The Best of S Club 7

Here's an Amazon review I wrote a few years back which Vlad reminded me about.

Zentralfriedhof

I went to the Central Cemetery today. It was rather rainy and miserable, so it seemed a good time to go. The cemetery is huge, at 2.4 square kilometres more than twice the size of the area within York's medieval walls, and with a (dead) population of well over 3 million. It's so big, stretching two kilometres along one of the main roads out of the city, that it has three separate tram stops and its own internal bus service.

I advised moogdroog, who has been busy lately organising resistance plans in the event of a zombie apocalypse, not to bother with Vienna. The city would be lost within hours.

Since the dead haven't yet risen to feast upon the brains of the living, I thought I'd go and take some photos while I had the chance. I gave myself a theme to make it more interesting: neglected or forgotten graves.

I thought this was an interesting contrast: in the background a grave drowning under fresh, colourful bouquets; in the foreground a grave neglected for so long that it's been torn apart by a tree trunk. Somebody must have come to cut the tree down, but not repair the grave.

This looked like a little girl's tomb, but the inscription was in Russian. No, I did not knock over the potted plant and stuffed toy for dramatic effect.

This was the oddest and saddest thing I saw - a marble cross inscribed "Beloved and Unforgotten" casually dumped on another grave by the side of the path. There wasn't a name on it, so I wondered if it even ever belonged to anyone.

The Patriot

My flatmates are still being elusive. Sometimes I hear noises from their rooms and new dishes on the draining board, so I know they’re not dead.

But neither are they truly alive.

I watched The Patriot at the weekend. It’s not as bad as I’d been led to believe by the man on the street, although I admit this may have lowered the bar to such an extent that the film barely needed to shuffle to get over it.

It wasn’t quite as rabidly anti-British as people claim, that’s for sure. The antagonist, Colonel Tavington, played by a snarling, cold-eyed Jason Isaacs, is loosely based on a real historical figure with the bombastic name Banastre Tarleton, who did indeed lead a company of light dragoons during the Revolutionary War and did do some pretty nasty things such as burning houses and massacring prisoners. He never locked an entire village of men, women and children in a church and burned them to death, but this incarnation is a Hollywood villain, after all. Cut him some slack.

This picture is mostly here to keep Vlad the Impaler happy

Furthermore, other British characters are not quite so evil. Most are even portrayed as decent and civilised, if suffering the natural flaw of all eighteenth-century Englishmen abroad: arrogance. Tom Wilkinson, for instance, who plays the British commander Cornwallis, repeatedly castigates Tavington for his barbaric conduct. “We serve the Crown,” he says, “and we must conduct ourselves accordingly. Surrending troops will be given quarter; these brutal tactics must stop!” Conversely, Mel Gibson’s guerillas commit a few war crimes of their own before they are reined in.

A big problem with the film is that it was directed by Roland Emmerich, the man behind such braindead blockbusters as Stargate, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012. He doesn’t really do subtlety. This isn’t a problem when the main villains happen to be aliens or natural disasters, but some people get tetchy when he bludgeons a historical period with his hammy fists. Ideally Emmerich would be allowed to direct the action sequences, but kept away from everything else.

A lesser problem is the writer, Robert Rodat, who also wrote Saving Private Ryan and is currently working on a movie adaptation of the online RPG World of Warcraft. He’s not that bad a writer, but some lines are like being poked in the ears with hot needles. For example:

Mel Gibson: May I sit with you?
Love Interest: It’s a free country. [Dramatic pause.] Or at least it will be.

Ouch. He also tiptoes around the slavery issue with impressive deftness. The hero, we learn early on, only employs freed blacks on his farm, not slaves. The redemption of the white man is symbolised by a minor character who is a bit racist to one black recruit, but then makes friends with him at the end, so everything is fine.

