Oooh, I'm cross...

On a good day, the so-called “Conservative” Party acts more like an organised crime syndicate than a legitimate political body, but even by its own appalling standards their latest behaviour is a shocker that should be very troubling everyone. Except that it isn’t. The papers are still all gooey about goggly-eyed David Camoron and his bandit gang. I said I was worked up about the Damian Green business and I could rant for hours, but boiling it all down, here’s why:

1. Politicians are not above the law, even if they think they should be. They don’t believe it’s any problem that civil servants be arrested for leaking, but get all hoity-toity if anyone imagines they ought to face the same treatment.

2. To hear them you’d think the worst thing about it was the fact that the police arrested Damian Green without a warrant. They had warrants for his private homes and offices, but his office in Parliament was raided without a warrant. That’s true, but Damian Green’s Parliamentary office is not his private personal property. The House of Commons is not MPs’ personal property either. It’s ours! They work there for us! The police no more need a warrant to enter a public building like the House of Commons than they would to search a bus.

3. Okay, but that’s not all. I quote from Blackstone’s Statutes on Criminal Law, page 5:

Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984:
Section 24. Arrest without warrant for arrestable offences...
(2) The offences to which subsection (2) below applies are -
...(b) offences under the Official Secrets Act 1911 and 1920 that are not arrestable offences by virtue of the term of imprisonment for which a person may be sentenced in respect of them...
...(e) offences under section 1 of the Public Bodies Corrupt Practices Act 1889 (corruption in office) or section 1 of the Prevention of Corruption Act 1906 (corrupt transactions with agents)...

4. I got very heartily sick of hearing our self-appointed lords and masters telling us all that their job is ‘to hold the government to account’. No it’s not. Their job is to represent the interests of their constituents! That’s what they get elected for, even if precious few of those trough-guzzling pigs ever think of the suckers who vote for them once they’re on the gravy train.

5. The Tories have been raving about us being on the slippery slope to a police state and that the Home Secretary should tell the police to back off and leave them alone. In a democracy, the executive and the criminal justice system are kept apart. Politicians make the laws, judges interpret and enact them. In a police state the politicians actually do have the power to command the police and judiciary to do as they want. Be very afraid, voters. That’s precisely what the Tories are calling for. Any bets on what they’d get up to in office?

6. In fact, the police have always been very sympathetic to the Tory Party. In my opinion, the new Tory mayor of London got rid of Met Chief Sir Iain Blair because he wasn’t being a sufficiently obedient poodle. He did not have the power to sack him, but used every loophole in the book to make his job impossible. But now the Tories have got no-one in their pocket in charge of the Met, and, blow me down, the police are actually free to go after their corrupt, lying, cheating, conniving, thieving and treachery. Know what? That’s their job!

7. Now it seems the Tories have employed their press poodles to attack London’s anti-terror chief and interfere in the investigation, publishing his home address so that terrorists and the Tories’ fellow criminals could threaten his family. Words fail me. They really do. This is not just against a whole slew of laws, it’s treason, pure and simple. Not that that surprises me, coming from that evil house of Lords Haw-Haw. Vote them in and it’s curtains for the lot of us. I ain’t kidding.

Terrence and Philip

Martin Rowson in today’s Guardian sums up my own thinking on the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand affair, really. No prizes for guessing whose physog is going to be on top of the bonfire this Guy Fawkes night, eh? But, as the cartoonist Banx commented in The Financial Times this morning, the scariest Hallowe’en trick-or-treat costume of all is the ‘hedge fund manager’ horror mask. Let’s get a sense of proportion, shall we kiddies?
Of course, I have been fascinated at this latest media frenzy. BBC Radio 5 devoted its hour-long morning phone-in to it three days running! I downloaded them all onto my new iPod! You betcha, as Sarah Palin would say.
Naturally enough, this outrage on the part of the fuddy-duddy tabloid press over an interview with ‘foul mouthed comedians’ did give me a strong sense of déjà-vu, that history from thirty years ago was repeating itself like a big burping belly that’s too full of Country Life English butter.
Well, today I found not one but two copies of Thursday’s Daily Mail on the bus. I was able to read, for the first time, a full transcript of Ross and Brand’s notorious prank telephone call, available only in snippets elsewhere. Here it is, least you forget how terrible it is, the Mail shrieked. I read it and I now have a shameful confession to make. You see, previously, when all I had to go on was a bald description of what was said, filtered through Terence Blacker in The Independent and others, I was sickened. It sounded vile and disgusting. The worst kind of bullying and taunting. But, when I was able to read it in context, and saw what those two fonejackers had actually said... I’m sorry, but I laughed. I thought it was funny.
Now, Jonathan Ross is a man I have no time for, but I do have a soft spot for Russell Brand. I know plenty of people hate him, but he is a friend of a friend* and that predisposes me to like him, I suppose, though I genuinely do think he is gifted at what he does. He pretends to be an idiot, when he is really very, very smart, while Ross is much the other way around.
Anyway, I shall leave aside the details of the prank call itself to draw attention to an interesting little detail in the Daily Mail warts-and-all transcript**. ‘Here is the bit that was not broadcast,’ they said, printing a section that even the few who had originally tuned in would not have heard. Now, I wondered, where did they get that from? Did their podcast have a special hidden bonus track at the end? Or did it come to them from the production team? Well, what do you think?
You see, I think this is not about whatever jokes Ross and Brand may or may not have thrown out in their ill-advised chat-show. That didn’t bother anyone for weeks, anyway. No, I think the joke that this was really all about was Ross’s off-the-cuff remark a little while ago that he was paid so much that he was ’worth as much as one thousand journalists...’ Now, to journalists that’s a challenge. That’s like a white glove across the face... it gives them the right to choice of weapons. And they have a mighty armory.
If they were going to write an honest op-ed piece about it, I reckon it would go a bit like this:

‘You think you’re worth a thousand of us, do you Ross? Well, watch what we can do to you, boy. How d’you fancy being the new Jade Goody, then? We can force the worst financial crisis in sixty years right off the front page to make room for your ugly mug every day... We can make the two minute hate last a whole week. We can cost you a million quid and make you smile as you let it go. That’s what we can do. And what can you do? Where’s this power of a thousand journalists that you’ve got then? Nowhere, chum. We can bend you over and make you take every inch, and there’s not a damned thing you can do to stop us. You may think you’re the biz, but you’re just another fucking civilian. We made you and we can break you. Just so’s you don’t forget who’s boss.’

By the way, that’s a warning to us as well, of course. Just so’s we don’t forget who really runs this country.

Footnotes:
*Although, weirdly, so is Jonathan Ross, now I come to think about it....
**Of course, the uncut version has found its way onto YouTube for those who would like to catch it It has already had 242,837 views... a bigger audience than the original radio programme had in the first place... while a shorter, but higher resolution copy has had three times the original audience...

Taxi rank

Following on from PJ O'Rourke's estimate of the quantity of money the 1989 Savings and Loan bailout represented (see below) I did a quick, back of the envelope calculation on the subject of the five hundred billion pound payout to the banks. It is roughly enough for Gordon Brown to take a London black cab from Westminster all the way to the Kuiper Belt Object (formerly planet) Pluto... and back again... ten times and fill in Peter Mandelson's name on the spare receipt so he can claim expenses for him too, and still leave enough for a substantial tip. Oh, and that includes the cabbie going over London Bridge twice - once in London and once in Arizona - and charging extra because he doesn't go south of Jupiter after midnight...

Watching the Defectives

Of course, you know that selling mortgages to people with no money and no assets isn’t going to make you rich. Your granny knows it. Fred down the street knows it. The toothless hobo shining shoes for beer knows it too. Just ask him, he’ll tell you. So how come all these bankers don’t know it? We keep being told how intelligent they are, but when even stupid people wouldn’t be that stupid, then just how talented are they?
The crash of 1929 came about mainly because the bankers were conning the public at large by selling them shares they secretly knew to be worthless. The Savings and Loan crash of 1989 was about them having tried to con each other, selling bonds to fellow bankers without telling them they were junk. But this latest one has gone beyond all bounds. The marks, the suckers, the victims of this latest con were the traders themselves.
”If I buy this worthless mortgage contract, I can pay myself a lot of money for it and with that money I can buy a lot more worthless contracts which I can sell to myself and then buy more... I’ll be rich in no time.” It’s like one of those perpetual motion machines that scamsters used to peddle to gullible nobles in the eighteenth century. The ball bearings roll over the top of the wheel, and then fall down the other side, dragging the wheel around faster each time, so it turns forever! Except that it doesn’t. There’s no new energy coming into the system to overcome resistance. Same here, except with money. But don’t worry, we can fall for as many dumb shell-games and shills as we like - it’ll all be okay in the end because the government will always bail us out!
If you want a mythological analogy for this, it’s easy to see. Sitting in the middle of his labyrinth, the half-Prince/half-bull Minotaur could be kept under control just as long as the King made it a regular blood sacrifice. Virgins, young men and women from the country were led into the maze, never to emerge. This was the contract the mortals had with their royal monster... In our new world order, the beast-like ‘Princes’ of the financial world can wreck havoc in our kingdoms, but every so often they demand we make a vast sacrifice to appease them. They want money, not blood, but the effect is the same. The City of London even looks like a labyrinth on the map, I notice.
If we are going to cut a deal with the dealers in the future, it ought to involve having some genuinely intelligent people accompany them at all times, charged with dragging them away from “Hunt the Pea” and “Find the Lady” stalls... at gun-point if need be. Where would you find these guardians? Oh, any unemployed seventeen year-old could do it. That toothless hobo I mentioned earlier would be more than capable of minding these brainless dimwits. He’s got far more common sense than any of them, but a thought occurs to me that we could kill two birds with one stone. Bankers love their drugs. Oooh, don’t they though! And drug dealers are not fools. They know how to make money. So, who better to award the contract of supervising the day-care of our banker class? It’s a win-win. It keeps them all off the streets. I think it’s a marriage made in heaven.

Crunchy

What have they done to the earth?
What have they done to our fair sister?
Jim Morrison

Friends have been asking me what I think about this whole crisis thing. Of course, it’s hit me very hard indeed, but I am trying to see the big picture. It’s no oil painting. I’ve tried to make it all hang together, but the Ratmen posting below still says it all for me. The rest are thoughts, unconnected, but parts of the whole. Here’s the first.
Money is not a natural resource. It won’t run out soon - unlike oil. It is not even a real thing. It is only a symbol that stands for real things. It is very easy to forget this. In 1995, the K Foundation burned a million pounds in cash as a performance art work. Many people ignorant of economics attacked them on the grounds that they had destroyed the earth’s resources, cheating the poor of bread. In fact, they had done the reverse. Just as forgery creates inflation, the destruction of bank notes boosts the value of a currency. Every remaining pound was worth very fractionally more. The size of the British economy was exactly the same as it had been.
Gold doesn’t have any real value either. It only seems to because we believe it does. Gold does not rust, granted, but its tensile strength is rubbish. You couldn’t build the Forth Bridge out of gold, it would sag in the middle. Massively heavy gold trains would fall off their bendy gold rails before they even got out of their drooping gold station.
Food is a real value thing, and it’s a finite, though renewable resource, unlike energy, which is finite but not renewable.
The sub-prime thing is nothing new. In the words of Carl Giles, for those too young to remember and for those whose memories may have grown short, back in 1989, the Savings and Loan crisis was just the same. Having bought into the junk bonds market, all America’s local savings banks went bust at once and the first George Bush agreed to bail them all out. I remember reading that it was equivalent to the entire cost of World War Two to both Allied and Axis powers combined, plus the Marshal Plan. I recall PJ O’Rourke writing in Rolling Stone magazine (“Piggy Banks”, 24th August 1989, pp. 43-4) to explain how much the public would have to pay. In layman’s terms, he said, it was like taking a New York cab all the way to the planet Neptune, ‘and that includes going over the Brooklyn bridge twice because the guy thinks you’re from out of town.’
Effectively, Junk Bonds were shares in bankrupt or even non-existent companies. Yet they could be traded as if they were real money. In that sense, they’re little different to sub-prime mortgages. Just as long as everybody went on believing in them, they could be treated like something real. The only problem with them came when someone asked for them to be turned into actual money without understanding that that’s not what you’re meant to do. Likewise, sub-prime mortgages can be bought and sold and, as with junk-bonds, they all come tumbling down the moment the bearer demands to be paid.
The S&L crisis was bailed out to tune of 124.6 billion US taxpayer dollars, and now the big banks have run what is effectively the same balls-up, US and UK taxpayers are rushing in to bail them out too.
The banks have now been bailed out twice, and now the bail-outs have come to look like business as usual. That’s how it goes. You put all your money on the armless, legless ‘living torso’ to win the World Kick-Boxing Championship Smackdown and the bookies gave you great ‘sub-prime’ odds, so how could you possibly lose? But don’t worry... big government will give it you all back again.
Just like the Ratmen of Rodencia, the bankers are holding hostage the very thing they are demanding as ransom.
“If you don’t pay us a vast amount of money, we’ll kill a vast amount of money!”
Unlike Saddam, they really do have WMDs, weapons of monetary destruction and they will use them until liberal democracy cries “Uncle”.
The New Capitalism runs like this: the banks make hay while the sun shines and when they crash, they get all their money back from the state. Heads I win. Tails you lose. Hold on, though. This doesn’t really sound very much like capitalism at all to me.
Let’s be honest about this. The credit crunch is not a natural disaster. The banks could stop it any time they liked. I don’t think it began deliberately, but they’re keeping it going on purpose. This is a corporate war and it’s being fought with money. It is also the banks saying to liberal democracy that it needs them more than they need it.
The crunch will carry on until Obama or McCain (but probably McCain) becomes US president and signs on their dotted line. In fact, it’s started already. In agreeing to buy up all their debt, the US government is effectively nationalising its banks... just like Charlie boy Marx said budding Communist administrations should do first on taking power. Welcome to the U.S.S.A. and its client state the Soviet Socialist Kingdom of Britain. You lucky people!

