Cacophone

Origin Story

2011-01-26T17:50:00.003Z

"The reason lies in your education, Max," he said diffidently. "The difficulties facing us now were beginning to show themselves over a generation ago. The government of the time decided to bring up a small number of children according to a new system of education. The idea was to develop people capable of comprehending in detail the massiveness of modern civilization, by means of forced learning in every subject. The experiment failed. All your schoolfellows lost their sanity. You survived, but did not turn into the product we had hoped for. To prevent any later derangement of your mind, a large part of the information which had been pressured into it was removed by hypnotic means. The result is yourself as you are, a super-dilettante, with an intense curiosity and a gift for management. We gave you the post you now hold and forgot about you. Now you are ideal for our purpose."

from Michael Moorcock's short story, Flux

The Old Believer

2010-11-23T22:15:00.004Z

"The Koran admittedly occupies an important position among the great religious books of the world. Though the youngest of the epoch-making works belonging to this class of literature, it yields to hardly any in the wonderful effect it has produced on large masses of men. It has created an all but new phase of human thought and a fresh type of character. It first transformed a number of heterogeneous desert tribes of the Arabian peninsula into a nation of heroes, and then proceeded to create the vast politico-religious organisations of the Muhammedan world which are one of the great forces with which Europe and the East have to reckon to-day."

G. Margoliouth, 1909, opening the preface to the

Wordsworth edition of the Koran, as translated by

the Reverend J.M. Rodwell

(wikipedia says he was a pal of Darwin's!).

My copy dating from roughly ~1929.

This is the way the world ends

2010-10-03T22:31:00.007+01:00

Richard Curtis' “mini-movie” No Pressure is a bloody disgrace. It takes a seriously wrongheaded approach to play so directly into climate change scepticism's paranoia. This was the joke:

In case you missed it, the joke is that moody people, uniformed children, dress-coded adults and relaxed celebrities alike, are the natural enemies of the passive-aggressive do-gooder, and will simply be put to death. Not because they disagree with the climate change science, or they don't think it's going to happen or affect them. Not for human reasons. Because they're moody and the 10:10 campaign doesn't understand why they're not complying. The same joke is repeated four times in four minutes, and as far as I can tell, no supplemental jokes are present to re-enforce the notion that it's meant to be funny. Humour is subjective, sure, but 10:10's defence of this “mini-movie” runs:

“Many people found the resulting film extremely funny, but unfortunately some didn't and we sincerely apologise...”

Really? Some people found that “extremely funny?” That is some super-subtle irony they're into. I'm going to go ahead and assume that these people were the same people that were involved in planning, writing and filming the ad. That it was a huge in-joke. Sort of like Richard Curtis' career should have been from the off. On twitter it was quickly pointed out to me that Curtis thinks that weather is affected by kissing. His input to the AGW debate should clearly have been a blast. Instead we get one joke, repeated four times, in four minutes. And it involves killing kids. Defending this thing on the basis of comedy is really not an option.

The conspiracy theorist in me loves the idea that this advert was never meant to air in cinemas. It was meant to offend, be pulled, kick up a media storm and put the 10:10 campaign in the news. In short, looking like a misjudgement is a great way to 'go viral.' The internet can be really bad at differentiating between circumventing censorship, and succumbing to a Trojan Streisand effect.

Still, we have a climate in which scowling people fare little better than gingers in the MIA-verse. Even David Ginola and Scully have to wipe the disdain off their faces. You would actually struggle to get much further from what we needed in the climate change discussion: a drastically illiberal angle that emphasises individual efforts when we desperately need a more structured action that gets at our largest corporate and governmental offenders, and that challenges the heaviest sources of carbon emission that fall outside any individual citizen's personal responsibility.

We're The Lucky Ones

2010-06-10T20:57:00.005+01:00

You have to make your predictions about the World Cup before the World Cup, clearly. As I worked my way through the draw I began laughing increasingly hysterically, as I realised how hypothetical it had all become. Here are my uneducated musings and hunches, for want of a better place to put them:

How much of a boost will African teams receive from this home World Cup? The climate will not be a particularly 'African' one, apparently. Three African teams have been seriously hurt by injuries to Chelsea players: Mikel, Essien and Drogba (who is still with the Ivory Coast squad but was meant to be seriously injured only recently - not good). Their absence would gut better sides. On quality alone, I think each of the African teams will struggle to progress from their groups - I hope I'm wrong, because without some home success this World Cup will suck. I think Cameroon may progress (Japan seem decent but fragile, Denmark solid but blunt, Holland with a question mark over the main man, Robben). South Africa are in a really tough group, while Ivory Coast need to beat either Brazil or Portugal. Algeria and Ghana are middling in middling groups, I feel.

I think Nigeria may make it past the group stage. They have some unpredictable quality up front and a good chance of beating South Korea and Greece. I'd also give them a chance of upsetting someone in the knockout round, France or South Korea, and England in the quarterfinals. But I'd be very worried about their midfield without Mikel.

European-based players are looking extremely banged up, including some players that are really depended upon to carry their team's attack: Messi in particular bothers me. Is Maradona really a good enough coach to win without him at his best? I rather doubt this. Then there's Robben, Nani and Drogba. I worry that European football's punishing and thoughtless scheduling may really give us the appalling World Cup we all deserve this summer.

The USA are meant to be really in the hat in this World Cup. But they might stuggle up front. Jozy Altidore is still somewhat green and a lot will rest on Landon Donovan, Clint Dempsey (who I like a lot) and Michael Bradley. They'll give England a good game but might get shocked by a sneakily good Slovenia side and possibly Algeria.

England, in my brief runthrough, were in the same half of the knockout draw as Brazil. No chance, surely! But they should be aiming to win Group C, although it contains decent teams. I'm very worried about a possible second round game against Serbia. But England are still one of the talented teams in world football and in Wayne Rooney they have a global superstar at his peak. This isn't a great side, far from it. But good enough to support in hope of a miracle, certainly.

Spain have a really soft group, and they're currently playing the best football on the planet, but their second round game will be a tough one against Brazil or Portugal (or Ivory Coast. Maybe). France, Germany and Italy are in a similar place to England; good sides who may spark and win the whole thing or may whiff out embarassingly.

The three teams I find legitimately terrifying: Spain, Brazil, Argentina (in that order).

Three teams that could cause a shock: Nigeria, Slovenia, Serbia.

My Final prediction: Brazil 1 - 3 Spain

Bad Aftertaste

2010-04-24T01:32:00.005+01:00

Should really be in bed but I forgot how much this subject drags you in. I thought I'd see what I could find on our local fascist PPC. Starts reasonably enough, of course, with standard 'reasonable' man-on-the-street stuff. Some eccentric spelling and grammar, a bit of uneven capitalisation. Lots of Union Jacks, military symbols and paraphenalia. My worldview is reassured by the fact that he is a Chelsea fan (!). His favourite historical figure? Winston, of course.

Sure enough though, under the surface lurks this illuminating passage:

"...Muslim women parading in Black Post Boxes(Burkha's) & Men in Dresses, Which can be seen on the Wilton Road in Salisbury now @ 2pm daily. The No Go area's which even the Police do not venture into in Oldham, & the Continuing Gang Raping of Young Indigenous Girls by Asian gangs. Your TV & Sun Newspaper will not tell you the truth because they are state controlled..."

In any case, what really drove me to post once more on this rubbish subject was what I found on his blogger profile. If this whole exercise wasn't about a particularly nasty kind of worldview reassurance on my part, I don't know what is. Still, I'm not sure he quite absorbed the message one of his favourite films was trying to get across:

Yuck, "patriotic" music. Ultimately, when I try to explain to my Irish housemate why I'm terrified of listening to any music that mentions British history, folk traditions of any of the home nations, is fronted with Celtic crosses or references Norse origins, why I run a mile from a band if anyone so much as breathes "Oi!", or why every time I find a cool metal or hardcore band I spend ten minutes online ensuring they're kosher and not c***s, it's because of these guys.

Nothing easy about being right

2010-04-24T01:13:00.006+01:00

You might be surprised to hear that I consider the BNP a fairly trivial part of the larger general election hype, but here goes again with another brief-ish note.

Churches Together in Salisbury hosts a debate in the city every general election. This Sunday at 2.30pm it's occuring at St Francis' church hall, and the local fascist candidate has been invited. The Lib Dems, Conservatives, UKIP and Greens will all be represented as well as independent candidate Arthur Pendragon.

Tom Gann, the labour candidate, will be boycotting the debate. I think this is absolutely the correct decision, as well as being principled and brave. I'm pleased that a major party candidate (and a fellow BWS alum!) has had the guts to do this, although I fear that it will be misconstrued - a tweet at TomGannLabour reads.

"A lot of publicity for the no platform position. Unfortunately, almost everyone thinks it's an act of cowardice or an affront to democracy"

Here, also, what he has to say in a statement on the Salisbury labour website:

"I will not be attending Sunday’s Churches Together debate because I believe it would be morally wrong for me to debate with the BNP’s candidate. This is a position I have long held and made clear to Churches Together before invitations were sent out.

The basis of democracy is that all citizens are equal and therefore equally entitled to participate in the democratic process. In a hustings debate this means that all potential voters are addressed equally by all parties regardless of race. This is the basis of a rational debate. So, although I disagree with John, Frances, Arthur, Nick and Nick about what policies are best for all the people of Salisbury and Britain as a whole, because they believe that their policies should be addressed to everyone as citizens, it is possible to have a rational debate with them. The BNP cannot do this because they do not view every British citizen as equal. There will be people in the room on Sunday who the BNP do not believe have a right to be there.”

Clearly, I hope the people of Salisbury will actually read his rationale. Unfortunately, in such a strongly Tory seat this will probably get spun. Mr Gann will also lead an anti-BNP protest outside the event explaining in person his view. He'll be alongside activists from Hope Not Hate, and also members of Churches Together - this was not a unanimous decision! Please, if you live in/near Salisbury and support Tom's views, attend!

It is right to deny the BNP legitimacy because they would happily exclude valid citizens from such debates and public life using racial dividing lines. It is unreasonable to enter into debate with those people. This has nothing to do with freedom of speech - which is a right to expression, not publicity.

I'm upset at even one vote going to the BNP in my hometown. How awful to think that the Very Rev June Osbourne will be inviting these monstrous mouthbreathers to comment on our schools and hospitals while a key participant stands outside. How naive to think there are no repercussions at the ballot box when you give publicity to fascists, however inept they may seem.

Quoting the event's organiser, Rev Scrace, it absolutely "would be a better meeting with him in it." But then, that's not Mr Gann's fault.

Now you're evil, now you're ordinary

2010-04-22T01:00:00.004+01:00

Just for the sheer I-told-you-so value of it all, just for a further condemnation of BBC balance, just for the sheer awfulness of it, this is what it means to put the BNP on TV and radio. It means that during election season they start appearing in round-panel discussions, like the one this morning on BBC radio 5live. Admittedly, it was pretty clear this morning that the people of Luton abhor the BNP. But it also meant that Victoria Derbyshire, chairing the debate, had to make the following proclamation.

The reason that the BNP are here is because they are a legitimate political party. 6... [angry crowd] I'm sorry... This is a democracy... They are a legitimate political party. They are a legitimate political party and 6 percent of voters who turned out at the European elections voted for them. You may not like their policies, it is your right to say so.

Followed by the BNP's spokesperson for repatriation or concentration camps or whatever getting the last word on denying his party's racism, and having a jab on the Iraq war. All for the sake of balance.

Swingin 'Til The Girls Come Home

2010-04-03T12:17:00.008+01:00

I watched my first director's commentary. I don't know why it took me so long when I've always been curious. Something about uncertainty and the idea of 'dead time.' Something about re-watching a film, but not watching it fully, watching it only for possible added insight.

There was really only ever one candidate for this honour, if I'm honest:

This coming just after my chronological Spike marathon, so I was completely ready to get into the mind of Spike Lee. She Hate Me was a film I just totally didn't get in 2004/5, I wasn't convinced I hadn't dreamt it. It was the first film of his I saw, too. Now maybe it does make sense. Slightly. There are so many threads to this film, if only because it's so unraveled. I think I enjoy this film, I'm definitely fascinated by it.

Anyway, an interesting bit. She Hate Me is a real glorious mess, and I don't really like that this seized my attention. But equally, it's the (perceived?) confused and controversial sexual politics portrayed in the film that most of its fierce criticism is rooted in. So. Here, Lee starts off talking about the technical consultant who helped him run a 'lesbian boot-camp' for the female cast:

"...Now, by law I cannot ask anybody their sexual preference so therefore I had to assume that all the women that were auditioning for the film were heterosexual, so therefore I needed someone to inform these actresses and so, Tristan running the boot camp really immersed these actresses into the world of lesbianism, and had field trips and stuff like that so I was not even part of that. And one of the most important things that Tristan told me, early on was she says 'Spike, there's no way that you're going to be able to make a film that's going to appease all the lesbians in the world' and so that was a very, for me, a liberating thing for her to say, because right away I understood that [that] meant that lesbians, like african-americans or any other group, are not one monolithic group, so I was not going to be able to make a film that all lesbians were going to like, and I'm glad she said that.

Before the film came out we had various screenings, advance screenings for lesbians in different areas and different centres around the USA, and it was really split down the line, 50-50. There were lesbians that loved the film, there were lesbians that hated it. But it was interesting that the lesbians of colour liked the film more than the caucasian lesbians. Tristan and I were trying to figure out why this was. I just think that, for a lot of the caucasian lesbians, they couldn't get around the element of penis. I guess that was a stumbling block... There's that school of people that think that any lesbian that's caught within 1000 feet of an erect penis is not a lesbian. And there's this other school that says "Look, y'know, you can't be as hard-line as that." So really it was divided along the penis. The penis was the dividing stick. Amongst the lesbians, that's where it was divided upon. On the almighty penis!"

Illusion

2010-01-03T19:43:00.000Z

As briefly as I can... a fair old time ago Sarah posted a nice quote (near the end) about films experienced in a different age, when films would move from town to town. The watchers would be aware that a film would be unlikely to return to their town and would watch it multiple times in a number of days, trying to commit them fully to memory. They would come away with their own 'versions' of the film. The presentation of film was different, so they thought about it totally differently.

I remember reading Steve Albini say once on an internet forum, while he was outspokenly criticising Burial in particular and electronic music in general, that he no longer had to listen to old punk records, that he had fully absorbed them, taken from them everything he could. It seemed this was emphatically distinct from not enjoying them. I think maybe he meant there would be nothing to gain, and even that enjoying the songs again, that doesn't count, the point is that they are already part of him and he can go forward with them, but without listening again. I searched for the quote but couldn't find it, I would really like to read that exchange again. Maybe this too is a way of sucking art dry to carry it with you. This is not what I meant to write about.

Anyway, I got sidetracked into sport as usual, and ended up thinking about my football attention span, which has always been based upon watching games on TV. I certainly did not grow up going to watch football every week. Instead, it was special to see the few matches that made it onto the terrestrial channels. My experience of watching football was completely dominated by the action replay. If the game is dull, you barely need to pay attention. You can go to the loo, and miss the goal, but you will still see it. You become sick of seeing the goal over and over, especially if it went against your team.

Now I'm older and often go to watch football games, often dreary affairs on cold afternoons, where the quality on display is significantly lower than what I'm used to seeing on TV. I can't help but notice how poor my match-memory is, and how often I miss an incident. Older men and women on the terraces hoard well formed memories of hundreds of goals per season; I can only seem to recall foggied impressions of what occured.

But this is not what I meant to talk about either. Whenever Liverpool play a big Champions League game, or England are going well and it really matters, or Salisbury have been dominating a game against rivals but not getting what they deserve, and a goal is conceded, I always have the same feeling. Especially when it doesn't seem fair, when there is doubt, and when I half hope the camera will cut to a flagging linesman, always the same feeling. A kind of emptiness and shock. I noted with half-amusement that I had the same exact feeling when I heard Michael Jackson had died - that this had gone against the run of play somehow, and violated the script. Supporting a football team, believing that victory is deserved for no good reason, makes one believe in scripts. And I think at the root of the emptiness, at the heart of the shattering disbelief, is a sense of irreversibility. The alteration to the scoreline is undeserved, unscripted, and eternally in place, and my gloom will never lift.

The reason I'm writing about this is that I watched Reading vs Liverpool last night. And when Simon Church put Reading ahead with a goal that simply looked wrong, I didn't get this customary emotion immediately, and it was a quite conspicuous absence. Was it because Liverpool's season had been quite so atrocious, and this did feel scripted? Was it because the goal was quite deserved for Reading? Was it because I had steeled myself for the worst as soon as the free-kick was conceded?

I think it was none of these things. Rather, I have been listening to the cricket on the radio over the past 3 weeks, England's Test Match series against South Africa. When a wicket falls in a cricket game, especially during a crucial period, the sense of irreversibility is even greater. A great chasm opens up, and the dismissed batsman is cast into it, and may not get another chance to play a part in the game. But this has changed, because this is the first test series I have followed where appeal against decisions by way of video replays has been in action. Many such key moments, when a batsman may have been dismissed, have been completely altered. Instead of celebrating fielders, a batsman uncertainly looking at the umpire and reluctantly walking back to the pavilion, and every watcher, viewer and listener doing a frantic calculus to determine the new balance of the game, the players stand around and wait for the TV official to give a verdict. This, of course, creates drama of its own, but it is not the terrifying finality of before. It's a brief remission, a limbo, an awkward hush.

This process interfered with my approach to football too. When Reading scored last night, I was waiting for the video appeal. I all but assumed it would have to be checked. Ten seconds later I remembered this was football, not cricket, and with my resignation the correct sort of pain kicked back in too. There has long been discussion about bringing video technology into football, and I view it as being inevitable in the next decade. I hope I will not lose that turmoil of emptiness forever.

Girls In The Field

2010-01-02T23:12:00.004Z

How's listening to Radio 4 going, dude? Well, pretty much the same as my relationship with any radio station actually – intrigue seeped in impotent fury. The same incomprehending rage that Danny Boyle diagnosed as the plague of the 21st Century.

This morning the Today programme was guest edited by one-time SDP rebel and now Lib Dem life peer Shirley Williams. One issue she chose to bring attention to was the relative lack of coverage of women's team sports, when compared both to men's sports in general and women's achievement in individual sports. To this end, an interview with Lynne Truss was aired.

This is a question that has always interested me, as a devoted sports fan. Once upon a time, I didn't understand why women don't play much sport and compete against men (I was told, and fully believed, men and women were equal). I wondered whether sport could provide a route for re-sculpting gender roles. I was outraged as anyone when FIFA's pig-in-chief Sepp Blatter suggested women's football should capitalise on its good-looking practitioners (“Let the women play in more feminine clothes like they do in volleyball.”)

Latterly, however, I just wonder whether sport is my blind spot, a vice as unforgivable as that of the life-long labour-voting professional with a fondness for first nights. The widely-gawped-at case of Caster Semenya over the summer went some way to cementing my feelings that I can never satisfactorily sync my fanatical love for sport with any leftward-leaning values I try to uphold. Anyway, I'm interested. I have produced some disorganised rambling. You can listen to the interview again here. If you prefer to read, and for long-term reference, I have hastily transcribed most of what was said. All emphasis and grammatical errors are mine:

-----

LT: I think at the deepest level, it's to do with why people play sports at all. And clearly team sports were originally designed for men to sort of sublimate other urges... sexual urges, aggression and violence and so on are all sublimated and channelled through the sport. And that makes it kind of interesting to watch.
When women play sport there's a very strange thing that happens which is that they appear to be enjoying it. I think that women play sport in a very pure kind of way, they play it in a non-sexualised way. It's nothing to do with sex, it's all almost anti-sex and it is actually them celebrating physicality... and for some reason, when things are sort of agony, they're much more interesting to watch, when they're joy you think they can get on with it and no-one need watch.

Q: When you look at team sport, [women in tennis and other individual sports have broken through and enjoyed success] it's in team sports where we don't take as much notice of them as we should, you're saying there is something about watching women play a team sport that is sort of fundamentally less interesting?

LT: Yes, I think so. You have to account for it. Why is it? I mean clearly what happens in any football match if it's played by men, played by women, will be roughly the same, won't it? You have the same incidents, the same drama and so there must be something underlying it. I wonder if, obviously the media and particularly the sports media have been traditionally run by me, whether they do find somehow that it's sort of a turn-off about women playing sport. When women play sport, team sports particularly, I think there is something they feel excluded from rather than attracted to. Whereas when men play team sports obviously men want to watch, and women want to watch. So there is something basically unfair going on there.

Q: So... no matter how good women get at team sports – and British women have done rather well recentlyy, if you look at the England women's rugby team, probably better than the men – there's no hope for them, because however good they get, we still won't be interested, you say?

LT: No, I think we have to overcome this! It's not something we should accept. I do think that we should overcome it and we certainly shouldn't tell women not to play team sports when they're obviously so good at them. But certainly the lead needs to be taken by the media doesn't it? And I'm surprised actually these days with sport being so expensive to cover on television, why not go into more diverse sports and televise women's sports until people get used to the idea? But I just think there's a sort of gut reaction to women playing sport that should of course be challenged and civilised. I think that's underlying the problem.

Q: But the people to do the challenging and the civilising will presumably be women and it's still a pretty male-dominated industry isn't it, the sport-watching industry as it were, writers and broadcasters.

LT: Yes, it is, it really is. And the thing I find really troubling is when sports commentators, sports editors do put women onto sports pages, it will be the “tennis babes.” They will say “it's perfectly OK to find women tennis players attractive.” I remember during the women's football world cup the American woman who scored a goal took her top off to celebrate – and of course it was on the back pages – and the front pages! Everyone thought “oh goody, at last something for us!” There clearly is sort of a misogyny in the whole business that runs so deep that people aren't aware it's there.

-----

Maybe it's a bit shooting fish in a barrel, but Truss is correct about sport – it goes a lot deeper than simply the actions of the individuals on field. I've felt that myself, at my low, low level of football. It gets more compelling the more is at stake. Hence the hype that prompted this Mitchell & Webb sketch. Sport is organised war, it's bucks crossing antlers. It is fun, and some weeks I have simply lived for football nights, but it's not pure fun.

Honestly, I don't have a clue about the way women approach team sports, but I would be a little surprised if the very best athletes weren't gritty competitors in precisely the same vein as men. I would expect them to be somewhat rarer, but not that much at the top levels. I have time for the suggestion that men are threatened by women's sports, because women's groups on the whole are threatening to men. But I don't think that is the root of the problem.

The most recent Women's World Cup was hosted in China in 2007. I was sharing a house with three women and a vehemently un-sporty bloke, and yet he would join me when I inevitably gravitated towards the highlights. And even he felt the quality was, um, a little lacking. It's not a fair representation to say the same incidents take place in the two versions of the game, any more than it is to say a Radiohead album contains the same chords as one by Coldplay. There's no doubt that serious athletes far faster, stronger and fitter than myself or any slovenly reader of this tripe play the women's game, but there's no serious argument that it challenges the men's.

I've come to see this as a problem of categorisation. Men's sport is not explicitly sport for mature individuals who have a Y chromosome. Men's football is an open competition, and to paraphrase the common saying, if you're good enough you're man enough (Of course, for the same sorts of reason that homosexuals are displaced from public participation in team sports, this is not the case. A woman could have the skill of Maradona and she'd be unlikely to make it through). Women's and disabled sport are related in that they are protected zones from which other athletes must be excluded to maintain the level of competition.

Luring spectators to a women's version of the game is not the same as asking a football fan to watch rugby or cricket, because sport is elitism if it is anything. In fairness, I don't think the casual misogyny of sport is all that hard to detect, but I guess Truss puts it diplomatically at the end there.

