It's not OK

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?

Full disclosure

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.

Panoramic views

Here we go again. Does anyone recall the happy slapping scare of 2005? Then as now, these "fight clubs" are at worst a handful of local assaults, situations that most conscientious adults could break up if they weren't scared of the kids. Yet again we see a nation-wide scare being constructed out of children behaving badly with new technology. Could the discovery of this new social problem be linked to a forthcoming Panorama broadcast? I couldn't possibly comment...

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On a not totally unrelated note, I am commenting on Paul Gormley's book in 7 Days this week.

New trend, _Old Boy_, same old bollocks

It had to happen. Following the Virginia Tech massacre, mass media gets the blame. There are plenty of commentators who see the killings as connected to YouTube, ranging from sensible treatments of meaningless nihilism to "mass media for the YouTube generation" (Paul Harris, "Killer made his own horror film", Daily Mail, 20 April 2007: 10-11).

The Daily Mail regrets the end of the 19th Century, but it has briefly joined the 20th with a typical complaint about old media (film) and copycat violence. "In Cho's sick mind he carried images of a violent movie", says Harris. How can we actually know this? The Mail supplies no evidence of what exactly was in Cho's mind, nor could it be expected to. Even the evidence that Cho saw the movie Old Boy (2003) is lacking.

Instead the article relies on Cho's martyrdom video clips showing "disturbing parallels" and "striking parallels" with scenes in the film. I would suggest that if a human being is photographed putting a gun to his/her head or wielding a claw hammer those photographs will look like certain production stills from the film Old Boy; short of evolving differently shaped bodies and heads, there is no getting away from this fact. The Mail's online caption - "Seung-Hui puts a gun to his head in another apparent attempt to copy the violent 2003 film" - is another example of a daft parallel based on completely different things happening to look the same.

The article is accompanied by a box piece enumerating the similarities between Cho's manifesto and Old Boy (Richard Shears, "Revenge tale with gruesome scenes of death and torture", ibid). The point about each comparison is that it relies on things in the film having (vaguely) similar descriptions in real life. Each observation is brought in as "evidence", but there is nothing in the article that proves the killer even saw the film. How can we say it caused the killings - "the ultimate Quentin Tarantino movie", apparently? We can't - there's no proof at all.



PS. I better be right about this: I bought one of my best mates the Old Boy DVD for his birthday last year. Any massacres he carries out in future are his own fault entirely, OK?

PPS. While I was writing this an apartment burned in the next street. I was going to slate the crowd of rubberneckers who'd gathered to watch -- some did video it on their cameraphones and you can probably find it on YouTube soon if you cared to -- but most of them had been evacuated from the apartment itself, and had little choice but to stand around until the fire was extinguished. Apologies for thinking the wrong thoughts, folks.

*Also in the Mail: the video fight club for toddlers.

When images rule the earth

Happy slapping banned in France - five year's inside for posting the material on the internet. South Yorkshire police go into meltdown over CCTV footage of a beating being made public. (Having spent half the 1990s dealing with that particular branch of the "service", I can't say I'm very sympathetic to them on this occasion.) In my neck of the woods, a typical Friday afternoon at the mall involves taking cellphone snapshots of women in defiance of new laws, to exchange with other leering men.

This follows hot on the heels of the conviction of chanting loon Abdul Muhid for soliciting murder (i.e. chanting anti-British slogans on a demonstration). While his words will get him some jail time, his earlier actions - smashing a Walthamstow bus shelter - netted a fine that was less than the value of the damage to the shelter itself.

How are we to make sense of all this? Where's Jean Baudrillard when you need him?