Geek Alert – EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS

Agamemnon‘s Hat

Everyone has an opinion on Christopher Nolan’s version of The Odyssey. It’s become the great talking point for these few weeks of summer before the next cultural controversy comes rolling in.

Me? Yes, I’ve seen it. I thought it was a highly impressive visual achievement and a massive slog all at once. A film to admire rather than love. That is my opinion. Others are available. But there’s an interesting exchange of ideas going on around The Odyssey regarding a particular niche interest of mine. In fact, it’s something I get paid to have a good working knowledge about, so it amuses me no end to see folks chatting about it.

If you’ll forgive a guy for using his personal space to yatter on at length on a pet subject —let’s talk about aspects ratios and framing.

Two Gardens

Great Dixter has stood since the fifteenth century, a great rambling country pile surrounded by seventy-two acres of land. The house, carefully restored by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1910 to reopen the Great Hall, Solar and Parlour, is certainly worth a visit, particularly for the way the architect also included twentieth-century flourishes. But the thousands of folks who visit Great Dixter every season treat it as a decidedly second-place attraction. Like us, they’re here for those grounds and the incredible gardens they contain.

Today Is Saturday, Watch And Smile

I have a very solid ritual upon which my whole Saturday revolves. The first step is, of course, compiling and scheduling this here newsletter, setting it up and ready for a 10am drop. That deadline is important, because before then I need to be showered, coffee’d up and in front of the programme that is, in my humble opinion, the best food show on telly—Saturday Kitchen.

Disobedient Geometry — metafiction, multiverse and The Bride!

There is a moment towards the end of Maggie Gyllenhaal’s daring, divisive movie The Bride! which completely recontextualised everything I’d seen up to that point. Don’t get me wrong, I was enjoying the ride. The Bride! delights in wild swerves in tone and style, deliberately wrong-footing the audience at every turn. I’d expected that, so came in prepared.

Then Doctor Euphronious upended the whole darn hayride.

***SPOILERS AFTER THE FOLD. TREAD CAREFUL***

Pockets

Cover image by beasturnchen on Pixabay

I have a little ritual I have to enact before I leave the house. A simpler version of the old Catholic mnemonic — spectacles, testicles, wallet and watch. This one ensures I have the holy trinity of items on me, confirmed with three swift pats to the body. Phone, wallet, keys. Tap tap tap. There. Now I can unseal the airlock and venture into the world, knowing I have everything about my person I need to manage my affairs.

I can feel some of you rolling your eyes at this, and you’re absolutely right to do so. As I swan out of Swipe Towers, I am powered on my merry, oblivious way by a huge waft of male privilege. I can travel light and easy, unencumbered by bags or slings or totes. For I am a man, and I wear clothes with functioning pockets.

How We Used To Live

Northumberland is border country, and normal rules barely apply. It’s wild land, rugged but beautiful, a place where authority has always struggled to assert itself. One of the most famous hard borders in the world is here — George RR Martin was hardly the first person to come up with the notion of a defensive wall between the ‘civilised’ south and the ‘untamed’ north. Rievers, bandits and scallywags roamed free across a landscape called, with no lack of irony, The Debatable Lands.

Here the borders between past and present seem thinner, too. Walking a path across fields hemmed by dry stone walls, or simply gazing out over a landscape where human intervention is barely visible, it’s easy to think you’re looking at the same view people from hundreds, perhaps thousands of years ago, would recognise.

But be careful, student of history. What you’re looking at and what you’re looking for are not the same thing.

Featured image: The Great Hall At Wallington, Northumberland. All picures by yours truly.

Super-Fantastic

It’s easy to lose faith. As a fan, reader and outspoken advocate for the medium of comics, it can be a struggle to argue your corner when folks will only see the worst parts of your favourite things. Worse, when they confuse the medium with the genre and offer up their gotchas based on prejudice, misinformation or plain ignorance.

Fire in The Hills

I believe that human ingenuity is only matched by the equally human capacity for cruelty. Think about what we have achieved over the millennia—the great works, the stunning, almost incomprehensible technological leaps. Then think about how they were achieved, and the terrible choices we made to enable that progress.

Five Minutes

The week can just run away with you. Perhaps it’s a symptom of age, maybe a simple matter of perception versus to-do list versus the increasingly urgent need to bank more than eight hours sleep a night. You can only fit so much into a sixteen-hour day. This week, unfortunately, has not provided opportunity for the glean and winnow of the internet which ends up with the half-baked confection that is your soar-away Saturday Swipe.

To put it another way—no linky madness this week, chums. Instead, let me open up and talk in a freeform way about time, roughly ordered into five short segments.

Boy, I know how to sell it, don’t I?

Where There’s Smoke

I fought the fire and the fire won.