Pet Sematary by Stephen King: a review (Contains Spoiler...)

'I don't wanna be buried / In a pet sematary!' sing The Ramones in the theme song from the soundtrack of the 1989 film adaptation of Stephen King's book. Those lines, and the lurid video that accompanied it, were my first exposure to the story, which to my teenage eyes looked deeply stupid. I have been guilty of sneering at Stephen King ever since but after recently viewing the TV versions of 11.22.63, Salem's Lot and The Stand, I have grown to admire his relentless storytelling and his weird, trash-Gothic sensibility. And so nearly thirty years after having laughed at The Ramones' song (which nonetheless remained riveted in my memory) I finally read Pet Sematary itself.

           In the book, Louis Creed, a doctor from Chicago, and his family move into a house in a small town in Maine located close to a pet cemetary. After the family's cat, Church, is killed by a passing lorry, elderly neighbour Jud Crandall urges Louis to bury the animal in an obscure area behind the cemetary, triggering a cycle of macabre events and revelations about the sordid history of the area.

            I will admit that there were stretches of saccharine dialogue (of the 'Daddy, I wanna go pee-pee' variety) that had me gritting my teeth in exasperation and the ending was little more than a B-movie custard pie in the face.  But otherwise this was a compulsive read with a lot of suitably taut prose and decriptive passages of real visceral power. 

             There is something very compelling and plausible about the book as an exploration of loss and grief that raises it above the level of the run-of-the-mill thriller and had King held back on the excesses of the ending, he might have achieved something genuinely haunting and even poignant. But this is clearly a writer wihout literary pretensions who is more interested in the grand guignol potential of his story and it's hard to begrudge him his wish to entertain his readers.   

Wild Cards in the World of TV Sport

Nowadays, snooker commands little more than a footnote in the sports news and most of the focus of BBC’s Forty Years At The Crucible was on the period in the 1980s when the green baize was a virtually inescapable presence on TV screens throughout the winter. So unsurprisingly, a good three-quarters of the programme was devoted to that era and to players who had the good fortune to be in the top tier at the time. They rolled out the old jokes about Steve ‘Interesting’ Davis, Dennis Taylor’s outsized glasses and Willie Thorne’s baldness, and there was talk about the 1985 final (the apex of the sport in terms of viewing figures) and Cliff Thorburn’s televised 147 (an extremely rare feat at the time).

In an audience mostly comprised of former and current snookerers, the Chinese players didn’t seem that interested – the camera caught several of them looking at their smartphones while presenter Hazel Irvine tripped down memory lane with one middle-aged ex-pro after another. In a country where Ding Junhui, their most successful player, commands viewing figures in the hundreds of millions, it would be easy to understand why they mightn’t be so interested in nostalgia.

While snooker is a ‘new’ sport in China, and one that is thriving, the sense that in Britain it is clinging to the past was compounded by supremo Barry Hearn’s announcement that veterans Jimmy White and Ken Doherty would be given invitational tour cards to allow them remain in the professional ranks for the forthcoming season.  Speaking on the programme, Hearn said, 'They are multiple ranking winners in their own right but great ambassadors for the sport of snooker'.

You can’t say they (White, in particular) haven’t given a lot to the sport but this move smacks of desperation, a decision based on sentiment and popularity rather than on the players' ability to compete at the highest level. 
Snooker has a history of depending on ‘characters’ to win over the agnostic viewers. In the 1980s, the players, most of whom had spent years as amateurs, were mostly very open in expressing their frustrations with what is a fiendishly complicated game. Grimaces, despondent head shakes and wry smiles were all part of the entertainment.  As in just about every sport, there was less money, less pressure and more fun.   The most successful player by far was the conspicuously professional, and impassive Steve Davis and the players who followed in his wake were by and large, versions of him. The puckish and brilliant Ronnie O’Sullivan, who has a mutual love-hate relationship with the snooker authorities, is the glaring exception, and interest in the world championship drains away after he is eliminated from tournament.   

  Women’s tennis is probably in a similar state. Maria Sharapova, recently returned from a twelve-month ban for neglecting to follow a directive regarding drug supplements, has received wild card entries for three tournaments who feel that they need her to boost their profile. Following the news that the pregnant Serena Williams has pulled out of the tour, it is likely that Sharapova will be offered further wild cards. After all, this is the second or third most recognisable tennis player in the world, the one whose face is on adverts and in magazines that reach far beyond the sport and tennis, like snooker, relies heavily on star quality to draw in spectators and viewers.

