| Monday, February 28, 2005 |
 | I would say NWA is a good demarcation of when rap crossed over [to the "dark side"]. It became much more about guns, drugs and gangs, while the early 80's was more about dancing, and had an innocence and an energy which I found appealing.
Beautiful. I may not know much about hip hop, but I do know delicious, farm-fresh stupidity when I see it.
Cray supercomputer on sale on eBay. It's incredible how quickly computers lose their value - in a fortnight's time he'll probably end up donating it to the local school, who will be grateful but a little confused. Personally, I'd want to know how many frames per second it can manage in Doom 3 before buying.
If you can't get a decent frame rate, you may be seeking another way to pass the time. Might I suggest a little game I've cooked up called Sudan 1 bingo? The rules, in short:
1) Go to the FSA website and download the list of contaminated foods. Since the FSA seems to have been too cocking lazy to pull the data into a single page, do their job for them by cutting and pasting the pages together.
2) Send this aggregated document to your fellow players.
3) Each player prints out a copy of this list.
4) Each player runs down the list, placing an asterisk against any product they have definitely consumed in the past two weeks, and a circle against any product they feel they might have consumed.
5) This list is then totted up, with one point for each asterisk and two for each circle (because uncertainty is the best part of any health scare). Highest score wins the round.
6) This repeats every time the list of proscribed foods is updated. The game ends when all participants die of bird flu, CJD or the effects of climate change.
7) If any player places a circle or asterisk next to Hot Dog and Ketchup Pot Noodle, the game ends immediately. Nobody wins. Everybody must sit down and thinks very seriously about his or her life.
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| Thursday, February 24, 2005 |
| I spend so little time in cars that every new development surprises me. Sitting in the back of an agency car easing through early morning traffic, wondering whether my driver was the same driver as last night, the car the same car, I noticed that the frosted plastic rectangles with small black mechanical switches had been replaced by smooth, Appleish white hemispheres, radiating a constant, gentle light. Romantic.
Meanwhile, soothe that early start without damaging productivity with low-impact computer games - Progress Quest and Tetris 1D. Or why not do something Incredibly stupid?
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| Monday, February 21, 2005 |
| The weekend, briefly.
Friday, dinner at Sagar to celebrate Matt's birthday. He remains awfully young, and hideously accomplished. London lovelies attended, including Tom, Gavin and Kim. I made two severe failures of etiquette, at least. Think I got away with both. I am now compiling a list of people to take to Sagar in my head. It's South Indian, which as a cuisine I don't know very well at all - some would say that I don't know any food at all well apart from the native cuisine of Openheatstiria - but utterly delicious and surprisingly affordable; the bill came to £20 each, although as usual teetotallers could feel hard done by through that allocation, and with good reason.
Saturday, A new record for library fines - £12 - organic pizza and late into town. Pondered checking out the Lee Miller exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, but remembered that I had found Dracula 2001 pretty uninspiring, so headed down to see Madame Yevonde instead. Despite sounding like a fortune teller, Madame Yevonde took some interesting pictures, in particular the "Goddesses" series, in which society beauties of the time were photographed dressed as great 18th Century religious and political thinkers. Aileen Leatherman as Minerva is fantastic. Seeing interbellum faces in colour is a little odd, although nowhere near as odd as the combined impact of that and of a clearly modern profile or three-quarters smiling out at you from the 1930s. From there to the ICA. Sissu Tarka's tranforming, horrible portrait of Richard Branson is not something I would recommend to diners. Tino Sehgal's downstairs work was pretty sophomoric - a slo-mo tribute to early Nauman - but upstairs was far more fun. Five speakers, keeping their faces turned away from the audience, comment on comments they overheard from the audience as the audience commented on... you see the point. The conversation is pretty banal, but the process is interesting - they seek to involve the viewer, discussing the need for repetitions or clarifications, but at the same time ignore them - because they are facing away, the comments may often be from those who have already left the room, and how exactly do you join in a conversation with a piece of art? It's a complex challenge, and not one anyone took up for the cycle I observed. Maybe others are more forward.
A little shopping followed.
Sunday - saw the Throne of Weapons, and a collection of Mathias Kauage paintings. It struck me that I had more conceptual tools to consider as art five people talking to each other in a gallery as an artwork than these bright, figurative paintings, which suggests terrible pretension. Maybe I should throw MOMA from the train.
