Obscuranting

Right Wing Economics: Dumber than a bucket of pigshit Part II

2009-02-08T04:09:00.002Z

And here you go - the worst economic downturn since the 1930s was not caused by systematically undermining the protections that kept investment bankers from gambling the economy away or by allowing Wall Street to take insane risks with our money for even more insane bonuses.
No, it was because the Democrats got elected in 2006 and - stick with me here - even with a Republican president in the White House (who had done his best to personally bugger the economy to bits), the *prospect* of tax cuts expiring in 2011 caused the economy to roll over and die.
We knew guys like Norquist are liars, we knew they're not really very bright - in fact they're dumb as hell - we knew they think we're stupider than roadkill, but really how long do they think they can keep pulling this shit???

Right Wing Economics: Dumber than a bucket of pigshit Part I

2009-02-08T04:04:00.002Z

You really couldn't make this crap up. Apparently, public sector employees should count as unemployed. As always, when the facts and the figures don't agree with right wing rubbish, it's the facts and figures that are at fault.

The magic of the private sector!

2008-12-05T12:04:00.002Z

As most of middle-class India subscribes more and more to the notion that the private sector is the cure for all ills, cutting out politicians and fixing everything wrong with the economy and the world, it's worth reading this.

From the 'Bihar is not a state, it's a state of mind' files...

2008-11-18T14:22:00.002Z

This is priceless! Well, actually, priced at 10,000 rupees, to be precise...

A salutary lesson for those who might be melatonin-disadvantaged and are foolhardy enough to visit Bihar - always, but *always*, ask the price first.

Decline and Fall ...

2008-11-12T16:40:00.002Z

A decade or two, when Hollywood started embracing the notion that videogames could be turned into movies, without all that messy business of finding stories, getting good screenplays, character development and similar wasteful activities, it seemed like the bottom of the barrel as far as creativity in Tinseltown was concerned.

Ha ha. And ha again.

Turns out all of us were ignoring a rich and potent source of compelling narratives, with gripping tension and rich characters - board games. Yes, that's right - board games. Read this and weep.

Coming soon to a theater near you - Scrabble The Musical!

As it sinks in - Part IV

2008-11-12T11:03:00.004Z

The more things change, the less they change.

Growing up in Calcutta, possibly the last place on earth where you will still find street graffiti that embrace Lenin, Stalin and other colossi of Communism, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the rapid unraveling of the Soviet bloc, one of the memes that you heard all the time was that 'Communism did not fail, because the Soviet Union and all its allies never achieved true Communism. If it were implemented in its pure form, as it's meant to be, it would never fail'. This line of course was both true and absurd, because it is unlikely that Communism will ever be implemented on any world in its 'pure' form, and the closer you tried to get, the worse it got and the more people wanted to get away from it.

This purity meme never quite goes away and makes for such strange bedfellows! Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the latest variant, from that witless idiot Jonah Goldberg - 'True conservatism has not been repudiated with the election of Barack Obama, because George Bush's reputation as a Conservative is simply a Liberal (boo! hiss!!) smear - he's not really a Conservative, because if he were, we would have won the election, Conservatism would have triumphed and I would get free blowjobs every day'. At least, that's what I think he's saying ...

Because it's difficult to read such tripe without laughing your mid-morning tea through your nose, given that he's got a hard-on for 'reformers' who worship 'market principles'. Oh, that's right - that would be the same market principles allied to naked greed that have brought the American economy to its knees. But then again, you know what Goldberg's pals are probably saying on Wall Street - since everyone knows all markets are actually not perfect markets, if only we had perfect markets with perfect information, none of this would have happened. (And of course, as we all know, if frogs had wings, they wouldn't bump their asses on the ground quite so much!)

The leading 'intellectuals' of the Neocon movement have always had an uncanny resemblance to a pack of monkeys throwing their faeces against a wall and howling at those who didn't appreciate their genius. After eight long years, it's good to sit back and have a belly laugh at their efforts.

P.s. He also promises to be the gift that keeps on giving, since he seems to feel that the person to rally the troops is that well known patriot, Rush 'I got my housemaid to enable my prescription drug addiction' and 'I dodged the Vietnam draft because of a pimple on my ass' Limbaugh! And the person at the head of this fearsome band of intellectuals and reformers? Why the person who makes Vlad 'The Bad' Putin quake in his boots every time he looks towards Alaska - Sarah 'Mediocre and proud of it' Palin! For once, it looks like we're going to be laughing a lot over the next few years ...

As it sinks in - Part III

2008-11-10T14:03:00.003Z

Required reading. I'd read Joe Conason on this subject, as well as more about John Judis and Ruy Texeira way back when, even before Kerry lost to Bush in '04. 2006 and last week are beginning to bear them out and it will not make pleasant reading for those who went to sleep happy on the 3rd November 2004, dreaming of that 'permanent Republican majority'. In common with most other tenets of the Republican/ Conservative faith, the best years for that particular meme are probably in the past already.

The gift that keeps on giving - Part I

2008-11-06T18:38:00.001Z

Bring back Sarah Palin! After all, if the loony element of the Republican Party, I mean the Republican Party, insists that she is the One, the True Saviour of Real Conservatism, who am I to disagree?
And since when do Real Conservatives have to conform to Socialist Elitist dogmas that distinguish between continents and countries anyway, huh?

As it sinks in - Part II

2008-11-05T16:29:00.000Z

This is really worth reading.

As it sinks in - Part I

2008-11-05T16:00:00.002Z

While I am going to go down that 8 years overdue glass of champagne tonight, it's worth reflecting bit by bit on exactly what President Obama means. It means a great chance to reverse the slippage of the Supreme Court into total wingnut territory, as Glenn Greenwald summarizes here.

Bipartisanship? No thanks, not just now...

2008-11-05T13:55:00.005Z

Hardly Socratic, but an interesting exchange of emails on a morning where everyone is waking up to a new dawn.

It was provoked by my Facebook status update, which read: ".... is happy. Very very happy and watching Fox News, loving the sight of those blowhards spin and squirm, still lying as the ship sinks below the waves!"

I think your Facebook status smacks of schadenfreude and is another indication that the pendulum will now swing to the other extreme -- right-wing hubris replaced by left-wing lunacy. So much crowing, so much "good riddance to the Republicans." Is this the much-boasted of Era of Change? Already the Democrats are licking their lips about how their majorities in Congress have kicked the Republicans in the ass and will help them drive their own pork through. I bet the left-wing base (like you) will turn a blind eye to the depredations of their own side that are sure to follow.

I hope I'm wrong.

What a pity more people don't read Kipling these days. He wrote the Recessional during Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, the very pinnacle of the British Empire. It's sobering reading, and perhaps the left-wing, now that it has secured that much dreamed of victory and is puffing out its chest, should take seriously.

Here it is, in case you haven't read it: http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Kipling/Recessional.htm

God of our fathers, known of old-- Lord of our far-flung battle line Beneath whose awful hand we hold Dominion over palm and pine--Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,Lest we forget - lest we forget!

Me
Today at 2:22pm

Sorry boss, I don't agree. If the likes of DeLay and Palin were still in power, they would not be reading Kipling to each other. (She probably thinks he's some European Communist, which would at least make him laugh in his grave) The exact reason Cheney and Bush were able to ram the public up the fundament is because liberals have always tried to find the middle path and woke up too late to the transformative nature of the American right wing at this point. Read the preface to Krugman's The Great Unraveling. If you have a Republican party that is already saying the real reason for their loss is that they were not 'conservative enough', that they didn't attack enough and that Palin was the best thing about them, then trying to be conciliatory to them is like offering mediation to a wounded rattlesnake. You cannot fix the economy, the energy crisis, the Iraq war or the healthcare crisis by trying to be conciliatory to Limbaugh and gang. Wait and watch for the speed with which they go on the attack - the modern Republican party is now little more than a cancerous growth that is only capable of being in endless opposition.

And frankly, I think it's way past time that liberals stood up and displayed some spine for our beliefs. Why the fuck are we hampered by perceptions of some pockets of left-wing extremism when right-wing extremism is pervasive, all round and so aggressive and refusing to admit even a chink of reality through the window? Did you see Limbaugh or Coulter backing off a jot during the Clinton years or the Bush years? You shoot the mad dog and throw a bone to the good ones. If the Obama administration decides to play nice they will find their entire legislative agenda in deadlock in 30 days.

They have not been elected to play nice - a black man with a suspicious name has wiped the floor with a white war veteran. If they have to implement the change that the voters are asking them to, it will not be done by playing nice. These changes have to be rammed through - if the Republicans stand in the way, and all the signs are that they will, they should be roadkill. Two years from now, if Obama is not able to show the legislative accomplishments that he has been voted in for, the excuse can't be that I was nice to the Republicans, but they wouldn't play ball.

I really think you should read that Krugman piece - he talks about how Napoleon took all of the European empires by surprise because everyone believed that all his extremism was just talk and that once they got to the real business of ruling, he would moderate himself. Then he drew the parallel to Bush and the current Republican gang, who pushed harder and faster to the right than the Democrats ever thought was possible and therefore, while the Democrats believed the rhetoric about bipartisanship after 9/11, Rove, Cheney and co simply got a better grip on the knives and pushed them in harder between their ribs. That kind of stuff has to be burned out of the system, not by talking nicey-nicey.

Me
Today at 2:24pm

P.s. Remember why Clinton was not able to do anything about healthcare reform? Because he tried to get the Republicans along and they declared a jihad on Hillary and him. To repeat that experience once again, in the name of cleaning up the political culture would be rampant stupidity. Remember what the Republicans said about bipartisanship when they came to power - another name for date rape, according to Grover Norquist. That's what they really think - forget all the 'let's all get along' crap that will be coming out now. 

YES! YES! YES!

2008-11-05T10:30:00.003Z

8 long years; 8 long years we've waited for this!

What's the only thing that can make this any better?

Watching Fox News and hearing a panel of lying bloviators say that they want to take a nap for the next four years! Yes, please - make than forty and I'll buy you the pills.

