Blog May 2004

May 30th 2004: "Beauty Is A Reflection Of Your Real Self Without A Shadow Upon It"

May 26th 2004: Mind Stuff

Was recently up in the lovely Lake District once again, this time for a whole week. I use my time up there as a healthy reference point to counter and antidote all the sick society stuff which we are constanty subjected to. I wonder about civilisation sometimes, and what's going to happen. I haven't listened to or watched the news for over a week and once or twice when it's come on, I deliberately switched the radio/TV off. Really, it's the same old hatred and unresolved crap going on and on and on: Iraq, Israel, Bush, Blair, house prices, mad Islamists......why listen to it when it's so predictable?

I don't need it. My knowing about it makes no difference; I do know it's going on in the backround and I understand the general issues. But as for who's just killed who, etc etc, I'm a happier person if I just don't know.

I'm starting to get interested in writer Kurt Vonnegut with his book Cat's Cradle, and remarks like this:

May 24th 2004: Food, Drink And Videotape

I've got a decent collection of videotapes - haven't yet taken the plunge into DVD - and yet I rarely watch them. I like knowing I've got them, which is a hobby-collector attitude rather than cinematic enjoyment. And that's not not really worth pursuing. So after enjoying Godfather 1, 2 and 3 recently, I've been considering the rest of my collection and thinking what to watch. There are even a few there that I've only seen once so they still have the fun associated with freshness and discovery (eg Amelie), and one or two I recorded and haven't yet spent time with. I've got a Japanese Ozu movie for example, and The Black Narcissus. And I also recorded The Sound of Music a month or two ago, and haven't got round to watching it. Bambi was the very first movie I ever saw and apparently - so I'm told - I showed my appreciation by standing up and shouting out "there's Bambi!" when the furry creature appeared on screen. Ah, childhood. It was followed quite closely by the Julie Andrews work. I remember being a little upset and disturbed by it, because I found the Nazi pursuers an incomprehensible but malevolent threat. I didn't really understand what was going on, but felt frightened because I knew they were evil.

Yesterday I dusted off my copy of Angel Heart, and have two things to say about it. First, how it's a reworking of the Oedipal idea where the protagonist is compelled to follow a narrative trajectory not of their making; that's never ocurred to me before. They experience some kind of awakening, but it's problematic and painful rather than joyful or beneficial. In Angel Heart Mickey Rourke has sex not with his mother, but his daughter. As with Oedipus, he does not know her real identity.

Second, every time I see the moment of coupling, it gives me a strangely unpleasant feeling because of the mise-en-scene: the room starts to flood with water, then blood, and the girl screams. And the feeling I get is the same as I experience when I see childbirth on TV: it's the asociation of blood and physical pain in that area, with the fact of sex. The proverbial man's 'crossing of the legs', if you see what I mean. Women find this amusing, because it doesn't effect them in the same way and it shows a kind of masculine weakness. It's an unnerving scene in the film , which of course it's supposed to be. It also reminds me of the famous crucifix self abuse moment in The Exorcist: with similar themes of blood, injury and wounding it gives me exactly the same discomfort. Eep!

There are some humorous moments though, and I enjoyed the following:

"What do you do in the summer?" "I bite the heads of rats". "What do you do in winter?" "The same" - as he sits sunbathing on a beach deck chair on a wintry day. Thought only we British were mad enough to do such things.

"Do you speak French?" "Ha ha ha! I'm from Brooklyn!"

"Are you an atheist?" "Yes I am - I'm from Brooklyn!"

Comic potential here along the lines of "something something something" "ha ha! I'm from Manchester!" Suggestions in an e mail.

May 17th 2004: Fun

Shirt collar turned up to avoid sun-burn: check.
Shirt sleeves and shorts: check.
Minimal extra clothing in rucksack: check.
Salty perspiration, sometimes stinging the eyes because it's hot: check.
Thinking ‘hmm, I must get a pair of lighter boots’: check.
Cool drinks from bubbling streams: check.
Re-visit photographic vantage points you recently failed to exploit, because of overcast conditions. Get great pictures: check.
Still on the hills at 7 or 8 pm with clear blue skies and sunshine: check.
Still light at 9 pm: check.

