marginal gloss

'kate moss: an icon of willpower and strength'

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:52:00 +0000

'kate moss: an icon of willpower and strength':

Here witness Giles Coren battling against ‘the disastrous collapse of journalistic standards…bloggorrhoea, the web generally, and the Cowellisation of our culture’ by producing truly revelatory statements like ‘“Fat and happy” is a myth, a monstrous lie.’

Actually, he’s right to criticise the hypocrisy of a media which hysterically condemned Kate Moss’ comment (‘Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’) while banging on and on about weight loss all the time. But with an astounding lack of self-consciousness, what Coren’s completely failed to realise is that this ugly, meretricious thing he’s written is part of the very culture he claims to so despise. It’s worse even than his ‘instant-gratification, bling-bling, X Factor, fizzy pop, white-bread world’ because — well, call me old-fashioned, but I would have thought that getting a half-page in a national newspaper means you have a duty to do better than that shit rather than leaping into it and rolling around like an over-eager labrador.

Also, nobody likes you as much as Victoria Coren.

Moving house is regularly ranked amongst births, marriages and...

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 00:04:00 +0000

Moving house is regularly ranked amongst births, marriages and deaths as one of the most stressful experiences in life. Oddly, I had expected it to be more affecting than it’s been for me. I don’t feel wholly unmoved, but already part removed.

A little context: my family recently sold the house we’ve lived in for over twenty years (i.e. ever since I was born) in order to move into a smaller one not far away in Chiswick. The old place is just too big for our needs — it has five floors, including a loft conversion and a basement flat. For a long time now we’ve been trying slowly to give or throw away two decades’ worth of accumulated junk, but the house still feels full of stuff, even though the rooms are once again growing larger without bookshelves and pictures on the walls. This weekend, the removal men are coming to take away all the bulkiest non-essential furniture and put it in storage, leaving us with just the basics before the actual day of exchange next monday.

All this seems like a distant, impossible prospect to me, perhaps because I’ve never lived anywhere else for a substantial period of time — nowhere for more than a month or two, and never in any arrangement that was anything other than temporary. There was always here, the room from which I write this, waiting for me. But I realised just the other day that I’d be at work next monday, when the last of the furniture is carted out and the keys handed over, and that I won’t get to walk around the empty rooms, won’t get to say goodbye to the place. Despite the fact that I’ve been packing and preparing for weeks, that was the first moment where I really understood that I could never, never come back here again.

‘One can never go home,’ said somebody whose name I forget. Variations on that saying are common, the meaning roughly equivalent to the notion that you can never step in the same river twice: Kierkegaard’s frustration with the impossibility of true repetition. ‘Home’ as more of a idealistic construct than an actuality. And I agree — in a sense, I left the ‘home’ of my childhood many, many years ago. The house has never felt quite the same since I returned from university, and indeed its features and furnishings have migrated from room to room so many times that it seems to have existed in countless different variants over the years.

But the fact is that there is and must be such a thing as home; certain places impress themselves so strongly on our minds that we can never forget them. They will always be the hallways we feel our way through in the dark, the stairs our feet find by instinct, the rooms we visit in our dreams. It might even be more correct to say that ‘one can never leave home’.

My own favourite work of literature on this subject is a short story by Henry James called The Jolly Corner. The lightness of the title is misleading; next to The Turn of the Screw it’s arguably his finest and most disturbing ghost story. In it, a wealthy, successful middle-aged man visits his childhood home first out of curiosity, then as a matter of obsession, frequently wandering its empty rooms at night. He is hunting something — or is that something hunting him? What he seeks is himself, or rather his alternate self, not quite his id but a vision of what might have been, of youthful possibilities long since departed. The implication is not only that the most haunting of all ghosts are those which come from within the mind, but that the most frightening thing we might encounter on a dark night of the soul is ourselves:

‘He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style. This effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where?—in the depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for weal or woe, abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner—feeling the place once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities. What he did therefore by this appeal of his hushed presence was to wake them into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy. They were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but they weren’t really sinister; at least they weren’t as he had hitherto felt them—before they had taken the Form he so yearned to make them take, the Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting on tiptoe, the points of his evening shoes, from room to room and from storey to storey.’

Some names I have for my dog that are not my dog’s...

