Trolleyed

This is one of those posts written to get the thought out of my head.

Abandoned shopping trolleys are urban clutter that speaks about the area it's found in.

An abandoned shopping trolley could mean any one or combination of the following:

• Can't afford a car
• Don't care about minor theft where commercial entities are the victim
• Bored kids live here
• Not my problem, it'll get cleaned up sooner or later
• The coin in the top is worth losing to get my shopping home without carrying it. What the hell I'll take a friend, we'll two trolley and plug them together so we don't even lose the coins

I suspect that abandoned trolleys are one of the things often targeted under zero tolerance urban management for these reasons. Getting rid of them immediately increases the feeling that the neighbourhood you're in is looked after and that the people in it actually care about where they live.

This is why it bothers me when I walk past 6 of these on my way to work in a neighbourhood which isn't exactly renowned for being wealthy but isn't exactly a hellhole either. Neglect of any sort bothers me.

With rights come obligations

iiNet Ruling | Piracy Fight Takes a Body Blow

HOLLYWOOD studios and record labels are being forced to go back to the drawing board to come up with a new way of combating online piracy after the Federal Court ruled that internet service providers are not required to police copyright infringement on their networks.

The music industry says it may have no choice but to sue individuals for illegal file sharing unless the federal government intervenes with a solution to its piracy woes.

Let's just look at the last sentence there. Read it again. What it says is that a large, rich industry that holds almost more copyrights than any other is asking for Government protection because it feels unable to defend its' property and is taking the passive-aggressive line that if it doesn't get it then it will have to sue individuals. If you sue an ISP for "authorising" illegal downloading you may as well sue the power companies as well. After all they provided the electricity, they knew people might be doing it with the electricity they supplied and they too failed to monitor if people were or were not doing so. Suing individuals is what they should have been doing in the first place, they don't want to because individuals are the customers. 

If you have rights, responsibilities come with them. In law when you hold a copyright and you wish to continue to hold on to it you are obliged to defend it. It is not the job of federal government or anyone else - with the possible exception of a an industry body with careful oversight - to police your rights for you. You can report rights violations as a crime and then the actual police will step in.

Warning: it's going to get a bit dull and polemic after this so I've put the rest behind the read more link

Too complicated?

The world always threatens to become too complex and make you feel like you're a troglodyte sat banging rocks together in the dark.

Unsurprisingly the opening of the Large Hadron Collider(LHC) on Friday has certainly done that for the majority of the world. When the worlds largest and most expensive experiment is a cathedral full of kit too  - complex and integrated to call any part of it an individual machine - buried under the French/Swiss border and when you have to divert the course of underground rivers to build it (done by freezing them - unbeleivably difficult, an astounding engineering feat but all I can think about is the environmental impact), things may actually have gone a little too far. It's very hard to give a context, rationalise its creation and point to what need there is for this thing.

The press have not been as much help as perhaps the scientific community would like on this point. despite the extremely erduite and lucid plain english explanations from the very earnest and concerned scientists - who seem well aware that they've lost the rest of us on this one - the press and so the popular imagination remains stuck in around 1954. The majority of the focus has been on one single (non) issue: "Will this experiment suck us all in to a black hole?"

If you start talking about exotic particles, all of which seem to have the most wonderrful names (a 'charm quark'? brilliant) or about the higgs mechanism and why we can't quite figure out actully what mass and therefore matter really is when you get right down to it, then everyone glazes over (the only Planck length most people care about is in the DIY store at the weekend). Talk to them about black holes and the end of the world then you've really got their attention. However despite repeated assurances with very long numbers representing orders of probability it didn't really get through that the liklihood of the LHC producing a singularity (black hole type thing) was only marginally above that of you triggering one by getting up in the morning and making a cup of coffee.

The blame here doesn't entirely sit with the press. If the scientists had been a trifle less honest there might have been less interest. If someone asks you, "is there any chance this thing could suck us all into a black hole?" it is more prudent just to say "no" than tell them the absolute fundamental truth in language that they are going to have trouble summarising for a public audience.

Just for the record the answer is that they are doing experiments at such high energies that it is possible that small singularities might be created but these will be contained within a vacuum a long way from any other matter and behind a magnetic field so strong that it could pull your fillings out from 50 metres away which will mean that they decay in such a short period of time that you'd have trouble proving their existence. I hope that clears it up.