I’ve had nice walks this year of course; it is almost summer. But this was perhaps the first of 2004 with all the idyllic ingredients of a beautiful-weather day. Snowy walks are really exhilarating, but winter escapades always involve an element of strain, because the extra hazards are mentally demanding. I like both, but there’s nothing like looong days when you are not concerned about being back down in the valley at any particular time; when it doesn’t matter, in fact, if you’re still high up at 9 or even 10 pm. When you think damn, I wish I had a tent – I would be very happy if I could whisk out a little stove, boil up some noodles, have some herb tea and then bed down up here in this wonderful silence. Kentmere is a delightful day-trip from Manchester; not the most beautiful valley but worth walking around as much as any other. I especially like the culmination of the classic horseshoe route when you reach the Thornthwaite cairn, and are suddenly gazing over at High Street and down to the Ullswater valley. Gaze across to a distant area and think – once again – that’s an area you want to revisit: check.

The first time I'd heard of Kentmere it was in relation to Kentmere photographic paper. Then many years later I discovered the place actually existed, then went past it many many times, on my way to more northerly parts of the Lake District. I'd imagined it was not worth getting excited about, that the really nice parts of the LD are above it. Not true; not only is is equal to other areas in terms of prettiness and walking fun, it's also a comfortable day trip from Manchester, just 1 1/2 hours away. Yay.

May 16th 2004: Sky Larks, Peak District

May 15th 2004: Tabloids Etc

<Rant> What is wrong with these scum-bag journalists, these paparazzi low-life, these purveyors of bullshit sensationalist gossip? What is wrong with people's lives when they are presumably so boring they enjoy being entertained by shock! horror! stories of infamy and crime. Can anyone explain how reading about Maxine Carr's current predicament enhances their life? Makes breakfast more fun? Gives you something to discuss with workplace colleagues over tea and biscuits? Leave this story alone! The scum bag press are trying to over-turn the court injunction insisting on her privacy! Why? Because they know she is hated. Because they don't care about the death threats. Because all they care about is a big scoop which increases non-news paper sales. Because a hack or photographer who gets a good story or picture will presumably get a £5000 bonus - or something. Because they peddle and deal in gutter-life gossip, because there is a market for it. I was appalled at Maxine Carr's behaviour. I happen to think there's an element of sadness to her particular role in what happened, but that's not really the point. The point is, I am not interested in reading about Maxine Carr's suffering, the shock! horror! content, the personal soap-opera details. I know it's happening, in a secret UK location. That is enough. These tabloids are nasty, grubby, undignified publications that pollute the atmosphere of this country.

And I'd just like to say.....ooh yes! And increase the internet links to the story, naturally. More gutter press drivel, sensationalising what is a serious subject which needs more consideration and maturity. Maybe other tabloid editors will think twice before they adopt their sensationalising tactics. Maybe someone will think up a hoax or two to make them also look stupid....more so than they already are. </Rant>

Travels Etc

Last year was so beautifully warm and sunny I started to believe the UK is an OK place to enjoy so much, you even have holidays here. Novel idea. Not something I've done since adolescence; the last occasion was a family trip to Devon, a place called Dawlish Warren. I think it's quite sweet that my family/parents used to go to those places - holiday camps with rows of chalets. All very 1950s Butlins, you've never had it so good new-found prosperity. All very little Britain, enjoying small pleasures and modest delights. Nothing wrong with that. So last year I spent eight days up in the Lakes and realised - rather perplexed - that it did indeed qualify as a holiday. It's probably also something to do with the fact that I don't have wife, children, all that kind of thing which makes a trip into a significant ritual. Anyway I drive out to the countryside quite frequently, I suppose, and occasionally drive around just to see what's there. Highest village in Britain...quick! Scotland? Wales? Strange Place You've Never Heard Of? Correct - the latter. A little Peak District hamlet called Flash, apparently.

May 14th 2004: Books Etc

I think the guy who founded it is a bit posey and ridiculous, but I have to admit Barbelith is a pretty cool place. It's wild and anarchic, but with undercurrents of unspoken respect. It discusses mainstream culture, with a non-mainstream ethos. People cuss and swear freely, as they do in any high street cafe or pub. Life as we know it, rather than a pseudo-clean place where moderator's regulations are frustrating and oppressive. Something for everyone, which includes book-talk. What are your buying and reading habits? Sometimes, as they say over there at said online venue, it concerns desire and consumption in a disappointingly Lacanian sense. Information can be as materialistic as anything else; you want to read it, own it, appropriate it, or simply put it on your bookshelves and possibly never even read it. But it's nice to know that it's there. And nice to swap little personal stories like this

