Dispatches from a moving time

Well, the process of moving continues – silence for the last week or so as I’ve been deep in final moving and decorations (with hugely invaluable help and support from H) before the new carpets go in at Allumination Central. More busy-ness continues – furniture ordering, sorting estate agents, etc, before the upcoming move to Stoke Newington. Yup, the Allumination Central mothership is relocating! More news on this as happens.

So, a quick post today, because there really hasn’t been too much pondering time of late. And, in salute of my upcoming new neighbourhood, let’s hear from Iain Sinclair as he wanders Abney Park Cemetery, our soon-to-be-local nuttily gothic burial ground, and discurses fascinatingly on the literary and general history of Stoke Newington, Hackney and London in general.

And I’m off to walk round the flat barefoot again – why didn’t I get new carpets years ago? Hey ho…

 

 

 

Electric Exorcist Miles

It’s a little known fact that ‘Dark Magus’, Miles Davis’ 1977 live album recording a 1974 concert in New York, made it into Q Magazine’s 2001 list of the heaviest albums of all time. It’s a ferocious funk metal attack, with Miles soloing dementedly over the top, that more than holds its own against heaviosity from luminaries including The MC5, Swans, Black Sabbath and Metallica. And it’s only one of the highlights of his extraordinary ‘Electric Miles’ phase in the 70s, where – as Julian Cope put it – he worked his way to an ‘epitome of music shamanism’ by creating a series of astonishing double albums that rock harder than a flotilla of out of control battleships crewed by demented Zen masters on speed.

They’re also a great way of flushing out last night’s cobblers; but alas, I can’t put them up here. Rather – go explore! Here’s Cope’s full article on Electric Miles. And then, go buy! Dark Magus, Get Up With It, Agartha, Pangaea, Live Evil, On the Corner – all deep, dark, heavy and magnificent. What I can post is this, from YouTube – a rather murkily mixed 16 minutes or so of the Dark Magus band at its peak. Enjoy!

Why I’m writing a Spanish Inquisition cop show

Well, I’ve only ever been able to see ‘The Exorcist’ as a comedy, and if you believe Martin Shaw in the BBC’s nutty new exorco-drama ‘Apparitions’, that probably means I’m possessed. Hey ho, we all have our crosses to bear (or rather, pitchforks). In my defense, the scene in ‘The Exorcist’ that first set me off is undeniably a bit nutty. It’s the one where the psychiatrists come and visit Regan. The bed’s levitating; a head’s spinning round; the wardrobe’s dancing; and the shrinks confidently declare that it’s all in her mind, with a positively surreal determination to deny reality that was really a bit too Monty Python for me.

Alas, ‘Apparitions’ – just watched on BBC iPlayer – wasn’t as entertaining. In fact, it left me feeling positively depressed. Martin Shaw is – as ever – elegantly smooth as an exorcist who bucks authority (in classic cop show style, his grumpy boss even demands his exorcist badge at one point – and of course Shaw pops up a couple of scenes later, exorcising away. I go my own way, dammit! Or, in his rather more priestly take on that particular cliche, ‘I can only promise to follow my conscience’.), in this opening episode dealing with a young girl, quite possibly the reincarnation of Mother Teresa (yup, that’s what seems to be going on), whose dad is possessed. And it’s the way that that possession is handled, and the show’s related condemnation of atheism, that left me feeling so bummed out.

So, let’s start with possession. Martin Shaw’s nemesis – the possessed dad – was, it transpires, taken ill in India, rushed to Mother Teresa’s hospital, and there baptised without his knowledge. This is the root of his problems; Shaw tells us that, if baptism isn’t followed by an acceptance of God, a void is created that demons rush into. And he backs this up with scriptural quotation, so we’re not just hearing this from him; we’re hearing it from the church. This isn’t opinion, the show makes a point of telling us; it’s doctrine. And, given that we’re told this by an experienced exorcist, in this dramatic context, it’s not just doctrine either – it’s fact.