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:57:26 +0000

Some names I have for my dog that are not my dog’s name:

Piggle
Pigdog
Woo Woo
Mr Woo
Boggins
Centrifugal grumble-pup (after Aldous Huxley)

inside the dignitas house

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 10:47:00 +0000

inside the dignitas house:

‘Finally, this summer, the two-storey house in Pfäffikon was bought for around €1m (£880,000) – much of it raised by donations from members. A newsletter sent out this month to members has pictures of the site, holiday-brochure style, with alluring captions: “Beside lies a tiny lake; a little waterfall dabbles.” After the Heidi-esque scenery we have driven through, the location of the modern, blue-metal construction is rather a surprise. The house is in an industrial zone, in the shadows of a vast grey machine-components factory; to the left there are factories, to the right there are factories, in front there is a football pitch. It’s not that the place is exactly charmless, it is just a bit peculiar. To enter, guests make their way across wooden decking over a large goldfish pond (which does have a tinkling water feature), and then they arrive in a light, open-plan room, with a hospital bed (which reclines electronically) in one corner, and a large white sofa in another. There is another room with a second bed to die in across the hallway. By the bed there is a CD player and a few CDs – Offenbach’s Gaîté Parisienne and Vivaldi’s La Stravaganza – left by former clients. There are open boxes of tissues ready on the tables. The former owner had the constellation of Orion picked out in halogen lights in the ceiling. On the shelves there is a kitsch stone statue of a cherub, and a few slightly wilting orchids. There is nothing funereal about the place; instead the space is sunny, clean and neutral, not unlike a holiday rental apartment.’

A fascinating glimpse inside the assisted suicide clinic in Switzerland. Blackly comic (’“We have had good weather for the last few weeks, so people don’t call us so much,”’) and thought-provoking, apart from this unsettling comment from the founder:

‘“In the second world war they closed the borders to Jews and those Jews who wanted to come here were repelled, and were murdered in concentration camps. And now we have people looking to end their lives in Switzerland and they are sent back and forced to live on. What is the difference? What is more cruel?”’

I call Godwin’s Law.

I was going to draw your attention to this article on the ‘outing’ of Belle de Jour and...

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:05:00 +0000

I was going to draw your attention to this article on the ‘outing’ of Belle de Jour and the problems of anonymous blogging but I can’t get the ‘people talking with-oooout speaking’ bit from The Sound of Silence out of my head. And now, I hope, neither can you. It must be a sign of something. Something silent but with sunny harmonies and an overdubbed electric backing that was recorded and released without the consent of the songwriters. Everything is connected, you guys.

Jesca Hoop — Murder of Birds Last week I went to see...

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:03:00 +0000

Jesca Hoop — Murder of Birds

Last week I went to see Andrew Bird at the Union Chapel in Islington; it was a wonderful show in beautiful surroundings by a man so astonishingly gifted that to watch him perform his one-man show is effectively to be left a blinking, stuttering wreck, painfully reminded of one’s own mediocrity. That said, I was pleasantly surprised by the sounds of this lady, his support act, who’s clearly a significant and singular talent compared to a great many other similarly folky, long-haired guitar people out there at the moment. This probably has nothing to do with the fact that she used to babysit for Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, but I’m sure it couldn’t have hurt.

Elbow’s Guy Garvey also features (quietly) on this track.

sleepflower

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 22:40:00 +0000

Often I wish I were one of those people who actively despises sleep: the kind of person who regards it as an immense waste of time, who goes to bed well before midnight and is awake at dawn, who switches off their alarm clock and immediately sets about making the best of the day. As it is, I’m greedy. If I have to get up, I’ll get up (and I’m rarely late for whatever it is I get up for) but if I have no particular appointment to keep I’ll gladly doze for hours, ideally while listening to Radio 4. When I do get up I inevitably feel bad about it, even though I’ve found that if I am forced out of bed for any reason on such a lazy day, I’m unlikely to do anything useful with the time I would’ve spent in bed anyway.

Marcus Aurelius was particularly hard on those over-fond of their beds:

‘In he morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present: I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?…Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature?…[Sleep] is necessary: however nature has fixed bounds to this too: she has fixed bounds both to eating and drinking, and yet thou goest beyond these bounds, beyond what is sufficient; yet in thy acts it is not so, but thou stoppest short of what thou canst do. So thou lovest not thyself, for if thou didst, thou wouldst love thy nature and her will.’