Now, I'm not in the floor to ceiling nutter category (heh!) and I don't buy that many books, but over the years it has accummulated to quite a large collection. What no one says on that discussion thread is how books extend your personal biography, and thus your sense of self identity. Like clothes they decorate and express the person you are, and are intellectually enabling. Like going to the gym, it's mental exercise with a pay-off. It's nourishing, the adult culmination of what used to be delightful under the bed-clothes reading when you were supposed to be falling asleep; bed-time stories from a loving Mum, soothing you with dream-like wonder; summer holiday comics, adolescent discoveries across various genres, and feeling so excited you didn't know whether to turn the page and finish thus abort the narrative fun, or put the book down and extend the gratification. Night time quiet when the world sleeps, and you discover it's 2, 3 or even 4 am, because you just didn't want to stop reading this wonderful story. What's going to happen?! What's going to happen?! Intellectual vistas, revealing entirely new and fresh ways of perceiving the world. And yes, because all of that is such fun, you learn to enjoy the actual book: the bound, covered, printed paper, the inside smell redolent of years of former pleasures. My parents used to enjoy the fact that on my birthday and Xmas wants-list, I invariably finished with a demand for "a few books". I loved those books. I remember an encyclopaedia with dinosaur pictures which I still have; a collection of fairy tales my Mum read me, which included the story of The Little Match Girl which I could sense made her sad. Stig of the Dump, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, a volume on Greek mythology, one called Beasts of Fact and Fable - which I still have (and never read!), and at primary school wonderful piratic tales of Roderick the Red and Gregory the Green and a detective story that I read several times and enjoyed so very, very much I used all my boyish determination to remember the title, remember it! - and I did, and still do: The League of the Purple Dagger, by Jack Plant. Long out of print, but I have seen it available on US internet databases.

And more at Barbelith, reminding me of the lovely intimacy of the proverbial good read: "Some of the scenes were heartbreaking. The scene where Hajime feeds water to Shimamoto in the form of melted snow from his own mouth" - and informing me of an author I have now put on my reading list. You can do with a book what you can't always do in big, bad, scary life: open yourself up to tender immersion and complete empathy; the Aristotelian catharsis, which may or may not concern specifically tragic narrative. But often it does, and when I read about this snow-drinking scene it reminded me of a little literary heart-break that really, I could barely read. I know it was fiction; I have, I think, quite sophisticated critical powers. But there's a moment in Phreak when a small, young, "sparrow-like" girl is murdered for simply knowing something that makes her dangerous to a criminal gang. She lives alone in a tiny dingy bed-sit, is constantly distressed by life, and the narrator tells us she's in terrible need of a motherly hug. She goes up the stairs to the building's shared shower and in the space of a few seconds but too late, the narrator realises she's in danger of being killed. It was painful reading that. A literary moment you don't forget, like the stunning ending of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, which makes your jaw drop at the devastating way it gets.....right....in there: inside the human heart, with its capacity for love and its resilient deflection of worldly adversity. The woman who breast feeds a starving, dying man has a "mysterious smile" on her lips. She knows, and you know when you read this scene, sometimes you just get so bruised by life there's really nothing left but a softness which has no edges.

May 12th 2004: Lyndee England

Lyndee England, Lyndee England, Lyndee England. Lyndee. England. That should guarantee a few more people read my blog. I don't understand the internet sometimes. I've discovered from referral logs that people from different parts of the world and the UK have been pointed here by Google, MSN Search and Yahoo, when they were searching "Lyndee England". First of all, my little writing space gets a small trickle - a trickle - of readers. And 98% of those are random searches, from people who do not subsequently return here. There's also a high proportion of people searching for images, finding my Lake District photographs. Secondly, there must be thousands of high proflie reports all around the world, documenting the Iraqi abuse story. So what gives? Why was my little blog coming second, fourth and fourth amidst that enormous volume of high profile material? Google apparently ranks according to links, ie the number of links made towards a particular site. Some people deliberately manipulate this; other people complain that blogs are clogging up the search engines because of their high numbers of links and low level of quaility content. As you can see, Recumbent Gaze is not exactly Top Ten reading material. So really, what gives? Lyndee. England.

Seriously...

