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For my writings from 23/4/2008-5/4/2010. It will not be updated again.

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501 Great Writers - 1-25

Via an online acquaintance, I came across this recently-released book on the all-time great writers. It's in the same series as 501 Films To See Before You Die, which was a useful resource for me (with contributions from Jonathan Rosenbaum, one of my favourite film critics), even if it seems a bit lightweight now. So, I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. In any case, the aforementioned acquaintance is providing me with the list, bit by bit. The authors are listed in chronological order, wisely side-stepping any number of impossible problems presented by ranking by order of quality - Ovid or Nabokov? Shakespeare or Homer? Etc.

Without further ado, here are the first 25 names:

Homer
Sappho
Aeschylus
Pindar
Sophocles
Euripides
Aristophanes
Plato
Gaius Valerius Catullus
Virgil
Horace
Ovid
Apuleius
St. Augustine
Chrétien de Troyes
Dante Aligheri
Francesco Petrarch
Hafiz
Giovanni Boccaccio
Geoffrey Chaucer
Francois Villon
Niccolo Machiavelli
Erasmus
Ludovico Ariosto
Francois Rabelais

I must stress I don't have the book itself, so I can't comment on the rationale provided by the editor, one Julian Patrick, a Canadian literary theorist and lecturer in Comparative Literature. Nevertheless, at this early stage, it's looking like a project that cannot be defended or salvaged. It is almost unfeasibly bad, even taking into account the facts that one, classical educations are rare these days, and two, Westerners tend to be very insular about the canon.

Let me be clear: this is dreadful work from any supposed scholar. The compiler of this list is asserting two indefensible falsehoods: that there were only 25 great writers until 1494 (when Rabelais was probably born) and that only 13 of these were classicists (in the Roman/Greek sense). In reality, it is generally accepted that the classical period was the high point of literature. Trying to come up with a list of the names of unquestionably great writers the author has omitted was exhausting, and at this point pretty much all I can do.

The first thing that leapt out at me was the inclusion of names like Plato and Machiavelli, which obviously means that the list is not limited to poetry and fiction but open to philosophers and essayists. Plato's inclusion is a given, of course - no list of this sort could possibly do without him. However, leaving out Aristotle is borderline criminal. Whilst it's true we only have perhaps a third of Aristotle's works, and that consists mainly of lecture notes by his pupils, this problem has not prevented the author from including Sappho, of whose work we have but fragments, and it hardly needs saying that Aristotle's are ideas that fundamentally (re)shaped physics, biology, ethics, logic, rhetoric, politics and, most importantly here, poetry and theatre. It wouldn't be a stretch to call him the most important thinker and writer who ever lived.

The greatest of the pre-Socratic philosophers, Heraclitus, is also left out. Hesiod, Archilocus, Alcman, Plutarch (!), Petronius, Plautus, Suetonius, Seneca, Livy, Cicero (!), Juvenal, Apollonios of Rhodes, Lucretius, Theocritus, Ennius (no less a figure than the father of Latinate poetry!), Callimachus, Lucan, Sextus Propertius and Tibullus are all conspicuous. The great historians are royally shafted - I understand that Herodotus is not everyone's cup of tea, but excluding Thucydides is staggeringly ignorant and baffling.

Moving outside of a Western context, and the foolishness of choosing only Plato, St Augustine and Machiavelli is laid bare. There is absolutely zero representation of Eastern thought or writing. No Ibn al-Nafis, arguably the founder of science fiction. No Averroes (Spanish, of course, but a huge contributor to Islamic philosophy), the founder of modern secular thought and great translator of Aristotle. No Avicenna. No Algazel. No Ibn Tufail. Omar Khayyám, hugely famous and popular even in the West, has not been included, so there's no hope for Rudaki, who is to Modern Persian what Shakespeare is to Modern English; Ferdowsi, the writer of Shahnameh, the great Persian epic; Nezāmi, the innovator of romanticism, realism and populism in the style of the Persian epic; his probable countryman Nesimi, similarly revered in Azerbaijan; Ali-Shir Nava'i, the national poet of the Uzbeks; Amir Khusrow; or Saadi. Kālidāsa, almost unanimously regarded as the greatest writer in Sanskrit, the author of not one but two great epics and at least one play that could be counted among the greatest of all time, is similarly without trace. Amazingly Hafiz does make it in, scant consolation for anyone who has dared to read outside of their own culture.

Travelling further East (obviously a mistake at this stage), Confucious, of all people, is missing! Laozi, apparently the second best selling poet of all time and the founder of a major religion, isn't there, nor is Zhuangzi. Luo Guanzhong, a writer of roughly equal standing as Kālidāsa, has not been mentioned.

I'm sure you more than get the picture. I know being given the task of Professor Patrick is unenviable (although honestly, I would gladly have put together twice as good a list for half the fee), but even with the numerical limitations, this is not even a representative sample of world literature over this period. I wish I could, as I did with the film equivalent, excuse it as a valuable resource for beginners. But all this book does is encourage the illiteracy and intellectual mediocrity that has blighted post-War generations, not to mention being a sad indictment on the unwillingness of departments of supposed higher education to engage with anything outside of their comfort zone.

Perhaps the list will improve as we move forward. But it's the classical period that is the foundation stone of an education in literature. Getting it wrong is the equivalent of not being able to do arithmetic in mathematics - not an impassable obstacle, but one that makes success very unlikely indeed.

Schwarzenegger and Us

When asked to name my five favourite Arnie films recently, I gave this list:

1. The Long Goodbye
2. The Terminator
3. Predator
4. The Running Man
5. Total Recall

Okay, maybe I was being clever and obtuse with the number one pick. Remove it, and the humorously satirical Last Action Hero squeezes in at number five, and Terminator and Predator take up the top spots, largely on the strength of the villains that outgrew Schwarzenegger himself. But the truth is, I regard all of these films as solid at the very least. Total Recall, for instance, possesses a pleasingly grotesque aesthetic you don't expect from an Arnie film. During the conversation, later films such as The 6th Day and End of Days were also discussed, neither of which are without merit (the latter, for instance, is one of the only times Arnie has ever seemed completely out of his element, and Gabriel Byrne also turns in an entertaining performance). It occurred to me that Arnie has perhaps been hard done to by both myself and others who regard him as a poor man's John Wayne.

Also discussed were the much-loved Terminator 2 and True Lies. Terminator 2 was my favourite film by far as a child, and True Lies a favourite during my formative years. Now, however, I am less enthusiastic about both. T2 is still a white-knuckle ride, thanks to the still ominous prescence of Robert Patrick's T-1000, but the film as a whole is little more than a cheesy, overblown remake of its predecessor (at least as much as Terminator 3 is a cheesy, overblown remake of Terminator 2 in turn). There's also an annoying tendency of James Cameron's to act like a teenager who has only just discovered the extra features on his new camera, and we are forced to sit though what at times resembles his special effects reel. For all its bad reviews, Terminator Salvation at least looks like it's trying something new, rather than rehashing the cyborg slasher storyline and retaining the "bigger is better" philosophy of the previous two outings.

True Lies is rather more objectionable. It is, admittedly, a funny film, and the main complaint I have with it structurally is in the way it goes on for far too long: the escape from the terrorist camp feels like an ending come none too soon, but then we have a chase sequence that seems to last an eternity and an extra half hour battle between Arnie and Art Malick over a stealth jet. But something more disturbing lies at its heart. Not simply that it's a borderline-racist western supremacy power fantasy, and strangely devoid of irony in this area considering it is a comedy, but also that it is unrepentantly sexist. The women are either scheming femme fatales or painfully clueless dummy housewives. It's difficult to imagine Jamie Lee Curtis' character being able to keep up at a Stepford book club, so her transition into secret agent is dutifully insulting, degrading and embarrassing. Even by the director's own admission (a potential sequel was abandonded in 2002) this film looks even more like a relic in a post-9/11 world, and all involved should be asking themselves just what the fuck they were thinking in the first place.

Now that the latest in the Terminator franchise is out, and Arnie's term as Governator (a complete failure for anyone expecting anything like Arnie's good friend Jesse Ventura's foray into politics) is coming to an end, could we expect further instalments in the career of the Austrain Oak? If so, we want more ridiculous sci-fi and less sequels and political thrillers. Or, if that can't be managed, cameos in hard-boiled detective films.

Hell, Germans, Libertines and Shakespeare

It feels like I've spent most of my time watching films lately, which obviously isn't a bad thing when you're a fan of films. I went to the cinema last week to see Drag Me To Hell, a review of which can be found on Paul's blog. It was certainly enjoyable enough, and we managed to make it through the rain in time to catch the England game in the AJ.

Since then I've watched two Fassbinders I haven't seen before. Mother Kusters' Trip To Heaven (1975) is a TV movie about a widow who unwillingly participates in distortions of her late husband's memory. Pulled between communists and anarchists, both of whom wish to make her a symbol in their cause, and systematically abandonded or ignored by her family, Brigitte Mira's character is put through the director's usual cruel ringer until the endings. Strangely, Fassbinder wrote two finales to this tragicomic tale, one astonishingly more violent and nasty than the one he settled upon. I much prefer the latter, where she manages to move on and maybe find love, to the original, where she dies of an anarchist's bullet wound in the arms of her feckless son. The real star of this is Ingird Caven, who is delightful as the worn, ambitious singer and daughter of the protagonist, who uses her father's death to cynically advance her lovelife and career. Her sparring with sister-in-law Irm Hermann is fantastic, too.

Substantially superior and more complete was Fear of Fear, a completely forgotten item from the same year (I don't think it even has its own Wikipedia page). This tells the story of Margot, a severly depressed housewife. Margot's battle with her anxiety following giving birth to her second child goes through the appropriate cycle: Leonard Cohen albums, valium, affairs, alcohol, until the conclusion. This allows Fassbinder to make his commentary upon the value and lack of understanding of these addictions, but the real villain here is the oppressive society of the Economic Miracle that shuns or judges Margot, from the dismissive doctors to the vile inlaws. "We're the normal ones!" screeches Irm Hermann, reprising her role from Mother Kusters'. The implication is unavoidable: Margot, whose world literally disintegrates around her, is the sane one, whilst the respectable in-laws, who chastise Margot for almost everything she does, are the repressed psychotic majority. In this sense, Fassbinder predicts both the medicated society and the religious democratic tyranny of numbers-make-right.

A word must be said for Margit Carstensen, who plays, or rather becomes, Margot. Her acting is comprised of quietly confused facials, which are equal parts brilliantly expressive and controlled. She allows Fassbinder to place ambiguity into his close-ups, such as the final shot of her where it is almost impossible to know for sure her reaction to her neighbour's death. We are left with the disturbing possibility she is happy about it, or is at least gratefully accepting of his self-sacrifice to the demons that haunted them both so that she might live. Or did he merely represent the last traces of her psychosis? The wobbly camera effect, that acted as avatar for her bouts of anxiety, accompanies the credits and works in tandem to split our interpretations. There's such control and economy with Fassbinder that his style is the perfect environment for this story to take hold.

Then The Libertine (2005) was on television the other night. I hadn't seen it since it was first out at the cinema, and having formally studied Wilmot since then was eager to see it again. I was disappointed: it's not as good as I remembered. Not that there's anything seriously wrong with it. It tells a solid story and doesn't shy away from the grotesque and bawdy elements of Rochester's life. Depp gives one of his better performances, though it is still not free from his compulsive false-eccentricity, and John Malkovich is solid as Charles II. There's even a very good piece of shooting in the first theatre scene. But for most part the camera doesn't know where to put itself, too often forcing us into unwarranted intimacy with the characters. There are also some truly outlandish elements, even for the source material. The script seems determined to equate Rochester with a modern rock star, which is not so much unwarranted as it is predictable and cliche, and we are all meant to be aghast at this story of unfulfilled potential without giving us any reason to consider the real Rochester's talent. Admittedly, it would have been difficult to dramatically convey a poem as lengthy as, say, A Satyr Against Reason and Mankind, but surely a poet as good as Rochester deserves better than to be remembered as a bit of a lad and a good acting coach.

I also finally managed to see Chimes At Midnight from start to finish and uninterrupted. On paper, it sounds like it should be the greatest film ever: script by Shakespeare, editing and direction by Orson Welles, cast that includes such talent as John Gielgud, Margaret Rutherford and Welles himself. There's a temptation to say the general high regard for this film is more influenced by its potential and rarity than by its quality, that those who praise it do so in the knowledge few are likely to call them on it. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. This is not quite so much the Holy Grail of Welles' canon (that would be the existing shards of his Don Quixote), nor is it another great but interferred-with show of potential like the Magnificent Ambersons. It is a realised vision, a complete and wonderful film, a culmination both of Welles' unparalleled cinematic skill and his admiration for Shakespeare.

Yes, there are a few problems with the sound, but nothing that couldn't be fixed with a half-hearted restoration. What really struck me about this film was how much Welles, ever the magician, had done with just a little money, cardboard and glue. We are transported to a medieval England of thatched wooden buildings and stone castles, thanks largely to the film's utterly fantastic lighting. Comforting, harrowing and portentious, the shadows themselves are a character. The technical pinnacle of this film comes in the famous Battle of Shrewsbury sequence, a seminal moment in film fight scenes.

The script is fantastic, too. Adapted from Welles' travesty of a play, Five Kings, it seamlessly blends dialogue from five (at my count) Shakespeare plays: the Henriad and The Merry Wives of Windsor. It gives us a sentimental version of Falstaff, more funny and playful than damagingly apathetic and cowardly, but he is none the worse for it. Welles puts in what might be his best performance, giving Falstaff a nuanced depth that is so often missing in other portrayals of the clownish character. In truth there isn't a performance in the film that isn't more than adequate, but this is about Welles, and about Falstaff as his avatar, and they are to be applauded. We learn more about Welles from this film, the way he speaks another man's words, than we do from a thousand biographies or interviews.

The Night of the Bastard

The results of the European elections were released Saturday night, and it’s difficult to imagine a worse evening/early morning for anyone left of centre without bringing Tequila and large prostitutes into it.

The socialists were comprehensively hammered all across the continent, whilst neoliberal, Euroskeptic and other centre-right parties did well at a time of global economic crisis. (Which, as I remarked to a friend, is like hearing Gary Glitter in the next room whilst you’re already being forcibly fucked in the arse.) As we speak, Silvio Berlusconi is rubbing his salty folds of flesh together in greedy anticipation of another stolen few years as de facto pimp of Italian politics, whilst the likes of Zapatero are licking their wounds. In the UK, David Cameron gloated smugly over a Conservative Wales, comparing himself to David Lloyd George; the vile Dan Hannan recited a Dr Seuss-like ditty before joining Nigel Farange, who looks like a cross between Peewee Herman and a diseased cock, for a spot of mutual masturbation. Finally, and at a glance most disturbingly, Britain elected not one, but two fascists to the European Parliament for the first time ever, only a day removed from the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings.

We had all anticipated weeks in advance that the British National Party would do well at these elections. I myself had stated it might be a blessing in disguise, that they would go the way of other smaller parties in the past and collapse under their newfound weight and exposure. We all knew that, no matter how well they did here, a first past the post set-up would stop them from ever advancing. But it did nothing to lessen the blow when it finally arrived. When it was announced that Andrew Brons, an outspoken ex-Colin Jordan brownshirt, had gained a seat in Yorkshire and Humber, those of us who had stayed up to watch were nearly speechless. Anger, vitriolic and disbelieving, flooded the Facebook home page. But even that was only a warm up for what happened next: Nick Griffin, leader of the BNP, won a North West seat.

A region hung its collective head in shame. The grinning, bloated face of Griffin, like a deliriously spastic Danny DeVito from Batman Returns, seemed to be tattooed on the inside of our eyelids. How could they have triumphed here, and in York, of all places? The answer was clear: low turnouts and electorate apathy had gifted this bumbling far-right Red Triangle Gang seats in an election where they had actually done worse in the popular vote than last time. But the response was impassioned and bewildered: I, for one, in a storm of mentally retarded e-fury, cut all ties to the North West on my Facebook and blog. Never again, I told myself, would I be proud of living in Liverpool, never again would I reminisce about the days when walking viruses like Kelvin MacKenzie would refer to us as a Socialist Republic for our romantic refusal to bend a lip to Thatcherism’s demented labia.

Awake and relatively sober now, we should all be able to take a step back from this and realise the fascist gains, here and in places like Hungary, are an embarrassment and nothing more. That noise you hear is your keys in the washing machine, not jackboots marching up and down outside.

What is far more worrying is Labour dying, a directionless and naive Conservative Party benefitting (although not experiencing the huge swing Cameron promised: realistically, it was a disappointing night for them, too), the worryingly more-mainstream-than-the-BNP UKIP making massive gains and the Lib Dems completely failing. With Vince Cable on their side, and lacking the baggage of the Tories and Labour, this should have been their moment. Instead, they dropped to fourth. Nick Clegg should stand down before the UK has no left-leaning liberal voice left.

What should we learn from this? We do have an enemy. But it’s not the immigrants, like the Daily Mail wants us to believe, or the Commie Jewish Bankers, like the Völkischer Beobachter told us, or the ‘Islamofascists,’ as anyone on the right seems to be screaming, or the Scientologists. It’s not even the BNP: they are a symptom, not the disease itself. The disease is the whole system, and our reaction to it. When liberalism was young, there was a time when our leaders feared us. Now, they only fear us not turning up to the polls. Anyone who doesn’t want this to happen again needs to make their voices a little louder whichever way they can.
For my part, I’m forming the Justice League party tomorrow. The good news is there are still a few places available: I need a Catwoman and an Aquaman before noon.

There are positives to take from this. The Pirate Party, who refuses to treat culture as a commodity, gained a seat. 50% more people voted Green this time around. And Labour took a kicking, perhaps the only centre-right party to do so off the top of my head (though who knows what their orientation is these days?) even if it was to the benefit of the Eton Alliance. But we need to face up to the fact that those who did well are those who are largely responsible for the current economic crisis, and it’s because of our willingness to let corrupt politicians off the hook instead of voting against them. And by the time a real election runs around, those of us who don’t want Dan Hannan to be stuttering the Hungry Hungry Caterpillar to a captivated House of Commons or more demented aspects of British life getting on to so much as a stage in a strip club with a grin on their face need to suck it up before the event rather than eating it afterwards.

The Meaning of Cameron

Tomorrow the results of the European elections will be laid bare, and it is almost a foregone conclusion that the Conservative Party will be able to claim another landslide victory as they have done in the local elections. Within the next 12 months, and, depending on the reaction from what remains of the Labour government, possibly within a few weeks, we will have a new Prime Minister: David Cameron, the Gingerbread Man.

Those casual observers in the States might be tempted to draw comparisons with their own recent election. The Gingerbread Man is, after all, a fresher, younger face taking over from a tired, failed and collapsing party.

Others might be tempted to take the other route and equate the Gingerbread Man with George W. Bush's victory in 2001; not for the controversy surrounding the vote counting, but both men's claims to be "compassionate conservatives," not to mention their succession representing a rightwards political shift. Even moreso than that, both Bush and the Gingerbread Man rose because of the capital granted to them by their political aristocracy. Bush, of course, was son of former president George H. W. Bush and grandson of Wall Street executive Prescott Bush, whilst the Gingerbread Man comes from more privileged stock still, the son of a stockbroker, the grandson of Sir William Mount, 2nd Baronet and direct descendant of King William IV. His wife, Samantha, is a descendant of King Charles II, and together the couple have a personal fortune of around £30 million. To call them the aristocracy is a regression of their royal lineage.

However, the Gingerbread Man is not a Bush, for many reasons. There is a long-standing tradition of keeping religion and politics apart in the United Kingdom, perhaps, ironically, because of the lack of official separation of church and state. The last incumbent of the highest office in the land, Tony Blair, famously affirmed this desire for secularism within the Commons and within the Cabinet when he said, "We don't do religion." The Gingerbread Man's vanity has caused him to remark in the past that he is the "heir to Blair," suggesting that a Christian Coalition-style reorientation of politics around faith is massively unlikely and that the Anglo-American tradition will continue, with conservatism remaining a brand of liberalism rather than a concealed far-right assault upon it.

He is also not a Barack Obama. The US president, in one of his more insightful moments, noted the Gingerbread Man was "a lightweight," and is in opposition to his hawkish foreign policy record and Euroskepticism. Obama arguably rose to the top in spite of his relatively unconventional background, whereas in stark contrast the Gingerbread Man has slithered to prominence as leader of the opposition via an old boy's network and has since honoured his connections by promoting his Etonian chums to high positions within the party.

In short, while Obama represents something new, the Gingerbread Man is a return to the days of political hierarchy reflecting the imbalanced order of its society: rich, white males governing. The Tory party has done everything in its power to convince people of the opposite. The patently fake concern for the environment, the "understanding" hand it intends to raise against yobs, the outwards rejection of Thatcherism, the pathetic usage of popular indie bands' music at its conferences - none of it can hold up under the most light of inspections.

The key to understanding the Gingerbread Man, perhaps, is to look at what he sees as the cause of the "broken society" he intends to fix, which is inevitably "the family." Any politician announcing his attention to protect "the family" or "family values" should, in this day and age, be immediately suspected of both homophobia and sexism, but the implication is so rarely picked up on. In the Gingerbread Man's case, it is at the very least pure patronising, a vomitive attempt to appeal to a plastic and hypocritical upper-middle class who will stay with their partners no matter what "for the sake of the children" and actively enforce the stigma that makes life so needlessly difficult for single parents socially and professionally all down the class scale. A more obvious transgression against those lower down the scale was to be found in his utterly juvenile tirade against the poor and the unhealthy, declaring it was their own fault and speaking out against "moral neutrality." Conscious of sounding like a pre-Marxian aristocratic apologist in a post-Marxian age, he hastened to add, “Of course, circumstances — where you are born, your neighbourhood, your school and the choices your parents make — have a huge impact. But social problems are often the consequence of the choices people make.” A few months later, returning to his "family" gimmicking, he added race into the mix, saying too many black fathers were shirking their responsibilities and calling for a "responsibility revolution."

How has this chubby bore been allowed to remain uncatchable? Criticisms have barely stayed in the media for days, satire has been in relatively short supply. The Tories have backed all of Labour's most awful policies - the Iraq War, tuition fees, and so forth, and lacked the economic skill, philosophy and influence to have prevented the current crisis had they been in power. Whilst it is true much of the Conservatives' having managed to escape the public bludgeoning Labour have been subjected to over the expenses scandal is a result of Britain's ignorance, a conflating of "parliament" and "government" that allows the opposition to slip by whilst the party in power bears the brunt, there is more to it. More than anything, what the Gingerbread Man represents is the death of New Labour, contributing actively as it did to the global irresponsibility that finds us where we are now, and perhaps the death of the Labour Party altogether; a nostalgia for the good old days; and working-class apathy. The upper-classes have received their last punch on the nose in the form of Alistair Darling's latest tax increase, and have rallied, whilst those below them, having had no real representation since 1994, have been stamped into the mud and are unwilling to go and vote to counter this resurgence of the nervous overlords shivering in their castles.

The whole country seems unconsciously aware of Giambattista Vico's historical model and is attempting to regress back from the chaotic precipice into the safe, comfortable aristocratic age that proceeded it. This collective urge to return to the womb seems as darkly, comically Jungian as it is ultimately flawed and doomed to failure. Even though the Gingerbread Man's crimes, his racism and his social elitism, his plastic personality politics, his laughable and almost unbelievably egotistical "Cameron Direct" programme, his passive support of the Botha regime, his complete lack of policies, his hypocrisy over drugs, have all failed to catch up with him so far, eventually he will walk into the fox's mouth and dissolve into the cruel river of public and media disapproval. But whilst the Gingerbread Man's vileness seems to know no bounds, for now, he looks likely to stay a few steps ahead of his detractors in this distracted time, for no reason other than there being no enemies to measure him by.

Roadside Ponderings

Stalker (Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979) is often hailed as a moving and frightening film, a thinking man's sci-fi to rival 2001. The comparisons with Kubrick's film are more deserved here than those often attributed to Tarkovsky's other venture into science fiction, Solyaris (1972), which I have always considered an interesting but ultimately self-parodying film (laborious shots combined with a pseudo-philosophical script), but again somewhat unusual. Whereas Space Odyssey certainly shares a technical competency and spirtual evolution angle with Stalker, that's where the similarities end. Kubrick's film is cold and impassive, even in moments of glory, underlining the director's understanding of tone and mood. Stalker, at its most pessimistic, is rich in human mystery and pondering on the theme of transcendence.

Watching Tarkovsky's Stalker uncovers the potential of cinema as a medium. We are never sure whether we are watching an artist or a magician; the truth is, the director is both, often simultaneously. Immediately we are struck by the aesthetics: the lighting is perfection, the control and patience of the shots chosen unmatched; furthermore, Tarkovsky is one of the cinema's great portraiters as well as a commendable landscape photographer. I fell in love with Alexander Kaidanovsky's head about twenty minutes in and the sympathy I felt for his character never left me.

Truthfully there are literally tens of shots in the film that suggest the director's genius, some of them, true to form, lasting for minutes on end. Our early shepherding into and out of the doorway into the bedroom, the continuous take on Monkey's progress down a slope as it is slowly revealed she is being carried rather than walking, the iconoclastic drift over images of the gods of our modern collective consciousness. (Jesus in prayer, money, a gun.) Perhaps the best example of the artist/magician duality is the final scene that at least deserves to be famous, in which Monkey moves a glass across a table with her mind. Or does she? Is she merely observing it's being progressed by the vibrations of a passing train? Our willingness to believe the unbelieveable, though, is a testament not to Tarkovsky's skill with a camera, but his understanding of psychology.

This scene follows what has been as much a psychoanalytical journey as a theological one. It is impossible not to pick up on the clumsy Id, Ego and Superego dynamic provided by the three (male) leads, but the Wittgensteinian undertones are far more subtle. The Zone, where our three heroes journey, is a metaphor for the functional world, a world of prepositions and language traps, where markers must be lain down to navigate in chaos. Just as we require illogical spatial recognitions to stay sane - Home, School, Work, Local Shop, Abroad, etc. - so does Stalker throw nuts to mark their progress before they've made it. Space is relative in this linguistic realm, and Stalker, who tries to impose his own rules on it, must thus lose the most at the pilgrimage's conclusion, in which it is revealed the Holy Grail of the story is a somewhere between a placebo and a subconscious manipulation of the universe (one theory posits that Monkey is born out of Porcupine's wish for his brother's return and is hence a reincarnation via subatomic reasoning). What is interesting is that it is Professor, ostensibly the broken, castrated Superego, who attempts to destroy Room in the Zone, where wishes are meant to be granted. His rejection of the oxymoronic scientific supernatural represents the ultimate failure of the Symbolic Circuit in Leary's model, and perhaps the culmination of a cinematic thesis extension of Lacan's Symbolic order.