But it’s hard not to feel some sympathy for less famous (or unknown) snooker or tennis players who may be bumped out of a tournament in favour of older, established stars who have been saved the bother of going through the qualification process.   

The National Broadcaster

Has anyone seen RTE’s ‘Dancing With The Stars’?  Hundreds of thousands of people apparently. What about ‘Operation Transformation’, another of the station’s sure-fire ratings winners? Despite having watched neither of them, I am very aware of their existence and I know that Des Cahill was a participant in the former show. During their recent runs, it was hard to avoid them because RTE radio one rarely missed a chance to advertise them via regular mentions on Ryan Tubridy and Ray Darcy’s shows. And there was even some light banter about ‘The Stars’ on the usually grim Morning Ireland. 

There’s an in-built assumption in this very parochial approach that the listeners are also regular watchers of RTE television and that other people (a fair-sized chunk of the population, mostly aged between 0 and 35) can go away.  RTE know their audience and are determined to hold onto them, rather than try to find new listeners and viewers.  As far as I can remember, Gay Byrne regularly tied in the Late Late Show to his radio programme but that was at a time when there was very little choice available on the airwaves and most people in this country had access to just two TV channels.  When he talked about a Late Late item, Byrne was continuing the conversation, but when Ryan, Ray, Miriam and even Aine talk gleefully about Op Trans or DWTS, it sounds rather desperate.   

Director-general Dee Forbes has been making some rather anxious sounds lately about the state of RTE, calling for a hike in the license fee and worrying about the 15-35 demographic most of whom obviously aren’t drawn in by the blanket coverage of dieting and celebrity dancing programmes.  David McSavage has drawn attention to what he considers the poor quality of the programming coming out of Montrose by refusing to pay his license fee. There is clear evidence that many others feel the same way – there is a high incidence of fee evasion in Ireland.

 This has led some people to wonder about the point of RTE. In this multi-platform media environment, for many people, it is another small fish fighting for attention in a vast pond of sounds and pictures.  Is a ‘national’ broadcaster necessary, they wonder? If so, what is it for?

Though it was heralded as a medium that would provide a ‘window on the world’ for the cave-dwellers of Ireland in 1961, RTE is at its best when it does uniquely Irish programming like ‘Nationwide’, ‘Ear to the Ground’, documentaries about the history of the country and investigative news programmes.  But it’s clear that RTE cannot compete with the bigger broadcasters.  Watching the BBC’s News at Ten after RTE’s Nine O’Clock News gives one an idea of the size of RTE’s budget – there are comparatively few ‘foreign’ news items on RTE and they only have two correspondents working outside of Ireland (in Brussel and Washington) while the BBC seem to be able to get cameras into emergency rooms in war zones everywhere. Watching the BBC news can be a hair-raising, visceral experience full of hellish violence from the four corners of the world while RTE is mostly about local trade union leaders’ grievances and bland comments from TDs.

 RTE has never been able to do comedy for some reason (Apres Match apart) and outside of soap operas, it is too expensive to produce drama programmes that can compete with the quality of shows coming out of Britain and the U.S.A.  Even so, the paucity of home-grown material is highlighted when one examines the schedule on any given day. On Monday, 24 April, 2017, less than ten of the 34 hours of programming on RTE’s channels was produced by the broadcaster itself and three hours of those ten were devoted to the daily news.

So surely RTE should stop trying to compete with the big fish and concentrate on what it’s good at? This bloated organisation that has a TV station and radio station (RTE 2 and 2FM) catering for a demographic that doesn’t care and the vast majority of programming on RTE 2 consists of imports that, thanks to digital, everyone can watch on other channels, while the national ‘pop’ music station plays hardly any music by Irish artists.  Sports organisations are following the money to richer pastures and RTE 2 will look especially denuded next spring without its live Six Nations rugby marathons.

So hasn’t the time come to get rid of RTE 2 and 2FM and leave whatever home-grown programmes that RTE feels might be a bit too edgy to the online RTE Player to which younger viewers will have easy access? RTE 1 and Radio 1 look and sound more and more like programming for the elderly - broadcasting for people who never tinker with the dial on their radio and rarely check the menu on the digital TV.

