I know you know I know



once, a long long time ago, I shared a disgustingly run-down but qualifyingly cheap house off the Beverley Road in Hull with three fellow students during the first term of our second year. they were John and Mary, who had paired up in the first year, Caroline, and Paul. Paul was a lively sprite - gay, Marxist, and Welsh. his spirit was disproportionately huge to his slight frame, his character irrepressible, mercurial, occasionally abrasive, painfully honest, frequently dope-befuddled, but actually as sharp as a pin, and a dead cert for fame and fortune - Director of the National Theatre of Wales, at the very least - somewhere down the line.

one day, he told me that in all the time he'd known me, he'd never heard me say "I don't know". I resented that, at the time, although I took it as part of the mutual intellectual sniping that characterised our relationship, and parried with some bluster about his never asking me hard enough questions. but I knew what he was talking about - a particular sort of arrogance that regards the intellect as a weapon and knowledge as ammunition; and at the time I considered the few people who I judged to be my intellectual equals fair game for a particular kind of debating style that prefers bare-faced sophistry to any admission of weakness - and an empty clip equals weakness, in such a world.

under the superficially wisening influence of the years, I've come to adopt almost the opposite position: the great cloud of not knowing now seems almost to be my default intellectual position, and I exercise immediate and almost instinctive caution on encountering such confident certitude in others.

unfortunately, the association of confidence with authority is embedded as an axiom of social organisation to such an extent that to admit to uncertainty in a wide field of decision-dependent practises would amount to professional suicide. the unholy alliance of politics and economics, for example, requires that each conforms to certain 'laws' in order to sustain the authority of the other. in truth, any economy larger than a potlatch operates according to laws that are as viscous and ephemeral as they are elusive: the Bank of England might as well make its up-or-down decisions about interest-rates on the basis of reading a rabbit's entrails or consulting the i ching for all the predictive insights its 'laws' offer it. the economist - as far from being a scientist as the gambler (whose 'laws' are suspiciously similar) - inhabits a Newtonian enclave in a post-Heisenberg world, where it is considered satisfactory - nay, necessary - to employ terminology unchanged from the Age of Steam (overheated, safety-valve, pressure) to describe economic fluctuations, and, when all else fails, resort to the language of voodoo (the spectre of inflation is one of my faves) - and as long as all this is done with the appropriate air of authority, everyone is happy.

do you remember the first time, as a child, you lay in the sun with your eyes closed and saw those strange floating shapes, like simple-celled transparent protozoa drifting along across the bright pink background glare of the inside of your eyelids? and whenever you tried to focus on one of them, it darted just to the side of your point of focus, and kept drifting, tantalisingly perceivable but absolutely unseeable?

Paul floated out of my circle of acquaintance fairly soon after leaving university, and it took a while for the news to reach me about his developing AIDS, and his subsequent death. I can't remember when we said goodbye to each other. I think it was after finals. he'd been threatening for months that he was going to make a political issue of it, and that nothing would change unless we all did as he was going to do - to sign in to the exams, then walk out. which is what he did. stupid prat. it's unlikely that we would ever have met again, but it's always salutary to consider that all farewells, however casual, contain the germ of that possibility - that you'll never see that person again.

the little we do know about ourselves and our place in the universe seems to be maintaining the same ratio of understanding to ignorance as it has throughout history: if anything, there seems to be a 'law' that supports this, which would state, if it were susceptible to definition, that what seems to be the case now will eventually turn out to be several miles off. if our understanding of the largest and smallest observable phenomena could have expanded by so many degrees of magnitude in bare centuries - each expansion preceded by statements of scientific certainty that this (the atom - the celestial sphere) represented the unsurpassable limit of cognition - then how much further off are we likely to be about current certainties - or, in the case of the post-Heisenberg world (already almost a century on), uncertainties?

the universe is no respecter of lives or careers or reputations - it proceeds, as it has always done, in ways that remain as mysterious and unknowable to most of us as when the first storytellers spun the first tales out of the rising sparks from the cavemouth fire and the fixed sparks in the black night sky.

me? don't ask me. I know naaaaathink.

could this be you?

let the games begin

ok, so I know it might sound a little cynical, but can there truly be any conscious, sentient being left standing on this beautiful blue planet who doesn't believe that the Olympic Games have nothing - nothing whatsoever - to do with sport?
chauvinistic nationalism - yes. monomaniacal egoism - yes. professionally clandestine drug abuse - yes. sport - I don't think so.
unless you happen to agree with the truly cynical consensus that, at that level of game, the winning - at any cost - trumps all other considerations - ethical, medical, or legal - and that the acquisition of a gold medal in itself somehow represents a pinnacle of human achievement rather than the irrelevant apex of a squalid pyramid of cheating, corruption and political chicanery - you surely have to concede that the only 'sport' is in second-guessing the coaches' ever more imaginative methods of pharmaceutically modifying the participants bodies, and even more imaginative methods of evading detection (blood-doping is my current fave).
the point about sport is its glorious pointlessness. it is enormously important that some human activities - such as sport and the arts - should be pointless, if not entirely meaningless. but sport has become invested with meaning - with currency - in the crudest imaginable sense. the glorious thing about a man or woman running incredibly fast in a circle is that it is utterly pointless - a completely meaningless event whose very meaninglessness becomes the empty field that the spectator can populate with mythic significance. once you divert the rationale for that socially inclusive - and supremely important - theatre of struggle from the pointless (the doing it for its own sake) to the aspirational (the doing it for the sponsorship deals, the commercial contracts, the material rewards of celebrity), you reduce the relationship between participant and spectator to the banal rubber-stamping of a trading licence - a credit agreement trading in some egregious futures market of human perfectibility.

the case against the president (by the son of another)

(via conscientious)

go naaaaaaaaaaaaaaadiaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!!!!!!!

growing up is hard to do

the majority of adolescents, by the time they leave school - whether to go on to further academic pursuits or to begin work - have already discovered that the majority of their elders are insane. the first day of work experience - that first glimpse behind the PR facade of any 'normal' working environment - is a shocking vision of institutionalised bedlam, wherein a microsociety of miserable, angry, frustrated people pretends, for eight, nine, ten hours at a stretch, that what they are doing matters, that it has meaning, and that it is worth doing, if only for the salary; whereas, given the choice, every single one of those individuals would be doing something else. this is insane, psychotic behaviour, and yet, very quickly - if they wish to survive in this world - the novice worker learns to accept that it is normal behaviour, and that seeing a circle but calling it a square is just what happens. exceptionally, there are some working environments that engage the willing commitment of an enthusiastic team of co-workers whose primary motivation is not financial - but they are few and far between. most people hate what they do for a living. 'the office' is not a satire. david brent is not a caricature.

'delusional' is one of those pseudo-scientific terms dragged from the bargain-bin of the most delusional of the pseudo-sciences (psychology) to justify defining 'normal' behaviour by how successfully the individual manages to constrain their impulse to liberate themselves from themselves (the latter being the self-constrained, 'normalised' version of themselves that they have been persuaded to believe is the more 'real').

reality - as in 'get real' - is such a contentious, over-rated state.

I'm absolutely convinced that the majority of the people I meet in the real world are virtual simulacra, with the 'real' version of their reconstructed selves silently screaming and writhing inside their socialised carapace. entire lives lived in a state of more or less stoical endurance, forever repeating this self-inflicted bonsai on the true self - clipping here, trimming there, always on the alert for some rogue root, branch, or leaf that aspires to a larger life, to a better, more fulfilling life, to - a life.

there are good constraints, of course - the learnt behaviour that modifies the infant's belief that the world revolves around them, that revenge is justice, that rules only apply to others, that might is right, and that the world is a limitless resource - is behaviour necessarily learnt in order to fulfill the minimum criteria on the syllabus of developing social skills. the self-adjustments required of the maturing adolescent, however, as he or she negotiates the cynical chicane of the education battery-farms and prepares for adulthood, is of a quite different order, requiring that they see a circle but agree to call it a square - because, in the real, conforming world, the prerogative of inclusion is conformity.

