Month: January 2025

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It had to be snakes

 

 

We’ve just had the celebration of Chinese New Year and, in the Chinese calendar, embarked on the Year of the Snake.

 

It’s appropriate, some would say, that the snake symbolises the year ahead.  After all, the keys of the White House and the reins of the world’s greatest economic and military power have recently been handed over to some of the biggest snakes on the planet.  Western cultures take a dim view of snakes, repulsed by their slithering physical appearance and associating them mentally with slyness, deviousness and general vindictiveness.  And if Trump, Musk and co. aren’t slithering, sly, devious and vindictive, then who is?

 

However, snakes get a much better deal in the Chinese Zodiac.  Folk born in the Year of the Snake are said to have plenty of positive qualities.  ‘Enthusiasm’, ‘decency’, ‘sophistication’, ‘eloquence’, ‘humorousness’, ‘level-headedness’, ‘creativity’ and ‘rationality’ are among the qualities attributed to them on the various Chinese astrological websites I’ve read.  That’s a relief.  I was born in the Year of the Snake myself and would hate to think my personality is on par with that of Nagini in the Harry Potter books (1997-2007), Sir Hiss in Walt Disney’s animated version of Robin Hood (1973), Kaa in another Disney movie, 1967’s The Jungle Book (though not in Rudyard Kipling’s original 1894 collection of Jungle Book stories, where Kaa is a good guy), or indeed, Satan in the Bible.

 

 

My local shopping mall in Singapore has a big open area at the bottom of its stairwell that’s usually given over to promotions or to stalls selling cheap clothing, footwear and blankets.  In advance of Chinese New Year, however, it was devoted to a display of giant horoscopes.  Each panel told people born under each of the twelve animals of the Chinese Zodiac what to expect in the year ahead in terms of their wealth, career, relationships and health.  These categories were given ratings out of five stars.

 

I’d naively expected that for someone born in a past Year of the Snake, the year ahead, also that of the Snake, would be a fortuitous one.  But apparently people born under an animal aren’t guaranteed a good time when the year of that animal arrives every dozen years.  My wealth, career, relationships and health prospects all look distinctly middling this year.  I haven’t seen so many three-out-of-five-star ratings since Alien: Romulus was released last August.

 

 

Just as well I don’t believe in astrology and regard it all as superstitious guff.  Mind you, I’m sure some positive astrological words at the start of the year would be nice for me subconsciously.

 

Anyway, Happy New Year again – Happy Chinese New Year this time.  And enjoy the Year of the Snake, despite everything.

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Favourite Scots words, T-V

 

From unsplash.com / © Edward Howell

 

Yesterday was January 25th and yesterday evening saw a multitude of whisky-and-haggis-fuelled suppers held across the world to honour the 266th birthday of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet and one of its most distinguished writers in the Scots language.  This is an appropriate time, then, to publish the latest instalment of my list of favourite words and phrases from Scots.  I’m getting near the end of the alphabet now – the items in this post begin with letters ‘T’, ‘U’ and ‘V’.

 

Tablet (n) – a sweet foodstuff peculiar to Scotland, described by one culinary website as ‘crumbly, buttery fudge’.  Actually, I remember tablet being hard rather than crumbly.  At the end of its cooking process, it’d be a big solid slab in a tin, which you then cut up into little blocks.  It was also unhealthily laden with sugar, so obviously it became a popular Scottish treat.  In fact, in a short story I wrote a couple of years ago, I referred to tablet as ‘that tooth-rotting, Scottish confection of butter, sugar and condensed milk.’

 

Tackety boots (n) – hobnailed boots, the tackety bits being the hobnails.

 

Tappit hen (n) – originally a hen with a crest, although more recently it’s become the term for a type of pewter tankard or jug, with a lid, and a little knob on the lid.  I remember from my youth how the Tappit Hen was also the name of a pub in Aberdeen and, if my memory serves me correctly, it had a little nightclub called ‘Roosters’ upstairs.  Ha-ha, Roosters… On top of the Tappit Hen.  Get it?

 

Tapsalteerie (adj) – upside down.

 

Tattie (n) – a potato.  Potatoes are a staple of the Scottish diet – see the ubiquity of the dish mince an’ tatties.  If you get work on a farm picking potatoes, you are said to go tattie howkin’.  And there’s a savoury snack in Scotland, a wedge of potato flatbread that goes very nicely with a fried breakfast, called a tattie scone.

 

© Grove Atlantic

 

Tattiebogle (n) – a scarecrow.  In Douglas Stuart’s novel Young Mungo (2022), set in Glasgow in the early 1990s, Tattiebogle is the nickname that the title character, 15-year-old Mungo Hamilton, and his sister Jodie give their mother whenever she’s on one of her (frequent) alcoholic benders.  That’s when she seemingly transforms into a deranged, subhuman horror.

 

Tawse (n) – also known as ‘the belt’, a tawse was a strip of leather that had a sadistically forked tail and was an instrument of corporal punishment in Scottish schools.  Misbehaving pupils would be brought to the front of the classroom, made to stand with one hand outstretched and the other hand supporting it under the wrist, and given ‘six of the belt’, i.e., half-a-dozen whacks from the tawse across the palm.  Thanks to a judgement against its use by the European Court of Human Rights, the tawse disappeared from Scottish schools in the early-to-mid-1980s – making folk my age the last schoolkids to have been terrorised by it.

 

Teem (v) – to pour (with rain).  I’ve seen this included in lists of Scots words but I’ve only ever heard it used in Northern Ireland, where a lot of those words ended up.  “Ach, it’s teemin’!” my mum, who hailed from near Enniskillen, would exclaim when the heavens opened and rain started pounding us.

 

Teuchter (n) – a derogatory word used by Lowland Scots towards a person from the Highlands and Islands (often one who speaks the Scottish Gaelic language).  In Robin Jenkins’ 1979 novel Fergus Lamont, the title character describes the word as “the most contemptuous name a Lowlander can call a Highlander: it implies, among other things, heathery ears and sheep-like wits.”  I’ve also heard Aberdonians use teuchter in reference to anybody from the surrounding countryside of North East Scotland.

 

From ebay.co.uk / © B. Feldman & Co

 

The day / the morra / the nicht (adv) – today, tomorrow and tonight.  The nicht is immortalised in the saying It’s a braw moonlicht nicht the nicht (‘It’s a beautiful moonlit night tonight’), which comes from a song called Wee Deoch and Doris by the popular Scottish music-hall performer Sir Harry Lauder.  The song includes the lines: “There’s a wee wifie waitin’ in a wee but an’ ben / If you can say, ‘It’s a braw bricht moonlicht nicht’ / Then ye’re a’richt, ye ken.”

 

Thirled (adj) – being bound to something, by law, by contract, by loyalty or by habit.  John Buchan’s novel Witch Wood (1927), whose action takes place in the 17th-century Scottish Borders, contains the questioning line: “Or were they so thirled to their evil-doing that his appeals were no more than an idle wind?”

 

Thrapple (n) – the throat or windpipe.

 

Thrawn (adj) – stubborn, obstinate and bloody-minded, inclined to do the opposite of what everyone urges you to do.  However, there’s a macabre short story called Thrawn Janet (1881) by Robert Louis Stevenson, in which the word has a different meaning – ‘twisted’ or ‘deformed’.  The title character is described as having “her neck thrawn, and her heid on ae side, like a body that has been hangit…”

 

© Charles River Editors

 

Tod (n) – a fox.  The Scottish author James Robertson once translated Roald Dahl’s children’s book Fantastic Mr Fox into Scots, where it sported the more Caledonian-friendly title Sleekit Mr Tod.

 

Trauchle (v) – to walk slowly and wearily.

 

Trews (n) – tartan trousers, once worn by Scotland’s southern regiments and regarded as a traditional garment of the country’s Lowlands (although in reality, like kilts, trews originated in the Highlands).  I’ve heard it said that trews were the prototype for the tartan plus-fours that golfers used to wear.

 

At modern Scottish gatherings, kilts tend to vastly outnumber trews, although I can think of a couple of famous people who had a liking for this form of Scottish legwear: the late Alex Salmond, First Minister of Scotland from 2007 to 2014, who once got involved in a stushie when he went on an official visit to China, forgot to pack his trews and then bought an emergency pair at the cost of 250 pounds to the Scottish taxpayer; the late and much-loved rugby player, Doddie Weir who, off the rugby field, was rarely photographed not in his trews; RuPaul, host of RuPaul’s Drag Race (2009-present), who wore them the day he got a star on Hollywood Boulevard; and, if yellow trews count, the British children’s cartoon character Rupert Bear.

 

Tup (n) – a ram.  Supposedly this term is used in the north of England too, but I’ve only ever heard it used in Scotland.

 

From unsplash.com / © Wolfgang Hasselmann

 

Turnshie (n) – a turnip.  Somewhat less common than neep, the other Scots word for turnip, turnshie has nonetheless spawned a couple of memorable compound nouns.  A turnshie-gowk is another Scots word for a scarecrow, while turnshie-heid is a term of abuse meaning ‘turnip-head’, i.e., a glaikit Liz Truss-style idiot.

 

Unco (adv) – very.  Robert Burns used this word in the following lines from his epic poem Tam O’Shanter (1791) to show the extreme happiness felt by Scotsmen whilst drinking alcohol: “While we sit bousin, at the nappy / And gettin fou and unco happy…”

 

Uisge beatha (n) – the Scottish Gaelic word for ‘whisky’, this has been commandeered by Scotland’s non-Gaelic speakers as an admiring term for their nation’s famous firewater.   Uisge beatha is sometimes spelt in Anglicised form as usquebaugh and it gets its poetic force from the fact that it means ‘water of life’.

 

Vennel (n) – an alleyway or narrow lane, the word being derived from the French one ‘venelle’.  Scottish terms with similar meanings include wynd and close.  Probably the most famous vennel in Scotland is one simply called ‘The Vennel’, which threads upwards from the southwestern end of the Grassmarket in Edinburgh and, at its highest point, provides a good vantage point for viewing and photographing Edinburgh Castle.

 

From unsplash.com / © Ross Findlay

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Haw Par Villa: a special place in hell

 

 

Donald Trump has been inaugurated as 47th President of the United States of America. With social-media platforms like X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and now TikTok acting as his cheerleaders and fascists like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters and those deranged January 6th rioters he’s just pardoned acting as his law enforcers, he looks set to transform the USA into a combination of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Ben Ali’s Tunisia and Benito Mussolini’s Italy.  That’s while his administration abandons science and embraces paranoid conspiracy fantasies, superstition and stupidity, pumps umpteen more billions of tons of carbon into our already-poisoned biosphere, and conspires to destroy what democracies remain in the modern world.  Therefore, it can be said we are now living in hell. 

 

With these hellish things happening, I thought it would be appropriate to devote a blogpost to the most vivid representation of hell I have ever seen: that at Haw Par Villa, Singapore’s most remarkable museum.

 

Haw Par Villa was originally built by Burmese-Chinese brothers Aw Boon Haw and Aw Boon Par, who developed and marketed the famous analgesic remedy Tiger Balm.  They relocated from Burma to Singapore in 1926 and purchased the site – today on the West Coast Highway, just along from the Haw Par Villa MRT Station – in 1935.  The villa was designed in an Art Deco style and completed in 1937, but its original incarnation didn’t last long, being bombed and occupied by the Japanese during World War II and demolished after the war ended.  Its gardens survived, though.  Up to his death in 1954, Aw Boon Haw installed statues and dioramas there that he hoped would help instil ‘traditional Chinese values’ in those who viewed them.  Subsequently, the gardens became a public park popular among Singaporean families.