More mythological is the introduction of a black dog that follows the trio. Undoubtedly Anubis, it consumes whilst Stalker talks of hearts, attaches itself to Stalker in his own words, and whines at Monkey's Osiric annointment by Beethoven. In other scenes it lingers, a curious reminder that in the Zone, just as in life, death (and judgement?) is around every corner. Whilst not quite Tarkovsky's masterpiece (that is undoubtedly Zerkalo (1975)), Stalker is a fascinating film whichever way you look at it and a worthy addition to his oeuvre.

Phantoms of Nabua

http://www.animateprojects.org/films/by_date/2009/phantoms

A chance to see Apichatpong Weerasethakul's latest short film, plus a brief digression on the subject beneath.

The Future

"Won't be nothin' you can measure any more.
The blizzard of the world has crossed the threshhold
And overturned the order of the soul."
- Leonard Cohen, The Future

Cohen's darkest song used to seem pregnant with unfortunate truths, a bleak but accurate outlook on the spiritual development of our species. These days for me it simply forecasts something to avoid, and is a ditty to enjoy for its daring and poise. For the more I read about potential scientific developments, the stronger my optimism.

Without the time or the inclination to delve into futurism/transhumanism for the uninitiated, I thought I'd simply post a timeline of interesting events-to-come for those who need cheering up. These are not from any lunatic-fringe scientist who has read too much Timothy Leary, but no less an authority than Raymond Kurzweil, the man once described as "the rightful heir to Thomas Edison," who in the 1980s correctly predicted such diverse subjects as the growth of the internet in the 1990s (as well as broadband in the 2000s), the fall of the Soviet Union and the superceding of human chess players by computers.

Next year
- Computers to no longer be distinct physical objects. Perhaps be a part of your clothing!
- Supercomputers will have the same raw power as human brains.

2010s
- Eyeglasses that beam images onto the users' retinas to produce virtual reality to be developed.
- The VR glasses will also have built-in computers featuring "virtual assistant" programs that can help the user with various daily tasks. One useful function of the virtual assistant would be real-time language translation for the user.

2020s
- Personal computers will have the same raw power as human brains.
- Nanomachines for medical purposes such as hyperaccurate brainscans and, more impressively, "feeding" human cells, replacing the need for traditional consumption of food.
- With food consumption and therefore hunger now obsolete, the age of the cyborg begins proper.
- Virtual reality becomes indistinguishable from reality itself.
- Nanomachines eliminate threat of pathogens, eliminating disease.
- First real AI created with all the potential of the human mind.

2030s
- The paths of nanotechnology and virtual reality cross. Practical uses include functional telepathy with other humans and similar immediate interfaces with computers.
- Humans can now alter their own intelligence, personality, memories and senses at will. We choose our own paradigm shifts more effectively, potentially eliminating war.
- Humans can upload their minds completely into machines.

2040s
- Human body 3.0. What's this? It can alter its shape and external appearance at will via nanotechnology. Organs are also replaced by superior cybernetic implants.
- Virtual reality becomes more popular than reality.

2045
- The coming of the Singularity: the technological Ubermensch. AIs surpass human beings as the smartest and most capable life forms on the Earth. Technological development is taken over by the machines, who can think, act and communicate so quickly that normal humans cannot even comprehend what is going on; thus the machines, acting in concert with those humans who have evolved into humanoid androids, achieve effective world domination. The machines enter into a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, with each new generation of AIs appearing faster and faster. From this point onwards, technological advancement is explosive, under the control of the machines, and thus cannot be accurately predicted.
- Sharp distinctions between man and machine will no longer exist thanks to the existence of cybernetically enhanced humans and uploaded humans.

Post-Singularity
- Computer transistors cannot be shrunk any more. Computers become bigger to become better again. Result? Earth becomes one giant computer coexisting with natural beauty.
- Space domination begins. AIs branch out, converting the rest of the universe bit by bit from inanimate matter to intelligent artificial sentience.
- Entire universe becomes giant, highly efficient supercomputer. Abrogation of the laws of Physics, interdimensional travel, and eternal life for what was once the human race.

Or we could just all live on farms. Either way I'm happy.

Ooooh, Warrarush

...As Hawk might have said, had he been Scouse.

It's been a bit of a mixed 4 weeks for me. I was recalled into hospital and had to have another blood transfusion, followed by a week of "observation." I entertained myself by pretending to be a nurse and telling the other inmates (patients; a recurring Freudian slip) they were allowed to smoke and assissting an elderly alcoholic in his zimmer-permitting escape attempts. As a result of my unreliable jalopy of a body, I've had to temporarily suspend my yoga, vegetarianism, sporting activities and... well, walking anywhere further than from one side of campus to the other. I'm also being investigated by the university for my absences.

Saw Kathryn Hunter's Othello at the Playhouse (i.e. with Patrice Naiambana, not Lenny Henry) which was enjoyable, if a bit overzealous and unrevealing. Also managed to catch Gran Torino, probably the funniest and most racist film I've seen in a while. Ah, and the new Watchmen film, about which I have little to add. As usual, Alan Moore is right: it shouldn't have been made.

Speaking of Moore, once again the media spotlight has fallen on him, and once again he's suffered from it somewhat. I've read some quite borderline-libellous stuff about his personal beliefs, alongside the assertion or implication he is insane. See, to me, anyone unwilling to compromise on his artistic integrity for money, or able to see a connection between fiction and mythology that goes beyond the boring rationalist level, is okay in my book. But maybe I, a practicing magician, am crazy in everyone else's book, too.

A while ago here I expressed envy for the polarisation American politics benefits from. I have no such fetishes about the embarrassing nature of them in general. Someone once said to me that pro wrestling was the American version of pantomime: they were right in one respect, but a more direct equivalent would be the ongoing war of ludicrous claims between the US's right-wing and everyone else. Recently Rush Limbaugh, second-grade radio entertainer, has stepped back into the arena as "the de facto leader of the Republican party." This sounds a lot like the death knell of the American conservative.

To give it credit, the Far-Right has done a great job of A) getting everyone to believe 'conservatism' and 'liberalism' are opposites, and B) passing themselves off as conservatives. True conservatives have a noble tradition of defending liberalism from itself, trying to ensure progress has a moral compass. Oppression of women and minority rights? Motions towards theocracy? These are not conservative values. Fortunately, the Tory Party in the UK, for all its faults, has not quite fallen prey to this sickening intrusion rebranding. But something is very rotten in the States of America.

Otherwise, I'm house-hunting, reading a lot, and wasting a fair bit of time on the computer. Same old, same old.

An attempt to reconcile my politics with my philosophy

At the risk of offering anecdotal evidence, in my experience, arborescent thinking often leads to people compartmentalising their political allegiances and their philosophical leanings into two seperate entities. I suspect am guilty of this myself, but my excuse is that the immediacy of politics often make them collide with philosophy, which is often more of a long term goal. This seems quite contradictory, and is a model that has failed to work throughout the Western world until one section, the Far Right, gave up on utopianism all together, with the Left soon following with the collapse of the Soviet Union. These defeatist attitudes have left us in a state of aporia. We now seem to live purely in the present: if someone strikes you, you strike them back, often in the name of peace. In the end, as in the Middle-East/USA conflict, we forget who threw the first punch, and if we're lucky to be actively literate, recall the morally bankrupt British hand in the formation of Israel or the States' support for Saddam Hussein in the 1970s, but to no end goal. One is reminded of the comical conflict between the offenders and the defenders in Finnegans Wake, who eventually become one all-encompassing concept: the fenders.

I sometimes think that as beings with a functioning cerebral cortex, we have to be hypocritical, or at least non-doctrinal. When philosophy or science, both, I agree with Rorty, types of literature, become dogmatic, they cease to be good philosophy or good science. Yet the scale of the hypocrisy must be measured. Being flexible does not have to mean supporting Israel when you did not support apartheid South Africa. (In fairness, commentaries on Hamas have very much resembled what Reagan and Thatcher said about Nelson Mandela; although I of course agree with Edward Said that Palestine is still waiting for its version of Mandela.) And surely, the best way to solve a problem like Israel/Palestine, to continue using a topical example, is for all concerned parties to look at what the country must eventually become in order to be allowed to co-exist with the modern world - a cosmopolitan liberal democracy not unlike South Africa - and work backwards from there.

