EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS

A Liddle Bit Of Good News

Rod-Liddle--001 — An image search for "Rod Liddle" brings up macros with a much more robust choice of language than this...

Columnist Rod Liddle now looks unlikely to be offered the position of editor at the Independent, following a groundswell of disapproval from staff and readers. This should universally be considered A Good Thing. Liddle would be a rotten fit for the paper. His views on women and minorities are well-known, thoroughly documented and utterly reprehensible. However, because the reader response was organised through Facebook and the campaign site 38 Degrees, some opinionistas in the press have taken the opportunity to tag public disapproval of the potential appointment as mob rule.
This is disingenuous, to put it mildly. So I won’t. It’s flipping ridiculous. Mob rule is a loaded and highly evocative phrase, which leads the reader to imagine that Liddle had been dragged out of town after being tarred and feathered (pause for a moment just to savour that image…) What actually happened was somewhat less dramatic. A highly paid journalist has not been ushered into an even more highly paid job, thanks in part to the efforts of concerned readers of the paper concerned. That’s it. It’s hardly bloody Salem, is it?
I will immediately state my interest in the affair. I joined the Facebook group, and signed the 38 Degrees petition. I don’t want an unmitigated shit like Liddle running a newspaper for which I have some measure of respect and affection. It is my right to inform the potential owner of that paper of my opinion. Did I gather with hundreds of other worried readers at the doors of the Independent’s offices, flaming torch in hand? Did I help to string up a gibbet at the door to Liddle’s flat? Have I in any way affected Liddle’s future earnings or his professional reputation?
No. No, I did not. I put my name to an internet petition and fired off an email to Simon Kelner and Alexander Lebedev. That’s all I have done. The fact that I was not alone in doing this seems to be the problem, and something that opinionistas are finding increasingly difficult to cope with. The idea that people can respond in their thousands to an article or story that they find objectionable, that somehow they can be held accountable for the things they write must scare them stool-less.
The angry letter to the editor is no longer the only option. The readership of our daily papers are more and more aware of their power, and ready to exercise it. If the chattering loudmouths that clog the opinion pages don’t like it, well, la-di-tough-shit. Guess what, passive consumption is a thing of the past, and about time. It’s easy now to show our disapproval of the badly-thought out, quickly dashed-off, lazily executed rubbish that passes as opinion in every paper on the news-stand.
In the face of public disapproval, all they can do, it seems, is call us either the thoughtless automatons of a liberal elite orchestrating our every move on Twitter (the Indie campaign was started by a reader, by the way, not a celebrity) or at worst a howling mob. Neither portrayal is likely to endear us to the writers that spawn this bollocks.
Liddle, as a columnist for the Times and The New Statesman, is just the latest and most obnoxious example of the problem. It’s interesting to note that as the campaign has unfolded, his complaints about social networking have become more hysterical. While trying not to paint himself as a victim, he has resorted to using ever more tenuous links to other, unrelated or outdated news stories to have a pop. It would be funny if it wasn’t so… oh, who am I kidding? It’s HILARIOUS.
To sum up, then. It would seem that public opinion becomes mob rule only when it isn’t working in your favour. And we are watching, opinionistas. Watching, and ready to call you out on your bullshit.

Code Grey – short notice of a screening!

Ack. Horribly disorganised, stupidly busy. So I can only apologise for the short notice of a screening of Code Grey and other Super 8 goodies thanks to the good graces of the Cambridge S8 crew. It’s tomorrow, and it’s in Newcastle. More details here.

If you can make it, please do, and let me know how it goes down…

Hail To The Ale

Ah, beer. Stuff of life. One of the first foods. Made from pretty much the same simple ingredients as bread, and it’s been with us for just as long. Grains, yeast, flavourings and time. That’s all there is to it. There is an argument in ecumenical circles that if Jesus Christ truly was of the working-class, then he would never have touched wine, and the Blood of Christ at Holy Communion should be a nice drop of IPA instead.