For further reading: From Buildings and Loans to Bail-outs: A History of the Savings and Loan Industry, 1831-1989 by David Mason (Cambridge University Press, 2004, ISBN 052182754X, 9780521827546)

“The great Ponzi-scheme rescue act of 1999” by PJ O’Rourke, Rolling Stone magazine, volume 148 (810), 1999

Parliament of Whores: A Lone Humorist Attempts to Explain the Entire U.S. Government by P. J. O’Rourke and Andrew Ferguson (Grove Press, 2003

“When Hell Sleazes Over” by Kathleen Day, New Republic Mar. 20, 1989

“Looking for Lessons From Agency That Mopped Up 1980s Thrift Mess” by JOHN M. BRODER
(published: New York Times, September 19, 2008)

On the fiddle

Oh God, no. Not Mandy again! What is it with this man? He gets the sack time after time, and still they bring him back. I can understand why outstanding political figures may clash with their leaders. I can also understand why men and women of overwhelming talent and ability have to be brought back from the wilderness because they are just so remarkable. But Peter “Mandy” Mandelson? Who the hell do they think he is? Seneca? Palmerstone? Voltaire? If “Mandy” has any of the powers of these heavyweights, it has remained stubbornly invisible to me, and to most of the British public.
Actually, the Seneca analogy is not entirely bogus. A thorn in the side of many early emperors, notably Claudius, Seneca was brought into the Nero administration because he was a political genius and Nero rather needed one of them, given his somewhat significant public opinion deficit after setting Rome on fire. Although Seneca tried bravely he did not have a lot to work with, as the Emperor Nero was - quite literally - a flaming maniac. I cannot put “Mandy” in the same frame as Seneca, who was one of the most brilliant literary and political minds of his age, but I can picture Gordon Brown as Nero - fiddling while the economy burns.

Vous savais ces hommes-rats?

Many years ago, when I was learning French at school, a teacher brought in a copy of a French daily newspaper. I can’t remember which one it was, but the thing that stuck in my mind was the one thing she urged us to ignore. On the funny pages there was a translation of an old American comic strip. In it, Mandrake the Magician was pondering the dilemma posed by the Rat-men. Of course they wanted to take over the world, as all outer-space bad hats did in those days. Doubtless in the original version there would have been exclamations of shock and horror such as ‘Holy Mackinole!’or ‘By Thor’s mighty hammer’ or whatever Mandrake magicians were likely to say. Rendered into French, however, it all became a lot more laid back, casual even. It slouched into an ‘I-suppose-we’d-better-surrender-now’ Gallic fatalism.
‘Vous savais que ces hommes-rats, ils demandent la terre comme rançon?’
‘Oui, je le sais.’
Oh, have you heard? Those rat-men, they want the world as a ransom.
Oh, yes, so they do. How tiresome.
There is something a lot more visceral about ‘homme-rat’ too, much like referring to ‘Man-Bat’ instead of ‘Batman’. You get a much stronger sense of these rat-men being really, seriously ratty. Not having seen any of the earlier episodes, I think another thing that puzzled me was what the hommes-rats had stolen. If they were demanding a ‘ransom’ then, presumably, it would be for the return of something or someone valuable. But if the whole world was the ransom, what could it possibly be? And wouldn’t it have to have been taken away from the world in the first place? So then it would surely be included in the inventory of Planet Earth’s fixtures and fittings when the rat-men take possession anyway? They’d return something only to get it back straight away... along with the whole of the world. A smart trick on their part, I thought, but a pretty dumb piece of bargaining by the Earthlings. It would have been like the Lindbergh kidnapper demanding the entire Lindbergh family, including the baby, as a ransom for the baby.
All the same, when I read in the Financial Times today about the deal that George W. Bush is trying to push through the US Congress I was reminded of Mandrake and les hommes-rats. The bankers are rat-men indeed, and their ransom is nothing less than the Earth.
This isn’t a negotiation. This is an unconditional surrender... of everything. All that seems to be at issue is just how fast Bush can give it all away.

The Mechanisms of Joy

I was talking to a much-loved friend the other night, we were both hampered by a lack of words for different kinds of love-relations. I was reminded that the Greeks had a number of extra words for love and this took me into a flight of fancy. I promised to identify them all. I knew the first three most often named, because they appear in the New Testament, namely eros, philia and agapé.
The Wikipedia, I notice, stretched the list as far as five by adding storge and thelema although I’m less convinced by them. I would add three significant others, though: epithymia, oikeios and erastés.
I talked of Paul Tillich and his Theology of the Erotic, of Freud, Rollo May and Plato to explain agapé and eros, and of Aleister Crowley to define theléma. I quoted from Roberto Calasso’s The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony to explain the mysteries of erastés. I was reminded that this last one “stressed the quality of areté and played down something self-evident: pleasure. Areté means an “excellence” that is also “virtue.” The word always had a moral meaning attached...”
In the end, though, I realised that there is a problem with any discussion of love and the ancient world... they thought in a different way to us. We’ve had our minds twisted up with ideas of romance (as its name suggests, a Roman invention) and witless celebrity. These words just don’t map onto ours at all. In a society which has lost the ideal of the areté, that has no passion for ‘excellence’ and ‘virtue’ it is impossible for us to understand what the Greeks meant. We have replaced virtue with commerce and consumerism, with Jordan and Paris Hilton, with people who are famous only for being famous, with artists and writers who say nothing about anything except themselves, with those who are empty of values. In a culture where no-one can be shamed any more, perhaps we cannot really attain the more advanced forms of love in the way they could. If we want them, we will have to create virtues of our own and uphold them, admire them, desire them, and share them.
I think the ancient Greeks saw their many concepts of love as components that all overlapped and fitted together, each turning the next, none able to stand without the others. I think it’s relevant that we now know they had developed a mechanical computer long before the birth of Christ, a miraculous assembly of cog-wheels and dials that calculated eclipses of the sun and moon, the movements of the planets, the dates of the Olympiads and much more besides. The Antikythera Mechanism was a means of representing the heavens to the people of the Earth - as above, so below. I think it is possible the Greeks thought of love and their culture in the same way, each wheel turning another, none separate from its neighbour, no movement possible without affecting all. In our new age of the computer, can we not engineer something similar again?

Another Point of View

This has been going through my mind for a while now... It’s inspired by the approaching start to the Olympic Games in China, and a warped kind of alternative history took form in my imagination. It is quite preposterous, of course... pure sci-fi, because nothing of the kind could ever happen in real life, but I cannot help wondering how we would have reacted if it had?

