Helicon blog links!

If you are interested in creative arts, take a look at the Helicon magazine blog! http://heliconbristol.blogspot.co.uk

Helicon is the University of Bristol's student-run creative arts magazine, and I'm one of the prose editors. It is a fabulous publication! We have three paper magazines published every year; each issue has a different theme, the last one was 'Journey' and our current theme is 'Perception'. We also have a year-round blog which is regularly updated with interesting posts. Prose, poetry, art, photography and music - its all there: so take a look!

If you'd like to read the things I have written personally, here are some links to my posts - but do take a general look, as there's always something going on!

Read about Bryan Lewis Saunders, the artist who took 25 different drugs to produce 25 fascinating self-portraits: http://heliconbristol.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/25-drugs-25-days.html

Or how about Louis Wain, the artist who suffered with Schizophrenia, and who's work reflects his affliction: http://heliconbristol.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/louis-wain-effects-of-schizophrenia-on.html

Have a penchant for Salvador Dali? http://heliconbristol.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/salvador-dali.html

Narrative's of perception: http://heliconbristol.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/if-doors-of-perception-were-cleansed.html

Daniel Richter's amazing art: http://heliconbristol.blogspot.co.uk/2013/02/daniel-richter.html

Havisham! http://heliconbristol.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/i-want-diversion-and-i-have-done-with.html

A little bit of Sexton's poetry: http://heliconbristol.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/between-seasons.html

Nobel prize for literature winning Mo Yan: http://heliconbristol.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/mo-yan.html

Why do poets love bees?! http://heliconbristol.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/the-buzz-word.html

A Clockwork Orange's unique language: http://heliconbristol.blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/a-clockwork-orange-zammechat.html


Happy Reading!

Flight: a journey to honesty.

Last night I watched 'Flight', starring Denzel Washington and directed by Robert Zemeckis. I was initially apprehensive about the film, as plane-crash films are not my favourite: however, I was pleasantly surprised. 

The film opens with Washington (Whip) waking up after a heavy night of drinking, drugs, and sex with a flight-attendant. He swigs beer and snorts cocaine, and then flies a plane. He consumes three small bottles of vodka whilst in air. Due to turbulent weather and faulty mechanics, the plane heads into a nose-dive. Whip (instructing his co-pilot and a flight attendant) flies the plane into an inverted position allowing it to glide to a (relatively) safe landing: only 6 lives are lost in the crash. 

Notwithstanding the palpable tension and jeopardy of this scene, the crash is -paradoxically - 'Flight's least compelling moment. The real intrigue is in the fall-out of the disaster. 

When released from hospital, Whip retreats to his grandfather's abandoned house. He scours the house, pouring away bottle after bottle of alcohol, discarding marijuana: razing the vicinity of the substances which he depended upon before the crash. However, when he meets with an attorney and discovers that a toxicology report evidences the substances in his blood on the flight, and could lead to four life sentences for manslaughter: he returns to the bottle. 

Zemeckis's focus now shifts to the mental and emotional affliction of substance-addiction. As I watched the ensuing scenes, I was uncannily reminded of the short-stories of one of my favourite writers - definitely my favourite American writer - Raymond Carver. Carver's stories often deal with the difficult subject of alcohol-addition. His style is all-inclusive, tackling everything from marital breakdowns, to ear-infections: documenting the ways in which alcoholism affects a sufferers ability to cope with the monumental and the mundane. This inclusiveness is reflected in Gatins's screenplay; we see shots of Whip struggling to change the television-channel, or rise from his chair - and equally, his inability to communicate with his ex-wife or forge a proper relationship with his son. 

No matter where Whip is, or what he's doing - there is always alcohol paraphernalia present. Zemeckis insistently and deftly insures alcohol is always in the shot, always the focal point; as Whip goes to rescue Nicole (his love-interest) from her abusive landlord, he climbs the stairs beer-can in one hand walking stick in the other, wrestles him from her beer-can still in hand. When paying the landlord, he needs two hands to access his wallet - but tucks the can under his chin rather than relinquish it. He drives Nicole home, can in hand; receives a massage, bottle in hand; fills plane-oil [?!], accompanied by a bottle (you get the picture). Arguably, this could all be crafty product-placement, but I appreciate the incredibly subtle way in which Zemeckis highlights Whip's affliction: it is a cinematic trick that unconsciously insinuates the reality of Whip's addiction into the viewers consciousness. No matter how many times he vehemently, vocally denies his problem, the enumerated cans and bottles continue to litter each scenes, taciturnly filling-up the screen: material, tangible proof of a notoriously intangible, immaterial disease. 

