Forgiveness

This website gives you the chance to forgive George Bush or anyone else you'd care too. It defines forgiveness as "giving up all hope for a better past". Who would want to give anyone forgiveness on those terms?
I am right in nursing resentment.

Jizz in my pants

Comedy gold

Friday

Trailer for the new Friday the 13th movie looks ... average... good to see they've used some of the original's sounds but altogether the trailer looks like some sort of standard teen horror flick, a little pointless perhaps. Plus it seems like they've gone for the simplistic hedonistic teens approach rather than the volunteers at summer camp approach. Still, could go either way I guess ... or hope...

The Jerk

Absolute genius comic from xkcd here.

Hubris?

This story is one that could be used to say quite a lot.  And indeed is in this article, but comparing it to Guernica in the headline?  A little excessive methinks.

It was a tragedy, yet it did not feel like an accident. All those
people were there, lined up in the cold and darkness, because of
sophisticated marketing forces that have produced this day now called
Black Friday. They were engaging in early-morning shopping as contact
sport. American business has long excelled at creating a sense of
shortage amid abundance, an anxiety that one must act now or miss out.

Baader Meinhof

I haven't seen the new Baader-Meinhof film but I've seen quite a bit written about it and all of it is of the type - "People say this film glamorises terrorism but...". The point being I've yet to see anyone actually say, "This film glamorises terrorism".

Betray him, my robots.

Been listening to the new Guns n' Roses album and I'm pretty into it actually. From what I've seen it's been getting really bad reviews, which I guess it was always going to, but as far as I'm concerned it's a good rock album nothing more, nothing less. Nothing earth-shattering, but Axl still sounds great, he's still got the tunes and, well, what more could you want. It helps that all the lyrics seem to be about betrayal. Which is a subject close to my heart at the moment.
And so to 808s And Heartbreak, the new Kanye West album. I think I'm loving this as well. At first I was in two minds, but the more I listen, the more I think it's probably a genius album. I still think I need a few more listens before absolutely committing myself. Maybe the one problem with it is the whole load of stuff about how all his cash isn't enough, it's the type of thing that always bugs me in some sort of bitter way - he should try being absolutely skint and heartbroken, see how he likes that...

Turkey Carnage

It's Friday

I've just watched all ten Friday the 13th films (not all together in one sitting or anything insane like that, and not counting Freddy v Jason, which I am going to watch but which doesn't really count does it?) in honour of the remake that's due shortly and with the intention of writing something on them and, well, just because it's so long since I watched any of them and I love these films.. First off though, seeing as I've been neglecting this blog recently I thought I might do a Top Ten of Friday the 13th films. How exciting? Plus I figured it might help me get some thoughts together on the whole Jason corpus.
So. Here goes.

10 - Part 8: Jason Takes Manhattan. Just a dreadful movie. First off how does Crystal Lake become connected to a waterway that can have yachts go in and out of it and connected to a waterway that gets you to New York? Besides this pedantry my main quibble with this film is that Jason is no longer the effective and efficient killing machine he has been upto this point in the series. Previously, one blow and you're dead and you generally don't see him coming. In this film he ends up chasing pretty much everyone before he kills them and there is now an awful misogyny to his kills which (despite the popular conception) was never there before. The women are all killed slower than the guys - there is one strangling, something Jason would never have bothered with before, far too slow. It's not just the misogyny either. Whereas previously he would kill anyone who came in his path in this film he walks the streets of Manhatten ignoring pretty much everyone, and when some kids yell at him, he doesn't kill them - he does a pointless scaring of them. Jason? Is that really you?

9 - Part 9: Jason Goes To Hell. I was close to putting this in tenth but it gets put here, not because of any redeeming features it may possess, but because Part 8 really is soooo bad. This is also utter rubbish, from the opening capture of Jason, through the absolutely laughable resurrection to the final "battle" and the crummy hint of Freddy v Jason at the end. Not so much a Friday the 13th film but a hotchpotch of horror movies mashed into a big pile and scattered over the wall indiscriminately and with no care for the resulting mess.

8 Part 6: Jason Lives. This one is the first of the ones which is actually good. It's one of the standard lump, nothing exceptional but then again nothing too awful. The whole beginning is pretty bad but it picks up into not a bad film. Interesting that they actually manage to get some kids into Crystal Lake for the first time and Jason is a nice guy who just leaves those kids alone.

7 Part 2: Again, pretty good. Some interesting moments - Jason as Christ references; sex as a little moment of death; shrine to dead mother. Some nice touches throughout

6 Part 3: This I like. Starts off and reminds me of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, something to do with the whole bizarre characters in the gas station I guess(the scene in which the guy walks through the shop randomly eating things off the shelves and putting them back in packs half eaten is an amazing scene and quite disgusting). And then turns into a pretty entertaining slasher flick. Good stuff. And the nod to the first one at the end - genius.

5 Part 4: The Final Chapter. An excellent example, everything's here, some fine kills, good humour, awful dancing, giving Jason flashbacks, skinny dipping, all the classic motifs really.

4 Jason X: Brilliant. After 8 and 9 I feared the worse here and it was done, so I read, as a stop gap till Freddy v Jason but it is absolute quality. Features one of the best kills of any of the films. Very entertaining. Still manages pretty well to stay within the formal constraints of the series while leaving the confines of Crystal Lake (unlike 8). It is interesting to note how as the series progresses more people survive, from the lone survivor of the first few, through the couple who survive in the middle portion to Jason X where the couple are joined by a third (and there actual survival depends on the sacrifice of the fourth.

3 Part 1: Maybe, as it is the first, I should have put this at no. 1, but as a stand alone film I prefer the two I've got above it. I think If you were watching for the first time this would be the only place to start but if you look at the series as a whole, after seeing them all, it takes its place nicely here. It's interesting, Knowing the ending, seeing the conventions which build up over the series to compare this to the others. Jason is obviously present though absent. It's retroactively given more meaning than intended. This I guess is the interest of the series, how looking at the whole changes the singular. Anyway, a quality film, and the shock ending is still pretty amazing.

