DON'T LOOK BACK 2

Landscape with the Destruction of Sodom & Gomorrah

Joachim Patinir, circa 1520

Two friendly angels lead Lot and his daughters to the safety of a nearby tent. In the background, the twin cities of Sodom & Gomorrah burn. In the foreground, a slightly bulbous pile of rocks are all that remains of Lot's nosey, disobedient wife.

Dutch master Patinir specialised in Biblical scenes, but this, with its elements of science fiction and horror, is perhaps his strangest work. There's something quite modern looking about it, despite it being painted over 500 years ago.

DON'T LOOK BACK

The Bible contains a lot of finger wagging, not surprisingly given that it is a control manual more than anything else. In it, we read that the people of Sodom were decadent and ungodly, so they needed to be destroyed (a common Old Testament theme - God makes an awful lot of mistakes for an omniscient, omnipotent being). 

Good old Lot and his family, being righteous and reverent, were spared, but only on the condition that they didn't watch the destruction of their former home. Lot's wife (Ado, Idit, or Ildith, according to your source) couldn't resist a last glance so, for her disobedience, was turned  instantly into a pillar of salt. 

There is some evidence of a 'cosmic airburst event' in the southern Jordan Valley around 1650 BCE. This violent and sudden explosion devastated the ancient city of Tall el-Hammam and made that area largely uninhabitable for over 500 years. Theories include (in order of wackiness) the Tunguska-style airborne detonation of a meteoroid, a nuclear explosion following a spaceship crash, and alien invasion. Any of these could, apparently, have turned a human being into a column of minerals (I can't say I'm convinced, but this sort of extrapolation is interesting in what it says about the human obsession with sense making).

Whatever the cause, whatever the outcome, the Bible uses this garbled and unknowable story to reinforce its own underlying message, especially when it comes to wives: do what you are told. No wonder it's such a popular book with bigots. We'll come back to this tale, I have a thing for it.

Screenshots taken from John Huston's 1966 epic The Bible: In The Beginning, which takes three hours and a cast of thousands to recount the first 22 chapters of the good book to half-brilliant, half-boring effect. 

FAMILIAR STATES

'A new and unbiased study of vigilance, fear, shock, guilt, shame, depression and other familiar states of mind...'

Cover design by Patrick McCreeth.

WHERE SCIENCE & THE OCULT CLASH!

Nothing But The Night, d. Peter Sasdy (1973)

Nothing But The Night is a bit of a one off, which is wholly appropriate given that it was the sole product of Charlemagne Films, a company set up to make intelligent horror films but lost so much money that they folded before they could make a follow up.   

The narrative takes a while to come together but, ultimately, it turns out to be a curious mix of (to paraphrase the US poster) science and the occult, with some lovely Highlands and Islands scenery and a great cast, including Peter Cushing, Christopher Lee, Diana Dors, Kathleen Byron, Keith Barron, Fulton Mackay and Cassandra out of ‘Only Fools & Horses’ as a kid who WILL-NOT-STOP-SCREAMING and, ultimately, will utter the greatest lines ever spoken on film by a child:

"You've destroyed my dreams. I curse your cruel God"

At its core is a rather disquieting tale of child abuse in a remote orphanage, but perhaps not in the way that you might immediately think. There’s also a marvellous sequence in which dear old Diana Dors (playing a crazy, shouty clairvoyant) goes feral, running around the countryside evading the authorities like a chocolate munching Ray Mears in a ginger wig and red leatherette rain coat.

Little seen, somewhat neglected, this film always reminds me of a pleasing mix of ‘The Damned’ and ‘Scream and Scream Again’, and although it’s no kind of masterpiece, it nevertheless has strange ideas and weird horror at its core, and that’s like Turkish Delight on Toast for me. 

INCOMING LACUNA

 

I'm going to take a short break to paint, drink and sit in the sun. See you in July!

FILE UNDER POST PUNK

 

Bee Vamp: Valium Girls / Lucky Grills / With Barry in Bengal 

Monster in Orbit Records (1981) 

'Well tell me, do you ever get headaches?'

One in three of all post punk bands came from Liverpool. Probably. You may not know this, but the city apparently has a rich musical heritage. Bee Vamp won't be getting a statue, a coach tour or a commemorative tin of shortbread biscuits any time soon, but they did leave behind two nice singles, the first of which is the quietly extraordinary Valium Girls.  

Intoxication is a standard subject for popular music in all its forms, particularly the getting high and the coming down. Fewer songs tackle domestic addiction, however, the epidemic of ordinary people in the thrall of prescription or over the counter remedies which now, apparently, affects nearly a million people in the UK alone. This song both parodies and celebrates the public’s obsession with pain killers, sounding like an art rock version of a pharmaceutical ad. The lyrics convey a grim kitchen sink vignette in a few well-chosen words: a young woman, ‘protected by her National Health prescription’ spends her days drifting aimlessly and thoughtlessly from room to room in her flat, numb, blank, drinking endless cups of Nescafe. We’ve all been there.

Like a lot of post punk music, this track features saxophone, but here it is played well rather than merely enthusiastically, much more Eric Dolphy than Eric Morecambe. The sax interpolations are played on the very edge of atonal, squeaky and squawky without quite becoming annoying. The guitars are bitty and intermittent, like somebody absently scratching their arm until it’s raw. There is a clever false ending that never fails to provide mild surprise. The bass and drums are good, too, never quite playing what you expect. It’s an excellent track all round, really, go and listen to it.

      

The b sides are much less interesting, but have verve, edging perhaps ill-advisedly into Pigbag territory, all happy horns, busy bongos and twangy tremolo arms. Bee Vamp were apparently great improvisers, and these tracks perhaps reflect what their live shows may have been like: energetic, chaotic, sweaty.   

As a final note, thinking about pain killers, isn't pain a vital message in bodily terms? I mean, isn’t it actually exceptionally important? Shouldn’t it be cured rather than killed or, rather, temporarily dulled? I don’t blame the addicts, but I do wish they could get more help with it. If this blog has any wisdom to impart (it really doesn’t), it's this: if it hurts, get it looked at it.

DANCE AWAY

The idea of adapting Edgar Allen Poe's short story 'The Black Cat' has occurred to a great many film makers, but very few of them set it in Texas with a cast of amateurs and a budget that was probably less than most movies lunch bills. The results are pretty poor, although some of the more frenetic elements did remind me of the pleasures and pains of an amphetamine based diet.

In the best scene, some youngish people become reasonably animated while listening to the worlds whitest band play a frat boy version of 'Bo Diddley' that doesn't come close to punching the gut and jerking the limbs like the superlative original. 

EVERYDAY ELECTRONICS

   011: Anti-Theft Alarm

DIRK BOGARDE NEARLY EATS A SANDWICH

Dirk Bogarde ultimately became an actor obsessed with making 'important' films that no-one particularly liked apart from the critics. This includes Providence, a film that sets out to be enigmatic and impenetrable but is actually just boring and unengaging. Dirk does virtually nothing with his underwritten character apart from a scene where he picks up a sandwich and runs through his standard range of expressions: exasperated, disappointed, supercilious, appalled...

Does Dirk eventually eat the sandwich? No, he does not.

A DULLISH WHOLE

 

Dead Shadow, d. Andrzej Klimowski (1980)

A fragment of an abstract dream - although this is, by far, the most interesting part of a dull-ish whole.