Park Live

At the point in British pop-culture when it was imperative that one chose between Blur and Oasis, I chose Blur. In Manchester in 1995, this was an interesting and perhaps hazardous choice. However, looking at the post-Britpop careers of the two bands, I'm pretty sure I made the right choice. Thanks to my sister, we got tickets to the first of the Blur gigs in Hyde Park on Thursday last week. Because it was really hot in London that day, and because the support acts were so disappointing (The Foals? Friendly Fires? Where are all Damon's world music mates when you need them?) we decided to turn up pretty late in the day, about seven. This worked pretty well, with the heat starting to die off as we arrived, although we also managed to make our usual error in going to the wrong tube station and having to walk the long way round to the entrance.

I confess to not really having followed the ins and outs of the Blur breakup when it happened, so my sister filled me in on the fact that it was Coxon vs. everyone else. Also discussed was how Damon had gone from being reviled in the mid-90s to pretty popular today, while Alex James is now apparently hated for for owning a dairy and writing about it in The Observer. It just goes to show though: someone should have told Jackson that all he needed to do was spend a decade pretending to be an animated character and writing elaborate stage shows about monkeys, and all would have been forgiven.

Once inside we grabbed a beer and headed into the crowd to get a good spot in what turned out to be a very big crowd indeed. As ever, the crowd itself provided all the needed entertainment before the band comes on. On particularly good form were two guys stood just behind us:

[Roadies wheel a big trolly of equipment onto the stage]

MAN 1: Maybe Damon's going to come on early and do some of his solo stuff?

MAN 2: I think everyone would get tired of Dub Reggae pretty quickly.

Then, a bit later:

MAN 1: (Observing the big map of Britain to the right of the stage) What's that island between Britain and Ireland?

MAN 2: I dunno, but I reckon we should go and check it out.

I hope they do, but I can't help but feel that they'll only be disappointed.

We've been to festivals and gigs in Hyde Park for a few years now, and what surprised us this time was the amount of plastic bottle-throwing, which started prior to the band coming on and continued throughout the evening. It reached epidemic proportions just before Blur took to the stage, and was oddly impressive, like a low-budget fireworks display. Also it was fun to imagine Blur cowering backstage, thinking "Oh God, is our comeback going to vanish under a hail of empty Tuborg bottles?"

Fortunately this failed to happen, and a cheerful and slightly dazed-seeming Albarn and the rest entered from the right. Albarn's somewhat garbled take on things was a main feature of the evening - comparable to seeing The Who a few years ago, but Townsend and Daltry have the excuse that they're now nearly a thousand years old. My favourite piece of incomprehensible banter from Damon? "At one point during this song I'm going to start running towards you, and I want you all to literally run towards me...literally, but not physically." What?

My era of Blur was really "The Great Escape", because I preferred them pretending to be The Kinks rather than pretending to be Pavement. What turned out to be one of my highlights of the evening came pretty early on, with a thumping, up-tempo version of "Girls and Boys": parody of Ibiza dance doing a pretty good job of being the real thing.

Perhaps it was the heat, or the size of the crowd, but the twat-ratio seemed to be higher than previous Hyde Park gigs we'd been to - witness the bottle throwing, but also one guy stood near us who, before nearly every song, shouted "PLAY THE ELVIS ONE!" Bizarrely, it turned out that this meant "Tender is the Night". No, I don't know why, either.

Tender is the night was very popular with the crowd, who continued to sing "Oh my baby/Oh my baby/Oh why/Oh my" for a short time after the song had finished. This did not go down well on stage, and Albarn responded with "If you want to carry on singing, could you leave the park and go down the road a bit?" Gracious as ever, Damo!

All the big hits were played, with people going absolutely fucking mental for "Song 2", causing a guy just to my left, who had a bag full of Graham Coxon flyers he was giving out, to desperately dive around saving the bag from beneath people's feet. "Coffee and TV" was enjoyed in a more sedate way, and it was only when Coxon introduced it that I realised that I'd somehow made it all the way through the 90s without realising that he has a really silly speaking voice. Maybe that's what drove him to drink?

"Park Life" obviously, was the centrepiece of the set, for which Phil Daniels joined the band on stage for simian-style mockney-dancing. Damon also told us that Hyde Park was the inspiration for the song, because he'd lived just around the corner in the early 90s.

The encore closed with "The Universal", always one of my favourites, although unlike the video there were no Clockwork Orange references forthcoming from the stage. It was a great way to finish - after all, it is now the next century...

WE really enjoyed the whole thing, and given the amount of energy expended by Albarn and the band it might be a good thing that we were there on the first night, because they must have been knackered on the Friday. I'd certainly be interested in new Blur album, if one's in the offing.

Teaching Greek Pottery To The Inbetweeners

Well, this week saw me doing a little outreach work for the department, by giving the Greek pottery session that I do for the undergraduates to classes of Sixth-Form students, in the hope that it'll encourage them to come here and do archaeology. It's a tough balance to strike: you want to be upbeat and friendly, but it's very easy to slip into doing this to nightmarish levels - see Graham Norton's character of the Youth Group Priest in Father Ted for reference.

it seemed to go pretty well. Despite the title of the post, the groups were really good, and I'd have been happy to have had them as an Undergraduate class.

My other work at the moment sees me writing a chapter on Bronze Age warfare in Italy and the Balkans. This has involved mechanically translating five books out of German, then making notes on the translation. Still, I now know an awful lot about the bronze swords of Hungary and Romania. I look forward to listing that as a skill to someone at the Job Centre.

You Can't Help Being Hard Up/Can't Trust The Gods We Trusted

There is, of course, a question as to whether I can afford the time or the money to go and see them. There's also a question as to whether I can afford to *not* have the bass line to "At Home He's a Tourist" echo around my ribcage.

Waiting For The Tanks

Found here, a "new" photograph of a familiar and moving scene. Remarkable.

Disaster Response

In a spectacularly good coincidence last week, Channel 4 had George Romero's The Crazies (1973) on, which I had heard of but hadn't seen before. The premise of the film is that a virus causing homicidal insanity has accidentally become loose in a small town in America. In a sense, what we have is a zombie film without any zombies.

Being made in-between Night of the Living Dead (1968) and Dawn of the Dead (1978), Romero clearly had very little money to spend on this, and it has that look that all low-budget 70s horror films seem to. What sets The Crazies apart from those films is Romero's more sophisticated take on the situation: the problem isn't so much the virus, but more the incompetent and heavy-handed response from the authorities.

I see from IMDB that an inevitable remake should be out next year. The core concept certainly has potential for a bigger budget remake, but I have a suspicion that, like the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, the badly flawed original will remain the more interesting piece.

Why I Hate Saturn

I recently aquired a scanner for the purposes of OCRing foreign-language papers and then running them through an automatic translator, rather than actually being able to read foreign languages like proper academics do. One spin-off from the purchase is that it came with a gadget to let you scan slides.

Now, unlike most people I know, I do actually have some slides - the product of spending your teenage years taking photos of the night sky, rather than doing something healthier, like talking to girls.

So, for the first time on the internet, some of the results. First up, Comet C/1996 B2 Hyakutake:





Then, a bit later, Comet C/1995 O1 Hale-Bopp:





With the constellation Cassiopeia



Taken slightly later, you can see that the tail has changed shape as the comet changes position relative to the sun

Walled In

[River Deep-Mountain High] was the simulacrum of all Spector's grandiosity, his overarching ambition; it was all his passion, his thirst for revenge and his madness. It was a record that swept you up into its particular psychosis and left you stunned and exhausted in its wake. You could be enthralled by it, but you could never love it.

- Mick Brown, Tearing Down The Wall Of Sound: The Rise and Fall of Phil Spector (2007)

Second-degree murder is, I suspect, a pretty accurate reflection of what happened. I was curious in the media reports of the verdict that Spector was described as having a history of threatening women with guns - this is true, but only in the sense that he had a history of threatening people in general with guns, The Ramones only being the most famous example.

This isn't to say, of course, that Spector's relationship with women wasn't extremely odd. That much was testified in the music, going right the way back to the beginning: tell me that there isn't something a little strange about the last line of "Spanish Harlem".

All in all, yet another case of someone being a great artist and a terrible human being.

Pandarama

As promised, videos of the wildlife from my visit to "Ocean Park" in Hong Kong.



The dolphins are housed in a place called "Dolphin University". This one just got a 2:2, but it's OK: that's what he expected to get.



In this one, the Dolphins can be heard talking, although the subject of the conversation is unclear.



A popular pastime for the members of "Dolphin University" is to roll over on their backs and let the water spray on their bellies.



I've always been fond of Rays, and this one very kindly surfaced and flapped along the shoreline while I was nearby.



Actually, they might be Seals rather than Sea Lions, but I'm not sure I can tell the difference. They seemed to like shooting along the bottom of the pool on their backs with their eyes closed.



"Lucky" has scars on his shell which suggest he was hit by a propeller. He spent several months in intensive care before joining the aquarium.



One of the main reasons I wanted to go to Ocean Park was the promise of Pandas. I was not disappointed. Apparently in the wild they are solitary animals, and the black-and-white coats help them avoid each other. It's no wonder breeding is such a problem for them.



These Pandas are asleep, and they don't have to justify themselves to you. The wobbling at the end of this clip is because a small child has just head-butted me in the stomach.



Jia Jia had been dozing sat up when I first got into the Panda enclosure. Then she woke up and scratched herself on a tree-trunk, to general excitement.

White Wedding (Part 1)

It's high time I finished off the posts about my visit to Hong Kong. I was up pretty early on the morning of the wedding itself, thanks to the effects of jet-lag. This did, however, give me plenty of time to go and poke about Aberdeen Harbour. From here you can get boats out to the floating seafood restaurants, but given that the food they serve is apparently pretty bad, and that they aren't actually floating, I didn't take up the opportunity.

Due to my deep, deep fear of becoming trapped in some obscure part of Hong Kong and unable to make it to the wedding, I changed into my suit before heading into town to spend the morning in Central. This meant that many of the citizens of Hong Kong got to see a profusely sweating white guy walking around the mid-levels, but I'm sure they're fairly used to that.

The mid-levels were reached by taking a series of escalators suspended above street level, which is a somewhat strange way to travel, but did help reduce the effects of wearing the suit. I got off at Hollywood Road to poke about the antiques district and visit the Man Mo temple. Some of the shops did have interesting antiquities that were far out of my price range. Man Mo temple is quite strangely placed, with modern buildings having grown up all around it.

There were what looked like nice carvings at the ground-level of the temple too, but the slightly strange decision to preserve them by encasing them in bubble-wrap had been taken, so it was hard to see what they actually were. In the neighbouring streets I kept an eye out for any "Bank of Hell" banknotes (because who wouldn't want currency from the Bank of Hell?) which are burned as offerings in the temple, but I drew a blank.

My previous visit to Kowloon had been done using the underground system, but I wanted to make the crossing by ferry at least once, so I decided to do that now. Comparisons to the Mersey ferries are favourable: not only are the Hong Kong ferries cheaper, they don't bombard you with a recording of "Ferry Across The Mersey", either. Although I suppose it would be quite weird if they did.

My worries about missing the wedding were unfounded, as I turned up about 15 minutes early, about the same time that Tom and his family got there. Being Valentine's Day, the church was having back-to-back wedding all day. Weddings were tending to collide with each other outside, and I wouldn't be surprised if at some point that day someone found themselves in the wrong one. I was interested to note the neon haloes on the statues inside the church, although apparently that's pretty common in the Far East.

As for the service itself, my Catholic upbringing was not enough for me to instinctively remember when I should be stood up or sat down. Doing what the majority of people did was clearly the best policy, although the cases where there wasn't a clear majority were a risky.

After the service, I joined everyone else in dodging between the official photographers - who had been fearless in getting in close for their shots during the service - in order to steal a few photos.

For the reception, we were bussed as a mob to a very nice hotel - the location of which I'm still not sure of - for a meal. I'm thinking the music was Tom's department, given that the playlist began with David Bowie's last good song ("Absolute Beginners" if you're wondering). I was also amused that he did, after all, manage to sneak Joy Division's "Love Will Tear Us Apart" in, which prompted a discussion on my table about other unconventional songs for weddings - post yours in the comments section.

Post-reception, we decamped back to the Irish bar where the stag-night had begun. I left earlier than I would have liked, but I was mindful of the possibility that I'd be left in the middle of nowhere again, and the next day would be my last in Hong Kong. As it was, I needn't have worried - the taxi driver knew the address, and dropped me off at the door of the hotel with no fuss. Where had that guy been all the other times?

The next day, I started off by heading to Ocean Park, the theme park on the south coast. Despite Aberdeen being quite near it, it seemed that the easiest way was to go to central and get the dedicated bus. Admission was £20, which is pretty reasonable. I had no intention of going on any of the rides, but was there to see the sealife - and pandas. I've got videos of this which I'll put up sometime soon, but it was well worth the visit.

I had a few other things to tick off on my list that day, which involved heading a little bit out into the suburbs. Wong Tai Sin temple was apparently miraculously saved several times from destruction by the Japanese in the Second World War, and has now given its name to the whole area.

I did go inside, although photography there was not allowed. Worship here took the form of shaking a beaker full of sticks in front of the altar - I think this causes one stick to come out, and that they have characters on which can be interpreted for meaning. Interesting to see.

Even further into the heart of suburbia was Kowloon Walled City Park, which I admit I was visiting purely because of the mentions William Gibson had given to the Walled City. Left out of the treaty which ceded Hong Kong to Britain, the Walled City had existed without a government until it was pulled down in 1992. It appears not to have been the crime-ridden hell-hole you might have imagined, either, despite apparently being run by Triad gangs. These days, the site is a really nice park, which contains some of the remains of the city, as well as a model of how it looked.

The last things I did were purchasing some gifts for people back home - a Chinese film flyer from the shop next to the Broadway Cinematheque for my sister, some green stone elephants and a teapot for my parents from Temple Street Night Market. The latter two items involved haggling, although I'm temperamentally unsuited to the activity, and I clearly paid well over the odds. On the other hand, it was never a game I was actually going to win at.

From there it was back to central to collect my case, then out to the airport to come home. There were some things I couldn't do because of the weather, and it would have been nice to have an extra day in the city, but I had a great time out there. Perhaps one day I'll go again.

"Well They'd Already Be In There, Wouldn't They?"

I spent this weekend in London, becuase my sister had cleverly gotten tickets to the premieres of the Red Riding Trilogy at the BFI, before the first one screens on Channel 4 later this week.

As readers of the blog and people who know me in real life will know, I'm a big fan of the novels, and of Peace's writing in general. Combined with the fact that this is my very own blog, I've never had such a good opportunity to become a raging fanboi. I'm going to try and pass the opportunity up, however.

As with any attempt to transform a novel into a 90-minute film, there is an inevitable process of reduction. The plots have had to be somewhat simplified, some characters amalgamated. Gone too are the first-person perspectives and internal monologues, replaced by a more standard third-person approach.

I'm not going to go into too much detail about the films, because people may well be seeing these stories for the first time later in the week. What was interesting was that, like the novels, 1980 is the gem here, and 1983 is easily the weakest. The latter compounds this by including a completely new ending which I suspect will cause David Peace to vomit with rage. 1974, the first part, makes the main protagonist far more sympathetic that he is in the novel - perilously close to a Sam Tyler-figure, in fact - but features some of the best cinematography of the three. The trilogy also features strong performances by several members of the cast - Paddy Considine, David Morrissey, Sean Bean, and Sean Harris all stand out.

