Jaguar Skills
Thursday 24th March - Concorde 2
Support: Tek One and Boycom
Jaguar Skills is a truly impatient man. Clad in a full-face black ninja mask, gold medallion flailing in the wake of his restless movements, Jag bombarded a mad-for-it crowd with a truly dizzying motorway pileup of party tunes, interjecting the floor-filling bangers-du-jour half knowingly, half reverently with the accepted jump-around classics. A mashup master with an extreme case of ADD, Jag's staccato tour of culturally popular music took in hip hop, hard house, dubstep and quite a bit of drum'n'bass, never sticking with one track for more than 30 seconds and seasoning this unholy audio gumbo with countless samples, sound effects and throwaway gags. His is a world where the recording of an actual police raid morphs into the siren whoop of KRS-One's Sound Of Tha Police, which segues seamlessly into the faux-reggae of The Police's Roxanne. Hendrix, Motörhead, Guns'N'Roses, Blur, Musical Youth - even the A-Team and Countdown themes got a decent look-in through the soul-shaking bass and urgent drum beats. They should wring the gallons of sweat from this man's ninja mask and sell it to aspiring DJs - God knows they could use some of what he's got.
Friday, 25 March 2011
HoooOOOOO!!! Part 2
Tuesday, 8 March 2011
Monday, 17 January 2011
Sheersy's Top Five: Films
Hey, it's my first 'regular' feature! Woo hoo, break out the Cherry Lambrini.
Probably as long as I've been reading books, I've been watching films [or 'movies', as our Atlantically-challenged cousins refer to them]. While I don't remember the actual occasion, I'm assured by my parents that I was taken to see Star Wars [it is called Star Wars, not Episode Whatever] in early '78, shortly after its UK cinema release, and the superlative space opera trilogy was an overriding obsession for a sizeable chunk of my formative years.
George Lucas shrewdly secured the rights to any and all associated merchandising - board games, action figures, clocks, mugs, duvet covers and so on, judged by 20th Century Fox to be entirely worthless - in lieu of a standard director's fee, netting hundreds of millions of dollars as a result and pretty much enabling him to self-fund the sequels. This may explain why subsequent films have become an ever more cynical exercise in toy marketing. Nevertheless, my brother and I shared a fairly comprehensive collection of the figures, vehicles and playsets released to accompany each of the first three films, so at least part of Lucas's unsightly Jabbajowls - barely concealed behind an outsized-but-still-far-too-small goatee - was constructed directly from our pocket money.
Our collection included most of the elusive Last 17, the final limited distribution run of niche interest figures [obscure Rebel pilots, Jabba's courtiers, Imperial dignitaries and second-string Ewoks], which we snapped up during a family holiday to Belgium in 1985. I should admittedly have known better by that age than to continue chucking good money away on plastic crap, but partial vindication came years later when I was able to eBay a single Yak Face figure - in good nick, but without backing card or accessories - for £60. Sixty smackeroos! For a little plastic man with the face of a yak! I should have invested in a whole boxload of Belgian Yak Faces. Stupid hindsight.
So, yes, films.
My criteria for this Top Five are films that particularly struck me on first seeing them - so much so that I will have obsessively rewatched each of them several times since. They have informed my cinematic tastes and represent my personal benchmark for films of their genre. While they may not offer any surprises to those familiar with my tastes, I like to think they showcase my geek cred in a straightforward and unpretentious way.
#5 - Star Wars [1977]
OK, I've already been banging on about this in the above pre-amble, but my denigrations didn't really address the film or its seismic impact on global cinema. George Lucas had initially wanted to revive sci-fi action hero Flash Gordon, but the property wasn't available at the time; instead he and collaborator Gary Kurtz cooked up their own take on the Universal and RKO serials of the '40s and '50s. Shamelessly incorporating elements [the plot, for instance, and the characters] from Akira Kurosawa's samurai adventure Hidden Fortress, and infused throughout with a World War 2 aesthetic - from the battered and rusting utilitarian retro-tech to the crisply starched uniforms and fetishistic battle armour of the baddies - Lucas and Kurtz created a cosmic vision at once comfortably familiar and strikingly unique. While the overarching theme of fresh-faced good triumphing over coolly self-assured evil might just as well have been stamped out on a production line, the execution itself was genuinely fresh and exciting.
The film explores the nuanced inequalities of a robotic slave underclass and the credible mundanity of interaction between alien races, as well as ensuring a place in escapist entertainment history for incredibly cool-sounding lightsabres, Darth Vader's sinister breathing, the Death Star and the delectable Princess Leia's Belgian bun hairstyle. Spot-on casting choices across the board lend some much-needed depth to the template action-adventure characters - who among us doesn't immediately warm to bad boy anti-hero Han Solo, who, straight off the bat, shoots a debt-collecting alien thug in the knackers under the table? - while the rugged visual design, state-of-the-art special effects [that still stand up today] and sound effects flawlessly coalesce into a vision unlike any other cinematic sci-fi on offer at the time.
The only glaring weakness in the Star Wars franchise - somewhat fundamentally - is George Lucas himself, who seems unable to either write or direct anything worthwhile without the tempering influence of other, more competent talents. The Empire Strike Back, generally held to be the most mature of all the Star Wars films, shared four or five directors - none of them Lucas - and the story was heavily influenced by Kurtz. As soon as Lucas took direct control, the schmaltzy feel-good elements were ramped up to 11 and toy sales began to lead the story. There was absolutely no need to revisit the original trilogy equipped only with a mid-life crisis and barely-adequate CGI. Ardman Studios could have knocked a more convincing Jabba together with Plasticine. Don't even get me started on the prequels.
#4 - Withnail and I [1986]
Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, who based the film on his own experience of living among the low-end boho set in London during the late '60s, Withnail and I boasts an entertaining array of picaresque characters, including Richard E. Grant in his breakthrough role as the aggressively forthright Withnail, Richard Griffiths as larger-than-life faded thesp [and "raving homosexual"] Uncle Monty and Ralph Brown as drawling, yellow-eyed drug dealer Danny.
This pre-eminently quotable loser lifestyle bible relates the misadventures of two impoverished, out-of-work actors, who go on holiday "by mistake" to the rain- and windswept Lake District. In between vain attempts to secure work through their agent, they alienate the locals, harass the well-to-do customers of a posh tea rooms, go fishing with a twelve-bore shotgun and find themselves obliquely menaced by a local poacher. As well as offering a uniquely British and hilariously grotty slant on the buddy comedy format, the film also acts as a thoughtful epoch end marker for the Summer of Love and all the political and artistic revolution it initially promised. As Danny laments towards the end of the film, "They're selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man."
Withnail and I also forms the basis for a famously gruelling drinking game, wherein one has simply to match Withnail drink for drink throughout the film. In the course of 90-odd minutes, the successful participant in this impossibly toxic endeavour would be expected to imbibe nine and a half glasses of red wine, a pint of cider ["ice in the cider"], two and a half shots of gin, six glasses of sherry, thirteen shots of whisky, half a pint of ale and a slug of lighter fluid. The Camberwell Carrot is optional, but to be quite honest after that lot you'd be hard pressed to fulfil even the most basic of motor functions, much less engineer a jumbo bifter.
#3 - Evil Dead II [1987]
Sam Raimi has gone on to direct much slicker Hollywood fare since his days as a guerrilla Michigan film-maker, but much of the trademark stylistic trickery learnt during those early days is still apparent in his current output. Having already been responsible for the notorious '80s video nasty The Evil Dead, Raimi experienced unwelcome studio meddling during the production of follow-up noir comedy Crimewave, which prompted him to return to his self-produced roots.
A sequel-cum-remake of the original feature, Evil Dead II features the same location - creaky old cabin in the woods - and a similar initial setup, but quickly moves into fresh new areas of no-budget cinematic creativity. Stop-motion animation, latex prosthetics and a dizzying array of simple-but-effective camera tricks collide to create a disorientating barrage of intense horror action; in the absence of a prohibitively expensive SteadiCam, Raimi instead improvised the ShakyCam - a plank of wood with a camera fixed to it, supported by a person at each end - to obtain swooping shots through the fog-shrouded forest. The production crew consisted of a hardcore of Raimi's multi-tasking close friends, who were willing to spend months being spattered with fake blood in sub-zero temperatures for no pay. As filming wore on, several cast members were unable to cope with the abysmal working conditions and dropped out - they were replaced on film with back-of-the-head shots of Raimi's wig-wearing brother, Ted.
