Month: April 2003

[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent April 2003]

In San Sebastian there was a woman. She was cute. She wasn’t wearing much clothing. She was four stories tall.

She was advertising a fantasy film fest, one of the more notable ones in the world according to later investigations. There is no point to me mentioning this except as a dubious lead-in to the real story, and because that giant cardboard chick was pretty memorable and deserves a reappearance in the morgueatlarge story. And because in theory this email list is for my travel adventures and, well, that was one. Whereas this… this isn’t.

The connection? One of the sibling festivals of the San Sebastian one is the equally highly-regarded Dead By Dawn, right here in Edinburgh. And I went along to the part of it that mattered.

They’d sold out the weekend passes but they were selling tickets for unclaimed seats ten minutes before sessions started. I figured I had a good shot of getting into the film I wanted because the film I wanted to see was closing the festival – at midnight on Sunday night. Surely someone would rather sleep than see yet another scare movie??

(Sleep, I spit on your grave!)

So at ten to twelve I rock up to the counter at the very styley Filmhouse and give the girl a winsome smile and I am rewarded with a ticket to the UK premiere of Don Coscarelli’s new one: BUBBA HO-TEP. (Three actually, I’d accumulated two Irish girls in the Filmhouse bar while waiting. Huzzah!)

And there were speeches and thank yous and prizes and finally the lights dimmed and the projector came on, showing the only existing print of Bubba Ho-Tep. Friends, let me tell you this – this is one HECK of a movie.

Starring Evil Dead’s Bruce Campbell as the King, Elvis himself, old and tired and stuck in a rest home with a growth on his pecker and no-one believing he is who he says he is. Bruce Campbell! The man with a chin full of shovels! The Western master of physical comedy! Infamous in NZ for co-starring in the Jack of All Trades TV series with Shorty alumni Angie Dotchin! The cult hero of all true movie geeks!

The story? Elvis teams up with (old, black) JFK to take on a soul-sucking mummy and his rubbery flesh-eating scarab beetles, all the while meditating on the arc of life and the process of aging and the way Western society treats its aged and its decrepit.

It’s *emotionally moving*. It’s *brilliantly performed*. It’s *about something serious*. And it has *Elvis fighting monsters with a zimmer frame*. Folks, this may be the perfect movie.

Director Don Coscarelli is, like Bruce, a name that raises smiles on the faces of the initiated, for his was the Phantasm horror trilogy, three outstandingly inventive low-budget frightfests that defy description. If
the Evil Dead trilogy is the Star Wars of the horror world, Phantasm must surely be its Indiana Jones.

[ASIDE FOR GEEK INDULGENCE]

(from ‘Fear Itself’. Buffy the Vampire Slayer season 4)

Xander: Okay, and on that happy note, I’ve got a treat for tomorrow night’s second annual Halloween screening. People, prepare to have your spines tingled, your gooses bumped by the terrifying (Pulls out a video and reads the title) Fantasia. Fantasia?
Oz: Maybe it’s because of all the horrific things we’ve seen, but hippos wearing tutus just don’t unnerve me the way they used to.
Xander: Phantasm. It was supposed to be Phantasm! Stupid video store!

[ASIDE ENDS]

See? Xander knows. Coscarelli! Phantasm! Reggie Bannister!

Bubba Ho-Tep!

BUT! THIS ISN’T EVEN THE POINT OF THE STORY!

The point of the story is this: on the way out I TOUCHED ELBOWS with Robert Englund!

Robert Englund is an actor. He played ‘Willie’ in the American Sci-Fi mini-series ‘V’ that was all over the airwaves in the 80s, the one with the alien reptiles disguised as humans eating rats and being all fascistic and stuff.

And he also played Freddy Krueger in all the Nightmare on Elm Street films.

Freddy Krueger! Elm St! He’s horror ROYALTY, man! He’s personally caused more nightmares than anyone since early Michael Jackson! (very obscure family in-joke there)

I TOUCHED FREDDY. I didn’t make it to his talk but I touched his elbow with my elbow and no-one can ever take that away from me.

