Postironic Brain

Tolkien About Degeneration

2009-06-19T23:30:09Z

"The magic goes west, of course, but there's also the peculiar abjuring of narrative form, in the strange echo after the final battle, the Lord of the Rings's post-end end, the Harrowing of the Shire--so criminally neglected by Jackson. In an alternate reality, this piece of scripting would have earned talented young tattooed hipster video-game designer Johnno Tolkien a slapped wrist from his studio: since when do you put a lesser villain straight after the final Boss Battle? But that's the point. The episode concludes 'well', of course, so far as it goes, but in its very pettiness relative to what's just been, it is brilliantly unsatisfying, ushering in an era of degraded parodies of epics, where it's not just the elves that are going: you can't even get a proper Dark Lord any more. Whatever we see as the drive behind Tolkien's tragic vision, and however we relate to its politics and aesthetics, the tragedy of the creeping tawdry quotidian gives Middle Earth a powerful melancholia lamentably missing from too much of what followed. It deserves celebrating and reclaiming."

I thought I hated Tolkien with fanatical passion, but China Mieville gives me pause in this brilliant article.

He's wrong about Greek mythology being less good intrinsically than Norse: the Greek stuff has had the blood drained out of it by vampire stuffed-shirt academics over centuries, as surely as time has flaked the brightly coloured paint off the friezes of the Parthenon: but read properly, the Iliad is every bit as magical and elegiac as Ragnarok or anything in LotR. I only wish I knew of an English translation I could actually recommend to you :-/

Aha, so THAT'S what I did all day today.

2009-05-22T08:50:49Z

This is the TEST shipment you asked for

23:50 Post-Braid and Bioshock, will video game companies finally realize that a good plotline is as important to a game as to a movie or a book? #
23:50 I guess if #dollhouse goes somewhere completely different in S2 it still has the potential to be an amazing show. #grudgingacceptance #
23:52 After a period of bubbling under, @iamjamesward is definitely back in my top ten James Wards based on recent solid performance. #
23:59 "Brevity is the soul of Twit" has 495 hits on Google. My guess is that the soul of Twit is in fact constant, soothing repetition. #
00:01 Oh my God, there's a cute dachsund puppy going crazy trying to tear up my laundry pile. How did this happen? What do I do? #
00:12 The puppy's name is Stamps. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Stamps cutely in a human face forever. #
00:13 Man, the Khartoum Network is a lot less fun and silly than those kids told me it was going to be. #
01:17 I've been climbing up the walls, having been off work for 6 weeks. What's the bet it takes 6 hours for me to hate work again on Tuesday? #
01:31 @rhodri: not a fan of Bragg's voice generally, but his New England is great, and I think it's more perfect from the male vantage point. #
03:04 Have to stop eating Marmite in bed, it's a deeply unattractive habit. #
03:11 God, the first episode of #startrek TOS is tawdry sex-crazed nonsense. Good advertisement for sucking salt out of puny humans though. #
05:45 Look up Breakfast at Sulimay's on YouTube - seniors angrily failing to make head nor tail of the stuff young hip folks listen to. AWESOME. #
06:16 Debearded myself with scissors prior to a razor shave. My face looks like a dog that's just had an operation. #
06:21 It's better this way. It's hard to be a big fey Goth with a bushy beard - no one takes you at all seriously. #
06:57 I got a backdated food stamps allowance a few days before I start my new job. I might lay in enough tinned goods to survive the apocalypse. #
06:58 The sad thing is, once I have a job, I'll no longer be able to "afford" things like avocados, fruit juice, protein, dietary fibre etc again. #
07:00 I'll tell you what makes me really angry - the way Americans pronounce "The Tudors". It's subtle but somehow important. #
07:04 William Shatner really brings it home to me that I have no idea at ALL what I'll look like when I'm in my seventies. #
07:09 #Ash are releasing 26 singles, one for each letter of the alphabet, once a fortnight for a whole year. #thegoodsortofbats #
07:21 Best bit in #startrek TOS 1st ep: the "alien plant" glove puppet covered in pink feathers, that Sulu has to stroke when an alien scares it. #
07:25 Oh yeah, and Spock pummeling the crap out of the face of a middle-aged woman. "Could the real Nancy withstand THIS, Doctor?" #spock-notch #
07:44 Crikey, Nichelle Nichols had fantastic legs in 1966. #startrek #septuagenarianlust #
07:54 City on the Edge of Forever = "best #startrek TOS ep ever" = in #doctorwho terms, something slightly more corny and less good than Timelash. #
08:03 If Spock raises an "ironic" eyebrow one more time I'm going to go kick Gene Roddenberry's gravestone. Joan Collins is hot though. #startrek #
08:56 Are they remaking Blake's 7 or aren't they? They claimed they were a year ago, but silence has fallen over the entire internet. #
09:03 Just used a time portal to go back and stop the Nazis from winning World War 2. Wish I hadn't, this alterna-2009 sucks almost as badly. #
09:24 I maintain that Voyager is my favorite #startrek series, but maybe I just say this to annoy aficionados. It always seemed pleasingly camp. #

