Man am I glad it's the weekend.

Really knackered this week for some reason, couldn't wait to get out of work yesterday. Purposefully have little planned for this weekend, just putting a short manuscript together for a writing competition, a little shopping and plenty of lounging about the place.

Despite my eagerness to start the weekend however I did wait to leave work yesterday, because it was tipping it down. For a good five or ten minutes I stood watching the rain, dithering stupidly and wishing over and over that I hadn't left my coat and hat at home.

Eventually I realised however, and from said realisation came this post, that there wasn't really anything wrong with getting a bit wet. I'd stood there squirming because I was desperately trying to think of a way of getting to the bus stop while remaining relatively dry.

What I realised was that this desperation was based on an assumption of which I was not previously aware, namely that thinking and technology should mean I never, ever get wet.

I had unwittingly moved myself into a position to recognise this flawed assumption by considering what people would have done before the last century or so: they'd have walked home and got wet doing it. What made me so special that I couldn't do the same.

In light of the fact that I was walking but a short distance to a bus shelter to wait for bus to drive me pretty to the door of my warm, dry house, I actually quite enjoyed getting soaked. At least part of this was the feeling that I was experiencing something that almost every human who's every lived had also felt.

Not a great story, granted, but there lies in it a theme that is played out all about us everyday to the cost of thousands of lives. Our perceptions of what is 'normal' or 'acceptable' can shift without us even realising until we become so far removed from the real world that we pose a serious danger to it.

The belief that we have an absolute, god given right to travel everywhere as quickly and comfortably as possible at any cost is probably one of the number one root causes of violent death in the world today.

The belief that we have an inalienable and sacred right to live in relative material luxury at any cost is possibly even more dominant and detrimental.

What does it say about a society when its members find themselves feeling oppressed and cheated at having to walk a short distance in the rain? Well one thing it says loud and clear is to prepare to be disappointed.

Allowing our expectation to ride so high means we can only ever feel let down by the real world but, far more dangerously, we are blinded to the benefits laid right there for the taking.

In the end you see walking in the rain felt good. While escaping the trappings of a society terminally riddled by consumer capitalism may seem like anathema to many the fact remains that a healthier, simpler life would make them live longer and feel happier.

It's not just that things we don't want can be good for us, but rather that things we don't want might actually exactly what we want we're just looking at them in the wrong way.

The third example of this problem concerns happiness itself. One of the shorts in the collection I recently completed, entitled 'cut it out', is concerned with the value of emotional pain.

I recently recounted my analogy of drugs being like fire, ie. we didn't sit in the cold and dark eating raw meat to avoid getting burned, rather we learned how to put it to good use. Another way of putting this would be to compare drugs to a car.

A motor vehicle is an inherently dangerous object being, basically, a couple of tons of metal that can propel itself at high speed. We don't ban cars, we just teach people how to use them correctly. In the same way that I believe this should apply to drugs, it is even more vital that it apply to emotional pain.

The fact is that while you may well be able to live your whole life without doing drugs or driving a car, no-one lives a life free of emotional pain. This being the case shouldn't we learn how to deal with it, how to put it to use even and then pass these skills to each generation?

Nope.

Apparently it's far better to instil in the individual the dangerously naive idea that people are entitled to be happy all the time.

When something shitty happens, as it invariably will, this person then cannot see themselves as just another human living a human life, a comrade in the endless struggle of being.

Instead they can only see themselves as an isolated victim of injustice, helplessly cheated out of the perfect life they were promised.

We learn and grow more from overcoming adversity than by enjoying contentment. This isn't to say that we shouldn't aim to be happy, (for all you polarisers out there!) just that we should be prepared rather than surprised when things go wrong.

The world can seem like a crazy place sometimes, like a great runaway shit storm that no one can control. Look a little closer though at the way people believe things to be and the way they actually are, what do you expect?

The calling I feel to write comes, I believe, from a deeper urge to think. Maybe it's because I'm an only child but I've always has a tendency to daydream, to wander through places of my own creation rather than engage with the real world around me.

An example of this is the following recurrent daydream:

I'm in a situation were Tony Blair is meeting the public and the press are there, snapping and flashing and fishing for soundbites. He makes his way along the line of plebs, eventually coming to me. I smile politely and nod while he extends his hand.

I don't move to reciprocate and he slips into that wonky open mouthed smile, his eyes sharpening slightly, we've all seen him get ambushed, you know what I mean. He moves his a little closer and I say:

"No thanks, blood's hell to shift."

Now while there's part of me that just likes the turn of phrase and situation from an abstract, writing point of view, that little scene has always bathed me in a warm, fuzzy and satisfying feeling.

I must now confess however that it had not occurred to me until today exactly what that feeling was. Initially it had masqueraded as some imagined moral victory but today I realised that it is actually nothing more than the sadistic pleasure of feeling superior to someone.

And so this particular daydream is now terminally soured. As angry as I feel towards Mr Blair I know that
making him look like an arse in public, or hanging him as a war criminal as some have suggested, wouldn't actually achieve anything.

The only possible way to genuinely counteract the damage done by such politicians is to change the minds of the people who support them and this can not be achieved by abusing the said politicians, regardless of how tempting that may be.

Down at the Hyde Park Picture House last week I saw a trailer for An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's global warming(1) doc. The journey I took in appreciating Michael Moore's work has provided a template for my response to all such films.

I'm excited that finally a big film doc is being made about the subject matter in question.

I enjoy the style and feeling of belonging that comes from hearing your own views expressed through mass media.

I realise that for the difference it will make, the cinematic event in question may as well have been a fiction and it collapses into a mere film accordingly.

The vast majority of people who go to see such films do so because they already agree with the message and, subsequently, it doesn't change anybody's mind. Sure it may cut through some apathy and ignorance but that's not what counts in this game.

Telling people that they're wrong and greedy and are killing everybody's children may be entirely accurate, and fun, but alienating them with insults doesn't stop them being or doing any of those things.

I've written this before, many times, about "people being more concerned with winning than solving the problem," etc and yet here I am getting off on landing a witty jab on Blair's nose in public.

The problem with trying to live your life to a moral code(2) is that you can't just lay back and expect breaches of that code to make themselves obvious. In order to live clean as it were, you need to think about everything.

But hey, nothing worth having is easy right?

So how did I come to gain this unforeseen perspective today? Well my ipod is currently knackered and I'm feeling a bit bereaved to be honest. Having a head full of the Wizard, or any other dirty, fuzzed out doom riffs makes it so much easier to get to work in a morning.

Anyway on the bus today I got fed up of looking out the window and resorted to reading the Metro(3). I came across a story about an asylum seeker, 36 year old Mr Manuel Bravo, who hung himself in Yarl's Wood detention centre so that his 13 year old son would not be deported back to their West African home.

Now this is clearly a pretty shitty situation but as I read on I reached the following line:

"The pair had been detained at their temporary home in Leeds by immigration officers..."

Instantly a memory barged into focus. Last week I attended work's Staff Briefing. This consists of pretty much every single employee of the Social Housing ALMO(4) I work for (half in the morning, half in the afternoon,) attending a meeting to discuss issues affecting the business.

Sitting on the bus, the last paragraphs of the piece as yet unread, I pictured as clear as the wakening day beyond the glass part of a presentation I had witnessed wherein a manager listed the achievements of his department and, subsequently, the whole ALMO.

One of these that we had found and helped take into custody nine asylum seekers living illegally in our properties. Suddenly I felt that was a solid, albeit nebulously indirect, link between myself and this man and his son.

It was a distinctly sickly feeling of which only traces were guilt. No the main basis of the frown I must have then worn was shame.

