The Mothman Cometh

Point Pleasant, West Virginia, is a handsome little town teetering on the banks of the Ohio River. You come to it suddenly, over a massive iron bridge; the effect is of arriving somewhere slightly different, slightly other. There is a fine Main Street, of the classic type, with a grand hotel, an American Legion building, and a deco post office with an empty flagpole. Many of the shop-windows are empty, with the ghostly remnants of a former prosperity still visible: a dressmakers; a barber’s with bolts in the floor where the chairs used to stand; a ticket-office enclosed in dusty glass in front of which which children once jostled and lied about their ages.

At the colonial graveyard, there is a large cast-iron sign alerting us to the graves of the courageous dead and that of the doctor who performed the first caesarian section in the United States. Many of the gravestones are little more than crumbling stumps; some of the smaller ones have been knocked over and the one large monument is drifting apart, with crevices opening along its sandstone seams. The grass is trampled flat and yellow, sodden with recent thaws. Two flaking clapperboard houses look on sightlessly. Technically it’s spring, but the trees are still stark and naked.

As soon as we cross the bridge, I lose my phone signal. Huh, that’s weird. It’s also weird that we came here accidentally but this is the comforting weirdness of a heady deja-vu; or the ordinary weirdness of very identical twins.

Because Point Pleasant is Mothman country.

For the benefit of the uninitiated, Mothman is a cryptid, which is a fancy word for an animal that does not, or cannot be proved to exist, like Chupacabra or Nessie. It’s reputedly a very tall humanoid, about seven feet high with spreading wings and eyes that either glow or reflect light reddishly. For fans of weird tales, Mothman dovetails quite nicely with the creepy extraterrestrials of Lovecraft’s The Whisperer in Darkness, to whom the tale may owe a debt. It started showing up in the late ’60′s (which is hardly surprising when you come to think about it,) and continued to be sighted throughout the ’70′s, an excellent decade for people who wanted to muck about with infra-red cameras and tape recorders.

Mothman flaps about after dark, spooking the unwary in lonely spots, and getting blamed for all manner of disturbances: howling static, flickering lights, cold spots and things that go bump in the night. Sightings were said to have intensified in the weeks before the collapse of the Silver Bridge on December 16th 1967, in which 46 people died. There were no sightings immediately afterward, resulting in rumors that Mothman is a harbinger of doom. Skeptical killjoys say that it just a large crane that got swept off course. Credulous fun-seekers like me know that it is part-alien, part-ghost and is totally real. Like all local phenomena, sightings multiplied and spread until virtually everyone had seen Mothman or knew someone who had.

Today, Mothman is a small local industry: there is a museum and a festival on the third weekend in September. There is a big stainless steel statue of Mothman just off Main Street, with spread wings and big red glass eyes. You can cower between his outstretched claws for a photo. So whatever it is, it’s a good, persistent story, and a story is like a cold: sooner or later, everyone catches it. Even scoffers like to hear them and Mothman is good for business, like that groundhog in Punxatawny, only freakier. You can blame Punxatawny Phil for the cold weather, but you can blame Mothman for anything.

Now as soon as I realized where we were, I messaged a friend and she tried to ruin it for me by telling me one of several perfectly rational explanations for the strange phenomena that put Point Pleasant on the paranormal map in the late sixties. None of that, please. There’s little enough folklore in the world these days so leave the few spooky ideas we have alone. No, I do not mean urban folklore, which is mostly just gossip and third-hand exaggerations, or the increasingly tedious world of online hoaxes. I mean good old fashioned ‘something nasty in the woodshed’ rural tales. Strange lights in the woods; weird chanting; mutilated livestock. In a world of glowing surfaces and short-attention span, there’s not much time or space left for glimpsing things in the darkness.

Released in 2002, The Mothman Prophecies is based on a book written in the seventies by parapsychologist John Keel. It’s a fine chiller for fans of The X-Files. Efforts are made not only to update the story but to give it some contemporary resonance. The central character, played by Richard Gere, is now a nineties political journalist named John Klein. He is seen walking about a wintry DC and being interviewed on a chat-show. This seems intended to confuse him with Joe Klein, a serious Beltway correspondent and Clinton biographer. On television, the fictional Klein is seen discussing a recent election::

‘I think that these parties are demonizing each other. They’re projecting our own personal fears and anxieties onto the national stage.’

As in so many thrillers, Klein is a happy, even complacent man about to move into an expensive new home with his beautiful wife. They even have sex on the floor, which sounds embarrassing for the realtor but hold on: if every bit of nookie resulted in a sale, I’m sure she’d be delighted. On the way back, lovely wife sees something uncanny and there is a minor accident. A hospital stay reveals something seriously wrong with her brain. She draws compulsively, wanders in thought, and dies. Klein is inconsolable and sits on icy benches looking at the freezing mall.

The exhausted Klein takes a trip to Virginia to interview the governor, suffers an attack of wooziness behind the wheel and suddenly finds himself hundreds of mile off course on the Ohio border. Point Pleasant, to be exact. Although he’s new in town, people have seen him before. Standard tropes follow: he becomes obsessed, is warned off by a previous investigator, falls in love with Laura Linney and gradually comes to realize that a major calamity is imminent.

