Charting The New Frontier

So, yes. I finally did it. I moved out. And it only took me five years to recover from the last time I tried it. Now, if memory serves, at this point, having lived away from home for about six weeks, give or take, when I was living over Gateshead I was in the midst of a terrible depression. Call it homesickness if you want, but I think it was something deeper than that. Am I experiencing that here? A little, but I'm depressed anyway (usual bollocks, but this time involving a completely different girl called Natalie - hey, at least I'm consistent, as Stef is with peeps called Chris, so I am with girls called Natalie. It's a motif.) and at least here I'm not tiptoeing around a nutty closet lesbian.

So, a bizarre side-effect of the move was that I for whatever reason ended up watching the first six series of Red Dwarf. You know, the good ones, before everything went off the boil. Not in order though. It was something like 1, 4, 5, 6, 2, 3, which serves only to highlight the massively varying quality between the series. Series 6 for example, for all it's Emmy award winning glory and shiny special effects is a big fat overweight series well on it's way to comedy heaven. The characters have long since ceased to be anything more than a collection of comedy tics (Lister with his curry and questionable hygiene, Kryten and his Space Corps directive and groinal socket jokes). True, it still has it's moments, but somewhere during Series 2 and Series 3 it stopped being a sitcom set in space and became a space show that happened to be a comedy. And not a very good one at that. Somewhere during Series 5 the quality just tails off and the much-vaunted 'Back To Reality', despite some intriguing ideas doesn't develop them enough for it to be good sf or is funny enough to be a good comedy. The Cat's Duane Dibbley character in particular is a lazy anorak joke that goes on far too long (and they had the tenacity to resurrect it the following season in 'Emohawk'). 'Holoship' is a good idea and has some hilarious moments (it's telling that most of the funny stuff in these twilight years is the product of Chris Barrie, it's also telling that from the moment he leaves the series in Series 7 the entire enterprise goes into nosedive) but again it's a schizophrenic turn - it doesn't know whether it wants to be a funny sf show or a sitcom that just happens to be set in outer space. This effect leaves most of the episodes feeling malnourished - the thirty minute mark is not long enough to introduce, develop and utilise a decent sf idea, as seen in 'Demons And Angels' for example. The first two series were essentially sitcom - the characters barely even moved out of the confines of their three stock sets, akin to Blackadder (now there was a show which knew its strengths and played them to the hilt) and whatever sf related plot turned up (echoes from the future, a subservient mechanoid, Holly getting replaced by a superior computer) were usually perfunctory enough to be dealt with quite nicely in the time allowed and in the manner the should have been; as a framework for the jokes to hang off.

I think it might be the case with any show that as time goes on, things become more and more formuliac. It happened with Friends, it happened with Cheers (and that show is perhaps the finest sitcom to emerge from America since Bewitched, speaking of Bewitched, that didn't so much become more formulaic as time went on but started out with a very strict formula and stuck with it), and it happened with Red Dwarf. By Series 6 you were guaranteed a Space Corps directive joke, a humourous reference to curry, some amusing metaphor for Rimmer's hair/Kryten's head and at least one fashion reference from the Cat. It obviously happened because Grant and Naylor were responding to popular demand. If one Space Corps joke got a big laugh, they were plainly going to try it again. Just witness the 'Tales Of The Riverbank: The Next Generation' conversation that tried and failed to top the hilariously insane conversation about Wilma Flintstone.

I think I might be being a bit harsh here. After all, watching the entire six series in the space of a week, I must have found something in them that I enjoyed. It's just I enjoyed some more than others. Peculiarly, going off conventional wisdom (ooh, there's that phrase again) the 'classic' episodes ('Backwards', 'Back To Reality', 'Gunmen Of The Apocalypse') were among my least favourite, while 'Meltdown', often cited as the series nadir was damn funny (perhaps, in that case, with the advent of bad taste comedy like Family Guy and South Park, we're more attuned to the comedy notion of Ghandi as a man in a nappy and Queen Victoria as an assassin). 'Holoship' especially because it had the lovely Jane Horrocks in, as well as that exhange between Lister and Don Warrington, would also be high on my list. But for me, the series' high point has to be Series 2. At that point, it was still true to its roots, while the kinks that had marred Series 1 (nothing serious, just the usual problems that need to be ironed out on any series) have been worked out.

Which brings us to Star Trek: Voyager. That unloved son of the Trek canon. Where to start? Okay, controversial opinion here, but, given that aside from DS9 (and that series is so unlike any other Trek it might be worth simply putting it in a category of its own) Voyager is quite good. Certainly as Space Opera goes, it's in the top ten of shows from the nineties. DS9 and Babylon 5 obviously top the chart, followed by TNG (which I hated as a kid and which I've learned to love much more as a adult). Stargate didn't really hit its stride until its third season, Andromeda was the televisual equivalent of laxative, Firefly and Battlestar Galactica had the good grace to start only once Voyager had finished (and will no doubt come up in a discussion of Enterprise, should I ever do one, which I probably will), leaving only the true might of Farscape to challenge it, and even then, that was only in Voyager's later years.

