Late Thoughts on a Slow Wednesday #4

ITEM: So, one night last week at one o’clock in the morning I was on the phone talking to a female friend and the conversation somehow drifted into a competition to see who owned the most knickers/underpants. I pretty much never throw anything away, so it was obvious who was going to be the winner.

It was only afterwards that it occurred to me, there are probably guys who would pay good money to have phone calls like this.

Perverts.

ITEM: Staying with the subject of phone calls, I think it’s important for a couple to have shared cultural references, which is why I was so pleased last weekend when I rang The Imaginary Girlfriend and she knew who it was the instant I said, ‘Hello Lily. It’s Herman calling.’

We could have got into some serious and intriguingly different role play if she’d been game, but instead we ended up having a conversation about Yvonne De Carlo. Ho hum.

ITEM: And flipping tracks to the subject of me never throwing stuff away, I just did a clear out of the medicine cabinet in my bathroom, and was quite amazed at some of the things I uncovered, such as a tube of Ibuleve Ibuprofen Gel that expired in October 1995. Wow!

In my defence, I’m a generally healthy person and seldom have recourse to over the counter medicines, and there were quite a few items in the medicine cabinet that weren’t out of date, such as cotton wool balls and cotton buds.

Later on I may squeeze out the contents of all the various tubes and pretend that I’m Jackson Pollock.

I also found some bottles of aftershave lurking in the back of the cabinet behind all the medicinal stuff, which was quite a revelation as I haven’t worn aftershave for years and years. My favourites used to be Aramis, which I splashed on when I wanted to make a good impression, and Blue Stratos when I didn’t want people to notice I smelled. I suspect they no longer make Blue Stratos. Names are important – I liked Aramis because of the musketeer and Blue Stratos because there was a Tangerine Dream album called Stratos Fear - the smell was just incidental, really.

The ones in the cabinet were Brut, which when I had a whiff didn’t smell too bad (perhaps, like fine wine, it improves with age), and a couple of others, Insignia and Hero, that weren’t very appetising at all – the phrase ‘gnat’s pee’ springs to mind. I’ve no idea where they came from – probably an unwanted Christmas present that my bro-in-law passed on. I’m toying with the idea of slapping some on and seeing if anybody notices.

This could all end badly.

ITEM: I’m concerned about the bees, and so it appears are rather a lot of other people. Last week one flew into my porch and I had a heck of a job getting the stupid thing to fly out again, and the week before one just kept flinging itself in front of the lawn mower as I was cutting the grass, almost as if it was trying to commit suicide. I’m depressed about the ConDems too, but you have to keep these things in perspective.

ITEM: I was in town today, and noticed that all the right wing newspapers are getting agitated about a European ruling that prisoners should have the vote. Personally I don’t see the problem, and in fact it could be a good thing. Let’s be honest and admit that if prisoners had been given the vote, there’s no way that stupid dog would have won.

ITEM: I’m inordinately fond of silly song titles, so was very pleased to learn that spoof country singer Tina C has a little number in her repertoire called ‘Of Course I Want You for Your Body (I Got a Mind of My Own)’.

Things like this need to be shared. Or not.

ITEM: I had a really weird dream last week, though I can’t recall much about it now – something to do with terrorists blowing stuff up and Tom Jones.

Anyway, that put me in mind of Mars Attacks and when I flung open the curtains this morning I had the distinct impression that aliens had invaded, but then I recognised the large yellow object in the sky as the sun, which hasn’t shown its smiling face in this neck of the woods for ages, since March in fact if memory serves.

About bloody time.

The first person to complain about the heat gets a free pass, but the next one will be boxed up and shipped to Antarctica.

I have loads of things that need doing, but with a few good days forecast it’s so tempting to say sod it all and head off to the coast for a day. Making hay while the sun shines, or something like that.

And if the warm weather looks like setting in for a while, I may change the duvet on the bed to something with a lower tog.

