Oaken's Twelve: Rounding out the Posse

Naturally, the Company of Oakenshield isn’t complete without a Wizard and a Thief…

My Gandalf and Bilbo figures are, as you might expect, not official Hobbit figures, although they are from Games Workshop’s Tolkien license line. Gandalf is one of five or six metal variants on the character (including two mounted and one on a cart), and is simply the easiest and most appropriate to use. This being a LotR version, there’s no silver scarf as mentioned in the book, but short of making one from green stuff, this will do – the important elements, his hat, staff and sword Glamdring, are present, and you can’t ask better than that.

 

Bilbo, on the other hand, is not Bilbo at all, but Frodo repainted and chosen for his pose and for having his sword/letter-opener Sting in hand. In his other hand ought to be the One Ring on a chain, as supplied by Bilbo himself, but as this was not present in The Hobbit I’ve remodelled things slightly and used the opportunity to include the scarf Bilbo wears in An Unexpected Journey. The green cloak loaned by Dwalin is, of course, not present in the movie (for shame!), but I’m happy to include it here, and the backpack is a nice touch and a happy accident, as the movie most definitely features one. No walking stick as seen on the big screen, however, but I’m not worried.

Bilbo, it has to be said, is not really just Frodo with different coloured hair. That said, I’ve not made any attempts to bulk up this hobbit or change his physique too much, hoping instead that a judicious paint job on his face will soften the more sculpted cheekbones and jawline of Elijah Woods circa 1999 and nod towards something closer to Martin Freeman circa 2011.

My base for Bilbo here incorporates some Mirkwood leaves – using the old modeller’s trick of dried birch seeds. I’ve not mentioned this before, but my original intention with these figure conversions some five years ago was to portray the company as they were making their way through Mirkwood – hence Fili’s grappling hooks, and giving me a reason to keep weapons like bows on the models (bows and knives being the weapons Beorn gives the non-sword-bearing party members in the book.) My birch leaves date from then, so they’re getting pretty withered now, and I’d based the figures originally with medium-grain local beach sand and herbal tea leaves – all of which needed to be scraped off after moth larvae took a shine to the Raspberry Zinger (or whatever it was I’d used.) Gandalf, of course, doesn’t accompany Thorin’s team through Mirkwood, so that idea is now laid to rest.  

And so, with the Company complete, here’s the whole gang gathered at last:

Next time: I’m still not done with Dwarves!

Once on Chunuk Bair

So far as I know there is no Simian family blood in the soil at Gallipoli, nor the Somme.

view of Anzac Cove from Lone Pine

Some families have stories of great heroism in their past; the stories of the Simians' combined families are perhaps more ordinary, somewhat anonymous in their loss - two brothers among the hundred of New Zealand troops killed in the futility of Passchendale, a young Kiwi aboard a bomber shot down over Cologne, each in themselves small incidents in far greater events, but each one a devastating, irreversible blow to our respective families. My Nan kept a picture of her late brother, Sgt Walter Foch Kelcher, in her hallway, and as a young man I fancied I saw some physical resemblance between he and I; we had similar faces and shared the same slightly stocky build. He wasn't a big man, but in the picture stands fit to burst with pride in his RNZAF uniform, the picture taken, I believe, in Canada where he trained for a time.

Walter's name stayed with me through my high school years, listed as it was on my school's roll of fallen old boys in our school hall, surrounded by austere stained-glass windows depicting Richard the Lionheart, and a New Zealand soldier, with the names of our great World War battlefields - Crete, Tunisia, et cetera, winding around him in heraldic tape. Every ANZAC Day the school service would of course feature the head boy reading the long list of the school's fallen, and Walter's name was of course on it - they seldom got the pronunciation right.

It's on my list of things to do, to visit Walter's grave in Reinholt War Cemetary. In its stead, and because Turkey was on our itinerary during our brief overseas holiday thirteen years ago, we visited Gallipoli.