So, what’s the problem? Well, it’s in a very reasonable objection that Possessed Dad raises. He asks about the Hindus and Muslims that are brought into the hospital, and is outraged that they should be forcibly converted. Of course, within the context of the show’s rhetoric, everything he says is false; presumably his outrage is intended to create in us, the credulous audience, a sense that in fact it’s rather good that these non-believers are getting forcibly Christianised. That’s well on the way to being rather offensive; but that’s not all. In the dramatic world that the show creates for us, the forcibly baptised are in fact empty vessels for demons. It’s unlikely that a Hindu or Muslim, unknowingly baptised, will then embrace a Christian God; and so they become the most fertile voids, wherein demons may dwell.

Ugh. And Ugh, too, to the show’s treatment of atheism. Earlier on, Possessed Dad’s daughter tries to convince a doubting Shaw that her dad is possessed. Her proof? Richard Dawkins books, ‘Jerry Springer – the Opera’ on the CD player, and so on. Atheism is here a direct path to damnation; thought independent of church dictat a sure road to destructiveness in this world (Possessed Dad ends the episode by nearly, it’s implied, raping and killing his daughter) and eternal flame in the next. Is this kind of boneheadedly authoritarian theology the kind of nonsense my licence fee is funding? I’m going to be on the phone to the Beeb tomorrow…

And I’ll have one final thing to complain about, too. Because this show really is putting across a theology of command, and that’s made very clear when we find out how Possessed Dad’s daughter was conceived. Her seed was sown on the day of Mother Teresa’s death; Possessed Dad and Mrs Possessed Dad were in Kensington Gardens, mourning the death of Diana. At least, Mrs PD was; Possessed Dad dragged her into the bushes for a quick one, ostensibly to celebrate Diana’s death but in fact to celebrate Mother T’s death. A fascinating moment, linking temporal and spiritual authority in a way not seen since the obsolescence of the divine right of kings.

So, all in all a bit of a waste of time, this programme. And (not wanting to rant excessively after the X-Files explosion below) I haven’t even mentioned the truly bizarre treatment of the show’s only gay character, an ex-leper who’s now almost a priest, until he’s cast out of the church and falls prey to the temptation to visit a sauna – ‘The Hot Room’ (because Hell’s, like, hot, and he’s going into somewhere like Hell! Good grief, I’m embarrassed to even type this stuff. Anyway…) – and as a result is flayed alive by a knife wielding demon who – we have earlier learnt – also hangs out outside the Vatican, selling the Italian version of ‘The Big Issue’. Hmm, casual – and clod-hoppingly literal – demonization of the homeless, too.

So, who’s this witless, propagandistic, two dimensional, utterly conservative nonsense aimed at? Well, certainly not people like me. I would say the deeply, narrowly religious, but I suspect that they’ll have turned off after the first five minutes, where we learn that -apparently – Mother Teresa spent the last few hours of life either under demonic attack, or actively possessed by demons. Right…

So I can’t see anyone really enjoying it (except, perhaps, for Martin Shaw’s mum, and she kind of has to), and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it. So why have I even written about it? Partially, because this kind of unpleasantly subtexted nonsense should always be dissected and exposed for the offensive cobblers that it is, and partially because I still can’t quite believe that something quite as witlessly regressive as this is being serialised on BBC1 at 9pm on Thursday nights. If nothing else, it should lay to rest the myth of the dominance of the liberal media – along with those other myths about intelligent media, challenging media, entertaining media and even just basically well thought through media.

And what now for me? Well, I’m off to get stuck into a script about a heroic crime solving heretic torturing demon fighting member of that wonderfully sympathetic organisation, the Spanish Inquisition – if I get it in front of whoever commissioned ‘Apparitions’, I’ll be a TV big shot before you know it…

The return of the Entropy Circus

Well, it’s been a busy few weeks at allumination central; I’m packing the flat up ready to move, establishing myself as a freelancer, and (for various reasons) whizzing up and down the country between Hebden Bridge, Glasgow and London. So, alas, little time for weird pondering.

