The Everyone Moment

There comes a point in many a movie badguy's runtime at which he must impress upon an underling the scale of response needed to a certain situation, usually a threat posed by the hero. I think of this point as The Everyone Moment.

In John Wick, which I watched this morning, that moment goes as follows:

Boss: "Task a crew."
Underling: "How many?"
Boss: "How many do you have?"

I think of this moment as The Everyone Moment, and I like to think that every movie boss also thinks of it that way when their moment comes.

Why do I think of it so?

Because the definitive example of this moment, the instance every movie must now shrug its shoulders and surrender in the face of, is the instance in Leon / The Professional, as executed by Gary Oldman:

There are two reasons why this example will never be bettered. The most important is that Oldman is superb in this role, with barely a human hair's width between where he pitches it and going overboard. His isn't the scariest or even the craziest movie villain - the former honour is shared by the characters played by Joe Pesci in Goodfellas and Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, to my mind; the latter I don't know, maybe Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight - but he is the zaniest movie villain who still manages to be scary.

The second is the actual scale of response the film delivers, which within the scope of my experience is matched only by the equivalent scene in Terminator 2 when the cops show up at Cyberdyne Systems. But T2's moment doesn't have Oldman.

Part 2:

A somewhat similar point in many action films is that at which the film establishes the badassery of its hero.

In John Wick this moment precedes the film's Everyone Moment by just a couple of minutes. It's a very successful, if slightly ridiculous scene, which starts with the following dialogue:

"It's not what you did, son, that angers me so. It's who you did it to."
"Who, that fuckin' nobody?"
"That fuckin' nobody ... is John Wick."

The badassery-establishing bit follows, but this is the bit that raises the hairs on the back of your neck.

I haven't yet found the definitive example of this moment, but for the time being I think of it as the Ryback's File Moment, from the scene in Under Siege in which Gary Busey's character finds a personnel file on who we previously thought was a mere cook (well, not really, because he's played by Steven Seagal) and proceeds to read it aloud to his fellow badguys. It's a rather blatant scene, but effective nevertheless, mainly because of the great performances of Busey and Tommy Lee Jones:

If anyone wants to offer a suggestion as to the definitive Ryback's File Moment, have at it in the comments.

The death of Tolstoy: a short review of Anna Karenina

The idea that Tolstoy is one of the greatest novelists really must be put to bed.

Henry James called the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky "loose, baggy monsters", and in Tolstoy's case that's the verdict that should stick.

It's not that Anna Karenina is all bad, it's that the juice is far from worth the squeeze.

The highlight is that there's a decent amount of complexity and variety in the characters - not shovel-loads, but a decent amount. Characters in AK are frustrating, and you root for them as they bumble around screwing things up. And Tolstoy is also very good at describing scenes of country life, like horse racing and farming, about which he was obviously knowledgeable.

But his sentence construction is fairly pedestrian, he includes too much and, worst of all, he's an excessive and blatant moraliser. In practically every chapter you can feel Tolstoy prodding you in the ribs and going "Now isn't this a foolish / the correct thing for the character to be doing?"

The message of AK can essentially be summarised in the following extract:

"He soon felt that the fulfillment of his desires had furnished him with only a grain of sand from that mountain of happiness which he had expected. This fulfillment showed him the constant mistake people make when they imagine that happiness lies in the fulfillment of desires."

Which is fine, but later on we have this nonsense, written without irony:

"What would I have been and how would I have spent my life if I had not had those beliefs, if I had not known that one must live for God and not for the satisfaction of one's needs? I should have robbed, lied, murdered."

No, Tolstoy, because EMPATHY.

I can only assume that Tolstoy's reputation is propped up by people of faith who like having that reinforced. It wouldn't bother me, but I only soldiered on with AK because of Tolstoy's standing; I felt I had to read at least one of his two tomes. Well, perhaps I'd have fared better with War and Peace, but I'm going to give it at least 20 years before finding out.

Oh, James was wrong about Dostoevsky, btw: Crime and Punishment is great.

Book review: Mythologies, Roland Barthes, 1957

Like any self-mythologising French philosopher, Barthes doesn't make life easy for the reader. He's not as nonsensical as Baudrillard, but then I think he preceded him, giving the latter the chance to up the stakes still further.

Anyway, Mythologies is about myth, which is what Barthes calls second- or further-order semiology - when something that's already been used to signify something is then used in another context to signify something else - and what happens to the original thing and what it originally signified, as well as the properties of what those two together then jointly signify at the new level. Clear? It won't be.

But there are some fun examples, like what beads of sweat mythologise in the film Julius Caesar, and what a photo of a writer on holiday mythologises. It's good stuff in places, I just wish it was less deliberately opaque in others.

Modern dating / Giulia

So modern dating now involves deciding whether you like the look of the person you've just been presented with on Tinder enough to leave their profile open on your phone, preventing any other use of said phone, until your "super like" gets renewed and you can tell them you like them, which might be anything up to 12 hours. "I waited 11 hours for you!" What romance!

Hungover thinking

There aren’t many upsides to hangovers, but I can think of a couple:

The guilt they induce serves as a kick up the arse: a push to do something productive as soon as you’re able, to make up for having had to mope around doing very little while the hangover lasts.

(Entirely by serendipity, I’ve just discovered that a word for this is metanoia, meaning a life change resulting from spiritual conversion or penitence, from the Greek metanoein, to change one’s mind. I discovered this while looking up the definition of metonymical, which I mistakenly thought was spelled with an “a” (meta-), for the next paragraph but one: I had hoped it might be an adjectival way of describing something as being meta, in the sense of having a recurrent higher order.)