Why am I wittering on about this when clearly the world didn't end in any proveable way (more than it seems to be doing daily in any case)? Because if you don't explain things properly people get over anxious and start acting stupidly. It seems that at an Indian suicided over the news reports on television. This is undeniably sad and symptomatic of tabloidisation of media and the ugly refusal of accountability that this brings with it but there's also a personal element - if you are that anxious about the world and incapable of rationally going to find more information rather than panicking then you really are in deep trouble.

My other big problem with the LHC and the issues round it is that it seems no-one seems to be trying to relate the science to a benefit for people and all we are seeing is the main focus of the thing itself, to find out how the universe fits together. Such existential issues don't trouble most people on a daily basis but if it is explained that some of the technology that buds off from these experiments changes the world in unexpected ways that have nothing to do with Bosons and Leptons then they might appreciate it a bit more. The last particle accelerator that was built at CERN produced the technology that spawned the Internet. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but even so that technology has changed our daily lives.

Using a by-product to justify an expensive and otherwise apparently irrelevant process has been done before and is a bit of a lame argument and it brings me to the last problem I have with the LHC. Despite all the technology, the potential benefits and my curiosity about how the universe works the actual concept is still a bit crude. What it does is accelerate protons round and round in opposite directions until they are as close to the speed of light as can be managed, smash them into each other and looks carefully at the pieces to see what they are. There are two ways to look at this and I am torn between thm. The LHC is either the greatest technological achievement of humankind - which is a position I am close to - or it really exposes how little knowledge we have about the world if all we can do is smash it up to see what it's made of.

Humankind just has to do better than this last position. We can't keep spending billions on things like this with the world decaying round us and justifying it with by-products and the benefits the eventual knowledge will almost certainly bring with it. It's quite possible that we might not be around to enjoy them given the amount of time that could take. The LHC might unlock a fundamental secret of the universe but if you look at it carefully humankind is actually still just sat in a cave in the dark smashing rocks together.

Threefold Inaccurate Catholics

I do hope that the same courtesies being extended to the Catholic Church will be extended to the World gathering of Pastafari that I propose takes place in Sydney next year. As a devout Pastafarian I will expect the city to be shut down, helicopters to hover constantly overhead and Spaghetti Carbonara to be available on every street corner. I believe it is everyone’s right to believe in the omnipotent supernatural being of their choice with as little evidence as they like and disrupt the lives of millions of others accordingly.

There are many things that I find innately annoying about World Youth Day, starting with the arrogant inaccuracy of the name:

1. World; amazingly not everyone is a Catholic. The name may mean universal but there are an awful lot of Indonesians, Indians, Chinese and pretty well the whole Middle and Far East to whom this really doesn’t apply. There’s quite a few Anglicans too, they used to burn Catholics…
2. Youth; it is a matter of record that unaccompanied minors and catholic clergy should not mix. In fact The German Shepherd himself is going to apologise for this very thing whilst he is here. This means that the city is filled with the only thing worse than devout children; the kind of devout adult who would volunteer to take them to WYD08
3. Day; day! It goes on for at least a week of rubbernecking pious bastardry.

Those attending WYD08 are known as ‘Pilgrims’ which I also cannot stand as it makes me adopt a John Wayne voice as I shove them out of the way (and sometimes into the harbour, I only wanted to see if they could walk on water…). Also in the age of cheaply available air travel is the word Pilgrim really appropriate? Surely the whole idea of pilgrimage is that it was meant to be hard, you were meant to go on foot and you were meant to discover things about the world around you and about yourself. What do I discover when I travel by air?

1. I don’t like most people
2. I don’t like airports
3. I don’t like aeroplanes
4. I do like a glass of wine and a decent movie

These are all things I could have discovered by travelling to my local shopping mall to pick up a DVD and a bottle of plonk, not travelling halfway round the world for a glimpse of the pope and to chant halleluiah tunelessly in another country.

The effect thousands of additional people in a city they don’t know very well has had a less than positive impact on the public transport system. The events in the city are supposedly timed not to coincide with the morning rush-hour. Unfortunately if you are pious enough and jet-lagged enough there’s no real way of predicting just how early you will get up do a little God-bothering sightseeing.

At least the propensity to wear the flag of their nation of origin and brightly coloured clothing and accessories makes them very easy to see through a rifle scope.