The tour was one of the worst I've been on, a combination of booking mix-ups which had our friendly guide questioning the validity of our presence constantly, and a general lack of knowledge of the area we were visiting (he took us to Troy as well, but coped better with guiding us around the site by reading aloud the English descriptions off the signs posted around the place). Because we were two Kiwis in a tour party of four, however (the other two being Swedes), ANZAC Cove and the Gallipoli Peninsula were ours.

Flagstaffs, Anzac Cove

Which isn't entirely true of course. The Peninsula and its highest point is no more 'owned' today by the people of New Zealand and Australia than it was on 10 August 1915 when it was decisively held by Ataturk, and it's his statue which rightly is posited on Chunuk Bair , and his holding of the point one of the few true victories of the campaign. As much as we believe that the nationhood and identity of New Zealand was born on the slopes of this cratered line of hills, it's also the birthplace of modern Turkey, its general and future leader's decisive moment of valour, now as much dedicated to the man who would free his country from its Ottoman past and bring it into the modern world, and of course it is his words in relief on the shores of ANZAC Cove, among the most eloquent and poignant lines of rhetoric I have ever read.

Ataturk's dedication

Gallipoli today is of course important to Turkey as a tourist destination as much a place of reverence and history. The battlefield museum on its lower slopes is a storehouse of some wretched stories and grim artefacts and remains, dead shells and bullet casings, shreds of cloth and shards of bone, each described on small cards as the belongings or remnants of a "martyr", regardless of its nationality (if ever such things could be determined from the shattered landscape.)

Off-season the battlefield sites are incongruously serene; the day we had set aside was warm, dry and blessed with azure skies a startling contrast to the mingling indigo waters of the Bosphoros and the turquoise Aegean. For all of this the landscape could easily have been that of home - the blasted cliffs of Anzac Cove simply resembled the similarly blasted quarry face of Cape Wanbrow, and I found myself constantly noting mentally that the soil on which I was standing was itself a burial ground, spent lives ploughed over by repeated assaults on the summits, the dry clay holding innumerable stories and pieces of other people's homeland. 

Grave markings on the beach

Also on the beach, a stray dog who knew the tourist market as well. He got some lokum for his trouble (it was all we had!) but looked like he could have used something a little more substantial in his diet.

Reaching Chunuk Bair by van and walking track was perhaps twenty minute's worth, past sites familiar to me from ANZAC Days past - Quinn's Post, Lone Pine, Johnson's Jolly, and the Canterbury Commonwealth Cemetary. Again, no familiar names, and the joshing of local stallsmen plying their wares on the road up to the summit ("why aren't you crying?" "this is a sad place!") was more than a little distracting. On to the top, then, for some peace and quiet and away from the wagons of painted plates and soft drinks.

restored trenches

Once on Chunuk Bair the entire Peninsular is evident, from the Dardanelles to the Aegean, we could apparently see Lesvos on the horizon, a tantalising glimpse of the nearest parts of Greece we'd see. Kicking the shingle at my feet near the Ataturk statute my toe caught a chip of blue-green shell, perhaps abalone, but maybe paua, no doubt left there by a traveler before me. It was utterly silent, and a perfect place for reflection, easily the most distant spot from home I could imagine. Despite there being no family blood spilt there, it's a place I'll not forget, and to which I still feel an eerie attachment.

Blogger and fellow tourists, Chunk Bair, September 2000.

1985: Ich bin ein Britischer

I am 15 and my world is expanding.

This isn't going to be a Video Affects post, nor a Manic Street Preachers one, although the video below is useful for more than just illustration. In my mid-teens my musical tastes went Northward, to the United Kingdom. Obviously, thanks to the Summer of Pop and the early Eighties British Pop Invasion the presence of a wide range of popular music from the Mother Country on New Zealand radios would have led to a lot of young teens such as myself building a music collection which had a particular geographical bias. Thanks to that, and after a brief dalliance with West Coast US rock, through an even briefer interest in NWOBHM, I settled on following British music almost exclusively - Frankie Goes to Hollywood, Duran Duran, The Police and Sting, U2, and eventually The Skids, The Clash, and The Smiths. For a while I could see no point to the sunshine and sweetness of American pop, and resisted the likes of Madonna and Prince to follow acts which I thought, in my tender years, spoke to me more about how the world really was. Goodbye California Girls, hello Eton Rifles.

