Atomic Café

We live in dispiriting and dangerous times. The New Barbarism continues to metastasise.

Neo-conservatives and the al-Qa'ida Death Cult (and their imitators) embrace and perpetuate simplistic dichotomies (Islamophile and Infidel, Islamo-fascist and Enlightened Western Democrat, Terrorist and Defender of the Free World, Patriot and Traitor, Hard-headed Realist and Appeasor) and objectify "The Other." The Devil isn’t in the details; He’s in the differentiation and the discrimination that follow.

It's a short step from objectification via demonisation to destruction, and both Bush and his nemesis-in-crime Bin Laden (and their apocalyptic acolytes) seem to share Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction.

The Internet is accelerant-in-chief of The New Barbarism: a revolution in global inter-connectivity, which, briefly, threatened to be a force for Good before showing its true colours as a repository of Evil. It could be claimed that Bin Laden isn't the Anti-Christ and neither is Bush: the Internet is.

Those of us who wish to maintain an online persona (and do we truly exist without one these days?) run the gauntlet daily in defiance of fraudsters, phishers, rogue diallers, pharmers, hackers, spyware and malware miscreants, trojan horses, viruses, worms and their constantly mutating variants. The average Internet surfer now needs tighter security than a Presidential motorcade.

Worse than that, bad ideas (metastasising memes) are proliferating at an alarming rate. Indigenous terrorist cells mimicking al-Qa'ida strike in London, at least in part, as a reaction to internet-disseminated Islamic fundamentalist propaganda; their atrocities are celebrated in, and by, the same medium and, in turn, inspire imitative acts of terror.

Of course it's tempting to "anthropomorphize" a morally neutral technological development in order to exculpate us from liability. The Internet is merely the dystopian human condition in microcosm but accelerated and abstracted at the same time. The Internet facilitates the dissemination of bad ideas by both bringing people closer (and faster) together and simultaneously distancing crime from commission, perpetrator from victim and consequence from action. The Internet confers a cloak of anonymity and a patina of passivity but obfuscates distinction between the Real and the Virtual.

The New Barbarism is characterised by the breakdown of barriers between fantasy and reality. It’s medium (and sometimes weapon) of choice, the Internet, is the natural habitat of the pervert, the paedophile, the criminal and the terrorist. In this virtual Sin City lawlessness is endemic, the authorities are impotent or corrupt (or both) and damnation is the only foreseeable denouement.

It’s disturbing to listen to American justifications for Hiroshima, and one can only view the Iraqi invasion as consistent with this tradition of disproportionate and indiscriminate response to aggression. Their inability to define their "own" aggression (hesitant though I am to ascribe proprietorial interest in Bush's war crimes to an entire nation, I'll settle for "aggression perpetuated in their name by their leaders") as such is equally disconcerting: Iraq was, presumably, a “legitimate” exercises of the right, of their presumably omniscient nation, to launch a pre-emptive “response” to a future threat. We’re all characters in Philip K. Dick’s Minority Report/Pre-Crime milieu now.

The USA abdicated the moral high ground after 9/11 by invading a state, which had nothing to do with that atrocity (Iraq) and by sanctioning the endemic sadism at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, all of which have radicalised and inflamed the Muslim world and engorged al-Qa’ida’s nihilistic heart with lifeblood.

The UK abdicated the moral high ground after 7/7 by summarily executing an innocent man at Stockwell tube station.

Al-Qa’ida is a cancer that can only be removed by a surgeon’s precise scalpel. Butcher Bush has already tried, and failed, to excise the malignancy with a blunt instrument and the fear is that indiscriminate radiation treatment cannot be far behind.

In the mendacious world of Neo-con justification for the illegal (incontestably so in the absence of any demonstrable basis for the invocation of the right to self-defence and without authorisation by the UN Security Council) invasion of the sovereign state of Iraq, the repudiation of the WMD "warrant" for pre-emptive “defence” left the invaders with no option but to tie themselves to the mast and go down with the “good” ship Equivocation.

The illegitimate invasion of Iraq was subsumed under the catch-all War on Terror (the recently deceased Robin Cook exposed the fallacy behind the nomenclature: a War on Terror implies that the bombers can be defeated simply by dropping bigger bombs of our own.) The conflation of the sins of the, admittedly vile, dictator Saddam Hussein and the terrorist atrocities perpetuated by al-Qa'ida, despite no demonstrable evidence of any connection ~ the Islamic fundamentalists hated Saddam more than we did, cannot be excused as mere muddled thinking; equivocation is characterised by intent to deceive. The desirability of regime change is a nice ex post facto rationalisation but it hardly constituted a warrant for invasion.

The invasion has been a disaster despite what mendacious Neo-con spin-doctors tell us. A study by The Lancet in late 2004 established that the risk of death by violence for Iraqi civilians was 58 times higher than before Bush began to liberate them. Iraq has certainly not got any safer of late.

Iraq is now the Crucible of Jihad: fertile al-Qu’ida recruitment ground, suitably lawless base of operations, inexhaustible repository of legitimate grievance within the world’s Muslim communities and symbolic red rag to enrage the Islamic fundamentalist bull.

Al-Qa’ida and their acolytes utilise the same sort of equivocation. The invasion of Iraq, illegal or otherwise, and associated grievances, is insufficient warrant for spilling the blood of innocents around the globe Although Neo-cons correctly point out that al-Qa’ida were perpetuating atrocities before Iraq (e.g. 9/11) they cannot logically demonstrate that Bush and Blair’s foreign policies have no causal connection to current terror campaigns (all available evidence suggests that the Iraqi invasion has strengthened and further radicalised Islamic Terror). Al-Qa’ida may not be overly concerned with legitimacy but they know that paying lip service to it works well in the areas of recruitment, motivation and inspiration.

Perplexingly, Americans seem to be simultaneously “clear-sighted” enough to see that Japan’s bombardment of a US military target (Pearl Harbour) provided sufficient justification for incinerating and irradiating hundreds of thousands of Japanese innocents yet too myopic to see the correlation between disaffected Muslims claiming that the invasion of Iraq (and “collateral” civilian fatalities well in excess of 100, 000) justifies the bombings of innocents in Madrid, London and, potentially, future atrocities.

It’s hardly surprising that states such as Iran are desperately trying to develop a nuclear deterrent when the Bush administration has exhibited complete contempt for international law, the United Nations & world opinion and displayed a willingness to launch campaigns of illegal aggression against other states in the region. This isn’t 1945 however: the USA was the only kid on the Atomic block in those days. This isn’t 1962 either: MAD was a deterrent back then and the bogeyman was a vulnerable, ostensibly rational sovereign state with a vested interest in self-preservation. Today's enemy is a shape-shifting Death Cult which resists not only territorial definition, but also the conventional preoccupations, interests and behavioural paradigms of statehood.

The United States developed the Bomb but, after trying out their new toy at Hiroshima & Nagasaki, recoiled from its infernal power. Al-Qa’ida is probably the only national, supranational, terrorist or criminal entity in the nuclear era to espouse a philosophy, which practically compels the deployment of nuclear weapons against their enemy; the only adversary to exhibit an apocalyptic death fixation. Al Qa'ida's raison d'être (an admittedly oxymoronic characterisation of a nihilistic death cult's guiding philosophy; they have an even greater reason to cease to exist: martyrdom and an after-life with an improbable demographic ~ 72 young virginal females for every Jihadist ~ eat your heart out Surf City!) demands inexorable geometric progression from atrocity to annihilation.

When, as seems inevitable, al-Qa’ida, or one of their affiliates, finally get their hands on nuclear weapons they will almost certainly turn them on the nation that invented, and first deployed, them. A great deal of quasi-religious justificatory “you reap what you sow” claptrap will doubtless emanate from both sides before (if past actions are a reliable predictor of future events) the inevitable indiscriminate American response hastens our journey to the Abyss.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, scientific director of the Manhattan Project, spoke of America’s sleazy sense of omnipotence.
America may have retained the sleaze but the myth of its omnipotence has been shattered forever. In an age where former certainties have been destroyed, a paranoid and insecure United States, presided over by a paranoid and insecure leader, may not possess the requisite sophistication, guile and subtlety to wage effective "war" against a highly resourceful, imaginative and constantly mutating enemy. Old-fashioned bluster and belligerence are no longer enough and a foreign policy predicated upon false dichotomies and equivocation only makes matters worse.

Let's hope Posterity is rather more phlegmatic and philosophical about George W. Bush having been, however temporarily, entrusted with it's past than I am about the decision of the American electorate to entrust him with our future.

Cool Album Art: Tales of Manhattan ~ Babs Gonzales

the cool philosophy of Babs Gonzales

How to Speak Hip

Betty's world (noun): Referring to any geopolitical event occurring during the reign of Elizabeth 1 (1558-1603). "That Shakespeare was the swingin' prose king in Betty's world."

Doll City (adj): Physically attractive in a standard-issue way. "Those Hemingway chicks with the Brezhnev brows are Doll City. I'll freeze."

Gettin' the mohawk (verb form): Building up irritation to a major level, causing one's hackles to rise. "There was nothing on at seven except for Family Feud. I was gettin' the mohawk."

I'll freeze, Bill (phrase): A polite turndown. "Thanks for inviting me to that Pia Zadora flick, but I'll freeze, Bill." (From The Price Is Right TV game show, per Tom Vickers)

Motel Hell (adj.): Characteristic of a bad place to stay, as in a souring love affair or dead-end job. "Man, I'm quitting; the gig is Motel Hell."

Shovel City (adj.): Deeply dug, much appreciated. "You enjoying the music?" "It's too much: Shovel City."

(to) swing like sixty (verb): To perform at peak, to freak freely or wail radically. "That girl's the cleanest when it comes to threads. The dress she wore last night swung like sixty."

Swiss (adj.): Neutral. Having no opinion or preference. From Vickers (1980-82): "1 don't care where we go tonight. Dinner? Flicks? I'm totally Swiss."

