April 2007: Democracy Inaction
Magazine Polls
The only reason I'm aware of these is undoubtedly because I started listening to Phantom some time back, which is a useful reminder that guitar-oriented indie music is every bit as shit as chart-oriented pop with an irritating pretence of “integrity” marbled over it. Anyone, Phantom do insist on running something music-related on the news every hour, which makes sense even if their ad campaign for this is colossally irritating – it goes along the lines of “we bring you the news you need to hear, and the news you want to hear.” This is, in fact, a devastatingly accurate critique on Where We're At, implying as it does that “proper” news is an inconvenience that is foisted on us by society, like eating your greens or dusting. True, nobody wants to hear about some kid in America going and killing almost as many people as died in the London tube / bus bombings, but only in the sense that I'd prefer it didn't happen at all; but if it has happened, well I actually do want to hear about it thanks very much. And as it happens, I have no interest in hearing that Bob Dylan thinks that Paul McCartney is the best singer in the world (as it goes I wish that hadn't happened either, but even has a slavering Bob Dylan fan and an avid Paul McCartney hater I can't bring myself to be all that bothered), or that some two-bit indie band who might have played Whelan's once have signed some record deal with some band or other. However these tidbits of information seem to run out pretty quickly, and you're left with them announcing that Rolling Stone have declared that Tom Waits is the best underrated musician ever, or NME have had a poll and it turns out that the best anthem ever is Live Forever by Oasis.
It goes without saying that this isn't news, not to anyone who counts – if you're really interested in music it'll prove that none of these magazines know what they're talking about, and if you aren't you won't care. Still, no point in bashing Phantom – not least because I recently attempted to become a daytime TV reviewer for them and was outblanded by some girl or other, so any complaints will seem like sour grapes – it's worth wondering why these things exist at all. Who cares what NME readers think? I'm willing to bet that not even NME readers do. Similarly, how do you decide what constitutes an “underrated” musician? You'd hard-pressed to find anyone who says “Oh yeah, that Tom Waits, he's shit he is” so how on earth can you constitute this as underrated?
The point here is that it assumes that there's such a thing as received wisdom, a sort of combined mass of opinion that has become the norm. This is, obviously, bollocks. If there's one thing that pisses me off it's trying to stop people actually thinking for themselves, and magazine polls like this is a step in that direction of establishing a music orthodoxy that decrees that Yes Oasis Were The Best Band Ever. Polls don't lead to anything interesting, just blank percentages – it's not like you get to hear smart people passionately argue for Live Forever, or really explain why Tom Waits should be considered underrated. Instead you just get numbers, percentages and pie-charts that end up governing everyone's responses, the vast array of human opinion boiled down to a faceless bunch of statistics which we can refer to when we don't know how to form an opinion on something. In short, if we're going to move on as a society, people really need to start arguing more.
Elections, Corruption, and Bertie Ahern
If we're talking about polls anyway, and sculpting this month's ramblings around the theme of “power”, it would seem churlish to ignore the whole “Trying to choose between a boatload of anonymous identical tossers” thing that's happening at the moment. It's possible that part of the reason that democracy is so fundamentally uninteresting is because it does, in the end, come down to numbers and points, and there's really not a whole lot than can be added as far as that goes. Occasionally you get politicians talking about how they love the drama of election night, but really – how dramatic is it to watch people standing in a room while other people call out numbers? At least in Britland they've the good sense to have it going on over the course of the night, which means that people who like that sort of thing can feel daring for staying up past their bedtime, while people who don't can just... well, y'know, go to bed.
Anyway, it's worth mentioning that I currently reside in Bertie Ahern's constituency, which means that I get many more posters of his mug grinning down at me than your average person. Annoyingly, he has called to my house on two occasions, and on both occasions I was hung over and couldn't be arsed opening the door even though I had really been looking forward to roundly abusing him over the general state of the country (I know it was him because I found a little leaflet saying, pretty much exactly in these words, “Bertie called round”. His first-name matiness annoys me straight away, as if I'm supposed to be delighted he called round and a slightly guilty that I wasn't there to offer him tea and biscuits. If it was such a big deal all he had to do was shout “I've got Nurofen” through the letterbox).
Anyway, the big news now is that Bertie may have taken money from some bloke or other, which probably cause his ratings to go up again (non-Irish readers will have to take this on trust – recently it came out that Bertie had accepted a whole pile of money on the sly, and his approval ratings improved. No, really). But why is anyone bothering to go looking for illicit piles of money in order to show that everything's corrupt? Our political system's completely fucked anyway – the two big parties have no policies of their own and are therefore completely unimportant, the Labour party are identical to the two big ones, the Greens are wishy-washy arsemonkeys, and the PDs manage to be evil and boring at the same time. It's no wonder that increasing numbers of people are voting for the Shinners, because at least ex-terrorist racists are actually interesting. But as for corruption – our fat, ignorant, thick bitch of a Minister for Health complaining about nurses (the only bunch of people in the health service who actually do anything) going on strike and trying to imply that it might end up with someone being killed, that's what I call corruption. A political system which breeds politicians who never actually say anything in case it offends some group or other, that's corruption. Having “terror suspects” (i.e. dodgy-looking Moslem who didn't salute the American flag) stopped off in Shannon on the way to some convenient location where they can be tortured, that's corruption... well actually it's pure fucking evil, but you take my point. Ahern taking eight grand off a builder – I really don't care all that much. It's Michael McDowell's continued existence that turns me off the democratic process.
