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Writer's Block: Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep
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May. 6th, 2008 @ 08:52 pm
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Exam Anxiety!
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May. 6th, 2008 @ 07:07 pm
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Evening Standard Cocaine Shock Horror!
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Oct. 16th, 2007 @ 08:23 pm
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The invitation for this year's Evening Standard Christmas Party
It can be exclusively revealed by this correspondent that at least 85% of the staff of the London newspaper the 'Evening Standard' are regular users of the killer drug Cocaine.
From the junior staff to the upper reaches of management, use of the deadly narcotic is said to be widespread particularly among the editorial staff, with many prominent journalists 'high as a kite' during substantial periods of the working day. Traces of white powder, believed to be cocaine, have been discovered in the staff toilets as well as in the former smoking room, now openly referred to as the 'Gak Chamber'. A routine inspection found substantial amounts of cocaine on 'very nearly' 100% of notes passed in the staff canteen - many of the staff are now obliged to pay in cash, owing to the fact that their credit cards have become damaged beyond use by constant hammering out of lines on every available surface throughout working hours. A source also revealed that keyboards are continually having to be replaced owing to the build-up of cocaine residue between the keys. On some days the fog of white dust in the air of the newsroom is reportedly so hazy it 'looks like Beijing on a particularly misty morning', making it difficult for journalists to actually see their screens and file their stories.
The influence of the evil drug is also to be observed in the often unorthodox behaviour of the paper's journalists. One of the showbiz staff, sent on a high-profile assignment to interview Janet Jackson, returned with a tape which editors regarded as unusable, given that it consisted of the said journalist talking incessantly about himself and his car for over an hour, pausing only to ask Ms. Jackson if she 'fancied a toot'. The use of cocaine is also said to have strongly influenced the paper's coverage of the current Rugby World Cup.
Investigations into the source of all this 'charlie', as the highly dangerous drug is known amongst dealers and addicts, tend to point the finger in the direction of one individual: Paul Cheston - author, coincidentally, of the daring, acclaimed, hard-hitting, ground-breaking, Pulitzer Prize-nominated exposé of the suspected Brazilian terrorist Jean-Charles de Menezes's own alleged drug use. Mr Cheston is said to 'knock out so much of the stuff so he sometimes forgets to pick up his paycheck at the end of the month'. From his ideally-placed Docklands apartment he is reported to oversee the delivery of three barges a month shipped directly from Colombia, an amount which is still believed to be barely enough to satisfy the cocaine mania of the E.S. newsroom.
At the time of writing the editor of the Evening Standard, a man who has been widely praised for his couragousness and integrity for giving front-page prominence to the Jean-Charles de Menezes cocaine story, was unavailable for comment. He was said to be in a meeting with a 'very important secret source', and could not be disturbed. The identity of this source remains a mystery, but it is rumoured to be a somewhat infamous underworld figure, widely believed to have been killed by police in a gun battle in Medellin in 1993, although for substantially different reasons than those that led to the death of Mr. Menezes.
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The First Emperors of New China
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Oct. 14th, 2007 @ 06:05 pm
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The current exhibition at the British Museum, The First Emperor, is a tribute to the man who ordered the building of that huge monument to himself, the tomb of the Terracotta Warriors. The focus of the exhibition is a small selection of artefacts from the tomb, including a number of statues of the warriors themselves. It is a blockbuster exhibition which attempts to match the scale and ambition of its subject.
A short film which precedes the main part of the exhibition shows how Emperor Qin managed to conquer and unite what is now the territory of China. At the end of the film we see the map rapidly turning crimson and the word ‘Qin’ appearing on the map. ‘Qin’, we learn, gave origin to the western word China to denote what was called in Chinese the Middle Kingdom – or the centre of the world.
The exhibition was partly criticised in the Guardian for offering an uncritical and revisionist account of the achievements of a man who history has generally remembered as a brutal tyrant who ‘massacred prisoners, burned books and slaughtered scholars’. The words ‘cruel’ and ‘brutal’ are absent from the exhibition. The key message of the exhibition, signalled clearly in that introductory film, is one that the Emperor himself would have been happy with: He was on a celestially-inspired mission to unite ‘All-under-Heaven’ and so to bring China into existence. The existence of China is, therefore, no historical accident: It was written in the stars.
However, historians have on the whole ceased to regard all human history of the great achievements of supreme individuals equipped with armies and visions of a future world reshaped according to their ambitions. Also, it would, or at least should, be very hard in 2007 for any serious thinking person to sustain the belief that nations and states have a historical mission to exist, that they are the result of destiny and not of chance.
We learn very little in the exhibition about the lives of those who actually built the tomb. There are some references to convicts being used, to the huge numbers of slaves whose lives were sacrificed to its construction. But the overall message is that this was the work of a visionary, an emperor creating a coherent and sovreign empire which has survived intact up to the present day.
One key theme or, I would argue, purpose of the exhibition is that of continuity. Qin established the systems of weights and currency and was also largely responsible for establishment of the writing system, as well as beginning the building of the Great Wall. This grants legitimacy to the subsequent rulers of China: a series of dynasties have maintained China’s unity and preserved and guarded its treasures. The rulers of this empire have now generously allowed those who cannot visit the Middle Kingdom to enjoy at first hand a glimpse of its profoundly rich and mysterious cultural legacy.
The way in which China chooses at different times to regard its previous rulers is very instructive. This is particularly true of representations on TV (1). According to the Asia Times:
‘It has been a tradition in China, both under the communists and long before, to criticize Chinese leaders indirectly but deftly by comparing them to misguided, wicked or weak emperors, ignoring the welfare of the people, or by comparing them to the wise and benevolent rulers of the past. Chinese readers - and today's television viewers - are savvy enough to read between the propagandists' lines and understand 2,000-year-old contrived allusions to current politics.’
The Chinese people, then, understand the significance of the different dynasties. Some of them represent more insular styles of rule, some more outgoing, some more brutal and legalistic, some wiser and more benign. Visitors to this exhibition are left to make their own connections between the great rulers of the past of the great rulers of the present.
The current Chinese emperors, then, are laying claim to a heritage which goes back way before 1949, when Chairman Mao told the Chinese people to stand up. Mao was a great admirer of Emperor Qin, by the way, allegedly claiming . It is claiming a inheritance which goes back 2,000 years, and which is ultimately divinely derived. What we are being shown in this exhibition are some of the more treasured family heirlooms.
So what is the problem? Every nation and state in the world seeks to demonstrate that its existence is the inevitable product of all earlier stages of history, and to this end adapts, adopts, invents and constructs myths, legends, historical figures and movements, not to mention pre-existing monuments, in order to prove its rightful legacy. ‘China’ is no more or less artificial an entity than any other nation.
China as a country, if not a nation, has, in broad terms, been around for a very long time. But my question is: How much legitimacy are we prepared to concede the Chinese Government? It consists of an unelected oligarchy of bureaucrats who govern by means of repression and corruption. The subjects of the Chinese Communist Party regime enjoy little in the way of human and democratic rights. It is the world's largest dictatorship, and its claims to legitimate authority are contested, or at least questioned by a large proportion of the world's population, including in China itself.