I counted the numbers of times I've recently referred in conversation to my job as being, 'guilt free' and thought about calling my friend at BAE Systems a baby killer. I remembered feeling good about not having to sell anything or make lethal products or equipment.

I'm a part of the machine too.

This led me to consider other potential discrepancies between my beliefs and my actions and hence the daydream outlined above.

The third stumble, you knew it was coming, concerns an exciting idea I've had recently. The manuscript I finally submitted last week is part of a larger project involving a 'creative writing for depression' workshop I'm trying to organise.

This project touches upon several issues and causes one of which is an attempt to try and build a kind of indie lit scene in Leeds, taking writing back to grassroots in the same way that film and particularly music have done recently.

On the horizon of my imagination this project began to grow into a much more ambitious design and I began to do a little speculative research into the idea of starting an independent publishing house.

Anyway I was pondering the myriad considerations of such an undertaking when I suddenly remembered a whole chunk of relevant abstract thinking I'd done.

Having never seriously contemplated setting up a business before all my thought on capitalism, trade and commerce had been theoretical. Suddenly faced with the reality of actually implementing those heartfelt beliefs I admit, I shat my pants.

Now I stand by everything I've said and if I do it, then I'll have to do it right, but god damn it's daunting. I must admit though that once I'd absorbed the initial shock the fear quickly distilled into a kind of unnerving excitement.

How cool could it be?

So what's the point of these three here then, has this been nothing more than an exercise in self flagellation?

Well no actually. I'm not beating myself up about any of these things but thinking about them has given me a useful reminder of my own weaknesses.

I see no necessary hypocrisy in not living life in perfect adherence to one's own moral code, what counts is that you care and you keep trying.

So I just want to say that I know I bang on about the great rights and wrongs and how everything should be, but if you're thinking, I can't live up to all that! then you know what? me 2.

footnotes

(1) yes GLOBAL WARMING not climate change, this particular exercise in rebranding has been hideously successful.

GLOBAL = the whole world, affecting everyone,
Climate = usually used in a local context, allows ease of geographic distancing for scary thoughts,

WARMING = perfectly describes the situation and supplies a definite direction,
change = admits to nothing regarding direction and carries with it overtones of the unavoidable,

so it's GLOBAL WARMING ok? I caught myself saying climate change the other day and felt utterly violated, get the fuck out of my head you fascist loons!

(2) just wanted to say that this doesn't have to come from organised religion, despite what most of them insist; as it happens I not really sure an organised religion can fill this role at all but that's another post altogether,

(3) METRO is a free paper distributed on buses and trains which I generally turn my nose up at due to some of the spurious shite I've seem them print about weed in the past,

(4) ALMO: Arms Length management Organisation, a private company fully owned and run by the local authority, basically a half privatised council department,

There's documentary on C4 tomorrow night entitled something like Endtime Thinking presented by Tony Robinson. Seeing the trailer I was immediately interested and not just because Tony Robinson is presenting it.(1)

I'm not entirely sure what the actual ideas being investigated will be but the very phrase tied together a few things I've been thinking of for a while so here's your three:

First off there's the difference between race and culture (including but far from limited to religion,) and I guess I should start here by explaining my stance on race:

I don't believe in skin colour.

Now I could be a pedant here and justify this seemingly rash statement by stating the fact the everyone's SKIN actually is the same colour, (it's the amount of natural sunblock underneath that produces an apparent difference in shade,) but thankfully my beliefs are based on a stronger argument than this.

Let me describe to you the thought experiment required to get on board here. Imagine if you will that all six billion human beings on earth stand side by side in a single line.

At one end is the person with darkest skin in all the world and at the other stands the very palest of us whiteys. The entire race is then ordered between the two by the shade of their skin.

Now if skin colour were a valid criteria by which to classify human beings we would be able to walk along this line and mark boundaries between categories. It is my belief that no such boundaries could be drawn as the transition from dark to light skin would be perfectly smooth.

