Well, since I can't seem to shut up about British stuff at the moment, here's a few thoughts on Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which I just rewatched on Netflix last night.
The first thing to say is that I'm not 100% sure it holds up. This is not to say it's a bad movie or anything, but it looks and sounds really raw, and the line readings and acting aren't always as great as they could be. Part of this is because a lot of the characters are played by non-actors - for a couple of them it was their first time in a movie, and others were definitely at the beginning of their careers.
Guy Ritchie also tries to be a little too clever sometimes with his cinematography. The spot where it really works is the start of the movie, where Eddy loses the card game and kicks off the chain of events that make up the plot. The camera focuses tight on his face, following him as he walks out and blurring or doubling shots of him to give that impression of drunken what-the-fuckness that I can relate to.
Not that I've ever lost £500,000 to East End gangsters in an underground poker game, but Ritchie does a good job of capturing that body-blow type of feeling.
He's a little less successful in a few other spots, like when they're celebrating having pulled off their heist, or when Big Chris (as played by Vinnie Jones) is beating Dog to death with a car door for having threatened his son. In the first case, it looks too staged, while in the second it's kind of obvious - of course Big Chris is enraged at his son being endangered, so I wonder if shooting that more matter-of-factly would have worked better than slow-motion.
Though it should be noted that I was super impressed with that scene when I was seventeen.
But about that there Vinnie Jones: was there ever a role better suited to a human being than that? Maybe I say it because I don't know Jones as a footballer, and because this film was the first I ever saw of him. But with twenty years of seeing Jones in other roles, and learning more about British gangster films, I have to appreciate how well he inhabits the role - after all, there's not many footballers I'd believe in the role of an East End enforcer.
Casting is uniformly pretty good in the movie, at least in terms of how the actors look. The main characters all look like petty criminal losers, the weed growers look like a bunch of middle-class stoners out of their element (I'm always a bit surprised to remember that Winston is not, in fact, played by Blur singer Damon Albarn, but he could have been), and the real criminals all look like real criminals.
As I said, sometimes the line readings aren't great, which might be because the actors aren't great at line readings, or because the lines aren't easy to read in the first place. But very little of it takes you out of the movie.
Two other casting choices I want to single out. First is Sting, as JD, Eddy's father. I always forget he's in this movie, and I have to say that for a tantric-sex-having, lute-playing former punk rocker he's actually fairly believable as a bar owner and basically the one honest man who's not affected by the shenanigans going on around him. The scene where Vinnie Jones comes to tell him he's going to have to give up the bar in a week, and Sting tells him to tell his boss to go fuck himself, is really fun and the two actors play off against each other really well.
The other one is Jason Statham, who like Vinnie Jones used this movie to launch his movie career. But where Jones has played essentially the same character for the past twenty years, Statham starts out here as a very different character from what he plays in the Transporter or the Fast & Furious movies. Actually, the first scene, where he's shilling stolen goods in an alley in London and giving it the wideboy patter (to use the Brits' own term of art) makes him pop like a firecracker. You can believe him in the role, even knowing what a badass he gets typecast as all these years later. Go rewatch that scene and enjoy an actor reveling in a role.
What else is there? The music, of course, though perhaps the most memorable thing is the use of Ocean Colour Scene's "100 Mile High City". Britpop was kind of over by then, but the movie still manages to catch that zeitgeist in a way that feels right. Most impressive to me was the use of "Fools Gold" by the Stone Roses as the end of the plot unfolds, with all the bad guys dead and the heroes walking away with whatever riches they've found. I love the song, and it's a nice revelation to see it crop up here.
So yeah, flawed movie and all, rough around the edges with the acting and scripting and cinematography, but you can't deny that the movie's fun and eye-catching and well-cast. Despite the presence of Jones and Statham, who went on to big success in Hollywood, it's not chock-full of other British actors that you recognize, so that you can just go on enjoying the movie without going, "What? John Simm, Doctor Who's the Master, as New Order guitarist Bernard Sumner?" To pull out an example at complete random.
Lock, Stock and its successor Snatch are the only two Guy Ritchie films I've seen. I don't know if I'm feeling the lack, but taken together they're a fun indicator of what British gangster movies were doing back then. They also got copied by a bunch of other movies, which also shows how people responded to them. Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is where it started, and it's a nice way to spend a couple of hours - so go check it out on Netflix asap.
Sunday, 27 January 2019
Sunday, 20 January 2019
English Football Managers: An Endangered Species
I've already written of my pleasure at Ole Gunnar Solskjaer's appointment as Manchester United manager. That was with three matches of him in charge, all of which he'd won. And now we're at seven, across both the Premier League and the FA Cup, and he's still got that perfect record. So talk is naturally turning to whether or not he should be offered the job on a permanent basis.
Some people (by which I mean Guardian football writers, since I get most of my footballing news and insights from there) would say yes, and others think it should go to another manager, perhaps one with more pedigree in winning stuff. The big name thrown about is Tottenham's Mauricio Pochettino, who's helped turn Spurs into title contenders (though not winners). The other one that's cropped up is Zinedine Zidane, who's available after his shock resignation from Real Madrid following their third Champions League victory.
I'm sure other names will crop up as the season draws to a close. There are plenty of innovative young managers (and not so young ones) all across the continent - I'm sure Thomas Tuchel would get a look in, and potentially Massimiliano Allegri, or any number of others. I've also heard Gareth Southgate mooted, though not without reservation.
Notably, though, he's the only English manager whose name comes up in these sorts of discussions, and that's only because he led England to the semi-finals in this most recent World Cup. He wasn't in the frame for discussions of who should get the Arsenal job or the Chelsea job when those came vacant at the end of last season.
But then, why would an owner of one of the top six sides select an English manager to lead their team, when they could just cherry-pick one of the best (or second-best) managers from Spain, Italy, Germany or France? And it's not just the top six sides who are a little scared of hiring Englishmen: in the whole Premier League, there are only five English managers (or six, if you count Chris Hughton, who's considered Irish because that's where he played internationally).
It wasn't always like this. In the Premier League's very first season, out of 22 managers, all but 16 managers in the division were English, with one Irishman and the rest all Scots. That trend held until the 1996-97 season, when Arsene Wenger joined Arsenal. At the end of that season English managers accounted for 55% of all managers in the league, whereas the year before they'd hit a never-to-be-achieved-again high of 80% (or 17 out of 20).
The number stuck around 50-55% until 2010, when it dropped to 25%. Despite climbing up as high as 45% again in 2015, though, the number's stuck at around 20% ever since, or an average of 27% across the last ten seasons.
These numbers are slightly skewed by the fact that they only count the managers in place at the end of the season, and in the case of 2019 they're in real-time, which is to say that they represent whoever's in charge at that moment. That means that I've just updated my spreadsheet to reflect that Mark Hudson has taken over as caretaker at Huddersfield Town following the resignation of David Wagner (American/German), and that I haven't counted Mark Hughes (Welsh) because he left Southampton before I created the spreadsheet.
One of my favorite facts is that no English manager has won the English top division since it became the Premier League. I'm not discounting the achievements of Alex Ferguson or Kenny Dalgliesh when their teams have won it, but they're Scottish, not English, and so despite having the same passport as Gareth Southgate or whoever, they don't count for the purposes of this blog. And Ferguson's success slightly distorts matters, as that means that only two Britons have won the league in the past 26 years.
That's a pretty long time for a country's managers not to have any success in winning league titles. If we take Spain as a counter-example, Spanish managers have won the title 12 times, of which four Castilian-speaking managers have won it seven times between them, with two Catalans and one Basque taking the rest.
Spain is a good example here, because like the UK, it has much sharper cultural differences between its regions than other European countries. There may not be an official Catalan or Basque or Galician national team, but those areas consider themselves separate, not least because of language, to a degree that you wouldn't find in Germany or Italy, or indeed even the UK itself.
Italy, by the way, has the opposite problem. The majority of managers are Italian, and there was a point this season where all 20 teams were managed by Italians. The last foreigner to win the title there was Jose Mourinho, with Inter, and each season since then has crowned either Antonio Conte or Max Allegri as the winning manager.
But back to England. The popularity of hiring English, or more generally British, managers has collapsed since the 90s. Any analysis of why that should be is likely to be incomplete, so let me attempt it anyway, so I can have it picked apart by people smarter than me.
The main cause is probably the division between the elite clubs in England and the rest - the ones who fall between seventh and seventeenth place. As the gap has widened between the buying power of Chelsea or Manchester City on the one hand, and Watford or Everton on the other, the bigger clubs have set their sights on larger prizes than just the league. They aim for the Champions League. And if no English manager has won the Premier League, certainly no English manager has won the Champions League during the period, from 2005 to 2012, when English sides dominated by getting to the final almost every year.
So the first strike against English managers is that they aren't proven Champions League winners. The next point is that they aren't proven trophy-winners of any sort, or at least any sort that matters to a top-flight team's owner. The likes of Eddie Howe (Bournemouth), Sean Dyche (Burnley) or Neil Warnock (Cardiff City) may have won second division trophies and steered their clubs to promotion into the Premier League, but they've won no other trophies of note, certainly not during their tenures in the top flight.
In fact, the only English manager currently in the EPL to have won any trophies at all is Roy Hodgson, at Crystal Palace, who's won an impressive eight top-flight leagues abroad, and two national cups in other countries. And in fairness he had a crack at a top EPL team, when he managed Liverpool, but that wasn't what you'd call a total success.
You could say that this reluctance to hire English managers is also down to the fact that their placing each season means they can't even realistically plan to win trophies. Some teams place high enough to participate in the Champions League or the Europa League, while others do badly enough that they drop into the Championship, but for those teams ranked 7 to 17, there's nothing to play for after a certain point. The winners of the league tend to emerge fairly early, and so do the candidates for relegation, so everyone else can basically coast.
An extreme example is last season's Burnley team, which got as high as seventh at one point and then embarked on a losing streak of something like 11 games, which saw their position dip not at all. If all a manager has to do is coast and avoid the kind of catastrophe that sees them relegated, that doesn't exactly indicate ground-breaking tactical nous.
The one example of someone who tried to bridge the gap is Everton's David Moyes (Scottish), who was handpicked by Alex Ferguson to take over at Manchester United in 2013. He was anointed on the basis of strong performances by Everton in the preceding years, which saw them nearly reach the Champions League. But Moyes's style proved unsuited to United's, and in a lot of ways the club has still not recovered from the tailspin caused by his 10 months in charge. Nor has his own reputation recovered quickly - he had shitty spells at Real Sociedad in Spain, and at Sunderland (which in recent years has become the graveyard of many a manager's career), before rescuing himself somewhat by keeping West Ham from being relegated last season.
You could argue that winning a European trophy would be a good way for an English manager to make a mark, and you might be right. Except that again, you run into the problem of the gap between the richest clubs and the middle class. The example here is Burnley this season. After last season's heroics they qualified for the Europa League, but because those games take place on a Thursday night, and typically require longer trips than Champions League away legs, the players have less time to recover. And Burnley's results have shown that. They currently sit 16th, on 22 points, with a -20 goal difference.
And to be fair, playing in the Champions League is already plenty tough for the richest clubs, which can afford larger squads to rotate in and out for those types of matches. What hope do smaller, less well-off clubs like Burnley have?
Let me leave you with a thought on how to resurrect the English manager, though. There was a time when English managers (and players) would crop up abroad and do exciting things out there. Terry Venables won La Liga with Barcelona in 1984-85, and Welshman John Toshack won it with Real Madrid five seasons later. Venables later led the English national team to the semi-finals in Euro 96, on home soil, making him one of the most successful national managers since 1966. Bobby Robson also had spells abroad, in Spain and Portugal and the Netherlands, and also led England to the semi-finals in the 1990 World Cup.
There may not actually be a correlation there, but it's worth exploring. More English managers should take postings abroad, so they can learn what's happening in other leagues and bring it back to England. Other countries' coaches have been introducing innovations to the EPL, so why shouldn't the English? There's a little promise here, as young English players like Jadon Sancho are suddenly becoming in vogue in Germany - if that continues, they could eventually become the managers who land elite jobs in England by having won big in Europe.
Some people (by which I mean Guardian football writers, since I get most of my footballing news and insights from there) would say yes, and others think it should go to another manager, perhaps one with more pedigree in winning stuff. The big name thrown about is Tottenham's Mauricio Pochettino, who's helped turn Spurs into title contenders (though not winners). The other one that's cropped up is Zinedine Zidane, who's available after his shock resignation from Real Madrid following their third Champions League victory.
I'm sure other names will crop up as the season draws to a close. There are plenty of innovative young managers (and not so young ones) all across the continent - I'm sure Thomas Tuchel would get a look in, and potentially Massimiliano Allegri, or any number of others. I've also heard Gareth Southgate mooted, though not without reservation.
Notably, though, he's the only English manager whose name comes up in these sorts of discussions, and that's only because he led England to the semi-finals in this most recent World Cup. He wasn't in the frame for discussions of who should get the Arsenal job or the Chelsea job when those came vacant at the end of last season.
But then, why would an owner of one of the top six sides select an English manager to lead their team, when they could just cherry-pick one of the best (or second-best) managers from Spain, Italy, Germany or France? And it's not just the top six sides who are a little scared of hiring Englishmen: in the whole Premier League, there are only five English managers (or six, if you count Chris Hughton, who's considered Irish because that's where he played internationally).
It wasn't always like this. In the Premier League's very first season, out of 22 managers, all but 16 managers in the division were English, with one Irishman and the rest all Scots. That trend held until the 1996-97 season, when Arsene Wenger joined Arsenal. At the end of that season English managers accounted for 55% of all managers in the league, whereas the year before they'd hit a never-to-be-achieved-again high of 80% (or 17 out of 20).
