The Bottle Dungeon

Received Dununciation – Part 1

I sometimes watch English language teachers doing their thing on youtube for the purpose of asking myself if their yammering actually helps anyone gain a better understanding of a complicated language, or rather, as I find is usually the case, these channels are little more than panhandling with a posh accent. There is a carny air to any any channel with the alarming combination of “English” “speak” and “native” in its title as it skirts the issue of what a “native” is “supposed” to sound like. Is a double-negative dropping Londoner any better or worse than, say, a Liverpudlian, or, for that matter, a good ole boy from Tennessee, or a Singaporean with British parents? All are “native” (and how archaic and otiose that word sounds) English speakers, but they all speak very different “Englishes”, to use a Crystalism – we’ll get to him later. “Native speaker” is a meaningless term, but one that still bears undue weight. A speaker of any foreign tongue should never attempt/aspire to sound like a “native” because such beings do not exist; it is a fool’s errand, a quixotic quest. Nevertheless, there is a delusion that being taught by a native, on youtube or otherwise, has some sort of cache, that these deities have an innate magic lantern that will illuminate the language for any mark seeking social status.

Allow me to share my wisdom, achieved, partially and piecemeal, of explaining modal verbs, the present perfect tense, relative clauses, comparative adjectives and all the rest for the past 10 years. It is abundantly clear that where one was born has no effect whatsoever on the degree of knowledge imparted to one’s students. To argue so would not only make one a candidate for mediocracy, but also an undercover eugenicist. Good teachers, of English or any subject, could be born on the moon; subject knowledge, a bond with the class and an ability to make the theoretic practical are really all that matter. And no, this doesn’t involve ripping up the textbook and having the students stand on desks hailing you as the messiah.Teachers may share certain traits with other performers – priests, comedians, prostitutes, circus geeks etc. – but the good ones aren’t in it out of a misplaced desire to “help people”, nor does anybody get into teaching out of lust for fortune and glory. It is a chosen profession, perhaps because all other options have been exhausted, but chosen nonetheless. It isn’t a calling, or a “gift”, but an experience-based craft, chosen out of a selfish desire to be listened to and understood. This, however, can yield delicious fruit for all.

Bloviation done, on with the good stuff. What happened was that an English teacher youtuber, Lucy, was accused of causing offense for making a video titled “Avoid Mispronouncing These Words If You Want To Sound Professional And Intelligent” (since deleted). It was a popular video that garnered nary a murmur of complaint until some time later when she was Called Out by another youtube English teacher. The effect on Lucy was dramatic, to the extent she stopped posting her videos on idioms and stuff for an extended period of time, several months, which is decades in the social media realm. I only noticed the unfortunate events when she made her non-triumphant return to the platform, posting a regretful video in which self flagellation occurred. I had to watch it, youtube told me to. She had experienced the worst thing any online figure can: she was publicly shamed. You don’t need to be Jon Ronson to know that this a Bad Thing that can have terrible consequences for the recipient. Her crime? As alluded to in the first paragraph, it was that she dared to speak in Received Pronunciation and posit that pronouncing certain words in a certain non-RP way would make the naive speaker wannabe look bad, or poor, or thick, or less of a native speaker or whatever. Wrong, yes, but hardly a Myra Hindlyesque repudiation of social duty. So far, so standard online performative outrage with an undeserving victim. But there’s more.

In her apology video Lucy films herself facing the camera centre screen with her hands clasped protectively in front of her, totemic wedding ring to the fore. She describes, in a tone usually employed by unfaithful politicians, “accent discrimination” as “the biggest mistake I’ve ever made” and states, “I am angry at the way I have been making people feel.” Grave words indeed. She explains that the title of her offensive video was chosen because “intelligent” and “professional” are “buzz words” that attract viewers. She then explains her epiphany that the flip side of the video title is that anyone mispronouncing the 10 words she picked would, therefore, not be intelligent or professional-sounding and the self-harm rate would thus sky rocket. Presumably. We don’t really get any specific examples of the consequences of her reckless actions, just a vague idea that she made some people “feel bad”. Which people, I wonder? Virtually all her comments are glowing endorsements. Her audience certainly seems to like her, although I imagine some of her traffic is gained not because of her teaching ability but because of her appearance – the comments below in many of her videos would tend to bear this out.

Towards the end of the 3:27 video (which attracted 876,000 views and over 12,000 comments mostly of the “PC gone mad” variety) Lucy announces, with renewed confidence, that, “This is now my period of learning.” because it’s 2020 and that’s the kind of guff people caught with their hand in the cookie jar feel obliged to utter. She says that she has “arranged conversations with some of the experts that have criticised me” because these days having a conversation is deemed the elixir to all that ails society, then, while somehow keeping a straight face, she declares, “I want to use my platform for good.” I’ll just let that hang for a moment. This, reader, is the dreadful consequence of forcing people to apologise when they shouldn’t have to – it martyrs them and through the medium of public apology. In this case, it can apparently beatify. Lucy concludes her speech with the preposterous, “To those who criticised me, thank you. You’re trying to effect positive change (pause) and I want to do that too.” Well, thanks for that, Obama. Notably, the short video has several edits – how long did it take to get just that right note of solemnity? Only a native speaker would know the answer.

Stranger Things and the Cul de Sac of Nostalgia

Thousands of bikes abandoned in a Chinese car park | Daily ...

