Monday, February 25, 2008

The last blog

The Crystal Ship is sinking…this is the last entry in the captain’s log

There is a creeping sense that this will all be ending soon. The wolves are already baying at the door, their fangs bared, flaked with the carrion of the past. These are not humans in wolfen garb, they are rather figments of my own regret, made valiant by the depths of indecision and self-contempt to which I have sunk.

Is this the way of the Nietzschian phase? Is it simply a withdrawal of Rousseau from my blood, the departure of decadence that fells me so low? I know that of this answer, I am ignorant.

The waking moments seem more strained, more tedious, they hammer down on the coffin lid, begging it closed. The daily journey is now fraught with tremors of the approaching cataclysm. Where once lingered literary thoughts and wistful ambition, now lies a Sartrian Nausea.

The wolves are so close now, I can feel the airy tendrils of their stinking breath reach inside me and clasp a soul that tries to hide, in vain. For it hides in shadows that serve as no refuge. It hides in shadows born from an eclipse of human feeling. The amorality lingers, as if waiting for the final chimes of the bell that would signal a last burst for freedom.

Yes, freedom: It has so interwoven with death; one can no more make out any difference between the two. One must surely follow the other now, of that I am certain. True freedom can only come away from the rottenness of this flesh that pens me in.

The time is near…I feel it. Time to shut down the machines that keep me alive through the storm of my own creation. Time to cast one last look. Time for one last wallow in the self-piteous morass of existence. Time to answer the bugles that herald in the distance.

But there are no bugles, only the drone of the machine. The cacophonic whirring of its cogs as it re-sets itself one last time.

The expectation has weighed heavily over the last few months, and the beast of burden is faltering under the weight of his own inadequacies – denied for so long.

There will be no more denial; there will be no more obfuscation. There will be clarity. If it’s the last thing I do, I will attain the pedestal of truth. Not the truth that we conjure to suit our sickly needs, but the truth that drips from the flower of knowledge.

It is time to go. I feel it every time the trains rush by. Freedom lies away from the wolves, especially those that reside within me.

I must go and end this putrid time. It is close…I must hold on but for a short while longer. Freedom is at hand.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

The silent observer

I first saw her sitting on the pavement outside my apartment block 10 days ago. Wrapped in her sari, she stared into space…her gaze focused on some distant memory, or so I like to think. She was no beggar, at least she never asked me for alms. Her position was constant, her posture fixed. Even the pack of strays that rule our street never took time out of their canine schedule to pay her any attention.
The human horde swept around her; there were no sly glances cast in her direction, and no words spoken. Over the days she began to seem more like one of the gargoyles that play sentinel to Mumbai's architectural heritage. Her purpose was unmapped, her reasons unknown, but sit she did, same place, all the time.
As the temperature plummeted, the sari was covered by a flimsy sheet, a knitted woolen cap held her face in a warm embrace. At night she was a mass of cloth, nothing to give away clues that a human being lay buried under there. My girlfriend and I often pondered her origins, her past, and her story, but city slickers that we aspire to be…talk was all we did. No help was ever mentioned, lest it destroy our urban reverie.
Yesterday, she was gone: Not a trace on the pavement of her existence. A hundred feet trod over where, just hours ago, sat the unnamed observer of Mumbai's life. Maybe she found what she was looking for, maybe a Samaritan took her to a place that was warmer, maybe she just died and someone dumped her unclaimed body in that place where few people go.
I like to think she found what she was looking for; hopefully it was that little bit of humanity, so rare in this sea of concrete frivolity in which we live.

Monday, February 4, 2008

So much to blag, so little time

Nick Davies writing in the Guardian on the continuing spiral of the news media

Here's a little example of what I call Flat Earth News. In June 2005, Fleet Street told its readers about a gang of feral child bullies who had attempted to murder a five-year-old boy by hanging him from a tree; the boy had managed to free himself. This story was not true. Indeed, it was obviously not true from the moment it started running. There was the commonsense problem that even a fully grown man with 10 years of SAS training who found himself hanging by the neck would have the greatest difficulty in reaching up and lifting his entire body weight with one hand while using the other to remove the noose. How would a five-year-old boy do it?

More than that, there was the evidence in the story itself. From the first day, the police refused to say the boy had been hanged. The parents and neighbours, who told the press how shocked they were, never claimed to know what had happened. The one and only line on which the whole story was built was a quote from the boy's adult cousin, who said he had told her: "Some boys and girls have tied a rope around my neck and tried to tie me to a tree." That's "tie me to a tree", not "hang me from a tree".

