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

American Gothic: True Detective (no spoilers, amazingly)

A friend of mine laughingly noted that ‘True Detective’ is a very good show about Matthew McConaughey’s cheekbones. This is both unfair and fair: people are raving about it because it is a very good police procedural; rich in atmosphere and skilful in manipulating narrative tropes. The difference between manipulating tropes and serving up cliches is that tropes are flexible and devious and make for compelling stories. Cliches just lie there clammy and motionless.

The cheekbone joke is pretty spot-on. ‘True Detective’ is undoubtedly McConaughey’s show and, though he shares acting and executive producing credits with Woody Harrelson, there is no doubt that if this story is about anything other than tracking a murderer, it is about watching the sharp angles of Matthew McConaughey’s skull push their way slowly out from behind the taut, bronzed, flirtatious mask that he wore for the first half of his career. In the recent ‘Dallas Buyers Club’, he was wire-thin and dancing with death but the flirt was still evident, struggling mulishly against death. In ‘True Detective’, what might once have been Detective Rustin Cohle is already long dead and has nothing at all to lose.

The story is related as a series of flashbacks to the Louisiana summer of 1995. Two detectives investigate the ritual murder of a prostitute who is found lashed to a tree, smeared with occult symbols and crowned with antlers. Though partners, they are not friends; they have barely spoken in the three months they have been working together. Cohle, a blow-in from Texas with a murky past and no conversation, is regarded with frustration and eye-rolling dislike by Martin Hart (Harrelson), a so-so family man intent on doing the job and getting home sane. ‘This place is like someone’s memory of a town, and the memory is fading” Cohle remarks at one point. The self-conscious writerliness of the line, uttered by a man with a name that might give Cormac McCarthy pause, is dragged back from the brink of parody by Harrelson, who sourly tells him to shut up saying nutty things before someone hears him.

The flashback device allows us the luxury of ignoring the mobile technology that harassed scriptwriters have worked hard to incorporate into recent drama. God how mobile ruin a story and jack the mood. Two men can sit in a car and attempt to have a conversation. The conversation takes a nihilistic turn and the discomfited family man tells the death’s head to shut up. ‘Let’s make this car a place of quiet reflection’ he suggests grumpily, and they both go back to looking out of the window. No phones. Just silence, pregnant with thought, and sunlight sliding over the windshield.

Nothing about this show feels particularly original, from the fecund yet mouldering Bible-belt landscapes to the boozy mismatched partners or the gruesome crime-scene. The components are all familiar; whatever is good about this lies in its assembly and in the way that Cohle’s damaged and depressed personality seems to the the root of a disease that is visibly overtaking the world. The idea that the Deep South is a putrid Eden where rottenness and violence are overlaid with warm sunshine and the smell of magnolia: this is a giant cliche, but it’s McConaughey’s performance that anchors that trope back the realm of myth. It’s thanks to him that we can accept the Gothic machismo and heavy symbolism.

Rustin Cohle (say it out loud) is a bereaved man with a history of alcoholism and heavy drug-abuse who still suffers from intermittent hallucinations and whose worldview is blackened by an overwhelming nihilism. The only reason he is still alive, even in 1995, is that he is ‘constitutionally unfit for suicide’. Yet there he is almost twenty years later, chain-smoking and drinking in the police station. And boy can he smoke: I haven’t seen a character on television pull on a cigarette with such desperate conviction in years.

’95 Cohle looks almost, but not quite like the bronzed surfer or idealistic young lawyer of McConaughey’s youth: fine-boned and a wavy-haired. Only close up does one see the webs of tiny lines crisscrossing his too-taut skin. Flash forward to the present and there’s a shock of mixed dismay and admiration as you notice how perfectly the actor and the make-up artists have conjured up the damage that twenty years of robotic alcoholism can do to a face. It’s not just the stringy grey-green hair and patina of broken veins on his cheeks and forehead nor even the rubbery softening of his entire face: an aura of loose and missing teeth. There’s also a new stiffness in his movements and long moments when it seems as if he has suddenly forgotten how to breath. ‘I live in a room behind a bar. I work four days a week and drink the rest’ I know who I am.’

Harrelson’s part is to play sounding-board to McConaughey’s emptiness, and to be threatened by the void that he represents. His 1995 persona leans forward with a pugnacious thrust-out chaw-bacca jaw and incredulous bug-eyes. Later, he sits back, hair gone, and lets his belly out. The subtle transformations in appearance and manner suggest volumes without giving the slightest clue about the narrative’s trajectory other than they have both, in some sense, survived. But it’s not over.

