Dream Theatre

The Sinovial Gaze -The Art Of Alessandro Fantini (Second Edition)

My cousin, Alessandro Fantini, asked me to write an expanded version of my Foreword from his Art Book. With his permission the entire article is below along with images from the book.

What lies beneath the conscious self?

FOREWORD

by

Lorenzo Fantini

Good question, I’ve spent years trying to find out the answer to that one myself in my own writings and drawings. Each of us who has even a passing interest in mapping the interior of our psychic landscapes has attempted this impossible task in their own unique way. For some it’s with words, others theatrical gestures, and for some it’s images on a canvas. 

The canvas: In some ways painting now has become decidedly old fashioned - it’s been done to death for thousands of years. Surely there can’t be anything else to say on the subject? Shouldn’t we as artists spend our time devising newer mediums and extending the boundaries of what we define as art in order to increase its relevance in this new millennium? Well, that's all very well and good, and certainly there are some magnificent contemporary artists out there doing just that. But don’t think for one moment that this classical brand of art can no longer challenge or offer anything new.

Alessandro Fantini in so many ways offers us a classical view of art and yet infuses it with a contemporary worldview. Perhaps it comes with the territory from where he is from. There is something uniquely inspirational about the Sangro Valley in the heartlands of the Italian Peninsula. Within a forty-minute drive you can go from the sandy coastline of the Adriatic to the spiny mountain chord of Italy’s backbone. Littered across this Mediterranean topography are hundreds, if not thousands of stories, either built from concrete and stone, or carved into ancient trees, hills, and mountains. Yet at the same time the industrialization of the area has lead to a transformation of the culture and geography of the valley, creating a didactic with its former identity. The noise of the modern with the whisper and the shadow of the past haunt these lands, providing a wellspring of inspiration for anyone with a keen observational mind.

Alessandro’s devotion to oil and canvas has rewarded us we with enough medianic meditations on the nature of the human mind to keep us transfixed for many years to come. His discipline and persistence from early childhood through his teens and now into his adulthood has taken the viewer on an incredible journey through an isolated landscape that invites dialogue, challenges preconceptions of existence, and teases us with sexual imagery that writhes through both foreground and background.

Alessandro is fascinated by the interior of the human mind, and more precisely his own. His art is defined by the eerie images of the transmogrification of the human body, its transience from youth to age, from life to death, from ethereal to grotesque animalism. The complexity of his images refuses to be defined precisely and they’re often unsettling in their depiction of our psychic core. 

Alessandro shows heavy influence from Dali, especially in his early paintings. Employing many of the same techniques and compositions as that mad old Spaniard, Alessandro refined and evolved his painterly skills. His earlier works are a cacophony of colour, passion and violence that bursts from the canvas.

The young painter exploring his sexual desires is most clearly evident by the fantasy females and phantasmagorical muses that haunt the ruined walls of castles and churches. Indeed they’re a recurrent element throughout his works, as we’re faced, uncomfortably so at times, with the raw, burning Eros that knaws deeply at the hearts of men.

His painting Monorchi Dea’s composition is uncompromising in his depiction of this fantasy female form. It refuses to allow the viewer to ignore what's being focused on. Real or fantasy, obtainable or out of reach, the gap between the physical expectations of males and females; the dialogue descends on you with the force of his oil strokes. Their precision and verisimilitude taunt with dimensionality and craftsmanship as this siren tempts its audience deeper into the layers of the painting. Once caught in her web, the eye is helpless to draw away and looks to the periphery for aid. Yet here there is only the dark. Alien shapes and exotic hieroglyphics lurk amongst a foamy sea of hives and bubbles that give no answers and no comfort to the trap that has been sprung. Inside one of these eggs a discombobulated head bubbles away – the male as victim or as spawn of the siren? 

Later paintings evolved into less busier compositions employing a confident simplicity that draws the eye to the kernel of the image. Take for example The Horizon of The Events. One of Alessandro’s most recent works is a totemic masterpiece of composition and exemplifies one of the continuing themes that runs through so many of his paintings. It encapsulates his fascination with the old material world with its fossilized aggregation of cells conglomerating on top of one enough, reaching out to the heavens for divine direction and regeneration so that life can once again course through this fantastical piece of architecture. The restrained palette of purple hues radiates through the image with both mystery and warmth, the rippled skyscraper membrane reveals a phallic concurrent theme of life gushing upwards, reaching towards new life from the old.

