A Mountain Out of a Molehill Over Danish Cartoons

"The fracas over the cartoons is a sad testament to the impotence of the Muslim world. That clerics and leaders of Muslim countries gain any sense of power over this issue is a reminder of how powerless they really are and also a reminder, as if we needed one, of the moral bankruptcy of our self-appointed moral guides. It is no wonder that these same moral guides have gone on a power trip over cartoons – after all, clerics in Egypt have been arguing over whether married couples can be naked during sex."

(more)

with a little help ...

I try, these days, to minimise the amount of work my liver has to do to separate the toxins from the good stuff, but I'm not evangelical about it - as far as I'm concerned, what you do with your own sacred temple's your own affair. what I do find interesting, though, is the imposition of value judgements onto the users of different categories of toxins according to the arbitrary rules of the day. obviously, the market for cocaine caters to a better class of person than that for skunk and crystal, and this is reflected in the price differential. but this price - inflated by the considerable retail markups that reflect its trading risks on the black market - is obviously worth paying to those who can afford it. people don't ingest these toxins because they're bad people, but because they're a nice way of getting high so long as you can afford it. it's actually no worse or better than any other brain-blasting activity based on freedom of choice, except that it's usually illegal. coke, especially, seems to be a most attractive toxin, providing an exquisite high with few side-effects. only the most delusional devotees of hypocrisy as an exercise in spiritual transcendence would argue that a cocaine habit is 'worse' than any other.

the only reason that we don't have to get our alcohol, nicotine, or caffeine fixes on prescription is that these three particular addictive toxins were adopted, some time ago, as the officially sanctioned reality-bending chemicals of choice, and became instrumental in establishing an excise franchise of such magnitude that government became, essentially, dependent on it. still is. the annual tax revenue from the legitimate sales of tea, coffee, tobacco and booze is staggering. without it, clearly, western democracy would sink without trace. bring it on, I say.

the tacky tabloid shock-horror response to the discovery that x or y - film star, rock musician, or model - has developed a drug-dependency problem has become such a paltry cliché that it's all but lost its value. very, very few people seem to manage to get through life without a little help from our pharmaceutical friends, be that in respect to pain-relief, depression-relief, or limp-dick relief, and far more people than are prepared to admit to it have a dependency problem with same pharmaceuticals. that the vast majority of crimes of violence are alcohol-related, or that a huge portion of the NHS budget is devoted to the relief of pulmonary, bronchial, and cardio-vascular problems directly attributable to smoking is far less sexy news than the fact that x or y have, thanks to their vastly inflated earnings and concomitant VIP admission to the sucker-bait market of unlicensed pharm retailers, developed a dependency on coke or angel dust or whatever. I mean, who cares? who - really - cares?

context is all. the supposedly pharm-free are all in possession - albeit mostly unwitting - of one of the most potent in-house drug-manufacturing facilities imaginable: if you want to point the finger point it no further than at your own neck, since that pesky thyroid gland is responsible, over the course of a lifetime, for regulating the injection into your bloodstream of enough home-made psychotropic substances to kill a prize ox. and, without ingesting a thing, there's not a man jack of us who's immune from the dependencies they promote: from the seratonin highs of falling in love to the adrenaline-rush of facing physical jeopardy, our hormones are the mood-altering tails that wag the dependent dog, and there's not a thing we can do about it.

number please




on a whim, I signed up to the SETI@home project the other day, so our downstairs computer (the boys computer, actually, but they say they don't mind) is now one of half a million or so which is lending its spare processing capacity to help crunch the numbers collected in Puerto Rico at the Arecibo telescope and analysed in Berkeley at the University of California.

SETI has been actively listening for twenty years or so, on and off, and there's still no peep from the deepest darkest reaches of outer space, but you never know - one day that computer downstairs might be the one to flag a spike in the 1.5 gigaherz band that signals the start of a download that ends with, erm, Jodie Foster dropping into a wormhole and meeting an alien in the form of her dead dad ... or something ...

there seem to be only two ET stereotypes: the aggressive invader and the hands-off benign super-intelligence. the one comes with a black exoskeletal carapace and/or big slanty eyes in a noseless ovoid head and abducts us in our sleep to conduct excruciatingly invasive experiments on us up there in orbit on the mothership before wiping our memories somewhat inefficiently and returning us to wander around naked in West Hartlepool or Paris Texas at three o'clock in the morning, and the other wafts around humming in a vaguely melodic language comprehensible only to maths nerds and deaf French movie directors and wearing shimmering things in Steiner colours whilst androgynously assisting us with our homework, helping us get over the deaths of our pets and/or parents, and reconciling warring nations. both are transparent mutations of the figments of the same mindset that saw incubi and succubi and angels around every sexually repressed corner in the Middle Ages and fairies and hobgoblins more recently, so I'll have no truck with either of them. and, to be perfectly frank, although I think that a universe as big as this one we find ourselves in is quite likely to have spawned a few more examples of intelligence other than our own (there has to be something more intelligent than this, please god, there just has to be) I skirt just this side of deep scepticism about the likelihood of our ever encountering it.

the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence proceeds in the shadow of two predominant theories, the one as optimistic (about there being something Out There) as the other is pessimistic:

the Drake Equation sets out the industry-standard variables for calculating just how many intelligent civilisations are likely to populate our galaxy (the consensus is about fifty).

the Fermi Paradox, however, can be summarised as follows: the belief that the universe contains many technologically advanced civilizations, combined with our lack of observational evidence to support that view, is inconsistent. either this assumption is incorrect (and technologically advanced intelligent life is much rarer than we believe), our current observations are incomplete (and we simply have not detected them yet), or our search methodologies are flawed (we are not searching for the correct indicators). in other words, if they were really out there, the skies should be teaming with the buggers, so where da fuck am they?

in order to register the existence of an extra-terrestrial intelligence, we have to aim our Arecibos at a likely wedge of the cosmos and then sift through a wide spectrum of EM signals, analysing these for anomalies - spikes which might originate in a source other than a known astrophysical phenomenon or the doppler-shifted red noise of background radiation. we can 'listen' in this way to the limits of our telescope's range - almost as far back as the big bang. obviously, however, (unless we suppose the physically impossible - that there was intelligent life around before the big bang) there is actually no point in 'listening' this far: our chances of discovering an intelligent source signal are much better if we concentrate on much closer distances - in astronomical terms - distances more congruent both with the time-period involved in the development of our own form of intelligence, and more amenable to the eventual possibility of physical contact.

the closest possibilities - in astronomical terms - namely, the theoretical planetary orbits of Alpha Centauri and Barnard's Star - 'only' five light years distant - have already been examined and found to be unintelligent. if intelligence is to be discovered, it will not be found any closer than ten light years or more distant - and most probably much, much more. our galaxy alone is ninety thousand light years across and three thousand light years thick. if, then, a signal were to be received from somewhere in our own galaxy, the possibilities of subsequent communication between us make terrestrial snail-mail seem like high-speed broadband: at best, a twenty-year wait between our reply and 'their' next packet, then another twenty-year wait for the next reply to our reply, and so on. then, assuming that this went well for a few transactions, someone would have to decide whether or not to send out an exploratory team, and this is where it all begins to get a bit sci-fi.

