Recommended

Lazy has begun adding the occasional new post, again.... realgem endures, yet...

But there is other work to be done... In the meantime, may I leave you with documentary-maker Adam Curtis's wonderful blog, The Medium and the Message, and its epic and unusual history of foreign involvement in the country of Afghanistan, Kabul: City Number One, rich with unknown history, supplemented by clips of rare footage from the depths of the BBC's archives.

(It occurs to me that Afghanistan, appropriately enough somehow for a country which in many ways occupies a different historical era from most of the readers of this blog, has its very own time zone at +4h30 GMT.)

"Detox or Die"

This is the original BBC documentary about David Graham Scott taking ibogaine to cure his long-term heroin and methadone addiction, mentioned in these pages before. The fact is, I had never actually seen it, or bothered or maybe not wanted to watch it. It's only now that I see what Ed Conn, who talked me through the ibogaine space on the phone, looks like. On camera, at least. I actually only watched it after David posted it on Ed Conn's Facebook (cf. earlier post on Facebook friends I've never met - Edward is another one I would never turn away from my door.)

I recognise many things about the experience, as he describes it and films himself. I can tell where he is. It is odd I should never have watched it before. I knew about it, we published an interview with David Graham Scott, I researched everything about ibogaine back then when I was put in touch with someone who could get me some, but I never watched this before. It is really very good.

Four Lions

One thing I will say about that movie is that it would never have been made in the US. They couldn't make a comedy about al-Qaeda terrorism.

But it has moments of high comic genius, like the bit with the snipers firing at the charity marathon with runners in costume. -This is control. The target is a bear. -I see a bear. Clear to fire? -Yes, engage the bear. (The bear falls.) -No, that's a wookie! -Is a wookie a bear? -Negative, a wookie is not a bear. -I took out the bear. -That wasn't a bear, it was a wookie! Wait, there's the Honey Monster. Control, is the Honey Monster a bear?

Or when armed cops burst into the kebab shop where Faisal is holding a single Muslim kebab shop guy hostage, and they shoot the hostage. -Are you alright mate? one of the cops asks Faisal. -Yeah, he says, and detonates the bomb. The spokesman of the Met Anti-Terror unit makes a TV statement: "Our position is, that the police shot the right man, and the wrong man blew up." Which sounds like some of the things they said during the de Menezes debacle.

But of course, they were all old jokes in that movie between me and the malung, anyway. And they could have thrown in "cause it's our deen, innit" somewhere as well. Barry was obviously based on Dave's mate Attila, otherwise known as Abu Abdullah. All in all, I would have expected more from Chris Morris, who brought us the infamous Brass Eye pedophilia edition (watch it if you haven't seen it before).

Phase IV and the 101st monkey

Phase IV, originally from 1973, is available to view streamed on lovefilm.com - it's one of the free ones, you don't even have to register for the site. I had never heard of the film until yesterday but then someone talked about when we were sitting around. I was electrified, galvanised when I heard what it was about, ranted excitedly at everyone, went to watch it right away.

In the Arizona desert, scientists discover ants behaving in ways that ants just don't. Different species co-operating and communicating, building strange structures in the desert, setting out to drive first species that are ant predators and then humans out of their area, declaring war on humankind. Not "It Came from the Desert" giant ants, just normal little ants that have a new agenda.

It was uncanny - you may remember even from this blog - this has been a theme I have been playing with for years. I am obsessed with the thought that, while I believe we will reach the stars from this planet one day, it may not be us, but the evolutionary descendants of the ants who cross the interstellar void... Once when I began to write it as a script, I began with "Scientists discover an ant colony in the Arizona desert somewhere that seems to have begun developing technology...", down to that detail about Arizona.

You know the 100th monkey phenomenon, of course? After the 100 monkeys have reached their critical mass and suddenly monkey minds everywhere flash with new knowledge, and you're one of the monkeys left thinking: "Ahhhh - that seems so obvious now! Why didn't I catch on in the beginning like those other monkeys?"

I feel like the 101st monkey... So. Somebody already had the idea. And somebody else just changed the name of their band to 101st Monkey, try looking it up on Myspace or something.

It is a very interesting film. It used the then-new technique of ultra-close up photography of ants, and real ants star collectively (unwillingly or unwittingly) as a major character of the film. It is not a B movie; more thoughtful than that. It has beautiful cinematography and some clever lines. And some stupid ones. It is different from my vision, where ants evolve high technology spontaneously (in the film, it ends up being some sort of alien radiation that speeds up evolution - which gets the humans too... hence Phase IV of evolution on this planet).

There's a nod to Un Chien Andalou, with ants crawling out from a hole in the palm of one of their dead human victims.

I am in touch with Hollywood people about doing the script for the remake.

Un Chien Andalou

got me a movie
i want you to know
slicing up eyeballs
i want you to know
girlie so groovy
i want you to know
don't know about you
but i am un chien andalusia
wanna grow
up to be
be a debaser

(from here)

Aliens go home!

There is this conceit that you come across in science fiction sometimes - I am reminded because I watched the recent re-make of The Day the Earth Stood Still yesterday (in low quality and dubbed badly into Portuguese, both of which probably improved the film) -- there is this conceit -

An alien from a hyper-advanced culture beyond our imaginings where all suffering and stupidity has been banished descends to earth to study us... accepts human limitations to live a human life in a human body among us... and mission finished, refuses to return to his blissful and transcendent alien life

- that there is something noble about the human condition...

something noble in the squalor of it.

Metametametameta

I and some friends, we all go to see Synecdoche New York. I look it up afterwards, and apparently it was released early last year. It takes time to sub-title a convoluted epic like that into Portuguese.

As we wait for the film to start, I ask Mr Farewell- novelist and poker player of distinction - whether he ever hears voices. On or off drugs, he asks. I explain my conviction that - if you learn to hear it, if you learn to heed its voice, if you have the supreme courage to follow its lead, even when it leads to strange and insane places - you can trust the voice. It will always know. The voice of the deep mind, the voice of your daemon, in the ancient Greek sense, the voice of your holy guardian angel.

Synecdoche New York is a bizarre, sprawling, complicated film, one of those meta-narratives about a theatre production that flips and turns inside-out and swallows all the actors' lives and swallows the film you are watching and swallows New York City. It takes us about an hour afterwards to decide whether we even liked it or not, but walking out of the cinema, it is clear that this is no ordinary production. The dazed looks on the faces of the people walking out say everything. It is a long time since I saw a film that startled me so, that gave so much to wonder at and think about, even if it dragged at points.

Towards the end, after theatre director Caden has replaced himself with someone playing him, both in the theatre piece that has been growing and developing for 17 years now and in real life, now indistinguishable, and the set in its ridiculously enormous warehouse has expanded to encompass much of NYC, and the actor playing the director replaces the director and - I shouldn't be trying to explain -

and the new director gives Caden an earpiece, through which he hears...

yes, a little voice in his head. "Wake up now" it tells him. "Spend about 10 minutes staring melancholically at the view out of the window, and then yawn, get up and stretch..." And so on and on, irrevocably, until the final scene and the final instruction: "Now die."

We walk out of the cinema, walk down Consolação, and stumble across a new building site, some grandiose parking scheme. It is eerily like the film poster, the absurdly huge theatre set that houses a city, with its dirigible flying around inside.

Sometimes real life puts the final unforgettable details on artistic experience...