 

By the 1980s, the place was losing its lustre and efforts to repackage it meant it underwent several name changes – from ‘Tiger Balm Gardens’ to ‘Haw Par Villa Dragon World’, back to ‘Tiger Balm Gardens’ and finally to ‘Haw Par Villa’ as it is today.  No doubt the Singaporean Tourist Board understood it was special, thanks to those installations Aw Boon Haw had made to promote his vision.  Yet it surely seemed too traditional, and too eccentric, to compete with the city-state’s more modern visitor attractions.  A study in 2014 reported ‘low tourist interest’ in it and made the melancholy observation that it was ‘rather rundown and not very well maintained’.  However, Journeys Pte Ltd acquired it in 2015 and closed it for a period at the start of the 2020s to make renovations.  Since reopening, the latest version of Har Par Villa has won acclaim.  In 2023, for instance, it was a finalist in the Singaporean Tourism Awards for Outstanding Attraction.  Let’s hope its future is now secure.

 

 

A while back, accompanied by my partner and a couple of friends, I visited Har Par Villa.  Approaching its entrance, we went past the place’s name in blood-red English letters and Chinese characters raised against a tableau of artificial rocks.  Then we went through a traditional Chinese paifang with a prominently-displayed picture of a tiger – appropriately for the home of Tiger Balm – and then found ourselves passing a gamut of strange statues.  These included big, spooky white rabbits with red mouths and eyes, mad-looking sheep with black horns and black-rimmed eyes, and a freaky humanoid pig in britches, cap and shirt, the shirt peeled back to reveal a fat belly and sagging man-boobs.  A couple with human bodies and tiger heads, wearing dungarees and a pink dress, held forward tins, boxes and packets of Tiger Balm.  And a pot-bellied Buddha with a wide cackling mouth resembled one of the Blue Meanies in the animated Beatles movie Yellow Submarine (1968).  It was all wonderfully, charmingly weird.

 

 

Our intention today was to visit just one part of Haw Par Villa, its most famous part – the attraction announced by a banner at the entrance, which said: ‘Hell’s Museum: Visions of Death and the Afterlife’.  From all accounts, there’s much more to see there, but that would have to wait until another visit.

 

After buying tickets at the ticket desk / gift shop – whose door had a sign saying ‘No food, no drinks, no pets (pets go to heaven)’ – we ventured into the first section of Hell’s Museum.  We discovered a corner where we could stand by a backdrop of red-hot lava, orange flames and grey smoke and have photos taken so that it looked like we were in hell; and a room where a short documentary film about religious concepts of death and hell played on a loop. Thereafter, we entered a modern and reasonably sober museum.  Haw Par Villa is famous for some over-the-top, properly hellish depictions of hell, but those would come later.

 

The museum contained displays and charts giving information on such things as different cultures’ and religions’ beliefs in the afterlife, the history of ‘handling death’ in Singapore, ‘Singapore’s industry of cremation’ and, courtesy of a large map, the locations of all the cemeteries in the city-state – Chinese, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, Baha’i, Parsi, Burmese, Japanese and ‘War’.  Among many other things, there were verses on the subject of death and hell from various sacred texts, such as the Buddhist Dhammapada.  (Chapter 9, Verses 126-128: “Some are born in the womb; the wicked are born in hell…”)

 

 

I particularly liked a replica of a Mexican Day of the Dead altar with all the traditional paraphernalia: photographs of the deceased, butterflies, flowers, bunting, candles, water, food, alcohol, cigars, salt, incense, mirrors, crosses and little skulls made of glass, ceramics, plaster and sugar.  There was also one of ‘a traditional Chinese void deck funeral’.  Void decks are the ground floors of the Singaporean Housing Development Board (HDB) apartment blocks that rise all over the city-state.  These floors are normally untenanted and have communal spaces and, according to the museum, create ‘opportunities for residents to interact and bond over activities…’ and let them ‘…stage social functions, weddings, and of course funerals.’  Coincidentally, I’d lately read a short story entitled The Moral Support of Presence by the Singaporean writer Karen Kwek, about a woman having to organise and sit through a void-deck funeral for her mother whilst coping with grief.

 

 

Immediately past the modern museum was another area of Haw Par Villa eccentricity.  The dioramas here included a mass of rock whose multiple folds and clefts were adorned with severed heads, their faces ghostly pale, tongues protruding, mouths and eyes leaking blood.  An even more bizarre display was a rocky landscape where rats and rabbits were depicted at war with each other.  I don’t know what story or legend inspired this, but to my Western eyes it resembled the title creatures of James Herbert’s The Rats (1974) taking on the rabbits in Richard Adams’ Watership Down (1972) – after those rabbits were infected with rabies. One rabbit chomping bloodily on a rat’s neck was an especially nasty detail.  Meanwhile, I felt sorry for a pair of rats wearing medic armbands who were trying to carry away an injured comrade on a stretcher.