So why is Voyager so unloved? Does it have anything to do with the female captain? It's certainly an intriguing suggestion and bears looking at with the knowledge that a surprising amount of Trek fans, especially in America, are massively right-wing. Surprising given Trek's liberal lefty approach to politics that is, not America's right-wing leanings. You only have to look at the fact that no Trek series has yet done a story that addresses the gay issue. Sure, you had 'The Outcast' on TNG, a dreadful piece of polemic by Jeri Taylor, a writer who plainly had no understanding or empathy for sf, but that shot itself in the foot by casting a woman in the role of Riker's supposedly androgynous love interest. Had they cast a man, it might have meant something. As it was, it was obviously to the entire audience that she was a woman underneath all the make-up so that made it 'safe' because any notions of 'deviant' sexuality were purely associational at best. And DS9 did 'Rejoined' in which Jadzia Dax becomes involved with her former lover, only as they are both Trills (and I've never been able to get over that species name, given that it's the same as a type of bird food), they were in different bodies at the time, one female, one male and now they are both female. The episode does go some way to addressing the whole issue, doing what Trek as the Offical National Metaphor of America does best, disguising the issue so that instead of the stigma they receive being because that if they get reacquianted now they will be a same-sex couple, but rather they will have broken the Trill taboo of getting involved with partners from a past life, although why this should be a taboo, I have no idea, and anyway, it didn't stop Ezri from bonking Worf a few months after Jadzia's death. Or does the taboo only apply to Trills? You might think it should be the other way round. The possible psychological trauma for Worf (for example) would be much greater than for Ezri, or the Dax symbiont because as a joined Trill, she is used to living different lives, while for Worf, it's almost as if there's a lot of his wife in there and he's still in love with Jadzia Dax, while Ezri Dax is an entirely different person, but Ezri getting down and dirty with him might send the wrong signals.


But that's a bit of a digression. We were discussing female captains. Women are psychologically unsuited to command, or so the final episode of the original series claimed back in 1969. And true to form, the network got cold feet about a woman captain (Voyager's main selling point) and we almost had Nigel Havers in command of the Voyager. Doubtless the female role would have been transferred to first office. But what we have in Janeway is something special. Generally, women on TV fall into three main categories: Maiden, mother and crone. Two of Voyager's female cast, Janeway and B'Elanna, don't fall into either of these (at least not at first, a lot of Janeway's mothering instincts come out with regard to Kes, and especially with Seven) and that in and of itself is a huge achievement. Additionally, managing to make Janeway a recognisable woman without falling into the normal trap of writing for a man and then just sticking a pair of comedy breasts on (as often happened to Tasha Yar in the early days of TNG) or making her weak in respect to the men under her command or making her a ball-breaker in the Jane Tennyson mould. Janeway is recognisably a woman in the same way that Sisko is recognisably a man, but roles for the, shall we say 'mature' woman, on TV tend to either the caring mother or the shrewish. Or the slapper. I make no judgements but point you to a certain cast member from 'Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country' who gained a certain amount of subsequent fame in a certain HBO TV show with the words 'city' and 'sex' in the title.

It's a serious achievement, even in the nineties. An something that should be applauded. The producers even had the courage to make Janeway flawed. She does things that Picard would neverhave even considered. In the fifth season opener, she's retreated to her quarters and is brooding. Has been for days. She second-guesses herself. And she's allowed to, because she's alone in the Delta Quadrant. If Picard ever doubted himself, he could just pick up the phone to Starfleet Command and get some advice from the guest admiral of the week. Janeway (a lot like Kirk before her, although you suspect that Kirk would have probably found a way to destroy the Caretaker's array that stranded them in the Delta Quadrant in the first place and get them home, all in the space of fifty minutes - I doubt he would have let any of that 70,000 light years from home shit get in his way) makes choices because she has to and the only people she can really confide in are Tuvok and Chakotay. So, a good captain.

What of the rest of the crew?

It's here we begin to slip up. Chakotay is as wooden as you can actually get without becoming a two by four (although those occasions when he does try, basically those scripts he likes which sadly aren't that plentiful, he can hit his marks with the best of them - I'd like to see him share a screen with Patrick Stewart, either Stewart would blow him out of the water or Beltran would be forced to raise his game and that would be worth paying good money for). It doesn't help that his character is plainly rubbish. It's odd that a series so generally respectful as Star Trek should think it's okay to produce a character who's transparently written as a generic Native American/Mayan/South American Ethnicity Of The Week. His spirituality is a dreadful melting pot of whatever the story needs that week.

Tuvok is essentially Spock Redux. Over the course of seven years you never find out anything about him. Sure, you find out about his wife and his kids (a little bit anyway) and you find out about his experience on the Excelsior and a bit about his prior relationship with Janeway (a relationship that generally gone sidelined and ignored in favour of the romance between Janeway and Chakotay that some of the writers were trying to work in but which was ignored by everyone else). But you never found out about him as a person. What made him tick? It didn't help that he was written as a generic 'man without emotions' most of the time and Tim Russ had to inject whatever personality he could purely by means of gestures and suchlike.

Neelix. The less said about Neelix the better. You'd think that after Quark, the DS9 comic relief who worked so much better as a dramatic character (and, indeed, after introducing the Ferengi themselves onto TNG as the new Big Bad before deciding they worked so much better as comic relief) that they would stop trying to pigeonhole characters before they've had a chance to settle down and find their feet. Ethan Phillips is a fine actor, and many of his performances are exceptional (especially given that he's beneath a mask that looks like the bastard son of a baboon, a leopard and a big bag of pus) unfortunately, most of the episodes where he is the notional star are duds purely because Neelix as a comic character does not work. Think about it: Here is a man whose entire family have been wiped out in a war, who has spent God knows how long wandering about, just about eking out a living by trading. Does this sound like comedy gold to you? Because it certainly doesn't to me. Whereas on DS9 they eventually accepted Quark's role (he still got the comedy stuff, but DS9 was a much grimmer series than Voyager so he got his fair share of heavy stuff to) Neelix would veer wildly about depending on who was writing him, often in the space of a single scene. And whoever had the idea of pairing him up with Naomi Wildman should be shot. Neelix doing caring and paternal is enough to make any puke.

Harry Kim is, like Tuvok, a blank slate really. You can imagine they were running short a character for the regular cast (and it you're being particularly cruel, an ethnic minority) and the notes for Kim simply read 'Ensign - Fresh out of the Academy' because he's not so much a character, more someone to stand there so the other actor in the scene has someone to talk to. Garrett Wang is a competent enough actor (in fact, I would go so far as to say that no regular in Trek, certainly the post TNG iterations, has been a bad actor - it's too high profile a job for that, although some of the guest cast have been absolutely appalling - naming no names but a certain recurring Vulcan engineer springs immediately to mind), but, like Travis in Enterprise, Kim's character seems to have gotten lost down the back of Rick Berman's desk.

