Glastonbury 2005 - Sunday

Entering the site at mid-day on the third day is like passing through a portal into a Breughel painting - a hyperactive Dionysiac party completely dissociated from real time or place, indeed, from reality in any shape - with added smells. The smells are a mixture of mud, body odour, the cooking smells of a thousand concessions offering every foodstuff imaginable, and the farmyard, because walking around at a wet Glastonbury's not like tromping around in a farmyard where the muck-heap has been overflowing after heavy rain - it is walking around on a farm where the muck-heap has been overflowing, and, with luck, it's just cow muck.


Whatever percentage of 7 million 130,000 is, it's obviously relatively small, so, since the first is the number of online applications there were this year, and the second the number of tickets that were issued - all within three hours of lines opening - the privilege of being offered a ticket for no better or fairer reason than happening to live nearby rather than having to enter that screamingly frustrating online lottery is clearly something akin to being born with a silver spoon in your mouth - hardly your fault, but making you a justifiable target of opprobrium unless you use it, like Paris Hilton, with modesty, discretion, grace, and decorum. So bring on that opprobrium. Easy on the mustard.

The size of the site is something that always overwhelms you, not many people outside the farming community being able to visualise what nine hundred acres actually means. But all distances are increased many-fold by the drag of the mud, the average velocity of the mass of bodies shuffling in your direction (there's absolutely no way of getting anywhere onsite in a hurry) and that of the mass of bodies coming the other way. There's probably a formula to calculate this sort of thing that factors individuals in as if they were molecules in a set of intermingling viscous fluids of varying densities. Anyway, the actual distance, in walking time, between, say, the former New Tent, now respectfully, and to universal approval, renamed the John Peel Stage at one side and the Acoustic Stage at the other, is probably around thirty minutes, with a multitude of intervening possibilities to either get you lost or diverted en route. And besides, as has been endlessly reiterated to anyone who'll listen, Glastonbury is far, far more than a music festival, and if you just wanted the musical experience, the good ole BBC's three-day wall-to-wall radio and TV coverage provides a far more comprehensive (and closer) view of what's going on musically than anything you could hope to experience onsite (although this, the first year without dear departed Peelie, made his loss feel particularly piquant).


So what did I do on Sunday?

• After having paid £2.50 for a lukewarm café latté somewhere on the main drag, I had a minor grumpy moment and thought, for a festival that's promoting stuff like fair trade and Greenpeace and making poverty history and suchlike worthy farm causes, there's an awful lot of classic capitalist exploitation going on here. I'm also, incidentally, appalled at how much food gets chucked away - enough paper-plates-full of every cuisine known to man discarded in hedges, trampled underfoot, and deposited in overflowing bins to feed a lost tribe. Shame on you all, you pampered wastrels.
  
  
• But then I was an accidental witness to a wedding in the Chapel of Love in the Field of Lost Vagueness - a raucous, joyous event supervised by a jaunty lady vicar in a sea captain's uniform and attended by a chorus of nubile nuns in bra and knickers and coifs - rather like being in a Carry On movie with less suggestion and more delivery - and I got over it.
  
  
• I wandered aimlessly around the fabulous mish mash of neo-hippy art and totally cutting edge environmental showcase that is the Green Fields (my single fave objets being the little hand-painted toy steamboats that chuff around in their plastic bowl powered only by candle-heated teeny-tiny boilers) and had a very encouraging chat with a lady from the British Wind Energy Association saying how, not only has initial local resistance to windfarms almost completely subsided in the face of the reality, but that the UK is now one of only eight countries in the world to have surpassed the 1000 megawatt capacity figure. Embrace the Revolution here.
  
  
• I'm not a main stage kinda guy - don't even get me started on Coldplay - and I wasn't there for the music this year (if I had been, I'd have chosen another day, eg John Peel Stage Friday: M83 - Be Your Own Pet - MIA - cool or what?) but I did happen to come across three bands that I quite enjoyed: Soulwax (Belgian, apparently) on the Other Stage, and Dresden Dolls and Client on the John Peel Stage. On the same stage I tried to like LCD Soundsystem again, wondering if James Murphy's live set would grab me more than his album has, but failed again. I dunno - he's someone I really want to like but can't. So it goes. And I did try to get to Tori's acoustic set, but I mistimed it.
  