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Asking The Big Questions

2009-04-23T05:55:27Z

Here's a question I've never known (or bothered to look up) the answer to - is Johnny Marr, legendary guitarist for arch-miserabilists The Smith, so-called as a pun on the French j'en ai marre ("I'm fed up"), or is his name an amazing coincidence? Especially given that his songwriting parter declares himself marre aussi...

That's Quite A Habit You've Got There

2009-04-02T22:45:52Z

Amusing bug I found while playing Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars the other day. There's a crooked cop with a mission to give me, but he wouldn't tell me about it until I brought him 2 bags of coke to satisfy his cravings. "You still need 2 bags of coke," it told me after he threw me out. So I went off and did the requisite wheeling and dealing, came back with the coke, got the mission, got killed in the line of duty, pootled off and did something else instead of restarting the mission, eventually got bored and went back to the cop's apartment for another go.

Apparently I'd waited too long and he was needing another hit of coke, because it reverted to the "I'm not giving you a mission till I get my coke" spiel. Except this time, after he ejected me, the message came up: "You still need 65535 bags of coke." Eek!

I'll say one thing for Rockstar games, they certainly have a lot of potential hours of gameplay in them :D

If The Pit Don't Get You Then The Pendulum Will

2009-03-25T23:10:03Z

Rapping the works of Edgar Allen Poe... today's candidate for the best thing ever.

http://www.flocabulary.com/poe_pit.html

Shoulderdog

2009-03-10T20:06:39Z

In the second of his Weltanschauung posts, bateleur addresses psychology, but it all turns out to be another singing of the praises of Game Theory. Now I think of game theory in much the same way I think of trigonometry, that is to say it has some useful applications and is not well understood by a lot of people, but that is still no excuse for grown men to obsess over it.

However something jumped out at me, I forget what, and prompted me to ask if the big B agreed with Socrates' famous assertion, "it is impossible to know the better course of action and choose the worse". Which he did; which he HAS to, as a math fanboy. To disagree would be like saying "I understand how to add, but it's still possible for 2 plus 2 to come to 5".

I did a lot of arguing about Socrates with my philosophy tutor at Magdalen, and I recall it well: I agreed with Socrates, I didn't see how you could know the better and do the worse. "What about when you're in bed and you know you're going to be late for work and you keep hitting the snooze button?" asked dear old Ralph Walker (a renowned expert on Kant), and I think I replied that you never know that being on time for work will be more desirable than five minutes more under the duvet. I've never failed to jump out of bed with alacrity when I've got a plane to catch, for instance. But what's so great about being a model employee?

Still, the seeds of doubt were planted in my mind, and to this day I wasn't satisfied with my account of the issue. Until, a little after the aforementioned post, my epiphany arrived. Depression, which as you may be able to tell from the general mania of my LJ has been with me all my life, is nothing more or less than knowing the better course of action and being able to choose the worse.

