The Loneliest Jukebox

Did the earth move for you?

2012-01-11T11:13:00.001Z

Opponents of the high speed rail-link are already speculating about the safety consequences of new underground tunnels. They could have a point. Look closely at the "Phase 2" map above, copied from last night's Evening Standard. The East Midlands have already shifted to somewhere north-north west of Birmingham, and work on the new train line has not even commenced yet.

New anthology chapter alert!

2012-01-02T21:02:00.000Z

Why not make it even more of a happy new year, or something, with London After the Recession: A Fictitious Capital? (edited by Gavin Poynter and Iain MacRury, both at University of East London, UK)

"This book examines the impact of the recession and discusses London’s future trajectory as an entrepreneurial city and capital of the United Kingdom. While recognising the enduring capacity of London to ‘reinvent’ itself, contributors evaluate different dimensions of the city’s current and future development through analyses derived from sociological, economic, cultural and urban studies perspectives." May 2012 c. 280 pages Hardback ISBN 978-1-4094-3102-2 c. £60.00; ebook 978-1-4094-3103-9 (see p.18 of the Ashgate catalogue).

Any overlap between my chapter and Stewart Home's contribution to Art, Money, Parties is entirely coincidental.

Fender defender

2011-12-22T07:46:00.000Z

In the Times Higher Ed this week, I review Nature, Class, and New Deal Literature: The Country Poor in the Great Depression by Stephen Fender.

Anthologise this too!

2011-10-15T14:43:00.000+01:00

When not writing about sustainability and sport, it's Eli Roth and torture porn* for me.

*The full reference is Graham Barnfield, 'A Hostel Environment: Sanitised Terror and the "Torture Porn" Cycle', in Philip Hammond (ed.), Screens of Terror: Representations of War and Terrorism in Film and Television since 9/11 (Bury St. Edmunds: Abramis, 2011, pp.133-148).

Anthologise this!

2011-09-28T10:35:00.000+01:00

Someone did:

My bit is Chapter 27: "2016, 2022, 2030, Go! Sustainability and Arabian Gulf Sporting Megaprojects",
pp. 269-276 of Jill Savery and Keith Gilbert (eds.) Sustainability and Sport (Common Ground Publishing).

Post-Fordism

2011-09-15T12:51:00.000+01:00

Nemesis. Darth Bricktop. Clifford Harding. A good bloke. Not me - Alan Ford. I've recently seen my own contribution to The Real Outlaws DVD (2007), in which I'm wearing a polo shirt under a 'smart casual' shirt, why god only knows. Needless to say, Ford's OTT presenting makes him the real star of the show.

From the Vaults

2011-09-11T09:42:00.000+01:00

From back in the day, here's me getting my retaliation in early on the whole ASBO/chavs issue. Should have done a book about it really.

Pot, Kettle, Black

2011-09-07T09:08:00.000+01:00

Phil turns ugly? How can they tell?

Phone-Hacking: My two cents

2011-07-09T08:28:00.000+01:00

Here's me spouting off in the Christian Science Monitor. This is Rebakah Brooks' take on the matter. We've almost seen the last of the New of the World, but not last of this issue.

Crosland's Missing Link

2011-07-03T12:11:00.000+01:00

Here's something that caught my eye:
Society's decisions impinge heavily on people's private lives as well as on their social and economic welfare; and now they impinge, in my view, in too restrictive and puritanical a manner. I should like to see action taken both to widen opportunities for enjoyment and relaxation, and to diminish existing restrictions on personal freedom .... This becomes manifest when we turn to the more serious question of socially-imposed restrictions on the individual's private life and liberty ... most of these are intolerable, and should be highly offensive to socialists, in whose blood there should always run a trace of the anarchist and the libertarian, and not too much of the prig and the prude.*
The extract is from Anthony Crosland*; it struck me as incongruous in a book called New Labour's Old Roots: Revisionist Thinkers in Labour's History 1930-1997. If Crosland didn't really 'get it' on the question of socialism, New Labour also missed the memo on personal freedom.

*'Liberty and Gaiety in Private Life: the Need for a Reaction Against the Fabian Tradition' (from 'The Meaning of Socialism' in The Future of Socialism (Cape, 1956) reprinted in Diamond, p93.

I've had a bellyfull...

2011-06-05T21:14:00.000+01:00

A guest post by me on the Walker Fox blog. Neil Davenport reminds me that Half Man Half Biscuit have a better critique though.

Misread by Redhead

2011-05-26T15:43:00.001+01:00

In younger, slimmer days I was frequently mistaken for an undercover cop. Too ‘smart casual’ to be a 1980s leftie, I guess – and yet still badly dressed. Almost two decades later, I was mistaken for a moral entrepreneur. (Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.) Oddly, something similar happens to me in a new book by Prof. Steve Redhead (admittedly, the chapter in question first appeared as a journal article in 2007, which I missed at the time).

In case you missed it, Redhead argues:

The Football Factory film was released to a highly contrived media moral panic in May 2004, shortly before the Euro 2004 football championship in Portugal. One newspaper critic (9) noted that the film had been ‘slammed in some circles as a fetid miasma of immorality. An academic commentator (10) saw the original novel as ‘centring on low life and lowlifes…social realism without the socialism’. The film was widely criticised, though enthusiastically received at the DVD stores, precisely because commentators claimed it used ‘real’ football hooligans as actors and advisers and evoked a ‘realistic’ atmosphere alongside an attitude that glorified the stylised football casual violence. The question of the ‘real’ in The Football Factory, however, is a much more complicated issue and relates directly to previous attempts at promoting social realism in British cinema and literature in the late 1950s and early 1960s and the reworking of such representations in the era of postmodernism in the 1980s and 1990s.

As for me, I am that academic commentator, dear reader, a footnote in his story (footnote 10 to be precise). I was also a bit surprised to see that, within a sentence of Redhead identifying ‘a highly contrived media moral panic’ in 2004, he cites me as part of the scare story. It takes a wilfully perverse reading of my second article on The Football Factory (excluding pseudonymous stuff) to see me as an early adopter of that panic (read it for yourself).

My review of the film was framed by my attack on both the panic – articulated by Richard Williams at the Guardian – and on the incorporation of media effects theory into the sports pages. In one paragraph I revisit my short, admittedly grumpy review of the novel in 1996. How this leads to my implied advocacy of a minor moral panic in 2004 is a mystery to me. But as Prof. Redhead says:

The media moral panic surrounding The Football Factory has been shown to be incorporated into the advertising and marketing of the film in a postmodern loop, especially on DVD, making the notion of the ‘real’ much more blurred. (p.27)

So blurred, it seems, that my lukewarm review of a movie has made me into Mary Whitehouse.

Note: There is, for now at least, a online version of this essay in PDF here. Page numbering in this blog posting is taken from this version.

Exceeding 140 characters

2011-04-02T00:18:00.000+01:00

I had a brief Twitter exchange with my old friends at Media Lens today.
The background is that Guardian editor Alan Rushbridger has locked his Twitter feed so he can't get incoming tweets from Media Lens. I suspect locking the feed means they can't read his tweets either.

I tweeted that this hardly constitutes an infringement of democratic rights and got three replies (and maybe a Freudian slip):

Media Lens @GrahamBarnfield Graham, forget freedom of speech - do you believe in the freedom to read what people write and to send them messages?
[Er, yes. Why forget free speech?]

