An advantage of an early start to the work day is the chance to see London before it properly wakes up. It’s a bit bleary-eyed, needs a shave and a haircut and another coffee wouldn’t go amiss.
No. Wait, that’s me. But the principle holds, and just after sunup is a good time to change focus and look up rather than at the pavement. Things catch your eye.
The reflection of a street in a car hood, and the way the attention is drawn down a bleak alleyway to a white tower in the distance. Two office blocks, squat and menacing, guarding the way into Oxford Street. Or a jet trail, catching the light in just the right way, lancing into a department store by Leicester Square, sending out a plume of statues like surrealist flowers.
Looking at these three together, I suddenly realise how much sky there is in them. As I work in a dark room all day, I’m sure there’s a reason for that.
It’s never good to watch your heroes fail. When you base your art and your writing style on the work of a man that you worship and respect, only to find that he is only human, and the sort of person you’d go out of your way to avoid at a party, then the hit is even harder. Somehow, his mistakes rebound on you. All of a sudden, people pop out of the woodwork, saying how they’d known that the guy was a jerk for years, how his work was a clear indicator of his inner malaise. All of a sudden, you look like a fanboy and an idiot.
That’s what I’m going through at the moment, Readership. Because my all-time comic hero Frank Miller has apparently just outed himself as a close-minded, ill-informed rightwing jagoff.
I still don’t think TV gets social networking. Despite the chatrooms, despite the hashtags that pop up as graphics on shows as disparate as the X Factor and Kirstie’s Homemade Britain, there’s still a sense that the broadcast networks can be caught unawares. That life online can often move at a bewildering pace, and in unexpected directions.
Charlie Brooker gets social networking. He certainly gets Twitter. Which is why The National Anthem, the first episode in his three-part drama series Black Mirror, works so well. As a long time tweeter, he sees how public opinion can change in minutes over the change in a news story, and how complacency, cant or hypocrisy will be seen through and shot down in flames.
St. John's College. It was lit by a cycling colour wheel. I happened to catch it at it's bloodiest.
Yesterday saw Oxford light up, as their annual Night Light festival ushered in the Christmas season. The town was heaving as the colleges and museums opened their doors to the curious, and markets filled the labyrinthine corridors around Oxford Castle and filled St Giles’ wide boulevard.
The Market At St. Giles'.
It was great fun to wander about and catch unexpected moments and photo opportunities. Mummers wandered through the throng. A drum troupe set up on the Monument and shook the air. Belly dancers gyrated in the halls of the Ashmolean, the sinuous music a fitting soundtrack to the new Egyptian galleries. TLC and I sat in the great hall at the Bodleian Library, and felt 2 IQ points smarter just by osmosis from all the learning that had soaked into the narrow benches we sat upon.
The entrance to the quad at the Bodleian Library.
I had been there earlier in the day, looking at an exhibition of some of the Library’s greatest treasures. I stood wonderingly in front of an original page of Mary Shelley’s manuscript for Frankenstein, complete with corrections and additions from Percy Bysshe. An edition of the Koran from the 15th century glowed in gold-leafed perfection, and I could see where Craig Thompson’s obsession with Arabic calligraphy came from. An illuminated Gutenberg Bible, one of less than 20 left in the world, came close to giving me the chills. The fact that these documents still exist is amazing enough. That they are such beautiful artifacts in their own right is nothing short of a miracle.
The Market At Oxford Castle
At its best, Oxford is a magical place, filled with history and wonder, with new delights down every narrow alleyway. Yesterday it shone, lit up like a beacon of civilisation and knowledge in the darkness.
Stories are the framework that we build our lives upon. Our beliefs, our fears, our relationship with the world, with birth, with death, with fate, all come out of the tales we whisper to each other, huddled round campfires in the dark. We have taught ourselves to respond to myth and legend, fable and saga. Fantasy used as a way to understand and codify the callous, bewildering universe around us.
In Habibi, Craig Thompson takes the idea of the story as key to survival and runs with it. Riffing on Islamic and Christian mythology, the Thousand and One Nights and the ways in which language can both divide and unite us, the book is an astonishing, bravura example of how the graphic novel can do things with a story that no other medium can touch.
Now, I loves me the ebooks. The Kindle I snagged for last year’s birthday is going strong, and stuffed full of goodness. It’s revolutionised the way I acquire and consume digital long-form fiction–oh, ok, how I buy and read books.
And yet, when it comes to comics and graphic novels, I’m resolutely and unrepentantly old-school. If it ain’t on print, I don’t want it. A lot of that, I guess, is down to the kind of comics I like to read. I’m no fan of masks and capes, and Marvel and DC for the most part leave me cold. I can’t remember the last time I bought a comic – either the flimsy glossy American pamphlet or good old sheddy English newsprint. It’s trade paperbacks and graphic novels for me, at. I’d much rather read a story all at once rather than wait for it to eke out on monthly 22-page instalments.
“I hereby undertake not to remove from the Library, nor to mark, deface, or injure in any way, any volume, document or other object belonging to it or in its custody; not to bring into the Library, or kindle therein, any fire or flame, and not to smoke in the Library; and I promise to obey all rules of the Library.”
All sounds fair enough to me. This is the Radcliffe Camera, part of the Bodleian Library. One of the oldest in Europe, the main depository for the University Of Oxford, and one of those buildings that gives Oxford it’s Harry Potter vibe. The quote above is the formal declaration for new readers, which has to be recited out loud in a ceremony at Michelmas before they’ll let you near the books.
And people wonder why I get swoony about libraries. I’d happily swear an oath of fealty to mine!
This has started bouncing around the Twittersphere already, so I take no credit for it. But it bears repeating.
Vampires. Dead, right? We’re agreed on that. If they’re dead, then there’s no heartbeat. No heartbeat, no blood pressure. And as Twilight vamps shatter like glass when killed, we can assume that they are effectively bloodless.
Without blood pressure, how then does Edward get an erection with which to impregnate his blushing bride? Unless the process has gifted him with what no less a thinker than William Gibson has already described as:
Riceian vampire permaboners, as I live and breathe.
A discussion to be had along the lines of that which takes place whenever we consider the possibility of Superman and Lois Lane starting a family. Enquiring minds wish to know.
To London, Islington, the Florence Tavern. Clive’s collaborator in The Vanished and independent film-maker in his own right, Keith Eyles had put together a night of shorts in a friendly Norf Londun boozer, and I was there for to show support. One of Keith’s films had Leading Man Clive in a supporting role, and he was also showing Simon’s latest collaborative effort with Ben Green–the boxing vignette Why I Fight. Continue reading A Long Night Of Shorts
Alright, it’s a big Chinese lantern, but damned if it doesn’t look like an alien jellyfish flying towards Trafalgar Square. The big blue Mothership in the distance is the W Hotel, which changes colour like a contented cuttlefish at night, gently pulsing around the colour wheel.
Sometimes the town I work in is still capable of surprising me.
EXCUSES AND HALF TRUTHS 