All in all, did I get the competition to The Wire that I was looking for? Not quite, but then comparing a 13-hour series with three 1.5-hour films isn't really fair. What we have got, though, is some superior British crime drama, something of an antidote to the carefully edited I Love The 70s nostalgia and the tea-and-scones vision of police corruption found in Life On Mars. Watch the series, but do go and find the novels, too.

Being the BFI screening, the audience was full of members of the cast and crew, and other well-known figures. Mike Leigh was sat two rows directly in front of me, and I could totally have bounced a scrunched-up piece of paper off the back of his head. I didn't, though. I'm not sure I'd ever been around so many famous people - it's not everyday you walk past one of Alex's Droogs sharing a cigarette with Fred Flintstone.

The films were followed by a Q&A. Given that many of the people in the audience were 1) in the films and 2) full of wine the questions weren't always that interesting. Warren Clarke believed that the films had "brought the bollocks back to British TV", but he meant it in a good way. I'll always remember this portion of the evening for the following:

HOST: (searches the audience) I understand that the Yorkshire Ripper is here, minus his beard?

[Joseph Mawle waves his arm in the air. There is a scattered round of applause - whether it's for being the Yorkshire Ripper or for having shaved is unclear]

Sensoria

I got into Hong Kong airport at about 2PM, and after failing to get my mobile phone working at the airport took the fast train into Central. At the Pacific Coffee Company in the IFC mall I was able to get internet access with my coffee, and discovered that I'd forgotten to put a "+" in front of the country code. I was then able to call Tom, who was able to round me up with his mum, brother, and Jon Brown, who I hadn't seen since London in 2003.

Tom was also kind enough to get me to Aberdeen on the south side of the island, where my hotel was. The taxi driver did not know where this was, and left us in the middle of nowhere - the start of a recurring pattern with me and Hong Kong taxi drivers. If Tom hadn't come with me I would probably never have been seen again.

Soon after reaching my hotel it was time to leave it again, and head out for the stag night on Lan Kwai Fong, which began at an Irish bar, took in one quite good place that had a band, and finished in a cheap dive which I was later informed was where everyone's maid goes when they're off-duty. My memories of the whole thing are a bit hazy, but those that are there are fun. Plus, travel is all about new experiences, and I'd never been accosted by an Aussie pimp before.

We left the last club at about 6AM, and I made the fatal mistake of attempting to get a taxi back to Aberdeen. Despite having the hotel address written down in Chinese characters, he left me in a different part of the middle of nowhere. Fortunately all signs in Hong Kong are bi-lingual, so I was able to find a bus stop which would take me back to central, where I could get a bus to Aberdeen.

In central I wanted a coffee and some breakfast. By this point, however, I had been awake for a dangerous number of hours, and had been drinking. Having my eyes open was strangely painful. There was clearly something wrong with my demeanour as I entered the IFC mall, because I was intercepted by the security staff. Fortunately for me they accepted that I wanted a coffee, rather than to kill everyone and burn the place to the ground, so I was allowed to proceed.

I finally returned to the hotel at about 9.30AM, a good 13 hours since I'd last been there. Most of Friday was therefore lost to sleep. In the evening, however, I made it over to Kowloon to the Night Market. If you want something in your house with a picture of one of the 20th Century's most effective mass murderers, you can buy it here, along with lots of fake watches, copied DVDs, and so on. Also, a surprising number of stalls seemed to be devoted to selling sex toys.

"He say you Blade Runner": Neon signs on Temple Street, Kowloon.

I was feeling a bit guilty that I'd been in Hong Kong this long and hadn't actually eaten any Chinese food yet. Not wanting to be ill for the wedding, I avoided the food stalls on Temple Street and headed to the "Heaven on Earth" restaurant on Knutsford Terrace, who were able to find me a table despite it being the day before Valentine's Day. They come recommended, if you ever go to Hong Kong.

To round things off, I walked down to Tsim Sha Tsui to see the famous Hong Kong skyline at night, where I took the picture at the top of this post. After the previous night, I made sure I took the bus back to Aberdeen.

Cities In Dust

The beginning of a full report of my visit to Hong Kong this month. As originally planned, I was going to spend about two hours in Qatar at Doha airport, waiting for my connecting flight to Hong Kong. As it turned out, a thick fog meant that I missed the connection, and had to wait 20 hours for the next one. I ended up being given a visa for Qatar, presumably to stop me escaping and living out my days as some sort of fierce desert bandit, but I hadn't packed for that anyway.

Fortunately, the airline put me up at a hotel for the day. More specifically, the five star Mövenpick Towers & Suites. It is, needless to say, the nicest hotel I've ever been in, and I'm unlikely to ever be anywhere that nice again. I would quite happily have rented my room as an apartment. Everyone else there was wearing very nice suits, and I was wearing a ten year-old sweater and had holes in my shoes. I felt somewhat out of place and apologetic, and that was before the incident with the orange juice at breakfast.

The hotel room contained a thick visitors guide to the country. It gave me a brief list of behaviour to avoid which included:

1. Don't take photos of buildings.
2. Don't take photos of people.
3. Don't talk to any Arab women.

It was shaping up to be a fun visit. Getting to the souks would also involve changing money into Riyals and getting to the other side of town, and I didn't want to miss any messages from the airline. I did, however, venture out onto the Corniche. As you'll see from the photos, the murk was beginning to gather again, and I wondered if I might be there even longer.

I was already breaking rule 1, but no-one arrested me on charges of spying on Qatar's huge military secrets. It pretty quickly became apparent that the whole West Bay area consists of nothing except luxury hotels and business skyscrapers. Anyone staying there is going to be spending a lot of time in the hotel, unless they're going to the golf course. Ten years ago there must have been hardly anything to Doha at all, which makes you wonder where, precisely, all that oil money was going before it was stimulating hotel construction.

The Sheraton hotel, Doha: Someone's been watching "Blade Runner". Also, if you get a penthouse suite you're allowed to cut someone's heart out and kick their body down the outside of the building.*

Something else was also becoming clear: in Doha, everyone drives everywhere. The only other people I encountered walking around were imported labourers here to do all the skyscraper-building, and joggers. Walking was a sign of extreme poverty. I still felt more at home than I did in the hotel.

The furthest point I reached was the mascot for the 2006 Asian Games. "What's the single most terrifying thing we could do?" they asked themselves. "How about building a giant, torch-wielding Oryx, and then leaving it to decay by the seashore?"

One day it will surely rampage amongst the skyscrapers. Until then, it waits.

I walked back to the hotel as evening set in. At 11 O'Clock the hotel bus ran me and the other passengers out to the airport. Seven hours later I was in Hong Kong, a day late, but still in time for the stag night. That's for the next post.

*This is a lie.

Hong Kong Conversation

I have now returned from Tom's wedding in Hong Kong. A fuller account will follow, with pictures and videos and everything. For now, please be content with this fragment of conversations, which I thought was worth preserving.

Tom: That's the tower that Batman jumps off in "The Dark Knight".

Tom's Mum: That seems like an unwise thing to do.

Tom: He's always been a bit of a loose cannon, that Batman.

Tom's Brother: Yes - he should be stopped.

Après-Culture

Never Never

Well, this week I got my rejection letter from the museum, having failed to get an interview for it. I'm reliably in formed that it was an inside job, so it doesn't seem that there was any danger of them letting the likes of me anywhere near it anyway. This doesn't really change the question, though, which is that if I wasn't considered suitable for this post, is there a post that I am going to be thought of as suitable for?

With an estimated 3.5 million unemployed this year, the corrections to the thesis, and getting The Worst Peer-Review ever this time last year, I'm increasingly thinking that finishing the thesis is the last thing I'll be doing in archaeology.

