Books for 2011

So this year I'm going to write about 100 books I'm going to read during the year. I know, I'm already behind schedule if I'm only starting now but I did decide a bit late. I will also, of course, cheat. The nature of the cheating will expose itself soon.

Last week I read "Touching the void" by Joe Simpson. We have taken to reading and watching mountain climbing films recently. We both read "Into thin air" by John Krakauer (having enjoyed his Into the wild and Under the banner of heaven) and decided to get our hands on the IMAX movie shot during that season. The climbing sequences in that really hammered home the craziness of the whole endeavour. This led us to watch Scream of stone by Werner Herzog - we're huge Herzog fans - partially due to Reinhold Messner being the climbing consultant. This may not be the greatest narrative film ever. Werner (my pal on facebook) disowned and didn't write the script and the acting is not actually great. But the mountain Cerro Torre, a 2KM needle of ice covered rock with a mushroom shaped summit made of windblown snow, is simply one of the most insane things I have ever seen that anyone would want to try and do a Batclimb all the way up. Back to the void. I read it over a decade ago. A few years ago this would have been a problem but I found myself with no clear memory of details from the book, as distinct from the film, which I watched maybe seven years ago. I have now rectified that by going back to the book and I realise to some extent how this happened.


Even now I read a book like this without fully understanding the climbing. I didn't draw little diagrams to work out the traverses and rappels and how the ropes were anchored during the descent in particular. I certainly wasn't entirely sure what a piton looked like and I think some of the knots and rope climbing techniques I don't really understand. I find that when a book doesn't form a coherent whole in your mind it is easy to forget. This was always the reason I didn't finish books if I really didn't like them: to allow me to forget something best forgotten. Of course in my youth I suffered from too much memory, which is not really a great problem these days. As I've got older I have discovered that if a book on a subject is interesting, it's even more interesting to read 10 or 20. And watch films. Because of that we've ended up reading a few books and watching a few more, and my intray has a few of both piling up. People ask, "what you sit at home reading and watching but don't climb?" to which I invariably reply "what is it about books and films with people losing body parts and lives to cold, ice, wind, hypoxia and falls that would make you want to get up a mountain? Oh, and we do it with the fire on on a COMFY sofa."

Back to the book: this is exactly the kind of extraordinary survival adventure that would make any sane person feel glad of their warm fire. It asks you one really important question over and over again: would you just lie back and die? Now would you? Stand on your dislocated broken knee and walk on broken scree, now would you? Thirsty passing out from pain hallucinating from hunger, now would you? How about now?

nationalism, rampant crony-capitalism, and liars

Patriotism transmutes individual selfishness into national egoism. Loyalty to a nation is a high form of altruism when compared with lesser loyalties and more parochial interests. It therefore becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses and expresses itself, on occasion, with such fervour that the critical attitude of the individual toward the nation and its enterprises is almost completely destroyed. The unqualified character of this devotion is the very basis of the nation's power and of the freedom to use the power without moral restraint. Thus the unselfishness of individuals makes for the selfishness of nations.
Reinhold Niebuhr Moral Man and Immoral Society 1932

How can you be a republican and absolutely abhor nationalism as I do? Just like that mate, just like that. I disagree that it becomes the vehicle of all the altruistic impulses. I would argue instead that non-altruistic impulses become transformed by regular association rather. Niebuhr calls this vicarious selfishness. This lunch I was also reading an essay about James K. Galbraith's The predator state: how conservatives abandoned the free market and why liberals should too which argues that the counterbalancing forces of big labour, big business and big government have collapsed. They have, he argues, been replaced by a new class

"endowed with vast personal income, freed from the corporation [who] set out to take over the state and run it - not for any ideological project but simply in the way that would bring to them, individually and as a group, the most money, the least disturbed power and the greatest chance of rescue should something go wrong".