the actual sci-fi solution is perennially the same - the hyperdrive (allowing faster-than-light speeds) and the wormhole gate (allowing instant transmission from one part of the universe to another). neither is available yet, nor even remotely possible (the one disregards one of the fundamental laws of physics, the other is still theoretically possible, but requires a power source akin to the energy released by the fission processes at the heart of a star to achieve). so crawling across inter-stellar space at a best possible speed of a tenth the speed of light is the only realistic option. therefore, the most optimistic estimate of the journey time (one way) for this first contact exploratory team is a hundred years - probably much more. given that this isn't going to happen - even if a first signal were to be received tomorrow - for at least a hundred years, that gives us plenty of time to consider the logistics - not to mention the economics - of such a mission. however, given that the universal lack of government interest in things cosmological is reflected in the ever-decreasing funding of astronomy - NASA is somehow hanging on in there by the skin of its teeth, but SETI is exclusively financed by private donations - it's overwhelmingly likely that the only possible source of funding for such a project would be a consortium of the kind of billionaires who, traditionally, have spent their billions on developing cutting-edge technology in order to develop their personal power base and win prestigious international acclaim by winning prizes for racing around the world in one way or another - people like Howard Hughes, Rupert Murdoch, or our own Richard Branson - a consortium, in other words, of unscrupulous assholes whose company any sensible person would travel far indeed to avoid, and whose claim to being representative of the human race verges on the tenuous, if not wildly presumptuous, if not hysterically funny, if not tragic.

the SETI project has been criticised for being more religion than science, but actually it's an art work - something profoundly senseless and yet essentially meaningful - an artful attempt to reconcile the human need to find meaning in a convincingly meaningless cosmos with the awful suspicion that there is none.

it would be tremendously exciting to get confirmation - even if only in the form of a few anomalous EM signals repeating in a sequence unequivocally associated with intelligence rather than accident - of the existence of the galactic neighbours. it would radically alter our relationship with our world to know - as a matter of science rather than belief - that we were not alone in the universe, although, party-pooper that I am, I have huge misgivings about how we might react to that knowledge.

consider, for instance, the global hysteria that the discovery of a signal would instigate if, at the same time, it were discovered that the alien signallers were actually approaching us, that they were en route rather than planet-bound. the world would, I'm afraid, instantly be divided into two camps, roughly corresponding to the adherents to the two ET stereotypes mentioned earlier, and, fairly obviously, the doomsayers would dominate (in a straight fight between the fundamentalist militias and the hippies I'd bet on the guys with the big guns and the crewcuts, wouldn't you?). so even if ET's ETA were set at two or three hundred years in the future, that event would become the High Noon of global civilisation, and, in the name of planetary security, provide a fine excuse for multinational fascist shenanigans on a scale undreamt of by all the tinpot dictators since Genghis Khan.

by far the likeliest scenario, however, is that there's going to be no result - no contact - and that, sooner or later, we'll come to accept the fact that, whereas we're probably not alone in the universe, the chance of our ever meeting our neighbours is virtually non-existent.

not a sexy result, but as necessary, probably, to the next stage of maturation of our species as separating from our parents is necessary to our maturation as individuals. so long as there's a lingering belief that someone or something out there - a god or a fairy godmother or an ET - will be coming along sooner or later to bail us out of this mess we've made down here, then we'll continue indulging in the sort of prevarication that makes cleaning the oven instead of filling in our tax returns seem trivial - excusing ourselves, basically, from rolling up our sleeves and getting down and dirty on the most urgent of the tasks in hand, namely, taking full individual responsibility for our collective historic bad behaviour and taking the appropriate steps to improve it.

now there's an alien thought

Bush Has Crossed the Rubicon by Paul Craig Roberts

"Many people fighting to strengthen the executive think they are fighting against legitimizing sodomy and murder in the womb. They are unaware that the real issue is that America is on the verge of elevating its president above the law."

give or take

clearly, Marx's suggestion as to how we might more equitably distribute the planet's resources amongst its inhabitants (from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs) is so alien to the prevailing global economic and political ideologies that it (the idea) has had to be progressively demonised to the point that it (the idea) is now almost synonymous with that other braindead idea - the invention of our zombie neocon overlords - 'Terror'.

that there is no nation called 'Terror' on any known maps at which we can point our cruise missiles has become entirely ignored - an invisible obstacle to this entirely irrational, ongoing war. in pursuit of this fiction, H C Andersen's invention of a tailor able to con an entire empire into believing that only his invisible materials were sufficiently extravagant, and sufficiently exorbitant, to clothe an emperor was amateurish in comparison to the ongoing industrial smog-machine of lies and disinformation that has been billowing from the collective arses of the Capitol and Westminster for the last four years.

that there might be, in these egregious corridors of power, the tiniest wisp of real concern for or compassion with those desperately trying to survive their impoverishment and dispossession either through forces of nature or forces of arms or market forces or forces merely of accident is so unlikely as to be ludicrous.

millions - possibly billions - of world citizens have been deprived of the information upon which they might make an educated choice about their economic and political futures because of the hysterical - primarily American - paranoia about socialism. just as Soviet Communism (which, in its devolved post-Revolutionary form of Stalinist dictatorship bore as little relation to the revolutionary proposals of those nineteenth-century European socialist thinkers as does American football to English rugby) had erased from the history books all mention of its opponents, so this so-called free market globalism - a system dedicated, supposedly, to the proliferation of choice in the market place - has restricted choice amongst the fundamental economic ideologies to that of one only, all others having been touched by the devil himself.

as is always the case in the field of capitalist economics, there is no rationale to any of this other than the self-interest of the stakeholders. despite all that queasy self-justifying stuff about wealth-generation and trickle-down effects, the laws of capitalist economics are absolutely indistinguishable from the laws of the jungle - the overriding interests of the zealots of acquisition are totally inimical to any inclination to altruism. the kindness displayed by the wealthy towards the poor - the foundations, the scholarships, the bequests - is no more than facile PR masking some heavy-duty fringe-illegal tax evasions. obviously, a nation which was truly concerned with the welfare of its less fortunate citizens would not need to request anything more than a reasonable (and affordable) tax deduction from the earnings of its more fortunate to make provision for their support. in the absence of any such administrational concern, and in the context of the degradation of the semantics of 'left' both in liberal economics and in governance to the point where it means little more than moderating the more extreme manifestations of naked greed in the markets, 'charity' is nothing more than a routine portfolio adjustment.

the age of revolution is long gone - neither the opportunity nor the means nor the intellectual spine remain, despite the fearsome universal weight of mass disaffection with our beloved leaders - and, such was the effectiveness of the lessons drawn from its (historically) momentary rocking of the geopolitical boat by the emergent clusters of reactionary power, so successfully have those agencies insinuated into the collective unconscious their sophistries and their monopolistic vision of economic progress (a vision predicated on the frankly insane assumption that the planet's finite mineral resources are infinitely expoitable) that unforeseen catastrophe would seem to be the only possible foreseeable engine of radical change - just as the KT boundary extinction event did for the dinosaurs of the Jurassic, so only some equally random armageddon analogue will do for the dinosaurs of the city.

the only reason why capitalism has emerged as top dog in the litter of possible scenarios for a global post-industrial economy is because it's the most aggressive - capitalism and the industries of war being co-dependent, locked together, forever, in a macabre dance of death. and aggressive, by definition, is all about winners and losers.

thing is, no-one wants to be a loser, but, under capitalism, ninety-nine percent are. they have to be. that's how it works. that's how the numbers work. that's why something like 3% of the world's population owns something like 95% of the planet's wealth. that's 'own', as in 'mine - fuck off - try taking it off me if you think you're so smart.' that's how we're persuaded to buy lottery tickets, even though the chances of winning are worse than being struck by lightning.