The first half an hour hinges on a bravura performance by Raimi's high school friend and B movie god Bruce Campbell, during which he is subjected to sustained psychological and physical assault by otherworldly demons. This outrageous one-man performance is two parts Three Stooges slapstick to one part grisly splatter horror and sees Campbell's character, Ash, fending off various attacks by his decapitated girlfriend, taunted and strangled by his own reflection, menaced by animated furniture and literally thrown around a kitchen by his own possessed hand, which he finally amputates with a chainsaw while cackling maniacally and screaming "Who's laughing now?"
Evil Dead II at once lampoons and reveres the clichéd tropes of the genre, restructuring them with manic energy into an influential horror masterpiece, the distinct flashes of which can be seen in the early work of such directors as Peter Jackson and Edgar Wright.
#2 - Duck Soup [1933]
When it comes to naming the best Marx Brothers film, aficionados tend to be split between Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera. Admittedly A Night at the Opera is a more polished production, but the shoehorning in of a straight romantic sub-plot, replete with lengthy Marx-free song-and-dance routines, is a resolute strike in the 'Cons' column. Conversely, Duck Soup is an uninterrupted stream of comic dialogue and quick-fire gags from start to finish, and while there are several musical numbers, they are uniformly ridiculous and exist solely to showcase the zany antics of the Marxes.
The prescient plot - the Nazis came to power that same year - concerns a personal feud between Rufus T. Firefly [Groucho], the new leader of the bankrupt state of Freedonia, and the dastardly Ambassador Trentino of neighbouring Sylvania, which through various convoluted misunderstandings spirals out of control and plunges both countries into conflict. Matters are further exacerbated by the incompetent duplicity of two Sylvanian spies, Chicolini [Chico] and Pinky [Harpo], who make no secret of the fact they are working for the other side and even treat their own court martial as a forum for more buffoonery.
The film features several classic set pieces, including the dialogue-free 'mirror' sequence, where Harpo attempts to match Groucho's every movement in an ultimately vain effort to convince him that he is Groucho's reflection, and the film is punctuated with throwaway visual gags, such as Groucho sporting a different military uniform in every scene during the final reel. Even Harpo's usual tiresome harp interlude is limited to a brief plucking at the strings of an open grand piano, the lid of which is quickly slammed shut on his fingers.
Duck Soup was the Marx Brothers' last film with Paramount Studios and wasn't particularly well received at the time of its release, but in recent years it has been critically reappraised as a mischievous satire on the absurdity of war and on the self-important men, ill-deserving of the power they wield, who determine the fate of their fellow countrymen.
#1 - Dawn of the Dead [1978]
George A. Romero had altered the landscape of horror cinema a decade earlier with his low-budget, high-scare indie feature Night of the Living Dead. In a plot that has since become a staple of the genre, the recently dead inexplicably reanimate with wall-eyed murderous intent; a few desperate, ill-matched survivors barricade themselves in a remote farmhouse and attempt to repel the ghouls. The impact of Romero's film can't be understated: it fully explored the practicalities of survival in such a situation, employing a near-documentary approach to great effect, replete with convincingly realized news reports and 'shit-has-definitely-hit-the-fan' emergency broadcasts. It was also one of the first mainstream American films to feature a black lead, opening up a new level of critical interpretation within the context of America's burgeoning Civil Rights movement.
Dawn of the Dead picks up where the original left off, even starting inside a panicked, claustrophobic TV studio that's transmitting the type of broadcasts received during Night of the Living Dead. Tensions are running high among the station staff and there is much whispered talk of fleeing the city. Traffic news helicopter pilot Stephen and his station staff girlfriend Fran escape, along with two hardened S.W.A.T. cop acquaintances, in the network's chopper, eventually setting down on an out-of-town shopping mall that swarms with the undead. They tentatively assess the situation and soon decide that the mall will offer the reliable security and abundant supplies they desperately need. Barricading the centre against further assault, they dispatch any zombies already inside, then settle down for the duration with their every material desire catered for. Weeks of seclusion take their psychological toll on the small group, however, and as well as the hordes of the undead clawing relentlessly at the reinforced glass doors, they also face danger from roving gangs of human looters eager to plunder the mall's resources.
Much like Night of the Living Dead's subtle Civil Rights message, there is an intelligent subtext embedded within Dawn of the Dead's ostensibly gory exterior. Here, the comment is on the vacuousness of consumerism, as evinced by the zombies thronging in their almost pitiable confusion to that shameless cathedral to Mammon, the visceral carnage incongruously soundtracked by upbeat glockenspiel muzak. As Stephen says, while contemplating why so many zombies seem drawn to the complex, "Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives." It's testament to the film's influence that the shopping mall has subsequently become a recurring feature of zombie apocalypse films and videogames.
Dawn of the Dead is not without its flaws - there are confusing jumps and cuts throughout, making it unclear exactly what's going on at certain points [unless, like me, you've watched it more times than you'd care to work out] and the acting is solid for a '70s horror but was never going to win any awards. Tom Savini's make-up effects, too, are good for the time but extremely dated by today's standards, the grey-blue foundation applied uniformly to hundreds of extras intermittently enlivened by explosions of bright red fake blood, an unnatural palette that lends the film a hyperreal quality [Savini redeemed himself a few years later with his truly gruesome make-up effects for Romero's Day of the Dead]. These are negligible quibbles, however, for those of us who see the appeal of the zombie apocalypse film, and what really marks Dawn of the Dead out as a classic is its deadly serious, pragmatic approach to an unthinkable doomsday scenario: what would you do if civilization collapsed overnight?
In the last few years the zombie has become as ubiquitous as the vampire, thanks to films like 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland and a fairly decent 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, books such as Max 'son-of-Mel' Brooks's The Zombie Survival Guide and follow-up World War Z [not to mention the tongue-through-cheek genre mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies], a wealth of comics - most notably Robert Kirkman's sublime ongoing saga The Walking Dead - and more video games than you can shake a brain-and-hair-caked stick at [Resident Evil, House of the Dead, Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead]. Clearly there's something in the idea of the reanimated, cannibalistic cadaver that fires the popular imagination... and that's a good thing.
Honourable mentions: Seven Samurai, Mad Max 2, Midnight Run, Aliens, Millennium Actress
Probably as long as I've been reading books, I've been watching films [or 'movies', as our Atlantically-challenged cousins refer to them]. While I don't remember the actual occasion, I'm assured by my parents that I was taken to see Star Wars [it is called Star Wars, not Episode Whatever] in early '78, shortly after its UK cinema release, and the superlative space opera trilogy was an overriding obsession for a sizeable chunk of my formative years.
George Lucas shrewdly secured the rights to any and all associated merchandising - board games, action figures, clocks, mugs, duvet covers and so on, judged by 20th Century Fox to be entirely worthless - in lieu of a standard director's fee, netting hundreds of millions of dollars as a result and pretty much enabling him to self-fund the sequels. This may explain why subsequent films have become an ever more cynical exercise in toy marketing. Nevertheless, my brother and I shared a fairly comprehensive collection of the figures, vehicles and playsets released to accompany each of the first three films, so at least part of Lucas's unsightly Jabbajowls - barely concealed behind an outsized-but-still-far-too-small goatee - was constructed directly from our pocket money.
Our collection included most of the elusive Last 17, the final limited distribution run of niche interest figures [obscure Rebel pilots, Jabba's courtiers, Imperial dignitaries and second-string Ewoks], which we snapped up during a family holiday to Belgium in 1985. I should admittedly have known better by that age than to continue chucking good money away on plastic crap, but partial vindication came years later when I was able to eBay a single Yak Face figure - in good nick, but without backing card or accessories - for £60. Sixty smackeroos! For a little plastic man with the face of a yak! I should have invested in a whole boxload of Belgian Yak Faces. Stupid hindsight.So, yes, films.
My criteria for this Top Five are films that particularly struck me on first seeing them - so much so that I will have obsessively rewatched each of them several times since. They have informed my cinematic tastes and represent my personal benchmark for films of their genre. While they may not offer any surprises to those familiar with my tastes, I like to think they showcase my geek cred in a straightforward and unpretentious way.
#5 - Star Wars [1977]
OK, I've already been banging on about this in the above pre-amble, but my denigrations didn't really address the film or its seismic impact on global cinema. George Lucas had initially wanted to revive sci-fi action hero Flash Gordon, but the property wasn't available at the time; instead he and collaborator Gary Kurtz cooked up their own take on the Universal and RKO serials of the '40s and '50s. Shamelessly incorporating elements [the plot, for instance, and the characters] from Akira Kurosawa's samurai adventure Hidden Fortress, and infused throughout with a World War 2 aesthetic - from the battered and rusting utilitarian retro-tech to the crisply starched uniforms and fetishistic battle armour of the baddies - Lucas and Kurtz created a cosmic vision at once comfortably familiar and strikingly unique. While the overarching theme of fresh-faced good triumphing over coolly self-assured evil might just as well have been stamped out on a production line, the execution itself was genuinely fresh and exciting.
The film explores the nuanced inequalities of a robotic slave underclass and the credible mundanity of interaction between alien races, as well as ensuring a place in escapist entertainment history for incredibly cool-sounding lightsabres, Darth Vader's sinister breathing, the Death Star and the delectable Princess Leia's Belgian bun hairstyle. Spot-on casting choices across the board lend some much-needed depth to the template action-adventure characters - who among us doesn't immediately warm to bad boy anti-hero Han Solo, who, straight off the bat, shoots a debt-collecting alien thug in the knackers under the table? - while the rugged visual design, state-of-the-art special effects [that still stand up today] and sound effects flawlessly coalesce into a vision unlike any other cinematic sci-fi on offer at the time.
The only glaring weakness in the Star Wars franchise - somewhat fundamentally - is George Lucas himself, who seems unable to either write or direct anything worthwhile without the tempering influence of other, more competent talents. The Empire Strike Back, generally held to be the most mature of all the Star Wars films, shared four or five directors - none of them Lucas - and the story was heavily influenced by Kurtz. As soon as Lucas took direct control, the schmaltzy feel-good elements were ramped up to 11 and toy sales began to lead the story. There was absolutely no need to revisit the original trilogy equipped only with a mid-life crisis and barely-adequate CGI. Ardman Studios could have knocked a more convincing Jabba together with Plasticine. Don't even get me started on the prequels.#4 - Withnail and I [1986]
Written and directed by Bruce Robinson, who based the film on his own experience of living among the low-end boho set in London during the late '60s, Withnail and I boasts an entertaining array of picaresque characters, including Richard E. Grant in his breakthrough role as the aggressively forthright Withnail, Richard Griffiths as larger-than-life faded thesp [and "raving homosexual"] Uncle Monty and Ralph Brown as drawling, yellow-eyed drug dealer Danny.
This pre-eminently quotable loser lifestyle bible relates the misadventures of two impoverished, out-of-work actors, who go on holiday "by mistake" to the rain- and windswept Lake District. In between vain attempts to secure work through their agent, they alienate the locals, harass the well-to-do customers of a posh tea rooms, go fishing with a twelve-bore shotgun and find themselves obliquely menaced by a local poacher. As well as offering a uniquely British and hilariously grotty slant on the buddy comedy format, the film also acts as a thoughtful epoch end marker for the Summer of Love and all the political and artistic revolution it initially promised. As Danny laments towards the end of the film, "They're selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man."
Withnail and I also forms the basis for a famously gruelling drinking game, wherein one has simply to match Withnail drink for drink throughout the film. In the course of 90-odd minutes, the successful participant in this impossibly toxic endeavour would be expected to imbibe nine and a half glasses of red wine, a pint of cider ["ice in the cider"], two and a half shots of gin, six glasses of sherry, thirteen shots of whisky, half a pint of ale and a slug of lighter fluid. The Camberwell Carrot is optional, but to be quite honest after that lot you'd be hard pressed to fulfil even the most basic of motor functions, much less engineer a jumbo bifter.#3 - Evil Dead II [1987]
Sam Raimi has gone on to direct much slicker Hollywood fare since his days as a guerrilla Michigan film-maker, but much of the trademark stylistic trickery learnt during those early days is still apparent in his current output. Having already been responsible for the notorious '80s video nasty The Evil Dead, Raimi experienced unwelcome studio meddling during the production of follow-up noir comedy Crimewave, which prompted him to return to his self-produced roots.
A sequel-cum-remake of the original feature, Evil Dead II features the same location - creaky old cabin in the woods - and a similar initial setup, but quickly moves into fresh new areas of no-budget cinematic creativity. Stop-motion animation, latex prosthetics and a dizzying array of simple-but-effective camera tricks collide to create a disorientating barrage of intense horror action; in the absence of a prohibitively expensive SteadiCam, Raimi instead improvised the ShakyCam - a plank of wood with a camera fixed to it, supported by a person at each end - to obtain swooping shots through the fog-shrouded forest. The production crew consisted of a hardcore of Raimi's multi-tasking close friends, who were willing to spend months being spattered with fake blood in sub-zero temperatures for no pay. As filming wore on, several cast members were unable to cope with the abysmal working conditions and dropped out - they were replaced on film with back-of-the-head shots of Raimi's wig-wearing brother, Ted.
The first half an hour hinges on a bravura performance by Raimi's high school friend and B movie god Bruce Campbell, during which he is subjected to sustained psychological and physical assault by otherworldly demons. This outrageous one-man performance is two parts Three Stooges slapstick to one part grisly splatter horror and sees Campbell's character, Ash, fending off various attacks by his decapitated girlfriend, taunted and strangled by his own reflection, menaced by animated furniture and literally thrown around a kitchen by his own possessed hand, which he finally amputates with a chainsaw while cackling maniacally and screaming "Who's laughing now?"
Evil Dead II at once lampoons and reveres the clichéd tropes of the genre, restructuring them with manic energy into an influential horror masterpiece, the distinct flashes of which can be seen in the early work of such directors as Peter Jackson and Edgar Wright.#2 - Duck Soup [1933]
When it comes to naming the best Marx Brothers film, aficionados tend to be split between Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera. Admittedly A Night at the Opera is a more polished production, but the shoehorning in of a straight romantic sub-plot, replete with lengthy Marx-free song-and-dance routines, is a resolute strike in the 'Cons' column. Conversely, Duck Soup is an uninterrupted stream of comic dialogue and quick-fire gags from start to finish, and while there are several musical numbers, they are uniformly ridiculous and exist solely to showcase the zany antics of the Marxes.
The prescient plot - the Nazis came to power that same year - concerns a personal feud between Rufus T. Firefly [Groucho], the new leader of the bankrupt state of Freedonia, and the dastardly Ambassador Trentino of neighbouring Sylvania, which through various convoluted misunderstandings spirals out of control and plunges both countries into conflict. Matters are further exacerbated by the incompetent duplicity of two Sylvanian spies, Chicolini [Chico] and Pinky [Harpo], who make no secret of the fact they are working for the other side and even treat their own court martial as a forum for more buffoonery.
The film features several classic set pieces, including the dialogue-free 'mirror' sequence, where Harpo attempts to match Groucho's every movement in an ultimately vain effort to convince him that he is Groucho's reflection, and the film is punctuated with throwaway visual gags, such as Groucho sporting a different military uniform in every scene during the final reel. Even Harpo's usual tiresome harp interlude is limited to a brief plucking at the strings of an open grand piano, the lid of which is quickly slammed shut on his fingers.
Duck Soup was the Marx Brothers' last film with Paramount Studios and wasn't particularly well received at the time of its release, but in recent years it has been critically reappraised as a mischievous satire on the absurdity of war and on the self-important men, ill-deserving of the power they wield, who determine the fate of their fellow countrymen.#1 - Dawn of the Dead [1978]
George A. Romero had altered the landscape of horror cinema a decade earlier with his low-budget, high-scare indie feature Night of the Living Dead. In a plot that has since become a staple of the genre, the recently dead inexplicably reanimate with wall-eyed murderous intent; a few desperate, ill-matched survivors barricade themselves in a remote farmhouse and attempt to repel the ghouls. The impact of Romero's film can't be understated: it fully explored the practicalities of survival in such a situation, employing a near-documentary approach to great effect, replete with convincingly realized news reports and 'shit-has-definitely-hit-the-fan' emergency broadcasts. It was also one of the first mainstream American films to feature a black lead, opening up a new level of critical interpretation within the context of America's burgeoning Civil Rights movement.