The number stuck around 50-55% until 2010, when it dropped to 25%. Despite climbing up as high as 45% again in 2015, though, the number's stuck at around 20% ever since, or an average of 27% across the last ten seasons.
These numbers are slightly skewed by the fact that they only count the managers in place at the end of the season, and in the case of 2019 they're in real-time, which is to say that they represent whoever's in charge at that moment. That means that I've just updated my spreadsheet to reflect that Mark Hudson has taken over as caretaker at Huddersfield Town following the resignation of David Wagner (American/German), and that I haven't counted Mark Hughes (Welsh) because he left Southampton before I created the spreadsheet.
One of my favorite facts is that no English manager has won the English top division since it became the Premier League. I'm not discounting the achievements of Alex Ferguson or Kenny Dalgliesh when their teams have won it, but they're Scottish, not English, and so despite having the same passport as Gareth Southgate or whoever, they don't count for the purposes of this blog. And Ferguson's success slightly distorts matters, as that means that only two Britons have won the league in the past 26 years.
That's a pretty long time for a country's managers not to have any success in winning league titles. If we take Spain as a counter-example, Spanish managers have won the title 12 times, of which four Castilian-speaking managers have won it seven times between them, with two Catalans and one Basque taking the rest.
Spain is a good example here, because like the UK, it has much sharper cultural differences between its regions than other European countries. There may not be an official Catalan or Basque or Galician national team, but those areas consider themselves separate, not least because of language, to a degree that you wouldn't find in Germany or Italy, or indeed even the UK itself.
Italy, by the way, has the opposite problem. The majority of managers are Italian, and there was a point this season where all 20 teams were managed by Italians. The last foreigner to win the title there was Jose Mourinho, with Inter, and each season since then has crowned either Antonio Conte or Max Allegri as the winning manager.
But back to England. The popularity of hiring English, or more generally British, managers has collapsed since the 90s. Any analysis of why that should be is likely to be incomplete, so let me attempt it anyway, so I can have it picked apart by people smarter than me.
The main cause is probably the division between the elite clubs in England and the rest - the ones who fall between seventh and seventeenth place. As the gap has widened between the buying power of Chelsea or Manchester City on the one hand, and Watford or Everton on the other, the bigger clubs have set their sights on larger prizes than just the league. They aim for the Champions League. And if no English manager has won the Premier League, certainly no English manager has won the Champions League during the period, from 2005 to 2012, when English sides dominated by getting to the final almost every year.
So the first strike against English managers is that they aren't proven Champions League winners. The next point is that they aren't proven trophy-winners of any sort, or at least any sort that matters to a top-flight team's owner. The likes of Eddie Howe (Bournemouth), Sean Dyche (Burnley) or Neil Warnock (Cardiff City) may have won second division trophies and steered their clubs to promotion into the Premier League, but they've won no other trophies of note, certainly not during their tenures in the top flight.
In fact, the only English manager currently in the EPL to have won any trophies at all is Roy Hodgson, at Crystal Palace, who's won an impressive eight top-flight leagues abroad, and two national cups in other countries. And in fairness he had a crack at a top EPL team, when he managed Liverpool, but that wasn't what you'd call a total success.
You could say that this reluctance to hire English managers is also down to the fact that their placing each season means they can't even realistically plan to win trophies. Some teams place high enough to participate in the Champions League or the Europa League, while others do badly enough that they drop into the Championship, but for those teams ranked 7 to 17, there's nothing to play for after a certain point. The winners of the league tend to emerge fairly early, and so do the candidates for relegation, so everyone else can basically coast.
An extreme example is last season's Burnley team, which got as high as seventh at one point and then embarked on a losing streak of something like 11 games, which saw their position dip not at all. If all a manager has to do is coast and avoid the kind of catastrophe that sees them relegated, that doesn't exactly indicate ground-breaking tactical nous.
The one example of someone who tried to bridge the gap is Everton's David Moyes (Scottish), who was handpicked by Alex Ferguson to take over at Manchester United in 2013. He was anointed on the basis of strong performances by Everton in the preceding years, which saw them nearly reach the Champions League. But Moyes's style proved unsuited to United's, and in a lot of ways the club has still not recovered from the tailspin caused by his 10 months in charge. Nor has his own reputation recovered quickly - he had shitty spells at Real Sociedad in Spain, and at Sunderland (which in recent years has become the graveyard of many a manager's career), before rescuing himself somewhat by keeping West Ham from being relegated last season.
You could argue that winning a European trophy would be a good way for an English manager to make a mark, and you might be right. Except that again, you run into the problem of the gap between the richest clubs and the middle class. The example here is Burnley this season. After last season's heroics they qualified for the Europa League, but because those games take place on a Thursday night, and typically require longer trips than Champions League away legs, the players have less time to recover. And Burnley's results have shown that. They currently sit 16th, on 22 points, with a -20 goal difference.
And to be fair, playing in the Champions League is already plenty tough for the richest clubs, which can afford larger squads to rotate in and out for those types of matches. What hope do smaller, less well-off clubs like Burnley have?
Let me leave you with a thought on how to resurrect the English manager, though. There was a time when English managers (and players) would crop up abroad and do exciting things out there. Terry Venables won La Liga with Barcelona in 1984-85, and Welshman John Toshack won it with Real Madrid five seasons later. Venables later led the English national team to the semi-finals in Euro 96, on home soil, making him one of the most successful national managers since 1966. Bobby Robson also had spells abroad, in Spain and Portugal and the Netherlands, and also led England to the semi-finals in the 1990 World Cup.
There may not actually be a correlation there, but it's worth exploring. More English managers should take postings abroad, so they can learn what's happening in other leagues and bring it back to England. Other countries' coaches have been introducing innovations to the EPL, so why shouldn't the English? There's a little promise here, as young English players like Jadon Sancho are suddenly becoming in vogue in Germany - if that continues, they could eventually become the managers who land elite jobs in England by having won big in Europe.
Sunday, 13 January 2019
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Is a Damn Delight
It's been a week since I managed to hoodwink my dad into going to see Into the Spider-Verse, and if he hated it, I'm happy to say that it fulfilled all my expectations, and on top of that was a great exploration of decades of Spider-Man history. Perhaps unsurprisingly, since they share some behind the scenes folk, it's up there for me with Lego Batman as a humorous but expansive take on a superhero's mythos.
I think the last time I regularly read new Spider-Man comics was around 2000 or 2001, when J Michael Straczynski was writing the character (pretty damn well, as I recall) and 9/11 happened. So I've missed out on a whole hell of a lot of continuity, not least the idea that there might be a bunch of different Spider-folk running around.
I had an idea of Miles Morales, of course, and of Spider-Gwen, so it was nice getting acquainted with those characters properly. And it was cool to see other takes, including Nicolas Cage's wonderful portrayal of Spider-Man Noir. I happen to love alternate versions of characters, especially from different time periods, so that really made me want to check out the Noir stories.