I doubt that more than a handful of people outside the specialist forums of professional economists and students of economics could name as many as three alternative economic systems to capitalism (Wikipedia lists thirty-nine). such options as the gift economy, or potlatch, for instance, which sustained the entire Native American population until it was displaced by the 'take' economy of the white immigrant invasions, are now regarded, if regarded at all, with ridicule and contempt, in much the same way as we have come to consider that other iconic victim of specicide, the dodo.

disastrous as it might be (and it is - it most certainly is) for the health of the planet and for all but a fraction of its citizens, the mixed economy version of capitalism is embedded for the long term. just how long that term proves to be is in neither the hands of the gods nor the politicians nor the insurance companies, none of whose provisions will be worth a can of beans once the real, non-compliant shit hits the fan. tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow.

ipod pas


until this morning, I was about to become a member of the iPod tribe. it being my birthday this weekend, pennies had been saved, share portfolios adjusted, surplus assets in various off-shore tax-free havens disposed of, and redundant body parts promised to a very nice gentleman called Gerald in Nottingham, but then fate came along, as it does, tipped us upside down, dangled us by the ankles, and emptied out all of our pockets with a lively chinking of haemorrhaging coinage, and - hey presto - my dream of owning a lovely white icon of cool disappeared in a cartoon bubble-bursting *pop*.

boo-hoo.

I really really wanted an iPod. I really didn't need an iPod. but I really really wanted one. for why? for no better reason than that of everyone else who's realised the fantasy and joined the tribe - because it's cool.

there are, probably, a few people who've found the umpteen gigabytes of mobile storage space in a wallet-sized minimalist white box a heaven-sent boon - people whose work, perhaps, benefits from their being able to say to someone - you know, that track from the Carl and the Klingons debut album that sounds exactly like track four from Led Zeppelin III - and then being able to provide concrete evidence, there and then, at the touch of a little white wheel. but these people, let's face it, are both few and far between and, not to put too fine a point on it, rather sad.

no, the point is, not what's on it, but simply the owning it, and, by so doing, belonging to that special tribe of people whose taste and discernment is en-branded in the brand. except that, to judge by the sheer numbers of thirteen-year-olds who are sporting the post-Christmas white earbud look this year, it's actually become as exceptional and distinctive to sport an iPod as to wear Nike trainers and chew gum. any brand of gum.

whatever it is that accounts for this triumph of brand-marketing is irrelevant. of course, the design and the interface and the sound quality, compared with the closest of its competitors, is miles ahead. of course it is. it's an apple. but, actually, if, like me, what you want is occasionally to enjoy the experience of music playing inside your head at a really good sound quality - whether you're on the move or not - no mp3 player is ever going to hold a candle to a good CD player - it's in the nature of the compressed sound-file to degrade the sound quality in the compression. absolutely the only practical argument for opting for an mp3 player over a cd player is the increased storage space. and, whereas I can see that it would be nice, if, say, I were about to embark on a three-year-long backpacking trip around the world twice to be able to include in a space no larger than my wallet the entirety of my cd collection plus the option of an ongoing multitude of catch-up downloads, I can't see that I'd ever find that particularly useful, since, even when I spend the entirety of a year in my own home, I never listen to more than a fraction of the cd's in my racks, and, more often, find myself listening to the same cd, not to say the same track, over and over again for weeks, if not months at a time. the fact that I could, if I so wished, listen to anything at all - and, at the current 60 gigs that's seriously possible - would, in my own case, be paralysingly prohibitive. there is such a thing as too much choice.

actually, I find the idea of filling a 60Gb iPod a tad scary - just how much music, how many photographs, how many videos does a person need to carry around with them?
which segués neatly back to that 'want' versus 'need' thing: of course no-one 'needs' that, but needing is not the point - wanting is. wanting to fill that cool white rectangular icon of cool with the stuff that makes it yours - that defines you, that characterises you, that displays your taste out there on that discreet coloured screen - that distinguishes you from that dork in the adjacent seat on the tube who's listening to Status Quo, for godsake!

the iPod is the ultimate bling on the urban armour - that defensive psychic overgarment that everyone who inhabits a city is obliged to don before leaving their home or risk utter madness at the sheer mayhem of the sensory assault that begins the moment they open the front door.

so if, like me, you're fortunate enough to live somewhere where the drive to anywhere is through fields and hills rather than through concrete canyons, it really doesn't make any sense at all to want to detach your senses from the matter at hand. indeed, I find myself less and less inclined to listen to music in the car at all, preferring to listen to the endlessly entertaining (if increasingly daft) interlocutions of my inner voices.

so have I talked myself out of my disappointment?

have I fuck.

"The US report ... said several studies had found an association between drinking and advertising ..."

erm - sorry - am I missing something here?

endurance

the capacity to endure ranks high in the category of life-skills that tend, like the capacity to be generous, to enlarge rather than diminish us.

life (apart from that experienced by our beloved leaders and slebs, of course) is normally hard - it's something that's always come with the territory, whether that's been the early days of trying to stay alive on the savannah or, more recently, having to deal with the anguish of breaking our fingernails on the wheels of our iPods. the hardness is punctuated by moments of lesser hardness - happiness, pleasure, contentment, joy, even - but these are not the norm. the norm is hard. always has been. always will. if it's not hard in the brutal survival sense, in the sense of having to do back-breaking work from dawn to dusk in order to put food on our family's table (the norm, that is, for the greater part of the planet's population) it's hard in the comparative sense - the price 'we' pay for having chosen a competitive rather than a co-operative system as the engine of our socio-economic existence. no matter how hard we try to improve our lot, in whatever sense we might understand 'improvement', we are doomed to failure, since the measure of our success is, by definition, a shifting thing, tied to a vacillating set of indicators as volatile as any trade index, endlessly receding down a road which we are bound to follow, endlessly, fruitlessly, because the promise will only ever be fulfilled tomorrow, when we reach the vanishing point.

endurance is part of the hard, which is why 'we' have developed so many artificial softening strategies: anaesthetic, distraction, denial, inter alia. drugs, normally, play a large part, as do a glorious mishmash of entertainments, some of which, ironically, are about sitting in our reinforced sofas watching others endure things - either in the 'pushing their bodies to the limits of their endurance' sense, or in the 'limiting their self-esteem to the point of enduring maximum humiliation in order to claim their moment of fame' sense.

endurance and patience - nature's beta-blockers.

the one - probably the only - experience that will soften the hard, cushion the crash, compensate for all the endurance, is the unconditional love - if reciprocated - of another human being.

sadly, many humans, especially in England, seem to have to settle for the supposedly unconditional love of an animal - a dog, a cat, a goldfish - when that of a person fails to materialise. this is called transference. (no it's not, you idiot, but it might as well be; if you still give credence to the repressed ravings of the jawless Viennese - no offence, and thanks for the unconscious, siggie - you might as well go the whole hog.) all else - the drink, the drugs, the hobbies, the obsessions, the package holidays, the clubs, the cars, the gadgets, the gizmos, the big macs, the praying (o lordie the praying!), the subscriptions, the flag-waving, the piercings, the yoga, the fan forums - is in some part a substitute for this one significant lack, this hole that cannot be filled, however hard we might try, by anything else.

eeny meeny miny mo




there's a lot to be said for good manners.

people generally respond warmly to 'please' and 'thank you' and to the kind of jokey deference in doorways - after you, no, after you, please, I insist - that actually happens in England, much to the puzzled amusement of the rest of the planet. at the root of politeness, though, is a philosophical view of the world that is prepared to give everyone the benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise, and that expects tit for tat when it comes to the diurnal dealings, as in 'do unto others as you would be done by.' there's a distasteful residue of autocratic paternalism in it - a 'gentleman', I recall, is defined by some Victorian novelist (George Eliot, I think) as someone who would never deliberately cause suffering to man, woman, or beast - but anyone who's ever been politely patronised by an English gentleman will admit that, for all his insufferable pomposity, it beats being arbitrarily insulted by an American immigration official for no better reason than that he didn't like the way you looked at him.

sticks and stones.

all mothers recite that mantra as if it were true.

but words are never 'just' words. the word 'freedom', for instance, has been added, with Microsoft's collusion, to the list of words which automatically flag a user's ISP account when typed into a Chinese search-engine. there are, however, some words and phrases that I don't, personally, like.

