trouble is my blog.

It's been over a week now since I saw the film adaptation of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code", a movie that has gripped 'our' cultural consciousness for the last month in a ubiquitous, self-perpetuating and vice-like fashion, - in both senses of the term 'vice'.

Firstly, as an 'event' movie, -a "prestige picture" -, Ron Howard's latest film has existed as the centre-point of a leviathanic promotions campaign, which has clinched and clasped the global media (entertainment and otherwise) within its clamps with unabated ruthlessness (and efficiency). Operating on every platform from print media upwards, it has approached us at every possible angle, from that of scandal ("catholic outrage"), to legal (high-court plagarism circuses), to the fittingly trivial (Newsweek's "Tom, Hollywood hates Da hair" for example) and beyond. As a regular film-goer, I have been sitting through trailers for the movie since December 2005, and, as far back as october I can remember coming across television specials dedicated to explorations of the 'Da Vinci' myth, both serious (see Tony Robinson, BBC4) and otherwise.

Of course, none of this particularily revelatory, but does in some part help me to explain both the second metaphoric extension of the term 'vice' and, to a greater extent, my relationship with and towards both the 'Da Vinci' movie and the wider cultural 'phenomenon' that has disseminated around Dan Brown's novel. In discussing both the novel and film during the past week with a number of work colleagues, friends, casual aquaintances etc., a sense of this second application of 'vice' - as "immoral, degrading practice or habit" began to emerge as perhaps the central relationship that many people may have with the type of movies and novels that the Da Vinci Code, in its numerous manifestations, has come to represent. And yet, however melodramtic terms such as "immoral" and "degrading" may seem when considering one's relationship towards works of fiction, there is a certain sense that in consuming films akin to the Da Vinci Code (and to a greater extent literature, with it's loftier pretensions) the viewer/reader is engaging in a glorious rite of guilty pleasure, a riotously indulgent act of "slumming it", undertaken in contravention of our usually over-considered and all-too-precious taste formations.

Thus, it was with this internal logic in mind that I allowed myself to watch the movie, knowing all too well that in doing so I was adopting the role of the hypo-critic; the individual who all-too-knowingly decries a particular picture before seeing it, with all judgements based upon a personal distaste for saturation marketing and anything so over-whelming popular and yet intellectually and creatively moribund. Neglecting to book in advance for a saturday night showing, I ended up seeing it at the Finchley Road "Vue" at 11:30pm and predictably it played, for all 149 minutes, to a packed auditorium of anticipatory spectators ( many of which, it should be mentioned, had no problems getting telephonic reception, despite the sound-proof, lead-lined walls of the theater.)

Anyway, As I had hoped, the film was underwhelming; but you already knew that if you've read a paper in the past week. It was in parts entertaining, in the same fashion as those Nescafe commercials featuring two flirtatious individuals during the 80's and 90's were, i.e, each scene seam-fully flowed into the next, seemingly bearing (as did the commercials) only scant relation to any of those preceding, or indeed following it. Furthermore, any sense of urgency imperative to the thriller genre was cleverly negated by the film's propensity to abandon conventions of space and time throughout the narrative. On numerous occasions, the intrepid Hanks/Tatou duo, having swiftly escaped from the cluthes of the law /hooded assasin, suddenly found reems of time to discuss and deliberate over some of the great existential questions of our time, as well as nostagically contemplate their overlapping personal histories..all of which would have been acceptable, had not this kind of dalliance ever-so-nearly got them killed in previous frames.

So, to conclude. This week I indulged my pretensions and bought into the Da Vinci zeitgeist, before trying to intellectualise my hyposcrisy using some of the most rudimentary rhetorical tools available to a humanities graduate. Then, to revert to type, I went to see a reportory screening of "tony takitani" as adapted from murakami and felt much better, before failing to make meringues and instead eating ice-cream.

Next: "Smart-Aleck Blog"

here's a little about me, if you can bare it.

During the day I work in a bookshop, the kind of place where suits chase paperbacks by the dozen, choosing by the charts what to read or buy for the bookshelf (ornamental) - filling (as it does) the space between the cherry veneer dining set and the flatscreen tv (HD ready), all parked upon 36 ounce tufted yarn, light grey, plush, no major stains.

Not that I resent the job, or our customers- many of which are very astute and scholarly, as their choice of literature attests. Swathes visit in pursuit of "that book by da vinci", and yet, prolific novelist as he was (one of the great romantics, I've heard) his works never seem to be in stock - let alone in print - and my hand is forced to recommend an antiquarian stockist (which may or may not be against company policy)... Regardless, the momentary, fleeting, almost serendipitous occasions when a joyce or a pynchon or a greene or a chandler (dear, dear raymond) a gogol, thomas,ginsberg or easton ellis (farewell accumulated credibility) pass through my hands and into a non-biodegradable bag serve to sustain both the job itself, and, when reread, the overly-melodramtic intonation of this prose...

Besides, I'm only working there because I dropped out of (grad) school and have nothing to do until january rolls around again and renews my academic inclination and purpose. I've got to keep myself in coffee and fruit pies somehow, have enough spare for demerara and ice cream, the occasional bottle of rye and books to spill it on and a sunday double bill here or there. Four hours a day, four bestselling hours a day, four three-for-two, two-pounds off, not-on-the-weekends hours a day, that's all, nothing more,.. nothing more.

So, to this blog, it's purpose (scant) and focus (bleary).

-It may last a week, two weeks, a month, or longer -just as long as anyone can endure it, including me.

-It'll probably be about nothing in particular, aside from that which can be read/watched/visited/slept through.

-Until I can figure out how to go about writing it, third and first person tenses will most likely be muddled together, and any semblance of a coherent narrative style should be considered accidental.

That's all I've really thought about or considered, without wasting reams of time staring at a computer screen. As an aside, today I began reading a new book, Michio Kaku's 'Parallel Worlds'- (a theoretical exploration of concepts of plural dimensionality, string theory and other universe-al topics), having decided that a sojourn away from Roth's 'American Pastoral' would aid completion of said text in the long term. On saturday last, I went to see the Da Vinci Code, and feel all the better for knowing that I won't have to see it again (more on that later). Finally, well, there is no finally.

next: "killer in the blog"