Tick tock, tick tock: Halfway through the probationary period.

"Little Ben", not a product of Island Dwarfism, is to be found near Victoria Station.

So time has flown, as it will, and I'm now halfway through the two year probationary period I've placed London on. Well, it won't technically be the one year anniversary of my arriving in London until Monday night but I'll be out that evening and blah blah seize the moment when you can.After a painfully sore foot keeping me in pseudo-house arrest last weekend, I was damned if I was going to stay around Islington today. With no specific game plan in mind, I grabbed a bus down to The City and went on a ramble which helped connect a lot of the dots which I've been highlighting here. I can honestly say that I can now give directions with confidence when it comes to The City and that I don't really need my London A-Z for that area anymore. If I had three hours and felt like wearing my feet into stumps, I could actually navigate from my doorstep to the Thames. My journey today started with a rough plan which placed me at that 177 year old cane and umbrella store I found near the British Museum.

After ogling some decently priced, superior umbrellas for the discerning gentleman (one of which I may come back and buy to replace the stupid, cheap thing I bought from a pharmacy) I think I was just about to inquire about the sword canes when I looked out the window. The fall sun hit the leaves and the architecture just right enough to produce that weird sensation which I've fallen prey to a few times before (at least one of which I've mentioned here). My eyes got a little wider, my imagination starts firing on all cylinders and any plan I may have had gets wiped out with a ruthless efficiency. One barely trembling foot steps in front of the other and off I go, a slight running of excess saliva along my lower lip. After my experience in Soho the other night, I must say I'm pleased this can still happen.
Retracing my steps, I know I went to Soho Square, enjoyed the peace it offers and wrote a short while before heading down Charing Cross road and Leicester Square. From there I found myself at St. Martins just before Trafalgar square - where I more took pictures of features which I've neglected in the past. I'll post most of them later in the week, for now I'll stick to the ones which I feel are most relevant today.So yes, do I want to come back? Sometimes! In fact, it wasn't more than a week ago I was seriously looking at coming over for the holidays...and staying. But while I was going around today, after the initial tourist-ettes passed, I guess all the thoughts I've been turning over for weeks now have finally coalesced into something better resembling a decision. I'm not coming back for good, this December. I don't yet know if I want to stay for good, but I know I want to stay longer. Fifteen months just isn't enough. Not when there's so much to do - I've just signed up for the ICA and by gum that place alone has enough to keep me fascinated. Plus the very physical reaction that sights like the southern promenade of St. James Park can trigger in me is something I'm not ready to say goodbye to yet.Addendum: Oh man oh geez I wish I had had some million dollar camera which could have captured the way I saw this last sight. The picture just doesn't do it justice, so I've included the others I took in the hopes that maybe they'll help. I'm not being hyperbolic for effect here, something really moved me about this.
It not only touched upon my appreciation for beauty but trigged some kind of nexus point between a dense multitude of treasured memories from as many moments and places in my life. If I'd been standing in a regular lane I'm not sure how long I would have ignored the cars behind me, but probably long enough for someone to get out of the car to move me.Anyways, I better sign off now before I start prattling on like some coke head squirrel going on about his favorite car.

Of cult gangster films and the adornment of dorm walls

To all my North American readers, though residents of other nations may have run into this phenomenon too, I'd like to ask you to bring yourself back to three iconic images which you see again and again on bedroom walls of those between the ages of 14-29 and in especially high concentration in "counterculture" poster shops as well as dorm rooms.

You've got your Scarface.

Then you've got your classic Pulp Fiction and your "Jules and Vincent" Pulp Fiction poster.

To a lesser degree you have your Goodfellas and your Godfather, but these three posters are the truly ubiquitous ones.

So yes, you certainly see them in England but there is one homegrown film which has a similar role.

(Micheal Caine is) Get Carter

Coming here I kind of remembered that there had been such a film, but only thanks to the shit-awful American remake from 2000 starring Sylvester Stallone, his then dying career. But when I started exploring film circles, book shops, poster shops, theater bars and the like I noticed one image kept coming up again and again.
Generally in black and white, sometimes in color, this is the most highly reproduced image from the film. From everything I'd read and all the evidence of the staying power this film has had in the popular culture of England, I'd say this is one of the essential English gangster films. You can read a synopsis and get a bunch of trivia at the site I linked to (or good old Wikipedia, of course). Maybe even IMDB, but why would you want to hurt your eyes on such an ugly website? (I mean really, is it just me or is it about as aesthetically pleasing as a Dee-Lites' video?).