I don't vote and have no intention of doing so, not because I have some fundamental objection to the democratic process, but just because there's nobody actually worth voting for. As it happens I got canvassed in Rathmines the other day by a bloke from the Green Party, who I told quite pleasantly that I don't vote because I'm a Revolutionary Socialist. His response was an enthusiastic “cool!”, as if it had never occurred to him that you can actually be one of those. So now I'm thinking of having my own leaflets printed, which I can hand out to anyone who comes the door and try and get people to support my party. Policy One will be the extermination of Garrett Tubridy, Policy Two will be to deal with the problem of binge-drinking by making it compulsory, and after that it'll just be any old shite that comes into my head.
Prizes
A quick glance at the front cover of The Observer shows that inside is a “superb report from Liberia by the prize-winning author” Zadie Smith. What I like about this is the non-specific nature of the “prize”, which somehow seems less specifically literary than an “award” (I always think of them as generic things that points win). As it happens, I once came second in a soccer skills tournament, and I wrote really bad poetry when I was younger. Does this make me a prize-winning author too?
Mysterious Da Vinci Code Music
One of those “and finally” pieces that make you realise just how stupid everyone's become. It's not the obvious problem, in which somebody actually “translates” mysterious carvings by putting sand on an oscillating plate, doing some other random stuff, subtracting the total from 84 and then making up a song in their spare time. It's that they did all this in the church that features in the Da Vinci Code, because... well because it features in the Da Vinci Code. Therefore it's now a celebrity church, and therefore must have something to contribute that goes beyond people hundreds of years ago believing in fairies and elves. If it happened in a church in, say, Tullamore, nobody would give a toss – in fact, nobody would have bothered with sand and oscillating plates and all that bollocks anyway (and the thing that really bothers me is that I would have thought that oscillating plates were in short supply back when the church was built, but nobody seems to have mentioned this to the people in question). Funnily enough, though, the two seem interrelated. Nowadays, very few people actually believe in god as an active force that affects things; some readers might recall that after the Tsunami, a lot of newspapers started printing big long debates about why God didn't do anything about it if he actually existed. Have them debate whey Superman didn't sort it out by flying backwards around the world and therefore turning back time and everyone would have seen how stupid this all was, but unfortunately we're still struggling with the concept of “religious tolerance” in this country. Anyway, in the absence of the big all-powerful thing that might actually strike you with lightning if you swear too much, it makes sense that people will instead use celebrities as their living gods – because, essentially, something has to fill the void that we might call uncertainty, otherwise people will actually start thinking for themselves. So a Celebrity Church (not Charlotte) is a sort of ultimate bringing together of our two mythologies, and could therefore go on to conquer the world if it wasn't... well... a church. What all this adds up to is that, just as the church used to run the country no matter who the Teeshuck was, our country is now run by Hello! and there's nothing anyone can do about it (unless you count Stop Reading The Fucking Thing, which would actually be quite effective). And that's another reason that elections are pointless.
Psycho-Killers (Qu'est-ce c'est?)
My dreams are actually getting... weirder. When I say “weirder” I mean that they're getting increasingly banal and ordinary, when they should be about having anal intercourse with a two-headed sheep or something. I was always supposed to believe that dreams are out there and crazy, but lately I've been having dreams about going to the shops and finding they've got no newspapers left. This just strikes me as wrong, like my subconscious has run out of weird shit to throw at me and is taking some time off while it gets over its case of writer's block. The most recent “bizarrely ordinary” dream I can remember was that I saw, in a tabloid newspaper somewhere, that the actor who plays the pillhead in Skins had sexually abused two young girls. I can even remember the headline - “Evil TV actor unrepentant”, because Chris-From-Skins had tried to argue that he was only nineteen so there really wasn't such a big age gap between him and the eleven year-olds he'd messed with; he just thought they were older because he was pissed. I'm sure that this was actually a detail in a larger dream, it's just the one that sticks in my mind – certainly my dream-self wasn't particularly bothered about this, except to note that tabloids will call anything evil. Or failing that, “sick”, which should sound more conciliatory – it implies some sort of disorder, after all – but it's used more to mean “gross”. Some time ago I seem to remember a newspaper referring to the Moors Murderer as “sick killer Brady” and I just found myself thinking well yes, that's presumably why he's in an asylum.
The latest evil guy is yer man from America who went and shot 34 people – as noted above, this is getting towards the number who died when bits of London blew up. There's the usual fallout conversations of what-should-we-do, and better yet what-can-we-do, and the admission is generally “well, not much.” Not much except radically change our society so that delusional schizophrenics don't have guns, maybe, or stop bombing the shit out of countries full of brown people.
The reason stuff like this scares everyone is that it makes our world a little unpredictable. This is particularly frightening in Europe, where roads now go pretty much everywhere and it's hard to imagine someone, say, starving to death because they got lost. In Europe, having your car break down is inconvenient. Even in America, it's actually a big deal – it can leave you stranded in a desert and just hoping someone else passes. I said on the podcast last month that in America they try and create mythologies, usually Lone Ranger type individualistic ones, and this is probably because they still live in a country that can kill them. In Europe, there's nowhere for mythologies to go any more.