Quite silly, of course, and by the time I'd left home a good few months of university life fixed such notions and I was adding The Pixies, Dinosaur Jr and Sonic Youth to a palette that even at high school couldn't quite manage resisting College-radio era REM. But enough listmaking, it's making me feel all weird and old.

The thing about following British culture, as I did in my teens, was that half a world away it seemed to require an additional investment in background cultural accumulation. Reading comics (Eagle, 2000AD) that over ten years would move from nodding at contemporary novelty newspaper headlines and TV ads through to actually quoting Morrissey lyrics; following TV series (The Young Ones, Spitting Image, Black Adder, any number of Comic Strip specials, New Statesman, Red Dwarf) that were the product of a new wave of politicised young comedians - all of this demanded some sort of context to it, and working out the relevance of terms like Special Patrol Group, or names like Scargill, Tebbit, Lawson... Thatcher.

At least the last name needed little introduction. Margaret Thatcher's political career spanned many more years than my teens, but her eleven years as British PM overlapped them neatly enough, and culturally she was everywhere, perhaps more than any other Prime Minister since Churchill. Looking back it seemed the political landscape of Cold War Eighties was dominated by these huge and polarising world leaders - Thatcher, Reagan, a succession of doomed Soviet Presidents culminating in Gorbachev, the formidable Bob Hawke, and here the outwardly sharp-witted David Lange, an orator king who'd thrust our defining foreign policy riposte into international waters - out Anti-Nuclear stance. This seemed like a brilliant burst of desperate hope compared to the grim picture painted by the songs, programmes and stories I'd read and watch and listen to. Polarising leaders inspire entire cultural movements in revolt, and so my music collection also acquired tones of political protest - The Specials, Billy Bragg, Elvis Costello and The Proclaimers. Only  my following all of this seems now more than a little disingenuous - a combination of good tunes and unfocused adolescent fervour. A far cry from those early Eagle magazines and their Falklands-themed pull-out posters of Harrier jump jets and MIG Foxbats. Culturally as well as politically the Thatcher years as I experienced them as a teenager still resonate in the movements and phases that followed - angry small press-inspired comic titles like Deadline and Revolver, Britpop's courtship and rejection of Tony Blair's New Labour, the stories of Ian Banks and Irvine Welsh, and even the shape of modern Doctor Who. Thatcher's death this week is a strange thing for me to mark then, her past career seemingly forming the bedrock of an artistic reaction that I could only really experience vicariously. It all seems so distant, geographically and chronologically; and as I type this with Tramp the Dirt Down playing in the background I feel I'm no closer now to the heart of it than I was at fifteen, seventeen or twenty.

Oaken's Twelve: Thorin Oakenshield

"There is no knowing what a dwarf will not dare & do for revenge"

And so finally I'm here - Thorin Thrainsson, the Oakenshield, Chief of the Company of Oakenshield. The Boss.

   

Thorin is the most complicated Dwarf character of The Hobbit, and his story is the most rewarding because of this. He has Fatal Flaw etched in him indelibly, and seems to personify the most infamous traits of his kind as lamented by Gandalf- obsessed with past injustices, wedded to revenge, servant to his passions, and not in a Mills & Boon way. I'm very curious to see how the remaining Hobbit movies will treat this character. So far he seems pretty close to the book version of Thorin, perhaps not so haughty (but then Richard Roxburgh's character hasn't met Elf king Thranduil yet), and maybe a little more sympathetic. His coming around regarding Bilbo of course happens earlier in the movies for reasons, I presume, of the movie trilogy's storytelling. That said, Thorin and Bilbo's relationship is an up and down affair throughout the book, and his mercurial personality is a major challenge for our Hobbit hero. 

