Et In Arcadia Ego

This is for my future reference, rather than your edification, but you might still be interested. I've been a pretty good girl this year, so despite the recession and protest action from the reindeer (now we discover why Rudolph had a "red" nose...), Santa managed:

• Patterned tights
• "1001 Films to Change Your Life" - a pretty nice collection, which I've read chunks of in bookshops. It collects films by Mood, as disparate as Wonder and Regret. It's going to be fun to dip into.
• A copy of Fortean Times, my sometime favourite magazine. It reports on the weird and wacky - Jesus images in marmalade, big ghost cat sightings, mysterious UFO sightings - all with a pleasing tone of "benevolent skepticism". Charles Fort, after whom the mag was named, is a bit of a hero - like me, he was "skeptical of scientific explanations, observing how scientists argued accoring to their own beliefs rather than the rules of evidence, and that inconvenient data was ignored, suppresed, discredited or explained away". This month: The Twilight Zone, the Ig Noble prizes, cursed gargoyle statues, and Tommy Cooper in a steak pie. Also, Dennis Wheatly, whose novel "The Devil Rides Out" Spirita owns.
• "This Strange Engine" - Marillion CD
  
• Art papers - soon to be reappropriated for origami
• Spare Parts - Doctor Who CD, classic Cyberman adventure. It's started, by the way, as I knew it would: the era of spotting Blake's 7 castmembers in Doctor Who, not the other way around.
  
• "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" - tee hee.
  
• Delta and the Bannermen - more Doctor Who, and I can't wait.
  
• "Who Killed Amanda Palmer" songbook - unlike the gorgeously irritating Virginia Companion, this one is playable. It still has nice pictures in though. The only downside is, the Xmas holidays mean the whole family is together. So I haven't been able to have a proper bash yet - that music can't be played, merely performed.It turns out the album title is a reference to Twin Peaks and Laura Palmer. Singing a song gives you a different perspective on what it means. In particular Astronaut (wow! chords!), which I gather is meant to be about a literal astronaut. I can't escape the feeling it's about a wife whose husband is being kept alive by machines after a horrific accident. Runs in the Family, frankly, does not work on the piano - but I'm working on it. Ampersand sounds great however it's played, but when I strive to get the rhythm right (one two one two on the top hand, one two three one two three on the bottom) it's exhilerating. Leeds United has lots of instructions reading "improvise something bluesy", which I can't quite do yet, but it cheers me up to see it. Having problems with Blake Says, but it's still lovely to play. The house hasn't been empty enough for me to try Oasis yet. It's just a shame it doesn't have What's the Use of Won'drin in it, but I suppose I can work it out.
  

From my family:

• Art gear - a pencil tin, nice colouring pencils and a new sketchbook. Jolly useful - I can draw, but I can't really do pencil sketches. Not yet at any rate... (grandad)
• Powell and Pressburger boxed set (mater and pater)
• Doctor Who T-shirt (sister of mine)
• A makeup kit (aunt and uncle mark I)
• a donation to the Emily fund (aunt and uncle mark II - may be put towards a copy of Six Characters in Search of an Author)
• a cute keyring, and an ethical "miracle" helping a blind person (aunt and uncle mark III)
  

And my good for nothing buddies:

• one of those mini top hats. You can't even concieve of how fine it makes me look :D And a biscuit, and a pack of jumbo playing cards. The huge, envelope-sized Jack of Hearts is now gracing my top hat.
  
