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Tag Archives: The French Revolution
September 4, 2012 · 10:42 pm
The Introduction to "The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption"
If you're curious about my new book The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, Gothic Fiction from 1794-Present, here is the introduction to the book, giving insight not only into what the book is about but also why the Gothic is so popular and why it matters today.
Our Long Love Affair with the Gothic
While yet a boy I sought for ghosts, and sped
Through many a listening chamber, cave and ruin,
And starlight wood, with fearful steps pursuing
Hopes of high talk with the departed dead.
I called on poisonous names with which our youth is fed;
I was not heard—I saw them not—
When musing deeply on the lot
Of life, at that sweet time when winds are wooing
All vital things that wake to bring
News of birds and blossoming,—
Sudden, thy shadow fell on me;
I shrieked, and clasped my hands in ecstasy!
— Percy Bysshe Shelley, "Hymn to Intellectual Beauty"
I love the Gothic. Most of us do, even if we don't know exactly what the term "Gothic" means. It may mean different things to all of us, yet those things are closely related. Some of us might think of the Goth look where teenagers wear all black. Others might think of Gothic cathedrals. And a smaller percentage of us might think about classic Gothic literature—the great eighteenth and nineteenth century novels of Mrs. Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and several others.
We love the Gothic partly because we have a fascination with being scared. I love to be scared—I don't go for the gory horror films of today, but I love suspense and the greatest Gothic literature builds up such suspense. But more importantly, Gothic literature reveals much about who we are, what we fear, and to what we aspire.
I was always fascinated with the Gothic—commonly called horror, or simply, when I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s, what was "scary." I didn't know the term Gothic and wouldn't know it until well into high school, but I knew the Munsters, the Addams Family, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Broom-Hilda the Witch, and countless other characters in popular culture from that time who were often watered down children's versions of the Gothic.
I remember the "Creature Feature" film being shown Saturday afternoons on TV50 from Detroit, and I loved Love at First Bite (1979) starring George Hamilton as Dracula—when it was broadcast on TV for the first time, my brother and I had a big fight over the TV (we only had one in the house in those days) because it was aired opposite Yogi's First Christmas, which he wanted to watch.
I was the proud owner of the Weebles Haunted House complete with Weebles that "wobble but they don't fall down"—including the witch with a removable pointy hat, a glow-in-the dark ghost, two Weeble children to be scared, secret panels, trapped doors, and a treasure chest with bats inside. All of it scary but wonderful!
In fourth grade, I was Dracula for Halloween—I remember still the thrill of running so my cape would flap in the wind, and I can still taste the plastic vampire teeth. Nor did I ever miss going through a Haunted House at the fair, and my friends and I commonly played haunted house, turning our bedrooms or the family room into a mansion of monsters and ghosts. Again, I was always Dracula.
And perhaps best of all, I owned the wonderfully dramatic record The Story of Dracula, the Wolfman and Frankenstein from Power Records. This fabulous 33 1/3 record came with a read along book in graphic novel form (we called them comic books back then) and it combined into one dramatic tale the stories of its title characters. I played this record over and over again and still have my copy today. I constantly quoted it to others, including the pivotal scene when the werewolf (oddly not the Wolfman but Vincent von Frankenstein's girlfriend Erika—Wolfwoman, I guess) attacks the Count, causing him to become enraged and reveal himself by declaring, "You dare!! You dare lay your paws on me! On me?! Low beast, you'll die for this, die at the hands of the Prince of Darkness…FOR I AM DRACULA!" Recently, when I was working on this introduction, I dug out the record to engage in nostalgia and left it on my coffee table. My brother came over to visit and saw the record there and rolled his eyes. When I asked whether he wanted to listen to it, he said, "No, I never want to have to listen to that record again." Apparently, I played it one—or maybe fifty—too many times.
But all these details could be dismissed as children's games and just good fun (despite the fanatics who would ban The Wizard of Oz, or more recently, the Harry Potter books and films because they contain depictions of witchcraft). Only, I think on some innocent level that I could not have articulated when I was ten years old, I was even then searching for meaning—to understand the mystery of life, even if it were only the simplified notion of good and evil. I was a very religious child who had read the entire Bible by fifth grade, loved to play at being various characters from the Bible—mostly Moses or Jacob—and wanted to grow up to be a priest. So if I were such a "religious nut"—as one friend called me—how do I explain my fascination with horror and the supernatural?
And how explain my curiosity over an activity that countless children have attempted over the years? Yes, I am one of those many children who locked himself in the bathroom in the dark, stared into the bathroom mirror, and then tried to find out whether it was true that if I could say, "Bloody Murder!" one hundred times without blinking, the devil would appear in the mirror. But I was never able not to blink before I could say it one hundred times, or I would inevitably lose count.
Still, the quest for forbidden knowledge was strong in me at an early age. The fascination with Good and Evil thrilled me like it does many children, but I wanted proof that the supernatural forces of Good and Evil truly existed. Years later, when I discovered Percy Shelley's lines quoted above, I was stunned by how perfectly he captured what I felt, his experiences matching mine of nearly two centuries later. And like Shelley, I eventually grew to love Intellectual Beauty.
As I reached my teen years, I discovered literature, having always loved to read, and soon novels like Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights and the works of Charles Dickens and Jane Austen became my primary fascination. It would be Jane Austen who really converted me into being a disciple of the Gothic. When I was about sixteen, I listened to an audio book version of Northanger Abbey with an introduction that explained the novel's purpose as a satire of the Gothic novels, particularly of Mrs. Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794). Of course, I had to read Mrs. Radcliffe. Her novel had to be special ordered from the bookstore and although it was well over 600 pages, I devoured it in a week, reading it every free minute before and after school. The prose was beautiful, the suspense fabulous, the Gothic world frighteningly fascinating. I went on to read the rest of Radcliffe's novels while I was still a teenager as well as reading other Gothic classics like Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764) and William Beckford's Vathek (1786). Dracula (1897) and Frankenstein (1818) followed, and in college when I discovered the Romantic poets, I could put all these books into context.
What was it about these books that thrilled me so much? Why did The Mysteries of Udolpho seem like such a wonderfully pleasant book to read, as well as a suspenseful page-turner? What about Dracula made me afraid to go to sleep, yet want to read it again—and enjoy the original novel so much more than the film versions of it—save for Coppola's fabulous Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)? I don't know that I asked myself that question until the late 1990s when my fascination with literature and my desire to be a novelist led me to being a Ph.D. candidate in the literature program at Western Michigan University. The result would be my writing a dissertation titled The Gothic Wanderer: From Transgression to Redemption, which has now been expanded into this book. And I wasn't the only enthusiastic student of the Gothic—at least two of my fellow doctoral candidates at the time also wrote about the Gothic in their dissertations.
Of all the subjects a person could write a dissertation on, why did I choose nineteenth century Gothic novels? I also loved Dickens, the Arthurian legend, Anthony Trollope, eighteenth century epistolary novels—why choose the Gothic over one of these topics? The reason was because I could relate to the Gothic; it resonated with me in ways those other great literary works did not at that time in my life. And I wanted to write about why it resonated with me, why I thought the Gothic mattered so much to people—I wanted to write what was called a "reader-response" dissertation, but I was dissuaded from it by my professors—told it would not be good for my academic career.
Now that I have long since left academia behind, I can straightforwardly say that academics too often forget that while they are the keepers of the culture, in order to pass that culture on, they have to show people why that culture matters—how it still relates to them. While at Western Michigan University, I had the opportunity to co-teach a class on the British Survey of Literature with Dr. Stephanie Gauper. During that class, she commented to me about my teaching, "The students like you because you make them understand how the literature is relevant to their lives. Most teachers don't do that." I always felt that was one of the greatest compliments I ever received. And while, in my dissertation, I made the mistake not to explain why the Gothic mattered and was still relevant to our lives, in this book, written for a wider audience, I wish to remedy that by stating that the Gothic is very relevant to our lives, that it speaks to us today, two hundred years after the great Gothic novels were written because what the people in the decades following the French Revolution and during the Victorian period dreamt, feared, longed for, and sought, is still what we dream, fear, long for, and seek today. The Gothic is perhaps the most relevant piece of literature for the twenty-first century, and its continuation in the novels of Stephen King and Anne Rice, the popular books and films of the Twilight series, and the countless vampire books, films, and television series being produced each year, testify to this fact.
But how does it speak to us? Why is it still relevant to us? Let me give one more example from my own history to make my point.
In the fall of 1995, I moved to Kalamazoo, Michigan, in the same state as my hometown of Marquette, but nearly five hundred miles from home—in fact on a different peninsula—I might as well have been in another state, in some ways, in another country. I had culture shock in Kalamazoo—it was the big city compared to what I was used to—I didn't know the people, the city streets, the weather, the mindset of those people. I was isolated, lonely, and downright miserable in Kalamazoo, wondering why I had ever made the decision to leave my hometown, but realizing the job market in Upper Michigan offered nothing for me, so I would have to go on to finish my degree, to become an English professor, and to take a job wherever one might exist—meaning I would never get to return home. I felt even more depressed and despairing when I looked at the future. If not for good friends and family and a telephone to talk to them on, I never would have gotten through those years. I would have defined these feelings as homesickness if I had not discovered a better word for it. That word I learned that first semester at Western Michigan University while taking a course on the Brontë sisters.