In his review of Super Dark Times, Kim Newman, the greatest critic of genre cinema remarked, “This bleak coming-of-age movie – set in the mid-90s – has little of the nostalgia of Stand By Me, and trades instead in a kind of numbed, frozen, adolescent angst which evokes River’s Edge or Over the Edge – fine films which, in turn, almost nobody is nostalgic about in the way more disposable artefacts like The Goonies or ET have been elevated lately to sacred text.” The closest The Goonies comes to “numbed, frozen, adolescent” angst is Chunk’s unmentioned but obvious eating disorder and his tearful confession to the heelish Fratelli family about provoking mass vomiting in a movie theater. It’s not quite Breakfast Clubian levels of lugubrious navel gazing, but weirdly affecting in a young-boy-fearing-imminent-murder kind of way. The Goonies does seem to occupy an exalted status among those of my age group, kindling fond memories of childhood trips to video rental stores – those Aladdin’s caves of tantalizing possibilities and The Strictly Forbidden – and Saturday mornings spent inches from the TV scarfing sugary cereal, a sensibility writ large in shows like Stranger Things, a sugary serial if nothing else.

The inherent problem with nostalgia is that you only get one side of the story. Misty-eyed reveries of boys on bikes reveling in their latchkey freedom from oblivious boomer parents to pursue adventure and undergo rites of passage crumple under the glare of scrutiny. Trust me, I was there. I had a bike – a green BMX with sexy white mag spokes – and I had male friends, well, a couple at least. And yes, so long as curfew was met we were indeed free to roam around town on our gaudy contraptions. However, seldom did we encounter booby-trapped caverns or benevolent alien life forms; rather the freedom granted to us usually resorted in acts of phone box terrorism, shoplifting, indecent exposure, gravestone tipping, vandalism, cruelty, arson and trespass. The latter crime The Goonies touches upon, granted, but it’s milk and cookies childhood as envisioned by Michael Jackson. All the time-killing cruelty of 80s childhood is jettisoned in favour of that most comestible trick in the carny’s armouy, the Sense of Wonder.

What did groups/pairs of boys actually do in the adventure playground of the 80s when free from the stifling rules of home and digital reigns? They did not listen to each other’s problems and form spontaneous safe spaces; rather they goaded each other into acts of wanton destruction under the influence of folie a deux, sometimes trois. Got a cigarette lighter and some spray on deodorant? C’mon, let’s go to the woods. There may well be a stash of sodden nudey magazines lying in wait for a bout of public masturbation, after the dead bird bonfire has dimmed. One of the most sought after objects for my peers was not the latest edition of Dungeon Master’s Guide, but a Black Widow catapult, capable of ruining any stranger’s greenhouse within seconds from an undetectable distance. Ludicrously, it was marketed as a vermin control device and sold largely in fishing tackle shops. Brattishness for boys of the 80s was at least partly chosen rather than foisted; we’ve all read Lord of the Flies, but the excuse of “there was nothing else to do” for unruliness doesn’t wash for 80s children, although pocket money would only get you so far. It is a fool’s errand to cast blame on the laissez faire decade of the 80s itself with its awful parents who when they weren’t missing were smacking us bitches up. That would be too easy, the accusatory finger of John Hughes pointing squarely at his forefathers and high school tormentors.

Really, the era I’m attempting to conjure with sufficient accuracy is the early 90s rather than the 80s – in truth I spent the 80s either at home, at school or being ferried to castles, museums, hills and better cities. Of course, the early 90s were very much still the 80s. People did not shear their mullets and burn their shellsuits on the stroke of midnight 1989. Nobody I knew ever had a mullet, anyway – the cool kids had something known as a “wedge” – shaved at the sides with a thatch atop, like a medieval lunatic, bonus points for tram lines. No, we still had some years to play with before Clinton, Friends, 64-bit consoles and Cobain’s dietary switch from Kraft mac n cheese to shotguns. Much like yowling grunge junkies, decades bleed into each other; they do not observe stringent boundaries. For all the twisted fire-starting and bus mooning, this was still a time, after all, when children could still amuse themselves by building model aircraft and swapping Panini stickers rather than just tall tales and racist jokes (the butt of which were often Ethiopians ie: Q/ What do you call an Ethiopian with his eyeball hanging out? A/ Swingball). A Saturday morning was just as likely to be spent at the local library as it was terrorizing bus passengers with tossed bangers bought from the joke shop. Limits there were, though. An invitation to skip first period Home Economics to take a microdot of acid with another 12 year old acquaintance was not one I accepted. Unsupervised and harmful we often were; utterly ensorcelled by peer pressure/financially motivated by “likes” we were not. There was always one line that wouldn’t be crossed, unless one had really terrible parents.

However, in a hauntological sense, anti-nostalgia, hostalgia as coined by Luke Haines, can also play tricks of the mind much like its equally seductive sister. Shun any fool who tries to tell you any decade was all bad, just as you would the starry-eyed past-dweller who can’t handle present responsibility and retreats into his own Xanadu. As I cast my mind back to those pre-Internet days, it occurs to me that BMX bikes (and sometimes skateboards) were more often than not used for their rightful purpose – my town even had a track – rather than being tools of the inchoate criminal. No, most of our devilry was committed on foot, bikes tending to be an encumbrance rather than a facilitator, the fear of theft looming large were they to be left unattended. Did all this bipedal freedom make us men, teach us independence and street smarts in an era when child molesters lured you directly from the pavement with promises of sweets and puppies, rather than sending friend requests followed by dick pics? Well, look at the current cohort of 40-somethings and you tell me. A generation of men who can DIY or overgrown children endlessly seeking a return, in the form of bingeable television, to a bogus halcyon era of easily monetized tropes? The gentle synth lilt of the Never Ending Story is sounding increasingly like a generational threnody. Some of the corpses are, however, amusing.