Tom Paris and B'Elanna. The great love story of Trek. No, really. I'm not bullshitting you here. Forget about Dax and Worf or whatever it was that Trip and T'Pol had (and the Kira/Odo love story? - you can fuck off right now, the entire beauty of that storyline was that Odo's love was unrequited, once Kira developed feelings back, it lost all its magic - let's face it, how many cases of unrequited love do we have these days? Not enough). Tom and B'Elanna are where it's at. They never did a lot on it, but that's what is so beautiful about it. It happens naturally, from them finding out they fancy each other, to admitting they fancy each other, to dating, all the way through to getting married and having a baby. They fight, sure. But they always make up. And because it's not a constant detail whenever we see them as it sometimes was with Dax and Worf it feels real. The main problem with Tom as a character was that his arc (the made good) was pretty much over and done with by the end of 'Caretaker', leading to odd throwbacks like 'Thirty Days' where Tom The Rebel suddenly resurfaced, seemingly purely for the purposes of shaking things up.

Kes. Hmm. In every Trek series there is a character who, on the surface, has a massive amount of potential but for whatever reason, never pans out. In the original series it was McCoy (despite being the third leading man he was never really given his chance to shine, although there was never any real chance for it, the way TV worked in those days, you had your hero and his sidekicks, Uhura was also someone who you occasionally got tantalisingly glimpses at and deserved far more screen time than she got), in TNG it was Deanna Troi, in DS9 it was Jake (amazingly the only human civilian who's been a regular) and in Enterprise it was Reed who got little more to do than stand around whingeing and making sarcastic comments. On Voyager it was Kes. Initially hamstrung by her relationship with the overprotective Neelix (and I'm not even going to go into the whole potential cradle snatching scenario, just to say that when Kes and Neelix are together, she celebrates her second birthday), the only times when Jennifer Lien got a chance to shine was when she wasn't playing the usual Kes (c.f. 'Before and After' and 'Warlord'). She got stuck in the same rut that Troi had on TNG for a while, popping up to the bridge once an episode or so and making asinine comments. While Troi eventually escaped this (although it took her till Season 6), on Voyager they decided to cut their losses and replaced Kes after Season 3 and replaced her with...

Seven Of Nine. Ah. Can you smell a desperate grab for ratings? Still, if you overlook Jeri Ryan's obvious... attributes and the fact that her uniform seems to consist solely of variously coloured skintight catsuits, Seven is a good character, and for once the writing staf aren't afraid to use that character. Too often in Seasons 1-3, Voyager comes across a planet, some stuff happens then they go on their way (and all too often, it often happened to guest stars - they do a Pon Farr episode, 'Blood Fever' and they hire a guest star to play the Vulcan undergoing the mating urge - how much better would it have been for it to have been Tuvok undergoing it, especially with his wife being 70,000 light years away). No real attempt was made to tie it into the characters, or even the overall arc of the series. Only the od episode, like 'The 37's' was really about the need to get home. With the introduction of Seven, they started generating stories that sprung out of the characters, well, I say characters, but it is really just Seven. It helps that Ryan is a very god actress (you only need to watch 'One', where she spends much of the time on screen alone and manages to hold your interest, or 'Infintie Regress' where she switchies between characters in less than a blink of an eye). The same is true of the Doctor, the other feather in Voyager's cap. Played by Robert Picardo as someone constantly on the verge of smacking someone out, the Doctor is the irascible jewel in Voyager's crown (and, were there any justice in the world, Seven and the Doctor would have ended up involved with each other). Like Harry, the Doctor starts off as a blank slate, but the writers actually do things with the Doctor. He's Voyager's Data substitute (although Data himself was just a Spock substitute, albeit with his goals reversed, while Spock distances himself from his human heritage, Data wants to become more human) and as such is guaranteed all the usual episodes like the 'first love' that Trek has down pat by now.

And maybe that's the problem people had with Voyager. By this point, Trek as a franchise had become very moribound. There were two series running, Voyager was designed to fill the gap as soon as TNG ended, there was a movie at the pictures every two or three years... Everything had become so predictable. While DS9 (like Voyager, a series that took a while to find its feet - in fact, both DS9 and Voyager didn't really find themselves until their third season and didn't produce a definitive season until Season 4, and each with fresh impetus - DS9's war with the Klingons and Voyager introducing Seven of Nine as well as featuring the Borg themselves, not really having been seen on TV since TNG's 'Descent' four years earlier) took its own path and did what it felt like doing (primarily due to Rick Berman leaving it alone and letting Ira Steven Behr and his team get on with it), Voyager was hamstrung by a number of factors that were inherent at the beginning of the series and they didn't take into account the lessons learned from TNG and the growing pains of DS9. That said, TNG didn't find its feet until well into its third year, nor did Enterprise (while back in the sixties, as the original Trek was entering its third series, everything was starting to go horribly wrong, c.f. Spock's Brain).

It's a funny old world. Voyager survived as long as it did simply because there was an expectaton for Star Trek (that and the fact of its placement as the flagship show of Paramount's TV station UPN guaranteed that no matter what ratings it got, it would survive) while Enterprise was crippled by the same expectation. When it comes down to it, Voyager is my least favourite Trek series, have to admit it. It would be Enterprise, but Seasons 3 and 4 of that show are up there with the best of what DS9 has to offer. But when Voyager was good (see Seasons 4 and 5, plus most of Season 7 until they get to that hideous finale) it stood up well against everything else that wasn't Trek. Had it not been Trek, it probably wouldn't have lasted as long as it did, which is a sad indicator of today's televisual climate when perfectly good quality shows aren't given the chances that they deserve, but it would perhaps have bee in Voyager's best interests. Had the show been forced to fight - and I mean really fight, facing a threat of cancellation every year - the producers and staff might have been pushed to do something truly great, rather than occasionally stumbling across it by accident. So, in conclusion, a good series (certainly one that deserves a better reputation than it currently has) but one which, given the odd kick up the arse, could have been a great one. After all, look what the desire to prove themselves did for Behr et al over at DS9. I wouldn't go so far as to say it's a wasted opportunity (shows like Firefly or Wonderfalls being cut down in their prime through lack of understanding or empathy, that is a wasted opprtunity) but were it a student it would probably pass, but have a chastising 'could do better'.

