The Spirit of the Stairwell

I’ll just let this speak for itself.

I don’t let my day job entrude on the pages of this blog very often but this is such a well put together film, the performance is brilliant and the impact it could have on the lives of the world’s poorest people so immense, I couldn’t resist it.

Please take the time to watch it, it’s more than entertaining enough to fill three minutes of your life and it offers a concrete and very real way you can take a small action that could change the world.

A baleful sun rose over the grey streets of New Malden as I hauled my tenderised carcass up from beneath the sheets. It seemed like a low life bar and a bottle of gin were a match made in hell and my throbbing head and half-closed right eye testified to this fact as my teeth rattled in my head and my jaw squeaked like a rusty gate.

Film club.

I poured myself a hair of the dog what gnawed my head off as my gut lurched unpleasantly beneath the starched cotton of my second best shirt. I wasn’t sure I was going to be able to take this but the time was bearing down on me like a runaway engine that had jumped the tracks at Clapham Junction and was barrelling down on me spitting sparks and tearing metal with all the demons in hell tumbling after. And stuck in the back of my head was a thought, the ultimate itch I couldn’t hope to scratch – I had arranged this, I had brought this event down upon myself as surely as if I had put my .45 in my mouth, hooked the trigger and made a fist.

And so they came. The dregs of society, the poor and the hopeless, the chancers, the misfits, the bums. The drunks and the floozies, the dirty cops and the wild-eyed crooks. They sat in my apartment, they smiled smiles that never reached their eyes and licked their cracked lips as the whole caper played out before them in a succession of high-contrast, staccato images full of betrayal and depravity.

I sat in my faded leather chair and waited for trouble.

But that’s the thing about trouble, it strolls round the corner when you’re thinking about better days, never when you’re expecting it. The whole shebang past without a hitch, they even seemed to enjoy themselves the shmoes.

I got out alive. I made it.

And now as I look at the future through the bottom of a dirty hi-ball I can feel its icy fingers enclose me.

I am a damned man and I’m playing with borrowed time. I’m going to do it again. Damn me.

I’m going to do it again.

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Film and literature are very different media. Even the laziest of observers will confirm that yes, books tend to be small, oblong and papery whereas cinemas are larger, less portable and serve popcorn. But those are just the surface differences, each art form has its own strengths and weaknesses, especially when it comes to the messy enterprise of story telling.

Books, in direct contrast to their compact size, can tell sprawling stories of emotional depth and complexity. Films require a certain economy of narrative but handle the grand sweep of action and spectacle with natural aplomb. Arguably, books unlock the reader’s imagination, challenging them to fill in the details of a fictional world, while cinema is more prescriptive, locking down those infinite possibilities to a consistent, artistic vision. Neither is the ultimate expression, each merely offers a different aperture to view the story.

And so we turn to John Hillcoat’s The Road, a grim, intimate and mostly successful attempt to bring Cormac McCarthy’s novel to the screen, or as script writer Joe Penhall puts it, ‘transmute the state from ice to water, or water to gas’ while leaving the audience in no doubt it’s the same base element. Penhall asserts that the novel is ‘delivered directly to the blood stream’ and the film attempts the same trick. It can’t rely on McCarthy’s stripped down, bleakly evocative prose but it can offer breathtaking vistas of rotting cityscapes and a dying world, broken and bowed by an unspecified apocalypse.

Viggo Mortesson’s perfectly calibrated performance draws us into this world, wielding sparse, fractured dialogue to devastating effect. Life on the road is sketched out in visceral detail in a series of scenes that unfold as slowly and deliberately as a storm front. By playing to the medium’s strengths in this way, concentrating on visual storytelling and well paced narrative beats, the celluloid Road captures the essence of its literary cousin and delivers a wounding yet strangely uplifting cinematic experience.

Now we know where Apple got the name from …

Take a look at this picture.

It’s a pretty rubbish picture, isn’t it? It’s grainy and someone has taken chunks out of it. It’s low resolution and you can’t see much of anything.

Well it may interest you to know, gentle reader, that this unassuming picture is currently making the internet geek out in a fairly major way. Because this might very well be the first public photo of the iTablet – the new Apple product Steve Jobs is set to present to the world at 6.00pm GMT today.

Rumours of the iTablet have been rife since 2002 when everyone thought it was basically going to be an iPod with a keyboard. Since there it’s gone through many rumoured iterations, everything from a flat MacBook to a giant iPhone. But the really funny thing is, all of this furious product development is in our heads. Apple has kept completely silent about the thing, it won’t officially confirm it exists at all. Even the invitation for today just says:

So what we’re talking about here is a fictional product that the public has seemingly willed into existence just by dint of WANTING it so badly. At some point in the past, someone presumably thought ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if Apple made a tablet device?’ and from that inauspicious starting point we’ve collectively worked ourselves up into a frothing mess. Without Apple lifting a finger. It’s a wonder they bother doing any advertising at all. (Especially when it’s this smug and irritating)

So if Steve Jobs does present the technological equivalent of the Loch Ness Monster today, there’s a good chance it’ll look like the photo above. There have been many a photoshopped hoax before, ranging from the plausible:

To the slightly silly:

… but nothing as realistic as the above. It’s bolted down, it doesn’t give anything away. It has the whiff of authenticity.

