the candidates

post-election update: Henry won!

family values

Sir Thomas Lucy and his Family - Cornelius Johnson (1593 - 1661)

I don't know what 'family values' means, any more than I know what 'hard-working families' means, except in the toadying political sense. this thing - the family (the developed nations Christian nuclear model) - the supposed bedrock of society, is really just one mythical construct overlaid on top of another - the myth that romantic love evolves into family responsibility by a process of a sort of effortless osmosis.
sure, it happens - we're hardwired to make it happen, willy nilly, but the development of those quintessentially familial parenting skills is predicated on the ruthless laws of biology, not myth, and the instinctual process is both accretive and merciless: any flaws in the bond between the parents will be urgently exposed, sooner rather than later, as if highlighted in neon red in the ongoing code - for either debugging or deletion. and - the silence on the universality of this experience is deafening - it's only the depth and potential for damage of those flaws that's variable. their existence is absolutely inevitable as long as we continue to believe in Hallmark love as the precondition of reproduction, and the received response of going into denial - cocooning the flaws in a cage of parentheses in the vain hope that it'll shield the syntax sufficiently to allow it to function - is to enter a hopeless cul de sac, the only comfort being that it's one that's populated, at least, with the familiar.
we all begin by believing that there must be a family out there somewhere that works, where, after the programmed process of social reproduction has been achieved, there is an equal division of care, trust, mutual respect, fairness and tolerance, as well as love; where, whichever individual member's point of view you choose to interrogate - mum's, dad's, or any of the kids, you'll find an honest agreement that, for all the negotiations, the compromises, the mistakes, their value as a member of the family was equal to everyone else's. there must, surely? but what are the chances, really, of applying this particular definition of family values - ie of each member of the family being of equal value within the family unit - when the concept of equality in the larger social sense is so compromised by the Realpolitik of the world we're obliged to inhabit?
very, very few people believe that all men and women are either born equal or are entitled to an equal share of the world's common wealth. we might be moved by an Irish millionaire pop singer's impassioned commitment to winning a Nobel prize the eradication of world poverty, but no further than would limit the perceived depreciation of our personal freedoms that would be incurred by giving up, what, half a percent of our net disposable income? and no-one who has acquired wealth - by whatever means - could possibly be persuaded (unless they lived in Scandinavia) that they had a moral and social responsibility to share the better part of it with those less fortunate.
the social contract is a flexible entity, by definition - a continuing trade-off between individual rights and responsibilities. as in families, so in society: more rights entail more responsibilities, and fewer responsibilities always entail fewer rights. the corollary of this, however - that more responsibilities deserves more rights, is infrequently, if ever observed, nor can it be, as long as the fundamentally hypocritical adherence to a notional 'equality' that has no real basis either in law or belief remains unchallenged.

BA ordered to let pilot halve hours for her child

terra nostra

the only recent election that history will demonstrate to have mattered took place last November, and the world is the loser to that second (in recent memory) rape of democracy by a caucus of cock-strutters who have set the global political clock back by centuries.

'dialogue' as it might be understood by a playwright or screenwriter - ie an exchange of words between two or more individuals that contributes to the illumination of character or event or contributes to the unfolding of the action - is not on the agenda with these people - despite its constantly appearing - as a word - on any agenda to do with the furtherance of their single-minded objectives. their ears are deaf, their minds closed, to anything other than what they want to hear - the universal, voiceless affirmation of their power and wealth, and the universal, voiceless submission to whatever means are necessary to sustain it.

such autocratic contempt for the electorate and the electoral process is, essentially, unopposable. existentially, however, it is not, and, such is the sorry state of affairs we find ourselves in, since all reasonable means of opposition to the will of these madmen is effectively vetoed by their illegally mandated deafness, the unreasonable options are the only ones worth adopting, if only experimentally.

as far as this little election of ours goes, its irrelevance couldn't be demonstrated clearer than in the funny-bunny antics of Michael Howard - man of the peepel - basing the entirety of the Conservatives campaign on persuading the FFF (the frightfully fearful and actually fascists except we don't use that word) to vote their way. hate foreigners? vote Conservative. we'll keep them out and send all the wogs back where they came from, then Britain will be Great again and everyone will be rich. simple. sorted. it's the lobotomised behaviour of an opposition party traumatised by its own realisation that it's moved from top dog to jailhouse bitch in less than a decade.

so they're dead.

the lib dems are on their way, but I anticipate some frantic back-pedalling next time round when they realise that they've got to change their (very sensible, quite attractive, but fundamentally unelectable) manifesto to include some serious tax-cutting and military supporting and US-arse-licking promises in order to function as an effective opposition (which, with luck, they will have become by the end of next month - tee hee).

meanwhile, in this one-party state we've presently become, the only question to be asked is: does the UK belong to Dubya or to Europe? the answer's blindingly obvious: we belong, most demonstrably, and in the most brutal sexual sense, to the America of George Dubya, but we actually belong, in the most pragmatic and historical and semantic sense, to the Europe we have used the Napoleonic blockades and the Channel as an excuse not to belong to for more than two hundred years. somehow, the argument for marrying into Europe needs to be tarted up so that it can match the sort of passion involved in the resistance to US-domination.

tough call.