2 Part 7: The New Blood. The way they resurrect Jason in this one is pretty much genius, so much better than the standard shot of electricity... The whole film is amazing. My one concern is that it is perhaps in this film that we see the inkling towards the drawn out kill which makes 8 so dreadful, but here it is handled well enough. The other amazing thing about this film (the ending is amazing as well to be fair (overuse of the word amazing fully justified)) is the way that Jason hunts people through the forest with a seeming ly random array of weapons, culminating in a chainsaw on a huge stick - the genius of this kill is its absolute anticlimax, after hunting this guy with it and getting him on the floor and starting up the chainsaw, the actual kill is nothing, we see nothing and hear nothing. Whether this was due to some cutting by the censors, who knows, but the affect is, well, to say stunning is perhaps odd given the anticlimax, but it is stunning in its shattering of expectation.

1 Part 5: A New Beginning. This is the real deal. On every level. It is the best example of the Friday the 13th "formula", the purest movie if you will, and yet it is also the one which takes the greatest distance from the formula, it is in many ways a parody of the films, while at the same time being a superb example of the films; it is the one in which Jason is the most Jason, in the ruthless efficiency and quickness of his kills, and yet Jason isn't even in it. This is the greatness of Jason - his emptiness, he is nothing but the mask (the mask which doen't even come into the films till the 3rd one) he is pure extimacy - he doesn't have to be physically in the films to be in the films, even the first one which predates him - he is retroactively in it. Just as his presence is all over 5 even though he is nowhere to be seen.
This also includes my favourite bit of any of the films, the bit where the ambulance man takes off the cover from the body, all the kids gasp or cry and the ambulance man sneers, "Bunch of pussies". Pow!

Classic Swearing

No Deal

This is genius.  Noel Edmonds goes on one about refusing to pay his TV Licence, becomes a darling of the right once more, and then it turns out he does have one after all.  I wonder if he said he'd leave the country in 1997 if Labour got into power like all the other loud talking right wingers, who are still here, still talking, loudly.

That a very wealthy man like Noel Edmonds would even contemplate not paying his Licence fee is beyond me anyway, although, that there are people out there who think he's a hero for doing so (or not) is more incomprehensile - "Hey, the rich aren't paying their taxes, aren't they great!"

Insoluble Flux

"It's interesting if you really think about it, how clumsy and laborious it seems to be to convey even the smallest thing" [From "Good Old Neon"]

Been rereading some of David Foster Wallace's stuff, to remind myself of how good he could be. Sometimes his stuff didn't work. Sometimes his stuff was amazing. I think this is what I liked about reading him, the sense that you didn't really know what to expect. I mean it wasn't like reading someone else, someone else you know is good, but who'll never surprise you or inspire you (like Martin Amis maybe, back in the day when Martin Amis was actually worth reading). It was different. I went through a phase, soon after having read everything David Foster Wallace wrote, of looking for someone similar - reading "Young American Novelists", "postmodern writers" looking for something of the same thrill that I found with him - but I never found anything as satisfying and gave up the search.
What perhaps struck me most in that search was (and I'll get to the other stuff I think made DFW great) the actual quality of the writing, a certain sharpness, a clarity of expression even in the midst of those long rolling sentences. Some of these other writers I looked at, well, maybe they had ideas (tho generally...), but the writing always seemed so dull compared to DFW. In a way perhaps this is the true genius of DFW: that while he wrote so much on the impossibilty of expressing feelings in writing, in language, his own writing was so good. Perhaps he felt that in some way if he could just write better and better (stylistically) he would eventually come upon the secret of some impossible expression...
And that is of course the other thing that I really loved about DFW, that there was always this belief in something else. It never (or hardly ever) had the feeling of writing for writings sake, pointless stylistic experiments, hiding behind irony - he was always willing to say something, to believe in something, to want to say something even if it seemed impossible to truly express anything at all.
I'll finish up these brief thoughts with a quote from the end of "Octet", in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, I found so many things I could have quoted, and this quote is overlong, but I think it expresses everything very well:

It may well be that all it'll do is make you look like a self-consciously inbent schmuck who's trying to salvage a fiasco by dropping back to a metadimension and commenting on the fiasco itself. Even under the most charitable interpretation, it's going to look desperate. Possibly pathetic. At any rate it's not going to make you look wise or secure or accomplished or any of the things readers usually want to pretend they believe the literary artist who wrote what they're reading is when they sit down to try to escape the insoluble flux of themselves and enter a world of prearranged meaning. Rather it's going to make you look fundamentally lost and confused and frightened and unsure about whether to trust even your most fundamental intuitions about urgency and sameness and whether other people deep inside experience things in anything like the same way you do... more like a reader, in other words, down here quivering in the mud of the trench with the rest of us, instead of a Writer, whom we imagine to be clean and dry and radiant of command presence and unwavering conviction as he coordinates the whole campaign from back at some gleaming abstract Olympian HQ.
So decide.

David Foster Wallace

So I get up and over breakfast read that David Foster Wallace has committed suicide.  I'm speechless.  Not even sure why I'm here posting on it.  I've nothing to say.
Emptiness.
Maybe I'll post something later when I've worked out a feeling.

