Cute Little Elephants

Beautiful Thai elephant lamp, 15th-16th century, via Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

This afternoon I saw a post by John McCafferty - a simple, beautiful sculpture of an elephant from 10th century Iran:

The elephant in question, via Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Something about those perfect hollow circles for eyes captivated me, and I thought - today is an elephant day. So here are some elephants. Please enjoy them. Happy elephant day. 

You have been noticed by the ceramic elephant.

I'm always so delighted by sculpture across the ages. You'll see some meticulously crafted, impeccable form and it'll be a thousand years old and from India or China or Wigan or Kuwait or Romania, and you'll think - these people were all just like me. They thought elephants looked cool. That's so real and true.

Elephant and its mahout, 11th century, via Louvre.

I really like the elephant lamp at the top of this post, with a blissful baldie perched atop the elephant's neck. Look how utterly satisfied he is. That's the right way to be if you are a little bald man. Fully nude, smiling with simple pleasure on top of an elephant. Isn't this every bald man's dream?

Get me on the elephant.

There are countless carved elephants to enjoy. Many come from Northern Thailand, something of a feature of Sawankhalok pottery and earthenware. They had an elephant boon. Good for them.

White elephant of Denmark (1822), Jacques-Evrard Bapst, via Louvre.

Very good elephants.

I Hate the New Descendants Movie

Disney released their latest addition to the Descendants franchise on Friday - Descendants: Wicked Wonderland - and so naturally, I watched that thing. This is the fifth Descendants movie, and it follows Descendants: The Rise of Red to expand the spin-off world that started there. The further we go into the incoherent, faraway land of desperately added characters, the funnier, arguably, it gets.

My favourite character, ugly Awkwafina cat.

I'm a devotee of these movies at this point, and so when this one opened on a deeply ugly multicoloured cat who is 1. the nasty daughter of the Cheshire Cat (okay, awesome), and 2. voiced by Awkwafina, I was screaming with joy and anticipation.

The Mad Hatter's son is here!

Each of these movies has the unenviable task of giving us a new hokey villain, and in this one it's the Mad Hatter, whose name is Maddox Hatter, obviously. The film opens with its best song, which is all about how weird it is that the events of the previous film (time travel alteration shenanigans) made our protagonists' mothers different. Red, the daughter of the previously evil Queen of Hearts (played by Rita Ora, who I'm happy to see anywhere outside of her notorious Primark line), suddenly has a new younger sister named Pink, who will be one of many pointless characters with nothing to do in this accursed movie, and Chloe, the daughter of Cinderella and Charming, now has a boring mother (?!).

The song sets up, seemingly, for a plot about dealing with the bizarre repercussions of the imperfect way they saved their little world. And it seems fun! How will they fit in to their altered social lives? How will they adjust to the stranger-fication of their respective mothers? Will Red punch and kick her new pink sister? But tragically, the movie utterly casts out this teased presence of a fun plot for a highly dull traipse through Wonderland with a few dull extra characters (the gently gothic son of the Mad Hatter, the stand-offish daughter of Captain Hook, the idiotic Smee twins, and Luis, the empty son of Encanto's Luisa Madrigal).

Confusing.

There was a deep incoherence to The Rise of Red, but as is to be expected, it gets even more nonsensical here. The plot goes in the incredibly uninspired direction of dealing with the vague friction between the HKs (Hero Kids) and VKs (Villain Kids) once more, but the crux of the conflict lies in a forced argument between Red and Chloe. It seems that the children of the Descendants universe are destined to be forever haunted by their lineage. There is no real transcendence of the culture (that is, being of villain or hero stock, genetically or whatever) they are born into. Time and time again, they return to the zone of disconnection. Perhaps their acceptance of each other can only be fickle. A Hero Kid must once again be wounded by nothing.

One funny thing about this movie is that Maddox Hatter basically doesn't do anything. What on Earth he wants is impossible to figure out, but his trapping of poor Rita Ora, which serves as the catalyst for the entire film, consists of like, vaguely putting some vines in front of her. He's trapping her in her castle, I suppose, but to what end I'm not sure, and it looks so fake. She's just standing behind a plant. It really doesn't look like she's trapped. The Mad Hatter does not feel like a genuine threat, he just feels like an annoying trickster. Can we have some peril, please?

Luis Madrigal is also a funny addition. He exists purely to be a sexy boyfriend for Red - they sing a romantic duet together - but he is pointless. Does he have any thoughts? Doubtful.

Two queens just cheesing.

