Prelude

Prelude.

You sit in the corner of a dark stone room. It is square and cold, fifteen foot along each wall and seven foot high. A strip light infrequently flickers from a central position, revealing snap shots of human bodies all in a frenzy, all lying on the floor; twenty five or thirty men and women in evening wear and bathrobes, caught in the sharp light, their positions grotesque, their movements spasmodic, all intoxicated on a private mania. The smell of fried steak and old curry fill your nose, and the moans of the mad and shrieks of the terrified rebound to your ears.

Here in the corner, on a solid plastic chair, you sit folding A4 pages of plain paper in perfect halves, filling a ledger as you go. Everything is taken into account, laid out line by line in this leather bound book. Its weight on your lap and your certainty of purpose gives the cool feeling of calm, feeding your fingers and arms like spring wine. Edge to edge the paper folds and the bodies disappear; the ledger is filled and the light becomes constant. The work complete, the room evaporates, you burn the paper and the wind blows.

It’s Not Right: Joe McCarthy and BBC Cronyism

Listening to “McCarthy: The Reds Were Under the Bed” on Radio 4, I found myself somewhat shocked. I do not often find myself jolted by such things, but this was too much; here was a program that was actually telling me that Joe ‘the drunken witch hunter’ McCarthy was right. This program wanted to tell me his wild accusations that every other mother’s son in the American government of the 1950’s was a communist have been proven true by recently released documents. Never mind that the most persuasive argument the program presented arose from evidence disseminated in 1995.

The program sets out to vindicate Joe McCarthy, ignoring how his unfounded accusations ruined people’s lives and has forever muddied the waters in the American psyche so that many do not know the differences between a liberal, a socialist and a communist.

Of the list of names that McCarthy claimed were all communists, or sympathisers or ‘fellow travellers, one contributor claims “It’s like the Rosetta stone”. The justification of this was that the FBI had files on those people and they were suspected of communist sympathies in the Second World War.

Claiming that suspicions raised ten years beforehand by the world’s most paranoid intelligence entity were evidence of a massive communist infiltration seemed to be a bit of a stretch, to me at least. But it was when the presenter, David Aaranovitch, said “Some say” that I became really interested.

The expression “Some say” is used on the Rupert Murdoch run ultra-right-wing dystopian future fascist propaganda channel ’Fox News’ as a way of introducing the presenter‘s ‘spin‘ on a subject, whilst still giving the appearance of fairness. For example: “President Obama took a bath this morning. Some say he bathes in child’s blood, lambs tears and pornography.” There is no claim of any basis for this version of his bathing habits, they just get the unfounded accusation in and move on. On Fox there is a drip-drip of this paranoia-inducing journalistic malpractice throughout the day.

I got a first hand dose of that stuff here in Foggy Albion when Aaranovitch blandly stated: “Some say the (US) government in 1945 wanted to downplay any apparent evidence of communist infiltration so as not to upset their ally, the Soviet Union. Also, the evidence of pro-Soviet influence… was obtained illegally through wire-tapping and burglary, tactics that would have prevented a conviction and would have been politically embarrassing.”

That is a lot of information all coming from under the gnarled wing of ‘some say’. It certainly does not contain any reference to who is ‘some’, nor does it make any sort of case for what constituted the communist ‘influence’.

Shaken by this lazy, sloppy, editorial sleight-of-hand I decided to find out who was responsible for the program and started getting to know Juniper Productions. According to linked-in, they are a three person outfit with one follower (Jesus, I’m down as a waiter and I have more than that). Digging deeper, I found an article by Andrew Pierce and Heidi Blake of the Telegraph, dated 19.7.09, entitled ‘BBC in cronyism row over paying 1.2 million in fees to family members’. It begins:

“The lion's share was taken by Samir Shah, a non executive director of the corporation, whose production company Juniper Communications was paid £715,000 last year. Mr Shah, who owns 70 per cent of Juniper, is paid £35,000 as a member of the BBC executive board which oversees the corporation's management and directs its editorial output.

