Drawing a line under the spandex apocalypse - Mad Max: Fury Road

If you like exercises in style, you'll love Mad Max: Fury Road.

I liked it a lot, yet in that difference between like and love lies something I want to talk about.

Like many successful fantasy and science-fiction films - Conan The Barbarian and The Fifth Element spring to mind - Fury Road can be understood as a sort of visual poem.

So much thought has gone into the look of the film that it staggers me. The cinematography, vehicle design, the costumes - the way every character is designed and presented as an archetype from the pages of a graphic novel - all of it is nothing short of brilliant. The same care and attention seems to have gone into someone on screen for 30 seconds as it has to those characters who carry the story forward.

It's very rare that I'll see a film with that level of commitment to an aesthetic and make it work harmoniously, outside of the meticulous replication of the period drama or the complete control offered by animation. And let's mention in passing here that director George Miller was also responsible for both Happy Feet films... 

Avoiding the post-apocalyptic power-trip

Fury Road doesn't reject plot, but sketches it with the clean and simple lines of pulp fantasy and SF. The great thing about pulp is that it tends towards the condition of mythology - great themes like redemption, revenge, competition for resources, tyranny and freedom rise to the surface without needing to be spelled out. And don't challenge the primacy of the visual experience.

It's also to the credit of the script that it avoids the Freudian pitfalls a film depicting the post-apocalyptic power-trips of manly men could so easily fall into. Making Charlize Theron's Imperator Furiosa the real protagonist and rescuer of the villain's chattel-slave wives (who all grasp their own agency over the course of the film) inoculates the film against explicit or implicit misogyny.

Meanwhile, Tom Hardy and the rest of the cast do a tremendous job of suggesting purpose without need for supernumerary dialogue and extensive backstories. The contrast to Avengers: Age of Ultron on all these points is striking.

Drawing a line under the spandex apocalypse

Mad Max began in the shadow of the oil shock - but with every episode the series has moved further away from any loose association with reality into future kitsch. With Fury Road, the latest and greatest installment, some sort of final stylistic yet ultimately hollow destination has been reached.

It could be the best translation to the screen of baroque post-apocalyptic tropes. It might be the most Games Workshop-esque film ever. It's certainly a darn good film. But when all's said and done, Fury Road remains an act of self-cannibalisation, devouring the original trilogy and thirty years of artistic responses in cinema, comics and in games to create a definitive pastiche. 

It might be a breathtaking, brilliant exercise in pastiche, but it's still a pastiche. And in that lies both its limitation. 

Julien's grassroots social media skill-share

Earlier this week, Julien Pritchard, the Campaign Support Worker for Birmingham Friends of the Earth, ran this rather excellent social media skill-share in his local group.

He's generously given permission for me to post his session plan here, while we think of an opportunity to share it more officially.

All thoughts welcome - especially if you can try it out and feedback your own experiences.

By GoogLiction (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Awful Green Things From Outer Space

From the Bring & Buy sale at Beer & Pretzels, a blast from the Towcester Wargames Club past: Awful Green Things From Outer Space.

And unlike many things from my teenage years, it's just as good as I remembered it. :-)

A thirty-seat strategy for environmentalists

This post starts with a disclaimer: I don't do political strategy for Friends of the Earth. But, I do get to think about grassroots organising a lot, and the two areas inevitably interconnect. This blog is also my personal space for thinking out loud, and what I write here is no way an official view from me or my employer. Capiche?

Bearing that in mind, here's a quick suggestion of one way environmentalists might begin to get the issues onto the political agenda over the next five years.

The problem

Whether you're a glass half-full or half-empty person, it's safe to say that the General Election confirmed the view that the environment needs to be higher on the political agenda than it is. Now, this isn't a party political point - in fact it's hard to imagine an election result earlier this month where this didn't hold true. 

And we can all discuss the undeniable merits of ignoring Parliament - at least some of the time - and getting on with making change happen on the ground, man. But I still believe we need, at the very least, the enabling consent of Westminster, its willingness to let a transformation towards a sustainable future happen.