My enthusiasm for the holy brew knows no boundaries. A decent beer is one of life’s finest ingredients. It speaks to me of community, of friendship, of good times. Too much will give you problems, but that is an argument that can be levelled at … well, anything. If I was forced to choose, I mean, really gun-to-the-head-of-a-loved-one choose, I believe I would rather drink beer than anything else. OK, it’s not going to replace the first cup of tea in the morning, or the flat white served with a smile from one of the AMT girls at Reading station, but on the whole… Well, let’s just say I look at historical records that tell us that everyone drank beer instead of water up until the mid-nineteenth century because it was safer, and wish vaguely that I was a time-traveller.

Before this turns into the confessions of an alcoholic, a little bit of focus. My love of the saintly sup has turned me into an activist. I am a member of CAMRA, and have signed petitions and written to my local MP regarding the perilous state of Britain’s pubs. The pub should be a cornerstone of British society, up there with the red phone box and the double-decker bus.

Of course, both of those are extinct, and the humble British boozer is going the same way. A pub a day is closing. These are terrible times for a vital part of English culture, and I try in my little way to support and encourage the public house and everything about it.

Which leads to my arrival at Clapham Junction yesterday, to meet some friends and enjoy the Battersea Beer Festival. This was our second attempt. Last year we were unable to gain admittance, faced with massive queues that refused to subside even in the face of a vicious snowstorm blasting down Lavender Hill. That night we ended up in The Falcon on St John’s Hill, just down the way from the station. This is a beautiful pub-in-the-round, with a lovely long bar, a couple of snugs, pretty decent food and a fabulous selection of beers. We had our own mini-festival that night, and The Falcon seemed the ideal place for our little group to form before heading up to the BAC, home of the festival.

This was a very wise move. There was a CAMRA stall, and kegs had been set up in the back room to entice punters into trying some slightly more esoteric brews. That, along with the food that Nicholson’s pubs like the Falcon specialise in (very good pies and sausages, ideal for soaking up booze) meant that we headed up Lavender Hill in high spirits, and in the mood for more.

We got into the venue without problems, issues or any kind of a wait. A token entry fee and £2 dropped for a commemorative beer glass, and we were in.

Now, a word on the beer glasses. You buy one at the door, and hang onto it through the session. You can buy half and pint glasses, and these are oversized and lined in third, half and pint measures. We always drink halves in beer festivals. It seems pointless to bloat out with a full pint of something you might not like. Plus with halves, you get to try more over the course of a session. One trick is to order halves in a pint glass. Inevitably, you will get more than the measure, especially as the day wears on and the worthies behind the bar, volunteers and enthusiasts all, become more and more tipsy and loose-wristed at the kegs. For the most part, we were getting tooths (two-thirds of a pint) for the price of a half. At £1.50ish a shot, this represents VERY GOOD VALUE FOR MONEY.

The venue is pretty impressive. The Great Hall at the BAC is a big old woody church hall, complete with high stained glass windows, and the booming echo of a decently crafted acoustic. That room, which must have been fifty feet long, is filled with a central, double-sided bar stacked high with kegs. By 6pm, that room will be stuffed to the gills with drinkers of all shapes, sizes and levels of beardiness. And that’s just the girls, kathudTISH.

I’m always surprised by how many females of the lady-type persuasion turn up to these gigs. Although the day is normally heavy on rotund hairy gentlemen of a certain age and the occasional dashing handsome interloper such as me and my crew, come hometime and whoops look out, it’s like a Boots advert in the Great Hall. Here come the girls, and they’re all after a half of insanely strong Belgian lambic, or a decent porter. They go for the strong dark stuff, ales with flavour, body and character. None of your cheap lager here. These are classy birds. Although they’d whop you one for telling them that. I am far too much of a gent/coward to try.

Eventually, we felt the urge for something different, and ventured downstairs to the cider and perry hall. This, we decide later, was a Big Mistake. The room is dingy and airless, and entirely populated by twats in stupid hats, urging each other on to ever more foolish feats of stunt alcoholism to the strains of (this is the godshonest truth) the refrain of Gary Glitter’s You Wanna Be In My Gang. We have a glass of something (Newton’s Hereford Perry, very nice) and do a runner before things turn nasty. C’mon, C’mon? No, f’anks.