• Magic Position Patrick Wolf CD (plus Baileys...and some awesome religious trash)
  
• A recipie notebook, with some handwritten veggie recipies in for me to try from Castelanne. Take that, housemates: I'm gonna come back and cook! I'm particularly looking forward to the Hazelnut and Vegitable Burgers, the Rice Cheesecakes, mediterranean Kebabs and the Thai Vegitable Curry. Also, origami post-it notes.
• And a model Liberator :D

The day passed pleasantly - I watched some Doctor Who in the morning. We watched The Hangover in the afternoon, which is probably better than you think it's going to be, but was still less good than I'd been lead to believe. Still, pretty good movie. Then the Doctor Who special. I'm having problems articulating quite how I feel about it, so I wouldn't hold my breath for a coherent review, or even a coherent conversation on the topic. Except that, when I had an inkling Russell T. Davies might ruin Christmas, this was emphatically not what I had in mind. Similarly, thought I expected to be dreading New Year's Day, I had no idea it would be for these reasons. Right now I'm not sure whether I prefer being disappointed or traumatised. What on earth does he think he's doing? After five years of defending him, I feel a little let down that he feels the need to pack out the episode with everything he's ever been criticised for.

I can't wait to see Lawrence Miles kick it to pieces. He's a genius Doctor Who writer who plunged out of fandom after having fallen out with everyone. He's rude, outspoken and very witty, seeing himself as our own Voice Of The Silent Majority. Unfortunately, he's very often correct even though no one else would dare articulate half of it. I'm reminded of his review of Ancestor Cell:

"What we've basically got is THE INFINITY DOCTORS with all the good bits missing, a desperate attempt to do something big and important which can't tell the difference between "epic" and "just happens to be set on Gallifrey"."

After this, we watched Star Trek. This didn't do much to calm my awful mood. It's a gorgeously shot film - also, considering everything it tries to do, it hangs together very well. But I still wasn't interested in the plot or characters. I'm particularly irritated that Spock and Kirk seem to become friends purely because they are told they are going to be in the future. That's not development - and I winced and shouted "Blinovich limitation effect!" at the screen every time the Spocks were there together. I was also amused that the much slashed Sulu/Chekov pair don't actually exchange a line of dialogue. How cracky is that. My final hurdle is that the Trek crew are working for "the Federation". Now, while it's clearly not the same Federation Blake is trying to take down (or if it is, then Trek is at least a century into the future), I still got a nasty shiver up my spine every time someone mentioned defending it. I even found myself having sympathy for the villain, when he blamed the Federation for allowing his planet to crack like an egg. Overkill: that's just like them...

Thought of the day:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MoralEventHorizon

Keeping you all updated is impossible! So much great stuff is going on, and the more stuff which happens the less time I have to type.

I attended the climate protest on Saturday. I had intended to go, then decided not to bother (what the hell difference is it going to make? And I hear a girl got assaulted on Reclaim the Night, so my faith in protests is even lower than usual), and then ended up going by accident. I was hunting down posh origami paper on Carnaby Street when I heard the unmistakeable sound of a protest-monitoring helicopter. I crossed into Piccadilly Circus and bumped into a huge number of blue protesters, with , mercifully, only a scattering of socialists.

(Socialism is causing me problems. All the ones I encounter in London offend me. They're like the world's worst stand up comics, concluding every joke with a single punchline (i.e. "The enviroment/economy/civil rights is in chaos! Become a Socialist!), and like the world's worst gatecrashers, show up for whatever protest action is going. I feel very sympathetic to their cause - capitalism, commercialism, there's so much wrong with it - but am doubly depressed by my leftie leanings. Everyone becomes a socialist at university, then stops when they have a mortgage. The inherent hypocracy of this, and knowledge that it's a phase even while I'm in it, is very demoralising.)

They happened to be going the same way as me, so I grabbed a placard and walked from Piccadilly to Whitehall, then left them to their futile shouting and jumping about in favour of the uni library. The placard is now next to the anti-BNP one in my room.

Then I spent a lovely afternoon folding in the Maughan. There's something enjoyable about using glue in a place like that. I'm making some dragons as a favour, and enjoying it immensely. There's a debate in the world of origami as to what the point should be. I am of the school of fun folding - I believe the finished product isn't so important, so long as the folding process was entertaining. I rarely have the excuse or inclination to produce something beautiful. Which is strage when you consider we are basically talking about Art here, and I'd (probably) sink a ship for the most beautiful song ever written.

