Nine Night

For Halloween - a cold autumnal festival - I thought I'd whisk you all off to hotter climes, where spirit-life burns slow like a sweat cramp under a tropical sun...

The Carribean.

The most famous piece of writing about the Carribean occult is Maya Deren's justly praised 'Divine Horsemen: Living Gods of Haiti'. It's a fantastic book, read it. However Zora Neale Hurston also wrote a powerful, if less well-known, book on mystical beliefs in another part of the region - Jamaican Obeah. The book is called 'Tell My Horse', it's an oral history of the society and customs of early 20th century Jamaica and quite beautiful. I thought I'd reprint a passage from it - about the ceremony known as 'Nine Night'.

'Nine Night' was a ritual enshrining of the belief in a soul's survival after death – the belief that there is no death, merely the fact that one's activities are changed from one bodily state to another, non-corporeal, one… In Jamaica, a 'duppy' is a kind of restless spirit - somewhere between a ghost and a poltergeist - a personification of the soul no longer inside it's human shell and after someone dies, part of the management of grief is this - their 'duppy' must be slowly eased to the the next life so that we can continue in ours. This process takes nine nights.

"One day you see a man walking down the road, the next day you come to his yard and find him dead. Him don't walk, him don't talk again. He is still and silent and does none of the things that he used to do. But you look upon him and you see that he has all the parts that the living have. Why is it that he cannot do what the living do? It is because the thing that gave power to these parts is no longer there. That is the duppy, and that is the most powerful part of any man. Everybody has evil in them, and when a man is alive, the heart and the brain controls him and he will not abandon himself to many evil things. But when the duppy leaves the body, it no longer has anything to restrain it and it will do more terrible things than any man ever dreamed of. It is no good for a duppy to stay among living folk. The duppy is much too powerful and is apt to hurt people all the time. So we make Nine Night to force the duppy to stay in his grave."

[On the 3rd night the duppy rises from his grave – he visits all the places he used to go and then, on Nine Night he goes back to the room where he lived last and takes with him the shadow of everything he wants. His loved ones prepare everything he wants in that 'Dead Room' so he will leave happy and not return to harm them]

"to make him happy so that he will rest well and not come back again" .

[There is much singing, everyone is there, a big feast all for the duppy. And at midnight, the dead is finally discharged:]

"Whether him is gone to you, Lord, or to Satan help we to discharge him from this house forever. The living has no right with the dead, Amen."

[Turning to the duppy:]

"We know you come and we make you welcome. We give you white fowl; we give you rice and leave your bed for you. We leave you water and we do everything for you. Done!!! Go on to your rest now and no do we no harm. We no want to see you again. You must left and you not to come again. No come back! Mind now, you come again we plant you!"

And so, it ends. The spirit is discharged.

Another part of the book decribes the 'specialists' - old women who spiritually and physically groom and prepare girls on the cusp of maturity for their adult life. The specialist would school their charge for another existence - that beyond childhood after which, Hurston, writes

"This young, young thing went forth with the assurance of infinity."

Which is far too beautiful a line to include in a Halloween post.

But I just can't help it.

[PS: the other classic book about Carribean occult - Jamaican Obeah again - is also by a woman with poetic, visionary style: Jean Rhys' novel 'Wide Sargasso Sea'. If you haven't read it, do so - it has an immense, intangible power. And it's very short]

Someone's Having Fun

Exxon Mobil posts record profit
Thu Oct 27, 2005 12:42 PM ET
By Deepa Babington

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Exxon Mobil Corp. on Thursday posted a quarterly profit of $9.9 billion, the largest in U.S. corporate history, as it raked in a bonanza from soaring oil and gas prices.

Read the whole thing here. And yes, you did read that right:

THE LARGEST QUARTERLY PROFIT IN US CORPORATE HISTORY

Faustian Implosion

Wow.

An incredible piece here from Blumenthal.

Sidney Blumenthal has always been a cold fish, his writing clear, crisp and lined with steel. If he jokes, the jokes are dry to the point of invisibility and laced with an icey meanness. But he knows of what he speaks - the geneology and composition of power in the Republic - and he delivers his information with clarity and eye to the literary and historical:

Bush is haunted by the history he insisted on defying.

Is the Shakespearian introduction to a piece which relentless concludes like this:

A sharp reversal of policy and turnover in personnel are the only actions that may enable Bush to salvage the shipwreck of his presidency, as they did for Reagan. But bringing in the elders, even if they could be summoned, would be psychologically devastating to Bush, a humiliating admission that his long history of recklessness and failure, from the Texas Air National Guard to Harken Energy, with rescue only through the intervention of his father and his father's friends, has reached its culmination.

Like I said, devastating. Read it.

High Treason

The death penalty was abolished decades ago in the United Kingdom, and for that I'm thankful. But it remains for one solitary and unforgiveable offence: high treason. Betraying the nation in a time of war. And while I'm vociferously opposed to capital punishment by the state, I'll make an exception for that. Seems fair enough.

