Friday 2 October 2009
Less Than Zero : an apology
I blogged earlier with what some might describe an ireful tone on Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. The general gist was who the hell cares. The 80s, been there, done that. Sadly enough I still have some of the t-shirts, including a small collection of original second hand joy division dating from the 70s.
That, however, is not the point. The point is that I was unfair to Bret Easton Ellis for no better reason than I work in an office of retrohead kids who think the 80s was all industrial chic, new romantics and Notting Hill carnival. The new romantic look is back in. Big, bouncy hair that actually doesn’t bounce, off the shoulder tops and stripes. Where did the stripes come from.
I digress. Having now read Less Than Zero I feel that I owe Bret Easton Ellis an apology. Yes, the book is tedious, self regarding and hinges on two moments which finally emerge as so what. But at the time it was new, one of the things you forget with age. The moral and emotional corruption of capitalism invested in children is kind of passé and like the rich still with us, but the ideology of self had to start some place. Post medieval European aristocracy I believe, but it didn’t become available to the culture and society as a whole until the idealism of the 70s had been well and truly bought out. Less Than Zero shows us the early generation of this. Unfortunately the book is as empty and pointless as the kids it depicts. Therein lies the point, maybe even the paradox.
Therein lies also me showing my age. Have a goodun.
That, however, is not the point. The point is that I was unfair to Bret Easton Ellis for no better reason than I work in an office of retrohead kids who think the 80s was all industrial chic, new romantics and Notting Hill carnival. The new romantic look is back in. Big, bouncy hair that actually doesn’t bounce, off the shoulder tops and stripes. Where did the stripes come from.
I digress. Having now read Less Than Zero I feel that I owe Bret Easton Ellis an apology. Yes, the book is tedious, self regarding and hinges on two moments which finally emerge as so what. But at the time it was new, one of the things you forget with age. The moral and emotional corruption of capitalism invested in children is kind of passé and like the rich still with us, but the ideology of self had to start some place. Post medieval European aristocracy I believe, but it didn’t become available to the culture and society as a whole until the idealism of the 70s had been well and truly bought out. Less Than Zero shows us the early generation of this. Unfortunately the book is as empty and pointless as the kids it depicts. Therein lies the point, maybe even the paradox.
Therein lies also me showing my age. Have a goodun.
Friday 25 September 2009
Thursday 24 September 2009
Yellow with dog hurt
Any of yous out there remember Warren Zevon. I have it somewhere at the back of my mind, along with the skeleton that never made it into the closet, that two of his songs defined my childhood.
I’m not that old if you’re wondering, but my parents are. Or to be more precise, my mother loved, perhaps a little too much, The Beatles and Cliff Richard. My father didn’t love anyone, but he played three songs over and over again: Bad Moon Rising (CCR, not Mr Zevon), Werewolves of London and Lawyers, Guns and Money.
To the ears of an impressionable child it was all incomprehensible, except that certain motifs got stuck in my imagination. Werewolves for one, and vague associations between them and long haired dogs. I would classify people as werewolves, potential werewolves, and food. Myself and my friends were all food. The bully in the year above, he was food too, if only for romantic reasons. The scary old lady at the end of the road, now she was a werewolf. The proof was in the fact that she kept a grey dog with a limp and mange, and the fact that she was never in the house at night. And every full moon people went missing. Not anyone I knew but people definitely went missing.
And then her dog died and her skin went yellow like jaundice. She used to go sit on the bench by the shops where the bus stop used to be. For hours she just sat there and we weren’t scared of her anymore. To us she was no longer a werewolf but a smelly old bag lady without any family who was waiting to die. I didn’t know what a bag lady was and it shames me now that I laughed at her.
I think of her whenever I see an old woman sat on a bench on her own. Maybe the world would be a better place if they really were all werewolves.
I’m not that old if you’re wondering, but my parents are. Or to be more precise, my mother loved, perhaps a little too much, The Beatles and Cliff Richard. My father didn’t love anyone, but he played three songs over and over again: Bad Moon Rising (CCR, not Mr Zevon), Werewolves of London and Lawyers, Guns and Money.
To the ears of an impressionable child it was all incomprehensible, except that certain motifs got stuck in my imagination. Werewolves for one, and vague associations between them and long haired dogs. I would classify people as werewolves, potential werewolves, and food. Myself and my friends were all food. The bully in the year above, he was food too, if only for romantic reasons. The scary old lady at the end of the road, now she was a werewolf. The proof was in the fact that she kept a grey dog with a limp and mange, and the fact that she was never in the house at night. And every full moon people went missing. Not anyone I knew but people definitely went missing.
And then her dog died and her skin went yellow like jaundice. She used to go sit on the bench by the shops where the bus stop used to be. For hours she just sat there and we weren’t scared of her anymore. To us she was no longer a werewolf but a smelly old bag lady without any family who was waiting to die. I didn’t know what a bag lady was and it shames me now that I laughed at her.
I think of her whenever I see an old woman sat on a bench on her own. Maybe the world would be a better place if they really were all werewolves.
Tuesday 22 September 2009
Quick blog on a slow subject
Choosing monitors for work, hands up who’s had that particular short straw. First team meeting I’ve missed in months and I get back to a bright pink post-it note. I think the colour was carefully chosen. It said, quote unquote:
4 monitors widescreen, budget ask ----------
A little explanation please, which was swiftly granted. They’re fussy buggers at work, like plenty of screen real estate, good image quality and as cheap as possible but still looking good. Like everyone wants their car to look like a Ferrari and run on air.
They knew I’d hate this job for one particular reason, in a past life I worked in IT. It’s a life I’ve tried hard to forget, mainly because I quite enjoyed it but two years slipped away in front of a computer screen. I was a generalist: simple databases, cross platform network solutions (enable a protocol on the server!), workstation build and configuration. Didn’t actually require that much knowledge, just an obsession with irrelevant detail. A tendency one or two people claim I have.
So that was a week ago and I’ve narrowed the choice down to the Benq G2200HD, 16:9 1920x1080; or the Samsung T240, 16:10 1920x1200. Hundred quid difference in the price, depends how much screen space you want. Benq probably has better colour but Samsung has a zero dead pixel policy. I spent a week narrowing it down to these two and you know what I was soooooooo bored but I couldn’t help myself, I had to read every last review of every goddam monitor that fitted the spec.
Then this morning I ordered four HP LP2475w. £700 over budget but dammit, they have an IPS panel, not the crappy TN you get on all the cheap stuff, and the best picture quality this side of an Eizo Foris FX2431.
Okay, I didn’t. Went for the Samsungs but I so need a life.
4 monitors widescreen, budget ask ----------
A little explanation please, which was swiftly granted. They’re fussy buggers at work, like plenty of screen real estate, good image quality and as cheap as possible but still looking good. Like everyone wants their car to look like a Ferrari and run on air.
They knew I’d hate this job for one particular reason, in a past life I worked in IT. It’s a life I’ve tried hard to forget, mainly because I quite enjoyed it but two years slipped away in front of a computer screen. I was a generalist: simple databases, cross platform network solutions (enable a protocol on the server!), workstation build and configuration. Didn’t actually require that much knowledge, just an obsession with irrelevant detail. A tendency one or two people claim I have.
So that was a week ago and I’ve narrowed the choice down to the Benq G2200HD, 16:9 1920x1080; or the Samsung T240, 16:10 1920x1200. Hundred quid difference in the price, depends how much screen space you want. Benq probably has better colour but Samsung has a zero dead pixel policy. I spent a week narrowing it down to these two and you know what I was soooooooo bored but I couldn’t help myself, I had to read every last review of every goddam monitor that fitted the spec.
Then this morning I ordered four HP LP2475w. £700 over budget but dammit, they have an IPS panel, not the crappy TN you get on all the cheap stuff, and the best picture quality this side of an Eizo Foris FX2431.
Okay, I didn’t. Went for the Samsungs but I so need a life.
Tuesday 15 September 2009
Taking yourself to the vet
Been a delay in posting for the last week or so, technical difficulties. Meaning a mild bout of depression. Had it since my twenties and it’s never properly gone away. Think it’s related to the kids and the fact of living apart from them.
All that aside I was making an effort to tidy the house and listening to the radio, maybe radio three or BBC Manchester, and they carried a report on the news that the NSPCC had objected to the government’s recently announced parent/adult vetting plans.
For those of you who don’t live in the UK, the NSPCC is the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (how rich the world is in irony) and has proud and distinguished history of scaremongering in general and bullying the working class in particular. The vetting plans are proposed by the government for any adult who has ‘frequent and intensive’ contact with children, to protect from the possibility of cruelty and abuse.
How you define child cruelty depends entirely on the extent to which you can enforce your own values, and in turn on the relationship between those values and the conditions in which you live. As far as the NSPCC are concerned the majority of the world’s poor are guilty of child abuse, not least because they define childhood as an inherently vulnerable state requiring protection. In the UK they sidestep the issue of evidence, the exact magnitude of the risk, and the consequences of getting involved.
Yeah, I remember the protection myself and my friends needed when we spent the summer holidays roaming for miles, getting into trouble, falling out of trees, trespassing on school grounds, stopping round at mates’ houses containing all kinds of undesirable working class men and women. Took risks, made mistakes, that’s how you learn. We knew who the miserable old codgers were, and the dodgy geezers, and the he’s-alright-but-make-sure-you-don’t-get-left-on-your-own-with-him guy. We knew who they were and our parents knew who they were. Of course shit happened, as kids we knew that. We knew about violence and abuse and neglect but we didn’t frame it in those terms. We knew some of our classmates kept secrets. But the main thing is they survived, they found their way through. They didn’t think of themselves as damaged or vulnerable and no-one’s life was in danger. If they were your mates you hated their parents as much as they did and didn’t quite understand how they could also still love them. Mixed up, crazy world; still don’t understand it.
The point is, if a kid’s life is in danger fair do’s if the state gets involved, but we have to be clear by what is meant by danger and what alternative is being offered. Looked after children as they’re now called (couldn’t carry on calling it being in care because it was obvious to everyone care is the one thing it didn’t do) are the only group of children in the UK who’s life chances go down compared to their peers. That includes their peers who are in abusive households but stay at home with support.
Children are resilient, families are resilient, extended families even more so. They’re resilient because they’re not alone, they have a community around them. Destroy that and you might as well take every child that’s born into the custody of the state. Of course things go wrong, that’s life, but you can’t prevent most of it after the fact. After the fact of dismantling informal support networks. After the fact of politically, socially and culturally persecuting people and living off the fear that that generates. After the fact of hundreds of years of exploitation of the working class, including their children. After the fact that every single person in the UK lives off the labour of children in the developing world. After the fact that the welfare of children is an economic more than a moral crusade.
