Blogcritics Author: Duke De Mondo

Travels In Scientology - Part Two

Duke De Mondo — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:52:24 EST

The conclusion of Aaron Fleming And Duke De Mondo's adventures with London's Scientologists.
(Part One)By Aaron Fleming & Duke De Mondo...

Music Review: Jello Biafra - In The Grip Of Official Treason

Duke De Mondo — Mon, 4 Feb 2008 08:47:46 EST

3 CDs of shy, restrained, barely-audible muttering. Or not.
IQuipped the prophet Elijah one evening whilst lolling about a particularly refulgent cumulonimbus arrangement - “Do you know this what I’m goin’ to tell you? It would be easier to tear the night-time from the skies with nowt but the yellow off a badger’s teeth, so it would, than to keep even halfways up to date with the...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

Pop-Cult Mind-Wax - Break-Ups and Buskers and Summer

Duke De Mondo — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 07:43:48 EDT

"Fair morning" a man says, tiltin' the hat at a couple lassies stood front the bus-stop next the old cinema. Marquees boarded over, graffiti-bedizened hardwood sheets - Shelly + ?, Trevor Was Ere / Is A Knob, INLA etc etc. "Couldn't be bad t'that, sure?"Lassies smiling, gesturing in agreement. One chewing the beads of her necklace, twirling a toe on the spot. Round about, throbbing like a trapped-fly 'neath an eyelid; summer. A warm breeze shorn of puff loiters lazily about the flower-baskets hung here and there from the lampposts. Headed for the train-station, men in painter's overalls pat sweat-slick foreheads with damp hankies. "Fair mourning" fella says again."It is that" I answer, sat on a bench at the town hall, looking up from the notebook open on my knee. "About time, an' all.""Now… We're long due it, is right, God knows."Wandering on, he's stopped at the top of Church Street by a fella in a white t-shirt and faded jeans, palm outstretched, unshaven face all scab-marked and potted, blackened eyes red-rimmed and wired. "You wouldn't have a pound, mate? Lend us till Monday?"Watching this, drumming my fingers idly off of a knee, I'm thinking; Myself and Beautiful Ms Gillian - many's a quid we gave him, an' all, afore now. Fidgeting with one hand for change, other holding the honeycomb ice-cream busy dribbling and drabbling o'er the knuckles. Him laughing, tellin' me - "You keep your eye on her, now. She'd be the right handful, that lady, looks of her" and us laughing too, your mouth making mock-shocked O's, looking away in feigned offense. (Line at the bottom of the notebook page - "For the memories we planned to gather, beacons be raised. For those we were lucky enough to catch - a song or two, I think.")Thinking also of Newcastle night-time few months back, man by the phone-box calling "Fifty pence to make a call, mate?" and me shrugging apologetically. "I'm sorry, man, I have nothin'."He then raising the palms, "Oh fair enough, like, fair enough. But would you have a brick, maybe? So as I could smash your fuckin' face in?"Friend and musicological associate Mr Gardiner whispering to me; "Walk on by, for Jesus sakes. Keep the head down. S'always the same; abuse if you haven't got it, abuse if you have. Gave him 85p one evening, I did. 'Thanks' says he, then flings it back at me, skites me right up the back o' the thigh with a twenty-pence-piece. Miscalls me for all the arse-bandit bastards of the day. Shockin'."From the fella on Church Street no insults nor slurs, just a smile as he pockets the change. "Also" he asks then, "You wouldn't have a cigarette at all?"Shake of the head from your man there. "That's one thing I won't have about me nor ever will is a cigarette.""No bother." Calling after as the gentleman walks off. "Need to be stoppin' anyway. Sure they've banned it in the pubs, the gets! What next, I say to that? Ban us from pishin' the very pish out our kidneys? Will they be at that? I wouldn't put it past them! Rogues and whores, them boys! Nanny State! Political correctness gone mad, that's what our Stanley calls it!"Grinding and rumbling and crunching to my left. School-bus, screeching brakes and tissss of the doors. Two lads step out onto the street, emo fringes tickling the bridges of their noses, black growing out at the sides. "Is she riding?" one's asking the other, school-bag slung careless over a shoulder, shirt collar all skewed to that side. "No. Fuck the ride she'll give. A month, and not so much as a dry wank. Tell you, I'm this close to skidaddling and tryin' the luck with wee Forrest there. Wild woman for the cock, Joe says. Like a starvin' youngster scrabblin' for a Yorkie, by all accounts."Christ. Brushing the fag-ash off the trousers, closing the notebook, rising to my feet, fidgeting for the iPod headphones dangling out the neck of my t-shirt. Up Linenhall Street then with Cassadaga in the ear-holes, headed for the park, passing four, five boarded-over storefronts and a poster advertising a car boot sale at the Church Of God and women walking two abreast with matching wains a-gaggle in matching prams. Singing with surest conviction - Conor Oberst;"Everything, it must belong somewhere - I know that now, that's why I'm staying here…"And wound around his words, my own from three nights past; "I must belong somewhere, everything does… but it's not here." Crying and rubbing the nose with my sleeve, snotters blinding me and she crying also but saying "I understand…" and reaching to touch my arm. "It's okay…"Aw balls - Lad I propositioned one time back in High School steps out the bookies next the traffic lights. Spying him I duck into the post office, passing the red bin I was shoved into one merry mid-October eve when the taxi driver refused to take me home on account of the boke still wet on my trousers. "Just had these fuckin' seats cleaned!" he was shouting, they told me the next day. "Fuck the pukin' hoor like that I'm taking anywhere!"For a time I inspect the jiffy bags and the packs of airmail envelopes, lifting the odd one in the hand, turning it this way and that, coddin' on that I'm after something, giving himself out there time enough to have wandered far enough away."Good thing about this" a mate told me back one time when I was showin' him the picture of us at thon christening, you remember? "Good thing about this is that all the boyos you used to try an' get off wi' will know you were only messin'.""What? Surely to God they know by now!""Well… There's the odd rumor goin' about yet. Hit the shins off one myself not so long ago. 'He'd be fond of a gargle of the salty yoke' I was told by your one out the petrol station, for instance.""Jesus!"Shrugging. "Well, you did grope his arse to him thon time. Tried to lick his ear, an all.""It was ironic, dammit!"With a box of driving licence applications held afore her, friend of mine emerges from behind the glass partitions, greeting me with a smile and a "How's yourself?""Not bad" says I, testing a green biro on the back of my hand. "You?""Ach." She rolls her eyes, tuts. "That Tommy's bein' the right knob so he is. Up all night I was, over the head of him. Comes in drunk at two in the mornin' with a weeks worth of santerin' to do, wouldn't you know? Wakes me up out my sleep and me only half an hour down as it was. 'We've to talk!' says he, and nothing would do him but we were up and sat at the kitchen table thonner - two in the mornin' I say! - assessing the relationship thus far and where we planned to be taking it and by what manner or means we would get there. Notes he was making on the back of the TV Times. Minutes! Quarter by six he finally passed out, praise to Jesus, and me workin' at nine bells.""Lord above" says I. She shakes her head. "Shockin'. But here - what's this I heard about yourself and your wee girl? Is it right enough?"Nodding. "It is.""Aw that's wicked so it is. I'm sorry to hear it."Sighing, shrug of the shoulders. "Me too. But I couldn't… it's cause I'm goin' away. London.""But you're comin' back, surely?""I don't know" I say. "I don't know if I am. I doubt it, as it happens. And being uncertain, it'd be nothin' but the foulest, most selfish chicanery to let things go on any longer. To pretend to herself and myself that it's only a temporary upheaval when everything's telling me it's nothing of the sort."She makes a sympathetic "Dear me…" face, biting at the corner of her bottom lip, tilting the head some. "Well are youse still friends, at least?""Oh God aye" I say. "To lose a girlfriend's wretched enough - to lose a best friend at the same time… save us it'd be enough to wreck a man six times my size." "Well that's always somethin'." Making for to head off towards the offices at the far-end of the building, she says "You'll keep in touch with us, aye? Let us all know how you're doin'.""I will" I assure her, wandering back then to the doorway, earphones re-inserted.To the park with one hand hung awkwardly at my side on account of the iPod leaving no room for it in the trouser pocket. At my side also walks herself. Sensing her as I go like a phantom limb, instinctively reaching to touch of occasion, and then nothing.Speaks a voice from the back of my mind; "You'd be the wild one for playin' the martyr, wouldn't you just?"Lashing the flesh off the shoulder blades with cat-o-nine-tails fashioned out old letters and birthday cards and valentines notes. Sleeping with memories of sleeping next to her wound round the waist like Talbot's barbed-wire corsets.The wild martyr, right enough.Wandering towards me, lad I know from back at tech, blue bag full o' Steiger lager hung from one arm. "Trevor" says I, too loud probably. "You well?" "Alright, mate?"Questions scurrying back and forth o'er the pavings like frightened rats, never answered. Of women living in houses next rivers and bodies touched with minds Leonard Cohen craggily coos. "A cartoon is all he is, that Cohen" a fella recently informed me, "Like Morrissey. Cartoon melancholy. Means nothin', really." Cartoon melancholy. Forlorn Leghorn. Oh Jesus, that's awful. Near chokes me.Choking also in her bedroom after it all. Twin Peaks paused on the laptop screen afore us. Cigarette trembling atween my fingers, and now and then from the room next door, yelps and whoops from the Spanish fella wreaking the savage havoc 'tween the thighs of the wee French lass he was courting."I'm sorry…" saying, and was, and am.Dale Cooper frozen and eyeing me with the sore disgust. "Jais' but you're the right bastard.""I couldn't do anything else, dammit."Red room and a man stood in the middle singing "I Drove All Night" two beats out of time. 'Pon an analyst's couch a blonde-haired woman whispers "Sselb, reh sevol eh llits tub, wa.""Course he does" spits the vagrant 'hind the drapes. "Obvious, that."Passing the woman from the chip-shop sold me a fish supper one night I was drunk for the price of a half-dozen fireworks I had in my coat pocket, muting Cohen a moment to hear the busker on the street next the office supply shop. Nicotine-yellowed fingers skite back and forth 'long slightly-bowed guitar neck, chasing out the frets an aching lament. Foot tapping arhythmically on the stones, he turns and gazes doe-eyed to the heavens, mouthing with gin-wizened intonation; "Oh Kitty, my darling, rememberThat the doom will be mine if I stayT'is far better to part though it's hard toThan to rot in their prison away…"Parked off the motorway with hazard-lights on and radio off and windscreen wipers swishing lazily every half-dozen seconds, he turns to her and says "Aw, Kitty. So it will, but. The doom… All mine, it'll be…""Poor you" says she, turned away."You understand, though?" Tapping ash off the cigarette out the passenger window, shaking his head solemnly, words clinging to the coat-tails of the blue/grey fag-reek plume. "Mean, t'is far better to…""Better for who?""For... Mean, Mother Mercy, Kitty, to rot? To rot in their prison? Rot clean away?""Oh for Christ's sakes" says she, tutting. "Just get out."Calling after her as she drives off, waving his arms frantic in the rain - "It's not you, Kitty! It's me!"Song's end, busker looks up at me, sapphire eyes searing incandescent. "Request?" he asks."Aye" says I, tossing a quid to the guitar case afore him, a loose scatter of copper hugging the lower end. "D'know 'I Still Miss Someone'?" He nods, hacks back a clattering throatful of phlegm, tilts the jaw this way and that. "Could tell by the droop tween the legs."Laughing then. "Free of charge, that."Till he tunes the guitar I perch myself 'pon the windowsill to the right, scribbling of occasion in the notebook, thinking about helium we sucked to make the voices high, about the pair of us walkin' down past the Liffey one night winter past, about pre-dawn danders 'round churchyards with green-coat fellas sleeping on the steps out back, about kisses and her bringing me out panic attacks and…"Hurts" busker says, first few notes staggerin' unsteadily about the soundways like a fresh-rid gazelle. "Does" I say. "But would've hurt more, eventually, if we hadn't. Still. Scarcely eases it any."With arms all whipping couple wains come bounding o'er the dentist walls, flinging lollypop-ends at other, cursing and cheering and chortling as they gallop ever on, near colliding with a fella strolling upwards there towards us."Fair morning" I hear him saying to the bloke coming out the garage."Aye" says he. "To pish, though, the forecast says."With narrowed eyes and furrowed brow the busker here now sings.Thanks folks.