What I'll tell you is my own reaction to the film, which I decided to pick up a couple months back when I'd noticed this very image stenciled on a wall near Leicester square (didn't have my camera at the time and, sadly, it had been obliterated by the time I came that way again). Like a lot of films older than about twenty years, the pacing can feel slow at times. But it's the steady building of an incredible momentum that carries you through the last third of the movie with an intensity that's impossible to ignore. It raises questions in you, early on, that you have to have answered. Best of all, it warrants repeat viewings and not just for film nerds who want to study it.

I'd seen Alfie not long before Get Carter and what struck me was how similar Alfie and Carter were and how these similarities highlighted the contrasts. Both characters are very sure of themselves and quick to assert control over any situation they find themselves in. Both cast a hard exterior and yet obviously are very sensitive to a few, highly specific facets of life. The differences lay, of course, in how they enact these characteristics and the fates their behavior brings them too.

I strongly recommend watching the two films back to back, which shouldn't be hard as any video store that carries classic Caine will have both. Anyways, enough of that then!

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Meanwhile, I'm blatantly stealing this clip from Posterchild's site. Just to warn you, it does feature scenes of (albeit animated) torture.

He put it up because of the stencil technique employed. I'm putting it up because I found it to be a suitably gripping piece of film work and an interesting angle on a well worked subject, an angle which I feel runs parallel to Adam Curtis' take on similar matters.

Jesus Jumped Up Christ...

...it is FREEZING in London right now. Something like six degrees Celsius of wet, wet, wet cold.

Perhaps the satisfaction of having made a new comic will keep me warm?

Meanwhile, I think Overcompensating knocked it out of the park today and, if my recent dearth of purty pictures is leaving a gaping hole in your life, may I suggest swinging by my pal Tom's page for some incredible photographs of Hawaii - including where he goes to camp inside a volcano known as The House of the Sun.

A quiet bit

Not much to say today, just two little items

1) Some news about an area of London I know which only serves to reinforce my intense opposition to the terribly problematic notion of cultural relativism. (Little reminder, when the English use the term "Asian" they generally mean people from between Turkey to the Indian Sub-continent, using "East Asian" or "Pacific Asian" to denote what we Canadians usually think of when simply saying "Asian").

2) I was walking to the Tottenham court tube station after having a drink with a friend in Soho when a thought occurred to me. "There is some novelty in walking through this neighborhood in the evening, but not as much as there used to be. On the other hand, it's somewhat personally flattering to think that I'm becoming less of a tourist/immigrant and more of a native".

Huh.

Phew! New comic and an honest to goodness little art upgrade

Only a lil' one, I know, but still it is a comic! I learned a lot while creating a reference page for Charlotte and salvaging/partially redrawing the disaster I aborted this past Wednesday. But it all took precious time! Still, I'll be much better prepared this coming Wednesday.

Blogger is acting WEIRD about uploading images. When I moved my small archive of twelve strips to the new address I had to put them on Photobucket and link to them as I kept getting that damn problem. But then, when I was done the new comic I tried regular uploading from my hard drive and wam bam spickidey spam....it worked?

Meanwhile, it's been a quiet weekend thanks to an incredibly sore right foot that has kept me from wanting to walk too far. This is what I get for having feet one size larger than what 99% of shoe stores in England carry, thus necessitating my getting my parents to send me a new pair of dress shoes from good ol' PayMore ShoeMoreShoe. While wating for them, I guess I've basically been walking on soles so thin as to not count under the Geneva conventions and thus here we are.

I did see Superbad though and I'd give it a hearty recommendation, even over Knocked Up. It just held together better, albeit probably because it had a simpler premise, and the overall theme of friends helping each other through tough transitions was executed in such a way that it was impossible not to see all sorts of funny and/or heartwarming similarities in my own life while watching. It doesn't desperately need the big screen though, so waiting for rental might not be a bad idea.