Author: MrM0untfield

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Paul McAllister sends some sunlight through the cracks

 

© Still Here Magazine

 

If you’ve read my recent posts about the state of the world – a world hostage to the crazed and destructive whims of the current occupant of the White House – you’ll be surprised to hear that I’ve just had a short story published in a magazine-issue whose theme is ‘hope’.

 

Issue 3 of the digital literary magazine Still Here features 19 poems and 18 pieces of fiction, each of which – in the words of editor Alauna Lester – “is a reminder that there is always light, even when it filters in quietly through the cracks.”  For that reason, the issue is titled Sunlight through the Cracks.  My contribution is a story called Learning to Leave and, as it’s set in Northern Ireland and doesn’t contain any elements of fantasy or horror, it’s attributed to Paul McAllister, the penname I usually put on stories of that sort.

 

The story, and its title, were inspired by an academic paper, Learning to Leave: The Irony of Schooling in a Coastal Community, which was written by Michael John Corbett and published by the University of British Columbia in 2000.  I read it in 2008, when I was beginning to study for an MA in Education and Development at the University of East Anglia (UEA).  One of the MA’s tutors, Professor Bryan Maddox, sent a copy of the paper to his students.  At the time, I suppose my course-mates and I had a missionary-like zeal about the transformative powers of education – we believed the world would be a much better place if all its inhabitants got to go to school, full-stop.  Corbett’s paper, though, advised caution, noting how one Canadian coastal community had suffered, not benefitted, from the educational system its young people had gone through.

 

By making us to read the paper, Bryan was playing devil’s advocate.  He wanted us to stop and think about the medicine we were so keen to prescribe.  Education, at least not in a one-size-fits-all form, isn’t necessarily the solution to everyone’s problems.  (Bryan, incidentally, was a great teacher.  I spent much of that year at the UEA tearing my hair out in frustration at lecturers who believed it was acceptable to subject their students to multi-slide PowerPoint presentations, overloaded with text, with zero time to process anything.  Bryan, though, kept the number of slides he used to single figures and encouraged discussion and reflection, and you walked out of his lectures feeling you’d actually learned something.)

 

Learning to Leave: The Irony of Schooling in a Coastal Community struck a chord with me because its message corresponded to something I’d noticed a few months earlier.  I’d accompanied my dad on a trip to Northern Ireland and, for the first time in decades, visited the little village in rural Country Tyrone where I’d spent my childhood.  And, years afterwards, the memory of that visit, plus the message of Corbett’s paper, compelled me to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) and write the story Learning to Leave.  However, because it appears in Sunlight through the Cracks, it isn’t wholly bleak.  Some hope appears late on in the narrative, from an unexpected source.

 

As usual, Alauna and her team have put much care and effort into producing Issue 3 of Still Here and it’s a visual as well as a literary treat.  You can download a copy of its third edition, Sunlight through the Cracks, here.

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The missiles are flying… Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

 

© Paramount Pictures / Dino De Laurentiis Company

 

With Donald Trump enacting his latest insanity – joining forces with Israel and bombing the bejeezus out of Iran, which has prompted the latter country to retaliate by firing ordinance in all directions and lighting up the Middle East like a Christmas tree – I find myself thinking of Greg Stillson, a character featuring prominently in Stephen King’s novel The Dead Zone (1979).  In the David Cronenberg-directed movie version of The Dead Zone (1983), Stillson is played by Martin Sheen.  It’s Sheen, as Stillson, who utters the quote that’s this blog-entry’s title.

 

Stillson is a psychotic bully who begins as a salesman, becomes a businessman and then a politician, and finally leads a populist movement that sweeps him into the White House.  Well, he does in one timeline.  Before winning the presidency, while he’s on the campaign trail, he shakes hands with The Dead Zone’s hero, Johnny Smith, who’s been blessed – or cursed – with the power to see into people’s futures just by touching them.  He has a vision of Stillson’s future wherein, as a despotic and unhinged US president, he presses the buttons that trigger an apocalyptic nuclear war.  Thereafter, Smith has to decide how he’s going to stop him.  (Spoiler – he does, but with tragic consequences for himself.)

 

I don’t know if anyone with clairvoyant visions touched one of Trump’s little hands a couple of decades ago and witnessed him pressing buttons and wiping out humanity in 2026, the 250th anniversary of American independence.  But it wouldn’t surprise me if someone had.

 

Anyway, it doesn’t need saying, but Trump’s actions – which began on February 27th, when in conjunction with the Israelis and under the moniker ‘Operation Epic Fury’, he had his military bombard Iran with missiles and drones; one source estimating on March 4th that nearly 900 people had been killed so far, including Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – are a vastly bad idea for many reasons.  Here are some of those reasons.

 

From wikipedia.org / farsi.khamenei.ir

 

One.  The attack is illegal under international law.  In the Conversation, Shannon Brincat and Juan Zahir Naranjo Caceres have written that “Israel said the strikes were ‘preventative’, meaning they were to prevent Iran from developing a capacity to be a threat.”  However, they point out that “preventative war has no legal basis under international law. The UN Security Council did not authorize any military action, meaning the sole lawful pathway for the use of force for self-defence was never pursued.”

 

Two.  The attack went against the American constitution.  The American historian Heather Cox Richardson has noted on her Substack: “In his letter to Congress notifying them of his attack, Trump said he had acted under the 1973 War Powers Act, which permits a president to attack another country if there is an urgent threat.  But the letter itself doesn’t identify any such urgent threat.  It simply said Iran is one of the world’s largest sponsors of state terrorism and that it ‘continues to seek the means to possess and employ nuclear weapons’…  The Framers of the Constitution placed the power to declare war in the hands of Congress and not in the president above all because they did not trust that much power in the hands of one man…”

 

Three.  It’s likely Benjamin Netanyahu bounced the USA into the attack.  Going back to Reason One, the supposedly ‘preventative’ nature of the USA and Israel’s assault on Iran is torturous to say the least.  A few days ago, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, “It was abundantly clear that if Iran came under attack by anyone – the United States or Israel or anyone – they were going to respond, and respond against the United States…  We knew that there was going to be an Israeli action. We knew that that would precipitate an attack against American forces, and we knew that if we didn’t pre-emptively go after them before they launched those attacks, we would suffer higher casualties.”

 

In other words..  We had to attack them before they attacked us, which they would surely do because Israel intended to attack them first.  This means the USA’s vast military firepower isn’t actually under the control of the American commander-in-chief, but under that of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.  The wily Netanyahu says ‘Jump’, the Americans say ‘How high?’

 

Four.  Dodgy Middle Eastern deals are possibly involved.  Who else, besides Netanyahu, has a finger in the pie here?  In 2025 Trump did investment deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, which he claimed were worth over two trillion dollars.  Qatar saw fit to gift – some would use the verb ‘bribe’ – Trump with a 400-million-dollar Boeing jumbo jet that he plans to turn into a new Air Force One, making one wonder how much of these investments will be enriching Trump and his clan rather than the USA itself.  Also, Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff – the real-estate developer whom, laughably, Trump sent into negotiations with Russia about the Ukraine War even though he had zero diplomatic experience – have been in the Middle East lately as ‘envoys’, hawking the idea that the decimated Gaza should be reinvented as a luxury resort with ‘180 skyscrapers’ (and any remaining Palestinians, presumably, doing jobs like cleaning the toilets).

 

In the future, if a saner administration ever comes to power in Washington DC and launches an investigation into this debacle, it’d be wise to ‘follow the money’.  I’ll bet at least some of the encouragement for this war came from business interests and wealthy leaders in the Middle East who regarded the Iranian regime as an undesirable neighbour, lowering the tone and property value of the area, and wanted it removed.

 

Five.  It’s actually Operation Forget Epstein.  Trump likes to distract.  When the headlines look bad for him, he does something outrageous that generates different headlines – not necessarily favourable ones, but enough to banish the previous, bad headlines from people’s memories.  This works especially well in our screen-obsessed, social-media-fixated era where attention-spans are short.

 

On February 25th, the New York Times published a report under the headline EPSTEIN FILES ARE MISSING RECORDS ABOUT WOMAN WHO MADE CLAIMS AGAINST TRUMP.  This mentioned documents “released by the Justice Department” that “briefly mention a woman’s unverified accusation that Donald J. Trump assaulted her in the 1980s, when she was a minor.”  Yet other documents relating to these allegations have been withheld or removed from the public database about Trump’s paedophilic, sex-trafficking old buddy Jeffrey Epstein.

 

And two days later, the assault began on Iran.  Funny, that.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Jesse Monford

 

Six.  There’s no plan and no objectives.  The George Bush Jr-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, which toppled Saddam Hussein but created massive instability and led to huge numbers of fatalities – estimates of which range “from 151,000 violent deaths as of June 2006 (per the Iraq Family Health Survey) to 1,033,000 excess deaths (per the 2007 Opinion Research Business [ORB] Survey)” – was a ruinous fiasco. It was also built on the lie that Saddam possessed ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’.  But compared to Trump’s Iran incursion, it looks like a masterpiece of planning.