Blue Lights On Black Sky

The first half of 2009 contains a couple of things in film and television which are of considerable interest to me - both of them David Peace - related. I already knew that a film adaptation of The Damned United with Michael Sheen as Brian Clough was going to be out. Now a preview of the year in one of the papers has informed me that Channel 4 will be screening an adaption of the same author's Red Riding Quartet starting in March.

This has considerable potential. For some time I've felt that British T.V. drama has been severely outclassed by that of American T.V., and by the output of H.B.O. in particular - the fact that I'm currently five episodes into the first series of The Wire is only confirming my opinion. Handled right, the Red Riding novels are the kind of source material which could produce something good. There are, of course, the normal concerns about the lower budgets of British T.V. and the possibility of a certain level of sanitisation taking place - things which made the recent adaptations of Jake Arnott's The Long Firm and He Kills Coppers somewhat lacklusture. Either way, I await the broadcasts with interest.

The Past Lives In The Books At Home/No Weak Men In The Books At Home

I was not killed outright during my PhD viva. In fact, I'm told I did rather well in it, referring constantly to things that were in the text, and mounting a vigorous and robust defence of the points I'd made. Perhaps the Mark-out-of-Peep-Show part of my subconscious was invoking Order 227?

The actual result was that I have passed subject to substantial corrections - they should take at least 6 months to complete, I have a maximum of a year to do them. So a good result, but not a great one. The main problem is that I was hoping that the viva would function as the event which would finally prove to me that I was good enough, and could, in fact, do this for a job*. For that, I'm still waiting.

I won't have to viva again however, and the examiners report which should arrive before Christmas will state precisely what I have to do in the form of corrections, so it's not like having to guess what the examiners want, which is pretty much what you have to do while you're writing the thesis.

*Curiously, I just finished reading David Peace's The Damned United, in which this is something of a theme. I suspect I'm substantially less damaged than Brian Clough, though.

And Each Separate Dying Ember Wrought Its Ghost Upon The Floor

Well, the viva is a week tomorrow, and I think the nerves are starting to kick in. I've got some of those books out of the Library. You know, the ones with titles like How Not To Be Killed Outright During Your PhD Viva.

Still, if all else fails I might finally get to use the Simpsons "You're not the time, Kent! YOU'RE not the time!" defence, so beloved by Emily and myself, in a proper context.

Protect And Survive

For various reasons, many of them probably connected to the release of Fallout 3, I've been interested in retro-apocalypse stuff recently. This led me to Youtube, and to the T.V. segments of the British government's "Protect and Survive" programme, which capture the apocalyptic mood of the early 1980s.

There are two main unsettling elements to these ads. One, of course, is the matter-of-fact way in which horrific information is being relayed. The other is that a campaign to assist the British public in surviving thermonuclear war appears to have had about 25p lavished on it.

Events

Well, things are, finally, happening. At the end of last week we found out that I will be vivaing on the 15th December. In the e-mail that my internal examiner got it was also apparent that the external examiner has got the names of me and the internal examiner mixed up. This could result in an interesting situation.

I'm also applying for a position at a Very Prestigious Museum in London, which wants a curator for its Greek Bronze Age collection. According to the person description in their application pack, I'm a fairly good match for what they want, so I'm hoping for an interview.

Obamapost

Yes, it's a little late, but I was up until 4 on Wednesday morning watching the results come in.

"The Future's Already Here - It's Just Not Evenly Distributed."

Looking at media headlines over the last few months, it's often seemed that we might, in fact, be living in the sort of dystopian future that 80s science-fiction was predicting. This week, the fact that stories about Iraq, global economic recession, and a child being murdered in Liverpool are taking second billing to two comedians making prank phone calls are only reinforcing the impression.

It's in this context that the photo below struck me when I saw it at the Daylife website. It is a view of the skyline from a shanty-town on the outskirts of Manila in the Philippines:

"Around Him Images of Glass And Steel Bigger Than His Imagination"

More dispatches from the world of Sigue Sigue Sputnik. Unlike previous mentions in this blog, however, they're not here for straddling that line between really clever and really ridiculous that I like so much, but for having done something that's actually rather good. This is the video to "Dancerama" (1989), but the focus here isn't on the song (although, as one of the YouTube comments says, sounding a bit like the good years of Roxy Music is never a bad thing) but very much on the video, which takes the form of an homage to cult French art-house sci-fi film La Jetée (1962). My favourite element is the lines of text scrolling across the bottom of the screen.

Thanks to Tom for originally bringing the video to my attention.

Post-Thesis

Well, that's the thesis. We have no idea how good it is yet, but it is reassuringly thick. There's no date for the viva as yet, but the latest news is that it may be possible to do it in December rather than January, which is good.

I actually handed the thesis in on 26th September, my final deadline day. I've been meaning to post about it here for a while, because not everyone who reads this is on Facebook yet. Handing in the thesis is a strange thing: everyone other than you seems to be quite excited by it. Really for me it wasn't all that special, other than that I could stop working quite so hard for a bit.

People find this lack of excitement strange, so I should probably explain it a bit. It's not, of course, that handing in is not A Good Thing. It's just that, for people who are still keen on having a career in academia, handing in is really a minor step. Finding out whether I'm any good at research is more important, and that's what the viva will tell me. Getting a job is what it's all about, and as far as I can tell I'm as close to that as I was four years ago. These, for me, are the milestones that will count.

In the post-thesis phase, I'm staying busy, thanks mostly to the fact that I'm now lecturing in the ancient warfare module at the university. So far student feedback has been quite good, which is encouraging. The teaching of ancient warfare does, however, have some fairly unique problems, such as the fact that you find yourself having to repeatedly use phrases such as "thrusting strokes" in front of an audience of 18 year-olds.

Like Jen, I think i'm going to try and make a post a week here from now on. We'll see how that goes.

Uh-Oh, Culture Comes To Town

A video, taken by me on Saturday evening, of "La Machine" in Liverpool with their giant mechanical spider . At one point near the end you can just about see a couple of people by its feet, to give some scale.

"Let Me Take You To School, Suckers...In Archaeology!"*

This morning the Continuing Eductation course-list booklet arrived in the post, and there I am on page 15. Hopefully there will be enough sign-ups to allow the course to go ahead. Should any regular readers want to join, they're welcome, although coming up here every Tuesday from the start of October would be a problem for most of you.

*Reference to a now-infamous Frank Miller Batman comic.

Through Every Human Heart

I have to confess, I hadn't realised that Solzhenitsyn was still alive. I've got my father's copy of The Gulag Archipelago sat on a shelf at home. I should really read it.

For You, There Is Only The Desert

Those of you who knew me a few years ago may remember my habit of flinching whenever I thought someone was going to touch me. According to Robert Graves, its a habit I shared with T.E. Lawrence. That, surely, was enough reason for me to go and see Lawrence of Arabia on a big screen at Philharmonic Hall. Oh, and he was an archaeologist, so that sealed it.

Prior to the film was a short introduction by Dr. Jack Shaheen, who noted that the film may in fact be the most positive portrayal Arabs have had in western cinema. Perhaps the biggest change the film makes from history is the depiction of the Arab occupation of Damascus in 1918: it shows Arab government failing after two days due to infighting and the refusal of the British to allow their technical experts with regards to power and medicine. In point of fact the Arab government lasted two years until 1920, when it fell because it was forcibly removed by the French. Shaheen would give it a C- as history, but an A+ as entertainment.

What was most interesting to me, not having seen the film in years, and having read Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom in the meantime, was the character portrait the film provides of a remarkably complex individual. Peter O'Toole's performance manages to capture the strange mixture of arrogant egoism and fragile insecurity that appears to have driven the historical Lawrence's personality - the personality which wrote an autobiographical account of colonial adventurism inspired by the Odyssey, Medieval Romances and modernist prose, and then finished it with the words "and then at once I knew how much I was sorry".