It was a nasty case of bullying but not an attempted murder. A 12-year-old girl had put a rope around the boy's neck and led him round like a dog, pulling on it hard enough to leave marks on his neck. That was clearly dangerous. But the boy never claimed she had hanged him from a tree. Indeed, he never even claimed that she had tied him to a tree, only that she had tried to. To double check, we spoke to Professor Christopher Milroy, the Home Office pathologist who handled the case. He said: "He had not been hanged. That was not correct and I couldn't understand why the press were insisting that he was."

Nevertheless, the tabloids ran all over it; and TV and the rest of Fleet Street joined in. The London Evening Standard called it a lynching; the Mail, Guardian and Times ran headlines which stated boldly that the boy had been hanged; the Independent ran a moody feature about fear descending on the boy's estate. Sundry columnists joined in with solemn comment about the youth of today and the impact of violence on television.

The ingredients in this little story run routinely through a stream of other small stories, through stories as big as those about the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, and then into a flood of media commentary that feeds into government policy and popular understanding - falsehood as profound as the idea that the Earth is flat, widely accepted as true to the point where it can feel like heresy to challenge it.

There never was a time when news media were perfect. Journalists have always worked with too little time and too little certainty; with interference from owners and governments; with laws that intimidate and inhibit the search for truth. But the evidence I found in researching my new book, Flat Earth News, suggests our tendency to recycle ignorance is far worse than it was.

I commissioned research from specialists at Cardiff University, who surveyed more than 2,000 UK news stories from the four quality dailies (Times, Telegraph, Guardian, Independent) and the Daily Mail. They found two striking things. First, when they tried to trace the origins of their "facts", they discovered that only 12% of the stories were wholly composed of material researched by reporters. With 8% of the stories, they just couldn't be sure. The remaining 80%, they found, were wholly, mainly or partially constructed from second-hand material, provided by news agencies and by the public relations industry. Second, when they looked for evidence that these "facts" had been thoroughly checked, they found this was happening in only 12% of the stories.

The implication of those two findings is truly alarming. Where once journalists were active gatherers of news, now they have generally become mere passive processors of unchecked, second-hand material, much of it contrived by PR to serve some political or commercial interest. Not journalists, but churnalists. An industry whose primary task is to filter out falsehood has become so vulnerable to manipulation that it is now involved in the mass production of falsehood, distortion and propaganda.

And the Cardiff researchers found one other key statistic that helps to explain why this has happened. For each of the 20 years from 1985, they dug out figures for the editorial staffing levels of all the Fleet Street publications and compared them with the amount of space they were filling. They discovered that the average Fleet Street journalist now is filling three times as much space as he or she was in 1985. In other words, as a crude average, they have only one-third of the time that they used to have to do their jobs. Generally, they don't find their owns stories, or check their content, because they simply don't have the time.

Add that to all of the traditional limits on journalists' trying to find the truth, and you can see why the mass media generally are no longer a reliable source of information.

· Flat Earth News: An Award-winning Reporter Exposes Falsehood, Distortion and Propaganda in the Global Media is published this week

Saturday, February 2, 2008

The Beatles in space…and we’re happyish

So it has been decided, the Beatles’ Across the Universe, is going to be sent into space by NASA on February 4. To be more specific, a Beatles’ tune is going to be our medium of communication with aliens (not the ones that jump over fences, and make dinky rafts that promptly sink when put in water).

Are we earthlings OK with this?

Let’s put it this way, if it wasn’t the Beatles, which band or musician would you have representing our rock?

I have no problem with the Beatles (after all, they are my second favourite band of all time). But I would rather have had my favourite, The Band…but what song? I would go with Acadian Driftwood, but you’d be hard-pressed finding an alien that understands what a ‘gypsy tailwind’ is.

Then of course, there’s the Starman himself, David Bowie.

Martians, however, would be rather perplexed at why they have never been privy to a spider. Bowie’s Space Oddity might be a good choice, after all spacelings may have seen quite a few of our bumbling astronauts prancing about like cosmic retards in their oversized nappies.

But why send Pop at all, what about Rock? Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir would be a nice — if a tad ominous in an ‘onward Earthy soldiers’ way — touch. Stairway to Heaven might go down a treat, what with all Dick Planty’s wailing, and hedgerow bustling. You can almost picture a bug-eyed and well-travelled Neptunian, describing a hedgerow to his partner: “It’s about four feet high, and meant to offer privacy to beings that average five feet in height…go figure.”

Then there’s the likes of Slayer, Slip Knot, Megadeth et al. There’s something to be said for using these dimwitted draft-dodgers’ music as the theme from Earth, the TV Show.

I’m pretty sure the lines, “I am eternal terror my quest will never end/I'll trap you in the pentagram/And seal your battered tomb” from Slayer’s Face the Slayer, will be a right showstopper at the annual Saturnela festival on…errr…Saturn.

Many will take umbrage, or may even be affronted, by the fact that jazz, blues and classical weren’t even thought of.

But honestly, would you rather listen to Earl Klugh tweetering on about nothing; Howlin’ Wolf wailin’ about why his lady left him (neatly skipping the fact that he’s an alcoholic, wife-beating, whore-monger), or Bach playing something so opulent, it screams of a pomposity that no other race — apart from star-eating Xerxons — deserve to boast about? Though not.

So it brings us back to pop…what’s that you say? Country?! Hmmm…country.

Let me tell you why country is such a bad idea, it doesn’t even deserve consideration.

For one, Rednecks shouldn’t be representing themselves, let alone an entire planet. Second, anyone who sings while wearing one of the world’s most bizarre headgears needs to be locked up, not asked to provide the message for interplanetary communication. And finally, who listens to country anyway? Imagine if an alien landed on earth and said, to the first passerby: “Hi ya’ll! How’s the li’l ladeh and ol’ dadeh that left when you was a little lied. An’ how’s Billy, and the boys at them Last Chance Saloon? An’ how’s yer cheatin’ art?” You’d probably nut the little green blighter and tell him to sod off to Texas. The whole world will become Texas. Every krypton-pickin’ alien in the universe would call us the good ol’ boys from Earth! Do you want that? No!

So we’re stuck with the Beatles, and Across the Universe.

I wonder what all the mullahs and Mein Pope will make of the fact that humanity is going to be represented by the words “Jai guru deva om”?

Anyone out there reckon the million Indians working for NASA had a hand in the selection?

Review of the week

Title: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Director: Andrew Dominik

Cast: Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Rockwell

Certification: R

There are certain characters in history, on whose lives, so many films have been made that it has rendered them almost unwatchable. Jesse James is one such character. According to Wikipedia, that unmatched and now rather accurate webopedia, there have been 18 films made about the criminal (with four being made in the last 10 years).

So when director Andrew Dominik decided to make film number 19, he knew he had to have a foolproof plan. Thankfully he did.

With Brad Pitt playing Jesse James, star wattage was assured. All he then needed was a suitably cowardly Robert Ford, and in Casey Affleck he found a perfect poltroon.

The story focuses on Jesse James’ life after the disbanding of the original James Gang. What’s left is a ragtag (and frightfully petty) band of aspiring train robbers and yellowbellied hangers-on that is kept in tow only by the knee-buckling levels of fear Jesse conjures in them.

Sam Rockwell plays Charley Ford, brother of Jesse’s would be assassin. And it is Charley who becomes Jesse’s right hand man in the final sunsets of the infamous outlaw’s life. Unbeknownst to him, Charley would also hold the lynch pin that Jesse would so prod him to pull.

Robert Ford, frustrated by the constant accusations of cowardice, immaturity and ineptness — leveled by, among others, Jesse — is never a key member of the Gang (although, ironically, it is his action [sic] that has the most profound effect).

Brad Pitt is very good as the paranoid, and mentally distraught James: His passion is as ferocious as his bouts of melancholy are dark.

But it is Affleck who is the real star actor of this film. His sneaky eyes and slimy smile epitomise the cunning of a man well-heeled in the ways of trouble-dodging. His blasé attitude towards the preservation of anyone else’s skin but his is so realistic, that I’m surprised no one has taken a potshot at him yet.

‘The Assassination of Jesse James’ may have some solid acting, and a decent script (also courtesy Dominik) but it needed more…it needed some magic. And the Merlin that answered the call was Coen Brothers’ staple, cinematographer Roger Deakins. Deakins’ work speaks volumes of the man’s prowess behind the camera. He was the man behind the gorgeous looks of films such as ‘No Country For Old Men’, ‘Jarhead’, ‘Fargo’, ‘O Brother Where Art Thou!’ and ‘The Shawshank Redemption’.

If it wasn’t for Deakins’ sublime vistas, and light play reminiscent of Freddie Young, ‘The Assassination of Jesse James’, would have been a moderately good film. But as it stands, it’s a very good one.


Rating: 3 and a 1/2

Thursday, January 31, 2008

Is this the best art on the Web?


Check out this awesome website
www.neosurrealismart.com
Here's a sample of the art it offers:

Sunday, January 20, 2008

Forget Mel, get a load of this world history

A US college professor with a knack for wit and a whole lot of time on his hands compiled a 'new' history of the world using students' exam answer papers. Be warned this may cause you to laugh until you die.

The inhabitants of Egypt were called mummies. They lived in the Sarah Dessert and traveled by Camelot. The climate of the Sarah is such that the inhabitants have to live elsewhere, so certain areas of the dessert are cultivated by irritation. The Egyptians built the Pyramids in the shape of a huge triangular cube. The Pramids are a range of mountains between France and Spain.

The Bible is full of interesting caricatures. In the first book of the Bible, Guinesses, Adam and Eve were created from an apple tree. One of their children, Cain, asked "Am I my brother's son?" God asked Abraham to sacrifice Issac on Mount Montezuma. Jacob, son of Issac, stole his brother's birthmark. Jacob was a partiarch who brought up his twelve sons to be partiarchs, but they did not take to it. One of Jacob's sons, Joseph, gave refuse to the Israelites.

Pharaoh forced the Hebrew slaves to make bread without straw. Moses led them to the Red Sea, where they made unleavened bread, which is bread made without any ingredients. Afterwards, Moses went up on Mount Cyanide to get the ten commandments. David was a Hebrew king skilled at playing the liar. He fougth with the Philatelists, a race of people who lived in Biblical times. Solomon, one of David's sons, had 500 wives and 500 porcupines.

Without the Greeks, we wouldn't have history. The Greeks invented three kinds of columns - Corinthian, Doric and Ironic. They also had myths. A myth is a female moth. One myth says that the mother of Achilles dipped him in the River Stynx until he became intolerable. Achilles appears in "The Illiad", by Homer. Homer also wrote the "Oddity", in which Penelope was the last hardship that Ulysses endured on his journey. Actually, Homer was not written by Homer but by another man of that name.

Socrates was a famous Greek teacher who went around giving people advice. They killed him. Socrates died from an overdose of wedlock.

In the Olympic Games, Greeks ran races, jumped, hurled the biscuits, and threw the java. The reward to the victor was a coral wreath. The government of Athen was democratic because the people took the law into their own hands. There were no wars in Greece, as the mountains were so high that they couldn't climb over to see what their neighbors were doing. When they fought the Parisians, the Greeks were outnumbered because the Persians had more men.

Eventually, the Ramons conquered the Geeks. History call people Romans because they never stayed in one place for very long. At Roman banquets, the guests wore garlic in their hair. Julius Caesar extinguished himself on the battlefields of Gaul. The Ides of March killed him because they thought he was going to be made king. Nero was a cruel tyrany who would torture his poor subjects by playing the fiddle to them.

Then came the Middle Ages. King Alfred conquered the Dames, King Arthur lived in the Age of Shivery, King Harlod mustarded his troops before the Battle of Hastings, Joan of Arc was cannonized by George Bernard Shaw, and the victims of the Black Death grew boobs on their necks. Finally, the Magna Carta provided that no free man should be hanged twice for the same offense.

In midevil times most of the people were alliterate. The greatest writer of the time was Chaucer, who wrote many poems and verse and also wrote literature. Another tale tells of William Tell, who shot an arrow through an apple while standing on his son's head.

The Renaissance was an age in which more individuals felt the value of their human being. Martin Luther was nailed to the church door at Wittenberg for selling papal indulgences. He died a horrible death, being excommunicated by a bull. It was the painter Donatello's interest in the female nude that made him the father of the Renaissance. It was an age of great inventions and discoveries. Gutenberg invented the Bible. Sir Walter Raleigh is a historical figure because he invented cigarettes. Another important invention was the circulation of blood. Sir Francis Drake circumcised the world with a 100-foot clipper.

The government of England was a limited mockery. Henry VIII found walking difficult because he had an abbess on his knee. Queen Elizabeth was the "Virgin Queen." As a queen she was a success. When Elizabeth exposed herself before her troops, they all shouted "hurrah." Then her navy went out and defeated the Spanish Armadillo.