The recent painting Adamanduga is a beguiling treatise into the conflict of the animus and anima. What strikes the viewer immediately is the diagonal tearing of this dimensional brane across the two genders, giving birth to a seahorse, a creature curious for the reversal of the reproductive role – the male carries the female’s eggs to term. The head looking towards us shows no pain and appears to be the male. The other, in profile and female, is in pain from the schism. Beyond the tear there is a void where only bubbles percolate sporadically from the rift.  In its entirety the selection and arrangement of concepts encroaches on some wonderfully esoteric themes. Perhaps at one time this world had been balanced between the animus and anima forms, however through the schism this equilibrium has been lost, and roles have become obfuscated leaving only a screaming emptiness where once there had been life. A cynical sign of the times?

These two recurrent themes in his work concerning the bodies of his muses and death are often  entwined together in grotesque arrangements. They evoke the works of Zdzislaw Bekinski who’s Fantastic Period dwelt on the disturbing images of post apocalyptic environments with intricate depictions of death, decay and necro-landscapes of the dying. No doubt a reflection of Polish recent history and the then political status quo.

Why Alessandro’s fascination with such darkness?  Why spend so much time meditating through the putrescence of the human body? It’s hardly a commercial pursuit nor reflective of the verdant lushness of central Italy, the source of so many of his paintings landscapes.  As I had previously mentioned Alessandro medianic purpose has been to channel the past through the present and the future. I see his works often as a comment on the social malaise and decay of the political and cultural climate. Just as Climate Change is threatening the traditional Tuscan vineyards with extinction, the Italy’s continual lack of harmony in so many areas has seen regressive steps harkening back to the darker years of Italian Fascism, and the death of liberal expression. Could it not be that the decay and rot so prominent in Alessandro’s works is in fact a statement about the reality of this cultural bankruptcy?

The more realistic painting Mulungu could well be a comment on the sign of these darkening times. The composition forms a depiction of an old town street climbing towards a decaying house that has seen better times. Towards the right there is the one surrealist element, a honeycomb spawning dead bodies wrapped tightly in white shrouds. Does this symbolize the decay, the spiritual malaise of this once vibrant culture of high art and literature? Does it reflect the pessimism of a generation that feels something irreplaceable is being squandered without any thought about the future?

The artist is often sensitive and acutely aware of these changes. We can see Alessandro often depicted as a figure being disassembled and integrated unwillingly amongst Gigeresque machines, or seduced by misshapen muses. The suppression of the individual spirit and the creative soul is a universal fear and paranoia prevalent in so many forms of art. It’s no coincidence that Alessandro’s fascination with Phillip K. Dick, Kubrick and other modern Speculative Science Luminaries have been channeled so intensely through his paintings.

To step into Alessandro’s multimedianic world is not always a comfortable experience. His fabulously detailed and exquisitely rendered images will cause you to engage and debate their nature, and wonder at the mind that they were spawned from. There is still something very new to be said in the world of canvas and oils Alessandro Fantini has only just gotten started.

Review: After Dark

You know, I love reading Haruki Murakami novels. For me Murakami captures a mood, an essence of reality and life in a simple minimalistic kind of way that that juxtaposes the mundane with the surreal and the fantastic, often exposing the underlining horrors that face our fragile lives in this world.

I’ve recently begun reading Jay Rubin’s Music of Words, which is a commentary on Murakami’s life, career and works. He makes some astute observations and explains succinctly where this style of Murakami’s evolved from.

Anyone who has spent time reading his novels will know that Murakami has a love of Jazz, a passion that was nurtured through his ownership of a Jazz bar for seven years. Rubins comments on how the rhythm of his words flowered from this experience.

 More interestingly from the Linguistic perspective - Murakami used to try and write in English to develop his style. His limited dexterity with lexis and structure meant he had to write simply, something that transferred and contributed immensely to his writing style in Japanese.  It's a fascinating insight into one of the premier league players of Japanese contemporary fiction.