Media Lens @GrahamBarnfield We meant 'leaving free speech aside'. If u agree on both, it makes +no+ sense to suggest AR had good reasons for banning us?
[Here I said it was basically up to AR. But it is worth saying he didn't ban Media Lens, or even its Twitter feed; he just stopped getting their incoming tweets and hosting them in his timeline.]
Media Lens @GrahamBarnfield True (by definition), but irrelevant to what we're discussing.

Just to recap: do I believe in the freedom to read what people write and to send them messages? Yes. That said, the first one is qualified slightly, in that I don't think such freedom extends automatically to people's private correspondence. (Maybe Rushbridger is now tweeting personal stuff.) The second one is that sending messages doesn't create any obligation for people to read or host them. For instance, Media Lens' page compiling reviews of Newspeak does not link to my mixed/negative review of the book. Free speech does not oblige them to add this link.

While such colleagues as Terri Senft write about this in more depth, it's also clear that the internet is used in ways that continue to blur the boundaries between private and public. For instance, someone compiling my recent EBay purchases or listing my Facebook friends would be creepy, but it would have been me who put the information there to begin with. Getting them shut down would breach freedom of speech, but ignoring them wouldn't.

All in the timing

2011-02-21T17:46:00.000Z

Knowledge is power, according to this online graphic. Yet just this morning, here's me reading how about it comes from paying a bunch of mercenaries.

Not again

2011-02-20T15:27:00.000Z

Temporarily boring:
Links to one of my old blog posts from 23 February 2006 have just appeared online as 'evidence' of, er, something or other. My post, from almost five years ago to the day, considered whether the author of the Temporary Hoarding blog had a bad memory or was just making stuff up in response to my blog. By reading other autobiographical material on his blog and elsewhere, it became clear that he was claiming to have been in two places at once, among other things. (Bear with me on this, reader.) Soon a reply to me appeared, now dated "4/8 March" (2006); the date indicates that two versions of the post existed, with some clean-up done on the first entry in the intervening days before the 8 March version.

Much silliness survives in the new edit, casting doubt on its reliability. For instance, there's an alleged screening of Gone with the Wind in Sheffield which I am supposed to have organised but which DID NOT HAPPEN. Full stop. It's a lie or a hallucination. Anyone who can prove I staged this event and that my memory is playing up or that I am lying wins a cash prize.

Less than 127 hours later

2011-01-07T14:08:00.000Z

After Wednesday's press screening, my review of Danny Boyle's 127 Hours is up on Spiked. I have since filed Aron Ralston's Between a Rock and a Hard Place with my other self-help books.

Oh no! Looks like I'm being Neurotic again

2011-01-02T08:17:00.000Z

Long-term readers of this (semi-retired) blog will know where its title comes from. It is therefore pleasing to see Steve Drewett's autoblogography You're Always Alone with a Neurotic! is now available to download.

Let's kick out the Tories!

Doh-a!

2010-12-03T12:45:00.000Z

Regular readers will know that this blog has gone a bit quiet lately, usurped by Twitter. Let me draw your attention to my new Spiked article about Qatar 2022, which ought to get me struck off a few people's Xmas card lists this year.

Inanimate Object

2010-11-09T08:33:00.000Z

As you may have noticed, this blog has slowed down to less than a crawl. While there will be updates from time to time, the inane banter and self-promotion continues in full swing at my Twitter feed. See you there.

They Spat on My Fest

2010-09-01T10:35:00.000+01:00

My thoughts on not seeing A Serbian Film at FrightFest 2010. Not a big revelation to say I won't be adding a link where readers can buy the DVD right now...

Staying Awake vs. Holding a Wake

2010-07-30T04:31:00.000+01:00

'Levels of Proofreading
... Intermediate II: Duties of Beginner and Intermediate I plus typeface identification and type specifications' (Laura Killen Anderson, Handbook for Proofreading, Lincolnwood, Ill.: NTC Business Books, p.4).

Hopefully any colleges teaching proofreading at this exhibition were not involved in teaching the exhibitor's publicity department.

Summer snippets

2010-07-13T12:01:00.000+01:00

Over in the August issue of that august journal Critique, you will find my book review of The New Civilisation?: Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union 1929-1941 by Paul Flewers. With my new publications appearing at such a slow rate these days, at least no-one can accuse me of being a Stakhanovite.

*Reference:
Book Reviews

Paul Flewers: The New Civilisation?: Understanding Stalin’s Soviet Union 1929 1941

London, Francis Boutle Publishers, 2008

ISBN: 978-1-90342-740-8 (paperback)

Critique

Vol. 38, No. 3, August 2010, pp. 519-527

ISSN 0301-7605 (print)/ISSN 1748-8605 (online)

Tesco Time Travel

2010-05-26T09:20:00.000+01:00

Looking up land banking in Tescopoly: How One Shop Came Out on Top and Why It Matters, by Andrew Simms (pp.120-127), I was astonished to discover the full extent of the supermarket's activity:
'Sometimes it can achieve results to equal Doctor Who's small-on-the-outside but big-on-the-inside spacecraft, the Tardis. For example, how did Tesco manage to get a 60,000-sq. ft store on to a site in Manchester for which Morrisons, until it was outbid, only planned a store of 35,000 sq. ft? The answer shows Tesco's cunning in getting around any seeming obstacle to growth.'

WTF? Tesco invented a time machine?!

Not exactly:
'It simply built the store on stilts.' (p.126).
Bollocks on stilts, more like.

Wolf's bane

2010-04-17T08:48:00.001+01:00

TV Choice is one of Britain's bestselling publications, yet none of this revenue seems to go on proper subeditors. I don't mean a proofer to check the spelling and punctuation, which is generally okay. It's someone to think about the context the words appear in. Many a time I read a plot summary of a film which uses the names of the actor and the character interchangeably. Or maybe Ghost Rider really is about Nicolas Cage turning into a demonic biker.

Things reached new levels of silliness with last week's competition:

You read it right: to celebrate the publication of Changeling: Blood Wolf the magazine is giving away a 'five-star holiday for two to the beautiful island of Cyprus'. Aside from whether the prose scans, this is a remarkably specific form of celebration. Sadly it not not make it onto my calendar either, suggesting the tenuous hold of Changeling: Blood Wolf day on the nation's collective heart. How many cards did you get?

Not with a bang...

2010-04-09T11:40:00.000+01:00

With a paragraph in the Evening Standard, and a bit of monstering in The Sun, the predicted national crimewave of Summer 2005 grinds to a halt.

Time to view

2010-03-27T14:40:00.000Z

For UK viewers, Ozon's Time to Leave has finally made its way onto terrestrial TV. It was one of my hot tips on release; now see if you like it too. Er, at 2.45am BST on Sunday 28 March.

On the Register

2010-02-23T17:59:00.000Z

Attendance registers are a big issue in classroom management in contemporary higher education.
Here's Raymond Williams on how things used to be:
'I used to say, as an adult tutor, that I was in the only kind of education where the students voted with their feet; if the class wasn't right, they didn't come. I had forgotten the Cambridge lecture system, in which attendance is optional and where, in English for example, only half the students ever attend at all. But this seems to me increasingly a negative freedom: the right to stay away (in fact often ignorantly or fashionably exercised) is no real substitute for cooperative decision.'*
This has to be better than the current arrangements, in which formalities come first.

*'The Teaching Relationship: Both Sides of the Wall', in David Rubinstein & Colin Stoneman (eds.), Education for Democracy, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970. pp. 214-221.

A hard-knock life

2010-01-26T23:46:00.000Z

"I just can't see myself sunning on the beach, playing in the water, eating a barbecue, and enjoying a cocktail while [in Port-au-Prince] there are tens of thousands of dead people being piled up on the streets, with the survivors stunned and looking for food and water," one passenger wrote on the Cruise Critic internet forum.

