The 1976 John Guillerman King Kong. It's a bit shit isn't it? I mean, yes, it's one of the last glorious gasps of the 'man in a monster suit' genre, and there are some brilliant bits when he goes on the rampage in the Big Apple, and yes, Jessica Lange was extremely fit back in the day. And Rene Auberjonois is always good value for money.
But it's still bobbins. Whoever thought Jeff Bridges was leading man material (he's a good actor, but his is the domain of character roles, he's too low key to be a star) was nuts.
Oh yes. That would be Dino de Laurentiis, wouldn't it, responsible for, among others, Conan, Barbarella, Flash Gordon, Red Dragon and dozens of other films of highly variable quality. Always after the big bucks was Dino.
And King Kong Lives, despite a brief appearance by Linda Hamilton's boobs, is even worse. I hired the video out of the store way back when it first came out and for years was convinced that I had somehow made it up because I could never find it again. The same thing with The Garbage Pail Kids, which I still haven't managed to track down a copy of.
Which brings me, in a somewhat roundabout way, to the subject of this blog: Forgotten movies.
Not movies which have gotten lost n the mists of time, but those half-remembered movies from when you're a kid which stick with you. For me the list includes Howard The Duck (a fifteen year quest to track down a copy of that film), Supergirl (a strange one because it's got none of the weird shit in it tha most of the other films in this list have, but it never seemed to be on telly and you couldn't get a video of it for love nor money), Jaws 3-D, Brides Of Dracula, King Kong Lives, Child's Play (traumatised me as a kid that one, I now own a copy but haven't quite got up the nerve to sit down and watch it - 21 years after seeing it, forced to watch it by my sister, I still remember the nightmares I had about Chucky, and the scene from Damien - The Omen 2 where that woman gets er eyes pecked out by the Devil in the form of a crow and then wanders right in front of an articulated lorry, which is strange because I remember watching all three Omen movies with her and now, watching them as an adult, there's much more disturbing stuff in them than that - the death of the nanny ("It's all for you, Damien!"), the kid who gets trapped under the ice and for some reason the whole scene where Gregory Peck digs up Damien's real mother and finds a jackal skeleton disturbs me immensely). It's mainly stuff that I probably shouldn't have been watching at that young and impressionable age.
There was a video shop in the next village over (we weren't posh enough to have a video shop, hell, we didn't even have a proper newsagents until a few years ago) and because the guy who ran the shop knew me and he knew my dad, he tended to let me get out what I wanted. Sounds awful now I know, but my mam used to send me round the shop for her tabs and they would sell me them. My sister bought her own first tabs by saying they were for our mam. But it was a more innocent age. I suspect that if I had tried to rent out Nine and a Half Weeks or something he would have had something to say. But I wasn't interested in sexy movies. In fact, I got a little nervous when they came on. I was watching The Terminator with my gran and the sex scene came on. I got a little nervous - you don't want to look too interested in case they notice you getting excited, but you don't want to make your apparent disinterest too obvious. Needless to say, when Kyle Reese kicked the bucket, I was over the moon, because it meant that there wouldn't be any more awkward sex scenes. Of course, my gran was a very strange woman. When I was ten, shortly before she died, I went over to her house. She was watching Fatal Attraction and bade me to come and sit down with her while she watched it. That's another movie that's stuck in my mind, and put me off Glenn Close for life.
My Gran was always the first port of call for movies in my life. My mother never really took me to the pictures (in fact, I can only remember two occasions - Superman 4: The Quest For Peace and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2: The Secret Of The Ooze, the latter of which I had won free tickets for and I can only remember her ever mentioned going to the pictures another two times - for Top Gun and Grease) but my gran would always take me. She would always fall asleep halfway through the film, but she took me. We would go to the Cannon in Sunderland, or the Empire Theatre, which has a small screening room and would tend to show slightly older films. After her death, I only remember going to see Jurassic Park at the Cannon. It closed down shortly afterward, stood derelict for the longest time then reopened while I was at university as a nightclub. Not that I've ever been in. Even when I was in the depths of my degree I still went out in Newcastle.I can't remember a single occasion when I actually have gone out drinking in Sunderland. Sure, I've had a few quiet drinks in the pubs round there (The Transporter, now sadly changed hands and name, The Royalty, Chesters, the Manor Quay) but Sunderland as a night out has never quite appealed. The Empire doesn't show movies anymore, at least, not that I'm aware of.
My first experience of a modern multiplex was when my sister took me to see GoldenEye at the Warner Village in Newcastle (a complex which no longer exists, they knocked it down some years ago to make student accomodation). I'd skived off school for the day, with my mother's persmission amazingly enough. It was the beginning of December and our Clare took me out to Newcastle Christmas shopping. I bought some Doctor Who books in Forbidden Planet - this was at the very beginning of my love affair with that shop. We argued and Clare almost didn't take me. But take me she did - our Clare has always had a very high tolerance for my idiocy - and I was amazed. The Cannon had two screens, obviously the bare minimum that it could have to qualify as a multiplex. The Warner Village had twelve. It was an eye opening experience, let me tell you. But that wasn't the big shock. The big shock for me was the fact that there were only around seven people in the screen with us. Now I was used to packed houses. I didn't believe that they could justify screening a film for this few people, but screen it they did (and I have subsequently been to screening with even less people in attendance, including when I went to see Shrooms and I was the only one in the theatre) and so my affair with modern cinema began.
And in a way my childhood ended then. Before GoldenEye, movies at the cinema were a transient, special treat, with the advent of my pilgrimage to the Warner Village, they became something that I could do whenever I want to. I was the master of my cinematic destiny, and I haven't looked back since.
Peace out.
Friday, 6 June 2008
Friday, 23 May 2008
You Can't Get There From Here
WARNING - CONTAINS SPOILERS FOR
"INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL"
AND ALSO, GRATUITOUS USE OF THE PHRASE
"THE EIGHTIES WERE THE GREATEST ERA OF FILM EVER"
"INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL"
AND ALSO, GRATUITOUS USE OF THE PHRASE
"THE EIGHTIES WERE THE GREATEST ERA OF FILM EVER"
Indiana Jones - or, as the adult, grown up version has him, Henry Jones, Jnr - is back. It's been nineteen years since we last saw him, at least properly. In the long hiatus, we've had the TV series but it was like a Stepford version of Indy, bereft of the thrills and matinee joys that made the original trilogy so damn entertaining.
Nineteen years. It's a long time, especially considering that Harrison Ford was not a young man even when they did Raiders Of The Lost Ark. It's also strange when you consider that Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade is very much a final act. It even has them riding off into the sunset at the end, father and son reconciled, evil defeated. So, while it's always nice to catch up with an old friend, sometimes it's better to leave the memories where they belong. Some fires should not be rekindled.
In the nineteen years since Henry Jones and Henry Jones, Jnr rode off into the sunset movies have changed immeasurably. CGI has risen swiftly, gone from its brash youth like a bull in a china shop to being a valuable tool in skilled hands. Superstars have burned brightly and then faded just as fast (and speaking of which, isn't it sad that all three of Indy's girls - Karen Allen, Kate Capshaw and the divine Alison Doody - seem to have faded into obscurity following their adventure). The global political scene has changed; the Cold War has finished, new enemies have emerged...
So Indiana Jones is a relic of a bygone age. And cleverly, they play with that notion in the film itself. It's nineteen years after the events of The Last Crusade. Indy is still teaching, but Marcus Brody has passed away, as has Henry Jones, Snr. There is a lot made of Indy's war record - apparently he worked for the Secret Service during the war - but at heart he's the same man, although older and crankier and he has the same zeal for archeology. And bringing Indy's dislocation into sharp focus, we have that young rising star, Shia LeBeouf, as a young greaser, looking exactly like Marlon Brando in The Wild One when we first see him.
The plot plays almost like a replay of The Temple Of Doom, but with better villains (the gorgeous and talented Cate Blanchett) but with the Roswell aliens/Erich von Daniken progenitors/The Mysterious Cities of Gold as the plot McGuffin instead of some borderline offensive Hindu mythology. It's a glorious hodge-podge of a dozen or so ideas that almost - but not quite - fits together perfectly.
It's probably no secret now that Mutt is Indy's son. Hell, it was no secret before the film came out. The rumour mill had been going full tilt and it would have been a surprise if Mutt hadn't been Indy's son. It's one element of the script that seems a little shoe-horned in. Sean Connery's role in The Last Crusade was thematically relevent and expertly woven into the plot. Mutt just seems to be there to fill in the youth demographic. One surprise is Ray Winstone's character. We all knew he would betray Indy (this is one area where the film differs from Temple - that film is the only one where he is not betrayed by a friend) but then he comes out as a double agent. It's a brilliant move and is only trumped later on when he reveals he was lying and actually has betrayed him after all.
Despite all of this, Indy IV is very much a film out of time. It tries to recapture the glories of the 80's action movie, because as we all know, the eighties were the greatest era of film ever, especially for fantasy films. And running along the spine of the 80's were the Indiana Jones films. Raiders was there in 1981 at the start and The Last Crusade made its bow in 1989, sandwiched in between them are some of the greatest fantasy films ever - Labyrinth, Star Trek 2, American Werewolf, Supergirl, Gremlins, The Fly, Terminator, Aliens, Blade Runner - it's the birth of modern fantasy movies.
Simce then we've had the rapid maturation of the science fiction movie followed by a rediscovery of its innocence with the rise of the superhero movie. Film has become aware of itself. In a very real sense, film has eaten itself. So much of film these days is post-modern, not in the breaking of the fourth wall sense, but in the sense that most movies are aware of their place, chock full of references to past efforts. It's a movement that gave Quentin Tarantino his entire career (even Jackie Brown is built on seventies blaxploitation). Indy IV doesn't do this.
And maybe that's a good thing.
It's kind of like a throwback. It wouldn't work for every film. Hell, it wouldn't work for many films. Indy gets away with it because of its heritage and the fact that despite his occasional misfires - naming no names but Hook, The Lost World, Amistad - Steven Speilberg is perhaps the greatest director of all time (and coming from a hardcore Scorsese fan, that's a funny thing to say) and if anyone can pull it off, it's the 'Berg.
