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.

Made From Moulded Plastic

See them on the TV screen
Looking back with electric eyes,
Razorblades and Vaseline, what I see is synthesized
Photographs in magazines will accept no compromise
Refueled on nicotine, all of them are synthesized

- The Epoxies, “Synthesized”

It’s been far too long since I was last at a live gig, so last night I remedied this by going to see The Epoxies at Roadkill in Liverpool. As usual, I’ll start with the ritualised slaughter of the support acts. First up were The Exorsisters, who had the air of a sixth-form band who’d fancied dressing up as The Ramones for the night. Completely standard three-cord punk songs followed. The highlight of their set was, predictably enough, a cover of “Sheena Is A Punk Rocker”.

Much better were Liverpool’s own Zombina and the Skeletones: if “Undead New Wave cabaret” wasn’t a genre before, it is now. Plus they released a pack of tame zombies into the audience before their set, so what’s not to like? They’re supporting GWAR at the Academy next week, but even Zombina isn’t enough to make me put up with the main act there.

The main act are a band I picked up via the internet a few years ago. They seem to come from some sort of alternate-1984 in which punk didn’t die after 100 days in 1977, but instead took on board the emergent synthesizer technology of the day. The result is a sort of X-Ray Spex/DEVO/Sigue Sigue Sputnik mash up, and I mean that in a most positive way. Like those 80s electronic bands, they’re also unashamedly geeky, with plenty of songs having a science-fiction-y feel. Much like Zombina and the Skeletones, they get extra points because, during the encore, the keyboardist announced that he was quitting the band in order to join the mosh-pit (or to be more accurate, given Roadkill’s small size, the mosh square-metre).

They’re out and about around Britain this month, and I think you should go and see them, lest I come round your house and smite you, Old Testament-style.

I know I’d know the difference somehow
If I was being rearranged
I’m sure if I had been reprogrammed
Something somehow surely would seem strange

- The Epoxies, “Radiation”

"I'm BATMAN!" 'Yes, But Which One?'

You're Bob Kane's Batman. You're a dark, mysterious vigilante who often kills his villains, and uses a gun. Your girlfriend's Julie Madison, an aspiring actress who thinks you're nothing more than a playboy millionaire. At this stage, you're fighting foes such as Dr.Death and the Monk, but they're only the beginning.
Take this quiz!

I was hoping for either this or the Adam West Batman.

Gissa Job

It feels like getting ahead of myself, but I am starting to think about getting a job. And for the first time in years, I actually saw an advert today for a lectureship in Archaeology that I could apply for (Edinburgh University). I wouldn't get it, and the closing date is at least a year too early, but I still choose to take it as a positive sign.

Sic Transit Gloria Mundi

The fact that RPG.net is currently having an honest-to-god flamewar about the death of Anna Nicole Smith illustrates everything about why I read it. Particularly when it produced the following line:

"A fitting end to a life of extravagance"? Who the fuck are you, Martin Luther?

Anyway, thanks to those who posted titles for the thesis. The Surrealist Compliment Generator wants me to call it:

Optical Delusions Still Themselves When You Pass By in Convexing Pomp and Sacral Trance: Warfare and Society In Mycenaean Greece

Hmm. Might be a bit long. The Greeks don't appear to have had a god for society or anything, so that's out. I don't have access to cats, which is a pity, because the cat-selected version sounds fun.

I think I might go with :

Beyond The Sharp Bronze: Warfare and Society In Mycenaean Greece

Which is a bit Homeric and does actually represent what I'm trying to do. Failing that, there's always:

Who The Fuck Are You? Martin Luther?: Warfare and Society In Mycenaean Greece.

Titles Are Hard

Well, the thesis approaches 30, 000 words, and I'm starting to think about what to call it. My titles usually follow a set pattern with the set pattern being "Poncy Bit: What It's Actually About". I know that the "what it's actually about" bit will be "Warfare and Society in Mycenaean Greece", but a good poncy bit is hard to find.

