The Spotify Playlist

Phonetics

When I was working at the Royal Bank of Scotland, part of the training ritual was to learn this phonetic alphabet so that we'd have a standard, professional way of reading letters back to customers, instead of 'P for Peter, H for Harry, O for Orange' etc. I used to know it backwards, but it seems my brain has since decided it was important to replace portions of that information to make way for the lyrics to Lily Allen's The Fear (here it is sung by The Siberian Chipmunks). Or like whatever. Anyway, in an attempt to relearn what I have learned I've put together this playlist.

a personal vision is self-indulgent

Film At about 3:15 this afternoon, I finally pulled the coat that had been sitting in my lap for two hours over my head as the room swelled with jingly-jangly music and I sat in my own personal darkness trying to gather my thought processes back into a state which would allow me to stand up, put on said coat, pick up my back pack and make my way out of the cinema. The credits were rolling on Charlie Kaufman’s new(ish) film Synecdoche, New York and I simply didn’t know what to do with myself. I was elated, pleased, excited and knew two things. That I couldn’t wait to see it again and again and also that I was looking forward to reading the inevitable film theory spin-offs.

Reviewers have been desperate to label the film a ‘masterpiece’ but none of writing I’ve seen has noted the film’s debt to the great auteurs, giants like Tarkovsky, Bunuel, Resnais, Fellini and Tati, directors who treated their audience with intelligence and respect with work in which ideas took precedence over explaining the plot and offered a visual contract that asked us to use our own imagination and personal experience to explain the order of events and character motivations. Like Kaufman, they’ve also been accused of self-indulgence which isn’t necessarily incorrect; but everyone with a personal vision is self-indulgent and more often than not the really interesting, surprising work comes when that vision hasn’t been compromised.

Many of the films of those directors have moments in which the viewer finds their understanding being stretched, which probably require a pause to check some director’s notes. Synecdoche is replete with such incidents, though like those films too, the ideas and themes coalesce afterwards as they did for me on the train home. That if we’re not all careful we can all find ourselves in a state of recursion trying to recreate the times when we truly comfortable rather than creating something new, a constant state of discontentedness that leads us to miss the moments when we actually should be contented. I'm growing my hair longer again because I remember being happier when I had longer hair. That sort of thing. Or we become afraid of taking risks in case that contentedness is wrecked, leading to a kind of emotional paralysis.

Nothing appears at Google Scholar yet. There’s the fittingly titled, “Debating Inclusion in Synecdoche, New York: A Response to Gresham and MacMillan” which is about “the comparative development of socialization skills in children with disabilities placed in inclusive or non-inclusive educational programs” but these things take time, critical mass must build, the film is too new. In interviews, Kaufman has said that he only wants to create films which lead to at least one conversation afterwards and he must have succeeded; for years to come I suspect, people will be debating the meaning of the work, from its structure to themes to meaning and not just in film classes, but psychonalysis courses. And mathematics labs too.

geocities rescue

Female Vocalism

A couple of years ago I was filtering through my CD collection working out what I would end up selling at Vinyl Exchange. I realised that other than film soundtracks and compilations, all I seemed to have was the work of female vocalists and particularly, obscure female vocalists. The list reads like a ‘who’s who’ of ‘who the hell’ . . . odd thing is how many actually have official web sites.

The only the conclusion I can come to as to why I’ve less Travis and more Tori Amos is reality. Other than this new wave of bands, your Semisonics and Stereophonics, male writers tend to write about the fantasy of a situation whereas your average angry grrrl will offer the reality.

It’s the on-going contrast between the shutdown emotions of the male and the open feelings of the female. Looking at the male members of my music collection I begin to see a trend. Bob Dylan, REM, Hootie and the Blowfish and The Devlins tend to write about their feelings, certainly more than the Bryan (I was twelve in 1969) Adams’ of this worlds.

Plus there is definitely a lot more expression in the voice of the average Lisa Loeb. In a female vocal track, there is more likely to be that heartbreaking note which scares the bejesus out of you.

Discuss . . .

Joseph Goebbels was, well not a fan exactly

Film One of the best elements of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca was the serpent-like performance of supporting actor George Sanders as an old friend of the old Mrs De Winter and he was back again for Hitch’s other film of 1940, Foreign Correspondent, this time as an altogether more charming British newspaperman who helps the lead character, Joel McCrea the foreign correspondent, to his story about the assassination of a foreign diplomat at the edge of the second world war. Their banter is definitely one of the highlights, and it’s a shame that Hitch wasn’t interested in franchises since a whole series could have spun off about these two men travelling the world chasing down exclusives as war crashes about around them with Laraine Day constantly on their tale ready to pull them back from the edge.

In his book on film genre, Film/Genre, theorist Rick Altman talks about how films, in an effort to appeal to as wide a market as possible can no longer be pigeon-holed in the old Hollywood tradition -- western, gangster, screwball, woman's film and in an attempt to appeal to as wide an audience as possible blend them together. Hitch was ahead of the game here as well, since Foreign Correspondent was already doing much the same thing forty years early. Within its two hours, Hitch manages to drop in elements of newspaper films, spy dramas, romantic comedy, war films, noir, travelogue, political thriller and even a disaster movie and so cunningly that it doesn’t draw attention to itself in the same way as, for example, From Dusk Till Dawn which very specifically wanted its audience to know it was incoherently slipping into a different genre mid-stream (and arguably becoming a better film in the process).