I don't like the phrase 'spazz out', for instance - as in 'Thom really spazzes out when he's performing Idioteque live' - because I used to have a friend whose child was afflicted with cerebral palsy - a so-called 'spastic' - whose uncontrollable limb movements and garbled speech are the reference for that descriptive phrase. I hate to think that, whenever anyone uses the phrase, 'spazz out', they're passively jeering - however thoughtlessly - at Gabriel's appearance and behaviour. I'm equally disconcerted by the widespread use of 'retard' as a mocking put-down of anyone who manifests stupidity - whether as a hereditary trait, genetic flaw, or social gaff - for much the same reason.

it happens to be the case, despite the fact that difference is the norm, despite the fact that there are far more ways in which we as individuals are different from a random collection of our fellow-humans than ways in which we are similar, that, so long as the smallest crack of distinction appears to distinguish one set of people from another, there's going to emerge a sub-set of people purporting to represent the set that considers itself superior, somehow, to the other, who will jemmy into that crack with all the resources they can muster in order to enlarge it into a chasm.

it begins in the playground with the 'norms' name-calling the 'fatties' and continues into so-called maturity with all the insults accrued historically around the diseased dogs of prejudice and bigotry. so you may insult me by nationality (paki, tinker, frog), sexuality (motherfucker, cocksucker, dyke), race (yid, raghead, sand-monkey) - and by several categories besides that are to communication as toilet-training is to development - something that ought to belong in the late-infant stage of behaviour, along with a fascination with poo and wee and where it comes from, but, alas, as so much else in the retarded (proper use, this time) canon of cultural affect, tends to become embedded way past its expiry date in the absence of grownup guidance.

I particularly dislike the word 'nigger'.

exactly why is difficult to say. my parents had no problem with it. in fact, the only problem they have with it now is that their children chide them for using it. "eeny meeny miny mo, catch a ..." "mum!" in my case (I don't presume to speak for my siblings, although I don't believe either of them would ever use the word) I've come to believe that the word 'nigger' encapsulates, in a single word, the entire weight of historical atrocity that began with the mass enslavement of millions of West African people in the early eighteenth century and their incorporation as wholesale bonded labour into the burgeoning capitalist economies of Europe and North America. I've come to believe that that unforgiveable appropriation by our two cultures - the European and the American - leaves us permanently, and literally, indebted to the descendents of those slaves, since a significant portion of our economic success was established on their unpaid labour. that belief comes from the experience of growing up in the 'sixties, when, to me and to many of my contemporaries, our thoughtless participation in the endemically racist culture to which we subscribed was challenged by the events surrounding the rapidly emerging black civil rights movement. much was achieved, then, through the selfless efforts of a multi-coloured grouping of men and women who dedicated their lives - and, in some cases, gave their lives - to the re-ordering of the social consensus into a more equitable racial distribution.

one of the only two black people I know in this tiny but perfectly formed country town I live in in Somerset is a young man who is a member of a hip-hop group - an incongruous phenomenon here (in the sense that the urban black culture it emerges from and relates to is a good ninety-minute bus ride away - in Bristol - and, en route, you could count the number of black faces you'd encounter on the fingers of one hand) but nevertheless rather a good one, I think. not my thing usually - well, why would it be? - but I have high hopes for them. they're this close to a record deal ... the group consists of seven guys - two black, five white. clearly, between them (they've all grown up together, been to the same schools, shared the same experiences) race is not an issue. the word 'nigger' is employed quite frequently in their lyrics - as it is by a large number of hip-hop artists - almost as a synonym for 'man', as in 'hey, man/nigga, how's it gon' down.'

a 'nigger' was the term by which the slavemasters came to describe their black (niger - Latin - black) cargo - a tool of production whose life was valueless except in so far as it benefited his or her white master. it is an anachronistic term - a shameful reminder of a shameful period in human history. I believe it's actually illegal, now, to use it as a racial insult. and yet we are led to understand that these young blacks are using either 'nigra' or 'nigga' amongst themselves as a term of endearment. so what does this new generation of black artists who claim somehow to have re-cycled it, disinfected, as it were, by art, intend by making it part of the culture of black youth? is there, indeed, intent, or is it just a tragically misguided provocation?

the latter, of course.

the time-honoured course of escape from the black ghetto has been through music and sport - the blues, boxing, basketball. it's obviously racist to deduce from this that blacks are 'naturally' better in these areas - the brute truth is that, for want of any but the remotest hope of success in the more white-dominated professions - has there ever been a black dentist in Surrey, let alone in Alabama? - blacks have had to channel their energies into those fields where success was not colour-dependent. and where are two men more equal than in the boxing ring? slowly, slowly, things have improved. but, in a culture in which a young black guy is still far more likely - by orders of magnitude - to be harassed by the police than his white friends, and where unemployment amongst black youth is still much higher than amongst white, the attractions of musical or sporting success still obtain as strongly as ever.

alas, for every young hip hop artist who manages to secure a contract, there are tens of thousands who are left to live in their dust, where being a 'nigger' - spell it whichever way you like, it still sounds and smells the same - can never be anything other than what it has always been - a powerless victim of a form of semantic oppression that is only further legitimised by its use, however ironically, by the oppressed. it is fundamentally misguided and staggeringly arrogant to think that it can be revived as an equivalent, amongst blacks, to 'mate', or 'dude' without there being a terrible price to pay, in terms of self-esteem, in the larger black community, where its use is only associated with racial insult. hopefully it's one of those tasteless fashion things that will quickly get consigned to the dustbin of history - sooner rather than later, before usage normalises it, because ignorance of history has never been a defence against history's very nasty habit of repeating itself.

I abhor censorship. I believe that the vilest, the most obnoxious opinions imaginable, should be freely accessible - published, broadcast, publicly aired - because I nurse a tenacious belief in the fundamental decency of the majority of people, whose reaction to such opinions is the same: to vilify and condemn them. the British BNP and National Front have been totally marginalised more as a result of grassroots activism and ridicule than any form of official intervention. I wouldn't thank anyone whose well-meaning censorship of the racist's right to free speech prevented me from giving them a verbal horse-whipping. there's not much sport in it, but if there's an 'r' in the month and you can't flush a fox, any young vermin will do, doncha know.

the bt truth

BT chief executive Ben Verwaayen last week announced to a packed auditorium of City of London analysts at the company’s St Paul’s headquarters that BT is now a business-to-business services company which just happens to have a consumer arm.

Ah - so that's why BT delivers such a shit service to its domestic customers. Nice to have it spelt out so clearly at last.

UK gags paper over Aljazeera memo

Wednesday 23 November 2005, 12:01 Makka Time, 9:01 GMT

"Britain's Daily Mirror newspaper has been ordered to cease publishing further details from an allegedly top secret memo revealing that US President George Bush wanted to bomb Aljazeera."

JOHN PILGER: I'm not at all surprised. I'm sure no one is surprised. I'm sure Al Jazeera isn’t surprised. After all ... the Americans clearly targeted Al Jazeera in Kabul and in Baghdad, killing one Al Jazeera journalist. They had been threatening Al Jazeera. It's part of U.S. policy to target the media. They – during the attack on Serbia in 1999, they targeted the headquarters of Yugoslav Broadcasting. The numbers of journalists who have been killed by American troops is higher than any time in the modern period. The media is terribly important to this whole disaster, and getting Al Jazeera, which has done an extraordinary job of bringing to millions of people, who otherwise would not have been informed about their own part of the world, bringing to them facts and information is very threatening to the United States and to Bush.

