The Peacock Throne

Eat, Prey, Hate

2010-11-10T13:01:00.000-08:00

I wanted to like it. I really did but when I finally got around to seeing the hit film of the summer, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo the first thing that struck me was that it appeared to be called something completely different in its home language. Män som hatar kvinnor appears in the credits. If my knowledge of Swedish serves me right (and doesn’t it just serve me right!) that has nothing whatever to do with dragons or even tattoos, but means ‘The men who hate women’ or possibly ‘men are those who hate women’ (I discounted an early reading which involved hats).
Well, that’s me told, isn’t it? A no-nonsense title, that. Radical, separatist feminists might have worn that on button badges in the 1980s or spray-painted it on walls while they were coming home from their book groups where they read Valerie Solanas’ Manifesto of the Society for Cutting Up Men. Another popular book from that time was Misogynies, a cheery tome which urged women to creep up behind random men and shove them into the path of speeding trains. My heart sank. Was this film going to be a sequel to that? Would it turn out to be Exploding Misogynies 3: Total Annihilation?
Well, it did and it didn’t. It had at least one male character who failed to prove a woman-hater or a murderer, but just the one, mind you. Woe betide you if you’re the remotest bit kinky or fetishistic, though, because then it goes without saying that you’re a rapist and molester you evil pig bastard. You must be punished! Let’s just say it’s not exactly a sex-positive movie. Shortbus it ain’t.
However, in the end it was not its politics that made me twitch. I kept thinking: ‘I’ve seen this before. Where have I seen this?’ Now that really bugged me. This plot was very, very familiar, but how could it be? This was a brand new film of a fairly new book. It wasn’t until they got to the meatballs that it clicked.
No visit to Swedish furnishing giant Ikea is complete without a plate of meatballs, eh? Once you’ve got them rattling around inside you, it’s time to tour the hangar-sized sheds in search of home-assembly wardrobes. As our hero cooked his meatballs I realised that Ikea was the inspiration for the whole plot of Men Hate Women (as I intend to call it from now on). It is constructed from ready-mades, painted in bright colours and slotted together. But where did the pre-fabricated pieces come from? Two novels by another writer had been chopped up, put through the mincer, reconstituted into one big ball and cooked in sauce. Or, to put it another way, they had been disassembled, then screwed back together to make a massive walk-in closet instead of two perfectly formed cupboards.
The first of these source novels had the splendid title of An Unsuitable Job for a Woman and the second was called The Skull beneath the Skin. Don’t know them? If you liked Men Hate Women then you’d love them. Come with me back to the 1970s... (Oh, and I should at this point, of course, say ‘Spoiler Alert!’)
Once upon a time, British crime-writer P.D. James decided to mess around with the idea of the gifted amateur, the likes of Miss Marple or Lord Peter Wimsey, say. As an antidote to these untrained but infallible detectives, P.D. James created Cordelia Grey, a young secretary who inherits her boss’s private investigation firm when he commits suicide. Cordelia launches into her new career with gusto. Gifted she most certainly is, but her amateur bungling nearly costs her her own life and taxes the other players in the drama even dearer. Trying to clear up the trail of murder, mayhem, burning cars, destroyed families and ruined reputations at the end, Inspector Dalgliesh is convinced Cordelia was behind it all, but can’t pin a thing on her. No surprises there. He has only himself to blame. Who trained her boss when he was in the police? Dalgliesh did.
Amazingly, this was not Cordelia’s last case. In the second book she is hired as a bodyguard for a woman who goes to a mansion on an island and is in fear of her life from a murderer whose identity only she knows. On top form, Cordelia’s body-guarding skills are such that her poor client doesn’t even last the night.
What has this to do with Stieg Larsson’s bestseller, Men Hate Women? Maybe nothing, but there are some odd coincidences. Oh, one or two would have been nothing more than that - coincidence... but there are maybe a few more than one or two. Consider these plot snippets taken from Dame P.D. James’ two Cordelia Grey novels...
A detective is invited to find out who killed a rich and powerful man’s child many years ago (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman). The killing took place on a small island where there was no access to the mainland. The island was a haunt of Nazis in the past and there had been at least one other death associated with them (The Skull beneath the Skin). The detective uncovers a vital clue in a strange coded message, found on the back page of a book the child once owned. It reveals the family secret that threatens everything (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman). The detective finds a clue in a photograph of a crowd at a pageant. The detective thinks the murder victim must have seen someone in the crowd who wanted to be hidden and finds that the original photograph is missing. On visiting someone who has copy of a local newspaper with the photograph in it, the detective sees the rich man himself in amongst the crowd (The Skull beneath the Skin). There is a very serious attempt to kill the detective but, on escaping, the detective chases after the would-be murderer who leaps into a car, drives off at high speed and crashes, dying in the fire (An Unsuitable Job for a Woman)...
Starting to sound familiar? Meatballs repeating on you, eh? That’s right, it’s the entire plot of Men Hate Women, but it’s only now when I write it out that I see author Stieg Larsson had been very crafty in his borrowing... he’d done it in badger stripes! One bit of the first James’ book, then the second, then the first again... The actual ending of his story is less P.D. James and more Raymond Chandler (The Little Sister) but then Dame P.D. did tend to go for complex, morally fraught conclusions, so best to plunder someone else there.
The one original thing Larsson did was to divide Cordelia Grey into two separate characters, the girl with the dragon tattoo and the journalist, but they both come straight out of P.D. James. Mind you, I had to say I liked the new English title. The girl did, after all, have drag on. And it was tat, too.

The (Clockwork) Orange Catholic Church ready to be wound up

2009-10-23T01:12:00.000-07:00

Under the plan, the Pope will issue an apostolic constitution, a form of papal decree, that will lead to the creation of “personal ordinariates” for Anglicans who convert to Rome. These will provide a legal framework to allow Anglicans to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving distinctive elements of their Anglican identity, such as liturgy.
But, but, but... if it is now possible for Church of England vicars to achieve full communion with Rome and yet still remain Church of England vicars, if the Anglican liturgy is to be incorporated into the Catholic creed... then Rome cannot any longer be Rome. It will have become, at least in part, the Church of England. The Reformation has reached the Vatican.
Of course, I dare say that Archbishop Cranmer would never have seen the Reformation as fully complete until the conversion of the Jews, that being their obsession back then, but I think he might have settled for the conversion of the Pope as a fair compromise. The Jesuits of his day, however, would have demanded an auto da fe and stuck Benedict on top of it themselves. To them, Holy Mother Church would have welcomed the Protestant heresy into its very heart.
Benedict is smiling at the supposed cleverness of his plan. Thousands of Anglicans will defect to his new half-way house, his modified Catholicism, and this will be a deadly blow to the enemy. I would humbly suggest he may not quite thought this through... so uncharacteristic of the present Pope. If married clergy are absorbed unchanged into the Mother Church, are not existing Catholic priests going to feel snubbed? Is it not as likely that disgruntled cradle Catholics may also defect to this new constitution as Protestants?
The Pope has already shown his determination to reunite Christendom at almost any price, welcoming back the traditionalist Society of Saint Pius X despite a Holocaust-denying bishop in its ranks...
The Vatican is acting like Seth Brundel, just after he has been through the telepod. It feels masterful, renewed, all-conquering. After a while, though, evidence of the weird mutation it has undergone will to start to appear. It is not going to be pretty. It will dawn on Catholics around the world that their faith has become a completely new animal, one they thought could never exist in nature.
Maledict could win 400,000 disgruntled Anglicans now, and lose far, far more Catholics later. He could forfeit all of Brazil, for instance. Evangelical missionaries are gaining ground in South America and they now need only point out to hesitant converts that there is no risk to their souls in making the leap, as the Vatican has already smoothed the way!
St Malachi’s prophesy is fulfilled. Maledict is indeed the last ever Catholic Pope. He has destroyed the church, as it was foreseen that he would. As I commented when Mr Blair converted, I trust that the bears’ personal sanitary arrangements remain unchanged, but in future, whenever anyone asks “Is the Pope a Catholic” the answer will have to be ’...er, well, no actually...’
See also: 400,000 former Anglicans worldwide seek immediate unity with Rome
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/biology_evolution/article6879293.ece

Dead or No Dead?

