Plastic People In Peril

"the best little club in the UK"

When are we going to take to the streets demanding cheap drugs and decent clubs?

We need to stand up for what we believe in

Ten Rules For Writing

Ten rules for writing fiction, written by yer honest-to-God writing luminaries: Hilary Mantel, Michael Moorcock, Michael Morpurgo, Andrew Motion, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx, Philip Pullman, Ian Rankin, Will Self, Helen Simpson, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Rose Tremain, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson; Apparently its been causing a stir on twitter and whatnot, which makes me feel old, for some reason.

There is a lot of good stuff in there but as is my wont I shall now pick upon a few negative shards that caught my gaze.

A lot of them feel the need to repeat that one about "if you want to be a writer, well you just have to write", which seemed at first hearing, many years ago, to be helpful, if very glib, but upon turgid repetition just seems glib. What if I said I wanted to be a good writer, instead of just a writer, would you then think it helpful to tell me "oh well you just have to write well"?

Lots about how you should never use adverbs or any ornamentation, which is very good advice for certain kinds of writers, for instance people can't decide that sort of thing for themselves thanks very much. I have never understood saying take out all the adverbs. What kind of writer thinks that a whole class of words is out of bounds? When the hell do we get to use adverbs? That kind of thing stinks of the fashion for spare writing, which is all well and good but is just a fashion. It's not bad advice for the many people who tend to overwrite, but my take on it would be that person should write, reread and rewrite until it sounds like something they like, not mechanically cut out of the adverbs, or words with the letter w in it, or some other sacrifice to the gods.

David Hare, amongst other odd trinkets of wisdom, offers: "Never take advice from anyone with no investment in the outcome," which seems a monumentally strange thing to say in a column made of um advice, but what do I know.

An alternate life, where I studied politics

Some very undeveloped thoughts on the state of democracy

Here an Obama adviser suggests that the Labour Party in the big cities is controlled by tight cabals who restrain the rise of maverick, radical politicians such as Obama. Quite apart from whether Obama is a radical, this raises questions about the potency of democracy in this country.

The transparency of the process by which individuals rise up through party ranks to positions of power is vital to the health of democracy. It is what allows us to say that democracy exists at all, since it clearly is not vested in the opportunity to vote once every five years. Instead it is vested in the possibility that anybody could, theoretically, rise up through a party machine to face an election. The party members who favour their platform, here represent the citizens who are not members of a party, in much the same way as MPs stand in for the rest of us when voting on law, until the politician gets to face a proper election. Finding out that this process is strangled by close-knit gangs of small-time politicians is not exactly surprising, but it informs against taking the existence of robust democracy seriously, since so much of it is already carved up between a small, unrepresentative cliques.

This is important, because the perception that democracy functions is vital for the health of society. The less a society is perceived as fair the worse the nature of its citizens' contributions. So if people believe, against some pretty impressive evidence, that democracy is thriving in this country - as opposed to power being concentrated in the hands of a tiny set of tycoons, moguls and lawyers - then they will probably be more inclined to contribute and co-operate with society in its basic functions. Less likely to cheat, steal, hurt others, help the police and so on.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps most people really do cheat as much as they can, perhaps they are cynical as to the motives of politicians - and I mean really cynical, not the faux-cynicism which is endemically fashionable but which lacks the finesse of true evidence-based disappointment - perhaps people won't co-operate less in a dystopian police state, since they already fail to co-operate now in the weakened "democratic" society of today. Perhaps it is only the power of the state to capture and punish criminals that stops us all from being criminals. But if that is so, what does that tell us about our alienation from our surroundings, and the true rotten state of affairs that passes for modern society.

On the other hand, perhaps people do believe in society and do find that they co-operate willingly because they believe that society is at least attempting to achieve fairness. If so then having genuinely participatory democracy is vital to engage and maintain that belief and prevent it getting sucked into cynicism. And genuine participatory democracy cannot begin to flourish if strangled by cabals. But then of course the cabals couldn't exist if people genuinely participated in democracy. So what kind of system do you try to bring about, which will encourage people to get involved, neuter complacent cynicism by offering genuine opportunities to contribute, and cast fresh and enduring light on the murky practices of professional politicians.

How do you get people to sacrifice their time to participate, and stop them being satisfied merely in complaining?

History Lesson

Marx said: "History repeats itself; the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

Santayana said: "He who cannot learn from history is doomed to repeat it."

I says: "Since farce is preferable to tragedy, it appears incautious to learn too much from the past."

quotes subtly altered for purposes of making post look cleverer than it is

The sauce of bad jokes

What did the fish say to the chips?
Ketchup later! Tartar For Now!!

Punk CCTV

As I was going along Holburn

As I was going along Holburn,
trying to find a bookshop
I found one Photo & Digital Shop
but no bloody bookshop

As I was going along Holburn,
trying to find a bookshop
I found one Photo & Digital Shop
two bookies
but no bloody bookshop

As I was going along Holburn,
trying to find a bookshop
I found one Photo & Digital Shop
two bookies
three greetings card shops
but no bloody bookshop

As I was going along Holburn,
trying to find a bookshop
I found one Photo & Digital Shop
two bookies
three greetings card shops
four sandwich shops
five restaurants
six public houses
seven off-licences
eight banks
nine building societies
and ten mini-supermarkets

but no bloody bookshop

Bill's demands

Today I came home and found that the local council had sent me ten (10) letters. Recently my girlfriend, somewhat inadvisedly, chose to contact the council entirely of her own free will and tell them that since she was now living with me I was no longer entitled to the 25% discount. I have no problem with paying the extra, by the way, especially since she will be paying it, but contact with bureaucracy is an activity that should be treated more or less the same way as watching Strictly Come Dancing - only when you have absolutely no choice - and the law of unexpected consequences is never more apparent than when you ring up some labyrinthintine public body for nothing more than a quick chat, and find yourself being charged for the outstanding fees for the disposal of the body of someone who died in your house in 1923.

This time the unexpected consequences have not yet amounted to much, but today ten (10) letters arrived on my door, addressed to both me and my girlfriend, which in itself is a slightly worrying development. I took them upstairs to peruse at my leisure. All seemed identical, so I opened one at random. It turned out to be a council tax bill for 2006/07, updated to take account of my girlfriend's arrival, which, for the record, happened in 2009. Fortunately, since the date of the new increased charge was September 2009, as noted on the bill, there was no additional balance due for 2006/07. Nor was there any additional charge for 2007/08, nor did 2008/09 have any outstanding arrears, neither did 2005/06, nor 2004/05, not 2003/04, not even 2002/03, which was after all, as you will remember, autism awareness year, nor 2001/02 - although the breakdown of charges this year did include £134.12 for what is noted as the Greater london council, which attentive readers will remember was abolished in 1986 - and especially not 2000/01, despite the hoo-haa over the millenium bug. Only 2009/10, that is the financial year we are currently in, saw any additional charges. The other 9 (nine) letters are perhaps a council measure in support of the post office workers, in which case I heartily endorse it, or perhaps a surfeit of envelopes that needed to be used up before new ones could be bought, or perhaps the council just felt that I'd like to know exactly how much too much money I've paid them over the last ten years for the privilege of living in a pokey one-bed in a - by official government standards - socially deprived area.

What do i do about this? Apart from, obviously, write a blog entry probably expressing not much more than I am short of things to do today. Do I complain, or perhaps merely point it out to the council that they could probably cut these very council tax bills, admittedly minutely, by the simple expedite of not sending out ten (10) when one (1) would do? Is there any point? Soon the council recycling truck will come and take back these 10 (ten) bills and perhaps some other lucky soul can be the recipient of the council largesse.

My car, ma

I was taking a sunday stroll down a suburban street, nice day, trees rustling their leaves in a summer breeze, when I looked up and saw two cars falling silently out of the blue sky. No-one was about and I watched rapt as the cars fell, one ahead of the other, both rightways up, wobbling as they fell. I looked up in the sky for a plane or somewhere the cars could have come from, but there was nothing to see, just a thin cloud far up in the distance. Only then did it occur to me that if I didn't pay attention I might get crushed by one so I started ducking around trying to judge the trajectory as they closed in.

Where I was standing a small road forked off from the main one, a scratch of grass separating them, and a wooden shelter sat in front of me on the grass. The first car hit the ground on the small road some way away. There was a ferocious noise, heavy and deep and gut-wrenching, but which it seems slightly pointless to use a metaphor to describe - the best I could think of might be the sound of two cars hitting the ground from a great height - followed by a succession of smaller, higher-pitched noises, like cymbals accompanying an orchestral epic. It was metal versus tarmac - a well-matched battle, both left in a bad way - and then bolts ripped from their fixings, glass shattered and sent spinning into the road, a searing smoke and the burning of things that shouldn't be burnt, and then the quiet.

Dust settled, glass stopped tinkling, bits of car came clattering and then to rest, smoke sailed on and up on the breeze. Perhaps, the thought occurred to me, I should check whether there was anybody in either of the cars, and see if they were alright. I looked up the main road and a small car was driving towards me. There was something strange about the way it moved, jerking through the gears and yet never getting up much speed. As I looked inside I saw a huge, fat guy, eyes drenched with medication, hunched over the steering wheel, looking worried. He drove past without acknowledging me.