TV and radio, which are still young media, now look more like libraries (or in the case of sport, bookshops) with channels devoted to programmes to suit the most esoteric of tastes. It would be best for RTE to give up trying to be anything like BBC 1 or ITV and concentrate on being a high quality niche broadcaster aimed specifically at the Irish consumer.  RTE was heralded in the 1960s as a ‘window on the world’ for Irish people. As there are now a thousand windows through which we can look at the world, that role is now redundant and RTE would be better off providing a window on the country in which it is made for the people who pay its license fee.

Film Review: Cobra Verde (1987)

             

The last film on which director Werner Herzog collaborated with actor Klaus Kinski, ‘Cobra Verde’, like ‘Aguirre: Wrath of God’ and ‘Fitzcarraldo’, features a European in conflict with hostile conditions in the colonies, a battle for survival that mirrored the famously fractious relationship between the two men. 

                Kinski, wild-eyed, wild-haired and utterly magnetic, is Cobra Verde, a wandering outlaw whose very name can inspire terror in the inhabitants of an entire Brazilian town in the opening scene. ‘Hide the children!’ people scream when he walks onto the plaza. Impressed by his icy demeanour, the owner of a sugar plantation makes him a slave overseer but lives to regret his decision when Cobra Verde goes on to impregnate all three of his daughters.  The owner plots with local dignitaries to rid Brazil of Cobra Verde by sending him across the sea to round up slaves in a colony in Africa. 

                Shot on location in Brazil,  Colombia and Ghana, the plot of Cobra Verde is simple and low on incident. Much of the film’s power stems from Herzog’s long shots of jungle and mountain, of scenes featuring masses of Africans, walking in lines that stretch for miles or taking part in ritual celebrations. Kinski has one of the great faces in cinema and for all his professed misgivings about working with him, Herzog is clearly happy to let the camera linger on the actor’s granite features.  His appearance - long blond hair, bulging eyes, scowling mouth and full uniform - stands in marked contrast with the naked Africans, and, together with Popol Vuh’s eerie electronica soundtrack, this serves to accentuate the sense of an unbridgeable divide between two cultures.  What the two civilisations do appear to share is a complete lack of sentimentality.

                 Though not as celebrated as ‘Aguirre: Wrath of God’ or ‘Fitzcarraldo’, ‘Cobra Verde’ has its own sense of brutal grandeur and contains images of intense beauty that will sear themselves into the memory of the viewer.

Review: The Old Ways by Robert MacFarlane

‘The eye is enticed by a path and the mind’s eye also. The imagination cannot help but pursue a line in the land – onwards in space, but also backwards in time, to the histories of the route and its previous followers.’ So writes Robert MacFarlane in a book which explores a range of ancient paths and passages in locations as diverse as the chalky Sussex Downs, the Guadarrama of central Spain and the mountains of Tibet.

                   Each of the sixteen chapters features an account of a journey by foot (or in one case by boat, between islands off the north coast of Scotland) which is enlivened by the author’s deep knowledge of the history of these places and of their natural features.  His regular references to his path-treading predecessors – pilgrims, traders, farmers, adventurers – give the book a sense of timeless communion between travellers, especially between the writer himself and his fellow Downs explorer, the poet Edward Thomas. Near the end of the book, there is a moving account of the last years of the life of this restless wanderer who was killed in World War I.  

MacFarlane’s prose is peppered with precise naturalist terms and richly descriptive passages.  ‘I found my sleeping place at twilight, not far from the beacon’s summit: a swathe of grass, the size of a double bed-sheet, overhung by a spreading hawthorn tree and hidden from the path by a ramp of gorse whose yellow blossoms lent their coconut scent to the breeze. A green woodpecker yapped in the distance. Planes flew past every few minutes, dragging cones of noise. Lichen glimmered on the trees.’

 He also provides some fascinating character sketches of the people he meets on his journeys – an artist on a remote island who makes sculptures from the dead creatures and detritus he finds washed up on the beach, a couple who create what look like hardbacked books but which are actually bound boxes containing objects collected on different walks.  It is hard not to envy MacFarlane’s easy attitude to what sometimes sound like arduous expeditions (he travels light, walks long and is unfussy about where he pitches his tent) and his ability to appreciate just about everything he sees is extremely life-affirming.  The book is a good advertisement for reading up on local flora and fauna before hiking.   Like all successful travel books, The Old Ways will make even the most sedentary of readers wish to go outside and explore.