  
• Then I sat at the top of the Stone Circle Field looking down on this limbo in the Yeo valley between the Mendips and Pennard Hill that's normally populated by a few hundred cows and pondered the sheer incongruity of it all whilst watching little groups of fellow humans partaking in what seems to have been this year's high of choice - filling balloons with nitrous oxide from little pressure cylinders that look like miniature water bottles, inhaling deep and long from the farting neck, then turning into gurning morons.
  
  
• I Braved The Long Drop (there's a badge I believe) - the infamous toilets built over a bottomless cess pit where a vast flotilla of floaters seethes in the stinking, churning, steaming pool of ordure some fifteen feet below your bum. Every year brings fresh Glastonbury myths regarding some out of his head dipstick jumping into this thing to recover some fumble-lost item - his wallet, his stash, his wits - and never being seen again.
  
  
• I listened to someone in the Leftfield Tent talking more sense about Africa and The Debt in fifteen minutes than the entire church of the latterday pop saints has managed thus far.
  
  
• And I wandered, wondering at the ceaseless wonders, for hours, until, foot-weary, it came time to retrieve my muddy brood, head back to the bus, and home to a hot bath, my dirty wet tent days being as far behind me as my anticipation of further Glastonburies is, hopefully, ahead.
  

The Ego Strut is something that a depressing number of shameless Pyramid Stage performers took to indulging in this year: this is where they jump down from the stage into the fifty-foot mined (only joking!) no man's land populated by sternly outward-facing security people dividing them from the front row of the crowd and do a prancing preening jig, radio mic in hand, still singing, along the duckboards that've been put behind the chest-high crash-barriers for that purpose; they can, if they choose, remain tantalisingly out of reach of the grasping hands of the faithful whilst they do this, but most choose to bless the lucky few with a touch of the fingertips here and there, as if they were dragging their hands through heads of wheat, and some (Brandon Flowers of the Killers, Felix Buxton of Basement Jaxx) get so carried away by the lerv that they have to be pulled back by the nervous security persons on the point of being literally carried away by the lerv of the fans. It's blatantly god-like (here I am, you mere mortals, drink deep of my immortal presence and weep), the next step on from that pathetic powertrippy superstar gesture of holding out the mic to face the audience so that they can be reassured that we lervs them so much that we knows all the words. Even Shirley Manson of Garbage succumbed to this, although, in her case, it resulted in her acquiring the tackiest accessory of a festival which prides itself on its high level of tacky - a pink plastic sex-doll - which she took back with her when she returned onstage and proceeded to use in a sub-Madonna manner not witnessed often on the Pyramid Stage. (Question: what was he thinking, that guy in the front row who was holding it out to her in the first place? Suspicion: he - and it - was a plant. 'Man masquerades as plant at Glastonbury.' Hardly hot news.) Someone needs to whisper the word 'hubris' in these guys' ears.

And no need, I'm sure, to reiterate the stuff of legend stuff that's already attached itself, like the mud, to the heels of this year's festival as the magic moment for many thousands of people: Brian Wilson's Beach Boys' Greatest Hits set on the Pyramid stage. After the deluge, Brian (they don't call boys Brian anymore, do they?), under blue skies and sun - it had to be - for this dogged survivor of the California surf-rock scene forty years down the track. I just kept thinking of that climactic moment (spoiler alert!) in Anthony Mann's El Cid, the classic 1961 precursor to Kingdom of Heaven, when they lash the dead Charlton Heston upright in the saddle of his horse in order that he might lead his army out of the city gates and on to the final victory charge. Not only can Brian Wilson barely Smile without consciously summoning up the lingering memory of how certain facial muscle groups work - the poor man can barely hold his head upright. He sits full-square centre stage at a keyboard - which he doesn't touch - reciting the lyrics from an autocue, and occasionally moving both arms as if they were being manipulated by some heavenly puppeteer, whilst this rather sinister ageing session group with pot-bellies and thinning hair belts out the numbers around - and despite - him. Brilliant songs, mind. At one point, between numbers, he diverged from the setlist for a moment as some poignant memory of how it was supposed to work seemed to infiltrate his mind, and sang 'row row row the boat' ridiculously high a few times, before waggling his hands in a way which seemed to imply that we do it too - which we dutifully did, all hundred thousand of us, or whatever, until we realised that he seemed almost instantly to have forgotten why he'd done that, and had certainly forgotten that it’s supposed to be a round, and so after a few unison repeats of 'row row row the boat' by the greatest mass choir in musical history the sinisterly smiling session-men struck up the intro to Good Vibrations, we roared our ecstatic recognition, and the moment passed. Excruciatingly embarassing, actually. I had to leave. I tried. God knows, I tried. But I couldn't. Totally hemmed in by the press of bodies, I had to remain. Help. I don't understand. Is it just that everyone knows the words?


