The Clear-Out

                Last year, I read and acted upon, the advice given by Marie Kondo in her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying.  This involved learning how to fold clothes so that it was easier to store and access them and disposing of a lot of things that I had been hanging onto for no good reason. Though there has been a slackening in my tidying routine, I still know the whereabouts of everything I own. Ask me for a pack of cards or a paperclip and I will find it for you next to immediately. This time last year I would have been pawing my way through a drawer full of wires, coins, pens and post-its for up to five minutes before I found either of the above items. 

                A recent holiday prompted another clear-out but this time it was my head that I tidied up.  While I was away, I realised that one of the main reasons I find breaks so relaxing and stimulating is that as well as a change of scene, I have a change of routine.  As I was abroad, I wasn’t able to buy my preferred national newspaper and as there was so much to see in my new surroundings, I didn’t feel the need to look at the news websites I usually checked twice or three times a day. I didn’t listen to talk radio either, save for some programmes on BBC Radio 4 while driving but none of those shows were discursive or centred on current affairs.  They were gardening programmes and documentaries.

                Those hours I usually spent perusing newspapers and websites and listening to people talk about politics, I devoted to reading books and when I wasn’t reading books I talked to my wife or looked around me. I noticed that reading books was easier without the temptation of the internet, that I was finding it easier to settle into a book, and that I was listening more closely to my wife and noticing more of what was going on in front of me or around me.  

This was still the case when we got home and I continued the same regime. Sitting at the kitchen table, with the radio off for once and no newspaper or i-pad in front of me, I noticed how the petunias in the pot in the corner looked like old-fashioned hard-boiled ribbon sweets. I also stared long and hard at the dog’s noble greyhound face. Walking in the park, I saw a heron fighting with two seagulls.

 As my thoughts were no longer as swamped with sparkly bits of information, I started to think about my friends more often and started to text and to ring them.  I found myself staring out the window or at the wall and thinking more than ever about myself and my life, my family, my friends, and what was close to me.  My sense of my priorities sharpened: I started to do thing I had been putting off: booking a check-up with the doctor, inviting friends over for dinner.  I had a series of epiphanies and, for the first time in years, I wrote a poem. I read books but more deeply than in years because they weren’t competing with the fast food of the net with their accompanying illustrative photographs and video clips.

I started to enjoy that feeling of being ‘almost bored’, just looking and listening in silence without the endless talk, the burbling adverts, the scrolling screen, the dyspeptic opinion pieces and repetitive sports journalism. And I realised how hooked I had become on ephemera, how I had got to know the names of famous people despite never having heard their music or seen them on television.

                It’s now two months since I reduced my media intake and though the initial excitement of the new regime has ebbed away, my sense of serenity has remained.  

                 

Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD DVD Review

Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD

Directed by Paul Goodwin (2014)

                Just released on DVD with a plethora of extras including extended interviews with creators such as Pat Mills, Dave Gibbons and Grant Morrison plus mini documentaries about the appeal of comics, Alex Garland’s Dredd film and the comic’s fractious relationship with the U.S.A., this is a worthwhile purchase for anyone interested in the hothouse of mind-warping talent that is 2000AD.

                Much of the film uses the creators’ memories to explore the groundbreaking nature of the comic. This was the first British comic to publish the creators’ names on their stories, the comic where creators were allowed to indulge their subversive sides and develop hard-edged, satirical stories such as Judge Dredd and Nemesis the Warlock that would help prepare the ground for the revolutionary Watchmen and DC’s Vertigo line.

                In the staid, deferential world of publishing in the 1970s, 2000AD needed strong personalities to steer it through troubled waters and a media that was hostile to what were still being referred to as ‘penny dreadfuls’ and it was lucky to have such creators as tenacious as Pat Mills, Kevin O’Neill and John Wagner on board.  Unsurprisingly, of all the interviewees, their contributions are the most revealing and entertaining, though David Bishop’s self-effacing comments about his time as editor during the comic’s dark period in the 1990s are also fascinating.

Anyone who stopped buying 2000AD in the 1980s will be interested to see the depths to which it appeared to plunge during its subsequent identity crisis.

Included among the extras is a candid half-hour interview with ex-editor Steve MacManus, who had declined to participate on the original documentary. Judging by his mild manner and obvious respect for the various creators who worked on the comic during its 1980s heyday, it’s easy to see why he was so successful as the middleman between a conservative and often hostile management at IPC and a group of sensitive and often feisty creators.

