the-gsos

[the-gsos]

“I’ve Got A Baaaad Feeling About This”

SPOILERS!

Now, I didn’t want to bore you all with this, but here we are two days after I watched The Last Jedi and I’m still unable to A) process quite how bad it was, and B) find a respected critic anywhere in the world who agrees with me (and trust me, I’ve trawled right down to the very depths of Rotten Tomatoes to find one.)

Although there does seem to be a bit of a wider schism going on, it’s one between warring clans of fans, not critics, and the malcontents are mostly being depicted as real-life versions of Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons - bearded, bespectacled Eggo eaters who recreate the Battle of Endor with figurines in their mum’s attic every day. People who weren’t going to give TLJ a chance whatever Rian Johnson did with it, basically.

Though I do have a bit of empathy with the mum’s attic demographic - I still curse my own mum daily for throwing out the original model of the Millennium Falcon which was my most prized possession circa 1991 - I wouldn’t say I’m one of them, mainly because I was more than willing to give TLJ a chance.

Granted, I was very sceptical when Disney took over and announced the new trilogy, but then The Force Awakens came along, and while I wasn’t exactly blown away I was pleasantly surprised. Some of the characters were a bit thin and the film as a whole was somewhat light on menace, edge, the Dark Side - whatever you want to call it, but essentially what JJ Abrams had done was supply us with a solid foundation stone, one that more interesting characters and plotlines could be layered upon. The success or failure of the new trilogy would therefore hinge on its decisive middle chapter.

And now it has arrived, and, well, I, it’s…it’s just awful. There are so many issues that I almost don’t know where to start, but the central problem is this - The Last Jedi is EXACTLY the film you feared Disney would make when they got their hands on Star Wars. No opportunity is missed to introduce cutesy, whacky alien critters that have absolutely no bearing on the story but can be turned into toys and monetised, from the porgs to the fish nuns to the snow foxes to those massive wheezing ballsacks Luke milks green mucus out of.

Then there’s the question of tone. Again, this has been debated at length on social media and elsewhere, but if TLJ was a person it would be a teenage stand-up comic in their debut public performance. It desperately, desperately wants to make you laugh, every ten seconds if possible, but just doesn’t really know how to. Consider that scene in the opening sequence where Poe Dameron dials in to the bridge of General Hux’s star destroyer to prank call him. Sorry, but that sort of scene belongs in a Guardians of the Galaxy film and nowhere else.

Maybe it’s just the way of the world; the average person is a lot more sarcastic and self-aware than they were back in 1977 and blockbusters are merely reflecting that (although the complete absence of this form of glib, self-satisfied humour from Blade Runner 2049 partially explains why that film felt like such a refreshing alternative.) But isn’t there anything to be said for a bit of moderation?

Think of that scene where Luke and Leia are finally reunited after so much time apart…with so many tragic events having happened in the intervening period…and the first thing she says is a joke about her hair? I mean, really?

Or how about those spectral Skype chats where Rey and Kylo Ren confront one another from afar? Personally I found these to be among the more effective, engrossing scenes TLJ has to offer, but even here Johnson pulls the rug out from under his own feet with a crap joke about Rey wanting Kylo to put some clothes on. Throw all these japes together and it feels like TLJ is millimetres away from being the type of film that has a blooper reel over the end credits.

The main charge that appears to have been levelled at Johnson is his failure to collect the relay baton from Abrams and tie up loose ends left over from TFA, mostly regarding Rey’s parents and Supreme Leader Snoke’s identity. I’m sort of on-board with this, but it’s not exactly at the top of my list of gripes. I do, however, agree that Snoke gets killed off far too early, and that’s mainly because the complete lack of character development in Kylo Ren up till this point leaves him totally underequipped to take over as the main antagonist in Episode IX. He’s still stomping around throwing tantrums, he’s still rubbish at fighting and he’s still got the exact same clothes and hair. This last point might seem a strange one but think of the way characters like Luke, Han and Leia developed and matured over the course of the original trilogy and how that was subtly reflected in their appearance (from Luke’s angelic garb and wide-eyed, smiley demeanour in A New Hope to his much colder presence and all-black ensemble in Return of the Jedi.) Also, the backstory of Kylo’s betrayal of Luke and destruction of the new temple could have absolutely stolen the show if done right, but instead all we got was a couple of oddly truncated snippets, one told from each character’s perspective.