2009-10-18T07:32:00.000-07:00

I just spotted this report on the website of the German newsmagazine Die Stern. It is all about a new game show on Japanese television. It is not unlike the 1980s British prime time, er, ‘entertainment’ Game for a Laugh but this one, though, ramps up the fear factor a little bit more than Jeremy Beadle used to. Just a little...
The German-language commentary starts off roughly like this:

“Do you find hidden camera shows boring? The Japanese do. That’s why they’ve taken to ‘pranking“ people with fake terror attacks in the popular “Candid Camera” style show, Panic Face King. The unwitting victim in this edition thinks that he alone has survived a terrorist onslaught - how his friends and the audience laugh as he tries to escape what he thinks is certain death...”

You shouldn’t need much in the way of translation after that. The pictures speak for themselves. This makes The Endurance Game that Clive James made his name laughing at back in the 80s look, well, almost gentle. I think the bit that gets me the most is the inset picture of people laughing. What a great joke!
“Der Clip hat im Netz zweifelhafte Popularität erlangt the reporter comments, noting that the YouTube videos from the show are proving a massive, though morally dubious, hit.
What next for Japanese TV fun? Well, The Endurance Game is still going and I recall seeing a report not long ago after a contestant lost all his fingers in one of their stunts, so there is only one place left for them to go. Saw, Hostel and My Little Eye the gameshow... but the twist? It’s a comedy! Laugh as they die! It’s hilarious. Naturally, they will want Noel Edmonds as a consultant. He's got previous on that one, of course. Which box has the Semtex under the lid, eh Noel?

Pithead Ballot

2009-10-12T13:43:00.000-07:00

Good ol’ Normo Tebbs. Bless him. Such an innocent lamb. Heard him last night on the radio reacting to the visit of the now-released Brighton bomber to the Houses of Parliament. Cracking stuff. All about how he hopes there is a Hell so that the bombers can suffer the worst punishments in the lowest pits of all. Classic! I love the way he thinks his Earthly snobbery is going to be continued into the afterlife. Those dirty working-class terrorists are going to be at the bottom of the nastiest, grungiest dungeon, whereas my mate, the Devil, is going to have a Lake-of-Fire-side penthouse apartment ready for me on the upper levels, where I can look down on you in your pain and grin. Really, Normo? Is that what you think? That’s what it’s going to be, then? Listen, sweetheart, Lord Satan is going to sort out your ironically-appropriate torment soon enough, straight after you check in. Quite frankly, at your age, I wouldn’t go putting any ideas into his head. If the Dark Prince knows you don’t want to be near any Irish terror-merchants, where’s the first place he’ll put you? You’re not so naive as to imagine he’s going to reward you for being such a good servant of his up here, do you? Sorry, Norm, but it just doesn’t work that way. Read the instruction manual again. They’ve got their own class system down there. See, unless you’re one of the original angels who fought with him against God, then... Sorry? What’s that, Norm? You’re not going to Hell? You’re going to be up in Heaven, with the Baby Jesus? No, it’s okay. I am still listening. It’s just that you’ll have to excuse me because I think I’ve just given myself a hernia laughing...

Let us now praise famous men

2009-10-10T15:00:00.000-07:00

When I saw the phrase “Minor tears in PM’s eye” on the BBC website I did wonder if Gordon Brown’s heart were melting, at last. Was he feeling a tinge of sorrow for the dead of Iraq and Afghanistan, maybe sympathy for the victims of the recession? I was, just for a moment, touched that he might cry for us all, instead of just for himself.
Then I heard it pronounced and realised it was the other kind of tear, the one that rhymes with bare. Oh well.
As for Obama’s peace prize, I was surprised, but pleased enough. Why not? As I was fond of saying when he was elected, it is good to see an Irishman back in the White House and so this is yet another Nobel peace prize success for Ireland... Of course, I was being silly about O’Bama sounding like an Irish name, but then I flicked through a recent copy of the Irish Enquirer and discovered that County Cork’s finest genealogists have outdone themselves, proving that both he and Michelle Obama are as Irish as the shamrocks. Well done to them. I wonder if they can do as well for former Japanese prime minister Ohara.
Anyway, it is a good omen. On the bright side, I suspect that the prize was given more in hope than anything else... and was that not his poster campaign slogan? On the dark side, I have a horrible suspicion that the Norwegian committee have chosen to laud him now because they secretly fear that he may not be with us the next time they convene.

Out Cold

2009-09-20T11:55:00.000-07:00

A curious boxing story, pointed out to me by the ever-watchful Savage Hamster. It seems that our brave boys have had the diarrhoea kicked out of them by a little girl. In a battle royale of the kind not seen since Ken Airconditioningsystem hung up his gloves, Ashley Wolfe, twenty-four years-old and five foot three in her stockinged feet, cold-cocked a contingent of Coldstream Guards in Canada. As the Vancouver Sun puts it:

A petite Vancouver woman is being sought by an English court after wiping the floor with a collection of Britain’s premier soldiers...

Well, her floor must have been spotless by the end of that little lot. Not even Cilit Bang could clean up that well!
It seems the soldiers were making unwelcome advances, so she knocked a sergeant out “cold with one punch after pushing two other guardsmen to the floor.”

Woolwich magistrates have had the audacity to try this Mighty Atom over the incident in absentia, as though British courts still had any jurisdiction over events occurring in Canada... which ceased to be a colony of ours some good few years ago now, I believe. Though I dare say the army may be embarrassed at the outcome of the fight and want the wigs and gowns to take revenge for them. The tone of the Vancouver Sun article is such that I doubt the Canadian authorities are going to treat the call for an international arrest warrant any too seriously, though. Patriotic pride mixed with equal parts smirking humour come across strongly in the reporting, I would say. On the basis of this story, I think we would be well advised not to start any wars with Canada.

To see a dramatic, artist’s impression of the fight, click here:

http://www.metrokitty.com/blog_files/min_page.jpg

As Savage Hamster says, Rule Britannia!

La Mer, quon voit danser...

2009-08-29T14:43:00.000-07:00

Merely passing on a few links here, courtesy of one of my favourite bloggers, the wonderful Agnès Giard who writes for the French daily, Libération. That’ll be political, then, eh? Pas de tout! Agnès’ blog, Les 400 culs, devotes itself to La planète sexe and this week reports from Venice.
The Divine Annie Sprinkle has been there, conducting a mass wedding in which artists and lovers marry the sea. This is the Blue Wedding, to match the Red, Green and Yellow ones previously enacted. It’s a four elements thing.
See the pictures here:
http://thefearsociety.wordpress.com/
and read the CVs of the Big Blue’s marriage partners here:
http://loveartlab.org/our-bios.php
Also highly recommended, while you’re on her page, is Agnès’provocative essay La fellation - acte rebelle which views the Ur-Eve, Lilith, from a radical new angle: elle fait l’amour d’une façon mystique, recevant le phallus comme une hostie, à genoux devant le fétiche qu’elle embrasse, éblouie par la grâce…
In poor taste? Er, hardly!

Shooting the breeze

2009-08-24T14:57:00.000-07:00

Ambient weirdness factor higher than it has been lately. A two on the Beaufort scale, I would judge. Stronger than just blowing smoke sideways. A tangible feeling of it on the face, as though breathing nearby.
First, half of a conversation on a mobile telephone, overheard:
‘He’s stupid. He thinks squirrels came to Britain from North America by flying. He thinks they flew here. First, the Atlantic Ocean’s three thousand miles across, right? And for another thing, squirrels can’t fly!’
Not long after this, I am on the top deck of a bus. There are a lot of things you can see from this vantage point that you miss on the ground. For one, the curious objects that have been placed on top of London’s bus-stops. My favourite is a potato struck all around with coloured, plastic cocktail sticks. It looks like a giant amoeba.
Then there are the trees. As we pulled up, I noticed a small metal name-plate nailed into the bark of a tree. Far too high up to read from the pavement, it was visible only to bus passengers, if they saw it. Very small and faded, I took it to be the scientific name of the tree. I read it:
‘Eugene A Cernan.’
One of the Apollo astronauts. Someone has named a tree after an astronaut, I thought. But not just that one tree. As we passed them, I saw that every single tree on the street had a tiny name-tag bolted to it, and each and every one bore the name of an astronaut. Why? I could not imagine. Perhaps as the trees grow, the tags move a little bit closer to the Moon. They are quite invisible to those on the Earth. Only in transit can they be seen at all.
Then there was the Polish argument. Three Polish people got on. They were in furious debate about something. Or, rather, about someone. I can little understand bits of Polish now and then. It shares its grammar and about half its vocabulary with Russian, which I do know, although the pronunciation is a world of its own.
‘It’s true,’ the older man was saying. He was wearing, for some reason, the Ghana national football strip. His two friends strongly disagreed with him. Tiny scraps came through to me. They were discussing the differences between English people and Polish people and money matters... I had missed the beginning of the argument so had no way of grasping even the gist of it now.
Then a man with a thick African accent interrupted them. I suspected he may actually have been from Ghana.
‘Do not speak about people in a disrespectful way!’ he shouted, in English.
I turned in as much surprise as the Polish people. Does he know? Does he speak Polish? How?
‘Are they listening to us?’ the Ghana-top wearer said, in Polish. His friends waved their hands, dismissing such a daft idea. But they had been disrespectful. I knew just enough to work that out. Did their heckler really understand them, or was he acting up? He interrupted their discussion many times more, though by the end he was laughing to himself like a crazy man. Did he really know Polish, or was he just mad?
By the time I got off, smoke was rising straight again, weather vanes still. The wind of weird had blown over.

Tie a Yellow Ribbon...

2009-08-20T15:12:00.000-07:00

Good old Bertie Basset al Mick McGahey returned to a hero's welcome in Libya tonight. Thank goodness we live in a country where justice is tempered with mercy. He’s served his time... well, a little bit of time, anyway, and as he is dying, it is surely right for us to free him at once. Even as we speak, prayers are being offered up to St Ernest of Saunders and St Augusto of Valparaiso for his miraculous recovery.
Some may say this contrasts oddly with Jack Straw’s decision in the case of Ronnie Biggs, just lately reversing a judgment he had made only a month ago never to release him Biggs, of course, was “wholly unrepentant” about his actions, said Straw, while, by complete contrast, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi has always insisted on his innocence.
Age is a factor, too. Biggs is a mere 79, whereas the Libyan is an elderly 57. Fortunately, unlike many barbarous, uncivilised countries, Britain is free of any statute of limitations. Thus Biggs could be locked up the moment he arrived home even though his sentence would have been finished with years before, and his crime written off as being just too long ago in places like the degenerate United States. Thank heavens Britons could sleep soundly knowing that this vile old man was safely behind bars, just as they can now that Fred Basset al-Mugabe is free as a bird in Libya.
Well, those people who carp about this decision tonight should remember something important. Ronnie Biggs committed a foul, filthy and inhuman crime. He stole bags of money! He savagely parted bankers and businessmen from their loved ones. They were never to see them again.
Some of this cash was to have been destroyed by the Royal Mint, so it could have been included in Britain’s famous Back Hand Aid Programme and helped needy politicians and civil servants in their retirement. Biggs cruelly prevented this. He is an evil, evil man, and none should pity him.
On the other hand, Abdelbaset Ali al-Megrahi never stole a penny. All he did was help remove a couple of hundred perfectly ordinary people from the surplus population. It is not as though there is any shortage of them! He did, admittedly, cost an airline company the price of a new plane, so it is right that he should have served eight years for that, but surely enough is enough.

Hard-Boiled Defective

2009-08-12T15:05:00.000-07:00

I can’t believe it of him. Talk about feet of clay. The other day I picked up a curiosity. A Hercule Poirot mystery I had never previously encountered. The Labours of Hercules it was called. Strange, I said to myself. I thought I knew all of them, but that title is news to me. There had never been a film of it, with the immortal Peter Ustinov, nor a TV version with the actor whose performance seems to have surgically moulded him into Poirot - David Suchet - nor yet a radio adaptation with the excellent John Moffat. It was an old edition, circa 1970, although the fly-leaf recorded that it was first published in 1939. So, it had been in print thirty odd years but faded since. I wondered why. It was on a bric-a-brac stall in a small market town, far from London and very cheaply priced. I bought it and tucked in on the way home, but soon discovered why it is somewhat less famous than other classic Poirots.
“Oh, I know,” you’ll be thinking. “It’s going to be like with that other famous Belgian, Tin Tin. It’ll be Poirot in the Congo - right?” Actually, no. It is politically dated, but not in that way. If anything, this one is worse...
I was highly impressed with the problem story, at first. Hercule is called in by the ‘People’s Party’ to deal with exactly the circumstances that overtook Westminster this year. Soon to be accused of presiding over a massive plundering of public funds for their own enrichment, party grandees admit that all the allegations are true, but can the story be suppressed? It’s so prescient, it’s almost spooky. The story is even called ‘The Augean Stables’! A passage from seventy years ago that sounds like it has come straight out of today’s papers.
I am sure that many politicians besieged by the expenses scandal might have wished for some help from a legendary detective to rid them of their duck house and moat-cleaning shame. Weirdly, Agatha Christie had foreseen all, in 1939, and put her top man on the case. So what happened?
Ah, well, that is where the clay feet come in. Poirot does exactly as he is told. He sets about ruining the newspaper that is preparing to air the story by feeding them a fake ‘scoop’ that he himself has engineered. They seize the bait, print the posed ‘sex scandal’ photos he has given them, and in no time Poirot has them in court for libel, trotting out a host of actors he has primed to testify the version of events that suit his clients. Success! The newspaper is forced to close as the case goes against its owners. Now no-one will believe their real story! Hurrah for Poirot! Lashings of ginger beer all round!
I turned the page, waiting for the O Henry ending, the one where Poirot reveals a far worse scandal that he has uncovered, one which will send the whole rotten People’s Party to prison forever. It was not there. I was aghast. There was no trace of irony in the mystery. Hercule Poirot, the great detective, had lied, set a ‘honey-trap’ for investigative reporters, fabricated evidence, wasted police time, solicited others to perjure themselves, faked a scandal to ruin a campaigning newspaper... and done all this purely and simply to make it safe for politicians to steal as much money from the tax-payer as they could carry! This was the moral of the story: helping good chaps in government to plunder the public purse in secret is a jolly good thing, don’cha know!
Oh, Hercule, Hercule... how you sold yourself! No wonder Ustinov, Suchet and Moffat never enacted this one. Those journalists were just like your famous compatriot! It is as if you were helping crooks that Tin Tin was trying to expose! That’s how ghastly this is! Maybe your readers cheered your actions in 1939, but today, as events repeat themselves, your reputation would look about as good as Hazel Blear’s car does right now, and you wouldn’t be using your little gray cells... you’d be in one.

Seen it all before...

2009-08-05T15:11:00.000-07:00

“Jordan’s Naked Hols Romp... Amazing Pictures...” yelled the cover of today’s Daily Star. Really? I mean, really “amazing”? There’s no doubting what the pictures will show: topless glamour model Jordan naked, having a “romp” (I believe that is a journalistic expression referring to sexual intimacy, m’lud) on her holidays. What larks! But how exactly do these pictures qualify as “amazing”? Do they feature Jordan “romping” with Elvis? Bigfoot? A space alien? The Duke of Edinburgh? Those images might well be amazing, though not because of Jordan. The sight of any of these individuals involved in “naked romp” on holiday would be amazing in and of itself, but the presence or otherwise of Jordan would produce scarcely any additional amazement value. Having sex in flagrante, on holiday is well within the bounds of what might reasonably be considered expected behaviour for Jordan, and as for being naked that is, after all, her metier.
But doncha, eh, wanna see Jordan, like nude and, you know what I mean, going at it? Yes, I know what you mean, but ho-hum. It’s not like I haven’t seen Jordan naked before. Of course, I haven’t ever actively sought out such images, but they are impossible to avoid. They are as ubiquitous these days as the adverts for Chelsea Lately that are plastered all across London in the most over-the-top campaign for a TV show I have seen since the Living channel scooped the rights to Season 5 of Will and Grace. Actually, I am a bit unsure about the image they have chosen. I don’t really know it’s doing them any favours. Yes, that picture is on every third billboard in this city right now. Mind you, it got me to watch last night, just to see if the show itself could be as appalling as the poster. It did at least answer one question for me - what Whose Line Is It Anyway? regular Greg Proops is up to these days. He is one of Chelsea’s “Round Table Regulars” it would seem. The show is not exactly funny, but it gives a strong sense of having been taped before a live studio audience... in 1981. Greg’s new hair-style - a buffant mullet - adds to the retro feel here no end. Hey, this is a show for men who love to leer up women’s skirts and drool over their gussets... what could be more 80s than that? Let’s all have a holiday from the 21st century, just like Jordan, yeah!
As for Jordan, well, if her snaps were to show her demurely dressed, reading a book or watching the races from Goodwood on TV while having a crafty fag, or talking to a plastic surgeon about having her breasts restored to their original size while not making any attempt whatever to seek publicity for herself, perhaps even shielding her face from the cameras... now that would amaze me!