A Late-comer's View of The Sopranos (Contains Spoiler...)

This month, I became a bit more like most people I know: I watched the entire series of The Sopranos.  At the very end of the final series, Dr Melfi realises that after years of one-to-one sessions, she has done nothing more than enable Tony, that his sociopathic personality is beyond therapy.  And so, after eighty-six hours of watching him shark his way through seven years of his life, we realise that Tony is little more than a two-dimensional thug whose main motivation is instant gratification (food, alcohol, sex, gambling, consumer goods) and keeping his family relatively happy. As David Thomson suggests, in his largely negative assessment of the show, it’s a far cry from the complexity of Michael Corleone.

                But perhaps Thomson is missing the point. Of course, Tony is shallow: he is chiefly defined by what he owns and the money he makes and the simple code of omerta he follows. The packets of money that his cronies give him help finance Tony’s high-rolling lifestyle, help make him attractive to a string of much younger women, help him buy favours from various associates, help him purchase the tokens that keep his wife tolerant of his behaviour and his son and daughter relatively quiescent.

              It’s a simple world in which people can be easily bought, including Tony’s main enabler, his wife Carmela. She prioritises her immediate family over the Christian principles with which she was raised even though she has sharp pangs of guilt about the source of the money she has used to furnish their enormous house and to finance their children’s educations.  Despite her misgivings, like the other mob wives, she plays the role of the attentive, pampered housewife who doesn’t get ‘mixed up’ in her husband’s ‘business’ despite the violent deaths of friends of the family and the money and guns she finds hidden in the house.  When she temporarily separates from Tony, the issue that causes the rupture is Tony’s womanising, not the thuggery and racketeering that finances her lifestyle and which no one wishes to talk about.

                It’s painful to watch her return to Tony in exchange for his assistance in helping her buy a plot of land to start her career as an estate agent, but it is also grimly inevitable as she is just as shallow and self-serving as Tony.  Their son AJ ends up doing much the same thing.  He is about to join the army, after expressing his doubts about the corrupted ways of the world, but then accepts Tony’s counter offer of a position as executive producer on a film financed by mob connection Little Carmine. These are sharp reminders of the various compromises we make, and how we allow malpractice and corruption to thrive when it doesn’t impinge negatively on (or even improves) our own lives. This is why tyrants can thrive where ‘good’ people live.    

For all its bloodletting, The Sopranos is essentially a jet-black comedy, a satire saturated in the cynicism of its times in which nothing ever really changes. By the end, Tony has become a major target for the Brooklyn family and several of his closest henchmen are dead but Meadow is due to marry (the traditional end to a comedy) and his wife and children are still with him, sitting around the table, about to eat yet another hearty meal in an Italian restaurant.  The final black-out leaves the ending to the viewer’s imagination but the scene in which AJ’s friends, the sons of two of Tony’s associates, punish another boy for his failure to re-pay a debt by burning off his toes is perhaps the most fitting conclusion – the cycle of cruelty and selfishness continues.     

A Minor Observation on Foreign Films.

I watched Pak Chan-woo’s ‘The Handmaiden’ at the weekend, a film set in the 1920s with a tricksy plot in which two Korean thieves try to swindle a Japanese heiress.  Much as I enjoyed the sumptuous visuals – the gorgeous interiors of the Edwardian/traditional Japanese hybrid house, the close-ups of exquisitely made-up faces – the film was a little too arch and artificial for me. The incredible attention to details in costume and sets and the quirkily detached characters, reminded me of Wes Anderson’s films, and I wondered whether I would enjoy an English language version of ‘The Handmaiden’, set in a more familiar place.   

                But I suppose much of the enjoyment of watching a ‘foreign’ film involves seeing a place and people who are not familiar (in other words, not Americans), and in learning something new about another country or culture.  For most us, after years of saturation in its culture, the U.S. feels like a second home, even if we have never actually been there. We have seen the insides of a thousand suburban homes and city apartments, watched people drive SUVs on countless multi-laned highways, shop in malls and sit at the chrome finished bars of a hundred diners. And most of us are familiar with Depression-era New York, the wild west and the deep south of the civil rights era. 

And so it is refreshing to simply see something different, to see how people live in a remote village in nineteenth century Jutland in ‘Babette’s Feast’, or to watch the wild gypsy wedding in ‘Gadjo Dilo’ or to hear the drunken throat-singing around the campfire in ‘Mongol’.  Even if the script isn’t up to much, at least we take a trip away from our natural film environment.