Wall Street didn't jump (descriptive phrase): Indicating an action which fails to draw the anticipated reaction; creating no ripples on the pond. "He told the finance company he'd be inheriting a million bucks in six months. Wall Street didn't jump."

in Wig City (descriptive phrase): Caught in the township of the flipped, just outside sanity and peopled by mad daddies and moms.

How To Speak Hip

Cool Album Art ~ How to Speak Hip ~ Del Close & John Brent

Random Transmissions 2: On Plagiarism

Cannibalistic culture is not a modern phenomenon. Art has always imitated Art:

Beethoven's reaction after sitting through the opening night of Ferdinando Paer's Achille:

I liked your opera, Ferdinando. I'm thinking of setting it to music.

Ironically enough he did just that. The Funeral March from Achille turned up some years later, in skillfully disguised form, as The Funeral March of Eroica.

As T.S. Eliot once remarked:

Immature artists imitate. Mature artists steal.

The American artist James McNeill Whistler, who at the time was President of the Royal Society of British Artists, was engaged in a battle of wits with Oscar Wilde. After one of Whistler's particularly corruscating remarks, Wilde is alleged to have said:

Well, Mr. President, I should have liked to have said that myself,

to which the American instantly replied:

You will, Oscar, you will.

Killer Movie Scenes: King of New York ~ Frank White greets his crew at the Plaza Hotel

Abel Ferrara’s King of New York begins as penitentiary-tanned Frank White (Christopher Walken) is decanted from prison cell back to his natural domain: nocturnal New York. Walken as White is Nosferatu: cadaverous countenance, cryogenically cool. Languid but lethal; eerily elegant, Frank White takes up residence, as befits his regal status, in a salubrious suite at the Plaza Hotel and surveys his empire. As he gazes outwards the Manhattan skyline is reflected back onto the window of the Plaza penthouse, almost obscuring his dead eyes, alien features and lethal, curtailed smile. His prison crop is revitalised: an electrified Don King eruption. His black Armani suit is as sharp as his features: Walken owns The Charisma Franchise.

In the following scene his crew (Jimmy Jump ~ Larry Fishburne, Lance ~ Giancarlo Esposito, Test Tube ~ Steve Buscemi et alia) arrive to pay homage to their King. Walken, unvisited during his long incarceration, mimes resentment then subverts it with a showman's dance of rapprochement and resurrection. A truly unexpected, extemporaneous, unscripted moment. Count Dracula meets Gene Kelly.

As the scene begins Jump and White eye eachother uneasily. Jump plays with a polystyrene cup; the tension is palpable.

Frank White: What’s in the cup?

Jimmy Jump: Root beer. You want some?

Frank White: There are some things I don’t do…..(dead eyes flash, a sly wink)..bop, bop, wooaah!
(Walken dances like only Walken can. Frank White is back).

Jimmy Jump: Yo, congratulations, Frank. Congratulations, man. The Columbian motherfuckers, they took permanent vacation in hell, if you know what I mean.

Frank White: Well, I must've been away too long because my feelings are dead. I feel no remorse. It’s a terrible thing. (a lethal smile ghosts across his features and vanishes).

Jimmy Jump: Yeah, I heard that being in jail makes you feel like that, man.
I got a present for you. Check it out (hands Frank a pair of gloves).
They were King Tito’s…but he don’t need them where he is now (laughs).
Yeah, I thought you might want to donate them to a clothing drive or something (laughs).

Frank White: You having a good time, eh Jim?

Jimmy Jump: Hey, man, I’ve been waiting years for this.

Lance: Emilio Zapa sends his regards (flips open an attaché case and holds up bundles of notes).

Frank White: (Gasps) Ow, Ooww! You know how I love money! …. Now help yourself (grins).

Frank White: Is the meeting set with Dalesio?

Lance: Downtown.

Jimmy Jump: You need to let me bust a cap in that moon-headed motherfucker’s ass, boy!

Henchman: Word!

Jimmy Jump: He's a f*cking glitter-boy; he's looking to get sprayed, laid, played, and slayed, you know what I'm saying?

Frank White: I heard that (laughs).
So, you gonna come downtown and say hello?

Jimmy Jump: You hob-knob with those homos if you want to. I’m going downtown to find me a girl, get my knob polished. Time for some real fun.

Frank White: Jim, ... How come you never came to see me?

Jimmy Jump: Who wanted to see you in a cage, man?

Frank White: (pauses reflectively, a mime of resentment followed by a snaky, slowburning smile)…Of course.

Public Enemy vs Herb Alpert, Vol.1 & 2

Public Enemy vs Herb Alpert, Vol. 1

Public Enemy vs Herb Alpert, Vol. 2

In the Jacuzzi Today

William S. Burroughs, Jenna Jameson and e.e. cummings

Star Wars: Break Me a Fucking Give

I'll put my cards on the table right from the get-go: I hate Star Wars.

As Peter Biskind observes in his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, "Star Bucks" heralded the death of the halcyon era of intelligent American Film and ushered in the Age of the Anodyne. It kick-started a trend which took us from The Godfather to Armageddon; from the Scorsese of substance (Raging Bull, Mean Streets et alia) to Scorsese-Lite (Gangs of New York, The Aviator); from Robert Altman to Michael Bay.

Taxi Driver's scriptwriter Paul Schrader lamented:

Star Wars was the film that ate at the heart and the soul of Hollywood. It created the big-budget comic book mentality.

Irrespective of it's symbolic significance in the decline of Hollywood, my hatred of Star Wars is purely aesthetic. George Lucas' dialogue sounds like it was written in Aramaic and translated into English by Babel Fish.

It says something about the paucity of Lucas' vision that with an unlimited palette of creative options at his disposal and a vast fictive universe awaiting imaginative construction he chose to centre Episode 1: The Phantom Menace around a tax dispute. In other words, Lucas chose to cork the creative genie back in the bottle, attach a dead weight for insurance and toss it into the Hudson River.

Has there ever been a more dispiriting overture to a movie than the following:

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....
(A vast sea of stars serves as the backdrop for the MAIN TITLE, followed by a ROLL UP, which crawls up into infinity.)
EPISODE 1 THE PHANTOM MENACE
Turmoil has engulfed the Galactic Republic. The taxation of trade routes to outlaying star systems is in dispute.

Now call me churlish but even a died-in-the-wool hater of the sexless Star Wars franchise might have expected a little more bang for his buck than this. Somewhere in the multiverse there, most assuredly, exists a parallel universe where Philip K. Dick's oeuvre has been filtered through the "creative" intermediary of a firm of chartered accountants just to impose some much-needed "double-entry discipline" on his disorganised sensibility. Luckily I won't live long enough to visit it.

Suffice to say, wild horses were not available to drag me to Revenge of the Sith. Presumably they were otherwise engaged hauling other unfortunate cinéastes, such as New Yorker reviewer Anthony Lane, to the movie. My reaction to his review: "I'm with that guy!"

Sith. What kind of a word is that? Sith. It sounds to me like the noise that emerges when you block one nostril and blow through the other, but to George Lucas it is a name that trumpets evil. What is proved beyond question by “Star Wars: Episode III—Revenge of the Sith,” the latest—and, you will be shattered to hear, the last—installment of his sci-fi bonanza, is that Lucas, though his eye may be greedy for sensation, has an ear of purest cloth. All those who concoct imagined worlds must populate and name them, and the resonance of those names is a fairly accurate guide to the mettle of the imagination in question. Tolkien, earthed in Old English, had a head start that led him straight to the flinty perfection of Mordor and Orc. Here, by contrast, are some Lucas inventions: Palpatine. Sidious. Mace Windu. (Isn’t that something you spray on colicky babies?) Bail Organa. And Sith.

Lucas was not always a rootless soul. He made “American Graffiti,” which yielded with affection to the gravitational pull of the small town. Since then, he has swung out of orbit, into deep nonsense, and the new film is the apotheosis of that drift. One stab of humor and the whole conceit would pop, but I have a grim feeling that Lucas wishes us to honor the remorseless non-comedy of his galactic conflict, so here goes. Obi-Wan Kenobi (Ewan McGregor) and his star pupil, Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen), are, with the other Jedi knights, defending the Republic against the encroachments of the Sith and their allies—millions of dumb droids, led by Count Dooku (Christopher Lee) and his henchman, General Grievous, who is best described as a slaying mantis. Meanwhile, the Chancellor of the Republic, Palpatine (Ian McDiarmid), is engaged in a sly bout of Realpolitik, suspected by nobody except Anakin, Obi-Wan, and every single person watching the movie. Anakin, too, is a divided figure, wrenched between his Jedi devotion to selfless duty and a lurking hunch that, if he bides his time and trashes his best friends, he may eventually get to wear a funky black mask and start breathing like a horse.

This film is the tale of his temptation. We already know the outcome—Anakin will indeed drop the killer-monk Jedi look and become Darth Vader, the hockey goalkeeper from hell—because it forms the substance of the original “Star Wars.” One of the things that make Episode III so dismal is the time and effort expended on Anakin’s conversion. Early in the story, he enjoys a sprightly light-sabre duel with Count Dooku, which ends with the removal of the Count’s hands. (The stumps glow, like logs on a fire; there is nothing here that reeks of human blood.) Anakin prepares to scissor off the head, while the mutilated Dooku kneels for mercy. A nice setup, with Palpatine egging our hero on from the background. The trouble is that Anakin’s choice of action now will be decisive, and the remaining two hours of the film—scene after scene in which Hayden Christensen has to glower and glare, blazing his conundrum to the skies—will add nothing to the result. “Something’s happening. I’m not the Jedi I should be,” he says. This is especially worrying for his wife, Padmé (Natalie Portman), who is great with child. Correction: with children.

