tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-206715152024-03-08T19:15:17.129+00:00Thought Readingstuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-3327928857602322912015-06-15T15:31:00.003+00:002015-06-15T15:31:57.780+00:00My forthcoming book, <i>In The Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling</i>, is to be published by Zero Books in September 2015. It is a critical study of the fate of the five physical senses (and the sixth non-physical one) in capitalist modernity.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-65583177365927401632013-04-05T11:33:00.001+00:002013-04-05T11:33:11.005+00:00From my forthcoming book, <i>In The Realm of the Senses: A Materialist Theory of Seeing and Feeling</i>, due from Zero Books in 2014:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.aeonmagazine.com/oceanic-feeling/stuart-walton-scepticism-belief/">http://www.aeonmagazine.com/oceanic-feeling/stuart-walton-scepticism-belief/</a><br />
<br />stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-24201003982209987892011-11-01T13:41:00.006+00:002011-11-01T16:19:38.425+00:00Sonnet 29<div><br /></div><div>When in disgrace with Fortune and men's eyes</div><div>I all alone beweep my outcast state,</div><div>And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,</div><div>And look upon myself and curse my fate,</div><div>Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,</div><div>Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,</div><div>Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,</div><div>With what I most enjoy contented least;</div><div>Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,</div><div>Haply I think on thee, and then my state</div><div>(Like to the lark at break of day arising)</div><div>From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate.</div><div>For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings</div><div>That then I scorn to change my state with kings.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> When, submerged in sympathy for the self during a period when Fortune is not looking kindly on him, the poet's mood sickens almost to self-loathing, his thoughts turn to the lover. Then, from wailing at the deafness of the heavenly host, he becomes a celestial carol-singer, at which point the absence of elusive Fortune matters not. Not even kings are as richly endowed.</div><div><br /></div><div> What speaks out of the 29th sonnet (and its companion piece, the 30th) is an acute sense of material impoverishment. Fortune, that notoriously inattentive floozy, has overlooked him while she has been busy bestowing favours and fancies elsewhere, to the extent that her understudy, Envy, has inveigled herself into the poet's home and set up camp. Others are 'more rich in hope' in the twin senses that they are more hopeful, but also that they have been blessed with the wherewithal to live more successful lives. Everywhere he looks there are people enjoying themselves, 'like him, like him', as the pivot of the sixth line has it, while he falls ruining at a heaven that has failed in its primary duty, to hear the unhappiness going on outside its walls.</div><div><br /></div><div>And then something makes him think of the boy, and it all flows back into perspective. Or rather, the conventional perspective is itself thrown into lustrous disproportion. Vaughan Williams's lark ascending makes an unscheduled parenthetical appearance (recalling the contemporaneous adage that 'If the sky fall, we may hap to catch larks'), and suddenly the ululations of grief at heaven's entrance turn into melodious praise, doubtless to the relief of the door-staff, who aren't so deaf after all. The metaphor of love as wealth is as old as Gilgamesh, but serves here to remind the lover that being a king wouldn't now add an iota to the contentment he denied as recently as the eighth line.</div><div><br /></div><div> In 'True Love', Joan Armatrading sings, 'Poverty can be romantic/ In black-and-white it looks like art/ Just as long as we're together/ I couldn't care less'. While commonly feeling that this is how it ought to be, we repeatedly fail in the duty of hope. When two together fail, the game is usually up. But if the face of one 'like him', rising absently in the dreaming mind, can burn the evidence of material failure to a cinder, then love, such as it is, is indeed true.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>Hear Fingersnap's David McAlmont give a beautifully considered reading of Sonnet 29 here: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE2FfNEp6jI&feature=youtu.be&noredirect=1">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mE2FfNEp6jI&feature=youtu.be&noredirect=1</a></div><div><br /></div>stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-24018758748643601162011-09-18T09:10:00.005+00:002011-09-18T10:05:05.902+00:00Sonnet 65<div><br /></div><div>Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,</div><div>But sad mortality o'ersways their power,</div><div>How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,</div><div>Whose action is no stronger than a flower?</div><div>O how shall summer's honey breath hold out</div><div>Against the wrackful siege of batt'ring days,</div><div>When rocks impregnable are not so stout,</div><div>Nor gates of steel so strong, but time decays?</div><div>O fearful meditation; where, alack,</div><div>Shall Time's best jewel from Time's chest lie hid?</div><div>Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back,</div><div>Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?</div><div>O none, unless this miracle have might,</div><div>That in black ink my love may still shine bright.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> Since there is nothing on earth that isn't subject to the sway of mortality, including the most elemental forces, youthful beauty in its fragility is hardly likely to endure. The idyllic summer days of happiness are likewise perishable, since time decays everything. In this sense, everything is in the <i>possession</i> of Time, including the lover's handsomeness, which has no more chance of hiding from its depredations than do rocks or steel. Nothing can stop Time's fleet-footed hurry, nor prevent it from reclaiming its own... unless the act of capturing the boy's beauty in written words has a chance of cheating it of the complete victory.</div><div><br /></div><div> The controlling metaphors of sonnet 65 are first legal, and then military. In the opening four lines, beauty is under the 'sway', or legal jurisdiction, of mortality, so that it has no chance of 'holding a plea' in Time's court, and its judicial action is no stronger than either the flower, or indeed the poem's distinctly feeble fourth line.</div><div> Then suddenly we leave the courtroom for a scene of siege, where the passing days are battering rams that will break down beauty as easily as (surely more easily than) they do natural fortifications or steel gates. As in the 64th sonnet, to which the present one can be read as a companion piece, the realisation itself is fatal. 'This thought is as a death' in 64 becomes here the equally querulous 'O fearful meditation', prior to the poem's most troubling metaphor, the idea that the lover's beauty properly belongs in the sealed chest of Time, as its 'best jewel'. By the twelfth line, it has become once again the trophy, or 'spoil', of that indomitable military campaign that Time conducts, and always wins. Its wasting action is so 'fearful' precisely because it jealously holds on to what it considers its own, with the express purpose of ruining it. Time's chest might as well be the dog's manger of classical fable.