I hold to a tenacious belief in the interplay between inevitability and exceptionality in human affairs: hardly a superstitious belief, because it is a demonstrable phenomenon, but a creed in the sense that I believe that there are exceptions to every 'hopeless' situation, and that merely to be mindful of that can help turn hopelessness into hope. whenever, all too often, there is a moment of media attention on a disaster - an earthquake, for example, when whole towns are reduced to mounds of rubble in seconds - there seems always to come a moment, many days later, when the rescue workers have turned their attention from finding survivors to finding bodies, when someone is discovered alive, and rescued, in circumstances which are always described as 'miraculous.' miracles are rare, but they do happen - all the time - literally, all the time, in such fields as quantum mechanics and string theory, where the conformist restraints - physical, temporal, even dimensional - of the macro-elemental world get short shrift. so it seems to me to be no less necessary in the wider scheme of things to acknowledge the inevitability of these exceptional events than to acknowledge the field of inevitable contingencies out of which they emerge in the 'real' world.

if it is delusional to anticipate or to expect the exceptional, the highest aspirations of the noblest and most virtuous men and women in history were delusional - prior to their achievement; the whole of art is predicated on delusion; the leap of faith that is love is delusional; the expectation of life itself is, essentially, delusional.

this is not to deny that self-delusion is a form of stupid arrogance - or even, in some sense, just another sort of conformity - a romantic fallacy. clearly, to continue in the belief that, say, your opinion matters more than that of a hundred million people who disagree with you, and that, with god's grace, in time, they will come to see that you were right and they were wrong, is to embrace self-delusion in the most essential sense - this is the way 'leaders' behave all the time (the monkey, the poodle, and the pope, to cite the obvious current examples). it is stupid and it is arrogant - and it is 'real'. what could be more real than the suffering inflicted on countless millions as a result - however indirect - of our great leaders' decisions?

to apply the same term as a sort of generic insult to anyone who dares to dream outside the box, however, is ultimately just a distortion of envy - the macro-cultural expression of every harassed grownup's response to the adolescent's flamboyance: 'how would it be if everyone did just as they wanted to do?' and depending on whether a continuing response to that question suggests a vision of paradise or a vision of hell decides perhaps one of the most important choices of our lives.

36 Ways the US Is Losing the War on Terror

(via spitting image)

Family Life In The Middle Ages

How different was life for the nobility compared to Peasents?

Areas to consider

• Work
  
• Marriage

'Life in the Middle Ages was very different for peasents compared to the nobility for example....The peasents had to work extremely hard all day in the fields while the noblemen stay at home bossing the servants around endlessly. Peasents also live in crampt damp dark huts while the noblemens housings is much finer with plenty of windows light and tons of servants rooms and art.
Also most Noblewoman had arranged marriges to big fat pigs but with lot's and lot's of money and they normaly never met there husbands before the actual wedding!
While peasents married for true love!'
(Jack T-R - 7C)

That's my boy!

Kafka on Guantanamo

mr p

an e-mail from my ultra-indulgent editor at no ripcord asking why I haven't sent in any reviews for the last couple of months. thing is, I did send one mid-June-ish, but it never appeared on the site, and, rather than simply e-mail the guy who's been acting editor whilst dave's been on extended holiday, I found myself lapsing into an unbelievably childish sulk about it, and got into an extended well fuck you then flounce that belies any whisper of rational justification.
no - this is not entirely true.
when I sent the review, I also sent a chummy e-mail saying hi, for the first time, to ben - said acting editor - who's the only writer on the site whose reviews I really enjoy (I mean, the others are good - but he's exceptionally good) - and the fact that neither my e-mail nor my review were even acknowledged sent me into a faintly hysterical paranoid spin - especially when I saw that said ben seemed to be using his temporary powers to cram the site with stuff of his own. so what was I thinking? that he'd taken one look at my byline and spiked it out of malice? far more likely that the e-mail and attached .doc simply never arrived (although it's an odd coincidence that an e-mail I sent on the same day to someone else on the site - who dave had said I should contact with wish-lists during his absence - never got replied to either).
it's really getting about time I grew up.

best before end:

most children, as they begin to exercise their curiosity about this thing called sex that grownups make such a big fuss about, develop a very clear idea how it is: mummies and daddies do this sexing thing to make a baby or two, then, having successfully done that, they stop. that's it. no more sexing. the idea that mummies and daddies might do sexing for any other reason (than making babies) is outside the frame (ask any teenager). and, of course, as is usually the case with the infantile take on the world - it only takes a moment's consideration to realise that their version is the better one.
clearly, the vast majority of our problems as so-called grownups - physical, mental, spiritual, psychological, political, social - would evaporate if our collective libido were to evaporate after the birth of our first child (or upon our failure to propagate by a certain time determined by the biological clock - round about the mid-twenties, say). then, rather than having to do all that familiar repression and/or sublimation stuff, that hitching of cheesy-smiling happy families denial to the post of teeth-gritting real families compromise and necessity that's all too familiar to everyone (everyone) who's a parent (ie in the real world, as opposed to the celebrity makeover world of limitless resources and limited half-lives), our energies would be properly (and contentedly) directed where they were most effective and most needed - in the highly energetic business of child-rearing and getting on with our lives.
it's slightly strange that such an automatic post-partum neutering didn't evolve as a trait amongst the primates, since it would have led to far more social cohesion in the troop > tribe > family, and proportionately less psychotic behaviour amongst the males, especially. other species have managed for far longer than humans with drones rather than males, queens rather than females, or, where sperm-carriers are still considered necessary, instant despatch (mantises, spiders) on delivery. only we humans persevere into dotage with this delusive drive that's doomed, always, to end in tears.
it would not only be a huge spur to getting on with it and getting it right - the knowledge that your bits were going to blow away when you passed your twenty-fifth birthday - it would be a merciful release from a steaming bucketload of cultural bullshit connected with mid-life-and-all-points-south crises (in every sex) and dangerously inappropriate liaisons of the humbert e humbert kind, with the net result of making the whole world a damn sight safer, happier, and friendlier place.

I'm back!

apologies to all for the week's silence - I couldn't get posts to publish - just - nada - try as I might, it wouldn't happen - so I've shifted it all back over to blogspot hosting and we'll see how that pans out.

mi casa no es su casa

US wins David Blunkett Lifetime Menace Award | The Register

most men live lives of quiet desperation


for whatever reason (call me a sad fuck) I've been stuck with that phrase hovering on the edge of my mind all day, wondering where it came from, vaguely (mis)remembering it as the introduction to a really good film, or something. so curiosity finally won out, and I checked it out. and it is, of course, a quote from one of Henry David Thoreau's essays, as is this - from his 1849 essay, 'Resistance to Civil Government':

I HEARTILY accept the motto,—"That government is best which governs least"; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—"That government is best which governs not at all"; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have.

*waves order papers in the air and bellows "hear hear!"*

stupid black dyslexic lesbian muslim feminists

the three most important lessons I've learnt so far (check back frequently for revisionist updates):

• if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him
  
• the only proper thing to do with power is give it away
  
• everything is about sex
  

the first is crucial: I have had it up to here with pundits and gurus from TV chefs to lifestyle counsellors to pop psychiatrists to garden makeoverers to feng shuisters to money managers to arts critics to the Blogging Pope and Saint Michael fucking Moore himself telling me how to run my life better.

I know I'm a stupid, lazy, procrastinating, impecunious, self-excusing, self-pitying, complacent arsewipe - I know it's all my own fault, and that all I have to do to put things right is buy fair trade organic coffee/think positively/forgive my mother/plant another tree/take that mirror out of the toilet/think more seriously about ISAS and pension funds/go to the Tate more than twice a decade/trust scientists/believe/vote - but I don't, OK? so shut up and go rattle your tin at someone else! (and anyway who in their right mind's going to pay over the odds for fair trade organic coffee that tastes like shite and is endorsed by a twat like Chris Martin?)

sheesh

as for the power thang.
well - since they who acquire it have, by and large (we'll deal with the aristos at a later date - as soon as they've repaired the guillotine) spent the better part of their sorry little lives believing that, so long as they could acquire it, everything would come better for them - that they'd be safe, that their equally powerful friends would look after them, that they'd be able to tell the little people what to do, at last, and that they'd be able to have all the sex they wanted - and, when they finally manage to claw their way up there, discover that none of these things is true - that they're permanently stressed out from fear of losing it all again, that they can't trust anyone, that all the little people have been outsourced to India where they never get to see them anyway, and that the constant supplies of Viagra that they need to counter the impotence the stress induces only aggravates the duodenal ulcers the stress has already caused - they're not about to admit that it was all a mistake - a horrible, life-and-soul-destroying waste of time and effort, are they?

and as for the third: well, that's so obvious it needs no elaboration from me.