Listening to a loony right wing radio talk show host say that the reason they lost is because their candidates were not right wing enough. Presumably he wants to put Palin front and centre for the next election - I say, go for it! Put Palin and Limbaugh on the same ticket and watch the GOP emulate the Titanic!!

'Sit down, boy!'

2008-10-07T08:09:00.002+01:00

This article from Dana Milbank in the Washington Post is more revealing and more repugnant than you'd think on first reading. And even on a first reading, there's plenty to loathe in there.

Re-reading the bit about the good ole 'folksy' folks who used a racial epithet towards a black cameraman, I found the 'Sit down, boy' comment to be the perfect summary of the entire Republican camp's reaction to the notion that Obama is about to hand them their ass on a platter.

(Did I mention she's 'folksy'?)

How dare he? How dare an 'uppity' black man threaten to beat their senile, hypocritical refugee from an anger-management programme and the vapid smile who's emptied her head and filled it with right wing cliches? He better know his place and 'sit down'.

(Oh and did I mention, she's 'folksy'?)

As the race threatens to swing further and further away from them, the nasty wing of the Republican Party - which, b.t.w *is* the Republican Party in its entirety today - will reveal just how desperate it is and just how low it will go. Well, we always knew it would go as low as possible - the only curiosity is in finding out how deep this year's sewers are.

(And by the way, did you hear, Palin's 'folksy'? I'm still waiting for the media to call her out on this schtick of spraying insults and epithets while using the vocabulary of a 10 year old and pretending that lack of intelligence is 'folksiness'.)

As for 'independents' and people who find 'Palin interesting', here's a mirror - take a good look at yourself.

Gail Collins in the NYT - must read

2008-09-18T13:49:00.005+01:00

While it's nice to see the media at long last cover the Presidential Election like they should - i.e. call a lie a lie - this is one of the best and funniest pieces I've read recently. It's Gail Collins in the NYT. I'll try not to put the whole thing here, but it's difficult when it's so uniformly good.

“The people of Ohio are the most productive in the world!” yelled John McCain at a rally outside of Youngstown on Tuesday. Present company perhaps excluded, since the crowd was made up entirely of people who were at liberty in the middle of a workday.

.....

And when McCain took the center stage, they were itching to cheer the war hero and boo all references to pork-barrel spenders.

Nobody had warned them that he had just morphed into a new persona — a raging populist demanding more regulation of the nation’s financial system. And since McCain’s willingness to make speeches that have nothing to do with his actual beliefs is not matched by an ability to give them, he wound up sounding like Bob Dole impersonating Huey Long.

Really, if McCain is going to keep changing into new people, the campaign should send out notices. (Come to a rally for the next president of the United States. Today he’s a vegetarian!)

.....

(I was laughing out loud at work at the last line there.)

.....

“We’re going to put an end to the abuses on Wall Street — enough is enough!” this new incarnation yelled, complaining angrily about greed and overpaid C.E.O.’s. Slowly, people begin to peel out of the crowd and drift away. Even in these troubled times, there are apparently a number of Republicans who think highly of corporate executives and captains of high finance.

....

It was a rather jumbled message, but the new story line was firm. The fundamentals were not things like employment rates or trade statistics. The fundamentals were the workers.

We are the fundamentals!

And, naturally, the humble, hard-working fundamentals are good. Who could doubt it? Was Barack Obama trying to say that he didn’t think the American working man and woman was good? Was this the sort of thing they talked about at those fancy-schmancy Hollywood fund-raisers? Which, of course, John McCain hates. Give him some hard cider and a log cabin, and he’s happy as a clam.

But wait! The fundamentals are in danger! At risk because of “greed.” Which John McCain was shocked to discover has been running rampant in the canyons of Wall Street.

......

McCain has always, genuinely, believed in dismantling government regulations, and there he was, vowing to create new “comprehensive regulations that will apply the rules and enforce them to the fullest.” It makes you think that he’s trying to impersonate something he’s not. Or wasn’t. Or might not be. The image is getting fuzzy.

This week, while McCain’s chief economic adviser was telling reporters that it was wrong to “run for president by denigrating everything in sight and trying to scare people,” McCain’s ad people were unveiling a new spot announcing “Our economy in crisis!” and calling for “tougher rules on Wall Street” along, of course, with more offshore drilling. Mournful unemployment-line music swells.

I have absolutely no idea of how John McCain would handle a financial crisis if he were president. But on behalf of all the nation’s fundamentals I would like to say that he now has me ready to stage a run on the first bank in sight.

Excellent stuff! Please go read the whole thing and then pass it on. After all, it's not like the rest of the newspaper is going to make you laugh ... for a few years ...

The End of Empire - required reading

2008-09-17T21:03:00.002+01:00

This book is essential reading, as is anything written by Matt Taibbi in general.

To take you back a bit, I first discovered him when he was reporting on the Kerry campaign in 2004, out of which came this excellent book - Spanking the Donkey. Required reading for anyone who, like me, woke up on the morning of the 3rd November 2004, wondering how the Democrats had managed to bollix up another election against Dubya.

But then, I became a fan for life when I read this piece of his, featuring The Moustache of Mediocrity, aka Thomas Friedman. Apart from anything else, I loved this bit:
On page 174, Friedman is describing a flight he took on Southwest Airlines from Baltimore to Hartford, Connecticut. (Friedman never forgets to name the company or the brand name; if he had written The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa would have awoken from uneasy dreams in a Sealy Posturepedic.) Here's what he says:

I stomped off, went through security, bought a Cinnabon, and glumly sat at the back of the B line, waiting to be herded on board so that I could hunt for space in the overhead bins.

Forget the Cinnabon. Name me a herd animal that hunts. Name me one.

This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It's not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It's that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it's absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that's guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.

And there's more:

On an ideological level, Friedman's new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we're not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we're not in Kansas anymore.) That's the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that's all there is.

I know it's brutally unfair to him to say this, because it's been said of so many posturing typewriter operators with just a handful of brain cells among them, but if ever there was a successor to Hunter S. Thompson's mantle as an intelligent, outraged and raging chronicler of our strange and stupid times, it's Taibbi.

The book is a thoughtful and considered delve into some pretty strange avenues of American behaviour that are almost mainstream - as Taibbi says, far from coming to their senses and trying to figure out how to get the US out of the mess that their lying, thieving and downright criminal politicians have landed them in, the great American public seem to be chasing even stranger rabbits down even weirder holes. He doesn't even bother to add the obligatory positive ending last chapter - he lays it out like he sees it, and it ain't pretty!

The End of Empire - # 1 in an occasional series

2008-09-17T20:02:00.007+01:00

One of my favourite hobby horses has been the impending end of the American Empire and how we would recognize it. It is an utterly unscientific and totally anecdotal theory, rather like one of those strange houses designed and built by eccentrics in their spare time, over decades. Without going into all the nooks and crannies of my reasoning, I usually hang facts on a framework of two or three basic points:

- All dominant civilizations and empires - Greek, Roman, Mughal, the Caliphate, British, Soviet etc - inevitably decline and fall. The inflexion point is usually not detected at the time and in retrospect, is usually found to have occurred around the time when common wisdom suggested its utter and total infallibility. 'The End of History', while looking like a particularly foolish statement of hubris for our time and which will damn Fukuyama to the laughing stocks of history, is not a new idea; even as late as the 1930s, a variant of it could be heard as 'The sun never sets on the British Empire'

- The rate of change is only increasing - while the Roman Empire lasted anywhere from 600+ to a thousand years, based on your point of view, the Mughal Empire lasted around 400 years, as did the British Empire and the Soviets found themselves slung out after a relatively brisk 70 odd years. Therefore, to suppose that the American Century is well past us is a perfectly acceptable hypothesis.

- The seeds of decline are varied and not necessarily external - while external events can precipitate dramatic changes, the rot is usually from within. The madness of the Romans had as much to do with their collapse as the Goth invasions; the Mughals alternated between fanatical religious fervour and world-class dissoluteness while the British empire crept up on it while the British empire was becoming an infeasible enterprise given the aspirations of its subjects and the march of the technology and resource driven American nation. The straws in the wind in America are beginning to accumulate - healthcare and the proportion of Americans without access to it at an affordable cost, the raging battles over whether or not Darwinism should be taught in school, the frantic battles in some sections to deny the impact of man's activities on the environment and the unsustainability of our current way of life, the use of Katrina by Republicans to carry out some convenient bleaching of the city's racial makeup, the seemingly ever-constricting grip of frankly loony evangelicals over the public discourse and the levers of power and the unshakeable belief that every war can be fought and refought till they are won. Even if they are lost. But with nukes next time.

Having said all of this, then, I spotted something in the New York Times today that really made me sit up. Given the carnage in the financial sector and the bloodbath going on, none of which contradicts my hypothesis in any way (especially given that I give it exactly 48 hours before some talking suits will pop up on TV to say that we should guard against the knee-jerk impulse to make regulation stronger as that would only harm the working man...), what caught my eye was rather surprising. It was this.

Let me extract some bits:

WASHINGTON — Judges around the world have long looked to the decisions of the United States Supreme Court for guidance, citing and often following them in hundreds of their own rulings since the Second World War.

But now American legal influence is waning. Even as a debate continues in the court over whether its decisions should ever cite foreign law, a diminishing number of foreign courts seem to pay attention to the writings of American justices.

“One of our great exports used to be constitutional law,” said Anne-Marie Slaughter, the dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton. “We are losing one of the greatest bully pulpits we have ever had.”

Remember 'soft power' ? Defined as 'its ability to attract others by the legitimacy of U.S. policies and the values that underlie them'? Well, this is exactly what the NYT article is talking about - take a good look, 'cause the tide seems to be running out.

The causes cited in the article should not be unfamiliar to anyone who goes past the daily Britney-Paris Hilton-Sarah Palin crap in the news. The extreme right-wing conservatism of the Supreme Court, America's foreign policy being increasinly unpalatable abroad, the insularity of American courts and their unwillingness to accept foreign law, none of these should be stunning front page news.

