Dead Guy: Part Two

Read Part One here.
My name is Henry Neville a.k.a Harry Neville a.k.a the Phantom Manager a.k.a Dead Guy. I've been dead for three years now, and a celebrity for two. My column is syndicated in a number of top-selling newspapers nation-wide and my book "Dead Head- 10 Top Tips for Management from Beyond the Grave" has spent 5 weeks at or around the top of the Amazon On-Line Mind-Body-Spirit Fastsellers index.
You know the stats. Of course you do. Your paper has them all on file. What you came here tonight to find out was: why me? Why have I, Harry Neville, been singled out for this kind of media attention? It's a good question. After all, I'm not the first member of corporate America to go on working after his mortal surcease and you can bet that I won't be the last. But hey- have you seen those other guys? I've spoken to a few (mostly in conjunction with my post-life seminars) and, despite what their publicists might say, these guys never feel at home in death. For one thing, they complain all the time- about the headaches, the insomnia, the whole maggot scenario. You'd think they'd be delighted to be given a second chance, but all you hear from them is nag, nag, nag. Food tastes different, I can't source medical insurance, why doesn't my wife find me attractive anymore? Put a guy like that in charge of a sensitive work portfolio, and watch the whole division become a flatliner. And it affects even the best of us. I've watched a recently deceased CEO of a Fortune 500 firm roll his eyes at the amount of clutter built up on his desk and mumble "What's the point?"
"What's the point?" I told him. "The point is this. In your working life, you've respected every single deadline- except one. As long as you keep hitting all the others, chances are you can continue to default on this."
But even as I said it I knew we had lost him. Within six weeks he had driven his company into the ground. Two months later, he followed it. His second funeral was much the same as his first one, with one fundamental difference- no-one came.
You know what I call these guys? I call them "Wormfood Wannabes". They've pushed and thrusted all their life and now they feel they've earned downtime for all eternity. They hanker for the quiet of the grave. Whereas for me, events ran counter-wise. Before my death, I was the lousiest salesman you could meet. I gave bad handshake. I swore throughout my pitch. I was too fatigued to step up for the clinch. But now that I am gone before, my days are animated with strange energies. Hell, I even clip my heels. I really do! You know that movie where Gene Kelly launches himself off on that old umbrella and slams those hoofs together in the air? Well, that's what I do fifty times a day!
Look at the room we're sitting in right now. Back when I was a gentleman's clothing salesman with Lawless and Gombrich, I'd spend all night in this kind of a room tearing myself apart. Doing sit-ups with my toes curled under the hotel bed. Watching the mosaic channel with the sound turned down, eyes darting round the twenty tiny windows, alert for shows of flesh or violence. Repeatedly flicking onto the in-house pornography, nonchalantly, as if by accident, until my minute's free viewing had expired. Working my melancholy way through the entire minibar, starting with the speciality beer. Reaching for the Gideon at one fifteen am and skim-reading Revelations and the Song of Solomon. Composing rambling messages on the Dictaphone to my estranged wife and kids. Give my love to little. Click. Suzie. Click. She must be three by now. Lying on the bedspread in tomorrow's suit, with motivational tapes playing on the stereo walkman. Listening hard to the elevator machinery at work behind the wall, because for a moment I thought I heard a child, crying.
But look at us today! No drink, no anomie, no dark silences- just two men in a hotel room enjoying a civil chat. And note my burry, modulated tones, the gestures of dispersal and gathering I'm making with my hands, the smiles that bloom and fade throughout the seasons of my speech. You know what all this means? It means I'm in charge of the conversation. Now that my life is done with, I'm finally imposing my control. At times like this I feel too… big for death. At times like this, I'm so excited, so in charge, I want to dip my head into the sea and suck it dry! Yes sir! All in one gulp! And you know what I'd do next? I'd tear down the sky! I'd jump up and rip the sky away in cold blue strips, the way you'd rip away old wallpaper. Then, when I'd finished, I'd reach into that blank space where the sky had been, and, very gently, lift down the sun- and I'd fuck it! That's right! I'd have sex with the sun! And you know something else? The sun would like it!
But I guess I'm going off message on you, kid. I know what you came here to talk about. You wanted the low down on tonight's seminar. You wanted to hear it from the source. Well, I won't say it's a disaster. You want to know what I think? I think it was for the most part a light-hearted and productive session, marred only towards the close by a string of bizarre and tragic accidents. If you need help, I can break the evening down into its pleasant and- let's say- disappointing elements.
tbc

Express Outrage

Today's front page headline in the Daily Express reads: "Bombers Were ALL Spongeing Asylum Seekers". I don't know what I find more depressing:

-the kettle-whistle glee of the whole enterprise (you get the feeling that the Express couldn't be more thrilled if it discovered the bombers had been trained and tooled up by a sleeper squad of one-legged lesbians),

- the open invitation to readers to invert the sentence and infer that spongeing asylum seekers are ALL bombers.

- the implication that the Express was right all along, and none of this would have happened if we'd just thrown out the pesky asylum seekers in the first place. This completely bypasses the fact that the real damage on 7 July was caused by young men of British identity, who came from respected families and were integrated into school and society, but somewhere in their teens or early twenties drifted into fundamentalist violence. Extremism among first generation British Muslims is a complex problem, and it will be quite a challenge to come up with an adequate solution; I really doubt you're going to find one in the Express.

- The weird emphasis on "spongeing". It may not be an argument you want to hear, but the fact that the bombers were asylum seekers is relevant (if it is accurate- see Dick's comment for an alternate view), and will definitely be used by those pressing for stricter asylum controls. The fact that they received benefits is not relevant: unless they were paid in gelignite, it adds nothing to the story.

- And, while I'm at it, that illiterate and redundant "e" in the word "spongeing". I'm not sure if I agree with Martin Amis that style is morality, but this word and the Daily Mail's coinage "Gipsies" are equally offensive from both perspectives. Did they choose "spongeing" for the aesthetic effect: did a sub-editor set out on purpose to make an ugly word even uglier? Or was the "e" inserted for the sake of clarity? Is the Express worried we might think their headline refers to people who spong?