He even managed to attract the very enemy he was working against. Joseph Goebbels was, well not a fan exactly but enamoured enough to call it a masterpiece of the form, “a first-class production which no doubt will make a certain impression upon the broad masses of the people in enemy countries.” What Goebbels might have been picking up on is that Hitch is careful not to portray the enemy within the film in completely black and white terms -- in at least one case we're clearly supposed to have a sympathetic reaction because the man is defending his country just as McCrea and Sanders are defending theres. They commit despicable crimes yet we find ourselves readily identifying ourselves with them and Hitch is demonstrating that there's nothing scarier than an enemy hiding in plain sight who we probably quite like.

misdealings

Politics David Bartlett from the Liverpool Daily Post has an excellent piece about the expenses scandal:

"Being an MP should be a privilege, it is not a right. Yet some of these MPs have behaved like they had a divine right not only to hold office but to also pretty much fleece the taxpayer with complete impunity. They have spent months trying to keep these claims secret, secret from the very people that put them into their positions of privilege and pay the taxes that pay their wages and their expenses. Do I think all MPs are bent or on the make? No, but enough of them have abused the system to taint them all and our parliament."

I just feel sorry for the few MPs that genuinely did nothing wrong, have worked hard for their constituents and are now being tarred with the same brush. And the people who work for the MPs that have done something wrong and are having to cope with the public reaction to their manager's misdealings. At this point it's difficult to see how we can trust the people who represent us again.

starring

Film Mega Shark vs Giant Octopus:



... starring Debbie Gibson. And Kroll.

presumed excuse

Games If Adam Curtis (Power of Nightmares, The Trap) ever decided to make a documentary about Massively multiplayer online games, the script might read like this:

"When City of Heroes released its user-created mission generator, it was mere hours before highly exploitative missions existed. Players quickly found the way to min-max the system, and started making quests that gave huge rewards for little effort. These are by far the most popular missions. Actually, from what I can tell, they are nearly the only missions that get used. Aside from a few “developer’s favorite” quests, it’s very hard to find the “fun but not exploitative” missions, because they get rated poorly by users and disappear into the miasma of mediocrity."

The presumed excuse of it being within the rules seems a bit shop-worn these days. [via]

Star Trek is ridiculously entertaining.

Film Star Trek is ridiculously entertaining.

Given that nearly everyone seems to have seen the film (if you haven’t yet I’d stop reading now, spoilers ahead) and a percentage of them have written reviews, it seems a bit pointless to trot out the usual stuff about how well cast everyone is, how well directed the action sequences are and how the only thing wrong with it is that we have to wait so long for the next adventure. It somehow manages to divine the magical essence of the original series and movies, oxidise them and create something new but completely within the spirit, a conical reboot. I laughed, I cried, I gasped, I spent most of the running time saying “I can’t believe they just did that…” under my breath.

What particularly interested me given my usual franchise predilection was how time travel would be dealt with by screenwriters Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman. Across the decades, Star Trek’s approach to time travel and parallel worlds has been fairly strict; in most of these kinds of episodes it’s accepted that we’re watching one particular timeline and such stories are mostly about the crew figuring out what disruption has been made and then go about the process of making right what once went wrong. So in City On The Edge of Forever, Kirk finds that he has to let Edith Keeler die; Yesterday’s Enterprise is about convincing the captain of the Enterprise-C to take her ship back to were it came from to end civil war; Star Trek: First Contact is about making sure the first warp ship launches on schedule. Enterprise’s main plot arc was about stopping the Xindi’s plans to make the future their own.

On initial inspection, the film would seem to conform to that idea; when Nero breaks into the past and kills Kirk’s father, it looks as though forty years worth of continuity has been chucked out of an airlock, ironically with the exception of the underrated Enterprise which is referenced in there somewhere. But I it isn’t that simple. Cleverly, in franchise terms, what Orci & Kurtman have done is change just slightly how time travel works in their universe by introducing a measure of one of the series little used reality benders, alternate realities. Star Trek hasn’t much dealt with parallel worlds, timelines running concurrently with our (their) own. Basically it’s the hokey old mirror universe or that Next Generation episode, Parallels, in which Worf does indeed travel between realities like the main character in the rubbish Jet Lee film The One, visiting a variety of different universes including one in which Wesley is the tactical officer of the Enterprise-D.

As they explain in this interview without naming names, the writers are essentially using the approach to time travel postulated by physicist David Deutsh to cope with the grandfather paradox. My understanding of what Deutsh suggests that if someone took the decision to travel back in time to kill their own grandfather, what they’d unconsciously succeed in doing is not only travelling in time but also creating an alternate reality in which such murder would be possible allowing for them to continue to exist afterwards. Here, when Nero and Spock pass through the temporal anomaly they’re not just travelling backwards in time, but also space, with the latter pitching up twenty-odd years after the former has set to work. What that would mean is that the Star Trek universe we’ve been watching for forty years still exists and carries on after the destruction of Romulus into the future that Daniels, the Xindi and the timeship Relativity missing one mining ship and a Vulcan Ambassador.

Some reviewers have been sniffy and said, well, it’s action packed but it doesn’t have the thematic depth of the Roddenberry sourced version. Rubbish. The film wrestles with the very theme which has been fundamental to the whole franchise; identity and what makes us human. On a more visible level there’s the eternal struggle between Spock’s Vulcan and human natures where his home planet is, but beneath that, the time travel elements allow us to see what of these characters changes when one of more elements of their biography are interfered with and what doesn’t. As say themselves, in changing history Nero has changed them and so can't predict what their choices will be. Kirk seems more reckless here than in the prime timeline – is that because of the death of his father; how does the death of his mother and home planet effect Spock’s approach to life and how come McCoy hasn’t change a bit (including the casual racism)? Does this mean that Uhura’s first name is finally officially Nyota not Penda or Samara or are they her middle names?

topping up your own already generous packet

Politics I've been enjoying the ongoing scandal about MPs expenses. It's a perfect opportunity to continue one of my favourite hobbies of shouting at the radio as elected representative after elected representative gives a statement in which they're entirely oblivious as to why we're pissed off with them.