September 4, 2001: Four CAAC aircraft on internal flights from Beijing are hijacked. They are crashed into strategic targets in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen, killing 2,993 people. Osama bin Laden is blamed, apparently angered at Chinese anti-separatist action in the largely Muslim province of Xinjiang. The date of the attack is seen as significant as 4 is an unlucky number for the Chinese and '9/4/01' sounds quite like a phrase in Mandarin meaning 'a close shave'.
October 7, 2001: China, together with a small group of ASEAN nations invade Afghanistan. The People's Liberation Army quickly defeat the Taliban.
January 11, 2002: China transfers captured militants from Afghanistan to a small island base near Taiwan which they seized from the Philippines at the end of World War Two. International groups are not granted access.
September 12, 2002: Chinese premier, Jiang Zemin, says China has identified a link between Saddam Hussein and the attacks of 9/4 and will move on Iraq if the U.N. does not. He reiterates the claim that Saddam's possession of weapons of mass destruction poses a direct military threat to China.
March 18, 2003: PLA troops launch a terrorist-seeking raid in Afghan villages
March 19, 2003: Newly appointed Communist Party General Secretary, Hu Jintao, says in a television address that “the People's Republic of China and its allies have launched a campaign to oust Saddam Hussein from Iraq and ‘free its people.’”
March 20, 2003: Iraq War begins. Chinese and North Korean troops invade.
April 9, 2003: Saddam Hussein’s statue is toppled in Fidros Square in Baghdad by PLA troops.
Dec. 13, 2003: Saddam Hussein is captured alive by North Korean troops in Tikrit, Hussein’s hometown.
Jan. 17, 2004: The death toll for Chinese soldiers in Iraq reaches 500.
April 29, 2004: Photographs of Chinese soldiers torturing and humiliating inmates at Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad are made public.
June 28, 2004: The Coalition provisional Authority is abolished, power is transferred to Iraqi authorities in a hurried, secret ceremony two days ahead of the scheduled transfer.
Oct. 7, 2004: A People's Liberation Army report concludes Saddam Hussein did not have weapons of mass destruction.
Sept. 6, 2004: The death toll for Chinese soldiers in Iraq reaches 1,000.
October 29, 2004: A study published by the Lancet says the risk of death by violence for civilians in Iraq is now 58 times higher than before the Chinese-led invasion.
November 15, 2004: Chinese troops re-establish control over most of Fallujah after a fierce assault.
Nov. 5, 2006: Saddam Hussein is convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death by hanging.
Nov 17, 2006: The Japanese newspaper, Nikei Shimbun, reports a sign of Chinese "permanency" in Iraq. The new Chinese embassy going up inside Baghdad's well-fortified Green Zone will be almost the size of the Vatican City.
Dec. 6, 2006: The Iraq Study Group releases its report, recommending against permanent bases in Iraq.
Dec. 30, 2006: Saddam Hussein is executed by hanging.
October 11, 2006: A team of Chinese and Iraqi epidemiologists estimates that 655,000 more people have died in Iraq since coalition forces arrived in March 2003 than would have died if the invasion had not occurred.
June 5, 2007: Hu Jintao, now Chinese president, announces that China wants 50 military bases, control of Iraqi airspace and legal immunity for all Chinese soldiers and contractors in Iraq. Iraqi officials fear that if Chinese troops occupy permanent bases, conduct military operations, arrest Iraqis and enjoy immunity from Iraqi law, it will lay the basis for unending conflict. President Hu wants to push through the accord by the end of next month so he can declare a military victory at the 17th National Party Congress in October and claim the 2003 invasion has been vindicated.

August 8, 2008: China hosts the opening ceremony of the Olympics in Beijing.

Who do you think will be coming?

Watching for the Break

„Помнишь, где ты сломал свою судьбу?‟

I have finally caught up with the Russian sequel Daywatch or Дневной дозор and a line leaps out at me. It stops me in my tracks. It is a question I have been asking myself now, for the best part of a year. Do I remember where I broke my destiny? Not yet, but I am perhaps starting to see.
Could things be about to turn? Is my dark night moving into the light, my year of pain and lack shifting to brighter times? Well, no surprise to see there is a card in the road to tell me how things are.
It's the Three of Diamonds today, or Three of Pentacles, as they would be in the Tarot. More appropriate it could not be. "It signifies a business proposal or undertaking," one of my many guides says. "Everybody has periods when things go terribly wrong, bad luck, lack of money, disputes and separations... The period of such a run of misfortune is usually three months or three years... So, if you have experienced such a period, take heart if the three of Pentacles turns up... for it can signify that such a period is coming to an end."
Fingers crossed! By the way, while looking for a good image to use, I stumbled on this fabulous new Tarot. It is a magnificent piece of work, I must say, full of dark Victorian fantasies, M.R. Jamesian horrors, Doré-esque fantasies, Fading Away fey, opium dreams and the roots of Ur-Goth, but I shall respect their wishes not to hotlink and instead leave you to discover its delights for yourselves:
http://www.bohemiangothic.com

Don't eat the caviar!

There’s a curious, perverse blend of ironies in this story, of contradictory mortalities, and the bite of the credit crunch all coming together. Of course, the very people able to give it up are the ones least likely to, I suppose. As reported in today’s Sueddeutschezeitung
Rettet den Stör: Nie mehr Kaviar
Die Umweltschützer haben schon vieles versucht, um den Stör zu retten. Vergeblich. Nun hilft nur noch eins: auf Kaviar verzichten...
[My trans] Environmental protectors have tried to save the sturgeon, in vain. Now only one thing can help: giving up caviar. Lower Saxony’s environment minster, Hans-Heinrich Sander, has called for people to forgo caviar on the grounds of saving the species. “Um den Stör zu retten, soll man Kaviar nicht mehr verzehren...”
“To save the sturgeon, don't eat any more caviar,” said the FDP-politician in Hanover. “All other protective measures have been fruitless up to now”, he went on...

In which the author is maddeningly cryptic

Earlier on today I posted up a book review which I was excited to share, because it had so freaked me out that I could hardly believe what I had discovered. Why had no-one else seen it before? I took the post down later on the advice of a trusted confidante.
‘Don’t put that on your blog!’ she gasped. ‘Someone’ll steal it! There’s a book in this, and you mustn’t tell anyone about it! I’ve got my Gypsy intuition going on this one - take it down now!’
So I did. I shall have to be mysterious, then, but it is an absolute stunner. I’ve found evidence, incontrovertable, though very subtly tucked away, that a classic, much-loved novel will have to be radically reinterpreted. So radically, in fact, that it will not only never be seen in the same way again, but it will turn from being a charming comedy into... something almost scary.
It’s as though... well, imagine you’d been leafing through The Wind in the Willows and wondered, in passing, why you had never previously noticed that Ratty lives on a canal and not a river, but you let that go and read on. Then, say in the chapter entitled “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn”, you spot a reference to “the twin moons”, and then see the sun described as “a twinkling star in the red sky.” Then you flick to the front and see a note on the fly-leaf that somehow you had never bothered to read before - that nobody has ever bothered to read, apparently. It says: “This story takes place on the Planet Mars”.
That’s not what I’ve stumbled on, incidentally. Ratty, Toad and Mole are still safely on Terra Firma, but that is the scale of the thing we’re talking about. The book in question is that well known and this is every bit as big a rethink as the one I have just described. With luck, all will be revealed in due course!

Thought for the day

“Worrying is praying for what you don’t want.”
(Ram Dass)

Widow's Peak

According to a shocking headline in Der Spiegel the other day, the Energy Watch Group does not think that ‘Peak Oil’ - the legendary point where the global oil supply starts to diminish - is still ahead in 2020, where some have speculated before. They think we passed it already, back in 2006.
[My Translation] “...According to the Energy Watch Group, the worldwide maximum supply of oil was already reached in 2006 at 81 million barrels per day. Since then production has fallen back. By 2020 it will be only 58 million barrel. With this, the experts have revised down earlier prognoses massively...”
While the industry-funded International Energy Agency sees supply merrily going up and up, the Energy Watch experts expect no more increases from now on. That is not to say that oil will run out, but that there will be few significant new finds of oil and that demand will continue to outstrip a gradually falling supply.
“...Traders explain the sudden increase in oil prices as being in the framework of daily fluctuations - or they blame the activities of speculators. But doubts about this scenario are growing. ‘Hopes that the “Speculator Bubble” will burst are futile’, says Werner Zittel, one of the authors of the Energy-Watch-Group-Study. In his view higher oil-prices have a real-world explanation - the dwindling of resources...”

