Vive la difference

So, I'm checking out a protest going on outside the offices of Le Pen's Front National party in Matrix Mall, Porcupine. It's a juvenile affair, with lots of name calling and childish over-excitement, made none-the-less-so by my presence.

"Je suis Anglais," I loudly declare, "Je pense que vous etes les idiots. Qu'est ce que vous pense?" It's a trifle harsh, I know, but I don't know the French for misguided. "Et comment est ce que mon francais?"

No one replies. They are ignoring me. I'm impressed.

On a neighbouring rooftop some tooled-up guns-for-hire are unloading copious amounts of ammo in the general direction of anybody venturing near their small but heavily fortified patch of metaturf.



Suddenly they abandon their rooftop and descend on a small sauna-like residence nearby. I drift past the open front door and glimpse a guy called Johann standing inside, naked, and somewhat alarmed. Johann slams the door shut, but not before I IM him to try and get a glimpse of his state of mind.

"Don't worry honey," he tells me.

"I won't," I reply. " Does this happen often?"

"Who the hell are you? Leave me alone goddammit."

Then this happens.



Down there in the bottom the picture you can just make out the body of one of isolationists jerking like a rag doll in the throes of what begins as an explosion and ends as all the colours of the rainbow radiating out towards me through a technicolour haze.

I'm airborne when it happens. I think that's what saves me.

What is it?

Answers in a comment pls...

SADDLE MOUNTAIN ROUNDUP (1942) - Dir. S. Roy Luby

Following on from the Tolstoyesque chronicles of Bib and Stiv, I'm going to keep this brief. Monday just gone was the inaugural meeting of the meQal anna's B-movie club. We gathered on a rooftop of Beauty and the Beast in Steelhead City at 7pm SLT. That's 3am GMT, on a schoolnight, so don't expect to see me there week in week out, but I'm glad I made it along for the opening feature.



SADDLE MOUNTAIN ROUNDUP (1941) stars Ray "Crash" Corrigan, John "Dusty" King and Max "Alibi" Terhune as the Range Busters, a trio of cowboys bringing truth, justice and well-pressed shirts to a wild, lawless and crumpled west.

The Range Busters were the brainchild of Corrigan, who had starred alongside Terhune as two of the Three Mesquiteers, the original 'trigger trio' and a hugely successful Republic Pictures series dating from September 1936 onwards. Corrigan and Terhune left Republic in 1939 over salary issues and came together with producer George Weeks and Monogram Pictures to bring no fewer than twenty-four Range Busters movies to the screen between the summer of 1940 and the fall of 1943. That's one film every fifty days. I mean, how good a movie can you really make in fifty days? (Answers in a comment please.)



Of course, it would be churlish to make a twenty-first century critique of SADDLE MOUNTAIN ROUNDUP, but that's precisely what I'm going to do. It's awful. It's an awful film in 2007, and it was an awful film sixty-five years ago. It may have seemed less awful in the context of a world preoccupied with the beginnings of the second world war, but it wasn't. Not when you consider that it's theatrical release was preceded, but a matter of weeks, by that of Orson Welles' CITIZEN KANE; that it has the narrative complexity of an early episode of Scooby Doo; that one of the film's least wooden performances comes from a wise-cracking ventriloquist's dummy called Elmer Sneezeweed.

Like KANE, ROUNDUP centres upon a world-weary old man whose wealth and influence has brought him only worry, misfortune, and, ultimately, a sad and pathetic demise. The figure in question is not an eccentric media magnate in the mould of William Randolph Hearst or Howard Hughes, but Magpie Harper, a geriatric rancher who dies at the hands of a money-grabbing killer known as The Raven. The Range Busters soon arrive to solve the mystery of Harper's death, bring his murderer to justice, and make safe the prospects of his highly eligible young dependent Nancy, not to mention those of Fang Way, Harper's bewildered Chinese manservant.



Nothing in the basic storyline of SADDLE MOUNTAIN ROUNDUP strays into the undergrowth of unpredictability. The film's sublime moments tend to revolve morearound "Dusty" King's musical numbers - he finds time to sing such classics as The Doggone Doggie Got Away and That Little Green Valley of Mine - and the presence of Max "Alibi" Terhune's saddle-bag sidekick, Elmer Sneezeweed.