Peace out.

The House That Marky Built

Yes. It seems like I, the last great advocate of living with parents, will soon be moving out. To a flat of my very own, well, aside from the fact that I'll be sharing it with a lad I work with, it will still be my flat. He's just a lodger there. A vital lodger because there's no way I can afford the rent and the bills and still be able to feed myself.

It has sort of come out of the blue. The Guv mentioned it one day and it has just snowballed from there. One simple suggestion from her and it's become reality. I've filled in the application for today so we should be moving in by the end of the month. It's kinda scary, given that I'm nearly 27 and aside from those six months I spent living in Gateshead I've never lived on my own, but it's something I think I need to do. And it's exciting. I'll actually have a living room for living in. I will no longer be living out of my bedroom. I'll have an entire house to fill with books and DVDs.

But it's unfurnished. And how expensive are some things? I've been lucky in that pretty much everyone has been donating odds and ends (a table here, a bookcase there) and Florence still has a lot of stuff kicking around. My Gran's old dining room table, for instance, will be travelling with me, as will the old freezer and a bunch of other stuff. But I need a bed and a whole load of bookcases. Beds (along with tables and sideboards and sofas) are ludicrously expensive, for what they are.

So I got a loan from the bank to cover the bond and some furniture. God, I feel so grown up now. Peace out.

The Architecture Of Morality

The Natalie Situation

Okay. So there was I, the doyen of singledom, out on a date. With a girl. That I liked. How did I get there? Well, as with the whole Alison debacle, it was down to Andrea. She got me to ask Natalie out (not that Natalie from earlier in this blog, but another Natalie - it seems to be a ridiculously comon name among the younger generation, like Clare was among my peers) and we ended up going to Newcastle together on the 23rd December. We looked around shops. She had a little bit of Christmas shopping to do. We did that. Had coffee (I paid). Almost went to the pictures (there was nothing on at a reasonable time). Talked about bands (she's into heavy thrash rock) and what have you. Didn't kiss, didn't hold hands. But that's fine. She's the shy sort. I was happy enough just talking to her. We got the bus home together, she got off at the Mow. I said goodbye, we said we'd see each other later. Saw her the next day when she came into work, exchanged a few words. I texted her on Boxing Day (I had intended to text her on Christmas Eve but I kinda forgot about it and texting Christmas Day - I thought - would seem a little weird and verging on the loony). She never texts back.

I'm still waiting for the reply. She's been in the shop plenty. Said hi, been pleasant enough. But not a word about my text. In fact, after being quizzed by Andrea (you've got to give my boss points) she said I'd never been in touch with her. Then the other day Shaun was talking to her and she was, apparently, saying something about how she wants to get to know me better, blah, blah, blah. Well, what better way to know get to know me than to actually reply to my texts and go out with me? I don't know. Andrea is now firmly of the opinion that she's a bit of a freak and while I still do fancy her (she was in the shop the other day and I couldn't help but stare at her arse) I just don't have the time or energy into chasing after someone who blatantly doesn't know what they want. I'll keep you updated.

School Reunion

Christmas came and went like it most often does with a faint air of disappointment and malaise. Got most of what I wanted, barring a dressing gown. Clare and Richie got me Mass Effect despite saying they hadn't (and leading me to almost buy it for myself the previous Friday) which is occupying most of my 360 time at the minute. Doctor Who was good. Christmas Eve at the pub (the Beamish Mary this year) was not as drunken and revelly as usual, but was a nice catch up. The big surprise this year was a Burnmoor Primary School reunion which was arranged over facebook (ah, the wonders of modern technology - it makes you wonder how people stayed in touch before the internet and how it's made shows like Cilla's Surprise Surprise almost completely redundant. Lost cousin in Australia? Just log on to Facebook, he's probably on there. You can friend him, fight his vampire and poke him all in the space of five minutes). Despite a massive response on Facebook in the end only Blades, Emma, myself (obviously), Gemma, Jav and Mesh turned up. Now Blades and Emma I still see regularly enough (although not nearly as often as I would like) but I haven't seen the other three since we left 6th Form, possibly even - in the case of Mesh - since we finished our GCSE's and it's a sobering thought to realise that that was eleven years ago now. Gemma is back up home after living away whereas we've just lost touch with Mesh and Jav. It was a lot of fun, more fun than I thought it would be. I was approaching the evening with a sense of anticipation but also dread (mainly due to the possible attendance by people from my past who I would rather stay buried, but who didn't, in the event, turn up anyway). There was still my ever-present depression at the evidence that these people, who are the same age as me and went through so many of the same formative experiences (I mean, I remember Jav's terrible homesickness on our first night in France during the top year juniors and I remember spending the night at Mesh's house - he was one of the first people I knew who got Sky and I became obsessed with Clarissa Explains It All, this was back when it tooks years - not months - for shows to come across from America) have made so much more of their lives than I have. Jav is living with someone in their own house. Gemma has been married and divorced (and is far fitter than I remember).