The problematic representation of female sportspeople in the media, the limited viable roles through which they are allowed to enter into the public eye, these are not problems unique to sport, but maybe this is their most extreme manifestation. I'm always appalled during the Wimbledon fortnight when tennis commentators get away with complimenting the female players, flouting the BBC's vaunted political correctness in the most egregious way.

This is a really worthy cause, but I'm worried that it's also a forlorn hope. For medical reasons alone, it would be tremendous to get sports participation in Britain on the rise, and beyond that lies opportunities for community cohesion, senses of achievement, and so on. Certainly though, I can't see women's team sports being given the same credibility as those of men anytime soon. I don't expect to see it within my lifetime. For that to come about would require a complete alteration of our modes of thought, and it would probably change the nature of sport itself.

And I still don't know how to feel about Korfball.

A Selection Of Albums, 2009

2010-01-01T22:28:00.002Z

If it interests the reader, I have catalogued the statistics accumulated on my Last.fm profile here. It gives an idea of what I actually listened to this year on my computer. It will be a bit skewed.

It's with sort of a morbid curiosity that I read end of year best-of lists. It's a stupid thing to do, in fairness. If it wasn't fun, and basically harmless to boot, it would be poison. I don't really understand The Wire's obligatory annual inclusion of a couple of albums from spheres of music they don't even cover during the year (see: Vampire Weekend, Dirty Projectors). Pitchfork have their ridiculous 25 “Honorable Mentions,” which they say “are not simply records #51-75 in our poll; rather, they're albums that we think deserve a bit more praise and notice.” I'm confused right there, and I want to meet the person that makes sense to. Last year Plan B stated something like “we don't believe in ranking music, so we haven't put our list of top albums of 2008 in any particular order.” Fine. But. YOU MADE A FUCKING LIST ALREADY.

Lastly, an inescapable point: The Wire, Plan B, Pitchfork, BBC Radio 3, NPR, Tim Westwood, Steve Lamacq, Walter Schreiffels and Steve Davis could all get together and name The XX's effort Album of 2009, for all I care. My relation to it will remain roughly the same as the Pope's to gays.

Everything about making music lists is petty, painful, unsatisfying, incorrect, nonsense, and ultimately FUN. A good reason not to give your list an order is because it's difficult, takes time, and you're not being paid for this, so you want it to only take an hour. Last year I had tremendous difficulty narrowing it down to two 10-album tiers and 6 “honorable mentions” (haha). This year, I thought I'd barely listened to a thing from 2009, until I picked up a pen and paper. It turns out that I did. Now, I'm reasonably certain I could list 50 decent albums. But that is not the point either. So here goes with 25 that make most sense to me.

I will also list some of the glaring omissions that spring to mind that make it obvious how meaningless proceedings here have been, and a handful of disappointments. Everything that follows is alphabetically ordered for sake of maximum fairness.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A top 10:

Califone – All My Friends Are Funeral Singers (Polished, perfect, top-form Califone album.)

Harlem Shakes – Technicolour Health (Irresistible and unashamed indie-pop in the vein of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah.)

Japandroids – Post-Nothing (Crash, crash, singalong, shout, smile, wallop.)

John Frusciante – The Empyrean (Thoroughly immersive and exhaustive concept album.)

Les Etoiles – To Leave A Mark (Heartfelt songs bear a heavy load of family history.)

The Blue Angel Lounge – The Blue Angel Lounge (Debut from superb Velvet Underground-inspired German psychedeliacs.)

The Love Language – The Love Language (Debut album of gorgeous romantic songs flies by)

These Are Powers – All Aboard Future (Confrontational, strangely alive avant/noise-pop.)

The Thermals – Now We Can See (Rattles through 11 great pop-punk songs. Fun.)

Shapes – The Pasture, The Oil (22-minute dose of jagged shout-along, some carnage.)

A further 10:

All The Empires Of The World – Blessings (Biased? Maybe a little. But enjoying the hell out of this thoroughly OTT doom/ambient album is no stretch.)

Animal Collective – Merriweather Post Pavilion (Consider: MPP actually met the hype.)

Bat For Lashes – Two Suns (Consistently crafting lush pop with measured magic.)

Busdriver – Jhelli Beam (Inimitable lightning vocals and great production.)

Dalek – Gutter Tactics (Hip-hop sunk deep into industrial noise territory. Mesmerising menace.)

Dirty Projectors – Bitte Orca (Haha, 10-word summary, funny. Fun. Jawdropping. Hard to grasp.)

Micachu & The Shapes – Jewellery (Couldn't stuff more genius or annoyance into these pop fragments.)

Nosaj Thing – Drift (Stunning glitch, bliss and crunch on this debut album.)

The Mount Fuji Doomjazz Corporation – Succubus (Whoa. Roving jazz instrumentals and impenetrable dark ambient.)

Wavves – Wavves (Teen goth beach party. The record that launched a thousand (shitty) mimics.)

“Honorable Mentions:”

A City Safe From Sea – Throw Me Through Walls

Amen Dunes – Dia

Peaking Lights – Imaginary Falcons

Teeth Of The Sea – Orphaned By The Ocean

The London Apartments – Signals & Cities Are Forever

Disappointments:

Themselves – Crownsdown (I just really hate the production, and it sounds awfully forced.)

Silversun Pickups – Swoon (I don't know if it's my fault or theirs, but this seemed flat.)

Condo Fucks (aka Yo La Tengo) – Fuckbook (This is just not an interesting kind of music for me.)

Bill Callahan – Sometimes I Wish We Were An Eagle (Dreary. I'm not even all that easily bored.)

Yet to hear (and actually do want to track these down this time):

Alasdair Roberts (Have had a very strong recommendation. Soon!)

Broadcast & The Focus Group (The Wire's AOTY has got to be worth a shout, surely!)

Do Make Say Think

epic45 (Only just found out they had a new one, thanks Dave!)

Flaming Lips

Fuck Buttons

Girls

Grizzly Bear (!!! Honestly, when it came out, I just wasn't in the mood. I will rectify this soon.)

Holopaw

Jim O'Rourke

Phoenix

Six Organs of Admittance

Sonic Youth (And I was actually psyched for this, but it came out in a hellish month of stress)

Sunn o))) (Have in fact bought this, but it hasn't arrived yet.)

Vic Chestnutt

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wow, that's a lot of names and stuff dropped by a serial and heinous namedropper. It only remains to say that I bet I didn't even hear a lot of the good stuff last year and boy do I sink in fear and nausea when I think about all the music that will be released in 2010. When I realise how much talent and effort there is out there and how much I have not yet heard, and how in every moment more and more is piled onto the backlog. Like a character in a book who pleads, No! Don't add to the levels of existence that are already in being presently. Don't make the world more real and its grip upon us more fierce. That is where the nausea comes from in the first place. Of course, I do not really want for these people to stop making music, not at all. But it does scare me.

(Oh, and to say that you should go to the Records On Ribs website and download the albums released last year by Les Etoiles, All The Empires Of The World, Sweet Potato, Talk Less Say More and Blue Ducks which are either listed above or were very good nonetheless.)

As The World Dies, The Eyes Of God Grow Bigger

2009-12-30T23:59:00.006Z

24 hours left. I'm writing to say there is one album left for you to download (for free, and legally) and experience before the year runs out and that you should do so by clicking this link. Also I try to express why. I wasn't going to do a list for 2009, I didn't listen to barely any of the new stuff that interests me, but maybe I shall, because it is fun, if fruitless.

To be clear, the only purpose of this initial paragraph is to make some kind of bridge between my starting to type and my eventual inevitable gushing of uncontrollable torrents of praise. Well, almost. All The Empires Of The World had split when I reviewed their previous offering, the Last Rites EP. Now this Schrödinger’s Band of a three-piece have released an album – an honest-to-goodness LP. The collision chamber is loaded with all the expressions of unabashed doom, high-volume overtures, expansive ambient phases and paranoia from a past age that marked ATEOTW’s previous releases, and the lever is thrown. End result: the fifty-two and a half minute span of Blessings.

On first listen, the sheer fist-pumping exuberance of seemingly everything I heard had me completely breathless. Opener Sands of Saturn tumbles only slowly into its beginning, but then makes a most magnificently theatrical announcement of its presence, yawningly manoeuvres around for similar glorious outburst before coming up astride a refrain of pure victory. Each time, the hammer-blow is heralded by a high-end shriek, which I can only assume was intended to have that Pavlovian effect on the listener. The second track features equally hair-raising roaring - mashing one’s head around to Ghosts of Sargasso/Of The Father is music made participatory to the same extent as Guitar Hero. Later, Asleep At The Temple pairs uneasy quiet with two piercing volleys of fight-or-flight chaos that are fit to wake the dead.

Throw in a couple of the other eardrum-threatening moments on the album, and you already have a monster of an LP which will certainly make you smile a little wider, breathe a little heavier, and drink a little more, or faster. This is definitely the most out-and-out fun I’ve had listening to ATEOTW… and yet, this is not the simple full-fat offering it first seems.

Lo! Third track [I Perceive Your Resonance] slowly fades in light guitarwork, and then vocals, which come back more urgently and jolt the song into a roaring shoegazey ending. Titan of Light resists all temptation to go loud, winding through a gentle melody and lending Blessings some internal breathing space. And the album's final piece, The Prophet Part II, is completely redolent of Richard Thompson's Grizzly Man soundtrack, up until its delicious victory throes. No wonder, with all this confuddlement, that the tracks are able to play powerfully with the listener's anticipation.

Blessings might be about discovering dinosaurs in a faraway land, or questing for a source of light to banish an encroaching darkness from one's homeland. It might be loosely based on a mission to space that was salvaged from near-tragedy, or maybe an existential crisis where a hero is cast into the blackest of nights and comes back with an Answer. I've been listening while playing Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, and that fits too, really well. The point being that it's really difficult to tie Blessings down, setting-wise, that its sonic palette is really too broad. But if this is a story, it is (in my ears, at least) an adventure worthy of any hero. The word I keep coming back to is 'romantic.'

And finally, the album sounds really, really good. As in, these recordings are worthy of the epic compositions they render. The guitars ring clearly when tamed and unleash a throaty roar when cut loose. Drums lead intrepidly through the storms and tenderly through their lapses. Everything grows, crashes, everything burns, everything is stunned into eloquent silence by the full-blooded refrains that stand before it. It's immensely satisfying, enormous fun, and if you have time to check out one more album before the decade rings out (and don't want to pay money for it neither) then you should definitely make it this one.*

Records On Ribs say:

"...an album of immense magnitude; seven bombastic paens to the affect of all things grand... Melodies are bold and memorable whilst dynamics go far beyond the cliches of quiet/loud, with a subtly inventive handling of crescendos and intelligent deployment of that sadly underused technique in so much rock music: silence... SEE ALSO: Manatees, Slowdive, Pelican, Explosions in the Sky, Jesu, Cult of Luna, Red Sparowes."

You can download Blessings, for free, from their website here, so do!

* Obviously it will sound just as good in 2010, and beyond, of course.

Gone In Time

2009-11-28T14:07:00.004Z

Not dead, just sleeping maybe. As a placeholder, here's some of what I've been listening to, courtesy of 8tracks, which I like:

8tracks has this thing going where you're not meant to spill on what all the artists/tracks on a mix are in advance, and that's cool. You don't need a blow-by-blow anyway and you're just google away from details. These were all things that just really gripped me in the past month for whatever reason - there's a bit of folk, country/americana, acoustic, hip-hop, noisiness, etc. Pretty inconsistent in general. But you should check out the following if you think they might be good:

The Blue Angel Lounge - Superb, Velvet Underground-inspired psychedelia with wonderful, hazy tunes. Deserve any attention they get! Very excited to hear this band.

Elephant Micah - Joe O'Connell is great and makes great low-tempo-y gaze-y americana-y music with vocals and instruments and arrangement. "Has toured with The Decemberists, Jason Molina" sounds about right. Several records available to download from his website.

GimmeSound (A City Safe From Sea page) - niceeee music site that promises to give bands money, use gentle adverts, give fans free streaming and downloads, siphon off a slice for charities of bands' choice. Sounds wonderful in theory anyway. Seems to be colonised by those post-hardcore/indie/instrumental/screamo bands (with silly names) that I don't always want to like but usually do. Never mind, worth a browse. I've chosen A City Safe From Sea's page because I happen to like them.

Zoltar's Revenge - A favourite music "sampling" blog of mine. Loads of psychedelic music, plus bits of avant, hip-hop, dub, doom etc. in a global selection.

Voices From The Front Line

2009-10-23T01:20:00.001+01:00

Far too much ink has already been spilled over Griffin's day in the sun, so briefly and bulleted as I can;

Thanks, BBC. Anytime you get a chance to give record exposure and star billing to the nation's leading exponent of race hate, you've got to do it. Props for using your news network to give this one that extra publicity, to really make it a must-watch.

Much though we should give the british population a little credit, the notion that fascists will automatically discredit themselves given a chance requires a distinctly culturally biased reading of politics. We have many airbrushed politicians. The BNP's entire target audience are not, in fact, turned off by unprofessional presentation - how often do we hear that "at least [Griffin] says what he thinks?" In many quarters his "non-PC," slip-strewn delivery is held to be a virtue.

Indeed, the very basis of "No Platform" is that fascist arguments are not rational, and are not targeted at rational actors. The success of reasoned debate, therefore, is limited. There are no shortage of people who disapprove of the BNP - but any number of individuals won over by Griffin can have destructive impacts - on communities and individual lives.

The Greens polled 2.4% higher in the European elections, and yet are able to break wind without attracting national attention. Probably rightly, but it is the middle class's (by way of the beeb) morbid obsession with the BNP that made them the pre-eminent force in UK politics on the 22nd of October. Everyone needs a bogeyman - a convenient villain to rally against, a particularly despicable opposition to measure oneself by.

Many have noted that fascism can be viewed as a simple socio-political index, an indicator of the effectiveness of the democratic process, like the murder rate, or unemployment. I certainly feel the extreme right will always raise its head periodically, as mainstream parties get tired, corrupt, ideologically moribund. Additionally, the economy will always have its stops and starts.

There are two parts to combating fascism. i) The Outrage is straightforward, and we've got that down pat. ii) Democracy is difficult. A democratic population requires non-superficial choices between understandable policies and ideologies, translated into observable actions by public servants they trust. It goes without saying that the rampantly anti-parliamentarian, anti-democratic, private-tie-in approach favoured by the government of the past 12 years has not helped in this regard.

Case study: French presidential elections 2002, 2007. Admittedly, there was a backlash against Le Pen's Front National after his huge success in the first round of voting in 2002 - outrage works! However, 5 years later the extremists were relegated to 4th place, although France was not a wholly different place. A hard-fought contest between genuinely Right - Left mainstream parties dominated the election, and Le Pen was made a footnote.

Functional democracy must also be continually rejuvenated at a grass-roots level - politics does not occur at the polls, a population earns its government day by day. It is hard work and this fact has been completely hidden by the "YES/NO ON RACISM" furore of the past month.

Freedom of speech involves prime-time audiences on QT? Give me a fucking break.

And many more gripes besides. I hope I'm not right about all of this - because David Cameron does not seem a wholly-representative, policy-centric, ideologically-fervent pro-democracy/anti-nazi panacea.

(Review) Les Étoiles - To Leave A Mark

2009-09-16T23:42:00.008+01:00

The artwork still makes a statement, even on a digital release. Never to Alight, the debut album of Les Etoiles (aka David Fitzpatrick) which I was absolutely floored by last year, had a sepia-coloured photo of train tracks running through a wooded setting. The image is slightly blurred; the train is in motion and this moment has been snatched from a much longer journey. Happily, this can also be said of the album itself, which contained such intimate songs, of such fragility, that the listener could but hold their breath and be thankful they were captured at all. A perfect snapshot.

On the follow-up album, To Leave A Mark, which will be released by Records on Ribs this Friday, things feel slightly more permanent. Small touches with a drum machine, breathy vocal intonations and subtle production play around the edges of the songs, which fans of the first album will come to cherish just as much again. The songs are straightforward but uncanny, inexplicable. Fitzpatrick’s understanding is remarkable, that he never lowers the intensity nor raises the volume.

The cover art this time is the view of a rural world through a window, from a darkened room. Another snatched image, another brief sanctuary for reminiscence, another hideaway. The album relates to Fitzpatrick’s hometown of Bridgnorth, where the album was conceived and recorded, in his parent’s home. The songs are about Bridgnorth, about memory and the dissonance it can make with the present. A lack of familiarity with the town is no barrier – the songs are a powerful testament to the sheer weight of history and emotional ancestry that can build up in a place, any place.

The album only makes sense over time; borne out of mournful nostalgia, it becomes a foreign land to walk in. Just as in memory itself, powerful moments are littered all about. Time after time a delicately delivered lyric or deliberately deployed lick of guitar or keyboard will strike home. The whole is fraught with such familiarity and genuine emotion it seems impossible to be unmoved.

While the common threads are clearly traceable from Never To Alight, subtle changes have been made. The gentle breaths of keyboard on From High Rock, the quiet ticking percussion on A Home Never Seen and the distinct rhythm that The Clearing settles into, oddly reminiscent of downtempo I’m Not A Gun, are indicators of the breadth of Fitzpatrick’s palette. I love the use of the drum machine, which accentuates the feeling of the empty space as in a living room or attic, in a very similar way to the crackle and hiss on Library Tapes’ album Hostluft. A Few Remains is a terrific track, creaking into life and Fitzpatrick’s voice sounding fuller and weightier than ever before, working through the track before delivering a heartstopping intonation. My favourite is Taken By The Breeze, with its hesitant piano shifting through the minor key, and the slow whirring in the background as it draws to a close.

At the end of closer Along Castle Walk, the hermetically sealed world breaks down, and the rumble of traffic is audible. This is the kind of waking that I imagined at the end of the first album, too, a slow dawn. To Leave A Mark lasts for the shortest of forevers, seeming positively timeless while playing, then slipping quickly into silence. It’s a remarkably complex album, for one so straightforwardly written and recorded, for such a commonplace and (literally) homely subject matter. Like the best fairytales, these songs issue from a world endlessly recognisable and utterly enchanted. Simply, another astonishing record.

To Leave A Mark is released on Friday. Follow the link to the Records on Ribs site, where all their great records are released as free downloads. You basically have no excuse. Get Never To Alight as well!

On Friday night in Nottingham, Les Etoiles will play a free show at Jamcafé in the Lace Market. Support from El Heath, doors 8pm. Nottingham people, don't miss it!

Future Markets

2009-08-12T23:47:00.003+01:00

Just briefly (if anyone is reading), I wanted to note that Alex has a great post at An und für sich, wherein he shows that Cameron's "new-breed" Conservatives should not be seen as an alternative to the prevailing neoliberal consensus, but would in fact be more of the same. I also want to try and express my fears with a general election nearing:

Relatively recently I was so appalled by the similarity of Labour and the Conservatives that I would have said "better a competent tory government for one term than a 4th term of lacklustre and sleaze-ridden governance by labour." Do I still believe this, that at least a change would draft in some honesty or competency? No, not particularly - it is hard to believe in honest politicians in the current climate. Additionally, I'm becoming fairly certain that while ministers might add a subtle change in emphasis, the hardware on which government runs changes fairly little.

Would a Tory win next year still be a mercy-killing? I do feel that with the present status quo the best-case scenario is to have the two major parties extremely close. My formative years (in political terms), were spent watching New Labour enjoy an unassailable lead in the polls, and watching a succession of Conservative leaders propose batty schemes in a desperate grab for votes, but in no position to actually oppose the government.

It is important for a party's rule not to drag on: the Conservatives were not damaged from 1997-2005 because Hague and Howard were particularly poor leaders or thinkers (IDS, granted was weak on PR, although I have a good degree of respect for him), but because the last of their 18 years in power were still fresh in the nation's memory. Strong candidates detract from the party leadership, but don't want the poisoned chalice for themselves - I rather suspect that David Milliband is holding off his leadership challenge because he doesn't want to be PM for 6 months, but instead Tony Blair mk.2.

I fear the long-term destruction of the Labour party by its current weakness, because though I loathe the current government, it is only from within Labour that a government I could really be happy with could emerge. Never the Conservatives, and I'm convinced the Lib Dems are 'not a real party,' bound together more by what they're not than what they are.

Were labour to become unelectable for another two decades it would precipitate disaster. And yet.

Not every part of our national infrastructure is meant to be dissolved in the free market, and yet I fear that the forthcoming Tory landslide will be seen by that party as a mandate to do just that. A centre-right agenda that will be both a continuation and a rejuvenation of the current government's direction.

With either Labour or the Conservatives, then, and in best case scenario or worst, it seems we will still end up slouching in the same direction. It has become altogether very difficult to envision where change might come from. The desperate thing about dystopias in literature is not necessarily how malevolent the living conditions within them are, it is how stable they are, how resistent to change. The stability of the present state of affairs suggests it can only be capsized by catastrophe.

Finding Nepo(tism)

2009-07-06T12:22:00.000+01:00

I have been a negligent blogger lately (isn't that just the worst kind?). Here is something I really did mean to mention a few months ago:

In a veritable orgy of people I know and admire, Records on Ribs put out a release by All The Empires Of The World. Ned only beat me to the scoop by several months. In fact, I left it long enough that the band in question have disbanded. Next you'll tell me that they only needed one more positive review, and they would have pulled through. I don't enjoy describing music ("good/bad/post-rock" are all you need) but the EP is titled Last Rites, the opener is called Prophecy at the Ruins and the band name is 6 words long but seems to last a lifetime. The prejudiced observer should need no help from me. The EP is available as a FREE DOWNLOAD, so you should do as it says.

I will say, however, that in this world where we are trained to make the most fleeting of cyber-connections with other glimpsed human beings, where we are continually trying to replace intuition and common sense with a scientific justification, where doom used to mean doom-y but now it's just mood backwards, and where ambience is a fancy french word somewhere between decor and feng shui for people with more wallpaper expertise than ribcage, All The Empires Of The World were not a re-hash.

An example: they played a gig I was at once, sandwiched between a snazzy continental-café electro-jazz laptop/sax act and a bunch of semi-likable, semi-significant vox-guitar-bass-drums-zzzzzzzzzz nothings and the word "massacre" was not mentioned even once (any after-show incidents were unfortunate). I even caught one unsuspecting female spectator smiling, but ATEOTW do give out a lot of bass when they play live, so she may just have had a mild tetany of the face. They say it takes just 13 muscles to smile and 33 to frown; I couldn't find any data on how many are required to strip one's self of all vestment and form a writhing coil around your favourite band member. It's irrelevant anyway, All The Empires Of The World's stated aim being to destroy as many of their listener's bodily functions as possible, one by fragile one. By the midpoint of a set the only thing preventing their victims' bodies from degrading into a formless gelatinous ooze is their clothing (which Oxfam will no longer accept).

I often read about ATEOTW being cavernous or sounding like the end of the world, thunder and lightning, rains of fire, power and menace wielded on a cosmological, theological or metereological level; This is true, although I prefer to think of the processes as internalised, dramatised processes of self, which in any case better fits with the primal vibe my ears detect. There's an opaque mysticism in play that seems to fit in with images of a raw and nascent earth. Having listened through many times now, I hear a sort of anti-spiritualism deeply rooted in human actors, an arcane architecture of ceremonies ill-understood from the outside. It's like medieval Europe as interpreted by Cormac McCarthy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the opening bars of Simon Helen Elizabeth (The Gate) which bring to mind valleys, light mist and coronation - not unlike The Lion King, but no doubt with more robes. Later, this track becomes more triumphant still, hitting an emphatic wall of rhythm, guitar and subverted vocals that's eerily reminiscent of The Angelic Process.

