Bigelow Unchained

Could the death of Osama bin Laden have received the same treatment as slavery in Django Unchained?

Not many people know Kathryn Bigelow for Point Break do they? The tale of two detectives breaking a surfing drugs gang on the Californian coast was described as 'Looks 10, Brains 3' by Time's Richard Corliss. It would be unfair - and erroneous - to say the same of Zero Dark Thirty, whatever your take on this film is.


Keanu Reeves plays perpetually dripping drip Johnny Utah in Point Break.

But reviewers have waded in on many aspects of ZDT, notably the thrilling conclusion (that I suspect are deeply cathartic to many Americans) and the highly contentious torture scenes that at least one reviewer suggests 'glorify' torture (although that argument sort of feels like a leap).

The best take on the whole circus, besides Michael Moore's amusingly straight-up diatribe via Facebook, could be Peter Maass in The Atlantic. Maass is apparently a vet of East Coast broadsheet attitudes, having written in the NYT and the New Yorker on both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. His suggestion is that ZDT is not to be trusted - precisely because the material gained by Bigelow and screenwriter Mark Boal in the making of the film to imbue it with authenticity came from the CIA.

It's a reasonable point, when you consider the angles that could be played here. How much were Boal and Bigelow given? Under what pretext? Did they themselves go in with a game plan (probably along the lines of 'don't annoy the CIA so we get the movie made with minimal fuss' - a potential game-changer in itself) and how much did they stick to it?

There's lots of factors at work here. Of equal importance is the legacy this film leaves - lots and lots and lots of reviewers, to a man/ woman Americans, have spoken of the emotional satisfaction - and even pride - they felt when they heard bin Laden had been killed by Navy SEALS in the hills of Pakistan. That's a lot of weight to push against, and without being cynical, it may be that Bigelow and Boal decided to cut a couple of (minor) corners in the belief they were on the right side of the argument. Does that do lasting damage or is it skin deep?

The threshold of truth for ZDT is infinitely higher than almost all of its contemporaries, precisely because it's such an emotionally 'engaging' (euphemism alert) event in Western and American culture. That's undoubtedly the challenge that Bigelow and Boal wanted to address when they went to the CIA for their answers, and whilst it's right that the bar is set high, it's hard not to wonder what would have happened if Bigelow decided to fictionalise elements (and I'm steering clear of the whole does torture work/ not work debate here by that inference).

So what's the answer? Leave the film to someone else? Not an option for a tough nut like Bigelow, ex-wife of Cameron that she is. Tone it down? Moot point. A left-field option (in more than one sense) would have been not to involve the government at all and simply record your own take, regardless of how controversial the subject is. Massively ballsy admittedly, and possibly a colossal act of vandalism. But how much of Jessica Chastain's character is legit and how much script rewrites?

It's interesting to look at Tarantino's Django Unchained, released a fortnight earlier in the UK, as a counterpoint to Zero. Both deal with moments that had - and have - tangible impacts on American culture. Both deal with extremely unpleasant elements of human behaviour. But where one aims to record an event as close to the 'truth' (i.e. what's discussed above), the other puts its desire to entertain front and centre.

No one can possibly say that Tarantino has meddled with the truth when it comes to Django Unchained. Because of course in this tale, there are no factual checkpoints - the whole story is fiction. But the violence, the blood, the admittedly appalling language that so offended Spike Lee, is all pretty accurate - toned down if anything according to the man himself. And yet the film has miraculously escaped censure from almost everyone, except Krishnan Guru-Murthy of course.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that the majority of the moviegoing public don't care as much about slavery as they do about a terrorist from Saudi Arabia. But is it easier to write a movie about the evils of slavery, which are shown many, many times in extremely gruesome contexts, than it is about a more contemporary issue? Are the screams of ZDT that much louder because they're that much nearer, temporally speaking?

It's fair to say the picture to the left is pretty shocking. Full disclosure: this man is eaten by dogs. That's sanctioned by his 'master' following his attempted escape of his hellish existence of beating other black men to death to stay alive. Without context, this might be one of those halfwit efforts Eli Roth or arch idiot Tom Six occasionally concoct and label 'cinema'. Is this a less appalling image because of the stylistic hues of Tarantino's direction? Because there's no explicit truth attached? Because - pardon the slight cynicism - it's expected of Tarantino, and therefore acceptable?

At the moment there's three films showing that all deal with huge events in America's history - these two plus Lincoln, Spielberg's eponymous biopic. Each is handled with its director's distinctive style; is that the only issue at stake here or is Bigelow under pressure to deliver a different sort of film due to the magnitude of the narrative? And if that's the case, why are others under less apparent pressure to deliver? Personal choice or something more pernicious at work?

Is it impossible to completely reimagine the death of Osama bin Laden? There appears to be huge psychological as well as critical implications here - a film it appears much of America was desperate to see perhaps couldn't have been done another way due to those two (crucial?) factors. Being practical, a reimagining could have been career suicide, and I guess it's fair to say the topic is of such a particularity that very few options were available to Bigelow in recreating a still-seismic event.

Perhaps thinking that a less self-consciously accurate appraisal of the political event of 2011 wouldn't be such a bad idea, I then considered this: Quentin Tarantino making Zero Dark Thirty. After Inglourious, I'm not sure after all that it's a good idea.