However, there has been time for music – and so, as a prelude to the full return of allumination, here’s some music from the mighty Zali Krishna. The clip below is my favourite one of his on Youtube; the rest are available at his channel page, here. Enjoy!

Batty falls from the stars

Screens in Blade Runner; for a movie that’s always been billed as a key cyberpunk progenitor, they are – for the most part – remarkably large, and remarkably one way. A core essence of cyberpunk is the hackable system, the two way engagement with the data stream, but there’s precious little of that in this film. Visuals float above Los Angeles, words booming down on its denizens, showing them worlds they can watch but never – it seems – interact with, or enter.

For me, those screens have more to do with the cinematic than the cyber. A cinema audience sits in darkness, visions washing over them; watching worlds they can imagine but never reach or participate in. The screens in Blade Runner make their audience potential migrants – ‘A new life awaits you in the off world colonies… a chance to begin again in a golden world of opportunity and adventure’ – but we know that only the most uncommon will ever really leave the dark city.

It’s the same with so many movies; sitting in the dark, watching people ‘begin again’ (how common a trope is that? The life restarted, the ordinary world left behind) in ‘a golden world of opportunity and adventure’. We too, as audience, become non-migrating migrants; enough of an urge to move on to make us unhappy with our lot, to make us want this kind of escapism, this promise that there could be somewhere else, that we could all be someone else; enough of a sense of stasis to keep us in our seats, to keep us in our lives, unchanged after all.

And yet, there can be glimpses; the other can break through. Roy Batty makes it to earth, and teaches Rick Deckard how to be human. Deckard’s flight is Batty’s in reverse; more tactful in his movements, needing to be less revolutionary, his leap out of the city will (we feel) be sustained, tacitly supported by his colleagues. He can take Rachael, and step out of the picture; away from the great floating dreams and – ironically – away from the screen we’ve been passively watching him on. To enter fulfilment is to leave narrative behind, to leave the sense of absence it’s founded on.

But there is a screen in Blade Runner that does foreshadow the cyber; the esper. Deckard uses it to burrow into the Replicant’s lives, revealing the social connections between them, understanding them as a social process, a network. He explores the room they’re in as he were almost there himself; able to watch, but not to touch. A lovely image of the working of the net, both in its interactivity and its subtle emphasis on emotional inter-relationship. But by the end of the film, that’s a screen he can step away from, too; he no longer needs to dissect the relationships of others, because he has one of his own, and will live it for himself.

Jesus wants me for a loyalty card special offer

Jesus called me yesterday and tried to sell me a 50% discount card, valid apparently at most of the best shops in the UK, including (He made a special point of telling me) Boots*. When I tried to find out more, He said he was going to put me through to His supervisor, at which point I rang off.

I can say no to Jesus without feeling too guilty – He is after all semi-human, and so gets that some of us might not actually need 50% discount cards, even if we do shop regularly at Boots – but I felt that I was risking lightning bolts etc if I turned down his boss, so thought it best to retire gracefully before this became an issue.

I do salute the practicality of His second coming tho’, and His very direct concern for those of us struggling in credit crash hit Britain. Perhaps I’ve also been misunderstanding all those robot phone calls offering me free holidays in Florida – could they be divine, too? Perhaps there is a frustrated choir of robot angels somewhere in Heaven, baffled as to why we persist in refusing their chirpily automatic munificence. Ah, the ingratitude of personkind…

Anyway, quite apart from religious visitations, I was – as regular readers will realise is completely unsurprising – going on about Ezra Pound the other night, having first been discussing the pleasures and miseries of being writing fantasy. But a fascinating comment from the person I was talking to. ‘Of course you like Pound’, she said, ‘you’re into D&D’.

