Charles the Predator lives near my house. He sits in a tree most of the day, clicking at passersby and idly targeting them with his shoulder laser. When he gets peckish, Charles the Predator swings down through the branches to Molly’s balcony. Molly is an old lady. She likes Charles the Predator and invites him in for tea. Charles takes his mask off and Molly throws bits of cake into his mandibles. His favourite type of cake is seed cake. Charles also likes wearing Molly’s hats. Molly has lots of hats. Charles’ favourite is a lime green and ivory fascinator. Molly is too polite to tell Charles that these colours really don’t suit him. Sometimes Charles goes window shopping. Once he went into his favourite shop, the bridal shop, and got fitted for a wedding dress. It was a cream dress with a ten foot train and seed pearls on the corset. All the assistants said he looked lovely, but Charles thought he looked fat and ran out of the shop crying. It was not a happy day for Charles, and he only felt better after he had collected the skulls of three fat businessmen who sniggered at him as they walked beneath his tree and heard his mournful tears.
This is to be written on the fly in the trouserless interval between getting back from walking my wife to work and the several hours in which I stare at a screen, tap out six words, curse myself for a moron, delete them, stare at the screen for another half hour, retype the same six words and finally give the sentence up for a lost cause. I call the latter process work, and am actually pretty busy with it at the moment (which I consider unfair). It is why things have been so blessedly quiet here of late and also why I intend to keep this short, messy and mildly obscene.
Point 1. A Thought On Comedy.
We watched the first two eps of Season 3 of THE INBETWEENERS last night. I wasn't entirely sure I wanted to carry on with it as I thought the second season not quite as strong as the first. However, my wife is less precious than me and we'd heard some good things about it, so we decided to give it a shot. I thought the first episode very funny, the second one slightly less so but still good. However, I also found myself suffering the same feeling of minor irritation, a sort of intellectual heartburn, which I felt whilst watching the second season.
I think this is ultimately down to the show stretching my credulity levels to breaking point with the sheer amount of cluelessness and incompetence shown by the main characters; I find it hard to believe that anyone really acts like this at school over a prolonged period of time and survives. I feel that this is essentially unrealistic, as human beings under conditions of stress (i.e. every school ever) learn and evolve systems of coping, and I think that the ability to learn and change in that context (is this what's known as a character arc?) would enhance the show no end. I know that defenders of The Inbetweeners will say I am missing the point, that it is all exaggerated for comic effect and, besides, the characters are quite plausible enough, thank you. But I think the best moments in the show always come when you get that yelp of pained recognition as they disinter the cadaver of some awfulness from your own past. For this process of identification to work, you need empathy with the character, and for empathy you need to believe that this is a real, rounded individual whose responses to catastrophe are credibly realistic (i.e. similar to your own); only then can you project onto them your own emotions and thereby experience that twist of embarrassment/horror from which the comedy derives.
This is Screenwriting 101, of course, all that stuff about having to earn the empathy of its audience. I also think it's something the show has done brilliantly at points, most memorably Jay's scene at the end of Season 2 in which he sought to conceal his heartbreak over his rejection by his first non-imaginary girlfriend by forcing his delusional banter out between choked back tears ('She wouldn't have this threesome I organised for her...my cock was too big for her.'). From the perspective of characterisation, it was the perfect way to reveal the vulnerability driving his outward, appalling persona and, from a structural point of view, his friends' response to it was the perfect way to end the season: not knowing how to articulate their sympathy, and having been shocked themselves (well, everyone apart from Neil) by their exposure to the messes and pain of almost-grown-up life, they retreat to childhood, taking him home to watch telly and eat chips and pretend they're still kids again. I hope the show manages to have some more moments like this, because I'm finding it difficult to care about the characters right now; right now, they seems like ciphers of teenagers instead of the real thing, who are autonomically going through the motions required to trigger pre-written comic set pieces. Anyway, here's Jay's scene in all its glory (skip to 05:42 for the relevant bit):
More sophisticated and nuanced characterisation is becoming the norm for comedy, where once it was only one-offs, like Reginald Perrin, which did it. Another show we've been following is COMMUNITY, which centres on the experiences of an unlikely collection of rejects, including a single mother, a disgraced lawyer, an acerbic yet wayward beatnik girl, an assortment of high-school drop-outs and Chevy Chase as an existentially confused, chauvinist retiree, as they attend community college. The first episode of the second season of this aired last week, and I thought it was an incredibly sophisticated way of resolving the cliffhangers from the final episode of Season 1. In the last ep of S01, Jeff, the lawyer and alpha male of the study group, got hideously involved in a four-way love triangle. The first episode of the new season didn't deny this had happened, nor did it succumb to a lame will they / won't they scenario. Without spoilers, it came up with a clever way of disempowering Jeff and transferring all the power over to Britta, the beatnik girl and essentially the mirror to his own egotism and therefore his predestined love interest. It was a compelling and brilliant way of acknowledging the fall-out from the previous season in which all the characters involved behaved exactly as previous episodes had indicated they would, and so it successfully reanimated the show for its second season and I cannot wait to see where they take it next, the clever bastards.