Would the British Museum, and by extension the British state, be prepared to host a similar exhibition on behalf of the Government of Burma? Or North Korea? (2)
In the exhibition bookshop you can buy a seemingly fairly random selection of things related to China. One thing that may be useful to anyone vaguely interested in Chinese history is a book giving a broad outline and a timeline of Chinese history for children. The book makes a brief reference to the Cultural Revolution, a period when a previous generation of Communist Party leaders ransacked their own country and tried as hard as they could to destroy the country's cultural legacy: it was reportedly only through the direct intervention of Zhou Enlai that such crucial sites as the Forbidden City, the Potala Palace in Lhasa and even the site of Terracotta Warriors were saved. It would be strange, to say the least, if a brief guide to Russian or German history made such scant reference to the Stalin and Hitler eras. There is no mention of the single most prominent recent event in Chinese history in the eyes of the world, the events of June 4 1989, when the previous generation of leaders again murdered thousands in a desperate attempt to hold on to the reins of power, an event which the current leadership refuses to acknowledge on any level.
The culmination of the book's timeline and, presumably the mental timeline of the exhibition's visitors, is, inevitably, summer 2008, when the Chinese capital will host the Olympic Games. This is a key moment for the Chinese Government, a coming-out ball which will confirm beyond any doubt that China is, despite its continuing refusal to grant basic democratic and human rights to its population, a nation whose sovreignty and authority is beyond question (3). It will be a coronation ceremony for the emperors of New China.
This seems to be an apt term for what has previously been known as the People's Republic; given that the only two pillars of CCP ideology for the last number of years has been nationalism and 'we can make you rich!'; a name change, beloved of despots in desperate need of a fresh new image, seems well overdue. The PR in China could stay, of course, but with a different meaning, and given the success of our own beloved former leader in rebranding his party with the facile addition of the word 'New', it seems entirely appropriate for the CCP's attempt to remake itself for internal and international consumption. 'Xin Zhonghuo', anyone?! (4)
The message of the Olympics is, to borrow a phrase: China's Coming Home. And just as the slaves dedicated themselves selflessly to building the stunning monument to vanity that is the tomb of Emperor Qin, the Chinese people are wholeheartedly and voluntarily putting themselves hard to work. A recent Guardian special collected some very revealing comments regarding the importance that a lot of people give to the Olympics, and the effect a successful games will have on 'national pride': '"I don't have any religious or political convictions. So you can say that the Olympics is my main belief," says primary school teacher Zhou Chenguang. According to the taxi driver Xia Shishan: 'We will finish top of the medal table. And when we win, I will be so excited my blood will boil.'' In Beijing projects are being completed at a furious pace and on a meglomaniac scale in the attempt to turn the host city into a place suitable for international visitors such as sports people, journalists and tourists, even if in the process making it into a city which will be pretty much unaffordable to the people who acually live there (4).
The current exhibition at the British Museum is a PR coup for the Chinese Government, and simultaneously an advert for the much greater showcase event next summer. It can to some extent be regarded as propaganda, rather than history.
Of course, a great deal can happen between now and June 2008, and a great deal could happen during the games themselves. What will happen if the very tight control that the authorities are trying to exercise over the event doesn't work? What if there are protests? What are the Falun Gong capable of? And how will the world react?
1 - The Qin dynasty was very positively portrayed in the 2005 film hero, regarded by some viewers as an outright piece of CCP propaganda. See also http://film.guardian.co.uk/News_Story/Critic_Review/Observer_Film_of_the_week/0,,1312773,00.html.
2 - Unfortunately I didn't see the Ancient Persia exhibition two years ago, so have little idea of how that may have related to the question of Modern Iran, beyond what I managed to glean from various websites. There is obviously a significant contrast between the Forgotten Empire, which no clear connection with the present, and the First Emperor, which implies continuity. According to the New York Times, the exhibition 'give ancient Persia its proper place -- between Assyria and Babylon on the one hand and Greece and Rome on the other -- in the chronology of early civilizations. In that sense, ''Forgotten Empire'' is also highly topical...John Curtis, the show's curator and keeper of the museum's ancient Near East department, added in a statement: ''It may also be important at this time of difficult East-West relations to remind people in the West of the remarkable cultural legacy of a country like Iran.'' '. Personally I find such aims perfectly laudable, but whatever the stated aims of the exhibition under discussion here they are not nearly as commendable. Plus, Iran is actually, strictly speaking, a democratic country...
3 - This contrasts with the status of little Taiwan, officially known as the Repuplic of China, which will once again compete under the name of Chinese Taipei, owing to the demands of the Chinese in Beijing. See also http://www.guardian.co.uk/china/story/0,,2174496,00.html.
4 - I'd love to read an analysis of how Beijing's rebranding of China as a dynamic forward-thinking business-friendly place matches Blair's project to ditch the Labour Party's ideological and historical baggage in the mid-nineties. I remember reading some time ago that one of the many foreign politicians to lecture the Chinese leadership in the 1990s was Peter Mandelson.
5 - Obviously East London is now starting to go through the same process. See http://www.redpepper.org.uk/article555.html.
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iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiyupiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
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Jun. 18th, 2007 @ 03:38 pm
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I'm not happy about the amount people are supposed/prepared to pay for language classes...
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Apr. 21st, 2007 @ 11:41 pm
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 .
...and I've decided to do something about it. Maybe I should, however, merely be revising for my exams.
(That's not ,me in the picture by the way. I think, by the looks of things, they might be Americans, the teachers that is, I mean I can't see any guns in the pictures, but then of course in China guns aren't allowed in the classroom, because, ahem, some of the Students Might Get Hurt, whereas in American schools they probably will be within a couple of years.)
Incidentally, I would like just like to take this oppurtunity to be the second ever person in the world (here is the first) to question the use of the verb 'to port', as in 'to transfer your number from one 'operator' to another'.
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I am once again in love
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Mar. 23rd, 2007 @ 06:48 pm
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Just found out about this:
>> Fuck Starbucks <<
"Hello," hollers Robin from Space Hijackers,
"Loads of B3tards came along to Circle Line Party
before, and I'm wondering if you could pop
something in your newsletter for us? Starbucks,
everyone's favourite nipple-less mermaid
merchants, have decided to move into the East
End with a new store in Whitechapel. We will be
setting up a stall and giving out free fair
trade teas, home-made sandwiches, and all
manner of other goodies to our neighbours, in
an attempt to show what the area will be
missing if Starbucks and their ilk are allowed
to settle in. Come - 1pm, Sat 24th March."
Sounds like fun and there's more details on the
site.
http://www.spacehijackers.org/html/welcome.html
So I sent them this:
I'll be there! I love you! Fuck my essay! I saw that thing yesterday and immediately thought of chucking a brick through the window! This shit is over!
And am so looking foward to it it's so not even as funny as the essay I'm supposed to be writing as this sentence and the day is, are, long, or something!
Hooray!!
I was already thinking of starting a Specifically anti-Starbucks campaign, but a good one, and here it is!
Unfortunately I can't go. |
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Bulgarians are weird
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Mar. 21st, 2007 @ 09:46 pm
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From a FAQ! on www.visittobulgaria.com:
Q16: About Yes and No when Bulgarians nod and shake their heads A16: Bulgarians nod their head to say no and shake their heads to say yes. But to confuse you even more the resorts and city`s do it the western way, so you dont have a clue if they mean yes or no.
go top
Hooray! |
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Portuguese Apartheid Essay
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Dec. 18th, 2006 @ 11:57 am
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In 1950-51 Gilberto Freyre conducted a tour of Portugal's overseas colonies at the invitation of the Estado Novo Government. At the end of a two-week stay in the largest of those possessions, Angola, he wrote the following:
'Aqui, a presença de Portugal nao significa a ausência, muito menos a morte da África...Angola, luzitanzando-se, enriquece a sua vida, a sua cultura de valores europeus que aqui, neste mundo em formação, confratanizam com valores nativos ou tropicais, sem os humiliar: a oliveira ao lado da bananeira; a uva ao lado do dem-dem; a macieira ao lado da palmeira; o branco ao lado do preto'.
