How I Met Your Mother Comes To E4

Mark it in your diaries: September 4th. The best US sitcom since Frasier is finally coming to the UK (albeit four seasons behind). After repeating Friends until I can just about quote every line of all ten seasons, E4 have finally bought How I Met Your Mother. BBC bought the first season a few years ago and killed it stone dead by showing it at 3 in the morning, and I only in the past year or so rediscovered it.
At first it seems like little more than a Friends clone, but by the end of season one, you will - I personally guarantee this - be utterly addicted and invested in the characters. It's frequently hilarious, always has a least one perfect quotable for the rest of the week moment, and, as it goes on becomes as perfectly poignant as Frasier used to be.
There are far too many highlights to name: The Slap Bet, The Bro Code, Marshall and Lily's wedding, Robin Sparkles...
And nothing can prepare you for Barney Stinson. He's Legen- wait for it - dary.
Here's a clip from one of my favourite episodes...

Harvey

"Years ago, my mother used to say to me, she'd say: 'In this world, Elwood,' she always used to call me Elwood. 'In this world, Elwood, you must be oh, so smart or oh, so pleasant.' Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. And you can quote me."
A story about an alcoholic dreamer with a giant invisible white rabbit as a friend. Sell that these days and think about all the ways that Hollywood could (and would) spoil it.
Luckily we'll always have Harvey, possibly James Stewart's finest hour (and considering his incredible career, that's really saying something), and one of the most gentle, magical, moving and downright luminous films ever made.
I don't need to say anything more about this film. I loved it as a child and, seeing it again tonight, I loved it even more. One of the most wonderful and beguiling movies ever made.
And Stewart's speech about sitting in a bar and meeting strangers is a sublime reminder for the creatively bankrupt movie makers of Hollywood about the power of words...

"Harvey and I sit in the bars... have a drink or two... play the juke box. And soon the faces of all the other people they turn toward mine and they smile. And they're saying, "We don't know your name, mister, but you're a very nice fella." Harvey and I warm ourselves in all these golden moments. We've entered as strangers - soon we have friends. And they come over... and they sit with us... and they drink with us... and they talk to us. They tell about the big terrible things they've done and the big wonderful things they'll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar. And then I introduce them to Harvey... and he's bigger and grander than anything they offer me. And when they leave, they leave impressed. The same people seldom come back; but that's envy, my dear. There's a little bit of envy in the best of us. "

John Hughes

I always thought John Hughes might have a classic comeback movie in him one day, but alas it's not to be. Despite some diminishing returns late in his career, he was nonetheless responsible for some classic comedy: The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Uncle Buck and National Lampoon's Vacation (both sublime comedy films in my estimation), She's Having A Baby (an often overlooked gem of a film) and Planes, Trains and Automobiles (which is one of those films that I could watch again and again.)
I can't think of a better tribute than a clip from my favourite Hughes movie.

They Don't Make 'Em Like They Used To...

It's true. They really don't make them like they used to. After seeing some pretty lame fare (and to be honest, I can't even recall what it was that set me off) I decided that it was high time to go back and either rediscover some old classic movies that I'd seen as a young man (and probably didn't fully appreciate), or have my mind blown by one that I'd never managed to see.

I've devoted a shelf of late to these classics, as they've begun to monopolise my movie watching interests. Why sit down to something pedestrian and disappointing (as, lets be honest, is pretty much 90% of formulaic A to B to C modern movie making these days) when you can put on a movie starring Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant or Audrey Hepburn, and be pretty much 100% assured of a thumping good hour and a half?

I'm not going to review them in any great detail, as movies like these have pages and pages devoted to their charms in film theory books and websites already. So a list of the delights we've savoured over the past few weeks...

North By Northwest

There's a rapidly expanding place for Hitchcock movies on my shelf. I've already got the classic Hollywood era films - Rear Window, The Birds, the utterly sublime (and my personal favourite) Vertigo, Notorious (which is in the to-watch pile for the next week) and Psycho (which I just got hold of, and I simply could watch every day). But North by Northwest is one of Hitch's films that I never could get on with for some reason.

But having obtained it for a couple of quid this week off Amazon, and re-watching it, I realised two things: One: It's bloody awesome. Two: Cary Grant - they just don't make movie stars as luminous as him these days do they? and Three: I realised that whenver I'd seen it previously, I'd missed the first part of the movie and was always subsequently confused as to what the hell was going on. With this realisation out of the way, I sat back, enjoyed it and discovered it was easily up there with Hitch's greatest movies. It just glows with genius and Hollywood magic.