Also moving through several phases, opener Prophecy At The Ruins covers a lot of ground, sounding initially distant and working its way to the foreground. Although their reputation for overbearing volume may go before them, Last Rites has phases that mark it out as a pleasingly melodic EP. There is a somewhat distant feel to much of the 25-minute span, feeling more like a sighting of the godhead on the horizon, and less like Ragnarok erupting in one's cochlea. ...Will Be Laid To Waste is certainly very grand, and forms a towering end to proceedings. This record sounds like the music Jesu should be making right now. Yeah, you should get this.

Now, on to the important bit. The record is released on Records On Ribs, a web-label run by some Nottingham people. All their releases are available as free downloads, and you should peruse the site. But here is the link for this one: All The Empires Of The World - Last Rites EP.

If you like this, you should already have been listening to older ATEOTW stuff like the more acoustic Coral EP or the rather long Magnetic Resonance, and I would happily vouch for both. We are to anticipate one final release from the band, which will be worth waiting for, no doubt. Maybe one can take solace from the fact that this opens up the possibility of liberated members joining your new ambient post-ska/metal ragga project.

You should go further. The releases by Strap The Button, El Heath and Sweet Potato are excellent, so be sure to check them out. But more than anything, get Les Étoiles' incredibly evocative Never To Alight, which was one of the best albums released anywhere last year.

Departure

2009-07-05T11:00:00.003+01:00

Watching films with others is... OK. The actual act itself is somewhere between acceptable and infuriating. The payoff is the walk home, where everything you thought in the past 90-180 minutes must be spewed back out again, in any order while still maintaining the pretence of dialogue. And sometimes listening - but film fans are snobbish, so this is entirely situational. There was a time when I went to see A Very Long Engagement, without having seen Amelie*, and in the company of afficionados - damn right I was listening. You never know what you might have to blag at some later date.

Silence is golden; well, it has little value in or of itself, but it does create more jabbering later on. Anything you thought about the flashing lights on the screen must echo and amplify inside your head, until you are convinced of its meaningfulness to nearly spiritual proportions. It has been odd lately, one of my major cinema-companions actually lived about 3 doors down from our local cinema, and there has been an element of surrogacy as we take the walk home to the living room (It helps that these are often blockbusters - there is little to discuss and we are not skilled at subtext).

A brief outline of the sequence of things: i) I first saw The Departed in the Savoy cinema, when it had been out in the UK for about a month, so about November 2006 (interestingly, this being my first year in Nottingham, it was maybe the first such visit with my filmgoing companions of that time, both heavy and naive with expectancy - these walks home can be the most intoxicating and tremulous, can be the most sour and quarrelsome). ii) January 2007 - I rented Infernal Affairs from "The Hollywood Movie Store" in Beeston, which had a good selection of foreign (and especially asian) film. iii) Early 2008 - a friend bought the Infernal Affairs DVD from a website somewhere and a group of us watch it. On completion, howls of appreciation and enthusiasm sound out around the room. iv) I watch The Departed for a second time with my father**, the date is the 3rd of July, 2009. Bang! we are in the present.

The Departed is a 2006 film by Martin Scorsese (who vowed it would be his last gangster flick) about a policeman (Leonardo DiCaprio) infiltrating a Boston gang leader's inner circle (Jack Nicholson) while a gangland mole (Matt Damon) ascends to the police unit investigating his boss. Intrigue, violence and multiple usages of the C word follow. The cast is strong and Nicholson appears to be having a lot of fun, as ever. On first viewing I was entertained and satisfied, but not impressed - so, similar to Gangs of New York, then. But I was shocked when it won both the Best Picture and Best Director Academy Awards***, it had seemed to be little more than a proficient thriller. And all this was before realising that The Departed had been copying someone else's notes.

I'm not sure what I knew, but I certainly did not fully realise that The Departed was a re-make until I followed the hype and rented Infernal Affairs, jointly directed by Alan Mak and Andy Lau, who also takes one of the starring roles alongside Tony Leung****, who has long been a favourite of mine. The story is essentially the same, taking place in Hong Kong. Infernal Affairs is a great film, a near-perfect exposition of the crime/intrigue motif and a totally exhilarating thriller. Excuse me while I gush. There is a genuine feeling of schizophrenia running through it, creating what is almost a split-screen effect in the mind of the viewer. Frame by frame, the compositions of shape and colour are stunning.

Contrast with The Departed, which I felt was good looking because it couldn't help it. Made by a major studio with great director and cinematographers, with the best equipment. The colour balance on screen was fine, totally professional. But sit the one down side-by-side with its predecessor, and it's clear. Infernal Affairs is flooded with vibrancy*****, kinetic energy, a vigour that is apparent throughout. Its Hollywood re-make is strong, but past its peak and ambling towards the retirement home. The law of diminishing returns holds firm, and this is even apparent if you see the mimic first.

Before I watched Scorsese's re-make a second time, I derided it as a scene-for-scene plagiarism, but that's not true. Scorsese does attempt to make the story his own. Mark Wahlberg's character is added, an unnecessarily foul-mouthed sergeant that yields the most watchable performance in the film, is also totally out of place. Wahlberg's appearance on screen signals something like an ad-break, ruining the flow of the story. Is this really where the film stands out from the original? 'Your mom' jokes? Anthony Wong's superintendent character gets split in half, supplying the amiable buffoon Alec Baldwin and pensively paternal Martin Sheen. The female character, who becomes unwittingly sandwiched between the two leads, is much more subtly involved in matters in Hong Kong, but in Boston her nuance is lost and a love triangle appears. And Scorsese's thematic centrepiece, the confusion and metamorphosis that the two moles' dissimulation causes, is actually much more apparent in the original, which doesn't make a big deal of it.

Finally, Scorsese's alterations to the plot facilitate a nice, neat wrapping-up of events, just as you'd expect from a

Ultimately, The Departed attempts to fine-tune its predecessor in some regards and break with it in others. On paper, the effect of the changes should be to make a more palatable movie for a western audience, but it ends up marooned; too much of a re-hash, it sags with the weight of nostalgia for its source, but no more than when it strays from the path. Scorsese simply couldn't win.

I used to charge these remakes with a cultural imperialism that I now think is a bit silly - this is a moneygrabbing maneuver first and foremost (although a scene involving some Chinese triads does offer an opportunity for Nicholson to spew a few epithets). I think this says less about the film-makers themselves than their audience, or possibly more about their level of respect for their audience. Maybe I just naively think first-is-best, which is a common enough delusion after all, not just in film. It may be that originality forms an overriding meta-aesthetic (metaesthetic? measthetic?) by which I judge film. This is, of course, the personal, situational approach to film that generates limitless perspective and confounds our attempt to evaluate absolutely. A superior remake would make for a more interesting study on this subject.

And so, the walk home, wrenching up from the sofa, creaking up the stairs, switching off lights. The end was neat, meaningless, perfectly OK. There is nothing to say about The Departed.

----

*Being English means never having to pronounce correctly or add foreign punctuation.
** Film-watching is an important shared activity for us, but he is overly fond of Steven Segal and does not care for subtitles, so consequently I leap at anything respectable. Furthermore, our loose alliance is the only thing banishing terrible US teen-rom-coms from the living room. It is a battle for resources.
***With hindsight, this was the point at which I should have stopped caring about the Oscars - much though Scorsese deserves a lifetime achievement award, much though The Departed did a credible impression of a top-notch film, it's astonishing really. Little Miss Sunshine was more enjoyable, Letters From Iwo Jima more consistent, Babel more 'worthy,' and United 93 undoubtedly more interesting to watch (and clearly better directed, provided you can put up with Greengrass' shaky-cam)
**** Or, Mak Siu-Fai, Lau Wai-Keung and Leung Chiu-Wai. I think I got those half-right. Yes, it is funny that someone would choose such vanilla names to make themselves more glamorous/saleable.
***** It is of course, obligatory for Western reviewers to use this word at least once when discussing foreign cinema. Indeed, for British people to use this to describe anything foreign (unless one wishes to demonstrate xenophobia; here the appropriate word is 'smelly').

You're Not Punk And I'm Tellin' Everyone

2009-07-02T11:44:00.008+01:00

Before the beginning of Hated: GG Allin and The Murder Junkies, their "one week only" video feature, Pitchfork have put up a fairly stark warning:

KIDS LEAVE THE ROOM

The following film contains obscene violence, explicit sexual content, and ridiculous music. If you're not into watching guys push things into their anuses, people pissing on each other and smearing themselves in shit, or dudes dancing around with corpses, please consider reading some of our highly professional music reviews instead.

Thanks,
The Management.

Well, there certainly are bodily fluids. If there's one consistent thread that can be traced through this film, it's the presence of nudity, aggression, excretion and anal manipulation. I think we are meant to be offended, and I sometimes wonder if Allin and his fans are leering at the 'norms' viewing. I wasn't particularly offended, but I wouldn't say I enjoy watching these things*. "Kids leave the room" seems somewhat ironic though: as an attempt to shock these tactics may be extreme but they are also juvenile.

The film explores the world of GG Allin, then with his band The Murder Junkies, and incorporates footage from the late 80s through to a tour in the early 90s. Tours would typically end in the police station or the hospital; Allin, usually performing fully naked, would not hesitate to lash out at members of his audience, who were expecting it. Gigs ended in scrums or were broken up by the police, and Allin delighted at all times in pushing the proverbial envelope of punk rock to it's furthest extreme.

Fascinatingly, this 1994 documentary is directed by the same Todd Phillips whose more recent work has included Road Trip, Old School, the Starsky and Hutch remake and the current box office hit The Hangover. It's another small reminder that the 'mainstream' is not necessarily as far away as I like to think. It shouldn't really be a shock that a successful filmmaker started small, with a rock-doc about a punk act with an obscene stage show and little musical finesse to back it up.

Although Hated is full of footage from live shows, the one thing that is conspicuously absent in the film is any real mention of music. These performances are really just an opportunity to view GG in situ. Closer to performance art than music (as the spoken word performances hint), punk rock was simply the best stage for his abrasive, aggressive style. Arguably, he doesn't display any other talents beside his showmanship (which is remarkable). In one segment he plays a guitar and sings. It's a short song rendition and pleasant enough, with a rough, croaky aesthetic. Today, he'd add some distortion and call it lo-fi, and we might well love it, but beyond this, music is sidelined**. The Murder Junkies are not a particularly inspiring musical force.

His bandmates are adorable. Brother Merle Allin plays bass and boasts a spectacular moustache. A totally addled "Dino the naked drummer" runs through some of the technical details of playing naked, and sprays out some narcotic remarks about spirituality. An ex-bandmate delights in dissing his former buddy, whining impotently about how GG is nothing special. But Allin had a number of devoted fans who evidently thought he was. One clearly knew him quite well, and revels in telling the story of the time GG told him to get a woman, any woman, to urinate on his face. The occasion was Allin's birthday.

The film itself starts by placing a quote onscreen:

"GG Allin is an entertainer with a message to a sick society. He makes us look at it for what we really are. The human is just another animal who is able to speak freely, to express himself clearly. Make no mistake about it, behind what he does is a brain"

This is attributed a few seconds later, once we've had a chance to take it in: John Wayne Gacy, Death Row, Menard, IL. There are a few mentions of Gacy in the middle of the film, highlighting the acquaintance of Gacy and Allin, who visited him in prison, as did several of Allin's fans.

I can't agree with Gacy's statement. The presence of "freaks" is not a comment on society. Rather, it is that these "freakshows" find an audience who wish to view real destruction as entertainment. Maybe this does involve a sick society, but the grisly obsession with serial killers as people who have gone beyond regular boundaries again seems juvenile to me. I agree that a human being is "just another animal," but the reaction most would have to GG Allin must if anything emphasise our differentiation. I am not aware that Allin did express himself clearly - if anything, his actions are an undeveloped response to his existence, environment and his own makeup. They certainly give us a lot to think about, and he was certainly possessed of incredible charisma, but the assertions of his intelligence are, I think, excuses to enjoy this voyeurism for a while longer.

In the latter parts of the film Allin and others discuss his assertion that he will commit suicide on Halloween 1992, possibly on stage, possibly with zealous fans also killing themselves alongside him. It seems a logical progression in the manifesto of "no limits," and in one spoken word performance, Allin lashes out at a spectator who tells him to do it sooner. But Allin does not say he is unhappy - he makes overtures about wanting to have "a strong spirit," but I wonder how much this action would be his own choice, how much it would be the product of bravado, hype and his own mischosen words. GG Allin actually died accidentally of a heroin overdose in June 1993.

Is there something about GG Allin and his fandom that runs deeper than bodily functions and senseless violence? Something in the extreme personal libertarianism, the undoubted anger and reticence to relate to others, suggests this really was a case of a distressed man, possibly unwell, attracting an unpleasant freakshow of fellow sufferers and disenfranchised youth. It must have been quite a spectacle. Maybe my efforts to medicalise are precisely the mainstream sentiments that he and his fans would have derided. Maybe he was healthy, I'm sure he had some fun.

Would I recommend Hated? Because I'm not sure whether I was watching it as a voyeur myself. It's a decent documentary that some people might find hard to stomach. GG Allin was a fascinating character who was undoubtedly very talented at what he did, who could have formed his fans into a cult, if that had been what he wanted. As a subject matter, he was repulsive, honest, intimidating, purile, and often tiresome. But never dull.

At any rate, be quick, the film will be up on pitchfork for maybe a couple more days. Youtube would have your back, but there's a bit too much nudity and faeces in this one.

---

*"Nothing offends me" is basically a challenge, and besides, it's not true. There are things that offend me, in fact deeply and on a daily basis, but it helps not to get too wound up about them and proceed in a catatonic glazed-over fashion. On the other hand, things like disgusting photographs, clips of surgery, these don't offend me. Sometimes, what offends me is the apparent intention of the person who is putting these images in front of me. Offence is difficult to monitor and while I'm probably not "easily offended," a large element in the perception of this is the amount of things I simply have to let slide.

** In modern indie culture this should not really be surprising. Music is not necessarily the natural environment for the concepts we load it with, it is merely the next best place to store our desired aesthetic - it can be deregulated and decentralised, it needn't be expensive, it can form a fully interactive culture, it lends itself to film, writing, fashion, nights out, visual art, and it has a physical output, which can be produced cheaply, circulated wildly, and associated with as many additional concepts and ideal-images as we wish to give it. The Murder Junkies are not even a particularly great example.

You Talk Way Too Much

2009-05-23T03:37:00.003+01:00

What could it possibly be, you wonder?

"What if everything you knew was a lie?" - well, that would clearly be on a par with the moon landing, the New Deal Jesus, Pearl Harbour, JFK assasination, Obamania, 9/11... and some other ones I can't work out, but don't seem too important. Our Air, Our Water, Our Life... Creation! 25/05/09!!! What on earth could this be?

Prepare to be underwhelmed. It's the unveiling of a fossil. Specifically, it's the unveiling of the first Darwinius masillae fossil, a very well preserved one, named Ida:

Ida is a VIP (very important primate) - and as Ed Yong reports, the media response has been nothing short of rapturous. This revolves around the notion of a "missing link" - even before we knew what the discovery was, John Wilkins on Evolving Thoughts had his doubts about this term - he also worries about announcing the "common ancestor of primates".

We are by now very much aware of the hype our media plasters over news stories. To translate them to large numbers of people in an interesting way, in our contemporary news-as-entertainment culture, they have to be blown up to significant proportions, and made 2-D and digestible in the process. It's difficult to imagine a more inappropriate or common example of this than in scientific discovery, where a public that often lacks the scientific knowledge to comprehend the raw importance of discovery needs it processed. This is the root cause of the foodstuff-causes-cancer news story.

In this week's Bad Science column, Ben Goldacre draws attention, as he does most weeks, to shoddy and hyped reporting of science news, including the current "men experience worse flu" story, which has nothing to do with flu (the pathogen tested causes food poisoning), may not be applicable to humans (tested in transgenic mice), and isn't as globally applicable as advertised. Scientific discovery gets mangled into headlines on a near-daily basis.

And in this case, there are even doubts as to the real meaning of this discovery - this article on Laelaps is fairly technical, but the consensus being reached is that the PR-heavy unveiling of Ida is ugly business. PZ Myers on Pharyngula describes it as Barnum-esque, and even to a total layman the comparison to the earth-shattering dates in the advert above seems totally absurd. For one thing, there is no single link between primates and the rest of the animal kingdom.

Ida is a significant fossil that should have been remembered for its incredible degree of preservation, and the energising effect it could have had on palaentology. Instead it could be remembered as a watershed event in our mangling of scientific coverage. Unfortunately, I fear it will be no more than a really great example - both as a primate fossil, and a hysterical headline.

A Placeholder; An Idea; A Dire Warning

2009-05-20T16:15:00.008+01:00

I am very, very busy, being a very busy person.

However, I need to put up a thought while it's here in my head. Recently, friends have raised the idea of teleology in evolution. Traditionally, biologists are very much not fans of teleological notions in evolution, possibly much more wary of it than they should be - I think this is at heart a matter of starting points, of didactic necessity, of the tendency to over-stress differences between new and old schemas of thought in order to press their significance. Sometimes the short-term necessity is to rebuff too strongly, spilling over into the awkward reversal some way down the line, in our constantly-revised science.

I am specifically looking at Simon Conway Morris' speculation that convergence is meaningful, and too much emphasis has been placed on contingency. My major problem with Conway-Morris on this issue is that he is very happy to pick patterns of convergence in evolution, but it is unclear what they mean. For example - squid and humans develop eyes, independently (Praise the Lord! - unfortunately, this is ultimately where SCM's argument ends up). It is unclear to me why this is meaningful, and further, if it is meaningful, does the fact that our eye is wired backwards also become significant? What does it mean where species continue to diversify?

More specifically still; Conway-Morris seems to believe that the existence of human beings is a unique mould that life would inevitably pour into, a gentle restatement of the anthropic principle. I have always found this anthropocentrism to be scarcely above contempt - to postulate that because this universe exists in this way, and not another one, x must be true, seems to me to represent the most profound lack of imagination and wilful disregard for existence in general. To propose a convergent principle of my own: where sentient organisms exist, they will come to the conclusion they are unique and the universe exists in order for them to be just so.

With this in mind, it should be clear that certain tentative trends could be expected in evolution. In exploring the gene-space Dawkins postulates in The Blind Watchmaker (this is essential reading, a powerful visualisation of the step-wise nature by which incredible variation can be reached - and also a demonstration of how deploying simple computer programming can produce valuable models) we might realise we come across stronger forms and weaker forms. Flight, sight, predation on other species and increased decisison making power are good candidates here; major advantages that can be reached. And if they can, presumably they will, eventually. And if they will, one imagines they will establish a niche, all things being equal. But contingency must rule here also - the variety of individual steps that can be made are huge, and yet elephants will not develop wings soon, and bats have little use for eyes.

I find it amusing that the internal evolution of evolutionary theory into a non-directional and thoroughly atheistic area of study is in fact a work of contingency, as is the subsequent backlash. Let us re-wind the tape of scientific discovery, press "play," and see if Dawkins re-emerges. Another little aside to evolutionary history is the similarity of teleological rebranding with that of Stephen Jay Gould and the Punctuational Equilibrists - a re-placing of emphasis on a theory that can already handle the disputes being laid on it, possibly a useful re-balancing of certain skewed views.

Critically, however, Stephen Jay Gould and his cohort were not loading their rejection of gradualism with theology. Conway-Morris considers his convergence to give evidence for the theistic nature of evolution - a belief I've always felt one shouldn't think too hard about, and pressing onto others is fraught with difficulty. Assuming a deity is involved in a process in a manner basically indistinguishable from the naturalistic method itself kicks up endless questions, not least the harped-on-about-yet-very-real problem of suffering.

In this article, Conway-Morris reveals his hand. You'll have to imagine the sneer, and it is admittedly difficult to read:

"But there is more. How to explain mind? Darwin fumbled it. Could he trust his thoughts any more than those of a dog? Or worse, perhaps here was one point (along, as it happens, with the origin of life) that his apparently all-embracing theory ran into the buffers? In some ways the former possibility, the woof-woof hypothesis, is the more entertaining. After all, being a product of evolution gives no warrant at all that what we perceive as rationality, and indeed one that science and mathematics employ with almost dizzying success, has as its basis anything more than sheer whimsy."

There is a reason that scientific discovery heavily stresses experimentation, the referentiality of theory to the world outside it. We take apparent confirmation seriously - although unfortunately we don't have the luxury of a divinely-sustained universe with clearly delineated truths. Removing absolute knowledge of truth from the table is regrettable, but I'd be lying if I said I relied on it much in my day-to-day existence anyway. Relying on God to sustain a universe we increasingly describe in material terms is a folly - there are reasons to consider a deity, but these are not them.

To take issue with one more thing: SCM, having rather inelegantly and confusingly typed his way to conclusions, leaves a real horror for those who venture into the final paragraph:

"Of course our brains are a product of evolution, but does anybody seriously believe consciousness itself is material?"

As I have said in conversation: be very careful, theists. I don't want to watch anyone reaching their hand over the nearest boundary of human knowledge and plucking an argument for god out. It has happened before, again and again, and I don't expect it to ever produce empirical evidence for God - indeed, I think it would be a very cruel God indeed that would wait until we had developed so far, technologically speaking, before revealing himself. It would be some coincidence if the next frontier turned out to be the last one. This is a route religion does not want to go down.

Where Shoddy Predictions Happen

2009-04-18T17:18:00.005+01:00

The NBA Playoffs are started today, pretty much as I wrote this (I promise I had already written my predictions for the Celtics and Cavaliers series before they tipped off, OK?). So, here are my calls for the first round (and a stab at beyond).
Eastern Conference
1st vs 8th: I honestly can't see Detroit pulling it together enough to take more than a single game against the Cavs, who have too many weapons, too much depth (LeBron alone probably has too much depth). Their 3-point shooting will be key this post-season, as will their inside threat. But I think the Pistons, especially Hamilton and Prince, may have enough pride to win one home game. Rasheed Wallace can be a force when he wants to be. Shame there's no Iverson in this series to add a bit of drama. Cleveland Cavaliers to take the series 4-1

2nd vs 7th: Interesting matchup between the ailing, KG-less Celtics and the resurgent Bulls. The acquisition of John Salmons has greatly benefited Chicago and how he matches up with Paul Pierce will be key to deciding this series. Boston will struggle to find new routes to score without Garnett and one of Glen Davis or Leon Powe is going to have to shoulder a heavy load on offense. Maybe then it'll be good for them to 'ease' into the postseason against Joakim Noah and Tyrus Thomas. I think the champs will get through the first round but I wouldn't be surprised to see this go to 6 or 7. Rondo and Allen will have to provide fire from the backcourt or PP34 is going to have to carry this team again. Chicago need to pinch one of the first two in Boston to make it a fight. Boston Celtics 4-2

3rd vs 6th: I haven't watched much of either the Orlando Magic or the Philadelphia 76ers but this seems to be something of a mismatch. There are a few doubts over Dwight Howard's ability to dominate games in the 4th quarter, but provided the Magic's shooters remain sharp it's hard to see Philly matching them. Orlando have tremendous strength on defense as well. I'm expecting them to take this in 4 or 5. If I watch any of these games I'll be looking to see how Howard steps up, and whether rookie SG Courtney Lee looks quite so composed in these playoff games. Orlando Magic 4-1

4th vs 5th: This is certainly appetising on paper, pitting Dwyane-Wade-fired Miami against a very solid Atlanta Hawks team. Neither are likely to trouble Cleveland too much in the 2nd round, but most expect this series to go to 7 games. I'd expect that to include Wade taking over in a huge way once or twice. But the Hawks won't have to go to their bench much and I expect their compact unit to be too much for Wade. Miami PG Chalmers is playing his first playoff games, also. Atlanta Hawks 4-3

Western Conference
1st vs 8th: The Lakers have looked like such a supreme force in the West, it's hard to imagine the shaky Utah Jazz stopping them in the first round. With Bynum and Gasol in the middle, and Kobe looking menacing absolutely everywhere, this will be too much for Deron Williams to steer through, although I doubt they'll be swept. Lamar Odom's attitude will be key for the Lakers throughout the playoffs. LA Lakers 4-1

2nd vs 7th: If Tyson Chandler and James Posey are fit, the Hornets have a chance in this one, given that Chris Paul is simply remarkable. Like all the top players in the playoffs, Paul's minutes will be up and the pressure will be on. Unfortunately for the Hornets, his opposite number Chauncey Billups is a superb defender and extremely experienced. His supporting cast in Denver seem much healthier and better drilled. Denver Nuggets 4-2

3rd vs 6th: The Dallas Mavericks looked a spent force 3 months ago, when they looked likely to be the 9th team in the West, but they're now on a decent run and preparing to face a San Antonio Spurs side missing one of their big three and fervently hoping another can get back to full strength. I expect that Howard and Terry will continue their form into the first round and Dallas will take this series. Tony Parker won't be able to carry the Spurs over 7 games against Nowitzki & Co. Dallas Mavericks 4-2

4th vs 5th: It's hard to judge how much weaker the Portland Trailblazers will be for their lack of playoff experience, but there are few players in the league that play better at crunch-time than Brandon Roy. Meanwhile Houston, much improved since McGrady's season ended, may be a touch over-reliant on Yao Ming, but under the right conditions convert his presence to free points. Still, if the Blazers continue to shoot well, I expect them to take this. Portland Trailblazers 4-3

A pretty conservative outlook, definitely. But real upsets look like they'll be hard to come by this year. I think if there's going to be one, Chicago-Boston might be the major candidate. If the Bulls can win a game in Boston then the Celtics should be concerned.