</div><div> The only wager against this fate is the poet's self-reflection at the close, that in the very act of recording the boy's beauty for posterity, of writing it down 'in black ink', it may paradoxically continue to scintillate as brightly as it does at the moment the sonnet is written. If there is any way of joining the war against Time, it lies in the possible afterlife of the literary work, for all that such a thought wryly strikes the poet as hoping for a miracle.</div><div> Art is the last resort by which the perishable may be preserved against the onslaught of the days and years, and even that seems a matter of crossed fingers. The pathos of sonnets 64 and 65, their curdled fatalism, derives from the poet's inability to treasure what beauty there is while it exists, rather than looking onward to its inevitable decay, and so already surrendering the precious jewel to Time's own treasure-chest.</div><div><br /></div>stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-20643092532619968162011-09-15T14:11:00.003+00:002011-09-16T14:09:51.908+00:00Sonnet 64<div><br /></div><div>When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced</div><div>The rich proud cost of outworn buried age,</div><div>When sometime lofty towers I see down razed</div><div>And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;</div><div>When I have seen the hungry ocean gain</div><div>Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,</div><div>And the firm soil win of the wat'ry main,</div><div>Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;</div><div>When I have seen such interchange of state,</div><div>Or state itself confounded to decay,</div><div>Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,</div><div>That time will come and take my love away.</div><div>This thought is as a death, which cannot choose</div><div>But weep to have that which it fears to lose.</div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div> The theme of the 64th sonnet is mortality, entropy, decay. The context is set by no fewer than ten lines of examples from the natural and political worlds. Everything falls away, into rot and ruin and desuetude and age.</div><div> Time's cruel hand is responsible for the disfigurements of age, when the richness of youth is obliterated in gradual wearing-out. Once-tall towers crumble away, supposedly durable brass is consumed by deadly tarnishing, and the ocean erodes the land, or else it drains away to dry land. These 'interchange[s] of state' all have the cumulative effect of loss, and are compounded by the fact that each state itself may as well be subject to decay as to entropic transformation (where 'state' has the supplementary meaning of the political state in which, like Hamlet, we can suspect something may be rotten).</div><div> The evidence of ruin is all around, so much so that the condition seems to seed the mental activity of rumination, where only the corruptible twin arches of an intercedent 'm' disguise the presence of more ruination. And what he ru(m)inates is love, which can't be any more immune to decay than anything else is. Whether the immediate cause be mortal illness or some other rival, Time will inevitably take the boy away.</div><div> A synthesis of ruining and ruminating produces the melancholy conclusion of the couplet: 'This thought is as a death'. Having the lover inevitably raises the possibility of one day losing him, so that joy always contains the seeds of a potential helpless sorrow. The thought has a deathly foreboding, but is also in itself the means of envisioning such a death.</div><div><br /></div><div> One of the two partners in a relationship is always more fatalistic than the other. He foresees the end in every disagreement, in every disaffection, in every alienation of sympathy. To the common wisdom, he is the partner who 'thinks too much'. Shakespeare's lover is fully aware of the corrosive nature of such excess of thinking. The too-much-examined love is not worth living. But the implication is that all thinking about love is dangerous, as though love were at its most efficacious when simply inhabited like a building, or travelled through like air or water. To look objectively at it is to become aware of its mortality, where, for all its towering stature or brass-bound robustness now, it is as susceptible to the predation of Time as towers or brass.</div><div> In the 20th century, Coward ends a lyric of self-accusing fatalism thus:</div><div><br /></div><div> I am no good at love</div><div> I betray it with little sins</div><div> For I feel the misery of the end</div><div> In the moment that it begins</div><div> And the bitterness of the last good-bye</div><div> Is the bitterness that wins.</div><div><br /></div><div>In previous stanzas, he gets the tone of the love-affair wrong, or else poisons the atmosphere with unfounded jealousies. But it is here in the final lines that the most odious crime of the thinking lover emerges. He sees love's end at its very beginning, and the final moment of separation will be the prevailing mood of his memory of it. Nothing is stronger than loss, and nothing is more inevitable. The thought is not just of death, but is in itself a death.</div><div> How to love, and not think about it?</div><div><br /></div>stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-23836784878673070842011-01-16T14:21:00.003+00:002011-01-16T14:27:02.741+00:00We may be exercising the faculty for judgment even when we imagine we have no such inclination. The taste for entertainments of all kinds represents an opinion about the allure, or relative lack of it, in our daily lives. Firework displays, temporary funfairs, the arrival in town of the circus, not to mention the seductive influences of modern entertainment and communications media, attest to the inadequate paucity of the rest of life. Even where they seem tawdry, or wholly predictable, such diversions mark a welcome suspension of the common round, and thus a judgment upon it.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-87573548265633087642011-01-05T15:05:00.002+00:002011-01-05T15:19:21.514+00:00The world is 'everything that is the case,' says Wittgenstein. But might it be otherwise? Does this 'everything' include the possible other ways it might be? Or even just the existence of those other possibilities in the minds of individuals?<br /><br />The whole must be the true, Hegel asserts. If we can grasp the whole picture, we will have grasped the truth. But in what sense is this 'whole' a normative concept? Is truth then no more than a fully comprehensive understanding of what already is? If so, in what sense does it differ from science? Opening our eyes on another pallidly unsatisfying day, are we to find comfort in the explanations of molecular biology and psychoanalysis? But this world goes on, and exceeds our understanding as it does so, and we turn inwards as before to find the reasons for our sense of lack.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-2116078592336097942011-01-04T14:44:00.002+00:002011-01-04T14:55:12.763+00:00There is a world. We live in it, we see it, we feel its impact, but we do not know it in the sense of understanding it.<br /><br />We know what it appears to expect of us, and this we do, more or less imperfectly, impatiently. For the rest, there is only the feeling of dead time slipping along, a time whose deadness appears to be generated from within in that, for others, time isn't so dead.<br /><br />The most fundamental step we might make - <em>might</em> make - is to decide what we think about this world, whether we should or can have an opinion about it, or whether opinions are a matter of supreme indifference to it, another of the legion of mere things it contains indifferently, like expanses of grass, precipitous cliff-edges or unhappiness.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-55656336318327847382009-12-18T15:21:00.003+00:002009-12-18T15:32:00.745+00:00UNDER REVIEW<br /><br /><br />What do we want book reviews to do? The question is one of those worrisome ones that never quite goes away. Gail Pool’s 2007 inquiry into the state of the trade in the US, <em>Faint Praise</em>, raised the old spectres of nepotism, sloppy summarising and gushing hype, concluding that publishing and the critical community that feeds on it are still in far too tight and slimy an embrace.