One Week Later

So it’s been just over seven days (give or take) which means it’s time for bloggy blog updatey happy time. Already I’ve been inundated with emails begging me to post something early. Anything, they beg, even a couple of misspelled racist slogans carved into the back of Hitler’s haircut to satisfy that insatiable need to read. I know, impatient or what? I mean, I’ve only been gone… Oh.

Well, bygones being bygones and deadlines being a concept I haven’t yet fully grasped, I feel I have a duty to my totally-real-and-not-made-up-at-all readership. After all, critics are only there to enhance the already rich cultural jungle that has provided them with so much narrative sustenance over the years. They just hide it really well by doing the opposite. It’s far easier to slag something off than try to figure out why you actually enjoyed it. That’s why it’s so rare to find anything you can praise without leaving yourself open to the jibes of some joyless human-beret complaining about anything written in the past thousand years in a language that more than five people in the world can understand.

Enter The Greatest TV Drama of All Time, one of those uncommon exceptions that turns sneers into smiles and brings people together from all walks of life. I’m going to give you three guesses what it is, and if you so much as think the words ‘big’ and ‘brother’, even as a consequence of reading them in this sentence, I’ll be very disappointed. Not so disappointed that I’ll feel the need to fire a remote mind-control dart into your brain in order to coerce you into participating in a nationally televised knife orgy, but not far off. The Greatest TV Drama of All Time, according to my sources, is:

Now normally I would dismiss comments like this with a hearty ‘Pah!’, maybe even the good old ‘greatness is subjective’ tactic, the sort of thing that a real writer would say right up to the point that they start talking about themselves. When you sit down and think about it though, The Sopranos probably is the greatest drama of all time, which is actually a little bit depressing. If someone, for example, tells you that Eminem is the greatest rapper of all time, you’ll stop, try to think of someone better and nothing springs to mind. All of a sudden you’re convinced that Eminem isn’t just an angry lyric-slinger pretending to be superman, he’s actually the best angry lyric-slinger pretending to be superman there ever was. This is a conclusion often followed by a feeling of emptiness and a realisation that maybe rap isn’t all that good.

Another suitable comparison are shows like The Hundred Greatest Cartoons of All Time, where you wait until the ungodly hour of five in the morning only to find that The Simpsons is still the best thing life has to offer. Why watch anything else? Why not just sit in your underwear all day with a bottomless tub of Ben and Jerry’s, gazing in infantile glee as Homer says ‘Doh’ over and over again and your insides gradually turn into Phish Food? While many will respond that they would if they could afford it (bottomless tubs of Ben and Jerry‘s are even more expensive than the normal sized ones), the truth of the matter is that this situation is likely to lead to a bad case of self-inflicted scissors in eye.

So, the first thing that I thought when I heard that The Sopranos was the Greatest TV Drama of All Time was that it would be pretty dull. Not only this, it would be so seeped in pretension that it would actually have to sprout an arse in the middle of the screen as a visual metaphor of how far up itself it was. It would be dry, convoluted and more incomprehensible than a renaissance poetry collection recited by Scooby Doo.

It’s actually fantastic. Even if I wanted to, there’s not one thing I can complain about. The Sopranos is genuinely, well… great. If you haven’t seen it, see it. If you have seen it, see it again. It’s really that good.

If you’re still in the dark, this is how it goes down. Mafioso Tony Soprano is having some trouble dividing his time between work and family. Except he works for the mob, which in a way is also his family, which kind of makes him a bigamist, which causes all sorts of problems at Christmas dinner. These conflicting (and at times agreeing) interests of the two parties make for a big headache and eventually Tony goes all emo and winds up seeing a psychiatrist. In other words, the audience is invited to share a voyeuristic glimpse into the inner workings of a man who commits atrocity after atrocity while somehow managing to convince himself of his own innocence, like some sort of serial rapist who firmly believes that the taxman is the greatest evil imaginable.

The rest of the show is divided up into violence and shooting, followed by Tony moaning about how violent and shooty he is. Shoot, moan, shoot, moan, shoot, moan. You would think that the simple answer would just be to stop shooting people, but that doesn’t quite stretch into six series. Instead you get offered a rich medley of characters contributing to Tony’s continuously fluctuating perceptions of reality. Is he really a cold blooded killer or just a little lost boy? A lamb in a lion’s clothing? A moray eel with a heart of gold? A sabre-toothed chihuahua? Who knows.

If there is any moral to be drawn out of this post (which there isn‘t), it’s that sometimes you have to set all scepticism aside and just buy all six box sets from play.com. Then tell me what happens. I'm still on season two.

Excuse Me Sir, Is this Your Child...?

Actually, no. That child has no legal parent / guardian. That child belongs to no one and is born of no one. It is the child that has witnessed the rise and fall of nations and empires, all the while calculating with mechanical precision its triumphant return. You don’t even know what you’re dealing with do you? That is no ordinary child. It’s the BACK IN BUSINESS BABY!

That’s right, after months and months of sheer negligence, I’ve realised that sooner or later social services are going to be on my back wanting to know why my bloggish brainchild is wriggling around on the floor in a pile of its own shit, smoking thirty a day and living off bits of peanut it’s picked out of the carpet. My only excuse is that babies are quite hard work and I’m quite a lazy person.

For those of you reaching for the phone in self-important outrage, calm down and read the last paragraph again. Done? That’s right, I was talking about my creative output, silly. I don’t have any children. Not living ones anyway. Just bloggish ones!

All in all, I’m feeling bigger, better and more hygienic than ever. You probably don’t care about the last bit too much, on account of you being tucked safely behind that glass screen that is my prison. Once I get out though, those initial reactions of ‘What the hell just dragged itself kicking and screaming from the monitor in a slurry of broken glass???’ will be counterbalanced by the realisation that ‘That is a fine smelling aftershave.’ Unfortunately that just makes the process all the more painful.

Digression aside for the moment, I’d like to announce my final descent into mainstream music. I’ve held out for a long time, locking myself in R&B-proof rooms, humming rock ballads to myself over and over again until my hair turns black and I start naturally sprouting nose-rings. It’s about as much good as thinking about dry land in an attempt to escape a sinking ship. Wishful thinking doesn’t work. Especially not when every radio station is pumping saltwater into your veins on a twenty-four hour basis. Resistance is futile. You might as well just give up and hope that the boat hasn’t gone down next to a sewage pipe or a nuclear waste dump. Or 50 Cent.

To cut a long story short I’ve been listening to B.O.B. To cut a long story short but be a bit more specific, I’ve been listening to Airplanes (or Aeroplanes if we’re being pedantic) with Paramore’s Haley Williams. It’s one of those songs that gets played continuously for a couple of weeks before being forcibly erased from public consciousness like a drunken night out you’d rather not remember. During those couple of weeks, lots and lots of people became very depressed. Relationships failed, businesses crashed headlong into the earth, and a small child found out that Santa isn’t real. (That’s right brats, he’s really called St. Nicholas!) It was all the bad feeling of a unwanted erection and an uncomfortably hot day mixed into one. Of course it could be a coincidence. It could be that Haley Williams is perfectly innocent and genuinely isn’t trying to take over the world by turning all radio listeners into glum blobs of disinterested paste. Or it could be... she is!

Let’s think about it for a second. The song revolves around a single image of a person desperately wishing for something, later revealed as a desire to return to more innocent and complete state of being. Back before things sucked. Except she can’t wish for any of this because in order to do so she needs some sort of rare atmospheric phenomenon (already a dubious object of faith) and there aren’t any going on at the moment so she’s going to have to kid herself into thinking that a Boeing 747 can do the same job. First off though, she’s got to ask permission from some unseen dictator of what can and can’t be wished upon. She could be talking to Bobby Ray. Hell, she could even be asking you, the listener! What are you going to do? Let Haley Williams delude herself into thinking she can return to some idyllic life of wanton bliss, back before she actually had to work for her piles and piles of money? Then what, you’re going to watch as the dream fails to manifest itself, gradually replaced by the realisation that all those ‘better times’ never really happened? Watch as the days turn into months and the months turn into years and she realises in one cold moment that she’s wasted her life away chasing a unachievable fantasy? Are you? No, you’re not. You’re going to turn around and say: ‘You can’t wish on that plane. It doesn’t even look like a shooting star. It looks like a plane.’

In all, the song is bursting at the seams with nostalgia, even as it exposes the feeling as inherently fallacious. Airplanes Part Two even features Eminem reminding everyone that you can’t achieve success by crossing your fingers and waiting for a miracle. Apparently you’ve just got to take a few risks and be completely fucked up to begin with. Sound advice if ever there was some. But who is Eminem to criticise childhood nostalgia when he’s responsible for half of that nostalgia in the first place? All that’s missing is a cameo from Buzz Lightyear and we’ll have anyone under the age of twenty-five in tears. The lyrics will just be ‘YOUR CHILDHOOD IS A LIE AND IT ISN’T COMING BACK,’ over and over again.

