RE. HEROES

The following text is my friend Anthony's amazing response to my splurge about Heroes, which he agreed to let me post here after I got down on my dirty little knees and begged him. Anthony is the Jedi Master on all things related to movies, comics and pulp fiction, and one of his many endearing qualities is that, somehow, he always manages to make it a pleasure to be gently set to rights by his encyclopaedic, deeply considered knowledge. Anthony blogs here and is one of the minds behind what sounds to me like the most bottom-clenchingly fearful movie quiz in the world, the mighty THEYQUIZ. 

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Heroes.

This piece was prompted in part by the Aurora shootings and my despair that anything so senseless and destructive could happen at an event designed to give people a couple of hours of pleasurable release and safe passage through a glass darkly. But I also happened to be thinking about heroes a lot in the week before that night, in particular about how we keep returning to heroic narratives despite living in a decidedly unheroic world. Is it OK to like heroes? Or does it represent a failure to engage with reality? Worse, is it dangerous?

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Close-Reading the Cliff Richard Calendar: May & June.

During the months of May and June, Cliff's hobby of collecting obscure vehicles developed into a costly and painful obsession. Sadly, there was nothing very unusual about this behaviour – the calendars from '77, '78, '83, '89, '90, '98 and 2000 all testify to Cliff's troubled history of transport addiction and the tragic toll it took upon his career. More troubling, however, is the way in which Cliff found himself simultaneously drawn during this period towards the notoriously addictive pairing of alligators and critical theory.

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Turning Point.

On Wednesday I managed to finish the first draft of a novel. On Sunday my daughter will be born. Today I am composed of a million rapidly expanding particles, most of which are running errands.

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The Bikini Shop.

Rua dos Pinheiros. Glamorous like Slough.Some weeks ago my wife and I went into a shop selling beachware to look at some Havaianas. It wasn’t a trendy store on Ipanema or a boutique on Oscar Freire. No, it was a nondescript, slightly shabby shop on a typical São Paulo street – which is to say dirty, congested and ninety-five kilometres from the sea. Given the banality of the circumstances, it was strange, then, to walk inside and see six young women moving about in the shadows at the back of the shop in various states of undress, giggling with excitement.

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