Wasted Talent

Pride Comes Before a Follicle

2006-03-21T15:35:00.000Z

“It’s all about sex. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise”. Caroline, 23, is a student from London, and is describing her decision to get a Hollywood, her “fifth or sixth” as far as she can remember. Her friend Lisa, 22, tells me she normally opts for a Brazilian, because “it looks a bit weird otherwise”. We’re not talking about holidays, nor even about cocktails. We’re talking about pubic hair. This is depilation, 21st century style.
In 2004, the UK spent £59m on depilatory products such as wax, creams, razors and bleach. A recent poll found that 97% of British women regularly remove hair from their body, and more than 99% had at some point in their lives waxed, shaved or used other means of hair removal. How is it so widespread? Why do women of every age and creed do it? And do men really care whether it’s there or not?
Depilation in its many forms has been with us for centuries. It was common amongst ancient Egyptians as long ago as 4000BC, when hair was considered shameful and uncivilised. Women would use beeswax to remove body and leg hair. Middle eastern women developed a hair-removal process using a soft, sugar-based paste. Most beauty parlours will still offer ‘sugaring’ as a less painful alternative to waxing. Medieval peasants in Britain didn’t develop any such complex chemistry to rid themselves of hair: early depilatories were made from quicklime, bean-flour, urine and sulphurate of arsenic.
Nowadays, hair removal is an altogether simpler affair. Veet, the best-known company specifically dedicated to hair removal, offer a range of waxes, creams and razors to rid women of unwanted hair. For those who want a permanent fix there is electrolysis – a means of killing the hair root so that hair cannot grow back.
Marian Carr, head of the British Institute and Association of Electrolysis, says that electrolysis is the only scientifically proven way to permanently remove hair. The process is done by cauterizing the hair follicle with needles. Doesn’t it hurt? “It depends very much on the sensitivity of the skin, and the skill of the operator,” says Carr. “If it’s badly done it hurts.” Carr says that electrolysis was a taboo subject until about ten years ago - “Some people didn’t think it was feminine” – but now things are different. “It’s socially acceptable,” she says. “There is a wide range of hair that is perfectly normal but we consider it unacceptable. Women remove hair because that’s what’s socially acceptable within our culture”
Merran Toerien, a medical researcher at Bristol University, wrote her sociology doctorate on female depilation. She interviewed women from various social backgrounds and asked them why they got rid of their body hair. “The overwhelming reason women gave was that it’s the social norm” she says. The subjects equated being ‘well-kept’ with being feminine, and being hairy with being masculine. Social pressure also has much to do with maintaining a hair-free look. “I heard repeated stories of being taunted, both as children and as adults,” says Toerien. “By friends, by family, by work colleagues and even bosses”.
But you don’t have to be a sociologist to realize that hairy women aren’t accepted by mainstream society. Julia Roberts found that out in 1999 when, during the premiere for Notting Hill, she exposed a clump of underarm hair to the delighted paparazzi. Drew Barrymore made headlines in February last year for appearing at New York Fashion Week with unshaved armpits. The Daily Mail printed photos beneath the headline ‘Drew’s the pits’ and was careful to draw attention to Barrymore’s supposed split with boyfriend Fabrizio Moretti. The link was clear – women who don’t depilate are guilty of a lapse in standards. They don’t look after themselves.
“I think it’s disgusting,” says Caroline. “Letting yourself go like that”. She’s been shaving her legs and armpits since she was 13, and considers herself a late starter. “My Mum wouldn’t let me buy a razor before then”. Caroline is one of a number of women who pay £45 to have a ‘Hollywood’ – waxing all hair from the pubic area. A slightly less extreme procedure is the ‘Brazilian’ which leaves a small patch on the pubis – a “landing strip” as X Folia manager Shaleena Grigg calls it. X Folia is a beauty salon with studios in Docklands and Holborn. Grigg reckons the popularity for complete hair removal from the genital area first began about six years ago, but ballooned after it featured in an episode of Sex and the City. “Women come in for it all year round, but especially in the summer,” she says. The procedure can be painful, and Grigg says it’s not something that can be done by yourself at home. “It’s a very sensitive area down there,” she says, “so you have to be careful”.
If it’s such a painful procedure, why do women go through it? “It makes you feel sexual,” says Lisa, Caroline’s friend who prefers a Brazilian wax. “And if a guy realises you’ve taken care of things, he’ll know you’re a sexual person”. Caroline feels that waxing the pubic area is now the norm. “No-one likes hairy women”.Caroline may be surprised, then, by some of the fetish communities that fester in the darkest corners of the internet. Armpit-sex.com is an online message board for men who can’t get enough of hairy women. Sal, the web administrator for armpit-sex says he started the site for acomoclitists – men with a fetish for shaven women – but found that it was overtaken by fans on the opposite end of the spectrum. “Men simply want what they cannot have,” he says. “Some cultures look down on unshaven women and that fact alone causes some men to rebel. They need that forbidden fruit”. Sal’s website provides plenty of fruity content for his readership, including long prose descriptions of sexual encounters with hairy women and pictures sent in by proud husbands. But could images of furry armpits make it into the mainstream media?“I can’t imagine how many complaints we’d get.” says Adrian Higgins, editor of Page3.com, the online home of the Sun’s famous pin-ups. “It would never happen. It’s not acceptable, and frankly it’s just not appealing”. Surprisingly, Page 3 doesn’t have to use airbrushing techniques to obscure unsightly body hair on its pictures. “The models do it themselves,” says Higgins. “If they didn’t we wouldn’t use them”. So what sort of woman would let her hair grow? A refusal to depilate is a defining stereotype of feminists. Germaine Greer wrote in The Female Eunuch that women ridding themselves of their body hair was an act of defeminisation: “Men cultivate [the removal of body hair]… women suppress it, just as they suppress all aspects of their vigour and libido”. Merran Toerien says that is not the case any more. “Times have changed since the Female Eunuch,” she says, though she acknowledges that it was once fashionable in feminist circles to let body hair grow. “Feminists today are more concerned about issues of equality”. She suggests that followers of Ashanti yoga often let their hair grow. Jenny Amadine, a teacher at London’s Yoga Place, dispels the myth. “I’ve been in the industry twenty years,” she says, “and no-one I know follows it.”My difficulty in finding a woman who refuses to depilate is a neat illustration of the overwhelming popularity of this particular kind of social grooming. Many of Merran Toerien’s subjects said they got rid of their body and facial hair because it made them feel more feminine, and therefore more attractive to men. Perhaps Caroline is right after all: it’s all about sex.