The Chicken and the Yegg

2009-08-02T12:27:00.000-07:00

I hadn’t realised the new film Public Enemies was based on a book, nor that the book was a straight history of the gangsters of the 1930s. I turned up a copy of it the other day and have not been able to put it down since. The revelation in it is that although I was vaguely familiar with the names and exploits of the prominent do-badders of the period, like Bonnie and Clyde, Baby-Face Nelson, Pretty Boy Floyd and John Dillinger, I never realised that they were all operating at the same time... nor that most of them knew one another. The gangs were in each other’s pockets the whole time. The crest of their crimewave took place during just two years, from 1933 to 1934, and the focus of Brian Burrough’s excellent history is how these ‘supervillains’ pushed the formation and development of the FBI. Out of this remarkable period in Depression-hit America come the stereotypes that informed so much of future crime fiction. I have long suspected that the pantheon of super-criminals of this era fuelled the imaginations of the cartoonists of both Dick Tracy and The Batman which emerged in the 1930s - Bob Kane’s Batman making his first outing in May 1939. Most striking was a reference in a contemporary newspaper to John Dillinger treating one of his many arrests ‘as a joke’. An inspiration for The Joker, perhaps? Certainly Two-Face and Baby Face are not a million miles apart. Pretty Boy Floyd must have been named ironically, as he wasn’t very pretty, indeed to my mind he did bear a vague resemblance to the Penguin, although it is also alleged that he served as the model for Chester Gould’s Flattop Jones. Bonnie and Clyde left mocking poems behind them, a little like The Riddler, maybe?
Without a doubt the idea of the supervillain emerges at the time, stoked by J Edgar Hoover, keen to promote a need for his ‘G-Men’ to combat the rising menace. Dick Tracy is much more the corporate detective, perhaps owing a little to Hoover’s star lawman, the effete and immaculate Melvin Purvis.
I was pleasantly surprised to read how much of Arthur Penn’s film Bonnie and Clyde actually seemed to be accurate, but I was disappointed to learn that Ma Barker was really a confused little old lady who lived only for her jigsaw puzzles - not the leader of the Barker-Karpis gang by any stretch of the imagination and nothing like the machine-gun toting Bloody Mama, or Ma Grissom in Roger Corman and Robert Aldritch’s versions of her life.
In the case of this outfit, something that has been forgotten is how much the emphasis was placed on kidnapping rather than bank jobs. The bank-robbers (or ‘yeggs’ as they were then called) made no secret of their Robin Hood ambitions, striking at the bankers who had caused the Depression. No prizes, then, for guessing why Michael Mann should be interested in the theme now that there is another great crisis in the banking system, but what sort of response should we expect? Will there be a new generation of supervillains, reincarnations of John Dillinger and Alvin Karpis? I somehow doubt it.
As noted, Karpis and the Barker brothers specialised in kidnapping the sons of mighty business magnates and holding them for extortionate ransoms. In each case, they paid up, anxious to be reunited with their loved ones. I cannot see that working nowadays. Who or what could anyone take away from, say, Fred Goodwin that he could possibly love more than his money? The supervillains of the 1930s were still dealing with robber-barons who had human emotions. I think that is long gone. The monsters of the old days have been reincarnated, but this time ‘Ugly Boy’ Goodwin and ‘Pruneface’ Paulson were running the banks, not robbing them. It’s now like the old Jack Benny radio sketch where a stick-up man points a gun and yells, ‘Your money or your life!’ There follows a long, long silence. ‘Didn’t you hear me?’ shouts the stick-up man. ‘I said, your money or your life!’ After another long pause, Jack Benny replies, ‘I’m thinking about it.’ 1940s audiences thought that hilarious, but who would laugh now? With our new breed of super-banksters, there would be no thinking time necessary. ‘Kill the baby!’ they would scream. ‘Save my money!’

Barefoot in the Head

2009-07-27T14:57:00.000-07:00

I had to clamp my hands over my mouth and nose and press hard to stop laughing out loud. I had found this source of merriment by chance while looking for something else and could not believe my eyes. Hooting with hysteria in the middle of the British Library is somewhat frowned upon, but all the same, this scientific paper had to be craziest I had ever encountered. Was it a joke? No, it was in a serious journal. It had been cited by other researchers, too.
Jarl Flensmark has discovered the cause of schizophrenia and it’s right under our feet. That’s right, under our feet, because the cause of schizophrenia is shoes! Shoes are the source of all mental disease! Shoes dampen down eccentric contractions of the foot when walking, and this produces tension signals from Golgi tendon organs. Calamity ensues, because the ‘electrical stimulation of the vermis inhibits the limbic structures and increases neurogenesis, and so do the signals from eccentric contractions...’
And, as we all know, the foot bone’s connected to the heel bone and ‘the use of heeled shoes results in less eccentric contractions with decreased neurogenesis.’ Now hear the word of the Lord! We are starving our brains of vital electricity by wearing shoes! As a result we suffer from depression, epilepsia, Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, schizophrenia, diabetes, and myopia!
Of course, I wondered for a moment whether this had not been written by a schizophrenic, but no. This is peer-reviewed journal, and this article has been picked up by others. An anti-shoe movement must surely follow.
But there is hope... ‘Bicycle riding reduces depression in schizophrenia due to stronger stimulation by improved lengthening contractions of the triceps surae muscles.’
Was it about a bicycle? The spirit of Myles na Gopaleen was alive and well here. A case for the Third Policeman if ever I heard one!
As I gasped for air and wiped the tears from my eyes, I had a moment of disquiet. What if he was right? I have recently become aware of the Barfuss (or ‘barefoot’) movement and even snipped out an article for a friend on the Trentham Gardens Adventure Barfuss Play-Park.
Perhaps there is something to be said for going unshod, as nature intended.
Is humanity’s ill-judged embracing of heeled shoes a devilish plot by the Dolman-Saxlil Shoe Corporation after all?

(Flensmark’s paper, ‘Physical activity, eccentric contractions of plantar flexors, and neurogenesis: Therapeutic potential of flat shoes in psychiatric and neurological disorders’ is to be found in Medical Hypotheses, Volume 73, Issue Number 2, August 2009, pp 130 - 132)

Ptang! Ptow! Ptath!

2009-07-10T16:02:00.000-07:00

For obscure but pertinent reasons I have become highly interested in the works of A.E. van Vogt once again. By chance I picked up an old Panther Books edition of his 1940s space opera The Book of Ptath. It’s a gem.
Nobody ever did utterly insane plots like old A.E van V and this one does not disappoint. A typical van Vogtian superman appears from nowhere, does all of Craig Raine’s ‘Martian’ poet concept forty years early and far better, then goes... oh, I’m bored with the superman discovering his powers thing, I’m going to make him a WWII fighter teleported into the far future... oh, no... er, he’s a reincarnation... It’s 200 million years AD. Er, no, I like ancient Egypt better. There’s a temple and a goddess with super powers too. Oh, no, er, I think I’ll have two goddesses. And there’s a magic chair... a magic chair to turn the superman into a god, if he sits down in it but he has to invade the supercontinent that’s stolen it first, but, er, for some reason he’s just been mistaken for a prince who’s got an army of billions and he’ll do it, but he’s not sure if he’s going to sit down in the chair or not. Only if it the opportunity presents itself. And one of the goddesses wants to kill him... er, no, to save him, er, no, she’s the reincarnation of his lost love... er, no, I think I’ll make her the Nemesis of the other goddess, and she wants to save the superman... or kill him... I’m not sure. Maybe both. And maybe the evil goddess wants him to start the war, or maybe she wants him not to invade after all... or maybe she wants both. Yeah. Both. That’s better...
Like I said, no-one wrote completely raving mad make-it-all-up-as-I-go-along plots like vV, and no-one managed to infuse every word with their own unique crazed brand of man-and-superman triumphant will philosophy better than him... not even Ayn Rand.
The best thing about the edition I have though, is that it features what has to be the laziest piece of SF cover art I have ever seen. Have a look. Is it a many tentacled creature from a black lagoon? Er, no. Is it a scene from a psychedelic freak-out? A little more homespun than that. A household object seen from an unusual angle, would you believe? No need to ask the family, though. Have another, closer look! That’s right! It’s a rubber bathmat!
Does the bathmat play an important part in the drama? It hasn’t so far, but it is so barking bonkers that it would not be out of place.

