Category: Art

Let me ruin every Western movie for you

What is the one thing you associate most with Westerns? Horses, right? Wrong! There are actually almost no horses in any Western movies you will ever watch. To prove the point, consider this picture of Clint Eastwood from the classic Rawhide, standing next to a ‘horse’:

Clinty Eastwood came to town, riding on a pony…

From this photo, we can see fairly clearly that the ‘withers’ of the equine in question (i.e. the ridge between the shoulder blades) reach up to just below Eastwood’s nipples. As any artist who has studied human anatomy can tell you, the distance from nipple to the top of the head is about 25% of total height.

Now we know Eastwood to be a tall man – the internet reliably informs me that he is in fact 193cm (6’4″) in height. Therefore we can estimate the distance from Eastwood’s crown to his nipple to be 48.25cm. Given the ‘horse’ and Eastwood are standing side by side, this yields a height from withers to hoof of 144.74cm.

But here’s the rub, fellow movie-watchers: Any equine below 147cm (14.2 hands) is not a horse, rather a ‘pony’! In fact, the animal pictured here is only a tad bigger than Coca, the pony my 8 year old daughter rides at our local stables.

Of course, my eyeball estimate could be a centimetre off, but even being generous, this animal barely crosses the threshold. To drive the point home, compare Clint with historical photos. Here we have one of the most famous horses in American history, Comanche, with his 185cm (6’1″) rider, Captain Myles Keogh. Note how Keogh’s eyes (eyes to crown: 0.5% of body) align with Comanche’s withers. Using our body proportions method, we can estimate the sole equine survivor of Little Bighorn stood 173cm (17 hands) tall – a good size horse, by any standards!

Captn Keogh (185cm) with Comanche,

Now consider this: if even mighty Clint had such a diminutive mount, what of the other, mostly shorter, cowboys who grace the silver screen? Go back and watch the movies and you can answer the question for yourself.

In reality, if actual cowboys tried to ride off into the sunset on such little ponies, saddlebags, guns and all, the animals would not get them more than a few miles from Tombstone before collapsing with fatigue. So why do directors choose to pair these mighty tough guys with the sort of puny ride that daddy’s little princess canters around with at overpriced stables in the Connecticut suburbs?

A few reasons: First, because the pairing automatically makes the director’s cowboy look bigger than he really is – that’s almost always a good thing. More practically, unless you are supremely athletic and dressed appropriately, jumping up onto a real horse is quite hard to do. And having your grizzly desperado drag over the mounting block so he can scramble his way into the saddle would take away from the magic of the screen. Ponies are also smaller, thus cheaper to feed and stable. And if the actor loses his stirrups mid-scene, he is less likely to be hurt from the shorter fall.

Most importantly, Hollywood does this because they can get away with it. Few movie-goers spend much time with actual horses, so they have no point of reference in real life for how big a horse should be.

It’s yet another reason to get off the couch, away from the phone, climb into the saddle and ride into the saloon of real life.

The Dragon’s Many Claws

My latest novel The Dragon’s Many Claws is now out, available on Amazon.

In some ways, I think this is my best book yet. The pacing, as an action thriller, is really good. I know this from the test readers and editors who have been through the text, but more to the point, I know it because I felt it when I was writing it.

The other thing I love about this book is that it is a war story that will appeal to people who don’t usually read war story – the same way The Hydra was a courtroom drama for people who never read courtroom dramas.

Anyway, this is where to go to buy a copy (I guarantee you won’t regret it if you do): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DXD56T4G

The Dragon’s Many Claws

I’m very excited to announce that my new thriller, The Dragon’s Many Claws, will be released on Amazon in paperback, ebook and audiobook on 1 February! Here’s the book cover and blurb as a teaser. Watch this space for more news!

US Army officer Stephen Chen has uncovered a plot by China to carry out a sneak attack on the United States. He’s got all the receipts and knows how to stop them before they even start. The only problem is, no one believes him.

The fight to bring the plot to light may cost Chen his relationship, his career and even his liberty. But if he is right, the fight to save America might cost the country even more.

Papa Jack’s Café – first piece of animation

This is a rom com musical feature film I have been working on together with my daughter Anna. The first piece of finished animation is hot out of the oven (literally, because the Indian guys who did the animation have had to deal with a heat wave in New Dehli).

