democracy

it's an old potato, but one worth chewing, now that the d-word trumps all rationality: that democracy has nothing whatsoever to do with moral arbitration. 'democracy' is no more inherently synonymous with 'good' than 'might' is synonymous with 'right' . when the majority in a given constituency decides, by democratic means, that a course of action which is morally compromised is nevertheless necessary, then that course of action becomes, de facto, the right course of action - even if, by all independent criteria, that course of action is wrong - as long as the elected authority endorses that view.

in a sense, this is no more nor less than a reflection of a root behaviour whereby 'we' - that amorphous entity that comprises a large enough grouping to be called a society rather than a family or a tribe - arrive at a collective agreement that such-and-such an abstract concept is one thing rather than another: that this thing, for example, is 'art', whereas this other thing is not, that this thing is 'true', whereas this is not, that this thing is 'good', whereas this is not. there are innumerable forms of marginal behaviour that, depending on the constituency or grouping of the instruments of persuasion, be they religion-, law-, or media-based, will become perceived as either tolerable or intolerable unorthodoxies until or unless the tides of those constituencies change. conversely, there are as many examples of once-commonly enjoyed behaviours which, because of such a tidal shift in the zeitgeist, are now completely marginalised: from public smoking and racial stereotyping to public executions and trashing the environment.

it's all too easy to perpetuate the idea of 'democracy' as being the least bad of the processes by which a government governs - and what two people can agree on what 'democracy' means? - when the governed are being as continuously misled as to the processes by which they are governed as we, the people, the supposed demos whose government supposedly belongs to us, are. even though the failures have been exposed time and time again in all nations which call themselves democracies - from the voting irregularities that install a government to the quasi-legal manipulations and mendacities that sustain it - there continues a tenacious belief that this is, indeed, the least worst form of government, and that there's really no practical alternative if what we want is that most of the people be content with the way things are run most of the time.

a majority is just a majority, and there are many situations where accepting the majority position simply because it is a majority is fundamentally wrong - the so-called 'tyranny of the majority' in a conflict between two diametrically opposed positions, when the supporters of one position outnumber the supporters of the other, when a free vote will automatically favour the more numerically represented. at a national scale this can lead, and has led to criminally repressive, and indeed, genocidal measures being instituted against ethnic or religious minorities under the technically legal guise of democratic transparency (a classic example being the manipulation of the electoral boundaries in the city of Derry, in Northern Ireland, to maintain Protestant control over a Catholic majority).

the likelihood of righting it now that it's so rooted in the global consciousness is zilch, but it's still beholden on those who care about such things to continue considering why democracy is wrong.

royals



whether it be for cutting the ribbon at a new motorway opening, breaking a bottle over the bows at a new submarine naming, or declaring open a new civic building, a royal is still the celeb of choice, and it's hard not to ask - in these enlightened times - why?

we have a new hospital on the edge of town - rather a nicely designed, airy, single-storey building, small (only 36 beds), with a physiotherapy gym, an x-ray department (proudly sporting four rhino pics in the waiting area, incidentally), and a minor injuries unit - whose official opening, last week, is the major item in all of this week's local papers, for no better reason than that it was opened by the Duchess of Gloucester.

who she?

well, she was born simply Birgitte van Deurs in Odense, Denmark, in June 1947, the daughter of a lawyer. after moving to Cambridge, and a period working in the Danish embassy in London, her life took a fairly dramatic turn when she met and subsequently married HRH Prince Richard of Gloucester, the second eldest son of HRH Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, whose career as an architect had been curtailed by the death of his older brother, thus bringing him first in line to his father's dukedom, and necessitating his taking upon himself the usual royal burdens of representing his cousin, the Queen, at openings and banquets and such. as the grandson of King George V through his son, Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, he became, upon the subsequent death of his father in June 1974, nineteenth in line to the succession (he is currently eighteenth).