After that, we took the advice of the marvellous Ciaran, who lives just round the corner from the BAC, and headed to another pub, The Eagle. This regularly wins awards, and no wonder. It’s a warm, cosy place, filled with locals, and the beer is clearly sourced, stored and served with care and pride. It’s a perfect place to finish the evening before the long drag home, and the pint of Loddon Hoppit that I sip is a clarion call back to the West. But I shall return.

So, recommendations. The Twitter stream I generated through the day is here. Yes, I tweeted the beer I drank. I’m 21st century, me. The hit of the fest for me was Black Hole Brewery’s RED DWARF, an unbelievably moreish toffee-flavoured treat. I was generally in the mood for milds, porters, stouts and other dark beers, so the list is by definition skewed that way. The Falcon is here. I’m not telling you where the Eagle is. I’d like to keep that one a little bit secret.

Windows In SF

No, not the Microsoft version, and you’d like to hope that the systems on board the Enterprise and the like are not based on an underpinning that’s liable to blue-screen on you halfway through a transporter cycle, or need to download an important security update before you can fire those photon torpedoes.

I'm not sure that's the best way to clean windows...

Windows in SF tend towards the panoramic. They are great floor to window room-width panes, around which your crew can gather to goggle in wonder at each new wonder they encounter on their impossible mission to the gates of forever. More recent iterations of The Big Window have embedded graphics. Just in case you weren’t sure about the exact designation of the Klingon Warbirds moving into battle configuration in front of you, handy pop-up windows, scrolling text boxes and spinning wire-frame models tell you more than you needed to know.

In reality, of course, the sort of panoramic window that you’d see on the bridge of the Enterprise or the command deck of an Imperial Destroyer could never happen. That much glass, under atmospheric pressure on the inside and the constant risk of micrometeorite impact from the outside, would be far too dangerous to install. On the International Space Station and the Shuttle, windows are tiny, quadruple-glazed portholes of thick crystal. You want a peek outside? That’s what video cameras are for.

The guy in red doesn't realise he's up for window-cleaning duty yet...

Which is why most “windows” in SF are actually really big projectors. They have zoom functions. They can hook into communication circuits, so that looming close-up of the approaching enemy warlord demanding your immediate surrender and the handover of fifty of your most fragrant ensigns can be really threatening. You can even show that things have gone really badly wrong by having the screen just show that fuzzy analogue static that is somehow still a signifier of lost signal even after ten years of fizz-free digital telly.

I’m a fan of The Big Window in Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, which started this whole SF decor riff in the first place. That window is a way for the crew to have a look at the approaching sun in all it’s fearful magnificence, and it’s tunable to filter out all but 3% of the light. This, for once, does just seem to be a portal, albeit one with some really smart sunblock. But it fulfills all of the rules I outlined earlier – it’s a Really Big Window, probably twenty feet square, and at one point the whole crew do gather around it to gawp in wonderment at Mercury passing across the surface of the sun. It’s a lovely moment, and sums up for me the important thing about SF set design. It should always be there to help the story along. Let’s face it, that bit of the film wouldn’t have had the emotional impact if the crew of the Icarus II had been crowded around a foot-square porthole.

We're gonna need a bigger tube of Factor 50.

One word you should never hear in an SF movie? “Budge up a bit, let me have a look.”

The Man Who Draws The Movies

As I think we’ve seen, set design in science fiction follows particular rules and tends towards particular looks. It does not, in general, have the jury-rigged aesthetic that you’d see on actual spacecraft, or long term habitations like the ISS. Which is fair enough. No-one really wants to see high drama carried out in the sort of cramped compartments astronauts have to survive in for months at a time. No, spacecraft in Hollywood are roomy affairs, filled with high-ceilinged, dramatically lit rooms that bizarrely are connected by low, dark corridors.

I put the blame for the look of Hollywood spacecraft squarely onto one man’s shoulders. He’s been a seminal influence on fantastic (as in cinema of the…, although his work is never less than brilliant) set design since the seventies, and was pivotal in creating the look of some of the greatest films of the genre.

I’m talking about Ron Cobb, of course.