(Democracy Now!)

no comment

we have ways



as a free-loading carnivore, I've occasionally wondered if I could butcher a large animal. in my careless youth, I used to shoot pigeons and hares and prepare them for the table without overmuch squeam, I've never found gutting fish a problem, and I have been known to wring the occasional chicken’s neck, but I strongly suspect, if push ever came to shove, that I'd wimp out at the prospect of poleaxing a cow and cutting its throat. meat, after all, comes in convenient cellophane-wrapped antiseptic white trays off the coolshelf at Tescos.

how much harder must it be, then, to kill a man.

and how very much harder, by several orders of magnitude, to keep a man alive, but in terrible pain, whilst continuing to apply more pain.

since Terror declared war on us (or was that the other way round?) there has been a silent 180° shift in the western Zeitgeist on the use of torture.

by the late 'nineties, thanks to the persistent lobbying of such organisations as Amnesty International, the process of naming and shaming governments with a track record of human rights abuses was well under way, and in some cases, the act of exposure was instrumental in effecting change - particularly amongst those smaller nations who were looking to boost their economies through trade or tourism tie-ins with us richer.

the very phrase - 'human rights' - had become integrated into the commonly-held perception of proper governance: a turn of the century government without a human rights manifesto was a bad government. we had loudly denounced apartheid in South Africa, and the totalitarian injustices of the USSR, and something profoundly significant had taken place in the collective Western psyche when Nelson Mandela was finally released from Robben Island, and the Berlin Wall came crashing down. by the year 1990 that wafer-thin veneer of civilising behaviours that restrains the worst in men and encourages the best had seemed to have acquired an extra layer.

moral decency, however, is not something that automatically replaces the removal of a culture of injustice and autocracy: so-called natural justice is defined by the system of authority that sustains it and that it, in turn, sustains, and, in the absence of any serious attempts at impartial assistance by the onlooking world, the reinvention of a blemish-free authorial oversight on the future development of these two exemplary recruits to the human-rights-implementing club was always going to be hijacked - either openly, in the case of the Russian mafia, or less openly, in the case of the South African political cadres and élites - by naked greed and corruption, since this is how things work in the so-called free markets.

the phrase 'human rights' continued to be the buzz-word of the next decade or so in the service of the advancement of democracy - flurries of outrage at such perceived atrocities as the Tiananmen Square and Srebrenica massacres - but then something happened, and, almost overnight, human rights were suspended, on the grounds that, because the human rights of 2,000 innocent American citizens had been most horrendously violated, those of all of the citizens of that formerly unmapped but now loudly demonised nation of Terror - upon whom 'we' now were obliged to wage endless war or risk being counted amongst their number - were, by analogy with that brutal Roman trick of decimation, henceforth to be suspended in perpetuity.

so now we inhabit a world in which, although 'human rights' continues to be used as a totemic stick with which to persuade compliance from various erring nations, there is the global understanding that the phrase is tending to the meaningless - that non-American, non-compliant humans have no rights under the pax Americana other than the right to go fuck themselves and die.

inevitably, one of the progressive notions that helped arm the vanguard of those heady days of the 'eighties and early 'nineties - the days of velvet revolutions and truth and reconciliation hearings - that is, the notion that torture was fundamentally wrong, and something that was incompatible with evolved humanity - was one of the first to be displaced in the heady days of post-9/11, when we were subject to a relentless blizzard of information to the effect that the citizens of Terror were utterly unscrupulous in their desire to destroy western civilisation, fanatical to the point of impossible intransigence, scattered into well-organised sleeper cells in every suburb of every town, and cunningly disguised as our next-door neighbours - ordinary students and shopkeepers - although mostly Middle Eastern-looking and Muslim. furthermore, we were told, on the best advice of the 'security forces' (that unsleeping band of invisible heroes upon whose vigilance we depend for our safety) that the definitive defence against these people was offence - to suspend the civil and human rights of all suspects at home, and to search out and destroy the suspected redoubts of their leaders - in Afghanistan and Iraq, for starters - abroad.

and to overlook the faked evidence for justifying this action.

and then to overlook the fact that - in the pulverised rubble that is now Afghanistan and Iraq - those supposed redoubts remain undiscovered and undestroyed.

a more inept strategy is difficult to imagine, unless the whole point of the exercise (aside from the obvious oil-related ones) has been to provoke and inflame the anger and hatred of the radical Muslim world to the point that jihad is multilaterally endorsed and America finally gets the excuse to finish off what Richard the Lionheart botched: The Crusades - The Endgame.

torture, of course, in such a context, is seldom about 'extracting' information: when Guy Fawkes was put on the rack, everyone present already knew the names of his co-conspirators. the reason he had to have all his limbs dislocated (he lasted half-an-hour, to his credit) was to persuade him to formally incriminate them and to sign the confession.

in the heat of an emergency, when one man is absolutely certain that his captive possesses the information which would, with certainty, preserve the lives of a group of innocent people - or the life, indeed, of only one innocent person - there's a strong argument for permitting that man to hurt the other until he releases that information. unfortunately, the historical record on such certainties is tenuous, to say the least. certainly, far more men and women have been tortured to death protesting their (genuine) ignorance of the information demanded than have been able to supply it. equally certainly, millions of men and women have themselves been falsely incriminated by the tortured person's earning a moment's respite from his or her interrogation by agreeing to his interrogator's suggestions about names and places. one of the reasons why so many innocent women were tortured and killed during the sixteenth-and seventeenth century European witch-hunts was that everyone interrogated was assumed to be part of a conspiracy, and was therefore required to supply the names of his or her companions before being allowed to die.

torture, far more frequently, is employed simply as an instrument of repression. as long as the sources of 'intelligence' are secure - that is, classified for the eyes of the authorities alone and exempt from any other form of civil scrutiny or verifiability – the information it purports to supply can be as fictitious as suits the authorial agenda. if a secret police force says there is a terrorist cell operating out of such-and-such a mosque in such-and-such a town, then there is - and if that secret police force is handed the power to identify and arrest the leaders of that cell, then they will - and if they then choose to hold those suspects indefinitely, without trial, in secret locations, in foreign countries, and to subject them to ongoing indignities and abuse - to torture them, in other words - then they can and will do so - with total impunity.

the idea of a secret police system maintaining a climate of low-grade but permanent state-endorsed terror as a tool of social control is a fairly recent emergent on the global political stage - the Spanish Catholic Inquisition, of course, was the model for everything that followed, with Metternich adapting it to a secular model around Congress of Vienna time, and various subtle and not-so-subtle refinements evolving from the Tsarist Okhrana to the Israeli Mossad via the Iranian VEVAK and Pinochet's DINA - but somehow we have been persuaded that it is a good and necessary thing. indeed, the persuasions have been so effective that the fact that George Bush Senior was former head of the CIA attracted little remark, either ironic or stigmatic, and the fact that Vladimir Putin, the current Russian President, was a former career officer in the KGB has been spun as a kind of charismatic footnote - à la James Bond - to his CV. if either man has any sense of historical continuity (let alone irony), they must surely be aware that the most infamous predecessors in their trade were Reinhard Heydrich, Heinrich Müller, and Adolf Eichmann, joint heads of the Nazi Gestapo. but somehow we have been persuaded that such comparisons are absurd, for the usual historical reasons that terrorists who emerge on the winning side are always redefined as freedom fighters in the winners' versions of history.

however, when an albeit compliant public, forever reluctant to accept extreme constraints, needs somehow to be persuaded that, in certain extreme circumstances, the application of a 10,000 volt current to another human's anatomy for no other purpose than to cause them indescribable suffering (we've already covered the pointlessness of pretending to 'extract' information) is a good and necessary thing, where, in what arena, might this mighty act of persuasion take place? where to look when the Zeitgeist needs a tiny helpful tweak? where else than television?

during the two years subsequent to 9/11, the spectacle of two noble CIA mavericks (one male, the other female) embracing (with the utmost reluctance) the painful (sorry) necessity of using torture in pursuit of their mission to rid the world of evil became the leitmotif of two of the highest-rated TV spy thrillers ever. whether consciously or not (not, most likely - such things are the stuff of a conspiracy theorists wet dream but usually turn out to be coincidences – as long as you believe in coincidences ... but that's another issue) the scriptwriters on 24 and Alias must, between them, assume the lion's share of responsibility for such modification of the collective unconscious as was required, during that dark period, in order to persuade us of the necessity of using real torture in the real world to rid it of real evil.