The Duke (Aaron McMullan to his parents and the clergy) is a Northern Irish writer, performer and insomniac currently residing in London. He is the creator of Mondo Irlando, wherein his scribblings and hollerings can be found. He is currently working towards the completion of his first novel, and his debut "punk / country / folk / whatever" album has recently been released by Ex Libris Records . You can also pop by His MySpace Page and maybe have a coffee and a biscuit.

Music Review: Touchers - The Underwater Fascist

Duke De Mondo — Thu, 28 Jun 2007 09:22:44 EDT

A handful of bent, wavering chords come clattering out the speakers to my right, couple flick-knife scads of screeching feedback throbbing in-between. A wash of spindly guitar unfurled o'er a quiff-skulled, bobbin' bassline. A voice harsh as the crust on a week-old hemorrhoid, yet enchanting as the siren's squawk to a rum-wrecked sailor. Smiling to myself, nodding the head enthusiastically, the shrill hiss of the swelling dawn simmering at the edges of the window-glass. "This is beautiful" I'm mouthing. "Beautiful…"Couple hours previous, I'm sat in the kitchen on a too-hard chair with the smoke from a too-thin cigarette scourging the retinas something fierce, examining the CD inlay held open afore me.Dotted about the glossy paper, sundry curious, disturbing sights; Sharks, Nazis, executions, three-boobed women all Playboy glaze-gaze, merboys and one-eyed soft-focus monkey beasts, faceless forms hung from gallows, garden party socialites and Hitler Youth parades. Death spectacles, killing machines, abominations. Puffing the cheeks, muttering under my breath; "Jesus save us all…" Glance at the song titles; "Aphrodite Has Gone Mad", "Not Right In The Head", "Two Shit Icepick"…Looking up from the case with the yap all skewed to one side, forehead wrinkled some, I'm saying to the fella sleeps in my hallway sometimes; "This is gon' be harsh.""What is?""This." Reaching him the record, The Underwater Fascist by Touchers. On the cover - some manner of slumbering ocean-woman, naked, the seaweed all coiling about her thighs and her arms and the nooks down yonder by the hoo-hah. He gives it a cursory glance, tosses it back at me. "Never heard of them" says he. "Who are they, pray tell?"Who they are, I explain, are an American indie outfit fronted and orchestrated by one Ben Brisini, a manic depressive, healthy-living 'musical autocrat' (Press Release says…) from Bozeman, Montana. "Jack Endino's produced it" I inform him. "I assume some sort of claustrophobic, lumber-haulin', grunge-hued sludge or other is the order of the day. Heavy shit, I'd guess - sonically, thematically and spiritually."Returning the focus to his paperback, he asks; "Can you handle it, d'you think?""I dunno" says I, glaring now at my reflection on the underside of the disc itself, red-ring eyes and unshaven jaw all flush with patchy bum-fluff fuzz. "Harsh times of late, you'll be aware. Break-ups, panic attacks, Grindhouse being released as two separate flicks… Last thing a man needs on top of all that is an hour's worth of a bi-polar fella screeching about Nazi sharks and shock therapy."A shrug. "Maybe it'll be funny. Like that Ricky Gervais stuff about sharks would've found Anne Frank in seconds.""Maybe…" I say, rising then to my feet. "Maybe…"Here and now, with that galloping, bigmuff stew slapped about the ear-holes, with the head afire with the rockabilly rompin' and the dropped-D sing-a-longs and with Ben Brisini howling and barking and raging like a rabid dog left and right, I'm thinking; "This is just the tonic I needed."Silly bastard - such was the part performed by me and my fine self for to have been so apprehensive with regards that first jab of a forefinger off of the play button.Discordant chaos? Impenetrable sheets of terrifying, hysterical, rotten dot com barbarity? Fuck the bit of it.The Underwater Fascists is, it transpires, an absolute joy of a record. It's amongst the most distinctive, memorable records I've encountered this year, and seeing as how this year has also offered the likes of Cassadaga and Icky Thump and Easy Tiger and Volta and Favourite Worst Nightmare and If The Ocean Gets Rough and those Traveling Wilburys reissues, that's a hell of a feat accomplished right there.Sonically, Touchers lurch and loll and loiter in and around a muck-crusted pasture I'm gonna go ahead and name Scuzz-Folk, or Dirty-Bastard-Country-Grunge, if you'd prefer. The sounds they create are of a sort you'd expect to find not underwater, but coiled about the trunk of some ancient, weather-wrecked cypress tree, a gargantuan article situated top a hillside overlooking a fifteen-mile industrial sprawl. From the branches; great glooping splods of factory-reek-hued sap bubble and pop, the rust-coloured leaves pawed and ruffled by a brooding, ash-grey breeze.The Underwater Fascist is the kinda record Johnny Cash might've ended up making if that "Rusty Cage" cover had been his idea. Kinda record Neil Young And Crazy Horse would've maybe crafted had they hung about with Eddie Vedder a couple albums longer. Kinda record Uncle Tupelo may have gotten around to eventually, had they gone on long enough to get lazy and need to "re-discover ourselves" - i.e., get some new haircuts and some louder guitars and some ballads shorn of string arrangements and lyrics about "fuck". It's a record lurches violently atween aching, ragged, tender beauty and head-down, arse-in-the-air, riff-sick abandon. It's as in love with the notion of a lilting, melancholy lullaby as it is with the idea of driving half your face into your kidneys with a power-chord the size of fifteen whale-bellies. At times it sounds like someone's taken a soldering iron to Surfer Rosa by The Pixies and the first Two Gallants album, joining the buggers at the bifkins and sending them racing out into the evening with a bagful of sticks and ECT-fried academics and hooks you could cripple a hovercraft with. Other times it's a bit like a less lo-fi Moldy Peaches, with lyrics about "I think you are beautiful, but you are for the worms" and "my brain is out to get me" instead of "Who'm I s'posed to stick my dick in?" or "I'm downloading porn with Dave".The influences are readily apparent, yes (in addition to the aforementioned, note also the Paul Simonon basslines, the screeching Black Flag rage, the smatterings of Sun-era Elvis - why not, it's in the public domain now anyway, I heard) and yet Touchers' sound is wholly unique. The phrase "They sound a bit like Touchers" seems totally plausible as a manner of describing some Dirty-Bastard-Country-Grunge outfit might maybe materialize in the near future. Sometime after the fifth spin, I'm addressing once more my friend from the second or third paragraph. "I was wrong" I'm saying. "Wrong as a cat-head hung from a vicar's bell-end.""Wrong about what?""About this record being something that was gon' upset me out my very last wits. This record is astonishing. Any justice in the world, I tell you, and these would be hit singles right here. "The Mattress Song", "There's The Rub", "February 22nd 1975" - fucking incredible, each and every one, and that's only the three I've noted down for the review I need to write. Half a dozen more as good or as good again or but a fart's width shy.""I'll maybe give it a listen" he says. "You should."He won't. And neither will enough other people, if the facts of the case are to be lain out afore us, like communion wafers crisp with the holy spirit of The Truth About The Touchers Thing. Most likely they'll remain an underground concern, the type o' band folks'll pretend they've listened to for years when some hip-hopper in the 22nd century samples "Do The New Plague, Babe" all of a sudden, but ignored till then by most everybody outside of the select few lucky enough to have had "Country Killer" darting and diving about the 04:28 of a June morning, or to have traveled to Dundalk by train with those chainsaw melodies hissin' out the earphones, smiling like a man possessed and terrifying the holy blue motherfucks out the wee woman on the far side of the carriage."It's alright, love, it's just this song by Touchers called 'Not Right In The Head' has got me giddy as a willy in a house made o' hoo-hah, and that is why I'm smiling like this. Not because I'm goin' to cut my bottom lip off and throw it at you."Thanks folksThe Underwater Fascist by Touchers is out now via Wantage USA. Pick it up via the Touchers MySpace Page.

