Category Archives: Media & Marketing

Media & Marketing, Personal

Alienation (part II): musings on Kryptonopolis

Another thought, on the same subject, but slightly distinct, that might go someway to further describing my state of mind, would be to draw an analogy, and given the exact type of Gareth Ian Michael Peter that I am, I’m going to do that by reference to that last son of Krypton we all know and love; Clark Kent/Kal-El.

Now, Superman, as the Crash Test Dummies observed, never made any money whilst saving the world from Solomon Grundy. But that’s really neither here nor there.

One of Superman’s most genuine dilemmas, as explored by the TV-series Smallville and a couple of the comic lines (although not recently) is the conflict between his homeworld and his adopted planet. In many ways, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster (Kal’s creators) had a pretty good feel that nurture won out in the n/n debate. Kryptonians were self-centred, soul-less and emotionless creatures; although Kal’s parents are generally depicted as anomalous, they were products of an entirely alien civilisation.

So what should Clark feel? Sure, a loving upbringing, good education, super-powers – but did he ever feel he belonged? Like Peter Parker, and so many other heroes (these are amongst the observations my brother made recently made in a paper he wrote on Superhero mythology, not currently available online, but go read Joseph Cambell’s Heroes with a Thousand Faces for an indication of where he’s going with it), Clark never belonged anywhere; not at school, not at the Daily Planet, only just with the Justice League… (ok, I sense I’m taking this too far, but you get my point).

I don’t think my current state of mind is particularly different or special from anything that anyone goes through, but there are obvious parallels (although my genetic heritage is kinder than Kal’s – except in the super-powers department, obviously). Born with so many cultures attached that I’m incapable of sustaining a single accent, have absolutely no idea who to support in the football (or any other sports), and can never say “we” when referring to a nationality or people. All I have is a general sense of obligation to the greater good, my family and my friends.

So, in a lot of ways, I really am Superman.

Sorry this is all a little weird. I should probably have got a little more sleep this weekend.

[Listening to: Queen of New Orleans – Bon Jovi – (04:28)]
Media & Marketing, Personal, Television

Scrubs (a lot of spoilers, both about television and my psyche, below)

I’ve been suffering a little lately from thinking too much and writing too little. And obviously a complete inability to express any of my feelings or frustrations to real people (well, this isn’t usually a problem, but I only really like doing it when I’m in a good mood). So its time for a vent, and, well, a return to the good old form, so I’m going talk about me for a while.

At least part of the result of my recent pent-upness was my nearly breaking down while watching the finale of Scrubs tonight. I always joke when I talk about my reactions to watching films; saying that the last time I was genuinely moved [to tears] while watching a film was when I was six and Optimus Prime died in Transformers: the Movie. Not wanting to denigrate the poignancy of that moment (I’ll never forget the passing of the Matrix to Ultra Magnus), but truth be told, particularly recently, a number of books and films and television programs have had a disproportionate effect on me. Or maybe I’m just getting soft in my middle-middle-age.

But (and most of these I’ve blogged about recently), the MASH finale, the Friends finale (least of these), Kavalier and Clay, and tonight, the season finale of Scrubs, all drove me far further into emotional exposition than I’ve gone in a while.

I don’t really know what the specific causes of my sudden empathy is; there are specific aspects of each that struck a very powerful chord with me; with the MASH finale it was Hawkeye’s breakdown; with Friends it was the fantastical closing of the Ross/Rachel deal (tired, but I was touched), and with Scrubs it was the much more real and much more tragic failure of JD and Elliot to normalise their friendship after the love yous/love you nots came out uneven. With Kavalier and Clay it was the travesty that Sammy Clay’s life became (at least as I read it).

The common thread, and it may sound tenuous, but I guess that’s why this is about me, is the sense of alienation that surrounds each of the narrators (other than Friends, which I just don’t rate highly enough to attribute depth of character to any of the six. Except maybe Chandler). Hawkeye, JD, Sam Clay; despite the friends, teams and family that surround each of them, the stories are theirs: they are at the centre, their struggles are our struggles and ultimately they are alone.

I guess this mirrors a sense of isolation I’ve been feeling lately. It’s kind of hard to explain; despite living with my brother and having a (large) set of generally incredibly supportive friends and a job which provides both intellectual and social stimulation and continuing sense of affirmation, I’ve been feeling increasingly… well, just, separate. Distinct.

It’s a bizarre sensation. I am getting a lot more mileage out of my fiction, but it’s damn tiring. Methinks a thought-free vacation is called for.

