Semantics #2

Idiosyncronicity - when being wrong is too much of a coincidence.

Family

"The great thing about family life is that it introduces you to people you'd otherwise never meet."
Christopher Hitchens

18 Stones of Idiot, Channel 4

aka 60 Minutes of Shite.

Johnny Vegas' new show, a Chris Evans-produced rehash of "Don't Forget Your Toothbrush" (other possible names may have included "Don't Forget Why You Left TV") is hopeful but suffers on too many levels. Although sporadically funny, Johnny's new found TV confidence finds him in hectoring, arrogant mood - but if I wanted to see 18 Stones of Yelling Alcoholic I could pop down to any number of pubs. It strikes me that a morbidly obese Northerner, no matter how quick-witted, is always going to have a problem cast as an obnoxious cunt, but Johnny perseveres, casting off his previous sympathetic, somewhat downtrodden persona for a character modelled roughly on a cross between Julie Burchill and Vyvian out the Young Ones' with a massive pile of cocaine. At this point I'd tend to seek solace in the Bible, where I'm sure it says "let he who is without man-tits cast the first stone", but the trendy young do-as-they're-told audience lap it up. In fact, considering the diabolical stste of TV nowadays, the show was more than passable. Ray Winstone made a fairly uninspiring guest and getting some doofus off the shopping channel to act as foil for JV's rapier spittle was also uninspiring - so much so that I couldnt think of another word. "Celebrity Lock-in", where 80's b-list slebs - Rusty Lee (!), Roland out of Grange Hill - sat in 90s-uber-pub the Good Mixer showed that TV is the best at parodying itself, but also failed to live up even to its own half-arsed joke. And letting Neil Hamilton on was just cruel.

Overall, 50/50. Meaning I wouldn't turn it on, but I wouldn't turn it off.

First Wanking, Now This

Viagra makes you blind

Whats next? Doggy Style? Blow jobs? Blindfolds?

Theatre of Blood, National Theatre

Lavish romp, based on seventies cult film, in which a deranged old ham murders a gaggle of critics after they murder his season of Shakespeare. Each murder is a twist on a famous Shakespearean death scene - Shylock gets his pound of flesh, Joan of Arc gets frizzled alive in a hairdressing salon, to mention just two. The subject matter obviously makes it hard for an uninhibited judgement, but luckily the play, and especially the performances, are spot on. Jim Broadbent, as the murderer is fantastic, spouting amateur-dramatic Shakespeare endlessly but still garnering sympathy. The critics are nicely judged in their seventies get up, each one's character faintly representing the paper they work for. The set, the proscenium arch of a delapidated theatre, sited in the austere Lyttleton, is a nice touch. Overall, its great fun and the added self-referential element - how the about-to-open National Theatre will ruin/save theatre - made it more involving than a straight black farce. That the point they may have been making was lost to those of us lacking theatrical pedigree, didnt matter.

Cannabis March

Surprised myself by stumbling upon this demo, gearing up in leafy Russell Square for a short trod to that concrete sun box, Trafalgar Square. The turnout wasn’t great and no-one I knew had heard about it either. The poor advertising was explained to me to be due to problems getting a licence to march from the authorities. Apparently the organisers had to stump up £1800 for the ‘security’ (presumably plod) and the licence wasn’t awarded until three weeks ago. The march was ostensibly about medical cannabis, presumably being the best route for the grievances to get a hearing and there were a few wheel-chaired bods about the place but it was mostly that studenty crowd that you’d expect. The march itself was OK, quite a bit of media around and samba drummers and pretty girls. Then everybody congregated in sunstroke hell under Nelson to listen to a variety of speakers including Caroline Coon, the lady who started Release. She started badly - "The campaign for the end of prohibition is often pejoratively stigmatised as silly, hippie, white and 'middle-class'" - and then got worse - choice out of context quotes include "Most dealers of cannabis are black" and "Black youth is drawn into the criminal gang culture because cannabis is a sellers market". You can read her somewhat controversial speech here. It is of course actually well-meaning and, listening closely, she may even have a point. But it somehow didnt seem right. Luckily the wind blew the sound all over the place.

I was thinking about how the government keeps drugs illegal because they can make more money out of them that way. The criminalisation of weed is such bad grace that only conspiracy theories really do it justice.

