More than Meets the Eye and Robots in Disguise purely on their respective merits as comics shows them for what they are excellent stories told well. This holds true for the art as well, and although I have a personal preference for Andrew Griffiths’ work on Robots in Disguise because of its combination of softer lines and a slightly less-lurid palette (degrees of which are necessary to help differentiate various Transformers from one another) Alex Milne has a strong and distinctive style which helps accentuate the different dramatic tones of the two series. I had my low expectations trampled underfoot, hopefully you’ll be interested enough to approach them with a more receptive attitude.

… Does anyone want to play Scepticons vs. Recepticons with me..?

John Dies at the End: at the End, John Dies

Thom Dicomidis — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:01:06 +0000

If your name is John then I offer my sympathies; the perfect name for your autobiography has already been taken by another book, John Dies at the End by David Wong, and now by a film based on the same book, John Dies at the End by David Wong, called John Dies at the End by writer (of the adaptation) and director Don Coscarelli. Neither of whom, it should be noted, are called John, although both have callously conspired to rob people called John everywhere of their literary destinies. Those of you called Jack are just going to have to get over it; you’ve already squandered your right to be offended by this injustice.

Since I haven’t read the book this is a review of the film, which is very good. I’ve seen it variously defined, misdefined and redefined in terms of genre and tone, its surreal aspects overplayed as revelatory and its influences unrecognised and unacknowledged. Stripped of a context John Dies at the End is only the sum of its various labels, and while that doesn’t preclude enjoyment of the film as spectacle, as funny, it does take away something of the depth. Not that the film is particularly bountiful land for critical harvest, but it does play off some elements of horror, fantasy, science fiction and spiritualism that engage the audience as more than passing frivolity.

There’s a Lovecraftian tinge to the mythology of the film which deftly avoids the more po-faced aspects of an Elder Gods or Great Old Ones scenario and the anarchic “nothing is true, everything is permitted” inclusivity of the ideas on offer reaches back past its latest pop-cultural renaissance in the Assassin’s Creed games to a more Discordian bent as informed by the work of Robert Anton Wilson et al. Perhaps the most apropos comparison is to 2010’s comic adaptation Dylan Dog: Dead of Night, another film which portrayed the idea of hidden worlds within the mundane albeit one with a more formalised ontology and tendency towards the portentous.

I guess I’m saying it’s worth your time, but more-so if you’ve got an interesting and understanding of the genre fiction from which it draws inspiration. John Dies at the End isn’t a parody, it’s a gleeful celebration of the weird blended into the vague shape of a idiotic but ambulatory Waiting for Godot, and that’s just a brilliant idea.