There are, of course, people who would maintain their accusations of pedantry towards me here and say that we could in fact draw these boundaries, the edges would just be a little fuzzy with a few people straddling each line.

I would dispute this however by imaging the line another way. If we now ordered our species by height would we be able to draw such lines? No, the transition in heights would again be perfectly smooth and all would surely agree that any boundaries drawn now would be entirely arbitrary. Skin colour is exactly the same.

From where then does this idea come, and I admit it carries a powerful air of instinctive truth, that skin colour is somehow more significant than height? The answer, which carries us neatly back towards the almost forgotten point of all this, is geography.

The only reason humans have different skin colours is that we developed different amounts of natural sunblock under our skins depending on where we lived. As our numbers increased and we began to travel and mingle further and more we began to make our way along a very special road.

Basically this road along which everybody fucks everybody else until we're all the same colour. (bare in mind the evolutionary timescales that determined skin colour is millions of years while that of the spread of the human race is thousands.)

Now all cultures, (and yes, religions, yawn,) have also been defined by geography but are fundamentally different from skin colour partly because they are much more recent and also because they can remain relatively constant despite our intermingling.

Going back to our thought experiment, you could indeed categorise humanity by culture, albeit with fuzzy lines. The reason we confuse skin colour with culture is that we simply haven't yet had time to mix it up enough for the difference to become to obvious.

And here we come to the whole endtime thinking issue. This is basically the attitude that the present is in fact the end of time, that we have reached some kind of plateau along which we will now cost at a constant speed for all eternity.

This dangerously weird delusion stops us from seeing things like skin colour as the temporal phenomena they are and tempts us to make sweeping statements that may appear to hold true for a few millennia but quickly fall down when taking a longer view.

So there you have it, there is no such thing as skin colour. You may as well decide that one size of pebble is superior to any other when, actually, they're all going to end up as grains of sand in the end.

The second angle on this endtime concept is more specific and considers not people but the organisation, and acronyms, they create. The UN and the NHS are the two groups of people and letters I was thinking of in particular.

The process of creating both was that of making of making a grand and impossible dream a reality with the aim of permanently solving some of the greatest problems people faced.

The concept that health care was something above and beyond power and politics, that access to the best medical care possible was an inalienable right to all regardless of status is, when you think about it, a pretty amazing thing.

So too is the idea that no nation should ever be at war with another and the subsequent creation of an arena within which preventative dialogue could always be held.

The problem we face today is that we have, again, slipped, fallen in to the trap of believing that we have arrived. The very existence of the NHS and the UN is seen as the end of the process when , in fact , they are both just the first step along the road.

Rather than carrying these noble intentions forward and reaching even higher, we are apparently content to allow our elected representatives, (pardon me while I spit,) to just maintain the appearance of standing still when, in reality, our loss of momentum now means we're actually sliding backwards.

The fight is not over, it has barely even begun and it's not a question of maintaining what we have but perfecting it so as build even further.

The third and final point here is to consider why this may be happening.

There's an argument to be made that the power to change the world lies in the global north west and that in this region we are so, relatively, affluent and comfortable that we have lost the desire to push forward. There are no doubt plenty of other contributing factors as well, suggestions please.

The factor that occurs most clearly to me however is, as you might expect, a little darker than this.

The people making the decisions in our society today are partly the politicians, (ting goes my spittoon,) but mainly large corporations. The careers and lifestyles these people enjoy are fundamentally based on the existence of problems in society.

Both groups are afforded power and riches by us the people in order to enable them to solve our problems. What happens to them however when those problems are solved? Get to the back of the dole queue messieurs Blair and Gates.

The fact is it is not in the interests of a company or a government to actually solve problems. If companies produced products that lasted forever for example, they'd go out of business. If governments delivered a decent and sustainable standard of living to the whole population what would we need them for?

The vertical structures within which we all choose to live have as their foundations the assumption that today is forever. While they are very good at producing the illusion of progress, what is actually changing for the better in our world?

