Prologue to a novel I will probably never write...

(Two in one day, thought I'd liven it up a bit. Wrote this many moons ago, as the prologue to a novella I was planning on writing, didn't happen but I kept hold of it 'cause I liked it...)

This is the beginning.

And the end.

It’s where my story culminates, being a high point I figured it’s as good a point as any to start, only problem is it’s also probably where it ends.

I’m twenty four, I’ve been living what a lot of people in my age group would consider the high life for going on a year now. And I got here quite by accident.

See, I was just a normal twenty three year old, I didn’t know I was normal, but I was. I didn’t have a fucking clue what I wanted to do with myself. Apparently I should have. I should have known where I was aiming, I should be training for something, I should know where I wanted to be ten years from now and I should be trying to get there. So I went along with the motions, I had a part time job to tide me over while I found a “career” that fit in with the “qualifications” I’d earned in school and college, which of course I’d decided on three or four years prior to me having any fucking clue on how the world actually works, not to mention what was actually going on in said world.

To me it felt like catch twenty-two, you needed to decide what you wanted to be, four years prior to actually deciding what you wanted to be. This may or may not have just been a product of the times, when I was ejected from the education system the whole country, nay, the whole world was in an economic downturn, there were five workers for two jobs, if you was lucky, and this was coming, seemingly, just after an economic and cultural boom where anyone could be anyone, or anything, the world was anyone and everyone’s oyster, companies were even training people for jobs that didn’t even exist yet. So people acted like the world was their oyster, they trained to be anything and everything, to do with the digital world mostly, me included, but when the analogue infrastructure that held the digital world up crumbled, they were left prospectless...

Not to mention the whole idea of “Being” irked me. Why couldn’t you just “Be”, you needed a tag, you needed to be a stock broker, or an IT consultant, or a trading standards officer, a cable joiner, plumber or electrician. Why couldn’t you just be someone? Why couldn’t you just be you and your job was a means to make that happen, instead of your job being a means of you happening...

C’est la vie I guess.

5 films most people haven't seen but should be considered required viewing...

Brick

Straight in at the top with Brick, a 2005 film written and directed by the not commonly known Rian Johnson, starring a young Jason Gordon-Levitt, which won the Special Jury Prize: Dramatic, for Originality of Vision at the Sundance Film Festival of the same year. It's a neo-noir film (although in my opinion it shows aspects of subtle surrealism too) set largely around a US high-school campus, with a stark lack of adults and an unusual yet easy to grasp language of slang used by most of the characters which kinda reminds me of something from either a Shakespeare play, or something from the Sprawl trilogy of books by William Gibson.


The story is quite twisty and turny, so it's hard to talk about without giving much away, but saying that, it's not hard to follow. If I had to sum this movie up in one line, it'd be: The Maltese Falcon meets Bullitt set in a somewhat surreal American high school. Gordon-Levitt is by far the star of the show, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was the film that helped spring-board him to where he seems to be going, as well as securing him as one of my favourite current actors.


If you liked Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Laura or any other of the 40's Noir epics, you're going to love this. It really is the only truly epic, classic Noir film that has been made since Bogart walked off into the fog and Welles got shot in a sewer.




London

Another film from 2005, that didn't seem to do too well at the box-office, over here in the UK atleast, which is strange if you look at it's all star cast, which I guess wasn't as "all star" in 2005 as they would be, currently, six years later. In the lead we have Chris Evans (who will probably go down in history now more for Captain America), with Jason Statham in the supporting role,and Jessica Biel as the love interest, with a few other familiar faces cropping up.


Again, it's slightly neo-noir, but not as classically so as the above Brick, and without any of the detective/sleuth aspects. At it's core it's a break-up/get-the-girl-back movie, but without any of the sappy romantic crap that tends to be the vestige of the genre. The vast majority of the film centres around Evan's "Syd" and Statham's "Bateman" (the former's drug dealer) spending the night waxing philosophically, whilst doing Scarface amounts of coke, in the bathroom of the farewell party being thrown for Syd's Ex, "London", played by Biel. The film revolves around Syd trying to pluck up the courage to go downstairs and talk to London, whilst other characters drop in, partake of their coke, offer anecdotes and suggestions, then leave, and that's pretty much it, apart from the odd flash-back to when Syd and London were still together, punctuating the stream.


Keep an eye out for Statham going all "Lock-Stock" / "Transporter" nearer the end of the film, well worth the wait even if you didn't like the 98% of the film before the scene...


Kidulthood & Adulthood

I'm not 100% sure these two belong here, because quite a few people have actually seen them (in the UK at least), but they're here because a lot of people haven't seen them for entirely the wrong reasons. In my opinion you need to talk about them both together, they don't really work as well apart. Quite a few people seem to have been put off by them because of the "chav" culture (if you want to give it that moniker) the films revolve around, but if you can get past that, what you get is a gritty, dark, brooding pair of movies that just don't hold any blows and cut deep into the subject matter they partake of.


They're both written by Noel Clarke, in my opinion a shining star of British movie culture, but only the latter was directed by him, his first step into directing, which kind of shows. It's a bit more choppy, doesn't kind of gel as well as the first, but it still doesn't sell it's self short.


These are both two films that any cinephile needs to have under their belt, and I'm going to go out on a limb and say that they could, and hopefully will, go down as some of the greatest movies that looked into and explored a certain culture at a certain time.


Push

So you've got "movers", people with telekinesis, and you've got "watchers", people who can see glances of the future, and you've got "pushers", people who can force a thought into someone else's mind, "shifters" who can change how people perceive objects in the mundane world...I'm going to stop there, because there's quite a few more, "Bleeders", "Sniffers", "Wipers"...


Pretty much it's the real world, but you've got a few, rare and select individuals that exhibit one of the above skills. The basis of the story line is that the main character is trying to uncover the history of what happened to his father, with the help of a young girl who is trying to save her mother, whilst both being hounded by a secret government organisation. Old hat, I know...


But what makes this a great film is the execution of the storyline. None of the powers any of these people posses are known to the public, so you get into a mindset of thinking were the good con-artists good, or were they "shifters"? Are good gamblers good gamblers or are they "movers"? On top of that there's a great interaction between the cast, they each work well in the role, and work together well in a way that's believable as their characters.


And any Neuromancer  (/sprawl trilogy) fans out there should definitely watch this film, it feels like it's set in the sprawl, except with hacking and implant skills replaced with supernatural abilities...

What to expect from Stuff, Things and General Eclecticisms...

Well, what can you expect from Stuff, Things and General Eclecticisms? Well, stuff, things and general eclecticisms (which is actually a word funnily enough) to put it bluntly. This blog is going to have a little bit of everything, from different authors, maybe a review of a band, a rant on public transport, a recipe for the perfect meatball, tips and tricks, how-to guides, you name it...