[Listening to: Perfect Love Song – Blak Twang & Lynden David Hall – (04:40)]
Books, Media & Marketing

The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

…was possibly one of the most profoundly entertaining, moving and, well, I’ve run out of superlatives, but really BEST books I’ve read in, um, ever. Seriously. See the below post, buy the bugger.

I’ve had the same favourite book since I was sixteen years old travelling through Poland (“Catch 22”), which has now been superceded.

[Listening to: Echo – Incubus – Morning View (03:36)]
Books, Film, Media & Marketing

“What is the why?”

Am reading an awesome book at the moment, which I thought I’d heartily recommend to the interweb at large: It’s called the Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and its by Michael Chabon. Telling the story of a couple of Jewish boys during the second world war, determined to cash in on “Opportunity” when it comes along and write a comic book that makes them “kill” (i.e. a lot of money – its not obvious in the book’s context, either).

Joe Kavalier is a Czech immigrant to the US, who’s recently escaped Hitler’s grasp, and is a prodigious artist and trained escape artist. Sammy Clay, Joe’s cousin, is an ambitious, but mediocre, artist, with a strong entrepreneurial bent, a gimpy leg from a childhood bout of polio, an extremely creative mind and a big heart. “What is the why” is Joe’s question to Sammy when wondering about the motivation of the hero of their comic book.

It’s a fantastic tale, and makes me excited about Spider Man 2, which according to Tom is written by Mr. Chabon. Tom should know, he tried to win a writing competition which the big MC adjudicated.

Of course, which such a great name, and such a good story behind it, it was merely a matter of time before they made a movie.

[Listening to: Walking After You – Foo Fighters – The Colour and the Shape (05:04)]
Media & Marketing, Music

Yowza

I’ve just found out what ‘Butterfly’ by Crazy Town was sampled from. It was RHCP (see below)! Man! Original,as you might imagine, rocks much more!

[Listening to: Pretty Little Ditty – Red Hot Chili Peppers – Mother’s Milk (01:37)]
Media & Marketing, Miscellany, Personal, Television

The one with the tribute

(or, the one where Armand avails himself of the ire of every female reader of the inter-web through an act of extremely childish and superficial and purposeless misogyny, poorly masked as aestheticism)

Friends came to a close. It saddened me, despite how average I thought the series had become by the 10th season. I have limited hopes for the spin-off, Joey, but I do hope it surprises me pleasantly.

Inspired, though, by a wonderful and silly anecdote from one of its episodes, and by a game I was encouraged into playing at a particularly embarrassing party for me, I have a compiled a list of my top 5 actresses.

So; not in any particular order, and selected for a plethora of, often random, and only slightly superficial criteria, here they are:

Kate Beckinsale
Sarah Chalke
Jennifer Connelly
Kirsten Dunst
Jennifer Aniston

I should point out at this point that their IMDB photos don’t do them the greatest justice, but they are nonetheless all very beautiful.

[Listening to: Already There – Goo Goo Dolls – Superstar Car Wash (02:46)]
Current affairs, Media & Marketing, Technology

The one where I try to catch up on all the things I’ve seen on the web for the last two weeks and fail

Since my recent silence began, this site has been visited by people from 27 countries, enabled by Google blogging, which has given a hundred mini- and un-optimized archive pages for each of my posts, and the friendly men at ‘G’ have also offered a terabyte of storage to selected Gmail users (not me). I’ve also audioscrobbled a fair number of songs, and have discovered a great new way to discover music based on music I like already, thanks to the mysterious ‘Bob’.

Tom has launched THE FIRST GLORIOUS TURKMENBASHI SHORT NON-FACTUAL WRITING CONTEST, Chris has been blogging in terms too geeky for me to understand although I still try, I’ve started reading the Economist Country Briefings to rid me of my occasional ignorance of events of world import.

Phew. And I haven’t even mentioned Tony Blair being attacked by a condom.

Oh. D’oh.

[Listening to: Girl Right Next to Me – Goo Goo Dolls – Superstar Car Wash (03:45)]
Film, Media & Marketing

B[ad] movie?

So I saw Van Helsing last night, Stephen Sommers’ new monster flick; a veritable beast-fest, in which an amnesiac monster hunter, Van Helsing (Hugh Jackman) is deployed by a special order of the Catholic Church to find and destroy Dracula, in Transylvania, and rescue the beautiful Anna Valerius’ (Kate Beckinsale) family from literal damnation. So far, one might think, so good. Or not.

In Transylvania, he fights a werewolf, rescues Frankenstein’s monster, punches Vampiric Oompa-Loompas in the face and comes toe-to-toe with Dracula and his three ‘brides’, as well as a near-infinite number of highly explosive vampire-babies. All accompanied by his very own version of Sancho Panza, the comical Carl, played by David Wenham (last seen being ever-so-slightly more manly as Farramir in the Lord of the Rings movies).