Pop Cult Mind Wax - Out Of The Mouths Of Babes

Duke De Mondo — Wed, 2 May 2007 03:45:02 EDT

IBeing stricken with a curious sort of voodoo done gripped the better part of my arse a couple weeks back, I found myself sat in the doctor's waiting room of Monday past leafing idly through a copy of Bizarre magazine inexplicably (or bizarrely) left alongside the half-dozen copies of Tuberculosis Monthly and V.D Review.Sat there reading a very interesting article about folks who have filth with aquatic animals, I'm suddenly startled no end by a great gasp coming from my right."Lord above!" a voice says.Turning, I find a fella in his thirties sat gazing slack-yapped at the image on the page afore me. A youngster of about six months sits on his knee, bouncing and heaving with demented abandon."Is that an octopus she's at?" the fella mouths."It is boy," says I. "And bejeesus isn't she at the eels a couple pages after.""She is not!""She is. Damn the beast the sea can conjure that she won't find a hole for."Shaking the head with awe he says, "An octopus in the hoo-hah... I've seen it all now.""Couldn't be up to them nowadays," I tut."So what's the matter with you, then?" he asks me presently. "What are in wi' the doctor for?""Ach, it's a savage predicament," I tell him. "I'm having the wild bother with the arse. Shockin' altogether. You'd think I'd ate nothin' but leprosy all year, by damn, the concoctions that rogue's puttin' out of him." "A tight leash" he says sagely. "That's what you've to keep that article on."Just then, the youngster on his knee thrusts forward with a great flail of the arms."No!" says the fella, the father of the child as it happens. "Sit there and behave." Turning then to me, he says, "He's at the crawlin', don't you know? Oh but he's the terrible man for the floor. Damn the peace you'll get, if he takes a notion for rovin'."Much pushing and straining."Phillip! Behave there!"Smiling, I extend a finger the child's direction. "Hello," says I.The youngster looks up at me."Are you not for speakin'?"The answer arrives by way of a joyous yelp, "Cock!"I fire a glance at the father. "Ah...""Mother o' Merciful God" the father says, closing his eyes and grimacing."Did he just say cock?" I ask, stunned a touch."He did.""Cock!" the lad repeats, louder. "Cock!""Phillip!" The father's pupils dart left and right about the room."That's amazing," says I. "I never said the word cock till I was 21 years old, and even then it was only cause I tripped in the middle of a conversation about timepieces. Did you teach him that yourself?""By Mary's nuts I did not" the father assures me, stern faced. "It's a word neither me nor the wife would have on the lips, I assure you.""Ha" I chortle. "You and the wife wi' cock on the lips!"Despite the inherent hilarity of this quip, the fella's face remains free of the faintest ghost of the slightest smile."So is that all he can say?" I quickly ask. "Has he never said a 'dada' or 'mama' or 'Decameron'?""Damn the bit of it. It's cock and more cock, day and night. And save us, didn't he even address the minister with the very same? 'Is this young Phillip?' says he, and says the youngster, 'Cock'. A fine thing for to be greeting a man of the cloth, a mouth all 'cock'."Marveling some at the whole affair, I tilt my head back on the seat and say, "Wouldn't it make you wonder what our own first words were? The devil only knows what filth we maybe flung wi' the first waggle o' the tongue. It's not as if anyone would ever tell us. 'Oh, wee Jonathan, boys but I remember your first words clear as day. Fanny-fart, you said.'"Despite his obvious embarrassment, anguish and guilt, the father slaps the arm of the chair at this and gives a great hoot of laughter. "Ho, boys" he says. "Wouldn't you just wonder, right enough.""Or what other folks first words might've been" I continue, warming to the subject. "All the Big Men and the Big Women. Your David Hume's or your John The Baptist's or your Joan Of Arc's or who have you. Wouldn't it be great to find out, right enough?""Heth it would..."For a time we sit silently contemplating this, the still threatened only by the intermittent scurrilities tossed to the skies by thon dirty, foul-mouthed infant.IIHolland, 1632The young Benedict de Spinoza chortles and giggles at the antics of his father, himself busy racing about the sitting room of their fairly spacious townhouse, ducking and diving and bounding behind the furniture. A right amusing sight to see, if not so enjoyable for the man himself, jumping about the place as he is by way of dodging the missiles flung his direction by Hannah, his wife. "What were you doin' then, Horace, tell me" says she, a great wallop of a pan in her right hand, "If you weren't lappin' and lickin' away? Were you perchance lookin' for chinamen in thon fandang?" "She told me she had a sore pain in the area!" roars the set-upon patriarch, hiding behind a chest of drawers."'A sore pain' says he, I'll give you a sore pain!"With that, she flings the pan and races to the hearth for to retrieve the poker. "And what was she doin' in your study anyway?""She wanted help with her accounts! Sure you know what them young lasses are like, it's all gobbledygook t'them!""Accounts? Well it was a queer abacus in your service, a queer abacus an' all."Throughout the whole carry-on, young Benedict roars wi' infant giggledom. Horace, racing to the child for protection, he says, "Is this the thing for a youngster to be witnessing?""Don't you dare shield behind wee Benedict. You done him damage enough by fatherin' him. I tell you, he'll be a fine one if he grows up like his Da. By God the Rabbi best chop the lot o' thon off o' him while he's at it, if it's to corrupt him like it corrupted you!"Gazing up at his father, Benedict claps his podgy hands and says "Balls!"The two parents look at other, dumbfounded."Balls!" repeats the infant. "Balls balls balls."Hannah drops the poker and throws her hands to the air. "Save us all, there he's at the balls already. D'you see what you've done?"Horace covers the boy's mouth with his trembling hand. "He said none balls, he said bald. Didn't you, Benedict?""Balls n' balls balls.""Merciful Lord above!""Balls balls balls."Cesena, 1742 Francesco Guilliarti addresses her lover with a fair measure of hush in the voice, the child she's busy minding having finally fallen asleep there in the crib. "We can't, Alberto," she's saying. "The Count could be home any minute.""Oh for Holy Christ's sakes," tuts Alberto, fiddling with his belt, "We'll be lucky if we see him afore Wednesday. Him out on the lash wi' the wife up thonner in her sick bed and with all the curious colours of the Italian night coiled about his thighs? My arse he'll be back any minute.""Well I don't feel comfortable. Wee Barnaba's in the room.""He's asleep. The hell'll he know one way or the other."Francesco gazes pensively towards the sleeping child. "I had a dream about him, Alberto.""Oh aye?" The lust-crazed lad slides o'er to his lady's side, kissing at her neck, fidgeting with her hair. "I've been dreamin' only o' you."She shrugs him off with a heave of the left shoulder. "I said no, dammit. I'm tryin' t'tell you about my bastard dream!"Alberto sighs and falls back upon the mattress. "Well what?""I saw the child worshipped by all nations, and the papal seal about his forehead. This boy will be pope, Alberto, I just know it.""Pfft. Pope my arse."Just then, the child stirs from out its sleep, knocking a tiny hand off of the side of the crib. "Look," scolds Francesco, "Didn't I tell you? Now it'll be an all-night session."She wanders over to the crib and looks down upon the baby, its wide eyes staring back at her, its fingers poking in around the half-dozen teeth piercing the pink of his gums. "Are you waken?" says she. "Is that baby all woke up?"The child pulls gently at its bottom lip. "Arse," it says.Francesco pauses."Arse.""You!" she says, turning to Alberto. "Look what you've done! With that arse-talk o' yours, you've only learned him to say it.""Learned him to say what?""Arse! He's said it, just now."Alberto roars with laughter. "Ah fuck off, did he say 'arse' right enough? That's mad.""Mad is it? It'll be my guts o'er the ceilings if'n the Count hears tell of it!""Arse blarse" the youngster babbles.Alberto screeches with hilarity. "I'm glad it amuses you" says Francesco. "A fine pope he'll make, arse this and arse that."Kentucky, 1809 Nancy Lincoln gently rocks her infant son in her arms, sat by the hearthside in the family home. Outside, the winter wind rips and tears about the surrounding acres o' Sinking Spring Farm. The flames o' the fire flicker and waver with the weight of the draught down the chimney. On a couch o'er by the window, Thomas Lincoln gazes dotingly 'pon his wife and his son, sucking on the end of a tobacco pipe and with the tiny log cabin 'thin which the child was born visible on the twilit landscape other side o' the glass behind him.The child near asleep, he sighs and coughs and then, with a great sigh he utters the word "cunt." Thomas stares quizzically at his wife. "What was that there now?"Nancy shrugs. "I don't know. He just gurgled or somethin' I think.""By God it sounded for all the word like...""Cunt," the child says, snuggling against the mother's breast."He is sayin' it!" Thomas says, standing up. "By jove he's sayin... the C-word.""Och he's sayin' nothin' o' the like" scolds Nancy. "You're just thinkin' that's what he's sayin', wi' that dirty mind o' yours.""Gahn-guff cunt.""There, again!" With a finger pointed at the youngsters yap Thomas says "I'll be damned if he's not cussin'.""Sure what does a wain know about cussin'?""He knows plenty, sounds o' things!""Keep your voice down, he's near asleep. And anyway, where would he've picked that up from?""From your Da, I'd go so far as to guess. Thon ol' bugger's got a mouth on him like the crack o' a sailor's arse.""Your fanny" says Nancy. "He's sayin' no C-word and that's all's to it.""Cunt" coos wee Abraham, afore falling asleep.Gujarat, 1869 The grand diwan of Porbandar, Karamchand Ghandi, sweeps o'er the crystalline ballroom with a crowd of near three-dozen doting lads and lassies bounding about him for to gaze upon the child held there in his silk-adorned arms."By God" says Ghandi, "Look at this, young Mohandas, the whole o' India's hoppin' like a bollock in stew for to look upon your tiny wrinkled mug."Throwing himself at the feet of the diwan, a young monk beats his hands off of the floor and wails with incredible ecstasy. "Oh, what a blessing is this child, as beautiful and saintly a lad as e'er the land's done puked o'er the dusts!""He's that if he's anything" says a young heiress swanning about the periphery of the crowd. "And tell me this, Karamchand, is he yet fit for to recognise himself in the reflection 'pon the still of the river?""Oh" says Karamchand, "He'll recognise himself gazing back from even the most turbulent, most disarrayed of surfaces.""And is he sittin' upright of his own will?""He is, and he's as sturdy and as straight as the staff o' F�el�n held aloft by God's own paws." "And what of the talkin'?" says a politician from the West of the country. "Boys-o it gives me a right pinch to hear a wain babblin' and bletherin' on like they do.""Sad to say" says Karamchand, "Young Mohandas has yet to grace us with a sensible word. A garrumph o' nonsense, a great spiel o' shite, such is as much as you'll get from thon tongue."As if by way of demonstration, the youngster babbles thus; "Merde skide cazzate."Those gathered laugh heartily at this recital of the most curious gibberish."Oh he's a terrible man for the prattlin'.""Follar oootthah". "Listen to him there now! Mother of God, will he ever say a thing worth an ear, I wonder?" Clonakilty, 1890 Michael and Marianne Collins wander through the marketplace with the latter pushing Michael Junior afore her in a navy blue pram. Michael Senior, a man well into his dotage (although not so much that he hadn't the sense about him to wed a lass forty years younger), he splutters into a silk hanky and snorts back great clods o' throat-muck as the three o' them pass the stalls and the racks, the braying vendors and the bustling crowds.On a wall at the far end of the street, Marianne spies her great friend Joanne McCluskey, and waves and hollers her direction. Her husband wanders on oblivious, having lost a fair portion of his hearing. Joanne races to greet her sister in all but birth with a face all smiles and arms all akimbo. "Och Jesus oh isn't it an age since I saw you last?" says she to Marianne. "And look at this young article!" She bends o'er the pram, cooing and prodding at the toddler's ample cheeks. "Look at you!" says she, again. "Isn't he a right imp and a half?" says the mother."Oh, he's that. Tell me this, is he walkin' yet?""Well now, he'd be like his father there of a Thursday morning. He'd be able to stand for a second or two but it'd be a foolhardy fella would bet on one leg being fit to cross the other without the lot crashin' to the carpet."The women laugh at this, Michael Senior by now half-ways up the street, oblivious to the fact that his wife has paused in her travels. "And is he talkin'?" says Joanne. "I bet he's got a right wee tongue on him by now.""No" Marianne sniffs. "No he hasn't said a word.""Ach he must've said somethin' by now.""He's not," says the mother. "Now tell me, how's your own twins getting on?"Thusly runs the banter anytime anyone asks about young Michael's verbal abilities. The truth of the matter is that he's said at least eight words by now, but not one of them have been any word a lady might in good conscience attribute to the mouth of her child. "Fuck" went one. "Bum" went another. A third wasn't far removed from "Bastard." It'll be another nine months afore he'll say anything repeatable, and it'll be the word "Boat." By that time, most o' the folks in the tiny County Cork community will assume Marianne and Michael to have fathered a mute, and will be bound in a sore sympathy for the parents. Thanks folks.