So, four out of five for Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull, losing points for a slightly pointless McGuffin (the previous three films were all about saving the world, Indy IV doesn't have anything like that focus) and for Cate Blanchett's slightly wandering Russian accent and the fact that she wears overalls throughout the entire film and doesn't get into anything more... alluring, like Alison Doody in Last Crusade.
Advide to George Lucas though: Let the franchise lie. It's a happy exercise in nostalgia, but like Star Wars and James Bond, it's time to let it rest or to reinvent it into something new and exciting. But with Indy, I'm not sure that would work, and if it did, it probably wouldn't be the Indiana Jones we know and love. In a way, Indy IV is like a love letter to the 80's (and it's ironic that a fil which is so rooted in thirties chapter serials and fifties B movies - no doubt an Indy film set during the forties would draw upon war movies and film noir - is so adoring towards the eighties). And that is a thing of beauty.
Peace out.
Friday, 16 May 2008
Questing For Peace
Okay. Superman.
In a way, he's the ultimate personification of the American Dream. He's the definitive alien immigrant. And I love him.
It's a long seated love, mainly rooted in the Christopher Reeve movies rather than the comics, because growing up as a kid in the north of England, the only place that I went to regularly that sold comics was the chemists in the Galleries at Washington. It wasn't until I was fifteen that I started frequenting Forbidden Planet, and even then, the whole history of comic books seemed to be far too complicated to just dive right in. It's a hobby that requires a lot of time, effort and most importantly, money. I briefly tried to get into the whole comic book nerd scene, but I was spending about fifty quid a month just to try and keep up with the core DC titles (those relating to Batman and Superman) and even then I felt like I was missing out of a whole load of stuff. So mostly my comic book love comes from graphic novels, where you can be sure you're getting the whole story and there's no worry that you're going to go to the comic shop and find out they've sold out of Part 5 of a six part story. It's not a bad way of going about things. You still get the quality stories (Watchmen, The Death Of Superman, A Death In The Family) without all the stress. So I'm laying my cards on the table here because whereas I would call myself a fan, I'm not hardcore.
So let us tal about why Superman is the greatest hero alive.
When I was a kid, I preferred Batman. Seriously. I mean, Superman was all well and good, but he was invulnerable, whereas Batman was dangerous and real and he could be hurt. And Tim Burton's Batman is a great movie.
So what happened? Well, when I was a kid, I thought that the best Star Wars movie was Return Of The Jedi. Now, I think it's The Empire Strikes Back. But by that rationale, my favourite Star Trek movie (The Wrath Of Khan in case you didn't know) would have changed as well, and it hasn't, and Blade Runner has been my faourite film since I was fourteen (the same age I was when I as espousing the opinion that Jedi was the best Star Wars film). I think a lot of it does have to do with growing up though. What you think is cool when you're a kid is not necessarily what you think is cool when you're grown up, and vice versa. If you'd told my eight year old self that in twenty years he'd not only own several Elton John albums but also actually enjoy listening to them and advocate him to his friends he'd have laughed in your face and then probably run off to listen to Kylie Minogue (again, some things never change, Kylie still rocks) or that he'd still love Mary Poppins and ET and Choose Your Own Adventure books and he wouldn't believe you. So, opinions about some things change and some things stay the same.
Somewhere in between Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (a tiny screening room at the Sunderland Empire, one of only two times my mother took me to the cinema, summer 1987) and Superman Returns (Gateshead UCI, probably by myself aged 25, summer 2006) Superman became my hero. Batman Begins (and like it or not, Batman's legacy was far more ruined by Batman and Robin than Superman's ever was by The Quest For Peace) had come out the previous year and was loved by me but in that nineteen year gap I had read The Death Of Superman (and watched and enjoyed four years of Lois and Clark and also a whole bunch of Smallville, which remains one of the most peculiarly paced of modern TV shows).
The Death Of Superman, originally published in 1993, at about the same period of time that Batman was getting his back broken, leading to one of the biggest shake ups in DC comics history (well, post Crisis on Infinite Earths history), is one of my favourite graphic novels of all time and certainly my favourite graphic novel with a hero like Superman at its core (the others, like Watchmen are limited series, as opposed to part of a serial comic). It was that book which allowed me to finally understand just what Superman is all about.
Not to cheapen Batman, but he does what he does because he feels he has to. He's driven to fight injustice by the murder of his parents. He is, in a sense, a psychopath himself, because he has these deep rooted psychological drives. Superman does what he does because he can. What he does, no one else can so he feels he has a duty. He has an obligation to serve and protect.
This duty is at the core of The Death Of Superman. It features the villain Doomsday, a raging, animalistic creature of mysterious origins. In the first issue he appears out of nowhere and immediately goes about trashing the place. The Justice League try and stop him and get collectively trounced. The entire Justice League. Some of them are hurt, badly. So Supes comes in and, after a long fight, manages to defeat Doomsday, but only at the cost of his own life. He gives so much to protect Metropolis (and Lois in partcular) that he dies. He sacrifices himself to save the city. And he does this without a second thought. . He doesn't even think about anything else. He only thinks to try and stop Doomsday, by any means necessary.
There's a moment in Superman Returns which perfectly captures this sense. It's near the start of the film and the bi action set piece with the plane. It's hurtling towards Earth, promising certain death for all those aboard (which, incidentallhy includes Lois). He grabs hold of a wing, but it comes loose, sending Supes reeling. As soons as he gets his equilibrium back, he's flying back down towards the plane as fast as he can. Naturally, this involves flying in a straight line. Unfortunately, that path is slightly occupied by the wing that's come loose. No matter, Supes just steels himself and flies straight through it.
It's a completely throaway moment, and if you want to be a pedant about it, we know he's Superman, a rogue airplane wing isn't going to bother him. But it's a moment in which you know that Bryan Singer knows and care about Superman. There's a lot wrong with Superman Returns (a lopsided dramatic structure, Kate Bosworth's complete lack of charisma, the whole Son of Superman subplot - which might become problematic if the Richard Donner cut of Superman 2, which has Supes erase his love affair with Lois by turning time back, a la the first movie as opposed to the original version with its 'magic kiss' becomes the default version, which isn't as unlikely as it sounds, given that the HD release contains only the Donner cut, with the theatrical release relegated to the bog standard DVD - and Frank Langella's phoned in performance as Perry White) but its heart is in the right place. If Singer stays on board, and can get over his relentless hero worship of the original Donner film, the franchise is in safe hands. They've already made moves in the right direction, promising a more villain led plot and the recasting of Katie Holmes' soporific Rachel from Batman Begins with the sublime Maggie Gyllenhaal for The Dark Knight is an indicator that they (that is, DC and Warners) are not afraid to admit to their mistakes and get rid of cast members that didn't gel.
Peace out.
In a way, he's the ultimate personification of the American Dream. He's the definitive alien immigrant. And I love him.
It's a long seated love, mainly rooted in the Christopher Reeve movies rather than the comics, because growing up as a kid in the north of England, the only place that I went to regularly that sold comics was the chemists in the Galleries at Washington. It wasn't until I was fifteen that I started frequenting Forbidden Planet, and even then, the whole history of comic books seemed to be far too complicated to just dive right in. It's a hobby that requires a lot of time, effort and most importantly, money. I briefly tried to get into the whole comic book nerd scene, but I was spending about fifty quid a month just to try and keep up with the core DC titles (those relating to Batman and Superman) and even then I felt like I was missing out of a whole load of stuff. So mostly my comic book love comes from graphic novels, where you can be sure you're getting the whole story and there's no worry that you're going to go to the comic shop and find out they've sold out of Part 5 of a six part story. It's not a bad way of going about things. You still get the quality stories (Watchmen, The Death Of Superman, A Death In The Family) without all the stress. So I'm laying my cards on the table here because whereas I would call myself a fan, I'm not hardcore.
So let us tal about why Superman is the greatest hero alive.
When I was a kid, I preferred Batman. Seriously. I mean, Superman was all well and good, but he was invulnerable, whereas Batman was dangerous and real and he could be hurt. And Tim Burton's Batman is a great movie.
So what happened? Well, when I was a kid, I thought that the best Star Wars movie was Return Of The Jedi. Now, I think it's The Empire Strikes Back. But by that rationale, my favourite Star Trek movie (The Wrath Of Khan in case you didn't know) would have changed as well, and it hasn't, and Blade Runner has been my faourite film since I was fourteen (the same age I was when I as espousing the opinion that Jedi was the best Star Wars film). I think a lot of it does have to do with growing up though. What you think is cool when you're a kid is not necessarily what you think is cool when you're grown up, and vice versa. If you'd told my eight year old self that in twenty years he'd not only own several Elton John albums but also actually enjoy listening to them and advocate him to his friends he'd have laughed in your face and then probably run off to listen to Kylie Minogue (again, some things never change, Kylie still rocks) or that he'd still love Mary Poppins and ET and Choose Your Own Adventure books and he wouldn't believe you. So, opinions about some things change and some things stay the same.
Somewhere in between Superman IV: The Quest For Peace (a tiny screening room at the Sunderland Empire, one of only two times my mother took me to the cinema, summer 1987) and Superman Returns (Gateshead UCI, probably by myself aged 25, summer 2006) Superman became my hero. Batman Begins (and like it or not, Batman's legacy was far more ruined by Batman and Robin than Superman's ever was by The Quest For Peace) had come out the previous year and was loved by me but in that nineteen year gap I had read The Death Of Superman (and watched and enjoyed four years of Lois and Clark and also a whole bunch of Smallville, which remains one of the most peculiarly paced of modern TV shows).
The Death Of Superman, originally published in 1993, at about the same period of time that Batman was getting his back broken, leading to one of the biggest shake ups in DC comics history (well, post Crisis on Infinite Earths history), is one of my favourite graphic novels of all time and certainly my favourite graphic novel with a hero like Superman at its core (the others, like Watchmen are limited series, as opposed to part of a serial comic). It was that book which allowed me to finally understand just what Superman is all about.