And to distinguish why I find this more persuasive than Naomi Klein's Disaster capitalism by analogy: he distinguishes between Cheney and Wolfowitz. Wolfie is a fool. A mad fool and a powerful one, but no more than a fool. An ideologue. He claims to have been SDS (I've never seen him mentioned in histories of the SDS, but whatever) so he was a party line man from the beginning. Whatever the party. And committed to ideological purity. Someone like, ****** for example in Ireland, who went from being a trotskyite official IRA loyalist all the way out to a pathetic apologist for a corrupt taoiseach at the end of his career (and got rewarded with a seat in the second chamber by the morally compromised man himself). Cheney couldn't care less. Rumsfeld could lie unblinkingly on TV about how al queda had massive underground caverns with air conditioning, entertainment centres, libraries, swimming pools etc. on air because he didn't. really. care. At all. About you. About what was best for the world. Cheney's unbridled and unhidden cynicism is breathtaking. And it is they, rather than their ideologue stooges who rule the world. Galbraith's argument that corruption and cronyism (of the state and its interventions in markets) are central to the way capitalism is working now are, no doubt, horrifyingly persuasive to the majority of people in the West. Klein's examination of the disaster capitalism / shock treatment ideologically driven imperative seems now only to be a special case of a greater truth. One needs only to look at the building industry in Ireland if one seeks examples and confirmation closer to home. Look at the financial industry that lived off it. Look at Anglo-Irish bank and their threats to the government of disaster prior to their generous underwriting. The state paid for their risk taking. This is not the "free market" nor is it "capitalism" it is the tools of socialism used for the ultra-rich, the very powerful. And pay great heed to Anglo-Irish's imprecations to the ordinary people that they had better tighten their belts and not seek pay rises in the future. And that public services would have to be cut.

What needs to be cut is the umbilical chord from the state feeding vampires the taxes of the people.

* I am honour bound, by the way - next time I meet him - to bitchslap this macho runt. He wrote after Susan Sontag died that his one regret was that when they met in Sarajevo he didn't put her over his knee and spank her. I believe Sontag was a monster to deal with. But she was a great intellectual and essayist rather than an intellectually stunted hack and apologist in search of power.

She would have kicked his sorry short arse for him too.

David Foster Wallace

A mate asked about him in an email and this is my reply:


I'm still seriously depressed, no disappointed the way that life does disappoint you, about DFW.

Somebody quoted from American Psycho to me recently when I said something about music and I was just thinking "that is the kind of "ironic" hip, self regarding, smug, empty, vapid, self conciously clever, consumer as creator, dead end of literature and culture that David Foster Wallace demonstrated is the nadir of civilisation. A rallying point, a line to make in the sand and anathema to reject. And now he's dead". I read Infinite Jest and A supposedly fun thing I'll never do again as well as various journalism. He's infuriating, Razor sharp yet obfusticating, earnest, sincere and elusive. Difficult and brilliant to read. I wanted to edit his books with a hammer.

McSweeney's doesn't do it for me, I feel like I'm not part of the joke, not part of the scene. DFW had a terribly self destructive streak, an inability to not analyse, to enjoy, to deliver straight. It's the thread that joins Harvey Pekar to Curb Your Enthusiasm but allied to a fierce and ferociously learned intellect and a genuine and sincere quest to understand modern society, happiness, sadness, horror, television, literature, advertisement, debasement, entertainment, infantilism, addiction, autoeroticism, intoxication, and again and again, sadness and living.

I can't honestly recommend that you read him however.

Lars and the Real Fantasy

So last night's film Lars and the Real Girl - in contrast to last week's properly creepy the Orphanage -was cute, life affirming and touching. Perhaps not a little twee. We went to it as fans of Six Feet Under (one of the many series that makes me say that current US TV is the golden age. The best in the world. Ever.) I'm sure you know the set up, painfully shy (or actually mentally ill and terrified of contact) young man brings home one of those Real Doll sex toys and it gets integrated into the community when everyone plays along with his delusion that she is real (Brazilian half Danish missionary - the Danish is important, this is a Danish community he lives in). The film had to work hard not to creep me out - I'd just come across the book Still Lovers in work the other week. This is a book of men and their real dolls. Even the shots that weren't creepy were creepy. Really creepy. I mean those shots that didn't look like the aftermath of rape looked like creepy mental illness...