I have, in my time, been fucked over by as many of the people I thought I was honour-bound to help (the poor, the needy, the weak, the oppressed, feminists - you know - the standard Sunday-School Good Samaritan list) as by the people who I expect to fuck me over (that's anyone wearing a tie and/or lipstick, basically). I no longer think it's possible to engage in a relationship with anyone - be that as supplicant/donor, employer/employee, friend, lover, advocate, adversary - without acknowledging the infinitely braided and fearsomely complex strands of inequity that strive for dominance at every step of the way. I have yet to encounter a relationship between any two people - be they friends, parent and child, husband and wife, work colleagues, artistic collaborators - wherein I was unable to identify which way those magic scales that weigh the balance of power were tipping. It's sometimes more obvious than at others - far too easy, for example, to tell which of two long-term partners is the one who's opted for the most compromise - but, in general, it seems to be part of the human hard-wiring - a kind of savannah-atavism - that acknowledges and accepts that some people are more equal than others. it's hard, sometimes - especially when the patently inadequate (in brute savannah terms) come to muddy the gene pool by dint of post-savannah dirty tricks and technology - but true, notwithstanding, that that micro-current of inequity seems to be one of the forces necessary in order to drive the engine of social interaction. nor is it a bad thing, any more than uneven distribution of rainfall - or any other chance-determined global phenomenon - is a bad thing. it's just what happens. some people are less empowered by birth, that is by environmental or genetic happenstance, than others, and it is up to us to decide whether to exploit that, or not.

Capitalism has always opted for the former, of course. freemarket liberal capitalism has, to be fair, adopted a rather mawkish set of validations in order to justify a limited amount of exploitation in a more so-called enlightened global environment, but, frankly, no-one who hasn't got their mind on backwards - especially those outsourced Korean sweatshop child labourers stitching together £150 designer trainers for pennies - could possibly be convinced that this is any more 'right' than burning women for possessing knowledge of herbs and owning a black cat. it's a creaky old system, capitalism, and it badly needs replacing, but, seeing as we're stuck with it for a while longer yet, we're obliged to continue tinkering at the edges to moderate its worst excesses.

to deny another person equality of status and opportunity on the grounds of an accident of birth is (obviously, we now say, although we continue to do it all the time) plain wrong. the culture that bestows on me, who was born into a rich, powerful, white, Christian, American family, the axiomatic right to exploit the labour, and hence determine the choices available to someone less privileged, or simply from a less advantaged culture, is an anachronistic culture, doomed to disaster (it's already happening). such a culture must either learn to share its wealth - in every sense - or try to barricade itself - as is now happening - against an ultimately irresistible tide of - in every sense - assimilation.

in the meantime, whilst we wooly-minded liberals are obliged to maintain our vigilant opposition to the worst excesses of exploitation and discrimination, we're equally obliged to acknowledge that freedom of choice means just that - the freedom to choose ways of behaving that chime less than harmoniously with our liberal proclivities: the underdog, released, might well want to emulate the master (more likely than not, if you stop to think about it); the abused often becomes the abuser; and religious intolerance is part of the package. I vividly recall giving a smelly old beggar - "just got out of nick this morning, mate" - a quid on the Earls Court platform once, who then proceeded to involve me, his newfound best buddy, in a loud-growled and lurid fantasy about what he'd like to do to the Chelsea-pedigree blonde standing a couple of yards away (he had a hair-fetish - I'll say no more). that train took a long time to arrive.

you either believe in equality or you don't - or, in the case of the liberal capitalist, you believe in the eventual possibility of equality, all else being equal, given that a unilateral redistribution of wealth would require such a dramatic realignment of ... yada-yada-yada-yada ...

the original feminists and gay rights campaigners were courageous people whose cause was just and whose demonisation at the hands of the media was only to be expected from the mouthpieces of the establishment. their cause, however, was fundamentally inseparable from the larger political picture - their demands for equality could not, in all seriousness, be treated as a special case within the larger radical demands for equality between everyone, which was why the uneasy alliances of gays, feminists, blacks, and militant socialists were quickly formed and as quickly dissolved. in a rabidly unequal society, where the cynical manipulation of inequality is a primary political and economic tool, 'rights' were only ever going to be allocated to the lucky few who happened to be both photogenic and/or funny. your average black working-class single mother is still only going to get equal pay to the boy next to her at the supermarket checkout when hell freezes over; the radical second-generation feminist voice only has the barest chance of being heard if it issues from a comely face (Naomi Wolfe, Arundhati Roy); and the big issue has been reduced to ladette bickering over who can drink whom under the table. similarly, think of 'gay' and you think 'celebrity clown' (Graham Norton, Will and Grace) - the big issue there reduced to the anodyne security of music-hall camp (where, incidentally, it was already long established). we delude ourselves if we imagine any significant progress in terms of equality - sexual or otherwise - has been made in the last thirty years. and who needs reminding that the tory prime minister who led a government that set women's rights back to the days of the Suffragettes was - arguably - a woman?

I have, I confess, been hoist more often than I'd care to remember on the petard of my own virtuousness: I've made the classic liberal mistake of forgetting that there are two forms of bad behaviour - the longitudinal, running thoughout culture and history, manifest as an imposition of the will of the establishment minority on the disempowered majority; and the lateral, which cuts across all classes, predilections, and beliefs. it's perfectly possible to be a dyslexic and to be ignorant; it's perfectly possible to be gay and to be racist; it's perfectly possible to be a Christian and to be a paedophile; it's perfectly possible to be black and stupid. it's perfectly possible, indeed, to be all of these at once, and live in Llandrindod Wells. in each case, only the right-hand section of the equation is wrong, but to feel restrained from voicing condemnation because of what's on the left-hand side is just plain craven.

I'm less and less inclined to pussyfoot around these almost fetishised issues of propriety concerning tensions between ethnicity, gender, and/or religious belief, and personal freedom and social responsibility. they bespeak a form of political cowardice masquerading as concern. there are very important issues on the agenda here, yet I search in vain for evidence of debate. as I understand it, for instance, a significant percentage of the citizens of my country sincerely believes that stoning a woman to death for the crime of committing adultery would be a perfectly appropriate and acceptable punishment under Sharia law if it weren't actually against the local law. I personally find this mind-bogglingly abhorrent - a perfect example of that longitudinal bad behaviour thing. equally, I find it hard to shrug off the well-documented facts that the wealthy Saudi inhabitants of (and owners of most of) Knightsbridge keep slaves (surely they can afford a cheap Filippina like everyone else?), or that honour-killings of daughters who refuse to marry their family's choice have been not unknown to happen in Leicester, or that clitoridectomy-parties are still considered a sort of female Bar Mitzvah in certain parts of the Midlands. I mean, what is this? the Middle Ages? you have to blink hard to remind yourself that there was ever such a thing as an Enlightenment, a Fourth Estate, a Jonathan Swift, a Karl Marx, an Emily Pankhurst, or a dazzling set of lovely Charlie's Angels.

to withhold from condemnation of bad behaviour on the grounds that it might offend someone is so feeble it sucks willies. ALL RELIGIONS - let's hear y'all join in on the chorus of this one - SUCK! it doesn't matter which - you name it - they're all about the same thing: controlling people - keeping them in line. it's the one enduring, time-tested, rock-solid guaranteed way of ensuring that the guys at the top - the priests and the politicians and the Rotarians (who happen to be the same people in some societies) - stay on top - that they'll be safe, that their equally powerful friends will look after them, that they'll be able to tell the little people what to do, and that they'll be able to have all the sex they want (mostly with little boys, it would seem). fundamentally (le mot juste?) nothing changes, nor will it ever change, so long as the priests, the mullahs, the rabbis, the imams, whatever, stay in control. this is just so obvious. isn't it? or were things actually better in the Middle Ages? when everyone knew their place (especially the women). let's have a vote on it. should that be a secret ballot or a show of hands? maybe a referendum? perhaps we should wait and see which way the November election goes first?

erm

let us pray.

oh - I guess we forgot to mention...

"Guidelines published by a government panel earlier this week, calling for aggressive use of statin medications to lower cholesterol in people at high risk of heart attacks, failed to list panelists' links to pharmaceutical companies, many of which manufacture statin drugs.

Of the nine panelists, six had received grants or consulting or speakers' fees from companies that produce some of the most popular statin medications on the market."

