See you in court, Lotus....

Apparently, we have now become so finely attuned to the sound of racism that we can even detect it in cars' engines. It is now possible, it seems, for the casual observer to discern a difference between opening the throttle a few times in neutral with no discriminatory agenda and doing so in a manner which implies belief in the inherent superiority of one's own race. Gosh. Chief Inspector Jenkins must have quite some ears: a kind of universal absolute pitch for noises of hatred. No doubt Lotus will soon find themselves under investigation for making racist-sounding V8s.

It's comforting, too, to know that the blurring of the line between race and Islam religion continues apace. Having failed, for the moment, to get much traction for the laughable Religious Hatred Bill, which attempted to codify Islam religion in the same terms as race, which is to say a condition into which one is born and over which one has no control and no option to change (which one might, in fairness, think describes tyrannical Islam tolerably well; nonetheless in theory at least religions are elective institutions, unlike race), it seems Plan B has been adopted, which is to treat Muslims religious people as though they were of a race anyway.

Such is the nature of the farcical routine of self-abasement and moral cowardice in which we, as a country and a civilisation, are presently engaged.

Yet more simulacra of ecstatic fury and crocodile tears

Another day, another effigy-burning.

And, naturally, it displays a wilful, almost autistic urge on the part of Muslims to misinterpret - or perhaps, more accurately, credulously to allow to have misinterpreted for them by clerics - anything said about them, their holy text, or their prophet. Are we really to believe that they are all so universally stupid as to consider that when Pope Benedict XVI quoted Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, in dialogue with "an educated Persian" on the subject of the rationality of religion and its compatibility with the Greek spirit of philosophical inquiry and who considered the early (pre-Mohammedan) Koran's injunction that "there is no compulsion in religion" incompatible with the Prophet's later teaching concerning the spreading of the faith by the sword (which cannot be said to be any tremendous theological insight, frankly), as saying, "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached," they all thought it was the Pope saying these things directly and that he subscribed to such notions?

Presumably not. Unthinking subscription to mediæval cults doesn't necessarily presuppose a total lack of higher brain functions. Whether or not any of them had individually happened across those words, they had nonetheless been written down for some 600 years, which is much older than even the most deluded, sub-Brown Catholic-conspiracy theorist nutbox can possibly believe that the Pope is. So, assuming we can take it as read that the billion "alienated" Muslims do not, in fact, believe that the Pope was using his own words to describe his own opinions, what are we to make of their reaction?

Another opportunity to kick up some fuss, presumably. Another opportunity to prance around like magnificent poufs waving signs urging severe physical punishment on those who dare to take a different viewpoint. ("Behead those who mock Islam" makes, if you ask me, a pretty efficient mockery of "the religion of peace" all on its own: does that mean the chap waving it around should be beheaded too?) Another chance to drive for more lily-livered appeasment from the terrified, morally uncertain Christian/secular West. Another little tap on the Sharia nail in the coffin of freedom. It doesn't hurt that it's the Pope bearing the brunt of the ill-considered opprobrium this time, either.

The price of liberty

Five years ago today I was approaching the end of a summer of no little indolence. I'd stayed on in my hall of residence over the summer rather than return to the clam and filth of London in July and August (consider, if you will, the impossible conditions prevalent here recently) and apart from having made half-hearted attempts to find employment (item: working in newly-opened bar - completed training weekend (! - surely "training half-hour"?) then blew it off on account of the deliberately hideous uniform; item: working in bars and restaurants around the Open golf tournament - blew it off on account of 5am reveille; item: did a few days' jobbing work in and around my hall - blew it off on account of it being severely infra dig and on account of my rapidly mounting distaste for the disastrous effect of the summer heat on my stout and deeply, wildly unattractive lady boss) had for the most part stayed up late, slept late, made the occasional trip to the supermarket to stock my newly-acquired fridge and more-or-less single-handedly kept the local Deals-on-Wheels™ skunk supplier in business while attempting to write a film and engaging in a correspondence seduction of its putative star, who was at the time exposing much of her extremely becoming form to the Los Angeles sun.

I don't mention any of this in order to contrast it with any seriousness of my response to, or any fundamental shift in my attitude inspired by, the attacks of September 11th 2001. I'm merely setting the scene. (The film was made, by the way, some 14 months later, by which time I had been fortunate enough to experience its star in all her fearsome glory (although I must admit to having exerted very little influence on the final approach, as it were); we're still friends, though not so much with the nudity these days.) There I was, then, only just dressed on that Tuesday afternoon (it being barely later than 2pm BST; I had, of course, been up until six or so that morning smoking furiously and writing slowly) - when thundering down the corridor came the colossal form of one of the few other people in my hall at the time. We were mostly on the same corridor (for the ease of the cleaning staff) and so he was simply banging on doors, yelling, in what even for a flamboyant, 20-stone, homosexual Swiss was a shockingly loud manner, that we should all "come and look at the fucking TV!" Which we did.