I decided in that class to write my final paper on the theme of colonialism in the Brontës' novels. In my research, I came across the term "displacement" to describe the African character in one of the Brontës' juvenilia. Instantly, I understood that word as perfectly describing my own feelings and experience. I was displaced. I was convinced that while I loved teaching and studying literature, I would never get to go home—I felt depressed when not terrorized by the thought. The job market in academia was such that it was unlikely I would ever find a tenure-track job at Northern Michigan University in Marquette. I foresaw myself moving from one university to another, always separated from my family and friends.
I stuck it out to finish my Ph.D. but my feelings of displacement did not get better. The job market—academia itself—was largely a nightmare—the MLA convention like a massive haunted house of pale young men in black suits, looking like blood-drained humans, fearful of interviewers yet hoping to be hired for tenure-track jobs. When I did find a job, it was a lowly one-year instructor position at Clemson University where I was given the equally "blood-draining" task of teaching up to 107 students per semester in a variety of composition and British literature survey courses (one literature and three composition sections). I had, consequently, upwards of five hundred papers per semester to grade and was paid $24,000 a year. And I had to do it in a hellishly hot climate I hated, while again feeling displaced. I have no doubt many people love Kalamazoo and South Carolina and I do not wish to disparage those places—my point is that I was unhappy and felt like a Gothic wanderer in them. Equally, we are all shaped by our individual preferences, likes and dislikes, and we all have different levels of tolerance. Here in Marquette, Michigan, I'm sure many people find our long winters and 200+ inches of snow per winter equally hellish, as roads between six foot snowbanks become like Gothic labyrinths, and bone-chilling temperatures seem like undeserving torture. Any place can be interpreted as "Gothic" if we so choose because Hell is in the mind—and the Gothic is nothing if not an exploration of human psychology and what we fear, as well as how we choose to let guilt and fear color our perspectives—one man's transgression may be another man's freedom.
And while my personal example may not seem nightmarish to most, it was like torture to me at the time, and it was in the midst of that nightmare that I began my doctoral dissertation. I chose to write about the Gothic wanderer because I felt myself to be like a Gothic wanderer, displaced and wandering through the mysterious maze of academia and the academic job market. In the chapters that follow, while I will discuss the Gothic novels themselves without commentary on how their themes relate to our lives today—something I don't doubt my readers can figure out for themselves, let me here briefly list a few examples of how these Gothic wanderer figures speak to who we—men and women, young and old, rich and poor, from all races and religions—are today, and who we have always been.
The Gothic's popularity arose at the time of the French Revolution as people questioned the legitimacy of their government—the monarchy—as well as the governments that replaced it, and the entire social order and its institutions, especially organized religion. Paranoia and conspiracy theories were common—our political concerns have not changed much today and continue to be reflected in our fiction. Just as the early Gothic novels theorized that certain secret societies were manipulating the French Revolution, today, we are no less fascinated by conspiracy theories—whether it be Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code with its alleged revelation of the Catholic Church's cover-up of the lost bloodline of Christ's children via Mary Magdalene (the Gothic has always loved to pick on the Catholic Church), or beliefs that the government is withholding information from us about everything from terrorists to UFOs. In the twenty-first century, the U.S. Government has even been accused by some of staging the 9/11 terrorist attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq.
Concerns about the patriarchal system, legitimate children, and the sanctity of the family were common in early Gothic novels—how much more today when divorce is prevalent and children are frequently born outside of marriage, mothers take men to court and have DNA paternity tests given to verify who a child's father may be, while in politics we hear about the need to return to "family values."
The Wandering Jew is one of the key figures in the Gothic, and although we may not be cursed to wander like him, our jobs and the economy often force us to move to unfamiliar places, to find employment in sectors we feel uncomfortable with, to experience displacement. At the same time, the Wandering Jew is a metaphor for the plight of the Jewish people. The effects of the Holocaust—a horror the nineteenth century Gothic novelists never could have imagined—still haunt us, and the Jewish people still struggle with prejudice and violence directed against them, even after having a homeland established in Israel.
The Rosicrucian Gothic wanderer is obsessed with finding the secret to eternal life. Are we any less obsessed with it today when we value youthfulness, and when studies predict that half of Americans born in the late twentieth century will live to see age one hundred? The Gothic fascination with life-extension continues for us today.
The Gothic concern with gambling is no less relevant today. Gambling in Gothic literature is viewed as a transgression, a way to achieve wealth to advance oneself in society, and consequently, it usually results in destruction for the gambler and his family. Today, gambling is an even bigger problem than it was two centuries ago. We constantly hear tales of lottery winners who waste their millions, only to become bankrupts. We know of people who invest in the stock market, or worse, get taken advantage of in Ponzi schemes, only to lose everything. We continually worry about the economy, and most of us continue to have financial difficulties or an unhealthy relationship with money, while longing for wealth that we falsely believe will solve all our problems.
Working conditions became a Gothic concern with the rise of the Industrial Revolution. In Dickens' day, horrendous working conditions were being fought against. In the early twentieth century, the rise of unions helped to solve many of those problems, establishing an eight-hour work day and the weekend. But how many of us today find ourselves working long hours? What industry did to the Victorians, modern technology has done to us, making us connected 24/7 and perhaps improving communication but also resulting in expectations to work constantly.
Perhaps no novelist in all of literature has been more visionary or speaks more to our time than the Gothic novelist Mary Shelley. The issues in Frankenstein are the very issues of stem cell research, cloning, and the other quandaries of science we continue to argue over today. The need for responsible science is now more important than ever. In The Last Man, Shelley introduced the fear of a worldwide plague which today remains a terrifying possibility. Shelley's vision of the future is frighteningly accurate in many ways. In recent decades, the scare of AIDS and the bird and swine flu have made people fear worldwide human extinction as a possibility. The possibility of nuclear war and biological warfare has made it possible that man could someday be responsible for his own extinction, unintentionally, or intentionally. The recent film Contagion (2011) is just one of many works that speak to these fears.
In the Victorian period, a religious crisis arose with the introduction of theories of evolution. Organized religion began slowly to lose its hold over people. Those shifts have only continued to the present day. The understanding that we are spiritual beings having a human experience has become a mantra in recent decades. More and more people have quit subscribing to organized religion but come to describe themselves as spiritual, and this desire to connect with our spiritual (supernatural) selves has led many down less traditional Western paths, including to eastern religions, beliefs in reincarnation, listening to entities who channel their messages through humans, an emphasis upon "the Goddess," and the creation of new religions such as scientology. In many cases, a general move away from institutional Christianity has not led to atheism but what might be termed a spiritual reawakening that allows humanity, if not the autonomy from God that Milton's Satan sought, then at least the "faith, hope, and self-esteem" that Percy Shelley dreamt of for humanity.
The vampire is the nineteenth century Gothic wanderer figure who has remained most popular in the twenty-first century and continues to be reinvented. Despite his "evil" nature, he has become glamorous and attractive; the lines between good and evil have been blurred; we now have dark heroes and sympathetic villains. The continuing popularity of the vampire two centuries after he was first introduced to English readers speaks to how much the Gothic still influences our lives today.
While the bulk of this study will cover nineteenth century British Gothic fiction, I will offer in the epilogue some insight into how the themes of that period's Gothic literature have continued and been transformed in twentieth and twenty-first century literature, some still noticeably Gothic, such as Stephenie Myer's Twilight series and Anne Rice's vampire novels, while other influences are hard-pressed to be termed "Gothic" but still have Gothic elements or owe a debt to the Gothic, including such popular figures as Tarzan and Batman.
The Gothic wanderer is still with us today; he has lost a lot of his angst over the centuries, but the figure still fascinates us. This study will hopefully help to explain a little of why we love the Gothic—because we discover in the Gothic wanderer our very selves.
Tyler R. Tichelaar, Ph.D. and Gothic Wanderer
The Gothic Wanderer is on sale now and available by visiting www.GothicWanderer.com
Filed under Classic Gothic Novels
Tagged as Anne Rice, Batman, Dracula, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, Northanger Abbey, Rosicrucians, Stephenie Myer, Tarzan, The Da Vinci Code, The French Revolution, The Gothic Wanderer, The Last Man, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Twilight, Wolfman
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text:
/*
 * Licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the "License");
 * you may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 * You may obtain a copy of the License at
 *
 *     http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 *
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */
package com.facebook.presto.orc.zstd;