Now people appeared, out of their houses and who knows where and starting gathering around, ringing other people, and probably the police, on their phones. There was talk but I was suddenly worried that no-one knew about the cars, that it had all been my imagination, and that they had all gathered here for some other reason, so I didn't say anything. Then I asked one woman: "Did you see the cars?" and the pause before she answered was long enough to make my heart flutter. Then she said: "Yes," and put me out of my misery. "We should ring the police and tell them about the plane," I said to the crowd, imagining a plane with its doors hanging open, cargo dropping away like gifts being showered by a benevolent god. Then I said: "Mind you they're probably going to Heathrow anyway."

Some pretty pictures of life, the universe and everything One pretty picture of some stars Thanks expiring picture links

(from)

(from)

Arsenal undo Celtic knot

Down to the Emirates for the tie given the unlikely subtitle "The Battle of Britain" by the souvenir floggers. With Arsenal two up from the away leg, it needed a Celtic goal in the first 20 mins, which was in the event never on the cards. Celtic turned up in an away strip of fluorescent green and black hoops, giving them the look more of a swarm of radioactive insects than a Champions League worthy football club. Like radioactive insects, they worked hard but were more or less put to the sword by Arsenal's sharper interplay. Eduardo missed a couple of sitters and got what looked from the other side of the ground like a soft penalty, and which apparently was a blatant dive. When he took the penalty you knew he was going to be cool, but he was so cool the goalie had practically packed up and gone home before he bothered to kick the ball. Crowdwise the Celtic obviously had a lot of life in them, the Emirates roused itself barely a few times; in response to the Scots' "Shall we sing a song for you?" the Londoners couldn't even be bothered to sing much of "Shall we score a goal for you?". There was a song to the old Adebayor hit (Sloop John B) which ended "We've got Arshavin, fuck Adebayor", but I failed to pick up what the first bit was, doth endeth my career as terrace scribe (but where my ears fail me, google shall prevail - it starts: "He's five foot four/He's five foot four"); the best bit of wit was when the Celtic crowd were lustily leaping up and down in their fluorescent tops - reminding me of when I watched a I think Croatian side here and their fans jumped up and down, shirts off to a man, for more or less the whole game - anyway the Celtic were leaping up and down in celebration of I guess not being in Scotland for a few hours and the bemused Arsenal crowd responded by singing: "Jump up/If you're 4-0 down." Which was nice.

A brief mention of last night's "organised hooliganism" down at West Ham - Millwall, but rather than a return to the old days it seems to have been a ruck for old time's sake. I don't think the two teams have played each other in the last ten years, so perhaps their two "legendary firms" were just reacquainting themselves with each other. Certainly there was no hint of knuckle in the bourgeois environs of Ashburton Grove, even with Glasgow in town.

like just some cool shit on the internet

The magnetic power of Bran Flakes

Tom Swifties, he offered in an amusing self-referential way, ah no um hang on

Old guy makes chairs

Cassetteboy has a blog

Thats right!!! Cassssetttttebbbboooooyyyyyy - he/they of the spectacular "Harry Potter & the under-AGE blow JOB!" and much much more - now has his/their very own blog

Progressive Conservatism

David Cameron on the politicians-are-scum revelations

I got as far as: "Our philosophy of progressive Conservatism – the pursuit of progressive goals through Conservative means . . ."

Talk about being all things to all people. We want to change things by keeping them the same. We want radical preservation. A transformative status quo. War is peace. Politics is PR. Satire is redundant.

The Unloved, Channel 4

Samantha Morton, the British Oscar-nominated actress famously reticent in interviews about her chaotic Nottingham upbringing, which included spells in a care home and with foster parents - and who is also, incidentally, the mother of my mate's daughter - turns to directing to tell a small part of her story in the semi-autobiographical The Unloved, a script co-written with Tony Grisoni. Eleven-year-old Lucy is taken into care away from her violent father (played by Robert Carlyle), a inadequate bully, who beats her with a belt while asking her "why are you making me do this?". "Can I live with my mummy?" she asks social workers a few times, without receiving much of a reply, although when she skips off and visits her mum she gives her the bus fare back to the home, without much more explanation.

For the most part Lucy is a quiet witness to the normally dimly lit world of kids in care. And while Morton shines a light into it, there is no sense of overdramatic inflammatory or sensationalist; it is a dark world we are near, but Lucy only skirts it, so the film skilfully avoids dropping into ghetto glamourisation. So while Lucy witnesses her room-mate, the mouthy 16-year-old Lauren, going shoplifting, sniffing Butane, getting abused by one of the carehome staff, and then finally going on the game, it is all abstracted, as if only revealed as what a quiet, shy 11-year-old girl can understand. Morton herself has said that the film is a diluted version of her experience.

It is a testament to Morton's film-making discipline that the whole film is underplayed to such good effect. Rather than striving to shock, it almost strives in the opposite direction, to downplay the reality. This helps make the film inherently believable. Nothing is never played for shock value. Instead the film is centred by - as well as centred on - the quiet, calm, withdrawn prescence of Lucy; the camera constantly refers back to her: Lauren is subdued by the police - cut to Lucy - Lauren sniffs on butane - cut to Lucy in her bed - Lauren is abused in her bed by Ben, one of the care home staff - cut to Lucy running away from the home - the other care home staff attack the "nonce", suspicious but without proof of his wrongdoing - cut to Lucy, who we know knows, and who always tells the truth when asked, looking on. This scene is one of the most satisfying of the film and illustrates precisely the disciplined, tight, unexcitable style Morton has gone for. Instead of Ben getting his comeuppance, we only see beginnings of his comeupance, in the same way that we only see the beginning of Lauren's slide into the abyss. Morton has said that one of the early seeds for the film was her realisation that a prostitute murdered in Nottingham had been in a care home with her.

The centring of the film of Lucy gave it a meditative quality that was amply reflected in the superb cinematography. The framing, the choice and the sequences of shots were all fantastic. Perhaps this is because there was little of the quick cutting which has become so ubiquitous, perhaps it was because of the director's choice to underplay the drama in order to get at the heart of the child's experience, perhaps it was just the choice of director and cinematographer. The Telegraph may somewhat disparagingly call it "Baftaland" but it is the first time for a long, long time I can remember being so moved by the pictures on screen, and again becoming aware of the potential for beauty in film. The final shot, with Lucy sitting on a bus on her way back from her mother's, while the sun plays across her face as the bus moves through the streets and a song that maybe Spiritualized's The Ballad Of Richie Lee plays in its entirety, was straight out of the Kubrick canon, and all the better for it.

A lot of comments I've read by people on the internet today have just complained that nothing happened, or it was over-long, or the story didn't move anything on. Which is depressing, but all the more reason to be grateful that Morton stuck to her vision, rather than letting someone else direct it for bangs and whizzes.

Choice caring quote: “Film-makers go into kids’ lives, stay for six months, give them lovely catering every day, make life a dream, it’s all cameras and da-di-da — and then they disappear, leaving a gaping hole. If I was going to make a Ken Loach-style film, maybe I might have needed the raw material, but I’m the raw material here.”

Overheard: the worst date in the world

The 476 bus from Stoke Newington, Sunday afternoon

"Yeah I went to sleep," the girl says

"You always go to sleep. You want to get drunk more."

"Hmmm. You wouldn't like me when I'm drunk. I get annoying."

"Me and my friend were in a pub in West London the other day and the people sitting next to us got up and they both left half-pints behind, so we drank them, and then we went round drinking other people's drinks that they'd left behind, and we got wrecked, oh well not wrecked, but we had a lot of drinks all for free, and then this girl left half her dinner so I was like 'are you going to finish that' and she said no so i got half a cold roast dinner as well, it was brilliant."

"Hmmmm."

"I've got hundreds of CDs, I hope you like CD shopping cos we're going to spend at least an hour in the CD shop."

"I don't really buy CDs anymore, I just download stuff."

"Do you know about Olympic weightlifting, the bar right in the Olympic weightlifting weighs 20 kilos on its own, so you know if you're lifting 20 kilos on each side, thats 60 kilos, thats like a lot more than I thought I was lifting, soon I'll be able to bench press my own bodyweight."

"Hmmmm."

when it's over, it's over

Is Dalston the coolest place in Britain? Not any more

Cyclism

So the sun arrives and suddenly my cycle to work is innundated with friendly cyclists. As if recently returned from their winter migration, they clutter up the traffic lights like a murder of crows. And murder it is.

Because most other cyclists, especially the unpractised, fair-weather ones who have magically appeared on the road, festooned with fresh-out-of-the-shop luminous cycle accessories, are infinitely more aggravating than cars. Cars have one basic, predicable motivation - to kill you - and you stay out of their way on that basis. But cars can more or less move only in two directions and from a stop have surprisingly slow acceleration. A bike, on the other hand, is quick away, but more to the point can veer in any number of unpredictable directions and has the added bonus of the ability to just topple on top of you at any given moment.