 

For one thing, to have a plan, you actually need to have objectives, i.e., things to plan towards. Trump and his cabinet apparently have no idea what the goal of all this is.  Rubio, as we’ve seen, has said they’re waging war simply because that’s what the Israelis are doing.  Meanwhile, Trump has suggested at one point it’s to achieve regime-change in Iran and replace Khamenei with someone more compliant to US interests, as was allegedly done in Venezuela after the abduction of its former president, Nicolas Maduro.  Though the other day Trump admitted there was a problem with this because his airstrikes had killed all the possible candidates to take over: “…none of the people we had in mind are going to come to power, because they are all dead.”  No, so far, that doesn’t sound like a brilliantly executed plan.

 

Trump has also claimed the war is to prevent Iran developing nuclear weapons, even though after the USA carried out a bombing raid on Iran in June last year he was adamant that “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.” Trump has tried to justify this new war by saying Iran was – here plucking a figure out of his arse – ‘two weeks’ away from acquiring a nuclear weapon.

 

Elsewhere, it’s been suggested the war is to encourage the Iranian people to rise up and overthrow the regime that’s oppressed and abused them for 47 years; to stop Iran sponsoring terrorism; and to destroy Iran’s navy.  But most likely it’s because Trump woke up the other morning, looked out of the window and thought, “Gee, this would be a good day to bomb Iran back to the Stone Age.”

 

Seven.  This sort of thing has been tried before.  Vietnam…  Afghanistan…  Iraq…  Libya.

 

Eight.  Possible destabilization of the Middle East.  Even if by some fluke Iran ends up with a Trump-and-Netanyahu-approved government, it’s difficult to see how it can impose order on a country so diverse and, after all this devastation and upheaval, febrile.  Iran’s population is 61 percent Persian, 16 percent Azerbaijani and 10 percent Kurdish, and the rest of it includes people like Lurs, Arabs, Baloch, Arabs and Turkish groups.  While it’s overwhelmingly Shia Muslim, 9 percent of the population are Sunni and other sects of Muslim and there are also Baha’i, Christians, Zoroastrians, Jews and Sabean Mandeans.  That’s before we get to political differences.  Has anyone in Washington DC considered this?  I doubt it.

 

Civil war in Iran could have devastating consequences for the Middle East.  We’ve already seen the current conflict’s knock-on effects on the world’s oil supply, especially the disruption of tanker-traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, and on air travel, with more than 20,000 flights grounded and a million people stranded around the world since late February.  The Middle East going J.G. Ballard is not good news for anyone.  Well, apart from Vladimir Putin, who’ll see an increase in demand for Russian oil.

 

Nine.  China may be thinking, “Hold my beer!”  Trump’s rhetoric about attacking Iran sounds uncomfortably like Putin’s excuse for invading Ukraine in 2022 – his goal was to ‘demilitarise’ and ‘denazify’ the country.  I also suspect China is watching keenly and wondering how it could cook up a similar motive for taking over Taiwan in the future.

 

Incidentally, Taiwan is the world’s foremost producer of Artificial Intelligence chips and according to the New York Times, without those chips, “the tech industry and the US economy would be crippled.”  Haven’t thought that one through either, have you, Donald?

 

From pixabay.com / © clecaux

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Weird Penguin: Claimed!

 

© Penguin Books

 

In 2024, Penguin Books launched its Weird Fiction series.  So far, this series has consisted of five classic titles: Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow (1895); William Hope Hodgeson’s The House on the Borderland (1908); Gertrude Barrows Bennett’s Claimed! (1920); Algernon Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries; and a collection of well-known stories of the weird by the likes of Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, W.W. Jacobs, May Sinclair, M.R. James and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called Weird Fiction: An Anthology (2024).  When I saw these books on sale in my local bookstore, I bought the two by Gertrude Barrows Bennett and Algernon Blackwood, which I hadn’t read before.

 

A while back, I posted my thoughts on Blackwood’s Ancient Sorceries.  Here’s what I made of Bennett’s Claimed!

 

While the content of Ancient Sorceries could be described as horror with a strong dose of the weird, Claimed! is a banquet of weirdness with the occasional plate of horror placed here and there.  It’s a short novel whose plot hinges around a strange box – “an oblong, bluish-green box, about a dozen inches long by half as many wide, highly polished, but severely simple of workmanship.  Its sole decoration was a single short line of characters belonging to some foreign language, which had apparently been incised across the top with an engineer’s tool and the lines filled in with scarlet enamel.”  The box won’t open and the inscription has a disconcerting habit of disappearing from its top surface and reappearing on its bottom surface, making those who possess it wonder if they’d turned the thing upside down without remembering doing so.

 

Ownership of the box passes from a mad sailor to a shopkeeper, who soon becomes mad, and then to a wealthy and irascible old industrialist called J.J. Robinson.  The latter doesn’t quite tip over into madness, but he certainly develops an unhealthy obsession with the box and with deciphering its secrets.  After an assault by a mysterious nighttime intruder, Robinson is left ailing and bedridden, though he insists on keeping the box by his side: “…he sank back, clasping the thing right to his breast…  ‘I got it!’ he croaked.  ‘What I want I get, and – what I get I keep! They can’t take it away from – old Jesse Robinson!  Nobody – can take it!  You – hear me?’”

 

At this point, Robinson’s niece Leilah and a young doctor called John Vanaman get involved in the strangeness while they try to care for the stricken but uncooperative old man.  Vanaman realises something odd is afoot when he sits by the slumbering Robinson’s bed one night and has a vision whereby a sea-tide seems to sluice in under the door and across the floor, even though he’s “sitting in the bedroom on the second floor of a house in Tremont, over fifty miles from the Atlantic shore.”

 

Even worse, something unspeakable enters the room with that impossible tide: “That which was in the room beneath the tide, and which had pushed the tide hither – before it, now gathered, took form, and rose up, sudden and monstrous…  Exactly what shape it had, Vanaman could not later clearly remember.  He could recall only his own fear and intuitive sense of it as a thing of awful force and of a potential destructiveness terrific beyond finite comprehension.”

 

Bennett sets up this scenario in the first 20 pages of the novel and it’s great, phantasmagorical stuff.  Alas, the mid-section of the book is less gripping.  There are a few incidents that set the pulse racing, such as a mysterious suicide and a bit where a hapless spiritualist tries to help, only to get her come-uppance.  But mainly it’s about the romance that inevitably brews between Leilah and Vanaman while they look after Robinson and try to work out what’s wrong with him.  As the straightforward, clean-cut hero and heroine of the story, they aren’t terribly interesting – and neither is their romance.

 

However, after the plot has become bogged down in Robinson’s mansion, page 65 sees a dramatic and welcome shift of gears.  Restored, the old man informs Vanaman: “We’re going to sea, my son.”  The action then shifts to a ship Robinson has chartered in order “to meet the party that wants my property, fair and square.”  He’s referring to the people, or beings, who created the box and who belonged to an ancient land that long ago sank below the ocean during a natural cataclysm.  In due course, we’re introduced to the Jack-London-esque character of the ship’s master, Captain Tom Porter – “well known and liked among the blunt, outspoken fraternity of his own kind” – and his hardy crew.  Happily, these new characters and the new locale give the novel a second wind.

 

There follows an unexpected abduction, a stirring nautical chase, and an impressively psychedelic finale wherein the protagonists cross a portal in time and space.  And this ties up all the mysteries surrounding the box…  Well, at least, I think it does.  For a 127-page novel, there’s been an awful lot going on.

 

One nice thing about Claimed! was that it introduced me to its remarkable author, whom I hadn’t heard of before.  The Minneapolis-born Gertrude Barrows Bennett spent her adult life working as a stenographer, but for three years from 1917 to 1920 – a fraught period when she had to support both a daughter and an invalid mother – she also earned money as a writer.  She had short stories and novellas published in magazines like Argosy and All-Story Weekly and produced four novels: The Citadel of Fear (1918), The Heads of Cerberus (1919), Avalon (1919) and finally Claimed!  According to her Wikipedia entry, her writing ceased when her mother passed away and she was suddenly under less financial pressure.

 

Brief though her writing career was, Bennett did enough for the noted science-fiction critic and historian Sam Moskowitz to hail her as “the great woman writer of science fiction in the period between Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and C.L. Moore.”  And though there’s debate about whether or not the legendary H.P. Lovecraft – who started his writing career around the same time she did – was aware of and influenced by Gertrude Barrows Bennett, there’s so much mind-boggling weirdness present in Claimed! that it wouldn’t surprise me if he was.

