My friend Joe Gillard is, however! Let’s ask him? (that link goes to one of his PhD papers which isn’t quite based on this, but does feature Superstring Vacua and Superstrings and Heterotic Strings, according to its keywords… good bedtime reading!)

Also, Ryan Howse has provided me with a simple and yet incredibly useful website link to check the current status of, um, our planet: has the Large Hadron Collider destroyed the Earth dot com!

But in seriousness, it’s brilliant! I can only echo the sentiments of others who’ve said it displays more character development than most Hollywood films for the year added together, and has a sweet sentiment… that people will judge you for how you are, or act, and not for what you are or look like.

It’s just a shame that it is so untrue!

In case you’ve been asleep, Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight is released this week. Hysterical plaudits and talk of posthumous Oscars aside, what Nolan’s take on the Batman franchise offers is a chilling depiction of the post 9/11 landscape and a dark insight into the way the Western audience is beginning to see itself. The references to 9/11 are there, as are those to Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. But what sticks in the mind is the depiction of the city itself. Be it Gotham or Hong Kong, the city is turned into a hall of mirrors, a space filled not with buildings but what Jean Baudrillard in America called millions of “vertiginous glass facades”. In countless scenes, the characters’ reflections are caught in these mirrors, all the while images of the actors playing them are refracted through the giant screen of the cinema. This is a film all about simulacra: Batman is plagued by doubles, while he and the Joker are flipsides of the same coin. Baudrillard famously pointed out in the aftermath to 9/11 that reality had absorbed the energy of fiction to become fiction; Nolan’s film, ostensibly an elaborate fiction, is so mired in our dismal reality that its spectre of menace feels all too disturbingly real.

I’m a fan of Christopher Nolan. I haven’t seen The Prestige, but I did see The Following, his pre-Memento debut film which was, incidentally and somewhat awesomely, a Soho based project filmed largely in the restaurant at my old Framestore office, and in the flat that Nolan used to share with one of my colleagues from there (I am reliably informed). Obviously the project is close to home so I’m bound to be bias, but I do think that it was up there with Memento in terms of twists and originality, and I’m happy that he seems to be taking a large part of his subtlty and style to a big franchise like Batman.

There is a trailer for The Following here. It’s worth a look.

Christians Confess and Dear God are two great sites that (like Post Secret before them) really help you understand that what people say, or how they act, isn’t necessarily a sign of all that’s going on. Of course, sometimes everything that’s going on is on the surface, and sometimes people are just nuts, or wrong.

It’s all part of the fun, huh?

Incidentally, I really, really like the design of Dear God!

I don’t think I am being bias towards my friend when I say that he was the best actor in the show… in fact, this review from Music OMH says of the double-header

Both plays are very well acted, with Adam Sopp as the unfortunate Frank in [in parenthesis] and Syrus Lowe as Baron, the more morally grounded of the three lads in Overspill, leaving the most lasting impression.

… and Adam is a an experienced actor (and the current voice of Harry Potter on the Playstation games!) so you might expect good things, but I can say without question that it is infinitely surreal to see you friend hanging dead in a harness for approximately fifteen minutes.

Grizzly Man:

It’s the story of Timothy Treadwell (who, it turns out, could have trodden better). Werner Herzog chucks a fantastic voice over – and some posthumous interviews with related people – onto the hours and hours of footage that Treadwell left. The fact that the subject was absolutely batshit insane suits Herzo fairly well.
Website
YouTube Trailer

Jesus Camp:

I have a special place in my heart for this film, having been a bit of a pseudo-victim of the kind of fundamentalist brainwashing it describes as a child. It follows a group of Christian characters in America and their adventures in conditioning children. Honestly? It makes you feel sick, but it’s enlightening too.
Website
YouTube Trailer

The Bridge:

When my boss suggested checking this film out at the ICA in London, I thought it was a great idea. Eric Steel filmed Golden Gate Bridge for a year, and made a documentary about the people who leapt from it. The most interesting aspect is when they start talking to the families, at which point I wonder if I would have perhaps taken the swim that needs no towel a little sooner, but also of interest is the implication that perhaps the overbearing nature of the bridge in San Francisco is somewhat related to their choice.
Website
YouTube Trailer

Wisconsin Death Trip:

This is a documentary about weird shit in a colonial American town. Think Tim Burton meets John White! The residents of Blackwater Falls experience varying amounts of bizarre happenings, and newspaper articles and photos from the time are slung around, along with recreations of certain scenes. Sometimes, photos become live action scenes in pretty creative ways, making it a touch above the usual historical documentary. The way it’s shot is intriguing and entertaining, and it’s just fucking weird enough that it stands a cut above the rest.
Website

* this was ‘cos another deadly spider sprung out of the fruit aisles at a UK supermarket. It’s a long-running joke with us since a spider escaped into the UK some years ago, and I set up this spoof blog that documented his many harrowing escapes.