Doctor Zhivago

A confession: until last week I'd never seen a David Lean movie all the way through. I'd seen bits and pieces of Bridge On The River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia and Zhivago as a child, but never really had the patience for them. I was young and to be fair, they are all at least three days long. The Director's Cut of Lawrence of Arabia that I picked up last week will take you a fortnight to get through, and I'm only just joking. They're long.

But I set three hours aside last week and sat back with Doctor Zhivago, which of course, is sumptuous, sprawling and self indulgent. But those three hours simply fly by. Lean was a master craftsman. Even with a rather diluted view of Russian history in service to an epic love story, it's a quite staggering piece of cinema for its detail and period set-pieces. Julie Christie, Omar Shariff, Rod Steiger, Alec Guiness and Tom Courtney: five perfect reasons to watch this movie alone. Amazing. I felt richer for having seen it. And I bet you don't get that with Transformers: Rise of the Fallen...

Funny Face

Put an Audrey Hepburn film on and I'll be entertained for 90 minutes. I've had this one knocking around for a while, but hadn't quite had the enthusiasm for it as I'd had for Breakfast at Tiffany's or Roman Holiday (probably my favourite film of all time at this present moment) or Sabrina.

It's a musical for one thing. I'm not a huge fan of musicals but I'm warming to them slowly. And I'd never seen Fred Astaire in the proper sense. I'd seen bit and pieces of him with Ginger Rogers as a child, but never really seen his work.

But after seeing Funny Face, I'm getting closer to liking musicals. This is filled with exquisite Gershwin songs and quite simly stunning choreography. I knew Astaire could dance, but my god, I didn't realise just how good he was. Literally jaw-droppingly good. He makes Strictly Come Dancing pro's look like me dancing. Although he knocking on for 60, while Hepburn was in her 20's, they still manage to make this majestic musical comedy romance work, and work beautifully. An absolute feast for the senses.

The Third Man

Another movie that I knew all about but had never seen. I watched this last night, and the imagery is still swarming around my head. The greatest British movie ever made? Quite possibly. There are few films quite so noir as this one. Orson Welles has less than half of the movie in screentime, but his prescence fills the movie. His entrance is sublime movie magic. He's charm and reptile all rolled into one. The cinematography casts post-war Vienna in a nightmarishly angled light (or darkness) and the soundtrack of Anton Karas's zither is one of the absolute great soundtracks. Filled with tension and some sublime set pieces, this is absolutely the classic everyone says it is. Shame about the 90 minute documentary on the second disc though. It drags with a pretentious and ponderous weight. Everything that was said could have been said in 30 minutes.

Sunset Boulevard

Any student of cinema, amateur or otherwise, should point to Billy Wilder as one of the greatest (and subtly subversive) movie directors of all time.

Sunset Boulevard is generally regarded as the best film ever made about Hollywood. This story of a faded movie star and a struggling screenwriter is, like most of Wilder's work, absolutely timeless. He was a writer and director who was years ahead of his time. Consider a career that covers Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Sabrina, Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard (to name but a few). This man was a genius. Everything I've seen of his stuns me, and he's beginning to woo me away from Hitchcock as the auteur to collect. Gloria Swanson ("I'm ready for my close-up") is a washed up actress, playing a washed up actress. Her servant is a washed up director playing a washed up director. And William Holden is a washed up actor, playing a washed up screenwriter (after being spurned by Audrey Hepburn, he turned to drink and barely recovered, save for this career defining performance). This Special Edition has some excellent docs and features on it too. Well worth a couple of quid off Amazon.

I haven't been keeping up with the blog of late as I'm still ploughing through the short novel I'm writing (150 pages and counting so far!), but I'll try to cover the next batch of movies I have waiting in the wings: Paris When It Sizzles, Notorious, Lawrence of Arabia, Eyes Without A Face, Brief Encounter, Charade and The Barefoot Contessa.

The Death of Bunny Munro

This sounds fantastic. Nick Cave's new novel, The Death of Bunny Munro is to be released in September, and the man himself is doing a series of events comprising music and readings to promote it.

The Audiobook looks very interesting too, as it features a specially composed soundtrack by Cave and Warren Ellis, using a '3D Spatial mix'. The excerpts on the website sound cool. Very twisted black humour. Definitely one not to miss...

