(Not) The ScreenWriter # 2

Our Screenwriter has been overwhelmed this week with arrangements involving his actual scriptwriting, so here in his place is a suitably screen-orientated website recommendation:

www.apple.com/trailers

I don’t want this to turn into an advert for Apple, so in a timely way I’ll open with a comment on the iPad, which looks like it’s going to be exactly the kind of thing one should expect from Apple – desirable enough to make you want one, but ultimately fulfilling neither the use of a laptop nor an eReader, thereby meaning you could never justify buying one, and it will ever remain one of those things that you covet. So screw them.

As is the case with the iPad, Apple never quite hits all the buttons, but what they are fanstastic at, is simplicity, and this is the joy of their trailers page. Why exactly Apple has a page where it simply displays the latest film trailers I’m not quite sure; perhaps they’re viewed on their iPods and Pads they whizz along that little bit faster, but I have never found myself wanting to watch them on the move. No, the trailer website is for those times when you have a little bit of time where nothing is happening. Perhaps you’ve woken up a little bit earlier than expected and have a bit of trawling time before going to a lecture; or woken up a bit later and have already missed the lecture, and are feeling aimless. Personally I like them if I’ve made lunch and there’s no one in the house: if you start watching something long at that point, you’re left without food far before it’s over, or if you spend a while choosing something you really want to watch, your food will be cold. Trailers are perfect, because they come in bite sizes, and you can watch as few or as many as you want.

Some people complain that trailers give away far too much of the film, but that is exactly their attraction. The number of films that come out nowadays is vast. Until I started visiting this page, I’d never realized quite how many it was, mainly because often they don’t make it to the UK, or sometimes not even to any cinema screen at all. There is no way I have the time, money or inclination to see them all, but every film gets made for a reason; there’s always some bit of interest in the plot, star or setting, even if it’s only enough to fill up 50 seconds of footage. So, as quite frequently happens when I try to watch a whole film, with a trailer there’s never time to get bored.

It seems perverse to enjoy these tiny tasters of plots, when I know I will rarely see the full story, but it is a similar enjoyment to that of reading the blurbs of books in Waterstone’s: it is the condensation of plot that makes them interesting: trailers are designed to be pure, unadulterated excitement: they hit all those hermeneutic and proairetic codes in an effort to leave you tantalized for more. Unfortunately (or rather, fortunately, given the time and money constrictions mentioned above) they usually fail, and a little taster of the story leaves you satisfied; but on those occasions when they really get it right, you have the rare pleasure of a potentially good film to look forward to.

AP

Commentary box # 1

Not Enough Vacation to Find a Vocation

While babysitting over Christmas, I had the chance to return to a one-time favourite pastime: playing The Game of Life. For those of you not familiar with this particular children’s board game, it involves at the beginning choosing whether one is going to ‘Go to University’ – which involves taking out a loan, but after a few goes or so you get a nice pick from three different job and salary cards – or ‘Starting a Career’, straight off, which means you’re lumped with whatever you pick first from the pile. Not the most subtle distinction perhaps, but one designed to inculcate children with the idea that University is the nice, safe, sensible option if you want to have the best chance of a good career.

Everyone reading this will doubtless now be conscious that a degree – even an Oxford degree – is no longer ‘enough’ to land a top job. Now I’m not averse to putting in the work to bump up a CV; do internships; network; learn advanced computer skills, or anything else now required, but it raises the problem that one needs to decide pretty early where to focus ones attention: if you suddenly decide you want to work in advertising, say, have you been wasting precious time acting in plays when you should have been doing the marketing?

It is a comment I have heard from a number of people recently that they feel they have no sense of vocation. The word wasn’t really on my radar until a Middlemarch tute last year when I was assured that that was what it absolutely was about, and if George Eliot thinks it’s that important then clearly this is something worth thinking about. Does everyone really have a vocation just waiting for them to find? Or is it just a term to be used in biographies when someone’s career fortuitously aligns with some comment they made in a diary aged ten about really wanting to be a such-and-such. Since in my case that applies to author, doctor, film director and a whole host of other jobs in between, including – during a serious West Wing phase – White House speech writer, I could end up doing pretty much anything and still claim I’d discerned my vocation at a tender age. I admit that bit about wanting to be a White House staffer by the way (despite not having a drop of American blood) only because I met a fourth year medic recently who told me with a straight face that his ambition in life was to be McDreamy, or rather, to have sex with Meredith Gray. I’d always assumed that the stringent application process for medicine siphoned off all those wannabe George Clooneys and Noah Wyles (or whoever the ER hotshots are these days) but apparently not.