This contrasts sharply with the conclusions of Gerald Bender in Angola under the Portuguese:
'Africans in colonial Angola were expected to assimilate an almost pure, unmitigated Portuguese culture, barely modified by the slightest trace of their own numerically dominant culture'.
Freyre's intention was to ascertain if his theories regarding Brazil could be extended to the other Portuguese colonies. He would subsequently write of his trip that he had been able to confirm an 'intuição antiga':
'Portugal, o Brazil, a África e a Índia portuguesa, a Madeira, os Açores e Cabo Verde constituem (...) uma unidade de sentimentos e de cultura' .
These consisted in a predisposition for miscegenation and an absence of racial prejudice, both of which had their origin in the influence of the Moors, the Jews and of Africa and had served to create the paternalistic and 'socially plastic' character of the Portuguese. The Portuguese was 'the European colonizer who best succeeded in fraternizing with the so-called inferior races' .
The publication of his first book Casa Grande e Senzala in 1933 had served to overturn the consensus on race in Brazil, which held that Brazil's lack of development was due to 'the ''debilitating' influence of the large black and mestiço population' . In the late nineteenth century Brazil had imposed ethnic quotas on immigration in an attempt to guarantee the country's 'ethnic integrity' . Freyre challenged these notions through detailing and celebrating the huge influence that the African and the Indian had had on Brazilian life.
However, such ideas of the racial inferiority of the non-European were and had been common currency in Portugal for some time. In 1880 Portugal's most prominent historian Oliveira Martins had written:
'Are there not (...) reasons for supposing that this fact of the limited intellectual capacity of the Negro races, proved in so many and such diverse times and places, has an intimate and constitutional cause? (...) Why not teach the gospel to the gorilla or the orangoutang, who do not fail to have ears because they cannot speak, and might understand pretty well as much as the negro?' ( Read more... ) |
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What fucking Tarot thing are you?
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Nov. 13th, 2006 @ 09:19 pm
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| You Are The Fool | 
You are a fascinating person who is way beyond the concerns of this world.
Young at heart, you are blissfully unaware of any dangers ahead.
You are a true wanderer - it has be difficult (editorial note: what dimwits come up with this fucking shite?!) finding your place in this world.
Full of confidence, you are likely to take a leap of faith.
Your fortune:
You are about to embark on a new phase in your life.
This may mean changing locations, jobs, friends, or love status. Or getting spayed, for instance.
You are open about what the future will bring, and free of worry.
You have made your peace with fate, and you're ready to start down your new path. |
(Apparently Lauren is Death). |
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Gearsticks and ...c ocks. And art.
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Nov. 3rd, 2006 @ 10:27 pm
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Dear Hyundai,
I notice that your current television advertising campaign features a copy of Leonardo Da Vinci's famous 'Proportions of man according to Vitruvius', except with the genitals airbrushed out. I wonder, then, if this means that your cars are made without gearsticks?
Richard Gunby (Mr.)
... and then the next morning, I receive this email:
Dear Mr Gunby
Thank you for recent comments regarding our current television campaign.
I am please to confirm that the censors have not any cause to modify our vehicles and as such all our vehicles feature conventional gearsticks - however theTrajet does feature a column mounted shift.
I hope this infomation is of some assistance to you.
Yours sincerely
Nicola Young
Customer Contact Executive
Hyundai Motor UK Ltd.
Tel. 08705 329980
Email. customer.query@hyundai-car.co.uk
HYUNDAI: DRIVE YOUR WAY
Visit our new website at: http://www.hyundai.co.uk
**********************************************************************************
This document should only be read by those persons to whom it is addressed and is not intended to be relied upon by any person without subsequent written confirmation of its contents. Accordingly, Hyundai Motor UK Ltd disclaim all responsibility and accept no liability (including in negligence) for the
consequences for any person acting, or refraining from acting, on such information prior to the receipt by those persons of subsequent written confirmation.
If you have received this E-mail message in error, please notify us immediately by telephone on +44 (0) 1494 428 690. Please also destroy and delete the message from your computer.
Any form of reproduction, dissemination, copying, disclosure, modification, distribution and/or publication of this E-mail message is strictly prohibited.
Download this as a file |
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Care for a free fucking newspaper?
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Sep. 4th, 2006 @ 07:32 pm
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Here are a few suggestions for possible responses for when one of them annoying fellas tries to force yet another free fucking newspaper on you with the words 'But it's free!!!!':
That's because it's worthless.
So are all the others (accompanied by filthy look).
So's cancer.
So's dogshit.
So's tap water.
So are plastic bags from Asda.
So's a kick in the teeth.
So's South Africa (in theory anyway).
So's Willy the fucking whale.
So was school milk.
So's the Polish Express.
So are adverts on the Gumtree.
So's this.
And also this.
So's what pigeons eat.
And my own personal favourite (although I'm yet to try it out myself): So's my choice NOT to take your piece of shit free newspaper, you overzealous purple-t-shirted fucking fuckwitted TWAT!!!
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Anyone up for a big huge massive game of Hide & Seek at the Barbican?!
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Aug. 28th, 2006 @ 10:09 pm
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It's just a mad wacky idea at the moment, but if a few people are interested it could be really good fun!
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The end of Communism and the death of vinyl
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Aug. 24th, 2006 @ 07:03 pm
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How much is an album worth these days? On CD, surprisingly little, given that I haven't bought a CD since, erm, 2002. You can pick up a physical copy of the marvellous new Pet Shop Boys album for only £7.95 at HMV. Online, if you care to make a donation to the ailing record companies, you can get it track by track for merely 79p a pop. But why pay for a physical product? Music is now in the air, floating around for free. And according to Bob Dylan, it's not worth paying for:
"It was like, 'everybody's gettin' music for free'. I was like, 'well, why not? It ain't worth nothing anyway'."
There is of course a marked difference between price and value. I'm sure Dylan didn't feel the same way about the folk and blues discs he treasured when he was growing up. Tom Stoppard's new(ish) play 'Rock n' Roll' is on one level an elegy to rock music as preserved on vinyl. In one of the most memorable scenes the main character returns to his flat in Prague to find that all of his beloved records have been smashed to pieces by the Communist secret police. His immediate reaction is to go to the bathroom and violently throw up.
Anyone who grew up with 12 inch LPs will immediately be able to sympathise. As someone recently wrote:
Entire lifestyles built up around albums, smoking dope to albums, having sex to albums. You lent your favourite albums out with trepidation; you ruefully replaced them, on CD, when they didn't come back. Getting hitched paled into insignificance next to merging record collections with your loved one. Getting rid of the doubles made divorce unthinkable. Elastica once sang, of waking: 'Make a cup of tea, put a record on.' That's how generations of hip young (and not so young) people have lived.
People's relationship with their physical albums - and singles too - was an intensely personal and jealously guarded one. Tom Stoppard chose several of his favourite tunes to be interspersed throughout the performance. His choices are fairly predictable ones, covering the broad canon of late-sixties early-seventies rock music, but then he is getting on for sixty or so; I would have made quite a different selection, with maybe more Motorhead and Momus and less Pink fucking Floyd and no Guns n' bleedin' Roses, but then I am only twenty-seven years old. In my mind, anyway. But I digress.