“OK, let’s go with the dead baby motif”

It talks about Colin Meloy of The Decemberists’ creative process, and should make interesting reading for anyone who does anything similar. I’m particularly interested in the embarrassment he describes during the creative process, while ideas are still being refined and the crap is still there to see. I haven’t always been too, err, conservative in throwing out works in progress, but these days I really am. The path to a finished final product is pretty hilly, as a rule, so I try and pick carefully the people who see me lying at the bottom (drunk, usually!) and help me push the half-written bastard back to a peak. There’s an amount of shame, I guess, in the cruft that comes with the creative process, but that’s really not what it’s about. It’s not something I think I need to beat, but just an interesting concept to think about.

There is much more worth reading in the article, so have a look… and here’s another excerpt:

Meloy is famed for his cast of characters: barrow boys, odalisques, gymnasts high above the ground. “The ones that pop out as being real characters come as a result of being just bizarre fascinations that I have,” he says. “I think of them as being archetypes or tropes from folk tales and adventure stories. When I started writing songs for the Decemberists, I got off on that tension between being an indiepop band and being kind of grossed out by what it was to be an indiepop band and what you were expected to write about. So, in some ways, I felt like it was an opportunity to make fun of the convention by saying, ‘Oh, here we are, an independent modern rock band but we’re singing about legionnaires stuck in the desert.’”

Second up is the inimitable Matthew Woodring Stover, who has been talking about his new novel (Caine: Black Knife, a follow up to Heroes Die and Blade of Tyshalle) as well as the problem of reading as a writer. Here’s a quote:

So this is the thing I really want to drive home for any and all people who find something special in my books (or, for that matter, in anyone else’s).

It’s not the book. It’s you. It’s your mind doing all the work. Your commitment, your willingness to be touched, your suspension of disbelief and the power of your imagination. That’s why there are many, many people who will never be moved by some story you love — or, for some impoverished souls, by any story at all.

If you find something extraordinary in one of my books, it’s because it was already inside you, and the words just helped you locate it, that’s all.

If you don’t know why Matt Stover is one of the most incredibly talented writers living and breathing on Earth at this moment, then click here and peruse the prologue that he tacked onto the beginning of the minutes to certain events in a galaxy not so close to ours. I’ve read the book three times, which is two times more than I’ve watched the not exactly mind-blowing movie. You make your own judgement… it’s geek material, but I can dig that. Can you?

Being a writer blows – it’s like having homework for the rest of your life.

Nice words… not that I agree, but hey, it’s a show about a writer. They have to pull that stuff out as surely as they have to have the entire cast tapping relentlessly into MacBooks (writers or not). What I do like, though, is Hank Moody’s response to what is pissing him off at the moment:

Just the fact that people seem to be getting dumber and dumber. You know, I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four figure wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and twenty-four hour a day access to kiddie porn. People… they don’t write anymore, they blog. Instead of talking, they text; no punctuation, no grammar. LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people at a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King’s English.

He’s as angry as me!

The show fits in well with my William Boyd kick, and mainstream writing period. Excellent.

Today I slept until the afternoon, and only got up when my friend Joe rang ‘cos he was outside with his dog. They came in and had coffee in the sun on my patio, with the Charbonnel et Walker Milk Marc De Champagne Truffles that arrived in a huge great big box of gifts (!) from Lottie last week. We then went for burgers at the place on the corner of the road nearby and enjoyed the global warming February sunshine. I got back and had an email from work saying that people normally work half days when they come back from this disease, which made my day. I don’t think I’ll take them up on that unless I feel awful after the first day, but I may start an hour or two later to get the extra hours of sleep for a week or two. Really, I ought to start making money by selling my infected kisses. Once you get passed the awful throat illness and are able to eat (ravenously) again, it’s the best damn illness in the world! Perhaps the most amazing thing? It’s all entirely legitimate. Woohoo!