EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS

1715 DST 0915 PDT

I hate flying. It’s tedious, uncomfortable, undignified and irritating, and that’s even before you get on the damn plane. You arrive at the airport stupidly early, and get in a queue. You queue to get in a queue, and then to get in another queue. Eventually, you get to put your shoes through an X-Ray machine. You hang around, drink coffee you don’t realy want and buy magazines you’re not that interested in reading until you get the call to go and hang around somewhere else. Frequently, this new place is much less attractive than the one you’ve just left, and now you can’t even buy the magazine you were indifferent towards. There may be free copies of the Daily Mail to flick through. If you’re sensible, you resist the temptation to cook off your blood pressure, and look out of a window at the planes instead.

If I could dose myself into a comatose state, and in that condition be strechered to and from the airport, unconscious and oblivious, then I would be a happy man. Dump me in an overhead locker. Revive me when I get to the hotel. Sweet Lethe, save me from the tedium of modern air travel.

Actually, this isn’t such a bad idea. Apply it on an industry-wide level, and just think of the money the airlines could save in food and entertainment costs. Just get everyone seated on the plane, pump a mild sedative gas into the cabin, and a nice quiet flight can be had by everyone. No jetlag, no air rage. It’s probably the closest we’d ever come to teleportation, at least in my lifetime. I’d sign up to that kind of initiative in a flash.

I couldn’t sleep on a plane if my life depended on it. How anyone manages to get a nano-second of shuteye in a metal tube barrelling above the cloud line at 550MPH is frankly beyond me. Squeezed into a two-by-three seat gap with no room to stretch your legs, with an excess of ambient noise, who could grab even the haziest of dozes? Let alone the full-on kip that Clare, beside me and bundled in an appropriately red blanket seems to be achieving, lucky sexpot.

Hello. Transatlantic Rob here, midway across the Big Blue on the way to Californi-ay. We’re spending the week in San Francisco, a city that’s been on our must-see list for the best part of a decade now. Home of Alcatraz Prison and the Zodiac Killer. And it’s gonna be great. That poor weak dollar’s getting wedgies from us, I tell yer. Once we get there.

For now, I’m on a Virgin 747-400, seriously regretting that second cappuccino and not spending a bit extra for an upgrade to premium economy, bush-baby wide-eyed, and contemplating my second film of the day.

Just watched 300, which had it’s moments, most of them directly cribbed from Frank Miller’s masterful graphic novel. The whole exercise seemed kind of pointless to me, and the over-faithful translation to screen adds nothing to an already spare narrative. An animated version might have been interesting. As it is, even the digital blood that’s flung around with such abandon doesn’t make enough of an impression to stick around. Seriously, check it out. The gore evaporates before it hits the ground. I know the show’s supposed to be stylised, but come on.

However, Lena Headey and Gerard Butler are both suitably charismatic and eye-candyish, and I’m prepared to go along with Leonidas bellowing in broad Glasgae whenever he gets angry. Thing is, it’s the usual argument for me when it comes to film adaptations of graphic novels. They’re never as good as the books. I’m not looking forward to Zac Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation. That’s one book that should stay in the unfilmable category.

It’s 9:21 in the AM in San Fran, twenty past five in the afternoon according to my body clock. A little over half way there. We have a lift from the airport from a friend of Clare’s and a queen-sized room at a hotel just off Union Square and therefore slap in the heart of the action. At the moment of writing, the only action I can contemplate is a hot shower and a catnap.

God, I hate flying.

1945 PDT

Aaaannd here we are. We cleared immigration at 3, a surprisingly painless experience considering the irritations at the Heathrow end. Security was all smiles and chatty, which is unexpected to say the least. Smoothly out to a warm welcome from our San Fran contact, X, who is hospitality itself. She’s warm, chatty and lovely. She chauffeurs us directly to our hotel, and leaves us with a care package containing wine and snackies. Wheeee.

We’re right in the heart of things, based in a quiet boutique place on Sutter St, a minute’s walk from Union Square. It’s chilled, boho and charming. Not flash, but it has everything we need. Big bed. Hot shower. And they do free wine during happy hour. Rehehehesult. We doze over a cheeky merlot in the hotel bar.