Right Herberts

2009-07-05T13:33:00.000-07:00

Curious thing... Twice in the same week I have heard, on quite separate and unrelated podcast networks, former oil company executives turned New Age gurus insisting that the idea of oil being a fossil fuel is a mere conspiracy theory. It was the conclusion of just one man more than a hundred years ago. There is no other evidence that it is so, they said. Not only that, they revealed that this opinion is the accepted wisdom of the oil industry. They said this in tones that suggested their own exits from that industry had not changed their belief that oil is not a fossil.
Highly interesting. If oil is not a fossil, then what is it? That coal is a fossil ought to be without doubt, since even I have seen the ghost veins of ancient leaves etched onto the surface of that black stuff. Since you can compress and crack coal into oil does strongly suggest that it is merely an older form of the same fossil.
Yet, it seems, industry insiders are sceptical of this theory. I had never heard this before. I have, though, long wondered why they took the approach to oil that it do, namely one of always assuming they will find more of the stuff and that we should never worry about it running out. I have long wondered why our political leaders act as though there is no crisis coming, as though there will always be plenty of oil forever and infinitely into the future.
They have no Plan B because in their minds, evidently, there is no need for a Plan B. Presumably they must believe that oil is a living substance, that it is still being manufactured, generated by some underground organism that secretes it and fills pockets in the crust as it passes through its tiny burrows.
It dawned on me that I had heard this before. This is the origin of Spice on Dune... Arrakis... Desert Planet. The ‘Little Makers’, deep below the surface generate the beginnings of it, and then the sandworms feed and process their makings into the finished product...
I then remembered that Frank Herbert began his career as an oil company executive, and that Dune is a fantasy version of Arabia, the extraction of Spice based on his own experience on the rigs. Was Herbert telling us the secret theory of oil that industry high-ups believe?
I think he might have been. But is there anything in it?
I do doubt it, but even if it were true, were oil like the everlasting cheese in the Grimm Brothers’ folktale, we are tearing into it at far too great a speed for it ever to regenerate. Their story, after all, ends with no crumb of cheese left for it to regrow, so greedy have the family been to consume it all. Herbert’s novel, though, ends with the Spice provoking a powerful new level of consciousness that spreads across the galaxy... as does a Jihad which leaves billions dead and Dune a lifeless rock. That oil will provoke the former is already evident as the world wakes up to the effect it is having on our planet. Whether Herbert’s second avatar will also follow is another question.

Doing Alright With The Boys

2009-06-29T13:11:00.000-07:00

You know who I feel sorry for? Gary Glitter. This must be very galling for him. “He was the same as me,” I can hear him thinking, “but they love him and they hate me.” Well, as the old saying goes, some animals are more equal than others. Gary, you didn‘t have $25,000,000 as a sweetener for accusers to drop the charges, did you? And you didn‘t have Jean Baptiste Pierre Antoine de Monnet, Chevalier de Lamarck in you corner, either. Learn from the master, Gary. That dead, French aristo is like two Johnny Cochranes on your team.
What the Chevalier de Lamarck taught us is that Darwin was wrong. Now, that’s a lesson every true Creationism-believing American wants to hear, so Jacko got the public on his side right away. He appealed to good, old fashioned common-sense, the kind that tells us iron ships sink and aeroplanes drop out of the sky.
Lamarckian evolution proposes not survival of the fittest, but improvement by design. Weaklings who become blacksmiths and build up bulging biceps at work will pass on their brawny arms to their sons. Short-necked giraffes have to stretch to reach the best leaves and they pass on the stretching to their off-spring who will have longer necks. Stands to reason doesn’t it?
So that is why a man who is born black and then undergoes years of painful plastic surgery to become white, will sire white children. And he did! Lamarck triumphant!
The only newspaper to discuss this topic in any detail, that I recall, was The Daily Star, which ran a memorable headline on the day Jackson’s first son was born:
“Jacko’s Kiddo Ain’t Blacko!”
What they lacked in English grammar, they made up for in basic biology. Even The Star knew something was strange there and anyone who has ever heard Public Enemy’s classic Fear of a Black Planet album would know why. But believers in the Chevalier’s theory had no qualms. Why shouldn’t his children inherit his new whiteness? Surely you’re not trying to say he hired surrogates to bear another man’s children and pretended he was the father just so as they’d be accepted as legally his, even though they weren’t? That’s the sickest thing I’ve ever heard! Only an evil paedophile would do that! This is Michael Jackson we’re talking about here!
Of course. No-one would ever suggest such a thing, because it would also imply that Jackson had bought his children. Certainly that he had paid for them... and I half remember the Americans had some sort of contretemps a while back about the rights and wrongs of buying human beings. Now I think of it, the question of being black or white was involved too. I wonder if they ever resolved that one.
You never thought of having your own captive clutch of kids, did you Gary, but I know what you’re thinking now. You’re thinking: “If I took an overdose of drugs, just like him, would they love me again then?”
Hold that thought, Gary, hold that thought.

We're bad, we're bad...

2009-06-27T04:45:00.000-07:00

"Michael Jackson's family blame London for death" (Evening Standard headline)
It had to happen. Old Persian proverb: when you are walking through the desert and you trip on a stone, be sure an Englishman has placed it there.
That Ayatollah, he knows the score. What did I tell you? We’re EVIL! Yeah! A frail and somewhat wobbly pop singer keels over in his crib and croaks... terribly sad, ain’t it, but who are you going to blame it on? The boogie? No chance. Blame it on the bogeyman! Even from thousands of miles away, London - the most evil city in the most evil nation on Earth - is so poisonous it can reach out across the whole world and strike Jackson down in his prime. Oh, we’re good. Or rather, we’re bad! You weren’t baaad, Michael, we’re baaaaad! We’re the best at being bad. There is nothing evil in the universe but we are at the back of it somewhere. We’re number one, again! Is there no end to our infamy?
(Oh, don’t think I’ve finished about Michael Jackson either...)

Were Number One!

2009-06-19T13:27:00.000-07:00

He said the election was a "political earthquake" for Iran's enemies - singling out Britain as "the most evil of them" - whom he accused of trying to foment unrest in the country.

Yay us! We shoot, we score! Top of the World, ma! We’re the worst - official! We out-evil America, Russia and North Korea, put together! We were up against stiff competition, but we won the Ayatollah Trophy: Most Evil Nation on Earth! We’re bad widdle boys! Better watch your back, Barack. Don’t start shootin’, Putin. You’re out on a limb, Kim. We’re evil. Yeah! You know what I'm sayin’?

Day of the **** All

2009-05-07T13:19:00.000-07:00

Well, it’s finally simmering down now. Pig Flu is only about as dangerous as ordinary flu, the one that kills thousands every year anyway, without raising a rumpus. So, that’s all right then. It was interesting to me, though, that you had so many prominent commentators asking why the media had gone so crazy on this story. Simon Jenkins, in his piece ‘There is no known antidote for panic’ made the point very well, and even repeated it on BBC radio, in no uncertain terms. Of course, they defended themselves, assuring us all that there had been no over-reaction after all. It was perfectly justified. Phew!
What might otherwise have appeared on the front pages, I wondered. What would it take? Perhaps a madman trying to kill the royal family by ramming them in a speeding car, killing by-standers during a patriotic pageant, live on TV. That would have knocked swine flu off the front pages, wouldn’t it?
Well, it didn’t. Unless you speak German or Dutch you may be forgiven for having missed this one last week. Yes... last week. It made massive headlines on the Continent, but was relegated to a tiny byline, on page twenty or something, in The Guardian, a sidebar tucked well inside the freesheet Metro and, well, and that was about it.
But what happened? The entire Dutch royal family were parading through the town of Apeldoorn when a car crashed through the barriers and ploughed through marchers, intent on ramming the Queen’s open-topped bus and taking out both her and her heir apparent.
The attempt failed, but only just. The motives of would-be assassin, Karst T. are still a mystery (Motief Karst T. voor zijn ouders ook een raadsel Friends and relatives are baffled. ’Dit was niet de Karst die wij kennen’ (’This wasn’t the Karst we know,’) said his father.
If this had taken place in America, we would never hear the end of it, but this was a suspected terror attack (the guy had guns and explosives at home) and certainly an assassination attempt in a country that is actually next-door to our own... and we hear virtually nothing. I can’t figure what their game is, but this has made me more troubled about the media agenda even than I was before. If this does not puncture their navel-gazing insularity, then what will? What else have they shovelled off the front pages lately?
I shall be following this story, though. It’s a mystery, it’s bizarre and it’s insane: just my cup of tea. And our news-outlets are keeping very, very quiet about it. Day of the Jackal? So what? Was Jordan involved? Don’t want to know, mate.

