Where Worlds Collide

You review Star Wars Episode III, and come up with lines like this

But Lucas doesn’t care about his script, under which gelid wodge of pork fat he immures the cast, especially Natalie Portman. They suffer like the damned frozen beneath Cocytus, mouthing clunking, mud-brick dialogue — “wooden” dialogue is several TLs above this stuff

I actually went to my local multiplex on the opening night to see a different film (Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy) which I really ought to have reviewed by now. I wondered why there were people dressed as Jar-Jar Binks wandering around.

Anyone wanting evidence that Blogcritics is still circling the drain only needs to read this posting. It’s by someone from the nasty end of the religious right. If you can stomach it, read his other postings on the site; they’re all pretty unpleasant stuff.

Blogcritics still advertises itself as “A sinister cabal of superior bloggers on music, books, film, popular culture, technology, and politics”.

It is patently obvious that such a statement is no longer true. Blogcritics, once a fine music and culture site, is now becoming nothing more than soapbox for crude rightwing rants, and any claims about “superior bloggers” are nonsense. Many recent postings would be embarrassing as trolls in the comments. But Eric Olsen has seen fit to recruit these blowhards as actual contributors to the site.

It’s not just a one-off incident. Every week there seem to be three or four new posters, and they’re nearly all from the brownshirt end of the political spectrum. Many of these postings are little more than badly-written boilerplate rants, and each new member seems to go just a little bit further than the one before, constantly ratcheting up the level of violently intolerant rhetoric.

I know the Blogosphere skews heavily to the right. Unfortunately the line between the mainstream right and what many would call the ‘brownshirt right’ is getting increasingly blurred. Nowadays too many rightwing bloggers are quite comfortable with the sorts of opinions that used to be unacceptable in polite company. And Blogcritics in increasingly resembing the worst of it,

Put a fork in Blogcritics. It’s over. This feels as bad as the time when Compu$erve turned the RPGAMES forum into a porn site. It used to be a great site once, otherwise I wouldn’t care.

Patrick Crozier wants blogs with RSS feeds to include the full text of the blog posting rather than just an extract, so the entire posting can be read through an RSS aggregator such as Bloglines. He makes the valid point that it makes postings easier to read if you don’t have to click on a link to get the full posting. It’s even more useful for some people who use RSS aggregators to slurp stuff up which they then read offline on the train or bus on the way to work.

Some commenters make the equally valid point that bloggers like to know their traffic, and want to make visitors actually click through onto their site; this would be very important for a site that’s dependant on advertising. Boing Boing has suffered from this, and now includes text ads in the RSS feed.

This blog is currently one of those that only displays the short extract, largely because I use the default template that came with Moveable Type. What’s the consensus of the three people and the cat who read this blog? Are you happy with the things as they are, or would you prefer the whole post in RSS? Or perhaps I should make the extracts longer, perhaps 50 words rather then 20?

At last some people on the right are beginning to realise that the stories of torture and abuse in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and Bagram can’t be dismissed as ‘a few rotten apples’ or ‘lies and smears by the liberal media’

Perry de Haviland of Samizdata.net says:

The Taliban is history and Al Qaeda is a mere shadow of its former self, so the question is why are US (and UK) forces still in effective control of Afghanistan? The latest example of appalling behaviour by US interrogators (who appear to have tortured a taxi cab driver to death at Bagram for being in the wrong place at the wrong time) is starting to turn local opinion against the over-mightly US presence. Not only do the people responsible need to be suitably called to account a good way up the chain of command, clearly there are some serious institutional problems in sections of the US military that need to be stamped on pretty harshly.

I’ve always believe the memetic war (the battle of ideas) is far more important than the actual shooting war. If we can’t win over the hearts and minds of ordinary people in Afganistan, Iraq and other parts of the middle east, we cannot win by any means short of total war. Torturing innocent people to death, setting attack dogs on naked prisoners, or desecrating Korans are not the way to promote western values of democracy, freedom and individual rights. No matter how cathartic it might be to some idiotic middle Americans.

Personally I think the buck goes as far up the chain of command as Donald Rumsfeld himself. He’s a classic rightwing alpha-geek, which is why so many rightwing geeks worship him. He may well be a tactical genius, seeing battles as a gigantic board game. But like a lot of geeks, he’s socially clueless. He’s got no idea about winning over hearts and minds. He can’t see why the prisoner abuses will lose the war if they go on unchecked. He sees combatants as cardboard game tokens rather than flesh-and-blood people. He needs to go.