Anyway, the kids travel through Wonderland, encounter some weird set pieces left for them by Mr. Hatter that they navigate in song, they learn the eternal lesson that VKs are fine, and they rescue the impotent queen(s) after an interlude where one of the hero characters tries a bit of villainy. All is solved, and all is boring. 

The saddest thing about this movie may well be the dullness of its songs, but it is a particular tragedy that the very first one is the greatest, partly because of the more involved, interesting, coherent sort of narrative it teases. All of the best ideas presented in the movie are rapidly abandoned. We don't learn anything about the Mad Hatter or his son, or indeed the Cheshire Cat's crazy daughter, who exists just to do a little bit of taunting. Really, if you can't think of anything for the hideous multi-coloured CGI Awkwafina cat to do, maybe you shouldn't make the movie.

Me watching this movie.

I enjoyed some of the more fun nonsense of this movie, as I always must, and the insanely saturated colour palette, but it was undeniably stinky. I can't wait for the next one.

Two bright pink women out of five.

★★☆☆☆

Which Spice Girl is the Most Evil?

Let's get to the bottom of an important question today. We all know that the Spice Girls can be placed on a relative spectrum of evil, yet the public has long been afraid to do so, frightened of the retaliation that may arrive if the most evil Spice Girl was to get wind of our talk. But I am not afraid. I am fearless. So today I will reveal the truth about the evil levels of each Spice Girl.

First, we must talk about the baby.

BABY SPICE

Baby Spice is the very picture of innocence. A cute little angel who would never push you over or steal money from you, or so it seems. You might think, "ah, here's the culprit! Baby Spice, by design, must be the most evil spice. I cannot be tricked by the veneer of sweetness." Well, that, dear reader, is it's own trick. Baby Spice is, basically, not evil. But she's not really a pillar of innocence either. No, as it turns out, she is a normal woman of mixed morality. She is dead centre on the spectrum. A evil rating of two. She is not our enemy.

★★☆☆☆

 

SCARY SPICE

Scary Spice might seem evil, for the simple reason that evil is a concept often associated with scary. But scary can come without evil, and here it does. Scary Spice is only one rung up on the evil ladder. She is barely evil at all.

★☆☆☆☆ 

 

GINGER SPICE

Ginger Spice has a strong dark energy within. There is a jittery, uncontrollable evil in her that any of us can readily see. It was clear when she performed 'Bag It Up' at the Brit Awards in the year 2000, emerging from gigantic splayed legs - here is a devil, of sorts. But she is, factually, not the most evil Spice Girl. She's a mere four out of five on the evil scale.

★★★★☆ 

 

POSH SPICE

Posh Spice has an apparent crust of evil coating the outside of her like a thin exoskeleton, but on the inside she is malleable, like the stuffing of a cheap bear. She is a three on the evil scale. 

★★★☆☆ 

 

SPORTY SPICE

Sporty Spice is quite an unassuming Spice. That duet with Bryan Adams was good, and any sort of rage within must surely directed into the sports of it all. But therein lies the rub - Sporty Spice is excellent at masking her dark ways. She comes across as very normal. Perhaps she might do a flip, but otherwise she sinks into the world like a vapour. This, I'm sorry to tell you, is a sure-fire sign of mega evil. 

★★★★★ 

 

The thing is - and maybe this will shock you - her evil just isn't so bad. She is, yes, a veritable five on the evil scale, but she simply deserves that. She's right to be evil. The evil of the Spices is distributed in just the way it ought to be.

***

And so, we have come to know the truth. But don't let it control you, or lead you to a place of fear. The evil is contained, for now, in just the way it must be - in the hands of the sportiest Spice.

A Gorgeous Vampire Film: The Addiction (1995)

The Addiction (1995) is a very interesting movie. It's a super stylish vampire story shot in black and white, and it's concerned with the uncontrollable, searing pain of grief and the hideous tendrils of addiction. The pain of it all is palpable, and made all the more direct through its protagonist's low-level suppression of that pain. Underneath all that, though, is its incredible beauty.

The film achieves this insane, perfect film-noir style. The shadows intrude, always, and its characters and rooms are bathed in such stark, sinister light. It's quite remarkable to watch a film and be so struck by its visual style. There is an unstoppable, great pleasure in looking at this movie, and it plays with that in interesting ways when it shows you disgusting, horrible things - not just the viscera of vampiric activities, but also footage of real atrocities and scattered, still victims. It is a confronting movie, and it uses its intense, gorgeous visual style to put forth that confrontation. We live in a world of real horror, says the movie - what does that mean for our dark myths, our imagined, evil creatures?

I'll let these stills speak for themselves, for now.

Three hospital beds out of five. 