This can also apply to movies set closer to home: the grey skies, small houses and poorly-stocked fridges of films set in Britain and Ireland often seem strangely foreign on the big-screen.

Gaelic Football. Hard to Watch? Hard to Play?

         The illumination of holy books during the Dark Ages aside, the GAA is perhaps the greatest achievement in the history of Ireland – an amateur organisation that covers all thirty-two counties and inspires enormous amounts of volunteer input to bind communities and give them a profound sense of identity.  Even the most gifted players are humble and grounded, an antidote to the preening narcissism of some of their multi-millionaire soccer counterparts. It is heavily subsidised and jealously protected by traditionalists and rightly so -  it’s good for society.  

                But the games themselves puzzle me. I will admit that I do not have a GAA background, and  spent many childhood Sundays floating about outside the rugby club while the dads were getting stink-o.  I’m told that hurling works better when you see it live – while the skill levels are obvious, on TV it just seems like a blur of sticks and a mostly invisible ball (yes, I know I should call it a sliotar). I have attended some football matches and enjoyed the hostile atmosphere as much as the fare on the pitch – at a Tyrone v Down match I heard women swearing viciously (something I have never heard at a rugby match) and saw a fight breaking out among Meath fans in a match against Offaly in Croke Park. I keep an eye on the league and championship results too and always feel a little excited when May rolls around. I think this is because I pick up on the giddy tones of the radio presenters whose job, it often seems to me, is to create a sense of breathless anticipation rather than report on a sports event.  How else does one explain the ever-lengthening pre-match build-up banter that seems to get longer with every year?

                But my problem with Gaelic football is that there only seem to be two or three high quality matches in the championship every year.  That’s like a box of biscuits that is ten per cent chocolate kimberleys and ninety per cent digestives. The provincial meetings are consistently low-standard affairs (the Ulster games have the slight merit of being competitive at least) and genuine quality doesn’t seem to emerge until the semi-finals. To their credit, the analysts don’t hide their disappointment but you wonder what the point is of televising all these poor games. I can’t believe they command high ratings beyond the viewers from the counties involved.

Come semi-final time, when the wheat has finally been separated

from all that chaff, we get to see the likes of Dublin, Kerry and

Mayo playing what looks like a different sport in Croke Park, with

players who can kick with accuracy and run up big scores in

minutes, players who can produce under pressure, players with

greater awareness of the dimensions of the pitch, who can pick

out their colleagues up  the field for an inch-perfect pass. And it

is glorious to behold.

                But why can so few players play gaelic football anywhere near to the standard of Kerry or Dublin? Why are so many of them unable to consistently kick points from a distance or create goal-scoring opportunities? The effect is akin to a summer spent watching the fixtures like Braintree Town against Yeovil and then Barcelona versus Chelsea in August. Some will protest that player numbers (Dublin) and tradition (Kerry) give those counties a supreme advantage over the others but surely the also-rans should have a better grasp of what I would call the basic skills?

                 Perhaps the missing element is a wider approach to player development, and the establishment of the sort of academies that are the norm in rugby. But that would probably be too much of a stretch on the GAA’s finances. Maybe there should be rule changes to accommodate the less skilful and make the game more playable for everyone.  Or maybe RTE and Sky should just give up on televising all but the last seven knock-out matches and leave the other games to local radio and to their counties’ supporters. After all, does GAA, like soccer and golf, need the same kind of saturation TV coverage that can only expose the frailties and dullness of much of the content?

The Song Doesn't Remain The Same: The Cover Versions that Re-Write the Originals.

               
               




‘You got a fast car / I got a ticket to anywhere / Maybe we can make a deal / Maybe we can get somewhere.’ So sings Tracy Chapman in ‘Fast Car’, a song that presents the thoughts of a young woman who runs away from an abusive alcoholic father only to find herself stuck in a dead-end job with a lover who is not unlike her dad.  The tropical house version by Jonas Blue that came out in 2015 speeds it up, turns the acoustic guitar hook into a snaky synth lead and features some semi-helium autotuned singing from Dakota.