So cast your eyes across the sea, to a nation that's far more easy with state-sponsored execution and consider carefully the scandal about to break: today, indictments will be served on members of the Bush administration at the very summit of command - closest advisers to the President and Vice President, possibly the Vice President himself - for the betrayal of state secrets during a time of war:

High treason.

Roger Casement was executed in World War One for conspiring with the Kaiser to ferment revolution in Ireland. Lord Haw Haw was executed in World War Two for betraying Britain in weekly radio addresses designed to sap the nation's resolve. Thousands may have died due to their actions, though it is still a nebulous matter to quantify.

Valerie Plame was a CIA operative. Her mission was to prevent enemies of the United States from building and deploying nuclear weapons against the United States. She was betrayed during a war - in Iraq - which was waged for the exact reason that she served: the defeat of an enemy nation regarded as a grave nuclear security threat. And she was betrayed.

By her own commanders.

Servants of the State who served either for or right next to the Commander-in-Chief himself.

I studued history at college - and I can't recall a case where high treason - betrayal of state secrets in wartime - was conducted against the nation by members of the government leadership itself.

I'm sure examples exist. Almost certainly in the darker and more corrupt years of the Roman Empire or the Habsburg dynasty for example - but not in modern history. If anyone can think of anything - please, post a comment.

This would be akin to Anthony Eden being accused in 1944 of revealing the plans for D-Day to the Nazis. This would be like Harold Ickes in early 1945 giving the Japanese Empire detailed blueprints of the Los Alamos project. This would be Robert McNamara in 1967 handing detailed construction data and projection dates for the NASA moon project to the Politburo.

There is no frame of reference that makes sense. It is quite simply, off the scale.

In fact, it's worse than any of those examples because the scale of destruction resulting from a breach of nuclear security will be so drastic it would dwarf even the loss of life resulting from a failed Normandy invasion or a Japanese attack using a primitive atomic device.

It's that bad.

And it was orchestrated directly from the office of a man who:

told Republican supporters at a town hall meeting in Des Moines that they needed to make "the right choice" in the November 2 election."If we make the wrong choice, then the danger is that we'll get hit again -- that we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States,"

Well, because of Valerie Plame's betrayal that possibility's become absolutely real. And if - or, as some believe, when - America's struck by enemies using a nuclear device then we can, without exagerration, say that 'devastating attack' occurred directly as a cause of high treason at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

High treason.

And these men call themselves Christian, they call themselves moral.

Like I said: off the scale.

And as this man says, when the indictments come down it's going to be a whole new ball game. Impeachment for fooling with the help in the Oval office? Per-lease:

Because if you thought blowjobs were bad, well, I think we're gonna find out exactly what bad is.

Uncharted waters. Off the scale. Without parallel.

Commander-in-chief, President, Vice President and all their men:

High Treason.

Think about. Then fix yourself a very stiff whisky. Crazy days are coming for the Republic. That Bill of Rights better have been written on some hard-wearing parchment - because it's gonna be 1776 with a nasty dash of 1862 all over again.

Bushwatch Megadrive

There's an amazing piece over here all about the road to Traitorgate, how closely entwined it is with Bush the son's deep-rooted, ah, issues with his dad and how easily his neoconservative Richelieu's may have manipulated them. The piece does a great job outlining why the White House's contempt for Ambassador Joe Wilson was so personal - pathetic, crude and snide, too - and almost certainly emanated from the top dog himself.

Go and read it. It's called 'I'll Believe in Santa Claus Before I'll Believe Dubya Didn't Know About TraitorGate' and it says things like -

So Poppys best friend Scowcroft (who's already on record for publicly calling Junior a fuckup) carries Wilson's article down to the White House and swats Junior over the head with it like a dog that had peed on the rug. Acting as a stand-in for his war veteran dad, holding Wilson up as a model of patriotism and bravery while laughing at Nintendo boy for launching a foolish war from the comfort of his Barcalounger.

Jesus tapdancing Christ. You think THAT didn't raise every hair on the back of Junior's neck?

And also -

Why would he allow Joe Wilson to have the limelight and shit all over his big PR campaign? 'Cos Wilson was Poppy's guy, that's why, Bush is his mama's boy -- as Arianna noted, he's a guy born on third base who thinks he's hit a triple. He can't talk back to Poppy. Hell, he can't even talk back to Scowcroft. But he sure could grind Joe Wilson into the ground with a faux-cowboy boot heel.

Which as well as being psychologically astute - is damn nice writing too. Enjoy.

And while I'm on the subject of Traitorgate, this well-publicised article about the fetid atmosphere in the Führerbunker... I mean, White House... includes the following observation of the Leader of the Free World® -

Presidential advisers and friends say Bush is a mass of contradictions: cheerful and serene, peevish and melancholy, occasionally lapsing into what he once derided as the "blame game."

