Author: MrM0untfield

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My safe space

 

 

The world is in a terrible state at the moment.  It’s apparently morphing into a real-life version of the scenario imagined by George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), wherein the planet is divided into three authoritarian superstates, Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania.  We now have Russia run by Vladimir Putin, China run by Xi Jinping, and the USA run by the grotesque triumvirate of orange gobshite Donald Trump, viper-in-hillbilly-form J.D. Vance, and the chainsaw-wielding, ketamine-popping, Seig Heiling, superrich super-dickhead Elon Musk.  All three countries have been open about their territorial ambitions, about their wish to expand and turn into real-life, continent-engulfing equivalents of Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania.  Very bad news if you live in Ukraine, Poland, the Baltic states, Taiwan, Panama, Greenland or Canada.  Pretty bad news for the rest of us.

 

Thus, in these troubled times, it’s a relief to have a safe space: a little cubby hole you can retreat to, and hide in, and where your brain can function removed from all the awfulness happening outside for a while.  For me, that space is provided by the Flying V bar, Singapore’s self-styled ‘heavy metal headquarters’, which is hidden away in a back corridor in the basement of the Adelphi Shopping Centre on the city’s Colman Street.  Actually, the shopping centre is next door to the National Gallery, which makes the Flying V an ideal spot to sit with a beer after a visit to the gallery and ruminate on all the artwork you’ve just experienced.

 

 

A Singaporean shopping centre may seem an incongruous place to find a heavy metal bar.  However, it isn’t the only music or metal-related business in the Adelphi.  On your way there, you pass a few units containing shops that sell vinyl records, many of the heavy-metal variety.

 

 

Inside, the walls of the Flying V are slathered with old posters and flyers advertising heavy-metal bands, concerts and festivals.  Even if you don’t touch a drop of alcohol, you can spend a pleasant hour in the place just reading the items crammed over the walls and savouring the little glows of nostalgia they kindle in you.  On my part, for example, I gave happy sighs when I discovered an Art Nouveau-inspired poster for the mighty space-rock band Hawkwind, designed by the graphic artist Barney Bubbles; a picture of the late, great Ronnie James Dio tricked out in sword-and-sorcery gear, as was Ronnie’s wont to wear; and a poster for the much-missed Motörhead on their 1980 world tour, promoting their greatest-ever album Ace of Spades.

 

 

When I took my cat-loving partner there, on the other hand, she was delighted to find this statement about the feline species emblazoned on the wall behind our table.

 

 

The Flying V’s drinks menu includes a beverage called Trooper Premium British Beer.  Trooper’s vivid label-design gives you a clue as to who produces it.  Yes, it’s the result of a project involving veteran heavy-metal band Iron Maiden, singers of such anthems as Number of the Beast (1982) and Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter (1990).  The latter song will always be close to my heart because of the fact it knocked Cliff Richard’s sanctimonious Saviour’s Day (1990) off the coveted Christmas Number One slot in the 1990 British singles chart.  The band produce Trooper in partnership with England’s Robinson’s Brewery.  So, spending an afternoon getting sloshed on the stuff in the Flying V isn’t a waste of time or effort.  You’re actually helping to fund Iron Maiden.

 

As I’ve said, the world is in a dire state just now and it sometimes feels tempting to retreat into the Flying V and hole up there for good.  However, the place does contain a warning against staying on the premises for too long.  You might end up like this guy.

 

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Eggers’ banquet

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu (2024) has finally reached Singapore and a few days ago I watched it in the city-state’s excellent arthouse cinema The Projector.  This is Eggers’ reimagining of the 1922 silent horror-movie classic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, which was directed by F.W. Murnau and based surreptitiously on Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula – though not so surreptitiously that Murnau and his producers escaped being sued by Stoker’s widow for breach of copyright.

 

The new Nosferatu has provoked some extreme responses.  The reaction has been as polarised as the weird relationship at the film’s core, wherein the beautiful, fragrant Ellen (Lily-Rose Depp) gets intimate with the gaunt, rotting, pustuled Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), the dreaded nosferatu – vampire – of the title.  A while back, I read a very positive review of it by Wendy Ide in the Guardian but was taken aback by the negativity of the some of the comments below the line: “A turd…” “Just awful…” “Absolutely terrible…” “Beyond boring, absolute crap…”

 

Well, I lean towards the Wendy Ide end of the Nosferatu debate because I thought the film was great.  At least, I thought so during the two hours and 12 minutes I sat before it in The Projector.  When my critical faculties started to function again – they’d been in a daze during the film itself – I became aware of a few flaws.  But generally, thanks to its atmosphere, its visuals, its sumptuous (if drained) palette and its overall craftsmanship, I found it the most impressive version of Stoker’s novel I’ve seen.  And yes, though it retains the original Nosferatu’s German setting and German character-names, this is essentially another retelling of Dracula.

 

Not that I’m saying it’s my favourite version of Dracula.  That accolade belongs to the 1958 Dracula made by Hammer Films, directed by Terence Fisher and starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing as Dracula and Van Helsing, which I saw when I was 13 years old.  13 is a formative age, when certain things tend to imprint themselves on your consciousness and become your favourites for life.  Also, I feel uncomfortable saying this Nosferatu is better than Murnau’s Nosferatu.  More than a century separates the two films, with huge differences in their historical contexts, themes, styles and filmmaking technology, and to me they’re like chalk and cheese.  That said, I noticed some of the flaws in Eggers’ Nosferatu when I did compare it with the old one.

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

While we’re on the subject of comparisons, I should say I massively preferred this film to the 1992 Francis Ford Coppola one, Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  Despite having the peerless Gary Oldman in the title role, it was one of the few films I’ve come close to walking out of in a cinema.  I stayed the course in the hope it would improve in its later stages, but it didn’t.  Eggers’ Nosferatu is as operatic in its tone and as flamboyant in its visuals as Coppola’s Dracula.  However, while Coppola threw everything at the wall – restless camera movements, gimmicky special effects and make-up, over-the-top costumes, hammy performances – in the hope at least some of it would stick and hold the attentions of the raised-on-MTV teenagers he assumed would be the film’s audience, Eggers doesn’t merely show off In Nosferatu.  There are also moments of stillness and silence, of subtlety and holding back, of allowing atmosphere to ferment and ripen.  Actually, for my money, comparing it to Coppola’s Dracula is like comparing a moody and detail-laden work by a Dutch Master to a hyperactive kids’ cartoon.

