Kaiju-eiga: Return to the source

Kaiju-eiga or 'Japanese monster movie' to you and me.

The British Film Institute are to re-release the complete uncut original 1954 Japanese monster movie Godzilla (dir. Ishiro Honda, a close friend of Akira Kurosawa). Big deal, you might think: blokes in daft rubber monster suits demolishing matchstick box replicas of Tokyo. Anyone who may have seen the twenty-odd sequels and countless rip-offs (let's not even mention Roland Emmerich's 1998 dire 'reimagining') that came out of Japan and elsewhere in the last 50 years would have a point. But the original 1954 film that started it all is an altogether different beast (excuse the pun).

Quite simply, Godzilla was an allegory of atomic warfare. It was a response not only to the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by atomic bomb in August 1945 but also the newly developed hydrogen bombs successfully tested by the Americans and Soviets in the early 1950s. In March 1952 the Japanese crew of the ironically monikered tuna-boat The Lucky Dragon developed radiation sickness as a result of the testing of an American hydrogen bomb on Bikini Atoll. It is effectively this scene that opens Godzilla. The explosion awakens the pre-historic creature, a once benign force of nature mutated by radiation into a malevolent, destructive monster.

The film struck a chord with a traumatised Japanese audience with its images of widespread destruction, nuclear contamination, black rain and bomb shelters. It was Japan's first stab at a big budget sci-fi epic, costing ten times as much as the average japanese film and twice as much as Kurosawa's The Seven Samauri that was released the same year.

In 1956 the distribution rights were sold to the Americans who judiscously exised the anti-nuclear message, including the H-bomb test and sinking of the Japanese tuna-boat opening scene, and re-edited and redubbed the picture into a typical monster-on-the-loose action flick with inserts of Raymond Burr acting as a news reporter commenting on the events. It is this immasculated version that has hitherto been available here in the West.

But now the Bfi are releasing the uncut Japanese original on DVD and giving it a limited theatrical run.

I used to love the many Godzilla sequels when I was a child even though they were basically (increasingly cute) monster trash-'em-ups but the original is a truly bleak apocalyptic vision. It's still a bloke in a suit but thanks to wonderful lighting and excellent black and white photography the special effects still stand up incredibly well against today's CGI saturated blockbusters.

At last we will get the opportunity to see the film as Honda intended on a big screen where it belongs.

Godzilla will be given a limited theatrical release in the UK on 14 October 2005.

More curious keyword trivia

Search for "crematorium and furnaces" in Google and my story Dreaming Of Fish is the top result.

Likewise, the words "is art important?" - a fairly common search question, I would have thought - returns my blog post on the subject as result #1.

The novelty of how far up the search engine rankings my site has crawled still hasn't worn off yet. Sorry.

In memory of a pioneer of squelch

The pioneer of analogue synthesisers, Bob Moog (rhymes with vogue), has died at the age of 71 from a brain tumour.

To say that he had an influence on modern music is like saying the pope is a bit religious.

He developed his first voltage-controlled synthesiser with composer Herman Deutsch whilst studying for a PhD in physics at Cornell University in 1964. By the end of that year, the legendary MiniMoog was unleashed onto an unsuspecting world.

It wasn't the first commercially available analogue synthesiser but it was smaller and lighter than its competitors and came with a plethora of knobs and dials that allowed unprecedented control over the timbre of the sounds it generated.

Anybody who is anybody in rock and electronic music has used a Moog either in its original wood-panelled form or in its most recent virtual synth incarnations.

So raise you glasses, ladies and gentlemen, and join me in a toast to a true visionary pioneer. Now grab that cut-off dial and make your Moog squeel like a pig.

Cheers Bob.

Further concerns about antidepressant

And the saga of paroxetine continues...

You may have read my experiences of taking this SSRI antidepressant (or rather my experiences of trying to stop taking this SSRI) elsewhere on this site - and today more concerns about the safety of paroxetine (known commercially as Seroxat in the UK, Paxil in the US) have come to light.

Last year the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency (MHRA) banned the prescribing of paroxetine to adolescents due to an increased risk of suicidal thoughts. However, they concluded that the modest increase in suicidal thoughts among adult users of paroxetine and SSRIs in general was outweighed by the reported benefits.

Scientists from the University of Oslo have now said that existing studies indicate that this ban should also be extended to adults.

The Norwegians conducted an analysis of 16 trials involving the drug in 1989. In these trials, 916 subjects were given paroxetine and 550 were put on a course of placebos. Seven patients in the paroxetine group attempted suicide during the trial while only one from the placebo group attempted to take their own life.