I know my musical taste is at 180 degrees to the collective groupthink of mainstream rock critics. I’m still an unrepentant fan of the much-maligned progressive rock bands of the early 70s, which is ridiculed and sneered at even by those who’ve never heard a single note of Yes, Genesis or ELP. I think most of today’s music would be vastly improved with the addition of more guitar solos (of for many bands, some guitar solos).

Consequently, I find a lot of the bands awarded iconic status to be rather overrated. None of those listed below are truly awful, down to the level of the hideous Morrissey. But the mainstream groupthink consistently rates these far above bands like Led Zeppelin or Pink Floyd, which to me is simply… wrong.

The Kinks. As far as I’m concerned, they were no more than a fair to middling band who had a few hits in the late sixties. I saw them live at the 1981 Reading festival, and found them dull and uninspiring, and wondered what all the fuss was about. But nowadays loads of dull bands seems to namecheck them. I can pretty much guarantee that any band claimed to ‘evoke the classic English songwriting of The Kinks’ is going to suck badly, and isn’t going to be worth listening to.

Roxy Music. OK, so there was some interesting stuff on their early of albums, especially when Brian Eno was still in the band. But they would have sounded better if they’d had a proper singer rather than that ridiculous poseur Ferry. Their major crime was to advance the idea that style mattered more than the actual content, which resulted in so many dreadful bands in the 1980s.

The Clash. I might have felt differently if I’d ever seen them live. But they never managed to reproduce the sound of their “ultimate high energy rock’n'roll” onto their often tinny records. And with the bloated ‘Sandanista’ album they proved that punk could outdo Yes or ELP when it came to self-indulgence. At least “Tales from Topographic Oceans” had some good music on it. If Roxy Music were the triumph of style over content, then The Clash were they triumph of attitude over content.

Harry thinks Robert Plant looks old and past it, and should retire gracefully.

Robert Plant appeared on BBC2’s “Later with Jools Holland” on Friday night. Plant and his band The Strange Sensation played three songs, two from the new album “Mighty Rearranger”, plus a reworking of the old Led Zep classic “When the Levee Breaks”. This didn’t sound like a washed up relic of the past to me; while Plant has abandoned the screaming vocals of the Zeppelin years (A 1969 clip of “Communication Breakdown” made an interesting comparison), he’s still in fine voice for the sort of material he’s playing nowadays, an eclectic mix of rock and ‘the exciting bits’ of world music. Certainly impressed me enough to make me buy the album.

Also on the show were ‘punk legends’, The Fall. I’m not sure if people only pretend to like the The Fall because they were championed by the high priest of unlistenably bad music, John Peel, or this was just a bad performance. They were awful. The bored-looking band robotically ground out a monotonous two-chord thrash while Mark E Smith ranted incomprehensibly into the microphone. The final song lapsed into chaos, only saved by Jools’ humour and professionalism. I don’t know whether he was really drunk, or whether he’s always like that. If anyone on that show was a shambling has-been, it was Mark E Smith.

Definitely Classic Rock 1, Punk 0

One of Harry’s commenters, Pawoodster, quoted this from Popbitch (I’ve partially excised the blue language)

Mark is the only artist in the history of the show to have a clause in his contract to state that Jools will not play f—ing boogie-woogie piano over any of his songs, or words to that effect. He also delayed filming several times by wandering in and out of shot, calling Robert Plant c—y and just generally behaving like what he is The Last Great Englishman….Robert Plant turned up in a bullit proof limo, the Fall were transported by Salford Van Hire.. oh and the Go-Team kept f—ing up much to the annoyance of all.

That popbitch quote crystallises everything that’s been wrong with the British music scene in the past 25 to 30 years.

Artists like Robert Plant are hated because they represented ‘the old guard’ back in 1975.

Unlistenable rubbish like The Fall now represents ‘the establishment’, but the pseudo-intellectual old punks can’t forgive Robert Plant for still being around in 2005.

The punk generation are as tiresome as America’s baby boomers. They think their stupid generational prejudices are eternal truths, and that the whole of history revolves around their coming-of-age.

Or Yet Another Music Meme.

I’ve been tagged for this Music Meme from Perverse Access Memory: Some similarities to an earlier music meme, but I’ll do it anyway.

1. Total number of records I own on CD (or vinyl or cassette):
CDs: Long time since I counted them, so I have no idea, but in the high 000s
Vinyl: About 300, all in storage at my parent’s place. There are an awful lot of classic albums I’ve still only got on LP.

