November 2008 Archives

While watching The Mindscape of Alan Moore, I could almost pass him off as an English eccentric. He certainly has that neo-post-punk hippie thing going on and it doesn't help he's introduced as writer and shaman. He actually refers to himself as a magician but he soon makes it clear his magic is the manipulation of perceived reality through the use of words. Once he explains his philosophy his eccentricity is charmingly gothic and you know you'd be happy to share an ale or a pot of herbal tea. I like to think of Moore as a nice version of Alistair Crowley.

Moore's mindset is very English left; his political views were born from the time of Thatcher's Britain. He has a passionate distrust for government and believes they'll do whatever they can get away with.  Read any of his works, especially Watchmen, From Hell or V for Vendetta and that soon becomes evident. You'll also notice he often draws upon English history to build his past, present and future distopian fantasies and the world of Victorian England is where The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen resides.  It is a team of Victorian fictional characters, Alan Quartermain, Mina Harker, Captain Nemo and others, who under the direction of the British Government act as a Justice League for the British Empire.

In the first two books the league confront Fu Manchu, Professor Moriaty and even H G Wells' own Martian horde. But it's no thrill ride adventure as the characters find reasons to distrust their masters, the institutions, each other, even their own principles. Moore pushes this even further in the latest, The Black Dossier. But that's not all he pushes. Unlike the previous first and second volumes, Black Dossier is not a compilation of a comic book mini-series, it is a single self contained work that very much plays against the norms of graphic novels.

Black Dossier jumps from the Victorian times of the past volumes to 1958, a year after the fall of Orwell's Big Brother. The graphic novel part of it deals with two people discovering the dossier and being pursued by conspiratorial entities. The other part of the book is an excerpt of the Black Dossier itself.  That includes stories in different styles, comics from different eras, a Shakespeare play, a Tijuana Bible, maps, diagrams and a 3-D section (with glasses). How this all ties in with the League of past volumes you'll have to find out for yourself.

It is an ambitious and most diversified work that has Moore yet again challenge the pre-conceived notions of the graphic novel. And other than its surface appearance as a companion to the first two books, it might be better described as an intertextual conglomeration of coded pastiches. However, I think I'd just call it a pretty darn clever bit of writing and drawing. The film The Mindscape of Alan Moore may well take you into Alan Moore's unique thought processes, but how he applies that to works like The Black Dossier is where his mantel of genius truly resides.

A few years back I was chatting with a couple of colleagues about Australian movie stars. We were debating who is the biggest today. Was it Russell Crowe or Mel Gibson or Nicole Kidman or Hugh Jackman? Smartarse me said that all of them combined still do not have the star power that Errol Flynn had in his day. The youngest of my fellow staffers asked who's Errol Flynn? I got over my initial shock and then told her he was Robin Hood, Captain Blood, the Sea Hawk and Don Juan. At the height of his Hollywood career he was the biggest movie star in the world and a household name anywhere where American movies were shown. The staffer asked when was he around, to which I replied in the '40s and '50s. She waves her hand and said "Oh, that was before my time". "It was before mine," I said sharply.

Being before your time is no excuse. Errol Flynn is Australia's greatest contribution to Hollywood entertainment. He changed and set the face of the romantic adventurer. He had that Australian type of accent - perhaps because he was a Tasmanian - that made him sound English to the ears of most non-Australians, thus he prances with mega-charming daring-do in that subtle Aussie way which at the time made him entrancingly different.

He's great to watch in action being a very physical performer. At first he looks like he was no great actor but there's a natural charm to him, an easy likeability, plus his roguish quality felt real, which it was. He was magnetic and attractive to both men and women. He also starred in some of the best and most successful Hollywood epics of the '30s. In the '40s, when older and wiser, and perhaps a little burnt out, he showed himself to actually be an actor capable of skilled performances.

It is the 50th anniversary of the passing of Errol Flynn at the age of 49. His legacy includes one of the best sword fights (against Basil Rathbone) in Captain Blood, one of the best hero entrances in Robin Hood when he fights off the guards with a stag over his shoulders, and one of the great screen partnerships of classic Hollywood. The chemistry between Flynn and Olivia de Havilland carried over the eight films they did together. He also proved himself a skilled writer with two well-received novels and what is still one of the very best Hollywood autobiographies with My Wicked Wicked Ways.