Normally, folding shapes is purely to amuse my hands - folding to amuse someone else's eyes is a slightly different dicipline, and I'm enjoying the oppertunity. Particularly to use proper Japanese patterned paper. I don't bother with it usually, and it is an extra challenge - you've more room for mistakes in one-colour paper. The finished product is incredible, much better than in that photo.

I've got myself a Doctor Who lunchbox using some of my birthday cash. I hope this will encourage me to make lunch in the mornings - instead of considering it, then feeling guilty about using a plastic bag; or forgetting, then being too cheap or lazy to hunt out food. Also, it says "exterminate" when you press the front. It's pretty huge, so I have packed it with non perishables as if I were going on arctic expedition, on the grounds that I will doubtless forget to refil it.

Sunday's treat was Fyfe Dangerfield (Guillemots frontman - keep up, keep up!) playing in a park. I headed on down to Bethnal Green, and spent fifteen minutes rooting around in trees trying to find him. Finally, I spotted a crowd in front of a bandstand - I climbed through one fence, and over another to get there. Fyfe wrote up the playlist in chalk, like a specials board, and captioned it with "all served with chips and salad". "Does anybody here have pliers?" went up the call, as one of his guitar strings snapped. It was quickly fixed though. I spent the entire thing wedged between the ear and cheek of a sitting woman, and the bum cheeks of an incredibly irritating one or two cameramen, sound-recordists or people who were sufficienly "with" the event, that none of the 20 or so fans standing behind them could tap them on the shoulder and punch them in the face. This was very frustrating, more so when the singing began.

Playlist:

Faster than the Setting Sun (as the sun was setting, aptly enough)

Livewire

She Needs Me (lovely chunky chords! I liked this one most)

Any Direction

It was just him and the guitar, with the light playing off the trees - and also, his foot on his keys to create a beat. Always the improviser, he ditched the guitar after Any Direction and continued singing, chinking along on the two chalk sticks. They snapped almost instantly, which brought a laugh, then a huge cheer and an end to what was almost a nice afternoon. Then I went down to a table by the lake (complete with a fountain and all sorts of waterfowl) and did Latin there till the sun set. Lovely!

I wanted to tell you about Beautiful Thing, Hamlet and Inherit the Wind, but I'm posting this from the library and am running out of time.

But one thing I have to mention is Chinatown, oh Chinatown! The final film in the Kings noir series. I have attended almost all of these - free, on Monday evenings, accompanied by about five minutes of academia and on a massive screen. And usually, featuring the projectionist screwing up. I'll talk about the program as a whole when I have time.

And to cap it off, the topic was neo-noir - of which Chinatown is a perfect example. I was reminded of L.A. Confidential all the way through - same location, same stylised story, and also the same composer using the same lonesome trumpet theme. I was interested by it's use of sunlight. L.A. C, notably, takes place entirely at night - it's a shock when the sun turns up in the final scene. Chinatown is almost more dark and threatening for being set mostly in day, under an unforgivingly cheerful sky. When I came out I was thinking one was as good as the other, but as I thought about it more I've come around to thinking Chinatown might be better. Which is a scary thought, because L.A. Confidential has always been my benchmark "great movie". And I did think about it, I have been thinking about it constantly. I couldn't get to sleep for running it over in my brain. I'm not sure what about it has caught my attention so fully, but you heard it here first, folks (off the record, on the QT and very hush hush...) - this is a love affair blossoming into life.

Oh, and the knife + nostril? Best reaction EVER from an audience. I felt sure the scene was sufficently famous that everyone would know about it, but apparently not. There was a hugely satisfying gasp, of a kind I've never experienced. Maybe the last time something similar was when Bilbo leaps for the ring in Fellowship - at which point the audience, myself included, lurched in their chairs.

This week I saw a Hitchcock film I actually liked - his first, The Lodger, or, A Story of the London Fog, with a live score improvised by Minima. The story is based on the Jack the Ripper murders, and concerns a mysterious "lodger" whom, we begin to suspect, has some very interesting nocturnal activities. There will be spoilers below, but for this very rare silent film you are never going to see. So I advise you keep reading.