 

Nosferatu’s storyline follows the Dracula template.  Young estate agent Thomas Hutter (the stand-in for Stoker’s Jonathan Harker, here played by Nicholas Hoult) is despatched from the fictional German port-city of Wisburg to a castle in Transylvania, where he has to supervise the paperwork for the purchase of a Wisburg mansion by the mysterious Transylvanian aristocrat Count Orlok.  Hutter’s sojourn in Orlok’s castle becomes a terrifying ordeal as he discovers the vampirical nature of his host.  He ends up plunging from one of its windows, into a river, while the Count sets off for Wisburg.

 

The Count’s chosen mode of travel is by ship – Romania, which Transylvania is part of now, borders on the Black Sea and Germany’s coast runs along the North and Baltic Seas, so this is evidently a long voyage – and he brings with him a horde of plague-carrying rats, which first destroy the ship’s crew and then start infecting the citizens of Wisburg when he reaches his destination.  These plague-rats are both a physical manifestation of Orlok’s evil and, presumably, a way of disguising his activities – with people dropping dead of plague left, right and centre, nobody’s going to notice a few blood-drained corpses.

 

But Orlok’s presence has been felt in Wisburg long before his arrival there.  Hutter’s wife Ellen – the Nosferatu equivalent of Stoker’s Mina Harker – has had an inexplicable psychic link to the ghoulish Count since her childhood and has already, in her dreams, pledged herself to him.  Also, Hutter’s boss Knock (Simon McBurney) has been communing with Orlok via some occult rituals.  Sending Hutter off to Transylvania was clearly part of a plan to relocate the vampire to the feeding-grounds of Wisburg.  Knock is the film’s version of Milo Renfield, the asylum-inmate who in Stoker’s novel becomes Dracula’s disciple.  Accordingly, Knock goes insane, gets incarcerated,  escapes and does Orlok’s bidding in the city.  Meanwhile, the thirsty Count makes a beeline for Ellen and those around her…

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

Eggers’ cast-members acquit themselves well.  Lily-Rose Depp is extremely impressive in a role that requires her to be frightened, helpless, yearning, lascivious, possessed and defiant – often a couple of those things in one scene.  As a female foil to Dracula, she’s as good as Eva Green’s character Vanessa Ives in John Logan’s gothic-horror TV show Penny Dreadful (2014-16).  Likening someone to the mighty Eva Green is big praise from me.

 

Playing Jonathan Harker in a Dracula film is a thankless task.  You have to be bland and bloodless enough to add spice to the forthcoming dalliance between your missus and the Count, to suggest she’s a desperate 19th-century housewife who might actually welcome the vampire’s kiss.  But you also have to be interesting enough to make the audience root for you while you’re trapped in Castle Dracula.  And Nicholas Hoult does what’s required as the Harker-esque Hutter.  His restraint contrasts with the silent-movie acting of the original Hutter, Gustav von Wangenheim, who spent the early scenes of the 1922 Nosferatu grinning like a maniac.

 

On the other hand, Simon McBurney is unnervingly off-the-scale as Knock.  The 1922 Knock, Alexander Granach, was off-the-scale too, but McBurney’s one is allowed to slather himself in some full-on, 2024-stye blood and gore.  (He follows the hallowed Renfield tradition of chomping on small animals.)  If there’s a criticism, it’s that he doesn’t get enough to do.  More on that in a minute.

 

Ralph Ineson and Willem Dafoe respectively play a beleaguered Wisburg physician, Dr Sievers, and a Swiss expert on the occult, Professor Von Franz, who correspond to Stoker’s Dr Seward and Professor Van Helsing.  When Hutter gets back to Wisburg, they team up with him to put a stop to Count Orlok’s onslaught.  Willem Dafoe won’t replace Peter Cushing in my affections as the ultimate cinematic Van Helsing, but he’s delightful as the eccentric, cat-loving Von Franz.  Kind old gent though he is, Von Franz concocts a plan to destroy the vampire that may have tragic consequences for the people he’s supposed to be protecting.

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

As for Bill Skarsgård and the film’s depiction of Count Orlok…  I can see why it’s been controversial.  Some have been disappointed that Eggers and Skarsgård didn’t replicate the iconic look of actor Max Schreck, who played the Count in 1922 as a bald, gaunt creature with rodentlike incisors, Spock ears and unseemly tufts of ear and eyebrow hair.  Indeed, in the first part of the film, we hardly see Orlok.  During the scenes set in his castle, he’s unsettlingly obscured by a haze of firelight, candlelight, shadows and darkness.  But when Eggers’ cameras finally reveal him, he’s an icky, mouldering thing, from the neck down at least, and he sports a monstrous and frankly distracting moustache.

 

I know Dracula had a moustache in the novel, and certain actors have played him with one, such as John Carradine in the Universal movies House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), and Christopher Lee in Jess Franco’s Count Dracula (1970).  But this must be the droopiest, shaggiest Drac-tache ever.

 

Maybe Eggers avoided the Max-Schreck look because he was sensitive to the accusations of antisemitism that dogged the old Nosferatu – that Schreck’s Orlok played on common German stereotypes and caricatures of Jewish people at the time.  Or maybe he just decided that look had become too much of a cliché.  As well as a slap-headed, pointy-eared vampire featuring in the previous remake of Nosferatu, Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre (1977), similar ones have appeared in the 1979 TV version of Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot, the original film version of What We Do In The Shadows (2014), and Guillermo del Toro’s Blade II (2002), where the leader of the baldy-vampires was played by Luke Goss.  (Yes… a Bros-feratu.)

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

 

It’s also debatable if Eggers and Skarsgård made the right choice for Orlok’s loud, guttural voice, which booms out of the screen like the Voice of the Mysterons from Gerry Anderson’s TV show Captain Scarlet (1967-68) with a Slavic accent.  At least it’s different…  And Skarsgård put a lot of work into creating those vocals, training with an Icelandic opera singer and even studying Mongolian throat singing.  But I actually found Yorkshireman Ralph Ineson’s deep, gruff, north-of-England tones more menacing, even though his character, Dr Sievers, is one of the good guys.  (Sievers must have had a medical practice in Leeds before moving to Wisburg.)

 

Elsewhere, not a great deal happens during the second half of the film, though Dafoe’s charming performance keeps us engaged.  The latter part of the 1922 film is enlivened by a sub-plot involving Knock, who gets blamed for the mayhem in Wisburg after Orlok’s ship arrives.  Believing him to be the real vampire, the townspeople pursue him through the streets and the surrounding countryside, in scenes that are still impressive today – Knock perched like a gargoyle atop a vertiginous rooftop, for instance, or the mob mistaking a distant scarecrow for him, rushing at it and tearing it to pieces.  Eggers removes this sub-plot, however, and Knock (who in the original film didn’t even meet Orlok physically) serves as a conventional vampire’s acolyte.  If nothing else, this gives the Count someone to transport his coffin from the Wisburg docks to the mansion he’s bought.  In the 1922 Nosferatu, he suffered the indignity of having to carry the coffin himself.