The first big thing they did to avoid the ick factor was they made Lars a serious churchgoer and in his fantasy Bianca (the realdoll) was a missionary so she slept in his brothers house. I'm glad to say that his brother didn't appear to take advantage of her. Leave out the psychobabble gloss they put in - that rubbish appears in all american movies and is no more or less serious than the magic that would be used to explain this in a fairy tale - and we have an incongrous, perhaps surreal device or plot element to make us consider the ordinary surroundings as if they were new. And now we see where the real fantasy is: the community he went to, his church, his work, the local GP who is also a psychiatrist and has hours of time a week to spend chatting to him (who's paying?). Hell the Emergency Room springs into action when he says Bianca is ill. Did he bring her to the local Kaiser Permanente ER? Did they perform a wallet autopsy on a sex doll? How did the insurance underwriters classify the treatment? Was it perhaps experimental and will Lars get a Real Bill be doing a long sequel of overtime to pay for it?
The fantasy is not that a man can love a doll, or that his community will accept it. The fantasy is that the community exists in the first place. Sure, you may think that your church is that community, leeching and tithing your money out of you: but try actually bringing in a sex doll to church.

Klaus Nomi is cold

I was trying to post this somewhere else, but I couldn't. So I'm putting it here.



I bought the rather fabulous Harmonia Mundi Masterworks - fifty milestones of Western music. I'm not really qualified to make judgments on classical music but I think anyone can spot this is a bargain. And the performances are exellent and the choices have sent me down various avenues (though there is too much baroque for my taste). I loved Purcell's opera King Arthur from which this is from.
It appears to be going for £70 (over 100 yoyos) on Amazon.cock. I bought mine for €40 on Presto - Amazon never delivered so I cancelled. So maybe not such good value any more:)

Addendum: it seems not to be too readily available any more, but Harmonia Mundi have it for £29 English pounds. So that's less than a quid a disc which is alright.

Previews

I really meant to write something serious here yesterday. It was to do with sentencing policy and drugs and stuff. But I didn't. I did write some previews of DVDs that arrived in here yesterday so I'll post them instead.

Don't look back (classic DA Pennebaker Bob doc)

Into great silence (god botherers being quiet for once - most popular film in the IFI last year)

20 to life: the life and times of John Sinclair (doc on life of MC5 manager and White Panthers chairman who got 20 years for two joints)

Gram Parsons Fallen Angel (biopic of dilletante heir and musician whose sweethearts of the rodeo, Burrito deluxe, grievous angel etc. are the palimpset for ALL country rock)

South (Shackleton, antartic, in glorious white and white)

Life and debt (mandatory viewing apparently)

Sicko (Moore)

Early cinema primitives and pioneers (you've read about all the films here in media studies books. Now you can watch them too. You lucky lucky people)

Two disc version of Nosferatu (we have the BFI one. I challenge you to find a film this old which still works as well as a film and not just as a historical document)

Lenny - (biopic. Swearing is $$^$ing great. It's big AND it's clever)

Nil by mount (nil by eyes after watching this)

Control (Ian Curtis biopic - for the fans)

Britannia Hospital (was Lyndsey Anderson a ruined genius or just a prick who couldn't be bothered getting on with other people - transpose your opinions on Roy Keane)

Network (it's studied for the script - but there's much more going on. Inchoate rage. The only sensible emotion)

1984 (original poster tag - will ecstasy be a crime? prescient)

Animal farm (the CIA funded one unfortunately - not the famous video nasty)

Deathproof (Tarantino's entry in the torture porn genre)

What have I done to deserve this (perhaps Almadovar's most misanthropic film - a must see)

Coming home (Vietnam film I bought under the mistaken belief that it won the best film O$€£r the year that Apocalypse now and Deer Hunter were out - it didn't. But Hal Ashby is still the forgotten great of 70s US film)

Exiles (Cannes winner 2004)

Chinese Odyssey 2002 (Chinese spoof on Crouching homo hidden hamster)

Myra Beckinridge (legendary "they didn't do that? Did they?" version of Gore Vidal shock sex satire with Racquel Welsh)

Rio Grande (Wayne, O'Hara, River, Big)

Phil Mulloy extreme animation (he tattoos the animations on his schlong, lasers them out, starts again. Looks like a rasher in the microwave for 10 hours.)