The only black note on the evening is that when we got home, Emma texted me and told me she could tell I fancied Gemma. Very true. She's emminantly fanciable. I then went on to state - not in a self-pitying way, I have to say - that she would never go out with someone like me. This whole conversation (which was reprised at the weekend following a trip to the beach to celebrate New Year before everyone went their separate ways again) descended into Emma basically trying to convince me that there's someone out their for me and me wallowing in a pool of misery wondering why - if there indeed was someone out there for me - hadn't I found them yet? Later, after the beach, Emma claimed that I fancied everyone (blatantly not true) and how was anmyone to know that they were special if I was perving over everyone anyway and that I should go for someone in my league. Which is a polite way of saying that I'm too ugly to attract someone like Gemma and that I should set my sights a little lower on someone uglier and more desperate.

None of which I agree with, by the by. I've never gone for any of this league bollocks. You're attracted to who you're attacted to. It's got nothing to do with leagues or anything rational. Beauty, as the age old adage goes, is in the eye of the beholder. And anyway, foregoing any of the 'superficial' arguments for the minute, I know I'm not fantastic looking, but I'm not too bad.

Moving On

The biggest news in my life at the moment, and the thing which is occupying most of my non-working time, is the fact that I'm moving out. To the flat above the shop. Brad is moving out this month and Iput my name down for it, along with Shaun, because I couldn't really afford it by myself (I could pay the rent and all the bills but I wouldn't be able to buy food). It's a good thing. I'm finally getting my own place, so I'll have freedom and be able to do whatever I want to do. Not that I'll be having women over every night simply by virtue of having my own flat, but it feels good, to know that soon I'll have my own space and I won't be answerable to anyone. Going to work will also be a doddle and there's a night bus which runs between Chester and Newcastle that would facilitate proper nights out.

I feel like I need this. I'm going to be twenty seven in just under five weeks. Thirty is just around the corner and I'm too damn old to be living with my mother. Strictly speaking I'm too damn old to never have had a proper long term relationship. Which reminds me. Valentine's Day. Fuck. There is a certain someone who I was going to send a card to but Andrea quietly pointed out to me that I have no real reason to believe that she even likes me that much, let alone fancies me. One drunken boob flash might be enough to give me a crush on her, but it might mean nothing to her. God knows. So, it looks like I'll be having another lonely VD. But it can't get worse han last year with my text to Stef and her non-reply leading to my ten mile trek around the wonders of Co Durham, culminating in a trudge through the woods at the back of Penshaw Monument in the middle of the night, when it's pitch black only for me to go into work the following day, find out she had no credit on her phone but that she didn't want to go out for a drink with me anyway. And don't get me started on her slow puncture 'I'm sorta seeing someone' bollocks rejection, because I know for a fact she wasn't seeing anyone. A couple of weeks beforehand I made some subtle investigations into her relationship status.

It's just me. I'm constantly attracted to women who treat me like crap. I mean, take Alison. I really thought we had something - there was talk of holidays and stuff. I gave myself (emotionally) to her more than I had thought possible. And then she goes and dumps me by text not once, but twice. The first time because she thought the age gap was too much and the second (the text received when I was in Oxford with Blades waiting for the coach to London, leading to a night of drunken bitterness with Blades, Amy and Ali in Maida Vale, public urination following a large Sprite from McDonald's and a conversation with an equally drunk lesbian on the Tube - I spent much of that day wandering around in a daze, ready to burst into tears at any point, I had to sit down in Tate Modern because it was all just getting too much for me. Blades, for his part when I confessed this to Amy said that I'd seemed okay all day - there's something to be said for being taciturn) because she thought I was more serious about the relationship than I was but which, I think, can be traced back to a very late night conversation over the phone - possibly involving some small measure of phone sex, I don't really care to remember - which, when we were saying out goodnights, an 'I love you,' slipped from between my lips. She said nothing for a few seconds and then said 'I don't know if I can say that yet...'. What blissful irony, being that it's usually the man who hides his feelings. Which leads us to...

You Can't Get There From Here

Why did I tell Alison I loved her? Was I being honest when I said it? Well, it just came out, and I'm of the opinion that if something slips out like that, then it's generally meant. Like a Freudian slip (which always reminds me of Meg Ryan in D.O.A., back when she was still young a cute - well, this is supposed to be a film-y blog, I have to get some stuff in somewhere otherwise it's just my boring-ass life). But the truth is, I don't know. She dumped me soon after so all my feelings for and about her are messed up. But I think the intent was there.

And you know why? I think it's because I've been without anyone for so long (before Alison my last experience with a woman was a couple of fumbles with my sister's friend Karen back when I was living in Gateshead - three and a half years separate those two women and there's a mammoth gap of eight and a half years between Sarah and Alison) that I latched on to the first person who showed me a bit of attention. It's a long tradition with me. I've always crushed on people who were nice and compassinate to me, and it's gotten so bad now that most of the time I can't tell the difference between a girl just being nice and them fancying me. Mostly I think they're just being nice. Take Stef for instance. The very first shift we ever worked together, in the dim and distant past of October 2006. We got on great and when I had locked the shop up, before we went to our respectives lifts, she hugged me. Hugged. Me. Let us pause for a second to let that sink in. People generally aren't very tactile with me. My mother isn't a touchy-feely person and neither is my sister. I like being touched though and I like touching people. Emma would probably, at this point, interject with some smart arse remark about groping, but it's not about groping, it's about contact with other living beings. It's about know, on a physical level that you're not alone in the universe, which is something I feel an awful lot.

I would, at this point, point out the wonderful irony that my relationship with Alison ended because I told her I loved her and that my relationship with Sarah ended because I couldn't tell her that, but it's late and I'm already fucked off enough as it is. And, to be honest with you, it's my life, and as much as it might resemble a French farce or one of the pretentiously grim student films where nothing ever actually happens, it's my fucking life and I'm sick of it.

Peace out.