"It was hard enough to sit and eat a picnic lunch at Labadee before the quake, knowing how many Haitians were starving," said another. "I can't imagine having to choke down a burger there now.''

Cruisers: IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU.

My revisions: must we burn Harris (1995)?

2010-01-17T11:48:00.000Z

A few days ago, the contributor copies of Richard Wright@100 beat the snow and arrived in the post (ISBN 9789727729395 - obrigada, Paula!). My chapter is called 'American Structure' and revolves around the literary apprenticeships of Wright and, to a much lesser extent, Ralph Ellison. More or less on the same day, I bumble across William Burrison's essay on 'Richard's Wright's Tricky Apprenticeship', which originally appeared in CLA Journal 29 (June 1986).* After the usual expletives and sweating it, I was pleased to discover no major sins of omission on my part. It does beg the question: at what point does the unreasonable expectation of total knowledge shade into being a rubbish researcher?

In related news, I was playing catch-up with Jonathan Harris recently. Harris' book on federal art** appeared as I was writing up my Ph.D. on a related topic. Panic ensued that it would force me to rewrite, but an appearance by Harris at my then university and a look at some of his other material, plus reading the book itself (!), convinced me I'd be fine. Up to a point, aspects of our arguments overlapped.

Cut forward by a decade, for Harris, or 15 years for me, in my sluggish efforts to stay on top of the literature, and Harris publishes the following description of his work:
'I think I pursued [my] scepticism over the value of art ... by deciding to research and write a Ph.D. about paintings and sculptures, those produced in the US during the 1930s, that remain in art derided history as some of the most awful ever produced anywhere.'

So far so good. Some of my wanderings took me to the same place.

'My attitude superintending this period of work, I now recognize, was very confused: ... I believed that questions of value or quality in art were simply irrelevant to me understanding why and how art was mobilized by Roosevelt's New Deal state. Particularly irrelevant were "modernist" art history judgements from the post-1945 period subsequently imposed on 1930s art.' (p.4)

Damn.

Subsequent commentary suggests that the author was in the process of revising his take on New Deal art (and more), not least because of the personal 'issues of identity' propelling him to revise his own subject-position as a writer: 'This period for me (1980-1986) was a heady time mixing theoretical Marxism and practical socialist politics, along with an engagement with a much more heterogeneous emergent intellectual discourse now called "cultural theory". (p.5) By 2005, things had clearly moved on.

Although he says it's not a confession, the 2005 book opens with the author setting things up along similar lines to Morrisey: has the world changed or has he changed? 'Probably both' is the answer, but where does this leave someone who is trying to work with his 1995 book in 2010?

*A version of the essay appears as Lawd Today: 'Richard's Wright's Tricky Apprenticeship' in pp.98-109 of Richard Wright: Critical Perspectives Past and Present.
**Federal Art and National Culture: The Politics of Identity in New Deal America (Cambridge Studies in American Visual Culture)

Cobbett over here

2010-01-02T00:43:00.000Z

Here's me in the THE, reconsidering William Cobbett's Rural Rides. Students of CC1500 Critical Approaches to Journalism will have heard all this already. Happy new year!

Antinomies of Futurology

2009-12-30T03:02:00.000Z

'Thanks to modern communications - email, MMS messaging and, in particular, Tweets - we were able to find out what the ordinary Iranian people were feeling without filters, restrictions or censorship. Truly amazing.' So says Richard Bacon, writing in Tuesday's Sun, in a 'personal view on how technology shaped the Noughties'.

Maybe. The pace of technological change is truly impressive these days. So how come the BBC still finds it impossible to pay my appearance fee for being a guest on his show in 2009?!!?

Wright here, right now

2009-12-28T22:12:00.000Z

Coming soon: The anthology Richard Wright at 100 (ISBN 9789727729395), edited by PAULA ELYSEU MESQUITA and published by Edições Colibri. I've got a chapter in it.

Name names

2009-12-19T00:07:00.002Z

Promotional guff for video release of Robert Young's Vampire Circus:
'This production set new standards in horror that many feel have yet to be equalled.'* Just who are those 'many'? The public should be told.

* The Video Collection 'Movie Greats' edition, 5014138031695

Park Hill Flats revisited

2009-12-09T07:32:00.004Z

Over at the (interesting-looking) Reconstruction 9.3, I have a short review of Owen Hatherley's punchy Militant Modernism. Enjoy!

The Buddhists of Suburbia

2009-11-12T00:10:00.005Z

Over at the Times Higher Education, I am reviewing the Media Lens book Newspeak. See how deftly I avoided the temptation to have a dig at the final chapter's call to replace journalism with meditation. Wisely, Brendan O'Neill started his review of Media Lens' Guardians of Power by saying he does not wish to be drawn into a lengthy correspondence after upsetting the authors; the same applies to me.

No omlettes for you

2009-10-24T08:58:00.005+01:00

Almost one year ago, I reported on the local authority's kill-joy approach to halloween. Yesterday it became clear that the policy was being extended to a ban - spearheaded by the authorities 'encouraging' shops to comply - on selling eggs and flour. 'Older teenagers' can also forget about wearing masks too.*

In just-about-connected news, the 22 October Evening Standard editorial has this to say:
The Dome's triumph
"Those who jeered at the Millennium Dome as a white elephant with no real function must now eat their words.
The O2 arena is now the most popular venue in the world. It's a lesson to cynics and naysayers everywhere."

Two points: the renaming and the repurposing are part of its present popularity (along with the closing of the other large Docklands venue which seemed to stage nothing but Disney on Ice shows). In contrast, part of the Dome's initial failure was down to its almost uniformly poor content, its war with the motor car, its excessive and highly publicised attendance targets, and the government's 1990s-style bid to unite the nation without resorting to war or a dead princess.

It's much easier to stick up for it now than confront the naysayers in 1999. The Evening Standard's defence of the Dome comes a decade too late.

*They'll just have to go to the local cinema instead. Or the dog track. Or Charlie Chan's nightclub. What's that you say? All closed? Then they will just have to wait for the 2012 'Olympic bounce' effect to get them decent facilities in the borough.

Pro-am gulf

2009-10-02T17:11:00.002+01:00

Over in the first issue of Proof, I have a short essay telling everyone to 'calm down, calm down' in the heated debate over objectivity and user-generated content. (Must the subconscious influence of my upcoming trip to Liverpool to celebrate someone's birthday.)

Reference: Graham Barnfield, 'Born Yesterday: By treating amateur journalism as a threat, the UGC controversy ignores history', Proof: Reading Journalism and Society, Volume 1 2010.

My Bacon role

2009-09-24T19:48:00.003+01:00

Over on BBC Radio 5 Live, I am a guest of tonight's Richard Bacon Show (Thursday 24 September). "Following reports that BBC News are looking for a 50 plus female newsreader, Richard asks [callers, me and the other guests] if it really matter[sic] who reads the news."

Text, tweet or call in your views, as they say.

Q and you (and me)

2009-08-31T13:09:00.004+01:00

Someone liked my piece on the Video Recordings Act 1984, calling it "an excellent and comprehensive article". In a thematically connected development - and despite this slipping through on his watch - my editorial colleague Michael Benton is not impressed with Tarantino and his new war movie. I've yet to see it - although Michael has seen it twice already - so I will be witholding comment for now. (Apparently US fans of Inglourious Basterds make two busloads of English footballers look like discerning cineastes. Interesting.)