Typical example, Cheryl Gillan, MP for the Chalfonts, Chesham and Amersham:

"The boiler broke down in the flat which I use exclusively for overnight stays when I am working on parliamentary business. In order for me to have central heating and hot water a plumber repaired the boiler. This is within the rules."

As though this is a legitimate excuse. It's unfair to single you out, but you and your colleagues have used tax payer money to pay for things which the rest of us have to fund from our own salary, effectively topping up your own already generous packet.

Here, we pay a maintenance allowance so that when our boiler packs in we can have someone visit with their apprentice (always two there are) and hit it or press a button or whatever they do. We don't then put the receipt in wherever we work and claim it on expenses. Where I work, I can't claim anything on expenses. Perhaps next time I should send it to one of these MPs, since they seem very pleased to use our money in the same way.

This parliamentary reputational clusterfuck spins onward at Google News. I don't remember a scandal like this having happened before which has effectively halted the business of government for days. That bit I'm not enjoying. The problem is that as the MPs constantly repeat that what they did was within the rules, then in the next breath say that the rules should be changed, the more desperate they seem and even less like the kinds of people you'd want running a country with our problems. Infighting has broken out now which only increases my feeling of hopelessness.

We've not heard about the Lib Dems yet. I'm not looking forward to that.

Update: Having followed this increasingly confusing story for a bit longer I'm now wondering if it was wrong for Cheryl Gillan, MP for the Chalfonts, Chesham and Amersham to claim for the boiler repair on expenses. If these are the 'digs' she has to have in London away from her proper home in her constituency and the rules did state that is was ok to claim for that on her expenses it doesn't seem that much different to a student having a maintenance grant for their college accommodation (well, before they were largely abolished). But at this point I really don't know. Which is why I try to never write about politics.

a semi-staged production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

Shakespeare Last night, the BBC broadcast one of its best pieces of arts television this year, though most people are unlikely to have heard it was on, let alone seen it. As part of Radio 3’s Mendelssohn weekend, the digital red button service simulcast a semi-staged production of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream featuring the composer’s music, specially recorded in the lush environments of the Middle Temple Hall in London and featuring the Ladies' Choir of the Enlightenment, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and a fantastic cast who’ve been touring the show for years, including Australia.

Lucky for you, the BBC have put the performance up on their website and it’s a couple of hours well spent, helpfully chopped up into acts, in case you don't have the time to see it all at once. If you are thinking about watching it, I’d stop reading here, because it’s one of those experiences which is best visited unaware with all of the surprises intact. This is the good version of radio on television, and an absolute treat, just the thing to cheer me up after the rotten week I’ve had full of cold (the reason I’ve not been around these parts apart from the pre-prepared regulars).

I was weary. ‘Semi-staged’ suggests that like opera, we’d simply get a reading of the play from some actors sitting at front of the stage with copy books, filling in the text between the music. Sure enough, just before the orchestra begins, Martin Turner and Melanie Jessop stroll on and as the opening overture ends, they stand and begin to read opening scene between Theseus and Hippolyta with little sense of the meaning of what’s being said, bit of mugging. I’m disappointed and thinking about simply recording the rest of it so that I can skip to the music. But I know Egeus is due to make his entrance and I’m interested to see how they handle it.

The way the handle it is the reason I was still watching two and half hours later. When his moment arrives, at the back of the stage, behind the orchestra, another actor pops up and he’s playing Egeus, there’s an audible sigh of relief from the audience. Turner continues from his copybook for a bit then, when he finds himself emphasising a point, irascibly puts it down and continues with the business of acting and soon a full scale production is in flow, with the performers appearing from within the orchestra which then provides the backdrop for the show, the wood near Athens, with the musicians and joining in with the action, with Charles Hazlewood Charles Hazlewood (sporting the beard he presumably grows when it’s the Proms off season) even getting a line.

The rest of the performance is like that, constantly subverting expectations, and part of the fun is watching them cope with the some of the requirements of the play in a venue that should be relatively hostile in terms of environment to this kind of work. I can’t help marvelling at the way that some of the actors are able to double or even triple up as nobles, players and fairies and have us emotionally invest in all of the characters. At one point, I even thought I saw Elena Pavli who plays Hermia, Peter Quince and the First Fairy appearing as two of them in the same scene. It’s great too to see a piece of drama that relies on the audience’s imagination, to be able to tell when an actor has gone from noble to supernatural figure when they’ve turned on the fairy light they have stuck to their dinner jacket.

Hearing Mendelssohn's themes in context is a revelatory experience which as it fades almost seems to bring with it the night and the magical setting of the play, the final pulse of the flutes. The bit that everyone knows, the wedding march, is extraordinary in this full orchestral version, as potent at the Ode To Joy and about as celebratory as music can be. I love the way it’s employed here too, as the moment when Bottom comes out of his reverie, a fully formed human again, perhaps remembering his night with the fairy queen wondering if it was a dream. John Paul Connolly’s bedecked in a Domino’s Pizza uniform seems to be genuinely enjoying himself which means that we do to.

The Spotify Playlist

Star Trek

When I was at college, a friend and I wondered what minimalist Star Trek would look like. We decided that nothing very much would happen and it wouldn’t happen over the course of an hour.

The episode opens with a shot of a barren landscape, nothing but a sandy floor stretching for miles (or at least the edges of the studio set with their force perspective hills that didn't really work) and a dark night sky (or backdrop with stars projected on it).

After a few seconds, Kirk beams in, phaser outstretched. We cut to close-up. His eyes darting backwards and forwards in alarm as he realises he’s can’t move. After a few seconds and some dramatic music, cut to titles.