Now that’s a really fascinating comment, because it reveals the previously unsuspected (at least by me) link between RPGs and certain Modernist / Post Modernist poetic strategies. Let me explain…

Key to much of the more interesting modern poetry is its demand that the reader becomes an active participant in creating meaning in it. The poem offers never quite enough information to finally resolve; the final decision as to any meaning(s) inherent in the text comes from the reader.

Remind you of anything? Yup, D&D and its ilk. RPGs aren’t narratives; they’re construction kits for narratives, a set of open fields, each demanding player participation to be completed, and each having no particular final meaning without that participation.

So, formally, there’s a really interesting comparison to be made there. And there’s another point of contact there too; RPGs and strange and strange and interesting modern poetry are very often sneered at in very similar terms.

They’re arcane; they’re esoteric; they’re the preserve of geeks; they have no real aesthetic credibility or worth, instead being little more than a self-indulgent waste of time that encourage flight from, rather than engagement with, reality.

Fascinating… and fascinating that a demand for action and engagement, rather than just passive enjoyment, on the part of the reader / player, should lead to such vituperation. Is not being told what to think by a text really so traumatic? Apparently so, at least for some.

As for me, pretty much all of the really interesting people I’ve ever met have either been dedicated RPGers or deeply into seriously odd and usually pretty incomprehensible poetry – so I know where my loyalties lie!**

*no, really, He did

** clearly if Jesus calls back and turns out NOT to be either an RPGer or a poetry geek, I’m screwed

A short post about hauntings

Late night Bank Holiday Monday, and rather than enjoying the delights of the Notting Hill Carnival the hard working writer of Weird Fiction finds himself enjoying a glass of whisky and the Amicus portmanteau semi-classic ‘Vault of Horror’. Terry Thomas, Tom Baker (in possibly the maddest ginger false beard and wig combo in cinema), Anna Massey, various others in the same film; the opening music an enjoyable melodramatic rip-off of Berlioz’s ‘Symphonie Fantastique’; the whole thing set in Millbank Tower, foreshadowing the horror that was to be New Labour; what’s not to like? Not much, but alas even with the best will in the world it’s well worth watching, but it’s not a classic.

For true portmanteau brilliance, I always go back to ‘Dead of Night’; authentically haunted black and white chills. It’s best known segment is the Michael Redgrave / ventriloquist’s dummy tale, but the story that always spooked me was the ‘Christmas Party’ section. An English country mansion; jolly chaps and chapesses playing hide and seek; a lovely young gel comes upon a mysterious child in a tucked away bedroom; talks to him, returns to the party, realises he’s in fact a ghost; and says, ‘I’m not scared. I’m not scared’, and then sits down, rather too quickly.

Such a subtle moment; horror registered not through gore or mayhem, but rather through the silencing of an otherwise irrepressible county girl, the kind of woman that John Betjeman would have romanced shocked into inactivity through an encounter with something absolutely outside her frame of reference. In a way, it can be read as a brilliant shorthand summary of the whole English ghost story tradition; the safe, dreaming idyll of the country house, the golf course, the bachelor apartment, the coastal path, shattered instantly and absolutely by the intrusion of the other. ‘I’m not scared. I’m not scared.’ – all the response that repression allows, but absolutely a lie in the face of a broken certain world.

Roots of the Summer (and some great news!)

Well, I’m off to Devon and beyond for my summer holidays over the next week or two – with H, of course – so there’s going to be an August hiatus on the blog.

But, before I go, first of all some great news – Black Static have picked up ‘Changeling’, my story of homecomings, marital discord and fairy hunting. Very exciting! More news of exactly when it’ll be in print as I get it. There’s also another *interesting thing* on the go, but for the moment I’m going to keep quiet about that…

And in salute to the season, (and to come down a bit after last post’s more than a little manic X-rant), here’s the summeriest thing I’ve heard in a long time, courtesy of mighty South London dub inflected rapper Roots Manuva. Enjoy, and happy Augustitude!

