Goodbye, Doctor.

Well that was a big pile of fucking terrible.  Obviously some of you out there don't agree.  You're strange and wrong, of course.  What am I talking about?  Doctor Who, of course.  That little BBC show that was off the air for about fifteen years and was brought back in 2005, to much fan fare and fandom creaming.  Really, about nine years down the line the shine's tarnished a bit.  And by 'a bit' I mean its now about as shiny as a tennis ball.  So it goes without saying I feel the need to go on a spoiler-ridden rant about it.

Seriously.  SPOILERS, morons.  If you don't want anything given away because you haven't caught up don't read on.  Although, I don't think anyone who is interested in Doctor Who will be behind that much.  You never can tell.

I'll admit I was one of the many people who got very excited when it was announced Doctor Who was going to return.  I watched it as a kid.  From what I learned more recently I was the only one in my household who enjoyed it.  How's that for making you feel shit?  Makes me feel like I was some kind of pre-pubescent dictator of the television.  That just sounds hilarious when thrown out into the ether.

So, the excitement in the year or so before Russell T. Davies brought Doctor Who back to the screen was quite palpable^*.  Christopher Eccleston was a good choice.  An actor with gravitas and the ability to play it light.  And ears, such magnificent ears.  My enthusiasm lasted through that first series.  Even then, there were concerns.

I mean the format for Doctor Who was always multi-part stories, told in half-hour chunks.  Davies came back and changed the format to stand alone forty-five minute stories.  It wasn't too terrible, for a while, but we'll come to that.

Then there was Rose Tyler.  In the first of this new series, the preoccupation with the companion was quite refreshing.  Rose Tyler wasn't a terrible character, and I was surprised how good an actress Billie Piper is, being more accustomed to her previous incarnation as teeny pop performer.  Now I see that's when the rot started to set in.  Russell T. Davies ran with this and Steven Moffat's taken that cue and gone further with it.  The companion being either a fawning cypher or unreasonably stubborn.  Whatever the companion, they shoved in one of my pet hates about modern storytelling: the pathological need to have a romantic subplot.  It's not the pinnacle of story, most of the time it's as interesting as overhearing a loud teenager's phone call.  Now we're here, on the cusp of the abyss^**.

The latest series of Doctor Who has been a dismal affair.  It's not just the preoccupation with the companion, in this case the empty vessel that's Clara Oswald, but let's dwell on it a moment.  In a show that's ostensibly a fantasy/science fiction premise, it felt like a lot of time was lavished on the life of Clara Oswald.  It's happened since Rose Tyler, through What's-Her-Name^† and Amy Pond.  These last series it's been turned up a couple of notches.  To the point it felt like a standard drama with some sci-fi spotted through.  Not even interesting drama.  The most mundane and boring stuff they could dredge up:
     "What's for tea tonight?"
     "Chips."
     "Oh, okay...Oh look.  The Doctor."
Wouldn't have been so bad if the sci-fi stuff counterpointing it was at all interesting, but it was like a shot of beige thrown into a wall of grey.

It doesn't help that Steven Moffat can't seem to write women.  This post here details his many crimes against women characters.  Clara Oswald was a dull character who was supposed to have strong traits, but never managed to show them.  She could have been played by a washcloth on a stick with 'Clara Oswald: Strong Female' stitched on it^‡.  In the last episode of the latest series The Mistress describes her as a 'control freak'.  What?  I never got that.  You can't just say that without having the character display it.  She was deceitful and wilful when she wasn't being a compliant puppet, but control freak?  And her wilfulness was always used in the most stupid way, in order to advance a plot that was in danger of plunging down a hole and managed to find another one.  Not that plot holes worry Steven Moffat much...

...Because, as Cracked observed, Doctor Who currently lives in a fucking plot hole.  And fuck does it.  I couldn't even tell you what the last few episodes were about, they were such a mess.  I have been chided in the past about my stories lacking internal logic.  You know, that thing where, no matter how nonsensical something is in a story, it makes sense in context.  Sapphire and Steel was great at it.  Most people couldn't follow what the fuck was going on, but there was a sense of some underlying logic that you just didn't understand.  Current Doctor Who tosses that out the window BECAUSE SOMETHING FUCKING COOL IS HAPPENING!  That only works in small doses, when entire episodes are full of contradictions it gets tiresome.  It feels like the writers have been throwing things on a page and hoping they miraculously come together.  That only works with stir fries.

I could even forgive the twisted mess the stories have been if they had been interesting, but they have completely lacked any kind of excitement.  You can see they want to be, like the kid who's wearing the glasses and drawn-on scar, really wants to be Harry Potter, but doesn't quite do it.  Russell T. Davies wasn't great at this kind of narrative excitement, but he did manage it, possibly by pure chance, in all the arm-flailing and scurrying around.  These recent episodes have been plodding affairs desperately pointing at the screen and shouting, "See!  Excitement!" while pointing at a tree.  The stakes never felt that high.

The stakes should have felt high, since the reboot, the series has been running on series-wide arcs.  These in themselves aren't a problem, but it's the need for a new story every week that's ground down the poor show.  It's the same problem that dogs American television, with its obsession for twenty-two and -four episode series.  It gets tired.  There's only so much that can be mined out of a premise.  Before for Doctor Who, that took almost thirty years, with the previous longer-form, multi-part stories, but it's been accelerated this time with so many stories being thrown at us in a series.

And the cardinal problem, for me, is that in a show called Doctor Who, we haven't seen that much of the Doctor.  Whether that's actually the case, I don't know, I'm sure some pedant will show me a spreadsheet showing, empirically, the Doctor was in the show the most.  The problem is, stories don't run on empirical evidence, they run on feelings and if you leave viewers feeling like the eponymous character hasn't been seen enough, you've done something tragically wrong.  Yes, they pulled it off in Blake's Seven, but there was actually a valid narrative reason: Blake was dead.  What's Doctor Who's excuse?  Steven Moffat wants to concentrate on Clara and Danny going down to Asda?  We really need to know how many times a week they see each other?  Come on, that's not drama, that's a desperate bid to make people turn off the television.

For me, after discussing it with my wife, it comes down to a basic problem: Doctor Who is a pure nostalgia-fest.  People who watched the original run, like yours truly, and loved it.  We are hoping for a snippet of that feeling, but for me at least, it's not coming.  I've tuned in week after week only to be disappointed and bored again.  Yes, there have been good things, but they're bogged down and buried by the utter shit.  Don't trot out that tired, "it's a kid's show" bit, because that's no excuse for shitty writing.  Doctor Who is tired now and I suspect a proportion of people tune in hoping it improves, only to be disappointed, their little forty-five minutes of sadness on a Saturday night for a few weeks.  This could be the only thing keeping it afloat.

After the Christmas episode, I'm out, and I'll probably cringe my way through that.  I can't handle the disappointment any more.  I can't handle the fucking terrible stories, either.  The final episode of the recent series was an exercise in not creating tension.  It was remarkable that scenes with a plane besieged by Cybermen could be so boring.  It was so bad I can't even come up with an amusing simile that encapsulates tedium.  But Michelle Gomez was fucking amazing.

There are some things that can be done to improve it: for a start, give us the Doctor, doing things, being mad, solving problems like a fucking beast.  He's smart and he's resourceful, but that hasn't come across well recently, because he's been mostly absent.  Ditch the cult of the companion, it's the worst while giving us an interesting companion, even go so far as a non-human or non-contemporary human.  Think through what's happening in the story more, dude.  Pulpish madness only works when there's a baseline somewhere, without that, doesn't matter how mental that baseline is, the viewers are floating around with a nothing plot.  I'd even plump for longer story arcs, two or three episodes to tell a story and let it breath more – the, "woo! thrown into the plot" thing makes me weary.

None of the above will happen, mind you.  Too many people are vocal in their love of Doctor Who, but for me it's lost its appeal.  It's a bit sad, but I'll be off watching things that are fun, instead of hoping for another episode of Doctor Who to end.

^* I may have jumped up and down clapping at one point.  It's out there, deal with it.

^** Hyperbolic?  Me?  I resent your unspoken implication and challenge you to a duel.  That I won't turn up to and call you a prick for going.

^† Yeah, I skipped the series with Catherine Tate, because I found her comedy vapid and unfunny, I couldn't imagine watching her as a companion.  I might have been wrong in my assessment, but that's where we are.

^‡ Before anyone starts shouting at me for some misogynistic slight, Danny Pink could have been played by another washcloth on a stick with 'Danny Pink: Man'.



Will

Yes, We Do Have Priorities.

"Stop talking about this and think about this!" I've been seeing this sentiment a lot recently.  My language might be vague and you're probably already wondering, after a whole sentence, why the fuck you clicked on this blog.  You need to bear with me.  I have a point, but I'm going to waffle a bit before I get there.  Make yourself a cup of tea or relax yourself with some porn, whatever it takes, I'll be waiting^*.

Done?  Got yer tea and biscuits in comfortable reach.  Cleaned up?  Dribbled tea everywhere when you thought you'd be a smart arse and try to do both things at once?  Sicko.  We'll assume you've done whatever thing you needed to relax yourself and we'll say no more.  Especially about the stains.   Oh, the stains.