Atonement (utter and complete SHITE. waste of two hours. By turns opaque and infuriatingly facile. Keira Knightley isn't even the most annoying thing in it.)

The wire (don't bother - I have it first)

Jury's still out on The Wire - I've watched two episodes and it doesn't strike me as being a radical departure from the genre. Maybe incremental rather than revolutionary.

St. John's Passion

Seeing as how my living circumstances have changed this year I only went to one performance in the Living Music festival. I went to none last year but it was John Adams and after having to sit through the RTE Concert Orchestra while they dragged their lazy arses through a soporific rendition of short ride in a fast machine I didn't feel like putting myself through it. Part should have been different and I would have gone to lot more if Back of Head wasn't in my life. I chose to go to the Passio on Saturday night in Christchurch and brought my mother as a Christmas present. I am vaguely familiar with the piece - I have the Naxos rather than the Hilliard ensemble recording and the presence of the Hilliard Ensemble was part of the reason to choose this rather than one of the other performances.

Hmmm.... they play it considerably slower. Glacially paced. Sure nothing much goes on in the music anyway but the pace, for me, exposed it's thinness. I love devotional music but rarely pay attention to the words. I often find myself walking down the road singing "chant down Babylon" but when I think of Babylon I think of Gilgamesh and rather appreciate its impact on world culture (apart from chunks of the bible being nicked from old Babylonian poetry. That's not so cool.). I digress. I had much time to pay attention to the words of this passion. The text comes from the latin version of St. Paul. It's a rum choice for a passion. The authorial interventions by The Evangelist (in the role of Basil Exposition) are many. And frequently elongated and monotonic. Jesus in this version is not a sympathetic character: he is aloof, a grudging participant in fate. And a smart arse "are you the king of the jews?" asks Pilate, "you say I am" Jesus replies. No Jesus, he didn't, he asked you a question, now tell him the answer and get out of there. The only attractive character, and played by the tenor who gets the liveliest musical line, is Pilate. He doesn't want to kill Jesus. He is forced into doing so by "the jews". This passion is a deeply anti-jewish text written as an apologia for Roman imperialism. Jesus was doing his job, so was Pilate: it was the nasty jews who weren't. It's quite obviously written for a Roman audience.

Most of these flaws are within the text itself. It does not lend itself to a sympathetic narrative of the passion. Its racism is out of tune with the modern world (if it was anti-roman we wouldn't really mind...) Its Jesus is almost old testament in his aloof disregard for creation, with only an almost modern Bart Simpson smartarse personality lending him humanity.
Po faced and solemn rather than moving and contemplative. I shifted on my wooden chair for the duration.

I don't care what Giovanni says - Arvo really does look like a hunched up Salman Rushdie.

I also wasted two hours watching Atonement at the weekend. If it wins an award for best supporting actor or something it should be the house that does it. The house was the best dressed, most interesting character in the film. The film was a strange mix of difficult and facile. The child was a proxy for the author in a crass way - her atonement was anything but. The exposition was sometimes so subtle as to make you feel a scene had been cut. Which it probably had.

Despair, hope, Repuberlick, and the Trap

As I have said many times before - it's not the despair. It's the hope that kills you.

Might I be allowed to watch republic playing a match without peeking through my fingers shaking my head groaning numbing myself with drugs and alcohol beseeching the elder ones in syllables beyond language?

I can see it all: I turn up. Spruce. Alert. Hopeful. Watchful.

My spirit gets dashed against a pebbledash wall and rubbed repeatedly while raw down to a stump.

Or:

He doesn't turn up as manager. Even Venerables decides he's too cool for us (and in fairness, too cool for the repuberlick is not too hard: the most high profile toupee wearer in English football is too cool for us) and we get somebody else who once coached Scunthorpe reserves through their bad patch before the current renaissance.

Adam Curtis' the trap pitched a world of theoretical people: hard hearted criminals the lot of them upon which the political / economical elite / establishment based its calculations for control. If only we were those people. The prisoner's dilemma would be simple: always assume the worst about Irish football. Always assume failure. We are trapped not by failure but by hope.

Saw this somewhere..

Also this looks really interesting too... Ordered a copy for "work".