What I continue to admire about The Mothman Prophecies is the neat confrontation between Gere’s smooth urban dweller, and the rural working people of small-town Virginia. There are no stupid hicks in this film, only decent folks played with grace and dignity by skilled actors like Linney and Will Patton. The script may irritate some, since it doesn’t strive for any concrete resolution. Instead, it conjures an atmosphere of decline and wrongness that seems both personal and national. The scenes following the death of Klein’s wife are excellent, filled with the suffocating impotence of sudden death. Elsewhere, there is a sense of national malaise and impending disaster that seems reflected in the wintry marble of DC and the rusting bridges of Virginia. Part of this is just the old, vast terror of America as a chaotic force: the pilgrim fear of the wilderness. But there’s also a sense of national betrayal, abandonment and neglect: a dread that seems ever more prophetic in the years since its release.

The Mothman Cometh

Cop Out: True Detective Finale

SPOILERS FOLLOW

When you’ve enjoyed a show this much and this viscerally, then it’s hard to admit that it has failed you at the last moment. I guess warning-lights should have started flashing when True Detective stopped being merely popular but a phenomenon, and good word-of-mouth became a constant exhortation to watch it. Shows usually take some time to gain what is somewhat ominously called ‘a following’; The Wire is a cult series: this was a church built overnight.

And now it’s crashed and burned. Sorry to all of you who are completely satisfied with last night’s denouement but I felt cheated of something larger.

What raised True Detective from a routine police procedural was the quality of the two lead performances, Rustin Cohle’s articulate and uncompromising world-view, and the powerful atmosphere of stagnant evil conjured up by the bayou setting. Apart from that, there was nothing much here that we haven’t seen before: a ritual murder, a shadowy conspiracy, mismatched cops and a very attractive wife.

(I am not going to discuss the lack of credible female agency here: it is a large subject and other people are doing excellent jobs elsewhere.)

Rust has stated that the death of his daughter saved him from ‘the sin of being a father’. It’s a bold, memorable statement and expresses a universal parental fear that we’ve all heard before: ‘How can I bring a child into a world like this?’ And what a world. From the initial corpse kneeling pallid under the twisted tree, the Louisiana of True Detective is one where evil seems rooted in the polluted soil, in sick families, in secret history, in the Mississippi turgid with cancerous chemicals. It’s everywhere. Rust’s ascetic refusal to admit hope seems the only way to maintain a bulwark against appalling chaos and brutality. He becomes a religious figure out of Flannery O’Connor: a martyr of the Church without Christ, haunted by visions; bereft of family or possessions: a pilgrim laboring towards crucifixion.

Powerful symbolism and archetypes abound, encouraging us to make sense of the patterns that emerge, just as the killer imposes appalling rituals and codes on the bodies of his victims. All the way along, Rust keeps warning that this is an illusion; that we are just machines programmed to find patterns where there are none; that there is nothing but chaos, endlessly repeating itself. ‘Tell ‘em stories while they’re tying sticks together.’ says the minister as Rust contemplates a cross. The killer arranges violated bodies; Rust arranges beer-can puppets; Marty’s daughter arranges dolls. Evidence of chaotic resonance keeps piling up: a video of an act so terrible that nobody can watch it; a baby incinerated in a microwave; the King in Yellow haunting the woods; Caracosa.

Eventually, the two men arrive at the heart of darkness, which turns out to be one of those rural hellholes made famous by redneck maniacs since The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: fetid rooms filled with broken dolls, moldering books and clattering bead-curtains. When Marty discovers a festering body with alpine fresheners dangling above it, one thinks irresistibly of David Fincher’s Se7en. That film was also about a stoic, world-weary detective and his flawed and vulnerable partner. And it ended up with a woman’s head in a cardboard box and the triumph of evil. So we expect the worst as Rust pursues the Minotaur into the labyrinth.

At the center of the maze, Rust has a vision/ hallucination of what appears to be a black vortex, suspended over the spot where so many innocents have died. The possibility is tentatively advanced that maybe there’s more to this than just a madman, or even a unclean conspiracy. Perhaps there is something else sowing evil and horror in the land and possessing people with the urge to violate and kill. Or maybe it’s just Rust’s drug-addled synapses misfiring. The vision passes, a duel ensues and, against fearful strength and terrible injuries, the two men manage to slay the beast.

This is where any decent writer would have ended the story: two warriors bleeding out on the carcass of the monster.

That must not have tested well, so we are treated to a lengthy epilogue. Rust improbably survives being disemboweled, the flashing police lights arrive deus ex machina, and the two heroes are whisked off to hospital where they recuperate. Marty receives a visit from his wife and daughters and has a good cry. Cohle assumes a fully Christ-like posture in his hospital bed.

The black pit is opened, the innumerable bodies of children are exhumed, the murder cult is dispersed, the unwatchable video is sent to every major network and newspaper. Everything comes to light.