On and off the screen Flynn was the real deal. Yes, the saying In Like Flynn is derived from his exploits. And as he was fond of a Bloody Mary for breakfast, so raise your own glass of spiked tomato juice as we toast to the memory of Australia's brightest son, Errol Flynn.

"Oh Errol - I would give everything, just to be like him"

For those who need an introduction, Banksy is deservedly the most famous or notorious (what you will) street artist in the world today. Though he started his exploits in the streets of England, he is of international renown for works in such locations as New Orleans, Paris, Los Angeles, Melbourne and the Israeli West Bank. He's also a master prankster and pretty much the figurehead of anarchic protest art. I have no doubt he has earned his place in art history. His book Wall and Piece is one of the coolest and cleverest art books you can get today.

There's no question of his technical abilities and his versatility as an artist. How he can take another work of art and redefine  it to be seen in a contemporary, socio- political viewpoint means he's an appropriator in the most skilled and respected sense. But what I love the most about his work is the humour. It is sun-  bleached wall dry with a strong sense of the charmingly wicked (I love his rats). I like how he makes a point of his work enhancing a location and never detracting. I know that not all would agree on that, especially municipal councils.

And somehow, Banksy makes that a message in itself. The real risk of the work being removed adds a different sense of permanency to the pieces. Don't just pass them, stop and look, really look, soak them in; keep them in the memory, for tomorrow they may well be gone.

Of course much of his work is stenciled and can be repeated elsewhere and any new work is photographed immediately and extensively. There is an irony to the fact they are regarded as graffiti, as disposable when other mediums make his work so very permanent. I don't think that escapes Banksy, and he even makes fun of it. 

Banksy is going very strong right now with new things appearing all over the place. Recently he open the Village Pet Store And Charcoal Grill in New York and it is a very clever, disturbingly funny and quite poignant place to visit. I don't know if he's a vegetarian or not, but he certainly doesn't want people to be deliberately ignorant of what they like to eat. It's one of the best works of prankster art in recent years.

All this means he bears close scrutiny and further investigation, not as a notorious vandal, but as the leading light to this most recent and exciting art movement. The first real book to discuss him is Banksy's Bristol: Home Sweet Home by Steve Wright. Banksy's home city is Bristol and it's a happening place cultural wise. Banksy is clearly at home there, being the place he developed his talents and coming back to visit from time to time. I suspect Bristol is secretly proud of him and I think they should be.

The World Fantasy Awards for 2008 were held quite recently.

The nominees for Best Novel were as follows:

     Territory by Emma Bull
     Ysabel by Guy Gavriel Kay
     Fangland by John Marks
     Gospel of the Knife by Will Shetterly
     The Servants by Michael Marshall Smith

The winner was Guy Gavriel Kay, a Canadian author with ten novels under his belt. A majority of those are tales set in an alternative medieval Europe. Since his first appearance in 1984 with The Summer Tree, the first of three in The Fionavar Tapestry all of his work has been critically well received. Tigana, set in an Italy of two moons, has achieved classic status. The financial success of his other novels has varied, but Ysabel has been the most successful for him to date. Of interest is that it is his first contemporary set novel, an urban fantasy, though it has links with The Fionavar Tapestry as some characters reappear.

Set in the streets of Provence, the protagonist, a fifteen-year-old boy, on one special night, encounters mythical figures from a history different to our own. The "gods walk among us" idea isn't a new one but Kay has merged it with the ideas of folklore and the powerful influence history has on modern society and modern lives. Its freshness is greatly enhanced by strong characters and Kay's reputable eloquence of prose. Though Ysabel has been around for a year in one edition or another, it is still on the rise and bestseller beckons in mass-market paperback.

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The International Horror Guild Awards were also in the last few weeks.

The nominees for Best Novel were:

     Grin of the Dark by Ramsey Campbell
     Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand
     The Missing by Sarah Langan
     Season of the Witch by Natasha Mostert
     The Terror by Dan Simmons

U.S. writer Dan Simmons took the prize with his huge Artic novel that is as much a historical adventure as it is a supernatural horror. Set on an 1845 expedition to find the North-West Passage two ships and crew are trapped in the ice and there they stay for close to two years. The hardship of this alone is enough for a good book as Dan Simmons is more than proficient to tell it. But Simmons adds an even darker element as something unknown is brutally killing the crew and leaving some pretty nasty corpses. Simmons makes this a novel of duel survival, from a deadly frozen landscape and the terror that tracks them in the darkness and ice on last bid trek to escape.