I felt quite technical, using the word ‘tog’.

Sunday Night with Psychic Suzie

Well, psychic Annie and psychic Claire, as it so happens.

Inspired by a passing remark made by The Imaginary Girlfriend about Derek Acorah, I decided to treat myself to a double bill of films featuring psychics.

The Gift (2000)

Annie Wilson (Cate Blanchett) has ‘the gift’, but it’s random and she can’t use it for personal gain, which is why she couldn’t prevent her husband’s death and is now trying to support herself and three children by reading cards for the locals. Unfortunately one of her clients is the wife of redneck Donnie Barksdale, and Annie doesn’t need to be psychic to know she’s being abused, but her ’interference’ isn’t welcomed by Donnie, who threatens both Annie and her children if she doesn’t butt out. And then a young woman goes missing and, having exhausted all other avenues, the police must ask Annie for her help, and conveniently enough the psychic clues lead to the discovery of the woman’s body in a pond on Donnie Barksdale’s land. Which is when things start to get interesting.

I must have seen this three times now, and enjoyed it more with each viewing. Blanchett is superb as ever, conveying whole waves of emotion with a single expression and totally convincing as a psychic, somebody who always seems to be looking out of the corner of her eye at something that’s invisible to the rest of us. The rest of the cast provide splendid back up, with special mention to Giovanni Ribisi as the tormented Buddy Cole, a young man traumatised in childhood and leaning on Annie for support, and Keanu Reeves, chillingly credible as redneck Donnie (this could be the best performance I’ve seen by him, which in the circumstances makes it all the more impressive).

The plot is pretty much a standard murder mystery, and of course most people will guess who the killer is in advance, even without Annie’s psychic nous. What makes it special, aside from the cast, is the atmosphere of the supernatural that permeates almost every scene, the sense of another world pressing in on our own, Raimi’s direction incorporating this other dimension seamlessly into the everyday world. There is also a subtext relating to bigotry, with Donnie and his friends all too ready to brand Annie a witch, when she is only an ordinary woman trying to hold her family together by making use of the talent she has been given. While Donnie is contemptible, there is the strong suggestion that society, as represented by the police and lawyers, shares his attitude, albeit expressed with greater subtlety, and this is something I think the film could perhaps have explored in some more detail. And, as a side issue, I was surprised that Annie’s fortune telling involves the use of Rhine cards rather than the more traditional Tarot deck (perhaps an attempt to get away from the cliched view of psychic power inherent in such devices).

In Dreams (1999)

The first time I’ve seen this film, and while it was okay I wasn’t that impressed, and it seemed somewhat disappointing by the usual standard of director Neil Jordan. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Claire Cooper (Annette Bening) has always had ‘dreams’, and lately these concern the fate of a small girl abducted from her community. The girl is found dead and then Claire’s own daughter is taken by the killer, and ‘in dreams’ she establishes a connection with the killer, one that threatens to plunge her into madness. The killer is sending Claire messages, luring her into a trap of his own devising, and everything leads back to events that took place twenty five years ago when the town of Northfield was flooded to form a reservoir.

There’s a lot of good stuff about this. The scenes set in the flooded town are visually compelling, providing a setting that seems haunted by the dreams of its own past and entirely in mood with the overall tone of the film. While she goes over the top on occasion, Bening’s depiction of a mental state that might as well be madness even though it isn’t is handled well, her spiral into lunacy combined with a suicidal despair depicted in harrowing detail, albeit a bit too accelerated for my liking. And Robert Downey Jr, looking nothing like his usual adorable self, is very good as the deranged killer, a mix of contradictory personality traits that see him both violently assertive and almost pathologically shy. Another thing that I liked very much, though liked is probably not the right word, is that the film doesn’t spare its characters, that loved ones, even a child, are brutally slaughtered in answer to the exigencies of the plot. It doesn’t flinch or turn away.

But at the same time, that’s one of the weaknesses of the film. In The Gift I got to know Annie and her family, and was involved when Donnie threatened them, but my time spent with Claire and her brood all seemed superficial, no real attempt to get under their skin or anchor them in reality, just a conventional middle class American family ordered in from Happy Days R’Us, and that impression stuck despite attempts to liven things up with the suggestion that pilot husband Paul has been playing away, so that when the shit hits the fan I didn’t quite care as much as I felt I should about their fates. In fact Aiden Quinn as Paul barely registered, with both husband and daughter totally eclipsed by Claire’s hysterics, so that their terrible deaths just seem like a plot convenience, a way to empower her psychic ability. And, unlike the case with Annie Wilson, the psychic episodes were very much over the top, to such an extent that they never seemed like ‘business as usual’, but were always overpoweringly there. Of course that was where the film was coming from, Claire delving into the mind of a killer, but it didn’t quite work for me.

The other problem was with the plot, with so much that seemed unlikely. Claire in isolation, drugged and attacking staff at a mental hospital in one scene, and in the next sharing a room with another patient. Her escape from the hospital, mirroring that of Vivian Thompson twenty five years earlier, was almost slapstick at times, and ridiculous to think that they wouldn’t have blocked that way out after the previous escape. Ridiculous also to think that when looking for the missing girl the police wouldn’t have investigated the abandoned cider factory being used by Vivian as his base of operations. And we don’t really get any satisfactory explanation for Vivian/Downey’s behaviour, or if not an explanation then at least a rationale for what he is doing and how he chooses his victims. All we are given is that he’s stark raving bonkers, with the film at the end devolving into a desperate fight for life between Claire and Vivian, cherry topped with one of those ‘this isn’t over yet’ predictable twist endings that horror films seem so fond of.

So what psychic shockers have pleasured the rest of you, and if you give me some good answers I may share my Tarot card experiences with you.

Mystic Pete sees all.

Song for a Sunday #13

This weekend I am in an American classical mood, and I’ve spent Saturday drowning in the sleazy triumphalism of Gershwin’s ‘An American in Paris’ and ‘Rhapsody in Blue’.

What better music for a Sunday morning though, than Aaron Copland’s hauntingly melodic ‘Saturday Night Waltz’ from the wonderful ‘Rodeo’?

Apologies for the static imagery, but the only ‘live’ performances I could find on YouTube were all spoiled by people coughing and the like.

Just turn the sound up and let it wash over you. Dancing is optional.

Filler Content #2

It’s time for another slice of Pete flash fiction, and this one was inspired by that most sinister and unwelcome of activities… gardening.

The thought of sticking my naked hands into the soil, where conqueror worms writhe in ecstasy and absolutely anything could be waiting, just completely unnerves me.

Anyway…

Enjoy!

RED THUMB

             Many years ago she had found happiness in the arms of Sir Henry’s younger brother, but the faithless Cuthbert had abandoned her without even a word of farewell.

            Lady Anne is reconciled to her fate. Grown old and bitter before her time, she is trapped in a loveless marriage to a man she despises. Her only joy in life comes from the prize winning roses that grow in her private garden.

            Sir Henry cares nothing for Lady Anne’s affection; so long as she adequately performs the duties required of a wife he is content.

            It was not always so though, and sometimes, as he watches Lady Anne tend to her flowers, Sir Henry smiles. He knows whose blood and whose bones enrich the soil where her choicest blooms have taken root.

Thoughts for a Thursday Evening #5

ITEM: Okay, I know it’s not quite evening as yet, but ‘Thoughts for a Thursday Late Afternoon’ just doesn’t work. If you’re that put out by chronological inaccuracy, feel free to come back in a few hours.

ITEM: A lot of people seem somewhat taken aback by the fact that the Britain’s Got Talent contest has been won by a dog that dances. I’m somewhat similarly disbelieving with regard to the part in national life played by football. I just can’t get to grips with the idea that whether one bunch of men in shorts can kick a ball round a field with more intent than another bunch of men in shorts is something we should care about. Makes absolutely no sense at all to me.

