You, me and Bernie? Where would we go, Verna? Niagara Falls?

Court philosopher to The Huffington Post Bernard-Henri Levy was exposed as a fraud on French television yesterday after quoting a fictional philosopher in defense of his book on Immanuel Kant. According to The Times Levy had not checked his sources before writing the book and was unaware that Jean-Baptiste Botul (founder of the, heh, botulism school of criticism) was a fictional character and an elaborate literary joke, something he would have discovered if he'd spent two seconds looking him up on wikipedia. The Times has the whole story here.

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I've been annoyed with Bernard-Henri Levy for quite a few years now. I studied philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition which is short on rhetorical flourishes and heavy on sourcing, formal logic and analysis. The French "philosophical" schools of the 1960's onwards with their incomprehensible Marxist/Hegelian/Habermasian dialectic are to my mind largely worthless verbiage. Bernard-Henri Levy is not the most ridiculous of the philosophes but he is the most famous. Charlie Rose has a man crush on him and he regularly pontificates on The Huffington Post about things he knows very little about. The only book of his I've managed to read all the way through was American Vertigo, a sociological examination of US life and manners. I hated it and was quite pleased when Garrison Keillor did a controlled demolition job in The New York Times. I don't like to see a man, any man, kicked when he's down but Bernard-Henri Levy's weasel worded defence of Roman Polanski in various media was something of a last straw for me. No Bernard, Polanski wasn't guilty of "sexual misconduct" or the victim of a "Puritan witch-hunt" he raped a 13 year old and it probably wasnt the first or the last time either.

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If you want to read a real philosopher, try a different Bernard, the late Bernard Williams whose short essay Which Slopes Are Slippery? is more interesting than anything Bernard-Henri Levy has ever written. And if you're looking for some good, solid philosophy try this hippy dude at Yale who also talks a little about my boy Bernie Williams near the end.

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On a slightly related subject here's a nice recent article by the BBC's Paris reporter wondering why Parisians are so bloody rude.

Pick Me Out A Winner Bobby - The Best Sports Movies Ever

I went to see Invictus yesterday. It wasn't bad. Matt Damon was about a foot too small but I dug his accent and his ball greediness, so typical of a flanker desperate to get all the glory while prop forwards do all the work. Anyhoo, it wasn't a classic. If I remember rightly the South Africans were the favourites to win that world cup and really how can you make a sports movie about the favourites? Still it gave me an excuse to have a think about my top sports flicks of all time and here for your edification is my list:
#14 Slap Shot - one of the few sports movies written by a woman (Nancy Dowd). The Hanson (Carlson) brothers are the standout.
#13 Rudy - My recollections of this film are hazy but I seem to remember this dialogue: "Oh Mr Frodo, sir, let me carry it for you. Please (sobbing) please Mr Frodo, please."
#12 Dodge Ball - that Rip Torn cracks me up. Here he is again hitting Norman Mailer with a hammer.
#11 Pride of the Yankees - Lou Gehrig gives his "luckiest man" speech at Yankee stadium, grown men weep.
#10 Gladiator - Boy was I surprised, I thought Commodus was going to win in the arena only to be strangled later in his bath by the wrestler Narcissus.
#9 Rocky - I'm not a big fan of boxing movies, hence no Raging Bull, but in Rocky I really like the stuff in the pet shop, the unorthodox training, the yelling of the word "Adrian" and the fact that (spoiler alert) he loses.
#8 Escape to Victory - I'm only including this because Pele is in it.
#7 Hoosiers - the movie that somehow makes basketball seem interesting.
#6 Bang the Drum Slowly - De Niro, baseball, death. And jokes. (Nah only kidding, no jokes).
#5 Field of Dreams - That penultimate scene - grown men weep again.
#4 Chariots of Fire - duh duh duh duh duhh duhhhh, duh duh duh duh duhhhh etc.
#3 The Natural - Someone read the book and decided to remove all the cynicism and cast uber WASP Robert Redford in the scrappy Roy Hobbs role. Still, "knock the cover off the ball, Roy" and "pick me out a winner, Bobby" get me every single time.
#2 Breaking Away - bicycling in a big circle 500 times. No really. Oh and yeah its one of the best films of all time.
#1 Bull Durham - Maybe now Costner and Sarandon will get together just like in the movies.

On The Road Again

With the Australian release this week of the new Cormac McCarthy film The Road, I thought I would re-repost my review of the book from January of last year....

You always know how a Cormac McCarthy novel is going to end. The strong man will vanquish the weak man. The man more versed in knife fighting will best the novice. The man with the shotgun bandoleer will save the child of the man armed only with an empty pistol. The bald headed immortal will kill the illiterate wastrel who is the witness to his crimes. And it's always men doing the killing. Women seldom appear and when they do they're usually doing the dying or being fought over like heroines of the silent screen.
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I've been reading Cormac McCarthy since the 1980's when I discovered Child of God in high school. I tore through his Tennessee novels and his Texas novels and his crime novel and at the weekend I finished his science fiction novel The Road. I've had misgivings about McCarthy's plots before (I've never liked the scene where they make gunpowder in Blood Meridian) but never about his prose. McCarthy writes as though its the 1640's and he's a pamphleteer warning a nervous populace that the apocalypse is imminent. His words are careful, atavistic, beautiful. His sentences are as crisp as haiku, his chapters as epic as Miltonian books.
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The Road begins seven or eight years after a comet has struck the Earth. Society everywhere has collapsed. Chaos reigns. And by chaos I mean cannibalism, slavery, murder, rape; the only organisation that seems to exist in this entropic, Hobbesian war of all against all is from isolated bands of anarchists who may or may not be benign. Into a wasted landscape (where photosynthesis has ceased and most animal phyla are extinct) a man and a boy are heading south before the brutal winter comes. The man can barely keep going, but he has to as the boy's mother has cut her throat in despair not too long before the book begins. The weak mother has failed her child but the resourceful father will not give up. In wonderful scenes he finds hidden springs, apples from an orchard, an old can of Coke and fuel for a fire. He gives everything to the boy and they dodge marauders and enslavers and those terrifying cannibals.
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The story is as harrowing as any Cormac McCarthy novel since Outer Dark but the prose is just as carefully wrought as his previous works. McCarthy thinks long and hard about how a word will sound in a sentence and if the word doesn't quite work he'll find a better one. I listened to The Road as an audiobook and there were times when it was like being privy to some secret ceremony in which magic spells were being chanted for my ears alone. Often the book would get too much and I'd have to unplug my iPod and listen to the silence for a while.
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Having said that though, I knew how the story was going to finish - though it (spoiler alert) turned out to be the Far From the Madding Crowd in McCarthy's rather Hardyesque universe. And of course all of my problems with McCarthy the artist are still there. The urban is disdained, the rural worshipped, women in The Road are the strange, enfeebled creatures beloved of patriarchal religion, while the male lead is the strong, silent type who - of course - is good with his hands. Mussolini would have enjoyed this book and doubtless The Road is a best seller among survivalists. No, Mussolini isn't quite the person I'm looking for. Nietzsche is closer to the mark - the great German prose stylist par excellence who also dismissed women, townies, the weak and people who talked too much; McCarthy - in a different branch of Germanic - treads through similar terrain. Although he's probably America's greatest living novelist with more poetic depth, lyricism and psychological insight than his contemporaries, his adulation of strength does get a bit wearisome after a while and I can't even imagine what the poor love thinks of a film like Brokeback Mountain. I do recommend The Road (and the other McCarthy novels) but I was quite relieved when it was over and as an antidote I watched Annie Hall - there the guy doesn't quite win either, but he doesn't have to hit anyone to show that he's a man; and he's funny.

Au Bout de la Terre in Vancouver

A couple of years ago I went to Vancouver to do a little thing on William Gibson. The William Gibson thing didnt come to pass but I hung out for three days had a very nice time. I got a deal on Orbitz and stayed at the Pan Pacific for 1 dollar a night and the view I had from my room was spectacular, looking down on flying boats landing in the bay. I had great breakfasts and fantastic fish meals in the evenings and I went to a donut factory for lunch. I took a kayak tour of the city and went running in the gorgeous Stanley Park. On my third and last today I took the bus out to UBC to see the campus and some locations for Battlestar Galactica (yes I know you dont even need to say it). I walked around UBC for a few hours and then I discovered a trail down to the sea. It was quite stormy and I found myself on this windswept place called Wreck Beach. The visibility was extraordinary. You could see all the way up to the mountains in the north, in the far west Vancouver Island and in the south almost down to Puget Sound. The sky was blue and it was cold and the beach was littered with big trees from the forests further up the Inland Passage. I stayed there alone watching the sun set over VI and the Pacific. It was extraordinary and peaceful and as close as I've ever gotten to any feeling of transcendence on this Earth.

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I flew back to Denver and told the wife and said she had go to Vancouver and especially to Wreck Beach. She went in June, stayed at the Pan Pacific ate at the fish restaurants, ran in Stanley Park, took the kayak tour. I begged her to go out to UBC and down to Wreck Beach and as soon as she got there to call me and talk to me about it. I was so excited waiting for her call, because I wanted her to experience the same feeling of transcendence that I had had and to get a bit of it back myself. She went to UBC, then to Wreck Beach and then she called me. "Well, how was it?" I asked. "Fine," Leah said. "Fine? Fine?! What do you mean fine," I said. She hesitated. "What is it?" I asked. "It would have been great but for all the penises," Leah said.

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You see Wreck Beach is a nude beach and on that particular June day it was full of creepy swinger dudes with chest chair and medallions who had all walked over to Leah to say "hey baby" and stuff like that. Yikes. But it demonstrates what Thomas Wolfe rightly pointed out a long time ago "you can't go home again, asshole, you can't go home again."

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(I think the title of this blog post is a double entendre in French Canadian but if it doesnt work somebody please let me know.)

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And for those of you looking for my review of Garry Disher's latest you can finally read it here. (I'm chuffed about the Blade Runner ref that I snuck by the sub editors).

We're Not Saying You Had To Be An Idiot To Have Liked Avatar, But...

I like to think that I began the Avatar backlash back in August four months before the film actually came out. So its nice to see that while the movie has become the most successful motion picture of all time the group of people who are least won over by its alleged charms are the science fiction geek community who expect more from their films than our non geeky brethren walking the streets. Geeks were the first ones to spot the Dances With Wolves connection, the FernGully connection, the Thomas Covenant connection and the general lameness of the film. I've come to the conclusion that the people who really loved Avatar were the same type of people who were amazed and terrified by trains coming directly towards them in the days of silent cinema. Several times over the last month I've been told that Avatar is all about enjoying the ride. Well, as RedLetterMedia point out in part two of this YouTube if you want to enjoy a ride go to bloody Disneyland. If you care about cinema stop supporting films like frickin Avatar, cos if you dont ten years from now all movies will be like this.