Outside the hospital, Marty presents Rust with a pack of cigarettes and Rust confesses that at the moment of death, he felt the love of his daughter waiting for him in the warm darkness below death. The two men look up at the stars in the night sky and discuss which is stronger: darkness or light. ‘You ask me, the light’s winning,’ murmurs Rust as Marty helps him away from the hospital towards a more hopeful future. The camera lingers on the sky as more and more stars come out.

The tone, which I find utterly unconvincing and at odds with the message of the show and McConnaughey’s mesmerizing performance, is that evil can be exorcised. The story stops being one about pilgrims toiling in a savage land, and becomes one about purification of the land and the self. The catharsis is too complete and lapses into exactly the kind of self-delusion that Rust used to mock as no weapon against true evil. I did not want to feel good at the end of this story. I wanted Rust sacrificed on the corpse of the beast and Marty alone with his regrets, and the world the way it is.

There is an aerial shot that occurs just before this: combing over plantations and levees, bayous and townships, back to the murder tree silhouetted against the setting sun, that I think would have made a far better closing image for True Detective. Perhaps the camera could have lingered on something ill-defined, hanging in the branches, or on the black hole at the center of the wreath of twigs.

Lengthening shadows, and watchfulness and the void.

Cop Out: True Detective Finale

Hell is Circular: True Detective 2

Goddamn it Rust, couldn’t you just have kept your big mouth shut?

On Sunday night, whilst receiving Hollywood’s shiniest award, Matthew McConaughey did his level best to torpedo the greatest performance he has ever given. And I’m not talking about Dallas Buyers Club.

Nobody in recent pop-culture has riffed on the mortality of God with more dusty panache than Rust Cohle on ‘True Detective’. So it was irritating to have McConaughey go and get all Jesus-is-My-Agent on us poor meat-puppets a week before the final apocalyptic showdown.

Let’s be clear: Dallas Buyer’s Club was shameless Oscar bait, lifted out of movie-of-the-week territory by fine performances by McConaughey and Jared Leto, both of whom underwent extensive weight-loss in preparation for their roles.

The story of a dissolute and venomously homophobic rodeo-rider who contracts AIDS and rediscovers both his humanity and his will to survive has been very well received by critics and audiences. The film is pure Oscar fodder but the performances are very high-quality and very, very skinny indeed. McConaughey is as thin as chicken-wire and meaner than a starving dog for the first half; Leto is suitably etiolated as the transsexual with a steely spine. The two stalk bonily around each other and the sight is impressive.

Treating your body as a sort of extreme costume is an impressive demonstration of studio commitment, as well as testament to the efforts of highly paid nutritionists and personal trainers. Gerard Butler reportedly became addicted to painkillers honing his body to a buffed and convex gleam for ’300′. He may have been left a bit of a wreck but the movie launched a thousand boot-camps. Taylor Lautner only managed to stay on Team Jacob by piling on the beefcake. Bradley Cooper and Ryan Gosling did the reverse for ‘Silver Linings Playbook’ and ‘Lars and the Real Girl’, padding themselves out with that convincing layer of beery weight that makes them look like regular guys instead of media assets. A few months and a whole lot of crunches later, the abs are back. In many cases, the project demands this sort of thing, but it’s hard not to look at it as a sort of penance: male stars proving that they are earning their money by torturing themselves physically.

Matthew McConaughey is no stranger to this: he had a flex-off with Bale ten years ago in a bit of rubbish about dragons nobody remembers or cares about today. Bale showed up to the post-apocalyptic shoot looking suitably haggard only to find McConaughey strutting bulkily about as though he was on Venice Beach: a battle of the barbells ensued and he made himself sick on tuna, raw eggs and chicken fillets. It was all for nothing: the movie crashed and burned. But McConaughey has been flaunting his beach body longer and more consistently than nearly anybody in Hollywood: his confident Texan beachiness is one of the main reasons that he was corralled into so many flimsy rom-coms and forgettable adventures during the nineties.

Magic Mike subverted that convention. As the mother-hen of a Florida male strip-club, he was still lithe and taut, but beside Channing Tatum he was starting to look tired, as though his knees were getting stiff, and he modulated his habitual lazy charm with a hard eye for profit. It was clear that he was looking for an exit-strategy.

Dallas Buyers Club was that exit. And McConaughey dashed through it on spidery denim legs, giving the (almost) performance of a lifetime. Everything looked great.

Then Leto went on a series of chat-shows and insulted the trans community by repeatedly referring to his character as ‘he’, which is a big no-no. After a bit of kicking, he finally seemed to catch on and, by Oscar night, had a speech prepared that paid muted respect to the victims of AIDS.

‘Muted’ is not the word that springs to mind when watching McConaughey claim his statuette. People who thank God for awards seem oblivious to the crass arrogance inherent in stating that your career has somehow been given a boost by a deity that ignores the suffering of millions on a daily basis. I guess that’s what evangelicals mean by a ‘personal Jesus’. And this was the old McConnaughy, as buffed and golden as the Oscar itself, not the skeletal cowboy or the scaly prophet of doom that’s been haunting HBO for the last seven weeks. His exhilaration was as depressing as Rust’s misery is weirdly uplifting. The artist failed his creation.