 

 

Finally we came to a structure housing Haw Par Villa’s most celebrated attraction – a series of dioramas representing the Ten Courts of Hell of Chinese mythology and Buddhism.  Guarding its entrance were the demons Ox Head (a minotaur holding a trident) and Horse Face (an equine-headed being clutching a spiked club).  These guardians, an information panel explained, were “…part of the netherworld’s bureaucracy.  They form a network of attendants and jailers responsible for escorting souls through the ten courts…”

 

 

Inside, things started fairly innocuously with Court 1, where ‘King Qinguang conducts a preliminary trial for the deceased.’  The diorama here showed a recently-deceased soul cowering in front of King Qinguang while demon guards with superlong tongues and bird’s claws, or heads shaped like malformed gourds, looked on.  Having been assessed according to the deeds they did alive, with the help of such judging tools as ‘the Book of Good and Evil’, ‘the Scale of Good and Evil’ and ‘the Mirror of Souls’, the souls are divided up: “Virtuous souls… may cross the Golden or Silver Bridges to either attain the Tao, become immortals or deities, or be reborn as humans blessed with good lives…”, whereas “…sinners will have to go through further judgement and punishment in the rest of the 10 courts.”  Needless to say, it’s the ordeals of that latter group that gives this attraction its ghoulish zest.

 

 

Thereafter, we learnt what types of miscreants are dealt with in Courts 2-9 and what punishments are meted out to them.  In Court 2, for instance, people who’ve caused hurt, cheated or robbed get ‘thrown into a volcanic pit’, those who’ve indulged in corruption, stealing or robbery (again) get ‘thrown into blocks of ice’, and those sullied by prostitution get ‘thrown into a pool of blood’.  By Court 9, robbers, murderers, rapists and those responsible for ‘any other unlawful conduct’ have their ‘head and arms chopped off’ while anyone guilty of ‘neglecting the old and the young’ gets ‘crushed under boulders’.

 

And the dioramas showed the courts’ demonic bureaucrats carrying out those punishments in bloody, gory detail.  We saw hearts being extracted (as punishment for ungratefulness, being disrespectful towards one’s elders or ‘escaping from prison’); writhing bodies disappearing under giant grindstones (that’s what you get if you’re disobedient to your siblings or don’t show enough ‘filial piety’); folk being graphically impaled on the branches of ‘a tree of knives’ (your comeuppance for cheating, kidnapping or using bad language); and tongues being removed (the price you pay if you spread rumours or cause discord among your family members).

 

 

Fabulously, the chopping, severing, gouging, crushing, impaling, disembowelling, dismembering and decapitating going on in Haw Par Villa’s 10 Courts of Hell have encouraged generations of parents to bring their children here in order to instil moral values in them – or, putting it more bluntly, to terrify them into being good.  They’ve forced their offspring to look on these horrors while warning them, “See what happens if you’re naughty!”  Indeed, one of my Singaporean colleagues told me she was brought here when she was eight years old and suffered nightmares for the next fortnight.

 

I found myself wondering, meanwhile, what chastisements the 47th President of the USA would face when he passed away and entered the netherworld.  From what I knew of his misdeeds, I calculated he’d be thrown into a volcanic pit, into blocks of ice, into a tree of knives and into a wok of boiling oil; have his heart and tongue cut out and his head and arms chopped off; and be grilled alive on a red-hot copper pillar, sawn in half and pounded by a stone mallet.  Oh, and dismembered.

 

 

Lastly, in Court 10, we saw King Zhuanlun making a final judgement on the souls who’ve been through hell’s punishments, deciding “what forms they will take upon their rebirth.  This will depend on their karma – the good and bad deeds committed in life.”  In this diorama, there were two sinners on their hands and knees before the king, and already the animals they’d become in their next lives were taking form on their backs.  One was metamorphosising into a black goat, the other into a white rabbit.  Before being reincarnated as those creatures, they had one more port of call – ‘Meng Po’s Pavillion’, where their  memories of previous lives, and presumably of hell, are erased.

 

With all this glorious, phantasmagorical barminess on display, it doesn’t surprise me that the Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka, who worked in Singapore at various times between 2014 and 2020 and whose Booker Prize-winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022) is about ghosts, demons and the afterlife in late-1980s Colombo, cites Har Par Villa as one of Seven Moons’ major inspirations.

 

As I’ve said, there was a great deal more at Haw Par Villa we didn’t have time to see that day.  I can’t wait for our next visit to this splendidly baroque place.

 

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The man from another place has gone to another place

 

From wikipedia.org / © Georges Biard

 

For the past few days, I’ve felt like wearing a black armband while I sip my cups of coffee.  That’s because David Lynch, visionary maker of movies, short films, TV shows, web series, music videos and commercials, and artist, musician and actor to boot, passed away on January 15th.

 

In his cinematic output, Lynch was surely one of the most American of film directors. His work was suffused with Americana, both the cosy variety populated by porches, picket fences, lawns, sprinklers, diners, coffee, pie and kindly, neighbourly folk; and the flashier variety whereby bequiffed, leather-jacketed Elvis wannabes and peroxide blondes cruised along endless highways in big, finned sports cars.  This being Lynch, though, submerged beneath the Americana and frequently bubbling to its surface were things altogether weirder, darker, more surreal and twisted.  There was as much Salvador Dali, Luis Bunuel and William S. Burroughs in his work as there was Edward Hopper, Frank Capra and Ray Bradbury.  Meanwhile, though Lynch’s themes, motifs, imagery and stylistic touches felt unique – no wonder ‘Lynchian’ became a word – he wasn’t afraid to dress his visions in the clothes of familiar genres: horror, thriller, crime noir, science fiction and – something Lynch didn’t get enough credit for – comedy.

 

Anyway, here’s a guide to my favourite parts of the David Lynch film-and-TV universe.

 

Favourite Lynch cast

Lynch’s version of Dune (1984) was a box-office flop and received much abuse from critics.  (Dung, I remember the New Musical Express calling it.)  Unfortunately, Dune’s old-school producer Dino De Laurentiis wanted the doorstop-sized and labyrinthine Frank Herbert novel on which it was based crammed into a regulation two-hour movie.  The condensed result didn’t make much sense.