 

So, the film drifts somewhat later on and I’m not fully convinced by its portrayal of Count Orlok.  But overall I really enjoyed Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu.  It’s a feast – an Eggers’ banquet – of gorgeousness, gloom, sensuality, repulsiveness, grue, humour, absurdity and tragedy.  It has fabulous visuals, entertaining performances and a smart balance between the aesthetically pleasing and the grotesquely yucky, meaning it should satisfy both cerebral arthouse types and horror-movie aficionados more interested in blood, gore and plague-rats.

 

And I can’t understand why some people disliked it so much.  This Nosferatu isn’t Dross-feratu, it’s the Absolute-boss-feratu.

 

© Focus Features / Universal Pictures

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Bernard Cornwell’s (still the) King

 

© Penguin Books

 

A while ago on this blog, I enthusiastically reviewed Bernard Cornwell’s The Winter King (1995), the first volume of his Warlord Chronicles.  These books are his take on the King Arthur legend, which he tells in a manner closer to the reality of the Dark Ages than most other interpretations of the legend.  As a gift last Christmas, my partner kindly bought me the second and third volumes of the Warlord Chronicles, Enemy of God (1996) and Excalibur (1997).  Here are my thoughts on Enemy of God, which I’ve recently finished reading.

 

Enemy of God’s framing device is the same as The Winter King’s.  In the sixth century, an elderly monk called Derfel is writing down the history of King Arthur at the behest of the young Queen Igraine, who’s obsessed with the Arthurian tales she’s heard.  As a young man Derfel knew Arthur and became one of his most trusted warriors.  A theme in the books is the tension between messy reality and fanciful legend.  Derfel’s version of events frequently disappoints Igraine, accustomed to hearing much more romanticised stories about the king.  At one point she tells him, “There are scullions who know how to tell a tale better than you!”  Derfel fatalistically assumes that Igraine, later, will doctor his writings and make them more compatible with the legend.

 

The Winter King ended with Arthur triumphing at the Battle of Lugg Vale, a contest brought about by his own foolishness in backing out of an arranged marriage to Princess Ceinwyn of Powys, which massively offended her father, and wedding instead the more alluring but also more calculating Guinevere.  Enemy of God continues Arthur and Derfel’s story by detailing three more major events in their lives.

 

Firstly, Derfel takes part in Merlin’s ongoing quest to retrieve some relics that according to legend were given to the ancient Britons by the old pagan Gods, are known as the ‘Treasures of Britain’ and will, Merlin believes, restore Britain to the golden age it supposedly enjoyed before the arrivals of the Romans and, more lately, the Saxons.  Specifically, they go hunting for a magical cauldron that’s hidden on the island of Ynys Mon (today the Welsh island of Anglesey) off the coast of the kingdom of Lleyn, controlled by the vicious Irish king Diwrnach.  Secondly, Arthur marshals the warriors of most of the Briton kingdoms and sets off to dislodge the most powerful Saxon king, Aelle, from the east of the island – a campaign that eventually brings him to Saxon-controlled London.  And lastly, Arthur finds himself facing a rebellion in his home kingdom of Dummonia.  The rebels have incited the Christian community to rise against the pagan one there, with Arthur unjustly portrayed as the oppressive, Christian-hating pagan-in-chief, i.e., the ‘Enemy of God’ of the title.

 

Along the way, Derfel finds happiness with Ceinwyn, the woman Arthur spurned in the previous book, and they start a family together.  He also makes a troubling discovery about who his father is.  Arthur, meanwhile, learns some hard truths about certain people close to him whom he’s loved or, at least, been willing to give the benefit of the doubt to.  That Mordred, the boy-king of Dummonia, for whom Arthur has been acting as the kingdom’s lord-protector until the lad reaches manhood, turns out to be a wrong ’un is the least of the book’s surprises.

 

From wikimedia.org

 

A couple of things make Enemy of God feel different from its predecessor.  Firstly, Christianity is portrayed much more negatively here.  In The Winter King, the Christian Britons co-existed peacefully alongside the pagan ones, and the Briton kings had priests as well as druids in their entourages, ensuring them the support of both the ‘old’ and ‘new’ Gods.  This harmoniousness was embodied in the character of the affable and loyal Bishop Bedwin, but Enemy of God bumps him off early on.  Thereafter, the only sympathetic Christian character is Sir Galahad, who’s so decent and broad-minded he even lends Merlin a hand in his quest for the pagan cauldron.

 

Amusingly, Cornwell portrays the Christians’ activities, wailing in tongues, flagellating themselves and generally behaving hysterically as the year 500 AD draw nears – likely, they believe, to be the year when their Saviour returns to the earth – as immensely disturbing to the pagans.  They react to the Christians’ shenanigans with as much distaste and fear as modern bourgeoisie Christians have reacted to the many loopy religious cults that have sprung up during the 20th and 21st centuries.

 

A second difference is that we get far more of Merlin in this book.  In The Winter King, he didn’t show up until page 282, more than halfway through.  I was slightly critical of how he was deployed in the previous book’s plot.  I wrote that “…the manner in which Merlin reappears undermines the narrative, because it’s all a bit too unlikely.  A couple of times, the cunning old wizard pops up out of nowhere and saves the day.  He might as well just whip off a Mission Impossible-style rubber face-mask / disguise and go, ‘Duh-dah!’”  This didn’t sit very comfortably with the book’s attempts to treat the Arthurian legend with non-fantastical seriousness.

 

Merlin’s still something of an issue In Enemy of God, though here it’s to do with how he manages to suddenly revitalise himself.  At different points he seems to be at death’s door, or to have lapsed into senile decrepitude, but then he stages startling comebacks.  He’s like Doctor Who regenerating when his old body is about to die though, unlike the TV Time Lord, Merlin doesn’t actually transform into someone new.

 

Still, Cornwell’s Merlin is an immensely engaging character and he gets the best lines.  While telling Derfel what a lion is, and describing one he once saw in Rome, he remarks: “It was a very unimpressive threadbare sort of thing.  I suspected it was receiving the wrong diet.  Maybe they were feeding it Mithraists instead of Christians?”  When he goes on to talk about a crocodile, and Derfel inquires what that is, he explains, “A thing like Lancelot.”