prior to the screening of these series, torture, when it was employed on-screen, was always the prerogative of the bad guy. its use epitomised the stuff of evil which we were dedicated to overcoming. James Bond will bribe, threaten, and pummel, but would never stoop to cold-blooded torture. however, thanks to a set of gratuitous story-lines that managed both to pay lip service to and then hastily dismiss the small matter of debate about the ethics of its use, both series plunged, with a dismaying rapidity, into a very smorgasbord of torture, with the only difference between the goodies and the baddies being that the goodies did it with stone faces, reluctantly. it became so in-your-face as to be laughable, god help us. and there you have it - already it's normal, routine – there's even torture by the good guys in Lost (written by the same guy, incidentally, as Alias).

this transcends the old chestnut about whether TV violence is responsible for social violence – this is about normalising something which is unacceptable, and about marginalising and trivialising that most important of the civil duties – the obligation to say stop when the authorities exceed their authority. why should the government bother about justifying its illegal behaviour when the TV is doing a perfectly fine job of doing it in its stead?

shame on them, that poxy crew of theatrical reactionaries, shame on Kiefer and Jennifer for taking their tainted shilling and running, and double shame on Jennifer for lending her screen persona to a (real) recruiting commercial for the (real) CIA. but there it is. actors - sweet things - what can you say? they need to feed their families like everyone else. it's just a job, being a torturer actor. great TV, though. wouldn't have missed it for the world. I buy my meat at the supermarket, after all.

Q: what connects the us defence secretary and bird flu?

A: $ $ $
and yet more $

so is anyone remotely surprised?

(thanks to xymphora)

the loyalty card

as fidelity to marriage, so patriotism to nationality - similar applications - different only in scale - of the same notion of 'loyalty' - one of those human behaviours that seems to hover in the misty hinterland between instinct and reason.

easier to consider what they mean by considering their converses: infidelity and treachery. the marriage-partner and the family suffers from the unfaithful spouse : the nation suffers from the traitor.

'suffer' - in both cases - has come to acquire an emotional significance that belies its original, more pragmatic usage - the loss of material integrity that accrues from the breach of the civil contract. 'loyalty' is required of the spouse and the citizen in return for the protections that the states of marriage and citizenship afford - protections from the predations of the unmarried, in the first case, and foreigners, in the other - the two primary perceived threats to the stability of the body politic.

unfortunately, neither the twenty-first century family nor the twenty-first century nation bears much more than a superficial resemblance to the ancestral type which formulated these quaint notions. the idea that marriage vows are sacred has largely been replaced with the idea that they are something akin to the 'I Agree' window you click on whenever you download a new piece of software: a necessary ritual wrapped in a less-then-binding legal document that no-one considers to be more serious than a playground promise made with your fingers crossed behind your back. similarly, the tabloid treacheries of a Guy Fawkes or a Kim Philby are meaningless in a post-Cold-War environment: in a globally internetted age, when you or I can as easily download a hi-res satellite image of any corner of the earth's surface as a pirate copy of The Spy Who Came in From The Cold, the idea of there being any military secrets anymore is purely notional. and anyway, who cares if 'they' can access the plans for 'our' latest hybrid stealth weapon - if they really want it all they have to do is ask - and we'll sell it to them! that's how capitalism - the definitive cultural environment - works. 'they' just have to have the moolah.

in such a world, loyalty is an irrelevance, since the global exchanges of capital (in a system predicated on the strange notion - unique amongst the laws that govern the physical universe - that there are no limits to growth, and that a finite resource - in our case, our planet - can be exploited as if it were infinite) navigate by a set of maps which owe more to the markets than Mercator, wherein the territorial boundaries extend around freshly opening markets (think cigarettes, think cars - think China) with the accommodating elasticity of a well-teased sphincter.

loyalty, instead, has become a tool of compliance, a faithful standby in the creaking armoury of political manipulations, whereby we - the ants who connive in our ant-dom because we are proud to be ants - can be brought to fiscal heel when the markets dip.

we're so used to being loyal that we actually need it - the being-loyal state - and seem not to be able to imagine life without it. why else - what possible other rational explanation can there be for such behaviour - do we devote so much of our time and energy, when we're not actually at war, to its surrogate, our surrogate nation, our 'team', whether that team centres on a ball, a puck, or a shop? (the supermarket, with its creche, its coffee bar, its instant access to everything we need, has, after all, long since displaced the church as the spiritual heart of all western communities.) the great thing about the being-loyal state is that, once you've entered into it, you don't have to ask any more questions - you just go with the flow, man.

never in human history has unquestioning obedience been so painless.

obviously, a nation whose leaders require of its citizens that they connive, unquestioningly, in immoral activities that further the interests of the very very rich at the expense of the very very poor (something that the US administration does as a matter of course but which - the further we advance into a twenty-first century threatened by total immersion in neo-con ideology - our own beloved leaders are doing their damnedest to emulate) is a morally bankrupt nation that has forfeited the right to loyalty. but it is precisely then - precisely now - in its deepest crisis of moral forfeiture, that the loyalty card becomes the ace in the political pack.

'my country - right or wrong' is such a deeply despicable sentiment, the desperate mantra of the desperately loyal, the sine qua non of Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Fallujah and the Patriot Act, and yet soon - without a shadow of a doubt - to be adopted into the English canon in the face of the unanimous opposition of the law lords themselves.

the sad thing, of course, is that, underneath all this manipulative flag-saluting rubbish lies deeply buried a sense - gut-sensed in all but the totally de-sensitised - of a parallel universe in which 'loyalty' - like its distant cousin, 'honour' - have a meaning and a utility beyond the cynical - something more appropriate to grownup men and women than to dogs; a meaning circumscribed by the universally experienced discomfort at lying and being lied to, and the pleasure at being trusted and confided in. it is perfectly possible - indeed, it's become commonplace - to exhort loyalty through lies in this universe, but, in that other one, loyalty, having, like respect, been earned, is commanded through no greater coercion than the tacit mutual recognition of its reciprocating benefits, benefits which have evolved far, far beyond the primitive protections described above.

even in this universe, though, there are a lucky few who experience this kind of loyalty - of friends, lovers, and family - as a form of benign social cement. these lucky, lucky few feel no sense of obligation to those who are loyal to them, because that loyalty is freely shared, never interrogated, and certainly never employed either to manipulate or to trade.

far more frequent is the experience of either having to demonstrate one's loyalty to a system one despises - or risk being fired, or worse - or, in the course of being reminded, incidentally, that one's participation as a consumer is the only social criterion that really matters, having one's loyalty bought - literally - by a credit card company, a supermarket, or by one's partner in a pre-nuptial agreement. and bought loyalty - as every deposed dictator can testify - is an ephemeral event, stamp-validated only up to the next coup.

aurora popup removal

I spent the better part of the weekend trying to prise this utter mongrel of a random popup generator out of a friend's pc. the fiendish thing about it is that, regardless of your knowing which programme is running it (NAIL.EXE) it's nigh-impossible to delete because of the way it's been configured to run on the back of another programme that's integral to the system bootup. so, although I think there are some legitimate custom uninstall downloads out there, I also know there are a few (including, not surprisingly, the free uninstall programme that you can get from the originating site) which are just substituting one set of malware for another, so here's how to get rid of it.