Dawn of the Dead picks up where the original left off, even starting inside a panicked, claustrophobic TV studio that's transmitting the type of broadcasts received during Night of the Living Dead. Tensions are running high among the station staff and there is much whispered talk of fleeing the city. Traffic news helicopter pilot Stephen and his station staff girlfriend Fran escape, along with two hardened S.W.A.T. cop acquaintances, in the network's chopper, eventually setting down on an out-of-town shopping mall that swarms with the undead. They tentatively assess the situation and soon decide that the mall will offer the reliable security and abundant supplies they desperately need. Barricading the centre against further assault, they dispatch any zombies already inside, then settle down for the duration with their every material desire catered for. Weeks of seclusion take their psychological toll on the small group, however, and as well as the hordes of the undead clawing relentlessly at the reinforced glass doors, they also face danger from roving gangs of human looters eager to plunder the mall's resources.
Much like Night of the Living Dead's subtle Civil Rights message, there is an intelligent subtext embedded within Dawn of the Dead's ostensibly gory exterior. Here, the comment is on the vacuousness of consumerism, as evinced by the zombies thronging in their almost pitiable confusion to that shameless cathedral to Mammon, the visceral carnage incongruously soundtracked by upbeat glockenspiel muzak. As Stephen says, while contemplating why so many zombies seem drawn to the complex, "Some kind of instinct. Memory, of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives." It's testament to the film's influence that the shopping mall has subsequently become a recurring feature of zombie apocalypse films and videogames.
Dawn of the Dead is not without its flaws - there are confusing jumps and cuts throughout, making it unclear exactly what's going on at certain points [unless, like me, you've watched it more times than you'd care to work out] and the acting is solid for a '70s horror but was never going to win any awards. Tom Savini's make-up effects, too, are good for the time but extremely dated by today's standards, the grey-blue foundation applied uniformly to hundreds of extras intermittently enlivened by explosions of bright red fake blood, an unnatural palette that lends the film a hyperreal quality [Savini redeemed himself a few years later with his truly gruesome make-up effects for Romero's Day of the Dead]. These are negligible quibbles, however, for those of us who see the appeal of the zombie apocalypse film, and what really marks Dawn of the Dead out as a classic is its deadly serious, pragmatic approach to an unthinkable doomsday scenario: what would you do if civilization collapsed overnight?
In the last few years the zombie has become as ubiquitous as the vampire, thanks to films like 28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead, Zombieland and a fairly decent 2004 Dawn of the Dead remake, books such as Max 'son-of-Mel' Brooks's The Zombie Survival Guide and follow-up World War Z [not to mention the tongue-through-cheek genre mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies], a wealth of comics - most notably Robert Kirkman's sublime ongoing saga The Walking Dead - and more video games than you can shake a brain-and-hair-caked stick at [Resident Evil, House of the Dead, Dead Rising, Left 4 Dead]. Clearly there's something in the idea of the reanimated, cannibalistic cadaver that fires the popular imagination... and that's a good thing.Honourable mentions: Seven Samurai, Mad Max 2, Midnight Run, Aliens, Millennium Actress
Friday, 17 December 2010
Atwood's Flood
I recently finished Margaret Atwood's The Year of the Flood and was as captivated by this as I was its speculative fiction predecessor, Oryx and Crake. One of the things I enjoyed about the sequel was spotting the more obvious intersections between the two novels: characters from one book are either referred to or have cameo appearances in the other, the events of both stories take place across shared geographical locations and within a similar timeframe rigidly pivoted by Crake's global plague, the catastrophic upheaval of which drastically alters the life of every surviving character. Atwood's afterword, however, made it clear that I had by no means picked up on every nuance of cross-reference, and being the OCD, pernickety completist that I am, I felt compelled to immediately revisit the first novel with sequel-expanded awareness.Atwood employs a strikingly unsensational descriptive style in both books, relating in an unsettlingly straightforward way the often harrowing ordeals undergone by her characters. Both novels remind me in particular of the satirical works of sci-fi legend Kurt Vonnegut, who routinely flattens the horrific elements any lesser author might make the glaring focal point, and who maintains the same measured evenness throughout his writing. This detached reportage has the double effect of channelling either a deeply traumatized [Cormac McCarthy] or gently sardonic [Vonnegut, Atwood] voice on the part of the writer, and of making the written word more participatory: the onus is subtly shifted onto the reader to infer from the prose that which is shocking and to react accordingly. It's a strangely persuasive literary technique that seems particularly suited to the dystopian visions of those authors.
The general tone of both novels, too, is very similar, with the tarnished veneer of near-future scientific marvel spread paper-thin over a malevolent substratum of exploitation and violence - the default, brutal human condition that constantly waits at the periphery of the stories. The events of Oryx and Crake are predominantly played out by the scientific elite and their coterie within the artificial comfort and tenuous security of the fortified corporation compounds, and the desperation of the underclasses is only glimpsed from afar - either ignored, irrelevant or used as ephemeral entertainment. Propelled by boredom and seeking illicit thrills, Crake and Jimmy seek out the worst kind of exploitative material - assisted suicides, live executions and child pornography - on dedicated sites with names like nitee-nite.com, brainfrizz.com and HotTotts, and Crake in particular eventually allows his privileged background, natural academic brilliance and general lack of human empathy to evolve into a full-blown god complex.
In The Year of the Flood, Atwood follows a logical imaginative progression to explore life on the other side of the corporate class divide. By contrast to Oryx and Crake's sole, male narrator [Atwood's first, by all accounts], The Year of the Flood is told from two markedly different female points of view. Toby and Ren are 'pleeblanders', the disenfranchised majority who struggle on with their grim, hopeless lives outside the dubious protection of the compounds. Atwood makes it unambiguous from the start that these are the urban badlands, where the corrupt and incompetent private security firms - the CorpSeCorps - turn a blind eye to racketeering, where violent, racially delineated gangs compete for supremacy and where people routinely show up dead, often in one of the garboil dumpsters where refuse is collected before being processed into fuel. Or else they disappear entirely. Atwood's twin protagonists are both exploited in one sense or another by men: Toby, a pragmatic survivor even before Crake's virus, is pursued throughout the book by Blanco, an obscenely-tattooed gangster with a predilection for raping and murdering vulnerable women, while Ren, a much younger and less serious character, has been drawn into a life of high class prostitution by the start of the story. On one hand her easy-going acceptance - indeed, active satisfaction - with her situation could be taken as proof of her comprehensive exploitation by a patriarchal culture, but this is more obviously evidence of the lengths that Ren will go to in order not just to survive but to thrive, in spite of the meagre opportunities on offer outside the compounds. Much like the sanguine points Kurt Vonnegut makes about man's inhumanity to man, Atwood's uniformly muted descriptive style benefits her general feminist stance, effectively rendering any further elaboration superfluous.
Both women are welcomed into the ranks of the God's Gardeners, an environmentally zealous religious cult mentioned several times throughout Oryx and Crake, often relating to the direct action of their more radicalized members. By today's standards they can easily be seen as insufferably worthy, but in the context of The Year of the Flood's profit-led social chasm they are the common sense counterpoint to the corporate new world order and Atwood goes to great pains to ensure they are cast in a sympathetic light. The leaders of the group - all named either Adam or Eve, depending on sex, followed by a number indicating their heirarchical position within the organization - preach humanist common sense and survivalist-level self-sufficiency, and they urge their followers to prepare for the coming 'Waterless Flood' by stockpiling imperishable food and essential items in an 'Ararat', to be relied upon for survival when the inevitable happens. It remains ambiguous as to whether head honcho Adam One is directly aware of Crake's plan to release a "hot bioform" on an unsuspecting world, but there are definite links between the group and MaddAddam, the coalition of rogue scientists that use Oryx and Crake's Extinctathon as a cover for their subversive projects. Adam One is certainly very tolerant of the erratic movements of Zeb, the coarse, larger-than-life Russian that Ren's mother moves in with after they flee the compounds, and it is more than strongly hinted that Zeb is routinely getting his hands dirty on behalf of the God's Gardeners, and that their benevolent façade might be a thoroughly realised and convincing front for more covert pursuits with a very different agenda.