Surely, I hear you cry, I am going too far; surely the parade of cyclists taking back the city from the menace of 4x4 planet wreckers is a good thing; surely a healthier nation is a happier nation; surely there is a camaraderie between the pedalling classes that I, as a thoughtful, concerned person, would wish to celebrate. Well, maybe, if they take some cycle proficiency tests and get out of my bloody way.

It is not as though I am one of the lycra-clad, Italian frame, all-over Campagnola brigade. My bike is often no more zippy than an overweight elephant trailing across the savanna, another overweight elephant atop. I am not a snob, I don't think, I just want to be able to get where I am going. And cycling in the city, at least during the winter, has a certain libertarian bent, a small anarchistic, individualist marker against a world of mass transportation and crowded tube platforms. The arrival of the hoardes upon their bikes, much galvanised by the bombings of 7/7 (for which, thanks Al-Qaeda, a small part of western civilisation you didn't intend to do in, I presume), has curtailed my small rebellion, and now I am in danger of becoming yet another bike in the crowd.

Cycling is still, just, a rebellion, which is why, alongside miserable jealousy, motorists get so irritated by bikes. I am very much of the view that a man on a bike can do no wrong in a inter-traffic scenario. I dimly remember a quote from the House of Lords where one good Lord said words to the effect of: "Whilst being driven around, I constantly observe cyclists on the road who jump red lights [check], ride on the pavement [check], ride without a helmet [check] or lights [check], pay no attention to the highway code [check] and further to this malignant attitude apparently are of the belief that they'll never have to face arrest or punishment [check]." This is the rebellion. The argument about red lights is a particular favourite in the Lords, but is a total red herring. Red lights are for cars because they cannot be trusted to go anywhere of their own accord without crashing into each other and killing small children. Bikes, on the other hand, can weave in and out without recourse to flashing lights and authoritarian strictures. This is not to say that cyclists can't get it wrong, but the ideal is summed up neatly on a sign on the canal path in Hackney: Considerate Cycling Permitted. Because cyclists, unlike motorists, are not cocooned away in what they have come to believe is an extension of their front room; they are out in the elements and face the world directly, not sheltering behind windscreen wipers and the old yell out the window and speed off routine.

Some say, having realised that it is perfectly safe for cyclists to jump red lights, provided they do it safely, that they shouldn't because it annoys drivers so much. Of course it does. Drivers are like the sheep of the hills, while cyclists are like the foxes.

This is the rebellion; you motorists are taxed, your every misdemeanour is filmed and then sent to you with an £80 bill, you're getting fat, you can't help but pay absurd prices for petrol, and then some smug twat on two wheels zings past the lights and zips off down the road, flashing their arse in the air at you - yes he's flashing his arse IN YOUR FACE FATBOY!!!

Drivers are often prone to complain that cyclists are smug. And the truth is, most of them are. Even I, who has never had a driving licence and, mainly through abject laziness, has more of a carbon thumbprint than carbon footprint, even I am prone to the hint of murderous rage when I see someone parading their bike around with a ONE LESS CAR sticker or (especially) flag. So much so that I even considered designing a car bumper sticker than says "One less smug cyclist". Alas I worry that someone even more depraved than me might think to stick them on those ghost bikes, the white monuments to cyclists killed on the road; this I suppose shows the limit of my misanthropy.

So I hate most cyclists, although I make an exception for dead ones. But I really hate cyclists who don't have gears. The trend of the last few years for cyclists to dispense with gears, flashing about on admittedly aesthetically pleasing, if somewhat neutered machines, has engendered much debate amongst cyclists. The form over function debate has got not so much an airing as a long, slow hot air balloon ride; although the single-speed merchants claim utility in that dispensing with gears is cheaper and leaves less to go wrong. Of course not having a bike at all leaves nothing at all to go wrong.

The first time I ever saw a guy riding a single-speed bike I asked him: "How the hell do you get up hills?" "London hasn't got any hills," he sneered at me, proving there and then both the idiocy and the smugness on which the entire single-speed edifice rests. Of course London doesn't have any hills, unless you count all those hills which are in London. It is true that if you limit your ride to the parts of London which are relatively flat you may be get away with it, although whatever money you save in not buying any gears you'll soon pay out in exorbitant rent.

In fact there are two types of one-gear buffoons - the fixed gear and the single-speed. The fixed gear, or fixed wheel, or fixie if you really need your head smacked with a D-lock, dispenses not only with the gear but also the freewheel, which means the crank of the pedal and the turning of the backwheel are inoperably connected. The pedals will go round if the wheel is going round and vice versa, which seems a recipe for disaster but some riders, no doubt spun out on cheap Moroccan hash, claim that it allows them to be one with their bike. It also allows the cyclist to brake using force from his feet, by pressing against the turning of the crank. Thus some fixed-wheel bike riders have dispensed not only with gears but also brakes, which in Darwinian terms is what you call an evolutionary dead end.

The other style of single gear bike is the so-called single-speed, which takes all the aesthetics of the fixed gear but allows the back wheel to freewheel, thus making it precisely a marker of fashion victimhood. It is no coincidence that the epicentre of single-speed bikes in London is Hoxton, aka the London Borough of Fashion Victims; you can safely be extremely wary of any phenomenon which increases in ratio to its vicinity to Shoreditch.

One of the most glaring, literally, elements of the single-speed trend is when the riders "accessorise" their bikes, with wacky colours, matching wheel rims and other self-aggrandising minutae, all in a vain (again, literally) attempt to individualise their bikes, in alas the exact same way as a thousand other inadequates. Disparaging these wheeled art installations, as they irritate their way from Commercial Road to Kingsland High Street, could occupy me all day, but it did give me an insight into my ordinarily fractious relationship with cab drivers. For, at a guess, what I think when I see the single-speed glarecyles, is what cabbies think when they see any of us cyclists.

Poems for my mum

1

My mother said to me son I'm proud for you to be a man
But don't you wait for me, cos I'll be running on
And when the day came she was there and then she was gone
Don't you wait for me, cos I won't be around

We were talking about how you pass your values on
The only thing that you can give your children
Some of hers were crooked, and I left them alone
Some of them were golden, and they shone in the sun

And I now I go out walking in the places where we walked when we were young,
Hoping to find something of the child that's gone
But nothing comes of nothing, so I guess that I am done
Don't you wait for me, cos I'll be running on

2

October
bastard month that it is,
I lost my mother in its raging winds

Leaves wrap the pavement
and the days struggle for breath
and the cold comes, I dont feel the cold
just a bitter edge on the air
a nip, a bite, sneaks in
makes itself at home
and the crooked corridors
and the waiting for the lift
can stop for now

I will spend my time looking at the view

3

She's lying on the bed
She's dead
you know she's gone,
you know she's gone
but still there's the hope

They've got her on a hundred machines,
you know what it means
you know she's gone,
you know she's gone
You felt her go,
You were at your friend's and the call said
Come back to the hospital,
You knew she'd gone

A seizure they said,
and that feeling's called dread
but you knew she'd gone,
you know she's gone
as you rode your bike, you felt her spirit rise
you felt her go,
you felt her leave
you know she's gone

but there's the hope
it keeps you in the ward,
keeps her on the bed
plugged in and made to breathe,
made to beat her heart
you know she's gone,
you know she's gone
but there's the hope

you know she's gone

Then Monday comes
and there's no hope,
they want to turn the machines off
and now she's gone
you knew she'd gone,
you know she's gone
but when they come to turn it off
it rises inside
saying No! lets keep her alive,
lets not let her go
there's the hope
always the hope

but you know she's gone,
you know she's gone
but there's the hope

and now she's gone
and before you leave you go to give her one last kiss
you knew she'd gone,
you knew she'd gone
and now she's gone

4

And now you'll cry in all the oddest places
On a plane, on a boat, in a park
in the oddest places,
but not at the funeral, not at the grave
instead in a restaurant
with the sun streaming in through the windows
the little boy cries for his mum
who always came and now she doesn't come no more
I'm sure it's not for want of trying
that she doesn't hear the crying

she would but for her dying

Everyone Will Leave At Exactly The Same Time

David Byrne, Royal Festival Hall

David Byrne is basically your favourite funky uncle. In a very cool artrock band in his younger days, when you were just a nipper, he now seems to potter around some swish and bohemian part of New York's West Side doing effortlessly interesting things - travelling the world, writing film soundtracks, designing bizarre bike racks. You hardly ever see him, but when you do its always a pleasure and he's always brought some quirky and original present for you.

This year he's brought a band dressed all in white - to match his hair, I suppose - and a setlist culled from his collaborations with Brian Eno; the second to the fourth Talking Heads' albums, 1981's brilliant and groundbreaking My Life in the Bush of Ghosts and their new effort, Everything That Happens Will Happen Today - whatever the hell that means - whose vocal parts and instrumentals pinged across the Atlantic between the two auteur's emails until it was finished. The band - drums, bass, keyboards, Byrne on guitar, a percussionist with practically a village of things to bang and rattle - were accompanied by three dancers, who pirouetted and sashayed across the stage in a dreadfully modern manner, including an expressive episode with some office chairs, a lot of frolicking hither and tither, before at one point the male dancer vaulted over Byrne's head.