In the absence of some global secular initiation rite, Glastonbury has come to represent a pretty fair substitute, and has become one of those defining cultural events that invests each year's attendees with a sort of election. The more rain, the more merit. For us locals, the regular transformation of that parcel of dairy land four miles east of the Tor into a small town with a population larger than our own and all the adjoining villages combined where the most exciting musicians in the world drop by to play for three days once in a while is as definitive as any ritual. It's characteristic that when my kids, who were born here, talk about going to Glastonbury, everyone knows that they're talking about somewhere else that coexists with but is somehow apart from their home turf, somewhere that's a manifestation of the Avalonian magic that comes with the territory here anyway. It's a pragmatic magic, though, and not nearly as fluttery-flakey as some people assume. Primal Scream's Bobby Gillespie decided to shit in his own backyard when he came over all punk rocker hessie fit twenty years too late and refused to relinquish the stage for Basement Jaxx, screaming something about wanting to kill all hippies (the title, incidentally, of a song he once wrote) and stuff like that. He was finally escorted off by security, the techs having pulled the plug, to a derisive but forbearing chorus of booing and laughter. He still doesn't get it, I guess. I think this might have been his last Glastonbury.

Shaima Rezayee, television presenter, born 1981; died May 18 2005





sometimes it's hard fatal to be a woman.

MSN China Agrees to Ban 'Freedom'

veritas et iustitia

a society that upheld the belief that justice was the prerogative of all its citizens and that every citizen was equal before the law would regard the idea that some lawyers were worth more than others with contempt. that society would recognise that the sole objective of a trial by jury was to discover the truth behind the circumstances of an alleged crime or misdemeanour, and that, in order to do so, the advocates for both parties should be remunerated by the state and should be interchangeable, ie that it should make no difference to the outcome of the trial which lawyer was representing either client. indeed, such a society might even have evolved a judicial system which incorporated such a process into its due process - the lawyers being responsible to the court, not to the opposing parties, and thus having to brief themselves sufficiently to be able to exchange positions mid-trial at the behest of the judge in order to ensure their impartiality.
the current model, of course, is theatre, not justice.
the idea that a jury's verdict after a high-profile trial is a kind of final endorsement of the truth of one side's position is nonsense: a judicial system which recognises that some lawyers are worth more than others because they succeed - ie they win their cases - more than others is a contemptible tool of the rich and the powerful, nothing more.
good theatre, though.

2005 ± 1,000 years

this news report from the middle ages confirms my increasing suspicion that the world's divisions are as much a function of time as place, and that time-slips aren't a harmless science fiction conceit at all - they're a lethal fact that we seem to be powerless to do anything about.

ribbit

Ringer poised to KO Coldplay
Crazy Frog leaps over Coldplay to top UK chart
Ringtone beats Coldplay song to number one
Frog ringtone beats Coldplay to No 1
Digital Spy: Crazy Frog beats Coldplay to number one
Crazy Frog trumps Coldplay on UK charts

Judges ban sale of porn videos on net

"so let me get this perfectly clear - apparently there are certain unsavoury individuals who wish to sell this saucy stuff on the watchemercallits - the computernets"
"apparently so, m'lud"
"then they must cease."
"absolutely, m'lud"