Oryx and Crake's speculative mythos featured a whole raft of high-concept zoological curiosities: the pigoon, the grotesquely enlarged 'pig-balloon' genetically modified to yield human transplant organs, which unexpectedly employs sophisticated tactics while pack-hunting Snowman, suggesting that its higher brain function is rapidly evolving to match our own; the snat, the misbegotten snake/rat hybrid that very probably escaped its sealed laboratory confines following Crake's plague; the rakunk, a raccoon/skunk crossbreed incorporating the least antisocial aspects of both animal and this season's must-have designer pet. Atwood naturally uses The Year of the Flood to expand on these ideas, with yet more ironically bright Newspeak nomenclature - AnooYoo and SecretBurgers - more gene-spliced lab animals gone feral - the Mo'Hair, a genetically tweaked sheep with a luxuriant coat for human hair transplant [that nevertheless retains a distinctly ovine aroma] and the liobam, a lion-lamb fusion specifically commissioned by the Lion-Isiahist religious movement to realize one minor aspect of religious scripture - and the carte blanche terror of the Painball Arena, where society's deadliest criminals are given free rein [and acid-pellet paintball guns] to fight each other to the death for televised entertainment.
The point of Atwood's apparent flights of fancy, in these days of corporate irresponsibility that straddles the line between the legally permissible and the morally reprehensible, of happy slapping attacks posted on YouTube, of fluorescent rabbits or mice with human ears grafted onto their backs, is that to all intents and purpose we are already at the point she describes in these stories. The all-pervasive Cold War fear of Mutually Assured Destruction might be a distant memory, but the Communist/democratic political divide of yesteryear was comparatively clearly defined and easier to comprehend than today's maelstrom of religio-political jihad and fanatical splinter groups plotting [insert deity]-knows-what. If most aspects of Atwood's current enthusiasm for - or possibly creative responsibility towards - musings on the probable course of mankind's development are already in existence, then how long before some crackpot sleeper cell detonates a suitcase bomb or pops a Petri dish of some weaponized virus? It's scary, relevant stuff.
Oryx and Crake tells the story of the man who remade the world, as remembered by his closest friend; The Year of the Flood is about the ordinary, honourably-intentioned, resourceful - but mostly just plain lucky - people who survive that catastrophe. Margaret Atwood has just recently revealed that she is working on an eponymous third novel in what is already being referred to as the MaddAddam trilogy, which would follow the various characters comprising that group, as well - I hope - as detailing exactly what Zeb was up to during his numerous enigmatic absences from the Gardeners.
The environmental hymns that follow Adam One's toned down, cautionary sermons have been set to music by composer Orville Stoeber and are available on old-fashioned Compacted Diskette.
Jason Courtney's impressive Oryx and Crake-inspired illustrations [including - 'ray! - a snat] can be seen here.
Monday, 1 November 2010
Fleas Release Me
Warning: this will almost definitely make you itch.
Getting a cat was my girlfriend's idea [despite being nearly 40, I can't help referring to her as my girlfriend, mostly for want of a more appropriate term - partner is far too modern [and boring], other half is so twee that it actually triggers my gag reflex, while co-mortgagee seems to be selling the relationship somewhat short]. Ostensibly for reasons of hygiene, I was staunchly opposed to letting some primal, instinct-led beast waltz nonchalantly into our relatively clean living space, carpeting the place liberally with its moultings and intermittently causing digestion-related crises. The idea of an accompanying flea infestation filled me with genuine horror, and having just experienced - and finally seen off - a comprehensive incursion of the little bastards, I can only say that I probably ought not to have relented so easily.
Aah, what a kee-yoodie.
That's probably a bit unfair. While the cat was originally a birthday present from her closest friend, I inevitably warmed to the idea of having a cute little kitten lolloping about the place - hey, I'm not made of stone - and in the intervening years I've sort of appropriated her as my own pet. I'm not overly bothered about her getting onto the kitchen surfaces [expect, perhaps, when she's got back-end cleanliness issues], it's not unknown for me to drop unnecessarily generous slices of cooked meat into her bowl and I don't get annoyed when she wakes me up in the middle of the night by purring loudly and hooking her needle-sharp claws into the soft skin of my throat.
But then: the fleas.
Scientists estimate - very broadly, since fossil records are extremely rare - that fleas have been sucking the life blood of terrestrial species since the late Jurassic period, between around 200 million and 160 million years ago. Their development accompanied that of an increasing population of small nocturnal marsupials, whose descendents have been rolling around and scratching frenziedly behind their ears with their hind legs ever since.
A prehistoric mammal yesterday.
There are numerous species of flea, each needing the blood of the specific animal they've evolved to afflict in order to breed, but as long as there's a plentiful supply of the stuff they're good to go. In the course of its lifetime, a female flea will lay about 600 eggs, which cascade from the host onto the surrounding environment. Temperature and humidity permitting, these eggs will hatch within a few days and, like the godless monsters they are, the worm-like larvae instantly shun the light and crawl to the safety of darker recesses - between floorboards or into the deep, luxuriant pile of your expensive carpets. Once they pupate, these wretched abominations can lie dormant for up to two years, until ground vibrations or a rise in carbon dioxide levels - caused by the proximity of a potential host - trigger the emergence of an adult and begin the hideous cycle anew.
Here's a photo I took on my phone.
It's difficult, in some perverse way, not to admire these perfectly evolved pests, whose bodies boast some incredible features. Propelled by strong limbs, and with backward-facing bristles on their bodies for additional traction, their vertically flattened bodies can sail unhindered between the individual hairs of a host's fur [the chinchilla, incidentally, is one mammal with such a dense coat that it's naturally immune to epidermal parasites - they just can't penetrate the fur. On the downside, they enjoy gnawing through all your electric cables, so it's swings and roundabouts, innit?]. An adult flea's armoured carapace is so resilient that simply squashing them with a fingertip against whatever surface they happen to be standing on has no discernible effect: they have to be crushed flat between hard surfaces - both thumbnails are ideal - which elicits a tiny but satisfying popping sound. The chances of getting them to stay still while doing this are minimal, however, as a remarkable internal mechanism constructed of elastic protein will trigger their freakishly long back legs and enable them to jump horizontally up to about 30 cm - some 200 times their body length. They do this with such rapidity that they seem to disappear before your appalled eyes. Rolling them very tightly between finger and thumb will temporarily disable them, I discovered, allowing a brief window in which to administer the merciful killing stroke.
Satisfying though this might be, it should come as no surprise that dispatching them one at a time is not an effective long-term solution. We must have tried every available domestic product over an increasingly nightmarish six-week period: dozens of cans of spray, packets of powder, sticky rollers, lamps suspended over ultra-adhesive discs, flea combs - including an ineffectual electrified contraption apparently designed to function not as a comb but as a unique device that wastes money and squanders hope in equal measure - our house rapidly became a proving ground for all manner of freely available anti-pest measures.
Here's another one I took. It's got some fancy filter on it or something.
Those weeks of intensive trial and error eventually yielded two predominant [and fairly obvious] essentials for ridding one's habitat of unwanted residents:
1] Dose your beast up with some serious poison. This takes the form of a small capsule of liquid that you spot onto the bare skin of a cat's neck, so it can't wash it straight back off again. The poison is absorbed into the bloodstream and kills anything that drinks it. Simples. Secreted somewhere behind the veritable pornographic smorgasbord that the web offers up with such alacrity, however, are numerous interested parties arguing whether or not fleas have developed an immunity to Frontline, the cheapest and most popular product on the market. Frontline say they haven't; Frontline customers say they have. We gave the cat a fresh dose of the stuff just before she became alive with undesirables, so make of that what you will. What I make of it is this: Frontline is absolute rubbish. Two weeks after a second go-round with slightly pricier competitor Stronghold, the fleas had vacated the premises. Advocate and Advantage come similarly recommended.
2] Blitz your living space. While fleas need an uncontaminated [or Frontline-dosed] cat in order to breed, they'll hop around your house merrily enough, and in the absence of a suitable feline beverage they'll give human claret a bloody good go. For a fee, any reputable pest control service will spray the floors of your house with an odourless insecticide that dries to a powder and will allegedly doom any flea that so much as brushes against it. This treatment remains effective for several weeks afterwards, so you should avoid dysoning during this time [this advice proved superfluous in our case].
Yes, my friends, we may have won this one small battle, but make no mistake: the war against fleas is one of attrition and victory can but be pyrrhic. Borne by rats, they were instrumental in spreading the Bubonic Plague, which wiped out a third of the world's population, and they will doubtless be drinking the irradiated blood of mutant mammals long after we've checked out. Never let your guard down for an instant.