Dan Simmons is an extraordinarily versatile author having written instant classics in horror like Song of Kali and Carrion Comfort and science fiction like the four novel Hyperion Cantos. He's also a successful writer of mainstream literature, crime and short fiction. I'm currently half way through his Illium/Olympus cycle, a mega-epic that merges post-humanist societies with Greek gods and the Trojan War as played out on Mars. It's very ambitious, but like everything else he does, his no mucking around prose style together with his rich knowledge and intelligence pulls it off quite successfully.

Michael Crichton, novelist and filmmaker, best known these days as the creator of E.R. and the author who started the whole Jurassic Park thing, died on November 4th of cancer at the age of 66. His novels were best selling works of popular fiction, researched and smartly written, usually cautionary tales about new technologies. Several of his novels have been adapted to varying degrees of success.

The best of them is Andromeda Strain about an underground science team dealing with a killer plague brought back to earth by a space probe. Both book (1968) and film (1971) have a verisimilitude that makes it seem plausible and thus rather gripping. Special mention also to the 1974 adaptation of Terminal Man, an underrated technothriller about a man hooked up to a computer to control his violent seizures but instead being elevated to psychopath.  

His only book he adapted himself is The Great Train Robbery. Filmed as The First Great Train Robbery in '79 this is a charming rogues adventure with Sean Connery and Donald Sutherland. It is Crichton's best work as director though the year previously he directed Coma which still is remembered as one of the better thrillers of the '70s and one of the times his background as a medical doctor would be handy.

Crichton also directed Looker (1981), about a cosmetic surgeon discovering evil advertising companies disposing of models and replacing them with computer reconstructions, and Runaway (1984), about cops dealing with out of control robots and the madman behind it all. Both have dated terribly, but it adds to their charm, especially Runaway with clockwork nasties and a leering Gene Simmons.

But Michael Crichton's legacy to popular culture largely comes down to one film. In 1973 he wrote and directed Westworld. Set in Delos, an amusement park made up of RomanWorld, MedievalWorld and WesternWorld, robots - indistinguishable from humans except their finger joints - are meant to please and entertain their guests but predictably go on a killing rampage. You may have seen the episode of The Simpsons about that.

The cool part of the film was watching Yul Brynner as a robot cowboy (clearly reminiscent of his Magnificent Seven persona) going terminator on Richard Benjamin's arse. Superior to Spielberg's "Westworld with dinosaurs", Crichton's resourceful use of a low budget succeeded in bringing all the elements together to make this a classic sci-fi flick and worthy of cult status.

Okay, I think it has to be admitted that Crichton could get a bit silly - like with Sphere and Congo - and there is no single work of brilliance in his books or films, but by putting Andromeda Strain, Westworld, Jurassic Park, E.R. and even Twister out there into the culture, his contribution is undeniable. So though some harsher critics might dismiss him I'll certainly raise my test-tube of peppered schnapps to Michael Crichton for some easy reading, easy watching, for putting some neat science ideas into our fiction and for the moment a robot Brynner stood up without a face.

On October 30th, 1938, at 8.00pm, the Mercury Theater On The Air, headed by Orson Welles, broadcasted their performance of The War of the Worlds. It was an hour program where the first half was done as contemporary news bulletins spelling out the vanguard of an invasion force landing at Grover's Mill, New Jersey. It was performed as a Halloween event but too many people tuned in at the wrong time and got caught up in it believing it to be authentic and running out the door before the second half began in a more traditional radio-play structure.

Well, the shit went down and there was some sporadic panic in the streets. Over the ensuing weeks, then years and decades the media have blown it a bit out of proportion, but the myth remains firm that seventy years ago was the night that panicked America. It deserves the hype; the broadcast itself was a wonderful live performance that holds up so very well today.

Close your eyes and listen to this nine and half minute excerpt:

Mercury Theater On The Air, being Orson Welles and his troupe of performers, adapted classic texts to radio and some are seminal.  Their Dracula is still one of the best versions and Heart of Darkness makes me wish that Orson Welles had made a movie of it. There was a lot of pressure on Welles to turn War of the Worlds into a film but he made Citizen Kane instead. I'll not complain. It was seventeen years later, fifty-five years ago, that George Pal and Byron Haskin made their version. It consciously and respectfully takes a lot from the radio-play and despite some quibbles and a touch of datedness it still deserves classic status and I admit I've watched it numerous times and will again.