At least he’s well on his way. As someone who wandered round quite a few careers fairs last term, picking up the odd branded pencil or GlaxoSmithKline sample, wondering whether I fully grasp the difference between management consultancy and asset management – and moreover, whether I could ever make myself care – it seems that a future where I burn up my twenties in a nice big company, push out a few kids, go part time, go back full time, and retire on a fat pension is looking unlikely. But talking to friends who do have those goals, I wonder whether they have really found a vocation for themselves, or if they just found the book that explained the terminology conundrums that little bit earlier, and were smart enough to realize what I wasn’t: that while it’s easy to feel glad not to be them right now, as they spend their days coming up with ways they “used persuasive skills in a group situation”, when it comes to next year and not only do they have a serious internship on their CV, but a healthy bank balance courtesy of Goldman, I will not be feeling so chipper. And as they can point out, when it comes to internships, you’re not going to be doing enough to either destroy or save the world either way, so there’s no reason to get ideologically uppity about it.

Nevertheless no one in their right mind would kill themselves for six weeks on a banking internship if they had no inclination to follow that career path, and this is why I’m envious that these friends have at least the smallest hint of vocation to have got that far. It’s not as though there aren’t lots of jobs I’m interested in – and of course it’s a luxury to be able to make these choices – but since I seem increasingly to be narrowing down career choices to those ones that require a serious starter investment of unpaid work, I would like to be pretty sure any industry I spend six months pouring tea for is really the one I want to progress in.

So next time I’m babysitting – and it looks like childcare will remain my primary source of income for the near future – I might just get out those Game of Life cards and pick one at random. After all, a vocation is meant to choose you, right?

Amelia Peterson

House Can Make You…

Into a Sooper-Dooper-Trooper
Tyree – Turn up the Bass

House Girls
Jungle Brothers – Girl I’ll House You

Realise the potential of the glockenspiel(?)
Hugh Masakela – Don’t Go Lose It Baby (BT Magnum edit)

Stomp your troubles away
K-yze – Stomp

Jerk something?
Thunderheist – Jerk It (Nacho Lovers remix)

Crop all the t-shirts in your wardrobe
Inner City – Big Fun

(If you can’t tell I’m fast running out of delightful headers…
Kechia Jenkins – I Need Somebody

…get down to Babylove tonight and see for yourselves?)
Adventures of Stevie V – Dirty Cash

First person to do The Running Man out there on the floor, nice one.

- isms # 2

Determinism – The following sentence was bound to be written. It was inevitable. No other possibility was ever available to me. The same of the preceding one. And this one. No matter how much I may think I have the choice to do otherwise, I never really had the option.

Determinism at its essence denies that free will of any kind exists. Any time an agent is presented with the choice of coffee or tea, it is already causally determined which one you will choose. You might try and fight it by changing your mind at the last minute. Or decide that the only way to fight fate is to be random and consign all of your choices to the throw of a dice. However, tragedy strikes as you realise that your decision to give up autonomy to the outcome of a dice throw was in fact, inexorably, inevitably, a choice that you were always going to make.

Why would this create problems for the philosopher? Surely it’s just a more cerebral way of saying “What happens, happens”. Moral philosophers are deeply concerned with this metaphysical biggie, since if no free will exists, then the concept of blame diminishes to insignificance. Similarly it would make no sense to congratulate or praise someone who possesses a virtuous nature, since they were always going to turn out that way. A combination of their genetics and environment has made that sunny disposition a pure fluke, not a noble trait to be rewarded.

Stephen Hussey

[The writer's abrupt close has left his editor stumped as to whether anything can be done about it. On reflection, it was decided it was always meant to be that way.]

The End of Januworry

Finally, blessedly, the first month of 2010 has rasped its last. While the celebration of being that bit closer to our inevitable end may seem a tad perverse, take the time to consider just how much better off you are beyond Janus’ ever-watchful and sombre gaze and merrily cavorting in February’s freedom.