What is certainly surprising, is to read a statement along the lines of this one: 'America is in danger of becoming something of a legal backwater'.

And who's the filthy, communist, terrorist-loving radical who said this?

Justice Michael Kirby, of the High Court of Australia!

Oh.

Election season again! Wa-hey!!

2008-08-22T18:04:00.002+01:00

Yes, it's that time of the ... errr... four year cycle?... again! When money talks and bullshit talks even louder. Let's kick things off with a little taster of what everyone's favourite 'Maverick-who-panders-to-the-Loony-Right' has been up to.

You've heard of the Mortgage Crisis, you've heard of the Housing Crisis, but have you heard of the McCain Housing Crisis yet? No?

From CBS News' Dean Reynolds:

(CHESAPEAKE, VA.) - Barack Obama was handed a gift-wrapped package from John McCain on Thursday. Just as the Illinois senator has begun focusing on economic concerns with greater intensity, McCain made a comment that opened wide a gulf between him and the electorate he is wooing.

McCain was asked a simple question during an interview with Politico.com. Nothing tricky about it. No curevball this: How many houses do you and Mrs. McCain have?

"I think," said McCain, "uh, I'll have my staff get to you. I'll try to tell you about that."

Huh? Most Americans would certainly be able to answer that question, especially the ones facing foreclosure or mortgages that are ratcheting up. McCain's staff did get back as promised, saying the number was "at least four." Again, few Americans are in the four-house category. Even more embarrassing was the finding of an independent watchdog project, Politifact.com, that McCain and his wife, Cindy, own at least seven. Seven homes. Worth in the neighborhood of $13 million. Scattered across the country.

Now this was too good for Obama to pass up.

"If you don't know how many houses you have then it's not surprising you might think the economy is fundamentally strong," he said.

Within hours his campaign had surrogates fanning out bringing news of McCain's residential bounty to voters in every corner of the nation. A new ad was produced in record time to strike while the iron is hot. Over a shot of the White House, the ad concluded thusly, "Here's one house Americans can't afford to have John McCain move into."

And here's absolutely the best rejoinder clogging up those tubes on the Internets - superb stuff:

And did I mention that one of his key campaign slogans is going to be 'McCain The Maverick. He shoots himself in the foot. To support the troops. And for America. And because he's more patriotic than you. Not because he flip-flops on the issues. No-oh. Not at all'. Read this bit, again from CBS' Reynolds:

The McCain campaign cried foul, pointing out that Obama earned $4 million last year, which doesn't exactly make him a man of the people. But by McCain's own definition, it doesn't make Obama rich either.

Remember this from last weekend's conference with Rev. Rick Warren at the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif.?

"Define rich," Warren said to McCain.

"How about $5 million?" McCain responded. The audience laughed. But nobody at the McCain campaign is laughing now.

And if you want a more sober take on the whole thing, as always, Paul Krugman continues to be on the money, as he's been for the last 8+ years!

You. Must. Hear. This!

2007-10-28T22:25:00.000Z

This is my discovery of the last month or so - the LA based band called Rilo Kiley. I discovered them by pure happenstance. I was hanging around the London Regent Street Apple store, waiting to get my sweaty paws on the new iPod Touch, but having to brave the lines that were three deep behind each one - deciding to wait it out, I was playing with one of the new Nanos and this track came on:

If you don't get hooked by the opening riff, you should check your pulse...

Call me a sucker for a well-turned line, but there is something immediately sardonic and naive at the same time about a line that goes 'And the talking leads to touching/ and the touching leads to sex/ and then there is no mystery left'...

Then, I discovered this from their new album.

If you recognize the opening riff, you should apply for a slot as Team Captain on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, but regardless of your social skills, this is another exquisitely written and performed track.

Run, don't walk, to get all of their albums!

(It's the riff from My Sweet Lord by George Harrison, by the way)

And as your reward for reading this far, here's a very obscure, but endearing video of them:

Sharkjumping for couch potatoes - in 24 easy lessons!

2007-02-12T20:39:00.000Z

This is the year I've reluctantly had to give up what used to be a favourite guilty pleasure - watching '24' has unfortunately become an activity too unpleasant for a Sunday evening, or indeed any evening when I'm not strapped into a chair by force and put under severe duress.

In previous seasons, Jack Bauer's endless quest to beat the clock against a variety of baddies intent on using a bomb/ nuke/ virus/ nerve gas against the good people of LA County (and the rest of the US of course, but we never seem them. Ever.) has been tipping slowly over the edge into self-parody, but this is the season when one of the more unpleasant undertones of the show has simply stepped forward and become the main theme.

Given the admittedly tough task of breathing new life into a format that seemed revolutionary, but has become stale and jaded, the producers and writers of the show have not so much decided to jump the shark as make the entire show a commercial for a shark-jumping school! In earlier seasons, you would wince at the torture scenes, but the plot points and the relative rarity of the use of torture would convince you that given a 'ticking bomb' and 'no other choice' even an honourable man like Jack Bauer had no choice. It's a tough world we live in, the bad guys don't support Amnesty International etc etc - you know the song.

But this year, different things seem to have combined to make the show more than a touch repellent. Torture is no longer the last option, it's usually the first - imagine Jack yelling, 'Chloe, we don't have the time' and you have pretty much the only excuse the writers use for every scene. The apogee or nadir, depending on your point of view, is the episode where after already torturing various baddies this season, Jack starts on his brother, who's revealed as the shadowy villain behind many nefarious evildoings! From last season even!! Apart exposing the lack of ideas of writers who have absolutely, completely and utterly run out of ideas, it just confirms that the show has taken a conscious turn towards being unapologetic propaganda for the kind of utterly dysfunctional and ineffective thinking that has characterized the 'War on Terror', but which is apparently de rigeur if you want to be called a patriot in Right wing America today.

Where does one start to deconstruct the hokum that this is the only way to fight terrorists? This piece by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker on the producer Joel Surnow does an excellent job of simply laying out the facts that are quite damning. Let me break down her article and present the best bits.

Let's start with the premise - the hypothetical 'ticking bomb' scenario is one where a terrorist or some generic Central Casting evil type has a ticking bomb stashed secretly somewhere, which will kill thousands/ millions (of Americans, of course!), unless our hero/ heroine can nobly overcome their wussy liberal impulses and torture (yeah, I said torture! Wassamatter with you, you want millions of Americans to die??) the baddies, the bomb will go off. Of course, this is the only premise behind 24. Ever.

So, how often has this happened in real life? Plenty often, if you believe the Republican and Right wing faction who always argues that without Abu Ghraib and the extraordinary renditions to 'black sites', any number of these ticking bombs would have gone off. Right?

Wrong! No terrorism expert has ever been able to point out a real-life example of this actually happening. In a delicious irony, this scenario first popped up in fiction and in a French novel no less! The story of Jean Lartéguy’s 1960 novel “Les Centurions,” set during France's brutal suppression of Algerian freedom fighters/ terrorists (take your pick) invented this scenario pretty much as an excuse to make French liberals feel less queasy at what La Republique was doing in their name! It was, needless to say, not backed up by fact, either in Algeria or anywhere else since.

But, you say, but even in some other cases, even if the bomb is not going off right away, there are certainly cases where torture can get information that will save lives, right? So, if anyone objects to torture, they must be wimpy liberals who can't see the larger picture for all the Amnesty protest signs, right?

Let's do a little quiz - Who visited the creative team to tell them that they'd 'come to voice their concern that the show’s central political premise—that the letter of American law must be sacrificed for the country’s security—was having a toxic effect. In their view, the show promoted unethical and illegal behavior and had adversely affected the training and performance of real American soldiers. “I’d like them to stop,” [Mr. x] said of the show’s producers. “They should do a show where torture backfires.”'

Which cheese-eating surrender monkey said this? Ah - that would be U.S. Army Brigadier General Patrick Finnegan, the dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point. Hmm.

Let's try another one: who 'said that, under both U.S. and international law, “Jack Bauer is a criminal. In real life, he would be prosecuted.” Yet the motto of many of his students was identical to Jack Bauer’s: “Whatever it takes.” His students were particularly impressed by a scene in which Bauer barges into a room where a stubborn suspect is being held, shoots him in one leg, and threatens to shoot the other if he doesn’t talk. In less than ten seconds, the suspect reveals that his associates plan to assassinate the Secretary of Defense. [Mr. Y] told me, “I tried to impress on them that this technique would open the wrong doors, but it was like trying to stomp out an anthill.”'

Who's the bleeding heart wimp that says this? Oh, that's only Gary Solis, a retired law professor who designed and taught the Law of War for Commanders curriculum at West Point. Oh-kay...

Anyone else attended the meeting? Who's this: He 'replied that torture was not an effective response. “These are very determined people, and they won’t turn just because you pull a fingernail out,” he told me. And Finnegan argued that torturing fanatical Islamist terrorists is particularly pointless. “They almost welcome torture,” he said. “They expect it. They want to be martyred.” A ticking time bomb, he pointed out, would make a suspect only more unwilling to talk. “They know if they can simply hold out several hours, all the more glory—the ticking time bomb will go off!”'

Which wussy lawyer type is this now? Only Joe Navarro, one of the F.B.I.’s top experts in questioning techniques, who's conducted over twelve thousand interrogations. I assure you, while it feels like Jack's done more in this season alone, he hasn't come close. And Jack is fictional, by the way.

Hmm. Let's get real here folks - have you been in Iraq? Well have you? Why don't we hear from someone who has and then see how these theoretical warriors' bullshit stands up, eh?

Ok - let's hear from Tony Lagouranis, a former Army interrogator in Iraq. What does he say?

