"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.