In the second round I expect the Cavs to cruise through in 4 or 5 again, as neither Miami nor the Hawks can match their firepower. Similarly, I'd expect the Lakers to make it to the West finals, although their record against the Trailblazers could make that a tough series. I think it would take something of a miracle for Boston to reach the East finals without KG, so I'd expect Orlando to win through to a matchup with the Cavs, and either Denver or Dallas to fight it out with the Lakers. I think this will be Denver's role, and although I'd love to see them beat the Lakers, I can't see it happening.

I expect the NBA finals to read Lakers-Cavaliers. It'll be a tough matchup that'll go all the way, but I think L.A. will have the slightest edge at the end.

Maybe we'll get to see some bits as good as this (I adore these ads - anything that combines slow-mo or black&white with sports):

Don't Lose The Faith

2009-04-11T10:04:00.004+01:00

Did Darwin Kill God? aired a few weeks ago. Being produced by a member of the theology department here at Nottingham, it caused a buzz among many of my theologian friends! I had a few reactions and ideas at the time, typed a few out, but didn't click the publish button then. Belatedly, and after a re-watch, here are some thoughts, cleaned up and influenced in no small amount by several people I've discussed it with since. It's no longer on the iPlayer, but you can find it easily on Youtube. Apologies, this is gonna be long!

First, a confession: I am no longer watching for the science. Indeed, it’s becoming increasingly hard to remember a point in the BBC’s Darwinian double-anniversary coverage at which I was captivated by the obligatory re-hash of Darwin’s theory of evolution that must precede any discussion. I have a developing awareness that it is not normal behaviour to watch every one of these Darwin docs. It’s not a useful adaptation.

It’s OK this time, however, because we know what we’re really here for: a fight. In Did Darwin Kill God? University of Nottingham theologian Conor Cunningham promises to delve into the question of extremism on either side of the evolutionary ‘debate.’ Thus plugging directly into the reason we love this quarrel anyway – stupid rednecks vs snobby uber-atheists. There’s a voyeurism in observing this conflict. We want harsh words. We want blood.

Unfortunately, this is a BBC documentary through and through. Nothing terribly remarkable about the way it looks, the tone held the right side of respectability, but often flirting with cheesiness. Cunningham cuts a presentable and affable figure, and is lit dramatically while he whispers his way through Genesis. Establishing that Genesis was not taken as a literal account of creation, he travels to Israel and Oxford, tracing the roots of biblical literalism to the reformation, and explains that geology and Christianity were perfectly compatible in Darwin’s time – indeed, many of the top geologists were clergymen. This is all useful stuff. It’s good to put the current spasm of mouth-frothing evangelical protestantism in some sort of context. Heavyweights such as St Augustine are in his corner, after all.

We also have a brief look at the course Darwin’s own faith took following publishing the Origin. This thread of reasoning always bemuses me: the originator of the theory was a Christian, and became an atheist, so is atheism inevitable following understanding of his theory? The question is stupid; the undignified bickering over the beliefs of the late biologist by believers and atheists alike awfully ugly. Alongside whether or not “Hitler believed in evolution,” this is neither of scientific nor philosophical import. At least this segment was brief.

Enough of this moderation. Let’s go to America, where hillbilly music plays as we delve into the Scopes trial and an increasingly fundamentalist reading of the Bible in the 60s. We get to see inside a creationist museum and listen to some daft claims; it’s all rather predictable fare. More interesting is Cunningham’s contention that by treating the Bible as a science textbook, the creationist is effectively worshiping science. The transition to intelligent design raises the question for Cunningham of why an interventionist designer would allow evil to occur in the world. Unfortunately, this seems something of an own goal; it’s certainly not clear that his God allays suffering either. Indeed, one might say that natural selection is as suffering-intensive as creation is likely to get.

Similarly, Cunningham states he sees God operating through evolution, in a way that leaves one wondering: is this divine evolution still automated, unguided, without direction? If God is responsible for mutations that grant us intelligence, sight or even flight, is he also responsible for the mutations that cause Cystic Fibrosis or Tay-Sachs disease? If he was not the active evolutionary force, then what function does he serve in the Creation? Cunningham’s role for God in evolution seems no more robust.

Asserting that the ‘clash’ between Christian belief and evolutionary theory is an artificial one, Conor turns his attention to a different group of fundamentalists. Immediately the use of terms ‘Darwinian’ and ‘ultra-darwinists’ bother me. Generally speaking, these terms flag a less-than-amicable relationship between the speaker and evolutionary theory. They are also meaningless: modern ‘Darwinians’ have a very different view of evolution, one that involves genetics, for one thing. But I suppose, no-one does like labels. They are necessary evils. My main criticism here would be that having used ‘ultradarwinian’ as a slur for the final twenty minutes of his documentary, Cunningham ends imploring us to “let Darwin rest in peace.”

While discussing the atheistic side of evolutionary theory, the central argument is that scientific theory can tell us only about things material, and so cannot disprove God. It’s a pretty elementary point – indeed most atheists accept this but counter that “he who asserts must prove” – but a key one. Michael Ruse puts it best, saying “If one goes into the lab…to do science, one is, as a scientist, not looking for God.” Francis Collins agrees.

Possibly this is a problem with the documentary as a whole. The notion that Darwin could have “killed God” is garbage! Rather, evolutionary theory is key in this battle of beliefs because i) it is the clearest example we can point to where material evidence contradicts the literal word of the Bible and ii) belief in God is functional, regardless of fact, and understanding our origins and place in the universe better diminishes the functional utility of belief.

The descent into meme theory in the final ten minutes is confusing. We are truly through the looking-glass here, and Cunningham seems rather lost himself, telling us that at its heart meme theory tells us “there is no me or you,” and “everything is an illusion.” This is somewhat misleading. Unfortunately meme theory is at its heart no more than a philosophical analogy that shows how ideas could be spread like genes. It certainly lacks the power to bring down religion – it should be obvious that describing an idea, for instance that of a crucified and resurrected deity, as a ‘meme’ does not alter the actuality. If it took place, then it took place, meme or otherwise. For the same reasons, Cunningham’s supposedly damning attack on meme theory – that it is tautological – ultimately falls flat.

‘Memetics’ merely describes the way the idea or belief has spread, although its proponents have been guilty of doing so with some fairly emotive language, it’s true. Maybe this grants meme theory too much credibility anyway. It’s not a truly scientific concept. But it is amusing to imagine that Conor is actually so aghast at Rickrolling, or the notion that LOLcats have ended belief.

From the start cards were laid on the table. Conor Cunningham is a Christian and an evolutionist, and through to this last section we have little reason to doubt it. But as we get in to the realms of more modern theory, a flicker of doubt takes life in my mind. Little instances of innuendo creep in, such as when Francis Collins vaguely denies that evolution is “all about genes”. There is an underlying hostility towards the “selfish gene theory” that is not at its heart scientific. (Here, the rather clunky faux-dialogue interview style employed throughout does really grate. When a point is made that feeds into Cunningham’s argument, the camera cuts to him so he can smile and nod encouragingly. It comes across a trifle smug.)

It’s natural for a theist to be hostile to the idea that we are nothing but the sum of our selfish genes. The implications for our moral grounding seem dire – although we do exhibit many separations from our natural origins, after all. Our understanding of genes should broaden in years to come, but this ‘selfish model’ is still the closest approximation we currently have. What rankles is that Cunningham’s criticisms are not scientific in nature – they pounce on perceived “dissent in the scientific community” and take this as their evidence.

Oh well. It is perfectly natural to pick and choose which bits you want to believe, when there’s no practical reason to get it 100% right. And there really isn’t, in this case.

The worst horrors should always be saved for the final reel. So it was for an atheist and scientist who so far can agree, if grudgingly and with however much nitpicking, with some of our conclusions so far: Science and Religion are two different things. Christians are not normally quite so belligerent, only Americans. Darwin cannot disprove God. Meme theory certainly does not disprove God.

Enter Simon Conway Morris, who also sees evolutionary theory as incomplete, much to Conor’s glee. But more importantly, he considers evolution might be the method nature uses to reach underlying, (dare we say divine) conclusions. This mysticism seems a pretty unforgiveable attempt to shoehorn God into evolution, and it violates Cunningham’s own scheme of separate science and faith. Our truce is broken. It’s a shame.

It’s a shame because there was some good stuff in this documentary. A condemnation of extremism (which is ludicrous on both sides), and a reminder that Christianity isn’t all about what happens in Colorado Springs. A few examples of theists who can get behind evolution. And an attempt at reconciliation. I fear I have dwelt overlong on the contentious aspects. But the key is this: evolutionary science is incomplete, and we must test it and understand it. It will take us wherever it will. And one gets the feeling that just as Conor Cunningham has an idea of the kind of God he can believe in, so too can he deal with evolutionary theory – on his own terms.

There, maybe that will be it for Darwin for the time being. I only just bought a copy of The Origin of Species, actually, so probably not (You may be surprised to hear that it's far from essential reading for the modern science student. Maybe you shouldn't be). Apologies to anyone's ideas I have pinched, most of these thoughts were my own, as far as I can tell. Maybe they were no more than memes. If you missed it on TV and iPlayer, Youtube has your back.

Stickmen and Chimneys

2009-04-04T09:58:00.001+01:00

Follow up from my post aaaages ago about the wonderful music of Just The Architect: Chan has teamed up with Jed Hart and a bunch of matchsticks to make a sweet video for Stickmen and Chimneys:

The track is on JTA's 508 EP, which features some of his best tracks to date, including the stomping Countach!!, and is available for free from this link. A new EP titled Theo the Weak will soon be available for download, so stay tuned!

You can also watch this on Youtube if you so choose. Subscribe to the JTA channel to see future moving pictures!

What Comes Next

2009-04-04T09:15:00.002+01:00

A big piece of news came through last night, and I had to make a note of it, coming so shortly after my pre-emptive eulogy to the glory-days of Allen Iverson. Allen Iverson has played his last game of the season, and hence also his final game as a Detroit Piston. So much for being motivated by his next contract. Iverson, after a poor display against New Jersey on Wednesday, made it clear that he couldn't deal with playing off the bench. It's clear that for A.I. it's got to be a starter's slot or nothing. He plays the game in his way, and no other. That's why he was revered in Philadelphia. It's why he's a near-certain Hall-of-Famer. And we may be watching his last days.

NBA.com's David Aldridge considers "where next?" for The Answer, suggesting he could re-team with Larry Brown in Charlotte. It seems odd, considering the Bobcats are starting to look like a well-constructed, balanced team on the rise, and Brown's past history with Iverson in Philadelphia. But phrased as a last hurrah for a superstar and 'his coach,' it's certainly attractive, if not plausible. One thing the basketball world seems agreed on is that Iverson won't be joining a top team - they were all paying attention to how this one has turned out, and they know he won't settle for 'providing a spark from the bench,' the role that has commonly been suggested for him this season. He won't be earning an 8 figure sum on his next contract, either, assuming he even signs one.

I expect him to, though. This is a disappointing black mark on his stellar career, one that he will be keen to expunge with one more season on a playoff team, at least one more season as a superstar, and the All-Star farewell that the fan-voting system would give him. Many teams will steer clear, but a team will be prepared to take a punt on a brand like Iverson that can fill arenas and create a buzz, especially with some franchises threatened by takeover and transfer to new cities. I think his pride means he won't accept the paltry veteran's minimum, but a reasonable mid-level contract from a team that will let him play on his terms would do the trick. Add in this speculation that he shares an agent with LeBron James, making this an opportunity to 'cosy up' for the watershed Summer of LeBron in 2010, makes this look a little more likely.

It's too late for him to go out at the top, but as such a huge figure for so long, I think Allen Iverson will find one last shot irresistible. And I think in a system that suits him (one where it is all about him, and one that compensates on defense) it wouldn't be impossible for A.I. to surprise us all once more. A Shaq-style indian summer would, however, require him to use all his craftiness, ferocity and grit, and to play with a huge chip on his shoulder. It would also be the stuff of sports fantasy.

Was the Allen Iverson experiment a failure? It seems at first the answer is yes: Detroit were the second-best team in the East last season, but won't finish any higher than 7th this season. They probably won't do reach .500, and they're not a lock for the playoffs, although I anticipate that they'll scrape into the first round without the distraction of the A.I. story. Former PG Chauncey Billups, meanwhile, has propelled the Nuggets to second in the West and himself into MVP column top 10s, even though he's not seriously in the debate itself. Detroit gave away a great player, in return received a legend who can't play team, and have crumpled.

But Iverson's $20.8 million salary will expire this summer, giving the Pistons valuable cap space that a crafty operator like Joe Dumars will look to maximise (Aldridge suggests bolstering the frontcourt with PFs Paul Millsap or David Lee, both impressive this season and free agents this summer). With several years to come from Rip Hamilton and Tayshaun Prince and the ongoing hope that Rodney Stuckey can become a dominant point guard who can knock down shots and impose himself on games, life will go on in Detroit, who should be a playoff team for several more years.

I don't think they'll replace Billups satisfactorily for a long time, but even with him, the Pistons wouldn't have been able to hold off the Cavs or Celts this season, and much though they enjoy playing the Magic, their days as an elite team in the East were numbered. The A.I. gamble was a risk worth taking, especially considering his expiring contract.

Now Detroit have to hope they can display some masterful ability to trade again. And the rest of us have to hope Allen Iverson signs elsewhere to give us a swansong worth remembering.

In other news, I really should have kept my mouth shut about the Cavs, going by their loss against the bottom-feeding Wizards and last night's destruction by Rashard Lewis and the Magic. They're still good, promise. Playoffs are coming!

Heroes Die

2009-04-02T18:38:00.001+01:00

Another angle of my NBA fandom that's affected by geographical detachment: it's a lot less consistent and more personal than it would be if I were duty-bound to follow a team. Contrast the small rosters of a basketball team with the 20+ stars in a top football club's squad, and you can see the NBA becomes a veritable pic'n'mix of favourites the casual fan can choose from on any given night (see: Delonte West, Dirk Nowitzki, Steve Nash, Big Baby Davis, LaMarcus Aldridge, Chris Andersen, Shaq). I can get interested in the up-swing in Thabo Sefaloosha's fortunes in a way I never could with, say, a resurgent Wigan Athletic full-back. I won't lie - the glamour and action, games every night of the week, and relentless accumulation of stats help too.

One of the odd things about starting to follow any sport is a lack of context when watching ageing stars, or even that lack of comprehension when watching stars really in their prime. When I started following football in 1995 Liverpool's squad included the waning Ian Rush and John Barnes, while Peter Beardsley was playing up front for Newcastle. I was a couple of years late to really understand these players. There's a lot of regret here: if I'd really been paying attention I could have been experiencing Fowler, Bergkamp, Le Tissier, Ginola and Cantona in their primes. I blame myself less for this, but similarly I was missing the best years in Europe of Zidane, Figo and Ronaldo. I still feel the only player I really appreciated at the time was Steve McManaman!

With this in mind and my basketball obsession in its infancy, there's a degree of desperate conservation that sets in when I watch basketball just now, as who knows when some of the current 'living legends' might break down? Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki have gone down as fast as their teams since their MVP days. Kobe may be getting his best shot at a solo championship this June. Tim Duncan may only be a playoff force for another year, and Shaq's incredible burst this season, at 37, already seems to be defying the laws of time and physiology.

Allen Iverson, at only 33, is already assured of legendary status: number one pick in the extraordinary 1996 draft (ahead of Kobe, Nash and 7 other future All-Stars) his ten years in Philadelphia included a League MVP, 4 seasons as scoring champion and perennial All-Star selection. Still, Iverson has a combustible personality and the Sixers were beset with friction, beaten out by Shaq's Lakers in Iverson's only Finals trip. Despite his astonishing scoring ability (3rd highest average points per game in league history) A.I. looks likely to end his career without a championship ring. A trade to the Nuggets placed him alongside another big-time scorer in Carmelo Anthony, but it was soon apparent that the duo were going to prove too defense-lite to get past a first-round playoff series. The Answer was moved on to Detroit for Chauncey Billups.

It's become fairly clear that Denver got the better end of this deal - Chauncey has propelled them to second in the Western Conference at time of writing, and instilled a new belief in D. Meanwhile, it's become apparent just how much influence "Mr Big Shot" had with the Pistons, who have fallen apart. After 6 consecutive East Finals appearances, Detroit are now sub-.500 and scrapping to make the playoffs while Iverson seems a very poor fit as a solo star in a team that was once the very definition of 'chemistry'. A poor substitute indeed for a gritty defensive point guard who could pull the strings and make shots.

There were reasons for hope. I mentioned yesterday that the Pistons are still a tough matchup with Rip Hamilton back in the lineup, and that with a focused Iverson adding firepower to the second unit they could scare anyone. Don't forget that the guy is meant to be playing for his next contract. But it looks like it won't happen that way (main story). Allen Iverson is a superstar, and with that self-belief has also come an intransigence that has doomed any attempt to fit him into a system. Ultimately it may be that stardom that denies him another chance at a ring. And if his thoughts are starting to swing towards retirement, that means any opportunity to see A.I. take over a game is unmissable, a real collector's item.

It's a peculiarity of american sports that everything is set for parity, from salary caps to college drafts. Talented players landing at loathsome franchises often get things all their own way and no backup, sometimes ingraining that lone hero status and turning them into novelty scorers. LeBron is astonishing but he's only received real quality support in the last year. Because of rookie contract length, it's not uncommon for a young star to remain in that dark place for 4 or 5 years before joining a contender (e.g. the stars of the 2003 draft class who will be in that extraordinary 2010 upheaval). By that stage, 'fitting in' may be too much to ask. Concerned for OJ Mayo yet? You should be.

Maybe this is why the revival of the Celtics has been such a story. Paul Pierce had been the only reason to smile for the C's during the past two torrid seasons, Kevin Garnett had won an MVP in Minnesota but endured 7 successive first round playoff defeats, and Ray Allen (aka Jesus Shuttleworth) had been quietly pouring in 3-pointers and enjoying cult status as everyone's favourite shooter. After years in the wilderness, they found each other, formed a tight unit, reincarnated a stumbling franchise, and completed their resumés. It's a great story.

Which brings me back to the beginning. I've had many basketball infatuations, but my love for Ray Allen constitutes more than a crush. It's the real deal. 'Ray Ray' cuts a sleek figure and doesn't dominate games like Kobe, LeBron or Dwight Howard, but in this defense-orientated Celtics setup he fits beautifully, harrying opposition wings on D. On offense he can drive in to the paint or, more usually spaces the floor and works off Pierce or Rondo to bury a dagger. He's a brilliant shooter, with a stroke that's simply beautiful to watch. He has a cheeky smile and interviews well. He reads books, for crying out loud! And he's 33, which means I am desperately trying to grab memories and encase them, any time he plays well. I know I'll miss him when he's gone.

Last night's game against Charlotte gave me an opportunity to post this. I briefly mentioned yesterday that Charlotte's playoff push is a serious one, and having sprung a defeat on the Lakers they were more than ready for the Celts, forcing the game into double overtime. Good job Boston have a player that can hit clutch shots; I was more than pleased with the way this one turned out:

Kingdom

2009-04-02T00:37:00.002+01:00

Obviously being a basketball fan in Britain isn't awfully convenient in a lot of ways, but here's one thing I'm thankful for: with no geographical reason to form allegiances, nothing holds me back from watching the most significant games. Faced with a close matchup, especially in the approaching post-season, I can always take a third path and root for history. It was hard not to perceive some significance watching the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Detroit Pistons, who met last night in Cleveland. The Cavs presently own the best record in the league and were going for a franchise-record 13th win, while the once-great Pistons are limping into the playoffs and desperately hunting for .500 parity. It was a highly watchable contest which ultimately highlighted the Cavaliers' excellence and underlined the MVP credentials of their star LeBron James, who might just be having a historically great season.

They call him King James for a reason. The Pistons got off to a fast start but by the end of the first half Cleveland had clawed back to 41-44. LeBron followed up a defensive stop with a drive and successful layup, plus a foul, which he converted from the line to make it 44 apiece at the half. A decent first-half Detroit effort all but erased.

It's commonly said that great teams and players define themselves in the clutch and as the clock runs down. So contrast LeBron's heroics at the death of the 2nd quarter with Rasheed Wallace's antics at the end of the third. As the Pistons prepared to take the last shot of the period, 'Sheed picked up a 16th technical for the season, which carries a one-game ban (at least he's still re-habbing his calf injury) and Joe Smith got a block ("he knocked the S and the P off Spalding") to preserve a 4-point Cleveland lead.

James & Co.'s class was even more evident late in the 4th. With 4:30 remaining and 67-69 down LeBron followed up a powerful dunk by flicking the ball from a Detroit hand to Mo Williams and on receiving it back delivering a spin move and really improbable basket-plus-one. LeBron had another extraordinary three point play with a couple of minutes on the clock, driving into the paint and laying in with contact from Wallace. The game was all but strangled. Anderson Varejao grabbed an offensive rebound shortly after to run the clock down on Detroit's hopes. The Cavaliers won out 79-73 (video recap).

Cleveland are the best team in the league right now. 36-1 at home, they seem assured of topping the league and enjoying that crucial home advantage in the playoffs, with the Lakers losing to Charlotte last night and falling 3 games back. Little doubt, either, that this is the best supporting cast LeBron has had. Mo Williams and Delonte West have formed a tenacious backcourt, with ample distance-shooting backup off the bench from 'Boobie' Gibson and Wally Sczerbiak. 'Wild Thing' Anderson Varejao adds extraordinary energy to the frontcourt while the experience of Smith and Ilgauskas will be a huge piece of the playoff push. Just imagine what this team could do if Ben Wallace returns locked in and ready to go.