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this commonly known as... 'Bi-Polar Personality Disorder'? Often seen in those who have or - have been through - severe addictive crises.

Alcohol, cocaine for example.

California Uber Alles

This is insane and grim, somehow meaningful - and strangely resonant.

Here are two pretty young sisters who sing songs:



Like me, you probably think they're the Olsen twins - they're not. Their names are Lamb and Lynx Gaede, they have a band called Prussian Blue named after the racial purity of their origins and they are massive stars at Neo-Nazi rallies around the USA.

... the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.

"We're proud of being white, we want to keep being white," said Lynx. "We want our people to stay white … we don't want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race."

[...]

Songs like "Sacrifice" — a tribute to Nazi Rudolf Hess, Hitler's deputy Fuhrer — clearly show the effect of the girls' upbringing. The lyrics praise Hess as a "man of peace who wouldn't give up."

You can read all about them here.

Like I said, I have a strange mixture of emotions reading this. The first is one that I've spoken of before - a sort of a baseline response these days - about how bizarre and off-centre the world has irrevocably become so that it can produce pretty little Neo-Nazi anti-boppers.

They emerge from an environment where pop cultural staples - disposable music sung by young role models promoting an image of healthy, clean entertainment - have been distorted, stretched like a reflection in a fairground mirror till they assume bizarre proportions. We're in the world of the comic book or science fiction which - like all futurist fiction - is primarily and deeply concerned with the present.

So, sure, the world of of the Gaede sisters is that of Ballard, Cronenberg and Gibson. A world in which cultural facets have been prised loose, squeezed and beaten thin like escalope to the most transparent - and most intrinsic - of meanings. But if you look at the story with a kind of unforgiving clarity and focus you could also say that it's not so strange at all. Not really. And any aberration from our culture is slight and not without relevance.

Our culture of celebrity is founded absolutely on a fetishisation of physical beauty and excellence (the two are identical, where they are not - as with the lionisation of someone disabled or physically impaired - it serves only as a reinforcemen). It's a cult of look and effect: relentlessly sculpted muscle and athletic superiority showcased by the famous few and emulated in hangar-sized gyms and fitness rooms by the many. It's a world in which those who are supreme - Kate Moss for example - are given to believe that they are beyond others: Nietszchian supermen and women in which the notion of moral superiority has been elided with physical and cultural lionisation.

It's a world tightly hinged to Leni Riesenthal's Utopia of Aryan Venuses and Adonises in Olympiad and Triumph of the Will - the first and greatest of Nike ads - which have since been so carefully co-opted to commercials. These were films where the beautiful - and intellectually and emotionally inexpressive - supermen are deified as what they are, how they perform.

That, it is clearly telegraphed, is what is required to rule. A cult of genetically ordained excellence. And in order for one to rule, there must be others who serve .

The other element that has relevance is the idea of the elite cadre - the special leadership - who stage and guide the tableaux of excellence for the masses and for the ceaseless promotion of its own inevitable victory.

Well now - and while this is just a somewhat relentless seeing through of things it is no joke - you ain't that far from the celebrity era tableaux of X-Factor or Pop Idol my friend.

Physical specimens who are selected to look and appear utterly correct, possessing a certain base of talent, to be refined by members of an elite who promise through their own esoteric arts - echoes again of Himmler's obsession with a mystical genesis for the Aryan dream - to school them in superiority.

Indeed, with its early sequences (again echoes of Nazism) of masses crowding into audition halls, begging, threatening and cajoling the judges to elevate them into a celebrity elite - X Factor is a not-so-subtle message that many are unworthy, only the few will rise and they will only do so if they deliver themselves entirely to the power of this Praetorian elite...

You my find this extrapolation a bit far-fetched or ridiculous - but it comes from one single seed and perhaps the road that takes us from Girls Aloud to Prussian Blue is neither as rocky nor as winding as we'd like to believe.

Great Tableaux of Fascism...

"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carry a cross," Sinclair Lewis once wrote, quite famously.

Indeed. And perhaps it has come wrapped in Chanel, carry a briefing file.

And, by the way, the caption to this extraordinary picture would be:

The secretary of state asserted that progress was being made but declined to rule out widening the war to Syria.

"Oceania is at war with Eurasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia," as another writer once wrote, also quite famously.

"The Complexity of the Game is Endless"

OK, having got my complex thoughts concerning the genesis, meaning and complex implications re: Traitorgate or how the Vice President of the United States may have personally indulged in and executed an act of premeditated treason during a time of war - I believe it is known as 'High Treason' and execution is the punishment - right off of my chest [see previous post] I'd like to bring to your attention a tangential titbit which I gleaned off the interweb today.