<br /><br />While this degree of soul-searching is less likely on this side of the Atlantic, there is still a feeling that the currency of reviews may have undergone some cheapening. Such practices as cover quotes that adorn the first appearances of books, and the excitable blurbs that extend from the back cover to the first two or three pages of the paperback edition, don’t help. ‘Spleen-rupturingly funny!’ ‘If there is a better book to be written this year, I’ll eat my shorts.’<br /><br />If it’s true that, like many another trade, reviewing has been subject to a healthy dose of web-led deprofessionalising, nonetheless a tenacious literary culture persists that sustains the likes of the LRB and TLS, and hasn’t entirely died out in the quality newspapers. It may well be that this community is still too closed, and too embroiled with the publicity departments of a handful of the big conglomerates, yet it manages to facilitate a weekly conversation about books that quite belies rumours of the decline of literacy.<br /><br />A useful review of a new novel should convey the mise-en-scène and atmosphere of the story, consider it if appropriate in the light of the author’s earlier works, and offer some level of evaluation of its success or otherwise in achieving its own aims. (And not, of course, give away the ending.)<br /><br />Non-fiction reviews might take a more scholarly tone, even to the extent of offering one’s own essay on the topic, before closing with some summary remarks on the book in hand. The weighty American work on eighteenth-century economic history I am currently reading for review is full of wearyingly stilted academic locutions, but is an undeniably valuable addition to the field. Should the one factor outweigh the other in my assessment?<br /><br />What most readers are looking for is a sensitivity and receptivity of response, buoyed by the range of reference to make sense of it all. There is a certain kind of critical shorthand in British reviewing that can veer towards the lazy – how many books turn out to be ‘compelling’, ‘engaging’, ‘meticulously researched’? – but if there is sufficient acuity and detail in the analysis, readers will overlook at least some of the clichés.<br /><br />In the Anglo-American world at least, there is often an inbred distaste for the subjective voice. We use words like ‘opinionated’ and ‘judgmental’ pejoratively, as though there were something embarrassing about the enactment of personal taste. But criticism has never been an exact science (despite the efforts of the structuralist movement), and most of us, I like to hope, are able to read a piece of fulsome praise and still know the book isn’t for us. Or conversely, enjoy a bloodbath of a review and go on to enjoy the murdered book even more.<br /><br />There are perhaps too many authors reviewing each other, and too monotonous a reliance on using the same names every time to review particular categories of books, but our literary culture would be a more impoverished place without reviews.<br /><br />Critics were the first pestilential nuisances to go into Stephen Fry’s Room 101, their uselessness evidenced by the fact that they spend their whole working lives parasitically judging the creativity of others. But the banning of critics from the Republic of Letters declares that its citizens are expected either not to have opinions, or else, like Victorian children, to keep them to themselves.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-419579882962138212009-09-03T13:35:00.002+00:002009-09-03T14:02:21.717+00:00DUSTBINS OF HISTORY<br /><br />People who raid supermarket waste-bins after hours to liberate the unwanted food have generally been known as 'freegans'. Some object to this term, though, on the grounds that it appears to imply, by portmanteau logic, a foraging for specifically <em>vegan</em> food. The preferred alternative is 'skippers', which runs the risk even more appallingly of suggesting a rummaging through building-site jetsam, but also has happier connotations of sports captaincy and a life on the ocean wave.<br /><br />Only a small number of these nocturnal foragers are in financial extremis and half-starving. Most are people who could shop in the supermarket during opening hours if they wished, but choose instead to make a statement about the atrocious waste that goes on. Much of the recovered food is within its sell-by date, and even most of that which isn't is perfectly edible. To be fair, the supermarkets have made something of an effort to distribute nearly expired food to the needy, but it inevitably remains far too easy to dump it.<br /><br />One chain has a policy now of securing its wasted food behind metal fences and cameras to prevent skippers from getting at it. Does this not pose a highly illuminating question? Apart from the legal issue of trespassing on private property, why should any company (or any individual) be concerned about what happens to waste material once it has been discarded? The very act of throwing away is a gesture of rejection, of declaring the disposed item to be superfluous to requirements, but as soon as somebody else tries to make use of it, an anal possessiveness comes over the disposer. The small child's conflict about the excrement that is expelled from his body is suggested. It is something repellent, and yet it must be his, because it has come from him.<br /><br />The seeming reason that the supermarkets don't want skippers to take their refuse is that they may then stand indicted for their profligacy in a world of deprivation, when even the developed nations are plagued by growing poverty and mounting unemployment. But then skippers almost never advertise their activity (other than during the period in 2007 when the news media collectively seized on it). The chief reason for their opposition to skipping is of course that if you can help yourself to their products for free, why would you go back to queuing at the checkouts to buy them?<br /><br />Notwithstanding the obvious capitalist objections, though, there remains the tantalising legal chimera of who owns rubbish, and why it should be as jealously protected from the enterprising forager as the products on shop shelves.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-31245816616542667002009-08-13T12:00:00.003+00:002009-08-13T12:18:20.987+00:00SHADES OF DOUBT<br /><br />It remains vitally important, while the sun lasts, to remember not to respond to any sexual advances from people wearing shades, for the simple reason that you can't properly see what they look like. Sunglasses can be dangerously flattering. Indeed, most of us choose them with that precise effect in mind.<br /><br />Faced with the unenviable predicament of having found oneself in a compromising situation with somebody who, now unmasked, turns out to be a googly-eyed horror, there is one possible recourse. We should quite properly ask our pursuer to put the shades back on again. For the same reason that the less one knows about a person, the easier it is to have unbridled sexual relations with them (think of Candy Clark in <em>American Graffiti</em> (1973) saying to the stetsoned Harrison Ford, whose car she has just got into as a way of punishing the long-standing boyfriend who has upset her, 'Don't say anything, and we'll get along just fine'), the less we can see of the face of somebody unattractive to us, the easier the deed itself becomes.