Here's a clip from Season 1 providing a glimpse of COMMUNITY's awesomeness - click around on related links to get more of a feel of the show
REV is another comedy I've been enjoying. It is essentially a study in character in which all the laughs derive from the juxtaposition of character and situation, and I can't believe it will ever put a foot wrong in its gentle development of stories pertaining to the Reverend Smallbone and his ensemble of modern, frustrated wife, worldly archdeacon, mental best mate and disturbingly lovely headmistress. It is an exquisite (and exquisitely acted) portrait of an overlooked and wonderfully eccentric corner of English culture.
Finally, I think EASTBOUND AND DOWN is a great show. The second season's coming soon and I am very excited to see where they go with it. The greatness of this show stems only partially from the torrents of outrageous sociopathic bile unleashed by Kenny Powers, the washed-up baseball player protagonist, but also from the terrible pathos of his condition. He is a classically tragic character, checking off all the points on Aristotle's list: a great individual brought low, hubris, a shifting admixture of blindness and denial concerning his own state. It is the same comedy of remorseless misfortune and loss which we're familiar with from The Office or Curb Your Enthusiasm, but here it is refined to an absurd degree. What differentiates it from its predecessors is that much of the pathos is evoked silently, through the facial contortions of Danny McBride as he struggles to contend with the seething mess of conflicting emotions inside him. This technique is so striking because it remains true to his character: the loud, offensive bully who he is (much like Jay in The Inbetweeners) would not be able to articulate the pain he's feeling and the concluding episode at the end of the last season, in which his inability to communicate manifested itself as his actual disappearance from the forecourt of a petrol station, was a genuinely affecting expression of this character trope. He is an incredible actor as well as a fine writer and I think that first season took the comedy of cruelty to a new level. I won't post the link to that moment here, as I don't want to spoil the plot. Here instead is a moment from the first episode when we first realise that there is more to Kenny Powers than the relentless boor he portrays himself to be (cue from 03:25).
Needless to say, I do not own the copyright in any of these clips and they are only hosted here for entertainment value and if anyone threatens me they will come down immediately and I will cry and offer to hoover their apartment for a month. Possibly.
Point 2. Compassion Fail.
I was walking home this morning and I saw a basset hound loping around the posh Jardins streets with a post-operative scratch cowl around his neck. He seemed lost. At my wife's behest, I went over half-heartedly to see if he had a name in his collar, but he startled and ran way. I felt tired and didn't chase after him. I looked out for him when I came back the same way, but he wasn't to be found. Later, when I was walking back from a detour to the supermarket (fun!), a girl in the apron of her workplace, a nearby furniture shop, overtook me and rushed over the crossing I was waiting at without looking left or right. Thinking no more of it than perhaps she knew the roads better than me, I followed on in the same direction and, a little further on, came across her sitting on a doorstep. She was in a terrible state, crying, chest heaving, really very upset, and it made me feel terrible. It's such a busy, noisy, filthy road, and no one should have to sit there, on a doorstep, crying for all the world to see. Sometimes the world is a horrible place. It occurred to me that I could give her something to cheer her up. I have heard that a packet of Halls Mentho-Lyptus is accepted currency for such moments over here, but I didn't have any. All I had was a cucumber and some bleach, and neither of these seemed appropriate, so I carried on walking, feeling like a rat.