Namely this article from Stratfor which analyzes the duties and MO of the CIA's Non Official Cover agents (NOCs): what they do, how they're recruited, trained and operated and why they're the lifeblood of the agency, each one an irreplaceable asset taking literally decades of cultivation.

That's why the willful exposure of an NOC specializing in nuclear proliferation operations was so ironic - in the way a heart attack is ironic. But what struck me quite intensely was the bizarre, rigorous, almost conceptual duplicity (literally, as in living two parallel lives neither one intersecting with the other) with which the NOC must structure their existence:

NOCs come into the program in different ways. Typically, they are recruited at an early age and shaped for the role they are going to play. Some may be tracked to follow China, and trained to be bankers based in Hong Kong. Others might work for an American engineering firm doing work in the Andes. Sometimes companies work with the CIA, knowingly permitting an agent to become an employee. In other circumstances, agents apply for and get jobs in foreign companies and work their way up the ladder, switching jobs as they go, moving closer and closer to a position of knowing the people who know what there is to know. Sometimes they receive financing to open a business in some foreign country, where over the course of their lives, they come to know and be trusted by more and more people. Ideally, the connection of these people to the U.S. intelligence apparatus is invisible. Or, if they can't be invisible due to something in their past and they still have to be used as NOCs, they develop an explanation for what they are doing that is so plausible that the idea that they are working for the CIA is dismissed or regarded as completely unlikely because it is so obvious. The complexity of the game is endless.

These are the true covert operatives of the intelligence world. Embassy personnel might recruit a foreign agent through bribes or blackmail. But at some point, they must sit across from the recruit and show their cards: "I'm from the CIA and...." At that point, they are in the hands of the recruit. A NOC may never once need to do this. He may take decades building up trusting relationships with intelligence sources in which the source never once suspects that he is speaking to the CIA, and the NOC never once gives a hint as to who he actually is.

It is an extraordinary life. On the one hand, NOCs may live well. The Number Two at a Latin American bank cannot be effective living on a U.S. government salary. NOCs get to live the role and frequently, as they climb higher in the target society, they live the good life. On the other hand, their real lives are a mystery to everyone. Frequently, their parents don't know what they really do, nor do their own children -- for their safety and the safety of the mission. The NOC may marry someone who cannot know who they really are. Sometimes they themselves forget who they are: It is an occupational disease and a form of madness. Being the best friend of a man whom you despise, and doing it for 20 years, is not easy. Some NOCs are recruited in mid-life and in mid-career. They spend less time in the madness, but they are less prepared for it as well. NOCs enter and leave the program in different ways -- sometimes under their real names, sometimes under completely fabricated ones. They share one thing: They live a lie on behalf of their country.

[....]

The problem is not recruiting them -- the life sounds cool for many recent college graduates. The crisis of the NOC occurs when he approaches the most valuable years of service, in his late 30s or so. What sounded neat at 22 rapidly becomes a mind-shattering nightmare when their two lives collide at 40.

This job's like a living conceptual puzzle.

A Philip K Dick memory game, a Borgesian mirror life, a Baconian inner hell enshrined in the secret profession of the national security state.

It's like living life as a 3-dimensional chess game, in two personalities, which has a beginning but no mortal end, no rules and no referee. What psychological mind state does one inhabit in this kind of existence?

And when the game has no limits and no separation, once you start - how do you ever see yourself again?

Careful & Studied Thoughts on Traitorgate

There is nothing I can write about the Traitorgate scandal about to burst across the face of Republican governance - sic - like a particularly juicy zit. Well nothing except -

Ha!

Let the Breath of God Fill You!

So I've been hoovering up a bunch of the preview screenings in the London Film Festival recently. And I thought I might share my experiences with you.

The LFF has always been a weird one. A major film festival, in a major city that is quite meaningless. It has no awards (not really) nor market so it has no meaning critically (like Sundance, Berlin, San Sebastian or Venice for example) nor financially (Toronto, Cannes). It is unbelievably broad, there are a vast, quite unwieldy amount of films being shown from all around the world in all different styles, so it doesn't even have the boutique cachet that New York, or Edinburgh for example, possess. And because the amount of British films - most of them documentaries or for TV but bumped to the festival due to a drought of product - barely fit on one double-page (there are twice as many French films on show) it doesn't even have any national significance.

However the festival is always well-attended and broadly caters to a population that loves film. Unfocussed, incoherent, low-impact, poor domestic product, hugely focussed on work from abroad and attended by eager audiences - a fitting festival for the home of the British film industry.

But, I digress. One of the good things about the LFF's wide selection is that you can catch alot of things that you simply wouldn't otherwise see. So I always take the opportunity to do so. So far I've seen 8 films. Only one has been good. And it was very good indeed. But that's not what I want to discuss. I want to discuss one of the bad ones. A very bad one. A silly, prissy, preening little film that falls into a category of bad films I hold a great fondness for: puffed-up pieces of self-important drivel that hold a self-esteem so misplaced that they're actually quite insane.