This happy chap who gives his name to the most intolerable of months was traditionally the Roman god of thresholds, beginnings and endings; the eyes of his two faces perpetually fixed on the past and the future. An apt namesake for a month where no-one seems to know whether they are coming or going, nor how to focus on the present. Similar indeed to everyone that you have contact with in January: the constant reminiscences of last year’s good times coupled with grand and impossible plans for the coming weeks, months, lifetime. What times we had! What money we’ll make! We’ll be fitter, brighter, better…

Unsurprisingly, January quickly becomes the Month of Disappointment. Each day is not judged on its actual achievements, but how it measures up to our extravagant and fantastical plans. Janus has no time for your day’s concerns. Janus cares not about how you just really NEEDED to watch that latest episode of Glee instead of getting your essay in for 9am. Janus just stares on mutely as your glittering future fades. Fun party guest, is our Janus.

What a joy it is that he’s gone. The only annoying things about February are schmaltzy couples and that stupid first ‘r’. You no longer sound deluded when you tentatively suggest the weather might be getting that bit warmer. You’ve finally started saying ‘twenty-ten’ with suitable confidence instead of ‘two thousand and n-, er…’. New Year’s resolutions are a distant and laughable memory, no longer dogging your footsteps as you trail sheepishly past the gym. Now there’s just plenty of time to come up with next year’s…

Tara Oakes

The Screenwriter # 1

For the Screenwriter, talking about Eastenders is like a biology student beginning an essay with, ‘Wow, isn’t it weird how you’re always breathing, but you don’t even notice it?’ Eastenders is just there, the algae on the pool of the BBC’s programming. It’s ugly, like the Mitchell brothers, and it kills the other, more beautiful water lilies as they gasp for some air-time on BBC3, but without it, the entire ecosystem would break down into a pike-infested sludge of despair. Anyway, the algae is twenty-five years old now and the BBC are celebrating with a series of shows about the best Eastenders cliffhangers, programmes which serve to show that, if nothing else, dramatic endings are always a hook, and always better when you’ve followed the rise and fall of a character for months, if not years. The Screenwriter has looked everywhere on the internet for one of the best adverts that the BBC has done – Grant Mitchell returning to find his Mum being attacked followed by those cursory tribal drums – but you may just have to watch some TV to find it. Here, though, is another great advert:

Away from populist television, a great hillbilly-horror spoof has picked up a distribution deal at the Sundance Film Festival. Tucker & Dale Vs Evil has the usual rednecks attacking the usual college students as they take the annual holiday in the woods (why do these people always go camping in a forest? Cool students – and in these films they’re always depicted as carefree, fun-loving guys – don’t go camping like speccy, tent-loving Scouts. They go to Magaluf.). The difference here, though, is that the hillbillies are just a pair of nice guys who don’t mean any harm and the students, their minds perverted by a diet of hillbilly horror films, are convinced that they’re psycho killers. Watch the trailer here:

And finally, the Screeenwriter is offering no opinion on Chris Morris’ new film genre: jihadist comedy, as we haven’t seen it (the invites to the recent film festivals have been sadly low on the ground). Jeremy Kay’s review of Four Lions in the Guardian is mixed, reminding us that Mr Morris, the best satirist since Swift, has a hell of a job to live up to all the brilliant things he has done in the past. True, but I’m not sure that the film won’t be brilliant, and if being the creator of The Day Today isn’t enough of a draw, the writers of Peep Show have lent a helping hand. This clip has endless rewatchability.

Fred Sugarman-Warner

Reading Music # 1

Does this bus stop at 42 street?

Bruce Springsteen isn’t the easiest writer to like, not least because he seems to think he is. Like Dylan, his imagery draws on familiar well-springs of the road, the rodeo, the city and the carnival; archetypes of the American picaresque, in other words. Whereas Dylan turns heads by recombining clichés, however, Springsteen’s use of stock phrases and characters sometimes feels no more than the sum of its parts – without a guiding principle, even if that principle is to confuse, his writing can come off all heart and no head, his clichés stay clichés placed in apposition for no apparent reason. When he shakes off the schmaltz however, he can easily become transcendent; an achievement to which ‘Does This Bus Stop at 82nd Street?’ is my current favourite testimony.

