Boxing Stupid

Whilst I was at large in Eastern Europe, my old friend Rigor Mortified (a veterinary nurse) told me a story that was just too funny not to steal, especially given this blog's unflinching pro-dog standpoint.

On one fateful day, RM is late into her shift when a large Geordie man enters her field of vision carrying a shoe-box.
"Weeya tak a luke at me puppy, like?" he asks.
"What?" responds RM.
"Me puppy.  Weeya tak a luke?" says the man, holding out the box.
"Um... OK" RM says slowly, eyeing the box with suspicion.  "What's wrong with your puppy?"
"It dinna eat," the man says. "An' dinna play. Willna gan fer a walk.  Two hundred quid ah paid fer this puppy. Pure breed, ah gat told."
"Right", says RM.  "A pure breed what?"
"A pure breed puppy," the man insists. "Rottweiler."
By now RM is thoroughly doubtful.  "You have a rottweiler puppy?"
"Aye."
"That cost two hundred quid?"
"Aye."
"In that rather small shoebox?"
"Aye, pet."
This, needless to say, is not good news.  Whatever else might be wrong with this poor creature, the fact it can fit into such a small space is clearly cause for concern in itself.  Not entirely sure she wants to see what pathetic creature awaits her within, RM takes the box gingerly, and opens the lid.

Demons And Douchebags

I have mentioned before my old friend Mad Richard (I recorded his most glorious moment for posterity here). The common theme throughout his adventures, from his refusal to stop drinking (following doctor's orders) because he believed he had two livers [1] to attempting to train an insect he thought might be a flea into jumping through hoops [2], the recurring theme is a total inability to link cause and effect, combined with the unwavering belief that he is essentially indestructible. Generally, it's pretty fun to watch, though this is somewhat less true if it takes place whilst you're in a car and he's driving.

I mention Mad Richard because he reminds me so totally of the hero in Paranormal Activity, which I dragged Tiger to this weekend (sorry for the nightmares, honey!). Spoilers follow.

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First off, I enjoyed the movie immensely. It's basically a text book example of a horror film that has a series of increasingly freaky events take place in the same location and then runs through them. It's hard not to view this as somewhat derivative, it's true, but it does it so well that I have no trouble forgiving it. I was particularly impressed with the fact that it managed so well to walk the fine line between explaining so much the unsettling mystery is lost and explaining so little it becomes impossible to tie the story together. If one considers a film to be a jigsaw puzzle, it's important that the viewer has enough pieces to feel like they can make a sensible guess as to what shape the missing pieces take (compare this with, say, Ringu II, in which it feels as though someone has mixed two entirely different jigsaw puzzles together and then handed you 30% of the resulting pile). Paranormal Activity manages that very well.

Part of it's skill lies in using its conceit (a couple attempts to videotape the strange goings on in their house) to its advantage. The static nature of the camera set up to film their hallway from their bedroom (and useless a tactic though I'm sure it would be, I'm pretty sure that if I believed a demon had set up residence in my house I'd be sleeping with the door closed) allows the film to ratchet up the tension very effectively. The same location with escalating events, as I say. This is helped by the fact that the location in question includes the characters' bedroom. One of the few things I liked about Ju-On was the scene in which a woman was killed by a ghost that slid into her bed; making what is supposed to be the place we feel most safe suddenly dangerous. This concept of the invasion of privacy is one of the film's best aspects, and is one of the reasons I think the repeated comparisons to The Blair Witch Project are so lazy. You need more than just a horror film shot with camcorders, I think.

On the other hand, there is a definite connection between the two films (and many other horror films) in one important way: the narrative is entirely dependent on at least one character being unbelievably fucking stupid. In The Blair Witch Project, that person is Mike, a man so entirely unburdened by intellect his response to finding a map difficult to read is to throw the thing away. That one act is so breath-takingly idiotic that it threw me right out of the film the first time I watched it, and it took me a long time to get back in.

As idiotic as Mike clearly is, though, he's small potatoes compared to Mika, the vacant-cranium numbnuts "hero" of Paranormal Activity. This is a man whose response to a demon haunting his home is to mock its power. A man who is so convinced that the psychic who visits his house is a charlatan that he immediately wants to disobey the advice that is proffered, namely: don't use a Ouija board to try and natter with the demon. A man who, having promised his girlfriend that he won't buy such a device (Katie being something like 15000 times smarter than he is, and that's despite the fact that the demon is clearly targeting her) then goes out and borrows one, as though her only problem was the expense involved, and then immediately asks her to help him use it. A man who attempts to interrupt the argument that follows Katie's horrified realisation that the demon used the board to spell out a message whilst they were out by asking if she'd possibly help him translate what the demon had said. He won't leave. He won't call the experts. He won't listen to his girlfriend at any point throughout the entire film. He claims to be in total control, in the same way Mad Richard will claim "It'll be fine!", only whilst in the middle of a situation in which his girlfriend's life might very well be in danger.

It's a real shame, because it does real damage to an otherwise excellent film. It doesn't exactly ruin it - the rest of the film is too good for that - but it makes it much harder to buy in. And horror films need you to buy in, especially those that are trading in "realism". I've mentioned before that I think people make too much of characters behaving "foolishly" in horror films. People go to watch a film about a mad axe murderer, and judge each character's actions as though they should be aware they are in a horror film, forgetting that they themselves hear noises in the dead of night, and don't run out of the door screaming in case it turns out to be a serial killer. Mika, though; Mika is just dumb by any metric. Not leaving the house because a door is mysteriously wobbling? Fine. Not leaving because your girlfriend has suddenly developed the world's creepiest case of somnambulism? OK. Not leaving despite the fact that you have videotaped evidence that an invisible creature is leaving footprints in your bedroom while you sleep? Get. The. Fuck. Out.

Anyway. If you have a higher (or I guess even equal) tolerance than I do for characters who are too simply stupid to be believable, I really recommend giving the film ago. Be warned, though, it's not an easy task to go to bed once you seen it.

[1] And one kidney. He described the day he was disabused of this particular notion as being akin to the moment one is informed that there is no Father Christmas.

[2] This was done by filling his bath with water, placing the wee beastie on a sponge floating in the centre (to prevent escape), holding out a hoop of some kind, and then prodding the sponge until the terrified arthropod leaped desperately to safety. Experimental conclusion: subject drowned.

Tales From The Crypt

Nothing much of interest to add to the running commentary on Ljubljana, so instead I shall once more delve into the archives to bring you the sorrowful tale of "Simon and the Duck".

One day Simon arrives at work to discover he has been summoned to see the boss (known as "Scrooge" in December and simply as "The Bastard" at all other times of year, though your humble scribe knows him first as "Father"). Trembling slightly, he knocks on the overlord's office door, and is granted audience.
The Bastard is in a gregarious mood. "You have done well!" he booms at our hero. "Your last client have registered their gratitude!"
"That bloke who lives in a mansion in the country and could afford to have everyone here killed?" Simon asks.
"The very same!" he is told. "He wishes to express your gratitude to you personally."
Simon is not sure he likes the sound of this.
"Express how?" he asks carefully.
"You are to attend his duck-shoot at his manor this very weekend," The Bastard informs him. "I HAVE SPOKEN!"

Simon, of course, has never shot a gun in his life. Nor has he ever killed anything, beyond stepping on the occasional snail, about which he always made sure to feel appropriately guilty. He had eaten duck in restaurants, of course, but he is quite convinced that having to dispatch the delicious water-fowl himself would certainly have been a deal-breaker.

But HE HAD SPOKEN, so like the dutiful corporate lawyer he was, Simon pulled up outside the palace-sized country house of his ludicrously well-to do client on a warm Saturday morning.
"Fine day for it!" his client tells him as he emerges from the mansion. Simon has no idea what exact properties of the current climate makes it particularly suitable for the executing of birds, but he nods anyway, to be polite and because this man is armed and scares him a great deal.