Movie Review: Screaming Masterpiece

Duke De Mondo — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 21:52:23 EST

With Regards The Setting Of Scenes Prior To The Reviewing Of Screaming MasterpieceSays a friend of mine to the local pharmacist of an evening a couple years back; "Tell me this, now… Can you perchance supply to me this fine noontide a toxin might feasibly instill within these cells, bones, nerve-endings and such, a sensation akin to that which Mother Mary must've felt when her belly got to swelling with the vapors of The Lord?"The fellow chewed the lips a time, clucked the tongue, and then; "I have exactly the article for that."From inside the old suit-jacket he had on, itself emblazoned with any number of Sufjan Stevens pins and Daniel Johnston badges, he produced a compact disc upon which was scrawled, in blue marker, the words Sigur Rós - Reykjavik 2001. "What's this" asks the punter. "OxyContin?""None o' that" quoth the merchant, "None of that at all. What it is, is the music of the glaciers, the sound of the Northern Lights glistening on the waters of Lake Langisjór, the symphonies of the Njarðvík night, the...""This is Icelandic music you're givin' me?" the lad interrupts, jerking the head back a touch, cocking an eyebrow. "The felchin' Christ do I want with this?""What don't you want with it?" rebuts the merchant. "Iceland, boyo. It's where it's at.""Since when?""Since… like, fuckin', ever. The vocals like they're comin' at you from across the river of Hades, the samples, the beats, the…""Beats?" the punter scoffs. "I care less for them than a willy-john cares for the sheen o' the Marble Arch. Samples? I couldn't give a fisted arse I never hear another in all my days.""Suit yourself, son" the seller shrugs, turning away. "But I tell you this; I put that on for no more than ten minutes and I swear on Noah's ankles it was a month afore I could see again."The lad bites his bottom lip, his eyes all twitching with contemplation. "Alright" he says eventually. "Alright then, give me the damn disc, and let me see if it's all that, right enough."He took the disc.No one saw or heard tell of him until early last December, when he showed up on the banks of the River Bann, bruised of body and famished of stomach and bollock-naked save for a length of sea-otter hide he'd wrapped about his skull like a turban. Now;Whilst altogether right amusing and beguiling in its own right, this particular anecdote serves also to illustrate here and now the shift occurred in the world of the musicologically minded sometime around 2002, when ( ), the fourth record by the aforementioned Sigur Rós, got to capturing the imagination of anyone who'd ever spent half an hour on Pitchfork Media pretending to have heard Devendra Banhart years before they did.What ( ) went ahead and revealed to the likes of our giddy-pill-peddler there and his fierce skeptical client, was that something right wicked exciting was going on Iceland with regards the composition of melody and the kicking of notes about a stave. For sure, everyone with half a drum in the ears knew about Bjork, and knew that her music was as beautiful and complex and evocative as anything anyone had ever even considered going about creating, and that it was as the sighing of the angels upon the frost-stung windows of heaven, or as the twitching of a sparrow's wings 'pon a dew-kissed hedgerow of a winter's morn, or as the swelling of a neon cityscape out the belly of Arcadia. Scarcely a man, woman or child walked the Earth in ignorance of these facts, but what ( ) suggested was that other individuals hidden away in the basements of Selfoss or wandering lonesome about the shores of Keflavík were creating music of a similarly compelling, fascinating, otherworldly nature, which, if not quite as astounding as Bjork's, was at least fit to sit upon the same shelf. Left and right and hither and thither, folks with immense cravings for sounds not unlike those of violins melting in the guts of the gods, or for melodies akin to the solemn lamentations of dying fauns choking on the fog, there and then they tuned the lugs to Iceland, and lo!, what wonders they found.These wonders, it turns out, have since been gathered together and stacked arse-to-jowl 'tween the opening and closing of Ari Alexander Ergis Magnússon's 2005 documentary Screaming Masterpiece, or Gargandi Snilld, being an expansive, wide-reaching overview of the contemporary Icelandic music scene, released on DVD by Milan Records on the 6th of March 2007.With Regards The Cinematic Worth Of Screaming MasterpieceScreaming Masterpiece opens with a series of shots detailing the kinds of untouched, crystalline expanses I see back my eyes every time I talk to my good friend Maja about her homeland, being the land of Iceland, conveniently enough.Great towering glaciers and frozen lakes and azure skylines hung precariously in the heavens like a cracked windscreen dangling 'tween the metal frame on God's own Volvo. Vapors and mists hovering about the ice like opium smoke. Gurgling, discombobulating wounds on the surface of the earth. These opening images, they invite a number of loose associations and stereotypes to come jiggering and jiving up front the lobes; desolation, isolation, mythology, the footprints of the Vikings, tiny communities huddled about Lutheran church halls.In-between the talking heads and the shredded violas and the incredible music and the drunken romping peppering Screaming Masterpiece's hour and a half run-time, we return time and again to those black beaches and silver pastures, mountain vistas and wetland sprawls, the resultant impression being that the creative genius on display every direction is as integral to the country as its topography or its history, and that each element feeds off the other.Rather than douse the celluloid with a wild amount of analysis or critique or sociology or what have you, however, Magnússon, a noted painter outside of his film work, approaches his subject in much the same fashion as a 15th century artist might have gone about crafting a fresco mural depicting maybe the destruction of Gomorrah, or the life of King David. He incorporates most everyone anyone might deem half-ways relevant, and works hard on establishing a mood (one of self-sustaining community and artistic freedom and cultural isolation), but Screaming Masterpiece serves better as a gorgeous-looking (and sounding) primer to further examination than as an exhaustive, comprehensive stand-alone investigation. It's more concerned with evoking the feel of the music, the feel of the country, than going into anything in any real depth.That said, it does at least attempt to answer, to varying degrees of success, a handful of core questions the lay-folk might well have rattling about the skulls soon as anyone might mention that Iceland is near to bowing with the weight of the musical gorgeousity erupting from therein.It wants to tell us Who The Hell These People Are.It wants to let us hear What The Hell These People Sound Like.It wants to at least suggest a couple reasons for Why The Hell Those Sounds Sound As They Do.For to settle the first concern, being Who The Hell These Folk Are, Anyroad, Screaming Masterpiece gathers about its jodhpurs a pleasingly diverse bunch of artistes and ensembles and assorted scenesters, some of whom share Sigur Rós' fondness for the ethereal, cerulean soundscapes, others who prefer to grasp at the coat-tails of less obviously "Icelandic" inspirations, be they Public Enemy or Nirvana or Sham 69 or whoever. With regards What The Hell They Might Sound Like, the answer is that they sound like you would expect a bunch of folks who share nowt but a postcode in common to sound like; fairly different from each other.The likes of Slowblow and Bang Gang, for example, sound like the waves lipping and lapping at the beaches, their semi-orchestral music by turns tranquil and tumultuous, raging and serene, whilst Ghostigital, by way of contrast, bring to mind some sort of amalgamation of The Fall and Atari Teenage Riot, all sneering yelps and stuttering, speed-fried rhythms. The Apparat Organ Quartet, meanwhile, busy themselves with fashioning pump-organ electronica, as crazed a melding as testicles and thistles, or religion and politics, and yet oh so very gorgeous to the hearing-holes. Then there are folks like acoustic nomad Mugison, a fella who rehearses his folk-pop ditties in an old church somewhere in Súdavik, an area on the west coast of the country all but abandoned since an avalanche in 1995.Hearing this music, one almost gets to mouthing a further question, being Why The Hell Are The Icelandic All So Amazing When It Comes To The Tunes And What Have You, but it soon becomes apparent that, actually, they're not. Just in case you might doubt such a pronouncement, Screaming Masterpiece offers us footage of several fairly fucking diabolical traditional rock band types for to shatter any illusion you might have had about how a man probably can't play a damn chord in any of those 23 counties without giving rise to some hitherto unimaginable symphony of ineffable wonderment. Now, whilst nobody has ever gotten anywhere worth being by attempting to hold above any group of people, let alone an entire nation, any sort of umbrella fashioned from the threads of The Unifying Traits, it is still fairly evident that the musicians and composers and performers featured herein do share a set of Core Characteristics, even though they may all operate within wildly different musical genres or disciplines, and even though some of them might be shite.These Core Characteristics, they probably go some way towards slapping an answer 'longside the last of those questions, being, as you'll recall from a wee while back, Why The Hell Do These Sounds Sound As They Do?The majority of these folks, for instance, obviously harbor a sense of experimentation, of adventurousness. They share a disregard for the rules concerning what might constitute a pop song, or a musical instrument. They also share a sense of community, of self-preservation. Rock bands and hip-hop acts and acoustic jazz-techno outfits play alongside one another, swapping personnel and equipment and audiences when the need arises. It's inspiring as all hell, is what it is, in the same way that the similar situation in, for example, Omaha is inspiring as all hell.And if that doesn't offer explanation enough for why the sound is so distinctive, then there are plenty other possibilities offered throughout, whether by musicians or historians or cultural commentators or pagan scholars or whoever. Most likely, the answer lies somewhere in the middle of all the potential reasons one might well conjure out the yap, reasons relating to cultural identity (the reclaiming of such), economic necessity (we had to create these bizarre instruments and fashion music in this manner because we couldn't afford anything else - how different Rock N Roll might've been had The Beatles not been beneficiaries of the welfare state and the advent of hire-purchase…) and a sense of genuine detachment from commercial concerns. As one interviewee has it, the bands become accustomed to the fact that they're probably not gonna get on the radio, that they'll probably play to no more than a handful of people, so why shouldn't they allow themselves the freedom to take their music whatever the hell direction they feel like? If one were to grab those last couple paragraphs by the neck and riffle about their innards like they were chickens out the olden days, one might well find glowering therein the explanation for The Icelandic Sound.Then again, maybe Bjork has the right idea, and since she made Medulla and Vespertine, we have no reason to assume she has anything else. What Bjork suggests is that there's no such thing, really, as an Icelandic Sound, that the music is no different to the music being produced anywhere. What is different is the mood of the performances. The nature of the Icelandic Mood, she poses, grinning of occasion and with the eyes all mischievous and glistening with the fires of creation, that would make for a much more worthwhile discussion. Bjork also shows up now and again throughout the reams of astounding live footage Magnússon has strung about the run-time. She appears as the 15-year-old frontwoman for Tappi Takaris in footage taken from vintage punk rock doc Rokk í Reykjavik, whilst more recent material has her stood afore a massive crowd in New York, ripping the very particles out the air by way of a couple face-melting performances. Further performance footage features Sigur Rós in sublime form in New York, Slowblow afire with violin and accordion abandon, Múm spluttering and glitching in incantatory fashion and a group of young fellas by the name of Nilfisk who appear live for the very first time of all ever as guests of the Foo Fighters, of all people. When the credits have rolled and all's left onscreen is a message about piracy causes bird-flu, what will most likely hover closest to the corner of the brain related to the remembering of things past, is that those performances were fucking incredible.For this reason alone Screaming Masterpiece would be essential. It's not as comprehensive as a fella might maybe have liked, and is probably best viewed as an introduction to Icelandic Popular Music, rather than as an All You Need To Know type deal, but it does have a staggering performance of All Is Full Of Love, and it does at least name-check the various elements and influences helped create this most astounding of near-Bohemian musical communities, a community thriving on little else but its own sense of adventure and suspicion of convention. Line it up for a marathon night's viewing alongside Jason Kulbel and Rob Walters' Saddle Creek documentary, James Szalapski's Heartworn Highways and the first couple instalments of Penelope Spheeris' Decline Of Western Civilisation series. That right there is the basis for a truly brain-frying eve of musical wonder, community values, terrifying hair and shockingly underrated genius. Thanks, folks.