Wapping - 20 Years On

2006-03-20T11:48:00.000Z

Before 1986, the print unions governed Fleet Street. The workers used ‘Spanish practices’ – the manipulation of labour agreements - to claim money for shifts they hadn’t done, and jobs they didn’t even show up for. If management cried foul, the unions had plenty of means to disrupt the newspaper’s publication: union meetings would be called at the same time as print deadlines; printing presses would mysteriously stop working; paper runs would unaccountably jam leading to frantic negotiations.
Newspapers suffered badly at the hands of the unions. The Times went unpublished from January until November 1979. The Financial Times was stopped for ten weeks in the summer of 1983. In the period from July 1984 to June 1985, national daily newspapers lost more than 85m copies through industrial action. A solution had to be found.
In October 1985, Rupert Murdoch announced a new London evening newspaper, the London Post, would be printed at News International’s new premises in Wapping, East London. The two unions employed by Murdoch, SOGAT (Society of Graphical and Allied Trades) and the NGA (National Graphical Association) were unhappy with the proposed terms. After weeks of fruitless wrangling, the unions elected to strike at News International’s Gray’s Road base, thinking that with a new title to print Murdoch would have little choice but to capitulate to their demands. The date was 22 January 1986.
Four days later, Rupert Murdoch pulled the rug from under the printers’ feet in dramatic and unprecedented fashion. For months, he and his executives had been secretly moving vast amounts of printing equipment and non-union staff to Wapping. Overnight on the 26th of January, he moved all four of his newspapers – the Times, Sunday Times, The Sun and the News of the World – to his newly fortified printworks. A deal had been made with the EETU (Electrical, Electronic, Telecommunications and Plumbing Union) to print the newspapers, and the entire 5,000-strong workforce of SOGAT and NGA members were given their notices. The London Post had been a smokescreen, and the unions had been duped.
“It was a fight, by Murdoch, to take the employees on, and to get his own way,” says Baroness Dean, then general secretary of SOGAT. “There was no negotiating in it at all.”
Dean had the thankless task of trying to work out a deal between Murdoch and the workers on the picket line. The problem was Murdoch didn’t want them at Wapping. A £50m redundancy package was rejected by the union members. “They wanted to go and work in Wapping” she says. “It was a battle of wills”.
Battles were also being fought inside News International. The majority of journalists on Murdoch’s titles had necessarily been unaware of the move until the night it happened. “Basically we had a gun put to our head,” remembers Lucy Hodges, then education correspondent on the Times. “We were told: turn up at Wapping on Monday or you’ll be fired”.
The NUJ chapels were furious at Murdoch’s deception and demanded its members walk out in sympathy at the printers. But many journalists felt differently. “I couldn’t believe that we would be expected to effectively give up our jobs for print workers who had been mucking up the presses and stopping the paper coming out” says Hodges. During a tense chapel meeting, Hodges put her hand up and asked the union leaders why they should strike with the printers. “I couldn’t see that we should be making common cause with them”. After a weekend of debate, more than 90 per cent of the company’s 750 journalists decided to go to Wapping.
There were those however who would not go to East London. Liz Bestic was a researcher for the Sunday Times employed by SOGAT’s clerical division. “I felt that Sogat had done right by me” she says. “I hated everything Wapping stood for. I thought morally it’s wrong to hire in labour.” Bestic joined the picket lines outside the barbed wire of Murdoch’s fortress.
The picketing was impassioned and violent. Every Saturday night, crowds would gather to try to delay the delivery trucks. As News International’s most popular title, the Sunday Times was the prime target. On February 13th, over 40 people were arrested and many hospitalised. As well as the striking workers, left-wing groups and neo-fascists came to settle personal scores. On top of this, the police were often heavy-handed. “The role of the Met was absolutely appalling” says Baroness Dean. “I saw two guys walking down the road doing nothing to anyone and some police just ran up to them out of nowhere and began hitting them with truncheons”.
Conditions weren’t much better for those who had to cross the picket lines. Lucy Hodges was spotted driving to Wapping by a young messenger on strike outside the building. “He started attacking our car,” she says. “He just started kicking at the passenger door where I was sitting.” She was regularly recognised as she entered the building. “All these people I knew, the Sogat people, would shout at me ‘Lucy ‘Odges, Lucy ‘Odges, Scab!’.
Others were affected mentally. Liz Bestic remembers a colleague at the Sunday Times who suffered a nervous breakdown after the strikes. “He was a war photographer and had visited all kinds of terrible war-torn countries but that whole thing of having to go in and see his colleagues throwing stones at him completely broke him,” she says. “He never worked again”.
After months of picketing, the print unions eventually realised Murdoch wasn’t going to cave in. Hopes faded and the crowds outside Wapping gradually dispersed. Murdoch had won, and the Wapping project had been a success. But twenty years on, can the same still be said?
Andrew Neil wrote, in his 1996 autobiography, that Wapping was designed to “reinvigorate the whole of the British newspaper industry”. The defeat of the print unions certainly led to huge changes. In the four years from January 1986 to 1990, ten new national newspapers were launched. The technological advances pioneered at Wapping – such as computerised typesetting - filtered through to all the other nationals.
But breaking the back of the unions had other repercussions, including the increased derecognition of the NUJ on Fleet Street. “From 1986 the National Union of Journalists entered a phase of rapid decline,” wrote Jeremy Tunstall in his book Newspaper Power. “By 1990 it had already lost most of its negotiating rights and industrial muscle”. Mike Power of the TUC agrees. “The NUJ were severely weakened during that period,” he says. “It was the end of the era for them”.
Baroness Dean sees the collapse of the NUJ’s power as a catastrophe for the industry. “What flowed through were pretty awful wages to journalists coming into the industry new and I don’t think they’ve reached the levels they should, given the skills journalists have”. The NUJ say now that nearly half of all journalists earn less than the average national wage of £26,151. Liz Bestic, now a freelance health writer, says “Freelancers money hasn’t gone up in the past twenty years”. Wapping hasn’t reinvigorated the industry that much, it would seem.
“If I met Rupert Murdoch now,” says Dean, “I would say advertising is flying out of the window for newspapers, technology is almost bypassing them and that is coupled with an entire generation that doesn’t read newspapers. So I’d say Rupert, what was it all about?”
(originally published in X-City Magazine 2006)

Cutting It

2005-11-22T10:24:00.000Z

Hammad Khan has every 14-year-old boy’s dream job. In an average day, he will sit through five and half hours in the cinema, or he might play five or six hours worth of computer games. Often he’ll have to watch pornography. Khan is one of the 25 examiners at the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), the organisation that decides how films and computer games should be rated. So, is it the perfect job of every teenager’s dreams?

“That’s more perception than reality,” laughs the 29-year-old. “If you like films then it’s good because you get to watch a lot of films… but you find there’s a lot more to it”.

Khan has been an examiner at the BBFC for almost four years. Born and raised in London, he studied law at Cardiff University. He was always a film enthusiast, he says, bunking off lectures to catch the latest arthouse releases. He returned to London to qualify as a barrister but before he’d even dusted off his wig, he spotted an advert for the examiner’s job in the newspaper. It perfectly combined his legal qualifications with his love of film. “I knew it was the one,” he says.

Film examining is a straightforward process. The film is projected in the Board’s small screening room to a pair of examiners. After it has finished they discuss the sensitive issues, come to a decision and file a report for the chief examiner. If there is a difference in opinion, a second team will view it. Controversial films will be seen by a variety of examiners. Khan’s knowledge of regulatory law comes in useful when scenes that contravene the Protection of Children Act or the Sexual Offences Act have to be cut.

Although it has a reputation as a stern moral guardian, the BBFC has never been as harsh a censor as some believe. Films famous for being banned that were in fact passed uncut for cinema release by the Board include Straw Dogs, The Exorcist and A Clockwork Orange. No film has been banned outright in the UK’s cinemas since 1990. “We’re not there to cut films willy-nilly,” says Khan. “We want to protect films to be released as they were made so that adults can enjoy them”.

Even today, very few mainstream films are cut for release - “less than one per cent,” says Khan – but it does still happen; recently a headbutt was excised from Star Wars Episode II so that it would receive a PG rating, and often DVD extras have to be cut for bad language so that their certificate matches that of the film they accompany.

Since 1985 the Board has been in charge of classifying all video recordings for sale in the UK. Khan explains that classified cinema films are examined again when released on video or DVD as the potential for harm is far greater. Not only can children access them more easily, but videos and DVDs can be watched repeatedly, paused, and slowed down – all of which can make harmful scenes more damaging.

The Board takes its responsibility to protect children very seriously. As well as holding monthly seminars and maintaining a website especially for children, examiners will often arrange screenings to ensure their ideas correspond with reality. The week before our meeting, Khan was in Glasgow with the Board’s education officer as part of National Schools Film Week, showing 100 15-year-olds Ae Fond Kiss [correct], a romantic drama set in the city. “We look for the reaction of children of that age group,” he says. “It’s a very important part of understanding what we’re doing”.

The BBFC now classifies computer games that depict “gross violence and human sexual activity” and some weeks the Board will classify more games than films. “In the past year it’s just gone through the roof,” says Khan.

Examining games presents problems for the Board. While a film can be watched by a pair of examiners in a couple of hours, computer games are often designed to be played over months. How do examiners do it? “We’re given walk-through cheats,” says Khan, “invisibility, extra weapons… all sorts of things to make them easier”.

Given the level of autonomy in computer games, violent games are surely more harmful to children than films, I suggest. Does the Board agree? “We have to be very careful of going down the line where we come up with our own ideas about what we like and what we don’t like” says Khan. “We’re not here to do that. We have a classification system we believe in. If a game contains sex or violence it’s going to be an 18.”

The ratings system that survives today – with U, PG, 15, and 18 certificates – was created in 1982. A 12 certificate was introduced in 1990, and changed for cinema releases to 12A – children under 12 must be accompanied by an adult - in 2002. The ratings are refreshed every five years and the Board consults focus groups and research into what people expect of their certificates.

Since 1997 film posters have been required to display boxes with consumer advice about what sensitive material the film might contain. Khan tells me some distributors use this advice as a selling point. Creep, a British horror film released last year, was advertised in the cinema with the tagline: “Contains. Strong. Bloody. Violence”.