The Books In Salinger's Safe

I did a little piece for The Times yesterday about JD Salinger that you can read here or in a slightly different form below:
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JD Salinger's death could be the beginning of a mini gold rush for the beleaguered American publishing industry. Although Salinger published nothing after 1961, in her memoir Dream Catcher, his daughter Margaret says that her father was extremely disciplined, writing every single morning, sometimes remaining in his study all day typing and editing. When she asked what he was doing he told her that he “was working on my books.” Occasionally he would even show her completed manuscripts, although he wouldn’t let her read them. What were these mysterious books about? It’s impossible to say but my guess is that they mostly concerned the Glass family, the heroes of his story collections: Nine Stories, Franny and Zooey and Raise High The Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour and Introduction. Margaret Salinger says that there were dozens of notebooks all over the house about the fictional Glasses that traced their connections, noted their likes and dislikes, and detailed their habits. Salinger was always referring to the notebooks and may have been using them to plot full length novels about the Glass kids.
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The Glasses were a large, self obsessed group of children who grew up in New York in the 1930's and who, in Salinger’s universe, appeared on a radio quiz show called It’s A Wise Child which made them famous. Like Salinger they had a Jewish father, a Christian mother and were smart beyond their years. They’re an interesting bunch certainly but to me at least the Glass family short stories which appeared in the New Yorker are not as warm or as interesting as Salinger’s great novel The Catcher in the Rye about another precocious youth, Holden Caulfield. Still there are some beautiful Glass family tales and A Perfect Day for Bananafish about World War Two veteran Seymour Glass’s breakdown and suicide is a classic. Full length novels about Seymour or Zooey or Buddy or any of the Glasses would certainly be fascinating.
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The “manuscripts in a safe” story was given credence by The New York Times who claim in their Salinger obituary that there are at least two manuscripts sitting in a bank vault in Cornish, New Hampshire; but my guess is that there are many more. Salinger wrote relatively quickly and surely in fifty years he produced more than two books. And yes, Salinger became increasingly eccentric as the decades went on and there is a possibility that these manuscripts are stuffed with mad ramblings or like Jack Torrance in The Shining filled with the same line repeated over and over. I don’t think so. In Ian Hamilton’s biography In Search of JD Salinger, Salinger is lucid, canny and clever well into the 1980's and only last year his lawyers stopped the publication of a Swedish “sequel” to Catcher in the Rye on the instructions of their client.
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Salinger himself several times referred to his unpublished books and gave directions that they should be published unedited after his death. This will be exciting few weeks, for although the aloof Glasses are not everyone’s cup of tea there could be other stuff in there too. Before his half century long hermitage in New Hampshire Salinger had an intriguing life. A platoon sergeant who landed at Utah beach he fought with his troops throughout the Normandy theatre and took part in the capture of Paris, where he had a drink with Ernest Hemingway in the freshly liberated bar of the Ritz Hotel. Sergeant Salinger was at the rough end of the dreadful battle of Huertgen forest and he apparently was also present at the liberation of at least one concentration camp.
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After the war Salinger met all of New York's literary elite and was widely celebrated and well travelled. It was only following the publication of Catcher in the Rye that he began to be pestered by adoring fans and decided to withdraw from the world to the relative obscurity of a house in Cornish, New Hampshire. (I say ‘relative’ obscurity because everyone in Cornish knows where Salinger lived and it is very easy to find his house.) Salinger embraced Eastern religions, meditation, vegetarianism, and apart from writing did not appear thereafter to do much of anything. He had no comment when Mark David Chapman said that Catcher in the Rye inspired him to shoot John Lennon in 1980. He refused every plea to turn Catcher into a film, turning down Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and others.
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My guess is that the film will now happen and we are certainly going to see many authorised and unauthorised biographies too. I suppose in a few months information will start to leak out about the manuscripts in the safe, but since all of Salinger’s books have sold in the millions, one thing is clear: whether they are good or bad, about the Glasses or about Holden, or even the War, they are all going to be best sellers and the publishing house who prints them is going to make a fortune.
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My agent Bob saw the piece above in The Times and emailed me this little postscript: "Adrian, years ago I had a two-too-many drink lunch with his agent Phyllis Westberg and she said that they had had discussions with him about the rules of what he was leaving behnd--and that he'd told them there would be plenty for them to deal with."

These Micksploitation Flicks Must End

I saw a trailer today for the new Amy Adams film Leap Year. My toes curled out the top of my leprechaun boots. As Joe Queenan once said:

Several years ago, I wrote an article called "Blarney Stoned" for Movieline in which I attempted to determine which was the most absurdly stereotypical Hibernian film in the history of cinema. Basically, there were two kinds of motion pictures in this genre: those centring on the Irish Republican Army, and those focusing on the wee, canny, loveable Irish people who always have a bounce in their step and a song in their hearts. The first group included everything from The Informer to Odd Man Out to Cal to Michael Collins. The second group included The Field, The Legend of Roan Inish, The Quiet Man, Far and Away, and even The Commitments. By and large, the IRA films tend to be engrossing if predictable, while the second group tend to be sappy and even more predictable films in which the pipes, the pipes never stop calling from glen to glen, making anyone of Irish or Irish-American ancestry desperate to get the next plane out of Carrickfergus for Santa Monica.
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Gotta love the Carrickfergus reference. And nobody, nobody ever seems to be able to get an Irish accent right except Miranda Richardson in The Crying Game. The worst Irish accent on film? Come on thats like shooting fish in a barrel. How about the worst Irish accent on film by a Scotsman who really should know better: My four finalists are Sean Connery, Billy Connolly, Ewan McGregor and Gerard Butler. I have to give the prize to Gerry Butler because at least he apologized.

I Have Seen The Future of Rock and Roll

And, er, this might not be it.

Roger Ebert

Removed from the grind of television and in recovery from cancer surgery Roger Ebert has become a deep, introspective blogger and writer. Apart from somehow loving Avatar, I think he's become a better film reviewer too. Here's how he begins his review of The Lovely Bones:

"The Lovely Bones is a deplorable film with this message: If you're a 14-year-old girl who has been brutally raped and murdered by a serial killer, you have a lot to look forward to. You can get together in heaven with the other teenage victims of the same killer, and gaze down in benevolence upon your family members as they mourn you and realize what a wonderful person you were. Sure, you miss your friends, but your fellow fatalities come dancing to greet you in a meadow of wildflowers, and how cool is that?

The makers of this film seem to have given slight thought to the psychology of teenage girls, less to the possibility that there is no heaven, and none at all to the likelihood that if there is one, it will not resemble a happy gathering of new Facebook friends. In its version of the events, the serial killer can almost be seen as a hero for liberating these girls from the tiresome ordeal of growing up and dispatching them directly to the Elysian Fields. The film's primary effect was to make me squirmy. It's based on the best-seller by Alice Sebold that everybody seemed to be reading a couple of years ago. I hope it's not faithful to the book; if it is, millions of Americans are scary. The murder of a young person is a tragedy, the murderer is a monster, and making the victim a sweet, poetic narrator is creepy. This movie sells the philosophy that even evil things are God's will, and their victims are happier now. Isn't it nice to think so. I think it's best if they don't happen at all. But if they do, why pretend they don't hurt? Those girls are dead."
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Brilliant, eh? Ebert's post on no longer being able to eat food or drink has rightly become a recent blogging classic. The fact that he mentions one of Cormac McCarthy's lesser known (and one of my favourite) novels Suttree in it is all to the good, although Roger and I are very different people - the scene that sticks in my mind from that book is the, er, incident in the melon patch.

James Ellroy On Desert Island Discs

James Ellroy appeared on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs this week. The premise of the venerable show (its been going since 1942) is that you are cast away on a desert island with only 8 records. You then talk about what 8 records (or pieces of music) you would pick, what they mean to you, and of course we get to hear snippets from all of them. You are also allowed one book on the island and you talk about that too. Ellroy's choices were surprising: really heavy on the Beethoven and Bruckner, nothing from North America. And for his book he went for Don Dellilo's Libra. I thought Libra was a great novel and will always remember that beautiful scene of Lee Harvey Oswald riding the subway in New York, at the front of the very first car looking out into the dark tunnels; Libra makes it clear that Oswald indeed shot JFK and was the lone gunman. Interestingly Ellroy's most important work The Underworld Trilogy takes the opposite tack and has the unlikely premise that Oswald was an utter patsy and that JFK was killed by Hoover and the Mafia. Anyway you can hear Ellroy explain himself (and for three more days you can listen to the entire programme) here. The pic is of Ellroy talking to Stu Neville at the great No Alibis bookshop in Belfast (Ellroy is the lanky, bald one). I've written about Ellroy a couple of times, most recently here.

The Sock That Sank The Presidency

I married a girl from Newton, Massachusetts and I have family in Newburyport and Cape Anne. I've spent the last eighteen summers and most Christmases on Plum Island, Mass. My driving license is from Beverly and I took my test in Salem with a big State Trooper called O'Rourke. (I drove through a stop sign and could not parallel park and he passed me with flying colours.) So I think I know the Bay State a little bit. It was with incredulity then that I heard Democratic Senatorial Candidate for Ted Kennedy's seat, Martha Coakley, say live on radio that Curt Schilling was a Yankees fan. Curt Schilling. Curt frickin Schilling. Now, I am a Yankees fan and have spent far more energy than I should hating Curt Schilling. Curt Schilling was the Yankees killer in the 2004 ALCS (an event we shall never speak of again on this blog) pitching his games hurt and like Robert Redford in The Natural with 'blood' leaking out onto his uniform (in Schilling's case, his sock). Schilling won two World Series for the Red Sox which is two more than the revered Ted Williams ever did and the sock went into the baseball Hall of Fame. Curt Schilling is a god to Red Sox Nation; (he's also a right wing nut who wants to bring back the Witch Trials and thinks that The Flintstones was some kind of documentary) but for Martha Coakley to say that Schilling was a Yankees fan and then backtrack and then express befuddlement as to who Schilling actually is, played wonderfully into the GOP strategy of positioning her as an out of touch elitist. As soon as I heard her say that I knew the election was over. You don't diss Curt Schilling in Beantown. You might as well have got Ted Williams's frozen skull and played basketball with it. Oh wait someone's already done that.
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Now that Coakley's lost the election the Democratic majority in the senate has sunk to a filibuster vulnerable 59 seats and Obama will not be able to pass many of the planks of his reform agenda. What a massive cockup. Couldn't the Democrats have found a candidate in Boston whose last name was Kennedy and who, oh, I don't know, likes the brews and an occasional visit to Fenway Park?
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Because of the sock the game was lost, because of the game the ALCS was lost, because of the ALCS the World Series was lost, because of the World Series, the Presidency was screwed. (That and listening to the advice of Paul Krugman.) The Democrats of course have massive majorities in both houses but they are such lightweights they cant apparently do anything. I think its because they have no sock related icons of their own. Where have you gone Shari Lewis a nation lifts its lonely eyes to you.

Bright Star

I so wanted to like Jane Campion's Bright Star. Campion is an auteur and an artist, she has a rich colour palette and she directs women very well. She points the camera with the deliberation of a Katsushika Hokusai and she is careful about every frame she shoots. Bright Star is full of dazzling imagery: the woods in summer, winter and autumn, a silent walk through tall reeds, an extreme close up of a needle and thread, and there's a beautiful scene of a lace curtain blowing into a room which could have gone on for an hour and I would not have complained. Yet the film doesn't really work. It's heavy on dialogue (much of it wooden) when Campion's trademark visuals would have told the story of John Keats's doomed romance with Fanny Brawne better and more delicately. Yes, its a film about a poet and the poet's words matter but film is a medium of the eye and Campion's gift is for turning a series of striking pictures into a narrative.

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I liked Abbie Cornish as Fanny, but Ben Whishaw playing Keats was a bit of a wet blanket whose charisma and talents may be more suited for the stage or television. Separately they might be good actors but their chemistry together ain't exactly Bogie and Bacall. Much of the time I felt embarrassed for them and was hoping someone would yell "cut". The screenplay is baggy and takes a few liberties here and there (a man who once visited Scotland with Keats is turned into a Scotsman by the American actor playing him) and Campion leaves us with the impression that Fanny Brawne was utterly broken by Keats's death and walked Hampstead a lonely soul for the rest of her days when, in fact, she married a few years later and had three kids.

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I don't think the problems in Bright Star are really Campion's fault (except maybe the casting). The sexism of the film industry allows someone like Lars von Trier to gleefully make terrible film after terrible film but the pressure on women directors to succeed is greater and if you don't you're finished. It took Kathryn Bigelow decades to claw her way back into the industry after a few setbacks and I suspect the squeeze on Jane Campion was immense after her last few releases failed at the box office. My biggest issue with Bright Star is that it suffers from a lack of ambition - it's the least Jane Campion-like of any her films and it seems that she was trying not to offend too many important people (money men/producers) with this safety first effort. As such it could comfortably be shown on a wet Thursday night on PBS (or BBC 2 or ABC1) and not create too much of a fuss. She can do so much better and be more unsettling and interesting. Hopefully with Bright Star under her belt Campion can go out next time and give us a mad, long, seriously deranged masterpiece that will have the money men screaming for her head.

Why I Hate Budweiser

On the AB-InBev corporate website I clicked on a link to find out what beers they brew (they control so many brands now its nuts) and this piece of company speak came up front and centre of the page. Go ahead, read it...Ok, what does that say to you? Nothing about making good beer or a delicious product or following ancient traditions or even a word about the goddamn Rheinheitsgebot but instead: "We build fresh appeal and competitive advantage through innovative products and services." Clearly that's Martian speak for "you must be a real bog-born eejit to drink our beer." We build fresh appeal. If you ever want a punch in the face just say "we build fresh appeal" to me. If you don't believe me about how much AnheuserBusch-InBev hate their customers just click the link above and take a dander through their website. Its all about building "brand loyality" among consumers and being a "portfolio player" in a high stakes James Bond corporate f**k fantasy. Leave a comment below if you find anything that evinces any kind of love for beer - the drink that took us out of the Stone Age, built the bloody pyramids and put a man on the moon.