There's no doubt that the songs he chose are those that have been most important to him, and the titles and names of the performers are displayed on a screen between each scene, emphasising just how much these little details are or were so important in the fetishing of each individual record. But if nostalgia for the days when rock music assumed such critical importance in our lives is one theme, the main one is the role of rock music in the ideological struggle against the repressive Czech regime. The characters argue bitterly and passionately about music and about politics. The polarisation of the debates about materialism, about sex, about human happiness, and about what could be endured (in the name of freedom) and what must be resisted (in the name of freedom) is very clear. There is an appetite for ideas and a willingness to explore the implications of a particular stance; just as a vinyl disc had two sides, every idea must have its counterpart, both in the mind and in the 'real world'. ( Read more... )
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Faire Bongo partie de l'histoire!
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Aug. 8th, 2006 @ 09:04 am
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He's laughing at you, you prick
Flicking gamely as I was through a predictably-difficult-to-read edition of 'Le Monde' the other day, I came across the following headline:
'Comment les Rolling Stones et U2 s'arrangent pour payer un minimum d'impôts'
La presse néerlandaise a révélé, lundi 31 juillet, que le groupe U2 avait, depuis quelques semaines, lui déménagé U2 Limited, la société qui détient les droits musicaux du chanteur Bono et de ses trois comparses, de Dublin vers les quais d'Amsterdam.
En conflit avec le gouvernement irlandais, qui a lancé une réforme fiscale et veut désormais taxer les artistes, U2 a décidé de confier ses intérêts à Jan Favié, directeur général de Promobridge, Promotone et Musidor, les sociétés néerlandaises des Rolling Stones.
Comme ses prédécesseurs, U2, le groupe le plus riche du monde - 201 millions d'euros de revenus en 2005, pour 120 millions à Jagger et sa bande -, entend bénéficier des largesses offertes par la législation des Pays-Bas, qui n'impose les droits musicaux qu'à hauteur de 1,6 %. Cette exception européenne a été dénoncée à de nombreuses reprises par la Commission de Bruxelles et l'Organisation pour la coopération et le développement en Europe (OCDE) mais le gouvernement de La Haye résiste vaillamment aux pressions.
Hmm, let's see. The richest rock group in the world, which made €201 million of revenue in 2005, which is more than I earn in two years, have moved their financial affairs to Holland, in order to take advantage of a somewhat overgenerous tax regime which has been condemned by the European Commission. You can find an interesting account (in English) of the groups's stance on paying their taxes here. In the meantime, I decided to find out what my old French friend Monsieur Petit-Choufleur, who was born in Wales to Parisean parents but learnt French from a free CD he got with the Daily Mail in 2004, thought of it all:
"Alors, U2, Bono, le nome me semble quelque chose...ça ne sera pas le petit nain qui toujours nous dit que les problèmes du monde seulement seront résolus si nous, erm, donnons(?!) notre argent a la charité? Le superbranleur qui a dit que ce n'est pas une question politique, qui est tres bonne ami de George Bush, tellement que lui a donné un cadeau d'un ipod et une Bible?! Qui a declare que 'Blair et Brown sont comme les Lennon et Mc Cartney de la lutte contre la pauvreté'? Qui nous urge que nous achetions une téléphone portable rouge et un carte de credite de la même couleur de son autres grandes amis de Motorola et American Express?
C'est incroyable, n'est pas? Bien sur, si les hommes riches du monde paierai ses impôts, nous aurions l'argent pour resolver tous les problèmes du monde, n'est pas?"( Read more... )
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Dear Lambeth Council...
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Aug. 2nd, 2006 @ 10:03 pm
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Dear Lambeth Council,
I am writing with reference to the following statement contained on your website, which I came across while searching for a municipal swimming pool in the borough:
We are committed to the provision and development of sport and recreation. There are four leisure centres and a community sports centre in the borough, and facilities in our parks and green spaces. We also run a healthy lifestyles programme.
Upon further investigation (ie. clicking on the link to 'Clapham Leisure Centre') I found the following website:
http://www.leisureconnection.co.uk
Another great offer to help you make 2006 your healthiest year ever
There are thousands of reasons to join Harpers Fitness and now you can try us for 7 days for just £7
Reduce cholesterol
Help manage your weight
Reduce levels of stress & anxiety
Protect against osteoporosis & arthritis
Reduce the risk of heart disease
Lower risk of high blood pressure & diabetes
In fact if exercise came in a pill, it would be the most cost effective medicine in the world today!
Contact your local Leisure Connection facility to find out how you can start a healthier lifestyle.
It turns out that there are no public leisure facilities in my borough whatsoever, merely some expensive private gyms which benefit from a huge amount of public money!
Whoever is responsible for this state of affairs should be burnt.
Yours sincerely,
R. Willmsen
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¡Coño, mira lo que comen los británicos!
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Jul. 31st, 2006 @ 07:34 pm
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Often, in my role as imparter of the English language to the overprivileged wastlings of the wealthier non-English speaking nations of the world, I am called upon to donn the mantle of George Orwell and to defend British food. I usually draw the attention of my students to the fact that, although British food is Not Up To Much, there is in the UK a huge variety of international food on offer due to our cosmopolitan multiculinary heritage.
More recently, however, and especially given that I now have to live here myself, I have decided that we are in fact simply schizophrenic when it comes to food. For all that TV chefs have been kind enough to share with us the benefits of their hard-earned wisdom, the end result is a nation of people wandering round oversized, catastrophically overpowerful and overpriced supermarkets feeling very confused and depressed about the prospect of what they are going to have for tea.
Understandably, a lot of people stick with a) what they can afford and b) what will fill them up as tastily as possible without giving them time to think about the nutritional consequences. This is of course all based on the widely accepted but basically erroneous understanding that the only people in the country who can 'cook' are the TV chefs and Nigel fucking Slater and his über-middle-class chums.
On a very recent trip to my local Walmart subsiduary to pick up some very low-fat turkey rashers for a friend, stuck as I was in the queue behind some large, gingerish people, I took the trouble to inspect the contents of their somewhat overladen shopping trolley. It contained:
6 boxes of Asda's own brand ready meal Chicken Kievs
A bag containing 6 bags of six different flavour crisps, making a total of 32 packets of crisps
Four tins of Asda's own brand Baked Beans
A breakfast cereal which appeared to be called 'Breakfast Boredom?'
Some more crisps
Several bags of Extra Special Chunky frozen chips
Four frozen Asda's own brand Lasagnes
A £6 DVD copy of the film 'Dude, Where's my car'?
A large number of frozen pizzas
Four frozen 'Indian style' nan-breads
A multipack of 'German-style' twiglets
A two litre bottle of Tizer
A six-pack of Smirnoff Ice
Another six-pack of Smirnoff Ice
A third six-pack of Smirnoff Ice, which seemed to be black in colour for some reason
A six-pack of Bacardi Breezers
A second six-pack of Bacardi Breezers (to be fair, they may have been planning some sort of celebration)
An apple (I am not making this up. Oh, okay, there wasn't an apple).
The sum total of this high-fat bounty came to £47.13. I wanted to try and get hold of the receipt but at this point I was too busy trying to get the bleedin' plastic bag open and getting slightly annoyed by the impatience of the woman behind me (contents of trolley: Sixteen rolls of kitchen, erm, roll and four two-litre bottles of Asda's own brand Still Water for fuck's sake). I did pass them on my way out of the shop. Fatty Bum-fluff Football shirt Boy was perusing the receipt avidly. I think perhaps he was planning to eat it. I did briefly consider grabbing it out of his hands and making a run for it, thereby gaining a more detailed and specific record of their anti-nutritional shopping expedition which would allow more scientific analysis, but I was scared that they might catch me and put me on the front page of the Daily Mail along with the words 'Student Type Caught Red-Handed in Terror Plot to Mock the Lower Orders!'. Or, you know, something.