Some ideas:

I'm Gonna Git You Sucka: Warfare and Society in Mycenaean Greece

"You know, like Kane in 'Kung Fu' ": Warfare and Society in Mycenaean Greece

This Is Not The Truth: Warfare and Society in Mycenaean Greece

Feel free to vote for these ideas, or suggest some of your own, in the comments section.

I Love The 70s

I've never seen the BBC series Life On Mars, although I'm reliably informed that I'd love it. Certainly, this promo video for the new series is brilliant in several ways.

The Secret Names Of Streets

Listening to Simon Mayo's show on Radio 5, there was some discussion of a new film called The Lives of the Saints, a "magical thriller" set in Green Lanes.

I'd suggest that the Duckett Road folk organise a reuninion where we go and see it, but it doesn't sound like it'll get much of a release.

"You’re terrified, but you feel for the characters, even though they are only sugar."

Sometimes what geeks are capable of surprises even me. Take this for example: a man who has re-created the battle of Helm's Deep from Lord of the Rings using confectionary. I suppose it counts as outsider art. Certainly it appeals to me, given that on one level it is quite brilliant, while on another, quite similar, level, it is a sure sign that its creator has Gone Wrong in a major way.

Mash-Up

Someone over at RPG.net has created a randomiser for game settings. The favourite ones I have had so far are:

Premise: Demonic penguins try to find true love in a transparent ripoff of/respectful homage to Tolkien's Middle-Earth.
Genre: Romance

Premise: Transhuman ducks kidnap hapless livestock on the high seas.
Genre: Romance

Premise: Odious angels fight crime in the ruins of post-apocalyptic New York.
Genre: Noir/Action

Premise: Rock star androids evolve beyond human limitations in Tokugawa-era Japan.
Genre: Horror/Alternative History

Premise: Cynical vikings try to get laid in the world of competitive cooking.
Genre: Cyberpunk/Dungeon Crawl/Drama

If you want a go, the generator can be found here (if you get a result including the phrase "fish out of water", it was included at my suggestion).

Mystery Archaeology Theater 3000

Well, it's been a while since I posted. This is because the normal post-Christmas depresion has been a bit compounded by the fact that I'll be moving house shortly. I don't really want to move, but one of my housemates is an arse and the landlord won't do anything about it, so I've not much choice.

But no-one comes here to hear about that stuff, so here's a film review of Apocalypto.

Apocalypto actually holds together very well on the level of an action film. As you might have guessed with a Mel Gibson film, however, once you get beyond that level things get quite problematic.

I'm fully aware that Apocalypto is in one sense not to be taken literally, as Gibson is using Mesoamerican history to offer a critique of contemporary western society. However, if you're going to use a historical allegory, you should do your best to get the history right, or your allegory will be pretty poor. This is actually the main problem with Apocalypto: it uses various features from over 1000 years of Maya society and throws them together into a pseudo-culture. The pyramid-building Classical Maya society was gone for a good 600 years prior to the arrival of Europeans in the area.

The portrayal of the pseudo-Maya is also a problem. To believe the film, the Maya were a society of bloodthirsty psychopaths who had no redeeming features. Is that a valid way to treat the ancestors of a group of people who are still very much with us (there are still 6 million Maya living in Mexico and Central America)? The Classic Maya did practice limited human sacrifice, but then so did the Romans, who tend to get a much more positive portrayal in film than the Maya do here.

The negativity of the human sacrifice in Apocalypto is ironic, given the manner in which Gibson's personal interpretation of Christianity seems to be all about the torture and sacrifice. The film is certainly heavily influenced by Gibson's beliefs, with the attempts to Christianise the beliefs of the hero's people also being somewhat jaring.

All in all, Apocalypto is interesting, possibly worth seeing, but ultimately badly flawed.

Idiot Savant

Well, the paper at Exeter went well. Extremely well, in fact. Several people came up to me and told me how much they enjoyed it. It being TAG, of course, they enjoyed it in ways I can barely comprehend, but that’s not so important, eh?