The thing that nobody said after the London bombings was that it happened in a country where everyone happily talked about the War. If a country's actually at War then it's the sort of thing you might expect to happen, particularly if it's a country that experienced the Blitz. But War in Iraq doesn't work that way, for the simple reason that we've been culturally trained to believe that Iraq doesn't really exist – it probably doesn't even have a McDonald's, for gawd's sake, so it's clearly about as real as Archenland. People are increasingly angry about the death-toll in Iraq, not the thousands upon thousands of made-up brown people but the white soldiers who died over there, because we've essentially sent them away to a battle along the lines of Helm's Deep, except they've got planes. It's stating the obvious that 51 people dead is an average Iraqi weekend, and 34 people dead isn't even that. It's just that things like that aren't supposed to happen here. Which is why the Daily Mail will continue to use words like “evil” and “sick” - they mark people out as aberrations, and most of all stop anyone thinking that it might actually be our fault.
Men Who Sing Like Girls
Phantom also have a strange habit of putting things that are years and years old on their playlist for no apparent reason. This can be a good thing – every radio station should play Debaser once a day and that's all there is to it – but the current single that's on heavy rotation (or at least, once a day, which is pretty heavy given that it's twelve years old) is Yes, by McAlmont and Butler. It's not a bad bit of pop, actually; nice ebullient chorus despite the rather uninspiring lyrics of “Yes I do feel better, yes I feel all right”- all right? Is that the level of drama we want from songs? The Beatles started it with the rather underwhelming “I feel fine” lyric, but really – try harder.
The thing is that I couldn't really remember very much about McAlmont and Butler, and so looked them up on the interweb. Shockingly, the Butler was Bernard, i.e. that bloke who was in Suede back when they were brilliant. Even more shockingly, McAlmont was a man. I really wasn't prepared for this. In much the same way that the lead singer of Gnarls Barkley is quite clearly a fat black woman with big wubblers, McAlmont sounds like a white version of Heather Small. According to Wikipedia he has “an impressive three octave range” - good for him, I'm sure – and he does actually look like Heather Small. Which makes me suspect she just shaved her hair off and tried to launch a second career after everyone realised that M People were unconscionably shit. It's still disorienting. What next? Tom Waits turns out to be Janis Joplin? Bob Dylan is whatserface from The Cardigans? Stop it, please.
The Manic Street Preachers: Your Love Alone is Not Enough
Speaking of whatserface from The Cardigans – she's singing with the Manic Street Preachers, who have offered a song as wretched as everything they've ever done. I don't know why – well all right, I do know why – but whenever I search for the words to describe the Manics, I tend to find “shit sandwich” crops up quite a lot.
Here's the thing – as the election period grinds onwards, I just know that some useless arsewits are going to be coming to my door trying to convince me to vote for their worthless candidate, and they'll probably be the kind of gits who like The Manic Street Preachers. It's the pretention coupled with complete vapidity, the eagerness to look like they're saying something intelligent rather than actually saying anything at all, that actually imply that they really could have been politicians had they not been able to come up with the occasional half-decent guitar lick. Their lead singer reminds me of David Cameron, and that says it all really. Ever since A Design For Life – their stopped clock moment, in which a good tumbling riff obscured the sheer self-indulgence of the lyrics – they've been coming up with the same old world-saving shite that some people who should know better call political. They fucked off some years ago but now they've popped up again, like an unexpected attack of Herpes, and they remain about as appealing now as they did then.
The thing about this is – well, it's rubbish. The Manic Street Preachers were colossally annoying, and they were shit, they weren't actually rubbish (and yes, rubbish is different to shit). Even their most hateful single, If You Tolerate This (for which the “I'd rather not” put-downs are just too obvious), wasn't rubbish – it was just portentous and arrogant and completely without merit. But this song is actually rubbish, real proper rubbish, actual “how in the name of fuck did this get cut” levels of rubbish. It opens with the line “Your love alone” - OK so far, even if the production is unusually bad – after which all the other band members chorus “is not enough not enough not enough” completely out of tune. And that's actually it, that's the whole song, featuring nuggets of wisdom like “When times are hard they get tough they get tough they get tough” - yes, still out of tune – and it actually sounds like they've drafted in football fans to sing along. Whatserface does her best, and she does have the added merit of actually being able to sing, even if she's nowhere near as hot as everyone thinks she is, but this is absolute toss from start to finish. But people can sing along with it and actually sound better than the song itself, which means it will be enormously popular before the end of the summer.
They've got an album out as well. I could possibly care less, but not without taking heroin.
Stupidity
The way I work out my ideas is pretty random; basically it involves me having an argument with someone, searching for the most offensive thing I can possibly say, and then realising with some shock that it's actually true. This was what happened to me lately when Mary Harney came up in conversation and I said, blithely, offhandly, “Yeah well fuck her, she's thick.” Followed by a dawning Oh-God-she-actually-is epiphany. The people I was with argued strenuously that I couldn't just dismiss her as thick, although they weren't able to come up with any arguments that she wasn't; I later shared this with a few friends and was quite disappointed when most of them said “Have you only worked that out now?” That's presumably why they're my friends.