Thanks to McConaughey’s impromptu revivalist meeting, the right-wing hootingly ignored the fact that the movie is about people with AIDS and decided that the whole things was about Jesus, the power of the free-market and why big gub’mint sucks.

Just try to forget about it. The final denouement of True Detective as almost upon us and I want to expand a bit before all is revealed.

It’s pretty clear that, whatever happens with this show in the future, Rust will not be coming back. The events of the first season have already made a broken old man of him. I’ve heard rumors that the template for each season will be different cops and maybe even a different state. I have no problem with that. Locations outside the obvious big cities have started figuring powerfully as characters on American television in recent years. I’m thinking of New Mexico’s pitiless, arid presence in Breaking Bad and the dank, dilapidated Baltimore of The Wire. The idea of a grisly new scenario playing out in Minnesota or Vermont appeals. Still, I wouldn’t care to take over from Woody and Matt.

To qualify early assumptions, Rust Cohle is still as dry and dispassionate as a piece of human driftwood but Marty Hart has revealed himself to be a weak, violent, emotionally-deaf philanderer, demanding the love and devotion that he so clearly neither deserves nor returns. He and Rust are not buddies and they never will be. Rust watches Marty blundering around with his sandpaper eyes, and humiliates him in the eyes of his wife by simply standing about being better than him: stiller, more attentive, more responsible; stonier and somehow sexier at the same time.

When Megan, Marty’s wife, discovers that the miserable drunk slumped at her dinner table is a grieving parent, it marks the moment when her respect for her feckless and complacent husband starts visibly to crumble. And when the inevitable infidelity occurs, it feels as sordid, irresistible and calculating as an ambush.

Six episodes later, a grotesque and sickening conspiracy is slowly rising into view. The hunt has been pursued through the most gripping undercover bust – and-extraction ever seen on TV (Scorsese or Mann would cheer,) to a locked room of filth and horror and a case-closed that isn’t. ‘Nothing ever ends’ Always, when you reach the basement, another trapdoor opens and another staircase leads down.

Marty pops open the door of a microwave to stare at the incinerated remains of a child;  Rust pops the button on a VHS player and plays a tape ‘nobody should own’;  maybe it’s just a little arrangement of dolls on a child’s bedroom floor, or ‘I work for the parish’: some necessary levee of denial crumbles and the languid pollution that has been threatening to drown this whole show rises up.

Every signpost points to hell, and Hell, as Dante and Flann O’Brien warned us, is circular.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hell is Circular: True Detective 2

You There Fellow: Monocles are Back

Either a reflection of the economic times we live in, or just hipsters ransacking the fancy-dress basket of history for accessories to bewilder and appall us? The New York Times reports that the monocle is making a fashion comeback. Interestingly, I haven’t seen a single convincing photograph of anybody sporting one, hipster or otherwise. The few photos I have seen seem to be mock-ups. Maybe they aren’t a thing.

Monocles are pretty much synonymous with effete wealthy people and snobs. When Leslie Knope wants to take a swipe at those fancy Eagleton types on Parks and Recreation, she cracks jokes about them polishing their monocles. They’re not really an optical aid, since they are so hard to keep in place at a proper distance from the eye. When the British boxer Chris Eubank, who is black, stared swaggering around in hunting tweeds and a monocle in the 90′s, he attracted heavy criticism for affecting the civilian trappings of Raj-era colonialism. But he did have a very effete voice for someone who hit people very hard for a living.

Monocles started out as a Regency fashion accessory: the quizzing glass that 18th century fops toyed with, and then the lorgnette, through which dowager duchesses stared balefully at young upstarts and clumsy servants. By the time monocles proper arrived, they were worn by terrifying Prussian army officers, blimpish British colonels and the kind of film directors who wore Jodhpurs and riding boots.

Bullies, basically: Victorian glassholes.

Apparently, the very fabulous Alan Cumming  wears a purple-tinted monocle on the cover of new fashion and arts magazine Spirit and Flesh, but we all know that fashion photographers get people to put on all sorts of eye-catching tat for magazine covers, so that counts for little.

You wear a monocle by gripping the rim of the lens with your soon-to-be-powerfully-developed eyebrow muscle and cranking one of your cheeks up into a humorless half-grin. The whole point of a monocle is to widen one of your eyes and make you stare at things with an horrible, contemptuous attention. They are designed to scare little people and make them feel inadequate. So how come it took hipsters so long to rediscover them?

For Americans, the most famous monocle wearer is Rich Uncle Moneybags, better known as the Monopoly Man. Monopoly, that classic game of capitalist economics from which children learn that once you get rich, there’s no stopping you and God help you if you start losing, was developed during the depths of the Great Depression. So I suppose it makes sense that one percent chic is on the rebound. If Manhattan hipsters really are staring through monocles at bands nobody has heard of yet, then rumors of gentrification trends have obviously reached a literal zenith. I look forward to the return of silk top hats, spats, and silver-topped canes.