Footage of the attack (with German language commentary):
http://www.spiegel.de/video/video-1000528.html

El Gordo

2009-04-27T12:23:00.000-07:00

‘This is it - the pig one!’
In Mexico - where the outbreak began - there are now 26 confirmed cases. Some reports say as many as 149 people may have died from swine flu, but WHO officials put the figure much lower and said only about 20 of the deaths could be definitely attributed to swine flu.

The thing with diseases is not that people die of them, but how many die out of those who catch it. With SARS the death rate is about 10%: roughly ten or twelve people will die for every hundred who get infected. That’s very high. People are right to be worried about SARS, but it’s not in quite the same league as The Black Death, which slashed Europe’s population by a third in the late fourteenth century. If you caught that one, it was pretty much curtains for you, really. Once you started sneezing it was all over bar the buboes.
So what concerned me was the death rate. It’s really impossible to judge from such a small number of cases, but I guess that is rather worrying if twenty out of twenty-six have succumbed. That’s a seventy-seven percent death rate, which would mean you would have less than a one-in-four chance if you came down with it. Now that’s well into the Black Death kill ratio.
Mind you, if - as the report appears to suggest - one hundred and forty nine people have died out of only twenty-six infected... then we are dealing with a disease of terrifying potency, one that kills through the power of suggestion. In that case, the thing we should most fear is fear itself.
Actually, a bizarre hysterical illness known as Grisi Siknis has been reported just lately in Mexico’s near neighbour, Nicaragua;

"Grisi Siknis turns people into witches and they go crazy," [said traditional healer Doña Porcela]. Last year there were 65 cases of Grisi Siknis, which translates from the local Miskito language as ’crazy sickness’. It behaves like a virus, sending teenager after teenager into a frenzied state followed by long periods of coma-like unconsciousness...

Of course, some uncharitable souls may suggest that sounds like normal teenage behaviour anyway, but I can’t help wondering if this is more than just a coincidence. During both World Wars, army doctors noted many cases of hysterical syphilis, as shell-shocked soldiers believed they were dying, and exhibited very real symptoms, yet showed no trace of infection. In our fevered climate of crisis and anxiety, I would not be surprised to see more casualties from imagined illness than the real thing. I expect to see London anonymised behind face masks by the end of the week.

Crash

2009-04-24T02:05:00.000-07:00

I could not help wondering if fate had played a hand in making the headlines on today’s BBC news page an unintended tribute to J.G. Ballard:

Titan prisons plans 'abandoned'

Dissidents issue SF death threat

Body parts pair still questioned

Of course, I am disappointed to learn that Saturn’s largest moon will not now become the new Botany Bay after all, that the British Interplanetary Society will never witness a fresh generation of Tolpuddle Martyrs blasting off for cells with a view of the ethane sea. Mind you, that Science-Fiction death threat sounds fearful indeed. A laser from space? Flying saucers?
I suspect Ballard would have appreciated the Evening Standard headline from Budget Day too - “Drink and Fuel Up!” I take it to be read as an instruction to binge drinkers to derive their energy from booze. It reminded me of the locals’ reaction to explorer Brigadier Blashford-Snell and his party going off-road in the bush: ‘They poured some of the firewater into their engines, and then the rest into themselves, and then they left.’ That’s the spirit. Get charged up.

Happy Easter

2009-04-12T01:45:00.000-07:00

I have been silent for a while, it’s true, and questions have been asked. The fact is, I have had nothing much to say and if I don't have much to say, then I don’t say anything. I have had a lot to think about, but very little worth repeating. There has also been illness on the radar and it’s taken time to break. I shall resurface, rest assured.
Of course, this blog has become infected itself, with hate-filled ‘Believers’, and I thought it best to give them time to get bored and drift away. They will not intimidate me, you may be pleased to hear. You see, one product of my new thinking is that the religions are not the problem. I used to think, as Dr Dawkins, that if only people could be cured of their extreme beliefs and superstitions then they could get on with their lives in peace with the rest of us. I now understand that the beliefs are not at fault. Oh, certainly, a lot of them are pernicious and vile, but some also have the noble and good tucked into the folds of the bad. They do not deserve our hate. They are no more than a fig-leaves: fig-leaves the believers hold to cover up that which truly shames them. They hope we will all focus on the leaf and not on the shrimpy member that lies beneath.
So, I am no longer going to laugh at their fig-leaves... I am going to start laughing at the things they hide. Those are much funnier!
In the meantime, in fresh (near) health, I intend to hate the sin, but love the sinner - and the first on that list is my own self.

The Trouble with Harry

2009-03-14T17:04:00.000-07:00

On Friday morning, on Radio Bloke, Nicky Campbell chose to ask the White Van drivers of the nation for their thoughts on the whys and wherefores of torturing terror suspects. You can imagine what that was like, can’t you, and the replies, for the most part, were what you’d expect. However, this particular exchange between Campbell and ‘Harry in Birmingham’ (twenty minutes and thirty-four seconds into the podcast) on what did and/or should happen to Binyam Mohamed made me prick up my ears:

Campbell: If he was tortured, was it justified?
Harry: I would put the adeno... er, the electrodes onto his testes and put ’em on! This guy’s a pathological, homoeopathic murderer, a terrorist, and I’d do that just to get vengeance back off him! Okay?

A pathological, homoeopathic murderer? How would a pathological, homoeopathic murderer operate? Would he stab his victims with a microscopic knife? Would he strangle them with a human hair? Now we know what those bombers had in their water-bottles... infinitely diluted tinctures of Semtex.
Of course, if a murderer were to adhere to the homoeopathic principle - to cure like with like - then he or she would have to kill by using the life force against itself. The only way I could imagine this happening would be to shag the victims to death, to subject them to such an orgiastic, orgasmic marathon of debauchery that they would expire out of sheer sexual exhaustion. To coin a War-On-Terror phrase... bring it on!
I also quite liked Harry’s phrasing at the end there: ‘I’d do that just to get vengeance back off him!’ In other words, he’d commit the torture especially so that he could, later, be the victim of his own victim’s vengeance, enacted upon himself... which is, er, both sadism and masochism in perfect - almost homoeopathic - harmony.

There Will Be Blood

2009-03-12T16:27:00.000-07:00

I have been silent lately because I have had very little to say. But I have been reading a lot - inspired and galvanized as I have been by the thinking of my friend Cat Vincent. Like me, he has been exercised by the men - and they are nearly always men - who scream their fanaticism for religious and political manias in fit and fury. He names them after ‘the unintelligent cartoon character’ of the old Viz comic. These souls take offence at the least perceived slight, and their fizzing hatred can do nought to sixty in under a second. The Stig!
Why are they so furious? I, too, have been wondering this. For a long time I have questioned whether ‘believers’ are, indeed, quite right in the head. Now I have read a lot of scientific papers over the past month or so... enough that I am beginning to see some evidence that, just maybe, they are not. The part of the brain that seems to be involved in their ill-behaviour is an area known as the temporoparietal junction. If you’re outraged to unblinking frenzy by anyone’s lack of faith in whatever personal obsession rules every minute of your day, then your t-junction may well have sustained a bit of damage along the way. Too many philosophical handbrake turns coming home from late-night mental ram-raids, I expect.
Of course, all the world’s muckers, hate-mongers, rude-kids and flame-boys are deft hands at DIY and will want to put it right themselves. I recommend a Black and Decker CD18CA Drill Driver with a 5mm bit in the keyless metal chuck. Angle it towards the nexus of the temporal and parietal lobes. Keep a steady hand and you'll surely get there, and after you do, admire your work in the mirror. As you gaze on that little round aperture, you will be able to see exactly how the rest of the world needs any of you.