I'm not going to dwell on this because as this person says, it raises your blood pressure and makes no difference to the situation, but he also makes some interesting remarks and is indicative of average American feeling. He rightly denounces the scum-bag media world which consistently fails to acknowledge the impact it has, like it's a quantum physics observer which does not affect the situation. It does affect the situation, it does change the world-wide mood, and it does have moral and political consequences. None of which concerned Piers Morgan, editor of one of the loathsome gutter press tabloids. They feed the gossip, just as they feed the gossip about ooh aah celebrity X and ooh aah celebrity Y and all the rest of their non-news paper nonsense.

However Photodude also says Lyndee England's excuses are not acceptable - and I think they are. How many hundreds, thousands of times have rank and file soldiers carried out orders knowing with full certainty that what they were doing was corrupt, immoral, stupid or mad? I don't think you can denounce someone for carrying out orders; you have to look higher in the chain of command. And finally, as I've said before, this matter is more about politics than real humanitarian concern. Real humanitarian concern has to acknowledge the bigger picture, the horror of the totality of war. This current story - unpleasant as it is - narrows your focus onto relatively small scale events. They are huge in the political and ideological world, but so what? It's a mad world when humanism is replaced with gossipy politicising.

Animal Hour

<Rant> Maybe we should establish a term like "cultural provocation" to account for the natural outrage when confronted with stories like this and this. Outrage, not only at this shocking behaviour, but also at the values and cultural attittudes which underlie it. In fact I think the stories are quite useful, because after the recent shock! horror! stuff in the Western media, these sub-humans have made it conveniently obvious who the real demons are: people capable of behaving like this. There's politics, and there's humanism. They are not the same thing, and my sympathies are with the latter. So with terrorism for example, I don't really care what the politics/shmolitics are; what I care about is their capacity for hatred, their capacity to maim and murder entirely innocent people, and destroy the lives of their friends and loved ones. It's a different kind of 'discourse', and no amount of politics/shmolitics justifies it. It seems to me this is what the problem is: the West is currently confronted with primitive and semi-primitive societies which don't follow the same rules of conduct. It's a very sad time for humanity....the world is full of hatred, and I suspect this religious/cultural/clash of civilisations feuding will continue for quite a few years because there is no over-arching consensus, no common understanding from which dialogue is possible. With all its corporate bullshit, celebrity-ising nonsense, materialism, have and have-not inequality and flawed politics, the West is still democratic with freedom of speech, continual intellectual development, respect for the individual, entrepreneurial freedom, and respect for liberty and human rights. I know all about the fashionable America-bashing cynicism floating around the world, but where would you rather live - Houston or Baghdad? California or Nigeria? New York or Egypt? The Middle East doesn't like the freedoms and liberality of the West; do you? I certainly do, and I'm tired of this trendy, media-driven cynicism in relation to West/Middle East relations. The BBC reported that

Why is it that we speak of our 'reputation in the Arab world' when the 'Arab world' doesn't give a damn how the West perceives them? (you just don't understand us - there's a reason why we mutilate people for petty theft - the problem is your perception). It's because we're trying to relate to the Middle East, but they don't want to relate to the West. They want to stay in the feudal, theocratic and female-oppressing past. It seems to me it's rather like a parent-child relatioship, where one party has the greater wisdom and capacity to accept the other, but the reverse is simply not possible. Except in this case it is possible, but they don't want to. </Rant>

Samurai Discipline: Force The Mind To Think About Nice Things: Silk, Blossom...

Someone wrote in their blog "Well, the blossom's gone. I now know how Tony Soprano felt when the ducks flew away". Nice. As is blossom. I don't mind if it's followed by high temperatures and lots of sun....but endless grey grey f****** grey? No, I want the blossom back...

May 11th 2004: Woman's Hour

I admit it - I like Radio 4's Woman's Hour. It's sweeet! They talk about nice things, soft things, often unrelated to hard-edged current affairs. Well sometimes....yesterday they discussed these famous photos of Iraqi abuse and it was both disturbing and illuminating.

A few days ago the BBC had a film professor on TV who made the obvious remark that news photographs are enormously powerful, sometimes with a disproportionate and unrepresentative significance. We form an emotional opinion about something within a few seconds, isolated from the greater inevitable complexities of a political situation.On Woman's Hour they were discussing - I said this was both disturbing and illuminating - how some of those photos resemble S & M imagery. I could sense this when I saw them but couldn't really understand or articulate it. They had an Arabic professor on the programme who said two interesting things. First, that any abuse of that kind is sexually humiliating. But secondly, she pointed out how in Arab culture masculinity is tied to a sense of honour, implying that what Lyndee England did was an assault on specifically Arabic sensibility. The professor doth protest too much, methinks: although the first point is undeniably correct, the way she used it to preface the second point indicated her reluctance to be fully honest about this.