Of course you know that Byrne is not bringing the usual rock gig trappings - for a start he's playing the rarefied Royal Festival Hall among other rather well-to-do venues on the UK leg - secondly he chats amiably and unpretentiously to the crowd at several points. "If you want to take photos on your pocket cameras, feel free," he told us joshily, "but you in the balcony, bear in mind that your flash may not reach all the way down to the stage." Some of what he told us was interesting: when introducing MLITBOG's Help Me Somebody he mentioned that the album used a lot of were then known as "found vocals", which later became known as samples.

The setlist leans towards the new material at the beginning, but with I Zimbra as the second tune, Talking Heads material is never far away. For the first half-hour it seems very amiable, although a little restrained; the crowd sit back on their well-holstered seats and enjoy the spectacle, but roundabout when Crosseyed and Painless gets underway, played at a fair clip, the crowd suddenly surges towards the front and the stalls get the party underway, although for us trapped on the balcony, it doesn't work out quite as well. A brief sojourn to try and get into the stalls didn't come off either.

The music is of course given superb treatment and its great to see him in such great voice. However, there seems to be little wavering from the canon. The songs were all played exactly to the letter, and while the band knocks out the edgy-funk with supreme finesse, they never seem to settle into the grooves, preferring to cap the songs at the same length as on record. This seems to me to be a bit of waste, because no matter how funky a rhythm is, if you can't lose yourself in it, it aint funky enough. Most especially, there are no segues; each song stands on its own, the band takes a bit of applause before striking up the next one. This slightly uptight element is definitely in keeping with Byrne's generally slightly uptight demeanour, as is his jerky dance style, the snakelike fits and pounces, preserved from the Talking Heads days, if a bit softened round the edges. And he does wiggle his bum at the audience as well.

But the band, and the tunes, or at least the old ones, are fucking funky. The new material, like most of Byrne's stuff post- more or less Stop Making Sense, is cheerful and bright. A cynic might imagine that in about 1986 Byrne gave up cocaine for religion, but what do I know. Somehow the chirpy stuff, nice as it is, never reaches the heights (or depths) of the old gear. For instance a tune like Heaven, which gets an airing, as slow, beautiful and major chord laden as any of the new stuff, somehow manages to avoid the slightly anodyne, inconsequential, daytime radio feel of his more recent offerings.

The encores, including Take Me To The River and a the non-Eno but seemingly inevitable Burning Down The House (with DB in a tutu), wrapped up a strong and welcome performance by an art-rock legend. But while the RFH acoustics meant the sound was crystal clear, I'd still swap that overcomfortable venue for a shoddier sound in a smaller, sweatier hall. Those in the stalls no doubt got a fair bit more out of it that I did, the lucky conts.

These two have more details and some nice photos, but anyone who says that it was better than the Stop Making Sense gig must be crazy.

What's in a name

Labour sources were pointing the finger at the Unite trade union, which is riven by splits

Air pressure

"My aircraft disintegrated around me at Mach3, 78,000ft"

Phrases to make your heart sink #253

"It's set in stone . . . at the moment"

Crack House, by Harry Keeble and Kris Hollington

Wrote this off the cuff thinking it had just been published, alas only nine months late . . .

Harry Keeble is the pseudonym of a British police officer who led the Haringey Drug Squad for twelve months in 2000. Det Sgt Keeble's modus operandi was, uncommonly for the time, a direct one: He led his small team, often but not always accompanied by the police heavy mob, the SPG, the TSG, through the reinforced doors and blacked-out windows of 100 crackhouses in Haringey, arresting those that he could, confiscating drugs and closing them down, before as often as not returning weeks later to close them down again. This policy wasn't particularly an attempt to imprison the dealers, those arrested frequently got off, or received short sentences. Instead, the militancy was merely aimed at disrupting the crack cocaine industry, breaking the grip that the villains and addicts had gained over the area's residents. This went against the received wisdom - that rather than bother with street dealers, you need to cut off the big dealers - and it did take an inordinate amount of effort. At times Keeble estimates that he was shutting down three crack houses a week, plus smaller operations, involving planning and briefings, early morning and late evening raids, followed by hours of interviewing, searching and booking those captured. But the drop to zero of black-on-black shootings in Haringey in the wake of his campaign, and the dramatic decline of muggings and shootings in the area, provides him with ample justification for his tactics.

Keeble's descriptions of the raids themselves, the people that he comes across, the response of the top brass and the more general descriptions of the effect of the crack epidemic since the early 1990s make this a gripping read. Keeble is no boneheaded cop; university educated, he provides a reassuringly enlightened view of the world he barges into, and the history of police relations with the community around him. He has a good word to say about Bernie Grant, surely a police first. While he of course sees contentious issues, for instance the death of Roger Sylvester in a police cell, from the police's point of view, he manages to come across as about as reasonable a copper as you could hope to find arresting you at three in the morning in a dingy Tottenham squat. Alongside his story he tells those of some of the addicts: the teenage girls driven to prostitution by an overwhelming desire for crack, the yuppies sucked into the dark world through a combination of exotica and arrogance, the street dealers, whose dream of making big money out of drugs frequently turns out to be yet another pipe dream. The story, co-written with crime writer Kris Hollington, vividly brings to life the slums and slum life lurking only minutes away from leafy suburban London.

The book, and especially the depictions of the depravity to which so many addicts have so quickly fallen, provides a sobering tonic for those advocating legalisation of all drugs, as a leader in the Economist did last week. Faced with this sort of evidence, it would take a frighteningly brave politician to decriminalise cocaine. And Keeble gives no quarter towards that view: he believes that the war on drugs - so often written off even as we spend millions more pounds on it - can be won, that if we raided crack houses with as much vigour as he and his small, underfunded team managed, strangling the supply of crack on the streets, we would save the lives or souls of the junkies, and protect and improve the lives of ordinary residents hugely.

But what appears self-evident from reading the book, that "the drugs war can only be won by constant and forceful vigilance", becomes less so on on further reflection. The vast majority of destruction caused by drugs is hugely aggravated by their criminalisation. Crack itself was created by criminals looking to make their coke sell quicker and for more money. Take the criminals out of the equation and who is going to turn young girls onto crack in order to turn them into prostitutes, as he describes? Who is going to be unleashing wildly inaccurate machine guns in quiet London streets to gain control of a crack house, as he describes? Who else but criminals would cut open the belly of a drug mule who has died after a bag of coke burst in his stomach, retrieve the rest of the drugs and then leave him in an alley, as he describes? Crack is a devastating drug, no doubt, but the argument for criminalisation falls down when taken to its logical conclusion. Alcohol, for all its destruction, for all the madness, illness, violence and depravity that it has engendered, remains legal. Consider the gin craze of the 17th century - the introduction of a new, foreign, powerful concotion, wreaking ruin wherever it took hold. Sound familiar? Yet no policeman, not even Harry Keeble, would suggest that we need to make alcohol illegal. Not because alcohol is incapable of being abused, of destroying lives, but because criminalisation would be entirely counterproductive. The same is true, it is increasingly apparent, about drugs, even cocaine, even crack. Yet this book, as exciting at times perhaps as a lick of the crack pipe, made me think again, if not change my mind.

Amusing jobs

I'd imagine writing the entry for 'world' in the CIA factbook might have been diverting

Simple mathematics

In a town outside of Neabridge the restaurants were battling for declining custom. Some tried advertising, some tried special offers. As things got worse, many took to attacking their competitors, by badmouthing them, sending threats and attacking delivery drivers. The winner out of the uproar was the supermarket, who were now selling hundreds more microwave meals than previously. Careful investigation discovered that the manager was the root of the problem, by secretly encouraging the restaurants to expand. How did that work, he was asked. He told them: "It's simple mathematics. You have to add take aways to multiply division."

Amnity

When I was younger
I tried to be what I was not
Now older
I try not to be what I am not

Sometimes it is harder

Perhaps I am now what I am not
or am not what I am

Perhaps I have changed
perhaps I have lost
what I am
perhaps not

Would all of the fame
be worth all the cost
of what I am
and what I am not

Encouragement for Lent

or angel; anon poem

Its not a poem, its some very naughty prose

Today I took my hangover to the shop and I bought some oranges
39p each these oranges were
and 3 for £1
But they were small oranges, the kind that should be 29p each and 4 for £1
The other day when i bought them I was unhappy about the price
But as it is the local shop, & I wanted the oranges, I bought them

Today when I was looking at the oranges I noticed that there were some big ones there as well
The kind that should be 39p each and 3 for £1
The big ones aren't normally as tasty as the little ones, but they are bigger

I dont know how much extra pleasure one gets from a bigger orange
Once you are eating an orange, you are eating it
It is just one orange
It may be academic whether the segments are 10cm or 15cm long
Nobody goes home and says today I ate 45g of orange
I dont think

Anyway today I bought two big ones and one little one
The two big ones in order to get full value for my money
And the little one to enjoy the flavour of
On my way back I reflected on my choice
a careful balancing act between logic and absurdity
I peeled the little one
Its flavour was insipid
And no more restorative than a bunch of damp leaves

Later on I considered if there was such a thing as a non-careful balancing act

Security v Liberty

From Slavoj Zizek's The Plague of Fantasies, preface to the new edition

In the last years of the Communist regime in Romania, Nicolae Ceausescu was asked by a foreign journalist how he justified the constraints on foreign travel imposed on Romanian citizens. Was this not a violation of their human rights? Ceausescu answered that these constraints existed to protect an even higher and more important human right, the right to safety, which would have been threatened by too much free travel.