Also, I must seek and destroy Jamie Oliver. This is not new, but the urgency has increased. They are using Deceptacon to push his new series, in which the flappy-faced mockney bastard brings cookery to the children, since no group, no matter how innocent, can be spared the attentions of the tonguemonster. He must be ended before he ruins Le Tigre for me forever. When I am commissioning editor, Oliver will be forced, if he wants the oxygen of publicity, to cook and eat himself as an audience of salivating lost boys pelt him with noodle doodles. No excuses.
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| Wednesday, February 16, 2005 |
| As my order for Lia Block sails into the ether, I find another potentially interesting piece of teen fiction - Boy Meets Boy. Apparently, it's a love story set in an American high school where for some reason the openly gay characters do not spend their lives being brutalised and isolated. Whether this will provide another model of action for the water polo team ("Wow! I never knew I didn't have to slam the faggoty kid's head in a locker!") will become clearer over time.
Speaking of unusual environments for teenagers, we continue an occasional set of peregrinations into the world of people who were really, really good in Championship Manager with the news that Cherno Samba, quondam teenage sensation, has signed for Cadiz. Since my knowledge of lower league clubs is informed primarily by Championship Manager, and I have not bought the latest iteration, Cherno Samba was vaguely in my head as being really good, at Millwall and only 14 - only included in the database, indeed, because such great things were expected of him. It transpires that none of those beliefs holds strictly true.
True, if not real, is Ultima Thule. Pytheas claimed to have discovered this land beyond the north, although the experiment was never successfully repeated. Pretty soon it became a metaphor for the furthest shore - for a while, Britain seemed like Ultima Thule, then Ireland. If the Empire had not ended, envious glances would have been thrown at the Arctic circle, where rumours of divine banquets would collect as the unknown world shrank around it. Whether it's worse to be understood or melted I am uncertain, but I know which one is going to put East Anglia underwater.
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| Regular readers of this series of bottled messages may have concluded that, although I do not know much about poetry, I know what I like. And what I like are the poetic stylings of John Bon Jovi. There is of course an ongoing argument in critical circles as to whether the lyrics of Bon Jovi are poetry set to music, or whether the lyrics and music combine to form a "tone poem", but I tend to side with the analysts - although without doubt things of beauty, the songs of Bon Jovi are best experienced as homage to the original words.
With this in mind, I would like to welcome you to my first "Bon Jovi Surgery". Here, I hope to untangle some of the skeins of complex meaning built into the poetry of John Bon Jovi, and maybe help others to understand why they inspire the feelings they do. Essentally, I seek to let a little comprehension in to illuminate the strange, primal feelings of religious awe that your minds currently register at the sound of "Living on a Prayer", say.
To begin, I'd like to look at the opening verses of "Bed of Roses". You may think you understand the meaning behind this poem - that John Bon Jovi likes a lady, and is upset about it. This is just a sign of the brilliant, interweaving complexity of Bon Jovi. You can love the poem at that level, and many have, but let's go... inside.
Sitting here wasted and wounded
at this old piano
As we know, John Bon Jovi is the rockingest guitar player in the world. So why is he sitting at a piano? Well, one obvious interpretation is that the piano is the weapon of choice of the serious artist - Elton John, Gary Barlow, Keane... these have all used pianos to express their melancholy and realness. So, Bon Jovi is subtly telling us both that he is sad, and that he is a serious artist. But is there another, deeper meaning? Read on...
Trying hard to capture
the moment this morning I don't know
'Cause a bottle of vodka
is still lodged in my head
The casual reader might think that this means that somebody - possibly that treacherous swine Richie Sambora - has hit John in the head with a vodka bottle with such force that it is now embedded in his skull. This is, of course, one "available reading" of the "text". However, it can also be taken to mean that he drank a bottle of vodka last night, and is still a little hung over. Thus, the bottle of vodka is metaphorically lodged in his head, although actually it is on the draining board, empty. Either of these readings can be given primacy without harming the sense of the poem - it's the doubt in the mind of the reader that creates the frisson.
And some blond gave me nightmares
I think that she's still in my bed
As I dream about movies
they won't make of me when I'm dead
Genius. Bon Jovi, by dreaming about movies they will not make of him when he's dead, reminds us of his fundamentally tripartite nature. Poet, musician, movie actor. So, he muses stoically, he will be remembered not as John Bon Jovi, but potentially only as an American military engineer, for example, if the person who is thinking about him has seen U-571, or perhaps as the vampire hunter Derek Bliss. Do you see? His very skill at placing himself inside the skin of a character will ultimately efface the real John Bon Jovi from memory. It is beautiful and sad.
With an ironclad fist I wake up and
French kiss the morning
"Ironclad fist" is important and relevant, and we shall come back to it. It is in no sense about wanking. Note also the ambiguity of the phrasing here - he may be waking up with an ironclad fist and subsequently French kissing the morning, or he may be French kissing the morning using an ironclad fist. This may sound rude, but is not - rather, it is a metaphor for punching in the mouth, reminding us that he may have a piano, but he is also one tough hombre.
While some marching band keeps
its own beat in my head
This apparently hackneyed decription of a hangover - picking up, of course on the bottle of vodka, which we now find is not actually lodged in his head - at least, probably not - is recontextualised - made rich and strange - by the reader's knowledge that John Bon Jovi has his own band. Why would Bon Jovi not be playing in Bon Jovi's head? I'll tell you why. Because they have left him in his hour of need. He has woken up with an ironclad fist, because that viper Richie Sambora has clad his fist in iron as he slept in the arms of Morpheus and Smirnoff. Maybe it started off as a joke, but then when he realised that with a fist clad in iron John Bon Jovi would be a) unable to play the guitar and b) superhumanly well-equipped to Danny Rand him like a red-headed stepchild for his fist-cladding impertinence, Sambora fled into the night. This also adds another layer to the use of the piano. Since you can play the piano one-handed, Bon Jovi uses it to highlight his own iron-fisted solitude.
While we're talking
About all of the things that I long to believe
About love and the truth and
what you mean to me
And the truth is baby you're all that I need
Who is "baby" here? Is it the blonde? Clearly not - she has been giving him nightmares. Is it Richie Sambora? Hardly. John Bon Jovi has demonstrated that he can succeed an his own merits as an actor, a musical artist and a poet wthout the so-called "help" of a man who has galvanised his right hand. The "baby" is clearly Bon Jovi's hand. All he needs is a hand not encased in iron, so that he can play the guitar again, and also write poetry and act without listing heavily to starboard. He calls his right hand "baby" as a knowing nod to the very traditions of the romantic genre that he is subverting, and it is definitely not about wanking.
I want to lay you down on a bed of roses
The casual reader will see this as romantic. After all "a bed of roses" is a good thing, isn't it? A good life is often likened to a bed of roses. However, think a bit more. A bed of roses is full of thorns, it is exposed to the elements... it's not a nice place to be. And really, ultimately, what do you lay on a bed of roses? Manure, that's what. It's proverbially good for the roses. And who will be laid on the bed of roses?
Richie Sambora. He's the shit. John Bon Jovi is the shovel. With a metal hand.
For tonight I sleep on a bed on nails
I want to be just as close as the Holy Ghost is
The mixing of different religious traditions - known as syncretism - is a common way of expressing the loss of distinct spiritual meaning afflicting the modern world. Whereas T.S. Eliot took the entire Wasteland to bring together the devotional language of the High Christian Church and the epic language of the Vedas, John Bon Jovi merges Catholicism and Eastern mysticism in a single couplet, and nearly made it rhyme. Think on.
And lay you down on bed of roses
He's a spiritual man, but he's a man of action, too. Don't think this is over, Sambora. You're heading for the roses, and there's nothing you can do to stop it.
I think we should take a break there. You may want to walk around for a bit, maybe have a cup of tea. It's powerful stuff.
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| Returning to work on Monday, I found that Amazon had finally made good on their nebulous threat to deliver Le Tigre. Yay! I heard Hot Topic on the radio what must be two or three months ago, and was reminded how much I needed this album, as I think I have been pretty regularly since it was released. I saw Le Tigre in Brighton... um... perhaps three years ago - when they were touring Feminist Sweepstakes, in any case - and remember bouncing enthusiastically to Deceptacon. That was a good evening: steaming venue, and a walk home through cool night air. I do miss Brighton, and the sea.
The sea. Thoughts:
1)Lost in the Irish Sea on a sailing boat. Dodging cruise ships, rolling in storms.
2)Looking out from a dying seaside town on the south coast in the dark, the sea as an absence, the coast as noise. On top of an observation tower, and cold.
3)Brighton, sitting on the wall above the beach at 3 in the morning, breath visible, wishing the world still.
4)The Blackwater and the sea. Between the water and the land is a vast, flat level of grassy mud. It looks like another planet. It feels like nothing could grow or live there, but life, as is its tradition, finds a way. The earth is rich and dead, and offers treacherous footing.
So anyway. Today, over coffee before work, I finally brought down the curtain on a very low period in my life. I finished Angels and Demons, by Dan Brown. My life is once again my own.