 

From philsp.com

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Cinematically stoned (Part 2)

 

© Taplin-Perry-Scorsese Productions / Warner Bros

 

I ended my previous post by promising I’d give a list of my favourite movie scenes wherein songs by the Rolling Stones are employed to memorable effect.  Here it is.

 

Jumpin’ Jack Flash (1968) in Mean Streets (1973)

Wow.  Martin Scorsese really likes the Rolling Stones.  Not only has he made a concert movie about them, 2008’s Shine a Light, but he’s used their music in umpteen films: Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), The Departed (2006) and the one that first put him on the map, 1973’s Mean Streets.  Even today, more than 50 years later, the scene in Mean Streets where a young Robert De Niro comes swaggering through a bar, in slow motion, towards a pensive Harvey Keitel, while Mick Jagger hollers in the background about being “born in a cross-fire hurricane”, is a great synthesis of rock ‘n’ roll music and rock ‘n’ roll cinema.  Indeed, Jumpin’ Jack Flash is a fitting accompaniment for the arrival in popular consciousness of De Niro, who’d spend the rest of the 20th century showing Hollywood how to do proper acting.  The 21st century, featuring such efforts as The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle (2000), Little Fockers (2010), New Year’s Eve (2011) and Dirty Grandpa (2016)…  Okay, not so much.

 

Satisfaction (1965) in Apocalypse Now (1979)

The Stones’ early, primordial and still potent stomper Satisfaction gets a brief but memorable airing in Francis Ford Coppola’s baroque Vietnam War masterpiece, playing on the radio while Captain Martin Sheen and his not-exactly-fighting-fit crew go cruising up the Nùng River in search of Marlon Brando.  Cue some funky on-deck dance moves by a frighteningly young-looking Laurence Fishburne and some funny / cringeworthy water-skiing moves by Sam Bottoms that knock various Vietnamese people out of their fishing boats.

 

© Omni Zoetrope / United Artists

 

Sympathy for the Devil (1968) in Alien Nation (1988) and in Interview with the Vampire (1994)

Graham Baker’s sci-fi / cop movie Alien Nation isn’t very good.  Its premise of an alien community getting stranded on earth and having to integrate as best as they can with the curmudgeonly human natives was handled much better in Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 (2009).  But I do like a woozy, hypnotic scene in it where alien-loathing cop James Caan enters a sleazy alien bar while a lady-alien performs an erotic dance to the strains of Sympathy for the Devil.  Not the original Stones song, but a correspondingly woozy, hypnotic cover-version of it by the great Jane’s Addiction.  I can’t find a film-clip of the scene, but here’s the Jane’s Addiction cover.

 

Meanwhile, Neil Jordan’s adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire ends with Sympathy for the Devil on the soundtrack.  Again, this isn’t the Rolling Stones version but a cover, this time by Guns n’ Roses.  It’s every bit as ramshackle, shonky and (for me) enjoyable as the other covers Guns n’ Roses have done, for example, of Wings’ Live and Let Die (1973) and Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door (1973).  Sympathy for the Devil kicks in when the vampire Lestat – Tom Cruise in one of his rare interesting roles – pops up to claim Christian Slater as his new vampirical companion for eternity.

 

Can’t You Hear Me Knocking? (1971) in Casino (1995)

While Martin Scorsese serenades Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel with Jumpin’ Jack Flash in Mean Streets, he employs the Stones song Can’t You Hear Me Knocking? for another of his regulars, Joe Pesci, in Casino.  Remarkably, Scorsese plays all seven minutes of the Santana-esque Can’t You… as an accompaniment to a lengthy sequence showing how Pesci’s Casino character Nicky Santoro gets established in Las Vegas.  Predictably, the sequence has Pesci doing what Pesci usually does in Scorsese movies: being a psychotic shit, barking orders at hoodlum sidekicks twice his size, eating in restaurants, ingratiating himself with fellow Mafiosi, being a psychotic shit, cursing and swearing, getting a blow-job, being a psychotic shit, talking about food, knocking off jewellery stores, acting the loving family man with his non-criminal relatives… and being a psychotic shit.

 

© Légende Entreprises / Universal Pictures

 

Ruby Tuesday (1967) in Children of Men (2006)

Wistful Stones ballad Ruby Tuesday features briefly on the soundtrack of Alfonso Cuarón’s gruellingly pessimistic science-fiction thriller Children of Men.  It’s another cover, sung by Franco Battiato.  We hear it during one of the movie’s calmer moments when Theo (Clive Owen) is visiting his old mate Jasper (Michael Caine), whose home provides a small pocket of sanity amid the unfolding dystopian grimness.  Amusingly, Caine, well known in real life for being a right-wing old grump with an aversion to paying tax, here plays an elderly anarcho-hippy with a fondness for smoking exceptionally strong pot.

 

Gimme Shelter (1969) in The Departed (2006)

Martin Scorsese loves the Rolling Stones and he loves their apocalyptic number Gimme Shelter in particular.  By my count he’s used it in three movies: Goodfellas, Casino and The Departed.  It’s best deployed at the beginning of The Departed, rumbling in the background while gangland thug Frank Costello (Jack Nicholson) expounds his philosophy.  “I don’t want to be a part of my environment,” he intones, imbuing his words with that leery, languid menace that only Nicholson is capable of.  “I want my environment to be a part of me.”  Strangely, in Scorsese’s Shine a Light two years later, Gimme Shelter was one of the songs the Stones didn’t perform on stage.  Marty missed a trick there.

 

© Plan B Entertainment / Warner Bros

 

Street Fighting Man (1968) in Fantastic Mr Fox (2009)

Director Wes Anderson also sticks Rolling Stones into his movies, but so far I haven’t mentioned him because I think most of his work is smug, pretentious and annoying.  For example, Play with Fire (1965) figures prominently in 2007’s The Darjeeling Limited, an Anderson movie so twee I find it the cinematic equivalent of being force-fed with chocolate-cake mix.  However, I like the scene in his stop-motion-animation adaptation of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox where, to the sound of the rabblerousing Stones anthem Street Fighting Man, Farmers Bean, Boggis and Bunce use three diggers to tear up the den of the titular Mr Fox; forcing the den’s inhabitants to frantically dig an escape-route.  Yes, they really ‘dig’ that song.  Sorry.

 

And finally…  Out of Time (1968) in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019)

I’m not the biggest fan of the Stones song Out of Time – Jagger’s vocals get a bit too caterwauling for my liking – but it sees good satirical use in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s paean to the American movie-making capital in the late 1960s, a fascinating period when traditional notions about what made a good film were rapidly being undermined by an uppity younger generation.  Played when Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), his new Italian spouse Francesca Capucci (Lorenza Izzo) and sidekick Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) return from Italy, where Rick has been making spaghetti westerns and action thrillers with the likes of Sergio Corbucci and Antonio Margheriti, Out of Time gives an one-the-nose summation of DiCaprio’s sad-sack character – an actor a bit too old, un-hip and uncomprehending of the changing world around him to get the leading roles he once did, now doomed to playing villains in second-rate TV shows.

 

© Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures Releasing 

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Cinematically stoned (Part 1)

 

© Goodtimes Enterprises / Warner Bros.

 

Oh God.  I’ve just discovered that the soundtrack of Melania (2026), the vanity-documentary about Melania Trump, financed by Jeff Bezos and directed by Brett Ratner – a man accused of sexual assault by six women (allegations Ratner has always denied) – contains a song I just might identify as my favourite one of all time.   That is Gimme Shelter, the opening track on the Rolling Stones’ 1969 album Let It Bleed.  Yes, a tune that means so much to me features in a movie pithily described by Mikey Smith, deputy political editor at the Daily Mirror, as ‘a bad film made by bad people about bad people’, and about which Variety suggested if they showed it on an airplane ‘people would still walk out’.  I feel besmirched.

 

It’s quite possible, though, that the Trumps and Brett Ratner bunged Gimme Shelter onto the soundtrack without actually listening to the words.  Supposedly played as an accompaniment to Melania’s preparations for her husband’s inauguration as 47th President of the USA, which one year later would lead to masked, paramilitary-style thugs abducting young children from their homes and schools and executing peaceful protesters on the street, the song has such lyrics as “Rape, murder / It’s just a shot away” and “War, children / It’s just a shot away.”  Very apt, when you think about it.

 

Anyway, this has at least got me thinking about a different, and nicer, Rolling Stones-related topic – the band and movies.  After all, over the years, there have been plenty of Beatles films: A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Help! (1965), Yellow Submarine (1968), Let It Be (1970), I Wanna Hold Your Hand (1978), Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), The Birth of the Beatles (1979), Give my Regards to Broad Street (1984), The Hours and Times (1991), Backbeat (1994), Two of Us (2000), The Beatles: Get Back (2021) (which is actually a miniseries, but Peter Jackson made it, so it feels like a movie to me) and Sam Mendes’s forthcoming project, The Beatles – A Four-Film Cinematic Event (2027).  But what about the Rolling Stones?  What contribution to cinema has been made by the Liverpudlian mop-tops’ less wholesome London rivals?