Premium Economy

There is a new service level on airlines and it is Premium Economy. These are not two words that sit well together and I suspect that the phenomeneon may be symptomatic of a greater sociological ill; we want it all but we're damned if we'll pay for it. Air travel should be expensive, it brutalises the planet and creates/supports an enormous number of jobs. From personal experience Ryan Air I can tell you that if you pay peanuts someone charges you for the monkeys.

So far I have discovered Premium Economy on Quantas, Thai Airways and Virgin Blue (who the hell thought up the brand name Virgin Blue for heaven's sake, it sounds like a dodgy website).

Just a quick note to the airlines; putting a contaminated sharps bin in the airoplane toilet might be very right-on but it doesn't send a great message about your cabin-mates. Just thought I'd mention it.

Get your Johnson out

Oh I say, how utterly ludicrous

3 Years ago, almost to the day, I left London:

Goodbye London, look after yourself!

We will Tom, have fun in Australia

A few months pass, and then:

KABOOM screams etc.

Er, what was that?

Terrorists, nothing new, as you were

3 years pass:

Oh Tom, we've decided to ditch one anachronistic old dinosaur of a mayor for another far more ridiculous one that will hugely damage our international reputation and make us the subject of stereotype ridicule for decades.

Never speak to me again.

A note to cyclists

Clearly a fetish

I'm not talking here to the ride it to work and back kind of cyclists, but to the multi-coloured lycra clad type. What you do is not a sport. It closely resembles a sport but consider: you need specialised equipment and lubricants to participate, the classic version has obscure french terminology, there are various shapes of foam rubber involved which you - excuse me - sit on! It is commonly done in large groups where participants seem to spend a lot of time looking at the bottom of the person in front of them.

Any activity that requires you to dress up like a perverted clown to massage your prostate with a custom formed piece of latex is not a sport it is a fetish. Particularly if you if you get up early in the morning to do it and shout to each other outside my bedroom window before I am awake.

Mountain bikers can stop feeling smug at this point, you do all this in the mud and rain and have clothing brands with names like "Muddy Fox".

Whilst I'm at it I'm sure there are several other sports that are little more than an excuse to engage in otherwise suspect physical encounters and hang around in changing rooms:

• Wrestling - Putting on a leotard to grapple each other to the floor and hold each other down. This is quite obvioulsy a fetish and greco-roman wrestlers need to be reminded that these wrestlers originally used to be naked and oiled.
• Judo - Really this is a sub-set of wrestling that shows off the Japanese capacity for taking things a bit too far. This is wrestling that you need to put on pajamas to take part in and then grapple each-other to the ground in an attempt to hold one-another down with your faces in each-other's armpits. Clearly a fetish.


Oooh chase me, chase me!

• Rugby - Using a funny shaped ball as an excuse to chase each-other around and wrestle each-other to the ground, in the mud! Until recently this was done in practical hard-wearing clothing. Now it seems to be done in skin-tight Lycra.
• Climbing - Uncomfortable harness that is particularly tight around the groin area, rope, silly little rubber shoes and again skin-tight bloody Lycra.
• Speed skating - This is a really weird one, a fetish where people with huge thighs to dress up in what amounts to a skin-tight Lycra gimp suit to chase each other around on ice. Bizarre.


Oh I'm comin' to getcha'

I'm sure there are more, I'll add them as I think of them.

On Browsing: Herbivorous consumption

Browsing is an activity where concentration and attention span as well as a deeper qualitative appreciation are hostile to the activity itself. It also means that people are more sensitive to negative forces, browsing has both push and pull forces and the push is instant and final and the pull is creeping and fickle.

"I'm a selective consumer me."

It's probably a bit unseemly to quote yourself but when I wrote this I started thinking more about browsing as it seems to be an increasingly important part of everyday experience.

Dictionary definitions aren't much good when you are looking to describe and understand something as prevalent and widely applied as the concept of browsing. At best you will be left with an awkwardly narrow definition and at worst discover that the term you are looking up has several different uses that vary only slightly in a semantic sense but when used as a basis for thinking about the thing it describes in a real world context produce a multitude of obfuscating subtleties (try saying that with a mouthful of jelly!). The definition I have come up with is:

Browsing is the act of continual selection and sampling dictating what will be consumed and what will be discarded.