Not to cheapen Batman, but he does what he does because he feels he has to. He's driven to fight injustice by the murder of his parents. He is, in a sense, a psychopath himself, because he has these deep rooted psychological drives. Superman does what he does because he can. What he does, no one else can so he feels he has a duty. He has an obligation to serve and protect.
This duty is at the core of The Death Of Superman. It features the villain Doomsday, a raging, animalistic creature of mysterious origins. In the first issue he appears out of nowhere and immediately goes about trashing the place. The Justice League try and stop him and get collectively trounced. The entire Justice League. Some of them are hurt, badly. So Supes comes in and, after a long fight, manages to defeat Doomsday, but only at the cost of his own life. He gives so much to protect Metropolis (and Lois in partcular) that he dies. He sacrifices himself to save the city. And he does this without a second thought. . He doesn't even think about anything else. He only thinks to try and stop Doomsday, by any means necessary.
There's a moment in Superman Returns which perfectly captures this sense. It's near the start of the film and the bi action set piece with the plane. It's hurtling towards Earth, promising certain death for all those aboard (which, incidentallhy includes Lois). He grabs hold of a wing, but it comes loose, sending Supes reeling. As soons as he gets his equilibrium back, he's flying back down towards the plane as fast as he can. Naturally, this involves flying in a straight line. Unfortunately, that path is slightly occupied by the wing that's come loose. No matter, Supes just steels himself and flies straight through it.
It's a completely throaway moment, and if you want to be a pedant about it, we know he's Superman, a rogue airplane wing isn't going to bother him. But it's a moment in which you know that Bryan Singer knows and care about Superman. There's a lot wrong with Superman Returns (a lopsided dramatic structure, Kate Bosworth's complete lack of charisma, the whole Son of Superman subplot - which might become problematic if the Richard Donner cut of Superman 2, which has Supes erase his love affair with Lois by turning time back, a la the first movie as opposed to the original version with its 'magic kiss' becomes the default version, which isn't as unlikely as it sounds, given that the HD release contains only the Donner cut, with the theatrical release relegated to the bog standard DVD - and Frank Langella's phoned in performance as Perry White) but its heart is in the right place. If Singer stays on board, and can get over his relentless hero worship of the original Donner film, the franchise is in safe hands. They've already made moves in the right direction, promising a more villain led plot and the recasting of Katie Holmes' soporific Rachel from Batman Begins with the sublime Maggie Gyllenhaal for The Dark Knight is an indicator that they (that is, DC and Warners) are not afraid to admit to their mistakes and get rid of cast members that didn't gel.
Peace out.
Thursday, 8 May 2008
"Why Don't You (Fuck Off And Leave Me Alone?)"
Let us talk, you and I, a little while. Let us talk about depression. Actually, no, let us talk about one of the root causes of my depression: Loneliness.
At time of writing, I am twenty seven years old. I live with a friend, although he's not here much. We've lived in the flat for coming up for three months now. Before that, I lived with my mother, and we never crossed paths much either. We both worked full time and we each had our things that we liked to do. So it's fair to say I spend a lot of time on my own. It sometimes strikes me as odd how much time other people spend with their friends. Ashley, for instance, that most famous non-girlfriend of recent times (she thinks I'm too old for her) seems to be hanging out with her friends all the time. Even when I was at school, I never hung out with my friends that much. Blades came over for tea once a week, we usually had a night out once a week and then every so often we would have a party at someone's (usually Gilli's or Emma's) house. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we all went out as a group of friends to the pictures or whatever (me and Blades alone went a few more times) and I can't really remember us just hanging out outside of school. How did I therefore spend my time? Well, I must have spent a lot of it writing, altough I can't remember coming in from school and sitting down to write. I remember spending most of my study leave for my GCSE's writing the first draft of 'The Trouble With Girls'. That was when I first had my electric typewriter. I still have the draft lying around somewhere, seventy some pages crammed full of tiny type. I hadn't at that point learned about double spacing or even leaving acceptable margins. It was more an exercise in getting as many words down on each page.
I did spend a lot of time watching movies. I know when me and Sarah were going out I was at the height of my film buff phase - I was all about Scorsese and Coppola. It's from this period of my life that movies like Taxi Driver and Short Cuts stem from. It's also from this period that my first bout of depression stems from.
While me and Sarah were going out, I was writing the original screenplay that eventually formed the basis for my novel 'Various Artists'. At its heart, it is a novel about trying to find yourself and maybe finding that the person you're interested in isn't the best person for you. It's about suffocating relationships. It's also probably the funniest thing I've written, but even then it ends with a suicide. Gordy, having been dumped by Sophie, finds that he can't cope without her and in a bout of madness, ends his own life. And this is the novel I was writing when I was going out with Sarah. If you want to get analystical about it, the Mary-Sue of the novel for me is Will, who goes out on his first date, enters into a relationship and then kinda freaks out and feels like it's not for him. That was me and Sarah. I had my first date with Sarah and we go and see There's Something About Mary. Will goes and sees Star Wars at the old revival theatre. Stuff happens. It's probablynot exaggerating the point to say I had my sexual awakening in that cinema (the cinema, incidentally, the old Warner Village, is no longer there). I'd only first kissed a girl a few weeks previously. Sarah and I had known each other for a little under a week, we'd met on the Monday and she'd asked me out on the Friday, although our 'date' had been established as far back as Tuesday. We'd first kissed, a hot, passionate, groping kiss (a kiss that led Louise Russell to comment that it was disgusting) on the Friday. I recall that I asked her if, now that we were going out, I could kiss her.
She liked me. A lot. She would probably deny it now but she really liked me. For my part, I really wanted to like her back. And I did like her. But at heart, I was a horny seventeen year old boy and I let my hormones get the better of me. The main point I always look back on when considering our break up (which is something I do far more than I should for an event that's now almost ten years gone) the main reason we broke up was because she said 'I love you,' and I couldn't say it back. At the time I wasn't sure if I did love her. All I knew is that I was in love with someone, unfortunately for Sarah and for me, it wasn't her.
No, there was another girl, one who shall remain nameless, but a girl who I was in love with. I told her so at the New Year's party following mine and sarah's break-up. She shot me down. I was drunk. I might have said some stupid things. I can't remember. I can't even remember how she shot me down. I can't imagine she was cruel about it. But it did lead to a bout of suicidal depression that lasted for thebest part of six months. I had already been on the brink following my break up with Sarah (and my subsequent rejection by a girl who I got off with at a party at Gilli's but who then avoided me), but following New Year, I was convinced that I was incapable of love. So there I was, heading towards my A-Levels at a rate of knots with no clue as to what I was going to do with my life and I was questioning my entire reason for living. Because what is the point of livng if you're never going to make a connection with anyone?
Love is a mutual dependence that two people share. It's an emotional connection that overrides any sort of rational thought. And as they say, no man is an island. Because what do men (or women) do when left to stew in their own juices? Well, I don't know for sure, and I'm pretty confident that it'll be different for everyone but I'm willing to bet that going nuts is high on the list. It's the reason why you see so many old people with cats, because, deep down, everyone's shit-scared of being lonely. There comes a point when you'll reach out and grab hold of anyone or anything you can just so you're not alone.
So how did I get here? Okay. Deep breath. After me and sarah split up, I went to university, had a completely miserable first year as my parents split up, fell in love with a girl named Isabella, asked her out the beginning of my second year, found out she had a boyfriend and then spent most of the second year depressed, buoyedonly by my friendship with Neil and Sue, two of the lecturers at uni. He's a huge Doctor Who fan, so we got along well. Most of my third year was spent in a blissful limbo, neither majorly happy or sad. I had a brief crush on a girl named Kat in one of my practical modules but I doubt she was even aware I existed. All through my time at university I never really connected with anyone. Sure, I'm still friends with John-Paul and Neil on Facebook, but Gilli and Blades are still really close friends with people they went to university with. Maybe it's a side-effect of moving away to go to university, but again, like at 6th Form, I spent much of my time at university by myself. At this point I was fairly sure that I was a solitary person by nature and that I was forever destined to be alone.
Now, that's a pretty sweeping statement for a twenty one year old to make, but even now, six years down the line, it's still holding true.
In my final year at uni, I started working at Global, developed several crushes on both staff and customers, none of which came to anything. I then started working at Mills and, within a few months of Andrea starting, she'd set me up with Alison. Irony is something I appreciate, and so I can laugh (bitterly, true, but still laugh) at the fact that me and Alison split up because I told her that I loved her. Did I? That's a question I don't know the answer to. I know why I said it. I said it because I had spent so long alone (before meeting Alison, it had been three and a half years since I had even kissed anyone, let alone had anything approaching a relationship) that I wanter her desperately. I wanted to be with her. I wanted not to be alone anymore. And she ran away. She didn't even have the common decency to dump me to my face. She sent a text, while I was on holiday (those bonus points just keeping mounting up - not only did she dump me, but she did it by text AND I was on holiday at the time, so she managed to spoil that as well, for good measure - I broke my tooth the following day and haven't been back down to Oxford since...). So me, Blades, Amy and Amy's boyfriend Ali ended up getting shitfaced (well, I got shitfaced - I can't remember how drunk the others were) and bemaoning my shitty life. Amy espoused the opinion that if she was going to do something like that, then she wasn't worth being with. Now, with the benefit of a year and some change of hindsight, I can agree, especially given that although the reason she gave for splitting up with me was that she thought I wanted something serious and she didn't in the June, not three months after we had broken up she was engaged and moving in with someone whoshe barely even knew. The thing of it is, I'm probably best off out of it. Coming to know the kind of person she is while unafflicted with my feelings for her... well, let's just say that it never would have worked out.
But it does leave me on my own again. It's something that's come to the forefront very strongly these past few weeks. I don't know what it is, whether it's the fact that I haven't been to the pub in the past couple of months on a Tuesday night or what, but I feel so very alone and every attempt I make to try and get out there is met with failure. I repeatedly try and make a date with Ashley and she just as repeatedly rebuffs me, I ask Bryony if she fancies going to see a movie and she's got a previous engagement, Clare and Richie always seem to be at work or off doing their own thing (and to be perfectly honest, I'm sick of being the third wheel in their relationship) and Emma and Haz are so set in their own routine that anything that isn't work or sleep has to be negotiated within an inch of its life and I'm sick of having to make appointments to see people who claim to be my friends. I want to be able just to give people a ring and hang out. That's not too much to ask, is it?