(some geek-skills required: how to reveal hidden files, how to modify files in the key registry, and how to reboot in safe mode and run a command prompt)

1. Reboot in Safe Mode with Command Prompt
2. Delete NAIL.EXE from root directory
3. Reboot in Safe Mode (there'll be a message about not being able to find 'Nail.exe' which you can safely ignore, of course)
4. Run regedit.exe
5. Delete all references to the dropper files in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Current Version\Run
(they'll be obvious as they're the only ones with random filenames like zghhhrt.exe)
6. Go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\WindowsNT\WINLOGON\ and locate the 'shell' command in the right pane
7. (*EXTREME CAUTION*) Double-click on 'shell' and delete the path and file name after 'Explorer.exe' in the 'Modify' sub-menu. (Do not delete the whole command - if you do you'll have trouble rebooting)
8. Reboot

that's it, basically - there's a whole mass of associated files if you can be bothered finding 'em, and whatever minor problems they might leave you with can be relatively easily dealt with later, but these (above) are the critical ones - they'll do the job.

how Aurora works is by using the Winlogon functions to spawn the shell (the Explorer interface) that appends the executable file to Explorer - thereby making it impossible to delete in any mode that calls Explorer - which includes Safe Mode as well as 'Normal' Mode.

as I said - fiendish.

the guys who wrote it (it first appeared in May this year) made - I'd a thought - the serious mistake of making it available as a direct marketing ploy to all those advertisers who - if you're plagued with it - keep popping up on your desktop, thereby - unusually for virus writers - making themselves easily traceable to those who know how to trace.

so, if you happen to live in New York:

Direct Revenue LLC
107 Grand Street
3rd Floor
New York, NY 10013
V: 646.613.0376
F: 646.613.0386

go say hello.

(and if you don't have those geek skills, don't despair - your first stop for legitimate help should be here)

better still - trade in that heap of eternally vulnerable Microsoft-dependent pc shit for a Mac.

nobody listens.

Aeolian Tor



so I'm up there this afternoon - fairly wild, overcast, gusty - and suddenly I'm aware of this sound coming from behind me, right at the edge of my hearing - kind of ambient weirdness - wild oscillations of pitch and tempo - and I look round - and there's nothing there - no-one, nothing - and I think, that's it, I've finally lost it, I've been living around here too long - I'm hearing the fairies - and I start carefully walking toward what seems to be the source - and I suddenly realise what it is.

they've put up a temporary fence around a newly-turfed area to protect it whilst it beds in - and some of the uprights have small drainage holes drilled in them at the bottom at irregular intervals - and the wind is turning the whole thing into a scratch sound sculpture - a kind of Aeolian harp with pipes instead of strings.

totally entrancing.

the art of two andy's



I found myself saying "I've really no idea what art is" the other day in that clever-dick sort of way that comes complete with the banal rider - "but I know what it does" - thus demonstrating both an infuriatingly smug humility and a rhetorical cowardice. but, apart from the spurious retro-self-flagellation, reflection prompts me to confess that, really, honestly, I have no idea what art is, despite having spent my entire working life, supposedly, 'in the arts.'

I think the problem, now, is the enormity of the gulf between what art has been and what it is presented as and what I - whose relationship with 'it' is tenuous to say the least - think it should be, and that the process of trying to articulate that gulf necessitates an engagement with such an impenetrable cartload of manure - both academic- and media-generated - that my inclination is to just turn away and say what the fuck who cares anyway and get on with doing whatever it is I do.

but if art matters at all, and if we're to continue using the word 'artist' to describe someone who makes art, then it matters what it is, and, somehow, we have to come to some sort of agreement about that, if it's only an agreement to differ.

I know what I used to think: I thought that art - secular western art - the only art I really know much about - was a manifestation of something called 'truth', and that the artist was an elective inheritor of a quasi-sacred trust: I actually visualised a golden thread of 'truth' stretching back to whenever, and the artist as someone whose function was to maintain the integrity of that thread and ensure its survival into the future.

I supported that belief by acknowledging that the root of all art is in the sacred - the pigmented scratchings on rocks and cave walls that testify to the earliest emergences of the conjunction of ritual and worship - and that, whereas secular art can deny its currency in a context of cultural agnosticism, it can no more deny the hermeneutics of that legacy than the individual artist can deny the existence or the original purpose of his or her tailbone.

the artist and the priest, therefore, had become like estranged brothers - estranged without hope of reconciliation, but without hope, either, of ever being liberated from that burden of shared provenance.

bereft of that fraternal bond, however, I regarded the relationship between the modern artist and the scientist as a kind of familial surrogacy - a second-cousinship of sorts - the only difference between them being that the 'truth' the scientist was attempting to illuminate was a physical phenomenon. a scientific experiment was 'verifiable' and, definitively, repeatable, whereas an artistic experiment was always ephemeral, intangible, and unique. certainly, I considered that the artistic and the scientific sensibilities were complementary, of equal value, indeed, that their different approaches to confronting what are essentially the same concerns about reality, meaning, and understanding our place in the cosmos represented something fundamental, something that chimes perenially in our consciousness as the symmetry of opposites, without which there is no balance, no possibility of conclusiveness, no hope of a definitive 'this is this' or 'that is that'.

time and the spider's kiss of reality have somewhat modified that view, not least in the sense that I have come to accept that the continuing use of terms like 'beauty' and 'truth' in that yoked Keatsian sense of the eternal verities being essentially, and simply, 'beautiful' is historically and pragmatically naive, and that even retaining the idea of 'truth' as definitive is to risk tautology - as in 'art is truth revealed through art'. 'truth', furthermore, is as often as not a very ugly beast indeed. which isn't to say that there isn't still a place for art that is beautiful, just as there is for mathematical resolutions that are beautiful, but to admit that there is equally a place for art that reflects that which is ugly - since the reflection, in either case, of truth, is, or should be the predominant concern.

further, I feel that, just as the community of post-Heisenberg science has been obliged to embrace some extremely discomfiting refutations of earlier assumptions about 'reality' - I'm thinking in particular about the ways in which notions like space and time have undergone fundamental revision in step with advancing understandings about quantum behaviours - so that world has been redefined and freshly illuminated in terms of the post-modern artist's displacement of his or her modern precursors.

clearly, art is whatever society agrees it is, and in the absence of a clear, passionate consensus, the tendency in our society has been, historically, to abrogate responsibility on what to agree upon to a small but influential caucus of critics and academics and, latterly, media fuhrers (occupying the space formerly occupied by gallery owners and agents) whose yeasay or naysay will drive the upward or downward inclination of an artist's stock.

what's really complicated the issue in the last fifty years or so has been the escalation of the information wars between the various media feeding the explosively affluent children of all classes as they emerged into the target zone of consumer marketing. whereas, until as recently as fifty years ago, the kind of surplus available to the arts from the sort of person who considered themselves a patron of the arts (in the middle-ranking sense of going to the theatre and concert halls regularly and purchasing the occasional painting) has become more and more the province of the young, and, whereas the amount spent per capita by this new arts patron is probably considerably less than it would have been by the mid-last-century middle classes, the combined purchasing power of this demographic grouping - the sheer weight of numbers, and the wide social spread of the grouping involved, has come to affect the art market very dramatically indeed.

the theatre, the opera, and the concert hall, therefore, is now virtually moribund as an active component in the current cultural scene - those yawning, empty blocks of premium seats in every auditorium are bleak witness to their abandonment to the corporate market's entertainment budget - since these relics of the elite High Arts have little relevance to an arts consumer used to the far more evolved multi-media arenas of live performance and the million-times more engaging narrative canvas of film. the gulf between the two cultures - the popular culture of tabloids, gameshows, the Premier League and the singles charts, and the élite culture of the South Bank - has never been greater, and the ever-increasing pressure on the latter to emulate the tangible successes of the former without alienating either its élite audience or its taxpaying source of subsidy has resulted in its inevitable implosion in a fit of hand-flapping histrionics and embarassing populist gimmicks. if I had a penny for every time I've heard some floppy-haired young theatre or opera director enthusing about how vitally important it was to engage a new audience with their wares, I'd be rolling in clover. the truth is that the theatre, and its cousins the opera and the ballet, have been stone dead for about thirty years, and no-one will admit it.