Max and Elmer's partnership originated from the early thirties, when vaudeville performer Terhune became master of ceremonies of radio's WLS Barn Dance. When Republic Pictures expressed an interest in having Terhune star in one of their earlier westerns he made it a condition of his involvement that Elmer would star with him. Republic, showing what must have seemed to Max like a prosaic fixation with reality, questioned whether or not ventriloquism had in fact existed in the wild west. Terhune in turn, showing a visionary appreciation of the fact that people - audiences and studios alike - will swallow anything if it suits them to do so. He convinced the production execs at Republic not only that ventriloquism was very much a reality in the formative years of modern America, but that it would not seem utterly ludicrous for a hard-talking, gun-toting, cattle-steering vigilante to have a little talking timber chum riding side saddle.

So it is that we are treated to some unlikely moments in the rich tapestry of cinematic history. At one point during a chase on horseback, with the thunderous piano crescendo rising ever higher in the background, Elmer's hair is shot off. Later, shortly after the Raven is unmasked - yes, it's Magpie Harper's scheming lawyer Dan Freeman, and he would have gotten away with it if it wasn't for those pesky Range Busters - Elmer, to use the parlance of the time, 'gets the girl'. We are left to imagine the anticlimax she experiences upon discovering the her new beau is but a wooden dummy, with a clothes peg for a cock. It is probably much the same sense of anticlimax as that with which the credits of SADDLE MOUNTAIN ROUNDUP roll, and that with which this review ends.

The first casualty of war is underpants

It stirs me from the haze of another brutally early morning. At first it's just a whisper in the breeze, almost imperceptible, the patter of hooves across a distant plain. A sparrow chirrups in the trees and takes flight, only to be intercepted and savaged by a sparrowhawk. I can't decide if it's a good omen, or a bad one. I listen awhile, and a clamour begins to swell, a battle roar hot on the heels of a lone outrider, all of it headed very much in my direction.

It was a bad one. War is upon Second Life.

Who else would be the bearer of such grim tidings but self-appointed sidekick and mistress to the masses Emilly O, coming to me from the frontline. "Airlift me in," I tell her, "I've always wanted to cover a warzone." Well, ever since reading Dispatches. If they ever bring back conscription I want to be a shoo-in for the Press Corp. Conscientious objection looks great on paper, but I bet when it comes to the crunch you end up sloping round town feeling like the only guy not packing heavy artillery.

I check my map on arrival. The sim is heavily populated, and I can see a cluster of bodies to the north. I try to fly in that direction, and spin out immediately, flung away on a crash course with nowhere. Damn my laptop, drunk on my excesses and clogged up with skin, semen and faecal matter. Damn the six Greeks living next door, who sit their with their laptops drinking my precious bandwidth like cheap Ouzo. And damn the Lindens, trying to power their precious grid, our precious grid, with a hamster on an exercise bicycle. Damn them all, and damn you too. War is hell.

"Bring me back," I tell Em. She TP's me back in, and this time I take a moment to survey my surroundings. It's night time, and the sim is full of dark corners. Nearby I can see a deserted building, the Second Life Developer University. It seems to be abandoned, presumably by students and professors running scared from the dogs of war. Speaking of which, where exactly are the dogs of war? All I can see is a throng of unfeasibly beautiful women, wearing even more unfeasibly pointy hats. And... hang on... isn't that a burning body lying on the ground between them. Oh, and look, there's Em, gleefully circling the fringes of this miniature conflagration, adding fuel to the fire with occasional, highly provocative remarks. Hang on a second. This is no war. This is something much, much worse.



This is a fracas.

A fracas, I immediately construe, with its origins in disorganised religion.

I have an instinctive aversion to most established faiths, but at least for the most part they keep themselves to themselves - and erect attractive buildings - albeit in the name of whatever ludicrous omnipotent force they've conjured up to subserve. The kind of DIY allegorical demagoguery you find in SL is far more insidious.