import sun.misc.Unsafe;

import java.lang.reflect.Field;
import java.nio.Buffer;

final class UnsafeUtil
{
    public static final Unsafe UNSAFE;
    private static final Field ADDRESS_ACCESSOR;

    private UnsafeUtil() {}

    static {
        try {
            Field theUnsafe = Unsafe.class.getDeclaredField("theUnsafe");
            theUnsafe.setAccessible(true);
            UNSAFE = (Unsafe) theUnsafe.get(null);
        }
        catch (Exception e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }

        try {
            Field field = Buffer.class.getDeclaredField("address");
            field.setAccessible(true);
            ADDRESS_ACCESSOR = field;
        }
        catch (Exception e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
    }

    public static long getAddress(Buffer buffer)
    {
        try {
            return (long) ADDRESS_ACCESSOR.get(buffer);
        }
        catch (IllegalAccessException e) {
            throw new RuntimeException(e);
        }
    }
}

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaGithub


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Submarine Director Richard Ayoade Interviewed
Daniel A Nixon , August 12th, 2011 08:00
The Quietus' Daniel Nixon speaks with the charmingly modest Richard Ayoade, of The IT Crowd and Garth Marenghi fame, whose directorial debut Submarine is out on DVD this week
"A film director is one of the last truly dictatorial posts left in a world that is becoming more and more democratic." So said Francis Ford Coppola after the filming of Apocalypse Now. If this view still holds any water, it is difficult to imagine Richard Ayoade in a personalized fold-out chair, with a megaphone in his hand and politely shouting 'ACTION!' in the direction of the set.
Ayoade is best known as Moss in The IT Crowd, a computer technician with the social skills of a genet: easily startled but inquisitive and ultimately domesticable. Some of these character traits are, if not present, recognizable in Ayoade himself; he comes across as anything but dictatorial. He is charming but modest; humbly accepting of praise, but quick to palm it off in other directions; scales any excitement down by a factor of ten; and is unaware of why some may privilege his thoughts on his debut feature Submarine above anybody else's. At times he is so self-effacing it is impossible to imagine him in a development meeting, surrounded by suited film execs, pitching for millions of pounds to fund his project.
Fortunately for Ayoade, Warp Films are not your average production company, and they saw enough talent in his music video work to offer him the helm on an adaptation of Joe Dunthorne's coming of age novel; the story of precocious, dictionary reading Oliver Tate, a teenager who doesn't want to let his principles stand in the way of progress. And it is a good thing they did, as Submarine arrives as a subtle, cinephilic and funny film that has the assurance of a director who fully understands his craft.
The Quietus caught up with Richard after nearly a year's worth of press work promoting the film – a circuit that must have been difficult for someone who confesses to being socially awkward. "I think it's probably hard for people to become aware of things unless there are famous people talking about a film," he says. "Unless it's a genre film I suppose, but for smaller independent films, it seems like the only route for people to find out about it." The first five minutes of our chat was a little stilted, demonstrating he is still coming to terms with his newfound position at the centre of attention. But as he relaxes, he becomes an amiable, if slightly hesitant subject.
It is a film well worth the laudable promotion effort Ayoade has put in, and indeed one you sense the director is proud of, although you would be hard pressed to make him admit it. He prefers to give credit to others involved in the project. For example, he emphasizes Paddy Considine's input to the brilliantly insane character, Graham T. Purvis: "[Paddy] was completely in control, because you can't ever really force an actor to do something they don't want to. Not really, I don't think. So there were guidelines, but with someone like Paddy, who's such a good writer anyway, you want them to be as involved as they'd like to be." Ever the democrat, never the dictator.
Considine's character Graham is a self-help guru, replete with leather trousers and electro-shocked mullet, with a method that categorises personality according to a colour spectrum. The outfit and the bravado have hints of Tom Cruise's Frank T. J. Mackey in P.T. Anderson's Magnolia, a comparison Ayoade acknowledges but plays down: "I guess there are quite a few Tom Cruise scientology videos, so there's a kind of crossover there with the actor. I love Magnolia, so I couldn't not be aware of Magnolia, but in terms of Paddy's performance, I'm not exactly sure what he would say influenced his role."
Graham is also Oliver's nemesis. But if Oliver recoils from Graham's 'mystic bullshit', Ayoade revels in the cheesiness, filming a pitch-perfect version of Graham's self-released VHS (available in full in the DVD extras), that flits and crackles over the screen like that battered tape of Back to the Future you can't quite stand to throw away. It's a nostalgic aesthetic he has used before, particularly in Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, an excellent 1980s horror spoof he co-wrote, directed and starred in for Channel 4 (Ayoade played Marenghi's camp publisher, Dean Learner, one of his earliest comic creations.)
Faithfully recreating such period-specific effects takes great technical knowhow, an aspect of the filmmaking process Ayoade enjoys: "I'm pretty involved with the technical aspects. I guess you don't really end up subdividing it too much, as it really depends what the specific problem in front of you is, and different sequences have greater technical demands than others, and they're all really interrelated. I'm not brilliant at categorising those things really … I know where the focus pull is, but I probably wouldn't be able to work one of those electronic focus pull docks myself. I could talk about aperture, though."
VHS tapes are one of a few 1980s signifiers in the film (characters also go to see Crocodile Dundee), but these touchstones stand out like islands on an otherwise timeless surface that undulates between the fifties and the nineties. "Crocodile Dundee feels to me like quite an old film, anyway, like a fifties, fish out of water Frank Capra story, which I quite like," he explains. "But unless you have a large amount of money to control things, you can't stop the modern world impacting on what you're filming. So I wanted it to be non-specific. Also, I thought Crocodile Dundee was the type of film that might have had an extended run. I remember Beverly Hills Cop played for about 7 years in Ipswich."
The music has all been composed specifically for the film, which adds to the difficulty in placing it. Arctic Monkey Alex Turner wrote a collection of solo songs for the project, whilst Andrew Hewitt, a regular collaborator of Ayoade's, composed a more conventional score. This was something Ayoade planned early on: "I wanted there to be two types of music. One an orchestral, internal score, inside Oliver's head, which would be like Georges Delerue. And then for the songs, it just seems like they have a lot of information attached to them if they pre-exist, or they certainly can, and I guess particularly with these types of films. And even for a while we were thinking of having Alex do covers of some John Cale songs, but it was just great that he could end up writing a whole batch of new songs, so I was really happy for that to happen."