His career began at UCLA in the early seventies. Working alongside a fledgeling director by the name of John Carpenter, Ron’s first piece of design was on Carpenter’s first film, Dark Star. Although the clean lines of Star Trek were still in evidence in the ship design, the tiny bridge room he put together was a clever way of working within a budget that was not so much tight as gonad-squeezing. All three astronauts are crammed into a tiny set, but by placing them face-to-face and stacked along the frame, he allowed Carpenter to build in long dialogue takes without needing to intercut. His work on Dark Star is smart and sharp, and makes a student film look much, much more expensive.

The work for which he’s best known would come with his collaboration with Ridley Scott on Alien. Taking a cue from Jodorowsky’s aborted Dune project, Scott assembled some of the best known SF illustrators of the day for their takes on the gigantic space tug Nostromo, the alien craft they discover, and the creature they bring back with them.

Cobb interiors. The second image is from Walt Simonson's fantastic adaptation of the film. Equally influential.

Cobb’s drawings of the interior of the Nostromo were a part of my childhood. One of my most prized possessions as a boy was a book on the making of Alien. This had a wealth of pre-production drawings from the likes of Cobb, Chris Foss and of course HR Giger. I wish I could tell you what happened to that book. It somehow managed to disappear during one of the many moves my family made while I was a teenager. I was drawn especially to Cobb’s boxy, solid interiors, and used to pore over the details, obsessing for hours over how he had managed to do so much with such apparent ease.

It was thanks to him that I started to draw, filling notebooks with carefully drafted approximations of his work. He helped me figure out perspective, shading and modelling. Even now, my choice of art materials skews towards the technical. Sharpies, Rotrings and markers rather than pastels, oils and charcoal. Tie that into my enduring love of comics, and the discovery that actually I’m not a bad cartoonist, and my path has been set artistically ever since. I’m a black line boy.

Ron is still working, of course, and it’s great to see his mantle taken up by other, equally talented film designers like Nigel Phelps. But I see his influence in comics and graphic work of all hues and persuasions as well. His boxy vehicle designs are very much echoed in current production line models like the Kia Soul, the Scion and most obviously to my mind, the Nissan Cube with it’s asymmetrical wrap-around window. The modern MRI scanner owes more than a tip of the hat to his medbay drawings for the Nostromo. It seems we all live in Ron Cobb’s world now.

If only I could remember what I’d done with that Alien artbook…

(once again, a tip of the hat to John Eaves and his excellent website, from whence a lot of these images have been ganked.)

The Chair In SF

The humble chair. A little spot designed for rest and relaxation, right? An item of furniture for you to take the weight off your feet, to switch off a bit.
Not in SF, it isn’t. In our favourite genre, the chair becomes a place of action.

Consider The Captain’s Chair in Star Trek. In The Original Series, it is a slab-sided, poorly padded lump of alloy on a swivel. Kirk spends a minuscule amount of time on it, and for the most part he perches on the edge of the seat cushion. Mainly because if he tried sitting back the rotten thing would dig a hole in his lower back. It wasn’t surprising he couldn’t wait to get out of it. It seemed to be a focal point for James T. to bark at Scotty through the communicator whilst leering at leggy ensigns.

It’s interesting to note that The Captain’s Chair becomes more comfortable the less outwardly aggressive it’s occupant. In the later seasons of Star Trek – The Next Generation, The Chair is better described as The Recliner. I swear, the thing has a footstool. I’m also certain there are opening shots in some of the later episodes where Picard can be spotted having a sneaky snooze.

SF chairs are not static objects. They do things. They move about. They are multi-purpose. They are dramatic objects. They are not designed for settling into with a mug of cocoa and a thick paperback.

A lot of them are on gimbals or tracks and whizz backwards and forwards with exciting whines and buzzes. They frequently incorporate communication devices, video equipment or in some cases, something more destructive.

Let’s do the Star Wars thing. I’m thinking specifically of the gun emplacements on the Millenium Falcon. These are fantastic. They’re ceiling-mounted. They have headsets, cool video screens and OH DID I MENTION THE GUNS?? I wanted one of these so badly when I was a kid. Oh, who am I kidding? I want one now.

Clearly I’m not alone. The gun emplacement bit in The End Of Time, the last Tennant Doctor Who episode, is a clear homage to the Falcon gunfight. Behind the scenes footage shows Bernard Cribbins having a whale of a time behind the sights of the lasers. I want to see the out-takes where he goes “pewpewpew” and makes exploding noises through his cheeks.