Pictures courtesy of msn.com and myreelpov.wordpress.com

No Shame, No Gain

My Mad Fat Diary is the latest TV programme to put its embarrassments front and centre. What makes us interested?

Embarrassing Bodies. Two Broke Girls. My Mad Fat Diary. The last one practically screams "I'M BLUSHING!!!!!" in your face through a megaphone from a mouth with melted chocolate smeared around it, possibly deliberately. The E4 show starring Sharon Rooney (no relation) is the latest in a whole series of programmes, both factual and fictional, that seem to take perverse pride in showing people struggling to exist for a few hours without making catastrophic errors of judgement.

MMFD in particular seems hellbent on cramming in as many excruciating scenarios as possible. Grab a notepad, tick them off. A mother living (and having noisy sex) with an illegal immigrant. Being evacuated from a women's clothing retailer wearing nothing but a swimsuit. Getting stuck in a slide at a pool party with cool, older boys in said swimsuit. Obesity.

The self-harm at the centre of the show is neatly used as the only real issue Rae has - and by implication you can laugh along with the rest. All's well that ends horribly, then. Still, when it comes to Shame TV, there's a lot of it floating about. Relatable? Well, yes but. Cathartic? Possibly too strong a word but there's certainly an element of that.

Increasingly TV is awash with actors that look a bit like you, with scripts that sound more like how you talk. Informally there seems to be a relationship between accessibility and the perception of wellbeing - the more materially satisfied a viewer, the more risks a show takes. And vice versa. Certainly the recession has done for comedy what Napster et al did for music.

Girls is deemed by many to be the heir equivalent of Sex and the City - but it shares little in common with its predecessor. Everything, from the actresses employed to the monosyllabic title, suggests a less fanciful show populated by women set in New York. Same place, similar ingredients - different recipe.

These stills for example. the SatC screenshot practically drips with glamour and every colour is Renaissance-rich. This is TV as perfume ad; no one would actually object here if Chanel No 5 wafted into view would they?
There are two pairs of legs crossed in these shots, but only one pair is really crossed, the other sort of slung with an arm dangling over the top. 'Coquettish' isn't a recession adjective; that's why Charlotte no longer exists in television. It's a bit like rich people getting embarrassed about Louis Vuitton print bags. They don't want to be seen with those any more.

Conversely check out the distinctly more naturalistic hues of this still from Girls, making effective use of cityscapes - brick walkway and three women sat on a wrought iron bench in front of a municipal playing grounds, coats and bags slung over the public property. The body language reflects women whose relationship with their environment is more interactive; something to use, not travel through on the way to another editorial meeting. There's a bag on the floor for God's sake.

Even being poor, a subject that raises few chuckles at the best of times, let alone the worst, is remodelled for comedic purposes. Two Broke Girls is set in a greasy diner in Brooklyn, stars two young women staring the sharp end in the face and has episodic cash-ups to help you remember how far along Dennings and Behr are to opening their own cupcake shop (the metaphor is strong - and puerile - in this one). Ignoring the appalling racist humour is tough - the show's slathered with it - but there are enough nods in the script to get you thinking; 'Could this be me?'

Naturally, watching disenfranchisement starring two stunningly beautiful women is a good deal more agreeable to viewers - possibly male viewers more than female - than a show like Only Fools and Horses, featuring men who had facial parts resembling root vegetables. American TV hasn't gone completely off the rails here and rather disingenuously it puts a pretty face on a still-desperate situation. Aspiration is streaked all over the show like bad tan lines, but it's hard to draw succour from something that has more than a hint of a bad taste.

And what of the perennially popular Big Bang Theory? This one confuses the hell out of me but Jim Parsons, Johnny Galecki and Kaley Cuoco have been churning out giggles - and winning Emmys - for 5 years now. Leaving aside the astro-whatever cardboard props each character carries around with them as character traits, the synopsis is thus: three really intelligent but equally dysfunctional people regularly act oddly and handle emotions like scientific apparatus (incidentally television, we have a problem if you think this is in any way acceptable comedy). Hilarity (your term TV guide, not mine) ensues.

Maybe it's time to do the mole test. What are the odds of seeing a man headline a show with a huge mole on the side of his face? I hate the show, but reimagine Two And A Half Men with that guy I just described replacing Charlie Sheen. Are we at that stage yet? Will we ever get there? Does the audience even want to see that? How much reality can we take?

Perhaps audiences don't need to feel as though they're watching people do things they can imagine themselves doing. Are we happy saying Allison Williams and Jim Parsons represent us? (I am, but I'm barely in the real world most of the time, by design more than choice) And maybe there still is an element that wants to see sexier, freer (read: the TV definitions) versions of ourselves.

Rooney commented recently that she wanted to see TV with 'more normal people in it.' OK, making this comment following an unsuccessful audition for Skins seems to be missing the point a bit but the more pertinent question might be: is that what the audience wants too?

Pictures courtesy of telegraph.co.uk and The Dating Jungle

A Dressing Down

Match of the Day is a window into the heart of the eminently reversible decline of men's high street fashion

Saturday night was the first time I've seen Match of the Day in about two years. Following football journalists on Twitter meant I had a fairly good idea of the standard of 'analysis' I was to expect from the BBC institution, which mostly seemed to comprise of lines indicating where a player was running to and from, and little blue and red spots to tell you they were on the pitch.