'a keen motorist', as they say, Prince Richard is president of the Institute of Advanced Motorists. on December 23rd 2004, however, he kind of blew that by getting banned from driving for six months and fined for speeding, this being his fourth similar offence in three years.

for some reason, whenever there's a royal needed around here, we seem to get one of these two - sometimes both. it's not as if they lived nearby - their official residence is at Kensington Palace and their country seat, Barnwell Manor, is in Northamptonshire. maybe they just like it here. anyway, many of the organisations of which the Duchess is Patron have either medical, educational, or welfare connections, and the Duke is interested in things like architecture and conservation, so between them they seem to be able to cover the more pressing local eventualities. this time, though, she did it solo.

as usual, she arrived by helicopter, which provides, I think, a significant clue as to the royals' enduring popularity. whenever Louis XIV put in a personal appearance at one of the masques he staged at Versailles for which his reign was famous, he made sure the designers had constructed for him something spectacular, like a golden chariot surrounded by clouds, that could be made to descend from the flies in appropriate Sun King mode. this self-appropriation of the ancient Greek theatre device of the deus ex machina was certainly intended, at the time, as a deliberate emphasising of the monarch's divine right to rule. and whereas few, now, would go so far as to maintain that the anointment of a modern monarch at his or her coronation was anything other than a symbolic acknowledgement of the constitutional relationship between church and state, there's clearly a tenacious residue of atavistic association at work across a wide swathe of society that still believes, deep down, that these people - these royals - are gods.

they descend from the heavens, and even C-list examples like this one seem to trigger a kind of cowering reflex, their mere presence transforming otherwise intelligent, coherent professionals into tongue-tied morons who happily suffer the ritual self-abasements - the bows, the curtsies, the fixed smiles, the fish-limp handshakes - and, simpering with pleasure, almost fainting with delight at being permitted to touch this person, engage in the kind of discourse that would discredit the intelligence of a braindead axolotol:

so how long have you been a person in a suit?
for as long as I can remember, ma'am.
how wonderful. and is it thrilling?
awfully, ma'am.
how simply splendid. well done.
thank you, ma'am, thank you.

I exaggerate. I have it on trustworthy authority that, as aristocrats go, they're really rather nice, quite intelligent people, these two, and, for no better reason than that she's a Dane and he's an architect, I'm inclined to believe it, being as irrational in my own Danophilia as I am rational about my republicanism.

perhaps that's the point - that the scorn I profess for those sorts of people who defer to rank for no better reason than its representing a form of social nostalgia - a nod at an older, better time, when everyone 'knew their place' - is a missing of the more important point: that even the most ordered, rational society requires its rituals, its traditions, its ways of marking significant events with something slightly more elevated than a three cheers and a communal toast, and that, despite their history of greed, psychotic acquisitiveness, and inbred psychosis, our beloved royals, who, in reality, owe the cringing respect we bestow on them to nothing more tangible than an accident of birth, seem, by virtue of the sheer historic inertia which they embody, uniquely qualified to fulfill this role - and it is, most literally, a role - better than anyone else.

values

common to a number of the proto-judicial systems that were being codified throughout Europe during the Middle Ages was the concept of weregeld, or 'the value of a man's life' (women, being chattel - either their father's or their husband's property, were valued more directly). so, according to your social rank, if someone injured or killed you, and was found to be guilty of that crime, he had to pay your next of kin his weregeld to forestall the otherwise inevitable vendetta.

as 'blood money', this concept still exists in many older cultures - something which the occupying armies of Iraq, coming from their own highly developed culture of compensation, have quickly adjusted to, discovering that an Iraqi's life comes quite cheap compared with, say,
a rich man's hurt feelings (or, at the median point,
a poor woman's health).

The Questioning of John Rykener, A Male Cross-Dressing Prostitute, 1395

*ahem*

a demented diatribe on motorphilia

on a badness scale of one to ten, with the late Mother Teresa at one end and the never-late Jeremy Clarkson at the other, cars should register at around nine-point-nine-nine.

virtuousness is always relative, of course, and some cars are badder than others, but between the outright unrepentant Pol Potty evil of the urban SUV and the honk-honk twee naughty of Noddy's Little Red and Yellow Car lie the barest split hairs of real moral distinction. they are an atrociously expensive, time-consuming, planet-despoiling blight, less useful in real terms than the inglenook, and arguably less effective as a status symbol. actually, both as status symbol and as functional object – as a means, that is, of travelling from A to B in the least possible time and with the least amount of stress - they compare very poorly with the yak, which has the decisive advantage of manuring the fields it plods across.