But is oversleeping always a symptom of low self-esteem? True, while in bed I can momentarily forget anything worrying me; I can feel safe, turn my back on my own nature, my own allotted place in the world, and succumb to oblivion — except it is not quite ‘oblivion’ because whether I’m asleep or drifting in and out of consciousness, the sleepy supine state brings not a complete insensibility but a turning of the mind inward. We can never cease to be ourselves. One could equally say that the tendency towards idleness comes from a kind of luxuriating self-love — choosing to follow an ideal of one’s self buried in the mind rather than the public persona we make each day in what we do, in what we must necessarily call the real world.

Conrad’s famous dictum that ‘We live as we dream — alone…’ ought, I think, to be taken entirely seriously. It may be that we are never more ourselves and never more alone than we are when we are asleep. From time to time it may even take great courage to face the inner self which is both composer and resident of our dreams. I wonder if there isn’t something of an answer to the reductions of Aurelius in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale, where the poet’s craving for oblivion only serves to turn his mind in on itself in a fantastical reverie of ‘embalmèd darkness’, finally settling on the realisation that ‘fancy cannot cheat so well / As she is famed to do’. Reality always seems lacking after we have sailed through the infinite worlds of sleep, but after the dreaming, we must wake in the wake of the dream. ‘Tomorrow was another day,’ as the old song goes.

From The Beginning of the Story by Lee Harwood. Read the whole...

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 14:18:00 +0000

From The Beginning of the Story by Lee Harwood.

Read the whole thing here (PDF - scroll down a bit).

whatever happened to 'the two remaining heads on temple bar'?

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 20:49:14 +0000

whatever happened to 'the two remaining heads on temple bar'?:

In case you wondered what all that was (partly) about, here is the PDF of an old New York Times article far too weird to be effectively summarised here.

"So the talk at top and bottom and both sides of the table, with its cross-readings, and muddle, and..."

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 19:48:00 +0000

“So the talk at top and bottom and both sides of the table, with its cross-readings, and muddle, and uproar, changed hands, and whisked and rioted, like a dance of Walpurgis, in his lonely brain. What he heard, on the whole, was very like this—’hubble-bubble-rubble-dubble—the great match of shuttlecock played between the gentlemen of the north and those of hubble-bubble—the Methodist persuasion; but—ha-ha-ha!—a squeeze of a lemon—rubble-dubble—ha-ha-ha!—wicked man—hubble-bubble—force-meat balls and yolks of eggs—rubble-dubble—musket balls from a steel cross-bow—upon my—hubble-bubble—throwing a sheep’s eye—ha-ha-ha—rubble-dubble—at the two remaining heads on Temple Bar—hubble-bubble—and the duke left by his will—rubble-dubble—a quid of tobacco in a brass snuff-box—hubble-bubble—and my Lady Rostrevor’s very sweet upon—rubble-dubble—old Alderman Wallop of John’s-lane—hubble-bubble—ha-ha-ha—from Jericho to Bethany, where David, Joab, and—rubble-dubble—the whole party upset in the mud in a chaise marine—and—hubble-bubble—shake a little white pepper over them—and—rubble-dubble—his name is Solomon—hubble-bubble—ha-ha-ha—the poor old thing dying of cold, and not a stitch of clothes to cover her nakedness—rubble-dubble—play or pay, on Finchley Common—hubble-bubble—most melancholy truly—ha-ha-ha!—rubble-dubble—and old Lady Ruth is ready to swear she never—hubble-bubble—served High Sheriff for the county of Down in the reign of Queen Anne—rubble-dubble—and Dr. and Mrs. Sturk—hubble-bubble—Secretaries of State in the room of the Duke of Grafton and General Conway—rubble-dubble—venerable prelate—ha-ha-ha! hubble-bubble—filthy creature—hubble-bubble-rubble-dubble.’”

- J. Sheridan Le Fanu, The House by the Churchyard — one of the key sources for Finnegans Wake.

One of a few messages found in an old Point Horror novel,...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:05:54 +0000

One of a few messages found in an old Point Horror novel, via found_magazine.

John Cale — Fear is a Man’s Best Friend

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:45:14 +0000

John Cale — Fear is a Man’s Best Friend

Having been a part-time lover of PC gaming pretty much all my...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 14:13:00 +0000

Having been a part-time lover of PC gaming pretty much all my life, and having recently come into possession of a new MacBook Pro, I’ve been keeping an eye out for OSX-friendly titles. Since I’m not willing to partition my hard drive and reinstall Windows just yet, there aren’t many games available (though I loved Braid) but being a fan of most things FPS and horror-ific I eagerly set upon the Penumbra trilogy for my fix.