And hey, don't have nightmares!
Thousands of fleas were mortally harmed [and badly Photoshopped] in the making of this post.
Getting a cat was my girlfriend's idea [despite being nearly 40, I can't help referring to her as my girlfriend, mostly for want of a more appropriate term - partner is far too modern [and boring], other half is so twee that it actually triggers my gag reflex, while co-mortgagee seems to be selling the relationship somewhat short]. Ostensibly for reasons of hygiene, I was staunchly opposed to letting some primal, instinct-led beast waltz nonchalantly into our relatively clean living space, carpeting the place liberally with its moultings and intermittently causing digestion-related crises. The idea of an accompanying flea infestation filled me with genuine horror, and having just experienced - and finally seen off - a comprehensive incursion of the little bastards, I can only say that I probably ought not to have relented so easily.
Aah, what a kee-yoodie.That's probably a bit unfair. While the cat was originally a birthday present from her closest friend, I inevitably warmed to the idea of having a cute little kitten lolloping about the place - hey, I'm not made of stone - and in the intervening years I've sort of appropriated her as my own pet. I'm not overly bothered about her getting onto the kitchen surfaces [expect, perhaps, when she's got back-end cleanliness issues], it's not unknown for me to drop unnecessarily generous slices of cooked meat into her bowl and I don't get annoyed when she wakes me up in the middle of the night by purring loudly and hooking her needle-sharp claws into the soft skin of my throat.
But then: the fleas.
Scientists estimate - very broadly, since fossil records are extremely rare - that fleas have been sucking the life blood of terrestrial species since the late Jurassic period, between around 200 million and 160 million years ago. Their development accompanied that of an increasing population of small nocturnal marsupials, whose descendents have been rolling around and scratching frenziedly behind their ears with their hind legs ever since.
A prehistoric mammal yesterday.There are numerous species of flea, each needing the blood of the specific animal they've evolved to afflict in order to breed, but as long as there's a plentiful supply of the stuff they're good to go. In the course of its lifetime, a female flea will lay about 600 eggs, which cascade from the host onto the surrounding environment. Temperature and humidity permitting, these eggs will hatch within a few days and, like the godless monsters they are, the worm-like larvae instantly shun the light and crawl to the safety of darker recesses - between floorboards or into the deep, luxuriant pile of your expensive carpets. Once they pupate, these wretched abominations can lie dormant for up to two years, until ground vibrations or a rise in carbon dioxide levels - caused by the proximity of a potential host - trigger the emergence of an adult and begin the hideous cycle anew.
Here's a photo I took on my phone.It's difficult, in some perverse way, not to admire these perfectly evolved pests, whose bodies boast some incredible features. Propelled by strong limbs, and with backward-facing bristles on their bodies for additional traction, their vertically flattened bodies can sail unhindered between the individual hairs of a host's fur [the chinchilla, incidentally, is one mammal with such a dense coat that it's naturally immune to epidermal parasites - they just can't penetrate the fur. On the downside, they enjoy gnawing through all your electric cables, so it's swings and roundabouts, innit?]. An adult flea's armoured carapace is so resilient that simply squashing them with a fingertip against whatever surface they happen to be standing on has no discernible effect: they have to be crushed flat between hard surfaces - both thumbnails are ideal - which elicits a tiny but satisfying popping sound. The chances of getting them to stay still while doing this are minimal, however, as a remarkable internal mechanism constructed of elastic protein will trigger their freakishly long back legs and enable them to jump horizontally up to about 30 cm - some 200 times their body length. They do this with such rapidity that they seem to disappear before your appalled eyes. Rolling them very tightly between finger and thumb will temporarily disable them, I discovered, allowing a brief window in which to administer the merciful killing stroke.
Satisfying though this might be, it should come as no surprise that dispatching them one at a time is not an effective long-term solution. We must have tried every available domestic product over an increasingly nightmarish six-week period: dozens of cans of spray, packets of powder, sticky rollers, lamps suspended over ultra-adhesive discs, flea combs - including an ineffectual electrified contraption apparently designed to function not as a comb but as a unique device that wastes money and squanders hope in equal measure - our house rapidly became a proving ground for all manner of freely available anti-pest measures.
Here's another one I took. It's got some fancy filter on it or something.Those weeks of intensive trial and error eventually yielded two predominant [and fairly obvious] essentials for ridding one's habitat of unwanted residents:
1] Dose your beast up with some serious poison. This takes the form of a small capsule of liquid that you spot onto the bare skin of a cat's neck, so it can't wash it straight back off again. The poison is absorbed into the bloodstream and kills anything that drinks it. Simples. Secreted somewhere behind the veritable pornographic smorgasbord that the web offers up with such alacrity, however, are numerous interested parties arguing whether or not fleas have developed an immunity to Frontline, the cheapest and most popular product on the market. Frontline say they haven't; Frontline customers say they have. We gave the cat a fresh dose of the stuff just before she became alive with undesirables, so make of that what you will. What I make of it is this: Frontline is absolute rubbish. Two weeks after a second go-round with slightly pricier competitor Stronghold, the fleas had vacated the premises. Advocate and Advantage come similarly recommended.
2] Blitz your living space. While fleas need an uncontaminated [or Frontline-dosed] cat in order to breed, they'll hop around your house merrily enough, and in the absence of a suitable feline beverage they'll give human claret a bloody good go. For a fee, any reputable pest control service will spray the floors of your house with an odourless insecticide that dries to a powder and will allegedly doom any flea that so much as brushes against it. This treatment remains effective for several weeks afterwards, so you should avoid dysoning during this time [this advice proved superfluous in our case].
Yes, my friends, we may have won this one small battle, but make no mistake: the war against fleas is one of attrition and victory can but be pyrrhic. Borne by rats, they were instrumental in spreading the Bubonic Plague, which wiped out a third of the world's population, and they will doubtless be drinking the irradiated blood of mutant mammals long after we've checked out. Never let your guard down for an instant.
And hey, don't have nightmares!
Thousands of fleas were mortally harmed [and badly Photoshopped] in the making of this post.Friday, 13 August 2010
Sheersy's Top Five: Novels
Finally, a post format I can run and run with.
I love nothing better than making lists [mmm - lovely, lovely lists], and formulating my Top Five in a particular genre is something I just can't help doing. It's perfectly in keeping with my various other OCD tendencies, so I'm not especially concerned about it. Anyway, Nick Hornby got a novel out of it, so back off.
Comics excepted, prose fiction rates higher on my pastime scale than music, film or videogames, but there'll be plenty of time to cover all of those later.
Covers shown are not necessarily the ones I own, just the ones I most covet:
#5 H.G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
Wells's hugely influential 'scientific romance' is original steampunk apocalypse of the first order, as Victorian England becomes the bridgehead for invasion by a warlike, technologically superior alien race. Having crash-landed in massive interplanetary cylinders, the Martians mobilize now-iconic armoured tripods and effortlessly decimate the British Army's meagre resistance. Faced with the enormity of the catastrophic events unfolding around him, our unnamed protagonist is powerless to do anything except catalogue his traumatic experiences as he travels the corpse-choked wasteland. Apart from a few brief moments of triumph - a direct hit by artillery on one tripod and HMS Thunder Child's suicidal assault on a further two - hope for survival of the human race looks increasingly bleak. Just when things couldn't look any worse, however, Wells drops a solid platinum plot device bomb - a beautifully simple resolution that gets us off the hook without cheating [I think I'm supposed to say ++++++SPOILERS++++++]: with no immunity to simple earthly bacteria, the Martians all snuffle themselves to death and everyone can get back to the serious business of expanding the bally Empire, what?
Cover designers have been massively over-egging the whole tripod imagery thing for decades, but the 2005 Finnish edition shown here is pretty much spot on.
#4 Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves
Danielewski's debut novel revolves around a fictional documentary called The Navidson Record. This film investigates the Navidson family's new home, which they notice - and corroborate by measuring - is slightly bigger on the inside than the outside. Shortly after this discrepancy is confirmed, the house starts to grow additional hallways and corridors at random, and a door eventually appears that opens onto a vast underground labyrinth of featureless grey stone. The Navidsons call in experienced adventurer Holloway Roberts, who mounts a full-on expedition into the Stygian depths - then things get really weird.