Widow’s Peak by Ian Rankin

Prologue

The man from Stirling was rapidly losing patience with his companion, the Fifer. They’d been at this for 2 hours now, and the night air was “colder than a witch’s tit” as the Fifer had put it, more than once. For a corpse there was no doubting her beauty, mused the man from Sterling as he paused to rub his handkerchief over his by now drenched widow’s peak. His mother would have called her a “wee bobby dazzler”. Such a shame what had to be done had to be done, but the Boss wasn’t one to take no for an answer. Still, with any luck they’d be halfway to Manchester before any alarm was raised. “What the bloody helll are you doing now?” he hissed at the Fifer, who for some reason was fumbling at the blue neck of the girl. “Nae use to her noo, eh?” came the reply as the Fifer snapped off the girl’s necklace and stuffed it into the pocket of his filthy tracksuit bottoms. The man from Stirling merely shook his head and went back to digging the grave. He would deal with the Fifer later.

Wee Tam drained his pint of Guiness and looked at John Rebus quizzically. “So, she was murdered tae fuck then, aye, the poor lassie?” Rebus, 3 pints and a double Laphroigh into his session at the Oxford bar, knew he should resist Tam’s drunken interrogation but something about the one-eared father of six’s demeanour was nagging at Rebus as he noticed Tam’s hands were shakier than usual. Maybe Tam could be of use for once in his wasted life? The older man gulped down the remnants of his own glass and tapped Tam on the beefy arm that boasted a rudimentary Hibernian tattoo, or rather a “Hibbies” tattoo. He thought better of mentioning it. “What have you heard about it then, Tam?” Rebus enquired. He was gasping for a smoke, but he had a sniff of a lead here, his first of a miserable week of endless busywork.

*****************************************************************

“Useless prick.” muttered Rebus to himself upon his return to the new flat in Tollcross, the encounter with Wee Tam having resulted only in a larger bill at the Oxford. The third floor property overlooked the independent Cameo cinema, but Rebus thought the last time he’d been to “the pictures”, as it was always known in his family, was a matinee screening of The French Connection sometime back in the 80s on a terrible date with Helen whatshername. Fishing in his coat pocket for his keys, Rebus noticed a crack in the door’s paintwork almost exactly halfway down, dividing it much like the old and new town of Auld Reekie itself, he thought. After missing the lock the first time, Rebus steadied himself and managed to get the door open on the second attempt. When he saw what was waiting for him inside he soon wished he hadn’t.

The Wretched State of The Guardian

The Guardian continues its descent into obsessive madness with this piece about Donald Trump’s presence at the last UFC show in NYC:

Obscene? I had until now thought the Guardian was tolerant of words like “motherfucker”, but apparently the style guide has been updated after the latest presidential outrage and we are now in an era of new puritanism. I thought this newspaper had reached their nadir of Trump obsession when they ran with this headline.

Ignore everything else a venerable actress has to say about her job in favour of the Trump insult because, of course, your readers expect nothing less. There are subterranean standards to undermine. Who cares about her experiences in Hollywood with some of the most notable figures from that milieu when a 5 second handshake with him happened? But that’s what they ran with to garner their readers’ attention. Turner’s words were worthless without that anecdote. No one was interested in her otherwise, according to the subeditor, and, presumably, their click counter. And I was one of them, for shame.

Anyway, back to 2019 and we’re up in arms about Trump retweeting a fighter, one carny to another. Do Guardian readers, who by and large have no interest in Mixed Martial Arts, read that and think “Oh, he’s gone too far this time, must do something about it!” and then click through more Trumpian stories, thus reaffirming their impotent rage, or what? Does it kill two birds with one stone by tethering “cage fighting” – which we all know is wrong and only followed by meathead right-wingers – to the bloviating of the POTUS? Does the Guardian think this will do anything to dent his support/encourage people to spend more time on their website rather than social media? Well, you can knock the damn door door down, but you ain’t gonna get a dime. Answer: none of the above. It is, rather, an own goal, a reckless act of self-sabotage.

Any right-leaning person who doesn’t read the Guardian regularly who happens upon the article will disregard it as leftie hysteria, as they should. It will only reinforce their beliefs and make them more likely to vote Trump if they are an American citizen. MMA fans couldn’t give a shit if Trump was at the show, they will not be interested in the Guardian’s view, and will not stay for any insight into the sport they like because it is non-existent. That leaves regular Guardian readers who must, unless they are particularly dim, be rolling their eyes at this stuff by now. Even if they don’t, even if they’re like “Ooh… how could he? I must read more articles criticising Trump on this website for the next hour or so instead of using Facebook!” then all you have is the same captive audience you already had.

Because that is what the Left has been reduced to; potshots and puritanism in lieu of the empathy that used to be trumpeted, or any recognizable ideology. We don’t want to read about how Donald Trump is using the language of the carnival to embiggen his fanbase; easier just to tut, frown and retweet. Or maybe that’s the whole point. Maybe Trump is the Guardian’s cash cow and they have a vested interest in him serving a second term, hence all the articles that play into the hands of the opposition? It would make sense given that clicks are all that matter to profit-driven websites like the Guardian. I clicked on the link, after all, therefore I am part of the problem (the problem being poor journalism, not The System). But ultimately? Ultimately… I think we all tolerate it until the Left gets a clue about how to market itself without constantly having to purchase new shoes due to the abundance of self-inflicted bullet wounds.

Liberty Through Inarticulation

“I’m glad you asked me twice. You see I’m a bilingual. A bilingual illiterate – I can’t read in two languages.”