<br /><br />A young man in a baseball cap who invited another back home to his flat for sex kept his hat on more or less throughout the act. When asked by the other whether he ever took it off, he briefly removed it to demonstrate that he looked much more boring without it, and then put it right back on again. Is this gesture not indicative of the greatest, the most considerate, sexual camaraderie?stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-52924839087960120502008-02-25T13:37:00.006+00:002008-02-26T12:17:08.523+00:00INJURY TIME<br /><br /><br />Sympathy for the atrocious injury sustained by Eduardo da Silva in Saturday's fixture between Arsenal and Birmingham at St Andrew's has extended well beyond the confines of north London. Those too squeamish to watch the moment of impact on <em>Match of the Day</em> would have gleaned the gist of it all too eloquently from the shock on the faces of the player's team-mates. Cesc Fabregas appeared to drift into a twilight zone somewhere between throwing up and passing out. The despair of Bacary Sagna and Emmanuel Adebayor were plain to see. A section of the player's lower fibula had erupted through the flesh and through his sock, while his foot lay semi-detached from the leg at an angle not seen in nature.<br /><br />What compounded the general revulsion at Birmingham centre-back Martin Taylor's action, for which 'foul' seems too feeble a term, and 'tackle' wholly inadequate, was the unexpectedly derisive response to the events of the match from certain quarters. Arsène Wenger's comment that the perpetrator should never be permitted to play football again became the instant post-match talking-point. One could argue that a manager of Wenger's experience should have seen that one coming. The remark wasn't made only to the BBC and, it could equally be argued, wasn't exactly made in the heat of the moment, since the incident had occurred barely three minutes after kickoff. At least a little of the motivation for the public retraction Wenger made later on Saturday evening may have been the need to re-focus attention on what had happened to the player. Certainly, for the never less than sternly orotund Garth Crooks, in the <em>Final Score</em> studio at teatime, the manager's remarks were worse than the injury itself.<br /><br />Nobody can seriously suggest that any player ever has the intention to cause injury of the kind that has ended not just Eduardo's Arsenal season, but his interest in the European Championships too. Indeed, Taylor looked suitably ashen as he was dismissed from the field. That said, certain of his team-mates have gone on record as saying that they don't feel the tackle merited a red card, as though the result of a late and clumsy crunch should be entirely subtracted from the consideration of intent. 'The reason the ref has sent him off,' reflected Stephen Kelly, 'is because he has seen Eduardo has broken his leg. I don't think you can send a player off for that.' Perhaps not if he has broken his own leg, but how about when he has had it broken for him? If Kelly was speaking for the team as a whole, and thereby undermining the public contrition its manager Alex McLeish properly showed in his own post-match comments, it can only be that self-delusion has reached astonishingly giddy heights at Birmingham City.<br /><br />In the <em>Match of the Day</em> studio, the proprieties were tossed aside with cheerful impunity. The focus of the analysis was on the woeful defensive errors in Arsenal's first-half performance, without a murmur about the psychological state the players were in. Their recovery after half-time to gain the lead reflected surely one of the more heroic recoveries (not to mention one of the more inspirational dressing-room talks) of the present season. William Gallas's emotional unravelling at the final whistle, exacerbated by the dubious nature of the injury-time penalty awarded to Birmingham, led the normally urbane Alan Hansen to scoff that Manchester United would surely be left laughing over the events at St Andrew's.<br /><br />Laughing? Really? If anybody had a laugh left in them on Saturday evening, they should have saved it for the efforts of the French penalty-kicker Damien Traille in the Six Nations rugby. Nothing that happened in Birmingham came anywhere near a laughing matter.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-29069339286430834172007-02-04T15:01:00.000+00:002007-02-04T16:38:29.618+00:00LOOKING FOR MR SULU<br /><br />In yet more evidence of time's relentless tread, George Takei turns 70 this year. When absolutely nothing pertaining to the original <em>Star Trek</em> TV series has escaped its due celebration, from the Klingon language and its strange proximity to Anglo-Saxon to the studio hands who whisked apart the automatic doors aboard the <em>Enterprise</em>, it hardly seems appropriate to accord Takei's character, the young Japanese-American helmsman Hikaru ('Mister') Sulu, the status of an unsung treasure. But for many years, this is precisely what Sulu was.<br /><br />Already cast as early as the show's second pilot (way ahead of his Russian buddy, Mr Chekov), Sulu's role in the United Nations of which the bridge of the <em>Enterprise</em> was composed was as a living, breathing rapprochement with the enemy of barely more than 20 years before. Like 120,000 other Japanese Americans, Takei was quarantined as a small boy in an internment camp in Arkansas following the Imperial Air Force attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. He spent part of his early childhood growing up behind barbed wire, an experience to which he compares more contemporary forms of social repression in the United States.<br /><br />Takei's background hardly merited such treatment. He may revert to racial type in the odd <em>Trek</em> episode (the frozen image of him stripped to the waist and brandishing a samurai sword was thought resonant enough to be included in the closing credits of the first series), but George was born in Los Angeles, from where he has barely ever strayed, and was named by his father after the newly crowned British king. The Takeis knew which side they were on.<br /><br />In the late fifties and early sixties, George studied theatre arts at UCLA (as well as Stratford-upon-Avon and Tokyo), before joining the Desilu actors' workshop in Hollywood, which would go on to invent <em>Star Trek</em>. He appeared in minor film roles in the early 1960s, often alongside the seigneurial British likes of Richard Burton and Alec Guinness, at a time when parts for east Asian actors were even thinner on the ground than they are in the allegedly more cosmopolitan present. In <em>PT-109</em>, he is the helmsman who navigates the Japanese destroyer into an attack on the young naval commander John F Kennedy's ship, a brave enough cameo when memories of 1941 were still so raw. (Having survived the cinematic naval guns, Kennedy would be felled by a sniper's bullet in Dallas the very year of the film's release.)<br /><br />It was within the ecumenical crew of the <em>USS Enterprise</em>, however, that Takei would find the role that made him globally famous, a stroke of career luck that he has never felt the need to repudiate. When Sulu was eventually joined by Chekov, the incubus of the American past was juxtaposed to one that was very much painfully present. If we could make friends with the Japs, hey, we could even envisage a world in which we might be pals with the godless Commie Russkies.<br /><br />Those whose memories of <em>Star Trek</em> revolve around the peerless emoting of William Shatner's Kirk, the arch impassiveness of Leonard Nimoy's Spock or the cornpone hokesiness of DeForest Kelley's Dr McCoy may be surprised to be reminded that Mr Sulu was rather more than a mere extra. He has a pivotal role in many of the storylines, a trajectory that began with the opening sequence of 'Return of the Archons' (1966), in which we see him got up like John Mills in <em>Great Expectations</em>, urgently radioing the ship to beam up him and a fellow member of a scouting party. Cowled monk-like figures with sinister sticks are closing in on them. His crewmate panics and runs, despite Sulu's insistence that they need to stay put while the transporter locks on to them. He is the one who gets it wrong though, getting zapped just before he is spirited away. By the time he is beamed aboard, he has been transmuted into a loved-up zombie gasping about 'Paradise'. Sinking to the steps of the transporter room, he looks like a boy in a nineties nightclub coming up on ecstasy, sure enough trigger for an exchange of nervous glances among his colleagues.