This film is called 'Bee Season' and it is directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel whose 'Suture' I adore and 'The Deep End' I think is very good indeed. McGehee and Siegel specialize in rigorously conceptual post modern, philosophically aware genre pieces - thrillers and melodrama - which are always executed with great and studied technical elan. The thing about making philosophically aware movies is that when you're on-point, that's great. But if you've misjudged - then you turn in a masterpiece of delusion.

'Bee Season' stars Richard Gere as brilliant professor of the Kabbalah who discovers that his 10 year old daughter has inherited from him a mystical understanding of words that enables her to do very well at spelling bees. Gere's wife is the beautiful-but-troubled Juliet Binoche who is undergoing some sort of mid-life crisis in which she breaks into people's seaview-facing, blue-lit Bay Area homes to steal decorative glassware in order to "build the poetry of light". She ends up getting sectioned. Binoche and Gere's son is Max Minghella who is a rebellious teenager who rebels against his father by getting cruised in the park by devoted Hindu Kate Bosworth and joining the Hare Krishnas. For some reason he does not try to fuck Kate Bosworth which, at the age of 18, would be the only reason why you would let Kate Bosworth take you to an ashram. Unless, of course, you yourself are going through an psychic crisis which playing even your father's recommended violin sonatas cannot solve.

There's a scene early on where the silver-haired Gere - looking like a particularly famed eyeware model in his wire frames and artfully rumpled corduroy jacket - spends 5 minutes pontificating on the Kabbalistic concept of Tikkun to a class of haloed adoring students - and I knew right then something was awry. "Yes, I'm the world's most famous Tibetan buddhist", you could hear Gere explaining to his directors from deep within the Zendo of his Winnebego, "but something about how you've written the spirituality of the Kabbala really speaks to me on a very deep level". ["On a very deep level" is a phrase that will have been used liberally by all involved with the making of this film]. By the time Gere has his secret Kabbalist manual out and is screaming at his daughter "Let the breath of god fill you!" while she enters a mystic trance state surround by beautifully rendered CGI Alephs and origami birds you know you're entering the deep end.

And, of all the actors to be telling beautifully photogenic ten year olds with dew eyes and vaginal beesting lips to "let the breath of god fill you", Richard Gere is one the least appropriate.

Gere's performance is simply extraordinary. It's like he's playing a Ralph Lauren model playing Richard Gere playing a champion Kabbalist who's going through an existential crisis. There are moments in the film where he has to play confused and desperate and comes off like he's ready to get nasty. On the edge of breakdown, trying to understand his wife's poetry-inspired kleptomania he looks like he's about mindtrip her for fucking with his flow. Perhaps Gere's performance is another of Siegel and McGehee's post modern games (I was always half-convinced that Kidman and Cruise's performances in Eyes Wide Shut was just one big parting joke on the star system by Stanley Kubrick) - but I'm not sure if even they are that advanced yet.

The film is an endless kalaidoscope of ridiculously beautiful actors playing 'real people with real - Kabbala induced - problems', magnificently graceful shots, disquisitions on philosophy held over omelette in artfully lit kitchens, Richard Gere crying in his SUV and Kate Bosworth looking like hindi Barbie in diaphanous orange robes and a vacant David Koresh smirk.

It is a film based on a critically aclaimed novel that was both "lyrical" and "magical". It is a fil about the mystical properties of letters that starts with a 5 minute sequence of a helicopter flying the letter 'A' over San Fransisco Bay. It is a film that has Juliet Binoche, sunken eyed and powder pale in the corridor of a mental institution, saying "Words, words, words! That's all you say but... {sotto; tearful; beat} They mean nothing!" And it has a photogenic ten year old girl with vaginal beesting lips suffering an Excorcist-like fit in a hotel room because she read too much of her dad's doctorate on the Kabbala and got hepped-up on the Breath of God.

It is a film of many many properties, none of them magical nor mystical. However, whatever else I may think - I cannot say I didn't enjoy it.

Couldn't Happen to Nicer Guys

That's what I think when I read about all the heap-big-trouble that looms over Karl Rove, 'Scooter' Libby, Tom DeLay, Dick Cheney etc. Indictments, careers and lives about to head toilet-wards, fear, paralysis, back-biting, character destruction, multiple aneurysms on knees.

Couldn't happen to nicer guys.

And I know it's been said before, but it's worth repeating: 'Scooter' is an extremely ill-advised nickname to be taking to a Federal Penitentiary. But, what the hell -

Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.

Temporary Secretary

Travelling the streets of South London this weekend, ferrying furniture in a tanklike Peugeot estate... And I heard a competition on the radio.