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that watching a foreign film without subtitles to guide you would be a frustrating, confounding experience. Not so. For film is a visual medium and the script is really just a carny tactic of the director-as-Lucifer to hoodwink the audience into admiring the vision. Words, words, words… how they intrude, bully and obfuscate, the endless yammering adding little meaning. So often unnecessary, so often nothing like an accurate representation of how people actually communicate. Seldom a stammer or a hiccup on the silver screen. Polished soliloquies and bon mots, with lighting and music to strip away any possible ambiguity. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Those with Louise Brooks avatars who affect an admiration for silent film with its histrionics, pratfalls and swooning starlets are clued in already, the rest of us can watch Indonesian horror films and gawp in tranquility. Horror is a genre that can jettison dialogue entirely and suffer no ill effects as it boils down to people running away from a bad thing. I have watched the Texas Chainsaw Massacre many times; it is not the words that stick in my mind. In fact, put a chainsaw to my head and I don’t think I could recite a single line other than “Aw, look what your brother did to the door!” You can pick up the whole inversion-of-nuclear-family-kill-all-hippies thing without it, though, amusing as it may be.

So it was that I took myself to the cinema and paid a pittance to rent comfort by watching Perempuan Tanah Jahanam, the latest from Joko Anwar, one of a select few Indonesian directors able to conjure a sense of the uncanny by putting his culture into a blender. I have lived in Indonesia for 9 years, yet I have a 3 year old’s grasp of the language. I can get where I need to go and feed myself, but that’s about the extent of my communicatory flair. Shameful? Of course. One would think that 9 years would be sufficient to achieve fluency, especially given how relatively simple Indonesian is to speak with its cavalier omission of tenses, genders and accents. The caveat is that to make the grade the inchoate speaker must possess steeliness and bulldog skin, two qualities I very much lack. Why speak when pointing works just as well? At least that is the rhetorical question that my pathetic reluctance proffers as an excuse. How many times I have upset people by speaking compared to offense caused by gesture, after all?

Flippancy aside, my guilt has started to manifest as an almost olfactory presence. I imagine vast clouds of my ignorance wafting from my pores to horrified onlookers. How, they wonder in astonishment, how can this guy still not fucking speak to us? My failure to achieve fluency is equivalent to the man who stubbornly refuses to change his underpants. Something had to be done, baby steps taken. Literacy and fluency are not achieved through pedagogery, but immersion and willingness. Waste time if you want by jotting down useful words and phrases but it will be for naught without context and application. So, what better way to extrapolate meaning by watching a film and trying to figure it out through action? It proved fruitful, and I imagine the application will come later. As the events on screen unfolded my mind was sprung from hibernation and forced to attempt some linguistic gymnastics. A mere horror film it was not, but a puzzle to be solved. What little vocabulary I had popped up intermittently, and how thrilling it was. Yet, that was not the object of this exercise. Inwardly I had to chide myself for being self-congratulatory and focus instead on the words I didn’t understand.

I recommend this practice for non-native speakers. If the cinema isn’t crowded, you can even mouth along with the actors, shadowing them, without appearing mentally deficient. Language learning is as physical as it is mental, the lips and tongue must enter into unchartered waters. Heck, just ordering the ticket was a hurdle in itself, but one that paid off. I practiced saying the title of the film beforehand. I could’ve just pointed at the screen to choose my seat (top corner, as far away from other people as possible) but I didn’t; I forced myself to utter the number and letter of the seat and then ask for directions to the screen. I knew fine where the screen was, but any opportunity to speak more should be seized. On a side note, I also suspect that any chance someone doing a mundane job like selling cinema tickets appreciates anything even slightly out of the ordinary, such as extended communication with a bashful foreigner. Quid pro quo; I spoke a little more of the language than I usually would, she got to help someone. We both slept easier that night.

As for the film itself, it was rather great. My enjoyment was enhanced, not tempered, by not understanding everything that was said. The mind fills in the blanks in accordance with the events as they unfold. I was reminded at points of Cannibal Holocaust and the aforementioned TCM; the hat was tipped to the genres forefathers, while the gauntlet was also thrown to other Indonesian horror directors – can you do something as atmospheric and uncanny as this without resorting to the same old same old same old ghost tropes? As interesting as Indonesian ghosts are for their cultural commentary, this nation’s cinema goers do not need another Kuntilanak or Pocong film. Horror, ipso facto, extrapolates present anxieties, the collective id; it is an exorcism of the madwoman in your attic. Perempuan Tanah Jahanam does this expertly, speaking to current fears of rising authoritarianism and the covert suspicion of unspeakable rituals being mindlessly followed in the literally unenlightened villages far removed from the glittering malls of Jakarta. This is a country in which a cannibalistic tribal slaughter occurred not 2 hours away from Jakarta in 1998, heads on spikes the whole 9 yards. How easy to forget without a cinematic reminder.

Breaking Bad

Reviewers still have a role to play, they are not redundant yet in this era of infinite instant choice. A good reviewer can illuminate parts of the art that the viewer wouldn’t have otherwise considered. Right, fine. However, some are going a bit nuts with the whole “being woke” thing and it’s adversely affecting the purpose. Case in point:

Did we need more Breaking Bad? Given some distance on it, the sheer level of fervour Vince Gilligan’s dusty drugs drama once inspired has now come to seem like something of a fever dream. Casually returning to some old episodes on Netflix, it’s difficult to remember quite why, collectively, we were so over-awed by the curdled buddy antics of rogue chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) and his former pupil-cum-fellow crystal meth dealer Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) – entertaining, then progressively more harrowing as they were. Already, too, it feels of its era, as one of the pillars of the so-called ‘anti-hero’ age, when morally dubious men did very bad things in confusingly alluring style.