Not only that, the animation was really well-done, to the point that it looked like rotoscoping at points. Though my one complaint was that some stuff out of the main focus of most shots (and sometimes within the main focus) was weirdly doubled, as if it was meant to be a 3D movie. I kept having to check the other viewers with me in the theater to see if they were wearing those special glasses.
But to get back to the Lego Batman comparison: the thing I loved about that movie was that all 80 or so years of Batman's continuity were fair game, and the filmmakers made reference to lots of the most important parts of that continuity.
Into the Spider-Verse did something similar, though it told a more straight-forwardly serious story, which also meant that it had to keep its references relevant to the story (except for the post-credits scene). That generally worked, even when they threw in references to Spider-Man 3 and Tobey Maguire's dance moves.
But overall, it showed that the animated versions of comic book movies are light years ahead of the live action versions in terms of inventiveness, humor and fan service (if that's not a dirty word). Lego Batman, Teen Titans Go to the Movies, and Into the Spider-Verse are able to do a lot more with the characters than The Dark Knight or Spider-Man: Homecoming, because the expectations are probably lower and the studio probably expects fewer people to go see them. So they can throw in stuff like Stan Lee cameos (yep, even in Teen Titans), references to Earth-616 (which I've only recently learned is the standard Earth of Marvel continuity) and dumb jokes that really only appeal to comic book geeks like me.
So it was a really fun movie, a really beautifully shot movie, and if you haven't seen it yet you should check it out. Fandom may be at a level of toxicity where you can't give Miles Morales a live-action movie starring Donald Glover, but this is somehow better, because the filmmakers can use a bigger canvas to tell their story. And I'm looking forward to seeing what's next, whether for these animators or for these characters.
I think the last time I regularly read new Spider-Man comics was around 2000 or 2001, when J Michael Straczynski was writing the character (pretty damn well, as I recall) and 9/11 happened. So I've missed out on a whole hell of a lot of continuity, not least the idea that there might be a bunch of different Spider-folk running around.
I had an idea of Miles Morales, of course, and of Spider-Gwen, so it was nice getting acquainted with those characters properly. And it was cool to see other takes, including Nicolas Cage's wonderful portrayal of Spider-Man Noir. I happen to love alternate versions of characters, especially from different time periods, so that really made me want to check out the Noir stories.
Not only that, the animation was really well-done, to the point that it looked like rotoscoping at points. Though my one complaint was that some stuff out of the main focus of most shots (and sometimes within the main focus) was weirdly doubled, as if it was meant to be a 3D movie. I kept having to check the other viewers with me in the theater to see if they were wearing those special glasses.
But to get back to the Lego Batman comparison: the thing I loved about that movie was that all 80 or so years of Batman's continuity were fair game, and the filmmakers made reference to lots of the most important parts of that continuity.
Into the Spider-Verse did something similar, though it told a more straight-forwardly serious story, which also meant that it had to keep its references relevant to the story (except for the post-credits scene). That generally worked, even when they threw in references to Spider-Man 3 and Tobey Maguire's dance moves.
But overall, it showed that the animated versions of comic book movies are light years ahead of the live action versions in terms of inventiveness, humor and fan service (if that's not a dirty word). Lego Batman, Teen Titans Go to the Movies, and Into the Spider-Verse are able to do a lot more with the characters than The Dark Knight or Spider-Man: Homecoming, because the expectations are probably lower and the studio probably expects fewer people to go see them. So they can throw in stuff like Stan Lee cameos (yep, even in Teen Titans), references to Earth-616 (which I've only recently learned is the standard Earth of Marvel continuity) and dumb jokes that really only appeal to comic book geeks like me.
So it was a really fun movie, a really beautifully shot movie, and if you haven't seen it yet you should check it out. Fandom may be at a level of toxicity where you can't give Miles Morales a live-action movie starring Donald Glover, but this is somehow better, because the filmmakers can use a bigger canvas to tell their story. And I'm looking forward to seeing what's next, whether for these animators or for these characters.
Sunday, 30 December 2018
Making Manchester United Again
#sorrynotsorry
I wanted to write this post a week or so ago, when Manchester United put us all out of our collective misery and fired Jose Mourinho, but now that we've seen how United's done under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as interim manager, I have a little more information to work with. And after watching them demolish Bournemouth this morning, it's fair to say that the change in management has perked the team up significantly.
I've long been ambivalent about Mourinho. He obviously led Chelsea to their greatest period of success back in the last decade, and before that, at Porto, claimed the last Champions League title for a team outside the Big Four countries in 2004. But his teams are frequently boring, and he's long had a knack for making great players look ordinary. Add to that his tendency to flame out in his third season at any club, and he looks more like an expensive gamble than a real option for a club to regain its former glory.
And maybe it's only that I've paid a lot more attention to him the past few years, because I've been playing Fantasy Premier League during that time, but he's also seemed worse this time around. His first season at United doesn't bring up any particular memories, but last season he kicked up his feuds with his own players, such that it was surprising to see how well Paul Pogba played in winning the World Cup this summer. And the start of this season saw him kick that feuding into high gear, even stripping Pogba of the captaincy and benching him completely for the last couple of games before he got the sack.
But then he was gone. The most mystifying thing for me was how much I cared - Manchester United has been one of the teams I've most loved to hate since about 1999, when they knocked Juventus out of the Champions League and then snatched it dramatically in the last five minutes of the final against Bayern Munich. Yet, oddly, seeing Mourinho go filled me with a weird excitement, a need to see what happened next and whether it meant United would finally challenge for the title again.
(Although there was also a perverse desire to see just how bad things could get - at some point would even United get relegated?)
That excitement rose when they announced that they'd be hiring Solskjaer as their interim manager for the rest of the season. Solskjaer obviously is the guy who scored the winning goal in that 1999 Champions League final, and despite not being associated with the club in the same way as David Beckham, Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs or Paul Scholes, is legitimately a club legend. He's even 45, the exact same age as Alex Ferguson when he took over in 1986, though I'll admit that's stretching analogies a bit too far - Ferguson had already had a certain amount of success as a manager in Scotland before getting the United job, whereas Solskjaer's previous managerial experience in the Premier League was an ill-starred stint where he took Cardiff City down to relegation.
And yet, as of today he's now overseen three successive wins in his first three games, something only Matt Busby and Jose Mourinho himself achieved. The other number people have been throwing around is the five goals his United team scored against Cardiff in his first game in charge - since that was the first time United had scored five in one match since Ferguson's last game in charge in 2013.
Generally it's not good to draw too many conclusions from this run, since these three matches have all been against decidedly weaker teams, two of whom were promoted in the last two years, and all of whom are in decidedly poor runs of form at the moment. In addition, Man United line up next against Newcastle United, who are also in their own difficulties at the moment, so Solskjaer's skills won't be properly tested against a top 6 side (Spurs) until 13 January.
But I come once again to the game I was watching this morning. United looked fluid, free-flowing, deadly - stringing together passes and rushing into danger areas where they were well placed to score against Bournemouth. Pogba was particularly deadly, pulling back the first two goals and creating another later on. Whatever Solskjaer's skills as a coach or the hands-on-ness of his approach, the evidence is right there in performances against opposition that the Mourinho team would have struggled against. It's also hard not to assume that he's trying to stamp on this United team the style of football he learned under Ferguson.
The other question is what happens at the end of the season. If Solskjaer continues like this, he'll surely be in the running for the job on a permanent basis, with Spurs manager Mauricio Pochettino the other likely candidate (unless he gets lured away to Real Madrid, who are also looking for a permanent coach but haven't made as charmed an appointment). It'd be interesting to see, if Solskjaer does get the job, what he'll be able to make of it, and whether this really does herald a change in fortunes for the team, rather than a dead-cat bounce.
This all brings us back to the question of why I care so much. As I mentioned, United has long been the team I loved to hate. They almost always got the players that helped put them head and shoulders above the competition, including a very young Cristiano Ronaldo, and they had the swagger and arrogance that came with dominating the game throughout the 1990s.
But I suspect my current nostalgia for the 90s is what's behind my excitement - Solskjaer is part of the team that I learned about when I first got into football, which is also when the UK in general, and Manchester in particular, was the cultural epicenter of everything I was into. Seeing them come back into that kind of form would be a nice throwback to days that were, if not happier, then not as marked by darkness (as evidenced by the title I came up with for this post).
When United was winning everything in sight, we were still years off from invasions of Iraq, wars on terror and rising xenophobia. Not to mention that the UK didn't seem likely to ditch the EU anytime soon, even if they did complain about it a whole lot.
In any case, it'll be fun to watch how United develops under Solskjaer. In particular, it'll be interesting to see whether Pogba's run of form continues, given the promise that attached itself to him with his £89 million price tag when United bought him from Juventus (and, um, when he won the fucking World Cup). United may not have the best team, but in Pogba it may have the best player, Mohamed Salah notwithstanding.
So for the first time in twenty years, and with shame in my heart, I think I may find myself rooting for Manchester United soon...
I wanted to write this post a week or so ago, when Manchester United put us all out of our collective misery and fired Jose Mourinho, but now that we've seen how United's done under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer as interim manager, I have a little more information to work with. And after watching them demolish Bournemouth this morning, it's fair to say that the change in management has perked the team up significantly.
I've long been ambivalent about Mourinho. He obviously led Chelsea to their greatest period of success back in the last decade, and before that, at Porto, claimed the last Champions League title for a team outside the Big Four countries in 2004. But his teams are frequently boring, and he's long had a knack for making great players look ordinary. Add to that his tendency to flame out in his third season at any club, and he looks more like an expensive gamble than a real option for a club to regain its former glory.
And maybe it's only that I've paid a lot more attention to him the past few years, because I've been playing Fantasy Premier League during that time, but he's also seemed worse this time around. His first season at United doesn't bring up any particular memories, but last season he kicked up his feuds with his own players, such that it was surprising to see how well Paul Pogba played in winning the World Cup this summer. And the start of this season saw him kick that feuding into high gear, even stripping Pogba of the captaincy and benching him completely for the last couple of games before he got the sack.
But then he was gone. The most mystifying thing for me was how much I cared - Manchester United has been one of the teams I've most loved to hate since about 1999, when they knocked Juventus out of the Champions League and then snatched it dramatically in the last five minutes of the final against Bayern Munich. Yet, oddly, seeing Mourinho go filled me with a weird excitement, a need to see what happened next and whether it meant United would finally challenge for the title again.
(Although there was also a perverse desire to see just how bad things could get - at some point would even United get relegated?)
That excitement rose when they announced that they'd be hiring Solskjaer as their interim manager for the rest of the season. Solskjaer obviously is the guy who scored the winning goal in that 1999 Champions League final, and despite not being associated with the club in the same way as David Beckham, Gary Neville, Ryan Giggs or Paul Scholes, is legitimately a club legend. He's even 45, the exact same age as Alex Ferguson when he took over in 1986, though I'll admit that's stretching analogies a bit too far - Ferguson had already had a certain amount of success as a manager in Scotland before getting the United job, whereas Solskjaer's previous managerial experience in the Premier League was an ill-starred stint where he took Cardiff City down to relegation.
And yet, as of today he's now overseen three successive wins in his first three games, something only Matt Busby and Jose Mourinho himself achieved. The other number people have been throwing around is the five goals his United team scored against Cardiff in his first game in charge - since that was the first time United had scored five in one match since Ferguson's last game in charge in 2013.
Generally it's not good to draw too many conclusions from this run, since these three matches have all been against decidedly weaker teams, two of whom were promoted in the last two years, and all of whom are in decidedly poor runs of form at the moment. In addition, Man United line up next against Newcastle United, who are also in their own difficulties at the moment, so Solskjaer's skills won't be properly tested against a top 6 side (Spurs) until 13 January.
But I come once again to the game I was watching this morning. United looked fluid, free-flowing, deadly - stringing together passes and rushing into danger areas where they were well placed to score against Bournemouth. Pogba was particularly deadly, pulling back the first two goals and creating another later on. Whatever Solskjaer's skills as a coach or the hands-on-ness of his approach, the evidence is right there in performances against opposition that the Mourinho team would have struggled against. It's also hard not to assume that he's trying to stamp on this United team the style of football he learned under Ferguson.
The other question is what happens at the end of the season. If Solskjaer continues like this, he'll surely be in the running for the job on a permanent basis, with Spurs manager Mauricio Pochettino the other likely candidate (unless he gets lured away to Real Madrid, who are also looking for a permanent coach but haven't made as charmed an appointment). It'd be interesting to see, if Solskjaer does get the job, what he'll be able to make of it, and whether this really does herald a change in fortunes for the team, rather than a dead-cat bounce.
This all brings us back to the question of why I care so much. As I mentioned, United has long been the team I loved to hate. They almost always got the players that helped put them head and shoulders above the competition, including a very young Cristiano Ronaldo, and they had the swagger and arrogance that came with dominating the game throughout the 1990s.
But I suspect my current nostalgia for the 90s is what's behind my excitement - Solskjaer is part of the team that I learned about when I first got into football, which is also when the UK in general, and Manchester in particular, was the cultural epicenter of everything I was into. Seeing them come back into that kind of form would be a nice throwback to days that were, if not happier, then not as marked by darkness (as evidenced by the title I came up with for this post).
When United was winning everything in sight, we were still years off from invasions of Iraq, wars on terror and rising xenophobia. Not to mention that the UK didn't seem likely to ditch the EU anytime soon, even if they did complain about it a whole lot.
In any case, it'll be fun to watch how United develops under Solskjaer. In particular, it'll be interesting to see whether Pogba's run of form continues, given the promise that attached itself to him with his £89 million price tag when United bought him from Juventus (and, um, when he won the fucking World Cup). United may not have the best team, but in Pogba it may have the best player, Mohamed Salah notwithstanding.
So for the first time in twenty years, and with shame in my heart, I think I may find myself rooting for Manchester United soon...
