I’m currently reading Apocalpyse Culture II. J.G.Ballard described its predecessor, Apocalypse Culture as “the terminal documents of the twentieth century.” It follows then, that what I’m reading must be a collection of the inaugural documents of the new millenium. Cannibalism, conspiracy theory, interviews with serial killers, homunculi, mind control, deviant sex, letters to Satan and more, this is the flipside of Popular Culture, the ugly edges of our collective conciousness. Fascinating, disturbing shit. You probably pass these people in the street every day, and don’t know anything about it. Read these books.
Oh, and another LOTR related thought:
Many people tend to excuse LOTR’s cliches by saying that it invented the genre, that we wouldn’t have fantasy without it. They are, of course, wrong. Modern fantasy would almost certainly be very different without it, but it didn’t invent the genre. Conan the Barbarian was around in the thirties, and if you want to really look to the roots of the thing, you’re going back from Conan Doyle and Hodgson via Verne and Wells to people like Shelley and Polidori, and then back to Shakespeare and his mates, and yes, further and further back to biblical and pre-biblical times – the roots of what might be called fantastic fiction, as opposed to fantasy, which is just a subset of the same and grows out of it…
LORD OF THE RINGS, then.
I hate the books. Did my A-level English dissertation on “The Influences Of Norse And Christian Myth On Early Fantastic Literature” with specific reference to LOTR and the Narnia books. (Which I hate even more. I despise propaganda, especially when it’s fed to kids.) I read them several times, in a shorter period of time than anyone should have to. There was a period when I could have quoted large chunks of it verbatim, but mercifully age, and a facility for repression, have spared me a lifetime with hobbits in the brain.
When I first heard the films were being made, I thought I’d just ignore them. Then I saw the trailers for FELLOWSHIP…, and thought I’d give it a go. If I’m honest, I wasn’t expecting to enjoy it.
But I did. The effects are stunning, and as an adaptation, it’s pretty first rate. They’ve cut out all the bits that made the book crap, and despite it’s three hour length, it only drags in a couple of places. There are only a few really bad bits – noteably the sequence between Frodo and Galadriel, where the scriptwriter seems to have taken a break and let the tea boy fill in, and the effects department clearly needed to be out of the office by half five. Sadly, most of these slow or just plain bad bits come toward the end of the film, so it’d be easy to come away with a worse impression than the film deserves.
But here’s the big flaw: It’s the first part of a trilogy of films. But as I recall, the book were not written, or first published, as a trilogy. They were written as one book in three volumes. Now, I’ve read the books. I know that some of the things that seem weak or needless in part one are there as set up for later parts. But I found myself saying “that’ll be made clearer later” an awful lot to the friends I saw it with, or “no, you just don’t have the full picture”. One the one hand, they’re a bit constrained by the books. On the other, they’ve clearly felt free to play fast-and-loose with the pacing in other places (and the film is better for it), but there are things I can’t help but feel they could have cut from the film without really losing anything, that would have made it a better film on it’s own merits, rather than just as part one of three.
I just know you bastards are going to point and laugh and generally accuse me of being a miserable sod, but I feel compelled to note that further to having spent a lot of time listen to Wainwright’s version of “Hallelujah”, I have come to the conclusion that the most heartbreakingly romantic song lyrics in the world are
“It’s not a cry
You can hear at night
It’s not somebody
Who’s seen the light
It’s a cold and
It’s a broken Hallelujah”
It’s all in the delivery, I admit, but fuck me, they’re fantastic.
Bloody hell! How’s this for customer service – I placed an order on-line last week for some stuff to go with my new MP3 player – some spare cables, a carry pack and reomte control thing like you get for Minidiscs and the like. They’ve just phoned me up to tell me the remote isn’t compatible with my player, and would I like to cancel that part of the order. I am impressed.
I have spent a large chunk of my day listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah”, as covered by Rufus Wainwright (from the sountrack to SHREK). Lovely song.
In a bit of gentle mickey taking, my mate Ade compared the “Three As” of Ninth Art to figures from the British music industry. Antony, he likened to Jarvis Cocker, Andrew to Mark E. Smith, and me to Bill Drummond. This amuses me on so many levels.
Warning: Design tweaking in progress. Please wear your hardhat at all times.
I don’t make New Years Resolutions. They’re too small. Quitting smoking, taking more excercise, doing something every day, these are small things. We can decide to do this sort of thing any day of the week. There’s no magic in New Years Day that makes these things easier – quite the reverse, in fact. You blow a New Year’s Resolution – well, everyone does that, don’t they? Yeah, so you blew it. Big deal. But making the decision on another day, well, then you’re only answerable to yourself, and if you can’t keep a promise you make to yourself, what’s wrong with you? No, New Years Resolutions aren’t for me.
Me, I plan the shape of my year. I pick a theme. I tie it all up with a bit of magic, and the year plays through. I’ve been doing this for a few years now. 1999 was all about putting myself back together. 2000 was the year for discipline. If I’d thought a bit more about those two, I’d have done something different with 2000, because I came out of it slightly fucked in the head. I spent 1999 re-assembling myself after a seriously fucking awful end to 1998, and having done that I then proceeeded to ignore my head in favour of The Work, which was just stupid – I had no idea who I was or what I wanted, and therefore had no idea what I was working toward, and working just for working, well, it taught me a few things, but ultimately, it’s just a bad idea. So 2001 was about getting to know myself better, introspection, and letting my headspace unfold a bit. And I think it’s worked. I’m happier and more together these days than I have been in a long time. Several of my friends have recently described me as one of the most well-balanced people they know. I’m not sure I’d go that far, but given the way I felt at the start of the year, things are obviously better.
2002? I’ll tell you next year.
According to this test my spirit animal is The Dragon. Which I find myself irrationally pleased by.