Hugh Montgomery sets out his stall as a crusader in his opening paragraph. This is not just a film review, but an attempt to settle scores, the brave reviewer running roughshod on toes and shotgunning a sacred cow. Well, Hugh, if you’re going to do it to Breaking Bad, Imma do it to you. Killing a sacred cow is not brave, it is a desperate cry for attention. It’s only only 2 sentences before we lapse into Tabloidese alliteration here. “Of it’s era”, not that good really, look at me with the benefit of hindsight. I see what’s trying to be done here, but it’s a symptom of intellectual bankruptcy to view the past through the lens of the present. And, goodness me, it’s not like Breaking Bad is a worthy candidate for this kind of “What were we thinking?” bollocks. Too soon? No, just make a good job of it if you must go down this road.

Dubious men doing confusingly alluring things, to whom, exactly? I was not confused while watching Breaking Bad, Walter White’s actions were meticulously mapped out. It was a series about the sin of pride, nothing more nothing less. The key word in this review, though, is “men”, cos this guy has a point to make and, by golly, he’s going to make it. In a staggerigly inept manner. To wit:

Six years on from its end, and the TV zeitgeist has decisively moved on – to Killing Eve and Fleabag, Russian Doll and Succession; to anti-heroines, less ambiguously awful men, and more sophisticated comedy-drama hybrids. But that’s not to say that the Breaking Bad fandom has dissipated. Ever since the series five finale, when White took himself and his Nazi enemies down in a hail of machine gun fire, the possibility of a movie sequel has been the subject of excited speculation. We have had the prequel series Better Call Saul, but despite acclaim, it has been too esoteric to achieve the same cut-through. So when a two-hour film called El Camino was finally announced over the summer, it felt inevitable if, by this stage, not altogether essential. Just how inessential the result is, though, is frankly mind-blogging.

There ya go; TV is automatically better with female protagonists, because Sex and the City was such a trailblazer. Yes, we’ve “decisively moved on” to sexy, invinsible, lesbian assassins (a role model to which any young girl can aspire!) and overly-articulated rehashes of Ground Hog Day. Nothing in those groundbreaking pooh poohers of gender norms to attract male attention, those sisters are doing it for themselves. Anyway, so BB attracted enough attention to garner a spin-off series and some people on the Internet speculating about a film version. Clearly, this is a Very Bad Thing. And what exactly is a cut-through? Look, I’m so sorry you have to do your job by watching films and writing about them on the BBC, but how about a bit of clarity for the sake of dimwits like me? But, the paragraph ends with an oh-so-clever pun, so I shall continue.

The question was always: where exactly could a sequel go? That closing shot of White bleeding out on the floor suggested he was very much a goner. An interesting and dramatically fertile choice would have been to focus on White’s wife Skyler: as she discovered her husband’s criminal activity, then reluctantly decided to collude with him, her morally compromised journey became one of the show’s most interesting aspects, even if some keyboard warriors notoriously directed abuse at her – and Anna Gunn, the actress who played her – for supposedly being a nag. When we last saw Skyler, she was living in an airless flat with her two children, working as a taxi dispatcher, her life of suburban affluence decimated: a film checking in with her now could have been a worthwhile endeavour.

This is the part that really bothers me, in terms of the role of the critic. You, the critic, can only review what’s put in front of you; you can’t indulge in “what ifs?” or you are simply saying “my ideas are better” and, if that’s the case, you have to write them yourself. But no, we get “keyboard warriors” and some sort of half-baked thesis about BB being not enough about women. There are hundreds of female-led shows out there, and even the 80s yielded the Golden Girls, but this is apparently insufficient. It’s a very strange point to make, that the character of Skylar would have been somehow more empowered if she had simply gone along with her husband and joined him in a life of crime. Call me a misogynist, but showing a wife left bereft by her husband’s life choices is not in any way an endorsement of patriarchy but quite the opposite.

Let’s skip over the plot description to get to:

Inevitably, there are a series of cameos from familiar faces – a few, like Pinkman’s wastrel buddies Badger and Skinny Pete, appearing in the present timeline, while others – including, yes, that one – are crowbarred in via flashback. The latter scenes are fan service as its most lumpen, narratively and dramatically negligible as they are, though it’s difficult to see how even the most ardent fans could get excited by them. You won’t find many women speaking actual lines among the assembled cast: there is no reappearance from Skyler or her sister Marie, it’s sad to say, though hey, we do a get a gaggle of nondescript, fur-coated sex workers.

So, better if they’d been naked and garrulous? Woke reviewers, you’ve really got to make your mind up about this, because at the moment the cake is being eaten and had. You can’t watch a film and count the words spoken by gender to make a stupid point because that is denying agency to the creator. Some films will be mostly male-led, others mostly female-led, obviously, but don’t go sticking round cocks into square holes.

If this fantastically empty endeavour is characterised by anything, it’s a kind of glib machismo, that the original show could be guilty of displaying, but is concentrated down here. Were there a tragic resonance to be found in the relatively young Pinkman’s pathway to a snowy oblivion, it’s obscured by the kind of low-grade humour that relishes bros calling each other ‘bitch’ and seems to find comedy in the very idea of the murder of someone’s cleaning lady. As the series progressed, the question of Breaking Bad’s so-called ‘bad fans’ – those who would misogynistically hero-worship White and deride his wife Skylar – inspired debate: was it subject to misinterpretation, or simply less sophisticated than it had initially appeared? After this grubby extra chapter, you’re less inclined to give Gilligan the benefit of the doubt.