To confuse matters even further, let’s look to The Matrix. The gateways to the virtual world on the Nebuchennezar are accessed through couch-mounted plugs and circuits. You take a seat to dial into the Matrix. Let me just reiterate that. In the Matrix, chairs can be doors.

In Iain M. Bank’s Use Of Weapons the chair becomes something more potent. I would argue that the events of the book revolve around the sourcing of materials and construction of a simple white chair. This might seem a bit of a strange thing to say when talking about a novel that chronicles the adventures of an interplanetary mercenary. And it’s a difficult thing to properly talk about without ruining the big wallop at the end of the story. I recommend reading the book, but if you must, there’s a spoiler below.

The chair is made out of the bones of the main character’s sister, complete with a cushion fashioned from her skin. Iain Banks’ SF is not cheerful. Although it is somewhat chairful. Sorry.

After all that, I need a sit down. Someone send me over an armchair…

The Door in SF

You thought I was kidding, didn’t you?

: Ron Cobb does the business. That’s the kind of door we’re talking about…

image courtesy of John Eaves. Check out his chunk of posts on Ron Cobb here.

Let’s consider the humble doorway, and how it has become a character in and of itself in SF. In every other genre I can think of, they are simple objects. They open. They close, occasionally with a slam. In a prison context, they are symbols of incarceration, although to be frank characters tend to talk about the walls more, and they are the object that will have the graffiti and the gate-bar scratches, counting off the days until freedom comes.

SF doors are infinitely more complex. They are desperately over-engineered for the job at hand. And at the same time they barely fulfil the essential design requisites that you and I would consider the door would need. They rarely have handles, for example. You have to punch a code or say a password or, memorably in Jeunet’s Alien:Resurrection, huff your cheesy breath into a detector.

And that’s before the darn things will even open for you. Then you get the best efforts of a team of props men as they slide back on tracks or drop through the floor or iris open like a lens. In Star Trek: DS9 the doors were built like cogs, and they rolled out of the way in a way that was far too complex for the end result. Lights will frequently blink and flash. In Peter Hyam’s Outland, they had useful red or green fluorescents to let you know if they were locked or not.

And then of course, they always make noise. Helpful bleeps and chimes to let you know that they’re about to do that fancy three-way split. The hiss of hydraulics. The unzipping sound that accompanied Captain Kirk as he marched down the corridors of the Enterprise (those corridors were always too fancy for my liking, although I’ve always had a thing for the Jeffries Tube). And I have to mention the doors on the Heart Of Gold in the Hitch-hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, that were programmed to take pleasure in opening and closing, and did so with an almost orgasmic sigh.

Of course, there are always exceptions. The doors in the reboot of Battlestar Galactica are heavy, unwieldy things, but at least they have a handle and they are pulled open and closed. However, as they’re all designed to isolate an area in the event of a leak, they still have valves and wheels and an excess of handles and cranks. Opening a door still takes up a disproportionate amount of screen time and effort.

I’ve not really talked about the more esoteric kind of SF door yet. The Stargates, for one, have devolved over the years from being a 2001-esque gateway across galactic space, complete with warp effects and the wailings of a heavenly choir, to the kind of thing that O’Neill and crew hop through when they fancy a walk in the Canadian woods. Then we have the organic portals of the living craft of Lexx and Farscape. These worry me. I’m not sure a door should drip and ooze. Or to that point, just vanish on you just at the point when you need them the most.

But of course, my all-time favourite SF door? Well, there’s no contest, really.

And don’t tell me you wouldn’t do the same with a door that did that. I want one for my garage.

The Joy Of Corridor

Like most things in my life, it all boils down to Star Wars.

There are certain kinds of films that I really go for, and will happily sit and watch again and again. Danny Boyle’s Sunshine is one of them, and in a short introduction before it’s screening last night on FilmFour, he nailed one reason why. They all seem to be of a particular type, a genre with a history and a meme-set that is easily tracked. I love films of the genre sub-species he described as “A Ship. A Crew. A Signal.”