There's nothing that can at this point be said that hasn't been said already by writers far more talented than I. I was disbelieving (although, being still slightly fugued from the previous night, slow to grasp the sheer enormity of the spectacle unfolding in New York and its far-reaching implications which we are, of course, still feeling today and will continue so to do for some considerable time yet); we watched, smoking heavily, the occasional "Christ" or "Fuck's sake" punctuating the equally stunned though rather more eloquent commentary on the TV. Then I went and made an entirely fatuous post to a newsgroup I read, which remains to this day available in Google's archive, and was deservedly utterly ignored, receiving not one reply while the group experienced its busiest day in history.

The reaction of others in the group, though, should have been an indication of what was to come. Barely had the second tower fallen but the arguments that would come to dominate the next five years had already been soundly thrashed out, rehearsed and turned any number of different ways. People had fallen into clichéd roles: the arrogant rednecks (one actually invoked the "you'd all be speaking German" canard), the lily-livered appeasers, the supercilious Europeans ... friendships and emnities that survive to this day were formed in the heat of the immediate aftermath of that surreal New York morning.

Afterwards: blah. The world changed: duh. Clash of civilisations, oil grab, fuelling radicalism, blah blah blah Usenetconspiracytheorycakes. I'm not particularly comfortable with the War on Turr, but I know a mediæval theocracy of repression when it flies a plane into a building; I know that I prefer an open society to a closed one; I know that I prefer women in skimpy clothes to women in bin-bags - and not just becaude I'm a perv but because it means they are free to dress like that if they wish; I know that I like my science up-to-date and, you know, scientific; and for all that I can't draw to save my life I know that I like being able to draw whatever I like, however badly I do it. I know that all these things are in danger at the moment, from within and without. I also know that:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

So said no less a pacifist utilitarian than J.S. Mill, who knew from Spinoza that peace is not merely the absence of war, "it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice." We will not have peace merely by stopping fighting; neither will we have security.

Classic Italian corruption.

As I type, the Italian Grand Prix is in full swing at Monza. Michael Schumacher, in a Ferrari, is trailing Renault driver Fernando Alonso by 12 points in the Drivers' Championship, with every chance of overhauling him if the disparity between the two cars' relative performance remains at present levels. Yesterday, Schumacher qualified second on the grid for the race; Alonso fifth. Qualifying takes place in a time-limited session, but as long as a driver has crossed the line to start a new lap within that time, he may complete the lap and have the time stand even if the session time has meanwhile run out. A flat-out lap at Monza, crossing the line at full speed with tyres at operating temperature, takes roughly 1m 22s, so when Alonso emerged from the pits at 50mph on cold tyres with 1m 30s remaining in the qualifying session, he wasn't going to have to hang around if he was going to cross the line to start his hot lap before the time ran out. So it proved: Alonso posted his fastest sector times of any lap in the 2nd and 3rd sectors of this particular out lap, and in the end he crossed the line to start the clock on his hot lap with barely 2 seconds remaining in the qualifying session. Unfortunately for him, it so happened that some 3- or 400 yards behind him for the duration of his out lap was the second Ferrari driver, Felipe Massa. The Ferrari F1 team is an extremely efficient organisation dedicated to securing as many points as possible, and is certainly not above a spot of bureaucratic wrangling, particularly at its home circuit. A complaint was lodged, breathtaking in its gall and utterly fatuous in its conception, that Alonso has blocked or impeded Massa while on his out lap and that Massa had consequently lost "up to 0.3s". The facts that Massa was never remotely close enough to have been impeded by Alonso and that Alonso was clearly driving absolutely flat-out in order to cross the line in time, which he barely managed to do, clearly weren't going to prevent Ferrari from shamelessly appealing to the (Italian) circuit authorities, who obligingly stripped Alonso of his three fasted qualifying times (an appropriately arbitrary punishment, never before imposed for qualifying infractions real or imagined as far as I can remember), which demoted him to tenth on the grid.

If the Championship ends up being decided in Schumacher's favour by fewer then three or four points, it's a pretty good bet that this piece of partisan manœuvering will have decided the outcome. Still, it won't be the first time Schumacher has won a title in thoroughly questionable circumstances, and I doubt he'll let such sporting considerations trouble him in the slightest.