Dead Guy: Part 1

Once or twice a year I might encounter them, my fellow graduates from Chicago GSB, and each time round it's much the same charade. I'm in the business lounge working on a presentation when a face across the aisle suddenly clarifies and shakes itself into focus. "Hey Ronnie," I might say, or "Hey Donny," as the case may be, or possibly "Hey Milt".
"Harry- it is Harry?" they will say. "But I heard there was an accident. I heard you were dead."
"You know something?" I lean towards them with a confidential air. "Officially, I am."
And as soon as they make the decision to beat it, pushing that warm mid-western smile forward and withdrawing everything else from behind it, I know it's time for some showbiz. I reach into my travel wallet and pull out a copy of the death certificate, countersigned by the doctor and the city coroner, which I have had laminated for my speaking tours. (The original remains the property of Lawless and Gombrich- you will find it hanging framed beside the David Hockney portrait of Julian Gombrich in the No.2 Boardroom.)
"Wait a minute," Don or Ron or Milt will say. "It's not… you're not… I mean you? Henry Neville? You're not the Henry Neville? The Dead Guy?"
And it turns out they have actually read my memoir, or listened to the best-selling audiobook read by Judd Nelson, or at least caught one of my guest appearances on the Duke Montana Show, but they never had the slightest idea that this was their Henry Neville, little Harry Neville from Salmon, Idaho, who drank milk straight from the carton and stole his roommate's mail. And though these are people who would not have approached me twenty years ago, something about my appearance today clearly touches them. It can be a little embarrassing sometimes. They relay candid stories of their burgeoning sexual crises. They drop their hands into their laps and wonder if they really are cut out for sales. They talk urgently and in a low voice of how they find themselves in their mid-forties standing in line for the airport metal detectors, worrying not only about x-rays from the detector, but also about coach-travel syndrome and UV exposure in high-altitude aircraft and dehydration and alimony payments and the IRS, yet still having the presence of mind to smile at the female security guard, as they hand her first their titanium samples cases filled with aftershave or feminine hygiene products or footwear, then their crumpled canvas overnight bags, then their mobiles, then (when the alarm first sounds) their coats, then (at the second, tetchier call-back) their keys and their loose change, and finally (when the guard, eyes hooded, takes them to one side and runs the scanner the length of their body) their mock-leather wallets, containing unclaimable receipts and unredeemed electronic keycards and crayon drawings of World-War II dogfights executed in an uncertain, childish hand.
"You're past all this, Harry," they say repeatedly, touching the tip of my sleeve. "You've made it. You're in the clear."
Before I leave, they ask me, with tears of what I presume is gratitude, to sign their courtesy newspaper or boarding card, a request I always go along with, sometimes even dotting the "i" in Neville with a miniature skull and crossbones. And if I have a speaking engagement coming up, I might slip them some complementary fliers for distribution in their place of work. You never know- this deadbeat could be the contact point that nets you your next contract, your next seminar. Not that I need to hustle for work anymore. On the contrary, my diary is fuller now than ever before. I can't deny- death has been good to me.
to be continued

Brontosaurus: A Short Story

Recovered this when clearing out the hard drive of my old, busted computer. Its a very short story I wrote within a year of moving here. London to me then was little more than the sum of its museums, but I was smitten nonetheless. Apologies to both my regular readers who've seen this one before...

Simon was a boy who matched things up. Anna thought it was because he came from a broken home. He would look at your life and offer you a book to shore it up or break it down. He was associative about his pleasures too; he let them scroll out before him, each one conjuring up the next, like hip-hop tags unspooling in his mouth. So, for instance, they were descending to the platform at Angel and suddenly he had to find that dinosaur.
"It's the sweep of the escalator that reminded you," Anna said. "Long and stately. Like a Brontosaurus neck."
"It's not particularly long," Simon said.
"It's the longest escalator in the world," Anna said.
"There's longer in Russia," Simon said.
"That's what brought back the Brontosaurus," Anna said. "The romance of dead empires. Their melancholy fall."
"The world's longest escalator is in Turkmenistan," he said. "It's only got ten steps, but they're each five stories high. Whole families fall into the gaps on either side."
"Angel is as long as these things get," she said. "They disappoint you. Just like dinosaurs."
"I was twenty-five years old when I saw the Brontosaurus and it was even better than I'd imagined," Simon said. "That's the thing about dinosaurs. They never let you down."
"Did you ever have a guardian angel?" Anna said.

When Anna was eleven, the head nun gave the class markers and told them to draw a picture of their guardian angels. Anna drew Pádraig Pearse, the Irish patriot- there was a photograph of him above the blackboard, and he looked like someone she could boss around. Most children drew extreme versions of nuns- nuns with harps, nuns with wings, nuns with halos and talons. One boy drew a battleship, and he was now a senior partner in a Newcastle law firm. Nobody, as far as she recalled, drew dinosaurs.

What she meant to say was this: everything in Simon's life balanced out, apart from herself.

So she was conducting an investigation, was she? Well, to be clear: Simon didn't come from a broken home. Simon came from a warm and caring household. Though there were rules; and the rules were there to be obeyed. Simon came from a home where the lights went out at nine, and the whole family lay there trembling, silent in the dark like dinosaurs.

To get to the dinosaurs, they had to make their way backwards through the birds. There was something spiteful about these old exhibits, something obscene and kinked, mocking both bird and man. The peacock's plume was a dusty, pubic tangle. A hummingbird display was a caseful of heart attacks. When Anna saw the starling flayed and pinned to a board, she realised who the curator was: busy Jack from Whitechapel, the humourless fussbudget with his leather apron and his belt of knives…

So this was it. Simon was escorting her to a crime scene. She would have to sit, hands in lap, beneath the huge catastrophe of bones. Simon would smile proudly, as if the carnage were his handiwork. "Anna," he'd say. "May I introduce my mother? I think you'll like her. She has brains in her head and in her tail."

