New Job, Christmas Loudness and Two Lovely Animals, Seasonally Snowed.

It’s been a strange set of times recently.  

There’s me undergoing a huge life change.  First outside the home job in 6 years, up at 5 a.m., back between 6.45 and 7.30 p.m., depending on the traffic or the invisible bus paradox, or the sudden cancelling of the exact train I was waiting for phenomenon.  A job where I’m around people all day (from relative solitude), to speaking to people all day (ditto), and then travelling for up to 4 hours a day (which is sometimes rather annoying, and would be very bad if I felt ill; but it’s very good for being alone [ish], and reading).  I am in a world full of small details, and procedures.  On the one hand this is comforting, I like to have processes around me to follow.  On the other hand, not being able to plainly speak my mind on solutions, outcomes etc…that is more…I am NOT going to say ‘challenging’, because (a) I hate what’s been done to that word, and (b) that does, in the new definition of that word, describe some of my customers, so I’ve ring-fenced (hee hee more jargon) that word for this purpose now.  No, not being able to cut through the vagueness and obtuseness of what I am saying sometimes makes me irritated: saying how something actually *is*, regardless of whether this will be liked, is a quicker, cleaner way of dealing with things.  Sometimes.  But not to be done.  Till I learn a more Sanza (see Game of Thrones, the books people, not the TV series) way of speaking, I will have to throttle my directness and carry on saying what’s needful, but feels a bit unclear.

When I get home, I catch up on the news.  The world has gone, it would appear, madder than usual in a bad way.  I can’t decide how much of that is down to reporting habits, fear mongering and the way the establishment wishes us to be perceiving whole groups of people and countries, for their own ends (i.e if we’re scared enough of them, we’ll stand by and let the government/s do whatever they want to those people and countries, usually for reasons other than those stated, for mineral or oil resources, for trade) – and how much is simply what’s happening.  I observe a dimming and a blurring going on between the bare facts (as much as they can be gathered) of what occurs when things happen, and then a bias, editorialising opinion-making reporting of these events.  So often I see opinions passed off as facts.  I see primary and secondary sources conflated.  I see things taken for granted that aren’t at all, things to be taken for granted.  I see that saying to myself ‘follow the money’ when I watch ANY news story still bears more fruit when finding motivation for slant and attempts to brainwash the viewing public to a gut-feeling point of view that seems so simple and common-sensical but evades even the barest deeper analysis.  Things are rarely black and white.  They are really annoyingly gradiated between grey, black, white, fog.  

Increasingly, bearing the insanity that is being portrayed to us in mind, I look to what I genuinely see around me.  People just wanting to get on and live their lives.  True, they don’t want to be interfered with much, specially by people they don’t know, or ‘figures of authority’, but at the same time – most people I meet and see behave decently.  They help when someone slips in the street.  They run after someone to give a dropped purse or wallet back.  If someone doesn’t have enough money to pay for something in a supermarket queue, and is fumbling with change and looking horribly embarrassed, your average person quietly gives over some money if they have it, with soft spoken words, trying to mitigate the horror of being helped by a stranger, “no no, don’t worry – you’d do the same for me…you could be my nan/my sister/my daughter…” etc.  This idea of chaos beating on the walls (the literal walls if some people had their way) around us, I don’t see it in our lives, not the way it’s painted.  I see a lot of quiet poverty, degrees of poverty, degrees of desperation, degrees of very difficult compromise.  But I don’t see humans as the worst kind of ruthless animals.  I don’t see yet, that Dawn of the Dead (the original, please - and that link there is an interesting article, go see) is true.