This feels like a capital economic description but is derived from natural history's description of the eating habits of herbivores and I've pinched this as a metaphor for thinking about the process. The very fact that to me this sounds like something that might come up in a marketing seminar points to what is important about browsing; it is a choice mechanism based on sampling. The actual item or experience to be consumed must be part consumed or experienced in the act of making a choice. Choice only occurs when there is more than one option to consume and browsing is how we appear to cope with an enormous variety of choice offered: too many options actually inhibit a quick and clear decision, sampling and acceptance or rejecion have become the norm. We have been turned into herbivorous consumers by the overwhelming quantity of options available.

Browsing also seems to be an effective means of avoiding a definitive choice. With a little of this and a little of that you can browse all day without settling on a single option. It could lead to overconsumption, particularly if you continue with the idea that you are looking for a single perfect thing or simply get lost in the habit of sampling and moving on. Apathy and inertia are an unhealthy combinaton.

The act of browsing seems to have become an activity in itself; window shopping, channel surfing and web browsing for fun. What becomes of a choice mechanism when the final objective is removed? The activity seems a kind of aimless meandering, a feckless self absorption and commitmentless waste of time. Without an aim continuous browsing will probably lead down roads marked out by the most basic and instinctual drives, the lowest common denominator. I'm wondering if this is why there is so much sex on the internet - a medium where you have to open a 'browser' just to be able to access most of the content.

There is another name for herbivores in natural history: prey species. It is only by herding together in vast numbers and/or reaching a really enormous size that they manage not to be devoured!

More thought needed.

Curators of a zeitgeist

William Gibson

The place of blogs in the media landscape seems to be constantly up for debate. The paper-published media seems to have been of hugely divided viewpoint and variously to feel threatened, empowered, to reject the technology before finally embracing it.

The Independent and particularly The Guardian newspapers in the UK seem to have taken the concept and moved a lot of their content online, as have The Telegraph and The Times to varying degrees (from what I experienced of The Guardian when I was back in the UK last month this was definitely to the detriment of the newsstand publication). Whilst this probably can't be described as blogging there are many blogs on the sites.

The Internet over here in Oz is slowly coming round as Internet connections speed up and the newspaper sites are publishing things online simultaneously with the day's first edition (The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald).

The US media has various levels of online access but mostly seems to be sticking to the pay for access model to at least some stories as per The Wall Street Journal - now with extra Murdoch - and The New York Times on the East coast, and a free to access model on the West: The LA Times, The San Francisco Chronicle. The Chicago Tribune seems to have a mixture and USA Today seems to have gone all out for online audience engagement.

Leaving aside that the newspapers are now becoming proto-broadcasters with mixed media online content it is quite interesting that almost all of them now have blogs after some fashion. If you believe in the concept and validity of Citizen Journalism then the lines between the the journalists and the bloggers seems to be becoming blurred, particularly on the level of journals covering specific areas such as emerging web technology e.g. Techcrunch (relevant article). The clear trendsetters in this space were Wired in the US and The Register in the UK, a personal favourite. Both of these two have been blogging as journalism since before it had a name.

If you don't believe in Citizen Journalism then you probably believe that there is still a defined and specific craft to writing and a duty to truth in journalism that it is very hard for your average Joe to recreate (the wikipedia link probably won't have much use for you either). You might find yourself in a minority here, everyone thinks they can write. This doesn't necessarily mean they're right , but it does mean 'me too' writers like me proliferate and litter the Internet with dubious opinion and often unchecked 'fact'. Personally I think this is a moot point and blogging is still an emerging phenomenon that is more interesting in a social context than it is in a journalistic one.

Web logs seem to have begun as link lists of interesting sites with diary elements creeping slowly into the logs as online publishing became easier (strangely pictures of cats seem to have played an important part in this). Many bloggers continue this trend posting links and diary snippets daily, sometimes hourly. Those that do tend to hook into certain trends and, if looked at as a whole, seem to have a kind of Jungian collective unconscious that identifies certain themes and ideas that have the attention of the Internet as a whole, which increasingly means the westernised world.

Oddly the best of this types of blogs seem to be by science fiction writers. I can only surmise that, watching the things they wrote about come to pass, these writers are watching in awe and extrapolating further to another unforeseen future.

What got me thinking about this was an interview with William Gibson in today's Sydney Morning Herald in which Gibson says he has switched his focus back to the present as it is far stranger than anything he could imagine (also see this one in The Washington Post). In fact the present frighteningly close to what he imagined. It is almost impossible to read Neuromancer now without compiling a mental timeline of how this future will occur.

