Monday, June 16, 2008

Templars Announce Reunion Tour of France

No updates for a while, as I've been busy with my two film projects, Folie à Deux and Lanterna Magicka. Plus I've also just come back from la belle France - belle that is, apart from their appalling non-vegetarian friendly cuisine and smug, lying waiters - where I have been appearing in a new documentary that will air on Channel 5 in September. Secrets of the Cross will be a four episode series, featuring programmes on Mary Magdalene, the so-called 'Jesus Tomb' in Jerusalem, Pontius Pilate and our old friends the Knights Templar. This is the one I will be in, and sees me holding forth in such belle locations as Troyes, Chinon and La Rochelle. It was a great trip, made all the more so by the fact that we were allowed into the dungeons at Chinon to see the mysterious carvings made my imprisoned Templars in 1308. Very strange indeed - they're either the C14th equivalent of naive art, or they're something esoteric; definitely not standard Christian iconography. (Chinon, incidentally, is Rabelais' hometown, what he called his 'old cow country'.)

My next book, the one after New Waves in Cinema, which I am still working on when the Man from Porlock is not hammering at the door with more trivial merde to distract me, is going to be on the Templars' chums, the Teutonic Knights. I hope this will be an excuse to get some nice pagan illustrations in the book - the TKs crusaded against pagans in the Baltic - preferrably either from Marketa Lazarova or the pagan episode of Andrei Rublev.

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