A recent poll showed that happiness levels among americans have stayed almost perfectly constant for the last half century, yet how much technological 'progress' has there been to your mind over that time?

It's easy to be angry at the world but anger can be a powerful engine when kept in perspective. One of the greatest sources of frustration I experience on an almost daily basis(2) is the feeling of treading water.

You look around you at all the people maing cricles in the dirt and just want to scream: "for fuck's sake come on! can we stop dicking about and just get on with it please?"

Generations passing without any actually development of the species? That's what animals do, that's why sharks and crocodiles today are almost identical to their ancestors of millions of years ago.

We are not however, at some point we set off along a road of radical change. Our heads swelled and our backs straightened; then we started planting seeds and putting one rock on top of another; then we started getting high and expressing ourselves by marking wood and rocks.

It was all going so well until, at some point we decided we couldn't be arsed any more. As mind blowingly, unimaginably wonderful as the golden city on the horizon may be we decided to stop by the side of the road and sit with our thumbs up our arses.

How much longer people, how much longer? We are most definitely NOT nearly there yet but that's no reason to stop altogether.

footnote

(1) is there anyone out there who doesn't like Tony Robinson? I've always had the impression that he's genuinely sound bloke and enjoyed watching him on TV, and yes, that's even before found out he's a stoner!

(2) while this is certainly partly due to working for the council it's also a result of the world at large as well,

So I was thinking of how to continue the trend of spreading it about a bit, there's the usual politics and social commentary, then we covered a bit art yesterday, books, music and film so what else am I passionate about that I can turn into a post? Oh yes, drugs, lovely, lovely drugs.

Now I've spoken about polarisation before and in particularly about the quite horrific dangers it poses. One of the ways I've tried to explain my life long obsession with the number three is that it's a good way to avoid polarisation.

The main danger, about which I've written at length in the past, is that we fall into the trap of thinking that two opposing arguments cover the whole gamut of an issue. It's a deadly trap that kills from the head down, fooling people into thinking that there are no other positions to adopt and so, at best, restricting their thought to a narrow field or, at worst, making thinking at all seem redundant.

A good example of this are the two main attitudes towards drug use. Now if you hit the READ MY WORK tag and find my article 'Prohibitive Costs', (nationally serialised when it was written thank you very much,) you'll find a very detailed explanation of my views on this situation. For the purposes of this post however I'll just state my beliefs and leave you to read the grounding for them at your leisure.

So the 'drug poles' if you will tend, as if often the case, to run vaguely along political lines. There's the right wing pole which states drug use is morally wrong in of itself, and that by choosing to escape from reality drug users are shirking their duty to society.

Then there's the left wing pole which states drug use is a terrible affliction to which poor souls are driven by society's failings and that they can't be blamed for escaping so harsh a reality. Their absence is seen here as society's loss.

Now one aspect of all this that immediately leaps off the page for me is that, and this is very common with polarisation, these arguments have far more in common than they do to separate them. One way to see this is to consider both pole's ideal situation.

For both the right and left wing poles here, their perfect world would feature zero drug use. The right because all the users would be reformed or dead, the left because, what they perceive to be, the reasons for drug use would have been eliminated.

My own position, a third angle if you like, (the third of a potentially infinite list, a bit of thought is all that's required to find your own,) is that not only can drug use be a fantastically wonderful thing but that, actually, drug use is an inherent part of humanity and the key to the evolution of both our species and culture.

Now let me make it clear that I agree drug use can be very damaging, but then so can fire. Do we still huddle together in the dark for warmth and eat raw meat? No, we learned how to harness that raw power for our own ends.

The distinction between drug use and drug abuse, for me anyway, has always been the difference between wanting to be stoned or not wanting to be sober. If you doing it to enjoy it and to feel different then the physical costs are outweighed by the mental benefits. Doing it just to avoid facing up to your ordinary life is doomed to failure and has no real benefits meaning it's all cost.

