Neil Gaiman's Black and White World.

Ah, Neil Gaiman: child prodigy of the comics world, cuddly, artfully tousled millionaire, open relationship renegade and Registered Trademark owner of the intriguing Byronic jacket photo.

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Gods Again.

Different lands have different gods. The magic of one land will not work in another land, but the stories are the same: finding the underlying harmony in things, non-violence, compassion, the river and the way, dying gods, in my end is my beginning. And of all these stories, the Abrahamic religions, born of the desert's austerity, are the most foreclosed: only one god mediating the umbilical between self and world, their simplicity and inflexibility perfectly equipping them for rapid viral dissemination and rabid fundamentalist extrapolations – misread, misused, missing the point entirely. 

Or so I thought as I watched Princess Mononoke for the first time last week. 

Faust.

Here's the translation of the blurb for a forthcoming production of Doctor Faustus at a theatre festival in Santos. I quite like it.

If Faust still reflects our servile condition before power, it is perhaps because it represents a continuation of the way that social conditions have always been in the West. In the moment when society as we understand it was formed, various powers imposed man’s limits upon him. This conditioned existence subject to another still remains in force, whether through the religious structures of the past or the capitalist structures of the present. The metaphorical import of the play is no longer the search for modernity but the collapse of desire. There is no longer any value in desiring something, since desire is a byproduct of what is permitted by dominant systems. Just as reactions are also controlled permissions, so man's only option is to conform to unreal desire. It does not matter what it is and who it is for. Desire really does not matter. Mephistopheles is transmuted from the genius promising fulfilment to a futile force unable to survive by itself. 

Galadriel's Choice.

Scary GaladrielYou know that bit in LOTR when Frodo offers Galadriel the ring and she thinks about it a bit and then goes all scary and then gets all sad and normal again before saying, 'No, Galadriel will fade and go into the West'? First of all, it's a bit Craig David to refer to herself in the third person like that. Second, I've come to realise this is the defining metaphor for growing old. Here she is being offered everything she could ever conceivably want: power, immortality, a life without fear. However, knowing as she does that she can't make the selfish choice without corrupting herself or the sacred balance of the universe, yadda-yadda-yadda, she says no. And that's just like getting old. Sure, you can be a dick about it and cling onto the dream of your youth, when you were amazingly wonderful and important, if only to yourself. But that, as Sauron learned the hard way, does not get you invited to Elrond's birthday party. Alternatively, you can be unselfish and let the natural course of things diminish you gradually, without eradicating whatever it is you still believe in. This is probably how it feels to be a cliff: you stand there every day getting eroded, and after a while you're pretty much unrecognisable even to yourself – but you're still a cliff. There's a certain comfort in thoughts like these. And that's probably why I find myself – most often in the shower when I've noticed some new travesty inflicted by my body's ongoing attritional war with time, whispering to myself, 'No, Galadriel will fade and go into the West.' 

Three-Part Essay.

An inter-connected thought about a forthcoming 'festa junina' party, a Panorama special about the dark side of the World Cup and Brazil's most vulnerable people.

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