Idea IS the format

Got one of these sitting on my desk awaiting assembly:

It’s a Lego Guggenheim. It’s part of the Lego Architecture series, picked it up a couple of weeks back in the midst of one of THE great afternoons, hanging with friend and collaborator Annie Ok in the MET.

I’ve been a complete legohead pretty much my entire life – at some point it became web design, and the shape of the blocks changed slightly, but the upside was someone started paying me to play with it.

These days, with some of the virtual world stuff we do (including, hopefully, imminent forays in Lego Universe) it’s pretty much gone full circle.  If you don’t know what Lego Universe, best thing you can do is watch this:

Toy-wise, Lego got me young, and held me captive.  It was a chance to tell stories and solve problems through exercises in form and function, powered by imaginative energy and intelligent design.

It must have been a busy parent’s dream to hear nothing of me for hours on end, nothing but the reassuring rattle of plastic bricks being shuffled endlessly around a wooden tray, signifying the never-ending search for that final piece.

Skip twenty years, as my Lego lies dormant awaiting a new generation of inquisitive hands, but my affection never really wanes.  Then, somewhere along the long and winding information super-highway I now travel for a living, I found this:

Further investigation revealed that its creator, Larry Lars, is a bit of a legend – some of the stuff he’s creating shows a brilliant eye, and a masterful ingenuity, not to mention the fact that he clearly has one hell of a Lego collection.

In the throes of the resulting nerdgasm, and inspired by his example, I can’t resist rolling back the years.

I start out thinking I’ll go as close to Larry’s model as I can, armed with substantially fewer bricks.  The switch to blue is a practical choice in that respect, but I quickly find myself rationalising this through the fictional narrative I’m slowly developing in parallel, imagined around and informing the emerging design.

Where the JCB colours of the original ALIENS power lifter were about visibility and hazard-warning, my lifter is designed and coloured for exploration on a planet’s surface, with differently styled arms designed to facilitate a broader spectrum of operations and manouevres.  Developed by it’s own division of Weyland-Yutani, it becomes a different class, a different series,  with a different set of classified documents informing the design.  Suddenly I can feel myself on exactly the same flights of the imagination I went on when I was a kid – almost meditative, head and hands in gentle concert, story-telling through design.

Like I said – nerdgasm.

Larry and I are not alone though.  There are more like us.  In fact, once you start to dig, you realise (if you haven’t already, in which case you’re probably Henry Jenkins) that Lego has extraordinary potential as a form of fan fiction, and it’s starting to find big audiences online. I’ve seen a lot of pretty cool stuff of late, but the example that really hammered this home is this one:

Star Wars Lego is nothing new in itself – on the contrary, its one of the staple entertainment brands Lego have teamed up with to really keep their product relevant over the last decade or so – others include Batman and Indiana Jones, brought to market not only as off-the-shelf Lego sets but also as a series of hugely successful computer games, as playable as they are popular.

The web is already teeming with Lego stop-motion animation – an ongoing attempt to collaboratively swede the entire first Star Wars movie incorporates a large number of scenes and sequences recreated thus.  The difference with a clip like this is not just the sheer technical accomplishment but that it creates something new within the Star Wars universe, invented and engineered by someone like you or I, and realised with a narrative verve and momentum typified by the fact that the bad guy wins. (I actually can’t remember being all that much more excited watching two Jedis and a Sith go at it for fifteen minutes at the end of The Phantom Menace.  I’d love to do a budget comparison on the two.)

The imminent opening of Lego Universe will only add to this, and the machinima will surely follow – the animated shorts powered by the Universe engine, differentiated not just by Lego’s stylish signature aesthetic but by the signature ingenuity of the generations who have grown up with it, and are still waiting for a better medium through which to bring their imaginations to three-dimensional life.

Following on from our Light family week in Inshriach last year, we decided to repeat the trick in 2010.  A major highlight of last year was creating our own 5-minute ’swede’ of the The Lord of the Rings.  With that in mind, I’m delighted to now unveil our 2010 Inshriach swede – THE [NEAR] THING:

‘That’s bold, cutting out “fun” altogether,’ says Cascavel. ‘Think they’ll allow it?’

‘We’re going to give it a try.’

The world of marketing was always going to come in for a tough time in one of James’ novels sooner or later.  You don’t evade the tractor beam of a career in the so-called ‘creative industries’ without delivering at least one good parting shot.  Especially when your exit strategy involves executing what pretty much every sufficiently self-loathing ad exec threatens to do sooner or later – that being to become a polished, published, award-winning novelist.