Blackness

How to approach a deeply personal subject in the context of this impersonal blog? The names have been changed to protect the innocent? No, no names shall be named, no names, just a feeling, a feeling of truth. I wouldn't write on this at all but it does involve Avril Lavigne, and in a way I never expected.
To begin - a personal disappointment, a disappointment I am having great difficulty dealing with, a disappointment which appears as just another in a consistent series but which hurts like hell all the same (To return to names, her name always occurred to me, could always be substituted, with the name of one of those others, while I was happy, while love lasted, but now it's over, now she takes her place amongst the pantheon, set in stone, no longer to be mistaken, replaced, she is one of them now, which is to say that now she has gone her identity becomes a stable thing, whereas before she always had the potential to -to what? - disappoint. So obvious now...). As ever with such disappointment I try and throw myself into abstract thought, the work of thought, to take my mind off it, to try and achieve something abstract when the personal fails. And so it was I returned to Avril.
And yet I didn't see what I expected to see - the incessant return to the honesty of the artwork - what I saw was different, somehow personal, still an incessant return to honesty but of a more personal nature. Maybe it says more about me than about Avril Lavigne that I only see this now. Maybe I always underplayed the personal to concentrate on aesthetics, looking too deep, reading something into nothing (something someone else was fond of criticising me for...).
And yet, on the other hand, isn't this precisely the point - that I expect from the artwork the same honesty that I would expect from someone else, and, perhaps more importantly, from myself. The two are inseparable. The artwork and the personal. Which isn't a call for confessional bullshit from artists. One of the main points of my reading of Avril is that this type of confessional is in itself dishonest, or, at the very least, too easily sold, too easily solidified into an advert. It is in the wavering that truth comes about. Wavering between aesthetics and the personal in itself being a form of this. It should also be added that in this context The Best Damn Thing is the least satisfying of the albums, so fixed in its mould: it is not about a return to "Innocence", it is about facing things, heeding the truth (the theme of innocence perhaps explains the regression to the childlike on The Best Damn Thing, including the suspiciously naughty swear words scattered throughout), having the full information and yet still persisting, for instance, on the first two albums, the persistence of honesty, despite all the evidence that it is an impossible honesty, not an honesty borne of innocence.
This throwing myself into abstract thought returned me therefore to the personal but in a way that made me feel better. Previously I had chosen two paths to deal; one way - to put on angry stuff, Envy and such like (I listened to Envy for two days solid, and I have my headphones in all day at work, so it was solid); the other way - putting on happy music, upbeat music. And neither way really worked, once the headphones came out everything seemed the same as when they went in, nothing had changed, the emptiness persisted. Listening to Avril Lavigne helped me confront the truth, and I was kind of surprised to learn that the truth didn't hurt as I expected
I at least had been true(to everyone and myself), had been honest (to everyone and myself) and what else could I have done?

"I can't keep it cool, so I keep it True"

"I can't keep it cool, so I keep it true"

Loving this new Kanye

Too hasty...

So I see that Big Brother warned Rex and Darnell like a day later, and I also notice that there was a reported 1500 complaints. So maybe I was a little hasty yesterday, but still, talking to them a day later, especially in Darnell's case seems too little too late.
Also, and I didn't see much of yesterday's show, the fact that Rex and Darnell (at least Rex in the bit I saw) consequently started blaming Sara for complaining about them seems like they have taken absolutely no responsibility for their actions.

Posted on 27 Aug 2008 at 09:08 UTC

Just a quick note on Big Brother. After watching last night's episode and seeing with increasing horror the way that Darnell was brutally and relentlessly attacking Sara I am absolutely astonished that Big Brother hasn't seen fit to issue him with a warning or, more realistically, thrown him out of the house.
I don't think this is an over-reaction. His treatment of her has gone beyond the rejected-male-turns-to-digs-to-get-his-satisfaction thing into disgusting misogynistic bullying. Rex was obviously just joking, despite his controlling nature, evidenced by his relationship with Nicola, with Sara it had the feel of joking, and he had the sense to realize he'd gone too far and apologize. Darnell however...
Big Brother warned Mo about homophobic comments to Dennis. Big Brother warned Mo for playfully slapping Michael on the head.
Apparently the only people Big Brother allows to be bullied is women.
And then I turned onto Big Mouth to discover Helen Chamberlain taking the ladette thing too far and saying it was Sara's fault for not understanding blokes and some audience member saying she "deserved it". Am I reliving the 1980's?

This is Hot

See more Paris Hilton videos at Funny or Die

Freud's Breakfast

Somewhere, I think it's in Looking Awry, Zizek says of Freud's myth of the Primal Father, "Freud so loved his Father that he gave him all the women". This thought comes to mind when watching the latest advert for Shreddies.



I find this reading of the advert quite interesting. The adverts aim, to sell cereal to children using the image of comfort, being propped up by reference to the Primal Father, as if comfort is predicated on patriarchal society.

Testing Again...

using a different app so thought I'd test it out with this picture of a panda I got off of cute overload.

Food, Cigarettes, and enjoyment

I'm in the middle (or at least the start of the middle, which is still the middle but could still be considered the beginning) of a healthy eating fortnight. No special diet. Nothing too hard. Just plain old trying to eat some healthy foods rather than the shit I usually eat. The reason? An experiment into the effects of food on the mind. An attempt to reinvigorate the mind if you will. The nutritional value of the things I generally live on is like zero so I'm interested in what the effects of eating things with like all the good stuff happening will be.
Results so far? Here's the problem. How to separate the actual effects of the food from the effect that me thinking the foods are having will have - the psychosomatic effect if you will. So yeah, I actually feel quite good - not feeling as tired as I generally do, have a bit more energy generally - hence me writing this and I've been getting another bit of work done that I hardly ever get round to, despite the best of intentions - and, here's the actual reason that I suspect the psychosomatic outweighs the physical benefits: I feel happier.
Happiness comes from task completed, the sense of satisfaction at success, in this case the continued healthiness of the food I consume. It's like stopping smoking. Whenever I stop, after a couple of days I always get into a state of mind where the addictive quality of the cigarette is competing with the addictive quality of the feeling of needing a cigarette - the edge that comes with needing a cigarette continuously becomes addictive in itself - and if I can go without a cigarette for another couple of weeks it takes over completely (not quite completely, for obviously I start again at some point - but even here the sweetness of nicotine is tempered by the dismay at the loss of the edge).
With the food it is slightly different: I have no emotional investment in food. I eat crap, not because of any enjoyment I get, but simply because it is convenient - I feel aggrieved at the time it takes to prepare meals, time that could be spent more constructively (or even less constructively, but more enjoyably). Whereas cigarettes are in the register of enjoyment, and thus the satisfaction I get from either smoking or not smoking is higher than the satisfaction I get from this healthy eating diet.

It has occurred to me that I had the idea of this healthy eating kick on Monday an hour or so after I had a cigarette after an attempt at stopping. It is as if one failure led to the a desire for a task I could complete...

A twosome

Here's the Lykke Li video for "Breaking It Up". Quality song. I got the album on a whim and, in between listening to the new Nas album (which is absolutely amazing - I'll now have to post the "Hero" video after this Lykke Li Video - the song absolutely delivers on every level), I've listened to it more than a lot of albums i've got recently. The video is also preety cool, excellent dancing.


Lykke Li - Breaking It Up from SylvAïn on Vimeo.

And to Nas

A test. A photo of work smoking area.