Black and white, united by their hatred of the British

One might also question why Tavington’s murderous dragoons are, but for a single officer, portrayed as English, when his real-life counterpart commanded a unit composed entirely of loyalist Americans. Presumably having Americans committing atrocities against other Americans during the Revolutionary War would have shattered the delicate mythology upon which the emotional impact of the film depends. (For a drama which seeks to enrich the myth of America's founding by exploring just such ambiguities, I'd recommend HBO's awesome miniseries John Adams.)

Emmerich wouldn't let Thomas Jefferson slouch like this, that's for damn sure

Yet I still enjoyed The Patriot, and having watched and enjoyed it, I’m almost tempted to revisit Braveheart. Although I suspect that it will only appear more moronic the second time round.

Paranormal Poppins

Last night I went to see the new independent horror film called Paranormal Activity. It’s about a young couple who set up a camera in their house to capture evidence of a haunting on film. I suppose one could call it another Blair Witch Project, although it’s a better film - more claustrophobic, more contained, more unsettling for its domestic setting.

Get used to this shot...

If you get the chance I’d recommend it. But don’t watch the trailer, cos it contains most of the creepy moments from the film, which mostly consists of waiting for something creepy to happen.

I also had a kind of nightmare last night. It didn’t come from Paranormal Activity though, it came from an episode of cult 90s Boosh-esque surreal sketch comedy show The Glam Metal Detectives I watched with moogdroog.

This episode involved a character called Mary ‘Pippins’ who gets kidnapped by an evil beefeater and has to be rescued by the eponymous heroes. In my dream I was trying to save two little kids from an evil version of Mary Poppins. First she blew up a petrol tanker we were using, but we managed to escape and found a place to sleep.

Then in the middle of the night she came into the room, took out a pistol, shot the kids dead and then shot me five times in the stomach and walked out. Somehow I was still alive, so I staggered to a hospital where the staff thought it was really funny that being shot five times in the stomach hadn’t killed me.

Which all goes to prove that Mary Poppins is inherently a more disturbing character than a demon from the pits of Hell.

New flat

Yesterday I signed on the dotted line for the flat I’ll be staying in from January until the end of April. I’m subrenting it from a retired Uraguayan painter who’s spending the winter with her relatives back home. Because she was having a hard time finding someone to fit this precise four-month window, which through sheer good luck happens to be my four-month window as well, I’ve got a pretty good deal.

It’s in an neighbourhood I’ve never been to before, but it looks interesting. There are students everywhere, a couple of small bookshops, a chocolate shop which sells confectionary of such extravagance that the first time I walked past the window I thought it was a jewellers, and some traditional-looking cafés and restaurants alongside the compulsary kebab shops and trendy bars.

Best of all, there’s a British/Irish pub with quiz nights on Tuesday and across the street an English supermarket. Well, it’s not really a supermarket, it’s just two rooms, but it sells all manner of English culinary specialities. Not just your Marmite and your Worcestershire Sauce, either. These people have gone the whole way. Tyrrell’s crisps, Lyon’s golden syrup, custard powder, an impressive variety of teas and real ales.

The main ingredient of Worcestershire Sauce: Englishness

It’s pricey though. A box of Yorkshire Tea, RRP £2.99, will set you back €5.70. A £1.29 bottle of Worcestershire Sauce costs €2.40. That’s a 100% markup. The question is, how much will I be willing to pay for a taste of home? In other words: just how much do I love my country?

Squeaky floors

My two flatmates are recluses. I’ve spoken to each of them twice in the last week. The first is a PhD biology student from Norway who doesn’t speak much German, but he gave me a can of beer when I first arrived, so he’s okay.

The second is a short, middle-aged German called Jürgen who walks about with an inadequately buttoned-up shirt. The first thing he said to me, after telling me his name, was ‘If you have a can, it goes in the white bin,’ pointing at the black bin. Then I saw him this morning. He said ‘hello’, I said ‘good morning’, and that was it.