I'm really getting too old for this shit.
At time of writing, I am twenty seven years old. I live with a friend, although he's not here much. We've lived in the flat for coming up for three months now. Before that, I lived with my mother, and we never crossed paths much either. We both worked full time and we each had our things that we liked to do. So it's fair to say I spend a lot of time on my own. It sometimes strikes me as odd how much time other people spend with their friends. Ashley, for instance, that most famous non-girlfriend of recent times (she thinks I'm too old for her) seems to be hanging out with her friends all the time. Even when I was at school, I never hung out with my friends that much. Blades came over for tea once a week, we usually had a night out once a week and then every so often we would have a party at someone's (usually Gilli's or Emma's) house. I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of times we all went out as a group of friends to the pictures or whatever (me and Blades alone went a few more times) and I can't really remember us just hanging out outside of school. How did I therefore spend my time? Well, I must have spent a lot of it writing, altough I can't remember coming in from school and sitting down to write. I remember spending most of my study leave for my GCSE's writing the first draft of 'The Trouble With Girls'. That was when I first had my electric typewriter. I still have the draft lying around somewhere, seventy some pages crammed full of tiny type. I hadn't at that point learned about double spacing or even leaving acceptable margins. It was more an exercise in getting as many words down on each page.
I did spend a lot of time watching movies. I know when me and Sarah were going out I was at the height of my film buff phase - I was all about Scorsese and Coppola. It's from this period of my life that movies like Taxi Driver and Short Cuts stem from. It's also from this period that my first bout of depression stems from.
While me and Sarah were going out, I was writing the original screenplay that eventually formed the basis for my novel 'Various Artists'. At its heart, it is a novel about trying to find yourself and maybe finding that the person you're interested in isn't the best person for you. It's about suffocating relationships. It's also probably the funniest thing I've written, but even then it ends with a suicide. Gordy, having been dumped by Sophie, finds that he can't cope without her and in a bout of madness, ends his own life. And this is the novel I was writing when I was going out with Sarah. If you want to get analystical about it, the Mary-Sue of the novel for me is Will, who goes out on his first date, enters into a relationship and then kinda freaks out and feels like it's not for him. That was me and Sarah. I had my first date with Sarah and we go and see There's Something About Mary. Will goes and sees Star Wars at the old revival theatre. Stuff happens. It's probablynot exaggerating the point to say I had my sexual awakening in that cinema (the cinema, incidentally, the old Warner Village, is no longer there). I'd only first kissed a girl a few weeks previously. Sarah and I had known each other for a little under a week, we'd met on the Monday and she'd asked me out on the Friday, although our 'date' had been established as far back as Tuesday. We'd first kissed, a hot, passionate, groping kiss (a kiss that led Louise Russell to comment that it was disgusting) on the Friday. I recall that I asked her if, now that we were going out, I could kiss her.
She liked me. A lot. She would probably deny it now but she really liked me. For my part, I really wanted to like her back. And I did like her. But at heart, I was a horny seventeen year old boy and I let my hormones get the better of me. The main point I always look back on when considering our break up (which is something I do far more than I should for an event that's now almost ten years gone) the main reason we broke up was because she said 'I love you,' and I couldn't say it back. At the time I wasn't sure if I did love her. All I knew is that I was in love with someone, unfortunately for Sarah and for me, it wasn't her.
No, there was another girl, one who shall remain nameless, but a girl who I was in love with. I told her so at the New Year's party following mine and sarah's break-up. She shot me down. I was drunk. I might have said some stupid things. I can't remember. I can't even remember how she shot me down. I can't imagine she was cruel about it. But it did lead to a bout of suicidal depression that lasted for thebest part of six months. I had already been on the brink following my break up with Sarah (and my subsequent rejection by a girl who I got off with at a party at Gilli's but who then avoided me), but following New Year, I was convinced that I was incapable of love. So there I was, heading towards my A-Levels at a rate of knots with no clue as to what I was going to do with my life and I was questioning my entire reason for living. Because what is the point of livng if you're never going to make a connection with anyone?
Love is a mutual dependence that two people share. It's an emotional connection that overrides any sort of rational thought. And as they say, no man is an island. Because what do men (or women) do when left to stew in their own juices? Well, I don't know for sure, and I'm pretty confident that it'll be different for everyone but I'm willing to bet that going nuts is high on the list. It's the reason why you see so many old people with cats, because, deep down, everyone's shit-scared of being lonely. There comes a point when you'll reach out and grab hold of anyone or anything you can just so you're not alone.
So how did I get here? Okay. Deep breath. After me and sarah split up, I went to university, had a completely miserable first year as my parents split up, fell in love with a girl named Isabella, asked her out the beginning of my second year, found out she had a boyfriend and then spent most of the second year depressed, buoyedonly by my friendship with Neil and Sue, two of the lecturers at uni. He's a huge Doctor Who fan, so we got along well. Most of my third year was spent in a blissful limbo, neither majorly happy or sad. I had a brief crush on a girl named Kat in one of my practical modules but I doubt she was even aware I existed. All through my time at university I never really connected with anyone. Sure, I'm still friends with John-Paul and Neil on Facebook, but Gilli and Blades are still really close friends with people they went to university with. Maybe it's a side-effect of moving away to go to university, but again, like at 6th Form, I spent much of my time at university by myself. At this point I was fairly sure that I was a solitary person by nature and that I was forever destined to be alone.
Now, that's a pretty sweeping statement for a twenty one year old to make, but even now, six years down the line, it's still holding true.
In my final year at uni, I started working at Global, developed several crushes on both staff and customers, none of which came to anything. I then started working at Mills and, within a few months of Andrea starting, she'd set me up with Alison. Irony is something I appreciate, and so I can laugh (bitterly, true, but still laugh) at the fact that me and Alison split up because I told her that I loved her. Did I? That's a question I don't know the answer to. I know why I said it. I said it because I had spent so long alone (before meeting Alison, it had been three and a half years since I had even kissed anyone, let alone had anything approaching a relationship) that I wanter her desperately. I wanted to be with her. I wanted not to be alone anymore. And she ran away. She didn't even have the common decency to dump me to my face. She sent a text, while I was on holiday (those bonus points just keeping mounting up - not only did she dump me, but she did it by text AND I was on holiday at the time, so she managed to spoil that as well, for good measure - I broke my tooth the following day and haven't been back down to Oxford since...). So me, Blades, Amy and Amy's boyfriend Ali ended up getting shitfaced (well, I got shitfaced - I can't remember how drunk the others were) and bemaoning my shitty life. Amy espoused the opinion that if she was going to do something like that, then she wasn't worth being with. Now, with the benefit of a year and some change of hindsight, I can agree, especially given that although the reason she gave for splitting up with me was that she thought I wanted something serious and she didn't in the June, not three months after we had broken up she was engaged and moving in with someone whoshe barely even knew. The thing of it is, I'm probably best off out of it. Coming to know the kind of person she is while unafflicted with my feelings for her... well, let's just say that it never would have worked out.
But it does leave me on my own again. It's something that's come to the forefront very strongly these past few weeks. I don't know what it is, whether it's the fact that I haven't been to the pub in the past couple of months on a Tuesday night or what, but I feel so very alone and every attempt I make to try and get out there is met with failure. I repeatedly try and make a date with Ashley and she just as repeatedly rebuffs me, I ask Bryony if she fancies going to see a movie and she's got a previous engagement, Clare and Richie always seem to be at work or off doing their own thing (and to be perfectly honest, I'm sick of being the third wheel in their relationship) and Emma and Haz are so set in their own routine that anything that isn't work or sleep has to be negotiated within an inch of its life and I'm sick of having to make appointments to see people who claim to be my friends. I want to be able just to give people a ring and hang out. That's not too much to ask, is it?
I'm really getting too old for this shit.
Sunday, 4 May 2008
Lovers Town Revisited, or My Adventures With Girls Not Named Natalie
It's Sunday. Again, and like pretty much every Sunday for a long while now, I've had the day off. I may hate working every Saturday, but at least it gives me the Sunday off. Not that I'm generally appreciating it at the moment.
Okay, Ashley. After a great deal of cajoling on my behalf by Shaun, I finally got her number. Not that it was an easy thing. She apparently asked Shaun to get me to ring her at work (she's the phone jockey at a pizza place along Birtley). So I got on my break and I do. I say Hi, it's Mark. She says, Mark who? which is a great start. I say that it's Mark from Shaun's party. She says hi, but that she's got to go now.
You know me enough by now to know how fucking paranoid I get. I'm sitting there, on my break, feeling like I'm going to throw up. I mean, was it some sort of joke on Shaun's part, on Ashley's? It turns out that it isn't, it's just that her boss popped up and obviously talking to mates on the phone when you're supposed to be at work isn't the done thing. So Shaun says he got a text off Ash to give me her number. This he does and I text her and we have an interesting night of bouncing text messages back and forth. The penultimate one comes about one o'clock. Me and Shaun are still up watching Doctor Who (another thing I hate about working Saturdays) and she says she's going to bed. An hour later, I'm in bed watching telly and my phone goes. It's Ashley again, saying if I want to ring her, I can. So I ring her. We talk for about quarter of an hour, about nothing in particular, although the whole age difference between us does come up and she says she wants to be friends, nothing more when I make a comment about us having a 'relationship' (I think I freaked her out a little then, what is it with me and saying stupid things during late night phone calls? Were it not for me blurting out 'love you' to Alison we might well still be together, or at least it might not have ended so miserably after three weeks). After a while we each go to bed. I promise to text her tomorrow.
This I do. She'd said on the phone that she was going out to the town with a friend today so I text her and suggest that maybe once she's finished in town she could come over and we could hang out. She texts back that she's hanging out with her friend all day. I reply that that's no bother ad maybe we could do something during the week and was there anything on at the pictures she fancied going to see, the implication clearly being that we could go and see a film together.
That was at one o'clock this afternoon. It's now half eleven and she still hasn't texted back. Hello Mr Paranoid.