What is my preferred end product? I am unashamedly an anarchist. Yet all movements that seem to be a step in the direction of anarchism range between distasteful and downright cruel. Take, for instance, economic libertarianism, which shares an incestuous bed with both anarcho-capitalism and Randian Objectivisim. I am in this sense a socialist and a Left-winger, largely because the Marxists, in setting themselves up as mutual enemies of capitalism, have had the largest successes in criticising the status quo (with the possible exception of Bakunin, one of the first to rightfully point out that dogmatic Communism would lead to totalitarianism). So whilst I agree with, say, anarcho-syndicalists, in many respects, I can't help but feel they are focusing their efforts in the wrong area. The biggest question anarchism has had to face (I have witnessed and participated in some beatdowns in debates against my fellow anarchists over this subject) is healthcare. Hence, why I have rarely agreed with a quote more than I agree with the utilitarian William Godwin's:

"Above all we should not forget, that government is an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind; and that, however we may be obliged to admit it as a necessary evil for the present, it behoves us, as the friends of reason and the human species, to admit as little of it as possible, and carefully to observe whether, in consequence of the gradual illumination of the human mind, that little may not hereafter be diminished."

The more I look at the world around me, as officials close down my local libraries and my government fails again and again to make education a priority, I realise that those in power realise this, too, and continue to make their assault on knowledge in order to prolong their necessity. One should look no further than the frankly despicable recent election campaigns in the United States. John McCain's vow to run a clean, respectful campaign resulted in him calling his opponent everything from a sexist to a terrorist sympathiser to a Marxist to an elistist (any one of which I would probably have welcomed were they aimed at me ;)). And now we discover Barack Obama's claim to end torture and the British government's claim to condemn it were not only false but conspiratorially so.

The problem with philosophical anarchism is that it breaks down by the very nature of its passivity. The zeitgeist of what is right and what is wrong has most usually been changed by radical or revolutionary individuals, such as Gallileo or Martin Luther King, who broke down the consensus in order to create a new one. Unfortunately people such as the women's suffrage campaigners did not compell people by the moral superiority of their arguments but at the force, passion and single mindedness they delivered them with. We must then draw inspiration from publications such as Einstein's Theory of Relativity, which could, within the sphere of scientific thought, be seen as a violent act, taking into account the effect it had on preconceived notions of, say, spectroscopy. Because the truth is that every lie our governments tell us, every library they close, every piece of spin a company puts on a product, is an act of violence, and we must respond by spreading knowledge and tearing down falsehoods in order to be in a situation where we can turn the other cheek, in the manner described by Tolstoy in his seminal treaty The Kingdom of God is Within You, without fear of being struck by an ignorant and powerful fist. That is the sick irony of the situation: that the analogy of the battlefield is inescapable, and we must find when and where the ends justify the means.

I do not, then, agree with neo-Luddites, who have more in common with the prosophobic Right than they would care to admit. Quite the opposite. If we can create a culture where our philosophic and our scientific progresses are paramount, we can achieve the socially-just, transhuman world we so desperately need in order to vindicate ourselves as a species. Already we can talk of germline engineering and celular manipulation of longevity in nature.

Vice-President Joe Biden posing with futurist
Steve Jurvetson, a photo that has disarmed my cynicism, however briefly.

I think this might be why I do a literature degree. Anarchy needs literature like birds need wings. There is something frightening and beautiful about both, which is why I was drawn to them. But in truth, anarchy is not alone in this respect. As Shelly put it:

"Reason is to imagination as the instrument is to the agent, as the body is to the spirit, as the shadow is to the substance."

"The great instrument of moral good is the imagination, and poetry administers to the effect by acting on the cause."

"Ethical science arranges the elements that poetry has created."

J.G. Ballard of course concurred but went a step further, saying that all fiction writers should be scientists. Whatever our political differences it might not be a bad thing to emphasise the things in life that matter, i.e. how we're all going to live together. Pride, partisanship and patriotism be damned if they get in the way. Long live science, literature and the arts. In my fictionalised review of the Sk-Interface exhibition I seemed justifiably frightened by a marriage of the three. But one guiding the other is probably not a bad idea at all, as long as that which is being lead does not fear rebelling from time to time: intellectual rebellion is the only way we truly advance.

Comics are still best when they're in print...

... Not on the big screen. And recently a lot of that has been down to one man.

Although I have always described myself as a comic book reader (can't stand the term "graphic novel," myself), I've become more of an Alan Moore reader in recent years. But his movements have been harder and harder to follow as he went from the truly shit but readily available Awesome line to America's Best Comics onto more independent publishing in an attempt to escape the ever pervasive mainstream comics limelight that has followed him since his blockbuster turns for DC in the 80s. It's not that I think he has diminished as a writer, but having to wait for the trade paperback of, say, Promethea, (you can fucking forget about getting a copy of Lost Girls for less that £30) at some point took over from the unfettered, instantly attainable jouissance of simply buying the latest X-Men or JLA comic and reading it from cover to cover. So, a few years ago now, I gave my wallet a break and transitioned back into the casual, mainstream comic world.

It wasn't a second honeymoon, largely due to my traditional willingness to give Marvel the benefit of the doubt over DC. I followed the Big M's major events and regretted it: Civil War, for instance, was an excremental excuse for a pile of super-fights, World War Hulk more of the same except even more nonsensical, sort of Greg Pak's childish way of getting back at all those Thor fans who have no doubt pointed out to him over the years that Hulk's warcry of being the Strongest One There Is is hyperbole by having him dick The Sentry. I read back a bit and caught Batman: Hush from the DC side, which helped me truly understand the special hatred resevered for Jeph Loeb (as if I was in any doubt, I did skim through Red Hulk recently. Gracious me). And Jim Lee's bulging torsos and gritted teeth reminded me why I stopped putting myself through this shit in the 90s. Soon, as the cynic inside me had anticipated, I longed for the complex reference structure of a V For Vendetta or the interesting mis en scene of a Watchmen. Or, at the very least, something grown-up but fun enough to keep me entertained, like Chris Claremont-era X-Men/New Mutants/Excalibur. After experiencing Claremont's New Excalibur debacle, I wasn't hopeful. The man should, frankly, be banned from writing comics before all my good childhood memories are erased.

However, it wasn't all doom and gloom. I knew at least I could rely on Grant Morrison. And I wasn't disappointed. His run on New X-Men was cruel and fascinating, siccing Cassandra Nova and an insane, drug-addicted Magneto on Charlie's loveable mutants (with Frank Quietly's artwork complimenting the dark tone perfectly). His Batman had its ups (I enjoyed the "Batgod," the Bruce Wayne with a plan for absolutely everything, he and Mark Waid have seemingly conspired on giving us over the years) and downs (Batman & Son being a tired retread of an Elseworlds story) but in Batman: RIP the series reached its creative zenith, a challenging, multi-faceted and hugely rewarding yarn that got as many people talking about Batman comics as any storyline since Knightfall, or perhaps even The Dark Knight Returns. And I've utterly devoured any issue of Final Crisis I've been able to lay my paws on, it being an event that has improved massively upon its predecessor and more than lived up to Crisis on Infinite Earths.

My point? Simply that it's so reassuring to find a media where craft and hard work brings in the dosh (DC has sold fantastically well this year during Morrison's free reign, but what else would you expect when Arkham Asylum is still the biggest selling Batman trade paperback of all time?), even if it is "only comics." Television has succumbed to cheap "reality-TV," pro-wrestling hasn't placed a real emphasis on quality since Giant Baba passed away, the best films are coming out of places like Thailand and are difficult to acquire, theatre is overly reliant on celebrity and even opera has me agreeing with Jonathan Miller that the establishment needs a kick in the pants. Everywhere, the Western superstructure is so weak you have to filter through so much crap before you find a diamond, except in comics, where Dulness, whilst undeniably present, is battled on an even economic field.

Having Superman's powers, a comic book genius-level
intellect and a snazzy green suit won't stop you
from getting fucking owned if you muck about
with the real deal.

I offer as defining evidence Morrison's All-Star Superman, which surpasses even Moore's Tom Strong and run on Supreme as a non-canonical reconstruction of the original superhero. After years of post-Crisis Superman playing second fiddle in terms of strength to the other JLA powerhouses like Green Lantern, Martian Manhunter, The Flash and even his own cousin Supergirl (yes, they'd all trounce Clark these days), it's incredible and heart-warming to see a return to the reverence that hasn't been offered to this character in modern times. Okay, so Supes isn't smashing through the time barrier on pure speed without breaking a sweat or closing a black hole with his bare hands like he did in the, ahem, good old days. But the reason the Richard Donner Superman (1978) is still the best superhero comic book adaptation is that it tempered that apotheosis with humour, and if anything, All-Star Superman plays these two elements in an even more convincing tandem. Whether he's effortlessly bicep-curling 20 quintillion tons or trouncing demigods at arm wrestling, you're in no doubt who is Superman and who is not. And I don't want to give anything away to people who haven't read it, but the true genius of All-Star Superman is in its metafictional revelation that a world without Superman could not exist: he would still have to be invented. That this is told in a way that incorporates directed panspermia and Nietzsche should make it irresistable, at least to anyone who shares my tastes.