The only real evidence anyone can offer is that she's not thick is that she was our Tawnishta for a bit, and that now she's Minister for Health. But nobody would dare suggest that Éamon O'Cuív isn't thick and he's been a minister for ages now, and besides which so is Willie O'Dea. So that one can be safely set aside. On the prosecution side you've got all the thick things she says. When people complained about spiralling inflation, Harney suggested we should all shop around more – not just disingenuous but also insulting, so thick on two levels. A baby dies in a Monaghan hospital due to a lack of nurses, and Harney announces she's going to appoint a manager when the obvious reaction is to appoint more nurses – thick. People point out about insurance costs and Irish firms making more profit than anyone else, and Harney sets up a massive anti-insurance fraud helpline (don't hear so much about that hotline these days do we? Maybe because only four people ever rang it); really, really thick. And as much as I've racked my brains, I can't for the life of me think of a time when she said anything vaguely intelligent. Occam's Razor and all that points you in an inevitable direction. Mary Harney: thick.
When I expounded this theory some people suggested that I had something personal against her. This is a silly thing to say – of course it's personal, because I hate her as a person, and why in the world wouldn't it be? Admittedly I do call her a fat cow sometimes, which is silly of me because that's not even in the top ten most repulsive things about her, but because she's Minister for Health I do find this strangely relevant. I actually always thought the main problem was that she was an ignorant, uncaring, self-interested right-wing blob of misery who holds political and sociological opinions that I find completely and utterly repugnant, but somehow the fact that she's thick seems more annoying than all these things. Michael McDowell insults my political and social beliefs, which is bad enough. Harney does all that but also insults my intelligence, and I think that's actually worse.
Reality
...is Kaká.
Rock The Vote
Oh, fucking hell. What is it with things that actually happen after South Park parodies them? What was the point of the Getting Gay With Kids episode if people are still trying to appeal to yoof McCulture by inserting the word “rock” into the title? I mean... “rock” the vote. Who actually says “rock” any more? The only possible context you can imagine it is with a parent unwittingly humiliating their kid in the company of his friends (“Oh yes, Anthony is a big fan of rock music, his favourite song is in the Hit Parade at the moment”). Quite apart from the obviously patronising attitude involved – oh, if we put rock in the title then all the kids will start voting – it's just so incompetently done. It just makes me think of “Rock the Boat”, the most annoying wedding-song of all, win which people dance by sitting down in a big line and patting the floor in unison. So the obvious question for the Rock the Vote thing is... well, I'd like to know where they got the notion..
Main Guy: Hey, young people aren't voting any more, what shall we do about it, any pitches?
Flunky No. 1: Well, what about us trying not to be a bunch in interchangeable middle-management nobodies who are all out for themselves, thereby encouraging them to believe that there's something worth voting for... no, I'm fired aren't I?
Flunky No. 2: How about having elections at weekends or making it easier to get a postal vote, so that students can actually vote?
Flunky No. 3: Why don't we stop fostering an excuse for society in which we consistently tell people that the only person they should actually care about is themselves? If we just keep emphasising the individual then it's hardly surprising that nobody cares about the shape of the society they live in – we've convinced them it's an irrelevance.
Main Guy: No, no, no. We just need some buzzword to make it work. Something like Rock the Vote, only not as shit. Go and work on a campaign, now!
In other words, don't tackle the actual problem – namely, that democracy is well and truly fucked, and the only thing that might save it is if we get a fascist or something like that trying to come to power. Voter turnout in France is enormous, because a high proportion of people running for office are psychotic racists. Having said that we've already got McDowell, so that theory doesn't quite work either.
The thing about all systems is they get old, and corrupt, and irrelevant; it's natural. Politicians obviously can't notice this, as they're part of the system and therefore have to believe they're doing something important – journalists won't notice either, because they're old and it hasn't occurred to them that maybe the falling voter turnout is a natural, inevitable, healthy thing. In twenty years time the PDs will be getting elected on a national turnout of 436, and that will be the moment when the system will inevitably collapse and be replaced by something newer, and fresher, and more democratic, and more dynamic, and less full of completely useless lumps of biomass clogging up space and stealing perfectly decent oxygen. The annoying thing is that, as it becomes increasingly clear that our current system is slowly stopping working, the people in charge assume that it's our problem. They refer to “voter apathy” as if it's a virus, rather than just a natural, intelligent reaction to all our politicians being useless.
I don't vote, and it's not actually because I'm a revolutionary socialist even if it is a good line – it's just that there's no-one around who I can be bothered voting for. I don't make any secret of this either, and what's doubly irritating is that some particularly stupid people react to me making any points at all by saying “Well you don't even vote, so I don't know what gives you the right to complain.” It's usually not even worth wasting my breath explaining that it's still my society, in which I live, and not-voting is actually as important and vocal a method of expression as voting, or indeed more vocal if you just vote for Fianna bloody Fáil because your Dad did. The other line, which people often unfurl during street protests which might cause slightly inconvenient traffic jams, is “Well if you don't like the choices you're given why don't you stand for election?” which is as stupid as giving someone a bike with its brake-cables cut, and then saying “well if you think there's something wrong, why don't you ride it?”
I'm quite content with my state of affairs, as it happens – well as content as anyone can be when they know they're living in a broken society – what I don't like is people trying to tell me that it's all my fault. I'd take to the streets about this, but being an activist is totally gay.
The best Rock the Vote soundbite is the Daire O'Briain one, by the way, where he says “Sure why would you want to be interested in politics? Just keep working on your Bebo page and let old people get on with the running the country.” Presumably it's supposed to be ironic, but to me it sounds like a pretty successful recipe for a happy life and it's certainly what I plan on doing. Except for the Bebo bit, which is so 2006.