So how’s After Dark? Well it’s less a novel and more of a novella, an extended short story by any other name. It's a snapshot into the interior of the nightlife in Shibuya. It explores the stories of those nameless individuals who sit in Denny’s all night, attend bars until the wee hours, and those who have to ensure the smooth running of the sex hotels in the neon lit side streets of Dogenzaka.

The book follows five characters at varying levels of intensity. It’s hard to say who is actually the headliner of the story and is more of an ensemble piece with an omniscient narrator who speaks in the manner of a running commentary of a movie script. A rare experience in a Murakami novel who has often preferred the intimacy of Boku or Watashi.

We first meet Mari, who sits in Denny’s reading intensely, not a runaway, but nor someone who enjoys being at home either. She encounters a Trumbone player who knew her sister Eri. His name is Takahashi, he asks her to help his friend who needs a Chinese speaker at a Love Hotel named Alphaville. Reluctantly she agrees and together they go to the place where they meet the manager, Kaoru, a bleached blonde ex-wrestler who has a problem. There is a Chinese hooker in one of the rooms who has been beaten and stripped naked by a client. From this set up we’re introduced to three story threads that may or may not be connected.

If the book has a main character it would probably be Eri, the only problem is that we never actually get to meet Eri, or at least spend much time talking to her, as she is asleep for the whole novel. I can’t remember the last time I think I read a novel where a main character never bothered to get up. It’s an intriguing plot device, allowing Murakami to explore prosaically a recurring theme in his novels. That is the connection between the conscious self and the unconscious one.

Beyond the metaphysical issues explored upon, the novel touches on a variety of social issues currently facing Japan. The Chinese sex industry, hikikomori, the lost generation, runnaways and dysfunctional families.

The novel is a brisk read, and can be done in a few hours. The central mystery surrounding Eri in her bed weaves through the novel building up both menace and a pervading sense of hopelessness quite frankly. One wonders if Murakami had decided to expand this into a more of a full length novel what might have happened. However we are left dangling at the end with little in the way of resolution to any of the character arcs. A literal snapshot of modern Shibuya nightlife, that’s all we get, the rest we have to fill in for ourselves.

I enjoyed the book, but as is often the case I felt frustrated by the daylight that bursts through the blinds and cracks in the final chapters. With the new sun, the darkness and threats of that night disappear, the anonymity of the city and its enormity swallowing up any hope of cause and affect. While talking to my friend about the novel – sadly, or not, that is often very much how life is.

Musings: Who and Potter

Well its been a while since I last blogged on here. Its been a super busy couple of months dealing with two near enough full time jobs in the teaching industry here in Japan, but things have finally started to wind down. Grading is nearly finished and the prospect of a twelve hour flight back to the UK is looming on the horizon for Sunday morning. Normally I would check out what kind of brain candy the in flight movie schedule is offering, but it appears that I'm going to be reading the final Harry Potter novel that is released tomorrow - the final cycle of a multi-media cash cow unseen in both the literary and movie world. An exaggeration? Well, no, I don't think even Star Wars has had this kind of Global penetration on so many levels. Working as an English Lecturer here in Tokyo you can see the broad appeal of Rowling's series by how students wanting to read the adventures of Harry in its original form motivates them to study English more, not even Star Wars has managed that. What's more its not just boys reading her novels but alot of girls too.

Where am I going with this? Well that's a good question I'm really just brainstorming here, but on Gallifreyone.com message boards Paul Cornell, writer of some of the finest Dr Who material in the modern period, asked the question about the nature of Dr Who fandom in Japan. Its a good question and several other posters mentioned the same as me - there isn't much of one. Apart from going out on NHK earlier this year, there is very little awareness of our Time Travelling hero, which got me thinking - why is that? I mean Dr Who has been around longer than Harry Potter, ostensibly Dr Who is one of our most enduring literary/visual heroes, having been around continuously for nearly forty five years. Why hasn't the good Doctor had the same breakout appeal in Japan? The obvious answer to that is quite simple - marketing. I sometimes wonder about the BBC don't they realize the enourmous marketing potential in this country? Do they realise that the current style of Doctor Who totally fits in with alot of Japanese anime? Just from a financial point of view you would think it would be a no brainer to push Who more in Japan. I for one have attempted to introduce Who in to my class rooms; one of the benefits of being a University teacher is the fact you can inflict your passions on students, on the whole feedback was positive. The only sad thing being that they didn't have the awareness or the access to watch more. The DVD here is like 18 000 yen to buy, not exactly within the budget of anyone in the target audience.