I was evidently on some sort of endorphin high, because that night I danced for the first time in about four years. And enjoyed it! The night ended with drinking Archer’s in a hall-room at Exeter University until 2 AM. We should make this a tradition.

The rest of the weekend I passed in a fairly relaxed manner, but not so relaxed that I fell asleep in anyone’s paper. In fact, I even managed to take in some papers that may help my thesis, so it counted as work. I failed to dance at the TAG party, so it seems that my fear is actually of dancing in large groups. I was put to shame by the 78-year-old Lord Renfrew, who could be seen jiving to “Johnny B. Goode” at one point.

I hope everyone’s having a good Christmas. See you next year!

Bond

So I got round to seeing Casino Royale, and was pleasantly surprised to find that it does live up to the hype. That's right, for the first time in about 30 years someone has made a James Bond film that's actually worth seeing.

The reason for this is that they were finally forced into taking a good, hard look at the genre in the aftermath of The Bourne Identity and Austin Powers. So gone are most of the camp elements, to be replaced by a more-or-less gadget-free Bond who succeeds through ingenuity and being a borderline psychopath.

Daniel Craig does pretty well, too, which is the advantage of giving the part to someone who can act a bit, as opposed to Pierce "Carved Out Of Stone" Brosnan. He looks suitably gritty, as well, which matches the tone of violence in the film: as Mark Kermode said on Radio 5, this is about as extreme as the 12A certificate is going to get. A scene with strong homoerotic BDSM undertones? Never would have happened with Roger Moore!

Actually, I think we're all pretty happy that it never happened with Roger Moore.

Honorable mention should also go to Mads Mikkelsen, who manages to rescue Bond-villany from the specter (ha!) of Doctor Evil. And manages to do it while looking like a sinister version of Antoine De Caunes, to boot.

If I have a complaint, it's that the running time is a bit too long - there are about 5 points at which the film appears to end, onlyto start up again. Aside from that, though, this one is well worth your money.

That Time of Year Again

Well, it transpires that the abstract I submitted to the TAG 2006 conference has been accepted, so I'll be in the plenary session on 15th December. The abstract is as follows:

Ex Machina: Archaeology In A Post-Human Future

Recent research in disciplines as varied as medicine, robotics, and artificial intelligence has raised the prospect that, during the 21 st Century, humans will be increasingly able to alter themselves physically, through both biological and mechanical means. The consequences of such alterations to humans may have serious implications for the study of humanity. Indeed, they have led to some researchers speculating that we may see the emergence of “post-humanity”, a development which has caused Francis Fukuyama to revise his previous assertion that human history essentially ended in 1989 (Fukuyama, 2002). The purpose of this paper, therefore, is twofold: to introduce some of the means by which humanity may become post-human, and to speculate as to how archaeology as a discipline might respond to the challenge of interpreting a human past from a post-human viewpoint.

I have to admit, when I first found out I'd made it in, I was terrified: the plenary session will be attended by just about everyone who's attending, which will include some very big names indeed. Then there's the fact that I'm not an expert in either posthuman or archaeological theory.

I've calmed down a bit now though. Thinking about it, they accepted the paper because they felt it was an interesting subject, and my main purpose is really just to raise the issue. Plus, being a plenary session, there's no Q&A, so no-one will be able to ask me a question I don't understand until I'm off-stage.

Full details on the TAg conference can be found here.

London Wants Me

I spent the weekend celebrating my Dad's 60th birthday in London. I went down on Friday morning so that I could have lunch with Emily in the resteraunt at the Sony building. It's very GATTACA-type minimalist, but the food was good ('though I do have some reservations about mushy peas mushed within an inch of their lives).

The main event was going with my parents and sister to the Fulham vs. Everton match on Saturday. The less said about the first half the better, but the highlight was undoubtedly the manner in which one Fulham fan decided to continually mock Joleon Lescott's hair (pictured below). Fortunately, Fulham had the decency to win the match with an excellent Claus Jensen goal in the second half, so we went away happy.



"Oo's your barber? Suuuuuuuuuuue your barber mate!"

I was going to go to the cinema on Saturday night, while my sister was at the Gogol Bordello gig, but there was nothing decent on at the Odeon Camden. I ended up watching Double Indemnity (which I'd surprisingly not seen before) on DVD. It's as good as they say it it - go and find it now!

The journey back on Sunday took 5 hours on a direct train, even though the journey down took 2. On the bright side, I did get to see bonfires and fireworks all across the country.

About As Accurate As It Could Be...

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Northeast Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The Midland
Boston
The South
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

All These Things That I've Read

Bookmeme: Bold the ones you've read and add four to the bottom

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
The Golden Compass (His Dark Materials Book 1)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter 6) - J.K. Rowling
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
1984 - George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Book 3) - J.K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Book 4) - J.K. Rowling
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter 5) - J.K. Rowling
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Book 1) - J.K. Rowling
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Book 2) - J.K. Rowling
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Ender’s Game (The Ender Saga) - Orson Scott Card
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
Atonement - Ian McEwan
The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Dune - Frank Herbert
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
Hey Nostradamus! - Douglas Coupland
The Nature of Blood - Caryl Phillips
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules -Ed. David Sedaris
Yarn Harlot by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee
Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz
Spook by Mary Roach
Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Suzanne Clarke
Marley and Me -- John Grogan
Gone to the Dogs - Emily Carmichael
Book the 11th: The Grim Grotto: The Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
State of Fear - Michael Crichton
The Speed of Dark -- Elizabeth Moon
Interview with the Vampire -- Anne Rice
The Vampire Lestat -- Anne Rice
The Snow Fox -- Susan Fromberg Schaeffer
Anansi Boys -- Neil Gaiman
The Princess Bride -- William Goldman
Luck in the Shadows -- Lynn Flewelling
Arthur & George -- Julian Barnes
The Seven Dials Mystery -- Agatha Christie
The Stupidest Angel -- Christopher Moore
Sabine's Notebook -- Nick Bantock
Strangers in the Night -- Linda Howard
Night Tales (v.1) -- Nora Roberts
Reunion -- Nora Roberts
White Lies -- Linda Howard
Fever Season (Merovingen Nights) -- CJ Cherryh
Divine Rite (Merovingen Nights) -- CJ Cherryh
Angel With a Sword (Merovingen Nights) CJ Cherryh
Mount Dragon -- Douglas Preston, Lincoln Child
Ella Enchanted -- Gail Carson Levine
Dreams Underfoot -- Charles de Lint
Settling Accounts: Return Engagement -- Harry Turtledove
In Cold Blood -- Truman Capote
Happy Hour at Casa Dracula -- Marta Acosta
Not in Kansas Anymore: The Curious Tale of How Magic is Transforming America -- Christine Wicker
Wicked -- Gregory Maguire
Holy Fools -- Joane Harris
Nikolai Gogol -- Vladimir Nabokov
The Picture of Dorian Gray -- Oscar Wilde
From a Buick 8 -- Stephen King
Half a Life -- V.S. Naipaul
Kafka on the Shore -- Haruki Murakami
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater -- Kurt Vonnegut
Naked Lunch -- William S. Burrough
The Illuminatus! Trilogy -- Robert Shea & Robert Anton Wilson
Fevre Dream -- George R.R. Martin
A Feast for Crows -- George R.R. Martin
The Burning -- Bentley Little
Men of Tomorrow -- Gerard Jones
Caucasia - Danzy Senna
Sacred Clowns - Tony Hillerman
Best American Mystery Stories 2005 - Various
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Sword of Truth series books 1 – 9 – Robert Jordan
Going Postal – Terry Pratchett
Tiger in the Shadows – I can’t remember who wrote this (Debra Wilson?)
Stagestruck Vampires – Suzy McKee Charnas
A Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin
The Crying of Lot 49 – Thomas Pynchon
Cosmopolis – Don Delillo
The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde
Vellum - Hal Duncan
Illicit Passage - Alice Nunn
Zahrah the Windseeker - NNedi Okorafor-Mbachu
Men At Arms - Terry Pratchett
Hyperion Cantos - Dan Simmons
A Scanner Darkly - Phillip K Dick
At the Mountains of Madness - H.P. Lovecraft
Divine Invasions: A Life of Phillip K Dick - Lawrence Sutin
Tales Of H.P. Lovecraft
Voyage Of The Space Beagle - A.E. van Vogt
Coraline - Neil Gaiman
Snakes & Earrings - Hitomi Kanehara
The Mists of Avalon - Marion Zimmer Bradley
Lady of Avalon - MZB as above
Botany of Desire - Michael Pollan
Scaramouche - Rafael Sabatini
The Darkness That Comes Before - R. Scott Bakker
Humpty Dumpty: An Oval - Damon Knight
The Dictionary of the Khazars - Milorad Pavic
Le Ton Beau de Marot - Douglas Hofstadter
Viriconium Nights - MJ Harrison
Fremder - Russell Hoban
Box Nine - Jack O'Connell
The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov
American Pastoral - Philip Roth
A Very Profitable War - Didier Daeninckx
Carter Beats the Devil - Glen David Gold
Crime & Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Case of Comrade Tulayev - Victor Serge
The Sword of Honour Trilogy - Evelyn Waugh
The Long Goodbye - Raymond Chandler
Do What Thou Wilt: A Life of Aleister Crowley - Lawrence Sutin

