"Personalities Frozen in Amber" - A Review of the Jayne Mansfield Story

Cover of The Jayne Mansfield Story

Icons fascinate me. There is little getting away from this fact. I grew up in showbusiness and I have experienced it in most of its forms. However, I think it is probably my very early interest in Greek and Norse mythology coupled with comic books that led me to my interest in the cult of personality. In both instances we have fictional figures that have become representative of what we love and fear, blown up to magical proportions. The way the Romans would also seek to deify their recently deceased emperors presents a very literal way of how humans have always needed immortal heroes. I have little time for current celebrity gossip and I do not elevate those society chooses to celebrate above anyone else. What interests me is the way a certain image is formed and how they go beyond what they ever were as a mortal figure. The icon is its own entity, merely being played by a flesh and blood human being for a relatively short time.

"An interesting read disguised as a simple guide" - James Marriott's "Horror Films": A Review

 What's It About?

"Horror Films" is an unimaginatively titled, self-styled "step-by-step companion to horror films" produced and commissioned by Virgin Books Ltd's "Virgin Film" subgenre written by James Marriott. Marriot has also written three other Virgin travel books under the pseudonym Patrick Blackden. The book's cover features a full page single black and white still of a fang-baring, blood drooling Christopher Lee in his iconic role of Dracula. Each of the book's 20 chapters focuses on an era defining and highly influential horror film and following a list of full cast and key crew members divides its discussion up under the following titles:

Magical Realism at its Best! - A Review of Angela Carter's "Bloody Chamber"

Cover of Bloody Chamber and Other Stories

Angela Carter was one of the boldest writers of the 20th century. Championed by feminists, Carter is not the usual PC promoting puritan that became a cliché in her time. Instead she strengthened female role models through her own imaginative ideas and often sourced through real evidence. She did this without diminishing other male characters in fiction; male and female villain roles can be equally treacherous, brutal and nasty. Her research into Gothic fiction and, in particular, folk stories reveals this best. This short collection of stories served as the source for the screenplay she wrote, "The Company of Wolves", one of the most startlingly original films of the 1980s. In Carter's works, characters familiar like Red Riding Hood do not overwhelm the male characters rather they compliment them with a different and yet equal strength.

The Curse of Wizzard

“It does seem really hard to get consumers to do the right thing. It is stupid that we use two tons of steel, glass, and plastic to haul our sorry selves to the shopping mall. It's stupid that we put water in plastic bottles in Fiji and ship it here.”

- John Doer

Me vs Street Shopping - The Battle Begins

I like to think that I am in touch with my so-called feminine side, but even I struggle to meet the metrosexual fashion of loving the shopping experience. The street shopping experience for me, which hasn't happened properly in a long time, is typically faced with "weekend eyes". I am tired and unenthusiastic. Arguments with partners nearly always inevitably arose from shopping excursions. It is a constant theme with me, so the blame probably rests squarely on my shoulders and I acknowledge it. I clearly do not want to be there and my every action is a move to get to the checkout and away from the place. When it comes to most types of street shopping I want to go in and get what I came for.

Icon Series: Bram Stoker and Dracula

English: Bram Stoker (1847-1912), novelist born in Ireland, author of "Dracula" (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Seeing as Google has reminded me that it is Bram Stoker's 165th birthday, I almost felt obliged to put something up here on the bloke. He is not what I would consider to be an icon, but he certainly created one. The Dublin-born Stoker seems to be cast as a most unlikely candidate to pen one literature's most successful figures of the Gothic and the macabre. He was no Edgar Alan Poe in his lifestyle and psychology and, despite working in showbusiness, couldn't have been further from a Lord Byron. Being the business manager of the Lyceum theatre, accounts have him trying to impress and being totally dominated by the overbearing actor, Sir Henry Irving. However, Stoker was a close acquaintance of Oscar Wilde's - going back to their student days where Stoker had proposed him for membership to The Philosophical Society - and I heard once on a "South Bank Show" special documentary that Wilde had an affair with Stoker's wife. I am not sure what the evidence is for this claim, but Wilde was certainly a suitor for Florence Balcombe, a celebrated beauty of Victorian society. Wilde was apparently upset about Stoker marrying Florence, but later they reconciled and they remained friends even after Wilde's fall.

Remembering Extreme World Warfare Part II

 

It was October 1998 and I was stood dressed in a pirate costume complete with a polka-dotted handkerchief wrapped around my head and a live macaw on my shoulder. The business of supplying and training animals for the entertainment industry is a rocky ride with varying highs and lows. Some days you can be enjoying the company of the world's most celebrated stars. My father has been personally summoned to Prince Rainier's palace, John Cleese's London apartment and many other places to receive recognition for his work with the most dangerous and beautiful animals on the planet. Other times you are sitting on the set of a basement level budget production with a box full of moths. That night in October, I and two female employees of my parents had been booked to appear at the 21st birthday party of a millionaire's daughter. Under a huge marquee an elaborate pirate party had been put together. The entrance to the event was off the end of a life-size replica ship, overhead there were fire-breathing entertainers on top of a specially constructed bridge and on the ground level paid actors walked amongst guests dressed as pirates and around tables decorated with "treasure chests." We were the parrot handlers, paid to walk around dressed like seafaring scallywags off a Christmas pantomime.

My mind wandered back to another time. Just two weeks ago my creation, "Dead Souls", the world's first Gothic martial arts act, had debuted in front of a shocked professional wrestling audience. Amid an array of lighting effects and pounding music, I, under the guise of the Spirit of Instinct, had done battle with The Gatekeeper in a routine that looked part ritual part fantasy performance with clashing blades, spinning high kicks and tumbling tricks. Nothing like this production had been presented before to a professional wrestling audience and certainly not a British one. It had become the climax of two exciting months of realising old dreams. My emotionally destructive relationship with my longest running girlfriend at the time had also been given its death stroke. I felt free and ready to explode with ideas and enthusiasm. The excitement of producing a show was over, but I, along with the wrestler, Stuart Allen, knew that there was a fantastic world out there to discover.

Then, just when I felt my soul being transported back to the cheering crowds and coloured lights, a voice broke through the haze. "Fetch me another ashtray." One of the many guests at the birthday party had mistaken me for being an elaborately dressed waiter. Keeping what little dignity I felt at the time I politely explained that I wasn't what she thought I was. At that very moment I was aware of a warm sensation creeping down my shoulder. The parrot had shit on me.

Bring me Cordelia! (review of "Bright-Sided")

Cover via Amazon

Positive thinking has become so integrated into the value system of our modern culture, it might seem somewhat odd to find an argument against it. And yet that is exactly what Barbara Ehrenreich does. The release of this book, which was published as “Smile or Die” in the UK has corresponded with the publication of more bold books, willing to challenge the power of positive thinking. A little while back I read Steve Salerno’s unrelenting attack on the self-help movement, “SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless” and since then we have had “The Art of Failure: The Anti-Self Help Book” by Neel Burton. Even the great psychologist Richard Wiseman has taken positive thinking to task and looked at the real science behind self-help in “59 Seconds”, which came out the same year as “Bright-Sided”. This book was not an overt criticism of the self-help movement but rather a genuine attempt to use case studies, raw data and proven psychological methods to help people improve their lives. However, in keeping to the science Wiseman highlighted just how much of the self-help movement was bogus and even damaging. His first chapter, “Happiness”, began with a total debunking of positive thinking and revealed that far from being innocuous at worse, these techniques endorsed by the vast majority of the self-help movement could actually be harmful.