Movie Review: Apocalypto

Duke De Mondo — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 09:14:57 EST

I. Regarding Mel GibsonBy the multiplex doors an old man high on lighter fluid stands screeching at the crowds wandering in for to watch Apocalypto, the new Mel Gibson picture, his lips lost midst the splurge of discombobulating foam done devoured the lower half of his face. His feet stomping in the puddles 'pon the steps, his right fist waving manic round his head, thus he stands roaring and barking and threatening. "Would you give your green to the Gestapo so quick?" says he, "Would you forgive Adolf half as fast if'n he made a picture show about a man eats a boar's bollocks for to coax you?"Men and women huddle against each other as they pass him, ducking their heads, raising hands to the sides o' their faces. "Save us, if'n only they'd had a jungle film at Nuremberg! Thon boyo's would've been free by the afternoon, wouldn't they just?"Wandering up the steps, I'm slipping my hands into my pockets, lowering my eyes, watching the rain pit-patting off of the concrete. As I'm approaching him, the old fella steps front of me, blocking my path. "You" he says, raising a finger. "What say you, y'craggy-toothed faggot?"I cautiously raise the mug. A cluster of tiny red and white spots marks the end of his nose, same spots friends of mine used to exhibit round the chops far-side of a fortnight spent scrunching a bag fulla glue to the yaps. His eyes rattle with anger, his shoulders trembling 'neath his brown and yellow pullover. "I say, what say you? Will you sleep well tonight knowing you done shoved another tenner into thon skitter-faced get's well-bustlin' coin-sack?"I give a shrug. "I like his films" I say. "I don't have to like him.""Oh is that right? And so he could say whatever he felt like saying, he could stand up afore the laws of the world and say 'In case you were wondering, the gays killed Muhammad' or 'Incidentally now, I must remark upon the blacks, for they're a sore bunch o' bastards' or 'What if we just set fire to the immigrants, would anybody really miss them?' and so long as he made a film about a man gets whipped and spat on every couple years it'd be dandy-o? Is that the gist of the situation?""Well", says I, giving an apologetic twirl of the shoe, "Many's an arsehole's produced a work of wonder afore now. I no more care for Gibson's stupid, twisted banter than I care for that uttered by D.W Griffith or Leni Riefenstahl. But I still think all three have made incredible motion pictures, arseholes or no.""He was drunk" a woman in a purple cardigan shouts. "Folks say a lot of things when they're drunk. I told me ma I was pregnant one night I was wrecked on porter, and by Christ I've never even flicked me own bean.""He crafts exquisite spectacles" says another."Spectacles, is it? I think I need spectacles, for I can hardly believe what I'm seeing! A crowd from here to Auschwitz lining up for observe the twisted brain-farts o' some hateful Nazi bastard just cause it has a bit where a cat bites the lips off of somebody's face."This said, he drops to his knees and roars to the heavens. "C'mon then, Riggs!" shouts he, "C'mon y'great whelp of a goon, c'mon then and call me to my face a beak-mugged money-huddlin' torn-cock swine, c'mon and tell me here and now! Where's my phone-call, where's my apology? Are you a man at all, or perchance are you as the ropes o' jelly dangle 'twixt a cow's fandango followin' a good solid calving?" Walking on across the foyer, I turn to the woman in the purple cardigan. "Still" says I, "You can see his point, sure as God, and I wonder now how I can feel anything at all for those protesters who stood up at the ballet in London Coliseum there for to shout down Simone Clarke, on account of her being all BNP, when here I am wandering happily t'wards the ticket booth for to pay to see the latest Mel Gibson?""Did you support the protesters?""Well yeah, mean, the British National Party are a buncha malignant, vicious, cancerous fuckers. All the same, mind you, she was just performing a ballet, she wasn't shooting swastikas out her hoo-hah or nothin'."The brain jiving and jagging and jiggering 'thin my skull like an arse fulla jackals, I'm pressing a finger and thumb 'gainst my eyes, grimacing some. "This is gon' have me awake for a month" I'm sighing. "Why couldn't he have blurted something I agree with, for fucks sakes.""What does it matter" says she. "Mean, who knows what shit Orson Welles or Pasolini or Lucio Fulci maybe gabbled when pished? Nobody knows, because they gabbled it back in the day, back before anyone gave a shit what drunken celebrities might splurge far-side of a ruction with the fuzz.""Anyway" she adds, reaching for her purse, "It's a flick about the Mayans. What difference what he thinks of Jews in the 20th or 21st century? It's surely not gon' have anything to do with this.""But see, now" says I, "Pasolini, blessed Pasolini, thon was a Marxist of impeccable intellect and humanity and sense, and when I see, say, The Gospel According To Matthew or The Decameron or Salo, I see that worldview fairly burning the celluloid afore me, whether it's set in Biblical times or Medieval times or whenever. By thon same token, if'n perchance there's some racist, right-wing ideology slinking about the corners of Gibson's head, it's more likely than not gon' show up in his work whether it's set last week or in the footfalls of the dinosaurs.""So then you react to that, and you say that's bullshit, but I like this, with the frog dart things. Mean, by way of an example, I can tell by those teeth of yours that you'd be a man fond of The Louvin Brothers.""Jesus oh, you'd be right about that.""Right, and yet those trousers you've on aren't the trousers of a Christian man, so how come you can appreciate the beauty in a song about 'Broad-minded is spelled S-I-N' even when, by the looks of things, a fella in the street saying that to you would be met with little more than a half-smile and a duck o' the mug?""Aye, that's a fair comment, now." Reaching the green to the fella pumping tickets out the doohickey 'side the till, I turn back to the woman there and say "And maybe, mean, maybe I just kinda feel sorry for him. As you yourself pointed out, many's a wretched word's tumbled off of a grog-lashed tongue afore now, and I dunno how just it is to hold anyone wholly accountable for such blather in the gloom of the hungover morn."A series of fragmented screams and rages ring out back my eyes, the cursing and the threatening and the… "I've said things I didn't mean" I continue, wandering towards the doors of Screen 1. "I said things a decade ago that still keep me awake, and God knows I meant none of them."She nods solemnly, then stops. "Balls" says she, "I forgot t'grab a bag o' peanuts. It'd be a quare time I'd have if'n I forgot to take a bag o' peanuts to the pictures."She races off to the sweetie stand, joins the queue behind a young lad in a Deicide shirt with a haircut juts out a foot and a half from his head at a 36 or 37 degree angle. Sucking the air through my teeth, I give the collar a tug a time or two and proceed towards yon screen."Alright, Mel" I'm thinking. "Don't be making me look a pillock now, y'hear? This best be fucking amazing."II. Regarding Apocalypto"That was fucking amazing!" a fella's roaring as he bounds out the doors of Screen 1 with the erection gnawing the denim out his jeans and the arms flailing frantically about him. "By God I've rarely saw a finer flick about men cut others' heads off in all my born days and nights and noontimes!""It was alright" says another, "But I tell you, it's a rare Mayan tribeswoman would've referred to her mother as 'mom'.""How do you know?" yonder zealot counters. "Where you there, perchance?"The foyer bristles with such banter, great clods of debate and critique and lamentation and highest praises all spilling out o'er the front steps and down into the car-park and lipping and lapping at the walls of the KFC across the way.Fidgeting in my jacket pocket for a packet o' cigarettes, I stop by the ashtray-bin things set out either side of the toilet doors. Two lasses are stood there also, one puffin' on a pencil-lead roll-up, the other grimacing her way through a counterfeit Regal King Size. "The thing about it all" says the roll-up woman, "Regardless of whether it was good or bad, and I'd put forward the notion that it leaned nearer the former than the latter, regardless of all of that says I, it was still worth paying for, and why? If for no other reason than it shows to the multiplex honchos that folks are more than willin' to watch a film has subtitles, if'n they have the opportunity to do so.""Pavin' the way for the rest of the arthouse lads" says herself there with the bootleg fag."Well now, I wouldn't go that far. It's hardly an arthouse film. It's an action flick with pretensions, and in that regard it's not an inch removed from those Steven Seagal pictures where he kicks a man's throat but then no, it's about the environment, or it's about Buddha, or whatever.""I wonder what Seagal thinks of the Jews, now when you mention him?""Funny, I was wondering the same thing this morning. Or Van Damme. Would you say Van Damme has any opinion on the Zionists?""It would be odd, now, if he hadn't."An A4 sheet's been folded up and tucked away within my wallet, an A4 sheet upon which a number of points were noted and jotted throughout the screening. Of these notes and jots, the following might be considered a fair representation;"The humor in the first half hour is by equal turns refreshing and god-awful. The dream sequence around the end of the first act is wretched and ridiculous and very very shitty.""Despite Gibson's braying to the contrary, the film says no more about the fall of the Mayan civilisation or about its parallels with Western civilisation in the here and now than The Omen III - The Final Conflict said about abortion. It's altogether possible that folks may well discuss said issues when discussing said feature-flicks, but that doesn't mean the works themselves do anything in particular to justify it.""The last hour and a half is astounding. Nowhere near as violent as folks've been led to believe, I doubt it's got a solitary drop o' guts more than Braveheart, but by God it's as invigorating as a shot o' raw ether to the bell-end for all of that. As the recent Empire review noted also, with regards Jungle Runnin' Trials, all the Big Hits are in evidence; Jaguars, quicksand, hastily-fashioned traps and tricks, darts fashioned from the poison of indigenous critters. Plenty crowd-pleasing catastrophe rained down 'pon the bellies and the faces and the tongues of both hunter and hunted." "Also, if a man were to fall asleep in the trailers and wake up 100 minutes in, he'd swear on all that's holy he's found himself sat at a screening of Predator. There are moments when Rudy Youngblood's performance is uncannily similar to that of, I believe, Sylvester Stallone in John McTiernan's masterpiece, particularly the bits where he's all mucked-up and lain o'er tree-branches glaring at the pursuers down below. It'd be a braver man than me would suggest Gibson hadn't watched the aforementioned Jungle Horror a time or two afore he got to growing that beard and pointing thon cameras. Maybe he also watched Predator 2 with his ol' mucker Danny Glover who's too old for this shit.""That birth shot was glorious. Best birth shot since Man With A Movie Camera, or maybe Warlock - The Armageddon. Special mention also to the birthing in Lars Von Trier's The Kingdom, and the similarly conceived (no pun intended, unless it made you laugh, in which case it was well intended, and worked out months ago) tomfoolery in Takashi Miike's Gozu."Being well-smoked and a touch knackered about the head-holes and in dire need of something feels like it was kneaded together from the sweat of the damned and the arse-gas of lepers from out thon establishment across the way, I made a final visit to the Gents afore departing.Within said off-white cocoon, two gentlemen are stood either end of the trough with the filths in the paws and the yaps all tuned to Gibson. "It was like Quest For Fire meets the trailer for The New World" says the one stood nearest the sink, fella with a Nirvana lyric tattooed around the back of his neck. "Or Ninja Scroll meets Pocahontas.""To tell you the truth" says the one nearest the rubber dispensary, "I thought it resembled nothing so much as The Passion. That bit with them wandering through the forests and the villages en route to the city, lugging thon wood about o'er their shoulders, sure wasn't it as near as dammit to Christ ascending yon hill, with the slow-motion and the eyes of the onlookers all empty and cold and, save us, lest we forget the evil children.""Aye, he's a wild man for a sprog afire wi' the devil, that Gibson."As chance would have it, I emerge from the pishers just as the woman in the purple cardigan from earlier is herself coming a-dandering out the Ladies. "Well" says I, "What did you think?"She shrugs. "It was alright, aye, was really good sometimes, was fuckin' shockin' at others. You?""I enjoyed it" says I. "Mean, it was no Passion, but it was as good an action flick as there's been since Face Off. Gibson obviously learned a thing or two from George Miller, sure as God.""Sure as God is right. By Noah's testes, I was half expecting one o' thon youngsters to fling a boomerang at the poor bugger."Stepping out into the sapphire nighttime, I bid farewell to herself there, and as I'm wandering o'er to the Poultry Shack I see sat beside the bins the protester from the opening paragraph. "How's you?" says I. He grunts and wafts his hand. "Away t'fuck" says he."What'd I do?""What didn't you do? 'An old man high on lighter fluid stands screeching at the crowds'" he recites. "'His lips lost midst the splurge of discombobulating foam done devoured the lower half of his face. His feet stomping in the puddles 'pon the steps, his right fist waving manic'… 'roaring and barking and threatening'"I run a hand about the back of my neck, stammering some. "Poetic licence, like.""You ridiculed me by way of nulling any point I made, regardless of how much sense said points done harbored. That's right nice, oh aye."He stands up, rubs the arse of his suit trousers, shakes the Rolex a time and wanders on towards the BMW parked by the path front the cinema. "Sorry" I shout. "I agreed with you, to some extent!"He raises his right hand, then a digit, then lowers the lot."Poetic licence" I repeat, shuffling a shoe o'er the gravel.Thanks, folks.