Sunday, 16 December 2018
2018: Another Year I'll be Glad to See Gone
On the one hand, life is a series of cosmic ironies: I once expressed confusion at someone saying that a particular year had been a bad one, and they were happy to see it go.
On the other hand, the screaming void continues to claim our sanity: I wrote posts in 2016 and 2017 saying how crappy the year had been, and now I'm doing a third.
In fairness, it's been slightly less crappy in some ways than the previous two years. I started out by going to London for three months, earning some extra cash and seeing friends and family. In a way it was a perfect vacation back into my old life between 2006 and 2013, right up to and including the fact that I was living next door to a friend's old place.
(I even ran into his old flatmate, and was thinking about that guy again recently. What struck me was how mature, even serene, the guy seemed now - he has a wife and lives in a nice house that he owns, in a neighborhood that's improved immeasurably since 2006. I'd like to be like that one day...)
And I've ended the year in an interesting new job, that's really stretching my creative boundaries in a lot of ways. The main negative for me is that I'm not writing as part of the job description, apart from a brief or slide deck here and there, but it takes some important strands from my previous full-time employment and lets me examine those more: stuff like working with startups and finding out about tech sectors that aren't gaining a lot of investment.
But to be honest, the stuff in between was pretty heavy-going at times. I managed some freelance work during the summer, but between those jobs found myself spinning in circles a bit - when you're not on a schedule, what's to stop you from playing web Solitaire all day? Turns out, it's my own willpower, which... well, wasn't always up to the task.
Jokes aside, I felt even more trapped in the house than before, when I'd been employed but working from home. When you don't have anywhere to go or anything to do, there's not much point in even leaving the house, and I could feel how that was spiraling into progressively less awesome things. So yeah, the new job came just at the right moment.
Personally, it was again a fairly blah year. A couple of friendships came to abrupt (or abrupt-ish) ends, and the dating was hamstrung by being both poor and resident at no fixed address. It doesn't help that I literally had one of the worst dating experiences of my life, which I'll be happy to tell you about IRL. And yeah, the looming 4-0 didn't help with looking at my dating life, or with feeling any less behind my friends.
There were other positives, though. The time in London, as I mentioned, allowed me to revisit parts of the UK I hadn't been to in a while, to see friends I hadn't seen for ages. And it was easy to bolt on my yearly trip to Italy, which despite having shitty weather was much more pleasurable than I'd expected it to be (in addition to giving me the idea for a new short story).
I also managed a couple of fun road trips, at opposite ends of California. Back in July my dad and I went on a road trip to southern Oregon, where I got to experience Ashland, Crater Lake and various other natural wonders (along with an impressive load of junk food). I even got to experience the pleasure of introducing my dad to an area of natural beauty that he hadn't seen before, the Avenue of the Giants.
Meanwhile in October I had my Joshua Tree trip, which as I said was a fun experience in pushing my own boundaries. And all the driving put a nice big dent in my podcast backlog, which is also nice, I guess.
Writing-wise, I don't know how much "progress" I made, but I was pleased to meet my goals and come up with new stories. I also started working with a freelance editor on some pieces, which helped me tighten things up, but also gave me heart that I'm on the right track with them.
I also went looking for help with the dating and fitness stuff, finding some awesome ladies to coach me at both. On the dating side I get some cheerleading and suggestions for places to try and meet more ladies, while on the fitness side I've learned how to properly stretch key muscle groups, and I'm pretty much able to touch my toes again (!).
So... despite the title, and how I started this blog post, I actually feel a bit hopeful for the year to come. It might evaporate on January 2nd, or it might turn into an unending parade of awesome, but it feels like the important thing is to take some action and ask for help (which was my big lesson of 2017, after all). I'll see how that goes next year, and what these actions turn into, if anything - but at any rate, I'll be sure to report back in twelve months.
On the other hand, the screaming void continues to claim our sanity: I wrote posts in 2016 and 2017 saying how crappy the year had been, and now I'm doing a third.
In fairness, it's been slightly less crappy in some ways than the previous two years. I started out by going to London for three months, earning some extra cash and seeing friends and family. In a way it was a perfect vacation back into my old life between 2006 and 2013, right up to and including the fact that I was living next door to a friend's old place.
(I even ran into his old flatmate, and was thinking about that guy again recently. What struck me was how mature, even serene, the guy seemed now - he has a wife and lives in a nice house that he owns, in a neighborhood that's improved immeasurably since 2006. I'd like to be like that one day...)
And I've ended the year in an interesting new job, that's really stretching my creative boundaries in a lot of ways. The main negative for me is that I'm not writing as part of the job description, apart from a brief or slide deck here and there, but it takes some important strands from my previous full-time employment and lets me examine those more: stuff like working with startups and finding out about tech sectors that aren't gaining a lot of investment.
But to be honest, the stuff in between was pretty heavy-going at times. I managed some freelance work during the summer, but between those jobs found myself spinning in circles a bit - when you're not on a schedule, what's to stop you from playing web Solitaire all day? Turns out, it's my own willpower, which... well, wasn't always up to the task.
Jokes aside, I felt even more trapped in the house than before, when I'd been employed but working from home. When you don't have anywhere to go or anything to do, there's not much point in even leaving the house, and I could feel how that was spiraling into progressively less awesome things. So yeah, the new job came just at the right moment.
Personally, it was again a fairly blah year. A couple of friendships came to abrupt (or abrupt-ish) ends, and the dating was hamstrung by being both poor and resident at no fixed address. It doesn't help that I literally had one of the worst dating experiences of my life, which I'll be happy to tell you about IRL. And yeah, the looming 4-0 didn't help with looking at my dating life, or with feeling any less behind my friends.
There were other positives, though. The time in London, as I mentioned, allowed me to revisit parts of the UK I hadn't been to in a while, to see friends I hadn't seen for ages. And it was easy to bolt on my yearly trip to Italy, which despite having shitty weather was much more pleasurable than I'd expected it to be (in addition to giving me the idea for a new short story).
I also managed a couple of fun road trips, at opposite ends of California. Back in July my dad and I went on a road trip to southern Oregon, where I got to experience Ashland, Crater Lake and various other natural wonders (along with an impressive load of junk food). I even got to experience the pleasure of introducing my dad to an area of natural beauty that he hadn't seen before, the Avenue of the Giants.
Meanwhile in October I had my Joshua Tree trip, which as I said was a fun experience in pushing my own boundaries. And all the driving put a nice big dent in my podcast backlog, which is also nice, I guess.
Writing-wise, I don't know how much "progress" I made, but I was pleased to meet my goals and come up with new stories. I also started working with a freelance editor on some pieces, which helped me tighten things up, but also gave me heart that I'm on the right track with them.
I also went looking for help with the dating and fitness stuff, finding some awesome ladies to coach me at both. On the dating side I get some cheerleading and suggestions for places to try and meet more ladies, while on the fitness side I've learned how to properly stretch key muscle groups, and I'm pretty much able to touch my toes again (!).
