Critic Cal

I'm pensive as I pair the socks. A mournful sigh or two escapes my lips. There is a dramatic flourish to the manner in which I add each newly-reunited couple to the growing pile. "What is it, darling?" -- Mr. W, resigning himself to my woes in generous acknowledgement of my none-too-subtle signals. "Oh, I dunno, you know, the usual" -- I try to keep it brief. His magnanimity takes a turn for the mischievous: "Awww. Do you feel like the kid who didn't get the presents they wanted?" A horrifying, hilarious, humbling hiatus... I feel profoundly diagnosed, with no choice remaining but to laugh at myself and my hitherto noble sense of weighty sorrow. (The sorrow lingered, but its pride and self-satisfaction were sorely dented). Indeed, the major part of my more recent miseries could be aptly described in that way: I don't get the presents I want. 'Tis true I have, in my own way, had  ' stuff to contend with' over the years -- and by t

NOTE: If you only have a few minutes spare, skip my ramblings and go straight for the Tom Wright clip near the end.... I was a cow in my first nativity play. In fact, I was such a spectacular cow (as any who know me might readily imagine) that the next year I was promoted to Mary. [Fast-tracked to my  "level of incompetence" or what? Or rather, way beyond my level, skipping several interim incompetencies along the way...my hospitality skills are somewhat lacking, I'm useless with animals, I'm neither wise nor a man...]. Here is another nativity play; the clip featured at the big, shiny, (fire-hazard-y), carol service I went to at our big friendly local Anglican (in true, hip-and-with-it, "it's multimedia all the way now, kids" style). I laughed a lot -- not least because it called to mind my fabulous dear sister, who (as a child), looked a lot like the protagonist of the piece, and was prone to display similar character, guts, and volume, with si

" If I could work my will,” said Scrooge indignantly, “every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!”  “Uncle!” pleaded the nephew.  “Nephew!” returned the uncle sternly, “keep Christmas in your own way, and let me keep it in mine.”  (Charles Dickens, from  A Christmas Carol ) Bah, humbug! -- Would that 'they' would let me be to keep Christmas my own way. But every year the same! Grrr. 'Be here', 'eat this', 'sing that', 'feel joy', 'talk to these people', 'smile now', 'say thank-you', 'wear this hat'... ('Drink up'...by which stage, it's usually '*sigh*, well, maybe I will...' :-/ ). If there's one thing that really riles me this time of year it's the 'magic' of it all (ferociously, disgustingly  monetised by the advertising industry ). Last year, I

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself." ( Matthew 22 :37-39) Intentionally or otherwise, the challenges posed by these instructions of Jesus underpin the achingly fabulous (but not-for-the-faint-hearted) work of self-reflexive [1] troubled genius that is ' Seven Psychopaths '. For all the gun-toting, axe-wielding, hacksaw-brandishing, crossbow-flourishing, gasoline-dousing, razor-slicing maniacal action, it is, at the end of the day, essentially a film about faith and friendship (as, arguably, was McDonagh 's previous film ' In Bruges '). To (very briefly) set the scene: Marty is a Hollywood scriptwriter working on a project which, as the film opens, has a title and not much else. His livewire best friend Billy is determined to help him find inspiration -- at one stage even putting an

"Justice is a knee in the gut from the floor on the chin at night sneaky with a knife brought up down on the magazine of a battleship sandbagged underhanded in the dark without a word of warning." ( Joseph Heller ,  Catch-22 ,  from Chapter 8 'Lieutenant Scheisskopf ') Justice, injustice, and the aching arbitrariness of it all is a central theme of Catch-22 [1] -- summed up powerfully in Chapter 39, which finds the protagonist Yossarian (a WWII bombadier) wandering through the streets of Rome, hopeless and helpless in the face of human tragedy and suffering: The night was raw. A boy in a thin shirt and thin tattered trousers walked out of the darkness on bare feet. The boy had black hair and needed a haircut and shoes and socks. His sickly face was pale and sad. His feet made grisly, soft, sucking sounds in the rain puddles on the wet pavement as he passed, and Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly

Neo: "I know Kung-Fu" Morpheus: "Show me" Classic. (Shame I can't link to a legitimately-uploaded clip...) When I first got a Kindle and began happily filling it with everything I'd ever had half a mind to read (fortunately my taste for old stuff means much of this is free) there was that inevitable moment where I thought "if only I could cut out the middle man -- wire my brain up and download direct", y'know, like in The Matrix . Now, I'm most certainly not disputing the pleasure of reading -- I'd save a choice selection to linger over the old-fashioned slow way. But there's so much information out there, and so little of it in my head! My computer screen, as well as my Kindle, bears testament to this frustrated greed for "knowledge" -- layer-upon-layer of browser windows, each packed to the edges with tabs, tracing a meandering, tenuously-linked train of thought through history, philosophy, literature, current affai

"I do not want to be a tragic or a philosophic chorus." (Louis MacNeice, 'Wolves') What is it with my propensity to set myself up as the 'voice of gloom'? -- everything's "Kafka this" and "Nietszche that" and "Bond is trite" and "I'm too deep to have fun" and "T.S. Eliot is the only one who understands me". Last Saturday, for example (possibly in protest against the mainstream hype surrounding the latest installment of said trite franchise) I dragged a few unfortunate associates to see ' Beasts of the Southern Wild ', an intensely artsy affair with plenty of hype of its own within appropriately artsy circles (to which I evidently have pretentions). It is a poetic, dreamlike exploration of the harsh animal brutality of human existence, seen through the eyes of a 6-year old girl living with her deteriorating father in a ramshackle bayou community on the 'wrong side' of the levee bu

Somewhere in the growing pile of books threatening to bury my bedside cabinet is one which, when the cares of life o'erwhelm me, I know I can turn to, open at random, stab blindly at the page with my finger and find a word to minister to my need. It is 'The Biggest Ever Tim Vine Joke Book'. "Crime in multi-storey car parks. That is wrong on so many different levels." "I've just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I'll tell you what, never again." "Rome wasn't built in a day. That's Milton Keynes you're thinking of." "So I was taking the M4 out of London, and this bloke said, put it back." "The trouble with an all day breakfast is you've got to eat it so slowly." "This bloke left a huge lump of plasticine in my dressing room. I don't know what to make of it." We all know the old story about the man who tries similar with his Bible. Hoping for guidance, he opens at random and al

Right, I need to stop subconsciously assuming the characters of the characters of every novel I read. So much for all that chat about being intentional, thoughtful, processing stuff carefully, etc etc -- apparently that only works if the fictional examples I encounter behave likewise. Latest example, The Post Office, by Charles Bukowski (a postmodern triumph!). Lots of drinking, lots of fearless bluntness, lots of job dissatisfaction. Cue an evening of unchecked work-misery-plus-too-much-red-wine-fuelled mouthing-off and generally being an arse. Followed by a morning of self-reproach-plus-back-to-work-fuelled misery, and a definite longing to chuck it all in and turn poet, if only I had Bukowski's lyricism -- I never saw such stark, brief language used to such effect! In the morning it was morning and I was still alive. Maybe I'll write a novel, I thought. And then I did. Thing is, Bukowski's three-quarters-autobiographical lead character, Chinaski, actually hides a go

"I have a story that will make you believe in God" -- a promise made by a 'spry, bright-eyed elderly man' to a writer's-block-stricken author, as they make polite conversation in a busy coffee house in India. And it is precisely this 'story' that lifts Yann Martel 's fictional author [1] from the mire of despondent unproductivity and occupies the remainder of Life of Pi ...my latest venture into the world of contemporary literature. That this novel, like my previous venture , should be so pre-occupied with religion, prompted some hasty generalisation on my part -- until Mr. W reminded me of the high chance of selection bias in a sample based on recommendations made by people who know me. That said, the attitudes and ideas reflected by the two books, as examples of what 'the rest of the world' are reading at the moment, provide some indication that God -- His existence or otherwise, and what to do about it -- is still a burning question. And t