<br /><br />There is a permanent slight air of the boyish ingénu about Sulu (Takei was then thirtyish going on 23). He is grown-up enough to be able to fly an intergalactic spacecraft, and yet wears the startled expression of the innocent abroad whenever things turn nasty. He gives the lie, gloriously, to the racist postulate that east Asian people lack facial expressiveness, as he can do erotic joy as easily as tremulous horror. Indeed, there is something utterly compelling about his face, which combines an almost Chinese roundness with the heavy eyebrows, strong nose and sculpted cheekbones of the young Japanese. The Oriental eyes of Western perception have the head start of always looking infinitely knowing, offset in Sulu's case by the regulation side-parted college boy's haircut with its one fugitive strand that never quite joins the rest across his forehead. Not the least of Takei's blessings is his vocal tone, which the decades haven't dimmed, an unusually deep, rich instrument that one of his MySpace friends has breathlessly hailed as 'possibly the greatest voice ever'.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-44938252526621788952007-01-13T15:50:00.000+00:002007-01-13T16:21:33.933+00:00I'm not very well. Thanks for asking.<br /><br />Having intended to start the new year in health-conscious detoxing style, I have so far succumbed to a third bout of cold in two months and an arthritic ankle. The latter has seen me hobbling to the corner shop with a ridiculous splayed left foot, since dragging it sideways behind me is the only way not to endure ferocious pain in the ankle. This has given me an uncertain gait somewhere between the listing roll of an old sea-dog and Charles Laughton's Quasimodo. Much innocent merriment was caused at the office as I tried to negotiate the way to my desk with a brimming cup of coffee and not spill any.<br /><br />Last week, in the course of trying to slice a lemon for my morning detox draught of hot lemon water, I stabbed myself in the finger. This called for a plaster, and then another after I managed to reopen the cut while attempting to get a shoe on to the arthritic foot.<br /><br />I am old. Or at least not young. I've arrived at the sort of age where it isn't advisable to take on complicated tasks such as slicing lemons, or anything that involves much in the way of hand-eye coordination. I can't even say I didn't notice it happening. It happened in mid-air in the year 2000 en route from Barbados to Gatwick when, somewhere between time-zones, I turned 40. Since I continue to look anything between five and ten years younger than I am, depending on the quality of the light, the kindness of strangers and the strength of any intoxicants they might have taken, the state of advancing senescence doesn't quite connect in other people's minds. Whence this frailty? I battle a sense of being an old git trapped in the body of somebody who would look only a little weathered at the Jools Holland Hootenanny, or conversely thrustingly young and vital on the government front bench.<br /><br />My curriculum vitae was of the blessed. Too young to be a hippie, spot-on for punk and too old for hip-hop, I nonetheless managed a seamless immersion into the Techno dance culture of the late 1990s. All bets are now off. I've started reading poetry again, and making lists of the books I always intended to read and still intend to (<em>déclassé</em> German maniacs, mostly). All these intimations of mortality notwithstanding, there is also the Prime of Life thesis to consider. Many people are taking on major new career responsibilities at my age, not bemoaning life's passing seasons, while my brother-in-law had a cardiac event at 39 last year.<br /><br />So let's rally to the colours, order in the glucosamine and raise our sights to the sunlit uplands once more. There's life in the old dog yet, and, as the other proverb has it, there is no better learner of new tricks. Is that right? One forgets.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-1146402647395694212006-04-30T12:29:00.000+00:002006-04-30T13:10:47.433+00:00IF MUZAK BE THE FOOD OF LOVE, LET'S KILL OURSELVES<br /><br /><br />Is there any music in the world not capable of being polluted through misuse? There might be a single you love until the person in the flat upstairs buys it, and has it on repeat play throughout the afternoon while you're trying to work. There is the music that minicab drivers have on at Guantanamo levels while you're trying to update your best mate in the back with what's been happening to you, from whenever you last saw each other until the minute you got into this cab.<br /><br />The thing that really takes the cake though, I mean really, is supermarket muzak. Many years ago, London Underground installed speakers in tube stations, and began piping a thin, staticky drizzle of barely decipherable pop classics over the happy travellers. It was extruded over your head, just out of reach, as you got on to the escalator at Tottenham Court Road, and somehow made you think about bringing forward that deadline date you'd pencilled in your mental diary for topping yourself, if your life hadn't altered immeasurably by then. Having added hugely to the misery of existence, and probably an increase in assaults on staff, the Tube muzak was withdrawn. It did seem unfathomable that, having tried to stamp out busking on the Underground for year after ineffectual year, LUL would choose to replace it with elevator music from Hades. But they did. So that was quite bad. But supermarket muzak. That really takes the old Swiss roll.<br /><br />So it is that we find ourselves trudging around Somerfield in Brighton, each of us humming privately, 'I still haven't found what I'm looking for'. And having no idea where they'd hidden the frozen pizzas, I hadn't actually. See what they're doing there? It's an ironic comment on the Sunday afternoon supermarket shopper's plight. A couple of minutes later and a spring comes into our step. 'You wear it well,' we murmur as we pore dubiously over the discounted beef mince, 'a little old-fashioned but I don't mind.' The week before, we'd stood at the checkout in Asda, noticing that others beside ourselves were swaying surreptitiously, almost subliminally, to Embrace. 'You should never fight the feeling,' we lip-synched as the conveyor belt juddered along, 'you have to follow Nature's law.'<br /><br />At the Brighton Marina Asda megastore, they've created a sort of mezzanine floor for the clothing department, where you can pick up a bomber jacket and jeans for about £2.99. The most salient thing about it is that you can also go and lean on the wall that looks down into the supermarket itself, and get an Olympian view of the entire seething purgatory below. If you were a dour humanist poet of the inter-war years, you might remark that you hadn't thought Death had undone so many. Marlon Brando fans (yes, you know who you are) might content themselves with the Mighty Blob's hoarse whisper from <em>Apocalypse Now</em>, via Joseph Conrad, 'The horror! The horror!'<br /><br />What seals the good old horror, though, and lends the scene its authentic ring of the infernal, is that it is all bathed in the warm unguent of Coldplay, promising in tones that already sound like the hired hood feeling your collar up some dark Sicilian alleyway, 'I will fix you'.