Hiatus

Forgive the lack of posts. I have a social networking / virtual community of practice project on the go and I will not be writing here until after the middle of June. I'm busy with
http colon backslash backslash crcp dot gcd dot ie

why have I suddenly gone secretive?

Sequel to Pi

If you don't know what this number is it's probably less funny.

Busy?

It turns into a catalogue - I can't write about it all. Thursday night went to see Kicking a deaad horse in the Peacock with Stephen Rea. I liked the horse. I bought the play to read it afterwards - I kind of missed what he was saying towards the end. I think he was knackered. Whenever I break my rule about seeing plays in the first two weeks I'm disappointed. Most people found his performance compelling but the play shit. In the pub on Saturday they were saying it was written in the 80s and sat in his drawer - he knew it wasn't good. So I didn't pop over to Sam Shepard in the pub and say hi, I mean if I'd loved the thing I would have.
Friday went to see Indigenes at the IFI, about Algerian soldiers fighting for France in WWII. Afterwards had tagines and Alsation riesling in respect (the film ends up in Alsace, they are fighting alone for a French village where the inn is called Sonntag and the snow is coming down). Fine film, very emotional.
Saturday evening went to see Joanna Newsom live in the Olympia and she was absolutely phenomenal, I think it's the first night of her current tour with a small scale band. All of whom were annoyingly young and gifted. Everything she does from playing the harp, to singing in an 'ickle gurl voice (she talks like that too) to using words like 'spelunking', 'dirigibles' and 'ledger' (though in fairness it does rhyme in the song...) should annoy me but I think she's a genius. Actually, I love the word dirigible. It's a privilege to be in the same room as someone when they turn it on like that. A real fucking privilege. She totally blew me away. Did a good long show too. After went to the pub and everyone had seen the play... that's when we saw Sam in the pub by the way.

Sunday went to seen Nanni Moretti's new film The Caiman about which nothing should be said and in the evening on to Sunshine Danny Boyle's pastiche of 2001, Solaris, and Event Horizon. Did I mention Silent Running? That too. I loved it. Particularly the bits where not much happened, but then I think that if Solaris was twice as long, and half as much happened, it would be four times as good. Which is kind of the opposite of most people's opionions. But it was kind of ruined at the end when Sam Neill's character from Event Horizon turns up all burnt skin and the movie briefly follows slasher conventions. I find them tedious in the extreme. There is not a film that I have seen where the baddie defies logic, physics, and good writing to repeatedly return from the dead to terrorise the people in the movie that I haven't despised as I was watching. Think of something like Cape Fear where that gurning oaf masquerading as an actor won't just fuck off and die... Anyway, I liked the film's abstract noise, liminal images, and grand gothic doom laden aura. I found it gripping and frightening. I found the acceptance and even craving for death believable and refreshing for a film such as this. The people I was with were less enthused.
Caught the Georgia O'Keeffe exhibition in there sometime too. It was alright.

La Folie

Just after buying (on Amazon.fr, thank fuck there isn't an Amazon.ie so we get to buy stuff at the cheap prices in France) an album by Benjamin Biolay and Chiara Mastroianni (no idea if she's related to the famous one) along with the box set of series one of Doctor Who for less in yo-yos than the price in English pounds of the box set from Amazon.co.ck Anyway, why would I buy such fey French acoustic pop? Have I no patriotism and cannot I get my fey whimsy from an Irish source? Well it's like this: on our honeymoon in Mexico we occasionally stayed in actual hotels, you know the things with plumbing in the rooms and TVs and it was rare there or anywhere that the music channels were not playing Shakira. You remember that Shakira video where she is being voyeured by the neighbour and she greases up in engine oil, pulls here trousers down so her hipbones are sticking out, lies down with her shoulders and feet on the ground and hips in the air, jiggling her scrawny butt across the floor humping nothing furiously, looking like she's going through sexual ecstasy and yodelling like a transgender Bulgarian weightlifter auditioning for "the Sound of Music: the muscle mary version"? Well that one pissed me off mightily because, well hearing her "it's a pity my breasts are small so you won't mistake them for a mountain/ it's lucky my ass is big. a like a my mama's" yodelling makes me cringe every time. I mean, if you're going to do porn Shakira just do fucking porn so I won't have to hear and see you when I go for coffee. Anyway, this video was such an antidote to Shiteera.



