I'll Have Some Of That Guilt Too

I hadn't planned on writing anything about the tragic killing of Renisha McBride here. Not because it doesn't horrify me, but because the circumstances of her death, despite being in obvious respects horribly familiar, has specifics which are little difficult for me to get my head around.

And the way I tend to deal with things I can't quite figure out is to write about them, which in this case feels to me too much like a white guy talking about himself in regards to a black woman losing her life. Which is a problem.

But MightyGodKing is right, I think. White people do need to talk about this stuff, if only to make sure we penetrate the fog of indifference our culture still seems perfectly happy about wrapping ourselves in.  A black person has been shot in America, again, and the police aren't sure whether it's worth arresting anyone, again.  Trayvon Martin died because a man assumed wearing a hoodie whilst on the streets meant he was probably a criminal, and decided to give chase. Renisha McBride died because a man assumed knocking on his front door at 3:30am meant she was probably a criminal, and went to the door with a loaded shotgun.

That is - that has to be - the takeaway message in all of this. That black people in America live in a culture of paranoid suspicion that means that, even when we can't be sure race was the reason they were targeted, they can be damn sure race will be the reason nobody in authority will care.

There are, as I say, a few specifics here regarding gun laws and gun culture which I think might need unpicking, but as I say, it's a white British man pontificating on how a black American woman came to be shot for the crime of needing help with her car.  So I'm putting it all below the fold.  If you're interested, have at it, but if you want to stop reading here, I couldn't come close to blaming you.

Boozing With Brummies

Being an abridged description of our adventures at the local booze convention. As always, my dislike of ale and obsession with cider must be taken into account when reading my shockingly biased 'reviews'.

Delicious Ciders

Blaengawney Rum

This is tough to order without worrying about pronunciation (a thousand blessings to the person who invented pointing).  Once you navigate that issue, it's tasty enough, but other than an above-average sweetness, there isn't anything particularly special here.

Oliver's Perry

This is heavy as hell. It starts off dry, but there's a submerged sweetness that runs rampant across the aftertaste like an enraged sugar-caked wildebeest.  It's pleasingly powerful, as well.  Really the only problem here is that after a few mouthfuls it becomes indistinguishable from cheap squash, albeit a squash that will reduce your liver to burnt blancmange.

Sweet Crossman

Sweet sulphur, more like. This would be the perfect accompaniment to a hot day in Hell (which is all of then), for when the gibbering demons find themselves between scourings and with a thirst to quench.  Mortals, in contrast, should approach with some caution.

Gwatkin's Perry

Smells like port, tastes like unstoppable victory.  And port. I would make a nest in this.  I would marry it, and settle down, and not even cheat on it with cocktails.  Not least because I'd be too drunk to leave the house.  Even finding the front door would cause problems.

Princess Pippin

This is 8% and utterly undrinkable; the latter quality perhaps functioning as a public service.

Awful Ales

Jumping Pirate

Great name, terrible drink. It's like burnt yeast with a Dettol aftertaste. Avoid.

Space Hoppy

Strong, bitter, and not tasting of shit, like I like my women. The label says "pale", but this is amber through and through.

Gunhild

A blank canvas onto which we project our dreams and desires. Or, more likely, not.  But there's nothing else to do with this. Still, we refer you to Puddleglum's First Law of Consumables: "If it doesn't taste like anything, it can't taste terrible."

(This law does not extend to rice cakes.)

Bad Kitty

Vegan beer!  And dammit, it's brilliant.  At last a "chocolaty" beer that lives up to the name. I could have done with milkier chocolate, I guess, but under the circumstances that would probably have been too much to ask.

Foreign Beers

Lindeman's Framboise

This is just fizzy raspberry cordial that gets you slightly drunk.  Which would be an entirely awesome were it not 12p a centilitre.  Some of us are on budgets here, Lindeman!

Einstok Icelandic Toasted Porter.

What are the chances that in an island nation of 320 000 people someone would combine alcohol, coffee and - um, ash, I think? - so well?

(Don't write in. I know the chances. Or I could definitely work them out. Maybe.)