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-1142172893973830492006-03-12T13:32:00.000+00:002006-03-12T14:14:54.046+00:00The creators of the Lonely Planet and Rough Guides have confessed to a late access of guilt over having sold so many books over the decades encouraging people to travel. It turns out that all the travelling has poisoned the lonely planet, and they urge us now, instead of signing up for an impulsive few days in a packed Prague, or a fortnight on some sun-kissed, poverty-stricken island, to stay put. Or at least reconsider the benefits of a Network Rail away-break to the Welsh valleys. Peacehaven, which is just up the road from me in Sussex, looks tempting. There's a rattling gale off the Channel just at the minute, but there's plenty of free parking, and anyway, do you want package-tour comforts or do you want reality?<br /><br />It isn't just selfish holidaymakers who've wrecked the environment of course. There's all that unnecessary business and diplomatic travel too. You do have to wonder why Condi Rice needs to be conducted personally around the cultural entrepot of Blackburn by Jack Straw, when she must surely be able to get the general idea from an online satellite camera somewhere. I myself must have assisted in wiping out a fair few species through undertaking press trips on a virtually monthly basis in the early stages of my career. What was the point of another five-day jaunt round the Languedoc? And the company was mostly Sartrean in its hellishness anyway. It's mostly leisure travel, though, that eats up all the aviation fuel, and carelessly belches its combustion all over the globe.<br /><br />What should make it really easy not to go anywhere, however, is the thought of never having to get on a plane again. I've become a nervous flyer over the years, not in the sense of having a pussy-assed panic attack at the thought of being so high up with nothing holding you up omiGOD!, but at the hideous treatment doled out to you throughout - from arrival at the mile-long, slowly shuffling check-in queue to the moment of your disgorgement on foreign soil and the start of that long, long wait for your battered baggage to be restored to you. No airline in the world is fit to travel on in Economy Class, owing to the lack of room, the lack of air, the lack of anything worth doing, and the appalling knowledge that, elsewhere on the craft, people are being treated to a seat for each buttock, cashew nuts that have been personally warmed by the captain, and as much Dom Perignon as they can just about hold down before you all enter that all-important period of turbulence.<br /><br />The era of 99p flights did not bring air travel within the ambit of ordinary people. It was there already. What it did was make flying somewhere seem less of an adventure, and more like something you'd do on a silly little weekend whim. This is a double deception. Firstly, it encouraged everyone to forget about air pollution, environmental despoliation and the insanity of the global oil market. But secondly, it made us all blind to the privations involved in the worst method of transport ever invented.<br /><br />Wherever you are, stretch out. Walk about. Put your own music on, instead of having to listen to an all-star Beatles tribute. Watch a cool DVD, instead of some crappy thriller with Bruce Willis in it. Open a 75cl bottle of wine, instead of having to fumble in your pocket while seated for a fistful of euros for a three-mouthful mini-bottle served warm from a trolley by a supercilious gay android who already thinks you ought to be restrained. Smile. You're not on a plane.<br /><br />But then, hey, neither are those poor saps sitting at Heathrow, waiting for further news on the delayed 04.50 Zoo Airlines flight to Magaluf.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-1141220194384370812006-03-01T13:05:00.000+00:002006-03-01T13:36:34.420+00:00'Professor Longjohn leaned back meditatively in his familiar leather chair. What he had just read was going to take some digesting. With that instinctive, unconscious movement that had stayed with him since his university days, he put a hand to his face and clutched his cheeks in thought. He pinched the greying whiskers beneath his lower lip. His skin retained a pliant freshness uncommon in a man of fifty, and his eyes had lost none of their darting hazel lustre. He rather prided himself on not having lost much of his hair, while others in the faculty twenty years his junior already had the prematurely glabrous sheen of the cloistered academic. They, though, would be confronted this morning with nothing more contentious than a new research paper on some minor eighteenth-century aristocrat's penchant for occult religion. Longjohn was in another league. He was being led to nothing less than a meeting with a man who claimed to be descended from Jesus Christ. With an effortlessly commanding gesture, he picked up the phone.'<br /><br />The great mystery in the ongoing publicity being given to the Holy Mother of all religious conspiracy theories - did Jesus marry Mary Magdalen, have a bunch of kids with her, and then come and settle in the Home Counties? (er, No, No and No) - is not whether the Roman Catholic church has covered up the truth of this matter over two millennia. It's more why anybody can bear to read several hundred pages of prose resembling the above. Agatha Christie, thou should'st be living at this hour.<br /><br />I have no idea how the plagiarism suit, now under way in London, against Dan Brown, author of <em>The Da Vinci Code</em>, will turn out. I rather hope it fails, since its success would reorient the definition of intellectual copyright in an alarmingly naive way. Richard Leigh and Michael Baigent, authors of <em>The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail</em>, on which vital work Brown has drawn with what he regards as due acknowledgement, are motivated, I am quite sure, only by the wish to see their own diligent researches accorded due protection, and not at all by the prospect of getting a light dusting from the avalanche of cash that Brown has been showered with since his novel became required reading throughout the whole of Christendom. However that may be, at least their book was honest-to-goodness, eminently readable airport pap, if you took it the right way. Dan Brown's effort thinks it's a literary novel - greying whiskers and all.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-1140354533860365442006-02-19T12:13:00.000+00:002006-02-19T13:08:53.893+00:00News that British Gas is ripping its customers with yet another price hike, this time a record-breaking 22%, allows us to reflect once again on the bone-chilling Nonspeak in which these cheery announcements are couched. Some of the extra revenue generated by this megawatt increase has already been spent taking out full-page press ads to explain it, under the headline 'Your questions answered'. This gives BG's customers the opportunity to have their fury assuaged, while customers of rival energy suppliers can wonder whether the paltry extra 15% they are having to stump up might be better spent on an energy company that takes the time to soothe its customers while they are in the middle of reading the news.<br /><br />The hand-wringing over the need to import wholesale gas, not to mention the restrictive practices of the European gas market, are rather thrown into relief when you notice that BG is going to be charging an extra 22% for electricity too, thus comfortably topping the extra 4.7% EDF Energy is asking for that scarce commodity, or the 8% wanted by Scottish Power.