The Kelburn Castle and Estate fully opens to the public on Easter and maintains regular hours from Easter until November second. Although Kelburn Castle has many historical and architectural features of interest, the aspect people tend to find most notable is the graffiti-covered portion.

A couple of years ago, it was determined that parts of the concrete rendering were probably going to need to be replaced in the relatively near future. Concrete rendering or plastering is the surface placed on the outside of stone or brick walls for a combination of weatherproofing and texture. In this case the harling or pebbledash was applied to the walls primarily because soft sandstone requires careful weatherproofing to last. David and Alice Boyle, the children of the tenth and current Earl of Glasgow, thought it might be fun to use upcoming renovations as an opportunity to have famous graffiti artists paint a portion of the castle.

So the family commissioned a team of Brazilian painters called Nina and Nunca and the duo Os Gemeos or, translated from Portuguese, The Twins, who are known for their yellow figures and ability to garner establishment regard for what some might view as vandalism. This team of four graffiti artists were invited to do their thang on a castle wall legally, instead of guerrilla style. MTV competition-winning audiovisual artist and music festival scenester luminary Elliot Thomson of Preamptive and the multi-pronged artist group the Novak Collective produced a time lapse video of The Graffiti Project. The project was undertaken in residence and completed in early summer 2007, but, despite the fine reputations of all the artists involved, a debate still goes on over whether this was a desecration of a beautiful historical landmark or pretty much the coolest thing ever.

I don’t think I can think of any dwelling I would get more of a kick out of than a castle fortress with beautiful colorful graffiti painting on it. How often does one get to like something for both hipster and medieval reasons at the same time?

It probably comes as no surprise then that I think the graffiti art is a cool idea. I also think it is in keeping with how such fortresses tend to be extended in different styles over time. Lord Glasgow states:

“Kelburn Castle, unlike most grand houses in Scotland was not planned by an eminent architect like Adams or Lorrimer. It simply evolved over a period of some 700 years. As the family became richer or more important, it grew organically. Over the years, various Earls of Glasgow, or more probably their wives, changed sitting rooms into bedrooms, partitioned rooms to make extra corridors, altered staircases, raised the level of floors and ceilings, mover kitchens from one end of the house to the other and changed the front door from the north to the south side of the house and then back to the north again. The result is that Kelburn is an eccentric half castle, half-house, constantly in use and still very much lived-in.”

Some of the concept of painting part of the castle was consciously to unite urban art and rural canvas. Looking at the history, though, the whole thing is very much in keeping with the origins of the estate. It is always odd for Americans, with our comparatively brief national history, but the Europeans really track where things come from for centuries, although there are always those who contend that some of European genealogy and history is at best excessive in detail.

At any rate, Kelburn began as a Norman Keep when the de Boyville family, who came from Normandy with William the Conqueror in 1066, moved to Ayrshire in 1140. It is estimated that the Norman Keep edition of the building on the Kelburn Estate was completed by 1200ish. Some time in the following centuries, the de Boyvilles evolved their family name to Boyle, which lead to cultural confusion over whether that was a proper Scottish noble name or an Irish name. Because Europeans care about such matters, the Boyles, despite their seven or eight hundred-year-old estate and titles, are often left off various lists due to their lack of an official tartan and a suspiciously Irish-sounding name. Technically, their name is Norman invader and many families have invented official tartans to get in on the whole uniforms and team colors culture. From an American perspective, I’ve spent time in Scotland and I’m probably more educated than the average American and I probably could not differentiate between Scotland and Ireland on a map with a vintage traditional broadsword to my head. Whether or not the threatening broadsword had creative graffiti on it.

In 1581, a more impressive castle was built around the original stone structure. During the following century, the Boyles got very paid in shipping and shipbuilding and, ahem stamping out smuggling in service of Customs & Excise. The Boyle family was rewarded for their public service in 1703 with the title of Earl. When he received his title, the first Earl of Glasgow had recently completed construction on Kelburn House, a mansion built to address the difficulty of castles being considered unfashionable at the time. If the first Earl was so concerned about what people might think, he is probably turning over in his grave over the idea of graffiti adorning Kelburn Castle, but it really is in keeping with updating with the times the same way he did. In the 1800’s, the fifth and sixth Earl of Glasgow caused the size of the Kelburn Estate to dwindle, the fifth through a fabulous fashionable gambler scenester lifestyle and the sixth through endowing churches. In between being seen at all the best parties and religious events, they did manage to put a Victorian wing around one of the 1581 towers.

In 1977, the current and tenth Earl of Glasgow and his wife Isabel were culturally generous enough to open the grounds and buildings of their family home, of many generations, as a park and museum for part of every year. You can now visit the incredibly beautiful and storied Kelburn Estate from Easter through November second.

You know how all 80’s teen romances featured a girl the hero wanted. And you know how that girl was always romanced by some guy with a sort of overdone Kennedy scion kind of haircut, a Porsche or similar ride, and generally some country clubbish or yacht-person sort of clothing? Well, apparently whoever made the introductory Scientology film didn’t get that viewers were supposed to want to be John Cusack’s Lane Mayer in Better Off Dead and not Aaron Dozier’s ski champion Roy Stalin. It’s like rooting for the nameless college guy in the red sports car over Ilan Mitchell-Smith’s Wyatt Donnelly in Weird Science. Weird Science is apt here. More on this in a moment.

So I went to the Scientology Celebrity Centre for brunch yesterday. The building is beautiful and blocks from my house. (I had a friend pick me up in his BMW SUV because, when it came down to it, walking didn’t feel Hollywood enough for such a Hollywood moment.) Food was varied and pretty tasty. Service was friendly and adequate, but unexceptional and could have been mildly more attentive. I particularly liked the crisp waffles and the smoked salmon and capers. The regular water was excellent for Los Angeles, so they must have a good filter, and the orange juice was good enough. Say you saw the brunch in the internet and it is a discounted $25 a person for all you can eat, rather than the walk-in price of $30 a plate.

I had a good time because I went with friends. I will refrain from naming said friends, due to their general nervousness about the establishment in question. Now I have lived blocks from the Celebrity Centre for years and, after my recent Scientology sign maker widget post got such a surprising amount of attention, I thought I might want to actually check it out. So I made a brunch reservation for three people and invited seven or eight of my friends. One person who declined pointed out that perhaps the week a dude with Samurai swords got shot by Scientology security guards in the Celebrity Centre parking lot was not the best timing to extend such an invitation. (I later looked this incident up online and noted that it apparently actually took place in November of last year and not this week at all.) Only one of my pals had the good excuse of being en route to attend the Barack Obama presidential inauguration. Everyone else plead hangover or terror or similar. At any rate, my friends came through for me and exceeded expectations and we ended up being a party of four. The grounds were lovely and we were seated facing indoors, beneath a hand-painted ceiling, by a window facing a garden fountain. There was a kind of terrible easy listening cover band outdoors, but we couldn’t really hear them where we were at. Because the company was terrific and the food was yummy, we had a great lunch.

The Hollywood Celebrity Centre was initially a sort of artists hotel, from the time most noir novels are set, when people would regularly rent hotel rooms by the week. Because of the building’s beauty and history, one of my friends found someone to ask if we could take the tour I’d heard they had. A room where Errol Flynn stayed was quickly pointed out and the gentleman we spoke with also mentioned that Cary Grant had stayed upstairs. Then he ushered us briskly through a hallway, which had at least a few somewhat interesting maxims framed on the walls, and into an office where we were given little questionnaires to fill out. I found it kind of hilarious that the questionnaire included a question about whether one had heard of Scientology. I asked the manager guy we’d been introduced to how many people sitting in that room wouldn’t have? Maybe it is a multipurpose form, but a little customization would seem a lot less silly. The form also asked how I had heard of Scientology and had a long list of boxes I could tick. I made my own box and checked my write-in answer of “Live in Los Angeles”.

One of my friends asked the manager guy where his accent was from and he said Sweden. As both one of my friends and I had been to Sweden, we chatted about that a little. We told him we were a bit pressed for time but had about twenty minutes available for a tour. The Scientologists assured us twenty minutes would be fine and ushered us into a nice little screening room to watch a movie which would answer many of the questions we might have about Scientology. I wouldn’t mind having their comfortable screening room, but they miscalculated wildly with their recruitment movie.

First off, the movie shows incredible footage of spectacular Scientology buildings, including a castle in the UK used as a school. It then immediately cuts to a diatribe against materialism. Uhm, poor segue. Most importantly, all four of us work in some aspect of the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. We pretty immediately became impatient with the recruitment film’s uber-beginners approach for morons. Instead of saying much about Scientology philosophies, such as those framed on their hallway walls, the film was incredibly defensive, going on and on about how it is too a religion and quoting court decisions from multiple countries. The flick drones on interminably about how Scientology is attacked by psychology and government because it is a good replacement for government mind control. Or something like that. They really failed to communicate their value proposition. They would have done much better by actually giving us a tour where a properly trained tour guide could have gauged each of our levels of interest, knowledge, and intelligence.

Most comically, the Scientology recruitment flick had a Troy McClure who really came across like the 80’s movie preppy jerk in the Porsche who treats the female lead so shabbily. I mean, I think tie pins under the tie knot are kinda pretty and I wouldn’t mind if they came back in fashion. But they really haven’t.

Finally, we nominated one of our party to go ask when the actual tour was going to start. They apparently didn’t have enough tour guides to start immediately or something and the movie droned on, so we got up and left. On the way out, the Swedish manager came out to speak to me, perhaps guessing that I had asked for the tour hoping to find something more meaningful and intriguing than dated prep haircuts. I asked him when the movie was made. Without hesitation, he started to say “eighty-” and then cut himself off, paused, looked up and away, and said, “uh, ninety . . . ninety-five.” It is possible that they did some sort of re-edit in 1995 where they added a building acquisition to the beginning or added a postscript to the end, after the badly-acted repetitive part, and we just didn’t sit through enough of it to see the post-1986 part.

So here is my free consulting advice to Scientology: Make a new recruitment movie more often than once every twenty years. If the Church of Scientology would like further media consulting, my rates are available via the contact form on this site.

Fun fact to know and share: Ilan Mitchell-Smith, who played the cute dork who gets the girl, Wyatt Donnelly, in 1985’s Weird Science, pursued a course of medieval studies and is now a professor of English. That’s hot.

I’m not sure modern social science has an explanation for how John Hughes could have done a movie as fun and positive as Weird Science and then done all the wretched values-destroying propaganda he did afterward, so maybe Scientology can trump psychology there and come up with a plausible explanation.

Last night, I went to see Beowulf with a bunch of my unsavory pals. This was our third attempt to put together a group of people to see it, but third time is a charm and there ended up being around a dozen of us including Blue Blood hotties Scar 13, Tassy Pink, Joel Awesome, and Kitty Von Klau, Blue Blood Creative Director Forrest Black, Allan Amato who shoots for Scar13.com and more. It was kind of cool because it seems like it is becoming less common to have a bunch of people get together for something simple like seeing a movie. Yes, I’m thinking of going to see a movie with naked vikings fucking water sprites as a wholesome activity. You have to consider what the rest of my existence is like to put it in context.

We saw Beowulf at the Arclight so we could view the 3D version. The Arclight has extra-comfy chairs and prides itself on its high tech theater equipment. This is Los Angeles, so the front hall featured a display with actual costumes worn by actors in the movie. I sort of thought they were all in motion suits and they made the flick video game style, but I guess physical outfits were involved at some point. I liked the clothing anyway. I think I need to start wearing a royal cape around. The Arclight personnel handed us 3D glasses on the way into the theater.

Spoiler alert: If you didn’t read Beowulf in school (or at any other point), then the rest of this might include spoilers. I studied all the Icelandic sagas in school. When I was in college, I actually took a class called “Kinship and Law in Medieval Iceland.” And now it is my job to do things like write up the Beowulf movie. I guess I wasn’t wasting time and money at university after all. Phew.

Most of the Scandanavian sagas came from many troubadours through oral tradition and they were about heroism and adventure. And possibly about the fact that vikings tended to drink mead stored in flasks which were fabulous breeding grounds for hallucinogenic fungus. Beowulf, by contrast, believed to be by one author of English or German origin, is almost a satire of the saga genre. In the book, it is unclear whether the hero Beowulf or the monster Grendel is really the protagonist. Grendel is a sympathetic monster and some scholars feel that he represents nature in the epic battle between man and nature. It seems like, in these environmentally conscious times, the movie makers would have hit the green message a bit harder. Personally, I buy recycled where I can, even if it costs a bit more. But I roll in a big American car and I leave my air conditioning on when it is hot, whether or not I’m home. So this didn’t exactly damage my enjoyment of the movie.

The main deviation from the original poem is in the nature of Beowulf’s relationship with Grendel’s mother. Scholars disagree vehemently with one another on whether Grendel’s mother was a heroic female warrior who, in response to the killing of her son, simply carried out the requirements of blood feud and debt. Or whether this descendant of Cain was monstrous in appearance. In the poem, Beowulf is described as killing her with a magical sword and then using that same sword to decapitate Grendel’s corpse and bring his head back to the mead hall. It is entertaining to think that the screenwriters looked at this and wondered why the warrior would have only brought back one head if he had slain two monsters. Their explanation might not be so true to the original, but many things can be explained by Angelina Jolie’s wet, buoyant, gold-slicked, CGI boobies. Many scholars believe that the original Beowulf poem was a Christian propagandist restructuring of familiar tales to impose Christian values on them. So one can hardly blame a modern retelling for imposing current rules of cinematic story structure on the film. Beowulf’s relationship with Grendel’s mother not only allowed Robert Zemeckis to bring us hot naked viking/water sprite sex, but it also honestly ties the Grendel portion of the Beowulf saga and the dragon portion together much more neatly, for modern sensibilities, than the original does. Some feminist scholars argue that Beowulf has a three part story structure where the battle with Grendel’s mother is as important as the one with Grendel and the one with the dragon, although the story is generally viewed as having a two part structure. It would probably be reaching to call the Zemeckis adaptation a feminist retelling, but it is tidy modern story structure for a modern audience.