The film is hysterical. It can’t be judged by any objective aesthetic criteria; as a movie it is flawed; the plot is slightly convoluted, it has deus ex machina written all over it, characterisation is shallow and the resolution couldn’t be more cheesey if it was an excessively ripe gorgonzola with a best before date sometime in the last century. The one-liners are terrible (and therefore excellent).

As a pastiche, though, its brilliant. Reviews have slated it for demeaning the monster flick oeuvre (please!), and for its poor characterisation. But if you go in expecting silly, full-on entertaining hero-slaying-monster type action, and don’t suffer from any kind of cinematic lactose intolerance, you will be entertained.

Warning, though: if you are serious about your monster movies, don’t go. You’ll be upset at apparent flaws in logic, the comic lovability of Frankenstein’s monster, the cute yet explosive creatures, the terrible, but wonderful dialogue, and the Valerius family in the sky. Still, I had fun, and wanted to write something in defense of the film when everyone I went to see the film with came out saying it was “terrible, but I enjoyed it.” I think its more than just comically entertaining; I think they went for exactly what they got; a B-movie for the 21st Century, and a damn sight more entertaining than Mars Attacks (admittedly made in the 90s).

Oh – it has a soundtrack by the awesome Alan Silvestri (of minor fame from the Back to the Future soundtrack), which I also liked. And there was another deeply weird trailer – Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law and Angelina Jolie in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, a 1940s SciFi flick (oh yes). Can’t wait, now.

[Listening to: Staring at the Sun – The Offspring – Americana (02:14)]
Film, Media & Marketing, Television

The good, the bad…

The good: the M*A*S*H finale. For those who didn’t know, M*A*S*H was a TV series that ran from 1972-1983, spun off a 1970 movie of the same name. It stands for “Mobile Army Surgical Hospital”, and the series (and the film) is a satirical take on the Vietnam war, set, appropriately enough, during the Korean war.

Struggling through a mediocre first few series, the characters and storylines matured into genuinely profound reflections on war, wartime morality, and how individual characters struggled with the lunacy of their situation. As with all good things, though, it came to an end in 1983 with a two and a half hour special, outlining the end of the war, the main character (Alan Alda, playing Captain ‘Hawkeye’ Piers) having a nervous breakdown, and each of the other major members of the cast dealing with their own drama.

I started watching M*A*S*H on my Dad’s inspiration a couple of years ago, the repeats obligingly running on Paramount Comedy twice daily and Tivo carefully picking them up for me, and have been moved by various episodes. It’s truly well written at times, and absolutely brilliant in general. The finale was no exception; watched on its original screening in 1983 by 106 million people, no sitcom has, in the intervening time, got close to those numbers, not even the up-and-coming Friends finale. I think they’re starting to release MASH on DVD now; if you haven’t seen it, you should really try to get hold of some.

Oddly, I hadn’t seen the finale at the time I had my dream about it. Peculiar.

The bad: Secret Window, Johnny Depp and Stephen King’s new film. Utterly mediocre, despite a decent performance from Mr Depp as a heartbroken novelist, the twist was genuinely completely predictable (and I normally don’t get these at all), and not really entertaining in any real way. Unless you want to see Mr Depp put on a Mississipi accent and wear a funny hat….

[Listening to: Miami – Will Smith – Big Willie Style [UK] (03:18)]
Current affairs, Media & Marketing, Personal

The girl all the bad guys want

Writing and therefore thinking, once again, on altruism – and trying to understand more fully some of the things that supposedly tie in to my world view.

I believe, in a nutshell, that humanity is predisposed to altruistic motivations (and therefore altruistic behaviour, on occasion when akrásia fails). And I believe there’s an evolutionary basis to this (and all other) morality.

What, then, is my view in light of the obvious and evident acts of torture and brutality that’s been going on, by the supposed good guys?

I guess, and this is something that Michael Madsen (Mr Blonde of Reservoir Dogs fame) says when talking about how to best play the bad guy: the bad guy never believes he’s the bad guy. Although this is not the most original thought there’s been, I think nothing could be more true than for the ‘crusaders’ in Iraq – watching their friends die in what they’ve been told is a war on evil, a war on terror.

The travesty, of course, is that no-one is quite speaking in terms of these acts of atrocity as acts of terror, acts of evil. They are atrocities, but somehow one accepts atrocities in war and we remain entrenched in the rut. I think someone needs to through the hyperbole back into Bush’s face and then we’ll see how grey his black and white universe is.

[Listening to: One Last Shot – Klaus Badelt – Pirates of the Caribbean OST (04:46)]