Tragic misapplication of the BBC budget notwithstanding, I did notice at least something interesting after about 15 minutes. It was Alan Shearer's jumper, scruffily unbuttoned shirt and shaved head.

Interesting because in my eyes, he looked like he was on a night out in Huddersfield or the like doing top shelf shots rather than presenting a football highlights programme. Non-football fans: I recognise that my expectations may be somewhat foolish. We're not talking Newsnight or the Channel Four news here, I know.

After that I mainly stopped listening to Shearer, Gary Lineker and Alan Hansen (in that order) and started analysing the sartorial decisions of the cast: I am of the belief that football needs smarter men (if you want, there's a double entendre there) and that frankly this open shirt at the throat business has gone on long enough. Never mind all this sport: what were the managers wearing?

Below seems to confirm my worst fears about the state of British men's fashion; it's all gone to hell and Next has got its talons into the shuddering carcass, hacking away at the tailoring wearing a lumberjack shirt with a tracksuit hood attached to it. Here's what the Premier League's managers are wearing in 2013. For some of them, it's not so different from 1974.

Here's Alan Pardew in a distinctly funereal black suit and tie combo. I get that Newcastle aren't doing that great at the moment Alan, but this Dickensian ensemble does you no favours. The shirt is well selected in proportion to the tie knot- it looks like a half Windsor, but there's no adventure here. The knot itself is too tight for me bearing in mind his team's predicament. The jacket reaffirms a somewhat puritanical vibe. It doesn't help that Pardew has steely grey hair; the monochrome styling belies a distinctly conservative look. That's the natural response when you're near the bottom - 'back to basics' (also a Conservative Party election theme) but really, get some pink in there. And a full Windsor, some loafers and a navy suit. The dressing room must be flat as a pancake.

Here's his counterpart Chris Hughton. Again an anonymous black suit coupled with white shirt and a yellow tie. A manager demonstrating his emotional attachment to his team through a coloured tie is common, and I feel for Hughton. He's undoubtedly got the hardest sartorial challenge in the Premier League. You can't even get a really bright yellow tie because, frankly, it'd be horrible. The V neck is the go to for those football managers who coach quick passing football without resorting to long balls and set pieces. Effectively it's a vanguard statement in English football; if you're wearing one, you discuss false nines and 4-2-3-1 formations like you just ate them for breakfast. You certainly don't see Sam 'Opta' Allardyce wearing one.

Ah, now this is a bit more like it. A man who speaks no less than five languages and is considered one of the greats of contemporary football, Swansea's Michael Laudrup (there's a pairing you wouldn't have envisaged a decade ago) ticks all the boxes for continental manager, without losing his northern European stylings. Smart Barbour-style coat? Check. Contrasting yet discreet jumper/ trouser combination? Check. Shirt with no tie worn properly beneath said V neck? Present. Laudrup could probably pass for an A list actor with his looks but that coat for me is the key to his style; a heritage staple (i.e. self-awareness) over a look that belies both intelligence and style. Sums up Swansea nicely.

Sam Allardyce looks a bit like my dearly deceased uncle, who ran a successful carpet-fitting business for years until his retirement. One of the only men who actually looks weird without a moustache, Allardyce's philosophy is captured plainly here. The tie knot is just big enough for the collar but again the black suit belies the staid Gary Cooper-esque outlook on life. The hue of the tie reminds me of a cut of beef on a butcher's hook, or an incredibly awful carpet in my uncle's warehouse. Allardyce is in/famous for his statistic-based approach to football, achieving success through intensely dull football at Bolton Wanderers. This sledgehammer approach to subtlety is the embodiment of his style. He is bloody consistent at least.

Oh Paul. What decade do you think this is? Aston Villa's Paul Lambert, presumably channelling the PE teacher look here with his tracksuit. Villa's predicament is currently a gloomy one - they lost again this weekend, this time at home to promoted Southampton. The tracksuit is the staple of the man who isn't afraid to roll up his sleeves - largely because he's not wearing a £500 jacket and you can't see the creases. Inevitably there's a psychological element at play here - both the perpetuation of youth and the open-minded philosophies that follow (although there's surely a sad irony here given the cultural inferences of the tracksuit in Britain, admittedly largely propagated by a conservative press) and the self-awareness at wearing this pitchside two-piece - suggesting humility, a closeness to the roots and spirit of the game. Of course, it's still just a tracksuit, and Villa are still a point off the relegation zone. So if you're going for a tracksuit, maybe something a bit more daring eh Paul? Your players have got to BELIEVE after all.

I might watch MotD, as the parlance goes, next weekend. I might not. I'm pretty sure of one thing though; when no other major football highlights programme has presenters without ties, you know you've gone out on a limb. Wardrobe: get these chaps to Charles Tyrwhit stat, and introduce them to Gary Neville. I never thought I'd write that.

All pictures courtesy of the BBC

A Natural World?

What does the narrative style of BBC documentary Africa say about the human desire to understand?

Another year, another David Attenborough documentary. The genial octogenarian has now been making television programming for the BBC for an impressive 50 years - 2013 will be his 51st. To spend more than half a century at the forefront of documentary programming is remarkable by anybody's estimation; to consistently claim millions of viewers for his work is testament to his outstanding abilities as a narrator and his mastery of his subject..