In our hearts we know this and the NSPCC knows this, but only for its own kind. I wonder, does its objection to the government’s vetting plans have something to do with the fact that it will affect middle class parents as much as working class ones.
All that aside I was making an effort to tidy the house and listening to the radio, maybe radio three or BBC Manchester, and they carried a report on the news that the NSPCC had objected to the government’s recently announced parent/adult vetting plans.
For those of you who don’t live in the UK, the NSPCC is the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (how rich the world is in irony) and has proud and distinguished history of scaremongering in general and bullying the working class in particular. The vetting plans are proposed by the government for any adult who has ‘frequent and intensive’ contact with children, to protect from the possibility of cruelty and abuse.
How you define child cruelty depends entirely on the extent to which you can enforce your own values, and in turn on the relationship between those values and the conditions in which you live. As far as the NSPCC are concerned the majority of the world’s poor are guilty of child abuse, not least because they define childhood as an inherently vulnerable state requiring protection. In the UK they sidestep the issue of evidence, the exact magnitude of the risk, and the consequences of getting involved.
Yeah, I remember the protection myself and my friends needed when we spent the summer holidays roaming for miles, getting into trouble, falling out of trees, trespassing on school grounds, stopping round at mates’ houses containing all kinds of undesirable working class men and women. Took risks, made mistakes, that’s how you learn. We knew who the miserable old codgers were, and the dodgy geezers, and the he’s-alright-but-make-sure-you-don’t-get-left-on-your-own-with-him guy. We knew who they were and our parents knew who they were. Of course shit happened, as kids we knew that. We knew about violence and abuse and neglect but we didn’t frame it in those terms. We knew some of our classmates kept secrets. But the main thing is they survived, they found their way through. They didn’t think of themselves as damaged or vulnerable and no-one’s life was in danger. If they were your mates you hated their parents as much as they did and didn’t quite understand how they could also still love them. Mixed up, crazy world; still don’t understand it.
The point is, if a kid’s life is in danger fair do’s if the state gets involved, but we have to be clear by what is meant by danger and what alternative is being offered. Looked after children as they’re now called (couldn’t carry on calling it being in care because it was obvious to everyone care is the one thing it didn’t do) are the only group of children in the UK who’s life chances go down compared to their peers. That includes their peers who are in abusive households but stay at home with support.
Children are resilient, families are resilient, extended families even more so. They’re resilient because they’re not alone, they have a community around them. Destroy that and you might as well take every child that’s born into the custody of the state. Of course things go wrong, that’s life, but you can’t prevent most of it after the fact. After the fact of dismantling informal support networks. After the fact of politically, socially and culturally persecuting people and living off the fear that that generates. After the fact of hundreds of years of exploitation of the working class, including their children. After the fact that every single person in the UK lives off the labour of children in the developing world. After the fact that the welfare of children is an economic more than a moral crusade.
In our hearts we know this and the NSPCC knows this, but only for its own kind. I wonder, does its objection to the government’s vetting plans have something to do with the fact that it will affect middle class parents as much as working class ones.
Sunday 6 September 2009
Levenshulme : the local campaign
I’m not a fan of facebook, which I’ll weblog on at a later date, but it does have its advantages. For one the dominant colour scheme is white and blue. For two it works locally as well as globally.
Levenshulme is the area of Manchester in which I live and which for many years has been called up and coming. What exactly is meant by that is a few trees planted on a few streets, and in the last couple of years a Subway and a Tesco. In the meantime, inbetween time, they knocked down the community centre, attempted to build a couple of football pitches on the local patch of communal land and proposed closing the local swimming baths.
In the grand scheme of things not a big deal, but on a local level Levenshulme has a strong sense of community which has been chronically underfunded for years. Local amenities have deteriorated, there’s been little investment by the council and when the community has organised to try and improve the local area it has faced active opposition by the Town Hall.
An ordinary tale of an ordinary part of Britain. To explain in fairytale terms, the example of the community centre: it was wooden, somewhat dilapidated, but relatively well used, given the state it was in and its lack of resources. Then the council huffed and it puffed and it blew the community centre down. No little piggies inside though.
Because the council was angry at not finding anything to eat it left the land waste, with a vague proposal of selling it off floating around somewhere over the rainbow. In response, members of the local community crawled out from the undergrowth and began turning the space into a community garden. Little Red Riding Hood visited, she was happy with it, but once again the wolf was at the door. The council demanded that as it was council land all unlicensed activity by the community to improve its surrounding be immediately stopped. Following negotiations between Peter, the community representative, and the council, it was agreed that a licence would be granted provided that those working on the garden formalised themselves and sent in a proposal. This they duly did ( in May this year) but the council delayed and until now no licence has been issued.
Peter has so far not succeeded in catching the council by its tail and neither has a woodcutter appeared.
Inaction appears to be the watchword generally in Manchester City Council’s dealings with the community, not only in Levenshulme but across the city. With that in mind a protest was organised at short notice on Facebook outside the local swimming baths to try and publicise the fact that though there has been some money invested most of the repairs and refurbishment needed still have not been carried out.
Again, in the grand scheme of things, its not going to make the front page, the back page, or anything inbetween. But it is exactly the kind of thing that’s important to local communities in established local areas. If you live in the city centre, who gives. The population is fairly transient and has easy access to a range of public and private amenities. In areas with established communities and chronic underinvestment, its exactly the kind of issue that’s important.
I can’t swim so you’re never going to find me at anything with swimming in the name, and the sprogs don’t like swimming either, but I went along to the protest anyway because its important to other local people. I might not know most of them, or only know them in passing. But that’s the nature of a community, you have a concern for others and an appreciation of what’s important to them.
Or to put it another way, you don’t see your neighbours as strangers at the door.
Levenshulme is the area of Manchester in which I live and which for many years has been called up and coming. What exactly is meant by that is a few trees planted on a few streets, and in the last couple of years a Subway and a Tesco. In the meantime, inbetween time, they knocked down the community centre, attempted to build a couple of football pitches on the local patch of communal land and proposed closing the local swimming baths.
In the grand scheme of things not a big deal, but on a local level Levenshulme has a strong sense of community which has been chronically underfunded for years. Local amenities have deteriorated, there’s been little investment by the council and when the community has organised to try and improve the local area it has faced active opposition by the Town Hall.
An ordinary tale of an ordinary part of Britain. To explain in fairytale terms, the example of the community centre: it was wooden, somewhat dilapidated, but relatively well used, given the state it was in and its lack of resources. Then the council huffed and it puffed and it blew the community centre down. No little piggies inside though.
Because the council was angry at not finding anything to eat it left the land waste, with a vague proposal of selling it off floating around somewhere over the rainbow. In response, members of the local community crawled out from the undergrowth and began turning the space into a community garden. Little Red Riding Hood visited, she was happy with it, but once again the wolf was at the door. The council demanded that as it was council land all unlicensed activity by the community to improve its surrounding be immediately stopped. Following negotiations between Peter, the community representative, and the council, it was agreed that a licence would be granted provided that those working on the garden formalised themselves and sent in a proposal. This they duly did ( in May this year) but the council delayed and until now no licence has been issued.
Peter has so far not succeeded in catching the council by its tail and neither has a woodcutter appeared.
Inaction appears to be the watchword generally in Manchester City Council’s dealings with the community, not only in Levenshulme but across the city. With that in mind a protest was organised at short notice on Facebook outside the local swimming baths to try and publicise the fact that though there has been some money invested most of the repairs and refurbishment needed still have not been carried out.
Again, in the grand scheme of things, its not going to make the front page, the back page, or anything inbetween. But it is exactly the kind of thing that’s important to local communities in established local areas. If you live in the city centre, who gives. The population is fairly transient and has easy access to a range of public and private amenities. In areas with established communities and chronic underinvestment, its exactly the kind of issue that’s important.
I can’t swim so you’re never going to find me at anything with swimming in the name, and the sprogs don’t like swimming either, but I went along to the protest anyway because its important to other local people. I might not know most of them, or only know them in passing. But that’s the nature of a community, you have a concern for others and an appreciation of what’s important to them.
Or to put it another way, you don’t see your neighbours as strangers at the door.
Saturday 5 September 2009
Currently I am not reading
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis. I was borrowed it by a friend who was of the opinion that I would enjoy it tremendously darling.
She didn’t quite say it like that as I do not currently, nor have I ever done, sexual relations with that woman. It’s the whole denial thing, every time I’m in a position of denial of think of Bill Clinton. Don’t know why, it just happens.
So a friend borrowed me the book, I don’t know anyone who says tremendously darling and I haven’t read it because when you get to my age [>35<45 if anyone’s interested] the life concerns, literature and music of the young tends to become a bit samey. Haven’t I heard that somewhere before. Oh yeah, me and pretty much everyone I knew lived through it. Now the zeitgeist fom the 30s was different. Same again for the 40s and 60s. But the 80s til now. Kind of walking the same path I’m afraid. Sex and drugs and lock and load, all my body needs.
She didn’t quite say it like that as I do not currently, nor have I ever done, sexual relations with that woman. It’s the whole denial thing, every time I’m in a position of denial of think of Bill Clinton. Don’t know why, it just happens.
So a friend borrowed me the book, I don’t know anyone who says tremendously darling and I haven’t read it because when you get to my age [>35<45 if anyone’s interested] the life concerns, literature and music of the young tends to become a bit samey. Haven’t I heard that somewhere before. Oh yeah, me and pretty much everyone I knew lived through it. Now the zeitgeist fom the 30s was different. Same again for the 40s and 60s. But the 80s til now. Kind of walking the same path I’m afraid. Sex and drugs and lock and load, all my body needs.
Friday 4 September 2009
Pride in the name of love
Took the skiddly winks into town last weekend to go see the Manchester Pride 09 parade. They enjoyed it, not having been to one before, though some of the ironies weren’t lost on them. In particular the girl skiddly wanted to know why the Home Office and Barclays Bank had floats. She wanted to know what either of them had done for gay people.
Good question, now go to the back of the queue.
She was the only person in the queue, so as with every good question a child asks I answered with a question of my own. Why are you asking that. She was thinking of Moses Kayiza, whom we met a few times on our travels around the many and various enclaves of the rainy city. Moses was from Uganda and had been persecuted because he was gay. His claim for asylum was refused by the Home Office.