The game is best described as a first-person puzzler with elements of survival horror, and comes in three parts: Overture, Black Plague and Requiem. In the first game, the player plays Philip, a physicist who receives a strange letter from his late father which leads him to an abandoned mine in Greenland where something terrible happened many years ago. Once inside, the entrance collapses and the player is forced to explore deeper into the facility. It’s very, very dark. There are strange rumblings, growls. There are things in the darkness. While Philip can fight back against them, there are no guns: the only weapons are the tools and objects he finds around the place. Almost anything can be picked up, rotated, dropped or thrown, and the physics of the game engine is smart enough to simulate all kinds of things, from the trajectory and bounce of a thrown rock to the sinister cracking of ice across a frozen underground lake. Picking up objects can be tricky at first, and something as simple as opening a door must be done by ‘pushing’ or ‘pulling’ with the mouse, an intuitive business which adds a convincing weight to actions. Improvised ‘weapons’ are ineffectual and tricky to use — difficult in the way I imagine fighting off a real rabid dog with a hammer might be — although as with most games, it would be a mistake to confuse this for a ‘simulation’ of real combat, or indeed of anything else. I’m sure we can all agree that even the most realistic shooter never provided an experience anything like firing a real gun. But throughout Penumbra it’s often a better idea to sneak past or simply flee from the bad things that want to eat your face.

That combat soon becomes altogether impossible is partly what makes Black Plague the best of the series by far. In the second game, Philip finds himself in a deeper part of the installation called ‘The Shelter’, but he’s anything but safe. The residents have been infected with a virus that’s turned them into shambling, zombie-like creatures, and unlike what lurks in the shadows of Overture, they can’t be killed. That said, direct confrontations are fairly rare; it’s mostly a matter of hurrying down darkened corridors and anxiously peering into the next dimly-lit, bloody room in search of some clue that’ll help you escape. It’s a stronger game in almost every respect compared to its predecessor — better maps, better characters, smarter puzzles, and a more imaginative storyline that presses into the psychological implications of Philip’s adventure: his journey into the facility becomes a journey into his own mental landscape. Without wishing to give too much away, I will say that near the end of the game there is one rare moment of genuine oh god what have I done narrative brilliance that could never be expressed in any other form.

Requiem is something a little different. It’s no longer clear whether Philip is still alive and wandering the (now wholly deserted) passages of the mine, or is he trapped in a fever-dream brought on by the infection, a prisoner of the cyclical traumas which has consume his imagination? There’s no combat here because there’s nothing to fight, only a series of puzzles accompanied by the voices of characters you had thought dead and gone, and certain haunting images and motifs from the two previous games. It’s more abstract, reminiscent at times of a less-brilliant Portal — the levels are similarly self-contained puzzles, but there’s little of that game’s effortless innovation. While the atmosphere remains as creepy as ever, there’s something distinctly unscary about it all. With no enemies it lacks any sense of threat, and though some of the puzzles act as a kind of metaphysical commentary on what came before, others are the kind of tedious fetch-and-carry/jump-over-lava filler that have been a staple of every FPS since Doom and Quake.

Though I enjoyed all three games, I have absolutely no wish to play any of them again for a long, long time. Indeed, I’m feeling something like relief at having finally finished the damn things; perhaps this might be attributed to the weaknesses of Requiem, but I’ve felt this feeling before, and I suspect it’s more a product of the necessary linearity of horror in single-player games.

To take another example, playing Call of Chthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth was often a genuinely terrifying experience which contained my current all-time favourite literary adaptation in gaming: a near-perfect rendition of the moment in H.P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth where the monstrous residents of the town burst in on the protagonist, who is forced to flee through the adjoining rooms of his hotel, bolting and blocking side-doors as he goes. In the game it’s a brilliantly detailed and exhilarating sequence, but it’s also unbelievably hard and almost impossible to complete the first time round. Survival horror is often punishing in that respect — a game can’t thrill and frighten the player if they feel too confident, too tough, too in control. The problem is that failure in these sequences tends to underline the linearity that pervades the whole game. Too often the player is punished for experimenting, and the whole thing is revealed as little more than smoke and mirrors, the modern equivalent of Victorian parlour tricks. The classic survival horror chase sequence is composed of a series of tasks that must be completed against a time limit, and a swift, messy demise follows if any part is overlooked or if the time runs out. And so the player reloads and tries again, and again, and again, and the third or forth time around they cease to be particularly frightened by what at first had sent their heart racing. If the player can’t find a solution to their situation soon, they’ve effectively hit a brick wall and will probably just stop playing. The scripted sequence is revealed for what it is — what all games must be, to some extent — and the player shuts it down in disgust. And when they do get past it, the thought of playing the game again and struggling through that sequence suddenly feels monumentally difficult.