Escapism, such as but not limited to drug use, is generally slammed as being 'non-productive' and feared for leaving the escapee vulnerable. It seems to me however, that the overall development of our societies has been to move away from hand to mouth and violence and towards long term security and comfort, ie. the conditions under which escapism can be undertaken safely.

A long time ago I wrote in a journal of mine that escapism is ok as long as you bring something back. Our evolution from 'animals' to 'people' can surely be defined in no better terms than the development of abstract thought, ie. thinking about things beyond the immediate physical.

From this ability has flowed everything we have. A fantastic lecturer of mine at uni, who I suspect was an actual, official genius, told us about what he called, 'the little bird moment'.

This is where the physicist, or whoever, has reached a limit and can proceed no further. Then, from out of the blue, it's as if a little bird lands on his shoulder and whispers in his ear. A tiny thought, a slight shift in perception and suddenly the great leap forward is made.

Although hard physical work and commitment are essential, it's ideas that actually change things. These ideas come from a place that is not physical and they are found when one escapes the physical world into that other place.

There are plenty of drugs I won't touch but that's for reasons of safety and / or personal preference, not because there's anything wrong with them in theory. Thanks to prohibition pills and powders can and usually do contain pretty much anything, not knowing what you're taking is not my idea of constructive drug use.

Stimulants are not really my thing either, I don't even drink tea, coffee or fizzy drinks but, as i say, that's personal preference. Hallucinogenics are my bag, and of course, the goddess herself, sweet, sweet Mary Jane. I love her and I love getting high and I owe most of what you read on here and most what I write professionally to her green guiding light.

Whether you agree with me, think I'm pretentious hippy scum or anywhere in between I guess the point here is just because two schools of thought come to dominate an issue doesn't mean that either are true, and it sure as shit doesn't mean they're right.

You can always have a think about it yourself and find your own path, bare in mind however that to do so makes you yet another escapee...

Seems like me feeling shitty and the wide wicked world of politics have come to dominate this blog recently so time to get back to a long neglected facet, art. So here's your three:

dark renaissance

I'm out of weed at the mo, which is always super shitty, but despite the temporary absence of my long time green lady friend I'm feeling surprisingly chipper. Could this be to do with the parcel I found awaiting me upon my return home from work today?

The greatest band in the world, creators of the soundtrack to my life, the almighty Electric Wizard, have recently rereleased much of their back catalogue. The few tracks I've needed to complete my almost exhaustive collection have long since eluded me, existing only on super rare vinyl or even homemade demo cassette tapes.

Thankfully however these ultra rare tracks have finally been released as bonus tracks on these latest CDs. They've also released the CD I'm listening to now, Pre Electric Wizard, basically the demos of the three bands (Lord of Putrefication then They Grief Eternal and then Eternal,) that gradually developed into Doom Chapter, who later changed their name to Electric Wizard.

What this amounts to is the equivalent of a couple of new Electric Wizard albums and I am absolutely made up! It doesn't really matter that almost no-one out there has a clue what I'm talking about here, the point is that art, the right art for you, can make life worth living.

Huge doom riffs and even a Black Sabbath cover, fan fucking tastic!

renaissance

Saw an absolutely amazing piece of cinema recently called Renaissance. Now I've written before about Aldous Huxley and his background: his father's side were scientists, including Charles Darwin I believe, while his mother's side were successful artists of their time. The combination of so called opposites created, I fell, an absolutely amazing bloke with a unique view on the world.

Learning this has since given me a great enthusiasm for the combination of seemingly opposing things. Renaissance is an example of such a combination and it works so, SO well. A Hollywood plot with fast cars, guns and cheese; yet set in Paris with lots of moody, film noir smoking in the dark and beautiful, wistful landscapes and oh yeah, it's animated.