The kitchen floor is also really squeaky. It has a lino covering, but the floorboards beneath squeak like crazy. It’s like walking about on the face of a giant angry mouse.

I need to go to the university library this afternoon, which will be exciting since I’ve never used it before. I get confused in the main university building because it reminds me so much of York campus.

The University of York

The University of Vienna

The worst film of all time

Moogdroog and I watched the classic 1950s sci-fi stinker Plan 9 from Outer Space recently. I’m sure any science fictions fans will already know it as supposedly the worst film of all time.

It isn’t the worst film of all time. There are plenty of more offensive strips of celluloid than this, such as Richard Curtis’s saccharine shit-storm Love Actually, which seems to divide people of good cinematic taste from everybody else with such efficiency that it might have been invented as a screening device for a genocide aimed specifically at the sort of person who thinks that true love is based on a shared obsession with a certain brand of blended coffee beans.

For example, here is a user review from the New York Times website:

By intertwining the individual love stories into an amazing tapestry of the struggle for true love in the contemporary world, he creates a two-hour long symphony for the heart strings... I find it nearly impossible that anyone but the most cynical of cynics could not be nearly overwhelmed with warm fuzzies by the end of this love-fest.

And here is another:

This movie is deserving of all the loathing a person can muster.

For the record, anyone who mixes metaphors and then uses the expression ‘warm fuzzies’ in a film review deserves to be hanged with fairy lights. Plan 9 is much less objectionable than Love Actually. For a start, it’s just charmingly incompetent, whereas Love Actually is so busy deluding itself that it’s a wonder - and a shame - it doesn’t just sink to the bottom of the ocean of liquid tripe of which it chiefly consists.

Also, Plan 9 makes no sense on the narrative level. Neither the motives nor the actions of any of the characters are intelligible. At no point is it made clear what the aliens actually want, or why they go about raising corpses in order to get it. There isn’t even a central protagonist. Its portrayal of females (human and alien) is chauvinist even for 1959. It feels very much as though it was filmed by someone who had five days, very little money and no talent.

Yet all these flaws just make it even more remarkable that Ed Wood made it at all - there must have been countless people who opposed or were indifferent to his project, but he got it finished regardless. If nothing else, few films express better the sheer amateurish love of cinema.

A great man

Love Actually is a shameless muddle of big names and sentimental hogwash, cynically targeted for the Christmas market. It is the fast food of romantic comedy, and the lazy interweaving of the various plots provides about as much emotional nutrition as a packet of twisted cheese strings.

The opening evocation of 9/11 to provide some slim thematic coherence to the film beyond its smug title is perhaps one of the most offensive moments I’ve ever experienced in a movie:

When the planes hit the Twin Towers, none of the phone calls from people on board were messages of hate or revenge, they were all messages of love.

Fuck off, Curtis. If you wanted to make a worthy film about 9/11, you should have made United 93.

Worse than Stalin

The opening words of Plan 9, meanwhile, are distilled brilliance:

Greetings, my friend. We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives. And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you, in the future...

There is, come to think of it, some common ground between the movies: they both involve the undead. That is to say, Plan 9 involves several corpses being risen by mysterious alien electrodes as malevolent zombies, while Love Actually was written and directed by a blood-sucking vampire. The only good thing to say about Love Actually is that by expelling a bunch of half-arsed subplots in one incoherent, rose-scented fart, Curtis spared us the eight feature-length explosions of diarrhoea he would otherwise have made.

Er, this didn’t actually start out as a review of Love Actually, which I watched about five years ago. I made the mistake of mentioning it offhand near the start of this entry and I found I simply couldn’t stop. Clearly I’ve been penting this rant up for a very long time.

Couldn't have said it better myself

It felt good though.

The moral, to end on a positive note, is: just because a film is a bad film doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. Go and watch Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Vinegraveyard

Since I was having a highly unproductive day today, I decided to cut my losses and go exploring some of the hills on the northern edge of the city. I hopped on a tram which took me to the endearingly-named suburb of Nussdorf, ‘nut village’, which has its own suburb of well-to-do houses nestling on the lower slopes of the Wienerwald.