It might make an interesting art project to go round Asda buying the most unhealthy week's shopping available, and seeing if you could make it match up to exactly £47.13. I suspect that the contents of such a trolley would be exactly the same as those I've listed above. Mind you, I dread to think what toll those low-fat turkey rashers will enact on us all one day...
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A History of Violence
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Jul. 23rd, 2006 @ 10:28 am
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"It’s very important to make the distinction between terror groups and freedom fighters, and between terror action and legitimate military action." So said the former Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, at a commemoration last week of the sixtieth anniversary of the bombing of the King David's Hotel in Jerusalem. The attack was carried out by a Jewish 'resistance branch', disguised as Arabs, and killed ninety-two people, seventeen of whom were Jewish. It made an important contribution to forcing the British out of Palestine and to the foundation of the Israeli state two years later. The group that carried it out was led by the future sixth Prime Minister of Israel, Menachem Begin.
So when Israel insists that it has a long-standing 'problem' with terrorism, it has a very good point.
That propensity towards using high levels of many different varieties of violence to get others to do what you want them to is now backed up by more advanced and expensive technology than mere milk churns contaning explosives. The BBC reported last week that the current Prime Minister had ordered the use of something called 'nocturnal sound bombs' in order to:
"...make sure no one sleeps at night in Gaza".
On salon.com Sandy Tolan summed up the situation as it stood about two weeks ago - before the attacks on Lebanon:
Under the pretext of forcing the release of a single soldier "kidnapped by terrorists" (or, if you prefer, "captured by the resistance"), Israel has done the following: seized members of a democratically elected government; bombed its interior ministry, the prime minister's offices, and a school; threatened another sovereign state (Syria) with a menacing overflight; dropped leaflets from the air, warning of harm to the civilian population if it does not "follow all orders of the IDF" (Israel Defense Forces); ...fired missiles into residential areas, killing children; and demolished a power station that was the sole generator of electricity and running water for hundreds of thousands of Gazans.
Besieged Palestinian families, trapped in a locked-up Gaza, are in many cases down to one meal a day, eaten in candlelight. Yet their desperate conditions go largely ignored by a world accustomed to extreme Israeli measures in the name of security: nearly 10,000 Palestinians locked in Israeli jails, many without charge; 4,000 Gaza and West Bank homes demolished since 2000 and hundreds of acres of olive groves plowed under; three times as many civilians killed as in Israel, many due to "collateral damage" in operations involving the assassination of suspected militants.
What will be the consequences of Israel's refusal to let its neighbours sleep? On a demonstration in London yesterday, the leader of the British Muslim Institute drew confused cheers from sections of the crowd when he promised that those leaders who condone and promote Israel's right to terrorise adjoining countries will soon face 'revenge'.
Unfortunately, unlike the Palestinians, Tony Blair and George Bush can sleep soundly in their beds. Such 'revenge' will not be enacted upon them, but on their citizens - namely ourselves. Given Blair's refusal to understand the connection between the wars in Iraq and the July bombings, it is quite unlikely that he has considered this. He knows he will never be at personal risk of terrorist attacks. ( Read more... )
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Wednesday After Work in the Park with Richard
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Jul. 19th, 2006 @ 08:09 pm
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An evidently confused woman walked up to me une fois in the centre of Dublin and asked me something in French with what sounded like 'cherche' and 'GPO' in it.
Now she might just have been asking 'Vous cherchez le GPO, n'est pas?', in which case the answer would have been 'Sí (it's true, it's proper grammar and everything, look it up), je suis pas Joseph Connolly et nous ne sommes pas dans l'an 1916'. I evidemment presumed that she was asking me where the General Post Office (which was about 20 yards behind us) was, so I told her immediately. By pointing.
My French has become much better now, danke schön very much. As for other foreign languages: I can do every word in Chinese except for tree, politics and, er, word, and I will hopefully soon very much impress my girlfriend during our Mystery Holiday in Berlin next month (NB: THAT BIT MEANS I CAN SPEAK GERMAN - R. Willmsen 22/03/07); I can speak almost as much Spanish as every other smug fucker out there who just happens to speak fucking Spanish. Oh yes, and I am also learning Italian. Very, very slowly.
More significantly, I speak better Portuguese than José Saramago, and will one day have a job to prove it. Which is partly why, in Battersea Park on the Hottest Day Ever (does that mean it's going to start getting colder now?!), sparsely surrounded by lots of people speaking the less passionate, more bored-sounding variety of the Portuguese language, on seeing a young black family walking towards me along the path, I, thinking that they may well be Angolan or maybe Portuguese or something, thought that I might say to them in a smiley fashion 'Fala-se português por aqui!' (they speak Portuguese round here).
I didn't say anything, thereby soundly killing off any possibility that I might a) the same day become the subject of an entertaining 'This sweaty guy we didn't know said something to us in a language we didn't understand!' anecdote or b) become the firmest of friends with some people for about 2 minutes.
About sixteen seconds later another young black family walked past me, speaking Portuguese. In the treasured words of Alanis Morissette: You live, you learn.
Incidentally, has anyone else in the imperial capital noticed that every single cafe in the centre of London (with the honourable exception of 'Brasil By Kilo') is suddenly run by Portuguese people?! They're everywhere all of a sudden, especially around here. Especially since I, you know, moved house. Quite a lot less Bangladeshi people too. That is not why I moved, by the way. I wonder if, one day, 'the Portuguese cuisine' will enjoy the same elevated position in our gastronomic hierachy as does that of our Polish communities. But as for competing with the Bengalis for a larger share of the cheaper end of the restaurant market...nem pensar!
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Could China be a new cultural superpower?
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Jun. 15th, 2006 @ 04:38 pm
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Another profoundly idiotic, craven and predictable article by Martin Jacques in the Guardian about the inevitable and glorious rise of China gave birth to an interesting thought.
In contrast to five years ago, the likely identity of the next superpower has become crystal clear. It is no longer just a possibility that it will be China; on the contrary, the probability is extremely high, if not yet a racing certainty. Nor does the timescale of this change have us peering into the distant future as it did five years ago. China is already beginning to acquire some of the interests and motivations of a superpower, and even a little of the demeanour. Beijing feels like a parallel universe to the US, and certainly Europe. There is an expansive mood about the place. China is growing in self-confidence by the day.
And with good reason. There is no sign of China's economic growth abating, and it is this that lies behind its growing confidence. The massive contrasts between China and the US, both socially and economically, are enjoined in the argument over America's trade deficit with the China. The latter is deeply aware that its future prospects depend on the continuation of its economic growth and this remains its priority. But no longer to the exclusion of all else: China is beginning to widen its range of concerns and interests.
So far so predictable: China is growing at an exponential rate and is beginning to challenge the global power of the US. My idea concerns this parallel between Chinese and American power, but at the level of culture.
It's clear that the US as a global cultural superpower foments opposition to itself by crushing or buying off any attempts at cultural independence, so that you increasingly see the same films advertised at the same time in the centres of cities all around the globe, for example, and so many people's free time is spent watching films from Blockbuster video, not to mention eating at McDonalds and shopping at Wal-Mart and so on. This makes the United States a very obvious target for anger against injustice and inequality.