And let's not forget that legislation (and campaigns for legislation) - like The Big Ask and the Climate Change Act - can be game-changing.

Map by Italay90, coloured by Cryptographic.2014, available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

A solution

One solution - I freely concede, a very partial one - would be for environmentalists to concentrate some of our grassroots organizing efforts in the areas where MP's (and later, prospective MP's) really need to listen to their public - the most marginal Conservative seats in the country.

Let's say - the top 30 most vulnerable seats, numerically speaking. as a starting point.

That would mean beginning a dialogue with those representatives going forward. Building a body of evidence that their constituents support the environment. Asking them to support local environmental projects and - ultimately - national campaigns.

It implies engaging local political parties, and yes, the local authority too. It would certainly benefit from finding and working with allies so that we can have this conversation with the best, most representative and loudest collective voice we can muster.

The local awareness raising on climate over the next 6 months leading up to the UN climate talks in Paris - that so many organisations support or are involved in - could provide an excellent framework for this. The great thing about this campaign is that it's as strident or as gentle as you want it to be (or your MP can cope with).

And from a grassroots organising perspective, it would of course also means building our strength in those areas. From now.

The seats

A big thanks to super volunteer Mandy Staunton, who pointed me towards this list of marginals here (all the way down to Enfield North - that's your top 30)

There's a good even spread across England and Wales - around half of them in areas where Friends of the Earth - never mind any other group -  already has a known presence. In some, a very strong active presence. In others, people who we can support and nurture. In still others, an opportunity to organise and find new allies.

Doubtless, some of the constituencies might prove unworkable, for political or practical reasons, or perhaps just ill luck. But if we can begin that dialogue, start to shift the political debate in even 20 of those constituencies in the next year, we would have made an investment which we can build on for the rest of the current Government.

As I said at the start - this is just a thought-piece. But it's certainly one on which I'd welcome your thoughts.

Seven alternative election proposals

Alternative voting proposal #1: candidate who performs the most authentic rendition of Bela Lugosi's Dead by Bauhaus (full version) wins.

— Tim Atkinson (@Magpiemoth) May 9, 2015

Alternative voting proposal #2 - Zoolander style walk-off.

— Tim Atkinson (@Magpiemoth) May 9, 2015

Alternative voting proposal #3 - all contenders publish photos of their bookshelves. Candidate judged best-read wins.

— Tim Atkinson (@Magpiemoth) May 9, 2015

Alternative voting proposal #4. As #3, but with record collections.

— Tim Atkinson (@Magpiemoth) May 9, 2015

Alternative voting proposal #5 - each candidate to start own microbrewery / make lemonade. Public to sample product and vote accordingly.

— Tim Atkinson (@Magpiemoth) May 9, 2015

Alternative voting proposal #6 - for easy identification, all candidates to have darts style shirts, nicknames and entrance music.

— Tim Atkinson (@Magpiemoth) May 9, 2015

Alternative voting proposal #7 - candidates to open a cafe where voters can sample their afternoon tea and their policies AT THE SAME TIME

— Tim Atkinson (@Magpiemoth) May 10, 2015

Amber-guity

Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber fits well into a string of ambivalent fantasies from the 70's. 

[mild spoilers ahead]

Amber's distrust of heroism - and the collateral damage it causes - places Zelazny (like contemporaries such as Donaldson, Harrison and Moorcock) in dialogue with the newly-minted tropes of the genre after the Tolkien boom. 

It being Zelazny - it's also at least superficially about a load of superhuman magnificent b**tards having a right old barney (see also Lord Of Light and This Immortal).

The scoundrels in question are the fourteen princes and princesses of Amber's royal family, squabbling for the vacant throne while also defending the kingdom - the literal centre of the multiverse - from external nemesis. Long-lived heirs to ancient powers, they are able to walk between worlds, discerning possibilities and picking the best (or worst) reality has to offer.

Our narrator is missing-presumed-dead Prince Corwin, who starts the first of the four books (all practically novella-length) collected here as an amnesiac exile on our Earth. Over the course of the Chronicles, he regains his memory and takes a lot of bad decisions which usually involve trusting his relatives. 