As an example, in Neuromancer Gibson describes a past in which a war is waged as much in cyberspace as it is in base reality. Somewhat presciently the war takes place between Eastern and Western powers. This is dangerously close to happening:

• Beware the Trojan panda
• Chinese military hacked into Pentagon
• Did China hack into Pentagon networks?

The quote below is attributed to Gibson though I can't immediately track down its' provenance:

"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed."

It's hard to argue with that.

Back on the point I had somewhere; bloggers like this are the reason for the title of this post. They both catalogue and define the milieu of an age that is increasingly about a 'lensed perception'. In an age where information arrives more quickly than it can be processed it's not so much about what you see as the viewpoint that you see it from and the way that you arrived at it that defines what you understand of the world around you.

For me blogging is this curatorial act/trusteeship where individual examples are probably not significant but a categorised broader view will be much more revealing in anthropological kind of way and over a long period of time. Of course cat pictures are always good too!

3 Recommendations with links from the sites below them.

William Gibson

• Russian ASCII goggles
• KKKlouraphobia!
• Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes

Bruce Sterling

• Planetary Imagery: 30 years from Voyager
• Days of cheap food are over
• Hookers swarming on Cragslist
  

Warren Ellis

• Only $11.99
• One species' genome discovered inside another's
• Memories of a massacre

"...dread and ecstasy at one and the same time, this is the modern condition."

Bleeding edge news and Tuesday blues

"I could use a hug about now"

With the APEC summit about to happen in Sydney and an opportunity for Australia to showcase its' position as a real economic and political player on the global stage the biggest news story over here at the moment is obviously going to be about a drug taking rugby player.

Last weekend Andrew Johns was arrested in London with an ecstasy tablet in his possession. That's right, one tablet. This is surprisingly convenient for him as if you get caught with one tablet in the UK you can say it's for personal use, if you get nicked with even only one more than that you get done for possession with intent to supply. A man of Johns' size, and apparently considerable experience with controlled substances, will probably want more than one pill to get his rocks off all night. Someone, possibly someone wearing a blue uniform, has done him a big favour and stepped on the rest.

Johns has pleaded that he has been battling bi-polar disorder and that he was using alcohol and drugs to self-medicate, something his doctor almost certainly told him not to do. For a start alcohol is a depressant and won't really work, the drinking experience would feel hollow and shallow and make the problem worse, especially if you drink predominantly filthy Australian beer.

As a second point MDMA, the active ingredient in ecstasy, whilst effective immediately, with even casual use has the side-effect of a nasty comedown when it wears off. With continued use you get delayed comedowns that take place a day or two from the high. These exhibit themselves as a rather dark and tearful mood a few days later - commonly known as the Tuesday blues.

There are a couple of points here that I don't like:

1. Johns' symptoms are as much a result of his self-medication as they are anything else. Given the length of time he's been using it will now be impossible to distinguish between these and the original depression. This doesn't matter however, the treatment will be the same.
2. Successful intoxication of any kind requires knowledge. Johns should have done his homework before stealing the key to the medicine cabinet.
3. Self-medication my arse. He did it to get wasted, just like the rest of us do.
   
4. This isn't exactly news now is it.

A sportsman exhibiting risk-taking misbeaviour? How unexpected. Amazingly he also has a ready excuse designed to provoke sympathy rather than a backlash, gosh I couldn't have predicted that either. Channel 10 has a rather unfunny sketch comedy called The Wedge in which there is a character called Mark Warey, a generic sports star who is constantly apologising for his bad behaviour. If bad sports star behaviour and subsequent apology and sob-story is such a staple of the social cannon that it appears in a slightly sub-standard comedy show as a weekly event then this can't be considered particularly shocking or revealing no matter who that sportsman is.

In a country about to host one of the world's most significant economic summits where the government is using anti-terror legislation to monitor protestors, where the country's largest city has had the central district fenced off to prevent protestors being able to get within 500 metres of anyone significant, where the federal government has stepped in to Aboriginal communities and effectively rolled back previous native land title legislation for a 5 year period there are much weightier things to talk about that are directly in the public interest.

Hospitals I have waited in

It appears to be a fundamental truism that on average one must visit a hospital at least every 18 months (obviously a bit more often for health care professionals). On this occasion you must sit and wait for a period of no less than two hours. The most recent of these for me was at the Prince of Wales Hospital in Randwick. The staff were excellent the best of them being the attending doctor, despite looking about 12 years old, it was a privilege to watch him work. However...