                This is an illuminating addition to a refreshingly zippy, no-nonsense documentary that is true to the spirit of the galaxy’s greatest comic. Zarjaz!

Rugby Is Lucky To Have New Zealand

Though New Zealand team’s permanently one-eyed defence of their players can be tiresome – in his otherwise fine autobiography, Richie McCaw claims that the spear tackle on Brian O’Driscoll in the first Lions test in 2005 was purely accidental and that he was disappointed when BOD complained - rugby is lucky to have a standard-bearer like New Zealand. The sport benefits hugely from having a team that equates ‘footy’ with national honour, that is so desperate to win every single match.  As a result, matches involving the All Blacks, together with the haka (which at least gets people into their seats early) are always genuine occasions.      

Last year some commentators felt that Ireland’s victory against New Zealand in Chicago was of less value because it was a match played outside of the world cup. But most teams would give their eye teeth for a win against the All Blacks regardless of the status of the test and that is because they are so resolutely hard to beat. The knock-on effect is that it is always worth going to see New Zealand play as they never truly flop – certain things may go awry which may lead to a rare loss but there is never a complete systems failure. And so, ninety-nine times out of a hundred, we get the best players playing the best rugby as though their lives depended on it.  

I’ve been to a lot of the autumn friendlies between Ireland and the Southern Hemisphere teams down the years and at times Australia, and especially South Africa, have looked a little uninterested, unprepared or even tired (these matches take place at the very end of their season). But that is never the case with New Zealand. It is unlikely that any other team would have scored that last minute try to deny Ireland in 2013. They are the team that respects their opposition more than any other.

                This need to win every match is coupled with an exceptional ruthlessness. If there is an imbalance in quality between two teams the stronger side usually takes an early lead and then eases off later in the match, maybe even leaking a couple of tries. Or the weaker side drags the stronger one down to their level by playing tight, defensive rugby. The above situations rarely happen when New Zealand play. If the opposition is weak, they exploit that weakness with breath-taking ruthlessness. Mistakes are crucified. And there is no let up, no relaxing of standards. Regardless of the paucity of opposition, New Zealand will continue to play at a high level and rack up scorelines that reflect the gulf in class. The same cannot be said of any of the other teams in the top ten. Ireland have been the victims of a number of absolute hidings from NZ teams that maintained their focus while the men in green wilted.   

                The importance of NZ to rugby was highlighted this summer when the Lions played their ten-match tour on the islands. When the fixture list was announced there were various predictions of doom for the tourists. How could they survive so many games against the best Super Rugby teams in the world before facing the number one international side? It was described by some as a suicidal itinerary.

                But the tough games against fully committed opposition were exactly what the Lions needed to gel the squad and bring out the best in the players and galvanise their supporters. It also reflected well on New Zealand. The idea of having games that were glorified training sessions (such as on the previous tours to Australia and South Africa) was anathema to them. To let a foreign team win comfortably on New Zealand soil was unthinkable. The result of this was a series of engrossing non-test matches played in cauldron-like conditions in various stadia.

                   Their need to be the best team at all times has also worked to the advantage of the world game as they have been the ones most willing to experiment and develop new strategies that are then adopted by the other nations.  In the past, they have introduced new types of players (most notably in the second row, back row, and at centre) and all of the frontline players have subtle handling skills.  New Zealand provide a template for the rest of the world.

                 Players from other countries talk about the importance of treating the All Blacks like any other team, of ignoring the mystique surrounding the black jersey, but it’s easy to see why such an aura has developed around New Zealand rugby.

Some Thoughts on Re-Reading Shakespeare's Four Major Tragedies

I went back to Shakespeare recently and re-read his four major tragedies – Hamlet, Othello, King Lear and Macbeth – one after the other, in that order. They are plays I know well but reading them straight through over the course of a day made me see them in a different light. Here are a few thoughts that came to me as I read:

HAMLET

Polonius is badly served by productions of Hamlet. In the ones I have seen, he has almost always been reduced to a figure of fun, a comic foil for Hamlet. Hamlet’s description of him as a ‘tedious old fool’ and Gertrude’s impatience with his long-windedness also serve to make him seem like a buffoon. But the same character’s advice to Laertes – ‘And these few precepts in thy memory / See thou character…’ is one of the best speeches that Shakespeare ever wrote – full of wisdom born of harsh experience and as practical today as it would have been four hundred years ago. It also features one of the greatest couplets Shakespeare ever wrote: ‘Those friends thou hast and their adoption tried / Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel.’  This same ‘old fool’ is a domineering father who bullies daughter and sends Reynaldo to spy on Laertes using subtle, cruel methods.