I don't entirely blame the fuck. After all, it is not his fault that a whole lot of people bought The da Vinci Code, and thus that his publishers rush-released his terrible sophomore novels, which until then had been gloriously unread. As such, how was he to know that it would become painfully clear that he had strip-mined the latter to provide ideas for the former?
Each begins with a killing. We then cut to Robert Langdon, Harvard symbologist. He is awoken in the night. The ensuing conversaton, in essence, goes like this.
Hello. You are Robert Langdon, esteemed Harvard symbologist. You have devoted your life to the study of religious symbols.
I have. Who are you, and why are you telling me my own autobiographical information?
Although mysterious, we need your help. We will send a vehicle, which will pick you up shortly.
I am confused. This will happen quite a lot, necessitating further exposition, because I juggle my duties as a Harvard symbologist with my hobby of being a fucking cretin.
There has been a symbologically intriguing death. Please to look at the funny picture.
My God! A gruesome image of a murdered man ... with some symbols.
Langdon is then rushed to the scene of the crime, where he has the opportunity to look at the corpse and repeat the symbological hook over and over again. He will also meet the fiery daughter/granddaughter of the victim, who will be understandably miffed about the whole matter, or antimatter. The parameters of the quest will be broadly defined, and Langdon will be packed off. It will be depressingly clear that, despite an age difference of around fifteen years and a relationship based primarily around moving rapidly from one point to another, she will at some point shortly after the conclusion of the novel sex him up.
Oh, cut to the sinister assassin, by the way. The sinister assassin is surprisingly picturesque for a killer. The Da Vinci Code excels at this point. A word of advice: if you are a giant albino, do not become an assassin. You are exceptionally easy to spot. The sinister assassin has some issues.
Langdon and femme then find themselves tasked with solving some very simple puzzles. The fiendish puzzles of the Da Vinci code include two anagrams, a pair of riddles and some mirror writing. Yes, mirror writing, which defeats a Harvard professor and an Oxford-educated historian. Angels and Demons revolves around solving a four-line riddle, and then moving in the direction that some statues are pointing until one encounters another statue. At some point we will hear the same disquisition on the iambic pentameter in both books. We will also be told that English is la lingua pura, both books being based around secret societies opposed by the Vatican. The writer will not notice that he is repeating himself almost word for word. He may be distracted by his hero's uncanny ability to dredge up lengthy memories of lectures he had delivered which helped to fill in exposition on the action currently taking place. Later, we will learn that the halos worn by saints in devotional art are based on the depiction of the divine in Egyptian art. Twice. As Langdon does battle with these surprisingly easy puzzles, we witness a battle of wits not matched since Richard Whitely met Chris Maslanka in a low-oxygen environment.
In a shocking reverse, it will transpire that one of the good guys introduced to aid Langdon is in fact the pseudonymous villain of the piece, and both Langdon and the sinister assassin have been mere dupes, played against each other. The vast plot holes created by this revelation are to a very great extent ignored.
Fortunately, it all turns out all right in the end.
The da Vinci Code is certainly more ambitious than Angels and Demons, but only in the sense that allowing your dog to crap in somebody's driveway is less ambitious than entering their house in the guise of a meter reader and defecating into their DVD player.
With a bit of luck, I may never have to read another Dan Brown book. For those who have yet to do so, I would recommend playing Deus Ex instead. It has all the same nouns, and the dialogue and plotting are actually better. It seems that Dan Brown includes among his top ten books of all time Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer, Robert Ludlum's Bourne series, and Strunk and White's Elements of Style - "Because who can possibly remember all the rules of grammar and punctuation?". I am unsure whether one can actually end another human being's life through papercuts inflicted by the target being secured to a chair in front of a snowblower into which an entire paperback run of The da Vinci Code is being poured, but I'm ready to try.
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| Tuesday, February 01, 2005 |
| Pavitr Prakhabar, the Spectacular Spider-Man. I think there's a definite "file under irony" here that this is being coproduced by Marvel and India's Gotham Entertainment Group. More generally (which is a phrase I realise is becoming a nervous tic for me), is this more rapacity, or an acknowledgement that India is a market that demands respect and tailoring, rather than the dumping of American product onto the market? I come back to the tendency of poster painters in India to put a bit more fat on pictures of Tom Cruise because the actual Cruiser looks wrong and untempting as a film star. Mind you, it's possible that the business model for this comic is based entirely around fans in the US who will buy the book as an import at far above the cover price...
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