"next case"

sickie

turning the corner today - finally! - on the worst of this utterly debilitating virus infection that seems to have pole-axed half of the world as I know it but hasn't been mentioned anywhere as far as I can tell as the life-threatening epidemic it obviously isn't, I found myself meditating on something doctor Jane told me (after indulging in the usual med-prof gallows-humour comfort about five days down and another five days back up) about the way viruses work, which is (only vaguely understood - pace you others, including the nearly-one who's just taking the last of his finals in Sheffield tomorrow - wahay!) that they 'borrow' a snippet of their host's DNA in order to replicate themselves, then (such gentlemen!) replace it, slip it back onto the shelf, as it were - except that it's now been changed a little bit. a tiny bit. an almost molecularly tiny bit. but still, a bit, as if a random word on a given page - the word 'if', for instance - had been replaced by, say, 'when'. so, after we've finished suffering the collateral effects of this latest invasion, we emerge, literally, transformed - slightly less the person, more the virus we were(n't) before. which sounds like one of those cryptic Chinese-type moments of seeing a crisis as an opportunity, or something, and making the most of this nudge in a new direction. so who shall I be now, then? or, at least, in another four or five days of increasingly less painful coughing, feebleness, and migraine. better, please God, just better. I'll do anything. I won't pre-judge the new Coldplay album. even when if it sucks.

things that really don't matter

in the same way as we find it hard to understand why, twenty years ago, we couldn't see how ridiculous we looked in padded shoulders and mullets (and that was just the boys), or that, in another twenty years time, we'll look back on the way we're dressed and coiffed today and regard that with similar derision, there'll come a time - sooner rather than later, if Allah is, indeed, merciful - when we'll look back on the things that preoccupy us today to the extent that they occlude all but the lower-brain functions with a wry smile and the briefest nod of acknowledgement that, after all, there were more important things - like noticing how fast our children were growing up, or experimenting with altruism, or failing spectacularly at being the person we wrongly imagined we wanted to be.

there are, despite much of what the mediated world pretends, real events populated by real people whose reality actually requires little or no endorsement by anyone other than those people immediately affected by their actions. however, we seem to have come to regard as normal the outlandish - if admittedly entertaining - behaviour of jack ok and jill hello and their ilk whose primary motive to get out of bed is the need to discover how many more people are aware of their existence today than yesterday. by what stagnant backwater of evolutionary accident we arrived at a point when success is measured by media profile is too recent to call, but it's clearly sooo yesterday to be outstandingly successful - as they used to say - 'in one's own field'. it's how you look onscreen whilst you're doing whatever it is that you do that really matters. it's curious how few 'successful' virtuoso violinists are female, fat, and ugly; conversely, it's quite unremarkable - indeed, a weekly occurrence - to go platinum with a wafer-thin blonde who everyone knows sings like a cat in heat but can shake her booty like a biatch.

clearly, the unexceptional narratives of our own lives will benefit from an inspirational acquaintance with someone remarkable. if we're very lucky, it might happen once or twice in a lifetime that we actually meet, touch, hear, and smell such a person, and vice versa. but it's far more likely, things being as they are, that we'll make that acquaintance at a distance mediated by time as much as by space. those who claim an intimate acquaintance with God, for instance, will, unless they happen to be one of the people who He chooses to speak to directly, have negotiated that acqaintance through a long chain of related experiences, mostly written down and transmitted, more or less accurately, in the form of stories either about Him or about other people who'd heard other people's versions of stories that they'd heard about what other people had heard about Him. and so on.

similarly, if less tendentiously, everything we know about anyone truly remarkable as opposed to numinous or merely famous - the late Susan Sontag, let's say, since that's the first name that sprung to mind as I wrote that - will, unless we were fortunate enough to have been included in her circle of acquaintance, either have come from our reading about her, or from seeing her on television, or from reading her books. obviously, the only one of these options which matters is the latter. primary sources - a useful mantra. hard as it was to try not to be mesmerised by that lightning-bolt of white in her hair, she was always fairly opaque in interview, or, rather, overly conscious of and too sceptical about the processes of mediation at work between herself and her audience, whoever that might be, to be able comfortably to occupy the role required of her. she tried, bless her, but she was obviously uncomfortable with it. in this, she was simply representing her type - the mid-European intellectual translated into the American academic/critical environment - as both supreme exemplar and, I fear, ultimate, final flowering. there will never again be her like, because the mediated world has opted for a totally different approach to thinking and doing from the one she exemplified. the mediated world's interpretation of events and ideas requires that bite-sized summaries be delivered at great speed, with frequent repetition and an abundance of sexy CGI and a composed-through electro-acoustic score, to an audience whose discriminatory faculties are assumed to be delegated to the medium. in twenty years time, however, it is more than likely that it will be her way of regarding the world that will be recognised as having been lost, and a revisionist breed of nouveau-intellectual podcaster will be virally reviving Sontagism as a radical alternative to the rolling weekly top hundred of everything.

