Love in the Time of Culture

Renshaw Street, Liverpool, summer 2008.

Fooling No-One

Just brought to my attention, the flag of the Χρυσή Αυγή ("Golden Dawn") party in Greece:

Hmmmmmmmmmmm. That's the most interesting use of the Greek meander pattern I've seen in a while.

Last Man Standing

My housemate has just moved out of the place where I live, so I currently have the place to myself. Actually, since when I move out at Christmas the landlord will move in here to do some renovations before selling it on, I'm the last tenant to ever occupy the house.

It's strange, because until quite recently I really hated the idea and the reality of living alone - dig back in this blog far enough and you'll find at least one post to that effect. These days, however, living on my own probably suits me best. A factor of age perhaps.

That said, I do now have plenty of space to put people up in if they're in Liverpool over the next few months.

An Idiosyncratic History of the Music Video, Part 1

with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

There is a common agreement - repeated so often that it has become cliche - that the 1960s ended with the death of Meredith Hunter during The Rolling Stones' set at Altamont in 1969. The point where other pop-culture decades ended is usually less clear. I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone put foward an event which ended the 1970s. This is perhaps because everyone was glad the 1970s were over, but that's beside the point.

My suggestion for when the 1970s ended involved Mick Jagger once again, making him some kind of agent of change. The event itself comes in 1985, with the release of the video for Jagger and David Bowie's ill-advised cover version of "Dancing in the Street". Suddenly the world was confronted with Earth's two coolest men somehow contriving to look like nothing so much as your dad and your uncle dancing at a wedding.

Perhaps due to the embarrasment of the participants, it seems that it isn't possible to embed any of the Youtube versions of the video, so if you want to see the evidence you'll have to follow a link.

An Elegant Weapon For A Less Civilised Age

I was recently in Dublin for a "War and Death" conference, and it reminded me that I still had videos of the bronze sword display from WAC-6 last year. I though people might be interested in seeing them, so here we go:

Dr. Alan Peatfield uses a bronze short sword on a melon.

Dr. Barry Molloy uses an Egyptian khephesh on rolled tatami mat, simulating a limb.

Drs. Peatfield and Molloy demonstrate the use of a khephesh against a shield. As far as I know, the man who breaks and runs on 0.19 is not doing so in fear of his life.

Sadly, I was not filming when a Very Eminent Scandinavian Prehistorian accidently almost opened up a woman's arm with a swing of a Bronze Age rapier - a near-miss that was not his fault, but still nearly took experimental archaeology onto a whole new level.

"Would You Like To Play A Game?"

It was the President Madagascar meme which first put me on to Pandemic 2 - a free online Flash game in which you play the part of a global pandemic, with the aim being to wipe out humanity as quickly as possible. The joke is that Madagascar has only a single seaport as a point of entry in the game, and the government there is extremely quick to shut off all communications before your virus arrives. For the record, I have yet to win the game, although I did manage to wipe out everyone apart from Japan, New Zealand, and (of course) Madagascar.

The topicality of the game put me in mind of a text-only game from the 1980s - which I cannot find mentioned anywhere on the internet - which allowed you to simulate a nuclear exchanged between the US and USSR. It did a very nice job of re-creating the mindset of MAD: launch everything you have at everything they have in the first wave, and hope that you still have something left at the end to technically make you the winner.

It also made me think that topicality in games was something that we didn't have for quite a while. In the glory days of the British computer game industry in the 1980s we had plenty, with Harrier Attack and Wanted: Monty Mole springing to mind. I suppose the small size of games then made it easy to produce them quickly, while events were still recent. As game have gotten more complex, the development time has increased markedly. Flash games seem to have provided a new way of producing things quickly, though.

Academic Comedy

Yesterday brought the revelation that my internal examiner is a big fan of BBC Three's not-as-good-as-Boosh-or-Conchords-but-still-good-fun comedy We Are Klang. This is funny both because he himself reminds me a lot of the guy in it who plays the teacher in The Inbetweeners, and because I suspect the programme represents his view of the department.

There's also the matter of this little gem on prehistoric art from my external examiner's 2007 book:

And the men are usually phallic. Why? Presumably not because they fought battles in that state; apart from the obvious discomfort and impracticality, one would think it would be physically impossible to sustain such a state during combat (it seems unlikely that experimental archaeology will come to our aid in this instance).

He wasn't that bleedin' funny in the viva, let me tell you.