 

© Shangri-La Entertainment / Paramount Classics

 

On the face of it, there isn’t a lot.  That is, if you don’t count the various documentaries made about them like Charlie is my Darling (1966), Jean Luc Godard’s oddball Sympathy for the Devil (1968) and Gimme Shelter (1970), a chronicle of their 1969 American tour that ended bloodily with Hells Angels-perpetrated carnage at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival.   And if you don’t count their many concert movies like The Stones in the Park (1969), Let’s Spend the Night Together (1982), Julien Temple’s The Stones at the Max (1991) (the first feature-length movie to be filmed in IMAX – because what you really want to see is a 100-feet-tall close-up of Keith Richards’ face, right?), The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (1996) (plug your ears for the bit with Yoko Ono) and the Martin Scorsese-directed Shine a Light (2008), which provided the gruesome spectacle of a leathery 60-something Jagger duetting with 20-something pop-moppet Christina Aguilera and prowling around her like a randy velociraptor.

 

There’s been little effort to film key events in the history of the Rolling Stones.  Off the top of my head, the only one I can think of is the little-known Stoned (2005), about the possible circumstances of Brian Jones’s death.  And as for movies featuring Stones-members as actors, well, there’s just a couple of items with Mick Jagger – epics such as Ned Kelly (1970) and Freejack (1992).  Ouch.

 

Actually, you could make a case for the Pirates of the Caribbean series being Rolling Stones films as their star Johnny Depp famously based the voice, mannerisms and swagger of his Captain Jack Sparrow character on Keith Richards.  I thought Depp-playing-Keith-playing-a-pirate was a rib-tickling gimmick that elevated the first Pirates of the Caribbean instalment, back in 2003, from being a middling film to being an entertaining one.  Alas, the sequels to it became ever-more convoluted, repetitious and tedious and, by the time of the third in the franchise, At World’s End (2007), when the filmmakers had the bright idea of bringing in the real Keith Richards to cameo as Captain Jack’s pirate dad, the idea had lost its novelty value.

 

© Buena Vista / Walt Disney Productions / Jerry Bruckheimer Films

 

Arguably, the most Rolling Stones-esque film of all is Performance (1968), the psychedelically weird crime-rock movie co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg.  Its cast includes Mick Jagger and Anita Pallenberg, then lover of Keith Richards.  The story of an on-the-run gangster (James Fox) who holes up in a mansion belonging to a burnt-out rock star (Jagger) and gets involved in some mind-bendingly druggy goings-on, the film neatly captures the dark, dangerous aura that was popularly associated with the Stones at the time.  Neither did it do the film’s scary reputation any harm that afterwards Fox underwent a ‘crisis’, dropped out of acting for the next decade-and-a-half and became an evangelical Christian.  As if the poor man hadn’t suffered enough, during the late 2010s, his son Laurence came out of the closet as a whinging, entitled, far-right-wing rentagob.

 

Keith Richards had and still has a deep-rooted aversion to Performance, thanks to the sexual shenanigans that Pallenberg supposedly got up to with Jagger during filming.  He believed these shenanigans were orchestrated by Donald Cammell, presumably as a way of getting Pallenberg and Jagger further ‘in character’.  In his autobiography Life (2020) – which was written with the help of a journalist also, confusingly, called James Fox – Richards describes Cammell as “the most destructive little turd I have ever met.”

 

Because of Richards’ loathing of Performance, one Jagger-Richards song that’s never been played at Rolling Stones gigs and is unlikely to ever be played at future ones is Memo from Turner (1968), which soundtracks a particularly strange sequence at the movie’s climax when everyone is out of their faces, the gangsters start stripping off and Jagger dances amid veering lights.  On the Performance recording of the song, Jagger is the only Stone involved, doing vocal duties, while Ry Cooder plays slide-guitar (wonderfully) and Randy Newman plays piano.  It’s a shame that we’ll never hear a live Stones version of it because it’s a belter.  I’m also partial to this cover of it by forgotten 1980s retro-rockers Diesel Park West.

 

Anyway, there’s one thing you can say about the Rolling Stones and celluloid.  In the right film, blasting over the soundtrack at the right moment, a Stones song can help create a splendid musical, visual and dramatic alchemy, turning a good cinematic scene into one that’s truly awesome.  In Part 2 of this post, I’ll list my favourite uses of Rolling Stones songs in the movies.  Stay tuned…

 

© Goodtimes Enterprises / Warner Bros.

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No shuffling off this Lacuna Coil

 

 

In 2022, the year I arrived in Singapore, the Italian gothic metal band Lacuna Coil played a gig at the city-state’s Esplanade Annex Studio.  Although I’d really enjoyed several of the band’s early albums, such as Comalies (2002) and Shallow Life (2009), I somehow, stupidly, missed seeing them on that occasion.  When I heard that the band would be paying a return visit to Singapore on February 9th this year, playing in the same venue, I made sure I didn’t make the same mistake again.

 

Lacuna Coil are currently touring in promotion of their 2025 album Sleepless Empire.  The album was well-received by critics, who noted that it showed the band moving towards a darker, heavier sound.

 

Though plentifully equipped with chugging guitars, earlier Lacuna Coil albums like those I’d mentioned above had prioritised melody over volume.   This was embodied in the band’s use of two vocalists, the operatic Christina Scabbia and the rougher, more aggressive-sounding Andrea Ferro.  Indeed, to me, they sounded like a goth-metal version of the 1980s Icelandic indie-band the Sugarcubes – wherein a very young Björk’s charmingly fey vocals were offset by the more discordant ones of Einar Ӧrn, allegedly ‘the first punk in Iceland’.  Nonetheless, Ferro’s rawer voice was still in synch with the tunes.

 

 

At tonight’s gig, I was discombobulated at first to encounter a louder, crunchier, snarlier incarnation of Lacuna Coil than I’d expected – songs from Sleepless Empire made up nearly half the setlist, with previous, gentler albums represented by one or two tracks only.  It was also a surprise to hear those alternating vocals.  While Scabbia was as operatic as ever, Ferro sometimes indulged in death-growling, Cannibal Corpse-style.  Actually, one of Sleepless Empire’s tracks, Hosting the Shadow, was recorded with guest vocals from Randy Blythe of the American thrash / groove metal band Lamb of God, who in the past has provided guest vocals for – surprise! – Cannibal Corpse.

 

But a few songs into Lacuna Coil’s set, my brain had adjusted and I enjoyed the rest of the gig enormously.  And the heaviness of Sleepless Empire was leavened by a few old tracks I’m fond of: Heaven’s a Lie and Swamped off Comalies, Spellbound off Shallow Life.  No room, alas, for Survive, the first track on Shallow Life, which is maybe my favourite Lacuna Coil song thanks to its use of a spooky, children’s-nursery-rhyme-like refrain, which sounds like something off the soundtrack of an old giallo movie.  (Giallo were a sub-genre of stylish but brutal horror-thrillers developed in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s by directors like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Sergio Martino and Lucio Fulci.  Frequently, the murders in them were the result of someone having suffered childhood trauma, which necessitated flashback scenes accompanied by the sounds of creepy children.)  And that brings me nicely to my next point…

 

 

One thing I liked about Lacuna Coil’s show tonight was how, visually, they echoed old Italian horror movies, of which I’m a big fan.  Bassist Marco Coti Zelati, who also composes the music for and produces their records – Scabbia and Ferro write the lyrics – was slathered in white corpse-paint, except for a dish-shaped portion at the top of his head, which had been painted red and brain-like to suggest his brainpan had been removed.  Indeed, he resembled a lumbering, reanimated cadaver from the zombie epics that Lucio Fulci started making after he stopped making giallo.  Meanwhile, recently recruited guitarist Daniele Salomone wore a cowl and resembled the hooded villain in Antonio Margheriti’s 1963 horror film The Virgin of Nuremberg.

 

 

The colours bathing the stage veered from garish blue to garish red with the abandon of the stylised lighting that drenched the movies of Mario Bava and Dario Argento.  And the dark-haired, red-dressed Scabbia would have made a good female lead in an Italian gothic horror, either being menaced (à la Jessica Harper) or doing the menacing (à la Barbara Steele).

 

Finally, I should say the crowd were appreciative of Lacuna Coil’s artistry, though a few too many phone-cameras were in operation.  I’d secured a good position near the front of the stage, but my view of the band was sometimes disrupted by a girl standing before me who held her phone permanently aloft, seemingly hellbent on filming the entire gig.  Occasionally, she’d turn and, with a sweep of the arm, try to film the audience behind her too. Whenever she did this, I noticed how her arm swooped up and down so as to avoid getting a close-up of my grizzled, decrepit visage amid these panoramic shots.  Heaven forbid — that would have ruined all her footage.