China, on the other hand, has almost no cultural influence on this level, give or take the occasional martial arts epic, which is itself effectively a product of the Hollywood system. There are no global Chinese music stars, and very few if any recent global household names in any field. There is, thankfully, no global Chinese equivalent to McDonalds or Pizza Hut; in fact, the brands most beloved of young Chinese people seem to be American or European ones - NBA, KFC, the Champions' League etc. Aside from a few satellite Chinese speaking parts of the world, China has little or virtually no cultural influence to match its growing economic clout.
Doesn't this mean, then, that its increasing international economic power will attract less notice and therefore less opposition? I'm thinking in terms of other developing countries, specifically Africa, the Middle East and South America, where the locally damaging effects of China's involvement are becoming more and more unavoidable (I wrote about some aspects of this here), as well as the catastrophic effects on the environment if every Chinese peasant did ever get to live the Chinese Dream. What China lacks, though, is anything like the very clear focus for opprobrium that US cultural products and brands represent.( Read more... )
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How to help the USA beat the world at football
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Jun. 14th, 2006 @ 08:08 am
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A good few months ago I posted a profoundly provocative anti-football rant, cunningly disguised as a 5-part autobiography of the last seven years of my life, or vice-versa, or something, in which I wrote the following:
There is something about football that I haven't mentioned yet, and it is something that these days gets very little attention. It concerns women and football.
Now there are many reasons why lots of women watch football. Some for the same reasons that men do - to see the occasional bit of spectacle that the sport offers, or because watching and following the game is usually a social thing. Some, it has to be said, are Uncle Toms, showing or developing an interest in it in order to please men.
Some women play football too, but like women's boxing the professional game exists as a side-effect of men's football. We don't see it on TV, and it's no accident that the best known player is the ex-wife of one of football's leading men. And, like boxing, when it does get some coverage it is often just for the titillation of men. Women footballers, unlike their male counterparts, have no visibility and no power.
The fact remains; football, in terms of the sport we see on TV, the thing that is so often cited as one thing that unites all the people and peoples of the world, does not involve women at any level.
Among the many people keen to prove that I was, you know, as I so often am, wrong, were a couple of posters who pointed out that actually, in the United States the women's game has a lot more prominence than the men's sport, and that most American people would be more likely to be able to name a female player than a male one. It seems that in the land of the freeandthebrave, 'soccer' is something of a girl's game.( Read more... )
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The Moral Saliva of Don Pepe
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Jun. 9th, 2006 @ 02:53 pm
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Thanks to Wikipedia I have acquired a new hero: José Figueres Ferrer, aka ‘Don Pepe’, the Costa Rican President in the 1940s-50s, who certainly achieved a great deal more progressive change in his nine years of power than Tony Blair has: in his first term in office he nationalised the banks, gave women and illiterate people the right to vote and abolished the army. This last move is of course absolutely laudable - it is difficult, let’s say, to imagine Blair or even Gordon Brown doing the same – but it led to short-term problems during the, ahem, war with Nicaragua seven years later.
In 1958 the then vice-president of the US, Richard Nixon, was spat at by a crowd in Caracas, Venezuela while visiting on a goodwill tour. An inquiry was held to attempt to ascertain the causes of the incident, and Ferrer was asked to speak before the Congress in Washington. The wonderful speech he gave reminded me of one of something I posted last year on the politics of spitting, actually my second favourite thing I’ve wrote here, in which I typed:
One of the other potential uses of staring, spitting and other generally anti-social behaviour is in the field of International Relations. A logical and non-violent way of resolving the territorial disputes of the world is in the same way that cats do - if Saddam Hussein had had the foresight to piss all over Kuwait in 1990, the Americans would have been understandably less keen to go in and remove him. Similarly , if Mao Zedong had sent all those young Chinese soldiers to North Korea in 1950 armed only with the simple order to stand on the border and spit, maybe one million lives could have been saved.
Somehow I’ve always managed to restrain myself from adopting expectoration as a form of direct action, although the constant vigil outside the Marie Stopes Centre in Ealing next to where I work presents quite a challenge to this. In the speech Ferrer explicitly cites spitting as a form of resistance against imperial power, against what he calls the ‘moral spitting’ of the powerful. It is well worth reading the whole thing; it is a rousing piece of rhetoric, which may just make you want to, regardless of the potentially drastic consequences, run up to the gates of the nearest American embassy and let fly:
"As a citizen of the hemisphere, as a man who has dedicated his public life to promoting inter-American comprehension, as an educated man who knows and appreciates the United States and who has never tried to hide that appreciation to anyone, no matter how hostile he was, I deplore that the people of the Latin America, represented by a fistful of overexcited Venezuelans, have spat on a worthy public officer who represents the greatest nation of our time. But I must speak frankly and even rudely, because I am convinced that the situation demands it: the people cannot spit on a foreign policy, which was what they tried to do. But when they have exhausted all other means of trying to make themselves understood, the only thing left to do is spit. ( Read more... )
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Come on Deutschland!
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May. 26th, 2006 @ 08:32 pm
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My New Favourite Person, Matthias Matussek, a journalist for Der Spiegel magazine, wrote recently in the Guardian's Germany special:
It was after repeated futile complaints about the primitive image of Germany cultivated by the English (as Nazis and frozen-faced engineers), that a plan was hatched by a group of German politicians and diplomats, among them my brother, Thomas, who was, until March, German envoy to Britain. What if they flew in a few English history teachers and wined and dined them like little potentates at the government's expense? If, after their stay, the teachers knew more about Heine's poems, Claudia Schiffer's golden tresses, Beethoven's symphonies, Humboldt's adventures, Willy Brandt's biography and, ja, if we must, notorious "pop idol" judge Dieter Bohlen (Germany's answer to Simon Cowell) - the good news would gradually filter down to the pupils.
Nearly two dozen teachers were invited to Berlin, Dresden and Bonn. They resided in five-star hotels, attended the opera, sauntered around the Reichstag, and - as emissaries of not just England but Britain - exchanged platitudes with representatives of the German nation. This red-carpet treatment cost German taxpayers some €52,000 (£35,000).
And what did the rotters do? They spurned all the attention as though it were some kind of indecent proposition. "It wasn't a great experience," a paper quoted one teacher, Peter Liddell, as saying. At the opera, the woman next to him nodded off, he reported. They went along for the ride. But that wouldn't change the curriculum, which - after all - calls for Hitler, Hitler and more Hitler. A colleague summed it up for the record: "Nazis are sexy. Evil is fascinating."
There are three simple lessons here. One: the British have zero interest in the new Germany. Two: the British have zero interest in the old Germany. Three: the British are interested only in Nazi Germany.
And that, I would say, is not a German problem, but a British one.
Gut gesagt! I'd imagine that in the Rwanda-Somalia-Cultural Revolution style chaos of the British Secondary School Classroom, amidst the shouting and the stabbing and the smoke, the teacher is comforted by the fact that there is always a magic word which will make the students shut up, sit down and pay attention. That word is 'Hitler'.( Read more... )
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Anyone up for burning some flags?
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May. 26th, 2006 @ 06:34 pm
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Provocative funnyman Charlie Brooker just took the words right outta my mouth and wrote something about the current fashion for hoisting the England flag out of car windows:
Imagine the outcry if government passed a law requiring the nation's dimbos to wear dunce's caps in public. No one would stand for it. There'd be acres of newsprint comparing Blair and co to the Nazis. We'd see rioting in the streets - badly organised rioting with a lot of mis-spelled placards, but rioting nonetheless.