Ong Bak

Much hyped Thai contribution to the martial arts revival of late, involving extraordinary stunt-work from the lead Tony Jaa reminiscent of Jackie Chan in his heyday. He leaps over, under, around, between moving cars, vats of boiling oil, panes of glass and countless other people - in one shot he escapes a legion of baddies by jumping up and running from shoulder to shoulder over them. Tbe opening scene, featuring 20 Thai schoolkids fighting to be first to the top of a tree - up and down the tree - was fantastic and original. The fight scenes, where he employs Muay Thai against a variety of western and oriental opponents, were dramatic and believable. Unfortunately the film commits the common error of using up all its big fights too early, so that the finale is just more of the same. Also the realism of the Muay Thai is at the expense of the delight and variation seen in the Hong Kong flicks. By the final fights it had almost lost my unforgivably jaded attention.

The just

He said to me, “you’ll sleep like a baby”
I said, “yeah I will. Wake up every two hours and cry.”

Henry IV Part 2

Shakespeare, according to popular wisdom, invented countless words we still use today. One word he should have invented is "superfluous", because it comes in handy summing up the dialogue in this drawn-out parade of insignifica. This play could well have been Kafka's inspiration for a labourious bureaucratic nightmare. It seems to me that if you are going to have to listen to three hours of esoteric verbal gerrymandering, you should at least get a few murders and a ghost, like in Scooby Doo. Watching this, in some vain attempt to up my cultural capacity, meant I turned down a ticket to see Arsenal. Luckily, they only won 7-0. Culture has not come out showered in glory.

Too Good To Be True

If something's too good to be true, they often say, it is. Alternatively, I have come to realise, it may just not be that good.

Love

Bill : He was murdered by a spurned lover
Nige : It could happen. Not to me, but it could happen.

Pope Idol

The new pope will be elected by votes from the cardinals. All the wannabes will have to do a turn or two. Could they televise it and call it "Pope Idol"? or maybe "The Cross Factor"

Dave Allen RIP

A great comedian whose enduring gags were those pointing up unnoticed absurdities in ordinary life. My personal favourite, which I remember watching as a very small boy, was one about a sign he had seen saying "Are you Illiterate? If you have trouble reading and writing, contact this address!" Others are here

In memorium, I'll offer my own. On the back of a credit card I saw a small notice saying "If your card is lost or stolen phone 0898xxxxxxxx". Handy, I suppose, if you've just stolen one.

Raison d'être

Within this life I find
that I'm craven
I could have been wine
but instead of that I'm
a raison

All of the time
I find I need a haven
I should have been wine
but I'm
a raison

The good doctor

"In America, childhood is a disease. Spontaneity is a symptom."
Oliver Sacks

Thinking is a Mindfield

Cheap Self-Help Phrase of the Week

"Your Wish Is Your Command"

Drugs damage the capacity for reason

The drugs debate takes another of its ponderous turns with the reaction to the new Met Police chief’s ludicrous attack on middle-class drugs users. Ekow Eshun makes a few valid points, but misses (or denies) the truly glaring inconsistency in the argument that the moral middle-classes should forgo cocaine because of its connection to global terrorism and crime. If ever an argument begged the point this is the one – is it the affluent user who creates the crime with their demand or is it the ass of a law which puts the control into the hands of gangsters.

Eshun makes an interesting point about Pete Doherty, the shambolic pop star, whose pictures – looking decidedly worse for wear - graced the tabloids throughout the week and who spent the weekend in prison after allegedly assaulting a photographer and stealing his money. Doherty, Eshun says, is feted by the broadsheets whilst being condemned by the tabloids. He thinks it's because Doherty is from a middle-class family, but it strikes me that drug-crushing rock stars were always working-class in the old days and were feted just the same. Well, not quite the same, since Doherty was – extraordinarily - interviewed by Newsnight’s Kirsty Wark, but it's just a matter of degree. It’s easy to say that if Doherty was in a Burberry suit he’d be ignored but history disagrees. Talent will out, generally, given the chance. (This is not to express an opinion on Doherty's talent which I have yet to actually witness, despite occasionally trying to listen to the Libertines.)