Wildly (excuse the pun) popular documentaries are rare beasts indeed. The turnoff for many, perversely in the eyes of some, seems to be the lack of a fictional element; the pace can be cumbersome, the story an uninspiring or derivative one told by someone more at home in a youth hostel than a plush studio in London. Yet the figures for his work are amazingly consistent; Planet Earth managed an audience of approximately 8.5 million and Blue Planet topped 6.5 million viewers overall.

Obviously it's crazy to suggest Attenborough has no part to play in this success - otherwise the Discovery Channel would be a smash hit (it isn't). Conventional storytelling is still the dominant form in a postmodern media that has already finished with its Big Brother offspring just a decade after bringing it to incredulous voyeurs in 2000 (and perhaps that asks questions of how far television has really moved in the last decade). But it's also true that realism, incidental truths, form the structure many people perceive in their daily lives and much of television has benefited from it.

Conservatism still abounds, however, in many areas of documentary films, particularly with regards to scoring the work. Africa, the BBC's latest ratings-magnet midweek documentary, makes intelligent use of its scenery to create 'found' orchestras on occasion, employing the percussive rustle of bird flight and the sparse bursts of water to nice effect. But predominantly it employs more traditional methods (although if I hear a trombone in a hippo's presence again I may write to them to demand an explanation for their laziness).

Much of what's not changed can be found in the twin pillars traditionally known as plot and character, and this is arguably where documentary appears to have captured imaginations. Right from the start documentary makers have recognised a need for an emotional - recognisable - core in this alien environment, and that's perhaps the most revealing point of natural documentary film.

Robert J. Flaherty's Nanook of the North, released in 1922, was the first to create a narrative out of a 'real' existence, although this followed other humans in the north of Alaska as they survived the planet's harshest seasons. Flaherty had his 'cast' act out their lives before the camera, perhaps aiming to strip the artifice of film and replace it with something closer to our own existence, as well as presenting his audience with something they had never know existed. Controversy arose when it was revealed Flaherty had woven fiction into his work, renaming the cast and building a cut-out igloo for his 'family' to live in and be filmed in comfort - but it didn't stop it becoming an enormous critical and commercial success.

And that thread runs through much of today's work, although now the narrators seek to describe what they see, without first setting the scene. It's absolutely a more naturalistic scene for it, and captures what we want from reality. But it's undoubtedly true that the heart of both historical and contemporary work lies in the emotional element; the desire to understand and relate.

Increasingly superior camerawork and visual technology's made natural beauty - the early draw with documentaries - a great more vivid and I feel there's much to be said for the clever deployment of handheld and steady shots - balletic movements abound, wave-like, throughout Blue Planet, and Africa utilises vast overheads to reveal colour-kissed landscapes much akin to abstract art. This in itself is an intelligent form of communication - a quietly accessible art for the 'chattering classes' as one journalist put it.

But its when bringing the creatures themselves into play that the traditional core of documentary film is best shown. Anthropomorphism's a lazy way to describe much of what occurs in the miniature arcs at work throughout these series - but to all intents and purposes that's what we're seeing, and whilst that's done great positive work in helping millions make sense of the world around them, or simply marvel at the wondrous palette of colour frequently on show, perhaps something is missing as a result.

Does this in itself change our perception of an untamed environment? Honesty's too clumsy a word but a certain fragment of truth spins away (me effectively saying honesty in more pretentious terms) when capturing and recording 'to the beat', to be watched on comprehensible terms. Frequently there are key themes being observed which have huge bearings on our lives; death, birth, conflict, all subject to the brutal Darwinian existence nature still adheres to.

Perhaps that final point underlies all others; the planet is simply too tough for us to countenance on anything but our own terms. Stories must be created, clearly for entertainment reasons but seeing nature at its brutal work - killing, breeding to maintain race, leaving children for dead - is beyond our emotional reasoning. Nothing's as much of a turn off as incomprehension.

Young Adult is 'Exploitative' and 'Sensational' Says Daily Mail

'Sensationalising suffering' is histrionic and misrepresentative of Young Adult fiction

Once again I was exasperated with the Daily Mail this weekend, this time over the 'sick-lit' article. Claiming youths were being fed a morally vacuous tales for sheer profit, the piece guts a body of young adult literature to present stark, dripping morsels as unambiguous horror shows that will ruin your child's mind, turning them to self-harm, thoughts of suicide, sex and, um, eyeliner.

Without wishing to take a journalist to task for what's clearly an overreaching editorial policy that's probably carved in moss-covered tablature somewhere, there are a few elements of this article that really annoyed me.

The main one concerns the basic lack of intelligence it assigns to young people, whom it perceives do not understand the idea of subjective experience, or, to put it in plain terms, the fact that everyone is different. Yes fine, fads happen - I remember Twilight and I'm still getting over half the office (read: the female half) reading the Fifty Shades books - but the idea that a teenager doesn't understand that cutting their wrists is bad because this will make their wrists bleed and then there is a chance they will die of lack of blood is the sort of patronising sentiment I'd expect of an institution from the 1950s. The article quotes a study by Julie Elman of the Uni of Missouri and finds, horrorstruck, that:

"In a research paper, she cites one example, So Much To Live For, in which the central character, who has eye cancer, is traumatised she can't wear make-up around her empty socket for fear of infection.:" http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2256356/The-sick-lit-books-aimed-children-Its-disturbing-phenomenon-Tales-teenage-cancer-self-harm-suicide-.html#ixzz2HEhBWE8K

Cancer is an extremely serious subject, obviously. Does the Mail really feel children would be better off - i.e. ignorant - of a disease which affects one in three people in the UK? Children attain all sorts of skills from reading about what is going on around them - insight, empathy, a broader vocabulary, tone, and for many a deeper understanding of action and consequence. Denying these elements is surely a self-defeating exercise.  And the eyeliner - well. What young person would not feel an affinity with this remark? Empathetic behaviour makes for better relationships and books build that in people. Or as Michelle Pauli put in The Guardian - do we want a nation of stone-cold psychopaths?