I promised no spoilers and, to be straight, I haven’t many to offer. There’s a missing child and creepy ‘Blair Witch’ tripods fashioned from creepery twigs. There’s a looming unctuous Reverend, brother to the governor, threatening a fundamentalist, anti-Satanic task-force. There’s seeping psilocybin skies and wheeling swarms of sparrows. There’s oil refineries fouling the horizon, burnt churches and pick-up bars lit pink and viridian. Perhaps best of all, there’s a lost diary with scrawled notes about seeing ‘The King in Yellow’ in the woods, which is about as classic a piece of American Gothic mythology as I can think of. For show so completely conjured from the junkyard of American popular culture and suffused with an atmosphere as rotten as it is torpid, it’s as taut, compelling and visually arousing a piece of television as I have seen in a very long while.

You give anything away, I’ll break your wrists.

American Gothic: True Detective (no spoilers, amazingly)

Venice: All the World is Drowning

Is it possible to write about Venice and not to be instantly inundated in a wash of received experience? Once, in the impossibly distant past, to be a Venetian was a glorious boast; thrown up on the shores of the Adriatic by the tidal wave that resulted after the foundations of the Roman Empire cracked, Venice was a shipwreck that became a legendary treasure house, a brothel and a labyrinth of intrigue. Like a starlet catapulted into the upper echelons of celebrity, her talent was no match for her self-promotion; she foundered as she rose and was poisoned on her own distorted sense of invincibility. Now she lies on her impossibly romantic deathbed, visited by an unending succession of pitying admirers, admiring her wasted face in the mirror of the waters that rises to suffocate her.

See how easily the pen bleeds purple as soon as you approach Venice? Is it a museum, a ruin or the largest artifact ever put on display? Even when the city was the navel of a huge muscular body of commerce stretching from Lisbon to the Far East, it luxuriated in myths. The Doges, gilded puppet rulers of the city, sailed out in their opulent barges to toss a precious ring into the waters of the Adriatic, symbol of the marriage of Venice and Neptune. Meanwhile, the city was ruled by an imperial rabble of merchant politicians, emeshing themselves into the story of their hydropolis like rats swarming aboard a sinking ship. The pillage of the Fourth Crusade heaped more artistic and aesthetic wealth on the city than it could bear and, wholly understandably, it began to sink. And it continues to subside in what must be the most lengthy and elegant decline that any great diva has ever been forced by circumstances to orchestrate.

Cliches abound; the city is a shivering mirage, a fleet of stone sails, a network of sewers, a graveyard, an empress, a courtesan, a scintillia of light and shade, the most durable and glorious error ever conceived. It was raining a thin cold sleet when I arrived. The winter breezes, laden with water, pushed and slid insistently up my trouser legs and trickled down my neck. Impossible to keep it out, the small gelid gusts provoked small moans of disbelief that anything so slight could be so icy. But one cannot arrive in the presence of the bride of the sea (see, there it goes again) huddled in the covered fibreglass compartment of a comfortless vaporetto; its perspex widows, dulled and scratched by salt and wind, making a foggy blur of the lights on the shore. Except there is no shore. No land to speak of at all. The buildings rise directly out of the black water (O, imagine falling in, imagine the icy pain!) like a Gothic stage effect: the ghost of the drowned maiden ascending from the tomb. Where are the foundations? A whole college of engineers can lecture me for a decade and I’ll still be shocked that the envious water doesn’t simply rise swiftly through the stone and bricks of the pallazzi and temples and tear them down, like a sugar cube set in a saucer of hot tea. No wonder the Romantics dashed themselves on reefs of rhetoric trying to describe it; it is the soul of the 19^th century sublime; a castle of Otranto, a drowned Gormenghast. Beauty distorted and paralyzed by terror, a princess on the rack.

It is late November. We are not staying in the city herself, but on the relatively solid land of the Lido, which actually qualifies as land and not some fairy reef. I’m glad. When I was younger, I read The Phantom of the Opera, proving that young people will often struggle with books that adults will shun as obscure and laborious. To be a Lloyd Webber musical is a fate that it thoroughly deserves. Yet the mental image of a Paris undermined by a labyrinth of warrens and vast caverns persists and even today, walking through the boulevards, those imaginary gulfs yawn under my feet. Likewise Venice feels as though it is spread on an impossible sheet of the thinnest ice over bottomless fathoms of dark water. You walk gingerly. One of the greatest persistent threats to the city is the boats which are its circulation and life; it has been found that the vibrations from the engines of the vessels which ply the lagoon are slowly, infinitesimally shaking the foundations of Venice to pieces. The ancient wooden piles that were sunk into the marshy islands, impervious to microscopic attack, are being slowly shivered to atoms. The sea-city is being killed by boats. Venice is the paramount example of an irremediable situation; the city cannot in the long term be saved, yet it must be. Priceless is to Venice as warm is to a supernova.