Those protesters who burn flags outside embassies have got the right idea - but they shouldn't be burning them because they disagree with something the country in question has done. They should be burning flags just because they're flags. And flags are rubbish.
I'm not sure if I dislike flags as such, although I certainly share some of this writer's concern about recent displays of my country's emblem:
Is it just me, or is anyone else slightly worried about the number of St George's flags flying from road vehicles right now? Of course, these displays of patriotism are to be expected in the build-up to next month's World Cup - which England enters with more confidence than at any time since 1970. This time, though, the flags seem to be on show earlier than ever.
In fact, they started appearing the day after the local elections on May 4. Apart from the Labour meltdown and the Tories getting their first respectable vote for 14 years, the big story of the election was the rise of the British National party, which gained 28 seats, nearly 20 in London alone. Could it be that many of the England flag-wavers are in fact supporters of this racist party, glorying in their "victory" and celebrating their racial pride?
I agree with both articles in that I think that the only reason anyone would want to buy and display their country's flag is because they are either right-wing or a little bit thick - or possibly, in a tiny minority of cases of course, both. Taking pride in the place where you happen to have been born is, in my humble onion, akin to holding up a piece of paper with 'MY MUM'S BETTER THAN YOUR MUM' written on it. At the same time, it is true to say that there have been a lot of people who aren't white proudly displaying the flag, so it may well be that we are witnessing one of those 'look at me I'm queer!' reclaiming-abusive-words-and-symbols-from-the-right-wing moments. I sincerely hope so. ( Read more... )
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The Enemy Within
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May. 26th, 2006 @ 06:16 pm
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George Orwell, in his book ‘The Road to Wigan Pier’, describes in detail the physical hell that Britain’s coal miners had to endure in return for a living wage:
Most of the things one imagines in hell are in there - heat, noise, confusion, darkness, foul air, and, above all, unbearably cramped space. Everything except the fire, for there is no fire down there except the feeble beams of Davy lamps and electric torches which scarcely penetrate the clouds of coal dust.
The miner's job would be as much beyond my power as it would be to perform on a flying trapeze or to win the Grand National ... by no conceivable amount of effort or training could I become a coal-miner, the work would kill me in a few weeks.
This strength that the miners exhibited, invisibly, underground had to have some counterpart on the surface. And so the National Union of Mineworkers fought on their behalf to defend their safety and their livelihoods.
Sixty years later Guardian journalist Seamus Milne, in his book ‘The Enemy Within: Thatcher's Secret War Against the Miners’, detailed how the vendetta that Margaret Thatcher’s 1980s Conservative government held against the NUM. Margaret Thatcher regarded the miners, with their collective recourse to industrial action to defend their jobs, their wages and the safety regulations that kept them alive, as ‘the enemy within’. The Chancellor Nigel Lawson felt that the Government had a duty to confront and destroy the miner’s industrial power akin to facing ‘the threat of Hitler in the late 1930s’. The bitter strike which resulted lasted for almost a year and was lost, narrowly, by the miners.
The consequences for the Labour movement were, just as the Tories had calculated, catastrophic. Membership of trade unions has almost halved since Thatcher and Co. began their all out assault on trade union power in 1979, and had already diminished considerably by 1992, when the Government announced that it was to close a third of Britain’s coal pits, with the loss of 31,000 jobs. There were huge protests against the closures but the NUM itself had already lost a great deal of members and a lot of the support which had sustained it through the strike eight years earlier. The Labour Party, which was in the process of concluding that if it was ever to regain power it would have to abandon most of its founding principles, offered no support whatsoever and the battle was lost.
Now what pits survive in Britain are in private hands, employing a tiny amount of people in very unsafe conditions. The communities that came into being because of the mines are now some of Europe’s poorest towns, suffering from high levels of long-term unemployment and heroin addiction. Not that the world has no need of coal, or that its production is not profitable; the regular news reports from China about tragic accidents show us where and how it is obtained, and at what price. ( Read more... )
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Ni shuo zhongwen ma?
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May. 23rd, 2006 @ 06:46 pm
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I’ve always found it a bit puzzling that people pay (often lots of) money to sit in a class and practise speaking foreign languages. Everyone on earth already has at least one language at their disposal and it’s not too hard to track down someone who wants to learn that language and in return will help you as your try your hardest to make yourself understood in their language. It’s just a case of tracking down that someone, which these days, what with the gumtree and whatnot, is not a very difficult task at all.
Of course occasionally you may, especially if you’re a woman, meet people with ulterior motives, or who are actually just really boring, or who laugh pitilessly every time you try and put a sentence together – or in the case of Mandarin Chinese, look at you with such puzzlement that you’d think you’d just told them there was something wrong with the Communist Party, whereas in fact you were simply trying to let them know that you come from Sheffield and you prefer broccoli to spinach. But on the whole it’s preferable to and a lot more effective than, say, paying €50 a month to some unscrupulous bastards who will continue fleecing your bank account long after the school has gone bankrupt and the teacher has fucked off back to London in poverty, or, if you’re Brazilian, will stick you in a tiny classroom on Oxford Street with eighteen of your compatriots so you end up speaking less English than you would back home.
Now I come to think of it, language teachers spend so much time trying to make their students pretend that they are not actually in a classroom at all that it really makes you question the point of being there in the first place.( Read more... )
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'José Saramago in the Land of the Blind', by me
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May. 22nd, 2006 @ 06:37 pm
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In the course of José Saramago’s ‘Blindness’, a euphorically pessimistic novel about a sudden and unexplained epidemic of blindness in an unnamed city and country, he makes some remarks about blind people which, in the context of a plague which has left all but one individual without sight, make a lot of sense. His essential argument has to do with solidarity making human society possible, so it seems reasonable to speculate that in a situation where nobody could actually see the Other, human feelings would take second place to a feral need to survive at any cost, which is what we witness throughout the novel.
There are, however, a couple of moments in the book where he seems keen to take it a little bit further and actually state quite baldly that the only reason that blind people have any feelings at all is because we are there to help them out. Which seems a little harsh, and perhaps a bit rich seeing as he himself wears a particularly thick pair of spectacles.
I don’t know if many blind people have read the novel. I did find one comment from a ‘visually impaired’ person who felt that ‘blindness operates in his text as both an intertextual sign and as a referent’, which is of course helpful, but may as far as I know not actually mean very much. Anyhoo. For it to be read widely in the, ahem, ‘blind community’ it would have to be published in Braille, and I don’t think it has been. Maybe, if it ever is, he might one day face a Salman Rushdie-style Fatwah, with copies of his and probably other books being burnt in obviously carefully controlled environments and our TV screens filled with the faces of angry blind people holding up photos of camels and Paris Hilton and proclaiming with fury ‘THIS MAN MUST DIE!’.
I digress. Here, in all it's not-really-worth-reading-if-you-haven't-read-the-book entirety is an essay I recently wrote about the novel, upon reading of the which (?!) they agreed to let me back into University, which is where I’ll be from October and hopefully up until the end of my life in, ooh, dozens of years’ time. I would particularly appreciate hearing any constructive comments from any blind readers out there, but unfortunately my experimentary attempts to make it easier for them by simply writing <'Braille'> <'/Braille'> have sadly proved as fruitless as, erm, my daily diet.
Alors je me tais.