I could go on and on, but I’ll stop there, for your sanity and mine. Suffice to say, no, I didn’t understand a word Benicio del Toro’s ‘DJ’ was saying either, and yes, I also found the entire Canto Bight sequence pointless and perplexing. Strangely, this second point seems to have been freely acknowledged in loads of the reviews yet that hasn’t stopped the critics in question dishing out a five-star rating. And also, please, no more of these articles with headlines like ‘The Last Jedi Killed My Childhood/ Doesn’t Care What You Think - And That’s Why It’s Brilliant’. This to me seems like the worst kind of modern ‘hot take-ery’, whereby the author has had one reaction, their natural reaction, but then seen where the prevailing wind is blowing and somehow contorted said reaction to the point where it fits in with the “Last Jedi is amazeballs, Johnson is a genius” consensus.

Anyway, I fully expect to be pouring similar contempt on Episode IX in two years’ time so see you then, maybe I’ll even have a dedicated blog for this kind of stuff by then instead of this defunct one...

[the-gsos]

Wizard and Glass Blether

So I’ve been reading Stephen King’s Dark Tower series since the end of last year, when I decided I needed something to fill the epic fantasy series void while GRR Martin continues to do his ‘asthmatic ant with heavy shopping job’ on the Game of Thrones books.

I’m enjoying the books and the fourth volume, Wizard and Glass, which I’ve finished just recently, is probably my favourite so far, but I’ve got a few more specific thoughts on it that I’d like to share with the two or three of you that have clicked on this link, saw that the article isn’t about Italian football (or Scottish bars + pubs) and somehow, inexplicably decided to keep reading. Warning - it’s going to be pretty spoiler-ific throughout, I don’t really see any way to avoid that, so if you plan to read the books or you ARE reading them and just haven’t got to number four yet, you should probably give this a miss. Oh, and there’s the small matter of the film adaptation that’s released in just over a month’s time, which is apparently going to be followed by a TV series that specifically depicts the events of Wizard and Glass (which will sound like a weird idea to the uninitiated, but W&G is a prequel, y’see), so anyone planning on watching those without ever having read the books should also probably stop reading this.

Huzzah, now that I’ve thinned my readership down to about minus three, let’s begin!

My overall impression was that Wizard and Glass is that rare type of book that’s very good but could have been great if only it hadn’t taken the wrong turn at a few key plot junctions.

(Here, have you noticed that I’m adopting more of a conversational, almost vlogger-ish tone with this article? What was that “so” all about in the first line? Eurgh.)

In the intro that’s printed at the start of each Dark Tower book King talks about his inspiration for the series, how he realised at the age of 19 that he wanted to fuse The Lord of the Rings with the Spaghetti Western, to write “a novel that contained Tolkien’s sense of quest and magic but set against Leone’s almost absurdly majestic Western backdrop”. Now obviously I haven’t read volumes five, six, seven and eight yet, but of the first four books it seems to me that Wizard and Glass is the closest he comes to achieving that vision, albeit it does in many ways pick up the stylistic thread of the first volume, The Gunslinger. The Dark Tower books are a bit of a bewildering mixture of genres and influences, but whereas volumes two and three transport the reader (and characters) back and forth between New York in the sixties, seventies and eighties and dystopian, post-apocalyptic landscapes, one and four are basically Westerns with fantastical elements laced through them.

It’s no secret that King is willing and able to bash out some pretty hefty tomes, with The Stand, It and Under the Dome all clocking in at over 1,000 pages, and going by my extremely amateurish internet research Wizard and Glass is the joint fifth longest novel he’s ever penned (although different editions seem to have different numbers of pages; mine has 840, others have 787). That’s pretty remarkable when you stop and think about it, especially given that A) every other Dark Tower novel up until then had been 500 pages or less, and B) it’s essentially one big flashback, a story told round a campfire by protagonist Roland Deschain to quest companions Jake, Eddie and Susannah. The main plot, the one centred on the four characters I’ve just mentioned, only progresses about two inches forward in this enormous book.

The question is, does it need to be quite so long, and the answer is a pretty resounding no. Again, I must stress that I enjoyed it, the last time I read a book that long it took up six months of my life; this took roughly two, so ol’ Stevie’s obviously doing something right. However there are countless passages about the weather and nature in Mejis - where the tale is set - when one or two would have sufficed. Yes, they add a little atmosphere and help the reader envision Mejis, but they also give you the very strong suspicion that King is stalling for time.