So really it isn’t any wonder that everyone was so depressed when the song first got so big. Thankfully there was an upside. Nostalgia gets old pretty quickly and once it’s gone, it’s gone. You can get nostalgic about just about anything except being nostalgic, which is probably why the song’s popularity dropped substantially and nobody really cared.

See y’all next week.

If you're feeling low...

Nerds have a thing, where in order to either deny or super-confirm their own status as nerdites, they must undergo the ritual of putting down other nerds. If, for example, you attend a comic convention, you must make a point of noticing how many nerds are actually there. “That’s a lot of nerds” you may say to an acquaintance “Don’t they smell. Haw haw haw.” You may think this makes people believe you stand apart from the smelly masses yourself. Allow me to explain something to you nerdkind. You are mistaken. Horribly mistaken.

First off, if people are going to brand you a nerd, they’re going to do it whether or not you brand other people. This is because they also don’t want to be called nerds. In the end, all we end up with is a big group of people calling each other names before whining themselves to sleep in the pitiful hope that other people don’t say the same thing about them.

Thinking about it though, what is so bad about actually being a nerd? The ability to endlessly appreciate outdated humour? The blithely positive attitude towards all problems and all situations? A blissful obliviousness to restrictive social etiquette? What’s not to love? It’s only when nerds start getting big ideas about breaking free from the hive mind that the problems start. That's where the self-deprecating, all consuming system of circular alienation begins.

I call on you all today to make a stand, for it is impossible to deny your heritage any longer. The very act of reading this piece of text makes you one of us, meaning that for you the time has come to act. The next time you exercise one of your petty attempts to hide your true identity through taking a steamer on someone else’s: think again. They’re going to do exactly the same to you. It’s not like smoking either. You can’t call yourself a casual, social or only-when-I’m-drunk nerd. This is who you are. Get used to it.

Right, I’m going to go do some press ups and socialise with my myriad of friends about topics unrelated to space travel or magic. Or books. Night, losers!

My Name's Katie and I Hate Icebreakers

It's not by the way. But I do. First day back at uni and you've got a wild eyed psychopath who would eat her own eyes to make a good impression on the first people she's been allowed to talk to in three years. Here's a tip: if you ever find yourself in this situation, please don't go around the room asking people their names and hobbies. It's icky. People don't like it.

I mean, what is the point of icebreakers anyway? They don't break the ice. They don't even thaw the tension. You don't know me and I don't know you. Nice and simple. The only function of breaking this unspoken agreement is to make everyone feel so awkward that they feel obliged to retreat into their own private inner well of despair. 'What are your hobbies?' she shrieks in cackling fits of madness. 'I haven't got any hobbies' you scream silently to yourself while those who have gone before you lie foaming on the floor.


Or maybe icebreakers are little chunks of necessary evil for our own good, disguised as awkward time wasting rituals . Perhaps subliminally they help us delve into the deep set hidden emotions of our co-students. Perhaps by talking about crap that nobody really cares about (good preparation for a literature module) we're simply learning to open ourselves up to the group. Perhaps it's 'rapport.' Perhaps it's just a good way for our demented overmistress to learn names.

Bull, bull, bull and bull. Nobody's listening to anything anyone else is saying. We don't care that Paul can ride a motorbike or that Jelly-Legs-Jimbo is doing a PGCE next year. We're too busy either bricking ourselves over what we're going to say next or regretting what we've already said. As if anyone could learn anything from a person's hobbies. 'I sew uncooked brussel sprouts into the eyes of dead animals so that the stalks look like pupils...' Nobody cares.


It's not rapport either and it's certainly not a good way of learning names. Rapport is when you say something and someone says something back. Icebreakers are when you say something and your words are swallowed into a void of ambivalence. As for name-learning, it's not as if you can look at someone and immediately associate them with whatever self-commending toss they've spouted earlier in the year. You've got your own little prejudices for that haven't you? It's not Jeremy the fun loving rascal who spends his time at the hospital singing to terminally ill puppies, it's Jeremy the blatant ket addict who pours jugs of peanut oil over himself for twenty minutes every day in an attempt to get it up. That's you Jeremy and don't you forget it.


