Disaster Response

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

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

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

Why I Hate Saturn

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

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

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





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





With the constellation Cassiopeia



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

Walled In

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

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

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

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

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

Pandarama

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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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



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

White Wedding (Part 1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sensoria

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cities In Dust

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*This is a lie.

Hong Kong Conversation

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

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

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

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

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

Après-Culture

Never Never

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

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

Blue Lights On Black Sky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Each Separate Dying Ember Wrought Its Ghost Upon The Floor

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

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

Protect And Survive

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

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

Events

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

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

Obamapost

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Post-Thesis

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

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

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

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

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