This is a pretty tough book to read. It's a doorstop, for a start, and weaves together the viewpoints of dozens of different characters, each in their own distinct font type. The book is littered with hidden codes, some sentences for instance spelling out additional messages in the first letter of each word. Danielewski also structures the text to reflect the events of the story, so when characters are exploring the dark miles of empty hallway beneath the house the text is crammed into tiny, claustral boxes in the centre of the page; later, when the characters are chased through the labyrinth by an entity - either real or imagined - there are only a few words per page for the duration of the pursuit. Certain sections feature blocks of text embedded within other text, while others have the text printed upside-down, backwards or following spiral patterns around the page. This catalogue of stylistic trickery - an example, apparently, of ergodic literature - adds to the reader's general sense of disorientation and unease. House of Leaves is also notable for its use of detailed, faux-academic footnotes, a literary quirk employed to similar expository effect in both Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman [the footnotes in the latter become more and more absurdly extensive as the novel progresses and eventually overwhelm the actual story].
Despite all of that - and I'm a lazy reader at the best of times - House of Leaves delivers more satisfying, high-concept horror than any of yer Stephen Kings or yer Conrad Williamses.
#3 Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake
In the not-too-distant future, the last remaining human - Snowman - struggles to survive in a genetically unrecognizable environment of blank-canvas posthumans and dangerously intelligent wild animals. His story is told in a series of flashbacks, beginning in an unspecified near-future where corporations house their ultra-rich employees in sealed compounds, while the poor languish in abject poverty in the neglected pleeblands outside. In his youth, Snowman was Jimmy, a privileged boy growing up in the compound of a corporation that his father worked for. He becomes friends with Glenn, who goes by the alias Crake throughout the book [the player name he adopts for the computer game Extinctathon - a sort of bleak-minded Pokémon that deals with extinct species]. Jimmy and Crake both obsess over a young Asian girl whose image they find on a child porn site, and when Crake later becomes a brilliant geneticist he hires a woman who may or may not have been that anonymous girl. She takes the name Oryx and acts as tutor to Crake's genetically tweaked humanity - the Crakers - as well as a lover to both men. Catastrophe eventually strikes when Crake's god complex goes into overdrive, and he sets idealistic but unhinged plans in motion for a new world order in which humanity plays no part.
Atwood is no stranger to satiro-dystopian sci fi [or spec fi, as she would prefer us to think of it], having previously penned The Handmaid's Tale, a scathing critique of patriarchal, organized religion, and more recently The Year of the Flood, itself a semi-sequel to Oryx and Crake. Here, she has grim fun concocting bland and simultaneously terrifying corporate entities - HelthWyzer, OrganInc, RejoovenEsence - and consumer products - the quivering, headless, limbless organism lab-designed to yield a ChickieNobs Bucket O'Nubbins. Often unfairly criticized for perfunctory characterization in favour of making a point, this presents a brilliantly unsettling vision of a future that's almost upon us.
#2 Cormac McCarthy - The Road
An emaciated father and son trudge the blasted landscape of a world that has been devastated by some unspecified [but probably nuclear] global catastrophe. Ash clouds obscure the sun and nearly all flora and fauna have died out. For the few human survivors, life has become a constant, desperate search for food, taking care to avoid the roving cannibal gangs that lie in wait or patrol the highways. Our protagonists heap essential provisions in a battered shopping cart, with a rear view motorbike mirror fitted to its handle to prevent unexpected attack. The environment they travel is littered with fresh atrocities that display not so much man's inhumanity to man, but the depths to which people will inevitably sink when faced with the dismal choice between survival and starvation. The father is single-minded in his mission to reach the coast in the hope of finding a better existence, and remains immensely suspicious - often with good reason - of other survivors. He can tell from his worsening, wracking cough that his time is short and is intent on instilling in his son both a strong moral code and a dependable survival instinct. By contrast, the boy is idealistic and willing to see the best in those they meet, sometimes putting the pair in danger but more often facilitating their few benevolent encounters.
I make time to scan the Grauniad's books supplement every Saturday and bought The Road on the back of Alan Warner's captivating review. The book is sparsely written and necessarily grim - the pop promo post-punk posturing of Mad Max is nowhere to be seen in The Road's feudal drudgery - but compelling in its depiction of the world that will probably exist in those last terrible moments before mankind's extinction. I'm big enough to admit that I had a good old cry at the end, which is testament to the emotional intensity of this outstanding work.
#1 David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
Mitchell's third novel still rates as his most ambitious. Six stories, each written in markedly different popular literary styles, are nested within each other like a Russian doll; only the sixth tale, at the centre of the book, remains intact. The other five stories are interrupted halfway through, some of them mid-sentence [when I came across the first instance of this, I was convinced I'd been sent a duff copy]. The second half of the book then resolves each of the stories in reverse order. The tales span several centuries, from the first story's nineteenth century nautical yarn to the sixth's far future, post-apocalypse [spot a theme yet?] adventure, and Mitchell strongly hints that the later protagonists are direct descendents of the earlier ones, since they all have a unique, comet-shaped birthmark just below their right shoulder blade. During the events of their own story, each protagonist also has cause to read the recorded story of the preceding main character, so that these fictional characters experience the various stories - and their interruptions - simultaneously with the reader.
I was literally knocked sideways when I first read this - it's an absolute blinder. On the strength of Cloud Atlas, I bought Mitchell's previous books - Ghostwritten and number9dream [both excellent] - and immediately jumped on Black Swan Green as soon as it was published. I'll admit to having been somewhat slower on the uptake with The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but it's on the list.
Five honourable mentions: Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby; Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell; George and Wheedon Grossmith - Diary of a Nobody; DBC Pierre - Vernon God Little; Luther Blissett - Q.
I love nothing better than making lists [mmm - lovely, lovely lists], and formulating my Top Five in a particular genre is something I just can't help doing. It's perfectly in keeping with my various other OCD tendencies, so I'm not especially concerned about it. Anyway, Nick Hornby got a novel out of it, so back off.
Comics excepted, prose fiction rates higher on my pastime scale than music, film or videogames, but there'll be plenty of time to cover all of those later.
Covers shown are not necessarily the ones I own, just the ones I most covet:
#5 H.G. Wells - The War of the Worlds
Wells's hugely influential 'scientific romance' is original steampunk apocalypse of the first order, as Victorian England becomes the bridgehead for invasion by a warlike, technologically superior alien race. Having crash-landed in massive interplanetary cylinders, the Martians mobilize now-iconic armoured tripods and effortlessly decimate the British Army's meagre resistance. Faced with the enormity of the catastrophic events unfolding around him, our unnamed protagonist is powerless to do anything except catalogue his traumatic experiences as he travels the corpse-choked wasteland. Apart from a few brief moments of triumph - a direct hit by artillery on one tripod and HMS Thunder Child's suicidal assault on a further two - hope for survival of the human race looks increasingly bleak. Just when things couldn't look any worse, however, Wells drops a solid platinum plot device bomb - a beautifully simple resolution that gets us off the hook without cheating [I think I'm supposed to say ++++++SPOILERS++++++]: with no immunity to simple earthly bacteria, the Martians all snuffle themselves to death and everyone can get back to the serious business of expanding the bally Empire, what?Cover designers have been massively over-egging the whole tripod imagery thing for decades, but the 2005 Finnish edition shown here is pretty much spot on.
#4 Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves
Danielewski's debut novel revolves around a fictional documentary called The Navidson Record. This film investigates the Navidson family's new home, which they notice - and corroborate by measuring - is slightly bigger on the inside than the outside. Shortly after this discrepancy is confirmed, the house starts to grow additional hallways and corridors at random, and a door eventually appears that opens onto a vast underground labyrinth of featureless grey stone. The Navidsons call in experienced adventurer Holloway Roberts, who mounts a full-on expedition into the Stygian depths - then things get really weird.This is a pretty tough book to read. It's a doorstop, for a start, and weaves together the viewpoints of dozens of different characters, each in their own distinct font type. The book is littered with hidden codes, some sentences for instance spelling out additional messages in the first letter of each word. Danielewski also structures the text to reflect the events of the story, so when characters are exploring the dark miles of empty hallway beneath the house the text is crammed into tiny, claustral boxes in the centre of the page; later, when the characters are chased through the labyrinth by an entity - either real or imagined - there are only a few words per page for the duration of the pursuit. Certain sections feature blocks of text embedded within other text, while others have the text printed upside-down, backwards or following spiral patterns around the page. This catalogue of stylistic trickery - an example, apparently, of ergodic literature - adds to the reader's general sense of disorientation and unease. House of Leaves is also notable for its use of detailed, faux-academic footnotes, a literary quirk employed to similar expository effect in both Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell and Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman [the footnotes in the latter become more and more absurdly extensive as the novel progresses and eventually overwhelm the actual story].