I despise waiting and I'm not fond of hospitals. Eventually, no matter how serious the reason for being in a hospital, you attempt to alleviate the anxious tedium of the waiting room by entering into an advanced level of schadenfreude in the form of a guessing game:

"Ooh, look at the one in the pink dressing gown! Bloodshot eyes, barely able to stand and carrying a bucket of puke. The dreaded lurgy or a cry for help?"

This is particularly true of accident and emergency wards where there is an additional element added to the game necessarily added by the triage process. Patients are rated into [it'll all end in] tiers to denote how urgent their treatment is and to allow the staff to prioritise the right people:

1. About to die. Intensive care required with the possibility that bits might need to be sewn back on.
2. In immediate danger, could be a bit messy, attending doctor should be prepared to get sticky
3. Pretty bloody urgent but not in immediate danger. They'll be OK for 10 minutes but keep an eye on 'em
4. "You nailed what? To where?! Ate/drank what? You dipstick."
5. Take 2 aspirin and call me in the morning

• Anything else - sticking plaster with mickey mouse on it and Mummy kiss it better.

You rarely see tier 1 or 2s in the waiting room. The helicopter/ambulance crew generally having scraped enough of them together for a delivery direct to the ICU (I wonder if the same rules as pizza apply here; if you wait more than half an hour do you get your treatment free?). You do see some tier 3s and some very funny high-end tier 4s. The best of which this time round was a very south American sounding man who was dragged in across the shoulders of his girlfriend, his eyes not focused and not quite capable of standing on his own.

Eee ate a mushroom in the bush and now ee is intoxicated!
A magic mushroom?
No, jus a mushroom. In the woods.

The idiot was dragged away to have his stomach pumped. Sadly my first thought was "we are interfering with natural selection and I'm not sure we should have on this occasion".

Whilst I understand that the position of triage nurse calls for an extremely grounded and pragmatic personality the two on duty here could have used a gentle reminder about privacy. One poor girl, brought in doubled up in pain, was shut in the consulting room to preserve her dignity, but not before the nurse had bellowed out that treatment would be "stuck in your bottom". I presumed it was an intramuscular injection but who knows, a dill pickle suppository may be more effective.

Probably the stand-out moment though was when we actually sitting in the ward waiting for everyone to be in the same place at the same time again. A & E wards are terrifying places at the best of times and this one has good road links to most of the eastern side of Sydney, and a helipad on the roof. The majority of patients were elderly brought in with suspected heart attacks but there were some in there who had clearly been spread across the road only an hour or so earlier.

The unseen octogenarian in the next cubicle over was having a tough time of it. The doctor returned to him and explained that he was going to have to do a rectal exam; "what that means is...". There was a rustling of sheets and a short, utterly silent pause. And then, "ooooh, aaaaarghhh, oooh!". I would have laughed out loud had they not been talking about a full blood transfusion to keep him alive.

Brooker, Banksy and Barley

Charlie Brooker may have gone a bit overboard with this article about Banksy. If you aren’t familiar with Banksy his website will tell you most of what you need to know about him and Charlie Brooker’s article will fill in the rest. Banksy started out as a graffiti artist and has branched out into other areas embracing other forms quickly, efficiently and in a very striking manner, his work is very media friendly. He is a skilled self-publicist and has essentially made himself a brand rather than an artist.

As always I agree with much of what Brooker says but he’s bordering on irrelevant here. Banksy’s background is as a graffiti artist and whilst Situationist influenced graffito had conceptual and political depth the form itself is far more based on immediate visual impact and not on profound insight and developed thinking. Warhol beat Banksy to the brand strategy by a clear three decades and Damien Hirst is probably much better at it in a far more financially gainful way so why would Banksy be so objectionable? Brooker seems to be particularly bothered by the pseudo subversive leanings of Banksy but the trouble is that cultural norms have now expanded to recognise anything remotely alternative. The knock-on effect is that to be genuinely subversive you actually have to be a subversive, making you subject to anti-terror legislation which is a bit of a frightening prospect. Not that Brooker is expecting genuinely subversive behaviour but seems to think that Banksy is trying to infer that he knows some real criminals, which he might. He does live and work in the East end of London and has done for some time.