 

It’s more difficult to breathe life into the character of Arthur.  There’s a danger that his very worthiness will make him seem two-dimensional and dull.  However, Cornwell mostly avoids this trap by highlighting the character-flaws that spring from this worthiness: naivete, gullibility and – paradoxically – being so in thrall to his sense of duty that he becomes villainous.  This last thing is illustrated when Cornwell weaves the tragic, chivalric romance of Tristan and Iseult into his narrative.  Here, the loving but doomed couple incur the wrath of King Mark of Kernow and Arthur feels duty-bound to side with Mark, even though Tristan has helped him in earlier campaigns.  When this ends horribly, Derfel is so disgusted with Arthur that he shuns him for a long time afterwards.

 

© Cartwright Hall Art Gallery / Bradford Museums & Galleries

 

It’s surprising to read a book written almost 30 years ago, and set roughly 1500 years ago, and find elements in it reminding me of 2025.  But Enemy of God does this in different ways.  Living in an era of Trumpian fake news, often transmitted by social media, I found myself smiling ruefully at Derfel’s accounts of how the weaselly Lancelot propagates a false image of himself, one brave and virtuous, by getting the bards to sing songs in praise of him around the countryside.  And after Derfel falls out with Arthur, he goes to those bards and pays for “a dozen songs about Tristan and Iseult that are sung to this day in all the feasting halls.  I made sure, too, that the songs put the blame for their deaths on Arthur.”

 

Also pushing fake news are the Christians.  At one point, a Christian magistrate called Nabur is executed for treason: “These days, of course, he is called a saint and martyr, but I only remember Nabur as a smooth, corrupt liar.”  Later, Arthur has to fight off an ambush in a squalid Christian settlement in the mountains of Powys, led by a filthy, wild-haired fanatic called Bishop Cadoc.  This also gets the Dark Ages equivalent of being reported on Elon Musk’s X: “They say that Arthur surprised Cadoc’s refuge, raped the women, killed the men and stole all Cadoc’s treasures, but I saw no rape, we killed only those who tried to kill us, and I found no treasures to steal – but even if there had been, Arthur would not have touched it…”  Obviously, “Cadoc was elevated into a living saint…”

 

It’s also interesting to view Enemy of God through the prism of 2025’s Britain, when Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform Party is rallying its supporters with chants of “We want our country back.”  Although Merlin is a very appealing character overall, it’s not difficult to see parallels between his mission to restore the old pre-Roman Britain and the nostalgic British nationalism peddled by Farage.  Ceinwyn, who’s quite enamoured with Merlin, gives a startlingly Farage-like speech at one point: “When I was a child… I heard all the tales of old Britain, how the Gods lived among us and everyone was happy.  There was no famine then, and no plagues, just us and the Gods and peace.  I want that Britain back, Derfel.”

 

On the other hand, Arthur evokes a more forward-looking – dare I say inclusive? – Britain.  Early in the book, he rejects Merlin’s vision of the island, saying: “This isn’t the old Britain…  Maybe once we were a people of one blood, but now?  The Romans brought men from every corner of the world!  Sarmatians, Libyans, Gauls, Numidians, Greeks!  Their blood is mingled with ours, just as it seethes with Roman blood and mixes now with Saxon blood.  We are what we are, Derfel, not what we once were…”  Arthur might be the greatest hero of British legend, but Farage’s Reform Party wouldn’t want to cite Cornwell’s version of him in their campaign literature.

 

In nearly every respect, Enemy of God is as good as its predecessor.   The only area where I think it pales a little in comparison to The Winter King is its ending.  Whereas the first volume ended with the bang that was the Battle of Lugg Vale, this volume is slightly anti-climactic.  Cornwell was presumably more concerned with manoeuvring his characters into position for the third and final volume than with finishing the second instalment with a bang similar to the first’s.  This is, to be fair, a problem that has beset many a middle volume in many a trilogy.  However, with everything else about Enemy of God so captivating and entertaining, I’m happy to overlook that slight shortcoming.

 

And so, in the near-future, I’ll hopefully get to grips with Excalibur…

 

© Michael Joseph / St Martin’s Press

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The Moore, the merrier

 

© Bloomsbury

 

I first came across the works of Alan Moore in the mid-1980s, while I was a student in Aberdeen.  One day, I discovered a ramshackle shop on the city’s King Street selling tatty second-hand paperbacks and comics out of cardboard boxes at ridiculously low prices.

 

There, I managed to buy most of the 26 issues of a comics anthology called Warrior, which had appeared monthly from 1982 to 1985.  Initially, I was attracted to Warrior because its contents included the continuing adventures of Father Shandor, a comic-strip character I’d been obsessed with in my early teens.  (Shandor was a 19th-century Transylvanian monk who fought vampires and demons.  He’d actually started as a movie character, played by the gruff, no-nonsense Scottish actor Andrew Keir, who was the foe of Christopher Lee’s Dracula in the 1966 Hammer horror movie Dracula: Prince of Darkness.  He became the hero of a comic strip in the late-1970s magazine House of Hammer, whose editor Dez Skinn would later edit Warrior.  At an even younger age, I’d been a big fan of Marvel Comics’ Doctor Strange and Shandor seemed a darker, more serious and more violent version of that.)  However, it was only one of many serials in Warrior and the most striking of these sprang from the pen of Alan Moore.

 

These included Marvelman, a revival of a British superhero who’d originally been the lead character in a comic book that’d run from 1953 to 1964, and The Bojeffries Saga, about a family of Munsters-like misfits and monsters living in a council house in Northampton, which incidentally is Moore’s hometown.  But it was the dystopian V for Vendetta, penned by Moore and drawn by David Lloyd (with occasional contributions from Tony Weare) that made me re-evaluate what comics were capable of doing.

 

Set in a neutral Britain that’s managed to avoid destruction in a nuclear war but now, in a dire situation after the subsequent nuclear winter, is under the heel of a fascist, totalitarian government, V for Vendetta was the first comic-book serial I’d encountered that seemed both utterly serious and utterly adult.  Yes, this was a time when it was still assumed anything drawn as a series of cartoons, in a series of boxes, with speech bubbles, could never be adult and must always be juvenile.  It also made uncomfortable reading – again, ‘uncomfortable’ was an adjective I hadn’t previously associated with comics – because (a) it was inviting its readers to associate with a hero who was, ostensibly, a terrorist, and (2) the authoritarian society depicted in V for Vendetta didn’t seem that far down the road from the one a certain Margaret Thatcher was engineering in Britain in the time.