And if that was far too wimpy for you try this: the resemblance to a Serge duet is uncanny, with subtracted loucheness though. Je suis folle d'elle.

Why am I happy?

So why was last night's one-nil victory by the Republic satisfying where other matches haven't been? Because they played a mostly young team with adventure. Because it looked like we now know our best side: Given, Finnan, O'Shea (for want of better full backs), McShane (who was impressive again last night and is already a bedrock of the team), Dunne (who made one mistake as usual but is otherwise unfussy, tough, fast, and his distribution last night was utterly sublime), Carsley/Kilbane, Ireland (when we play with say, Ireland and McGeady there's nobody to win the ball and we get blown over), Hunt (who was dreadful for 3 minutes when he came on, lost the ball, but not his confidence to run at his men and anyway picked himself up and tracked back), Duff (back on form for the first half last night), Doyle (whose header last night for the goal was awesome), and Keane. Though perhaps Duff's performance might have had something to do with Keane's absence.

So there were a bunch of players out playing who were fine passers of the ball, the control, the takes from long passes, were a joy to watch. Most importantly: they played without the crippling fear that has blighted this team. Whether they can take this courage on the road is another question, but beating Slovakia away should not be beyond them. They are technically superior players.

And talking of Keane's absence. He was putting it about that Cork players weren't playing because of a Dublin bias. This was the least Dublin based team I can remember. There are now young players from around the country and not just Cork. Ireland is from Cork, Miller didn't play despite being in form because when he has played (bar against Sweden who didn't show up for the match) he has been useless. He also said that Given had too many caps and shouldn't have played some of the matches he did: he played when he was asked to unlike Keane. The team needs him for solidity whenever any experiment is made. The previous team needed Keane and he wasn't there. I know he's looking for the Ireland job in the future when he slags off GIven but he's simply not in a position to do it.

Keane should have played many more games for Ireland but he let us down instead and assuaged his own ugly, cynical ego.

Walk on by

I had meant to discuss Adam Curtis's fascinating and fun documentary The Trap: what happened to our dream of freedom but to be honest I spent most of it counting the music and going "got that". And anyway the most powerful artistic experience that I had this weekend was from a Dionne Warwick record . I just bought some kind of 60s greatest hits (by Dionne Warwicke as the record has it) and the first song is "walk on by". I've never been a fan of the song itself particularly. But oh the production. And her voice wrapped around you, warm and full. Kind of quite the opposite kind of performance to the shrieking divatrons catterwauling through their autotuners. Oh so hysterical with the soul they got baby, sounding like a Japanese robot doing vocal warmups while grudgefucking an overweight golf-playing samariman. And filing its nails. You ain't got soul baby. If you don't know what I mean have a listen to the vocal histrionics in that cover version of "Lady Marmalade" that was used to promote that sparkly turd "Moulin Rouge".
I digress, I digress
I concentrate less, and less
Let us speak no more of such things. But "walk on by" in its original production and arrangement is beautifully sublime. The mix makes no attempt for everything to sound as loud as everything else. This is an edit. There is a really loud guitar chop at the beginning, barely audible acoustic guitars and her voice. The piano kicks in for the chorous and the famous piano figure is played quieter here than in other versions: they were aware it was facile and didn't overplay it. The orchestra swells, swooning backing vocals drift in and out of the mix, suddenly it all drops out and her voice is present in the room, with a more live room reverb than all the other sounds - she is there with you, suddenly intimate and shocking. The whole thing glides on to the end, with the drums really only kicking in during the fade out. This sounds like nothing that could be played live. It is pure electroacoustic music. A product of recording technology being used inventively to create something new rather than echo something else. Mature use of technology. And you need it on record. A mature technology. I don't know what it would sound like on mp3 and don't want to know.

Staircase wit

The cold snap that traditionally accompanies paddy's day has just ended, proof that while god doesn't exist he does hate us so very much, and the spring birds are singing merrily. And is that early chicks I hear in the attic space above me? And we just discovered that the only way Ireland would win a cricket game against a test nation is by foul means. Not necessarily ours - but this is the foulest, most sordid sports story I have ever encountered...

