Author: Robert Wringham

To Glasgow’s UGC hellaplex last night to see ginger Ron Howard’s reification of The Da Vinci Code. It has become a horrible cliche to moan about how lacking in substance this film/novel may or may not be. It’s a crime bestseller, no? A trifle. A yellowback. It should make an OK movie in terms of moving wallpaper. So on entertaining my first exposure to the Dan Brown franchise last night, I was determined to enjoy Da Vinci so that I might not join the ranks of morons slagging off the same harmless thing.

Unfortunately the movie was fairly bad. I must side with the miserable grumpholes who dislike it. The way in which Ian McKellen’s character interprets Da Vinci’s The Last Supper painting is moronic to a Face On Mars extreme and the guy who plays the monk-assassin should be shot at dawn.

But enough of this tot. It is the trailers preceding last night’s movie that I would prefer to discuss.

Now, while everyone knows that Hollywood is now an industry specialising in remaking old films, I must admit to finding it an unlikely possibility that every single mainstream film put out this summer is going to be a remake. Out of the seven or eight trailers I saw last night there was only one film which didn’t seem to be a remake – the new Adam Sandler vehicle: Click. And even that seems to be derivative of Pleasentville and Bruce Almighty and (according to the fora at IMDB) episodes of The Jetsons and Goosebumps.

(On the topic of Click, doesn’t the title suggest a film about a computer mouse rather than a TV remote? Shouldn’t it really be called “The Switcher” or “Knobs” or something? How about “Press the Red Button Now”? I also hate how Christopher Walken has allowed himself to be transformed into a grotesque parody of Christopher Lloyd.)

Casino Royale. Poseidon. Superman Returns. X Men 3. Mission Impossible 3. Omen 666. et cetera.

The fact that so many movies now are remakes, sequels or rip-offs of something else is interesting. It’s as though the film industry has become (or rather has always been) an “advancing parallel”. Where it once made stories inspired by real world events (even science fiction has some real world basis), movies now ARE the real world (or rather a sizable chunk of it in the ‘real’ world of those working in the industry) and so the natural thing for movies to do now is to turn to self reference in one way or another.

Movies refer to the world and in a world of movies all it can refer to are movies. In the case of an integral, interesting film in this reality, a film-about-films would be produced: some kind of metacommentary upon other films. But most of the time Hollywood will just opt for the remake, sequel or ripoff.

I also dislike how a film based upon a novel, comic book or TV Series is considered more original than a remake and in fact exists at all. Shouldn’t a movie be a movie for a reason? Shouldn’t a movie result from a movie script rather than a novel? It implies that (a) the movie is the highest form of art and that novels or comics are just raw material that the movie industry might take to mining and (b) an idea can exist an any form and not be specifically tailored for a given menium.

For example, Pleasentville is necesarily a movie and not a book. As is The Matrix. Jeff Noon’s Falling Out of Cars is a necessarily a novel and not an ice cream sundae. Boo to movie adaptations. Paul Auster, for example, is an author: not a franchise waiting to graduate to movie status.

The best two movie adaptations I can think of are Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation and Michael Winterbottom’s A Cock and Bull Story. The former is about the adaptation process and how it fails. The latter is a a filmed counterpart to a book rather than an adaptation, translating ideas to the screen and working with the book rather than mapping haphazardly selected episode of plot onto a screenplay format.

If one conducts a Google search for “The Liar”, the first link in the results list is to Tony Blair’s official biography at number10.gov.uk.

How does that happen? Has someone monkeyed around with the site’s metadata? Or is someone at Google being a naughty anarchist?

In case you’re wondering what prompted this discovery, I was looking for mentions of the Stephen Fry novel.

Heraclitus would have loved Glasgow’s Merchant City. It is in a constant state of flux – seldom can one be in this district during daylight hours without having to listen to a road drill or see a doll’s-house cross section of a building such as this one. I’m not sure why I took this photograph but I must have wanted it quite badly as I had to wait for about six construction vehicles to pass before I could get a decent shot.

On my way home, I was stopped by a young Sikh-looking man. He didn’t seem to speak much English and instead presented a laminated card. My racist brain told me to keep on walking as he was probably after a portion my precious dosh but he wore an impeccably sharp suit and so I discounted this idea and stopped to read his card.

A beggar he was not, but rather – his card announced – some sort of ‘swami’ capable of reading fortunes. This didn’t really make sense to me as ‘swami’, as far as I know, is a Hindu title and this guy seemed to be a Sikh.