meanwhile, I'm most effectively managing to stick to my resolution not to take any notice at all of what is going on in this election campaign. I shall vote, on May 5th - of course - because to not use my vote is tantamount to pissing on the graves of those many many men and women who fought - literally - to obtain it for me, in the belief that I, in common with every citizen, should be entitled to an equal say in the running of my country as the aristocracy and the landed gentry. I have no illusions whatever, though, about what the outcome is going to be, nor that the so-called 'protest votes' of those disaffected Labour supporters like me and my ilk will have the slightest effect in 'sending a message to Tony'. Tony and his ilk are way above listening to messages they don't want to hear. he's been taking his lessons as well as his cues from his master (see above) for far too long. we, too, are ineluctably bound for another five years of the same old same old.

so (with a certain sense of relief, I have to admit) I've been turning the page and/or switching channels (or simply leaving the room) whenever the subject is raised in the media, and I'm absolutely certain that, in my absence, nothing has been or will be said on the subject worth listening to.

which brings me back to my point about the irrational alternatives - specifically, to the existential ones.

I recall first encountering the notion of disempowering someone through ignoring them in the novel Terra Nostra by Carlos Fuentes (in my opinion one of the greatest novels of all time) in which the mad, ascetic King Felipe II of Spain meditates on accidentally overhearing a servant's momentary muttering of rebellion:

"El Señor did not dwell upon this enigma beyond a well-remembered maxim of his father the Prince: Give the most beggarly of the beggars of this land of paupers the least sign of recognition, and he will immediately comport himself like a vain and pretentious nobleman; do not dignify them, my son, not even with a glance; they are entirely without importance."
(translated from the Spanish by Margaret Sayers Peden)

all men are monarchs now, and in the case of these most contemptible liars and thieves and clowns who have the shameless audacity and risible conceit to declare themselves our current 'leaders' I suggest this mantra: they are entirely without importance - I do not dignify them with my recognition.

good news

it seems incredible - we're so far behind Europe in this - but, at last, the UK's first battery recycling plant for household batteries has opened.

vaticancy

if something as corrosive and inimical to human life as the papacy were found in nature, it would have to be synthesised by Northrop Grumman and licensed for sale as warheads to the defenders of democracy everywhere.
after two hundred and sixty-four attempts spread over two thousand years at persuading the world that there's a god in heaven who'll see that everything will turn out alright in the end, you'd think the world might have cottoned onto the scam by now. but hey. one more fluffy puff of white smoke and the whole thing starts rolling all over again.
obedience, stoic suffering, uncomplaining acceptance of the status quo, a militant intolerance of divergent ideas and beliefs, but especially the condition of dogmatic obedience to the priests interpretations of the word in the book is something most of the major religions have in common. but a pathological disgust with sex in general and a spastic hatred of non-virgin or non-reproducing women in particular is the ingredient that leaves the jesus priests peculiar take on salvation with a distinctively odious historic stench, the long-lingering reek of countless witches living pyres.
over a billion people worldwide, apparently, subscribe to this faith. for the great majority that will be a thoughtless cultural event, like being born with dark skin, but for some, there will have been consideration, meditation, enquiry, and choice in the matter.
there are mysteries within mysteries that are not meant to be understood - like why buttered toast always drops face down, or why we drive on the left, or why examples are always delivered in threes, but why anyone in their right mind ...

through a glass darkly

(photo: Josef Koudelka)

I can't exactly remember what st paul's point was in that letter to the corinthians about the differences in perception betwen childhood and maturity, but I've always taken it as meaning that there's an all-too-brief window of clarity, as childhood comes to an end and the realities of adulthood are beginning to emerge, into the real nature of things, which, with the increasing complexities and compromises of adult interrelationships, becomes correspondingly occluded and compromised, so that that clarity of vision is replaced by another, and that we struggle to look through the glass darkly, whereas before it was as clear as if nothing were there between.
I'm reminded of that because I've just noticed that a young man - who describes himself as a poet - from somewhere in Ohio, I think, has named me as his favourite photographer in one of those profile lists in a kind of live journal site called deviant art. furthermore, he's included three of my photographs in his online pinboard-gallery, which wouldn't be remarkable, were it not for the fact that, amongst the twenty or so other photographs in his gallery - all of them interesting, if unfamiliar, images - are two of my own personal faves - one by Henri Cartier-Bresson and the other (I'm looking at it on my own - real - pinboard right now) the amazing photograph of a black dog in the snow at the parc du château de Sceaux by Josef Koudelka (above). my point being that, as far as young Zack of Ohio is concerned, the scoring in his personal pantheon of great photographers of the twentieth century goes Bresson - 1 : Koudelka - 1 : Melancholy Rhino - 3. which is patently absurd, but as thrilling as all Corinthia to someone who regards himself, if truth were told, as one of the twentieth century's most minor, and most disregardable fuckups.
so thank you, Zack, for making my day - however delusional that might be.
one small thing that kind of redresses the imbalance of hubris: whereas he's posted the images, he's not bothered saying who took any of them, so everyone on his board - including Henri and Josef - is rocking in the same boat of web-based anonymity. which is exactly as it should be.

slush fund



one of the projects I'll never get round to is researching what they have in common, these areas that the local drunks hang around in. churchyards figure prominently, I've noticed. some atavistic survival of a memory of tolerance, forgiveness, charity, alms, perhaps, although there's an equally lively countrywide tradition of the local stocks being sited at the church gates. the local churchwardens resorted, a few years ago, to re-erecting the decorative wrought-iron fence that got pulled down, like so many others, for melting down and re-casting as howitzers and shells during the first world war, and keeping the gate heavily padlocked except for services, but they still congregate on the benches outside on the High Street and sneak in whenever they can.
that fence was very expensive. it was partly funded from the rental charged for the erection and establishment of an Orange microwave relay mast inside the belfry. the church authority organised that without public consultation and refused to bow to local pressure to have it removed. they said the government said it was safe. we parents of children at the local primary school adjacent - so close that the procession from schoolyard to church for regular services is through a gate in the common wall - begged to differ. the doomed campaign was mostly organised by phone. mobile phone. good reception.
no-one who had the power to choose would choose to spend their time hanging around on the High Street like this keeping the cold out with a can of Fosters. each one of these guys has a story about how they came to this, a story that will never be heard except here, in this familiar group of a dozen or so similarly swollen burst-veined faces sharing that loose, loud, slightly swaying camaraderie of sozzled destitution. several dogs. one woman has an oversized mutt the size of a small pony which probably eats more than she does. they attract sniffy disdain from us straight locals, but are never quite rowdy enough to attract more than the mildest of now let's be moving along nows from the local mr and ms plods, and anyway they only move along from one bench to the next, settling down opposite the discreet yellow sign on the lamp-post that advises, humorously, that this is an alcohol-free area and that flouting the law will invoke a maximum fine of £1,000.
'maximum'? I know I'm picky, but that wording does seem to imply that, so long as you've got a thousand quid to spare, then no worries, mate. perhaps that's what it does mean.
cheers.

with a bang

ok - so presuming there's any money left when my turn comes around, and after they've sorted out the obvious dispensations, I've decided how I want the remainder spent: on one stupendous mother of a fireworks display with free booze and chocolate cake. it occurred to me last night - the climax of the boys birthday after a stupendous day-long glut of fun and frolics being the letting off of the two big-as-a-thirteen-year-old rockets that Michael had given them. slightly scary, as I wasn't sure how much the tail-whoosh would spread, and the furthest launch distance away from the house was limited by the overhang from the enormous tree at the bottom of our garden. however, all went well - Bo's went first (he being the firstborn - no paper-rock-scissors this time, at least) - a head-messingly fearsome screech as it lifted off, then the fiery trail, up, up, up, neck-craningly high, until, at the faltering apogee - BOOOOMMMM!!!! - and a huge, oooh-aaah glorious, fifteen-metre blossoming dahlia of molten colours, that lingered for just long enough, then faded back to silent darkness. then Jack's - and the same all over again.
so anyway that's what I've decided I want. up, up and away. byeee. (but not for a while yet, ok?)

off on or on off?


the Energy Saving Trust is a government-backed organisation dedicated to educating us about saving energy.
fair enough.
their latest TV advert depicts a bunch of unpleasant individuals dissing energy-saving campaigns on the grounds that one individual's efforts to save energy amounts to so much pissing in the wind. closeup on a single room light. zoom back to overview of an entire city glowing with artificial light. cut to closeup of a finger flicking a light-switch off.
except - rewind, replay - something a little odd here - the off-switching finger is flicking the switch down as the light simultaneously goes off>.
hmmm.
gone are the halcyon days when advertising creatives (excuse me while I stifle a giggle) employed native wit and a peculiarly patronising take on subliminal reinforcement to encode their world-shakingly consumptive message, otherwise I'd say this was another one of those transparently silly ploys to make us sit up and take notice. hey look, they turn the light on and it goes off! think I'd better do the same. duh.
alas, it's far more likely a case of the filming, editing, post-production, distribution - the whole shebang - having been contracted out, for reasons best understood by the geniuses in charge of the EST, to some flavour-of-the-month American team, who clearly couldn't shake themselves of the notion that the only right way to do anything is the American way.
today light-switches. tomorrow democracy. hey ho.

Wolfowitz to rule the world (bank)

but some men are more equal than others

what a minefield, this education thing.
black kids, especially boys, are performing worse than any other ethnic group in the league tables - and have been for quite a while.
whenever education is the subject of either political or media attention, the key phrases that keep turning up time and time again are 'equality of opportunity' and 'freedom of choice' - as if either of these might apply universally across the social spectrum.
obviously, black boys from poor backgrounds need more help than, say the Princes William or Harry, if they're going to get any passes in their GCSE's. if I really need to explain why that's the case, I'm talking to the wrong person. go away, nothing here for you, if you think that poor black kids as a genotype are more stupid than William or Harry (than whose own genotype only the equally pleasing ambulant shrub is more stupid).
the revealing thing is that, when someone who really knows what he's talking about comes up with a suggestion to improve things as they stand, he's immediately jumped on as if he'd pissed on the woolsack. I don't happen to believe that any kind of segregated education can help equalise an unequal situation. I'm sorry that some parents (those who are fortunate enough to be able to choose) find it necessary to send their sons and daughters to segregated schools (segregated, that is, either by race, religion, class, or gender) in order to better their chances. I believe that, if the idea that everyone's really entitled to equality of opportunity and equal freedom of choice were anything more than a notional soundbite, there wouldn't be any problem at all. alas, it isn't, and will never become an entitlement until it's legally enabled, which no government in any way dependent on support from the corporate sector and the higher band taxpayer will ever dare implement. so it will never actually be the case. which lets us all off the hook, doesn’t it?
meanwhile, the real teachers struggling to help our children and young people to get an education in the state schools are yoked to a cartload of political ballast that's absolutely irrelevant to the matter in hand. heroes, every one of them.