On the flip side Harry Potter here has soared like the Dumbledore's phoenix. The books are widely sold and awareness of the characters and situations are huge here - unusual for a British product, considering the Japanese market is inundated with American TV and movies. Why is this the case? Is it that Dr Who is too British perhaps? Harry Potter is after all written by an ex-English teacher who is no doubt far savvyer to the tastes of international English culture? Certainly her vocabulary and language is far friendlier. This brings me to another point. The Guardian this week had a book reviewer tearing apart her writing style, saying it would have been elegant prose for a writer if they were aged 9, well, I'd like to defend Rowling here. Her writing is written clearly, simply and starkly in some ways. Her prose flows like machine code, allowing the reader to build up a vast visual vocabulary that renders the filmic topography of her world in an efforlecent and efficent manner. This is precisely why so many people who are second language speakers have warmed to her prose and filled Rowling's coffers in the process. Furthermore her character architypes are familiar, because they delve the heroic literary and movie mass consciousness that has become so ubiquitous in the fantasy genre these days.
Hmm seem to have answered my own rambling question - its all about who you've written for - Harry Potter takes place in a parallel world with enough of an international flavour in content and style to win over non native speakers. Dr Who on the other hand in some ways and it feels bizarre to say this is perhaps too weird and to Anglocentric to be appreicated? Let me expand on that.
What is the concept of Who? Basically a time travelling alien with two hearts who has a space ship in the shape of a curious blue box bigger on the inside than the outside and picks up good looking twenty something women and puts their lives through hell of a regular basis, hmm. Difficult to relate to if you haven't been brought up on it. Now contrast it to Potter.
A lonely boy with glasses with no friends finds out he has a secret destiny and special ability - he is eleven years old and he's about to start the adventure of a life time quickly becoming friends with two other social misfits who have difficulty fitting in because of class, status and race.
There you go - Potter is an easier sell. Who, while more imaginative and barmier it takes alot of investment before the viewer can totally buy in to the concept.

South of the Border, West of the Sun

You know some writers tend to write the same story over and over again. Conscious decision or just something that happens naturally as you’re writing? I guess there is an attraction in an idea or a feeling that the story can evoke in the mindscape of a writer. Certainly its something I’ve noticed with my own work recently, not that anyone can read my latest fiction unless you have the eyes of a microscope and the handwriting recognition talent of dozens  of Coptic scholars mind you.

Graham Greene was one such writer, he pretty much told the same love triangle story in a string of novels, no doubt working out his own demons about his own failed romances. With Murakami, well, he’s either someone who’s been frustrated by a dozen or so enigmatic women in his life, or the mysterious absent woman who pops in and out of the lives of his protagonists is a metaphor for desire and the failure to act.

Can’t say I want to criticize him for it though, as the iconic disappearing siren that has been recurrent throughout much of his work makes for great story telling, allowing him to paint impressionistic canvases about the nature of male desire and the impossibility of ever satisfying it.

South of the Border, is his least surrealistic novels since perhaps Norwegian Wood. Its also one of his shortest full-length novels, in fact it feels more of a novella than anything else, a straightforward tale about a young man growing up in Post-war Japan. The protagonist’s name is Hajime (meaning "beginning" in Japanese) and the tale focuses on his life from around ten years old through to the novel’s present time when he is thirty seven. Typically of Murakami’s characters, Hajime is not one for easy expression of his feelings. Concerning matters of the heart he can never bring himself to take a risk and explain his feelings to the one person who really matters to him, the one person who he really loves, Shimamoto. She’s the girl who lived next door, the girl who suffered from Polio as a child and now has a lame leg. As tweenies they listened to his father’s record collection, in particular the Nat King Cole record: South of the Border, where they would dream together about where that land might be and what that place was like. After she moves away Hajime stops seeing her, as he is too self conscious about what her mother is thinking about this boy that keeps visiting her daughter, and the fact he was afraid of getting hurt should Shimamoto reject his feelings for her.