The omissions the film makes regarding Lawrence's personality are also interesting - you don't need to read much of Seven Pillars of Wisdom to realise that the historical Lawrence was much more racist that the film would have you believe. You also don't have to read much to realise that he was a complete sado-masochist, something which an early 1960s film can only hint at.

Regardless of what it does with history and character portraits, though, Lawrence of Arabia is perhaps the most subtle and intelligent of epics. As such, it's a fitting study of a very modern protagonist, and one which has become strangely relevant again.

I'll Bomb Your Photo Good

More new terminology being spread by the internet: "photobombing" describes the fine art of sneaking into someone else's photo and doing something hilarious. The list of photos over at the blog List of the Day appears to be the start of a definative catalogue.

Surely there should be world championships for this? If so, I believe these people would make the finals:

Sans Cat

I have just been alerted to the existance of Garfield Minus Garfield, a website which removes the eponymous cat and his speech bubbles from the cartoon strips. It's a simple concept, but one which turns an otherwise bland daily comic strip into something darkly surreal.

Some highlights:

"You're A Teacher?" 'Part-Time.'

As an archaeologist, it was pretty much mandatory fro me to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, so over the weekend I did. While it has its moments - many of them being call-backs to the original three, the overall film is only OK, and I would say that the three 1980s films were better. Yes, even Temple of Doom.

There was also a nagging feeling that Indiana Jones is somehow out of place in the 1950s. The 30s and 40s? Sure, that's the period of pulp adventure, but the 50s somehow feels slightly off. If there's a fifth installment they better not push it into the 60s. More positively, Harrison Ford does quite well here, which is impressive when you remember that his last decent film was, what, The Fugitive? Actually, Scrubs fans will be pleased to see the Janitor pop up yet again in a Harrison Ford film.

Of interest to the archaeological crowd is the fact that our impeccably anti-Communist Dr. Jones declares himself to be a fan of Vere Gordon Childe.

Post-Docs, And Rumours Of Post-Docs

The word on the archaeological street is that during the week, the British School at Athens will be informing those who applied for the MacMillan Scholarship whether or not they got an interview. Hopefully I'll be amongst them, as the MacMillan is my last opportunity to get funding that starts in September 2008 rather than September 2009.

Dreaming Darkly Of Craven Cottage

I'm not sure I've ever been so worried about a football match that it worried my sleep before. Last night, however, I was dreaming about today. My subconscious has some good verisimilitude, because it didn't have me at the match, it had me sat in front of my computer watching the automatic updates on Yahoo! Sport. As I recall, Fulham simultaneously won and lost the match.

In real life, I don't think I'll be able to take watching the automatic updates or listening on the radio. I shall walk around Sefton Park with my iPod, and will only turn on the media once the results are in.

Jobhunting

Today I applied for a job at Birkbeck College. I'm almost entirely certain that they won't be interested in me - the advert is for a lecturer of Classical Archaeology or the Material Culture of the Greco-Roman world, which I only fit if you squint quite a lot. It's also possible that they'll get at least one application from someone who's actually given a lecture at some point. On the other hand, there was nothing to be gained by not applying.

The other thing that strikes me is how intimidating it is to see the quality of some departments out there. Birkbeck's archaeology falls under their "School of History, Classics and Archaeology", which currently features Eric Hobsbawm and Orlando Figes, so I'm pretty sure you can see the gap in class between me and them.

Already, They Are Organising The Viva

I just had confirmation of who the external examiner for my PhD will be. Prior to that, in July, he'll also be at WAC-6 in Dublin, in the same conference session as me. I hope he likes my paper...

Change

Tinkering is occurring, and because the old code was in such a state, there's no way back! Let me know if anything mysteriously stops working, as we boldly head off into the unknown.

"Shoot Me"

It's not often that I go to see a film on the day it's released, but on Friday I ended up doing just that for Diary of the Dead, the new George A. Romero zombie film. Sadly, it turns out to be largely an exercise in frustration.

The problem with Diary of the Dead is that Romero doesn't seem to know what sort of film it was supposed to be. Update of previous themes? Use of new technology? Interesting media-collage zombie film? Scream-style genre deconstruction? All of these are attempted, with the result that there isn't really a core to the film that emerges.

This is actually a great shame, because there are some interesting ideas in Diary of the Dead, but they aren't really executed properly. To some extent, this is a long-standing problem with Romero's films: watch the original Dawn of the Dead again, and you'll notice that it's too long and flabby, which is why Night of the Living Dead and Day of the Dead are much more cohesive pieces of work.

These days, however, even Romero's good points seem to be slipping. In Dawn of the Dead the social commentary was implied, while in Diary of the Dead you'll usually find one of the actors delivers it straight to the camera.

The most interesting elements here are the use of hand-held video cameras, and the (under-utilized) idea of creating a larger picture through pseudo-new media sources. As someone who made his name on shoestring-budgets, you'd think that Romero would be in his element with the opportunities for first-person perspectives, but it feels a little stagey. The hand-held camera idea was actually utilized much better in the micro-budget British effort The Zombie Diaries (2006), where it feels real: confusing and panic stricken (the film still isn't up to much, mind, mostly because of its reliance on masturbatory sadism for the horror element).

So, while there is some entertainment to be had here, there are also a lot of missed opportunities. The commentary on new media and the use of hand-held could have made this one of Romero's most interesting films, but as it is, the far more conventional Land of the Dead is much more successful.

Also of interest on this cinema visit was the trailer for the forthcoming superhero film Iron Man. The film itself might not have a strong theme of "See the primitive Muslim savages quail before American technological might!" but the trailer appears to have been put together with just that in mind.

"Smells Like...Barbeque"

OK, some of you may have seen this before - an episode of the children's cartoon series Eek the Cat which is closely modeled on one of the greatest non-children's films ever made.

You may not Get This, but if you do not then you may be Dead To Me.



In a similar vein, one day I will be able to show you the episode of Pinky and the Brain called "The Third Mouse"...

When Fiction Was Never Knowingly Under-Sold

The thing about this cover is that, being for a Spillane novel, it's totally representative of the contents.

We'll Keep The Green Flag Flying Here?

Recently I took the Political Compass test. It plots you on Left-Right, Authoritarian-Libertarian axes depending on your answers to their questions. As a guideline, some famous political figures are plotted out here:



Now, my own views came out like this:

Holy fuck! I think I just pwned Gandhi! Also, I appear to be Bakunin, or someone.

More seriously, that's not too far from what I thought, but there's a good chance that my results have been pushed slightly to the left and slightly down by two factors:

1. Some of the questions are clearly designed to test Americans, and don't really help in mapping out British folk.
2. I suspect that I idealized my political beliefs a bit when answering the questions.

The next bit of analysis, plotting the major British political parties, was where things got interesting:



Like most people, I've never really considered the Green Party. This prompted me to check out their policies. While there are parts of their programme that I'm not really bothered about (No nuclear power? Might have to be a bullet we bite, I'm afraid. No medical testing on animals? Do we *have* perfect simulations of people yet?), a fair few of their other ideas do interest me, to the extent that I'm going to have to find out more, at least.

So, long story short, this could be a solution to the problem of wanting to vote for a non-Labour leftist party that isn't some species of Marxist-Leninism.

They Made The Wrong Film

Recently I saw Grindhouse on DVD, and it has to be said that the best thing about it isn't Rodriguez's Planet Terror or Tarantino's Deathproof, but the spoof trailers that separate the two films. The pick of the bunch is "Machete", which is approximately one million times better than either director's main effort.



"Machete" (Probably Not Safe For Work)

The One And Only Billy Shears

Ringo Starr and Dave Stewart playing on top of St. George's Hall. Honest.

Yes, I was there at the opening ceremony for Liverpool Capital of Culture 2008. I arrived a bit too late to get a really good view, but it was a bit cold to be standing around outside for an hour and a half or more.