According to a picture graphic in another article in Der Spiegel on the same subject, if all the oil known to exist were added to all the oil believed to exist, it would come to just under two hundred and forty-five billion tonnes. This got me thinking. Although my arithmetic is not the best, I was tempted to do a quick shuffle through Internet sources for scientific measures and conversion tables. This leads me to believe that one barrel of crude oil would weigh about 142.80 kilos. A tonne of crude oil would then be about seven barrels. Let’s assume that the world uses about eighty million barrels of crude oil per day (sources vary on this). If so, then the world uses about eleven million, four hundred thousand tonnes of oil per day. Therefore the world has fifty-eight years and eight months of oil left, in total... including all the reserves not yet considered economic to recover. Therefore, the very last drop will be consumed early in 2067.

You've come a long way, baby!

I am delighted to hear that we are back on Mars again, especially after a number of disappointing disasters lately, like Britain's flagship mission Beagle 2. Most of all, I am astounded at the march of science.
Back in 1976, NASA landed two robot probes on Mars, Viking I and Viking II. These were simple devices by modern standards. They had three landing pads; a fixed, unmoving platform; a radioisotope thermoelectric generator; a meteorological boon; a radio mast; a robot arm; a scoop for taking soil samples; two mini-labs to test the soil samples for signs of life and a colour camera.
That was then, this is now. Thirty-two years on, Phoenix has every bell and whistle you could want: three landing pads; a fixed, unmoving platform; solar panels; a meteorological boon; a radio mast; a robot arm; a scoop for taking soil samples; one mini-lab to test the soil samples for signs of life and a black-and-white camera. By Vulcan's Hammer, the technological dawn has reached us indeed!

See how their stats stack up:
http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/basics/bsf9-2h.gif
http://pal2pal.com/BLOGEE/images/uploads/phoenix_lander_labels.jpg

Oh I know, I'm being too cynical, but, damnit! where's my hi-tech future gone to? Where's HAL? Why aren't any of these devices on Mars?

Why aren't they walking abroad and talking us through what they see? Don't we have the technology to put Robbie the Robot in space yet? Actually, I think we do... (click here to see an amazing video) so why are we still recycling 1970s designs?

Same Bat Cave, Same Bat Belfry

I had not intended to stay until the Sunday, but when invited to extend my visit another day, I was only too delighted to do so. I had mentioned that I had made tentative plans to hook up with my friend D- that afternoon to visit the Royston Cave, but as this was just a few miles down the road, H- and S- and their young son were inspired to go there themselves.
Thus we drove down to the little Hertfordshire town to see this peculiar local feature. I could not contact D- in the end, but left instructions as to where and when he might find us were he to make the trip himself.
Down we went into the earth. The cave, just north of the church, is accessible through a steep passageway carved into the rock, and which reminded me of the narrow tunnel that leads out onto the observation platforms over the Avon Gorge in Bristol.
The cave is man-made, though it was never intended to have an entrance at the bottom, this having been added after its rediscovery in 1742
It took a while for my eyes to adjust to the light and even to see the carvings at all. Most of them have been defaced by nineteenth century graffiti anyway, which makes them hard to distinguish, but so rough-hewn is the cave itself that it is also hard to tell the carvings from the tool-marks from its construction.
The guide was selling a clear message. The relief carvings were evidence of the Knights Templar. They had used the cave as a secret meeting spot, out of sight, where they could practise their pagan and heretical rituals, sacrifices, mumbo and, indeed, jumbo. This was presented as a concrete fact. The town council, which runs the place, even celebrates this ‘fact’ on its website, and seems committed to the belief that this is one of the major Templar artifacts in Britain. I squinted at the chiseled scribbles but could see nothing to suggest their involvement.
The crucial ‘evidence’ was an image of two men sitting on a horse, a certain Templar and Masonic symbol, apparently.
‘We had a Mason in here and he took one look at that,’ the guide said, ‘and he recognised them.’
‘Recognised them as what?’ I asked.
‘Oh, he wouldn’t say,’ the guide replied. ‘They don’t, those Masons. They keep their secrets. My father was in the Brotherhood of Zion and he didn’t give away anything. They fear the chop if they do. But he knew that’s a Masonic sign all right.’
Well, that’s clear proof, isn’t it? I looked again. Not only could I not see any Masonic symbolism in the image, I couldn’t even see a horse. The carving was incomplete. Was that meant to be a tail or a crack in the wall? Who cares? That’s all the proof the Templar fans needed. Were there any other carvings that contained any Templar imagery? No. Just that one. Isn't that enough?
So, no evidence the Templars were anywhere near the place, no evidence they carved any of the images in the cave, no evidence they did anything with it. It all adds up, eh? That’s right. If you’re a conspiracy theorist, no evidence is all the real evidence you need.
The guide indicated a crude image of two adults and what could have been a child next to them.
‘The Holy Family,’ he announced. ‘Or is it? Mary and Joseph? I don’t think so.’
Indeed not. It was instead clear proof that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalen, raised their daughter and trusted the Knights Templar to keep the secret of the Sacred Bloodline. Of course. Holy Dan Brown! Well, blow me down, what did he do next but hold aloft his chief source of research knowledge, The da Vinci Code!
I could see S- was about to walk out on the spot. Or punch him. I was wondering how long it would be before he brought out Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods as well and demonstrated the carvings proved our Mediaeval ancestors had been probed by aliens.
H- was appalled by what we had heard.
‘Knights Templars!’ she said. ‘What nonsense. I’m convinced it was a hermit’s cave.’
‘That makes the most sense,’ I said. ‘They had lots of them in those days. Anchorites were sealed up in caves and things like that. It’s far more likely to be a anchorite cave.’
Anyway, if the Knights Templar had been using it I would have expected them to have got a decent sculptor in to do them. These all look very amateur. H- made a local connection with it all. Some of the images were certainly related to the Bible and the lives of the saints, but some might just as easily have been inspired by the legend of Tom Hickathrift and the Wisbech Giant. This would account for the images of cartwheels, with which Tom defeated the giant. But who can tell? The carvings look like the work of numerous, untutored hands, with a lot of time on them: in other words, hermits and anchorites.