 

Ironically, if the world of V for Vendetta was to come about, Thatcher wouldn’t have been in power for most of the 1980s.  Presumably the story had been conceived before the 1982 Falklands War, which gave a massive boost to Thatcher’s popularity.  Back then, it’d looked possible she’d lose the next British general election and the Labour Party, led by the pacifistic Michael Foot, could win it, which would have set up V for Vendetta’s neutral-Britain-survives-a-nuclear-war scenario.

 

Anyway, 40 years later, it’s highly unlikely anyone would only find out who Alan Moore is after rooting around in a box of second-hand comics in a shop in Aberdeen.  After V for Vendetta (published in its entirety by DC Comics’ Vertigo imprint in 1988-89), The Ballad of Halo Jones (1984-86), Watchmen (1986-87), From Hell (1989-98) and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2019), and his acclaimed work with established comic-book characters like Batman, Superman and Swamp Thing, and his authorship of the tomes Jerusalem (2016) and The Great When: A Long London Novel (2024), and his reputation as a magician and occultist, and his popularity as an interviewee and a social commentator, and his being garlanded with accolades such as ‘national treasure’, ‘sage’ and ‘world’s greatest living Englishman’, it’s fair to say we’re living in an era of Alan Moore ubiquity.  And we’re all the better for it.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Quality Communications

 

Anyway, I’ve just read his 2022 collection of short stories, Illuminations.  Of the nine pieces it contains, eight are good or great in my opinion.  Also, one of the stories, What We Can Know About Thunderman, isn’t a short one but a 240-page novel.  It’s about 30 pages longer than the other stories put together.

 

Fortunately, given its length, What We Can Know About Thunderman isn’t the story I consider to be a dud.  No, I think the dud is the penultimate one, American Light – An Appreciation, which purports to a poem by an imaginary Beat poet called Harmon Belner, choc-a-bloc with references to the ‘San Franciscan and Beat culture’ and the ‘post-Beat counterculture that prevailed in San Francisco during the 1960s and 1970s’, plus an introduction and copious footnotes by an imaginary scholar called C.F. Bird.  Connoisseurs of all things Beat may find it a delightful pastiche, snapshot and celebration of the movement, but it simply didn’t appeal to me, someone who finds most Beat writers tedious, pretentious and arsehole-y.  (How I cheered when I read what Keith Richards said of Allen Ginsberg in the former’s autobiography: “…Ginsberg was staying at Mick’s place in London once, and I spent an evening listening to the old gasbag pontificating on everything.  It was the period when Ginsberg sat around playing a concertina badly and making ommm sounds, pretending he was oblivious to his socialite surroundings.”)

 

What We Can Know About Thunderman on the other hand is a fictionalized history of the American mainstream comic-book industry where the foundational superhero of that industry isn’t Superman but a Superman-like character called Thunderman.  It’s also an indictment of the business, which has inflicted indignities and belittlements on numerous writers and artists, including Moore, over the decades.  For instance, Moore is justifiably bitter about losing ownership of V for Vendetta and Watchmen to DC Comics.  (When he made a guest appearance in a 2007 episode of The Simpsons, Milhouse Van Houten was shown making a grievous faux pas by asking Moore to autograph a DVD featuring the DC Comics characters, Watchmen Babies in V for Vacation.)

 

Although the characters in Thunderman have unfamiliar names, comics fans won’t have difficulty linking many of them to real-life publishers, editors, writers and artists.  I’m not particularly knowledgeable, though even I recognized one Sam Blatz “…in his tilted hat, his jacket slung over one shoulder like Sinatra…” and wearing ‘snazzy sunglasses’.  Blatz’s chief talent is for titling characters: “…at least Sam’s monsters looked great, drawn by Gold or Novak, so that all he had to do was think up whacky names…”  Yes, Blatz is Moore’s sour reimagining of Marvel Comics’ head-honcho Stan Lee.  That would make the artists ‘Gold’ and ‘Novak’ the more talented, but less financially rewarded, Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko.  There has been writing online, some of it in great detail, about who the cast-members of Thunderman represent in the real comics world.  If your expertise in the field is lacking, as mine is, it may be useful to have one of those online pieces handy, for consultation, while you read the story.

 

Thunderman is impressively bilious as it charts its characters’ progress during the 20th and early 21st centuries.  They start as young, naïve comic-book enthusiasts, become comic-book creatives, and wind up as middle-aged predators or victims: variously corrupt, grasping, sociopathic, perverted, ridiculous, embittered or crushed.  The story is told from a range of perspectives and in a range of styles and formats, including interviews, monologues, reviews, playscripts, internet-forum discussions, psychoanalysis sessions and comic-book panels (described in written form), as well as in conventional prose.  If not every part works equally well, the assorted viewpoints and formats keep it fresh.  Fear not if something isn’t quite engaging you – something different will be along in another few pages.

 

My favourite sections were the comic-book panels, which chronicle how the creators of Thunderman, Simon Schuman and David Kessler – thinly-veiled versions of Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster – were conned out of the rights to the lucrative Thunderman franchise by American Comics, the story’s stand-in for DC Comics; and a series of reviews that evaluate how Thunderman has been adapted to the large and small screens.  Again, Thunderman’s exploits in the cinema and on TV mirror Superman’s.  I particularly enjoyed the review of Thunderman IV: The Search for Love, obviously inspired by 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace.  However, while Superman IV had the late Chrisopher Reeve in the title role, trying to preserve his dignity in a poor film, Moore brilliantly imagines Thunderman IV featuring Robin Askwith, star of those dire British 1970s sex-comedies, the Confessions films: “…most of the supposed humour rests in the mullet-styled hero using his Thundervision to see through the walls of ladies’ changing rooms, complete with BOI-OI-OING sound effects.”

 

© Canon Group, Inc. / Warner Bros.

 

Elsewhere in Illuminations, Moore stretches his imagination and writing abilities with The Improbably Complex High-Energy State.  This is both a cautionary tale and a riff on the paradox put forward by 19th-century physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who mused that it was statistically more likely for a self-aware brain, perceiving an infinite universe, to come into being through random fluctuations of particles than it was for an infinite universe itself, as postulated under conventional cosmological theory, to exist.  In other words, we’re more likely spontaneously-created entities thinking we see an infinite universe than we’re actual parts of an infinite universe.  Moore’s story has such a brain – and a lot of other stuff – appearing soon after the universe does.  As it becomes aware of its unique situation, it rapidly develops human, and depressingly familiar, personality traits.