Anna searched the museum for something redeemable. She saw the skeleton of a giant sloth, with a pelvis you could lounge in. She saw prehistoric dolphins, and a fifty foot long sea crocodile. She saw the petrified head of an Ichthyosaur, found in 1811 on Charmouth Beach by a fossil hunter called Joseph Anning and his eleven year old sister Mary.
"Is that alive?" said a girl.
"No," said her mother. "It was alive. But now its covered in what's the word." The girl raced her brother to the sandwich bar. To herself the mother said: "Cement."
Anna thought the mother had it wrong. The ichthyosaur was the most vital creature she had ever seen. The jaws gleamed, as if narrowly released from the muzzle of the earth, and the iris seemed to be contracting in adjustment to the newer, harsher light. In 1812, Mary Anning returned to the rockface alone and hacked out the creature's neck. Her brother didn't accompany her; he was a young man with a career ahead of him, he had no time for bringing monsters back to life. Mary was working blind, without models, relying on the earth's fragile memory and her own guilelessness. Of course, the earth exaggerated. Who wouldn't, with all that attention, so late in the day? The neck it surrendered was the most beautiful and pointless object in the world. Anna wanted desperately to see the body that bore this rococo caber. But it didn't exist. After the neck, there was nothing else. Mary's excavations let her down. Which meant that innocence could only get you so far along the way. Or else it meant: even the earth forgets.

When she was eleven, Anna made her own monster. She stared at Pearse's face until a thorny part of her went into those soft features. Hers was a contrary angel. His punches never left a mark, but his disregard could crush her utterly. Real boys seemed flimsy in comparison; she sifted them in vain for her angel's weightiness, his fearsome gravity.

"Brontosaurus," Simon said.
In the centre of the lobby stood the storybook figure: backbone spilling gracefully across the squat torso, an elegant bell-curve of bones.
"And that's just a baby," Simon said loudly. "My one took up the whole room."
"It says on the label this is a diplodocus," Anna said.
Simon walked away, fists by his sides. She found him in the Late Cretaceous, striding briskly past the Stegosaurs and Iguanadons as if they were a crew of fairground shrills.
"In Dublin Zoo they had a crocodile that grew too big for his enclosure," Anna said. "There was a narrow groove in the floor of the reptile house, and the crocodile lay wedged in it. The children threw their pennies at his back."
"Children are brutes," Simon said, and she wondered if he was turning into his father. But no, he was just pining for his Brontosaurus.
"Maybe they've put it in storage," she said.
"Maybe it never existed in the first place," Simon said.
Technically, Anna knew that he was right. The first Brontosaurus was created in the 19th century by a man called Othniel Charles Marsh, who fitted up the body of an Apatosaurus with a Camosaurus skull. It was probably an honest mistake. At least, Marsh had no motive for the deception, apart from jealousy. He was desperate to find and name as many species as possible, to spite his deadly rival, Edward Cope. Marsh was not a man who matched things up. He would call the front leg of a specimen one name, the back leg another, the ribcage something else again. Anna imagined sex with Othniel Charles Marsh. She thought of him thrashing around beneath the covers, snorting with greed, breaking her body up into a daft menagerie, a nest of monsters with extraordinary names. Which was the exact opposite of sex with Simon. Simon had sex as if he were putting together a great creature that had lived once, in slower times, shadowing out its heft and shape, articulating the ribs in the dry air, frowning all the while as though engaged in a task of scrupulous creation (though at the end there was always the moment of hilarious failure, when the ladder toppled over and all the great bones clattered to the floor.)

That was when Anna realised. Simon was in love with her. He loved her and he couldn't cope with it. That was what put his calculations out and made him yearn for things that weren't there. He was looking for a counterweight and a brontosaurus wasn't big enough. She felt a rush of something that might have been compassion and might have been pity or alarm. She slid her hand into his, and he squeezed back, so hard it actually hurt, so hard that she could feel the tiny bones in her fingers all compacted together, as if under the weight of centuries, as if they were encased in what's the word? Cement.

Bloggin' the Blog

So what do bloggers do when the danger recedes? Where's the event glamour, the sense of nations' destinies in flux, when all you have for material is the dullard jumble of everyday life? Last Thursday night, after the second wave of bombs, I was up till all hours posting about my own panic and mass panic, and drawing sweeping conclusions about the nature of terror and bravado. I said a lot of things which were shrill and adolescent, but I was writing from a place which was equally shrill and adolescent; when I finished, I felt that, if nothing else, I'd captured my mood at a really strange moment. Now I've got nothing but my own weekend to blog, and I'm finding it a real chore to tart it up for you. I know it's got to happen to everyone eventually; at some stage even Salam Pax will have to blog about the day the plumbers came. Still, you'd think I'd have spent Sunday doing something more relevant. I live in a city which, while no longer traumatised in the strictest sense of the word, could still do with a good backrub now and then. I could have spent the day hearing claim and counterclaim at Speaker's Corner, or walked to a cafe on the Edgeware Road and documented the growing tension and unease. Instead I sat at home and listened to the rain. It was steady, heavy morning rain, like you get in Limerick and movies from Korea. As you listen, you want to put on a folky album as a kind of deft counterpoint, a bit of Sufjan Stevens or Nick Drake. The guy in the flat upstairs beats me to the draw though, and throws on the only album he seems to own, a mid-90s mix of dancefloor chart hits, which, when you can hear nothing but the bassline, actually sounds like a robot baby learning to walk above your head. It starts off steadfast and robust, growing faster and less stable as the breakdown approaches, and then- just when it's at its quickest- there's a resonant bang, a sudden silence, and rising out of it, a querulous, electronic wail. This is the end of the line, you think. Its back in the pram for Roboboy. But soon enough the plucky little fellow gets back on his feet, and here he comes again, stomping away, as bold as ever. Yes, this is how I spent Sunday; listening to my neighbour's awful music, and anthromorphising it. For the record, I think the song in question was "Tocca's Miracle".