You know when you see something so odd that it stops you in your tracks?  Sometimes you go, "Oh, right," and carry on with your day and pour out those cold beans from the can and shovel them into your mouth^**.  Sometimes that weird thing gets you thinking.  It could be anything, but let's go with a celebrity's face suddenly changes to something unrecognisable^†.  It's obvious that's she's had work done.  Enough to alter the way she looks so drastically.  Now, I don't think it's fair to shame her, she's a victim of a hypocritical system that pulls women one way then another, mocking them for just about any decision they make.

The small rumble of interest caused a few people to start wailing about all the other things wrong in the world.  Excuse me?  "There are more important things in the world than Renée Zellweger's face!" No kidding, crazy person.

Even stranger, and more odiously, was when Nigel Farage waded into the vague nonsense that was the UKIP Calypso this week.  Now, the song was an offensive piece of crap on a number of levels, and I'm not going to link it.  But the pan-faced goblin that is Nigel Farage got on his high horse in the Independent.  He does the same, "There are more important things to be angry about," rant and then points, obliquely, at Ebola and more blatantly at historical child abuse in Rotherham.  In this article you can almost see the straining erection he has for getting more column inches and air time for such a stupid thing and then thrusts a veiny, probably corkscrew-shaped, stiffy in the faces of anyone close by.  It was easy publicity for a racism-factory that runs on a sticky fuel of grubby attention^‡.

This curious phenomenon of pointing at things that are more important to shift attention away from something seen as fairly trivial does a disservice to people in general.  You are aware that we can give thinking time to other things, right?  Some things make a bigger impact, and time does dull them – be honest, in a few months both of the examples above will be forgotten.  By squealing about them you've got people thinking about them for longer and perversely taking attention away from the thing your trying to point out.  People are weird, contrarian and arseholey about that.

People do need to think about other things than all the horrible shit that's going on in the world – even if it is a minor scandal or uproar – because we would become either fatigued or humourless existers who can't eat because they are stuck in constant sad face.  It's like having a tiny bit of salacious gossip and screaming at the person, "I don't care if he fell into bed with his brother-in-law's wife, what about fucking PALESTINE^§!?"

Yes, giving any thought to the small things is silly, and that's kind of the point.  We're still aware of the giant ogres and injustices stomping around the world, we just need something to take the edge of or we'd go fucking nuts.  I notice no one ever berates anyone for looking at cute animal vids on Youtube.  Sometimes we need something less horrible to be able to deal with the nightmarish shit that's going on.

And then, of course, looking at my half-formed examples above more closely, you'll start to see that they're indicative of much bigger issues with society.  Poor Renée Zellweger is a new poster child for our fucked up attitudes towards women – she shouldn't have felt the need to use surgery to look younger, but she conversely shouldn't be pilloried for doing it.  Nigel Farage and UKIP are fucking cancerous political spectres, stoking hatred against certain demographics, giving voice to the worst kind of bigotry and polishing it up as mainstream politics.  You know why Farage and his particular breed of ghoul are trying to do this?  To line their already pretty money-padded pockets.  They are an expression of our greedy-shit political system, amplified to a chinless, guffawing, hundred pound note-smoking, poor-mocking caricature straight out of a Dickens novel.

In Nigel Farage's case in particular, you have to ask who benefits from the distraction: the song itself was a distraction on its own, but still shone a spotlight on UKIP's spineless dickery, so Farage^§§, the slippery fuck, did a bit of crafty sleight of hand.  He got publicity for the party while diverting attention away from their abhorrent policies.  He's clearly been getting lessons from David Blane^§§§.

So, everyone, just calm the fuck down, take a deep breath and let's just agree that Nigel Farage is a cunt.

^* Just keep thinking about that when you're trying to crank one out.

^** Oh?  That's just me.  Okay.  Fuck.

^† I mean, seriously, if the captions and headlines hadn't said who she was, I wouldn't have known.  No, Russell Brand, that's not a result of getting older.  Ageing a few years in adulthood doesn't cause that level of appearance change.

^‡ And, fucking hell, the BBC have been doing enough of that.  How much of Farage's tainted champagne have BBC execs drank to constantly shove that cunt to the forefront of political debate in the UK when UKIP are still essentially a fringe party?

^§ But really it's still fucking awful there.

^§§ He might be a giant grinning thumb, but he's a sharp grinning thumb, that's why he's so dangerous.

^§§§ Is that charlatan shithead still around?  Levitation, fucking hell.



Will

Goddamn It! It's Not About THAT!

I'm going to insult some of you.  Yeah, I've probably been insulting your intelligence in this blog for a while, but today, I'm just going to come out and say it, I'm going to insult you.  To be honest I think the ones I'm going to insult need it.  Probably won't achieve much, but...well, I haven't thought much past that.  Rest assured there's a good reason, I'm sure you'll come up with one, you brainless fuck.

Got this booklet through the door this morning.  Actually, this afternoon, since the poor, overworked postman would be shoving the bloody things through every single fucking door.  The booklet was called What Staying in the United Kingdom means for Scotland.  It claims to be information.  It reads like a fucking book full of patronising orders and flimsy proclamations to me.  It's a publication created by the vested interest of Westminster^*.

And it was the final straw on whether I should go off on a fucking rant about the question of Scottish independence.  I'll tell you right now, I'm for it.  Just get that right out there before any ambiguity can set in.  I'll be voting yes.

Do you want to know why?

Probably not, but I'm going to tell you.  I'm sick of London being the centre of every decision made in this country.  It feels like every political and fiscal decision made by the UK government is for the benefit of the parasitic resource sink in the south east.  I have nothing against London, it's a wonderful place to visit, but that doesn't mean I want every decision made in the rest of the country used to prop it up.  It's not right and it's not fair.  Money and people who would benefit areas like Yorkshire, Cumbria and Central Scotland are drawn to the city to the detriment of these places.  How the fuck is that right?

It's like the clichéd school bully who demands your lunch money and gives you nothing but pain in return.  The rest of the country only gets inflated house prices in return for sending tributes of people and money to the insatiable London.  A whole country can't be used to finance a single city.

Yet we, the Scottish people are urged to stay with this abusive relationship, because, we're condescendingly informed, it's better for us.  Yeah, I like being scudded in the head with a cane while some cunt who has enough money already dips my fucking pocket.  And none of the current national parties will do anything different, because we have a bunch of creepy career politicians who are beholden to equally creepy business interests.  Rich folk helping out rich folk, aye they have our best interests at heart.  Bunch of fucking cunts.

And you do realise why some of the Better Together people are shouting so loud, right?  No?  How about if I say they're MPs?  That help you out?

They are another vested interest.  What happens to all those Scottish MPs in the event of a 'Yes' vote?  That's right, they don't get their subsidised trips to London any more.  Oh no!  Their relevance will twirl away down the toilet.  You know and the nice, generous expenses and chance at a juicy peerage.  But of course the money and title has nothing to do with it, it's all about doing the best for their constituents.  I do wish there was a sarcasm tag.

Let's be clear, too, this isn't some wrong-headed Braveheart^** pish about fucking the English.  That has nothing to do with it.  I think the rest of England could benefit from getting shot of slimy shits that inhabit Whitehall.  The UK government doesn't really represent Scotland or the rest of the country as it stands.  If the current UK government wasn't hacking up the NHS or punishing poor people for not having enough money or being led around by the nose by tabloid journalism, I might waver a bit more, but what we see is Tories and LibDems slashing at the infrastructure of welfare and finger-fucking the wounds.

And that's another thing, all the fuckwits who think "I don't like Alex Salmond and Nicola Sturgeon," is a valid reason for voting no, please take a swim in the North Sea with bowling balls tied to your legs, because your diminutive IQ is dragging the rest of us down.  Yeah Salmond is an egotistical goon, but we don't need to have him forever.  An independent Scotland will still be democratic, we won't suddenly become a dictatorship.  Vote the fucker out once we have our own country.  Simple as that.

I'm sure there's a chance he'll turn on us when he gets into office, but I'd rather take that chance over dealing with the Westminster fuckers who've shown they'll happily slit a newborn's throat if it got them a few extra coppers in their pockets.  The breed at the top in the Houses of Parliament at the moment are the most heartless, corporate and ideology-driven fungal-infections you can imagine.  In it together; or in it for themselves?  You shouldn't need to think about that if you follow the pattern of their behaviour.

Essentially, if you vote 'No' to independence you've forfeited your right to complain about any Westminster government, because you told them you were happy to let them continue to do whatever the fuck they like.  I mean they've already fast tracked privatising the Royal Mail, what kind of shit is that?  Who's to say the next government won't start to renege on devolution, because, "Clearly you want to have more to do with Westminster.  Why else would you stay in the union.  Come, this will only hurt forever."

Tell me you can't imagine that walking modelling balloon David Cameron doing something like that to appease the great Maggie.  Seriously, can't you just imagine him having a shrine to Margaret Thatcher in his bedroom, with the mask he makes his wife wear when he's fucking her hung up next to unnervingly intimate photos of Thatcher?  David Cameron and that smirking goblin Nigel Farage show the same contempt for Scotland as Thatcher did.  It's the same contempt they hold for anyone not as rich as them.  You want a shit-monger like Cameron to still be making decisions from Downing Street?  Fuck, do you want barely there political drone Ed Milliband in Number Ten?  What sort of hell do you think he'll rain on Scotland?  Those adenoids are just waiting for their revenge, people!