Cameron delenda est?

I rather hope that this is simply an artless sop to the kind of ill-informed person who thinks No Logo was a book that had anything valuable to say, rather than an indication of the kind of ignorance with which we can expect to be goverened should he win.

Watching things die, from an uncomfortable proximity

Back in April, I looked forward with slight trepidation to the release of the new Tool album. In May, I'd heard it but wasn't ready to offer an opinion.

As I suggest in those posts, there was a time when this admission would have been utterly earth-shaking: but I haven't listened to 10,000 Days voluntarily (that is to say, of my own volition; I don't mean that I've been tied down and forced to listen to it, simply that there have been times when someone else has put it on and I've listened to it) since, I would think, the middle of June.

Part of the reason for this, to be sure, has to do with the experience of seeing them live at the Hammersmith Apollo on the 13th and 14th of June. The album had only been out a week, which some would consider a problem, especially for music as dense as Tool's - but then, Lateralus had barely been out for three weeks when I saw them in 2001, and that was a thoroughly unforgettable experience. No, the problem with the gigs was threefold.

1: Length (a common enough complaint, hur hur). Previously, when I have seen Tool, they have been supported by instantly forgettable (at best) bands seemingly selected (by Justin Chancellor, on the British dates, apparently) for the easy contrast they provide between their own stunning mediocrity (or worse) and Tool's overpowering genius. This, more than anything, has left me with a great antipathy for support bands, since the time they spend pissing about in front of an unreceptive crowd and then having their gear removed eats heavily into the time the band everyone's actually come to see can spend on stage before contravening the venue's no doubt fatuous curfew. Hence, no doubt, the rise in popularity of "An Evening With..." shows in the last few years, now a staple of, for example, Dream Theater's tours, where they take full advantage of the extra time allowed them by not having a support band and play for at least two-and-a-half hours. So I was pleased to learn that there would not be a support band at these Tool shows. At last, I though to myself, I'll get to see Tool play a decently full setlist.

More fool me. On the way into the venue (of which more, vitriolically, later), we were informed by notice that Tool would take to the stage at 8 and be off by 10. I knew from reading reports of previous shows from this tour that this would include a break, during which the members of Tool would congregate near Danny's drum riser and sit down for a rest, which depending on your point of view is either a touching moment of congregation with the fans or a staggeringly self-regarding opportunity to be cheered at wildly for sitting down. As it turned out, they took to the stage at closer to 8.20, had their break and were gone by 10.10: a bog-standard hour and forty minutes - not exactly pushing the boat out for fans in a city where they've played 6 times in 14 years before these dates and who always give them a raturous reception. It's easy to conclude that they were going through the motions, but the alternative reflects scarcely any better on Tool: that they were careful to get off the stage in good time because of the absurd conditions of entry they had imposed on their fans.

2: Absurd conditions of entry. As someone who had finally, after a good decade of concerted sybarism (including a heavily narcotic five years at university), recently acquired a working habit, I came straight to the first night from work, complete with bag. I, along with, needless to say, a good 35 or 40% of the crowd who were, for various reasons, in exactly the same position, was stunned to discover that, rather than simply having our bags searched (for recording equipment, one assumes), as is quite normal and widely accepted, we would be required to hand them in at the cloakroom. Initially I was mainly concerned that, this action being compulsory, we wouldn't be charged for the use of the cloakroom, and indeed we weren't, but after the show I queued for at least an hour to reclaim my bag. I had also assumed, when depositing my bag before the show, that this was a venue-enforced policy.

More fool me. The venue's security staff were at great pains to make sure we all knew that this was entirely Tool's policy (presumably to stave off the inevitable riot that would otherwise have kicked off). This struck me, I have to say, as completely pathetic, head-up-your-ass, self-important precious rockstar bullshit. Clearly Tool were trying to prevent the gig being recorded, but I have to say to them, the gig will always be recorded. People will smuggle in equipment up their asses if they have to. Fucking get over it. If you think it's OK to alienate and seriously inconvenience a bunch of fans (I missed the last train home as a result of queueing for my bag for nearly as long as Tool played in the first place and had to walk the last two miles home, getting in at 2am for a 7.30 start) just on the off-chance that it might stop one or two of the ten people who inevitably will have recorded the gig, then you have definitively become that egomaniac rockstar caricature that you probably found so pathetic in your early days.