After such an impressive debut, one would expect the offers to be rolling in for Ayoade. In typical fashion, though, he is very cautious about the future: "Unless you're in a very particular position it's probably unlikely that you'll get to make films regularly enough for that to be the only thing that you did. So it's likely that some other things will happen, but as to what they are I'm not sure really." However, he is already working on an adaptation of Dostoevsky's novella The Double, co-written with Avi Korine, which he feels is going well "at the moment", and he bagged a guest director slot on the excellent NBC sitcom Community last year – a role Ayoade insists was purely down to nepotism, and nothing to do with his own obvious talent or appropriateness (the episode features a parody of My Dinner with Andre by Louis Malle, one of Ayoade's favourite director's). He makes out Joel McHale, the show's star, bullied the producers into giving him the slot: "it was through Joel really, because I did a pilot of The IT Crowd for America, and he was in it. So we kept in touch, and I think he probably just persuaded them to let me direct an episode." He laughs at the suggestion the producers of a hit show might just have done some research before offering him the job: "Oh, well, they're easily influenced."
Richard Ayoade will never be one to blow his own megaphone; indeed he has little in common with the classic image of the director as general that Coppola described all those years ago. However much he may attempt to persude you otherwise though, he possesses great cinematic talent, and Submarine is perhaps a testament to a focused vision and a more understated modus operandi, one where you are actually nice to people and don't throw a tantrum because your cappuccino isn't frothy enough.
Win Tickets to Richard Ayoade's New Film Submarine »
Tyrannosaur: Beneath The Surface In A Paddy Considine Interview »
Warp Films 10 Report »
Richard Ayoade Hosts Ingmar Bergman Docs »
"This Ain't Acting" - On The Set Of This Is England '88 »
MORE FROM DANIEL A NIXON
Who's Your Man? Take This Waltz Reviewed »
Twist And Scout: Moonrise Kingdom Reviewed »
Deep Cuts: Pedro Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In »
Submarine Director Richard Ayoade Interviewed »
The Coen Bros' True Grit: Jeff Bridges and Hailee Steinfeld Interviewed »

redpajama_set_name: RedPajamaCommonCrawl


Zirconia grain stabilised platinum alloys developed by Johnson Matthey are widely used to contain molten glass. The high temperature strength of these alloys is well in excess of that of similar conventional rhodium-platinum alloys, and zirconia grain stabilised ten per cent rhodium-platinum, the strongest alloy in the range, is used in the most demanding applications where its excellent creep resistance offers prolonged component life. However the present high cost of rhodium, compared with that of platinum, has generated increased interest in alloys with a lower rhodium content suitable for certain applications where the outstanding properties of the ten per cent alloy are not fully utilised. To meet this demand Johnson Matthey have now developed zirconia grain stabilised five per cent rhodium-platinum. This alloy offers a useful range of physical properties for applications where economic considerations are a major factor.
Molten glass is one of the most corrosive materials known to man. However platinum and certain of its alloys have excelled as materials used for the manufacture of apparatus for handling molten glass, primarily because of their unique chemical inertness. This property separates them from all other "corrosion resistant" alloys, and consequently the relatively low strength of conventional platinum alloys at molten glass temperatures was tolerated, and compensated for by careful design including the use of refractory supports. When Johnson Matthey introduced zirconia grain stabilised (ZGS) platinum and platinum alloys their higher strengths and improved creep resistance increased considerably the range of possible applications.
Johnson Matthey manufacture three ZGS materials in significant volume, these being ZGS platinum, ZGS 10 per cent rhodium-platinum and ZGS 5 per cent gold-platinum. All are strengthened by the incorporation of a fine dispersion of zirconium oxide within the metal/alloy matrix. The effect of this oxide is to reduce the rate of grain boundary movement, resulting in the retention of the fibrous micro-structure produced during fabrication. High temperature strength and creep resistance are significantly improved by the retention of this highly aligned grain structure, even after a prolonged period at high temperature. Thus component life is increased, or alternatively it may be manufactured from thinner sectioned materials; in either case a considerable cost advantage occurs (1, 2).
The strongest alloy in the ZGS range is ZGS 10 per cent rhodium-platinum. This is widely used as a constructional material throughout the glass manufacturing industry, and especially for baseplates for glass fibre bushings. The rhodium acts as a solid solution strengthener giving superior creep resistance to that of ZGS platinum, which in turn has greater creep resistance than all the conventional alloys up to and including 40 per cent rhodium-platinum. In addition rhodium increases the wetting angle of molten glass in contact with the alloy, which is advantageous when high quality glass is being manufactured (3).
The recent rise in the price of rhodium, however, has resulted in a demand for high strength alloys of lower rhodium content. As an alternative to ZGS 10 per cent rhodium-platinum Johnson Matthey have developed ZGS 5 per cent rhodium-platinum, a cheaper alloy which none the less is more resistant to creep than ZGS platinum.
The manufacturing process used to produce ZGS 5 per cent rhodium-platinum is essentially that used for the current range of ZGS alloys, thus its physical and mechanical properties lie between those of ZGS platinum and ZGS 10 per cent rhodium-platinum.
The comparison is shown in the Table, where the properties of some conventional rhodium-platinum alloys are also included. For glass manufacture one of the most significant properties is the high temperature strength and in this respect it can be seen that, although not matching the excellent creep resistance of ZGS 10 per cent rhodium-platinum, ZGS 5 per cent rhodium-platinum offers considerable improvement over both ZGS platinum and the strongest conventional rhodium-platinum alloy, namely 40 per cent rhodium-platinum. This is shown in more detail in Figure 1 where the stress-rupture lives of ZGS alloys are plotted against the applied stresses.
The work hardening response and recrystallisation behaviour of the new alloy are illustrated in Figures 2 and 3, respectively, where comparison is again made with the other ZGS alloys. These properties suggest that ZGS 5 per cent rhodium-platinum would fabricate as readily as the other ZGS alloys, and this has been confirmed during development work.
The microstructural behaviour is typical of the ZGS alloys, the zirconia dispersion retaining the fibrous "as worked" structure; this is shown in Figures 4 and 5.
In the past twelve months the ratio of the cost of rhodium to that of platinum has fluctuated between 2 : 1 and 4 : 1. In the medium term it seems probable that the price differential existing between these two elements will be maintained. Thus the basic material cost of rhodium-platinum alloys is considerably influenced by the rhodium content. Every 5 per cent rhodium addition to platinum increases the cost of the alloy by approximately 10 per cent. For those who use large amounts of rhodium-platinum alloys, such as the manufacturers of high quality glass, the cost savings that can be made by using alloys of lower rhodium content, wherever possible, are significant.
By retaining many of the virtues of the higher rhodium content alloy, ZGS 5 per cent rhodium-platinum offers an attractive economic alternative to ZGS 10 per cent rhodium-platinum.