Then you have the leaders of the Scottish Labour party and the Scottish Conservative party, Johann Lamont and Ruth Davidson, who hold the people of Scotland in such little worth they don't believe we can think for ourselves.  Johann Lamont just out and said it.  Ruth Davidson hasn't in so many words, but, because she's a Tory, it's an easy bet she believes it, too.

They all subscribe to the same corrosive notion that rigid capitalism is the most sensible economic option.  Yeah, and trickle-down economics works.  Fucking hell, the idea of infinite growth for anything is the most preposterous notion ever conceived.  Not to sound hysterical here^†, but it's a big old lie.  It's a lie to keep already frighteningly wealthy and powerful people in the power and wealth they think is their right.  It's the same lie that's led to sell offs of public services or the barmy notion that public services should be profitable.  That's not the benchmark of a public service's worth; efficiency isn't decided by how much money electricity, public transport, the postal service or healthcare makes, it's how well they're doing to stop society from crumbling around our ears.  Taxes from the businesses these services help to support should be invested, not wrenched in bloated bills from the pockets of normal people.  The fact that Westminster politicians are so cowardly and lacking in imagination to dare deviate from this dogmatic bollocks scares the living shit out of me and it should you, too.

Do you really want to be still part of that shit?  If you do then you're a fucking moron.  You don't deserve my respect.  Or air, for that matter.

I'll concede, though, both sides in this campaign have been guilty of being cagey on several subjects.  It's not been a nice campaign.  The Yes side have stooped as low as the No side and that's fucking shameful.  We shouldn't let this political bickering put us off getting our own country.  The transition won't be easy, my friend, but there's a chance it will be worth it.  Can it really be as bad as what we've had shoved down our throats already?

^* There's a brilliant ripping apart of it here.  Or there was.  The fucking links died hasn't it?

^** I fucking hate that piece of shit button-pressing film.  It's not about freedom, it's about a fucking sociopath annoyed because he can't get his dick wet.

^† Dude, already happened, wipe the spittle away.


Will

Tut tut tut. I'm So Disappointed in You.

It's been a little while, hasn't it?  Not quite as long as before, but I've been quiet for the better part of a month.  Not that you'd notice.

Why?  Well because none of your fucking business, nosy bastard.

I've been waiting for something to strike me just the right way to say something about it.  I've also been holding back on something that will come in time.  Oh, my yes, I got me a big bag of bile right here on that score.

So, this little bit of fuckwaddery was brought to my attention.  Read it and let it sink in, right under your skin, that burning itch is normal.  One Direction fan fiction given a huge advance and now being adapted into a film.  This isn't a precedent, because a previous fan fiction bod got a book deal out of her work.  Loving the Band was rushed to e-book, without much said about the advance.  Actually I noticed the Independent was curiously reticent about giving any kind of details on the deal, kinda weird, doncha think?

The new one seems even worse, because there's this suggestion that there hasn't even been an editing process.  Ahem, what?  Are you fucking kididing me?  This blog led me to this blog.  Our erstwhile writer in the second blog is, understandably, bemused.  I'm fucking furious.

As she points out, we writers^* are told when we start out on the long, frustrating, painful road that we have to be at our fucking best.  Hone our shit to a razor-sharp edge and then, maybe, a publisher might arch an eyebrow in interest.  Once we've been allowed in by the erstwhile gatekeepers we are sent to editing boot camp.  I know a few professional writers who go through the wringer with edits to get their work in what is considered publishable shape.

Yet, we see this girl get her work fast-tracked by the publisher.  Not her fault.  I'm not angry at her, there's no point, she's probably delighted to have her work in print and getting a fat cheque for it and let her enjoy it.  As Jenny Trout points out, there's always a chance Anna Todd might mature into a good writer.  Although looking at Emily Baker, that might not hold.   The people my ire is aimed at are the publishers.

This will probably mean I'll never see my work in print, but, fuck it, the more people who point this shit out, the better.

This kind of thing is part of the same horrible decline that's happening with the film and music industries: risk-averse bullshit where the blandest shit is shoved at us in pretty packaging.  New things are to be shunned if they don't instantly have millions of people clamouring for it.  Anything that makes even a wee bit of money is jumped on and aped, without understanding why it's popular.  So publishing has followed suit, getting quick-fix crap on the shelves and paying the often vacuous cardboard cut-outs we call celebrities wads of money for ghost-written drivel.

It feels like the industry is kicking sand in the face of people like myself, hungry for a break, but told we're not quite good enough or what we're writing isn't quite right.  When poorly-written shit^** is packaged and thrown out for public consumption like it's the pinnacle of writing achievement, we the mass of writers, who feel like we are kept out by this shit, we have to look askance at the big publishers and ask if they know what the fuck they're doing^†.

I don't know where to go with this now.  My anger's played itself out.  Impotent, impotent anger.  I'm going to lie down.  Really we should expect better from the big publishers, shouldn't we?

^*  I'm a fucking writer.  I might not have success, wealth, fame or even earn a living, but I do the work.  That's how it works.

^** Let's not mention that fucking shit-monger E.L. James who hit on the genius idea of shittily re-writing shit fiction.  That's so fucking expired it might cause me a stroke.

^† Don't get me started on self-publishing, though.  The advice for that makes you like a needy arsehole.  Nope, not for me.


Will

Inarticulate Snarl!

Doing things in good faith is a perfect way of getting it in the gub.  It's a life lesson I can't quite grasp, even though it's happened to me so often.  I enter into things with an open mind and end up getting kicked in the brain^*.  I have been approaching some modern horror films with this attitude of late, fool that I am.

I'm still not finished with this little jag; there are a load of horror films from the last few years I haven't seen.  In truth there are some older horror films I haven't seen – wouldn't mind giving Don't Look Now and Freaks a go around.  By the same token I'm not interested in some newer horror films like The Human Centipede 2 or any of the Hostel films.  I am not squeamish, as you'll know if you've read some of my fiction, but the retarded and boring fascination with gore and debasement^** just doesn't do anything for me.  Add to that, the first Human Centipede was some of the most inept film making I've ever seen and it didn't bode well for the follow-up.  Use an idea as the basis for a story, but it shouldn't be the entire fucking thing.

Anyway, I entered into watching a couple of Rob Zombie films a few days ago.  Yeah, I suppose walking into Rob Zombie film-making exploits is a big invitation to getting a toe in the frontal lobe, but I decided I should, just to see if the impression left by House of 1,000 Corpses was erroneous.  This is the point where I stick a disclaimer in your face: I have liked Rob Zombie's music for a long time, going on twenty years now^†, and I was really excited when House of 1,000 Corpses was coming out, abandoning any misgivings about his directorial abilities, because even the promos he directed for his songs are on the shoddy side.  So, yeah, fan of Rob Zombie music.

House of 1,000 Corpses turned out to be an incoherent clusterfuck of a mess.  It's like it has been written by someone who doesn't know what a story is and has the tedious hyperactive style of bad music promos.  Bad film!  Swat it with a fucking slipper.  It was disappointing and quite saddening, that trashy, wild and incoherent style that worked so well in his music didn't stand up to a change of medium.  Should have seen it coming, but I was naive and really wanted to enjoy his film work as much as I liked his music.

I pretended this hadn't happened.  I pretended I was coming into The Devil's Rejects without ever having seen House of 1,000 Corpses, aaaaaand it was still shit.  I will admit it was better written, there was actually the semblance of a narrative.  It was a shit narrative with the desperate need for you to empathise with a bunch of reprehensible psychopaths.  It's almost impossible to empathise with characters who have no redeeming features whatsoever.  Yet there goes Mister Cummings trying to make us care for characters so horrible and twisted there's nothing tangible to hold onto.  They're just a bunch of gurning sick fucks who kill a bunch of faceless people and deserve to die.  Actually they probably didn't deserve to have what little cinematic life was given to them.

What's probably most dull about The Devil's Rejects is Rob Zombie's slavish copying of a particular brand of seventies films.  He doesn't even try to bring anything new to the business, just making a nasty seventies exploitation film a couple of decades too late.  It's witless and artless and a kind of wank material for people who want to see senseless, pointless killing and boobs.  It would be fine if that was all he was trying to do, but there are too many things inserted that make it seem like he's trying for something loftier and when he doesn't get anywhere near them it's difficult to decide whether to scud him on the head for being so inept or pat his weirdly-hatted bonce in commiseration for making an attempt.

And while we're on the subject of mindlessly copying the work of other directors, having seen The Lords of Salem, it seems he'd watched a bit of Stanley Kubrick, only instead of taking the lessons of story-telling and character he took away STATIC SHOTS and DRAGGING SCENES.  So many static shots for no reason.  You're not learning anything, it's not moving the plot along and it's not creating tension.  What's the fucking point, man?

I mean, again, better than either The Devil's Rejects or House of 1,000 Corpses, but still a million miles away from being a good film.  He shows a wee bit of restraint when it comes to the violence, but his need to have waaaaaay too much nudity is yawn-inducing.  Actually, I'll correct that: too much female nudity.  I'm a red-blooded heterosexual male, I enjoy looking at the female form, but when it's just women parading around nude, for no real purpose, it gets creepy.  It does get to the point where a full-frontal naked guy would be something of a relief; it would make it feel less like some leering pervert's sitting next to you massaging himself.  Urk.