And nothing can be truly priceless that is safe; this is the pathos of beauty; it must decay or be defaced. On the third day of our stay, I saw a terrible sight that has become an everyday one to the Venetian; those who have elected to stay. Crossing the Piazza San Marco, chilly ranks of ogival arches pacing around the perimeter like cowled monks attending on the gorgeous parasitic bulk of the basilica, a thin layer of water was creeping across the smooth stones. Tourists stood on the makeshift gangplanks that are pulled out at these times, holding their little silver cameras up to capture the reflected light of the street lamps, admiring the mirror-effect. This is now a common occurrence; the waters used to rise twice a year; the average is now forty. This is terrifying. There is a famous modern painting that shows the end of the world. An everyday row of sepia houses occupies the left hand side of the canvas, and on the right; a vast motionless sea, rising by millimeters. No towering waves, no tempest, no Great Day of His Wroth. Just the familiar sea, rising and rising, refusing to retreat. One remembers a memorable quotation from the catastrophic Asian tsunami of this year: ‘it just wouldn’t stop. It just kept coming’. It just keeps coming.

If the wooden walkways are flimsy, other schemes to save Venice are magnificent and hopeless. Shortly before I arrived, the ‘amazing science’ story of the week was, coincidentally, a plan to pump vast quantities of water into the seabed deep under bneath the city. Seawater, ironically. It seems impossible: an intricate and fragile network of buildings being floated to safety, like a raft. But it is a certainty that the impossible be made possible if Venice is to be ultimately saved.

The goldoli of Venice are all crooked, expertly joined to curve gently to the right. Their shape offsets the effects of the oar, which is mounted on a rowlock on the right, pushing to the left. Their glossy, luxuriant and uniform black is the result of a venerable decree of the old Venetians that they should not become vehicles for displays of personal wealth and status. Writers inevitably liken them to coffins.

 

Venice: All the World is Drowning

Chasing the Dragon: Tet in Saigon

I arrive in Saigon (cumbersomely renamed Ho Chi Minh City) on a shuddering propeller flight courtesy of Cambodia Air. I hate propellers; they always seem dangerously ramshackle. I spend most of the short flight avoiding the window.

Traditionally, New Years Day in the West is devoted to an ideal of renewal and fresh starts. ‘Out with the old, in with the new’ is the cliché on everyone’s lips. But, as bells ring and champagne corks fly, many people are overcome with dejection. They meditate on the passage of time, worry about their weight and fumble for the aspirin. Resolutions made in good faith are quickly forgotten.
The ceremonies of Tet Nguyen Dan, the Vietnamese New Year, celebrated with special magnificence in Saigon, take a different approach. Through active rituals of cleansing and change, people cement their resolve, fixing their eyes clearly on the future. To this end the week preceding the New Year bustles with activity. People scour their homes; floors are swept and scrubbed; walls freshly painted. The rubbish of the year past is thrown out and burnt. Everyone gets haircuts and new clothing. Families reunite and perform rites honoring ancestors. Grudges are forgiven, debts settled, charity is omnipresent.

A Taoist-Buddhist mythology of order and justice underpins these activities. A week before Tet, a celestial ceremony called Le Tao Quan occurs. The Tao Quan is a single holy entity formed by three spirits associated with the hearth and domestic happiness. 

 

The Taoist legend of the Tao Quan tells the story of a happy couple fallen on hard times. The woodcutter husband, demoralized by his inability to provide food for his household, begins to drink heavily and becomes cruel and tyrannical. Unable to bear his abuse, his wife abandons him. Years pass and the wife marries again, this time to a hunter. One day, while her husband is out in the forest, the wife receives a beggar at the door and invites him in for food. As he eats they recognize each other and are filled with pity and remorse. On hearing the hunter returning, she hides the prodigal under a pile of straw. Entering, the hunter suspects something and sets the straw alight to roast game. The former husband remains silent and his wife realizes he is burning quietly to death, unwilling to shatter her present happiness. Overcome with pity the wife throws herself upon the pyre. The horrified hunter believes that he has driven his wife to her death through some cruelty. He too hurls himself into the flames. All three are consumed.