Now I think that bateleur and Socrates are among the lucky ones who have never been depressed. But when I stay up till 4 in the morning (work at 8am sharp) for the third day straight playing online Carcassonne, knowing I'll feel like sh*t for a week, when I sabotage and firebomb the most important relationships in my life for no reason (hopefully a thing of the past!), that's just depression working. At no point have I ever lost my ability to look at choices A and B and see that one is sensible and the other miserable, it's just that when the depression is "on" there is absolutely no concern for outcomes. So you just flip a coin, or just take the bad course because you're sick to death of everyone telling you to do the other thing when DON'T THEY REALISE IT MAKES NO F***ING DIFFERENCE IN THE END.

How happy the man or woman who always proceeds efficiently along the paths that probably lead to greatest advantage! But spare a thought for those of us lost in the labyrinth, choosing paths at random, hearing the bellowing and sometimes even smelling the breath of the minotaur.

You were my ball of string, you know, you were my ball of string. Where did you go?

ego custodii ipsos custodes

2009-03-06T21:07:21Z

If there is one thing, just one thing, that would improve the quality of my life, it would be the ability to turn down my housemate Thomas when he invites me to midnight showings of movies. Thanks to him I saw only about the first five minutes of Batman Begins on the big screen before passing out, and thanks to him I was up until 4 am (with work at 8 am sharp the next morning) watching Watchmen.

Difficult to know what to say about it really. Zack Snyder is the ultimate reverent adapter, but perhaps a shot-by-shot remake of a comic ends up as something less than the comic itself. The original pacing feels wrong for a movie, and there are numerous tableaux, effectively panels from the graphic novel come to life, that feel similarly stagey and stilted on a giant screen. The changes made to the script are few, thankfully, as they are not improvements, especially the mystifyingly dullified ending and Rorschach's considerably less exquisite disposal of the child kidnapper. (Probably a good idea to cut the Tales of the Black Freighter, though, given that Watchmen weighs in at two and a half hours already.)

It's mostly a great revisiting of the glories of the graphic novel, though, and the actors are mostly superb, especially an unimpeachable Rorscach and Billy Crudup's eerie turn as Dr Manhattan. Veidt is the biggest disappointment, seeming much more chinless and less serene than the golden king of the novel[1] - and his arctic palace comes across as a cheap and tawdry warehouse with a few statues scattered around the place. But all is forgiven when we get to the real reason for the existence of this movie: finally, a medium that can do passable justice to Rorschach's ever-shifting face.

If you've never read the graphic novel you should definitely do that before seeing the film, but to tide you over here's the brilliant Saturday morning cartoon version:

This Watchmen webcomic is also injokily AWESOME.

[1] I fully endorse Thomas's idea that amongst a cast of relative unknowns they should have cast Tom Cruise to play Ozymandias.

It Starts Out As Harmless Fun...

2009-03-05T20:48:53Z

But all I see in this movie (which admittedly I watched with the sound off) is Grant Morrison's "We3" waiting to happen.

(15 Seconds Of) Fame At Last!

2009-03-05T18:17:21Z

Finally! After some months of concerted attempts to ingratiate myself, I have been namechecked on my favourite steampunk encephalopodcast "The Clockwork Cabaret" (which has recently become available via iTunes, if you wanted to check it out).

I proposed the necessity of a steampunk-emo crossover because, well, "steamo", it's too good a marketing label to pass up, right? This brilliant yet horrifying concept ran away with the entire episode, to the extent that there is now a competition going on to provide album art and lyrics for Clockwork Confessional's debut album "Bloodsoaked and Covered in Gears", with a prize of a $20 gift voucher redeemable at a store that sells squid hats (this is actually true).

Obviously I MUST WIN THIS. I can do the lyrics in my sleep, but all I have to make album art with is Paint. Many of you are experts at this kind of thing thanks to the Wikipedia album art meme, I don't suppose you could knock me up a quick album sleeve? I'm thinking a Jesus figure being crucified on a giant clockwork cog. Perhaps being prodded in his wounded side by a squid, though maybe that's a little bit too much. With obviously the name of the band in a nice Victorian/Gothic script.

I know I ask a lot, but there is a part share of a squid hat in this for you. At the very least a tentacle.