So drool over The Dark Knight's Guignol acting, "wow factor" setpieces, political opportunism and blunt directorship only if you're starved for the real deal. End this one-for-me, one-for-the-studio director culture and remember that there's a reason comics are comics and not films: they really can play by different rules. And sometimes, just sometimes, you might get that tickle in your soul you got when Jean Grey died, that little tug that nobody from Ingmar Bergman to David Tennant's Hamlet to Coronation Street has been able to replace. Best attempted with a free Saturday afternoon and a beanbag chair.

Political life is a Cabaret, old chum

I think the main reason I like Cabaret (1972, Bob Fosse) so much is it's one of the few mainstream films that really seems to "get" fascism. Aside from that, of course, it's a fantastically choreographed film, with some inspired shooting; take, for instance, the scene in Max's blue room, where Max, from our perspective stealing Sally away with consumate ease, and Brian, seething with repressed emotion, are seperated only by an elaborate clock. Or the event of the old man's beating, interspersed with the entertainment being offered inside the Kit Kat Klub. Heavy handed as it may be, it forces us to confront whether enjoying escapism, however satiric, is ever justified in times of such political turmoil. The Nazis don't march into the film, they seep in, scene by scene, and by the time of the wonderful closing shot, we're almost wondering how it happened.

Which leads me back to my original point. In 1935 Walter Benjamin in his seminal essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction wrote: "Fascism leads logically to an aestheticization of political life." Off the top of my head I can think of no better representative scene than that in the beer garden. A young boy, beautiful, with blonde hair and blue eyes, leads a chorus of the uplifting lyrical song "Tomorrow Belongs To Me." The camera slowly allows us to discover his Nazi uniform, immediately distasteful to us with the benefit of hindsight but completely innocent within the context of the other singers. Only Brian, Max and an old man who has seen it all before refrain from partaking.

"NOOOO! Don't tarnish us with politics, too! Please!!"

I can't help but think that old man should be unnecessary today in our culture of immediate information access. But really, all one has to do is take a piece of right-wing literature and to replace "Muslim" with "Jew" and "terrorist" with "banker/communist" and you're well on your way to being back in the late Weimar Republic. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink.

Indeed, the word "terrorist" has undergone an interesting etymological change in recent years (it would be fairly clumsy to say since 9/11). Whereas it once meant, more or less, the process of intimidating a population or government by attacking non-combatants, it has now become almost exclusively a term for guerrilla warfare undertaken by Muslims. I have too often heard the term "Islamists" on television to attribute it to a mere Freudian slip for those who mean "Islamofascists;" it has now become an acceptable synonym in some sections of the media for Middle Eastern terrorists/insurgents. Among (I think it was) Wafa Sultan's claims were that Muslim/Christian violence and Muslim/Buddhist violence are both one-way streets, with the Muslims being the aggressors. This kind of wilful ignorance, that seems to have no knowledge of the Muslims who are beheaded in Indonesia or mutilated by the Lord's Resistance Army or who go missing every year whilst "in custody" in Burma, seems pervasive. I suppose all those Muslims in Srebrenica shot themselves to make the Christians look bad, too.

"Praise Jesus," said Ochola John, after being treated so nicely by the Christians.

Perhaps I am simply attacking easy targets. But it took what would in any other circumstances be called a war crime for many people to stop sympathising purely with Israel in the recent Gaza fighting. Even Gordon Brown called the deployment of white phosphorus on a UN humanitarian aid centre to be "indefensible." In my ongoing quest to be outraged, I am eager to read the response from Fox News. But whatever the swing in opinion, I doubt anything will be done. The aestheticization of politics was once done by uplifting music and patriotic propaganda, now it actively feeds stupidity with slogans and pervades the language like the virus once attempted by William S. Burroughs. According to Benjamin, the response from the left will be to politicise art. Expect my first book to be filled with subtexual vitriol.

Hitler: A Film From Germany

http://www.syberberg.de/Syberberg2/Hitler_full_eng_QT2.html

Like everything else, this is really just here for posterity. Widely regarded as Syberberg's masterpiece, H:AFFG's running time does seem a bit daunting but I have no doubt it's worth every minute.

Life in Salo

A casual glance at my previous blog entries reveals a disdain for the capitalist machine, the "liberal democracy," we find ourselves cogs in, so if I'm treading old ground forgive me. It has occurred to me again and again that perhaps the most distasteful operation of this mechanism is the system's pretence of arguing with itself. The difference between this and "totalitarian" states, it seems, is that in totalitarian states, the lack of democratic choice was blatantly transparent (and perhaps the fact our leaders have moved from the Kremlin to Wall Street). They never thought to set up something as insultingly partisan as Prime Minister's Questions to convince the public there were other options, for instance, but instead preferred childish scapegoatism of figures like Trotsky (famously parodied in George Orwell's Animal Farm) or Jews that were both bankers and communists. We have managed to convince ourselves that totalitarianism died and the liberal democracy triumphed at the end of the Cold War rather than seeing we are, as ever, living in the result of a non-impartial dialectic, the product of a patriarchal marriage. This reverse-nostalgia is potentially more damaging than it first appears.

Pier Paolo Pasolini's last film before his brutal murder, Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom, has been the subject of much discussion, debate, criticism, controversy and denouncement since its release in 1975. However, it has also long been hailed as a must-see film, and it absolutely is for any fan of film or philosophy (Roland Barthes, incidentally, collaborated on the screenplay, I believe). It is ostensibly an attack on fascism, specifically Mussolini's Republic of Salo, but we are led to believe it was banned (it was only compartively recently made available in the UK) for its obscenity rather than the fact it hits too close to home.

You may think that, by praising this film as I am about to do, I am being hypocritical. I did of course acrimoniously throw V For Vendetta's credentials as anti-establishment cinema out of the window because of how dated the establishment it was critiquing was. It is not a brave knight who thrusts his lance through the heart of a dead dragon. However, what sets Salo apart is that it's attack on Mussolini's dictatorship is actually a thinly veiled attack on what came afterwards in Italy: an embrace of capitalism. This is evidenced clearly by the shit-eating scenes, which Pasolini maintained was a metaphor for the consumer society's insatiable hunger for junk food. If the success of McDonald's has taught us anything, it's that if an authority tells you eating shit is a special treat, you will willingly buy and ingest massive amounts of it. The storytelling each evening by the three women, meant to titilate the captors and catives, seems obviously reminiscent of television (a medium which, unlike film, has never lived up to its potential and has utterly failed to retain artistic integrity, but that's a rant for another time). Also extremely relevant is the marriage scene, in which a boy and a girl are chosen for each other, wed and forced to copulate in front of the eyes of their libertine captors. When it is decided they are doing it wrong, the leaders forcibly insert themselves into the marriage bed. A more graphic summation of the recent Proposition 8 controversy in California could not be imagined.

The film then moves from clear fascism at the start (uniforms, marches, expulsion of religion) into the capitalist liberal democracy. The guards, who at the start were necessary to keep order, are seen in fewer and fewer number. Religion worms its way back in. The prisoners are praised, rewarded, allocated quantums of power. Just as we in the real world are encouraged to inform the government of benefit cheats, the captives save themselves from the wrath of the captors by snitching on each other's rulebreaking. The critic Geoff Andrew denigrated Salo and claimed it offered no insight into power or fascism because the captives willingly went along with whatever the libertines tried to force them to do; to me there could not be a more contradictory statement. What exactly do we do when reductions of our freedoms are proposed? We go out and vote for them. As Pasolini himself put it: "Fascism . . . had not been capable of even scratching the soul of the Italian people; this new fascism, armed with new means of communication and information . . . has not only scratched the soul of the Italian people but has lacerated, raped, and besmirched it forever.”

Life in Salo becomes easier and easier for the victims. By the time they're brutalised in the torture yard at the film's completion, there has not been a physical resistance to the system since a young girl desperately tried to break through a window at the film's start. Towards the end, the captives are willingly sleeping with the captors. They eat their own shit and joke about it. Any rebellion is quashed not because of the overwhelming physical presence of their captors, but because they turn against each other to cowardly re-establish the status quo. Physically, the libertines are weak, almost impotent and in smaller and smaller number. But now the guards are psychological ones and cannot be overcome, nor do the captives seem to wish to. If I believed in a fascist term like "human spirit," I would say that at this point it has been quashed as the human beings slip into servitude, little more than machines themselves. One is reminded of Baudrillard and Fukyama's passive embrace of "The End of History," (though I will say Baudrillard never seemed as fetishistic about this phenomena as Fukyama does) final stop to rebellions, idelogical clashes and revolutionary propositions of new world orders. If pigs could talk, like in Animal Farm, they'd be singing the praises of the farmer on the way to the slaughterhouse. We, it seems, are no different.

Beatrix Kiddo vs the Female Ubermensch

When Kill Bill was released in 2004, it was denigrated for lot of reasons. Some claimed it was too violent, others that it was a case of style of substance, yet more disliked the genre-splicing. Of course, it had its fans (I suppose I am one of them). The stylistic action and dialogue notwithstanding, many seem to agree with Tarantino himself when he described the project as a “feminist statement” and claimed it was all about “girl power.”