“There followed a week of the sort of weather that makes folk apt to crawl back into bed after lunch…”

“The great storms of autumn were still a month or more distant…”

“Some called the Huntress the last moon of summer, some called it the first of fall…”

SO many chapters begin like this, and it’s particularly frustrating given that King has already assembled a great cast of characters by that point and established tension - of both the sexual and violent kind - between them. It’s almost like he’s written a brilliant script for a play and got all the actors he wanted, but is making them wait in the wings while he obsessively tinkers with the stage design and lighting.

Another bugbear is the teenage love story between Roland and Susan Delgado. King admits in his afterword that he procrastinated with the writing of Wizard and Glass because was “scared to death” of writing that story, and well, you can sort of see why. There isn’t a sock in the world strong enough to withstand the force that your toes curl upward with when reading these scenes, which soar beyond even Attack of the Clones’ Padme and Anakin love scenes on the cringe-ometer.

For example: “He uttered a small moaning sigh directly into her mouth. And as he drew her closer and began to trail kisses down her neck, she felt the stone hardness of him below the buckle of his belt, a slim, warm length which exactly matched the melting she felt in the same place. Those two places were meant for each other, as she was…”

Yeah, you get the picture.

That said, teenage love by its very nature is cloying and sickly sweet, King freely admits this sort of stuff isn’t his bag and there’s no way around it if we’re to fully understand why Roland is still so fixated on Susan so many years later. His relationship with her and the agonising manner in which it ends is the central, formative event of his entire life.

More than anything else though, the main thing stopping Wizard and Glass from ascending into the echelon of fantasy classics is the way the antagonists are dealt with. The Big Coffin Hunters are an undoubtedly brilliant creation. Reynolds and Depape may be slightly thinly sketched, but the physical touches - Reynolds’ long cloak, Depape’s gold-rimmed glasses - are enough to make them memorable, and the ringleader Eldred Jonas is a magnificent villain. Cunning, cold and mean, he’s a character that never loses his aura, even when he strides naked onto a balcony at one point. The scene is set for an almighty showdown between Jonas and Roland, but we don’t get one. Instead both Jonas and Depape are shot down easily and matter-of-factly by Roland out in the desert, and Reynolds escapes, but not to be put to any particular use in the remainder of the story. Part of the thinking behind this is presumably the need to demonstrate just how much of a badass Roland was even at the age of 14, and that’s fair enough. No-one’s expecting or wanting him to die; indeed, given the nature of prequels, we know that he can’t. But surely after establishing all that tension for all of those pages, and crafting such a formidable foe in the shape of Jonas, the reader deserves something a bit more prolonged, a bit less one-sided?

There’s also a hint of a bait and switch to it, as Rhea, the demented but ultimately deadly witch character, comes to the fore and plays a leading role in Susan’s demise. That particularly scene is incredibly well done, and while I don’t want to say that I ‘enjoyed’ reading about an innocent teenage girl being burned at the stake, it certainly lives with you.

One more thing: why do both Cuthbert and Alain survive after Roland has hinted at their demises in his interior monologues in the first three books? Does that mean future volumes will include yet more flashbacks? And would that be an admission that King is struggling to pad out the main plot? In fact, don’t tell me the answer to any of those questions.

Anyway, for all its flaws - which I hopefully  haven’t been too rant-ey about - Wizard and Glass is still a helluva page turner and hasn’t changed my mind about wanting to read the remaining books in the saga. I just wish King had made one or two better decisions when it came to the business end of things. Sort of makes you long for those Choose Your Own Adventure books of your childhood…

[the-gsos]

Harleys Sky Bar

So here it is, a mere 14 months after coming up with the idea and setting up this blog: the first entry proper. A number of things have held me up. Procrastination, laziness, other commitments, a strange unwillingness on the part of my mates to spend their time and money in places I’ve gone out of my way to define as ‘shite’. I’d never consciously given up on the Great Shiteclubs quest, but it had drifted to the back of my brain, and would have stayed there, perhaps indefinitely, if fate hadn’t intervened the Saturday before last. Well, fate plus 11 or 12 pints, a fair lashing of tequila and the dehumanising effect of sitting through 90 minutes of utterly pish SPFL football. 

You see, I decided to join my pals Graham and Matt in watching their beloved Hamilton Accies take on Dundee at New Douglas Park, grabbing a few pre-game pints in nearby pub The Tap Room and a few post-game ones in The Vaults, a cosy if slightly ramshackle old-school boozer that’s synonymous with the football club. (You might have seen footage of the team bus stopping outside it to allow the players to jump off and cavort with the fans on the day Accies won promotion to the SPFL in 2013.) As gratifying as it was to see the likes of Gary Harkins and Christian Nade in the flesh, the game itself was a dreary 1-1 draw, only brought to life in the second half by Dundee’s hugely deflected opener, followed by the gloriously daft sending off of South Lanarkshire’s answer to Gary Medel (Darian Mackinnon) and a richly-merited late equaliser for the ten men of Accies. 

Afterwards in The Vaults we were confronted by Paddy, an elderly pug owned by one of the pub’s regulars. I don’t know if you saw the piece on Reporting Scotland a while back about dog therapy at Barlinnie, the prisoners using a cuddly boxer dog to help soothe their tempers and forget their grim pasts, but this was something along the same lines, the memory of all those overhit passes and mistimed tackles fading as we passed Paddy around, cradling him and stroking his grey-bearded chin. It should definitely be one of Neil Doncaster’s priorities to ensure a docile auld pug is stationed at the nearest pub to every SPFL club’s ground, especially during the winter months. 

Anyway, ever the sensible one, Matt scarpered hamewards around about 6.30ish, leaving me and Graham to jump on a train through to Rutherglen (fare successfully skipped: take that, ABELLIO), where he’s recently moved into a new flat. Our nourishment needs ably met by Marini’s chippy, we decided to go on a tour of Rutherglen’s hostelries, visiting The Wee Mill, Chapmans, The Stirrup Cup, Doctor Gorman’s and The Picture House. The Wee Mill is a small pub that caters to a young, fishbowl-slurping clientele and does karaoke on a Saturday night. The Stirrup Cup is an even smaller old man’s pub with faded sofas and dusty antiques randomly sprinkled around, and does karaoke on a Saturday night. Doctor Gorman’s is a more spacious and well-attended back-street establishment...and it does karaoke on a Saturday night. It was beginning to dawn on us that Rutherglen is the karaoke capital of Glasgow, nay, Scotland, and the brilliance of it was how seriously it was took by almost all concerned. With the exception of one woman who giggled all the way through her rendition of that godawful “Let’s Marvin Gaye and get it on” song, no-one was doing it for a laugh. They just got up, picked a song that meant something to them, sang it wholeheartedly and sat back down again, content now that the ancient rite had been observed. 

Travelling to and from these different pubs required us to crisscross the main street several times, and so it was that we caught a glimpse of our eventual destination - Harley’s Sky Bar. Now I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable, when you’re told you’re going to somewhere called “Harley’s Sky Bar”, to expect the nightclub equivalent of Cloud City from Star Wars, with robot waitresses gliding around on wheels and two-headed alien barmen, all presided over by Harley himself, a cigar-chomping, eye-patch-wearing sky captain and professional gambler. I don’t think that’s unreasonable at all. Harley’s doesn’t quite live up to that remit however, starting with the fact that it’s not really in the sky, or anywhere near it. In fact, it’s only one floor up, perched on top of a branch of Iceland directly across from the old church graveyard. You could comfortably dreepee down from it without any risk of a broken ankle. If Harley’s is entitled to call itself a sky bar, then anyone who lives above a row of shops is entitled to refer to their flat as The International Space Station.

With the four huge windows at the front though, one thing any attendee can’t claim after the fact is that they didn’t know exactly what they were in for. 

Myself and Graham tossed the patently daft idea of going to Harley’s around and around all night until it went from being a bad joke to a serious proposition. We’ve always had this dynamic, me and him, when no matter where you are, how little money is in your pocket, how early you’re working the next morning or how shite a time you’re having, no one wants to be the first to call it quits, to slam your foot on the brakes in this game of night-out chicken. 

In our defence, the only other options were heading home when the pubs shut - anathema for anyone that’s crossed the five pint Rubicon - or taxi-ing it along to The Shed in Shawlands (which I lived practically next door to until recently and will be writing about in depth soon. And yes, I don’t care if you met your wife in there or if you think the fitness classes they run during the week are just fab, it does qualify as a shiteclub.)