(Newsday)

false signals




so I woke up to a feeling of imminent something - of being just on the edge of some kind of huge revelation, of just - almost understanding - of satori, perhaps.

turns out it was just the beginning of a migraine.

I've just remembered a couple of excruciatingly embarassing malapropisms committed as a callow youth that I still blush at remembering:

- called to discuss some writer or other in class (Baudelaire maybe) earnestly describing him as a frotteur (I meant flaneur)

and

- talking to the youth club leader's beautiful young wife (on whom I had a huge crush) about the forthcoming production of the play she was rehearsing, and wondering if there was going to be a perineum arch (I meant a proscenium arch)

*shudders in horror at the memory*

manger de la vache enrageé

oops - France in denial as BSE-infected beef entered food chain

Lost In Translation



*SPOILER ALERT* (skip this post unless you've seen the movie)

in venerable rhino tradition the buzz-movie of 2003 has finally been experienced at home on DVD. not much to add to the universal plaudits - all of which I'd endorse, of course - other than to wonder about part two (given that this must count as the most protracted foreplay movie in cinematic history).
clearly, the 'mystery' of that final inaudibly whispered sentence - a coup de theatre if ever there was one - is no mystery at all. there was a scripted sentence there, after all, which, although the director decided not to let it be heard, was nevertheless uttered, and its substance was transparently contained in those final parting looks between Bob and Charlotte - he walking happily backwards, she smiling through upwelling tears. and yet most critics seem to have decided that, whatever was whispered, that was the end of the affair - in the Brief Encounter-like interests of propriety, perhaps - that the relationship was contained in and defined by that hermetic cultural bubble in which it was formed, and that, beyond those confines, back in the 'real' world, both characters recognise that there is no possiblility of its continuing.
some critics even spoke of that final kiss as being 'platonic'.
as if.
which is, I think, a curiously Puritan misreading of those performances - and, as neither the fabulous Bill Murray (way to go, Bill - performance of a lifetime) nor the incredibly precocious Scarlett Johanssen put a foot wrong throughout the movie in defining, with the most extraordinary delicacy and honesty, the irresistible arc of mutual recognition developing between those two characters that the movie is all about, this is doing them a bit of an injustice, really. no, I reckon those critics have been just either too uncomfortable with their own reactions to the complicated implications of that secret resolution, or too neurotically burdened by their own prejudice as to be wilfully blind to it.
I must say, after watching the way Sofia Coppolla and Bill Murray are together in that rooftop interview in the DVD extras, I find myself wondering whether the whole production wasn't basically a fantastic pretext - a prolix seduction - of which the movie itself is part analogue part billet doux. it wouldn't be the first time in cinema history that an infatuated auteur has built a movie around the object of desire, just the first time for such an age and gender reversal: a fairly radical issue to have slipped in underneath the radar over there. nice one, Ms Coppolla.

are you listening?


so sad, the increasing incidence of US Americans - particularly young Americans - who are articulating a sense of embarassment at their president's (and by extension, shame at their country's) behaviour. any blog-hopping trip encounters a fresh batch of hand-wringing sighs of dismay and disbelief at the latest display of swaggering contempt for every culture that doesn't genuflect before the stars and stripes on the 4th of July.
it's always sad to discover that 'for country, right or wrong' is and always has been the mantra of the right, which consists - always - of people who, in lieu of understanding the difference (between right and wrong), substitute dogma. on the other hand, it's good to discover this sooner than later. it's practically an axiom of political science that the radical perplexities of youthful freedom will morph, in time, into the more fiscally restrained, less risk-loving (ie mortgage- and family-shackled) profile of the constituency of the right: all they have to do is wait, and that demographic shift will happen. meanwhile, it's actually in the interests of the right to keep the young so disillusioned and disgusted with politics as not to want to bother engaging with it at all - because, obviously, their votes would go against the establishment. so it's probably important to remind those hand-wringing sighers out there (you know who you are!) that they are the Americans that matter, that they, effectively, have the fate of the world in their hands (given that returning this man to office for another term would be like handing over the nuclear codes to Ozzy Osbourne for safekeeping), and that, globally, they have the urgent support of a vast network of furious, indignant people who are not anti-American, nor even necessarily anti-Republican (although it sticks in the craw to say it - but one has to admit that Republicans aren't de jure evil, just de facto wrong), but rabidly anti-everything Monkey Bush and his braying corporate handlers and toadying bible-bashing drones (and that - for shame - includes Poodle Blair) stand for.
at the root of all human conflict can be found a word with an -ism as a suffix: from fundamentalism to nationalism via chauvinism, evangelism, dogmatism .... et al - once you endorse a political - or ethical - position predicated on belief (and even rationalism can become a belief) you close the only door that really matters - the one that allows both parties in a conflict to actually hear what the other is saying. one -ist never really listens beyond the -ism tag of the other -ist: everything he or she supposedly hears is as if polarised by the opposing filters of belief. an argument between one -ist and another is always effectively just a performance to the attendant gallery of fellow -ists: see how deaf this fellow is to my patient demonstrations of how we are right and they are wrong.
but, somehow, this reduction of global politics to jaw-jutting bragging and contemptuous swaggering has to be stopped, and there's only one way - democratically - to do that.
I never thought I'd hear myself saying this, but
STOP MOANING, REGISTER, and VOTE, AMERICA!
(actually, on reflection, I'd choose Ozzy as keeper of the keys every time.)

GOP convention New York

for what do they really convene, the good and the great of the incumbent party of US family values and godliness?

why, for the sex, of course!

(and just what does GOP stand for, anyway?)

and, whilst we're on the subject (of sex and politics) check out this 'woman to woman' video (DSL/cable here or 56k here) - easily one of the scariest things I've ever seen.
(needs the disgusting real player)

heard the one about the monkey and the irish reporter?

"REPORTER: Mr. President, the world is a more dangerous place today. I don't know whether you can see --
BUSH: Why do you say that?
REPORTER: -- that or not. There are terrorist bombings every single day. It's now a daily event. It wasn't like that two years ago.
BUSH: What was it like September the eleventh, 2001? It was a, it was a relative calm.
REPORTER: But if your response to Iraq does --
BUSH: Let me finish, please. Please. You ask the questions, and I'll answer them, if you don't mind."

we know they can no longer do it where you come from, mr president, but asking questions is what reporters are supposed to do. they weren't even tough questions - if you thought ms coleman of RTE was 'disrespectful', you should meet messrs paxman ("The justification for our existence as journalists is that we are not afraid to say boo to these people.") or humphries of the BBC - now there's a wonderful thought.

(more at unknown news.)

and on and on and on and on.....

Northern Ireland
"By the age of 7, some youngsters are already becoming caught up in violence between the province's Protestant majority and Catholic minority"

duff


there's a beer commercial around at the moment - can't remember which (it must be one of those über-subtle sub-limbic crypto-hypnogogic delayed branding things that only the especially gifted can hope to understand ) - that opens with the kitsch idyll - helicopter shot over rolling ripe grain fields, fecund undulation of green - then closes on a breezy ear of barley, then moves indoors to the jolly flat-capped worker tipping a bucket of golden grain into the open trap at the top of a huge wooden vat, and so on, and finally ends with the money-shot - the spuming amber liquid itself - all to a hilarious voiceover droning on about 100% natural ingredients or something - the sort of thing that just grates on the edge of your consciousness like a mosquito's whine.
on the same night, the news footage of the current round of 'celebrations' attendant on a certain event in Portugal (god how I hate all this), and it suddenly strikes me, with the deadly and hopeless certainty of realising that, for many, the earth really is flat, and that the sun really does go round the earth, that 99% of those men who consider a good time to consist of getting totally bladdered during and after the match and then going and destroying as much as possible and giving anyone who gets in the way a thorough kicking will peer at those images in complete incomprehension. fields? wheat? beer? wuh? what's the connection?

a totally wasted day. it happens sometimes. actually, when I look back, I suppose I have to concede that the ratio of effort to result has always been horrendously high for me. I seem to have to laboriously pile up these mountains of material that behave like tottering towers of fine shifting sand in order to - suddenly, usually - discover what it was that I was looking for. but today was just an infuriating struggle, with no result at all.
but I can't help thinking of those poor bastards up the road at Pilton - no sooner have they started arriving and pitching camp (the music's just over the weekend, but lots of people stay a week or so) than the temperature plummets and the heavens open! so unfair. so Glastonbury. for some of those kids it's the highlight of the year - and round about now (midnight) they're shivering in their tents with no way of drying their sodden clothes wondering when the famous magic will kick in. Jane did a few shifts manning the emergency medical centre three years ago (the last time time it was a total mudbath) and found herself treating trench-foot for the first time in her career - en masse.

vroom


I've never taken a picture of a motor-bike before - no, really! not my thing at all. my favoured mode of transport is feet or Learjet. but I saw this one earlier today and I found myself doing what I've seen other people doing when they come across a Harley parked in the street, or something like this one below (ugly-looking duck - ati - he he) - I just stood there looking at it, quite entranced thinking, hmmm. I even found myself taking a picture of its bloody engine!
I'm sure it's just one of those passing things. I'll get over it. won't I?

children kidnapped and imprisoned by well-meaning heroes with full approval of a grateful nation released without explanation.