 

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Democracy dies in Donald-grovelling

 

From wikipedia.org / © The Washington Post

 

“What would you say to Epstein survivors…?”

 

“You are so bad.  You are the worst reporter.  No wonder CNN has no ratings.  She’s a young woman.  I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smile.   They should be ashamed of you.”

 

On February 4th, CNN reporter Kaitlan Collins was cut off in the middle of a question about the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, notorious paedophile, human trafficker and friend to the rich and famous, at a White House press conference.  Cutting her off was President Donald Trump, coincidentally someone who receives, according to the New York Times, 38,000 mentions in the Epstein files so far released by the US Department of Justice.  Evidently, in Trump’s mind, you need to smile when you ask questions about victims of paedophilia and human trafficking.

 

I find his objection ironic considering that for the last 21 years Trump’s been married to Melania Trump, a woman on whose visage – gimlet-eyed and as smooth, hard and unyielding as an iron bedpan – anything resembling a smile rarely flickers.  Obviously, though, if you were expected to share a marital bed with Trump, your face wouldn’t be projecting sunbeams and rainbows either.

 

Lately, Melania Trump has been in the news because of the release of a new documentary movie about her.  Entitled Melania, it focuses on her during the run-up to her husband’s second inauguration as president.  Jeff Bezos’s Amazon paid 40 million dollars for the rights to the documentary – 28 million of that reportedly going straight into Ms. Trump’s pocket – and another 35 million to advertise it.

 

Reviews of Melania have not been, shall we say, overly enthusiastic.  The last time I checked the review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, its ‘Tomato-meter’ had it at seven percent.  William Thomas at Empire magazine advised, “Do try not to choke on your popcorn.”  Sean Burns at North Shore Movies observed, “At least Leni Riefenstahl could frame a shot.”  Mark Kermode at Kermode and Mayo’s Take – The Brand New Podcast described it as “the most depressing experience I have ever had in the cinema.”  He added, “I mean, I’ve seen A Serbian Film (2010), I’ve seen Cannibal Holocaust (1980), I have never felt this depressed…  I thought it was absolutely repugnant.”

 

By the way, the director of Melania is Brett Ratner, who in 2017 was accused of sexual assault and harassment by six women, accusations he’s denied.  In photos recently released from the Epstein files, he appears sitting on a sofa beside the late, loathsome paedophile, both of them cuddling young women.  The women’s faces are blocked to protect their identities, so you can’t tell how young they are.

 

I should also say that Melania made seven million dollars on its opening weekend, a decent haul for a documentary.  Obviously, it appeals to a certain audience in the USA, i.e., cultish MAGA dingbats so worshipful of her husband they’d spend a fortune on eBay to acquire pieces of his used toilet paper, which they’d then frame and hang prominently in their living rooms.  However, it still looks like it’ll be a long time before Amazon recoups anything like the 75 million dollars it invested in the movie.

 

From wikipedia.org / © White House

 

In totally unconnected developments during Trump’s first year as 47th president, the Orange One signed an executive order relaxing environmental rules about space launches (benefiting Bezos’s private space venture Blue Origin); signed an order preventing US states from enforcing their own AI regulations (benefiting Bezos’s AI start-up Project Prometheus); and generally created a oligarch-friendly climate that’s allowed Bezos and fellow magnificoes Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg to increase their collective wealth by approximately 250 billion dollars.

 

But I don’t know why Bezos would take a financial hit by getting involved in Melania, a vanity project that nobody apart from those hardcore MAGA nutters would pay money to see.  I really don’t know.

 

In other, totally unconnected news last week, the Washington Post, a once-respected newspaper whose motto is ‘Democracy dies in darkness’, and which broke the story about the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency in 1974, has announced a ‘strategic reset’.  This reset involves showing a third of its current workforce the door.  It’s also “ending the current iteration of its popular sports desk… restructuring its local coverage, reducing its international reporting operation, cutting its books desk and suspending its flagship daily news podcast Post Reports.”  The loss of the Washington Post’s books desk means it’ll no longer publish its literary review supplement Book World.

 

The Washington Post has been on a downward spiral this past year, a spiral of its – or its proprietor’s – own making.  Previously, and unsurprisingly, it’d not been enamoured with Trump.  As 2024’s presidential race neared election day, however, and with Trump looking likely to regain the White House and launch his glorious new thousand-year Reich, the Washington Post’s editorial board was ordered not to publish an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, Trump’s rival for the presidency.  As a result, more than 200,000 disgusted readers – eight percent of its 2.5 million-strong readership – cancelled their digital subscriptions to the newspaper.

 

After the announcement of the Washington Post‘s downsizing, its legendary Watergate  reporter Bob Woodward lamented, “I am crushed that so many of my beloved colleagues have lost their jobs and our readers have been given less news and sound analysis.  They deserve more.”  Meanwhile, Trump’s Communications Director Steve Cheung crowed on Twitter, “Just a reminder that printing fake news is not a profitable business model.”

 

Earlier, the Washington Post’s proprietor had defended his decision to have the newspaper sit on the fence before the 2024 election, which’d started the rot.  He wrote: “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election…  What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias.  A perception of non-independence.  Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”  Aye, right.  That’s the principled thing to do.  When there’s a choice between a candidate who’s a convicted criminal and convicted sexual abuser and a candidate who isn’t, you say nothing.  Heaven forbid anyone perceives you as being biased and non-independent.

 

From wikipedia.org / © Van Ha, US Space Force

 

And who’s the proprietor of the Washington Post?  Oh look, it’s Jeff Bezos.  Funny that he should take a hit by alienating his newspaper’s natural readership and sending it down the toilet, just as he took a hit by shelling out 75 million dollars for a dud like the Melania movie.  It’s almost like he has an ulterior motive.  Almost like he’s trying to… curry favour with someone.

 

But seriously.  A while ago, I posted about “an unholy alliance of authoritarians, kleptocrats, fascists, media tycoons, tech bros and oil barons”, working hard “at stripping freedoms from those of us living in societies that,  until now, have retained some freedoms; at transferring another huge chunk of wealth from our dwindling coffers to their swelling coffers; and at burning and poisoning the planet we live on in their quest for profits whilst aggressively pushing the line that any science questioning this policy is a ‘hoax’.”  You see that here.  Bezos grovelling to Trump by financing his missus’s dreadful movie and nuking the Washington Post.  As a reward, Trump throwing him a few legislative and financial scraps from the White House table so he can carry on making pots of money for himself.

 

And with Bezos and his ilk embracing automation and Artificial Intelligence to maximise profits by eliminating human employees, and salaries, the future looks grim.  Journalists will soon go the way of lamplighters, elevator operators, switchboard operators and video store clerks.  News copy will be written by AI technology, controlled by billionaires, who’ll make sure that copy panders to their interests and those of their political allies.  And if there’s bad news they can’t avoid reporting, it’ll be blamed on those people not plugged into their extreme-right-wing, white-Christian-nationalist gestalt: blacks, Latinos, Muslims, Jews, atheists, gays, trans-people, liberals, socialists, trade unionists.

 

Education will be similar.  Teachers will disappear too and kids will be taught by AI, with the likes of Elon Musk deciding what’s in the curriculum.  Indeed, Musk has done a deal with El Salvador’s government to “bring his artificial intelligence company’s chatbot, Grok, to more than 1 million students across the country… to ‘deploy’ the chatbot to more than 5,000 public schools in an ‘AI-powered education program’.”  Yes, that’s Grok, the lovable chatbot that praises Hitler and puts tweens in tiny bikinis for the gratification of paedophiles, coming to a school near you to teach your kids.

 

The stinking rich and stinking powerful won’t only hoard wealth – they’ll hoard information too, whilst making sure only small, approved increments of it leak down to the masses they regard as their serfs and inferiors.  Especially manipulated will be scientific information about the climate catastrophe posing an increasing threat to our civilisation’s survival on this planet.  So that their environmentally-ruinous cash-generating projects, like power-guzzling and water-guzzling AI data centres, escape censure, they’ll suppress this information or bury it under an avalanche of counter-arguing pseudoscientific gibberish, or not collect it in the first place.

 

But let’s end positively.  While it’s sickening to watch America’s business magnates, corporations, media organisations, law firms and universities bend over supinely and lick Trump’s gruesome arse, the way ordinary Americans have reacted to his policies gives glimmers of hope.

 

© MS NOW

 

I’m thinking especially of Minneapolis.  Since December, the city has been overrun and brutalised by up to 3000 of Trump’s masked, violent, badly-trained thugs from Immigration and Customs (ICE) and Customs and Border Patrol.  Ostensibly, they came to crack down on fraud allegedly committed by Minneapolis’s Somali-American community.  In reality, as Wikipedia reports, they’ve assaulted, harassed and detained people  “on the basis of their alleged or suspected immigration status”, including “restaurant, airport and hotel workers, Target employees, children and families, Native Americans, students and commuters”, many of whom “have been US citizens, legal residents with work authorisation, or asylum seekers.”