Banksy’s work is ContentLite and style heavy but it makes extensive use of irony, something Brooker ought to be well acquainted with as he makes his living with it. You only have to read through Brooker’s article twice to see that he has badly missed the point on at least one occasion. Brooker may not like Banksy’s popular leftist anti-globalisation leanings and his association of American capitalist icons with the political activities of that country but the point is that whilst these may be shallow and poorly constructed they do point at a resistance to a cultural invasion from a country whose actions are increasingly abhorrent to the general public. Banksy might not be the sharpest tool in the box but he is at least getting involved.

Whilst popular culture and the mediatisation of everything give everyone a chance to see creative work and to be creative almost none of us are but most of us have an opinion about what creativity is and how it should be done. The modern world has made everyone a consumer and a critic. Brooker himself is most successful as a TV critic and writer who can hand out the kind of vitriol and satire on contemporary existence that makes the rest of the media check themselves against his every scribbling to ensure that they haven’t slipped too far into being Nathan Barley.

Nathan Barley is Brooker’s creation, a kind of conceptual voodoo doll for him to stick pins in, a hate figure and all too common occurrence in everyday life. Nathan Barley is a patchwork archetype of loathsome traits who doesn’t do anything in particular with his life and is agonisingly self-involved and self-important but somehow still holds influence. If you’ve been to Hoxton of a Friday night at any time in the past six years or so you will have seen hundreds of Nathan Barleys out parading themselves around. Nathan Barley became a TV series in which Brooker and Chris Morris used heavy handed irony to build the character and assassinate it, possibly in despair that the kind of narcissist that Barley represents to them is exactly the kind now being given precedence by popular culture.

I find Nathan Barley problematic because at some point just about everyone steps across the line into Barley-dom and the charge of hypocrisy is all too easy to level at Brooker himself. If you look at the unctuous Barley’s claim of being a ‘self facilitating media node’ it is far too easy to apply that definition to Brooker who writes for newspapers, publishes a website writes for and appears on TV, producing mostly parody, pastiche and criticism safely free of the need for originality.

Brooker and Morris have become unspoken media-appointed guardians of integrity – if they get to you you’ve done something wrong - but something about their output bugs me. For example Nathan Barley isn’t parody or humour, it was close enough to the nature of real life that I could barely watch it. In fact I couldn’t escape the feeling that I was watching Brooker & Morris’s self-loathing made flesh. I also had an uneasy feeling that if they didn’t continue producing this kind of material they might easily have become this kind of person, or worse still are in danger of becoming the real life Dan Ashcroft of the Nathan Barley series whose identification of the ‘New Idiots’ and articulation of their horrors sanctifies and reinforces them. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that both writers have fallen into with their wallets open. It also irks me that when people like Brooker, who go out of their way to be a bit different, do something creative you end up with Nathan Barley which is more of the same but dramatised rather than flatly stated as in his other writing. Boring, barely relevant and cringingly difficult to watch.

Banksy might be a bit of a nob but show me an artist that isn’t and I guarantee you they don’t make any money from their artistic work, they probably have to write for newspapers, television and websites. When I lived and worked in London my walk to work from Old Street station took me past at least 5 of Banksy’s pieces and I was constantly noticing new ones. Let’s not mistake quantity for quality, Banksy’s work definitely isn’t of a deep and meaningful nature but it has a huge presence in contemporary culture just as Brooker does. The chief difference is that Banksy isn’t shooting his mouth off about how crap other people’s output is whilst actually failing to engage with the material he’s criticising, however pretentious and showy.


By the way I am aware of the additional layer of irony created by posting this piece of consumer criticism on a website with little or no original work, just in case you got a sudden urge to point this out to me.

Crikey!

Put it down

You may have noticed that Steve Irwin died last week. You haven’t? What are you, a troglodyte? Have you been living on the moon for the last fortnight (and can I borrow your spaceship, I tire of this planet?)? This has provided Australia with (another) Diana Moment^TM; a spontaneous outpouring of grief marked by the national spending on inappropriate cut flowers tripling over night.

I’m not going to pretend that this isn’t sad, the man was only 44, a father of two and one of the world’s most committed conservationists, this is ground that has been well covered elsewhere. The thing is that Irwin was a lot more…er…’hands on’ than most others in his field and had been riding his luck for years. My cynical and immediate response to the news of his death was: “well something was going to get him sooner or later”. A friend put it a little better: “there’s hundreds of crocs out there thinking, ‘dammit, that bastard was mine!’”.