Despite all of that - and I'm a lazy reader at the best of times - House of Leaves delivers more satisfying, high-concept horror than any of yer Stephen Kings or yer Conrad Williamses.
#3 Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake
In the not-too-distant future, the last remaining human - Snowman - struggles to survive in a genetically unrecognizable environment of blank-canvas posthumans and dangerously intelligent wild animals. His story is told in a series of flashbacks, beginning in an unspecified near-future where corporations house their ultra-rich employees in sealed compounds, while the poor languish in abject poverty in the neglected pleeblands outside. In his youth, Snowman was Jimmy, a privileged boy growing up in the compound of a corporation that his father worked for. He becomes friends with Glenn, who goes by the alias Crake throughout the book [the player name he adopts for the computer game Extinctathon - a sort of bleak-minded Pokémon that deals with extinct species]. Jimmy and Crake both obsess over a young Asian girl whose image they find on a child porn site, and when Crake later becomes a brilliant geneticist he hires a woman who may or may not have been that anonymous girl. She takes the name Oryx and acts as tutor to Crake's genetically tweaked humanity - the Crakers - as well as a lover to both men. Catastrophe eventually strikes when Crake's god complex goes into overdrive, and he sets idealistic but unhinged plans in motion for a new world order in which humanity plays no part.Atwood is no stranger to satiro-dystopian sci fi [or spec fi, as she would prefer us to think of it], having previously penned The Handmaid's Tale, a scathing critique of patriarchal, organized religion, and more recently The Year of the Flood, itself a semi-sequel to Oryx and Crake. Here, she has grim fun concocting bland and simultaneously terrifying corporate entities - HelthWyzer, OrganInc, RejoovenEsence - and consumer products - the quivering, headless, limbless organism lab-designed to yield a ChickieNobs Bucket O'Nubbins. Often unfairly criticized for perfunctory characterization in favour of making a point, this presents a brilliantly unsettling vision of a future that's almost upon us.
#2 Cormac McCarthy - The Road
An emaciated father and son trudge the blasted landscape of a world that has been devastated by some unspecified [but probably nuclear] global catastrophe. Ash clouds obscure the sun and nearly all flora and fauna have died out. For the few human survivors, life has become a constant, desperate search for food, taking care to avoid the roving cannibal gangs that lie in wait or patrol the highways. Our protagonists heap essential provisions in a battered shopping cart, with a rear view motorbike mirror fitted to its handle to prevent unexpected attack. The environment they travel is littered with fresh atrocities that display not so much man's inhumanity to man, but the depths to which people will inevitably sink when faced with the dismal choice between survival and starvation. The father is single-minded in his mission to reach the coast in the hope of finding a better existence, and remains immensely suspicious - often with good reason - of other survivors. He can tell from his worsening, wracking cough that his time is short and is intent on instilling in his son both a strong moral code and a dependable survival instinct. By contrast, the boy is idealistic and willing to see the best in those they meet, sometimes putting the pair in danger but more often facilitating their few benevolent encounters.I make time to scan the Grauniad's books supplement every Saturday and bought The Road on the back of Alan Warner's captivating review. The book is sparsely written and necessarily grim - the pop promo post-punk posturing of Mad Max is nowhere to be seen in The Road's feudal drudgery - but compelling in its depiction of the world that will probably exist in those last terrible moments before mankind's extinction. I'm big enough to admit that I had a good old cry at the end, which is testament to the emotional intensity of this outstanding work.
#1 David Mitchell - Cloud Atlas
Mitchell's third novel still rates as his most ambitious. Six stories, each written in markedly different popular literary styles, are nested within each other like a Russian doll; only the sixth tale, at the centre of the book, remains intact. The other five stories are interrupted halfway through, some of them mid-sentence [when I came across the first instance of this, I was convinced I'd been sent a duff copy]. The second half of the book then resolves each of the stories in reverse order. The tales span several centuries, from the first story's nineteenth century nautical yarn to the sixth's far future, post-apocalypse [spot a theme yet?] adventure, and Mitchell strongly hints that the later protagonists are direct descendents of the earlier ones, since they all have a unique, comet-shaped birthmark just below their right shoulder blade. During the events of their own story, each protagonist also has cause to read the recorded story of the preceding main character, so that these fictional characters experience the various stories - and their interruptions - simultaneously with the reader.I was literally knocked sideways when I first read this - it's an absolute blinder. On the strength of Cloud Atlas, I bought Mitchell's previous books - Ghostwritten and number9dream [both excellent] - and immediately jumped on Black Swan Green as soon as it was published. I'll admit to having been somewhat slower on the uptake with The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, but it's on the list.
Five honourable mentions: Chuck Palahniuk - Lullaby; Susanna Clarke - Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell; George and Wheedon Grossmith - Diary of a Nobody; DBC Pierre - Vernon God Little; Luther Blissett - Q.
Tuesday, 3 August 2010
A Moving Experience
We've just recently moved house, which, popular opinion would have it, is one of the most stressful things a civilized, middle class Westerner can hope to endure in their life.
I can confirm that the overall experience was, by turns, tedious, tentatively hopeful, enormously frustrating, preposterously frantic and - finally - liberating, although tinged with despair at the amount of work that now surrounds us like an unavoidable and somehow inhabitable 'To Do' list. Had anyone been documenting my facial expressions throughout the whole sorry process - a Brighton art student, perhaps, or [I flatter myself] a stalker - I might well have ended up resembling that unnaturally gurning brat from the tin plate Fry's Chocolate ads you might see on the platform of a preservation railway station.
I present merely the highlights:
I can confirm that the overall experience was, by turns, tedious, tentatively hopeful, enormously frustrating, preposterously frantic and - finally - liberating, although tinged with despair at the amount of work that now surrounds us like an unavoidable and somehow inhabitable 'To Do' list. Had anyone been documenting my facial expressions throughout the whole sorry process - a Brighton art student, perhaps, or [I flatter myself] a stalker - I might well have ended up resembling that unnaturally gurning brat from the tin plate Fry's Chocolate ads you might see on the platform of a preservation railway station.
I present merely the highlights:- Our buyers exhibited a tentative grasp of the notion of honour, incrementally nudging the sale price down at every opportunity. I console myself that only now, once they've had time to absorb the scale and extent of the dilapidations - the rising damp, the last-legs double glazing, the unreliable bungaroosh walls - will they have realized precisely who was stitching up whom.
- On the day before we were due to move, the back door of our old house literally fell out of its comprehensively rotted frame. That's Sod's law in action, right there. Luckily my Dad's only decent O-Level was woodwork, so he did a bang-up job of making it look like nothing had ever happened. Thanks Dad!
- The removal company of the house we were moving to let them down at the last minute [allegedly - it's more likely that the dopey losers were out of it on joss sticks and patchouli oil and only realized they were supposed to be moving out when our van rocked up], so we couldn't start unloading anything until the starlings were beginning their final mass congregation of the day.
- Their disorganization meant that the new house was not in the least bit clean and, among other insanitary atrocities, one of our hapless volunteers hauled about a full wigsworth of predominantly human hair out from beneath the kitchen units. We're still fighting an minor insurgency of cat fleas they left as a moving-in present. Thanks a frigging bunch, movey-out people.
- The sofa bed - which I will admit is an awesome piece of equipment, ideal for blocking the main routes in to or out of cities - wouldn't fit either downstairs into the living room or upstairs to any of the bedrooms, so I came back from my final sweep of the old house to find it parked in the garage. We know some fairly open-minded people [which makes it sound like we're swingers - we aren't], but I don't think even the most easy-going among them would take too kindly to being put up right next to the washing machine. As luck would have it, our neighbours a] are accommodating types and b] have already had their lounge banisters removed, so we could just about manoeuvre it through their house, over the garden fence and in through our back door. Thanks Steve and Claire!
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