Lately I've received a huge amount of unwelcome junk mail about the movie The Wedding Crashers, and I still can't decide if this is the dumbest or most astute marketing tactic in history. I spent Saturday gatecrashing a barbecue on Saturday with my mate Seb, and just to say: it's not as much fun as the flyers make out. To be fair, it was mostly our own fault. We hadn't got the double act dynamics sorted out. Neither of us wanted to be the neurotic ball of energy; both of us were angling for the role of chilled out ladies' man. (From a quick look at the trailer, I guess the film may be facing a similar problem.) Plus, we forgot the golden rule of gatecrashing: you must have an agenda. Crashing itself is only establishing a platform; the real hard work is seizing the party and bringing it where it wants to go. Most parties are pretty willing to be crashed; at base, they are nothing more than the workplace in shorter sleeves, and any added value will either come very slowly from the wine rack or very quickly from the loon in the deerstalker who just fell in the door. And as Seb and I discovered, there's nothing less forgiveable than a gatecrasher who just wants to fit in. For our trouble, we ended up crammed in the corner with the only other stranger there, a guy from the army who spends his time flying helicopters around Iraq. On the face of it, he should have been a solid gold gatecrasher. He had an unusual (and uncheckable) backstory, a plentiful supply of booze, and some strange "back in the Falkands" anecdotes. Plus, he'd brought sausages. If he'd brought the helicopter instead, we could actually have a movie here...

Dummy Blasts

"It's confirmed now," said the assistant at W.H. Smith's as he handed me my change and receipt. "I just heard it. Three more bombs gone off on the tube."
On my way out of the shop I was already on my mobile, firing off emergency texts, texts that sounded like Radiohead album titles (im ok are u ok), to everyone I knew before the networks went down. When I got my first failure notice, it felt like a tiny stab in my side. All around me, I could see other pedestrians work their phones, frowning, jaws set, like old ladies with their beads. (If anyone is interested in making a movie about modern urban disaster this is how it looks. No riots, no lootings, no traffic pile-ups. Just people walking fast with tight faces, staring at their fists.) I stopped at a crossing close to the office. There was a plane banking low over South London, and I watched it for a second, feeling sentimental about how innocent it looked up there in the blue sky, like a pointer on a computer screen. The traffic was growing thicker. I walked past two packed buses pulled in to the kerb and tried not to look at the scared faces on board. For the first time in a week I was aware of the sirens again, coming from every direction, all whooping loud: You See? You See? You See?

It wasn't the big one, of course. It wasn't more than a minor incident. But it did leave me slightly shaken, perhaps more than I had expected. I guess when I blogged here last week, I was wrong about terror. I had only heard half the story. Because we had come through a horrible attack with grace and dignity, I thought we had resisted terror. But that's not the way terror works. Terror isn't a test of character. Terror is bullying written large. And just as strength, popularity and competence are no defence against bullying, so level-headedness and pragmatism don't cut it against terror in the long term. Because the spectacular, straight-ahead attacks, aren't really the day to day business of terror. Terror thrives on the bomb threats, the spur of the moment evacuations, and the dummy blasts, just as bullies live for the feints, the head fakes, the threatening glares. Bullies and terrorists have a common goal: to reach a situation where they lift a finger, and you fly into a panic, or a rage.

Although the details remain unclear, it looked as if today's incident had a pedagogic sheen- it was all about re-inforcement. The inane repetition of the particulars of the first attack (three tubes, one bus) takes what seemed like a random act of violence and invests it with a mysterious significance. A panicking commuter will start to think: why these bus lines? Why these tube stations? What's the link? And if I find it, will it help save my life? This is terror's goal. Terror wants to infantalise us, to reduce us to a state where paranoia and superstition seem like valid survival strategies. In the end, blowing up a train is nothing but violence; horrific, senseless violence. Making us relive it day after day: that's terrorism.

Dog Day Afternoon

So: I shark into Westminster underground, past a row of Evening Standard posters that read: "Sniffer Dogs to Patrol Tube", duck through the ticket gates- and walk straight into a detective out patrolling with his sniffer dogs. It's a photo op, of course. There's a news cameraman spread out on the ground before one dog, encouraging it to snuffle at his lens; he wants the final shot of the report, where the journalist gets to use his witty tag line, and they cut back to the grinning anchorman. Even if you didn't see the cameras, you'd notice that these dogs (I think they are springer spaniels) look exceptionally well groomed. You can't help but feel that this is the telly totty of the police-dog world, and that there's a pitbull with the nose of a perfumier tied to a railing out the back. The banker ahead of me is told to lay his sports bag on the ground and one of the spaniels sniffs it daintily. "Good boy," says the policeman softly, and the banker says "Thank you".

This is towards the close of a long day. About eight hours earlier I'm sitting in a busy street, drinking coffee with Charlie and chatting away about the countryside. Charlie's a decent guy, and modest too; I knew him for months before he ever mentioned his sideline as a stuntsman. Because he's quite slight, he's mostly cast as some kind of doomed child, though he sometimes plays women too: he spent most of last weekend in a wig and pregnancy suit, falling out of a Stena lift for a BBC sitcom. This was an unusual job for him: most of time he works on soaps and advertisements. Casualty and Crimewatch are lifelines. Work on a drama series is the best, he says. By the time you get there, the cast and crew have been living in each others' pockets for weeks, and the place is like a pit of snakes. You turn up, fall off a ladder, and suddenly everyone's your friend. It's like the day the circus comes to town.