I adored it, start to finish, but my feelings exploded into a bit of a wordvomit, part justification and part exploration revolving around Jack the Ripper. My least favourite obsession - I know, in part, where it came from, but I'm not particularly proud of it. The way I see it is: at least I'm honest. And it's not so much the history that fascinates me, as the way the world at large has attempted to make their obsession reasonable. And it's this in turn, I like to tell myself, that makes my interest acceptable. All those ideas are coming out in a splurged, tinged with the reek of academese, but do try and keep up as I think I'm attempting to say something valuable.

There are no footnotes because these are all my ideas, but you can take it as given that many of them have been expressed more eloquently by people with careers.

People love nosying into violent murder. It's hidden between the respectable sheets of the "London Lite", or made "OK" by the ten o'clock news - but secretly, everyone is fascinated. The interesting thing about Jack is the way this fascination is allowed to be public. There are Ripperology conventions, and the fella's had cameos on Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Smallville, X-Men - even a namecheck in Doctor Who - in a way I can't see Ed Geind doing any time soon.

It's an example of cinema (and more widely, of course, fiction) mediating images and making it "safe". Smoking looks pretty cool on screen, so do car chases, gunfights and all sorts of behavior we should find reprehensible. Another example would be how we can watch the news impassively, almost on autopilot, without engaging with the reality of any of the stories. Poor Saucy Jack has been mediated in this way for a good century now - we are safe from engaging with the real life corpses of five real, dead women because he has been made successively more fictional, more and more safe.

One example of the "fictionalisation" process is the use of Ripperologist terminology. Those five victims are popularly referred to as the "canonical" five, to separate them from other deaths attributed to him (sometimes up to 20). But the use of the word "canonical" is telling - a word which means not only correct, but someone has decided its correct. An aspect of fiction - someone has decided how we're going to pass this story down. Medea kills her children, and all pre-Euripidean versions where the kids make it are non-canonical.

Of course, there's time and decency. And all serial killers go through a version of this - because we are also piecing them together from news reports - but because Mr Jack remained a mystery, there's room for us to write whatever we like straight over the top of him. The Jack we have is a heavily romanticised figure: The Lodger portrays him as beautiful and sad - Gotham by Gaslight makes him maladjusted, but intelligent. This is another way of rendering him "safe" - as Oscar Wilde puts it, "we praise the banker that we may overdraw our account, and find good qualities in the highwayman in the hope that he may spare our pockets. "

The looping together of history and fiction finds it's home in the Gothic Horror genre, and so he inherits many of the vampire traits. Dangerous, but also sexy - aristocratic - villainous, but on some level a heroic social rebel. The Lodger in particular portrays him with waxy pale skin and a huge black cloak, while Anno Dracula reveals he is actually Jack Seward of the original novel. Dracula. The Last Sherlock Holmes Story melanges him with that other great Victorian Gothic figure - as does Exit Sherlock Holmes. The animated Van Helsing preview also takes Jack on - this time, he's actually Mr Hyde. You can bet he's in League of Extraordinary Gentlemen too. Magic and sorcery get their turn also- From Hell figures him as a Freemason trying to...do whatever Freemasons do, Matrix is using the killings to power some sort of super-magic-McGuffin, and Yours Truly, Jack The Ripper has them as an attempt at immortality (more of that later). He's mixed up with Crippen, Spring Heeled Jack and Sweeney Todd - appropriately, those three figures are in turn are real, sort-of real and fictional.