Definitely Maybe

I like the occasional romantic comedy every now and then, especially when they're as good as Definitely Maybe. Coming from the Working Title stable (Love Actually, Notting Hill etc) Definitely Maybe manages to side-step all those usual A-Z cliches of Rom-Coms, while still being sweet and funny and managing to tick all the boxes any casual film-goer would expect.
I've always been a fan of Ryan Reynolds, from way back in his sit-com days when he starred in a show called Two Guys and A Girl, which never really got a decent airing over here in the UK, and still hasn't ever seen a release on DVD anywhere. It started out as a Friends clone, but evolved into a very funny ensemble show, and also introduced the world to the charms of Mr Nathan Fillion. But Reynolds always stood out, and I expected him to have a huge movie career. But he's been saddled with some pretty shoddy vehicles over the years.
Definitely Maybe kind of slipped under the radar upon release, possibly due to its slightly-smarter-than-the-average-bear credentials. But it's an excellent film.
The story is mainly told in flashback, as Reynolds' daughter in the film (played by the wonderful Little Miss Sunshine's Abigal Breslin) quizzes him as to how he met his mother, who he’s in the process of getting a divorce from. Reynolds' tale follows three failed romances - with college sweetheart Emily (Elizabeth Banks), free spirit April (Isla Fisher), and ambitious intellectual Summer (Rachel Weisz) - and the film holds back on revealing the answer to its mysteries until pretty much the final reel.
It's not laugh out loud funny, but it carries a little more weight than your standard rom-com and by the end leaves you feeling that you've seen something with a little more substance than usual. The cast are excellent, particularly Isla Fisher, (who pretty much labours under the weight of being Sasha Baron Cohen's other half these days), and Reynolds repartee with Breslin is beautifully played. Kevin Kline (who plays an alcolholic writer also has a splendid part to play in the proceedings. It's unconventional, bittersweet and much, much better than you'd expect from the writer of Wimbledon and Bridget Jones 2. Highly recommended.

Torchwood: Children of Earth

Well, it might have taken three seasons (even if the last half of season two was rather good) but Torchwood has finally stepped out of the shadow of Doctor Who and become the show it always just needed some fine tuning to be.
Two episodes in and it's fast paced, witty and finally feels like a show that gives US TV a run for its money. It was a clever ploy by the Beeb to air the show on its flagship channel with the week long event that it deserves, and return the ubiquitous Mr Barrowman to what he does best: being killed multiple times and getting his arse out...
High points so far: the Torchwood-mobile being stolen by Chavs, the creepy Wyndham-esque WE ARE COMING, and the very funny WE WANT A PONY riff on it tonight, the scene between Jack and a daughter who looks older than he does, the regeneration of Jack in episode two, and the curious allure of Eve Myles running around with two guns...
A slightly Scooby-Doo escape in episode two did nothing to diminsh the fun of it all. It's hokum but it's utterly wonderful hokum.

One Time Directors

A quick question for anyone who's out there. There's part of my current novella that involves a director who only made one film due to box office failure and critical indifference, and I was trying to compile a list of similar directors for inclusion in the story. Most cinephiles know about Charles Laughton and Night of the Hunter which failed mightily upon release, but is now generally regarded (rightfully) as a classic, but are there any others?
Any help would be gratefully received!

Lenka - The Show

Very much enjoying this lady's new album. In the vein of Regina Spektor (but with a dash of some world music influences), Aussie TV actress Lenka's The Show is a fabulously catchy summer record. The title song had featured on numerous adverts, and the video is suitably kooky. It's a crowded market these days (and I must admit there are too many crazy singer songwriter girls around these days), but this is fab.

It's Been A While, I Know...

I've been a little absent from my blog for a while now. Admittedly it's for good reasons. In the past month I've finally completed all the work on my novel and started sending it out to agents. Thus far I've had three rejections, but there's plenty of agents and most of them only take on one or two authors a year; throw in the present current financial climate and it's a uphill struggle.
To offset any downside to the rejections, I've started work on a new novella, Everything Beautiful Is Far Away which I'm currently 40-odd pages into. It's going extremely well too. The writing feels good to me and a niggling problem with some of the 'weird stuff' was rectified this morning with one of those 'eureka' moments. I had to get out of bed to make some notes and now the core of the story has some much needed internal consistency. Even the weird stuff needs internal consistency...

Aside from that, I have a lot of plotting done for another full length novel (should the first one not find a home, I'd like a back up book to be ready to go), as well as notes for a follow up to the novel that out in agent-world.

In between bouts of writing, I'm also enjoying the Wimbledon this year. Tennis is the only sport I can stand to watch without lapsing into a coma. All those Russian female players certainly aid the enjoyment too. Plus we finally have a Brit who can play. Andy Murray absolutely slaughtered Troicki today on Centre Court...

I'm currently half way through Carlos Ruiz Zafon's excellent The Shadow of the Wind. This was a huge Spanish bestseller about a 'Cemetery of Forgotten Books' in Barcelona, and the mystery of an author's life and death. It's a great book; deeply evocative and full of mystery and atmosphere.