All relative

Here is the website of Sam Pablo Kuper, a cousin of mine, who didnt let on of his internet presence, meaning that I only found out about it while partaking in the unbecoming yet irresistible habit of googling myself. I havent read it yet except to note that Sam uses even longer and flasher words than myself, which I shall hopefully be rectifying imminently, after a thorough bathing in the refreshing waters of my thesaurus.

Educative

Its not a joke, but I found this Jerry Seinfeld quote interesting.
"School is not learning, it's exercise. You don't remember anything that you learn but the act of trying to learn is mental exercise and that exercise builds some sort of muscle that you can use."
From

Yes, this casino really is called

Moron go

Victoria observations

Having no cash and no credit cards and therefore no lunch, I stop for a while in the street on the edges of Belgravia and take in the gentle caress of winter sun. Not hungry yet, but no doubt I will be soon.

A couple, the man with a child on his shoulders, approaches their 4x4 parked in front of me. The child demounts, showing off his grey public school socks, pulled up to his knee. I consider how egalitarian I am not to feel any resentment at their obviously inordinate wealth. The man, a substantial chap, speaks to his long, thin, Scandanavian wife. She tells him: "We've had a lovely lunch, please don't spoil it." They threaten to bicker there and then in the street. The wife takes her expensive platform shoes around the car and gets in. He knocks on the window. "Stress," he says to her, although whether it's his or hers isn't clear. He walks off. As she drives away she beeps the horn twice, and waves out of the window. He waves back, his back turned, as he walks down the street.

Past me walk three men. The oldest is also the fattest, a grand specimen of wealth, who walks lamely with a hospital crutch as a walking stick. His fellows seem inadequate beside him, insubstantial and unreal. Only he, with his solidity, seems to have any reality. The other two, although clad in garments of no doubt reputable manufacture, seem cheap and low quality. Doubtless they have indulged in too much exercise in their lives, and not enough eating. I have never before considered that eating to become more real may be a perfectly well-adapted habit, instead of the mark of psychological inadequacy that we are led to believe. Despite, or perhaps because, of its long-term damage - principally gout and other diseases of the rich - it seems to be a perfectly rational response to the winds of the soul that threaten to blow us away at any moment.

Outside the restaurant at which I have inappropriately dumped myself there sits a large M-reg Rolls Royce. As the owner returns to his car he tells a interested passer-by: "1973. She's 36 years old." A year older than me. A beautiful work, no doubt, with a couple of dents in the bodywork for authenticity. She looks a bit clumsy, nowadays, as though the doors don't fit as well as you'd expect. In motion, it is a glorious sight, of course, born to occupy the road, but time has not been kind to the designer's vision. As he drives past, I catch a glimpse of the front wing, which reminds me of nothing so much as a London cab.

Back at the office, I immediately feel hungry.

On the train to Brighton

Mid-morning, not a lot of people about. Each traveller has his own little section of seating. A yout steps on the train and goes through the interlocking doors to the next carriage, leaving the door swinging. I get up to close it, sharing a friendly look of mild exasperation - "the young, eh" - with the old guy across the aisle. The train leaves Blackfriars. As it squeaks its way through London, with the enthusiasm of a teenager sent to write thank-you letters to his delapidated aunt, the door swings open again. My neighbour takes it upon himself to close it, and once again we share a friendly look of mild exasperation - "doors, eh." After East Croydon the train begins to speed up, and the door, suffering from a clearly inadequate latch/keep configuration, starts to swing open sporadically. I close it, and catch my accomplice's eye once more - "latch/keep configurations, eh." He closes it, and catches my eye. He closes it another time, and catches my eye once more. Suddenly, I am concerned. There is no more to share, yet the eyes continue to pass on mild exasperated glances. But there is nothing new. Yes, we are two concerned citizens, yes we are both responsible adults, in a world of malevolent children, yes we are both capable of closing a door, but that's it. The glances have conveyed their intent. They are gently gliding into the realm of the unnecessary, the unusual. I move to close the door again but this time my eyes are suddenly intently fascinated by a dog which cavorts in a field by the tracks. What kind of dog is that, I practically say out loud. Oh, its a border collie, how incredibly unusual. It's his turn to shut the door, the sharing of the glance is restored. As we near Brighton I start to worry: do I have to say goodbye to him? We've shared glances, it is true, a few more than strictly necessary, it is true. Do I bid him adieu? Is a final glance appropriate? What if he doesn't think so? I feel pressured, hemmed in by the twin poles of polite behaviour and innate misanthropy. I feel like an episode of Seinfeld. Perhaps he'll get off before Brighton, I think to myself hopefully. But at Preston Park, the penultimate station, he makes no move to gather his bags, nor to put his coat on. He merely leans over, shuts the swinging door and once again a glance is shared. At Brighton station, I pause, thinking that if I sit here long enough, he'll have to leave first and he can offer the goodbye glance or not. I don't mind, I'll be happy either way. But he takes too long gathering his stuff and the carriage empties and I can no longer justify sitting in my seat, so I leap up, pass him without a glance and follow the arse of the pretty girl with too much slap down the platform and into Brighton.

1010101010

Lights on
Lights off
Lights on
Lights off
Lights on, lights off, lights on, lights off
Lights on
Lights off

Wax on,
wax off
Wax on
Wax off
Wax on, wax off, wax on, whack off
wax on, wax off

Your mum
your dad
your mum
your dad
your mum, your dad
your mum i've had
your mum, your dad

Jack's on, Jack's off
Jack's on, Jack's off
Jackson jacks off, Jackson jacks off
Jack's on, Jack's off

Off the buses

Some years ago I remember seeing on a billboard outside a church this slogan: “Why pray when you can worry and take drugs?” I like that slogan. It is short and pithy and, more to the point, it offers something. Compare to this weeks’s much heralded atheist advert: “There probably isn’t a God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life. And make it sharpish, you weasely inadequate, because the non-God squad will be knocking on doors, making sure that you aren’t worrying, or non-God forbid, praying.” Maybe its just me but “now stop worrying and enjoy your life” seems to be the sort of thing a stern matron says to you, just before she dunks you in a freezing bath.

Maybe it’s just me. Maybe it’s just that I first heard about this campaign when it was bathed in approval by Polly Toynbee, who strikes me as the classic prescriptivist liberal, going around telling people what they must do to be as self-satisfied as she is. Maybe it’s just that telling people to be stop worrying and be happy, maybe, just maybe, isn’t as helpful, considerate or constructive as it may appear, God or not.

Rubbish poem

The rubbish men come
& swear & spill the rubbish in the street
& break glass

they feed their giant rubbish truck
an odd animal, which eats from its behind
& then they're gone
leaving the detritus of the detritus
that they've took away

And then comes the street sweeper
with his brush & cart
& look of placid disgruntlement

Such a seamless operation
you'd think they must be acting in concert
But the sweeper has never met the rubbish men
& knows them only by their litter
He's told on Monday go here
on Tuesday go here
and as if by magic, the streets are paved with rubbish

Sometimes he hears them in the next road
hears their shouts & broken glass
sometimes he catches a glimpse & thinks
this rubbish really stinks

Chin up

I met a Chinese guy the other day
We argued about politics
I told him: You are lied to by your press,
He said: Are you are not? And I said: Yes.

He asked: Why should we take lectures from you,
on feeble democracy,
the recent record is a shambles,
the people have no credit

Is it democracy that invaded Iraq?
That plundered & pillaged through an ancient nation?
Ah, I told him, 2 million marched against that war
& he laughed
Marching is all your democracy is good for
How did you let it happen?
You marched & then thought that was enough
I've marched, now no longer in my name, this war can go on just the same

But what do you suggest we did, I pressed
Well, could you have managed any less?

But we punish our rulers
they cannot escape their mistakes, I claimed
Ah, I see, he replied
so Blair who takes the blame
goes off to find fortune & fame
he'll not feel the credit crunch
perhaps spiritual credit, but I've a hunch
he'll buy it off with a rebirthing lunch

You cannot criticise us, my Chinese friend told me,
mainly because you know fuck all about us,
as do we about you
you believe your media
as we believe ours,
but we're not so arrogant to believe
that ours don't lie to us

overhearance

"So you see round here, the Bengalis, the Gujaratis, Punjabis, they all smell, I mean sell smack."

Suf is m

No-one eats your daily bread for you
No-one performs your acts except yourself
As death is hurrying toward you so address your life now to meet it
Every moment of your life is under the eye and judgment of God
Hatim al-Assam

A new day

"Bitch may be the new black but black is the new president, bitch!"
Sir Tracy Morgan Esq

funniest line of the day so far

I, for one, welcome our new competent, informed, professional, and intellectually curious overlords
courtesy of

Ideas Factory

These just get better and better. Todays is the Backwards Dictionary: one that arranges words alphabetically from the last letter backwards ... damnhandy for when you want a list of words ending in dom, oon or ier. Get to it my pretties!