I read a Sunday Times story describing how US marines taunted the enemy in Afghanistan over loudspeakers by calling them homosexuals, saying they were impotent etc. The reaction was quite strange, but had military advantage - basically, those men were so "offended" by this they would get mightily pissed and betray their positions in front of obvious military supremacy. They were prepared to die, because someone said they'd got inoperative wieners. Whichever way you look at it, that is pretty dumb. But the point is this: there is such a thing as an Arab 'mind' or way of thinking, and one aspect of this is macho so called honour. Don't believe me? Refer to the Arab woman, UK Arabic professor, on Radio 4.

Philosopher GI Gurdjieff advises in one of his books "don't add anything negative to sex energy", being one of the most destructive things that can happen to a human being. His writings are sometimes tricky and odd, but sometimes startlingly perceptive in relation to human psychology. What he meant by that was if you add negative or destructive tendencies to the sexual impulse, you have an enormously dangerous situation because the sex impulse is inevitable and irrepressible. Those strange and disturbing stories like the Ian Huntley affair are the obvious example. Child killers and mass murderers; the aberrations of people like Fred and Rosemary West. They are psychotic people, and we feel completely dumbfounded as to what was going in such deranged minds. But we understand that inside their dark psyche, they derive some kind of satisfaction from what they do. We understand that sometimes, human psycho-sexual wiring goes disastrously wrong. I find the films of David Kronenberg dark and rancid; Crash is not cool because it is 'challenging', 'subversive' or whatever nonsense people say about it: it portrays psychological sickness which is itself an OK subject for investigation, but it does it as a kind of aesthetic cool which I find totally repellent and unacceptable. It's like peering inside a psychiatric hospital and saying hey, isn't this just great? No, it's not. Kronenberg is not interesting, he's sick - if he thinks blending erotic interest with car accidents deserves artistic interpretation.

In both life and film, the combination of sex + distorted psychology = an obviously sick mind. We may not understand it, but we can understand the significance of Gurdjieff's remark. If you add a strange psychological complex to a constant and powerful impulse, the former is amplified by the latter. Freud is also significant here, ie his assertion that sexuality underlies the personal psyche and indeed civilisation as a whole. Somewhere in my piles of books, photo copies and assorted literary stuff, I've got a copy of Freud's Civilisation and Its Discontents. I printed it out from the internet. I've not read it but have glanced through it (I've got book and papers that I'm not sure I ever will read; there's just so much to get through these days). The basic premise is fairly simple: the 'discontents' part of his thesis is sexual in origin. There's a constant tension between instinctive desire - call it the animal part of humanity - and the more evolved and 'civil' part of a human being. Whatever you think of Freud - and some of his ideas were flawed - the veracity of this idea is fairly, if loosely obvious. We're not animals - we create cities, art, technology - but part of us remains instinctive and animal-like. Even the most powerful man in the world is susceptible to (irrational) desires....and novel experimentation with cigars.

Now, different cultures balance and reconcile this tension in different ways. With regard to these famous photos, I think there is not one but two important factors. First, the obvious humanitarian and political level - proving a disastrous embarrassment for the reputation of US and UK government. It annoys me to see the enormous impact it's having all around the world because in relation to thousands of people being killed, innocent people being killed, it is extremely trivial. Yes it is reprehensible; no it is not more grievous than the more substantial horrors of the totality of war. But that's the way our media-driven world works: 'abuse' is a more evocative term than 'collateral damage', and this current story will provoke weeks of gossip and world-wide bickering which the 'collateral damage' never did.

But secondly, as the little Woman's Hour discussion portrayed, these photographs have a wider cultural significance in relation to the Arab 'masculine' and the kind of 'honour' which means a man will jump out of his hiding place if someone calls him a fairy, and be cut down by inevitable gun fire. And not only that, in some parts of the Moslem world we hear about honour killings, where innocent women and girls are subjected to a wretched, vicious, and primitive patriarchy. You my wife (sister, daughter, whatever), you not smile at another man, me kill you, you bitch. Which is an approximate characterisation of what happens, in various permutations.