 

This has disastrously impacted on the city’s businesses, schools and whole social fabric.  ICE was accused of violating at least 96 court orders during four weeks in January alone; and they’ve executed two citizens during peaceful protests, Renee Good on January 7th and Alex Pretti on January 24th.

 

Obviously, the operation was designed to intimidate Minneapolis – whose state governor is Tim Walz, Kamala’s running mate against Trump in 2024 – and intimidate liberal-leaning cities generally.  But local people are having none of it.  They’ve protested peacefully, organized strikes, alerted neigbours about approaching ICE patrols, monitored and filmed their activities, and provided support for people at risk from those activities by helping them get to their schools and places of worship unmolested, running errands for them and raising money for them.  They’ve stood by their fellow citizens in a display of decent, old-fashioned community values – values Trump would despise if his reptile brain could ever understand them in the first place.

 

One thing that particularly impressed and moved me was a viral clip showing a white-bearded old man protesting against ICE on a snowbound and teargas-fogged Minneapolis street on January 24th.  When a reporter and camera crew approached him, he raged, “I’m just angry.  I’m 70 years old and I’m f**king angry.”  Then, wearing neither mask nor goggles, he strode off through a billowing wall of teargas.

 

That furious but defiant old-timer, it transpired, was Greg Ketter, founder and proprietor of the Minneapolis independent bookstore DreamHaven Books and Comics.  The renowned sci-fi and fantasy writer Harlan Ellison once described DreamHaven as “a book-seeker’s cave of miracles”.

 

I find it inspiring to see a man who’s devoted a lifetime to books taking a stand against Trump, someone who brags about not reading as if it’s a badge of honour.  And by extension, against Trump’s billionaire toadies, currently trying to create an AI dystopia wherein novels and other human art-forms are replaced by soulless, AI-generated slop.  And against Trump’s toady at Amazon, Jeff Bezos, who’s just axed the Washington Post’s Book World, one of the very few literary supplements the American newspaper industry had left.

 

From wikipedia.org / © DreamHaven Books & Comics

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Rab Foster has another river to cross

 

© Crimson Quill Quarterly

 

My sword-and-sorcery story The Voice of the River is now available to read in Volume 9 of the magazine Crimson Quill Quarterly, which was published at the end of last month.  As with all my fantasy fiction, it’s attributed to the pseudonym Rab Foster.

 

Someone once observed – it might have been Stephen King in his forward to his 1978 collection Night Shift – that a writer’s mind is like the grating on a storm drain.  Just as water flows in through a real grating and the bigger debris it carries gets stuck there, so a writer’s mental grating gets clogged with ideas, impressions and images while his or her life-experiences seep through it – all things that can inspire or be incorporated into stories.  The gunk trapped in my grating, from which I fashioned The Voice of the River, contained some disparate things indeed.

 

When I was 11 or 12 years old, I watched a western on late-night TV called Barquero (1970).  I assumed at the time it was a spaghetti western, because Lee Van Cleef was in it, but since then I’ve discovered it was an American movie directed by the prolific Gordon Douglas, whose best-remembered film is probably the giant-ants-on-the-loose sci-fi / horror classic Them! (1954).  The cast also included Warren Oates, Forest Tucker and Kerwin Matthews, so I should have twigged onto Barquero’s American-ness sooner.  Anyway, as Van Cleef’s character was a river ferryman, who gets caught up in shenanigans with some bandits, and as I’d recently been reading Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories, I suddenly had an idea: Wow, what if Conan retired from being a barbarian and took up a supposedly easier job, running a barge that ferried people across a river?

 

The notion sank to the back of my head and remained dormant for several decades – until last year, in fact, when I read Cormac McCarthy’s Outer Dark (1968), which contains an episode set on a river ferry.  That reminded me of my long-ago idea about ‘Conan the Ferryman’ – though I realised an unruly, adventure-loving character like Conan would balk at such a job.  So I modified the premise to ‘a sword-and-sorcery story involving a river ferry’.

 

Other debris stuck in that mental grating, also from movies, gave me inspiration for the story’s characters.  I’ve long been interested in the late Northern Irish character actor John Hallam, who appeared as hard men and coppers in a string of 1970s British crime movies – Villain (1971), The Offence (1972), Hennessey (1975) – though he’s maybe best-known for playing Luro, Brian Blessed’s winged sidekick in Flash Gordon (1980).  I visualised The Voice of the River’s main character as being like the tall, gangly, craggy Hallam and took his name, Halym, from the actor’s surname.  Meanwhile, both the appearance and personality of another character in the story were inspired by Peter Cushing in the role of Gustav Weil, the fanatical anti-hero of one of my favourite Hammer horror movies, 1972’s Twins of Evil.

 

© BBC / London Films

 

Finally, The Voice of the River pays tribute, sort of, to a scene from a TV show that’s always haunted me.  It comes at the end of the final episode of I, Claudius (1976), the BBC’s acclaimed adaptation of Robert Graves’s novels I, Claudius (1934) and Claudius the God (1935), when Claudius (Derek Jacobi), on his deathbed, has a conversation with a supernatural entity – the oracle the Sybil (Freda Dowie), who’s come to usher him to the River Styx and the underworld.  I love how, though one is flesh-and-blood and the other is ethereal, they speak as equals and both have seen so much of the world that they’re weary of it.  (“It all sounds depressingly familiar,” Claudius sighs after the Sybil has told him what will happen to Rome after his death. “Yes,” she replies, “isn’t it?”)  I tried to replicate a little of that magic in this newly-published story.

 

So, The Voice of the River owes its genesis to a 1970 Lee Van Cleef western, Cormac McCarthy, a tough Northern Irish character actor, some Hammer horror villainy by Peter Cushing and I, Claudius.  Not bad for a simple sword-and-sorcery tale.

 

One thing about Crimson Quill Quarterly that impresses me is the time and effort its editors spend on the editing process – including consulting and reconsulting the writers of its stories about suggested improvements – to ensure that the fiction in its volumes is in its best possible form when they go on sale.  Containing seven stirring tales of fantasy, magic and derring-do, its ninth edition can be purchased here.

 

© United Artists

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Ralph’s extraordinary world

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

The recently released 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is the latest in the series of British zombie movies that began with 28 Days Later (2002).  It’s also a direct sequel to last year’s 28 Years Later.  Though I had a few reservations about 28 Years Later, which was scripted by Alex Garland and directed by Danny Boyle, creators of the original 2002 film, it generally impressed me.  I felt wary about the forthcoming Bone Temple, though, because one of my 28 Years Later reservations was how it ended and set up its sequel.

 

I wrote at the time: “Its last minutes have upset a few people with their unexpected reference to a dark episode in recent British history, but I don’t mind that.  I think it’s a pretty audacious move by Garland’s script.  Rather, I don’t appreciate the goofy, cartoony manner in which those last minutes are filmed, which jar against the sombre tone of everything that’s happened previously.  This makes me nervous about what the sequel will be like (and it isn’t directed by Boyle, but by Nia DaCosta).”

 

Happily, having just seen 28 Year Later: The Bone Temple, I realise I had nothing to worry about.  It isn’t goofy or cartoony at all.  Actually, Nia DaCosta shoots her movie in a more measured, controlled style than Boyle shot his – he filmed with numerous iPhone cameras, edited frenziedly, and intercut the action with clips from old war documentaries and Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944).  Parts of DaCosta’s film are so still and character-focused you feel you’re watching a stage-play.  And overall, it’s a near-perfect blend of horror, violence, humour, pathos and, yes, optimism.  I’d even rate it as the best of the 28 Days / Weeks / Years Later movies – praise indeed, since I think the previous three films are all quality.  (I know the 2007 installment, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo’s 28 Weeks Later, gets some grief. But, apart from one idiotic lapse in plot logic, I like it.)

 

A warning.  From here on, there’ll be spoilers for 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple.

 

So, what was that ‘dark episode in recent British history’ referenced at the end of 28 Years Later?  Well, it concluded with its juvenile hero Spike (Alfie Wiliams) being rescued from the infected – the series’ name for the humans who’ve succumbed to the ‘rage virus’ and transformed into slavering, red-eyed, hyperactive zombies – by eight youths wearing tracksuits, bling and long, blonde wigs.  Their leader, played by Jack O’Connell, introduces himself as ‘Sir Jimmy’.  Indeed, they’re all called ‘Jimmy’: Jimmy Shite, Jimmy Fox, Jimmy Snake, etc.  Wandering around this post-apocalyptic, zombie-infested hellscape is a gang fixated on Jimmy Savile.