'He told the show’s staff that DVDs of shows such as “24” circulate widely among soldiers stationed in Iraq. Lagouranis said to me, “People watch the shows, and then walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things they’ve just seen.” He recalled that some men he had worked with in Iraq watched a television program in which a suspect was forced to hear tortured screams from a neighboring cell; the men later tried to persuade their Iraqi translator to act the part of a torture “victim,” in a similar intimidation ploy....“In Iraq, I never saw pain produce intelligence...If anything, he said, “physical pain can strengthen the resolve to clam up.”
Lagouranis told the “24” team what the U.S. military and the F.B.I. teach real intelligence professionals: “rapport-building,” the slow process of winning over informants, is the method that generally works best... Cochran and the others from “24” worried that such approaches would “take too much time” on an hour-long television show.

So let's get this straight - after trying to scare the pants off you by telling you that this could happen to us all unless someone like Jack Bauer saves us at the last minute, they then admit that showing the actual techniques which could save lives would 'take too much time' - so essentially torture makes for a snappier plot device. Can't argue with that, eh? So, some guys in the Army ape the show and get rubbish intelligence in return - time to trot out that old cliche about how people can always distinguish between television and reality. So nice when an old liberal argument can be used to shut them up. So what if the evidence suggests plenty of young impressionable troops ape exactly what they see on the show? Still in the 'reality-based' world are we?

But the funniest response of all is from the show's chief brain Joel Surnow - his right wing links and connections are a matter for a different day, but why don't we listen to what he has to say to the meeting with the military, a meeting that he ducked out of?

'“We’ve had all of these torture experts come by recently, and they say, ‘You don’t realize how many people are affected by this. Be careful.’ They say torture doesn’t work. But I don’t believe that. I don’t think it’s honest to say that if someone you love was being held, and you had five minutes to save them, you wouldn’t do it. Tell me, what would you do? If someone had one of my children, or my wife, I would hope I’d do it. There is nothing—nothing—I wouldn’t do.”'

Ah - so we now know that Joel Surnow knows more about torture working than the Army, the FBI and people who've actually had to do it. (It should surprise no one that he's bosom buddies with Rush Oxycontin Limbaugh, who's always pro-war, any war, but stays far from the possibility of ever fighting one himself!) Using the hoariest cliche in the book, he does a classic bait-and-switch. If someone had my wife and children, yes, I'd do anything to save them too. But - you moron - what you're being told is that torture would NOT WORK! IT WOULD NOT SAVE THEM!!

It is unwittingly revealing of the mentality of Surnow and the entire Republican Right wing 'torture 'em now!' crowd that this statement clearly disdains any argument about the inefficiency and ineffectiveness of torture - the one and only rationale left is that it makes them feel more manly. With his wife and children under threat, what else would a manly mannish man do, but lash out and blindly torture someone, anyone? So what if it wouldn't work? So what if it would almost certainly give them incorrect information and therefore doom said wife and kids? Pah - that stuff is for wimps! Cue gravely voice and spliced shots of the Stars and Stripes - I love my family as much as anyone, but if they have to die for me to save them, so be it ... (sniff)

The entire Iraq war has been all about a bunch of draft dodgers and war profiteers seeking to compensate for their lack of any actual manhood by sending others into a senseless war that has strengthened Al Qaeda's cause immeasurably and make the Middle East even more toxic than it was to begin with. To have to watch a TV show by another hack seeking to display his cojones - no, I'm sorry, even Jack can't torture me into doing this anymore!

RIP Ms Ivins

2007-02-01T12:42:00.000Z

(Photo courtesy: The Texas Observer)

Molly Ivins is dead. Here's the link to the story. Many good and heartfelt pieces have already appeared to mark her passing.

Read Joe Conason at Salon here - (subscription or clicking on an ad required). There's also an excellent obituary in The Guardian as well, here.

Many longer and better obituaries will be written about her - since many of the networks covered her death and even President Bush (a contemporary of hers from their high school in Midland, Texas) saw fit to weigh in with a few words, it is safe to assume many hypocritical things will be said too, but I do want to put down some thoughts on why I think the loss of this funny, witty, sharp lady is a loss for us all.

Why am I, a 35 year old Indian man who grew up in India, far from Austin Texas, who spent two years living in the USA (admittedy during a time that included the 2000 presidential election!) and who now lives in London, close to tears at the death of a writer who spent most of her professional life covering Texas politics?

Because after I discovered her through her incisive and funny biography of George W. Bush, ‘Shrub’ (co-authored with Lou Dubose), it was clear that here was a political writer who had an acutely tuned bullshit meter and had a killer sense of humour as well. That book made me gasp and laugh in equal measure and in later years, her comment on her old schoolmate (something along the lines of - Don’t complain America, we told you what he was like and you *still* voted for him!) seemed more prophetic than ever. After ‘Shrub’ I started reading every online column she ever wrote. I live in a different country now and have changed laptops ten times or more since 2000, but if it doesn’t have a link to her latest column and a local folder full of her older columns, it’s not mine.

Because the more I read her work, going back to the collections of her political writing, ‘Molly Ivins can’t say that, can she?’, ‘You’ve got to dance with them what brung you’ and ‘Nothin’ but good times ahead’ and ‘Who let the dogs in’, her pieces on politics were perceptive, funny, unashamedly liberal and always fierce in the defence of what she thought was right. I made sure I read ‘Bushwhacked’ (also co-written with Dubose) as soon as it came out - darker and grimmer, Molly simply catalogued what the Bush years were doing to her country and let the people in her book speak for themselves. When I came to the chapter on Priscilla Owen, one of Bush’s candidates for judicial confirmation, I nearly wept on a London bus.

Because she was a one-woman lesson in how to conduct political debate and the god of the putdown, but never descended into the illiterate name-calling that usually characterized her counterparts on the right. Her immortal take on the Texas legislature, the august body that gave the world Tom DeLay and George W. Bush, was simple - "Whee, here we go, the lege is back in session! And many a village is missing its idiot."

Because, during the last seven years, it often felt that apart from some lonely outposts of honesty such as Salon, hers was the only voice in the mainstream American print media that had the honesty to tell it like it is. She was the first and for a long time, the only person in the media to highlight the essential incompetence of George W Bush and his administration. Long before the rest of the media found and then ignored it as if it were irrelevant, she pointed out Dubya’s career of incredible incompetence, his habit of ‘failing upwards’ and being bailed out by ‘friends and family’ because his last name made them rich. While White House correspondents rolled over and played nice in the hope that the Republicans would tickle their tummies, talk show hosts were played for rubes by Bush, Cheney and gang and came back for seconds, when the rest of the media tried to avoid the taint of liberal bias by fawning over the liars and grilling liberals who dared to question, Ms Ivins kept writing her columns with humour and verve, often asking and answering to herself and to the rest of us - why bother? In November, we remembered why.

Because even as she was obviously counting her days down, she remained fierce to the end, openly scoffing at the sudden embrace of civility and good manners in politics by the Right that was curiously timed – after they had had their butts handed back to them in the November mid-term elections.

Because in the end, what you were left with was the memory of a woman who loved her country and countrymen deeply and passionately and because she believed in the power of human beings to do good, she used her considerable intelligence and enormous wit to keep nudging, poking and goading them to do so.

In a column by a writer in the Guardian, Simon Hoggart, who knew her, I found out a few years ago that she had cancer. That explained the gaps between columns that grew longer but also triggered a sense of apprehension for the health of someone I had never met and would not meet . Somehow, at a gut level, I loved this lady and wished she would keep writing at least as long as I lived. I wrote her the occasional mail about her column - always wishing her well and hoping she was well - I don’t know if she ever got them, but I hope she did.

I’m happy she lived long enough to see the poisonous DeLay discredited and his machine in shambles, Bush and his administration in disarray and Cheney exposed for the bullying fraud that he is. Long after the hate merchants of the right-wing are turning to dust six feet under and their reputations even further underground, we will still be laughing and crying at Molly Ivins' work - I can't think of a greater tribute to her.

But who will speak truth to power now? Jon Stewart, Keith Olbermann - your time is now.

Ha ha ha ha ....

2006-11-11T13:49:00.000Z

For the last few days, I've been doing what I've never before and might never do again - watching Fox News and reading the blowhard idiots at the National Review with a big, huge, gigantic grin on my face!

I'm now waiting eagerly to hear those three little words that'd mean oh so much:
Impeach the motherf**kers!!!!

Who are they?

2006-10-31T08:25:00.000Z

Read this -

And then read this -

This captures all the reasons I still love this band/ these guys and will always make time to listen to whatever Townshend decides to do next. Any band of this size and vintage would have figured out a neatly worked, manicured and tweezed story for the press and the public by now, containing just the right proportions of the following:

- Yes, we had our differences but we're like brothers now that we've discovered how much we mean to each other.
- No, we never wrote songs together, but I was surprised how much he brought to the process this time and it really opened my eyes.
- No, no, no it's never been about the money for us. Honest.
- This album really is a return to form for us.
- We love all of this new technology and all of this new stuff - it's a great way for us to communicate directly with our fans.

The Who? Townshend says of the last few Who tours: 'When Roger and I were on our last tour with John, I sat with our manager, Bill Curbishley, on the last day and asked, "Are we gonna do this again?" He said, "If you want to, we can always do it again." And I said, "Is there any possibility that we're enabling John Entwistle? Rather than helping him, what we're actually doing is sending him home with, after tax, probably a million dollars, half of it's probably gonna go up his girlfriend's nose." God rest her soul, she's dead now. I thought, "I don't need to play old Who songs. I could sell them to fucking CSI."'

And this next bit is, for my money, the most brutally honest and direct statement to come out of any rocker of his generation in what - 30 years? (Take notes Sir Mick, when you're done shtupping 25 year old models!) From Rolling Stone:

'I don't think that the big boomer bands are going to be able to do this much longer. I really don't. We're fucking lucky to be able to do it, but I don't think we'll be able to do it much longer. I don't want to go out and see Bob Dylan. I don't want to go out and see the Stones. I wouldn't pay money to go see the Who, not even with new songs. I wouldn't pay money to go see Crosby, Stills and Nash. They fucking make me sick. When I say that, what I mean is I'm ageist about it. I don't want to look at these old guys in their self-congratulatory mode. Somebody gave me tickets for Marlene Dietrich's last concert in London, and apparently she came out and she looked fantastic under the lights, but you know that she's an eighty-year-old woman held together by glue and string. Why would you want to do that? I'd prefer to come and see Elaine Stritch down in the bar here. My point is, I don't think it will go on much longer.

Our audience, our boomer audience, are sustaining it. It's not young kids. People say, "Oh, I went to a Rolling Stones concert and there were lots of young people there!" Once. They come once. I went to see Jimmy Reed once. I went to see John Lee Hooker once. I went to see Jimmy Smith once. I went to see Ray Charles once. I just wanted to be able to say I saw him. If Charlie Parker had been alive, I would have seen him once. I saw Roland Kirk once. I saw them all once. I wouldn't follow them around the fucking world. There's a lot of people that come and see bands like the Who once.

RS: It works out fine, right? Because those same artists aren't going to be touring forever. It's not like fifteen years from now you're going to be like, "Oh, I guess nobody wants to come to our shows anymore."

'No, my point is when you look at the commerce behind the music business, what's running the whole thing is live shows. The problem for the Who is because we can go out and generate hundreds of millions of dollars in ticket grosses, we're a commodity and treated as such. It would be nice if it was the same with the record, but it won't be. Universal are probably stamping around today thinking, "Oh, my God, not another fucking Who record. Oh, my God, what do we do? Thank God for the Scissor Sisters!"'

The last bit is as funny as it is true - acts of the Who's vintage often put out new albums just for a hook to hang a tour on. The bands I'd hail as honourable exceptions would be few - Neil Young (NOT CNSY - when I went to see them, I pretty much sold it to myself as Young + 3), Dylan and I can't think of anyone else. Townshend will be well aware that he himself released two very average 'new songs' as part of the 73rd Greatest Hits compilation from The Who two years ago and then went on tour ...

Still - bracing stuff.

Darth Vader vs Japanese Police

2006-10-17T22:21:00.000+01:00

So sue me! This is totally pointless and therefore extremely funny!

Civil discourse???

2006-10-17T12:12:00.000+01:00

Since I make no bones about being a Liberal, it makes me laugh my lunch out of my mouth when I hear Right wingers of any description or nationality talk about how shrill, intolerant and downright uncivil Liberals are.

Watching the Republicans get ready to re-enact the Hindenburg landing, it is amusing enough to make a cat laugh that some of the most divisive, deranged figures of the Republican Right are already making noises about how intolerant of dissent Liberals are!!!

I guess I must have misunderstood when Ann Coulter claimed that all Liberals and Democrats were treasonous, when Bush creates imaginary straw men to knock them down in ever more desperate campaign speeches across the country, when someone who says something uncomplimentary to Darth Cheney at a public appearance is arrested by the Secret Service, when the Republicans got a CBS TV film on Reagan cancelled because it had a soupcon less fawning admiration and a dash too little of hero worshipping than they demanded! Silly me - Liberals are intolerant *and* stupid as well, I guess.

Or - hang on, having made a dog's breakfast of actually governing the US, now that any possible notion of the Republicans having any more integrity than junkie pimps hanging around outside an elementary school, the competence to run even a swimming school for ducks or even as much honesty as a hyena has well and truly been blown to bits, they're preparing the story for their tenure in opposition. 'Restoring civility' to American politics - when they get investigated, censured, impeached, barred from office and just plain imprisoned, the meme will be in place. It's not their fault - it's the Democrats' fault for lowering the standard of discourse in American politics.

We all know that left to themselves, George Bush, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Tom de Lay, Bill Frist and Antonin Scalia like nothing better than to kick back over a grapefruit juice, discuss Plato's Republic, have Don Rumsfeld hold a pop quiz on Thomas Paine and even throw in a little more Thomas More once in a while... Of course, it can get rough sometimes - I hear they once raised their voices to each other when discussing the Federalist Papers, but hey, that's quality discourse!

Not this - Jack Abramoff's going to jail for scamming Native American tribes, Duke Cunningham's going to jail for taking whopping bribes, Bob Ney's going to jail for taking bribes, David Safavian's going to jail for taking bribes, Mark Foley's resigned for grooming kids for sex, Dennis Hastert's hiding out because he was hiding Foley's shenanigans, Bill Frist is being investigated for insider trading, Jim Kolbe's being investigated for inappropriate contact with minors, Susan Ralston's resigned and being investigated for corruption, Scooter Libby's going to jail for leaking classified info to discredit administration critics, Darth Cheney's company has been proved to have ripped off American taxpayers for millions - but this all just goes to show much Liberals have dirtied American politics!

Here's an excellent piece that's required reading for anyone who ever fell for that line.

Ridiculously good guitar playing...

2006-10-13T15:12:00.000+01:00

This kid, whoever he is, is just phenomenal. There's a million clips of wannabe Malmsteens (ugh!) wanking on their guitars in their bedrooms. This guy is special. He's playing an obscure classical piece for starters, for another, he's just unbelievable.
Apparently, he's a Korean high schooler, around 14 or so.
Watch this.

Will Ferrell & Jim Carrey on SNL

2006-10-13T14:40:00.000+01:00

If you haven't seen this, you really should ...

The Roxbury Boys

2006-10-13T14:34:00.000+01:00

This was one of the better long-running gags on SNL. Will Ferrell and Chris Kattan were always these gormless ex-yuppie clubbing types, woefully out of step with whatever trends were blowing past them, stuck on some early 90s dance track, never ever managing to score with a single woman and given to much gurning.
Every once in a while, a guest star would join them on their 'adventures'. Jim Carrey was of course a special special guest, because if anyone can out-gurn Kattan and Ferrell, it's him.
Take a look.

And some more ...

2006-10-13T14:30:00.000+01:00

For those who're not obssessive about SNL, here's a take on one of the spoof commercials that they insert quite slyly! I've been taken in a few times and I know people who'd swear they're real...

Convergence ...

2006-10-13T14:24:00.000+01:00

Neatly bringing my last two themes together, here's Will Ferrell as George W Bush, a role he was absolutely *born* to do!

In any case, the SNL Bush probably did as much to catch Osama as the real one did...

More Will...

2006-10-13T14:21:00.000+01:00

This seems to have started out as a parody of the dinner scene in American Beauty and then gets better and better ...

Ana Gasteyer on the left was one of the best performers I've ever seen on SNL - she was a brilliant foil to Will Ferrell across a whole range of characters and skits. I only wish I could find the 'Bobby & Marty Culp' sketches online somewhere.

Sarah Michelle Gellar is no slouch either...'Shut up you drunken witch'!

More Ferrell on SNL...

2006-10-13T14:16:00.000+01:00

This clip starts off brilliantly - Will Ferrell doing the creepy over-tactile professor in a hot tub and bonus: Wynona Ryder in the hot tub!

This clip has bits where things are beginning to go obviously wrong - skits being broadcast live on tv don't leave much room for error, so the way they pull out of the dives and still have the audience in splits is just superb!

Will Ferrell and SNL

2006-10-13T14:09:00.000+01:00

People who've only seen Will Ferrell in Anchorman, Old School or Elf always look quizzical when I insist he's one of the finest comic actors I've seen in a long time.
I was heartbroken when I heard he was leaving Saturday Night Live, because I thought he was consistently superb on the show.
He could do almost anything - any character, any kind of skit - and take it further and further than you'd believe possible.
Watch this one - after this, you can't listen to Neil Diamond without spraying your food across the room.

Freedom of speech (with exceptions)

2006-10-13T14:05:00.000+01:00

Olbermann shines a light on Dubya's shifty attempts to conflate anyone in the media who questions him with Al Quaeda.
It's hilarious to hear Bush try to quote Mein Kampf - if he even heard the name of this book before 2001, he'd have thought it was a ski camp in the Austrian Alps.
As for Bush bringing up this comparison, it's interesting to note that his own grandfather, Prescott Bush, was hand in glove with businesses who financed the Nazis.
Not that you'll ever hear about it..

Did I mention...

2006-10-13T14:02:00.000+01:00

...Olbermann for President?

This is one more of his Special Comments, reacting to Donald 'Freedom's Messy' Rumsfeld, who was trying to compare anyone who questioned him to Nazis and their appeasers.

As always, enjoyable for being blistering, but depressing because he's almost the only one doing this in the mainstream media.

Olbermann for President!

2006-10-13T13:55:00.000+01:00

Keith Olbermann has single handedly cast doubt on the near confirmed theory that all mainstream American media figures are spineless, unprincipled greedheads who have elevated the art of fellating the Right wing to an art form. This is one of his 'Special Comments', after Fox News tried to play the next move in the 'Clinton was responsible for 9-11' game, but came badly unstuck.

His Special Comments have grown more and more direct, pointed and honest. The blistering venom of these segments is made all the more lethal by the fact that unlike Faux News, he sticks to the proven facts. This is one of the best.

Just in case, here's the interview in question.

Part I:

and here's Part II:

Happy Jack

2006-10-13T13:52:00.000+01:00

How many great pop hits have been written about a seaside donkey? With a promo film featuring Keith Moon? Only one, of course.

Enjoy

Lazy lazy lazy ...

2006-10-13T13:47:00.000+01:00

Since I'm pathologically lazy, I thought I'd get back to posting by doing some light linking at first:

Funniest blog on the Net?

2006-07-14T18:29:00.000+01:00

This has to be a leading contender for the funniest post on the funniest blog on the Net - http://www.alzarqawismomsblog.com/?i=317

This one seems to be from the same person(s) and is rather good as well - http://www.keiraknightleysjaw.com/

Some new reading...

2006-07-11T13:58:00.000+01:00

This is one of those books that was in every shop window a while back, got great reviews and has been sitting in my 'Next' pile for a while. I'm usually suspicious of books that are supposed to be at that perfect intersection of commercial success and critical acclaim, but 'Carter Beats the Devil' is very good indeed.

I had always thought this must be a thinly-veiled takeoff on Houdini, but it's nothing of the sort. Even if you've never been a particular fan of magic or magicians, it draws you in and takes you along. And no, it's not a sword-and-sorcery type trip.

The key plot device of the opening chapters turns out to be a bit of a Macguffin, while the great secret at the heart of it may not strike us as all that important, but the book is well-written, it does move well and while others have complained of the sentimentality of the ending, Gold does make you care for the characters, so a happy ending is quite all right by me.

Tintin in the land of the Critics

2006-07-01T18:07:00.000+01:00

I was extremely happy to wake up and open this morning's Guardian to find a long, loving article on Tintin. It's always struck me as curious, bordering on bizarre, that most mentions of Tintin in the Western media has somehow always been coupled with discussion of Herge's supposed collaboration with the Nazis and the even more insubstantial taints of anti-Semitism and his cheerleading for imperialism.

Having grown up revering Tintin and everything about his universe, I have never found common ground with these criticisms. There has been enough said for and against Herge re: the charges of collaborating with the Nazis - read this. Anyone who has read 'Ottokar's Sceptre', 'Land of Black Gold' and 'The Blue Lotus', encountered characters like Mueller, Musstler and various assorted Bordurians and still makes the case that Herge was sympathetic to the Nazis is guilty at least of severe inconsistency. As for Herge returning to occupied Belgium to work, it was after King Leopold's appeal and in any case, there was an entire continent that could be charged with the same offence, beginning with the Vichy regime, something that gets discussed a whole lot less than De Gaulle's broadcasts.

The charge of anti-Semitism seems to be based on even less substantial evidence - one of his villains is called Bohlwinkel (which was Herge's idea of the name of a typical American tycoon, ironically changed from Blumenstein because he didn't want it to be perceived as anti-Jewish!) and the villanous tycoon running through the series - Rastapopoulos has a large nose!

Herge's position on empire is much more complicated. Reading 'Tintin in the Soviet Union' and the first version of 'Tintin in the Congo' is an eye-opener. 'Soviet Union' features more one-dimensional caricatures of hook-nosed 'Commisars' than you can shake a stick at - taken on its own and out of context with the rest of Herge's ouevre, it is appallingly simplistic and stuffed with every bad anti-Communist caricature there is. Bad as this might be, this only reflected the prevalent attitudes in the West in 1929, especially considering that Herge created Tintin for Le Petit Vingtieme, which was a Catholic magazine for youth, determined to stave off the 'scourge' of creeping Communism.

'Congo' is even more complicated - Herge seems to be an unapologetic cheerleader for the Belgian empire and its rule of the Congo. King Leopold the IInd's antics in the Congo, treating it as his personal bank and its inhabitants as his personal slaves, is regarded by historians as possibly the most brutal and exploitative colonial regime ever, which is some distinction given the competition available. In this book, Tintin is shown teaching adoring dark-skinned Congolese children that "King Leopold is our father" and is generally shouldering the 'White Man's Burden' in black and white. Personally, the low point of the entire Tintin series is a toss between this and the moment when Tintin goes rhino hunting - his simple, yet elegant method being to drill a hole in the rhino's hide and plant a stick of dynamite in it!

That Herge grew in his viewpoints and certainly changed his mind is not in doubt - while many of his early, almost crudely drawn books were redrawn, recoloured and almost completely rewritten in some cases, he gave up 'Soviet Union' as irretrievable and never brought out a colour version. 'Congo' was redrawn and coloured, but also rewritten drastically - the famous classroom scene has Tintin taking an innocuous addition lesson, while the rhino is saved from appearing altogether.

But there is more to Herge's attitudes than just a recanting of his positions on the Belgian empire. His denunciation of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and his clear sympathy for the Chinese runs throughout 'The Blue Lotus', 'The Broken Ear' details American and European shenanigans in Central and South America with piercing detail (including a portrayal of an international arms dealer called Sir Basil Baharoff, getting rich off both sides of any conflict, not a million miles from the real Sir Basil Zaharoff) and the last published Tintin adventure 'Tintin and the Picaros' is more in his continuing interest in the instability and pointless coups of Central/ South America.

Taken as a whole, only the most determinedly short-sighted observer can deny the essential humanism and optimism of Herge's work. Whether it's the newly moneyed Captain Haddock indignantly offering a band of Gypsies a meadow in his grounds to camp on, where the local villagefolk had banished them to a rubbish dump, Tintin taking the side of the Arabs against multinational oil companies or eventually ensuring that General Alcazar's revolution succeeds while extracting promises of not shooting the losing side en masse - as a whole, his work stands up as a positive, optimistic and above all insatiably curious look at a world that had changed out of all recognition in his own lifetime.

Rodrigo Y Gabriela

2006-06-30T13:17:00.000+01:00

Please please please check out Rodrigo Y Gabriela! Look here first, then go and buy their new album. I saw them first in a brief snippet on Channel 4, one of those ten minute filler things. I had heard of them before, but nothing had really registered. Then I saw them play - my god!

I guess since they play acoustic guitars and come from Mexico, there is a temptation to call them flamenco-based, but since they started off playing in a thrash metal band and throw in covers of Metallica's Orion and Stairway to Heaven as well on their new album, they defy classification.

Go to their website (www.rodgab.com) and watch the live video of them playing the first track - it's just two guitars, a girl and a guy, but it's like nothing you've heard before. Phenomenal virtuosity, but unlike the deeply, deeply boring playing of the thrash scene they came from, they're not in thrall to technique over emotion or groove. Their songs are fantastically rhythmic without saying 'look at me, I can play in 13/19' or some such meters, have fabulous playing from both of them and make every track a joy. I thought the gold standard for albums like this was 'Friday Night in San Francisco', but this might make me change my mind.

P.s. I didn't know whether to be amused or angry at one of the reviewers who posted about this album on iTunes. I paraphrase, but the gist of it was - 'they're from Mexico, but they're way better than Cheech and Chong, so buy this album'!!! So what if these guys are good enough to be compared to John McLaughlin, all that Americans know of Mexican music is a stoner comedy duo from the 70s??? Surely not? Oh well, I guess that person meant well...

It shouldn't surprise you at all ...

2006-06-27T14:10:00.000+01:00

I first heard Billy Joel around the age of 14 or 15, growing up in Calcutta in India. We had one state-run broadcaster and the only western pop you would hear on it was either at lunchtimes or late at night. 'Lunchtime Variety' on Sunday usually featured some interesting DJs and one of them used to play this interesting piano-driven track called 'Surprises' endlessly.

The first collection of his I heard was a 'Greatest Hits' cassette, which of course did not even feature 'Surprises', which was on 'The Nylon Curtain'. This was the first real album I heard, full of little gems like 'Allentown', with its steam-whistle intro, 'Pressure', with the immortal non-sequitur 'All of your life is Time magazine, I read it too' and the cod-Beatles-psychedelic 'Scandinavian Skies' that is much less irritating than it sounds.

Fast forward to New Year's Eve 1999/ 2000, years after Billy Joel had either decided to become a 'serious' classical musician or hit a serious case of writer's block, he decides to play some New Year's shows at Madison Square Garden, which was interesting, but not half as much as the prices for the show - top tickets around $ 3000!!! For a guy who used to sign off on stage saying 'Don't let the bastards grind you down', it was a depressing little segue into 'Exclusive pre-booking for American Express cardholders' or some such. I think it was The Eagles' neverending 'Reunion/ Farewell' tours that started to set my teeth on edge and longing for 1977 all over again (this was of course before Johnny Rotten appeared on 'I'm a Celebrity, get me out of here'), but this was up there with the greediest of them.

When I saw he was touring again this year, on the strength of the success of 'Movin' Out', the musical based on his songs, it seemed like another bad cash-in by someone whose best days are clearly behind them. Having said that, I have to confess I was struck by the live album that's come out of his 12 nights at Madison Square Garden earlier this year - '12 Gardens Live'.

Unless there has been a vast amount of studio overdubbing added on (think Led Zeppelin's Song Remains The Same...), his voice, singing and playing are all surprisingly strong. It's not as if there are any huge surprises in the arrangements, but when I heard 'Miami 2017', I was ready to love the album. He's dipped deeply into a very strong songbook and played some of my personal favourites - 'Zanzibar', with the great 'I got a jazz guitar, I got my old man's car, I got a tab at Zan-zi-bar!'; 'Everybody loves you now'; 'Keepin' the Faith' - 'I got a fresh pack of Luckys and a mint called Sen-Sen'; 'Big Shot' and of course 'Movin' Out'. With these, you can even forgive clunkers like 'Always a woman' and 'River of Dreams'.

I'm still not going to watch the show when it rolls around - I refuse to be the sheep that gets sheared for the pension fund or the second alimony (There's an idea for a tour - 'The Summer 2006 Alimony II Tour!'), unless there are some new songs or a new album that at least proves the artist in question is trying to do some new work. (The exception being The Rolling Stones, who put out new albums just to have a name for the tour. If you sat Keith Richards down and asked him for the name of the last three Stones albums, I think you might wait a long time.) But by all means, run out and buy '12 Gardens Live'.

By the way, on the subject of topping up pension funds, I was rolling over with laughter when I read the name of 'The Eagles'' latest tour - it's called 'Farewell 1' - ha ha ha! How brazen do you have to be to make it so bleeding obvious - why not call it the 'Blatant Cash-in till we come round again' tour? More 'authentic', isn't it?

Reality-based vs BS-based...

2006-06-27T13:34:00.000+01:00

Ron Suskind has quietly risen to some prominence in the last few years as one of the few journalists to take any kind of in-depth look at the shenanigans of, what we must call for lack of any other words, the Bush Administration.

I first read his excellent piece on the sham that was Compassionate Conservatism - my personal opinion has always been that anyone who believed those two words fitted together deserved what they were going to get, but this was a long, calmly written article that was all the more damning for the unpartisan, reflective nature of the piece.