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WAS TOP STATE DEPARTMENT RESIGNATION A POLITICAL MOVE TO PROTECT HIGHER-UPS?
Diplomatic sources believe that the State Department official charged with managing private security firms such as Blackwater and other contractors in Iraq and elsewhere overseas was 'thrown under the bus' by the Bush Administration seeking a 'sacrificial lamb' to protect the more politically powerful people who supervised his office.
Richard Griffin, State's Assistant Secretary for the Bureau of Diplomatic Security and Director of the Office of Foreign Missions (DS), resigned abruptly on October 24 in the face of a gathering firestorm of criticism regarding the management and oversight of the 'private armies' charged with protecting US diplomats, Iraqi government officials, and visiting VIPs including members of the House and Senate.
A State Department source, who spoke on condition of anonymity "because of the sensitivity" of the issue, said Griffin's resignation was calculated to provide cover for several politically better-connected higher-ups who were responsible for the overall management and oversight of contractors who provide security services and others engaged in major construction projects such as the massive new American Embassy in Baghdad.
The protected officials were identified as Griffin's boss, Henrietta H. Fore, Undersecretary for Management, and State's Inspector General, Howard J. Krongard.
The House of Representatives Committee on Government Reform, led by feisty California Democrat Henry Waxman, has been conducting ongoing investigations into Blackwater and other private security contractors, as well as reportedly large-scale problems in the construction of the Baghdad embassy.
Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice testified before the Committee last week, largely evading questions about the activities of Blackwater, while acknowledging shortcomings in the supervision of the Embassy construction project but claiming that it was the State Department itself that identified and moved to correct the problems.
Krongard is already under attack by Waxman, but Fore has thus far managed to keep a relatively low profile. However, according to a State Department source, "The Waxman investigation into (the Office of the Inspector General) would have implicated Fore and Griffin pretty quickly. Of the three -- Krongard, Fore, and Griffin, Griffin has the least political clout and support. So we think that he was sacrificed early in a public gesture in order to placate the Waxman committee and keep them away from Fore, who has the most clout."
Appointed by President Bush in August 2005 as Under Secretary for Management, Fore is responsible for the State Department's people, resources, facilities, technology and security, and is principal advisor on management issues. Among many other management and administrative functions, she leads the Department's diplomatic security and overseas buildings operations – the two offices most directly implicated in the Blackwater and Embassy construction issues.
Fore is also State's White House liaison and its representative on the President's Management Council. In the wake of a sex scandal that forced the resignation of Randall Tobias as Director of US Foreign Assistance, in May she was named to fill that post as well as becoming Acting Administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).
According to Waxman, government officials have accused Krongard of repeatedly blocking investigations into contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, including construction of the new Embassy in Baghdad, and censoring reports that might prove politically embarrassing to the Bush administration.
The State Department source said, "Krongard's guilt is that he helped cover up what Fore and Griffin did. Of the three, Griffin is the weakest link, so he gets to be the scapegoat for the other two."
The organization that represents America's diplomats, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) has called on Inspector General Krongard to "surrender day-to-day control of State's vital Office of Inspector General pending the resolution of grave allegations of malfeasance leveled against him by numerous current and former career government officials."
AFSA urged the Bush Administration to make it a top priority to obtain additional staffing resources for diplomacy. In Iraq alone, some 270 Foreign Service positions remain unfilled. State has also requested funds to hire an additional 100 DS Special Agents.
But the State Department source says Griffin is more than a mere scapegoat. The Bureau Griffin headed hired Blackwater and other private security firms including DynCorp and Triple Canopy, "ostensibly trained them, supervised them, and then failed to hold them accountable for errors. In fact, it appears that the DS Bureau actually covered up for Blackwater in several cases."
One diplomat said, "While construction of the Embassy is supervised by another State office, Griffin's office was also involved. It is responsible for supervising the construction of, and certifying, physical security features, such as bomb resistant walls, protective barriers, and so forth. In order for OBO to accept the building contractors' work, DS has to certify that the work on these features meets or exceeds their security standards. One complaint is that a wall, ostensibly certified by DS as meeting their standards (which should have been impervious to a rocket attack) was breached by a launched grenade (smaller than a rocket), which obviously meant that it should never have been certified as 'safe'." The Office of the Inspector General (IG) and Griffin's office are accused of attempting to cover up this fact.
A diplomatic advocacy group, Concerned Foreign Service Officers (CFSO), said that Griffin and his deputy, "fostered the kind of 'we are above the law - accountable to no-one' environment which gave carte blanche to Blackwater and others to act as they saw fit."
The organization said the killing of Iraqi civilians and other alleged excesses by Blackwater "come as little surprise to those who have complained for years about the 'above-the-law' culture that has developed in the State Department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security."
It charged that DS believes "that the laws and regulations of the United States need not apply to those who are entrusted to enforce those laws or to protect American diplomats."
Griffin, an ambassador-rank official who previously held senior posts with the Secret Service and Veteran's Affairs Administration, had been in his current position since June 2005.
The management and oversight of security contractors such as Blackwater intensified after Blackwater guards shot and killed 17 Iraqi civilians in a Baghdad traffic circle on Sept. 16. The FBI, as well as the Iraqi government and the State and Defense departments are investigating the incident, but Baghdad has ordered Blackwater to leave Iraq and has vowed to overturn a law shielding contractors from prosecution.
Earlier, in 2005, a drunken American employee of Blackwater, had shot and killed one of the personal bodyguards of Iraq's vice president the night before. Within 36 hours of the shooting, Blackwater and the embassy had shipped him out of the country. But as with previous killings by contractors, the case was handled with apologies and a payoff.
Blackwater fired the shooter and fined him $14,697 -- the total of his back pay, a scheduled bonus and the cost of his plane ticket home, according to Blackwater documents. The amount nearly equaled the $15,000 the company agreed to give the Iraqi guard's family.
The recent shootings have also triggered the disclosure of a number of similar events previously, and reopened a long-standing feud between the State Department and the Pentagon about who is responsible for the safety of US civilians serving in Iraq. Also at issue is the question of whether civilian contractors in Iraq can be prosecuted under US criminal law, the Pentagon's Uniform Code of Military Justice, or not at all.
According to an email from a US Embassy spokesman to superiors. "If the [private security company] is found negligent, the only recourse is dismissal. In cases where there was clear criminal intent, a criminal case could hypothetically be pursued in US federal court, but this has yet to happen out here."
With State Department and FBI investigations underway, the military leaked its own report on the September 16 shootings, finding no evidence that the Blackwater guards fired in self-defense, as the company has maintained. US officers have publicly criticized the security contractors as out-of-control "cowboys" whose behavior alienates Iraqis.
Testifying before Waxman's committee, Blackwater founder and CEO Erik Prince refused to comment on the September 16 shootings because they are the subject of ongoing investigations. But he defended his company's record. He noted that 30 Blackwater employees had been killed in Iraq since the US invasion in 2003 and that there had been no casualties among those the company was charged to protect.
Some Democrats in Congress have pointed out that Prince and his family has long been substantial contributors to Republican candidates and causes, but State Department officials have said the contracting process is immune from political influence. Prince is a former US Navy Seal.
In response to the growing criticism of Blackwater and similar contractors, DS has more than doubled its three-dozen agents in Baghdad. It has deployed to Iraq a third of the 100-agent SWAT force it maintains for emergencies anywhere in the world. Secretary Rice has ordered that at least one DS agent accompany every Blackwater-guarded convoy leaving the Green Zone -- an average of six or seven each day -- and has directed DS to monitor and archive radio and video transmissions from Blackwater vehicles to be used as evidence in any future incident.
Some observers believe continuing Congressional scrutiny may force Rice to remove Blackwater's approximately 900 personal-security personnel from Iraq. And a new, $112 million contract was signed with Blackwater just last month may be in jeopardy, according to a senior DS official.
The new contract added 241 Blackwater personnel and increased its helicopter fleet in Iraq from eight to 24 to provide a quick-reaction air component for diplomatic transport, medical evacuation and rescue -- tasks the military has declined to take on.
According to documents obtained by Waxman's committee, contractors are highly paid for security duties: Blackwater charges State $1,221.62 a day for a "protective security specialist," according to a 2005 invoice released by the committee.
But during a recent interview on the "Charlie Rose" television show, Blackwater head Prince said, "That is an all-inclusive cost. They get paid well, but they get paid only for every day they are at work in a hot zone. They pay significant taxes right off the top of that, state and federal. They have to cover their own insurance, their own housing allowance -- all those benefits that a soldier gets wrapped in."
In any case, Prince said, "I know it would be hard for the State Department to recruit other people to come over and do reconstruction work . . . if some of them are going home in coffins." Most of Blackwater's security personnel have formerly served in the US military.
The Blackwater controversy intensified even as Secretary Rice appeared before Waxman's committee, where she acknowledged that she regretted that oversight of security contractors was not as good as it could have been but generally defended her department's performance.
At the same time, however, ABC News revealed new evidence that the US sought to conceal details of Blackwater shootings of Iraqi civilians more than two years ago.
ABC charged that internal e-mails "show that State Department officials tried to deflect a 2005 Los Angeles Times inquiry into an alleged killing of an Iraqi civilian by Blackwater guards.
"Give [the Los Angeles Times] what we can and then dump the rest on Blackwater," one State Department official wrote to another in the e-mails. "We can't win this one."
One department official taking part in a chain of e-mails noted that the "findings of the investigation are to remain off-limits to the reporter." Another recommended that there be no mention of the existence of a criminal investigation since such a reference would "raise questions and issues."
In the May 2005 incident, a Blackwater convoy was transporting a senior US diplomat down a Baghdad thoroughfare when guards opened fire on an approaching taxi. The taxi driver told The Times that he was slowing to a stop when a burst of machine-gun fire cut into his taxi, wounding him and killing a 19-year-old passenger.
The Times began making inquiries after receiving a tip in August 2005. Peter Mitchell, then a spokesman for the US Embassy, told superiors that he planned to tell a reporter that the State Department had "thoroughly investigated" the incident and that "no criminal act occurred."
ABC charged that the e-mails indicate, however, that the only investigation done was "administrative." Two Blackwater employees were fired and sent back to the US after they were found to have violated operating procedures. Blackwater has declined to comment on the incident.
Following allegations of waste, fraud and mismanagement in the construction of the new Baghdad Embassy, a 182-page report prepared by the embassy itself concluded that "Currently, Iraq is not capable of even rudimentary enforcement of anticorruption laws." As a result, the report said, corruption has become "the norm in many [Iraqi government] ministries."
The confidential report, first disclosed by The Nation magazine, said "All indications point to corruption as undermining the support of the population for Iraq's government." The government of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, it said, "is an enabler of the spreading corruption."
It added,"The Prime Minister's Office has demonstrated an open hostility
to the concept of an independent agency to investigate or prosecute corruption cases. The Iraqi Government has been withholding basic support and resources" from an Iraqi Government commission formed to investigate corruption.
In her testimony before the Waxman committee, Secretary Rice vowed to examine corruption allegations against Maliki, but refused to discuss publicly what she said could be rumor. Rice said her office would look into these allegations as well as "hundreds of reports of corruption" among other Iraqi officials.
Meanwhile, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) says urgent action is needed to deploy more foreign service personnel worldwide, as well as to hotspots such as Iraq and Afghanistan. AFSA's president, John K. Naland, says, "The magnitude of current staffing shortfalls is astounding." He said the current deficit is 2,094 Foreign Service positions worldwide.
Posted by Unknown at Wednesday, October 31, 2007 No comments:
WAS TOP STATE DEPARTMENT RESIGNATION A POLITICAL M...