★★★☆☆

Performative Reading? Yes Please

My friend, the writer and musclebound hunk John Paul Brammer, who I saw the 2025 animated Smurfs movie with at the cinema (a beautiful memory), wrote an intriguing article about so-called “performative reading” on his Substack. I have been hearing this accursed two-word phrase, but I have never really paid it my full attention. It's been a fly buzzing round my head, easy to tune out. But now I must listen.

Me reading some stinky book. Frowning to let all passers by know I am judging.

J. P. says:

It should go without saying that no one should let themselves be bullied out of reading Infinite Jest because of rude posts on the internet. Ignore. But it does seem to me that reading books, and professing to reading books, invites a certain resentment these days. Resentment usually has something interesting to say. There are things in every culture that typically go unsaid, but find expression in resentment.

The idea of performative reading is something that, like many other online expressions of searing derision, seems transparently to come from a place of jealousy. Like with many opinions on welfare policies, train strikes, and the casual use of obviously expensive accessories, the 'performative reading' claim traces such a pin-straight throughline from the observer (I don't read) to the observed (you do read - and how!) that you could play it like a harp string.

I'm not claiming that no one has ever pretended to read something cool or important when they haven't, nor that book choices have never come from a consideration of what might make a reader look impressive - I certainly choose to read big canonical books in part because I'll feel good about having become a reader of that special, exalted book. None of us are immune from the societal image a book may confer, especially since, y'know, reading books is as much about engaging with culture and opinion as much as it is an insular hobby that one can sink into in delicious aloneness, but the gulf of judgement opens up too wide and too quickly, imo. It's an exercise in superiority that serves to spoil reading. Let's bring up barriers around 'correct' reading and ruthlessly apply them to random people on the train, we cry, because perhaps the reader is too beautiful to be respected.

It's an inevitable human desire to be superior, especially when confronted with the apparently effortless Instagrammable deities who dare to ride public transport as if they are like us anguished, unfiltered pedestrians, yet what is to be lost when we attempt to box away these enemies? Every sneer runs the risk of multiplying and turning inward. Oh, you're a Jane Austen fan? Name twelve of her esteemed, intimidating landowners right now.

But if 'performative reading' - i.e. posting a gorgeous picture of yourself reading a beautiful book, or dragging your tome to the café to sip elegantly on a cappuccino while dear Jean Valjean rips off his chains with beastlike strength (see - I have really read Les Mis), or even strategically positioning yourself in front of your aloof crush with a copy of their favourite Steinbeck novel - which you don't care about in the slightest - is considered a hideous betrayal of the pure spirit of reading, then paradoxically we become tight and closed-off. Reading cannot be for clout, we scream in the library, for reading must be pure and intelligent. And reader, I think this is a mistake.

Just having a smile at that book. She's wrong for this.

The statistical decline in literacy, the lowered percentage of adults who finish even one book per year (fewer than half of all American adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022), the big, comedy phone positioned directly in front of every child who might otherwise become an insatiable bookworm - all of these things have far-reaching effects and do constitute something of a cultural tragedy. I'm not the biggest doomer when it comes to phone use - I like phone! - but the simple fact is that there is little friction between all of us and looking at stuff on our phones, and there is a basic friction between all of us and opening a book. It might be small, but it is persistent. There is a huge amount of compelling content and information available to us at just a couple of quick swipes. You don't even have to think about it, you just open up a feed and away you go.

Miley Cyrus isn't on that phone. She's literally reading The Hunger Games.

It's a skill in its own right to cultivate choice and intentionality in a world of algorithmic funneling. It's fun and easy to scroll crazy style and check out whatever is brought to you. You can't do this with books, although of course, you might decide on which books to read based on what books you come across in this manner. In such an environment, any and all performative book posting might be quite the net positive. Okay, maybe Susan Gorgeous (my hypothetical beautiful book-reading influencer type) is reading The Count of Monte Cristo. Perhaps she is an identifiable dunce who only reads it (or pretends to) for the glittering special edition rhinestone cover she has been sent by an opportunistic publisher (they saw an opening in the market for bedazzled books). But maybe you see that thing and you think, ok, maybe I read The Count of Monte Cristo. Maybe reading, in whatever strange form, is cool.

Is that bad, or is that really good, actually?

This pap walk will never fail to make me laugh.

I think I might pursue reading more performatively than ever. Find me perched on the central line with my own glittering - blinding, even - copy of Ulysses.

“Every life is in many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love, but always meeting ourselves.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses (I haven't read it)

Fly

Here is a short story about a fly, and about writing, and being near writing, and death, and public reaction, and laughing at yourself.

