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: