Haven't written anything on this for a while - I've been spending my spare time trying to write a graphic novel and trying to sort out some animation for a music video (both things I should be doing at the moment, but I thought I'd write this instead for a bit).
Other stuff I've done:
I've read Stewart Lee's book 'How I Escaped My Certain Fate...', which I really liked - I had actually seen all of the shows that are transcribed in the book, but it was good to re-look at them. It did make me have a very disturbing dream where I was making a ventriloquist dummy of Stewart Lee though - I kept having to show the dummy to Lee himself, only for him to say it wasn't good enough over and over again.
I started watching some of the films in the hammer horror box set that I brought some time ago: 'The Plague of the Zombies' is the best of the ones I've watched so far - it's a strange film set in Cornwall with a great hero in the form of an oldish man with a tash that arrives from London to sort out the zombies. I tried to watch 'She', but couldn't get passed the opening scene, which features Bernard Cribbins dancing.
Saw 'Ghost Stories' at the theatre in London, which was good fun but not nearly as frightening as I thought it was gonna be.
Tuesday, 7 September 2010
Monday, 12 July 2010
The Road
I read the Road by Cormac McCarthy in two days. It was very bleak indeed. But it was strangely compelling. Considering you don't find out what the two main character's names are, and that, for the most part, not a lot happens, it's hard to put the book down. It's mainly about a father and son walking around a post-apocalyptic dead world pushing a trolly, trying to find something to eat. But you probably know that anyway, seeing as the film of the book was everywhere a while back. I haven't seen the film, but reading the book made me think that maybe it should just stay as a book, that a film doesn't need to exist. What a book can create with a few words, would take a load of money to create on the big screen, and whats the point, if it doesn't add anything to what has been created perfectly as a novel?
Friday, 9 July 2010
Top 500!
Just got back from a couple of days in York. On the last night we had a few drinks in a city centre pub. Very nice it was too. And whilst I stood at the bar waiting for my first drink to be pulled, I couldn’t help but listen in to a conversation being had by the two blokes next to me:
They had a print-out of guitar tab for a song (annoyingly, I couldn’t see what the song was, although I think it would diminish the tale somewhat, rather than enhance it, if the song was actually known) and the chord progressions on the print-out were being complimented. Then one of the men said that he didn’t actually know the song. And the other one replied that it was a beautiful song, and was definitely in his “top 500”. And I thought it was pretty amazing that he seemingly had a top 500 song list in his head. Then thought that the song couldn’t have really been that good if it had just made the list, and so was at number 478 or something.
They had a print-out of guitar tab for a song (annoyingly, I couldn’t see what the song was, although I think it would diminish the tale somewhat, rather than enhance it, if the song was actually known) and the chord progressions on the print-out were being complimented. Then one of the men said that he didn’t actually know the song. And the other one replied that it was a beautiful song, and was definitely in his “top 500”. And I thought it was pretty amazing that he seemingly had a top 500 song list in his head. Then thought that the song couldn’t have really been that good if it had just made the list, and so was at number 478 or something.
Thursday, 1 July 2010
Horror films are generally more horrifying when you haven't seen them.
I was never allowed to watch horror films when I was a little lad, and so, I think, they grew in my mind into truly terrifying things. And as they grew more terrifying, and more taboo, they started to seem more and more intriguing. I can clearly remember a girl at primary school describing how she watched Psycho on the telly through the banisters on the stairs, when her parents thought she'd gone to bed. And I remember someone describing Nightmare on Elm Street 3 to me in the playground and conjuring up horrendous images of it in my mind. When I eventually saw the film, of course, it was a crushing disappointment one scene I'd been told about that had stayed with me for some time, with the boy being used as a puppet with his veins as the strings, seemed particularly small-scale compared to the scene in my imagination - but by then I'd already seen a few horrors and was strangely compelled to see some more.