As for the opening ceremony, it was...well it was all a bit opening ceremony. Lots of acrobats in hard hats representing the workers of Liverpool. Semaphore representing maritime trade. No mentions of slavery. You know the drill. Really I was only there to see Ringo. Perhaps fortunately, him and his mate Dave Stewart were too away to hear my comments about the less popular quarter of the Beatles and the less popular half of the Eurythmics. Their contribution was to close the ceremony by singing one of the songs from Ringo's new 2008 tie-in album (the world has, of course, been crying out for a new Ringo Starr album). This I was vaguely disappointed by: it would've been good if he'd done "With A Little Help From My Friends" as well, say. Still, it got a large crowd out, and I gather the whole thing looked good on TV, so job done.

I also realise that I haven't said much, if anything, about Liverpool 08 in this blog. Partly it all seemed a long way off for a long time, and, of course, I'm not exactly immersed in the cultural life of the city. There's also the fact that I'm a touch ambivalent about the whole thing.

Liverpool 08 is supposed to be a celebration of the city's culture, but I suspect that it's actually an attempt to create a new type of culture in the city. A friend of mine lived in Dublin when they were Capital of Culture in the early '90s, and he reports that what it did most effectively was kill off the pre-existing culture. Capital of Culture is an exercise in bringing to the city the kind of culture that businesses, and the young professionals that work for those businesses, will want to see - and that's not, in large part, the Liverpool culture that's already here.

You can see it written in the building work being conducted in the city. There's hardly an empty warehouse or a patch of land in the city centre that isn't being turned into "luxury apartments". I have a weird feeling that the city's going to be left with a large surplus of luxury apartments in a few years. In Toxteth (just next to the city centre, on the river front) they moved "problem" residents into Kensington to make room for apartments and business space. Less solving a problem, more moving it to where it'll be less visible.

At the same time, I'm compelled to be my own counterpoint. It's all very well for me to be sniffy from my ivory tower about the motivation and the means for the 08 project. After all, I'm not relying on a job for it. There's no denying that it has brought much-needed jobs and investment into a city which has some of the worst areas of deprivation in western Europe, and that's undoubtedly important.

So I suspect that Liverpool 08 is going to be a two-edged sword. Which edge has the most effect remains to be seen.

Countdown

Well, 2008 has finally arrived. In many ways it's likely to be the least fun year I can remember. On my list of things to do for the year are finishing the thesis, organising a conference, publishing the proceedings from another conference, writing a paper for WAC-6 in Dublin, and doing the viva.

Oh, and convincing someone to give me an academic job so that I don't have to go a-warehousing again come October.

Still, I'll not be bored.

Tomorrow Was Another Day...

My Good friend Peter has alerted me to the existence of the blog "Dark Roasted Blend", which collects interesting images, by theme. Some favourites of mine:

Retro-Future: To The Stars!

Retro-Future: Glorious Urbanism

Communist Gothic

In The Details

We all went up to Gettysburg, the summer of '63: and some of us came back from there: and that's all except the details.

- Captain Praxiteles Swan, American Civil War veteran, quoted in L.A. Tritle's From Melos To My Lai: War and Survival

There's a good chance my thesis is going to start with that quote.

The Most Important Thing You Will Ever Read

Only the genuine highlights of RPG.net discussion make it to this blog, but the following, from a "give people good advice" thread, is simply wonderful:

Never, ever punch the air in celebration if there's a lightbulb above you. You will send yourself, or anyone standing near you to hospital.

I like the fact that it's so specific. I also like the fact that it fails to take into account most of the factors which cause the accidents it's trying to prevent.

Marbleized

Recently, while reading Jon Courtenay Grimwood's Stamping Butterflies, I wondered why no-one has ever written a cyberpunk-esque novel set in Athens. On a hill sits the building which modernity took as it's symbol of choice, while below, stretching away as far as the eye can see is the city that modernity built from concrete and ethnic cleansing.

That city is an interzone, where tourists from Europe and Asia with digital cameras and audio guides mingle with cheap immigrant labour from Africa and Albania, selling CDs on the beach and reviving crumbling Ottoman mosques. Small boats with a variety of cargoes make their way across the Aegean, and getting beaten and fitted up by the police isn't unknown.

A month or so ago, I ran into a guy called Phil. Phil used to work as an 18-30 holiday rep in Spain. These day's he's an office worker, but he missed the old lifestyle. Apparently that lifestyle consisted of a maximum of one hour's sleep a night, knowing the moves to every Steps dance routine, vodka-redbull for breakfast, and regularly vomiting blood.

So I think I've got my main character.

What Are The Politics Of Boredom?

Talk of a possible snap General Election prompts thoughts of who I'd actually vote for. One of the problems of being vaguely to the left of Social Democracy is that you don't really have anyone to vote for: the prominent alternative left-wing parties of Britain are either Trotskyists, apologists for Stalin, or a strange mixture including the above.

So Labour are the only real option, although I'm not hugely enthusiastic about it. Either of the seats I'm eligible to vote in are pretty much safe for Labour anyway. I suppose my real plan will be to vote as tactically as possible in order to keep the Conservatives out.

Burma

INTERVIEWER: What do you remember most vividly?

REPORTER: The students singing as they were being shot. And a student, a girl, who said to me "What can they do to us? We have our whole future ahead of us, and we've seen it."

- BBC news report, 19 June 1989, quoted in Greil Marcus' The Dustbin of History

Memery

On the one hand, I'm slightly ashamed that I've finally succummed. On the other, I'm fairly proud of what I came up with.

An Occult History Of Leeds United

Tuesday saw me in Manchester to attend a book-signing by the novelist David Peace. Not having seen Peace, or any pictures of him, I was somewhat surprised by his appearance. Given the brutality of his narratives, and the fact that they're often set in 1970s/80s Britain, you might expect him to be some sort of hulking skinhead.

Predictably, this is not the case. He's a quietly spoken man, all slender physique and somewhat nerdy Japanese designer glasses (although those glasses are missing for his book-jacket photos).

Peace read extracts from two of his books, "Tokyo Year Zero" which he was here to promote, and "The Dammned United", a novel about Brian Clough's 44 days as manager of Leeds United. It was interesting to note that Peace's writing style doesn't lend itself well to being read out loud - the jump-cuts and repetitions represent the internal monologue of a character, and are much more effective when they're interwoven with the reader's internal monologue.

The question and answer session was interesting. In 2004 Peace released a novel "GB84", set in West Yorkshire during the Miner's Strike. He recalled that he was worried that there would be a glut of books that year to mark the anniversary, or that there would be at least one major non-fiction account of the strike. In the event, his novel was practically the only book to mention the strike that year.

I couldn't think of any questions at the time, but did wonder afterwards if he'd seen Life on Mars, and what he'd think of it's somewhat cosy view of police coruption.

"And They Won't Let Me Forget It."

William Gibson begins his "UK mini-tour" (read: he's doing a couple of dates in London) today, so it looks like I'll have to catch him another time. To mark the occasion, however, here's a spectacularly uncomfortable cameo by Gibson in Oliver Stone's delightfully mental cyberpunk mini-series Wild Palms, from 1992.

Now The Party's Over

I have protected myself from ever having to sell out by having nothing to sell out.

- Tony Wilson, Twenty-Four Hour Party People

I'm not usually that upset when famous people pass on, but this, somehow, is different.

A Victim Of The Art

Some art unquestionably makes the world a better place in which to live. As an example, I give you these two pieces by painter and author Harland Miller:

To Lead, Not To Read

Well, I saw The Simpsons Movie last night, and the verdict is............it's OK.

It basically is an extended episode, and in some ways that's a disappointment. They don't do what I thought they probably would, which is have lots of jokes about it being a film, and lots of star cameos. Perhaps that's a good thing.

At 90 minutes long, it also felt a touch short - another 15 minutes or so might have made it feel a little more meaty.