major cultural shifts are only ever identifiable in retrospect, and, whereas it's clear that - a simplistic summary - the collapse of Soviet communism and the end of the Cold War marked the moment when the push towards American hegemony really began in earnest, it's still far too early - the waters are far too muddied still - to be able to discern what the 'new' culture - the victors culture - is that is replacing the 'old' - that which was aligned with the vanquished. it's heartbreakingly easy, however, to identify one, at least, of the outstanding characteristics of this victorious culture - strutting triumphalism - in the way the bankrupt residue of the Soviet-subsidised high art system has been assimilated by the west: there's been a brisk east-west migration for the last decade or so of highly-trained ice-skaters and ballet dancers, for instance, upping by several orders of magnitude the skills ante in the popular arenas of ice-spectaculars, nightclub revues, and lap-dancing clubs from Las Vegas to Blackpool - at bargain-basement prices.

there are rarely more than a handful of discrete major artists - groundbreakers, as opposed to consolidators - in any given generation, and the Russian filmmaker Andzrej Tarkovsky and his American contemporary and counterpart, the artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol, were two such.

Tarkovsky represents the ultimate flowering of a kind of artistic impulse that has dominated Western consciousness since the Renaissance - the heroic engagement with an intrinsically conservative status quo in order to be perceived as an immortal - to be remembered as one who represented their time in paint, stone, music, or literature. in his case, that engagement necessitated mastering a particularly complicated dance of negotiation with the Soviet cinema's presiding bureaucracy - a monolithic beast dedicated to one purpose - ensuring the political rectitude of its stable of artists. and in common with all the artists of his generation working behind the Iron Curtain, from the Baltic to the Urals, that dance was a dance of stealthy deception - of cloaking meaning in such a convoluted veil of metaphor that any surface test of political correctness must surely fail to find purchase or fault. as a consequence, he brought the vocabulary of cinema closer to music than any previous cinema auteur, and leaves a legacy that summarises the achievement of Soviet artists in particular, and of all artists still working under the umbrella of state-centralised controls. this legacy, however, is one which the victorious culture seems as anxious to forget as the one which generated it.

at the same time as Tarkovsky was enjoying what turned out to be the golden age of Soviet state patronage of the arts, Andy Warhol was enjoying a liberal arts education that straddled both the ideals of social realism (something which Tarkovsky abhorred) and the aspirations of the American Dream in its more infantilised, Shirley Temple-worshipping form. Warhol's stature as a seer who understood the power of the image, the religion of fame, and the narcosis of consumerism is something that has been welded onto his myth as a critical afterthought: in reality he seems to have had no articulate agenda, and, unlike his Russian contemporary, he left practically no commentary or critique on his own work other than the briefest, the most anecdotal and the almost cringingly banal.

both artists, although poles apart in their artistic, intellectual, and metaphysical ideologies, were almost morbidly obsessed with time (Tarkovsky's self-critical memoir - 'Sculpting in Time' - describes his own working process) and, technically, both were heedless about challenging their audiences' boredom threshold: typically, a Tarkovsky tracking shot will pass very slowly over some detail in a landscape, or a painting, or a domestic interior, for as long as ten minutes, and two of Warhol's most infamous films - 'Empire' and 'Sleep' - consist of one static eight-hour shot of a still subject.

the time-period for which Warhol is remembered, however, by everyone, regardless of whether they know anything about pop art, is the fifteen minutes of fame which he predicted would become the universal allotment.

whether or not the one was the 'better' artist than the other is beside the point: both happened to be working at round about the same time in two countries whose horns were locked for the entirety of these two artists' working lives in the most terrifying of nuclear standoffs. after winning that confrontation, the inevitable artistic consequence of the supremacy of a Warhol-world rather than a Tarkovsky-world was the emergence within twenty years of the soap opera, online gaming, and reality TV as the dominant forms of cultural expression. whether it also entailed the inevitable decline of the artist from shamanic gatekeeper to McDonalds clown is still far too early to say.

no pussyfooting around

we used to call a spade a spade around here once, apparently ...

decisive attitudes

in common with most people I know, I have been trying to bring up my twin sons to understand that violent behaviour is a form of sickness, and that violent people can be helped to change their behaviour.

now, at thirteen, they seem to be developing into quite big, strong fellows - quite capable of humiliating several of my friends foolish enough to challenge them at arm-wrestling (not me, not quite, not yet), and well on their way to being able, as they say, to take care of themselves - and I find myself beginning to wonder if I oughtn't to lighten up a little on an issue which, to them, clearly isn't an issue.

I say this because I'm beginning to have to accept that, thanks in large part to the miserable failures of the dominant culture and its cringing satellites in curbing the excesses of inequality that are now hopelessly endemic in the social structures of the so-called developed world, the notion that might is right is the indisputable norm of political, and therefore social persuasion. Gandhi (shanti, shanti, shanti) would get short shrift if he sat down in front of an advancing platoon of American or Israeli soldiers these days.

from the school playground to the White House, the bully's day is right here, right now - having taken all the advantage he can muster from the well-meaning liberal tolerances which have failed to deter him.

if and when it happens that one of my boys takes on one of the grunting psychopaths that all schools have to tolerate and gives him the kicking of his miserable, un-boundaried, parenting-impoverished life, I doubt if I shall do more than go through the motions of tut-tutting in the head's office at the subsequent enquiry - the same cynical nod at compliance that she herself learnt in the damage-limitation module of schools management, her proficiency in which she has already demonstrated by bringing two boys together in her office - one aged twelve, five foot, a hundred pounds, his persistent tormentor aged fifteen, six-foot, one-eighty pounds - to 'shake hands,' thereby having implemented, on the record, the school's decisive attitude towards such behaviour.

I recall no-one shedding any tears when one particular psycho at my own school was given the 'surprise selection' treatment - ie he, despite having never demonstrated any team aptitude whatsoever, was 'selected' (he had no choice in the matter) for inclusion in a house rugby match, during which fifteen of the school's finest - all perfectly aware of his reputation - legitimately grounded and battered, kicked, choked, elbowed, kneed, and generally mauled him at every opportunity for one of the longest and most painful hours of his violent existence - with a large, knowing crowd having assembled to add humiliation to (superficial) injury.

antisocial behaviour can be modified pacifically, given the will, and sufficient resources to repair and recover the backstory damage that promotes it. I seriously wonder, however, if the will is there, other than at the individual level of those few saints upon whom society seems eternally to rely as moral arbiters. meanwhile, I shan't stand in the way of my own sons meting out such summary discouragement as they might consider appropriate to such malcontents as enjoy beating up kids who are half their size.

god and muscular dystrophy

why are the fundies so foetus-fixated? what's their holy writ reason for getting so hot under the collar about early womb-life, given that the sacred book compilers had about as much understanding of female biology as a newt has about quantum mechanics? if the foetus has a soul, then it follows that a sperm and an egg have half a soul each, which means that two months of menstruation = one ticket to purgatory and one wank must be equal to several genocides, which means that the entire fundie population is condemned to endlessly unavoidable breaking of the holy rules and life is unutterably hopeless and shameful so why bother?
human life, it seems, is so sacred, at even the protozoic level, when it resembles little else than a tadpole, that it is worth taking a few lives to protect it.
and, when some wonderful piece of technology worthy of our place at the rim of the local galactic cluster at this period in time emerges that makes possible the control of one or two of the more seriously incurable genetic disorders known to our species, what do they do, the fundies? they wail in horror, loudly expressing their preference to continue living in the middle ages, in a condition of fearful superstitious fumbling in the dark, trusting in the enlightenment of the sacred texts.