Despite his young age the ghost of Shimamoto haunts him throughout the rest of his life even though she isn’t dead yet. It causes him to make bad choices with relationships that hurt those closest to him. In particular his teenage years girlfriend, Izumi, who he ends up betraying by sleeping with her ephemeral cousin who, although not exactly beautiful, had an unstoppable magnetism that made him forget about how his actions would harm Izumi.

Hajime eventually finds what he thinks is happiness with a woman named Yukiko who is the daughter of a wealthy construction company president. Within a few years Hajime, on paper at least, thinks he is happy with his life. The owner of two fashionable jazz clubs and the father of two little girls, what more could any man want? Well that’s a stupid question when you’re dealing with the desires of a Murakami Everyman, none of them are ever satisfied, somehow, somewhere in their lives exists their untouchable ephemeral muse who they believe encompasses all of their desires in one womanly body. Eventually on a rainy evening in his club Shimamoto reenters his life, turning his life upside down inducing a nauseating vertigo in our protagonist. She’s everything he imagined and every time he is with her he feels as if his soul, his life is complete, only there is his wife who he does love, and his children who he also loves. What’s a guy to do? Well you can probably guess. If you don’t want to read about how it ends stop here.

Anansi Boys

If you've never read any Neil Gaiman and you have a taste for the surreal and fantastical you should do yourself a favour and pick up a copy of Anansai Boys. Anansi Boys is a comic novel along the lines of Good Omens which Gaiman co-wrote with Comedy Fantasy writer Terry Pratchett over fifteen years ago or more. Keeping with the theme of Gods from his previous novel, American Gods, Gaiman tells us the story of Fat Charlie Nancy who used to think he was a normal sort of bloke with a father who had a habit of humiliating him on repeated occasions and a fiance with the cliched mother from hell who refused to sleep with him until they got married. Like I said a normal run of the  mill life. That is until his father dies and ends up totally ruining everything for him.

Gaiman is one of those writers who just seems to know plain everything  concerning fairytales, folklore and of course Shakespeare. He's written quite possibly in every medium, from comics to short stories, to plays, to Japanese anime and of course movies. He's the sort of bloke who you can imagine around a camp fire spinning  silk webbed fables that'll make the hairs of your back freeze as if a vampire break dancing on your grave while at the same time using a feather to tickle you to death with laughter. He's that kind of writer, honestly.

This novel reads quickly and visually, betraying Gaiman's comic book origins. His similies and metaphors jump off the page and stick to you like the chewing gum that held the nickname Fat Charlie to the protagonist even though he was only ever slightly chubby for a few months of his twenty plus year life.

Not to ruin to much of the story for you but this is comedy fantasy novel that ties in the mundane everyday world with the rich tapestry of folklore legends about Gods who used to shape the world.  Fat Charlie's dad had a habit of naming things and making those names stick. It wasn't an uncanny knack that he had that was precisely what he existed to do. You see Charlie's dad is or was a God, a Spider god that went by the name of Anansi, when his father finally croaks it holding on to the breast of an American Blonde woman, Fat Charlie learns that he actually has a brother that he never knew existed. Eager to to learn more about him he follows the advice of an old lady friend of his father, Mrs Higgler, and talks to a spider to find him. Lo and behold the next day his brother appears and then Fat Charlie's life begins to unravel quicker than a stripper's corset lace with a thousand dollar bill tucked in its cleavage.

The characters are naturally larger than life portraits that radiate off the page in vividly. Spider, Fat Charlie's brother is wonderful creation, a quick witted trickster that has inherited all of his father's powers, along with his sense of amorality. Spider thinks nothing of it to swipe Charlie's fiance, Rosie from under his nose, or start poking into the dodgy affairs of Charlie's boss Graham Coats.

I could go on but I'm not, better to discover it all for yourselves I've said to much already. At 378 pages long it feels more like a two hundred page read. Gaiman's sense of pacing never leaves you wanting to skip paragraphs or pages, his comic book sense of continuity and meticulousness to detail allows some of the smallest points to become relevant later on as the story gathers steam towards its denoument. A great travel read and will certainly wile away a few days of the winter vacation -enjoy.