What can you say about a civilization where people zip from one solar system to the next as if they were changing their socks but where a woman fails to register for an ultrasound, and thus to realize that she is carrying twins until she is about to give birth? Mind you, how Padmé got pregnant is anybody’s guess, although I’m prepared to wager that it involved Anakin nipping into a broom closet with a warm glass jar and a copy of Ewok Babes. After all, the Lucasian universe is drained of all reference to bodily functions. Nobody ingests or excretes. Language remains unblue. Smoking and cursing are out of bounds, as is drunkenness, although personally I wouldn’t go near the place without a hip flask. Did Lucas learn nothing from “Alien” and “Blade Runner”—from the suggestion that other times and places might be no less rusted and septic than ours, and that the creation of a disinfected galaxy, where even the storm troopers wear bright-white outfits, looks not so much fantastical as dated? What Lucas has devised, over six movies, is a terrible puritan dream: a morality tale in which both sides are bent on moral cleansing, and where their differences can be assuaged only by a triumphant circus of violence. Judging from the whoops and crowings that greeted the opening credits, this is the only dream we are good for. We get the films we deserve.

The general opinion of “Revenge of the Sith” seems to be that it marks a distinct improvement on the last two episodes, “The Phantom Menace” and “Attack of the Clones.” True, but only in the same way that dying from natural causes is preferable to crucifixion. So much here is guaranteed to cause either offense or pain, starting with the nineteen-twenties leather football helmet that Natalie Portman suddenly dons for no reason, and rising to the continual horror of Ewan McGregor’s accent. “Another happy landing”—or, to be precise, “anothah heppy lending”—he remarks, as Anakin parks the front half of a burning starcruiser on a convenient airstrip. The young Obi-Wan Kenobi is not, I hasten to add, the most nauseating figure onscreen; nor is R2-D2 or even C-3PO, although I still fail to understand why I should have been expected to waste twenty-five years of my life following the progress of a beeping trash can and a gay, gold-plated Jeeves.

No, the one who gets me is Yoda. May I take the opportunity to enter a brief plea in favor of his extermination? Any educated moviegoer would know what to do, having watched that helpful sequence in “Gremlins” when a small, sage-colored beastie is fed into an electric blender. A fittingly frantic end, I feel, for the faux-pensive stillness on which the Yoda legend has hung. At one point in the new film, he assumes the role of cosmic shrink—squatting opposite Anakin in a noirish room, where the light bleeds sideways through slatted blinds. Anakin keeps having problems with his dark side, in the way that you or I might suffer from tennis elbow, but Yoda, whose reptilian smugness we have been encouraged to mistake for wisdom, has the answer. “Train yourself to let go of everything you fear to lose,” he says. Hold on, Kermit, run that past me one more time. If you ever got laid (admittedly a long shot, unless we can dig you up some undiscerning alien hottie with a name like Jar Jar Gabor), and spawned a brood of Yodettes, are you saying that you’d leave them behind at the first sniff of danger? Also, while we’re here, what’s with the screwy syntax? Deepest mind in the galaxy, apparently, and you still express yourself like a day-tripper with a dog-eared phrase book. “I hope right you are.” Break me a fucking give.

The prize for the least speakable burst of dialogue has, over half a dozen helpings of “Star Wars,” grown into a fiercely contested tradition, but for once the winning entry is clear, shared between Anakin and Padmé for their exchange of endearments at home:

“You’re so beautiful.” “That’s only because I’m so in love.” “No, it’s because I’m so in love with you.”

For a moment, it looks as if they might bat this one back and forth forever, like a baseline rally on a clay court. And if you think the script is on the tacky side, get an eyeful of the décor. All of the interiors in Lucasworld are anthems to clean living, with molded furniture, the tranquillity of a morgue, and none of the clutter and quirkiness that signify the process known as existence. Illumination is provided not by daylight but by a dispiriting plastic sheen, as if Lucas were coating all private affairs—those tricky little threats to his near-fascistic rage for order—in a protective glaze. Only outside does he relax, and what he relaxes into is apocalypse. “Revenge of the Sith” is a zoo of rampant storyboards. Why show a pond when C.G.I. can deliver a lake that gleams to the far horizon? Why set a paltry house on fire when you can stage your final showdown on an entire planet that streams with ruddy, gulping lava? Whether the director is aware of John Martin, the Victorian painter who specialized in the cataclysmic, I cannot say, but he has certainly inherited that grand perversity, mobilized it in every frame of the film, and thus produced what I take to be unique: an art of flawless and irredeemable vulgarity. All movies bear a tint of it, in varying degrees, but it takes a vulgarian genius such as Lucas to create a landscape in which actions can carry vast importance but no discernible meaning, in which style is strangled at birth by design, and in which the intimate and the ironic, not the Sith, are the principal foes to be suppressed. It is a vision at once gargantuan and murderously limited, and the profits that await it are unfit for contemplation. I keep thinking of the rueful Obi-Wan Kenobi, as he surveys the holographic evidence of Anakin’s betrayal. “I can’t watch anymore,” he says. Wise words, Obi-Wan, and I shall carry them in my heart.

Star Wars: Episode 111 by Anthony Lane

Real Folk Blues ~ Rayzd

Real Folk Blues from Just Fade Away: Music of Cowboy Bebop and Other Sounds for the Otaku ~ Rayzd
Real Folk Blues

Killer Movie Scenes: Mulholland Drive ~ The Audition Scene

The audition scene in David Lynch's Mulholland Drive is masterful; the scene around which the rest of the movie pivots. Up until this point the tale is a mystery wrapped around an enigma of a dull, dualistic kind: either we're experiencing a naive neophyte's fevered dream of the pursuit of Hollywood stardom or we're locked into an embittered loser's hallucinatory idealisation of a past that never was. However we choose to deconstruct the story, the overture's clumsy romanticism is decidedly off-key and Lynch struggles to smuggle his characteristically malevolent medicine into this sickly spoonful of faux-sentimentality. Thus far, Mulholland Drive is a genetically modified silk purse, displaying decidedly unflattering detritus of sow's ear, masquerading as a movie.

The audition scene, however, is truly metamorphic: Mulholland Drive suddenly shifts gear from simple arithmetic to Euclidian geometry. The hick crosses the Styx to Hades and discovers drugs, depravity and death. Characters switch identities and comforting certainties are abandoned in Lynch’s impressionistic, surreal, shape-shifting denouement.

The scene is a subtle deconstruction of the clichéd wannabe/starlet audition scenario. Wally is an avuncular fellow who, as a friend of Betty's aunt, has pulled a few strings to secure her audition. Jimmy is an ageing actor: a predatory lothario with a permatan. Betty turns the cosy, creepy, misogynistic interview set-up on its head with an entirely unexpected injection of real passion (all the more shocking when counter pointed with the lifeless pre-audition rehearsal, which we'd seen her perform earlier with her friend Rita).

The pathos of the scene is provided by the realisation that her "taking control" (adopting the role of femme fatale rather than naive ingénue/victim) is the catalyst for her demise. Catharsis in Lynch's world generally leads to damnation rather salvation.

WALLY: Well then, take a seat everyone. Betty why don't you join Jimmy and we'll play the scene. Is there anything you'd like to say Bob... something to Betty before they begin? (Betty stops on her way across to Jimmy and looks to Bob the director)

BOB: No ... it's not a contest, see, the two of them with themselves, so don't play it for real until it gets real. (Betty doesn't know what to say. She catches Sarah's assistant, Nicki, rolling her eyes)

BETTY: Okay. (Betty continues walking toward Jimmy who opens his arms to her as she approaches. He's old enough to be her father)

JIMMY: Just tell me where it hurts, baby.

BETTY: What?

JIMMY: I want to play this one close, Bob. Like it was with that girl, what's her name, with the black hair. That felt good. Whaddya think? (Betty looks from Jimmy to Bob)

BOB: That'd be good, Jimmy. Just don't rush that line again. I told you... the line where you say, "Before what?"

JIMMY: I was playin' off 'em. They say, "They'll arrest you"... and stuff like that.. "put you in jail"... they say it like that. They all say it the same way, so I react like that.

(Jimmy turns to Betty)
JIMMY: (cont'd) Look ... what's your name?

BETTY: Betty.

JIMMY: Yeah ... Betty. You don't rush it. I don't rush it. We play it close, just like in the movies.
(Jimmy reaches out and puts his arm around Betty and bringsher in against his pot belly)

JIMMY: (cont'd) Dad's best friend goes to work. (Jimmy smiles as he brings Betty a little closer. She is trying to concentrate through the nervousness and Jimmy's breath. There is a silence as Jimmy looks her in the eyes. Everyone in the room is looking Betty in the eyes)

WALLY: Bob?

BOB: And ... ACTION!

(Betty and Jimmy start the scene. It is very difficult for Betty as Jimmy has her in an absurd clench now)

BETTY: You're still here?

JIMMY: I came back. I thought that's what you wanted. (Jimmy plays this with a big lecherous smile. He gives the last part of the line across her cheek up to her ear)

BETTY: Nobody wants you here. (Betty uses the anger of this line to push herself away from Jimmy)

(Jimmy reaches out and grabs her wrist)
JIMMY: Really?

(Betty pulls her hand away and stands her ground)
BETTY: My parents are right upstairs! They think you've left.

(Jimmy smiles broadly and moves again toward Betty)
JIMMY: So ... surprise!

(Betty pushes him back)
BETTY: I can call them... I can call my dad.

JIMMY: But you won't.
(He grabs Betty by the wrist again and pulls her in to him. He puts his hand on her waist and it accidently slips and keeps going down her hips. He jerks his hand back. Bettylooks down and sees Jimmy's hand hovering above her thigh. Betty takes her hand and gently presses down on Jimmy's hand. She slowly looks up with the most seductive smile. Jimmy lets his hand rest more firmly on her thigh, and squeezes her thigh as he sees her smile. With his other hand Jimmy gently pulls her closer)

(Something has started coming over Betty and she catches the drift of this scene in a different way. She's surprising herself)
BETTY: (almost a hot whisper) You're playing a dangerous game here. If you're trying to blackmail me... it's not going to work.