So he also gets constructed as part of the archetypal Gothic-Victorian landscape: taxidermy, heavy mahogany, gas lights, cobbles, shadows, and in particular, fog. The Lodger is subtitled "a Story of the Londern Fog", as if the fog were somehow implicated in all that ripping - similarly the Buffy the Vampire novel which takes him on is called "Blood and Fog". In the Doctor Who novel Matrix, the Fog decends when Jack does. The novel is set in an alternate London where the killings never stopped, ultimately plunging the country into chaos as the paranoia and killing turn into a sort of epidemic:

"Following the Ripper murders, the citizens of London rose up against the authorities who were unable to protect them, and a period of civil unrest followed. Then, during World War One, rumours of atrocities drifted back from the front lines -- and when the shell-shocked veterans returned, something evil returned with them. Ever since, London has been under siege from the walking dead, social order has broken down, and gangs of youths who worship Jack as the new Messiah roam the streets. The Americans took control after the war with Hitler and put London under quarantine, but all they've done is contain the problem"

Army crackdowns, Jacksprites everywhere, zombies and rationing. And fog, lots of fog: in the universe where Jack's spectre never left, neither did the Fog.

The lingering spectre is a powerful image, because it's not altogether incorrect. The fascination hasn't left. Perhaps it's the draw of an unsolved mystery. That's the significance of the fact he was never caught, nor even found - because he hasn't left either. Those novels with immortality attempts are perhaps deeper than they intended to be. Certainly, he's been regarded as the father of the modern serial killer (more because he was the first to be widely reported by a hysterical Victorian newspaper machine). From Hell gives Jack an out-of-body experience through time, where his spirit literally inspires Peter Sutcliffe, Ian Brady and William Blake.
And much like Matrix, From Hell at one point claims that he kickstarted the entire 20th century, and was the culmination of the Victorian period. "Jack" says:

"It is beginning, Netley. Only just beginning. For better or worse, the twentieth century. I have delivered it."

And Alan Moore says:

"the Ripper murders — happening when they did and where they did — were almost like an apocalyptic summary of... that entire Victorian age."

I mean, for goodness sake! Remember what we are actually talking about: one very pathetic fella who diced five women in gory detail. Yet the cling he has on the popular imagination is immense - he was voted "The Worst Briton in History" - when we can'tt even know for sure if he is a Brit.

Ah, all I want is half a year to construct a proper essay on this theme!


As for the film.

I had suspected from the start that the Generic Production Code Thingy would impact the movie's ending. I can't recall exactly what the rules were in 20s Britain, but I assumed it would be similar to America's of the same time. Bad must be punished, and the audience's sympathy must not be with crime. The downbeat ending is a relatively new innovation in screen terms.

In actual fact, the Lodger cops out not once but twice. Our Jack can't get away with it, and is inevitably caught by the police. But then, in a second startling twist, we discover that he's not guilty at all but is an innocent party also tracking the Avenger. Which is pretty limp and unexpected given what's gone before. But by the time this is revealed, the damage has been done. You've already had the thrill factor of seeing a beautiful girl seduced by a monster - the "spectacle", if you like - and of sympathising with a vicious killer, because it's been so heavily hinted it is him throughout. The Lodger has as good as done the crimes - or, by the end of the movie, it doens't matter that he hasn't. It may as well have been him. The shock twist almost makes it all more obvious. IMDb confirms what I'd already guessed: Hitchcock wanted an ambiguous ending to the film, but the studio wouldn't allow it to be implied that the lodger might actually be the murderer. I still think it's pretty ambiguous, or perhaps I just wanted it to be. There are also strong overlaps with Psycho - blondes in bathtubs, rented rooms as dangerous spaces, or spaces disjointed from conventional morality, not to mention twisted sexuality and an innocent on the run.

Innocent. Pah.


A good essay on the Lodger is here:http://www.cinemademerde.com/Essay-Lodger_Hitchcocks_First_Film.shtml

We spent today in Acton High Street. It's about the same distance the campus was from "other" Hampstead last year. Calypso and I took longer walking there because we were distracted by a great charity shop, at which I fufilled my long urge for a harmonica and a gentleman's evening scarf. I can almost play Once Upon A Time In The West on it. The harmonica, not the scarf. We also narrowly avoided a Rorschach hat.