In here every flea-brained Joe can start their own cult for less than the cost of a hand shandy. What's more, they onlt need drop in on their local strip club to find a more than willing flock, punters and pros looking for something to do between hard-ons. Nothing illustrates this better than the story of Stiv:

"One summery day in Rivula, the itinerant wandering musician Stiv was burned to death by his soon to be nemesis, forever after known as the Anti-Stiv."

"As he lay under the blackjack tables of the Enigma, he reflected that even here, there was gum on the underside of the table. He swore in that smoking moment that if he lived, he would dedicate his life to making sure gum was removed from all places of gambling."

"He died, so the next day he decided on a new goal--be God. God, that night, called forth the people in his holy place, and bade them join him to spread the gospel of Stiv. This is why there's so many sex workers in the Church."

It was Emilly who regaled me with the story of Stiv. Yes, that Emilly. She's a resident of Rivula. And a dancer at the Enigma. Oh, and a member of the church. In fact, you might say, she's a Mary Magdalen to Stiv's messiah, and, in current context, the Helen to his Menelaus.

Stiv is not alone in having found in SL a loyal congregation, where in RL he could have hoped for little more than ridicule and alienation. Take for example the deity Bib. Little is known about Bib, nothing in fact, except that his many followers signal their devotion to his cause by wearing pointy hats, channeling the fruit of their doctrine-addled brains towards the heavens in which he claims to reside. Bib, being a celestial body, requires ambassadors on earth. Ninja Tsiolkovsy is one of them.

Tsiolkovsky, a gentleman of leisure and soldier of fortune, is known for expert martial artistry and keeping snails under his hat. Many have speculated that Bib is but his invention, and that his parables are but crude, plainly derivative devices for soliciting money and liturgical sexual favours from impressionable young women. That is to say, I have speculated to this effect, and I can't believe that I'm alone in doing so.

Tsiolkovsky also happens to be a recent flame of Emilly O. A very recent flame in fact, when you reflect upon the fact that his is the freshly incinerated body now smouldering on the ground in front of me. Even as whisps of smoke rise from his ashes he can be heard imploring his attendant minions not to permit the followers of Stiv to steal and desecrate his body. There doesn't seem to be any danger of that, given that the followers of Stiv have apparently followed him all the way back to Rivula, where they are no doubt banqueting on marshmallows and char-grilled chicken.

Except for, that is, for Emilly O, who was plainly the catalyst for the whole sorry shenanigan. I later learn that she felt it necessary to introduce Tsiolkovsky to Stiv, driven by some perverse logic leading to the cataclysmic conclusion that the metaverse would be made better for this meeting of minds.

Just as I am coming to reflect on the fact that even a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day, and that the fall of Bib may have taken place to the betterment of us all, Em makes a desperate attempt to revive hostilities. She invites her trigger-happy cohort Ryce - and his bazooka - to join the fray, and transforms herself into a zombie, intent on devouring the brains of all and sundry. I feel a gentle stirring in my loins, and sense that this is an appropriate moment to withdraw.



Standing on some ethereal plane and raising my eyes to the virtual heavens, I feel confident that neither Stiv nor Bib is frowning down upon me. I feel confident in fact, suddenly and completely, that there is no god.

I bet this sort of shit doesn't happen in World of Warcraft.

Happy New Year!

Just gone midnight SLT in Steelhead, and I'm watching a fireworks display on one of the sim's many wood-panelled rooftops. The owner of the building promises that eventually this clock tower will have fully working innards running like... clockwork. This the kind of painstaking labour-of-love Steelhead is built on. And, for that matter, built of.

I'm already planning a piece on steampunk in SL. For the uninitiated, steampunk is 'a subgenre of speculative fiction set in the past, or a world resembling the past, in which modern technological paradigms occurred earlier in history, but were accomplished via the science already present in that time period.' Think LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN, meaning Alan Moore's original - make that highly original - comic book series rather than the (reportedly woeful) film adaptation.


There are two SL sims best known for celebrating the kind of esoteric Victoriana steampunk feeds on. Steelhead is one, home to Le Jardin, surely the finest bordello in all the metaverse. The other is Caledon, a larger, fast-growing sim that recently became home to a new bureau of your favourite news network and mine, SLNN. Does this have any bearing on the decision to let a piece of gratuitous advertorial dominate the homepage for the best part of a festive fortnight? Probably, but no more so than the fact that Christmas is when the metacorps go quiet and stop issuing press releases just because a CEO thinks about tying his virtual shoelaces.