I dunno if there's something inherently wrong with modern horror, or if this kind of rot has always been there, but Rob Zombie's films are kind of indicative of something a bit skewed about the genre.  The need to parade unpleasant violence and nudity in place of story and character makes me feel a lot of horror film makers miss the point of the genre.  Like most genres it's about showing us fundamental truths about humanity, yeah that sounds fucking pretentious, but it doesn't make it any less true, but a lot of directors seem to think it's an excuse to show off boobs and wave a dripping pancreas in our faces while screaming, "Ha ha ha ha!  Isn't this fucking awesome!"

Rob Zombie probably isn't beyond redemption as a film maker.  There were a few points in The Devil's Rejects, actually some of the best scenes, where he showed a keen sense of comic timing.  Perhaps ditching horror and making a foray into comedy might work out better.

^* Okay, not everything.  Some things.  In case you hadn't noticed I'm not the most open-minded person.  I'm not the most closed-minded, either.  Receptive to some things more than others.  Like A REAL HUMAN BEING!  Gasp.

^** And don't forget that little smattering of misogyny, that shit gets everywhere and leaves a funky smell.

^† I even got to see White Zombie the one time they toured in the UK.  Throwing that out there for no particular reason.



Will

Swirly-whirly.

Oh shit, look out.  They're moving around – reshuffling as they like to call it.  Another chapter in the current cycle of Torygeddon started up again this week with MPs coming back from the summer recess and David Cameron shouting, "Change places!" showing, again that his medication isn't at all up to snuff.

The reshuffle itself is pretty much inconsequential, we've still got the same collection of dead-eyed mutant entitled arse shavings that we had before MPs were moved into different seats.  Yes, some of the people put in place will allow the PM to do what he wants that little bit more easily.  Like, for example, strapping on his Edward Scissorhands gloves and flailing at the NHS and the welfare state, because poor people shouldn't be allowed the security and health that he's never had to worry about.  The two institutions are, in England at least^*, already bloody and torn messes.  That's okay because, idealogue ole Davey-wavey-scumbag doesn't see anything wrong with damaging the people who actually do the grunt work in the country.

Gideon Osborne still resides on his throne as Chancellor of the Exchequer, replete with giant butt plug, sans lube, to make sure he maintains the look of a man who's thirty seconds away from shitting himself with glee or dismissing peasants to go and work in the mines.  He doesn't care what mines, any mines, arsenic mines that have been closed for decades, just as long as their in mines, that's where the poor (read non-millionaires) belong.

It amused me to hear about Osborne being booed at the Paralympics the other day.  Look at that gommy motherfucker, he doesn't even have the decency to look ashamed of himself for the mess he and the rest of the government have left people with disabilities in.  The man's clearly had some kind of shame bypass, which isn't a huge shock, how else can you account for him going out of the house with a face like that for all these years.

Cameron's not even pretending the Lib Dems have got any kind of sway any more.  He's just moved more Tory ghouls from one place to another.  Lots of nasty pieces of work like Jeremy Hunt as health secretary, who was under investigation for his handling of News Corp's dodgy bid to buy BSkyB and is known to be against the NHS, stem cell research and anti-abortion.  Wonder what he'll be doing then.  Whatever it is, I bet it won't involve any lube and will end up with lots of people with worse or no health care.

Then there's this cunt, Chris Grayling who cheated the system for £127,000 of expenses and has now been put in charge of the Department of Work and Pensions.  Just the person to look after the benefits of the most vulnerable in our society.  Let me reiterate that for those who nodded off: another very rich man who will happily fuck the system to get even more money and will shit on people will virtually nothing, from a great height.  I think that sums it up nicely.

And let's not forget the nice, tolerant Maria Miller, who's been made minister of equality.  A woman who's so into her equality that she's voted against gay rights issues on numerous occasions.  She's minister for EQUALITY.  Do we see a problem here?  David Cameron clearly doesn't as he's happy to have this intolerant dolt in the position.  He might as well just set the Catholic church up in an equality council.

That's only a small selection of the horrible bastards the Prime Minister has put in place to screw the country over that little bit more.  And old Nick Clegg and the rest of his party look on with happy grins, letting all this happen.  Thanks, Nick you spineless scrap of junk sperm.

So here we are, in the early part of the twenty-first century, governed by a regressive bunch of over privileged shits^** pulling bits from the country's infrastructure like the highest-stakes game of Jenga in the world.  Fucking cunts.

^* I will reiterate that I'm Scottish, but it doesn't mean I'm happy about this shit going down.

^** Or partially in my case.  Scotland's devolved government gives us a buffer against the fuckers.


Will

Riffling some brain folds.

On the off chance it's escaped your attention, I like films.  I like all kinds of films. Horror, action, comedy, fantasy, thrillers, dramas and on rare instances even a western. I have a curious relationship with the film Ferris Bueller's Day Off.  Yes, that's a brave statement to make, I know, I'm a hero.  You can sit down from your ovation now and let me speak so that you, too, may understand.

I'm also going to nonchalantly spoil the film here.  In further addition I'm going to repeat some things that dozens of other people have gone over in the past, live with this, get through; I think you'll find it's worth it.  If not the doors over there, you whiny cunt.

When I first saw the film, in my mid-teens, I thought it was a fantastic film about a teenager bucking the system and skipping school with his friends to live large in Chicago for one day.  The ease with which he outsmarted anyone who dared get in his way (this wording is important) I found comedically and narratively satisfying.  When it seems he's about to get busted by his jealous, uptight sister that satisfaction when she softens and realises he's not quite so bad after all (you, know after she hooked up with a grotty-looking drug dealer^* in a police station) is a moment of dramatic tension that settles you in for the climax.  I enjoyed the film, is what I'm getting at.

Now, fast forward the better part of twenty years.  There I am, sitting in front of the television looking for something to watch and I stumble on the film in question.  Now everything that I loved from my adolescent viewings is still there: the teen rebellion, the hapless determination of the teacher, the parking attendants fucking the trio over, the faint hope that one of Sloane's boobs will pop out in that hot tub bit. However something else started to edge its way into my adult brain, something that set the hackles of my grown up sensibilities quivering.  I was still enjoying this film, but I couldn't shake the feeling of nebulous outrage that took me until the end of the film to pin down.

Ferris Bueller is a horribly entitled and over-privileged shitweed!  The revelation was like being slapped in the face with the week old corpse of a dog.  Almost everything he does in the film is hideously reprehensible in some way.  The way he emotionally blackmails his best friend into going with him.  Hacking the school's computer.  He commits several kinds of fraud^** including impersonating a police officer.  Grand larceny and makes Sloane and poor, poor Cameron accessories.  And he does it all with a cocksure smile on his face that says, "Yeah, man, I should be allowed to do this.  Why should the law apply to me, I'm fucking awesome!" and lo, he gets away with every criminal act and every instance of horrendous psychological torture he inflicts on Cameron^†.

My sense of outrage was only stoked further when I realised I still liked the fucking film!  How can this be?  My new viewing revealed to me that Ferris Bueller was a reprehensible slime ball who would happily destroy the lives of people around him as long as he got a laugh out of it.  He's an avatar of the '80s yuppie culture and everything I hate about the modern world.  I put it down to the charming storytelling of John Hughes (RIP) and the supporting cast of flawed and likeable characters.  You know, with the obvious exception of Ferris Bueller and the need to tell us everyone likes him when there's really nothing redeeming about him.

As an aside, I was witness to one of the worst Freddie Mercury impersonators (or impersonator of any kind) ever this weekend.  It got me wondering if the guy was taking some kind of bizarre revenge out on the late singer because of some kind of trauma.  For some reason it got me thinking about this next bit.

In case no one's noticed, I consider myself something of a writer, these rambling, incoherent blog blabbings notwithstanding.  I started thinking about Ferris Bueller's Day Off and what could be done with a sequel.  I'd had the same thoughts for another John Hughes classic: Weird Science^‡.  I've even gone in a similar direction.

For this little bit of speculation, we begin with Ferris Bueller, twenty-six years later.  He's been to college, got a degree and gone into the same line of work as his father (whatever that was – vague business man?), got married to Sloane, had a couple of kids, got divorced from Sloane and is now living with his girlfriend who is still in college and looks almost identical to Sloane.  He's got a good life.

One day he comes back from work to find his teenage son waiting for him in the flat.  Ferris's son, let's call him Tom after Ferris's father, is a lot like Ferris, in that he's confident, successful and has wanted for nothing in life.  Ferris knows something's up and his suspicion is horribly realised when he finds the raped and strangled corpse of his wife on the floor.  Tom says she reminded him of his mother.

Ferris begins to help his son dispose of the body, but as he goes about this he learns more and more about his son's secret life of sneaking around without Sloane's knowledge and murdering hobos, as well as possibly Ferris's parents and dealing drugs.  Ferris realises Tom's even more of a sociopath than he ever was and has to make the decision whether to put an end to Tom's murderous ways or cover up for his son. Then he realises he'll go to jail too and decides to cover up the murder and help young Tom in the future.  Cos he'll be fucked if he goes down for someone else's murder.

There you have it a Ferris Bueller sequel fitting for the character.  I didn't say it was going to be comedy, did I?

^* Bonus!  Played by Charlie Sheen!

^** Admittedly one of the instances of fraud is down to the mass gullibility of his school-age contemporaries in what must have been the worst school of all time, but it still all stems from him being a dicky wad of manipulative shit.