 

At this point, British viewers of 28 Years Later went, “Eek!”  Everyone else in the world probably went, “Huh?”

 

Savile, in case you didn’t know, was a British disc jockey, children’s TV presenter and charity fundraiser – in his lifetime he raised around 40 million pounds – who died in 2011.  With his long, greasy locks of blonde hair, penchant for tracksuits, cigars and bling, and irritating, homemade patois (“Now then, now then, as it happens, goodness gracious, how’s about that then, guys ‘n’ gals?”), he cut a grotesque figure, but was regarded as a saint because of his charity work.  One year after his death, though, he turned into a modern-day folk-demon when it became apparent he’d been a sexual predator who’d abused children, young women and others on an industrial scale – often patients in hospitals he’d raised funds for.  In fact, there’d been rumours about his evil proclivities while he was alive, but he never faced justice thanks to his saintly image and connections with the political and media establishments.

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

28 Years Later began with a prologue, seemingly unlinked to the rest of the film, wherein during the rage virus’s original outbreak in 2002 a group of children are stuck in a room watching a Teletubbies (1997-2001) video while their parents try, unsuccessfully, to barricade the house against an army of the infected.  Only one small boy escapes and he flees into a nearby church.  There, he sees his father, the local cleric, get attacked, transform and then seemingly lead the other infected off in a macabre, marauding dance.  The boy, it transpires, becomes Sir Jimmy, O’Connell’s character.  Grown up, his brain is an unhinged cocktail of zombie trauma, garbled religious dogma (from his father) and obsolete British pop culture (from the TV) – in the films’ alternative timeline, civilization ended in 2002, so Savile’s crimes were never revealed.  Thus, Sir Jimmy enthuses about Teletubbies and has trained one of his gang, Jimmima (Emma Laird), to do a Teletubbies dance-routine.  Also, echoing Savile, he frequently talks about ‘charity’ – though he uses the word as a euphemism for ‘torture’.

 

For Sir Jimmy’s gang are Clockwork Orange-type psychopaths.  He’s convinced them he’s the son of the devil and they’re on a holy, or unholy, mission to slaughter the infected and uninfected alike in what’s left of Britain.  Spike, fallen into their clutches and forced to join their ranks, spends 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple trying to stay alive and figure out how to escape from them.

 

The movie has a second plot-strand, concerning Dr Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), whom we also met in the previous film.  He’s a hermit who, in the middle of the countryside, has created a spectacular ‘bone temple’ – a structure built from the skeletal remains of the victims of the 28-year-long contagion that also honours those victims.  Kelson is certainly eccentric, but he’s decent and humane too and he’s managed to find a way of peacefully co-existing with the dangerous, brutal world around him.

 

Emblematic of that danger and brutality is Samson (Chi Lewis-Parry) – the name Kelson has given an ‘alpha’ member of the infected who stalks the environs of the temple.  Alphas are specimens bigger, stronger and even more dangerous than the ordinary infected.  Kelson uses morphine-tipped darts fired from a blowpipe to subdue Samson as he approaches, but he’s noticed that Samson has been coming back to the temple more often.  It’s as if he enjoys the doses of morphine he’s getting.  This inspires Kelson to experiment on the alpha.  How much, he wonders, of what’s wrong with the infected is a virus and how much is psychosis?  If the psychosis can be calmed – possibly lifted? – by drugs, what remains of the victim’s mind and memories?  Though Spike’s dad (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) claimed in the previous film that the infected don’t have souls, Kelson, as his relationship with Samson develops, realises something of a soul does linger in the infected’s simultaneously terrifying and pitiful husks.

 

So, Spike is trapped among the Jimmies, Fiennes is improbably bonding with Samson and, ominously, we know these two storylines are going to crash together sooner or later with painful results for everyone.  One thing I like about The Bone Temple, again scripted by Alex Garland, is that for all the simplicity of its plotting, it’s less predictable than you’d expect.  I’d assumed the Jimmies would intrude violently on Kelson with a ‘home invasion’ of his bone temple, but what happens is more complex.  I’d also seen people assume online before the film’s release that the Jimmies would kill Kelson and an enraged Samson would go on the rampage, or the Jimmies would kill Samson and an enraged Kelson would go on the rampage – but neither happens here. The real outcome is unexpectedly hopeful, funny, sad and satisfying.  And the long-awaited scene when Sir Jimmy and Kelson finally come face to face is splendid in both its drama and its restraint.  Generally, while O’Connell’s performance is great, Fiennes’ performance is one for the ages.

 

The previous film posited that although Britain had been ravaged by the rage virus, mainland Europe hadn’t and it’d continued to develop as it actually did in the 21st century.  This scenario of an isolated and seriously in-the-shit Britain was an obvious metaphor for Brexit.  The Bone Temple is less on the nose with state-of-the-nation metaphors, but you can still see some.

 

The kids making up Sir Jimmy’s gang – and they are kids, as evidenced by scenes where a couple of them suffer fatal injuries and reveal their true, frightened selves during their death throes, one of them even lamenting about a long-ago pet kitten – symbolize the victims of a half-century of ruthless government policies that decreed there had to be winners and losers and split the country into haves and have-nots. They’re the losers, the have-nots, the left-behind youngsters condemned to membership of a feral underclass.  Tellingly, the opening scene shows the Jimmies gathered in a decayed public swimming pool in some abandoned post-industrial city: the sort of public amenity, in the sort of place that desperately needed public amenities, that got the chop during David Cameron’s premiership and ‘austerity’ project in the early 2010s.

 

Significantly, they’re exploited, manipulated and fashioned into a squad of killers by someone modelling himself on Jimmy Savile.  The real Savile was a respected member of the establishment at the time when British politics turned callous and abandoned the principle that all citizens, including the weak, poor and vulnerable, should be looked after.  Each Christmas-time in the 1980s, for instance, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher would invite him to spend Boxing Day with her at Chequers.  He was also a confidante of Prince (now King) Charles.

 

© Columbia Pictures

 

If Sir Jimmy and his minions represent everything rotten about Britain recently, Kelson represents the opposite.  For one thing, he was formerly a doctor in the country’s National Health Service, an institution founded on the principle that the weak, poor and vulnerable should be looked after (and not have to pay a fortune for their treatment).  When he treats the arrow wounds that a doped-up Samson has incurred during his travels, he quips, “So you owe me…  Only kidding.  I’m NHS, free of charge.”  Another British cultural reference that may go over the heads of American audiences.

 

Kelson also reminds us that as well as being an imperial superpower, Britain was once a more benevolent, cultural one. (It helps that he’s played by Ralph Fiennes, a fixture in two massive, British-originating cultural franchises, Harry Potter and James Bond.)  Despite the apocalypse, Kelson has managed to hang onto his old vinyl collection and he plays stuff from it at appropriate moments – Duran Duran’s Ordinary World (1992) when Samson needs some pacification; Radiohead’s Everything in its Right Place (2000) when he’s wistfully contemplating the night-sky; and fabulously, when he has to deal with the Jimmies, Iron Maiden’s Number of the Beast (1982) – “Let’s turn this up to 11,” he says, and he does.  Iron Maiden, Radiohead, Duran Duran…  In their different ways, at different times, these British bands were massively popular, musical juggernauts worldwide (and coincidentally, all three have been touring again lately).  That’s the sort of global soft power Britain should be proud of.

 

Indeed, Kelson seems an embodiment of the caring and creative British values that the country tried to project to the outside world during the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics – a ceremony whose artistic director was Danny Boyle.

 

Aside from the script, performances, themes and general execution, a reason why I liked The Bone Temple so much was because the relationship between Kelson and Samson echoed something in one of my all-time favourite horror movies, George A. Romero’s Day of the Dead (1985).  In the Romero film, a scientist called Dr Logan (Richard Liberty) attempts to ‘domesticate’ a zombie nicknamed ‘Bub’ (Sherman Howard).  Good though Chi Lewis-Parry is, Samson doesn’t quite have the pathos of Bub – it would be difficult, since at the start of The Bone Temple we see Samson doing business as usual, i.e., ripping off someone’s head and dragging their spine out of their neck-stump.  Kelson, though, is a far more endearing character than the obsessed and unbalanced Logan.  The scenes with him and an ever-more docile Samson are both amusing and touching and you feel increasingly worried about them both as the Jimmies close in.

 

If I have a criticism of The Bone Temple, it’s about how it depicts the other infected, the ones who aren’t Samson.  They feel like a device that gets turned on and off according to the needs of the plot.  Uninfected humans out in the open who need to be threatened?  The infected are ubiquitous.  Uninfected humans out in the open who need to have a chat by the campfire?  The infected are nowhere to be seen.  Also, near the end, I can’t understand why the infected don’t immediately swarm the bone temple when it’s lit up like a chandelier and blasting out Iron Maiden.