 

From the birth of the universe in The Improbably Complex High-Energy State, Moore moves to the end of the world in Location, Location, Location.  He describes the apocalypse in majestically vivid Book-of-Revelation fashion, but sets the action in the unassuming English market-town of Bedford.  This is where the real-life Panacea Society, believers in the teachings of the 19th-century prophetess Joanna Southcott, believed the site of the original Garden of Eden to be.  They also maintained a house on Bedford’s Albany Road as a residence for the Messiah to move into after the Second Coming.  In Location, Location, Location, it transpires that, yes, the Panacea Society got it right and Jesus Christ – who’s presented like a well-meaning but slightly embarrassing ‘cool dad’, with a pierced ear and a T-shirt saying ‘I may be old, but at least I got to see all the best bands’ – has just arrived in Bedford to claim the house.  The story is told through the eyes of an understandably distracted solicitor called Angie, who’s been given the task of overseeing the handover.  This she has to do while images of giant winged beasts with lions’ heads and battling squadrons of angels fill the sky above.  Location, Location, Location is an excellent example of Moore’s ability to combine the jaw-droppingly fantastical with the humdrum and mundane.

 

But the stories I enjoyed most in Illuminations were a trio of tales that struck me as belonging to a school of spooky British fiction that stretches from Arthur Machen, via Robert Aickman, to Ramsey Campbell, in that they present the supernatural in very British settings: everyday, awkward, slightly rundown and tawdry.  Not Even Legend features an organization of hapless paranormal investigators called CSICON (the Committee For Surrealist Investigation of Claims Of the Normal), who are trying to get to grips with some cryptid-type beings so adept at hiding themselves that no one, until now, suspects they even exist.  Not Even Legend has a complicated structure that rewards the reader’s patience when it becomes clear how clever the story’s premise is.  And Moore’s enthusiasm for inventing strange new types of monsters is endearing.  He mentions such creatures as Snapjackets, Mormoleens, Jilkies and – most prominently – Whispering Petes.

 

More conventional is Cold Reading about a phony, but pathetically self-justifying, clairvoyant who spots an opportunity to make easy money when a man asks him if he can contact the spirit of his deceased twin brother.  A twist can be seen coming, but the story’s mixture of cynicism and melancholia, and its evocation of a bleak wintry night in Northampton, make it very atmospheric.  Finally, I greatly enjoyed the title story, which takes place in a dilapidated, seen-better-days British seaside resort.  Moore obviously relishes describing the setting.  The tale of a middle-aged man returning to the coastal town in which, during his childhood, he used to holiday with his parents, it reminds me slightly of the Harlan Ellison short story One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty (1970).  And there’s something about it that calls to mind the Gerald Kersh story The Brighton Monster (1948) too.

 

Your enjoyment of Illuminations may depend on your willingness to spend half of it reading a novel that’s a diatribe against the American comic-book industry.  I was happy to do so, and I got a lot out of that story and out of the collection generally.  Illuminations really did light up my reading life for a few days.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Matt Biddulph

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Jim Mountfield gets beached

 

© Stygian Lepus 

 

Jim Mountfield, the penname I use when I write scary stories, has just had his first fiction published in 2025.  This is a short story entitled Beach Bodies, which appears in Issue 22 of the Stygian Lepus, a magazine where “readers explore the depths of imagination, where fear and fascination entwine.”

 

As its title suggests, Beach Bodies was inspired by a visit I made to a beach: Nyang Nyang Beach in the Uluwata area of Bali, Indonesia.  I’d walked a fair bit along the beach, away from its touristy part, to a stretch of it where there was hardly another human being in sight, when suddenly I came across a huge, long slab of rock embedded in the sand.  It was flat but its surface was covered in ruts and runnels that, each time a wave crashed against the shore and breakers came hissing up the beach, filled with white foam and formed strange, drizzling patterns.  There was something weird – something a bit, well, alien – about that rock formation.  And that’s how my story got its basic idea.

 

Meanwhile, most of the Western tourists I saw on the beach seemed to be busy filming themselves with their smartphones, recording clips of their hopefully-glamorous, hopefully-exotic holiday-adventures that would then be uploaded to their social media accounts.  I even noticed a Balinese guy on the shore, operating a film camera pointed at a group of surfers out amid the waves.  He’d been hired to film their surfing exploits, the footage of which would no doubt be posted online.  This influencer-style narcissism made me immensely grumpy…  That grumpiness also features in the story.

 

For the next few weeks, Beach Bodies can be read online here, while the contents page of the Stygian Lepus, Issue 22, is accessible here.  And go to this link if you’d like to sample the issue as an eBook.

 

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Eco chamber

 

From wikipedia.org / © Rob Bogaerts

 

A follow-on from my previous post…

 

Elon Musk’s stiff-armed salutes at Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration on January 24th – at least, unlike Dr Strangelove, he didn’t address Trump as “Mein Führer!” – inspired me to read again Umberto Eco’s 1995 essay Ur-Fascism or Eternal Fascism: 14 Ways of Looking at a Blackshirt.

 

This begins with Eco reminiscing: “In 1942, at the age of ten, I received the First Provincial Award of Ludi Juveniles (a voluntary, compulsory competition for young Italian Fascists—that is, for every young Italian).  I elaborated with rhetorical skill on the subject ‘Should we die for the glory of Mussolini and the immortal destiny of Italy?’  My answer was positive.  I was a smart boy.”  It goes on to describe Eco’s hometown being taken over in 1945 first by the partisans and then by American soldiers (all of whom were African-Americans) and then muses on the nature of Italian fascism, as helmed by Mussolini, and of fascism generally.  It ends with Eco identifying 14 key traits that he believes appear in fascist movements and quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1938: “I venture the challenging statement that if American democracy ceases to move forward as a living force, seeking day and night by peaceful means to better the lot of our citizens, fascism will grow in strength in our land.”

 

Well, Roosevelt’s words seem sadly ironic now.  Under Trump, American democracy appears to be moving backwards as a dying force, and the only citizens whose lot he’s seeking day and night to better are rich, white, straight, male ones.  But what about those 14 traits of fascism?  How many of them are detectible in Trump’s America at the moment?

 

Spoilers…  A lot.