Back from titles and Kirk still can’t move, his eyes still looking about, but every few seconds we can see that they’re repeating the same motion we saw in the teaser.

Spock beams in opposite him, tricorder held aloft. He too is paralysed and can’t move.

“Spock!” Kirk shouts in surprise.
“Captain --” Spock replies as though he’s about to say something important.
“Spock!” Kirk shouts in surprise.
“Captain --” Spock replies as though he’s about to say something important.
“Spock!” Kirk shouts in surprise.
“Captain --” Spock replies as though he’s about to say something important.

And they’re both caught in the time loop and as we cut back and forth between them, the only thing that changes is the star field behind with imperceptibly moves. This continues for about five minutes, dramatic music, cut to commercials.

Back from commercials:

“Spock!” Kirk shouts in surprise.
“Captain --” Spock replies as though he’s about to say something important.
“Spock!” Kirk shouts in surprise.
“Captain --” Spock replies as though he’s about to say something important.

For a bit. Then Dr. McCoy beams in next to the both of them.

“Bones?” Kirk asks.
“Jim –-“ McCoy replies as though he’s about to say something important.
“Doctor?” Spock asks.
“Spock –-“ McCoy replies as though he’s about to say something else important.
“Bones?” Kirk asks.
“Jim –-“ McCoy replies as though he’s about to say something important.
“Doctor?” Spock asks.
“Spock –-“ McCoy replies as though he’s about to say something else important.

Now all three of them are stuck in the time loop, but the events have changed now that McCoy is there. Dramatic music, cut to commercials.

Back from commercials and the scene is, as you’d expect, much the same.

“Bones?” Kirk asks.
“Jim –-“ McCoy replies as though he’s about to say something important.
“Doctor?” Spock asks.
“Spock –-“ McCoy replies as though he’s about to say something else important.
“Bones?” Kirk asks.
“Jim –-“ McCoy replies as though he’s about to say something important.
“Doctor?” Spock asks.
“Spock –-“ McCoy replies as though he’s about to say something else important.

Which carries on for longer this time.

A Klingon beams in. He looks fierce and has a disrupter pointed directly at the three of them. The party look startled. Dramatic music, commercials.

Back from commercials.

The party look startled.
The party look startled.
The party look startled.

Then we see that that Klingon is inching forward slowly and that Spock is moving towards him and that Kirk is reaching for his communicator but that it's all in slow motion. Each time someone beams in the time loop is extended and with the fourth man it's breaking completely.

Kirk is able to hold the communicator to his mouth.

“Scotty?”

Jim, Spock and Bones are beamed away leaving the Klingon alone in the landscape. He’s startled. And because he’s the only one left, the time loop has returned to the way it was when Kirk originally beamed in. Which means…

He’s startled.
He’s startled.
He’s startled.

For the rest of eternity or his ship mates find a way to get him back.

Cut to credits.

Well, I'd watch that. Wouldn't you?

"Gosh! 2009 was the year of Milk and Benjamin Button! Wow. I mean wow."

Film Alfred Hitchcock reaches The States, signing a seven year deal to work under David O. Selznick and though he’s now essentially working within what amounts to a huger, more oppressive version of the studio system he was used to back home, Selznick gives him far greater latitude and flexibility with the material. Which makes it all the more perverse that his first film, like the disappointing Jamaica Inn, is based on a Daphne Du Maurier novel and set in Cornwall, with British leads in Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier.

Rebecca is the deceased wife of Olivier whom his new wife Joan Fontaine finds impossible to live up to. The couple meet and marry in Monte Carlo and Fontaine follows him to the old estate, Manderley, were everything is still arranged as Rebecca expected and the adversarially witchy housekeeper Mrs. Danvers maintains (the house keeper is played with carefully subsumed mania by Judith Anderson who would end her career first playing the Vulcan High Priestess in Star Trek III then four years in Santa Barbara). Slowly it becomes apparent that tragedy stalks the house and there’s nothing that Fontaine can do to stop it as the dead woman's lifestyle slowly subsumes her and threatens to drown her own personality.

Rebecca is technically a step up again from his Gaumont period just as The 39 Steps showed an improvement from British International Pictures. So much of an improvement in fact, that it won Best Picture at the Oscars the following year and garnered nominations in almost every category (it wasn’t a short or in a foreign language!). He lost out to John Ford for The Grapes of Wrath. It was that kind of year. I can't imagine future cineaste looking back at the list of films under consideration this year with quite the same awe. "Gosh! 2009 was the year of Milk and Benjamin Button! Wow. I mean wow." Nope, not going to happen.

Back at this film, Hitch is clearly revelling in the larger budget and so, though this is a far more domestic piece than something like The Lady Vanishes, it has a much greater sense of scale and extraordinarily impressive photography from the great George Barnes (who won the film’s other Oscar). There are shots which still influence filmmakers now particular the moment when the curtain’s are drawn back in Rebecca’s room and daylight floods in for the first time in a year.

Hitch is so control of style and form in fact that he’s able to conjure Rebecca into a rounded being through that photography, plus editing, music and the performances of the other actors to the point that she’s as vivid the viewer’s imagination as the characters on screen. In one scene the camera is tilted backwards and forwards to reveal the movements the woman made in the past, as though an actress is still in shot. Perhaps she’s played by The Lady Vanishes’ Margaret Lockwood with some of her bite from The Wicked Lady.

I was surprised by how closely the film follows Kirsten Thompson's four act structure with each of the turning points worked around Fontaine's discovery of who her predecessor was. At first turning point Fontaine reaches Mandalay, next she enters her predecessor's room and at the next she discovers the truth about the woman she's replaced and each happens at just over half hour intervals until she almost drops from the plot as the focus changes to the investigation into exactly how Rebecca died.