 

Otherwise, 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple is a hugely impressive achievement by Nia DaCosta, Alex Garland and their cast and crew.  And while Ralph Fiennes won’t win an Oscar for his performance, much as he deserves to – zombie movies don’t win Oscars – Iron Maiden should at least get him onstage during the rest of their world tour.

 

© Columbia Pictures

Posted on

Favourite Scots words, W-Z

 

From wikipedia.org / Scottish National Portrait Gallery

 

It’s Burns Night this evening.  In other words, it’s been 267 years exactly since Agnes Burnes (né Broun) gave birth to little Robert Burns, who would grow up to be Scotland’s greatest poet.  I currently reside in Singapore and am not connected with the city-state’s St Andrew’s Society (whom I believe organise an annual Burns Supper in this part of the world), so I won’t be celebrating the bard’s birthday in the traditional fashion, i.e., quaffing whisky, listening to poetry recitals, quaffing more whisky, stuffing myself with haggis, neeps and tatties, and quaffing yet more whisky.  However, I’ll make sure tonight I drink a couple of bottles of Tiger Beer to the great man’s memory in my local bak-kut-teh eatery – and will post this latest instalment in my series about my favourite words in the Scots language, the medium in which Burns wrote his poetry.

 

Here, I’ll cover those Scots words beginning with the final four letters of the alphabet.  Actually, beginning with just ‘W’ and ‘Y’, since I don’t know of any ones beginning with ‘X’ and ‘Z’, unless you count Zetland, an old name for the Shetland Islands.

 

Wally (adj) – porcelain.  I believe I mentioned this before when I covered the term peely-wally, meaning pale and sickly-looking to the point where the person so described is the colour of porcelain.  A wally dug is a porcelain ornament in the form of a dog, while wallies is a Scots term for dentures – porcelain was first used to make false teeth in the late 18th century and was still a component in their manufacture two centuries later.  Finally, a fancy alleyway lined with porcelain tiles is referred to as a wallie close.

 

Wean (noun) – a young child.  Wean is a blend of the words wee and ane (one).  For example, Glaswegian poet Liz Lochhead’s 1985 Scots-language adaptation of Molière’s Tartuffe (1664) contains the couplet, “Can you bring the wean up well / When you’re scarce mair than a lassie yoursel’?”

 

Wee (adj) – small.  One of the commonest and most famous Scots words, wee isn’t just used across Scotland but in the north of England and Ireland too.  It’s frequently heard in my birthplace Northern Ireland, which contains its own variant of Scots, Ulster-Scots.  Indeed, so fond of the word are the inhabitants of Northern Ireland that in the TV show Derry Girls (2018-22), James – ‘The wee English fella’ – remarks on it.  “People here,” he cries exasperatedly, “use the word wee to describe things that aren’t even actually that small!”

 

From derry.fandom.com / © Hat Trick Productions / Channel 4

 

Back in Scotland, Scots terms that incorporate wee include Wee Free, referring to a member of the Free Church of Scotland, an uncompromising, purist and, well, wee splinter-church from mainstream Presbyterianism; the Wee Rangers, a nickname for Berwick Rangers, a considerably less well-known and wee-er football team than Glasgow Rangers – how everyone in Scotland who wasn’t a Glasgow Rangers supporter laughed when Berwick Rangers beat Glasgow Rangers 1-0 in the first round of the Scottish Cup in 1967; and wee dram , a ‘small’ whisky, though in my experience, anyone who’s offered me a wee dram has served me something not that wee.  Come to think of it, I’ve heard wee drams also referred to as wee refreshments, wee libations and wee sensations.  Meanwhile, the exclamation “What in the name o’ the Wee Man?” can be translated as “What in the name of the devil?”  And I’ve heard a few Scottish teachers in my time refer to their juvenile charges, uncharitably, as wee shites.

 

Weegie / Weedgie (noun) – an affectionate, and sometimes not so affectionate, term for an inhabitant of Glasgow.  I remember lending my copy of Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993) to a Canadian friend during the late 1990s.  When she returned it, she said, “I really enjoyed it, but tell me one thing…  What’s a Weegie?”  Maybe she was puzzled by the musings of the book’s hero / anti-hero, and staunch Edinburgh-er, Mark Renton, who at one point muses: ““Weegies huv this built-in belief that they’re hard done by, but they’re no.  It’s just self-pity.  Ah mean, Edinburgh’s jist as fuckin bad in places, but ye don’t hear us greetin aboot it aw the f**kin time.”

 

And I believe another Edinburgh – or Edinburgh-based – author, Iain Rankin, has written at least one crime novel wherein Inspector Rebus is sent to investigate a case 50 miles along the road from the Scottish capital in… Weegie-land.

 

Whaup (noun) – a curlew.

 

Wheech (verb) – to move very quickly or remove something from somewhere very quickly.  The word features in the Billy Connolly stand-up routine about the mechanism that purportedly exists in airplane lavatories, the jobby–wheecher: a sort of “ladle on a string and it’s tucked under the toilet seat, and as soon as you close the lid…  WHEECH!  Away it goes.”

 

© Castle Music UK

 

Whitterick (noun) – a weasel or stoat.  This word seems to exist in different forms.  In my well-thumbed copy of the Colllin Pocket Scots Dictionary, it’s whitterick.  But in Sleekit Mr Tod, James Robertson’s 2008 Scots translation of Roald Dahl’s children’s book Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970), Mr. and Mrs. Weasel are rechristened Mr. and Mrs. Whiteret.

 

Widdershins / withershins (adverb) – anti-clockwise or in the opposite direction from the sun’s movement across the sky.  This gives widdershins and the motion it denotes the connotation of being against the order of things, of being unnatural, of being unlucky and sinister.  As a result, it turns up regularly in folklore and tales of the supernatural.  In Robert Louis Stevenson’s short fable The Song of the Morrow (1896), when the King’s daughter and her nurse go to “that part of the beach were strange things had been done in the ancient ages, lo, there was the crone, and she was dancing widdershins.”  At the same time, ominously, “the clouds raced in the sky, and the gulls flew widdershins” too.

 

Wifie (noun) – not a ‘wife’ as you might think, but a woman in general.  However, as a conversation I’ve seen on Quora delicately puts it, it’s usually a term for ‘a woman of uncertain age, but probably past the first flush of youth’.

 

Winch (verb) – to kiss and cuddle or, as folk would say during the time of my misspent youth, to ‘get off with’ someone.

 

Windae (noun) – window.  Windae-hingin’ is leaning out of the window, a windae-stane is a windowsill and a windae-sneck is the catch on a window frame you use to open or close it.  Yer bum’s oot the windae is an abusive phrase, basically meaning, “You’re talking rubbish.”  And don’t ask about the politically incorrect term windae-licker.  This landed maverick Scottish politician George Galloway in hot water when he reacted to a Glasgow Rangers-supporting critic on Twitter with the retort: “You badly need medical help son.  Will decent Rangers fans please substitute this windae-licker…?”

 

© The Belfast Telegraph

 

Wynd (noun) – like its counterpart Scots words close and vennel, this refers to a narrow lane or alleyway.  Though most of the narrow side-streets and alleyways that cut off from the sides of Edinburgh’s historic Royal Mile are called closes, a couple of them have wynd in their name, for example, Bell’s Wynd and Old Tollbooth Wynd,

 

Yatter (verb) – according to the online Collins Dictionary, this word’s roots are Scottish and it means ‘to talk idly and foolishly about trivial things’.

 

Yestreen (noun) – yesterday evening or last night.  In Robert Burns’ poem Halloween (1785), the granny tells young Jenny, ““Ae hairst afore the Sherra-moor / I mind’t as weel’s yestreen / I was a gilpey then, I’m sure / I wasna past fifteen…”

 

Yoke (noun) – obviously, this is the crosspiece placed over the necks of a pair of horses or oxen when they’re made to pull a plough.  But in a couple of Sots dictionaries, I’ve seen this described as a term for a motor car.  I’ve never heard it used in this context in Scotland, though I did so plenty of times in Northern Ireland.  An old friend of my father’s once told me that, in his youth, my old man was famous, or infamous, for the cars he drove – they weren’t sleek, fancy or flashy, but the very opposite.  “Aye,” mused the friend, “he drove some right clapped-out oul yokes.”

 

Yous (pronoun) – unlike standard English, Scots differentiates between the second-person singular and plural personal pronouns.  Talk to one person, it’s ‘you’ (or ye).  Talk to more than one and it’s yous.

 

And with that…  I will wish yous all a merry Burns Night.

 

P.S.  This should be the end of my posts about the Scots language.  But, looking at previous entries, I’ve realised there are loads of other Scots words I’ve forgotten to mention.  So, in the future, there will undoubtedly be further entries in which I start again at ‘A’ and try to cover all the omissions.

 

From pixabay.com / © Makamuki0