 

© Dino De Laurentiis Corporation / Universal Pictures

 

But Lynch never worked with a better troupe of actors.  It even outshone the cast that, four decades later, Denis Villeneuve assembled for his telling of the story in 2022 and 2024.  The Lynch Dune features Kyle MacLachlan, Jurgen Prochnow, Francesca Annis, Kenneth McMillan, Paul Smith, Patrick Stewart, Richard Jordan, Freddie Jones, Sian Phillips, Virginia Madsen, Jack Nance, José Ferrer, Everitt McGill, Brad Dourif, Max von Sydow and Dean Stockwell.  Oh, and Sting – more on him in a minute.

 

Favourite Lynch collaborator

That would be Jack Nance, who played Henry Spencer, lead character in Eraserhead (1977), the film that put Lynch on the map.  With his impassive features, bouffant, tight suit and peculiar gait, Nance contributes as much to the film’s atmosphere as the elements that today we’d regard as typically Lynchian – the mutant baby, the lady in the radiator, the flickering lights, the industrial noise.  Thereafter, he was in all Lynch’s film projects (apart from 1980’s The Elephant Man) up to 1997’s Lost Highway.  He most famously played the amiable, fishing-and-chess-obsessed Pete Martell in Twin Peaks (1990-91), Lynch and Mark Frost’s oddball, sometimes barmy, occasionally confounding TV murder whodunnit, which coincidentally was a soap opera, comedy, horror story and science-fiction drama too.

 

© AFI Center for Advanced Studies / Libra Films

 

Nance’s life was hardly a bed of roses.  His film work was intermittent and in the mid-1980s he worked as a hotel clerk to make ends meet.  His second wife Kelly Jean Van Dyke (Dick Van Dyke’s niece) committed suicide.  And he had severe alcohol problems.  During the filming of Blue Velvet (1986), he was in such a state that Dennis Hopper – Dennis Hopper! – had to drive him to a rehabilitation centre.  In 1996, Nance died of a subdural hematoma, resulting from a ‘blunt force trauma’.  The previous day his face was bruised and he told friends that he’d been punched during a brawl he’d got into with some strangers in a doughnut shop.  Lynch said in tribute: “There’s not another actor I can think of who could fill his shoes.  I had roles in my head for future films that I was saving for Jack.  I cannot think of anyone else who could do it.”

 

Favourite Lynch funny bit

The other day at work I was discussing Lynch’s passing with a colleague.  I started enthusing about the sequence where Nicolas Cage and Willem Dafoe try to rob a feed store in Wild at Heart (1991) and how funny it was: “Willem Dafoe trips and falls on his shotgun and it goes off and you see the top of his head flying up in the air…  Meanwhile, there’s a wounded clerk who’s had his hand blown off at the wrist…  His colleague comforts him by saying modern surgery can reattach his hand… And then you see a dog running away outside with the hand in its mouth…”

 

At this point I realised my colleague wasn’t laughing with me, but was looking decidedly queasy.  He didn’t seem happy to be reminded of that sequence.  Which shows humour is subjective.  Still, I think the attempted robbery in Wild at Heart is Lynch’s funniest moment.

 

© PolyGram / Propaganda Films / Samuel Goldwyn Company

 

Favourite Lynch musical bit

Lynch was a musician, so music played a big role in his films – right from Eraserhead, when the lady in the radiator sings In Heaven.  In his final major work, Twin Peaks: The Return (2017), the long-awaited third season of his celebrated TV show, music wasn’t so much an element as a fixture.  Each episode ended with a scene in the Roadhouse, the bar / concert venue in the town of Twin Peaks, where a musical act would be performing.  Given Twin Peaks’ small size and remote location, the Roadhouse attracted some unfeasibly big names: Julee Cruise, the Cactus Blossoms, Rebekah Del Rio with Moby on guitar, and one Edward Louis Severson – Eddie Vedder to you and me.

 

But in my opinion, the act that rounds off Episode 8 of Twin Peaks: The Return is best of all.  It’s the fearsome electro-metal juggernaut Nine Inch Nails, whom the Roadhouse MC introduces as the Nine Inch Nails, no less.

 

© Dino De Laurentiis Corporation / Universal Pictures

 

Favourite Lynch musician in an acting role

Lynch was also fond of putting singers and musicians in his casts.  Many remember Sting playing Feyd-Rautha Harknonnen, evil nephew of the equally-evil Baron Harkonnen, in Dune.  I’m not a fan of Sting’s acting but visually, with his spiky blonde hair, lean frame and daft codpiece, he was striking.  Indeed, when I saw Denis Villeneuve’s Dune Part 2 and Austen Butler strolled into view as Feyd-Rautha, my first thought was: “Oh look, there’s what’s-his-name in the Sting role!”

 

© Twin Peaks Productions / New Line Cinema / CiBy 2000

 

However, my favourite Lynchian musical-cameo comes in the middle of Twin Peaks’ cinematic prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992).  This is when David Bowie pops up as Phillip Jeffries, an FBI agent who’s been mysteriously missing for two years.  One morning, he suddenly steps out of a lift at FBI headquarters.  He proceeds to babble gibberish at FBI agents and Twin Peaks regulars Dale Cooper, Albert Rosenthal and Gordon Cole (Kyle MacLachlan, Miguel Ferrer and Lynch himself): “Who do you think this is, there…?  I found something.  And then there they were!”  Then he narrates a trippy dream montage involving dwarves, killers, masks, disembodied mouths and long-nosed spectres.  And then he vanishes into thin air.  “He’s gone!” squawks McLachlan.  “He was never here!” retorts Ferrer.

 

Bowie died early in 2016, before Twin Peaks: The Return began filming, which seemed to rule Philip Jeffries out of the third series’ storyline.  However, Lynch did include Jeffries.  Only now the disappearing agent is a giant teapot voiced by an actor called Nathan Frizell doing a Bowie impersonation.