^† I can't really count poor Sloane, because, while she shows every sign that she should be very intelligent, for most of the film she wanders around with an empty-eyed grin, passively going along with whatever Ferris suggests.

^‡ This one actually stands up to my recent viewings, probably because it's fucking bonkers and the Ferris Bueller-type characters are the utter bastards they should be.


Will

Gaaaaasssssp!

And finally I re-emerge.  Criminy, that was some hard writing.  I've been crowing about this a bit elsewhere, but once more isn't going to hurt anyone:

250,000 words, motherfuckers!  Ha!

I don't even know who that's aimed at.  Maybe at the last person, other than me, who looks at this blog.^*

The novel version of Crown Wearer has had a long, tough journey.  It took me forever to get up off my arse to start the thing in the first place and then another aeon passed before I got organised enough to make a proper go of it.  And that only happened once I stopped being intimidated by the length I initially thought it was going to be – a length it exceeded by about 70,000 words.

Now, to some people, all this talk of word counts is meaningless.  I sympathise with you, I really do.  Actually, I envy you.  Not knowing the significance of word count would make my life a whole lot easier as a writer.  I imagine being able to sit down at the computer, grinning from ear to ear, with my mug with the rainbow on the side, filled with more rainbows and clack out a couple of thousand words, no worries.  There are some days like that, y'know, without that weird rainbow business, but a lot of days are wrangling and subduing words that end up not being right anyway.  And, yes, that does involve a lot of staring off into the middle distance, it's an intellectual pursuit.^**

So now I'm left with this manuscript, damp from brain juice and imagination placenta.  What am I going to do with it?  Who could possibly want this smelly, sticky brick of a manuscript from a writer who's never had a book published outside of a couple of disastrous Lulu attempts?  Not my priority at the moment, is the answer (I bet you thought I was going to go on a rant, faithless bastards).  For now what I'm going to do is follow the advice of every writer out there and leave it the fuck alone.  That's right, it's going to sit on my various storage devices for a couple of months while I do other things and get a little distance between myself and it.

Unlike a good cheese, when I cut through the rind of the novel I won't be rewarded with the sweet nutty taste of aged milk, I'll be confronted by the horror of what I've actually written.  Something riddled with spelling and grammar errors.  Something that doesn't make a lick of sense because of a network of glaringly embarrassing plot holes.  Hey, look at that, another cheese analogy.^†


And I'll be lost again.  Knee deep in the toxic porridge I've crusted the page with in hopes that some kind person will take pity on this mangled wretch and publish this monster of a book^‡


For now, I'm back, ready to spew my neurotic semi-psychotic ramblings at your brain craters.  We're going to have fun, dammit!


^* The person who came back and thought this time it would be different.  Sucker.


^** Only geniuses and idiots claim they can bang out stories without thinking about it.  If anyone you know says this and unless you know for certain otherwise slap that fucking idiot.


^† I really want some Norwegian brown cheese.  The stuff sounds amazing.


^‡ It's only a partial monster.  My research tells me it's at the lower end in length of one of George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire books.  And less than half the length of things like War and Peace, The Stand and Atlas Shrugged, so there you go.




Will

There's actual sunlight?

My, but I like my films.  I enjoy sitting and letting myself be taken away by a story.  Or failing that, I enjoy mocking the cack-fisted attempts at story thrown together, recorded and called a film.

In the last month or so I've been watching a lot of films.  I've gone through more new (for me) films in the last few weeks than I've seen in the previous two years.  It's left my head crammed with all sorts of silliness, so I thought I'd spray you with some nonsense about my film-viewing.

You won't be surprised to learn that a lot of this will be negative, with Viewing Joe that I am pointing and laughing at the pitiful abortions plastered on the screen in hopes of eking money from me.  And they might want to entertain, too, but it's harder to prove that.

Micmacs is a prime example of a jolly good film.  It has 'we are crazy French film makers' plastered all over it, but that's fine, because it's charming and you actually like this odd collection of characters and you can't help but applaud what they're doing.

Not something that can be said for Dread.  I should have been on my guard the moment one of the half dozen or so producers was Clive Barker.  Pushing aside my misgivings I watched and an age passed, humanity went extinct around me and a new civilisation of floating amphibious celeriac came to power.  Then I look at the time: I'd been sitting for ten minutes.  Arrrgh!  What the fuck, man?  Did you people set out to make the most boring, boneheaded film ever?  You probably failed, but you weren't that far off.  You didn't add any interest by tagging on a torture porn third act.  Dead-eyed, humourless and boring are not how horror films should be.  That's something you should've learned in primary school.

At least Rec. and Rec. 2 had a bit of life about them.  They were still bunk, but they managed to make the 'found footage' film interesting to me.  No mean feat after seeing the snooze-and-whine-fest The Blair Witch Project in the cinema (although, in fairness, it's a better experience on television, just).  The films start off silly and just keep getting dafter as they go on.  But they pull the case zero apocalypse thing that I find overdone and dull too.

Still, better than Scott Pilgrim vs. the World.  A whinging, creepy main character surrounded by annoying caricatures isn't an inviting premise.  The saving grace of this film are the fight scenes, but you have to wade through dreary navel-gazing scenes of unfunny dialogue to get to them.  If I wanted to do that I'd watch The Ultimate Fighter on TV.  I wouldn't be quite so annoyed by this if there hadn't been months a couple of years ago of people dribbling about how fucking awesome it was.  You were wrong, you bastards.

The same applies to Super 8.  This is another film that commits the supreme sin of being fucking tedious.  I had the curious feeling when it was being advertised with the desperation of a failed writer trying to get you to buy his wares (what the fuck are you looking at, shit clomp, go about your business).  And yes. it was terrible, stupid and dull, just like a Tory MP.  The best part of it was the intentionally shit film they showed over the credits.

Weeks before I sat down to churn my way through Super 8 I'd decided to give Salt a go.  I was presented with the world's longest pilot for an '80s television pilot, right down to setting up a baddie of the week structure.  Clearly this was both fantastic and horrifying to watch in equal measure.

I've watched a lot more than that, but I'm not Rotten fucking Tomatoes, you want recommendations, go there.you bastards, stop expecting me to do WORK!


Will

Fans don't care about ticket prices.

Do any of you remember the days when going to a concert was affordable, even cheap?  You could go into a shop and pay six or eight quid to go see a band you liked.  Some bigger bands, playing bigger venues, would ask for twenty, maybe thirty quid.

(For the real crusties out there, I'm sure you could get a ticket for ha' penny and a bacon sandwich in your day; it all ties in with what I'm saying, really.)

Today, in my meanderings through my usual internet haunts I came across the news that Motörhead are touring and will be hitting the O2 Academy in Glasgow later this year.  Having seen something of a trend in recent years, I decided, perhaps counter to my heart health to take wee look at the prices for the gig.  Now, the O2 Academy is a middle-sized venue, which for better or worse will always inform my view of the ticket prices.  Once I'd followed the links from the official site and got nowhere, I found somewhere that gave them.  When these tickets go on sale in the next couple of days they'll be looking for a whopping thirty-one quid.  Twenty-seven pounds plus a four quid booking fee, the rise of booking fees has been a point of contention for me for a long time too.

What the cunting fuck?

That's a disgusting price for a gig in a medium-sized venue.  And, as I feared it tied in with other gig pricings.  Chris Cornell playing the same venue are a staggering forty-odd quid!  What's he going to do?  Paint the stage in twenty-four carat gold and sit in a paddling pool of caviare?  If I paid that I'd expect at least to have a butler waiting on me all night.

I won't even go into the price tag Iron Maiden tickets had, it just makes me angry, after Bruce Dickinson's protestations that the band just want people to have an affordable good time.  A bit difficult when fans are being charged fifty quid a ticket in this economic climate (yes, I said it, I'm adult, no need to be embarrassed).

The thing is, I'm not sure who to blame for the price-setting.  How much control do the bands have?  How much is driven by the venues themselves?  There's no question that anyone who can ask for that kind of money with a straight face is a cunt.  It's just too murky to point the finger at any one entity (I did it with the Iron Maiden thing, out of anger and frustration).  I know that everyone's been hit by the economic downturn, but if you're that desperate to tour you might consider being a bit more conservative with your pricing.

One thing we should be doing is maybe telling them to fuck off.  That's right, a wholesome boycott.  Don't go to gigs by big bands and back it up with an email or (gasp!) snail-mail campaign.  They'll get the message and you'll see the prices drop.

But then that hits the wall when you come to fans.  Fans of things are great, the more fans of something there are, the longer it (whatever you want to replace 'it' with) hangs around (or it might end up horrible, depending on what the 'it' is).  The downside is that fans are often uncritical of those things that they like, so you end up in a situation where a band charges fifty or sixty quid and the tickets vanish like vapour in a few minutes.  And then these same fans will smugly say when you offer your legitimate concerns over pricing, "You're not a real fan, are you?"

To which I have to answer 'no'.  I've discovered that I'm not a real fan of anything.  I can't deal with things uncritically any more.  From comics, to books, to music, to films.  I look at things and weigh them up.  Of course I want to enjoy things, but I'm not going to ignore dreadful things or things just not to my taste.  I love the writing of Alan Moore, but I'm just not interested in 'Promethea' and found 'America's Best Comics' patchy.  I think Iron Maiden are a fantastic band, but I still can't listen to most of 'Piece of Mind'.  So any attempt to gouge money is going to be met with a very stern expression.