The Santa (Get Out) Clause

Okay. Christmas. Now, as I quite famously do not believe in God (or ghosts or anything of that nature, despite my love of the horror genre) how do I approach Christmas? It is after all the most sacred holiday in the Christian calendar. Hell, it's the only day of the year that the newsagents I work at closes. The only day. We don't close for Hannukah or Passover or Ramadan - we don't even acknowledge their existence. In fact, by opening on a Saturday, you could say that we are actually mocking the Jewish faith. The only thing that stops it being a big fuck you to Eddie Moskowicz and all his Rabbi pals is that we defy the Christian church by opening on a Sunday as well, and not just for the state suggested times of six hours. No. The only concession we get to respect God is that we close half an hour earlier than during the week. We still open at five in the morning and close at half ten at night. Seventeen and a half hours of God-mocking business.

Now, as I said before, I don't believe in God. I'm not even agnostic. I'm an atheist, through and though, and it isn't an easy belief to hold (coming soon, a discussion of how atheism is a belief and not just a lack of belief). People of the religious persuasion have all the fun of the afterlife to look forward to. Or reincarnation. Or something, whatever. The point is that pretty much every religion holds that death is not the end. When you shuffle off this mortal coil, there's something beyond that. Be it heaven, hell, reincarnation as a goat, Nirvana, whatever. Not believing in God, we lonely, unloved atheists have no choice to believe that once you die, that's it. Finito. It's not an easy thing to think because as human beings, we're so aware of our own selves and our own minds that it's extremely difficult to consider that one day that's it. No more me. There's this very solid notion that somehow the consciousness muct live on. Well, I call it consciousness, religious folk would probably call it the soul - it amounts to the same thing. It's who you are. The essence of your being. The only real difference is that my view of the consciousness is defined primarily through experiences and emotions - memories, essentially, while I'm sure that some, the Catholic church in particualar, would probably like to think of the soul as something that doesn't really change throughout life, tainted only by sin. I could go off on one about Catholicism and its notions of sin and absolution, but I won't. It's a far bigger can of worms than I am prepared to open today.

Strictly speaking, in a purely scientific term, we do continue on after death. One of the first things we learned in GCSE Science was that energy cannot be created or destroyed. Once you get past the mind-boggling notion that the energy we are now expending has existed since the Big Bang (and before, if you subscribe to the theory that this universe is simply the latest in a long line of universes that explode outward at birth then contract together, creating another huge explosion which births the next universe - but quite frankly, I have enough trouble comprehending the numbers that our own universe generates without adding an infinite number of previous universes into the equation) and that energy will simply be endlessly transferred around until the end of time, you arrive at the epiphany that once you die, your body's energy doesn't simply go 'phht', it is transferred to other things. If you get buried, you become fertiliser, feeding the grass and the trees, which in turn feeds animals and so on and so forth. You get cremated (my own personal choice - I'm not keen on the idea of being buried, even if I am dead by that point and so past caring, it's the notion that what was once me will be just left to rot in the ground and it isn't a fun thought) and you become heat and light and sound. There's a poetry to that which I don't think a religous person would really appreciate.

So where was I? Ah yes. Britain is a Christian country. Forget the ramblings of the right wing fascist papers like the Daily Mail with their Conservative fears that the country is going to be overrun with asylum seekers and racist rants about Johnny Foreigner taking all the hard working white man's jobs (another subject not to get me started on, this) there is no way Britain will ever be anything other than a Christian country. Same with America. There's a reason we have a special Christmas edition of the Radio Times and shops like mine close for Christmas Day and no other. Sure, there are other communities within Britain, but they are in the minority and, like most minorities, generally ignored, left alone to get on with their own business on their own time. A shop which closed for Hannukah would get a lot of comment except in perhaps the orthodox Jewish neighbourhoods in Gateshead and the like.

And so I celebrate Christmas. Does this make me a hypocrite? Well, strictly speaking, yes. I am one hell of a hypocrite for celebrating Christmas and not actually believing in God or that Jesus Christ was our Saviour. But just as firmly, I am not, because Christmas today as we celebrate it doesn't have much to do with the birth of Christ at all, just as Easter these days is more about chocolate eggs and a giant pink bunny than some guy getting strung up on a cross and having his guts spilled by a Roman Centurion named Longinus. Because, in this day and age, we only want to commemorate happy things. Bad things are generally pushed to one side or remembered only briefly. A one minute silence out of respect for the victims of 9/11, a parade and a one minute silence for Remembrance Day. We had poppies in the shop for Remembrance Day and a whole bunch of kids came in getting them. I don't think they knew what they were for. To them it was probably just some cheap gimmick. Likewise, Christmas isn't about the birth of someone some two thousand years ago in a country halfway round the world. No. Christmas is about toys and snow and time off school if you're a kid. If you're an adult, it's about food and drinking and falling asleep in front of a James Bond movie on Christmas afternoon. All the pledges and homilies that are paraded out at this time of year, all that goodwill to all men crap - well, why don't we be nice to each other all year round? Isn't that what the Bible teaches us? Because, yes, I was brought up in a fairly informally religious community. We got taught Bible stories at school and sangs hymns. At Christmas we went up to the local church and sang carols. It wasn't really until secondary school that we were even explicity told that there were other religions, but even then, there was an implicit implication that they were 'other religions' and Christianity was the default.

So, were I to not celebrate Christmas, I would probably get a lot of strange looks, especially in the shop where I work as lately the big questions seems to have been, "Are you all set for Christmas?" Out of a sense of mischief I really wanted to reply to some people with some witticism along the lines of, "No, actually. I am Jewish and we don't celebrate Christmas." But such is the assumption that everyone celebrates Christmas and the generally low tolerance for sarcasm where I work that such a comment would probably not go over very well.

Ultimately, what it boils down to is tradition and peer pressure. Tradition because Christmas is something that we've always done - my mother is still fairly religious - and peer pressure because it's just what everyone else is doing. But bear this in mind: Next year my sister is getting married. Now, my sister is an atheist like me, although she probably doesn't analyse her belief in the non-existence of God in the way I do. But she's not getting married in a church. I asked her about this when they first chose the place they're getting married and tying the knot in a church never even crossed their minds. It's probably a good thing. Two of my friends got married in a church in June and I felt extremely weird about being in a place of worship. It probably didn't help that it was the same church we used to go to for carol services when we were at school which was somehwere I hadn't been since I was fourteen, so, coupled with the whole non-belief in God, I had a whole bunch of childhood related issues to deal with.