So... despite the title, and how I started this blog post, I actually feel a bit hopeful for the year to come. It might evaporate on January 2nd, or it might turn into an unending parade of awesome, but it feels like the important thing is to take some action and ask for help (which was my big lesson of 2017, after all). I'll see how that goes next year, and what these actions turn into, if anything - but at any rate, I'll be sure to report back in twelve months.
Sunday, 9 December 2018
Punisher War Zone: Frank Castle as He's Meant to Be
The universe has been conspiring to have me watch this movie lately: after discovering that it existed, I found out that a filmmaker I follow on Twitter, Lexi Alexander, directed it, and then someone on a private, comics-focused group I'm part of on Facebook started talking about it. I went and found the episode of the "How Did This Get Made" podcast that has Alexander talking about the making of the movie. So, inspired by this I went to my Amazon Fire TV last night intending to rent it.
Result? It turns out it's been on Netflix the entire time.
So I watched it, and I can say that it's probably the best adaptation of the Punisher that's out there, including Netflix's own collaboration with Marvel, starring Jon Bernthal.
Of course, let's get one thing out of the way straight off: this isn't exactly Citizen Kane. Or even Raiders of the Lost Ark. It feels like it wouldn't be out of place buried on the SyFy channel's lineup of direct-to-video movies, even though it has a pretty good cast (including Dominic West, the Wire's own Jimmy McNulty, as the main villain Jigsaw).
But, its charm comes from a certain unhinged, go-for-broke willingness to plumb the depths of the source material's absurdity. Not content to set up a trio of parkour-loving criminals to get killed by the Punisher, it dispatches one of them, mid-flip, with a rocket-propelled grenade.
When the Punisher blows a gangster's head off in front of the FBI agent who's been chasing him all movie, the agent's reaction is less horror as annoyance.
And in the climactic battle, where the Punisher faces off against most of New York's street gangs, one bad guy's last words are, "Oh, for fuck's sake." To put it another way, this movie has Garth Ennis's fingerprints all over it, and to be honest, that's exactly how it should be.
In case you don't know, Garth Ennis is the Northern Irish writer of comics like Preacher, Hitman, the Demon and the Marvel Max Nick Fury mini-series that apparently put off George Clooney because of how ridiculously violent it was. He also had a couple of defining runs on the Punisher, beginning with a 12-issue limited series in 2000 and going through a regular series on the mature-readers Marvel Max imprint.
I caught the 2000 series when it came out, but didn't read any of the Max series until a couple of years ago, when a friend lent me the "Kitchen Irish" storyline. You could say that Ennis and the Punisher were made for each other - if you take the premise of a guy killing every violent criminal he sees at face value, it'd get boring, so you need to add something extra, a little colorful, maybe a little grotesque. And this is exactly what Ennis specializes in.
War Zone dispenses with the Punisher's origin story almost completely. It mentions it from time to time in order to give viewers just as much information as they need, but otherwise the Punisher is a known presence in New York, with both the cops and the mob well aware of him. It does give Jigsaw's origin story, by having the Punisher throw him into a glass-grinding machine.
Even when story elements don't come from Garth Ennis, they feel like they could: one of Jigsaw's henchmen is his brother Loony Bin Jim (played by Doug Hutchison), who in his first scene eats the insane asylum orderly who's been torturing him for years. Once free he smashes every mirror he sees for the rest of the movie, out of respect to Jigsaw and (presumably) because he really likes smashing things.
In case it's not obvious, this movie is kind of like a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, but with all the gore and violence retained. People are dispatched with guns, knives, spiked railings, baseball bats and a chair leg, among other things. The Punisher himself, played here by Ray Stephenson, is kind of a cypher, stoically wading through hundreds of bad guys and not uttering a line until about 20 minutes into the movie. His Terminator-like crusade positions him as the straight man against the incompetent and morally compromised cops and FBI agents who first are assigned to catch him but end up teaming with him.
Put another way, this is a spiritual precursor to Deadpool, though more grounded in reality because the Punisher doesn't have superpowers. And if it looks a little cheaper, at least it all looks and feels appropriate - and anyway, it's clear the filmmakers blew all their budget on the gore effects.
So, silly and absurd and violent as it is, I can't do anything other than recommend you check it out ASAP, while it's still on Netflix. Forget the po-faced discussions of PTSD and gun control that dominate the Jon Bernthal show: this is the Punisher as it's meant to be.
Result? It turns out it's been on Netflix the entire time.
So I watched it, and I can say that it's probably the best adaptation of the Punisher that's out there, including Netflix's own collaboration with Marvel, starring Jon Bernthal.
Of course, let's get one thing out of the way straight off: this isn't exactly Citizen Kane. Or even Raiders of the Lost Ark. It feels like it wouldn't be out of place buried on the SyFy channel's lineup of direct-to-video movies, even though it has a pretty good cast (including Dominic West, the Wire's own Jimmy McNulty, as the main villain Jigsaw).
But, its charm comes from a certain unhinged, go-for-broke willingness to plumb the depths of the source material's absurdity. Not content to set up a trio of parkour-loving criminals to get killed by the Punisher, it dispatches one of them, mid-flip, with a rocket-propelled grenade.
When the Punisher blows a gangster's head off in front of the FBI agent who's been chasing him all movie, the agent's reaction is less horror as annoyance.
And in the climactic battle, where the Punisher faces off against most of New York's street gangs, one bad guy's last words are, "Oh, for fuck's sake." To put it another way, this movie has Garth Ennis's fingerprints all over it, and to be honest, that's exactly how it should be.
In case you don't know, Garth Ennis is the Northern Irish writer of comics like Preacher, Hitman, the Demon and the Marvel Max Nick Fury mini-series that apparently put off George Clooney because of how ridiculously violent it was. He also had a couple of defining runs on the Punisher, beginning with a 12-issue limited series in 2000 and going through a regular series on the mature-readers Marvel Max imprint.
I caught the 2000 series when it came out, but didn't read any of the Max series until a couple of years ago, when a friend lent me the "Kitchen Irish" storyline. You could say that Ennis and the Punisher were made for each other - if you take the premise of a guy killing every violent criminal he sees at face value, it'd get boring, so you need to add something extra, a little colorful, maybe a little grotesque. And this is exactly what Ennis specializes in.
War Zone dispenses with the Punisher's origin story almost completely. It mentions it from time to time in order to give viewers just as much information as they need, but otherwise the Punisher is a known presence in New York, with both the cops and the mob well aware of him. It does give Jigsaw's origin story, by having the Punisher throw him into a glass-grinding machine.
Even when story elements don't come from Garth Ennis, they feel like they could: one of Jigsaw's henchmen is his brother Loony Bin Jim (played by Doug Hutchison), who in his first scene eats the insane asylum orderly who's been torturing him for years. Once free he smashes every mirror he sees for the rest of the movie, out of respect to Jigsaw and (presumably) because he really likes smashing things.