Learning at an early stage that the protagonist of his new book, Ludo, was to be in the gainful employ of a high-flying São Paulo advertising agency, I came into it eagerly anticipating some suitably withering observations lofted in the general direction of his former employers – one of the world’s better-known and more serially self-satisfied outfits.  Precisely the kind of place where, ‘although a veneer of funky self-assurance coats every employee in the building, you don’t have to scratch hard before it chips off  in your hand.  Under the surface, everyone lives in fear.  Fear of being found out, of not being found out.  Fear of the possibility that the white goods, mobile telephones and confectionary they are paid to promote might be all there is to life.’

One soon realises that, beyond the incisively amusing cut and thrust of Ludo’s terminal disillusionment with his job, the world of marketing has a more nuanced agency within Heliopolis.

Their building, nicknamed the ‘Beehive’, still tells the story of its days as a derelict squat serving the nearby favela, scarred with graffiti tastelessly preserved to provide the decor of the regenerated building.  It feels like a sick joke, playing to a wider pretence permeating the storyline, typified by the their belief that all São Paulo’s poor and unfortunates require in order to be saved and civilised is their own downmarket Kwik-E-Mart.

One of the principle proponents of this assumption is the head of the place, Oscar Cascavel, ‘an amoral little monster who dry-humps you in the corridor when his serotonin is up, and trashes your day for fun when it isn’t.’ His stature within Heliopolis is somehow diminished by his pre-eminent position at the head of this profoundly vacuous enterprise, condemning him to life as a member of the supporting cast.  He is a character who must exist, but only as much as is entirely necessary.

Given that I still swim with sharks (or, given the Portuguese translation of his surname, curl up with rattlesnakes) in the mould of Oscar Cascavel, I can presumably be forgiven for focusing on this aspect of Heliopolis.  Suffice to say, it’s one simple strand of the story, the meat of which is slow-boiled in the melting pot of family, with all the secret ingredients it contains.  We meet the infant Ludo in the process of being rescued from a treacherous childhood in a São Paulo slum, propelled by remote circumstance into a life of precipitous privilege growing up as the adopted son of a wealthy Brazilian couple.  As we jump back and forth between the  defining moments of Ludo’s childhood and a week-in-the-life-of portrait of the young adult they engender, we experience a rite of passage tenderly rendered against a backdrop of the skyscraping highs and favelado lows of modern inner-city Brazil.

Said unlikely pre-text of Ludo’s adoption is the sheer delicacy of a serving of feijão prepared by his slum-bound mother for the visiting, philanthropic wife of the family’s imperious head, Ze Generoso. Taken into the family’s service on the strength of a single bowl of beans and rice, Ludo and his mother live out a blessed life staffing the kitchen of Ze’s far-flung rural getaway, whereby Ludo comes to see his mother through the prism of her unfaltering culinary over-achievement:

‘Food had saved her, and food became her mode of expression.  Her hatred and determination, her relief and joy, were beaten into soufflés, stirred into risottos and baked into pies.  I could gauge her mood through what she was making: something simple but soothing, like pão de queijo, cheese bread fresh from the oven, meant contentment, equanimity; richer treats, such as brigadeiros, tiny chocolate bombs with payloads of condensed milk, signified something closer to happiness.  If she was frustrated or angry, the conflict would emerge in bold clashes of spice and sugar: clove and orange, chilli and ginger, coconut and saffron. When these exotic pasties and sweatmeats came my way, I kept quiet, loving the sparks they generated on my tastebuds even as I knew they meant I should keep a low profile.’

Of everything Heliopolis has to offer, it is passages like this one that have lodged themselves most firmly in my memory, a week or two on from finally picking up a copy and reading it, cover to cover, without interruption.  The passages that blend poetry and story-telling, finding meaning between the carefully-chosen words, executed unpretentiously and with an empathetic appreciation of the simple things.  The very best of these moments cannot be amputated as cleanly as this one, tending to find their mark in broad context.  This is especially true as Heliopolis powers to a close, and all the momentum the story has been building is held, suspended in the moment of self-realisation – actual, and symbolic – to which it has always driven.

I am no more accomplished a reviewer of books than I am food critic – this is the first novel I’ve read since James’ debut, The Amnesia Clinic, and its taken me a year since publication to get around to it – but my assessment, for whatever it is worth, is this.  If words are his ingredients, if story is his meat or fish, and imagery his flavour, Heliopolis sees James well on his way to that first Michelin star.  With his appetite for story-telling, an irresistable wit, and an intelligent, poetic heart so evident in the man as well as the writer, sooner or later he must deliver the kind of literary feast that lives and grows in the memory long after the taste has faded.  I’m no gourmet, but I plan to be around to see that happen.