Like most people who do extraordinary things, Charlie's an eminently practical guy. But there are no limits to his practicality- it's boundless, almost fundamentalist; he'll try anything as long as he thinks it's do-able. Like the time he wanted a garden, and decided he would build one in his room.
"I needed the space to walk around," he says. "This is before I had the wife and kids. I was on my own and thought: I'll go mad without a garden! I had to make one in the bedroom in the end."
"How did you go about that?"
"It was fairly straightforward. I put tarpaulin down, covered it up with soil and fertilizer, and then just planted away."
"How much soil did you need?"
"Too much," Charlie says. "That was the expensive part. About two carloads full. It was a huge room, much bigger than I thought. At first I was looking to get away with a sprinkle on the ground, but I ended up going about a foot, a foot and a half deep? Up as far as the lip of the pond."
"You had a pond?"
"Ah, yeah. Nothing too fancy, though. You know those plastic pond moulds you can buy? Just filled one up with water, threw in a few fish, and there you go."
"And the garden itself?"
"Mostly grass; grass from seed. Planted a couple of flowers, a few trees. Miniatures. Not bonzai, but miniatures. Shrubs that looked like trees. I was going to roll out some turf, but I thought that was going a bit far. It looked quite nice, though. I had one of those daylight bulbs, and you could just walk in there, put on a rainforest tape, with the frogs and the rain and the thunder in the distance, and it was like a different world."
"How long did you keep it?"
"Only a few months. Had to throw it out in the end. The soil was always muddy because the water wouldn't drain. Cutting the grass was a nightmare too. I had to go around the room, on my knees, with a little pair of scissors. And then about July the flies came out. You know those tiny little black flies?"
"I know those flies," I say. "I stayed in a flat once, where vegetables went off in the kitchen, and those flies were everywhere."
"All of a sudden," Charlie says. "Suddenly they appear."
"Just like that," I say. "That's the kind of flies they are."
"And I don't know where they came from," Charlie says.
"The thing is, you can't get rid of them," I say.
"The thing is, they keep on coming back," Charlie says. "I sprayed them with insect spray and all."
"They probably hatched out of the soil," I say. "The eggs were probably in it all along."
"That's what I thought too," he says. "I sprayed a couple of times, but no effect."
"No use?" I say.
"They kept on coming back," Charlie says.
There is a lengthy pause.
"Plus you get sick of sleeping on top of the wardrobe after a while," Charlie says.
I look out the window at the heavy traffic. Rush hour is just beginning. In twenty minutes these roads will be jammed. Above us, airplanes are stacked in a holding pattern, waiting for clearance.
"Yeah," I say. "I guess maybe you do."

E-mails from the Dead: Part Four

To: "the kids"
From: Martinvandervelt@deadmail.com
Subject: Last words

You will, I'm sure, remember the moment before I died, when I motioned you all closer with my hand, held your gaze in mine for what seemed to be an eternity, and whispered: "The emeralds are in the glove compartment". Just a quick note to say: I've no idea what I meant by this. You know those comments that come into your head at completely the wrong moment? I was feeling nervous as hell and you were all hunched up so close with these solemn faces on and, between one thing and the next, I guess it just popped out.

Of course I realise in hindsight that this was a completely irresponsible act, even for a dying man. Let's just say I feel wholly to blame for the downward spiral of violence, paranoia, litigation and car-jacking that has since humbled our once-proud family. I feel obliged to make things up to you- and that is why I'm finally breaking silence on the 35 solid gold Krugerrand tucked behind the kitchen skirting board. (So now you know why Alison got so obsessed with home improvement all of a sudden... Only kidding, Alison!)

I know I might have talked a bit of "blarney" in the past, but this time, I'm serious. Honestly, I am. The gold is real. Go check. Just make sure you get there first :-)

Do me proud, kids!

All my love,
Martin

Would Batman Ever Stop Beginning, Please?

There is a scene towards the end of Batman Begins where Bruce Wayne (Christian Bale) must feign boorish drunkenness in order to rescue his party guests from danger. He stands up to deliver a speech, which rapidly turns into a bratty (if accurate) rant against parasites and arrivistes, sending everyone spinning out of the room, ripe with indignation. Once the guests are safe, Wayne turns to face his real enemies, who have used the party as cover to access his mansion. You're waiting for a payoff where he attacks these humourless blowhards with the exact same cocktail of ridicule and jockish arrogance, but the opposite occurs; Bale turns down the volume and reacts instead with coiled agression, all blanked out gaze and steely monotone. There is a subtle disconnect here; you're waiting for the Joker, and instead you get Batman.

As it turns out, this scene holds the key to Batman Begins. It's a sober movie pretending to be drunk. For one and a half hours it sells itself as a summer spectacle, endlessly digressive, jumping around in time and space and picking up cameos, set pieces and serious amounts of kit along the way. It charms the audience into accepting its magpie instincts and leisurely pace- and suddenly, in the last half-hour, it reveals itself as a lean, merciless thriller. You leave the theatre shocked and impressed by qualities you're not supposed to register in blockbuster cinema: economy, symmetry, sparesness. Whether its clinicism would seem quite as admirable if it hadn't come in the door all shaggy haired and crazy-eyed is a point well worth considering.

The opening is an orthodox enough piece of psychodrama. A young Wayne falls into an abandoned well, and is enveloped by a swarm of bats. As it turns out, this is a pretty neat analogy for what will happen to the viewer over the next half hour or so. We cut to the adult Wayne, astray in the wastes of China, who is recognised and taken up by Liam Neeson’s authoritarian ninja. Neeson trains him in a workcamp among the glaciers, alternately dispensing beatings and Nietzschean epithets that bristle with abstract nouns; it's The Magic Mountain with extra broadswords. Fear, and the conquering of same, feature prominently in Neeson's spiritual programme, but so do justice, rage, vengeance, corruption, purity. After a while, it is impossible for the audience to screen or process this information; we sit dully in Neeson's mesh of abstractions like bees in a smoked hive.