Movie Review: United 93

Duke De Mondo — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 10:56:15 EST

I9/11 In The Goon-ShackSeptember 11th 2001 I'm sat in the smoking room of a psychiatric hospital listenin' to a fella telling me all about the time Judas Iscariot sucked him off, out back some ale-house couple hours west of Jerusalem. "He earned his 30 pieces that night," says he, "I'll tell you that for the price o' a builder's rawhide. And I'd have happily given him thrice as much again, had I been in any position to give him anything. As it happens, I was well skint."I nod. "I dare say he'd have been a wild man for the willy, right enough.""Oh, save us, he was shockin'," says he, "Swear to God, the nuts o' fifty men couldn't o' held the lust he had boilin' 'tween the thighs."Round about, sulphur-mawed men and women sit muttering to themselves or growling at fag-ends or grinding great clods of theosophical cud atween teeth ragged and cragged and blackened and bent. In the center of the room, the Spice Girls sing about 2 becoming 1 from out a set of knackered speakers."Did he swallow, at all?" asks Garth, an old fella sat leafing through a month old broadsheet, pulling on a counterfeit Regal King Size."He done none o' that," says my companion, "And well he didn't. I dare say he'd have had no bother wi' thon noose, if'n he had've, for he'd o' been choked t'death there and then."For a time I sit watching the smoke rising up and out the throats of those assembled, great clouds o' grey / black fugg jiggering and jaggering out past trembling lips, wreathing about dope-dulled skulls, drifting past eyes look like candles flick'rin dimly other side of upheld bed-sheets. I watch that, and I watch also the woman in the corner, woman sat patting at her eyes with the end of a lipstick-stained sleeve, woman now and then mouthing the name of a husband she never met, of a son she never bore. I watch her, and I watch also the skyway other side of the glass door, I watch that skyway as the fly bound in the yarn of the arachnid's arsehole watches said spindly-legged bastard fidgeting on the other end o' yon web. I watch that skyway as the fella lain in muck and shit and the blood o' his friends watches some faceless phantom through the lens of the rifle held afore him. I watch that skyway with the stomach careering around my ribs and with the taste of a savage terror draped o'er my tongue as a shawl. "Turn thon up, there," says Garth, wagging a yellowed finger at the radio. "Turn it up, what's that he's sayin'?"From out the cracklin' fuzz of the airwaves, a woman announces that one of the World Trade Center towers has been struck by some manner of missile. A breathless fella talking via a mobile phone half-connection stutters and stammers and says about it just streaked across the sky, whatever it was, just careered o'er the heavens like thon plague o' liquid night Yahweh sent skiting o'er the stones of Egypt. From out the sky, it came.I turn away from the glass-door, and from that terrifying, infinite spread.In the TV room, a half-dozen patients are sat on their knees front the screen, with the flames and the fumes and the screaming and the roaring and the rubble and the ruin lashing at the gloom. "They interrupted Trisha,” says a young lass with a black eye. "And wasn't it goin' to be shown who the father o' the wain was, and me waiting three days to find out."The newscaster squirming in a tiny box bottom right of the screen, he's saying about it was an airplane, it turns out, an airplane flung like a dart from out the blue into the side of that building. They're playing with the possibility that it could've been intentional, but by who and for what reason they're not at all keen on hypothesizing at this stage.Couple nurses arrive at the door with the arms folded and the heads shaking. "Isn't it wild altogether?" says one, and the other, he sucks the air through his teeth and says "Break your heart, wouldn't it? And me and the wife with the flight booked for a month's time, sure it'd put you off ever rising so much as a foot off of the kerbstones, wouldn't it not?"The second plane hits the second tower in a 'ruption of red and orange and black, the screen wobbling, the gasps and the cries and the "Holy shit", the lot of us sat there with the yaps agape and the eyebrows twitching and back of the brains gnawed rotten by one thought thunk in unison; "Dear Christ, I hope they don't attack this hospital."Harry, an old auctioneer from a town few miles removed from Antrim, he stands up with a great snarl and, with arms flailing about him, he says "Didn't I tell you, and did youse listen? You listened none, and what now? Cities attacked on the TV screens there, and me preachin' war day and night. You'll listen now, heth you will, you'll want t'be hearing everything Harry has to say about the trenches and the mushroom clouds o'er Dublin."Harry, he's riddled with paranoia and schizophrenia, but he's saying nothing the rest of us aren't thinking. It's war. We're buggered."Will we be drafted, d'you think?" I'm asking Janet in the smoke room later that evening. "Look at me, how can I shoot a gun? By god I can barely blow a load 'gainst the porcelain without needing to be lain in a darkened room for a fortnight with the shame and the guilt risen like boils on my back, how can I fire an AK?""If'n they're draftin' it'll not be out the nut-house," she says, but Harry, sat across the way there, fiddling with a rolling machine, he's not so sure. "Suppose, now," says he, "You've got a load of healthy young men and women well trained and educated and fit as Samson's nut-sack. Suppose you've also got a bunch o' cuckoos in the wards there jigglin' like tuning forks off of wheel trims. Who's the first you send, who's the ones you fling in blind to test the place? It's not the elite, I tell you that. It's the goons, is who, for by Jesus it's better to loose a man already lost as loose one o' the able.""That's a load o' arse," says Janet, putting a hand on my arm, "Don't listen to him.""And anyway," she adds, quoting Morrissey afore he got time to think of it, "They attacked America. America is not the world. America's not County Londonderry."She says this and I'm thinking of the yellow M risen far side of the river, glaring o'er the town, casting shadows across the waters and the roads and the council estates. ("It's not actually an M," says a woman high on Winsor McKay, "It's arches.")I'm thinking of the Starbucks set for splurging incandescent out the ashes of the old record store used to be perched on the corner by the newsagents.I'm thinking how many times I've heard someone say "Totally" or "Random" this evening.Sometimes around 10 in the PM I'm sat on the edge of the mattress yackin' to the nurse, I'm saying about what are the chances, pray tell, of them maybe flying thon planes into the hospital here?"I wouldn't worry about that," says she, "For even if they did attack Northern Ireland, the chances of which are altogether very slim, even if they did, it wouldn't be the hospitals they'd go for.""Well what, then?""Oh, I dunno, maybe the banks or Stormont Castle or something. But they won't, anyway.""Can you promise that?" I'm saying, leaning forward, "Can you promise they won't, for I'd be a man would put a lot of stock in a promise, particularly one from out the mouth of a nurse.""I can promise you it's very, very unlikely."A friend of mine, lad suffers something savage from manic depression, he's been talking all evening about the folks who overpowered the hijackers on one of the planes, crashed into a field in Pennsylvania. Curiously, it's served to rouse him momentarily from out the insufferable blue's kept him pinned to the mattress like Christ to the cross for the past eight days. "Can you imagine?" he says. "Can you imagine the courage that must've taken? To bring that plane down? Can you imagine how beautiful those souls must be shining tonight?""No," I said. "No, I can't for a moment imagine it." And it's true. And I still can't.I fall asleep listening to a fella scribbling plans for a shelter into an A4 file-block. "Underground," he's muttering, "Underground is where t'be, and them boys'll all be waddling about the streets for they're stupid, is what they are, but no, underground, that's where I'm headed."II"Does the sky still scare you?" asks my ladyfriend, Beautiful Ms Gillian, the pair of us headed towards the doors of the multiplex one evening in sunny July of 2006."Not so much," says I, "The pills and the doctors and the occupational therapy and what have you, afore long they siphon out any such deranged notions 'till all's left's a sort of mucus dangling from atween the thighs. I still step in it of occasion, but it's nothin' a wire-brush and a prosaic lather can't shift."In order that there might be some canoodling and laughing and smooching of an hour or two, y'unnerstann, myself and herself, we figured we'd take ourselves down the street for to sit in the glow of a cinema screen for a couple hours. "You can pick the flick," said she, passing a newspaper my direction. "Whatever you want. Something fun.""Something fun," said I, nodding. "That'll be the very thing for us.""So this is about 9/11" she's saying as we dander towards the ticket booth. "It's that if it's anything, and it'll be amazing, I can assure you. Paul Greengrass, he's by all accounts gone out his way to fashion the starkest, tightest, most harrowing hour and a half of plane-based drama a fella could e'er envision. And by God, if his Bloody Sunday wasn't the best 'Troubles' flick since In The Name Of The Father then I don't know what at all might be."Beside the doors of Screen 3, a one-sheet's hung on the wall advertising Over The Hedge. "I laughed 'till I pished my mother's knickers," says the quote on the poster. Another assures us that "If'n it's a date film you're after, well by Luther's belly, this is the very article for you. Laughin' and canoodlin', that's what you'll be up to, if this is the picture you and the lady friend are viewing."On the United 93 poster, the quotes are all stunned silences. Closest they get to a sentence is this one from, I believe, The Sun; "Death… loss… my eyes crawl o'er my face like dying flies…""It'll be fun," I reassure Ms Gillian as we're taking the seats.An hour and a half later I'm staggering out the cinema like a hobo just pulled a bungalow out his urethra. "That was… I can't breathe. That was devastating... I'm devastated. My tongue's gone black, look, black as a miner's arse-crack. The best film of the year, and I know I said that about The Hills Have Eyes and also Brokeback Mountain and The Proposition but… no, film of the year, United 93 is."Ms Gillian, she's not so sure, and less sure again about how much "fun" it might've been, the whole affair. "I was kind of in the mood for… y'know. A good time?""Hmm," says I, scratching the chin. "You were, and so was I, and yet there we sat choked and silent afore thirty minutes of men muttering confused commands to one another followed by an hour of people hurtling to their deaths."The pair of us wander ashen-jawed to the car-park, contemplating the horrors scarred thon screen.Still, we look like giddy dope-drunk cherubs bathed in God's lambent dribble in comparison to the poor bastards stumbled out The Da Vinci Code round about the same time. They claw at others ear-lobes and scratch confounded laments o'er others legs. "I thought I'd died half-way through" says one, "But then, didn't I come to my senses and see no, I hadn't died, and worse, there was near an hour and a half of the fuckin' thing left."Similar sentiments mouthed by angry punters stompin' out The Wind That Shakes The Barley. "Has Ireland not suffered enough?" says one. "First the potatoes wither and rot 'side the turnip, then the civil war, then the troubles, and now, maybe worst of all, Ken Loach.""Aye," nods the lass beside him. "It's more than any nation should be asked to tolerate.""It'd be a braver man than me," says the young lad crawling on hands and knees behind them, "Could put up with a quarter of it."Bravery. It's something United 93 has a man considering long into the following Thursday.IIIEarly January 2007 and I'm watching United 93 for the fifth time, sat in the living room with an old blanket strewn about me and a bent cigarette dangling out the maw. Every viewing, a whole new set of questions rises out the murk of the mind.What would I have done in that situation? Would I have fought, would I have stormed up the aisle with the fire-extinguisher thrust this way and that, or would I have sat weeping into an in-flight magazine chewing on rosary beads and whispering Hare Krishna?How many of the folks who died on that unholy morning did so whilst rejecting with all their hearts the counter-measures taken against the hijackers? How do we feel about those individuals? Are they heroes also?Are there any heroes here? Why is a film about the most horrendous, terrifying, tragic situation a man might imagine so exhilarating, so stirring, so life-affirming?Part of the answer to the last, of course, is that no answers whatsoever are provided for any of the others.United 93 is the best film of 2006 and the best of Greengrass' career thus far. It's probably the bravest, also. "Oh aye?" says an ol' queen stood jabbing at the buttons of a poker machine in the far-end of the tavern later that evening. "And what's so brave about it, at all?""What's not brave about it?" says I, closing the notebook a moment. "That it goes out of its way to present the hijackers as human beings is in itself a fairly brave move.""Human beings, is that right? Funny now, for all I saw were a bunch o' screeching yahoo's racin' about the place with red headbands on. They were caricatures.""No they weren't, and here's why. For all of the Hard Man posturing they might've employed once they'd gained control of the plane, United 93 never once suggests that these people aren't fucking terrified, at least as terrified as the people they're bent on killing. They're terrified but they go ahead anyway, and why? Well, for any number of reasons. That it was too late to do anything else may be one. That death by that stage was a lot more welcoming than the consequences they'd face should they decide to abandon the whole wretched plot, no doubt that played on their minds. But at the bottom of it all, see, is the belief that what they were doin' was right. Greengrass refuses to present these people as monsters, I'd wager, for at least two reasons. One of them is that they weren't, at least as far as they were concerned. What they did may be evil, and surely you and I both agree on that. But were they evil? To be evil, does a man not need to be consciously acting against the notion of goodness? They didn't think that for a second."The queen tuts and shakes his head. "Moral relativist horse-shite." He takes a jag of whiskey out the pint glass on the table-top next to him. "And what's the other reason? Why else does he so 'humanize' them, then?""Because to buy into the notion of an ultimate evil, to assume certain individuals are inherently, unalterably so, takes a hell of a lot of responsibility out of the hands of folks like us. And we have a hell of a lot of responsibility. At the very least, we have a responsibility to reduce the chances of folks like those onboard that flight ever having to make those kinds of decisions again." The queen spits onto the wooden floor. Me and him, we disagree on most everything, but oh how I cherish our debates. "So the best of the year, according to you?""It is that. If for no reason other than it manages to be the tensest, most exhilarating thriller of the decade without ever once resorting to thriller tactics. Half an hour or more we're watching men watching tiny monitors, and yet look at these knuckles, still white however many months later.""Well" says he, "I'll take a quarter of Passenger 57 over a dozen o' them. Wesley Snipes. Now there's a man knows how to keep an arse in shape.""That he does" says I, opening the notebook again for to finish off an article all about how United 93 is the best film of 2006.Thanks folks.