Now, at this point we’ve been up for 20 hours, and are making less sense by the ganglion. Food needed as a matter of urgency. We stumble out to refuel, and end up at Lori’s Diner, one of those intentionally kitsch Ed’s Easy Diner type places, just at the bottom of the road. Faux Americana, sure, but faux Americana in America still kinda works on me. Plus, it’s shabby enough to have a bit of charm, and the waitresses have a good line in that tattooed devil’s cheerleader vibe. For added surrealality, with Halloween just around the corner, the joint is encrusted in spray cobweb and cardboard skeletons. Or maybe I just imagined it. It’s possible. We’re both double-exposing at this point in the day/night/whatevs. Blaaargh. Then we just have enough juice left for a stroll round Union Square, before we give up and head back to the hotel to crash.

2010. Clare’s asleep. I’m just awake enough to type, with NBC burbling away in the background.

Tomorrow is another day. With a lot of shopping in it.

For me, the internets have always been about those moments of genuine surprise. Those moments where a slow day’s aimless browsing is suddenly brought to a screaming halt by a phrase, a picture, an image, and everything is just a little different. This can be a good thing, sometimes a very bad thing. There’s always a physical response. My head comes up. My eyebrows lift. There’s frequently a vocalisation. 

From the NYT, a story on a firm of fortune cookie makers who’ve decided not to sugarcoat our future anymore…

Thursday night brought me to the Cineworld, Shaftesbury Avenue, for the annual Straight8 night through the Raindance Film Festival. I was there to show support for my mate Nick Scott, whose film “The Other Half” was one of the top ten. As regular readers may know, Clive Sick Puppy and I also submitted a short, which got nowhere in the rankings. We’re quietly proud of it though, and I’ve had some very positive comments back about how it turned out.

The evening was great fun, with the general high quality of material I’ve come to expect from Straight8 fully on display. Intersetingly, the film that seemed most mentioned was a charming bit of whimsy called “Little Cumulus,” about a cloud that is stranded on earth, and only finds it’s way back into the sky with the aid of a hot air balloon. Not bad, considering for the most part it was footage of a guy wandering around dressed in a job lot of cotton wool…

Masses of technical problems on the night though, which surprised me no end. The first couple of films had to be shown twice, due to either being monochrome or mute, which is frankly not on. I know the quality of projection is evaporating in this country at a high rate (at a recent screening of 3.10 To Yuma I had to inform the projectionist he’d left a 1.85 mask in the gate of the projector – reeeeally long, thin pictures!) but it can’t be that hard to hit play on a tape deck, surely.

Here’s Nick’s making of The Other Half, explaining how he achieved the most technically difficult effect ever achieved under the Straight8 rules…

although The Sick Puppies went through their own personal hell in making “The Gourmand”…

I was lucky enough to be able to sneak into an early screening of the Sigur Ros tour film Heima.
It’s a stunning piece of work and, speaking as a fan, pretty much flawless. It covers the band as they toured their home country, Iceland, last year, playing venues as varied as an abandoned fish factory and a protest camp over a massive new hydroelectric dam. The music is wonderful, the images breathtaking. Widescreen sound and pictures all the way.
If I was to put my critics hat on (the grey fedora with the plaid ribbon and the inky crow quill stuck in it) I would say that it’s charm depends largely on whether you find Icelandic pixie types and their aethereal music annoying. If you do, then this is effectively an ad for the Icelandic Tourist Board, and you’re not gonna like the whimsy on offer.
I thought it was a joy from beginning to end, and the DVD is going straight on my Christmas list. I’m already raving to everyone I can about it, and I recommend that if you can get into a screening, go for it. It’s a whole different animal on the big screen.

Guys, seriously… takk.

…and no psychedelics involved. Result.

Fuck Off To The Epicure Restaurant, Then

As I once heard a barman at the Coach & Horses yell at a punter.

So people keep asking, and I’m not typing it out every single
bloody time, so maybe this’ll hold you:

You take a whole head of garlic, also known as a whole bulb
of garlic.

You draw off a big length of tinfoil, twice as much as you think
you’d need to make a large pocket or bag to contain the bulb.
And you fold it in half. And then you fold it in half again to make
your double-walled tinfoil sack, wrapping the edges together to
seal it. Leaving the top open, of course.

Saw the top off your bulb, to just expose the tops of the cloves
inside. Chuck it in the bag.

Throw a glass of white wine or sparkling wine (I often use
champagne) on top. NOTE: do not cook with any alcohol
that you wouldn’t be happy to drink on its own. NOTE: some
of you would drink paintstripper out of a dead soldier’s arse.
Imagine what an actual human would consider drinkable
and act accordingly.

You may also throw in herbs to taste — I often throw a
twig of rosemary in there.