last tally ho

I live within 155mm mortar range of Wells, a quiet little town with a rather impressive cathedral, a good market, an even better Tesco's, a very high opinion of itself, and the worst cinema in Europe. the owner of the cinema - an upgraded scouts hut - has been known to confiscate kids sweets as they go in as you're only allowed to take in what you buy at the counter. I don't know anyone who hasn't had a run-in with him at some time. I once got so pissed off with the movie we were watching being out of focus that I went back out and up to the projection-booth - where I found no-one at the helm, and an inarticulate gum-chewing fifteen-year-old usherette leaning aganst the wall outside not having a clue or caring less where anyone was (at least that's how I interpreted her shrug).

there was a demo in Wells the other day - first ever, as far as I know. blocked High Street. disproportionate police presence. chanting. slogans. the gist of it was that our democratic rights were being undermined yet again, and that the government was acting like a bunch of arseholes - the usual sort of thing, and the sort of thing that I'm usually totally up for. except that this was a demo by supporters of the local hunt on the first day of the coming into force of the law forbidding the hunting of mammals with dogs. red jackets, trot-trot, hunting horns, Barbour coats, flat caps. they were well-organised and excruciatingly polite, but angry, dashit! in a jolly good-humoured way.

what's interesting about the Countryside Alliance is that it's facing up to something that the Northern mining communities had to face up to twenty years ago when She Who Cannot Be Named (*hawk - spit*) was busy dismantling the miners unions: that 'democracy' is something that bends and sways in accordance with the current political breeze. this Wells demo was a pale shadow of all those held in every major UK city during 1984 - 85, and an insignificant squeak compared with the million-strong anti-war demos held in every major city in the world prior to the latest invasion of Iraq, but, for once, the people demonstrating were from that class formerly assumed to represent the establishment. their arrogance in assuming that they'll eventually get their way and have the ban overturned through either the House of Lords or the European Commission only further highlights the marginalisation of their constituency. they're energetically trying to assimilate and convert the tactics of political militancy to their own cause, and they can't see how desperate and irrelevant that makes them appear. there's a certain pleasure - a schadenfreude - to be gained, it's true, in witnessing their dawning dismay that, finally, to the tune of the swansong of their beloved Conservative party, which is busy immolating itself in a positively Dickensian conflagration of issue-twitching and marginal-seat-targeting, they're going to be sidelined. history is just passing them by. they've become as much a social anachronism as those back-to-back mining communities, who didn't have the benefit of their land and inheritances to fall back on.

the pro-hunting lobby still has plenty of fight left in it (proportionate to its plethora of resources), and I'm looking forward to seeing the first physical skirmishes between the hunters and the police on the news. these people have assumed, for as long as Chief Constables have been guests at the Rotary Clubs, that the police are instruments of their will. they are about to discover, however, that they command little if no natural respect in the average bobby, and I have no doubt there's many a constable from Taunton to Yeovil to Exeter who's looking forward to the moment when he's given permission to crack a few of these arrogant bastards heads.

police have their sport, too.

pro-hunting arguments fall into four defensive categories: tradition, pest-control, sport, and the local economy. the antis are more simplistic, and a little monothematic: cruel, uncivilised, anachronistic.

I'm the first to heave at the saccharine sentimentalities of Disney anthropomorphism. I find it superficially interesting, the way kids who were brought up to shed buckets at the evil threats upon countless large-eyed dumb beasties from Dumbo to the Dalmatians learn to adapt to the realities of life on the farm. and, if I had to choose, I trust I'd save the human child before the fox cub - who wouldn't? but I recognised a long time ago the politics behind the reverse sentimentalism that demonises the fox. yes, I've seen what a fox can do in a chicken-coop, but what's a chicken coop to an intelligent animal like a fox? it's like a free supermarket: once in, you're going to kill as much as you can before grabbing as much as you can in your jaws to haul away to your family and hope you can come back for the rest later. there's nothing more evil or sneaky or malicious about a fox than there is about any other feral predator. the red fox is not on the official MAFF (Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food) list of agricultural pests. the perception of foxy's pestiness far outweighs the reality. yes, if you happen to want to rear free range chickens, you'll consider him a pest, and a threat - if much less so - to the more vulnerable stock like newborn lambs, but the people who really really hate him are the owners of the shooting-estates who rear game-birds.

as anyone who's accidentally wandered onto the wrong part of the moor knows, they're very serious, those shooters, about their sport. and as anyone who listens to the Archers knows, it's a very lucrative business, shooting. foxy kill pheasant. pheasant= many £. foxy must die. dial S for Superaristo.