 

Touched by the loyalty and self-sacrifice of the three, the Jade Emperor, divine judge, elevates them to gods. As the Tao Quan, three souls bound as one, they are charged by the heavenly ruler to visit household hearths and to safeguard the well-being of the home. A week before the New Year, on the festival of Le Tao Quan, the three gods ascend heavenward on golden fish. There, they report on the state of each household to the Jade Emperor. Based on their reports, the Emperor dispenses good fortune to virtuous households for the coming year. Every household strives to behave well and appear its very best at Le Tao Quan.

 

The hotel we’re stiting in is a slender pink concrete brick, like a slice of strawberry ice-cream, jutting out of a labyrinth of market stalls. The rounding streets are a pungent stew of odors: of fruit, vegetables, fish, poultry, people, and the fumes from scooters. Here in Duong Nguyen Thau Hoc people come to buy provisions for the three-day holiday that many carry on for a full week. During this period the Vietnamese eat and drink better than they will for the rest of the year. Poorer citizens scrimp and save all year to to be able to afford the required ritual items to enjoy the Tet holiday in style.

Many of the fruits and flowers on sale are a symbolic and seasonal part of Tet. Baskets are heaped with the crisp pink-skinned Chinese apple-pears, or the scarlet-and-jade-green dragon fruit whose spiky pods open onto milk-white flesh. Watermelons are another seasonal favorite and piles of them form emerald ramparts along the sidewalks.

In other parts of Saigon, temporary forests spring up where peach and plum trees blossom. These trees, like the conifers sold at Christmas in the West, are an indispensable part of Tet. Wealthy people buy full-sized trees in heavy wooden tubs that require trucks to transport. Poorer people make do with tabletop miniatures, carried home nestling in their laps as they peddle, or lean back in rickshaws. 

By New Year’s Eve, all the blossom trees, fruit and decorations have found new homes and the market is emptying. Beginning in the morning, people everywhere hurry to gather up every shred of garbage and hose down pavements. Looking down from my balcony, I struggle to remember how it looked yesterday, with streets a seething mass of yammering commerce. By the time the sun reaches its zenith, the streets stretch wide, empty, arid and silent. 

Now it is Le Tao Quan; everybody is at home, quietly celebrating the rituals of hearth and family. Watching a bony dog foraging for scraps, I feel a little lonely. I even miss the rickshaw-drivers incessantly touting for fares. This evening, the Tao Quan will return from heaven, riding their golden fish down to the world to dispense the New Year’s fortune. The atmosphere in the streets is sleepy yet expectant. I mooch about for a while but find nothing going on, and trudge back to my hotel to drink a Tiger beer or two out of the mini-bar before falling asleep.

When I wake, the square of light in the window has faded to a dusky violet. I grope for my watch: eight-thirty! Cursing inwardly, I splash on cold water, run my fingers through my hair, grab my bag and dive out the door. The streets are dimly lit with neon and sodium. The crowds have reemerged and their movements, brisk and deliberate, all lead in one direction. I fall in and march across busy intersections southward as the crowds converge. 

Thousands of scooters hum past in great waves. Young couples ride on some, while others are weighted down with families of five. Everyone is immaculately groomed, dressed in crisp silk or spotless cotton. Tet Nguyen Dan is everybody’s birthday; all of Vietnam celebrates growing a year older at Tet. So tonight is everyone’s party and celebration is compulsory. Many have saved for months in order to afford this birthday blowout.

The crowds thicken as I draw closer to the commercial center of the city, where the flaking French colonial palace of the old Hotel de Ville is theatrically lit, contrasting with the red balloons bobbing and tugging from trees and railings, clutched in chubby fists and tethered to the pillions of motorbikes. These lend the scene a festive but decidedly communist atmosphere more of the northern capital Hanoi, than Saigon, its decadent southern counterpart.

I soon discover, however, that this is not a political rally: red is the color of prosperity. Children run about clutching Li Xi: red paper envelopes embellished with gold lettering. These are to be filled with ‘lucky money’ by family and friends and I try to oblige with a few dong whenever I’m asked. 

The crowds pour towards the docks.