Thankfully we have a pretty clear image of Thorin provided to us by Tolkien - an older Dwarf (older than Roxburgh's version seems to be to me), with a "sky-blue" hood with a long silver-tipped tassel. This style of hood is in fact a liripipe, and it was only through reading John Rateliff's notes to The Hobbit that I had a clearer picture of this in my mind - the earlier version of the model I simply opted to have a silver-braided wire tail with moulded tassel, but I was quite wrong and, in trying to correct this with more green stuff sculpting, met a rather heft challenge in getting the dynamics and flow right. In the end I don't thin  I did, quite, but it's a fudged-sort of movement that I think balances out the raised arm bearing Orcrist, not an Elven blade as such (it's the hand and sword of a butchered Gondorian soldier I've used here), but a significantly de-stabilising element to the model.

As shown here the model I used for Thorin has been altered a fair bit, including a new sword and hand, removal of hand axes and of course the tail and tassel. I also enlarged his shoulder bag (a hangover from when I stared these models back in the day and didn't want to sculpt backpacks, so opted for the nearest thing), and a gold chain around his neck which, strictly speaking, Thorin shouldn't have until he reaches the hoard of Erebor. The colouring is simple - some purple to the inner cloak to signify his regal bearing, and a Dwarven motif added at the last minute to break up the space a little bit. And that's Thorin.

Ah, but is it all the Dwarves? Wait and see...

Judge Dredd Movies: A return trip to Resyk?

Just when you think you've done away with the Law, it threatens a comeback. The Box-Office failure of Dredd last year is a matter of historical record, and despite really healthy UK BluRay sales (it topped the charts quite emphatically on the day of release), for now it seem that its main problem was not the dedication of its small but significant fanbase, or the large budget, but possibly a bungled promotional effort. Maybe. What I do know is that the 'Dredd Deserved Better' meme is still with us (recent typical comment on Ain't It Cool News' boards: "Drok (sic) anyone that didn't see Dredd in 3D in the theater. You never get to complain about anything ever again. It's now my prerequisite question if I catch any of you bitching about movies. Did you see Dredd in 3D at the theater? No? Well then you can just fuck off because you are part of the problem. They made a perfect movie that is everything you have ever asked for and you didn't show up.")

 All is not lost, however. Executive Producer Adi Shankar confirmed recently on Reddit that he is planning a small scale short along the lines of the well-received Punisher short Dirty Laundry. The fact that Shankar named Dirty Laundry and that said short starred the most recent cinematic Punisher Thomas Jane has a lot of Dredd fanboys (myself among them) hoping that we might see Karl Urban in the helmet once more. But it's a long road, and nothing's certain - well, apart from this version probably not being in 3D (Shankar wasn't mad about '3D' even being in the title). There's also a precedent from before Dirty Laundry: Batman fans made convention favourite Batman : Dead End on a modest location and budget, and recently Morgue linked to a Wonder Woman short made by an aspiring action film director, but the difference here is of course who's behind the story and who has the rights. With a sequel being reliably out of contention, a ten-minute mini budget Dredd on YouTube might be the best we get, and a decent hope for any interest in the movie outside of video shops and the torrents. I hope it get made, and I really hope it will feature at least Urban once more - but I'm expecting this to be small, and hoping for some wit this time. And no Dark Judges, because... just no. There's over thirty years of one-shot Dredd stories that could make fun shorts, and no end of talented writers who know the character, plus fans who'd lap this up. Bring it on.

And in the mean-time of course, next month sees the online release of Judge Minty, a new trailer for which is hosted on 2000ADonline.com, and while it's not strictly Dedd's story, it is a Dredd adaptation, and a classic, too. From the looks of it it should be well worth waiting for.