“The payments to Juniper will also further enrich the family of Jana Bennett, the BBC head of Vision, who is tipped to be the first woman director general of the corporation. Miss Bennett's husband Richard Clemmow owns 10 per cent of Juniper. Last year Miss Bennett was paid £535,000 by the BBC.”

So Mr. Shah is on the BBC’s executive board and he directs editorial output? No wonder this program was in the headline banner of the BBC homepage. Further investigation turned up another dirty nugget, this time from Tom Harper of the Mail on Sunday, dated 6.9.09:

“Dr Shah’s firm was paid £308,000 for the My Story clips featuring TV fashion expert Gok Wan, comedian Sanjeev Bhaskar and paralympian Dame Tanni Grey-Thompson. However, an investigation into the deal, passed to The Mail on Sunday, found the original budget for the films was just £30,000.

“The 34-page report also reveals that another unnamed production company submitted a significantly lower offer to produce the films. A senior EHRC source said that bid was ‘around £55,000’.”

‘Juniper Communications’ has disappeared, but ‘Juniper Productions’ seems to have taken its place, after a quick clean-up operation and a fairly unimaginative re-naming. The ‘linked-in’ page for Juniper Productions describes the company as producing “Historical Audio Media Music Productions for Broadcast” (lol) and the link listed as ‘homepage‘ led to http://rayteret.com/, a page trying to hawk some flea-bitten and filthy ‘how to become an entrepreneur’ DVD.

So, how do you become an entrepreneur? It’s easy if you know people who will give you licence-fee money with no questions asked. Should nothing else come up, £715,000 will keep you well oiled for the next year, then change the company name and repeat. Hilariously, rayteret.com recommends getting to grips with the web as a tool for professional advancement, and yet their own linked-in page and wider web-presence is a pitiful joke; I could find nothing on facebook, myspace or twitter.

Nietzsche said ‘monstrum in facie, monstrum in animo’ meaning that if what you present to the world is rotten, then so too is your soul. This is my central point: that this program does a sub-standard job by presenting a frighteningly two dimensional view of the McCarthy trials. Juniper Productions are commissioned to do so, not because they are a genuinely respected company, but because they know the right people. The air-waves are polluted with this vacuous garbage in the guise of intellectually diverting programming because the people in charge of the BBC believe ‘jobs for the boys‘ is a valid hiring policy.

Production companies that legitimately sought BBC funds to produce programming were ignored in favour of the friends, relatives and even companies of the board. As a result we got at least one program that was misguided in its central premise that McCarthy could ever be proven right; he cannot.

It was never whether there were communists on capital hill that gave McCarthy his bad name; instead it was his manner, his wild and unfounded allegations, his demagoguery that was his crime. The spy game goes on and will always go on and it was ever thus, but accusing people with no evidence, or evidence that you refuse to reveal, of plotting to ‘infiltrate’ the position they possess, that is McCarthyism.

Whether or not one or other person actually is a communist, it was the perversion of the judicial process that defined his campaign not as lawful trials or even as an anti-communist crusade, but as witch hunts. In a witch hunt; the evidence is inaccessible, the accusations are only offensive to the ignorant and the suspicion of guilt is equal to a conviction in the mob’s eye. That was the injustice of Joe McCarthy; he can never be vindicated.

It should be no surprise, however, that a production company receiving BBC commissions through cronyism could not see that it was justice herself who McCarthy offended: they have forgotten that process matters and would rather not think about such abstract things as justice, fair-trading, right and wrong. Juniper Productions are doomed to be capable only of soulless garbage because if for a moment they were possessed by the kind of self-reflection necessary for quality programming then the blackened wastes of their hearts might awake in them and, for a moment, they might feel the ego-crushing shame of realising that they are an edifice of contemptible air, farted from the arses of undeserving, aristocratic parasites.

realisations of worthlessness

Myspace is Bedlam by M.C. Escher, administered by Franz Kafka's worst nightmare.

I want to change the background, so I search for ways of doing so. I am directed to a page that doesn't exist and, when I find its replacement, the code I'm directed to input there doesn't change the background, but it does depopulate the music player.

Hastily deleting the code I am chided by myspace by the player remaining empty.