And once the secrets are revealed, you want to go back and watch the film again with this new perspective, something that is rare of films from the period. If nothing else it means you can scrutinise Larry superb 'tache some more and wonder at the way that Anderson seems to drift through scenes like a ninja, almost popping up on queue to give Fontaine a disapproving look. Mrs Danvers was played by Diana Rigg in the 90s tv version of the book and I can't imagine she had quite the same austerity (though you can bet I'll be seeking the dvd to have a look).

geocities rescue

Lost Souls

There is something gut wrenching about the cancellation of a favourite television show, especially a drama. Over the period of broadcast the viewer invests a certain emotion interest in the lives of the characters. So when these characters are left in the middle of story arcs or plotlines we are denied something which he rightly expect in real life. Closure. One show in particular was a particular pain.

For some reason I keep coming back to ‘My So-Called Life’. Every year I get the shows out and watch them again. Every year I see new things. I understand more. I'm twenty-six now. What's going on?

When you're a teenager, and you have those problems, and you know your friends will make fun of you if you tell them, you look to film, music and TV for answers. Living in England, honest to goodness teen shows were pretty thin on the ground. There's 'Byker Grove', 'Grange Hill' and hints of 'HollyOaks' and that's about it. The trouble is that none of them quite has the audacity or time slot to cut to the heart of what its actually like to be a teenager. Most of the time you have to look to US shows like 'Dawson's Creek' or 'Buffy'. But standing above them all was 'My So-called Life' a television programme that answered all of our questions. When the show was transmitted on our Channel 4 in 1995 it was stupidly popular.

No one had seen anything like this. Suddenly you knew what to do about that older boy or girl you fancy. Or if you have feelings for the girl next door. Or if you weren't sure about your sexuality. Or of someone loved you but you couldn't return their feelings. Or if you got handcuffed to a bed. Your heart was broken by it week after week, but you came back before because you knew it was doing you good. A free hour of therapy with what amounted to being your friends.

Even if you didn't want to admit it, you were one of them. You were Rayanne Graffe, afraid of the world and overcompensating. Sharon Cherski, searching for your own identity beneath the expectations of others. You were Ricki Vasquez unsure who you were but quietly finding an equilibrium. You were Jordan Catalano torn between your friends and something else. You were Brian Krakow, the romantic with so many high expectations of people. You were Danielle Chase, always being kicked out of different rooms. You were Patty Chase fighting to keep your family together. You were Graham Chase fighting to keep yourself together. And you were always Angela, your world falling apart around you, every choice being wrong, every moment a battle, but somehow slowly working it all out.

Then, after nineteen episodes, it was gone. Replaced, I believe, by a rerun of 'Matlock'. The show should never have been cancelled. It wasn't fair goddam it. And not on that cliffhanger. But perhaps it had the right end. The perfect ending. The only ending this show could have had. Making a choice then watching in pain the road not travelled. So like life. So-called Life.

This year we would have had its sixth season (this was written in 2000 -- the older version of me). All of the contracts would have been up for renewal. The teenagers would have been twenty something. Characters would have gone, new characters brought in. The writing teams change. But it would not have been the same show.

The show I keep coming back to.

knowledgeable (geeky)

TV Because I know you love me talking about Doctor Who all of the sodding time, I thought I'd post this fabulously knowledgeable (geeky) lightly coherent comment I've just written to appear under MaryAnn's latest legacy review:

The End of the World is where the series really began and I can still remember my reaction to that speech. Gut-wrenching. The Doctor in the old series simply didn't talk like that and though there had been similar since in the spin-off media, this was the first time we'd heard him really talk about his feelings in such a bald way on screen (with the odd exception during the Hartnell era).

But it's the content too, the hints of what may have happened between the last time we saw him and now whether you believe that to be the end of the novels, comic books, audio series or TV Movie and whether you even believe it was the Eighth Doctor who was in the time war. It's not something which has ever been established on screen, just a general assumption that he must have regenerated as a result of something that happened during the time war, the destruction of Gallifrey presumably.

Author Lance Parkin's suggestion is that it's the same event from the novels seen from different points of view something he elaborated on in his recent Tenth Doctor novel The Eyeless which features a moment in which the timelord reflects back on the time war and the description of his home planet being snuffed out replicates what's said in The Ancestor Cell. The Eyeless is replete with these subliminal reference to the EDAs, for example the origin of the weapon.

Personally I'd rather not know what happened during the Time War because nothing which happens on screen could be exciting as the version going on in our heads. I remember with affection the years in which I could only dream about the content of The Clone Wars and the crushing disappointment when I found out the clones where all just Boba Fett's dad over and over and over again.

If we were to see Eighth again I'd much rather in a multiple Doctor story and from early within his own timeline, way before the time war with the post-Gallifreyan destruction Doctor unable to tell him about his future, demonstrate once again that he has the web of time in his hands and demonstrating to whoever his companion is the gravity of trying to change time -- look I can't even use it to save my own planet. Though depending on who you talk to, the Doctor's subliminally aware of both his past and future but the convenient victim (for the purposes of drama) of a deep case of selective memory.

Hands up anyone else who understood that...

100 Things About Me

Yo! Sushi, originally uploaded by jpundt79.

82: I don't eat fish. Much.

I can’t stand fish. The smell, the texture, the idea. I’ll watch cookery programmes and marvel at the cookery process, the choice of flavours, the philosophy, but can’t imagine why I would put it in my mouth, least of having dealt with possible bones. It wasn’t always this way – I used to love prawn and crab and salmon. But somewhere in my late tweens, something psychological happened and the closest I’ll get to a cod now is if it's covered in batter and nestling next to some chips as far away from its natural form and shape as possible (even though sometimes it gives me the trots) (you weren’t expecting me to say that where you?).

Which should make a visit to Yo! Sushi an insane idea. All of that raw fish. But I like the novelty of the little plates passing by on a conveyor belt and my Dad wanted to see what it was like. I think I might have disillusioned him slightly when I explained that it wasn’t a Japanese company but set up by a British entrepreneur in the late nineties after a visit to Tokyo. Since then it has gone global, though no restaurants have been set up in Japan. I wonder what that would be like, coals to Newcastle I suppose, Café Nerro pitching up in Seattle or Pizza/Pasta Hut in Italy.

When I last visited, at a Selfridge's somewhere, the only alternative was to vegetable, but by now the slogan ‘more than just sushi’ has been added to the window and I was thankful to see that various types of poultry and meat have been added to the mebu which might feel like cheating to a weary visitor but from a business perspective means they can attract a wider crowd of cheater. They've also added a big red button to the table to press for service which saves on trying to attract someone’s attention. I’m not sure how the staff know they’re needed. Perhaps an implant is added to the brain during the induction.

It must be one of the more difficult places for staff to work. Apart from the beck and call button, they have to work in front of the public as we scrutinise their every move even when they make a mistake. It’s fascinating to watch the meals prepared though, the rice wrapped around the main ingredient and the giant leaf after that before being cut into slices. Not that you can always identify what that ingredient is and half the fun is trying to match the little photographs on the menu with the reality.

You sit at the bar and watch the little colour coded dishes pass by, ironically like fish in a stream, now and putting your hand out to hook something to eat. It’s addictive, and as the plates pile up you end up only having a vague notion of how much its all costing and it always seems to be the expensive pink dishes that have the yummier food. Between courses you can hypnotically watching the little plastic plates going around and round as some things returned again and again right through the lunch hour, when something like a collection of noodles had been roundly ignored for over twenty minutes.

Dad’s less squeamish about edible marine life, so was very pleased with his salmon and squid and king prawns, and though I liked the crispy chicken and crispy tofu and omelette, I was a bit disappointed with the spicy chicken which was a bit cold and hard. Considering the price of some of the dishes, I don’t think anything was particularly exceptional, especially the chicken dumpling soup which was just about inedible. That’s a result of mass production, I suppose, and attempting to produce a variety of foods to suite a range of tastes, for people like me whose pallet might not necessarily be attuned to some of the subtler flavours.

The only other disappointment was that we seemed to spend most of the meal asking for things they didn’t have in because of a missed delivery. No seared beef, no crab, none of the particular variety of chicken needed for a few of the dishes. Our waiter was looking increasingly frustrated that he had to keep telling offering us alternatives and the last straw was at the end when it became apparent they’d run out of the desert we’d ordered. But he gave us something similar on the house which was nice of him. He looked tired and harassed too, and I suppose I would too if I was being run ragged by people enjoying the novelty of a big red service button that lights up.

recursive occlusion

TV See if you can spot the Doctor Who reference in this poster?



Or an Escher reference, though like a recursive occlusion they're much the same thing.

And Godspeed You Black Emperor?

Katy Perry Looks Like Zooey Deschanel

Quiz! Katy Perry Looks Like Zooey Deschanel. Which she does. Can you tell them apart?

The Spotify Playlist

FIAT Million Hits

"12 tracks from original artists who have sold over a million. Produced in support of the FIAT Madagascar Appeal to commemorate the 1,000,000 Fiat Uno."

It's the mid-1980s and to show their commitment to saving the planet, FIAT gave away these charity compilations with their cars. Given that it's songs which sold lots and lots of copies, it's a pretty good microcosm of what people were listening to in the 80s without the faux-amnesia which strikes when meeting new people when you pretend that the first record you bought was from The Smith, knowing full well it was Five Star.

The liner notes are a fairly spectacular fail on the part of FIAT, or at least the person attempting to justify their green credentials. They begin with this quote from naturalist David Bellamy:

"May I go on record and say thank you for caring enough to take part in the FIAT Madahascar Appeal. Thanks to you, FIAT and the World Wildlife Fund, one of the earths top ten conservation sites and hundreds of species of animals and plants which are found there and nowhere else on earth, are much safer."

Which is fine and laudable. Then there's a section describing the extinction event pending in Madagscar and the causes:

"Madagascar's population of eight million is growing at a rate of 3% a year, and with this growth the natural habitat of the wildlife, including extensive rain forests, is being ruthlessly destroyed. The effects of this development have been so dramatic that today there are more endangered species in Madagscar than in another other country in the world."

Which is true and will continue to be so what with the current political climate in the country. The notes continue by explaining why the aye-aye has been chosen as the symbol of the campaign -- it was the most under threat as Douglas Adams discovered at the time. But then you come up against this bit of prose and see if you can spot the sentence were by jaw metaphorically hit the floor:

Scientists estimate that unless something is down now, the opportunity of saving the wildlife of Madagascar will be gone within ten years. The World Wildlife Fund has given this top priority, and now their action is being funded by another organisation with a worldwide reputation.

FIAT.

For almost a century, Fiat have been associated with the production of high quality cars. But the company's international name can also be seen in areas as diverse as agricultural machinery, construction and excavation equipment, production systems, components for motor vehicles, industrial and domestic appliances, as well as in tourism and transport, aviation, and telecommunications."

To underscore their global credentials, FIAT admits to helping produce the very kinds of machinery which is putting Madagascar under threat in the first place. For the benefit of the lawyers, I should say I'm not implying that FIAT had a contract on the island; I'm just saying that I can't believe that whoever was writing the liner notes didn't find some other way of explaining why the car company is interested. Perhaps they were expecting people to be enjoying the record so much that they wouldn't bother to read it anyway.

At least they didn't mention the tanks and aircraft.