After the first expectant flutter of piano and guitar, the beat and vocals kick in like the bus itself hitting a higher gear and we’re strapped in tight for a whistle-stop tour of – what, exactly? The scatter-gun, rogue’s gallery approach doesn’t make anything fully clear, but the central thrust is hope and what happens it to. How to cope. What we can make of the future.

The exuberant announcement ‘Hey bus driver, keep the change’ puts the listener in a mood of generosity and optimism; it’s one blue-collar worker speaking to another, giving them something to smile about. ‘Bless your children, give them names’ casts the singer as a surrogate godfather, passing on a benediction to the next generation. The children probably already have names unless the driver’s some kind of psychopath, but we’ll let that pass for now. The next two lines are functional advice, to be taken with a pinch of salt; thrown out in true ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ fashion, we’re not sure quite where the suggestions come from, but not trusting men who walk with canes might be a good idea if they’re the kind with a top hat and monocle, old New Jersey money. Growing wings on your feet sounds like a Red Bull advert; I never said it was perfect.

Escape, however, is the message; a dream of future fulfilment, like the Christmas crier’s love, dock workers’ dreams and ‘panthers’ schemes to someday own the rodeo’. We don’t know if they ever will, but the song acknowledges their efforts, makes their aspiration notable among the visual data of the city’s advertising that assaults the singer’s sense impressions. There’s a flipside – ‘tainted women’ performing for out-of-state kids have probably failed to achieve their ambitions, what Rex calls ‘love’ has left his limp, and the full-page ad taken out in the trades by the Everglades lovers ‘to announce their arrival’ is comically hubristic.

All these characters are jostling to make themselves known, to find fulfilment or a way to survive, and some manage it better than others. Appropriately for a song about fantasies, Mary Lou finds out how to cope by ‘rid[ing] to heaven on a gyroscope’ (if you can’t figure out where he’s going with that, I suggest you ask your parents), but even this gesture of escapist self-love transmutes into a universal positive: asked by the Daily News for the dope, she responds – ‘the dope’s that there’s still hope’.

As if to underline this simple, all-embracing fact, the song slows down to give its final image space to breathe. ‘Senorita Spanish rose’ – in the spirit of the moment, we’ll forgive him that, not least since he undercuts the sentimentality by having her blow her nose – throws a rose to ’some lucky young matador’. Finally, somebody gets what he wants, and at 2:06 the song has nothing left to say. It’s a heady ride, but we got there in the end. Just don’t ask me what ‘interstellar mongrel nymphs’ are; it sounds fantastic, but I doubt that even Bruce can help us here.

Richard O’Brien

Ayesis or Naysis?

The Fashion editor gives her verdict on the ISIS night attendees.

Ayesis: We love our photographer. This is such a great shot. We also have sympathy with this chap – the fashion team at Isis, too, are confused about check shirts. Are they in or are they out? We’re still loving that extra layer of warmth and they’re SO GREAT buttoned right up to the top. Verdict pending.
Naysis: Cleaning your ear. IN PUBLIC?? Is that laughter of terror or mirth? We’re not sure we want to know…

Ayesis: Doctor
Naysis: Banker. (Well technically that was her choice, not ours)

Ayesis: Now THAT’S the way to keep cool when you’ve been dancing non-stop for three hours! That drapey crop top really gets the ventilation going so you can dance until closing time! (Wait, didn’t we do that already…?) Also, crop tops are, like, the coolest thing ever, as anyone who’s put two toes over the threshold of Topshop in the last six months will know. Keep em drapey though kids, this is a nonchalant thing. You wouldn’t want to end up looking chalant now, would you?

Ayesis: Wow, these guys have GREAT hair! Do they go to the same hairdresser or are they related, that’s the killer question though. This gentleman’s doing a good job trying to sway us in favour of the check shirts (damn you fashion…must…follow…glamour magazine’s…rules!) Hair in eyes though? More effort needed.
Love the florals plus lace plus pretty much hitting the underwear-as-outerwear trend in one! A++!
Naysis: ah yes, the old finger in the photo look. Photographer, take note: That is SO last season. No more woo woos for you!

