Well, it's been a while, again.

Had both the week before last of work and the intention to put the time to good literary use. As it turned out I spent the first half of the week doing absolutely nothing, just lolling in a grumpy funk, (now there's musical genre just waiting to be explored!) Then on the Wednesday some mates, including our very own GeordieKeith, came over to stay.

Significant quantities of dope, booze (them not me,) pills, computer games and frisbies, without any pesky distractions like work or sleep, meant that I had a much better end to my holiday. Thanks to all involved, let's do it again soon ;)

Anyway none of that left much time for writing and then it was back to work. A bleary eyed Monday morning email check brought serious but positive news. Turns out some work I submitted months ago is going to be published in a collection, AND I'M GETTING PAID FOR IT!, while my own publishers had issued a kind of final demand for the collection of shorts I'm supposed to be writing for them.

So this week, besides catching up on my duties as both Admin Officer and Assistant Information Officer at work during the day, I've been up nights writing. Got in on Thursday and went for a nap about 6pm, didn't wake up until 7am Friday. As you may expect I'm pretty glad it's the weekend.

Anyway, that was supposed to be an explanation not a list of excuses, next time I'll just get a note from my mum shall I? While I may not have been physically attending to my blog recently I've certainly been thinking about it, and about you guys too. :) Turns out no matter how much I abuse my body, my head just will not switch off. This being the case I've a whole load of crap built up since the last time I wrote on here so here we go:

different types of food

Talking to one of the temps at work the other day I mentioned that my ipod is often the only thing that can get me to work in a morning. Now this is partly by way of distraction, just closing my eyes and losing myself in the tunes, not thinking about the day's work ahead.

There's more to it than this however. A distinct lack of food and sleep over the last couple of weeks has left me in a bit of a state to be honest, floating in a kind of grey where engagement with anything real just seems like too much effort.

Despite this however, on the bus yesterday I was staring out of the window listening to Nebula's 'Atomic Ritual' when a particular line in a particular song actually gave me goosebumps, I mean every hair on my bare and sunbathed arms was up on end.

No matter ho far removed I find myself , the right books and music have always been able to cut straight through all the crap and reach me. I've thought and written a great deal about the physical and the non physical and this is about as close I get to the idea of the 'soul' so eloquently argued for by my good friend MSM in past months. (1)

Sitting there on the bus, looking at the bumps on my arms and feeling the shivers down my spine, I remembered something I hadn't thought of for years: a brief conversation with a brief uni housemate of mine.

We were in the kitchen and I believe I was making myself a brown sauce sandwich for tea, classic cuisine of the skint. Apparently overcome by a fit of maternal instinct, she was pressing me as to why I'd spent the last of my money on a CD when my cupboards were bare. Now for all my great love of words I have to admit that, for the most part, they approximate the ideas they convey. Every so often however, and almost always without conscious design, they work just right. I don't know where it came from but, like I told her, there are different types of food.

Watched a film the other night though I can't remember the title so can someone help me out here please. It was, overall, a pretty lame dystopian vision saved only by the usual magnificent performance by Christian Bale. A future where the population are drugged to remove any emotion in order to live in orderly peace without art or expression. Bale is the man on the inside who wakes up etc etc.

The punchline of the piece hinged around a conversation he has with Sean Bean at the start. Bean is a colleague who has become a sense offender, ie. stopped taking his meds and started feeling, secretly reading books.

Bale reels off the rhetoric about art and emotion having too high a price to society and asks bean if he is really prepared to pay that price. "I would pay it gladly," Bean says as Bale executes him. Then of course at the end Bale is about to kill the Big Brother figure, (Father I think he's called, seriously it was about the least original thing I've ever seen!) and they have the same conversation. Very good.

When I was at uni I had the feeling that anything went as it was only for a limited period. The future was the murky place where maybe I'd grow up and take things a bit more seriously. Turns out I'm still here though, still just paying lip service to the physical and only really living in my head.

I'm sure there'll be a price to pay but to be honest, and not to give too much credit to a cack film by quoting it, I'd pay it gladly.

technical truth

As John Stewart pointed out on the consistently entertaining Daily Show last night, holy shit it's world war three! After a few years of seemingly moving towards peace, even if just by a little, the Middle East is erupting into a shitstorm that has the potential to go all the way.

Reading the Guardian online at work yesterday I read a piece by some guy called Jonathan Spyer, who I believe works for some Israeli thinktank or other. He struck me as a classic fascist, lots of absolutes and easy answers, everything was simple and all blame easily allocated to evil people.