And on the less cerebral side of life, I'm currently enjoying Dead Space on the XBox - hugely entertaining and downright scary stuff on a monster filled space station. Whack on the surround sound at night and this is jump out of your seat good. Looks beautiful too. I've also picked up TopSpin 3 too, which is an excellent Tennis sim - much more fun than Virtua Tennis - and a lot less effort than actually playing tennis...

And we watched Priceless tonight. An fantastic French comedy starring the luminous Audrey Tatou. She plays a scheming opportunist who dates rich older men on the French Riviera purely for their money. When she mistakes a shy bartender (the fanbulous comic talent, Gad Elmaleh) for a millionaire, this lovely movie unfolds like a modern day Audrey Hepburn movie. Tatou is gorgeous and the film shimmers with French Riviera heat. And it's absolutely hilarious. I recommend it highly.

The Dark Angel - Camille O' Sullivan at the Town Hall

Daily Telegraph: "The new queen of Cabaret...When she sings it's as though her breath is soaked in paraffin; one spark, and the whole room would ignite"
Next time Camille O'Sullivan comes around to Birmingham EVERYONE I know has to come. Tonight's Dark Angel show was more than just a gig; it was Cabaret of the darkest kind, it was frequently hilarious, and took the term 'audience partcipation' to its absolute limit!
Having heard how O'Sullivan likes to bring the show to the crowd, I decided to book tickets that although right in the centre, was a 'safe' three rows back. Alas, when we got there, we discovered that the row in front of us was purely for her to prowl across and then jump over... we were right in the firing line! By the second song, she was amongst us, sitting on laps, talking to us, taunting us and in my case, ruffling hair and enjoying the look of fear on my face...
But it was incredible. I'd go as far to say that it was one of the best gigs I've ever been to. I, of course, was a captive audience: she sang Jacques Brel (My Death for the starter), Nick Cave (Little Water Song, and her stunning interpretation of The Ship Song for the finale), Tom Waits (All The World Is Green and Misery Is The River of the World), as well as a staggeringly emotive version of Hurt, a very dark version of Mack The Knife (in the original German, no less), and an impromptu rendition of Nick Drake's River Man (that they'd rehearsed once and completely nailed).
The intimacy of the Town Hall - and the fact that we were front and centre - made it feel like you were transported to the dark and unpredictable 30's Weimar Berlin. It's part West End show, part absurdist comedy and pure burlesque. To cover songs like Brel's Amsterdam and Bowie's Five Years, and make them entirely her own is no mean feat. It was absolutely stunning.
At the end, she and her band filed off the stage singing the final refrain of Cave's The Ship Song, and then out into the foyer. And afterward, she even waited to meet everyone, sign CDs and talk about the songs and the show, and was a delight to meet.
And as I said before, next time EVERYONE is coming. Front and centre. I think it's the only way...

... and as an example of that 'audience participation' thing, here's a YouTube clip of just that...

Franklyn

Although this escaped into the world with only lukewarm reviews, I finally managed to catch up with Franklyn tonight, and enjoyed it immensely. It's admittedly not for everyone. Taking place in modern day London, as well as a the dystopian future Meanwhile City (where church and state are one), Gerald McMorrow's feature film debut deserves to be celebrated, not just because it's a pretty satisfying story that refuses to explain where it's going until it's good and ready, but also because it's nice to see a new Brit movie maker who can make something as visionary as established fantasy movie makers like Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton, but on a minimal budget.
While the aetheist vigilante Ryan Phillipe wears a hollow eyed mask in search of his nemesis, The Individual in Meanwhile City, in a more prosaic London, jilted groom, Sam Riley goes in search of his childhood sweetheart, Bernard Hill searches for his estranged war damaged son, and Eva Green makes video installations of herself comitting suicide.
It's an audacious (and sometimes a little bit pretentious) bit of storytelling; a scattered jigsaw of pieces that gradually begin to form a satisfyingly complete picture, while playing with comic book mythology and the notion of perception and fantasy.
The design of Meanwhile City is a ruined gothic delight, the acting is subtle and the writing sensitive and low key. I hope that despite the somewhat muted response to the movie, McMorrow can follow Franklyn up with more of the same. We need more Brit directors with this kind of vision. It's interesting to note that McMorrow started out as a runner on the movie Hardware; there's a hint of that DIY spirit that Richard Stanley started out with in Franklyn. Lets hope McMorrow doesn't end up with such a disastrous career...