Saying that: I have felt a bit bombarded by consumerism this year.  Maybe it’s because I have been massively taken up, first with jobhunting, and then with doing this huge learning curve of a job.  The long commute.  The job has swallowed me whole, I’m not yet properly rebalanced.  Home is a mirage where I sleep worriedly, dreaming about callers and things they may say that I don’t yet know the answers to.  I wake up wondering how close to 5 a.m. it is.  But Christmas appeared to start in September, didn’t it?  That’s when I first heard carols in the shops.  And shortly after, the decorations began.  Then there was the whole imported ‘Black Friday’ thing the other week.  I was sitting in any old shopping centre in workplace area, having some quiet (ha ha) time away from the phones with my lunchtime sandwich, listening to announcements about DEALS, and registering that foot traffic was way up on usual for the time of day.  People pushing past one another, looking focussed, harassed and rather grumpy – not happy, I’d say, about DEALS, with many many bags.  I’m completely skint till my first paypacket, so I wasn’t taking part.  Did most of my Christmas shopping earlier, in anticipation of future skintness.  But every day, the carols seemed to get louder and more intense.

By the time I took Fluffhead to the Whitgift Centre in Croydon, I was feeling, and it sounds stupid, yes I know it does, attacked by Christmas being pushed at me as shopping and a feeling of forced jollity.  Adverts about family get togethers, huge boards advertising Sky movies, where sad things happened before families got together at the end and smiled while wearing green and red and surrounded by sparkling oh so sparkling and tinkly silver and gold things.  There were live carol singers, one week from a church outreach, another time from a homelessness project.  That was nice, hearing real voices sing.  But they fought against the taped and piped voices.  The mixing of genres.  ‘Santa Baby’ fought against ‘Good Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’ against ‘Do They Know Its Christmas Time At All…’  Everything was shining at me, everything so loud.  Try a chocolate, try a mincepie, get your Sky package for Christmas!  This all MUST have been here in previous years, perhaps it’s simply that I’m very tired all the time at the moment – but I have never felt more Bah Humbug.

It’s not that ‘the real meaning of Christmas’ is getting lost.  Of course it IS, in the sense that it’s a Christian religious festival, I’m not Christian, I don’t go along with the idea, it belongs to them, not me[1].  It is lost in the sense that their Jesus didn’t pop down to remind us to not miss Black Friday and get our Sky package.  So yes, that’s a bit of a travesty.  But it’s perfectly possible to borrow lightly from the Christian festival, and come out with a pleasing secular idea of Christmas involving emphasis on giving things to people cos it makes you feel happy to do so.  Giving things to charities and those who have less (ditto, don’t pretend to be selfless; think of it as enlightened self-interest instead – there by the grace of whichever god go I etc).  Decorating because it’s fun to make a fuss of certain days – and it’s nice to celebrate red and gold and green and silver and make things sparkle. It’s nice to have friends and family over if you like and see them and maybe cook them dinner if you’d like to.  (Notice how lovely and ‘if you like’ that all was.  Ahhhh, if only.)  It’s nice and fun and good for us to be grateful for what we have, what we’ve been given, and to try and see the goodness in people.  Nice to see the wonder of the world and each other.  

I think both the Christian Christmas and the secular Christmas are being a bit bombarded by the COME AND BUY STUFF AND EAT FAR TOO MUCH  AND BE WITH YOUR WONDERFUL FAMILY THAT YOU *ADORE* messages.  You KNOW something is wrong when you start thinking the misery of an Eastenders Christmas Day episode is both more naturalistic and preferable than the saccharine and manipulative images you’re being forcefed are!  I really will do muchos shopping earlier than ever next year, and online.  It’s just not fun shopping (or just being out) when everyone is all stressed out and spending too much and grumpy and harassed, and all the children are really tiresome from waiting in line for 2 hours to get a present from Santa’s Grotto.  (Fluffhead did really well, actually.  He was only naughty twice, and most of the time was highly amused to watch some people dressed as reindeer on stilts wafting about.  WHY were they???  And a man in a bear costume collecting for a charity in a bucket, whose head was obviously on slightly wrong, so that he couldn’t see any of the children milling around before and below him tugging on him and waving at him, and was just wandering up and down, looking, even though I couldn’t see his face, dejected.  It was in the shoulders.)