They were staging a two-way run-off for the best Paul McCartney (solo) song ever. A head-to-head between Live & Let Die - unutterably brilliant and probably the greatest James Bond title song ever (this does not include the original Monty-Norman-Orchestra-though-almost-certainly-John-Barry Dr No title song which then went on to be the running theme to the series, and also my life, and doesn't count) - and a little-known Macca nugget from the early eighties called Temporary Secretary. So, I immediately call my brother and tell him to listen to XFM and then hang up.

And after the commercial break - Temporary Secretary wins, as I hoped it would, and when it played it was like taking a bite of a sonic Proustian madeleine. You see, when I was but a small one, in that lost continent where the Soviet Union existed, a carbonated soda stream was the height of style and a Big Mac was but a rare exotic treat, my brother and I spent an entire holiday playing this song relentlessly - on an 8-track cassette I do believe. And yes, that's true, not period propping.

With its bizarre-at-the-time-but-now-strangely-fashionable repetetive beats, vocoder harmonising and inane, nonsensical, hypnotically relentless chorus of "temp-orary sec-retary" repeated forever it was.... A perfect children's song. We chanted it at at each other, at our parents, at the television, at the sky, at each other again for an entire Christmas holiday (or was it Spring? I remember it quite wintry, but I dunno) and sent ourselves and everyone around us completely beserk.

And after that, I never heard the song again.

Until Sunday when those strange sensations of nostalgia and memory flooded through me. My brother immediately called back - he was hearing the song for the first time in years as well and almost fell off his bike. And then he went and got the song and sent it today and I started playing it... and playing it... and playing it. And once more that mindless metronomic beat invaded my mind, making me chant 'Temp-orary Sec-retary' again and again and again to myself, the TV, the sky, myself. More than twenty years apart, I was responding to this song exactly as I left it. And so, I started to ruminate - understand this: the octopus is the most metaphysical of inverterbrates - and here is what I thought:

No matter where we go in life, somehow we always find ourselves at the beginning again.

Greatly satisfied by such a poetic, philosophic - and yet also ethereal - mid-afternoon rumination I girded myself for another to take shape. An aphorism, an epigram, a de la Rochefoucaultian bon mot possibly more resonant and meaningful than the last was slowly shaping in my mind. Swelling into form, articulation, cogitation. Taking over the synapses, converting from pure neurone to bio-electrical signal, to spoken word. And it was:

Temp-orary sec-retary.

Smurftown gets Nuked

This is really just an post-script to my previous post. But the picture is so bizarre and astonishing, it deserves a post all its own:



We are truly in the end-days, my friends.

Cartoon Babylon

First, Bert from Sesame Street revealed himself to be an al-Qaeda operative.



Then, Spongebob Squarepants was identified as a dangerous homosexual, grooming young fans to his ways. Now, the Smurfs get bombed to shit to prove a lesson in escalatory global conflict.

When cartoons go bad we must raise our eyes to the skies and gravely ask ourselves:

What is going on, my droogies?

Well, let's step back a moment. The Bert-Osama connection may be a fraud. Another twist in the labyrinthine 'Bert is Evil' conspiracy - if you don't know it, it's sort of a muppet da Vinci Code - and, like Mohammed Atta meeting Iraqi intelligence in Prague, the whole thing was probably a set-up. Spongebob Bob is undoubtedly of indeterminate sexuality - as only a hermaphrodite cartoon sponge with arms and legs can be - but he gets a free pass because his Christian values nemesis is a complete psycho. And the Smurfs..? Well, I don't know.

I always found them a bit creepy.

Who Ya Callin' Infallible?

Well, not the Catholic Church as it turns out. Bishops in England, Scotland and Wales have added some small print to their parishioners understanding of the bible:

The Catholic bishops of England, Wales and Scotland are warning their five million worshippers, as well as any others drawn to the study of scripture, that they should not expect “total accuracy” from the Bible.

“We should not expect to find in Scripture full scientific accuracy or complete historical precision,” they say in The Gift of Scripture.

Would've been good to know that a few hundred years ago. A lot of misunderstanding could have been avoided.

And what's this? The bible's riddled with factual inaccuracies?

Surely not.

Well, for a book in which God appears to undergo a full Katie Holmes-style-Scientology-assisted-personality-transplant between Testaments (paranoid vengeful psycho-dad always breathing down your neck - kill ya son! Go to Canaan! No, wait, don't go to Canaan! - Hang in the desert for 40 years! Why! Why!? WHY!? Because I TELL YA TO!!!!! - turns into ethereal distant presence)... that is none too surprising.

Alternate Universe

Sometimes someone just comes out and says exactly what you're thinking.

It's almost as if America has entered "an alternate universe?"

Al Gore never did much for me when he was a politician. And - like many people - somewhere I blame him for not fighting hard enough in 2000 and allowing what ensued... to ensue.

But he's spoken some pretty sharp truths recently. Pity he had to wait so long to get there.

You May Have Noticed Some Changes

Just autumn refurbishment.

Popcorn Stanley

Finally.... a Kubrick film to warm your heart & laugh to.