I may even read it.

*

You can get the newly published vintage edition of Heliopolis on Amazon for less than six of your earth pounds.

All of a sudden it’s looking like this might have been the first in a series.Because here’s another of  those moments when I’ve been watching a movie and I’ve suddenly stumbled on a line or two I recognise from one of my favourite songs.

I only saw The Warriors for the first time a couple of years ago, not long after I first heard Stanton Warriors’ Stanton Sessions Vol 2.  Both hold a pretty special place in their respective forms.  The former is a seventies cinematic beat-em-up that makes Gangs of New York look like a teddy bears’ picnic, the latter a rich, imposing soundscape of bustling beats and towering vocals, built on a foundation of deep, heart-stopping bass.

This isn’t my favourite version of Track 10, Who Are The Warriors, but it’s still well worth a listen:

Oh, and for anybody wondering what a Stanton Warrior is, the answer comes care of friend and colleague @henryryder:

That was me yesterday.

And that, there on the left, looking slightly pissed off, is twenty-four hours later.

Nice to know I can shave ten years off myself armed with nothing more than a razor. Not to mention the fact that my good lady wife is prepared to be physically intimate with me again.

I hadn’t shaved since my cousin Max’s funeral back in November. I knew all along I was growing a beard for a reason, I just didn’t know what exactly what that reason was. Turns out it was #Plan9.

I’m going to assume that you’re a regular reader of my blog, and that if you’re not, you know how to follow a link. If you don’t know what Loch Ghoon is, you might want to read this.

The potted version is that late last year I saw a cousin four years my junior exit this world, and about forty-eight hours later decided to adopt a pet film project of his and see it through to fruition. Maybe it was actually just a moment of selfish psychological opportunism, a bid to try and revive my own faltering aspirations as a film-maker, jumpstarted by the shock of his loss. I don’t really know.

But I do know that we’re none of us, however many beards we shave off, getting any younger. And I know Max would have loved what we got up to yesterday, if only the sheer audacity of it. A shoot at one of the best locations in London, a cast of thousands, and it didn’t cost us a bean.

So what the hell is #Plan9? Well, it started life as just a regular Plan B. Driving back from Scotland after New Year, contemplating my spectacular failure to shoot the original Loch Ghoon teaser.

I guess I should have seen it coming, as soon as I settled on the title for this post. Sizemore or no Sizemore, you don’t get to rub it in the faces of the god of indie film-making without rebuke. And sure enough, things started to go awry almost as soon as the imaginary ink was figuratively dry.

With the entire Cairngorms cloaked in snow, and the temperature plummeting, a call came through from Walter. Just a delicate suggestion that we might want to start to rethink any plans to film outside. Or, for that matter, go outside.

If the house was to be our box, we had, at the very least, to think outside of it. I attempted some frantic rewrites, but quickly ran into trouble. It’s one thing for your protagonist to encounter an ancient amphibian aggressor lurking on the banks of a small Scottish loch. I found myself struggling to rationalise the hitherto reclusive creature’s decision to depart the sanctuary of its icebound home, climb several hundred yards up a steep hill, and break into a nearby house, for the sole purpose of molesting its peace-loving inhabitants. Anything I produced seemed to require not so much the suspension of disbelief as its unconditional expulsion.

Meanwhile, as the flavour of our original script was being diluted thus, it became increasingly apparent that the heroic intentions of our leading man – you may know him under the name of Benny Crime – were in danger of crossing the fine line that divides stoicism and lunacy.

Benny had kindly agreed to take the pivotal role in our original teaser, that of a gentleman thief called The Otter (so named because of his propensity for escaping over water).  His other half, Judy, had subsequently agreed to direct.  Both had committed, in doing so, to driving a small and notoriously erratic car called Colin the length of the country, in order to shoot thirty-six scenes, and then drive all the way back to London.  And all this over the course of just three calendar days.

Oh, and the penalty for failing to get back on time?  No biggie.  Just that they would miss Judy’s mother’s wedding, taking place on New Year’s Eve.

Finally, common sense prevailed.  And thank fuck, because when Emma and I reached the end of our own horrific journey north – the last two hours of which were spent driving blindly into a maelstrom of darkness and snow, punctuated by occasional bursts of bright light and sharp metal – we found a house full of party. Never a bad result, au contraire, but no place for an elaborate and already wildly over-ambitious film shoot.