However, it’s a second upside I’m more interested in here. (Although it’s related to the arse-kicking upside, in that it also has implications for productivity.) It’s that I think differently when I’m hungover.

I’m convinced this is true. When I’m hungover I'm more observant; I'm more inclined to think and to think at length; I tend to think about deeper and more complex subjects; a broader range of ideas seems to be available to me; and I'm more productive in my thinking.

I don’t think this is narcissistic: I make no claims to think well in any state, it's that I have thoughts and ideas when hungover that I wouldn’t otherwise have – or at least not as readily. The ideas underlying many of the posts on this blog came to me when I was hungover - including, predictably but pleasingly metanymically (see above: I’m coining the term. I never use the word metonym anyway: that’s why I had to look it up), the idea for this one. 

I’ve recognised this for a while: I’ve long thought it helpful to consider important decisions while sober, drunk and hungover, partly because I spend not-insignificant portions of my life in the latter two of these three states, so it’s only fair for my sober self to take my drunk and hungover selves’ opinions into consideration, but also because I know that being drunk or hungover might facilitate inspiration.

Is this property of hangovers particular to me, or is it true for everyone? I don't know. There must have been reams written about the effects of alcohol, but I haven't read much of it. I know Hemingway said that whiskey put his thoughts on a different plane, but I assume he meant on imbibing, not the day after.

I doubt there’s been much if any research into how substances affect thought patterns beyond matters of addiction and impulse control. There ought to be. If anyone knows of any or has any good references on the subject, please do leave them below.

Meanwhile, I need to get up off my arse and do something with my day.

Book review: Fear of Music, David Stubbs, Zero Books, 2009

Best read with Spotify or similar to hand.

Despite being subtitled "Why people get Rothko but don't get Stockhausen", Fear of Music doesn't actually address the question of "why modern [read: avant garde] art is embraced and understood while modern [as above] music is ignored, derided or regarded with bewilderment as noisy, random nonsense perpetrated and listened to by the inexplicably crazed", as the blurb puts it, until its conclusion - a mere 26 pages out of 137. Rather, the first 111 pages set out the parallel histories of the two beasts.

The answers eventually proffered are: because the megabucks associated with modern art have familiarised the public with it; because modern music can feel like an infliction; because music more powerfully depicts the future, and the future is bleak; because humans are inherently more tolerant of visual than auditory chaos; and, a more general repetition of the first, because people aren't used to modern music.

Of these, I give most credence to the infliction and tolerance suggestions. To take the latter first, modern music much more commonly causes physical pain through sheer extent (in its case, volume) than modern art when experienced live, and auditory chaos also much more readily causes headaches (even at reasonable volume).

The infliction point is related. Although modern art often aims to challenge, it doesn't generally aim to cause as much unpleasantness to its audience as possible, whereas this does seem to be the aim of bands like Throbbing Gristle, Napalm Death and Sunn O))). A more appropriate comparison to these more extreme avant garde bands than the sublime (in an artistic sense) works of Rothko would be images of violence such as those force-fed to Alex in A Clockwork Orange.

The very premise of the book is on shaky ground in this respect. In setting out the history of avant garde music, Stubbs includes such figures as Jimi Hendrix, Kraftwerk, Joy Division, Brian Eno and Radiohead - hardly musicians that lacked a popular following. Furthermore, he states that millions of people already do embrace avant garde music (albeit calling this "a tiny fragment of the overall demographic"). Most damagingly, he even says "it's hard to conceive that Duke Ellington's music was once considered 'dissonant' or to recapture just what a fissure the joyful peal of Louis Armstrong's trumpet represented" - i.e., that in these cases at least the avant garde has been wholly accepted by and subsumed into the mainstream.

Likewise, although Rothko is indeed extremely popular, the same cannot be said of all avant garde art. The Tate Modern may receive millions of visitors per year, but this is due more  to its cannily having been established as a symbol of trendy London and to the monumentalism of the building itself than to its housing works by the likes of Giacometti, which are barely glanced at by the incessantly shuffling crowds, despite a Giacometti having sold for $141m this year. The public much prefers shows of works by old masters like Rembrandt and Leonardo or impressionists like Monet to the Futurists or conceptualists.

Having said all that, I like the premise of the book even if it's a false one, simply because it gives Stubbs the chance to provide his parallel histories of these two fascinating movements. And I like the book itself: Stubbs writes well and with a keen eye for what to cover from what must have been a wealth of material, and includes just enough of himself to add an extra dimension without being intrusive. I read it in one day, fighting to keep going through straining eyes (see the glasses in the photo above).

The book is also a fantastic way of discovering new music, and I recommend having access to Spotify or similar when reading it so that you can appreciate what's being discussed as you go along.

I also like the ethos of Zero Books, which claims to have the lofty aim of fighting the contemporary elimination of the public and the intellectual.

However, while both the publisher and the author seek to stand up for the avant garde, I do wish they hadn't taken such a free-thinking approach to grammar and spelling in the edition of FoM I read: practices such as printing words in a meaningful order, including every word in a sentence but only as many times as is required, subject-verb agreement, apostrophe placement, knowledge of what commas are for and reserving paragraph returns for the ends of paragraphs do help to convey a message more easily, boringly conservative though they may be.

The Big Ones #1: Wasps

If, as you're meandering along, contemplating the beauty of every living thing and how best you can serve your fellow man today, you happen upon a wasp sitting placidly on some surface, does your position in the social compact mean that you're morally obligated to kill it? Discuss.