So after sitting through all that sex and violence, can examiners become desensitised? Khan says he is surprised to find that he still can be shocked, mentioning a recent DVD that was denied classification called Terrorists, Killers and Other Wackos. “It was an hour of reality footage of the sickest most detailed forms of human death. That’s all it was, with a techno soundtrack. That’ll always be shocking”.

Khan says that at the end of the working day he can leave behind the extreme images he is compelled to watch. He quotes the tag-line to Last House on the Left, a notorious 1970s horror film originally banned by the BBFC: “Just keep repeating to yourself it’s only a movie”. When you’re watching films there’s a distance, he says: “It’s important to remember that or we’d just feel that films are evil… which is not the case”. As any 14-year-old could tell you.

About the BBFC The BBFC was founded in 1913. Originally the C stood for Censors and was only changed to Classification in 1984. The Board’s original brief was to prevent films breaching public decency, and the first censors imposed a rigorously puritan code: concerns included “subjects dealing with the premeditated seduction of girls”; “references to controversial politics” and “incidents having a tendency to disparage our Allies”. As the century progressed, the Board became more liberal as film became more explicit. The explosion of video in the 1980s led the media to focus on the Board’s practices; it came under fire for passing the ‘video nasties’ that were said to have influenced the ten-year-old killers of the toddler Jamie Bulger in 1993. The public outcry led to an amendment in the Video Recordings Act, requiring the Board to take particular care when classifying videos and DVDs with the “potential for harm”. Today the Board examine roughly 500 films and 12,000 videos a year.

Back of the Net

2005-01-28T23:16:00.000Z

I went to see Closer last week, the Mike Nichols four-hander currently attaining all sorts of critical plaudits around the globe. It was solidly good melodramatic fare though its static pace sometimes betrayed its theatrical roots. The original National Theatre production of Patrick Marber’s play garnered much attention upon its premiere in May 1997 thanks to its pioneering scene involving an internet sex chat room. These were the early days of the world wide web and Marber’s scene was considered daring and novel.
These days of course the internet is part of the fabric of our daily lives and though the scene is important to the narrative it feels oddly out-of-place in the film. When Larry (played by Clive Owen) calls the web ‘the way of the future’ you can’t help but disagree that in fact it is very much the way of the present. Internet chat rooms however have mainly fallen by the wayside, their reputations spoiled by tales of runaway teens hooking up with internet paedophiles. Sex websites still exist of course for those wanting brief anonymous thrills – one of the most popular sites for gay men (Gaydar) is used as the central device of writer/performer Tim Fountain’s current Royal Court show.
Sexual shenanigans aside I began to wonder what sort of person uses the internet nowadays as a meeting-place for like-minded souls. Not wanting to delve too deeply into the twilight world of trembling knees and furtive toilet trysts I decided to instead limit my investigation to the numerous talkboards set up by various special-interest websites. Who are these people? What makes them tick?

Website http://www.imdb.com/
What is it? Massive online directory of film and all things film-related
Talkboards? IMDB have the largest range of talkboards I’ve found on the web – one on nearly every film you care to think of (and if there isn’t you can start one) and further ones on music, books, and politics to name but a few.
Who posts there? A mixture of film buffs/postgraduates and swear-happy American teenagers.
Username examples colonel_kurtz, MrPink177, gandalfthegrey0000
Good Things One of the most popular (and useful) talkboards on IMDB is the Need To Know board. I posted a query regarding a film I’d seen years before about which I could remember the barest details. Within minutes a response came from another talkboarder with the film’s name and IMDB link. This was incredible, especially given the utter rarity of the film. However I managed to pay the favour on to somebody else.
Bad Things IMDB talkboarders tend, like extreme film buffs, to be very arrogant about their extensive film knowledge. Almost every serious discussion quickly descends into insults being traded. I thought I might get intelligent discourse on the Citizen Kane talkboard but was quickly branded an idiot for labelling it a film noir. It is a film noir, by the way.
Representative extract “I just saw Casablancaand I don't understand why so some poeple I know like this. I mean, I can find many movies from that time that can beat this c***. Take Gone With The Wind for example,and it is even in color. The acting made me crck up and the black and white idea just bores me. Really stupid really”

Website http://www.theslate.com/
What is it? An online U.S. magazine covering American culture and politics, mostly from a liberal slant. Some of the best journalism to be found on the web, laid-out in a weblog style.
Talkboards? ‘The Fray’ allows you to post comments on any article or journalist writing on The Slate. Often, the journalists themselves will respond to points you make.
Who posts there? A disarming mixture of earnestly left-wing politics students, journalists and fiercely right-wing lunatics.
User name examples MyPetGoat, dogsforpeace, TheWordOfGod134
Good Things Contrary to what the British media might have you believe there are some intelligent Americans out there, and the ones that The Fray tend to be better-informed than your average web-head. This is the place to go for serious discussion on such topics as why the Democrats lost the last election, if that’s what floats your boat.
Bad Things Unlike IMDB who maintain some quality control in that they will delete extremely abusive posts, The Slate believes in free speech. This can attract redneck God-botherers looking for a grammatically-inaccurate fight.
Representative extracts “Dissent is an American value and, quite frankly, it is the ONE absolutely necessary to a democratic society”
“WE BELEIVE IN ONE GOD UNDR PRESIDENT BUSH!!!!!! ur all liberal fags go back to canada and suck micheal moores cock you pussy commies”

Little Green Footballs

What is it? The premier talkboard for disgruntled right-wing web surfers. Started a rival campaign to The Guardian’s Clark County initiative sending letters to Clark County citizens urging them not to have their opinions swayed by a load of limey liberals.
Username Examples father4freedom79, american_eagle, MyColdDeadHands
Who Posts There? Reactionaries. Angry, angry Americans not content with the moral victory brought about by the recent electoral success of the most right-wing president in recent memory who sound off about the U.S. media’s “liberal bias” and the shocking downturn in core American values.
Good Things Not many, frankly. At their very best, posters on this board can be wittily frank about their conservatism in the same way as, for example, PJ O’Rourke or Mark Steyn – you may disagree with their views but they write with such confidence and humour you start to understand their politics.
Bad Things At their very worst, posters on this board are vile bigots, spewing forth hatred about gays, blacks, foreigners, jews and pretty much anyone else who isn’t a God-fearing southern WASP.
Representative Extract

b3ta.com

What is it? A site dedicated to the weirdest and most amusing material the web has to offer. Designed for bored 9-to-5ers wanting a giggle during their coffee breaks.
Talkboards? Each week the webmaster starts off two discussions for the talkboards. One is a graphics challenge for aspiring photoshoppers to cut and paste something humorous together and the other is a question e.g. What’s the most embarrassing job interview you ever had? The talkboarders respond in force and the best are posted on the main site for all to see.
Who posts there? Graphic designers, bored middle managers, final year undergraduates.
Username Examples timewaitsfornorman, gonzodog822, baz_the_bastard
Good Things The boards can often be very funny, particularly for those who like their humour contemporary and tasteless. Better are the reams of photoshopped photos and flash movies which, again, mine the depths of bad taste for cheap laughs (which, honestly, are the funniest laughs to have).
Bad Things Can get a little bit cliquey; the board has developed its own slang (e.g. rather than swearing, boarders will create portmanteau curses such as ‘twunt’ or ‘cucksocker’) and there are regulars who have their own private jokes. The boards have so many users that there is usually far too much material to wade through to follow any kind of conversational strand.
Representative extract

BBC Co
What is it? A section of the BBC website dedicated to matters ‘cultural’ and aimed for the 18-30 market. You can contribute your own reviews for films, music, books, gigs and television and others comment on them. Oddly, the Beeb’s remit of culture doesn’t extend here to theatre or art, not to mention opera, dance or all the rest.
Who posts there? All kinds of undergraduates, earnest postgraduates and bored first-jobbers.
Username Examples indiaman, lesbian_seagull, meaningoflife42
Good Things The site covers all kinds of different musical and filmic genres rather than just blockbusters and pop music. You can post your own reviews for anything you find on the website. Feel you have something burning to say about Aphex Twin’s Druqs album? Here you can write as much as you like. Most boarders possess at least a third-level degree so you can expect some intelligent comment.
Bad Things No-one knows about it. You can post as contentious a review as you like and chances are no-one will respond to it for weeks, especially if the film has left the limelight. The academic level of the debate can be boring, especially as most posters prefer paying attention to what they are writing rather than what others write.
Representative Extract

Jellybean
What is it? A series of forums for teenage girls to discuss sex, problems, adolescence, boys, make-up and whatever else occupies their minds. Mostly sex.
Who posts there? Teenage girls, teenage boys looking to chat to teenage girls, middle-aged perverts pretending to be teenage girls, pervert bloggers ostensibly browsing to write a piece on it later.
Username examples littleblueeyes, InnocentBlonde18, tara_loves_joel
Good Things Well, if you’re an adolescent with social problems (and let’s face it, most of us were at some point) some empathy can be found with kindred souls here. Also, it can be far easier to chat to people online than it can be in the real world. Despite being American (and therefore, one would assume, moralistic) the site links to family planning and abortion advice sites. For those of us who aren’t adolescents much entertainment can be gained from the bitchiness of some of these posters. They are teenage girls, after all.
Bad Things Pretty uninteresting if you aren’t a teenage girl or a pervert. The amount of misinformation proffered was astounding – one girl asked if she could get pregnant from giving a blowjob and a poster replied ‘only if you swallow’. Thankfully this was corrected (much to the delight of one American lad, one imagines) but other assertions remain inaccurate. A raging debate over whether piercing your clitoris meant you could never give birth finished with all parties agreeing that it did. One ‘totally looked it up in a book’, so that’s alright. Too many mind-boggingly incomprehensible Internet acronyms.
Representative Comments “My breasts are too big. Their always getting in the way and I have to wear special bras to fit them. I hate them!!!!!!!!! Does anyone else have problems with big breasts?!
“SFW? U hav to come here and show off about your breasts? No-one f***n cares!!! Stop being so arregant, some of us would kill for like D cup or something. GOYG”

(SFW – So Fucking What; GOYG – Get Over Yourself Girl)

My jaunt in cyberspace was eye-opening in many ways, most of them bad. Obviously you can’t take the population of the web as representative of any particular demographic but the universally poor English and grammar does not say much for 21st century education. Linguistics experts will tell you that languages evolve and change and it is my firm belief that in twenty years internet slang will start appearing in everyday speech. Just listen for the first person to say “lol” (possibly the most ubiquitous acronym on the web it stands for Lots Of Love or Laugh Out Loud). Grammar mistakes were not the worst thing I found on the web however; the uncensored and faceless nature of the internet allows for all kinds of repressed prejudices to leak out. In the same way that klansmen used to wear white sheets to conceal their identity, internet bigots can say what they like under the cover of anonymity. However, this can also be liberating – on the internet you can be whoever you want to be, with no-one to point attention to your physical shortcomings. This probably explains the appeal of internet forums to teenagers; indeed I would guess that most of the people I came into contact with were under the age of 20.
Teenagers though are by their nature impressionable; the proliferation of racism and bigotry must have a negative effect on them. Defenders of free speech may hold the internet up as the last bastion of the uncensored word but I for one would welcome moderate regulations for those who hijack talkboards to vent their prejudices. On IMDB, a boarder named Neocon repeatedly posts large articles claiming Chinese immigrants are planning to overthrow America from the inside. Ridiculous, sure, and quite funny if he weren’t serious. He is though, and all it takes is for one thirteen-year-old to start distrusting people because of their race and the cycle of racism that infected the world for most of our recent history rolls on.

The Giving Pay-Rights

2005-01-12T14:54:00.000Z

As Andrew Marr perspicaciously pointed out in the Telegraph today, the Asian tsunami has washed away most of the other news in the world over the past couple of weeks. Faced with a tragedy of such immensity the British press have wasted no time in feeding off it greedily. Stories have ranged from the heroic to the tragic to the bizarrely surreal but news of late has been dominated by a plethora of back-slapping editorials congratulating the good old British public for their warm-hearted generosity. That generosity has admittedly been immense with something like £120 million pounds raised so far and more to come no doubt with the fund-raising concerts, telethons and pledges that are to come over the following months. The Daily Mail has been first amongst the back-slappers, but the other tabloids have followed suit with expansive headlines about how much their readers have raised (although The Sun has been oddly muted; perhaps because its ‘tsunami auction’ has so far raised a rather paltry £7230). The Mail has indeed raised an extremely large amount (over £7 million pounds) but given its status as the middle-class’ favourite read and Fleet Street’s current best-selling newspaper you could perhaps expect their appeal to be a success. No matter, the result is still the highest public response to a charitable cause in history. Live Aid didn’t make nearly as much, even taking inflation into account. So why did the quake shake the British people’s sense of altruism to such a degree? Is it because of the large number of British dead? Is it because so many of us choose to holiday in South-East Asia and are disproportionately fond of it? Is it simply because the tragedy unfolded over the New Year when the Western world traditionally looks for a way to assuage the guilt of a gluttonous Christmas?

In truth, the media was instrumental in tsunami awareness; with its rapid response series of human interest stories, timelines and glossy photographic evidence of the scale of destruction visible on the front of every newspaper and also with its quickness to congratulate the British public on doing something good. As an irreconcilable cynic I’ll profess that to my mind the enormous amounts raised are due to psychological egoism – we need to feel good about something on these gloomy January days, and giving our money away makes us feel good. Something about those massive headlines detailing the millions raised by we milk-of-human-kindness Brits tells me the Daily Mail thinks so too.

p.s. apologies again for the pun-tastic headline. I need a sub-editor.

Now Pimpin Aint Easy But Its Necessary...

2005-01-11T13:26:00.000Z

...so I'm chasing bitches like Tom chased Jerry...
There’s a scene in the little-known and under-appreciated comedy Office Space, directed by King of the Hill creator Mike Judge where nerdy, bespectacled I.T. drone Michael Bolton is stuck in heavy traffic. Blaring from his radio is ‘No Tears’ by forgotten mid-90s gangsta rapper Scarface and Bolton is singing along in full OG mode, hands outstretched, at the top of his voice. Alongside a car-full of black workers slowly pulls level and Bolton, noticing them, turns the volume down and affects normalcy. As they pull ahead, the volume goes up and Bolton returns to his hip-hop stylings.
Brother, I sympathise. As a fairly solid middle-class WASP my affection for mid-90s hip-hop is beginning in my 25th year to be a source of embarrassment. I like nothing better than returning home after work and booming Ice Cube or Cypress Hill from my stereo, all the while mouthing along with the sometimes frighteningly obscene lyrics. My infrequent gym sessions are ordinarily accompanied by the Notorious BIG’s Ready to Die album (although I skip through the soul/r’n’b sections to the meaty goodness of Gimme The Loot and Ready to Die) and if I happen to have had a couple of drinks in a bar and the DJ plays anything by De La Soul it will take an act of divine proportions to stop me bouncing up and down in my seat and rapping along. Like I said, it’s a source of embarrassment.
It all started in 1990 when I was ten years old, a shorty in the hood of a respectably expensive boarding school in Berkshire. A boy in the year ahead of me, Adrian, had an older brother whose tastes in music extended beyond the Top 40 pop sunshine music others of our age were listening to on their Sony Walkmans. It was an era of bad music, of MC Hammer, Technotronic, and the Shamen. Vanilla Ice was shortly to be introduced to the British public. Adrian’s brother gave us recorded tapes of ‘music we should be listening to’ – hip-hop that wasn’t all about smiling dancers leaping about in stupid trousers. It was revolutionary stuff. Straight Outta Compton by NWA, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, Amerikkka’s Most Wanted by Ice Cube, Ice T’s Original Gangster. Admittedly a lot of the attraction was due to the constant swearing; at age 10 swearing was still both shocking and impressive. The ‘N’ word that all these rappers bandied about frequently was almost unheard-of in our lives. In fact, because these rap crews used the word as a greeting and a reclaimed title – and sometimes even a term of endearment – it doesn’t have the same hateful resonance for me as it does for others. As the years went on some of these artists progressed – the first single I ever bought was Public Enemy’s anti-slavery anthem Can’t Truss It – but others regressed. NWA’s massive second album Efil4zaggin was initially banned in the UK for its glorification of the gangster lifestyle (including the squirm-inducing ode to oral sex, She Swallowed It) while ex-member Ice Cube was busy insulting gays, Asians and pretty much anyone else who listened to his Death Certificate album. Adrian and I began to get more into the lighter side of American hip-hop, the jazzy East Coast stylings of De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest and Arrested Development. Times and musical tastes change; we moved on to the same school but I became interested in grunge and then Britpop and he in acid house and underground dance music. Our friendship, based on our shared love for loud, curse-laden invectives, faded. Hip-hop never left me for long, however, even in those bright days of Oasis, Blur et al. I discovered Cypress Hill’s Black Sunday and House of Pain’s Fine Malt Lyrics, not to mention the blustering weirdness of the Wu Tang Clan. As the decade wore on I discovered more and more, moving from Jurassic 5 to Blackstar to Common to Blackalicious… and when the mp3 revolution hit, I discovered even more; Madvillain, Athletic Mic League, People Under The Stairs, Kanye West…. It’s the gangsta rap that stays with me, though. Even now, any time I want to feel tough, powerful, or strong I’ll put on Bring Tha Ruckus or Real Niggaz Don’t Die as loud as I can and bob my head to the beat.

I can’t get past the incongruence though of being a slacks-and-shirt-wearing white boy listening to what is still young black music. Imagine a baggy-panted, baseball-cap-wearing black Londoner listening to and singing along to Rufus Wainwright and you might have some idea. I keep thinking I’ll grow out of it eventually but what if I don’t? Will I be giving these CDs to my children, saying this is what Daddy used to listen to when I was your age? 99% of these niggers ain’t shit, and most of these niggers suck dick… I can’t say whether all that bad language had a terrible effect on me; I don’t think I was any more foul-mouthed than most other children of my age. My parents were quietly liberal about it all; my father had had such a grilling from his father about rock music I think he was unwilling to do the same to me. Besides, I knew I wasn’t supposed to be swearing like Eazy-E and MC Ren and Dr Dre and all the others; it was just quite fun to hear them doing it. Their gangster lifestyle was so far removed from my own it couldn’t influence me into evil ways. What was I going to do, pop a cap in my piano teacher so I didn’t have to practice my scales?
For which reason I was filled with guilty excitement at the new Grand Theft Auto computer game which gives you the chance not only to kill prostitutes and run bystanders down in your car but also to be a mid-90s gangbanger in South Central L.A. Driving in my low-rider the radio blasts out tunes by all my old heroes; Dre and Snoop, Ice Cube, 2 Live Crew. It’s the one place on earth I can indulge myself in my music without feeling like a square wheel. Still, I was encouraged by a trip on the tube during rush hour last week. Next to me was a full-on corporate suit type, scribbling something in unintelligible code on a notepad. Blasting out of his ear-phones (at what must have been an incredible volume) was yo yo yo yo shorty it’s ya birthday gonna party like it’s ya birthday… I felt like going up to him and whispering ‘got yo’ back, homes’ but I didn’t. Instead I turned up Jay-Z on my mp3 player and bobbed my head along with a smile.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

2004-11-05T11:46:00.000Z

The Times, after almost two hundred years of publication, has changed to an exclusively tabloid format. The traditional broadsheet size, unchanged since 1822, was scrapped after sales figures rose in such areas as Scotland, the West Country and Northern Ireland where only the tabloid edition was available. Robert Thomson, the Times’ Editor, penned an editorial welcome to the new edition stressing that although the paper’s size had changed the dedication to ‘fine journalism’ had not. The surprise move, predicted but never acknowledged until the day of the changeover, has elicited some anger from both media commentators and Times readers (please see Private Eye’s Media section for several flaming examples) for whom the main gripe seems to be that it moves the newspaper downmarket. Thomson is obviously trying to combat these fears: the ‘T’ word is not mentioned in his somewhat portentous editorial; instead he refers to the new Times as the ‘compact edition’.

What might anger the Times’ traditional rural readership – surely one of its higher demographics – is that the move to a tabloid, sorry, compact format is a clear concession to metropolitan readers who read their newspapers on the tube or on the commute and don’t have the patience or the room to struggle with an unwieldy broadsheet. The Independent’s format change a year ago made more sense because the bulk of its readership is the urban left, more likely to be crammed into a train carriage or coffee shop whilst reading their paper; The Guardian’s forthcoming switch to a ‘midloid’ format will appease the same readers. The place of the Times however has traditionally been the kitchen tables of middle-class households. Why then this sudden move to please urban readers?

The truth is that The Times has slowly been moving towards a more – shall we say – egilatarian editorial line for years. There are still excellent commentators: Matthew Parris, Anatole Kaletsky and Simon Barnes to name but three. However they vie for space with Polly Filla-like columnist Mary-Ann Sieghart and the execrable Julie Burchill, both of whose pieces are filled with tabloid-style outrage (particularly the latter who, in my opinion, might be sister to the Sun’s Richard Littlejohn). There is still an onus on celebrity columnists such as Jonny Wilkinson who, let’s face it, was hardly hired for his linguistic dexterity. The consequence of the smaller newspaper format means that space will be at a premium – only the ‘top-selling’ stories will get in. This cannot but lead to a populist tabloid-style mentality. A specialist article on Kazakhstanian farming that might take up a quarter-page in broadsheet would take up a single page in a tabloid. Why risk boring the readers? My guess is that what we will see over the coming years is The Times turning into a pro-establishment version of the Daily Mail with attention-grabbing headlines and outraged voices on every page. Stephen Glover has argued that it is this readership that the Times are going after and why not? The Daily Mail is one of the highest-selling papers in the country. The Times’ change therefore makes sense from a business perspective.

The only worry is the impact on the rest of the newspapers: after The Guardian adopts its ‘Berliner’ format the only two remaining daily broadsheets will be the Daily Telegraph and the Financial Times. The Telegraph has promised it will not go tabloid and has no doubt reaped the benefit of disgruntled Times traditionalists switching right-wing papers but once there are no alternatives - apart from the FT which caters for a specific market and cannot be considered a rival - who’s to say they will keep that promise? The Times said many a time that they would not switch (and even put a website up to combat rumours to that end) and then did. Telegraph owners the Barclay twins are shrewd businessmen who are unafraid to sacrifice tradition for profit. My prediction is that in five years time the days of struggling with broadsheets will be over.

I’ll leave you with a final word of apology for the title of this post. I just couldn’t help myself.

All Over Bar The Suing

2004-11-02T19:37:00.000Z

So this time tomorrow the dust will have settled, the people will have spoken and the lawyers will be rolling up their sleeves. Journalists have been going insane over the past few days. The Guardian, which seems to be the paper of choice for American liberals judging from the most-viewed articles list on their website, has thrown itself rather aggressively behind the Kerry campaign – the website’s servers were blocked for a while last week owing to the sudden surge of visitors resulting from the spreading reputation of Charlie Brooker’s call to arms in the Guide. On the other end of the political spectrum everyone’s favourite loudmouth reactionary Mark Steyn promised in the Spectator to leave the U.S.A. if the President was not re-elected. In the States, most commentators in spite of their leanings seem to have it as ‘too close to call’ with The Slate for example predicting an all-out draw and lawsuits at dawn.

It has long been a criticism of the United States that its judicial processes get in the way of what some might consider reasonable justice. Everyone has their favourite urban myth about American lawsuits. We’ve all heard of the McDonalds patron who sued after sustaining burns from her coffee because she had not been warned that the contents were likely to be hot, or the burglar who sued after tripping on a loose floorboard in his victim’s home. We may well laugh at these but the settling of a supposedly democratic election in the courtroom for the second successive time would have decidely grave consequences for the ideals of democracy. That the jobs, futures and lives of millions of people might be decided in the bureaucratic mire of the law courts by the rich super-educated American gentry might, in fact, be construed as more meritocracy than democracy. Part of this is still down to the ludicrous continuation in America of the electoral colleges.

Many American liberals – not least Michael Moore who made a big point of it in Farenheit 9/11 – will point out that although Al Gore won the popular vote by over half a million people in 2000, he lost the number of electoral college votes and therefore the election. The idea of having electoral colleges representing the votes of each state’s populace is ostensibly so that the say of the smaller states count against those of the larger ones. There are many more people in California and New York state than in most of the smaller states put together but the electoral college system gives all those North Dakotans and Wisconsians a slightly louder voice. The reason this system persists is mainly because with voting on an individual person basis the Democrats, with their solidly blue coastal, urban states would nearly always win. The electoral process is certainly fairer, then, in terms of a two-party system. But why so few electoral colleges? Only 516 colleges amongst 180-odd voting Americans… I’ll save you the maths – that comes to almost 349,000 voters per electoral college. Surely having a smaller breakdown and more electoral colleges would allow for a more democratic count and prevent the return of the embittered legal fights of 2000?
It is a shame that a country that has always – but especially in the past few years – presented itself as a beacon of the free world should still allow so archaic a democratic process to govern what many still consider the most important election in the world. The fierce attention on the presidential race paid by the British media and people, not to mention our European counterparts, illustrates this perfectly.