Movie Review: Beat Angel - A Film About The Spirit Of Jack Kerouac

Duke De Mondo — Mon, 27 Nov 2006 22:20:38 EST

On October 21 of 1969, with the grog-battered liver misshapen and warped and slumped around his gallbladder like the folds of a heifer's arse stretched about the head of a fried sparrow, with his skin yellowed and his skull afire, Jack Kerouac let fly his last lilting haiku from atween the sheets in St Anthony's hospital, Florida, or front the telly in his living room, depending on who tells it. Kerouac, who had spent the past twenty years etching the blueprint for an original, spectacular, incendiary, wholly holy form of writing, he died the predictable, depressing, sad, uninspired death of the Renegade Writer.That this man who dedicated half his life to kicking and pulling and tugging and spitting and lashing and thumping at cliché should die a cliché himself… God above, the irony of it all. Sure wouldn't it have you chuckling something wicked if it didn't break your bastard heart.But there you go, such is life.Now, couple nights past I was musing along these lines with my ladyfriend, Beautiful Ms Gillian, debating the ins and outs of Kerouac's life and death and weighing up The Work against All The Other Guff and pondering off and on with regards the shower o' insufferable, stuck-up goons wandering the train stations at all hours high on every click and every other clack of Kerouac's much-mythologized typewriter. "Those individuals" I yapped in-between pulls on a Mayfair King Size, "Those elitist, pompous tools, they are surely The Establishment's revenge for the Beat Generation.""Have your fun" The Powers What Be done glowered, "But by Jesus you'll pay for it, I tell you that. And your children will pay for it. And their children. And their children's children. Then, it'll take a break on account of the children of those children will most likely be too busy playing with their second willies. But their sprogs, oh boys-a-boys, they'll pay a thousandfold what you paid. And the price? The braying and blowing of a thousand yaps in unison all gibbering wild about how On The Road changed their lives and do you know who you are, I bet you don't and no-one knows nothing 'till they've heard it told 'em through a fugg of stewed 'shroom."The final victory is that no one will ever again read On The Road or Big Sur or even Howl or Naked Lunch or The First Third and if they do, they won't mention it in public, and why? "Why?" asks Beautiful Ms Gillian."Because one o' them bastards might overhear, and next thing you know it's 'Oh, but you've never read it until you've heard it read, and you've never heard it read 'till you've heard it read on acid, and…' Saint's preserve us, sure it'd turn your head."She stubbs out her cigarette and through the waft of smoke rising from the ashtray she says "That's a touch bitter for you, that. And anyroad, what are you doin' now, if not talking about it? And thirdly, what's the point of it all, also?"The Point Of It All, it transpired, was that I had recently come into possession of a DVD entitled Beat Angel, being a film all about Jack Kerouac's spirit comes back to Earth on the thirtieth anniversary of his death for to inhabit the body of a vagrant, hang around at a beat poetry night being held in his honor and also discuss his life and work with a trio of struggling artists; the painter who gave up painting, the writer who gave up writing and the young lass still in awe of the power of a beautiful sentence lain o'er the page like an angel lain touching itself in the shadow of The Lord."Is it good?""Well that's the thing, I haven't watched it yet. I'm scared. I'm scared it's the work of one of them. I'm scared it'll be full of self-obsessed, pretentious knobs smoking dope and battering drumsticks off of beer-cans whilst a prat in a terrible sweater slurs for hours about some wank they heard their granddad having back when they were a kid." "I think you should watch it" she says. "You love Jack Kerouac. You dig the purple parpin' of a bop-fried trumpet of an evening. You're pretentious and self-obsessed. Go for it.""You're right" says I, and she was, and I did.Now, what happened was this:Some time ago, back in the coke-scourged haze of the nineteen and eighties, an actor/writer by the name of Vincent Balestri was busy wandering stages left and right and here and there delivering a one man show by the name of Kerouac: The Essence Of Jack. The play, conceived by both Balestri and Kerouac's first wife, Edie, turned out to be a funny, insightful, inspiring account of the fella's life and work and so, as is only fair, it proved right successful.Around the arse-end of the nineties, Balestri was concerning himself with bringing the show to the screen, discussing the matter at great length with fellow actor Frank Tabbita, a fella who, coincidentally, bears uncanny resemblance to Howard Marks, being another scribbler (although one scarcely fit to wipe the commas from Kerouac's blurbs) right venerated by, y'know, them, on account of he got high a whole lot one time.Tabbita probably said something along the lines of "Well, now, it's a grand play, but by the friar's o' Culloden, boy, would it be anything a man or a woman might want to sit afore in a movie picture-show for an hour and 39 minutes?""It's that and plenty more" I dare say Balestri asserted. "I'd wager they'll do that and they'll also buy the DVD with an excellent writers' commentary and also a 30 minute film of the stage show and a couple deleted scenes, and they'll enjoy it so much they'll forget all about the wanker stood front of them in the queue for Borat saying about the night he got drunk and wrote a novel there and then just nearly like Kerouac, and would've had it published, too, except it was just too personal."Balestri and Tabbita enlisted the help of director Randy Allred and writer Bruce Boyle and lo and behold, there it is, Beat Angel, A Film About The Spirit Of Jack Kerouac, and also, conveniently enough, The Film About Which I'm Talking.Beat Angel is a curious affair, and I'll tell you why here and now whilst I remember for I'd be a man fond of a digression if given half a chance. It's a curious affair because it seems to capture with right alarming clarity The Essence Of Jack whilst also being devoid of a good chunk of what that Essence had to do with. To wit; Style.Kerouac's writing has plenty to say about this and the other, and both of them articles are often worth a good fourteen or fifteen minutes-worth of contemplation far-side of a read over, but he also marries that substance with an incredible style. You might've heard tell of such things in one of the eighteen million and seven articles written about Kerouac's style in the past week. You might've came away from them with a thought in your head about how right enough, there's no doubting that the man had a wicked style about him.Beat Angel, as a motion picture, has plenty of substance. A man can scarcely skip from one frame to the next without hitting his shins the fuck off of a great wadge of substance sticking up out the floor-tiles. What it doesn't have is very much style, and what style it is in possession of is that of a trailer for a 1978 Abel Ferrara film about a man who has no style wandering stylelessly about a street nobody can find because it looks like a crap cardigan.It's oft-times stagey, the performances are somewhat eccentric of occasion, i.e., some of them aren't very good, the sound leaves a lot to be desired and visually, it's none too appealing at all. Whilst some folks, the aforementioned Mr Ferrara there amongst them, have made a virtue of such an aesthetic drought, Randy Allred oft-times seems like he's shrugged his shoulders and figured to blazes with it, the substance'll carry us through.Which it does, so plenty marks for foresight. At this point in the proceedings, me sat scribbling in a café filled with Spanish revelers all out their minds waiting for the fuck-club next door to open, a gentleman arrives out the gloom of the late evening and says some things along the lines of the following;"It's all well and good jerking the knee like yonder knee just jerked o'er that there page" says he, "But is it at all true what you're saying? Is it true, right enough, that from start to end Beat Angel employs none style whatever? I'd be right amazed if that were indeed the case.""Well" says I, "To tell you the truth, there are some stylistic virtues here and there, wee moments that pierce that veil of inherent… ugliness, for want of a better word. For one thing - and it's a marvel of a thing