Uploaded by www.cellspin.net

Big Brother 9 and its discontents

I'm now going to approach Big Brother. The question I ask myself is, why have I been avoiding it? Sheer laziness? Perhaps, but that would be too easy - the question is, what lies behind the laziness? I've been watching the show and enjoying it as much as ever, so why the reluctance to approach it in writing?
I think the answer lies in what surrounds Big Brother. It is as if one is forced to take sides every summer. One can no longer simply watch Big Brother, one must either love it or hate it. The difference in recent series is that whereas previously the side of community was on the side of loving, whereas now, the haters have their community and we are left to own devices. This may be a generalisation, and there may well be pockets of resistance, and it must also be noted that the haters have always tried to hasten the demise of the show, always looking for decline, and yet I feel that the actual climate has change, that the consensus is that the show is over - that it has died without knowing it.
I will add that this general feeling is heightened by my own personal experience - in previous years, among my friends, the group was split between those he hated it and those that loved it. I always found it strange that the haters took such pride in not watching it, detailing their avoidance strategies, as if it was somehow a virtuous thing to not watch Big Brother. That is still true - there is a strange pleasure to be had from hating Big Brother. The lovers were the smaller group always, getting smaller with each series, yet still we clung together. This series is the first I've watched alone. It is a strange feeling. And, as with the haters, why do i feel a certain unnecessary loss at having to watch it alone? Other programs I watch that friends don't and it doesn't bother me. For example, Heroes - I was for long time the only person I knew who watched it, and while I spent some time singing its praises I never actually felt alone in my watching - I never really thought of it in those terms.
So now I find the tables turned and I take a certain pleasure in the simple fact that I watch the show, it is a badge I wear with pride, and when the conversation comes up, as it still often does, the haters finding it hard to give up on their pleasure, I enjoy detailing the reasons Big Brother is the best thing on TV, and take pleasure from the bemused reactions of my audience.
I should here also mention the third approach (there is always a third way), that of watching it to hate it. The Guardian is a big fan of this approach, as anyone who reads their live blog of Friday evictions will testify - from the (changing) blogger to the majority of the commentators there is a pleasure taken in watching it solely to hate it. This sneering approach is the worst, putting a distance between themselves and the show, it is a refusal to commit, it is saying "I am above this!", it presupposes a viewer who "believes" wholeheartedly in Big Brother and uses this imaginary viewer to make them feel superior - "people take this seriously?! Not I! I know what this is all about - it is rubbish, but as media event I must watch."
And so I find it difficult to write on it. There isn't even the semblance of a critical distance to the show. I must praise no matter what. Let not the haters win.

And, to turn to the show itself, isn't the exact opposite now true of the show itself. That is to say, it is all critical distance. How many times have the housemates sat around and discussed the final 6, how they are perceived out side of the show. Yes, this has always happened, but I think the self-criticism, and the criticism of others has certainly reached some sort of critical mass. I am particularly thinking of the way Rachel has been questioned throughout the show, doubted for her reasonableness, as if because everyone knows only "freaks" go on the show, this person must be a freak, her normality must be a mask. In a similar vein is the criticism of Kat, but here the opposite is true - no one is that outlandish all the time, she is too much of a "freak", therefore she must be a freak. In BB8 the exception to this rule of self criticism was of course the twins, who were simply "themselves" (it is interesting that it took two housemates to act the unified self...) throughout, their behaviour was barely questioned as an act. The closest we got to this in BB9 is Bex, and yet here we see the danger of positing someone as "being themselves", for in BEx we saw first hand how the dynamics of the group change what "being oneself" actually entails. Bex's entrance to the house was a carbon copy of the way the twins entered the house, screaming, overexcitement - enthusiasm would probably be the most appropiate word, but the way the other housemates recieved this Bex forced a change. No one wanted this Bex, the house this year did not want such enthusiasm. This was apparent from the first, with the way the housemates looked down on Bex's version of the twins entrance straight away (as a sidenote, could this have been because the twins were blonde thin and pretty, whereas Bex is pretty much the opposite - what was cute from the twins became unbearable from Bex). It took a while for the enthusiasm to wear off completely, as Bex floundered for a new self, remember "Chipgate", in which Bex ruined the chips from simply wanting to help out - her enthusiasm. She eventually found her new self as the exact opposite of the person she went in as - the new Bex refused to do anything, every task was too much, tried without enthusiasm (her 4 minutes on the tyre being, of course, the great example), treated as an unpleasent necessity to be done only if absolutely forced. She moaned about everything, her original enthusiasm reduced to a tic - the constant showing of her breasts.
For a similar thing one can look to Luke and the way that his involvement in the original secret mission has created him as the insider, going form group to group seeing how the land lies before reporting back, friends with everyone, friends with no one.
And Rex. Rex has the most interesting moment of the season in his epiphany. He went in the house to find himself - and he says he succeeded - and from that moment he has gone from arrogant, materialistic, snob to ... arrogant materialistic snob. He has fully accepted his role as his self. For this, if not much else, he must be admired.

The great danger of Big Brother is that of a certain humanism. Watching people day after after it is very hard to continue hating, so that even the arrogant, inherited wealth and confidence of Rex becomes strangely likeable. That, and the current campaign by Stuart, Dale and Rex to try and be nasty so that they get nominated, prove the lie of Morrisey's statement that "it's so easy to hate, it takes guts to be gentle and kind". It takes a great effort to adhere to a position against the inevitable tide of convenient liking.

In terms of the actual show, I think that this series hasn't actually been as dull as the haters make out. The very fact that there is no clear cut winner, or at least no clear cut candidates from day one, makes it a bit of a novelty for Big Brother. Plus there has been some stand out moments - the Jen painting argument being up there with the highlights from all series.

A Test

This is just a test post from my new phone. Some sort of actual big brother post will follow, hopefully tomorrow, as promised.

The Billionaire Idiots Club

I haven't posted on here for a while, and then, having decided to do a long intended post on this series of Big Brother (tho admittedly not having actually started that post), I saw a story that just seemed so insane that I had to post it. The story is here :

Bill Gates and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced on Wednesday that they will spend $500 million to stop people around the world from smoking.

Now, I know there is a certain type of billionaire who gets a kick from the whole foundation thing, giving money away in their own name to combat disease or illiteracy or poverty or whatever, but an anti-smoking campaign?