The greatest writer of the Renaissance was William Shakespear. Shakespear never made much money and is famous only because of his plays. He lived in Windsor with his merry wives, writing tragedies, comedies and errors. In one of Shakespear's famous plays, Hamlet rations out his situation by relieving himself in a long soliloquy. In another, Lady Macbeth tries to convince Macbeth to kill the King by attacking his manhood. Romeo and Juliet are an example of a heroic couplet. Writing at the same time as Shakespear was Miquel Cervantes. He wrote "Donkey Hote". The next great author was John Milton. Milton wrote "Paradise Lost." Then his wife dies and he wrote "Paradise Regained."

During the Renaissance America began. Christopher Columbus was a great navigator who discovered America while cursing about the Atlantic. His ships were called the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Fe. Later the Pilgrims crossed the Ocean, and the was called the Pilgrim's Progress. When they landed at Plymouth Rock, they were greeted by Indians, who came down the hill rolling their was hoops before them. The Indian squabs carried porposies on their back. Many of the Indian heroes were killed, along with their cabooses, which proved very fatal to them. The winter of 1620 was a hard one for the settlers. Many people died and many babies were born. Captain John Smith was responsible for all this.

One of the causes of the Revolutionary Wars was the English put tacks in their tea. Also, the colonists would send their pacels through the post without stamps. During the War, Red Coats and Paul Revere was throwing balls over stone walls. The dogs were barking and the peacocks crowing. Finally, the colonists won the War and no longer had to pay for taxis.

Delegates from the original thirteen states formed the Contented Congress. Thomas Jefferson, a Virgin, and Benjamin Franklin were two singers of the Declaration of Independence. Franklin had gone to Boston carrying all his clothes in his pocket and a loaf of bread under each arm. He invented electricity by rubbing cats backwards and declared "a horse divided against itself cannot stand." Franklin died in 1790 and is still dead.

George Washington married Matha Curtis and in due time became the Father of Our Country. Them the Constitution of the United States was adopted to secure domestic hostility. Under the Constitution the people enjoyed the right to keep bare arms.

Abraham Lincoln became America's greatest Precedent. Lincoln's mother died in infancy, and he was born in a log cabin which he built with his own hands. When Lincoln was President, he wore only a tall silk hat. He said, "In onion there is strength."

Abraham Lincoln write the Gettysburg address while traveling from Washington to Gettysburg on the back of an envelope. He also signed the Emasculation Proclamation, and the Fourteenth Amendment gave the ex-Negroes citizenship. But the Clue Clux Clan would torcher and lynch the ex-Negroes and other innocent victims. On the night of April 14, 1865, Lincoln went to the theater and got shot in his seat by one of the actors in a moving picture show. The believed assinator was John Wilkes Booth, a supposedl insane actor. This ruined Booth's career.

Meanwhile in Europe, the enlightenment was a reasonable time. Voltare invented electricity and also wrote a book called "Candy". Gravity was invented by Issac Walton. It is chiefly noticeable in the Autumn, when the apples are flaling off the trees.

Bach was the most famous composer in the world, and so was Handel. Handel was half German, half Italian and half English. He was very large. Bach died from 1750 to the present. Beethoven wrote music even though he was deaf. He was so deaf he wrote loud music. He took long walks in the forest even when everyone was calling for him. Beethoven expired in 1827 and later died for this.

France was in a very serious state. The French Revolution was accomplished before it happened. The Marseillaise was the theme song of the French Revolution, and it catapulted into Napoleon. During the Napoleonic Wars, the crowned heads of Europe were trembling in their shoes. Then the Spanish gorrilas came down from the hills and nipped at Napoleon's flanks. Napoleon became ill with bladder problems and was very tense and unrestrained. He wanted an heir to inheret his power, but since Josephine was a baroness, she couldn't bear him any children.

The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West. Queen Victoria was the longest queen. She sat on a thorn for 63 years. He reclining years and finally the end of her life were exemplatory of a great personality. Her death was the final event which ended her reign.

The nineteenth century was a time of many great inventions and thoughts. The invention of the steamboat caused a network of rivers to spring up. Cyrus McCormick invented the McCormick Raper, which did the work of a hundred men. Samuel Morse invented a code for telepathy. Louis Pastuer discovered a cure for rabbis. Charles Darwin was a naturailst who wrote the "Organ of the Species". Madman Curie discovered radium. And Karl Marx became one of the Marx Brothers.

The First World War, cause by the assignation of the Arch-Duck by a surf, ushered in a new error in the anals of human history.