New Music 09: The Heavy Hitters

2009-03-03T23:40:29Z

As part of my ongoing new year's resolution to engage with music more in 2009, I have to listen to an awful lot of shash perpetrated by people who should probably know better. None of the following three albums is in my top ten of year so far, which means they are extremely unlikely to make my all-important festive fifty at decade end, but here are my impressions of the efforts of the Big Names thus far in 2009:

Bruce Springsteen, having 3 entries in Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time and 2 in the Pitchfork 500: "Working On A Dream" seems like a pretty bad title, but once you listen to the eight-minute shaggy dog story that is album opener "Outlaw Pete" and hugely overblown profession of love for a checkout girl in "Queen of the Supermarket" it's obvious that Bruce is feeling, if not quite hilarious, at least impish: tongue firmly in cheek, he's going through the Springsteen motions without feeling any need to (once again) write the Great American Album. He wasn't ever the Boss of me - I only really relate to him through a Badly Drawn Boy cover of "Thunder Road" and Ballboy doing "Born In The USA", both of which I still think are greatly superior to the originals. But the man is statesmanlike here and everything on the record is completely listenable. Plus The Wrestler (song) was cheated at the Oscars, and should have won Best Song, if only because The Wrestler (movie) should have won everything at the Oscars, being like twenty times as good as Slumdog Millionaire.

U2, having 2 songs in the Pitchfork 500 and a whopping 6 in Rolling Stone's list: now don't get me wrong, I don't completely hate U2. I do rather like "One", though I wish they'd stopped before they got to two. But even by U2 standards "No Line On The Horizon" is a stinker, reminiscent of being trapped in the corner by a coked-up fiftysomething bore at a really dull party where the only thing on the stereo is the hoariest old MOR imaginable. Perhaps U2 sensed this when they decided to rope in Brian Eno for a sonic tune-up, but maybe he's a coked-up fiftysomething bore by this stage as well. Anyway, save yourself the trouble of wading through this sludge, download at most the eponymous opening track which has its moments and maybe first single "Get On Your Boots", if you can sit through Bono asserting "I don't wanna talk about wars between nations, not right now, sexy boots, get on your boots!", thus simultaneously implying that his other job is as a relevant political force and sounding like a complete idiot, without throwing up.

Morrissey, having 2 songs at the Rolling Stone but 4 in the vastly more important Pitchfork 500, so suck it Bono: I think I love Morrissey slightly more than my own dad, but it's pretty much a given these days that each "new" album will be 40% petulant carping about high court judges and 40% adolescent posturing that no one could ever love him. But apart from being about to enter a record-breaking fifth decade of being a teenager, Morrissey uses "Years of Refusal" to wrestle with his own mortality in a fairly entertaining way. I don't think there's a truly great Morrissey song to be found here, though there's a hilarious bit at the end of "You Were Good In Your Time" where Moz sings "are you aware wherever you are that you have just died" - at which point the track abruptly launches into two minutes of scary Silent Hill style rumblings, moanings, sinister whale noises and incomprehensible foreign voices emanating from the next room. Apparently Morrissey thinks the afterlife will sound like a Swans song!

Love Lockdown

2009-02-27T23:06:43Z

If my "SO HUNGRY I ATE MY DOG" scheme doesn't pan out, I think I might find work as a where's-the-fireman. Basically I'd roll slowly up onto the scene in my engine, sirens conspiciously disabled, gaze on the situation critically for a minute or two, and then say "You called the emergency services for this?"

The real reason I'm making this post though is to tell you that I've disabled anonymous comments on my journal. Goodbye, Japanese spammers, I'll miss you! Now if you want to post dozens of bizarre and incomprehensible gibberish in my journal seemingly with the sole intention of winding me up, you'll have to get yourself an account for the purpose, like all the rest of my friends did.

You May Say That I'm A Screamo, But I'm Not The Only One

2009-02-27T16:40:42Z

Hey, does anyone know anything about the noble popular music genre that is post-hardcore/screamo? I have to interview a band called Thursday asap and it would be good to think up some questions beyond "you haven't been having the thoughts about cutting yourself again since our last session, have you, Mr Rickly?"