When I was thirteen I had a poster on my wall. Freddy was there. Funnily enough, it was a modern monster group shot like those ones you find of the Universal Studios posse, Dracula-Wolfman-BlackLagoonCreature- FrankensteinMonster – it also featured Michael Myers, the William-Shatner-masked killer of the Halloween films, and Leatherface, the grunting terror from primo date flick Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, along with the other member of the modern pre-Scream scare pantheon, Jason from the Friday the 13th series. Which is relevant, because the long rumoured Freddy vs Jason is in the can and up for release soon, helmed by Bride of Chucky mad genius Ronny Yu! Chucky was voiced by Brad Dourif who was Grima Wormtongue in The Two Towers! Grima was part of the entourage of King Theoden of Rohan, alongside Hama played by John Leigh!   John Leigh was in Shortland Street as Lionel Skeggins the beloved doofus husband of Kirsty Knight played by Angie Dotchin! ANGIE DOTCHIN WHO WAS IN JACK OF ALL TRADES WITH BRUCE CAMPBELL WHO WAS IN BUBBA HO-TEP!

EVERYTHING CONNECTS!

I just thought it was cool.

————–

Relevant links:

Dead by Dawn:
http://www.deadbydawn.co.uk

San Sebastian Fantasy and Horror Film Fest, which has a (different) pic of the giant woman on the front page http://www.donostiakultura.com/terror/

Morgue in San Sebastian – the November 9, 2002 entry at
http://www.topica.com/lists/morgueatlarge/read/
Featuring special guest star Ella!

Robert Englund’s IMDB:
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Englund,+Robert

Bubba HoTep’s IMDB:
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0281686

Freddy vs Jason’s IMDB:
http://us.imdb.com/Title?0329101

Angie Dotchin’s IMDB:
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Dotchin,+Angela+Marie

My mate Norman’s IMDB just because he has one:
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Cates,+Norman

Charlie Bleakley’s IMDB because I said g’day to him on the streets of Edinburgh without explaining who I was or how I knew him, undoubtedly screwing him up for the rest of the day:
http://us.imdb.com/Name?Bleakley,+Charlie

Nat Torkington’s classic review of the first Shortland St magazine, published way way back in the early days, and featuring on the cover Angie Dotchin (ta da!) and Hollywood’s b-movie hunk du jour, Martin Henderson (most recently and bigly the doomed hubbie in The Ring)
http://prometheus.frii.com/~gnat/frii/shorters/

———-

All is right with the world.

Anyone who emails me will get a reply telling them in amusing fashion exactly how happy I am. I will attempt to incorporate any one word of your choosing in the first sentence of my reply!

Love and peace to all.

morgue (missing the ol’ BBS… *sigh*)

[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent April 2003]

This morning Ben my brother took a bus. Off to London. (He just arrived where he’s staying there – tip o’ the hat to Jon Ball for that – and to the wonders of the internet for giving me instant news of his arrival.) A few nights ago I said goodbye to mater and pater in likewise fashion. My family reunion, incomplete as it was, is now over. It was good to see them.

—–

It’s been too long since the last one of these – particularly since so much has happened. But I’m gonna pick up where I left off, in Vienna.

Vienna! (It’s in Austria, doncha know.) Wide streets and efficiency. We’d been in the railway station a matter of minutes, getting our bearings in the bright, clean working-ness of it all, and an oldish gent stops as he passes to ask if we’re all right. ‘We only speak English,’ my mother says apologetically and he nods, ‘English, ah,’ and beats a polite retreat. Except it’s only a temporary departure. A minute later he’s returned, having summoned his English to mind – he asks us what we are looking for, how he can help. We’re just looking for the information desk and he happily points the way, and bids us a good day, his good deed done.

Every new place should start like that. Makes you feel at home.

—

Our hotel in Vienna was a bit out of the main part of town, near to the amusement park with the big ol’ wheel featured so prominently and memorably in Graham Greene’s Vienna post-war drama, The Third Man. As luck would have it, I had watched the Third Man for the first time just a few weeks before – working at a video shop did have its advantages – and furthermore, Welles’ immortal self-penned line about peace, prosperity and cuckoo clocks was fresh in my mind from visiting Craig and Massey in Luzern – in my mind I can hear the Swiss bristling at the mere suggestion… Ben and I rode the wheel at night, which was sort of fun, but, well, Vienna ain’t a city to gaze at by night from on high. It’s a city you want to be right in the middle of.

Also notable was the fact that the number of girls-unclothed bars outnumbered normal bars by a factor of about five to one throughout the city, and particularly on the streets around our hotel. But even this just built on that positive first impression – as I’d walk back to the hotel late at night, a variety of young women would appear at the doors to these bars and invite me in. So welcoming, Vienna, so welcoming!

—

Vienna is a town where you can be a tourist without guilt. In fact, if you’re not being a tourist, you’re not doing it right. The good thing about Vienna is not the atmosphere (although it’s lovely, it’s also unremarkable) but the features. The tourist attractions are genuine, comprehensive and worthwhile. There were many stops on our tourist route, but some standouts were:

* the Kunsthistorisches Museum, an astounding art collection, including a bunch of Rubens and Bruegels and Maerten van Heemskerck’s “Victory Parade of Bacchus” which I’d read about not long before and had no idea was there until I stumbled over it http://www.khm.at/homeE3.html

* the apartment where Mozart wrote ‘le nozze di figaro’, which is a piece of music I love

* the excavations of the old synagogue, site of an appalling anti-semitic atrocity and, similarly, a place to commemmorate the mind-numbing destruction of the Jewish population of Vienna under the Nazis. http://www.jmw.at/

* the kunsthaus of hundertwasser, genius artist, lover of the spiral, vienna-born and NewZealand-died, designer of exquisite public toilet in tiny Kawakawa, visionary, general font of inspiration. http://www.kunsthauswien.com/english/hundertwasser.htm

—

I also had a good night out in a smoky jazz club listening to jazz legend Red Holloway, born 1927, go mad on the sax. There were no strippers. Not that night, anyway. http://www.redholloway.com/

It’s a hell of a place. My Eastern European tour was finished with a day trip to Salzburg, where I caught my thrifty 6 euro flight back to London – there I visited Mozart’s birthplace and watched local chesshacks fight it out on a giant board in the town square. Prague, Budapest, Vienna, Salzburg. All amazing cities, each with a very distinctive atmosphere. I would love to get into the countryside in each of these countries, but as a capital city tour that has got to be hard to beat.

If I have to pick a favourite? Budapest. It was vital, it was vibrant, it made no concessions to the tourist but dared them to keep up. And yet it was also international, powerful, friendly. I want to go back.

That’s one of the problems of travelling though, isn’t it – if you do it well, you keep wanting to go back to everywhere you go to. Ticking places off a list is a nice idea, but in practice is just can’t work. There’s more world than there is lifetime, and that’s just the way it is.

Which, in my book, is a wonderful thing.

—

Shouts to the family I saw, and the family I didn’t see. Love you all.

And to all the folk who turned up at the London lunch!

And to Pearce Duncan, who sent me a lovely, thoughtful email that made me laugh and think and generally get some more perspective.

And to Jamie Norrish, back from Thailand!

And to Andrew Salmond, who should be writing a script instead of reading this.

And to Karen Wilson, who got married to some bloke recently!

And, and, and…

Peace!
morgue

[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent April 2003]

Reminder – Sunday lunch in London – 1pm, All Bar One, Leicester Square.

—-

Grafitto outside UN building in Vienna- “self-deceit is common among those from the tropics”

—-

Weird – in my mind I have always associated Budapest with Turkish exotica, and Hungary with Russo-slavic ruritania. It is resoundingly neither. It is very much a typical city of Western Europe, and the abundant good historical museums make clear that this has been the case for hundreds of years. Londoners would have always felt quite at home.

It is a big, sprawling city that more than anything else seems to have been architecturally frozen for a hundred years. The buildings are amazing, and they play best against the dark skies and sprinkling rain of my first-night wanderings. It’s a haunting place, filled with a profound indifference to the vicissitudes of history, as a result of being the scene of so much of it. The city (cities, really, born only in the 19th century of neighbours Buda and Pest) has over centuries been the seat of control for numerous conquering powers, most significantly the Austrian Hapsburg line who for a time used Budapest as the seat of the Holy Roman Empire; also Turks and COmmunists, to name two other sources of influence. It is a city of foreigners, and has been since its growth as a trade centre a thousand years ago; for very little of that time has it been a spiritual centre for Hungarians. You can sense it on the streets, a curl of the lip with the locals, a curtness, a sense that they secretly know that all foreigners are fooling themselves if they think they can ever claim to know and own Hungary through Budapest.

It is a city of great beauty, whirling speed, vibrant and happy people, and it wears its history like tidal rocks wear the signs of the ocean washing over them and back again. I have a lot of love for Budapest, but I don’t really feel I’ve visited Hungary, any more than Barcelona showed me Spain. But, like Barcelona, it is a place I will strongly recommend.

————-

Now I am in Vienna. Everywhere is very cold. It snowed on us in Budapest, and we arrived in Vienna just after a snowfall. The seasons continue to become more chaotic – once, this would have been an omen of looming change.

————-

I really want to make this ten times as long but I have two minutes left on my internet time. So, obviously, I won’t. Thanks to all those who have emailed me, I love getting news and thoughts from home and elsewhere, and promise to contact all of you over the next month or so as I ratchet some free time at the work computer.

Love and peace,
morgue

[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent April 2003]

I’ll try to ramble less this time.

—

Prague. It feels like a Kafka protagonist, not in control of its circumstances, locked in a curious relationship of two-way exploitation, reluctant to act out of spite or stubborness or fear, probably destined for regret. The tourists have definitely come and the city weighs heavy with them, and with its own response. There is great beauty here but an autistic failure to relate it to the world outside. As a populace, the Czechs have woken up from their long sleep under Communist rule; as a city, Prague is still disoriented. A visit here is not exactly disappointing, but somehow it lacks the power to move – if it were a tale, it would be one with a lot of incident, but no thematic power.

One crucial exception: the Charles Bridge. It is like a flexing muscle across the Moldova, utterly certain of its place and its message. I will remember it clearly.

—-

Dogs are either running free or on leads and muzzled. In the hotel restaurant a brown snout nudged past my brother’s elbow, eager for his steak. It looked like a friendly moray eel.

—-

I have met my parents and my older brother and we are travelling to Budapest tomorrow! Family is grand. They are well, since you asked.

—-

Today we visited one of the more infamous concentration camps, Terezin (thereisenstadt), the model ghetto. Sombre. The museums were full of documentation, the intricate workings of a managed atrocity, and art, the sketches and words of the Jews interned there. A jarring combination, speaking to deeply-understood themes of the dehumanising power of bureaucracy and the soul-defining power of art. I could say a lot more, but as always with such places, words will fail to convey much more than the barest understanding; I felt like I was just starting to glimpse something, something fearful and perhaps oddly beautiful, from the time I spent there. It is, if nothing else, a reminder of our shared humanity, through
remembrance of its most terrible denials.

—-

And a quartet performed Dvorak, Bach, others. Great musicians perform in lovingly restored classical venues to crowds of tourists lured by cheaply photocopied advertisements pushed on them by street hawkers. The contradictions of Prague. It will be a different place in ten years, and I sincerely hope it comes more fully into itself.

—-

Shouts to Tina C, happy birthday!

—-

morgue

[originally an email to the morgueatlarge list, sent April 2003]

Lots has happened.

I’m still in Edinburgh – tonight. Tomorrow I’m on a plane, to Prague no less. I have arranged to meet my family there.

I am meeting my family in Prague. It feels terribly, pleasingly bourgeois.

Family! Travel! Motion! The obvious fun. Stay tuned.

—–

Londoners: I am coming back through London, crashing with the Leon monster (still looking for his little dog), and would like to see people! Thus I call to order the TRIPLE ONE LUNCH WITH MORGUE!

When: Sunday April 13 at ONE pm
Where: All Bar ONE in Leicester Square (“L square” and lower case “l” looks like ONE)
Why: Because I am fresh-faced and pure of body.

I know some people don’t like awful chain bar things. Suck it up and come along.

