Someone Can Represent Something To You Without You Noticing

Bye bye, nice face man. (Source) 

 Tears, weirdly, on and off all evening, as soon as I found out that Christopher Plummer was dead. He seemed to be working harder and harder over the last fifteen years, was that it? He always seemed part of a team, too. This evening, I'd seen Ana de Armas sharing beautiful pictures of the two of them working together on Knives Out on instagram, but hadn't bothered to read why. Don't watch the clip below if you don't want spoilers, but know it's one of the first three things I think of now when I think of Christopher Plummer.

 

 An actor is said to "hold their own" when sharing a screen with a legend like him, as if acting is a zero sum game of attention, which for some actors I suppose it is, but not Plummer. Nobody's good on their own, and I've seen Verne Troyer "hold his own" with Plummer. I can think of no other film star over eighty so regularly – and successfully – employed to show love towards those he played opposite. He might prove irreplaceable. 

 This is the second thing I think of when I think of Christopher Plummer: my DVD of Beginners.

 

 

 I'm not scared of dying, I don't think, and I'm not scared of aging. But I am scared getting older will make be me crueller and more dull. It's harder to meet different people when you're older – not just new people, different people, which, I think, keeps you kind. But in his final years, there's nowhere Christopher Plummer looked out of place. So this might be what he represents. He reminds me that I chose to be an actor, and he reminds me why. Because I thought it might be a way to see the world, and a way to stay young. 

 We'll see.

 This is the third thing I think of:

 

The actual Imaganarium of Dr. Parnassus, whose full build you can see documented here. 

"My eyebrows shot up..." (Good day, Mr. Cummings)

"My eyebrows shot up"

Science fiction writer William Gibson, @GreatDismal, says Downing St adviser Dominic Cummings might want to go back and read his books again before recommending the govt employ more people who resemble his characters#r4today | https://t.co/vFkbBqZyfV pic.twitter.com/U6MV3aLh6I

— BBC Radio 4 Today (@BBCr4today) January 20, 2020

 I haven't read William Gibson's "Pattern Recognition" but, as an Oxbridge Humanities graduate, I bet you anything that when Dominic Cummings refered to its heroine Cayce Pollard as "that girl hired by Bigend" in his horribly-written call-out for "a sort of personal assistant to me for a year", he was very consciously comparing himself to Gibson's bullshitting brainiac. Showily even. He knew exactly what he was doing in that respect at least. But...

Brazil. Charles McKeown (eyebrows shot up). Jonathan Pryce. Magic.

 I also bet that in not actually naming Cayce Pollard, Dom unconsciously betrayed something far more telling: a deep-seated, adolescent fear of being teased for admitting knowledge of any woman's name because that means you must fancy them. I honestly think the Gove-ian, a-human, legislation-free future the man currently running this country as much as anyone is attempting to spearhead will be this pathetic. I would still really like to see which self-styled "weirdoes and misfits with odd skills" do end up responding to his call, because I suspect a lot of them will more closely resemble that boy not hired by Kubrick:

 And also, I bet he does fancy her.
 (And also also, what Cummings is really after, it seems, is another William Gibson, who got 5 out of 150 in his mathematics SATs. There's a great piece here on how Gibson had to repeatedly postpone finishing his latest book because reality kept overtaking it, which is also my excuse for not writing more "Time Spanner".
 [And also, should I apply?
 {Also, "[M]uch"?}])

Why Not Build A World? (Enjoying the Unvisitable)

  I'm very sympathetic to the idea that all the best fiction has a map at the front, but I'm not a complete convert. Different maps serve different puposes: the map in The Hobbit is a call to adventure, while the maps of the Hundred Acre Wood or Moominvalley are more like welcoming gifts. Both types are pretty scant on detail, and both are types I like: maps you don't have to constantly refer to. It's not just laziness that makes me favour these maps, it's that they make no serious attempt to pretend – as some fantasies do – that imagined lands can be depicted objectively.

 It was Nerdwriter's video below that got me thinking about this (that, and the fact I just finished "A Wizard of Earthsea" but I'll write about that map tomorrow). According to Nerdwriter the "bill of goods" of a fantasy is not World-Building, but "the ideas and insights that spring forth from the explosive act of reading":

Or to quote M. John Harrison on his own imagined world:

"Like all books, Viriconuim is just some words. There is no place, no society, no dependable furniture to 'make real'. You can't read it for that stuff, so you have to read it for everything else."

  I was delighted to see Harrison's name pop up. I've always loved "In Viriconium" – there's a detectable Viriconian influence here for example. Like Bastian's Fantasia in "The Neverending Story" the city is unmappable. In my spare periods at school, I used to walk along the then undeveloped South Bank in the shadow of Bankside Power Station (now Tate Britain) looking for places Viriconium might be, scouting liminal locations. And any reader in any other city could do the same.

 That's one of the reasons I love Orson Welles' film of "The Trial", whence all these images (more here). Unable to shoot in Prague, he had to invent his own dream city from bits of Paris, Milan, Rome, Dubrovnik and Zagreb – effectively shooting the film in Viriconium. Terry Gilliam's own stab at Kafka a couple of decades later, "Brazil", would conjure a similar city out of real locations; its setting, according to the opening title – "somewhere in the twentieth century"  – similarly vague.

 So that's why I'm not a-hundred-per-cent a fan of maps at the beginning of books. Fantasy locations are unvisitable. Definitive visualisations are impossible. That said...

  I can't have been the only child to think Tolkein was taking the piss with his illustations to "The Hobbit". Show us the bloody monsters.

MUST FLY

(originally posted on myspace here)

 

 

Day Two. Pah. This picture was much bigger than it should be because Adobe Imageready has got lost or some- I mean what even is it? - anyway I don't have the thing to make it smaller (Posthumously this may have been corrected). And It's just been intimated to me that "cockgoggles" is not a suitable word for radio 4 at 6:30 in the evening. Sorry, Miklus. Huh. Anyway... I'm a healer, says f*c*b**k, that's my "PURPOSE IN LIFE", and I should get my eyebrow pierced. Thanks. (Sarcasm. And I've remembered the asterisks this time, which is healthy.) I'm also Spider-Man, Footloose and Audrey Hepburn and should marry Cameron Diaz. Not my will, f*c*b**k but thine be done. However these are revelations I have too little time to ponder now, no I just wanted to stick up today's photo of the archaeopteryx... I wonder what interview with Lars Von Trier I am. Ah, "Which Marginalised Disney Gal are you?" Great, I'll take that one. Here meanwhile is a cartoon. X