All that said, it was funny enough, and it was interesting watching the Simpsons with a big crowd - you get to see all the diferent types of audience the show has, and the different types of joke they laugh at.

However, it's hard to escape the feeling that the Simpsons is finally reaching the end of its run.

WEASELS RIPPED MY FLESH!

The cover of the September 1956 issue of "Man's Life" magazine.

There isn't an element of that cover that isn't brilliant in one way or another. If I had any talent as an artist, I'd render incidents from my own life in the same style.

Normal Service Is Resumed

OK, back to the normal pop-culture references. Over at The Simpsons Movie Site they have a character generator which you can use to make a Simpsons version of yourself. Here's how I might look in the Simpsons world:

It's not a terrible likeness, if I do say so myself.

Coming Soon

As it's now up on the website, I think it's appropriate to publish the abstract for the session I'm co-organising at the TAG 2007 conference. We're after papers for it, if anyone's interested.

Chance, Choice, and Catastrophe: An Archaeology of the Unpredictable

Stephen O’Brien, David Smith, Helen Murphy (University of Liverpool)

Archaeologists, regardless of their ideological stripe, have a tendency to look for recognisable patterns in the archaeological record. In many ways this is unsurprising, given archaeology’s origins as part of the Modernist project (Thomas, 2004), and the manner in which the western world is emerging from a period characterised by the two competing determinist schools of thought provided by Marxism and Free-Market economics (Ferguson, 1997). The question must be raised, however, as to how well archaeology deals with the random unpredictable event.

This is particularly relevant in light of recent scientific developments such as non-linear systems theory, which implies that the unpredictable is in fact a highly relevant factor in any complex system, which human culture certainly is. Such developments create a tension between the paradigms of the unpredictable event and gradual development, and those of individual agency and group dynamics. This session will therefore seek to present papers analysing the role of the unpredictable in archaeology, and how archaeology may incorporate such thinking into its work.

References

Ferguson, N. 1997. “Virtual History: Towards a ‘chaotic’ theory of the past”, in N. Ferguson (ed.) Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals. 1-90. London: Papermac.

Thomas, J. 2004. Archaeology and Modernity. London: Routledge.

Thanks To YouTube

Sometimes there are bands that go beyond producing songs that you like. Sometimes there are bands that do the things that you think you'd do, if you were to be a band.

Case in point? This 1978 performance by Devo on French TV , doing their cover of The Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction":

26th Birthday

'I'm thirty', I said. 'I'm five years too old to lie to myself and call it honour.'

- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1926)

Heh.

It occurs to me that my birthday was last Sunday, but I hadn't actually mentioned it here yet. I actually spent it in London with my sister, who noted that she never seems to feature here.

We had tickets to two days of the Wireless Festival in Hyde park , which allowed me to see The White Stripes and The Kaiser Chiefs headlining. The foirmer were predictably good, but the latter actually sold me on them as a band - I'd liked some of the singles, but as a live act they were really excellent.

Other highlights included seeing The Only Ones playing their herointastic "Another Girl, Another Planet" (currently to be heard selling mobile phones), beneatha rival mobile company's logo, the lead singer of The Cribs biting off far more than he could chew when he dived into the crowd, and the fresh faced youngsters of Mumm-Ra experiencing a positive reaction to a new song ("Did you like that? Ooh, we'll use that one!").

Origins

From the online comic Shortpacked. I often find the occasional superhero jokes like this to be better than the regular comic, but that could just be me.

God Save Your Mad Parade

Suddenly you didn't have to be alone. You submerged. You had a good time by having a bad time. You were full of poison.

- Jon Savage, England's Dreaming (1991)

Yes, it's now 30 years since punk's high point - causing there to be no Number One single in the week of the Queen's Silver Jubilee, because the top selling single was the Sex Pistol's "God Save The Queen" and the BBC didn't want to cause offence. That week, the charts ended at Number 2.

Why my favourite musical era is one which happeded a few years before I was born is an interesting question. I suspect that Jon Savage nailed it with that quote, however.

Circular Chess

I really don't have a tactical brain. Therefore, no-one was more surprised than me when I won a game of "Cirondo" at RPG.soc yesterday. Cirondo is a sort of four-person circular chess with only three types of piece: pawns, bishops, and queens.

Admittedly, when two of the players had been eliminated, the third forgot one of the cardinal rules of the game: you lose when you have only one piece left. Still, a win's a win.

The Director Did It

"This film is based on actual case files."

Most of the problems with David Fincher's Zodiac can be traced back to that sentence, which opens the film. Zodiac is the story of the investigation into the "Zodiac killer" who operated in California in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

The problem, however, is that having made the decision to be fairly factual with the case, Fincher is left with a standard police procedural story that wouldn't look too out of place on evening television. And as with real life, people fade in and out of the story. We are presented with four principle characters, two detectives and two journalists, but their narratives are insuficiently interlaced. It's almost as if two different films had been made and then cut together.

The attempt to stick to facts means that Fincher is unable to play to one of his strengths, the psychological aspects of the investigation. It's fairly obvious that Robert Graysmith (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a fairly creepy and obsessed individual, but, perhaps because the screenplay is based on Graysmith's book, this is glossed over, often being presented in comic terms.

Further problems are brought in when Fincher attempts to make the story more "Hollywood" bu introducing some standard thriller elements, which appear far-fetched and melodramatic.

The films strength is perhaps in giving a sense of time and place, with the fashions and soundtrack envoking the 1970s without descending into the over-the-top cliche version of the decade that we see all too often.

Overall, Zodiac isn't a bad film, it's just a solid, by-the-numbers film, but that's a disapointment, given the director and the subject matter.

South Atlantic Wind Blows/Ice From A Dying Creed

People who know me well may have heard me talk about how, a few years back, I worked with a formed skinhead. He'd been the stereotype, even down to a swastika tatoo on his shoulder. He was a big fan of skinhead films (Made In Britain, Romper Stomper. Also Scum because he'd been in Borstal, but that's another story). As such, I wondered what he'd make of This Is England, which I saw at the cinema only the other day.

The film focusses on a small group of skinheads in the north of England in 1983, and attempts to show how what was originally a non-racist movement (starting with white working class kids imitating the fashions of hard Jamaican lads in the 1960s) was infilitrated and overtaken by Neo-Nazis in the 1970s and 1980s. More than that, it tries to show why membership of a group (whether of a "gang" or a Fascist party) can become so central to someone's life. This is the most successful aspect of the film, helped greatly by some excellent performances, both from the young cast, and from Stephen Graham as the sympathetic-demon "Combo".

Where the film perhaps falls down is its attempts to use the early 1980s as an analogy for the current state of the nation. Skinheads as hoodies is perhaps appropriate, but the presented ideology of the National Front seems a little too contemporary. The analogy of the Falklands War (sorry, "Conflict") with Iraq seems strange, too. There's no doubt that nearly 1000 people dying for some rocks inthe South Atlantic was a terrible waste (Borges famously described it as "Two bald men figting over a comb"), but it was also a response to an unprovoked invasion by a military dictatorship with an appalling human right record. Iraq somehow manages to make the Falklands look good.

All in all, though, it's well worth seeing given the current debate about Britishness (and, by extension, Englishness), and I certainly can't fault it for trying to talk abotut he consequences of being socially end economically isolated from the rest of society.

Fire

Because far too many people are still unaware of Arrested Development, which might just be the funniest American sitcom ever:

This Machine Kills Icelandic Management Lecturers

Yesterday my arsehole of a housemate (see previous posts/e-mails) left the house for the last time. The landlord finally lost patience with him a month ago and suggested that it might be better if he left.

The landlord wants to sell the house, so I shall still be moving before September. However, this is a huge victory for me and the other people in the house.

Champaigne will be drunk.

In Your Face, Ahmadinejad!