There's my little call for activism, I'll be over here, trying to be invisible.


Will

Flicky-clicky! The Art of Intolerance.

The last couple of posts have been very writer-centric. I may have already alienated folks. Now I reckon I'll alienate a couple more. Now, how can I do that?

Television!

It's a love/hate relationship I've had since I was young.  Like most people of my generation, I suppose, but being the introverted antisocial troll that I was, I took it a bit further.  I won't go into just how insular I was, you might cry and I don't want anyone getting their keyboard all soggy on my account.

As I've got older though, I haven't watched quite as much television.  Other diversions have vied for my attention: computer games, writing, reading, going out to (hey look at that, finally!) socialise and, of course, women.  But I always go back, quite often to disappointment and repeats.

My current deep disappointment is aimed at programmes like Jersey Shore and The Only Way is Essex.  These are programmes that I'm put off of the moment I see trailers for them, as they look like the most vapidly lazy programming.  They all centre around the worst that humanity has to offer, which wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for the feeling that the characters (because let's all be honest here, that's what they are, there aren't any real people, just actors looking for an easy break) are being held up as role models.  Now, I can't say for certain (and I'm not some big city lawyer), but I'm sure that the original intent was to mock these orange caricatures.  Instead what we have is a world in which Snooki (urg, can't people see the producers are taking the piss?) has a lucrative book deal.  Yes, a woman who is supposed to look and act like she has trouble reciting the alphabet has a book deal, and I can't get la- er, published*.

Yeah.  It annoys me.  They clog up the airwaves with as much mediocrity as soap operas.  We all know the reason for it, smart arse.  I know why I don't like having my toe crushed by a mallet, doesn't change my opinion on it.

Another kind of 'reality' television that I have less intolerance for are cookery programmes (take a look at this for more on my cookery programme fascination).  I can hear you smirking, fucko.  Nothing wrong with enjoying cooking and eating.  It's life enriching.  You should think about that the next time you're choking down a sausage supper with enough cholesterol to clog the London Underground Central Line.

But, in this, dear reader I have my prejudices.  Let us take the sainted (or at least ordained) Nigella Lawson.  I used to quite like Nigella as a programme host, outside of the weird, fetishy sexualisation (and that her father is a Tory and she followed suit, boo!  Hiss!) of food she seemed quite personable.  Then I started noticing something, something that made me blink in slight confusion and now it makes me want to attack the TV with a fucking tenderising mallet: snobbishness.  There's always room for a bit of snobbishness in life, but not if it's presented as THE ONE TRUE PATH.  Ingredients that seem innocuous to the layman become a benighted spectre to Nigella Lawson.  Use the wrong (read: least expensive) kind of capers and pal you better have a good fuckin' excuse.  It's infuriating and quite often it's utterly arbitrary.  Use what you can use and fuck what some rich woman on the TV says.

Speaking of crazy women cooks.  My wife and I have been watching the The Little Paris Kitchen which involves woman-child eternastudent Rachel Khoo proving that she's almost mental enough to start throwing buckets of molten butter over her balcony onto any heathen who deviates a tenth of an iota from TRUE FRENCH PATISSERIE.  Seriously, this woman is bonkers.  She lives in a Paris flat that's barely large enough for an adult and runs a restaurant from her optimistically named front room.  A lot of her cooking looks rather nice, but her style gives an over-romanticised view of France and Paris in particular that doesn't quite match up to the living quarters she has.  Perhaps she's deluded or perhaps she really is happy there; all I know is I'd be gnawing my arms off because of the claustrophobia.

Or maybe I'm deluded and should step away from the remote, verrry slowly...

^*(Yes, yes, I understand that there's a demand for it.  I'm not ignorant of these things.  I'm still allowed to rail and have the opinion that it's peddling mediocrity and general human shittiness.)


Will

Hellooooo, Mister Whitescreen!

It's a common complaint amongst writers about that moment when they sit in front of the computer (or if you're archaic or doing some weird back-to-basics exercise, in front of the typewriter*) and they're faced with the blank white screen (or page, to the troglodytes).

They talk in hushed whispers, from behind the pint they're nursing, about the way it just stares at them, taunting them, sapping the very marrow from their souls.  They feel terror and apprehension as they try to urge words onto the glaring whiteness before them.  It breaks them, just this part of the process, you can see the hollowness in the eyes where a bright intelligence used to be.  Even when they manage to splatter their creative cum onto the screen (page, goddamn Luddite) some fundamental part of them lies in bloody tatters around their feet, whimpering its last pitiful breath.

And it shouldn't need to be this way.  For all that every writer's process is different to one degree or another, this grisly, demeaning part of writing shouldn't even feature.  You should look at that screen and shake its shake its fuckin' hand and say, "Hey, man!  Nice to meet you, we're going to do cool shit together, you and I, so lets get down to it." And you whack a word on that damn whiteness; could be anything, could be what you had for breakfast or how hard you want to punch a member of your most hated political party, hell you might even want to go out on a crazy limb and write the first word of the story or novel or script you're planning to do.

Writing has enough hardships as it is (and yes it has some astoundingly easy things, but that's not what we're discussing here, concentrate) without adding the prospect of the opening salvo of sticky, sticky creative goo to the list.  That right there, in case you missed my subtle suggestions, should be one of a series of wonderful orgasmic releases, and not the shameful ham shank while no one's looking.  Remember, this is likely to be a first draft, you can always go back and change it – no biggie, it's part of the writing process.

For me, starting isn't a problem, my greatest bugbear is word count: am I doing enough?  Am I just vomiting description onto the page just to change another digit in the thousands column?  Should I just hit delete and consign the whole mess to the thing to the attic of my mind where it will be fed nothing but cat litter and Rizlas?  At the moment this is hitting me harder than ever; I'm in the middle of a book that, by my calculations is going to be – forgive the technical term – fucking huge and those are just the worries that plague me every time I open up the file to add more of my mad or mediocre ravings.  That's perhaps a discussion for another day.

^* I don't get the freakish romanticism associated with typewriters, particularly the monstrosities people like Hunter S Thompson did his work on.  These aren't mystical machines that will help you channel the ghosts of literary greats past, all they'll do is channel your inner pretentious twat.  I used a type writer once, in the misty past, it was an electronic thing and I can tell you this, since using a word processor, it adds more complexity and frustration to the process than is needed.  So fuck that jive, man.


Will

A Hinter Tale.

Come, take a walk with me.

I don’t do a great deal of wandering around the internet, I’ve got a few places that I frequent a lot – a forum here, a Twitter there, some news sites, social networking stuff, a very few blogs that I don’t read often enough and a clutch of amusing webcomics. I’ve been doing the same thing pretty much for the past four years or so with a few modifications. If my habits were equivalent to walking through snow, my foot prints would be deep enough to do open cast mining.

Not to say that I delve that deeply (I’ve yet to tunnel down into the Deep Web, a term that I was only introduced to recently) nor am I limited to what I view by my habitual site visits; I’ll follow links to places that may grab my interest.

I know there is a lot of odd stuff out there. People seem to often use the internet as a place to offload their madness. The reasoning being that, as far as I’m aware, they can dump the simmering sludge of barmy into the electronic byways to allow them to function in a better way with other human beings. I don’t know how well this works as I’ve had some experience with crazies who just seem to dig further and further into their demented worlds.

Or there’s the even less pleasant side where people get to be utterly shit to one another in a way that would get them punched in the face if they did it in a pub. People see it as carte blanche to be unremittingly horrible to one another because they are doing it to a computer screen and not using their real name. That’s the nature of free speech, but I’m surprised that there haven’t been more cases of someone being tracked down and getting the snot kicked out of them for saying someone’s spouse looks like a donkey with Down’s Syndrome.

There’s definitely a lot of entertaining stuff out there that celebrates the best humanity has to offer, but it’s never going outweigh the inane, depressing and boring or simply unsettling content that you lock your peepers and your poor beleaguered web browser on. In times past I’ve bemoaned my lack of web exploration, feeling that there’s a lot to see out there, but I’m not putting the effort into finding it. I’d like to be one of those people who clicks away stumbling across curious bits of the internet, but I’ve never found myself having the time or inclination. Where would I start? I have a hard enough time working out what I’m going to have for dinner each day and my mind doesn’t work like a random subject generator.

Hmm, maybe that’s why I’m such a shit conversationalist. Something worth thinking about in the future, that.

I, like a lot of people out there have had mixed fortunes when it comes to the phenomenon of the forum. These are the venues in which the free flow of ideas and the art of conversation can be practiced. More often than not, though they are playground in which people shout, “You’re wrong and you’re a dick!” and, “No! You’re wrong and you’re a dick!”

There are a lot of things that bemuse and frustrate me on such forums, like the habit on some where people say something quite insightful and clever only to be ignored, and then have someone down the thread say the same thing and be called a genius. Something of a pet hate that one. And of course there’s what I mentioned earlier about people using it as their abuse shield – “I get to call you a fuckwit with suppurating genital warts all around your anus and you can’t do shit! Ha ha!”