( Read more... )
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Damien Hirst: "Fuck all there at the end of the day"
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May. 21st, 2006 @ 05:55 pm
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A Dead Shark Isn't Art, Stuckism International 2003
In addition to being worth over £100 million, Damien Hirst is, according to today's Observer, the most powerful figure in the art world today. His new work will cost between £8-£10 million to produce, but when it is complete it will be worth a hell of a lot more:
Damien Hirst's work in progress is a small, delicate object: a life-size human skull. Not just any skull, mind, but one cast in platinum and encased entirely in diamonds - some 8,500 in all. It will be the most expensive work of art ever created, costing between £8m and £10m.
'I just want to celebrate life by saying to hell with death,' said the artist, 'What better way of saying that than by taking the ultimate symbol of death and covering it in the ultimate symbol of luxury, desire and decadence? The only part of the original skull that will remain will be the teeth. You need that grotesque element for it to work as a piece of art. God is in the details and all that.'
Of course, diamonds are, for some people, as both Kanye West and Miss Dynamite have been keen to tell us, more than just a symbol of 'luxury, desire and decadence':
In many African countries, including Angola, Sierra Leone and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) diamonds have been, and continue to be linked to terrible human rights abuses either by insurgent groups to fuel conflict and carry out atrocities against innocent civilians or by unscrupulous government who are equally brutal. ( Read more... ) |
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Dych chi’n siarad Italian?
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May. 21st, 2006 @ 01:27 pm
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I take a certain amount of encouragement in life from the fact that I don't speak Italian. Perche? Well, I have tried to learn, a little bit. I spent a few days in Rome years ago wondering why all those street signs with arrows on them all said 'Unica Via', and I can put together some simple phrases like 'No me piacce il calcio', ' Dove c'e musica' and 'Oggi ho fatto qualcosa nostra', but I don't I know if I'd be up to, say, having a short conversation about il tempo meterelogico. So how can my lack of basic Italian conversation skills be a source of encouragement, even pride?
Well, Signor Nessuno, what it is is that I like knowing that it will always be an opzione. If at any point I ever have cause to become really bored or despondent, like per exemplo if we ever get to the point where newspapers stop asking asinine rhetorical questions like 'is it too late to prevent global warming' and start accepting that we really are actually finito nella merda, then at that point I can always invest in a cheap grammar book and a copy of 'La Republica' or whatever the most left-wing daily newspaper is and comenzare (a?) aprendere.
See, it's easy to learn Italian, and it's fun and makes your brain grow. To the size of an Italian's! If I ever get really interested in it I could always go and live there for a while, although one less radical option would be to find an intercambio. Recently I put an ad on the gumtree site 'cause of wanting to practice those few languages in which I can have a short conversation about the weather. Italian wasn't one of them, obviously, which is why it was a bit of a sorpresa to recebere una risposta from una ragazza Italiana. Ma no voglio praticare mi inglese! I protested in reply. Alguni personi sono idioti.
I'd recommend this nozione of Learning Italian as Potential Life TherapyTM to anyone feeling down, bored or even suicida.
If you're ever faced with someone – friend, family, or even someone you work with but don't actually like – who is entertaining thoughts of topping theyselves, just ask 'parle italiano?' If by any chance they answer 'Ma sono italiano!', you could always try, I dunno, 'Dych chi’n siarad Cymraeg?', although that might actually not work in quite the same way. If you're for any reason having this conversation with Berlesconi or Paulo di Canio, just tell them, in all seriousness 'Penso, come amico, que la migliore cosa que le puoi fare è suicidaresi. Stronzo fascista'.
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Nightmare on Esol Street
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May. 20th, 2006 @ 04:12 pm
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Imagine a war between Somalia and Iraq. How bad would that be? Imagine if Sri Lanka joined in! It's ... inconceivable. Except it's not, I conceived of it the other day, in class.
I imagined it just after each of my two students had finished speaking, reasonably eloquently for a low-level class, on the subject of how tragically, totally and infamously had their respective countries collapsed into barbarism, and about how they could, in almost all certainty, never go home again.
We sat in silent reflection for a moment or so. I had to try to lift the gloom that had descended. I had to try and cheer us all up. I thought, what's a way in which things, in the absence of hope, could possibly be worse. A simple answer came to me. So I suggested it. They looked at me blankly. They hadn't understood. I repeated it slowly. They looked confused. We did 'between' and 'invaded'. And 'war'. They smiled. We laughed! What an idea! Gayness returned to the classroom. What a relief!
One of my students is an interesting character; he comes from Basra and speaks Aramaic, which they! told me was a dead language, but means that speaking to him is a bit like speaking to Jesus, or something. He used to play football for the Iraqi reserve team, and hasn't been to the cinema since 1974. As his surname is Baki, and he introduces himself to people with his surname, and he has a slight problem with his 'ps' and 'bs', he spent the first few months of his life here calling himself 'Paki'.
The other student (or 'customer', as they infuriatingly refer to them in my, fuck it, school) used to be Somali, but is now French, and I when I came back from my break the other day she actually appeared to be reading a book, and the book was in French, so, you know, she must be very clever.
We moved on to talk of other matters, and to tackle together a simple worksheet I had assembled on the difference between 'jack up' and 'jack off'. But throughout the rest of the lesson my outlandish notion, that two of the world's most beleaguered nations might for no reason at all turn on one another in warfare, came to be mentioned more than once, so much in fact that by the end of the lesson I was beginning to regret ever having made - purely in jest - such a suggestion. I began to feel a little ... apprehensive. Had I, with my glib remark, somehow unleashed forces that it would ultimately prove difficult to contain?( Read more... )
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Slavoj Žižek on 'Liberal Communism'
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May. 18th, 2006 @ 06:38 pm
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You know, from a certain perspective, you could be forgiven for thinking that all is well with the world at present. Bill Gates, formerly one of the most avaricious capitalists on the planet, is giving away his fortune as quickly as he can and is now is already the single greatest benefactor in the history of humanity, spreading his munificence to fight malaria and Aids and to provide education for all those people who so desperately need a chance in life. Bongo off of U2, one of the most famous and admired (although not in my house) global celebrities, a man with an undoubtedly sincere commitment to social justice and equality, has persuaded some of the most powerful corporations on the planet to donate significant portions of their wealth to progressive causes, and furthermore is on such good terms with the our present global overseers that he recently presented his friend George with gifts of an ipod and a Bible, as well as getting his buddy Condoleeza to write about her top ten musical favourites in the edition of the Independent he guest-edited this week.
Is it even conceivable that anyone might have a problem with any of this? The rich and powerful have been converted to social justice and equality, the struggle is over, all that is being asked of us is that we spend spend spend our way to freedom, equality and prosperity!!!
Well, I for one have a bias to confess which is that I cannot fucking stand the Independent; a wretched and desperate attempt to find or create a newspaper readership among those people too clever for the Times but who for some inexplicable reason feel unable to read the Guardian. I find it as gimmicky, dull and inconsequential as a copy of Que! or Metro. But that is just my own probably-at-the-end-of-the-day-a-little-extreme-Richard p.o.v. I do on the other hand love a good read of the London Review of Books, which is where the Wisest Man Alive Today, Slavoj Žižek, recently wrote the following words:
So who are these liberal communists? The usual suspects: Bill Gates and George Soros, the CEOs of Google, IBM, Intel, eBay, as well as court-philosophers like Thomas Friedman.
Bill Gates is the icon of what he has called ‘frictionless capitalism’, the post-industrial society and the ‘end of labour’. Software is winning over hardware and the young nerd over the old manager in his black suit. In the new company headquarters, there is little external discipline; former hackers dominate the scene, working long |
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