If I had money I’d have probably humoured the guy, mainly to see how he could tell me my fortune without the gift of English language. But alas, I was coinless so I told him no thank you and continued on my way. “You are a very lucky man”, he said as I left.

This struck me as a rather nice thing to say considering I’d declined his offer. But then I couldn’t help wondering if “You are a very lucky man” might be some kind of curse or insult akin to the quasi-Chinese “May you live in Interesting Times.”

Following closely behind the young guy was an elderly Sikh man wearing a similarly amazing suit and with the biggest and most handsome turban I think I have ever seen.

The old guy produces a laminated card in the exact same fashion as his colleague had done, despite the fact that he must surely have seen me decline the offer already. “No thank you,” I said smiling and again I was told that I am “a very lucky man”. When he said this, the old Sikh rubbed the bridge of his nose from top to bottom. I am aware that I have a rather ‘defined’ nose: consequently I cannot help wondering whether my ‘luck’ has something to do with my being gifted in the conk department.

A quick google search for the phrase “You are a very lucky man” results in similar anecdotes but in these, the ‘Swami’ starts off with the phrase as a way of getting the traveller’s attention (and not, conversely, as a parting note). Perhaps the guys I spoke to just got their patter muddled up, much as they may have done with the term ‘Swami’.

If anyone actully knows what the phrase “You are a very lucky man” might mean coming from such people, please do not leave me curious.

In other news, points out that my recent Idler article has drummed up some stimulating conversation on the magazine’s accompanying discussion forum. It all looks remarkably critical, which of course I find rather thrilling.

My copy of the latest Idler arrived yesterday. I’m chuffed to see how suitably and marvelously grotesque is the artwork accompanying my article.

To be honest, I was surprised that they went to the effort of having so much art done for it. There are three full-page illustrations involved; each one depicting a person shedding their professional veneers in the forms of rubbery, besuited and soulless skins.

I don’t know the artist (B. P. Berry) but he or she has done a super job. Three cheers for B. P.!

In other news, I watched Jim Jarmusch’s fairly super Ghost Dog this morning. The soundtrack by RZA is superb and there is some wonderfully moving and funny stuff in it. I hate it when webloggers pretend to be film critics and I vow not to do it too often, but sometimes you enjoy a film so much, you just want to talk about it and Ghost Dog for me was one of those.

Perhaps my favourite motif is Ghost Dog’s relationship with a Haitian ice cream salesman. The ice cream man speaks French while Ghost Dog speaks only American English so neither of them understand a word the other is saying. It makes you wonder how they became friends in the first plce and why they both persist in this relationship. It’s not even as though they are just casual acquaintances either: both describes the other as his best friend.

Perhaps the film is telling us that conversation isn’t all it cracked up to be and the really important element in friendship is being together and keeping good company. Ghost Dog and Ice Cream guy just play chess and hang out together and show each other amazing things (including a neighbour who is slowly building a large wooden boat on the roof of his New Jersey apartment building despite being miles away from the water or even the ground – he’s clearly a modern day Noah).

Another excellent motif is the constant presence of cartoons. The smalltime mobsters Ghost Dog is involved with are forever watching Felix the Cat and Bettie Boop with expressions of quite serious concentration on their faces. Strangely, one of the cartoons they watch is The Itchy and Scratchy Show: a fact which has some serious ramifications in terms of intertextuality. Ghost Dog also wears white gloves, which kinda make him resemble and old-style Warner Bros or Disney cartoon a la Micky Mouse and he can be repeatedly shot and theoretically dismembered (much like a cartoon) due to his spiritual Samurai abilities.

The one thing that annoyed me slightly about Ghost Dog was the use of the Noble Savage stock character. I mean Ghost Dog is much more than that of course, but the fact that he’s an educated and gentle guy, encouraging kids to read books while simultaneously being a wild and casual murderer is a little annoying and reminds one of the horribly racist P. T. Barnum sideshow character, What is it?. I never had Jim Jarmusch pegged as a guilty liberal but I guess 9/11 has a lot to answer for in terms of New York film making.

Blah Blah Blah. Half-baked critique over and out.

Having watched every video I own to a grim and fuzzy death, I’ve begun scraping the barrel and watching what can only be described as meta-telly: the telly about the telly that you love so much, mainly in the forms of DVD extra features.

Most of it is rubbish, isn’t it? Pure bosh. Uninspiring and resulting only in downtime and the bursting of so many bubbles.