A friend pointed out that the modern equivalent of the monocle is Google glass, whose users already seem to be getting a reputation for being abstracted creeps. Google glass doesn’t just stare at you; it takes pictures too, so that everyone on the internet can see what a terrible bore you are. Or maybe they’re not even looking at you. Maybe being stared at is less annoying than being completely ignored while someone reads your resume or watches youtube videos over the top of your head in restaurants.

So you can use the new quizzing glass to check wikipedia.

There really is no way this will not be super-annoying.

You There Fellow: Monocles are Back

Feel the Burn: Pain and Gain (MIchael Bay 2013)

‘Pain and Gain’ has been described as Michael Bay’s most thought-provoking movie to date. Which, at first glance, appears not to be saying very much much: Bay’s movies usually annihilate thought (usually through a series of detonations) and ‘what was I thinking?’ must be a common question as the cinema-goer reels toward the exit.

In ‘Pain and Gain’ however, Bay seems to have stumbled across a script, based on a series of actual events, that exactly meets his criteria for what constitutes rad entertainment and mordant social commentary. This is both a revelation and a shock, because the ‘true’ events are violent, sordid abductions and murders and the satire appears to be at the expense of the lobotomized hyper-masculinity that has been Bay’s stock-in-trade since forever.

The movie denigrates everything it celebrates, and celebrates everything it mocks.


A talented cast participates in this lurid charade with gusto. Mark Wahlberg, who is never better than when playing very much dumber than he really is, resurrects both Marky Mark and Dirk Diggler in his performance as Daniel Lugo: a meat-head personal trainer whose devotion to a cracker-barrel personal philosophy in which success, fitness, greed, resentment, insecurity, amorality and faith are all grotesquely tangled leads him to kidnapping, torture, extortion, fraud and eventually murder.

Lugo appears to be thirty-something Dirk Diggler going mad with fear. My most vivid memory of ‘Boogie Nights’, apart from Walhberg’s notorious prosthetic, is the scene in which the newly prosperous Dirk wanders louchely around his new pad, pointing out its gruesome 70s stylings for the edification of an unseen observer: my shag carpeting, my curtains, my bar. The crimes in ‘Pain and Gain’ are motivated by a similar lust for cool stuff, and a belief that they are intrinsic to self-worth; that they express success and silence anxiety.

Not that out-sized prostheses do not appear in profusion. In ‘Boogie Nights’, we were persuaded to believe in the authenticity of Dirk’s equipment; the ‘gift’ that God had given him. Here, all the dicks are patently false. In a movie about musclemen, every other body part is enlarged and glorified at the expense of the penis, the primary joke is impotence.and sexual anxiety is pervasive. In a significant diversion from the facts of the case (which were beyond lurid to start with) the hostage (Tony Shaloub) is incarcerated in a warehouse filled with sex-toys for no other reason than that Michael Bay thinks dildos are gay and funny, and would like someone to be clubbed with one in his movie. On the other hand, it does result in a scene in which Dwayne (who must now be tired of being reminded that he was The Rock) Johnson looks perplexedly at a shelf of ponderous rubber cocks. I’m reminded of the line in ‘Fight Club’ where Helena Bonham Carter says to Brad Pitt of a dildo wobbling on a dresser: ‘Don’t worry: it’s not a threat to you’.

Except, I suppose, when you’re threatening someone with one.

Johnson is a very decent actor, with a fine control of his cartoon-handsome features, a wall-of-death grin, and an awesome body, (more chiseled, less puffy than that of his former incarnation.) Bay counters all this by identifying him as ‘the weak link’ (he has Jesus and makes laughable attempts to identify sin and lurch towards redemption as the dismembered bodies pile up around him,) Bay dresses him in ridiculous clothes, sprays him with green paint, shoots off his toe and make him a cocaine-fuelled priapus (he is the only character who is portrayed as sexually potent). He also, oh so hilariously, almost beats a thin, elderly, gay priest to death for making a move on him, evoking distasteful memories of a homophobic scene in ‘Conan the Barbarian’ (1982). Y’all know the one: ‘THUMP! Dat’s all yoo’ll eva need’

In many ways, this movie is still 1982. The Miami it evokes is the same stuccoed pleasure ground lit by day in dazzling sunshine; by night with parallel bars of fluorescent turquoise and pink, of Miami Vice and Scarface: a world of horizon pools, hard-eyed, hard-bodied strippers, tiny hilarious dogs and blow. One can imagine Michelle Pfeiffer striding in, all leg-warmers and cheekbones: straight out of a Nagel print.

In Bay’s movies, the body is a jigsaw: made to be disassembled, judged, and reassembled like a kit, or blown to fragments and rebuilt, like one of his Transformer robots. As bodybuilder’s ‘cut’ themselves to pieces and define themselves piecemeal: pectorals, deltoids, biceps, quads; Bay saws bodies to bits: a corpse for him is a sexual plaything (in one horrifically misjudged attempt at a joke, one of the gang is told to stop playing with the tits of a dead woman,) and a source of slapstick (see Bad Boys II’s infamous ambulance chase for no further explanation,) and whether it’s a ‘real’ toe in the mouth of a toy dog, silicone breast implants jiggling on a tray or hair caught in a chainsaw, there is no sense of wholeness: these people are all chopping themselves or each other to bits.