Leaving aside the whole debate around asylum, there’s the slightly different debate around what Pride means and what it now stands for. During Pride 2006 I stood in the rain with Moses and a small gang of his friends and supporters collecting signatures for his anti-deportation campaign. He got a few hundred over the course of the weekend (including an off duty policewoman who’s partner reminded her that as a police officer she was prohibited from making political statements. She shrugged and signed anyway. Props to her, whoever she was). Not bad, but how many thousands of people were there. And why wasn’t his campaign, and others like it, an official part of Pride. Didn’t Pride begin as a protest against homophobic discrimination and violence, or am I missing something.
Now that the pink pound is out in the open and can breathe we find that the other side is blue. I guess a lot of people always knew this, gay black people especially. But still ,reflecting on it, I can’t help but be disappointed. In the same way that I feel disappointed by the men I know fighting against racism who can’t see their parallel behaviour towards women.
How much further up your own arse have you got to be before you remember what Pride was about. You lose your right to complain about discrimination and prejudice when you are guilty of it yourself. Or being slightly less harsh about it, as Pastor Niemöller probably maybe might well have said :
…by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
_________________________________________________
My favourite moment of the parade: the Labour representation, on foot, following behind the Barclays Bank float, which looked very blue, very efficient and very well got it made. Actually there was another foot patrol between them, but I’ll attribute that indiscretion to the organisers, who obviously struggle in the same sentence with the concept of political humour and irony.
Good question, now go to the back of the queue.
She was the only person in the queue, so as with every good question a child asks I answered with a question of my own. Why are you asking that. She was thinking of Moses Kayiza, whom we met a few times on our travels around the many and various enclaves of the rainy city. Moses was from Uganda and had been persecuted because he was gay. His claim for asylum was refused by the Home Office.
Leaving aside the whole debate around asylum, there’s the slightly different debate around what Pride means and what it now stands for. During Pride 2006 I stood in the rain with Moses and a small gang of his friends and supporters collecting signatures for his anti-deportation campaign. He got a few hundred over the course of the weekend (including an off duty policewoman who’s partner reminded her that as a police officer she was prohibited from making political statements. She shrugged and signed anyway. Props to her, whoever she was). Not bad, but how many thousands of people were there. And why wasn’t his campaign, and others like it, an official part of Pride. Didn’t Pride begin as a protest against homophobic discrimination and violence, or am I missing something.
Now that the pink pound is out in the open and can breathe we find that the other side is blue. I guess a lot of people always knew this, gay black people especially. But still ,reflecting on it, I can’t help but be disappointed. In the same way that I feel disappointed by the men I know fighting against racism who can’t see their parallel behaviour towards women.
How much further up your own arse have you got to be before you remember what Pride was about. You lose your right to complain about discrimination and prejudice when you are guilty of it yourself. Or being slightly less harsh about it, as Pastor Niemöller probably maybe might well have said :
…by that time there was no one left to speak up for me.
_________________________________________________
My favourite moment of the parade: the Labour representation, on foot, following behind the Barclays Bank float, which looked very blue, very efficient and very well got it made. Actually there was another foot patrol between them, but I’ll attribute that indiscretion to the organisers, who obviously struggle in the same sentence with the concept of political humour and irony.
Saturday 29 August 2009
And another thing
Actually I finished my blog for today, tonight, whatever; but then I remembered. Ah, what. I meant to explain a bit more what’s missing. The question marks.
A phobia can be a learned behaviour or can arise from some incident or trauma in the past. So far so good. It is rooted in the unconscious mind and is therefore available to hypnotherapic (is that a word) intervention.
Yeah, right. I’m gonna regress back to the time a question mark fell out of the sky and knocked me unconscious. I was seven and the question mark was at the end of the question is there a god.
I guess she heard me, the irony. As in, there is a god after all (question mark).
You know what, I could get used to this blog thing. Just need to be a little more light hearted and get some new toothpaste.
Damn, now I’ve got to find another picture.
A phobia can be a learned behaviour or can arise from some incident or trauma in the past. So far so good. It is rooted in the unconscious mind and is therefore available to hypnotherapic (is that a word) intervention.
Yeah, right. I’m gonna regress back to the time a question mark fell out of the sky and knocked me unconscious. I was seven and the question mark was at the end of the question is there a god.
I guess she heard me, the irony. As in, there is a god after all (question mark).
You know what, I could get used to this blog thing. Just need to be a little more light hearted and get some new toothpaste.
Damn, now I’ve got to find another picture.
Lockerbie and the historical world of compassion
Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, convicted by a Scottish court of the muder of 270 people on Pan Am flight 103, was last week released on compassionate grounds. He is terminally ill with prostate cancer.
Seems simple enough. Under Section 30 of the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997 a prisoner may be released if they are terminally ill and likely to have less than three months to live. Principle is adhered to, mercy serves the interests of justice, justice serves the interests of the state and we have demonstrated once again that all are equal before the law. Even foreign murderers.
Nice. Dispassionate. Objective. Without the shoot first of a lynch mob and the anti-intellectualism of moral outrage.
Except there was moral outrage, with domestic and international protest keen to demonstrate its irrelevance. Read for domestic and international, opponents of the Scottish National Party and America. Their protest has been loud but crucially has no available legal challenge. Unlike Megrahi.
Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary who made the decision, got a pretty hard time. He’s not a hard man but he stood firm and this is politics so what else could he expect. He made the decision on his own as a minister and a lawyer, and he made the decision with the law unequivocally on his side. To those that protest, as Megrahi might point out, you can invade a country but it is much more difficult to invade a principle. Though you can drag a principle along with you when you undertake an invasion, aka holy war, just war, or the-principle-of-capitalism-and-you-have-the-oil war. Megrahi might also point out that though he dropped his appeal had he gone ahead with it he would have had at least a reasonable chance of being cleared of guilt.
I’m drifting, my apologies. I shall haul myself back.
Amongst the more considered arguments against the Justice Secretary, the main charge laid against him seems to be that he was right in law, right in principle, but wrong in everything else. I have difficulty understanding, however, what everything else is.
Does everything else include, for example, decency and common sense. Neither of which are principles, neither of which can be jailed or released, and neither of which behave with much decency or common sense. The actions of Hilary Clinton spring to mind.
Maybe everything else includes time, there generally being less of it than we realise. Time for the families of those murdered. Time for Megrahi’s appeal to be heard and possibly, though improbably, for the truth to out. Time for penitence and suffering and retribution. Time for history to judge.
The problem for history is the problem of politics, an abstraction with a tenuous experience of life, that can neither be solved nor left behind. Politics and history are simultaneous equations whose graphs never cross for the simple reason that there is nothing within them that is necessarily true. 1 + 1 may equal 2 for the woman on the street but in the corridors of power and the past 1 + 1 generally equals 3: there is always either a sufficiently large value of 1 or a sufficiently small value of 3.
Not that principles or the law fares much better. As I understand it 23 terminally ill prisoners have been released in Scotland in the last 16 years. Two things: have there only been 23 terminally ill prisoners in the last 16 years, and how long before death were they released. Not three months, I’d bet my sub prime on that, and my second mortgage that more than a few have died in jail. The last few pennies I’d bet on one of the motivating factors for those that were released being the bureaucratic nightmare of someone dying in jail. I suppose that’s one form of compassion, the administrators having compassion for themselves.
In effect the rule of law and the principle which underpin it are, in Western democratic form, a species of bureaucratic humanism. Was it really compassion that led to Megrahi’s release, or a deal struck to secure British interests in Libyan oil, or neither or both. In some ways it doesn’t matter, in the way that Iran Air Flight 655 doesn’t matter. Its all part of the bureaucratic administration of the interests of the state, the political appropriation of values, and the history in the moment that makes the same mistakes it keeps trying to forget.
Megrahi may be a murderer, William C. Rogers unequivocally is. Captain of the USS Vincennes, he found it inexplicably difficult too distinguish between a civilian airliner broadcasting itself as such and ascending a civilian flight path, and an F14 fighter descending to attack.
In the end Megrahi and Rogers both shape shift in the realm of politics, and both are footnotes in history. In another ten years we’ll barely be able to find them.
My question is, what does compassion mean when 560 people die. Not at the moment of their death but afterwards, when all the hatred is done. The law doesn’t hate Megrahi, but then it never loved those that were killed. Compassion is a quality not a principle. As a quality it shows us something about ourselves, as a principle it is a currency that every day is traded in.
But then when the interests of a country are at stake who wouldn’t trade in their compassion, either for the political mileage or failing that a new car.
Seems simple enough. Under Section 30 of the Crime (Sentences) Act 1997 a prisoner may be released if they are terminally ill and likely to have less than three months to live. Principle is adhered to, mercy serves the interests of justice, justice serves the interests of the state and we have demonstrated once again that all are equal before the law. Even foreign murderers.
Nice. Dispassionate. Objective. Without the shoot first of a lynch mob and the anti-intellectualism of moral outrage.
Except there was moral outrage, with domestic and international protest keen to demonstrate its irrelevance. Read for domestic and international, opponents of the Scottish National Party and America. Their protest has been loud but crucially has no available legal challenge. Unlike Megrahi.
Kenny MacAskill, the Scottish Justice Secretary who made the decision, got a pretty hard time. He’s not a hard man but he stood firm and this is politics so what else could he expect. He made the decision on his own as a minister and a lawyer, and he made the decision with the law unequivocally on his side. To those that protest, as Megrahi might point out, you can invade a country but it is much more difficult to invade a principle. Though you can drag a principle along with you when you undertake an invasion, aka holy war, just war, or the-principle-of-capitalism-and-you-have-the-oil war. Megrahi might also point out that though he dropped his appeal had he gone ahead with it he would have had at least a reasonable chance of being cleared of guilt.
I’m drifting, my apologies. I shall haul myself back.
Amongst the more considered arguments against the Justice Secretary, the main charge laid against him seems to be that he was right in law, right in principle, but wrong in everything else. I have difficulty understanding, however, what everything else is.
Does everything else include, for example, decency and common sense. Neither of which are principles, neither of which can be jailed or released, and neither of which behave with much decency or common sense. The actions of Hilary Clinton spring to mind.
Maybe everything else includes time, there generally being less of it than we realise. Time for the families of those murdered. Time for Megrahi’s appeal to be heard and possibly, though improbably, for the truth to out. Time for penitence and suffering and retribution. Time for history to judge.