Blind Willow Sleeping Woman

You know I hate airport bookshops, everything worth buying is part of a 2 for 3 sale and you never really have enough time to actually savour all those books thanks to your plane always about to leave for somewhere else in the world. In fact you could say that buying books at an airport is the worst thing you can do in the departure lounge and to books themselves. They deserve more than just being treated like some jumble sale with a ticky ticky time bomb count down. What’s worse is that the so called airport exclusives are the oversized versions which are quite possibly the most impractical format imaginable, especially considering the fascist like zeal that is airport security these days with size restrictions. So what do I do? I buy this book twice. No I wasn’t going crazy, just that I bought the first copy for my cousin Alessandro who lives in Italy, and the other for myself, yet again I had to sacrifice the opportunity to buy a Dan Brown volume of badly written conspiracy theory, always next year I suppose.

I wanted to introduce my cousin to what I consider is the finest example of contemporary Japanese literature around today. I was confident that Murakami’s wacked out surrealist style would pull my cousin into his dreamlike world of exotic beauties who always have the habit of disappearing just when you’re used to them being around. I wasn’t wrong, my cousin has a bit of thing for surrealism and beautiful women, you only have to glance at his paintings to realize that. Anyhow this current collection of Murakami shorts was published following the recent international success of Kafka On the Shore. This volume collects a lot of works that I’ve read before in magazines such as the The New Yorker, it also gives us a chance to see how some of his early shorts eventually became some of his most famous novels. In particular, anyone who is a fan of Norwegian Wood will find reading The Firefly an absolute must.

So how does this latest volume rate? Well like any collection there are the hits, the b-sides and misses. Like Homer I’m always more fond of the hits rather than the B-sides, nonetheless you can’t but help admire Murakami’s crisp photographic writing style. I found the title story somewhat overly obscure and found myself wondering why it became the title of the collection. Quite frankly the more powerful pieces are found towards the middle. These are my favorites from the book.

The Seventh Man is a stand out a tale, especially considering the recent Tsunami which casts its contemporay weight over every word of the story. A group of unnamed men who are huddled in a circle with the wind howling around them each tell a story from their lives. The unnamed narrator (the seventh man –getit?) recounts how as a boy a huge wave took away from him everything that was dear. The story is classic Murakami, no names are mentioned, characters are stripped to their thoughts, with only an initial to establish identity. Murakami’s wave embodies all the primal fears children have of nature and of life. The story shows how the narrator is tortured by this force of nature and how his whole life became overshadowed by its dark shadow and scream. Why I like this story is how the structure is shared by one of my own shorts, about how an event from childhood can dominate the shape of the life to come.

    The Ice Man is a frosty allegory about intercultural marriages. Told from the first person a woman recounts how she met her husband who is known as an Iceman. For me, who had been an X-men reader as a teenager, I couldn’t help visualize a frozen Bobby Drake in the role, colouring the story in an icy blue hue. Although touching delicately on the absurd, the story works well at examining the difficulties couple in international marriages face. Murakami captures succinctly the alieness that can sometimes exist in a relationship with the unfamiliar. His description of the couple’s love making in particular encapsulates a lot of ambivalent feelings that I’m sure so many people have shared. The ending too works well as a parable about taking a wife or husband our of their own society and being forced to fit in with their spouses, needless to say the end isn’t exactly what you would call happy.

Tony Takitani is a bittersweet story of a man who although Japanese was cursed with a western name and made to feel an outsider for much of his life, until that is he meets the love of his life a nameless woman who was able to fill the emptiness inside him and cast off the state of loneliness that had always engulfed him. Of course no relationship is perfect – Murakami paints an absurdist tale of a woman with a compulsive shopping disorder who feels compelled to buy every brand item she can. His description of her trancelike state when she’s doing this sounds surreal but quite frankly if anyone has been to a family sale in Tokyo its not so far off the truth if you ask me. Without ruining the ending for you - it has a twisted, almost malicious denouement more Brother’s Grimm than Disney.