On which note, I'm also planning a piece on The Avastar, SL's 'first' tabloid newspaper. I've checked out the first couple of copies, as well as the grilling they got on the 'always fairly unbalanced' Second Life Herald for ripping off photos in the first issue and subsequently banning a handful of unhelpful residents from entering an Aimee Weber designed sim that sounds like it needs all the visitors it can get. From what I've seen so far a lot of hard work has gone into it, but that's no guarantee of anything, and what I'd really like to see is some figures for their circulation.

So, like I said, Happy New Year! My resolutions? Keep on blogging, look after my wife and kid better, and GET MORE SLEEP...

Make the most of now

I first learn of Vodafone's 'teaser island' on Second Life News Network (SLNN), my first port of call for all things corporate in SL. SLNN is sponsored by 'virtual world agency' Rivers Run Red (RRR), who are, amongst other things, the agents of Vodafone's arrival in SL. No wonder Avalon, RRR's stylish and brilliantly conceived home in SL, has the occasional whiff of detergent thereabouts, the same flavour that SLNN, with its shiny finish and sterile editorial, is swimming in.

For my part, having been repeatedly snubbed by RRR's CEO in both lives, I'd love to denounce the article as shameless advertorial. In truth brand-centric non-events like this seem to be SLNN's bread and butter, regardless of the agency behind them (a fact I was quick enough to take advantage of when it suited me, although that bridge must now be considered burnt). Furthermore, amidst two paragraphs of regurgitated press release, their roving reporter even finds time for some journalism, pondering the curious timing of the announcement, it being the night before the night before Christmas.

Sure enough, little is stirring inside SL when I arrive, not even the mouse of friend and round-the-clock confidante Emilly O. She's abandoned her vigil in an eerily quiet Steelhead to tend to a meatspace vindaloo (Hardly the most festive of fare, but she's a cave-dweller and a pagan of sorts, so she's just relieved the days are getting longer at last).

I find the island of 'Vodafone' on the map, wince, and tp in. I have in instinctive dislike of brand named islands. Maybe I'd feel differently if I was one of their customers, or felt some affinity to their brand. However, given their dwindling market share, and my proclivity for going to unimaginable lengths to abandon underachieving service providers, surely I'm exactly the kind of floating voter they ought to be getting on-side?

I realise the non-descript furry white object I've been deposited on is a cloud at precisely the moment I stroll casually off the edge. Easing seamlessly into freefall, I have time to reflect on how irritated I am - and to wonder who moved the page up button - before I hit concrete, which turns out to be sea water, and floods my punctured lungs. It's an undignified entrance, by anyone's standards. I rest on the sea bed for a moment, considering legal action.

I surface, and fly, moth-like, towards the glowing red column signalling... something. I'm soon hovering a short distance away from a small, bright, perfectly circular yellow island, peppered with Super Mario-style flora and fauna, in the shadow of three enormous intertwined brass horns. A multi-coloured butterfly appears and glides through my midriff, it's wings beating gently in the imagined breeze. I'm reminded of Hate Something Change Something, Honda's testimony to the fact that corporations can do trippy. It occurs to me that the viability of any creative treatment ultimately comes down to its pertinence in relation to the underlying message. I drift gently downwards, determined to find one.

The three enormous brass horns stand silent. I check for my volume control, but it isn't there. Looks as though nobody is blowing Vodafone's triple-headed trumpet, least of all themselves. They remind me of the inner workings of the human ear, of cochleas, canals and tympanic membranes. They also remind me of one of the most disastrous branding exercises in history, BT's Piper, who breathed his last in 2003, 12 years after a £50m rebrand.

Beneath the horns, and a large rotating welcome message, is the island's centrepiece; a watercooler, almost monolithic atop its tiered red pedestal. The message explains that I can touch the watercooler to receive today's goodie, or take a watercooler of my own. Today's goodie turns out to be a selection of seasonal stocking fillers; a sign pointing towards the north pole; a sprig of mistletoe; some reindeer antlers.