Putting the mockers on it

2009-02-12T14:37:00.000-08:00

I would direct your attention to a recent post by a very good friend of mine who, like me, has been worrying away at the conundrum of the nutty fundamentalists and their inability to take a joke. He has put together some provocative ideas, and even gives me a name-check into the bargain, for which many thanks.
I have thoughts on this same topic a brewing, but am holding back just for now. Soak up Cat Vincent’s considered wisdom on the subject, though. ‘I’ve finally nailed that piece about satire and mockery,’ he says. I think so too. Have a look at it here:

http://catvincent.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/making-a-mockery/

The video inserts are spectacularly well chosen, too!

I have also been enjoying these podcast feeds, and cannot recommend them too highly to all psychonauts and alternative thinkers. Shamanic Freedom Radio has an interview with scientific heretic Dr Rupert Sheldrake and also a recording of his recent talk at Goldsmith’s College for Dr Chris French’s psychology department.
Much as I massively respect him, Sheldrake is a little too wary of Dr French in his interview, though, accusing him of being the leader in the promotion of the debunking school of British scepticism. I would award that accolade to Dr Richard Wiseman, myself, however. He is what I would call a sKeptic - namely someone whom no amount of evidence would ever convince, while Dr French is a true sceptic (note I differentiate the spelling!) who remains to be convinced, but I believe he really would be if the evidence was there. I have met both these men, and... well, I do not think Dr Wiseman would invite Dr Sheldrake to breathe anywhere near him, let alone speak to his students; quite unlike Chris French, who hosted the lecture. Listen and be informed!

The other podcast page to watch is Psychonautica in which ‘Max Freakout’ introduces some outstanding talks from the World Psychedelic Forum. Of special interest are podcasts 060 and 059 in which legendary psi-science guru Dr Stanislav Grof talks at the forum on the ‘psychology of the future: lessons from modern consciousness research.’ Also highly recommended are the sessions with Daniel Pinchbeck on the future of psychedelics, science and technology.

Feed your head!

Phoney Business

2009-02-12T14:30:00.000-08:00

I met a good friend a few nights ago and asked him what he thinks about the political scene. His is normally a very informed opinion, rubbing shoulders as he does with the movers and shakers of London politics. He has been surprised how much new freedom he has with the contractors he needs to deploy on big council projects.
‘People who wouldn’t have discussed business seriously at all before are now offering me as much as I want!’ he told me. ‘It’s not the public sector that’s making me the big offers, it’s the private companies because they’re quick off the mark. They know they have to adapt or die and so they’re doing it, while government has to sit around and hold meetings before they can make a decision.’
‘That’s why planned economies fail,’ I said. ‘The free market does work, but it only works if you have swift circulation of money. You can’t have survival-of-the-fittest competition if all your consumers are beggar-poor. That’s why Thatcher failed, too. She was obsessed with reducing the circulation, cutting the money supply, and then she couldn’t understand why everyone else in Europe was overtaking us, like we were a Vintage Model T in Formula One race. Well, now the banks have cut off the money supply entirely, and everyone can see it’s not good for business.’
‘These new Tories, though,’ he said, ‘they’re different. I had a meeting with them the other day and I was surprised. To me, Tories have always meant Margaret Thatcher and her old Fascists,’ he said. ‘But these ones are a different breed. They’re educated. And a lot of them are gay.’
‘William Haig’s front bench was almost entirely gay,’ I said. ‘Although they weren’t ‘out’, of course.’
‘Well these new Tories are and they impressed me,’ he said. ‘They’re going to win. Trust me on this. The next election’s got to be in the next twelve months. What can Brown do between now and then?’
‘A year’s a long time,’ I said. ‘A year ago everyone thought he was finished. Who’d have guessed he’d look so much better now? He’s playing the old Thatcher strategy: we got you into this mess, and we’re the only ones who can get you out of it.’
‘I still say the Tories’re going to win,’ he said. ‘And when they do, they’ll hold a second term.’
‘We’ll see,’ I said. ‘As I’ve mentioned before, elections aren’t won on poll leads, they’re won on swing, and this is still a big swing for them to pull off. Besides, it doesn’t matter how we vote, or how anyone votes...’
‘I know, it’ll be down to the key marginals,’ he said.
‘And they’re all in the West Midlands,’I said.
‘The BNP’s going to win, then, if that’s the case,’ he said. ‘Besides, it’ll be a good time for Fascists. It was in the last Great Depression.’
‘You know,’ I said, ‘I look around at the world from the top deck of the bus and it’s a very revealing picture. If there’s an economic disaster, where is it? Nothing’s different. Everyone’s still driving around in their gas-guzzling, four-by-fours, just like they ever did. Pull up to the bumper, baby! You wouldn’t think there was anything wrong. I saw a man the other night, all on his own, in his giant People Carrier, a long jam of equally vast cars ahead of him but he was happy. He had an animatronic toy chihuahua dancing about on his dashboard, wiggling its ears. The ears were tiny tweeters. It was attached by a cable to his iPod. This was a singing, dancing robot dog! Where is this Great Depression with executive toys like that about?’
‘You see,’ I went on, ‘this is the Phoney War. This’s like the Autumn of 1939. Everyone knew war had been declared, but nothing had happened. So they all went on about their business. There was a bit of news in the papers about some of our boys going out to France, getting holed up near some place called Dunkerque. Well, that would discourage Fritz. No reason to worry. And this went on for a while, but then, come 1940, it was: “Jesus! Christ! They’re dropping bombs on us!” And then they remembered they were in a war. We haven’t reached that point yet, but it’s coming. If the Tories win, they’ll come in during the Phoney War. They will then be sitting on the Treasury Bench when the Blitz arrives. That second term won’t look so easy after that. But whoever it is, whether it’s Brown pulling off a narrow-squeak victory, or Cameron, they’ll both come off as weak as Chamberlaine in the face of the blast. I don’t see any sign of a new Churchill, either.’

Vertrauensverlust

2009-02-01T15:18:00.000-08:00

Long have I wondered whether I should live to see the final prophecy of St Malachi come about. Is it possible that Maladict, sorry, Benedict XVI is indeed the last ever Pope? In the saint’s future chronology, none follow him, save Petrus Romanus, whose destiny is to destroy the Church forever... but apparently this figure was added in the nineteenth century. According to the original list, the present Pope is the last Supreme Pontiff the Catholic Church is ever to have.
Well, nothing Papa Ratzi has done so far has led me to believe St Malachi was wide of the mark. But the decision today to have a denier of the Holocaust ordained as a bishop really is a classic, even by Maladict’s sterling standards.
I have been following this story for the past couple of weeks, via the BBC’s excellent Sunday programme, which I highly recommend, actually. It’s broadcast at 7am on Sunday morning - crazy early for me, although I’m well aware it’s on at that time so that pious folk (its intended audience) can listen to it over breakfast before heading off to church. There is, fortunately, a weekly podcast, though.
The editorial line seems to be strictly C of E and so it can get a bit All Gas and Gaiters at times, devoting substantial coverage to Lambeth Palace, Synods and Archbishops’ meetings, but it still has some of the best ethical interviews and debates on any channel for my money.
Anyway, they were well ahead of the major news-sources on this story, covering it anxiously last week, and doing a very good follow-up this morning. The understanding was that in the reordination of Bishop Williamson, the Pope was more interested in Catholic unity than in either what anyone inside the Church had to say about it, or in the feelings of those outside it, especially among the Jewish community. But nothing that Roger Bolton and his ecclesiastical guests said, though, quite prepared me for the reaction on today’s Der Spiegel website:

Empörung über den Papst Vatikan-Diplomaten kehren Benedikts Scherben zusammen “Katastrophe”, “Vertrauensverlust”, “Unsensibilität”: Mit der Rehabilitierung eines Holocaust-Leugners hat der Papst seine Kirche blamiert, die Reaktionen sind verheerend. Der Vatikan will nun retten, was an Glaubwürdigkeit noch übrig ist. Doch der katholische Fels bröckelt bereits... Outrage at the Pope Vatican diplomats are sweeping up the fragments after Benedict’s shattering action. “A disaster,” “a loss of confidence”, “insensitivity”: with the rehabilitation of a Holocaust denier, the Pope has disgraced his Church, and the reactions are devastating. The Vatican now wants to save whatever credibility it still has left. But the Catholic rock is crumbling already...