I read with waning interest, the guy's opinion had to be respected but he just sounded like a million other dogmatic nutters and it's hard to give them your full attention when you've heard it all before. Whose mind did he think he would change with that rant? As far as I could see, his work served no purpose.

Overall I wasn't really moved in any way by piece, other than been a bit annoyed that I'd wasted some of my lunch break reading it. Then I came across something that really pissed me off.

Just another beat on his, 'these pesky Arabs don't want peace' drum, he described how the Lebanese government had rejected a UN resolution, clearly thereby proving that they deserved everything they got from Israel.

What got right up my nose about this was the way he presented it. He reported that the Lebanese government had rejected UN resolution 1559 which stated that, and gave a two line description and quote. Now I'll hold my handsup and admit that I've never read a UN resolution, but I'd be willing to bet cold hard cash that they're generally longer than a couple of lines.

I'm sure it is a fact that the Lebanese did reject that resolution, but this is not what Spyer was really saying. He presented the situation to suggest that the Lebanese had rejected, what he presented as, the ideas behind the resolution. Quite obviously however, the Lebanese may have fully embraced the idea but rejected the resolution because of some specific condition or clause.

I don't know if that's the case or not, but that doesn't really matter. Spyer was attempting to mislead his audience by at once telling a technical truth and an effective lie. We're surrounded by this kind of thing all day everyday, it's called advertising.

The technical truth is that their product does this or that, but the effective lie is the unspoken suggestion that buying the product will make you happy, safe, popular, etc. As I've stated in the past I consider this to be, in the consistently outstanding words of Zack de la Rocha, "mass mind rape".

At least it is to be expected in advertising however, at the end of the day we all know they're trying to sell us things and if we forget then more fool us. What got me angry yesterday was finding the exact same practice masquerading as professional journalism. It's all around us peeps, it's everywhere, and our only defence is to recognise it for what it is.

Beware the technical truth.

quantising reality (wutio Guns n Roses)

Had a thought some time ago about the video camera, but first let's consider a number line:

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

The question is, what lies between these numbers?

More numbers. More accurately in fact, an infinite number of numbers as there is no limit to how many decimal places you can go to.

The numbers listed above are arbitrary landmarks of convenience. There's no actual difference between that number line and this one:

1.37 2.37 3.37 4.37 5.37 6.37 7.37 8.37 9.37

We use the first as it is easiest, and why not, it seems to work pretty well doesn't it? There is a technical limitation to these number lines however, let's consider a couple of places along these lines:

1.370002

and

1.370003

We cannot distinguish between these two places using the number lines above. According to our lines these numbers are in fact the same. What we've done with these number lines is to quantise that infinite mess of numbers, ie. break down into a standard unit so that we can use.

So, the video camera.

What occurred to me was that a video camera basically quantises reality(2). If we think of reality as an, effectively, infinite flow of information all about us, a video camera breaks it down into twenty-five uniform pieces per second.

Of course there's an infinite amount of info lost in this process, ie. everything that happens in between those twenty-five frames per second. This is ok though as it's close enough to fool our brains, ie. it does the job.

There you go, so what?

Well it got me thinking. I had a stoned revelation(3) the other day wherein I finally got a proper grip on an idea I'd had for a while about life as a string moments, just once instance after another.

So many times I've come across a statistic or a phrase or a few bars of music that have completely changed the way I see the world. Each one of these moments, each of these 'nows', has the potential to rewrite everything we know. In fact I'd been leaning towards believing that each of them does change us, to just varying degrees.

The obvious question then, is to compare the human body to the video camera. Could it be that this perceived string if instances, this perpetual reinvention of self, actually results from our physical sense quantising reality in the same way as the camera?

Well into our three day bender, and not long after we'd dropped some pills, I broached the subject with GeordieKeith and my other visiting friend. The followed some lengthy speculation about the mechanics of human perception but we were ultimately stumped by a lack of technical knowledge about EXACTLY how our eyes and ears function.

The key area, it seemed to me, was, for example, the transition of information from the eye to the optic nerve. Are our eyes sending a constant flow of data to our brains, ie. a system fundamentally different from the number lines above; or discrete packets of info to the brain, ie. quantisation.

As I say, we were frustratingly limited by our ignorance of biology so I'd certainly appreciate any knowledge anyone has to share on this subject. It's a work in progress and no doubt I'll encounter another life changing moment in the future that'll tie in with it and allow me to progress further. It's so weird to be able to use a system without being able to understand how it works.