The author should get an ear-bashing for describing The Lovely Bones as a novel popular with children - highly disingenuous and irresponsible. Objective fact it may well be, but it is certainly not a book for kids, and never was intended to be. I guess in essence my contention is that the young adult genre is exactly what it says on the tin - if young adult did not deal with themes that affect young adults, they would simply go elsewhere for their kicks. There was very little in the way of the genre for me as a teenager so guess what - I went to the adult stuff. And of course, your perception of what 'adults' read when you're developing into one yourself is radically stronger than the reality (which I admit I found somewhat depressing having read a ton of Stephen King and James Herbert novels as a skinny teenager - I thought life was so much more X rated).

And whilst it is always a safe bet in media to suggest a PLC is acting in a nefarious way to undermine your utopian existence - this one states that suffering is being sensationalised to sell books - this too feels disingenuous and downright tricky. The idea that every child will want to read a narrative that in no way they can relate to and be content with that is amazingly naïve and written from a viewpoint that feels detached from the reality it seeks to critique. Principles are admirable but this for me does not feel rooted in modern society; the fundamental flaw of any media story, I would guess.

This argument reminds me of the one put forward by David Cameron earlier this year when he suggested he may force UK internet service providers (ISPs) to 'block' access to porn sites to protect minors. All well and good, but why are kids being given the ability to access these sites anyway?. As Charles Arthur amusingly pointed out, it isn't the industry that needs regulation, it's the kids. By the parents. Because that's presumably what parents still do. Right?

At least the article ends on a note of common sense, stating that parents should be vigilant if they see their kids reading lots of these books, and that they should ask what the book they are reading is about. I'll skip the underlying assumptions made there and simply state that this evening I have spent lots of time scooting through the Independent Book Blogger Awards and read a lot of the blogs that were up for nominations (favourites: Dunce Academy, The Grammarian's Reviews, Okay, I Blog and Some Smart, Some Don't). Young Adult is clearly something that kindles (not that Kindle) fires in people and inspires some really good writing from all walks of life and a sense of community - and with that in mind the Mail's histrionics ought to be given short shrift.

Today, Joyce; Tomorrow, The Dandy

The graphic novel has entered literary awards. Is this (finally) the watershed moment?

Vindication for doodlers everywhere? It was amusing but nonetheless heartening to see Dotter of her Father's Eyes (great title) win the biography award in the Costa book awards (hereby dubbed forevermore by me as the Costas). Amusing because two decades earlier across the Atlantic, the Pulitzer Prize winning Maus by American Art Spiegelman was reckoned to be the 'serious' literary breakthrough that many who know a bit about the graphic novel with arguably a much more powerful subject (guess) than this week's winner.

This honour may go to a magical-looking graphic novel that intertwines and meditates upon the daughter of James Joyce, one of the great writers of our time, and the daughter of an eminent scholar of that writer; and that, I guess, feels like a very 'literary' thing to do.  The couple Mary and Bryan Talbot, the former a distinguished academic and author, the latter a well-known and liked graphic novelist of many years, have finally earned the graphic novel the prestige it should surely have garnered a long time before.

Leaving aside the charming names Joyce gave his children (I have never met a Giorgio but would love to) the story of Lucia Joyce is a fascinating and ultimately sad one. Blessed with being conceived in a century still rife with upheaval, she was party to many famous events and some of the 'A listers' of the time, including Samuel Beckett, whom she dated, and the dancer Isadora Duncan (who, on a complete tangent, appears to have had a fantastically odd - and brief - time of it with the tragic Soviet poet Sergei Yasenin, who killed himself in 1930). She suffered from strabismus (a crossing of the eyes) from an early age and, obviously being the daughter of one of the greatest literary geniuses ever known, tended to move around a lot; five different addresses before the age of 18.

I don't intend to ruminate on something I haven't read (but want to - you can buy an iVersion from the Talbots' website direct or the book from Amazon) but it's so good to see the graphic novel finally come into the sphere of, um, 'high art'. I guess the pertinent question for me is: why not sooner?

'Comics' for me have connotations of two-bit threads, Reds under the bed and scabby knees on boisterous schoolkids, and have been building toward a critical mass for years. Spiegelman is undoubtedly a significant contributor but ignoring other such luminaries as Moore and Joe Kubert (whom appears to me to live on in Chabon's Kavalier and Clay) would be disrespectful; all have moved a genre forward in narrative style, reach and perspective.

The echoes of graphic art found in Lichtenstein, Warhol and pop philosophy have served to do for art in literature what a similar expedition failed to do in popular music over the same period (perversely art has always appeared to stay below the eyeline of the average consumer, emboldening its vision of possibilities whereas the repositioning of music appears to have killed any serious artistic pretensions it had). And that's only the start.