I think it may have jinxed me, writing that post all those years back about how I loved Christmas when everyone around me didn’t much.  (See here – it is wonderfully enthusiastic.)  Since then, I have not had one Christmas that hasn’t been a bit odd.  Mum’s car accident that year (where she sat in terrible pain through Christmas dinner because the paramedics had missed the fact she had a broken collarbone, and then she was very sick after dinner, and eventually we ended up in Casualty).  This year, Stanley’s father has died not very long ago, so we appear to be still doing Christmas, though its chances of being anything other than strange, dour and gloomy are slight, as any forced occasion is.  That’s the really weird thing about Christmas – the way people seem to think they MUST do it in some way shape or form, even when it’s not appropriate for them at that particular time, because of its connotations of jollity and familial closeness.  My mother has been trying to have an alone Christmas ever since my dad died in 2008.  She just wants to rest and be quiet on that day and not have the pressure of everything unless she *chooses* it.  But every year it’s either been her here, because Stanley or I have been sick, or Fluffhead is too; or she’s had to go to her brother’s (a noisy extended family thing, several children).  Stanley and I are doing Christmas because of Fluffhead – if you do it lightly, its very fun for the little ones (he and I used to do our own kid Christmas brilliantly, as 2 overgrown children together).   

But we aren’t feeling it this year.  And that’s alright.  That will happen sometimes.  I shall stick with wonder at the natural world, and loving the green and red and gold and silver.  Not as dictated to me by others, but just because they really are beautiful.

 Image from: www.lovethispic.com

I am definitely off-balance at the moment though.  I’ll show you what I mean.  An incident from a couple of weeks ago.  You know when you feel you’ve made a connection with people, and you’re wrong?  That feeling?  Embarrassment, isolation, not exactly loneliness, but out of placeness?

There’s these Eastern European young men I see in Costa every morning at the station.  They get there either before me or very shortly after me.  Very young, early 20s.  Something very isolated about them too, just as there is about most Eastern European people I see, as if they are still partially elsewhere.  I don’t know if that’s because they wish they were elsewhere, or can’t forget good or bad things that happened elsewhere, or if we haven’t made them feel very welcome, or likely, a combination of all three.  They are always glued to each other talking in their own language, these two, separated from the rest of us, who are not talking all in the one language.  It must be nice, for privacy, to have another language, like being in another room without having to be.  I feel a sort of siege mentality from them sometimes.

I had occasion to speak to them one day a while back, I dropped something or they did or someone minded someone’s stuff while someone got more coffee or went to the bathroom.  They were all smiles and helpfulness; a real difference in their faces.  Lovely to see. Their reserve vanished on speaking to them.

Anyway.  They are too clean and well dressed to be construction workers.  Too casual and loose for office workers.  No bags with books and folders, so not students.  I wonder what they do, now they have piqued my interest by being so friendly suddenly.  

On the first day I was here at the coffeeshop after the minding or borrowing (which was it?), I smiled and nodded at them, and there began the daily smiling and nodding.  They usually left before me, so we always had the smiling and nodding on the goodbyes, as I sit by the exit so they come past me to leave.  Nothing more than that.  They don’t look for me, but when they do see me, they smile and wave, before becoming a mysterious and foreign speaking unit again.

As a person new to the area, new to my job and this entire section of my life, these small and apparently meaningless encounters MEAN something to me.  Same people everyday on the train platform; these men in Costa; the woman on the bus going home in the evening who recognised me: they make the start of routine, of familiarity.  Small patches of warmth in an uncertain and cooled newness.

So this morning, I stood in the queue for my coffee with the younger of the two men.  The one I think of as more mischievous and quick with his movements.  The other strikes me as more solid and dependable.  (Oh, first impressions – wouldn’t it be so funny if I was completely wrong?!)

He said hi.

I said “Hi!” back.  Bright smile.

“How are you?”  He says politely, eyes (I should have been warned) far away.

I make an extreme tired face.  He looks a little bit bored, but understanding, and mimes it back.

 “My shift is changing, so I won’t be seeing you guys after next week.”  I add.