At an implicit and wider cultural level, those events in Middle East prisons were taking the piss out of Arabic macho 'honour'. One US commentator said they were like a college initiation rite, implying they were not that serious. Clearly they were serious, as the Red Cross is currently outlining. I'm sure he regrets those words. But I think there are subtle ramifications to all of this which can be deconstructed, in relation to the Arab mind. And I think in relation to some of the ideas I've mentioned here - Gurdjief, Freud and pathology - the Arabic honour sensibility has to be regarded as primitive because of the ramifications it has: how women are perceived, and how it fails to incorporate sexuality into a modern psychological, political and cultural understanding. How, in fact, in a culture where 'masculinity' is regarded as of paramount 'honour value', something "negative" is being added to sex energy. Except in this instance it's not personal psychology/pathology; it concerns cultural politics and the politics of men-women relations, and what you are 'adding' is guns and military capability. It seems obvious that some part of those abusive events was a direct assault on primitive macho arrogance: a woman soldier laughing at naked men; women's panties put on a man's head. I think this is a more complicated subject than the media is currently portraying - concerned as they are with their shock! horror! sales (the wretched tabloids), and only the political ie establishment ramifications.

May 10th 2004: If Only

Hedgerows, country roses, mild sunny days, skylarks, stamp collecting, afternoon tea, modest seaside towns, the Times, cricket, the BBC, Shakespeare, George Orwell, Radio 4.....Complete nonsense of course: the old romantic England never existed, just as any good old days nostalgia is just a dreamy escapism from an increasingly complex and disappointing present. And a worrying world future. One of the Dadaists once said "you have to be completely modern" and that's a striking recipe for a kind of conscious advance; anything else is a bind, historical shackles tying you to a fictitious past. But sometimes it's nice to believe it. I have known hazy country days full of hedgerows and boyhood contentment. I have known exciting, blissful holidays on modest sandy beaches. These garden make-over programmes perplex me when I see the modern ideas, when traditional English design is so beautifully soothing and feels right, respecting but taming natural disorder into green lawns, borders, rock gardens. We're famous for it...or at least, we used to be.

It's lovely to reminisce that some parts of my earlier life were like that, I have lived in places with access, at least, to quintessential English countryside. If only life could have stayed like this:

May 9th 2004: Beautiful Words

There's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold And she's buying a stairway to heaven
And when she gets there she knows if the stores are closed With a word she can get what she came for And she's buying a stairway to heaven There's a sign on the wall but she wants to be sure And you know sometimes words have two meanings
In the tree by the brook there's a songbird who sings Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven And she's buying a stairway to heaven There's a feeling I get when I look to the west And my spirit is crying for leaving In my thoughts I have seen rings of smoke through the trees And the voices of those who stand looking And she's buying a stairway to heaven And it's whispered that soon, if we all call the tune Then the piper will lead us to reason And a new day will dawn for those who stand long And the forest will echo with laughter And it makes me wonder If there's a bustle in your hedgerow
Don't be alarmed now It's just a spring clean for the May Queen Yes there are two paths you can go by but in the long run There's still time to change the road you're on Your head is humming and it won't go because you don't know The piper's calling you to join him Dear lady can't you hear the wind blow and did you know Your stairway lies on the whispering wind And as we wind on down the road Our shadows taller than our souls There walks a lady we all know Who shines white light and wants to show
How everything still turns to gold And if you listen very hard The tune will come to you at last When all are one and one is all To be a rock and not to roll And she's buying a stairway to heavenThere's a lady who's sure all that glitters is gold And she's buying a stairway to heaven And when she gets there she knows if the stores are closed
With a word she can get what she came for And she's buying a stairway to heaven, uh uh uh.

May 8th 2004: Dumb Words

Reader, beware: if you see the expression “hetero-normative”, know that you are entering an intellectual domain where you are defenceless against cleverly constructed piffle, cannot protest established but questionable argument. I saw it again recently and it’s not difficult to find. But what it actually means is: most people are heterosexual. It’s normal. But you have to say “normal” instead. Hetero-normative. Whatever.

I prefer to see this subject in terms of obvious biological structures which no Cultural Theory can override. In terms of Nature (“nature”) which exists like the sun, rain and seasons, regardless of what you say about it. In psychological terms, recognising the tendency the mind has to simply make things up: invent stuff, in order to sound learned and impressive, conflating what Is with What You Say About It. Everything’s a cultural construct, innit? Er, yes. If you say so.