Fortifying ourselves with the aforementioned tequila, we used The Picture House as base camp before the final ascent. It’s one of those places that very much has the vibe of a Wetherspoons without actually being one (the obligatory real one is just over the road, if you’re wondering), and has a large dance floor perilously near the bar. I don’t even want to imagine how many Maceranas and Casper Slides have swiftly evolved into mass brawls there over the years. 

It costs eight bob to get into Harley’s, which is scandalous considering you can get into much better places in the city centre for less, but the genius of Harley’s and all the places like it in small towns and the outskirts of cities is that they know they can get away with it. They know that when push comes to shove and people finish their pre-bevving in houses or pubs, many would rather go to a piss poor local nightclub that’s within walking distance than bother with the long(ish) journeys and high(ish) costs involved in travelling to a  decent nightclub. 

You ascend a steer staircase to enter the main bulk of the club, which has a bar down the right-hand side, a raised DJ booth behind, a seating area with booths running along underneath the windows and a wooden dance floor on the left-hand side. Later in the evening I was informed that Harley’s used to be a pool hall, and the covered over pool table right next to the dance floor was a pretty big clue to be fair, but I think I might have guessed nonetheless. Something about the decor just didn’t add up, and there’s a defiantly un-trendy aura to the place that can’t be exorcised simply by adding a few strobe lights. 

We got ourselves a few Morgans and settled down at a booth with a particularly lovely view of the graveyard, where we were eventually joined by a couple that I would guess were in their forties. The man greeted us fondly but explained in ominous tones that Harley’s was the kind of place where outsiders could easily be stabbed for dancing with the wrong girl. He needn’t have worried, as the one small delegation of local lassies left on the dance floor by the time we were blootered enough to disregard his advice scurried off it as soon as we stumbled on. I’m still not sure whether the man’s advice was borne out of a genuine concern for us naive travellers or just the kind of thing people say to out-of-towners when putting on the Franky Fryer act and exaggerating how ‘proper naughty’ their home town can be. 

I’d be lying if I claimed to remember much else about the night, but I do remember the warm, contented glow I had on the way to Rutherglen’s 24-hour Tesco. The quest to catalogue Scotland’s shitest nightclubs had, at long last, begun. 

PS: I realise for blogs like this to work well pictures are a big part of it, but as you can probably tell from the article our first expedition was a very scatterbrained make-it-up-as-we-go-along endeavour, so unfortunately I have no snaps of my Harley’s experience to share. I’ll try and remember and take some in future, but in the meantime I DO have a picture of Graham snuggling up to the bold Paddy, which I will share shortly. Ta-ra

[the-gsos]

Why am I doing this?

..is probably a good question to ask when you catch yourself wondering what shade of pink to type the word 'shiteclub' in, or what picture of the Tantra facade to yoink off google images. You know Tantra, right? Nah? Well, there you go, that's the reason I'm doing this I suppose - to illuminate the darkest corners of Scotland's nightlife scene, to do unto the nation's nightclubs as they do unto others by shining the house lights into their bleary eyes at the end of the night and revealing in graphic detail what foul deeds they've been party to. Actually, there's a good chance I'm just looking for an excuse to become a full-time alky, and if I can pretend to be doing some truly transcendental Tom Wolfe style New Journalism along the way, all the better. Boredom's certainly played its part. I'm bored of the 5% of Glasgow nightclubs I do like and just as scunnered with the other 95% as I always have been. Somehow, I've ended up pining for those places the great homogenising wave that's washed over West Central Scotland in the last few years hasn't reached, places like the Hamilton Palace, Downtown in East Kilbride, the Mega Bar in Motherwell and of course my local, the daddy of them all, the pound-for-pound champ, Jabba's Palace itself - Tantra, in Kirkintilloch. That's just a list off the top of my head but it's precisely the type of joint I'll be looking to hit first, places that are convenient travel-wise and that I'm already familiar with, either because I've already been or because I know people that have and they've told me some tales. In the long run however I'll be more than happy to bust out of the Central Belt and venture north, south, east, west, wherever. So if there's any clubs where you've been bottled, glassed, smashed, spiked or accused of witchcraft and burnt at the stake, and you'd like to see the same things happen to me, don't hesitate to send in your recommendations. Be it in Buckie, Bothwell or Baljaffray, I'm not really bothered, just as long as it's Scottish, and in the truest sense of the word, a shiteclub. Cheerie