“Never meet your heroes, they only let you down”, sing The Bluetones, “I can see the cracks in yourmakeup the closer you are.” I’ve never put too much stock in that idea: I’ve met several of my “heroes” professionally, casually and as a stalking fanatic, and they’ve usually been nice and worldly dudes. But in metatelly world, it’s easy to discover that many of the people involved in the creative processes of making your favourite shows or movies are clueless boobs.

Watching the documentaries attached to American Dad! this morning, one of the voice artists tells me that “American Dad is just on another level. It can go anywhere. Just anywhere!”

No it can’t. And doesn’t. Family Guy might be able to ‘go anywhere’ with its use of non-sequitur but American Dad! doesn’t do any of that stuff and exists in a highly rigid format which can’t change very much. The characters occupy a unique Post-9/11 world of paranoia and racism and overtly conservative values. It can’t and doesn’t go ‘anywhere’ and that’s precisely why it’s great. It does what it does very well and doesn’t worry about ‘going anywhere’ like some homogenised general ‘TV show’*. Ya gink.

(*There’s a thought: what if, mass conformity and fear of trying new stuff eventually results in one single TV show called “Tv Show” or “The Broadcast”? Hands off it, Mr. Jeff Noon, that’s mine!”)

On a similar note, I remember reading a Guardian interview with Richard Kelly about his creating Donnie Darko. He said that the ‘philosophy of time travel’ story didn’t come about until the last minute and that his writing the book of the same name (or rather the manuscript since it was never actually published and Wikipedia actually describes it as fictional) was what made the film what it was. But without the time travel dimension, what the hell is Donnie Darko? Probably just some rubbish film about a kid with schizophrenia.

It makes you wonder whether the things that are great and the things that you love are only great and lovable by pure accident. Did Seth McFarlane actually set out to write a brilliant satire of American life or did he just want to do a cartoon with a talking fish in it?

Does it even matter? I once met Dr. Alan Rauch who told me that he was fascinated with bobbleheads. Now why the fresh dogturd would a published, respected academic have an interest in these ephemeral trend-inspired pieces of tat? Well, because they present a cultural archaeology. Why don’t they sell many ‘Jetsons’ bobbleheads today but they did in the 1970s? Et Cetera. Each bobblehead is semiotic and intrinsically connected to the culture it was born in.

So even if a show is brainless or only great due to accidental circumstances, it is irrevocably relevant to the ‘now’ in which it came from.

But that’s a digression. The moral of this diary entry is to GO OUTSIDE instead of watching meta-telly. Or at least invite your friends over and tell them to bring as many videos as humanly possible.

After my entry and our discussion the other day on what makes a good blog, I’ve decided that the key is to take a Sartrian approach to things. This’ll allow for personal anecdote, gonzo journalism and funny stuff.

Sartre On Adventure:

“‘What sort of adventures?” I asked him, astonished. ‘All sorts, Monsieur. Getting on the wrong train. Stopping in an unknown city. Losing your briefcase, being arrested by mistake, spending the night in prison. Monsieur, I believe the word adventure could be defined: an events out of ordinary without being necessarily extraordinary.'”
–Jean-Paul Sartre, Nausea (1964)

I’ve hardly moved from my position at the computer all day in the hope that I might finish my last ever university assignment due in on Friday. Once it is handed in, I will be Robert G. Wringham BSc MSc and (most importantly) a free man. Forever and ever. Well, actually there is still a dissertation left to write but the subject matter actually interests me and I don’t think writing it will be any shape of chore.

Despite my sitting here for something like five hours now, I’ve written little more than two paragraphs on the project. I keep procrastinating from writing it on the grounds that it’s just such a boring load of jiff. Forcing myself to think any more than I have to about WebDewey is like a sort-of self inflicted intellectual rape.

But in this quagmire of procrastination, I’ve found myself being quite productive in other areas. I fired off an email to Tom Hodgkinson, the editor of The Idler about my writing a regular feature for him. Astoundingly enough, he seemed quite sold on the idea and also remembered to send me a free copy of the new issue and a big pile of money for my last piece. Which was nice.

Incidentally, my last piece made the new cover – it’s the “Death to Professionalism” bit at the bottom, see? The cover on Amazon is slightly different though and doesn’t include me, so we’ll see what it really looks like when it gets here. The article is published in under my real birth name, I think, so if anyone wants to know what it might have been before I changed it in favour of a pseudonym a whapping five months ago, you might want to buy this issue. It has Michael Palin and Adam Buxton and some other people writing for it too, but you should buy it mainly for me.