The campaign will urge governments to sharply raise tobacco taxes, outlaw smoking in public places, outlaw advertising to children and free giveaways of cigarettes, start antismoking advertising campaigns and offer their citizens nicotine patches or other help quitting. Third world health officials, consumer groups, journalists, tax officers and others will be brought to the United States for workshops on topics like lobbying, public service advertising, catching cigarette smugglers and running telephone hot lines for smokers wanting to quit.

How patronising is all this? Third World Officials being bought to the US to be taught on lobbying? Genius. The lobbying system in the US certainly doesn't need changing does it? Let's export it to the world.

Insane

Just seen this story:

Dunkin' Donuts has pulled an online advertisement featuring Rachael Ray after complaints that a fringed black-and-white scarf that the celebrity chef wore in the ad offers symbolic support for Muslim extremism and terrorism.

Symbolism gone mad.

Stupid Nostalgia

Not checked in for a while, but nevermind, just been indulging in some nostalgia and thought I'd share some of it round.

This is a video of The Happy Mondays performing Performance on The Other Side of Midnight, I remember watching this and being absolutely blown away:



So that was the thing I was looking for but then the search results threw up some more shit I thought I might as well check out. There's this of the Fall performing (complete with retro VHS "effects"), "if there was a holy grail, only this man should be allowed to pick it up":



And lastly there's this of Peter Hook performing a New Order song by himself, which I remember thinking was really cool when I saw it all them years ago. Still do I guess.

The Queen

Tony Blair is an utter tw*t. Nothing new there then. Look at this story here:

Former prime minister Tony Blair was left red-faced when he was caught travelling on a train without a ticket and said he had no cash to pay the fare, a report said on Wednesday.

So far so ordinary for a man who obviously has absolutely no idea what life is actually like, but then you read this:

his bodyguard offered to pay the ticket, but the inspector said he could travel for free.

Who is this guy letting Tony Blair off his ticket? In fact, as he had no money to pay for the ticket, he's commiting an offense, and so further action should have been taken.
Next time I'm without a ticket on a train I'm going to have to cite the Tony Blair rule and get me some of that free travel.

What Cats can do...

Saw this video on Gawker. It's pretty amazing.

Officially Rubbish

I think I posted about this at the time (and yes I'm to lazy to look for/link to it), but ofcom has ruled on a Catherine Tate sketch in which she made ridiculous stereotypes about the Northern Irish:

"Overall this episode was typical of The Catherine Tate Show and would not have gone beyond the expectations of its usual audience," the Ofcom ruling said.

Ofcom understatement: typically rubbish, obviously.

Dancing On Graves

While I'm here...

Just seen this bit of news which I thought was kind of cool, not altogether sure why:

Kate Moss and her boyfriend, Kills singer Jamie Hince, have been told off by police for dancing on the grave of Doors singer Jim Morrison.

The pair visited Morrison's grave at Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris and were let in by security guards after the shrine had closed.

Funny Video

It's been a while.

So I pop up and give you this humourous video which I came upon via Boing Boing.



Funny. Isn't it.

Robotic Love

Study Finds Dogs, Robots Cheer Elderly

The very last time

I must break my Perez Hilton embargo because this is just too good. It's the whole Perez IM conversation with some dude. Transcript here. Anyway, the only thing I wanted to mention about it was the bit where he says he wasn't posting about Chris Crocker on his site because "He's not giving him any publicity, even bad press is good press" (I'm ignoring the bit where he pretty much claims hollywood is bad because it's so shallow (ie. and he's so fucking deep)). So when he posts about Avril Lavigne and hating her sooooo much he's doing what exactly? Being a prick. That's what.

Embargo back in action.

Love Is...

In the early 90s, when I was living in Havana with my family, my eldest daughter, Bella, who was then about six years old, came home from school one afternoon in a state of excitement. She asked me, in Spanish: "Daddy, do you know what 'amor' means?" I feigned ignorance. Taking a deep breath, Bella recited: "Amor es lo que Fidel siente para el pueblo" - "Love is what Fidel feels for the people."

More Rock Please

Performing at the Brits last night, the Klaxons and Rihanna.

It's OK.

Isn't the problem with The Klaxons "New Rave" the fact that they just don't rock it hard enough. Which is to say that the dance music they copy (with guitars) is already more powerful than their rock version. And that's the problem with this performance as well.

I should add that I liked their album at the time it was released but haven't been back there for a long time, don't think I could face it really. It could have been so much better (both their album and this performance).

Singleness

Having a spare moment and having been inspired by the last post I thought I'd take a moment to post this amazing passage from Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis about married couples:

I locked in on the smug feeling of superiority that married couples gave off and that permeated the air - the shared assumptions, the sweet and contented apathy, it all lingered everywhere - despite the absence in the room of anyone single at which to aim this. I concluded with an aching finality that the could-happen possibilities were gone, that doing whatever you wanted whenever you wanted was over. The future didn't exist anymore. Everything was in the past and would stay there. And I assumed - since I was the most recent addition to this group and had not yet let myself be fully iniated into its rituals and habits - that I was the loner, the outsider, the one whose solitude seemed endless.

I love that passage.

After Glamorama i'd written off BEE but Lunar Park's amazing, probably his best.

Public Service Advertisements

At work they always have on this local radio station playing standard inoffensive fare from the 60's onwards. You know the type of thing. For as long as I can remember pretty much every advertising break has included a safe sex advert, aimed at teenagers (The question of why they have these adverts on this station is one I'm not really interested in here, but is a question worth asking anyway: talk about an advert completely missing its intended audience).

So I'm at work yesterday and I hear not a single advert telling me how horrible STDs can be. What's on instead? Every advertising break I am now deluged by adverts telling me that being single is horrible and, especially at this time of year, I should consider their dating service.

I understand the whole advertising-love-when-all-over-the-place-single-people-are-feeling- especially-single-given-the-sweet-valentine-action-everywhere thing. What I find odd is that this isn't also therefore the best time to get their safe sex message out there. The only answer to this is obviously that the dating companies don't want their ads sandwiched between some depressed teen whose lost everything because of an ill-advised condomless sexual adventure (or am I confusing this with the anti drink-drive ad? maybe she's just lost her boyfriend and her sexual appetite).

This, of course, actually implies that there is no such thing as a Public Service Announcement, these things are just ways to fill in airtime when there's a lack of actual advertisers. When actual advertisers come along the public can go fuck themselves (without a condom).