Of course this all depends on how well the board is monitored for this kind of thing. Some forums are rigorous about having people act as though they have a higher emotional age than three and they prosper because of it. Although I’ve seen a fair few that prosper because (I’d love to say in spite of, but I’d be lying) of this kind of school yard behaviour. Those aren’t the kind of places I’m going to hang around in for very long, I stopped finding playground banter entertaining when I was fourteen or fifteen and seeing it perpetuated by people my age and older is sad and boring. There would be some people less robust than I who might find this kind of thing intimidating.

I’ve been on some forums, small and large, that have been friendly and well-run where there’s a limited amount of animosity and quite a bit of interesting conversation. Those are ones that I tend to orbit a lot and they enrich my internet experience no end.

I’m not going to list them all because you might turn and fucking spoil them but this place, White Chapel is a pretty good place to hang around if you want adults to be adults. Mostly it’s because they are under constant threat of being crushed by the admins if they act like idiots, but mostly it’s because they are a decent bunch of people.

There’s no way I could talk about forums and message boards without mentioning the very odd and specialised breed that are the news site message boards.

News corporations, particularly the papers, have had a tough time of it since the internet grew into the all-encompassing tentacle monster that it has. They have all had to up their game and adapt to a medium that they can pin down and control about as well as they could an ocean. The internet comes from so many different directions and sources that to control it would take an insane amount of work – not that that stops anyone from trying.

In their wild efforts to add more content and interest to their sites many papers have a comments section below articles and stories. And just like any other forum they have their moments of inanity and times of brilliance.

Weirdly though, both of these things are generally blotted out by insane extremists. People who seem to scour the internet to look for these very comments pages to fill up with their hate-filled and often uninformed views.

The most obvious example of this is the BBC News website’s Have Your Say section.

Because, for the BBC, being able to comment on every story would be tantamount to heresy, they pick a few stories, seemingly at random or picked by an autistic rhesus monkey, and throw them out to the public like bread crumbs to pigeons.

And no matter what the story - doesn’t matter if it’s the most inoffensive fluff piece in the world - you’re always guaranteed to have someone going and saying that those on unemployment benefits are to blame. Even if there’s a picture of fluffy ginger kitten, you’ll get one comment in capitals thus (spelling and grammatical errors for effect): “ITS A DISGRASE! THESE DOLE SCROUNGERS LIVING OF MY TAXES SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF THEMSELFS FOR THIS.”

It’s amazing that so many people are so offended by people out of work getting money to help them out that they feel the need to tell the world at every opportunity they get. It must be awful to feel so aggrieved at having to help people in between jobs, do they get annoyed about millions sunk into bad government investments or given to hospital administrators when the medical staff are so low paid?

But then, this is the internet after all and trying to apply rational thought just falls down in the face of all the concentrated insanity that free floats from one place to another. Maybe I should just start wearing wooden clothes and call myself Beverage Carrier Bag XVII, I might just start to look normal…


Will

The record skips and goes to the start of another song.

It’s the same dreary song we’ve heard over again from the same album. All the songs sound pretty much the same; artistic integrity isn’t the point of the exercise. We all roll our eyes, sigh, grumble, shake our heads and mutter, but we get up all the same and dance along with the dreary tune because we don’t seem to have much choice in the matter. After all we don’t want people staring at us for sitting there with our arms crossed over our chests because we’re not doing what everyone else is when we neither want nor need to do it. That’s just crazy.

So, over two thirds of the way through January and we’re being thrust headlong into another round of ‘Terrorismania!’. Note the exclamation point. The exclamation point is important. The exclamation point will dance with your mother. The exclamation point will tell you things about what happened that summer in Greece. The exclamation point will stand on the twelve kittens. The exclamation point has Import.

You can call it Terrorismania! or you can call it Threat Level: Severe. It’s really all down to personal taste. One sounds like a musical in the style of ‘Jerry Springer: The Opera’ or ‘Springtime for Hitler’ and is probably more apt, while the other sounds like a straight to video action film starring Wesley Snipes, Dolph Lundgren or Steven Seagal, a film that would be really quite good if it were written with any skill or panache, but just comes off as a bunch of pyros going off with people swearing in between – or in the case of Threat Level: Severe standing around waiting for the pyros to go off and not even having the energy to swear anymore until it peters out.

The UK terrorism threat level has been raised from ‘substantial’ to ‘severe’. Feel the tension in the air here, people. Or don’t. This American-style scale of, ‘are we going to die in droves today’ seems to hover always around the vague bits. It could happen, but then again it might not. This upping of the heat doesn’t seem to mean anything practical for the day-to-day running of the country.

It’s all a little bit Mystic Meg really. Cold reading the country. There could be terrorists plotting something heinous, somewhere in the world right now and they’re probably right, but in general the people planning them are a combination of mad and incompetent, and we don’t ever see them. Unless they decide to become politicians in which case their careers sky rocket.

Now the general theory – denied by MI6, but used by the media and politicians – is that this is in response to the lone clod who failed to blow himself and a planeload of other travellers up in Detroit on Christmas last year (2009 for you future people).

Wait a second. Because a man who seems to have acted alone didn’t manage to do anything beyond scare the shit out of a plane load of people, the UK is expecting some kind of terrorist attack. There’s an interesting jump of logic. It’s almost like saying that nasty dog down the road bit Mister Robertson, all the dogs in the world must be preparing to overthrow mankind!

Never mind that a renegade group of the IRA have been twitching for the last few months, a man with incendiary underpants didn’t do anything was caught on a plane, we must do something! Let’s see, we’ll do a few token things and try to push through a full-body x-ray machine that wouldn’t have detected anything the Nigerian guy was carrying, but will have the benefit of humiliating anyone wanting to travel out of the country!

I am not reassured. I don’t think many people are. I (along with most of the country again) am not that intimidated either.

If it’s going to be Threat Level: Severe I at least want to wake up in the morning with a man (for some reason with a French accent, I don’t know why, I have no reason to believe that the French, Canadians or Belgians are particularly nasty people) sitting next to my bed pointing a gun at my head saying, “Tomorrow it could be you,” before holstering his weapon and walking out of the room. That would be a severe threat level that’s guaranteed to get my attention. Call it Threat Level: Imminent Death or don’t bother with it at all.

The Detroit thing reminds me of the attempted ‘bombing’ of Glasgow Airport a couple of years ago. Another bungled attack that did nothing more than show that the medical students involved were retarded and best off out of the medical profession and made a ned a celebrity for kicking a man who was on fire. It was inspiring, it really was. Apart from the fact that all that would have happened in the worst case scenario would have been a bit of property damage and the two men would have been, at the most, wounded – you see they were clever (in a vicious way) in wrapping the propane canisters up with ball bearings, but they didn’t realise that those tanks are designed to resist high temperatures and when they do explode they tear instead of shattering. Idiots.

What we got then was Gordon Brown (all nice and shiny from the recent hand-over of power) telling us to be more vigilant, essentially that there was a terrorist on every street corner waiting to blow up. A smart move by someone in power.

So in a time of economic uncertainty and political upheaval, the people in charge of the country have decided, in their infinite wisdom to concentrate on attempting to wind the populace up and be the heroes of the hour by shuffling papers and throwing some new terms at us. Oo, I feel about as protected as a cocktail sausage at a Tory Party Conference.

We’d be much happier if you just did your job and helped people back into work and into some kind of comfort.

So let’s get ready to put the record on the turntable one more time; I feel like a bit of a boogie.


Will

The Tower Shakes, But Doesn't Fall.

I have a hard time dealing with politics. It’s full of politicians for a start – an old chestnut that, but it wouldn’t be trotted out so much if it didn’t continue to be true on a year-on-year basis. It should be something more interesting, but all the really dramatic stuff that happens is lost in a fog of dull maintenance type debate and insipid protocol. It’s kind of like watching Formula 1 except more repetitive.

Heaven knows that I’ve tried to sit through even a few minutes of overfed men – and a few frightening-looking women – get up to do their little spiel about how the parking policy in their constituency’s hospital needs an overhaul or some such. I’m sure it’s very important to the democratic process and to the people that it affects, but it makes watching televised coverage of the House of Commons a major slog.

Who knows, maybe that’s been the point all along, to stop plebs like myself – brought up on half-hour chunks of television that moves along at brisk pace – from paying that much attention to what goes on there. Maybe before they televised the Commons the MPs stripped to the waist and beat each other with sticks to determine who won a debate.

Oh, fuck. That just put the image of Margaret Thatcher stripped to the waist into my head. I will now inflict it on you, good reader; I’ll be damned if I’m going to suffer that nightmare on my own. You too can wake up in a cold sweat, roused from your sleep by the thought of that evil old crone’s (because, let’s be honest, in the eighties she was still ancient, that kind of evil’s born that way) sagging body and the shrivelled dugs that passed for breasts on her bony chest, pale and blue veined as a wheel of stilton.

It’s good to share.

Anyway, I find it very hard to follow all the meta language that goes on within politics. In general a few moments of thought and I’ll know what they are babbling about and trying to evade, but I’m lazy and have other things I want to do than give too much brain-thinky time to how our government wants to screw us over this time.

(It leaves me with something of a grudging admiration for political correspondents who wade through all this political verbal diarrhoea. It’s how the bastards interpret what they’ve sifted that gets under my skin, but more on that later.)

My general difficulty following and getting intellectually involved in political debate, and the whole antipathy towards the breed known as Politician meant that I almost missed the nugget of decency from the Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg that turned up earlier in the week.