The first Horror film I ever saw was Halloween 3, which, in hindsight, is an awful film. It's also quite a strange film in that it doesn't feature the killer from the first two Halloweens but instead concentrates on a bizarre plot to create Halloween masks that send out lasers, triggered when some music plays from an advert for the masks, that burn children's heads off, or something. This didn't matter at the time, because I'd never seen or heard of the first two films. And I did find it pretty horrific: I think Iremember a spider coming out of a skull, and this, mixed with the fact that I was actually watching a horror film, something my parents wouldn't have allowed, was enough to be a bit thrilling at the time. I tried to watch the film again actually, when it was on telly last year, but I couldn't get through the opening sequence without being aware that it was going to destroy any remaining traces of dignity that it still has in my memory.
The first horror film I saw that lived up to the film that I imagined it to be was Dawn of the Dead I saw a trailer for this when I was quite young, before something like Arnold swarchenegger's Commando, or Nine Deaths of the Ninja, or something (I had a friend at primary school that was really into Ninjas that had parents that didn't mind what he watched. As a result we watched loads of ninja films). The trailer looked horrible and, again, lodged itself into the back of my mind. When I eventually saw the film it was, in fact, bigger and better than the film my mind had concocted. But, I don't know if I can class Dawn of the Dead as a horror film really at heart it's more of a strange kind of disaster film really isn't it?
The first Horror film I ever saw was Halloween 3, which, in hindsight, is an awful film. It's also quite a strange film in that it doesn't feature the killer from the first two Halloweens but instead concentrates on a bizarre plot to create Halloween masks that send out lasers, triggered when some music plays from an advert for the masks, that burn children's heads off, or something. This didn't matter at the time, because I'd never seen or heard of the first two films. And I did find it pretty horrific: I think Iremember a spider coming out of a skull, and this, mixed with the fact that I was actually watching a horror film, something my parents wouldn't have allowed, was enough to be a bit thrilling at the time. I tried to watch the film again actually, when it was on telly last year, but I couldn't get through the opening sequence without being aware that it was going to destroy any remaining traces of dignity that it still has in my memory.
The first horror film I saw that lived up to the film that I imagined it to be was Dawn of the Dead I saw a trailer for this when I was quite young, before something like Arnold swarchenegger's Commando, or Nine Deaths of the Ninja, or something (I had a friend at primary school that was really into Ninjas that had parents that didn't mind what he watched. As a result we watched loads of ninja films). The trailer looked horrible and, again, lodged itself into the back of my mind. When I eventually saw the film it was, in fact, bigger and better than the film my mind had concocted. But, I don't know if I can class Dawn of the Dead as a horror film really at heart it's more of a strange kind of disaster film really isn't it?
Wednesday, 30 June 2010
I'm gonna go to bed, and when I wake up I'm gonna be someone else
The Scapegoat by Daphne Du Maurier
I wrote a song a couple of years ago about going to bed one night and then waking up the next morning as a different person. And, having just finished "The Scapegoat" by Daphne Du Maurier, it seems to me that the song could have been based on this story, if I hadn't written it years before I'd even heard of the book. It's a great book - the unsettling beginning, where a man meets his exact double that then goes on to force them to exchange lives. is pretty dark. That the other man's family don't seem to notice any difference in the man seems a little far-fetched at first, but then you realise that you would just accept someone you know and love to be that person if they looked exactly the same, even if they acted a little strangely. The man ends up not knowing who he is at all, which of the two men is the real one and which is the fake; I read it as an extreme example of something I'm sure a lot of people go through in life, pretending to be different people on a daily basis, eventually forgetting who they really are.
I wrote a song a couple of years ago about going to bed one night and then waking up the next morning as a different person. And, having just finished "The Scapegoat" by Daphne Du Maurier, it seems to me that the song could have been based on this story, if I hadn't written it years before I'd even heard of the book. It's a great book - the unsettling beginning, where a man meets his exact double that then goes on to force them to exchange lives. is pretty dark. That the other man's family don't seem to notice any difference in the man seems a little far-fetched at first, but then you realise that you would just accept someone you know and love to be that person if they looked exactly the same, even if they acted a little strangely. The man ends up not knowing who he is at all, which of the two men is the real one and which is the fake; I read it as an extreme example of something I'm sure a lot of people go through in life, pretending to be different people on a daily basis, eventually forgetting who they really are.
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