Whip's relationship with Nicole is also an interesting element of the film. Nicole is a heroin addict - yet she, unlike Whip, recognises and accepts her addiction (there's no way you can ignore it, really). The scene where Nicole confronts Whip about his alcoholism is emotionally-charged and compelling: he says she can't talk, considering her own problems, and she says, at least she's honest about them. This introduces some fascinating paradoxes; is accepting a problem - as the old cliche says - half way to solving in it? what, on the scale of addiction, is worse: heroin addiction, or alcoholism? what is the more ethical/honest/healthy way to fund said addiction (if 'healthy' is even an appropriate term to use here): tenuously up-keeping a dangerous, but glamorous high-profile career, or drifting through dead-end jobs, pornography and prostitution? Gatins and Zemeckis refuse to show sympathy on either side, or answer these questions: but they certainly raise them, and they hang in the air, poised and potent. 

The most poignant scene of the film (tenser even than the high-octane plan-crash) is when Whip is left in a hotel-room, before his hearing. All alcohol has been removed from his room, he has been sober for eight days, and has nothing to do but wait until morning and try and sleep. He shaves, he eats, watches television. These mundane actions knowingly build up to the scenes climax (and seem to reflect the actions of many of Carver's characters, who take special care over their day-to-day actions, in order to try and relieve and redirect some of the pressure of their very un-ordinary, life-altering afflictions). As he tries to sleep, he hears a knocking noise. It is the door of the adjoining room. The room is open. The mini-bar is full. As we take stock of the rows and rows of tiny, glimmering bottles - tantalisingly refracted and infinitely multiplied by the mirrored panels of the fridge - along with Whip, the audience feels the full impact of the temptation that confronts him. One could almost, tangibly reach out and take a bottle. And that is what Whip does: smelling it, before replacing it, and closing the fridge's door. The audience feels an - albeit brief - sense of victory on Whip's behalf. However, I couldn't help but think, in that split-second, that his abstinence was disingenuous or half-hearted (fully recovered alcoholics do not, or should not at least, count down the minutes since their last drink, nor is recovery realistically viable in a mere eight days). As we see a close-up of Whip's hand quickly, and confidently grab the bottle, and hear the metallic clink of glass departing from the granite worktop resonate throughout the movie-theatre, the audience realises the Whip's demons remain unvanquished: they were simply hovering in the recesses of the darkened room. 

There is undeniable comedy in the scenes of the following morning, as the officials struggle to prepare a horrendously drunk Whip for his public appearance, drafting in his drug-dealer to provide a line of cocaine to perk him up. Whip approaches the hearing with a calm confidence (brought about by the toxic cocktail he so recently consumed), yet it off-put by a small-child in the elevator, penetrating his facade with an innocent - but knowing - gaze, as Whip wipes dregs of cocaine from his nose. His confidence resumes at the hearing, when his suspicions about the plane's poor state are confirmed (it was always going to fall from the sky), and when his toxicology report is deemed void as a result of some crafty manoeuvres by his lawyer.

Yet, as the three errant vodka bottles (which only crew would have access to) are brought to his attention, Whip is torn. He has the perfect get-out-clause: the deceased flight-attendant (who he was sleeping with) had alcohol in her system, and was a documented alcoholic. Here, the major moral dilemma of the film emerges: do you lie to preserve your facade - to keep your wings, stay out of jail, avoid infamy, maintain the praise of the multitude, or tell the truth, to save your life - that which is unseen: your conscience, your moral integrity, your mental health. Whip chooses the latter: but it is not an obvious choice. We have watched him through the whole film, and his choices are - in the large part - wrong, and immoral: he regularly delights in getting off scott-free. Yet, his decision to do the right thing now doesn't seem incongruous, it is as if, as he says, he has 'reached [his] maximum limit of lies'. We see, not a man broken, but a man realising the limit of his capacity for wrongdoing: a man who, like a lot closeted alcoholics, can still ostensibly function and operate in society (can operate a plane, can save all the people on board from certain death) yet, has become incapable of operating morally. Importantly, Whip realises and recognises this incapacity, and can begin to recover from a disaster infinitely more sustained and affecting than a large, explosive plane crash (that's merely a blip) - can recover from the slowly simmering, everyday disaster that is alcoholism and the life of an alcoholic. 

