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

Test Post from Charles Brennan

Test Post from Charles Brennan http://www.chazbrennan.com