Real Life is rubbish

I don’t know about you, but I loved Yann Martell’s Life of Pi. I thought it was one of the most startlingly original novels I’ve ever read in my life. And that includes Mervyn Peake’s monumental Gormenghast trilogy. So we’re up against stiff competition.

But not long after I read it, a peculiar thing started to happen. People began to say to me: a shipwrecked boy sharing his lifeboat with a Bengal tiger, hyena and orang-utan in the Pacific Ocean? You gotta be kidding they cried! They said it couldn’t happen. It wasn’t real. The boy would be eaten, the tiger would drown, the boat would capsize, blah blah yawn yawn…their voices began to merge into one long continuous drone. I began to feel depressed and needed a Jack Daniels and coke. Quickly.

Yes, these people had an effect on me. When they said Life of Pi wasn’t true what they meant was; life is not like that. Apart from the obvious question of how on earth would they know (who do you know who’s recently been shipwrecked in a lifeboat with a tiger?) they miss the point of storytelling; it doesn’t have to be true to be believable!

Personally I’ve never come across fairies in my local woods but I groove over Shakespeare’s A Midsummer’s Night Dream every time I see it. Who is Keyser Soze in the film The Usual Suspects? Arch-criminal? Bogeyman? Anti-Christ? I couldn’t give a fig, it was a damn good crime thriller. Salman Rushdie is up against this problem all the time. Here’s the opening chapter of The Satanic Verses:

‘To be born again’ sang Gibreel Farishta tumbling from the heavens, ‘first you have to die. Ho ji! Ho ji! To land upon the bosomy earth, first one needs to fly. Tat-taa! Taka-thun! How to ever smile again, if first you won’t cry? How to with the darling’s love, mister, without a sigh? Baba, if you want to get born again…’ Just before dawn one winter’s morning, New Year’s Day or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, towards the English Channel without benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky’

Men don’t fall 20,000 ft out of the sky and live do they? No they don’t, if you don’t believe it. But when the words are this good (as they often are in Rushdie’s case) o, yes, I believe it alright. Good storytelling requires a willingness to believe that is almost akin to religious fervour, the only difference being of course that getting ‘really into a book’ rarely leads to stuff like The Crusades, home-grown suicide bombers and George ‘Dubya’ Bush.

I realize it personal taste, but people who don’t get Life of Pi and baulk at the ‘unrealness’ of its hero’s adventures remind me of the grim-faced schoolmaster Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times:

‘Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!’

It was Daniel Pennac in his wonderful book, The Rights of the Reader, a passionate defence of reading for pleasure, who said you have the right to mistake a book for real life. And he’s spot on. I’d rather go to an unreal place I believed in than one that was real but I didn’t believe in.

Because let’s face it, real life often is rubbish.

Reasons to be Cheerful Part 2: The most stylish KO in the history of boxing.

It’s not only the most stylish KO it’s also one of the most memorable fights in boxing; Rumble in the Jungle, or if you like, Ali-isn’t-given-a-hope-in-hell-against-a-mean-moody-and- awesomely-powerful-George-Foreman.

You must know the story. Ali stays on the ropes while ol’ George batters him relentlessly, everybody’s worried sick for Ali, they think he’s gonna die, even his corner are screaming for him to get off the ropes, but Ali’s a magician and this is his infamous rope-a-dope trick.

He lies against the ropes and becomes a human punch bag for George. George takes the bait and hammers Ali for eight rounds. Only trouble is Ali doges most of the punches and by round 5 George is tired. Very tired.

What happens in the eighth is the stuff of pugilistic history. A left hook followed by a right straight to the face topples George. As George goes down it looks like Ali’s going to throw another punch just to be sure, but he pulls back. He wants his KO to look good, not ugly. It does, it looks great. Check it out yourself here.

Reasons to be Cheerful Part 1: The first 41 seconds to Leftfield’s Phat Planet

Yes you do know it. It was used in the legendary Guinness Surfer ad, the one with passages from Moby Dick in the voice-over: ‘I don’t care you who are, here’s to your dreams’

Phat Planet’s intro is the probably the most malevolent bass build-up ever in the history of popular music. Roughly 40 seconds of pulsating, throbbing, deeply ominous bass.

It’s the sound of seven samurai warriors preparing for battle, they’re up against an Emperor’s army of thousands. By the end there’s nothing left of the army.

A Frank Confession

I haven’t written any new material for nearly a year. I realize this is hardly a world-shattering fact. But it’s an unusual position I find myself in. I usually write like a nutter. And I love it. Especially at 2 in the morning. This is when I work best. When all I can hear outside my window are the occasional bellow of a gang member or screech of cat-fight, otherwise silence “like an abattoir in the dead of night”. Um, that’s actually a line from Hard Man Les, a character in my play Gob, but I like it, so there. Punching away on my keyboard in the early hours always brings to mind Dylan Thomas’s lovely poem about writing not for fame or riches, but for the secrets of common humanity:

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labor by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

I can picture Thomas in his cottage in the village of Laugharne, whirring away with his typewriter, fingers permanently curled round a whisky glass, fag butts spattered across the carpet, collapsing finally sweaty and puffy into bed at seven in the morning. I’ve done this too, except I don’t come up with poems like 'In my craft or sullen art'. No, I come up with unintelligible drivel.