This week's reading is taken from ...

Ireland
Sums up a whole country in just four photographs.

The Top Ten Things I Learnt From Going To Sci-Fi Conventions
From Bob Fisher author of Wiffle Lever to Full. One of these days...

Swine flu turns my son into Woody Allen
"When I was in school, I cheated on my metaphysics exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me."

New Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian Movie Trailer
I hate myself for wanting to see this just because of the cast. And Darth. I know it's going to be rubbish.

Adding revolving headlines to the BBC Red Button homepage
I only understand about a quarter of this, but I love that the BBC allows its public face to be so expressively geeky.

Ward & White's Karaoke Circus
Because even those of us who can't sing deserve a decent band too.

Inflatable Enclosures
I always wanted one of these for the garden.

TV Review: News Wipe with Charlie Brooker, *BBC Four*
Mof says everything I would want to about the programme. It has been a revelation and made it near impossible to look at news media now without some kind of cynicism about how much of the truth has been obscured or misreported because of some hidden agenda.

Manchester's Peregrine Falcons are back!
It's Naturewatch without Bill Oddie's sinister innuendo.

BBC2 to position original drama as ‘major event of the week’
After my rant last time we did this, it's great to see the channel's new controller taking the bull by the horns and trying to do something with it. Which she would given that she's the last person who made BBC Four great. Is she the reason they've scheduled a bunch of interesting documentaries in the 7 o'clock slot every night next week?

Famous fans are excited by Angels' comeback
Mark Kermode fulfils his dream of introducing the Comsat Angels.

Faber’s Beckett covers
Wonderful, minimalist designs that attempt to capture what the play write originally wanted.

Blog it!
Flog It! visits Liverpool.

* Take cover: you're about to have a new favourite girlband
Girls Can't Catch -- what !?! Still, Shazney Lewis is writing for them so...

95 Old School Games You Can Still Play Online
Hours of fun for everyone.

Jewel Announces West Coast Tour Supporting Her New Album "Lullaby"
Not for kids actually. "It's all mellow mood music so if you want to come home at night and relax its all really lyric driven," I'm still there.

Geocities: Lessons So Far
Jason Scott's archive team are download and backing up Geocities. Wow. That is a lot of reading.

Possibly the Most Difficult Post I Have Ever Written
As good a piece of writing about dealing with a religion and the sexuality it abhors that I've seen.

The fall and rise and fall and rise and fall
I don't have a problem with remakes. I do have a problem with remakes that aren't clever enough (like BSG) to do something completely different.

Packing Hell
"I don't know when or why, but somewhere in my upbringing it was instilled in me that the highest of all human virtues is traveling light."

5 Things About “Love Actually”
The end of the film is a mess. Jamie (Colin Firth) apparently enters his family’s home after the chart show ends (usually at seven o’clock on a Sunday), and the audience is expected to believe that on Christmas Eve he is able to flag a taxi to the airport, fly to Marseilles, take a taxi to Aurelia’s village, find her house then the restaurant at which she is employed so that he can proposing to her. The Earth being dragged back into orbit in Doctor Who I can accept. But that's just pure fantasy.

Real life Twitter..!
Expect this to be ripped off by a UK sketch show very soon.

10 Worst Countries to be a *Blogger*
More outrages from the unreported world.

And now on BBC1, it’s time to pour another glass of…
I read somewhere else that the BBC have been trying to cancel this for years but are scared of the outrage.

Filling Young Minds
Spot the moment which made me feel like I was about a hundred years old.

What’s the Matter With Margaret?
I'd wondered what happened to the writer-director of You Can Count on Me. Now I know. Post-production hell. Make sure you read the comments too, because they fill in some of the gaps in the story.

Do beautiful 404 error pages still help users?
Not always, but I'd rather that than simply 'page cannot be displayed'. It's instructive to know that the website you're looking at still exists a bit.

Hollywood feels the pinch: Film production at standstill
"In the last few months there have been precisely two big-budget movies shot in Los Angeles - Iron Man II and Tim Burton's new version of Alice in Wonderland - with just six more in the pipeline for the rest of 2009. That compares with 21 major film shoots last year, and 71 in 1996."

A new format war?
It's still hard to believe that in a couple of years my 500gb hard disk is going to look antiquated.

Victoria Raimes: Twitter craze is going down a tweet
For the headline.

I'm a terrible human being. I have punched my mum in the face - metaphorically, that is. I have left home
For the comments. Congratulations to The Guardian for nurturing new talent, even if putting Tom in Charlie Brooker's slot is akin to throwing him to the lions.

geocities rescue

On-digital

We recently got on-digital.

Yes - we're the one.

We almost didn't. When I went into the local Dixons to hire, the sale person was all too quick to tell us to get Sky 'Because its better". But we didn't want Sky, and not just because of the whole Rupert Murdock ownership conscience. You see we live atop a high rise and in strong winds, saucer sightings are sure to increase. So is Sky better, or is on-digital, though not necessarily cheaper, simply better for your health? Let's look at the evidence, channel-by-channel.

NB: Even though our set is an 'ordinary' shape we've set the thing to 'widescreen' ratio - out of curiosity. So now you know.

BBC One / BBC Two/ ITV / Channel 4 There is something initially quite disconcerting about watching regular television in widescreen. For a start, there is all the extra space for everyone to move. But more than that it's impossible not to mentally work out how the full screen picture would look. Is it actually better - well yes - to a point. Study based dramas and soaps don't actually look any more like film, and sitcom especially tends to look plain wrong. News programming becomes necessarily more cinematic and so more dramatic, although the weather maps are even smaller.