Actually I've just seen that the lead singer is a big fan of Marvel Comics, so they are going to get a fantastic writeup, as per the rules of the Old Geek Network.

On a side note, I'm about ~~apathetic~~ patient as it's possible to get, but these Japanese spam comments do start to get rather annoying, don't they? Is there a story behind them, and did everyone else in the world just switch off their anonymous commenting like a month ago? Or else I'm thinking I could just learn to embrace their static, in the same way as certain guitarists learned to love feedback and distortion. That's right! I shall form a Japanese Spamcore band.

Shock Moon

2009-02-27T01:15:19Z

"I've come to think of madness as not so much losing one's mind, as gaining a new perspective," he said. "Marriage gives you in-laws... madness gives you in-sanity."

Out Out Damn Spot

2009-02-26T22:36:28Z

"Forget leprechaun gold at the end of every rainbow... I was brought up on pirate stories, and they taught me that there MUST be buried treasure about two letters before the end of every alphabet. But I've dug and dug and there never is. There never is."

"Food stamps? I've always wanted to mail food!"

2009-02-26T18:32:09Z

Yesterday a recruitment person got in touch with me about some Web Editor position doing write-ups of hotels for Expedia, which sounded fun enough, but the true amusement came later that evening when I received a phone call from a second "recruitment professional" eagerly desiring to put my resume forward for... exactly the same job. It's quite sad to realise that there's a whole raft of people out there who must make a living googling for resumes on monster.com. They are worse parasites than Dylan-loving poetry profs!

I do need a job soon though, as admission-processing season at the university is about to run out. Walking to my guitar lesson the other night I spied a man in dark glasses milling around at the side of the road by some stoplights. He had a sign declaring him to be "BLIND, HOMELESS, HUNGRY" and a surly-looking boxer dog tethered nearby. I wasn't sure if I believed he was blind, the handwriting was suspiciously good and the dog didn't look like it would have passed its seeing-eye exams, plus if I was a blind man the last place I'd want to be was teetering precariously on the edge of traffic; but you can't accost people and accuse them of not being blind, can you, it's like when you declare someone's luxuriant beard to be fake and try to wrench it off their chin, it always ends badly.

Anyway, the point of this story is that if I don't have a new job within a week or two my ingenious moneymaking plan is to stand at an intersection in dark glasses and a sign that reads "BLIND, HOMELESS, AND SO HUNGRY I ATE MY DOG". It'd take a hard heart to withhold spare change from that.

Best Episode Of Scooby Doo Ever?

2009-02-26T16:17:57Z

"Yes! It was ME who shot the deputy while wearing my Bob Marley mask. And I would have gotten away with it too if it hadn't been for you meddling kids..."

Lyrical Trainspotting

2009-02-25T20:16:20Z

I hadn't thought about it much before, but when Mick Jagger sings "I can't get no satisfaction, I can't get no girl reaction", is it because he is challenging women to duels and they won't take him up on it? Slapping them in the face with his glove, whereupon they just roll their eyes and walk away? I never thought "Satisfaction" had much to say about my life before, but maybe now it does.

"Satisfaction" is Rolling Stone magazine's second greatest song of all time. Its #1 song of all time is, only partly narcissistically, Bob Dylan's "Like A Rolling Stone". A ditty which admittedly does have one of the greatest choruses ever, but also verses the likes of:

You used to ride on the chrome horse with your diplomat
Who carried on his shoulder a siamese cat
Ain't it hard when you discover that
He really wasn't where it's at
After he took from you everything he could steal

It really, really bugs me when they pull in literature professors (or other worthless parasitic layabouts who can't get a real job) to be all sniffy about rock/pop lyrics in general before pronouncing Dylan one of the greatest poets of his generation. He was about as great a poet as Edward Lear. Just with better cheekbones.

How Everything Feels Lately

2009-02-25T08:21:49Z

And Some Have Greatness Upstairs From Them

2009-02-12T02:17:06Z

As I was walking back home from work I saw an unusual amount of activity through the windows of the University Bookstore, so I ducked inside to investigate. It turns out that ex-President Jimmy Carter was somewhere on the upper level, signing his books or doing whatever else retired Presidents do when they're in town.