(Jimmy now surprises himself. He becomes almost tender and genuinely worked up from the heat coming off Betty)
JIMMY: You know what I want...it's not that difficult.

(Where the scene should turn to anger from Betty it can't now and Betty plays it as she feels it. She stays in very close to Jimmy - looking him right in the eyes)
BETTY: (whispering desperately - slowly) Get out... Get out before I call my dad. He trusts you... you're his best friend. (her arms go around him) This will be the end of everything.

(Jimmy gets lost. He doesn't know where he is anymore. He can only see Betty's eyes)
JIMMY: What about you? What will your dad think about you?

(Betty still playing it in a dreamy whisper... lost in heat)
BETTY: Stop... just stop! That's what you said from the beginning. If I tell what happened... they'll arrest you and put you in jail, so get out of here before...

JIMMY: (caught by her transfixing, sultry eyes, and almost breathless ... he finds himself taking an extra long pause) Before what?

(As scripted Betty pretends to pull the knife from behind herback, but wraps the knife around behind Jimmy and pulls him into a kiss)
BETTY: (as she kisses him - whispers) Before I kill you.

(Jimmy panics and pushes Betty away with his hands on her shoulders as if forcing himself to come out of a trance. He finally is able to say his line)
JIMMY: Then they'd put you in jail.

(As scripted Betty is supposed to cry now and it is very easy for her to do this because she's ashamed at how the sex of the scene took her over. Tears begin running down her cheeks. She backs away)
BETTY: I hate you... I hate us both!

(She pretends to drop the knife. The scene ends. Everyone in the room has become mesmerized by Betty, but they soon drift back to reality and begin applauding theperformance. Sarah turns to Nicki)
SARAH JAMES: I'm going to take her over there.

NICKI: Big time!

WALLY: (to everyone) Wow!

(Betty wipes her eyes and turns smiling - still shocked at herself)
BETTY: Well, there it was.

JIMMY: There it was it was! Baby, you got a way!

Cool Album Art: Romesville ~ The Googie Rene Combo

Random Transmissions

Sticks and stones can hurt my bones but words cause permanent damage ~ Barry Champlain ~ Talk Radio

I'm the Anti-Christ. You got me in a vendetta kind of mood, you will tell the angels in heaven that you have never seen pure evil so singularly personified as you did in the face of the man who killed you ~ Vincenzo Coccotti ~ True Romance

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Champagne for my real friends, and real pain for my sham friends ~ Monty Brogan ~ 25th Hour

Wit has truth in it; wisecracking is simply calisthenics with words ~ Dorothy Parker

Memory is a dangerous function. It retrospectively gives meaning to that which did not have any. It retrospectively cancels out the internal illusoriness of events, which was their originality. But if events retained their original, enigmatic form, their ambiguous, terrifying form, there would doubtless no longer be any history ~ Jean Baudrillard

In the east ... the far east... when a person is sentenced to death... they're sent to a place where they can't escape... never knowing when an executioner will step up behind them and fire a bullet into the back of their head... it could be days... weeks... or even years after the death sentence has been pronounced... This uncertainty adds an exquisite element of torture to the situation, don't you think? It's been a pleasure talking to you ~ Mystery Man ~ Lost Highway

Straight outta Compton ~ Nina Gordon

Straight Outta Compton ~ Nina Gordon

Extract from "Radio Man"

Its SRO tonight : every table's taken. Latecomers are standing at the back and in the aisles. Uptown meets downtown in the ringside seats. Hoodlums, hustlers, hucksters and hoods hangin' with teenage thugbrats acting like clowns in daddy's hand me downs. Wanna be wise guys hangin' mean with a pale facsimile of a gangsta lean. Diggin' the scene like a photo shoot for a lifestyle magazine. The band's getting ready to go to work.

Warm-up man Sammy T's up on stage applying a little heat to the crowd right now. Sturdy frame, easy laugh, Sam used to open for Tony Bennett on Broadway but now he's Frank's right hand man. He's still got that Big Apple bite though, walkin' the walk, talkin' that street talk:

Nice to see so many Chicago cats on vacation gathered round our little watering hole down here in the desert. Who you got mindin' the shop boys? Or did you just leave the keys with the next door neighbour? Did I say vacation? Who am I kiddin? These Windy City boys are always workin'. They've always got an angle. Must think there's moolah in these sand dunes. Sorry to break it to you boys but they're ain't nothin down here but us camels. Still what do I know? I grew up riding the subway, running with people, up in Harlem, down on Broadway. They used to call me the heart and soul of New York City. Now I'm surfin' on that Reno vibe. I'm in a Nevada State of mind.

Sam's inviting Frank up on stage. The crowd are on their feet.

And now, ladies and gentlemen please welcome to the stage "Mr. Variety" himself, Fraaaank Sinaaatraa.

Anticipation courses through the auditorium.

Flash forward a few years and Basie's workin' the room into a frenzy at The Sands and the band's just struck up Sinatra's signature tune but, for now, a band of session musos and a crowd of wannabe wiseguys will work just fine.

Frank knows the value of this moment. He teases the crowd for a delicious minute, maybe more. Makin' like he's not gonna bother to show up on stage tonight. He knows they're gonna shoot their load when they see that curtain ripple so he decides to hold them right there on the edge for a while. That place where expectation of imminent gratification merges slowly but seamlessly into panic . He lights up a Lucky backstage and slowly inhales the heady mixture of nicotine and hysteria. This audience ain't goin' nowhere, the band's locked tight into an imperial overture. It's his room and he calls the shots.

The first time Frank got up there, under these lights, in front of a crowd, he froze. He sprayed a few one-liners around the room quickfire, finished with a couple of verses of Fly Me To The Moon and got the f*** outta there. He sure as hell wasn't going to stick around to examine the wreckage. Now it's easy.

At last he strolls up on stage and the applause is all over him like Vesuvius over Pompeii. A sly smile, a conspiratorial wink, a slow, cool drag on the cancer stick and he's off.

Frank takes aim and fires:

I guess you folks didn't bargain on a profound thinker but here he comes, movin' to the beat, speakin' in tongues. We're talkin' crease-resistant human art, buddy. Tainted and forever breathing.

The snare drum cracks and echoes like a bullet flying around an oil drum, merging into the epileptic artillery fire of a few hundred hands clapping. He's already got them eating out of the palm of his hand like monkees at the zoo. He throws them another couple of peanuts:

My sweetheart don't care much for postmodernism. She's got love on her mind. My baby likes to get physical all the time. I tell ya doc, it's livin' hell being married to a woman with no capacity for abstract thought.

A faint tickle of ivory, a sharp rim shot and a casual segue from philosophical to political. Patriotic and topical, he's got all the bases covered but he can't stop hittin' home runs:

They're rapping for Jesus now. Straight outta Utah. Preachas with Attitude. Educated brothers with sharp suits. From the moral precipice they're here to stop you fallin'. Kickin' knowledge for dollar bills is their callin'. So give it up smooth. A few more dead presidents and they'll break into a dance groove. Spreadin' the Word sure turned out to be a good career move.

Frank's workin' these suckers like a hooker works a lovesick john. He teases them, insults them, leads them on a little but never lets them get too close, never shows them too much. When it's over he'll wish them goodnight and count the money. He knows they'll be back next week for more. Frank's strictly business.

Hey Frank, give us a song!, one of the johns cries with delight.

What's your hurry, Joe? Your girlfriend got school in the morning?

But Frank's just teasing and he's gonna get there soon enough. And when, at last, he sings, the sultan of swing starts nice and soft like a shy sophomore's kiss. Soon he'll step up the intensity but for now he shows a gossamer touch and the room is hushed. Frank's gently vibrating vocal chords barely disturb the air. Sweet sound couriered on butterfly wings direct to your table.

But inexplicably the parcels of delight are delayed in transit and for a wonderful, mysteriously elongated moment we're in a silent movie. Extras frozen in position. Redundant, eviscerated. Awaiting the rejuvenating alchemy of the soundwave. Cigarette smoke spiralling hypnotically around the slash of light exposing Frank. Frank prowling the stage like a panther, all stealth and preternaturally silent. Pure control with an edge of black cat. He's almost primeval but they like him like that

Someone flips on the sound and the room comes to life. Frank's voice tender like two-day lobster-red Rio sunburn :

Some folks like to get away, Take a holiday from the neighbourhood, Catch a flight to Miami Beach or to Hollywood, But I'm hopping a jumbo jet, The very first one I can find, I'm in a Nevada state of mind.

And then Frank walks right off stage like he's not coming back.

Ewan McNaught

Bushwhacked ~ Chris Morris

Bushwhacked

Spandau Filet ~ The Evolution Control Committee

Spandau Filet

Rockin' Ozzy Oswald

The War on Terror claims another victim

Another "glorious" chapter of The War on Terror was written the other day with the execution of an innocent man at Stockwell tube station. It's equally absurd to blame the victim for his own demise as it is to exculpate the plain-clothes policemen (or, more likely, special forces operatives) from any moral responsibilty for this tragic mistake.

Last time I checked I was inhabiting an enlightened democracy in which it wasn't a capital offence to live in the same residential block as a suspected criminal; a reassuringly sane world in which wearing an overcoat on a hot day didn't constitute a declaration of readiness to meet one's maker; a place where possessing a propensity to run away when chased didn't merit summary execution. I know things have moved quite a bit since those halcyon days of, oh, all of 3 weeks ago but being shot 5 times in the head at point-blank range seems a fairly excessive price to pay for jumping a turnstile.

Believe me, I'm desperately trying to get up to speed with the rapidly-evolving zeitgeist (let's just call it The New Barbarism) but my rapidly deteriorating brain is still struggling to comprehend a prevailing mood which proposes that termination with extreme prejudice "Mafia-style" is proportionate payback for failure to respond to a Police, Stop! command.