by the same route as the soap is descended from the Greek tragedies, the celebrity is a devolved version of the mythical hero. both, being objects of patent centrality in the cultural arena, are examples of things that don't matter co-existing with things that do. what matters, within the cosmetic shell of their not-matteringness, is what they say about how we function, and specifically about the pervasive historic continuity of the human habit of organising its spirit through different forms of surrogacy. whatever the reality of their real lives, the role of a celebrity is to occupy the soap opera version of it which is constructed around them (with their complete, if naïve collusion) by the slick operatives of the mediated world - who themselves occupy roles previously performed by priests and shamen.

a common theme of the heroic myth is the chance selection of an ordinary individual to perform extraordinary events on behalf of his or her fellows. so it is with the celebrity. a previous life of startling ordinariness used to be helpful, in that this helped prime the fantasy-pump of identification that irrigates the whole process. the A- to D-list (and counting) categorisation of celebs by ratings-value, however, has necessitated widening the net considerably, and there's now a growing interest in dynastic successions of celebrity that lends further credence to the tragedy-becomes-soap model. the mediated world that is the set of the celebrity soap is experiencing a runaway population explosion caused by the sons and daughters of celebs succeeding to the mantle, a latter-day Malthusian catastrophe in the making were it not for the seemingly infinite capacity of the media to adapt to these geometric progressions of celebrity spawnings with the cold arithmetic progressions of market supply: the more celebs, the more channels for them to fill, the more channels, the more need for celebs to fill them.

the mediated world prefers percentages to numbers: this is how election results are always declared, largely to disguise the relatively small numbers of people who our elected leaders actually get elected by. there are 44 million people on the UK electoral register. in last week's General Election, the number of those who turned out to vote was 61% = 26.8 million. of those who voted, the number who wanted New Labour's Tony Blair back was 36% of that, which is 9.6 million - less than a quarter of the electorate. when Big Brother fires up again this summer, the Endemol team at Channel 4 will be pulling out all the stops to beat last year's achievement, when UK viewers chose a Portuguese male-to-female transsexual called Nadia (wahay!) to win the competition: she won 75% of the vote, which, in real numbers, translates as 3.9 million. which means that Tony Blair is worth just two Nadias in terms of things that really matter to the citizens of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. personally, I think that's generous, but that's democracy for you.

telic



"Captain Abbirose Adey, a TA officer serving as the British Army's representative alongside Iraqi officials coordinating the refurbishment of Basrah's hospitals, holds a baby delivered in the new maternity ward just completed at Al Faihaa General Hospital, a former Iraqi military hospital now converted to look after the needs of the local community. The construction work was funded by UK grants and implemented by Iraqi workers."

(from the Operation Telic archive of the Ministry of Defence website)



one of the reasons we find it so difficult to think outside the frame of the war culture is that the instruments of that culture - the army, and, to a certain extent, the police - have managed to pull off a first-rate piece of cultural subterfuge, almost completely concealing what they actually do beneath the PR facade of delivering babies and tending to sick and injured bunnies and other abandoned fluffy creatures.

the very terms we have become used to employing in describing military activity are a triumph of semantic topsy-turviness over reality: the so-called Ministry of Defence has not been called upon, since the Battle of Britain, to 'defend' anything other than our supposed national right to impose our will in the field where it most matters - usually in the usurpation of a weaker nation's right to capitalise on its native resources. how the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq can be construed as defensive beggars belief, but so it goes. all is spin.