Jonathan Carroll

As a side-post to the last one, I started re-reading Jonathan Carroll's Land of Laughs again the other day, when I realised that the aforementioned novella was going to similar places as that wonderful book. Just to make sure that no fictional toes were stepped on.
And I'd forgotten just how brilliant that book was. Of course, most of Carroll's books are wonderful, uncategorizable flights of fictional genius, but Land of Laughs was most people's point of entry into his world, and it remains one of his absolute best and the template for much of his work: a smart, funny, likable narrator, a sparklingly perfect woman and a romance that unfolds, and then things get weird. Dogs talk in their sleep weird.
Of late, I started to fall out of love with Carroll's books purely for the reason that the madness seems to start too early in his recent stuff; in the early books he took his time with the romance and introducing a normal world and then turned it upside down. I've tried to read White Apples and The Wooden Sea several times and just can't get into them (although I'll doubtless try again).
To that end, I've embedded this audio interview with Carroll from the Barnes and Noble website, as it's an excellent interview. I had the good fortune to meet Carroll a good ten or twelve years ago now in - of all places - Swansea. I was with Rog Peyton for a horror convention, and Rog knowing Carroll, I was introduced to him. I've never met another writer who seemed to have such an aura about them; even other authors were falling over themselves to introduce themself and looking sort of awestruck.
He arrived with a beautiful woman that Rog didn't seem to think was his wife. He wafted about the halls, giving off the whiff of an old Hollywood star; in short we were all under the influence of the magic of his books - he brought it with him somehow.
On the Sunday afternoon I took my chance to talk with him. We were in a crowded room and although our eyes didn't meet across it, no one else seemed to be able to summon up the nerve to talk with him. So I did. And we talked. And talked. And talked. During that hour of one to one, he told me about his father, Sidney Carroll, about his writing habits, about Vienna, and about his lunches with Harrison Ford and Oliver Stone (who'd both intended to make movies of his books). I in turn felt impelled to tell him about the time I was reading Bones of the Moon; it was deep in the middle of a very harsh British winter; I had taken the bus home in the snow from work with about a hundred pages of Bones to read. About a mile from my house, the bus finally gave up amongst the drifts of snow, just as I'd finished. Anyone who's ever read the book will tell you what an emotionally affecting ending that book has and I was in tears. I had to surreptitiously wipe my eyes before we all disembarked and started the trek on foot. He was enormously pleased to hear the story.
When I looked around after an hour, I realised that a lot of people had that look of why am I not talking to Carroll? I probably wouldn't be able to do it now, so I'm glad I got the chance. It's good when your heroes are more than you expect.
Here's the link...

A novella and reasons to hassle me...

In the course of bringing all the strands of a recent idea together for what will probably be a novella, I've been gathering various (and very disparate) books and research materials for it. The first seed of the idea began a couple of years ago while we were holidaying in Devon; we were in Ilfracombe at the time, which is one of those old, faded (but still deeply pretty) Victorian seaside towns. I realised that I wanted to set a story there, possibly in one of those old, dilapidated guesthouses, and probably in the vein of Don't Look Now. I wrote it down, along with a few notes and left it to percolate in the recesses of my brain.
At some point I've wanted to write a fictionalised version of the Carry On ensemble, as they've long fascinated me; Kenneth Williams in particular. And Williams at some point became a key figure in the aforementioned story idea. The camp raconteur with the acid tongue, and a faded Victorian seaside town. That's all I had for a long time.
Then a couple of weeks ago, the idea seemed to want to come out; ideas do that sometimes. They're like babies; they've come to term and here they come, ready or not. So I started taking notes, involving spiritualists and little children and the past, and suddenly the story was taking shape, and then wanting to be a novella when I discovered there was a burgeoning market for them (no money, but a market just the same). Then a little side-note to add some colour suggested something else, and I ended up discarding a lot of the plot and going elsewhere.
I ordered a book of Kenneth Williams diaries, and an annotated volume of the complete Lewis Carroll as Dodgson and little Alice were taking over the story too.
I'm hoping I can get this off the ground in the next couple of weeks as I've written nothing since completing the novel. Hence this post. Forcing myself to feel bad if I don't get this story about Alice and Carroll and Williams and the Muses in a faded seaside town done. Hassle me about it if you know me. Really. Hassle me about the novel too while you're at it...