However, these talented players are dwarfed by James. His 25 points and 12 rebounds were almost nothing special. Oftentimes his triple-doubles feel like nothing special. The statistics don't fully explain how he takes hold of a game, how he refuses to allow his team to lose at home. For all the squabbling over the MVP voting, you might think there was some kind of debate. It masks the fact that LeBron James' 08-09 season has showcased the sort of ability and achievement that are just waiting to be capped with a title. Forget the regular season MVP - a Finals MVP would place this season squarely in the history books. They call him King James for a reason.

It's no wonder that they're the Presidential pick to represent the East in the finals.

Meanwhile, this loss for the Pistons kept the race for 7th and 8th seeds in the East wide open, with Chicago also losing, and Charlotte's victory. Which actually wasn't that much of a surprise for Brett Hainline of Queen City Hoops, who outlined how results could look (Box 2) as the Bobcats gun for their first ever playoff appearance.

Overhauling Detroit wasn't mentioned, and I think they'll probably make it. Hamilton, Prince, Dice, Wallace and Iverson, even misfiring, really have too much talent, grit and experience not to. Iverson looked good off the bench and could really help them through this rough patch, although he's not happy with the role. Stuckey, Maxiell and Bynum are good young players that can provide important bursts. The Pistons won't be returning to the East finals this season, but if they make the playoffs, no-one should be taking them lightly.

Scientist Studies

2009-04-01T09:45:00.004+01:00

Wow, this is really huge. John S. Wilkins at Evolving Thoughts reports on a paper that would rewrite the rulebook on evolutionary theory. It's not often, or ever, that you get to read about a change in a field so cataclysmic that it completely changes the outlook on a whole field, certainly not one so important or controversial as evolutionary theory.

If true, the theory of Empedoclean Evolution would totally discredit natural selection, in this Darwin anniversary year of all times. Professor Augustus P. Rillful's paper concerning the importance of horizontal transfer of genes (for example by viral and bacterial mechanisms) foreshadows a comprehensive understanding of all sides of speciation.

Looks like a Nobel-prizewinner, doesn't he?

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Meanwhile, a couple of other interesting links I found in my morning perusal:

A really fascinating post at Genetic Future about the marketing strategy personal genomics company 23andMe are using. I've always really liked that name, incidentally. Their plan is to form a community of users based around their "mommy bloggers" who'll chat about pregnancy and kids. Daniel McArthur suggests mothers-to-be might graduate from comparing weight gains to genotypes, splashing out on DNA testing kits for their loved ones to determine how their offspring might turn out. It really could be a fantastic marketing masterstroke, making this information seem relevant to a big-spending demographic.

It hasn't gone down well with Steve Murphy "The Gene Sherpa," who highlights the effect it could have on the clinical load. Imagine having to somehow convince a pregnant mother that their child will turn out perfectly normal despite that elevated heart disease risk factor.

It occured to me lately quite how fortunate I am. There are a few science columns I read by guys in their 50s that mention that they'll wait a couple more years for the price to drop on personal genome sequencing, and then they're doing it. That is, getting hold of the sequence for a fraction of their genome, the size and price of which is dependent on the package and company they go for. 23andMe's service tests for a number of significant (disease-indicating) variations at 600,000 positions, at the fairly affordable price of $399. A couple of other operators are in the $1,000-2,500 range, testing roughly a million polymorphisms. Each service is aimed at providing estimates of their customer's 'genetic risk.'

Meanwhile, Knome (another really great name, and tagline!) offer a complete personal genome sequence and analysis, for a somewhat-heftier price. This year-old article suggests a figure of $350,000 (wikipedia haggles down to $99,500) , which would include ongoing support by a team of geneticists and bioinformaticians, apparently (career bells start ringing...). And would you believe it, they output on a sparkly new USB key!

But it won't be in the hundreds of thousands forever. Certainly in 20 years we should anticipate it will be affordable for us regulars - indeed this wide availability is a crucial point of all the genetic dystopias we've been busily envisaging since Human Genome Project results started coming through in 2000. Of course, we all expect health insurance premiums to be calculated on the basis of our genetic disease risk. A short step indeed to Gattaca.

I fully anticipate that within my lifetime I'll be able to have a browse through the complete sequence of As, Cs, Ts and Gs that determine so much about me, without breaking the bank. I only hope I'll be savvy enough to understand what some of it means. It's magical really, and represents an comprehension of human biology standing on the brink of the unimaginable. Beyond it lies real sci-fi territory.

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Are viruses alive? Yes or No? This question is a controversial one at ERV, where there's frustration at a recent review in Nature Reviews: Microbiology (Bear in mind that with an impact factor of ~15, that's a pretty hefty journal to go spitting on virologists in). The notion of excluding viruses from the "Tree of Life" seems a peculiar one to me: they have played such a huge part in the development of life, and continue to have a huge role in living systems, it really doesn't make sense on a practical level. Ultimately the use of having such a tree is to understand the relationships within it between living things, and the history of their development, and given that viruses have such relationships, they should really be in. That would, at least, be my view from a practical standpoint.

There's an interesting question here anyway, about our definition, ever hazy, of life. It can't rest on autonomy, as last time I checked humans, among other species, wouldn't do terribly well left on our own. Nor can we disqualify viruses simply because it's hard to trace their lineages, as unsatisfying as it may be if we are unable to reach the root of the tree. As we scrabble around trying to find the boundary between living and non-living we naturally enter into questions of abiogenesis. It's a pretty fascinating area to think about, and ill-served by artificially imposing living/dead boundaries.

Good News For People Who Love Bad News

2009-03-30T22:30:00.000+01:00

The latest post at Bad Science has me creasing my brow. Not that that's unusual - Ben Goldacre's Guardian column (granted, I tend to read it 'second-hand' online) is pretty consistent but this week he makes a point about journalism in suicide cases that put me heavily in mind of the first episode of Charlie Brooker's new series Newswipe.

I've actually not been that huge a fan of Brooker - comedy's a hit and miss thing and I'm not hugely forgiving at the best of times. Charlie's heavily purile streak has been enough to put me off in the past - while Screenwipe certainly had its moments, it doesn't take a truly great wit to find humour in sub-par TV, so it often seemed a poor replacement for half-watching with a group of friends.

But there's a sickness in journalism that needs confronting: rife with spin and sensationalism, prizing production over content and self-obsessed to a ludicrous degree, it's already a much maligned profession and Brooker is in worthy territory here, cutting it down to size. His irreverent approach, relentless cynicism, and eye for a telling clip are actually a perfect combination (the editing in this program is really excellent, maybe the key to the whole shebang). This may be his true vocation.

There's a welcome appearance from the absurd resident poet Tim Key, and a segment explaining the convergence of PR and journalism. Spleens are well and truly vented. A brief section on re-branding the recession is a slight misfire, but Brooker's punchy treatment of stories in the news is great, and would seem right at home on Have I Got News For You.

And finally, the bit that puts me in mind of Goldacre (from about the 24 minute mark), which above all the rest I'd recommend watching. You'd struggle to claim that it's funny when Charlie picks up on the recent coverage of mass-shooting in Germany and contrasts the advised media coverage with the actuality. Like Goldacre's article, Newswipe highlights the callous disregard for 'the public interest' in a field where it should be most critical. There's a combination of malignancy and insanity there that has to be rooted out.

Of course, it's a dysfunction we can probably blame on no-one but ourselves. The irony would of course appeal to few people more than to that perennial misanthrope, Charlie Brooker.

Newswipe airs Wednesdays, 22:30 on BBC4. At time of writing, episode one was available on the BBC's iPlayer here, for a further 5 days.

How to be Perfect Men

2009-03-25T16:20:00.001Z

Yet another piece of the BBC's ongoing double celebration of Charles Darwin (200 years since his birth, 150 years since The Origin of the Species - do keep up), I found part 2 of Andrew Marr's "Darwin's Dangerous Idea" to be a decent hour's diversion. Telling the story of natural selection's place within political thought in the past 150 years, Marr rattles through the development of the depiction of natural selection as "Survival of the fittest," and the development from there of 'social darwinism.' Tracing this fibre leads us to some dark places: first to some 'harmless' eugenics, then the extremely harmful variety, from which we emerge to view a 'rehabilitation' of the theory in the service of equality and universal human rights. In polished, professional OU style Marr gives us a glimpse of the ever-shifting future before saying his adieus.
Marr is on good form, actually. He's a very likeable presenter, suitably wry for dealing with the charming Olde Worlde racism of the 19th Century gentlemen we encounter, but with the necessary solemnity for the more weighty and grave matters. And he does a pretty decent job with the science! There were a couple of mis-cues that niggled, but nothing terribly important. Towards the end he gets a bit eager over some recent research and starts talking about "joining his black brothers," but there's a scientist on hand to calm him down, thankfully. It's all rather endearing.

Well, maybe one thing. This Darwin season has been a bit of a mixed blessing. Fantastic that it gets people talking about important science, certainly. However, I have misgivings - increasingly one wonders if viewers grasp the separation between the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, and its originator, or its applications. These are separate things, and for the same reason I dislike terms such as "Darwinism," because we don't understand evolution as Darwin did. Indeed, we should to hone our understanding, not immortalise it.

After all, if Evolutionary theory best describes how the diversity of life on the planet came about, then its implications, applications or fanbase is irrelevant. Not that this will sink in with the sort of people who'll cheerfully tell you Hitler's acceptance of evolution is a dent to its credibility. Hardly a battle worth fighting.

Marr's story takes us from the entry of Darwin's theory into public understanding and explains its mutation by liberal thinkers into a eugenics movement. Improving the underclasses for work or war piqued many interests at the time, as did ridding the wealthy nations of the "feeble-minded" once and for all. This is an interesting segment. Bluff casual-racists take it in turns to say hopelessly un-PC things that a modern audience can chuckle at. We end up wondering about comparitive, situational morality, whether simply not-being-a-racist was truly saintly behaviour for the 19th century.

But of course these ideas are not as innocuous as they first seem. With a new age of understanding beckoning in genetics, the heinous acts when these ideas were last in vogue are an important reminder of why we do view eugenics as being as sinister as it is outdated. The Holocaust throws a large shadow over proceedings, as it must. As a culmination of 'bad Darwinism,' the most evil occurence in human history came about. Shortly afterwards, the UN considers common human descent a key part of the puzzle where human equality is concerned.

And like that, we're into the present, seeing how a gene database and genetic counselling service has allowed the near-elimination of Tay-Sachs disease in New York. This case is interesting, although it has much more to do with Mendelian genetics or Watson-Crick DNA modelling than it does Darwin! Still, as an illustration of the "personal genetic decisions of the future" it's a good point. The combination of modern technological advancement with a more traditional pro-life mindset is an interesting one, and the self-denial involved, in an age where we are meant to be able to have children as we like with whoever we like, is remarkable.

Finally, a consideration for the post-genomic age which will be upon us sooner than we think. Marr picks up on a "new intelligence gene variant" which has been proposed and may be more prevalent in Europeans than those of African descent. That's a maybe, controversial and recent. But with sequencing and bioinformatics getting cheaper and quicker, accurate and studies into the genetic basis of intelligence are virtually inevitable. The underlying fact is that we cannot naively wait for the new genetic technologies to creep into our lives. DNA analysis will have wide-ranging effects from job recruitment to health insurance. Coupled with IVF technology, gene manipulation can go further still, going beyond the boundaries of disease into realms that earlier eugenics proponents never dreamed of. Before too long we could find ourselves attempting to define 'feeble-mindedness' again, and our society needs to be robust enough to withstand that in advance.

Ultimately, we are still putting words in Darwin's mouth. Nice words, true, but just as the Nazis spun evolutionary theory into something terrible, we're taking the truth and reading it how it suits us. Which is a shame, really. If the history of science can teach us anything, it's that truths can be discovered, but that values must be hard-won.

The 3 episodes of Darwin's Dangerous Idea are available on BBC iPlayer here for a very short while, I'd recommend episode 2 mostly, but it's all good stuff.

Those who place great emphasis on science are also the first to abuse it

2009-03-18T15:58:00.004Z

I've criticised Pharyngula before. It's sort of like when you've had a crush on someone, admired little things about them, picked out things you like about the way they wear their long dark hair, their clothes which are cheap and ready but perfectly in place, their ability to write helpfully and clearly about science. A couple of years later, when you've had some separation, you might be over them when you see them heavily cropped, in a designer dress and only ever ranting about the Pope being evil. A walking advert for the ludicrous "Out Campaign.*"

You keep an eye on them and you resent them. It's emotionally exhausting, I don't mind admitting.

Where do I still agree with Myers? Well... Science must be as apolitical as possible. You don't go into scientific exploration knowing the results in advance, much less in order to confirm your current opinions. You're testing hypotheses, you don't know what you'll come up with, and you don't serve up results with a side-order of heaped invective...

Fuck.

Those fears I had that the sclogosphere (trust me, that'll catch on) might not be a good substitute for peer-reviewed journals are further reinforced. I don't know if Myers has read the original paper (I intend to find it when I visit campus later) but he links to a news source. This study has been reinterpreted by a journalist even before it received the Pharyngula treatment!

Contrast with Ed Yong at Not Exactly Rocket Science, who only uses primary research papers, and does his best to fully understand the research first (read his rules). No reinterpreted headlines here. There's a reason this has become my favourite science blog. A soothing balm, and my new crush!

Is Myers' interpretation accurate? Possibly, I can't rule it out. A biased conclusion can be the correct one if you hitch to the right wagon. But it's certainly not proven. Psychological research has shown a large range of effects religious practice can have on believers, some more intuitive than others. It's a complex set of contributing factors and jumping straight for the "fear and ignorance" parameters seems hugely simplistic and convenient.

PZ Myers has a nice choir to preach to by now, a well-rehearsed line in atheism, a total disregard for the philosophical/theological heritage present-day thought (including much of his) comes from, and plenty of bile. He's certainly a pretty skilled writer, I envy him that. I know full well that he and his followers are content in the knowledge that they are the most rational people in the world, and that's fine. I can only hope my views are somewhat less reductive.

A further annoyance: Scientific knowledge, we all understand, has been built up from foundation levels to much more intricate and detailed platforms. I seem to be reading so much right now where scientists stride boldly and rationally into other areas with no foundation whatsoever. I hope I at least have the good grace to be tentative!

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There's a whole quagmire here that I shouldn't get into, but the very next post he's made, about Catholicism's opposition to condom use in Africa (an area I should agree with him on), also winds me up. There's a glaring clash in his view that you can't deny human nature, when it's juxtaposed with decrying certain human behaviours as pathological. Read Pharyngula for a few weeks (probably more like days) and you'll understand Myers applies this idea of pathology to a wide range of irrational behaviours.

Admittedly, sex is a pretty fundamental drive for human beings. But one has to wonder, if we've been prone to irrational belief throughout recorded history, and show few signs of stopping now, what's the difference? Can sex be described as pathological? Is hardcore rationalism denying human nature? In the latter case, I think the answer is certainly.

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*So, if I were worried about religion causing evil to come about because it creates factions that hate each other I'm sure as hell the first thing I'd do is create a new faction that aggressively states its difference to all others
Furthermore, I'd want to alienate moderates with my "if you're not with us, you're against us" attitude. Comparing myself to the great liberators and civil-rights campaigners of history would be my choice technique for squaring things off.

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Capital letters in headings? I really don't know. I used to, religiously, "every word as important as the word that precedes it" and all that. But in the middle of typing out that title it just struck me as a bit ridiculous, more than a little pompous, frankly.
I shall just see which whims take me.

Nothing Bad To Say

2009-03-16T17:15:00.002Z

Little later than planned/promised but here goes with a trio of films that I utterly adored in the past couple of months:

Waltz With Bashir was as visually arresting as I could have wished for. This telling of a set of events in the 1982 Israeli campaign in Lebanon is presented as an animated documentary with a personal tilt, where director Ari Folman re-learns events that he was part of some 26 years previously. There was a sort of guilt that set in for me when I paid attention to the documentary, that I wasn't paying full attention to the animation, and vice versa.

The effect of the technique used is highly reminiscent of rotoscoping - during the interviews Folman conducts it would take a mammoth effort to avoid comparisons with A Waking Life - and complements the film perfectly. Folman is exploring his lost memory in a perfectly post-modern way, forming human bridges to his forgotten past and allowing enough reconstruction to take place that his one niggling dream-scene slots right in.

And for this, the presentation is perfect. Waltz With Bashir is one half dream to one half devastating reality. While some scenes allow Folman or his contemporaries to float dully off into reverie, remembering the changed towns they came home to and surreal things they saw, others heighten the terror of the truth: in this cartoon world bullets, bombs and child soldiers are more present than they could be if filmed.

This is to say nothing of the wonderful score set down by the great Max Richter or the macabre yet surprisingly gentle humour that runs throughout the film. Or the perfect compassion that fills every frame, every pore. Waltz With Bashir is a work that treats its character as human, that steers away from simple answers. And seems more real than real, right into its final reel. Then, it leaves the viewer with no doubts about what reality is.

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Documentary also receives a make-over in The Class ("Entre Les Murs") where, confusingly, the author of the semi-autobiographical subject material of the same title plays the main protagonist, François, who is French teacher to a class of teenagers in inner-city Paris. The students (played by real students in a semi-improvised fashion) are a mixed bunch. Not only is talent and committment as varied as might be expected in any classroom, but François' charges include pupils of European, West Indian, Chinese and both North and West African descents, which on occasion leads to tension.

The vast majority of the film takes place in a single classroom. Multiple cameras are used to pick out the subjects in their classroom, one focussing on the teacher, another on the pupils as they respond, and one more has an eye for detail. The sensation when things go well is of a warm embrace, which can quickly turn sour and claustrophobic. Our omniscience extends only beyond these 4 walls on a handful of occasions, when events are discussed in the playground,headmaster's office, or among the traumatised occupants of the staff-room.

On the battleground, François' familiar teaching style is capable of engaging and delivering great results, but can also de-rail proceedings hugely. The 9 months we observe are certainly not without their highlights, but it's a warts-and-all depiction where a mis-step can send repercussions reverberating through the rest of the school. And with François' attitude, and that of his class, mis-steps are inevitable, making parent-teacher councils a microcosm of conservative-liberal debates in schools (and media) everywhere. The Class is a film that doesn't hesitate to deliver joyous moments alongside crushing ones, presenting a hero who can easily fall and villains we desperately want to pull through. More-real-than-real, it feels like we've taught a full school year in just over two hours.

---

Already reality is a theme here, as I come to my favourite film of recent times, The Wrestler. I don't want to qualify that because if I have a more perfect cinema experience anytime soon I doubt my heart will take the strain. I can't do this justice (although I shall try) because The Wrestler not only has to be seen, it must be lived! Darren Aronofsky's 4th feature film takes a less-than-trendy form of entertainment and makes it a universal tale of broken dreams and triumph.

Applying compassion liberally to the semi-pro wrestling ring seems like it should be a thankless task, but among the sweat, broken glass, staple guns and chest hair, Mickey Rourke makes it easy. It's hard to imagine a more outstanding acting performance than the one we get from Rourke (it was well documented he took training for the role seriously), a career role where his fading wrestling glory sits awkwardly alongside his difficult romance with stripper Cassidy (Marisa Tomei) and reconciliation with estranged daughter Stephanie (Evan Rachel Wood).

Much though I admire Sean Penn, to say Rourke was passed over for the Oscar is a mammoth understatement. The Ram, hardly ever off the screen, displays all the scars of the past across his face and stands boldly, beautifully and self-destructively above his circumstances and (immaculately realised) surroundings. The elation pouring out from the screen when The Ram interacts with his fans, even during a memorable scene where he puts in a showstopping performance behind a deli counter, feels nothing but unutterably true.

Things don't go The Ram's way, precisely. But it's never lost on the viewer that this film is about performance. Every time we view Rourke, channeling Randy, from behind, taking in his gait, his shabby environs (that feel absolutely accurate), we feel how different this is to life in the ring, that everything outside that is a pale shadow. The joy when he does what he does best, the pride that radiates from the screeen during the ring scenes and the respect he automatically commands when he's in costume cast aside any feeling we might have that we're watching a lovable loser, and never more than in the final scene.

As Randy Robinson stands atop the ropes, trembling, whipping the crowd into a frenzy, ready to perform his signature move, we see him for who he would be, and at that moment is: The one man standing triumphant as the universal, doing the thing he's best at and proud of. In short, being the greatest.

That's also how I feel about this film. I'm 100% as slavishly enamoured with it as I sound. It's beautifully made in almost every regard, it's emotionally brutal, it feels more-real-than-real, it understands that both truths and happy endings are subjective, and it leaves us believing that things matter. It embraces all humanity through one character, and not just the pretty bits.

---

What makes these films special? I'm not certain, but I've been trying to trace several threads. Technicality is important, films have to be well-made for any theme, however powerful, to kick in. Novelty, gimmicks, distinctive styles are not to be sniffed at, provided there's some content behind them. A full world, populated by characters as complex as human beings always are, is a must. A sense of purpose, a meaningful story to tell, makes a film worthwhile. These films are of consequence, in the way they are written and made, not by being consciously weighty.

And I suspect the 'transcendence' I feel about these particular films comes from symbolism. Within each, the well-presented particular is able to represent more universal human and emotional forms. I feel particularly fortunate to have seen all these things coming together three times already this year.

Death On Display

2009-03-11T22:39:00.003Z

I put together an extremely-short-notice round for a music quiz on Monday night (it was written during the first two rounds). So maybe you can take pleasure in getting these right (this was probably the easiest). If you get 10 then you can kid yourself you would have won the quiz, and with it some novelty vinyl. The theme was "Dead Musicians," necro:

Which longhaired singer killed himself in the greenhouse of 171 Lake Washington Boulevard East in 1994?
The killer of John Lennon, Mark David Chapman, was reputedly obsessed with which American novel?
Which big band leader disappeared in 1944 on US Army business, travelling to entertain troops in France? His body was never found.
Influential bluesman Robert Johnson died from drinking poisoned whiskey at a Missisippi crossroads in 1938. Legend has it he owed his phenomenal guitar-playing abilities to whom?
What age were Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, Robert Johnson and Jim Morrison when they met their untimely ends?
Who was shot dead in September 1996 in Las Vegas after attending a Mike Tyson boxing bout?
Who hung himself in Macclesfield in 1980, shortly after listening to Iggy Pop's album "The Idiot"?
The lead singer of which psychedelic rock band died in a Parisian bathtub in 1971, having snorted heroin?
Which Welsh co-writer of The Holy Bible has been missing under mysterious circumstances since 1995?
What did Don McLean famously call the day of Buddy Holly's death in a plane crash (slightly more than) 50 years ago?

Of course, I had to hastily apologise that in questions 2 and 9 I could not guarantee the death of the persons in question. And to add that in 7 that the relationship was not causative. I'll put the answers in a comment. Tell me how you did?

Something Bad To Say

2009-03-04T19:30:00.000Z

It's worrying when you find yourself liking a whole string of things in a row. If you're anything like me at least; you start worrying about whether you've lost your critical faculties, or about the extent by which you've been influenced by media hype. Film-wise, this early stretch of the year can be a mixed blessing - all the Oscar-worthy pieces are trotted out and the self-doubt begins to blossom.

These posts, another will follow shortly, really aim to say there are films, and there are films. On the one hand, films can be well made, roles well acted, stories diverting, scenes good-looking. Films can be good. But just now I can't help but feel that doesn't cut it. Here are 3 such:

Milk was good. Very good really. The case of Harvey Milk was always going to be one that deserved a very careful and meaningful treatment. And combined with Sean Penn, it was an unsurprising Oscar-role. Extremely watchable and with a great cast, Milk had the epic scale I'd hoped for, and yet a refreshing focus on the story - which is a good one.