2. Total volume of music files on my computer:
Very little

3. The last record I bought:
Van der Graaf Generator’s reunion album: Present

4. The last record listened to / song playing now:
Last record listened to: Porcupine Tree’s Deadwing. As I started to write this, Robert Plant and band were performing a song who’s name I didn’t catch on BBC2’s Later with Jools Holland.

5. Five records that I listen to a lot or that mean a lot to me (either singles or albums):

• Pink Floyd: “The Wall”. First album I ever bought. Overlong, patchy, and self-indulgent in places, but still magnificent in others. And I got to see the whole thing performed live.
• Rainbow, “Down to Earth”, or more significantly the song ‘Eyes of he World’. This wasn’t Rainbow’s best album, with some cheesy pop singles and far too much mediocre filler, but that song is still a classic. And it was hearing that song on the radio that got me into Rock
• Blue Öyster Cult: “Some Enchanted Evening”. Their 1977 live album, with the incredible version of ‘Astronomy‘. I got into this band through a friend at university, Mark Huggett. I remember being completely blown away the first time I heard that song.
• Twelfth Night, “Live at the Target”. This was the debut album of the relatively short-lived 80s neo-prog band, who never achieved much commercial success, but were a big influence on bands like Marillion. Significant for me because I was in the audience the night they recorded it. I’ve since been to shows by UFO, Gillan, Thin Lizzy, Marillion and Uriah Heep that ended up on live albums.
• Mostly Autumn, “The Last Bright Light”. First time for many years I’ve been really enthused by a new band, and this one’s still my favourite album of theirs.

6. Finally, tag five people to do this meme:

Scott (again), Karen Cravens, Steve “Electric Nose” Jones, Martyn Read and Alan Monk. Not having a blog in no excuse, that’s what the comments are for!

The current blog meme doing the rounds, from Harry’s Place, Ten things I’ve Never Done:

1. Owned a car
2. Visited any country outside Western Europe or the US.
3. Voted for any successful election candidate who hasn’t either suffered from cancer or died in office.
4. Been able to tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi
5. liked The Smiths or Morrissey
6. Managed to read more than 100 pages of Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time”.
7. Read anything at all of “Ulysses” or “Atlas Shrugged”
8. Played a MMPORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Game)
9. Actually finish a model railway layout.
10. Managed to build a Parkwood OOV “Clayhood” wagon kit that runs properly.

I’ve switched the blogroll on the front page from blogrolling.com to bloglines, which I’ve been using as an online RSS aggregator for quite a while. Over the past months the blogs I’ve been reading and the ones on the blogroll have been getting further and further out of synch with each other. Quite a few blogs, particularly American political ones are now gone, and there are just as many new ones.

There are a few weblogs I read that don’t have RSS feeds which are temporarily absent, notably Electric Nose and The Gline. I’m going to have to pare down the old blogrolling one to resurrect them.

A thread on DreamLyrics has got people waxing nostalgically about legendary online games of the past, both in Dreamlyrics itself, and in it’s predecessor, the CompuServe RPGAMES Forum.

My most memorable game has to be the very first online game I ever played in, HVG: Maughn Matsuoka’s Hawaiian Vacation.

The system was GURPS Cyberpunk, and Maughn put together a very detailed near-future dystopian setting, with pages and pages of background material. There was a plethora of megacorps, all detailed, and massive changes in geopolitics. The EU had fused into a single state while the US had fragmented into several smaller nations. Ebola rampaged unchecked across Africa turning the continent into Hell-on-Earth.

The pace was fast and furious, with a whole sequence of set-piece battles; the roadside rest stop attack and the ninja attack in the Frontier Hotel were particularly memorable. The latter was a real ’so this is it we’re all going to die’ moment, much scarier than many supposedly horror games.

Despite all the fights, my character, the techie Neil Jones, wasn’t really a combat character; he spent one entire fight cowering in a ditch while bullets flew overhead. He considered mere survival to count as victory.

The climactic finale had us foiling a Russian plot to set of a load of nukes along the San Andreas fault, calculated to set off a massive tsunami which would have taken out the whole of the Pacific Rim. Nicki Jett’s scary cybered-up amazon Kiko took out a whole squad of Israeli special forces who were supposed to have been our allies! Fortunately she took out most of the Russians as well.

It’s notable as one of the few online games that actually ended, rather than suffer the usual online game fate of fizzling out.