So. Let's forget Ashley for the minute and let's just wonder over my whole history with girls and how I seem to fuck everything up comprehensively. Most recently, we have Kayleigh who I liked and who I thought liked me. She arranged to come over one afternoon after a weekend of texts which I took to be very flirty. I made some moves and she freaks out, although she doesn't tell me. She tells the Guv and gets her to tell me. Since then she hasn't come over. Even Natalie hasn't been over and she seemed to find very convinient excuses every time I asked her over to watch Harry Potter (god, that sounds a bit twisted, but in all honesty, that's all it was going to be) and now she's off to Tenerife to work in a bar so it's odds on that I ever see her again. You have to start wondering when girls are actually leaving the country rather than spending time wth you (and yes, I'm well aware that I'm indulging in hyperbole, I probably don't even begin to figure on Nat's list of things that she'll miss about the Mow let alone being the sole reason she's leaving).
I try too hard, apparently. Even Christina has said that and for Christina to make a comment that doesn't directly relate to herself, it's a major thing. But what can I say? In my twenty seven years on this Earth, even if you only take into account the period from my first kiss (August 1998) that's still nearly a decade in which I have had relationshipness for seven weeks. Seven whole weeks. I've probably spent longer watching Star Trek over that period (at which point Christina, probably thinking she's some stellar wit, would most likely opine that that is specifically the reason why I don't have a girlfriend). So, yeah, I'm desperate. But only for something that everyone else has.
You see, all these people offering advice are in relationships or have had significant relationships and entering into another relationship at some point in the future is not some impossible goal. Like it is for me. I have my low periods (or perhaps I should say 'lower' periods, because I am generally low,all the time anyway) and in those periods, I'm always reminded that there are people youger than me who are married and have kids. Pretty much everyone I went to school with is in a long term serious relationship. Blades and Will have been together for something like seven years, Emma and Haz are coming up for being together an entire decade. Even Amy and Ali have been together something like four years. And out of the single triumvirate that once existed composed of me, Gilli and Tom, Tom is now happily living with Emily and anyway, both Gilli and Tom have had serious relationships before. It's not like some great mental block that they have. I think I might be incapable of being in a relationship, at least not without fucking it up in some way. I fucked it up with Sarah quite consciously and maybe my subconscious was trying to sabotage my relationship with Alison. Seven weeks out of a decade is nothing. Most people would hae spent a lot longer than that on holiday during that time. And if I was to work out the amount of time me and Sarah spent together during that month or how long me and Alison enjoyed each other's company, it'll boil down to even less.
Maybe I should just face up to the fact that I'm not boyfriend material. Fuck, I'm hardly even friend material.
The area manager and the Guv had a talk with me on Thursday. I had a little stressout on Tuesday and the Guv had a few words with me. Then the area manager comes in and puts on his 'friend' hat and tries to talk to me but just comes off as being patronising. I tell him that my depression is in large part due to my lack of relationshipness and he says that it happens to everyone. I felt like asking him if he knew how it felt to be more or less single for ten long lonely years. Or how it felt to have only had three girls who liked me enough to even kiss me in the last five. And one of those was completely pissed out of her mind. Because I know he won't. He's married and he's got a kid. There's something that happens to you when you have that sort of security. You stop being able to comprehend the fear.
The fear of course is the fear of dying alone. Actually, no, it's the fear of having the live your entire life alone. Dying is, by virtue of the act itself, something everyone does alone. Sure, you may have peolpe around you when you kick the bucket, but the actual dying? That's something you do alone. Living a solitary life? Now that's difficult.
It would be impossible I think, for a lot of people. In fact, as I have said before on occasion, put someone else in my shoes, give them my family life and all the bullying and the esteem issues and see how well they cope. I think that it's a testament to my strength of will (or sheer bloody-mindedness, whichever) that I'm even still here at all and as well adjusted as I am (which,as I'm sure you'llbe aware isn't massively, but I'm not exactly a back brain recluse yet, am I?).
Back when I was a kid and actually believed in God, I used to pray at night and wish for the chances everyone else got. And that's all I still want, although events have precluded my belief in any sort of higher power, all I want is for what everyone else has. Or at the very least, a chance to have what everyone else has. You know, you see people coming into the shop - complete dickheads with no discernable personality or even borderline good looks and they have girlfriends. You have to look at them and then consider yourself and wonder just what the fuck it is that is so repellant about you that girls just don't like you.
I've got an appointment at the doctor's on Friday. Seeing him about my depression. Part of me still hates the idea of popping a bunch of pills to make my life better because as far as I can see it, my life is shit because of outside forces. I'm considering counselling, but the cynical part of me knows that it's going to be the same old patronising bullshit that everyone's been trying to feed me since I was eighteen, just so they can comfort themselves that they are helping but without actually putting themselves out.
Fuck.
Okay, Ashley. After a great deal of cajoling on my behalf by Shaun, I finally got her number. Not that it was an easy thing. She apparently asked Shaun to get me to ring her at work (she's the phone jockey at a pizza place along Birtley). So I got on my break and I do. I say Hi, it's Mark. She says, Mark who? which is a great start. I say that it's Mark from Shaun's party. She says hi, but that she's got to go now.
You know me enough by now to know how fucking paranoid I get. I'm sitting there, on my break, feeling like I'm going to throw up. I mean, was it some sort of joke on Shaun's part, on Ashley's? It turns out that it isn't, it's just that her boss popped up and obviously talking to mates on the phone when you're supposed to be at work isn't the done thing. So Shaun says he got a text off Ash to give me her number. This he does and I text her and we have an interesting night of bouncing text messages back and forth. The penultimate one comes about one o'clock. Me and Shaun are still up watching Doctor Who (another thing I hate about working Saturdays) and she says she's going to bed. An hour later, I'm in bed watching telly and my phone goes. It's Ashley again, saying if I want to ring her, I can. So I ring her. We talk for about quarter of an hour, about nothing in particular, although the whole age difference between us does come up and she says she wants to be friends, nothing more when I make a comment about us having a 'relationship' (I think I freaked her out a little then, what is it with me and saying stupid things during late night phone calls? Were it not for me blurting out 'love you' to Alison we might well still be together, or at least it might not have ended so miserably after three weeks). After a while we each go to bed. I promise to text her tomorrow.
This I do. She'd said on the phone that she was going out to the town with a friend today so I text her and suggest that maybe once she's finished in town she could come over and we could hang out. She texts back that she's hanging out with her friend all day. I reply that that's no bother ad maybe we could do something during the week and was there anything on at the pictures she fancied going to see, the implication clearly being that we could go and see a film together.
That was at one o'clock this afternoon. It's now half eleven and she still hasn't texted back. Hello Mr Paranoid.
So. Let's forget Ashley for the minute and let's just wonder over my whole history with girls and how I seem to fuck everything up comprehensively. Most recently, we have Kayleigh who I liked and who I thought liked me. She arranged to come over one afternoon after a weekend of texts which I took to be very flirty. I made some moves and she freaks out, although she doesn't tell me. She tells the Guv and gets her to tell me. Since then she hasn't come over. Even Natalie hasn't been over and she seemed to find very convinient excuses every time I asked her over to watch Harry Potter (god, that sounds a bit twisted, but in all honesty, that's all it was going to be) and now she's off to Tenerife to work in a bar so it's odds on that I ever see her again. You have to start wondering when girls are actually leaving the country rather than spending time wth you (and yes, I'm well aware that I'm indulging in hyperbole, I probably don't even begin to figure on Nat's list of things that she'll miss about the Mow let alone being the sole reason she's leaving).
I try too hard, apparently. Even Christina has said that and for Christina to make a comment that doesn't directly relate to herself, it's a major thing. But what can I say? In my twenty seven years on this Earth, even if you only take into account the period from my first kiss (August 1998) that's still nearly a decade in which I have had relationshipness for seven weeks. Seven whole weeks. I've probably spent longer watching Star Trek over that period (at which point Christina, probably thinking she's some stellar wit, would most likely opine that that is specifically the reason why I don't have a girlfriend). So, yeah, I'm desperate. But only for something that everyone else has.
You see, all these people offering advice are in relationships or have had significant relationships and entering into another relationship at some point in the future is not some impossible goal. Like it is for me. I have my low periods (or perhaps I should say 'lower' periods, because I am generally low,all the time anyway) and in those periods, I'm always reminded that there are people youger than me who are married and have kids. Pretty much everyone I went to school with is in a long term serious relationship. Blades and Will have been together for something like seven years, Emma and Haz are coming up for being together an entire decade. Even Amy and Ali have been together something like four years. And out of the single triumvirate that once existed composed of me, Gilli and Tom, Tom is now happily living with Emily and anyway, both Gilli and Tom have had serious relationships before. It's not like some great mental block that they have. I think I might be incapable of being in a relationship, at least not without fucking it up in some way. I fucked it up with Sarah quite consciously and maybe my subconscious was trying to sabotage my relationship with Alison. Seven weeks out of a decade is nothing. Most people would hae spent a lot longer than that on holiday during that time. And if I was to work out the amount of time me and Sarah spent together during that month or how long me and Alison enjoyed each other's company, it'll boil down to even less.
Maybe I should just face up to the fact that I'm not boyfriend material. Fuck, I'm hardly even friend material.
The area manager and the Guv had a talk with me on Thursday. I had a little stressout on Tuesday and the Guv had a few words with me. Then the area manager comes in and puts on his 'friend' hat and tries to talk to me but just comes off as being patronising. I tell him that my depression is in large part due to my lack of relationshipness and he says that it happens to everyone. I felt like asking him if he knew how it felt to be more or less single for ten long lonely years. Or how it felt to have only had three girls who liked me enough to even kiss me in the last five. And one of those was completely pissed out of her mind. Because I know he won't. He's married and he's got a kid. There's something that happens to you when you have that sort of security. You stop being able to comprehend the fear.
The fear of course is the fear of dying alone. Actually, no, it's the fear of having the live your entire life alone. Dying is, by virtue of the act itself, something everyone does alone. Sure, you may have peolpe around you when you kick the bucket, but the actual dying? That's something you do alone. Living a solitary life? Now that's difficult.