Acton is a chaos of scuzzy ethnic food places. It's such a multi-cultural area - coming from Guernsey, where the teachers confused our year's two dark-skinned girls for the whole of seven years despite the fact one's parents were Egyptian and the other South American, it's something I really enjoy about being in England. All the same, I feel guilty for not being more in touch. For example a lot of places were selling "halal" meat. I know it's an important religious thingy, but what is it exactly? There were lots of religious buildings - we found Acton mosque, Acton Catholic church, Acton Baptist Church and many others. Acton has wool shop, a great mask shop, a 17th Century pub and only the most tacky brands - Macdonalds and 99p stores were the only ones I recognised. Marvellous! A particular treat was the local lamp shop - very beautiful, a chaotic flurry of tasteless glowing tat.

We lunched at Acton Market, at Mr Sing's Express Curry stand - he's a friendly fellow who wanted us to test-drive a meal he is intending to sell. For a pound, he gave us an aloo tika with spicy chickpeas, drizzled with tamarind chutney. Calypso and I are thinking of making a small portable guide to foreign food - for example, I like pasta but am often tripped up in restaurants if they don't explain exactly what "siciliana" or something means. Especially important now we're all vegitarian too.

We finally found Acton library - a puny little thing, but our membership gets into lots of surrounding libraries so I'm sure it'll be OK. Cool, but frustrating, there are huge non-English sections. I loathe non-English books - they always look far more interesting than anything one could read. Calypso made a girl laugh by badmouthing Twilight. We secured internet connections! Woo hoo! Disappointingly, we are too old to come to the library's Fairy Princess day.
Calypso got "The Good Giving Guide", the truth about charity and how best to help, a Terry Prachett book and a book about sustainable living - I carried off "Costume in Detail 1730 - 1930", a book of drawings of women's dresses; "The Four Feathers", a film I adored about gung-ho heroics and people with more honour than sense and "Save the Last Bullet", the memoirs of a mercenary from the Balkans and Somalia. I shouldn't really be indulging my love of angst and guts, but there wasn't any Alastair MacLean there. I feel a little bad - when it's the movies, I can sort of justify the kick I get out of violence; a factual book will make it seem far more like a dirty activity. Finally for my graphic novel fix, "Hellblazer: Roots of Coincidence". I still feel a certain debt to Constantine for getting me into comics, even though I've found them increasingly repetitive.

We also got some DVDs. There were about two there I would ever deign to watch - when in company, I seem to get snobbier about film. One of them was Mullholland Drive. Our last stop was the local Scope, where Calypso found a 30s dress and I got a cheap DVD with two episodes of Danger Man on it. So it was, in a way, an expensive day - but we now know our area better.

We are using one of the spare see-thru jars, and filling it with colourful origami stars made from the junk mail. Dinner was lentil bake - semi successful, but we'll know how to do better next time - and Kate Bush. Afterwards, we watched Queen Sized - a Lifetime movie starring Nikki Blonski about a fat-girl-turns-Homecoming-Queen. It wasn't as bad as it sounds. For example, I kinda expected Maggie to be dressed really unflatteringly throughout, before the inevitable makeover moment. Y'know, get a haircut and suddenly she's being played by Lindsay Lohan. The idea of an ugly woman is faintly ridiculous - ugliness or beauty is all about the way you present yourself, and any figure can be flattered with smart choices. But actually, she was glamourous and friendly all the way through - it was purely an issue of perception - and Hollywood did not require her to turn into a skinny bint and go on a diet. Little touches like this made the movie pleasingly non-patronising, to the extent I can't really take the rack out of it. Also, she was haunted by an invisible version of her mum. I know self-critical is hard to dramatise, but it added a really nice surreal edge.

I'd like to do a truth-beauty essay one day. Dorian Gray is ugly inside, but everyone believes he is good because he is beautiful. Frankenstein's monster is good inside, but becomes ugly because everyone believes he is. In Beauty and the Beast - clue is in the title - Belle is good because she can see through the Beast's ugliness, but her reward is him turning back into a handsome hunk. The Ugly Sisters are evil, while Cinderella hides her beauty in rags. And so on. There's a point to be made in here somewhere but I can't see it. It's the Beauty and the Beast one that strikes me as most strange.