Hamlet’s attitude towards Ophelia and the dead Polonius is still very puzzling. In the last act, when he realises that the corpse of the suicide being buried is that of Desdemona, Hamlet claims he loved Desdemona more than ‘twenty thousand brothers’.  But when he accidentally kills Polonius, whose death triggers Ophelia’s madness, he shows no remorse and only calls him a ‘wretched, rash, intruding fool’. I would have thought that if he really did love Ophelia, his first thoughts would be about the impact of the killing on her.

OTHELLO  

Iago is disturbingly familiar. Though his soliloquies that frame events in the play, Iago succeeds in involving the audience in the gulling of Othello and drags the audience down to the gutter with him. He is a tremendously unpleasant character who haunts literature and is a reminder of the human capacity to store up massive reserves of secret hatred, like the people who vomit their fury in chatrooms, on message boards and on comments sections on the internet. He does this literally in the first scene when he shouts up to Brabantio’s window filthy, racist comments about Othello and Desdemona.

KING LEAR

Of the four plays, King Lear is the most enjoyable to read. Hamlet is the most dazzling and perplexing of the four plays. Othello is the most immediately accessible, the one that has at its centre a love story that is poisoned and corrupted. King Lear has the best balance of characters and is the most consistently exciting of the plays. It is the most action-packed one with plenty of violence (beating, kicking, stocking, eye-gouging, stabbing, duelling), stormy weather, angry confrontations (Lear v Cordelia, Kent v Lear, Lear v Oswald, Kent v Oswald, Lear v Goneril, Kent v Oswald again, Regan and Cornwall v Kent, Lear v Goneril and Regan, Regan and Cornwall v Gloucester, Cornwall’s servant v Cornwall, Albany v Goneril, Oswald v Edgar, the French army v the British army, Goneril v Regan, Albany v Edmund, Edgar v Edmund, Albany v Goneril) and plenty of deaths (Cornwall’s servant, Cornwall, Oswald, Regan, Goneril, Edmund, Gloucester, Cordelia, Lear and possibly the Fool). And a lot less thinking than the other three.

However, Lear is also the play that requires the greatest leap of imagination. The sceptical need to accept several moments that feel implausible. How can Gloucester and Edgar be so gullible, so willing to accept Edmund’s phony suspicions and bogus warnings?  Does Edgar need to play the filthy, blabbering mad beggar with such manic volubility?  Does Gloucester really believe he is at the edge of a cliff? Wouldn’t he put his hands over the edge to feel the sharp decline?  Would Lear really be able to kill the man who hanged Cordelia? Like ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and Friar Laurence’s potion in ‘Romeo and Juliet’, King Lear requires a good dose of ‘a willing suspension of disbelief.’

Unlike the other heroes, Lear is never alone. This may have been the norm for kings, who would have been constantly surrounded by courtiers. And thus, all his pronouncements are public – at no point does he make a soliloquy, unlike the tortured Hamlet, Othello and Macbeth. Lear does not plot or connive – the moment he swears revenge on his daughters is famously pathetic. 

MACBETH

Macbeth is shockingly short, less than half the length of Hamlet and Lear and substantially slimmer than Othello. The scene set in England where Malcolm tests Macduff’s loyalty feels long when you see it in performance but it only seems like that because the other scenes in Macbeth are so rapid.

There is a marked lack of goodness in Macbeth. Unlike the other plays, where there are some acts of decency and moments to mitigate the floods of cruelty, almost everyone seems flawed or tainted by Macbeth’s tyranny. The hero Macduff leaves his family to be slaughtered; though he suspects Macbeth of having killed Duncan, Banquo’s self-interest inhibits him, the other thanes are weak and beaten down, full of self-pity and the would-be king Malcolm is suspicious and manipulative. There are no shining beacons of compassion like Desdemona or Cordelia and no loyal friends like Horatio in this world of brutal realpolitik. The only characters who appear genuinely innocent (besides Fleance) are Macduff’s wife and son who berate their protector’s disappearance, and the treachery of all men, before they are murdered by Macbeth’s henchmen.