For more information on hermits and anchorites in the Middle Ages:
http://www.willinghamchurch.org/Lander/Lander.htm

For Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews’ scholarly debunking of the Templars connection in Royston:
http://www.badarchaeology.net/conspiracy/royston_cave.php

For the Templar-obsessed “authorised” version, but with fine images:
http://www.detecting.org.uk/html/Royston_Cave-A_lost_cave_rediscovered.html

UPDATE:
A friend writes that a shell grotto in Margate has remarkably similarities with my cave, "mostly in that during the process of rediscovery a small boy was sent down on a rope. A symbol of fertility??"
http://www.shellgrotto.co.uk

I had a look for some more and turned up this rather interesting page:

"In 1570 the historian William Lambarde wrote in his 'Perambulations of Kent': '...There are to be seen ... near this town ... sundry artificial caves or holes in the earth, whereof some have ten, some fifteen and some twenty fathoms in depth: at the mouth (and thence downward) narrow, like the tunnell of a chimney or passage of a well: but in the bottom large, and of great receipt: insomuch as some of them have sundry rooms (or partitions) one within another, strongly vaulted, and supported with pillars of chalk, and, in the opinion of the inhabitants, these were in former times digged, as well for the use of the chalk towards building, as for to marle their arable lands therewith…'
Lambarde was describing the excavations which have become known as deneholes. The term denehole (or dene-hole, dene hole or danehole) is semi-modern in usage, the earlier writers on the subject describing them as 'pits'. The particular holes mentioned above were in Stankey Wood near Bexley and Crayford..."
The shape of these 'Deneholes' are astonishingly similar to that of the Royston Cave, I have to say.

Spray Mount

Last night, delightful evening with M- and her new friends H- and P- to the South Bank. I had heard about this Banksy exhibition that was on - there was a line about it on the BBC website - but I probably wouldn’t have bothered going down had she not suggested it. I have been sceptical about Banksy, but more of that later.
The holiday was the first time in a long while that we have seen a real degree of sun in this country, and the chance to walk about in light clothes and enjoy sitting outside. The South Bank is a great place for people watching, and while we were waiting for P- to turn up. Dressing up was happening again. Home-made fashions were out and about.
‘It all looks very 70s tonight,’ I said.
‘It’s a very 70s time in fashion now,’ M- said.
A little girl in brilliant pink shoes won approval, but the contingent of neo-punks with scalp tattoos got the thumbs down.
‘Ill-advised retro,’ I said.
‘That’s not retro,’ M- said, ‘that’s ret-wrong!’
A man strode past in a brown suede baseball jacket, a fixed stare on his face, a brown beard and fuzz of hair, looking a little like Michael Landon in I Was A Teenage Werewolf but more like...
‘Carlos the Jackal,’ I said. ‘He looks like he can’t move his head separate from his body.’
‘He gets the prize for nutter of the day,’ M- said.
Top marks to a girl in a fabulous, layered Kansas Dorothy dress, a green-haired girl carrying a large Garfield doll (all right, that was a majority decision) and another who had every shade of blue atop her stiletto heels, but the walk to make it work.
‘She could wear anything with that walk,’ M- said.
A man dressed almost exactly like Wesley Snipes in Demolition Man did not go down so well with our jury.
‘There is a New York magazine that does this as a feature,’ I said.
‘Vice Dos and Don’ts,’ H- said. ‘I know it.’
‘Did you know you can get Dos and Don’ts action figures now?’ I asked. ‘Only in the States, though.’
By the time P- arrived, the crowd to see the Banksy exhibition had dwindled down a little, but was still amazingly long. The show was in an archway under the old Eurostar terminal, but the queue was corralled into a tight snake. I was unsurprised to find The Retwrongs and Demolition Man in the line with us, but also a startling Pete Doherty look-alike. Fatter than the real one, as H- pointed out at once, but he had clearly gone to a lot of trouble to resemble his idle idol.
I was impressed by the first piece - a row of Campbell’s Tomato Soup cans with aerosol tops on them, although our fellow visitors were perplexed by the significance.
But the art in general? Weeeell. Remember the ‘Tea Break’ cartoons the Daily Mirror used to run next to the Old Codgers column? They always had a man on a desert island, a secretary confused by some new office gizmo, a belligerent mother-in-law or a drink-driving husband. Well, to me a lot of Britart is like those cartoons. Too much of it is like a visual joke. You look at it and you go, “tee hee”, and move on.
Sarah Lucas fits that bill, in my books. See this fried breakfast? See it? Yeah? It’s a breakfast, right? All greasy sausages and eggs? Well look at it upside down and, you know... doesn’t it look a bit like a set of female genitalia! How we laughed! But once you’ve got the joke, what more has it to say?
Now, the thing I have about Banksy is the same kind of thing I have with Britart in general. I get the joke... now what? A great many of the graffiti works were parodies of familiar paintings, copies of iD and Face covers from the 1980s or visual jokes of some description or other. But, in the end, I was impressed with the exhibition. It won me over. I had expected just an archway lockup spray-painted to amuse, but this was an entire street and Banksy and his pals had turned the whole stretch into a vast installation, complete with cars - crashed and submerged into the asphalt - a piano, an artificial beach, and an ice-cream van. They’d put a gigatonne of effort into this and it was an on-going project. There were still people spray-painting the next section as we watched. What will happen to it? Hard to say, but there are images from the exhibition well taken by a visitor and posted on their blog for you to look at until H- gets his up (he had a very professional lens on his camera, so I’m expecting fine things from him).

En stor liten dame fra Sandnes

Golly - what a week for celebrated deaths. After Albert Hofmann and Humphrey Lyttleton going, I couldn't leave the passing of Julie Ege without comment. A fixture in saucy British movies of the 1970s, along with Ingrid Pitt one of the foremost Scandinavian Hammer Horror scream queens, it seems almost improper that she should be gone already. Click here to see the Norwegian obituary [Julie Ege døde tirsdag. Hun ble 64 år gammel. = Julie Ege died on Tuesday. She was 64 years old]
The obit makes much of her small town origins. Born in Sandnes, she's much loved there, as their primary (if not only) celebrity. Of course, Sandnes sounds like an English place-name (we'd spell it with two esses of course) and that's a sign of our shared Viking past.

On a brighter note, there is some nicely nutty news from Norway too. Today's papers over there are dominated by an art installation underway across the north.

Campingkvinner på vei (The caravan-women are on the way!)
Kunstner Marit Benthe Norheim har laget fem campingvogner der ulike kvinnefigurer vokser ut av taket. Klokken 09.30 lørdag startet ferden nordover for de fire meter høye rullende installasjonene.

= Artist Marit Benthe Norheim has made five different female figures out of wax and put them on caravans. At 09.30 on Saturday, four meter high rolling installations start their trip northwards [from Hjørring to Stavanger]...

For a detailed picture of the caravan in the studio, click this link here. What's it about? Not really sure. There's little in the way of explanation, save for the information that the five sculptures have separate names («Beskytteren», «Flyktningen», «Bruden», «Camping-Mama» and «Sirene») but what it means is up to the viewers, I would say.

Albert Hofmann 1906-2008

Der «Vater des LSD», Albert Hofmann, ist im Alter von 102 Jahren gestorben...
(The “Father of LSD” has died at the age of 102)

Google's front page today seems almost like an unconscious tribute to Hofmann. The bouquet of metallic flowers is by Jeff Koons and forms part of Google's art season, but if seen as a psychedelic wreath it does seem like the most fitting for Hofmann.
In another curious coincidence, although Hofmann's death is not the lead story in any of the major Swiss papers - the headlines being taken by local politics - the odd one out is the Francophone tabloid Le Matin which leads with a report that ...une société de films pornographiques américaine a annoncé la mise en vente mardi d'un DVD montrant le musicien Jimi Hendrix en train d'avoir des relations sexuelles avec deux femmes, une vidéo amateur datant de 40 ans et acquise auprès d'un collectionneur... or that an American pornographic film company is to release an amateur film of Jimi Hendrix - who did more than a little bit to popularise Albert's discovery - performing live with two women. Sex, drugs and Rock 'n' Roll laughing in the face of Death. I quite like that.