A little self-consciously worthy, but it's very difficult to avoid that in a human rights film, during awards season, with such a long list of notable names in the cast and with Gus Van Sant at the helm. He's good, but he does veer a little towards the sentimental. In spite of that gripe, I was very pleased with it.

Frost/Nixon was fun. It looked good, and seemed well written - the to-and-fro between Martin Sheen, Frank Langella, Kevin Bacon, Oliver Platt, Sam Rockwell and Matthew MacFadyen filled a happy couple of hours. It did feel a bit like a film convinced of its tale's own significance but which never bothered to relay that element to the audience. I laughed - out loud even! - a few times, but still, on the walk home it left little to think about (other than Michael Sheen's ability as a mimic - The Damned United is also released soon). Ron Howard continues to bemuse.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was nearly 3 hours long. This bloated love-story-with-a-twist isn't without its good moments, but it's hard to see why anyone felt it deserved such epic treatment. To the credit of the filmmakers, the 'curious' situation the backwards-ageing Brad Pitt finds himself in is made to seem natural within the film, incidental to his romance with Cate Blanchett. But this new focal point isn't actually that interesting - Benjamin and Daisy don't seem that fated, or tortured, or even important.

I also found myself wondering why there was so little colour in the past. I appreciate that 'the world of the '50s wasn't awash with neon lighting. But this film seemed to exhibit a pathological fear of colour, or bright lighting. THE PAST IS BROWNY-GREY! Combined with its length, the overall impression was that I'd taken a 3 hour nap.

I thought of David Fincher as a maker of snappy, punchy films. Alien3, Se7en and The Game were pretty dynamic and fully enjoyable. Fight Club even more so, a really excellent modern film. Benjamin Button, combined with admirable drag Zodiac, really screams that he should stay the right side of the 140 minute mark.

Three films, many positive points between them. But something missing from each. It does occur to me that these are very similar story types. Well maybe - it is awards season, so the major releases are rarely irreverent and frequently pretty wordy, po-faced pieces. Sort of like old paintings left out in the sun. Later I'm going to tell you what I loved instead, and hopefully put a bit of effort into working out why.

Ironic (Amateur Aesthetics Within)

2009-02-18T13:29:00.007Z

I have made a stab at reading Hegel's Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics recently. I'm altogether lacking any sort of background reading on the subject, so I will avoid any kind of overall analysis. As ever when I over-reach into the realms of philosophy, I found it difficult to retain a consistent focus on the author's arguments, but sporadically bits and pieces would flash at me from the page and I'd be "in the zone" for the briefest while. These little passages of illumination are totally exhilarating and worth some of the hardship the rest of the book might bring.

Indeed I imagine my lack of context often means that I am nowhere near understanding the point the author is making, but on my more superficial level I can still happily derive satisfaction from the flights of fancy these misinterpretations send me on.

From this book? Sweet spots I will recall fondly must certainly include the distinctions between art and nature, and also Hegel's explanation of "the antithesis" and its key role in the definitions of both humanity and art. Hegel seems to envision a series of fundamental dualities at the heart of man - something that really struck a chord with me. I think I'd like to explore this further.

Hegel also devotes a few pages to "Irony" (he criticises a specific brand of such - but I'm not acquainted with this, so again I apply to the general and familiar). He's not hot on irony - after all much of his discussion of art describes the relationship between the artistic work in particular and the absolute, the universal form. "Irony," however, relates to "I," and lacks this earnest approach to the divine and true. It plunges all into relativism with the effect that "every positive matter is annihilated into this abstract freedom and unity." The ironical observer has no bonds - all things around him are lifeless and representative of nothing. It's further intimated that such an observer "looks down in superiority on all mankind besides."

I can't think about this in terms of the art of Hegel's day. But this does fuel an idea I've had for a while - that in great works of art, whatever medium, there is a core that cries out to the observer with a passion and a purity. This makes it pretty easy to contrast the heart-felt with the cynical, the functional and the deliberately, knowingly crass. I find myself wondering what the great man himself would have made of the self-knowing hordes that fill Stealth vs Rescue Rooms on a weekly basis.

Taking Refuge

2009-01-29T23:04:00.006Z

So, a rough day is enough to precipitate a retreat. Such a wonderful retreat, however. One of the things I always appreciate about Nottingham (in comparison to Salisbury, which, lovely though it is, is a backwater) is that there are cinemas here that screen films I actually want to see. The other week I finally saw Waltz With Bashir, and it was worth the wait. Tonight I went to see The Wrestler (in fact, I immersed myself in it completely, and came up drenched in sweat and tears).

I'll note my thoughts on it tomorrow (clue: I liked it), when I can gather them. Suffice to say, combined with a stop-off at Lee Rosy's, it was a fairly perfect evening and I felt positively resurrected walking home, my day of dissertation-toil and application-frustration well behind me. But for now I just want to note that the feature was preceded by this trailer, the first time I've seen it in full:

Sure enough, Milk is next in my list of must-sees. I don't even care that it could be a bit of an Oscars love-in, or that it's one of those deliberately serious-accessible films. I care that this is almost as 'important' as a film could conceivably be dubbed, and it is as emphatically pro-equality with regard to sexuality as you could say Malcolm X or Remember The Titans were with regard to race (for some reason I don't award Brokeback Mountain this accolade, maybe unfairly, but in some way I don't feel it made the same point).

So within my (admittedly myopic and goldfish-like) experience, this is sort of a watershed event in cinema, possibly similarly to Milk's real-world impact. Gays are OK, in a slightly schmaltzy way. Maybe I'm just emotional tonight, but I can't wait.

-------------------------------

I know, I know, I'm so melodramatic. But here it is, and it's no big surprise; I'm tired of listening to partisan arguments for the time being, and more tired still of participating. It's a shame because I've often learnt valuable things in such discourse, both about myself and the subjects in hand. But the internet is an uncivil place. Maybe it's the anonymity, the testosterone, or the ease of finding allies in a global network. At any rate this over-abundant aggro taints everything, and it's boring.

While I thought I had a sense of humour, I'm clearly not terribly thick-skinned, and I wouldn't care to be either. It hurts me in some way to see so much hatred, both casual and calculated. I can't find the precise quote (I do need to watch Stalker again soon; I will correct this later) but when man is born he is sensitive to all things and drinks them in, and when he dies he is cold and hard as stone. Anyway, this is all a bit E/N but, like, whatever.

Positive Feedback

2009-01-27T07:41:00.005Z

Given how little I understand about economics (even as, I would suppose, a relatively interested observer) I'm hesitant to stick my oar in, but here's what scares me about the current incarnation of the stock market.

What bothers me about the current situation is that the oft-cited level of "confidence" is twice divorced from truly representing the "grass-roots" status of the economy. Through interpretation into share prices and then aggregation into larger indices, the efficacy of businesses themselves is obscured. And indeed, traders are making individual decisions on the basis of their "confidence in the market" - a third factor of whether these indices might go up or down.

Surely there is an integral and unavoidable positive feedback loop in this system? In short, because the market is deteriorating, it will deteriorate further. Positive feedback mechanisms are by their very nature immoderate - they "snowball". It further seems that there is nothing in the current set-up of the economy that discourages this state of affairs. Indeed, for the players within the system, continual fluctuation is presumably favourable. Whether the same can be said for the broader population, I'm not sure.

I do know I'm not alone in questioning the foundations of our economy at this time. Terms such as 'confidence' seem indicative of a bizarre form of mysticism in play, and we can't help but wonder if the traders understand this much better than we do.

-------------------------------

I do my best to stay away from the still-fucking-ludicrous 'debate' between Christianity and atheism, which is not a new thing. Every e-mail I receive or youtube link I get forwarded just further entrenches my view that human beings need something to argue about just as much as they need something to worship. That Dawkins, Hitchens et al. seem to believe that their "one big push" will put the matter to bed simply bemuses me.

It's difficult to determine whether the garbage spewed on each side is intellectual dishonesty of the worst kind or merely old-fashioned ignorance. It's easy for laymen to misrepresent scienfitic theory, for example, and scientists who rush headlong into philosophy don't get it right straight away. But arguing over Hitler's belief system (so, y'know, we can decide whose column the 6 million Jews go in) is as reprehensible as it is ridiculous.

But of course we know why this happens. The public debate is much less the proving ground for ideas than an intellectual boxing match. Anyone who has been punched in the face knows that immediately afterwards nothing matters but to strike back, by whatever means. It rarely attracts the kind of person who would graciously cede a point when incorrect, but instead the chest-thumping public schoolboy.

The discourse isn't worthless. But clearly we need to tinker with the format. The more we scrutinise the arguments we sink into, at least one point becomes clear: We are descended from apes, but not by as much as we'd like to think.

Radio happenings (happened)

2009-01-16T19:49:00.009Z

Anyone fortunate enough to have been listening to Alex Hale's excellent show on URN late on Wednesday night (it had a global audience that evening at least) will have heard a live set from The Wandering Goose. The Wandering Goose are a Canadian trio that Alex encountered outside his house the night before. They make sweet folk-y music. He got chatting to them and radio history was made.

They did not disappoint, being clearly impressively game. It was really lovely and helped a whole lot of people through some revision, I dare say.

Alex has uploaded (with permission, obviously) the tracks to last.fm. They are both streamable and set as a free download so you should go NOW and listen to your heart's content.

Alex's radio show, Do Not Disconnect, is jolly good fun even when I'm being slandered, and airs Wednesdays during term-time on URN, from 11pm-1am (GMT). You can listen live from the URN website.

(I also heartily recommend Transmission, which packs a tremendous variety of sound and goes out 9-11pm on a Monday night.)

Claims to the Promised Land

2009-01-07T20:10:00.009Z

Recently I read Exodus by Leon Uris. It was odd reading it at a time when the conflict in Palestine was flaring up again. My views of the book are extremely coloured by Israel's actions over the past couple of years. I wrote a review of the book on Goodreads here, but here are some details that struck me over the past few days.

I characterised Exodus as a kind of modern-day appendix to the Old Testament. The details it goes into are more suited to a history than a novel, and certain assumptions (of Jewish uprightness, European malice etc.) go unchallenged throught. Equally I would call it a melodrama where besieged Israel is set upon by archvillains Europe, Britain and Arabia in turn. I do believe there's a large amount of truth in the book, but extracting it from the ferocious pro-Zionist bias proves exhausting. I closed the book a last time with almost as strong a sympathy with Palestinians as I began it.

I was most vexed by the fictional characters in the book. Uris creates characters of high significance on a national level, of impeccable virtue and high ability, and infers from these that the nascent Israel was populated by superhuman beings (who are also quite tiresome - there are precisely two good characters in this book). Exodus has the feel of a re-written history book. I was continually comparing it with the similarly lengthy, similarly primed work by Solzhenitsyn, August 1914. Fictional characters sit alongside real generals there as well, but August 1914 is saturated with a rare compassion and humanity that's in scarce supply here. The crimes against the Jews were beyond all measurement, but that didn't allow me to partake in the same glee the author appears to feel at each bloody riposte to their enemies.

I was surprised at just how little mention of faith there was in the book. Inasmuch as this can be a reliable source on the religion, I just don't get Judaism. The first warriors of the new Israel are absorbed in its history and traditions, and may well feel God is right behind them, but these are nationalists, not holy men.

Finally, Exodus is inconsistent in almost all regards. Uris will sometimes describe the Arabs as illiterate, pitiful people, the next minute stupid and lazy and later simply malign. On occasions he flirts with placing things in perspective but never follows through. Uris is capable of some good passages but I felt the standard slipped sometime after page 150, and didn't really recover. That's a sore blow to a 600-page tome.

I can't say I enjoyed reading it, but Exodus wasn't entirely a waste of my time. At least I can make a better approximation to the zealous Zionist's perspective on the conflict. Even if it may be quite a while before that comes in handy.

Our Ugly Response to Fundamentalism

2009-01-06T12:25:00.011Z

Science blogs can be fascinating. At least, that's when they're (mercifully) discussing science. The New Scientist's own blog, Short Sharp Science, is fairly reliable. Investigation of Scienceblogs.com can be both entertaining and rewarding. Its posterchild, Pharyngula, was pretty good, was quite consistently so for at least a few years.

Looking at Pharyngula today, I'm hugely disappointed. There is no science discussion here, no analysis of new findings. You would say that one post on the whole front page makes a scientific point, as opposed to discussing 'Science' as a cultural/political meta-subject. Most of Myer's posts, for a long time, have been about creationists and the political battleground. Of course, it's just the one guy, and his current thoughts. But there's a worrying overall trend.

A quick browse of related columns and channels on Scienceblogs, Blogger, Youtube and all over the web confirms: we spend as much time 'bashing down fundies' as we do discussing mankinds attempts to push forward the frontiers of our knowledge.

It's a pattern as seductive as it is ugly. Seeing our irrational 'enemy' out of their depth, we point, laugh and deride. I've indulged in it many times before and doubtless will again. I'll feel bad about it afterwards, but I still take that amount of pleasure in seeing extreme views dissected.

Additionally, it's entirely unproductive: I hesitate to use the clichéd term 'straw man,' but we mustn't be misled by the ease with which these positions are ridiculed. Religious fundamentalists can't be considered representative of faith, just as I wouldn't welcome the 'Professors' that frequently speak on their behalf.

There are, I suppose, two things I'd like to see. A degree of restraint on our part as scientists; having fun at the expense of other's ignorance is unlikely to reduce the gulf emerging between scientists and the general population. A more considered response is clearly required. And secondly, for scientists to use online resources to rediscover their love of discovery - and display it once in a while, too.

Edit: Just to add some positive to this post, here's the kind of science blogging that I do consider helpful, courtesy of Gene Expression (one of my favourites). In these articles the author tackles a subject that does get people thinking. They're a good example of how clear explanation can explain everyday phenomena that would otherwise be notched up to superstition. Now we just need to equip the population to understand such excellent writing.

Debating-Hall Blues

2009-01-04T19:01:00.003Z

I’m beginning to think like Boris Johnson. Give me an issue, any issue you like, and I am instantly ready to decry the meddling EU, unleash a deep guffaw in the direction of the Lib Dems, or recoil in horror from one of Livingstone’s horrific bendy-bus contraptions. At any moment I might seize upon one of our great country’s proud traditions and defend it against all-comers.

This is the result of ploughing through an anthology of his articles from the Telegraph, Guardian and Observer, Have I Got Views For You. And, despite my long-held policy of holding in contempt any book with the author’s face on the front (especially when said author is a conservative/car fanatic/‘TV personality’), I must admit to having rather liked it.

The articles are rarely more than five or six pages in length – and this is probably why the whole book has had such a brain-washing effect. Within each piece is the issue, as Boris sees it, a blinding riposte to those Trots/Lefties/Europhiles/Europeans, and a concise and punchy outline of the virtues of the Conservative approach. There can be little doubt that he knows how to perfectly frame an argument.

It’s immediately obvious that Johnson is possessed of a wonderful literate flair. His blustering style is imbued with a dazzling charm and wit, and his public school education is seeped into each and every page. The Lib Dems, he says, are muddle-headed mugwumps whose “policy on cake is pro-having it and pro-eating it.” He draws comparison between Virgil’s Aeneid and the Middle East, between the classic tragedies and modern sleaze.

Maybe this is what holds me back from fully entering the world of Boris – it takes just a sniff of debating-union glamour to summon images of the Tory benches during PMQs, bellowing and baying like so many drunken sixth-formers. A nerve is struck as soon as Blair is reeled out as a ‘public-school prefect’, and my flirtation with Conservatism is all but ended.

Instinctively too, there is shock and reproach a few hundred pages in, when one realises that one has given a persuasive, indeed masterful politician freedom to expound his views without response. Without the opposite and alternative viewpoints present when these pieces were first published. It was nearly too late – like a virus or a vampire he nearly won you over.

Have I Got Views For You should be a book you would ‘dip’ in and out of, but one needs to be more at ease with Johnson’s views than myself to find that enjoyable. Instead, I read it in one go, finding not entirely to my surprise that a) Boris, formerly a journalist, is a wonderful writer, that b) he takes a fairly centrist, moderate conservative stance on most things, and c) that the Mayor of London is of course much smarter than he makes out.

So this collection is a good start if one wants to know the mind of Boris – just take care you don’t end up knowing it too well.

A Selection of Albums, 2008

2009-01-02T14:43:00.008Z

In the interests of keeping this brief (it is a vain enterprise after all) I'm not going to try and eke out an order. Indeed, even the boundary between top and bottom tiers is an insecure one. Neither will I be making any particularly elaborate attempts to persuade you my selection is correct - I think these albums all speak for themselves.

A top 10:

Born Ruffians – Red, Yellow And Blue (Clattering sing-song with irresistible choruses)

Charlottefield – What Friends Are For (Yelping, convulsive rock. Sadly missed)

Gregor Samsa – Rest (Slowcore gems that gently tie your gut in knots)

Lau Nau – Nukkuu (Abstract pieces woven from threads of contentedness and peace)

Les Étoiles – Never To Alight (Fragile moments of dawn-touched solitude. Heartaching)

Little Joy – Little Joy (Fuzzy feelgood record just waiting for the summertime)

Parts & Labour – Receivers (Reeling noises and rolling drums suffused with epic melodies)

Peter Broderick – Float (As rich in understatement as in melancholy. Insanely more-ish)

Religious Knives – It’s After Dark (Surprisingly muscly, mesmerising rhythm and drone)

Sic Alps – U.S. Ez (Like a lo-fi static attic haphazardly littered with shambolic pop blasts)

A further 10:

Fuck Buttons – Street Horrrsing (Initially disappointing, now totally engrossing)

Haruka Nakamura – Grace (Songs in turn wistful, peaceful, joyful and simple)

Islaja – Blaze Mountain Recordings (Menacing experimental folk from a faraway cavern)

No Age – Nouns (Distorted melodies briefly flicker and the album’s past before you realise)

This Will Destroy You – This Will Destroy You (Beautifully executed post-rock)

War On Drugs – Wagonwheel Blues (Seemingly effortless shoegazy Americana)

Wetnurse – Invisible City (Scary in its ambition, terrifying in its execution)

Wildbirds & Peacedrums – Heartcore (Enchanting combination of folk and blues)

Wilderness – (K)No(W)Here (My first experience with the Wilderness formula)

Wolf Parade – At Mount Zoomer (Possibly the years biggest grower)

Interestingly, while many (a quarter!) bands in my list begin with the letter W, the sub-categorisation has resulted in a ghettoisation of these to the 'somewhat less essential' status. I cannot begin to imagine why. The following are also worthy of consideration.

Still good:

Shapes – Get Your Learn On EP

Gang Gang Dance – Saint Dymphna

El Heath – Winter Soundtrack

Why? - Alopecia

Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes

Grouper – Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (A failure on my part, to give this enough plays)

Lastly, there are a lot of things I intended to hear in 2008, but didn't. The first part of any year is always spent catching up on things missed the year before.

Still Need To Hear:

Asva

Conor Oberst

Fennesz

Flying Lotus

Four Tet

Fucked Up

Harvey Milk

Hauschka

Hercules & Love Affair

Lovvers

M83

Papier Tigre

Portishead

Sun Kil Moon

The Bug

William Burroughs

This final list should confirm that in fact my selection is hardly the most comprehensive out there. I posted a run-down of what I've actually been listening to the most, from my computer at least, on my last.fm page. It is here.

Together Or Alone - Solo 2003

2008-12-31T12:33:00.004Z

I've really fallen in love with Bakesale lately, and particularly this song. Here's a really nice solo version from 2003:

This is not, clearly, an obligatory end of 2008 post. That may come later but I can't imagine it matters. When I decide which are my favourite albums of the year (I haven't listened to that many 2008 albums really) I will probably post that.

Substitute

2008-12-30T20:42:00.005Z

The concept of Flat Daddies is giving me some pause for thought this evening. Quite simply, I struggle to know how I really feel about it.

It's wonderful that our feeling for parents, and the amount of love we have to give, are so deep that we can have real joy for a cardboard cut-out. If it helps families, then of course it must be tremendous. And it's fantastic that our free market could never leave such a crucial need unserved (albeit at $50 a pop - this is not a charity).

But it's also incredibly sad that a love that seems so real and vital between a child and their flesh-parent (so as not to discriminate against all the photo-parents out there) could seemingly be easily transferred to a thing.

What does this say about our contemporary view of relationships? These aren't posited as some kind of replacement, but still, how might this make a child feel about objects, as opposed to organisms? Might having this presence inhibit an infant's ability to find the attention that they need during their formative years?

Flat Daddies say on their site: "Experts believe the cutouts are a useful psychological device, especially for children, to help cope with the stress of long absences. It helps the family stay connected and is a constant reminder that even though mom or dad is thousands of miles away, they are still a part of their lives." I hope so. Clearly, I don't know what long-term research exists.

I sympathise greatly with the families that feel a Flat Daddy can help them. Kids should have a two parents, and where families have been wrenched apart through necessity (foreign policy notwithstanding) the effort to keep the other parent 'alive' in their child's mind must be a difficult one.

Getting Educated

2008-12-27T16:22:00.006Z

Christmas comes and Christmas goes, and in its wake yet more tomes are added to the small library I hope I can eventually plough through. With so many modern novels to read, how will I ever address those old epics? War & Peace, Dante's Divine Comedy, A Brief History of Time, Ulysses, The Iliad - we've all set aside some big names that we'll someday tackle, educating ourselves in the process, maybe finishing them in time for it to go on our gravestones.

Give up. I've come to terms with it. I'm never going to get through the complete works of Shakespeare. Austen is too dull. Infinite Jest is actually insultingly long, while Rainbow Six is too much for any one man to understand.

Reading is not all it's cracked up to be - getting things read to you, that's where it's at. Get onto the BBC site and listen to Milton's Paradise Lost, read by Anton Lesser. It's all about God and Satan and things, and contains some excellent words. It's like reading but less grind.

Episode 1 is available for just a couple more days. GO!

Grey Days

2008-12-24T17:59:00.001Z

It’s here. If all the headlines and news-talk didn’t hit home ‘til now, this is it. “Welcome to the recession.”

This is running through my mind as I stand just inside the door at Woolworths. The combination of dishevelled, half-stocked shelves and shuffling crowds plugs uncannily into the zombie-movie scenes that’re so in vogue online. I catch my hands sub-consciously wielding a pump-action shotgun. My nostrils flare and catch a whiff of pure desperation.

I haven’t been in a Woolworths for at least a year, and even then I was dragged in. I haven’t wanted to enter in a decade. That would be when I was buying Stereophonics singles on cassette (ah, that that could be the most embarrassing crime against taste I committed in that grand old store). Even then, all tacky books and oversized chocolate, it was well on the way to becoming a failing pound shop. Woolworth’s demise is hardly my fault. But it’s too much watching others pick over its stiffening corpse, let alone joining in the plunder myself. I move on.

Despair is thick in the air all around the town, on the final Saturday of financial life. Already the morning news reports declared “sell or bust”. Fairy lights in the windows of even the least festive stores are meant to drag in precious customers who seek to make every coin count. Isn’t desperation the currency of every Christmastime? Seasonal slogans in inappropriate places, the impossibility of reading our loved ones’ minds, a determination to make one day a delight for all concerned, all add up to a heady mix.

This year is different. I visit the only independent record store in town, even if it rarely has anything I’m looking for. I spend an hour in my favourite bookstore, just reading the back of novels, even if Waterstones has a better selection. In a way my interest in Christmas shopping has been rekindled now it’s a rescue mission. The sensation of economic decline is reinforced by the languid grey sky hanging heavily overhead.

