Can Style Be Substance?

So I’m supposed to be trying out that pared down style now. All those adjectives, superfluous nouns and weird exclamation marks flying all over the goddamn place were getting old. No more corpulence.


It’s a shame that the Blade franchise, stemming from the Marvel comic book incarnation of the same name, has died out for several reasons. First of all, the visceral style of the first two movies in the trilogy had a sensual edge to them which really seemed to capture the zeitgeist of the nineties, that icy, hard, cool exterior with not much underneath – firm to the touch yet brittle. And inside...inside...

 We won’t dwell on the third of the trilogy. Some things are best left dead and buried.

 The second reason seems to stem from a growing disdain towards films which produce an overt aesthetic which does not conform to that which is set down by the status quo of conventional Hollywood blockbusters. That grungy, eastern-European setting to Blade 2 was unpalatable for viewers who desired their Western brains uncontaminated by the Other and all its grotesque trappings. The idea of a bureaucratic race of bloodsuckers, by the same token, also seemed no doubt a little too close to the bone. There are enough people out there getting fucked by pale guys in suits at it is.

 The third reason has something to do with the short lived season of the Blade series. It was a fat candle with a big wick and in the very short period it took to burn bright and out most viewers were either drooling over the basketball or seriously pissed off by the fact that their brains had been stimulated by a rich mélange of neo-noir aesthetics and stylized ultra-violence.

 Those last two facets of the Blade franchise are what brought about its demise in the first place. There’s something bizarrely familiar about that alternate universe which viewers find unsettling; the shortcomings of the director to alienate the audience from the spectacle has had the opposite of the desired effect. The protagonist grabs a cop and dashes his brains out against the trunk of the patrol car. Broad daylight. New Yorkers everywhere. No one pays much attention. At first the sight seems intrinsically ridiculous. Maybe the director was lazy, the viewers think, and shift back into their seats. Either way, the complete apathy of human beings towards each is being illustrated in no uncertain terms on the big screen. The movie ends. No one pays much attention.

I suppose it’s ironic. The director sets out to make a film which art only in the most superficial sense – the surface is the canvas. So can style be substance? The end result is the complete opposite of what anyone had ever intended, and that, I guess, leads into why the films are associated with what one lazily refers to as postmodernism.

Do Not Bend

So I finally got through the traumatic process of editing alongside the team at a certain Europhillic publication and the finished piece is right here:

http://www.europeandme.eu/10diaphragm/513-recreation-for-the-masses .

It might be recognizable from the original but I wouldn't know because I have no intention of re-reading the goddamn thing.

March Of The Pigs

Cacophony in the UK - tabloids baying for blood from one end of the newspaper aisle to the other, wild-eyed media moguls screaming through print in one last desperate spurt of rancid discourse, anything to drag those foolish atheists away from certain destruction and eternal retribution in fire, burnt bodies and the old sagging cunts of the sex industry pushed reluctantly to page fifteen...

London. Out of the dust and the filth, somewhere in the near distance, reeling in and out of the fog, a great armoured car, hideously stuffed with epithets of holy war, penetrates the vision of the crowd and, arms flailing wildly, an old decadent figurehead calls out to deaf ears, eyes clouding over in doubt as the cheering begins to fade and perhaps through the cobwebs of his mind some far-off and distant thought emerges, at last, ‘’Gott ist tot – und wir haben ihn geotetet*!’’

Two grotesque vignettes which neither objectively chart the Pope’s visit to the UK, nor do they present the occasion in any meaningful and constructive way. Indeed, such vibrant and shamelessly subjective accounts of this demonically powerful politician of the void are quite destructive. Yet it seems there is no other way to cover or analyse or simply relay the events unfolding in London which surround the Pope – indeed, which surround the Catholic Church – because one becomes immediately embroiled in the dogmatic values of the Church itself, within a matter of seconds.  The imagery of hellfire and brimstone, and the so-called ‘’war lingo’’ one is more accustomed to seeing in Iraq/Afghanistan reporting will always rear its ugly head, simply because the temptation to do so is almost entirely overwhelming.

Never before has such a prestigious, revered and literally worshipped figurehead in the discursive movements of this era been torn down from his coach and drenched in the filth of his followers with such vigour and enthusiasm. First came the wave of child abuse allegations, corrosive to the minds of the loyal, but sweet nectar to victims, atheists, cynics and free-thinkers alike. Then Professor Hawking murdered God via the Times, just as countless free-thinkers have done so before him: Darwin, Nietzsche, Camus, Sartre, Sade, Foucault, Montaigne, Bachelard, Houellebecq, Russell, Shakespeare...

While this strange creature writhes and moans on the ground, the only remaining possibilities are to remain the passive observer and grossly gape on, or indeed to participate in the sacrilege, the heresy, the natural order of things. Even Catholics have dealt fatal blows to the Pope without even realising it – Anne Widdecombe’s disastrous attempt to portray the Catholic Church as a source for good, via ad hominem arguments and dogmatic values, stands as a valid testament to such a bold claim. Each time devout members of the Catholic Church condescend to the level of the thinker  (as opposed to the follower -another inversion of the natural order not uncommon in this cult) their clumsy attempts to jam the pieces back together only tear more stray threads from the garment itself. Total disintegration. Grab a limb, and pull as hard as you can.

*''God is dead - and we have murdered him!'' Thus Spake Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche