Animal Photobombing

Bound

"There are some things we'll never understand..."

Look at him again. This 23-year-old with a day job and a kid, a wife and lover and a debilitating, unpredictable illness, all of which are killing him. This is his moment. He isn't fucking about on Later, he will not be clinking a bottle of green-room Budweiser and sharing a few jokes with Jonathan Ross and The Kooks about his dancing. He will not be putting his arm around his bandmates' shoulders for the bows. There is no time for that, no time for anything now. Love is tearing him apart.

- Stuart Maconie on Ian Curtis, Word magazine August 2008.

Something of a companion-piece to the previous post, this week I finally got around to seeing Control on DVD. It's a worthwhile film, being beautifully shot, and concerning itself with the facts far more than 24 Hour Party People did. Where it falls down somewhat is the fact that for much of its length it feels like quite a conventional biopic, with only the last 45 minutes operating above that. I also felt that the film doesn't really offer any insights into who Curtis actually was, but then, that's something that it may not be possible to provide any answers to.

"Very Andy Warhol." 'Very L.S. Lowry.'

My sister was up from London last weekend, and coincidentally Friday was the opening of FAC251, the old Factory Records building, as a new live music venue and club by Peter Hook of New Order, so I got tickets for it. Apparently the tickets had sold out in about 10 minutes, so I seem to have done pretty well.

There's been a bit of backlash about the whole thing in some blogs as an cash-in exercise which reduces Manchester and its music scene to a late 70s-late 80s theme park. And y'know, to some extent they have a point - the crowd was a mixture of senior types in their 40s and 50s (blue jeans & pinstripe suit-jacket) and students (newly-bought "Unknown Pleasures" t-shirts). The set that Hook played, despite featuring contributions from Hook's current bands The Light and Freebass, was mostly a run-through of the Joy Division and New Order back-catalogues. Being too young to really remember 1980s Manchester, the only song played the I recall from the charts was Monaco's "What Do You Want From Me". Anyone? Anyone?

But treating The Factory entirely as a bit of reification and a retirement plan for 'ookey might be both too harsh and too premature. Yes, the opening did feature the shambling corpse of Madchester in the form of Mani and Rowetta, but in coming weeks the club is playing host to bands, such as MAY68, who are precisely the sort of new, non-Madchester-types that some of The Factory's critics are championing. And from observing on the ground, one of the striking features was how young and inexperienced most of the staff of the club were. They were recruited from the same Facebook group which I was part of, and giving people a chance to actually do something and get an idea of the ground seems genuinely in keeping with the spirit that the city should have.

The gig was pretty enjoyable, kicked off by Howard Marks doing his usual schtick, and really only marred by Peter Hook not actually being a singer and his unnerving habit of at random intervals pointing at the audience from slightly above his head. Rowetta actually justified her presence by coming onstage to provide the vocals to two Joy Division tracks. "Atmosphere", never fails to move me to the core, and her vocal performance had all the hairs on the back of my neck standing up. Hearing "Warsaw", "Transmission" and "Shadowplay" was pleasing to me, as well. Of some interest was a "lost" Joy Division song which from the lyrics I would have said was called "In The Night Time", but actually turns out to be "Pictures". Closing, predictably enough, was Ian Curtis' own anthem to doomed youth "Love Will Tear Us Apart", although being part of a large crowd singing the chorus is vaguely unsettling. The encore was "Blue Monday", and this, in truth, was something of a let-down. The understandable desire on the part of the band is always to do something slightly different with the really famous songs, but the original "Blue Monday" managed to capture the sprawl of night and cities in which we all now live so perfectly that nothing else really does it justice.

It's impossible to say whether The Factory will turn out to be a springboard for new innovative talent, but it seems unlikely that you'd be able to pre-judge it from an opening-night party.

An Idiosyncratic History of the Music Video, Part 2

Sometimes, good songs have inexplicably bad videos made for them. Recently this point was hammered home to me on viewing the video for The Sisters of Mercy's 1988 single "Lucretia, My Reflection".



I think it's best if I keep a log of my reactions:

0.17: The line "I hear the roar of a big machine" is illustrated by filming Andrew Eldritch standing next to a big machine. This does not bode well.

0.41: Goths on a Train would have been the natural direction for the "Snakes on a Plane" franchise to go in.

0.49: Eldritch appears to have come dressed as the villain from every Hong Kong action film I have ever seen. I actually approve of this.