Finally, we get to the nail being hit on the head, the irony of “fantasically empty endeavour” fluttering in the wafting ordure. This is not a review at all, but the worst king of attempt at social justice. The overly aggressive kind, the kind that merely adds weak fuel to the non-existent fire and embiggens one’s opponents. Because, really, I don’t think anyone watched BB and thought “glib machismo, should have more female voice” just as no one reading this review or my take on it thinks “yeah, you’ve got a point there.” Just as no one thinks that Sex and the City needs more male Communist voices, because they’re so horribly underrepresented. Dude bros do use the word “bitch” in real life (which was skewered adeptly by Steve Carrell in Date Night as he yelled “You Whore!” at his opponent) yet the word “bitch” is uttered not once by Jesse in El Camino; Vince Gilligan is a reporter, not an endorser. As if that even needed pointing out. But it’s the “bad fans” that are given attention. This is othering, plain and disgraceful. Millions watched BB; very few sent aggressive tweets to Anna Gunn. That must have been upsetting for her, and it’s unjustifiable, but in terms of assessment of the show? A non issue. Something only an attention whore would write about in a piece of uniquely funded BBC twaddle.

Joke’s on You Part 2

I do wonder if there would have been all this wailing and gnashing of teeth if Arthur Fleck had been black. Now that would have been a provocative move by the filmmakers. Would a black, or, for ultimate on-pointetness, a transgendered Hispanic protagonist be seen as triumphing Ali-like over an unfair system on a dog day afternoon, rather than bull-horning angry loners into doing unspeakable things? And really, it’s not like they (pronouns, pal) needed any inspiration from films before Joker. Where are these narcissistic wretches claiming, that, “a film made me do it, sir”? That guy with the orange hair? Wasn’t even a fan. Even Ted Bundy only stooped to fingering porn (ahem) when the chair was almost a lock, porn, not prayer, being the last refuge of that scoundrel. Or would the critics, when faced with a Joker of Color, invoke the DC Snipers and/or castigate the film for demonizing an ethnic group a la Rambo: Last Blood? We can only speculate. Rambo (Blood the First) is worth bringing up, though, as another film that contemporary critics stressed about, partly because it differed on screen wildly to the tone of its print version. Strangely, Falling Down (the ultimate angry-white- guy-on-a-rampage film, and far more of a militant cri de coeur than the impressionistic Joker) seems to have been given a free pass at the time, despite the audience very much being asked to empathize with the vengeful D-Fens. And that dude didn’t dance once.

Here’s Ebert, who could easily have been writing from beyond the grave about Joker:

What is fascinating about the Douglas character, as written and played, is the core of sadness in his soul. Yes, by the time we meet him, he has gone over the edge. But there is no exhilaration in his rampage, no release. He seems weary and confused, and in his actions he unconsciously follows scripts that he may have learned from the movies, or on the news, where other frustrated misfits vent their rage on innocent bystanders

Similarly, Peter Travers in Rolling Stone:

There’s no denying the power of the tale or of Douglas’s riveting performance – his best and riskiest since Wall Street. Douglas neither demonizes nor canonizes this flawed character. Marching across a violent urban landscape toward an illusory home, this shattered Everyman is never less than real … “I’m the bad guy?” he asks in disbelief. Douglas speaks the line with a searing poignancy that illuminates uncomfortable truths without excusing the character. Schumacher could have exploited those tabloid headlines about solid citizens going berserk. Instead, the timely, gripping Falling Down puts a human face on a cold statistic and then dares us to look away

Is there an echo in here, or have I contracted tinnitus as a result of all the earnest lamenting? Of course mass shootings weren’t really a thing in 1993, and they only are now thanks to blanket media coverage of a statistical nonentity; on any given day almost anything is more likely to kill you than some dick with a gun who primarily targets his immediate social group,. Mass shootings are catnip to rolling news; crying bystanders, sirens, victim tally, comments from an NRA pick and a horrified Hater of Freedom, finished with “But will anything change?” No, not if you keep doing this, it won’t. And yet, the fucking thing has been out for over a week and acts of mass murder seem not to have spiked. Look, if you want to be regarded by history as foolish and hysterical, then the best way is to try to instigate a moral panic. The righties did it in the 80s with Satanism and now the lefties, bless their fair trade lattes, are attempting to do it with films like Joker.

If you think that the visual switcheroo of Fleck trudging up the steps at first as a schlub, then dancing down them after his rebirth as the non-articled Joker, signifies a progression or validation of his actions, then you haven’t been paying much attention. The dance down the steps is not triumphant, it is a defeat, a couldn’t-be-clearer statement that Fleck has lost whatever sanity to which he previously clung. Clue: he is in full gimmick. Men who have made it in life do not put on a costume and dance alone. Or dance down some steps after just committing murder. The scene may be set to Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll Part 2 (and it might as well have been The Fall’s New Big Prinz with its similar thump and “He is NOT-uh appreciated” refrain + dancing, and ohmygod the dancing is good in Joker), but the viewer is certainly not invited to the party, rather she is supposed to acknowledge the literal descent. Fleck is walking away, not up towards anything approaching the acceptance he once craved. The feeble minded reviewer does not grasp this and tweets about getting non-congratulatory tweets. Who is the one really in need of adulation in this pointless spat? Who, I constantly ask these days, really has the privilege? Well, it’s sure as shit not Arthur Fleck, nor the guy giving away his anger for free. Demons Dance Alone.