We’ve heard this shit before, of course. The Charlie’s Angels films too claimed to be about female empowerment regardless of the transparent appeal to adolescent boys. But unlike these degrading exercises in titillation dressed up as “feminist” films, the Kill Bill experience contains few if any instances of scantily-dressed females.

However, Kill Bill is still a deeply sexist film that reveals a lot about Tarantino’s mindset, beyond the usual blatantly obvious cult film geekery and foot fetish. The theme of male dominance in this film is absolutely overwhelming to the point where it’s almost impossible to believe any claim he made to the contrary. Yes, perhaps, on the surface, The Bride is physically dominant, able to dispatch hordes of male combatants with relative ease and is only in trouble in the first volume when she comes across another woman. However, she is only tough and empowered so long as she conforms to the male action hero archetype: a revenge-seeking, one-liner-dropping, martially-skilled, decisive, composed, pain-tolerant assassin. She first wears a yellow jump suit in order to be reminiscent of male action star Bruce Lee, and later adopts jeans, cowboy boots and a t-shirt.

Her other overwhelming character trait is an obsession with a man. It quite simply could not have been an accident that the centre of the film, the sun around which all the violent female planets revolve, is the eponymous Bill. Bill is the leader of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, the Bride’s targets and former peers, and it was he who selected their dangerous missions and presumably portioned out payment for. That he is perfectly analogous to a pimp is difficult to get around: women are (forcibly in the case of O’Ren Ishi, another supposedly “empowered” woman) indebted to him whilst he retains an air of cool, again archetypal with cultural depictions of pimps. Not, might I add, the first time Tarantino has stuck his oar into stereotypic black culture.

Tellingly, Bill's father figure, Esteban, actually is a pimp. Even more tellingly is that if the Bride is Uma Thurman's screen persona (that Thurman and Tarantino came up with the character together is suggested as much in interviews) then the supercool, comic-book referencing director-of-all-events Bill is so obviously Tarantino's. Where the power lies is never in doubt.

The film does not even continue its idea of only women being a threat to the Bride into the second volume. She is outsmarted and defeated in a humiliating manner by Bud, Bill’s slow-witted hick brother, before reminiscing about her defeat, humiliation and tutelage by her male mentor, Pai Mei (described indifferently as her “master,” ostensibly a reference to classic samurai/martial art revenge movies but functionally degrading). If the Deadly Vipers are the assassination equivalent of a brothel, Pai Mei is the captain of the ship the prostitutes are smuggled into the country on, and it is under him they learn how to please their predominantly male world. Pai Mei is utterly unbeatable in fair combat, and can only be overcome by the female treachery of Elle Driver, who poisons him. By the time we come to the climax, a thinly-veiled lament for father’s rights, the Bride is just about permitted to defeat a drunken, elderly and washed up Bill, and all pretences of feminism are in tatters. Her life, having up to now been defined entirely by Bill's actions, is now dedicated to raising Bill's child whilst Bill fades with Pai Mei into martial arts legend.

Kill Bill is not, though, an uncommon phenomenon in today’s society. At feminism’s start, it was required to define itself by male dominance in order to oppose it. But as we move closer and closer to a world of equal gender rights within the liberal democracy, the feminist movement has still not yet begun to define women by anything else than their male oppressors. There has, plainly speaking, never been a female Nietzsche. Nietzsche, you may remember, became famous for the statement “God is dead,” which was an avatar for the ubermensch, the next stage in man’s spiritual evolution. The ubermensch, as Nietzsche describes him in the seminal Thus Spoke Zarathustra (my first and still favourite work of philosophy), has overcome nihilism and is able to put together his own moral code completely undefined by any that had gone before or exists around him, specifically religion within the context. General cultural feminism cannot get to that stage of independent introversion and still clings to these male-defined female heroines such as the Bride. Most damning is the fact I hear a lot of women saying they came out of Kill Bill feeling strong and empowered and wanting to take up karate.

This may just be another case of Tarantino being a snake-oil salesman. But it may also be an intrinsic fault in the diamond that is feminist theory, a fault already noted by Third-Wave feminists or post-feminists who have been powerless to do anything about it. Even the attempted reclaiming of words like “bitch” and “whore” suggested by the likes of Inga Muscio has its origins in a male-defined worldview. Like in Kill Bill, women are still victims desperately trying to reassert control over their world, rather than true adventurers for whom the world is their birthright. Perhaps the first novel to concentrate on the plight of women was Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, the eponymous heroine of which is born not under a male thumb but in Newgate prison, the closest thing 18th century England had to limbo. Whilst her career is then based around the exploitation of men through sexual pragmatism and ethical survivalism, it’s worth remembering her voidesque starting point is somewhere she desperately doesn’t want to visit again, and thus being back at the beginning is the most she has to lose. There’s an attitude there that should be considered. Women should not consider themselves to be born from the head of Zeus but anywhere they damn please.

The rise and fall and rise and fall of Liverpool

British cinema has never been known for paying due respect to its home grown talent in the manner of, say, its French counterpart, but the extent to which Terence Davies has been maligned and forgotten about is more than just a little bit shocking. After testing the waters with his fondly thought of Robert Tucker trilogy in the seventies and early eighties, Davies exploded onto a nearly non-existent independent British scene with Distant Voices, Still Lives, a film that would be all but consigned to the dustbin of history were it not for the recently revived British Film Institute. Critical acclaim followed, the cheques didn’t, and soon the former dried up, too: The House of Mirth and The Neon Bible, Davies’ attempted comebacks, were met with derision and indifference.

Now Davies returns once more, to cinema and to his early themes of regional identity and homosexuality, with Of Time And The City. Functionally, Of Time and the City is a collection of documentary and news footage about Liverpool through the ages book-ended by a few cityscopes Davies has recently shot himself, a obvious departure from his narrative films. It’s fascinating that Davies, who has covered Liverpool so often in his works, would choose this as a format to pay tribute to his home town, and a cynic might read it as an admission that Davies no longer believes he possesses the deep filmic understanding and masterful cinematic hand required to live up to his previous opera. However, this is no easy way out (or easy way back in) Davies has attempted, no cobbling together of old newsreels set to self-congratulatory narration and snobbish music. Somehow, he has managed to assemble the clips into a portrait of his vision of an evolving and self-renewing place, in the documentary style of Humphrey Jennings’ Listen to Britain. We follow the development of Davies and Liverpool through the desperation of the 40s and 50s, the hopeful innocence of the 60s, the working class nightmare of the 70s and 80s to the revitalised city of today, and you feel nothing has been left unsaid. This is a work that speaks for generations, and yet seems deeply personal.

If it is a visual poem, it is Larkinesque, and an angry one at times. Davies unsurprisingly turns his witty vitriol (witriol? One to remember) on the Catholic Church ("Pope Pius XII, John XXIII, Paul VI and Clitoris the Umpteenth"), the monarchy ("the Betty Windsor Show") and the Thatcherite boot delivered to the working classes, but also attacks more unconventional targets. He speaks disparagingly about the rise of The Beatles, which to him represented the death of subtle songwriting (here I agree with him), and even admits he feels nostalgic for the Liverpool prior to its renovation. The illogic of this pining for times gone by is rendered impotent by a director so adept at capturing and reviving ephemera as Davies is, and we feel his opinions as though they are our own. His non-partisan integrity on these issues in the midst of the self-congratulatory Capital of Culture celebrations is nothing short of admirable. We have Sibelius, Bruckner, Mahler and The Hollies in place of John, Paul, George and Ringo, and instead of Patten, Henri and McGough, Davies quotes Marlowe, Houseman, Raleigh, Joyce, Shelley and Eliot. In a city that has long been so insular, defining itself by itself, this knitting of Scouse values and memories with universal writers and artists is deliciously refreshing.

At the tail end of a year where Liverpool has looked towards the future whilst Britain teeters on the precipice, this film was sorely needed, not just to document times that would have been more forgotten than Davies himself had become (perhaps this is why he feels such an affinity with pasttimes like going to New Brighton for a fun afternoon), but to reiterate the warning whispered by Distant Voices: the good times don’t last. But at least in the 80s, Liverpool was in no danger of forgetting itself. Can we still say that today? Hopefully, if this is Davies’ foot in the door rather than his career eulogy, yes. Technically brilliant, emotionally moving, Of Time and the City is required viewing for Liverpudlians, historians, political theorists, poets, philosophers and film fans alike.

Every Stone Left Unturned

I have been able to take time out of my lazy schedule to go to the cinema recently, which is just as well considering the amount of films that have been vying for my attention. Alexandra, Burn After Reading, Quantum of Solace... all three of these heavyweights were barely pushed aside by W., but were all massacred by Of Time And The City, the two I elected to see.