History has provided plenty of opportunities to take the graphic novel seriously: Weird Science and Captain America both reported on the Cold War with varying degrees of satire and straight moral horror at what was unfolding. Artist Robert Crumb depicted the mind-altering Sixties in a characteristically surreal fashion, and Moore of course wrote that fascinating revision of Nixon's Watergate moment in Watchmen in 1985.

Attributing the dearth of graphic novels at the highest altar of art in the face of this mass of activity feels odd. In light of the initial reaction to Stravinsky, Duchamp, Joyce et al it's tempting to simply suggest that art necessarily moves faster than those principles it grows out of (and, admittedly, frequently against).

This could be a question of perspective of course - are literary awards gravitating ever-closer to the middle ground of popular culture (remember that uproar around the Man Booker last year?) and thus the graphic novel simply met in the middle? Hard to say in the present tense. All in all a possible watershed moment and one that should be taken seriously for what each medium - the written and the drawn - can offer the other in expression and ingenuity.

One final thought (and hope): that as the title suggests, comics now use the both the mainstream and artistic power they wield intelligently and with a light touch, and above all, aim high. A great moment - but don't let it go to waste.

Feed The Animals (Music)

The Rite of Spring is a century old this year. Does contemporary music have the same ability to shock its audience?

One hundred years ago in Paris saw the opening night of Stravinsky's seminal Rite of Spring, in which a young Russian woman uncomplainingly danced herself to death to ensure a good harvest for the coming year. The music appeared to forewarn of the impending crashes and booms of war a year later. Subtle violence was to be found in its pounding rhythmic propulsion and predictably the reaction was one of outrage, hostility and fury, with many in the audience loudly complaining throughout.

Leaving aside even that reaction, which as far as I can recall has not happened in high art for 28 years (I'm 28 now. And I'm backing my baby memory and toddler years) and reading of Skandalkonzert in Vienna months before the uproar in Paris, I was struck by the thought that this particular form has effectively lost the ability to shock when put into historical context.

A bold statement, one I don't wish to extrapolate upon in huge detail right now (I'll return to it again) but I feel a true one when comparing notes in Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise (which now appears to be running a festival at the Southbank in London for an entire year) and Kevin Jackson's Constellation of Genius, which both point to a fomentation and a formal displeasure with the status quo amongst a significant number of composers, painters, writers etc.

It seems that music now occupies a different sphere. There's plenty of irony in making music as ubiquitous as an advert via online streaming and leaving aside the democratic element of that it also partially why shock factor has been diminished.

I'd argue many record executives - pragmatists at heart, naturally - recognise the hand they have been dealt and understand what not to play. The simple challenge of currency in an insane warp-speed environment is the overriding impulse of production and release, which goes a long way to explaining the lack of Stravinsky moments. Heidegger no doubt has something to say here arguably and ironically the death of archaic movements like Romanticism served to further undermine (although this particular position may never have offered anything outside the wilfully conservative - speculation is disingenuous and fun)

But how to explain the lack of artists willing to undertake what, in 1913, was recognised as outrageous chance? That's another blog.

If you're ever interested, TRiN and CoG are both fantasic reads. More on them another time but as a jumping-off point for seismic cultural events you'd do worse than read these two. Ross chews over all the A listers and many more; he also 'does' Wagner as a sort of origin story in typically erudite detail and deftly weaves the threads linking many of the greatest composers and their relationships. He's also very good at clearly showing where the bend in the road took place with modern composition when discussing Berg, Webern et al.

In CoG Jackson chooses Joyce and Eliot as his progenitors of a modernist revolution in 20th century Europe but lets the political and artistic community of 1922 - Hemingway, Matisse, Radiguet and Cocteau, Brancusi, Lenin, E.M. Forster, D.H. Lawrence - even Aleister Crowley - intermingle on the page as if it were a Parisian café. Format helps - it is written as sort of world diary checking in at some of the hubs of culture and delivers fascinating morsels alongside judicious commentary with regular aplomb.

As a final note, interesting that that historically much of the great works in art appear to have been formed from the bloodiest decades as civilisation moved at a head-spinning pace (Jackson's regular check-ins on an increasingly sickly/exhausted Lenin throughout 1922 offer a neat microcosm here) from 1914-1922 saw a Soviet revolution, WW1, Irish unrest at it's colonial cousin, wars in Peking (now Beijing) the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the independence of Egypt, the gradual crumbling of colonial rule in India, amongst dozens of other events. There's more in that...

ANYWAY
My album of the year = Frank Ocean's Channel Orange. Considering the themes, a record that feels really intimate and places the listener at the centre of the experience - it's hard to get that right without still coming across as a narcissist but this is a wonderful effort.

All Pain, No Gain

Bay tries true-story comedy without apparently checking what he was sending up

Returning to my abode after the festivities I decided to catch up on some terrible film trailers. Yes I got some presents, thank you very much. Usually my go to are the horror trailers on IMDB's Coming Soon link (the Android app, incidentally, is about 1.5648043043 million times better than it used to be - no more pointless clicking!) which is now handily showcased in a swipe-able reel across the top of the app. And here was trailer #1: oh my God. Pain and Gain.