In fact the point about the tabloids points up something else, which is the way that the working-class often have stricter morals than the middle-class (which the tabloids reflect with their lurid and condemnatory coverage). They need them, because they can end up so much worse than the poor rich kids. So the problem with middle-class drug users becomes that because they have the leisure, money and space in which to indulge their drug use they encourage society as a whole to accept drug use, the results of which are far worse once they become endemic on poor council estates amongst people with none of these luxuries.

But this is really an argument long overtaken by events. It seems to be a constant one step forward two steps back. A study comes out showing that heroin, removed from its criminal snare and simply prescribed to addicts is actually basically manageable and causes little strain on the addict’s body, certainly far less than alcohol. I remember reading a report of a Swiss study which showed this in the seventies. The reaction to this sensible study is entirely predictable – a cacophony of condemnation for suggesting that people can take heroin safely. The fact that it appears they can is lost. Again it comes down to the same old point. The drug laws create more problems than they solve.


Looking through newspaper reports this morning you see the same words coming up over and over again. “Feted”, “shambles”, “worse for wear”. Luckily I’ve managed to avoid using them myself.

Rather brilliant headline here ’I chased Pete Doherty with a claw hammer’ in the Telegraph of all places.

Tree tops

Space cadets. We sat at the corner of the park, waiting for the sun to go down far enough to make it too cold to sit there any more. The wind picked up and the light trailed across the grass in long, stalactite-like rays. The sun glistened at the top of the trees, like a diver waiting to plunge off a high board. The grass rustled in the wind, spelling out the wind’s impetus, as though two invisible people were having a wrestling match. We was high.

It was inevitable, nowadays, but in a car crash you’d prefer an airbag and so, living in a society of car crashes, I’d come to prefer a cushion or two. It blew up in my face, and smothered me, just as I was getting worried. Sometimes I worried that I couldn’t breathe, but that went away.

My friend, who was restless by nature, had gone off and was considering the higher branches of a tree. Mentally, of course, all things are possible. And as the mind and the body are one, that means that physically all things are possible. It is just a matter of bending physics to will, I suppose. Not necessarily to will, of course, but perhaps more to intention. These subtle differences meant nothing to me, but they provided us with a great deal of idle chat.

I looked up in time to see my friend skirting those same upper branches with the agility of a small monkey. “Its still warm up here,” he told me, as a blast of wind stung my face.

I turned around and looked at the tree, which seemed to be still growing out of the ground as I stared, a gigantic thing of constant motion, which I suppose it actually is. The trunk seemed to be straining to get away from the roots, just as the roots seemed to be snaking out of the ground. The intention of a tree is plain – to go upwards – but does it have a will?

Climbing a tree is as natural – perhaps more natural – than walking, but it requires a certain lack of attention, a forgetfulness, which is the forgetfulness of down. Your body carries you upwards quite happily, but your mind will remain on the ground if you let it, and constantly interfere. Only when you have to return to the ground do you appreciate what it was going on about.

We sat up in the branches, smoking weed and staring into the sun. Suddenly a wave of dissatisfaction came over me. “This is all very twee,” it said, “we want more about the car crashes.” I turned to look at my friend who had nestled between the branches like he was on a sofa, but his eyes were shut. I realised I was both in the tree and on the ground at the same time. If I made a wrong move, it occurred to me, something very wrong could happen. I could either fall out of the tree or, possibly, fall back into it.

The branches seemed to constrict me now, full of intention. I realised that my arms and legs were not in their usual place, that is somewhere to the left and right of me, but instead appeared to be all around me, in front, behind, above, in places in which you’d never think they’d get to. I stretched my leg out and began felt a long hard stab in my back which ran up my spine and past my head. Air rushed past my ears, whistling a favourite tune. Branches bounced off me, as though a whole gang of schoolkids were attacking me. I grabbed one as it went past and held on tight to it, hoping to use it as protection. It spoke to me.

It said, “Hold tight.” The other branches stopped hitting me and I dangled in the air listening to the movement of the tree. I thought I’d open my eyes at this point. When I did I realised that I was above my friend in the tree, and not below him, as I had thought I would be. This gave me a powerful shock as I realised the tree had actually been attacking me, instead of the whole thing being a cosy hallucination as I tumbled downwards.

Later on we repaired to my house and sat around staring at the ceiling.

I took acid with Groucho Marx

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