However, we must not let ourselves become too arrogant in our oh-so-considered liberalism. The Guardian’s “Operation Clark County” is a case in point. Supposedly well-intentioned, the G2 supplement invited readers to send their letters to voters in Clark County, Ohio, one of the smallest counties in one of the most important of swing states. The idea was that we British could have our say in an election whose result will have undeniable effects on us. Certainly some of the letters will have been tactful but for the most part one can only imagine the bile with which some earnestly supercilious lefties poured scorn on the Americans for even thinking about voting for George W Bush. The fact of the matter is – and here I would ask you to disregard his policies and his much-lampooned character – we Europeans are judging the President by our own political standards and not by American ones. The portrayal that W has painted of himself for the American people is of the man-next-door, the good old home-town Southern boy who believes in God, Justice and the American dream. It’s shrewd political showmanship in the greatest of American traditions: the down-home boy makes good and ends up in the White House. Europeans don’t want the man next door leading the country because we think that – like Bush – he’d be terrible at it. Kerry is, therefore, the obvious European choice because he’s well-educated, verbose and ever-so-slightly detached from what we might think of as traditionally American. Well, here’s the thing: millions of American voters are looking for a traditional American to lead the country. And who knows? In a few hours, they might just get him.

The House Always Wins?

2004-10-29T15:28:00.000Z

Everyone knows the feeling, that cold squeeze of fear that grabs your colon and sets your heart on edge, ready to feel delight or despair… it’s the sensation you feel when you’re ushered into your boss’ office for “a quick word”, when you open the envelope containing your exam results, or when the striker approaches the penalty spot to land the shot that could send your team to the finals.
It’s also the feeling you get when the roulette ball skitters between red and black, when the first three numbers of your lottery ticket come up and you’re waiting for the fourth, or when you hold a straight flush and all bets are in. This is the crucial part of the dizzying thrill of gambling, that glorious half-second when you’re on a knife edge between winning and losing. It’s why so many of us do it; and why some of us are addicted to it.
The Labour government has already made changes to gambling laws in the past few years (allowing the sale of alcohol in casinos for example) and the Gambling Bill to be debated in the commons on Nov 1st will, if successful in its current form, abolish restrictions on the number of casinos and allow for the introduction of ‘super casinos’ with million-pound jackpots and one-armed bandits. Many argue that this will lead to a sharp increase in gambling addiction and personal borrowing. With the national debt of British citizens having just broken the trillion-pound mark, it’s worth wondering why exactly the government are behind the Bill, and why its critics are so vociferously against it.
Labour compares the proposed Gambling Bill to the introduction of the National Lottery in 1994. The Lottery was greeted then with the same criticisms the Gambling Bill has received this week – moral condemnations from church leaders, worries about a ‘tax on the poor’, the same concerns about addiction and borrowing. Yet we have had the National Lottery for 10 years and it has made billions for charities all over the country and provides ‘what if?’ dreams for people of every walk of life. Labour seem to be asking – what’s the difference?
Well, the first difference is that the super casinos are not being set up in the interests of charity. The American entrepreneurs who, we are told, are set to bring Las Vegas-style glamour to our shores are not interested in putting money back into the local communities but more concerned with lining their already bulging pockets. It’s naked capitalism, pure and simple, with the profits all going straight to the owners.
Secondly, the National Lottery works with colossal odds. You have something like a 14 million-to-one chance of winning. Only the most foolhardy of gamblers is going to fritter away hundreds pounds on the longest shot of all. However, casinos work on much smaller odds, have more variety of games, pay out with more regularity and generally bring the dreams of riches closer to your nose. Of course, it’s an illusion. The old adage still rings true – the house always wins. If this weren’t true then why would anyone open a casino?
The ‘tax on the poor’ accusations still stand. Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary who has proposed the bill, called such claims “snobbish”. While there is no denying that it is patronising to suggest that under-privileged people are more likely to become gambling addicts, the fact remains that there are those who gamble for pleasure and those who gamble for money. Whether they are “working-class” or not it is they who are most likely to become addicted and they who are most likely to suffer.
Whether Labour have introduced these measures to bring foreign investments to our soil or to ‘give a little fun to the people’ it seems inevitable that the bill in its current form will be shot down in the Commons, perhaps unsurprising given the mauling it has received from the media. This in itself is further evidence of the astonishing unpopularity of Tony Blair’s government which, having long been accused of nanny-state-ism, instead proposes a Bill that relies on the autonomy of the individual only for that to be ripped apart as well. It is telling that on the day after the reading of the Gambling Bill to Parliament, there is a debate on the new guidelines set up by Labour restricting the use of physical force on one’s children, measures that have provoked criticisms of over-protection almost as fierce as those directed towards the House over the Gambling Bill. It seems as if Labour really can’t win at the moment. Will this losing streak continue until May? Perhaps betting on red isn't as safe as once it was.

A Nice Little Turner

2004-10-25T14:33:00.000Z

To Tate Britain yesterday to see the 2004 Turner Prize exhibition. It had been a while since I’d been to the Milbank Tate and it struck me what a beautiful building it is. Scale-wise it is not in the same league as Tate Modern’s turbine room capacity but I think the atrium at Tate Britain could be used for similar projects if it wished to compete with its younger sister. It is dominated at the moment by Michael Landy’s colossal Semi-Detached, a piece-by-piece reconstruction of his parents’ house in Essex, cut in half with accompanying video installation.

Video installations are very much the order of the day for the Turner Prize nominees as well. I’ve always been rather taken with the Turner Prize, probably because I like the idea of a prize rewarding someone for being an artist rather than rewarding a particular piece of art. These days the term ‘artist’ seems to be as much a catch-all as the word ‘terrorist’ or ‘racist’. Writers, actors, cooks, hairdressers, all – supposedly – can be artists. Even to be involved in something creative makes one an artist these days, which draws a lot of power from the term. But it works both ways. When a builder builds a house, it’s a house; but when Michael Landy builds a house, it’s art. However, rather than get bogged down in an argument that will have art theorists arguing for decades yet, it’s probably better to say that my concept of an artist is someone who lives for art, whose very existence is dedicated to art. Whether this art is in paintings or performance or sculptures or installations or even flower-arranging doesn’t matter. What matters is the artist.
Which fact makes it difficult to evaluate the Turner Prize nominees on the basis of one room of their work. Langlands and Bell’s exhibition is made up from their work on post-war Afghanistan commissioned by the Imperial War Museum (the highlight of which is a Lara Croft-like computer game based on Osama Bin Laden’s house) and has drawn much ire from art critics who find it facile and meaningless. But what about the rest of their oeuvre? We don’t find out about it. Jeremy Deller’s room offers a more diverse range of pieces but as an exhibition in its own right it fails because the works on display have more or less nothing to do with each other. A video about Texas, a documentary on a parade he organised in San Sebastian, and public memorials to dead miners and Brian Epstein may well be indicative of Deller’s art but you don’t feel like you’re seeing the whole picture, as it were. Turkish documentarist Kutlug Ataman presents a room of six-foot talking heads from a remote Turkish community whose people believe in reincarnation. The videos are presented together and in such a way that you cannot watch all at the same time and must choose which to concentrate on amongst the hubbub of voices and screens. It is impossible to walk through the room without stepping in front of one of the projections – this I suppose is a constant reminder of your own presence in the installation but while I was there I heard ‘get out of the bloody way!’ from several British viewers. Yinka Shonibare's exhibition is the closest to traditional crafts-based art that the 2004 nominees have to offer. A wall of hat-box shaped paintings is certainly the most colourful piece in the entire exhibition. Shonibare designs European period dresses in African colours and designs which are shown off in another video piece of heavily stylised dancing recounting the assassination of Princep Gustav of Sweden. This for me is the most captivating video piece, folding and unfolding forwards and in reverse with close microphones picking up the eerie backwards sounds of the swishing costumes.