As the film closes, the real drama of the performance resonates. Perhaps it is not the memorable, climactic moments in life which are the most affecting - but the banal: especially when the banal moments are insistently collocated with a disease like alcoholism. Like Carver's short-stories, 'Flight' investigates the human-drama of affliction, the intimate failure and alterations of a very personal addiction. Underneath the glamour of every high-functioning pilot and his gold-buttoned uniform there is, very possibly, a concealed, yet rampant disorder: alcoholism, drug-addiction, etc. - take your pick. 

Lena Dunham: voice of 2013? But for what reason?

I live in the UK, and obviously, we're behind slightly on all HBO's excellent shows (GOT series 3, cannot wait!), so I didn't get into the GIRLS hype 'till late last year: but I'm glad I did.

From the first episode of the first series, I was amazed and perplexed by Hannah. As an English student, wondering what I'm going to do with my degree/life and when I'm eventually going to have to pay my own way, I felt like everything Hannah said in that first episode applied to me. As the series progressed I also felt like Hannah's failed love-life resonated with mine: we've all been the over-zealous  Hannah to a passive, uninterested Adam.

However, this series, the tone of GIRLS changed. At first glimpse Hannah had been the hopeless, hapless, slightly irritating twenty-something we could empathise, laugh and cry with. Now, largely, I vehemently dislike Hannah; I find her desperate, self-indulgent, narcissistic, a bad friend, and frankly have little sympathy for her OCD (a fissure that seemingly came out of nowhere, and is rather over-done and cliched). At first, I though Dunham was helping the feminist cause (if that's even a viable/ tangible thing anymore); by being comfortable with her body, outspoken, inappropriate, having Marnie 'throw' an abortion for Jessa: ultimately, projecting four feisty (if not always likeable) women onto our screens and providing them with more interesting, complex and frankly realer back-stories than - this one likes shoes, this one's a man-eater (SATC, I'm looking at you!).

Yet, as I've begun to contemplate my strange change of heart, I've started to think that it's all part of Lena Dunham's master plan. What she aims for - if I've interpreted her correctly, as I feel I have - is ambiguity. Dunham isn't always trying to redraw the lines: she's asking, deftly probing and interrogating, where those lines stand - and what possible potential for movement there might be. 

Here's the break-down of my theory.

1. One of Hannah's defining characteristics is bodily self-confidence: although she is said to have been uncomfortable with her body in high school, hence the tattoos [Dunham's own comfortableness with her body, and willingness to have it screened is hardly surprising - just look at her mother's art!]. Hannah's almost constant nakedness has, to some extent, been met with positivity; some have hailed her as an inspiration for the generation, a forerunner in the fight against eating disorders and a refreshingly real alternative to magazine models, a new, original voice saying 'yes this not particularly beautiful girl can nab an attractive doctor for a weekend of uninhibited sex'. Others have been less enthusiastic, and Dunham has gathered a wide following of trolls on the internet, who enjoy scrutinising her body. Yet, arguably, this terse conflict is exactly what Dunham wants. She confidently asks, when others have approached with caution - what is the definition of beauty in 2013? does society want us to be confident in our bodies - yet keep that confidence to ourselves? what's stronger, our aversion to eating-disorders, or obesity? is playing ping-pong topless a beautiful, or repulsive sight? Dunham is no idiot, when she stripped down for the small-screen she knew her body would polarise opinion, and these are the questions - when she wore a string-vest for an entire show, or fainted in the shower - that she wanted us to ask.
2. Another question, inextricably bound with the last: where is the line between self-confidence, and gratuitous self-exposure? I begun by admiring Dunham's bravery, yet now, more often than not, feel that her nudity is unnecessary and often ridiculous. 
3. Hannah is, as I've noted - extremely outspoken. Yet, there are times when her speech is uncomfortable, and annoying (I'm thinking, for example of the episode where she spends the weekend with Joshua). Here, people have argued that Joshua is intimidated by a strong, independent woman who speaks her mind. I think it is far more complex than that: Dunham tests the boundaries between being 'outspoken' and speaking too much; sharing your mind, and offloading; opening yourself to another person, and gratuitously exposing yourself (Dunham is all about exposure); knowing what you want and who you are, and obliterating the other person in the process: making them the insignificant, silent, negated inter-locuter while you conduct your very vocal personal pity-party. My relationship with Hannah is always liminal: I occasionally appreciate what she says, but feel that the large part of her dialogue is self-indulgent drivel ~ do we want to hear other people, or only ourselves?
4. GIRLS is, at times, intensely funny: usually in a dark, scurrilous way rather than 'ha ha' hilarious. Yet, there are times when that comedy verges on the disturbing. For example, the aforementioned 'abortion' shower. I am firmly, immovably, intrinsically pro-choice. However, I still found a twinge of repulsion to hear abortion being discussed in such a nonchalant manner. A substantial group of my friends who are pro-choice: yet, I would never imagine that we would discuss what is in reality an extremely grave, sensitive issue, with such casual expression ~ again, I hasten to say: this is the point. Are these girls refreshingly, wholly liberated - the epoch and definitive leaders of modern-day feminism. Or, are they disconcertingly naive, chillingly desensitised to the reality of abortion, to the inherent psychological and social repercussions it has: are they, really, dis-morphed and mutated followers of a (and I say this warily, knowing that it doesn't quite and never will express exactly what I mean) over-liberated American female population. Dunham lights this taper.
5. And finally, I come to the most evocative and intense antithesis explored in GIRLS: where is the line between sex, and rape. In the most recent episode shown in the UK, we see Adam direct Natalia to crawl on all-fours to his bedroom; he then has sex with her from behind, whilst asking her if she likes it, and ejaculates on her - the scene ends with the camera's focus on Natalia's grimacing, repulsed face and the words 'I'm not sure if I liked that'. ~ what is it about this powerful scene that has set the internet alight?