 

David Bowie turned into a teapot.  Only David Lynch could do that.

 

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Showtime Networks

 

Favourite Lynch sad bit

Because of the nightmarish aspects of his works – it’s not the majority of their content, but it’s the stuff that lingers in viewers’ minds – Lynch isn’t readily associated with pathos.  Yet there are moments in his films that I find incredibly sad.  In The Elephant Man, for instance, it’s when the titular character John Merrick (John Hurt) escapes from the freak show owned by the evil Bytes (Freddie Jones), with the help of the show’s other inmates.  A dwarf, played by Star Wars’ Kenny Baker, remarks ruefully: “Luck, my friend, luck.  Who needs it more than we?”  Or in Twin Peaks: The Return when Deputy Hawk (Michael Horse) says a final goodbye to the ailing Margaret Lanterman, aka the Log Lady.  This is made more poignant by knowing that Log-Lady actress Catherine Coulson died early in the third season’s production.

 

But my number-one Lynch sad moment is probably the ending of The Straight Story (1999), when Alvin (Richard Farnworth) finally makes it to the shack of his unwell brother, Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton).  They’re two old codgers, one using walking sticks and the other a Zimmer frame, and clearly aren’t used to expressing their feelings.  But Lynch, with some basic dialogue (“Did you ride that thing all the way out here to see me?” “I did, Lyle.”), some silence and some anxious, exhausted looks and expressions from his actors, conveys a huge amount of emotion.

 

© Asymmetrical Productions / Film4 / Buena Vista Productions

 

Favourite Lynch scary bit

Obviously, there are lots of scary bits in Lynch’s oeuvre.  I imagine he’d have been miffed if you described his works as ‘horror’ films, but he more than earned his entry in any ‘Encyclopaedia of Horror’.

 

Particularly freaky to me were several things in Twin Peaks and its 2017 sequel.  The image of Killer Bob (Frank Silva) crawling over a sofa in the original series was terrifying.  Twin Peaks: The Return featured in its first episode a strange experiment involving a big glass box and a mass of surveillance equipment that eventually conjures up a phantom entity.  Unfortunately for the guy monitoring the experiment – who’s inopportunely chosen this moment to have it off with his girlfriend – the entity is equipped with kitchen-blender fingers and It proceeds to reduce their heads to bloody confetti.  Also horrific is a sequence in a later episode wherein Deputy Bobby Briggs (Dana Ashbrook) tries to calm a hysterical woman at the wheel of a stalled car and a convulsing, vomiting zombie-like creature slowly rises out of the seat beside her.  This is never explained or referred to again – a perfect, scary Lynchian moment in other words.

 

And I remember sinking into my cinema seat, not wanting to look at the screen too much, during Lost Highway (1996), when Lynch’s camera starts prowling deep – deep – into the black recesses of the house belonging to Fred (Bill Pullman), the film’s initial hero.  That sequence had a real primordial chill to it.

 

But for my money, the scariest Lynch moment is the ‘Winkie’s Diner’ sequence in Mulholland Drive (2001).  A man sitting in the diner (Patrick Fischler) recounts two dreams he’s had, both of which take place there.  In each dream he’s been possessed by an inexplicable fear – and a man with a hideous face living behind the diner, whom he can see ‘through the wall’, seems to be responsible.  When a companion suggests he exorcises the memory of the dreams by checking behind the real diner, he reluctantly complies.  So they venture along the side alleyway, and…  What follows is one of the very few jump-scares in cinematic history that actually made me jump.

 

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Spelling Entertainment

 

Favourite Lynch speech

Miguel Ferrer’s Albert Rosenthal, the arrogant FBI pathologist who assists Kyle MacLachlan’s Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks, gets my vote here.  During the first season, Albert is very vocal about his low opinion of the town of Twin Peaks, which results in him getting punched out by Sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean).  During the second season, when Truman’s ready to punch him out again following a cutting jibe – “You might practise walking without dragging your knuckles on the floor” – Albert responds to the threat of violence with an impassioned speech explaining that he’s happy to be a knob-end if it helps him in the greater scheme of things, i.e. in the struggle against evil.  Oh, and he’s a committed pacifist too.

 

“While I will admit to a certain cynicism, the fact is that I’m a naysayer and hatchet-man in the fight against violence.  I pride myself in taking a punch and I’ll gladly take another because I choose to live my life in the company of Gandhi and King.  My concerns are global.  I reject absolutely revenge, aggression and retaliation.  The foundation of such a method is love.  I love you, Sheriff Truman.”

 

No wonder Cooper tells the dumfounded Truman afterwards, “Albert’s path is a strange and difficult one.”

 

© De Laurentiis Entertainment Group

 

Favourite Lynch villain

There are a good many contenders for this too: Killer Bob in Twin Peaks, Willem Dafoe’s Bobby Peru in Wild at Heart, and Kenneth McMillan’s Baron Harkonnen in Dune, who’s basically a levitating, leering sack of pus.  But at the end of the day, my ‘Favourite Lynch Villain’ award has to go to Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth in Blue Velvet.

 

The scene where the black-clad, slick-haired Frank assaults Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini) whilst acting out a deranged sexual fantasy, screaming things like “Baby wants to f**k! Baby wants to f**k blue velvet!” and slurping gas out of a canister is astonishing.  It’s made even more harrowing by the fact that the hapless Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is hiding nearby in a closet and has to witness it all.  This is the moment when the preppy, clean-cut Jeffrey discovers life is a lot more complicated, in a bad way, than he thought.  No wonder he laments: “Why are there people like Frank? Why is there so much trouble in this world?”