If you’ve never picked up a Murakami collection or novel before, this is a good a place as any to start. There is a fine variety of his writing within the covers, displaying his enigmatic minimalism that can border occasionally on the frustrating, but also his heartbreaking portraits of the everyman who never seems to able to hold on to what he loves dear. 

Book Review: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles

This has been the sixth Murakami novel that I’ve read, it’s also the longest, clocking at a whopping 609 pages. As well it’s also been the hardest to write about, considering the breadth of the subject matter and the oblique structure of its form. I think this book is either something you’ll think is a work of genius or a novel that could have done with some seriously judicious editing. As noted in previous reviews I consider myself a fan of Murakami’s stories they blend without explanation the mundane with the fantastic and explore modern Japanese culture and society with the ease with which a cat navigates the branches of a tree filled with singing birds. I

Its easy to understand why he is popular in western countries, Murakami constantly explores the themes of rebellion, corruption and isolation in society, they’re not things specific just to Japanese culture but are a part of bigger, more universal concepts. That being said Murakami doesn’t allow his stories to be constrained by standard axioms of story telling either. He’s quite happy to fill up his pages with literal red herrings for pure aesthetic value, which many readers might consider extraneous to the story. Certainly, in this novel he takes this to the extreme on many occasions, introducing metaphor laden symbolism fully sketched characters, and plot threads only to drop or forget about later on in the story. A traditional editor would have pulled their hair out dealing with the various plot strands that followed Japanese roads going nowhere.

Who owns history?

I haven't actually read The Da Vinci Code, making me one of a minority of regular long haul airline passengers who hasn't I suppose. Dan Brown the writer has certainly done well for himself, not only becoming a millionaire out of it, but also having a movie made of the book, surely a sign of any cultural ly significant novel, and having several law suits filed against him on various accounts, not including provoking the ire of the Vatican who actually went to great lengths to appoint a Cardinal to publically rebuke the novel.

What's prompted me to write about this is the recent case involving two historians Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh who are currently trying to take Dan to the cleaners for making more money than they did with their book The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail. They claim that his who conspiracy theory in his novel is directly taken from their own non-fiction work, which porported the theory that the Catholic church has been covering up the fact that Jesus married Mary Magdelene, had a child by her, and who's blood line still continues today. Don't know about you, but they never taught me that one at Sunday school, Jesus marries a hooker! Can you imagine what the headlines would have been had The Sun newspaper and the British Papparazzi been around back then? Anyhow, I have actually read this book, and its actually a rather good read, sort of thing to take a pinch of salt with mind you, but provocative none the less.

What's interesting about this is that Baigent and Leigh claim intellectual property theft, however, and here's the problem; they claimed it be truth, not fiction, so how can Dan Brown be accused of theft? Its a bit like saying that any writer writing about a controversial area of historical study will be liable for legal action. I can think of further examples down the line; in the book Fingerprints of the Gods written by Graham Hancock, he proposed the idea that a unknown civilisation previously existed on the continent of Antartica, claiming that at one time it had been a temperate land, capable of sustaining a civilisation. Well that idea was plundered in the highly intellectual Aliens Vs Predator movie. Wonder when he'll begin court proceedings?

I can see even more horrible things happening in the future, will this mean that the Tolkien estate will start sueing every fantasy writer in the last twenty years for theft of fantasy stereotypes that the late J.R.R. Tolkien created? Will Terry Prattchett finally lose his sense of humour and take Ms Rowling to court for lifting his idea of infusing humour with fantasy? The scariness continues. Follow the link for the article.
Link to article

Book Review. The Vesuvius Club

I've just finished this offering from Mark Gatiss called The Vesuvius Club. A Lucifer Box Novel.

For those of you who don't know Mark Gatiss is both a co-writer and performer in the dark surrealistic comedy The League Of Gentlemen. This is not to be confused with the crappy Sean Connery movie The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, follow carefully it get complicated from here on. He's also a writer for the new Doctor Who series, and wrote the victorian period episode, which incidently was the first one to garner complaints, hearlding the good Doctor's return to its halycon days of the seventies when Mary Whitehouse (one of those nasty moral crusaders who likes to ruin everyone's TV viewing) was foaming at the mouth at every crappy special effect.

