Well before any advent of the plasterers who were finally supposed to fix the ceiling our bathroom has been mostly lacking since August, we were blasted awake by jackhammers and a vacuum truck. With the blessing of my live-in mate, I fled the house.
Because the 2022 BBC The Dark Is Rising is audibly a labor of love, I am a little sorry not to have been able to love it uncomplicatedly in its own right, but it is atmospherically invested in the eeriness of the story and its interleaving of narration and dialogue and the constant drift and sting of music is theatrically immersive and I had expected Toby Jones to make a good Walker, but he almost warps the production into the event horizon of his own damned time loop, which must have haunted co-adapter Robert Macfarlane as strongly as it noped my godchild out of the sequence. I would have let the script give a little more of the gleam of the bright-eyed original Hawkin, his green velvet coat not yet turned—his actor has the charm for it and it hurts more—but when he confronts Merriman at the Manor among the cold-burning candles of winter, every one of his six hundred unwanted years can be heard in his voice, all that pain dragged up through time as hopelessly endured as the great doors in and out of Time are a seamless sleight of hand. His incantation of the long chain of names that open the way for the Dark is a chilling high wire and he calls the Dark in at last with ironic courtesy, triumphant as his own mourning. I still feel bad that only two years ago did it occur to me that Cooper was writing a fantasy of the Cold War when it's right there on the surface of the text: "This is a cold battle we are in, Will, and in it we must sometimes do cold things." I didn't know when I was eleven to wonder if Merriman had made the mistake not of trusting a mortal man with more than he could bear, but of loving the asset he was running as far as his death. The music remains terrific and annoys me a little by not apparently existing on CD.
(Aside from choices made in the adaptation, it turned out I had opinions about the voices of Merriman and the Black Rider, which were not the fault of Paul Rhys or Tim McMullan. Without thinking much about it, I had always heard the latter with a kind of dry dark copper voice, like the color of his hair—Loki-red, his artisan's guise of Mr. Mitothin. I had never imagined his accent because it canonically sounds like no human language's trace, the natural dialect of the Dark. The former had always sounded as deeply to me as a bell in the bones of the land and I had not realized it was important to me for him not to sound exactly modern, even knowing how chameleonically the Old Ones belong to any time they choose. On the other hand, the incorporation of multiple voices into lines of the Light worked beautifully, especially when one of them reminds so strongly that the Circle is not English alone. The ominous, rook-cawed acceleration of the ending into the present moment is against the book, but not necessarily the sequence: and you may not lie expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. It is perhaps unfair of me to think from the way he delivers the last question of the radio series that director and co-adapter Simon McBurney could have done any of Merriman, the Rider, or the High Magic.)
I don't know how good a sign it is that I have been listening on repeat to the retro-pop dystopian cycle of Descartes a Kant's After Destruction (2023), but I also like the videos.
It doesn't seem to be plague, but I have spent most of this month increasingly sick and feeling that the entire year has been reeling past me in brainless exhaustion, one stressor on top of the next. I appreciate that Hestia has been spending a majority of nights curled against me, a solicitousness she did not always display. She is the sole doctor in the house now.
Because the 2022 BBC The Dark Is Rising is audibly a labor of love, I am a little sorry not to have been able to love it uncomplicatedly in its own right, but it is atmospherically invested in the eeriness of the story and its interleaving of narration and dialogue and the constant drift and sting of music is theatrically immersive and I had expected Toby Jones to make a good Walker, but he almost warps the production into the event horizon of his own damned time loop, which must have haunted co-adapter Robert Macfarlane as strongly as it noped my godchild out of the sequence. I would have let the script give a little more of the gleam of the bright-eyed original Hawkin, his green velvet coat not yet turned—his actor has the charm for it and it hurts more—but when he confronts Merriman at the Manor among the cold-burning candles of winter, every one of his six hundred unwanted years can be heard in his voice, all that pain dragged up through time as hopelessly endured as the great doors in and out of Time are a seamless sleight of hand. His incantation of the long chain of names that open the way for the Dark is a chilling high wire and he calls the Dark in at last with ironic courtesy, triumphant as his own mourning. I still feel bad that only two years ago did it occur to me that Cooper was writing a fantasy of the Cold War when it's right there on the surface of the text: "This is a cold battle we are in, Will, and in it we must sometimes do cold things." I didn't know when I was eleven to wonder if Merriman had made the mistake not of trusting a mortal man with more than he could bear, but of loving the asset he was running as far as his death. The music remains terrific and annoys me a little by not apparently existing on CD.
(Aside from choices made in the adaptation, it turned out I had opinions about the voices of Merriman and the Black Rider, which were not the fault of Paul Rhys or Tim McMullan. Without thinking much about it, I had always heard the latter with a kind of dry dark copper voice, like the color of his hair—Loki-red, his artisan's guise of Mr. Mitothin. I had never imagined his accent because it canonically sounds like no human language's trace, the natural dialect of the Dark. The former had always sounded as deeply to me as a bell in the bones of the land and I had not realized it was important to me for him not to sound exactly modern, even knowing how chameleonically the Old Ones belong to any time they choose. On the other hand, the incorporation of multiple voices into lines of the Light worked beautifully, especially when one of them reminds so strongly that the Circle is not English alone. The ominous, rook-cawed acceleration of the ending into the present moment is against the book, but not necessarily the sequence: and you may not lie expecting the second coming of anybody now, because the world is yours and it is up to you. It is perhaps unfair of me to think from the way he delivers the last question of the radio series that director and co-adapter Simon McBurney could have done any of Merriman, the Rider, or the High Magic.)
I don't know how good a sign it is that I have been listening on repeat to the retro-pop dystopian cycle of Descartes a Kant's After Destruction (2023), but I also like the videos.
It doesn't seem to be plague, but I have spent most of this month increasingly sick and feeling that the entire year has been reeling past me in brainless exhaustion, one stressor on top of the next. I appreciate that Hestia has been spending a majority of nights curled against me, a solicitousness she did not always display. She is the sole doctor in the house now.
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