3: Setlist. For the first time I was able to see both nights Tool played in London. In 2002 (the last time they toured the UK) I had exam commitments and struggled to make it to one show; in 2001 I saw them in Manchester and missed both London shows; they were sold out in 1997 (one show) and I wasn't aware they were playing in 1994 (one show: those are the six shows they played in London between 1992 and 2006). In 2001 and 2002, they mixed up the setlists of the two London shows to great effect, including a world premiere of The Patient for the second night of the 2001 shows and rare performances of H, Flood and 4° in 2002. So I had high hopes for the second night after a first night setlist almost dreary in its predictability.

More fool me. The songs played were exactly the same, and the only way the order was different on the second night was that the opening song was pushed back to the middle of the first set. It threw Maynard's first night question, "How many of you are coming tomorrow?" (half the crowd, at least, cheered), into sharp, ironic relief. What was the point of ascertaining that so many people were coming the second night only to give them exactly the same set? More egomania, I suspect.

A disillusioning experience all round, then. (Tool themselves were, it must be said, tight as toast (although that can hardly be surprising given the rigid nature of their setlist) - but nearly everything else about the shows was underwhelming to say the least.) But I also wonder if I'd not have been prepared to cut Tool a little more slack over the whole farrago if I'd been getting on better with 10,000 Days, an album with 11 tracks yet only 6 recognisable songs.

It starts off promisingly enough, Vicarious bearing Maynard's trademark pith as it discusses our current widespread addiction to others' suffering, whether sought (reality TV) or unsought (war, famine, disaster: "I need to watch things die, from a good safe distance" is a classic Tool lyric set, it must be said, to a flat-out classic piece of Tool instrumentation. (Not for nothing are Tool referred to as the thinking man's AC/DC, who have been making the same album for thirty years. Nothing wrong with that: find a style that works for you and make it work for you, is what I say.) The next track, Jambi, seems rather unfocused, save another storming pile of riffage - and that's the end of the heavy section of this album. Again, nothing wrong with that per se - there are plenty of non-heavy songs I like - but here's where the matrimonial beatification begins.

Maynard has already written a couple of great songs about, or for, his mother, Judith Marie Keenan: A Perfect Circle's Judith, which took her to task for her continued religious faith in the light of her devastating stroke ("Fuck your God, your Lord, your Christ. He did this: took all you had and left you this way - still you pray, never stray, never taste of the fruit, never thought to question why. It's not like you killed someone, not like you drove a hateful spear into his side. You praise the one who left you broken down and paralysed.") and Tool's jimmy, concerning his own reaction to the stroke in his childhood ("What was it like to see the face of your own stability suddenly look away, leaving you with the dead and hopeless?"). Nonetheless, her recent death some 27 years (or 10,000 days, geddit?) after her stroke has apparently caused him to look afresh at this personal tragedy, and he appears to have concluded, in the diptych Wings for Marie and 10,000 Days (Wings Part II), that his mother pretty much ought to be canonised, which is fair enough I suppose - but the joke is the more-or-less direct comparison he makes between her and Mary of Nazareth. Which, of course, casts him as Jesus.

Easy enough, I suppose, after a decade or more of being cast in that role by alarmingly obsessive fans - but surely less than we expected from someone who has so consistently confounded our expectations. The Pot certainly does that, opening with Maynard a capella, somewhere between chest and head voices. Unfortunately, the second half of the album descends into segue hell, with just two songs in the last six tracks, one of which is so wilfully "difficult" that it barely counts as a song at all. And it's this which is ultimately the problem, not Maynard's faux-Messianism or Adam's ill-advised Talkbox excursions. Their masterpiece, Ænima, may have had 6 segues in 15 tracks, but at least two of those also function as songs, and most if not all were anyway vital to the theme and intellectual coherence of the album. 10,000 Days' segues appear to be pretty much random, and as such are symptomatic of a wider laziness to which their perfunctory set and unchanging setlist also point. Sad to say, here seems to be a band that is now content to appear to be pushing the envelope, while in fact barely troubling themselves to write a whole album.

As long as they destroy the Labour Party too, I don't care any more

What is there fresh to say about the Blair/Brown farrago? Part of me wants to unleash reams of disgust at the childish antics of the holders of two of the highest offices in the land - but part of knows I'll be repeating myself and about a thousand other people. And part of me, of course, simply can't be bothered.

The centre: where conviction goes to die

Yesterday, I allowed the consideration that my comment at the end of this post was "shockingly naive" (by which, of course, I meant naïve). Back in April, while admitting that Cameron's leadership of the Conservative Party had not been everything for which I had hoped, I suggested, essentially, that Cameron was too well steeped in the liberal tradition and had too great a respect for the traditions of his country, as well as his party, to go too far (i.e., to go much further) along that path with which he had been ostentatiously toying.

A grave misjudgment of the man, it seems.