Star Trek

There's little I can add to the generally across the board love for the Star Trek franchise's reboot by J.J. Abrams. I'm certainly not going to disagree with any of it. It's a fantastic blockbuster movie, made even more impressive by the eye-popping IMAX cinema experience.
The young cast are excellent. Quinto's Spock is as perfect a piece of casting as everyone expected, as is Karl Urban's spot-on 'Bones' McCoy. Chris Pine, wisely side-stepping a Shatner caricture is also absolutely excellent, playing his Kirk as defiant, rebellious and heroic and promising to only get more confident and comfortable in the role as the franchise continues. In fact all of the classic characters get a fair crack at the whip - the young Sulu and Chekov play on some old series tropes and come out well, as does Pegg's Scotty, who delivers the classic Doohan lines with relish.
The story manages to straddle the old Trek values and cliches with a knowing wink and also serves up a huge effects-laden blockbuster that barrels along at break-neck pace. This is, of course, no mean feat. Re-imagining a forty year old show for a much more clued-up generation while retaining its charm, character and look is a real achievement. It's hard these days to be really swept up by the blockbuster movie, as there's just so many of them, but the new Trek is two hours of exhilarating, unalloyed FUN. Fantastic.

The Witnesses Are Gone

...and speaking of Joel Lane, I just ordered his new novella, The Witnesses Are Gone from PS Publishing tonight.

Here's the blurb:

The Witnesses Are Gone is a first-hand account of a journey into the underworld in all the wrong places. Martin Swann, its narrator, moves into an old house and finds a box of videocassettes in the garden shed. One of them has a bootleg copy of a morbid and disturbing film by a little-known French director, Jean Rien.

Martin's search for Rien's other films, and for a way to understand them, draws him away from his home and his lover into a shadow realm of secrets, rituals and encroaching decay. An encounter with a schizoid film journalist in Gravesend leads to a drug-fuelled vision in Paris – and finally to the Mexican desert where a grim revelation awaits him.

The Witnesses Are Gone updates the Orpheus myth for a world losing touch with reality. Blending supernatural horror with eroticism and warped comedy, it takes a look behind the screen on which our collective nightmares play.

It can be found here at PS Publishing. Sounds fantastic. I'll post a review once I've read it.

Also available (but a little more expensive at $40) is a new short story collection from Ex Occidente Press, by the title of The Terrible Changes.

I may try and get hold of one at some point as it looks like a nice selection of 25 years of Lane horror, and has an absolutely tremendous cover that feels very reminsicent of the old Arkham House Lovecraft hardcovers.

Beneath The Ground and Lost and Found - A new review of an old book...

Some time ago I contributed a short story called Lost and Found for Joel Lane's Beneath The Ground anthology, which after some delays was published in 2003 by Alchemy Press. It remains one of my favourite short stories as it references a couple of subjects that have long been close to my heart: the music of Nick Drake and the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. To be able to merge the two into some kind of cohesive piece of fiction is one of my proudest achievements. Sometimes you look back on old work and you recall where and who you were when you wrote it, and see shortcomings both in your life and your work, but I think Lost and Found still holds up even now. It being for Joel Lane, who inspired and encouraged me right from the start, I felt an obligation to give him the absolute best that I could, and I think I did.
I bring all this up purely because I was pointed toward a recent review of Beneath the Ground by D.F.Lewis here

Lost and Found
This substantial story continues the river of people on the London Underground from the previous story, each story complementing and enlightening the other. I can't do this story justice. It is teeming with images that coalesce: an obsession with the London Underground finally bearing fruit as a religious epiphany with a presence that overhangs us all as well as subsuming us; a subtle narrative trick of narrators narrating being narrated in various layers of collusiveness and non-collusiveness; relationships both sibling and sexual; loss, failure, amputation, Leonard Cohen... but I was listening to Goldfrapp's 'Felt Mountain' duing the reading of this story and it imbued everything with a gorgeous sadness... "'It was like a cathedral,' he wrote. Amongst the stalagmite basins and the stalactite pillars, he could hear the sound of something like prayer. He was terrified and in awe." There are letters, too, a stack of letters. This story would not have worked in the email age. I feel as if I cannot fix this story in the kiln. It's far too diffusive - like music straight into the veins. Like trying to shape origami from air (to pinch an image from the story). Or as if trying to rediscover a place... "'It was one of those anonymous East End streets,' he wrote. 'Concrete gardens. Children playing in the road. A chip shop at one end, an off-licence at the other. It was the kind of place you'd never find twice.'"

It's nice after all these years to see that people are still discovering the anthology and the story. Strange too at this point while I'm about to start working on a short horror story that feels like it'll have a similar 'vibe' to Lost And Found. Perhaps someone's trying to tell me something...