For those familiar with the sombre original, the effect is hilarious - the beleaguered victim now sounds like she’s going out clubbing with her friends, swigging an alcopop, excited about the night ahead – it’s wonderfully, carelessly young and the lines ‘I had a feeling that I belonged / I had a feeling that I could be someone’ now seem like a hymn to self-realisation through partying. There is something cheering about the fact that many of those who have come to the song via the cover neither know nor care what it’s about. Like all the best cover versions, the artist re-makes the original in his or her own image.

                A forerunner of ‘Fast Car’ is The Pet Shop Boys’ bright and airy disco version of ‘Where the Streets Have no Name’, in which Neil Tennant’s gentle, half-spoken vocal rids the song of all trace of Bono’s flatulent bombast before segueing into Frankie Valli’s ‘Can’t Take My Eyes Off You’. Lou Donaldson does something similar on his cover of ‘approach to ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’, is just as radical, as he transforms the earnest ballad into a loose and breezy saxophone version instrumental that reminds the listener that for all the brilliance of the lyrics, the song would be nothing without that wonderful tune.  Almost as thrilling is Bryan Ferry’s camp re-working of ‘A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall’ in which he turns ten monochromatically apocalyptic verses and choruses into air kisses and cocktails in a bouncy castle bar.

                At the other end of the spectrum, some artists add extra layers of pathos and gravitas to a song. When the audibly sick Johnny Cash, covering ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, croaks ‘When you’re down and out / When you’re on the streets’ in his take on ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, it colours subsequent listens to the original – as pretty as his voice is, the young Art Garfunkel’s take on those lines suddenly sounds callow., like a figure of speech rather than an expression of real lived experience.  Cash does something similar on The Eagles’ ‘Desperado’, his crumbling baritone investing a creaky cliché of a song with a sense of wounded majesty it hardly deserves.

                 It would be interesting to hear what Cash might have done with The Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’. Listening to his lascivious vocal, it’s hard to imagine Mick Jagger being unable get some ‘girl reaction’, even before you see footage of him performing it in front of hordes of screaming females. Devo’s version feels truer to the sentiments expressed in the song, and is one of the great musical definitions of sexual frustration – a coiled spring of agitated metronome guitars and choppy rhythm section topped with a tuneless, semi-stutter vocal that has none of the lazy swagger of the original. It is the sound of a young man on the verge of implosion.

                There is more edgy yearning on The Flying Burrito Brothers’ version of ‘To Love Somebody’. but this is achieved more by way of accident than by design. In a performance that is little more than a rough demo (unlike the brassy Bee Gees’ brassy original) Gram Parsons’s quavering voice walks a tightrope between tender and thin but when his voice cracks on the line ‘I’m just a man / Can’t you tell that’s what I am’, the effect is spine-tingling.  As desperate as Barry Gibb sounds, thanks to a hard to reach note, Parsons is on a cliff-edge.  According to Barney Hoskyns’s book Hotel California, the splintered quality that gives Parsons’s singing its winsome vulnerability was probably due to a heavy cocaine habit. If that is true, he didn’t snort in vain. 

The great cover versions add something new to a song, and make us listen with new ears.

               

Play review: Underneath

Underneath

Peacock theatre, Dublin

Written by and starring Pat Kinevane

Directed by Jim Culleton

           Everything's been better since death, claims the anonymous woman in Underneath, one of actor/writer Pat Kinevane's three one-person shows currently running at the Peacock. Under a section of a graveyard in Cobh (dark save for some lengths of golden fabric that hang from the ceiling), her skin blackened from decomposition, she recounts her life story from the moment she was disfigured after being strurck by a bolt of lightning as a girl, through the torments of bullying and isolation at school to finding kinship with sympathetic eastern European women in a Dublin flat.

          Kinevane mixes unsettling confessional moments with chatty observations about pop culture to startling effect and his interaction with the audience is warm and funny: once he finds out the names of three of the people in the front row, he integrates them into the script in a way that makes the character seem touchingly vulnerable.  

         The play can be heavyhanded in its attempts to explore the primacy image over substance - the parodies of home improvement and makeover TV programmes are a little obvious - and the resolution feels unnecessarily neat but Kinevane is a magnetic physical performer who moves with grace and menace, the black make-up highlighting his twinkling eyes and flashing teeth

           Like Silent, one of the other plays in the trilogy, Underneath gives a voice to a victim of cruel luck in a world where those on the margins appear to be increasingly isolated. Near the end of the play, Kinevane's unnamed character is explicit and direct in her plea to the audience to appreciate the people we have in our lives, a message that is always worth repeating.