The other thing is that we’re not really even sure what we want the device to do. “Tablet” is a form factor, it’s the body the clever stuff is housed in, it doesn’t give any clue as to what the gizmo would actually do. Is it a slightly more portable laptop, an ebook reader, a PDA writ large, an entertainment and games system? Knowing Apple it’ll probably be a lot of these things but there are still a myriad ways to implement those functions. Do you go for a traditional OS X set up with files and folders and a simulated desktop environment or something more like the multi-function iPhone OS which basically transforms the entire user interface on the fly depending on the function you select? We may firmly believe that this thing is going to revolutionise portable computing forever (like the iPhone arguably has for the mobile phone industry) but as it stands we just have no conception of what it actually is or what it’ll do for us.

Until now.

Because that picture above gives away more than it seems to. If it’s genuine (and I think it is) then we’ve finally got some answers to at least some of our questions. For a start that’s undeniably a massive version of an iPhone application, so we now know it’ll be running something at least closely related to the iPhone OS. Also notice the wifi icon at the top of the page and the “no service” mobile phone signal indicator. So it’ll probably have wireless and a (persistent?) 3G connection – something akin to Amazon’s Kindle – allowing the user to download books, newspapers, movies, albums and browse the web. The iTunes store will become the iGeneral store and Apple begins to take on Amazon on it’s home ground. You can also see a home button at the bottom, identical to that on an iPhone so we know something about the styling. Other rumours suggest a 10.1 inch screen and an aluminium back to fit in with the new iMacs and MacBook Pros.

So there we are, it’s the day of the launch and we’ve finally been able to define the device pretty well. What surprises haveApple managed to preserve?

Well for a start we just made up the name iTablet …

Something that made me laugh out loud from the mighty xkcd.com.

The Tories are going to get into power. It’ll be like the 80s all over again. We’re in a fix.

But until then there’s this …

To see more (and to make your own), go here - http://mydavidcameron.com.

Let’s make the most of it while we can. The guy is going to be our leader soon.

Our leader.

It’s like a horrible dystopian nightmare.

David Tennant has left Dr Who. He was a brilliant Doctor and this piece he wrote for the 2009 Specials Box Set has warmed me to him even more.

In a suburban house in Paisley a wee boy was sticky-taping the leg of his oft-snapped spectacles back together. He couldn’t remember a time when they hadn’t been augmented with at least one area of peeling sellotape. Suddenly and quite without warning there was a rupture in the fabric of space and time and a tall, skinny man tumbled through a wormhole in the middle of the living room and landed in a puddle of brown coat at the boy’s feet.

“Who are you?” asked the boy. Confused and a little scared, but mostly loving it.

“Oh- ah, hello. It’s you! I’m you…You’re ..me”

“Eh? the boy asked. (Try as she might the boy’s mother could not get him to say “Pardon”)

“I’m you. In the future. I’m thirty-eight years old”

Because he was eight the boy accepted this quite quickly. “Is that my coat then? Can I try it on?”

“No, no, no -” Interrupted the skinny man slightly disappointed his time travelling was being greeted with so little wonderment. “This is my costume. These clothes are The Doctor’s. In thirty years time you get to play The Doctor. What do you think of that?!”

“Tom Baker leaves!” the boy boggled.

“Well.. Yes, eventually..”

“And then I take over?”

“Not quite, no, there’s a bit of time in between but..”

“And that’s what The Doctor wears?”

“Yes. Yes it is”

The boy took a moment to give his full attention. “I prefer the scarf”

The skinny man looked a little crushed. “But this is really cool. People write about this outfit in newspapers and style magazines. This is geek chic!.. But actually you’re right; people never really get over the scarf.”

“Are the monsters good?” The boy asked.

“Oh there are some great ones. And you get to fight the Daleks, and the Cyberman -”

“- and the Zygons?!!”

“Erm, no, no not the Zygons. But loads of other ones that you’ll love. And guess what.. Sarah comes back! and K-9!”

“K-9 leaves too!! ” the boy groaned.

“Well, yes but he comes back – with you. And there are loads of great companions. Some of them aren’t even born yet – but they’re just brilliant! And you won’t belive this, but you know Bernard Cribbins from ‘The Wombles?”

“- and ‘Jackanory’ -”

“- and ‘Jackanory’, yes. Well he’s in it too. You get to do all sorts of scenes with him.”

“That’s amazing!”

“It is.”

“Why do I have to wait so long?” asked the boy.

“Eh? I mean, pardon?”

“You’re really old.”

“I don’t think — well – not so – it’s all relative.” The skinny man protested.

“And how come your hair’s all dark?” the wee boy asked.

“That just happens..round about twelve I think.”

The skinny man regarded his younger self. “Look there’s quite a bit of stuff to get through first but hang in there. It’s worth it. I promise. I can’t tell you how much you’ll love it.”

“Really? Do I really get to be The Doctor?”

“You do. And listen – you are going to have: the best time of your life”

And with that the skinny man disappeared in a swirl of pulsing temporal vortex. The wee boy held his damaged glasses in front of his face as the wormhole blinked out of existence. That was unexpected, he thought. And pretty unlikely. Then he turned his attention back to the sellotape and the glasses. “The Creature from the Pit” Part Two was on later. He needed to be ready.

- David John McDonald, 3rd November 1979/2009

Bless him!

But onwards and upwards to the new series, which looks awesome.

(also watch out for the first episode of The Oodcast in the next few days)