I also managed to do a pile of admin, which was literally this high, emailed a bunch of people I’ve not spoken to in about two years, played six games of Pacman and killed literally two wasps.

What, in your opinion, dear reader, makes a good blog? Bloggery is such a freewheeling medium, it’s difficult to say, isn’t it? This blog, The Occasional Papers hasn’t really come into its own yet, mainly because I’ve been chimping around with the sorts of entry I write in it. I think I used to want to be Richard Herring and used my old blog to report comically upon the stacks of daily ennui and neurotic detritus that so plague the urban layabout. These days, however, I think the hight of blog perfection has been reached by Momus who uses his blog as a mixing tray for ideas and as a sort of well-informed online gonzo journalism.

Assuming that the number of comments a LiveJournal entry receives is a fair indicator of an entry’s ‘goodness’, I find that the best sorts of entry are the ones that relate to an issue that the majority of the blog’s readers know a bit about already. Trouble is: I hate writing about the news. I’m not in politics and anything I have to say about the news is bound to be a half-baked load of claptrap. If only some other bloggers realised that then the blogosophere could be a better, less littered cyberplace.

I try to write these days about art (visual, televisual, literary, musical, comedic) and the train of thoughts I experience as a result of it. To me, this is what an integral, considered blog should be like. But are other people interested in this? I met Stewart Lee recently who advised me not to go into standup comedy with an agenda (such as to be subversive) but just to talk about what interests me and let the ‘agenda’ be a byproduct. I’m not sure how I feel about this: if a comedian just wanted to talk about things of interest to him, why would he do it on a stage in front of thirty to three thousand people? If I wanted to write a diary of personal memoranda or things that interest me exclusively, then I wouldn’t publish it online but instead write it in one of my many notebooks. If it’s not going to entertain or interest other people then it shouldn’t be on the web.

I recall Dickon Edwards writing on a few occasions about what he thinks makes a good blog (or ‘diary’ in his case). He said that entries are best received when short and frequent. I think he’s probably right. The problem is though, that the reason they are so successful is that people (I strongly suspect) often treat their friends’ blogs like pieces of online daily admin: little chores that they have to get though, akin to checking email or their ebay stock. I know that I’m guilty of this. But there are blogs that I really enjoy (namely the aforementioned journals of Momus, Dickon and Herring and perhaps those of and ) that I actually like to savour and read properly. I’d like my to be like that for other people. Why shouldn’t a blog be an entity in its own right rather than just a piece of metacritical detritus floating around the web, akin to all those bits of debris in orbit around the planet.

Lots of people use their blogs to critique or respond to what a proper critic (in a newspaper/magazine/popular blog) has said about a TV show/film/album/gig. I don’t realy understand the motivation for doing this. The person being written about will never read the opinions recorded here (unless they play the google-my-own-name game and the blog is popular enough or covered with enough metadata to be picked up by Google). So why not write to the critic in question (they are usually quite accessible) or else take part in a discussion on Comment is Free? I realise as I write these words that I have bitched about a columnist in these electronic pages in the past. I guess there is a certain ‘psychological escape valve’ aspect to blogging: our blogs can serve as safe and soudproofed padded cells despite their being on a huge electronic stage for all to see. I wonder what we did to satisfy our desires for a soapbox before we had our webblogs? And what do the vast numbers of the blogless do?

Perhaps a good blog simply depends upon who’s writing it and what they do. Herring and Momus are constantly travelling and attend interesting events frequently enough to always have something interesting to report upon.

So, what makes a good blog? Why do you genuinely enjoy reading some of the blogs in your livejournal friends list and skip past others? What makes you leave a comment?

My friend, Stuart and I used to live in a remarkably average flat in Glasgow’s remarkably average Waverley Gate complex. I think we were initially attracted to it because it had a greater number of modern conveniences than many of the other flats we had seen around that time and because of the large number of friendly Indian families living in the same block, filling the halls daily with culinary smells both homeley and exotic.

After a while, however, we began to find this white-walled, electrically enhanced and overly functional modernist enclave a little too sterile and impersonal for our tastes. Plus, our upstairs neighbour turned out to be annoying twat, earning himself the Nabokovian pseudonym of ‘Mr. Honourable Upstairs’ due to his being a besuited office boy by day and noisy party fiend by night who would keep us awake by playing his 90s nightclub ‘classics’ and playing on his XBox with a hundred yobbish friends in the microscopic hours. When we discovered on top of all this that every single flat in the complex had the exact same interior, we decided to look for somewhere else. This was battery living.