Not long afterwards Simon finds himself stood beside a wooden post, his arms cradling a shotgun and his pockets filled with spare shells. On either side slight iterations of the stereotypical red-faced corpulent borderline-alcoholic country "gentleman" stand ready, their shotguns pointed toward the sky.
Then the slaughter begins. The sound is nearly deafening as several dozen blood-crazed tweed-clad psychopaths begin to blaze into the sky, bringing down bird after bird after bird. Simon tries to join in, half-heartedly at first, then with increasing fervour. At first, after all, the main concern in all of this is that he doesn't want to kill an innocent animal. After a few minutes, though, the principle concern becomes that he can't seem to hit any of the damn things. All thoughts of moral ambiguity leaves Simon's mind as he becomes more and more determined that at least one duck shall feel his wrath this day.
It's not going to happen. The birds are just too fast on the wing. Simon is down to his last shell, and he's furious. That's when he spots one duck, either injured by a previous blast or just too damn stupid to live, waddling across the damp ground a few metres in front of him.
Delighted to finally have at least some possibility of proving his worth, Simon takes aim.
"Good God, man!" his host shouts in outrage, "You can't shoot a duck whilst it's walking!"
"I'm well aware of that," Simon tells him coolly. "I'm waiting for the bastard to stop."

This true story courtesy of Squid Senior.

Wherein My Tendency To Over-Analyse Reaches Its Zenith

Right, so, anyone remember Fraggle Rock?

Sure you do.

What you probably don't remember is that it was Marxist propaganda.

I'm serious. Fraggle Rock was The Communist Manifesto with Muppets. Let's start with the Gorgs, who consider themselves the "King and Queen of the universe" despite not having any subjects. This represents the inevitable irrelevance of the Aristocracy and their self-appointed titles. Producing nothing of value of their own, they simply complain about the Fraggles stealing their radishes (clearly here radishes=money).

Under the Gorgs (quite literally) live the Fraggles, who are clearly the Bourgeoisie by any other name. They spend their time cavorting around the caverns, handing out radishes to the Doozers under the condition that they continue to serve them. Capricious and indecisive, the worst of these scabs upon society is their leader Gobo. Not only does he fail to see the plight of the Doozers, but he regularly reads postcards from his Uncle Matt who continually feeds him misinformation about the workings of alternative systems of governance, referring to those that have shaken off the shackles of aristocratic authoritarianism as "silly creatures".

Finally you have the Doozers, who symbolise the Proletariat. They spend all day thanklessly creating complex structures (out of radishes, naturally) that the Fraggles constantly destroy and consume without a second thought. Sure, they claim that they're happy with their lot, but that's just so Gobo doesn't lock them up in some proto-gulag that they had to build themselves. The poor green bastards are so down-trodden that they don't even get to be the heroes of a series about Marxism, which is pretty damn perverted when you think about it (and clearly I've thought about it a lot).

Somewhere, under those adorable hard hats and behind the button noses, the Doozers are planning revolution.

You can carry the metaphor further, since I'm sure we can all agree that I haven't taken it far enough yet. Who else could Marjory the Trash Heap represent, with all her wisdom and predictive powers, but Lenin. Her heckling rats, of course, stand for Stalin, simply waiting for the right moment to undo Lenin and his grandiose plans.

Finally, we have "Doc" the inventor (clearly a metaphor for God himself) and his workshop, (which is Heaven) in which lives Sprocket, who represents Marx himself. Shaggy dog = shaggy beard.

Someone call HUAC!

In conclusion, then, this is conclusive proof that Henson was attempting to twist the minds of children into joining the American Communist Party. Well, that, or eat a few more radishes.

Next week: how The Clangers is marred by a disturbing undercurrent of radical Zionism.

So It's Come To This: SpaceSquid On Musicals

Sometimes the universe folds back in on itself in strange and surprising ways.

Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved the musical Chess. Well, if we’re rigidly accurate about things (and we all know how much I love rigid accuracy, unless it gets in the way of the dick jokes), I can’t claim to live the musical itself, because I’ve never seen it. Moreover, there at least two very different versions of the show, and I’m not talking about either of them. I’m talking about the original work in progress double CD released back in 1984. From what I understand, the West End version of the musical (which kicked off in 1986 and ran for three years) bears great similarity to this recording. The Broadway version, though, not so much. They gutted the whole thing, setting it over one tournament instead of two, and in the process pissed all over the core concept in a way that forever proves that the Americans hate art, chess, the Swedish, and, er, Elaine Page (even the Broadway critics were smart enough to recognise that it was bilge). Since then, apparently, newer variants of the show have combined the two versions in various ways.

None of which particularly matters. It’s the original concept album that fascinates me. My mother listened to very little music whilst I was growing up, and my father almost none. The one piece of music that I was ever likely to catch whilst we drove around my dearly departed home county was the bearded half of ABBA’s latest project. Sometimes I wonder if this lack of input as a child is what left me essentially entirely uninterested in music until I was into my late teens, but that’s another story.

As a young child there was very little about the story I understood. Obviously, something was going on with chess matches and such, and the Cold War was involved (of course, I was still in primary school at the time, so the Cold War was something I only understood in the vaguest terms: the Russians didn’t like us, and if we were very lucky no-one was going to get blown to pieces for no good reason). All I really took from it, though, was there was one song about a man whose father had left him at twelve, and whose mother had ignored or berated him throughout the following years (I banned Dad from playing that one because it upset me so much, which I‘m hoping is an admission people class as sweet rather than pathetic), and another one which made use of the word “bastard”, a truly thrilling prospect to any prepubescent boy.

The months went by, added up to years, and eventually my father tired of the increasingly worn tapes [1], and I got to get my sticky mitts on them. On and off, they began to soundtrack my teenage years, and ultimately my time at university and beyond. Of course by then I finally had a grip on the story as well.

And what a story it is. The chess World Championship is to be played between East and West in the very middle of the Cold War (this actually happened in the early Seventies when Spassky Boris Spassky faced Bobby Fischer). The Russian (neither player has names in the original) and the distinctly Fischer-like American [2] will be playing each other in the mountains of Tyrol . For their respective countries, this is an opportunity for a glorious propaganda victory (this desire is most overtly expressed by the Russian’s adviser and party-man Molokov, for whom beating the American is the only consideration for the entire competition, but one assumes the Americans are just as bloodthirsty). The problem is that neither player wants to, forgive me, play along. The Russian dreams of defecting, not due to any love of the West but because he is so tired of the endless machinations of The Party who believe they control him utterly and can take the credit for his victories. The American, on the other hand, simply wants the adoration of the public (likely due to the neglect he suffered at his parents’ hands, hence the song that made little Squid so miserable). More importantly, though, he wants the love of his second, Florence (though the exact nature of that love is ambiguous). She, however, quickly falls for the Russian, and joins him in exile when he defects at the end of the first act [3], having beaten the American to a pulp over the course of the tournament.

The fall-out to this is extreme. The Russians are furious that they have lost their prodigy, and the American is devastated that he has lost not only the title, but Florence too. A year passes, and the Championship begins again, this time in Bangkok (“One Night In Bangkok” being officially the second most famous song from Chess). The Russian will be facing a former countryman (this time of unquestionably loyalty to The Party), with the American acting as a kind of MC to the whole affair. The Soviets plan to embarrass the “traitor” by allowing his wife Svetlana to join him in his exile, a development that leads to him leaving Florence since he refuses to deal with her concern at the cost of the tournament.

The American, for his part, demands the Russian forfeit the match, or else he will tell Florence the secret of her father’s betrayal during the Hungarian Uprising in ‘56 (information she doesn’t possess, and which has been handed to the American by a wrathful Molokov).

It’s almost too obvious to point it out, but the characters themselves are of course trapped within their own chess game, as oblivious as their pieces.