Sunshine
Isn't Cillian Murphy absolutely 100 per cent gorgeous?
I'll lay odds that everyone is expecting some sort of ironic comment here, but the fact is that he is. He's got the most wonderfully cherubic face, but at the same time there's something incredibly dangerous about him. His eyes just seem to get bluer and bluer with each film he does, and he moves with an amazing dishevelled grace. In the opening scenes of Sunshine, while everyone's sitting around a table, you can't understand why no-one's jumped up and gone “bloody hell, we're sitting next to Cillian Murphy.” But there you go.
One of the ways that people really establish control is to create notions of acceptable behaviour, what we can and can't do, which is why it's perfectly acceptable for a straight woman to comment that she thinks Angeline Jolie is attractive but a straight man simply can't say that they fancy Cillian Murphy without everyone making comments about they being gay. This obviously comes back to maleness still ruling the universe, because part-time lesbianism is acceptable to straight men but part-time gayness is obviously perverted. One of the good, interesting things about Sunshine, then, is people actually trying to do something – using up all of Earth's resources to send a great big bomb to fly into the sun – and bugger the consequences. It's such a touchingly optimistic view of humanity that it could almost make you weep.
All that aside, Sunshine opens up as a whole pile of classic SF movies jammed together. Oh look, there's the weary crew and the illuminated table from Alien. Ooh, there's some trees like in Silent Running. Hey, a bit of Solaris. And after 45 minutes of this the whole thing is really trying the viewer's patience – it's just a question of watching it and going “seen that, seen that, seen that, and hey the originals were all better”, which leads to the portentous tone of the thing becoming rather wearing. It's not helped by a script that wobbles early on, relying on the best scientists humanity has to offer fighting with each other, and then everyone being endangered because one of the (allegedly) brilliant scientists makes a schoolboyish blunder with his figures which nobody even bothered checking. I was getting irritated, and when I get irritated I sigh quite a lot, means that the people sitting beside me were getting irritated too.
But.
Well, the script improves when the ship reaches the other ship (it turns into Event Horizon for a bit) – it finally seems to acquire some actual dramatic impetus, and narrative thrust, and the questioning of what the sun actually means to people becomes an interesting sideline rather than just being this great plodding argument that doesn't really go anywhere. The characters might be implausible, but they're rounded human beings, and as the story progresses they become more and more involving. The set-pieces are good. Michelle Yeoh's in it, and she's always worth looking at (so's Cillian Murphy, but that much should be obvious). And, and and and, it just looks fantastic. Boyle was always a brash director, but here he seems to have calmed down and taken time to really construct sequences – boy, are they good. There's a lot of moving from darkness to light, or from hot to cold (thematically linked to the story, which matters) and the spaceship itself really feels like a great big lump of stuff. We're living in an age where people say “visually spectacular” about things like 300 or King Kong, which blatantly aren't spectacular because they all look like computer games – compare King Kong to 2001: A Space Odyssey and you'll see what visually spectacular really means – so it's a hell of a treat to see a film which actually does look great. If It's quite an exhausting watch, in the best sense of the word. And this, more than anything, is what made it work – more so than the decent characterisation, or the nice use of concepts, or the slowly building or the genuinely rather lovely finale. It's not a masterpiece, in fact it's not as good as 28 Days Later (good film, but criminally overrated), but it does pack a solid wallop. Rather wonderful, really.
CompuHorrors
I had resolved not to talk about Doctor Who this month, but the CGI chat highlighted something. The most recent episode of Doctor Who had a simple premise – old bloke gets in a rejuvenation machine which makes him younger, but also corrupts his DNA so that he keeps morphing into a big ugly scorpion thing. The first glance of this we see is a tentacle, and it's damn scary. But when they reveal the whole thing it's an enormous computer-generated thingamujig and, and and and, it's rubbish. The episode is clearly a reworking of Cronenberg's version of The Fly, but what it doesn't seem to understand is that The Fly was scary because Jeff Goldblum was still recognisably Jeff Goldblum, even when he started scuttling up walls and puking on his food. The problem with CGI is that it assumes “bigger” automatically equates to “better”, so you get scenes with huge computer-graphic scorpions scuttling along the ceiling. Whereas if it was a human with icky skin and strange claws scuttling along the ceiling it would be 1000 times more frightening. Interestingly, Stephen Greenhorn the writer says “I'd written a bit about the scientific theory of where this monster comes from and a vague idea of how I thought it might look. The guys at The Mill [they'll be the CGI people] saw that and thought, 'we can do better than that!'... they think it's the scariest thing they've done.” Better meaning bigger. All you have, sadly, is a computer thing with no connection to anything real or physical. In an episode about human metamorphosis it stands to reason that the thing should still look like a human rather than an anything - bear in mind that the scariest thing the new series of Doctor Who has done is people with gas masks on - but that's not how CGI-heads think. And that's why the Star Wars Special Editions are shit.
Greens
There was a programme on the other day about how much stuff humans use, called “The Human Footprint” - which is a bit of a stupid name, because it sounds like an hour of people looking at an actual footprint – but nobody actually thinks of a “footprint” as the imprint a foot makes in the ground any more, so it seems to have been only me who thought about it. Anyway, I didn't watch it, I just wanted to point out how silly it is before I start laying into the Green Party.