It therefore comes as no surprise that Johnson’s character is a composite and everything that happens to him (the dildoes, the gay-bashing, the coke, the botched robbery of an armored car) is total fabrication from beginning to end: Michael Bay’s ‘contribution’ to the facts. At one point, an onscreen caption alerts us to the non-fact that ‘This is still a true story’ at precisely the point when it is most false. Is this satire or mere confusion?

This pathological need to pump up a story already explosive with witless greed, incompetence and cruelty identifies Bay not as a cool commentator, but as one hopelessly enthralled by the excesses he refuses to merely document, but is compelled to supplement.

He is the director on steroids: his guns are sick, his mass is freaky and one is gravely concerned for the state of his internal organs.

 

Feel the Burn: Pain and Gain (MIchael Bay 2013)

Holy Rollers: Five Religious Festivals 2014

It’s Lent, time for the faithful to give up their chocolate and steak, drink black coffee and, even worse, turn off their phones and iPads. You don’t have to be religious to find faith fascinatingly weird, and, wars and pogroms aside, a bit of self-denial, a long hard walk and a moment of existential reflection probably does everyone good. Better still, go and watch other people doing it. No one religion has a monopoly on either celebration or self-inflicted torture and it’s remarkable how similar are the things people do around the world in the name of faith. So here are five religious festivals that should be on everybody’s bucket list.

Holi, Mathura, India

Every culture has its spring festival, even the ones that don’t experience winter. In Northern India, it’s Holi: the Festival of Color, which centers on the twin cities of Mathura and Vrindabana. Mathura is home to the largest temple in India consecrated to Krishna: the Hindu Apollo, lord of youth, beauty and music. Krishna was something of a hedonist: a bit of satyr mixed in with the handsome prince. Like Pan, he took delight in chasing shepherdesses about in woodland surroundings, playfully splashing them with water and throwing flower petals about. This is basically the sort of coy romantic pursuit that you see in a million Bollywood movies. Krishna’s water-antics sound delightful until thousands of people armed with super-soakers filled with food colouring get involved. Do not wear anything to Holi that you value: you are going to be mercilessly targeted all day and will come back looking like Martin Sheen at the end of ‘Apocalypse Now’. This is definitely a festival for the hardcore adventurer: a sludgy bacchanal reminiscent of Woodstock or a particularly bad year at Glastonbury. The photography is amazing but remember to keep your camera in a strong plastic bag, and, if you have issues with personal space or mess, stay away.

Holy Week, Seville, Spain.

Another ritual that seems common to most religions is that of carrying ponderous objects about the streets all day. In Seville, the objects are huge, priceless wooden effigies of Christ and the Virgin covered in gold leaf, crowned in thorns, swathed in velvet and encrusted with blood-red jewels and crystal tears. The endless processions snake through the narrow streets all day. Each proud Sevillano neighborhood is represented by a guild, exactly like the krewes at Mardi Gras. The ubiquitous penitent’s costume is a hooded mask with a pointed crown but despite what you think, it has no racial connotations whatsoever. Local men (and increasingly women,) prove their mettle by shouldering the crushing weight all day until their shoulders are callused and raw. The endless shuffling pauses intermittently as local women serenade the Virgin with saetas: dolorous flamenco ballads of great antiquity. Children run here and there through the crowds, collecting the dripping wax from huge candles into large balls. But it’s not all torture and gloom: the tapas bars do wild business in sizzling shrimp and endless tiny, icy glasses of beer. The celebrations go one and on into and through the night. If you survive, there will be hot chocolate and churros (long snakes of fried dough) in the morning.

 Easter Week, Jerusalem.

The Via Dolorosa (Way of Sorrows) stretches from the Mount of Olives though the narrow streets of the Jerusalem Old Quarter to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which purportedly stands on the Mount of Calvary where Christ was crucified. Apocryphal or not, it’s impossible not to be touched by the heavy hand of all those centuries of blood and faith, concentrated on this one spot. All week, heavy crosses are born along the route by murmuring pilgrims. The Church itself is a bat-haunted cavern with fissured walls, crumbling columns and flagstones spattered with tallow. It’s uneasily shared by most of the world’s major Christian sects. Ethiopians chant on the rooftop; Franciscans haunt the galleries; Coptic priests brood under the vaults. The focus is on the Crucifixion and the candle-lit interior is heavy with incense and chanting. It’s a haunting place that seems very far away from the smooth, gleaming world of Apple stores and online banking. You may not believe in god, but there’s no denying that you feel awed by the presence of time. However, if the brooding atmosphere gets too much for you, springtime in Jerusalem is undeniably beautiful so you can easily escape to the sparkling sunshine and fresh air.