For now, it's worth noting that a) the Italian pulp movie of (almost) the same name is pretty good; b) Death Proof was pretty rubbish and c) whereas Michael is uneasy with Tarantino's negative effects on audiences, at least one author - another colleague, Paul Gormley - has praised Tarantino for his "cinema of affect" where producing visceral movements was the name of the game. More on this later (when I've seen the film).

Straight to Video

2009-08-27T14:35:00.001+01:00

Over at Spiked, I'm taking a chainsaw to the Video Recordings Act 1984. Enjoy!

Bristol University

2009-08-15T07:48:00.004+01:00

... said it had introduced "disappointment training" for admissions officers to help them cope with distraught teenagers.

Perhaps this could be expanded beyond clearing, extending the training to cover students at all stages of the "student experience" across the entire HE sector. Heaven forbid anyone should spontaneously make sense of life's disappointments on their own.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=loneliejukebo-20&o=1&p=9&l=ez&f=ifr" scrolling="no" border="0" frameborder="0" style="border:none;">

Full disclosure from South Beach

2009-07-29T19:14:00.003+01:00

It's all starting to make sense now. According to David Buxton in From the Avengers to Miami Vice: Form and Ideology in the Television Series, 'Vice was the first series to make use of neurophysiological research on the viewing process: research carried out in the Communication Technology Laboratory of the University of Michigan has shown that (American) viewers tend to become impatient with overly elaborate stories or characterisations. In an attempt to maintain constant visual and sound excitement, the series uses aesthetic devices from the clip (aggressive camera movements, "unnatural" colour schemes and mood music) to fill out the story rather than resorting to "irrelevant" complications of plot and dialogue, both reduced to a minimum' (p.140).* With hindsight, it's clear the 2006 big-screen adaptation took these traits to a greater level of abstraction.

* Manchester University Press, 1990.

Ebay versus the Canon

2009-07-27T21:53:00.003+01:00

Some censorship is just stupid. Take Ugly Feelings by Sianne Ngai (2005/2007). Its blurb promises readers this: "Through readings of Herman Melville, Nella La*sen, Sigmund Freud, Alfred Hitchco*k, Gertrude Stein, Ralph Ellison, John Yau, and Bruce Andrews, among others, Ngai shows how art turns to ugly feelings as a site for interrogating its own suspended agency in the affirmative culture of a market society, where art is tolerated as essentially unthreatening." I haven't read the book; I definitely don't recognise La*sen and Hitchco*k, although I watched Stage Fright by one Alfred Hitchcock just this weekend.

The asterisks presumably come from Buy-It-Now Books, which seems to fret over either bizarre levels of perceived obscenity or worries about the crudity of spam filters and net nanny software. Either way, don't expect this store to relocate to Cockfosters anytime soon.

The grass in the Forest

2009-07-27T06:53:00.002+01:00

From the Daily Express (27 July 2009):

"Get £500 to spy on neighbours

Waltham Forest council last week launched the Conviction Reward Scheme, in which residents are offered rewards of up to £500 for reporting bad conduct by their neighbours to the authorities. Anyone who photographs dog fouling, littering, graffiti or fly tipping that leads to a prosecution will receive a cash reward. The scheme, which has been given the logo ‘See them, report them’, could be rolled out across the country. Waltham Forest council said the scheme was launched because residents wanted more to be done to tackle environmental crime."

According to the report, subject to the conviction, the value of the available bounty is to be staggered. Unlike most of the residents, who are getting used to this sort of thing from the council by now.

Eco towns and the uses of English

2009-07-26T12:38:00.002+01:00

A recent snippet in The Times caught my fancy, when coverage of eco-towns threw up the following:
"All four in the first wave will be expected to have a zero-carbon school by 2013, and parks, playgrounds and gardens will make up 40 per cent of the towns. At least 30 per cent of affordable housing will be required, with one member of each working couple expected to work in the town." Are we to take it that 70 per cent of the housing will be unaffordable? Probably.

Gordon Burn

2009-07-23T00:19:00.003+01:00

Sorry to read the obituaries of Gordon Burn. I was a latecomer to his ouvere, until laid up with an unmentionable injury, at which point a colleague introduced me to his The North of England Home Service. He - Burn - will be missed.

Michael Jackson and the Half-Baked Prints

2009-07-19T12:06:00.008+01:00

As a journalism tutor, I seldom want to see publications closing down. After all, they could well employ my graduates. Conversely, fewer newspapers and magazines might - and only might - deter vocationally minded applicants from signing up for a course.

I'm not unsympathetic to fears that magazines are becoming obselete: why be locked into a monthly production cycle when the internet helps you to keep up with changing events? Accordingly, I will forgive the August 2009 issue of Red for this: "If ever proof was needed that they don't make pop stars like they used to, then the frenzy over Michael Jackson's 50-show residency at London's O2 Arena is it ... If you're lucky enough to have tickets, get ready for a show that will go down in history" (p.109). Quite.

In all fairness to Red, it went to press before certain recent events. The same excuses for crappy content can't be used by wfm - note the trendy lower case - house rag of Waltham Forest council. Public funds are used to promote the local authority's interminable campaign against anti-social behaviour. The 6 July issue revels in an ASBO issued to Mr Minghua Wang, who will be prosecuted if found "having in his possession more than two DVDs or CDs in any public place in Greater London within the M25 perimeter" (p.4). No more boxed sets for you, sonny! Of course, the legal quibble that carrying three or more DVDs is NOT an offence can be overcome by attaching criminal penalties to same act. This is nothing to celebrate, and the council bringing The Men They Couldn't Hang - but presumably could still ASBO - to town does not excuse its ad-hoc lawmaking.

The good news is that this story appeared in the final issue of wfm. The bad news is that this miserable greentop tabloid will be replaced with "Waltham Forest News" from tomorrow - retro font, and probably more of the same authoritarian content.

Obituaries - celebs on slabs

2009-07-05T00:16:00.006+01:00

A week of obituaries - Michael Jackson, Karl Malden, Mollie Sugden. The latter prompted a few 'pussy' gags when I saw punk covers band Scam 69 at one of my local pubs the other night. One person who I could imagine running out of patience with permafrost new wave acts is Steven "Seething" Wells, who predeceased the celebrity trio. Most commentators noted the passing of a gonzo journalist who started out as part of the mid-80s fanzine craze; I have uncomfortable memories of arriving late for a gig involving him and Attila the Stockbroker at Loughborough University. I'd battled through snow to get there and due to the layout of the venue had to walk across the stage to get to my seat. "And what time do you call this then?" Wells asked, seething. The diatribe continued long after I was (un)settled.

In a not totally unrelated development to 1980s Thatcher-bashing, I'd noticed a growing role for the media industries in the demands made by demonstrations. The rhetorical question "Whadda we want? Media coverage! When do we wannit? Now" reared its head on a Gulf War demo in Brighton in 1991, and the sentiment has swelled ever since, even as the politics faded away. Twelve hours before this post was written - okay, so I have not quite optimised my use of Twitter yet - I was on a 'Save our Stow' protest (see picture) where the BBC and Sky News were thanked from the platform while local news photographers directed the demonstration into a suitably photogenic shape. It's not my call to knock the campaign's media strategy, but it is interesting that news coverage has come to be seen as increasingly important.

What would Swells make of all this?

Near Silence in the Library

2009-06-24T17:32:00.004+01:00

Not a lot of blogging of late. Some of my pithier updates now appear on Facebook or Twitter. Liking the sound of my own voice won't cut it anymore, not that it ever did. As Bourdieu reminds us:

Now, if there is one thing that our ‘modern’ or ‘postmodern’ philosophers have in common, beyond the conflicts that divide the, it is this excessive confidence in the power of language. It is the typical illusion of the lector, who can regard an academic commentary as a political act or the critique of texts as a feat of resistance, and experience revolutions in the order of words as radical revolutions in the order of things. (Pascalian Meditations, p.2)

Send her Victorian

2009-06-22T07:41:00.002+01:00

I was tickled to read a recent report in the Independent about the decline of British stag weekends in Riga, Latvia. "I imagined that Englishmen would all be real gentlemen, like Sherlock Holmes," said 21 year-old student Marika. Unfortunately, "they are little more than animals."

Which nationalities have most disappointed you by not resembling fictional characters in late Victorian fiction? Perhaps Chinese men are insufficiently like Fu Manchu? Romanians who differ from Count Dracula? Mark your entry "modern nationalities which differ from their fictitious counterparts" and send answers on a postcard to ...

Britain's got to get out more

2009-05-31T10:49:00.002+01:00

As a long-term critic of reality TV, I posted the above (miserablist?) line as a Facebook status update yesterday evening. It provoked a few responses from people who really should be going out on Saturday nights, including a school mate of Stavros Flatley.

Note how I didn't name this post "lancing the Boyle", or something similar. Roll on Big Brother.

Wrote to Spiked

2009-05-06T15:41:00.001+01:00

Letter published, did not win £10. Eagle-eyed viewers will spot a recycled blog entry in this bit of correspondence.

Oxymoron

2009-04-13T23:40:00.003+01:00

Thanks to the BBC and Gordon Brown for this one.
I am doing some real volunteering next weekend. Sponsor me here.

Secular atrium

2009-03-27T18:24:00.003Z

I don't think I'm airing too much dirty laundry in public to say that an email with the above subject line was circulated at my work today, inviting over 30 replies and touching on a number of the issues that correspond to the labels used for my current blog entry. (If this all sounds a bit cryptic, it's because of some of the emails propose a follow-up public event that should be more useful than (yet more) off-the-cuff blog remarks from me: that's what Twitter is for.)

That said, I was struck by the fact it was a long time before anyone even mentioned the suspension of one of our own by the University after he spoke to the media regarding the upcoming G20 protests. Priorities, people.

Sean to be wild?

2009-03-26T00:40:00.004Z

Find out in my review of Sean McCann, A Pinnacle of Feeling, in the 26 March Times Higher Ed.

It's not OK

2009-03-18T18:12:00.005Z

In the past 15 seasons of ER, one of the "money shot" moments was when a patient expired after unsuccessful surgery, not long after the line "crack open his chest" was uttered. A cast member then got to call the time of death.

ER drawing to a close does not mean the end of such scenes, however. Jumping into the ER-shaped void nice and early with such a final diagnosis is OK magazine, running a Jade Goody tribute special that assumed, at the time of writing, she would have pegged it by now. This seems like the logical consequence of having her mass media celebrity deathwatch of the last few months unfolding in real time.

At least wait until the body is cold, OK?

Hat-tip: Martyn

After watching Watchmen...

2009-03-13T12:20:00.002Z

... I reviewed it for Spiked here.

I doubt if I'll also be watching the DVD.

Let the Twittering Begin

2009-03-07T00:09:00.002Z

Yes, I know I've been neglecting this blog of late. Some of the more anecdotal, chatty and unnecessary one-liners continue to appear at Facebook - where I was a relatively early adopter - from time to time. I will now be (late) adopting Twitter to see if that gets me anywhere in life (see links). More later.

Been a bit busy

2009-01-21T12:51:00.003Z

There was a time in my life when I cut down on blogging because I was working in a "tolerant" authoritarian state. Not any more. These days I've cut back because I am so busy, working furiously and galavanting off now and then (albeit to do work). So happy new year everyone.

Meanwhile certain publications bearing my pawprint continue to appear, so if you need your regular gold of Graham's for breakfast, check out some of these links:

The Russian Royals

2008-12-09T17:11:00.004Z

For a disturbing 20 per cent of my working life I have been passing the Royals Business Park on the way to work, and for most of that time it has been empty. "That's obscene", as an ex-girlfriend used to say. Why is the Royals like an astronomy student at Imperial College? Because it's taking up space in London.

In keeping with this spirit, the news page on the Royals' website does not appear to have been updated since 2004, and Ken Livingstone is still mayor there.

In fairness to this glass tomb of regeneration, it has seen a bit of activity in the last few months. Last night the Spooks season finale aired, and I finally got to see what the Royals Business Park has been used for. The Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB) houses its UK death squad there.

Another mystery solved then.

When junk food + social science = junk social science

2008-12-05T17:12:00.006Z

Neighbours. Everybody needs good neighbours. Despite the geographical proximity, union-busting Epping Forest College is NOT a good neighbour.

Across the way, the war on fried chicken continues. No casualty figures yet, but the latest wheeze is a blatant piece of advocacy research (of the sort carried out by Barnardos that my colleague Brendan O'Neill exposed recently). The "hot food takeaways in Waltham Forest" questionnaire has two neutral questions about the role of the council in planning applications. Then come three kickers: Do you agree or disagree that planning applications for hot food takeaway shops in Waltham Forest should be managed to:

resist proposals that would cause an unacceptable risk of crime and antisocial behaviour?

ensure that they don't have an unacceptable impact on road safety?

ensure that they have good systems in place to deal with smells and waste?

In other words, three out of five questions invite respondents to side with the council in expanding its planning permission powers around a dietary social policy objective. Who is going to answer in ways that encourage more crime, traffic collisions and filth in the streets? Setting up the questionnaire this way means that the "research" can be used to rubber stamp an existing decision -- expressed in council leader Clyde Loakes' "war on fried chicken" that was declared well before the December closing date for survey returns.

Update from Torbay Magistrates' Court

2008-12-05T16:37:00.004Z

Back in the day, happy slapping involved filming common assaults with cameraphones. Now it seems a common assault qualifies as a happy slap, not the other way around. Thus a "happy-slapping pensioner was told yesterday to 'count to ten' before lashing out again" (Metro, 4 December 2008, p.17). He didn't film his antics.

If we can't dump the happy slapping label, at least let's use it accurately.

For reference

2008-11-25T16:22:00.003Z

Coming soon: my entries in British Crime Writing: An Encyclopedia, edited by Barry Forshaw and published by Greenwood.

The Uses of English

2008-11-12T09:20:00.002Z

From my inbox:
"This is an important email from Ticketmaster with regards to your booking for Monkey: Journey to the West at Monkey's World, The O2.It has come to light that there has been some confusion with the terminology used in the text for this event.The term 'Journey Starts' does not mean there is any form of pre-show activity. It was simply a term chosen to keep in with the show's title and theme - 'Journey to the West.' The 'Journey' time refers to the door opening time.

Please accept our sincerest apologies for any inconvenience caused." Quite.

Meanwhile my DVD rental service has more inappropriate-sounding tidings for me:
"Dear Graham, Good news! We've just posted Cannibal Holocaust to you, so please look out for it." Good news indeed.

Working Doors, Dalrymple Deconstructed

2008-11-03T14:33:00.004Z

The new issue of Reconstruction, a section of which I co-edited, is out today. Read on.

In the same issue is a book review of books by Simon Winlow and Theodore Dalrymple. If it seems like these books have been around for a while, that's because they have (the review having gone around the houses at one journal for donkey's years before getting rejected, while leaving me to guess this fact for myself).

What I really needed was for the bloody thing to appear at around the same time as an earlier review of a Francis Gilbert book, as with it I might have avoided a grumpy email exchange with Dr. Winlow himself. Anyway, hopefully the belated appearance of this review article might set things straight.

Happy halloween

2008-10-31T16:30:00.005Z

So here I am in an internet cafe, blogging next to Amy Rigby who is doing a gig down the road with Wreckless Eric later tonight. Outside, the Local Council has issued a detailed warning about the dangers this Halloween:

We are working with the police to reduce the anxiety that is caused to members of our community at this time of year.
‘Sorry No Trick or Treat’ posters will be available in wfm 20 October issue, from the community safety van or you can download your ‘Sorry No Trick or Treat’ poster here (946KB PDF file)
The poster can be displayed in your window or door to discourage trick or treaters from calling. Remember that you do not have to open your door to them:
Do not let anyone in your house unless you are happy with their identity
Do not deal with doorstep sales people unless you are sure they are genuine
Always ask for identification from official callers
Halloween safety tips for parents and children
For safety reasons children should never trick or treat alone. Parents may want to consider having a fancy-dress themed Halloween party at home as an alternative to trick or treating.
Parents and children:
Do not go into strangers home
Restrict trick or treat visits to homes with outside lights on
Use costumes with light or bright coloured material and trim
Check to see that costumes do not interfere with walking
Set a time limit for your children to trick or treat and designate a specific route to take
Encourage children to use face paint and/or make-up rather than hoods, wigs or masks that can block vision
Check all treats before the children eat the sweets and other Halloween goodies
Stay in areas that are well lit with street lights but also take a torch just in case
Be visible and take care when crossing the road
Report any suspicious or criminal activity
Don't knock on doors where there is a sign saying 'sorry no trick or treat'
Police are urging trick or treaters to show consideration for vulnerable and elderly members of the community this Halloween and even though Halloween is supposed to be spooky, be careful not to frighten the elderly.
To report anti-social behaviour call Waltham Forest Direct 020 8496 3000

Probably safer indoors, but for the back-to-back gorno movies showing on Freeview. I noticed from the TV listings that Saw, Saw 2, Hostel, 2001 Maniacs and Reeker were all doing their bit to add to the festivities recently.

Enjoy your evening.

On two fronts

2008-10-15T10:23:00.002+01:00

Never mind its war on fried chicken, Waltham Forest Council has also declared war on fly-tipping. As usual, no figures on the expected troop deployments have been provided ... Luckily, the Borough has no (openly acknowledged) money in Icelandic banks, otherwise its navy would be crossing the North Atlantic already.

A bit of freelance work

2008-10-08T11:23:00.002+01:00

Look out for me in the new Ivano Fossati video (for his song Il Remedio):

Full disclosure

2008-09-23T13:59:00.005+01:00

At the start of this month I was chatting to Terri Senft, author of Camgirls. I never got around to applying my crude binary logic and asking the $64,000 dirham question, namely: the breakdown of public and private - is it a good thing or a bad thing?

In the interests of full disclosure, I can say that in the month of September I saw Forster Gallery-hosted bands Penguins, Kill Kenada and, elsewhere, The Secret Project. I saw Leicester City beat Leyton Orient and went to the opening night of the Russian Film Festival. I bought the "Neptune City" CD and watched Carnivale season 1.

Not the most useful information ever to come your way. But more on all this in a future post.

Security disservice

2008-08-27T11:55:00.004+01:00

Regular readers will know I've got my criticisms of Spooks. But compared to Spooks: Code 9, it seems written by Shakespeare. Older viewers might remember the comic strip "Kids Rule OK" from Action comic if they have a strong sense of having seen this show somewhere before...

Has romance lost its Spark(ey)?

2008-08-17T10:47:00.004+01:00

According to one of my Facebook newsfeeds:
"In total, you were reviewed for dating 54 times and one person expressed interest in you. You are more desirable than 44% of 37,391,024 people. Recently you were viewed 10 times and no people expressed interested in you."

Ha! Eat my shorts, all 16,452,050.56 of you.

How is one supposed to hook up based on this data? Your guess is as good as mine.

On the Wayne

2008-08-02T19:13:00.002+01:00

My take on the new Batman film and its popularity appears on Spiked. (If you are reading this blog after reading "Nostalgia for Kidults", then you know that already.)

Cock tales

2008-07-20T01:13:00.002+01:00

ITEM: All the sex on the beach jokes have been done to death. Not much to add, on threat of deportation. Except to note that the Daily Mail, which has published front pages on the threat of Shariah law coming to Britain, seems to quite like it applied the glitz and golf of Dubai. Oh, and the idea of an ITP employee “bringing the company into disrepute”. Gate, horse, bolted.

ITEM: “Waltham Forest Council announced last week that it is waging war on the effects of excessive fast food in the borough … a borough that was should be synonymous with change, progress and achievement – not grease, fast food and litter.” So said the Council’s 24 March newsletter. Nearly four months on, and local residents are being kept in the dark. How long is the war expected to last? What are the predicted casualty rates? Is there a plan for withdrawal? The public must be told.

“What did you do in the war on the effects of excessive fast food, daddy?” “Had two pieces of Perfect Fried with chips, Alex. Twice in one week.”

Boba job

2008-06-30T23:50:00.004+01:00

I had high hopes for the movie Number One Longing. Number Two Regret. I got my first feature credit, no doubt bringing new depths to the role of "Woods Guy". Now it turns out that Jeremy "Boba Fett" Bulloch, in the role of "Robert A. Fett" in the film, had similar ideas. In his memoirs he looks forward to the day when the film goes on mainstream release (p.232), hopefully netting him a long term payday, in the style of Sir Alec "Obi Wan Kenobi" Guinness for Star Wars. Like me, I imagine he's still waiting.

Still hacking away

2008-06-13T03:59:00.001+01:00

You'll du it our way, or not at all

2008-04-30T12:59:00.005+01:00

Formally speaking, many UAE universities are clustered in a free zone.

Knowledge Village indeed. New filtering techniques pursued by local ISP du mean that, for instance, the academic journal Genders online is now blocked, the content not being consistent with the moral, cultural and social values of the UAE, apparently. Like the odd custodial arrangements for gender studies textbooks, local web filtering points to the need for academic freedom in the Arabian Gulf.

And freedom more generally.

Sibling rivalry

2008-04-21T07:21:00.004+01:00

At one point in the new Jay Rayner book my brother is introduced as being "enthusiatic" (p.135). I, on the other hand, have to make do with being "comforting for other academics licking the wounds of their mauling at the hands of media" (Goggin, p.123). Hey, it's a job.

Reconstruction; anti-construction

2008-03-22T11:34:00.007Z

The latest issue of Reconstruction - Class, Culture and Public Intellectuals - is online now, with my co-editorial fingerprints all over it. It was a long haul, but I'm very pleased with the content (and the form: thanks Justin and Sean).

Meanwhile a return to the UK presents me with public life that seems to be a caricature of itself. Being away means missing the mediating links, but preoccupations with body image, plastic bags and cycling abound. In my old stomping grounds, a patch of industrial wasteland - the former Halex factory - will not be turned into flats and a supermarket, ostensibly in order to preserve the character of the area. Ironically, if the Halex factory was back in action, environmentalists would oppose that too. At least the residents of Rosia Montana are hitting back against the industrial counter-revolution; when are Brits going to do the same?