Leffe Ruby

"Red fruits and Belgian beer", it says on the label.  Probably. My French isn't all that good. The result is stronger than Lindeman's Framboise and not quite so sweet.  It's by far the best Leffe I've tasted, but again, you're most certainly paying for the upgrade.

Berliner Kindl Weisse

Well, this is a hell of a thing. I can't exactly say it's pleasant - the closest I can come to a description is "carbonated stomach acid" - but its so far out of the wheelhouse of British beers that it's worth trying just to see how the Germans do it. Which, it turns out, is to make beer taste as much like sour milk as possible.

Friday Talisman: The Only Player In Town

That weapon is a bit of a shapeless nothing, but I guess when you're riding a motherfucking dragon, it doesn't matter all that much what's in your sword-hand. You have to respect a game which is so unconcerned about balance it can have players being leprachauns and minstrels vying for victory with a woman atop a gigantic flying six-limbed firebreathing lizard. 

 

1.11: Thicker Than Water

Steven had to take some time off the comic so he could go become a doctor, but with that trifle out of the way, it's time to dive back into the strange world of Achstein U.

1.10

A Film Of A Shadow

"All this amoral obsessiveness has given me such a hangover."

I love Shadow of the Vampire.

1.

German Expressionist films can be pretty tricky for the contemporary viewer. The thick make-up and considerably over-emphasis of body language can often be off-putting.  Nosferatu is, in fact, a wonderfully off-kilter experience, the obvious lack of realism adding to its oppressive dream-like atmosphere.

By shooting a modern film about the shooting of a German Expressionist masterpiece, this becomes somewhat more clear. The ultimate aim of Shadow... is the same as that of Nosferatu; to unsettle.  The methods through which this is accomplished have changed in eight decades, of course, but Shadow... demonstrates just how cosmetic those changes are. The unreal - even the absurd - is not a barrier to the unnerving. Quite the opposite, in some cases.  The first death in the film occurs when "Shreck" drains a man atop half of a sailing ship attached to the side of a medieval Czechoslovakian castle.  And it doesn't matter in the least.

The film also provides some context to Expressionism, by reminding us of two things.  Firstly, many of the actors working in these early films were established stage actors; that is, people who are used to scaling their vocal and physical performance to crowds of people who are watching actors on a stage from several metres away at least.  It's hardly surprising that when placed in front of a camera and told to act - without speaking, no less - their response would be to perform in a way which to contemporary eyes seems desperately over-egged.  Secondly, via Murnau's visits to what seems to be somewhere between an opium den and a gay orgy, we're reminded that the Expressionist films of the inter-war period (the period the most famous such films came from; Nosferatu itself, the Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Metropolis) were created during a time of ludicrous hedonistic excess. It's probably pretty difficult to tell whether someone is whirling their arms about too much when you're mashed off your tits on laudanum.

2.

Indeed, what's fascinating about Murnau's attitude is that in his own opiate-addled mind the only thing that matters is authenticity.  He hires an actual fucking vampire for his vampire flick.  He has his lead actor (a frankly rather shaky Eddie Izzard, though he does sell nervousness quite well) meet "Shreck" at night in a creepy castle whilst filming their first scene together.  He agrees to sell his female lead to his undead hire, and his plan to betray "Schreck" by exposing him to sunlight, he of course intends to film the results.

This, it seems to me, ties into a more general instinct among 20th and 21st century people to film what they don't understand and/or which scare them.  There's a reason Blair Witch Project did so well, after all. Here, Murnau has found something outside of his comprehension, so he's dissecting it through film.  Which, of course, is what we're doing too.  When "Schreck" meets his end, we don't see him burn up or explode or crumble into dust, we see the frames which carry his image shrivelling up. What we see on film can only be interpreted through that film.  Thousands of years ago we made up stories to explain those phenomenon we couldn't understand. These days we employ people to pretend to face things that don't exist in order to explain things we don't yet fully grasp, and then for some ridiculous reason we insist this obbious intentional artifice must have the sheen of realism.  This is no less stupid today than it was when Murnau wore his goggles.

(Note here that I'm using the word 'realism' to describe something entirely different to internal consistency. The wilful refusal by so many people to understand the difference between the two is one of the most aggravating aspects of genre fandom. Murnau wanting a genuine vampire for his movie is evidence the man is crazy.  Him getting upset during the final scene that the stake is in the wrong place whilst "Schreck" dies is entirely sensible.  Or it would be, were it not following the brutal murder of two members of his film crew.)