 Sanja Matsura, Tokyo

Springtime in Japan means cherry-blossoms. The Sanja Matsura (‘Three Shrine Festival) is the largest Shinto festival in the world. Centered on the vast Sensō-ji temple in Tokyo, the festival is dedicated to the spirits of two fishermen who found a statue of a Buddhist saint in the Sumida river and, together with a local merchant, subsequently converted to Buddhism. The statue is now inside the temple. The ceremonies attract millions of visitors every year. Despite the throngs, the atmosphere is safe and pleasant. Huge bronze prayer bells clang and drums beat incessantly. Heavy Mikoshi shrines are carried around by burly men in the traditional costume of loincloth, short kimono, two-toed socks and wooden sandals, yelling the Japanese version of the haka. This is the one time of the year when the infamous Yakuza display their ornate tattoos to the world: so if you bump into a man crawling with fish and dragons, apologize. People drink oceans of sake and beer later, so you may see some Japanese businessmen getting unusually emotional in the afternoon and evening. Cast your fortune with the I Ching, win a goldfish, or sample some of the matchless Japanese street-food: if it can be caught, seasoned, grilled, and impaled on a stick: you will find it here.

 Croagh Patrick, Ireland.

Back home for the last one, which celebrates much that is wonderful and awful about Ireland. Croagh Patrick is a small but steep hill in Mayo made entirely of razor-sharp rocks. Saint Patrick came up here in 441AD to fast and get with the Lord, but it may also commemorate Lughnasadh (‘loo-na sa’): the ancient Celtic harvest festival. Pious Catholics are supposed to ‘Ooh’ and Ow’ their way barefoot up its slopes on ‘Reek Sunday’: the last Sunday in July. This may sound like summer but you can bet it’ll be as foggy and gray as any February morning. The mood is anything but solemn: there’s a definite feeling of ‘A Grand Day Out’ with chocolate biscuits and flasks of hot tea so strong ‘you could trot a mouse on it’. If you don’t feel up to bare feet, feel free to wear boots. Up to 30,000 people participate, led by the bishop of Tuam. The walk only takes a couple of hours but there are injuries and people taken ill every year, so it’s a busy time for the Gardaí and Rescue Services. Bring a stout walking stick and a rain poncho. You should really do this on a growling stomach and save the full Irish breakfast of sausages, eggs, pudding, bacon and a fried slice, for when you get back to the local snug. Ah sure, Jesus wouldn’t begrudge you a ham sandwich.

 

 

Holy Rollers: Five Religious Festivals 2014

Gadzooks, Naughty Varlet: the Michigan Renaissance Fair

A few weeks ago, we went to the remnants of the Michigan State Fair. I remember state fairs. They took place in large fields, where the grass was trampled flat on the hardened summer earth. There was corn-dogs and cotton candy and rides and enormous pigs and cattle and even larger pumpkins and marrows and loud-hailers making announcements about lost children and tug-of-war competitions and blue ribbons for everything.

Then they started to lose money as the countryside depopulated. In the interest of community togetherness and ‘giving something back’ corporations offered to bankroll the state fair. With that blindness to things that are banal and rubbish, these large, gray, complacent organizations decided that the State Fair should be moved to a suburb a stone’s throw from Detroit, and held in a cavernous aluminum warehouse with concrete floors, surrounded by strip-malls and lit with fluorescent tubing. Suburbanites drank Starbucks coffee as their children stared at somnolent rabbits dozing in cages. Commercial stalls are everywhere, selling those stupid gadgets you see on the shopping channel or emblazoned with advertisements for health insurance and iPhones. It was a terrible disappointment and a dismal shadow of what had once been a sunny day out on the farm. It wasn’t that something was missing. Nearly everything was missing: the only thing that was left was the pigs.

Hippies are real conservatives. They actually conserve things, and don’t allow market forces to strip-mine, privatize, bundle, short-sell and liquidate everything that isn’t nailed down. And the only real Mecca for hippies in these dark times is a Renaissance Festival: an irony-free zone where people who just like things: melodic metal, dressing up in robes, D&D, wenches carrying flagons of ale, tattoos in Sindarin Elvish, amethyst jewelry, and things written in olde tymey skrypt can come to indulge their simple pleasures. The huge popular success of Tolkien and ‘Game of Thones’ in recent years has undoubtedly had a rejuvenating effect on the Renaissance Fairs. Kids are lining up to get their photos taken kicking their heels on a replica of the Iron Throne of Westeros, though I’d be surprised if they’re allowed watch the show: all that brutal violence and sexposition. 

It’s about two in the afternoon and most events are in full swing. There is a lot of buying and selling going on, but the stalls all seem to be independently run and owned by the sort of artisans who travel from art-fair to festival around the country flogging their fares: pewter goblets writhing with sculpted dragons and snakes, fantasy art depicting bosomy barbarian women and pec-tacular barbarian men comparing chest measurements, flower fairies peeping out of cowslips and more dragons: scarlet, gold, emerald, onyx and copper. There are a lot of dreamy-looking girls selling handmade jewelry and candles, and some serious artisans selling hand-crafted (and wildly expensive) fantasy leather-work, boots and shoes. One full suit of molded leather armor costs $1500. The boots are knee-high, slightly kinky and run to over $200.