only a bunch of aristocrats - genetically feeble-minded and as imaginative as a pondful of newts - could have concluded that the best way to control a local fox population was to get a bunch of mates together with a pack of dogs and go hurtling around the local fields on horseback knocking over fences and punching horse-sized holes in hedgerows in hopes of finding one and killing it. it makes about as much sense as letting a party of five-year-olds with mallets rampage around your kitchen in hopes of catching a mouse. the miracle is that they ever catch anything. 'they' don't, of course. the dogs do. messy. always. (no messier, I concede, than the chicken-coop, but forget that bullshit about the Master quickly despatching the beast with his pistol: a) he's got to drag a pack of up to thirty blood-crazed dogs off first; b) he's got to have remembered to load his pistol; and c) it'll misfire most of the time so he'll end up bashing what's left of its head in with his heel.)

the relationship between the hunters and the shooters is symbiotic - the one has evolved out of the same set of social and economic conditions as the other. it's a function of the endless existential struggle to fill a meaningless life with meaning, which, in the aristos case, has meant huntin an shootin an fishin for as long as anyone can remember. god-given right, apparently. be sure that if the fox had evolved to predate on, say, cats or mongrels (the kind of animals that the hoi polloi own), he'd be running around free as a bird (well, not as free as a game bird, but you catch my drift).

the only rational justification for hunting with horses and hounds (all the others are more or less emotional) is, if you're an aristocrat, to keep your local pool of conscriptable arms-bearing men and your fellow mounted cavalry up to scratch between wars. the way you (or your chief huntsman) organise your tactics and signalling methods and marshal your men and negotiate the terrain will correspond very closely to the way you'll expect things to go in battle. it's a wargame, but not one that's had any real correspondence with real wars for about three hundred years.

the 'traditional country pursuits' argument is the feeblest and easiest to dismiss. if 'it's traditional' were a legitimate excuse, we'd still have cockpits and bear-baiting and the stocks (although, as a matter of fact, I'm personally in favour of reinstalling the stocks as a more effective alternative to hilarious things like ASBO's), and, by default, we'd have to defend other cultures' rights to bind feet and cut out clitorises and god knows what else.

the 'pest-control' argument is equally lame: the local Master of Foxhounds is quoted in the local (mostly pro-hunting) paper as saying that this is as dark a day for the foxes as it is for everyone else - referring to the transparently ludicrous and totally unchallenged belief that, unless they cull them, they'll overbreed and then all manner of hell will be let loose. as for the efficiency of this form of pest-control - pull the other one.

the 'don't interfere with our sport' argument is fair enough, provided you come clean and explain why chasing a live fox is better than drag-hunting (chasing a trail laid down by someone who's gone ahead dragging a sack impregnated with foxy-smelling stuff). obviously, foxy is going to be a lot more imaginative about where he or she goes when in full flight from the hounds than some oik running cross-country dragging a smelly sack behind him. I readily concede that, were it not for the ignorant obnoxiousness of the company of the aristos (and, indeed, there are hunts that consist of lower ranking, slightly less obnoxious mortals) the idea of spending a day on horseback chasing around the countryside in a dashing red jacket is quite appealing (jodhpurs! down, boy!). but the hub, the kernel, the essence of the chase is that the object and the end of the hunt is the kill, and killing things is fun. it's thrilling. I happened to be strolling through some woods in Devon with a couple of friends a few years back when we came across a stag-hunting party that was just finishing its work. hugely impressive collection of powerful, steaming horses, stamping about in the undergrowth between the birch trees where the beast had been finally brought to bay. happy, tongue-lolloping, panting, tail-wagging hounds, ecstatically receiving the affectionate compliments of the dismounted hunters. the beast itself - huge, steaming, many-tined, bloody, dead, beginning to be dragged, by the antlers, with enormous effort, by four big men, straining at the limits of their strength, out of the little stream where it had been brought down. everyone flushed, elated, lots of laughter, mid-orgasmic. thrilling.

no-one will admit it - it's a form of sex.

the final argument - the socio-economic one - is a toughie, but equally lame. it's true that all hunts keep a number (a relatively small and exaggeratedly significant but nevertheless a number) of local people in work - work that, compared with what else is on offer in what tend to be economically depressed rural areas, is reasonably interesting and fulfilling - working with animals usually is - if not particularly remunerative. but to justify something that is wrong on the grounds that if you take it away you're taking away people's livelihoods is nonsense. it's a form of blackmail, which the aristos are masters at, but which is employed all the time by far more egregious employers. whole communities have become involved in ethically dubious industries, from weapons-manufacture to cigarette-manufacture, where the choice is presented as either/or - either you're in or you're out of work. very, very few people have the luxury of being able to choose not to compromise their moral scrupulousness in selecting their field of work. obviously, if your livelihood depends on the hunt, whether it be working in the kennels or the stables, you're not going to admit any distinction between what you're doing for the hunt and what your friends and relations might be doing in the Big House - what's one fox against a roof over your head and food on your family's table? it's a trivial thing.

except it isn't. the terrorising of an animal in the name of sport or tradition or anything else is not a trivial thing.

the only argument that's hard to counter is the one that goes 'fuck off milksop townies - we likes killin' things, we's allus done it, we's'n gonna go on doin it and none of your namby-pamby townie ways is going to change any o' that - we don't come into your towns an' start tellin' youse how to run your lives, do us?' it's hard to counter because it's not an argument, just an excuse to pick a fight, but that about sums it up.

no-one's summarised the fox-hunting fraternity better than Oscar Wilde: "the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable".

Man has been hunting for a long time. we used to do it the hard way - our canines are evidence of that - but, once we'd learnt how to make throwing weapons and how to organise ourselves into tactical groups, we got better. I don't think that millennia-long learning curve will ever get totally erased from the genetic memory. there's always going to be something in us that remembers what it was like, hunting for a living. it's clear, for instance, that the prehistoric hunters developed a great respect for their prey. the earliest works of art attest to that. and I think there's something of that - an atavistic epiphany - in the common use of the word 'beauty' by hunters - the moment of finding a twelve-pointer in their sights being one of 'beauty'. breath catches. heart hammers. this 'beautiful' creature's life is, literally, in this moment before (exquisite suspension of time) they squeeze the trigger, in their hands.

but we don't need to hunt for food anymore. we haven't needed to for a long time, although it's a not-so-bad thing to do, now and again, if only to remind ourselves of what meat really is. in order to hunt and kill an animal you have to learn a little about it, although it's ludicrously easy to actually kill it (with a gun) when you've finally found it. then the skinning and the gutting and the butchering and the cooking and the eating - all good, if done in a spirit of respect for the animal whose life you've taken in return for your sustenance.

so.
food-hunting good.
trophy-hunting bad.
really - it's as simple as that.

to reduce an animal to a lifeless object for the sake of a photo-opportunity is as sick as it gets. we don't have the right, simply because we can do something, to do it. great power must be moderated by great restraint, otherwise we have failed all the lessons of civilisation. if we use the power of a high-calibre rifle to assert our authority over the animal world for the sake of nothing more than a photograph, it's only a few steps away from doing the same to a man. all it needs is a few tweaks of the conscience-gland (a steady drip-feed of macdonalds and coke seems to do the trick) and to be sufficiently persuaded that the man is a beast. it goes on all the time.

last day of the gates

(photo: Wolfgang Volz)

there are some fairly obvious reasons for it - furthest distance from the sun, worst-favoured inclination of the ecliptic, the coldest, the darkest, the dreariest - February really sucks. so many depressed faces, so little enthusiasm for anything, so very hard, the morning struggle to lift back out of the cosy amniotic bubble of dreaming into another day - into yet another day of the same.
I get such a vicarious lift from seeing these pictures. thank you, Christo. thank you, Jeanne-Claude. thank you, you army of crazy helpers (not volunteers, incidentally - they've always insisted on paying their helpers, if only a pittance and food). if I lived in New York, my February, this year, would have been utterly transformed, knowing that all I had to do to escape these midwinter blues was take a stroll in Central Park. I so envy this guy with the backpack crunch-crunching between this wonderful avenue of orange portals. why didn't I just go? they're pulling them all down tomorrow. stand by for a massive wave of depression sweeping through the apple - a macro-cultural equivalent of the day when you pull the christmas decorations down. we're familiar with SAD (seasonal affective disorder). now for NOMORGATES (non-microsoft-related post-gates syndrome).

more wonderful photos here

everyone a critic

someone wrote to say that one of my reviews wasn't objective enough.

I don't really know what 'objective' means. I think I know what it's supposed to mean, in that an 'objective' assessment of any given situation is supposed to be one that's uninfluenced by personal prejudice on the part of the assessor. it's the credo of both the experimental scientist and the BBC journalist. an 'objective' report - whether on a set of clinical trials or a distant war-zone - is meant to be one that just states the facts. conversely, a 'subjective' report is one that comments on the facts from a personal viewpoint.

I just find it a little hard to believe that there can be anyone left in this well-informed world - this better than at any time in history informed world - who seriously believes that there can be such phenomena as 'facts.'

I have just read a report that includes an interview with the surviving 'Brother No.2' of the Khmer Rouge - the Cambodian communist elite which, under the leadership of Pol Pot ('Brother No.1'), organised the killing of over a million and a half people who were in any way associated with 'wrong thought'. This man - a free man, incidentally, who has never been formally accused of or tried for anything - not even minor traffic offences - denies any knowledge of those killings. From his point of view, they are not 'facts' at all, but misunderstandings and misrepresentations of otherwise inexplicable events that somehow left a million and a half people lying in unmarked mass graves.
Slobodan Milosevic is currently playing the same game in front of his accusers at the Hague.

truth, clearly, is a function of belief as much as it is a function of fact.
I understand, for example, that a majority of American and a few English citizens actually believe the government-peddled 'facts' presented as justification for the invasion of Iraq: a) that Iraq was involved somehow in the destruction of the twin towers; and b) that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction which were capable of being launched against allied nations (ie Israel - but there were dark, incredibly preposterous hints at the time that London and Washington were at risk) at twenty minutes notice.
I also understand that the 'fact' that our planet coalesced from a mass of smaller planetoids over a period of several thousand millennia and that life on earth then evolved after a waiting period of several more is seriously disputed by many millions who prefer the biblical 'truth' that all this happened in a week.

so I find it a little dismaying that anyone should expect 'objectivity' in a music review.

a piece of music, like any work of art, is an objective phenomenon in only the most limited and constrained sense: any evaluation of its value can only ever be an opinion. it's not like a racing trimaran - you can't apply a set of rigorous assessments in order to evaluate its efficiency: check-list assessment will effectively forestall the design of a racing trimaran that has blunt ends, a corrugated hull, a tiny mast and is made from reinforced concrete; but if I were to compile a list of things that music does and reverse-engineer those aspects of some of the most successful three-minute hits into a song, I might end up with a hit, an amusing TV mini-series and another gadfly celebrity or five, but I won't have made music.