I had a few such moments in Penumbra, but not nearly so many — it’s not a particularly hard game. But after the initial menace of the dark spaces and the spooky noises wears off, playing it felt like dragging myself through long, dull sequences to get to the few moments of genuine beauty and terror. Endless dark corridors, cave systems, near-identical storage rooms — I know underground research facilities are not much to look at, but after a while I began to wonder whether horror necessarily needs to be set in such Doom-y, monotonous, claustrophobic spaces after all. That said, it was quite fun to imagine that I was really wandering around in an old black-and-white episode of Quatermass, and that the dull surroundings were a product of BBC budget constraints. When it’s done with real care and attention, games can make horror cliche work in ways that books and film can’t — one classic example being the Shalebridge Cradle in Thief: Deadly Shadows — but what I’d really like is for a game to unsettle me in the way that Alfred Hitchcock and David Lynch do: not by laying it on thick with the rattling chains, groaning floorboards and knee-jerk scares, but by making the ordinary and the everyday seem suddenly strange and uncanny. But that’s a matter of atmosphere, and there must be more to it than that; rather than imitating horror tropes developed in film and fiction, games ought to focus on what frightens in uniquely the game-like experience. The unpredictable encounter with toothy monsters is a necessary evil, but what the Penumbra games do so well is that which I think gaming does best, and the same effect I so admired in the considerably more lo-fi Small Worlds: enabling the player to create their own narrative through exploration, discovery and play.

You can get the Penumbra trilogy here. It’s available for Windows, Mac and Linux and is well worth your time.

A mysterious monocular creature spotted at my local tube...

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:57:00 +0000

A mysterious monocular creature spotted at my local tube station.

I wouldn’t go through that door if I were you.

dyoublong

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:16:00 +0000

Everyone who visits Dublin has to go to the Guinness Storehouse, don’t they? Even if they don’t drink the stuff; especially, perhaps; though I do, and I do with great relish. I blame my dad. Anyway, we got it out the way early on; I enjoyed it, but I don’t want to go there ever again. The main exhibition blows its load rather too early on, and soon trekking up the seven-storey building becomes a chore, with what scant stuff there is to look at punctuated by deserted conference rooms, bored ushers and unattended video installations. Hello, Diageo. The most interesting part of it all is a small section dedicated to the old art of cooperage, which shows a video from the 1950’s of a wooden cask being made from scratch by hand. It was rather humbling. Everything else was interesting enough but also rather obscure, a vague and conceptual exploration of ‘Guinness’, the brand as well as the beer. The view from the ‘Gravity Bar’ at the top is lovely, but it was rather spoiled by the terrible disco music the management insist on playing at high volume — I can only assume because they know that loud music + limited seating = drinking up and getting out. Actually, it wasn’t all terrible: they did play Video Killed the Radio Star. Appropriate, somehow.

The James Joyce Centre was rather disappointing. It’s small, with little in the way of actual exhibits; the touch-screens were interesting as far as they went, but in simply delivering shiny Flash-powered synopses of Ulysses they made it hard work for the uninitiated and rather dull for the fans. And of course there was virtually nothing on Finnegans Wake. Most curious is a reconstruction of what Joyce’s bedroom may have looked like, complete with wholly superficial details and that distinctive ‘old’ smell that museums always use in bucketfuls for such things. You must be able to buy it canned. In reality I’m sure he smelt much worse; a far more interesting (and filthy) reconstruction of Joyce can be found in the portrait of Dr Matthew O’Connor in Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood, but it may be that there is simply no substitute for just reading his books.

There’s more in the way of actual information to be gleaned at the Writer’s Museum, which contains (amongst other things) Joyce’s old piano and Samuel Beckett’s telephone (‘Complete with red button for excluding incoming calls’, as the notice appropriately points out). It’s a handsome old building with many pretty pictures, and the Ulysses mural is rather splendid. Other highlights included a lovely cup of tea at Bewley’s on Grafton Street, and plentiful ‘wine of the country’ at Mulligan’s and Oliver St John Gogarty’s; the latter was rather touristy and expensive, with the Irishry verging on self-parody (as perhaps befits the shrine to Buck Mulligan) but upstairs was uncrowded and a good enough place to watch the big boxing match on Saturday night.