"It's Such A Fine Line Between Stupid, And Clever."

There's nothing funnier than a band completely lacking self-awareness. Case in point: this video for Cathedral's song "Witchfinder General". It's a special feature on the DVD of the same name, but now, thanks to YouTube (a subsidiary of Google!), you can see it too.

Poor-quality metal? A random woman in leather? "Vampires" half-heartedly lezzing up? Lead singer an idiot? It's like Spinal Tap never happened.

William Gibson Overdrive

I just started reading Idoru, and the first 40 pages have already reminded me why I love Gibson's writing: unlike most SF writers (even the good ones), there's a sense of realism at work which draws you in. This, of course, is because most SF writers come from a science-y background, and will spend pages telling you how something would work. Gibson cheerfully knows nothing about how things work, but he's interested in how people use technology, the consequences of it. Hence the following passage:

He knew that she was screaming because her mouth was open, but the syllables of her rage couldn't penetrate the seamless hissing surf of the white-noise generator provided by his lawyers. He'd been advised to wear the generator at all times, during this last visit to the Slitscan offices. He'd been instructed to make no statements. Certainly he would hear none.

Ultimate Horror

The Just-Like-Me Doll

What response can I give, other than "What the fuck is wrong with you?"

Students On A Plane

Yesterday I went to Manchester Airport to film a promotional video for the International Office at the University. The idea was to film the students being met at the airport bu Uni representatives, and taken back to their halls of residence. It went pretty well, despire me and Rik, who were doing the filming, being pretty inexperienced with the use of a semi-pro camera.

Also interesting was the point where we were hassled by a young asian man, who apparantly felt that Two White Guys Filming Asian Students Arriving = Agents Of The Vast Racist Conspiracy. Typically, the response he got from me was the short embarased/annoyed laugh that you give when you find yourself talking to an arse, rather than the sentence "Listen pal, why don't you go and vent your paranoid passive-aggression at that cop over there with the loaded MP5?"

You should eventually be able to see the film on the University of Liverpool website.

Normal Service Will Be Resumed

Well, I have returned from Greece. Hopefully you're reading this because I've fixed the problem with the blog, which meant that I couldn't blog from Greece. It's probably for the best - it would just have been a list of mior complaints and threats of extreme violence against a Frenchman who we laughingly refer to as an archaeologist.