Madonna loses/Madonna wins - a tale of two headlines.

"Ramblers will be free to roam across 54 hectares of Madonna's £9 million ($A24 million) English country estate after the singer failed to establish that recreational walkers would violate her human rights.

While a public inquiry on Friday ruled that the public had no right of access to 15 out of 17 pockets of land on Madonna's Ashcombe estate in the west of England, two tracts declared "open country" amount to nearly half the area being disputed by the UK Countryside Agency and Madonna and husband Guy Ritchie."
(TheAge)

I've encountered few clearer demonstrations of the shameless political allegiances of the disgusting owned press than this - a relatively silly story about a couple of poor rich folk trying to use their hard-earned dosh to do what poor rich folk do - buy justice - specifically, to keep the nasty common folk off the empty tracts of land they own and do nothing with but want to keep empty. whether or not they won or lost depends on which paper you subscribe to. a quick glance at this google search reveals that the headline 'Madonna wins' beats 'Madonna loses' by a ratio of about 8:1. no prizes for guessing the reason for this curious bias.

Where to download music legally
(insound's particularly fine for free indie stuff)

sticklebrick festival

Lori Sean Berg and Shane Aspegren of Berg Sans Nipple

Jack and I went along on Saturday and had a rollicking old time.
More here.

what seems usually to happen to empires, in a nutshell, is that they overestimate their capacity to administer effectively right out to the edges and finally implode at the centre under the stress (cite: Roman, Spanish, French, Russian, British). the more successful (ie longer-lived) empires tend to have combined a rigidly inflexible, divinely authorised centre with only a moderately expansionist policy (cite: Egyptian, Chinese, Japanese).
it's difficult to guess which model the leader of the free world is working with, but, as a figurehead, the monkey's clearly modelling himself on Caligula rather than Hadrian - someone whom the contemporary international (and, incidentally, domestic) community learnt to treat with the utmost caution.
unfortunately for us, the current 'international community' is also controlled by a busload of paranoid twitchers whose morals make the average smack dealer smell sweeter than Mother Teresa.
I'm fairly sure that the vast majority of the citizens of China, Russia, France, Iran, Paraguay, Iceland, wherever, shares the same dream of co-operation and the fruitful exchange of ideas and experience that has driven the engines of international creativity in the arts and sciences for many many years. the number of Reykjavik townsfolk who are lusting to rape and pillage the townsfolk of Portland, Oregon, let's say (substitute any other two random towns on the planet), is really very small indeed. and yet our great leaders insist that this is not the case, and that, since certain evil foreign people are determined to try to kill them, personally, we - the people - are obliged to defend them from them.
either they're wrong or I'm wrong.
it might be me.
well - it might be.

street ethicette

I can feel another little moral crisis coming on.
I bumped into a friend - another photographer - who said she was glad she'd met me because she'd photographed me earlier in the street whilst I was photographing something else and I'd moved away too fast for her to ask if that was OK. after reading my incomprehension, she said she always approaches people she's photographed to ask if it's alright with them - whereupon I rapidly deflected her tacit "don't you do that?" into some joke about catching up with people on trains and buses and in crowds. but, really, if it's wrong to photograph people unawares and unconsenting, then the vast majority of documentary photographers and photojournalists couldn't do what they do.
I do half-remember reading an article somewhere not so long ago about a rather famous French photographer being sued for a huge amount of money by someone in one of his (rather famous) street photographs who was maintaining that she, as subject of the photograph, was entitled to a share of the money he'd made from it.
she had a point, I thought.
for sure, most people, in my experience, enjoy a photographer's attentions. but some don't (I don't, actually). oh, these endless moral mazes!

round robin

is there any less effective way of communicating with, or more effective way of alienating neglected friends than the fucking round robin? such a stupidly innocuous description - cheepy chirpy little fellow - of an utterly worthless form - first cousin once removed to spam itself.
the annual christmas letter was bad enough - that tragic listing of happy family triumphs ("and we finally succeeded in persuading malcolm's teachers to let him chew the legs off his desk whenever he started to feel a bit ADS") composed over god knows how many miserable weeks of trying to think of the positive - anything - the cat didn't shit on the landing in October - in order to convince everyone on the christmas card list that life is so much better on this side of the fence. straight in the bin, every time. but the e-mail variant is so much worse, because not only does it try speak to everyone - therefore no-one - about everything - therefore nothing - but it wants at the same time to impress the recipient with the size of the spammer's address book - look how many other people I'm sending this shit to - as if to say - look, these are all the wonderful people I should be writing to who I haven't because I couldn't be arsed, just the same as with you, so I hope you'll understand that it'd take so long to catch up with everyone and anyway it's the thought that counts, isn't it? well, no, actually - and no again. it's lazy, it's careless, it's boring, it's sad and it's very very annoying. if you want to talk to me, talk to me - to me, not number forty-seven in your address book. if you don't, don't. simple. delete.

awesome

we're all amateur astronomers at times like this, and, whereas this transit of Venus lacked the communal frisson of the total eclipse of 1999 that required that whole populations migrate to the optimal viewing sites (in our case the Cornish coast) for the sake of experiencing that three-minute event, it was worth digging out those old safe solar viewing filters and dragging the boys out into the garden before school.
what you can never be prepared for is the awe - the totally humbling sense of scale. we're so used to having such images mediated through a page or a screen that we forget just what's involved here. Venus is often the most spectacular 'star' in the sky, but to see it for what it really is - the next planet in towards the sun - as, by rare chance, it passes directly between us and the sun, is to catch an inkling of the truly inconceivable immensity of it all. Venus is the planet closest in size to the Earth, so that's how we'd look to an observer that far away - a dot the size of a 10-point full-stop against a 10p-sized Sun in a sky larger than the largest thing we've ever seen - an empty ocean, perhaps - in fact with no imaginable boundary at all. all our history, our lives, our preoccupations, all this - stuff - sailing through space.

in this morning's post

it may seem a tad ungracious - we do, after all, qualify, as local residents, for these discounted day tickets, which are just there for the asking - compared with all those thousands of poor souls who failed to get one after hours and hours (I think the record was fourteen hours solid) of trying to get through to that disastrous new phone and online booking system - but I'm actually looking forward more to a new indie festival called the sticklebrick festival that's happening in Bristol this weekend - I mean, just look at this lineup! I couldn't believe my eyes when I found out about it (purely by accident). if you happen to be Bristol-based and are dithering - GO! (I've a relevant review up here if that helps.)

one down...

(click on image for bio of ronnie)

because people are nice

along with ten thousand or so other blogger users, I was offered a gmail account a few weeks ago. I didn't think much about it, except that to have a free web-based e-mail account with a 1Gb capacity instead of the measly Hotmail 3 Mb limit sounded like a good idea. but I decided to go for it anyway, even though I can only use it on the pc, as it doesn't work on macs running pre-OSX. then, a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that for every one of us who now has a gmail account there are many more who desperately want one, for various reasons, and that there's a website been set up where people are posting what they'll trade for an invite (each one of us was given the chance to invite two others to apply for an account). it seemed utterly absurd to me that some people should be prepared to pay up to £50 for an invite - I find that vaguely obscene - but some of the offers of trade were quite fun - in the typically american high school sense - like a personalised mix-cd, or a guided tour of downtown Seattle or whatever. having skimmed through a couple of dozen, my eye settled on two in particular: firstly, a young pastor working with disadvantaged kids in new york, and secondly, a young geek from Louisiana with lots of space on his server: the former wasn't offering anything in exchange, but sounded deserving, the latter was offering virtually unlimited storage and bandwidth. I contacted both, and we struck the deals, and the invitations were sent. that was ten days ago. the pastor hasn't been in touch since, so I don't even know if the invitation got to him. the geek has stopped replying to my e-mails saying I hadn't a clue what he was talking about (lots of unintelligible acronyms - OC3, ATM, SSH) and why can't I just ftp to his server like I do to the others I use using such a username with such a password without getting error messages all the time. I still (honestly - I know I'm naive but I did check them both out - the pastor's current e-mail address is with a theological college and the geek's is on his website - which shows him to be a geek but an honest enough geek) don't believe either of them intended to cheat me, but I just don't understand why they're both being so damn rude. plus I was looking forward to putting much more music on the site - which otherwise requires my purchasing much more webspace. POOH! I say and POOH! again.

so I missed my Flash course because of The Bug - so?
so I missed my Flash course. there'll be others. I was looking forward, but hey.
and maybe the Rhino's better for being unFlashed - personally I find so many of those slick photographers sites far more interesting for the design than for the photographs, and that cain't be right, now, cain't it.
besides, I've been starting lately to feel just slightly guilty at how 56k-ist I've become since acquiring Broadband; I've quite forgotten that infuriating frustration at these image-rich sites (like this one) that take absolutely no account whatsoever of slower connections - that demand minutes-long downloading of image-heavy pages that, at the end of it all, really aren't worth the wait. since most of the Rhino was constructed before we got Broad, I was sort of allowing for that, so I think it's just about OK still. if I were making it now, I'd make most of the images link to a higher-res version - some of them just look so awful to me now - but I really can't be bothered going back through them all: I'd end up wanting to change everything, which I probably will, one day, but not yet - nondum.

one of the good things about being ill is it thoroughly defocusses the mind. when you have a hacking cough, your nose is streaming, a sore throat, a headache, and barely have the energy to drag yourself from recumbent to vertical then back to recumbent after hopefully having aimed the stream accurately, the little things that tend to preoccupy you in 'health' such as wondering whether world peace is achievable, whether you'll ever work again, or where you left that really nice 2B pencil get shunted off into some misty siding of the mind where they just have to bloody well wait until this clanky old slow train of hacking and head-clutching and dreaming - oh the dreams! - finally trails itself out into the shimmery evaporations of recovery.

so charles has lost part of his art collection.
boo-hoo.
lest we forget - charles and brother maurice, as partners in the saatchi & saatchi advertising agency were, throughout the dreadful eighties, enthusiastic supporters of margaret (she whose name must only be spoken whilst hawking loudly and spitting thrice onto her as-yet-unoccupied but slowly and relentlessly yawning grave) thatcher and major donors to the conservative party - a group of barely human beings whose inability to distinguish art from shit is as much a precondition of membership as their inability to say sorry - for a catalogue of crimes as long as history itself.
margaret (*spit*) thatcher's only contribution to history was to cut free classroom milk to schoolkids, shamelessly suck american dick (a lesson tony blair learnt at her feet), declare war on Argentina and the coal miners, and shit the $ onto everything she could think of that threatened her uptight control-freak image of the universe : $hit $chools, $hit $ocial $ervices, $hit NH$, and $hit Art$. people like charles saatchi were her fawning sycophants, burrowing their noses deep into her übertight arse in return for some pathetic favour or other.
charles is a totally dysfunctional human being whose taste in art is transparently valueless: how can an advertising executive know anything about art?
it's very simple: art is about truth - advertising is about lies.
just because he happens to be as rich as croesus, the fine art world - naturally - has capitulated to his every pathetic whim, so that whomsoever he has chosen to bless with his approval has suddenly become the greatest modern artist in the world, ever, and their art has been sold for lots and lots and lots of money.
so now there's been a fire in his warehouse, and it's all gone.
(note - no-one could actually see this art - it was stashed in a warehouse - a very big safe - it's purpose was to sit there and accrue value.)
and now it's all gone.
and, because the art world has become as completely alienated from the real world as dubya and tony, no-one gives a monkeys.
apart from the insurers, who are going to have to find a ripe £50m - which is all it's ever been about, anyway - and the odd critic whose career depends on his continuing to insist that the nude emperor's clothes are just simply - why won't you common people see? - ravishing.

European Elections


'Daggy.'
So much more colourful than the equivalent English 'tacky' or American 'flakey'. It's Australian, of course, and refers to those clusters of shit-balls (known as 'dags' or, even better, 'dingleberries') that hang off the backsides of unshorn sheep: such an animal is referred to as being 'daggy'.
Of all the art forms, the local electioneering pamphlet has to be the daggiest - aspiring to the PR gloss of the better-funded central office prototypes, but with all the undigested crap of failed comprehension of the actual nature of the beast hanging out for all to see.
You can practically hear the thinking, can't you? 'We want a nice, average family - reach out to the Common Man - Labour cares for the future generation - all smiles - a snapshot - something for the family album....' ya-da-ya-da-ya-da .....
Hey guys, gather round.
Tip #1: Wait for a sunny day. A warm sunny day. The Happy Family myth requires all the help it can get, and the grey light of a cold, drizzly Sunday morning can only serve to expose the fraud.
Tip #2: Fake the family. Real families simply can't do 'happy' nearly as well as models. Self-conscious fixed smiles just say "Can we make this the last one? I'm frozen and I think I left the gas on." What we want is fantasy, not a reflection of the reality of how awful Sunday mornings can really be.
Tip #3: Ditch the purple. Purple is a bad colour. No-one - no-one - is going to vote for a man who wears a purple shirt - especially if the freshly-unwrapped crease is evident on the shoulder, and especially if the wife is wearing - omygod - mauve!
Of course, there are constituencies which might respond positively to this image, people who might regard it as an aspirational model. Romanians, possibly. Czechs or Poles, maybe, circa 1980. Certainly, it's an image from another time - another culture, even. See, comrades, if you toil diligently and fulfill your three-year quota, our glorious ten-year plan will eventually unfold, like a healthy cabbage, and you, too, will have a shared apartment and perhaps even a television receiver.
I mean - could you get it wronger if you tried?
Look - it's a dreary playground at the edge of a dreary housing estate somewhere in Nowhere. It's winter (bleak, bare-branched willows - which would be weeping if only they could) - it's a Sunday morning - there's no-one else around. It's drizzling. It's cold. Plucked from their warm beds, this hapless family has been dragged out into the park with barely time to get dressed and brush their hair (Mum washed hers, but wasn't given time to dry it), where someone plonked the eldest two into a tyre-swing and said "Smile please."
And that's it.
Caption: 'Labour - working hard for Britain.'
What the ... ?
Do they want to drive everyone into the arms of - well, anyone else's arms, really - anyone who'll offer an alternative to this vision of hell? They might as well have put a thought-bubble above hubby's head saying "for godsake won't someone please rescue me from all this?" and above wifey's saying "I'll give it one more year, then I'll kill him."
There's one scrap of cynical pleasure: I'd like to think that the brain-deads who constructed this image sub-consciously chose to place those two kids in a tyre-swing as an ironic reference to the Labour Party as the evil Lords of Spin. But somehow I doubt it.
It's just daggy.
I'll be voting Green, by the way.

"Where once photographing war was the province of photojournalists, now the soldiers themselves are all photographers - recording their war, their fun, their observations of what they find picturesque, their atrocities - and swapping images among themselves, and emailing them around the globe. "

Guardian Unlimited - What have we done? Susan Sontag on the Abu Ghraib images

"The demolition of houses in Rafah must stop. It is not humane, not Jewish and causes us grave damage in the world," Justice Minister Yosef Lapid told the cabinet yesterday.
Lapid added that he had seen a picture of an elderly Palestinian woman searching in the debris

for her medication, and had been reminded of his grandmother [who perished in the Holocaust].
His remarks sparked an uproar in the cabinet since Lapid is a Holocaust survivor and his words were interpreted as a comparison between the IDF and the Nazis.