The shoppers who laugh (for there are a few) are not happy. They are demented. They are in denial. They are drugged worshippers of a death cult, merrily embracing their end. I'm torn between scorn and pity.

There are vultures outside the town, eyeing up the carcasses, ready to strip our failing high street bare of all cashflow. Their prices are unmatchable, their efficiency undeniable and their appetite insatiable. Tescos have added another floor in order to sell more clothes. Week-to-week you needn’t go anywhere else, for anything.

If there’s one lesson I’d love us all to absorb, it would be to shop in places we like, re-learn the link between payment and prestige, and really consider what we value. ‘Bang for your buck’ pales into insignificance against the human cost of forsaking our independent shops in favour of sterile megastores. There must be a rebirth after the fall, and it is still within our power to determine quite what sort of phoenix will rise.

Doubt/Hope

2008-10-16T23:41:00.002+01:00

I'm back online! That said, not much has changed. Wildbirds & Peacedrums are my new favourite band, and I highly recommend you check out Heartcore, from which this single was taken.

Canada fails us

2008-09-09T20:20:00.001+01:00

NEWS LINK WITH SHOCKING STORY

This would not even be a crime in a civilised country!

My How We Laughed

2008-08-09T10:29:00.003+01:00

Stephen Hawking's Black Holes and Baby Universes (and other essays) is an interesting read, although prone to repeating itself, as each chapter derives from a lecure Hawking has actually given, hence background information tends to recur. To a relative layman, however, it relates some extremely fascinating and novel information - I had no idea that Einstein had rejected quantum theory, nor that Black Holes actually emit certain particles/energy.

Maybe more surprisingly, it's extremely well written, if brief. It is a warm, accessible book that includes physics (a few chapters are actually more like an autobiography). Indeed, at the end you may find yourself thirsting for more detail, more of a challenge. Far from seeming stuffy, Hawking displays an easy wit throughout. One neat aside reads:

"What all this means is that going through a black hole is unlikely to prove a popular and reliable method of space travel. First of all, you would have to get there by travelling in imaginary time and not care that your history in real time came to a sticky end. Second, you couldn't choose your destination. It would be like travelling on some airlines I could name. "

Far from being unique, these gentle quips appear throughout his writing. They're welcome, even if I find the idea of them being read out in Hawking's famous synthesized voice a bit disconcerting.

More famous for his writing ability and humour is Bill Bryson. If a book makes you laugh out loud once, it's surely worth reading. If a book draws worried enquiries from relatives in other buildings, well, maybe its worth blogging about? The Life and Times of The Thunderbolt Kid is one such book.

Bryson cuts loose completely here. It seems in previous books he's felt an obligation to his subject matter. As The Thunderbolt Kid, however, he is his subject matter, and takes his talent for constructing a funny story or clever observation to absolute heights. Riffing on the subject of his childhood he seems to be having, literally, the time of his life.

On the way he takes a sideswipe at prevailing ideas in the 50s US. McCarthyism, nuclear testing, portrayals of teenagers and sex in film, and casual attitudes to health and safety. He's not serious though - in fact the whole thing reads more like an obituary for innocence, and the real goodwill he feels seems to radiate from every page. Combined with childlike flights of fantasy, it's a heady mix.

Far from the most challenging thing I'll read all summer, I'm devouring this. Enough to transform Bryson from a favourite in my eyes, into a literary hero.

Nay, a superhero. The Thunderbolt Kid.

Sad Days

2008-08-03T22:46:00.002+01:00

It's being reported that Alexander Solzhenitsyn has died. I've only read "A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch" (I was going to read "August 14" shortly), but I thought it was worth noting the passing of "Russia's soul." Reading it a year ago, I was taken aback by the wealth and matter-of-factness of his descriptions, and I've since read impressive tales of the effect he had in Russia.

I just felt it was worth noting the death of a man who so staunchly stood against forces of tyranny.

Omens

2008-07-13T19:34:00.004+01:00

I found a copy of Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie left long-forgotten on a shelf in our spare room a couple of months ago. Now I resolve to sit down and read it (I find Rushdie a fairly intimidating writer).

Of habit I turn to the back to see how many pages there are. 463. Just before the final page a scrap of newspaper hangs out .It is dated to 1994 and has marked page 453 for goodness knows how long.

Were I a superstitious man I would go and find another copy, but here goes...

Night Sight

2008-07-01T15:54:00.002+01:00

Jews: The Next Generation

2008-06-29T17:37:00.004+01:00

The holocaust is a subject so horrific, and so incomprehensibly awful, that much as we do our best to remember, really we consign it to a locked room in the back our minds and bring it up only as the example of evil-doing. This is true for myself and, I am sure, others with no link at all to that terrible period in the history of the Jewish people.

So how do the repercussions of that time impact the lives of people who weren't there, but were affected? This is the subject of Vanessa Engle's excellent documentary, the second of three that BBC4 have entitled, simply, Jews.

Engle explores the feelings of the children of holocaust survivors, and finds that the wounds inflicted more than 60 years ago cut extremely deep. Those who fled and became parents in the UK reacted in different ways - commonly though, changing their identities, overprotecting their families, and trying (always failing) to forget.

One subject learnt only recently of her Jewish background (yet others did not realise while their parents were still alive). She claims that those terrible times, and her parents' efforts, shape her 'entire psychological hinterland.' Another explains that she shares her name with another child her mother had, who did not survive Auschwitz. She seems to embrace this mark of her family, but it surely cannot be a fully comfortable fact.

There is something more complex here than 'dealing with' the holocaust. Relationships between parents and children, usually complex anyway, are twisted and further complicated by incredibly sore emotional scars. In some cases the surviving parents themselves are present, but rarely are they able to engage with their children's questions or feelings.

There is a sense in which as these middle-aged offspring come to realise how great the shockwaves through their lives have been, they also realise that with time the answers and causes are continuously retreating. One lady gives up her life in the UK to learn just what happened to her mother's family in Vienna, just what tore at her mother for so many years. Coming at the end of the film, this segment is especially poignant.

Interesting to me is the effect that fleeing the Nazis had on the faith of the survivors and their offspring. Out of fear, few maintained their Jewish faith, or even their mother tongues, and it seems all integrated as fully as possible. This may have interesting implications for how we relate to beliefs and culture. Their children, however, approached what was frequently a newly-discovered heritage in a surprising variety of ways.

Part two of this excellent series is a huge change of pace. The gently comedic Samuel has been replaced with a horrifying, looming, past. Inconsistent it may be, but Jews continues to make involving and thought-provoking viewing.

My review of part one is here, and this episode is available on BBC's iPlayer for a few days yet...

Tasty Genetics

2008-06-28T19:43:00.004+01:00

The Chocolate Genome Project? That's science I can get behind.

Tasty tasty science

It makes a lot of sense. Two thoughts: 1) 5 years? To both sequence and 'analyse' a genome? They'll be lucky to get terribly valuable information that quickly, I should expect. 2) It may be completely through self-interest, but important groundwork being laid by a corporation isn't to be sniffed at. Valuable information could surely result.

Kith and Kin

2008-06-24T02:33:00.008+01:00

I got back from a gig to flop in front of the rather wonderful documentary The Prisoner, part of the BBC Four series, Jews. Samuel Leibowitz has just finished a spell in prison for drug smuggling. On his release he has returned to his childhood community of ultra-orthodox hasidic jews in north London.

(Unfortunately a small failing of the film is it didn't really explain to me what a hasidic Jew is. There's always the danger we might conclude that all Jews live in this way, but I'm relatively sure they do not.)

The extraordinarily devoted and restricted lives of the ~20,000 members of this community are completely at odds with the lifestyle of most modern britons, most especially those Samuel has been meeting in a prison environment. Even the term 'kosher', which we will have at least heard of, proves very difficult to really explain. Over the course of the hour, Vanessa Engle explores these rules and conflictions, and attempts to find the nature of Samuel's rebellion.

It's a fascinating insight into an extremely insular community. The temptation is clearly there for Engle to reach conclusions about this society, especially about the role of women and the effect on adolescents, but her restraint is crucial; after all we can easily decide for ourselves.

The main question we must ask is whether Samuel reacts like very many people would, or is he simply as strange an individual as he seems, somehow dysfunctional? Are the extremities of his rebellion therefore the result of the overbearing culture in which he was brought up?

As enjoyable as the current trend of "religious freak" documentaries are, it's refreshing to see this film, although clearly not quite embracing the hasidic jewish lifestyle, at least engaging with a totally alien culture and teasing out a fair

Episode 1 of 'Jews' is available to stream on the BBC iPlayer service for at least 6 more days HERE. 2 more episodes will be aired in the next week.

False Advertising

2008-06-21T12:46:00.004+01:00

A google search for Marion (I was looking for 'The Matrix' Shawn, not a teensy Iowa town) brings up this page with its rather amusing tagline.

Where should one place stress on "You can go home again," exactly?

Is this a hack-job in a literal or rhetorical sense? That can't surely be deliberate.

P.S. Even if you've never heard of Shawn Marion, the story about his Chinese-language tattoo is worth a repost.

Farewell and Goodnight

2008-06-19T04:46:00.004+01:00

For some time I'll fondly recall an explosive Rajon Rondo performance (precisely when it mattered!), remember being oh-so-proud of Jesus Shuttleworth (a ring at last!), and wonder whether these brief fireworks were worth the mortgaged future the Celtics landed themselves with (obviously!).

And for almost as long, I'll miss this ad.

Spine-tingling.

When We Were Younger & Better

2008-06-05T09:01:00.005+01:00

Having just finished and mostly enjoyed Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy, which I'd agree is a masterpiece but certainly a rather dense one, I embarked this morning upon The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins.

This is Dawkins c. 1986, a book as old as I am, and it's difficult to forget that he has yet to become a cause célèbre or go on the offensive. It predates The God Delusion by twenty years. That it was a different world is made evident by this sentence, on the first page of the preface:

"The computer on which I write these words has an information storage capacity of about 64 kilobytes"

I'm still only a couple of chapters in, but my first impression is that this version of Dawkins is much more constructive. I'm coming to think that he is foremost an evolutionist, and would not be at all interested in his present christian-baiting had they not 'started it.'

Here he is positive and wastes no time in celebrating the natural world. He goes so far as almost to praise William Paley, theologian and originator of the "watchmaker analogy," concluding that Paley has reached the wrong conclusion but understandably so, and in praising the diversity and apparent design of nature they are almost united!

It would be interesting to see how he felt about Paley now.

His extraordinary ability to introduce and explain scientific principles with the written word is astounding to me, and something nearly any science writer could learn a lot from. Even though I am well acquainted with the subject, I'm very much looking forward to my reading time in the coming week.

End of the Line

2008-06-03T13:48:00.002+01:00

Torrent fiends: get paranoid.

I find this a little off the mark:

"Concerns are myriad at this point, ranging from how authorities can prove their cases using the easily manipulated user data seized during the initial OiNK raid, to why the police are involved at all in what some have suggested is merely a matter that calls for civil action, to, of course, whether the arrests will continue-- and, if so, who will be next."

I can see why you'd be concerned, but c'mon, you use these sites and these systems for sharing music you have no real right to (I'll repeat that - music may be as free as the air and the birds in the trees, but musicians put the effort in and deserve to make a little back) and you always know if it catches up with you you have no real excuse.

Funnier is the concept of DNA samples and fingerprints being taken, I grant you. Although it's pretty egalitarian that some cardigan-clad pop nerd goes in the database alongside the serial rapist.

All I'll say, as someone who downloads a lot of music but equally buys a lot of CDs and goes to a lot of gigs, is it's impossible to get to grips with certain areas of music without delving into torrents and music blogs. Once you get into real experimental/avant territory you'll struggle to find new stuff you like on MTV2.
I know a lot of people who download albums online and some are good for music, others not so good. But that's describing people in general. On the whole it's an essential part of the progression of music as we know it.

Just don't complain when you get nicked.

Things I Learnt From Zizek In May

2008-06-01T15:04:00.004+01:00

I watched The Pervert's Guide To Cinema yesterday, in which Slavoj Zizek applies psychoanalytical ideas to films as diverse as Alien: Resurrection, Vertigo, Persona, The Wizard of Oz and The Matrix. It's about 2 hours of concepts I really don't understand. Here is what I learnt:

*You can tell if someone is a father figure as they will "wear the phallus" as their insignia.

*Flowers should be forbidden for children as they are basically vaginas.

*The use of voice to suggest altered identity is particularly effective as it is "not an organic part of the body."

*If a scene or narrative device is effective, it's probably because you want to hump someone, and also probably you shouldn't.

*One's virtual, fantasised self may be more "real" than that which inhabits the physical world, as it is not impeded by outside influences. Hence our fantasies may be a better guide to who we really are.

It was a lot of fun to watch, albeit hard work at times. I'd seriously recommend it as a novel (to me) angle of film criticism. The entire thing is on Youtube, and not hard to find, but I'll be buying the DVD I'm pretty sure.

Staying Alive

2008-06-01T08:21:00.003+01:00

Hicham was due to be deported today, but there's been good news. The original removal directions have been cancelled. It's good news, but he's not out of the woods yet!

Please, if you're interested, keep an eye on freehichamyezza.wordpress.com/. There are facebook groups, one for the nottingham network, one global, from which information is being disseminated!

A Worthy Cause

2008-05-30T05:39:00.003+01:00

I'm afraid I'm no expert, I shall have to cut and paste, but this is a worthy cause and deserves support:

Stop The Deportation Of Hicham Yezza!

(from facebook group)

Hicham Yezza, a popular, respected and valued former PhD student and current employee of the University of Nottingham faces deportation to Algeria on Sunday 1st June. That's NEXT SUNDAY.
This follows his unjust arrest under the Terrorism Act 2000 on Wednesday 14th May alongside Rizwaan Sabir and their release without charge six days later.

On his release Hicham was re-arrested under immigration legislation and, due to confusion over his visa documentation, charged with offences relating to his immigration status. He sought legal advice and representation over these matters whilst in custody. On Friday 23rd May, he was suddenly served with a deportation notice and moved to an immigration detention centre. The deportation is being urgently appealed. Hich maintains he will be able to sucessfully fight deportation in the courts.

Hicham has been resident in the U.K. for 13 years, during which time he has studied for both undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in Nottingham. He is an active member of debating societies, a prominent member of an arts and theatre group, and has been writing editorials for the Student Peace Movement magazine for the last five years. He is well known and popular on campus amongst the university community and has established himself as a voracious reader and an authority on literature and music. An application for British citizenship was underway, and he had been planning to make his yearly trip to Wales for the Hay Festival when he was suddenly arrested.

There's more information at http://freehichamyezza.wordpress.com/ which has information as to how you can help. But if you've only a limited amount of time and still want to do something, please do the following:

1. Sign the e-petition at http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/freehich/ this is FREE (despite the conspicuous donation ad) and will take a minute MAX.

2. Send an e-mail to home secretary Jacqui Smith at the home office informing her of your support of Hicham's case and asking her to stop the deportation of this man who is being dealt with without trial. A template and e-mail address are available at http://freehichamyezza.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/model-letter-to-the-home-office/.

There's an awful lot to this, none of which I can claim to totally understand. A complex set of worrying implications for academic freedom and right to due process. But I cannot explain these. All I would hope is that Hicham gets an opportunity to defend himself in court before anyone can eject him from the country he's lived in for 13 years.

Thanks for any time you can give.

Pushkin

2008-05-26T23:22:00.003+01:00

'Tis time, my dear, 'tis time. The heart demands repose
Day after day slips by and with each hour there goes
A little bit of life; but meanwhile you and I
Together plan to dwell... yet lo! 'tis then we die.
There is not bliss on earth; there's peace and freedom though,
An enviable lot I long have yearned to know.
Long have I, weary slave, been contemplating flight
To a remote abode of work and pure delight.

Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin, 1834

I've let things slip of late, it's true. But exams, you know. Anyway, I found it hard to get hold of Pushkin that's not, y'know, in Russian. Not even really understanding their alphabet I have no idea what it sounds like. But this translation is nice (it's by Nabokov, author of Lolita)

Death

2008-05-04T14:47:00.001+01:00

I've been intermittently leafing through the complete works of W.B. Yeats (the everyman edition with at least as many pages of notes as poems themselves). It's been quite a slog at times, I've not yet developed an ear (eye?) for longer poems, and I'm pretty sure I'm getting on better with modern poets than classical ones. Still, that's not to say that I haven't enjoyed parts of it.

Nor dread nor hope attend
A dying animal;
Man awaits his end
Dreading and hoping all;
Many times he died,
Many times he rose again.
A great man in his pride
Confronting murderous men
Casts derision upon
Supersession of breath;
He knows death to the bone
Man has created death.

W.B. Yeats (~1933)

I've taken to posting my weekly poem up on the fridge door, as much for my pleasure as for my housemates'. But as with so many things it's become a source of conflict. For I appear to gravitate towards rather grim subject matter, and this poem about death was swiftly removed. Better luck next time.

This week I'm reading some verse by E.E Cummings. It's a special joy because since picking up a book of his about a week ago I've discovered I adore his poetry. It's precisely why I set out upon this enterprise, to discover stuff like this. I might try and pick a cheery one (One ends "and everyone's in love and flowers pick themselves" - should strike a bell with some UK music fans).

Oh yes and I've missed out a week (our internet's cut off!) but I have learnt a poem by Pushkin. Unfortunately it's proven tricky to get hold of much of his work. I'll do that later.

This Bread I Break

2008-04-26T18:44:00.000+01:00

Multiple things are swallowing up all my time. Also our internet connection has been cut off - something to do with a controversial matter also known as "not paying bills". Oh well.

I have had time to read some Dylan Thomas though. Also latterly some Yeats. In both cases, when they're good, they sound great. Unfortunately, when they're impenetrable, I feel a headache coming on. Anyway:

This bread I break was once the oat,
The wine upon a foreign tree
Plunged in its fruit;
Man in the day, or wind by night
Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.

Once in this wine the summer blood
Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
Once in this bread
The oat was merry in the wind;
Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.

This flesh you break, this blood you let
Make desolation in the vein,
Were oat and grape
Born of sensual root and sap;
My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

Dylan Thomas, 1933.

Thomas is a fascinating character and a great poet, but unfortunately I find I can only seldom enjoy reading his poetry, and then only because I've given myself plenty of time to work up to it - unlike Auden, who I felt more able to dip in and out of.

Regardless, another that I think I should like to return to.

Gare Du Midi

2008-04-13T21:47:00.002+01:00

Tough to choose one, I've really rather enjoyed my research into Auden as well, although his work seems odd, sometimes seemingly direct and straightforward, sometimes hard to fathom.

A nondescript express in from the South,
Crowds round the ticket barrier, A face
To welcome which the mayor has not contrived
Bugles or braid: Something about the face
Distracts the stray look with alarm and pity.
Snow is falling. Clutching a little case,
He walks out briskly to infect a city
Whose terrible future may have just arrived.

WH Auden, 1938

What immediately appeals to me about this one (apart from the short length that characterises all my choices!) is the meaning one could choose to read into it. A 21st century reader could be forgiven for imagining a terrorist with a vial of lethal pathogen. At the time it was written, that "little case" could be all the more hostile for containing instead an ideology, whether one that's downright evil, or simply an alien sense of bureaucracy.

I'd like to know more about Auden's concerns around that time but that's really where I ran out of research time for the week. Later, later.

Auden's whole body of work is excellent though, really. I've thoroughly enjoyed picking my way through a variety of sentiments and structures. "Gare Du Midi" is a favourite alongside "Here War is Simple like a Monument," "In Memory of W.B. Yeats," and "In Praise in Limestone." I don't think I can do such a man of words justice with my own, but I would heartily recommend the collection I have, at the least. It's collected together by John Fuller.

By this time next week I hope I'll have had time to read some of Dylan Thomas' poetry.

Second Hand News

2008-04-11T13:54:00.004+01:00

Lately I've become a bit obsessed with Google Trends. It sort of combines two fascinations of mine; how huge swathes of traffic move online, and the uncanny way statistics can document history. Of course, they've only been recording search frequencies from 2004, so it's very recent history, but regardless, it can indicate the rise of youtube or give an idea of how the democratic presidential nomination race has emerged so far.

Maybe more fascinating though, is the short-term chart, for the day's "hottest" search terms. This can unearth some really intriguing stories that maybe won't fully break into the mainstream media and won't be going round for more than a couple of days.

Example: at time of writing, the top search term is "dick cheney sunglasses." Seemingly nonsensical, but of course "Trends" grants you links to news stories, that you might make sense of these weird surges.

And sure enough, enlightenment, here, here, here, and hundreds of others besides I don't doubt.

The story: a press photo of Dick Cheney appears to show a nudey lady reflected in his sunglasses. How embarassing. For the sake of it, here's the photo:

Google trends: positively half hours of intrigue.

The Bard

2008-04-07T12:48:00.005+01:00

So, Shakespeare this week. Fella wrote 154 sonnets, but I was a bit pushed for time this week, so I stuck with one, and I decided to make it a crowd-pleaser;

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is His gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st.
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

William Shakespeare

Shakespeare's 18th sonnet is probably his most well-known, by first line alone. It's pretty pleasing to learn verse that itself promises it will last "so long as men can breathe," almost making myself complicit to Shakespeare's promise of immortality to his subject.

Reading Shakespeare's poetry more widely was hard to start with; the immediate appeal of this one is its familiarity, which allowed me to get straight in there. But I found some others that I really liked, and I shall be returning to Shakespeare (I've long felt I should know more about his plays, besides). If only for his place and reputation as the foundation of english literature as we know it.

"Shakespeare's Sonnets" was an invaluable source.

This week I'm hoping to dip more frequently into WH Auden, who's already a bit of a favourite.

Sold Out

2008-04-05T16:52:00.003+01:00

Lately listening to a lot of Sleater Kinney, Hüsker Dü, Get Hustle, Quicksand, A//Political, Rites of Spring, My Dad is Dead, Black Flag, By the End of Tonight. Guess what mood I'm in.

Looking forward to a few Nottingham gigs upcoming. I'll put some anticipated ones up here, for my own reference as much as anything. No way I can go to all of these, no way it's an all-encompassing list either.

First off, Damn You! have some quality ones (big groan at the student trait of only thinking in terms):

18/04/08 Ted Leo & The Pharmacists @ The Maze
22/04/08 Carla Bozulich's Evangelista @ The Maze
24/04/08 Magik Markers (+ Gnomes of Zurich support! Could be quality) @ Rose of England
13/05/08 Pissed Jeans @ The Maze

Bodega Social:

21/04/08 Buttonhead
22/04/08 Ulrich Schnauss (Uh-oh clash)
06/05/08 Health
20/05/08 A Place To Bury Strangers
09/06/08 Why? + SJ Esau (Birthday treat for me)

Rescue Rooms put on 65daysofstatic on 10/05/08 could be pretty good.

Also on 16/04/08 Mantile has Broken Sleep and also the amazingly-named Milf Wolf, at The Chameleon. Sounds noisy and delicious.

Dot to Dot festival is on 24/05/08 and will be a big fun weekend. To be honest the lineup looked pretty weak but The Most Serene Republic may have rescued it for me.

Have I missed anything? Is there anything I should have down here? Please let me know.