They'll do well in this election, which I suppose isn't a bad thing (in as much as I care – we're all doomed, remember), because caring about the environment is cool at the moment. Besides which they're vaguely left-wing, so that's a positive thing too. But the outlook is just plain wrong, in much the same way that feminism is wrong. No improvement is ever made by concentrating on just one issue, no good ever comes of thinking that there's only one problem. Feminism is silly because it only highlights one area of discrimination, but the fact is that all people should be treated as equals and that's all there is to it – it's got nothing to do with men and women, and everything to do with a basic decency that we should expect from everyone. But now we live in an age where people refer to “gender politics”, simply because something that wasn't really about gender became focused on that issue. Cosmopolitan magazine is feminism's fault, I'm afraid.
Somebody may well point out that the Greens aren't just about “green” issues (and even that word annoys me – it just makes me think of sick people), but if you call your party the Green party then you're obviously going to view everything through that prism. The whole question of what we're doing to the ecosystem is one of behaviour, a way that people have been encouraged to think, which is – like all of society's problems are, by definition – sociological. Bluntly, pretty much every message we get now is about improving the lot of the individual, which is why politicians use words like “choice” a lot. People like to blather on about “freedom of choice”, but what this actually means is that they want to do whatever they want. When the smoking ban came in a few years ago the dispiriting thing was the tone of the debate: smokers blabbed on about “freedom of choice”, which if you accept the health concerns then it's a bit like complaining about anti-murder laws restricting your personal freedoms; and non-smokers said they were sick of other people inflicting their habit upon them, but nobody made the point that it's a habit that a large proportion of the population share, and besides which it wasn't “inflicted” on anybody because nobody forces anyone to go into a pub (which is a shame, really). What really came through was that nobody actually thought of things from the other person's point of view; everybody, every side of the argument, was fought for selfish reasons. We've now accepted this as the norm, ever since Thatcherism dressed itself up as a tiger of some description and settled down in Dublin – nobody really believes in society as something that they should take responsibility for, something that might make them actually consider the wishes of other people over their own. So it's hardly a surprise that no-one cares about preserving the world for future generations – nobody cares about the people who are around now, let alone the ones that might be around in a few years.
(It's noticeable that many of the soundbites about the Invire-O-Ment give the game away, because they tend say “your children's future” rather than “future generations” - they understand that nobody gives a toss about something as abstract as a generation, but if you make it about something that's theirs they might take some notice.)
So the world's-going-to-drown-in-waste problem is the same problem as the-starving-Africans, or the Iraq of-course-it's-not-a-war, or feminism, or racism, or whatever you care to name; it's that we live in a society where we're encouraged not to give a fuck about other people. And if you just go at it from your own pet manifestation of the problem and nothing else, then you only compound things. It's an old chestnut, but true, that people previously didn't create enormous amounts of waste because it just wasn't what you did – wasting something was wrong, irresponsible. My toaster broke lately, and my landlady – who is part of the aforementioned generation – actually talked about getting it fixed. I'd already bought a new one, obviously, but it still knocked me sideways. The mentality is the same as not wasting food, though – it's not about the short supply, it's that when there's other people around who might not have a toaster then not even trying to repair your own is just... rude. Nowadays, other people don't come into it. And all the solar panels in the world won't cure that problem, now, will they?
Jeff Buckley
Well it's not current, except that I roundly abused someone for liking him last night, but... would everyone stop it, please? It's not just that he's shite, it's that his dad (that'll be Tim) was great, but everyone keeps liking the whiney tosspot son who couldn't swim. I told the someone-last-night this, and was informed that she hadn't actually listened to him and were they similar? It's probably not a big piece of news, but I'll still advise everyone that if they want to terminate a conversation like this then the sentence “Not really, because Tim Buckley's not shit” seems to do the trick.
Jason Donovan
I discovered the other day that I know all the words to Too Many Broken Hearts in the World. It took me years to recover from the discovery that I know all the words to Especially For You, so I'm not sure how I'm going to react to this one. I dream of a day when some Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind procedure can purge all this shite from my mind (which I think might have made a more interesting movie – imagine someone going in to Brian Cox and saying that I Should Be So Lucky had been going round in their head for days and they wanted it removed), but I know that's a dangerous bargain to make – too many dreams can be broken in two, after all.
Birdshit
A bird nearly shat on me the other day, but thankfully it only got my shoe. I have actually been shat on by a bird before, and was told by several people that it's good luck. This is probably the most stupid thing I've ever heard – given the sheer enormity of the area of the world which isn't my head, getting shat on is quite obviously very unlucky indeed. There's actually some country or other which makes most of its revenue from exporting birdshit as fertiliser, but I can't remember which one. The other thing that I can't remember – and I'm certain about this – is the other word that people used to use for birdshit. It was a single word, and was somehow more delicate than just “birdshit”. Whatever it is, the world seems a little less interesting without the birdshit-word in it.
Snooker
Snooker is, really really really is, absolutely bloody brilliant.