For centuries, Asians have traditionally used fireworks to frighten off evil spirits with loud noise. Although the government banned the personal use of firecrackers in 1998, people do their best to replace them with drums and gongs, hammering out an unrelenting din. As the density of people and mopeds becomes critical, I find a spot and stay put. Nearby stalls are selling such delicious Vietnamese finger-food as fried squid, egg rolls and the Tet specialty; Banh Chung—sticky rice cakes filled with pork and mung beans, resembling parcels wrapped in their banana leaf pouches.

Without a countdown or warning the fireworks begin on the stroke of midnight. Starting intermittently, the detonations intensify until individual cracks and pops merge into a soft overwhelming roar of sound. Every neck is craned back. The sound thunders off buildings lining the quays, and glass office-blocks leap forth brilliantly from the darkness. The crowd watches calmly until the last sparks fade. The street fills with a sudden communal roar as several thousand mopeds get kicked-started into life. Within twenty minutes, the tens of thousands have dispersed into the night without the slightest hitch. 

Through lamp-lit windows and doorways people are seen celebrating Giao Tua, the ushering in of the New Year. On the doorsteps stand little pagodas: model shrines where people lay out food offerings for ancestral spirits and burn incense and votive candles. People kindle small bonfires in the gutter where are incinerated such detritus of the past year as old bills and letters bearing bad news.

The New Year starts with a day of dazzling sunshine. The Vietnamese consider the first person to cross the threshold of the home on New Year’s Day as extremely important to the family’s wellbeing. The first visitor of the year can bring either good or evil luck on the household. Therefore families strive to ensure that the first visitor is someone happy and prosperous, influential, healthy and possessed of a large family. The household shares in the visitors’ good fortune. The poor, ineffectual, sick, lame and barren may find themselves barred from entering the home at this time, although they can expect every kindness otherwise.

I discover I am very much in demand. At curb-sides, people of all ages sit around tables in the sun. They wave me over to them with loud shouts of greeting.

Slightly embarrassed, since I am unable to return the favor with conversation, I accept the cups of beer offered by each of the seated men. Refusing their hospitality would not only be unlucky but horribly rude. After weaving my way from one side of the street to the other I try to make a break for the commercial district only to find myself corralled by a group of local buddies.

These fellows demand that I drink from each of their glasses before providing me with my own. They then go to some lengths to ensure that it never gets more than half empty. Blocks of dubious looking ice bob in the booze. The conversation goes extremely well, despite consisting entirely of laughing, pointing at things and occasionally shouting ‘Chuc Mung Nam Moi!’ I make a present of my sunglasses to a small boy and get a novelty cigarette in return. A wiry middle-aged man performs a cabaret tune. Though the song is in Vietnamese, I recognize the arched wheedling tone. Thwe whole and everyone roars with laughter at the smutty parts, which he emphasizes with fluttering eyelids and suggestive hand gestures. 

A woman comes out and passes various dishes of food around the table. The soups and mixed dishes look a little suspect and doctors’ warnings echo distantly in my mind. I decide upon a small hard-boiled quail’s egg as the least threatening, rolling it until it cracks. Out seeps a dark brownish gruel. The entire table and most of the street sense my discomfort; everyone pauses to watch as I pick the shell apart revealing the hard-boiled remains of a half-formed bird embryo, complete with bulging eyes and damp feathers.

Full of Dutch courage and a desire not to embarrass myself, I half close my eyes and push it between my teeth. It tastes like egg and feels like a mushroom. The atmosphere relaxes. Vaguely disgusted, and yet perversely proud I crack a few more and join in the rest of the meal.

After the fifteenth attempt at emptying my glass, amiably foiled every time, the room is teetering off -balance and I’m certain it’s time to leave. Improvising a clumsy pantomime of my intentions I haul myself upright. A moment passes before I realize just how soused I am. With a final addled wave, I march off with the stiff-legged gait of the self-conscious inebriate.

Lurking in the gloom of the nearest Internet café, I drain my sixth cup of fragrant Vietnamese espresso and shudder visibly. The national brew goes down like sweet spring water and then causes uncontrollable trembling and waves of perspiration. But like a black sledgehammer, it sweeps the alcohol out of me. 

 

The sun vanishes behind sullen mauve clouds every afternoon as the humidity and heat peaks. A half-hour cloudburst follows and then the sun reemerges to boil the pavements dry. Travelers hunching over computer terminals pack the café as they send updates, trying to inspire envy in their friends at home. I sit for a while trying out my various motor functions. I’m a little twitchy and my vision is darting about a bit, but I seem much improved. The steaming streets smell of stewing vegetation. The effects of the morning’s iexcess may have worn off, but I still feel a bit seedy and decide to make a pilgrimage down to the temple district and atone for my sins. 