Overheard overhead

"Yeah all the adults who want to be down with the kids are doing it."

"What's it called?"

"Weblog, or drivel for short."

Ah the good old days

Chris Morris rings the Sun

Get Your Gloat

Three Men in Another Boat

More up-to-date reviewing for you here, as I stumbled on this programme about a year late, repeated last night at midnight. Griff Rhys Jones takes Dara O'Brien and Rory McGrath on a trip in his beautifully appointed racing yacht around the Kent coast, for amusement value. Jones is a bit of a sailor and knows what everything is called. He bosses the other two lugs around in a slightly embarrassed way, quite at odds with the "I need anger therapy" series that he is doing right now.

At one point, perhaps because nothing much is going on at sea, the other two get a boat agent to value the yacht behind Jones' back. Their eyes widen significantly at the price he puts on it, and this is after they've already seen boats going for £300,000. So it's a lot. According to wikipedia Jones and Mel Smith sold Talkback for £62 million, so, well, who knew.

Yes, its rich people playing around being rich. The idea of taking three comedians and making them do something slightly unlikely, well it is a winner really. And both the poverty of the concept and the way that it does actually work are on display here. Nothing really happens, the trio are not particularly funny, they mingle with other people who have far too much money as well, what could be right about it? But despite none of them saying anything witty, they are all far too well schooled in arts of funny bones for them not to raise a smile from time to time. Maybe I'm going soft. I could have watched this for hours. It was warm and comfortable like a nice cardy. Telly for the Telegraph types. Middle-class. That's it for me, I'm afraid. I've fallen into the abyss.

Twelfth Night, Tricycle

Within a few minutes of this Filter production of Shakespeare's comedy of mistaken identity I knew I was in the middle of something outrageous. We'd entered to theatre to find a double bass centre stage, musical instruments, laptops, a drum kit, a trumpet, a few mini Marshall amps cluttering up the rest – “where are all the actors going to go?” asks one of the audience. The actors meander onto the stage, talking amongst themselves; “Chat a bit longer,” one tells the audience as we quiet in expectation, “we're not ready yet.” After a while they break into a jazz overture, and so begins one of the wildest, most frenetic, upturned, shaken all about versions of a first folio text – the Bard via Charles Mingus.

The fourth wall has rarely found itself so neglected – the audience provide costume, some get slugs of tequila, some are dragged up on stage to dance (yes that was me cavorting like I thought I knew how), at one point pizzas are delivered and passed to those in the upper tier. Meanwhile on stage a cacophony of imagination and rulebreaking guides every twist and turn of the plot. The shipping forecast tells Violio she is in Illyria; a mobile phone rings and Orsino takes the call; two characters crack tins of Special Brew; while most are in modern dress, Sir Toby meanders about drunkenly in full Elizabethan ruff-ness before later collapsing in one of the aisles; Malvolio strips to his boxers at the joy of his mistaken love; all the while crazy shit house rat jazz music is played, supplemented with scene-setting soundscapes eeked out of sample-firing playstation joysticks, feedbacking microphones, cymbals played with cello bows, all created on stage in front of your eyes, gorged on a unrestrained, febrile exuberance and then, just occasionally, a Shakespeare play breaks out.

Ah, the play. Well it happened, or some of it happened, there were mistaken identities, and upturned love affairs and hearts broken and Malvolio, O Malvolio, how he does fall viciously prey to consumption of a broken mistaken heart identity. Who knows how much of the play there is in this Twelfth Night, and in what order. Not me anyway, having spurned the chance beforehand to read the wikipedia synopsis, I barely followed the plot, but it mattered not, because the riotous energy of the show - one that takes up the challenge of making theatre work every inch of its limitations - carries you past the humble considerations of what precisely is going on. It is enough to understand enough to enjoy enough; if it ends abruptly after 90 minutes with someone having happened to somebody, who cares, I went home singing the finale. Here is a musical which never seemed to force its music on its subject (nor, admittedly, its subject onto its music); but which made music its subject, its food of love, and constructed out of that music a bizarre, crazy carnival, worth every crazy, bizarre minute.

In honour of Roger McGough MBE

I always wondered why they give CBEs
and MBEs
and OBEs
to people who do what they please
people who do what they like,
like footballers
or poets
What about people who don't?

I'm not thinking of myself
of course
but what about the people
who got a job they didn't like
because they were forced to;
because they were told to

You don't get OBEs for doing
what you're told to
which is funny, when you think about it

Nobody wants “he did what he was told to”
on their tombstone


I want letters after my name
I don't have a degree
I'm not on the honours list
and I'm not a mason
So I'm facing
a bit of a struggle

I want poet's letters after my name
maybe one of those that Shelley sent to Byron
Then I'd make people address me
by my full title
That's me:
bringing poetry to the masses

the other day we were discussing letters
after your name
or LAYN for short
I could be criticalbill LAYN
and nobody could disagree
Someone suggested ACAB
All coppers are bastards
But I don't know
I quite like tuppenies

who me?

He Appeared to be someone who couldn't bear to fulfil his talent, since he preferred infinite potential to the limits of achievement

Picture a man going on a journalism course

The headline said Hospital's £4m cost of Absent Patients. Now I straight away thought: well, its probably not £4m at all; you know they've just counted it up every which way in order to get the figure as high as possible, in order to make this story more interesting. they've probably over-valued, double-counted, rounded-up, everything they can think of to squeeze the figure up into the next million pound bracket, to give the headline more clout on what is, lets face it, a remarkably dull story about people missing appointments. Do you think someone actually thought "oh, i wonder how much money it costs all these missed appointments?" or did they think "what we need is a headline saying all these missed appointments cost loads!" Well, maybe they did, maybe they did just innocently investigate how much it cost, without any agenda at all, as part of a summer audit, and there magically dropped out the figure £4m, just right there into their laps. Well, what are we meant to think? I mean, it could be £500,000 or £2m or £20m and the story is exactly the same: don't miss your appointments people, it costs money! i don't know whether £4m is a lot or a little for missed appointments. I don't know how big the hospital is, how many missed appointments it covers, how much they are over-paying the doctors who are being paid for these missed appointments, i don't know how £4m stacks up with all the rest of the money being pissed away in hospitals, schools, councils, government, anywhere where money gets spent. I mean it sounds like a lot, £4m, its definitely more than i've got to hand, but i can't help wondering how much money we are supposed to spend on missed appointments, and when I think about it closer, £500,000, or £2m sound like too little, or at least there wouldn't be a story if it was that amount, whereas £10m sounds like far too much, a completely implausible figure. So by that reckoning, hospital's £4m cost of absent patients sounds exactly right. Phew!

The Dark Knight

What's scary nowadays? Apart from the prospect of having to ring up your ISP to complain about your internet connection being fucked all week long - hmmm, sometimes you can find a little too much out about yourself from your writing - no, really, apart from the prospect of global warming, losing your house, your children growing up to be like Sam Sparro, what is scary? Not monsters, not freaks, no way.

Normally a film is made scary by the tension, but the Dark Knight has very little tension; you know that Batman is going to off the Joker by the end, apart from anything else, and the scenes aren't played for suspense in that manner anyway, yet even so the Joker may well be one of the disturbing incarnations to be brought to the big screen for many a year.

Why so? Heath Ledger's perfectly balanced performance sits between at the under-mined meeting point of comedy and horror; he takes Jack Nicholson's version (YT) and makes it more level, more believable and down-to-earth, even as he incarnates a comic strip in front of your eyes. That is its horror, that he takes something evidently unreal and moulds it into plausibility. That is what grips you as the various bat-toys zwing across two and a half hours of screen time, the prospect that maybe, just maybe, the Joker has a point.

The film-makers do this in a somewhat underhand manner; they take a completely psychopathic lunatic and then feed him lots of reasonable sounding lines. If you miss their sleight of hand, you are in danger of deciding that, if you were to "have some of what he's having", or at least have subscribed at some time to some of the outre, but not unfathomable, theories that the Joker is trying to squeeze out, in between his supernatural feats of ingenious destruction, if you were to do that, you would necessarily and automatically become a psychopathic terrorist with no compassion or empathy for the rest of humanity.

Heath Ledger's Joker is a man on a very bad trip, but he's enjoying it. That prospect does surely worry someone like myself, who likes to think that acid will not turn people into psychopathic killers. Of course Charles Manson long ago buried the idea of the necessarily benevolent psychedelic somewhere in Death Valley, but even so I'm pretty sure that the screenwriters gratuitiously dosed the Joker up on a little RAW discordianism to unsettle the likes of me. Maybe I'm hallucinated it. Whatever, it worked. Heath Ledger's Joker is a work of majesty. When he appears dressed as a nurse, or when you catch a glimpse of him in the crowd without his make-up, he is as perfectly formed as when he drifts carelessly into a room full of Gotham mob bosses, who he just happens to have robbed.