(This, by the way, is why you want to be growing
herbs on a windowsill.)

Wrap up the top of the bag tightly, because now it’s full
of booze and you don’t want it to leak out.

Throw it in a hot oven for 90 minutes — less if you want
it less creamy and with more of its garlic bite.

What’s a hot oven? No less than 190 degrees C, 375
degrees F, gas mark 5.

This goes well with lamb: you can throw lamb in the
oven at the same temperature by the following sum:
30 mins per pound/450g + an extra 30 mins at the end.
So if you’ve got two pounds of lamb in there, that’s
90 minutes. Instead of burying it under a sauce, try
pulling the cooked meat apart with forks until it’s
shredded, and then shower it with pomegranate seeds.

Serve with an inexpensive Merlot from Chile, which have
been terrific for the last three years or so, and then
leave me alone.

— W

via warrenellis.com, obvs.

(and extra nice with homegrown or young garlic, but I may be twatting the recipe up too much. Regardless, YUM.)

The weather has turned. Autumn is warming the colours in the trees, and when the alarm goes off in the mornings, I wake to a dark room.
This sucks, clearly. Even with the patented combat roll method that has me in the shower and wet within a minute of the clock going off, it’s still poo, and does nasty things to my sleep patterns. I notice that I have more problems getting and staying asleep at this time of the year than any other. After daylight savings kicks in I’m fine. I’m kind of used to fumbling my way to the bathroom in pitch blackness by then. But up until that point… zombie.

The Wired wiki has some interesting pointers on sleep-hacking. Mostly common-sense, but that’s never stopped me before.
Maybe I should just try the 28 Hour Day. It’ll come in handy come November, when I’m back into the cruel discipline of Novel-Writing Month…

The owner of the New Piccadilly gives us a few nuggets of wisdom.

Horror and fantasy have, as a genre, always been a scapegoat for society’s ills. Think back to the Victorian Penny Dreadfuls, Frderic Wertham’s clampdown on the EC and Warren horror comics in the 50s, the video nasty debacle of the 80s.

Now, it seems, creators of horrific or disturbing images are under attack again. And this time, ordinary law-abiding citizens who are completely unaware that they’re doing anything wrong may be as well.

Jane Longhurst, a teacher from my home town of Reading, was murdered in 2003. Her killer, Graham Coutts had strangled her to death, and police later found out that he was a regular visitor to strangulation websites.

Jane’s mother Liz, appalled at how easy it was to access this material, started a petition to ban violent pornography. She quickly gathered 50,000 signatures, and the support of an army of MP’s, including my own, Rob Wilson.

That petition has now been mutated into the Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill, set to go before Parliament next month. I’ve chosen the word “mutated” with care, as the bill now seems to have changed from a well-meaning attempt to protect us from the worst excesses of the internet, to becoming a direct assault on the makers of horror and horror fantasy images, the BDSM community and even readers of some magazines that you can easily pick up in WH Smiths.

Here’s the problem. I’m quoting section 64 of the Bill, sub-section 6:

“An “extreme image” is an image of any of the following ~
(a) an act which threatens or appears to threaten a person’s life,
(b) an act which results in or appears to result (or be likely to result) in serious injury to a person’s anus, breasts or genitals,
(c) an act which involves or appears to involve sexual interference with a human corpse,
(d) a person performing or appearing to perform an act of intercourse or oral sex with an animal, where (in each case) any such act, person or animal depicted in the image is or appears to be real.”

See the problem? It’s that little word “appears”. With that word in place, prosecuting officers using the Bill can make it mean whatever they want it to mean. There’s no distinction between the kind of nasty, abusive porn coming over the borders from Eastern Europe, and horror films like Hostel 2, or indeed the simulation of violent sexual activity that could be coming out of a consensual scenario between two lovers. Think back to the Spanner Case in the 80s, when a group of BDSM enthusiasts were imprisoned for acts that caused no-one but the group themselves any damage. All of a sudden, we’re on the brink of legalising governmental intrusion into areas of our lives in which they have no fucking business. (scuse the pun.)

Comics Britannia again on Monday night, looking at the so-called Golden Age – 1955 through to the mid 70s. So the focus was on publications like Eagle and Warlord, and more interestingly, girls comics like Girl and Tammy. The sections on girls’ comics was a particular eye-opener, and deftly handled. I never realised that the great Pat Mills began his career on titles like Bunty, and the dark tone of some of the stories fascinated me. Orphan War Camp Slaves? Wasn’t that an Italian horror movie?