My point (I think) is that people shouldn't be pressured into formulating a public image for themselves when they don't really want one. Don't be fooled, this is exactly the sort of brainwashing that icebreakers foster. If you don't have a hobby besides drinking and reading (again prerequisites for an English degree) you had better get one soon. And you can't choose horse riding because that's already taken.


The same goes for blogging. It's apparently impossible to create and maintain a blog without some sort of public image manifesting. Which is why I want to take this moment to apologise. I'm sorry world but this isn't me. This is merely a reflection of me mediated through the distorting lens of the written word. In real life I'm actually quite a nice person. Except when I'm drunk. Then I'm a tyrant.


You'll forgive me then (I'm sure) for criticising Seth Rogan's Zak and Miri Make a Porno because I actually quite like it.

If you haven't seen it, here's the craic. Zak and Miri are flatmates who always forget to pay their bills. They're grown up together around a completely platonic relationship with seemingly zero tension, giving an impression of the ideal no strings friendship. When they finally run out of money however, Zak's zany scheme to make a porno flick forces the pair's repressed emotions to surface, culminating in bizarre romance all round.

So far so good. The strengths of the comedy lie in pornography's innate inability to depict meaningful sex. That, some metacommentary about Rogan directing himself acting directing himself acting, and some good old fashioned poo humour. Hilarious.


There are some weak parts though. Don't get me wrong, I respect Seth Rogan. I respect the way he takes hard hitting contemporary issues and deals with them as delicately as a baboon with a jackhammer. I'm not being sarcastic, I think it's integral not only to the comedy but to dispelling all those nasty little taboos that any upstanding film producer wouldn't dare talk about. My problem with Zak and Miri isn't its disregard of taboo, it's that it doesn't go far enough. All the pornstars are depicted as happy-go-lucky scamps who seem genuinely interested in creating a work of art. I don't want that, I want soulless whores who participate only to fuel their hunger for cocaine. I suppose that would make for some pretty dreary comedy, but still, it's slightly more realistic than them all clubbing together to pay the bills at the flat.


Feeling reletively jolly all of a sudden, I also took it upon myself to read Shakespeare's The Merry Wives of Winsor. Yes, Shakespeare, yawn.
Actually, it's pretty hilarious, if not in language, certainly in plot. The trick to reading Shakespeare of course, is to replace the character's names with those of family members or celebrities, especially when said character is a fat, arrogrant, sweaty lecher with about as much chance of seducing a woman as an anthropomorphic dog turd. The entire play consists of two women playing tricks on poor old Falstaff, including burying him in dirty clothes and hitting him. Hilarious. Needless to say I was picturing Gordon Brown at the butt end of all this, failing miserably to bed Michelle Obama behind wacky old Barrack's back.

Perhaps that's unfair. I mean, Brown's a largely annoying political abomination, but he's probably not a First Lady stealer. Maybe you should have told us this in the icebreaker Gordon. Then we'd all be your friend.

'Ava tart

Well ladies and gents this all seems to be going rather well doesn't it? Christmas is over, New Year has been and gone and it's noses back to the mundane old grindstone for everone. Now there's nothing but hardship and misery before the next brief season of celebration rolls around and we can all shop ourselves to exhaustion and bathe in glorious mutual disappointment.


On the bright side I've had a bit of an epiphany regarding the art of blogging. As far as I can tell no one wants to read a ten page essay on fourteen different books per month, so it's probably better to either break it down into weekly segements or whittle it down to the best of a bad bunch. Those are your two options. VOTE NOW!



Ok poll closed, I voted yea to both since it's inevitably going to be easier on your eyes and my hands. From now on: more regular updates about not so very much. Except not today, since I need to catch up on all the Decemberage that I've missed. Well, some of it.



Kicking off then, the film that's currently burned onto everyone's retinas in 3d!

I have dreams about Avatar. Sometimes they're wet dreams. Most of the time they're psychodellic trips into a universe where societies function with either utopian synchronicity or downright bastardness. No in between. No middle ground. You're either a giant azure hippie or a mechanical tyrant. It's actually a tough choice when you think about it.