Now I would have quite liked to catch a glimpse of a real-life President, but there was a big line (or "queue" as it's known in civilized countries) of people who seemed to be clutching three or four fat hardback volumes each, and I was hungry and didn't want to run the risk of being forced to buy an expensive book from the former most powerful leader on the planet. So I went away and got some pizza instead.

I don't really have much of a personal response to Carter, apart from the fact that he is the first President I can remember - I think I remember the announcement of him being on the way out - and that I like peanuts. No one seems to want to make silly films like Frost/Nixon about him these days, so it's possible that he's not all that interesting by Presidential standards. He is an astrological Libran though, which puts him in about the top 8% of the population in terms of integrity and charisma, and also wins Nobel Peace Prizes and stuff which doesn't hurt either. On balance I give James Earl Carter Jr - the first President to be born in a hospital! - a cautious thumbs up.

(EDIT: I've just discovered that Carter granted an official pardon to Peter Yarrow, the singer-songwriter who composed "Puff The Magic Dragon". If that's not enough to secure his place in the ranks of the good guys, I don't know what is!)

Anyway, that makes two times that I've been in at least the same building as a President now. Gods, Our American Cousin was a tedious play.

Ghosts of Christmas Past

2009-02-11T23:18:55Z

Was just listening to some of John Peel's "Festive Fifty" tracks for the year of our lord 1980, and was struck by a few things:

(1) If the alternative music is anything to go by, everyone was pretty bloody depressed in 1980. Joy Division, The Sex Pistols, Killing Joke, Stiff Little Fingers, Dead Kennedys, Public Image Limited... every lyric is full of apocalyptic dread and every guitar part sounds like the muffled clanging of a tin cup against the bars of a dank, underground prison cell. When the jolliest moments are provided by Mark E Smith sounding like he's having a nervous breakdown (i.e. any Fall song ever), you know you're in trouble. It wasn't just the underground music scene, was it? I seem to recall ABBA repeatedly topped the charts round about this time, with songs that might as well have been suicide notes sung by icicles from a dimension that never invented the concept of "major key". Was life genuinely this depressing 30 years ago, was anyone here around to confirm? I can't imagine the current music scene ever hitting more than around 10% of this Unremitting Bleakness Quotient, even in a particularly bad hair week.

(2) There's a lovely moment where John wonders aloud if anyone is "sitting out there at home, writing all of these down". And then informs listeners that if they want a copy of the Festive Fifty list, they can send in a stamped addressed envelope. It's quite poignant, thinking about this World Before Internet, with all its transience and inefficiency, isn't it?

(3) Clearly there was much less interesting music out there then than there is now: many of the songs in the Fifty seem to have appeared in both the 1978 and 1979 countdowns, which I think I'm safe in saying would never happen today, on the grounds of sheer volume of output if nothing else. (Though I believe Pulp's "Common People" featured in the Festive Fifty twice in the nineties, once somewhere in the middle of the chart and then again at #1 the next year once the slow people finally cottoned onto it being the best song of the entire decade.)

All of which points add up to support today's thesis that WE'VE NEVER HAD IT SO GOOD. John Peel excepted, perhaps.

9/11 Is Not A Joke

2009-02-11T21:09:51Z

Highly amusing instalment of Film Geld last night - Film Geld being a Tuesday night meetup hosted by a group of my friends, wherein a different person gets to choose a movie to watch each week, and quite often everyone gets too drunk to follow it altogether (and no, I have no more idea why it's a Geld rather than a Guild than you do). Last week was the awesome The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, so I suppose it was just karma that this week we were subjected to idiotic conspiracy theory farrago Zeitgeist.