Tet Nguyen Dan is a busy day in Vietnamese temples; almost the entire population of the country pours through their gates in a continuous torrent of boisterous piety. Outside the temples, monks and nuns solicit alms from the faithful. Temporary stalls sell gigantic sticks and bundles of incense, bound in gold and red paper and covered in good-luck symbols. The largest sticks stand over four feet tall and as thick as a child’s arm. Lit, the pungent smoke billows from them as from a locomotive. 

That heavy, sweet small is everywhere inside. Everyone carries incense and from the ceiling hang dozens of huge conical spirals of the stuff, like coils for monstrous mosquitos. Despite the efforts of a huge extractor fan, my eyes sting. Through the smoky gloom, soot-blackened Buddhas and Bodhisvattas smile beatifically, flanked by wild-eyed guardian spirits with demonic lion-faces brandishing fearsome weapons. Flowers and gaudy plastic decorations array the shrines and carved dragons coil about their feet. The walls whisper with prayer slips set fluttering by the fans. I find some slips inscribed in English and French in gold and silver ink. One catches my eye, ‘For Granny, who has cancer. Love Aoife, Cork, Ireland.’

Buddhism has no taboos against outsider participation. For this reason, non-Buddhists might find themselves taking part in some rituals and often sensing a benefit from this inclusion. The concept of the infidel is alien to Buddhist philosophy and although leading an exemplary life is highly respected, aggressive evangelizing is unheard-of. Rules governing dress and deportment in temples have less to do with dogma than with common courtesy. You remove your shoes as you would before entering any house and avoid rude gestures and those denoting bad luck. In general, don’t point or wiggle your fingers.

The fireworks last night drove out demons; the ceremonies today welcome in spirits of justice, mercy, charity and good fortune. 

Famed worldwide, the ‘dragon’ dances serve this purpose as well as provide spectacles of color, sound and artistry. It’s interesting that the ‘dragons’ of these dances are now called ‘unicorns’. Western tradition associates draco with evil and havoc. Asian myths, however, depict dragons, with their undulating ribbon bodies, curly horns and whiskered faces, as heavenly emissaries, creatures of pure dignity and virtue. The use of the word ‘unicorn’ best suggests the Asian dragon’s actual parallel in the West.

Unicorn dance troupes shake out their tangled ribbons at around six-o-clock in the morning. Still cool, the streets fill with lemon-yellow sunshine as troupes release their serpents from trucks driven into the temple districts. The dancers dress in shiny scarlet and saffron costumes and their unicorns gleam fifty feet long with gold braid, silk and baubles. Carried on long poles above the heads of the crowd, the procession begins to circle and double back on itself in a series of complex convolutions. The courtyard in front of the temple becomes a churning sea of colour as the dance intensifies. The great head of the monster, with its wide toothy smile and bulging eyes, repeatedly vanishes beneath the coils of its body…and then thrusts skyward with a bunching and stretching of acrobatic muscles only to sink back into the swirling mass. 

These upward leapers snatch gifts of money and food held out the high windows. With these donations, the troupe trains, makes repairs and parties. Dancers prepare the displays and rehearse their sinuous moves for months until their technique is flawless. Ot of the multitude, one creature is born. After a long mesmerizing performance they slow down and slink their way into the temple where the dragon and its dancers bow before idols and wash in incense. 

Each unicorn troupe belongs to a different neighborhood. The troupe’s virtuosity inspires local pride when they best other troupes in amiable competition. Each troupe visits several temples during the morning. They then take a break during the hottest part of the day and take to the streets again after the downpour cools things off. 

They arrive unannounced, like all fortune: good or bad. Accompanying the unicorn dances are several less magnificent spin-offs. Pairs of dancers stamp around the edges of the main formation costumed as fierce lion dogs. They poke their heads in through windows, clap their wooden jaws and bounce in and out of shops gathering donations. The gathered children squeal with delight as the lions charge and snap at them.

As the sun sets on the First Day, a feeling of renewal fills the streets of Saigon. People stroll homewards with serene expressions. They have completed all the necessary rituals. I sense nothing of anti-climax or of disappointment; instead, a sense of optimism and order pervades. Observing Tet seems to exert a genuinely beneficial influence on the Vietnamese.