This is not conclusive evidence but it is merely the latest in a continuous stream of empirical data regarding the negative side effects of this drug.

See the following links for more information:

• BMC Psychiatry - the Biomed Central journal that published the University of Oslo's findings
• Drug 'can trigger suicide in adults' - news item on these latest findings from The Guardian
• MIND - UK mental health charity who have collected much anecdotal information from users of paroxetine
• BBC Panorama - the BBC current affairs programme has reported extensively on the claims against paroxetine and has collated much useful information on its website
• Drugs Are Bad [Part 1] [Part 2] - my own experiences of paroxetine

It's funny... I just don't know why

The latest episode of weirdy BBC comedy programme The Mighty Boosh, entitled The Legend Of Old Gregg, is the scariest fucking thing I have seen for quite some time.

Data retention explained

My friend Suw Charman has helpfully distilled the current push by the UK, France, Ireland and Sweden to get a directive for data retention into EU legislation into comprehensible English.

I suggest you read it.

Data Retention in the EU - Your Digital Rights at Risk

The Man Booker Prize 2005 - Longlist announced

The longlist for the Man Booker Prize 2005 has been announced. You can either pop over to the official website to read the official press release or you can skip the corporate guff and read the longlist below:

Aw, Tash - The Harmony Silk Factory
Banville, John - The Sea
Barnes, Julian - Arthur & George
Barry, Sebastian - A Long Long Way
Coetzee, J.M. - Slow Man
Cusk, Rachel - In the Fold
Ishiguro, Kazuo - Never Let Me Go
Jacobson, Dan - All For Love
Lewycka, Marina - A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
Mantel, Hilary - Beyond Black
McEwan, Ian - Saturday
Meek, James - The People's Act of Love
Rushdie, Salman - Shalimar The Clown
Smith, Ali - The Accidental
Smith, Zadie - On Beauty
Thompson, Harry - This Thing Of Darkness
Wall, William - This Is The Country

Reverberating through the publishing industry

Jai Clare has blogged about an interesing new small press publisher on the block called reverb [sic].

Judging by their mission statement, this sounds like an interesting venture:

"reverb isn’t a traditional publisher. We think of it as a cross between an online community of readers and an independent record label. Why a record label? Because we publish books that have broadly the same ‘sound’ – contemporary literary fiction with an edge. This edge can be humorous, it can be thought-provoking, but it is something that makes the book stand out from the crowd. We hope that if a reader has enjoyed one reverb book then they will enjoy the others."

The other interesting thing is that they are based right here in Oxford. Hmm, maybe I should try to get in with the good folk of reverb.

Visit reverb's website to find out more.

Is art important?

A colleague from an online writers' workshop asked a question about what the hell is meant by saying an author is minor or major writer. What makes a writer "important"? This question was inspired by a comment made by the late Arthur Miller who deemed Carson McCullers as a "minor author".

The question has been playing on my mind a lot recently. What is art for? Does it matter?

This is what I came up with (although it may be absolute guff):

It has to do with some perceived value of "importance" of the the author's work. Quite how this "importance" is defined is a bit of a mystery.

I don't know what makes art important. I don't even know if art is important to the world at large at all. It's important to me, both as a viewer and a creator. But what makes one novel, say, more important than another? The subject it tackles? The way it explored that subject? Or does it not have anything to do with quality but how popular it is? Is Bridget Jones' Diary important because it sold so many copies? Does its popularity automatically mean that it must say something important about modern women?

Does a popularity imply that there must be something inherrent in the work worth studying because it touched so many people? Is artistic value, literary importance, retrospectively shoehorned into a piece of work once it becomes apparent how popular it is and, therefore by implication, how profoundly it has spoken to its contemporary audience?

Is Frankenstein important because it is a great novel or because it was the first "horror" novel? Is it important because of the subject matter and the questions it raises about scientists playing God? Is its importance actually based on whether it is any good or not? Personally, I think it is a dreadful novel but I appreciate that it effectively created the horror genre and its influence is still felt in art today and its themes are even more relevant now than they were in Shelley's day.

So perhaps literary importance of a book or writer can be defined as that which transcends questions of quality of writing or even of sales but someone who provokes discussions and arguements not only among contemporary audiences but far beyond.

Or perhaps an important author is someone he manages all three: quality of writing, impressive sales and posing of pertinent questions about the world at large.

On the other hand, maybe art has most importance to the artists who create it.