Dr Who - A Dissent

The Russell T Davies era of Dr Who ended on New Year's Day with the "death" of David Tennant's incarnation of the Doctor and Davies's retirement from the show. What Davies has done with the franchise has been universally praised by fanboys and critics alike and the ratings for the new Who have been huge. Late Review critic Mark Lawson compared Dr Who to Hamlet and even fearless monkey killer and TV reviewing bad boy AA Gill dared not lift a pen against the last Dr. Who. But I haven't loved the new series, in fact for much of the time I haven't even liked it. I've been ransacking my brain to figure out why I'm out of step with the rest of humanity. Here are some possible reasons:

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1. Its the special effects: Dr Who is a cheap little show with cheesy special effects and dreary location shoots in and around Cardiff. Its hard to suspend ones disbelief when everything looks so rickety and Cardiffy.

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2. Its the camp: I've never liked high camp and the new Who is very campy. The English have a higher toleration for camp than any other people on the planet and certainly more than the Irish. Done well its fine (Kenneth Williams) done badly its just silly.

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3. Its the magic feathers: Almost every story ends with a deus ex machina or magic feather. There's usually a big build up and then a rushed technobabble or hand of God ending. This kind of scripting annoys me.

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4 Its the corridors: Even in the Star Trek universe having people run down corridors as filler went out of favour sometime during the third season of Next Generation.

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5. Its the fantasy. The old Who was a sci-fi show, this one is essentially a fantasy show with the rules of physics frequently violated. (Oh matron!) Science fiction is harder to do and needs an understanding of, er, science. Davies went for the easy option instead.

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6. Its the kids: Unlike say Battlestar Galactica, Dr Who is essentially a children's TV programme (there were no fart jokes on Galactica) which is not really meant to be watched by adults. True, a lot of adults do watch and like Who, but I feel that they are the same people who liked Avatar.

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7. Its the acting: Actually I think the acting's been rather good. (Except, obviously, for Billie Piper.)

Is Avatar an Unattributed Remake of FernGully?

The FernGully meme has been gaining momentum over the last week. In James Cameron's defence these ideas have been floating around for years; still, this YouTube makes a pretty compelling case and if I were Diana Young the Aussie writer of FernGully, I'd be on the blower with Bill Kunstler...wait he's dead? Ok Gloria Allred then.

Mrs Robinson You're Trying to Seduce Me - Aren't You?

In 2008 Iris Robinson, wife of Northern Ireland's First Minister Peter Robinson said that homosexuals were an "abomination" and "worse even than child molesters." She explained that as an MP and member of Northern Ireland's Assembly that it was her duty and the duty of all public servants to uphold God's law as exemplified by the 10 Commandments. (Not a big reader of Edmund Burke is Mrs R).
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Well we all knew what was going to happen next didn't we? Every single time one of those holier than thou uber-Pentecostal freaks starts blathering about gays and sodomy and God's law you just know that they are going to be found out as complete and utter twists trying desperately to weave a smokescreen. BBC Northern Ireland's excellent Spotlight programme discovered yesterday that Mrs Robinson had seduced a 19 year old graduate (well, a high school graduate) and had given him a wad of cash so he could open (only in Northern Ireland folks) a chip shop.
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Of course now under God's law poor Mrs Robinson will actually have to be stoned to death. Her husband and all the members of the Stalinist-Gothic Metropolitan Faith Cathedral in north Belfast will have to dig a hole and bung her in it and chuck rocks at her Iran-style. This hardly seems fair. She's an attractive woman and Northern Ireland could always do with another chip shop or two. And if Peter Robinson resigns and the Northern Ireland Assembly falls apart and Ulster tumbles into civil war because of this I for one am going to blame the BBC. . . for not showing Mike Nichols's edifying masterpiece The Graduate often enough.

And speaking of edifying...here's that creepy/foxy chick from Pomplamoose Music with a nice version of Simon and Garfunkel's Mrs Robinson. The lyrics were never more appropriate.

The Pacific

Filmed mostly here in Melbourne and further up on the Queensland Coast Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg's The Pacific will attempt to do for a platoon of marines what the excellent Band of Brothers did for the 101st Airborne in World War 2, i.e. tell their story from the beginning right through to the end of the War. The trailer has an interesting vibe of Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line about it, which I thought was better by a long way than Spielberg's own Saving Private Ryan. A combination of TTRL and Band of Brothers could be really good. They've been showing longer previews of this series here in Australia but the only one I could find online is the HBO one on YouTube.

The Greatest Beers in the World

Over the holidays I had quite a few interesting brews, so here's a list of the greatest beers in the world in the humble opinion of your own correspondent:

1. Pliny the Elder - IPA, USA
2. Westvleteren 12 - Trappist Quad, Belgium
3. Theakston Old Peculier - Trad. Ale, England
4. Dark Lord - Imperial Stout, USA
5. Fuller's London Porter - Porter, England
6. Rochefort Trappistes 10 - Trappist Quad, Belgium
7. Ayinger Celebrator - Dobblebock, Germany
8. Samuel Smith's Oatmeal Stout - Stout, England
9. Guinness Draft - Dry Stout, Ireland
10. Russian River Supplication - Sour Ale, USA

#1 and #10 on my list come from the great Russian River Brewing Company

The Not So Simple Art of Murder

I'm reposting this from June of last year. According to the New York Times in 2009 New York had fewer recorded homicides than at any time in its history. The number of white murder victims in Manhattan last year seems to be fewer than ten. White Manhattanites are thus living in the safest large Metropolitan area in the world, although you wouldnt know that from the TV:
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The New York Times has published an interactive murder map of New York City which incorporates comprehensive NYPD data for the last five years. The map is interactive because you can filter it by race/age/location etc. It makes for some interesting reading. I always thought it was amusing when I lived in Oxford that Inspector Morse stumbled across a murder every week when there hadn't been an actual murder in the city of dreaming spires in eight years. New York's plummeting murder rate has generated a similar dissonance. If you add up all the deaths on Law & Order, L&O SVU, CSI-NY etc. etc. there are easily 100+ murders in Manhattan every season and because most of the writers are white - and that's the demographic they skew to - most of the TV victims are also white. And this is where the dissonance comes in. If you look at the actual data around 90 percent of all murder victims in New York City are black or Latino. So far in Manhattan this year 4 white people have been killed. Four. Yes this is four people too many people and of course it still represents four tragedies but that's not my point. By several orders of magnitude there are going to be more white Manhattanite crime victims on network TV, movies and in crime novels this year than actually died in real life. I reckon three or four times as many white people will be killed on the Law & Order franchises alone than in the real world. Why is this? Well murder sells of course and I don't want to put a stop to that but why can't the networks tell us the real story that emerges from the NYT interactive map? The real victims of crime in New York are black and Latino and they live in places like Harlem, Washington Heights, the South Bronx, Bed Sty. Places where the actors, execs and writers never go. Maybe the studios are worried that those stories wouldn't play in Iowa. Well the success of The Wire proves that realistic crime dramas can work, but it's not easy, you can't just give people formula, you've got to write intelligent believable characters; in short the writers would have to exercise that big muscle between their ears and the networks would have to stop playing it safe. Would Inspector Morse have been as successful a show if he had gone after bicycle thieves and cocaine dealers? Maybe. Maybe not. But I think a little dose of reality might have been fun once in a while. Similarly with TV, films and crime fiction. Perhaps they could at least make an occasional attempt to show the reality of murder in New York. It's a reality that mostly exists across 110th Street way beyond the comfort zone of most of the creative types, who if truth be told probably all live in Santa Monica anyway.

The Most Significant Event of the Decade - China's Rise

On December 29th in Urumqi, China, a mentally ill British national was executed (probably by lethal injection although the Chinese won't tell us) for smuggling heroin in a suitcase from Tajikistan. Akmal Shaikh, 53, and a father of three was convicted in a 2008 trial which lasted half an hour. During the proceedings the judges laughed at Mr. Shaikh's rambling attempt to explain the suitcase found in his possession and declared him guilty. A British national has not been executed in China since the Second World War, but despite pleas for clemency from British PM Gordon Brown and Foreign Secretary David Miliband the killing took place on time and in secret. According to the BBC "Mr Shaikh's family made continued calls for leniency right up until the execution deadline, citing his mental state, saying that he suffered from bipolar disorder. His daughter Leilla Horsnell said: "I am shocked and disappointed that the execution went ahead with no regards to my dad's mental health problems.""
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China knows that nowadays it can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants to whomever it wants. In a process that began in 2003 President Bush began borrowing huge sums of money from China (through US Treasuries) to fund his wars; FDR raised taxes to beat the Nazis, Bush borrowed from the Chinese. The process continued throughout the decade as the United States non military budget also soared. In the last year Obama's Keynesian recovery plan was financed not by raising taxes but by selling even more Treasury Bonds to China. China is now our bank and the one person you can never afford to piss off is the bank manager. China's GDP growth in this recession year was a measly 7.5 percent and this year she expanded her conventional and nuclear arsenal - China is a bank manager toting an AK-47 in one hand and a TOW anti-tank launcher in the other.
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Everything is now made in China: shoes, clothes, toys, kitchen equipment, tools, soon Volvo cars, not long after that, all other cars. The Chinese make everything, they work harder than everyone else, and there are 1.3 billion of them. This decade saw the Chinese began finally to flex their muscles protecting their heinous friends in such places as Iran, Zimbabwe, North Korea and Burma. If I were a third world dictator with, say, a big bauxite mine on my territory I'd cozy up to the Chinese too. This hegemonization process, is, I think, largely irreversible. America will not face up to the situation it is in: the Democrats won't cut entitlements or raise retirement ages, the Republicans won't raise taxes - the days of balanced budgets and paying down the debt are over. Europe and Japan are even more screwed as they age, become less productive, and increasingly irrelevant.
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I've been to China and I found it to be a rough and scary place. People who care about human rights or weep about the West's treatment of animals should certainly avoid going there; but the Chinese way is the way of the future - their recent accumulation of capital is almost unparalleled in history and shows no sign (thanks to Paul Krugman and the Afghan War) of slowing. The Sixteenth Century belonged to the Spanish. The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries to the French. The 1800's was the era of the British Empire and the Twentieth Century was dominated by America. Hopefully India will rise too as it is more my sort of place but for the moment I think we are all living in the Chinese Century and we just haven't realised it yet.

Book of the Year

I read a lot of quality fiction this year from the likes of Garbhan Downey, Ken Bruen, Colum McCann, Hilary Mantel, AS Byatt, John McFetridge, Cormac McCarthy, Orhan Pamuk, Jonathan Lethem, Michael Chabon, Colin Bateman, Zadie Smith, Alan Glynn, Dec Burke, Gita Hariharan, Stu Neville et. al. but for me the novel I enjoyed most was Thomas Pynchon's Inherent Vice. At a party in July I had a bit of a friendly row about Inherent Vice with the crime reviewer of The Times; he felt that the book was disjointed and overly silly and not a proper crime novel but those were three of the reasons that I liked it. It is silly and its more of a riff on detective fiction than an attempt to fully engage the genre. Mainly though I liked the book because of its Big Lebowski vibe and the fact that its very funny. Chronologically it lies between The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland and it sort of inhabits the same paranoid, druggy, conspiratorial, trippy, ascerbic universe. Here's a paragraph explaining why there are no blacks in Gordita Beach: "When a black family had actually tried to move into town [after the War] the citizens, with helpful advice from the Ku Klux Klan had burned their place to the ground and then as if some ancient curse had come into effect refused to allow another house ever to be built on the site. The lot stood empty until the town finally confiscated it and turned it into a park, where the youth of Gordita Beach by the laws of karmic adjustment were soon gathering at night to drink, dope, and f**k, depressing their parents though not property values particularly."
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I've already posted about Inherent Vice twice, here and here so that's probably enough for now.

Merry Christmas From The Family

Avatar is The Abyss, not Aliens

Don't believe the critics who tell you that Avatar is a great film: these guys are paid shills, corporate hacks, sell-outs and professional boosters for the film industry. Do believe me because I have no axe to grind, except maybe against James Cameron's beardy face. Avatar is a headache inducing bore of colossal proportions. The first four hours are like a really bad National Geographic special on New Guinea. We are supposed to be awe struck by 3 D digital plants and pseudo Native American blue aliens. The grumbling in my cinema started an hour in and then the grumbling became groans, a couple of walk outs, and then quite a few people in my row started taking their 3 D glasses off to give their eyeballs a break. The hours crawled by and it just went on and on with lines like: "I fell in love with the forest and then I fell in love with you." Ugh. Remember that cool bit in Titanic where the falling dude hits the propeller? - there isn't even a bit like that. To quote Michael Palin in the lion tamer sketch: its just dull, dull, deadly dull. The last act of the film is better but by this time my brain had forced me into a protective coma so I couldn't really appreciate it. I'll admit I was nervous about Avatar because of the extended trailer, but I liked T1, T2 and Aliens and expected a lot more of Cameron than a cheesy Thomas Covenant rip off. Yeah that's right I said Thomas Covenant rip off, namely Vol 2 The Ill Earth War. I have read everything! BTW whoever calls this film science fiction does not understand the concept of science fiction. This is a mid 80's era fantasy film, nothing more nothing less. The one consolation in the whole brain damaging mess is Sam Worthington who is clearly going to be the new Russell Crowe. If you havent seen Avatar, if I were you, I'd stick on Nickelodeon and watch Avatar: The Last Airbender instead - a kids cartoon with better dialogue, mythology and effects that wont give you a headache.