Now maybe it's just me but I would have thought there would be little or no point in dispatching undercover operatives to stake out, and when deemed appropriate terminate, suspected terrorists if they're just going to give the game away by yelling Police, Stop! all the time. Might as well just dress them up as regulation Bobbies and get them to shout Allo, 'allo, 'allo! and Evening, all! as polite precursors to a final Do you feel lucky, punk? before injecting five doses of hot lead straight into the suspect's cerebellum.

In these days of shape-shifting law enforcement it's, I'd assume, extremely unlikely that the victim was challenged with a Police, Stop! command. An explosive-laden terrorist in a public place would, presumably, regard just such a greeting as the perfect pretext to detonate his load.

It's highly possible that this poor guy realised he was being followed but had no idea by whom and why. Covert surveillance is by definition covert. It would be counter-productive for the operatives to disclose themselves to the suspect at any stage of the operation. It seems likely that the suspect realised he was being tailed and, quite understandably, panicked, ran and a chase ensued. It's possible that the operatives in question were visibly armed but eyewitnesses testified that the execution was performed with a handgun so it's by no means certain. A well-trained counter-terrorist operative working to a shoot-to-kill brief (close range hit rather than sniper) would, presumably, only draw his weapon at the last possible moment 1) to minimise the possibility of detonation before successful elimination of the terrorist suspect & 2) to minimise collateral panic amongst the general public which would, inevitably, lessen the likelihood of a "clean" operation, increase danger to the general public and further increase the likelihood of detonation.

It could, plausibly, be argued that the "law enforcement" attack dogs were only doing their job and that the fault properly resided higher up the chain of command. If so, then Police Intelligence (in this case at least, conforming to it's stereotypical representation as an oxymoron) should have been capable of profiling the terrorist suspect(s) under surveillance with a far greater degree of accuracy. No police operation with any pretence towards legitimacy could possibly countenance a margin of error which extended to the elimination of members of the general public who just happened to live in the same area, and who just happened to correspond to an, ostensibly, similar ethno-cultural profile, as the suspect(s).

It could equally plausibly be argued that the fault didn't lie with Intelligence and that the attack dogs were just tailing this guy on a hunch (either they were given a fairly broad remit or were acting, to a greater or lesser extent, autonomously) and that the routine operation took on it's own testosterone-fuelled momentum after the suspect panicked. In the latter case the psychological suitability of the operative(s) concerned to discharge their duties in a professional, proportionate and responsible manner is a suitable subject for inquiry.

The Rule of Law in this country has always been predicated on the principle that it's better for ten guilty men to go unpunished than for one innocent man to be imprisoned. It's logical to extrapolate the conclusion that the death of an innocent man can never be considered an acceptable price for the prosecution of the guilty. Even pernicious modern phenomena such as suicide bombers are incapable of re-configuring this basic Arithmetic of Justice.

The assertion that it's better to kill one innocent man than run the risk of losing many more innocent victims to a terrorist attack is a false dichotomy. Killing innocents clearly doesn't save lives; on the contrary it costs lives and it empowers The New Barbarism. The natural extension of this logic is the proposition that the elimination of the entire human race will result in the elimination of terrorism: true but the collateral damage is somewhat disproportionate. This is exactly the same anti-humanist calculus employed by the terrorists: human life is expendable in the pursuit of their objectives.

If we're going to throw away our heritage of due legal process, disregard long-standing constitutional checks and balances on the executive power of the State and empower it's officers to administer summary capital punishment (we're not talking self-defence here) to suspected criminals (a power denied to the judiciary even after due deliberation of the evidence) then we better, at least, try to make sure that those who are chosen, and choose, to discharge this onerous burden are constrained by a legal framework which obligates them to display a higher standard of care than seems to have been exhibited in this case.

The alternative is chaos.

Killer Movie Scenes: Glengarry Glen Ross ~ Coffee's for Closers

Alec Baldwin (Blake) has been sent down to this real estate office to give a bunch of loser salesmen a "pep talk":

Blake: Let me have your attention for a moment. Put that coffee down. Coffee's for closers only. You think I'm fucking with you? I am not fucking with you. I'm here from downtown. I'm here from Mitch and Murray. And I'm here on a mission of mercy.

Blake: The good news is you're fired. The bad news is: you've got, all you've got, just one week to regain your jobs starting tonight. Starting with tonight's sit. Oh, have I got your attention now? Good. 'Cause we're adding a little something to this month's sales contest. As you all know, first prize is a Cadillac Eldorado. Anybody want to see second prize? [Holds up prize.] Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired.

Blake: Do you get the picture? You laughing now? You've got leads. Mitch and Murray paid good money. Get their names to sell them. You can't close the leads you're given, you can't close shit; you are shit. Hit the bricks pal and beat it cause you are going out! If you can't play in the man's game, you can't close them. You go home and tell your wife your troubles. Because only one thing counts in this life: get them to sign on the line which is dotted. A-B-C. A-Always, B-Be, C-Closing. Always be closing, always be closing. Get out there. You got the prospects coming in. You think they came in to get out of the rain? A guy don't walk on the lot lest he wants to buy. They're sitting out there waiting to give you their money.

Moss: Who are you? What's your name?

Blake: You see this watch? You see this watch?

Moss: Yeah.

Blake: That watch costs more than you car. I made $970,000 last year. How much you make? You see pal, that's who I am, and you're nothing. Nice guy, I don't give a shit. Good father, fuck you! Go home and play with your kids! You wanna work here, close! You think this is abuse? You think this is abuse, you cocksucker? You can't take this, how can you take the abuse you get on a sit? You don't like it? Leave.
I can go out there tonight, the materials you got, make myself $15,000. Tonight! In two hours! Can you? Can you? Go and do likewise. Get mad you son of a bitches, get mad!

Levene: The leads are weak.

Blake: The leads are weak? Fuckin' leads are weak? You're weak. I've been in this business fifteen years.

Moss: What's your name?

Blake: FUCK YOU! That's my name. You know why, mister? 'Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, and I drove an $80,000 BMW. That's my name!

Moss: We don't gotta sit here and listen to this.

Blake: You sure don't pal, 'cause the good news is - you're fired!

Blake: You know what it takes to sell real estate? It takes brass balls to sell real estate. Go and do likewise gents. The money's out there, you pick it up it's yours, you don't, I got no sympathy for you. You want to go out on those sits tonight and close, close it's yours. If not you're going to be shinin' my shoes. And you know what you'll be saying, a bunch of losers sittin' around in a bar: 'oh yeah I used to be a salesman, it's a tough racket.'

Blake: These are the new leads. These are the Glengarry leads. And to you they're gold, and you don't get them. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away. They're for closers.

Blake: I'd wish you good luck but you wouldn't know what to do with it if you got it.

7/7

It’s been said that the London bombings were the inevitable pay-off to the absurd decision taken by the British government to slavishly follow the most universally reviled President in American history into the prosecution of an illegitimate war in Iraq under the spurious pretext of the "War on Terror." There may well be more than a scintilla of truth in the assertion: the illegal invasion of Iraq should henceforth be renamed Al-Qa'ida: the Recruitment Drive and (just in case the last disenfranchised, disillusioned disciple of Islam hadn’t got the message) the sadists of Guantanamo Bay and Al Ghraib brought the final pots of simmering resentment to the boil and doused the remaining reservoirs of troubled water with oil.

Of course al Qa’ida, and their imitative ilk (they are a cancer which scatters self-sustaining secondary tumours throughout the globe), don’t need a reason for blowing up innocents: preternatural hatred of America, it’s allies and everything they stand for is sufficient pretext for indulging in the butchery which they so patently enjoy, but anyone who proposes that Britain (or Iraq, the United States, Spain, the world in general) is a safer place since the Iraqi invasion is patently certifiable.

Guilt-ridden liberals erroneously characterise the metastasing menace of al-Qa’ida as the terrorist/insurgent/freedom fighter equivalent of a battered wife retaliating against her abuser but al-Qa’ida are even less likely to fit a bogus pseudo-psychological profile of victimhood than S&M serial killer Karla Homolka. The Al-Qa’ida Death Cult embrace death, depravity and indiscriminate destruction with sado-masochistic, psycho-sexual rapture.

Al-Qa’ida aren’t particularly interested in the plight of the Palestinian people and they couldn’t care less about the Allied incursion into Iraq beyond the opportunistic identification of that particular Hell-on-Earth as a fertile recruitment ground and suitable base for operations. These nihilistic harbingers of Chaos style themselves as Islamic avengers but they're really the Fifth Circle of Hell's PR department.

Al-Qa’ida’s primary interest is the dissemination of fear. Their chosen vehicle is pornography: an act of barbarism is only invested with meaning if it’s caught on camera. Any society gets the pornography it deserves and in the decadent democracies the prevailing trend is towards violence.

Al-Qa’ida are nothing if not hip to the zeitgeist. They’re locked into a self-perpetuating and endlessly self-referential cycle: the production and distribution of low-cost, gonzo snuff movies ~ pornographic paroxysms of violence with faux-religious overtones ~ executions of hostages posted on the web and terrorist atrocities filmed by the voraciously voyeuristic cameras of the world’s media, captured on the digital cameras and mobile phones of victims and bystanders, and endlessly replayed on CNN and other 24 hour news networks for our depraved delectation and delight.

The timing of this week's bombings had nothing to do with the Olympics (the decision to award the Games to London merely added an extra, though to some extent fortuitous, portion of insult to an already generous helping of injury) but everything to do with the start of the G8 Conference, which took place a few miles up the road from Casa del eugenio. The “great and the good” should hold future get-togethers on the surface of the moon as nowhere on Planet Earth is an outbreak of Ugly American Neo-conservatism likely to be greeted with anything other than a proportionate and reciprocal measure of contempt.