All of which meant that, coming back down the M1 on January 2nd, the car needlessly burdened with all manner of unused film-making equipment, and my brain going overtime trying to synthesise serotonin from the various chemical constituents of pickled onion Monster Munch, I was feeling a little downbeat about the whole thing.

But you can’t beat yourself up over these things, not too much, not too long. You have to take the regret, the failure, the frustration, and shape it into something worthwhile, something better, something that couldn’t exist if it not for being forged in the fires of your own self-reproach.

So it was that Plan B came into being. Plan B, which swiftly became #Plan9, on account of the extent to which I was starting to identify with a man hailed the worst film-maker of all time – the writer, director and producer of Plan 9 from Outer Space, Ed Wood.

And #Plan9 is better. I’m not going to go into why – the stories you still hope to tell can always keep. I do want to thank the people who helped out though, I guess that’s what this post is building up to, even if it isn’t quite Oscar night.

It’s quite a roll-call. I’m talking @whatleydude, @_AKA_, @ruperthowe and @katiesol, the latter two of whom had volunteered to help without our ever having met in the flesh before. Then there’s @saffront, @scudamour and @skinnertron, all of whom had no reason to be there but for the readiness to help out, and be involved. And of course @bennycrime and @sizemore, even if Mike didn’t technically turn up, in the tediously corporeal sense at least.

And what did we achieve? I guess that remains to be seen. I’ll tell you what it meant to me though.

It meant an original idea getting off the page. Trust me, we’ve got the footage to prove it. It might be awful, but that’s got fuck all to do with it. If you’re like me, if you’ve talked up enough projects and never delivered, nailing a few scenes feels like blowing up the Hoover Dam.

It meant poking a finger through the slippery membrane that constitutes my comfort zone, and finding that I could pretty easily slide my whole body through. It was invigorating, it always is, when you realise that your essential insignificance is the greatest freedom you’ll ever enjoy. Rejuvenating even.

Meaning that, in a building full of things that aren’t getting any younger, I stole back just a day or two.

It’s a start.

Posting this because, if you’re anything like me, and you’re discovering this for the first time, it will make the hairs on your neck stand up.

If not, take yourself back nineteen years, and listen to this:

Yup, #VHSMovieClub is BACK.  This time our venue will be SCOOTERWORKS from around 6PM on the evening of MONDAY JANUARY 25th, bringing you the mother of all creature double-features.

First up we have the original CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954).  This will be followed by the main event – John Carpenter’s THE THING (1982).

Why this particular line-up?  The reason is my cousin, Max Biles, who passed away on the morning of our first #VHSMovieClub get-together, and would have loved this shit.  I’ll elaborate a little on the night, if I’m feeling it.  If not, we’ll just kick back, raise a glass, and watch two of his favourite movies.

For anybody wondering about the venue, you can find it here:

And it looks like this:

It’s not costing anything to hire, so the only thing you’ll need any money for is the bar. Which is probably for the best, in that many of us won’t have seen a pay cheque for the best part of six weeks.

Try and ping @VHSMovieClub or @ewebber on Twitter if you want to come along, just so we can keep a sense of where we are with numbers. Shouldn’t be an issue though – if last time was anything to go by, we do quality, not quantity.

See you there X

UPDATE 07/01/10: I just created a Twtvite.

A is for AFK – I seem to get some of my best work done when I’m not staring at a screen.  I guess I’m more of a pencil person.

B is for BREAKFAST – The most important meal of the day.  And a chance to get ahead on all the fruit and fibre of which my diet seems to be otherwise totally devoid.  Take my word for it, breakfast is going to be BIG in 2010.  And fibrous.  And, well, rather boring.

C is for CRUNK – My version of Lent, involving a break from all the crap drugs.  You know the ones;  booze; coke; sugar; television.  I’m not damning them outright, they just aren’t my cup of green tea.  Last year I managed 37 days.  As of right now I’m four down and counting.

D is for @danlight – Twitter’s become an outlet through which I waste time and energy trying to validate inconsequential aspects of my life in the eyes of people who likely couldn’t give a shit.  Which would be fine, except that that’s what my blog’s for. Going to try and mix it up a bit on Twitter.

E is for ELECTION – Some of my favourite blog posts (by me, that is) were written about the 2008 US presidential election campaign.  Hopefully I can find some time to conjure a bit of commentary on the ‘compassionate conservative’ clusterfuck we can look forward to in the run-up to May 6th.  Without having to break my leg in two places in the process.