The Detroit Pistons pay a visit to the Dallas Mavericks at the American Airlines Center on Friday night.
The Detroit Pistons have been well below their best lately, but they're starting to turn things around with four wins in their last seven outings and they will be looking to build on Wednesday's 98-94 road win at New Orleans. Blake Griffin led the team with 37 points, nine rebounds and seven assists, Reggie Jackson added 17 points while Jon Leuer chipped in with 11 points off the bench. As a team, the Pistons shot just 40 percent from the field and 13 of 39 from the 3-point line as they held on for the narrow win after leading by as many as 13 points in the third quarter. With the much-needed win, Detroit improved to 21-26 overall and 8-15 on the road.
Meanwhile, the Dallas Mavericks have been in rough shape as they've lost seven of their last 10 games, but they will be feeling a little better after putting a halt to a four-game skid with a 106-98 home win on Tuesday. Harrison Barnes led the team with 20 points, Luke Doncic added 17 points with seven rebounds and six assists, Dennis Smith Jr added 17 points with four assists while DeAndre Jordan chipped in with 13 points, 16 rebounds, four assists and four blocks. As a team, the Mavericks shot 46 percent from the field and 10 of 34 from the 3-point line, but the key to the win was actually the defense as they held the Clippers to just 42 points in the second half and 36 percent shooting from the field. With the much-needed win, Dallas improved to 21-26 overall and 17-6 at home.
Looking at the betting trends, the Pistons are 2-5-1 ATS in their last eight games following a win, 2-5 ATS in their last seven road games against a team with a home record above .600 and 5-2 ATS in their last seven games overall. The Mavericks are 14-5 ATS in their last 19 home games, 14-6 ATS in their last 20 games playing on two days rest and 8-3 ATS in their last 11 against the Eastern Conference.
Head to head, the under is 5-2 in the last seven meetings and the Pistons are 5-2 ATS in the last seven meetings.
The Pistons are starting to turn the corner with four wins in their last seven games and they will be looking at Griffin to lead them again in the first of two meetings between these teams. The Mavericks have had their bright moments this season with Doncic leading the way, but they've been in a funk ever since Smith Jr was mentioned in trade rumors. The Pistons are 5-2 ATS in the last seven meetings, but they're not nearly as good on the road so I'm taking the Mavericks who are 14-5 ATS in their last19 home games.