Solstice Sunset

St Kilda, 9.03 pm

Albums of the Year

Some of these are from 2008 cos [start doing a Wallace & Gromit Yorkshire accent now] eee, I'm a bit slow on the uptake, like.

1. The Bird and Bee - Ray Guns Are Not Just The Future
2. The Ting Tings - We Started Nothing
3. Monsters of Folk - Monsters of Folk
4. Jay Z - The Blueprint #3
5. Beyonce - I Am Sasha Fierce
6. Them Crooked Vultures - Them Crooked Vultures
7. The Honey Brothers - Demonstration EP
8. Lily Allen - It's Not Me, It's You
9. Arctic Monkeys - Humbug
10. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz!

Most Overrated of the Decade

The defining art form of the twenty first century is marketing. We all know of people who are effectively content free but who have relentlessly marketed themselves into our consciousness. This trend has become more pronounced over the last 1o years and unfortunately we don't have Bill Hicks or Neil Postman around any more to mock the powerful engines of consumerism and their agents. But at least we can blog about it. Below is my list of people or things that I think were overrated in the world of arts and literature in the last decade. Unlike some bloggers I aint going for minor novelists, models and other soft targets. In reverse order of crapness then:

10. The New Yorker: Remember when they had James Thurber and E B White? Now they have Sasha Frere-Jones and "comedy" from Woody Allen.
9. The BBC: The high point came with the first series of The Office in 2001. Its all game shows, dancing and second rate Britcoms today. Sadly the BBC is now run by boarding school boys who think that that's what the plebian public wants.
8. Saturday Night Live: It was never funny but in the noughties it got even not funnier.
7. The Simpsons: Like the fall of The Byzantine Empire The Simpsons diminishes in size and totters towards irrelevance with every passing season. Where is Mehmed II when you need him?
6. The New Atheists: Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett. It's real simple: 100 billion suns in our galaxy, 100 billion galaxies: trillions of Earth like worlds: if you don't think some powerful god-like being has evolved and is out there watching us you're just not using your imagination.
5. Martin Scorsese & Stephen Spielberg: A parade of dreary, piss poor films lacking any kind of spark, intelligence or invention. They seemed to have forgotten everything they knew about directing this decade. Please stop now gentlemen.
4. Quentin Tarantino & Wes Anderson: Tarantino made three of the best films of the 90's and in the noughties 3 of the worst of all time. Wes Anderson really needs to go get some life experience far far away from his hipster pals.
3. The Huffington Post: The Fox News of journalism.
2. Harry Potter: The Harry Potter novels were obviously some kind of mass delusion or hypnosis. They read now like campy 1950's children's books, filled with silly names, condescending plots and the prose of a wet Edinburgh phone book.
1. Bono: The most obnoxious man walking the planet Earth.

Steam Punk Chic

The first Steam Punk novel I read was The Difference Engine by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. It was an early classic of the genre and envisaged a world in which Charles Babbage had got his Difference Engine beyond the theoretical stage: Victorian London sees the world's first steam powered mechanical computer and there's lots of fun and games with Lady Lovelace, Byron's daughter, Mary Shelley etc. Steam Punk is basically cyberpunk but set in an imagined technological past. Neal Stephenson writes a lot of these books and one of my favourites is Alan Moore's comic The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol I and II (especially II). What I didn't know until today was the fact that you can buy Steam Punk clothing for men and women from The Steampunk Emporium , but of course it makes sense. If they sell Star Trek uniforms why not techno Victoriana? (I particularly liked the Emporium's gear for "Dewey Oldfield, the autoist" and "Barnaby Clifton the intrepid motorist.")
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When I was at Oxford I remember there was a lecturer who rode around on an old fashioned bicycle and dressed in Edwardian clothing. He was an amiable nut, but as we saw with the costumes of Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman in the film version of The Golden Compass, Steam Punk kit is much, much cooler for tootling around the city of dreaming spires, tootling around anywhere in fact. BTW, I have no idea who the people are in the above pic but it's nice to see the sheilas getting into the spirit of the thing too.

Books For Christmas

The Guardian newspaper has picked my novel Fifty Grand as one of its books of the year and as a recommended book for Christmas (thank you Justine Jordan). Fifty Grand also got a nod as one of the books of the year by John O'Connell in the The New Statesman and I got a hat tip from Chris Mullin in The Observer. So far so good in Britain! but this is a novel which has struggled a bit in the US. The reasons for this are many: the bad economy didn't help; it also wasnt good that my editor left Holt two months before publication and that my replacement editor left two weeks before the pub day. Editors are crucially important in getting blurbs for books and getting them into the hands of reviewers. With 50G review copies were only sporadically sent out, were not followed up on, and there was no budget for publicity. I also think the subject matter may have been too controversial for some American reviewers. Still the success of Stuart Neville's Ghosts of Belfast shows you what a dedicated publishing house can do (it also helps that the book is f**king brilliant) and in the UK the success of Fifty Grand is all down to the hard work of Rebecca Gray, Anna-Marie Fitzgerald, Pete Ayrton et alia at Serpents Tail; and in Oz, Kate Hyde at Allen and Unwin. Word of mouth of course also helps and if you were one of the people who reviewed Fifty Grand on Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk or Good Reads or Audible.com rest assured that I not only read your review but showed it around the family and probably sent it to my agent to prove that "some people like me". Thank you very much, I really appreciate it.

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Blurbs are important too and I'd like to thank Ken Bruen for being an early champion of Fifty Grand. Finally a word about the blogosphere. Because I didn't get reviews in the likes of The New York Times, The Washington Post etc. I was more dependent than ever this year on bloggers for their support, so a big thank you to Declan Burke, Gerard Brennan, Peter Rozovsky, Dana King, Brian Lindemuth, Seana Graham, Sandra Ruttan, Brian O'Rourke, Liam Hoyle, Dan Wagner, Jolie Jordan, John McFetridge and many others - without you I'd be up the bloody creek. Thank you guys and gals. If there are going to be Adrian McKinty crime novels in the future (something I'm thinking quite hard about right now) it will largely be down to your support. Go raibh maith agaibh.

An Open Letter To Peter Jackson

Dear Mr Jackson, I'll come straight to the point, The Hobbit starts filming in six months and I want to be in it. I know that you've said that only New Zealanders will be considered as extras because of government restrictions and ok I'm a Mick but please hear me out. First of all I read The Hobbit in 1977 when I was about nine so I am no Johnnie come lately to this franchise and I've read the book at least three times since so I am familiar with the material. Second of all I played The Hobbit module in MERP many times (about six people on Earth will understand what this means). Third of all I played The Hobbit video game on the Sinclair Spectrum which was the slowest loading video game in the history of the world and required great patience and strength of character. Fourth of all although I own a copy of Karen Fonstad's Atlas of Middle Earth I promise I am not a nutter.

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Fifthly (and this is my most important argument) the mission to The Lonely Mountain was a joint enterprise which brought in Dwarves from all over Middle Earth. Dwarves came from The Iron Hills, The Blue Mountains etc. etc. and it would be a mistake if you gave them all the same Englishy actor accent which we saw a lot of in The Lord of the Rings. There should be important regional variations in the Dwarvish accents in the new films. Thorin of course could speak BBC English, but you should also have regional accents and dialects to show that these are Dwarves from all over the world. Now here's my point, although I've never actually acted in anything I think you should have a Belfast accent in there and I can do one. Here's an audio file of me on Radio New Zealand ! I can also do Gorbals Glasgow and a serviceable Brummie so please Mr Jackson (and of course Mr del Torro) think of the integrity of the story and give me a call. It doesn't have to be Balin or one of the glamour roles, Oin would be fine or even poor doomed Fili (er, spoiler alert). Also I can grow my own beard too which is more than you can say for Orlando Bloom.

My Best Fiend

With the permission of Werner Herzog, the entire documentary My Best Fiend has been posted on YouTube. Its a good introduction to Herzog and especially to his extraordinary work with the mercurial Klaus Kinski. Dont be put off by the first two minutes, the documentary is in English.

What I Think About When I Think About Running

What I think about is: when is this run going to be over, or, did that pregnant lady pushing the twin stroller really just go past me, or, how many times can I listen to John Fogerty singing "I wanna know, have you ever seen the rain?" without going completely insane. What Haruki Murakami thinks about is very different. He thinks about what running means as an endeavour, he thinks about the mechanics of movement, he thinks about how good looking the girls are in Cambridge, Mass. His book is called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, but actually he hasn't talked about it much before this, which is odd because when you read WITAWITAR you see how important running is to him. Murakami is a Japanese novelist who routinely gets mentioned as a potential nobelist, but dont let that put you off. WITAWITAR is an arresting memoir about how Murakami's interest in jogging became an obsession with running marathons and ultra marathons. He says that he took as a model (as well as his title) Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but the book to me is actually squarely in the Japanese tradition of poetic memoir and travelogue which goes back at least to Matsuo Basho whose Narrow Road to the Deep North is the all time classic of this trope. Both men are travellers, seekers of the way, searchers after truth.
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One of the best scenes in Murakami's book is a 60K ultamarathon in northern Japan where he bonks and entirely goes to pieces before getting passed by an octogenarian lady who cheerfully tells him not to give up. Turning misery into something funny or transcendent - into spiritual truth - is the artist's job. One of the best haiku in all of Basho is when he's ill and staying at a miserable inn in the arse end of nowhere:

bitten by fleas and lice
I slept in a bed
a horse pissing all the time
close to the window

All you can do is laugh, because it really isn't funny at all.

FIlms of the Decade

Following on from my books post last week, below I've listed my favourite films of the decade. I don't think it was a particularly good era for the movies. The Coens were off the boil, we no longer had Stanley Kubrick, some idiot reinvented torture porn and mindless blockbusters continued to dominate. Outside of Hollywood I think English and French art house films generally got overpraised out of sheer desperation (the Times puts the feeble Cache as their #1 film of the decade) and the explosion of Korean horror films didn't do much for me. Still, for what it's worth, these are my favourite films (not necessarily the best) of the noughties.

1. Mulholland Drive (2001) David Lynch
2. The Barbarian Invasions (2003) Denys Arcand
3. Grizzly Man (2005) Werner Herzog
4. In The Mood For Love (2000) Wong Kar Wai
5. Lost in Translation (2003) Sofia Coppola
6. Shaun of the Dead (2004) Edgar Wright
7. Bloody Sunday (2002) Paul Greengrass.
8. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) Guillermo del Toro
9. Juno (2007) Jason Reitman
10. Children of Men (2006) Alfonso Cuaron

Wrong Desert, Good Analogy, Dubai is a Massive Pyramid Scheme

Last week Dubai World Corp attempted to reschedule some of its debt. Stock markets across the planet fell but initially many of the commentators I watched on the business channels told people not to panic, because "the economics of Dubai were fundamentally sound." I'm not sure that I agree with that. When you walk around the empty malls, empty bookshops, empty cinemas and empty restaurants in Dubai you wonder if this Emirate without any oil or other natural resources really represents the future of urban planning, architecture and civilization as we know it (which its leaders proclaim). Parts of Dubai are like a movie set or ghost town and just as many cranes are standing idle as working. By Monday it seemed that people were finally waking up to the reality in Dubai. I read an interesting summary of opinion about the Emirate's potential problems in the New York Times here and a rather more ballsy piece by Rod Liddle in The Times of London here. And I found this little article tucked away on CNN which wonders if the Dubai real estate market is and always was a gigantic pyramid scheme:

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London, England (CNN) -- For the past decade, Dubai has been home to the greatest concentration of cranes anywhere in the world as billions of tonnes of concrete, steel and glass have refashioned the city skyline. But the rapid growth of the past six years has slowed recently due to the global slump in property prices. Hopes of a recovery have now been further imperiled by the news that the state-owned Dubai World has requested to delay paying its massive debts by six months. Dubai has become a playground for architects as well as millionaires commissioning a string of audacious building projects aimed at helping reposition the city as the financial and cultural hub of the Middle East. Billions of dollars have been spent transforming the landscape, erecting buildings which continue to break records of all dimensions. The Burj Dubai -- at 818 meter the world's tallest skyscraper, the vast Palm Jumeirah -- built on land reclaimed from the sea, the Dubai Mall -- the largest shopping center in the world and the Mall of the Emirates; home to the world's biggest indoor ski slope form part of a very long list of completed construction projects. "The whole place is kind of like a time-lapse film. You wake up in the morning and it's just a little bit different," Jim Krane, author of "City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism" told CNN. But, according to Krane, some of these projects, like the Burj Dubai, suffer from a severe lack of practicality. "Dubai doesn't really need to have to build tall asides from prestige purposes. If you look at it, it's a really bad idea. It uses as much electricity as an entire city. And every time the toilet is flushed they've got to pump water half a mile into the sky," he said. The telescopic shape is also presents problems of a more practical nature Krane thinks. "The upper 30 or 40 floors are so tiny that they're useless, so they can't use them for anything else apart from storage. They've built a small, not so useful storage warehouse half a mile in the sky," he said.

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The CNN piece also mentions the $12 billion Palm Jumeirah where David Beckham has a home and "You can't even see the sea and all the fronds which house the communities are gated." And they conclude with the ridiculous sounding Palazzo Versace hotel in Dubai which is going to have a beach "featuring refrigerated sand."

The Melbourne Gangland Murders

Like no other city in Australia, Melbourne has been blessed by a fascinating gangland culture, which has helped inspire TV shows, books and feature films - you can get the gist of the whole story on Wikipedia here. I reviewed a couple of memoirs by two of the major players in Saturday's Melbourne Age: ex boxer Mick Gatto and mob wife Roberta Williams (right). I liked both books as you can see below:
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My Life by Roberta Williams; I, Mick Gatto by Mick Gatto and Tom Noble

Apart from a dispiriting lack of basic competence, what distinguishes Melbourne’s criminal underclass from their counterparts in say, the New York mafia, is their enthusiasm for publicity. Where La Cosa Nostra embraces omertà - the code of silence - Melbourne’s underworld clans act rather more like the village chiacchierone: the local gossip who airs everyone’s dirty laundry in public. Recently Mick Gatto and Roberta Williams have been attacking each other in the tabloids with such ferocity that if this were a 1930's film, the third act would finish with one of them saying “kiss me you fool,” accompanied by a soaring musical score.
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Mick Gatto’s account of his life in gambling, boxing and crime I, Mick Gatto is published by an imprint of Melbourne University Press and was co-written by former Age journalist Tom Noble. It is fast paced, lively and unpretentious, and the story of Gatto’s South Melbourne childhood is particularly affecting. Gatto offers no angst ridden self justification for his later actions but says that he was a happy kid surrounded by friends and family. Born in 1955, Gatto’s parents were first generation immigrants from Calabria who, really, must have known all about omertà.
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After a run in with local hoods Gatto decides to learn boxing as a method of self defence and quickly finds that he has talent and, he says, with a little more discipline and some luck he could have been, like Terry Molloy, “a contender”. Instead he became a bouncer and petty crook and ended up in Melbourne’s Pentridge Prison for burglary. Post prison life took Gatto into illegal gambling clubs, but his biggest win was surely marrying his formidable wife Cheryle who has ridden the Gatto rollercoaster for more than thirty years. The meat of I, Mick Gatto, of course, is his sensational 2005 murder trial, when he was accused of assassinating underworld hitman Andrew Veniamin. Gatto’s story is gripping: he and Veniamin (a former friend who had attended his birthday party) got into an argument in the back room of La Porcella restaurant in Carlton over the recent killing of a gangland associate. Veniamin apparently pulled out a .38 calibre revolver and with his boxer’s reflexes, Gatto says that he managed to turn Veniamin’s gun on himself. The jury bought the defence argument that because the .38 misfired it must have meant that the two men were struggling over the weapon, and Gatto was acquitted. Gatto is fortunate that this incident happened in Melbourne where the average jury panelist would not have experienced the fairly common instance of a misfiring .38 at the local gun range, and he’s also lucky the jury never got to hear about the fact that he had a body bag waiting in the boot of his car.
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Gatto’s book is charming and engaging, probably like the man himself, and near the end there is an interesting scene where he meets Roberta Williams after Underbelly has begun showing on Channel 9. He describes her affectionately as having a “lot of dash, more than her husband Carl ever had,” which is nice when both claim the other tried to have them killed.
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You can see this dash and flintiness throughout Williams’s own book My Life - The Untold Story of an Underworld Survivor. Her childhood in Seaford and Frankston was grim: her father died when she was still a baby and her mother could not cope in the slightest. She got pregnant at seventeen, moved to the city and later was horrifically beaten up by her partner Dean Stephens, a friend of rising criminal stars, the Moran brothers.
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In 1994 her life changed when she met chubby, baby faced gangster Carl Williams. They fell in love, married and Carl raised her kids like they were his own. The war with the Morans began when they tried to kill Carl over a money feud and as Williams cold bloodedly points out “luckily for us the Morans were stupid because they let Carl live and he knew he would never make the same mistake they did. Underbelly made Carl out to be the dumb one. . .but think of this, they are dead and he is alive. Who is the dumb one?”
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Roberta denies that Carl ordered the killing of Mark Moran, but she agrees that Carl was behind Jason Moran’s murder on June 21 2003. Indeed she relishes the fact and admits her joy upon hearing of Moran’s death (although she denies foreknowledge of the hit). This part of the book is rather chilly. Williams sees herself as a victim persecuted by the media and the criminal justice system and she portrays Carl as a gun toting loveable rogue. She shows no sign of remorse that Jason Moran and Pasquale Barbaro were shot in their car in front of five young children, including Moran’s twins. Indeed, she mocks the family members who appeared shocked and grief stricken that night on the TV news.
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There’s no denying Williams’s charisma or her toughness or her love for her own children but a kinder editor might have made her temper such sociopathic statements. I also think Harper Collins could have spent a few dollars compiling an index that would assist the general reader in keeping track of all the diverse characters in Williams’s absorbing story.
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Reading these memoirs together is a little like viewing Rashomon: people and actions are either good or evil depending on whom you believe; however truth isn’t necessarily why people are going to buy these books. If you enjoyed Underbelly by John Silvester and Andrew Rule or the first TV series then these volumes should be right up your alley.

Getting Your Geek On

There's still a month to go until James Cameron's Avatar hits the screens and despite hating the trailer I find myself checking AICN every few days for updates. Once a geek always a geek I guess. In the meantime I found this mashup of the Spike Jonze/Beastie Boys Sabotage vid and The Empire Strikes Back. Men of a, uhm, certain age will love this, everyone else should give it a miss... I uploaded the High Def version so you might to want to pause it until the whole thing loads before you play.

Novels of the Decade

Let me jump on the listmania bandwagon and give you my favourite novels of the decade. Maybe these aren't the best books of the noughties but they're the ones I liked most.

1. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
2. The Cold Six Thousand - James Ellroy
3. L'Amour est très surestimé - Brigitte Giraud
4. Grotesque - Natsuo Kirino
5. Let the Right One In - John Lindqvist
6. The Corrections - Jonathan Franzen
7. Her Last Call To Louis MacNeice - Ken Bruen
8. White Teeth - Zadie Smith
9. The Red Riding Quartet - David Peace
10. Fingersmith - Sarah Waters

The Prosecution Rests in the Knox Case

The prosecution case against Amanda Knox rested today. If you don't know who Amanda Knox is then your life is probably a good bit richer and more interesting than mine. Here's a useful CNN summary:
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Perugia, Italy (CNN) -- [According to the Prosecution] The November 2, 2007, death of British student Meredith Kercher occurred during a twisted sex game in which Amanda Knox taunted Kercher, and two men -- boyfriend Rafael Sollecito and acquaintance Rudy Guede -- sexually assaulted her. Prosecutor Guilano Mignini said during his seven-hour closing that Knox hated and resented Kercher and had decided the time had come to exact revenge. Knox, 22, and Sollecito, 26, are on trial for sexual assault and murder. Police found Kercher's bloody body under a duvet on the floor of the apartment she shared with Knox. Both deny the charges. Mignini said Kercher died about 11:30 p.m. after she and Knox had quarreled -- either over money or Guede's presence at the house. The prosecutor said the men pinned Kercher down by her arms while Knox played with the knife, prodding at her throat and saying, "Ah, you were pretending to be such a little saint. ... Now we are going to show you."

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The defense argument is that Knox spent the night sleeping at her boyfriend's house smoking marijuana and thus has no clear recollection of the evening's events. The drugs apparently also explained her bizarre 'confession' to the local cops and her odd behaviour in the days following the murder. For good measure the defense also says that Knox's DNA appeared on the murder weapon because of evidence mishandling by the Italian forensics unit.

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Despite the fact that this has become a cause celebre and, ridiculously, an early candidate for Trial of the Century, to me this is a fairly simple case, complicated only by the fact that Amanda Knox is American and very good looking. Patricia Highsmith wrote about uncannily similar events to the Knox affair in her novel The Talented Mr Ripley over three decades ago. Ms Knox is not as talented as Tom Ripley, not by a long chalk I'm happy to say.

The Lost Symbol

Ok, so I've taken the piss out of Dan Brown on this blog before, but I've got to admit that there's a good novel buried within The Lost Symbol. The story is fast paced, unusual and exciting. There are two excellent plot twists that I didn't see coming and the book's characters could possibly exist in the real world (allbeit a real world where an assembly full of high school students cheer wildly when they discover that their guest speaker is the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution). I listened to the audiobook version of The Lost Symbol and the narration was crisp and fluid and the characters were well differentiated. For at least three quarters of the book I was gripped by the premise and Brown's clever nesting of the plot within objects and arcana. I admired Brown's dispassionate prose which is the way to go with sensational material and I dug his device of leaving each chapter on a hook. The book takes place in Washington DC and there's murky goings on with masons - two elements that I also really enjoyed.

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However, (and you knew there was a however coming didn't you?) the problems I had with The Lost Symbol were many. First of all, I didn't like the fact that the book ended and then we still had two full hours to go. Two hours of exposition, back tracking and explanation that added nothing to the story whatsoever; and it annoyed the hell of me that the people doing this exposition had just seen their loved ones tortured and killed, but somehow, avoiding a mental breakdown, they decided to lecture us on their own personal exegesis of the Old Testament. End the book already! I kept yelling at the iPod.

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Secondly I didn't like Brown playing fast and loose with science: no Mr Brown ESP doesn't work, positive thoughts cannot reverse the growth of cancer cells, there is no such thing as a Jungian collective unconscious etc. etc. Those studies you mentioned about people praying for heart patients? - the results were the opposite of what you put in the book.

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My third problem was Brown's use of the word "chuckle". Everybody was always chuckling. Nobody laughed, tittered, hooted, snorted, guffawed, broke up, convulsed, snickered, whooped etc. They just chuckled. And boy did they chuckle. They chuckled in extremis. They chuckled when recalling memories. They especially chuckled when revealing odd bits of masonic lore. Dan Brown's got fifty million dollars and a library of ten thousand volumes but he doesn't own a Thesaurus?

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Ok, but that's enough of the hating. It's probably just jealousy. Dan Brown has written a page turner that's quite a bit slicker than the Da Vinci Code with less obvious howlers and better twists; so if you're looking for a good audiobook for your commute, I'd happily recommend it. (He said with a chuckle).

Thank You Yoko

A few months ago the BBC had a piece about those apparently few eccentrics in the world who dislike the music of John, Paul, George and Ringo. After some exhaustive research it was concluded that to say that you liked pop music but disliked the pop music of the Beatles was an incoherent and untenable position. It was ok to dislike pop music in general, preferring classical, but, according to the Beeb, it didn't make any sense to doubt the genius of the Beatles if you were a fan of the pop music genre.

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Well maybe I'm philosophically unsound but I hate the bloody Beatles. I hate their sound, their harmonies, their lyrics, everything about them. I find their music insipid, dull, bland, so bad in fact that it's almost torture to listen to. I hate the McCartney songs most of all, but the entire oeuvre pains my ears. And it's not as if I'm prejudiced against that era. Quite the reverse in fact. Among my favourite bands are Led Zep, Pink Floyd, The Who, The Stones, The Kinks, The Animals, Cream, but not the frickin Beatles. I hate the early mop top Beatles, I'm a little more tolerant of the middle period stuff in Revolver and Rubber Soul, but then it really gets bad with the late psychedelic albums. Everything about those records makes me irritated and I defy the most ardent Beatles fan to watch the whole of Magical Mystery Tour without wincing in pain and agony. Apart from the two Harrison tracks on Abbey Road I'd be happy never to hear any of those songs ever again as long as I live. (Harrison is my favourite Beatle not just because of his music, but also because he mortgaged his house so that Monty Python could make Life of Brian.)*

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I know most people won't understand me when I confess to these feelings, but there they are, the cat's out of the bag and I feel better.The BBC may disagree with me but some influential people are also jumping on the Beatles hating bandwagon. Anyway I'll stop now before someone gets me started on The Beach Boys or The Eagles or the abomination that was known as Wings.