(today's Ha'aretz - I can't believe I'm the only one with a sense of deja-vu over this)

take it wherever you can get it, kid

here in England, of course, we don't find this sort of thing at all amusing - not at all.

max richter - the blue notebooks



Most music seems to affect us via one of two gates: in chakra terms, that's either the muladhara, or root chakra, located between the anus and the genitals (that would be rock 'n' roll and PJ Harvey, then), or the manipura chakra, the solar plexus chakra, the realm associated with emotions and gut feelings (need I say? The Reykjavik Connection?). It happens, though, from time to time, that you find yourself listening to something that has totally galvanised you - but neither in the goolies, nor in the gut - and you find yourself stroking your chin and thinking, 'Hmm, if my memory (of the Seven Primary Chakras) serves me right, this seems to be tickling my sixth, or ajna chakra .' Then, 'My God!' (appropriately enough) 'So I do still have a soul!'

(read the full review here)

"Shame" - Matt Sesow (11" x 14" oil on stretched canvas)
(click on image to enlarge)

this is the first artwork I've come across that refers to that iconic image - the first of many, I've no doubt.
(more of Matt Sesow's work here)

the gray zone
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH

How a secret Pentagon program came to Abu Ghraib.

“We’re giving the world a ready-made excuse to ignore the Geneva Conventions. Rumsfeld has lowered the bar.”

another one of those days

with the polls looking like this, world oil prices at an all-time high, and that irritating oik from flint about to blow the gaffe on daddy's connections with the world's major oil supplier, you begin to wonder - is it really worth it?

god bless you, mr vonnegut

photo: Jill Krementz

'Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial, about to face cold turkey.
And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.'

(from In These Times)

three crown prince and princesses

'happiness is....' (contd)

actually, now I see it down there, I have absolutely no idea what it means. I mean, I just felt like putting up something beautiful, for a change, and I end up with a drivelling piece of inexcusably platitudinous bilge - even calligraphy can be bilge - one of those instances of its being preferable not to know what it means...
or maybe it doesn't translate well from the Japanese...
hmmm.
I might, one day, begin to address my swirling suspicions that 'happiness' is something that's only available to the child or the child-like - which is why the infantilising effects of alcohol, drugs, being 'in love', and day-time soaps are so appealing, since one molecule of 'thought' or 'reality' dropped into the warm pink ocean of 'happy' turns it instantly a chill blue. one day - not today. today I'll stay with 'happy'.

'happiness is a state of mind'

(calligraphic artist: Yuan Lee)

Beyond science?

Effects of remote, retroactive intercessory prayer on outcomes in patients with bloodstream infection: randomised controlled trial

Leonard Leibovici, professor. 

Department of Medicine, Beilinson Campus, Rabin Medical Center, Petah-Tiqva 49100, Israel

Objective: To determine whether remote, retroactive intercessory prayer, said for a group of patients with a bloodstream infection, has an effect on outcomes.

Design: Double blind, parallel group, randomised controlled trial of a retroactive intervention.
Setting: University hospital.

Subjects: All 3393 adult patients whose bloodstream infection was detected at the hospital in 1990-6.

Intervention: In July 2000 patients were randomised to a control group and an intervention group. A remote, retroactive intercessory prayer was said for the well being and full recovery of the intervention group.

Main outcome measures: Mortality in hospital, length of stay in hospital, and duration of fever.

Results: Mortality was 28.1% (475/1691) in the intervention group and 30.2% (514/1702) in the control group (P for difference=0.4). Length of stay in hospital and duration of fever were significantly shorter in the intervention group than in the control group (P=0.01 and P=0.04, respectively).

Conclusions: Remote, retroactive intercessory prayer said for a group is associated with a shorter stay in hospital and shorter duration of fever in patients with a bloodstream infection and should be considered for use in clinical practice.

British Medical Journal: Abstracts

(all emphases mine)

god is great

I'm deeply sceptical about the so-called power of photographs to affect public opinion: I think it's sketchy-verging-on-simplistic (not to say not a little condescending) to imagine that the person who bothers to vote is going to have his or her opinion about an important issue like foreign policy be swayed by a photograph. certainly, some photographs have been adopted as iconic in precisely that sense: the Saigon police chief's summary execution of a prisoner; the naked little girl fleeing, screaming, from her napalmed village - powerful examples of a powerful force, but not one, I think, that 'changed public opinion' about the Vietnam war. what did that was the demoralising statistics about GI losses during and after the Tet offensive, the exponentially increasing military costs, and, as the months became years, the increasing impossibility of being able to continue to hide that single, extraordinary, shaming fact - the evident inability of the greatest military force in history to seek out and destroy a proportionately tiny, but desperately committed guerilla army.

terrible atrocities were committed by the Americans in Vietnam, too, of course. there are photographs. there is film. there is shame.

and now - another iconic image.








with relentless, breathtaking speed, America has assumed from Great Britain the mantle of being the most feared and loathed nation on the planet. in the historic past, enemy-nations were those which threatened one's sovereignty - either literally, in the sense that their economic and territorial expansion was perceived as impinging on one's own, or figuratively, in the sense that their political alignments were threatening one's economic interests. they had names. Germany. Japan. Korea. Vietnam.

now, under an illegally-adopted president, a morally bankrupt, ideologically monolithic administration is rampaging freely, like a wounded fighting dog, desperately trying to discover the name of the enemy that wounded it, in order to expose and eradicate it. and, in the absence of a name, it has called this nation upon which it has declared war - 'Terror'.

of course, there is no Terror, no single source. if there were, it could no more be uprooted than Evil, its familiar twin. both are fictions - defining factors in the processes of manipulation and control that maintain an obedient, placid, uncomplainingly consuming McDisney World. Terror is the secular arm of the fundamentalist Christian's Evil, the relationship between the two being much the same as the relationship between Sinn Fein and the IRA and the Catholics, the Orangemen and the Provos and the Protestants, or Herri Batasuna and ETA. in truth, Americans have more to fear from their own people than they do from any foreign nation. this being the most enduring of the narratives of nationalism, however, Christians have never seen anything wrong in fighting Evil with its own weapons, however double-edged they might turn out to be - there has never been an institution more terrifying than the Inquisition - and there was never any question that those weapons might be blunted by the furious metal of Reason.

it seemed, for one brief moment in history, that the veneer of civilisation was beginning to spread and coalesce, and that a set of accommodations was being painstakingly engineered that would address the murderous lunacies inherent in all fundamentalist religious positions - the insane inflexibilities of the god-inspired everywhere. it seemed that their (the god-obsessed) superstitious ravings were at last going to be relegated to the curio-pile of history - that decisions affecting your and my life in the new twenty-first century were no longer going to be subject to the specious interpretations of tenth-century documents by psychotic old men, but to the reasonable debate between equals in a democracy. but the god-men have won, it would seem. and they want to settle it, once and for all.

allah akhbar means "god is great." so does "hallelujah." so "whose god is the greatest?" has become the only rallying-cry. the only political rhetoric being employed on Capitol Hill is the same as that in the Shi'ite mosques - that of the Crusades.

I have seen it plausibly, if extremely argued that the neo-cons seriously want to decide it once and for all in the Middle East. just nuke the bastards and take over. problems with oil supply? solved. it's a terrifying, certifiably insane thought, but they are terrifying, arguably insane people - and like the Nazis, who went to great pains to ensure that everything they did in pursuit of the Final Solution was done within the letter of the law, their insane ideology has been legitimised by a corrupt legislature, so, whatever crimes they commit, they are pre-absolved by the secular authority, just as the suicide bombers by the religious.

which makes me wonder about these photographs.

clearly, horrifying as they are, they represent only a fraction of what's been going on. the massacres at Falluja - now these photographs - could they really be deliberate provocations, deliberate attempts to stir the still-patient arab world into the final suicidal confrontation to end all suicidal confrontations? either this is the most stupid army in the world, barely under the control of the most stupid set of people ever to take office, or they know exactly what they're doing. for the time being, I prefer to invoke Occam's Razor and believe, reluctantly, that the former is the case. the latter is unthinkable.

ashes

arriving on top of the Tor with my favourite dog (actually Jane's - I was doggy-sitting her whilst she did a day-trip to London to try on wedding dresses at Harvey Nich's), we discovered several little piles of freshly-tipped ashes, beginning to disperse in the south-westerly wind that hardly ever dies fully away up there. after having a cursory sniff, she immediately adopted one of those fetching generic poses - "Mourning Becomes Arrow" - and I dutifully recorded the solemn moment. but it set me to thinking - yes, indeed, where better to be finally dispersed? (note to self, sons, and/or surviving descendants, though - the word is scatter, ok? not just dump!)

the wonderful Mr Michael Eavis - farmer, Glastonbury Festival organiser, artist (in that order)

               (photo: Paul Roylance)

A 70ft high tower celebrating the global struggle for social and economic justice is to be built at the entrance to a union-run section of this year's Glastonbury Festival.
Work got underway at the weekend on the giant steel structure, which has been designed by festival organiser Michael Eavis and Cornwall-based artists Graham Jobbins and Kurt Jackson.
"I came up with the idea of having 12 large figures cut out of steel plate revolving on a big cylinder pulling a rope which should indicate the need for all people around the world to work and pull together," said Mr Eavis.

aquí en los campos verdes del somerset venceremos esas vacas del capitalista!