Anyway, watched "the consequences of love" the other night and really enjoyed it. It had a sedate, hypnotic pace and only became less good in the last third when things started happening. The director wasn't so good at that. Then again Tarkovsky was no John Woo and that's no bad thing. Other people have compared it to Sophia Coppolla, and my Beloved and I both thought of lost in translation but it was far less crass than that film. And deliciously morbid too. And a powerful argument for the quotidien blandness of days going by, endlessly, pulling you into the future.
Perhaps we enjoyed it so much partially as it began with pictures of escalators (or more properly moving sidewalks) and blank industrial spaces and bland hotels and we had just been to see Thomas Demand's L'esprit d'escalier exhibition at IMMA. He makes sculptures out of paper, mdf, plastic and photographs these sculptures into luscious huge prints. The subjects are frequently semi-industrial bland areas: a stock office in a warehouse, a stock room for a shop, a lift, an indescribable yellow machine in a factory. At first the pictures look like the real thing and then you notice that the steel stairway spiralling around the machine is painted on; that while the untreated MDF shelves are real the office is in fact largely paint, and the phones sitting on the desk lack buttons and numbers; the balconies coming out of the building are simply corrugated cardboard.

Don't bother with the Alex Katz New York exhibition on at the same venue - NY toffs drawing pictures of each other. They should print them in the New Yorker. Or something. In case you didn't know I despise as contemptible the graphic style of the New Yorker and it old world pretentiousness "from our correspondant in Tallinn". Ick.

Kennedy assassin: the long wait for a culprit ends

“I was responsible for the 9/11 operation from A to Z” Khalid Sheikh Mohammed said in a transcript released by the Pentagon. The transcript goes on to detail the many chilling murders he was behind. It seems "It also makes clear that al-Qaida wanted to down a second trans-Atlantic aircraft during would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid’s operation." (MSNBC News)He was behind the first bomb in the World Trade Centre, the attempt to shoot down and El-Al plane ("or other jewish airliner" wow, airplanes can now have a religion. I live in strange times) in Kenya and the Bali nightclub bomb. "Other plots he said he was responsible for included planned attacks against the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Empire State Building and New York Stock Exchange, the Panama Canal and Big Ben and Heathrow Airport in London — none of which happened." (MSNBC news again).

As for the procedure itself, he said he had no objection to the tribunal process, it was in fact "okay by me"he also said that he was responsible for dirty bombs and biological weapons on US soil in a 31 point confession of activities.

It seems likely, if and when the Pentagon releases the redacted portions, that we now know the identity of the Lindbergh baby kidnapper, Jack the Ripper, and quite possibly the Bogey Man himself.

You really should pop over to the transript itself.

Ministry of Space

While this book may be slight, it's beautiful. And I really can't stress too much just how beautiful the artwork in this book is. I'm sure (and I know it had a slightly troubled history, the last issue was delayed three years) that the artist spent a huge chunk of his life for comparatively little pay doing it. It was worth it though. Though my word for it is suspect as I deeply fetishise retro-futurism. It's like Dan Dare meets modern repro and digital techniques. Each frame is bursting with colour and detail.

As for the story: it's an alternative history of the late twentieth century. British imperialism rules the skies. The satire, while not gentle, is subtle and pervasive. These two reviews are interesting as both the authors
a) don't know what a mcguffin is, and
b) bought the mcguffin with extra chips to go
so maybe the satire is a little less pointed than I had thought. The source of the funding for the Ministry of Space is the mcguffin by the way, not the plot. The real story is something rather different and by choosing Britain as the target of the satire the author makes some positive points about the US while at the same time exposing the imperialist project for what it is.

I thought it was a tiny bit expensive for such a small comic, but it is so beautiful, so extraordinarily beautiful, that I bought it anyway. Then I thought that if I lent it to a friend of mine I wouldn't be able to accept it back as the art is even more up his street so I went and bought another copy for him. You should buy one for your friends too. This little gem is worthy of our support.