It would be impossible I think, for a lot of people. In fact, as I have said before on occasion, put someone else in my shoes, give them my family life and all the bullying and the esteem issues and see how well they cope. I think that it's a testament to my strength of will (or sheer bloody-mindedness, whichever) that I'm even still here at all and as well adjusted as I am (which,as I'm sure you'llbe aware isn't massively, but I'm not exactly a back brain recluse yet, am I?).
Back when I was a kid and actually believed in God, I used to pray at night and wish for the chances everyone else got. And that's all I still want, although events have precluded my belief in any sort of higher power, all I want is for what everyone else has. Or at the very least, a chance to have what everyone else has. You know, you see people coming into the shop - complete dickheads with no discernable personality or even borderline good looks and they have girlfriends. You have to look at them and then consider yourself and wonder just what the fuck it is that is so repellant about you that girls just don't like you.
I've got an appointment at the doctor's on Friday. Seeing him about my depression. Part of me still hates the idea of popping a bunch of pills to make my life better because as far as I can see it, my life is shit because of outside forces. I'm considering counselling, but the cynical part of me knows that it's going to be the same old patronising bullshit that everyone's been trying to feed me since I was eighteen, just so they can comfort themselves that they are helping but without actually putting themselves out.
Fuck.
Sunday, 27 April 2008
Sunday, Bloody Sunday
It's just after six o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. Late April, so it's still pretty light outside, even though it's been a shitty day (the highlight being when I was out in the yard earlier tidying up all the cans that the local yobbo's chuck over my fence thinking my yard is a rubbish bin). It's been a shitty day generally. I've been flu-ridden all week, managed to recover enough to go to Shaun's party on Friday night (more on that later) yet I have spent today doing a bit of housework (I stress the 'bit' portion of that phrase) and fooling around on the internet and on my Playstation. Doing, in short, nothing constructive whatsoever.
Why?
To be honest with you, I have no fucking idea. Am I depressed? Not massively so. Something happened on Friday night that cheered me up no end. True, light was ched on said events on Saturday which might give me cause to doubt the intentions of what happened, but compared with the sheer mundanity of my life, it was practically a godsend, and when I finally get round to teling you what happened, you might begin to comprehend just how sad my life actually is. I've even had a conceptual breakthrough on 'Bridge End' today, finding the tone of the piece and the central thread, which s a big thing, even if I haven't done any antual honest-to-God writing on it. So whyam I depressed? Is it because that depression is just my natural state of being?
I was out in Newcastle the other weekend because Gilli was up. I hadn't planned on it; I was at work till eleven, but I had such a crappy day that I needed to go out and get drunk. Or at least pissed. So there we were, me and Gilli, and you know us two, we are of very similar temperaments. In fact, were certain circumstances different, I think me and her would make a very good couple. But circumstances aren't and it's no use complaining about it. So me and Gilli, we're both fairly depressive people and we are, as paradoxical as it sounds, happy with that. Both of us are comfortable with not being shiny and happy. And to us, that's not a bad thing. I remember John Brosnan, that late, great sf critic whose personal belief was that being depressed was a natural state of being because happiness, when achieved, was always fleeting, so you would soon return to a state of depression. Of course, John Brosnan essentially drank himself to death and his body was nly found because of the smell it started to produce.
But there is a point there, and it's a very valid one. Happiness doesn't last.
There's also a school of thought which equates depression to intelligence. Now, I don't generally espouse this theory because it makes me sound like a right twat, but I am an intelligent person. I am, somehow (as I'm not even sure myself how it happened) something of an intellectual, especially when it coems to my peers at work. And I'm a thinker. I analyse things. I think. I think too much. I over-analyse. And that's my downfall. Were I less of an intellectual I presume I could quite hapily just bumble through life and not worry about things. For fuck's sake, I started worrying when we were in primary school and my teacher told me that in about thirty years we were going to run out of oil (and that, for those of you keeping score, was twenty years ago, give or take a couple of years). I broached the subject with my sister who essentially told me not to worry about it because we'd have undoubtedly found a substitute by then. So...
I am depressed because I can think about things. It's not that cut and paste, natch, but that's the long and the short of it.
Right, Friday night. Shaun's birthday party. Some of his friends were there, natch, including the oft-mentioned Lauren and Ashley. And seeing as how for a great portion of the night I was Billy No-Mates (Kayleigh and Emma came much later than I did and even then spent a good amount of time off somewhere and Shaun had a family crisis to deal with) I ended up talking to Ashley a lot. It transpired that she was single and had recently split up with her boyfriend. He finished her, I have to say, because it is fairly important to what comes later. Through the course of conversation we somehow manage to establish that I think she's fit and we spend most of the night flirting with each other. She's drinking a fair amount of vodka, but at the time I don't think about it. Towards the end of the night, she drags me up on the dance floor and dances with me. Properly dances with me, holding hands, hugging me and all that, not just wanting someone to share the dance floor with. So I think that maybe she likes me. I try to play it cool and ask her if she fancies going out sometime (not the greatest line ever, but I like it - it's honest and straightforward). She says that she doesn't think she's ready. She had just split up with her boyfriend. So I say okay, she sasks me if that's alright. I say yes, because it is, honestly. I've seen some unpleasent things happen when people rebound off each other. It never ends well. So here I push my luck a little and ask her if she'd like to maybe do something sometime after she's had a chance to get over him. It's not the kind of move that I would usually make. Hell, asking someone out in the first place isn't the kind of move I generally make after barely meeting someone. So yes, I'm pushing my luck but I have to take this chance because you never know, I might never see her again. So she says that I should get her number off Shaun and there we part company.
Well, before I get on with the story there is a little detail that I should add. Right. So we're up on the dance floor and she's getting into it. And I mean really getting into it. Kayleigh referred to it later as dirty dancing and she's not really exaggerating. There's parts of bodies getting rubbed together which send me a fairly strng signal. So I go to kiss her. This is after I've asked her out. She says she's not ready, so we end up not kissing (and this is after all the rubbage) apart from on the cheek. Me, girls and mixed signals. It's a motif.
Later. Me and Shaun are waling home. I ask and he tells me that Ashley and her ex have been split up exactly one day.
Great. I finally meet a single girl who might actually like me and she's just (and by just it might as well have been right that second) split up with her ex. But you know, I think we can do the friend thing, get to know each other, take it slowly. Because me and Alison rushed it and that ended badly. So, the next day, I ask Shaun for her number. Thinking I might ask her out to the pictures or something. He says that he would, but he's going to ring her first to make sure it's okay. According to Shaun, she says that she doesn't know if she wants me to ring her or text her or whatever. And this is when the paranoia sets in. This is when I start to think that she had her vodka-goggles on the night before and in the cold light of day she's thinking to herself 'what the hell did I do last night?' and then I pop into her head and she thinks 'ew, gross' and vows never to see me again. So Shaun's texting her, trying to persuade her to go out with me or whatever, I don't know. He does have a bit of a history of harrassing girls to try and get them to go out with me, which I'm fairly ambivalent about. I'm not a pushy person by nature. Shaun is, and I'm of the opinion that if he keeps hassling them, they're going to be less inclined to be interested in me. It's the old pestering thing. And we all know how that turned out with Natalie.
And then it gets worse. I find out that she usually doesn't get that drunk, that the only reason she was drinking was because she'd just split up with her boyfriend. I start to think that maybe I was the nearest available chunk of manflesh to help her with her self-esteem. After all, thinking back, she was the one who started talking to me. She was very much the pro-active one out of the two of us. But maybe it's just me being paranoid. But then again, as Kurt Cobain once said, just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they're not after you. Or something. She was supposed to be coming over to see the house today, her and Lauren, but Shaun, making one of his usual flying visits (I honestly don't know why he bothered moving out - he's spent one night out of the past five her, the rest he's spent at his mam's) told me that Ashley had to go to her Nan's and that Lauren thought she'd feel a little weird by herself. The truth? Or just a cover-up to try and disguise the fact that Ashley didn't want to see me? It's not exactly out of character of Shaun to try and cover things up. But, like I said, it might just be me being paranoid. I spend far too much of my life at the minute being paranoid. I think he means well, but as the old saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. If (or when) I see Ashley again, it might allay some of these fears, but until then, I'm being forced by my own paranoid nature to chalk it up to her being drunk/pissed off about being dumped. Which is not something I want to do. Honestly, she's the first girl in over a year who's shown much interest in me (my abortive thing with Kayleigh doesn't even begin to count - I don't even know what -if anything- we had) and naturally I want her to like me (and I don't want to fuck it up like I somehow manage to fuck most of my prospects up - there's a discussion about self-loathing buriedin here somewhere) and her only talking to me because she's drunk and upset isn't going to do much for my ego.
Peace out.
Why?
To be honest with you, I have no fucking idea. Am I depressed? Not massively so. Something happened on Friday night that cheered me up no end. True, light was ched on said events on Saturday which might give me cause to doubt the intentions of what happened, but compared with the sheer mundanity of my life, it was practically a godsend, and when I finally get round to teling you what happened, you might begin to comprehend just how sad my life actually is. I've even had a conceptual breakthrough on 'Bridge End' today, finding the tone of the piece and the central thread, which s a big thing, even if I haven't done any antual honest-to-God writing on it. So whyam I depressed? Is it because that depression is just my natural state of being?
I was out in Newcastle the other weekend because Gilli was up. I hadn't planned on it; I was at work till eleven, but I had such a crappy day that I needed to go out and get drunk. Or at least pissed. So there we were, me and Gilli, and you know us two, we are of very similar temperaments. In fact, were certain circumstances different, I think me and her would make a very good couple. But circumstances aren't and it's no use complaining about it. So me and Gilli, we're both fairly depressive people and we are, as paradoxical as it sounds, happy with that. Both of us are comfortable with not being shiny and happy. And to us, that's not a bad thing. I remember John Brosnan, that late, great sf critic whose personal belief was that being depressed was a natural state of being because happiness, when achieved, was always fleeting, so you would soon return to a state of depression. Of course, John Brosnan essentially drank himself to death and his body was nly found because of the smell it started to produce.