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Tag Archives: Strontium Dog
The Dr Who Guide alerts me to the fact that my radio play Immortal Beloved was broadcast on BBC7 on this day ten years ago. So in its honour, I post up the text of the interview that Kenny Smith did with me for Finished Product magazine.
KS: Firstly, was the finished story the one you always intended to go with? Or did you have other story ideas? Were you asked to submit an outline, and how detailed was it?
The story actually started out very differently, around 2002, as a Strontium Dog script. Toby Longworth asked me if I'd write something with Sanjeev Bhaskar in mind, so I had a character called Vishnu Patel, a six-armed mutant from Bradford, and his sexy associate Carly. The idea was that they'd set off a time grenade on their ship as the Strontium Dogs were getting ready to capture it. Suddenly, the ship was gone, but the formerly barren planet below was covered with city lights. At which point the bounty hunters would realise that their prey had gone so far back in time that they had founded an entire civilisation on the planet, and set themselves up as its divine rulers, an idea lifted from Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light. The bounty hunters go down to apprehend them, and have to face the issue of the person they're arresting being the nth generation clone of the person they were chasing. Then there would have been all sorts of arguments about statutes of limitations, and time travel and culpability.
But anyway, Strontium Dog was cancelled, and I was asked to pitch something for the short-lived Richard E. Grant animated Doctor Who. I retooled the story but kept its original title, which back then was Kingmaker. That actually made it a long way through the process before that, too, was cancelled.
18 months later, the BBC's option on Kingmaker ran out, and I was asked if I'd do something for the McGanns. Time was really of the essence, because everything had to be done in ten minutes flat, or something daft. So I said to Big Finish, look, I've got Kingmaker here, the BBC have already approved it. That's going to go through a lot faster. So we went with that, under a working title of Sins of the Father. I gave [script editor] Alan Barnes some alternate titles, including Karma Police, Together Forever, and Immortal Beloved.
Of course, you can imagine, the outline was nicely matured by that point. It was about 3500 words long, for a script that needed to be 10,000 words total. So it was very well worked out by that point.
There was originally a lot more in there about cybernetic implants as well, in order to match with the Master, who featured in the Richard E. Grant scripts as a travelling companion.
There are still elements of the original, such as when Zeus threatens to kill a different Lucie every day for a hundred years, and a Lord of Light moment, when Hera remembers that Poseidon's original name was Jeffrey.
Life and death are strong themes in the Sympathy for the Devil and Immortal Beloved – are these themes that you're interested in exploring?
I'm more interested in what makes us who we are. Same in Sympathy for the Devil. Take the characters out of the situations you remember them in, and what do they do? The Doctor is still the Doctor, the Brigadier is still ultimately his ally, the Master is still a sneaky git. The Ke Le Divisions are supposed to be non-human, like clones, but they still end up with feelings, and those feelings backfire.
In Immortal Beloved, I wanted to ask questions about cloning. I don't know the answers, but I like asking the questions. I love the idea of these clones turning into their parents, of being able to see them at two stages in their lives simultaneously, and wondering which one is the real person.
Jason Haigh-Ellery jumped on this one right away. I heard that back when it was still Kingmaker, he was already telling people that he was going to direct it, and even threatening to make it as a Big Finish with another Doctor if the BBC didn't commission it as a Richard E. Grant. I don't know why he was so enthusiastic about this one in particular, but he was supporting it for two years before it actually went into production! He wouldn't let the idea drop, he really fought for it.
How did you find writing for a new Doctor/companion team? Were you given much in the way of pointers for Lucie (played by Sheridan Smith)? Did she turn out the way you'd hoped?
This one was great because Lucie is so bolshie. Her dialogue just writes itself, taking the piss out the Doctor all the time, referring to him as her assistant, ridiculing his navigation skills. The perfect Lucie line is actually in Jonathan Morris's Max Warp, when she calls the TARDIS a shed. I just wrote her as everyone's annoying big sister walking in while you're trying to watch Doctor Who and ridiculing everything. So yes, she was perfect. Note-perfect, exactly as I imagined her.
What did you think of the finished story?
I thought it was great. I was rather irked that the BBC announcer said it was set in Ancient Greece, which it wasn't. I actually had a very nice email from someone at BBC7 telling me who was responsible "just so you know we're not a bunch of monkeys." It turned out that the culprit was much closer to home at BF towers. I was present for the ceremonial flaying and keelhauling.
Weren't the cast great!
Ian McNeice! You can't do better than that. Frankly, I wrote it for him, without even realising it. I had Baron Harkonnen in mind as Zeus, without knowing that Ian had played Baron Harkonnen in the Sci Fi channel Dune.
One day my grandfather fell off a ladder and knocked himself out. My grandmother found him and thought he was dead. She grabbed him and said: "No! You can't go! Not yet! I'm not ready!" I put a lot of that into the lines Elspet Gray had to say as Hera, particularly her scene in the garden. My grandmother said to me shortly before she died: "Jonathan, don't get old. Don't get old." It was so mournful and heartfelt, but I remember thinking at the time, do I have a choice…? All that's in Hera's lines, and I think Elspet managed it very well.
Was it how you imagined it to be?
Yes, although Ganymede was a bit of a surprise, since he wasn't in my script when I delivered it.
I believe that the ending was slightly different – Sarati was 'poisoned', to simulate death, thanks to the Doctor. As a result, Kalkin stabbed Zeus. How did the change come about? Are you happy with the revised change?
Yeah, the ending was different when I thought I was writing a 100-minute story. The only real difficulty with Immortal Beloved was slicing it down from 100 minutes for Richard E. Grant to 50 minutes for Paul McGann. Your question implies that was done for me, but I'm pretty sure that I wrote the Sararti stabbing scene myself. So it was all about timing — obviously the poison business was another Romeo and Juliet reference that got edged out. I thought it worked fine without it in the end, but something had to go when 50% of the content was being cut.
How much fun did you have coming up with alternative names for everyday things, like helicopters, etc? Was it a real challenge to get something mythological sounding for things like a decontamination chamber? Did you come up with any more that were cut or changed?
The "magic wand" business was something that had been floating around my head for 20 years, ever since I read the D&D Dungeon Master's Guide. Look at what it says about the "charges" and powers of magic wands, and rods, and staves. It's describing firearms: pistols, carbines and rifles. I thought that was so cool. So, I guess that's my way of saying that it wasn't my idea at all, but Gary Gygax's.
I think other people had more fun with it than I did. The "ether trumpet" was someone else's line. Nick Briggs, perhaps, or it could have been Alan, I suppose. It is the funniest line in the play, and I am now obliged to tell everyone I didn't write it.