His book, The Price of Loyalty, was excellent - for the first time, there was conclusive evidence that Iraq was always on the agenda for Bush II. If 9/11 hadn't happened, something else would have, to enable them to pursue their dream of taking down one of the easiest targets in the Middle East. The rather flattering portrait painted of Treasury Secretary Paul O' Neill (who after all oversaw the ballooning of gigantic budget deficits fuelled by extraordinarily illogical tax cuts) can be at least excused by O' Neill's defiance in going on the record with his criticisms.

Then, this came out before the 2004 Presidential elections. While Suskind could not in any light be mistaken for a Bush supporter, the careful, even tone of his writing keeps it from sliding into hoarse polemic, though the message could not have been clearer. This was an administration that was led by a profoundly incurious son of privilege, used to getting his own way not through his own accomplishments, but his family name, his connections and lately, the trappings of the power he had acquired. It was also remarkable for his continuing to unravel the lies behind Bush's pose of being a man of faith, not an angle most liberal commentators were comfortable pursuing.

This new book, however, seems to call a spade a spade quite unflinchingly. It is a hard-eyed look at the GWOT (Global War on Terror, if you haven't been keeping up) and what it's been yielding. Apart from anything else, it is worth the price of admission for this: When his CIA briefer led George W. Bush through that famous daily briefing of 6th August 2001, which told the President that Bin Laden was determined to strike inside the US, how did the great defender react? What was his comment on it? Perhaps a stirring message to his troops on the need to fight? A thoughtful comment on how it would take years of struggle to defeat such an enemy?

Not even close. Apparently, it took the form of a sharp comment to the CIA employee in question - 'All right, you've covered your ass, now.' And no further questions or comments.

But surely, 9/11 changed everything? Since then, he has risen to the occasion?

Um, here's Sidney Blumenthal in Salon - "At one briefing in 2002, Suskind writes, Bruce Gephardt, deputy director of the FBI, told Bush that a group of men of "Middle Eastern descent" in Kansas had been discovered offering "cash for a large storage facility." "Middle Easterners in Kansas," said Bush. "We've got to get on this, immediately." Bush is reported to like barking orders, almost at a shout. The next day, he demanded a report. "Mr. President, the FBI has Kansas surrounded!" "That's what I like to hear," Bush replied. But it turned out that the men of Middle Eastern descent were operators of flea markets, not would-be terrorists. The diligent FBI had closed in on their accumulated piles of old clothing and Sinatra records."

Not much else left to say, except that I'm rather glad I haven't visited Kansas since 2000!

Corners being turned

2006-06-20T16:21:00.000+01:00

This is essential reading (From the Washington Post - free registration required). At the end of the day, even assuming the civil war were to magically disappear, what Bush, Blair and assorted other jokers have done is created another unstable fundamentalist state in the Middle East.

Iraq is so screwed up that none of their neighbours will tolerate any arrangement that might lead to peace. Iran and Turkey will not tolerate an independent Kurd state, Iran will not tolerate a Sunni-majority south, the Saudis will not tolerate a Shiite-majority Iraq and the possibility of the Kurds, Sunnis and Shias reconstituting a unified Iraq is as likely as Christmas in July - but George the Fourth won't be around to pick up the pieces, will he?

Making Hay in the mud

2006-06-19T22:04:00.000+01:00

Finally managed to go to the literary festival at Hay-on-Wye this year. The town itself has always seemed to have that slightly magical aura that very few places in the world seem to retain. I mean, there is hardly a town in the country that doesn't have an identikit High Street with identikit burger bars and spotty teens in hoodies just getting there from Central Casting.

Actually, that's unfair - there are at least two or three basic models of High Street. At the more tasteful, 'upper-income' end, you have the Henley-on-Thames/ Windsor model, where the thrift shops have better books, even the burger chains have mock-Tudor frontages and there isn't a 'Texa Fried Chicken' within smelling distance. Further down, you have the Reading/ Croydon model, where there is still a pedestrian area, the Waitrose has been downgraded to a Sainsbury's and Cafe Rouge is a hotbed of exciting cuisine. And then, at what we can euphemistically call the 'cash-efficient' end of the market, we have the Hayes model. Here, the FARA thrift shop looks like Selfridges, you pop into Argos but not too often because you might go dizzy with the excitement, there's a guy at the Barclays ATM complaining to his friend about the lack of information on his receipt ('It said "Do you want an Advice Slip?". I thought it was going to give me some advice - this is just a receipt!') and the culinary choices veer between Greggs, Baker's Choice and ... um, that's it!

How did I get on to this? Ah Hay.

Yes, that there is still a town in this country where there really isn't much of a High Street and there are more book stores than any other kind put together, now that's something! Small book stores, large book stores, second hand book stores, new book stores - heaven! Every time I dipped into one, I swore blind that it would be the last store I even entered. And then I'd come to the next one. It was when I hit the store which was selling new books for £ 1, every book! that I really lost it. Carrying the whole lot back from Cardiff by train was much less fun. Much much less.

Highlights:

1. A 1930s, large format compilation of H. M. Bateman's elaborate cartoons. The first work of his I ever saw was the memorable 'The Boy Who Breathed On The Glass At The British Museum'.

2. 'The Dictionary of National Celebrity'. Superbly funny stuff. Co-written by William Donaldson, who died recently at a ripe old age after a rich career of boozing, shagging and all round debauchery. He was also the author of the Henry Root letters and the excellent 'Brewer's Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics'. It cost me £1, but I would happily pay five times that for a volume that enriches my life with the knowledge that 'Victoria and David Beckham' also forms the acronym 'Bravo! Victim and dickhead'.

The festival itself - as a first time visitor, I loved it. J and I went up to Cardiff, met up with her cousin and his partner and drove up to Hay-on-Wye. In spite of the crowds, we managed to take in at least one talk each - I attended a talk by one of the few Britons to come out of Guantanamo Bay - Moazzam Begg. I had in fact seen him arrive earlier in the afternoon. In the middle of the busy ticketing tent, a short, darkish, bearded Asian man with his young son and a folded umbrella was wandering around slightly confusedly - only because I had seen photos of him did I realize that this slight, innocuous man had actually been through experiences and hardship that would make most of our lives look like a gentle stroll in the park.

His talk was fascinating not just for the content, on which more at a later time, but because I found myself in an interesting position. The strength of his religious beliefs as well as his stated conviction on the issue of Kashmir, both of these were points on which I disagreed strongly and with as much conviction. However, even to my mind those did not in any way even begin to justify what he had to go through with the Americans, especially at Guantanamo. He's written a book which I intend to pick up, even if I see myself arguing with it loudly on public transport. What I did find remarkable was his even-tempered dry wit, even when talking about what must be his darkest hours.

A sample was this anecdote he offered: At one meeting/ interrogation where representatives of the British Secret Service where present, they offered him a copy of Jeremy Paxman's 'The English', apparently as a peace offering. According to Begg, it provided him a great deal of comfort in trying to reconcile his identities as a Muslim and a Briton. When he was out and actually met Paxman, he mentioned this to him and even showed him the copy in question, with a stamp of 'Approved by U.S. forces' on the flyleaf. Begg said that for once, Paxman was open-mouthed and stunned into silence, before recovering enough to point to the book and say 'Well, there's evidence of torture right there!'

On a related, rather ridiculous note, I see from a Village Voice report that the US Army says that detainees being interrogated at Guantanamo sit on a chair that looks like a more comfortable version of the Barcalounger. I am reminded of the Spanish Inquisition sketch from Monty Python - are these 'evildoers' really being interrogated with an American version of 'Bring out the comfy chair'?

Tom Lehrer is supposed to have retired as a satirist after he learned Kissinger had won the Nobel Peace Prize, declaring that satire was dead. This looks like the remains were exhumed, spat on and then rendered for burger meat at the local meatpackers.

He goes purple in the face so you don't have to ... and Seinfeld on the car stereo

2006-06-19T21:36:00.000+01:00

Continuing the Daily Show theme, check this out. I saw him first on guest appearances on The Daily Show, in a segment called 'Back in Black' and just got hold of one of his live albums, when he appeared at Carnegie Hall.

On The Daily Show, he's always one last syllable this side of a fatal apoplectic fit, while on the live album, he's more evenly paced. I always find him spot on in terms of his targets (his riff on how gay marriage is 'destroying' marriage in America is rather good) and am always heartened that there are some liberals who are willing to amp up their feelings to the volume that the loony right always subjects us to.

He's the first standup who I've put on my iPod since one J Seinfeld.

Speaking of whom, I still remember listening incessantly to 'I'm telling you for the last time' on my car stereo in the summer of 2001, when I was living in Chicago. I was living an upside down life, in an upside down year (about to get a lot worse) and it seemed fitting that I lived in downtown Chicago and commuted an hour out into the sticks, near Schaumburg. The trip into work could take anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half and when I got to work, it would be time to sit by the phone and start a day of cold-calling! Controlling the all-too-natural impulse to lie down and die in a quiet corner was possible only because I would listen to the Seinfeld live album all the way in and bound into work with a grin on my face.

Another album of that summer was 'Roxy and Elsewhere' by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, but more on that later.

Media Matters - more than ever

2006-06-19T19:36:00.000+01:00

The inexplicable cravenness of the US media coupled with their strange fondness for balancing the Right Wing Republican point of view with a Right Wing Republican point of view drives better men than me insane.

This series in Media Matters is indispensable. Depressing and tends to enrage you, but still indispensable.

People like Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann who're trying to stem the tide of whoredom deserve thanks and ratings in equal measure.

Random Rants...