The Chinese scenes are intercut with flashbacks telling us how Wayne came from pampered child of billionaire philanthropists to this hollow-cheeked wraith lost in the borderlands. As if one primal scene wasn't enough, now we get a chain of them, each opening out into the next. So, the young Wayne is brought to the opera (Wagner, don't you know) as a treat following his rescue from the bats. But his fear reasserts itself, and as his parents are spiriting him out through a side door they encounter a petty mugger and are killed. Much later, Wayne lies in wait for his father's killer at the courtroom, only to be beaten to the draw by a bigger, meaner criminal. So he poses as a deadbeat and sets off for China, thinking he can undermine all criminals by learning how to understand the criminal mindset. Yes, you think, as each new plot point reveals itself, very neatly phrased; now would Batman ever stop beginning please?

Luckily, just when the movie seems overloaded with abstraction and exposition, Michael Caine's Alfred arrives in a jet to haul Wayne back to Gotham City and the present. In his past decade of movies Caine has alternated between two archetypes- stalwart gentleman and cheeky Cockney; in playing Alfred he gleefully mixes up the two. Never have Caine's cocky silences been better used; until he opens his mouth you don't know what you're getting- the butler or the rogue. As the "interior" Wayne, Christian Bale also has two modes: "haunted" and "vacant"; as the Batman identity coalesces, he begins to add "robotic" to that mix. Ironically, it is in playing his cover-act, Bruce Wayne as obnoxious, vulgar, tabloid billionaire, that Bale comes alive; here alone he seems vivid and dangerous. Bale seems to take pleasure in Wayne's ostentatious bad behaviour, and the audience is happy to cheer him along. The following section sees the most of the public Wayne and it is the happiest part of the movie. The plotting may appear predictable, but the casting and the performances are always trying to push you off course. Rutger Hauer takes on the Tom Wilkinson role- a tightassed but vaguely corruptible steward of the Wayne family fortune. Tom Wilkinson appears also, and in a sporting gesture, has a pop at Rutger Hauer's part; the ruthless, larger than life gangster kingpin. Wilkinson is a little gamey, but Hauer, underacting for once in a sensible business suit, is all rapt stillness- he doesn't do much, but you can't take your eyes off him.

As Wayne vows to avenge his father and hijacks his own fears for traction, his first adversary is also making solid progress- Dr Crane, as played by Cillian Murphy, is a superlatively nasty young psychologist conducting dodgy research into the nature of fear at Arkham Asylum. Murphy has one great moment, and you’ve all seen it in the trailer: where he smiles and taunts the Batman while the camera swoops batlike beneath his chin. You sense at this moment how his impish malevolence could take hold of this movie, perhaps matching and bringing out Bale's own petulance. It would certainly set up a satisfying climax, where the mask slips and Bale's native arrogance is allowed bleed into the Batman template. But the opportunity is lost; Murphy soon puts on a hessian sack and transforms into the Scarecrow; he spends the last act of the movie on a horse, galumphing expressionalistically around Gotham's seedier districts.

The good guys aren't given as much leeway, although Gary Oldman, another formidable ham, is impressively tamped down as Lieutenant Gordon, the only decent cop on Gotham's force (he actually looks like a straightforward transfer from the original DC cartoon). As a crusading district attorney, Katie Holmes doesn't make much of an impression in a role that is stranded in the barren land between victim and sidekick; you feel her part was written to fill in the psychological territory between the other players. "You're not the man I fell in love with," she tells Bruce at one stage, but there's no sense of how or when this happened, and the script doesn't bother telling us what kind of man he was (it seems odd, given the car-crash of his back-story, that Wayne was ever not haunted by his parent's death). Holmes' only way to engage the audience lies in her prior understanding of Wayne; when she refuses to even play this card, her part dies at the source.

Not that the director seems to mind. In fact, as the movie goes on, you notice how little time Nolan has for the stage-business of superhero movies. Action sequences are practically unreadable; all fights are cut in rapid saccades, which I think are supposed to evoke the inital attack of the bats, but may also mask a distaste for the overt violence of the summer hit. Even when Nolan endorses the formula, he follows it through in a perverse, bassackwards way. There is a lengthy sequence where Wayne painstakingly assembles an arsenal of Batmaniana, but despite a huge potential for in-jokes and mischief, Nolan decides to play it disturbingly straight. He even adopts a respectful documentary tone, as if he is chronicling the details of a corporate raider's well thought out campaign. (It doesn't help that a billionaire like Wayne needn't do anything genuinely exciting in order to set up his new identity. Wayne orders most of his costume out of a catalogue; the rest of his gear he appropriates from a secret lab, with the approval of twinkly scientist Morgan Freeman, gradually, day by day, as if he were checking books out of a college library).

The film's greatest stylistic risk is with the superhero format. The money quote from Sam Raimi's Spiderman- "With great power comes great responsibility"- also blows the lid on the superhero movie. It's there to tell adolescents how to control and tame (but not renounce) the powers of maturity, and warns them of the pleasures and sacrifices this involves. With Batman Begins, Nolan inverts the equation. Batman Begins is about great responsibility on the hunt for some decent power it can throw around. Batman's quest is cumulative, just one thing after another- a car, a cape, a mask; once he has conquered his fear, he finds it easy to convert it into further capital. The villains he opposes are straightforward and confident in doing evil (full of great irresponsibility), and they are not so much lined up against Batman as they are ranged alongside him, all engaged in parallel searches for kit and leverage. Sometimes it feels like you are observing different players of the same board game, taking turns to roll the dice and make their selfish moves.