He looks like I just said far too many words.  An expression passes over his face and I can’t decide if it’s pure boredom that that woman in the coffeeshop is speaking to him, or whether I just spoke so fast that I went further than his ability to process English.  I gibberished, maybe.

However, he’s still looking at me, so I try again, and repeat it a bit slower, with the chaser, “so I’ll be here much earlier, catching an earlier train; gone earlier.”

I really don’t know what I was expecting here.  A falling to the ground in abject sorrow with weeping and wailing, that they won’t be able to say hi to me in the morning.  That we’ll never be able to go beyond saying ‘hi’, to actually being acquaintances, progress to small talk.  I had a fond (and no doubt highly dubious) imagining that we’d eventually small talk ourselves to where they were from, and they’d teach me small throwaway phrases in that lovely language they speak so earnestly.  That I could ask them what they do here, and there would be no more mystery.  That they might laugh with me about how if it’s very windy or very rainy, I will get lots of calls about nothing but weather related damage all day, so that I feel like a barometer now when I’m out, keeping one eye always on the weather.  Oh the indignance of fallen trees.  Or if it snows, there will be 100 righteous demands for residential road gritting.  The little silly things that make up conversations.  The beginnings of connections with fellow humans.  Just a warm smile and slight, if thoroughly shallow, understanding of another’s life and current experience.  All stuff that’s fascinating to me.

Anyway.  So he looks like I said too many words again.  Not exactly irritated, but tired and surprised.  I say the thing about the earlier train.

I think I wanted him to say, like a polite old style English person would (see – cultural difference, that’s a hole easily fallen into): “oh no, shame, it’s been nice seeing you every day – hope all goes well for you, good luck, and bye!” – something like that?!  And I would ask where the beautiful accents come from, just to satisfy my endless curiosity.

Instead, he just continues to look completely nonplussed, a hassled barista gives him his coffee, and he nods at me in a brusque way with eyes averted, and goes off to his table.

I feel confused.  (Which is not exactly an uncommon state of affairs for me.)

Obviously I completely misjudged either his English, or his interest in any talking at all.  I hope he didn’t think I was flirting?

I’m an inveterate talker to people.  I’m usually pretty good at reading bog off signals too.  In the world of scary new job, where everyone is nice but I am waiting to fall flat on my face (and I will, because the training is huge and extensive but rushed and there’s not been enough consolidation time) – tiny scrappets of smiles and warmth were helping.

I realise I definitely did misjudge something, and all my usual waiting feelings of my out of placeness rise up.  I take my own coffee and deliberately go and sit down somewhere where I can’t see them and have my back to where they are.

Better they just go back to nodding and so do I.  I read my kindle.  When they leave, before me, as they always do, the solid more dependable one makes a point of saying ‘hi’ and ‘how are you’, but now I am hearing it sounding just like polite boys taught to not be rude by someone when small.  Just something you say (and something people never seem to want the actual answer to, which always perplexes me).  I have developed the habit of just smiling when people ask me that, then asking them back, or complimenting them on something (never hard to find something nice to say about a jacket or hair or pendant or just looking well).  It’s like a hurdle you have to get past, before you can have an actual conversation with people.

Its times like this, me thinking like this, that I miss Fry most.  His total unabashed social awkwardness mixed with a testosteroney ‘oh fuck it’ disposition.  He would have understood my reaction to this small and stupid exchange, my misreading of the situation, feeble attempts to make a tenuous connection.  And he would have shrugged at the end, at my sadness at the misunderstanding.  He would have said something to make me laugh.

In this new world, I keep hallucinating Stanley and Fry around the place.  When I’m in the shopping centre at lunchtime eating my pack lunch – on the one hand blessedly alone; on the other isolated and cut off in an invisible bubble, I see them out of the corner of my eye, going past, coming or going.  As if they just went for coffee and will be back in a minute.

I hold the images of them close.  Pretend it’s so and they are here.  I feel the warmth of Fluffhead on my lap having the ‘dressing hug’ he always stops in the middle of dressing to have, one of the best hugs of the day.  He’s not there, but I feel it.