 

So, thank you David Lynch.  Your oeuvre was sometimes comfortingly genial, sometimes perplexingly weird, sometimes shockingly dark – but it was always fascinating.  I raise a damn fine cup of coffee in your honour.

 

© Lynch-Frost Productions / Showtime Networks

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My 2024 writing round-up

 

© The Sirens Call Publications

 

“Well, 2024 was an excellent year!”  No future historians will say, ever.  Come to think of it, because of events in 2024, there might not be any future historians.  Not any future, full-stop.

 

However, on a personal level, 2024 saw some improvements in my situation.  Firstly, in March, my partner and I, and our cat, moved apartments in our current city (and country) of abode, Singapore.  We’d been in an expensive condo, inhabited mostly by rich Western and Chinese expatriates, in a modern part of the city-state.  We moved into a cheaper and more modest condo in an older and more traditional district where our neighbours are nearly all Singaporean.  It’s so much nicer.  For one thing there are no spoilt, bratty kids running riot outside our front door because the unfortunate Filippino / Indonesian / Burmese girls hired by their expat parents as ‘maids’ or ‘helpers’ and made to look after them are afraid or unwilling to discipline them.  Also, our new neighbourhood is handier for getting to our work and has several notable Hawkers’ Centres and eateries offering a range of good but modestly-priced foods.  Singapore is generally expensive and its Hawkers’ Centres are one of its saving graces.

 

Secondly, I had a successful year with regard to my writing.  Indeed, in terms of short stories published, 2024 even topped 2023, when 15 of my stories made it into my print.  This has been my best writing year to date.

 

So, here’s a round-up of my stories published in 2024.  Details are provided about who published them, what pseudonym they were published under and, when possible, how they can be accessed today.

 

As Jim Mountfield:

  • Jim Mountfield, the pseudonym I stick on my horror fiction, was first published in 2024 at the end of January when the story Underneath the Arches was included in the quarterly fiction-and-poetry magazine The Sirens Call.  Heavily inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, Underneath the Arches was written by me at a young age – and I think it shows in the florid writing style.  However, I was grateful to The Sirens Call for giving the story (which’d languished on my computer hard-drive for decades) a home at last.  Alas, The Sirens Call ceased publication late in the year and I can no longer provide a link for downloading its past issues.
  • In April, Issue 11 of The Stygian Lepus featured my ‘cosmic-horror’ story The Followers, which was set in the English city I lived in from 2002 to 2005, Newcastle-upon-Tyne.  Specifically, it was set in two parts of it, Grainger Market and Chinatown on Stowell Street.  Issue 11 can be read here if you become a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or purchased here.

 

© The Stygian Lepus

 

  • April was also when my Northern-Ireland-set short story The Crawler, which involved a devious policeman and a collection of sinister dolls, appeared in 2024’s second issue of The Sirens Call.
  • And in July the next – and unfortunately, the last ever – issue of The Sirens Call contained my sci-fi / horror story The Colony.  This was set in East Anglia after manmade climate change has hoicked up temperatures and sea levels.  Its premise was that scientists had created, through genetic engineering, millions of giant jellyfish-like organisms and tethered them offshore in order to hold back storm surges and reduce coastal erosion.  Obviously, nothing could go wrong with this scheme.  Nothing at all…
  • The Hole in the Wall was a ‘folk-horror’ story about a member of an organisation modelled on Britain’s Campaign for Real Ale (CAMRA) who’s researching a couple of pubs.  First, he visits a horrible dump of a pub; then he stumbles across a pub that’s so classy it seems too good to be true.  And yes, the second one is too good to be true because it has a mysterious, malevolent something lurking in its walls.  The Hole in the Wall appeared in Volume 18, Issue 12 – the October 2024 edition – of Schlock! Webzine, which can be purchased here.
  • Also in October, my story The Activation was the opening number in the anthology Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024, the annual volume of scary fiction published by Cloaked Press.  As the collection’s title suggests, its theme this year was body horror, described by Wikipedia as “a subgenre of horror fiction that intentionally showcases grotesque or psychologically disturbing violations of the human body or of another creature…” including “aberrant sex, mutations, mutilation, zombification, gratuitous violence, disease, or unnatural movements of the body.”  The Activation contained about five of those things, so I think it fitted the bill.  It was also a prequel to my story The Nuclei, which appeared in the 2020 collection Xenobiology – Stranger Creatures.  Nightmare Fuel: Body Horror 2024 can be purchased on Kindle here and as a paperback here.

 

© Cloaked Press

 

  • In November, a Jim Mountfield story appeared in the collection Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 from Leg Iron Books.  A monster of a book indeed, this featured 39 spooky stories, including my Halloween-set effort Bag of Tricks.  The story was inspired by a memory I had of riding on Bangkok’s Skytrain one October 31st when some Thai kids entered the carriage wearing fancy dress, presumably on their way to a Halloween party; but most of Bag of Tricks actually takes place in Scotland.  Monster: Underdog Anthology 2024 can be bought on Kindle here and as a paperback here.
  • The Tears of the Pontianak, which appeared in the Samhain 2024 edition of the magazine The Hungur Chronicles, published in November too, was a first for me.  This was my first published story where the setting is my current home, Singapore.  As you can tell from the title, it’s mainly about a Pontianak, a blood-drinking demon of Malaysian, Singaporean and Indonesian folklore.  But the idea for the story actually came to me one afternoon when I was exploring Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum and encountered some beautiful pieces of local, antique furniture.  The Hungur Chronicles’ Samhain 2024 issue can be purchased directly from Hiraeth Publishing here or from Barnes & Noble here.
  • Coming from a farming background, quite a few of my stories are set on farms.  However, I only had one ‘farm-horror’ story published in 2024.  This was in Issue 19 – the December 2024 edition – of The Stygian Lepus and its title was Rack and Ruin.  It owed something to the legendary American horror writer H.P. Lovecraft, although the Lovecraftian elements were mixed with the mud, muck and rain of a hill farm in autumnal southern Scotland.  Again, Issue 19 can be read here if you’re a member of The Stygian Lepus’s Back Catalogue; or simply bought here.
  • The influence of H.P. Lovecraft could also be seen in The House of Glass, the final Jim Mountfield story I had published in 2024.  As its title implies, most of the action takes place inside a house made almost entirely of glass.  The house stands in the mountains of Sri Lanka, the country where I lived in real life from 2014 to 2022.  The House of Glass appears in the anthology Swan Song: The Final Anthology, which, sadly, is the last volume to come from Trevor Denyer’s Midnight Street Press – from now on, Midnight Street Press will exist only to sell what’s on its back catalogue, not to produce anything new.  It can be purchased from Amazon UK here and from Amazon US here.