3.

One of the great cliches of vampire stories is how lonely and depressing it is to be one of the undying.  This is generally pretty difficult to take even remotely seriously in film, because of the nature of movie casting.  How, one might reasonably ask, are we supposed to sympathise with ridiculously good-looking eternally young people who are lamenting the fact that they will never be able to stop fucking other ridiculously good-looking eternally young people.  Young people are unbearable even when we know their self-obsessed springtime won't last forever.

Shadow... deals with this expertly.  One of the greatest scenes in the film sees "Max Schreck" drinking Schnapps with the producer and the scriptwriter, discussing the sheer degree of knowledge and experience his centuries of life has pushed out of his head, and how all those years of solitude means he can no longer even remember the most basic ways in which humans behave.  "Schreck's" life is not one of eternal youth, but eternal lonely old-age and ugliness.  It's a wonderful tonic to the standard practice of employing impossibly beautiful people who try to reflect our own fears and experiences back at us whilst barely visible through a fog of hormones.  There are no slim and impressionable young girls to hang off "Schreck's" every word, just two middle-aged drunken me who would rather he leave and stop bringing them down.

4.

Why didn't they include the werewolf?  That's the funniest scene in the original film. "The werewolf is roaming the forest." BOOM. Cut to hyena. Cut to scared horses. Cut to hyena. NEVER MENTION IT AGAIN.

Pissiness And Photos

After spending last night watching scary movies with - among others - our two comrades from last months epic Ryanair disaster, it occurred to me that I never really explained just what the hell happened.  Seven weeks on I don't still have the same hatred in my heart as I did at the time, so suffice it to say:

1. If you're running an international airport, you should make sure the person making announcements speaks enough English to be comprehensible;
2. If you're announcing a flight has been cancelled, you should probably give at least a few more details, and when you direct passengers to the internet to find out what's going on, you should probably check the wi-fi in your airport is actually working;
3. If you're running an airline and you cancel a flight because the pilot doesn't want to land in rainy weather (our pilot-to-be was the only person who felt this way that whole day, but I don't want to be second-guessing whether a potentially lethal activity I know nothing about is possible or not, so, fine), you should probably not tell people the next flight is three days away, you'll have to pay for the resulting three nights in a local hotel, which they should reimburse you for later on, perhaps;
4. If you're on the customer service desk and people are asking where else they can get a flight to Birmingham from nearby, you probably shouldn't be directing them to travel 90km in order to get a flight two days later rather than three, especially when it ultimately turns out the flight is to Bournemouth.

 Thankfully point 4 proved not to effect us, as we were able to hurriedly book an early evening flight to Southampton, and then hire a car (go Europcar, by the way; the only people to come out of this clustercuss at all well) to get home.

So that's that, then.  I don't want to linger on the horrors that concluded our French trip, though.  Instead, here are some lovely photos Fliss took whilst I was busy learning conjugations whilst writing and drinking in strict rotation.

Nor Is Any Woman Powered By Electricity

This made me laugh pretty hard, assuming, as I think we must do, that it's a joke.

I mean, as a joke, it's pretty funny.  It's notably less funny than when my friend Phil told me conspiratorially "Novels: those are a pack of lies, aren't they?", but Mr Gallagher is trying his best here.

Unless he actually means what he's saying, of course.  That's hilarious in a different way.  We'll leave aside the obvious objection here - Gallagher lists his favourite film as The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, which two Italian guys just, like, totally made up - and point out Gallagher himself writes fictitious songs. No-one will ever find him in a champagne supernova.  No-one will ever find a champagne supernova.  Should one ever create a champagne supernova - a disgraceful waste of booze that could have otherwise been used to, you know, get me drunk - it will utterly inaccessible to those unfortunates who find themselves caught beneath landslides.

Come on, Noel.  We all hate people in roughly similar professions who look down on us for no good reason; I was a maths teacher for three years, after all.  If your going to put the boot in, though, do it with a least a nod towards internal coherence, yeah? S'all I'm sayin'.