Clever Words

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent"
- Wittgenstein

Silky Fozzie Bear Words

So, Norah Jones on Jools Holland's music show. I've got one or two of her CDs but can't decide if I really like her or not. Got a lovely voice and some nice lyrics ("come away with me and I'll write you a song" - what an invitation!). But she slips all the time into a nasal modulation which sounds like Fozzie Bear.

May 3rd 2004: Videos

OK I admit I'm biassed. No, that's a little unfair on myself: I just like the idea and possibility of 'video art'. There was a historical exhibition in London about 12 months ago and most of it, I have to say, was dreary narcissistic or silly superficial stuff. Here's a video of me lacerating my chest; here's another one of little plastic bears drinking tea. That kind of thing; all very uninspired. I think it's a medium which is mostly explored far too closely to other forms of expression - like TV or cartoons - so the result is when you watch it you think what's the point of that? You can find the same kind of material elsewhere without any artistic pretension. Bill Viola's work is about as good as it gets; he may even be the only person who has explored this medium successfully.

But there are occasional exceptions. The 2002 Turner Prize winner was a video piece which I quite liked, and I also like David Sleeping. If you've spent any time reading Recumbent Gaze that might surprise you: I am not in favour of these not-so-young British artists, not in favour of football, and not in favour of celebrity fashion nonsense. And there's David Beckham lying in bed asleep - allegedly. But I think it's a great idea for video art, exploring the hidden intimacy of sleep-life and making it public, with a highly public figure. It thus turns upside down the more normal and conventional expectations we have about this kind of subject. I must admit I won't go and see this exhibit, because I am not the slighest bit interested in a super rich footballer with model good looks. Who cares? But as an idea, I think this is a good one. And plenty of people will want to see it.

May 2nd 2004: Photos

I'm delighted with the resolving power of my Canon 10D, especially its low 'noise' and capabilities with low lighting. With this in hand, or rather slung over shoulder, you can wander around Lake District fells, the way you do, and capture shots like this - not the usual touristy kind of picture, but one which reflects the sometimes wild beauty of the Lakes. It's in Eskdale, and shortly before I was getting seriously chilled by gale force winds and rain coming down from the giants in the Scafell area and the head of Wasdale:

May 1st 2004: True Romance!

There’s a book called Trash Aesthetics which I browsed a few times in a library but never read properly. The title is self explanatory and there’s a psychology to it which is quite interesting. It begins:

On the matter of cultural relativism, I think feet should step very carefully and a little more philosophically. However.....Tarantino is of course the high priest of trash aesthetics and although Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs are the well known rites of worship, I prefer True Romance which he wrote rather than directed. I have yet to see either of the 'Bills'; I tend to watch films in my own time, and ignore the current fashions. Romance is less clichéd and iconic, which means you think a bit more when you watch it rather than just drink in the stylised cool, the hyper-violence, and all the rest. Hooker after meeting her date:

After I see a movie I like to get a piece of pie and talk about it…..do you like to get pie after you see a good movie?
Yeah I love to get pie after a movie
Would you like to go get some pie with me? (giggle)
I’d love some pie!

Pie!......and then ten minutes later the budding lovers say:

I think what you did…
WHAT?!
I think what you did…
WHAT?!
Was so…romantic!!

…..when he has just killed her ex-pimp and his gang, freeing her from her past.

Tarantino undermines and subverts traditional (received) value systems, and therein lies some of the fun of his work, when you dissolve the constraints and parameters of normality. It’s a great film and there are two moments I find especially poignant – first, where the hero’s father (Dennis Hopper) is being beaten and is about to be killed by a mafia gangster (Christopher Walken). He lives in a trailer next to a railway line, living a grim and barren life, and he realises in this moment the only thing that means anything to him is his love for his son. Cut me, shoot me, kill me; I will not tell you where he is. The second moment is when the girlfriend is also being beaten up by a gangster, turned into a butcher’s display, and also refuses to tell where her boyfriend is: I don’t care, I will not tell you....

Both Hopper and Walken give a terrific performance, the latter dark and shadowy and the former illuminated by an overhead light: he knows he is going to die and, Christ-like, is quite prepared to go through with it. There’s a section in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love when he says he who cares the less about something has the greater power. Think suicide bombers, and the Taliban; living on the edge of cheapened life. It’s a very cool movie.