Much as the original saga was almost making fun of the braggadocio of its predecessors, the Beowulf movie is sold as a costume adventure blockbuster, but it points out that maybe the adventures just are not really that great. When Beowulf kills Grendel, the monster is tragic and, despite Beowulf’s humorous and aesthetically pleasing nudity, the warrior comes off as a bully, brutalizing a monster who is no match for him. It is uncomfortable to watch and the monster takes an agonizingly long time to die in his mother’s arms.

The movie pretty immediately switches tone from a certain almost cheesy brashness to a dismal and depressing ever after. The plot goes briskly from the warrior king yelling “I am Beowulf!” Flava Flav style to telling his young slave girl that none of it was as great as it should have been, not the battles, not the treasures, not the kingdom, not the women. She seems distressed that not even the women excited him in a particularly pleasant way, but he pretty much confirms that he can’t even summon interest in sex.

Beowulf set out to do battle for glory rather than gold, but he has acquired both through his exploits. Beowulf’s closest companions revere him. He is a king. He has wealth and many followers. People keep telling him that his praises will be sung after everything then alive has turned to dust. But, basically, nothing feels good.

Unusually, for a Hollywood blockbuster, the writers of the movie get top billing in the closing credits. The screenplay was written by the very impressive duo of Neil Gaiman and Roger Avary. Neil Gaiman is very well known in comic book and science fiction and fantasy circles. If you are gothic, you are probably familiar with his Sandman comic (or should probably at least fake like you are.) If you are more fandom-identified, then his somewhat tongue-in-cheek novels may be more your thing. Although Quentin Tarantino is the name everyone knows from Pulp Fiction, Roger Avary also has a screenwriting credit on it and has said in interviews since that he can’t hang out with Quentin Tarantino because the man just sucks the ideas right out of him. Roger Avary is probably best known for having written and directed the solid film adaptation of one of my favorite books, Bret Easton Ellis’ Rules of Attraction, (which Forrest Black and I shot some promo for with Scar 13 years ago.) There is some buzz about whether the technology involved in making Beowulf will ultimately somewhat replace actors, or at least turn them into licensable clip art. I will be interested to see if this sort of technology will ultimately mean that writers and scenic designers and people like that will receive more credit for how a movie turns out. Before I knew anything about how Hollywood works, it used to trouble me, as a consumer, that whether or not I enjoyed a movie depended very much on plot and story structure, only movies were never advertised as “written by the guy who wrote that other thing you liked.” A great actor with a horrid plot is generally Michael Madsen in that awful poker movie which comes on late night cable only. No Oscars there.

Perhaps because the original Beowulf saga mocked the more traditional sagas, although the movie is marketed as an epic adventure for fantasy fans, it feels almost like the viewer is being told that what they were coming to see is not as terrific as they might think. After the credits ran, most of my group of mighty thanes went to get shabu shabu. Everyone kept asking each other if they liked the movie. Except for Scar, who had promised to dislike the movie beforehand, no one seemed to know if they felt like it was a good movie or a bad one or somewhere in between. I know the film left me feeling a little extra aggro such that I wanted to attack the waitress when I asked her for a sparkling Voss water the seventh time. Not that people doing their job badly doesn’t annoy me normally, but not in such a visceral way. I think Joel Awesome and I might have been the only ones who were somewhat familiar with the saga genre. (Wait until you all see the super hot signature couples set of Joel and Kittie which Forrest and I shot for BlueBlood.com. All that hotness and smart and well-read too!) I think the movie was well-done and technologically interesting, but, being familiar with the original, I was mostly sort of kicking myself for being surprised that it was not a feel-good movie.

The message of the Beowulf movie seemed very much: “Look upon my works, ye mighty, with 3D glasses, and despair.” (Joel says that, when he was little, he used to confuse Gilgamesh and Grendel, so I can stick Ozymandius in my Beowulf if I want.) Fortunately, we had to give the 3D glasses back to the Arclight after the movie. It was disorienting, at first, to look at the world without them.