—–

I have quit my video-store job – purpose served. An interesting experience, tending vid, watching couples split up over the man’s poor taste in movies, watching the dubious rise of DJ Qualls as leading man, watching time and again as people who shouldn’t know better choose good films over bad, and subtitles be damned. I have yet hope for humanity. And now I have evenings free, and material for the long-in-development short play about people taking forever to choose their vid! Onwards!

—–

And after Prague, Budapest! And Vienna! I am like unto a god!

—–

I attended/helped out at my ‘landlady’ Fiona Campbell’s games convention, Conpulsion. It went well. I have surprisingly little to say on the matter. A good time was had by all, and I got to use bad language an awful lot and then spend the rest of the weekend convincing people I didn’t really talk like that.

——

And I’ve been on a couple of protest marches.

——

(The following was written a week ago. I can’t be bothered editing it.)

The war. I can’t figure out how to get away without talking about this at least once.

War dominates. I think about the war all the time. I think about reasons for and against military action. I question the media coverage and the coverage of the media coverage. The edges of my life are merging with the edges of the war.

Bombs are dropping. Precision bombs – Baghdad’s infrastructure has survived. This is good. Yet when I read a sceptic say it survives so the US can have a working city when they seize it to control its oil, I have to admit that this is what will happen. Can something be both right and wrong at the same time? The very notion of right and wrong start to collapse. Realpolitik, Clausewitzian total war, politics as war by other means. B52s take off from Scotland and unload bombs on Iraq and people die. And the precision still brings death to innocents, it must do, but – so far – it is not as bad as I feared. The civilian dead number in the hundreds, not the thousands. Good. Is this a victory for the peace movement? Forcing a more conscientious form of destruction? Doesn’t it just make the case against any war even harder to make? There is a sick feeling in me still, that all this precision bombing has achieved nothing for the coalition military other than a public relations display, because the targets they are precision-bombing are dead and gone but the war in Baghdad has yet to begin. Destroying Saddam’s palaces will not destroy the regime and will not win the war. Tony Blair is on the television, reiterating his position, that there is a real and pressing danger, that the war is justified. Public opinion is shifting. I can feel it, I can see it in the polls. The momentum of the peace movement has stalled and I can’t see why, but I can feel it. The war has come and fewer people care than before. The fears of war without the UN have been realised, and yet Blair’s cause is slowly gaining in support.

The peace movement. I become frustrated with a peace movement compromised by inappropriate ‘radicalism’. I wonder if an uncompromised peace movement is even possible. I went on a march on Saturday, ten thousand people marching on the main streets of Edinburgh. It felt weakened. It felt confused. Sometimes the message came through, the slogan, not in our name, more real than ever. This war is not in our name. We do not condone.

Read this blog written by an Iraqi in Baghdad: http://dearraed.blogspot.com/

Follow links to the large number of determined bloggers who post views I disagree with so vehemently. I wonder how it can be that we both think each other is the politically naïve, the deluded, the misled. How can there be a way forward? I want to simplify, simplify, simplify. There are wrong premises at the root of all disputes. Why does the media shy away from auditing the talk of the powerful?

This is a war of liberation now? Then why should disarming have stopped the war? The ground was always shifting, is it any wonder we are cynical?

The argument goes in circles. Those for the war say the Iraqis are suffering, that Saddam is a tyrant. Those for the peace agree, because that is not the argument. And yet it is. Saddam is a tyrant so whatever we do
is justified. I feel pity for the soldiers, locked in propaganda, trying to do the right thing, as if the world was as simple as their government portrays it. A kind of ignorance, a kind of madness. I felt ill last night, physically nauseated, unable to concentrate, unable to relax, riddled with emotions. And it is hard to see a way forward.

——–

Further to the above:

Salam Pax’s blog has not been updated for a week. Internet access in the capital is cut off. I hate myself for wanting the Iraqis to fight, because I want the US and UK governments to understand the weakness of their propaganda. But I hate myself for wanting it, because the more they fight, the more they die, written off as fanatics brainwashed by a tyrant.

We must always be mindful.

——–

the road moose is going to prague. The road moose always has a good time.

——–

morgue (looking for the peace)