<br /><br />BG say that they are helping the elderly by offering a winter rebate, which is kind of them, although as this latest gouge is being applied in March, there'll be an awful lot of layout to go before the pensioners get any of it back. The ad goes on to say that you should beware of other companies offering cheap deals, saying that the rates offered may well rise again - a frightful outcome that BG will be only too familiar with, as its customers are about to fork out for their fourth increase in just over two years. January 2004 saw a 6% hike in gas and electricity. They managed to do a little better than that eight months later with 12.4% on gas and 9.4% on electricity. A year later, it was 14.2% on both, and now that awesome, pulse-quickening, even rather sexy 22%. Way to charge, guys! Respect!<br /><br />What BG's ads don't say - and here something about lights and bushels springs to mind - is that the gas and electricity they are offering comes with the assurance that it is being provided by a company that was once run in the interests of public service only. Theirs isn't just any old gas. It is the Rolls-Royce of gas, done up in ribbons and bows, lovingly piped and assiduously quality-checked before it comes seeping through the burners to warm up your Venetian-style prawn linguine readymeal. And if they need to make a few extra million for their shareholders as it does so, well, who would be churlish enough to deny them? What's more, that direct debit arrangement means you won't even have the pain of writing an inch-thick cheque. They'll just discreetly help themselves from your bank account on a date that's convenient to them.<br /><br />Those reckless enough to consider going downmarket, meanwhile, will no doubt soon be hurtling in the direction of <a href="http://www.simplyswitch.com">www.simplyswitch.com</a>, where you can compare prices among a range of suppliers in your area, and perhaps even change to a cheaper one. But then some people have no shame.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-1139407815604459802006-02-08T13:20:00.000+00:002006-02-08T14:10:23.626+00:00At last the new year has begun.<br /><br />Yours may have started on January 1st, in accordance with the Gregorian calendar, but mine never does that. I spent that infernal night alone when a hot date with an old pal and some intoxicants fell through as she succumbed to flu (the human strain, not the avian). As the magic midnight hour approached, I was blasting the music system in an empty building, accompanying the molten exhilaration of Idlewild's 2002 near-miss, 'You Held The World In Your Arms Tonight', with an abstemious bottle of Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon. As the clock ticked down, I lurched into the bedroom in time for Jools Holland's countdown, immediately after which my dear friend Marc Almond, recovered from a motorbike disaster and a hole in his skull, performed a jumpin', big-band version of his 25-year-old mega-hit, 'Tainted Love'. After that, it was pretty much downhill.<br /><br />The last weekend of January brought the Chinese new year, a chance to 'kung-hay-fat-tsoi' with my pride-and-joy and start all over again, if only he hadn't been in Hong Kong for a family reunion. So I nibbled wistfully on a moon cake (the kind with a bit of yolk-yellow peanutty gunge in the middle, to reflect the bitterness of solitude), and kept watching the skies. The <em>Daily Mail</em> astrologer Jonathan Cainer had advised me I was about to have the Best Year of My Life, and although I pretty much think astrology is horse-poo, I am advised that a word from him counts as good authority. As the weeks have crawled by, however, with each fresh provocation jostling the last for pre-eminence, I feel an urge to place a call to Mr Cainer and ask him to define 'best'.<br /><br />Last weekend though, the hoped-for relief arrived, not quite on the scale of Mafeking to the disinterested observer, I grant, but good enough for me. My neighbour has taken down her Christmas decorations.<br /><br />Is there any sicklier token of time's relentless tread than festive adornments that have outstayed their occasion? Slanting winter sun picked out the purple baubles on the massive tree, the tinsel was way past the twinkling stage and had begun to to pant feebly for want of being thrown into a box in the wardrobe, while the Christmas stocking hung at the window was a daily affront to passers-by, grim memento of the gifts they didn't receive - and even grimmer perhaps of the ones they did. I note though that, even while the fairy-lights have gone, the tree itself still stands. Denuded, but not quite stripped of its dignity, it is possibly now serving the place of a token of springtime renewal, the reinvestiture of hope, a cheery defiance of the bare plane trees across the street. I can't bear to ask.<br /><br />At any rate, there is at last the feeling of knuckling down to the year ahead, or the eleven-twelfths of it that remain to us. As each day brings bracing new challenges, it is at least a comfort to know that those around me have now joined me in an awareness that the game - like we it or no - is on.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-1138810092713492942006-02-01T15:26:00.000+00:002006-02-01T19:54:30.843+00:00<em>Men's Fitnes</em>s magazine, for want of anything better to do, has established that Bradford is the fattest city in the UK. In a report compiled from sales of junk food, incidence of heart disease and levels of gym membership, the home of Hockney, Delius and the Brontes has now been named and shamed as the Lardbucket capital of our adipose isle.<br /><br />Residents of Bradford do not reap. Neither do they sow. All they do is sit on their fat arses necking fast food and booze, the notion of 'exercise' a mere mythical chimera to them. Reflecting on the ghastly findings, <em>MF</em> deputy editor Michael Donlevy sent up an anguished lamentation: 'You can ban smoking in pubs and arrest drunks, but who is to stop people gorging on junk food in their own front rooms?'<br /><br />This rather begs a question. Would it not be possible to establish a national inspection network, rather in the manner of those <em>eminences grises</em> who apparently choose deliberately awkward times to doorstep people who haven't got TV licences? In a warning ad for the system, we see a lonely old dear in her kitchen, abstractedly stirring cake mixture, stopped in her tracks by the doorbell. Apart from a haunted glance in the direction of the sound, she doesn't move a muscle. This is a surveillance world in which anybody who comes to the door might be about to ask you a question you can't answer, haul you off or do you in, like thugs posing as meter-readers.<br /><br />In a world run by the fitness industry, there would be a similar army of inspectors who might at any stage have the right of entry to your home, where they would hope to catch you in the very act of unwrapping a Kit-Kat or stuffing down crisps, impound the offending materials, and issue a caution or a spot-fine. Initially concentrated in Bradford obviously, these teams would eventually be rolled out across the country, the data they collect being stored electronically on our ID cards. It would only need a small modification in biometric technology to enable scanners to recognise not just iris colour and facial shape, but our body mass index too. Anybody above the crucial 25% BMI cutoff point could then be denied access to social services, medical care, even passenger aircraft or theme-park rides (where their obscene bulk can only be accommodated in two seats rather than one).<br /><br />Fat is such an ugly word, but if the inhabitants of Bradford know what's good for them, which seems highly unlikely, they'll mend their sedentary ways as fast as their inflated physiques will allow. Either that, or just take out gym membership. Whether you actually go near the treadmill is up to you, but the annual subscription itself will help to bring down the shameful statistics next time the fitness inspectors come snooping.