Will Eisner's Tenement Tales

The Contract with God Trilogy by Will Eisner

                If you wish to get a sense of life in 1930s New York, Will Eisner’s The Contract with God Trilogy is not a bad place to start. Written in the 1970s and 1980s, the three stories (A Contract with God, A Life Force and Dropsie Avenue) follow the lives of tenement-dwellers in the depression era Bronx as they struggle to get by in the face diminishing opportunities. Eisner himself grew up in similar circumstances and many of the characters are based on people he knew or saw on the streets (or heard through the paper-thin walls). 

                Though mainly preoccupied with the Jewish inhabitants of Dropsie Avenue, these stories also explore the similar struggles of the Italians, the Irish, the Spanish and the African Americans. And Eisner doesn’t flinch in his pursuit of realism. In A Life Force, Jacob Shtarkah becomes a tool of vicious mobsters when he has to ask favours to get a carpentry business up and running, in A Contract with God, Frimme Hersh, the good-natured pillar of the community, is left devastated by the premature death of his daughter. There is any amount of bullying, prejudice and thuggery but this is partially relieved by some evidence of neighbourly solidarity.

                 While the stories themselves have engaging but unremarkable plotlines, Eisner’s art and lay-out is never anything less than brilliant. His street scenes, filled with overturned garbage cans, washing hanging out to dry between buildings, scrapping children, cockroaches and heads poking out of windows are richly evocative of the era and his almost supernatural depictions of rainfall, sunshine, smoke and steam add layers of atmosphere and raise these stories to somewhere close to the sublime. In one scene, where Willie is deciding whether to leave his family’s flat to attend a meeting of the communists his father abhors, it’s the snaky flow of steam from his mother’s soup moving from the kitchen and out onto the landing that appears to lasso him at the door.

               Perhaps his greatest achievement is in managing to inject such emotion into the cartoonish faces and bodies of his characters that they are probably the most ‘human’ characters ever to appear in a comic book.
                 Convinced that comics deserved greater recognition, Eisner chose the term 'graphic novel' to describe A Contract with God at a time when most comics creators were treated with indifference outside of the small band of 'fans'. This is a work of enduring grace and power that merits a place in the pantheon of great works of fiction.

Three Recent Music Documentaries

Eight Days a Week (Ron Howard, 2016)

Amy (Asif Kapadia, 2015)

Cobain: Montage of Heck (Brett Morgen, 2015)

'Amy' and 'Montage of Heck', are brilliant-looking but joyless investigations into their subjects' lives. The first gathers together footage of Amy Winehouse taken from hand-held cameras and from peoples' smart-phones, an approach which serves to remind us of the intense, glaring spotlight of modern media where just about everyone is a potential papparazzo. The shaky close-ups create a clammy, claustrophobic atmosphere and the interviews with the various unreliable people in Winehouse's life add to the queasy effect. We get to see Amy strung out on a couch in a filthy flat, drunkenly unable to perform at a festival, looking pale and fragile in front of a hundred photographers.

Released in the same year, 'Cobain: Montage of Heck' records the songwriter's brief  and similarly troubled career using animated segments which incorporate some of the grotesque sketches from his journal. And so we see the schoolboy Kurt's attempt to have sex with a mentally disabled girl and the calamitous impact that event has on how he is viewed by his peers, and we see video footage of him and his wife as heroin-addled parents.  The narrative thrust is 'Amy was doomed from the start' and the director does his damnedest to prove this thesis.  Like 'Amy', 'Montage of Heck' doesn't shy away from the problems that both artists faced, in fact it positively revels in them.   

In both films, the music is little more than a decorative element - Winehouse's songs are played with the lyrics rolling across the screen, we hear no more than snippets of the songs that made Cobain an international star.

After all that, what a relief it is to watch The Beatles clearly having the time of their lives in 'Eight Days a Week' as they play to venues filled with screaming girls. The Fab Four smile and laugh their way through the film and the focus is very much on the music with performances of entire songs taking up most of the running time.

Is this the full story? No, of course not. These were hard-headed, ambitious people with their own neuroses and ot course a light-hearted tone would be unsuited to films covering the lives of people who committed suicide. But Kapadia and Morgen spend so much time rooting around in the dirty laundry bag that they appear to forget the joyous, life-affirming music (and yes, despite their often grim subject-matter, Nirvana's songs are liberating and bracing, at their best) that Winehouse and Cobain created.