That word Vertrauensverlust is especially interesting because it could also be interpreted as ‘crisis of faith’ in a religious context. Spiegel is clear, this is a decision that actually threatens the continuing faith of Catholic believers. Of course, although Sunday took this story seriously, their strict C of E perspective blinded them to the seriousness of the story. It’s about the Pope so it’s foreign news. Thus they reported it as they might an item about Islam or Judaism. In a country with a substantial Catholic population, like Germany, it has another weight altogether. I don’t believe I have ever seen such language from the sombre and serious Der Spiegel on a subject like this, and certainly not about the Pope.
Needless to say, the Italian press have been covering the story too, although with more measured language. See:
Rompere i rapporti con il Vaticano

...while in France, government minister Christine Boutin has also condemned the move:
Boutin condamne le négationnisme, pas la main tendue aux intégristes

I am reminded of Dr Johnson’s comment that one who converted away from Catholicism was likely to suffer ‘lacerations of the mind’ and can’t help but wonder that this might be a reasonable description of what a great many Catholics across Europe must be feeling right now.

Old Scrotum

2009-01-28T14:02:00.000-08:00

A bit of a balls-up, but they’ve been stringing them along... A World Service interview that amused me, revealing that the medical condition of “cello scrotum” was a hoax all along, invented to counter another condition reported in the BMJ that the hoaxers felt sure was surely also a joke.
The bit that most amused me, however, was the incidental fact that the Musicians’ Union has been lobbying to have “cello scrotum” recognised as an “industrial injury” and that even cellists in the then-USSR claimed to suffer from it. Now that we can rest assured it is (a) fictitious and (b) impossible anyway, Jerome K Jerome’s belief that anyone reading a medical text-book will convince themselves they suffer from every ailment in it (save Housemaid’s Knee) survives the passage of time.

Top of the Morning

2009-01-21T14:44:00.000-08:00

A sign of the times? A bus-stop advertisement had broken down, such that only the top of one poster appeared at the bottom of the frame. “Top ur self” it read. That’s text-speak, of course. I knew that. But the message was a grim one. Has the credit crunch become that serious? “It’s hopeless, so why not do yourself in right now and get it over with?” What were they advertising? Futurama-style suicide booths? Or was it a public service, to push enough people over the edge so as to reduce the surplus population, as Ebeneezer Scrooge (and doubtless Gordon Brown) would have phrased it?
Then a man who had been standing in front of the display moved to the right and the whole slogan was revealed. “Top ur self up for £1.99”. It was for fried chicken. Great. But for a mad moment I had genuinely entertained the idea that a billboard advertising campaign might have started to encourage mass euthanasia. “Visit Switzerland! £65 (one way).” Of course, the cynical might have felt the fried chicken would do the same job in the end. Oh, sorry, that’s me that is - the cynical. I thought that too. Either way, as the drunken crazyman sitting next to me (where else?) on the bus put it later on, “We’re all going to the same place. We're all going to the same place.” Too right, Joe. Top up?

Captain Peng Watch

2009-01-18T14:48:00.000-08:00

There is a great deal I could say about the current round of fighting in the ‘Holy Land’, but I really find it too depressing to add to all the words already wasted over it. It reminds me of a thought I have long and often held... that in this world there is - and has only ever been - one single conflict. On the one side are the Men of Violence. On the other side is everybody else.

However, two stories have stood out in terms of what they say about the nature of wars, terrorism and the human use of human beings. One flows from a conflict which bears astonishing parallels to the Middle Eastern troubles, yet is largely overlooked by the world's media. A prominent Sri Lankan journalist foretold his own assassination and wrote about it. His words from beyond the grave were read out on BBC World Service by actor Bill Nye. It is astounding, and worth listening to in full. It maps onto so many conflicts and addresses us all in what we think of as our havens of safety.

The other was another World Service story, but one that offers more hope. To me, the actions of Captain Peng battling pirates on his ship exemplifies the spirit of Shaolin.
As my old martial arts teacher used to say to me, when an enemy approaches the Kung Fu man he (or she) should first tell the enemy that they do not want to fight and warn the aggressor to go away. The enemy continues his advance. The warrior runs. The enemy runs after. The warrior again warns the enemy that they do not want to fight. The warrior should then hide or run further. The enemy attacks. The warrior is trapped in a corner. Now the warrior has no choice. The warrior must fight, and fight like fury. The warrior will use the enemy's own strength against him, exhausting him with the futility of his aggression. In the end, the enemy has to retreat. But, the enemy must not be humiliated or dishonoured in defeat, for then the warrior is disgraced.
All of these elements are present in this story, but it is that last bit about the shoes that made my spirit soar. I would never suggest that Captain Peng was consciously invoking the practices of the Shaolin Temple, but he did not need to. It has soaked through into Chinese culture. This story gives me hope. Should that nation come to the greater prominence in the world that so many expect, that tradition of conflict and its resolution may radiate outward. There is a proverb in China that goes something like this: I used to weep because I had no shoes, until I met a man with no feet.

La Lutte Continue...

2009-01-11T04:53:00.000-08:00

¡Che! He’s a sexy boy, eh? A beardy beatnik in a beret who beat up Batista’s bastards. Who could fail to love him? Er, well, lots of people, actually. How about the thousands slung into jail for daring to criticise the vile, repressive regimes he helped put in power? The ones who were murdered outright, either by the Communists or by Che himself would not, of course, have been able to comment. But, hey, he’s got a sexy beard... eh? And great cheekbones. So, you forgive him, yeah?
No, I bloody don’t. All this Che adoration that’s coming out of the film world... arencha sick of it? I am. First The Motorcycle Diaries and now we’ve got another one - the first of a two parter, no less. How would we react to a major Hollywood film depicting the early life of Frederico Franco, I wonder. Well, he was very sexy too, when he was young, and - what a hero! - he liberated Spain from democracy and brought in a fine, enduring Fascist tyranny. Hurrah!
And how about Tristan, the life of thrusting, sexy German revolutionary Reinhardt ‘Hangman’ Heydrich, who stormed across Europe, spreading Nazism wherever he went. Just like Che, he cheerfully killed and tortured everyone who dared criticise his inspiring leader (in his case Adolf Hitler) or stood in the way of his glorious vision - a Nazi in every home! Cheer as he helps mastermind the Final Solution! Weep as his sexy, thrusting life is cut short by terrorists in the pay of those evil, dastardly Allies - Boo!
Can we not also look forward to Hendrik - the life of sexy, thrusting racist Dr Hendrik Verwoerd and his heroic struggle to establish Apartheid in South Africa, before he was cruelly gunned down by beastly supporters of (ugh!) democracy - ‘Boo’ and ‘Boo’ again!
I don’t see any difference between Nazism and Communism. Both were evil ideologies, both ordered the wholesale slaughter, torture, and oppression of millions, while raking in cash and corruption for their kleptomaniac tyrants. Che was a cold-blooded killer who wanted only to impose a foul, repressive dictatorship on the world. The dead cannot accuse him. We should not celebrate him.
Oh, and all you beardy beatniks out there who still love the blood-soaked Che Guevara, let me tell you a home-truth you won’t like. You only support revolution because you think that, if it came, you’d be at the captain’s table afterwards, yes? Because you were good Commies all along, right? Think again! The first thing a fresh tyrant always does - and must always do - is massacre the revolutionaries who put him in power. After all, if they could pull off one revolution successfully, they might be able to do it again and get rid of him! So you Che-ite nitwits out there would be first for the chop.
Mind you, speaking of biopics for prominent torturers, I’m still looking forward to seeing Forces Sweetheart: the Lynndie England Story. Come on, come on! Surely that’s got to get the green light soon?
(It also made me smile to see what you get if you go to www.che.com)

Oooh, I'm cross...

2008-12-22T07:59:00.000-08:00

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

2008-10-31T18:29:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-12T05:35:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-05T12:44:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-05T12:33:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-04T06:42:00.001-07:00

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?

2008-09-26T14:34:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-11T12:25:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-06T23:27:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-11T03:50:00.000-07:00

„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!

2008-06-09T10:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-08T09:56:00.001-07:00

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

2008-05-27T17:59:00.000-07:00

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

Widow's Peak

2008-05-27T09:25:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-05-26T15:19:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-26T15:04:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-06T17:07:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-03T11:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-30T03:23:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-18T12:55:00.000-07:00

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

2008-04-11T12:46:00.000-07:00

‘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

2008-04-06T10:37:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-20T15:38:00.000-07:00

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

2008-03-12T05:03:00.000-07:00

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.