Enjoy. 

***

Flies don’t live long. Three weeks, on average, for my kind. In any case, we spend our time in gargantuan rooms, privy to the whims of you all. There is a great network of fly gossip. We live for it, die for it, it is the sap of our little lifetimes, delicious and rapid.

I live on the white speckled wall of a writer. He leaves great pools of sweet brown and yellow liquids in the bottom of ridged bottles. My tasty lakes. I suck up what I can. He’ll write another story. I’ll touch my legs together. Our ritual.

He writes one about murder. Not a murder, but the concept. Teasing out some dirty truth about the strained act of observing. She was killed, he writes, slow as a sunset. A frail woman with a long Sunday ahead of her. Rancid alive, oddly clean in death. Christmas time.

In the story, a woman speaks. Unseen and youthful. Lithe, combative. The perfect female counterpart to the author’s stoic voice.
“Just because she was conservative,” says this princess of the story, “that doesn’t make it funny.”

The author pauses, stressed. Furrowed brow of consternation. The woman on the page continues,
“She was a frail old woman. Killed in her own home.”
“I don’t know,” replies a character, Steve,
“she was racist, I mean really horrible.”
“Yes, but-“
“They strung her up in Christmas lights.”
A twinkle in Steve’s eye, just then.
“They left a little black Santa at the scene.”

The woman frowns. Steve implores:
“Isn’t that a bit funny?”

The author smiles delicately, just a little. Hard to suppress. He gets up, satisfied, to retrieve a drink from the fridge. At that, I fall from the wall. Land with a pif on the cream-coloured rug. Let my legs curl inward in that way that so repulses.

He can’t know it, but I’m smiling too.

Hot Fruit: An Otherwordly Short Story Collection

I was looking through NetGalley for a new book I could read before release, a tantalising short book with, perhaps, four existing reviews or so that I could check out and feel special for getting in on early (such is the great pleasure of it), and I spotted Erinrose Mager's Hot Fruit - a poetry collection (or... story collection, I suppose the cover does say 'stories') with that appealing, visceral title and a gorgeously muddy painting adorning the cover.

Yummy.

This could be weird, I thought. The muddy colours and the fruit theme evoke that visceral style I often love in poetry. What I discovered was that this is a prose poem collection, essentially, and that really interests me because it sort of bridges the gap between poetry and prose in a really neat way. It doesn't feel quite the way a short story collection usually would. Its eye for the poetic is too strong, its taste for the sensorial details too prominent, to enter the more rigidly structured, more grounded world of what I think of as a typical book of short stories.

Yet its prosaic style also lends it a certain straightforwardness. There is something direct about the prose poem that complements the lavish descriptive wandering of the poet's mind. But I suppose at some point we're splitting hairs. Where and when does a poem become a short story, or vice versa? This is an interesting question to ask, and I don't quite know the answer. Somewhere, they must meet and become one.

A very cute picture of the author, from her website.

There is a throughline to these stories. They explore themes of disconnection, the alienation that can come with adoption, strange familial fissures, and the unbelievable and meticulous pleasure of good food. They all manage a synchronicity between satisfying directness and a murky, faraway feeling. The fable is often invoked. There is a sense of humour that creeps in, and a sometimes diaristic tone to these stories. I liked this passage from a story titled Excellent Nature:

Some might say I cannot live without assurances that I garner from patient men who have tragically lost their mothers. But I am patient. I am the patient one. Look at me! I am a highly skilled person, and my lover is interested in purchasing drones.

I also liked the opening of a story titled Joon-Ho:

My father is always away, directing movies to great acclaim.

Bong Joon-Ho, in case you have forgotten.

And, finally, I loved this passage, which makes up one of many tiny interstitial stories all titled True Fable:

Here, the spouses double-cleanse their moon faces, apply their toners, their essences, their ampoules, their serums, their sheet masks, their eye creams, and their moisturizers, slip from their bathrooms, drift down the steps of their basements while their partners sleep, and chip away at their earthen floors with bone spoons, little by little, to expose the planet's molten core from which the spouses harvest magma, turned in air to obsidian, for their hair treatments, and for their weapons.

It's just so evocative and beautifully weird, and a little bit funny. A touch of The Stepford Wives about it. There's something undeniably satisfying in the sensorially rich descriptions and some of the odder, more surreal scenarios that make up this collection.

A very special debut. And one that makes me want to read about a million more short stories.

Four delicious lemon slices out of five.

★★★★☆

P. S. I highly recommend this gorgeous review of the book from this person. Absolutely delicious.