“We’ll Get There” performed by Anna Offergeld-Stull, written by Anna Offergeld-Stull and Graham Stull, arranged by Stéphane Collin

There’s also a GoFundMe if folks want to check it out, share and like and subscribe and pray to the tech gods….

Nineties-stalgia: why the Golden Decade is due for a comeback

From Dust cover til Red Dawn

Those of us old enough to remember life in the 1980s will no doubt recall the very real fear of thermonuclear annihilation. We tried to make light of it at the time, with movies like Rocky IV or off-the-cuff black humour – how it was better to be close to ground zero than to suffer the slow, cancerous demise occasioned by a nuclear winter. Still, it haunted us at night. As children, we awoke in cold war sweats, to stare out our bedroom windows and watch imaginary mushroom clouds dominating the night sky.

But as the 80s drew to a close, the fear ended too. David Hasselhoff stood on the Berlin Wall wearing piano keys. And as every non-German marvelled at the fact that Knight Rider could kinda sing, the conflict and angst that defined two generations crumbled into legend. The mighty Soviet Union was reduced to an alcoholic Russian joke, in the person of Boris Yeltsin.

Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!

Thus were born the 1990s. A decade when any remaining questions the world had asked about Western dominance seemed to be answered. The slow progression of liberal values looked inevitable. Sure the Third World was still a mess, but give us a bit of time and we’d sort that out too. Bob Geldof was, after all, recording a second version of Band Aid, and after U2’s musical death in a custom-graffittied Trabant, Bono was soon to reveal himself at Emmaus.

Image result for dawsons creek
Only a decade with the confidence of the 1990s could have given us something as deliciously bad as Dawson’s Creek.

And so slipped by the Golden Decade. Our thoughts turned to home affairs perhaps, with only a distracting glance in Dan Rather’s direction, to see if the glove fitted on OJ’s hand, or if the cigar fitted into Monika Lewinsky’s … version of events. The news had become a light distraction, a welcome interruption from the humdrum of our civilisation’s happy ending.

As you undermine our security, we undermine yours

And with a whiff of not-too-genuine concern about the Y2K bug, we set about partying like it’s 1999. But the Golden Decade had a little more to give. Which is why we failed to brace for impact when, 20 months later, it all came crashing down in a heap of dust and debris, and a new shadow swept over the West – the spectre of Islamic terrorism. Like the current crisis, the reality of terrorist threats was nothing near as deadly as our overreaction to it – in this sense the terrorists succeeded in every goal they had. With a couple of box cutters, they got us to submit to any and all kinds of security checks, extraordinary rendition or the waging of reckless, endless war on petty despots and the civilians they oppressed. The enduring impact of 9/11 was not the bullets of Kalishnikov-wielding theocrats, but the subtle abandonment of our liberal values; the precedent that when our fear is great enough, we will throw away everything we pretended to hold dear.

Rohan, my lord, is ready to fall

After this traumatic early childhood, the Millenium’s awakening into teenagerdom was little better. There was no single drama that defined the crappiness of the 2010s, rather we were caught in an emotional pinser movement by three slow-moving threats: Immigration, Climate Angst and the inequality which followed the Great Recession. What belief we might once have had in our own civilisation was just about thoroughly beaten down, and as any casual glimpse at the Netflix catalogue will reveal, by mid-decade we could hardly imagine any kind of fiction that didn’t sport the adjective ‘dystopian’. We valued our democracies as little as we valued our data, all to be given away for trinkets in the clouds. We were ready for something like Donald Trump’s tweets. Oh and we got them. We got Rachel Maddow in ‘literal’ [sic.] hysterics over imagined Russian collusion. We got slick, Youtube-ready comedians dispensing sanatised, corporatist Identity Politics by the sound bite. And we kept giving away our privacy to enjoy more of the show.

This background helps us make sense of the madness that is 2020 – how a seemingly mighty tree can topple with only a slight gust of wind, once its core has been allowed to rot away for twenty years. How three hundred years of enlightment principles could be uprooted in a single storm.

Rediscovering the lost decade

And it’s also why, looking back on them now, the 1990s seem so damn appealing. It’s why Nineties-stalgia is the way to go. I defy anyone to tune in to the first few seasons of Friends and not find themselves longing for a time when music sucked but we still had public payphones. Your job might have been a joke, you might have been broke, but if you were young in the 1990s, Western Civilisation was there for you.