in itself - it is undeniably charming for to see a grainy, 16mm motion picture in this day and age. Bejeesus it warms the cockles fierce to see an ultra-low-budget independent film that's actually a film, as opposed to a video.""It is that" says the fella."And also, while I'm perched in the coal-hole of this particular train of thought, the scene that intercuts the death of Jack Kerouac with his momentary rebirth via yon hobo protagonist, that's right beautifully handled too." "And what of the…""And then, and then" says I, interrupting with a great flail of the arms, "Now, the open-mic 'Kerouac' performance that serves as the centerpiece of the whole enterprise, a breathless bop-lashed Definition of the man's manners and means delivered by a tsunami-tongued Balestri, that right there is perfectly realized. And so too are the biographical sketches potting the narrative there, wonderful scenes wherein Balestri plays both Jack and, by way of example, for I know you've got a thirst for some examples…""By Jesus I have that.""By way of example, says I, his publisher, or his high-school sports coach, or whoever." The old fella blows a fistful of nose-muck into a scrunched up wad of pink toilet paper and wipes the yap with the back of a hand. "So for that loose triumvirate of flourishes" he sniffs, "If nothing else, you could almost say that your remark about the film has no style is in itself a terrible fallacy.""I dare say so. But if'n I'm to give a right proper review of the whole enterprise, which is what I'm set for doing as a matter of fact, it's surely only fair that I must mention the overall sense of none much prettiness nor flair whilst also leaving space aside for a few points the likes of which we've raised here and now." "I'd be keen to see the state of your tongue after tryin' to wrap it around such a contradictory set of musings."And me too, I'm soon thinking. And me too."But enough of the style" says Beautiful Ms Gillian the following evening, "What of this substance?" She says this to me whilst the pair of us are stood about a pool table in a bar a shit fling's shy of the university. She says this and thank God for that, for if she hadn't I could've spent another twelve paragraphs talking about how much most of the mercifully-brief dream-sequences annoyed me and what have you and afore you know where you are you've got a Negative Review, you've got Three of a possible Nine stars and no, that would be wrong, for I enjoyed Beat Angel immensely. Principal to my enjoyment was the writing, fittingly enough, but I'll concern myself with that in due course, for first of all a man must rightly applaud the central performance of Mr Vincent Balestri. The central performance of Mr Vincent Balestri is a thing of no small wonder, right enough, straddling that line 'twixt cute caricature and Proper Performance with incredible, assured grace, much like Phillip Seymour Hoffman managed in Capote, a film about, if my sources are accurate, celebrated author Dean Koontz. The Voice, specifically, is eerily accurate. Thon banter-patterns are spot-on, all monotone stretches all a sudden set upon by manic, 'lectric charges of jiving, evangelistic delirium, and then again with the drooping and the slouching of the vowels and the shit-myself-waddle of the consonants. "Would you say he's the stand out then?" Ms Gillian enquires as she pots the black for to shame the five red blotches still looming out the green on account of I'm crap at pool. "No, on account of I'm exceptionally good.""Fair enough. And yes, Balestri is the man the eyes crave and the ears pine for throughout much of every scene. Although, in saying that, the other principals are by no means a pox on the fine profession of the acting. For sure, there's the odd line delivery here and there has a fella pickin' splinters out his ears for a fortnight, but now and then they right blossom, they do. Soon, a fella's noting the sadness in your painter woman's eyes, the flickering of both naivety and uncertainty in the shrug of the young scribbler's shoulders and the curious amalgam of sorrow and resentment and spite and affection all flushing about Tabbita's well-slung jowls."And then, as I hinted up yonder, there's the writing.The poetry let loose now and then for to thunder about the screen like a herd o' buffalo afire with rabies and with Christ… the funny, altogether right touching slabs of biographical anecdote related with much color and charm and wit every so often… the grand banter about Kerouac was a God, no, he was a twat matter of fact, no, he wasn't etc etc… All of it, most every syllable, is glorious. Refreshing and thought-provoking and sore beguiling, and by the punctured palms o' Padre Pio it's liable for to leave a man with fierce erection of the brains, or a touch o' cerebral panty-weep, if'n you're perchance a lady."It's inspiring, is what it is" I'm telling a fella sat half-asleep 'front a re-run of The Good Life. "Inspiring.""Oh aye, is that right?""It is right, an' all. Inspiring."For as much as it hollers wild about Kerouac, for as much as it has the man's name in the title and his words running rings around the celluloid, for as much as all of that, Beat Angel is nonetheless a flick less concerned with Kerouac than it is with Inspiration.At risk of soiling my Review Card beyond any measure of hope however faltering, I'll go ahead and relate that immediately before and after viewing Beat Angel I myself was sat six chapters deep in the scribbling of a grand novel that's been frying my fuck right useless for much of the past seven months. Battering at one sentence in particular, I was, and with the smoke stinging my eyes and the nausea stringing a terrible chorus o'er the stave of my caffeine-scourged gut.In need of a kick to the stimulation glands, and with none coffee left to my Mother's maiden name, I watched Beat Angel and found myself, far side of it all, with at least five words I'd been lacking hitherto, and if those five words weren't the finest I'd utilized all week then by God they were right close.It's impossible to watch Beat Angel and not be inspired, is the truth of a case. Play it front a drunk and you'll find he's concocted seven brand new hangovers first thing in the morning. It's like yonder Dream Machine William Burroughs sat staring at for hours of a winter's morn, it sets light the crud all hanging about the thought-chutes and melds the resultant pus into something not a skip and a twirl north of Thoughts Worth Thinking. And, praise Jandek, Thoughts Worth Writing where I was concerned.The ashen-chinned crowd, it cries Conclude, and so aye, In Conclusion;Even here and now in this year of 2024 or whatever the fuck it is, even now when a man can't fart twice in succession without a youngster sniffin' about the arse for to upload the texture of the gas onto YouTube, even now when no one remembers what it was like to see something that didn't clip and stop and start every so often and with the sound running four minutes and 14 seconds ahead of the visuals, even now, says I, Beat Angel could quite possibly appear jarringly lo-fi to some folks."The lower the fi the better!" cries a lad wearing a Bonnie Prince Billy armband, and I raise a hand, I say "You'll get no argument from me. But for some of us here it could rightly put us off proceeding much further than the opening two and a half minutes."But that would be a grand mistake, because whilst Beat Angel is far from perfect and whilst it lacks a bit in the aesthetics, it is nonetheless for all of that a joy to be in the presence of. It's got Heart enough for a thousand and six renditions of What About Love? It has enthusiasm and charm and by God it has a right savage way with the words.What more could a man ask for with regards a flick concerned with Jack Kerouac?"Maybe a bit where he points out the myriad myths about his life and work and corrects them, since for a film so preoccupied with Truth, it is right enough well indebted to Fiction."Well, maybe so, but in the world of Films What Are Indeed Real And Have Indeed Been Made, Beat Angel is as beautifully soulful a picture about Jack and Writing and Time and all that stuff as anyone has yet gone ahead and conceived.In the still of the wee hours with the sleepers still unpopped from the packet and with the head hung weary on my shoulders, I figured I'd forget about Chapter Seven for a time and watched Beat Angel again, and then the 1986 feature documentary Kerouac. As fine a double bill as I've ever been sat afore, that right there.I fell asleep with my head on a week-old Guardian. Thanks folks.