But the bombings weren’t just about the charm-less Yank: Al Qa’ida wanted to give Bush’s lapdog Blair a bloody nose and, sure enough, the bombs sent him whimpering away from his master’s side in search of his cajones. Blair was always going to reap a bitter harvest from his inexplicable decision to style himself as Bush’s bitch. Al Qa’ida clearly wanted to humiliate Blair, undermine the G8 but, perhaps most importantly, it was time for the most narcissistic, jealous and insecure terror group in history to get back in front of the cameras in a bid to reinforce the al-Qa’ida Terror brand in a fickle market currently dominated by sexier rivals such as Make Poverty History and Global Warming.

It had all been so different a few days earlier when Blair had assured his African advisers Bono, Bob Geldof, Brad Pitt and George Clooney that he’d make sure Mr. Bush got down with the Make Poverty History program. Normal service was resumed when George informed the world that I really don’t view our relationship as one of quid pro quo, I view our relationship as one of master and slave. No concessions on Africa or climate change in exchange supporting us in Iraq proclaimed Bush, puncturing the happy-clappy optimistic bubble blown by the Messianic Rock Stars Without a Mandate.

Needless to say with the re-energised War on Terror raining on Africa’s parade the “trivial” matter of Global Warming was conveniently shuffled to the back of the pack. Reducing the impact of poverty and Aids on the African populace is perfectly laudable if their continent has any prospect of remaining habitable. The American Neo-cons, characteristically, cherry-pick science to best fit their ideology and throw the rest in the trash. Playing craps with climate change, for now, might be George's idea of fun but if, or more likely when, he rolls snake eyes and Africa ends up relocating to Antartica just as South-East Asia migrates to Siberia we’ll spare a thought for the intransigent Yanks as they’re trying to shoehorn 49 states into the bit of Alaska which isn’t under water. I'm no betting man but I'll wager a whisky sour to all the beer in Brooklyn that one day soon Climate Wars will make the Middle East seem like Woodstock.

The 8 kilometre long, two metre-high steel mesh perimeter fence, guarded by a series of watchtowers and a network of surveillance cameras, patrolled by armed police and circled by military helicopters, surrounding Gleneagles proved more than sufficient to keep the protestors out but fears that it wasn’t capable of keeping the war criminals in were realised yesterday when George Bush escaped.

In truth al-Qa’ida is suffering from acute second album syndrome. When you start by flying hi-jacked passenger jets into the Twin Towers the only way is down. Three tiny homemade bombs were detonated in the underground system and a fourth peeled the roof off a bus. London’s public transport system shut down for a day but the next it was pretty much business as usual. My guess is that Britain will deal with the bombings in it’s customarily stoical fashion and will probably resist the understandable temptations to clamp down on civil liberties, invade a sovereign state with no discernable connection to the bombings, detain hordes of suspects without due legal process in makeshift prison camps, build human pyramids out of naked Arabs and evict folk singers from casinos for purporting to enjoy a Michael Moore movie.

A closing thought: it would be nice to effect regime change in the United States but I don’t, yet, consider this to be sufficient reason to invade it.

eugene ionesco

Killer Movie Scenes: 25th Hour ~ Monty's Monologue

(Monty walks into the bathroom. He looks in the mirror. In the bottom corner, someone's written Fuck You!)

Monty: Yeah, fuck you, too.

Monty's Reflection: Fuck me? Fuck you! Fuck you and this whole city and everyone in it.
Fuck the panhandlers, grubbing for money, and smiling at me behind my back.
Fuck squeegee men dirtying up the clean windshield of my car. Get a fucking job!
Fuck the Sikhs and the Pakistanis bombing down the avenues in decrepit cabs, curry steaming out their pores and stinking up my day. Terrorists in fucking training. Slow the fuck down!
Fuck the Chelsea boys with their waxed chests and pumped up biceps. Going down on each other in my parks and on my piers, jingling their dicks on my Channel 35.
Fuck the Korean grocers with their pyramids of overpriced fruit and their tulips and roses wrapped in plastic. Ten years in the country, still no speaky English?
Fuck the Russians in Brighton Beach. Mobster thugs sitting in cafés, sipping tea in little glasses, sugar cubes between their teeth. Wheelin' and dealin' and schemin'. Go back where you fucking came from!
Fuck the black-hatted Chassidim, strolling up and down 47th street in their dirty gabardine with their dandruff. Selling South African apartheid diamonds!
Fuck the Wall Street brokers. Self-styled masters of the universe. Michael Douglas, Gordon Gecko wannabe mother fuckers, figuring out new ways to rob hard working people blind. Send those Enron assholes to jail for fucking life! You think Bush and Cheney didn't know about that shit? Give me a fucking break! Tyco! Imclone! Adelphia! Worldcom!
Fuck the Puerto Ricans. 20 to a car, swelling up the welfare rolls, worst fuckin' parade in the city. And don't even get me started on the Dom-in-i-cans, because they make the Puerto Ricans look good.
Fuck the Bensonhurst Italians with their pomaded hair, their nylon warm-up suits, and their St. Anthony medallions. Swinging their, Jason Giambi, Louisville slugger, baseball bats, trying to audition for the Sopranos.
Fuck the Upper East Side wives with their Hermés scarves and their fifty-dollar Balducci artichokes. Overfed faces getting pulled and lifted and stretched, all taut and shiny. You're not fooling anybody, sweetheart!
Fuck the uptown brothers. They never pass the ball, they don't want to play defense, they take five steps on every lay-up to the hoop. And then they want to turn around and blame everything on the white man. Slavery ended one hundred and thirty seven years ago. Move the fuck on!
Fuck the corrupt cops with their anus violating plungers and their 41 shots, standing behind a blue wall of silence. You betray our trust!
Fuck the priests who put their hands down some innocent child's pants. Fuck the church that protects them, delivering us into evil. And while you're at it, fuck JC! He got off easy! A day on the cross, a weekend in hell, and all the hallelujahs of the legioned angels for eternity! Try seven years in fuckin Otisville, Jay!
Fuck Osama Bin Laden, Alqueda, and backward-ass, cave-dwelling, fundamentalist assholes everywhere. On the names of innocent thousands murdered, I pray you spend the rest of eternity with your seventy-two whores roasting in a jet-fueled fire in hell. You towel headed camel jockeys can kiss my royal, Irish ass!
Fuck Jacob Elinski, whining malcontent.
Fuck Francis Xavier Slaughtery, my best friend, judging me while he stares at my girlfriend's ass.
Fuck Naturel Rivera. I gave her my trust and she stabbed me in the back. Sold me up the river. Fucking bitch.
Fuck my father with his endless grief, standing behind that bar. Sipping on club soda, selling whiskey to firemen and cheering the Bronx Bombers.
Fuck this whole city and everyone in it. From the row houses of Astoria to the penthouses on Park Avenue. From the projects in the Bronx to the lofts in Soho. From the tenements in Alphabet City to the brownstones in Park slope to the split levels in Staten Island. Let an earthquake crumble it. Let the fires rage. Let it burn to fuckin ash then let the waters rise and submerge this whole, rat-infested place.
Monty: No. No, fuck you, Montgomery Brogan. You had it all and then you threw it away, you dumb fuck!

(He takes a breath and tries to rub away the words.)

Frankie & Lola ~ Josh Agle

Scottish Saltires v Kent Spitfires

Now don’t get me wrong; cricket was never my gig. Any sport that requires you to take a week’s holiday to watch the damned thing is a non-starter as far as this busy entrepreneur is concerned. Factor in the small matter of Scotsmen aspiring to represent England in addition to the frustration of watching grown men scamper towards the pavilion at the first signs of precipitation and the dice were stacked against cricket right from the get-go. Let’s put it this way: if you offered me a choice between a prime seat for the final day of a finely-balanced Ashes encounter or an equivalent ticket for Waiting for Godot : The Musical then I’d most assuredly have said : Hook me up with a box seat for the Sam Beckett/Rogers & Hammerstein spectacular, amigo!

Still, as Scottish football and rugby burrowed on relentlessly beyond previously charted depths it seemed churlish to refuse to embrace a scintilla of sporting success emanating from La Belle Écosse. So, a couple of years back, when the Saltires blew into the NCL like a scirocco my attention was aroused. The arrival of Rahul Dravid sealed the deal. I was hooked.

To cut a long story short, my wife and Champions League football have, finally, bonded: both had great difficulty prising me away from the pleasure of watching South Africa and West Indies parsimoniously sacrifice a couple of wickets a day at St. John’s, Antigua. What you don’t realise, Darling, is that if they could only find a way to extend this to a 10-day contest we’d have a better than even chance of a clear-cut result!

So, it was with feverish anticipation, or at least a sensation in the same general neighbourhood as excitement, that I greeted the arrival of the new cricket season. The minor inconveniences of a washout in the first game, followed by an entire day’s play inexplicably lost to glorious weather in the next, merely whetted this born-again cricket aficionado’s appetite. Just as any football fan will tell you that the seldom-sighted interloper Triumph cannot be truly savoured without first having made a friend of Failure the equally masochistic cricketing cognoscenti will avow that gratification is illusory unless preceded by interminable delay.

And anyway, I’ve just invested in a new MP3 player. What exactly is the point of having a 60GB state-of-the art player if I’m going to squander it on a football match? 90 minutes (plus half-time) is barely capable of scratching the surface of my music collection. Football’s instant gratification and tribal identification (who cares if the Saltires are all from South Africa, Pakistan, Zimbabwe and Oz?) are so passé. What I need is a leisurely game of cricket. I’m with the old guard on this issue: one-day encounters are a venal corruption of the classic form of the game. And don’t even get me started on 20/20, that veritable Whore of Babylon! I’ve got at least 4 days worth of tunes on this baby and I’m just itching for the opportunity to use them. Sadly, until that glorious day when Scotland are invited to compete in the County Championship I guess I’ll just have to settle for Cricket-Lite.