I had wanted to go down to Sandymount Strand to get my Stephen Dedalus on (not the peeing so much, more the meandering-sans-spectacles, certainly no Bloomian shenanigans) but the trains weren’t running in that direction, and Howth is really just as good for a Joycean pilgrimage — the headland is where Leo Bloom proposed to Molly, and in Finnegans Wake it represents the head of the sleeping giant who is Dublin, and also known as HCE (‘Howth Castle and Environs’, ‘Here Comes Everybody’ being a few of his many names). The Wellington Monument in Phoenix Park is his erection, of course. Anyway, Howth was lovely. We sat and ate seafood chowder and watched the seals being fed in the harbour, which I’m not sure is a good thing to do with wild seals, but it was lovely. I bought an enormous gingerbread man. Then we toddled up along the headland and back and had a pint and then home. Lovely.

All in all, I had a great time. I feel I haven’t stressed this enough. This post is not a proportionate representation of my complaints in relation to the delights of Dublin. It was a lot of fun.

And now I’m home and it’s dark in this room and the dogs want walking.

"But we don’t think that you should pay slavish attention to what business people, especially..."

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:55:41 +0000

“But we don’t think that you should pay slavish attention to what business people, especially those who believe themselves fit to judge things about which they know nothing, say are their “needs” because we do not have any confidence that without more philosophy than most of them possess, they have the least idea what those needs are. We merely note that conceptions of need that have given us such outstanding examples of business expertise as British Leyland, Rover and RBS seem strange instruments with which to assess institutions that enabled such legacies as those left by Bacon, Locke, Hume and Wittgenstein. We are, to adapt one minister’s words, intensely relaxed about having assisted the country to this filthy rich legacy.”

- Cambridge professor Simon Blackburn, via Steven Poole on the ‘need’ for universities to ‘make greater contributions to the economy’.

Off to Dublin this weekend. This is all the guidebook I need,...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:06:53 +0000

Off to Dublin this weekend. This is all the guidebook I need, right?

happy endings not guaranteed

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 23:08:04 +0000

happy endings not guaranteed:

I wrote something on The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus for filmosophy.

What is it about IKEA? We all know that they sell self-assembly...

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 19:10:00 +0000

What is it about IKEA? We all know that they sell self-assembly furniture and homeware at affordable prices, and that much of it is well-designed; I’m not sure what I’d do without their ‘Billy’ bookshelves. But it would be rather naive to cite that as the sole reason for their success. To put it another way, what makes a trip to IKEA different to any other big shop? Why that scene from Fight Club? Why IKEA Heights? Why do we love it so much?

I don’t exclude myself from the cult of IKEA. I always come back with a pocket full of those little pencils. I like looking through the knife-free cupboards and the remaindered Swedish-language novels on the shelves, wondering what impossible families could possibly occupy these rooms. They look like sets for a film that’ll never be made, so elegantly harmless they might be designed for a mental patient on parole; the modern equivalent of the padded cell. Yesterday I saw a middle-aged man in a suit seated behind a desk in a mocked-up office, chatting idly to a woman beside him, and he seemed so at ease in his surroundings I genuinely couldn’t tell whether he worked there or not. I like fantasising about secretly living in IKEA, like Charlie Chaplin lives in the department store in Modern Times, and having to survive off stolen meatballs, gravlax, and those nice little iced cakes. Then I’d be discovered by security and it would turn into the absurd shoot-out at the end of Mr and Mrs Smith — the confusing, Escher-esque architecture of their showrooms seems to invite senseless destruction as well as nurturing the nesting instinct. But I always leave tired and disappointed, annoyed by the crowds and by my own sense of failure to consume, drifting around on the same old low blood-sugar low that always follows long visits to museums and usually necessitates the purchase of a large bag of mini Daim bars.

‘Home is the most important place in the world’, says their latest advertising campaign. But if home were really the most important place in the world, then why would we go to IKEA? Of course, it doesn’t really mean your own home as it is now — it means an imagined utopian space, the future envisaged as a series of spacious rooms bathed in eternal daylight and furnished with a range of attractive and complementary objects. There is no hard sell here, only a dream of consistency and coherence at once beautiful and terrifying.

everyone's entitled to one good scare

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:12:00 +0000

everyone's entitled to one good scare:

It’s Halloween.

My latest post over at filmosophy is on Halloween.

See what I did there?