books | the brilliantly leaping gazelle

34:63 presets ” 1 Corinthians 13 : 11.”

Today is “Star Wars Day.

Of course it is.

All because a load grown-ups who have’t fully adjusted to the fact their no longer children, think that when they says the date out loud, it reminds them of the line, ‘May the force be with you’. I know, I feel bad for even acknowledging it’s a thing. Don’t misunderstand me. ‘Star Wars ‘ was a great film. Was, not is, as Yoda might say.

I was 10 when I saw it and it was like nothing I’d ever seen. But then I was 10, and at 10 it doesn’t take much to excite a boy. Well maybe not in 2024 but in 1977? The main thing I remember about it though – apart from the bit near the end where the rebel ships attack the Death Star, which was easily the best part – was queuing up around the block beforehand and having to keep our coats on in the cinema because there was a heating strike.

But quite why it has become some kind of revered cultural artefact, as opposed to the entertaining yet ephemeral piece of tat it was, is a constant source of bemusement to me. It has spawned sequels and prequels, standalone films set within its own universe and television shows. In fact the only truly innovative thing that ‘Star Wars’ ever did was to create a lucrative world of merchandising opportunities, where all manner of ways to induce pester power from children to divorce parents from their money were dreamt up.

Some of these children have never quite recovered from their childhood and even though they look like adults, are desperate to recreate it. But just like an addict nothing searching to recreate the feeling of their first hit, nothing will ever be as good as the first time. So despite being powerful studio heads, movie executives or other equally valuable members of society, they keep on churning out more of the same in the mistaken belief it is has deeper meaning beyond simply funding their coke habit.

So of course today is ‘Star Wars Day’.

Jane Austen meets Winnie-the-Pooh.

I like Jane Austen.

Actually, I’ve only read ‘Pride and Prejudice’ and that was at school for ‘O’ Level English, but I have seen most of the TV and film adaptations of her books and I like those. Which is almost as good. That’s why this headline caught my eye;

‘Winchester plan for £100,000 Jane Austen statue triggers ‘Disneyfication’ fears’, before going on to report that ‘People at public meeting raise concerns that sculpture in cathedral grounds will attract tourists taking selfies‘

As one might imagine, my first thought upon reading this was how big was this statue going to be if it cost £100,000. Secondly, and more problematic for the sculptor I would’ve thought, is the fact that no likeness of her actually exists. But then I remembered we are living in 2024 and that doesn’t matter in an age ofArtificial Intelligence, of ‘remixing’ photo’s on our ‘phones, of deepfake revenge porn, and now with Google Gemini and its black Nazi’s, the end of historical accuracy. This quote, from the sculptor Martin Jennings, after unveiling his preliminary model, is a damning critique of a culture that places the now over the past.

Welcome to now, where it is always now, and the past only exists as something to be re-imagined, re-contextualised and ultimately re-cycled in a continuous process of re-evaluation, and where there is no future, only a now that hasn’t happened yet, the pre-re.

“In life, she may have been aghast at being represented in this way. But after death, she belongs to all of us.”

‘In death she belongs to all of us.’ And that, boys and girls, sums up perfectly an ever more prevalent artistic aesthetic, one that has more to do with the the values of now, of some cultural commissars, than of the work itself. The notion that once a piece of art has been created, the artist then relinquishes any say over how it is interpreted because then it enters the public domain and the public can then be told by cultural commissars if it is either good or bad.

In my wilder flights of fancy I can easily imagine an artist creating a work of art now – be it music, a painting, a book – and thinking to themselves ‘ Sure, it’ll pass muster now, now it’s fine, but what about in 50 or 100 years from now, when attitudes will have changed. What then?’ Perhaps artists will have to put a moratorium of sorts on their work, a legally binding stipulation in their will that after their death all their works are to be destroyed and consigned to the dustbin of history.

If only A.A.Milne had thought to do that, then the Pooh books would never fallen out of copyright, entering the public domain, resulting in ‘Winnie-the Pooh; Blood and Honey’, a 2023 slasher movie, that follows Pooh and Piglet, who – obviously – have become feral and bloodthirsty murderers, as they terrorise a group of young university women and Christopher Robin when he returns to the Hundred Acre Wood five years later after leaving for college. Despite being widely acknowledged as one of the worst films ever made, the numbers don’t lie – made for $100,000 but with box office of about $5 Million – and a sequel is planned.

I was foolishly then that thinking that Jane Austen had got off lightly, until I remembered 2016’s ‘Pride and Prejudice and Zombies..’…

the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Tag: books

May 4, 2025

34:63 presets ” 1 Corinthians 13 : 11.”

March 10, 2024

Jane Austen meets Winnie-the-Pooh.