On a sidenote, I recently mentioned my atheism in passing to my boss. I have to stress the 'in passing' part of it because otherwise it makes me look like a nutjob who wanders rounds telling people about my beliefs and people like that really piss me off. Anyway, she (that is, my boss) said she did believe in God and asked me why I didn't. I admitted that I used to, back when I was young and then I had a whole agnostic period in my teens and early twenties and had only recently come to the conclusion that God either doesn't exist or that he's a sadistic son of a bitch and to be honest, as with my own father, I prefer to believe that he doesn't exist than believe that he does but he just doesn't give a shit. Because my life is generally not fun. It's a hard slog and things that seem to come so easily to other people are like getting blood from a stone for me, and if there's anything that all those RE lessons in junior school taught me (and say what you like about the Bible, from a point of view of being a moral guidebook it's fairly solid, just don't get me started on the plot) it's that if you live a decent life and are good to other people then you can't go far wrong and that's just not my life. For no good reason, I was bullied pretty badly for fourteen years of my life, so much so that I still suffer the psychological scars to this day and I used to justify it by thinking that, come adulthood, I would be the success and the bullies would be the ones who were miserable and unhappy. At the time, it seemed like a good deal. But it didn't work out like that. I'm constantly on the lookout for signs that my life is getting better, even just to the point where it doesn't actively suck all the time, but I just can't see them.

Peace out.

Michael Myers Lives!

So, yeah, Halloween 5. The true nadir of the franchise. Or that might be Halloween 6, but I really cannot be bothered to dig out my video of it (The Curse Of Michael Myers is the only installment I don't own on DVD) and, hey, it's got Mike off of Friends in it, how bad can it be? It's fairly popular on the Internet Movie Database as well, but then, every film has its fans on the IMDb. Even Jaws 3-D. Yes, that's me.

It's a stupid, stupid film. Even leaving aside the wholesale raping of the finale to Part 4 and the sheer idiocy of the fact that some hermit - a fucking hermit! - looks after him for a year this is a movie where when he's locked up by the police, they don't even take his mask off him. Seriously, the guy is sitting there in a prison cell with his mask on. You have to wonder when they took the pictures if they took it off and then gave him it back.

There is one good bit in the movie when Jamie (having miraculously rediscovered the power of speech just as everyone who could interpret her for the audiences benefit bought the farm) is cornered by Michael (in a coffin he has unearthed from one of his previous victims, although why this is I have no idea) and as he pauses, she asks to see his face. He takes off his mask and we don't really see him. It's all in shadow and Jamie says 'You're like me,' which seems to be a remnant of a better script which dealt with Jamie's own homicidal impulses rather than bringing back Michael for a redundant encore.

Halloween H20, spurred on by the adrenalin shot administered to the genre by Kevin Williamson, is a much better film, mainly because it goes back to the essentials of the franchise. Whereas both Friday The 13th and the Nightmare on Elm Street series were both much more about the killer, Halloween is much more about the victims, or the Final Girl. The true star of Halloween is not Michael Myers, but Laurie Strode (well, actually, the true star of Halloween is its cinematography, Dean Cundey is a cinematographer that films like Friday The 13th dream about). And so Laurie returns in H20, twenty years older and wiser. This is a film which attempts to explore the psychological ramifications of being relentlessly hunted by a homicidal maniac. She drinks, she freaks out, she represses her son and manages to fuck up every relationship she's ever had because she's scared. She is, in short, not the star of a slasher movie. She's a survivor of a slasher movie, plunged into another one. The most apposite comparison I can find to make is Ripley in the first two Alien movies. When she chooses to go along with the marines in Aliens, she's facing her fears, conquering them. That's what Laurie does in H20, conquers her fears. Only where Ripley uses a flamethrower and a power loader, Laurie uses an axe.

And while H20 has come in for a lot of criticism from hardcore fans (and where it comes to 'comic relief' security guard LL Cool J, I'm right there with them) it does a lot right, including the contentious decision to ignore the continuity for every Halloween film since Halloween 2. It's a franchise reboot that works, because it strips the concept down to the bone and just lets it play out. There's a very low body count, very little blood and, most of all, it's scary. Unlike Scream and the reboots of Elm Street and Friday The 13th which emphasised the comedy, H20 is as old school as you can get, meaning that it's faithful in spirit to the original, which is not something many films can say. I mean, look at the differences between Dr No and Octopussy, or Friday The 13th and Jason X, both of which are two examples of the same franchise separated by twenty years but which, surface aside, are very different beasts.

Halloween Resurrection makes the same mistakes as Halloween 5, retconning Michael's death in H20, putting Laurie in a nuthouse, despite the clear implication at the end of H20 that she'd conquered her demons and then presenting us with a bog-standard story. No, actually it's worse than bog-standard. It's a story that seems to have been written by someone who's just constructed a melange of slasher movie cliches in their head and then vomited them up on the screen. So the old Myers home, which was never that important an element, is suddenly vastly important in the same way that Camp Crystal Lake was important to Jason or that Elm Street was important to Freddy. And with the unforgivable dispatching of Laurie at the beginning of the film, we're left without a decent heroine. Resurrection descends into something its predecessors (even the abominable Part 5) never were; a faceless slasher movie.

As of this writing I haven't seen the Rob Zombie remake of the first film. The trailers look good, but what I've heard of it - that it explains why Michael does what he does - doesn't do much for me. Michael's homicidal rampage was all the more terrifying because we didn't know why he was doing what he was doing. Why did he have an overriding impulse to wipe out his own family? It's scarier if we don't know. If we know, then he just becomes another serial killer wearing a stupid mask.

Peace out.