and yet we do love them so. from their cute little 'bleeps' as we unlock them to the hilarious polyphonic wailings of their alarms which the barest kiss of a dawn breeze seems able to trigger. and they do – let’s admit it - save us having to sit next to smelly people on buses or in the tube. plus they are a neat ritual weapon - good for getting our own back on people who’ve cut us up by catching up with them and riding an inch from their tail. oh – let’s be honest – cars are also a really cool real weapon - a finely-tuned lethal weapon - Vorsprung durch Technik – despatching an estimated 1.2 million humans throughout the world annually, according to the recent World Health Organization/World Bank report, ‘The Global Burden of Disease’. this report, incidentally, predicts that road traffic injuries are expected to take third place in the rank order of disease burden by the year 2020.

third place! (‘War’ only manages a paltry eighth.) killer-cars are outranked only by heart disease and – wait for it – Unipolar Major Depression (or terminal moping-about).

so how is it that cars kill people?

well, they don't do it by themselves, that's for sure! (cute giggle.) stationary and inactivated, they're no more dangerous than any other lump of inert matter. so what transforms them, once that ignition key has been turned and they've been eased out into the road, into such dangerous objects? (rhetorical question - I'm not here to insult your intelligence - this isn't a Jeremy Clarkson rant.) whatever it is, these mysterious transformative powers extend to the drivers as well: that person who tried to kill you on the Junction 23 sliproad is more likely than not a model citizen with badges for kindness to strangers and gentleness to babies and animals in real, ie non-motorised life. this inelegant symbiosis of car and driver seems only to require the most basic urges of aggressive competition to be activated. occupation of the driver's seat serves, de facto, as a liberation from the more inconvenient social requirements of restraint and cooperation and, even, the law itself.

so, given that humans operating them with undue care and attention and at ludicrously unsafe speeds are to blame for all this, and that there are legal checks in place to counteract this behaviour, such as speed cameras, what's the problem? why does the carnage continue, and why is it projected to continue, unabated, to such a patently unacceptable level within the next fifteen years?

in a word, because there are very powerful lobbies at work to ensure, not that it does continue, but that if it does it's everybody else's fault - the government, the local council, the police, the tooth fairy - than either the car manufacturers, the oil suppliers, the go-faster-stripe dealers, or anyone else who contributes either directly or indirectly to this lunatic car-loving culture we have come to inhabit. and how is it that the so-called independent motoring organisations (which are about as independent from the road transport lobby as Hallmark is from Christmas) are so successful in diverting the fundamental blame for the continuing motoring massacres from the drivers to the government, the local councils ... etc? because (again this is really rhetorical, but let's risk insulting Jeremy here) their sine qua non is The Happy Motorist, a creature as mythical as The Green Man, who inhabits a world of empty country roads unmarked by anything more threatening than the flickering shadows of the trees he or she drives past (remember all those ludicrous stories about the epilepsy-inducing lines of plane trees on French B-roads to further justify the local authorities' hacking them all down because so many drunks were driving into them) at speeds which he or she deems 'sensible.'

the real world, alas, is this far away from gridlock most of the time, and inhabited, clearly, by more psychopaths than you'd care to shake a stick at (well, maybe not - best not to provoke them too much), who consider themselves so elevated above any laws that they can with impunity flaunt any and all speed restrictions and feel justified in threatening anyone who gets in their way (ie everyone in front of them) with inches-close encounters of the tailgating kind - at speeds which could only be described as 'sensible' by an F-16 pilot.