 

The American far-right’s modus operandi of ‘moving fast and breaking things’ was a concept originally attributed to Mark Zuckerberg, one of the new Trump-grovellers-in-chief, and is something Trump’s been doing ever since his inauguration three weeks ago: ‘Tariffs!’ / ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ / ‘Invade Greenland!’ / ‘Invade Panama!’ / ‘Make Canada the 51st state!’ / ‘Leave the WHO!’ / ‘Leave the Paris agreement!’ / ‘More tariffs!’ / ‘Abolish DEI!’ / ‘Abolish USAID!’ / ‘Abolish trans-people!’ / ‘Abolish Gaza and turn it into the new Riviera!’ / etc.  This obviously corresponds to Eco’s fascist trait number three: “the cult of action for action for action’s sake… Action being beautiful in itself, it must be taken before, or without, any previous reflection.”

 

Also Trump down to a ‘T’ is trait number four: ‘disagreement is treason’.  So too is number five: ‘fear of difference’.  I can’t see life in America over the next four years being much fun if you’re different from one of those aforementioned rich, white, straight males.  And absolutely so too is number six: “appeal to a frustrated middle class… a class suffering from an economic crisis or feelings of political humiliation, and frightened by the pressure of lower social groups.”

 

Number seven is: ‘obsession with a plot’.  Yup, Trump has never shut up about the ‘deep state’, whatever that is, being out to get him and he’s happily courted all those delusional QAnon believers and other conspiracy fantasists.  Number eight is the belief that one’s ‘enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak’?  Well, listen to Trump’s speeches and you’ll hear him ranting simultaneously about how shit the US has become in the face of international competition and how it’s still somehow the greatest country on earth.

 

© Lumen Press

 

Number nine, the notion that ‘pacifism is trafficking with the enemy… life is permanent warfare’?  Well, see what I wrote in my previous post, about how “when things aren’t going wrong, Trump will still dial up the panic, make it look like there’s a crisis, and blame immigrants, liberals, working mothers, people of colour, etc.  That’s because he can’t afford to let his base relax and simply get on with their lives.  To ensure their ongoing support, he has to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and in constant readiness to lash out about it.”

 

Numbers ten, eleven, twelve and thirteen, which are respectively, ‘contempt for the weak,’ ‘everyone is educated to become a hero’ (heroism is especially easy when your population has ready access to AR-15s), ‘machismo’ (note Trump’s conviction in a civil court in 2023 for sexual abuse) and ‘selective populism’?  Tick, tick, tick and tick.

 

I don’t think Trump’s smart enough to have entertained thoughts about number fourteen, ‘newspeak’, wherein, for example, “Nazi or Fascist schoolbooks made use of an impoverished vocabulary, and an elementary syntax, in order to limit the instruments for complex and critical reasoning”.  In George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), this was the project that Winston Smith’s colleague Syme was working on at the Ministry of Truth, whittling down the size of dictionaries so that people has less vocabulary to articulate such abstract concepts as free will and self-expression.  Mind you, the many social-media platforms now doing Trump’s bidding are infested with so much short, simplistic, soundbite messaging – ranting, basically – that’s there’s little room for critical reasoning in them.

 

I haven’t mentioned numbers one and two yet, which are the ‘cult of tradition’ and ‘rejection of modernism’, wherein fascists deny the “advancement of learning. Truth has been already spelled out once and for all, and we can only keep interpreting its obscure message” and the “Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”  But obviously, that’s written large across Trump and his operation, from his rejection of what the overwhelming majority of climate scientists are warning us about, to his efforts to put the anti-vaxxer grifter Robert F. Kennedy in charge of America’s public health, to his lackey Musk getting rid of fact-checking on X and lackey Zuckerberg doing the same on Facebook, Instagram and Threads, to the idea that you can turn any untruth into a truth by repeating it often and loudly and brazenly enough: Haitian immigrants are eating pets, vaccines cause autism, DEI policies caused a mid-air collision, USAID supplied condoms to Hamas and so on, and so forth.

 

And that brings me to another piece of writing I’ve encountered recently.  It’s a passage from the book The Demon-Haunted World (1995) by the late, great American astrophysicist and writer Carl Sagan, which I’ve seen quoted on several people’s social-media pages.  Sagan’s mid-1990s fears about a near-future America were, shall we say, troublingly prescient.

 

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

 

“The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second soundbites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

 

Awesome technological powers in the hands of a very few…  Public representatives unable to grasp the issues…  Critical faculties in decline…  Dumbing down…  Soundbites…  Pseudoscience…  Superstition…  Yes, Carl, you nailed it.  I’m glad, though, that you (and Umberto Eco) aren’t around to witness the ultimate, apocalyptic celebration of ignorance that’s erupted with the advent of Trump Mark II.

 

© Random House

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You won’t ever be happy

 

From pixabay.com / © clecaux

 

It’s been two weeks since Donald Trump’s inauguration as 47th president of the United States.  For the 49.8 percent of Americans who voted in November 2024’s presidential election and voted for him, his previous four-year stint as 45th president obviously wasn’t enough.

 

Already those two weeks feel like two decades.  I live in Singapore, a long way away from Trump’s USA, and yet his orange visage assails me non-stop, smirking and scowling out of photos in the news websites and social media accounts I peruse.  I feel sorry for the poor folk who can’t stand the sight of him but have to live within the same country-borders as him.

 

It’s been relentless.  One moment he’s pardoning the 1600-odd dingbats who attacked the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, including 600 who were charged with attacking or impeding law-enforcement officers, and including the lunatic shaman-guy in the buffalo horns who reacted to his pardon by posting on Twitter, “Now I am gonna by some motha f**kin guns!”  The next moment he’s pulling the USA out of the Paris climate agreement (again) and halting Joe Biden’s Green New Deal – much to the delight, I’m sure, of the Chinese government, whom he blames for pushing the ‘hoax’ of man-made climate change.  They’ll now seize the opportunity to establish their country as the world’s renewable-energy superpower.

 

And the next moment again he’s halting all American foreign aid, giving Elon Musk’s ‘Department of Governmental Efficiency’ (DOGE) free rein to destroy the US Agency for International Development (USAID), or as Musk calls it, ‘a viper’s nest of radical left-Marxists who hate America’.  Again, I’m sure the Chinese government is cheering.  As the US’s disease-prevention, food security, water security, education, etc., programmes in the Global South and elsewhere grind to a halt, they’ll swoop in and replace them, thus greatly extending China’s global soft power and influence.

 

What else?  Trump’s pulled the US out of the World Health Organisation (WHO) – obviously, when there’s a deadly global pandemic, he doesn’t want medical experts interfering in how he runs his country and warning him that his proposed ‘inject yourself with bleach’ cure isn’t a good idea.  He’s banned all Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programmes in the belief that important jobs must be left to straight, fully-abled white men, who are inherently smarter than everyone else.  Why, even before the bodies of those killed in January 29th’s mid-air collision at Washington DC were cold, Trump raged that DEI policies were responsible for the tragedy.