But there is a point there, and it's a very valid one. Happiness doesn't last.
There's also a school of thought which equates depression to intelligence. Now, I don't generally espouse this theory because it makes me sound like a right twat, but I am an intelligent person. I am, somehow (as I'm not even sure myself how it happened) something of an intellectual, especially when it coems to my peers at work. And I'm a thinker. I analyse things. I think. I think too much. I over-analyse. And that's my downfall. Were I less of an intellectual I presume I could quite hapily just bumble through life and not worry about things. For fuck's sake, I started worrying when we were in primary school and my teacher told me that in about thirty years we were going to run out of oil (and that, for those of you keeping score, was twenty years ago, give or take a couple of years). I broached the subject with my sister who essentially told me not to worry about it because we'd have undoubtedly found a substitute by then. So...
I am depressed because I can think about things. It's not that cut and paste, natch, but that's the long and the short of it.
Right, Friday night. Shaun's birthday party. Some of his friends were there, natch, including the oft-mentioned Lauren and Ashley. And seeing as how for a great portion of the night I was Billy No-Mates (Kayleigh and Emma came much later than I did and even then spent a good amount of time off somewhere and Shaun had a family crisis to deal with) I ended up talking to Ashley a lot. It transpired that she was single and had recently split up with her boyfriend. He finished her, I have to say, because it is fairly important to what comes later. Through the course of conversation we somehow manage to establish that I think she's fit and we spend most of the night flirting with each other. She's drinking a fair amount of vodka, but at the time I don't think about it. Towards the end of the night, she drags me up on the dance floor and dances with me. Properly dances with me, holding hands, hugging me and all that, not just wanting someone to share the dance floor with. So I think that maybe she likes me. I try to play it cool and ask her if she fancies going out sometime (not the greatest line ever, but I like it - it's honest and straightforward). She says that she doesn't think she's ready. She had just split up with her boyfriend. So I say okay, she sasks me if that's alright. I say yes, because it is, honestly. I've seen some unpleasent things happen when people rebound off each other. It never ends well. So here I push my luck a little and ask her if she'd like to maybe do something sometime after she's had a chance to get over him. It's not the kind of move that I would usually make. Hell, asking someone out in the first place isn't the kind of move I generally make after barely meeting someone. So yes, I'm pushing my luck but I have to take this chance because you never know, I might never see her again. So she says that I should get her number off Shaun and there we part company.
Well, before I get on with the story there is a little detail that I should add. Right. So we're up on the dance floor and she's getting into it. And I mean really getting into it. Kayleigh referred to it later as dirty dancing and she's not really exaggerating. There's parts of bodies getting rubbed together which send me a fairly strng signal. So I go to kiss her. This is after I've asked her out. She says she's not ready, so we end up not kissing (and this is after all the rubbage) apart from on the cheek. Me, girls and mixed signals. It's a motif.
Later. Me and Shaun are waling home. I ask and he tells me that Ashley and her ex have been split up exactly one day.
Great. I finally meet a single girl who might actually like me and she's just (and by just it might as well have been right that second) split up with her ex. But you know, I think we can do the friend thing, get to know each other, take it slowly. Because me and Alison rushed it and that ended badly. So, the next day, I ask Shaun for her number. Thinking I might ask her out to the pictures or something. He says that he would, but he's going to ring her first to make sure it's okay. According to Shaun, she says that she doesn't know if she wants me to ring her or text her or whatever. And this is when the paranoia sets in. This is when I start to think that she had her vodka-goggles on the night before and in the cold light of day she's thinking to herself 'what the hell did I do last night?' and then I pop into her head and she thinks 'ew, gross' and vows never to see me again. So Shaun's texting her, trying to persuade her to go out with me or whatever, I don't know. He does have a bit of a history of harrassing girls to try and get them to go out with me, which I'm fairly ambivalent about. I'm not a pushy person by nature. Shaun is, and I'm of the opinion that if he keeps hassling them, they're going to be less inclined to be interested in me. It's the old pestering thing. And we all know how that turned out with Natalie.
And then it gets worse. I find out that she usually doesn't get that drunk, that the only reason she was drinking was because she'd just split up with her boyfriend. I start to think that maybe I was the nearest available chunk of manflesh to help her with her self-esteem. After all, thinking back, she was the one who started talking to me. She was very much the pro-active one out of the two of us. But maybe it's just me being paranoid. But then again, as Kurt Cobain once said, just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they're not after you. Or something. She was supposed to be coming over to see the house today, her and Lauren, but Shaun, making one of his usual flying visits (I honestly don't know why he bothered moving out - he's spent one night out of the past five her, the rest he's spent at his mam's) told me that Ashley had to go to her Nan's and that Lauren thought she'd feel a little weird by herself. The truth? Or just a cover-up to try and disguise the fact that Ashley didn't want to see me? It's not exactly out of character of Shaun to try and cover things up. But, like I said, it might just be me being paranoid. I spend far too much of my life at the minute being paranoid. I think he means well, but as the old saying goes, the road to Hell is paved with good intentions. If (or when) I see Ashley again, it might allay some of these fears, but until then, I'm being forced by my own paranoid nature to chalk it up to her being drunk/pissed off about being dumped. Which is not something I want to do. Honestly, she's the first girl in over a year who's shown much interest in me (my abortive thing with Kayleigh doesn't even begin to count - I don't even know what -if anything- we had) and naturally I want her to like me (and I don't want to fuck it up like I somehow manage to fuck most of my prospects up - there's a discussion about self-loathing buriedin here somewhere) and her only talking to me because she's drunk and upset isn't going to do much for my ego.
Peace out.
Thursday, 17 April 2008
Face-fooked, Saving The Cheerleader & Foreskins
Now, for longer than I probably care to remember, I've been part of what is generally known as social networking. I started out on MySpace and reluctantly defected to Facebook when I realised that everyone (and I mean everyone) I knew was there. Even my internet-phobic sister has succumbed to the lure of Facebook. So far I've managed to get back in touch with dozens of people I had thought lost to the ravages of time. People from secondary school; hell, people from junior school have crawled out of the woodwork, including some that I probably would have preferred to remain buried. But hey, it's only over the internet. It's not like you have to talk to them all the time. I've even made a couple of tentative friends completely at random thanks to the numerous applications Facebook offers. It's been an invaluable tool for staying in touch with people I've met on my trips to visit friends and it's much easier than e-mailing everyone all the time. If you want to know what someone's up to, you just pop over to their page and see. It's a work of genius, it really is.
It also might be a very dangerous tool. Admittedly, it's not as easy to stalk someone as it is on MySpace (where you don't even have to be friends with someone to read their blog, view their pics or stare a their profile for hours on end), but it's somehow all too easy to keep an eye on people. But maybe that's just the world i which we live today. The internet has changed the way we live our lives dramatically. Theoretically, it's now possible for me to do everything (bar work, and if I tried hard enough I could probably even find a job that I could do over the internet) from home. I don't ever have to leave, not even to do the shopping. And now, thanks to Facebook, I can even stay in touch with all my friends without ever having to leave the house. Shit, I could probably do it all from the comfort of my bed. Just think on that.
And while I'm here, let's have a little think about Heroes. The second series starts a week from tonight, still a little pariah over on BBC2, despite the huge ratings it got last year. That said, it took till the third series of The X Files (the last big mainstream sf hit from America) for it to be transferred to the main stage of BBC1, and there the ratings... stayed exactly the same. So does it really matter? Not really. BBC2 is no longer the shabbier, studenty younger brother of BBC1, a home for all the cult and minority interest stuff. That's what they have BBC4 for (BBC3 is obviously for endless repeats of Family Guy and Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps). BBC2 is now, somehow, one of the Big 4 (Channel 5, or 'Five' as I think it's called these days never managed to break the Big 4's hold - the Big 4, in case you're wondering being BBC's 1 and 2, ITV (or ITV1 as it's dubbed these days) and Channel 4, all of which cater for slightly different needs), as evidenced by the fact that in the past year we've seen numerous Radio Times covers for shows like Heroes and Torchwood, and although the cover of the Radio Times is no longer the big thing that it used to be, it's still a fairly prestigious thing, like guest starring in Doctor Who in the 80's.
It's a good show (I'm back talking about Heroes now, in case you're a bit lost). I'm currently rewatching the first series (or Volume 1 - Genesis as the show's own mythology has it) thanks to the death of HD and therefore companies like Amazon offloading HD DVD stock like it's going out of fashion. Which it is, to be honest with you. But I have an HD DVD player and a whole bunch of HD DVD's (I also have a Blu-Ray player in my PS3 so I'm not too fussed about HD DVD going the way of Betamax) and I'm not ashamed of that fact. So I bought the HD box set of Heroes, despite the fact I bought the R1 box set of the bog standard DVD's when it first came out (and watched it over the course of a weekend). It's also a show very much of its time. The serial structure of TV (especially American action/drama TV) has been growing in stature since its inception with Babylon 5, although it took 24 and then Lost to really popularise the format. It's definitively post 9/11 (the central story behind Volume 1 has our mismatched heroes trying to foil the destruction of New York), like Battlestar Galactica (and if you need the 9/11 inspirations for that one pointed out your shoe size is probably bigger than your IQ) and like Galactica it takes a bunch of tropes that are so familiar as to be practically archetypes and turns them into living, breathing flesh and blood and then turns the intensity up to eleven. Insert Spinal Tap joke here.