To see a Berlin street artist's tribute, see
http://www.fensterzumhof.eu/102/berlin-friedrichshain-warschauer-strasse-drogen/
and to read Alex Grey on Hofmann:
http://beinart.org/modules/Word-Press/2007/05/10/cosm-journal-alex-grey-on-albert-hofmann/
German language obituaries:
http://www.nzz.ch/nachrichten/wissenschaft/entdecker_der_droge_lsd_gestorben_1.722874.html
https://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/mensch/0,1518,550669,00.html

French-Swiss:
http://www.lematin.ch/fr/actu/suisse/le-pere-du-lsd-albert-hofmann-est-mort_9-146061

In English:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/1912485/Albert-Hofmann,-LSD-inventor,-dies.html#continue

The Mammal the Monkey, the Monkey the Man

Watching Mike Leigh’s Naked (1993) again, on TV last night, after a good many years, I find that my first viewing of it had left such a powerful impression on me that I had forgotten very little of it, but I saw it with new eyes. I had been half aware the first time that it was an amazing mix of mythological allusions Leigh had thrown into it, but now - primed - I saw more... much more. Oh yes, it’s gritty, miserablist drama if you want to read it that way, and it is truthful about trauma and abuse on a level that few films have ever been, but sets out to make the characters mythic emblems too.
I turned to the Internet, expecting to see loads of essays about the hidden meanings in it, comparing it to O Brother Where Art Thou?, but found none. Oh well, I suppose I’ll have to get the ball rolling myself. I am going to wax excessive over this, and be warned there are lots of spoilers for those who have not yet seen it. Beg steal or borrow a copy, watch it, and then read my lengthy, mythological interpretation of this magnificent, profound movie.
Johnny leaves Manchester to ‘escape a beating’ but ends up in London for a worse pounding than he feared at home. Is the opening sex scene a rape, or Johnny’s usual rough sex? Probably the latter, but the rape (or ‘abduction’) of Helen was the starting point for the Trojan war, and it is a personal war that Johnny tries to escape... jumping from the start of the myth right to the very end, changing from Paris to Odysseus, returning to his lost love. All the mythology he has skipped in this leap comes back to haunt him in his journey, however. And a lot of other traditions come into the mix too. Johnny alludes to himself as a ‘monkey’ throughout the film and brings up the history of evolution as his main metaphor for life in general, but blends with the Millennial ranting from the Book Of Revelations. But, although he is not aware of it, he is also bringing in ideas from Gnostic Christianity and from dualist religion in general.
Jeremy, the uptight, aggressive yuppie, is a kind of double for Johnny. Not his shadow, notice. The two of them behave in a very similar way, although from quite different motives. The parallel between Johnny and Jeremy makes sense of an apparently slight bit of business in which Johnny is mistaken for a millionaire by a chauffeur, and invited to step into a Rolls Royce, until his accent gives him away. Johnny thinks nothing of it, but it reveals that he has a twin - a rich and powerful duplicate at large in the world.
Jeremy is the false ‘landlord’ - in other words the devil, the Prince of this World. He, like Johnny, invades the fake paradise of No. 33 (very Masonic!) and takes it over. Only at the end do he and Johnny appear in the same place at the same time, and then there is a very strange encounter between them, Johnny muttering about his mother and his brother, reaching out to touch Jeremy and appearing to give him an electric shock in so doing. This is his symbolic rebirth (‘I’m still wet...’)
The two, Johnny and Jeremy, are twin aspects of the same personality... one from the north and one from the south; one dark and the other darker. Seth and Osiris, the ill triumphant while the relative good is broken and wounded. Yet it is Jeremy who is threatened with Osiris-style castration by Louise, who is both Penelope and Isis. They also recall Gilgamesh and Enkidu - Johnny being much closer to Enkidu on many occasions (“Monkey see, monkey do...”), but also mirroring some of their myth too, especially with the older woman in the upper room where he rejects her advances as Gilgamesh did the Goddess Ishtar.
Is all this coincidental? Hardly. Johnny makes constant references to religion, calling Archie ‘Bodhidharma’, asking Maggie if she believes in the devil, questioning Sandra’s Buddhist figures, asking why there are Greek images in the cafe girl’s house (‘Who lives here? Zeus?] and even picking up a copy of The Odyssey at one point, thrusting it at the camera, showing it to us as a concrete symbol of the myth he is in. Yet he fails to be Odysseus. The cafe girl (Calypso, effectively) throws him out after he says he does not like dogs. Only Odysseus’ dog recognised him when he returned, and if Johnny is not a dog-man, he cannot have the return of Odysseus. He endures many other aspects of the Odyssey, though.
His bag is stolen, and after this the true conflict begins for him, just as it is for Odysseus when his sailors untie the bag Aeolus gave him and release the winds. The storm is released for Johnny once his bag is taken away.
Brian the night-watchman is, on one level, the Cyclops, Polyphemus. He takes Johnny/Odysseus prisoner, because although he offers him sanctuary, he locks the doors and shuts him in. Brian is obsessed with not being seen, but he watches the woman across the street through a large, round window, like a great, single eye, like that of Polyphemus. Yet Johnny does not (as he did with Sophie) pretend to have no name. Instead he raises many religious themes with him. As Brian scans the mechanical ‘eye’ of his employer, Johnny asks if it is a ‘dadaist nun’.
Johnny makes Brian confront the idea that the Creator is the devil, that the real God is a universal truth beyond time and space... beyond the end of the world that Johnny expects. We shall only understand it when we evolve into something more advanced than humanity, something that can connect with the divine wisdom and recognise it for what it is.
Sophie is also part of the dualist symbolism. Sophia, the source of divine wisdom, is tattooed with an ‘ornithological mutilation’, a bird - the sign of the Holy Spirit. She is abused by both man (the monkey) and the devil, and withdraws from the false paradise, taking her silver ‘S’ sign with her.
Sandra (S[eth]-and-Ra) is the embodiment of the solar principle - returning early in the morning - but not on the Sunday (Sun’s day) when she was expected. She is the counterpart of Jeremy, and seems to be an ex-lover of his, coming out of Africa to bring order to her house once again; healing Johnny’s broken body but not healing any psychological rifts in the house since these are beyond her comprehension. Only life and death are her concern, as they are for Jeremy, who intends to kill himself rather than become old. In Egyptian Gnosticism, Seth was often referred to as Seth-and-Ra or Seth-Beloved-of-Ra, and Sandra is this figure, embracing all human religions (Catholicism and Buddhism) .
There’s a tiny bit of what looks like irrelevant banter about a firescreen at the very end. We see, briefly, a twin sun motif. ‘It’s something my dad...’ she says. As Seth-and-Ra, her dad is Father Nun, perhaps even the dadaist nun itself! Sophie, in turning the screen to the wall, neither banishing nor negating, as Johnny interprets, but reversing the influence of the creators of light and darkness, turning them back against the hidden fire of divine knowledge.
At the very end, Johnny is Achilles (wounded in his ankle) but still alive and still moving. He becomes Jason, the man with one shoe, who is destined to fulfill the prophecy and claim the Golden Fleece, but he is also Oedipus (the ‘swell-footed’ limping man) on his way to the next stage of his myth, killing his father and facing the Sphinx. Bereft of Odysseus’ symbols, Johnny now possesses the black eye of Horus. Like Adam, Johnny is cast out of the garden, and No. 33 is a green and leafy place. Notice how the first thing Sandra does on her return is tend to her plants, of which she has many!
Resurrected, like Osiris, like Horus, like Jesus, like Odin (who also suffered eye damage during his harrowing) Johnny hobbles away, beginning another cycle, another myth, destined to collide with more lives in chaos. He is rejecting the promised return to Manchester - the ‘city of man’, venturing instead into the city of destruction, seeking the city of God, or perhaps the Fleece, yet, significantly, he advances in the opposite direction to Sophie. The monkey-man has not yet evolved far enough to rejoin her.