Some of these houses were more like mansions, complete with security gates and German Shepherds dozing in the yard. I walked past the home of the Moroccan ambassador to Austria, which was most impressive. I thought better of standing outside and taking a photo, so you’ll just have to trust me.

This man has a much nicer house than you

Above the mansions, overlooking the distant, misty metropolis of Vienna below, was an entire hillside of deserted vineyards. I followed an old cobbled path up the hill, passing one or two people walking their dogs. A vineyard is a haunting place in the winter, a cold, colour-drained hangover to the bacchic excess of the summer.

Bacchus, who knew that no party was complete without nude, drunk infants peeing on the floor

There was a woman sat on a bench with a thermos and a book; I would have asked out of curiosity what she was reading, but for that unfortunate social norm which would compel a woman sitting in a deserted vineyard to regard any strange male who approached her as a potential rapist or worse.

I walked on. On each side passed row after row of naked vines, clinging to their poles and wires like frozen snakes. The only trace of life was an occasional clutch of grapes hanging limp and shrivelled in the still air. Empty holiday chalets, which no doubt sat in a bucolic paradise of green and purple in July and August, now looked like tombs in the middle of a graveyard. Anyway, here are some photos.

It was very peaceful, and I hope to go back up there for some hill running.

Bidazed

My bathroom has a bidet in it. That's quite normal except for the fact that it doesn't have a toilet.

The toilet and sink are in a little cupboard room by themselves down the hall, two locked doors away.

Being English and poor, I find the very concept of bidets unsettling, but this arrangement strikes me as just plain weird.

If the bathroom arrangements of my flat were a cat, this is what they would look like

Tell me baby, do you recognise me?

It seems I am developing a habit of returning to Vienna every three years.

I first came here on a German course in the summer of 2003. I remember the heavy heat which left the entire city weary and breathless for weeks on end; our landlord, who owned a family bakery on the ground floor and every week brought up a tray of unsold loaves and sweet pastries, and once asserted that northern Germans had no culture because they ate schnitzel with mustard. I remember walking back from class with my roommate the day I turned 23 and telling him how much I hated having a fuss made on my birthday, minutes before we entered the flat to the extravagant surprise party he had arranged with our other flatmates.

Three years later I was back, to a different flat and a better school. This summer was even hotter, bad enough to kill off thousands of old French people and bring the rest of Europe to its sweating knees. I had a flatmate who had fled the USA as a teenager and spoke a curious, half-remembered kind of English, and sometimes used my laptop to arrange gay intrigues in the city. I visited the opera and the famous Heuriger, the wine taverns that cluster on the lower slopes of the Wienerwald, and stayed at the parochial house of a village called Pinkafeld, whose Indian parish priest happened to be a classmate of mine.

Now it’s 2009 and I’m back again, this time for three weeks, then from January to April. I went for a wander into the city last night to watch the city tugging on its Christmas finery. Most of the decorations are already up, well before the real tourist season of December. I was also here for a conference in early December 2006 and found the place heaving, its Weihnachtsdörfer, Christmas Villages, packed with heavily-wrapped tourists clutching cups of Glühwein in their mittened hands, the air booming with the songs of those great Viennese composers, George Michael and Bing Crosby.

Last night George and Bing were at the Christmas Village on Maria Theresa Platz, but the tourists weren’t; that is, not in anything like the numbers that December will bring. It was good to walk between the rows of huts without being crushed, thinking about buying a hot drink or a crepe of a piece of Christmas tat, maybe a hand-carved Santa or a little wooden nutcracker, and deciding not to because Christmas Villages are not designed for solitary enjoyment.

Instead I moved on, pausing only to take a snap of Maria Theresa - a kind of Austrian Queen Victoria - squatting graciously and approvingly above us.