Sticking To Principles

Was pretty humoured by this story about Chelsea Clinton from The Wall Story Journal (coming via Wonkette):

Despite her more-public face, Ms. Clinton is still deeply wary of the media. She is noticeably uncomfortable in crowds in which reporters may overhear her and shuns most questions. She declined several requests for an interview for this article.

On a campaign stop in Iowa in December, a 9-year-old student reporter for Scholastic News asked Ms. Clinton if she thought her father would make a good "first man."

"I'm sorry, I don't talk to the press, and that applies to you, unfortunately. Even though I think you're cute," she told the little girl.

No exceptions. I like this. Escpecially the "I think you're cute" which presumably translates as "I could get away with answering your question because you are, after all, only nine years old, and yet, to seperate you from the set of all media would actually be pretty patronising so, instead, I shall point out the patronising nature of this relationship without answering your question".

Genius.

Just watched First Blood Part 2 again after a piece on Cinematical made me want to reevaluate it. I'd only seen it once and was pretty unimpressed. 1 and 3 I've always loved but 2? I just couldn't see it. The first and only time I saw it I thought it was awful. I should point out that living in the UK I've not had the chance to see the new one yet: what is with the bizarre decision to have a month between American and British releases of this film? I thought movie companies wanted to get rid of piracy, not give people a reason to do it?


So what of First Blood Part 2? I can safely say that I thought it pretty good. So good in fact that I'm at a loss as to what made me hate it in the first place. I know one of my problems with it was the female character who seemed a rather pointless addition to the plot (Rambo and his guide fall in love, she gets mowed down by bullets). This pointlessness perhaps infected the rest of the film for me. This time round though I think I actually worked out the point of this plot. It's very quickness was what puzzled me at first, it's kind of like they fall in love quickly (I have no problems with that) and, after sharing their first kiss, they go to move on and, while Rambo collects his knives and bow, she walks into the open and gets shot, telling him never to forget her with her dying breath. It seemed so utterly preposterous. However, watching it this time it occurs to me that she has to die, there is no where else to go. It is a very good example of the fantastical support of the relationship, both sides utterly missing the other, seeing only some version of the other that supports their own self. The woman sees in Rambo her opportunity to leave her (miserable) life behind and start anew in America. Rambo sees in her someone who loves him. The point is not just that Rambo misses the fact that she wants to use him to get to America (a point she makes explicit in their original conversation on the boat), but that she misses the fact that Rambo cannot be at home in America, that she has backed the wrong horse. As the end of the film makes clear, this is where Rambo feels at home. The only way to make this relationship work is for her to die.


The fantastical nature of this relationship is also highlighted by the lack of reference to it in the rest of the film. Once Rambo has buried her he washes his hands of her (almost literally, in that he rubs his hands through the dirt covering the grave, the purity of love being taken over by the dirtiness of the job at hand perhaps). He returns to his reality. Where previously I saw this as a failure, now I see it as consistency. Throughout the film I noticed similarities between Rambo and Jason Voorhees from The Friday the 13th films: they are both empty, automatons, their killing is a simple fact, unrelated to pathological motives. Thus Rambo continues as he was before, he does not go on killing to avenge the death of his beloved, he just goes on killing because that is what he does. Had he not forgotten about his love he would have been a less effective killing machine: emotion has no place in his killing. One can see here a certain similarity to Freddy vs Jason, in which Jason is absolutely ineffective in his work, he always allows someone to escape and raise the alarm before he finishes the job (of killing everyone in reach), absolutely at odds with previous versions of Jason. And the reason for this? Jason has been given character, he is no longer empty vessel.

Vietnam is Rambo's Crystal Lake. The place where he died and where he continues undead until America is ready to bury him ("I just want America to love us as much as we love it").

It's the economy stupid

Came to this story via Boing Boing:

Paul McGuinness, long-time manager of rock band U2, on Monday launched a verbal attack against illegal music downloaders, as well as internet service providers, device makers, Silicon Valley and even hippies in a speech at a conference in France.

In days long gone I used to have an image of people getting into music, the business side of music, because they really believed in a band, or because they loved music, or some such reason. Maybe it was Tony Wilson's fault. But apparently not:

"There are plenty of private equity fund managers who are Deadheads," he said, a reference to hippy icons The Grateful Dead. "And embedded deep down in the brilliance of those entrepreneurial, hippy values seems to be a disregard for the true value of music."

So, "The true value of music" is money is it? U2 must be just about the greatest band ever then.
Oh. I'm sorry. They're utter shite. I forgot. Must have been while they were arse-licking warmongering presidents.

Change The Record

Came to this piece of trash via some hater or other. Won't spend too much time on it cos it's the usual idiocy.

The whole argument seems to be that Avril dislikes photographers. And that's like it. Except for the pretty patronising way he (obviously a he) like keeps putting the word like in to make his writing similar to the speech of someone like way younger than him. Ya know what I mean?

Yes. He's one of those.

Oh yeah. He also like rehashes the plagiarism thing. Inspired. Oh yeah and he like really hates her cos she doesn't like having her photograph taken.

Indeed, just when you thought it couldn't get any worse he goes on to praise the Catherine Tate show. And that's the type of guy we're dealing with. What about this for a quote:

Her pointed use of ethnic stereotyping by some of her deranged characters can take your breath away.

Oh. And did I happen to mention that Avril Lavigne really hates having her photo taken?

The Shallow Progression

Progressive Rock.

Progressive.

I've now listened to the new Mars Volta like 2 and a half several times. Each time it progresses. Each time there's something more to hear. And yet...

It's the same with every Mars Volta album. They bear, indeed insist upon, repeated listens. I've seen it said that their albums are so long, so involved, that in this day of quick fix tunes, internet buzz, high turnover, who could be bothered with it? And in a way isn't that why they're refreshing? They demand where others almost apologise for distracting our attention. Cedric Bixlar-Zavala, in an interview has this interesting comparison:

Some of our conversations in life are fifteen minutes long, you know. I’d hate to think that the stereotypical American is someone who just says “Hi – bye” in conversation. That’s how Europeans see us. And I’d like to think that not all of us are like that. If I do meet someone and I ask them how it’s going, and they are having a shitty day and their dog has died, I do want to know about it. I want to know humanity. I don’t want fast-food culture in my interactions with people.