I leave the page alone and the songs come back, but I still want to change the background, so I try to upgrade to myspace 2.0, and to do so I am directed to a page that doesn't exist and my songs are, unaccountably, deleted once more.

Defeated, hopeless, questioning my every move, I recognise now that it is I who was wrong for wanting my background changed; I arrogantly presumed that my will should be expressed rather than annihilated, mocked and subsumed by the far greater will of the myspace platform. I only hope that, by this admission, they will see fit to allow my songs to once more populate the player. I promise never to try, never to investigate and never to think of customising my myspace page ever again.

Re-posted from my myspace blog. Read more:http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.ListAll&friendID=231390149#ixzz0u7VDZml1

Yammer, stammer, button and glue

Liam Stranger showed up on my doorstep yesterday afternoon. It was just the thing; I had descended into listening to Test Match Special and playing computer games and instead I spent the day talking and throwing some ball in the park with beer and cigarettes like all the other bums (except I catch one handed and throw like a demon; Liam has a weakness under the high ball and surprisingly poor hand-eye coordination for a master martial artist).

It was good to talk; I don't really talk to anyone much and have got quite out of practice, which seems strange to say, but you have to think pretty quick to form complete sentences, especially when you're trying to express thoughts any more complex than the simple requests and questions which form the bulk of my communication with the outside world.

I have been thinking about trying to strike up meaningful vocal congress with a guy at work called Charles, who seems to bring two different books to work each day and in the awful 'breaking the ice' bit of the introduction, where we were required to draw pictures of things we liked, he drew T.S. Elliot and Nabokov high-fiving, which has to count for something. But I've never liked talking to people, and besides he seems a bit crazy ~ all right; the only reason I say that is because he holds the phone to his ear with his shoulder which may not seem strange ~ the thing is, we're wearing headsets.

Sure I could visit Bird more often, but I never know when would be bad or good because they work strange hours and there always seem to be something and then there's the hill which wipes me out by the time I get up there. I do talk to Scarlett plenty, but our forms of expression are frequently littered with short-cuts other's can't understand and long soliloquies others don't have the time for. And I don't have a phone. (zero phone ~ none).

Talking more might make me happier, but it could also lead to unwanted friendships and awkward silences. Thales, the Greek philosopher, refused to marry and have children because he couldn't bear the idea of caring for someone so much. I should stop making excuses and just do it.

David Cameron now commands less authority, less legitimacy and less popularity than John Major did at his lowest ebb. Traditionally, incumbents only lose support, but it's hard to imagine how one can go down from auctioning off cabinet posts to the third party in the hope that their back-benchers will vote against their own consciences.

There are those who wonder why people of my generation are disillusioned with politics: they ignored us when we took to the streets in our hundreds of thousands against the Iraq war, they blamed us for breaking Britain, saddled us with mind-boggling debt, then they said "There's no jobs, son, you're out of luck" quickly adding "now move out of your parents and get off benefits, you're a sponge" and now Clegg woos us only to submit sickeningly to an Etonian slug and his party of cannibalistic lizards.

One can only guess at the grand perversion of the initiation ceremonies that have exhausted the Lib Dem leadership since election night as they have pawed, sucked, grimaced and flexed their way to some hollow facsimile of the taste of power. Their every spasm, their every whimper, their every submission a betrayal of every voter who, disillusioned, cast their lot for the unsullied idealists.

We were wrong to believe.

A breakdown of my thinking for tomorrow's elections:

Tories: toxic for those who are victims of recession, bad luck, bad health or bad treatment. If you've got a safe job you might pay a bit less tax - otherwise, you'll find everything gets more expensive as an old Etonian plays make-believe economics and tries to socially engineer a world he simply is not acquainted with. Was once stuck behind Cameron in the queue at Boots - he's not a confident or commanding chap, though I don't doubt he's nice enough; overly self-aware, uncomfortable in his own skin, louder than he thinks he is. I sympathise, but I'm not impressed.