One might assume that video art is one of the most accessible of art forms but in fact the reverse is quite often the truth. After all, to get the measure of a painting one has only to look at it for a few seconds but to do the same for a video requires watching the entirety of the piece. Art galleries are rarely decked out with sprung seats and popcorn so your viewing position will likely be on a stool or leaning against a wall. In short it’s not a comfortable experience, and the structure and design of video installations is equally never as comfortable an experience as the viewing, say, of a Hollywood blockbuster. In Deller’s 'Memory Bucket' there is an 8-minute sequence of bats flying from a cave at sunset. Trained on films and television and feeling the twinges of backache the average viewer becomes impatient for something to happen at about minute 3.
So who was the best? I’m no art critic, and as a great believer in the innate subjectivity of visual art I can’t say whose exhibition was definitively the best but I enjoyed Shonibare’s the most. It’s difficult though on the basis of the exhibition to predict a winner, as the pieces on display formed such a small indication of the artists’ bodies of work. Interviews with the four at the end (yet another video!) gave some sort of greater idea but basing a prediction on the Tate Britain show would be a bit like going for a four-course meal at the Ritz, having a bite of each dish and declaring it the best restaurant in the world.

Little Things

2004-10-21T15:20:00.000Z

Not much in the papers today. Some sports news.

Paul Gascoigne changed his name to 'G8' today. Not, apparently, in homage to the international forum that aggravates the anarchists of the world but a combination of the first letter of his surname and his shirt number as was. The man himself said that the name change had come about because "it's too closely linked to the past". Which, when you consider his history of wife-beating, alcoholism and grievous Chris Evans friendship, is probably fair enough. I wonder whether all Geordies use the royal 'we' like G8 does. As he says, "Paul isn't right for us". A big ego, or just schizophrenic?
It has been reported that world cup hero Johnny Wilkinson will be watching the Autumn tests against Canada, South Africa and Australia from the sidelines as he has another injury - a haematoma, no less, in his left shoulder. This means that when we get thrashed by the Ozzies the press can again blame it on the absence of our talismanic fly-half, as if when he does recover our struggling team will miraculously return to form. Johnny might well be forgiven for feeling great pressure on his shoulders - and not just from the haematoma.
The battle between Williams and BAR for the services of Formula 1 wunderkind Jensen Button has resulted in victory for the latter team. Button was contracted to stay on with BAR for another season but Williams made a characteristically sneaky attempt to poach the British driver. Despite the court case, all parties were surprisingly amicable about the result with Frank Williams accepting Button will probably transfer to Williams in 2006 and BAR chief Dave Richards pleased he will be fielding the drivers who brought such success this year. No appeals, no bitchy comments from either team, and complete compliance from Button - how refreshing. Imagine if he'd been a footballer and Willams and BAR had been Chelsea and Man U. Difficult to see such a cheery resolution there.
Speaking of footballers, some other overpaid goon has let the money go to his head and ruined his career. Chelsea striker Adrian Mutu found that, as a professional athlete, he wasn't content with the rush of money, girls, cars and success that comes with being a star member of one of the world's best teams. Disregarding the frequent drug-tests that he and his team-mates are contractually obliged to take, it seems as if he took cocaine. What an utter thicko. What is it about footballers and common sense? Didn't he think, you know, maybe this isn't such a good idea as I have to take frequent bloody drug-tests?! Yet another example of how too much cash has ruined what apparently used to be a glorious game.

I don't like football, by the way, if you hadn't guessed. Then again, I'm not a moron.

A Right Royal Barrel O' Monkeys!

2004-10-20T13:45:00.000Z

The title's from a particularly memorable Fast Show sketch spoofing that post-Lock Stock And Two Smoking Barrels era when every other film coming out was a half-baked Guy Ritchie knock-off with ex-Eastenders actors, a self-consciously hip soundtrack, and someone saying "oi you caaaaarnt" every two seconds. I was greatly reminded of the sketch last night whilst watching Layer Cake or, as it is written on the Trainspotting-ish poster, L4yer Cak3.
Directed by Matthew Vaughan, the producer of LSATSB(apologies for the acronym but it's much tidier), Layer Cake is a throwback to those heady days of Cool Britannia when New Labour were in power, Robbie Williams was top of the charts and Britain was in thrall to the golden boots of David Beckham. How different from today.... er, wait a minute...
This is not to say that Layer Cake is a rip-off, or even anything like LSATSB, but it is a logical progression of that film. If Ritchie's film is the cinematic equivalent of an issue of Loaded, then Vaughan's is the equivalent of GQ. Where LSATSB had a variety of lowlifes in jeans and sheepskin coats, Layer Cake has smoothies in Boateng suits. Drab student flats become shiny Ikea warehouses, pub lock-ins become country-house private rooms, cups of tea and fry-ups become brandy, champagne and cigars, Vinnie Jones becomes Sir Michael Gambon. In a way it mirrors Ritchie and Vaughan's journey from mockney chancers rubbing together enough pennies to put together a deal to the powerfully rich success stories they are today, complete with trophy wives (and they don't come more trophy than Madonna and Claudia Schiffer - it's like they purposefully went out to pick up their pin-ups from the 80s/90s) and millionaire lifestyles.
Layer Cake deals with the various echelons of the drug trade. A successful cocaine dealer (Daniel Craig) becomes the middleman for a large ecstasy deal between overlord Jimmy Price (Kenneth Cranham) and criminal lowlife The Duke (Jamie Foreman). Of course, The Duke has in the process ripped off some bad dudes and soon Craig's character (unnamed, a la Fight Club) is avoiding a psychotic Serbian hitman as well as 'gaffer' Eddie Temple (Gambon, complete with John Kerry-like man-tan) who wants our hero to find his daughter.
Unlike other films of the genre, Layer Cake doesn't go out of its way to appeal to the Sun readership with washed-up footballers and popstars in cameo roles, but instead puts together a very strong cast. Gambon, Kenneth Cranham and Colm Meany rub shoulders with newcomers Sienna Miller, Ben Whishaw and - in a leading man role that has been a long time coming - Daniel Craig. It's Craig's film and, although he sometimes sounds out of place as the slightly-posh out-of-his-depth dealer, his astonishing presence and piercing blue eyes more than compensate. When he must - against his avowed moral code - kill someone for the first time, his subsequent anguish is most strongly apparent in his bloodshot, teary eyes. The other performances are not as strong, consisting mainly of drama-school graduates doing the old 'gorblimey' accent. The exception is Gambon, who hams it up gloriously as an old-school patriarch.
The script is, honestly, a little dull. Craig's character's friendships with Morty and Gil never ring true and the ending, trying to be a bang, ends up as a whimper. There are half-sketched characters all over the place, random episodes seemingly only present for random sex and violence and none of the great lines or laughs that made LSATSB such a success. It even resorts a couple of times to that screenwriters' great no-no, characters telling jokes - "Oi, mate, heard the one about..." etc*.
I'm aware that during this review I've continually compared Layer Cake with its older brother but honestly it's difficult not to. LSATSB is the yardstick when it comes to these films. Like it or loathe it (and people do in equal measure) Ritchie's film, as well as creating a new subgenre of blokeish gangster films, stands as one of the British films of the 90s. Everything made since of a similar ilk is going to be in its shadow.

* The one exception to this rule is Jack Nicholson's gag in Chinatown. If you haven't seen it I won't ruin it for you suffice to say it made milk come out of my nose and I wasn't even drinking any at the time.