It's an interaction. It's kind of interesting that here's this band that people suggest don't really fit the internet age talking up interaction. Isn't that what the internet has meant to have brought us? More interaction with more people? Or has it only brought faster interaction? Faster because shorter? More interaction taking up the same amount of time so there's less possibility for substance in interaction?

So they demand. I like that. I've got so many albums recently that have washed straight over me. Admittedly they were pleasant enough while they passed but they left nothing. There was no desire on their part to stay with me, no desire on my part to have them stick around. Pleasant. It refreshes to have a listen that demands. Refreshes to actually have to say, "Right. I'm going to devote 75 minutes to this album. I'm not just going to listen to a couple of tracks while I'm browsing the internet, I'm going to listen. And then I may well listen again."

This is progressive.

They demand and demand more than ever on Bedlam in Goliath. Cedric's voice has never demanded more. He's turned up the shriek and sustains it over the whole album. And there seems to be a lack of space on the album. A lack of space to breathe, it hardly ever stops, hardly ever tones down, just keeps on coming. This is probably the major difference between Bedlam and the previous albums. Intensity.

And yet.

Here's Cedric on being termed Prog Rock:

It concerns me because I think the style of prog rock is, we don't want to carbon copy it. The fact that we're so active the way we are live makes us candidates for punks instead of prog rock really. But I like the term in terms of the dictionary definition of progressive music, moving forward and trying things that push boundaries, but we're not on stage singing about medieval goblins or stuff like that.

It's interesting that he compares their music to both punk and prog because isn't this the whole point? That it's only within the "spirit of the age" that punk and prog mean anything. The original punk surge was radical because of what it swept aside but once punk has become the mainstream, once it was discovered that this was easier, more saleable than prog, then prog became the outsider, was given the chance to become radical. He distances their music from a stereotype of prog while embracing the idea, embracing the intensity of prog under the name of punk.

This is progressive.

But progression? "Moving forward and trying things that push boundaries"? This is where my reservations on this album lie. My very first reaction to it was that it was The Mars Volta by numbers. Having listened to it more I've mellowed to it. I can see something in it. But I'm not exactly sure it's progression. It's more of a ...
essentialisation ... if that's even a word... It is The Mars Volta with everything inessential removed. So on first listen it sounded like Mars Volta by numbers, but digging deeper it turns out that they have distilled their essence and put it on record.

And I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Not really. It's just that I really liked Amputechture. I know many didn't, but I thought it was a progression, taking the sound from the first two albums and adding a different feel while keeping the essence. Another quote from Cedric:

I think it’s one thing to say you’re adventurous and it’s another thing to actually do it. That’s why there’s all these bands that are recreating OK Computer. Radiohead doesn’t want to recreate OK Computer, so you have all these mediocre either soccer-mom versions of it or metal versions of it, so it can appeal to young people. Because young people didn’t gravitate toward or understand things like Amnesiac or Kid A, which I think are phenomenal – and one of the reasons I do is because they don’t sound like OK Computer. It sounds like music of the future. It’s the sound of a band shedding its skin every time there’s a new record to be made. I wish more bands would do that. Then we’d have less bands like Coldplay and Travis trying to rip off the most digestible parts of Radiohead – selling it back to people who are dumb enough to think it’s something new or interesting. A lot of people who’ve said they’d follow us with blind faith, they really don’t. They’re hoping we’d recreate our first two albums again, which is just boring. That’s suicide more than it is murder. I’m not going to give a fan the benefit of a suicide. I’m paying too much attention to them. We’ve never been a jukebox and we’ve never been the kind of DJ who takes requests.

Isn't the problem (one problem among many) with Travis/Coldplay that they lose the essence of what they're copying? They take it and turn it to nothing. And I can't leave the quote without suggesting he's wrong about the whole "young people didn’t gravitate toward or understand things like Amnesiac or Kid A", I don't think it's a problem with, specifically, young people. It's just a "problem" with "people".

Bedlam though. I think the mention of suicide in the above quote is interesting because Bedlam seems to be less of a progression and more of an affirmation of The Mars Volta. It's certainly not a return to the first two albums, but neither is it a progression. And it isn't a treading of water either. It fits none of these categories.

There's a comparison to be made here with the lyrical content of their albums. The amazing thing about The Mars Volta's lyrics has always been their ability to condense the major theme of the album into just about every single lyric on the album, without ever making the major theme of the album explicit in any lyric. So just as musically Bedlam condenses some of sort of essence of Mars Volta, so it condenses the essence of the album lyrically without ever spelling it out. In this sense it is an essence that is always absent, but an essence still. It circles round a core, without ever approaching it but constantly referring to it. If we transfer this thought to the music we can perhaps see what happens to the essence in the example above "bands like Coldplay and Travis trying to rip off the most digestible parts of Radiohead". They have attempted to name the essence, capture this essence that is empty and they end up with precisely nothing.

Of course it is here that we come across the much mentioned way that the album came about, Omar coming across a Ouija board:

Omar stumbled across this antique talking board. In American terms, it’s called a Ouija board, even that “Ouija” is not an American word. I think it’s either French or German. Omar just knew I would love something like that. Having the old habits that I do with drug use, it became my new drug. It became a private sort of drug that only Omar and I would play. And pretty much playing that thing was when we had all our drummer problems and everything kind of went to shit for our last album. We didn’t get to tour that much on it because of all the problems, all the bad luck from it. That’s when it started, and the more and more I played it, the more and more I wrote everything down that it was saying, and the more and more I was excited by it, because I was having such a dry spell for inspiration. And, of course, a lot of people can comment and say it probably just is me writing this stuff down. But it’s an exercise in opening up portals in the back of the head – not so immediately in front.

This most essential of Mars Volta albums comes about not because of some voice deep within, from some deep, essential soul, but externally, from the different voices emanating from this Ouija board. If they had actually set out to make the essential Mars Volta album they would have been in the same position as Colplay in relation to Radiohead, losing the essence in an attempt to capture the essence. The only way to reach this essence is to ignore it completely, or, more accurately, the essence is created from without, not from deep within.

And in this we find a rock equivalent of Burial's Untrue. Whereas Untrue uses samples, Bedlam uses voices from a Ouija board, to create something essentially progressive.

Shock! Horror! Scotsman Sounds Scottish!