Josie Thaddeus-Johns

NB if you’re featured on our blog about the Isis club night, dance. EVOLVE, you get free entry next time it’s on. So send an email to editor@isismagazine.org.uk if you’re featured here, and we’ll bung you on a special fashiony people list. Fashion elite of oxford, don’t say you ain’t got it good!

- isms # 1

Aestheticism – Dandy, foppish, and very Oxfordian. Aesthesticism is life lived as a work of art. A movement promoted by Oscar Wilde who, when asked his thoughts on the cause of the American Civil War replied “Probably because the curtains are so ugly”. Though easily dismissed as a camp remark from a celebrated dandy, this contained within it everything you need to know about the aesthetic movement and it’s ‘Art for art’s sake’ philosophy.

The Oxford aesthetes society, which Evelyn Waugh often lampooned despite being a member of, existed over the 19th and 20th century as a tribute to all things decadent and sumptuous. Reveling in the sensuous pleasures of beauty above all other virtues was precisely what the Oxford aesthetes celebrated. Its advocates staunchly denied that art had to express any profound moral lessons; all that was important was that it stimulated the senses. While a student at Magdalen College, Oscar Wilde reportedly embraced his aesthetic sentiments by wearing his hair long and decorating his room with peacock feathers, sunflowers, blue china and assorted objets d’art. Aesthetes enjoy their dress sense garish and their prose steeped in the most luxurious soft velvet tissues of extravagance, stitched lovingly together with elegant verbal frills, and quilted with superlative metaphor to add a morsel of delicacy to one’s personal discourses. A pure devotion to the sensual pleasure of what is pleasing to the eye, not only in one’s physical appearance, but how one carried oneself, using graceful gestures and elegant language in conversation. In short, life reflecting the purity that can only be found in art.

Stephen Hussey

Things To Do In a Blackout

Many of you won’t have noticed, but at around 10:30 pm three nights ago Cornmarket went dark. A power-outage struck random pockets of the city; from Debenhams up Broad Street and down towards KFC, shadow reigned. Two lovelorn house alarms rung out their mating calls. One disaffected student suggested having a crack at some looting, since the clubs had all shut down: “I need another pair of boxers”. Crowds drifted, insect-like, towards the Kings Arms. Real darkness is so rare in a city it’s hard to know what to do when it descends. Certainly, more could have been made of Oxford’s most recent dip into the night; to that end, here are just a few historical hints and tips for the next time the traffic-lights go out:

New York, 1965
1. Make use of the mood-lighting – it is rumoured that, nine months to the day after the blackout, birth-rates spiked…but demographical scientist J. Richard Udry, who apparently didn’t get laid, undertook a statistical study to debunk this as fiction.
2. Rejoice that you’re not flying a plane – United Airlines pilot Dale Chapman looked out the window for the landing-strip to see that “the whole city of New York was missing. It looked like the end of the world.”
3. Blame the government – Women’s Wear Daily claimed in its next issue that the blackout was the result of the Pentagon testing a new weapon, “Fireball”, which had sucked all the energy from New York before firing it in two beams deep into space. Their collision:”would become a mammoth burst of artificial lightning and would presumably destroy any enemy missiles within range.”

New York, 1977
4. Borrow a stranger’s clothes – the nude cast of Oh! Calcutta!, unable to find their way back to the dressing rooms, begged clothes from the audience before disappearing in cabs.
5. Aphorise, wistfully – Policeman John Fitzgerald saw the demolition of the city at dawn the next morning and sighed: “There are only cops and crooks left here now”.
6. Unleash inner-ninja – Time magazine records that a “6-ft. 8-in. Jamaican security guard brandished a pearl-handled machete” outside an A and P Supermarket in Brooklyn.

New York, 2003 (you think they’d have learned…)
7. Sell, sell, sell – Entrepeneurs fashioned thousands of t-shirts with the slogan “Where Were You When the Lights Went Out?” in the aftermath of a power-outage that left 55 million in the dark.

Oxford, TBC
8. Read Cormac MacCarthy’s The Road (by candle-light) and worry about the threat of cannibalism if this continues much longer. Squeeze flab ruefully.
9. Take up smoking – it’ll make a good story.

Hopefully, wherever you are the next time a city is stripped of its neon, you’ll get through at least three of these. Or just go for a naked jog.
Memphis Barker