Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

I have an assign­ment due very, very, very soon how­ever, I seem to have been over­come by a severe com­pul­sion to pro­cras­tin­ate these last few days and the res­ults of which have been somewhat…eclectic in nature.

Today, for the most part, has con­sisted of an online scav­enger hunt for juicy morsels of inform­a­tion on my favour­ite “action trans­vest­ite”, Mr. Eddie Izzard. There was no par­tic­u­lar reason for my erm…research, I just felt in an “Eddie mood”. Its worth not­ing once more, that I am a per­son of a very fan­at­ical nature and as such, I have “moods” and “days” that are focused on objects of my fan­dom as opposed to emotions/activities. Its a bit like a Beeb weather fore­cast of an OCD-sufferer-cum-celeb-stalker: Today was an “Eddie day” with patches of Placebo early afternoon…

The Placebo patches refer to the delight­ful visit from our rodent-like, eld­erly post­man. We have a “new” post­man you see, our last one con­sisted of a neigh­bour who resides sev­eral doors down. For years and years he barely acknow­ledged us, but upon Ran­dom Mail appoint­ing our street as being on his round, he sud­denly became all a bit too famil­iar. In typ­ical Brit­ish fash­ion, this sud­den over-familiarity went down like a lead bal­loon and it all ended in tears, or rather a shout­ing match across the street.

Now, we have a new postie: A sweet, con­sid­er­ate, bespec­tacled gen­tle­men, obvi­ously short-sighted. He peers at address labels gingerly, arms out­stretched, eyes blink­ing and then nar­row­ing through the small eye-glasses perched pre­cari­ously upon the end of his poin­ted nose, rather remin­is­ant of the pop­u­lar depic­tions of moles in children’s book illus­tra­tions. Said new postie delivered a rather eagerly awaited “secret” pack­age to me today con­tain­ing an offi­cial MEDS UK Tour T-Shirt. A harm­less “secret”, I just couldn’t be bothered with the eye-rolling I would have been sub­ject to, cour­tesy of K, upon my voicing of yet another order of Placebo merchandise.

Although, I atten­ded a date on that tour sev­eral weeks ago, I didn’t pur­chase the T-Shirt on the night as the breed of Placebo fans that sur­round mer­chand­ise stalls are not to be reckoned with when you’re in a seated pos­i­tion and your head is at their elbow height. They don’t mean any inten­tional harm, how­ever acci­dents will hap­pen when four-dozen gothed-up teens ambush a mer­chand­ise stall, heavy boots stomp­ing and studded/spiked paraphernalia blaz­ing. I decided to play it safe and order it as soon as it became avail­able online (as I did with the OMWF/Wembley night). I only wished I’d have done the same with the SWG UK tour instead of put­ting it off — now I can’t get that shirt for love nor money…Bugger.

This even­ing, has been spent pre­oc­cu­pied with a some­what new/renewed pas­time: watch­ing K game.

You see a couple of weeks ago, it was K’s 20^th birth­day and we decided to brave our local (and very much dilap­id­ated) cinema and “treat” ourselves to a film to cel­eb­rate. Des­pite hav­ing to sit in my wheel­chair through­out as one of the two seats in the “dis­abled viewer” area was com­pletely van­dal­ised, it was an enjoy­able even­ing. The film of choice was Silent Hill, a movie derived and inspired from the plots and char­ac­ters of the Konami sur­vival horror-genre com­puter games of the same name. When I met K, she was very much a hard­core gamer, skip­ping school and pulling all-nighters just to com­plete a game. Come to think of it, I think one of the first birth­day presents I ever bought her was a PS2…

Any­way, one of her main “pois­ons” when it comes to con­sole titles of choice is the sur­vival hor­ror. An ulti­mate and etern­ally loyal Res­id­ent Evil Series fan through and through, she also dabbled occa­sion­ally in Silent Hill.

Being unable to play these types of con­sole games (the delayed reflexes, woolly motor skills and low-leg spasms that occur when intently using my hands don’t help much. ), I got releg­ated to spec­tator status, watch­ing the plot unfold and the action play out as if it were an inter­act­ive anim­ated movie.

Res­id­ent Evil was cool in a Sci-Fi Hor­ror kind of way, with stonk­ing graph­ics and hil­ari­ously ridicu­lous plots, but Silent Hill was ulti­mate hor­ror. Visu­ally, aud­ibly and psy­cho­lo­gic­ally dis­turb­ing in so many ways, I would often be left tense, win­cing, glan­cing through my fin­gers and jump­ing out of my skin. Silent Hill 2 and its mon­sters were my favour­ite, the man­nequin (or “legs” as I referred to her at the time) was one of the most pro­foundly dis­turb­ing, con­sist­ing of two lower female human halves joined at the waist rather like the Hans Bellmer dolls I saw at the Tate Gal­lery in Lon­don once. Pyr­amid Head was another favour­ite – even K who is com­pletely unaf­fected by the hor­ror and gore will admit that he fright­ens her on some level. K no longer games as she used to, but hav­ing such “fond” memor­ies of Silent Hill made us both very curi­ous when trail­ers for the film began show­ing on TV.

The film was immense, encap­su­lat­ing all the atmo­sphere, ten­sion and hor­ror of the games and blast­ing it in full Tech­nicolor and boom­ing sur­round sound. The sound-scapes and visu­als were amaz­ing, it was just as I ima­gined Silent Hill would be like if it were “real”, I really can’t explain how much of the essence of Silent Hill was cap­tured on film. (And as a side note: “Cybil Ben­net” was hot and reminded me of Christina Cox’s “Kim” in Bet­ter Than Chocol­ate)

As pre­dicted, I spent the dur­a­tion of the movie rebound­ing off the ceil­ing as prac­tic­ally everything made me jump, but noth­ing pre­pared me for what we were to meet upon leav­ing the cinema: there was a blanket of the thick­est fog I have ever seen in my life and it stretched for miles! (SH fans will know the sig­ni­fic­ance of fog here, only too well). Our 15 minute jour­ney home at gone mid­night took almost an hour as we crawled through the fog – it was so dense that on approach­ing a round­about, the chev­ron signs placed on the round­about itself could only be vaguely seen once we were actu­ally going around the round­about, no exag­ger­a­tion. We even missed the turn­ing to my street the vis­ib­il­ity was so bad. I was brick­ing it (and I don’t mind admit­ting it) and all the way home we were jok­ing about hav­ing stepped out into Silent Hill…We can laugh about how cool it was now, but at the time it was bey­ond creepy.

The film has now awoken the gamer in K and “we” have been play­ing SH3 nightly for the last week, after hav­ing pur­chased all but the first of the Silent Hill games (K had owned them pre­vi­ously, but has a tend­ency to sell/trade games upon com­ple­tion). True to form, the fan­atic in me has come to the fore and I’ve found myself avidly search­ing the inter­net, edu­cat­ing myself on the the­or­ies and meta­phors behind almost every aspect of the game.

Unfor­tu­nately, as intric­ate, fas­cin­at­ing and thought-provoking as all these the­or­ies are, it appears that this depth of under­stand­ing and explan­a­tion is omit­ted from the game, with the main char­ac­ter being some­what drugged (she must be on some­thing, if I had exper­i­enced all that, I cer­tainly wouldn’t be stand­ing with my hand on my hip giv­ing it all the teen­age “Like, duh, whatever” atti­tude) and the dia­logue bizar­rely vague and laboured.

I just hope that there will be a sequel to the film so that I can see Silent Hill 3 the way it is in my head as opposed to the way the game is currently.