 

Initial thoughts - sunbleached California, gigantic Mark Wahlberg yelling at himself, 'BASED ON A TRUE STORY' - I rolled my eyes, sniggered and ate the crumbs off of my t-shirt. Classic Bay Film - this one appeared to be about some superhulk who was such a master criminal an entire branch of armed LAPD officers were needed to bring him down. So far, so embarrassing. But then:

You ever just get tired of being where you are Adrian?"
Two things about this line:

1. This line was so awful in substance and tone it was off the chart in cringeworthiness. Even for Michael Bay.
2. It was delivered following a barbell being smashed to the gym floor in supremely adolescent style. Verdict: Sixth form existential crisis alert.

You'd associate both of these with Bay - his films (or "films" as at least one reviewer probably refers to them) reek of testosterone and this is classic repressed male adolescence territory. I was kind of surprised that this was Bay's first film set in a gym - and then it hit me. The FML guitar, the ridiculous physiques, the atypical woman's existence validated by man vibe - "there you go, yeeeaaheeaahh!" croons an arm-flexing Wahlberg to a sycophant gym-ho - it all adds up.

Michael Bay has Googled himself on the Internet. And this time he actually read the results.

I watched more, now perversely fascinated. My unbelieving eyes saw Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson appear (with a really weird vein in his shoulder area). I like him because he never takes himself, or indeed anything, seriously - exactly how a multimillionaire beefcake should act. Another nail in the Bay persona? Everything Johnson does is deeply silly. Was he trying to ironize himself? A crazy thought.

More follows. In brief: a kidnap of a millionaire gym owner (Tony Shalhoub) who thinks vegetables are for poor people (again when the hell did Bay start doing sendups of his own characters?) in awful superhero suits and then Ed Harris - Ed Harris - as... what? I couldn't figure it out. A mobster, reclaiming his role from Cronenberg's A History of Violence? An off-duty cop? I paused and went to my Wikipedia app (their new update is terrible. Crashes all the time!) to look this up.

And then I learnt this really was a true story and that in fact the characters Wahlberg and Johnson play are awaiting death sentences in Miami for kidnap and extortion.

So this was a comedy sending up two men about to be executed in real life. Makes Zero Dark Thirty look like a bastion of impartiality doesn't it. And my vision of a post-Enlightenment Michael Bay dragged back to the Dark Ages, by... Michael Bay. When will he learn?

It's Hip To Be Square (But Not Made of Concrete)

Changing city skylines through contemporary styles is laudable but may waste more money than it intends to generate through repopulation

Two stories in Tuesday's Guardian culture section took my eye, because I live near one and lived near the other and at first glance seemed opposite ends of the creative spectrum.

In the first. a row of rather charming terraces have sprung up in Ancoats, where a lot of my family come from in East Manchester following the painfully slow death of a Will Alsop project (my exposure to this guy is fleeting although the gist I get is a weird rococo-absurdist concoction) fronted by the Urban Splash people. Alsop is apparently emblematic of the 'champagne socialism' years of New Labour (how child's toys in Middlesbrough relate to that socioeconomic model I'll never know but eh) in the late Nineties when huge swathes of the city were reconstructed following the Commonwealth Games project win. The turnaround could not be more striking; here is Great Ancoats Street in the late Eighties:

Image from open.edu
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/society/great-ancoats-street-manchester

And here it is now following these rather charming, faintly Scandinavian (truly those Nordic monsters have never lost their pillaging prerogative) terraces in traditional red terrace brock topped with bright and breezy confections.



Image from guardian.co.uk
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2012/dec/18/social-housing-new-islington-manchester

Functionality is the term here and it's interesting to note the change in approach the respective architects have undertaken in response to the economic times they operate in. "The bones of [the plan] come from Alsop's sketch, made with a glass of wine in one hand and a thick felt pen in the other," reads the promotional page for the Urban Splash project. It's easy to perceive an almost judgement in the construction here - and I personally prefer it.

The second article concerns the long-overdue (my opinion) demolition of Preston city bus station, a monument to the Seventies fashion of brutalism (the station was completed in 1969 when, interestingly, the country was again beginning to sail into choppy political and economic waters). Here's a picture for you to vomit over:

Image from BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/travelnews/Lancashire

However. Whilst the great pieces of architecture rarely appear to be debated (everyone bar everyone loves Barcelona, Gehry's Opera House, Bilbao international airport, The Shard - okay I'm definitely pushing it there) at least to my untrained totally amateur eye it does feel that regeneration is increasingly an argument for money on style. Indeed although eye-watering to me, many protesters have announced the station as a masterpiece of a certain style which ought to be preserved as - don't chuckle - a piece of national heritage. Costs, inevitably in these times, have proved its final undoing.

Whether you agree with that or not, what is it about the functional terraces of Ancoats that are infinitely preferable to the arguably equally more functional and more stylish (i.e. it is of a style) concrete station in Preston? Clearly style - or more probably taste, which possesses a certain moral (i.e. insufferably smug) quality to it - moves on, but surely on any level the arguments here are murky at best.

I suppose my summation here is that perhaps mere functionality is the great undoing (and I recognise my own responsibilities here too) of much popular modern architecture now. Whilst I certainly prefer my red brick block of apartments to living in La Scala (yes I do) I recognise a certain guiltiness on my part; irony underlies the linear idea that the less ornate a thing, naturally the more naked it becomes. And we should be able to live with that.