I’ve got it all worked out : saunter down to The Grange, pull up a chair, put my new gizmo on “Shuffle” and hope that Dame Chance will throw up a sublime juxtaposition of music and cricket such as Every Little Thing S(he) Does is Magic just as Majid Haq downs a Spitfire with a deceptively-flighted delivery. Well, I guess it might have been possible…if I liked The Police...and if Mr. Haq had deceived anyone during the dozen deliveries he’d been allocated.

What actually happened was the following : It’s likely that I imagined Ella Fitzgerald extemporaneously exclaiming Howzat! , during a characteristically irreverent reading of Satin Doll, as adopted Scot Paul Hoffmann clattered adopted Englishman Geraint Jones on the pads plum in front of the sticks. I punched the air playfully: a restrained gesture of post-modern patriotism syncopated to the polyrhythmic beat of Mr. Basie’s band.

I’ll spare you the details of the MP3/cricketing interface for the remainder of the Kent innings but, suffice to say, I thought both Paul Hoffmann and Craig Wright bowled economically, without ever really threatening to rent Kent’s deep batting line-up asunder. Their excellent line and length segued rather smoothly with my musical accompaniment. When Robert Key struck an off-note by sending a Wright delivery skyward and, eventually, into Colin Smith’s receptive gloves I sensed the Spitfires might be on the verge of losing the Battle of Britain. No such luck: batsman-friendly spinners Watson and Haq were soon deployed to predictable effect and Arafat and Butt’s final few overs went for far, far too many. From my vantage point, on the grassy knoll of Relative Ignorance, I’d say the Saltires are at least a couple of quality bowlers short of a complement capable of applying sustained pressure to opposition of this quality. Luckily we’ve got Blain, Brown and Hamilton waiting in the wings for the World Cup qualifiers.

The run chase was on but someone forgot to tell Dougie Lockhart. I was hoping for an opening partnership of some substance and, in the context of previous performances, 32 represented a comparatively prodigious yield from our openers. As far as partnerships go, though, it wasn’t exactly Burt Bacharach and Hal David. More like George Michael and the other bloke from Wham who’s name I forget. Watts, at least initially, gorged himself on runs while Lockhart distanced himself from the feast with the disdain of an anorexic teenager. Two runs from 24 balls isn’t so much pedestrian as immobile. We only had forty five overs to start with so Lockhart’s decision to spend four of them trying to avoid hitting the ball was, at best, questionable. Dougie wasn’t so much playing second fiddle to Watts as an unobtrusive third fiddle behind Extras.

Sadly, the Saltires’ batting line-up proved to be as shallow as Kent’s was deep. Watts, Watson and Smith seem to be the only batsmen capable of cutting it at this level (let’s hope the counties release Brown, Hamilton and Coetzer for those qualifiers) but Fraser, once again, fell in the 20s and Watson’s uncharacteristically circumspect knock didn’t yield as many runs as we might have hoped.

After Ryan’s departure, the steady stream of incoming batsmen was such that we needed an air traffic controller rather than an announcer. From the subliminal to the ridiculous: just as I’d finished my cheeseburger and started masticating on a slightly tougher conundrum ~ How could an all-rounder who’s not been given a bowl in all the times I’ve seen the Saltires, and who’s only rated good enough to bat at number 8 in this line-up, have amassed 147 caps? ~ the Incoming Greg Williamson became the Outgoing Greg Williamson. It’s an immutable law of nature that all living things shall grow, mature and, finally, expire but the ephemeral life-cycle of the Scottish Batsman makes the Mayfly seem like Methuselah. If only one or two of them could hang around for three score minutes and ten!

I almost forgot to mention that we traversed the broad spectrum of Scottish weather from sun to hail and, inevitably, rain. As Butt and Hoffman scampered towards the pavilion, during the afternoon’s second brief shower, I headed towards the exit.

Nevertheless, wife permitting, I’ll be back next Sunday.

eugene ionesco

Are We Living in a Simulation?

Buadrillard, Eco et alia have developed Jorge Luis Borges' idea of "the Map of the Empire which perfectly co-incided with the Empire itself" into The Philosophy of Simulation. As hard-headed "realists" we assume that we have an intuitive grasp of where reality stops and simulation begins. The cartographer who constructed the great Map of the Empire presumably knew that the Empire itself was real. Or did he? Could such an assumption be philosophically warranted?

According to Nick Bostrom, and others, the strong likelihood is that we are living in a computer simulation.

The logic is as follows: At least one of these propositions is true: (1) The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before becoming technologically mature is negligibly small. (2) Almost no technologically mature civilisations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours. (3) You are almost certainly in a simulation. Each of these propositions seems prima facie implausible but let's work through them logically: If proposition (1) is false (there may be some highly dangerous technological development which sufficiently advanced civilisations inevitably develop which then destroys them, but let's, optimistically, assume this isn't so) then we, and/or other human or alien civilisation(s), have a good chance of reaching technological maturity. It then seems most unlikely that, with the corresponding exponential growth of computer processing power, that we/they are not going to harness a fraction of their technological resources to exploring the possibility of simulating human minds within the context of greater simulated or virtual realities. If we reject propositions (1) and (2) then it is logically inconsistent to reject proposition (3) since such an advanced civilisation could reasonably be expected to generate an astronomical number of simulated minds and these would, inevitably, far outnumber the non-simulated or "real" minds powered by organic brains. We, and the world we live in, are therefore (if we accept the logic) almost certainly part of a simulation.

This theory dovetails nicely with the subject of time travel. The most likely way for future generations to "visit the past" would be, I'd suggest, for them to visit a computer-generated simulation/virtual reality. If we follow Bostrom's logic, even if, as is currently thought likely, a technologically mature civilisation is incapable of harnessing enough energy to "really" travel in time it would probably have the capacity to generate an almost infinite number of exact replicas of the past. It is very, therefore, likely that we are currently "living" in just such an "ancestor simulation".

The controversial aspect of the Nick Bostrom's argument relates to the assumption of "substrate-independence" i.e. It is not an essential property of consciousness that it is implemented on carbon-based biological neural networks inside a cranium: silicon-based processors inside a computer could in principle do the trick as well. If we accept the proposition that advanced computers are likely to be capable of simulating a human mind then the logic appears sound. If we accept that technologically mature civilisations are likely to be capable of replicating the functionality of organic brain tissue in silico then it seems inconcievable that they should choose not to devote a fraction of their technological resources to this very task and thus reach, what could be referred to as, a "posthuman" stage of development. If we also assume that technological development is not likely to be constrained by the extinction of the species then the conclusion that posthuman civilizations would have enough computing power to run hugely many ancestor-simulations even while using only a tiny fraction of their resources for that purpose is philosophically warranted.

Bostrom's logic is quite simple: The refutation of the first two, prima facie implausible, propositions, the above caveat notwithstanding, clearly warrants acceptance of the third. If either, or both, of the first two propositions are true then the third proposition is clearly false. If you accept that the first two propositions are probably false, as do I, the high likelihood is, the "substrate-independence" assumption notwithstanding, that we are indeed "living in a simulation" (hence the "almost certainly" caveat).

Having refuted the first two propositions, one reason why we might not be living in a simulation could, of course, be that we are the original civilisation approaching technological maturity but, if we accept the proposition that technologically mature civilisations would be capable of and predisposed towards running ancestor-simulations then the high likelihood is that we are not the original civilisation but rather a replicated civilisation residing in a simulation rather than the "real" world.

Indeed the simulation theory leads inevitably to the conclusion that those who created the simulation we inhabit are themselves part of a simulation devised by an even older, more technologically sophisticated race. Simulations generated by, and within, simulations are not only foreseeable but inevitable if the simulated civilisations are to "authentically" replicate the original civilisation.

What really interests me, however, is even if we could determine that we were living in a simulation would we act any differently? Would we be liberated from all moral and ethical constraints or would pragmatic consequentialism (adherence to the simulation's internal rules of reward and punishment) lead us to act in much the same way? Would liberation from the prospect of punishment in the afterlife (for the God, or Devil, fearing amongst us) prompt us to adopt a pragmatic strategy such as "everything is permitted provided you don't get caught"? Probably not. Presumably any "omniscient", "omnipotent" (or merely sadistic) simulation programmer would have thought of constructing another level to the simulation? Your fate in that "afterlife", or "aftersim", could well depend on how you behaved in your present simulated incarnation. Even if we were living in a simulation, the best way to predict what would happen next in our simulation would be the ordinary methods – extrapolation of past trends, scientific modelling, common sense and so on. If you thought you were in a simulation, you should, probably, get on with your life in much the same way as if you were convinced that you are living a non-simulated life.

The Aladdin Casino and The New McCarthyism

It's my sad duty to convey the news that all is not well in Sin City.

At the end of the movie Casino Bobby De Niro lamented the Kafka-esque metamorphosis of Las Vegas from a mob-controlled den of vice, gambling, sleaze, decadence, and hedonism to a family-orientated theme park. Cocktail Angst's Last Tango in Vegas (featured on the Vegas Swings compilation) poses the question What happened to the seeds that Frankie sowed; what have they done to Bugsy's town? The answer is inescapable. They killed it stone dead. I'll tell you why....

Now I'm no fan of Michael Moore. I think he's a talented polemicist who never lets the facts stand in the way of a good story. I'm not going to elaborate on this because it's only my view and, for the purposes of this argument, it matters not a jot what I think of the guy. What matters is he has a right to express his views and people have a right to hear him and make their own minds up.

Not, it seems, in Bush's America. "The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave" just got a little less free and a lot more paranoid and scared.

It's been coming for a while. Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks was forced into making a public apology to Bush after she had the "temerity" to remark in London recently that the current President made her ashamed to come from Texas. Irate callers, apparently, jammed country music radio station switchboards demanding an embargo be placed on the Dixie Chicks music and "concerned and patriotic citizens" called for boycotts of their records and the Dixie Chicks record label. An amusing parody of Maines' apology can be found here

So much so worrying but now The Aladdin Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas has jumped on the populist bandwagon that is The New McCarthyism.