I suppose the other question you could ask is whether certain books (or any work of art) is inherrently important or whether importance is bestowed upon a work by concensus. Can something only be important if enough people say it is important? If so, does it also matter who says it is important? Can an important group of people judge if a work is important or can anyone? Who decides the importance of the people deemed important enough to judge the importance of a work? And so on.

Or can importance be assigned to a work by a silent but appreciative audience who may not even be aware of each other? If a work of art affects a whole bunch of disparate people who then go out into the world and, under the influence of that work, do something they would not have done otherwise, something that benefits more than only themselves, couldn't that work be deemed important even if the nobody is aware of the influence it has had? But, then again, if nobody is aware of a work's influence, how can anyone justify ascribing importance to it? If a tree falls in a forest and no-one is around to hear it...

Does any of the above actually matter? All this philosophising may be a diverting mental exercise for me but is the pursuit of a satisfatory answer important? Would any of the above be more important if Arthur Miller had said it and not me?

Weekend reading material

Here are a couple of interesting articles to wile away the weekend:

The Observer - Blake Morrison asks if editing is becoming a dying art in the British publishing scene - Black day for the blue pencil

The London Review Of Books - Andrew O'Hagan recalls the terrorist attacks of 7 July in London - City of Prose

Novel use of a blog

A writer friend of mine, TL Hines, has managed to conjure up interest in his first novel after an Aquisitions Editor discovered his blog and downloaded the first chapter. He now has a two book deal under his belt.

Obviously, TL has blogged about his brush with Divine Providence.

Keyword analysis action

Amazingly, enter the phrase "crap joke" into Google UK - a common pairing of words across the internet, you would think - and my website is the third result listed. Third! And all because I repeated a dodgy David Hasslehoff gag elsewhere on this blog.

Search for "bugger all the place" in Google and this site comes out as the top result.

Search for "Mad Hatters' Review" in Google and this site is the fifth result.

Oh, and search for "Steve Kane" in Google and my site is the second listed after the Steve Kane Radio Show host's site.

One person managed to get here by searching for the phrase "london zoo diarrhoea" although I have no idea how.

I know my site has been around in one form or another for about four years now but I am surprised at how high it ranks in the major search engines these days. I mean, who the fuck am I? Some bloke who has written some stories and a handful of tunes. I'm nobody. But Google seems to rate me highly.

Curious.

'Popular success is not my area.'

A nice article about filmmaker Jim Jarmusch in today's Guardian.

The world we live in

Oxford, England... The City Of Dreaming Spires (or something). Nice place to live, you'd think. Prestigious university at which both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien taught; the Bodleian Library; the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology; punting... Anyone who has seen Inspector Morse will know that even murder in Oxford is civilised.

But even the oldest and most respectable of cities have their scummy areas and my latest temp job happens to be on the edge of one such scummy area. Indeed, to get to and from work I have to ride a bus right through the arse-end of Oxford. It's as scummy as any city's scummy bits. It's a bleak sight to see every day.

But today was even better. Driving through the scummy arse-end of Oxford, the bus pulls up to a stop. There is an almighty pop! Everybody is startled and looks around - it sounds like something hit the bus. Then a young woman seated near the rear of the bus looks to the window beside her and quickly stands up. The glass in the frame is shattered. At the centre of the tiny shards is small hole, a bullet hole.

Someone had fired a gun at the bus.

The driver switched off the engine, called the bus depot to ask for advice and asked those who had been sitting close to the shattered window for their contact details. Everybody else, including me, got off the bus to catch the next one that had pulled up behind.

As I rode the bus the rest of the way into the city centre, I marvelled at what had just happened. Someone had fired a gun at us... a gun. Maybe if I lived London or Manchester or Birmingham I wouldn't have been so taken aback. Even though Oxford has it's dodgy suburbs like any other city it is still... well, Oxford.

On the other hand, even if you do live in a major town or city where such things happen every day, is it still a shock when you actually witness something like this at close quarters? I suddenly felt extremely depressed that this kind of occurence is not exceptional but the norm. Everybody who doesn't live a hermit's life in a remote cave is going to experience something like this at least once in their life no matter where they live. No matter how nice a place you inhabit, there will always be people who will come in and fuck it up.

As an addendum to getting shot at on a bus, the remainder of my journey home on foot was beset by an unusually high number of abusive drunkards and youths roaming the streets (ah, the school summer holidays), not to mention the pisshead who had passed out on the pavement outside the indian takeaway, his head resting in a puddle of lager from a dropped can. And this was as I passed into the "nice" bit of Oxford where I live.

I was going to say that some days it is hard not to despair for the human race but then I remember how lucky I am to not be living in Baghdad or Dafur. Everything is relative but, really, I can't complain.