(today in the central somerset gazette)

I never intended that the rhinoblog be any kind of journal - I'm far too much of a hoarder of my treasured privacy to allow anyone within a mile of the inner sanctum - and anyway, although I admit I do, myself, enjoy dipping occasionally into the daily trivia of some regular bloggers lives, I can't help wondering at both our motives - theirs and mine - in colluding in such an act of public intimacy.
rather, the rhinoblog was conceived as an extension of the melancholy rhino itself - originally a kind of magical mystery tour kind of a photogallery thingy, which acquired a few additional pages of opinion and comment, and just sort of grewed - into the curiously hybrid kind of creature it now is - a fair - if forever incomplete - reflection of its author's characteristically unfocussed concerns - sometimes domestic, sometimes cultural, sometimes political, sometimes just plain whimsical. a kind of scrapbook, I suppose. yet another pathetic attempt to carve a smidgeon of meaning out of that buzzing chaos of contingency out there (and, incidentally, in here - *points to his head* - not to mention here - *taps his chest*).
so hello, gentle reader, whoever you might be - and welcome. I see, in the last couple of hours, that you've come from Buenos Aires, Portsmouth and Sheffield (just down the road in global terms), Ono in Spain (never heard of that before), Kyoto, Cairo, Seoul, and Katowice in Poland, as well as from several places in the united states.
very strange. very strange indeed.
it's pouring with rain outside, so the blood-red lunar eclipse we were promised for tonight goes unremarked unless by those airline passengers who still, like me, look out of aeroplane windows in a state of consummate awe.

vote-rigging us-style (contd)

it gets worse:

" In the last presidential election, approximately 1 million black and other minorities voted, and their ballots were thrown away. And they will be tossed again in November 2004, efficiently, by computer--because HAVA and other bogus reform measures, stressing reform through complex computerization, do not address, and in fact worsen, the racial bias of the uncounted vote.
One million votes will disappear in a puff of very black smoke."

(The Nation article here)

the urosevich brothers

rob and todd - not the sweet cartoon sons of dear old neddley-darn-diddley, but the sinister (and all-too-real) dudes who have been chosen to help rig the us presidential elections this coming november.

(update - except in California)

A Citizen's Income

is an unconditional, nonwithdrawable income payable to each individual as a right of citizenship.
A Citizen's Income scheme (sometimes called Basic Income or Universal Benefit) is intended to overcome the failings of the present welfare state. It would be simple in application, increase economic efficiency, help prevent poverty and unite our society.

at the moment the UK Green Party is the only political party with the sense to recognise that this very simple idea - first proposed by Thomas Paine - could solve an awful lot of social problems at one stroke; maybe it's an idea whose time has still to come, but, for want of any better...

War Photographer

In his darkroom he is finally alone
with spools of suffering set out in ordered rows.
The only light is red and softly glows,
as though this were a church and he
a priest preparing to intone a Mass.
Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh. All flesh is grass.

He has a job to do. Solutions slop in trays
beneath his hands which did not tremble then
though seem to now. Rural England. Home again
to ordinary pain which simple weather can dispel,
to fields which don't explode beneath the feet
of running children in a nightmare heat.

Something is happening. A stranger's features
faintly start to twist before his eyes
a half-formed ghost. He remembers the cries
of this man's wife, how he sought approval
without words to do what someone must
and how blood stained into foreign dust.

A hundred agonies in black-and-white
from which his editor will pick out five or six
for Sunday's supplement. The reader's eyeballs prick
with tears between the bath and pre-lunch beers.
From the aeroplane he stares impassively at where
he earns his living and they do not care.

Carol Ann Duffy

(thanks to james at consumptive)

work

REUTERS/Punit Paranjpe

this image happens to have come from near a village called Dahanu, 120 km north-east of Bombay, but it's worth reminding ourselves from time to time, that, for by far the majority of the people on this planet, this is what 'work' means.

firsts and lasts




parenting is full of firsts - gurgle, smile, tooth, word, step - each noted with as much pride as if it were genuinely a first. which, in a sense, a child's first always is, essentially irreducible to any of that crass exegesis based on infant development or instinct or learning behavioural theory: all these can do is describe the field in which these things are supposed to or appear to happen - the best we as parents can do is to ensure that that field is cleared of hot and sharp objects - the happeningness of them is always, uniquely, the individual child's individual, unique experience - a miracle, each and every time.
parenting is also full of lasts, although these tend to go unremarked, left behind in the turbulent wash of the diurnal: last nappy-change, last broken night, last visit from the tooth fairy, last time you gave them a piggy-back - a long list of milestones passed, most with relief, some with a wry backward glance over the shoulder.
the boys (twins, of course) announced, a week or two back, that they'd decided - "don't take this the wrong way, dad" - that this should be the last story. I should explain - our bedtime ritual has been the same for a very long time - it used to be bath - teeth - pyjamas - milk - story - goodnight hug 'n' kiss; the bath went years ago, but a ritual nod at self-cleansing still remains, as does the tooth-brushing, the milk, and - amazingly - the story - a fifteen-minute or so reading from a book of their choice. or did - until last night.
I have finished reading the last bedtime story to my boys. I feel utterly bereft.
I know - I'm a damn lucky bunny - how many can say they their kids still wanted a bedtime story at the age of twelve? but I have enjoyed it soooooooo much! I kind of imagined it going on forever. ok guys, put that girl down, story-time. but that's really it - something begun some eleven years ago with Two Heads and Peep-Bo! ends, here, with The Last of the Sky Pirates - Book V of The Edge Chronicles‚ (we've read the other four, of course) by Paul Stewart and Chris Riddell. having encountered, en route, so many treasures: from Roald Dahl to Philip Pullman, via Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings (my readings of Dobby and Gollum were legendary - Stephen Fry? pshaw!) in their entirety. true, latterly, I've been reading whilst they, too have been reading - either an X-Men comic or the latest Lemony Snicket: I was getting a little pissed with that until I realised that a) they were, in fact, perfectly capable of taking in both at the same time (I tested them) and b) the cultural continuity of my voice was the important thing, not the story per se - Jack, in particular, has always insisted that that sound of my reading voice has been an essential part of his always being able to go to sleep so easily.
in fact, they said this (last story, this one, dad) six months ago, and bottled out after a couple of nights: maybe just one more. but somehow I don't think that's going to happen again.

The Law of Comorientes


my dear father, 88, now so frail he can barely shuffle from room to room, half-blind, parkinson-palsied, pregnant with the inoperable time-bomb of an abdominal aortic aneurysm, yet still capable of remembering the most astonishingly obscure details from his long-since-retired professional specialism in probate law.
apparently, there is a near-obsolete law that applies only in the case of the simultaneous decease of husband and wife (in a fatal crash, for example), when their individual wills have been made on the presumption that one would survive the other - called the Law of Comorientes, it says that the order of decease is presumed by age, and that proper execution of the estate should be made on that assumption.
somehow, I doubt that any of those sharp lawyer-lurkers out there skimming for silly fees on the back of a default document pretending to be a Last Will and Testament has even the remotest idea that such a law ever even existed.

President George W Bush

different easters


Participants carry a portable phallic shrine during the Kanamara Festival at Wakamiya Hachimangu Shrine in Kawasaki, south of Tokyo April 4, 2004.

Reuters Pictures/Issei Kato








A group of Franciscan monks process through the streets of Jerusalem on Good Friday (right) to observe the Passion of Christ.

(photographer unknown)




well - I've decided which one I'm signing up for next year. it was a tough call, but I've gone for the one that offers air miles.

chernobyl biker chick is back (at least until her bandwidth limit gets exceeded again)

this is the photojournal of a girl on a motorbike who likes to take day-trips to the hottest place in the ukraine with a dosimeter.