this insistence by the raving motorphiliac lobby that most drivers are able to recognise what a sensible speed is and will adapt to different road conditions according to the various factors of visibility, weather, and personal skill and experience is just so much specious nonsense - patent nonsense - arrogant nonsense - and potentially (and actually) lethal nonsense. the argument that roads liberated from speed restrictions would somehow be safer roads is just so dumb it's flat earth, and yet this is what the motoring liberationists are seriously trying to propose. in the face of the overwhelming evidence that speed restrictions and their enforcement through speed cameras save lives, they want to lift them because they're an infringement of their civil liberties?! pull the other one! arresting people and holding them without charge or trial on suspicion of their being involved in criminal activity is an infringement of civil liberty. the introduction of an ID card with a chip capable of tracing your movements through a GSP link is an infringement of civil liberty. photographing your driving too fast and fining you for it is not an infringement of civil liberty.

the citizens of Nowhere Land are beholden to no-one, restricted by nothing, and as free to do whatever they fancy as any other citizen of a fantasy community. in the actual world, citizens are obliged to accept certain responsibilities in proportion to the degree of their participation in society. in this world, 'participation' includes the use of the superstructures and infrastructures of the available transportation systems. our reciprocal responsibility, therefore, is to use these in a manner which, at best, gives due consideration to the other users of those systems, and, at least, does them no harm.

using the roads is one of those social events over which we have only very limited control. the act of driving along a road is one of the few truly universal social levellers. roads have to be shared with a random selection of people, many of whom we'd go to considerable lengths to avoid encountering in 'normal' life. this is one of the reasons why so much design emphasis is placed on making the internal environment of a car so comfortably insulated from the external. our cars have become (or have become to be perceived as) armoured mobile extensions of our homes - in many cases, even more comfortable versions of our real homes. for many of us, the most comfortable seat we ever sit in is the driver's seat of our car. and how many of us live in homes that are air-conditioned? and sound-proofed? with tinted windows? and surrounded by cool glowing dials and multiple control surfaces?

such is the ubiquity of this myth of invulnerability that anyone who dares to challenge it is demonised by the motorphiliac mafia (of which Mr Clarkson must be considered at least a don, if not a godfather) as, at best, a killjoy, and at worst as some kind of political subversive. the car is the dominant global fetish, arguably a religious fetish akin to the St Christopher that dangles from the more superstitious rearview mirrors, in the most literal sense that its primary function as an extension of the personality of its driver predicates on a set of superstitions and beliefs that no amount of rational discourse is able to displace. the imagistic juxtaposition of the tangle of blood-stained metal in the latest motorway massacre pics on the news with the slick state of the art persuasions of the car adverts in the commercial break becomes as meaningless as any other in the lexicon of the commodification of everything. there is simply no recognition of a causal relationship between the two. the one doesn't exist in the same world as the other.

there's only one way to break this morbid obsession, and that's by exposing the bottom line.

the cost (in hard cash - the human life factor is clearly non-factorable) of restoring that annual megatonnage of motor-mangled human flesh and bone to something resembling functionality must be absolutely astronomical. in direct, hands-on medical intervention and rehabilitation terms high enough, but then when you add on the loss of skills, productivity, and all those little things that make a working human so valuable to the economy, it must send the gross through the roof. if someone were to calculate the actual figure, add on an underwriters percentage, and then feed it back to the motorist as a percentage of his or her annual insurance premiums, there might be the stirrings of a recognition that, not only is he or she being exposed to the most appalling injuries as a direct result of his or her love affair with the car, but that he or she is paying right royally for the privilege of treating everyone else, even if he or she never gets injured.

my personal pipedream is that sanity finally prevails, the motoring industry concedes that their relationship with the roadkill is no different than that between the arms industry and the battlefield, and cars are begun to be developed that make us feel less, not more secure with the speed at which they can travel. if our Beamers and Mercs were modelled more on Trabbies, made out of corrugated cardboard and coming with a top-limit two bhp engine with no more torque than a salad-spinner, we'd start thinking twice about cutting up those losers trying to overtake that convoy of grannies in electric wheelchairs on the bypass.

sooner rather than later, despite everything the government's ass-licking response to the road users lobby implements to forestall the inevitable, the country is going to lock solid into one endlessly revolving mass of traffic, and long before that happens, we're going to have to learn to drive as if we were connected carriages in a train - once you've managed to join the stream, you stay where you are - because any attempt to overtake will be as impossible as it will be pointless. this is already an all-too recognisable scenario for anyone using, say, the M25 on a regular basis, or using any of the motorway system south of Bristol during a Bank Holiday weekend.