The Wind That Shakes The Barley (wutio Electric Wizard)

I remember seeing this film reviewed on BBCN24 and thinking that I'd be interested to see it. Of course I promptly forgot all about it and would have missed it were it not for a glowing recommendation from a work colleague. (Thanks again for that by the way, if you've found your way on here ;) )

So I went to see it the other night and was deeply moved. I could, as always having witnessed a genuinely great piece of cinema, wax lyrical for pages and pages about the experience. This post is already taking on truly monstrous proportions however so I'll be brief.

I'll no doubt be referring back to this film when I finally get my anti-democracy post together but for now I'll focus on the film itself. Set in Ireland in the early twentieth century it follows portrays the British occupation and the emergence of the IRA.

For a start it is clearly obvious that Ken Loach is a director of vast experience and talent. This was made obvious to me by the fact that he managed to walk the line between presented beautifully framed shots without that beauty detracting from the what was actually happening. The very best direction is usually that which you don't notice and it comes from the confidence to be subtle.

Another wonderful element to this film are the stumbles. There are several verbal and least one physical stumble which have an truly unscripted air. Far from making the piece seem unprofessional these instances lend a vast weight of realism to the film, making the events that take place feel even heavier to witness.

I cannot recommend this film highly enough and though I wouldn't go as far as my colleague and say it was one of my favourite films of all time, it is certainly a truly excellent piece of cinema. For me the most heartbreaking thing about the situation presented was the sickening familiarity.

A brutal occupying force with fear, ignorance and hatred on both sides driving the violence to ever deeper realms of brutality; the seemingly insurmountable sectarian divides and the intolerable yet relentless suffering of innocents throughout.

Throughout history and across the globe this situation occurs time and time again. An early scene in the film sees British troops lining young Irish men up against a wall and demanding their names. When one refuses to speak in English they are all forced to strip and he is taken away and beaten to death.

Change the scenery, the accents and the uniforms and we could be in Iraq, Chechyna, Palestine and any other number of tragedy soaked man made hells. I believe Ken Loach came under fire in the right wing press for making this film, partly for portraying the British army in a bad light and partly for dredging up the past.

In Loach's defence I have to say that firstly, I'm unfortunately pretty sure that there've been people wearing the uniform of our country doing unspeakably awful things to foreigners for a very long time. Secondly, both vicious brutality and brave compassion appear on both sides of the conflict in the film.

In response to the criticism of dragging up the past, the past clearly needs to be dragged up, again and again and again, until we learn the fucking lessons it teaches us! The mistakes and the crimes and the suffering shown in Loach's film are still tearing us apart today and so, despite being set over half a century in the past, this is an incredibly relevant film.

What more can I say? Lots probably, but I won't. The Wind That Shakes The Barley is an amazing film, watch it.

babykillers?

Finally, I promise, I wanted to canvass opinion on another debate I had with my mates during my holiday. One of my friends, who shall remain nameless, (unless he wants to name himself?) works for BAE Systems, (they used to be called British Aerospace,) and is currently involved in designing computer systems for fighter jets.

Now luckily my mate and I are both tolerant and open minded enough to be able to discuss this without having to resort to fear based hysterical dogma. Basically I told him he was, in my eyes, a babykiller. He made a conscious choice to be a part of the war machine, a machine that kills children on a daily basis.

He didn't disagree outright but simply said that he felt so removed from the ultimate outcome that he didn't really think about it. He also pointed out that we all pay the taxes that fund this work so we're all involved to some degree.

My question is, is it fair to call my bro a babykiller? We're all involved, but he's chosen to be more involved. It's a stone cold fact that if everyone throughout the defence industries of the world refused to do their jobs there could be no more war. Does that make my mate directly responsible for the children killed by the jet he helps build?

Wow, that really was a whole load of crap. For those who've made it to the end and actually read all this, well done! You have no idea how much I appreciate it, thank you :) Back to some posts of normal length and style over the next week or so I think.

footnotes

(1) GeordieKeith provided me with an amazing metaphor for the non-physical: apparently on the first space shuttle mission the engineers asked the IT guys how much their software would weigh. The IT guys explained that the software didn't weigh anything, it was the HOLES in the punch cards. What a beautiful way of thinking about it, won't forget that in hurry, cheers man, love ya ;)

(2) was very hesitant to use the word reality as I'm not generally happy with sweeping assumption that there is a single external reality within which we all dwell, for the purposes of these notes however that assumption will do for now,

(3) one of those abrupt shifts of perception whereby something previously beyond comprehension suddenly becomes clear and obvious, oh how I love sweet Mary Jane! ;)