The Hawk In The Rain

2008-03-31T17:57:00.003+01:00

As promised, I've learnt a poem by Ted Hughes this week:

I drown in the drumming ploughland, I drag up
Heel after heel from the swallowing of the earth's mouth,
From clay that clutches my each step to the ankle
With the habit of the dogged grave, but the hawk

Effortlessly at height hangs his still eye.
His wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet,
Steady as a hallucination in the streaming air.
While banging wind kills these stubborn hedges,

Thumbs my eyes, throws my breath, tackles my heart,
And rain hacks my head to the bone, the hawk hangs,
The diamond point of will that polestars
The sea drowner's endurance: And I,

Bloodily grabbed dazed last-moment-counting
Morsel in the earth's mouth, strain to the master-
Fulcrum of violence where the hawk hangs still.
That maybe in his own time meets the weather

Coming the wrong way, suffers the air, hurled upside-down,
Fall from his eye, the ponderous shires crash on him,
The horizon trap him; the round angelic eye
Smashed, mix his heart's blood with the mire of the land.

Ted Hughes

Overall, I've really enjoyed reading Hughes' poems. "Pike" and "The Shot" also became favourites. I'll certainly be seeking out more of his work.

Also, happily, it didn't prove too hard to remember these 20 lines. I had no idea how easy/tricky it would be, but I typed this out from memory, needing to correct only a couple of bits of punctuation.

This week I'll be learning a bit of Shakespeare; how could I take interest in poetry without having a look at the classics?

TV Party

2008-03-29T01:04:00.005Z

How on earth does Peter Krause manage it? The first ten minutes of Six Feet Under displayed his character Nate getting intimate with a nameless woman in an airport cupboard. Meanwhile, his dad had just died in a hearse-crash, and Nate and his new acquaintance must face his highly-strung mother and his sister, who’s just plain high. Sex, death and crystal meth within twelve minutes. Of course, before the pilot ended we got a gay love scene too.

So Krause, this time as lawyer Nick George, has a knack for getting involved with messy families, as evidenced by the first episodes of Dirty Sexy Money. His dad just died in a plane crash, and Nick’s been called upon to take his old job, as family lawyer and general dogsbody for uber-wealthy, dysfunctional New York family the Darlings.

On this occasion though, it’s out with philosophy and in with debit card glamour.

It’s a wild ride as Nick desperately seeks a non-existent balance point between his own life (He’s found himself another ridiculously sexy girlfriend), and those of the other six people he must now babysit. As viewers we revel in the Darling’s decadence, their absurd materialism and moral corruption.

We feel more at home to find the Darlings are anchored by patriarch Donald Sutherland, and count William Baldwin and Samaire Armstrong (The O.C.!) among their numbers. Transexual prostitutes, affairs and an illegitimate son born to a clergyman ensure there’s plenty on Nick’s plate.

Indeed, we’d come to feel bad about it if it wasn’t all so tongue-in-cheek. Maybe that makes it less satisfying than the real deal, that we really wish we were watching. It’s fun, at times uproarious, but obviously lightweight fluff. The young(ish) part of the cast bring limo-loads of energy, in combination with the daft plotlines, while Sutherland veers between deft tone-setting and plain senility.

You’ll want to like Dirty Sexy Money, for its energy and simplicity, and it’s possible to really disengage the brain and enjoy this frothy, high-calorie nonsense. Just don’t expect to feel full afterwards.

----

“You’re the best,” declares the patient. “You break the rules, and you don’t care about anyone but yourself.” Of course, the maverick physician can only be Gregory House. And Hugh ‘unloved in Britain’ Laurie’s show returns to our screens for a fourth series, as grouchy, cynical and over-the-top as ever.

Having dismissed his staff at the end of series 3, House must whittle 40-odd applicants down to a new trio. While, obviously, watching House save the day, we can play a fun guessing game, trying to spot those final three.

Be that by spotting familiar faces (Anne Dudek of The Book Group and Mad Men?), or deepening characterization (The foreign chick? The old guy? The black dude?), it’s a fun distraction for when Laurie isn’t on the screen. Naturally, when he is, he steals the show.

Sadly, House’s writers have continued that disturbing trend of thinking-out-loud through the characters from series 3 to series 4. It’s catching and it sometimes brings you back to earth with a jolt. This is, after all, pretty silly, and getting to feel mass-produced.

But, like Dirty Sexy Money, it still charms. Yet more proof that good TV doesn’t always have to be art.

Poet in the Pit - One-a-Week

2008-03-24T14:44:00.002Z

In my unrelenting (!) quest to better myself I've seized upon someone else's initiative. It's not an original idea but it appeals to me: I'm going to learn one poem a week until my head can hold no more.

By learn, I guess I mean off by heart, verbatim. Certainly if I choose a poem on Monday or Tuesday I anticipate I should be able to remember it pretty much perfectly on Sunday. But I'll place more importance on enjoying or comprehending it.

I won't lie though, I'd like to be one of those smarmy people who can pull a verse from mid-air seemingly effortlessly.

I guess I'll be setting myself three main targets;

Firstly, I want to read poetry by a variety of different poets, hopefully from different backgrounds as well. Therefore I'm going to try and dot around from week to week, and cover a fair number of famous ones, as well as getting a sense of the depth of the art-form.
Secondly, for each poet I intend to learn a favourite one, but also to read around it, to get a sense of the poet's overall work, and the context within which he wrote.
Thirdly, I hope I'm going to be able to understand the words I'm learning as well as just liking the sound of them. I'd expect I won't get it straight away, but after a few weeks of exposing myself to verse, I might have a better and more immediate feel for poetry, and especially its meaning.

So here goes. On the afternoon of the 24th of March, 2008, I undertake this mission. Obviously I'll be posting here with the poems I'm learning and how it's all going. My first poet will be Ted Hughes (I won't lie, those free poetry pamphlets in the papers last week will help!).

Wish me luck!

"The Ghostly Apples Tea Drinking Show" - Phantom Dog Beneath The Moon, Les Étoiles, The Anvil, 14/03/08

2008-03-18T00:02:00.007Z

Have you ever been into Nottingham city centre on a Friday night? It's carnage. Nottingham's a classic example of the new urban frontier town, where the forces of sobriety and temperance clash with the forces of drunkenness and disruliness, nightly.

So you'd have to cast yor net pretty far to find a case of greater contrast, then, than that between Lee Rosy's tea rooms and its surroundings. There aren't many chairs, but it's still hugely comfy inside for this low-key free gig.

The crowd stumble in from the cold in coats and promptly sweat profusely once they start on the first cups of tea. Thirty people can make the place seem quite packed, not least in front of the "stage," which first sees The Anvil, the project of Nottingham's Matthew Fullwood, take to the sweetly-smelling wooden boards.

You couldn't want a much more warming sound to kick off. One could listen to this folky, psychedelic set forever, quite happily. Bringing to mind a more contented Six Organs of Admittance, or a more organic Animal Collective, or Jesu bent through a singer-songwriter's lens, there are plenty of nodding heads by the time Matthew's finished; definitely a hit.

I was chiefly present to see the second act, Les Étoiles. This pseudonym is the mask of David Fitzpatrick, whose album Never To Alight is one of the big must-hears on nascent music label Records on Ribs. The album features some of the most intimate songs I feel I've ever heard, and is touching and mournful in equal measure.

The live experience is not quite as perfect as it is recorded. The delicate instrumental additions are absent, and the delivery of lines is endearingly, but just overly, wavering. But this really is quibbling, as the audience, which previously had been wandering in and out liberally, is held rapt. I'm desperate to hold my breath, to not break the spell, or the magic that delicately holds each piece together. Embraced tenderly by each word, the aftertaste is haunting.

It's one of the hardest acts you could follow. Phantom Dog Beneath The Moon are gamely up for the task, and although we're all tanked up on Almond Cream tea by this late stage of proceedings, and thus quite full and tiring, there's a huge degree of goodwill in the air. After all, vocalist Aaron put the night together and the duo have it in them to finish it all off brilliantly.

Various things aren't right here. The vocals can be a challenging listen, the songs are often introduced with a number of words, the acoustic guitar crescendos can seem obvious. But in this case it hangs together extremely well. Those introductions are evocative and deeply personal. The crescendos are accompanied by rasping additions on the cello, while Aaron can intone lyrics or shift towards an anguished, plaintive voice of surprising power.

The melodies are at once simple and powerful, lent strength by the poweful symbiosis of the two men; their musical understanding seems effortless. The opening songs are haunting, breathy and bitter-sweet. As the set grows, so do the songs, as the last two pieces end loud and make you sit up. It's not unlike a transition from folk to Radiohead, though not quite.

All those things I initially doubt are blended into a quite perfect final set, and as we troop back out into the foul-smelling, unwelcoming cold, we're all quite content.

Like all Records on Ribs releases, Les Étoiles' album "Never To Alight" is available as a free download. Phantom Dog are on the Rusted Rail label and have released an EP, "Through a Forest Only." Releases by The Anvil are available at Woven Wheat Whispers.

Humanity and Paper Balloons

2008-03-14T12:31:00.004Z

Humanity and Paper Balloons (1937) is a touching period piece following the exploits of two men in 18th century feudal Japan. Unno is a masterless samurai, a ronin, who is desperate to find work and restore his name and honour. Shinza is a barber, and a cheeky rulebreaker and schemer, who seeks better and hasn't quite worked out how to get it.

Set in what's now Tokyo, most of the characters live in a slum, where the scene opens with the residents discussing an off-screen suicide, by a dishonoured samurai who had lived among them. We're gradually introduced to the residents, their pompous landlord, and the hierarchy beyond the ghetto, where a gang of local men hold immediate authority.

The owners and workers of a nearby pawn shop are better off, while master Mori, the leader of the samurai clan, is a respected figure, in charge of the well-being and wedding of a noble's daughter. It is he Unno must beg for a fresh shot at honour and employment, and observing his deferral in the face of such rejection is heartbreaking.

While Unno battles with the temptation to take refuge in drink, Shinza is causing trouble for himself, hosting gambling games and continually on the run from the local gangs. The audience naturally comes to like Shinza, a daring young man of good nature and sharp wit. Eventually, from about halfway through the film, he takes his daring further than before, kidnapping the bride-to-be, and conspiring with Unno to hold her, seeking the pride and honour that will come from role-reversal, should the governor come and beg him for a change.

Filmed in 1937 and released on the very day its director Sadao Yamanaka was drafted into military service, during which he died, less than a year later, Humanity and Paper Balloons is a tragicomedic film. Warmly humourous character observations are peppered through the film, with true good feeling piercing through the difficult conditions the poor tenants endure. The landlord brings a dose of bustling levity, as does the blind man whose senses are so sharp the other tenants swear he can really see.

Ultimately a sad, but not depressing, film, Humanity and Paper Balloons is shot beautifully. Sets look wonderful, scenes are composed as delicate tableaus, to give a tremendous sense of historic Japan. Yamanaka balances these works in light against the struggle of the everyday people, portraying a society where poverty isn't a disaster, but dishonour is. From the very opening scene we get the feeling that Unno's fate hangs over him very heavily indeed.

A tragedy, really, that only three of Yamanaka's films survive to this day. Even more awful to think, if he made 30 before his death at age 29, quite how much more beauty he may have had to contribute to the world.

Humanity and Paper Balloons offers little entertainment to a general modern, western audience. But if we can put aside the pace and characterisation, slow compared to that to which we are accustomed, and immerse ourselves in the beautiful compositions put before us and the tenderness of the tale, there's plenty of pleasure to be derived here, in a story that's passed off as small-time and incidental but tells us more about Japanese culture, past and present, than we might expect.

Just The Architect

2008-03-14T03:22:00.004Z

If I may, I'd like to bend your ear briefly, to vouch for the music of a talented man. Just The Architect is the project of one Johnathan Chan, who arms himself (not necessarily) nightly with guitar, keyboard and violin to do battle with those creative urges.

Now, I'll have to be honest, I've known Chan a little while and been hearing his creations for almost as long. I was fortunate enough to see "Aky and the Architect" play an ultra-exclusive set (!) and they sounded great. I'd have to say, though, that it's only just lately I've realised that no-one's playing at music here...

A quick list of comparisons would have to include Final Fantasy, Patrick Wolf, The Decemberists, Grizzly Bear and Bat for Lashes, though obviously influences don't stop there. And Chan'd be among the first to admit he's worn his influences on his sleeve at times; a personal favourite, Melodrama, shimmers and rips with Owen Pallett-worshipping violin, while Avast!'s lyrics are hitting upon ground familiar to fans of Pallett or Meloy, thematically at least.

Well, easy to say, but this is no one trick pony. For starters, the vocals are only a recent addition to JTA's repertoire, and they've begun to add new dimensions, to say the least. Transmuting trans-atlantic influences with a mediating British accent, Chan with vocals is a whole different beast on tracks like BC and Tinseltown Tongues, which are led by choral intonations.

Being lulled and soothed is one thing, but to be shaken up by Cadet Force is even a step further; these don't just demonstrate a voice, but even more a compositional step beyond influences into uncharted territory. On Tiger Vs World, with an incredible chanted transition, we literally hear JTA snarl for the first time.

It's obviously come full circle when you take in Fields; the strong violin part's still there to get us going, but more than that, the track progresses in its very own way as we first flirt with minimalism, then a low, swelling, pulse which evokes some form of otherworldly nature documentary, less Boards of Canada than American Gothic.

If this feels a bit less snug, the difference is rejuvenating. By the time we get round to his remix of Scott Davis' Rise, we're hitting the depths of melancholy as Chan lends terrifically sensitive touch to the subject. For my money, it's one of his best efforts so far.

I won't claim JTA's material is all perfect, but then, I don't think it's hit its heights yet. Some tracks come on a bit strong, while others hold out too much. It can hardly be an easy equilibrium to reach. Regardless, there's something special about hearing a musician (especially someone you know) steal away from their influences, bit by bit, and striking out their own notes.

Whether it's with creepy minimalist compositions, deftly handled remixes, or lo-fi alt-pop songs, I have a feeling Just The Architect will before too long come fully into its own, and that could be absolutely terrific.

Between Myspace and Last.fm, virtually all the tracks mentioned are freely listenable/downloadable.

No Country For Old Men

2008-03-09T16:35:00.003Z

I was conflicted while approaching this film. Is it the new piece by the Coen brothers, or is it the recent Best Picture oscar-winner? Is there even a significant distinction to be drawn between the two?

In a study in coincidence and injustice, the set-up is the cat-and-mouse chase between an innocent everyman who stumbles across a fortune (Josh Brolin), and a maniacal killer, Chigurh, who doesn't follow the expected Hollywood morality for maniacal killers (Javier Bardem).

Don't be drawn in. Neither of these are the lead role. In fact, many events are perceived through the eyes of a retiring sheriff (Tommy Lee Jones). It's through his eyes we assess the rough injustice of the Tex-Mex border region, and ask ourselves if this dark world is as devoid of God as it is seemingly devoid of morality.

These lead roles are truly crucial to the piece; a lesser actor in Jones' place might lead us to wonder whether the film had any meaning whatsoever, while Brolin balances hope, greed, and desperation on a fine knife-edge throughout.

Meanwhile, Bardem astounds. His role is the absolute centre of the work, which at its core is hugely violent. Two grotesque murders await us before any plot has even been divulged. They're so grotesque they conduct the thoughts of both the lead and the audience throughout. Each time Bardem enters a scene he infuses the entire film with a sense of dread.

Chigurh redoubles already unbearable tension with his belief in fate and attitude to justice, so alien to a western audience that he becomes a complete black box. He both enacts and holds to such a belief in fate that we too question whether anyone else can ultimately triumph.

The three main characters dance an intimate and delicate waltz throughout the film. Scene by scene, they never seal each other's fates as we'd expect, but instead, under the guidance of the Coens, weave a web of chance encounter and suspense, that holds us rapt throughout.

The Coens paint a bleak, harsh landscape, of a country that has no regard for our expectations of justice, decency, or even self-determination. Scene by scene they tease out a nervous humour and a thoroughly unconventional narrative, combining it with as masterful direction and cinematography as you'd come to expect from the duo, until regardless of how happy you feel about it, you can't doubt you're watching something truly remarkable.

Chris Leo @ The Maze, Nottingham, 07-03-08

2008-03-09T04:20:00.005Z

This fellow was really great, excellent lyrics, engaging songwriting. If you can wade through a lot of reading, you can find out more about Chris Leo, probably starting here.

Breakdown

2008-02-29T00:31:00.004Z

This is so brilliant. These things are sometimes kind of dumb, but in this case it's hilarious and so well executed:

I could really go for watching American Psycho again sometime soon. And maybe a re-read as it's one of my favourite books.

(Found via Alex A on facebook!)

I'm calling to procure a hasty abortion...

2008-02-28T15:58:00.006Z

As films go, Juno is an odd beast. For me at least. Because I approve of Jason Reitman, having laughed uproariously at Thank-You for Smoking. Meanwhile, J.K Simmons was almost the best thing in that film. Ellen Page is clearly a talent, and add the homeliness of having Arrested Development stars kicking around, there's not much to dislike, surely?

And I enjoyed parts of it, sure enough. I laughed a few times, if only inwardly. It's a well-made film, and very much in the vein of the Alexander Payne/Wes Anderson school, unconventional, but not unwelcoming. Cosy comedy that can get away with a bit of sentimentality.

But that's the whole problem for Juno; a film that casts itself as so desperately counter-culture can't survive buckets of lovey-dovey montage ("obvious" music usage was a major irritant throughout) and a complete mire of emotional clichés. Which, sure enough, is what we end up with.

I was turned off in the first twenty minutes by the fact that EVERYONE appears to quip. Hearing "honest to blog?" uttered is bad enough, but that's comparatively just a minor crime. Some lines led me to hair-tearing. The Oscar-winning script, and its writer, are surely enough receiving plenty of attention, and much of that is negative.

It's hard to say why Diablo Cody is receiving such criticism now. It's arguable that jealousy comes into it. After all, if her film hadn't grossed $150mil at the box office, we'd probably be OK with it, right? But while her supporters claim she's simply paying the price for sticking out from the crowd, I'd submit that while that may be the case, no film script should draw so much attention from the rest of the movie. Or make me retch so much, for that matter.

Cody's script was wonderfully parodied in Bob Mackey's SomethingAwful.com article, which is getting circulation. I'd have to confess that while I was far from sold on first viewing, seeing that truly drove a stake through the heart of Juno, for me.

Papier Tigre, Nottingham, 1st February

2008-02-26T17:08:00.006Z

Finally gonna get a few choice snapshots up here. Nantes' stunning indie-rock trio Papier Tigre visited Nottingham at the beginning of the month. Yet another great band highsoc's been involved with this year, I felt proud. Although I'd put very little actual effort in myself, it has to be said.

Find out more about these guys (they're dead good like) and others through Collectif Effervescence.

In The Time We've Got

2008-02-26T01:21:00.001Z

Just stumbled across the video for one of my favourite recent songs. Enough to get me interested in boxing:

Hrishikesh Hirway's project, The One AM Radio, blends wonderful, delicate songwriting with shimmering instrumental arrangements and passages you can really lose yourself in.

If that wasn't enough, through video and packaging and images it's all topped off with a delightful visual aesthetic. Well!

I'm still desperately in love with the album, This Too Will Pass, and it's been months, literally. I need to check out his other albums.

Band Entropy

2008-02-24T03:31:00.000Z

A word to the wise. If you form a successful band, you're going to want your picture to be everywhere. Pick a name that's striking and individual enough that google image search will send your cheery faces straight to the screen of every office-chair journalist and wannabe NME-hound out there.

A pity I publish this piece of advice a little too late for Islands, because when I look for pictures of the band, I have to trawl through to page 8 for their first, out of date, pic. This expansive indie-rock group almost inevitably hail from Montreal, and as they finish touring Europe during the remainder of this month they'll be dragging behind them good times, a rocking stage-show, a few cracking tunes from hit album Return to the Sea, and already-dedicated fans.

I was fortunate enough to catch them at Stealth versus Rescued tonight. It was an extremely accomplished show, and sounded as good as the Stealth soundsystem ever has. With two guitars, a bass, two violins and occasionally a keyboard, I'm surprised the whole thing didn't explode under the strain.

The strings and guitars give plenty to watch, and even the impression of two frontmen. The songs from the first album sound great, even the rap-less "Where There's A Will There's A Wishbone". "Rough Gem" didn't materialise, but with all those other hits still glistening, they got by.

They deserved better than the terrible PA system, and a slightly lacklustre crowd, but such is the way with SvR, what with half the people getting in free anyway. I'll look forward to seeing them, the sooner the better, somewhere they can really do themselves justice. That I was so impressed really is a testament to their vigour and ability onstage.

Even better news, the new tracks seem to bode well for the new album, Arm's Way, which is due April 21st. Fingers crossed and ears peeled.

Some Sort of Revelation

2008-02-15T02:02:00.000Z

Valentine's day not such a big issue. I am, however missing home. And Sasha in particular:

Took a lot of effort that evening, trying to get her still enough and to look at the camera. Worth it.

Been listening to a lot of Pseudosix and Death Cab for Cutie while working late. Thanks for stopping by. I've not really launched this blog properly yet, I'm too busy. But I'd love to know why you ended up here, so do drop a comment.

When the Sun Sets the Clouds on Fire

2008-02-02T13:58:00.001Z

As promised there will be photographs:

The whole reason I love train journeys.

Cacophone

2008-02-02T13:56:00.000Z

This is a new blog, entitled cacophone, because I frequently make awful noises. Let me qualify that statement; "I" refers to Unfire. That is me. It doesn't take a lot of work to find the name society assigns to me on a day-to-day basis, I'm just not typing it here. Not now anyway.

I like taking photos, writing, listening to all sorts of music, playing football, watching sports in general, film and reading books. In time I hope I'll be able to provide information about these so giving them generalised labels now would be pointless and potentially misleading.

The first thing I'm going to do is provide my maiden readers with the lyrics (as far as I can hear them) to the title track of the album "Bayani" by excellent Seattle hip-hop duo Blue Scholars. Consider it a gift. It's possibly my favourite track off the album, which is well worth checking out. And I wouldn't even say that hip-hop is my area of expertise.

Well I couldn't find lyrics for this track anywhere else online, so I'm going to put them here. I think they're mostly right and I really like them:

Turn off your radio, Turn up your stereo

Northwest rock, rock on, What’s the scenario?

Four years ago two students skipped a class

When they crafted an album, Some called it a classic

But we’ve grown past, It was good while it lasted,

Now it’s time to put that education into practice,

Beats, rhymes, rice be the breakfast of champions,

We hold the whole town now,

Together with the plan to hold the mic with compassion

Like Ruby did Malcolm,

Travelled down the coast since we dropped the last album,

That plus one is how long we’ve been war-torn,

It’s the return of the hard-knocking hardcore

From hard rock to hip hop,

The migration of flocks who once mocked what we ride for

It’s side war,

From sidewalks to billboards and stores

Telling all poor people that “the world is yours

But this money is ours, you can get a little back,

You start putting in hours, you can widen the gap”

But you can see it in the towers standing next to the squatters

Who be wandering the city in search of a job offer

The first generation in the US of A to be paid less wages

Than the ones that came before

The wicked waged war in the desert terrain,

24 short bars could have measured the pain

So now I, greet the neighbour daily

He’s on his porch smoking

Overhead thunderclouds move in slow motion

Came across an ocean in hope of some better days

Expatriated citizens of third world decay

Where children translate for their parents say

Get a landscape where the working class can escape

These languages twisted, tongues get unravelled

Can’t understand each other in this modern day Babel (/babble?)

Now we’re trying to get a piece of what the city broke down,

Barely claiming families but quick to claim the town,

Recognise it’s serious but ain’t afraid to clown,

Trained for confrontation there’s no other way around,

These sacred ground desecrators, they try to decimate us,

They hit the ballot like the mayor’s gonna save us,

And it pains me to say this, but pain is what made this,

It’s gonna take more than just rain to change this.
(Just some rain to change this.)