Them and U.S. (2)

2004-10-19T10:46:00.000Z

The news yesterday and today has been dominated by first speculation and then confirmation by defence secretary Geoff Hoon that Britain have been asked by the U.S. to send troops to assist the U.S. forces outside of the British-controlled area in the south. The Black Watch regiment, made up of rock-hard Scotsmen, are likely to be deployed to Iskandariyah and Latifiyah, towns just outside Baghdad. The soldiers will be working with U.S. marines and be under U.S. command, facts which are causing consternation in the British Army because of the difference in their tactical approaches. The argument goes that U.S. marines tend to favour a rapid, no-holds-barred approach - and normally have the firepower to back it up - whereas the British, owing largely to their financial inferiority to the American forces, prefer a slower and more methodical set of procedures.
Whatever you believe regarding the soldiers' differences, it cannot be denied that this fresh deployment of America's greatest allies comes at an expedient time for the Bush administration, whose lack of allied assistance has been the focus of much criticism by presidential candidate John Kerry. Many of the papers (2)- and some politicians- have labelled the request a nakedly political move coming as it does so soon before the U.S. election. Hoon countered by nervously stating in the commons that the only election this would support was the Iraqi election scheduled for January. But of course, he would say that.
It is a measure of how astonishingly cynical we have become about New Labour's decisions that it is perfectly believable that they would deploy British troops in order to help President Bush's election campaign. The press, the opposition, the anti-war MPs and the electorate are all perfectly willing to believe that our government would put British lives at risk for nothing more than political credit with our allies. For this I suppose one can blame Hutton, Butler and all the rest but I find it hard to believe that our governments are that machiavellian. Devious, certainly, but not evil.
However, what did strike me was the inevitability of Hoon's announcement. There was never any possibility but that the troops would be deployed. Sketch cartoonists like to portray Blair as Bush's lapdog but here he proved himself more of a snarling alsatian. Granted, we are the U.S.A's main ally and our agreement to go to war was to support their troops. Is there, though, a point where we can say 'no more'? At what stage will the government be able to say no to the U.S.A? When they invade Iran? When they nuke North Korea? We are a country whose political autonomy is largely within our own heads when it comes to foreign policy, and so our leaders have proved again. The political fallout if, for whatever reason, Hoon and Blair had refused assistance to the U.S. troops might have been small or it might have been huge but they are too afraid to risk it. This is the first of the U.S.A's requests. It will not be the last.

Them and U.S.

2004-10-15T13:36:00.000Z

The news has been dominated lately by the U.S. presidential debates and, honestly, it rather puts the U.K. political scene into stark grey relief. For some reason, Yankee politics have always carried more excitement and glamour than our own here in Britain. Over there, JFK has an affair with Marilyn Monroe; Nixon resigns after Watergate; and assassination attempts both successful and unsuccessful stir up the political climate every few years (JFK, Bobby Kennedy, Reagan) - over here, we have John Major cuddling up to Edwina Currie (shudder); politicians resigning either because they've been caught in sordid sex acts (Nick Brown, David Mellor, etc, etc) or because they can't really be bothered (Estelle Morris, Alan Milburn); and the only assassination attempt of a prime minister in recent memory was at the 1984 Tory conference. Somehow, a muddled bomb blast in Brighton doesn't have the same movie-like lucidity of watching the president's head being blown off in broad daylight. They in the U.S. have intrigue, scandal, and glamour on a large scale, whereas we have squabbles, embarrassments and monotony. No wonder the U.K. electorate is so disenfranchised. So what could we do to change all this? I think we could learn a few lessons from our cousins across the Atlantic.

Firstly, the major parties should be allowed to buy advertising time on television and radio. Ok, we already have the dull-beyond-belief party political broadcasts, teeming with 'ordinary' people lining up to tell us how the policies of the government/opposition have changed/will change their lives. Yawn. No-one seems to realise that 'ordinary' means 'boring'. We want smear campaigns, people. We want Blair coming on and telling us Howard is a snivelling Jew bastard who wants to suck the life out of the country with his big vampire teeth. We want Howard to take a life-size cut out of Blair to Iraq and show gangs of youths burning and dismembering it. We want Charles Kennedy to reveal that Blair toked up and got stoned at Oxford whilst Howard joined the Young Blackshirts Society as a youth. Vitriol is what we want.

Secondly, we should allow - nay, encourage - celebrities to support a particular party. Steps have been made towards this with 'Vote Idol' encouraging the text generation to name a potential rival to Blair's Sedgefield constituency, although it remains to be seen whether this will actually go ahead. But watch how stars Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Arnold, Britney, Bruce Willis and 'The Rock' have thrown their support behind the Bush administration. The plus side of this is it is likely to work the other way round in cynical Britain. Can you imagine the potential damage to a political party sustained by the vocal support of Peter Andre? The years of hard work undone by the approval of your party by Victor from Big Brother? The parties would be lining up unpopular figures to extol the good qualities of their opponents. Heat magazine would suddenly become as politically important as The Spectator or New Statesman. Perhaps a talk-show host could quit T.V. and move into right-wing politics... er, hang on a 60 million Americans watched the first debate in 2004. That's a quarter of the population. Alright, it's not an election year here but you can bet the 1pm live feed from PM's QT didn't even get a 1% audience share.

Alright, so people are going to say the measures I've suggested are sensationalist and reduce politics to a lower common denominator. Which is probably true, but is that necessarily a bad thing if it gets your average bottom-feeder to sit up, shake their head and start thinking about who controls this country and how they do it?

The Million Dollar McQuestion Mark

2004-10-13T09:45:00.000Z

Today saw the announcement that McDonalds, the "troubled" fast food empire (although a company that still posts a profit of £23 million pounds can hardly be all that "troubled" if you ask me), is dropping their characteristic 'golden arches' logo in favour of a lone, single 'golden question mark'. Shaken by unflattering documentaries, the anti-obesity drive and tumbling profits the sinking corporation have clearly grabbed the life-raft of corporate rebranding to help lure back some of its disillusioned burger-junkies.
The problem is that changing your brand does not automatically give you a new lease of life. Indeed, as Coca-Cola discovered with New Coke and British Airways found with their ludicrous tail-fin design, it can sometimes have the reverse effect. What's more, desperate rebranding can often seem like the death throes of a dying idea (witness, for example, the Tories' recent addition of a muscular arm to their flaming torch logo - that'll help them win the next election, I don't think). And so it is with the McDonalds question mark. What is it supposed to mean? Advertising types talk about 'concept' - what's the concept here? A question mark, on its own, has echoes of confusion, uncertainty, doubt... It says "I don't know". This, surely, is not the message those high-paid execs want to be sending out? Perhaps it's intentionally mysterious, asking us a question that we have to go to McDonald's to answer? In that case, what's the question?
Have the McDonalds decision-makers, after so long at the top of the tree, forgotten that the reason they're so phenomenally successful is because a trip to McDonalds involves exactly no mystery at all (apart from the precise ingredients of their food, regarding which I will refer you to Morgan Spurlock)? People visit McDonalds because they know what they're going to get before they even enter the doors. It's a brain-free eating experience. Their spiralling profits are more to do with their half-witted attempts to court the healthy-eating crowd (Please. If you're a salad type why on earth would you even think of eating one in McDonalds?) and their allying themselves to an 'urban' advertising strategy (The cringe-worthy 'I'm lovin' it' slogan cancels itself of any street value with that achingly-uncool-yet-punctually-accurate apostrophe after lovin') than fundamental problems with their key strategies. In short, it's the constant advertising and re-branding that's doing them harm. So how do you fix that? It seems for McDonalds that the answer is
?

My First Blog

2004-10-12T17:15:00.000Z

'Blog' - what a terrible word. I'm not a big fan of portmanteu words in general but 'blog' fills me with mid-noughties distaste. Nevertheless here I am. I've never done anything quite like this before and suspect that my readership will be small and accidental. I don't intend to tell anyone in the non-virtual world about it just yet: maybe that'll change when I become proud of it (if that happens).
For the record, the reason I've started this is because I'm just about to turn twenty-five, I have long-held dreams of becoming a writer and I have of late done very little to turn these dreams into reality. When I was a bit younger I was very dynamic in the writing that I did, putting on plays and writing freelance articles for student publications. On 'writing nights' for the past year and half though I've hesitated, made coffee, written three paragraphs of a new short story or six pages of a play and then gone and watched television. I have literally hundreds of beginnings, scant few middles and no endings. This might go someway towards explaining the title above. So this 'blog (and yes, I am going to apostrophize it like that) is going to rectify that situation in that it gives me a forum to publish in immediately (albeit to no-one at all). In short, it gives me something to write for.
The other thing I can assure you, my anonymous - and as yet non-existent - reader, is that I promise never to write about me and who I am and what I do and how I'm feeling. I hate the way most 'blogs bleat on in a high-pitched, self-involved, awkwardly personal 'American' way (apologies to anyone Stateside who may be reading but, well, you know what I mean) although I can't say that I won't occasionally when inebriated late at night tell you all how I'm really feeling (and then hurriedly delete it the next day when hungover). Along the way I'll do my best not to rant too much about politics, film, theatre, art, London, Britain and all the rest. I'd much appreciate hearing from anyone who actually finds this interesting, or finds it at all given my aforementioned 'not telling anyone' rule.
Actually... I'm too self-involved not to tell anyone. I give it two weeks, max.