Rarely have I witnessed a popular religious observance whose social influence is so gentle and yet profound. Here at Tet, religious ceremonies are enacted that are deeply enjoyable and personally elevating. Rituals that liberate individuals from the past without forgetting enable everybody to move into the future without bitterness.

 

“Chuc Mung Nam Moi!

 

Chasing the Dragon: Tet in Saigon

Everything is Awesome: The Lego Movie

First of all, lets get one thing straight: it’s LEGO. It’s always LEGO. There is only LEGO. There are no LEGOS. The small objects that you connect together are LEGO bricks.

Sorry for getting a bit Lord/President Business on you all but this bit of linguistic pedantry has a point. The word LEGO is contracted from the Danish phrase ‘Leg godt’, which means ‘play well’. The elegant appeal of LEGO, as anybody born in the last fifty years knows, is in its blend of uniformity and variation, wholeness and fragmentation, labour and play.

Any LEGO brick manufactured at any time can interconnect with any other brick. They are unimaginably profuse: there are only 200 billion US pennies in circulation at this moment but 400 billion LEGO bricks have been manufactured since 1949. Admittedly many of these bricks have been chewed up by dogs, lost down drains and in sandpits, disappeared down lavatories (after navigating their way through infant digestive canals,) and been thrown out of windows by enraged parents who have stepped out of the shower only to find one suddenly lodged in the pain center of the foot.

But they are all one. They are all LEGO and there is no brick that is not LEGO: there are no ‘other’ LEGOS.

This interplay between conformity and bubbling variation, this brickolage, has become a part of our collective consciousness. When geneticists speak of DNA being ‘the building blocks of life’, who doesn’t visualise the double helix as a model built of multicolored plastic units? In some sense, we imagine that the universe must fit together in as rational a way as LEGO. It is a dream of ordnung: LEGO snaps together with a satisfactory sound of mini-completion that is denied to bricks of stone, clay or wood. It is the sound of rightness: a child’s first intimation of success.

LEGO poster 1981

The very best toy commercial in poster form is the one that shows a sturdy little red-haired girl in dungarees beaming mischievously from behind her LEGO creation. The inevitable, idiotic, adult question is predicted, evaluated and dismissed by the tag-line: ‘What it is, is beautiful.’ From its earliest days, LEGO has been marketed not as a simple object or objects in itself, nor even as a complex system (thought it is both,) but as a conduit for infant thought: an expression of pure creativity. It is the only thing of plastic that has ever rivaled the crayon, and is regularly voted the greatest toy ever manufactured in the age of mass-production and precision engineering. The absence of LEGO from a house where children live is now charged as a form of criminal neglect under European law.

That last part is not true. But I bet a part of you thinks it should be.

The company itself has been through some tough times, though that seems hard to believe today. Still privately owned, it has faced bankruptcy on at least one occasion, and rebuilt itself, not by selling its soul but by making fundamental changes to what we can happily call its business model.

During the 80s, kit-based LEGO appeared, with a picture on the box of the one object that the bricks included would certainly make if you followed the instructions. I had one of these kits: an early LEGO castle in uniform grey, which I broke down and reassembled, following the detailed instructions, (it must be said that LEGO instructions are themselves masterpieces of lucid technical drawing,) and can testify to an sense of anticlimax. My LEGO castle literally gathered dust from then on. A friend of mine used quite blatantly to invite himself over for the sole and obvious purpose of ‘playing with’ my LEGO castle. By playing with it, he meant playing around it and admiring its little portcullis and drawbridge (raised and lowered with thread: a minor cheat,) its prison cell and trapdoor; its rigid little plastic pennons fluttering in the non-breeze. But he never suggested pulling it to bits and making anything else. And its uniformly grey bricks and prefabricated wall-panels with their little arrow slits, never got mixed into the basket of coloured LEGO. The idea was unthinkable. It was a thing apart.

Then came LEGO Technic, which included gears and other moving parts as well as a power source that made the whole thing move. All very well for the advanced builder and LEGO engineer but still marketed with the implicit assumption that the picture on the box was, if not the only thing that could be made with the pieces, then surely the biggest and best thing.

The new LEGO movie deals, quite skillfully, with the problems of LEGO’s uniformity and variation, and the problems that arise when the two overlap, interlock, and click. The story is a tried and true formula straight off the back of the box: an insignificant LEGO everyman, considered dull even by the standards of his colleagues, happens across a source of power that threatens the rule of Lord Business, a Legolomaniac obsessed with conformity, division and perfection in the universe of little plastic blocks. Assisted by an assortment of LEGO comrades, our little nobody develops himself as a person whilst thwarting the not-so-dark Lord’s plans to literally glue the world together into immoveable stasis.