It’s because I’m so tired I am feeling like this, and out of kilter this way; attaching vast significance to small incidents, small feelings.  Always the same.  Remember the tiredness factor. 

Finish the coffee. Off to work.  Do my best, try to help the people.  Be kind, be polite, be present.  And feel the invisible hugs.

See?  I’m not quite right at the moment and have to bear it in mind and be slow, be calm and be careful.

I had a wonderful time yesterday afternoon with Rosa, my closest Green Party friend, writing a small analysis of COP21 for the Sutton members newsletter.  There, I felt competent and calm.  We worked beautifully as a team, suggesting phraseology and where to put each point so it all flowed clearly and usefully.  She finds me funny, laughs at my silly jokes.  She’s ill, but exudes so much joy and energy (even when she can’t hold up her own head because she’s so tired) that whenever I leave I feel buoyed up and more able to take life as it comes, and see the happiness all over the place, the waiting of smiles.  There’s a Spirit of Christmas.  And people like that are All Year.  

I know many people who do their best in this totally confusing world with its contradictory messages.  Time Traveller, writing now her third book, always seeking answers, always questioning.  Alias True, with his willingness to overthink with me to a place of calm and plateau, where we look down and see events and the world for the lessons they all are.  They’re just the two who pop to mind immediately.  I think the world is a better place than we are told, despite all the nastiness definitely going on.  Much to hope for, much to believe in and work toward.

Strange and interesting times, for sure.  Hold fast, hold steady, be kind.  Be calm.  Out of the corner of my eye, Fluffy Cat who has been clawing the smallest tree in the garden, jumps three feet up in the air, which is quite miraculous seeing as she’s immensely huge, and then leaps sideways with a bit of a screech and dives into the hedge – gone.  Ehem.  Yes.  Be calm.  Do not follow the Ways of This Cat.  Or you will need much Brushing, Later.

Have a lovely Christmas, and a Peaceful New Year.

---

[1] Yes yes yes, don’t get me started on the pagan stuff came before the Christmas stuff and it’s all the same.  Yes, I know that.  For the purposes of this comment, I’m speaking as a person living in a nominally Christian country, where there’s been some strong arming of the ‘spirit of Christmas’.  Back to the main point.

Time-mining, Segment One, a short story from a few years back...

Don't bother with this blogpost if you don't like horror at all, or aren't interested in Italian horror films, it'll just tire your brain...

This is an old story I wrote, for an exercise in an Open University Course some time ago.  It’s a short horror-ish story.  More of a vignette than anything else.  I’m going to give links about what I was on about at the end – only cos if you aren’t a fan of the films of Dario Argento, you will probably find the story daft and inexplicable.  Hell – you might regardless of explanation!!  Anywaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyy…..Here you go.

Bit of teenagey gothness! 

***

 Cliche and Argento

They say starting is the hard part.  That may be true of writing a song, or a soundtrack or making a film.  It wasn’t true of my best friend.  Starting, and finishing her, was the easiest thing I have finally let myself do.  

She would sit in school, years I watched this: being the butterfly, being the one everyone loved.  Spreading herself too thin.  I would be sitting next to her, with my walkman hidden by my hair, the wires sneaking back and under my collar, easy; like so much else when I finally freed myself.  Listening to her with one ear, her husky voice asking about someone else, a crisis, a wise comment…half of me would be listening to Goblin.  I had to have it on quiet; it’s an intrusive sound, those Italian geniuses.  I had a thing for Profondo Rosso for a while, then Suspiria.  It was when I hit Tenebrae that I knew I had to kill her.

I would watch her, flicking her hair, lovely blond hair, genuine, not a dye.  Like straw, the colour of straw, but soft like kitten fur…soft, so soft.

She’d turn to me, and say: ‘Do you mind if we go to Clare’s house tonight on the way home?  Her dad’s away again, and she might drink, but she won’t if we’re there, and we cheer her up?’  She’d know that if she smiled at me, let it go to her eyes, that she’d have me.  She always had me.  She’d turn back to Clare (or whoever, the mother Theresa), and hunch forward, soft caressing hand on the arm, those soft smiles, soft words.