2006-06-19T18:16:00.000+01:00

I liked:

36 Quai des Orfevres: French thriller, starring Daniel Auteuil and Gerard Depardieu, as well as the lovely Valeria Golino, known unfortunately in the English speaking world only for Hot Shots! Depardieu might be more famous, but Auteuil can claim to be an even better actor. From The Closet to Hidden and now 36, he has the range and the chops to act anyone off the screen. Excellent film.
Zappa presents Zappa: I didn't think I would get to see anyone competent ever play the music of the late, great Frank Zappa live. So, when his son Dweezil announced a tour including Napoleon Murphy Brock (from his phenomenal Seventies touring band), Terry Bozzio (from one of the better Eighties' lineups) and Steve Vai, I was on. Great show at The Royal Albert Hall, including two songs on the massive pipe organ! No Terry Bozzio, but as Dweezil said, a better show than the last time his dad played that venue. (For those less obssessive, in 1971, when Zappa played there, an audience member charged him and knocked him into the orchestra pit. A drop of 15 feet. The subsequent year or so that Zappa spent in a body cast and a wheelchair for a broken back did not increase his affection for playing live in London). Here's a review for the previous night's show in Manchester - London went off without a hitch and seemed to be even tighter. If I had one gripe, it was that Frank's arrangements were never as conventional as Dweezil's seemed to be - it was never obviously intro-chorus-solo-chorus-outro, but full marks to Dweezil for putting on a very good show. And Steve Vai has more charisma to burn than whole cities full of people ...

I loathed:

Fanaa: Every once in a while, you can tell Aamir Khan's private banker has called recently. You want to know what this film is like? How about - there's one of those obnoxiously sweet Hindi film kids, with a full hour of screen-time ( at least it felt like an hour to me!) who insists on referring to himself in the third person. As in 'Rehan wants milk mama', or 'Rehan wants a colonoscopy, mama', or some such. Is that enough for you? What about the fact that this mediocre piece of crap goes on for three and a half long long hours?

The 10 - no, make that 3 - Commandments

2006-06-19T17:43:00.000+01:00

One of my few regrets about living in London is that we do not get to see The Colbert Report on this side of the pond. I was a fan of Stephen Colbert way back when, when Jon Stewart's The Daily Show was already becoming the only news show in the US worth watching.

His own show is fantastic. As he proved at the White House Correspondents' Dinner, the man has no fear and seems to value the truth more than his access to the 'Dick and me go hunting' club.

This is child's play for him, really, but great stuff nonetheless.

Protest music?

2006-06-19T17:05:00.000+01:00

This is a particular bugbear of mine. I often go off on these jags on 'how come Dylan/ Young/ fill-in-a-name have to write protest songs forty/thirty/twenty years after they first started? How come no one's interested in doing that any more' and then descend into a foaming rant in which the words 'sellout', 'wankers', 'greedheads' and such can barely be made out before J kindly leads me away from polite company into a darkened room and my favourite straitjacket.

But I digress.

The point is, it's not that simple. Read this.

Conservatism

2006-06-19T16:06:00.000+01:00

Excellent article by Alan Wolfe in the Washington Monthly - Why Conservatives Can't Govern. Now that Ann 'Kill 'em all' Coulter is what passes for a Conservative Intellectual (kind of like horse poop passing for Chanel no 5, but that's a debate for a different day) and any pretensions along the lines of 'Conservatives are more efficient' have been blasted to hell and back, the grey hairs of the movement are wringing their hands at the 'hijacking' of the Conservative movement.

It takes me back to a childhood spent in Bengal, in India, where the collapse of the Soviet bloc was dismissed by leftover Stalinist types with one simple retort - what was in practice was never 'true Marxism' as Marx would have defined it. If it were 'true Marxism', it would never have collapsed. Apart from the elegant circularity of the logic, in this case it is the delicious irony that you have to love - ideological opposites resorting to using the same scraps of tattered dogma to keep reality out.

Wolfe has a simple premise - if someone with an ingrained belief in the evil of government runs government, the results are exactly what we see in the US today. All the guff about how this is not 'true Conservatism' is just that - guff. I'm curious as to why there haven't been more furious, Bill O' Reilly style denunciations of this article - but then one of the conditions of joining Faux News or the NRO could be an inability to focus on one thing for more than two seconds. I would expect the worthies of the Standard to weigh in on this though.

Reading...

2006-06-19T14:44:00.000+01:00

The joys of a three hour commute on London's commuter rail network are few and far between, so I should thank the fact that it lets me read for extended stretches of time. I weave in and out of periods when I don't touch fiction at all, but I stumbled on a couple of authors lately who have repaid the effort.
(My usual tactic for discovering new authors is to pick up interesting looking titles during my thrift shop browsing [God bless Oxfam Bookshops, British Heart Foundation, Cancer Research and all of the others!] and then follow up on the author if it seems worthwhile. )
The first was Jasper Fforde, who's whimsical without being twee, inventive without being a complete showoff about it and often quite funny. At the same time, there is a level of commentary underneath it that's quite sharp as well.
Start with 'The Eyre Affair', work your way through 'Lost in a Good Book' and 'The Well of Lost Plots' and finish with 'Something Rotten' - all of which feature his heroine Thursday Next. She's a cop or a detective of sorts, in an England (and occasionally Wales) that is ever so slightly different. Well, different enough that the Crimean War was still going into the 1980s... He's recently started another series, with 'The Big Over Easy' and 'The Fourth Bear', which I haven't gotten to yet.
Given the growth of his writing across the successive books in the Thursday Next series, he seems to be just getting started, so he should be fun to watch. He has an excellent, if rather busy, website that's well worth a visit, at www.jasperfforde.com

The second author who's not new by any means, but new to me, is Jonathan Coe. At last count he had at least six novels in print, but he made his mark with 'What a Carveup', 'The House of Sleep' was well-acclaimed and 'The Rotters Club' was a huge success. There is a sequel to 'The Rotter's Club' as well - 'The Closed Circle'.
I bought 'The Rotter's Club' and started it - halfway through I ran out to the shops to pick up everything else by him! I then went on to 'What a Carve-up' and am halfway through 'The Closed Circle'.
He's ambitious, expansive, funny and quite pointed in his social commentary. 'What ...' brought out comparisons to Dickens, but for me, he's a lot closer to Robertson Davies, who had the misfortune to be Canadian and thus almost obscure for today's readers. He has the same effortless sweep, encompassing families and mini-dynasties, stretching across decades and creating characters who you can care for. Very highly recommended.

A Huge Improvement...

2006-06-19T14:38:00.000+01:00

Already this blog is a huge improvement over others (two? three?) that I started and never went back to. The reason was simple and the same in each case - after spending hours thinking of a phenomenally apposite title for my blog, I would forget it and never manage to get back into it again! This time should be different....

War!

2004-11-19T19:34:00.000Z

Much is being made of the fact that America is in a "Waronterror" and all that goes with it. Personally, I think you need a longer lens to look at the whole mess. The election has shown that the American people, or 51% of them at least, have declared war on a shadowy enemy from the past.
That's right folks, step right up and meet

The War on The Enlightenment!

The joke's on those of us who tried earnestly and hard to convince people that Bush and Co. weren't trying to undo Clinton or bring about Reagan-redux, that they were aiming for Roosevelt's New Deal. Ha ha - that's so 2001!

My only fear right now is once abortion gets the death penalty (the ultimate in pro-life statements!), once they decree that all scientists have to publicly flagellate themselves every time they mention the word evolution, and they start beheading homosexuals in public, will they have enough time to declare a flat-earth or not? Worrying questions...

Senile Dementia in a crap white suit

2004-11-19T18:49:00.000Z

Since I intend to use this little corner as a spleen-vent, it seems only fitting to kick it off with something that has been amusing me a lot lately. As amusing, that is, as a ten-car pile up where random bodies and body parts are being carried off by carrion crows in bits and pieces.

Am I the only one stunned by Tom Wolfe's current posing as a "Red-state Man of the People (tm)"? He started this current line of drivel in a Guardian interview the day before the US election where he came up with the same tired drooping argument that Faux News peddles 36 hours a day, of Bush-haters being 'out of touch' liberals. I howled with laughter at the sight of the ultimate dandy, long since marginalised from his old haunts by gradual loss of his talent and perception, now recasting himself as Jim Bob and Billy Joe Bigot's best pal!

With a bad book to plug (pension funds need topping up, now that King Dubya's about to give the economy a sulphuric acid enema, even a poseur Republican like Wolfe can see *that*!), Wolfe puts out even worse nonsense in a Rolling Stone piece. The lines to die for are these: "Right after 9/11, when Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson said that the attacks were punishment for the decadence of the American people, I found myself getting defensive on their behalf: "Robertson went to the same college that I did, and Falwell is from Lynchburg, Virginia. What they said was ludicrous, but these are my people!" You couldn't defend anything they said, but because of championism, I didn't want to see my people abused."

So let me see if I understand this - after a lifetime of writing about people reaching out to the stars, reaching for power, reaching for some kind of higher understanding (admittedly fuelled by vast quantities of hallucinogens, which tend to manufacture their own reality), Wolfe has decided that the only thing he has learnt from this life is "My ignorant, dumbass neighbour, right or wrong"???? He wants to call it "championism", one of those its-a-word-because-I-say-it-is words, which just sounds better than "greedy, racist, bigoted, gay bashing, evangelical thief-ism".

I found myself wishing if only Wolfe had gone to high school with one of the Catholic priests who was caught up in the child-abuse scandal, to see if he could come up with a good way of justifying that. Since anything is permissible as long as the perpetrator is connectable to Wolfe's past, you can only wonder how Osama missed a trick by not driving a pickup truck around Lynchburg for a few months before 9/11 so that he would have at least one tireless defender in America.

With all this, I had to wonder - how come this "champion" of the real people doesn't live where the real people apparently do? He lives in Manhattan? Where latte-swilling lesbians and gays secretly plot ways to overthrow Jesus's kingdom, overthrow the holy and sacred institution of marriage, outlaw guns, promote vicious cults that will enforce abortion at the age of 5 and force everyone to convert to Islam, that Manhattan?

The age of fools is upon us, when court jesters and jerk-off artists see sages and savants when they look in the mirror.