Scott Pixello's Blog, page 9

Riddle of the Sphinx

The main Riddle of the Sphinx for me is what-the-flip is it supposed to be? In any other situation a creature that’s half lion and half human would be chased down the street with plenty of healthy finger-pointing and cries of ‘Freak’. But make it hundreds of feet high and somehow a stone freak with a smashed-up face becomes art. Watch out Keith Richards.

Christmas wishes & Anchorman

'Everyone wanted to make the movie so badly' (Will Ferrell on Anchorman 2)
The problem is that, especially at Christmas, wishes really do come true.

Is the world going to the dogs?

Culturally, I mean. Well, we don’t have time for a proper scientific experiment, so here’s an improper one.
25 years before skeletal Miley smashed her rebellious way onto our screens with her wrecking ball, Sinead O’Connor’s shaven head filled our screens with a slightly softer, more melodic toon (although written by Prince, not known for his feminist credentials). However, other TV appearances and statements about the Pope might suggest Miss O’Connor is being a little premature in criticizing Miss Cyrus’ willingness to disrobe for a male-dominated media.
25 years before Lady Gaga (not sure who gave her the title) drew ire in some quarters for her in-ya-face sexual and religious imagery (I’m think Alley-alley-handrow), another female star was singing about burning crosses while cavorting around a churchyard. Remember her? Like a Prayer. So did the world become a moral cesspit in the meantime? Only in the Mayor of Toronto’s personal space, I think.

OED + OCD = OECD

The first time I came across the term OECD, I wondered if it was someone with OCD who’s just discovered Ecstasy. Sadly, as with so many things in life, the expectation was more thrilling than the reality. A bit like the British politician Baron Adonis, whose appearance, in my humble opinion, doesn’t quite live up to the hype of his name.

OED + OCD = OECD
Jargon + paranoia = headless chickens

The Truman Show

This was on TV the other night and yes, it's an interesting film, but I have two problems with it. One: If Christo (a thinly-veiled omniscient God/Jesus figure), the creator of Truman’s world, is so super-clever and puts cameras absolutely everywhere so we can see Truman’s every move, then why are there no cameras just outside the ‘set’? If it’s such a clear parody of the whole Big Brother phenomenon, then Christo surely should be savvy enough to realize that the greatest drama is likely to occur just as inhabitants leave.
Two: Truman’s ‘wife’ has effectively agreed to be a prisoner herself on the island. Why? For money? That would make her position of sleeping with Truman for money look close to prostitution. If it is against her will, then we’re talking people/sex trafficking. Either way, there’s a king-sized moral hole in the plot here.
That said, it’s an interesting film but far from original. Check out Nabokov’s An Invitation to a Beheading, in which the protagonist constantly notes the fake nature of the fictional scenery around him, before finally stepping out of it completely.

What do Mr Bean and the Terminator have in common?

In the great sit-com Father Ted, writer Graham Linehan was careful never to show the three main characters actually doing any part of their job as priests. They never stop being priests but we see the 9/10 of their ridiculous lives outside that professional role.
In Friends, the fact that no-one actually knows what Chandler does as a job becomes a central gag in the episode with the quiz to win an apartment. It isn't until that moment that you realise how unimportant a fact it is.
Does Mr Bean have a job? Could we imagine a character like that holding down a job? Once you do that, it instantly limits the situations he could be placed in.
Where does the time machine in the Terminator films come from? Answer: No-one cares. The pace is too high. We're following the next chase sequence.
My point here is, although logic would often suggest you need to create a world around a fictional character, if you have an empathetic protagonist or two and narrative drive is maintained, that is not always true.

Technology v. storytelling

Been thinking about the number of drama series on TV that are set BTI (Before the Internet). The presence of the Net and mobile phone technology change so much about storytelling, I wonder if readers/viewers prefer narratives from before this time when characters really had to talk to each other to find things out, misunderstandings could occur and just at a simple Level, mysteries could remain unknown without recourse to Mr Google.
Journeys become unnecessary with CSI-style forensics and the element of speculation is often lost about motivation as well as circumstances. Does this destroy pleasure in certain genres (most obviously crime stories/thrillers but even in romances and horror stories) or does it open up interesting possibilities? The appearance of technology in everyday life is not new but the extent to which it increasingly influences almost everything we do makes certain narratives almost obsolete.

Top lifestyle tip for Friday

Apparently, Pliny the Elder recommended onions as a suppository, believing that
they were a good cure for hemorrhoids. So that's why they make your eyes water. Foolish me, I've been putting them in food all these years.
Maybe that's why stereotypical Frenchmen wear strings of onions round their necks to help with the painful consequences of all the cycling they do.

How to make the earth move

Like most of us, I could do to lose a few unwanted pounds. I asked my wife recently how to do this and she suggested divorce.
Now of course, this blog is not the place to make cheap gags about overweight Americans.
But if it was, it would be hard to ignore the story about the Seattle Seahawks who won a recent match, during which there was such a crowd reaction to a First Quarter touch-down that the Pacific North –West Seismic Network detected a seismic reaction equivalent to a 1-2 Magnitude earthquake. I'm not sure I believe that proverb about if everyone in China marched in step but certainly if America really punched above its weight, we’d all be in trouble.

Was Van Gogh a Stoner?

Going out of print in 1966, only a year after publication, John Williams’ Stoner was a novel that had been largely passed over and forgotten. However, dubbed an example of ‘Lazarus Literature’ it has just risen from the dead to be awarded Waterstones’ Book of the Year (now that is an apostrophe dilemma). Its cause has been championed by Ian McEwan and Nick Hornby, who have helped bring it to a wider audience.
Just as painters might die penniless and largely neglected (Van Gogh being the obvious example) so might writers. However, my point from a few posts ago about almost being lost these days is relevant here and makes such ‘re-discoveries’ even more likely in the future.
Williams, who died in 1994, was not completely unknown (his novel Augustus won a National Book Award in 1972) but Stoner, a story of a failed academic with an unhappy marriage, feels (to me at least) like an American version of David Lodge’s campus novels, which is finally getting the recognition it deserves.