the war cultures of America (and, by extension, the UK) work in a very simple way: the staggeringly huge sums of money available from the manufacture and distribution of weapons and military materiel is one of the golden geese, almost a sine qua non - together with pharmaceuticals and tobacco and CocaCola - of the bluechip portfolio investors, whose individual and corporate infuence in the corridors of power is proportionate to their value. armies use this stuff, but it's actually useless unless they use it, so a compelling cultural perception of its necessity needs to be maintained, regardless of whether or not that need can be justified in rational terms. almost any excuse to start a new war is therefore welcomed as a means of keeping this cycle of profit rotating and - even better - expanding. each new theatre of war is a proving ground for the latest technology - a forum of demonstration and justification for the very large sums of money billed for its development and production.

clearly, the public needs to be kept onside in regard to the fiscal extravagance of all this. why the American people haven't risen up in arms against their leaders' year-by-year extended overdrawing of the national budget in order to fund these military adventures is a staggering demonstration of the triumph of institutional mendacity and propaganda over common sense. it's happened here, too, of course, but, in truth, it's actually been going on for a very long time - the extension of the war culture far beyond its sell-by date.

the basic lie that sustains all the other lies is that the outside world is a constant threat. it's an attitude unchanged since the time of Genghis Khan, and, although it's been demonstrated time and time again that it's nonsense, it's a simple and effective way of keeping a population scared, and therefore compliant. as long as we can be made to believe that any relaxation of 'security' and its consequent military backup will result in our homes being invaded by bloodthirsty foreigners and our throats cut and womenfolk abducted and enslaved then there's no problem in rolling out the next generation of stealth cluster-scythes and armoured boomboxes which are supposed to help protect us from same.

the perpetuation of the lower-grade version of the same global threats - the myth that the streets are increasingly unsafe, that there are violent crims around every corner, and that teenagers attend mugging workshops as a matter of course - serves two vital services: encouraging an individual state of fear that fits naturally into the larger, paranoid mindset of the culture of war, and fuelling the other section of the economy that feeds most heartily off this culture - the insurance industry, the forgotten fifth horseman of the Apocalypse.

this intolerable tension between the facts and the fictions of our diurnal experience as citizens has only one inevitable outcome - a pathology of social denial that requires the continuous application of cosmetic bullshit to that tenuous membrane of suspended disbelief at the interface of the actual and the spin-doctored state of affairs in order to sustain it. such blatantly manipulative PR gambits as showing soldiers caring for children is typical.

individually, soldiers are as good or as bad, as morally equivocal and fallible as the next man or woman. collectively, an army of soldiers is by definition excused both ethical and individual responsibilities. an army is the unthinking iron fist of the body politic, and is not required to do anything other than act when ordered to do so. the bottom line is that a soldier is licensed to kill, and that he or she may, in turn, be killed, in the line of duty. such very tenuous restraints on the limits of that license as the so-called 'rules of engagement'- and the Geneva Convention - are more a part of the PR exercise than of the military culture. there are too many instances of latter-day berserkers going apeshit in the zone - from Katyn to My Lai to Abu Ghraib - to pretend otherwise. obviously, as long as there are armies, and as long as 'our boys and girls' (yet another instance of tabloid-endorsed PR) in those armies have been trained properly, ie convinced that 'the enemy' is a dehumanised object - a target only - there will be atrocious killings, and not just of other soldiers.

what happened at Fallujah and Abu Ghraib - what is still happening at Guantanamo - is acknowledged to be the tip of the iceberg of the barbaric behaviour that is par for the course of the war culture. none of this was 'necessary' in any sense other than the contractual. the sooner we come to terms with the fact that such events as these are unexceptional - merely the ones that, more by accident than design, have come to light - the better our chances of moving on to something else, something more appropriate to humanity.

so show me no more images of softly smiling soldiers holding children like a loving aunt or uncle. show me the real image - of the roaring warrior snatching the baby from its mothers breast, swinging it by its ankles, and smashing its brains out against a wall. I'm a grownup. I can take it.

the candidates

post-election update: Henry won!

family values

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

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

BA ordered to let pilot halve hours for her child

terra nostra

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

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

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

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

so they're dead.

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

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

tough call.

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

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

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

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

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

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

good news

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

vaticancy

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

through a glass darkly

(photo: Josef Koudelka)

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

slush fund



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

with a bang

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

off on or on off?


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