In case it's not obvious, this movie is kind of like a live-action Looney Tunes cartoon, but with all the gore and violence retained. People are dispatched with guns, knives, spiked railings, baseball bats and a chair leg, among other things. The Punisher himself, played here by Ray Stephenson, is kind of a cypher, stoically wading through hundreds of bad guys and not uttering a line until about 20 minutes into the movie. His Terminator-like crusade positions him as the straight man against the incompetent and morally compromised cops and FBI agents who first are assigned to catch him but end up teaming with him.
Put another way, this is a spiritual precursor to Deadpool, though more grounded in reality because the Punisher doesn't have superpowers. And if it looks a little cheaper, at least it all looks and feels appropriate - and anyway, it's clear the filmmakers blew all their budget on the gore effects.
So, silly and absurd and violent as it is, I can't do anything other than recommend you check it out ASAP, while it's still on Netflix. Forget the po-faced discussions of PTSD and gun control that dominate the Jon Bernthal show: this is the Punisher as it's meant to be.
Sunday, 25 November 2018
An Afternoon of Warhol at Stanford's Cantor Arts Center
As I usually do when I have a free Sunday afternoon, I headed out to the Cantor Gallery on Stanford campus today. Not because there was anything I particularly wanted to see, but because it's free and offers nice opportunities to get some walking done, and enjoy the fresh air. It also has a new central exhibition every few months, and I discovered today that they were hosting an exhibition of photography by Andy Warhol.
I don't feel I know that much about Warhol, despite a profile about him in Paradox Press's Big Book of Weirdoes from the 90s, so I gamely went to check it out. It's a review of the different themes and subject matter he took photos of throughout the last decade of his life, from the celebrity work he's known for to people in the gay community and the Studio 54 crowd, among others.
The Cantor Gallery actually acquired the contact sheets and negatives from the Warhol Foundation, so this is the first time a lot of these pictures are being displayed, which made it more interesting.
In any case, I was struck by a thought as I looked at the celebrity photos he took and that were in his interview magazine. Among the shots of Liza Minnelli, Nancy Reagan and Grace Jones, there was a photo of Michael Jackson as a rather young man, on which Warhol had traced lines following the contours of his face.
Looking at it, and the pictures around it, it struck me that it was similar to the famous Campbell's Soup painting, in that these celebrities are also brands and iconography that the public recognizes and responds to in specific ways. The silkscreen prints of Mao Zedong or Marilyn Monroe, or indeed this traced-on photo of Michael Jackson, seemed to me a way to try and distill that essence of who these people are, which made it even more interesting to try and locate the same meaning in the other pictures.
I don't know if these thoughts are ground-breaking (probably not) or so basic as to elicit snorts of derision (probably more likely), but if accurate, gives me a new way to appreciate his work and that of others in the Pop Art movement. It also gives me an insight into what he was interested in, which helps explain why he made the art that he made. Every artist has their preoccupations and pet themes, which show up again and again in their work, and for me, being able to identify these themes makes me like the work more.
It's on my mind quite a bit also because I recently spent a few idle minutes reading up on some of Neil Gaiman's work on Wikipedia, which listed certain themes he's played with since his early comics work. It also made me think of what the themes are that I'm most interested in for my own stories - future generations of literary critics will have to parse this out themselves, I suppose, but based on some of the stories I've been writing lately consciousness and artificial intelligence are fairly big, at least in some of my stuff.
On the other hand, a writer (or any other artist) probably shouldn't spend too much time teasing the themes out of his own work, right? Maybe it's all Freudian and I'm trying to express something related to shagging. Who knows?
That notwithstanding, if you're in the Bay Area, you should have a look at the exhibition. The page warns, somewhat euphemistically, that some images "may not be appropriate for young viewers", so I'll spell it out: there are some female and male nudes, which are generally quite tasteful and artistic, and then there are some photos of gay sex, including ejaculation. The more explicit contacts remain fairly small, but it's pretty clear what's going on, so if that sort of thing bothers you, feel free to skim that corner of the gallery and focus on the others.
And please do check it out! As I say, there are a lot of interesting themes covered, and if nothing else the pictures of celebrities, storefronts and Warhol's acquaintances in the drag community are fascinating artifacts of 1970s and 1980s New York, subject matter that I've always liked.
I don't feel I know that much about Warhol, despite a profile about him in Paradox Press's Big Book of Weirdoes from the 90s, so I gamely went to check it out. It's a review of the different themes and subject matter he took photos of throughout the last decade of his life, from the celebrity work he's known for to people in the gay community and the Studio 54 crowd, among others.
The Cantor Gallery actually acquired the contact sheets and negatives from the Warhol Foundation, so this is the first time a lot of these pictures are being displayed, which made it more interesting.
In any case, I was struck by a thought as I looked at the celebrity photos he took and that were in his interview magazine. Among the shots of Liza Minnelli, Nancy Reagan and Grace Jones, there was a photo of Michael Jackson as a rather young man, on which Warhol had traced lines following the contours of his face.
Looking at it, and the pictures around it, it struck me that it was similar to the famous Campbell's Soup painting, in that these celebrities are also brands and iconography that the public recognizes and responds to in specific ways. The silkscreen prints of Mao Zedong or Marilyn Monroe, or indeed this traced-on photo of Michael Jackson, seemed to me a way to try and distill that essence of who these people are, which made it even more interesting to try and locate the same meaning in the other pictures.
I don't know if these thoughts are ground-breaking (probably not) or so basic as to elicit snorts of derision (probably more likely), but if accurate, gives me a new way to appreciate his work and that of others in the Pop Art movement. It also gives me an insight into what he was interested in, which helps explain why he made the art that he made. Every artist has their preoccupations and pet themes, which show up again and again in their work, and for me, being able to identify these themes makes me like the work more.
It's on my mind quite a bit also because I recently spent a few idle minutes reading up on some of Neil Gaiman's work on Wikipedia, which listed certain themes he's played with since his early comics work. It also made me think of what the themes are that I'm most interested in for my own stories - future generations of literary critics will have to parse this out themselves, I suppose, but based on some of the stories I've been writing lately consciousness and artificial intelligence are fairly big, at least in some of my stuff.
On the other hand, a writer (or any other artist) probably shouldn't spend too much time teasing the themes out of his own work, right? Maybe it's all Freudian and I'm trying to express something related to shagging. Who knows?
That notwithstanding, if you're in the Bay Area, you should have a look at the exhibition. The page warns, somewhat euphemistically, that some images "may not be appropriate for young viewers", so I'll spell it out: there are some female and male nudes, which are generally quite tasteful and artistic, and then there are some photos of gay sex, including ejaculation. The more explicit contacts remain fairly small, but it's pretty clear what's going on, so if that sort of thing bothers you, feel free to skim that corner of the gallery and focus on the others.
And please do check it out! As I say, there are a lot of interesting themes covered, and if nothing else the pictures of celebrities, storefronts and Warhol's acquaintances in the drag community are fascinating artifacts of 1970s and 1980s New York, subject matter that I've always liked.
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