This all seems relatively mean-spirited; and I would just like to step out of character here and state that I hugely enjoyed the movie, and came out of it buzzing with excitement and ideas. But, looking back, the pleasure was all formal. Like Memento, Batman Begins is a puzzle movie. Unlike Memento, it doesn't have any application to our own lives. And whenever Nolan tries to aim bigger- tries to load the script with references to the war on terror- his observations seem incohate and scattergun. The constant namechecking of fear as the source of Batman's miseries and strengths tells us that Nolan has watched the BBC series The Power of Nightmares, but it doesn't tell us anything else. As the flawed father substitute, Hauer occasionally seems to be assaying a Cheney impersonation. The skinny, drawn Wayne who arrives China has something of the look of John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban. On the other hand, Bale's caricature of Bruce Wayne, billionaire, owes a lot to George Walker Bush- the drunk scene in particular seems to feed off footage of the 70s oil fortune heir. Later, in a more sympathetic moment, Bale seems to quote Bush again, this time to evoke the dilemma of the War President- a downhearted, confused man, clambering through the rubble in freshly pressed chinos. But there is no real consistency to the parallels, these are merely glancing blows. The only real message the film transmits is the old Pied Piper adage: don't try to harness extremism to accomplish pragmatic goals. If your goals are themselves extreme, then, as this Batman demonstrates, with his costumes and gadgets and impressive psychological toolkit, you can harness whatever the hell you want, just as long as you budget properly.

A very smart coda sets the franchise up for sequels- it turns out that the revamped, safer Gotham will also be an ideal arena for grotesque supercriminals. Yet you feel that if you lived in the city, you would welcome the influx of cartoon villains- they might jazz up the place a little. This highlights what I think is the movie's fundamental flaw. Gotham is lovingly realised- part eighties New York, part contemporary Moscow, part Sixties Hong Kong, with a sublimely hokey World Fair monorail- but its people remain severely underdeveloped. Everyone is either a hoodlum or a hero; there is no sense of regular folk trying to go about their lives. You miss the democratic razzmatazz of the Superman movies; you miss the sense of a town worth fighting for. Nolan must have noticed this lack early in editing, as his action sequences now come capped with a range of clumsy reaction shots. Usually these consist of the most vapid stage-business (a parking lot attendant sees the Batmobile roar past and looks disbelievingly at his coffee cup), but they are shot in a jerky offhand manner, with deliberately awful timing, as if trying to wriggle away from their own cheesiness. Unfortunately the distancing works; despite his protestations, it seems that Bale's Batman ultimately has nothing at stake beyond his own needs. Batman Begins is a neat movie; it has made all the connections, except for the one that really matters. This film, and its hero, show at least as much contempt for the common people of Gotham as does Neeson’s quasi-fascist mandarin.

E-mails from the Dead: Part Three

To: Mikemoore25@yahoo.com, moored11@yahoo.com, "work", "school", "friends"
From: Mary_moore@deadmail.com

Subject: FW: fw: fw: FW: Pass this on to 15 people OR ELSE...

Guys,
I didn't!!!

M

Attachment: gypsycurse.doc (17Kb)

E-mails from the Dead: Part Two

To: Buddies, "Mom", "Steven P.", Workmates, "Jojo"
From: Stephanie_Adamms@deadmail.com
Subject: Hi all!!

Can you believe it????? I just got here and it turns out they have the net!!! Now I can mail you guys from beyond the grave!!! Is that amazing or what??? No, I couldn't believe it myself. It IS amazing. Wow.

Other than that I've no real news.

Ttyl

Steff

Welcome on board

First up, welcome to the blog. I hope you like it. It's supposed to be funny, mostly, though this entry just happens to be incredibly po-faced. The title for the blog is from a song I love by Jubilee Allstars, and the motto comes from a song-title by Joan of Arc (perhaps fittingly, the song itself is enormously underwhelming.)

When I first planned this blog, just over a week ago, my main worry was finding enough material to keep it alive. As it turns out, material wasn't really my problem. All Saturday, while I was trying out templates and typefaces, I had to shut the window to drown out the world's largest charity concert taking place in the park across the road. It was harder to ignore the consumately tweedy crowds coming down Victoria Wednesday at lunchtime wearing London 2012 rosettes (though, by the set of them, it could have read 1912, and they could just as easily have been celebrating the Titanic's maiden voyage and the resolution of the first Balkan war). And then came Thursday 7th and all the fear and shock and pain that followed... But I'm still reluctant to put any of this on the blog. It's not like I've actually witnessed anything of note, and there are enough people out there telling important stories about these days, stories which matter, stories which make a difference. But still, I can't help thinking that Samuel Pepys would have managed to squeeze a couple of decent chapters out of a week like that.

As it happens, I have little new to say about Thursday and Friday, mainly because I spent both days and nights stuck at work. My abiding memory of Thursday 7th was the weather. It really was a dog of a day. Every so often you'd look out the window and think: they're bombing London- AND it's raining. I work on a main artery into the city centre, and occasionally columns of bedraggled Londoners evacuated from a train or tube station would march past, like a sodden commuter army in retreat.

Since I returned to London on Monday I've been trying to get a feel for how life here has changed. This is not, and never will be, a touchy-feely city, but there is a growing amount of consideration on display. It also seems like there are a lot more emergency vehicles about- mostly plain clothes police whizzing about in unmarked cars. You're very aware of all the localised security alerts and incidents that don't make it onto the news. I got off the tube at Westminster this evening, to find that the Houses of Parliament had been evacuated in the middle of a garden party. All the guests, including a slew of Jilly Cooper lookalikes, Norman Lamont and, bizarrely enough, Paul Daniels, waited with the Italian backpackers on the path outside, wearing fixed smiles but not quite sure whether they needed to keep talking to each other outside the party paradigm. After a while, an elderly man appeared on a balcony and waved delightedly to the guests: he was wearing some kind of ceremonial dress, but it was difficult to tell at this distance whether he was an Usher or a Lord. He pointed to his watch and performed an outsized shrug, then traced a huge question mark in the air with his hand. The guests had stopped paying attention, but a nice couple from Wisconsin gave him an enthusiastic thumbs up, and he seemed happy enough with that.