"Why that day?"

Are you kidding, for Chrissakes?

No?

Oh.

Welcome to Vladimir Putin's America.

You wha-?

This is funny. It sums up it all up: -

At Valley View, pastors preach that abortion is murder, that the Bible is the literal word of God and that homosexuality is a sin -- although they also preach that God loves everybody.

It begs the question: how do these people go to sleep at night without their heads exploding? Oh, I forgot -

Heavy repression.

The Perfect Storm

The fallout from Hurricane Katrina remains pretty damn bad if you're a poor black welfare recipient from the slums of New Orleans.

If, on the other hand, you're a rich, white Republican in Washington DC - it's looking f***ing great.

First off, not only has an entire Democrat congressional district been likely wiped off the map but also - it looks like it'll finally tilt Louisiana into a hard red state:

If evacuees from the Ninth Ward in New Orleans - a reliable bloc of 30,000 black voters that is traditionally easy to mobilize - choose suburban or rural areas over their urban roots in coming years, it could be a political blow to Democrats, said Roy Fletcher, a political consultant from Shreveport who helped elect former Gov. Mike Foster, a Republican.

"It would give a whole lot of a stronger foothold to Republicans in the Legislature and statewide," Mr. Fletcher said. "Louisiana has always been a swing state, a purple state that's both blue and red. You take the Ninth Ward out of that equation and you get a real shot of Republicans winning statewide office."

Second: all that anarchy and violence the natives got up to in the 5-Day Paralysis after the storm hit? - well, it was mostly lies:

....The picture that emerged was one of the impoverished, masses of flood victims resorting to utter depravity, randomly attacking each other, as well as the police trying to protect them and the rescue workers trying to save them. [Mayor Ray] Nagin told [Oprah] Winfrey the crowd has descended to an "almost animalistic state."

...

"I think 99 percent of it is bulls---," said Sgt. 1st Class Jason Lachney, who played a key role in security and humanitarian work inside the Dome. "Don't get me wrong, bad things happened, but I didn't see any killing and raping and cutting of throats or anything....Ninety-nine percent of the people in the Dome were very well-behaved."

But useful lies indeed. Lies that stoked up the worst of human prejudices - fear, mistrust and racial hatred. Lies that helped create a climate in which the military was seen as the only solution.

Lies which have made it easier, indeed preferable, to erode ancient laws protecting the Republic from martial law:

The active duty military is currently forbidden from undertaking law enforcement duties by the federal Posse Comitatus Act.

That law, passed in 1878 after the U.S. Civil War, does not prohibit National Guard troops under state control from doing police work. But, unless the law is changed, it would keep them from doing so in the Gulf region, Bush had asked Congress to consider giving the military control over initial response in dealing with major natural or other domestic disasters.

Of course, Katrina was just a one-off. A 'perfect storm' of massive government incompetency (and as for those levees that should have withstood the storm - let's not even go there) and 10,000 atomic bomb's worth of natural energy slamming into the Gulf Coast.

Well, maybe. And maybe the government wasn't so clueless after all...

White House and homeland security officials wouldn't explain why [Department of Homeland Security Director] Chertoff waited some 36 hours to declare Katrina an incident of national significance and why he didn't immediately begin to direct the federal response from the moment on Aug. 27 when the National Hurricane Center predicted that Katrina would strike the Gulf Coast with catastrophic force in 48 hours. Nor would they explain why Bush felt the need to appoint a separate task force.

Chertoff's hesitation and Bush's creation of a task force both appear to contradict the National Response Plan and previous presidential directives that specify what the secretary of homeland security is assigned to do without further presidential orders.

...

The Department of Homeland Security has refused repeated requests to provide details about Chertoff's schedule and said it couldn't say specifically when the department requested assistance from the military. Knocke said a military liaison was working with FEMA, but said he didn't know his or her name or rank. FEMA officials said they wouldn't provide information about the liaison.

And maybe Katrina wasn't so much a one-off. More like a foundation stone. A way to maximize the potential for catastrophe-level events likely to come:

President George W. Bush asked Congress on Tuesday to consider giving him powers to use the military to enforce quarantines in case of an avian influenza epidemic.

And if you really want to screw with your mind then you can contemplate the possibility that all of this is another move closer to an grim dystopian end-game in which dark powers beyond our ken are plotting to deplete the world of its population and revert us to a pre-feudal slave state.

But that's a conspiracy theory.

So lets just leave it that they're all Keystone Kops and this is coincidence. A fortunate $200 billion, no-bid, profit-enabled buddy's dividend to their absent-minded dithering.

OK then, and good enough. Feeling better already.

Audio-geddon

George Bush sings Imagine, der Governator mix-mash & other bloc rockin beats.

Check it out.

Full Fat

Sometime soon, this has got to hurt.