Labour: took us into Iraq, a war that has a cost countless innocent lives (a hundred thousand? a million? I hear different figures), because a failed Texan oil man wanted to retire comfortably. I'll never forgive that raft of lies and scaremongering. In addition, their leader was the chancellor who presided over our worst financial meltdown in seventy years. No-one understands the tax code, no-one understands the benefit system, no-one believes a word they say. Tired government with no will left to reform, thus they are the safest vote.

LibDem: OK, maybe they have chance now, but when they wrote their manifesto, when they formed their vision of what a LibDem UK would look like, they didn't seriously believe they'd be implementing it. I predict that chaos will reign as one ill-conceived, costly program after another falls DOA into the exchequer's expanding deficit. The party of Lembit "I'm with a cheeky girl" Opik, Charles "One for the road" Kennedy and Nick "Comfortably Dull" Clegg.

Greens: Single issue, fuck the mainstream, protest vote. At least I live in Brighton Pavilion, so it will count - unlike everywhere else.

Duel Pizza Showdown

Two for one at Dominos and 2 for five pounds red wine from Smokemart last night and this morning my living room is unliveable. First thing: change that. I boil water while I tidy and wash - not because I need it, but because the purity of the steam rising from the kettle acts as my idol, my ideal, my inspiration. Clean water is steam; clean living room is liveable; clean dishes glow; clean glass is perfectly transparent; all will be vaporous silk.

Avatar

Saw the new "Titanic Director James Cameron" movie, Avatar, last night. It was spectacular and must have cost a huge amount to realise, but my overriding feeling is that it was cheap in its heart. The whole experience was one of raw emotional manipulation and shallow posturing. Though the visual affects were gorgeously smooth, like luxurious chocolates served in a palace of pearls and gold by a waitress clone of Angelina Jolie, in a room full of guests invited from the pages of Grazia, the plot was a cheap rip-off of Rocky IV; the conversation also from Grazia.

I understand! The way these films work is entirely formulaic: you introduce the characters, (optional montage), the good guys get a whooping (Apollo Creed/The Na'Vi), then there's a montage (non-negotiable) after which 'The Big Fight' ensues and just when it looks like the good guys are never going to make it, Ivan Drago gets knocked out and Rocky makes an impassioned speech about brotherly love and thawing cold-war relations.

Everybody cheers.

There is nothing wrong with this formula. It has worked time and time again. Why? Because I can understand Rocky - his pain is my pain, his victory is my victory. It works in Avatar. But it works too damn well.

Most people know something about the plight of Africans, Native Americans and Australian Aborigines during the several hundred years of awful persecution under 'Enlightenment' Europe. The Native Americans and Aborigines have all but disappeared as cultures. This, if you need to be told, is a real tragedy. It is their plight that Avatar replays, albeit with lanky blue giants on an alien planet.

So the Na'Vi are Rocky and Apollo Creed, right? Well, no. I can wrap my head around the pain of a guy getting hit - I can't bear the agony of the destruction of an entire culture. We are invited to witness their genocide and root for them against a cartoon Colonel. I felt like I was being torn apart - it is simply an unconscionable set-up. It's too much. It's like Cameron doesn't understand his subject matter enough, or doesn't trust his audience to understand it, so feels it necessary to labour the obscene tragedy as heavily as it could ever be laboured. It's too much.

The best period of the movie is the development of the relationship between the lead characters at their world. The exploration of the Na'Vi mythology and the beautiful sights we're treated to are a real pleasure to witness and held my interest almost completely. Then again, I studied religion.

We are introduced to this beautiful world to woo our sympathies in a cynical and cheap effort to crush us when that world is defiled and destroyed. That this is affective is not in doubt. It's just not right.

James Cameron makes me sick.

At the end of Avatar you're left with nothing else to chew on except the cold, calculated manner in which you've just been manipulated and the crushing inevitability of the sequel. You haven't been taken for a thrill ride, you haven't been given a transcendent experience, you know yourself no better; you're just poorer by the price of a ticket and the time in your evening.

The movie sums its self-centred nature up in its final moment, when the word 'AVATAR' is splayed across the screen in giant green letters.

Cheap expensive cynical beautiful manipulation for soul-dead eco-conscious mooning tragi-junkies. And not a patch on Rocky IV.