And let’s not mention the Olympics, or we’ll be here till it actually is Thursday evening.

ITEM: Staying with the subject of Britain’s Got Talent, a female friend asked me who I fancied the most out of Alesha Dixon and Amanda Holden (‘fancied’ wasn’t the term she used exactly, but this is a family blog, even if the family are The Munsters). She then got quite miffed when I asked her the same question about Simon Cowell and David Walliams, in fact characterised herself as ‘insulted’ by my insinuation that she might ’fancy’ either of them.

I believe I have mentioned before that women operate a double standard.

ITEM: Yesterday’s WTF search term bringing people to this blog was ‘susan storm raped by frat boys’. Sometimes I despair of you people.

ITEM: And this morning found me rifling through the dustbin in search of the winning lottery ticket I had accidentally thrown away. There was a time when I had enough dignity that I would never have gone to such lengths for a mere tenner.

Oh, fallen are the once proud.

Fallen, but £10 better off. Yay!

ITEM: I was very happy at the drubbing the ConDems received earlier this month in the local elections.

But my happiness moved up to an almost orgasmic level with the discovery that Luke Mackenzie lost his seat on Basildon Council.

This was the individual who, at the start of the year, when disabled protesters were demonstrating against the coalition’s draconian benefit cuts, tweeted ‘I hear there are a bunch of unwashed people at Oxford and Regent Street, if you don’t like capitalism move to North Korea’.

Hopefully this nasty little oik will never be elected to public office again. He can stay at home and play with his money.

ITEM: Staying with the theme of politics, I am somewhat warming to the double act of Dave and George.

It isn’t that they are anything other than contemptible. It’s just that everything is relative, and when you compare them with the rest of the current incumbency – vile creatures like IDS, Graything, Lansley, Theresa May, Mad Nad etc – they seem almost human.

Almost, but not quite.

The tragedy of political life in Britain today, is that when we are ruled by a cabal of super-villians and dearly need a Hulk to sweep them out of office, all we get is Ed Miliband.

ITEM: My house is filled to overflowing with books. There are books in the garage and books in the bedrooms, two piles of books on the kitchen table, books inside the wardrobe and books on top of the wardrobe, books in the hallway, and in the front room there are two chairs I use, one to watch television and the other to eat and read, and there’s a pile of books I shift between the two depending on which one I wish to sit on at any given time.

The only room free of books is the toilet.

I think it’s fair to say that I love books.

They’ve enriched my life in so many ways.

And yet it’s also fair to say that there are moments when I resent them, the fact that I can’t turn round without knocking into the bloody things.

#conflicted, as all the cool kids say on twitter.

Right, I’m off to read something.

A Man With No Name

Okay, hands up everyone who read that Subject line and instantly knew they’d be reading about Clint Eastwood’s cowboy movies.

I watched three over the course of the weekend.

Pale Rider (1985)

It’s pretty much a bog standard western movie plot, with a community of panhandlers holding out for the dream being threatened by a powerful mining baron, and into town rides an enigmatic stranger who sees that justice gets done. What makes it interesting is the use of Biblical references throughout (e.g. Death rides on a pale horse, and one of the character’s reads this reference from the Book of Revelation as she prays for a miracle, just before the ‘pale rider’ arrives) and the suggestion of something supernatural in the mix, that Eastwood’s preacher character is a revenant, albeit this is somewhat undercut by having him retrieve his revolver from a safe deposit box, not something I expect from a ghost. In many ways the story is a rerun of High Plains Drifter, only in this film Eastwood is clearly a hero, as opposed to the spirit of vengeance manifestation in Drifter: he saves a woman from rape, rejects the love of another, and spurns attempts to bribe him with mammon, almost as if Eastwood wanted to remake the movie only this time with himself as the good guy. And while Drifter drew on an infernal palette for its photography, black and red dominating, here we have a moody and slightly more evocative feel, with the town of LaHood beset by snow throughout. Kudos also for showing that not all the bad guys are unredeemably so, as with the giant Club (Richard Kiel), who will fight for his employer but has the decency to object to rape and backshooting. As an aside, until I watched this I’d always thought the actress’ name was Carrie Snodgrass. In fact it’s Snodgress. Well, I never.