Now before the word cartoon looms into your mind let me assure you have never seen animation like this. No lines, no colours, NOTHING but black shapes and white shapes interwoven. As clumsy as this sounds the characters produced are the most realistic animated people I've EVER seen.

Better even than the bodies in Ghost in the Shell, my anime expert friend agreed with me when I said that I suspected the weird animation style somehow leaves gaps in the detail just the right size for your brain to fill in, lending it it's weird air of being so obviously abstract while simultaneously utterly convincing.

He also took the words out of my mouth when we left the cinema and he turned to me and said, "that was more Sin City than Sin City." Putting it much better than I could have, he'd put his finger right on it.

The best way to describe this amazing style, (just go and see it for gods sake!) is to compare it to the artwork in Frank Miller's Sin City graphic novels, also favourites of mine. Although I thought the film adaptation of Sin City was ok it's a shame it was made simply because now no-one's going to fund another version using this technique.

Now as it happens I quite enjoyed the plot of Renaissance, having as it did more depth than you might imagine at first. even if I hadn't however, i would have happily just sat there and looked at it for two hours, (and no, I wasn't stoned at the time )

I left the cinema with that wonderful feeling that the previous couple of hours spent in the dark had actually added something to my mind and left a subtle change in me. Go see it, it kicks ass, and if you're still in this mindset, which i just don't get, that animation is just for kids and Japanese people maybe it's about time you joined the 21st century.

dark

One of my favourite, and most repeatedly watched, films of all time is Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It is another example of a beautiful combination creating something which is so much more than the sum of its parts. This time however it's a combination of my favourite things:

One of my all time favourite writers, (HST RIP) and that's a very short list, believe me; one of my all time favourite directors, Terry Gilliam is an actual genius and creator of magical things; and one of my favourite actors, Johnny Depp is terrifyingly convincing as the Doc having lived with him for a while to learn the role, (lucky bastard!)

A glance at the list of books I've read this year then might give you a clue as to why I was so excited about A Scanner Darkly. Not only another of my all time favourite writers, (PKD RIP) but one of my all time favourite books.

Throw in another of my all time favourite directors, Richard Linklater's Slacker stunned me as a kid and his more recent Waking Life was an absolute delight. Some more great actors, (great in their own particular niche anyway,) and I was expecting something very special.

I guess I have to say from the start that, unlike Fear & Loathing, A Scanner Darkly was not a perfect translation of book into film. To be fair to Linklater though the I believe the following three things to be true:

it was yet another beautiful, unique Richard Linklater cinema experience in its own right,

it couldn't have been done any better,

PKD books just cannot be translated into films,

What I love about PKD, all time master of the headfuck, are the seemingly endless scope of his ideas. While this film was a pleasure to watch I highly recommend reading the book first as the whole thing is much more powerful in print.

An undercover narc investigating his own cover persona while taking a drug that splits the brain is something that only PKD could come up with. Throughout the novel a sens eof fraying sanity builds and builds creating at once a chilling social commentary and a very personal portrait of isolation and the path to madness.

The plot twists back and forth, inducing in the reader the same confusion, fear and loosening of the grip on reality as the narrator describes. I actually reeled as i read the last paragraph, it's the only word for it, he quite literally blew my mind.

Now in order to be true to this truly great work of literature, the film would have to be so long and so dark and so hard to follow that it would be unwatchable.

What Linklater has created instead is a visually stunning film that is at once delightfully funny, while still communicating that horrendous tension and sense of despair. The journey is lighter and shorter, and nowhere near as confusingly twisted, but it's great none the less.

Linklater has employed a similar, (the same?) technique here as with Waking Life wherein the film was recorded normally but then the individual frames were painted over to produce a completely arresting hybrid of animation and live action.

Read the book, watch the film, listen to music, go to an art gallery, guys, seriously, go get some art, I really believe it's what we're here for.

pubs

Finally.

Sat in front of me, amid the varied clutter of my desk, is a big old manuscript that represents the culmination of the last ten months. I've finished my collection of shorts and will be submitting it to my publisher tomorrow.