• Firstly, I want to establish that this scene is - for a number of reasons - my favourite in GIRLS.
• Avid GIRLS followers, arguably, will have known that Adam and Natalia's relationship could not last: that there is a naturally darker aspect to Adam's persona which he had to repress when he was with her. 
• Yet - arguably - no one could not have envisioned that it would end this way. 
• Earlier in this episode we had seen Charlie, finally, take charge with Marnie - he grabs her and they have sex in an extremely passionate, consensual way. Dunham prepares something to contrast the later sex-scene with: an example of 'right' sexual-conduct. 
• As the focus comes to Adam and Natalia, her disgust is almost palpable as she surveys Adam's cluttered, disorganised flat (or should I say hovel). ~ the repressed disgust foreshadows Natalia's soon unrepressed disgust.
• He asks her if that changes her opinion of him: she says no - but one can't help but think that she doesn't quite understand the question.
• Adam commands her to crawl to the bedroom, she is unwilling. At this stage, the tone in his voice is verging on menacing, yet still controlled enough to suggest that this could just be a normal - if slightly strange - sex game. 
• Now, it is important to stress that we are aware of Adam's strange sexual fantasies. This is not new: and, importantly, at the start of their relationship, Hannah was equally as wary of Adam as Natalia is now, before gradually becoming sensitised and relaxed: and, to a large extent, adopting his peculiar border-line unhealthy attitude towards sex - see the scene when she returns home and has sex with the pharmacist, and disturbs him with her disconcerting dirty-talk. 
• So, at this stage, Dunham is still within the boundaries of what (naturally, may disturb us about Adam), but is an intrinsic part of his character. 
• This context infects our interpretation of what happens next. I felt a striking ambiguity as Adam scoops Natalia up and sex with her. I was torn between seeing this as a normal - albeit aggressive - sex-scene, and noting the fear and disgust on her face. I simultaneously felt annoyance and sympathy for her: I was irritated because I instantly thought 'just tell him to get off, tell him to stop' and sympathetic because I appreciated that she was in a subjugated state - physically and mentally less powerful than Adam. Why did I feel these conflicting emotions? This is the clincher - this is Dunham's expertise at play - I had been in this situation. The initial, harmless 'oh my god I'm Hannah, what am I going to do with my life' that I felt in the first episode of the first series became for me - and I hope, for many other women - 'oh my god, I am Natalia, and what am I, or society, or anyone going to do about that: and what could they possibly do?'
• As Natalia lies there while Adam climaxes, pulling her own dress down to save it from a stain - the passive object of his lust - the 'feminist' issue (an issue I struggle to gage my own response to, on a daily basis) rears its ugly head. 
• The sex-scene becomes SO MUCH MORE; an interrogation into gender-politics; an identification of the continued enthralment of women in the sexual arena; an examination of the phrase 'healthy sexual behaviour'; a probing of the line between consent, and rape. 
• (NB: I like that HBO have refused to define the scene (they have yet to publicly say its a sex-scene or a rape-scene. I love that: because that's the point in it ~ we just don't know). 
• Dunham - with skill, panache and confidence - manages to, in what first seemed to be a cool, but benign 'girly' show, get the world thinking about the inherently complicated, undefined, ungovernable nature of sexual conflict. I'm going to sound all pretentious here, but I've recently finished an essay focussing on sexual desire in Ovid; I don't believe that it is an over-elevation to say that I see Ovid's insistently questioning manner in Dunham. The questions his myths ask - is the co-mingling of female and male (see Hermaphroditus) beautiful or repulsive; why can't a woman be the aggressive wooer (see Venus and Adonis); and where is the boundary between intense sexual pursuit and rape (see Daphne and Apollo) - are uncannily regenerated in Dunham's art (and I do call it art, it is art). For both Ovid and Dunham the key word is ambivalence.