We began to look for a place to live with a little more character, somewhere a little eccentric and more interesting. When we found that an attic had become available in an old Hyndland townhouse and that it was actually a slightly lower rent than we’d been paying in Waverley Gate, we snapped it up. Our neighbours now would be bearded academics and the sterile walls would be replaced by creaking pine panels and friendly single-pane skylights.

I had half-fancied living in a loft ever since reading Jerome K. Jerome’s On furnished apartments in which he writes:

“A good many great men have lived in attics and some have died there. Attics, says the dictionary, are “places where lumber is stored,” and the world has used them to store a good deal of its lumber in at one time or another. Its preachers and painters and poets, its deep-browed men who will find out things, its fire-eyed men who will tell truths that no one wants to hear–these are the lumber that the world hides away in its attics. Haydn grew up in an attic and Chatterton starved in one. Addison and Goldsmith wrote in garrets. Faraday and De Quincey knew them well. Dr. Johnson camped cheerfully in them, sleeping soundly–too soundly sometimes–upon their trundle-beds, like the sturdy old soldier of fortune that he was, inured to hardship and all careless of himself. Dickens spent his youth among them, Morland his old age–alas! a drunken, premature old age. Hans Andersen, the fairy king, dreamed his sweet fancies beneath their sloping roofs. Poor, wayward-hearted Collins leaned his head upon their crazy tables; priggish Benjamin Franklin; Savage, the wrong-headed, much troubled when he could afford any softer bed than a doorstep; young Bloomfield, “Bobby” Burns, Hogarth, Watts the engineer–the roll is endless. Ever since the habitations of men were reared two stories high has the garret been the nursery of genius. […] Huddle them up in your lumber-rooms, oh, world! Shut them fast in and turn the key of poverty upon them. Weld close the bars, and let them fret their hero lives away within the narrow cage. Leave them there to starve, and rot, and die. Laugh at the frenzied beatings of their hands against the door. Roll onward in your dust and noise and pass them by, forgotten.”

At last we could live the Bohemian dream! Living in an attic, we would clunk away on old typewriters while listening to my old jazz records on a crackly gramaphone and taking sweet tokes from a hookah. The Glasgow tour bus could stop here to demonstrate what a cliched West End ne’er dowell looks like.

But now I have discovered the problems with living in such a place. Jerome admits that he would not like to live in a loft due to there being too many steps and “too many facilities for bumping your head”. Both of these things I have found to be true and more.

Most every time I turn on a tap (a cold tap, mind you, for the hot water does not rise this high and must be manufactured using an expensive water heater) the flow explodes out in a combination of water and air, previously trapped in the pipes. The force of this escaping air is so stong that it turns much of the water into a fine and floating spray. It’s one way of getting washed first thing in the morning, I suppose. I’m assured that there’s nothing to be done about this problem: rather than being a fault in the pipework, it is a result of living at such a high altitude and with a system of plumbing not designed to bring water all the way up to the house’s lumber room.

And then there’s the wasps. There must be a nest in one of the rafters our beneath one of the roof tiles outside of the bathroom window. There have been three intrusions so far of gigantic, navally turgid wasps: big enough to have been written into reality by Jonathan Swift. I don’t like killing things (this being the driving force of my vegetarianism) but the thought of getting close enough to these monstrous things in order to trap and release them leaves me far too squeemish for words.

Because our wacky new home occupies what is possibly the highest point in Hyndland it does not have the same protection from the wind as the lower flats do from their neighbours on the same plane. So by night we listen to the wind howling around us and turning the walls into polar twins of the hotplate. It doesn’t matter how stoked the fire is (yes, we have a coal fire rather than any such thing as central heating), the place – through its sticking out into the windy sky and its woeful lack of insulation – will remain in one helluva chill.

But contentment is the enemy of invention, as Lucifer Davies says, so it is my hope that living in this cold, wasp-infested deathtrap will give rise to that first novel.

I should probably mention that I’m grumbling for the sake of it. There are many wonderful things to be said about our lofty dwelling, but those will have to wait for another Occasional Paper.

To Edinburgh’s Calton Hill last night to enjoy the Beltane Fire Festival. It was fucking great.