So, what happens now? Is it time to draw lessons from Thursday yet? Or am I crossing an invisible picket line? Because I'm all set with the sweeping generalisations over here. For a start, the whole stoic thing. Up to last week, I had completely misunderstood the concept of the British stiff upper lip. A diet of Noel Coward movies had convinced me that the famous British doughtiness was merely a side-effect of a particularly stunted emotional life. But what I and Coward missed was the vital social function of stoicism. Being sanguine in the face of emergency is an act of enormous civic generosity. Calm spreads as quickly as panic, for exactly the same reason: it's very easy to remain cool when everyone around you is acting as if nothing extraordinary has happened. Also, and this is something I'd never imagined, staying calm can be fun. Andrew Sullivan places British stoicism on a par with British humour; I'd argue that the two are more closely related than you'd think. A chat with friends in the pub becomes a competition about who can display the least concern for life and limb. Sometimes it feels as if the whole city is participating in a particularly deadpan Monty Python sketch. We're practically winking at each other as we ignore the Sky News bulletins playing in front of our faces and talk about tennis and the Lions tour and Darren Clarke, of all people.

A final impression is that by placing bombs on the underground, the terrorists completely misread the role of the tube in the life of the city- its attraction and its strangeness. Terror asserts its power by taking comfortable places and making them suddenly threatening- but no-one is ever really comfortable on the tube in the first place. As a strategy for propagating fear, targeting the tube is just about as effective as planting bombs in dentists' waiting rooms. The risk of a bomb becomes just another one of the portfolio of risks you take on board when entering the tube (discomfort, heat, vermin, muggers, accidents, delays), and weigh up against its enormous convenience. Terror aims to destroy innocence, but tube travellers aren't innocents; they're pragmatists from the word go. Also, when calculating the effects of the bomb I don't think you can ignore the cussed affection this city has for its underground. Without getting all Iain Sinclair on you, the tube is no ordinary transport network; plenty of people see it as the id of the city, its catacombs, its great big dirty secret. You can see it at its plainest in the blogosphere- I can't think of a blog about London that doesn't secretly fancy itself as a blog about the tube. People here have been obsessing over, arguing with, complaining about and projecting onto the underground for more than 150 years, and it would take a bigger man than Bin Laden to interfere with that relationship.

E-mails from the Dead: Part One

To: Ariel-cummins34@lycos.com
From: Anne.cummins@deadmail.com
Subject: haunting moments

My dearest daughter,

You know the way sometimes you're testing the water for a shower, and there seems to be a shiver in the air, even though a thick mist has already gathered on the medicine cabinet mirror, and just then you sense a ghostly presence in the room, right behind your shoulder, bathing all your actions in a serene, unworldly glow, and automatically you glance around and softly call out "mom"?

Well, that's not me. It's your great-uncle Marvin. And you know what he was like. So be careful now, is all I'm saying.

Your loving mother,
Anne

Important Staff Memo

To: all staff
From: T.R. Barney, CEO

Here at Thunder Lizard Incorporated we remain upbeat about the longterm economic outlook. Those freak electrical storms and solar flares can't go on for ever, and we're confident that the thick pall of smoke covering the Earth's surface will disperse by the middle of next quarter. Still, the slowdown has given us a perfect opportunity to take stock of our situation, and maybe make the changes needed to meet the growing challenge from the mammalian sector. Once the upswing kicks in, we'll have to work 24/7 on maintaining and devouring our customer base, so it is vital that we roll out our comprehensive restructuring programme AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. From next Monday, we will be instituting important changes in all of the following areas:

Outlook: We Tyrannosaurs are used to thinking of ourselves within certain parameters: strength, brutality, appetite. Maybe we should ask the question: is such a rigid paradigm helpful? Or does it actually limit our openness to change? Some other terms we could explore instead: exoticism, fragility, allure.

Stature: In order to survive a future downturn we need to become smaller and more flexible. How much smaller? Well, currently the average staff-member measures fifteen feet eight inches from tip to tail. If we can shave fifteen feet off that figure, then I think we're finally getting close to where we want to be.

Vulnerability: Armour plating. Who needs it? It's ugly, expensive and- frankly- passé. What I'm proposing is swapping our ironclad hides for state-of-the-art feather technology. Leave the hard shells to the throwbacks and the herbivores and come frolic in the future in your nets made out of air. Feathers may seem lightweight- even delicate- but at the slightest hint of danger they "ruffle", creating a forcefield that is, we believe, virtually impenetrable. Don't take our word for it. Try them and see!

Rapacity: I'm afraid a mouthful of razor-sharp fangs is another luxury we'll have to forgo in these troubled times. To promote the spirit of austerity, all staff will issued with what we are calling a Beak, which team members will use to provide a range of grooming and carrion disposal services to the strategically important large reptile market.

Dexterity: I'm sure you will be glad to hear that our freakishly undersized forearms will be scrapped immediately, as R&D begin work on updated arms more suited to the needs of the modern sauropod. Unfortunately, this will necessitate a brief transition period during which staff will be asked to work with no forearms at all. I want to assure you that this is a purely temporary measure, and that full mobility should be restored by the beginning of next quarter. In the meantime, you should have no difficulty using your Beaks to carry out the full range of workplace tasks- all the way from typing to piercing foil-topped beverages to tugging on office-supply elastic bands. Ongoing construction projects will remain unaffected, provided that they can be completed using a slightly more restricted range of materials, such as blades of grass, saliva and small twigs.

Transport: Here's the good news: to cut down on commuting and parking costs, all executives will be issued with wings. "So we'll be flying?" my assistants ask me. "Like pteranodons?" Exactly! I reply. Just like pteranodons! Only we'll be smaller, slower and ten times more appetising. Until further notice, staff are advised to stay well clear of all pteranodons.

One more detail: due to cost constraints, not all staff will be able to participate in the changeover. Unfortunately this means that all of us at senior management will have to wait a full six months before assuming avian form. Obviously, this is a huge personal disappointment, but it won't stop me from overseeing your transformation with interest- and with pride. When I think of arriving at the premises Monday morning, and seeing a thousand newly-fledged birds gathered in the lobby, "ruffling" their plumage, exposing their songsters' throats to me in a hymn of welcome and uplift, I feel so suddenly, ridiculously happy that my outmoded slashing-claws begin to tremble, and tears of joy run freely from my piercing, gimlet eyes.