I was expecting some great sense of relief but actually, I just feel weird. I think I'd just got used to having it hanging over my head and it hasn't quite sunk in yet that it's finished. Still, it's another step away from boring day jobs towards a life of full time smoking, thinking and writing.

Another such step took itself recently as a short story I submitted ages ago was recently published in a new collection. I hadn't really thought about it for a while then suddenly I've got a cheque and a paperback with my work in it! (1)

So progress is being made, albeit gradual. I'm still after a literary agent and a deal with a major publisher but I must say, the two indies I'm working with currently, (ID Publishing and Chipmunka Publishing,) are great guys. I just wish I could make a living writing for people like this.

clubs

So I recently acquired an XBOX360, which is kick ass and has already sucked many hours from my life. The manner in which I acquired this piece of hardware however, is what I really wanted to talk about in this post.

We're all familiar with the process of buying stuff right?

Your average high street store is basically just a single great mechanical system. Customers come in here, pick up priced products there and move to the checkout. The staff then process the customer and their purchase in a standardised manner.

Everyone, theoretically, gets treated exactly the same. For the most part the individual attributes of the people, customers and staff alike, do not factor in this process.

Well this is isn't how I bought my 360, and it's not how I buy CDs or how I used to buy second hand books. When I bought the 360 I went into my favourite games store and had a chat with the guy that ran something like this:

This is what I want, this is what I've got, let's do a deal.

The difference with this system was that:

a) I got exactly what I wanted, not the closest available,

b) I got everything a whole lot cheaper,

c) I recycled my XBOX by trading it in,

Luckily there's still a great independent metal CD store in Leeds, though the greatest second book shop I ever encountered, Elephant Books, has long since closed down. It's better for the customer in terms of price and choice to shop in this way, it's produces less waste and it involves actual communication with another human being, usually someone who shares your interest.

Now during the world cup I had a thought which, it turns out, is relevant here. There were various instances where the commentators informed us that FIFA had decreed, 'if this happens the ref must book the player'.

It occurred to me then that this is akin to the mandatory minimum sentencing approach applied to drug offences in the US over the last few decades. (How d'you like that? A tangent within a tangent!) Basically these are both examples of the rule makers removing discretion from their operatives on the ground.

Both the referee on the pitch and the judge in the courtroom have their hands tied under such systems because they are no longer able to put the punishment in context. The underlying assumption here is that the rules are so good that they can be applied to absolutely any situation. Hence the use of discretion can only serve to pollute the ultimate justness of the laws.

Unfortunately such an assumption is not just dangerously arrogant but also quite insanely naive. It is simply impossible for any of us to predict all possible eventualities of any situation. Does it no then make more sense to rely on people to do what people have spent so many millions of years evolving to do? Respond and adapt.

Anyway, back to commerce. In the days just before eBay, (was there ever a time before eBay? apparently so,) many critics dismissed the idea as pure idiocy. Quite clearly, they said, everyone will just rip one another off.

Well eBay told it's own story and, love it or hate it, it has to be said that the whole thing is fundamentally built upon one single concept: trust in absolute strangers.

My point here is human beings are fantastic things, put two of them together and their brilliance is far greater than the sum of their parts. Why then do we seem to insist, in all areas of society, in trying to cut the man out of the machine?

We then act all surprised and sit around bitching when the cold, dead systems we've built to replace basic human warmth don't meet our needs. So many problems in the world, so many difficulties, what to do?

money is not the answer,

technology is not the answer,

you are the answer.

People need people. If we, as a society, could rediscover the huge power and potential of one on one human relationships; if we could stop scoffing, acting too cool for school when in fact we're quivering inside, and actually connect with those around us, there is nothing we could not achieve.

How's that for a come back? Expect more soon

footnote

(1) check out my first published work of fiction @:
http://www.route-online.com/routev7/page.asp?idno=292