Beyond my comprehension

2008-03-18T13:07:00.003Z

(Austrian) kids these days. How do we test their grasp of English? Have them interview me (see p.2). Weird.

A foxy calendar story

2008-03-10T04:35:00.005Z

Not content with dealing mucky books from under the counter, I am also curator of an obscure object that doubles as a guide to a parallel world. I refer to the Leicester City 2008 official calendar, which in its own way explains why my home town side is circling the drain.

Take January, which shows Jimmy Nielsen - left on a free having never played for the club - and Marton Fulop - probably kept us out of the drop zone, now back with Sunderland. Skipping over Paul Henderson to February, we find the perennially transfer-listed Elvis Hammond alongside Darren Kenton (contract terminated by mutual consent), now with Leeds - as is "Mr. April", Leeds loanee and free kick specialist Alan Sheehan. To add insult to injury, this month also sees a snap of Mark Deep Freeze staring back at me, now firing blanks with Dundee United. Presumably they didn't have a photo of an abyss to use, or at least Leicester did not sign one in time for the calendar photoshoot.

The quarter is not up yet, but the calendar embodies the key reasons for City's decline of late: instability in the squad and players who simply aren't good enough. Hammond and Kenton first came to Leicester on loan spells where we worked out they weren't very good, but they got contracts anyway. And so it goes on.

Let's just say there's a strong chance of this calendar leaving on a free transfer before the year is out. (At least the dates are accurate.)

Bear with me, I'm the new moral guardian

2008-03-09T08:57:00.003Z

In my February blog entry, I reminisce briefly about being comparatively slim in 1983. Over on Facebook, my profile has attracted some fanmail about my current build: "nothing wrong with being chunky mate, I've always liked men who are chunky. Bald is very attractive too, but the biggest turn-on in that pic is to see just how hairy you are - lovely!" and "your [sic] just such a handsome man with a stunning furry body :)" Using a bare minimum of gym time, it seems I have made the transition to being a UK bear.

Which in a roundabout way brings me to comment on a current role for academics, that of protecting students from themselves. Picture the scene: on arrival at a new teaching post, I was given a new responsibility. Mine to keep under lock and key, to be let out to third year students in connection with dissertation research only, are ... four academic tomes on the history of sexuality. Is this the Closed University, with a "do not feed the bears" policy?

The (Cannibal) Holocaust: Not Again

2008-02-04T14:14:00.000Z

27 January 2008 and I suddenly slipped back in time 25 years. 1983: a chance to put things right and, ignoring any Prime Directive, to make a difference. Looking slim, GB!

Except I was reading the Sunday Express, the self-styled world's greatest newspaper: Outrage at Sick Nazi DVDs for Sale. In the frame are SS Experiment Camp, Cannibal Holocaust, I Spit on Your Grave and Faces of Death. Missing from the line-up are The Evil Dead and Driller Killer, but otherwise this could be a library story on the front page. Recycling rules at the Express.

Only the availability of these films on DVD now instead of VHS differentiates this panic from its carbon copy in 1983-85. Even Keith Vaz, a prospective parliamentary candidate for Leicester East seeking to unseat rentaquote MP Peter Bruinvels at the time of the video nasties panic, is in on the act.

The facts are simple - only the first of these vids has a "Nazi" title to highlight the lurid content, spoofed recently by Rob Zombie: the rest have no (formally) fascistic leanings, unless pretend sadism counts as fascism these days, yet academic writers have repositioned Holocaust as a critique of media manipulation and Spit as a feminist rape-revenge flick. Faeces of Death remains a risible compilation of mondo, fake and news footage of its subjects' final moments.

We've been here before. Only a dimwit could have failed to notice the staged torture scenes that pepper the multiplexes, if the pirate DVD guys don't get there first. Even the posters on the Express web forum seem more upset about Islam than the availability of these movies.

The Sunday Express - weak at the weekend. An old prediction of mine went "don't expect an SS Experiment Camp revival any time soon", although maybe Express Investigations Editor James Murray can instigate one through his pointless outrage.

Slightly surrealism

2008-01-27T02:59:00.000Z

From time to time I have been known to write about social realism in literature and the visual arts.* That said, it was still strange last week to see a superabundance of the genre used to decorate the National Military Museum in Cairo. All of it manufactured in North Korea, no less. I can think of a website or two that would have a field day with this information, although the authors are unlikely to visit Cairo anytime soon.

As a motion pictures complement to all this belligerent socialist realism, required viewing was political thriller Al Rahina (2006). I won't spoil the ending for you; cynics might say that the filmmakers manage this all by themselves.

(*See my respective chapters in M.E.Sharpe Library of Franklin D.Roosevelt Studies: Franklin D.Roosevelt and the Shaping of American Political Culture v. 1. and Propaganda: Political Rhetoric and Identity, 1300-2000 (Themes in History).)

The Basics Reloaded

2008-01-12T07:51:00.000Z

A happy new year to readers of this semi-retired blog is order, but what with work, co-editing a forthcoming issue of Reconstruction, and taking in some half-decent football for a change, I am squeezed like a lemon for time . That said, I still managed to review Philip Hammond's excellent new book.

Cross words

2007-12-23T14:41:00.000Z

My review of the new Neil Cross novel appears above (I'll add the link when the 7 Days website is a bit more stable). Despite some of the griping about Cross's writing in the Times -- at least he can spell the word "night" -- and in the Guardian, not getting the author's technique for elevating a sense of domestic menace, Human Nature is a very good book (hat tip to Chris -- pictured -- for delivering me a copy).

Tourism is not terrorism ...

2007-12-17T14:22:00.000Z

... although you wouldn't think so from reading Leo Hickman's book The Final Call. Since the book was published, he seems to have softened his line on Spanish holidays, according to articles here and here.

Peace offering

2007-11-30T10:36:00.000Z

This blog generally has kind words for historical crime writer David Peace. So when reviewing his Brian Clough novel The Damned Utd -- soon to be adapted into a TV movie -- for Seven Days newspaper, I continued this tradition. Whatdya want, blood?

E-Mailer

2007-11-26T17:52:00.000Z

Farewell Norman Mailer. The obituaries came in thick and fast and everyone had an opinion. For many reasons -- some to do with Mailer, some not -- the links between his attitudes to women, his conduct towards women and his writing would always be under scrutiny. It was hard to scan these assessments without some mention of his stabbing of second wife Adele, in the late 1960s.

Few recalled his medicalised excuse for his conduct, which would fit in nicely with present day mores: "There are no modern Insarovs. Instead there are cancerphobes like Norman Mailer, who recently explained that had he not stabbed his wife (and acted out 'a murderous nest of feeling') he would have gotten cancer and 'been dead in a few years himself.' it is the same fantasy that was once attached to TB, but in rather a nastier version." (Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (1978), Vintage, 1979 ed. p. 22.)

Prevention is better than cure, they say. Better for whom?

My hidden hand

2007-11-26T05:47:00.000Z

I am one of the writers of the document at this link. Hold onto your hats, readers ...

The Pro-Waugh left: a decent anecdote

2007-11-23T19:11:00.000Z

It’s obvious that the decent left likes a bit of Evelyn Waugh. Take Christopher Hitchens, for instance, as he sticks up for Martin Amis:

In the same essay that initially attacked Amis, Eagleton also slammed me for disappointing him and not, after all, becoming the George Orwell of my generation. I have instead, he snorts, become the Evelyn Waugh! How is one to come to grips with a man so crude in his sneers that his idea of an insult is to compare me to one of the greatest novelists of the past century?