Salman Rushdie: Last Action Hero

Am I the only person that wants to see a middle aged author have an argument with Chewbacca?

Just read Shortlist's interview with Sir Salman Rushdie and his possibly not extemporaneous relating of the 'furore' shall we say of that little book he published in 1989 (how can anything that well reported be something he needs to reach back into the recesses of his mind for?).

I have the usual mixture of pity and admiration for the man that no doubt most people do and it must be a trifle unsettling to see your own name running neck and neck in the interest stakes with what's still a pungent and immersive read.

But. It did give me an idea. As I sat freezing on the tram I started thinking of Rushdie as a character in his own narrative; the urgency and sharp practices of his unique situation were so alien they made a seamless transition in fictional territory.

So then I started imagining other writers as characters apart from their work, Rushdie almost coming across as a - dare I say - Bournesque figure (specifically I'm thinking Guardian journalist Paddy Considine in the third one) and I nearly missed my stop. But that was due to the tannoy being totally out of the loop (we stopped at Piccadilly three times in my journey apparently).

The below are simply caricatures; I thought it best to keep them simple but there is possibly a few curveballs in there depending on perspective. With each I have tried to tie them to an outpost in pop culture. I have gone purely for entertainment value; generally where they would be least comfortable, I have placed them. Avant:

Jonathan Franzen as Hooper (played by Richard Dreyfus) in Jaws

This would be a sparkling comedy with Franzen in there - Jaws is one of my all-time faves and there are so many tight scenes between the trio which would probably split my sides if Franzen was in there. Specifically I'm imagining him as a blend of the good doctor and himself - uppity, snappish, warm and empathetic. The cage scene could descend into Marx Brothers-levels of hilarity (I am generally imagining a sped-up scene of the shark chasing a furiously pedalling Franzen around his smashed cage set to trumpets) and the final release post-sharksplosion I would probably finish with a really waspish comment which Scheider just doesn't get before swimming off.

Italo Calvino as Rufus T. Firefly (played by Groucho Marx) in Duck Soup

Calvino always struck me as a guy who had a ball writing his classics. Less so with the headliner If On A Winter's Night... this nevertheless had its quietly farcical moments (the visit to the publishers of the mysterious text is a scream and the relaying of the villainous author seesaws between bright hilarity and black drama). Calvino is one of my faves so I wanted to give him something he could really chew on, and I think he wouldn't have looked out of place in the Marx Brother's classic brouhaha Duck Soup. Imagining the Italian in slapstick mode is easy and in his eager playful style he upends the heaviest of topics, an enduring strength of the best satire and comedy. I may have broken my own rules here but I'm pretty sure this would deliver in spades.

Stephen King as Jack Torrance (played by Jack Nicholson) in The Shining

Yeah OK so we all know Torrance really is King; the raging alcoholism, the desperation for familiarity in his environment that made both authors, real and written, reach out for increasingly weird behaviours as success (and the ever-present fear of failure) manifested. But having read almost all of King's 'good' stuff in my early teens and knowing what he thought of Kubrick's take on his superb tale, I would be generally interested to see King take that role himself. I thought the raving Jack Nicholson did an incendiary job, coming to pieces in a totally 'believable' way and his easy camaraderie with the racist bartender is a scene that regularly flies under the radar but is brilliantly creepy on repeat viewing. Playing devil's advocate, I would of course love to be a fly on the wall for the filming too. King vs Kubrick; and that's definitely the way it would have gone down.

Hunter S Thompson as Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) in Apocalypse Now

A good friend of mine once described Thompson as the sort of liberal who wants absolutely nothing to do with the state; I think I'd take that one step further and say he wanted nothing to do with society, unless it was on his terms. Principles were, as far as I can tell, there to be tested to the limit. Preferably whilst on drugs.

The heady combination of imported dogma and foreign rule were prevalent in both Conrad and Thompson's day and both have clear disgust for it. There's an ironic tendency for those ideals to twist and warp due to the very fact of their inflexibility however and very occasionally come unmoored, leaving their proponent appearing detached or worse, insane. Thompson was never a man to shy away from debate and controversy and Kurtz, one of the great sociopaths of the 20th century, has floated from the shores of existence through a combination of intellectual loneliness and tyrannical abuse of power. Thompson's wide-eyed mix of fascination, wit and disgust in essaying these nutcases would, in my eyes make for a good role reversal.

 

Will Self as Captain Han Solo (played by Harrison Ford) in Star Wars Ep IV: A New Hope

My goodness. I'm not sure how this might pan out but I'm basically thinking of the almost narcoleptic Self of Shooting Stars fame when I think of this superimposing. Self as the space cowboy of flowing locks, stylish waistcoating and pilot of the Millennium Falcon would probably be a mess but a man whose work was recently described as 'dazlling' trying to crash his way headfirst through the appalling contrivances of Lucas's space soap opera could potentially be the funniest thing on film.

I regularly associate Self with director Christopher Guest for no other reason than both have been known to lampoon modern wants with impervious wit (they have to my knowledge never worked together) and I like imagining Self in Spinal Tap. But Self having to converse -without shedding a tear of despair - with Chewbacca, an aggressive intergalactic Furby, would truly make my day. With apologies to Mr Self.