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*Here's a fact for trivia fans: George Harrison and Elvis both shared a favourite film: Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

Back From The Wars

My little brother got back safely from Afghanistan at the weekend. I've talked to him on the phone but he was too exhausted to really give me a lot of details, though I get the impression that this was a harder tour than his time in Iraq last year. Physically it seemed much more difficult: he was based in the desert in Helmand, was sleeping in a tent and although he's an intelligence officer, he was much closer to the front lines this time too.

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Still Gareth is back and everyone in the McKinty family is relieved. Because this was his second combat mission in two years he wont have to go on a combat tour again for a long time. And I'm just glad I'm off the hook. My grandad fought in the trenches of World War 1 for an incredible four years, my dad was in the Royal Navy for twenty years and now Gareth has done his bit for our generation. Hopefully the next generation will not have to deal with any of this craziness.

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Incidentally, Gareth sent me a video of his last dinner in the officer's mess that sensitive souls should not watch.

Everything We Know Is Wrong

From The New York Times

Chocolate Milk May Reduce Inflammation
RONI CARYN RABIN
November 9, 2009
Move over, red wine. Make room for chocolate milk. A new study suggests that regular consumption of skim milk with flavonoid-rich cocoa may reduce inflammation, potentially slowing or preventing development of atherosclerosis. Researchers noted, however, that the effect was not as pronounced as that seen with red wine. Volunteers ages 55 and older who were at risk for heart disease. Half were given 20-gram sachets of soluble cocoa powder to drink with skim milk twice a day, while the rest drank plain skim milk. After one month, the groups were switched. Blood tests found that after participants drank chocolate milk twice a day for four weeks, they had significantly lower levels of several inflammatory biomarkers, though some markers of cellular inflammation remained unchanged.
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Participants also had significantly higher levels of good HDL cholesterol after completing the chocolate milk regimen, according to the study, which appears in the November issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and is already online.

A Good End To A Weak Season

In the John Cheever story "The 5.48" a philandering Madison Avenue ad-man from Westchester County gets his comeuppance from a crazy woman he slept with and then completely forgot about. The TV series Mad Men takes place in the same time period and milieu as "The 5.48," and I've been dreading the appearance of a crazy lady with a gun since about episode 2. When Don Draper, the philandering ad exec who lives in Ossining, started seeing a nutty school teacher, I felt sure that this was how season 3 was going to end.

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It didn't. Betty Draper, the enemy within, was the one who plunged the metaphorical knife, ostensibly because of Don's serial affairs with a bevy of brunettes, although it seemed to me that Mrs Draper decided to end their marriage more because she discovered he was poor white trash from West Virginia or thereabouts. She, of course, is a Main Line Bryn Mawr girl cut from the same cloth as Grace Kelly's character in High Society. And now that I think about it, I suspect that rather than following John Cheever as a model for future shows the writers of Mad Men will take us on a dance a bit like High Society (or the better original The Philadelphia Story) where Betty will have to choose between one of several suitors including her ex husband.

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Most of the reviews I've read of Mad Men have raved about another brilliant season, but actually I think this series was weak and unfocused with a lot of non sequitur storylines and tangential plots. The secondary characters grew duller and were absent for much of the time. Did Kurt and Smitty have any lines at all this year? And I really missed Joan giving it the old boom shaka boom shaka boom round the office. At least we did get our weekly dose of Martian Pete Campbell trying desperately not to blow his human cover. Still, much of it was thin gruel. I wasn't impressed by the appearance of Conrad Hilton and I thought the manufactured fight between Roger and Don was pretty lame - Don really could do with a Moriarity but Roger isn't it. What saved season 3 for me was the strength of its final two episodes - last week's mournful riff on the Kennedy assassination and this week's exciting industrial espionage romp. Matthew Weiner has distilled Mad Men back to its essence and we're now literally in a small hotel room with all the main characters as they try to start a new company. Roger, Coop, Pete, Peggy and Joan allied with Don will make for good TV next go round.

Jacques Barzun Is Alive and Well and Living in Texas

In a couple of weeks its going to be Jacques Barzun's 102nd birthday. I hope Jacques hangs in there because in this degraded epoch of ours where ill educated oafs like Glenn Beck and Patrick J Buchanan are lauded as sages Barzun is a rare link to an age when a person would be ashamed to pontificate on any subject without having a thorough knowledge of history, the classics and several European languages.
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Born in France, educated in America, Barzun was for many decades the doyen of the Great Books programme at Columbia University. I have read three books by Monsieur B: Simple & Direct - a sensible and practical guide to writing; The Use and Abuse of Art - an essay which does exactly what it says on the tin describing the uses and abuses of art; From Dawn to Decadence - probably the best history of western civilization from 1500 - 2000 that has ever been written. Let me talk a little more about Dawn to Dec. It's basically a long but fast paced cultural history for the general reader. Barzun's prose is effortless, his learning eclectic, his wit playful, clever and acerbic. It's a book that manages to be both deep and wide ranging and most important of all it, is never dull. If you haven't read From Dawn to Decadence I both pity and envy you. I pity because you're undoubtedly lost in a sea of unknowning, but I envy because you've got a real treat to look forward to. (Hmm, doesn't Mr. T. famously say the previous sentence in a more concise way?)
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Anyway, Joyeux Anniversaire, Jacques.

Yoani Sanchez Beaten By The Cuban Secret Police

Aside from my little brother Gareth, Yoani Sanchez is one of the bravest people I know. She is a young Cuban blogger who writes about the perversities of life in the Castro brothers personal island fiefdom. I've emailed with Yoani a couple of times and I make sure to read her blog every few days. On Friday Raul Castro's secret police, the DGI, grabbed her on the street, pulling her hair and beating her until she got into their car. She was taken to a police station and there, according to CNN, the agents "warned her that her writings had gone too far" and threatened her. Yoani has been intimidated several times in the past but this is the first time she has been beaten by Castro's bullies. She is out of police custody now but badly shaken.
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Late last year Yoani was named one of the world's 100 most influential people by Time magazine and last month the Cuban government banned her from traveling to New York to receive an international journalism award. (Only high ranking Communist officials are allowed to travel outside of Cuba). The DGI frequently attempts to block Yoani's blog, but most of the time you can read it here: Generacion Y.

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I'm really upset about what happened to Yoani but there's a wider problem too. Cuba, I feel, gets far too easy a ride in media circles. Pro Cuban stories frequently appear on the BBC and CNN talking about the wonderful music scene in Havana, Cuban beach holidays, and how "Cubans are more ready to meet the challenges of recession because of their policy of recycling junk." These are puff pieces without a hint of serious reporting. I've been to Cuba many times and take it from me Cuba is not a tropical paradise with a benign dictatorship, happy go lucky cops and great gleaming hospitals. Cuba is a clumsy, thuggish, police state and Havana is a town filled with teen prostitutes, pimps and "sex tourists". There is no freedom of travel or speech in Cuba and the Communist Party and the Secret Police run the island with unsubtle brutality. I think it's very hard to get this truth across because most journalists are broadly sympathetic to Cuba regarding it as a plucky little island holding up a defiant middle finger to big bad Uncle Sam on the other side of the Florida Strait. A particular offender in my eyes is The Huffington Post who published a fawning interview between Sean Penn and Raul Castro late last year and just a couple of weeks ago ran an impassioned "editorial" from Alec Baldwin demanding an end to the ban on US citizens travelling to Cuba. (US citizens, of course, are not banned from travelling to Cuba, they just aren't allowed to spend money there, but try telling that to Mr Baldwin or Huffington Post readers and you'll get disbelieving howls.)

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The embargo is a whole other issue and I'd like to see an end to it too because the Castro brothers use it as an excuse for their disastrous economic incompetence and gross mismanagement. Even if the brothers were geniuses (which they are not) no two people should run any country for fifty years. If you really hated living under George Bush for 8 years, imagine how Cubans feel living under Raul and Fidel for 50.

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I've emailed Yoani to see if she's ok, but the best thing we can all do is email our local Cuban embassy or consulate to let them know that the whole world will be watching how they treat her and other dissidents. This is the email address of the Cuban Embassy in London: embacuba@cubaldn.com and they can be called here: 0207 240-2488

The Neville Has All The Best Tunes

Ok, so I stole the pun in the title from Declan Burke, but if you can't lift from The Master who can you lift from? I just finished Stuart Neville's The Twelve yesterday and I was blown away by it. It's a dark, exciting, lyrical, uncompromising thriller set in Northern Ireland. James Ellroy has described Neville as a brilliant new voice in Irish fiction and after reading The Twelve I whole heartedly agree. There's a great non spoiler review on Ger Brennan's Crime Scene Northern Ireland here. And if you haven't yet jumped on board the runaway train that is the Celtic New Wave in Irish crime writing, Neville's The Twelve is an excellent place to start. And then after Neville make sure you check out: Declan Burke, Brian McGilloway, Ken Bruen, Eoin MacNamee, Declan Hughes, Colin Bateman, Garbhan Downey, Ger Brennan, David Park, Sam Millar et al. I mean really folks, wouldn't it be nice to be ahead of the trend for once?

How To Win The War Against Al Qaeda

As some of you may know my little brother Gareth is currently an intelligence officer serving in Afghanistan. He's got a lot on his plate but among his tasks is helping in the hunt for Al Qaeda operatives and Mr Bin Laden himself. OBL is in one of three places: The Afghani side of the Af-Pak border, the Waziri side of the Af-Pak border or Pakistan administered Kashmir. As confident as I am in my little brother's abilities, conventional methods of finding OBL don't seem to be working which is why I think the time has come to bring in 70's TV favourite Grizzly Adams. Why do I say this? Well, I think the following story from the BBC explains it better than I can:

Bear kills militants in Kashmir
By Altaf Hussain
BBC News, Srinagar


A bear killed two militants after discovering them in its den in Indian-administered Kashmir, police say. Two other militants escaped, one of them badly wounded, after the attack in Kulgam district, south of Srinagar. The militants had assault rifles but were taken by surprise - police found the remains of pudding they had made to eat when the bear attacked.

It is thought to be the first such incident since Muslim separatists took up arms against Indian rule in 1989. The militants had made their hideout in a cave which was actually the bear's den, said police officer Farooq Ahmed. The dead have been identified as Mohammad Amin alias Qaiser, and Bashir Ahmed alias Saifullah.

News of the attack emerged when their injured comrade went to a nearby village for treatment. "Word spread in the village that Qaiser had been killed by the bear," another police officer said. A joint party of the police and army personnel went into the forest and collected the bodies of the two militants. Police say they also recovered two Kalashnikov assault rifles and some ammunition from the hideout.

Oh Those Ghastly Americans and Their Dreadful Halloween (Again!)

Every year the British press publishes an article by some Little Englander nutcase attacking Halloween as a gauche American invention that's all about requiring you to spend, spend, spend. This year it was AN Wilson's turn in The Daily Mail. What's interesting about Wilson's lazy article is how similar it was to Andrew Martin's piece in the Guardian last year. It's almost as if Wilson had Martin's article in front of him while he was typing. Hmmm.

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These columns are so tedious to me. They ignore the fact that Halloween is a Celtic invention, not an American one and thrives in the parts of the British Isles where toffs like AN Wilson obviously never travel to. Still for a man so well educated you think he at least would have dipped into The Golden Bough now and again where the multifarious British manifestations of Halloween are well documented. I'd love to rehash all my arguments from November 2008, but the articles are so suspiciously similar, perhaps you should just read my post from last year instead.

The Cove

A few weeks ago I went to see a film called The Cove about the secret slaughter of dolphins in Japan and the shipping of the survivors to water parks (like Sea World) across the globe. I knew that if I wrote about the film then I would say something stupid and intemperate; unfortunately in the ensuing weeks I have not calmed down. If you get a chance to go see The Cove you should. Its a very well made documentary, both beautifully shot, oddly exciting and very moving. (There's a whole Soylent Green subtext too which is perversely funny). If self aggrandizing bully Michael Moore represents everything that is wrong with modern documentary film making, The Cove represents everything that is good. The hero of the film is Richard O'Barry who was the original trainer for Flipper and who after years of working in Hollywood had a Road to Damascus moment when one of his dolphins died in his arms.
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The Cove is a wonderful film but you should probably skip it if you don't want your blood pressure to go through the roof. Also, don't take the kids. Here's Roger Ebert's four star review, and here's what Evan Williams said in The Australian.

