Castlevania

What did you do yesterday evening, Marion?

Well, I watched the entire second season of Castlevania in one sitting.

It took me an episode or two to get into the first season, but I'm hooked. There are some fabulous lines, plenty of profanity, and wonderfully gory animation. 

"Adamic is the original human language. The one spoken by Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The one that was split into all other languages at the Tower of Babel by God, to prevent human cooperation."

"Is that how you understand that story?"

"Oh, yes. The Speakers are the enemy of God. We live in cooperation and hide our stories inside ourselves so he cannot strike them down in jealousy."

I'm seriously shipping Belmont and Alucard, but respect that they've kept romance out of it in favour of ripping people's throats out. Fantastic set of characters, and very nice to see Jaime Murray on the lineup - I was a huge Hustle fan.

Vampires never get old (no, really, they don't), but there were some nice twists that gave them fresh fangs. 

You can find it on Netflix at the moment. Really looking forward to Season Three.

Blank

I'm really looking forward to this. Giles Paley-Phillips featured briefly in my TEDx talk with his origami swan. He's now starting a podcast with his friend Jim Daly called Blank. You can find more information via Twitter: @Blankpod. They're kicking off on 7th November, interviewing the fantastic Jon Ronson. I was lucky enough to catch him at Cheltenham Literature Festival in 2012 and loved his books The Psychopath Test and So You've Been Publicly Shamed. Absolutely tuning in for this. You can plug yourself in via their website.

Girls & Boys

Whilst on my travels, I downloaded a copy of Girls & Boys, a play by Dennis Kelly, performed by Carey Mulligan. 

When they met at an airport, it was love at first sight. But in time, everything collapsed. As an unnamed but unforgettable woman muses on her life—from meet cute to marriage and parenthood—her recollections inexorably build to a devastating truth. In this shattering performance, Carey Mulligan, star of the critically lauded drama An Education, captivates audiences with playwright Dennis Kelly’s harrowing ruminations on family, ambition, gender, and violence. An acclaimed Off-Broadway play, the gut-wrenching world of Girls & Boys now thrives as an Audible Theater production.

It's an extremely well-written and well-performed play unpacking gender-based violence and its consequences. It's peppered with disarming, dark humour. The way it's delivered really draws you in and you're listening so closely, you don't see what's coming.

It's available on Audible, and there's an interview with Dennis Kelly afterwards which is a nice added extra. Highly recommend it.

Samhain Salutations

Have a satiatingly salacious Samhain. Found this critter in The Hague.

TEDx Livestream

Hi guys. I've been a little bit quiet recently as I've been off giving a TEDx talk at the University of Luxembourg. It was a fairly intense experience. There was a lot of preparation involved, writing the speech and rewriting it. I left Kigali on 22nd October, arrived in Luxembourg on 23rd, then there was a dress rehearsal, a private coaching session, and then the proper performance on 26th. So, it was all go.

Thankfully, the team and the speakers were absolutely fantastic. It was such a supportive environment and a wonderful chance to talk about ideas and passions. A truly incredible experience.

They're currently editing the speeches now, so there will be a bright, glossy version which I will post later on, but if you don't want to wait, the livestream is still available here. It's rough and ready, but what people were watching on the day.

I'm currently holed up in The Hague with my lovely cousin Tamsin and her fella, Guido. Eating, drinking and attempting to survive the freezing cold weather before flying back to a sensible climate on Wednesday.

Mood Today

The Death Book

I'd like to give a shout out to a most excellent individual, Matthew Holroyd. 

He's releasing this gem on Halloween:

Edited and published by Matthew Holroyd, the founder of Baron and Baroness Magazines and photographer Edith Bergfors, the death book is a series of loosely connected vignettes exploring photography’s relationship to death and how death is portrayed in Western society.

A photograph typically captures a moment in the past, bringing it to the present. In contemporary surveillance culture (a.k.a the internet), the dead and alive exist side by side. On the satellite mapping site Google Earth, for example, Bergfors has sourced photographs of her now-deceased grandparents gardening. Likewise, as a genre, portraiture tends to circle around mortality, desire and power.  Through extensive Photoshop manipulation, the editors of this book presents themselves as thinned down, airbrushed and clad in designer fashions, in an attempt to be remembered as rich and picture-perfect. Sadly, The National Portrait Gallery, London, rejected their attempts to bequeath these portraits to the nation.

Popular representations of death act as simulations of death, rather than representations of any reality. For example, the devil has come to signify a host of mortal sins – from drinking to sexing. Playing on this legacy, here a rent boy is portrayed as the devil, alongside muscular clubbers exhibiting their sporty physique.

The book also contains contributions from  image makers and other visual practitioners who have informed the editors’ own ideas on death; these include Palm d’Or-winning director Lars von Trier, Golden Lion-winning director Roy Andersson, Turner Prize-winner Damien Hirst, a letter from the musician Merle Allin to the serial killer Danny Rolling, conceptual artist Manabu Yamanaka, the documentary photographer Miron Zownir,  conceptual artist Dallas Seitz and crime scene simulator Bill’s Playhouse.

In a time where a digital version of almost anything is possible, the advantage of being able to upload a posthumous video for loved ones to watch is now a possibility. Bergfors and Holroyd recreate such films and the book ends with two QR codes for anyone to scan and watch, just like a supermarket barcode.

The subject of photography and death is something I'm also extremely interested in, and writing my own novel about.

Got very excited when I saw Matthew post about this. We were at BRIT School together, and once got an A in Physical Theatre for doing two-person forward rolls back and forth in front of a television playing white static. That probably explains a lot about how we came to be where we are today.

Anyway, you can pre-order a signed copy here.