As for Batman, well, whatever, he was always just window dressing for his villains, and though films have got more high-tech and supposedly darker, he is no match for any of them for interest. You feel like he is destined to forever be missing something, like he has stubbonly remained the campest straight at Gay Pride.

Apart from Ledger, the film falls down if not everywhere then at least plentywhere. Despite a fantastic set-piece where Batman kidnaps - extraordinarily renditions perhaps - a Chinese national from Hong Kong, (after all, China won't extradite one of their own, they tell us) and we see the US's current Chinese puzzle, despite that and the film's evocation of a city apparently under a "terrorist" assault - this a terrorist who has, let's be frank about it, purer motives than most - and despite the aerial view of a devastated building which cannot help but remind one and all of the twin towers, despite all of this, the film is never able to anchor itself and construct relevance for itself. It remains comic book stupid, brilliant, but dumb, by which i mean it has nothing to say.

But its fatal flaw, beyond constantly having people mumble potentious sounding lines beneath a soaring soundtrack (nobody i was with could tell me what the last line of the film was), was that it went on too bloody long, for no good reason, and its tightness unravelled like a ball of string rolling across the floor. The Joker, having escaped in typically brilliant fashion from police cells, then decides to run a moral test on Gotham's population, a sort of mass murder version of the Stanford Experiment [OK, probably not the Stanford Experiment, but if you know which Experiment I should be referring to, then by all means drop me a comment]. He does something similar in Alan Moore's the Killing Joke so I am loathe to say that it is out of character, but for someone so pleased with his own outlook, it seems a shame that he suddenly feels the need to prove something by constructing a ridiculous test that doesnt even prove what he claims he is trying to prove. Far better for the film to have ended with Two-Face recently injured - here I have to admit that i cant recall exactly what order things happened in, so bear with me - the Joker on the run, perhaps with his last speech about how much "fun" Batman is still intact and us half an hour better off, with no guff about the spirit of the unJokered humanity to ruin what is otherwise a cracking film.

Addendum: Interesting post by someone far more knowledgable than me, also interesting to note how much better presented the Joker is in most of the comics, compared with Ledger's somewhat grubby incarnation

Vacancy

How to look busy. Hmmm, Stare out the window, not good. Read the paper, not good. Type something meaningless in Word, not great. Do some work? Impossible.

Is that the editor over there, peering across the savannah of computer screens at my under-rated corner? Don’t be ridiculous, he’s got much more important things to be pondering than why you haven’t done any work for the last hour and a half. No way is he going to march over, grip you by the shoulders and say: “Haven’t you done anything since you’ve been here?”

No chance of anything that exciting happening. Instead of bit of work crops up, occupies me for a minute and a half, no make that two minutes, and is done, wrapped up and shoved back down the pipe to the next keyboard monkey to soak in spittle. Back to staring out the window.

Hmmm, I’m pretty sure he’s looking at me now. He’s thinking, “What is that guy writing when he’s supposed to be working? Does he think he’s some kind of reporter? Some comment writer? Obit guy? What’s he doing in the spaz corner, with all the ne’er do wells then? Ah, that must be why. He’s probably on work experience and they haven’t found anything for him to do today. Probably he’ll be gone by next week, no need for me to worry my editorial genius over him, he can stare out of the window to his heart’s content. But I think I’ll get someone to read what he’s writing though, I’m sure its about me.”

Not a chance of that, matey. I’d rather write about eating my own tail than write anything you’d recognise. Yum, yum, cor this tail is tasty. Don’t know why I’ve never tried it before. Yumptious. Good quality protein and all, I must say. A real hearty snack. Hopefully it’ll grow back by tomorrow and I can have another crack at it.

Oh god, now the night editor has got the look as well. Better get my coat ready for the off. Hopefully the oystercard’s got enough to get me home, because it’s a long walk back with no raincoat and no money to buy one.

It’s a long walk back with a raincoat, of course. Tappity tap tap, what a load of important work is getting done in this room. Everyone’s so typie its amazing. No time for a chat, I’ve got important typing to do. Ooh look at me, typing up the world’s news, ain’t I a bit of all that.

Even this drivel can’t keep me occupied any longer. I’ve run out of crap to write. That’s it, I’m on my last legs, I can’t even turn out utter nonsense anymore.

I might invent a torture called Chinese typewriter torture. They sit you in a chair and type around you for 40 years until your brain finally caves in and then they give you £60 a week pension and a decrepit flat in Haringey. Actually its not called CTT, its just called life.

Tapping must be the world’s most uninspiring sound. Rhythmless, tuneless, its completely devoid of any of the things that make sound worth hearing. Although it does hold a faint needling quality, that other people are getting on with work, while you sit there worthless and wretched. If you listen long enough you can hear waves of tapping across the room, like, well like waves, I suppose. I did say it was uninspiring. Little bursts of tapping, like gunfire in a war torn Slavic city, as you sit in a grim hotel room, betting on how far the damp will rise before the night is out.

I wonder if I should time exactly how much of this shift I spend working and how much I spend not working. At a guess I’ve spent less than half an hour actually working and its already half-8. On that basis, I’ll can do no more than the best part of an hour before I go home. Assuming they don’t toss me out with the recycling.
I wonder how long you could do a job that paid you a decent wage for just sitting somewhere for eight hours a day.

Formulaic headline

I read this story the other day, the gist of which is how two doctors watching the grand prix suddenly realised that they might be able to learn something from the speedy, intense workings of the pitstop that they could use in the critical handover stage between surgery and intensive care. Apparently this wasn't a completely gratuitious attempt to get free Formula 1 tickets and did yield some significant improvement in patient health care. But it got me thinking that this shows how any activity, no matter how frivolous or apparently wasteful - say for example, aimlessly surfing the internet or lying on your sofa staring out of the window - could one day be transformed into a unambigiously good contribution to the future of mankind, at least one of which we are all entitled to have made before we go back to feed the trees. All I need now is someone to do the transformation, and I'm quids in.

Zythophile

One of my fellow Wapping keyboard monkeys is zythophile, whose excellent beer blog, which is currently experiencing a bonanza of posts after a fallow period, is endlessly and surprisingly fascinating on the past and present of the great world of beer making. Mr Phile is also the author of this book, which traces the history of beer from a few Celts squabbling over a dubious barrel of mouldy rye through ale, hops, porter, mild and on to the rise of lager and the revenge of the microbrewery.

To commence?

Years after turning off reader feedback on this blog because there was none, and post after post finishing with: comments 0 began to look a little depressing, i have realised of course that the essence of a blog is the interaction with the readership, such as it is. So I am considering turning it back on. So, if you think I should do, please leave a note in the comment section at the bottom.

Rocket Festival, Alamaha de Granada

Excuse the dusty writing style, I thought I might flog this piece, but no joy

Some years ago many of the luminaries of Britain’s free festival scene decamped for Europe. Their reasoning was two-fold: practical, since the weather, which consistantly turns British festival gatherings into Somme-style endurances, is much better on the continent; but also practical, since the 1994 Criminal Justice Bill had given the police a new dynamism in combating the scourge of young people enjoying themselves. The continent promised more tolerance for the travelling free festival scene, and Spiral Tribe and others paraded their “teknival” around for western and central Europe for a good few years. For various reasons, however, that scene has not endured, but the spirit has had a huge impact on its adherents. And so it came about that a few years further down the line some of those same people should decide to set up a festival in the mould of Glastonbury in the dusty hills of Andalucia near Granada.

The three-day Rocket Festival began in 2005 and attempts, according to the website to be a “celebration of life and alternative culture. A meeting of minds for fun and music in a beautiful, rural and sun drenched site in the south of Spain.” Punters are promised “much more than just a concert … a three day celebration of life through music performance and art; a whirlwind weekend of delicious assaults on all the senses.” A fusion of the English festival energy with Spanish sensibilities and a chance to escape the breath-crushing rigmarole of the British licensing system.

So, for example, the line up ran through the night and into the morning. This was the first festival I’ve been to where it was possible to find out exactly who would be playing at 8.30 on Sunday morning on one of six or so different areas. The list of DJs and bands just carried on through the night, into the morning and on again into the afternoon. Of course, away from the main stage, the programme didn’t bear any resemblance to what was actually going on, but there really was no let up at the most of the stages between Friday afternoon and Monday morning.

Across the site were sculptures and installations, many built by Glastonbury favourites the Mutoid Waste Company, some of whom have decamped to Italy and who excelled themselves this time with their automated robot pole-dancing CCTV stormtroopers - which were even better than they sound. Elsewhere were billboards of graffiti art, a kids area with climbing nets that were swarming with kids, and a healing area featuring sincere-looking men sitting on blankets.