The Beer and the Book

I've been reading Greenmantle by John Buchan. It's a hundred year old spy novel set in Germany and the Mid East during World War I and it is a sort of sequel to the 39 Steps. If, like me, you read the 39 Steps and didn't think it was as good as the Hitchcock film Greenmantle will come as a pleasant surprise: it's exciting, fast paced and apart from some unironic jingoism (and an over reliance on coincidence) a very good read. There's an interesting scene early on where Hannay meets the Kaiser at a railway station and the sympathetic treatment of the German Emperor must have shocked many Brits at the time (it was published in 1916).

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But I didn't really want to talk about the book that much, I actually wanted to chat about a unique experience in my life: reading the book while drinking the beer that's been named after it. I know of no other beer which has been named after a book, and didn't know about Greenmantle Ale until I found it in my local beer shop in St Kilda. Greenmantle Ale is a light session ale - malty, hoppy, smooth and very drinkable. To my mind there were caramel and chocolate notes and a pleasant slightly tannic aftertaste. The alcohol content is not high and you could knock back three or four and still concentrate on your novel.

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There are of course Thomas Hardy ales but I haven't heard of another beer/book combination like this. There's plenty of scope for others: War and Peace could inspire a Russian Imperial Stout and surely the Brooklyn Brewing Company could do something with Last Exit to Brooklyn. The lack of a Ulysses Porter seems like an enormous gap in the market, but of course sometimes its the evil of the giant brewing companies that's to blame.

Aren't You A Little Short For A Stormtrooper?

A few months ago Casey Pugh had the idea of remaking Star Wars Sweded style as a collaborative fan based video project. He divided Star Wars into 473 15 second clips and asked for contributions. When its done the movie will be spliced together and called Star Wars Uncut. There are about 50 15 second segments left so if you want to be part of what will be the funniest and best Stars Wars Fan Vid ever jump on over to StarWarsUncut.com. They've released a trailer on YouTube of what they've got so far and I think its got classic written all over it.

The Next King of Scotland?

Without question the Conservative Party is going to win the 2010 General Election in Britain, once again launching the idea of Scottish independence into the spotlight. The Scots have been relatively quiet since 1997 because Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were Scots from the Labour Party (which is strong north of the Border). David Cameron, the Conservative leader, however, is both English and Tory, which bodes ill for the union. The Scottish National Party rules the devolved Scottish Assembly and although opinion polls have fluctuated, probably a majority of Scots now favour independence. If independence happens I wonder if the Scottish would be willing to turn back the clock and take on current Jacobite Pretender to the Scottish crown, this gentleman to the right, Prince Franz of Bavaria.

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As you may know the Jacobites were denied the Kingship of England and Scotland (and Ireland) because they were Catholics and after the defeat of James II at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 they fled to France. In 1715 (the "fifteen") and again under Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745 (the "forty-five") they tried to raise the clans in Scotland. It didn't work and the English put down the rebellion and Charlie fled back to France. The Jacobites married into European Royalty and they haven't gone away although they gave up their actual claim to the British throne in 1810.

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Prince Franz seems like a decent chap. He's a member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and he collects modern art. He spent part of his childhood in Dachau concentration camp where he was sent because his family opposed the Nazis. The Scots really could do a lot worse. (King Mel the First anyone?) Franz (who the Jacobites title King Francis II of Scotland) doesn't however have any kids so the succession would pass to Prince Max of Bavaria and then to the charmingly named Sophie, Hereditary Princess of Liechtenstein.

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Of course a few pro independent Scots are republicans and some favour the current Queen (who is half Scottish after all) but I think there are still some who hanker for "the King over the water." So Prince Franz, here's a question for you, do you take Lowenbrau with your haggis or maybe a nice Schneider Weisse?

The Lost Squirrel...

I've been listening to The Lost Symbol as an audiobook and in the library CD package I found this unknown Dan Brown work that I thought I should share with everyone...

The Lost Squirrel

Robert Langdon woke from a dreamless sleep in his Cambridge apartment near Harvard University, America’s oldest and finest college of higher learning. Sleep, he knew, was a habit shared by all mammals and most invertebrates. No one understood why sleep was so necessary for these life forms but Robert Langdon knew that dolphins only slept with half their brain at any one time, otherwise they would drown. Dreams were another of the many domains of Robert Langdon's expertise. Freud, of course, was not the first to interpret dreams; famously Joseph of the Israelites, exiled in the land of Egypt, had become an expert dream reader for the pharaohs.

Robert Langdon got out of bed and walked across the carpet. Carpets had been covering the homes of human beings since weaving was discovered by the Sumerians in the second millennium BC. His carpet had not however come from Sumeria, but rather from the Ikea on I-95. It was 5.55 in the morning the same time philosopher Immanuel Kant woke each day for his constitutional walk around the city of Konigsberg. Kant was so regular that shopkeepers could set their watches by him. Now of course Konigsberg had been renamed Kaliningrad and was no longer in East Prussia but rather in the odd Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. Chuckling Robert Langdon wondered if the Knights of the Teutonic order would have been happy with that state of affairs.

“Oh tempora, oh mores,” he said in Latin, once the universal language spoken by all cultured peoples but now a mere tool for academics and the esoteric tongue of the Vatican.

In the kitchen the Harvard University wall calendar told him that it was Tuesday. Tuesday, he thought, remembering that it was named for the Norse god Tiu, the equivalent of the Roman god Mars. Tuesday was the second day of the week, coming between Monday and Wednesday. Tuesday and Thursday were the only days of the week that began with a T, although Thursday's T was a soft one, not a hard one.

Robert Langdon opened his Northland 3000 refrigerator, the most expensive fridge in the world, a gift from his mentor the brilliant Professor of quantum mechanics John Elton who was also an international singing star and who used a cunningly inverted stage name and red wig to hide himself. Robert Langdon took out a pint of milk. Milk he knew came from the lactation glands of cows. All female mammals lactated. He wondered if duck billed platypuses did so. Hmm, he thought, if only there was some device that could give him that information easily. Some kind of encyclopedia - perhaps stored electronically. If such a device existed you wouldn’t need everything explained all the time, because you could assume that people weren’t idiots and they could just look stuff up they didn't know.

He poured the milk into his bowl of cornflakes. Cornflakes of course had been developed by William Keith Kellogg as a health food, but now were consumed across the world by all cultures. He ate quickly. The Harvard University pool where he swam each morning opened at 6:30 and that only gave him fifteen minutes to get dressed in his trousers and polo neck. Trousers of course had been popularized by Beau Brummel following the sans culottes revolution in F-

The phone rang. “Is this Bob Langdon?” a guttural voice asked. A voice that seemed to be speaking from another dimension entirely, maybe even another universe. Modern physics had proven that many universes existed - the multiverse it was called - but telephone conversations between the universes had never been thought possible. Perhaps until today!

“This is Semiotics Professor Robert Langdon of Harvard University, America’s oldest and finest institution of higher learning.”

“I’m a Boise State man myself, listen Bob, we live just across the street and your car alarm has been going off for the last fifteen minutes, can you come out and turn it off, please.”

Robert Langdon knew that alarms had existed since Roman times when the sacred geese on the Capitol hill had alerted the sleeping citizens that an attack by the Celts was imminent.

"Can you go outside, please, pal. We want to get back to sleep.”

"Did you know that dolphins only sleep with half their br..." Robert Langdon began but the phone was dead. It reminded him that the first phone call had been made in this very city by Alexander Graham Bell who had unfortunately not taught at Harvard but rather at the inferior Boston University.

Professor Robert Langdon dressed and went outside. The alarm on his Porsche Boxster S was indeed sounding. Porsche was a German company founded in 1931 by Ferdinand Porsche, but that was not important right now, what was important was the alarm.

He turned it off with a push on his infrared key button. Robert Langdon was worried. What could possibly have set off this alarm in the first place? He examined the car’s roof. It was covered with squirrel poop. Squirrels were a type of rodent common in North America and Europe. The squirrel was in the tree, naked and afraid. Could it have jumped on the roof and started the alarm, shat itself and jumped off. No. That didn't seem likely at all. What struck Robert Langdon about the poop was the fact that if you cocked your head and looked at it in a funny way it seemed to be arranged in an aleph, first letter of the Hebrew alphabet and key to the ancient wisdom of the Zohar. A chill coursed through him.

“I have a terrible feeling,” he said out loud to no one in particular “that I am about to be thrust into another one of my strange adventures.”

The wind blew from the north, which in this hemisphere was where the polar regions lay. He turned up the collar on his coat and headed towards the Georgian buildings of Harvard University, America’s oldest and finest institution of higher learning.

Sometimes Even Orwell Nods

When I was a student at Oxford I made a little pilgrimage one day to visit George Orwell's grave at the nearby All Saints Cemetery in Sutton Courtenay. The grave wasn't in very good condition and you could barely read the name Eric Arthur Blair and his dates, but I was well pleased. It was important to me because I had liked Orwell's novels and essays and I still think of him as a model for the clarity of his sense and prose. I was little dismayed therefore yesterday to read this bit in an essay he wrote on Mark Twain:

In Life on the Mississippi there is a queer little illustration of the central weakness of Mark Twain’s character. In the earlier part of this mainly autobiographical book the dates have been altered. Mark Twain describes his adventures as a Mississippi pilot as though he had been a boy of about seventeen at the time, whereas in fact he was a young man of nearly thirty. There is a reason for this. The same part of the book describes his exploits in the Civil War, which were distinctly inglorious. Moreover, Mark Twain started by fighting, if he can be said to have fought, on the Southern side, and then changed his allegiance before the war was over. This kind of behaviour is more excusable in a boy than in a man, whence the adjustment of the dates. It is also clear enough, however, that he changed sides because he saw that the North was going to win; and this tendency to side with the stronger whenever possible, to believe that might must be right, is apparent throughout his career.

Orwell is quite wrong about this. Mark Twain was 22 when he began studying to be a pilot on the Mississippi and 24 when he got his license. By the age of 25 he had already abandoned the Confederate Army had headed west to Nevada. 25 strikes me as still being pretty young. Its also very odd for Orwell to claim that Twain was jumping onto the winning team. It looked like the Confederacy was going to win the war or at least force a negotiated peace well in to 1864, a good three years after the young Sam Clemens had headed west.

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Childhood heroes let you down as you get older, but that's sort of their job and Orwell is no different. Unfortunately he couldn't resist fitting his facts around his theories, a flaw that shines through some of his work. However when he was good he was very, very good. Take a look at England Your England or Such Such Were The Joys as nice examples of his high art.

Literary Trivia To Astound/Annoy Your Friends

I very much enjoyed this account of the baseball trivia world series in the New York Times. With statistics stretching over three different centuries and an ultra geeky fanbase, baseball attracts more trivia buffs than perhaps any other sport, save cricket. My favourite piece of arcana was this question: Which three players appeared in games when they were older than the sitting United States President? Answer: Dan Brouthers and Jim O’Rourke (older than Teddy Roosevelt in 1904) and Satchel Paige who was older than Lyndon Johnson in 1965 (and presumably 1964 and 1963 too?)
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Literature doesn't attract that level of devotion alas and the facts are so well known that they don't really count as trivia, however, thematically following on from my last post, I have compiled a list of 8 facts that may amuse some of you. (Why 8 and not 10? Well, I sometimes think about what life would be like if octopii had used their surprisingly large brains to become the dominant species on Earth and everything was thus in base 8, and, also, to be honest, I got a bit lazy.) And yes I know that's not the plural of octopus. Ok on with the facts:
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1. Marcel Proust and James Joyce once shared a taxi in Paris. (You won't be surprised to learn that both complained about their health and Proust paid.)
2. Samuel Beckett and Raymond Chandler were both cricket playing Irish novelists.
3. Philip Larkin worked as a librarian in Belfast.
4. William Faulkner wrote the plan of his novel A Fable on a bedroom wall in his house in Oxford, Mississippi (and its still there to this very day).
5. JD Salinger once bought Ernest Hemingway a drink in the bar of the Ritz Hotel during the liberation of Paris. The bar of course now (like many others throughout the world) is called the Hemingway Bar.
6. Jonathan Swift was a vicar in my home town of Carrickfergus for about a year, during which he time he wrote A Tale of a Tub and possibly a preliminary sketch of Gulliver's Travels.
7. The focal point of L Ron Hubbard's "novel" Battlefield Earth is the Denver Public Library which is the same place where Jack Kerouac wrote preliminary sketches for On The Road. (And, I, er, your humble correspondent, wrote a couple of novels).
8. Alexander Pushkin's most famous poem is about a man who ruins his life in a duel. Pushkin was later killed in a duel. Mikhail Lermontov (Pushkin's most famous successor) was so incensed by this that he wrote a series of passionate poems about the stupidity of duelling and accused the Tsar of being complicit in the duel which killed Pushkin. Lermonotov, of course, was later killed in a duel.
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Incidentally when I visited the site of Pushkin's duel in a park north of Saint Petersburg a young girl had brought flowers for Pushkin and was weeping for him uncontrollably - proving once again that poets and rock stars should die young and a little bit stupidly if they want immortal fame.
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Ok that's it, we're out, if you can think of any lit triv, I'd love to hear to it.