The movie is not really a movie at all, but quite simply the greatest, funniest and most ravishing commercial ever made for the world’s most beloved plaything. The longevity, nostalgia, pleasure and reverence that LEGO represents means that people have quite simply forgotten that LEGO is a brand, like Starbucks or L’Oreal. Decades of happiness have invested LEGO with a significance that crosses boundaries of race and culture, overcomes the generation gap and invests it with an almost sacred power. The cast is packed with brilliant comic voice-actors in the service of a script so bursting with jokes and visual gags that, no matter how fast the visuals race, they always seem to be one step behind the writing.

And HOW the visuals race. At certain points, something about what I was looking at almost frightened me. Let’s call it the fear of myriad. How many of us, as children, sat staring at raindrops on a window pane and suddenly realized that each one contained a mirror image of the observer? Or examined one grain of sand, and then looked up at the beach and saw it, and realised that this is ALL REAL: this is a world made of parts so tiny, and so many, and interweaving in a pattern so mysterious that just brushing the idea filled one with a holy dread? Stars, planets, gases, rocks, me, germs, molecules, atoms, quarks, up, down, bottom, top, strange, charm.

Everything is…wait for it.

The LEGO Movie perhaps accidentally evokes that awe; engineering an atomic world of tiny parts in constant flux: there is an image of a LEGO sea, slate-grey and heaving, that stopped my breath. The entire film is thronged with comparable images of vastness: still or in motion, contending ceaselessly with the intricate fabric of its own creation. LEGO explosions, LEGO splashes of water, LEGO waving and swelling and bursting and shrinking and rearing up and collapsing.

It’s terrifying, and it’s enormous fun.

I’m not in the spoiler business but let me say that the movie does a pretty good job of reconciling LEGO’s strange contradictions, the chief one being the tension between the inherent discipline that LEGO represents (particularly when following the instructions,) and the freedom it once promised. Lets just say that tyranny is understood, forgiven, and allowed to disassemble itself, rather than be smashed to pieces. The LEGO man triumphs over ignorance, rather than evil. Creativity’s mandate is restored and disaster averted.

Along the way, the movie pays homage to recognizable types of LEGO, including the many hilarious pop-cultural tie-ins (Batman, Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings,) that have made the LEGO video games an enormous success. The fact that video games are diametrically opposed to the most basic principles of LEGO is ignored in plain view, or at least pushed to the side. So, as eye-popping, unstoppable and clever as the LEGO movie is, there’s no escaping a basic problem.

Delirious passive entertainments like this movie, and semi-passive diversions like the LEGO video games ultimately undermine and overcome the simple, quiet satisfactions of LEGO itself. LEGO is not this kind of fun at all. LEGO does not rage unchecked, dance, collapse or explode with tremendous detonations. LEGO is a child sitting engrossed on the carpet over something only they can see, and the only sound that breaks the silence of concentration is the rattle of a hand in the bricks and a quiet click.

LEGO is big business but it’s also little busy-ness, and the film never really squares that circle, no matter how hard it tries.

The contradiction at the heart of The LEGO Movie is encapsulated by the maddening jingle, performed by hipster favorites Tegan and Sarah, and jock-hipster favorites The Lonely Island, that pervades the movie. Is it meant to be idiotic? The LEGO people seem to hate it and love it at the same time: it’s virtually an anthem to conformity and mindless positivism, brimming with all that snort-worthy nonsense about ‘living our dreams’ that everybody seems to hate and nobody seems able to get rid of.  It’s a irresistible anti-parody, as addictive and deadly as sugar . You can’t stop humming it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StTqXEQ2l-Y

LEGO movies and console games do not make children want to play with LEGO: they make them want to see more movies and play more console games. LEGO’s true successor is Mindcraft: which is true virtual LEGO: communal, organic,  boundless, and incomprehensible to most adults. The LEGO movie is a brilliant entertainment, and some say it is a brilliant commercial, but I think the only thing it is really advertising is itself, or an idea of LEGO that is rooted in parental nostalgia.

It is mostly definitely awesome, in both the literal and the modern, degraded sense of that once-powerful word.

And perhaps what it is, is beautiful.

But is it really LEGO?

Everything is Awesome: The Lego Movie