W. is empty, lazy entertainment. It has its strengths, most notably the performances of almost every actor in the film, most notably Toby Jones (Karl Rove), Jeffrey Wright (Colin Powell) and Brolin himself, but Oliver Stone permits nobody to rise above the level of caricature. Thandie Newton is certainly ugly enough to be Condoleeza Rice, but instead plays Bush’s PA, curiously going by the same name, and she might as well not be there. Ellen Burstyn is completely wasted on Barbara Bush. Richard Dreyfuss (Dick Cheney) and Scott Glenn (Donald Rumsfeld) are devious pantomime villains. And Ioan Gruffudd’s 20 second cameo as Tony Blair is borderline insulting. Whereas in real life, Blair was publically calling for “a long-overdue appointment” with Saddam Hussein as early as 1998 following the Nato-assisted fall of Slobodan Milosevic, in Stone’s world he is a weak English stereotype swiftly bullied into going along with the 2003 invasion (contrasted with the heroic refusals of Jacques Chirac and Vladimir Putin, the latter being made reference to in a scatological joke by the childish, tantrum throwing Bush) presumably after a brief stint playing quarterback for the London Silly Nannies. Truly, the only characters that escape with any dignity intact are Laura Welch (an uninspired Elizabeth banks) and Powell, although since both are defecated upon by their peers this may seem a contentious statement.

And what of Dubya himself? As noted by several other reviewers, here Stone has taken the easy way out. Instead of portraying him as a complex, intelligent individual who made the wrong choices for good or for bad, Stone has him pencilled in as the redneck buffoon he played in public. As hard as Brolin has worked to overcome his lack of immediate similarity with the President, all Stone’s graft has already been done by the real life Bush. This biopic is fun, but it is neither insightful nor realistic. Some vague idea that it was Bush’s Congressional District defeat to Kent Hance that inflamed his desire to not be “out-Christianed and out-Texaned” again may seem like a revelation to some, but this was a paraphrasing of the real-life Bush anyway. And that’s really where the film finds itself: educating to people who don’t follow politics, unimportant to those that do, and uninspiring for film aficionados. There are genuinely funny moments (“Wait, guys, I think we’ve missed the side road,” says Bush to his cabinet as they walk around the grounds to the Robin Hood theme, preparing for war) but this is a subject that needs to be tackled by a serious director, not the lazy, confused one Stone is.

A review of Of Time And The City is pending.

My cynicism takes a brief interlude

“Everybody knows the dice are loaded, everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over, everybody knows the good guys lost.”
- Leonard Cohen

I have in recent months criticised the simply abominable focus on race that both the American and British media are responsible for as per the US elections. However, even I have to admit, in the early hours of the day we Brits celebrate as Guy Fawkes Night, it was difficult not to be overawed with the American historical significance as for the first time in their history, the most powerful country in the world elected a black man as their leader.

The USA has always struck me as something of a missed opportunity. I am an admirer of the values it was founded upon, the contributions it has made to literature and the arts, and that it has always ostensibly stood for “something better.” But slavery and civil rights disputes always hung over what should have been the standard bearer for fairness and liberalism. It is one of the cruellest paradoxes in history that Thomas Jefferson, to whom so many of us owe our freedoms directly or indirectly, was a slave owner. And what of Lincoln? Anyone with a more concise view of history than “Lincoln freed the slaves” would be all the more cynical about America if these are arguably its two greatest presidents.

Then we had FDR. And the 60s, of course. And Dr King. But by the time of the Bush regime, through which the US has stumbled and its reputation cheyne-stoked painfully, the best we had to hope for was their promise of a post-Reagan compassionate conservatism (a promise that was never delivered on). It is ridiculous to mention the next president in the same revered or reviled tones as these men and I do not announce Mr Obama as a great president-elect. However, the significance of his victory cannot be undermined. The next day when the BBC chose to splice violent clips from the Civil Rights disputes with Jesse Jackson’s tears of joy at the announcement of Barack Obama’s win, it was impossible not to feel a certain euphoria.

This is not to say John McCain is a bad guy. His campaign has been criticised on one hand for not doing enough, and on another for being too negative (Christopher Hitchens, whom to my delight the BBC hired for their panel on Tuesday night, described it as something like disgusting). This is one of the reasons I predict that in 10 years if not before we will be talking about Rovian or post-Rovian politics, so it was refreshing to see that McCain and his allies, whilst not running the best or most gracious campaign, seemed to ignore almost every filthy tactic Karl Rove employed on behalf of George W. Bush. The fact McCain lost and Bush won, however, might serve as further endorsement of the ethics of the evil piggy-eyed shithead who has dictated US politics over the past decade. It is terrifying to combine this fear with the thought Sarah Palin is expected to run in 2012.

But, and this is the only time I will endorse this behaviour, let’s not allow cynicism about the future to cloud politics. My friend Pvt. Steven Hildreth supported John McCain and has vehemently opposed Obama (even denouncing him as a Communist), and on his blog can be read “R.I.P. the United States of America: 1776-2008.” In a way I agree with that epitaph. The racial debate may be far from over, but the United States have finally come full circle symbolically by doing something none of the white-dominated so-called European intelligencia countries have done: put their fate into the hands of a man from a minority. There is an oneiric quality to the fact that this has taken place so soon after 9/11, which some foresaw as the beginning of the end of multiculturalism.

Perhaps Barack Obama will not be able to deliver on his Achitophelian rhetoric. Perhaps he won because he is black, and we have traded one form of racism for another. Perhaps he has won on the strength of a catchphrase, namely “Change.” But an ideological shift has often benefitted the nation before. And after over 200 years of bigotry, unspent potential and broken promises, this finally felt like the good guys had won.

The Root of All Evil?

The most prominent critics of religion currently active roll off the tongue: Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, Harris, etc. I myself am often a critic of religion, but whenever I watch, listen to or read the works of one of these men, I never find myself in full agreement. Don't get me wrong, I respect some of them greatly. Hitchens I find an infinitely entertaining journalist and speaker. Professor Dawkins was kind enough to sign my copy of The Selfish Gene. But for me, religion's biggest crime today is the promotion of ignorance, not the causing of conflict, whereas the common assertion seems to be that everything from the Inquisition to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the Irish Troubles is in some way its fault.

The common response: what about Hitler? Stalin? Pol Pot? These arguments are, of course, deficient. At least on the surface. Totalitarian systems, and these included, so often exploit religious iconography and convention that to call any of these 20th century examples atheist would be absurd even before we look at the connections between Stalin and the Russian Orthodox Church, between Nazi-brand fascism and Catholicism. However, they were not theocracies, either: this I am sure we can agree on. But where do the similarities come from?

Watching 2001: A Space Odyssey is a fascinating experience as it charters man's regression through progression. We discover tools, yes, and use them to murder in order to master the world. In space we are infants once more, needing to be potty trained and taught how to eat and walk again. Finally, our tools rebel, and our next stage of evolution is into a state of innocence from rationality: we return to the Garden of Eden. Whilst nobody would pretend this is a realistic portrayal of man's evolution, it is at least a symbolically sound one. What's worth noticing in this instance is not the fact the Monolith inspired the apes to use tools, but that the film post-Monolith deliberately sets up a far clearer tribal divide between the species. The fight over the watering hole becomes more obviously a battle, with well-defined armies driven by testosterone and territorial awareness.

This pattern is recurrent throughout nature. Compare the ant colony or the wolf pack with a group of sports fans. They have no real discernible difference with fans of another sports club, yet meetings often erupt into disputes and even violence. I have often found myself making derogatory comments towards fans of Newcastle or Spurs, but what really separates us in general? Upbringing and location, and no more.

This should instantly remind you of nationalism and, of course, religion. Why? Because they are essentially the same thing. The belief that one thing is inherently superior to another because of personal affinity or kinship. The killing of something by a member of its own species may seem negative and deficient in an evolutionary sense, but this is simply a fire man had to stoke in order to master the world. Through loving one thing he neglects another, and through conflict he thrives. So many medical, technological and cultural advances could not have taken place where it not for this vestigial territorialism or tsambouka, of which nationalism, family, regional identity and religion all result.It is no wonder nobody can make up their minds whether the Israeli-Palestine conflict is a religious, cultural or territorial one: they are all essentially the same thing. We are misunderstanding when we hope for an IRA gunman to read Jesus' messages of peace. Do we really believe he will shoot someone for not accepting the succession of bishops, or acknowledging the divinity of the host? No. The words "Catholic" or "Protestant" or "Unionist" or "Loyalist" or "middle-class" or "Arab" or "kike" or "nigger" or "fag" simply mean "you're on the other team." They are the Other in the Lacanian sense.

This isn't a religious trait. Nor is it merely a human one. It is rather an animalistic attribute. Religion is simply one of the many excuses for this sort of behaviour. The irony is that in setting themselves up as separate (Dennett and Dawkins are patrons/founders of the Brights movement, an attempt to assign a positive moniker to atheism in the way that "gay" was to homosexuality) intellectually and philosophically, these "Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" are behaving in the same way. No, they aren't, as is often claimed by asinine critics, priests or prophets, but they are very proud of what sets them apart: McDonald's theology. As much as I like Dawkins and Hitchens, they more and more seem to fit G.K. Chesterton's description of "the village atheists shouting at the village idiots."