Bummer

Climate change deniers are like those kids back in the playground who were obedient and conventional but routinely and obstinately ventriloquised the most immoderate and contrarian views of their Dad when they felt the need to be provocative. They disapproved of the various models of rebellion displayed by other kids, such as the hard case, the early smoker, the incipient gay or bohemian and, as they neared school leaving age, had already begun assembling a wardrobe of corduroy, scarlet or mustard waistcoats, brogues and cravats (we’re talking the 50s here but every generation produces them). At university, having had heard about epigrams from their reading of the classics, they would, prematurely quinquagenarian, foist feeble and unworldly attempts at the form on their less demonstrative followers, who would bray. Some years down the line they would receive a few hundred pounds a pop for writing in newspapers what their Dad would have said about climate change.

The ‘debate’ has, mercifully, moved on in the last few months. The focus now is on identifying those countries whose emissions estimates are deeply flawed and whose reduction proposals are, therefore, devoid of realism.

After that will come the Bans. Nobody talks about them yet. The banning, for example, of driving, apart from essential services. The banning of international travel, apart from those journeys of international importance. The rationing of national travel. The electricity curfews – equivalent to war- time blackout regulations. The ‘lodger’ quotas, wherein households with spare rooms will be required to take in climate refugees. The rationing of foods and liquids whose scarcity can no longer be managed by mere astronomic price escalation.

Bit of a vote-loser. Sternness may have to be applied.

Bicycling will be allowed.

10.12.2007

But, anyhow

Barbara Campbell is an Australian artist who has been running the 1001 Nights Cast for, at the time of writing, 898 days. Barbara invites writers to accept an emailed ‘prompt’ in the form of a phrase taken from a news story published on the day of writing. The news story is usually about the situation in the Middle East but the writer can write about what they want. My prompt was ‘but, anyhow’.

I started writing at 9 pm, finished 90 mins later, forwarded it to Barbara, who was asleep, waited until she awoke then had the pleasure of hearing it performed live from Australia at 8.50 am, whilst watching a close-up of Barbara’s lips as she did it.

I’m story number 895 on the Archive page on the site. I’ve posted the text below, however.

Story #895

‘The point,’ gritted Tex, ‘is not to criticise another man’s Horse – that’s about the worst thing you could do in a standoff featuring the grinding  to a halt of the street of a town at dusk in order that old-school insultists can can cans of moths and sell them as a palate tickler prior to a facedown of pride, taut issues and general manly strength concerns.’

A hush fell down over the street – all kinds of citizens were present, not just guys with a grouse. You had folk there who thought little about transport – they had cars mostly and this whole Back to the Horse movement struck them as quaint but not unwatchable especially if you’d done the grocery shopping and were just aiming  along in an ambling saunter past lit bars and glimpses of the mountains.

‘That man called Tex,’ reasoned the passing Peter to his acquaintance Wendy, ‘is he, like, for the Horse in an animalist way, to replace roar with clip clop for health reasons or is it a more Reasonable type of thing where you argue coherently for the right for a person to say anything even if you hate what they say and actually harbour fantasies of violence against them which you would never act out because, like, to act out is not be confused with a good thing where you disinhibit, unrepress, exhold, unguard or dekeep?’

‘Peter, grow up,’ suggested Wendy. Peter’s eyes flicked tinily – it had been a while since That issue had been raised, and a good thing too, he was doing well and was actually beginning  to enjoy shaving. ‘Look what we have here: it’s sunset, the town is on a plain, strong pinks are tearing through the purple sky, terrific cars are rolling through with groceries and leisure goods, and damn me if Carl Perkins don’t trip on a spittoon and rend the velvet of his outfit which, it has to be said, is not so much practical as a weird, wax-haired, gold-toothed old guy with lavender spats and one of those shiny walking canes spun from black sugar kind of retired showbusiness thing. Can we fail to commiserate or do we say ‘Hey mister, with language  like that you’ll shrivel a stallion before you can grasp the pommel.’’

‘Pommel?’ pouted Peter. ‘Is that a small apple or a lady from Great Britain?’ Tex, up to this point calm, measured, even handed, not giving or at least showing side, overheard Peter’s petulant enquiry and felt his face taken by an expression. He had only moments ago made his Horse comment and had kind of expected the general nodding and uh-huh of assent that increasingly becomes the experience of communication for those whose qualities are so outstanding that everybody only ever asks them what they are doing now so all they ever talk about is themselves.  ‘Kid,’ Tex commented. ‘It’s an important part of a saddle.’

The smooth running saloons shifted uneasily, their whitewall tyres rolling in small segments. Electric windows were activated so that the in-car crowd could hear better. Radios were quashed and players were paused. But in a jalopy was an unworldly child: open, free, young, ungripped, loosely, uninked, a blank slate, a rased table. Turns to his Mummy and says ‘Maw, they’re out there, I can hear them, is what they say anything I should pay attention to?’ ‘Darling,’  murmured his Mummy, ‘Some big mens is just jousting. Ain’t nothing for which to get unduly exercised.’ ‘Maw, I cannot let men hurt each other,’ peeped the shrimp.

But anyway, after that young innocent articulated his attractive lack of the effete and the affected, a barely audible sigh lifted from the thrumming coupés and all manner of hardened, sclerotised, leathery, repugnant antipathies dissolved. Mister Ward and his icy wife. Miss de la True and her twin liars. Chalky Boteet and his enviable position. And others much in that mould. They all thought that the general combination of Tex’s dry if ponderous sagacity, Peter’s somewhat arsey twerpery, Wendy’s faintly hygienic clarity and the young unsmirched youngster’s emotional directness was very much like a novelty pack of greetings cards and had, I suppose, its uses but the overall impact was actually to reinforce rather than wonderfully bring about.