Absolute

I am not a Neo-Conservative. I am not a theocrat. I am not a moral absolutist. I am not a party ideologue. I do not see things in fundamentals. I do not see the world in black and white. And it is rare that I am able to honestly speak with granite certainty. So when I get the chance to do so, I seize it:

I will never see this film.

Autumnal Ruin

The one known as The Doctor has replied to my last post. And his words, as always, got me to cogitating.

I found myself thinking about those three defining political figures of the 80s - Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev - their legacy and their fates.

In their time, they were supreme. An electronic age that pre-dated the digital, they were televisual figures. We remember them as kind of monumental MCs hosting their vast assemblies - party conferences, ideological conventions, May Day parades - bathed in the honeyed electronic tint of mid-era video tape.

And then they left the stage - all three vanished into a kind of melancholic disintergration. Reagan, as the Doctor says, became a recluse, imprisoned in the cage of his own dementia. Thatcher, so rudely defenestrated by men she'd made, lurched further into vicious meddling that helped cripple her party and then she crumbled away, eroded by drink, physical and mental frailty, the death of her beloved husband, the ruin and humiliation of the no-good son she doted upon. And Gorbachev has dissolved into insignificance, despised and finally forgotten by his own people.

What strange metaphors, what strange ends. Figures who thrived in the cheap glamour of a brash, insolent age, they end their years in dicrepit solitude. Forgotten, humiliated, unspeaking and unheard.

You look at Thatcher and Gorbachev now, the absent shadow that was Reagan - demented, kept hidden for a decade in the grounds of his Californian mansion - and you see empty shells, people whose insides have been scooped out like a cantaloupe. They're like symbolic figures from some dark, overwhelming art film - Siberberg, Tarr or Sokhurov - shuffling befuddled into the fading light.

I wonder... was this always their fate?

Evidence is sought from her

They say that in the twilight of Sir Edward Heath's life his single desire was to stay alive just long enough to attend Margaret Thatcher's funeral.

Fate decreed differently. But far more distressing for Sir Edward must be the fact that he won't be around to see her apprehension on corruption charges and the final, lasting violation of her and her family's name:

Disclosing that US authorities were seeking aid from UK counterparts, a secret Home Office briefing says: "One visit to the UK involved a meeting with Mrs Margaret Thatcher.

"Evidence is sought from her about that meeting and her involvement in the alleged deception and violation of US criminal laws."

...

The revelations will be a body-blow to Lady Thatcher's reputation and dash Tory morale on the opening day of its crucial party conference.

If Lady Thatcher is found to have been involved in the alleged scam she could face a criminal probe in the US or even be banned from travelling to the country.

The investigation that has speckled the Iron Lady's surface with such acidic rust marks is Tom DeLay's indictment in Texas for what is effectively money laundering. This is linked to some pretty heavy charges against Republican super-lobbyist Jack Abramoff, ex-Christian Coalition boy-wonder Ralph Reed and many many others. It is a side-effect of the putsch with which the cro-magnon conservative movement took final, ultimate control of where the money goes:

In 2003, the Republican National Committee could claim that 33 of the top 36 top-level K Street positions were in Republican hands. Today, it's even closer to a clean sweep.

Corporations get their rewards. The oil and gas industry now gives 80 per cent of its campaign cash to Republicans (20 years ago, the split was roughly 50-50), and influence on this year's energy bill was a classic sting. American petrol can now contain a suspected carcinogen; operators of US natural-gas wells can contaminate water aquifers to improve the yields from the wells; the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is open to oil exploration - concessions all created by DeLay's inside track. And to provide ideological juice, there's a bevy of think-tanks, paid for from the same web of contributions, cranking out the justification that the 'state' and 'regulation' are everywhere and always wrong.

And this comes in conjunction with the Valerie Plame 'Traitorgate' proceedings, which is inseparable from the real reasons we went to war in Iraq which brings us to 9/11, the 2000 Florida election fraud and I think in some not-so-distant-way-at-all held together in a web of.... well of many things. Things that would blow our minds. But for now I'll crib from New Order: 'Power, Corruption and Lies'.

If this stuff is exposed, allowed to be exposed, then there will some kind of god-awful unravelling. I want to revel in the collapse. In seeing such a hateful pack of sewer snakes getting their just deserts, but it won't be a time of celebration. Not when we find out what has been done, what - somnambulantly - we have allowed to be done and the lengths to which these people are ready to go in order to survive.

How odd that Margaret Thatcher's final note, that coveted 'place in history' may be as peripheral roadkill. An ironic postscript to the great meltdown of the movement she once led triumphant in a time that now seems so distant.

Fear

Joanna Bourke's piece about the politics of fear in the West was interesting -

In the new conflicts of the 21st century - conducted by global terrorists, who possess contradictory and unrealistic political goals - a new paradigm of resistance is needed. The great paradox of this new form of warfare is that our survival depends as much upon our response to our own political leaders as on our response to the terrorists themselves.