I won't rant about it too much, but you will get the general picture if I say that the movie begins with a SEARING EXPOSE (it hopes) of the fact that the Jesus story, from Christmas to Easter via a bit of light miracle working, is a stock-in-trade of pretty much every sun-worship-derived religion of the time. It then doesn't do anything with this "revelation", which as far as I could tell invalidates Christianity for nobody except creationist fundamentalists who are barking mad anyway, but moves straight onto the events of 9/11 and presents further ASTONISHING EVIDENCE that some of the facts of the event are still a bit unclear, that possibly the towers could have been brought down by a detonation from inside the building, and, it started to seem, that MAYBE THERE WEREN'T EVEN ANY PLANES OR HIJACKERS AT ALL. To cut a long story short, 9/11 was an inside job designed to give the Bush dynasty an excuse to go to war just like Pearl Harbor and the sinking of the Lusitania before it, the world is run by the banks which LOAN EVERY SINGLE DOLLAR TO THE GOVERNMENT AT EXORBITANT RATES OF INTEREST, pretty soon we will all have microchips inside our bodies which will give the government total control over every aspect of our lives, and also the American government has already SECRETLY UNITED ITSELF WITH CANADA AND MEXICO INTO A NORTH AMERICAN SUPERSTATE, which will soon adopt a single currency the "Amero" before ultimately merging with the world into ONE GLOBAL NATION WITH ONE ARMY AND ONE SINGLE GOVERNMENT IN CHARGE OF A POPULATION OF SLAVES.

Funny how all of this made some sort of twisted sense in 2007, but in 2009:

(i) If rich white political dynasties run the world, what happened in the last US election?
(ii) If banks have it all sewn up to the point of basically owning the people, why did they need a massive bailout just now?
(iii) If maintaining us in a constant state of fear is necessary to justify eternal military adventurism, how come hardly anyone seems to care about The War on Terror any more?

This movie has scored 8.7/10 on IMDB across 10,627 votes. I presume that non-wackjobs stayed away from the theatres in droves.

After the closing credits we had a nice little Q&A session with "Moonlight", the chooser of this week's film, about what we can do to stem the encroachment of the New World Order. His first good idea was that we should all learn how to become self-sufficient and grow our own food from the land, to counter the DISINFORMATION the government has fed us that there is no possibility of humanity surviving a nuclear war. I pointed out that I'd rather spend my time enjoying music, books, TV and films, even bad conspiracy theory documentaries, than waste hours of my week doing subsistence farming in an allotment just for the chance of being able to say "I told you so" in the event of nuclear catastrophe, but this did not go down well. As Moonlight went on to say such things as (i) education is bad because there seems to be a correlation between people going to university and them becoming indoctrinated by establishment lies (ii) the internet is bad because it has increased the potential of exposure to bad information and bad music and (iii) dandelions from your front yard are a delicious and free source of nutrition that the government doesn't want you to know about, I decided just to keep my mouth shut.

Basically, Zeitgeist is a nasty little propaganda flick for a group of people who I may now hate more than anarchists, i.e. idiot-libertarians: the people who want to be allowed to live armed to the teeth in their own little fortified farmsteads in the wilderness, who don't want to pay any taxes, who love borders because they keep out immigrants and stop us from becoming "ruled" by foreign interests (in your face, Brussels, you'll never abolish our monarchy or our pound!), who think education is indoctrination and religion, community and society alike are just different ways of parting them from their "hard-earned" cash. These people are the absolute, pettiest, most selfish scum of the earth. If we could iron out our resource management issues we are within an ace of creating a golden age on earth, and they want to drag us back to the Dark Ages.

The only good bits of the film are clips from 1976 classic "Network", in which frankly round-the-twist newsman Howard Beale rants uncontrollably about how the government and the media are pulling the wool over our eyes and destroying everything good and kind and pure about our world. Peter Finch won an Oscar for this role... but he was dead before the award ceremony at which he might have collected it. COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT.

Finnegan's Birthday

2009-02-10T23:21:38Z

My puppy is one year old today!

And I've seen him for about three days' total out of the past 8 months. Truly, the children of absent fathers are doomed to become absent fathers themselves.

Here he is following his recent haircut (my dog is at least twice as vain about his apperance as I am), smoking his hookah and contemplating his number one role model, the Great Sphinx of Giza:

I have been in the US for 8 months this weekend! Four more and maybe I'll be able to go home.

With Apologies To Will Rogers

2009-02-02T06:57:03Z

Surviving loneliness is the art of saying "Nice rock" until you can find a doggie.