Way back when, I said (though I was by no means the first) that Blair's leadership was an exercise in following and making it look like leadership. His obsession with focus groups, dedicated to finding out what people want rather than demonstrating an ounce of conviction (at least in domestic policy: no-one could argue he has not shown conviction in the geopolitical theatre, for which I applaud him), made him, essentially, into the man that says, "There go my people. I must find out where they're going so I can lead them." Cameron, in the spirit of his rather fatuous new slogan, "Change to win ... win for Britain", appears to have swallowed unthinkingly the same canard. (Mixing my metaphors there, sorry.) Cameron believes that people are unshaking in their belief in the inherent virtue of public services, and so the only way to get the Tories back into power is to embrace that whole corrupt statist edifice wholeheartedly, abandoning ideological opposition to it as the mere baggage of a bygone era when this country actually managed to create a dash or two of wealth.

Even assuming he is right (and let's not forget that it's not Conservative policies to which people object: it's the fact that they are Conservative policies), that by no means indicates that in order to win elections Cameron shouldn't challenge this particular piece of staggering collectivist complacency. He has done the hard work of making the Tory leader trustworthy again: now, surely, he must use that trust to tell people the truth about the public sector. The only reason people are so convinced that public services are inherently good is that they have been so relentlessly conditioned to look to only one place for so many of the things they need: the state. They have no experience, even during that brief period when the inexorable expansion of the state was, if not actually reversed, at least significantly reduced, of living in a country where the state doesn't perform a great many of the functions of day-to-day life, so they have no experience of how it might be possible to do them better and cheaper without the state taking its cut. The state, like any other organism, is primarily self-serving. It must ensure its own survival first. In the case of the state, part of that task is accomplished by making itself seem indispensible when in reality it is entirely superfluous.

Fame at last

Turns out I have had at least one or two readers in the past. Gosh.

A pity, though, that Gareth chose the post he did, or at least to quote that part of the post which he did. My style was apparently somewhere near its zenith of insufferable self-regard that day. Similarly, the folks at Backing Blair chose a post that ends with a comment that now looks shockingly naive. Still, these things are sent to try us. It's almost enough to make me start blogging regularly again.

What to make, then, of the last couple of months? I could here try to make an excuse stick about the silly season, but it's been anything but silly. I just haven't been bothered. Events generally overtook my ability to write about them, so that by the time I'd conceived and written a stinging post about something, it would already have been rendered obsolete by some further outrage. I speak, of course, of the conflict in the Lebanon and the astonishing worldwide reaction to it, which placed a rogue terrorist faction of an unpopular and unmandated political party funded and directed by a third party state on the same moral footing as - not to say a higher moral footing than - a nation state and its professional army.

Probably the real reason I've not updated in a while is that all my rhetorical energy has been absorbed in a long running email debate with a friend of mine, covering many topics (we have five threads running concurrently, I think, and the longest mail I've sent him was 70K of plain text), this one not the least of them. Therein, I argued that the obsession with "proportionality" that emerged during the conflict, aside from belying a confusion between "proportional" and "proportionate", reduces warfare to an accountancy of the dead and casts Israel as the villains for not letting their civilians get killed enough while overlooking the genuine war-crimes committed by Hezbollah by placing military assets in civilian areas. And so on.

The real story of that war, at least in the context of what I suppose I must call the blogosphere, was the steady stream of what Thaddeus Tremayne over at Samizdata, in a rather fabulous neologism, referred to as fauxtographs. (Perhaps it's nothing of the kind and I have just never come across it before, but heigh-ho.) Numerous stories leaked out of that region concerning the increasingly absurdly stage-managed nature of more-or-less all journalism going on there, from the hilariously amateurish doctoring of Reuters' photographs of bomb-damaged Beirut, to the chap with the green helmet creating tableaux of the dead; from the photogenic bomb victim who died cap in hand yet later that day was photographed clearing rubble, to the Lebanese woman who had two homes bombed inside three weeks yet hadn't even managed to change her clothes, all of which is not to mention the alarmingly brazen manner in which various national media outlets attempted to perpetrate their view of events. The difference, for example, between a BBC and an independent news report concerning bomb damage in the same town was staggering. One wonders how the BBC reconciles its mission for impartial reporting with its habit of advertising its vacant positions in the Guardian only, but there it is.

Some links, then.

Telegraph's Hannan borrows heavily from Mark Steyn.

Pictures worth a thousand lives.

Media Missiles.

No, this isn't a geopolitical ploy by Iran at all.... (login may be required: www.bugmenot.com)

Adnan Hajj.

Other photographic controversies.