 

© Swords and Sorcery Magazine

 

As Rab Foster:

  • Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when writing fantasy fiction – usually the unruly sub-genre of fantasy called ‘sword and sorcery’ – hit the ground running in 2024.  On January 1st, the second and final part of my story The Boots of the Cat appeared in Volume 18 Issue 3 of Schlock! Webzine.  This was about a group of mercenaries who, while sequestered in an unwelcoming city, find themselves in a strange scenario inspired by a famous fairy tale.  And no, despite the title, that fairy tale isn’t Puss in Boots.  The issue can be purchased here.
  • Because of a publishing delay, the December 2023 edition of the fiction magazine Savage Realms Monthly didn’t appear until January 2024.  It contained my story Pit of the Orybadak, which combined fantasy elements – slimy flesh-eating monsters slithering around in a giant bog – with the pertinent real-life theme of how soldiers are treated (or mistreated) when they become prisoners of war.  This issue of Savage Realms Monthly can be bought here.
  • The Fleet of Lamvula, a heady story inspired by my love of ‘lost graveyards of ships’ stories, and the movies of Ray Harryhausen, and the trippiest song ever recorded, Black Sabbath’s Planet Caravan, appeared in late January in Issue 144 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine. The story can now be read in Swords and Sorcery Magazine’s archive, here.
  • In July, my Rab Foster story The Drakvur Challenge made it into the pages of Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly.  This was a milestone for me, being (by my calculations) the 100th short story I’ve had published.  The Drakvur Challenge was inspired by a visit I made to Tirta Gangga Royal Water Garden in Bali, Indonesia – a place I found fascinating because of its beautiful ponds, fish, fountains and networks of stepping stones… while, stowed away in a compound at the back, it also had some surprisingly monstrous-looking statues.  However, like much of my fantasy fiction, The Drakvur Challenge owed a big debt to the cinematic marvel that was Ray Harryhausen too.  Issue 3 of Crimson Quill Quarterly can be obtained as a paperback here and on Kindle here.

 

© Crimson Quill Quarterly

 

  • August saw the appearance of my story The Scarecrow of Terryk Head in Issue 151 of Swords and Sorcery Magazine.  In it, one of my recurring fantasy-fiction characters, Gudroon the Witch, had to deal with not only the evil scarecrow of the title but with three doltish farmers – and with three even-more-doltish farmers’ sons.  Again, The Scarecrow of Terryk Head is now available to read in the magazine’s archive, here.
  • In November, Rab Foster strayed into the controversial sub-genre of fantasy known as ‘grimdark’ and served up a tale of violence and gore, nihilism and despair, entitled The Mechanisms of Raphar.  (What, I wonder, inspired this?  What event in the real world in November 2024 could have induced nihilism and despair in me?)  Owing something to Edgar Allan Poe’s The Pit and the Pendulum (1842) and also something to the ’10 Courts of Hell’ display at Singapore’s most remarkable museum, Haw Par Villa, The Mechanisms of Raphar appeared in Volume 18, Issue 13 of Schlock! Webzine, now purchasable at Amazon here.

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

As Steve Cashel:

  • Steve Cashel, the penname I put on non-horrific, non-fantastical and often crime-tinged stories set in Scotland, had one piece published in 2024.  In fact, it appeared only yesterday, on December 31st, the final day of the year.  It’s called Malkied and appears on the short-fiction page of the website for the crime-and-mystery publisher Close to the Bone.  It’s accessible here.

 

And finally…

  • This is cheating.  Self-publishing doesn’t count.  But on September 18th, 2024 – the tenth anniversary of Scotland’s referendum on independence – I took the opportunity to post on this blog a short story entitled Mither, which I’d written in 2014 soon after I’d heard the referendum’s result.  A mixture of Scottish politics and Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), it was too weird to ever get properly published.  (Still, even if I say so myself, I think Norman Bates and his mom are a good metaphor for Scotland and the divisions between ‘yes’ and ‘no’ voters that supposedly materialised at the time.)  Anyway, if you’re interested, you can read it here.

 

So, I had 17 short stories published in 2024, which makes it my most successful year as a writer ever.  I suspect I will be hard-pressed to equal or better that record in 2025, however.  That’s because of the recent disappearances of certain magazines (like The Sirens Call) and publishers (like Midnight Street Press) who have published my stuff regularly in the past.

 

Meanwhile, 2025 looks like it’s going to be garbage, largely due to Donald Trump regaining the American presidency, which will embolden fascists, climate-change deniers, anti-vaxxers and conspiracy-fantasist nutjobs around the world.  I suspect even somewhere as famously stable as Singapore will be affected, negatively, by the USA turning into a mafia state / an oligarchy / the political equivalent of a meth lab.  And there’ll be extra, unwelcome input from Elon Musk…  Oh well.  My strategy for surviving 2025 with my sanity intact will be to keep my head down and keep writing.

 

© The Sirens Call Publications