A Fistful of Dollars (1964)

Directed by Sergio Leone and, I believe, the first of the spaghetti westerns. Eastwood is a lone gunfighter who arrives in the town of San Miguel and sets out to get rich by playing two crime families, the Baxters and the Rojos, off against each other. His plan works up to a point, but then he takes pity on a poor Mexican family and does a good deed, and no good deed goes unrewarded as they say, his action precipitating an all out war between the two families and seeing Eastwood badly beaten and on the run from the victorious Rojos, before coming back as the man with a plan in the final reel. Again, it was pretty much a by the book plot, though the basic idea may have had a bit more novelty back in 1964, with a huge question mark over how the Baxters and Rojos can be so stupid as to let Eastwood play them like this. Regardless, it’s an engaging and entertaining story, with plenty of gun action, moments of comedy, most of them courtesy of the town gravedigger, who always has the measure of his man, and a memorable bad guy in Ramon Rojo (Gian Maria Volonte), with the final showdown between Eastwood and the Rojos providing an edge of the seat ending. I enjoyed it.

For a Few Dollars More (1965)

A sequel of sorts to the above, as the title might suggest, and starring Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef as bounty hunters on the trail of bandit chief El Indio (Volonte again). Rivals at first, they join forces to take down their man, with Eastwood infiltrating the outlaw gang, while Van Cleef has an agenda of his own aside from the reward money. It was a little too long at 126 mins I thought, with a middle section in which the two bounty hunters are unmasked by the gang adding nothing much to the film, while El Indio’s motives for much of what he does seem slightly dubious, as with the end scenes in which he ‘arranges’ the demise of his gang. On the plus side, the two leads play off of each other very well, with different approaches and conflicting ethoses that complement each other, and the word play between them never less than engaging. Another high point is the complexity of El Indio, a killer who always seems close to breaking point, with his trademark use of a musical pocket watch before killing an opponent the key to the bandit’s character – he is a driven man, one who can inspire love and loyalty in others, as when he is having a nightmare and his lieutenant wakes him and then covers the bandit chief with a blanket, a surprising moment of tenderness that speaks volumes about their relationship (and, also, which makes his betrayal of his men even more incomprehensible). Neither El Indio or Van Cleef’s character are quite who they present themselves as, and that extra dimension is what makes them and the film interesting, raising it above the level of just another tale of killing and double crossing.

There’s nothing here to match Unforgiven but Eastwood nearly always puts on a good show.

What’s your favourite western film? What’s your favourite Clint Eastwood film? And do the two overlap, I wonder.

Song for a Sunday #12

But first a snippet of news.

Not only am I a special juror for one of the British Fantasy Awards, but I am also now a contender, with the Case Notes column from Black Static shortlisted in the Non-Fiction category.

Click here and then scroll down to the very bottom of the page, where you’ll find little old me propping up everybody else.

Isn’t it exciting?

And thank you to anyone reading this who was actually misguided enough to recommend me.

To celebrate and show this hasn’t gone to my head, we shall have a poetry reading by Mr Michael Moorcock, followed by the mighty Hawk Lords’ rendition of one of their most fantabulous numbers.

This is, it has to be conceded, not a particularly good version of the song, but hey, Michael Moorcock.

I used to have all Hawkwind’s albums. I’ve seen them perform at least once, and maybe even twice, though sadly at a time when they were past their prime. As I recall it was very loud.