The problem for history is the problem of politics, an abstraction with a tenuous experience of life, that can neither be solved nor left behind. Politics and history are simultaneous equations whose graphs never cross for the simple reason that there is nothing within them that is necessarily true. 1 + 1 may equal 2 for the woman on the street but in the corridors of power and the past 1 + 1 generally equals 3: there is always either a sufficiently large value of 1 or a sufficiently small value of 3.
Not that principles or the law fares much better. As I understand it 23 terminally ill prisoners have been released in Scotland in the last 16 years. Two things: have there only been 23 terminally ill prisoners in the last 16 years, and how long before death were they released. Not three months, I’d bet my sub prime on that, and my second mortgage that more than a few have died in jail. The last few pennies I’d bet on one of the motivating factors for those that were released being the bureaucratic nightmare of someone dying in jail. I suppose that’s one form of compassion, the administrators having compassion for themselves.
In effect the rule of law and the principle which underpin it are, in Western democratic form, a species of bureaucratic humanism. Was it really compassion that led to Megrahi’s release, or a deal struck to secure British interests in Libyan oil, or neither or both. In some ways it doesn’t matter, in the way that Iran Air Flight 655 doesn’t matter. Its all part of the bureaucratic administration of the interests of the state, the political appropriation of values, and the history in the moment that makes the same mistakes it keeps trying to forget.
Megrahi may be a murderer, William C. Rogers unequivocally is. Captain of the USS Vincennes, he found it inexplicably difficult too distinguish between a civilian airliner broadcasting itself as such and ascending a civilian flight path, and an F14 fighter descending to attack.
In the end Megrahi and Rogers both shape shift in the realm of politics, and both are footnotes in history. In another ten years we’ll barely be able to find them.
My question is, what does compassion mean when 560 people die. Not at the moment of their death but afterwards, when all the hatred is done. The law doesn’t hate Megrahi, but then it never loved those that were killed. Compassion is a quality not a principle. As a quality it shows us something about ourselves, as a principle it is a currency that every day is traded in.
But then when the interests of a country are at stake who wouldn’t trade in their compassion, either for the political mileage or failing that a new car.
Tuesday 25 August 2009
Currently I am reading
Elektra Assassin, by Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz. Published by Epic Comics 1986.
Innovative in its time, with the cynicism you’d expect.
Innovative in its time, with the cynicism you’d expect.
Monday 24 August 2009
My foot
Before we go any further let me quote the great man:
Yeah, well I saw it on TV first, then I made it up.
In total there were seventeen contestants. I counted them all out and I counted them all back. Not one of them crashed and burned. The atmosphere was retroholic, more serious than the 60s studentville frock and beards found in the trendsetter alcoves just now. Most of them had decked out their lives from the 70s, with original cars and furniture, even fridges. Their clothes had been taken out from the back of a wardrobe and made to live again. That kind of dedication is generally its own reward.
The question that mattered however was: was it good. Good enough, every last eau de cologne too cool to sweat sweaty moment of it. At the end I tripped on the stairs and nearly broke my foot. Back then I was young, the bruising only took a few weeks to clear up.
Thinking about it nearly is one of life’s most underrated words, the opposite of probably. I nearly became a millionaire, my numbers came up, but that week I forgot to buy a ticket. I nearly became happy buying up everything that would fit me in the store. I nearly didn’t regret taking on so much credit. Nearly is a word the advertising guidelines accept and the advertisers don’t.
Nearly, my foot. It wouldn’t have been my foot prior to 1923, before then it would’ve been my ass. But the English are a polite race who apparently become easily confused when presented with something that looks rather similar to a mule or a donkey. This is not an ass, as the more rhetorically inclined might say.
On the subject, check out Forever Fever, if you can get hold of it. Try eBay. It’s a Singapore film Tony Manero would nearly approve of. Something along the lines of patriarchy plus state plus disco equals soul.
Sunday 23 August 2009
On advertising
I feel there’s a whole bunch of stuff you should know. Knowledge they say is power, therefore I grant you power :
Feet on their own are interesting things, feet attached to people less so. People have a habit of not communicating properly with their feet. Taking them for granted. Dressing them in a style more suited to their eyes. As a consequence feet protest, and when their protestations are met with abuse they grow a thick skin. How many bathrooms up and down the country have a pumice stone as catharsis for exactly this problem.
Watching your feet grow is like being a minor figure in a tragedy, hovering on the edge of great and terrible things. Watching helplessly as the acts pass and it all goes tits up. Verrucas, corns, misshapen toes and dry skin. The solution is simple, talk to them. Babies know how to do this even before they learn how to speak. Try keeping a baby’s foot out of its mouth. Its as impossible as keeping your own foot out of your own mouth, except that baby and foot enjoy it being there.
So what has any of this got to do with advertising. Nothing, I never said that it did. But if it did then it would be like Carlsberg, probably the best blog not on advertising in the world.
- I don’t work in advertising
- I spend most of my time in a small town in England called Madchester
- Nobody calls it Madchester any more
- I used to fit shoes for a living
Feet on their own are interesting things, feet attached to people less so. People have a habit of not communicating properly with their feet. Taking them for granted. Dressing them in a style more suited to their eyes. As a consequence feet protest, and when their protestations are met with abuse they grow a thick skin. How many bathrooms up and down the country have a pumice stone as catharsis for exactly this problem.