The armorers are doing a roaring trade in weapons that can’t really be called replicas, since these fantasy weapons were never swung by any soldier in history. Nor can they be classed as fake; they are expertly cast in flawless oiled steel. Burly men test their strength just hefting the larger battleaxes and war-hammers, and the counter is littered with daggers, poniards, maces, glaives, falchions, flails and even an few nasty looking sets of knuckledusters. Their craftsmanship is reflected in their costliness: the larger weapons run to hundreds of dollars, but it’s hard to see what you might do with them once you have them, bar hanging them over your mantle. It’s obvious that the buying power is considerable: the best weapons, leather-work, costumes, jewelry and art are astronomically expensive: luxury goods for the discerning barbarian marauder or Elf Queen. For those who are less picky about their rings of power and instruments of death, there is a pirate auction being held next door: a buccaneering fellow with a carrying patter is selling off lucky bags: you place your bid and, if you win, you might walk of with something shiny and razor-sharp at a knock-down price. He loudly warns us not to unwrap any of the parcels until we have left the fair: we can’t have impromptu duels starting: not with all this beer flowing.

Some folks are splendidly outfitted in rigs that must have run to hundreds of dollars; others are in aluminum foil and duct tape. Every little girl has a tiara and fairy wings, and every little boy has a sword, or vice versa: no oppressive gender norms in Fantasyland, thank you. Nearly everybody’s dressed up and I feel a bit grumpy that I hadn’t packed anything that clanks or swishes. I don’t even have a staff. But we’re not the only ones and you never feel that you’ve failed, or that people are looking at you funny.

This lack of disparagement is something that creeps up on you. As a society increasingly defined by dissatisfaction, we are so accustomed to thinking that you have to look a certain way at a meeting, at the beach, at a party or at the gym, that to enter an arena where that expectation is completely absent is initially disorientating. The only people who are getting pointed at are the ones who look particularly amazing: moving theater-sets and creations worthy of Jim Henson or Stan Winston: stilt-walking Ents, tattooed shamans, knights in full plate-male and wizards with real waist-length white beards that would put Saruman to shame. The children are literally squealing with delight, surrounded by adults who not only know how to play make-believe, but who know that the real secret to make-believe is that you have to take it seriously. Enjoyment is pervasive; mockery has taken a holiday.

The food is great, as long as you don’t mind getting a bit boozy and very greasy. Huge broiled turkey drumsticks are the snack du jour, with a long line at the barbecue. Near to the stall selling the amazing Barbarian Burgers (two-handed BIG, made from scratch ground-chop, and served on a proper crusty bread roll,) one of those wonderfully drunk couples is canoodling standing up, as much from a need to provide mutual support until the field stops pitching and spinning as from tender feelings. Grinning and red-eyed, they burble sweet-nothings at each other. Hopeless romantic that he is, the dude is complaining into her hair that, for the price they paid for the bracelet the girl is wearing, they could have gotten six more beers. I have to agree: the ale here is really good: nearly all hearty brown Michigan craft stuff: not a Coors or a Miller Lite to be seen. No wonder they’re merry. He’s increasingly making sense. She seems to agree. They stagger off, presumably to find Ye Olde Pawnebrokyr.

The centerpiece of the festival has to be the tourney ground. At midday, the heralds start tooting and the bleachers fill. Peter wants to move to a spot in the stands where the sun is behind him and he can get the best shots of the jousting. I stay where I am, not so much because the view is good (which it is) but because sitting (and occasionally standing,) in front of me are four dudes emitting a pleasant, green, cowshed smell. These guys are totally engrossed what is about to go down, and are getting each other psyched up for the smiting. The stands are divided according to knightly-loyalty. We are in the green sector but my dudes have taken a look at the green knight and decided that he is a rank noob unworthy of their patronage or fealty. They have thrown in with the red knight: a swarthy fellow with a chest like an oil drum and long lank hair. They huzzah him in terms that are not precisely medieval but are unmistakably supportive. His opponent, a preening, courtly fellow in blue, they subject to bitter scorn and many objectionable comparisons. He is busy currying their disfavor by kissing his glove, smirking and addressing the crowd as ‘good people’. 

When the Queen, in full Elizabeth I regalia, appears at her pavilion, the Blue Knight grovels effeminately and spouts phony poetry. He is obviously meant to be the bad guy. Green is the inexperienced one, red is the old stalwart. The challengers mount their horses and canter about a bit before heading to their respective ends of the tilting field. There is a little preliminary showing-off with rings thrown into the air, not all of which are caught on lances, and then the joust begins. Strangely, it turns out that Sir Oily Prancelot is not in fact going to get his buttocks presented to him. The knights thunder past each other a few time, walloping at each other with their swords, then they shatter a few lances and finally dismount for a bit of fun with morning-stars, people’s helmets getting spun around back-to-front, knees in the groin and belly, and a big whack on the head with a war hammer made of thumpy styrofoam. Green goes down first and then, to the chagrin of my hairy buddies, Sir Devon the Red gets it in the crown jewels, goes all glassy-eyed and slumps over on the grassy sward.

Roars of outrage and more unnecessary glove-kissing as the knavish blue knight is declared champion. Mayhap he’ll be trounced at the five-o-clock show.

Gadzooks, Naughty Varlet: the Michigan Renaissance Fair