These are the horror-tinged bottle films, where most of the action takes place on a dark, monolithic spacecraft, within the confines of which BAD THINGS HAPPEN once The Crew pick up and foolishly answer The Signal. This Signal is usually a misinterpreted message to STAY THE FRAK AWAY. From then on in there will be running and screaming and dying and mostly a single survivor.

But mostly, there will be corridors. Hundreds of them, stretching for miles. They will be encrusted in vents, ducts, computery bits, extraneous ribbing, tons of stencilling and detailing in a limited palette of sans-serif fonts. There will be steam. Oh my word, there will be steam. I often wonder whether ships like the Nostromo and the Event Horizon are powered by a coal-fired boiler rather than a nuclear reactor.

The camera will start the film drifting in a dreamy manner down these corridors, and end it whizzing down them as the final character either has to get to a door before a timer runs out, or because something insectoid with too many teeth is chasing them. Frequently, both of these things are happening at once. There will be a whooping alert sound. It’s the same one in all of these films. There will also be a calm female voice doing the countdown. I think Winona Ryder has the monopoly on that one.

Sunshine has some great corridors. The set took over the entirety of Three Mills Studio in East London when the film was shot in 2006, and the detailing is exquisite. I’m happy to report that there’s also little attempt to score points off the meme. Although the ship is on it’s way to the sun, the corridors are dark and claustrophobic. The feel is heavy and industrial. Like most of these ships, the Icarus II is a submarine in space, a tiny metal bubble of life in an environment that’s almost instantly lethal.

I spent years in my youth drawing corridors like the ones you see in films like Sunshine and Alien. Once the technical drawing classes I took in junior high school taught me the rudiments of perspective, I was away. I can still draft a pretty good blocky spaceship in three-point, or an infinitely expansive throughway liberally coated in technological cruft. I love them. They are places where adventure happens, where there is high drama, monsters coming out of the walls and lots of those spinning orange lights they have on the roofs of ambulances.

I said at the beginning that I blamed this on Star Wars. Think about it. Two minutes into the film, after all that tedious nonsense with the yellow letters and the big triangle that goes on for miles, we are inside the Tantive IV, and we see… well, THIS.

This, and the later scenes in the Death Star are something that should not be shown to an impressionable ten-year-old who’s already a little too lost in his own imagination for his own good. Especially the bits in the prison block.

For further reading, I cannot recommend Martin Anderson’s post on Den Of Geek highly enough. If you think I’m wibbling on un-necessarily, just wait and see what he’s got.

Coming up: doors in SF.

Satan’s Schoolgirls

girl silhouette.jpg I should mention this, shouldn’t I? The observant amongst you, Readership, will have noticed the ranty banner at the top of the page. Let’s reiterate the message. For the first time, the entire text of my first novel, the St. Trinian’s meets Lord of The Flies mashup Satan’s Schoolgirls is available, gratis, free and without charge. Click on the link, or here, to send a PDF copy flying to your downloads folder.

Would you like a copy in ePub, or as a Kindle file? That’s in the works, as is the ultimate aim – a paperback version. This will be print on demand, most likely through the lovely people at Createspace, and is – well, imminent. For the meantime, enjoy the story. Please, give me feedback. I’d love to know at which point you feel it all went horribly wrong.

Done A Mix

Yesterday, the popular link-forwarding site Reddit was asked to generate a list of songs to get you out of bed and moving on a Monday morning. The response was – shall we say enthusiastic? As I had some spare time, I decided to plug those results into Spotify, and ended up with a mix that will last you through most of the day.

It’s here, and it’s collaborative, so if there’s anything you think should be added, go right ahead. Usual Spotify caveats apply – no Beatles, but then that’s true of digital media in general. No Led Zep either, as far as I can tell. I’ve tried to keep the list to one song per artist, and I should stress these are not my choices, so don’t be raggin’ on me about the Phil Collins, mmmmkay? However, in general I think it’s a great list, and will work for any day you need to get your lazy ass out of bed and getting the day by the short hairs.

(If anyone doesn’t have Spotify yet, and would like an invite, hit me up in the comments. I have plenty to spare, and it’s a service that’s worth a look.)