Hot Hot Heat

A list of things which have struck me since I arrived in Greece:

• I really should have brought a hammock.
• Athens really is ugly, isn't it?
• Why are ants trying to eat my tent?
• "Hoovering a Neolithic floor" is an hilarious sentence, but not as funny as the activity itself.
• A pig-knuckle and a human finger-bone look really similar.

Hearing Music From Another Time

Members of the British Battalion in Barcelona, September 1936.

The System Of The World

I saw the new Pirates of the Caribbean film over the weekend. It's OK (mostly for Depp, again), but also quite disapointing in its own way.

The thing that I really liked about it, actually, was its use of the British East India Company as a villain: as someone on RPG.net commented, we are talking about the original country-owning megacorporation. The brief comment on Globalisation in an 18th Century context was easily the most interesting thing the script did.

It also got me thinking about the recent resurgence of interest in the 18th century in popular culture: that series the BBC is running about how the 18th Century created the modern world, the very modern-feeling Casanova series last year, and Neal Stephenson's trilogy of near future science fiction novels (which aren't science fiction and take place in the 18th century, if you see what I mean). Going back a bit further, there's the short story "Mozart In Mirrorshades", which is one of my favourite pieces of short fiction, and you should read it.

What this all actually means, I don't know. Are we becoming the new Georgians in preparation for Charles becoming George VII? Is it because we've spent the past century doing our best to get rid of Victorian morality? Maybe we just really like frilly shirts?

Now That's A Sport...

Just Another Country

So there we are. And at the end all I could think was "Why are they lying on the ground and crying like it was an act of God? They had the ability to change things, yet didn't." For the first time in my life I found myself admiring Phil Neville, as he stayed on his feet, not a tear in his eye, shaking hands with the Portugal players. Like you're supposed to. Like a man.

Quite frankly, Gerrard and Lampard shouldn't be considered world-class if tyey can't score from a free shot from 12 yards. Yet again the fans were great, and the team were shit.

All of which leads me to consider a new policy. When England reach a finals, I will not watch them until they make the semis. They have to prove that they are worthy of my time and effort.

Flow My Tears, The Viewer Said

Watching "Big Brother's Big Mouth" last night (yes, I know) I came across the final proof that human history and culture have reached their logical end-points. One of the studio audience was attempting to be Russell Brand.

I'll pause a moment to let the full horror of that sink in.

At some point there was a man, possibly a fairly normal man. One day, upon watching TV, he thought "I know what'll make me popular: becoming a less talented version of Russell Brand".

Nuclear war is our only hope.

The Street Finds Its Own Uses For Things

God I love this story:

This is one ringtone you've gotta hear

Enterprising teenagers have hijacked a high-pitched electronic blip which adults cannot hear and turned it into a stealth ringtone.

It is suitable for use in situations where grown ups aren't meant know there's an incoming call or text message.

The ringtone - which can be downloaded from the internet - is proving especially popular amongst school students in the US and UK who use it in classrooms.

With it, students can receive text message alerts on their mobile phones without the teacher knowing.

As people age, many develop what's known as presbycusis or aging ear - a loss of the ability to hear higher-frequency sounds.

The ringtone is a spin-off of technology that was originally meant to repel teenagers - not help them.

Last year, a Welsh security company developed the 17-kilohertz buzz to help shopkeepers disperse youngsters loitering in front of their stores.

Mr Howard Stapleton, the inventor of the "Mosquito", claims the high-frequency pulsing sound can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30.

Realising the commercial possibilities in the unintended use of the blip, Mr Stapleton's company has quickly produced it's own official version of the ringtone which they are calling the "the authentic Mosquito ring tone".

From The Sidney Morning Herald

Back Home

So, did we all enjoy the first weekend of the World Cup? My main enjoyment came from not having to apologise to my friends in Frankfurt for the England fans destroying the town center. Hopefully that'll continue.