2.10: Homeless people in developing world filmed for use in goth-rock video. Classy.

2.34: If he keeps pratting about with the metal bar like that, I'm going to think we've found the direct ancestor of Star Wars Kid.

2.53: From what I gather from music videos, people in the mid-to-late 1980s spent an inordinate amount of time running down corridors in slow motion.

4.03: "Oh, sod this - let's just go to the beach."

Athens

I did spend a weekend at a conference in Athens last month, but was too busy with one thing and another to post much about it here. I thought I might share some choice photos, though.

Oh, what a surprise. Yes, the crane is ancient - IS THAT WHAT YOU WANT TO HEAR?

The conference was at the main building of the University of Athens, seemingly unscathed by the anarchist riots a week before.

Not far from the university is Heinrich Schliemann's old house, now the National Numismatic Museum, which sported graffiti and broken windows. Whether the anarchists were more enraged by the presence of their oldest enemy - coins - or by the pre-Nazi swastikas decorating the railings, I couldn't really say.

The new Acropolis Museum, unfortunately closed on Mondays, which was the only time I was able to make it there. The glass box on top is a viewing gallery for the Acropolis itself. Opinion is divided over the architecture of the museum - I rather like it.

Graffiti not far from the Acropolis Museum. Arabic, I think.

I did get the chance to spend a short time in the reorganised National Archaeological Museum. Having to take photos without flash meant that not all of my pictures are as sharp as they should be, but I did get some decent shots of a few of my favourite objects.

A Mycenaean boar's-tusk helmet of the 14th century BC. A helmet of this type is lent to Odysseus by Meriones in Book X of the Iliad.

The "Warrior Vase" from Mycenae, c.1200 BC, as discussed in my thesis.

A marble figure of a harpist from the island of Keros, dating to the Early Bronze Age (c.2800-2300 BC).

Maximum Octopus: a Cretan "Marine Style" vase of the 15th century BC.

It Is Snowing Here Also

The North, where we do what we want - or would if we weren't worried about getting the car back into the drive.

The Thesis Is Resubmitted

"Let Me Tell You About My Mother..."

From an RPG.net thread:

"My brother was interviewed recently by a Christian group seeking to introduce its (teen) membership to a variety of faiths.

One of the questions he was asked, non-ironically, was 'Do atheists dream?'"

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

I've had the copy of the revised thesis I gave to my tutor back, and there are no major issues. Tomorrow I should get the copy from my internal examiner, but I saw him today and it doesn't seem like he's picked up much either. I should be on course to actually re-submit it quite soon. All that will remain is what the external thinks. I don't think he'll be able to say that I didn't address the topics he wanted addressed, but whether he'll like what I've said is another matter.

Love in the Time of Culture

Renshaw Street, Liverpool, summer 2008.

Fooling No-One

Just brought to my attention, the flag of the Χρυσή Αυγή ("Golden Dawn") party in Greece:



Hmmmmmmmmmmm. That's the most interesting use of the Greek meander pattern I've seen in a while.

Last Man Standing

My housemate has just moved out of the place where I live, so I currently have the place to myself. Actually, since when I move out at Christmas the landlord will move in here to do some renovations before selling it on, I'm the last tenant to ever occupy the house.

It's strange, because until quite recently I really hated the idea and the reality of living alone - dig back in this blog far enough and you'll find at least one post to that effect. These days, however, living on my own probably suits me best. A factor of age perhaps.

That said, I do now have plenty of space to put people up in if they're in Liverpool over the next few months.

An Idiosyncratic History of the Music Video, Part 1

with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark - that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

There is a common agreement - repeated so often that it has become cliche - that the 1960s ended with the death of Meredith Hunter during The Rolling Stones' set at Altamont in 1969. The point where other pop-culture decades ended is usually less clear. I'm not sure I've ever heard anyone put foward an event which ended the 1970s. This is perhaps because everyone was glad the 1970s were over, but that's beside the point.

My suggestion for when the 1970s ended involved Mick Jagger once again, making him some kind of agent of change. The event itself comes in 1985, with the release of the video for Jagger and David Bowie's ill-advised cover version of "Dancing in the Street". Suddenly the world was confronted with Earth's two coolest men somehow contriving to look like nothing so much as your dad and your uncle dancing at a wedding.

Perhaps due to the embarrasment of the participants, it seems that it isn't possible to embed any of the Youtube versions of the video, so if you want to see the evidence you'll have to follow a link.

