Karavansara

East of Constantinople, West of Shanghai


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Maybe not a good idea

You are tired, still cranky for the long tail of a bad case of the flu. It’s cold and the forecast says snow. You have been having strange dreams when you manage to sleep,and have been listening to Japanese music these last three months. You are short on money and have a ton of stuff to write in the hope that someone will pay you and you will have enough to pay the next mortgage installment.

So you spend the whole night up, drinking green mint tea and writing the first four thousand words of a new story. One that you might, it’s true, pitch to a publisher, but that’s the mother of all the long shots.

And you do not just go and start a new story. No, you start writing a new frigging novel. But wait, it gets better than that. You start writing the first novel in a series.

That’s crazy.

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Poetry for real men

In the end the instigators were, of all people, Robert E. Howard and Stephen Fry, quite an odd couple if you think about it. And weird things might come out of all this. But I am getting ahead of myself, so let me give you a bit of background here.

For the best part of my life I only owned three books of poetry: a selection of verses by John Donne, a collection of poetry by Edgar Allan Poe and one of haiku by Matsuo Basho. And this was it. My generation was taught a lot of poetry in school – but that amounted basically to learning verses by heart and then writing essays about what the poet meant by writing what he wrote (and not, strangely enough, the way he wrote it). It is reasonable to say that we learned more about metrics and rhythm and all that from the radio, by listening to rock’n’roll.

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Folk horror: Eye of the Devil (1966)

Sharon Tate was so beautiful it hurts.
Which is stating the obvious, but there’s nothing wrong with it. Her fame rests on her beauty, on a handful of movies and on her tragic death at the hands of Charles Manson’s cultists.

Tate’s screen debut was slated to be Eye of the Devil, a small black and white occult/folk horror with a stellar cast: Deborah Kerr, David Niven, Donald Pleasence, David Hemmings. The lead female role should have been covered by Kim Novak, but the actress had a riding accident early on in the filming, and was replaced. Or maybe she was replaced because she fought with director J. Lee Thompson, and/or because she had had an on-set affair with Hemmings.

It was, all things considered, a very troubled production: change of leading lady, three directors stepping in and then out, at least a major rewrite of the script, a change of title (the movie was originally to be called 13) then the movie shelved for over one year.

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Raiders of the Lost Franchise: Sky Bandits (1986)

What was it about 1986 and planes, and adventure movies? Because we just had the time to take stock of the disappointing weirdness that was Sky Pirates/Dakota Harris that we find ourselves back again in the time of Biggles – well, the real time of Biggles, the Great War – for another one of those weird eccentric movies that would have been a great first episode for a franchise, only the franchise never happened, and maybe it’s better this way. The movie in question is the 1986 British independent movie Sky Bandits, aka Gunbus – that I saw back to back with Sky Pirates over the weekend (hence this episode of the series so close to the previous).

Not to be confused with the 1940 Monogram movie also known as Renfrew of the Royal Mounted in Sky Bandits, Sky Bandits/Gunbus is a historical adventure movie with some weird/science fictional elements (not enough to make it dieselpunk or what – just plain weird).
The plot in a nutshell (courtesy of Wikipedia): In the dying days of the old west, two bank robbers, Barney and Luke, find themselves fighting in World War One in France.

Nice and smooth.
Well, not exactly.

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