Joke’s on You

When a bubblegum genre film attracted the sort of lofty critical praise and concomitant pro-lash that Joker received before its official unfurling it piqued my curiosity as one who normally shuns the endless barrage of cape flicks. A Scorsesian triumph cried some. An irresponsible clarion call to wingnuts and incels howled others. So this particular film about a man in a costume behaving in an outre manner must clearly be about something other than the world being saved from dastardly forces, being rather a timely commentary on our current political cockfight. After all, don’t comic books speak to our desire to escape into fantasy when the going gets tough, to a more binary world of heroes and villains? When our world leaders fail us, when there’s panic on the streets of London, when a 16 year old girl attempts to slay the evil Orange Man with her Scowl of Doom, isn’t it necessary for this fear and loathing to be funneled into the dominant film genre so we can delight in our own foibles being rendered funhouse mirror style in an amusingly uncanny way?

The trouble with using a comic book character as a synecdoche for the culture wars is that they are already so loud and infantile there is nothing left to caricature. Although Chris Morris adeptly slays that argument, thankfully. However, depicting the Occupy movement as clowns isn’t satirizing them; it’s merely an ouroboros. The Occupiers took their masks from Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta, the Killing Joke influenced Joker now reclaims the trophy. If real life is going to ape comics, then films like Joker must follow suit. Insert your own gag about playing joker and trump cards. The AV Club fretting about “the wrong crowd” misinterpreting the film is ludicrous; we are all masked avatars now, hewn in a memetic mound, the V mask or the MAGA hat. And Joker, in the form of Arthur Fleck, is nothing if not a spreader of memes. The film is the tail wagging the dog; real life will borrow memes from Joker, but Joker does not reference reality, only other films.

All this is to say that Joker isn’t a reflection of present culture, but vice versa. The culture war is nothing but endlessly regurgitated catchprases, money for old tropes. When Arthur Fleck literally punches the time clock, it isn’t a howl of frustration, rather it is the Instagram story in his own head, an act of self myth-creation. It is how he wants to be seen by his co-workers – powerful, rebellious – rather than who he actually is – feeble and mentally ill. It is real life reflecting fiction as the clip will be rendered on message boards by people who, like Fleck, wish to portray themselves as rebellious but who, dissimilarly, aren’t willing to actually hurt their hand. The impotence isn’t Fleck’s, it is the guy’s posting the meme because he has nothing to draw upon to say who he is other than through the medium of a fictional character. Present culture re-flecks the film as Fleck is not witty or capable of original thought; his quips are lame and cliched, he is only a comedian in his imagination, reduced to pseudonymous trolling (but with an actual gun). If Joker were reflecting present culture, Fleck would feel impotent and enraged, but he would also have material wealth and sanity.

Fleck is not an incel or even what any incel would aspire to be. The slights he suffers are not imagined (I am ignoring the unreliable narrator angle of the film for the sake of clarity) – people do not ignore him, they kick the shit out of him. His impotence is foisted, not adopted. Real life incels have all day to craft their online screeds, Fleck is reduced to Neil Hamburgering his big moment, but without the self awareness, and stammering inanities about how “everyone just yells at each other”. Holy revelation, Batman. It’s hardly the wounded articulation at which most incels fancy themselves adept. Only a minute fraction of incels turn to violence, and those who do are only celebrated by their odious fraternity, not society as a whole. The incel is not enraged because he is nameless and faceless, or lacks wealth and status, but rather because his wealth and status have not afforded him what he thinks is his right; they are the right wing Bruce Wayne, not Fleck. They lust after conformity, not the chaos they perceive. Fleck is not terrified or scornful of women, nor are his actions vaginally determined. His distaff fantasies do not even creep up to PG. Incels do not bathe their mothers.

Nonetheless, Joker is an interesting film. It manages pathos and, in one murder scene, the type of violence one expects from Nicholas Winding Refn, not he guy who previously helmed The Hangover. Joker’s cannibalization of Scorsese is, again, reality reflecting the film as everything is just a Warholian factory product now, much like sequential comic books, yet the cultural appropriation is done with admirably shameless relish. It’s rare for a comic book origin story to feature such a lithesome performance from its star and I particularly enjoyed his lunatic Chaplin dance to Gary Glitter’s Rock and Roll part 2, perhaps the best unhinged contortions since Leatherface flailed at the end of Texas Chainsaw massacre, having failed to get his girl. And no, he wasn’t an incel either. Am I saying don’t read too much into the film and just dance along with Fleck? No. By all means see it through whichever ideological prism you see fit, but know that prism was spawned from the repressed realm of fantasy merchants to begin with.

Indonesian Parents

Cinemas in Jakarta are done rather well. While the kleptotheocracy running the show deem it an affront for the hoi polloi to glimpse a female nipple on screen lest it give them funny ideas about increasing the population of 260 million (a figure that suggests no encouragement is needed), gruesome violence is free from circumcision, and a velvet class cinema ticket which affords the viewer a dentist’s chair and a blanket usually costs less than a pint of beer. Much cheaper cans of beer can easily be smuggled into the theatre inside a bag. So far so acceptable. But there is a twist in the tale…

One gripe this ticket buyer has is the use of mobile telephones during the film. How dare they not be as enraptured with the events on screen as I, the vile narcissists! It’s not so much that they are ruining the shared experience, but the tiny glowing oblong of their apparently more vital screen infecting my field of vision that irks. I’ve found contorting my legs in such a way can usually block out the infraction, but it also tends to leave me egressing like a rickets sufferer. Considering how much effort goes into making a feature film, it seems churlish to merely use it as background noise while you whatsapp your dinner plans and rearrange your baseball cap.