Ultimately, the American and Molokov are ignored. The Russian annihilates his opponent, losing Florence and Svetlana, both of whom realise he doesn't care about anything but winning (both had begun to suspect that, of course, that's what the song "I Know Him So Well" is about, which every person reading this post has heard). He, for his part, realises that winning is a necessary condition for him, his unquestionable dominance of his chosen field is essential to his self-worth. Women and countries come and go, but his abilities are unquestionable. All he ever really wanted was the chance to show his victories were his, that he was responsible for the movements of his own life (hardly surprising for a chess player, did I mention this works on two levels yet?). No matter how obvious it is that he needs to win, though, he seems to find it harder to persuade himself that winning is sufficient.

The American has always been convinced that winning is sufficient, not for its own sake, but because he is sure that it will immediately lead to the respect he has been searching for his whole life. Of course, he will never get to find that out. He lost the actual chess tournament a year ago, and he has lost the meta-game now. The Russian has ignored him as irrelevant, Florence has abandoned him. The only bullet left in his gun is the secret regarding his former assistant's father. Which, of course, knowing that it will do him no good and will cause her nothing but pain, he fires anyway. It's literally the only move left to make in the game.

These ideas about finding one's necessary and sufficient conditions for happiness/self-respect correlated to thoughts I had been having at the time, and continue to have to this day. Am I best attempting to excel in one particular area of my life, or would I be more content striking a balance between various things? Most importantly, how much of one aspect should you deliberately sacrifice in exchange for advancement in another. I still haven't decided, and of course it strikes me as massively unlikely that there is just one answer (or that that my answer and your answer would, or should, match). Sometimes I wonder to what extent I enjoy Chess because it ties in so closely to those themes, and to what extent those themes were something I subconsciously acquired through repeated exposure to the musical in the first place. [4]

So its important to me; important to a degree very few artifacts from my childhood can match. Given all of that, it’s tempting to leave my view of the musical frozen in the past, just reach for my CD’s again, and pretend that nothing ever changes.

Except that on Wednesday I discovered that there’s going to be a performance of Chess in my humble little town come November. My better judgement tells me that I shouldn’t go, that it can’t possibly measure up the images my brain has constructed from the songs and singers I’ve been listening to for two decades now. On the other hand, the chance to finally watch the story unfold rather than to just read a synopsis is pretty hard to resist, even if I know that both main story variants dare to end on less of a bummer than the original does.

Plus: night at the theatre. I could get myself right purdy. Scrub m’sel’ up all posh like. And, of course, they have a bar…

[1] He’d started playing the flute and wanted to listen to as many flautists as possible, presumably to maximise his self-loathing. I love my Dad.

[2] If you’ve never heard of Bobby Fischer, please take the time to read his Wikipedia entry. The man was a grade A lunatic. His refusal to defend his title in 1975 is a high point of advanced nuttiness. The entry doesn’t go into full detail, but he refused to play because the ICF would only agree to 178 of his 179 conditions for attendance. Condition 179: if the tournament ended in a nine-all tie, he won.

There’s much more in there (I keep meaning to try playing some Fischer Random Chess with Danny, though I am certain to lose fast and ugly), and it gets increasingly unpleasant (Fischer was a notorious anti-Semitic) , but it’s a fascinating story about a true genius, who also happened to be a total douche.

[3] The Russian lays out his feelings just before he is smuggled out by a Western embassy in the song “Anthem”, one of the better known pieces from the musical. He opines that nations and borders are all wastes of time, needless barriers to humanity. Of course, he has a natural advantage in that his pride and self-belief are so bullet-proof that love of ones home would never occur to him. Who needs a place to belong when everything you give a damn about you get to carry with you?

Incidentally, Michael Ball massacred the song without mercy on his 1996 album The Musicals, proving once and for all that there exists nothing in this universe too great for Michael Ball to be unable to reduce it to foetid excrement with his touch. Seriously, he’s like King Midas, if Midas has wanted everything he touched to be turned to sewage. And then sold to idiots.