I recently installed the free StatCounter software on my blog, so that I could see how popular it is, and where people are viewing it from. The results were surprising. I'm predictably popular in Britain, although I'm not sure who keeps viewing from Birmingham. I've had views from as far away as Brazil and Mexico, too. What pleased me most, however, was the two visits I'd had from the Islamic Republic of Iran. What they made of it is anyone's guess.

The software also allows me to see what search-engine keywords have brought people to the blog. My favourite was the person who was looking for "Ladyboys of Bangkok in Nottingham". I can only assume that they were disappointed with what they found.

The House That Jack Built

Battlecrease House, Aigburth

In many ways, it's amazing that it didn't occur to me sooner. Some of you may remember, about 15 years back, that a man in Liverpool claimed to have found Jack the Ripper's diary, implicating a Liverpool cotton merchant named James Maybrick as the murderer.

It occurred to me to wonder where Maybrick lived in 1888, and it turned out that it was at Battlecrease House, just up the road from where I live now. So on Saturday I went to take a look (Yes, I felt that finding the house of a possible Victorian serial killer was a perfectly normal way of spending a nice spring afternoon. Why do you ask?).

The diary, of course, is a fake. However, we can be certain that one Victorian murder case did involve Battlecrease: Maybrick's wife Florence was convicted of poisoning him with arsenic in May 1889, in one of the most famous murder trials of the era. As Alan Moore noted in From Hell, Maybrick being the Ripper would be like Sharon Tate turning out to be the Boston Strangler.

Of course, the diary being fake doesn't rule Maybrick out as a suspect, and while there's nothing to place him in London at the time of the murders, there's also nothing to establish that he wasn't. There are also a couple of curious details.

A few years back, interviews with elderly Liverpool residents indicated that, in the early years of the 20th Century, children used to run past Battlecrease and shout "Look out, look out, Jack the Ripper's about!". An urban legend about Maybrick may go back quite way.

There's also a detail of a letter that Florence Maybrick sent to her lover shortly before James' death, in which she reports that he is "Delirious...perfectly ignorant of everything", before going on to say that "The tale he told me was a pure fabrication and only intended to frighten the truth out of me."

There is, however, no indication as to what that tale was.

Buttle/Tuttle

So, a list of names of terrorist suspects is being used by banks and car-dealers to vet clients, and is causing problems for people who have names similar to those of terrorist suspects.

Look, having things from William Gibson novels come true is one thing, having things from Brazil come true is quite another.

Rage - Goddess, Sing...

Achilles. You're a good person to have around on the rare occasions you're ready to do some work, but you have volatility issues. Your willingness to enlist the help of your mum won't win you any friends, either

Which Homeric Hero Are You?

Crikey. I mean, it's accurate enough, but Achilles? Surely I should be someone who's more of a wuss, like Paris.

THIS! IS! sorry, which city am I king of again?

It was inevitable that I would go and see 300 with a group of archaeologists, so it was no surprise when that happened last night.

I was particularly interested in seeing it, because an epic battle has recently been waged in the pages of RPG.net over the question of subtext. On one side are those who think that, given the current world-political climate, making a film in which Resolutely Heterosexual Spartan Manly-Men Who Don’t Wear Armour (all played by actors of solidly north-European ancestry) slaughter countless thousands of the Faceless Asiatic Hordes Who Are Led By A Ten-Foot-Tall Effeminate Bisexual (all played by extras who are distinctly either black or brown of skin-tone) might just be a bit troubling.

The counterpoint made was that the subtext is actually critical of the Spartans, and that the battle is really presented as a suitably Frank Miller tale of anti-heroes against villains.

Having seen the film, I can now tell you that the latter argument is complete bollocks.

I promise you that I’m not using hyperbole, or just being a shrieking lefty arts-student, when I say that 300 reminds me of nothing so much as Nazi propaganda films. It’s all here: the worship of the leader figure, the elite of perfectly sculpted male warriors, the idea that the enemy may not actually be human at all, and, of course, the Dolchstoß by corrupt politicians and sub-human mutants. It all reminds me far too much of Spinrad’s novel The Iron Dream. And sadly, this isn’t a satire like that novel, or like Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers. You are quite explicitly supposed to identify with and admire this film’s Spartans.

Don’t get me wrong. If you’ve seen this film and liked it, I’m not saying that you’re a Nazi: the visuals are quite spectacular, although I’m not sure I liked them as much as the look and feel of something like Hero (another film with some troubling politics). It’s just that for me, the visuals don’t disguise what is, in fact, a very troubling subtext.

It will still be worth your while seeing it if you’re interested, if only so that you can e-mail me and tell me that I’m completely wrong. Of course, if I am wrong, then 300 is two hours of vacuous macho bullshit, nonetheless.

A Spectre Haunting Europe

What's a picklock compared to a share certificate?
What's robbing a bank compared to founding a bank?

- Bertolt Brecht, "Happy End" (1929)

Well, I now have an ISA, which I think makes me officially bourgeois. On the other hand, I was kind of born like that. Either way, Trotsky wouldn't be too pleased with me.

On a not-completely-unrelated point, I've recently been looking on ebay for a bust of Marx. I should be getting desk-space in an office next year, and I need something to mark my territory. The interesting thing is that Marx is pretty hard to find, and is much more expensive than either Lenin or Stalin. There's almost certainly an incredibly clever joke about the market in there, but I'll be blowed if I can put it together.

The question is, what will people think the meaning of a bust of Marx is when they see it? Am I referring to myself as a Marxist, and if so, what does that mean? I agree with large chunks of the Marxist critique of Capitalism, but generally disagree with the preposed solutions. I like the democratic process, for a start, and I'm not a utopian, so I don't think you'll ever achieve a perfectly equal society. But that doesn't mean I can't believe in a more equitable distribution of wealth, and be somewhat doubtful that Free-Market Capitalism is going to deliver a good standard of living on a global scale.

Of course, there's a good 150 years of evolving Marxist thought, some of which is more in line with my way of thinking. I've got a lot of reading still to do. I suppose the bust of Marx would be similar to a psychologist having a bust of Freud - it's recognition that he started something important, rather than complete agreement with everything he said. You can't rely on people to magically realise that, though.

Judge Judy And Executioner

With the enormous wave of goodwill that Shaun of the Dead generated, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg have produced Hot Fuzz, another British comedy, this time spoofing the overblown cop-antics of Lethal Weapon et al. Will it live up to its predecessor?

The setup of Hot Fuzz is fairly simple, with Pegg playing a “supercop” in London who is posted to a small rural village because he makes all the other policemen look bad. While there he runs into a murder spree and mentors a bumbling rural police constable with dreams of being a proper cop (played by old Spaced and Shaun of the Dead stooge Nick Frost).

The interplay between Pegg and Frost is probably the film’s strongest point, as they use it to play up the homoerotic undertones that usually feature in buddy-cop films. Also good are the inevitable references to The Wicker Man, Straw Dogs, and Bergerac. I was the only person in my cinema who laughed at the Chinatown reference, which made me feel all special.

There is a feeling that the film is really just a build-up to the big action-sequence of the last half hour. This is pretty good, and you suspect that in many ways, this was the moment that Edgar Wright has been waiting for his whole life. Certainly it’s hard not to be carried along by the sheer exuberance with which Wright proceeds to fuck up rural England using automatic gunfire. There’s a nice subversion of the “cop as Fascist vigilante” archetype going on here, too.

The problem is that this build-up leaves the rest of the film a bit bereft of purpose. Also, the plot feels a little too over-egged, making the finale seem a bit too far-fetched even for a send-up of Jerry Bruckheimer. Having said that, you will laugh. I did. And those of us who remember the bad days of British comedy cinema (for my sins, I saw Guest House Paradiso at the cinema) will take that any time.

Vignette

Over at N.A.O.W.F.I.T. there's another snippet of writing by me, called "Hello, Goodbye, London". I'm pretty happy with it. Generally I always seem happier with the results from writing about stuff that's actually happended to me.