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-1138731304174416752006-01-31T18:15:00.000+00:002006-01-31T18:15:04.176+00:00Stuart Walton <a href='http://picasa.google.com/blogger/' target='ext'><img src='http://photos1.blogger.com/pbp.gif' alt='Posted by Picasa' border='0' style='border:0px;padding:0px;background:transparent;' align='absmiddle'></a><br /><a href='http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/127/9653/320/Original%20stuart%20walton%20-%20black.jpg'><img border='0' class='phostImg' src='http://photos1.blogger.com/hello/127/9653/320/Original%20stuart%20walton%20-%20black.jpg'></a>stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-1138454912779775992006-01-28T12:34:00.000+00:002006-01-28T13:28:32.816+00:00Postmodern jokes are becoming a bit post-postmodern these days. One wonders how long it will be before jokes come back, and whether we'll understand them if they do. In the meantime, there's plenty more mileage to be had from savage irony, which turns out to be as nutritious as spinach in today's televisual world.<br /><br />The emergence of Chantelle Houghton as the 2006 winner of Endemol's <em>Celebrity Big Brother</em> (Channel 4) adds yet another new convolution to the intricate masquerie of reality TV. It often has to be explained to me who 75% of the participants are on any show with 'celebrity' in the title. I haven't ever read the right columns, and it's far too late to start now. This one's famous because she has unconvincingly denied having an affair with a Premiership footballer. Another's fame derives from the ten months he spent in a band that had one middling hit before splitting in acrimony. But then the whole point is that, if they were more famous than this, they wouldn't need to go on celebrity reality shows. It isn't quite true that nobody at the peak of their renown is involved, but there is a disproportionate admixture of the ex-famous and the half-famous mixed in with the soap stars and Germaine Greer.<br /><br />Chantelle is neither ex- nor semi-famous. She is pre-famous, or at least she was until this week. Now she is famous. And will fairly soon, no doubt, be ex-famous. What matters is that it doesn't matter. Celebrity reality shows are deconstructing the whole concept of fame in a more ruthlessly efficient way than even spoof news shows ever managed. When <em>Brass Eye</em> proved that you could get the famous to demean their fame by credulously giving their names to any apparently worthy cause - no matter how blindingly preposterous - a complex and instructive point was made about the nature of being in the public eye, the opportunities and responsibilities it throws up, and most of all, what attitudes it leads the famous to have towards the nonentities. <em>Celebrity Big Brother</em> isn't half as vindictive as that, but appears to be mining fresh and surprising nuances from the whole grubby business of the production and reception of fame.<br /><br />A group of the famous have been made, over the course of the last few weeks, to accept a happy, smiley girl off the streets as one of their own. Her victory perhaps shouldn't surprise us because we like an underdog, especially one from Essex, and while we quite enjoy razor-tongued cattiness when delivered with the Scouse aplomb of a cosmetically reconstructed ex-pop star, we ultimately like to see politeness triumph over rancour, and sweet smiles win the day over comedy lips that look like they'd burst if you sprinkled salt on them. Plus, it's not hard to see which way the lad vote went on Friday night.<br /><br />But let me get this right. A non-celebrity has won the celebrity version of <em>Big Brother</em>. Presumably she wouldn't now be eligible for the other <em>Big Brother</em> series in the summer, the one that features non-celebrities who are on their way to becoming celebrities. I don't pretend I don't understand this, and nor do I think it a force for evil in a world with Kim Jong-Il in it. While I have no interest whatsoever in sitting through the nightly transmissions from the Endemol house, it's less because I think it's beneath me, and more because it feels like being stuck in a lift with people who won't shut their yaps. Julie Burchill puts a lack of interest in <em>Big Brother</em> down to rancid snobbery. 'Is it all too too ghastly for you, darling?' she asked me last year. Not ghastly, just brain-shreddingly boring. George Galloway has not become one iota more interesting or forgivable for having engaged in an act of public humiliation with Rula Lenska.<br /><br />If I'd had £1.50 to waste on a text vote last night, I'd have voted not for Pete Burns, whose 1980s turn in the sun was indeed a thing of beauty, but for that boy I'd never heard of from the Ordinary Boys, whose songs I've never heard. I only saw the final, by the way. But then that of course is the other post-postmodern thing about reality TV. You don't have to watch it to know what's happening. This too is an advance for contemporary culture.stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-20671515.post-1137849341467783632006-01-21T12:14:00.000+00:002006-01-22T09:44:16.490+00:00A Whale in the Thames<br /><em></em><br /><em></em><br /><em></em><br /><em>They that observe lying vanities forsake their own mercy. </em>(Jonah, 2:8)<br /><br /><br />The unprecedented appearance of a bottlenose whale in the Thames in the first month of the year would undoubtedly have been seen as some form of portent in times gone by. Like storms of scarlet hailstones, or untoward silver showers of mackerel, it would have provoked mingled excitation and foreboding. It would have spoken of the Lord's benediction, or his wrath, depending on whether the temper of the times was benign or malcontent.<br /><br />In Christian myth, the whale is a fiend, known as the devourer of Jonah in the Old Testament story (Jonah, chapters 1-2), still cited as fact by Jesus (Matthew12:40). In the early years of the twentieth century, an English Jonah, a fisherman named John Killam, was alleged to have been swallowed by a whale in the South Atlantic, and later safely disgorged when the beast was harpooned by his shipmates on the <em>Star of the East</em>. After medical attention, he went on to live a normal life, although it is said his skin was stained a bluish-white, supposedly by cetacean gastric acid. The tale was thought to give retroactive credence to the biblical myth, until it was given the lie by Killam's wife in an interview with a sceptical journal, the <em>Expository Times</em>, in 1907.<br /><br />The hardy persistence of Jonah stories reflects a wish to believe in a benign form of predation, in a utopia in which ravening beasts, having swallowed us whole, will obligingly spew us forth once more, largely unharmed if perhaps a little digested. A rorqual whale that ran aground off the Norfolk fishing port of Gorleston in 1891 was put on public display for several days after beached exhaustion had finished it off. It was then stuffed and carried in triumph to the London Aquarium and thence around the country, so that all could see its devouring days were done. The Thames whale, thrashing its way under Chelsea Bridge and beaching on the shingle beneath Battersea power station, lay at risk only of the indignity of being rolled on to inflatable cushions for re-immersion, rather than succumbing to the taxidermist's tender mercies.<br /><br />As onlookers crowded the bridges to view the whale's progress, the Whale and Dolphin Conservation Society cautioned against the temptation of the news media to give it a name. 'It would be too painful if it passes away.' And lo, before very long, it passed away. A whale in the capital is no longer a divine portent, only the potential star of a real-life animatronic movie unfolding before us. This, and not the disproof of some whiskery old maritime yarn, is the true evidence of secularisation.<br /><br /><a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10940878/">http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10940878/</a>stuartwaltonhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14329863067827170518noreply@blogger.com0