there are, it's true, music journalists who try hard to appear objective. they do this by using a form of analytical language that invokes and implies authority if not authenticity by association with either a form of academic hermeticism or street lingo, or a combination of both. such critics rarely use the first person singular, for example: they conceal their opinions behind a buttress of recondite allusion and a shield of encyclopaedic cross-reference. either that or they just describe what happens in the music, track by track, as if it were a series of paintings, or the plot of a movie.

art in general, however, is very resistant to evaluation against mechanistic sets of criteria.
this is the problem with teaching art, whether it be painting, performance, or music - the teacher has to allow the student the freedom to develop their own set of discriminatory sensors within the context of understanding that nothing comes from nowhere and that everything ultimately refers to something else. that some art is 'good' and some is 'bad' and that there's a spectrum of relative goodness and badness in between is simply not the case. art is not like science. bad science is demonstrably bad. there is an international language of science which subjects any new science to a rigorous process of peer-reviewed evaluations which has nothing whatsoever to do with individual opinions about what happened (usually - there are outstandingly interesting exceptions when it comes to cutting-edge science like cosmology or string theory or quantum effects). such is never, has never been, nor could ever be the case with art. art is always and irrevocably contextualised by its cultural currency, and that currency moves up and down in the cultural stock markets as fast as a whore's drawers.

the dominant culture decides. always. this is very obvious in the case of the endless struggle we English have with the so-called Americanisation of our culture - from root to branch, from spellings to styles of governance, it's clear that there are some aspects of supposed Englishness that are on the wane. (the same applies everywhere, of course - the Académie Française was established to maintain the purity of the French language, and has certain strange legislative powers that actually oblige newspaper editors not to use words like 'le weekend' and so on.)

English spelling was a very flexible affair in Elizabethan times. Shakespeare used at least two spellings for 'colour': coulour from the original Old French and color from the Latin; colour, the compromise, became the more commonly used one, so that by the time Johnson and the other eighteenth-century dictionary writers came to formalise it, they decided that 'colour' was the way to go, whereas 'formalize' was not. and so it has continued.

we can continue spelling 'colour' the English way so long as we don't want to rewrite an HTML tag, however, in which case we have no choice: if we want a web page with a black background, then 'body bgcolor=#000000"' is the only spelling that will work. in the programming world, it just hasn't proved to be worth anyone's time to create and insert into the browsers the snippet of code that would apply an either/or there. and it's no longer a 'fact' that Americanisation with an 's' is right and Americanization with a 'z' wrong. most dictionaries now concede that either will do. and, while we're on the subject, you'd better be clear about which floor you want to live on: if you choose the first floor here, you'll expect to be on the first landing you arrive at upstairs, whereas in the States you'll be put on what we call the ground floor. there are innumerable such examples of cultural difference, of course.

obviously (to me and maybe to you) there's a lot of misplaced energy here: whereas it's definitely worth fighting tooth and nail against a lot of instances of creeping Americanisation (the insurance-based model of health care that's undermining the NHS; the virtual monopolisation of media-ownership; the politics of paranoia; the measuring of success exclusively in dollars and cents; the industrialisation of human relationships) it hardly seems worth the effort to rail against those shifts in language use, for example, that are just going to happen, willy-nilly, as part of the development of a living language. there are many American usages that are uniquely apposite and great fun: 'go figure', for example, is so wonderfully succinct - the English 'work it out for yourself' doesn't capture the half of the conspiratorial shrewdness contained in that expression. ditto the ubiquitous 'meh', which I think perfectly encapsulates the frequently needed 'totally average - neither good nor bad - not worth talking about' hand-waggle. I shall continue spelling colour o-u-r for the same reason I pronounce laboratory with the accent on the second rather than the first syllable - because that's how I learnt it here (and, besides, the American way still sounds too close to 'lavatory' for me to be able totally to suppress the sniggering seven-year-old inside us all whenever I hear it). however, I expect a word such as 'probably' to be displaced by the already widely-used 'prolly' eventually, and, come the twenty-fifties, surely the grandchildren of the current generations of Cholmondeleys and Featherstonehaughs will have decided enough's enough - we're Chumleys and Fanshaws - get over it, grandad.

most human transactions are based on agreements: these range from the trivial (I agree to call this object salt in order that there won't be any confusion when you ask me to pass it you at the table) to the metaphysical (I agree that what you are perceiving and recognising as 'real' is much the same as me in order that we might co-exist and communicate in similar universes). there are real and valid arguments that one individual's inability to agree with another on either of these levels - these supposed aberrations from normal behaviour - represent merely an extreme form of alternative opinion rather than symptoms of madness, but so long as the cultural consensus remains in favour of salt being sodium chloride rather than a fluffy quadruped with long ears, the social boat remains relatively unrocked by such assertions.

in the matter of critical objectivity, however, the check-list-and-score method of assessment is one I'll continue to resist, since it belongs ultimately in the same cultural model that requires that someone must be to blame for everything bad that happens - the 'the insurance will cover it' model, in other words. sometimes shit just happens. and quite often it happens under the auspices of the major recording labels.

go figure.

the dark ages (contd)