The Night He Came Home. Again. And Again...

There's conventional wisdom about slasher movies as well. Mainly that the first one is worth watching and then it's a steady rate of decline from then on. Basically, the higher the number after the title, the worse it is, which is probably why after Friday The 13th Part 8 - Jason Takes Manhattan and Halloween 6 - The Curse Of Michael Myers they stopped using numbers and went with just the subtitles so that people wouldn't have any idea about how bad they were intentionally going to be (and, knowing Hollywood, there was probably some debate that if something is a Part 9, then you have to have seen Parts 1 through 8 to have made sense of it all, and in this dubious tactic they might be right, after all, The Golden Compass has just come out at the pictures and half the people I've spoken to have no idea that it's the first part of a trilogy - hell, I know people who went to see The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring and expected it to end).

But, as always, conventional wisdom doesn't have it entirely right. After all, Jason X (or as I like to call it, Friday The 13th Part 10 - Jason In Space!) is the best of the Friday The 13th films, including the first one. In fact, when it comes to Jason and his machete-wielding adventures, in my opinion, the first film is one of the worst (and not just because he's barely in it). In fact, on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the worst (Jason Takes Manhattan, despite the best comedy decapitation ever) and one being the best (Jason X), the original Friday The 13th makes its home around number 7, above The New Blood and Part 3, but below such alleged franchise nadirs as Jason Lives and the non-Jason entry A New Beginning.

The Halloween franchise is slightly different. I'll take anyone outside who offers up the opinion that the first film in this, the most archetypal of slashers, is not a true masterpiece. It's so great they even teach it on Film Studies courses, alongside such recognised classics as The Searchers, Jaws and Casablanca. The sequels, however, are a very different kettle of fish. Just like no one would ever try to squeeze Jaws 3-D onto a degree level Film Theory course, no case could be made for any of the Halloween sequels, despite some of them being far better than their reputation suggests.

Before I start though, I'm going to say that I won't even be going anywhere near the Michael Myers lacking third entry. While John Carpenter and Debra Hill's idea of doing a 'Halloween' film every year with a completely different story/cast like a cinematic version of The Twilight Zone was a good one, it was ultimately scuttled by the gorehounds devotion to Michael Myers and his William Shatner mask wearing antics.

So, Halloween 2. Still scripted by Carpenter and Hill, but directed by Rick Rosenthal (who has since made something of a comeback directing episodes of Buffy, Point Pleasant and Smallville). It follows on directly from the end of the first film, so much so that you could watch both of them in a three hour chunk if you really wanted to. And it works watching them like this as well. While the first film doesn't offer any real sense of closure, Halloween 2 sees Michael dead at the end, burned up, giving Jamie Lee the chance to move on with her life. Except that she doesn't get that chance. Halloween 2 is actually a good film, very much a Moonraker to Halloween's The Spy Who Loved Me and none of the ancillary characters stand out the way that PJ Soles and Nancy Loomis did in the first installment, but all in all, it's a far better film than anyone could have hoped for.

Halloween 4, subtitled The Return Of Michael Myers, to assuage any confusion that it was going to be another Season Of The Witch, is also a far better film than it has any right to be. Starring Jamie, the daughter of Jamie Lee's character (Jamie Lee, seen only in pictures here, has been killed in an off screen car crash, Dr Loomis is inexplicably alive, given the ending of Halloween 2 and Michael is more or less fine, despite spending the last decade in a coma) and her step-sister Rachel are our main points of focus here and while you may question the sense in having a slasher film with an eight year old lead, it all works. Unlike most films of this type, the police are called in early (all the more fodder for Michael to work his way through) with none of the usual disbelief and 'cry wolf' tactics that usually pad out such films. The ending, which sees Michael dead (again), also plays against expectations, showing us little Jamie having been pushed over the edge from witnessing her uncle's reign of terror, killing her stepmother, an event which also almost pushes Loomis over the brink. His reaction to seeing Jamie standing at the top of the stairs - he pulls out his gun and goes to shoot her, only stopped by the Sheriff - is also fantastically demented. It's probably the last time in the series that Pleasence gets to do anything enjoyable.

Because by the time we come to Halloween 5, subtitled The Revenge Of Michael Myers, again most probably to assure people that Michael would be in it, Michael is alive, having survived his fall down a mineshaft, taken a swim in a river and stumbled upon the wooden shack of the local hermit. He promptly tries to kill the hermit but falls into a coma. One year later, he wakes up, still at the shack (obviously it never occured to the hermit to take him to a hospital or call the police or anything else that might actually make sense), kills the hermit (at least he pays for his stupidity) and goes after Jamie again, who has been traumatised by the events of Halloween 4 and so hasn't spoken for a year. Now under the care of Loomis at the Haddonfield Children's Clinic, it transpires her step-mother is fine, the kid stabbed her and then, at the end of the fourth entry, she obviously decided it would be best to lay there in the bath quietly as she bled out to provide us with our shock ending. Rachel and her best friend, the annoying peppy Tina, come to visit her and tell her she'll be fine. Jamie uses sign language with them. I vomit.

I have to go to work now, so: To Be Continued...

Down And Out In Bradford

Traditional wisdom holds that most people, when starting diaries, do well for the first few weeks and then tail off. Ahem.

Not that much has happened in my life. At all. But I thought I should tell you all I'm still alive. Still single, as well, but that's not really a cause for celebration.

And there's not really any potential people out there for me. There're a couple of people I like - there's actually one person who I really like - but the liklihood of anything happening there is slim-to-none.

So I come back to my dilemma which is partially why I stopped writing on here in the first place - is this an online blog of my life, or the criticisms of a caustic critic? I just don't have the energy for writing two blobs (I barely have enough energy to do one). I originally thought that I might be able to combine them, but it looks a bit messy. But maybe that's what this blog is - a bit messy.

So, you'll be hearing from me soon. Hopefully.

Peace out.