Some Tidbits From The Paris Review Interviews

I recently got The Paris Review Interviews III to go with I and II. I think this one might be my favourite of them all. Instead of reviewing the books however I thought I would just give you 10 interesting tidbits from the interviews:

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1. Salman Rushdie is a Lord of the Rings geek and speaks fluent Elvish. That, my friends, is clearly how to impress the ladies.

2. Norman Mailer believed in reincarnation.

3. Jean Rhys lived in terror of obeah - West Indian black magic.

4. Simenon wrote a new Maigret novel every 11 days.

5. Ernest Hemingway wrote standing up.

6. James Thurber had a photographic memory and could transcribe entire conversations, perfectly, decades later.

7. Until 100 Years of Solitude came out none of Garcia Marquez's books had ever sold more than 700 copies. (There's hope for all of us!)

8. Martin Amis appeared as a child actor in the film A High Wind in Jamaica.

9. Stephen King was drunk during the writing of Cujo.

10. Isaac Bashevis Singer felt that we were surrounded by ghosts and spirits.

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My favourite interviews were with Singer, Faulkner, Denison and Hemingway who all seem pretty likeable. My least favourite were with Graham Greene and William Gaddis who, frankly, seem like jerks.

One Football Team For Ireland

Northern Ireland’s sorry and predictable elimination from yet another World Cup at least didn’t culminate with the players getting in a punch up with one another as they did after their Euro 2008 qualifying debacle. Still, things have come to a pretty pass, Northern Ireland has not played in a World Cup since Mexico in 1986 when they were eliminated in the first round and I doubt they will ever qualify again. In the 1980's the Iron Curtain was still intact, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union only fielded one team each and Northern Ireland could usually secure a second or third seed in the group competition. The standard of play and the number of countries has increased in Eastern Europe since and typically Northern Ireland now gets a third or fourth seed with virtually no hope of making it to the World Cup finals against superior opposition.
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Northern Irish fans have coasted on memories of the 1982 World Cup when we came within a whisker of making it to the semis, but those glory days were more than a generation ago and the current squad has more in common with a team like Iceland or Latvia or - God save us - Wales, perennial also rans. The situation in the Republic of Ireland is almost exactly the opposite. Since their nadir in the 1980's the Republic has been to three World Cups: 1990, 1994 and 2002 and this week they made it into the knock out playoffs for 2010. In 1990 and 1994 the Republic acquitted themselves with distinction and 2002 was only spoiled because of the spat between Roy Keane and Mick McCarthy.
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It wasn’t Northern Ireland’s fault that football - unlike rugby - became split in Ireland. Dublin was the centre for Gaelic Games on the island and Belfast was traditionally the centre for football. The IFA was (and still is) based in Belfast but after partition in 1923, a rival federation, the FAI, was established in Dublin. Confusion reigned for the next thirty years with dozens of players getting called up by both Ireland federations until, in the 1950's, Con Martin, Davy Walsh, Tommy Ahern and Reg Ryan had the odd distinction of playing for the IFA and FAI teams in World Cup qualifiers. FIFA put a stop to this by ordering a renaming of the Irish teams and a strict division of players: footballers born in Eire would play for the Republic of Ireland, those born in the north, Northern Ireland.
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Northern Ireland still managed to punch above its weight, qualifying for the 1958 World Cup and then producing such stars as George Best, Pat Jennings, Sammy McIroy and Danny Blanchflower, before the heroics of the Espana ‘82 campaign. Northern Ireland fans are a small but dedicated bunch and I have been to many memorable home games at Windsor Park. The defeats of England and Germany come to mind and truly anything can happen there in that tiny, intimidating ground in the heart of west Belfast. But now that the team has been eliminated for the sixth World Cup in a row it is time to face facts, an all Ireland team is our best hope of ever getting to the Cup again and over the long term an all Ireland team might do quite well, especially if it began to draw players from all of Ireland’s football codes.
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The all Ireland rugby team is currently ranked fifth in the world and an all Ireland football team would surely rise in the FIFA rankings. There are of course many problems with this scheme. Firstly, the IFA would be furious at the loss of money and prestige if home games moved to the Aviva stadium in Dublin. Secondly, football is not rugby, rugby in Ireland is a middle class game that no one, deep down, really gets too serious about whereas football is important and comes with a heavy sectarian baggage that rugby does not possess. I concede these points, but one way to win over hearts and minds in Belfast would be to play half the home games there, perhaps in the new multi sport stadium being planned for the Ulster rugby and GAA teams. Loyalist and Republican paraphernalia and flags could be banned completely as they are for Belfast Giants games and then you might even see some Catholic supporters or families with children, rarities both in Windsor Park. Sectarianism is not the universal acid it once was in Belfast and it shouldn’t be forgot that Glasgow is a city divided between Rangers and Celtic supporters who come together to boo England at Hampden Park.
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Another difficulty is that many Northern Ireland players would fight to qualify for an all Ireland team; perhaps none of the current team would be good enough. But competition is ultimately a good thing, you want footballers playing their hearts out to get selected for the national team, not just assuming they’ve made it because they’re on a big club in the EPL. The Irish rugby team grants no favors to players because they are from Ulster or any of the other provinces and that has made the team stronger. Of course the diehard sectarian nutcase ‘supporters’ will never buy into this plan, but the whole point of the peace process in Northern Ireland is to build cross community bridges and displace sectarianism whenever possible. Money, patience and trust, but especially money from FIFA, UEFA and the British and Irish governments could grease a lot of wheels and make it happen. It’s already too late to get the ball rolling for Brazil 2014, but the 2018 World Cup is most likely going to go to England and FIFA, who helped create this mess in the first place, could throw Ireland several group stage games as a way of further sweetening the financial pot.
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I know some people will say, hold on a minute, it's not just about winning it's about playing the game, old chap. Yeah, pal, that may apply to some sports but not football.

Meades Meets The Future on the Isle of Lewis

One of my favourite people, Jonathan Meades, is back on BBC 4 with a new series, this time called Off Kilter which is all about the architecture and symbolism of Scotland. Thanks to the Meades Shrine you can watch this and every series on YouTube and you should (just don't tell too many people or the BBC that you're doing it). In the clip to the right Meades has gone to the Isle of Lewis & Harris and found a Ballardian futurescape of rust and beauty. Because the clip has been uploaded in glorious hi-def you'll need to pause it for about a minute after the circle thing stops loading, so that it will play without interruption. (It's worth the hassle.) And check out more Meades on YouTube.

We Have A Winner

Thanks to everyone who entered the Dead Trilogy competition. The actual time it took me to walk the length of Manhattan was a lackadaisical nine hours and forty minutes. I thought I gave a good clue when I said it took me longer than I was expecting but most people under-estimated the time which means, I suppose, that I'm a good bit slower and lazier than y'all think. If you didn't win thank you for participating.

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Enough about those losers, now for the winner...the closest guess was 9 hours 37 minutes from Ryan. Just three minutes out! Freaky. Anyway the trilogy edition of the Dead series goes to him. Well done mate, now do us a favour and give me your email or your address and I'll have those books off to you in tomorrow's post. I hope you don't live in England, I just heard that the Royal Mail is going on strike...

The Dead Trilogy Competition

Thanks to the largesse of those kind people at Allen and Unwin and Serpents Tail, I recently received a couple of copies of the trilogy edition of Dead I Well May Be, The Dead Yard and The Bloomsday Dead. The books look fantastic in this edition and the covers and artwork are consistent throughout. I'm keeping one set for myself but I thought I might as well give the other set away. It isn't available in the US (Dead I Well May Be isn't even in print in the US) so this might be a nice get for someone. They are all first editions and of course I'll sign them. It might be worth a few bob one day especially if I go onto fame or infamy.
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Ok it's fairly simple competition. I lived in New York for seven years and Dead I Well May Be mostly takes place there. To get to know the city, one day I decided to walk the whole length of Broadway from the top of Manhattan to the bottom. I stopped off to eat a couple of times and there were a couple of bathroom breaks but mostly it was just me walking. My question is this: how long did it take? I noted my start time way up on 220th street and my finish time when I met the missus at South Ferry. The person closest to my time in hours and minutes gets the books. Just leave your guess and name and an email address in the comments below, or if you have a blogger account just your name, answer and tick the email follow on button.
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Unless someone gets the exact time in hours and minutes the competition will close forty eight hours after this post goes up and I'm only going to allow one guess per person. Finally, here's a wee hint: I did the walk all on one day but it took much longer than I was expecting. Good luck!

Richard Dawkins Is Not Really An Atheist

Richard Dawkins was on BBC 5 Live recently talking about his latest book and he said something that struck me as rather odd. Paraphrasing (because the BBC's podcasts disappear after a week) he mused that there may be super beings out there in the universe indistinguishable from gods, who are the end products of a long period of evolution on their home worlds. He said something similar on Fresh Air two years ago. And although he thinks it unlikely Dawkins speculates that life here on Earth may have begun because one of these superbeings got the ball rolling with an initial seeding.

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Now Dawkins says that he doesn't believe in God because he thinks that God has to be infinite, and has to exist prior to the Big Bang, but he is, apparently, willing to believe in a finite god who is the end product of evolution. This doesn't seem an enormous distinction to me. Let's say a god-like being did kick off evolution on this planet and he or she has been watching us closely for the last 4 billion years (those first three billion must have dragged). Wouldn't it make sense then to worship and pray to this entity in the hope that we could benefit from the entity's largess? If sufficiently advanced couldn't this entity do just about anything including preserving our mind states and transmuting these mind states into another form after our deaths? Dawkins consistently mocks the efficacy of prayer and the belief in resurrection, but these are the logical outcomes of what he's saying here. Furthermore in a universe of 10 000 billion suns with billions of Earth like worlds that's been knocking around now for at least 13 billion years doesn't it seem more likely than not that these god-like beings have evolved somewhere and indeed are out there right now? Wouldn't prayer and worship seem like sensible, precautionary steps in dealing with these potentially terrifying entities? And what exactly does Dawkins's atheism mean if he is prepared to believe in gods, but not an infinite God? In the strict sense of the word Dawkins is not an atheist, he's an agnostic. Theism is the belief in at least one god, atheism is the certain belief that there are no gods.

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Hold on a minute, you may be saying to yourself, can the world's most famous atheist really not be an atheist at all? Uhm, yeah, I think so. I also think that if you believe in evolution by natural selection (and the evidence is overwhelming folks) and if you believe that the universe is 13.5 billion years old (again lots of evidence) then strict atheism (belief in no gods or god-like entities) is not very logical. Somewhere, somewhen they must have evolved.

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And don't even get me started on Dawkins's colleague, Professor Nick Bostrom and his theory that none of this is real to begin with and that we are all very probably living in a computer simulation controlled by god-like beings from the future.

Kids Say The Creepiest Things

Unfortunately I grew up in the era when film directors realised the full potential of having creepy children in their movies. I think it may have begun with the blonde geniuses in Children of the Damned but by the seventies Damien in the Omen really took the prize for terrifying toddlers. Damien freaked me out and then at a very vulnerable age I happened to see Stanley Kubrick's The Shining and that was the icing on the nightmares.

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Of course since then we've had The Sixth Sense and The Ring so that now the scary supernatural child is almost the default position in horror films and the trope is so pervasive you begin to suspect it even in your own life. Tonight my daughter and I were out for an evening walk in a tumbledown part of St Kilda when we passed a house covered in ivy with a decrepit roof, old fashioned shutters and windows that had a vague, oddly sinister fairy-tale appearance. The garden however was full of wild flowers, so I said "Oh what a lovely house." My daughter replied, "Yes, but the gate is talking to me and wants me to go in." I'm pretty sure that if I hadn't been conditioned by The Ring, The Omen etc. I would have just ignored this remark; as it was, a chill went down my spine. "What do you mean the gate was talking to you?" I asked. "Oh you know, the way everything talks to you," she explained.

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I was scared and did not press the matter further. I decided that I didn't want to know. Finding out accelerates you to Act 2 and for the present I want to stay in Act 1. Of course it's nothing more than the innocent ramblings of an imaginative seven year old, but then again...