Conservapaedia (sic)

I thought you might be interested in a new wiki project to correct the anti-christian and anti-american bias of wikipedia. for example they have a list of biases in Wikipedia. Here's number one

"1 Wikipedia allows the use of B.C.E. instead of B.C. and C.E. instead of A.D. The dates are based on the birth of Jesus, so why pretend otherwise? Conservapedia is Christian-friendly and exposes the CE deception."

How right they are. I don't know if you've read an academic book on ancient history or archeology recently but they do it too! The whole world isn't utterly compliant with fundaligionist christians. This must be fixed immediately and wikipedia is unworkable with.

The anti-american bias of Wikipedia, and the evidence of it, is even more damning, try this -

9 Wikipedia often uses foreign spelling of words, even though most English-speaking users are American. Look up "Most Favored Nation" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts the spelling to the British spelling "Most Favoured Nation." Look up "Division of labor" on Wikipedia and it automatically converts to the British spelling "Division of labour," then insists on the British spelling for "specialization" also.[9] Enter "Hapsburg" (the European ruling family)
and Wikipedia automatically changes the spelling to Habsburg, even though the American spelling has always been "Hapsburg". Within entries British spellings appear in the silliest of places, even when the topic is American. Conservapedia favors American spellings of words.

We should insist that this be changed immediately, or until it is changed, insist that everyone use the Conservapedia.
Lead Kindly Light!

I should point out that their page on the bias of Wikipedia is a great advertisement for the corrective nature of wikipedia itself - many of the points that seem to exhibit bias have indeed been changed and others effortlessly withstand the conservapedia criticism. For example: the US no longer uses, according to Wikipedia, the term "most favored nation", and has replaced it with, rather sensibly it has to be said, the term "Normal Trade Relations". The GATT treaty itself also spells in in the non-US English way (can't bring myself to say British English).

I'm not particularly a fan of wikipedia by the way - I just lambasted a student for writing an article in a student newspaper lifted from the wiki only yesterday. But the Conservopedia is a particularly funny example of the uneducated but increasingly powerful religious lunatic. The conservapedia page itself, sadly, is a rather fine example of selective use of evidence, circular argument, peurile name-calling, base anti-intellectualism, non-scientific pseudo reasoning, and pure simple utter madness. I might note that they link to the Religious Tolerance website to lend credance to their view that the majority of Americans disagree with evolution. This is not what their page on the subject actually says. It says that 44% of Americans (overall) believe in some form of young earth creationism, that god created man inside the last 10.000 years. 49% believe in either theistic or non-theistic evolution. That would include the two largest Western faiths by the way. Not that wikipedia as an international document should necessarily reflect majority American opinion.

One last point about largely uneducated religious crazies, whether they be christian, muslim, jewish, or buddhist: to suggest that a scientific article, or an encyclopaedia (non-american spelling, so sue me) should include crazy young earth creationism when writing about evolution and suggesting that it is worthless and biased for not doing so, is much like pointing out that the bible, or koran, or whatever is worthless and biased for not writing about scientifically valid evolution.

And we wouldn't have that said would we?

The Polical Compass

This has been the buzz around the office for the last couple of days: we've been having fun with the political compass. We were at a seminar about critical thinking in students and one of the suggestions was a tool to help them perceive the bias they approached a subject with.

Its central premise I take to be self-evident: that the axis of left and right is unsatisfactory for plotting political convictions and that another of authoritarian vs. libertarian is needed. This, obviously, doesn't work for Americans who like to confuse 'liberal' with 'left' when they are not the same thing. This is part of the reason why former lefties (say Wolfowitz et al though for all their trumpeting of SDS leadership I've never seen them mentioned in anything on the SDS) end up with a very right wing government.

I have long argued that Irish political parties are only comprehensible if you have a three dimensioal axis including both these measures and nationalism and unionism. The lack of a major fascist party here is partially attributable to strong nationalism being associated with the left a bit more than the right. DeValera would have been a willing fascist but his fellow travellers would not.

By the way, I score somewhere between Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama.

From people at work's score I suspect that most people's politics, when not considering which of their limited parties to vote for, are far less authoritarian than the options offered them. And probably quite a bit left too. Howard Zinn noted that about polling the US people rather than the options they are offered