Even better than Friends is Dawson’s Creek. Not actually ‘better’. The scripting is at times painfully bad, the accoustic underscores are suburban coffee-shop cringeworthy and the teenagers are, even by the standards of the Golden Decade, implausibly articulate and self-confident. But it is the most perfect encapsulation of the optimism that came to those who grew up in the long Indian summer of a victorious empire.

One that did not yet see its downfall coming.

What is life?

Life is that time you played
What started out as hide-and-seek
Then someone added Nerf guns
Secret bases, boys-vee-girls
And finally a rope swing and a dare
Water so cold it warmed the after-swimming air.
Treats meant to last the week eaten then and there.
Nothing ever tasted so sweet.
No one saw the June sun duck below the trees behind the river line.
Well past supper time!
On legs sore from running you nonetheless peeled
Across the fields
To a half-meant ‘sorry momma’, and a half-cold spaghetti meal.

Life is the buzzing sound
From music played too loud
And the noise of the college crowd.
That lingers still in ears and on your clothes
All down September’s rain-painted side-walk home,
Reminds you of that second pint,
The little smile she bore you
Sideways, mid sentence to her friends,
That might – just might – some future night, blossom into much, much more.

Life is those endless minutes waiting, anticipating
The breaking of the swept and polished order of long-kept
Knick-knacks, unmoved since last They stormed the door;
That in two violent minutes of shedding little coats and mittens triggered
More noise than needles make in all the winter weeks of knitting new ones, one size bigger.
Then They finally appear, you find
Little faces so filled with Now and so in likeness of Their parent-child, standing, smiling just behind,
It calls to mind, every school lunch prepared, every memory shared
and all those times bygone.
This rich reward, this weekend chaos, is the reason why you struggle on.

Life is never ‘staying safe’,
Waiting, clutching to existence,
Until every living risk fades to nothing.

My review of George du Maurier’s Trilby

TrilbyTrilby by George du Maurier
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

It happened the other day, while I was reading George du Maurier’s Trilby, that a young man asked me whether I read mainly fiction or non-fiction – his preference clearly being for the latter. I answered the former, and had to supress within me a slight sense of shame. Does the fiction reader not, after all, sunbathe in supercillious fantasy while lazing on the beach; whereas the non-fiction reader applies his mind to the ‘hard facts’?

Maybe it is engrained in us to think so. But the distinction is shallow and meaningless when you dig a little deeper. For one thing, if 2020 has anything to teach us, it is that the ‘hard facts’, even those that are as hard as rock, are so numerous and tiny that they give way to the cudgel of dogma and zealotry, like grains of sand on that very same beach. One eye-catching event, propelled by the right algorithms, can trump an entire discipline of rigorous empiricism.

Non-fiction can easily fall into the trap of pretending the ‘castle of truth’ which the author has built up is structurally sound. Fiction, as written from the perspective of the narrator, or better still, the third persons who inhabit the narration, harbours no such pretense of architectural stability. The reader knows that the truth on which a novel is based is a shifty one; changing with the tide and giving way to the footprints left by the author’s own biases, those of his characters and those of the reader.

In this respect, a book like ‘Trilby’ helps us gain perspective on the ‘truthiness’ of our own age. It places fantastical events in a historical and subjective context, and in doing so removes us from the fantastical context of our own time, allowing us to regard these as no less subjective and ephemeral.

At the time of its publication, ‘Trilby’ was a sensation – the ‘Da Vinci Code’ of its day. Upon reading it, it’s easy to see why. Borrowing with self-effacing openness from Thackery, Dickens and Dumas, this festival of vanity, a tale set in Two Cities, chronicles the adventures of three very British ‘musketeers of the brush’ (artists) and their acquaintance with the Anglo-Irish Parisian washerwoman of the title. The narrative is light and fun, rich in the tradition of turn-of-the-Century satirists like Wilde or Saki. The plot is compelling, though perhaps somewhat too linear for modern tastes.

Mostly though, I read it as an antidote to the irrationality and illiberalism of the dominant ‘Liberal’ world view. If we must inhabit sand castles in order to have a coherent frame of reference, let’s at least decorate them with the colourful seashells of funny, well-written Victorian prose.

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