Nick Cohen is also a fan and riffing off fictional entities the Daily Beast and Lord Copper is one of his ways of talking about the British media today.

Another familiar Cohen trope is his annual exposés of the erstwhile Revolutionary Communist Party (1981-1997). A couple of these drew on the anecdotes of the historian Dave Renton, until an inevitable parting of the ways:
“I used to have correspond occasionally [sic] with the journalist Nik Cohen [sic]: until the Iraq war. He interviewed me twice for pieces in the New Statesman. I tried emailing him as the bombings in Afghanistan started. By the end, we could hardly speak."

Renton may or may not crop up as “John” in one of these articles when it appeared in the Observer. He’s definitely in the second of the series, observing an RCP member who won’t give money to a beggar because it’s “helping capitalism”.

I also remember Comrade Pappenhacker, who was perennially rude to waiters. He used to say that “every time you are polite to a proletarian you are helping bolster up the capitalist system.” He was not in the RCP, but part of the supporting cast of Evelyn Waugh's novel Scoop (Centenary Edition, p.32).

Hanson (and Grendel)

2007-11-20T14:58:00.000Z

As pointed out previously, this week's Beowulf movie has set the critics talking about digital filmmaking once again. Bang on cue, one of my own contributions on the topic rocks up on the Audacity website. Like comedy, being topical is all in the timing.

Should all CGI be banned?

2007-11-14T13:58:00.000Z

... asks the Guardian.

No.

If you don't believe me, see the two books by Matt Hanson and published by RotoVision:
Sci-Fi Moviescapes: The Science Behind the Fiction (RotoVision, 2005: 176 pages, ISBN: 288046787X, £27.50) and The End of Celluloid: Film Futures in the Digital Age (RotoVision 2004: 176 pages, ISBN: 2880467837, £24.99)

Always time for crime

2007-11-09T12:47:00.000Z

On and off, I've been writing for Crime Time for over a decade now, first appearing in issue 2. (Birthdays can cause one to reflect on the passage of time in this way.) I've been through magazine, photocopy, magazine again, trade paperback - one day the font will be large enough for me to read it - and website versions. Here's to the next 10 years of Crime Time.

Something Wiki This Way Comes

2007-11-04T15:07:00.000Z

Not long ago I blogged an anecdote illustrating the unreliability of Wikipedia as a research tool (18 October). I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or not, but within five days user 86.136.176.158, apparently a London-based BT Broadband customer, nipped onto the page about me and "associated" me with an organisation that was disbanded in 1997. (My weekly TV and radio appearances in summer 2005 were also cut from "frequent" to "some", although with hindsight, given the mindlessness of most of the radio slots, I would have settled for "some".)

The user history shows an hour spent online toying with a fleeting obsession, suggesting a pound sterling wasted on "research" in a London internet cafe. But then at close to 2 a.m., up go six factoids, suggesting both personal knowledge to do with left-leaning greens in higher education such as Derek Wall (if they are correct), and a home broadband connection. Hence the following cyber-footprint (most recent changes first):

02:01, 24 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Institute of Education‎ (→Notable people) (top)
01:59, 24 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Denis Smalley‎ (top)
01:58, 24 October 2007 (hist) (diff) City University, London‎ (→Academics)
01:57, 24 October 2007 (hist) (diff) City University, London‎
01:56, 24 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Goldsmiths, University of London‎
01:54, 24 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Derek Wall‎ (→Political Career) (top)
21:51, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Entryism‎ (→In the United Kingdom)
21:51, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Front organization‎ (→See also)
21:50, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Front organization‎ (→See also)
21:50, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Front organization‎ (→See also)
21:50, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Entryism‎ (→See also)
21:49, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Entryism‎ (→See also)
21:36, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) James Heartfield‎
21:36, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) James Heartfield‎
21:35, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) James Heartfield‎
21:12, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Fiona Fox (UK press officer)‎ (top)
21:11, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Claire Fox‎ (→Criticism)
21:08, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Living Marxism‎ (→George Monbiot and the 'LobbyWatch Network')
21:07, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Brendan O’Neill‎
21:04, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Brendan O’Neill‎
21:04, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Brendan O’Neill‎
21:00, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Graham Barnfield‎
20:59, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Graham Barnfield‎
20:58, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Living Marxism‎ (→See also)
20:57, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Living Marxism‎ (→George Monbiot and the 'LobbyWatch Network')
20:51, 23 October 2007 (hist) (diff) Graham Barnfield‎

Why beat a three-hour retreat from, err, repeating information in the public domain, Woodward? Scared of missing the 10-minute freeview on the Adult Channel? Trying to catch last orders, unaware of Britain's relaxed licensing laws? Get a life or at least go to bed...

Once again the blogosphere/wikiworld is shown to be a great place for avoiding important issues. Next thing someone will have grammar-flame drama queen Oliver Kamm bang to rights, for calling Flight KAL 858 Flight 857, or some other such breakthrough ...

1966 and all that

2007-10-18T15:41:00.000+01:00

One of the duties/chores/professional obligations of the lecturer, especially the journalism lecturer, is to warn students, especially student journalists, of the shortcomings of Wikipedia.

Where am I going with this rambling post?

Recent I was working alongside a well-known former England footballer who had a slate of press interviews lined up. Certain internet print-outs were doing the rounds among his interviewers. "So, you met your wife at a dry cleaners..." started one question. "No, at an ice rink," came a bemused reply. "Where do people get this stuff from?"

Where indeed?

Try reading a book...

Going completely batshit

2007-10-09T14:52:00.000+01:00

Regular readers will know I'm more likely to review books than restaurants. Contrary to appearances, I'm no expert on the latter. That said, I know what I like and was a bit disconcerted when trying out 3nity the other night. The theme here is healthy eating and relaxation, planned by feng shui creatives using the word "holistic", no doubt. The musak was a bit dodgy, but the main barrier to relaxation was the big screen looping a BBC wildlife documentary DVD. In a particularly appetising scene, a bat drowns in guano while being eaten alive by cockroaches. "Meal times again," as my mother would say.

Looking Daggers

2007-10-04T15:05:00.000+01:00

There are times when I miss teaching, so it's good to see an article of mine being used to teach film in Lexington, Kentucky. Ahh, film school, I'm almost tempted to enroll myself...

On motors and mobiles

2007-09-24T12:45:00.000+01:00

The car may be death-proof, but the film's not above criticism (see my review here). Getting a less bumpy ride from this reviewer is Cell Phone Culture by Gerard Goggin.

The fallen

2007-09-04T16:43:00.001+01:00

My Spiked-online review of the movie Seraphim Falls, recently released in the UK, appears here.

I have known few people tough enough to get through the real life equivalent of the fictional ordeal inflicted on Gideon (Pierce Brosnan) in Seraphim Falls. One of them was my late grandfather, Bert Allton; another was my friend Dave Hallsworth, an inspirational figure who died last week. He will be much missed.

This link takes you to Dave commenting on Grandpa's war diary. Dave Hallsworth, Presente!

The Reisz stuff

2007-09-02T15:41:00.000+01:00

Still reviewing for 7 Days newspaper. Here's the latest, albeit truncated book review.
The last paragraph would have read:
Reisz’s work tended more towards the “art house” end of the film business. When he was allowed to helm Hollywood movies – Isadora, The Gambler, Dog Soldiers – they often lost money and audiences found them hard to comprehend. Author Colin Gardner explains exactly each of these movies is about and helps readers to appreciate the director’s interesting but uneven career.

Still mainly a factual synopsis of the book, hence my questioning of the worth of capsule reviews.