 

He’s renamed the Gulf of Mexico ‘the Gulf of America’.  (What next?  One wag speculated on social media that he might rename the Oxford comma ‘the Comma of America’.)  He’s tried to bully Denmark into handing over Greenland to him, as part of his expand-the-American-Empire project (no doubt inspired by his buddy Putin’s expand-the-Russian-Empire project).  And he’s also tried to bully Mexico and Canada, by threatening to slap tariffs on their goods.  I’m not a big fan of Pierre Trudeau, but his riposte to Trump’s blustering bollocks showed he has more class and statesmanship in the tip of his little finger than Trump has in his whole, gross body.

 

From pixabay.com / © StockSnap

 

However, I’m sure that for tens of millions of Trump’s supporters, this is music to their ears.  They must feel like they’re in heaven.  Thanks to the antics of their orange hero, they’re now owning the libtards.  They’re bathing in libtard tears.  They’re loving the smell of napalmed libtards in the morning.  They’re achieving their number-one objective, which is to cause maximum distress to those libtard snowflakes who want to deny them their constitutional right to stockpile huge quantities of military assault rifles, and their right to go ‘rolling coal’ in their modified diesel-engine trucks, and their right to grab women by the pussy without suffering consequences, and their right to live in neighbourhoods with zero numbers of people of colour, and so on.  They’re all on Twitter, or ‘X’ as Musk insists on calling it, yeehawing their joy in their echo-chambers of MAGA-ites, incels, neo-Nazis and Russian bots at how President Trump is blasting those libtard wusses with both barrels.

 

Well, to the vast majority of Trump’s supporters – i.e., those not rich enough to qualify as being in the top 10 percent who own half the nation’s wealth – I have some bad news.  You won’t ever be happy.

 

Firstly, your lives aren’t going to improve materially.  The involvement in Trump’s project of Elon Musk, who’s the world’s richest human being and whose right arm had a Dr Strangelove-style tendency to slip into troubling, sloping salutes at the inauguration, should be a warning of that.  So too should the prominent places given at that inauguration to Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg.  Big tax-cuts are coming for Trump’s wealthy and super-wealthy friends.  A large part of the bill for those will be shifted onto the working and middle-classes, for example, through the extra they’ll have to pay for goods when Trump starts imposing his beloved tariffs.

 

Some of these tax-cuts will also be financed through the axing of government services, which Musk is doing in his new, DOGE-eat-dog world right now.  There’s always much whinging about how much is removed from your pay-packet and sent off to fund distant government departments.  But when departments overseeing such things as social security, medical care, education, tax refunds, disease control, environmental protection, disaster relief and so on receive the chop, and the effects of their loss are felt, I suspect people’s tunes will change.

 

Incidentally, it’s ironic that far-right-wing commentators, influencers and social-media grifters have for years belched out claims that the world’s governments are secretly controlled by liberal-minded billionaires like Bill Gates or George Soros.  They’ve also indulged in antisemitic dog-whistling by suggesting that billionaire banking family the Rothschilds are pulling the levers.  (See, for instance, a 2023 complaint by the Board of Deputies of British Jews to GB News about their presenter and conspiracy fantasist Neil Oliver referencing the antisemitic, Rothschild-accusing document Silent Weapons for Silent Wars during one of his diatribes about impending ‘one-world government’.)  Yet here we have a billionaire who, unelected and in plain sight, is heavily financing, influencing and manipulating an elected government for his own benefit.  And there’s not a peep out of them.

 

From unsplash.com / © Larissa Avononmadegbe

 

Musk has even got access to classified US treasury files, which are full of confidential data about citizens’ social security and Medicare payment systems.  You’d think this violation of people’s private information would give right-wing conspiracy nuts the heebie-geebies.  But no, they’ve been strangely quiet.  Maybe Musk’s salute at the inauguration did it.  He showed these guys that they didn’t have to worry – he’s the type of billionaire they’d want to have controlling their government.

 

But returning to Trump, I don’t see how his antics are going to improve life for the average citizen who voted for him.  If he carries out his witless threats to impose tariffs, he’ll drive up prices.  Meanwhile, his belief that, conveniently, climate change is just a sham will no doubt see the American economy take a severe battering in the years ahead as the country itself takes a battering from increasingly inclement weather.  Imagine what home-insurance bills will be like after a good chunk of Florida tips into the Atlantic Ocean.

 

Not that I think his supporters will be loudly belly-aching about their lives continuing to be shit, or being even shitter than they were previously.  A lot of them will be conditioned by sunk-cost fallacy and keep quiet – having invested so much time and energy in backing Trump and his MAGA movement, they’ll be reluctant to admit they were wrong.  Also, Trump now has X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads and, most recently, Tik Tok singing his praises.  He also has newspapers like Jeff Bezos’s Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong’s Los Angeles Times kowtowing and kissing his ring.  The bulk of the American media will spend the next four years assuring the public they’ve never had it so good, when in all probability they’ve never had it so bad.

 

And that’s not all, Trump supporters.  Even in the unlikely case of your circumstances getting better, you still won’t ever be happy.  Trump and his lackeys won’t allow you to be happy.  To illustrate what I mean, you only have to look at Britain and the nearest institution Britain has to Trumpism – that toxic far-right-wing newspaper the Daily Mail.  Paul Dacre, its former editor and now the editor-in-chief of its publisher DMG Media, once remarked that the perfect Daily Mail story was one that (1) confirmed its readers’ worst fears and (2) gave them someone to blame for it.  You can expect something similar in the US over the next few years.  (Maybe forever, if Trump can change the constitution so that it resembles that of Putin’s Russia, and politicians who might oppose him in future elections start falling to their deaths out of windows.)

 

Everything that goes wrong will be the fault of immigrants eating people’s pets, or environmentalists not pumping enough water to put out wildfires, or Democrats controlling the weather, or Jewish space-lasers, or deadly aircraft-destroying DEI programmes.  Even when things aren’t going wrong, Trump will still dial up the panic, make it look like crises are happening, and blame immigrants, liberals, working mothers, people of colour, etc.  That’s because he can’t afford to let his base relax and simply get on with their lives.  To ensure their ongoing support, he has to keep them in a constant state of anxiety and in constant readiness to lash out about it.  They’re to be riled up, permanently.

 

So, Trump people, I’m sorry, but you won’t ever be happy.  As someone once put it: “Hell is getting what you think it is you want.”

 

From pixabay.com / © heblo

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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.