The line-up was patchy, but included nuggets of gold: Dalston heroes Bad Manners pitched up on Saturday night, Buster Bloodvessel and the boys solid but unspectacular. Mr Bloodvessel’s well reported illness has obviously taken its toll on his vitality, and he led proceedings more nonchalantly than one brought up on stories of his excesses might have expected. Turntablists JFB, alongside beatboxer Beardyman, took full advantage of a packed dance tent to show off their skills, and left the Nextmen, who played the next night, looking lacklustre. Coldcut blew away the main stage, and were the talk of the town for their live video-mixing show. From Spain there seemed at first to be quite a few angry rock bands but that was rectified when flamenco-blues band Los Delinquentes, and Barcelona-based Muchachito Bomo Infierno, with their bright, upbeat, modern rhumba, electrified the crowds. [Full disclosure: I didnt actually see Los Delinquentes and Muchachito Bomo, or Coldcut, because I was too busy tripping my bollocks off while looking after a terrified cuddly toy, but I was trying to appear professional]

The spectacular festival site, with a backdrop of epic Andalucian mountains, was compact, and it was possible to circle the whole site within ten minutes. It was doubtful whether the Spanish truly got the whole idea behind the festival. They didn’t turn up until late on Saturday and then left again sometime on Sunday morning, so the heaving main night was bookended by two of very thin crowds of English people milling around. But why should the Spanish, who are quite used to all night fiestas in the streets of their hometowns, want to lug themselves to a fenced off area in the middle of nowhere, pay good money and then camp in a dusty outcrop with a load of English people?

But thin though the crowd was, Sunday night did hold one golden moment: Zurrapa, a traditional but youthful flamenco group, took to the stage in the Cantina Galactica with a gang of fierce solo dancers and proceeded to show us jaded losers the all-too-rare sight of tradition safely treasured in the hands of the young.

First is nowhere

In 1971, Jacob Holdt, a 24-year-old Dane, entered the US with $40 in his pocket and bummed around on his way to a holiday in South America. Shocked by the poverty, racism and desperate circumstances he found around him, he began living as a "vagabond" amongst the people he met. His parents sent him a cheap camera and for five years he sold his blood plasma to get the money to buy film as he hitch-hiked over 100,000 miles up and down the poverty-stricken reality of Nixon's America. Needless to say, the pictures and stories that he gathered then, and since, make up an extraordinary, epic read which, typically enough, he has put up online in its entirety. A beautiful voice of conscience, he serves as a stringent reminder of the horror of the real, unromanticised ghetto and also as a gentle but penetrating lesson to people, like myself, much fallen amongst cynicism and laziness and fear.

I'm in the market for information

In the market amongst the usual piles of tat, fake designer clothes and cheap tools were two tall, slim black guys with about eight DVDs laid out on a sheet on the ground. They stood above the DVDs and, as people ventured towards them, began their spiel, in the manner of a courtesy light. "Information everyone needs to know," one of them said. "Information about the government and what it's doing." He pointed to one DVD. "That one's David Icke, talking in Brixton Academy, with part two there's over nine hours of him talking, telling you what's really going on in the world, the Royal Family, the people in power." He paused, apparently waiting for a flood of interest. "That one's Bush and Bin Laden, it tells you how the Bush and Bin Laden families have been doing business together for years. You look intrigued, sir," he said to someone who was walking away. Another black guy bent down to pick up a DVD marked "The Rise of Rastafari". "That one's roots and culture, yes," the salesman said, but it wasn't his top priority. I thought about it, and then I left them to it. "Information everyone needs to hear," said the other guy as I fell back into the crowd perusing mobile phones.

Inventionally

While perusing the groaning shelves of my local shoddy chinese products emporium, I chanced upon this (there will be a picture of it eventually): THE MUG WITH A PLUG. This brilliant invention allows you to drink your cup of tea while getting electrocuted, just the sort of handy technological development that makes having left the trees so worthwhile. But why stop there? Why not develop more rhyming products? Here's a few of my suggestions:

THE CUP WITH A PUP! For all your dog-drinking needs
THE PLATE WITH A GRATE! So you can strain your pasta and eat it in one fell swoop!
THE COMPUTER WITH A ROUTER! This one is self-explanatory
THE CAR WITH A LAR! Once I invent the lar, this will be the obvious next step
THE CLOCK WITH A SMOCK! For those mornings when you just can't face the time
etc

Rolling in the Heather

I see Heather Mills has got £25m for divorcing Macca. £25m! I'd cut off my left leg for that much!

Runway success

So to the Methodist Central Hall for a rally against the proposed third runway at Heathrow. What was I, practically a lynchpin of the apatheterati, doing there amongst the angry and strident? I can only plead fraternity: I was there because a friend was on the abundant list of speakers, and I was working nearby. I remember rallies from the old days, when there was a left-wing to speak of, but this was quite a revelation. The place was full, but it was more of a Methodist congregation than a rabble awaiting rousing – well-heeled, well behaved and predominantly old. I would have been unsurprised to see Saga leafleting outside alongside the Green party. I lost count of the number of full-length coats and fur-trimmed accessories floating about, not to mention the good number of craggy visages topped with gleaming pates (and that was just the women). I wondered if it wasn't just the same left-wing protesters as used to go to rallies all those years ago, older and better off, or whether it really was the new breed of Tory protester, of the kind we first saw marching – marching! - for hunting when Blair was just out the traps. In fact this issue has a cross-party consensus – which sounds good until you remember that the last cross party consensus was for the war on Iraq, but never mind – so we had Tories and lefties and, to judge from the speaker panel, a preponderance of Liberals. Lacking any obvious markers to try and gainsay the scope of the political spectrum represented in the packed hall, I divvied up the greys by counting ties against beards, and came up with a slight leaning to the right. This was somewhat confirmed by one of the early speakers who said of the government: “I don't know who they think they are, and really I don't think they know who we are!” giving the impression that this is all a gigantic mistake which will be put right as soon as the government cottons on to the plethora of Daily Mail readers it is aggravating.

Before the speakers we were treated to a band who played the sort of MOR tune that brought to mind driving out on the M4 listening to Magic FM, so I suppose was suitable. But the lyrics were relevant, if a little gauche. The chorus even included the line “stand up to the powers that be”, something I've not heard for quite a few years. After the band finished playing the song, they quickly reprised it and tried to get everyone standing up and singing along, which was not an overwhelming success.

A lot of MPs queued up to speak with varying degrees of competence, including the Lib Dem leader, who only reinforced the idea that nowadays politicians are geared towards telly, and flounder hopelessly when asked to work a room. Many of the politicians betrayed their lack of mastery, painfully repeating the same facts and lines that previous speakers had iterated, while the crowd grew less and less keen on clapping endlessly as the evening wore on. Susan Kramer did a short speech which was memorable because she said something along the lines of: “There's a lot of people who are not here because they think nothing can be done, well now we can tell them, yes it can.” This, I think, should be said before every public meeting about anything, anywhere.

Much later we had a video message from Boris, which gave the impression that he'd just worked out how to turn the video camera on. He leant into the camera alarmingly, so that his forehead was cut off by the top of the screen, and spoke into it in a haphazard way, from a dowdy looking office with the blinds all drawn, as though he'd been using the video for much more entertaining purposes moments before. The film resembled nothing so much as a poor webcam blog made by a complete idiot, which I suppose is what it was. Boris's act of being a chump seems to have rubbed off on the other Tories; the next one to speak could hardly help himself fluffing his lines in that buffon-charm way that tries to give the idea that “hey, i'm a bit of clown, a fun guy, what possible harm can it do to give me loads of power!”

Despite most people leaving long before the epic list of speakers had been trawled through, the speakers did (generally) get better as things went on, John McDonnell particularly good and Geraldine Nicholson showing the rest what passion, humour and commitment actually look like packaged in a speech.

Speaking personally, I'm not too keen on rallies. Being a contrary type, I tend to find that if I listen to two hours of people stating one point of view, I tend to end up thinking that there must be something pretty good about the opposing view, or they wouldn't be hiding it. That's not to say that the campaign is wrong: the government have undoubtably cheated and lied their way to get this runway which only a tiny group of corporate power players want or stand to gain from. And rallies are also useful for a few other things, one being that you can tell a lot about what is going on by what people clap the loudest. What they clapped the loudest tonight was the statement that the Department of Transport are in bed with the aviation industry.

Afterwards I met a few of the campaigners I knew. Chatting to them was an middle-aged guy, the sort they used to call soap-dodgers, who looked like he'd just come from a tree camp. He made the blue-blazered security nervous. “He's not one of them activists, is he?” one asked.

There goes the childhood

“I'm fed up with these kids, growing up, taking our jobs,” he says. “Have you seen how they go on? They're all crazy, bringing all these drugs and gang fighting, graffiti, violence, this used to be a nice area.”
But weren't you a kid once yourself, I ask.
“Yeah, but I've grown up,” he says. “I've fitted in, become an adult, these kids now they can't do that, you can see, they're just not civilised. My father, OK, he had kids, he was forced to, by unforseen circumstance, but he always made clear we had to be adults and fit in with adults. These kids now, how can they fit in with our adult society? Its in danger of losing its adultness.
So you just want to pull the drawbridge up behind you?
“Look, I'm not against kids, don't get me wrong, but they should stay where they belong and not spoil a perfectly good society.”
Aren't kids good for the economy, I ask. Aren't they going to pay his pension?
“Well, that maybe so, but it doesn't stop it being wrong. We need to Save our Society, Kick the Kids Out!”