"Only about a third of Americans believe that Charles Darwin's theory of evolution is a scientific theory that has been well supported by the evidence, while just as many say that it is just one of many theories and has not been supported by the evidence. The rest say they don't know enough to say. Forty-five percent of Americans also believe that God created human beings pretty much in their present form about 10,000 years ago. A third of Americans are biblical literalists who believe that the Bible is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word."

pull the other one

scientific fact: there's more nothing than something out there
believe
believe

Nepal - party on!



yes, I know stylus is a music e-zine, but I would have thought a journalist who happened to be in Kathmandu when King Gyandendra celebrated Nepal Democracy Day by suspending democracy might have thought such a thing worth mentioning, if only en passant. but no, you'll search in vain in this interview with a wannabe-Ricky-Martin Nepalese pop-star called Jhumi Jhumi, and in the writer's breathless excitement over his subsequent performance at a party for the sons and daughters of Kathmandu's finest for the slightest tremor of concern over what was going on outside.
fortunately for us, Radio Free Nepal wasn't on the guest-list.

call me naïve..

if it were possible for seven men, with seven cheque books, to eradicate world poverty at seven simultaneous strokes of a pen, I for one would expect them to do it.
and it is, and they don't, so there it is.
billionaires are different from you and me (unless I happen to be talking to a billionaire - in which case e-mail me for the fawning and flattering version of this post), and are not subject to the same moral constraints, so it seems to be up to us little people to help each other out here.
even in our little rural neck of the woods, we've become used, over the past few years, to stepping past the Big Issue vendors with a quick smile that's supposed to say 'hi, I want to acknowledge you as a fellow-human in need, and don't want you to think that I'm either ignoring you or am careless about your plight, but I'm actually in some conflict here about the self-evident legitimate need in your personal case and the efficacy of the role you're imposing on me by inviting me to participate in its alleviation in this manner: you see, the big issue involves a lot more than the Big Issue...' and actually is interpreted as 'cringing liberal tightwad who passes by twice a day and smiles to cover his embarassment at pretending to human warmth despite wishing the council or the police or anyone really would move me and my bloody dog somewhere else'.
a billionaire wouldn't have these scruples - he'd just walk past. no recognition. no compassion. no problem.
it's evidently incumbent in billionairity to be liberated - a rare gift - from the imagination.
meantime, with a best shot at a definition of a contentious word saying that it applies if you live below 60% of the national median income (itself defined as the mid-point on the shifting scale of national earnings), and exemplified as a household of 2 adults and 2 children having less than £193 per week to spend after housing costs, that seems to work out at somewhere between a third and a quarter of the population in this supposedly developed country. it's much the same in the states, and apparently one in five Israeli children go to bed hungry.

it was the nightingale and not the lark


so the most stressful day in the calendar for all teenagers and for far too many so-called grownups (apart from christmas) looms, like a leering gargoyle, some krusty ronald mcdonald of the senses, most cynically exploiting the better part of our human natures in thrall to the worst.
be my valentine.
kill me.
in common with most subsequent commercial abominations, we Brits were originally to blame, of course. together with the Merry Christmas Whore of bauble-trash and guilt-shopping, and the invention of photography, and the not-unrelated invention of the Welsh national costume, some unspeakable Victorian entrepreneur dreamed up and marketed the Valentine as the definitive expression of secret love. the idea caught, emigrated to the US, took fire - and from 1910 there was Hallmark.
being in love is a wonderful thing. when you're in love, every day is Valentine's day. at any and every opportunity you're going to think up some new way of showering your soulmate with gifts. nothing is less of a chore, more of a delight. constructing those handmade cards, filling in the I love you balloon letters in neon red, covering them with glitter-glue, stuffing the envelope with glittery hearts that are all going to fall out all over the carpet when the beloved opens it. oh the delight!
new lovers - beware - accept no substitute for those tacky handmade cards. cherish them. the tackiest, most amateurish handmade card, crafted, literally, with love, is worth a thousand of those ten-quid padded and be-glittered Hallmark monstrosities. once you either receive or stoop to sending one of those, the writing's on the wall. there's an all-too familiar formula relating the likely endurance of the new love, in weeks, expressed inversely as a function of the size of the card and the price per square centimetre. ugly, but true.
like all similar states of fever, or chemically-induced delirium, the being-in-love state is experienced at several dimensions removed from the universe as it is known and experienced most of the time. everyone, once in it, wants it to last forever. on average, it lasts about three weeks. what happens after that is that guilt begins to emerge - guilt at the cooling of the fever, and the reluctant emergence of the realisation that either this is something that matters, that needs to be considered as an ongoing life-changing event, and, if so, necessitating the scary sacrificial absorption of the being-in-love cell into the larger organism of this other thing, or not. and where there's guilt, there's profit, as Quark used to say.
what does it say about us that we're so desperately reluctant to disengage from the fantasy narrative of romantic love that we'll collude in such a tacky industrial process of emotional surrogacy rather than confront the real? where in the canon is the alternative to the Romeo and Juliet model? why is everyone so happy at weddings - the statistically near-inevitable moment of love's murder?
in 2003, Hallmark reported consolidated net revenues of $4.3 billion, which is more than the annual Gross Domestic Product of the Seychelles, Eritrea, Burundi, Djibouti, Liberia, The Gambia, Comoros, and Guinea-Bissau combined.
tweet-tweet.