Notwithstanding this drama, Corwin ultimately helps to save the day from the forces of Chaos* threatening to unpick the warp and woof of Amber (and thus the universe). He also becomes less of a self-obsessed ass, which by the standards of his family is no small achievement. 

A big part of the pay-off in reading the Chronicles is the gradual revelation that he's not the chosen one, that he doesn't want the throne, and that someone else in the family has been on an even longer emotional journey than he has - that is to say, they are the protagonist. 

This reversal of expectations, this sense of displacement from cliche is pretty fundamental to Amber's appeal. Take our apparent heroes for another example. 

All of the Amber siblings are capable of heroic acts, but they are monsters too. They win the day not necessarily because they are better than their opponents - on that, your mileage will vary - but because they are more resourceful and more ruthless. Entire armies are recruited from across the planes and perish in their service, while the series is ridden with their one-on-one fratricidal cruelties and plots.

They are Olympian in every sense of the word. And now that I come to think of it, the whole family drama lays itself wide open to a Freudian reading. Hmmm.

Given the above, it's no surprise then that altogether the best scenes in the books, as is usual for Zelazny, are dialogue. It's a delight to read passages with the squabbling sibs aiming rhetorical barbs at each other, like characters from a multi-planar telenovella. 

Elsewhere the writing can be described - like much 70's SFF - as pulp with a side-order of experimentation, usually taking the form of fragmented slide-show descriptions of travel between the worlds. For my money, this side of the Chronicles hasn't aged as well as it might, although I suppose its jarring quality heightens the sense of displacement, this time from the text itself.

And Amber's age does show in its portrayal of women as lovers, wives and femme fatales, but at least tends more toward sins of omission rather than Greg Mitchell style commission.

But in its confounding of expectations and in the richness of its dysfunctional family, Amber is greater than the sum of its parts. It might not be Zelazny's masterpiece - that's still Lord of Light - but in its ambivalence and ambiguity lies its lasting value.

*Zelazny's cosmology here is similar to Moorcock's: lots of law and chaos, only not so psychedelic.

By the time I get to Phoenix '96 - another student music review flashback

In my wasted youth at University of Hull, I penned the odd review for Hullfire, the student newspaper. For the sake of completeness and comedy value, I'm adding them to this blog. 

Here's a never-before published (because not very good) reflection on the Phoenix Festival 1996, which I came across in the recent loft clear-out.

1996! [shudders]

It is the nature of festivals to promise more than they eventually deliver. The hoped-for epiphany of a second Woodstock, with all the rose-tinted, incense-scented baggage this entails, pales before the reality. 

Hours spent gridlocked in traffic outside Stratford-upon-Avon, only to be confronted by second rate bands (hello Gene, hello Bis, hello Shed bloody Seven) plugging holes in inadequate schedules. Yet complaining about the toilets, or the price of food, or even the irritating habit half the camping field had of shouting b******s as I was trying to sleep misses the point: the Phoenix was nevertheless fantastic this year.

Taking place at a Warwickshire WW2 airfield in mid-July, the Festival's keynote was rampant eclecticism. While the headliners were unusually dad-friendly (David Bowie, Neil Young, Sex Pistols), indie, dance, acid jazz and folk thrills were yours for the taking elsewhere on the site, together with the usual sideshows, stunts, strangenesses and stupid hat stalls.

As with all such events, the festival was not entirely without disappointment, with both Leftfield and Massive Attack proving shadows of their recorded selves. Fortunately, it's far easier to name the bands who made it great: the terrifying-bassist-rock of Scheer, the good-time soul of Corduroy and the genre-transcendence of Beck and Bjork.

My festival moment? Being awestruck by obscure New York hip-hop eclecto-rock geniuses New Kingdom whilst caught in water pistol crossfire from the crowd and roadies alike, and then shot some more outside the tent for wearing an Oasis T-shirt. I was soaking wet, but - and if I can sum up the festival experience at all then this is it - why gripe about it all when the music was this good?