A Persistence of Vision - Theodore Roszak's Flicker

What initially strikes you about Flicker is, quite apart from its cultural prescience (and it was published in 1992) is its similarity thematically with Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code. But while there are shadowy conspiracies, paranoia and Gnosticism, Flicker contains no car chases, cliff-hangers or narrow escapes.
Roszak at the time was better known for his sociology texts and for allegedly coining the term 'counterculture'; subsequently Flicker is a slow-burn - literary, analytical, comtemplative and a deeply, deeply seductive piece of writing.
Beginning in the 50's, Jonathan Gates, a young film scholar gradually discovers that the works of an all-but forgotten German film-maker, Max Castle are a window to an ancient hidden conspiracy, the ongoing work of Cathar religious heretics.
Gates finds himself under the tutelage of the older, analytical Clare Swann, a woman running a mildewed art-house cinema in L.A. and who likes to use film criticism as a sex aid. A "frenzied cerebral-genital curriculum". Together they unearth more of the mystery of the enigmatic Castle. To avoid the Nazi's Castle fled to Hollywood and found himself knocking out low grade horror and exploitation fare. After Castle was lost at sea near the end of the war, Castle's movies slid into obscurity. When they discover one of the 'lost' Castle movies, Gates slowly starts to realise there is more to his movies than meets the eye - literally. There are movies within his movies, something hidden within the 'flicker'...

There was in Castle’s films a genuine horror, one that froze through to the bone. At no point could I have said precisely where the film’s power lay—except that I was sure it was nothing I’d consciously seen that produced the effect. Rather, it was as if somewhere behind my eyes, another part of me was observing a different world, one in which the vampire and his victim were real, the supernatural events were real, the blasphemy was real.

Of course the subject of subliminal imagery has cropped up in many movies over the years: the skull over laying Anthony Perkins face in Psycho, the devils head in The Exorcist, and of course any amount of subliminal messages lurking behind modern day advertising. But that's a whole other conspiracy for another day.

Over the course of 600+ pages, Roszak very deliberately builds up a grandiose conspracy involving Gnostic dualists, Catholic persecution and an impending apocalypse that manages to convince purely because he's taken his sweet time about building up a rich fantasia of characters and places. There's a deep abiding love for cinema too, directors, actors, Hollywood trivia and an almost masturbatory detail for media theory. Orson Welles makes a cameo after it's established that Castle was on set for Citizen Kane, and was responsible for many of the innovations in the movie; indeed there's a wonderful overlap of fiction and actual movie fact in Flicker that you constantly find yourself wanting to rush to Wikipedia in order to tease apart the two in more obscure refrerences.

The subliminal 'movies within movies' is a seductive idea too; aside from the more well-known examples as noted earlier, it makes you wish for a real life equivalent of Castle's movies. Readers of the novel will know each other by the quickening of their pulse at the mention of a 'sallyrand', and I'll say no more.

Alas in the final 200 pages or so of the book, Roszak loses focus to an extent as he turns his attention from classic film appreciation to modern day movie making. The conspiracy takes centre stage and the characters slip out of focus somewhat. And for all Roszak's clear and abiding love of the golden age of cinema, his view of more modern fare makes him sound like an old curmudgeon. The ending too, while admittedly quite peverse, is something of a let-down after the comtemplative and academic stance of much of the novel. It feels like the denoument of a completely different, slightly more sensationalistic book.

That aside I can say that I did adore the book. It's rich, funny, beautifully written and filled to the brim with ideas. And books like that don't come along all that often.

Apparently Darren Aronofsky and Fight Club screenwriter JimUhls were connected with the book for a while, but it appears to have slipped through the cracks for the time being. Although Flicker would be a tough call for most directors, I can easily imagine Aronofsky getting to grips with the book's complexities and playing with the idea of Castle's subliminal movies within movies. Maybe one day.

Next up is Michael Chabon's Gentlemen of the Road...

STENDEC

The memory is a funny thing. Years ago when I was quite young, I used to collect re-prints of 50's comic books published by Marvel before Stan Lee went on to create Spider-Man/Fantastic Four/X-Men etc. They went under the banner of Atlas Comics and had titles like Tales of Suspense, Strange Worlds and Tales to Astonish, and usually contained short comic book tales akin to Rod Serling's Twilight Zone. At an impressionable age, they really blew my mind and remain a delight. In fact I started to track them down on ebay to see if they were as good as I recalled, and they were. They were also probably my first exposure to the writing talents of Stan 'The Man' Lee and the wonderfully weird world of artist Steve Ditko.

But that isn't really where the post is going. Tonight after watching an episode of the recently obtained boxset of Supernatural (a show that has inexpicably slipped under my radar for four seasons, and is really rather fantastic), I was reminded of a story I read when I was probably no more than six years old in one of those Atlas Comics reprints. It purported to be a true story of the Stardust Airliner that vanished from the skies mid-flight in 1947. I don't recall the details by now but what I do remember is the final panel that recounted the final radio message from the Stardust minutes before it vanished; it was

ETA SANTIAGO 17.45 [standard time] STENDEC

The meaning of the word STENDEC has never been conclusively explained, the comic book told me.

Somewhat bizarrely the word STENDEC has stuck with me for over thirty years. I've forgotten the detail of people's faces, names, dates and experiences, but STENDEC stuck with me. When this episode of Supernatural concerning a demon causing a series of plane crashes begun, STENDEC suddenly popped into my head for the first time in a few years, and as the internet was at hand, I typed it into Google, expecting some seriously random results.

But it turns out that that story in a reprint of a fifties comic was based on an actual event, and finally after thirty years the mystery of the word opened up for me again.

This is from a BBC site concerning a Horizon programme about the missing Stardust...

On August 2nd 1947, a British civilian version of the wartime Lancaster bomber took off from Buenos Aires airport on a scheduled flight to Santiago. There were 5 crew and 6 passengers on board the plane - named "Stardust". But Stardust never made it to Santiago. Instead it vanished when it was apparently just a few minutes from touchdown. One final strange morse code radio message - "STENDEC" - was sent, but after that nothing more was heard from the plane.

Despite a massive search of the Andes mountains no trace of the plane was ever found. For 53 years the families of those who disappeared have not known what happened to their loved ones.

But earlier this year the plane suddenly reappeared on a glacier high up in the Andes, more than 50 km’s from the area where the plane was last reported. In February this year the Argentine army arranged a major expedition to visit the crash site beneath the massive Tupangato peak (6800m). Their aim was to bring back the human remains which had been found at the site, so that an attempt could be made at identifying them. The expedition also offered a unique opportunity for crash investigators to see if they could finally explain what happened to the ill-fated plane.

The expedition discovered the plane and some human remains, and explained much of the mystery surrounding the Stardust's disappearance: the high altitude 'jetstream' in all probability caused the Stadust to veer from its course and collide with Mount Tupangato; the plane then became buried in the glacier, travelling downhill under the influence of gravity until it reached a warmer zone, and the ice began to melt. Fifty years later, the Stardust had revealed its secrets.
All save for one: STENDEC.
For a long time it became part of the tapestry of UFO conspiracy theories (and becoming the name of a Spanish UFO magazine); but of course, once the Stardust was discovered, we could be fairly certain that little green men had nothing to do with it. If I recall correctly, that Atlas story certainly indicated the UFO angle, and was probably why it captured my imagination at an early age; who doesn't love a UFO story when they're a kid?
In 1947 the official report into Stardust’s disappearance had this to say on the subject of STENDEC:
The 17.41 signal was received by Santiago only 4 minutes before the ETA. The Chilean radio operator at Santiago states that the reception of the signal was loud and clear but that it was given out very fast. Not understanding the word "STENDEC" he queried it and had the same word repeated by the aircraft twice in succession. A solution to the word "STENDEC" has not been found. From this time on nothing further was heard from the aircraft and no contact was made with the control tower at Santiago. All further calls were unanswered.

Type STENDEC into Google and you'll find a multitude of theories:

• STENDEC is an anagram of DESCENT. Variations suggested that the crew might have been suffering from hypoxia (lack of oxygen) as the Lancastrian was unpressurised and the plane was flying at 24000 feet, which would have led the radio operator to scramble the message. Other explanations for the appearance of an anagram in an otherwise routine message included a dyxlexic radio operator and/or receiver in Santiago, and playfulness on behalf of Stardust’s radio operator.
• The radio operator meant to say Stardust. STENDEC and Stardust have some similarities both in Morse code and English.
• Various people came up with intriguing, imaginative and sometimes amusing messages based on using STENDEC as a series of initials: Hence we have:"Santiago tower message now descending entering cloud" (or "Santiago tower aircraft now descending entering cloud")"Stardust tank empty no diesel expected crash""Systems to the end navigation depends entirely on circle" (although this correspondent conceded that "the last bit may be a bit muddled")."Santiago tower even navigator doesn’t exactly know"

STENDEC (or anything similar to the word ) doesn't appear in any language apparently, so the mystery will remain unsolved. I'm sure the truth is really rather prosaic (as is often the case), but at least tonight I've resolved a word that's been bouncing around unarrested in my subconscious for thirty years. Maybe one day I'll find the comic it appeared in too, and I can close the circle completely...

Easter Means...

... a new Doctor Who. Who needs Easter eggs when you have a new Doctor Who on the telly?