Thing is, it's brilliant in a different way from most other sports. All sports are generally about the physical – that, bluntly, is what sport is – and there is a great joy in seeing Ryan Giggs running, legs stepping high and elegant, body straight, looking exactly like people are supposed to look when they run. Obviously that's not all there is too it, otherwise I'd just by some gay porn mags and get on with it, but nothing is as mental as snooker. Obviously it requires physical skill and precision – having a good cue action is something that takes years to perfect – but by the time you've reached the top of the game, everybody has a perfect cue action and everybody can knock in 147s in practice. So it's almost entirely about character, because if it wasn't then Ronnie O'Sullivan would just win everything, whereas these days – especially these days – it seems that any one of about thirty players can win the World Championship. This year a bloke called Mark Selby has made the final, in spite of being nobody much. Lots of people complain about there being no “characters” in the game any more, but actually it's just that snooker players are younger now and by definition not as eccentric. It's still a game of character.
Matthew Stevens was playing Shaun Murphy this year and was 12-7 ahead, needing 13 to win. Murphy won 13-12. He didn't win it by making a few hundreds and getting quick frames either – he ground his way through every single one. What made this so fascinating was watching Matthew Stevens disintegrate as the game went on. This is the essence of most individual sports – you get it in tennis or golf – but in snooker there's sod all you can do if you're playing badly, because you just have to sit there in a chair watching the other guy win. In the Stevens-Murphy game, the drama was in watching Murphy growing in confidence, while Stevens seemed to physically shrink. By the end he was in pieces, missing pots by a foot that he'd have potted with his eyes closed a couple of hours earlier, and there was no way in hell that Murphy was going to lose. Actually being able to see one guy dominate another, without even talking to him – that's proper drama.
That, as it happens, is why no-one's ever made a really good movie about sport (because boxing isn't sport, so it doesn't count). Any Given Sunday's a good movie but it's about a clash of generations, not American Football. Sporting encounters have a narrative already, so telling a story about them is as stupid as trying to make a film about War and Peace.
This is why I didn't go and see that film Zidane, and got increasingly annoyed by all the bollocks that was talked about it. It was founded on a principle that some artist or other had decided he understood the beauty of football and footballers in a way nobody else did, and then everyone else started blabbing on about it being a portrait of a man at work. The point is that I can see all this just by watching Real Madrid versus Manchester United in the Champion's League anyway, and what's more I get to see a football game going on around it. It's a film born from all the middle-class snobbery about sport, that old “It's just a load of men kicking a pig's bladder around a field” bullshit which is as moronic a statement as “Well Beethoven's just a load of men making noise.” Sport is a form of improvised physical storytelling but, because it's primarily played by big blokes who don't have degrees, poncey tossers think they can dismiss it as moronic because they don't understand it. So here's the dividing line; anyone who watched Matthew Stevens versus Shaun Murphy and doesn't accept it as a marvellous piece of drama is an idiot. And can piss right off.
Macy Gray
Still sounds like Eric Cartman, still has no neck. Next.
Jason Donovan (Again)
Hey... why specify that the dreams are broken “in two”? I know it's a metaphor, but still – the number of pieces is surely irrelevant, and it would actually be far more dramatic if they were broken into more than two pieces. I know the answer is so it can rhyme with “you”, but it still bothers me. Besides, a bit more imagination would have lead to a more interesting chorus: "Too many broken hearts in the world / Yes, too many dreams break into smithereens / If you try and leave I'll put you into a blender / And serve you at dinner from a soup tureen."
Bryan Ferry
Why the hell was everyone getting so het-up about this? For those who don't know, Bryan Ferry was lambasted for saying that the Nazis had a decent sense of style. This is, quite simply, true. Nobody has ever made sexually-charged torture soft-porn films in which a woman is tied up and beaten by a socialist, have they? It's now accepted by the ruling classes that Nazis are evil – which is a pretty sound judgement – but in the climate of good taste, it's now unacceptable to like anything that may or may not be connected, however obliquely, to the guy with the funny moustache. It's like the way that everyone is suspicious of somebody who admits to liking Wagner, not for the right reason (i.e. Wagner is bombastic toss) but because he was a Nazi. Wagner being a Nazi is fantastically irrelevant; he could have raped babies and eaten them and it wouldn't make a blind bit of difference. Similarly, if Bryan Ferry wants to like Albert Speer's architecture, let him; making things taboo is always bad, because it's trying to stop people thinking. Now if everyone had lambasted Bryan Ferry for murdering a whole raft of Bob Dylan songs, that would have been fair. Nazis are one thing, but fucking about with Bob Dylan – that's far more evil, thanks.
Doubles
I seem to have two copies of Lost Songs by Palace Music. This bothers me. It's universally accepted that some CDs multiply – everyone has a copy of a Verve album, including me, although I've never listened to it and have no idea how it came into my possession – but Will Oldham is not generally one of those CDs. And it makes me remember the time that I got three Obi-Wan Kenobi stickers in the same pack, about half way through completing my Star Wars album, and when I wrote to Panini to complain they gave me six packets of stickers in compensation. Six. It was like winning the lottery.
I also seem to have lost my copy of I See A Darkness. This makes me wonder if it actually turned into the extra Lost Songs CD, as if all the Bonnie Prince Billy albums spontaneously morph into Palace Music stuff if you leave them alone for long enough; maybe they're trying to revert to their superior, earlier state of evolution, like Mark Gatiss in the aforementioned Doctor Who episode. In which case it's a bit of a pisser that it was the best Bonnie Prince Billy album that decided to go first, when Ease Down The Road is still sitting on my shelf.
Anyway, if anyone wants a copy of one of the best albums of the last twenty years, drop me an email.