Anyway on the basis of that pedigree, back while I was in England  this novel caught more attention, apart from anything it has a wicked cover, and anyone who knows me will understand my attraction to artwork like you can see on the left here.

The novel concerns the adventure of of the title character Lucifer who plays a James Bond like secret agent in an Edwardian setting. The tone and character of this novel has more in common with the League of Extraordinary Gentleman, than Gatiss's former work, by this I'm referring to Alan Moore's excellent graphic novel series as opposed to the movie (told you it gets confusing.)

The story follows the episodes of Lucifer's life as a government secret agent working in the circles of high society, along the way he becomes involved in a rather standard spy plot involving murdered and kidnapped scientists who are somehow connected to an exclusive club in Naples called, The Vesuvius Club.

There is nothing of weight to this story, there is very little subtext apart from the obvious fact that the writer is clearly having fun in his Pseudo Edwardian world, which feels more like a movie version reality rather than what the real thing must have been like. The conceit of Lucifer's character is that this must have been how Oscar Wilde might have written James Bond. Whatever the point was its a fast enjoyable read if you like the spy genre and Gatiss's subversive humour which there is plenty of. Don't expect a warm fuzzy read though Lucifer, unsurprisingly enough, is a rather amoral character who makes decisions based purely on circumstance and personal advancement.

Having just checked Amazon it appears the novel has been successful enough to spawn a sequel story, no doubt a movie of TV version will happen at some point.

A Tabloid Life - Warren Beatty

Warren Beatty The sexiest man alive by Ellis Amburn

Before reading this book I had zero interest in Beatty, I’ve only seen one movie of his, Dick Tracy, a tired uninspired piece that attempted to cash in on the trailblazer comic book movie, Batman. I knew that he was a Hollywood actor who personified all the excesses of that deeply tacky, seedy, and tasteless place, but I had no inclination to watch his movies or research his life. Recently a friend of mine with reasonable taste in literature persuaded me to give this bio a try, citing the man’s extraordinary list of conquests as a reason to read it, promising me an easy quick read.

So what’s my verdict?

First off Warren Beatty’s list of sexual conquests is, well, how can I be polite about it? Impressive, intimidating, enviable, unbelievable? Take your pick of any extreme adjective basically. Really, if the book is to be believed the man must have slept his way through several generations of Hollywood starlets and wannabes. We are talking about some seriously impressive Hollywood ladies here, Natalie Wood, Joan Collins, Barbra Streisand, Bridget Bardot, Julie Christie, Michelle Phillips, Diane Keaton, and other Hollywood sex symbols, the guy had a life, you know what I mean?

The book does a fairly pedestrian job in painting a canvas of Beatty’s life. To be honest its not the best example of biographical writing, in a lot of places it wanders completely off topic and seems more concerned in muck raking, not just Beatty but pretty much everyone who was ever involved with him. In places its crass, pornographic and tasteless, and spends several pages detailing in graphic detail the Sharon Tate murder. Its shamelessly page turning material though, well for precisely the above criticisms. It charts a slice of Hollywood history at its most irresponsible and amoral period.

Amburn is strongest when he focuses on Beatty, in particular charting his career choices and his struggle to maintain artistic control on his pictures, the accounts of the making of Shampoo and Reds stand out in particular.

However what really irritated me about this book was the way Amburn continually practiced shampoo psychology on Beatty at every chance he could, on the one hand he displays some admiration for his standing in politics and his artistic endeavors and then on the other he can’t wait to twist the knife, it makes for a very schizophrenic read quite frankly, who needs to be told the bloody obvious every other page? Is it jealousy? Sometimes you gotta wonder. Another problem with the book is the fact that most of the information is third hand, based on other people’s accounts, confessions and tattletale, we get very little insight into the man himself directly, the book suffers because of it. A lot of the fluff here could have easily have been edited making the book a shorter sharper read. Yet in certain ways the book succeeds in spite of itself mainly because of its subject, who is both enigmatic and an open book all at the same time. Certainly Beatty has made some staggering achievements for a pretty boy actor, it has certainly encouraged me to check out his movies, in particular Reds, Shampoo and of course Bonnie and Clyde which in movie history was a revolutionary film.