Busman’s Holiday Reading

Three weeks now without an iPod. It changes a man, especially one who is accustomed to listening to stuff on the bus. As threatened, I’ve been reading books instead, waiting for the day when an iPod will once again be mine (date undisclosed), and I’ve actually been enjoying it! Chiefest of my accomplishments is the tackling and sometimes finishing off of books I’d started ages ago and never finished or, in some cases, been gifted but never started. For shame. Here’s the tally so far:

Popcorn by Ben Elton
[A birthday present in 1997 from my future sister-in-law. Never started - sorry]
Well this I didn’t like. Really didn’t like. Preachy (it’s Ben and his big righteous hammer so where are all those them nails then?) and unlikeable characters - and those are the two main issue I had with what is otherwise a pretty tense and interesting story. Mind you, they are big issues to me. Oh it’s a spoof? Yeah, I still hated it. The violent excesses of Tarantinos movies are beyond parody, really, and to shoehorn an argument about violent cultures inspiring violent people through the medium of another obvious Tarantino pastiche? Spare me. Moving right along...

The Heart of the Matter by Graham Greene
[A birthday present in 2000 from an old Uni friend. Started but stalled ¾ through]
Brilliant. A devastating and penetrating account of one's loss of faith and the consequential moral torpor that follows as a Catholic police officer of impeccable and otherwise unremarkable scruples slowly loses everything on the Ivory Coast for so very little. Greene gets under the skin of his fallen protagonist more than any author I’ve read (although Maurice Gee’s Plumb comes close, I think), and I was quite affected by this. Not one I’ll return to in a hurry, but a rewarding read.

54 by Wu Ming
[Loaned to me by a workmate in 2011. Stalled after three pages]
Long and over-stocked to distraction with extraneous characters and historical detail (the writing committee that are Wu Ming clearly had a lot of political history to get off their chests], but once it gets going hugely entertaining and in places quite hilarious. It's also something of a shaggy dog tale, and if its focal point takes a while to find itself, then at least here's some interesting modern history along the way. Cary Grant, Italian communists, American cultural invasion, the birth of the global heroin trade, and the mad adventures of a sentient TV called McGuffin. What’s not to like?

Howling at the Moon by Walter Yetnikoff
[Given to me by a friend in 2012. Kept for a rainy day (Monday past)]
The autobiography of CBS’s wild man president of the 70s and 80s is a hell of a story from a self-confessed prick, really, charting his childhood in Brooklyn through to his mogul status, inevitable fall from glory and beyond. There’s a seam of self-effacing Jewish humour that undercuts a lot of pretty bullish and sometimes downright nasty corporate skulduggery in a rapidly changing entertainment landscape; Yetnikoff’s voice also makes him an appealing character despite his appalling behaviour and he’s smart enough not to paint his story as one of total redemption. And yet, it's an American story, and at the end there's the sense of a classic character arc being played out - albeit one crafted in the telling by its protagonist. The rock star anecdotes are cool, too – Springsteen, James Taylor, Streisand, Billy Joel, Jackson (Michael), Simon (Paul), Jagger, McCartney, Geffen, Motolla – what a cast!

There's more in the list to come: the possibility of some actual Gee, Julius Vogel's Sci-Fi novel, a Charlie Higson outing and some collected Washington Irving. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I might know where our old iRiver is. Hmm, I wonder...?

Oaken’s Twelve: Where Are We Now?

Time for a quick summary. You may well have imagined, dear reader, that with Bombur, the twelfth member of Thorin Oakenshield’s company now complete, the job was done. Au contraire. You can’t have a Company without a leader, and so this weekend I intend to finish him off. Yes, the Oakenshield and heir of Thrain II is nearly ready for unveiling. He’s no Bombur as conversions go, but I’m pretty happy with him. Group shot to follow, of course.

The question then remains on what I’ll do next. Dain? Bilbo and Gandalf? But then what about Gollum, Elrond, Thranduil, Bard…? Actually, I think I can see a line to stop at, and I’ll likely do it. More projects beckon, time to move on.

Then there’s Balin’s Tomb, my cutaway project which has moved on from the last snaps, but not hugely. I’ll add that to the list. And then I’ll be done with Tolkien for a while I reckon. Come the end of 2013 with a new Hobbit movie released – that’ll be when I tackle some more figures from that world.

In the mean-Time, some long-expected artwork beckons, and on the figure front another near dozen wandering heroes, each one a Lord…