The notion of cloned Lucies being tortured is quite scary – copies of yourself dying in different ways, without you even knowing it. Do you like implied horror like that?
Actually I can't stand horror. I find it too horrific. I am paid to have an over-active imagination, and horror tends to scare me! I think it's an excellent way of reversing the standard questions about stem cells and cloning, though. You lose your arm, but there is a magical way of giving you a new arm… except somewhere, there is a copy of you who's just had his arm hacked off… I think *that* is horrific.
How did you find writing for the McGann Doctor? I felt you had him down to a T – plenty of enthusiasm, but with a serious streak. Did you listen to many of the other Big Finish releases, or did you just write a generic Doctor that you remembered from childhood, as Rob Shearman did?
Is that what Rob did? Oh, bless! I suppose I did, too. There wasn't a lot to go on with McGann because you only have the one TV outing. I listened to Chimes of Midnight, but more because it was Rob's not because it was McGann.
To be honest, it's Lucie that I write for with the McGanns. I find it easier to write the Doctor's loving exasperation with her, than I do to write the Doctor himself. Lucie thinks of herself as the heroine in her own little show, and I write it that way, and then I put the Doctor's reaction in later — his reaction being the actual plot and everything. There's an element of that in Immortal Beloved where she introduces the Doctor as her "bumbling assistant."
I have to say, I only heard Brave New Town yesterday, and Sheridan Smith nails it. She nails every line. At her very worst, she does exactly what I wanted. At her best, she takes it and does something I never even thought of. You can't ask for more than that, can you?
Big Finish don't let you write "generic" Doctors, though. Briggs will throw something back at you and say: "That won't work, it's too Sixth Doctor." You can actually give him words, single words, and he will tell you if a particular Doctor would use them or not. So whatever Rob thought he was doing, it will have been distinctively McGann by the third draft!
Anything you'd go back and change if you could?
There's a line that someone altered that I wish they hadn't, but there's also a line that someone altered which made me look a lot smarter than I really am, so I figure we'd better call it quits.
If you could be reincarnated in another body, whose would you go for?
Ooh, Jason Haigh-Ellery's. All that money, all those women, all that power…
Immortal Beloved is available on CD and download from Big Finish.
Posted in News | Tagged Big Finish, Doctor Who, Dr Who, science fiction, Strontium Dog | Leave a reply
The Embers of Black Flame
Posted on November 24, 2009 by ixarette
News arrives via David Bishop's blog that a number of novels in the old 2000ad line, including my own Strontium Dog: Ruthless, have suddenly appeared in Kindle editions.
Ruthless had a bizarre gestation. I'd written two Strontium Dog audio plays for Big Finish Productions. Featuring Simon Pegg (now better known as Scottie in Star Trek) as Johnny Alpha, they were critically acclaimed, albeit not stellar sellers, and eventually sold to the BBC Cult website, which offered them in the user-unfriendly streaming format.
The first of my Strontium Dog scripts, Down to Earth, featured a car chase in the dark, the execution of which impressed someone at Black Flame enough for him to ask me if I would consider writing the novelisation of the movie Highwaymen, which was frankly one long car chase in need of fleshing out. While that was limping through the production process (and, curiously, never actually going on sale, despite the claim of some second-hand booksellers to have copies available), I was then put forward to write the first of the Strontium Dog novels for Black Flame's new line.
Soon after, my original contact was kicked upstairs in a well-deserved promotion, leaving me to the less able ministrations of his minions. The original commissioning editor had been great to work with, but faded into the background to be replaced with someone who kept sending me other people's emails, a sub-editor with a chip on her shoulder, and a man who once accused me of breaking the terms of a contract that he hadn't actually read, only to slink back and acknowledge that I had done exactly what I was asked to do. Black Flame began pushing my Strontium Dog novel to the trade, and took a couple of thousand advance orders. They did, however, forget one crucial point. At the time, they hadn't actually contracted me to write it.
So it was that I had a panicked message from a new editor with a week to go before a deadline that only existed in his head, asking me if there was any chance I could knock out the book by the day before yesterday. Er… no, I said.
Black Flame scrabbled around and found another book to plug the gap, with the ironic title of Strontium Dog: Bad Timing. My own novel, Ruthless, eventually limped out as the third in the series, complete with an opening chapter designed to introduce new readers to the franchise, even though they would now have been reading two other books first.
Despite all this, I had a fantastic time. There is nothing, I repeat, nothing as much fun as writing a novel. I spent a lazy summer in a shed by a lake in Finland, writing my required number of words per day, and loving every minute of it. I veered off into tangents about alien biology, blocked out fight scenes on hijacked space liners, and speculated on the future of Martian journalism. After so many years squeezing my ideas into haiku, song lyrics and short stories, suddenly I had the freedom offered by 70,000 words. It was never going to set the literary world alight (as one Finnish newspaper article unkindly suggested), but I loved it anyway.
Now I hear that Black Flame is no more, which shows you how much attention I've been paying. I stopped pitching ideas to them in 2005 or thereabouts, having long since tired of broken promises and petty cock-ups, souring what had begun as a very cordial relationship. I'm pretty sure, too, that they remembered me ever after as the guy who refused to bail them out when they accidentally sold a book that hadn't been written yet.
Now, apparently, the time elapsed since the demise of Black Flame means that the rights have reverted to Rebellion, the owners of Strontium Dog, which allows Rebellion's Abaddon imprint to re-release the book in Kindle format. Like the other authors in the line, there's nothing in it for me personally – we were working with other people's characters, and signed away our rights to future royalties, but that's not the point. It's just nice to see that it's still out there.
Posted in News | Tagged 2000 AD, Black Flame, Jonathan Clements, Rebellion, Ruthless, Simon Pegg, Strontium Dog | Leave a reply
Cattle Call
Posted on October 23, 2009 by ixarette
"Actors," said Alfred Hitchcock, "are cattle." You control them with a pointy stick. You tell them where to stand. You leave them in a field all day, chewing regurgitated grass. You pull on their teats when you need a drink. No, I am not entirely sure where he was going with that. But actors should definitely do what they're told, otherwise how will the director's vision make it to the audience? Actors are the vital conduit between text and audience. And they make empty, melancholy mooing noises with bovine regularity.
I have had to sit, powerless in a studio, while actors droned on about how I had made factual mistakes in my script for their bewilderingly popular, 30-year-old franchise. In the recording booth, I reminded the director that we had copies of the DVD on site that would prove the actors wrong. He shrugged and said it was too much trouble. It was then I started wishing for a cattle prod. Continue reading →
Posted in News | Tagged 2000 AD, Doctor Who, Judge Dredd, Mark Gatiss, Mark McDonnell, Rupert Degas, Sheridan Smith, Simon Pegg, Strontium Dog, Tara Platt, Toby Longworth, Yuri Lowenthal | Leave a reply


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