ITV2 is something of a televisual ghetto for US programming. Letterman is shown here a night after the states, and there are stripped re-runs of 'Northern Exposure'. 'Townies' an ensemble sitcom set in the big city - a sort of blue collar 'Friends' featuring Molly Ringwald and a pre-Dhama Jenna Elfman - pretty funny, even if some characters don't have much to do; 'Sheena' - Gena Lee Nolan trades in her bathing suit for a leopard skin bikini - not exactly Buffy; 'Felicity', basically 'Dawson's Creek' in college, if grungier and with more of a 'My So-Called Life' view on life - one the Channel 4 imports that got away. As a channel, lack cohesion. We like that they show youth shows and the like, but seems like an excuse to have an extra digital channel just in case. SKY viewers not missing too much.

Channel 5 is missing from our programme list. Not in the right area. A good thing? Discuss.

BBC Choice is an excuse to re-run BBC programming and like ITV2 seems to be an excuse to have an extra digital channel just in case. Runs the same CBBC programming all day - so back-to-back episiodes of The Tweenies, Teletubbies, Chucklevision and Pigeon Street of all things ('One looks up, one looks down').

BBC News 24 could do with letting its hair down a bit - the only newsreaders who seem to have a personality are on in the middle of the night, perhaps because no one is watching, so who cares. Good for spotting Radio Five presenters getting in some TV experience (cat in headlights doesn't even begin to describe Five Live lynchpin Ian Paine's appearance the other day) and washed-up BBC One newscasters (Andrew Harvey, Philip Hayton).

BBC Parliament offers a blank screen, some text and politicians direct from the commons. Who other than politicians and broadcasters would watch?

E4 currently showing near 24 hour coverage of Big Brother. Much has already been written about this, but it really has to be seen to be believed. Probably the most banal programme ever created (even more so than the 'Open Door' tree incident - ask your Dad), wrings excitement from whether someone will have tea or coffee. Trouble is, its so damn compelling. Sat today watching the housemates piling up sugar cubes into towers and trying to work out the best technique. Perhaps of most interest to fans if only to see how biased the highlights show on Channel 4 actually is. What of the rest? Good to see 'The West Wing' early - and 'The Priory Clinic' has the distinction of being funnier than the main show.

Sky One is a good place to go if you like 'The Simpsons' and 'Star Trek'. For the rest of us we have early showings of Buffy, Angel and Roswell. Like ITV2, difficult to pin down as a channel, attempts at homegrown programming just seeming inferior to everyone else.

Granada Plus seems to think that we want to watch re-runs of Miami Vice and Kojak every night. They'd be wrong. Odd seeing Taggart from when the title actually meant something.

MTV seems a poor relation to its US cousin. Surely Mike Nesmith never wanted us to sit through 'Lady Marmalade' on such heavy rotation? And although we like some R&B, there is other music around.

British Eurosport like things that move fast. Cars. Motorbikes. Superbikes. Slow down.

Carlton Cinema feels like the old BBC2 strand, Moviedrome, a veritable Scorsese wetdream. Pity the Nine O'clock 'recent' films aren't up to much. Does anyone really want to see tonight's offering 'Men at Work' - the Emilio Estevez / Charlie Sheen 'comedy'? Currently running a Russell Crowe season - seemingly his entire back catalogue from before LA Confidential.

Discovery Kids - science shows for American kids. Johnny Ball not in sight.

Discovery Wings. Someone at on digital must be an aviation fan, because rather than offering THE Discovery channel, we have this. Some good space documentaries however.

Granada Breeze for all your daytime TV needs. 'This Morning' for hours on end.

Granada Men & Motors or rather Discovery Cars and free porn.

PLAY uk is what I was expecting from MTV. Pop videos for hours on end. Inconsistent re-runs of BBC shows (how?). Home grown comedy includes Pop Profiles in which Jamie Theakston (the busiest presenter on TV) interviews George Doors in a variety of guises (ABBA, Bucks Fizz, Steps).

Taste CFN or what the chefs off-of Ready Steady Cook do instead. Wall to wall food programmes. And they aren't kidding. Even more fun for spotting old BBC kids presenters (Mark Curry, Debbie Greenwood, Paul Coya). Features one of the dullest game shows in existence, a 'general knowledge' quiz about food with the scouser from the Holiday programmes who thinks he's Craig Charles. Features contestants 'Wipeout' would reject. Also has panel game with Paul 'I'll do anything' Ross. Typical guests - Floella Benjamin, Geoff Capes, Jim Bowen.

UK Gold was my actual reason for getting this whole thing. Doctor Who, you see. Pity about all that comedy. Do we really need to see that same episode of 'My Hero' the Ardal O'Hanlan sitcom so many times?

Cartoon Network. Johnny Bravo, we salute you.

UK Style / UK Horizons - three days of one, four days the other. For fans of make-over shows and docusoaps. Strangely compelling.

Nickelodeon, Goody. Rugrats. We like Alex Mac though.

Paramount Comedy Channel reruns of Frasier, Taxi and Cheers. Ten year old episodes of Drop The Dead Donkey. Whose Line is it Anyway with John Sessions pretending to be Dylan Thomas all the time. Timeless.

well being, at the end of the dial and watching it you feels like the end of your life. The production values of a shopping channel, despite the face they aren't actually selling you anything. Call in if you have an ailment and want advice on treatment. I thought that was what the NHS hotline was for . . .

So is on digital worth it? For me certainly (weekly Who) and it is nice to see imports months ahead of schedule. And if you are at all interested in food, there is always something on. But on-digital's lack of success is easily attributable. Inconsistencies, such as channels with a very narrow focus (airplanes, health) coupled with odd scheduling (UK Style / UK Horizon) can make for some confusion. And the price. The various film channels (unreviewed) are available, but cost an extra £21 - not terribly competitive in comparison with those men with dishes. Close call, then. ****