Ron Howard rightly puts the music front and centre because it's as much as 'the real story' as The Beatles' lives off-stage and out of the studio.  It's sad to that barely ten seconds are devoted to Amy's influences - I'd rather see some footage of Sarah Vaughan and Thelonius Monk rather than the witless mumblings of Winehouse's boyfriend.

Making and performing music is wonderful, musicians generally enjoy one another's company and the creative process involves work and inspiration but 'Amy' and 'Cobain: Montage of  Heck' choose ot ignore these facts and prefer to focus on the soap opera elements of stardom.  

Scarlet Traces by Ian Edgington and D'Israeli

Scarlet Traces Volume One by Ian Edgington and D'Israeli.

Rebellion 2017

Scarlet Traces Volume One contains a re-telling of H.G.Wells's War of the Worlds and a sequel that answers the question of what happened to the Martian technology after the war.

War of the Worlds tells the story of the Martian invasion from the point of view of the hapless George and in the post-war world of the sequel (Scarlet Traces), the British have studied and exploited the technology the  Martians left behind them to revolutionise transport and infrastructure. Early-twentieth century London is now a city of vast buildings of various fantastic shapes that dwarf Big Ben and Nelson's Column, and over-ground trains suspended from cables. The horses that previously drew carriages have been replaced not by internal combustion engines and wheels but by mechanical spider legs that scuttle around in clouds of green smoke. 

However, not all is well in this sleek new world. In the industrial heartlands of the north of England and in Scotland, employment has been destroyed by super-efficient machines and there is some disquiet about the disappearance of young women and the discovery of emaciated corpses in the Thames marshlands. 

When Sergeant Archibold Currie discovers that one of  those  missing women is his niece, he and his employer Major Robert Autumn set out to find her, and in the process they discover one of the dark secrets of the British government.

Edgington's wry, fast-moving script and D'Israeli's cartoonish but meticulously detailed art (Herge is an obvious influence and Tintin himself makes a brief cameo) combine to create a compelling mixture of the comical and the grotesque. Much of the humour stems from the book's steampunk sensibility - the clash of Victorian fashions and customs with the kind of science-fiction elements we associate with the late 1950s.  Thin gruel, you might think, but scenes in which elaborately moustashed soldiers fire cannons at tentacled tripod war machines are irresistable.

Never say 'No More Heroes': Grant Morrison on the Supergods.

Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero

by Grant Morrison

                Like the ultra-flexible, cosmically-adjusted body of Mr Fantastic, superheroes have been bending and twisting to fit in with the times since 1938. In Supergods, Grant Morrison charts their history, from Superman’s first appearance in Action Comics Number 1 to the pervasive presence of costumed characters in the mainstream media of today. 

                Morrison explores how superhero comics have continued to mirror the preoccupations and anxieties of the times, from the 'Jap-bashing' of Captain America to the Reagan-era paranoia of Watchmen and the post-9/11 soul-searching of Marvel’s Civil War.  He also provides some fascinating information about the origins and early days of the most famous characters – Superman’s oft-derided ‘underpants outside tights’ costume was borrowed directly from the look of 1930s circus strongmen, Wonder Woman’s appearance was based on the shared lover of her creator and his wife – and his commentaries on the various film adaptations are perceptive and frequently hilarious.

As well as looking at the changes superheroes have undergone over seventy years, Morrison reflects on the impact on his childhood of the stars of DC and Marvel comics and tells the story of own career as a writer who helped to shape and re-boot a host of famous characters. It’s easy to see how galaxy-traversing superhumans appeal to the author, whose life often appears to be a quest (sometimes fuelled by drugs and philosophy) for wisdom and enlightenment.

                What is perhaps most notable about the book is Morrison’s sceptical view of the harsh realism of Alan Moore’s Watchmen, in which superheroes are deeply flawed individuals who are co-opted by an authoritarian state, and his belief that superheroes can play an important role in a world that seems to increasingly feed on negativity. ‘It should give us hope,’ he writes, ‘that superhero stories are flourishing everywhere because they are a bright flickering sign of our need to move on, to imagine the better, more just, and more proactive people we can be.’

                This is a worthwhile addition to the study of an area that had never had as wide a reach as in the present time.