And I couldn’t resist putting this up too – a classic tune, and a great video where Roots returns to his – erm – roots by hitting his old school’s sports day…

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDWgtB_MD24 width=”400″]

THE SENTENCE THAT MAN WAS NEVER MEANT TO READ (or, why the new X-Files movie stinks)

A quick post today, as – what with one thing and another – I’m running around at high speed. So, a high speed rant about what a total dog the new X-Files movie is…. As it is an epic of badness, a truly colossal set of plot and ethics blunders, a movie that gives duncery a bad name, a Fuckwitiad of an epic of an idiotic abortion of a waste of celluloid that should have never been made. And, come the end of the post, it’s going to have me typing THE SENTENCE THAT MAN WAS NEVER MEANT TO READ. I can’t type it here, because reading it will bring about the apocalypse. Sorry, but the new X-Files movie is that bad. I have to type THE SENTENCE THAT ETC.

Oh, and this review is going to be full of spoilers, but this film is so awful I really don’t think anyone should see it (in fact dissing it feels like some kind of religious calling – perhaps I am the new SF fuelled religious guru de nos jours, and can found a religion based on doing the exact opposite of everything that happens in the X-Files movie? We shall see. If I am driving a gold plated Rolls Royce this time next year, you’ll know it’s worked, and perhaps some positive thing will have come out of seeing this eye gougingly painful acrapalypse of dismality. Anyway…)

So, why’s is it so bad? Well, at the most basic level, it feels like it’s several rewrites off a finished draft. For example, there’s a weird ambiguity about whether Mulder and Scully are living together or not. At the start of the film, Scully drives off into the middle of nowhere to find him living in bachelor-y isolation; suddenly they’re in bed together; suddenly they’re splitting up (!) and Scully’s saying she’s not coming home again, which upsets Mulder deeply. Have they been living together? When did that happen? WTF?

Then, there’s a truly nutty twenty four hour sequences where Scully stays up all night bustin’ crime in the freezing fields of Virginia, before going to work, arguing for the life of a dying orphan she’s treating (he’s not really an orphan, but the film works at that level of manipulative emotional pap, so that’s what I’m going to call him), discovering a previously unknown miracle cure for him, researching it on the internet, accidentally cracking the case that she’s on with Mulder (by this time it seems to be early afternoon), going into full surgery with several doctors, nurses, watching nuns (yes, really), and then wandering off to sort out more crime.

The NHS should hire her! She’d make everyone immediately healthy using previously unsuspected techniques she found on Google, save many other orphans at the last minute, sort out the London knife crime epidemic while her kettle’s boiling for elevenses, and then discover that by playing with the wiring on the kettle she could sign a peace treaty with those whacky dudes from Alpha Centauri. Result!

There’s the berserk ethical front loading of Scully’s rationality. As any fule kno (ta Molesworth), the Scully / Mulder conflict is built on the conflict between Scully’s rationality and Mulder’s sense of faith (I want to believe, as the movie clodhoppingly subtitles itself). The movie seeks to reaffirm faith, in a god-vomitingly programmatic and absurd way, so as it begins it sets up a seemingly unopposable argument for rationality over faith.

Scully gets to try and cure her orphan using THE POWER OF SCIENCE. Mulder gets to listen to prophecies and visions about a kidnapped FBI agent from a 36-choirboy buggering paedophile (the script is very precise about its numbers) priest who lives on some strange self-policing paedophile compound. I’m really not making this up. But you won’t believe me, because now I have to tell you that Father Joe – the aforementioned choirboy fiddler – is played by Billy Connolly.

Honestly, I’m really not making this up… Cosmically peculiar casting of a cosmically awful role. Anyway, of course by the end of the film Scully realises that she can only cure her orphan with THE POWER OF FAITH; and Father Joe has quite possibly been forgiven by God and received into Heaven, etc. Not that I have any problems with forgiveness per se; rather, I’ve got considerable disdain for such boneheaded moralising that seeks to be ‘challenging’ by dealing in such absurdly opposed moral opposites.