Still very much in the shadow of the banks’ failure we’re seeing a bit of political upheaval in this country, after the US managed to shuck of a hideously corrupt regime, we’re going to get the opportunity to do the same; only we’ll just let another corrupt lot in right away. As I’ve said before there are more than two parties in this country, but there might as well only be two most of the time the way people vote. Except for the poor (as in actually impoverished and desperate) people who went mad and voted the unashamedly bigoted in so many ways BNP into a local government in England. It was scary, but I have a horrible feeling that as disgusting as the BNP are to the people of this constituency they may have been the most trustworthy of the lot.

Doesn’t say a lot for the democratic process though: if you feel so let down by a mainstream party, why don’t you vote for a party that has extreme views, that’ll show ‘em. Not the smartest move, I have to say, but it did seem to send a message.

It seems though, that Nick Clegg wants to make some major political changes, even going so far as reshaping Whitehall. Yes, Mister Clegg wants to shake up the whole British political map. He’s even gone so far as to get rid of a good chunk of his party’s pledges because they aren’t realistic in the current economic climate. Big words from the perennial also-rans.

But why should they always be consigned to third or even fourth place? If Nick Clegg were to even keep half of these promises it would mean the country would be a better place in which to live. It would make a great change from the continued bullshit of politicians telling the public, “You’ll have to put up with living in financial uncertainty for a few years more, but don’t worry all the people who caused this will stay rich and so will we. Aren’t you happy for us? Don’t you think we’re doing a stand-up job?”

I’ve intimated in the past that the Lib Dems are a bit of a wishy-washy, airy-fairy party, but with this kind of bold statement, and let’s be clear here it’s an honest statement (something you won’t hear me saying often about a politician of any stripe), he’s admitted that the things that his party has been promising for years are out of bounds and then he’s offered an alternative. An actual, concrete alternative. You don’t get that with the Tories or Labour, from them you get spin and more evasion. Just what the electorate want, vague assurances from the two ‘main’ parties that something will be done…but you’ll have to wait to find out what once you elect them.

In any other arena this would be called blackmail, whereas here people just shrug and go, “It’s politics,” and then go and vote for who they’ve always voted for and probably who their parents and grandparents voted for before them. They have the same kind of disinterest in politics that I try to fight through, but they don’t have the interest or energy to do even that.

Then, of course, you have the pundits and correspondents who rifle through all of these political shenanigans and give their opinions on it. I won’t say that they are all the same, I’m sure there are those who give a balanced and fair appraisal of the political climate. I can’t say, because I don’t read enough of them.

However, I’d just like to turn your attention to the BBC and their lead political correspondent and blogger Nick Robinson. The first time I saw Nick Robinson on television, he struck me as a dry and even sarcastic political commentator – just the type of person that I’d like to see giving opinions on the political landscape. I mean, he’s even had a little snarky banter with George W Bush, what a guy!

Then I started reading what he was actually saying in his BBC blog. The breaking point for me came when he varnished over Nick Clegg’s statements to burble on about the Tories and, in particular, the Labour party. He does more spin doctoring than Alastair Campbell. He does a marvellous job of taking what the Labour party says, interpreting it in such a way that it sounds like something more palatable and totally different.

“The government today unveiled plans for mulching newborn babies and using them as fertiliser. Let’s go to Nick Robinson…”

“When the Gordon Brown says he wants to mulch newborns, what he is in essence saying is that more should be spent on Primary Schools.”

I’ve seen this kind of thing a lot on the BBC. We see a politician saying one thing in the Commons and we go to a studio where the presenters tell us a completely different story of what happened. I mean it’s well-known that Politics is full of double-dealing and linguistic jiggery pokery, but can the meanings be that different from what politicians say and what they mean?

We need a more even-handed way of having politics (and the news in general) presented to us. The BBC have bought into the glossy American style of reporting current events that values bias and big events over telling us what’s happened, although they’ve yet to reach the depths of vacuous hideousness that Sky News (the British arm of Fox News, really) has delved. If they pull back again, they’ll probably be fine.

And this brings me onto the insane and shadowy world of the public opinion parts of news sites, but that’s for another time.


Will

Oh, I can't be bothered changing the channel...

“On the first day of Christmas TV gave to me,
Hours of depressing soap operas!”

It’s the season to be merry, have fun, relax (kind of…well not really, but it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?), overeat, over drink and sit down to watch some bad television. Y’know, the stuff that the channels have been hooting and hollering about since the end of October.

Every year, for those of us who watch any television, we switch on the goggle box whenever we manage to roll out of bed and after we’ve unwrapped our presents and we hope beyond reasonable hope that this year it will be different. This year our expectations will be, if not met, at least given something to chew on.

We will look out on the Arctic nightmare the outside world has become, this year we’re looking at heavy snowfalls and sub zero temperatures, and feel cosy as we curl up in front of the television.

(The bookies must be shitting themselves this year. Hoping that we’ve had all the snow we’re going to get in 2009. Y’see, snow lying on the ground doesn’t make it an official White Christmas, snow falling does.)

We want to be enthralled, entertained, made happy that its Christmas and that we don’t need to interact with our relatives, alternatively grinning at us like they want eat some vital part of our anatomy or scowling at us like they want to eat some vital part of our anatomy. Yes, you’ve given us some lovely gifts and I’m most grateful, honestly, but right now could you stop staring at me like you’re one of the cast from ‘The Hills Have Eyes’ and let me inure myself to the season with something mindlessly amusing flickered into my brainstem.

Yes, we get the odd gem of good telly. Things like ‘Wallace and Gromit: A Matter of Loaf and Death’ and a good film from four years ago will be highlights, but they tend to be few and far between, stuck amongst things like the Queen’s Christmas Speech and any number of rank smelling dramas and television shows that wouldn’t be allowed on air at any other time.

I mean Noel Edmonds is a master of bringing us foetid television, the worst being (and I’m not the only person to note this and I may even have been pointed in the direction by Charlie Brooker, so what? This is the internet, I don’t no stinking original ideas!) ‘Noel’s HQ’ and ‘Noel’s Christmas Presents’. Horrific examples of celebrity guilt schmaltz that would make Frank Capra break out into hives.

Then you have the catering to the soap opera junkies. These poor, zombified souls have been steadily hooked more and more by these insidious dramas, going from being shown two or three nights a week to encroaching on every night. Now the vicarious living that’s offered by these programmes is ingrained in quite a portion of the UK population.

It probably wouldn’t be so bad if the portrayals of life in these fictional places was, y’know something akin to real life with ups and downs, but the wisdom of dramatic imperative for programmes like ‘Coronation Street’, ‘Emerdale’, ‘River City’ (which is only in Scotland, the rest of the UK can heave a sigh of relief about that) and the grand master of them all ‘Eastenders’ is that life for working class people is a never-ending slog from one kind of deep misery to another. The characters listlessly go through their joyless existences until they are swept off the mortal coil in some way so tragic that it stops you from wanting to get up in the morning. Unless a character comes into the show when they are older, they are unlikely to reach anything approaching old age – most of them are lucky if they make it out of their teens. And don’t even get me started on the miraculous metamorphoses that take place.

The grand high wizard of this crushing misery is ‘Eastenders’, a programme so morose that you’d be lucky to see an actor smile in a month, let alone an episode. These people live such uncertain, tragic and short lives that you wonder why anyone would want to live in Albert Square. Murder, rape, insanity, disease and disaster are staples of soap opera life, but only ‘Eastenders’ is innovative enough to pile it all onto the one character. Yes. Yes! They are visionaries in their desperation to keep the viewers coming to the show.

And the Christmas episodes are the jewel in the miserable crown of the ‘Eastenders’ year. A day when they have to double the depression. We are treated to an hour long episode filled with less Christmas cheer than in the city centre of Tehran.

Which brings the thought of what the writers would do if they could get away with it. I mean, they seem to be so keen to portray life with such grey joylessness, and bleak desolation, why not step it up, take it to the next level? I’ve been thinking about this and it wouldn’t be that hard. It would actually be cheaper than their normal offerings, whether they used special effects…or not.

It start like this: you open with the ‘Eastenders’ theme tune as normal, then you would have the characters all sitting in the Queen Vic. All of the tables and chairs have been removed so that everyone has to sit down. As you have come to expect, no one is smiling, but this time there is quite a concrete reason for this – they are all holding shotguns in their mouths.

Slowly the camera pans across their faces, the deadness created by their grinding lives shining there, perhaps a hint of pleading in the younger characters’ eyes. No one says a word, they just stare long and deep into the camera.

Then the person at the end of the line fires. And so it goes, they blow their brains, making a tune: ‘Jingle Bells’ in 12-gauge minor.

Once this spectacle ends the camera drifts across the bleeding, twitching corpses, showing us the growing pools and rivers of blood as they form on the wooden floor. In the background a baby cries and over the sound track plays Adagio for Strings. This continues for the rest of the hour-long running time, going into silence once the music stops, the only sound now the crying baby.

And now ‘My Family’.

Now, I know that this is what people want, but sometimes perhaps the channels might want to consider thinking a bit differently and have something fun, even funny for us to watch after gorging on our Christmas meal.

A nice dream.

And on that note I say Merry Christmas and, if I don’t feel another rant coming on beforehand, a very happy New Year!


Will