Powerlessnesslessness

2009-01-28T20:51:01Z

There seems to be some sort of laudable and interesting mid-life crisis going on at bateleur at the moment, whereby he has announced a year-long project to catalogue his position on everything, or as close to everything as possible. While I have no intention of responding with any definitive statements of my own - mainly because I create most of my opinions on the fly, to annoy whoever I'm talking to - I may become a small barnacle on the bandwagon by posting brief retorts.

He's started, as one probably should, with politics. Now I had a quick think about the people I know and off the top of my head couldn't think of one person that wasn't, to all intents and purposes, almost completely apolitical.

What do I mean by that? Well, we are fortunate enough to be living in an age where it's just been proven that, through engagement with the political process, even an African-American can now achieve a platform to implement real change on his society and world. Is anyone I know engaging with politics in that way? No, many of them don't even vote, and those that do vote are or should be aware that, in and of itself, a vote achieves precisely nothing.

Planting a tree to offset your plane travel, giving a small fraction of your disposable income to charity, these are more political actions than casting a vote once every few years. But I'm generally of the opinion that most of us "give back" considerably less to society and the world in this way than we extract from it, and as such actions of this sort are largely just a way of assuaging our private capitalist guilt.

How about having strong political opinions and being vocal about them? Well, I used to participate in interminable, heated online debates on political subjects before I finally realised the blindingly obvious, that even if I did manage to assemble an array of killer facts backed up by unimpeachable logic to support my position and force an argumentative "victory"... I had just achieved nothing at all, in real terms. Having opinions, however correct, changes the world nothing at all. Which is why there is such a large population of what I politely refer to as anarchist wankers to be found on internet forums, basking in the ultimate safety of knowing they will never run the risk of their utopian propositions ever actually being implemented. But anyway, if I made an LJ post saying I thought Israel, or Palestine, or both, or neither, had the right of things at the moment, would make any difference to anyone, anywhere, however much we chewed the issue out in comment? No. So we might as well just leave it out.

Politics, as far as I'm concerned, is active participation. There's no such thing as theoretical politics, all real politics is done in the field. If you attend and speak up at local government meetings and suchlike then colour me impressed, that's politics. I never have, but then I haven't really lived in the same place for more than a year since ceasing to be a minor. Nomads are notoriously politically disenfranchised.

For my money the greatest (and most evil) act of politics I can remember is the flying of hijacked planes into tower blocks at the beginning of this decade. Now that was engagement of the most significant kind, from a group of people that might have been considered to have little or no voice, and it changed the world instantly and dramatically. Yes, it's better that we carry on making as little difference to the course of history as someone dropping a pebble in the ocean makes to the sea level, than that we become murderous terrorists. But let's not pretend that doing nothing but paying lip service to our alleged beliefs is "political". We have bought into powerlessness and apathy as a lifestyle and it's a bed we're just going to have to lie in, come whatever future may.

Great Apocryphal Albums #731

2009-01-16T06:34:52Z

I've been getting quite excited over "The Stand Ins" by Okkervil River lately - definitely a late contender for my favourite album of 2008 - and one of its standout tracks is a supremely bitchy character assassination entitled Singer Songwriter. Anyway for one reason or other I was googling its lyrics and the following couplet caught my eye:

I heard Cuss by The Kinks on your speakers,
I saw Poe and Artaud on your shelves

Now I consider myself a great fan of Ray Davies & co, but I'd never heard of "Cuss". Therefore I spent half an hour searching obscure Kinks discographies for this fabled record... which of course doesn't exist, as the lyrics is almost certainly "cuts by the Kinks", as I'd initially heard.

The Kinks Cuss just sounds so plausible and desirable a piece of rare vinyl! It certainly didn't set off the alarm bells of the lyrics c&p'ers who have spread this Chinese whisper all over the internet by now. And see me contribute +1 to the number of search engine hits it will get forevermore. I <3 eggcorns and I hope they win the war for the hearts and minds of the people.

And that's how an album that doesn't even exist became my favourite Kinks album. Where's a best albums of the 60s poll when you need one?