Watching your feet grow is like being a minor figure in a tragedy, hovering on the edge of great and terrible things. Watching helplessly as the acts pass and it all goes tits up. Verrucas, corns, misshapen toes and dry skin. The solution is simple, talk to them. Babies know how to do this even before they learn how to speak. Try keeping a baby’s foot out of its mouth. Its as impossible as keeping your own foot out of your own mouth, except that baby and foot enjoy it being there.
So what has any of this got to do with advertising. Nothing, I never said that it did. But if it did then it would be like Carlsberg, probably the best blog not on advertising in the world.
Saturday 22 August 2009
Trackday two
The great thing about time is that it carries on going forward, at least within our perception of temporal mechanics. That means we get to look back at things, failed relationships for instance. And blog posts.
I realised that I forgot to mention the colour of the cars in the previous post. The Ferrari was obviously red in the same way that the sky is obviously blue, except at night when its black, or there’s cloud cover. Or at sunrise and sunset for that matter. The Porsche was grey, like the sky. Only less obviously so.
On the subject of sunrise and sunset, it shows how readily we accept illusion. If we don’t have a better explanation then common sense prevails. I’m not a big fan of common sense, its an invention of the flat earth society, a kind of deliberate ignorance of the evidence, replacing curvature with spin. An all of the people all of the time advertising.
Nobody believes the earth is flat any more, except Dave. He even has his own channel devoted to that belief. And the Flat Earth Society, which admittedly is a little bit weak since the death of Charles Johnson. (I wanted to write Charles Bronson but only one of him is dead.) Which is curious because the fact that nobody believes in a flat earth doesn’t stop us from behaving as if we still did. What shall we do with the planet this week. Blow it up. Nah, that’s too violent. Slowly and all too perceptibly destroy all of its primary ecosystems and the equilibrium that’s sustained multi-celled life for millions of years. Yeah, that’s it, that’s what we’ll do. After all, the sun still spins round the earth.
I realised that I forgot to mention the colour of the cars in the previous post. The Ferrari was obviously red in the same way that the sky is obviously blue, except at night when its black, or there’s cloud cover. Or at sunrise and sunset for that matter. The Porsche was grey, like the sky. Only less obviously so.
On the subject of sunrise and sunset, it shows how readily we accept illusion. If we don’t have a better explanation then common sense prevails. I’m not a big fan of common sense, its an invention of the flat earth society, a kind of deliberate ignorance of the evidence, replacing curvature with spin. An all of the people all of the time advertising.
Nobody believes the earth is flat any more, except Dave. He even has his own channel devoted to that belief. And the Flat Earth Society, which admittedly is a little bit weak since the death of Charles Johnson. (I wanted to write Charles Bronson but only one of him is dead.) Which is curious because the fact that nobody believes in a flat earth doesn’t stop us from behaving as if we still did. What shall we do with the planet this week. Blow it up. Nah, that’s too violent. Slowly and all too perceptibly destroy all of its primary ecosystems and the equilibrium that’s sustained multi-celled life for millions of years. Yeah, that’s it, that’s what we’ll do. After all, the sun still spins round the earth.
Thursday 20 August 2009
Trackday one
So why Trackdayspecial. No particular reason, other than I recently spent a day stood on the side of a track watching various forms of exotica blip past in the distance. It didn’t rain, which was good. The day lasted forever, which wasn’t.
I need to confess at this point I have an aversion to question marks, a bit like a phobia of buttons. Can you get through the day without seeing a button. It's the same with question marks.
The question I asked myself stood at the side of the track was why am I here. A three hundred quid birthday present for someone I love. (Yes, I’m lying, it was one fifty nine and we were only there for three hours. It felt longer. The point remains valid.)
What point. Standing at the side of a track for three hours so the person who’s present it was could get exactly nine minutes of track time. Someone was getting rich and it wasn’t me.
For the record they drove a Ferrari F430 and a Porsche 911 Carrera 2. Three laps in each. Just enough to know how the other one percent lives, get the first inkling of an addiction, eat ice cream on the way home. Wonderful stuff ice cream, if it had been freely available in the nineteenth century there never would have been a working class movement. It’s a metaphor for the middle class. Ask the guy that leases the Ferrari that someone drives for three and a half minutes.
So why did I get the present in the first place. It’s a dream. Not my dream. In my dream the fat lady crosses the road and gets run over by a white transit van just as she opens her mouth to sing. Thunk. What was that.
I need to confess at this point I have an aversion to question marks, a bit like a phobia of buttons. Can you get through the day without seeing a button. It's the same with question marks.
The question I asked myself stood at the side of the track was why am I here. A three hundred quid birthday present for someone I love. (Yes, I’m lying, it was one fifty nine and we were only there for three hours. It felt longer. The point remains valid.)
What point. Standing at the side of a track for three hours so the person who’s present it was could get exactly nine minutes of track time. Someone was getting rich and it wasn’t me.
For the record they drove a Ferrari F430 and a Porsche 911 Carrera 2. Three laps in each. Just enough to know how the other one percent lives, get the first inkling of an addiction, eat ice cream on the way home. Wonderful stuff ice cream, if it had been freely available in the nineteenth century there never would have been a working class movement. It’s a metaphor for the middle class. Ask the guy that leases the Ferrari that someone drives for three and a half minutes.
So why did I get the present in the first place. It’s a dream. Not my dream. In my dream the fat lady crosses the road and gets run over by a white transit van just as she opens her mouth to sing. Thunk. What was that.
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