In the first instance, I don't think it's particularly appropriate to point the few winter guests I can look forward to receiving in the direction of the North Pole. And, for my own part, and without wishing to seem uncharitable, I really couldn't give a flying fuck where the North Pole is. As for the mistletoe, I contemplate for a moment turning up on Emilly's doorstep brandishing a sprig. Most likely she'd strip me naked, put the antlers round the base of my bollocks, and whip my winkle with the mistletoe until I could pass myself off as riding astride the world's most famous reindeer.

On the tablet above the cooler, the words 'make the most of now' sign off Vodafone's welcome message. As if by magic, Emilly IMs me. I tell her to gather some holly and expect me shortly, but not before reflecting on the fact that this can't be what Lucy Vodafone, owner of the watercooler, intended.

If it is, I'd definitely like to make her acquaintance.

Time to die

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.

Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion.

I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.

Time to die.

ROY BATTY (Rutger Hauer), BLADE RUNNER, 1982

ALTERED (2006) - Dir. Eduardo Sanchez

If you want to know about the real curse of the Blair Witch, Ed Sanchez is living through it right now. Almost a decade on from the release of directorial debut THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (TBWP), costing $35,000 to produce and grossing over $250,000,000 worldwide, nothing Sanchez touches will escape critical comparison with this defining work.

In fairness to we critics, Sanchez isn't exactly making it difficult for us. ALTERED, his new film, sees a clutch of guys (and a token gal) holed up in some rustic corner of the great American outback, at odds with an unearthly tormentor whose insidious presence turns our protagonists gradually against one another. Sound vaguely familiar? Would it help if I told you that this is where the similarity ends, that ALTERED trades the narrative spontaneity and sinister, suggestive power of TBWP for a deft little script and some nifty special effects? Probably not.

There are other, more superficial distinctions. In ALTERED the villain of the piece is not a witch but a visitor from outer space, an alien who - in a simple and satisfying reversal of roles - is quickly abducted by three gun-toting Florida hicks. We soon learn that this is by way of retribution for some transgression that took place fifteen years ago, resulting in the death of a childhood friend and the ruin of each of their respective backwater lives.


Duke (Brad William Henke), Cody (Paul Boyington-McCarthy Jr) and Otis (Michael C. Williams) whisk the alien off to a lock-up owned by their friend Wyatt (Adam Kaufman) and his girlfriend Hope (Catherine Mangan), and try to lie low on the off-chance that none of its extra terrestrial travelling companions will come looking for it. However, as the night wears on the abductee begins to manipulate its captors, turning them against one another and bending them to its will, we move inexorably towards a spectacular... nerve-shredding... finale?

Ok, ok, so I've only seen the first 57 minutes (see 'My first time at the drive-in' to find out why). And maybe I'm doing Sanchez a terrible injustice, having the temerity to review his movie without watching it in its entirety. Or maybe it's you, my beloved readers, who are being sold short, and ALTERED comes apart in the last half hour in a way that has to be seen to be believed. At least the latter might explain the distributor's decision to send ALTERED it straight-to-DVD. With 57 minutes under my belt I find this decision incomprehensible (as, it would seem, does Sanchez - who, it must be hoped, has watched the film in its entirety).


True, ALTERED has a slightly glossy made-for-TV feel more akin to an uberseries like INVASION, exemplified by the presence of the assured and implausibly attractive Kaufman, a veteran of Steven Spielberg's TAKEN. But far worse movies than this have mustered a theatrical release, however limited, and none of them could boasted of having been brought to you by one of the directors of TBWP.

Make no mistake, ALTERED is a B-movie, but not the C-movie TBWP would have been if Sanchez and his 'crew' hadn't struck improvised gold as they led their bewildered 'cast' a merry dance through Maryland forest. Confined by the strictures of script and special effects budget, ALTERED is the work of a man feeling his way towards something like the normal film-making process. When he arrives, he might bless us with a grade-A feature, something with the power and production values of Ridley Scott's ALIEN or John Carpenter's THE THING, something compact, claustrophic, performance-driven. Failing this, falling victim to his own preposterously front-loaded success, he may come to be regarded as one of cinema's one-trick ponies, albeit one of the cruellest and most brilliant tricks ever played.