Bernini's Daphne and Apollo

I might not always like Lena Dunham: but I admire what she has done, is doing, and hopefully will continue to do. 

'The Glass Menagerie' : 'a deeply intimate, affecting piece of drama' *****

The Falstaff Society's recent production of Tennessee Williams' 'The Glass Menagerie' was simply exquisite. 'The Glass Menagerie' tells the story of Amanda Wingfield, a faded Southern belle, and her two 'dysfunctional' children, who struggle to get by after being abandoned by their father. Tom works at a warehouse by day, but is a poet at heart; he craves adventure and excitement, which he attempts to inject into his stultifying daily routine through incessant late-night trips to the movie theatre. Laura, crippled by a childhood illness, has an 'inferiority complex', and concurrently actively excludes herself from society, choosing to remain indoors and play old phonograph records and cultivate her 'Glass Menagerie': a collection of tiny glass animals. 

Performed in the Alma Tavern, a small, intimate location, the set was sparse; however, as the action unfolded the sparsity of the set became fundamental, offsetting the passion of the action, and the poetry of Tom's soliloquies. 

Ed Phillips embodied Tom perfectly, combining wry humour with a subtle, attractive American twang. He accurately portrays the frustration of a creative man confined by the harsh necessity of reality, in thrall to the invisible, yet un-ignorable social maxims of the sanctity of 'duty' and 'family'; his wistful speeches convey a fervent longing for adventure and titillation, superseding the stultifying drudgery of everyday life. Phillips commanded the stage beautifully, confidently projecting his voice during his soliloquies, and conveying similar strength when interacting with the other characters; Tom's exchanges with his mother were particularly compelling, presenting the tension between old-world convention and new American optimism, paling authority and aspirational youth.  

Letty Thomas as Amanda was similarly wonderfully cast. 'The Glass Menagerie' thrives as much on what does not happen as what does; Amanda's nostalgic, fragmented memories of her long-passed girlhood - the 'seventeen Gentlemen callers' at her door, the accommodating slaves, the 'Southern hospitality' - conveyed a longing which uncannily parallels that of her sons: while Tom hungers for a rich, vibrant future, she struggles to cling to a hazy simulacrum of former glory. 

Laura is an complex, inexplicable entity. Alice Kirk did a fabulous job of subtly communicating both the physical defects, and the debilitating internal monsters which plague Laura's life, inhibiting her potential to flourish. Her strange idiosyncrasy of obsessively playing with and humanizing her glass ornament collection is another mutation of the desperate longing that hampers her mother and brother; projecting one's affections onto inanimate objects is simply another form of escapism - like going to the movie theatre, or obsessing over gentlemen callers - only this escape is to the internal recesses of the imagination. 

Oliver Bahbout as 'freckles' or Jim O'Connor, burst onto the scene with incongruous optimism. Bahbout excellently injected a typically, undeniably American positivism that harshly jarred with the sensitive, delicate internal struggles we had seen develop so fully in each of the characters throughout the first half of the play. His scene with Laura really was a fascinating, compelling piece of drama; it presented the clash of the introvert and extrovert, the pessimist and optimist, the socially-stunted and the socially-inflated persona. 'Freckles' moralizing seemed - as it should seem - like a violation of Laura's individuality, and I strangely found myself willing her to resist his advances and his pompous assumption that 'public speaking' is the future of America: I wished her to be free from her private demons, but not via the methods O'Connor proposes. 

'The Glass Menagerie' was a deeply intimate, affecting piece of drama, presenting a wonderfully intricate spectrum of interweaving, inter-lapping, yet entirely distinct psychologies. In a play of only four characters, each could have an entire two hours devoted to their particular stories, and still keep an audience wholly in rapture. 

Particular credit must go to the play's directors, Maureen Lennon and Theo Scholefield, who excellently transformed the raw material of Williams's already rich script into an unforgettable theatrical performance, with undeniable skill and economy. 

Undoubtedly a five star production. *****

''Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.'' (1.1, Tom).