F is for FAMILY – It’s the easiest thing in the world to cite work/writing/whatever-you-fancy as a reason for being an absent or inadequate husband/father/son.  Even worse, you might actually try to convince yourself that it’s more difficult, or more important. It’s not.

G is for graze.com – One of my oldest friends, Tommy P, is one of the founders of graze.com.  Honestly, I didn’t see them surviving the downturn, but they seem to be doing just that.  What’s more, I met a few of the guys behind the business, and they’re an impressive bunch.  Expect good things in 2010.

H is for HELIOPOLIS – James Scudamore, another very old friend  – try 30-odd years – published his second novel, Heliopolis, exactly one year ago.  It ha since received considerable critical acclaim, and was long-listed for the Booker Prize.  I still haven’t read it.  (In fairness, it’s not like I read any other novels in 2009.)  This is lame as fuck.  I will read Heliopolis in 2010.

I is for INSHRIACH – The hard-working highland estate owned and managed by our pal Walter.  Just back from spending a truly magnificent few days seeing in the new year, and set to get back up there for one family holiday, three stag weekends and one music festival over the next six months.  Oh, and I want to try and shoot a film there (see L).  Project Inshriach goes from strength to strength.

J is for JUICE – Just don’t drink enough of it.  Cranberry is best, for the kidney win.

K is for kickstarter.com – a clever little site, recognising the amplified power of Internet crowdsourcing as the basis for funding a range of worthwhile endeavours.  Hope to try it out with something, quite possibly…

L is for LOCH GHOON – …a film I’m going to make.  So far I’ve failed spectacularly in almost everything I’ve set out to do.  Fortunately, for as long as I’m only playing with my time or money, that doesn’t really matter.  Expect more spectacular failures in 2010.

M is for MAX – My cousin, who passed away in 2009.  I’m going to honour his memory in the year to come, in a number of ways.  (See L, N and V.)

N is for NORTH DORSET RUGBY FOOTBALL CLUB – Max was their Club Captain.  Going to make sure I get a long to a game or two, starting with the home game against joint-leaders of the Southern Counties League, Frome, on January 30th.  Let me know if you fancy it.

O is for ORGANISED – Not very.  Just a bit.  I’m talking a to-do list on a Monday morning, is all.  Meaning that O is also for Optimistic.

P is for PSYCHOTHERAPY – The new vocation Ems has chosen for herself, following almost a decade in corporate public relations.  Her foundation year starts right here, and four years down the line…

Q is for QUALIFICATIONS – …enabling her to practice Psychotherapy in a professional capacity.  I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t concerned about what could come out in the wash along the way, but it feels great that she’s pursuing a vocation that has the potential to play to her real strengths.

R is for RESOLVE – Emma has it.  Once she commits herself to something, she gets the job done.  I’ve always been more of a butterfly, but I don’t beat myself up over it – it has its own advantages.  Between us we both seem to get stuff done.  I guess R is also for Rapport.

S is for SLINGERS SIZZLE – Very keen to see where this ends up, after generating such a huge buzz back in early December.  So I guess S is also for Sizemore and Sleepydog.

T is for TOMMY P – He’s getting married in May.  I figure that gets him his own entry, especially being that I’m best man.  Soon as I’m done with this list, I need to make a start on that speech.

U is for UNSUBSCRIBE – Meaning I don’t care how many of my friends took quizzes this week.  Or what kind of dried fruit you are.  Or what kind of dried fruit I am.

V is for #VHSMovieClub – and the 365 VHS videos I’m going to watch in 2010.  Follow @VHSMovieClub to keep pace, and for details of our occasional outings, the first of which is the Max Biles Memorial #VHSMovieClub taking place at The Scooterworks on January 25th

W is for WILLIAM DESMOND TAYLOR – The subject of the most grown-up thing I’ve ever attempted.  Watch this space.

X is for EXERCISE – kind of.  Because I’m going to start taking regular exercise. Kind of.  It starts with getting back on a climbing wall.  Reckon my leg is back where it needs to be, and I can probably squeeze a spare evening out of the week, especially during Crunk.  Probably Thursdays at The Castle in Green Lanes, if anybody fancies it.

Y is for WHY NOT? – It’s a much better question than ‘Why?’  For someone who’s supposed to be creative, I think my mind is sometimes far too closed to the more challenging ideas of the people around me.  Need to fix that.

Z is for ZZZ – Every aspect of my life seems to be improved off the back of a good night’s sleep.  It’s effortless, enjoyable, and a great way to experience the extraordinary imaginative energy and latent creativity of the human mind.   Speaking of which, I fancy a kip.  See you in 2011.