The first I ever saw of Irwin was a typically gung-ho piece of television. Irwin was going to hunt out the world’s top 10 most venomous snakes and kiss them. Finding them at least should be relatively easy for an Aussie as 8 of the top ten live within driving distance of me. The idea behind this was to show that with the correct knowledge the mythology of ‘dangerous’ wildlife could be dispelled and people would feel more affectionate and conservationally minded towards creatures that don’t have enough “aaaaaaahhh” factor. As is evident from observing the world around us the road to hell is paved with good intentions and through a combination of his own enormous enthusiasm, planet sized personality and what appeared to the casual observer to be foolhardy disregard for his own personal safety Irwin quickly invalidated this enterprise.

Scrabbling amongst the dust and rocks in a remote area dressed in shorts and a short sleeved shirt Irwin picked up a snake in each hand, described its preferred habitat, how aggressive it wasn’t until you try you pick it up, the effects of its venom and what you should do if you were stupid enough to try and pick it up and got bitten by it. He then handed the snakes to his heavily pregnant wife and charged off into a small dark cave in search of more, his wife’s cautions following him into the cave. If he were going to deliver a demonstration of how not to behave in the presence of a venomous creature that just wants to be left alone he could not have provided a better example.

I said put it down!

The next segment of the show saw Irwin in woodlands, again scrabbling about under rocks until he found a specimen that suited his needs. Again he squatted down picked up the timid creature and described its’ lifecycle in intimate detail. Halfway through his spiel he halted, his eyes bulging out of his head, he looked straight at the camera: “Oh crikey!” He stood quickly and moved away, he put down the snake and moved aside the rock he was squatting over. Concealed in the hollow underneath and not three inches from where his testicles had been only moments before was an entire nest of poisonous snakes. “Oh man, that could have been nasty”, quoth the khaki clad clot, “They go for the warm bits…” It was a moment of unintentional comic genius that whilst certainly added to the appeal of the man also exposed the fact that was he was attempting was not just the act of a showboating show-off but to anyone less knowledgeable and skilled than himself would certainly have been a terminal experience.

The Ahhhhhh factor in action

Irwin was a reflection of the creatures he loved and worked with: a rare breed that is instantly intriguing and dangerous if not handled carefully. His unbelievable joie de vivre and enthusiasm played as entertainment on screen went over fantastically in America and in Australia but left me wondering whether he was making entertainment with animals as props rather than his stated objective of conservation and education. Naming his show “The Crocodile Hunter” also jarred with that for me. I also couldn’t help feeling that the personality that made him a global celebrity would have me attempting to tear his throat out after half an hour in his presence – I empathised too easily with the animals trying to kill him. I loathed Irwin’s public persona but I found his TV presence hypnotic simply because I could not believe that he made it through half an hour of such adventures, never mind a lifetime of them, without being stung, bitten, dismembered or eaten by the extraordinary array of creatures he felt the need to lay hands on. At the end of his programs I was left in a state of catharsis that quite rid me of any fear of anything but left me too exhausted to step outside the house.

It is this ambivalence towards him that characterises my reaction to his death. I am sorry to see the end of a great conservationist and an iconic Australian but I can’t help the feeling that natural selection finally called time on him. His sensationalist TV shows and frequent work at his own Australia Zoo in front of crowds mean that I can’t help feeling that it is quite fortunate that his death wasn’t far more public than was actually the case. Videos of it would have hit the internet in minutes had it happened anywhere he was being filmed by tourists. No one is indestructible and whilst Irwin was one of those people that are a reassuring presence and point of reference, the point of reference was always as a remarkable example of how many risks could be taken without falling foul of them. Irwin may well become a cautionary tale for parents and children round the globe.

It seems worth repeating the tragic irony of his death that he was killed by a creature that is normally placid - if not lugubriously unconcerned - trying to demonstrate that it was in no way as dangerous as its name or reputation suggested. He wasn’t even trying to touch it, kiss it, feel its goolies or otherwise interfere with it. There was almost no risk in the situation. Other naturalists and fishermen who have spent time around stingrays have said that at best guess the fish was just not in the mood to be watched. So remember kids, when they say leave it alone on the wildlife documentaries it doesn’t matter how knowledgeable or able you are, if it is having a bad day it will still kill you – leave it alone.