I used to live on those moments where we’d actually, finally be alone, and she would turn those smiles and words on me.  I lived for that small time, last summer, when she let me touch her.  Touched me back.  She worried of course.  That she was becoming a lesbian!  I thought that hilarious.  I have always wanted to touch, really touch, anyone I have ever loved: to me it felt normal.  To her…she thought, I suppose, that it was an extension to caring, all that help she gave people, all that endless bloody peacemaking.  Turned out that she enjoyed this particular help, but too much for her comfort.  

I was insulted, and realised that…she didn’t really love me.  Not like I loved her. I cried quite a bit.  I played lots of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, trying both to calm down, and to experience some attenuated, clearer sort of consciousness.  A pinnacle of suffering, where I would receive enlightenment.  All the while I watched her, and behaved as the faithful sidekick, as I ever had.  I didn’t ask for that time back, or her touch again.  I touched myself, I thought of her.  I started to want to be rough, to cut my nails to hard triangles and use them on her soft wetness, to scrape, to dig.  Then I realised the next logical thing.  I could help her out of her hypocrisy, her uncaring.

It was a few days after I began listening to the Tenebrae soundtrack that this dawned on me.  It was she who was the filthy, slimy pervert the killer talks about.  All I really needed was an old fashioned razor.  Some black gloves.  A white top for her to be changing into.  Forget the fancy camerawork, the famous Luna crane sequence – obviously, I couldn’t replicate that scene.  But she hated Goblin!  I could make her yell to turn it off.  Easy.

So I had the beginning of a stupid, but oddly easy plan.  Do you really want to hear the rest?  How even though I succeeded, and she is not with us anymore, and the feeling of slicing into the skin and muscle of someone you love is amazingly easy, both mentally and actually (providing the razor is sharp), I am still not happy?  It was a great trip – it really felt like a film – being caught.  I didn’t run, I sat, and I watched her die. I watched the blood congeal, I watched the edges of the wounds on her throat (it really does gout, it’s astonishing, be prepared to do a massive clean up if you don’t plan to sit and stay) change colour from that livid red, to a quite unattractive meat-sat-in-the-sun-for-too-long tone.  Sort of purple pink orange.  Not pretty.  Not that beauty of death Argento talks about.  

The more I sat, the more disappointed I got.  She was beautiful to begin with, beautiful uncaring bitch.  Then beautiful as I killed her, and she choked, and it all spilled – wow!  But then, the more time passed, the more I wanted to do it again, she was starting to seem so…boring now.  I got down on the floor and looked into her eyes, as you are told to in Four Flies on Grey Velvet, to see what the last image recorded on the retina was – whether she registered surprise or an emotion, something.  Nope.  Just empty, dead, stupid eyes.  

When the policewoman came in – it was only about 45 minutes later, Merriam made lots of noise as she went down, after all, till I cut the cause – I knew I was going to have to try to do it again.  I knew I didn’t have a plan this time, and I need forethought.  So I knew it was probably going to fail.  But even if I just got her hand when she put it up to defend herself – even just one slice…

I’m in for life.  A filmic cliché.  They say, what do they know, that I am criminally insane.  They have not loved, they have certainly not possessed.  They know nothing.  They don’t know about love, or punishment, or music, or making things look perfect.  Maybe I should have just tried to make a film?  Or write a soundtrack?  I do that now, sitting here, I get given paper.

They say starting is the hard part.  

But there’s so much inside my head.

If they gave me something sharper than crayons, I could try and get it out.