I wonder though. Was Thomas really a total piss-head when it came to writing or does it suit the Welsh hell-raiser myth? Personally the only time I’ll allow myself a beer when I’m writing is when I’m doing stage directions. I mean, anyone can do stage directions. They are beaucoup boooorrrng. Writing is an art (Thomas subconsciously acknowledges this by putting the word in the title of his poem!) and requires a good deal of concentration, a bit like driving, and you wouldn’t drive drunk would you? And if you did, you’d probably crash…hope you see my point?

I digress. The fact of the matter is I haven’t really wanted to write any new plays for a while. This is partly circumstances. Two simple equations will illustrate my point nicely:

Demanding job = knackered = less energy to write
Relationship = weekends taken up = less time to write

The relationship has gone, but the day job remains. In other words, life has got a bit in the way. But the other reason I haven’t written for a while is nothing has really got my goat lately. I don’t feel particularly churned up about anything. Really good plays have this starting point. You get worked up. It won’t go away. Follows you around day and night. Face it, you’re obsessed. The play’s gotta get written.

Martin Amis said: I don’t want to write a sentence that any guy could have written’. No, I don’t want to inflict on the public a play they couldn’t give a damn about either. So it’s not writers’ block that worries me, it’s can I get worked up enough these days? Watch this space…

It’s a dirty job, but someone’s gotta do it: I debunk my Heroes. Part 1: De Niro/Scorcese

It’s a self-evident truth that it’s a looooong time since De Niro and Scorsese did anything as powerful and memorable as their holy trinity of movie male self-loathing: Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull. And they’re not going to are they? Falling in Love? Analyse This? The Colour of Money? Bringing Out The Dead? You get the picture I think.

Let’s not kid ourselves. De Niro’s and Scoreses’s reputations are built on three movies and three alone. And no one but no one can take that away from them. We’re talking reputations made in Mount Rushmore stone. Which is just as it should be. But c’mon, after the Big 3, it’s strictly downhill. (Okay, I’ll give you Goodfellas, but it sure as hell ain’t De Niro’s movie like the Big 3 are).

Those early movies have one obvious thing in common; they’re deeply uncomfortable to watch and yet you can’t take your eyes of the screen. So how did we end up with The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwhinkle? Maybe you can’t sustain that level of intensity for long: psychopaths, loners, losers, and bums takes it out of you. Or maybe it’s the Golden Age of movie-making that’s gone, the fabled 70s where the Director ruled the earth and Hollywood just said yes. Everybody knows what would happen to Taxi Driver if it was made today. Travis would cop off with Cybil Shepherd and after a few ups and downs (a little bit of an incident with a gun but nothing serious) he’d settle down and maybe stop doing night shifts.

Of course De Niro and Scorese are soooo good they only need three movies to secure their place in cinematic iconography. And that’s the thing. Everything after seems…well…a little tame. I keep harking back to the old days, like a lover who can’t accept it’s over. Hey, Bobby, remember that scene in Taxi Driver where you watch the dancing couples on TV with a gun in your hand and it's Jackson Browne’s Too Late For The Sky on the soundtrack?

Ever wanted a really memorable definition of great acting? Mick Jagger’s character Turner nails it in the film Performance:

“The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness”

Don’t get me wrong, De Niro and Scorsese still make good movies, it's just that they’re a little too normal for me.

Kubrick: he ain't that good

I was watching Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket the other night and a dark thought came over me. I say dark because Kubrick is the Zeus of movie-making and you’re not supposed to fuck with Gods. But as rent-an-inspirational-quote Ghandi used to say: “The truth is the truth even if you are a minority of one”. So at the risk of being chained to a rock and having an eagle gnaw at my bollocks forever, or whatever it is the Gods do to you when they’re pissed, here goes; the film’s crap, folks.

Holy dogshit! My flat’s surrounded by Stanley-groupies and they’re all dressed like Alex from A Clockwork Orange and I think they want to perform a bit of the old ‘ultra-violence’ on me! Hey, back off, this is the democratic UK, not the cinematic Taliban. Can I speak? Thank you. Okay, call me glib, but the reason why I groove over FMJ is simply because of one man: R Lee Ermey. Who? No, you do remember him. Frankly, it maybe all you remember. He’s the Marine Drill Instructor with a unique way of motivating his new recruits, here’s some examples:

“I bet you’re the kind of a guy that would fuck a person in the ass and not even have the goddam common courtesy to give him a reach-around”

“Did your parents have any children that lived? I bet they’re regret that. You’re so ugly you could be a modern art masterpiece”

“I’m gonna give you three seconds, exactly three fuckin’ seconds, to wipe that stupid lookin’ grin off your face or I will gouge out your eyes balls and skull-fuck you!”

After Lee’s been blasted away by Private Pyle, let’s face it, the film reverts to a bog-standard American Vietnam war movie; kill gooks, feel a little bad, start shooting again.

All you Kubrick-nuts will of course know that Lee was originally a technical advisor on the film, but he was so good as the Instructor Kubrick hired him on the spot. Now that’s what I call common sense, not genius. Sorry, Stanley

O, yes, and another thing…the award for the most pointless voice-over ever in movies goes to…FULL METAL JACKET. I mean, we know they’re in Vietnam and war is hell and blah blah yawn yawn…

And another another thing: have you noticed how Kubrick’s been served by some master stories and storytellers? Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, Stephen King's The Shining, Arthur C Clark's 2001. Interesting how when it’s a shit story it’s a shit film, no, not even Stanley could rescue Wide Eyes Shut. I mean, how far can you go wrong with stories like the above?

Unlike good ole' Lee, I welcome of course debate on the matter.