05.12.2007

Sub Urb

The World’s Largest Driving Simulator (2007), built by Toyota (take a ride here). Like the little sweet cake that precipitated seven volumes of Proustian reminiscence, this promotional item provokes memories of the early days of cyberspace when, post-Neuromancer (1984), the technophilic glossy magazine Mondo 2000 (1989) (also here) slid perfect-bound into the laps of those, including my eager self, enthralled by the promises of cyberculture.

Mondo was the best magazine in the world from 1989 to at least 1993, enjoying at its peak, a circulation of over 100,000. Wired magazine came out in 1993, presaging the corporatisation of cyberculture while failing to acknowledge its debt to the vigour, flair and innovation of its technohippie- VR-as-safe-drugspace predecessor. Mondo was daft, credulous but exhilarating.

So there you are, years down the line, having savoured or endured Neal Stephenson, The Matrix, Arthur Kroker, Howard Rheingold, Tron, Jaron Lanier, the Johnnies Baudrillard and Mnemonic etc etc and you’re in your Toyota in a Tronscape of traffic and roads, looking out of your car window at The Detail. Because that’s what it’s down to. It’s all in The Detail. Without The Detail you’re in a theme park ride whizzing past ghosts and castles that someone has daubed on a wall. And we’re still in the My Arse Era because My Arse has more Detail than the Toyotascape. My Arse, of course, being real, will always have more Detail.

So why would you want to live in a place like that? Why do people want to live in the side streets visible from the main drag of the Toyotronscape? Streets that somebody built on a computer last year? Let’s not bother to go into it all over again. They don’t want The Detail.

Eventually, of course, The Detail will be there. Look at the online virtual world that is Second Life (I have, it’s ridiculous). Imagine, in ten years’ time. It’ll be like a place. Oh shut up.

04.12.2007

Meat Rays beef cont’d…

Further to my piece of the earlier instant, there are only two ways my sandwich could have infected Joe’s sandwich. The first way involves inter-sandwich contact, a scenario in which I place my meaty sandwich not merely on Joe’s plate but actually brush or collide with his lettuce sandwich. Beef atoms in the vicinity of the surface of the sandwiched beef are transferred to the surface of either the bread or the lettuce of the resident sandwich. it must be said, however, that lettuce atoms, in such a scenario, are also transferred to the surface of my meat. You don’t hear me whining about that, by the way.

It is, I will concede, possible that if the two opposed sandwiches were placed very very close to each other but not touching then atoms of beef might, willy nilly, ‘jump’ from one platform to the other. And vice versa, not that you’ll catch me snivelling about it. In the phenomenon of radioactivity, for example, we see hyperactive surfaces that can barely contain their vaporish exuberance. In the more depressed world of the placidly surfaced everyday item a more languorous local effervescence will take place.

But these fundaments of physics and chemistry should not be used as an excuse for Going Mad and shouting things like “But man, the whole Universe is vibrational! Everything is connected by wave forms in a continuum! Everything has its distinct wave form and this can be seen in its aura which you can see if you’re ready to see or happen to have a Kirlian camera! That’s why Jesus and the saints in paintings have plates behind their heads! They’re not plates! They’re their auras! That’s how spiritual they are! They’re giving it off! Like beef does!”

It’s not necessary to carry on like that.

23.11.2007

Tat Tittle

How can straight men look at men’s bodies in a way that is not gay but is gay? One solution is offered in David Cronenberg’s current “Eastern Promises” in which the hypermanly milieu of Russian mafia in London becomes a site for the covert but comfortable inspection of Viggo Mortensen in his pants and without his pants.

In one scene the muscular actor, his body marked by criminal tattoos that denote, like badges, his affiliations and achievements, is seated, in his underpants, before a crescent of very tough men who are assessing him for induction to their inner circles of badness. The tough men, none of whom you would want to quiz on his sexuality unless you were passing by in a speeding car, study Vig dispassionately yet approvingly. They like what they see but they are seeing as specialists, not gay men. They do, however, create a licence for looking at Vig. The logic seems to be ‘Well, if these fucking hard cases can look at him in his pants then no one is going to criticise us for doing the same.’ The violence of the mafia men insulates the straight male viewer from the destabilising effect of his own sexualised gaze.

In another scene, the pants are off and the violence is extreme. Viggo is attacked in the Turkish baths by two besuited Chechen lunks who pound the shit out of his naked body. He fights back, blow for blow, and his body is seen from a variety of angles, some of which involve full-on cock or arse shots. Finally Vig wrests a curved bladed knife from one of his attackers and drives it deep into his eye, thereby rather abruptly tranquillising him.

And we get to look. And it’s okay because: it’s so violent that a sexual dimension is unthinkable (but it isn’t really); Viggo consistently resists the forcible assault; Viggo punishes his assaulters severely; Viggo’s character Nikolai is, in the baths scene, thought by the Chechens to be another character, the mafia boss’s son Kirill. Given that Kirill is thought to be (and may be) gay by the rival hoods, the mistaken identity element works to reinforce the non-homosexuality of Nikolai. Similarly, our knowing that the Chechens are homophobic helps to innoculate them against being seen as opportunistic pervs.

The muffling, obscuring, redirecting or diverting of the potential for homosexualisation of the male viewer’s viewing is hardly a novel operation in the movies. One of the reasons it obtrudes in ‘Eastern Promises’ is that, while the film is pleasingly tense and gripping (and violent), it’s very hard to say what it’s actually about. It appears to have no subtext that the director might have wished to promote – there are no social issues of any substance aired, no moral messages are delivered. This sounds like a description of that contentious quantity ‘pure entertainment’. If this is the case then the purity functions to mask what some would regard as an impure invitation.

23.11.2007