Anyway, as yet I’ve only scratched the surface of the awfulness of this nonsensical melodrama, this cinematic purgatory, this inferno of any form of the televisual arts, this film so pointless that – had the first caveman who first put chalk to wall to create the first cave paintings seen it, thus seeding the visual arts as we know them today – he would have fed both his hands to the nearest woolly mammoth and gone and sat in the sea to try and de-evolve into an amoeba for the good of creation as a whole – because I haven’t mentioned the villains.

And once I’ve mentioned the villains you’ll think, nope, it really can’t get any worse. And that’s when I’ll start talking about its sexual politics. And at that point you’ll be on your way to the sea to start de-evolving into an amoeba yourself. And only then will THE SENTENCE THAT ETC be unleashed, and the apocalypse won’t matter, because we’ll all be happy little amoebae and won’t even notice it.

So there is a silver lining after all.

Anyway, the villains. So these rather shitty looking Eastern European guys (probably Russians) have set up a severed head (and, it’s implied, other limbs) swapping facility in a kennels somewhere in Virginia, using various local women (who they meet at a swimming pool and select for their rare blood type, detected apparently by watching their swimming style and drawing according conclusions – there’s some nonsense early on in the film about how two of the victims have been treated at the same medical facility, but that’s just forgotten about as the film goes on and the narrative torture continues).

The limbs are discarded in a conveniently frozen river (how they mystically teleport into the feet of ice they’re found in, rather than just sit on top of it like severed limbs would if you or I tossed them in there, is beyond me – give Scully half an hour and a Kit-Kat and she’d no doubt develop an entirely new branch of theoretical physics to explain it, but anyway…).

No motive is given for this nutty limb swapping facility; no sense of what it’s up to, how it pays its multiple doctors and nurses, why they might want to swap limbs and heads in Virginia, is defined. No back story for any of it; no groovy alien or conspiratorial connections (surely a sine qua non of any X-Files movie?); nothing. They’re just a bunch of whacky Russians who decided to go and swap some limbs around in a kennel somewhere. As you do. And in fact, we only see one head and limb swapping patient – and he’s at the heart of this Dreckenbury Village’s spectacular fucked sexual politics, so I can’t hold back the rant gates any more…

So, the two antagonists of the film – a severed limb delivery bloke (really) and the guy who runs the firm he works for – are gay lovers. One of them was one of Father Joe’s choirboys. Implicit in their presentation is the sense that homosexuality is catching, that it’s spread by paedophilia, and that homosexual love can lead to the kind of mass murdering moral depravity we see in the film. And that’s not all; this sclerotic codpiece of awfulness doesn’t even have the courage of its comprehensively repugnant convictions. Because the action of the film takes place because limb delivery boy needs to find a new body for his lung-cancer dying lover; and so he’s kidnapping women to find a replacement body for him.

WTF??? I kid you not. Our loopy antagonists are busy trying to transplant the head of a gay man onto a woman so that – presumably – antagonist gayness can be neutralised in a bout of ‘actually I’d rather shag you as a woman’. So contemptuous of gay relationships that it goes as far as an entire body swap to avoid having to deal with them, having first presented them as some kind of ethical leprosy, this film is built on possibly the most fucked sexual politics I’ve ever encountered. It has no redeeming features, beyond the fact that it’s finite. And, one day, with the onset of senility or similar, I might actually forget that I’ve seen it.

Oh, and one of the plastic severed heads in the final scenes is actually pretty good. It needs a better agent, tho’, if this kind of cobblers is the only sort of thing it’s getting offered.

Anyway, so that’s the rant over and done with. And now it’s time for THE SENTENCE THAT MAN WAS NEVER MEANT TO READ:

Don’t go and see this film; go and see ‘Battlefield Earth’, it’s better.

Enjoy the apocalypse, amoeboid regressing friends! I’ll see you in the swamps…