I am afraid of being sucked into a vortex, or maybe left stranded in the desert, the vast wasteland of television, stretching for endless miles, no oasis in sight. Worse than being stranded alone, I am stranded with a wild pack of teenagers no less.

I hear they’ve got good drugs, or that’s what the online synopses tell me.

This may be a good time to indulge.

We’re in for a bumpy ride.

So, I’m here on the precipice – mixing metaphors with my gin and tonic- ready to jump into the abyss, god knows what is now in my hand and soon in my mouth and down the slippery slope courtesy of some hyper-laconic beanie-headed teen bloke who called me scutler amid a series of grunts and sighs.

I’m hooked, and I haven’t even taken the first dose.

Blame Scotland lads and lasses, most particularly, a Scot named Stuart Murdoch, he who fronts Belle & Sebastian and he who recently had the temerity to reveal his filmmaking talents to the vast media space of our world, filling a great void that had developed somewhere around the prime meridian not far from Greenwich. It was a mean time.

Luck Fondon reverberates from the narth,

for Glasgow is king.

B&S, Camera Obscura, CHVRCHES, and the list is goes on and on. ‘Tis a scene, man!

Woe is he who sits through God Help the Girl, for he shalt sit and sit again and again as new details- phrases, nods, winks, nuances, and assorted gestures pop their heads in each running – yes – Buffy Gone Mad; Buffy Gu Brath as the pipers of the fiefdom have seized the consciousness as only a blessed handful can.

He may even dance and sing.

Ah, bless the rock and roll musical, and of course, Cassie – Cassandra – the myth, the character, the legend – dare I say, archetype? Where is the C.G. Jung when ya need’em?- and not just in GHTG, but in the wicked narcotic that is tempting me, thrown me from my moorings – Skins. Yes. That Skins, from channel four, from what is still called the UK by the antediluvian, the imminent rupture of Scotland, Wales, North Ireland, England flying o’er their heads, perhaps doing a shit in the process as such flying things are want. Would someone please get Mr. Cameron a kerchief.

One Ms. Hannah Murray has taken one character and made it into two, if not more, murdering the manic pixie dream girl, wearing the dead girl’s disguise, and replacing her with a darker deeper girl of both dreams and nightmares and the whole spectrum of consciousness in between. Yes, our dear Cassandra is much darker in Skins, but the darkness lingers beneath the her dork veneer in GHTG, waiting to pounce. [In my social coffin, I blame all the boffins, for making me fail. – it’s as angry as it is funny.] To bring CGJ back to the fore, Cassandra is the smothering shadow of the MPDG. Shall we just call her the manic pixie nightmare? “Oh wow,” as she so often declares.

But return southward with me, please, where St. George reigns, due west of that city that shall not be named.

Something is rotten in Bristol. Sex, drugs, rock -n- roll, mental illness, and more drugs, just to be sure, and, while we’re at it, howzabout another shag.

The id is rampant Herr Freud.

Joyous decadence is afoot.

Oh damn!!

In my reverie, I have burnt the broccoli.

Do wish me luck, please. May I return to these shores in one piece as I make my Homeric quest in search of what made those cold damp isles all atwitter from 2007 – 2013. God speed, friends. I’ll miss you.

Season one is queued.

As always —

Luck Fondon.

 

Cassie in GHTG

Cassie in SKINS