long before then, I hope that they'll stop painting speed cameras a gaudy yellow and publishing maps of where exactly they're located, and institute a guerilla campaign of camouflaging them and moving them about randomly and secretly. and enough of this discreetly flash-photographing offenders and fining them. each camera should be equipped with a metal-piercing harpoon that decelerates the bastards from sixty to zero in 0.4 seconds flat. that'd teach 'em. they could keep the photograph printed on a T-shirt with a choice of two amusing legends: 'I survived 10g in a random airbag test' or 'my other car's in the wash'.

Sebastião Salgado - Antarctica

even at ridiculous postcard size and at a crumbly 72 dpi this photograph is quite overwhelming. imagine a 12 x 16 bromide print! Salgado's always been technically amazing, but this is the sort of nightmare hand-printing job - jagged ice against cloudy sky - that any photographer will reel at (an all-zones job if ever there was one), and if he really did this himself, then all credit to the guy. it's way up there in the Anselm Adams/Edward Weston class, and confirms the rhino law that a great photograph is one part visual skill to 49 parts luck to 50 parts technique: it's all too painfully predictable what a hash a boatload of enthusiasts would have made of this image if they'd all been in the same boat at the same time. it's almost too dramatic - Romantic verging on kitsch - a Piranesi take on Gormenghast - perhaps only appealing to a minority now, of shameless romantics like me. I'm glad he's shifted away from the photojournalism - some of the criticism levelled at him for beautifying poverty was harsh, but, as a lot of it came from the impoverished themselves, perfectly justified.

ch-ch-ch-changes

change happens - consider the universe
humans are no different from stars or galaxies - only the time-scales are different
the shift from wanting to change to changing is as simple as removing the impediments that we place on the mechanisms of change through the fear of it
take off the brakes, take away the safety nets, and wait - change will happen
simple
but wanting to change is usually about wanting things to get better
and change can also make things worse
this is called risk
without risk - no change, either for the better or for the worse

some changes - possibly the only ones that matter - are single-use, ie they occur out of a most particular set of circumstances which can never be repeated: these circumstances represent an opportunity which, once passed, is irrevocably gone. Shakespeare knew this, as he knew most things to do with the human condition:

There is a tide in the affairs of men,   
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;   
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
(Julius Caesar Act IV Sc.3)

as for individuals, so for societies
my gut-feeling is that we've blown it
big time
but what to do?

Sam Beckett to the rescue (somone else who knew a thing or two about the human condition):

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
(Westward Ho)

Being a Muslim for a month

7/7

what happened in London yesterday was appalling. what happened in New York on 9/11/01 was appalling. what happend in Bali on 10/12/02 was appalling. what happened in Madrid on 3/11/04 was appalling.
the evil citizens of Terror - that amorphous nation with which we are told we are at war - have struck again, and the rhetorical response has been a unilateral reinforcement of the wall of prejudice and fear and hatred that stands between us and them.
one of the most frequently used words in the headshaking lexicon is 'incomprehensible', as if there had never been a historical dialectic, as if there had never been any art, as if we had simply not evolved the capacity, through the intelligence and the imagination, to understand anything which didn't fit the familiar. this is not merely ignorant - it is lethal. just because you and I feel constrained by our upbringing, our education, our sense of morality, even our beliefs, not to retaliate when provoked, not to separate human lives by sect into those with and those without value, not to be willing to surrender our own lives to some greater perceived good, does not automatically bestow the right to ignore the possibility that, underlining these perceived 'evils', is a fundamental disturbance in the global body politic that must - and could - be addressed, providing the means of understanding - the sine qua non of diplomacy - is not continually hamstrung by this kind of semantic censorship. it is possible - nay, easy - to understand and deplore, but to deny understanding as if by so doing we were somehow tainting ourselves with evil is to back ourselves into the same cul de sac of superstition and stupidity that got us all into this mess in the first place.
what happened yesterday in London was appalling. what happened in New York on 9/11 was appalling. what happened in Fallujah in March was appalling.

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.