The recent Spielberg version has nice effects but keeping it contemporary really didn't work for me. The machines felt like they should have been stomping around an earlier time, preferably when H.G. Wells set his novel in 1898 and preferably back in England. Despite other right shitty versions not worth talking about there hasn't been a reasonably loyal adaptation of the book. I think it is worthy of such and I hope one day in the near future someone gives it a jolly good try.

But for now, I'm going to put on Jeff Wayne's Musical Version and do a disco dance in the office.

No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth Century...  

The 2nd of November is the Dia de Los Muertos or Day of the Dead and is celebrated in Mexico and the Southwest states of the U.S. It is a day where those who have died are welcomed back home to spend a day with loved ones. Usually altars are prepared with photos and things the deceased would like. Some even have picnics in graveyards where the departed are the guests of honour. Family members and even pets are not just fondly remembered but considered still members of the family. It is based on the idea that life is but a dream and when you die you wake up to your real life.

On the Day of the Dead they come to visit and party like nobody's business. I think Dia de Los Muertos is cooler than Halloween for its decorations and music, for its sense of festival and especially for its art. It might seem like all skeletons but they're all funky, partying skeletons. Joyous skeletons!

The best novel to appreciate Day of the Dead is probably Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. Not a happy tale by any means the story is set on that day in 1938 as a concerned wife comes to Quauhnahuac, Mexico, to reunite with her a husband, a former British Consul lost in sadness and drink. Of course, there are complications with other characters but the backdrop of the festival interweaves its mystery all to a fateful close. It is a classic of English literature and of the human condition. There was a respectable film adaptation that contains an empathic performance by Albert Finney.

A rather different twist to this day is in Ian McDonald's novel known as Necroville in the UK and Terminal Cafe in the US. Technology has made it possible to resurrect the dead but their legal status remains non-living. They have to work off the expense of maintaining their legal dead state and they live in segregated enclaves. In Los Angeles they live in Necroville. But for one night of the year, The Night of the Dead, everyone goes to Necroville, living and dead, to be part of the wildest party of the year. The novel follows five narratives as these five characters wander the streets looking for either loved ones or a sense to one's own existence. In its visually rich and multi-textured world, past and future ideals clash and it asks what place our souls have within it.

But you don't need to read. You can watch Robert Rodriguez's Once Upon a Time in Mexico; frenetic, erratic and messy but plenty of gun-fu which climaxes on The Day of the Dead and all the exotic imagery that it contains. But it brings back to mind something very cool regarding those images of skeletons and flowers and Mexican architecture. I recall most fondly a 1988 computer adventure game by Lucasarts called Grim Fandango. Stylised like Casablanca in The Land of the Dead where everyone is in the form of a Calaca, a Day of the Dead skeleton, must travel to the Ninth Underworld. A great game but best of all was the world it contained; an Aztecan world of 20s Noir intrigue where one might imagine the dead  go to live out their lives. I know it's only a game but I have often thought there needs to be a movie, even a computer animated feature, set in this world.

Imagery is what is so very special to me about the Day of the Dead. It's not from my own culture so I'm guessing I don't fully fathom the full meaning of it. But I think there's something  magical about it, something that allows colour and love in what could be a dark place. And I feel that most in the art, especially the folk art of this festival. You could kind of live it yourself by making paper machete skeletons and hanging them round the home. Make sugar  skulls and give them out as treats. Invite your living friends to party with the dead. Why should they miss out on the fun? I suggest picking up a copy of Day of the Dead Crafts: More Than 24 Projects that Celebrate Da de los Muertos.

Also seek out the art of José Guadalupe Posada, an engraver who during the late 1800s and early 1900s produced many wonderful illustrations depicting Dia de Los Muertos, some macabre but largely engaging and humourous. His influence throughout the twentieth century is hard to measure but clearly there, right up to a direct inspiration for Edward Gorey and Tim Burton. Posada has been rediscovered numerous times including most recently as template for tattoo designs.

I recommend you get to know better this Day of the Dead and also the festival the day before, on the 1st of November, called Dia de los Angelitos when people remember the children that have died. I think there's something special about it, something funky and sublime at the same time and a cultural event the world could do better to appreciate. Even if in the end you hang up your paper skeleton, get your friends to toast your tequila shots (lick-sip-suck) to the altar of Anthony Quinn and then watch the sunset while listening to Los Lobos.