Singer Linda Ronstadt appeared at The Aladdin a few days ago. She dedicated a song to Moore and urged people to go and see his new movie Farenheit 9/11. What followed could have been described as farcical if it wasn't so disturbing. First of all a significant minority of the audience decided to storm out of the theatre demanding their money back. Some allegedly threw their cocktails in the air and tore down posters advertising the gig. Next the Aladdin, in it's finite wisdom, elected to curtail Ronstadt's performance and eject her from the premises, not even having the courtesy to allow her to go back to her suite to change and collect her luggage.

The Casino claimed that "Ms Ronstadt was hired to entertain the guests of the Aladdin, not to espouse her political views." They claimed that she was engaged to sing and not to talk politics.

So singers shouldn't be allowed to talk? Should stand-up comedians be allowed to sing? Should singers introduce their songs with a song? I once saw Al Green sing his travel itinerary to an appreciative audience but even he talked a little. Al talked about Christianity and stuff like that. I guess that was beyond his remit?

If Linda Ronstadt had sung a song attacking the Bush administration or one in tribute to Michael Moore that would, presumably, have been fine by with The Aladdin ~ I assume they're not proposing that singers be prohibited from singing about political matters? If they are it loooks like we just lost approximately half the world's legacy of popular song! If she had sung a pro-Moore or anti-Bush song I'll bet you a whisky sour to all the beer in Brooklyn that the monkey in charge of the casino would still have thrown her out.

If we follow the Aladdin's reasoning to it's absurd conclusion stand-up comedians would be within their rights to tell "unpatriotic" jokes about the Iraqi campaign but would be in deep trouble if they sang about it. People who go to see comedians, according to Aladdin logic, pay to hear jokes (and only jokes) and jokes critical of the Bush administration are still jokes, right?

Tom Cruise gave an excruciatingly jingoistic speech at the Oscars following 9/11. Presumably the literal-minded Aladdin management would suggest his ass should have been thrown out onto the red carpet because award ceremonies are, duh, for giving out awards? I doubt it.

And why should actors express their political opinions in public anyway?

I know Vegas is another world but I didn't realise performers had to check their political views at the casino door. So are we to assume, then, that certain venues in certain cities are off-limits to politics. Which venues in which towns are appropriate for the expression of political opinions? New York, L.A. and San Francisco are OK, I guess. Vegas, Houston and Salt Lake City are, I'm guessing, out? Or is it just that some political views are off-limits wherever they're expressed in "The Land of the Free" these days?

Vegas has changed and that's a fact. I'm sure the casino bosses were AOK with Frank Sinatra's racist jokes about Rat Pack "buddy" Sammy Davis Jnr. back in the day and the Chairman of the Board's sexist treatment of "broads" probably had Sam Giancana and co. rolling in the aisles when they weren't too busy relieving the count room of the mob's share of the casino profits. Of course I'm just being facetious now but I'm sure Vegas wasn't exactly off-limits to politics when Sinatra and co. were smoothing JFK's passage to the White House.

The Aladdin and some irate customers claimed that they had no warning that the show might contain political content. As a matter of fact Linda Ronstadt is a well-known opinionated liberal and she'd introduced the same song with a reference to Michael Moore at all her other tour dates. Presumably if Ronstadt had been made aware of the fact that different standards apply in Vegas then perhaps she could have confined herself to the stereotypical preconception her audience had of her?

Now correct me if I'm wrong but I thought the whole point of art was to provoke, amuse, surprise, stimulate and excite? Not in America it seems.

Rock and roll, and popular music in general, have never been, and should never be, about conformism. If you can predict exactly what an artist is going to do or say on stage then you're probably at an anodyne Celine Dion concert with an audience composed of conformist cadavers and the blue-rinse brigade. Of course any audience have the right to vote with their feet if they don't like what an artist sings or says. They have the right to decline to buy their product. They don't have the right to prevent them from saying and singing what they like.

The casino was, no doubt, trying to make cheap promotional capital by pandering to prevailing populist political sentiment. This is Vegas we're talking about after all. Nothing goes down in Vegas if money isn't at the root of it. I'll warrant this was all about "the dead presidents" rather than the brain-dead president.

One thing's for sure a venue would be roundly castigated by British public opinion if it pulled a cheap political stunt like this. Trying to ingratiate yourself with the current administration by attacking freedom of political and artistic expression is not a tactic anyone would even think of using in the U.K. Who would want to be known as a censorious sycophant? I know Huey Lewis sang It's hip to be square but why the Hell did the Yanks have to take him so seriously?

You can't disengage people from their political views and you certainly can't disengage politics from music. One of my favourite albums of all-time is an undeniably political record: "What's Goin' On" by Marvin Gaye.

Ironically America has a particularly rich tradition of political music. From rock to r'n'b, funk, soul and rap (the most overtly political genre of music yet) politics and music have been inseparable.

Singers, musicians, artists, comedians and creative people generally are multi-faceted individuals. From the moment they take to the stage to the moment they leave it they own the stage. They can say, do and sing what they like. It's called freedom of artistic expression.

If artists break the law alert the approproriate authorities. Otherwise let performers perform. The minute baboons in dinner jackets begin censoring their performances and pandering to populist, reactionary sentiment is the minute we're all in big trouble. And the moment "intelligent" people (The Aladdin's egregious act has had more than it's share of apologists in the American media) start approving of the actions of reactionary baboons in dinner jackets is the moment the party ends.

Looks like, in Vegas at any rate, that time is now.

A few thoughts on the demise of Frasier

The imminent demise of one of my favourite shows prompted me to trawl through the internet looking for information about upcoming Frasier dvd releases. I can't imagine life without my regular "Frasier fix" and Paramount repeats just won't do ~ I need nice shiny Frasier artefacts assuming pride of place in my dvd collection and I need them now. I recently discovered a lone copy of series 2 hidden forlornly, and almost apologetically, behind the massed ranks of Friends dvds in my local record store and I was alarmed at the implications for aspiring completists amongst us.

Now, I wouldn't consider myself a Frasier aficionado and I'm certainly not an anorak. I couldn't even tell you the names of more than a handful of episodes. But one thing I do know is this: I feel sad that Frasier is coming to an end. All that sentimental rubbish that Friends' fans spout about losing their ersatz "buddies" is starting to hit home. What will life be like without Frasier and Niles' dry wit, erudite charm and endearing pretensions? Diminished without a doubt. Frasier was such a rich and rewarding viewing experience for me because it was populated almost exclusively by characters I'd really like to hang out with and shoot the breeze with. I'm gonna miss those guys and gals. Sadly, there's little doubt that we'll never see Frasier's likes again. Frasier represented one of the few remaining recalcitrant ghettos of intelligence in the dumbed-down dystopia that is contemporary t.v. programming.

What have we got left? The West Wing, The Sopranos and The Simpsons, at a push. Not that there ever was a golden age of intelligent t.v. Shows like Twin Peaks, Monty Python, Fawlty Towers and Larry Sanders were always the exception rather than the rule. However we're now fairly and squarely in the grip of lowest common denominator scheduling. I've got about 900 channels and I can't find anything worth watching on any of them. Jackass, Big Brother, Pop Idol and their execrable ilk seem to be the template for the future. I suspect even the insipid "Friends" will seem like an anachronistic example of intellectual humour to future generations.

I never really understood the alleged "rivalry" between Friends and Frasier. To compare the entertaining antics of the stylish Seattle sophisticates to the anodyne adventures of a bunch of vacuous telegenic New York yuppies is the equivalent of proposing that Manhattan and Ace Ventura Pet Detective be accorded equal status in the pantheon of cinematic comedy. My sister and my wife both love Friends and I've been subjected to the infernal show more times than I'd care to admit yet I've failed to smile once let alone laugh. I don't know if it's a "chick" thing, and due to the affection those nearest and dearest to me obviously possess for the show I'm naturally reluctant to claim that it's a "thick" thing, but I just don't "get" it. I'm sure the writers on Friends are smart people and I'm equally sure that they were "slumming it" and "writing down" for the sake of the ratings.

The thing I love about Frasier is that it's never been afraid to shoot for the stars. It never patronises and underestimates the intelligence of the viewer. And, as the excellent final series has proved, it was never afraid to take risks. One of the last episodes (Crock Tales) was a brilliantly subtle deconstruction of the inanity of "rival" shows as well as a touching reaffirmation of all that has been, and is, unique about Frasier. This wonderful episode was certainly nostalgic and sentimental but in Frasier's inimitably endearing, imaginative, intelligent and idiosyncratic way. Thankfully the formulaic predictability of other shows has never been Frasier's modus operandi. We can argue until the cows come home about which were the best episodes, and seasons, or moan about how the show lost some of it's sparkle in seasons 8-10 but the truth is the worst of Frasier was always far superior to the best of practically any other show. One thing's for sure though: I've never met a Frasier fan I didn't like.

As Steely Dan once sang: Sharing the things we know and love, with those of our kind; Libations, sensations, that stagger the mind. Frasier is quite simply one of the best things in life, and it's always been an axiomatic principle of mine that "if you like Frasier too then we're going to get along just fine."

Playaz & Hataz

If Miles Davis and Ernest Hemingway could have produced a child it would have been Ewan. True creative writing genius is a rare beast, and of all the current posters in here I can think of only one – Ewan is clearly the 400 lb gorilla in our midst ~ Nathan Hasalbauer, President, International High IQ Society, New York.

Ewan - A profound and enlightening writer for the masses, a light sardonic touch. A real post-post modernist outlook that gives him the look of a man on the edge of civilization; not dire, but an optimistically dire perspective. Sees life through the eyes of an Underworld traveller but with the panoramic scope of a flying hedonist. Darts through the mesosphere with a yawn and sometimes a slyly held middle finger ~ Will Weatherley, Southern California

He a jazz record. Don’t look. Listen ~ Robbie, Berkeley

A misanthropist with a mean streak a mile wide ~ Robert, San Francisco

Pretentious p**** ~ P.B., Kirkcaldy