The Blueshirtinator
Everyone's been saying for ages that Fine Gael need to change their image, but is that any reason for them to make their candidates look computer-generated? Whoever's been touching the thing's up on Photoshop must have decided to play a practical joke or something, because it makes half the cadidates look a bit scary. Enda Kenny looks like he's landed from Mars, and is in fact and android trying to blend in with our hyoo-mahn ways. Although that's not a million miles from the truth.
I've never quite seen the point of election posters anyway. Leaflets obviously make sense, but why would I vote for anyone because I've seen them trying to smile at me from a poster (and in the case of most politicians, it looks like they can barely remember the sequence of muscle movements required to smile)? Plus they're all too big, which means I can see people's faces in far more detail than I'd like. Maybe other people are more inclined to vote for Johnny Nobmuncher once they've seen his nostril-hairs, but I'm not one of those people.
Natasha Bedingfield: I Wanna Have Your Babies
And I wanna punch you in the face – rumour has it you bruise easily – but we can't have everything.
She's not as objectionable as her brother Daniel, but nor is syphilis. She's best known for that These Words song, in which Natasha sang at great length about how she couldn't write songs. It was a dizzying moment of self-awareness on her part, but not quite sufficient to stop her writing the dratted things, which means that we had to put up with Natasha singing I Love You I Love You I Love You, shortly after the classic “read some Byron, Shelly and Keats, recited them over a hip-hop beat” which is just the shittest bit of rhyming that anyone can hope to hear, ever. It's a bit like The Circus Animals Desertion, rewritten by a moron (which is almost as annoying as the version we've got, which was written by a pretentious stuck-up tosser. If Maud Gonne had just shagged W.B. Yeats we might never have had to put up with the moany old git – she really should have taken one for the team if you ask me).
This song manages a trick of being really, really bad on a number of different levels, so I'm just going to have ignore lots of them – first of all that Natasha can't rhyme to save her life, secondly that the damn thing doesn't have a tune, thirdly that the line in the chorus that goes “we should get serious like crazy” is in the running for Most Stupid Line Of The Year competition (although Avril Lavigne's effort of “She's, like, so whatever” is still favourite), and fourthly that the video features over- or under- sized babies sprouting spontaneously from the landscape in a way that's more than a little frightening.
My main problem with it, though, is that Natasha is one of those women who keeps coming up with songs that are clearly intended to be feminine, but are actually full of the most oppressive drivel in the world. The basis for this song is that poor old Natasha is absolutely keeerrrrazzzeeeee about the bloke she's seeing, so much so that she wants to have his babies, but obviously she can't say this to him or he'll get scared and run off. As the video makes clear, the baby thing is meant completely literally. The point's reinforced by the plot of the video, which shows a succession of men running off on Natasha once she makes her feelings known.
First up – if all of them are doing a runner on Natasha, maybe she wants to consider that it could be her problem. The fact is that men aren't really terrified of commitment at all, it's just a line they come up with when they don't really like their girlfriend all that much because it sounds plausibly sensitive and not as crude as “Well, you've got chubby ankles.” Which links into the second point, that it's based on a notion that's bullshit. If you're madly in love with your boyfriend then the best way forward is obviously to tell him; if he gets scared and runs away then you've prevented yourself from wasting time with someone who's not really all that interested in you, and if if he doesn't then it's obviously a positive outcome. But the thing we do these days is control behaviour by propagating untruths until they're accepted as a sort of orthodoxy, so it's now uniformly accepted by all and sundry that any man will run a mile when a girl indicates that she's interested. This is horseshit – one of the more tedious things about men is that they love owning stuff, so if somebody says “I want to have your babies” then it indicates a submissive girlfriend which is male fantasy number seven.
The worst thing anyone can do is just accept things as true, but shite like this is all about that – creating a received wisdom that becomes self-fulfilling, because it becomes the way people are expected to behave. And that behaviour is generally about not saying anything that might be construed as controversial, because dull people are more likely to buy shit. It's not Natasha's fault, obviously – her only crime is being obnoxiously boring, which is pretty serious in itself but nothing that a good slap wouldn't cure – it's just another symptom of a world where people just shrug their shoulders and say “that's the way world is.” No it isn't.
Rhyming
The comment about Natasha not being able to rhyme things properly just reminded me how exciting it is when somebody rhymes something really, really well – the best recent example being the Arctic Monkeys, who are good at that sort of thing anyway but excelled themselves on their latest album with “This house is a circus, berserk as fuck.” The all time best rhyme ever remains by Snap though, with their effort “I'm serious as cancer when I say rhythm is a dancer” - not because it's particularly clever, but just because, fifteen years on, I still can't quite believe that no middle-management producer type at any point in the production process stood up and said “hang on, you can't describe yourself as being serious as cancer.” This might be a good time to note that the guy from the video to When The Sun Goes Down (you know, the scummy man) is currently giving an incredible performance as a National Front skinhead in This Is England, but then again, maybe not.
Contemporary Sculpture
Well actually it's a wine glass I broke when I was pissed (presumably – I woke up in the morning with a hangover and there it was on my table which was in turn covered in wine, so unless someone's started breaking into my house and turning my delph into interesting sculptures I suppose it must have been me), but I'm definitely keeping it.
I'm just annoyed because I have no idea how I did it. Otherwise I'd break the others and make a set. Sod it, I can drink cheap bottles of wine from mugs. I'm not standing on ceremony.