The Game's Up

‘You must write about this on your blog,’ said a friend. ‘You’d be so funny about it.’
I could be I suppose, but not as funny as he had already been, pointing out that however serious the protest, the attempt to put out the Olympic flame with a fire extinguisher was pure Harry Hill-type slapstick (“Who‘s tougher? Free Tibet protesters or Chinese Olympic flame protectors? Only one way to find out... FIIIIGHT!”) But faced with the whole Olympic thing all over again I cannot rustle up much humour. I feel more like Steve Bell during the worst excesses of Thatcherism, writing under his daily strip “No apologies for the absence of jokes this week.” Of course, the airwaves are full of concerned former medalists defending the IOC, all of them sounding unnervingly similar to former Olympic silver medallist Denver Mills in Little Britain and all of them singing the same tune: sport has nothing to do with politics.
Is that so? That must be why they have all those militaristic parades with flags of every nation at the start of the games, then, and why they play national anthems every time someone wins a medal, and have league tables of nations who've won the most, yes? That's just how to keep politics out of sport, eh?
The thing about the Olympics is that it is something from another era... indeed from the age before WWI, when the Edwardians thought a fine, macho, nationalistic sporting and winning jamboree was the perfect way to foster good relations between greedy, aggressive European empires. Or not, as it turned out.
To be fair to them, the IOC had given the games to Weimar Germany, not anticipating that Hitler would end up hosting them, but you know that supposedly non-existent political angle to the Games? He did, sort of, manage to find that, didn’t he?
So, a competition that got the Hitler seal of approval... and the Brezhnev thumbs up, and now Chinese Communist delight... I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with the Olympics, I suppose, if you’re really into sports and enjoy spending thirty years paying off ruinous debt for stadiums that will never be used again, but there is something badly awry with the way it‘s packaged. If the Denver Millses of the world want to have games that are free of politics, fine. Take the bloody politics out of them, then! Get rid of the flags and the anthems. If you won’t, that’s your call. But if you insist on being as naive as a Mitford sister at a Berchtesgaden tea party, don’t blub when people lay into your choice of friends.
I have been amused by the sticker-joker (allegedly Newcastle footie-fan ‘fatty Phil’) who has recrafted the London Olympic Logo as above and stuck it up all along Piccadilly. I predict that his version of the symbol will be seen more and more often in the run-up to the doomed 2012 Dome-a-thon.
As for re-packaging the Games... well, look no further than visionary Nigel Kneale, who saw their future. The Year of the Sex Olympics... now I would love to see Britain and France going, er, head to head on that one.
By the way, while I was searching for an appropriate image of Kneale’s Sex Olympics I stumbled on this very fine blog, an assembly point for lots of weird and wonderful things, including a YouTube clip of a Korean Anime version of Rugrats, in which it is made abundantly clear that distributing submachine guns to toddlers is an unwise idea. Mind you, the lead story isn't as up to date as he thinks - surfing the trains was old news in Hamburg even when I was there.

Goodbye to All That... and to all this. Oh, and to everything else too

I heard a troubling discussion on the Today programme the other day. It seems that someone is trying to take out an injunction to halt the new Hadron Collider at CERN. Apparently there are fears that if it were to be activated, a kind of micro-Black Hole may be created in the planned collisions. This would be a Health and Safety hazard as it would consume the whole of the Earth, reducing it to a mere teaspoonful of neutron-density matter in a fraction of a second. I can see why this would be inconvenient, but luckily a cheery British scientist was on hand to mock the protesters' ignorance and reassure the public that the chances of this happening were “negligible.” So, that’s all right then.
Hang on a second. No, it's not all right. “Negligible” does not mean “zero”. It means that there is a finite probability that this will happen. In fact, if I understand Quantum Mechanics aright, since it holds that every possible outcome of every possible quantum experiment actually does obtain, then “negligible” means that in some parallel universe, the Earth is guaranteed to be destroyed. And how are they so certain that that universe is not this one? I'm now more worried than I was, not less.
I think this is the result of no longer teaching would-be scientists the Philosophy of Science any more. Louis Wolpert and Richard Dawkins hate the idea of the Philosophy of Science, of course, because it means thinking about the consequences of your actions, and, since we scientists are God, we shouldn’t be made to. Because we have decided that the risk of oblivion is low, we don’t have to listen to a lot of stupid people who are worried that we might be wrong. The swine! We’re always right!
It also troubles me that the precautionary principle seems to have gone out of the window. A good many scientists these days keep coming up with this same retort, namely that, because there is no actual proof that something is dangerous, then it must be safe. But absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It may be dangerous - you just don’t know yet.
The assessment of risk also depends upon just how much potential damage could result from your being wrong. In this case, the potential damage is the loss of the whole world in the blink of an eye, so I would have said that a few blithe assurances from the physicists involved that they think Stephen Hawking’s untested hypothesis about the instant evaporation of micro-Black Holes is probably right - in spite of his having had to revise his opinions on Black Holes in general quite recently - isn’t really good enough, not given the somewhat high costs if he proves to be wrong.
In a sublimely Tralfamadorian moment, in which the button has always been pressed and always will be pressed, they are happy to sacrifice us all to their inevitable. I just hope this Hadron Collider of theirs has been better designed than Heathrow’s Terminal Five.
(Previously published at astvinr.livejournal.com)

Happy Monday

After a long time feeling a bit hopeless about my future prospects, Monday brought frenzied activity and lots to do. I had a call from a dear friend asking for my advice in a hurry on a briefing document for a major client. I read, commented on and turned the pitch around in an hour, then finished a translation from Italian into English of a three thousand word essay, then rushed off to give a lecture on The History of Art. This is the sort of life I could really go for. If only every Monday could be like this.

Þú ert leikstórinn í þínu lífi

An old one, but a good item to dig up again to initiate this new blog. I stumbled on this Icelandic confection on the Morgunblaðið homepage a while back now, and it's still going. The wording spoke to me, and still does. Perhaps now, more than ever. Of course, it’s just the usual advertising shtick from a bank (“Whatever you do, Trade Association stands beside you...”) but the rest of it just seemed very pertinent:
“What do you want to be? What do you want to learn? Where do you want to go? You are the (film/theatre) director of your own life...”




I suppose it’s aimed at beautiful Scandinavian women rather than at me, but nevertheless, it’s got a strong motivational sense behind it.