Oviously, being based on the notion of superpowers, Heroes' inspirations are comics, but crucially this is a series which is damn serious. No one wears tights, has secret lairs or even a secret identity. Hiro, a fan favourite, is a nerd like us - in the first episode he's constantly makes allusions to Star Trek and gets his theory of time travel from X Men comics and he toyswith the idea of suiting up and adopting a secret identity, prompting his friend Ando to make a derogatory comment about tights. It's the same mindset which Joss Whedon adopted for Buffy (a superhero story with vampires) and his fingerprints on the initial X Men movie (he was responsible for the 'yellow spandex' line which, at the time seemed like the best way to do a superhero movie - to get it all away from the gaudy four colour splash pages of its origins, until Sam Raimi came along and did a Spider-Man movie so faithful to the spirit of the comic (if not the continuity) that it was as if he'd just ripped up a comic and pasted it to the screen) and it's a mindset that seems to be necessary for a show to receive mainstream acclaim. Galactica is forever being praised in the big outside world but they all downplay that face that, at heart, it's a show about a great big space ship and robots. They focus on the politics and the fact that - good god! - people shag each other on this show! It's the standard way to give sf a good review in the mainstream press (the standard way to give it a bad review is to focus not on the show, but on the fans, who are uniformly portrayed as sad anoraks, exclusively male and lacking social lives) because it essentially says 'this is good, despite the sf' instead of simply saying 'this is good sf' because the general public, that is, those people whose idea of far fetched plots doesn't stretch much further than Dirty Den coming back from the dead in EastEnders, doesn't like sf (or so the accepted logic goes; before the revival of Doctor Who and the massive success it's had, prompting the creation of a least a dozen other fantasy/sf shows, sf on TV was a dead genre, despite the fact that the biggest films are almost exclusively fantasy and sf). And so it is with Heroes. It's much harder, of course, to pretend that Heroes isn't sf than it is with say, Lost or Alias, but it has a lot going for it on that count.It's set in the present day, for a start, which excludes all of that awkward gubbins with spaceships and aliens (speaking of aliens, it's telling that even the new version of Galactica has yet to feature an alien race - they even made the Cylon's a product of human engineering rather than the soliders of a long dead reptillian race as they were in the seventies incarnation) and, a couple of the heroes aside (yes Hiro, I'm looking at you) their powers are pretty much low key - Claire's regeneration, DL's 'phasing' (I'm nicking the terminology from X Men here, because DL is essentially a fly version of Kitty Pryde), even Niki/Jessica's superstrength which is barely remarked upon. It's all stuff that isn't too out there, all stuff that the general audience will already be familiar with. And those powers which aren't are pretty thoroughly explained within the series itself (Peter's human spongey-ness, Hiro's ability to bend time and space).
It's accessible, and that's important these days. It's also a very intelligent program and would stand as a shining example of how smart regular viewers are when you give them a chance. Well, it would, but then a show like Flash Gordon comes along.
So, before I go, the 'foreskins' section of this entry. No, I'm not going to talk about circumcison, but censorship.
You see, this morning I got up and was watching That 70's Show on MTV. Now, it would have been about eight/nine in the morning. And they bleeped out the word foreskin. It's a peculiar double standard, when you can have characters talk about having sex but not mentio the word 'foreskin'. It also brings to mind that song by Wheatus, 'Teenage Dirtbag', which features the line 'her boyfriend's a dick' but then obscures the next line, or part of it anyway, which is 'he brings a gun to school'. Can you guess which part they censor? As James Toback once said, if you're goingto censor something, at least censor someon'e head getting lopped off. It's a strange world in which we live where you can see people getting killed on TV, but an erect penis (and certainly shots of actual vaginal penetration) is still strictly verboten. It's a depressing world, actually. You get the impression that people's priorities are a little fucked up.
And before I go, don't go and see Awake, that film with Anakin Skywalker and Sue Storm in. It's rubbish. I might have felt offended if it was a TV special. As a film it was just diabolical. Peace out.
It also might be a very dangerous tool. Admittedly, it's not as easy to stalk someone as it is on MySpace (where you don't even have to be friends with someone to read their blog, view their pics or stare a their profile for hours on end), but it's somehow all too easy to keep an eye on people. But maybe that's just the world i which we live today. The internet has changed the way we live our lives dramatically. Theoretically, it's now possible for me to do everything (bar work, and if I tried hard enough I could probably even find a job that I could do over the internet) from home. I don't ever have to leave, not even to do the shopping. And now, thanks to Facebook, I can even stay in touch with all my friends without ever having to leave the house. Shit, I could probably do it all from the comfort of my bed. Just think on that.
And while I'm here, let's have a little think about Heroes. The second series starts a week from tonight, still a little pariah over on BBC2, despite the huge ratings it got last year. That said, it took till the third series of The X Files (the last big mainstream sf hit from America) for it to be transferred to the main stage of BBC1, and there the ratings... stayed exactly the same. So does it really matter? Not really. BBC2 is no longer the shabbier, studenty younger brother of BBC1, a home for all the cult and minority interest stuff. That's what they have BBC4 for (BBC3 is obviously for endless repeats of Family Guy and Two Pints Of Lager And A Packet Of Crisps). BBC2 is now, somehow, one of the Big 4 (Channel 5, or 'Five' as I think it's called these days never managed to break the Big 4's hold - the Big 4, in case you're wondering being BBC's 1 and 2, ITV (or ITV1 as it's dubbed these days) and Channel 4, all of which cater for slightly different needs), as evidenced by the fact that in the past year we've seen numerous Radio Times covers for shows like Heroes and Torchwood, and although the cover of the Radio Times is no longer the big thing that it used to be, it's still a fairly prestigious thing, like guest starring in Doctor Who in the 80's.
It's a good show (I'm back talking about Heroes now, in case you're a bit lost). I'm currently rewatching the first series (or Volume 1 - Genesis as the show's own mythology has it) thanks to the death of HD and therefore companies like Amazon offloading HD DVD stock like it's going out of fashion. Which it is, to be honest with you. But I have an HD DVD player and a whole bunch of HD DVD's (I also have a Blu-Ray player in my PS3 so I'm not too fussed about HD DVD going the way of Betamax) and I'm not ashamed of that fact. So I bought the HD box set of Heroes, despite the fact I bought the R1 box set of the bog standard DVD's when it first came out (and watched it over the course of a weekend). It's also a show very much of its time. The serial structure of TV (especially American action/drama TV) has been growing in stature since its inception with Babylon 5, although it took 24 and then Lost to really popularise the format. It's definitively post 9/11 (the central story behind Volume 1 has our mismatched heroes trying to foil the destruction of New York), like Battlestar Galactica (and if you need the 9/11 inspirations for that one pointed out your shoe size is probably bigger than your IQ) and like Galactica it takes a bunch of tropes that are so familiar as to be practically archetypes and turns them into living, breathing flesh and blood and then turns the intensity up to eleven. Insert Spinal Tap joke here.
Oviously, being based on the notion of superpowers, Heroes' inspirations are comics, but crucially this is a series which is damn serious. No one wears tights, has secret lairs or even a secret identity. Hiro, a fan favourite, is a nerd like us - in the first episode he's constantly makes allusions to Star Trek and gets his theory of time travel from X Men comics and he toyswith the idea of suiting up and adopting a secret identity, prompting his friend Ando to make a derogatory comment about tights. It's the same mindset which Joss Whedon adopted for Buffy (a superhero story with vampires) and his fingerprints on the initial X Men movie (he was responsible for the 'yellow spandex' line which, at the time seemed like the best way to do a superhero movie - to get it all away from the gaudy four colour splash pages of its origins, until Sam Raimi came along and did a Spider-Man movie so faithful to the spirit of the comic (if not the continuity) that it was as if he'd just ripped up a comic and pasted it to the screen) and it's a mindset that seems to be necessary for a show to receive mainstream acclaim. Galactica is forever being praised in the big outside world but they all downplay that face that, at heart, it's a show about a great big space ship and robots. They focus on the politics and the fact that - good god! - people shag each other on this show! It's the standard way to give sf a good review in the mainstream press (the standard way to give it a bad review is to focus not on the show, but on the fans, who are uniformly portrayed as sad anoraks, exclusively male and lacking social lives) because it essentially says 'this is good, despite the sf' instead of simply saying 'this is good sf' because the general public, that is, those people whose idea of far fetched plots doesn't stretch much further than Dirty Den coming back from the dead in EastEnders, doesn't like sf (or so the accepted logic goes; before the revival of Doctor Who and the massive success it's had, prompting the creation of a least a dozen other fantasy/sf shows, sf on TV was a dead genre, despite the fact that the biggest films are almost exclusively fantasy and sf). And so it is with Heroes. It's much harder, of course, to pretend that Heroes isn't sf than it is with say, Lost or Alias, but it has a lot going for it on that count.It's set in the present day, for a start, which excludes all of that awkward gubbins with spaceships and aliens (speaking of aliens, it's telling that even the new version of Galactica has yet to feature an alien race - they even made the Cylon's a product of human engineering rather than the soliders of a long dead reptillian race as they were in the seventies incarnation) and, a couple of the heroes aside (yes Hiro, I'm looking at you) their powers are pretty much low key - Claire's regeneration, DL's 'phasing' (I'm nicking the terminology from X Men here, because DL is essentially a fly version of Kitty Pryde), even Niki/Jessica's superstrength which is barely remarked upon. It's all stuff that isn't too out there, all stuff that the general audience will already be familiar with. And those powers which aren't are pretty thoroughly explained within the series itself (Peter's human spongey-ness, Hiro's ability to bend time and space).
It's accessible, and that's important these days. It's also a very intelligent program and would stand as a shining example of how smart regular viewers are when you give them a chance. Well, it would, but then a show like Flash Gordon comes along.
So, before I go, the 'foreskins' section of this entry. No, I'm not going to talk about circumcison, but censorship.
You see, this morning I got up and was watching That 70's Show on MTV. Now, it would have been about eight/nine in the morning. And they bleeped out the word foreskin. It's a peculiar double standard, when you can have characters talk about having sex but not mentio the word 'foreskin'. It also brings to mind that song by Wheatus, 'Teenage Dirtbag', which features the line 'her boyfriend's a dick' but then obscures the next line, or part of it anyway, which is 'he brings a gun to school'. Can you guess which part they censor? As James Toback once said, if you're goingto censor something, at least censor someon'e head getting lopped off. It's a strange world in which we live where you can see people getting killed on TV, but an erect penis (and certainly shots of actual vaginal penetration) is still strictly verboten. It's a depressing world, actually. You get the impression that people's priorities are a little fucked up.
And before I go, don't go and see Awake, that film with Anakin Skywalker and Sue Storm in. It's rubbish. I might have felt offended if it was a TV special. As a film it was just diabolical. Peace out.
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