What annoyed me about Avatar (and don't get me wrong, my eyes were in a constant state of orgasm the entire time) was the sheer preachiness of it all. Not just the fact that the all-consuming capitalist army tossers were consciously exploiting the pretty blue people. Not just the fact that the pretty blue people were a thinly veiled allegory for every single victim of imperialism from the days of the British Empire right up to the Iraq war with a fair few allusions to Vietnam thrown in for good measure. No I don't mind any of that: it just reconfirms my original suspicions that the real world is built around the sort of cut and dried morality you might find in a Famous Five novel. What really annoyed me... what really left me feeling disappointed... what really... what really got my goat... Ok well I don't really know what annoyed me about Avatar. It's very hard to pinpoint anything specific in a film so uncompromisingly enjoyable that a stony-faced Victorian schoolmaster would have trouble keeping a straight face. Perhaps it was the fact that all the preachiness didn't seem to be aimed at anyone in particular. While the film had all the makings of a manipultive political agenda, I'm not really sure what the agenda actually was. What does Cameron actually want from us? Should we be planting trees? Researching liberating if ultimately trippy cyberpunk technology? Halting our invasions of countries full of blue indigenese? No, he wants us to buy a pair of 3d glasses, throw them away and buy another pair. And we all know what our glasses are made from. Cheap plastic made with cheap oil made with cheap foreign labor. You hypocritte Cameron, you pointless, self-aggrandising hypocritte.

Perhaps Avatar 2 will be different. I foresee a cast of bad guys named after oil corporations travelling to Pandora (recently renamed 'Nam.2) aboard a giant floating spacecraft version of the Vatican City in an attempt to hook the locals on heroine and convince them to pursue careers in Neo-Christian porn. Just to make it all that more realistic some of the Na'vi actually go along with it, leading to moral dilemmas of an unthinkable magnitude. Does Jake Sully fight against these turncoat space-whores in an attempt to preserve his newfound way of life or does he let bygones be bygones and top himself there and then? I can picture it now, armies of zealous pterodactyl-riding junkies defending their rights to live life by their own rules while a resurrected Richard Dawkins shows up with an array of Greenpeace atheists whose annoyance towards everything and anything proves the deciding factor in .

Obviously I'm joking. Everyone knows that Dawkins doesn't need to be resurrected. He's immortal, he just doesn't want anyone to find out. Anyway, you can brand the US Army as baby-murdering imperialist pigs all you want, but criticise religion? Never.

Well Assassin's Creed 2 would appear to argue otherwise.

Turning on your 360 (or PS3 if you swing that way) you'll be confronted with a desperately apologetic message claiming that the development team consist of a multi-ethnic-multi-faith-multi-pack of token programers so into tolerance it makes you feel bad for sneering at paedophiles. If you think the content of the game is a call to arms, you're mistaken because this is a game of tolerance. We're not attacking your worldviews. Tolerance you see. We're all about tolerance. Intolerance? No: tolerance.

To cut a long story short, you have to kill the Pope. Well you're supposed to, except after brutally murdering hundreds upon hundreds of people in your quest to exact revenge upon your family's killers, your character decides to wimp out. Years of relentless bloodletting rendered moot. 'I guess killing you won't bring my family back.' Sure it's never to late for forgiveness, but Ezio takes it a bit far. It's not noble when the one person you don't mindlessly slaughter turns out to be the one person who really deserves it.

Ezio himself is a freerunning renaissance dickwad if ever there was one. In between climbing impossible buildings to find opportunities to pose, Ezio spends his time emoing it up batman style, nicking Venetian gondalas like a kid who's played too much GTA and justifying his vigilanteism by arguing that most of his victims are slightly bigger arseholes than him. Arguable Ezio. Very arguable.

Perhaps I just didn't understand what was really going on. As far as the storyline goes, it's like Dan Brown and an Italian phrasebook have gone back and time and decided to start killing people. The Templars are definitely the bad guys, I'm just not sure why. I think it's because they assassinate people. Which is also your main occupation... Maybe I should have played Assassin's Creed 1 first.

On the bright side the gameplay was quite enjoyable. As with all great games your character is effectively a regenerating jumping machine with infinite stamina and a sleepless body clock. Fall from a thousand feet and you'll end up miraculously landing in a bale of hay, but run into someone at ground level and you'll probably fall over. Just nod your head and accept it. It's fun. Except when you convince yourself that it's a good idea to collect all of something. There's 66 Viewpoints for example, tall structures to masturbate over in HD. Get one and there's a bit of text saying 'Viewpoints Synchronised 1/66.' Awesome, something to collect! Collect all 66 and... nothing happens. No gamer points. No cutscene. No nothing. I'm talking hours if not days of hopping, skipping and jumping all for the pleasant feeling of NOTHING. If you can't appreciate the severity of such a betrayal I suggest you go outside and throw your 360 (or PS3) at a slab of concrete full force. There's a bunch of diamonds inside. Honest.

Oh yeah. Spoilers above.