Just browsing Emusic, stumbled upon Arab Strap, noticed they had the only Arab Strap I don't have, clicked on it, and there, in all it's glory, the most inane comment I think I've ever seen:

This is spoiled for me by the accent. Some accents enhance, some are just unnoticeable. Here a hard Scottish accent invades almost every track.

Holy Shit.

Quality Hat Action

Never Again

Perez. Again. This is gonna be the last time I post shit about him. I should stop reading it, but what would that do? Ignoring him won't make him go away. I'm gonna hold back posting any complaints about him though. It's just pointless.

But having said that...

2 things.

1) "Heath Ledge"???? He posted Heath Ledger's death as "Heath Ledge". Not only that, he said "Sources exclusively reveal to Perez". I don't want to get into a whole "but Perez was so far behind in the news, how can he claim an exclusive" thing, that's not really the point (tho he was a good hour behind apparently). The point is why on earth would anyone claim exclusivity on such news? It's not like it's going to be hidden for long is it. What's the point? Claim to be quick off the draw for sure, but "sources reveal exclusively"? What a tosser.

And I'm not a going to pretend to be a big Heath Ledger fan or anything so I'm not pretending to be mortally offended or anything but don't you get the feeling that Perez never feels anything? Pretty much every post he writes on Heath Ledger (actually on pretty much everything he writes) he ends with the words "Sad. So Sad!" (The last one was "Sad. Still sad." As if you needed the still less than 24 hours after he died...). It appears at the end of every post he writes in lieu of any actual feeling in his other words. It's an empty sign of feeling. Everything he writes demonstrates how little he cares about anything but himself, but if he ends with "Sad. So Sad!" he becomes a feeling man...


2) Is it just me or has Perez been supporting Barack Obama for weeks? I'm not checking back on his posts but when he posted the other day that he was still undecided about who to support, Barack or Hilary, I was a little confused. Is it simply backtracking? The mighty Perez can not be seen to have backed the wrong horse so he'll say he's still undecided now that Hilary is coming on strong and hope no one remembers his previous position.

He feels nothing and he believes in nothing.


And hopefully I never need post on him again.

Interview

Go here for an interview with Avril in which she talks about like stuff.

Soundtrack To Life

I was recently in bed and was woken up by my neighbour playing loud music (this happens quite often, not that he's inconsiderate, it's that I work strange hours). There was also the sound of a loud argument between him and his girlfriend. What was interesting about this otherwise rather dull (from my perspective anyway) event was that he seemed to be live DJing the argument. When I awoke he was playing some proper hardcore dance music, then from somewhere I heard a door slam and the music changed to more downbeat, female vocals, swirling sounds, you know the type of thing, then (I imagined) the door reopened and (I heard) the voices started again and some more dance music, not so fast this time, but as the voices became louder the beats grew faster, as if he was speeding the track up, rather than just the track getting faster.
I thought this was kind of interesting. Putting on music to suit a mood, the way you're feeling at the time is one thing, actually live DJing events while they're happening seems like quite another. Is this where the MP3 player is taking us?
How did the argument end up? No idea. The music stopped abruptly.

So there.

"We are satisfied that any similarities between the two songs resulted from Avril and Luke's use of certain common and widely used lyrics. We therefore completely exonerate Avril and Luke from any wrongdoing of any kind in connection with the claims made by us in our lawsuit."

Didn't take them too long to see the bleeding obvious then did it?

Prick

One thing I did forget to mention yesterday is that Perez is still (if not more of) a prick. Not entirely sure what it is that offends so much, it's just that he seems to make outrageousness so unoutrageous, every view he has could be held by George Bush and yet he thinks having pink hair and dressing like a twat somehow makes him da bitch.

Today he goes with the whole Avril settles lawsuit story I mentioned yesterday. Here's the link, if you must. Here's another version of the story from the Toronto Star:

Punky pop star Avril Lavigne has reached a settlement in a lawsuit that accused her of plagiarizing her summer hit single, "Girlfriend."

As a result, claims that '70s rock band the Rubinoos were ripped off have been dropped.

Songwriters Tommy Dunbar and James Gangwer charged that Lavigne's boppy track sounded suspiciously like their 1979 single, "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend."

Rubinoos lawyer Nicholas Carlin says a confidential settlement has been reached but could not comment further. A spokesperson for Lavigne could not immediately be reached.

A settlement does not necessarily indicate an admission of copyright infringement.

Lavigne has said she'd never heard the Rubinoos song, while her manager, Terry McBride, has said he consulted a musicologist who found no similarities between the songs.

Still, McBride admitted he would consider settling the matter out of court to avoid a costly legal battle.

Thought making the last bit bold might make the obvious slightly more obvious for the criminally stupid.

Lost In The Post

And finally I'm back.

6 weeks without a computer. It was hell.

But I'm back and with an actual new and better computer (things getting lost in the post can have its advantages). I've just about got all the essential software back on my computer, guessi'll work out what else i'm missing as the days go by. I've spent a couple of days trawling through my feeds on google reader, so much missed and boy am I glad I switched to google reader or I'd have had to find all the feeds again.

So what have I missed?

Well. It must be said that while my computer was away I was thinking that I was probably missing lots of amazing stuff but, having actuallylabouriously gone through my feeds it turns out I've missed a load of trivial events. Is everything reduced to trivia I ask myself? So much information out there and all I seem to get is trivia. It's a question I can't be bothered to confront right now.

I missed the opportunity to do lots of year end lists, which, to be honest, I'm pretty glad about. I hate the list, but it's just so tempting to do. So tempting cos so self-indulgent i guess. There were a lot of great albums last year (although I guess I listened toMidlake from the year before more than most albums this year so where does that leave the list?), I'm tempted to mention some here, but I'll refrain. The one thing I will say is that I was utterly shocked that the LCDSoundsystem album scored so highly on just about everyone's end of year list. It was an album I never even thought of including, or thought would be included anywhere. It's an album of terminal dullness as far as I was concerned, and when I saw it there, in the lists, Irelistened and it was still an album of terminal dullness.

Not a lot been happening in the world of Avril, some rumour that there's an out of court settlement with The Rubinhos, sounds convenient, for everyone, get it out of the way without the need for expensive lawyers, beautiful.

Would Avril's album have made my year end list? Depends if I'd done a top ten, a top 20, a top 50, or whatever. And maybe I'd have made it number 1 just because, well, what's it actually matter?