Hmm. That was meant to be a quick, off the cuff blog between walking and working - yet a couple of hours just got past me. I am still trouserless and unshowered and now I'm also starving hungry. I had better go and do something useful.
(Direct google translation from Folha de São Paulo, 12.09.10: http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/cotidiano/797654-sao-paulo-entra-em-estado-de-alerta-devido-a-baixa-umidade-do-ar.shtml)
São Paulo goes on alert due to low air humidity The city of São Paulo is on alert due to the low relative humidity. At 16:25 on Sunday, the CGE (Center Emergency Management) of the prefecture reported moisture contents between 15 and 20%. Earlier this afternoon, the Municipal Civil Defense had already decreed a state of attention in the state capital.
Guarulhos airport has one of the worst hit, with 30º C and relative humidity of 15.5%.
Also according to the CGE, Monday (13th Sep) will be as dry and sunny as this Sunday. The maximum should reach 33º C and relative humidity will drop, once again, to within 15%.
The situation should only improve from the end of Tuesday (14th Sep) and fourth place (15th Sep), when a cold front will pass by the coast of São Paulo, increasing the relative humidity. The forecast is for isolated showers.
According to the WHO (World Health Organization), indices of relative humidity below 30% classify as a state of attention, 20% to 12%, a state of alertness, and below 12% a state of alert. The main effects of low moisture are dry throat and eyes and breathing problems.
The agency also warns that the low humidity increases the chances of fire in grasslands and forests and asks people not to put fire in vacant lots and dry vegetation.
The recommendation of the Civil Defense is that people avoid outdoor activities and exposure to the sun between 10h and 17h and do not practice exercises between 11h and 15h. We recommend eating plenty of fluids to not have problems of dehydration.
It’s termite season again. Termites only seem to come out at night here in São Paulo, like disappointing vampires. But what they lose in fright potential, they make up for in volume. Each night a few thousand of them congregate around every outdoor electric light in a city which is a huge constellated field of electric lights, millions upon millions of them. Once they’ve found their particular spot – the light of their life, so to speak – they don’t do very much apart from dive bomb each other and whirl around the nucleus of light in great flickering, slow-mo flurries. In the morning their wings form glistening drifts of translucent lace which, if wings were diamonds, would create ten million millionaires overnight. But, this not being the case, we simply fetch the dust-pan and brush each morning and start sweeping them up from where they’ve heaped against the skirting board and under the table, chasing after the skittering whorls and eddies, taking the pan-full of fallen gems out to the kitchen and shaking them into the bin.
São Paulo is the first city in the world to fulfil Bill Hicks’ dystopian vision of what will happen to us if we live with ‘the eyes of fear’ rather than ‘the eyes of love’. That’s right, folks: the security presence is so strong here that pizzas are indeed delivered through our mailboxes. Most apartments round here have one: a delivery slot built into the entrance gate. Here’s ours:
The thinking here is that the pizza delivery guy can hand you his wares and you can hand over your money without ever having to feel at risk of viewing him as another human being. No, he’s socially inferior and therefore a potential criminal and we must treat him as such. Who knows, his poverty may even be contagious. Unfortunately no one's found a way of entirely eliminating human contact from the process – at least, not yet.
It’s disgusting, of course. But it’s hard not to let yourself get sucked into the fear bubble which pervades everything you do here. To get an idea of how deep these paranoiac delusions go, all you need to do is take a walk around a wealthy enclave like Pinheiros or Jardins. As you do, you can carry out a sort of imaginative archaeological dig in which you use your surroundings to peel back the layers of recently accreted history and see for yourself how the city used to be and how it has changed.