[4] I know full well that I’m heading out of my area of expertise, but I would think there are some fascinating discussions to be had on the effect our favourite fiction has upon our emotional and intellectual development, and to what degree our personality chooses our best-loved works as oppose to our best-loved works shaping our personality. The phrase “X changed my life” probably exists for a good reason, and I have several things that could replace the unknown in that sentence.

From The Archives

It's now two on a Thursday morning, leaving me with four more days to finish the novel I sort of wrote back in November and wanted to actually end properly. Unfortunately writer's block has hit pretty hard (and if anyone has a cool name for a hideously be-weaponed battle cruiser, I'm open to ideas), so I'm basically just up drinking. Thus, in order to justify the damage to my liver, I choose to indulge in one of the activities I'd always assumed the internet was built for: relating stories about my insane friend Mad Richard.

Mad Richard is, at the very least, a statistical anomaly. In fact, he is a statistical anomaly on two fronts. Firstly, the very weirdest of weird shit constantly happens to him; Richard is liable to say "I had to hitch-hike home on a tractor" in much the same way you or I might say "I had to go inside because it started raining."

Secondly, none of the crazy events that seem to follow him around like probability-defying flies has ever managed to kill him. They totalled his bike once, and it's a miracle his liver survived celebrating R's nineteenth birthday (he told me once he'd only been drinking so hard because he'd misheard his biology teacher in school and thought he had two livers; the revelation that he had only the one was something he likened to discovering that Santa Claus was entirely fictitious).

In honour of Mad Richard, then, I present the conversation that occurred between us on the day R introduced us.

Mad R: Hey!

R: Hey Richard. This is my mate Squid.

SS: Wotcha.

R: How are things.

Mad R: Pretty awesome actually. I got a job!

This is clearly news of some surprise.

R: Really?

Mad R: Really. Of course, I had to lie a bit on the entrance form.

This is apparently news of considerably less surprise.

R: Christ, Richard, what did you do this time?

Mad R: I pretended to have eighteen years of fighter pilot experience.

R: You're only eighteen years old!

Mad R: Well obviously I had to lie about my date of birth, too.

R: Fine. Let's skip a number of steps and get straight to you telling us what this job actually is.

Mad R: You know what a black hole is?

R: Yeeeeeeees.

Mad R: And you know how anything fired into a black hole will be instantly crushed by the horrific gravitational forces such celestial phenomena generate?

R: I'm not sure I can cope with what's coming next.

SS: I find myself oddly curious from a scientific perspective.

R: You said that about "Pets Win Prizes".

Mad R: Anyway, the very instant NASA develop a vessel that can survive the pummelling already described, they're going to fire me into a black hole inside of it. You would not believe how much they're offering as payment.

There is silence for several seconds.

SS: I think we need to review.

Mad R: What do you mean?

SS: I mean that even if NASA are so blind they can't tell the difference between a man who's been flying for eighteen years and a teenager who's been breathing for eighteen years, and even if we skip over the somewhat inconvenient truth [1] that we're talking about singularities here, and "survive the pummelling already described" isn't really a question of bolting on an extra layer of steel or anything, and the equally problematical fact that we have no idea where to find black holes, much less how to get you there, then current scientific thinking about this stuff suggests you're gonna get tossed into another universe, or into the past, or something. You'll never return to collect your salary.

Mad R: Well, if I'm going to get thrown into the past, I hope it'll be to yesterday; I completely fucked up that assessed chemistry practical.

R: Is it time to get drunk yet?

Finis.

Right, that hasn't helped at all. I'm going to bed.

PS: I promised not to drone on about politics unless I came up with some angle I hadn't seen anywhere else, so I'll keep this brief, but I did want to mention that the White House has started dealing with irksome environmental reports that condemn them by no longer opening the e-mails they are contained in. This, by the way, is an excuse that has been tried by our undergraduates and failed miserably, so it's interesting that the "Leader of the Free World" is looking to get in on the action.

[1] I fucking copyrighted that! Damn Al Gore. DAMN HIM!