As far as the football has gone, I'm very, very afraid of Argentina. They're certainly the first team to look capable of winning it. Germany seemed a bit too excited about scoring four against Costa Rica. Perhaps they were trying to blot out the memory of conceding two to Paulo Wanchope, a man famous to Premiership fans for playing like his legs belong to someone else, and have just been sown on to his hips.

England managed to provide the most boring match of the finals so far. This was doubtless part of Sven's master plan. Why else would he have taken off our actual fast striker, and left Peter Crouch on his own, heading the ball at nothing? The man's a genius, I tell you!

Today of course, we get to see Brazil, whom I hate with the fire of thousands of suns. Not for anything to do with them, but for every two-bit Nike-endorsed excitement-whore that they bring out of the woodwork at this point, claiming that thay love football. Face it Brazil, you're the Manchester United of world football, but with worse teeth.

"...*Steal* A Car..."

Probably my favourite of all the things Kids In The Hall ever did:


Get this video and more at MySpace.com

On Not Thinking Things Through

Yes, it is real, and it really was made.

WILL THE FRENCH DESTROY YOUR HOUSE?

Daily Mail-O-Matic

Genius. Pure genius.

“I’ve Got All Five Senses And I Slept Last Night: That Puts Me Six Up On You.”

A film noir in which the protagonist is the high school geek? Yeah, you knew this one was never going to score less than “average” with me.

But Brick is more than art-porn for lonely kids who’ve read too much Raymond Chandler. It’s the best film I’ve seen this year, and might even be the best film I’ve seen in rather a long time.

The idea of making a film noir set in a school seems ridiculous at first, but the more you see of it, the more it makes sense. In addition, the unusual setting allows the film to avoid and/or subvert the conventions of the genre. Indeed, the plot somehow manages to encompass everything you would expect to find in classic noir, and somehow manages to make you believe it. As always with noir, though, to concentrate on the plot is to miss the point entirely: this film is all about creating a mood.

Mood is perhaps where the film excels the most, with the cinematography picking out the menacing emptiness in the American landscape, in much the same way that Hopper paintings did. The soundtrack is suitably subdues as well, which is a welcome change after years of jock-rock in American school films.

Not everything in Brick is perfect. There are occasions when its desire to pastiche classic noir nearly crosses the line into parody, and there’s no question that the best moments of the film are when it is trying to play things relatively straight.

If you’ve read this far, you probably already know whether this sounds like your sort of thing or not. It certainly comes with my highest recommendation.

"Choke on 'em! Choke on 'em!"

It's about time I told the blog readers that I have a character in Urban Dead. Urban dead is a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) set in a city suffering from a zombie outbreak. You can play a survivor or a zombie, and will find yourself switching around as you get killed or "revivified". It's surprisingly fun for a browser-based game.

You can also see the current status of my character, Roy Allenson.

I'll see you behind the nearest barricade...

"Isn't He Beautiful?"

So what happens when the cyberpunk asthetic meets the rest of Eighties culture? The answer, should you be looking for one, is provided by this, the video to Sigue Sigue Sputnik's 1986 single "Love Missile F1-11" (you heard me).

Sad though it is, this actually sums up what I think a music video should be: equal parts cool and hilariously absurd.

Build My Gallows High, Baby.

The Movie Of Your Life Is Film Noir

So what if you're a little nihilistic at times? Life with meaning is highly over-rated. Your best movie matches: Sin City, L. A. Confidential, Blade Runner

If Your Life Was a Movie, What Genre Would It Be?

21st Century Minimalist Rebellion

Over at Mind On The Run, Tom is talking about becoming Irish. I've asked him to keep me updated on the process. I don't want an ID card: it's no-one's business who I am, and I'm not here for the police's convenience.

I'm also not sure that I want to be part of a country which apparently thinks that the Geneva Convention should be altered to allow torture and the starting of wars of aggression.

Tom was amused by my use of the phrase "becoming Irish as a form of protest". Maybe we should co-author a book on the subject?