Of far greater concern, however, is the presence of infants in films made for adults. This, I believe, is something distinctive of developing countries where regulations are generally treated as foes to be if not slain, then roundly ignored. Heck, when the government can’t be bothered following their supernaturally mandated edicts, why should those who aren’t in a position to plunder vast sums? Soeharto remains the most corrupt dictator of all time, with a haul of $30 billion, almost 1 billion for every year he helped farmers, erected homoerotic statues in Jakarta, unified 17,000 + islands with a national language and indulged in a bit of dehumanization and genocide. Damn, I love Indonesia, as the t-shirt slogan goes.

Where was I? Right, kids watching horror films. For a country where besotted parents label their little miracles things like Diamond, Sun, Princess, Star and Love, and strictly forbid any premarital carnal activity, one might have the reasonable expectation that doing things like forcing them to ride with 3 of their helmetless siblings on motorcycles and plonking them down in front of clearly marked Over 17s Only fare might meet similar censure. Au contraire. Many parents here think nothing of taking along their garrulous offspring to wildly inappropriate films, just as they are blase about letting them ride around the lunatic streets with nary a driving lesson taken or a bribe-bought license concealed in their training bras.

Renting Motorcycles & Scooters in Bali, Indonesia

I’ve ranted before about breastfeeding on planes, and I don’t mean to give the impression that I am some Herodian crank. My beef is entirely with the sins of the father, or the mother, whatever, being foisted onto the child. The days of moral panics, satanic or otherwise, may be a fading specter in the West, but they are very much alive in Indonesia. This is still a country, after all, in which possessed workers can run amok during cemetery demolitions. And, how sweet it is when a Malay word is used in context. But. I’m no Dr. Phil, but even a reckless scoundrel like me can, in a rare bout of exercise, jump to the conclusion that giving the little darling the old Ludovico Treatment for a screening of Necro Sluts from Beyond the Grave might perhaps cause if not nightmares, then a looming meth addiction.

Parents of Indonesia, just fucking knock it off. If you’re at the mall of a Saturday night, parading around in your finery, then you almost certainly have a nanny. Leave the kids with her and make it up to them on Sunday by taking them somewhere more age appropriate, a shooting range or an anti-LGBT rally or somewhere, anywhere, that doesn’t necessitate me writing this. After all, I’m masturbating furiously under that blanket.

Joe and Dough

Eating out in Jakarta is often cheaper than eating in, but it’s fraught with tension. Will they actually have what’s promised on the menu? Will the staff be zen-like in their ability to ignore an aloft waggling palm followed by screaming “Mbak! Mbak!” like a worried sheep, or will they hover mosquito-like and demonstrate a neediness bordering on the stalkerish? Thankfully, neither extreme manifested at Plaza Indonesia’s Joe and Dough, a bijou bistro specializing in pastries and breakfasty type things. The service was speedy and fine. The food arrived at peak appetite whettedness, before the onset of despair and gloom, a cancelled order and recriminations.

I’ll get my complaints out of the way first. This is a place designed for LIlliputians – we sat at a tiny circular table in a booth outside the main dining area. So much the better for people watching, but the table was about the size of a pizza. When you have two cups of coffee, an orange juice (which was delightfully pressed and very much orangey), a bowl of soup with a side plate of toast – more on that later – and a skillet pan which kept spinning round every time I attempted to withdraw its contents, it becomes a bit of a bother. The upholstery was slightly grubby, but not to the extent that I winced or even felt the need to remark upon it. Some things are best left unsaid for the sake of conviviality.

Now, the important part. I ordered a “fry up skillet” which was 2 sunny side up eggs, mushrooms (slimy little fuckers, prone to ruining many a dish, which I have always hated but am training myself to tolerate, much like the use of “am”) beef “bacon” which actually wasn’t far off the real haram deal, and cherry tomatoes. It was accompanied with a tiny pot of baked beans and the best toast I have eaten in Indonesia; herbed, buttered and just crunchy yet pliable enough. Oh, I was happy smearing a knifepoint of beans on the toast and being all British and culturally reappropriative. In fact, I could have done without the eggs and mushrooms entirely and just gorged on that lovely toast and the beans for about half an hour. The nigh subversive novelty of gaming the system and eating beans on toast in public in Indonesia is no mere trifle. I reveled. If I’d had Woo-stah sauce concealed in my koteka like I usually do, there’s a good chance that fantasy would stretch to an hour with a repeat order preceding an offer to felch the manager.

My boon companion ordered “truffled mushroom soup” which also came with great toast. I was forced to try some of the soup and, for mushroom soup, much less one with a needy signifier, it certainly wasn’t disgusting. Nicely seasoned, not scalding like Starbucks coffee, the right amount of blending. It tasted… earthy? Not like soil or a nude hippie, but in a robust, short back and sides way I appreciated. But I almost forgot the spoons! Our coffee came with copper teaspoons of such pleasing heft that it took all my sobriety not to conceal one in the strap of my watch as we egressed. The handle of the spoon was this perfect cylinder with no irksome handle at the end – it just stopped. A masterpiece of precision. I was unsure of whether to stir my coffee with it – not really necessary, but y’know, it’s there – or just hold it in my hand and enjoy its neightiwess.

And! And! The bill arrived promptly and this allowed me to stride forth into the rest of the mall to buy more useless shit and books that will sit in their clingfilmed state in my cabinet for the next 7 years. A wonderful afternoon it was. I didn’t steal the spoon.

Joe & Dough at Leisure Park Kallang | Cafes worth a Visit ...

I was right there! See what I mean about the tables?