(story copyright: me!  BlackberryJuniper!, 2012)

***

I’m a bit in love with the last line there: I can really hear the voice saying it.  (Aaaahhhhhh.  Moment of adoration of own stuff....ehem, ok, I'm over it.)  The whole thing is wildly cheesy, but hey – cheese is fun sometimes.  Ok, bit of explanation…Dario Argento does Italian horror films, thrillers.  He was most famous for his work of the late 60's through till early 80's, when he was more or less exclusively a horror director (he's done many other genres, as have alot of the classic Italian directors of the same generation).  I love Italian horror cinema almost more than the English.  Everything is so amazingly lurid, vivid and OTT.  (And badly dubbed: joy!)  Amazing style, and a complete lack of worry about believability too.  Makes for some unforgettable cinema.  (He's not the only great director there, either, for the genre: there are quite a few more: the Bava father and son, Lucio Fulci, and thats just 3 more famous ones - there are all sorts of hidden not so famous ones - go look, such fun!!)

Suspiria was always - and still is - my favourite: nothing like the setting of a German girls boarding school, all that red and green lighting, and evil witch covens led by an ageing Joan Bennett (my recommendation: see the incredibly atmospheric Secret Beyond the Door, 1948, with Michael Redgrave and directed by Fritz Lang: perfection...).  Wonderful stuff!  Closely followed by Profundo Rosso.  So many good actors and actresses; and the creepy and bonkers music of Goblin.

Ah, the music of Goblin, yes, very important to my little tiny story.  They did lots of work with Dario Argento on his films.  (Depending on what version of Romero's original  Dawn of the Dead you have seen - there are many more than the one, you'll hear more or less of them on that too, as a more mainstream way to hear them...).  The soundtrack for Suspiria is terrifying and screechy; for Dawn of the Dead eclectic and memorable; for Profundo Rosso (aren't I lovely to have found you the whole film - don't watch if you don't like old schlocky bloody horror films; but you're safe to listen for the music over the credits at the beginning) catchy and nursery rhymeish one minute and hooky the next; for Tenebrae, the film I talk of alot in the story - well, you'll hear it in a minute, if you click the link.  Try to imagine being teenage, very unstable, in love with your best friend - the love that, in a comprehensive school at least, still cannot speak its name...obsessed with these films and this music and...there's my story, really.

The thing about Tenebrae is that it is considered by some people to be a classic giallo type thriller. (I've referenced giallo before and won't go on about it again - think of it as a particularly unforgivingly violent thriller, early 70s style - and very very stylishly scored and filmed; its an Italian subgenre.  Despite their grittiness in places, alot of it would of course appear tame by today's torture-porn standards.  This is not a good thing.)  

The section I mention, the Luna Crane sequence was about a famous sequence in the film where a shot continued, unbroken, for a very long time (by the standards of that genre, and those times), and was accomplished using the Luna Crane, a sort of support for a steadicam - here is the sequence.  (Stanley Kubrick was famous for the same sort of work in his films, used differently.)  Its the sequence that the protagonist in my tiny story gets obsessed with, and decided to emulate when it comes to killing her best friend.  (Don't worry, its a more or less bloodless sequence - it's about the music and the camerawork, not Argento's adoration of 'the beauty of death' as filmed, surreally.  By the way, this academic article here has some interesting things to say to the critics of Argento's love for killing off beautiful women in a very violent way.  I'm a feminist, for sure, and I love his films: vive la paradox.)

I mentioned to a couple of people that this small story would have to go up with notes and they said, typical received wisdom, that if it can't stand alone it doesn't stand.  I disagree.  If it introduces anybody to the delights of giallo through these little notes - well and good!  I wouldn't call my tiny story a fan fiction either - it's a reference to what to me, is very familiar (pop) culture: if you were all as into horror films or Argento as me, you'd all know what I was talking about without need of the notes!  (There's a circular bit of logic!)

Anyway - there may be more time-mining soon, I'm reading over lots of old stuff at the moment; and its the old old story, I have precious little time to think of anything new, let alone be able to type it up right now...But don't fret, I shan't subject you to throat slittings every post.  As far as I remember, this was the only story of this kind I ever wrote....I mean: there was a funny/silly one about a cursed locket or something...but I shan't bother you with that!

Er, I better do a disclaimer here: Here am I officially telling you its not a good idea to get obsessed with anything then go and kill people, for any reason.  Tsk!  That's what fiction is for, working stuff out therapeutically...

Till next time!