Along those winding tree-lined streets, where the palpable hush is the sound of money whispering to itself, you’ll see elegant townhouses built during the fifties and sixties. At the time of their construction, all these houses made some concession to security whether by high walls or spiked wrought-iron fences or spy holes in the front door. But the designers seem to have been too idealistic, too optimistic in their estimation of their city’s future because, over time, these precautions have evidently been deemed inadequate. Now additional layers of security have been improvised over the top of them: the wrought iron fence today has three filaments of electrified fence running across its top, the wall has coils of razor wire all across it, and the front door has an electrically-controlled gate to vet all entrants. I would provide you with a photo of this, but if I tried to take one, I’d probably get tasered.
Then there are the hastily constructed plastic and breeze-block shelters which have been plonked down on the streets themselves. Every street in wealthy areas like Jardins or Interlagos has one, and each is inhabited by a 24-hour security detail whose vigilance is subsidised by each household on the street. It’s the same story in Pinheiros, where we live, only with apartment buildings: each one has a man sat in a little cabin all day and all night, watching over a row of security cameras, buzzing in residents and maids and workmen and pizzas. Here, again, is ours.
It’s only a single gate, because our place isn’t that fancy. Lots of blocks have got two sets of gates, each one of which you are buzzed through because no one is allowed their own key to this gate, presumably to prevent an enterprising mugger taking it off you and then entering the property under false pretences.
Then there are the car ports; you can just about see ours to the left of the picture. These generally consist of a double set of automatic gates with a twenty foot cordon between them, like the bailey of a medieval castle. I guess the thinking here is that, if you’re an enterprising car jacker, you’re likely to get penned in between the first and second gates, whereupon the security guards will pour hot oil on you. Of course, when I first got here, all it did was remind me of Indiana Jones, and every time a gate closed I had the urge to wait until the last possible moment and then roll under, rescuing my fedora with a desperate grab. I don’t know what would have happened to me then. Severe beating? Taser? Sexual assault? Nothing good, anyway.
The high levels of car paranoia are justified, however. Cars are extraordinarily expensive here and they hardly depreciate in value over long periods of time. There is consequently a huge car-theft industry, with cars being taken from rich areas into parts of town where the police can’t even travel, and then smuggled out of the country via loose border control areas such as Foz do Iguaçu. As a result, one of the things you learn never to do here is sit in a stationary vehicle. We have a friend who broke this rule along with her boyfriend, and was car-jacked (and hit in the face with a pistol) as they were sitting directly outside her apartment. Scary.
Another friend was car-jacked and taken at gunpoint on a trip round the banks to empty her accounts. The guy in the front seat sounds like a character from a Coen brothers' movie. He seemed cheerfully amoral and insisted on giving this woman helpful tips during the course of the journey. ‘Why were you parked by the side of the road, talking on your phone? That was silly. You should be more careful, you know. You could get hurt.’
Of course, drivers still have to stop when the traffic stops. But people have developed a defensive strategy here as well. What they’ll do, many of them, is leave a wide gap between themselves and the car in front of them whenever they stop. That way, if they feel threatened, they can make a quick get-away. Or, more realistically, drive back and forth until the car-jacker gets really tired and wanders off, complaining that it's just not fair.
All this fear made our recent road trip pretty hair-raising. It was fine once we made it out of the city. Unfortunately, we had the loan of a sat nav (shat-nav) which refused to let this happen. It kept directing us down ever narrowing roads, into suspiciously empty, scary looking areas where small children and old women looked at us with hungry, knowing expressions. We couldn’t stop to check what the fuck was wrong with the bloody GPS at this juncture, despite being hopelessly lost, because stopping would have made us vulnerable. Eventually, when we found ourselves in a car park which the sat nav was insisting to be the Ayrton Senna Highway, we switched the damn thing off and just drove and screamed (and screamed and drove) until we found ourselves back on a main road. Ah, Brazil.
Tuesday, September 28, 2010 at 11:17AM 