An Elegant Weapon For A Less Civilised Age

I was recently in Dublin for a "War and Death" conference, and it reminded me that I still had videos of the bronze sword display from WAC-6 last year. I though people might be interested in seeing them, so here we go:

Dr. Alan Peatfield uses a bronze short sword on a melon.

Dr. Barry Molloy uses an Egyptian khephesh on rolled tatami mat, simulating a limb.

Drs. Peatfield and Molloy demonstrate the use of a khephesh against a shield. As far as I know, the man who breaks and runs on 0.19 is not doing so in fear of his life.

Sadly, I was not filming when a Very Eminent Scandinavian Prehistorian accidently almost opened up a woman's arm with a swing of a Bronze Age rapier - a near-miss that was not his fault, but still nearly took experimental archaeology onto a whole new level.

"Would You Like To Play A Game?"

It was the President Madagascar meme which first put me on to Pandemic 2 - a free online Flash game in which you play the part of a global pandemic, with the aim being to wipe out humanity as quickly as possible. The joke is that Madagascar has only a single seaport as a point of entry in the game, and the government there is extremely quick to shut off all communications before your virus arrives. For the record, I have yet to win the game, although I did manage to wipe out everyone apart from Japan, New Zealand, and (of course) Madagascar.

The topicality of the game put me in mind of a text-only game from the 1980s - which I cannot find mentioned anywhere on the internet - which allowed you to simulate a nuclear exchanged between the US and USSR. It did a very nice job of re-creating the mindset of MAD: launch everything you have at everything they have in the first wave, and hope that you still have something left at the end to technically make you the winner.

It also made me think that topicality in games was something that we didn't have for quite a while. In the glory days of the British computer game industry in the 1980s we had plenty, with Harrier Attack and Wanted: Monty Mole springing to mind. I suppose the small size of games then made it easy to produce them quickly, while events were still recent. As game have gotten more complex, the development time has increased markedly. Flash games seem to have provided a new way of producing things quickly, though.

Academic Comedy

Yesterday brought the revelation that my internal examiner is a big fan of BBC Three's not-as-good-as-Boosh-or-Conchords-but-still-good-fun comedy We Are Klang. This is funny both because he himself reminds me a lot of the guy in it who plays the teacher in The Inbetweeners, and because I suspect the programme represents his view of the department.

There's also the matter of this little gem on prehistoric art from my external examiner's 2007 book:

And the men are usually phallic. Why? Presumably not because they fought battles in that state; apart from the obvious discomfort and impracticality, one would think it would be physically impossible to sustain such a state during combat (it seems unlikely that experimental archaeology will come to our aid in this instance).

He wasn't that bleedin' funny in the viva, let me tell you.

Don't You...

I think I first saw The Breakfast Club when I was about 15, which is probably the perfect age at which to do so. A few years later, when I was at university, I forced some of my friends to watch it. They didn't get it, I still did. These things stay with you: I'm considering re-creating the Judd-Nelson-on-the-football-field pose here in Liverpool when I finally get the thesis re-submitted.

It's easy to get caught up in the 80s nostalgia element of the John Hughes films, but they're more than that. I reckon they're streets ahead of most films made for a teenage audience today, at any rate.

Hit And Hope

This week I submitted an application to an institution in New York which funds research into human aggression, domination and violence. It should probably be there now, in fact. I asked for a year's funding to expand the work of my thesis into a published monograph. I have pretty much no expectation that the application will be successful, but there you go.

There's A Popular Misconception/Says We Haven't Seen Anything Yet

So here we are at the 40th Anniversary of Apollo 11. For me the most surprising thing is discovering that Armstrong, Aldrin and Collins were all 39 when they did the mission. Clearly there's plenty of time left for me to do something important.

It seems to be pretty common these days for people to dismiss the whole Apollo project as a meaningless exercise which cost a huge amount of money which could've been better spent elsewhere. Perhaps, but it's worth noting that Apollo cost far less than the Vietnam war and killed a significantly smaller number of people.

Anyway, by way of celebration, some music. It was down to either this, or "Also Sprach Zarathustra". The tie-breaker was that Clint Boon was DJ-ing in a club once where I got so drunk that I couldn't see properly. Has Richard Strauss done that for me? Has he bollocks.

And, because it's one of the best things ever to appear on the internet, here we have Buzz Aldrin ("Second comes right after first!") offering a robust response to someone claiming that he never actually went to the moon: