the right kind of tired.

It’s left me queasy in the stomach and cut-up and physically very knackered but I had a brilliant, totally different day today: up on the steep-sloped Sussex downs, clearing back brush and cutting it down to the roots for the Sussex Wildlife Trust. The company for whom I write charidee fundraising guff organises a staff volunteer day and invited me to get in on some rural hard labour action. Couldn’t resist. The SWT also has more seasoned volunteers who work every week on clearing miles of the valley. So far it’s taken four years. But they regularly chuck groups of slack-handed city corporate types and students up there as well for much needed fresh air. Voluntary? If Michael Caine is going to bang on about national service (pay your taxes mate, contribute properly yourself before you start barking opinions on sorting the kids out) then what about making this kind of environmentally sound contribution a compulsory part of the curriculum? Or the whole curriculum? But, in the words of Ronnie Corbett, I digress. Apparently the staff at Brighton Amex went along with a huge Waitrose picnic hamper, packed beer instead of water, were totally fucked up by lunchtime.

Anyway, the work involved chopping and sawing brush away from its roots, creating huge thorny balls of unhooked plant, roughly the size of a small cottage, then rolling them down to the bottom of the slope like a giant snowball, where they were chucked onto a big bonfire. Basically, since the war and mixymatosis in the 50s, no animals have grazed the southern downs properly. Now the whole thing is becoming a National Park, they’re trying to recapture what downland should be like. First get rid of the overgrown nonsense, then bring the animals back to graze. SWT have their own sheep and cattle already on the job – however apparently regular farmers can get paid to allow their livestock to graze on the downs.

If you know Sussex, we were up behind the white cliffs of Lewes.

While I was there, sawing away, the details of next year’s single, album and tour all got remarkably smoothly ironed out and fell into place during an email conversation between the guys at ITB and Xtra Mile. It was weird because the normal music industry organisational discussions all took place with me joining in on email while actually rolling around in sheep shit and getting thorns in places thorns should never ever go. I even got the iPhone covered in rabbit droppings at one point. Although it was tempting just to stop and concentrate on music things, I would’ve looked a right dick sitting on this gorgeous piece of empty downland tapping away at my phone.

Now, I’m the right kind of tired. Don’t get it very much, certainly not at home. 95% of my life, my brain gets tired by the end of the day but I haven’t really exerted myself. Even on tour, when we’re carrying gear around or performing or what not, it’s not truly heavy exercise – and comes in small doses. But spend a day doing reasonable (not even particularly extreme if I’m honest) physical labour and the kind of tired I feel at the end is so much better, so much healthier and more balanced, it’s a stark reminder the depth of the koyaanisqatsi we find ourselves in most of our days. I don’t watch Hugh Fearnley-Wotsit very often because of how much he loves to eat everything alive. But I hadn’t realised he was behind the land-share project, where people who have spare land let other people make positive use of it. Genius. Let’s connect younger, hipper companies and collectives either to the kind of volunteer projects I sweated on today or, even better, get them involved in sharing land and putting it to good use.

A campfire micro-tour circuit. Create a series of spaces across the country where small gatherings take place through summer to share unamplified music, like tiny miniature folk festivals. Keep them responsible, fewer than 50 people, nothing like an actual festival, and base the whole thing around a campfire. Make it a “between ‘proper’ festival” tour circuit. Include stand-up and storytelling and non-stage theatre… but make it tread lightly, take its litter home and don’t fuck up the land. Could be epic.

So anyway, I got home as inspired as I was cream crackered.

Like Question Time but with Nazis in

At first I wasn’t too bothered by the idea that Nick Griffin was going on Question Time. I definitely subscribe to the view that shining a light on the BNP is a better way of showing them to be the plonkers they are, than forcing them into dark corners where it’s easier for them to mislead and shit stir. That they are inveterate liars and myth-makers as a ‘political force’ is without question – even this week the Dick Barnbrook their London Assembly member was discredited in court for lying through his teeth.

But as the furore has unfolded, I’ve realised I made my usual error of drastically over-estimating the forces of reason ranged against the twats. Jack Straw is the big gun rolled out by Labour to face Griffin on QT and this instantly flashed warning lights: Straw is a hesitant, thoughtful speaker (to put it kindly) and - more importantly - he is massively hamstrung by his senior position at the heart of the Labour Party establishment. There will be so much he simply can’t argue with, from that standpoint, while maintaining the balancing act of being their ‘corporate voice’. Anybody who’s watched Question Time recently will know, regardless of how individually gifted or honest the Labour panellist might be, saddled with being that struggling party’s spokesperson, they’re about 85% fucked before opening their mouths. It’s only on the rare issue where the party line isn’t clear or important, that they get a chance to shine a bit and briefly occupy their own ideological space.

So the last thing we need is a Big Gun in that sense: we need a proper hard hitter, one of the brilliant mavericks who can destroy the Griffin but previously wouldn’t’ve gone near him. Of course I’d love to be proved wrong and watch Straw flatten the holocaust-denying Hitler mini-me scumbag. But it’s going to be a rum do. My friend Steve just pointed out we need Galloway, or Dennis Skinner when he wasn’t so frail – though the razor is still sharp, or maybe Jeremy Corbyn, if they’d ever let him remotely near anything media-shaped.

Livingstone would be another choice, possibly the closest remaining to the Labour establishment who could make a real dent. Though I spose Prescott could just twat him. That might win Labour the election in a single punch.

The worst thing – that now feels oddly inevitable to me – will be if the Tories pile in with a useful fighter to show utter derision for Griffin (even smug old Hague could do that) and then they come out as the party that properly challenged the far-right. It would be another swift nail in the coffin and I started to think this afternoon: maybe it’s a put-up job and the Tories jumped onboard with the BBC first, leaving Labour playing catch-up once the gig was booked.

Another warning bell: why didn’t the BBC put the nazis on Any Questions first? Why have they been able to leap straight up to the high-profile TV version, rather than having to prove their mettle on the slightly more highbrow (and less consumed) radio version first? If the BBC was playing straight their newfound ‘involving’ strategy for the BNP, surely they should have had a BNP panellist on Any Questions long before the much higher-risk idea of sticking one of the cunts on the telly?

Anyway, it’s going to be fascinating and possibly horrific. I think still, deep down, I prefer that we give him the rope to hang himself, rather than silencing him to the extent that he can play martyr. But it’s risky.

Bush family Christmas video

One more moment of craziness to avoid writing a proper blog. I put it on Facebook but can’t resist posting it here too. This is not a spoof, Brits, this is the genuine article:

(super, super gutted. I should be at Proud Galleries right now partying with the Xtra Mile Crowd but circumstances have conspired and I’m at home, sober. tears before bedtime)

Cross-eyed Hammas fighter

At the risk of this blog becoming a series of pointless short posts about the Beeb… Did the BBC make this Hammas fighter cross-eyed, or does he just look like a muppet in real life?

(this is the cover photo on today’s BBC News website story about the ceasefire ending)

Screenwiped

From: complaintresponse@bbc.co.uk
Subject: BBC Complaints [T2008121000HPS010Z4860158]
Date: 18 December 2008 14:34:53 GMT

Dear Mr T-T
Thanks for your e-mail regarding ‘Charlie Brooker’s Screenwipe’.

I understand you’re unhappy that swearing is beeped out during the programme, despite a language warning at the very start. 

As far as I know, the beeping out during the programme is inserted by the programme makers and is intended to be humorous.

Thanks for taking the time to contact us with your concerns.

Regards
Rick Miles
BBC Complaints

ELECTION NIGHT

Right, I’ve totally failed to finish and publish a tour diary and now it’s election night so our rock’n'roll adventures will just have to wait.

Tonight we’re (obviously) staying up to watch the results and I’ll be blogging live here anything that strikes me. You are more than welcome to comment, argue, or whatever. I’ll also be on Twitter and joining Dean’s group blog HERE. 

Cheers, see you on the other side.

The Gathering Storm

I’m no anti-American, seriously, not in a million years. I don’t subscribe to any of the Brit crap about USA stupidity or the lack-of-irony myth, when my own experience has been almost exclusively that of open-minded, open-hearted people. They’ve maintained welcoming curiosity and in many cases good manners that have long gone in many parts of Drunk UK.

But it’s worth really thinking about some of the raw aggression and open racism that has surfaced in the crowds at the increasingly desperate McCain/Palin rallies recently. The heckles need to be tied to the possible defeat of the conservative ticket, the economic problems and the slow decay of the American Empire: and I think they, as much as anything, signal the truly dreadful possibilities ahead in that land.

I love the USA so much. A month doesn’t go by when we don’t sit at home seriously weighing up the possibilities of moving to southern California and, when the boys from Entourage went out to Joshua Tree last week to take shrooms, I felt a physical longing for that place. No, it doesn’t conflict with my politics, obviously you can love a land, people, culture, counter-culture, even streets and buildings, without loving its government or systems. And anyway, if I was to move somewhere purely for politics, I’d be in Cuba or Venezuela right now, so that makes no sense.

However, I think there’s a truly epic gathering storm, as the great empire of the 20th century makes way for the great empires of the 21st, in the far east. You can see it in Simon Schama’s exploration of the water problems in the Colorado basin and even hints of it in Stephen Fry’s lighter-in-tone but equally perceptive jaunt.

They are used to opulence and it’s running out. They are used to freedom and – in order to maintain control as resources thin – it will be reigned in. Some are used to tying morally regressive patriarchy to isolationist elegy, when now, both are seeping away. Some are used to ignoring the Other America, the underbelly of The Wire and Hurricane Katrina and no health insurance, yet now that underbelly is rising. They are used to cheap gas (it’s still half the price of ours) but that’s ebbing fast and relies on their enemies.

They are used to being winners and deifying the concept of victory, yet they are headed – in so many ways – for defeat. There’s still no bigger insult than ‘loser’ in the USA.

They are armed. 

By the way, I’ve just boshed off a complaint to the BBC about last night’s execrable Panorama, which, despite touting itself as a balanced look at the US election, turned out to be a strangely Fox News-esque and unBeeblike hatchet job, moulding scarcely any real content into a negative picture of Obama’s rise, while avoiding any similar study of his two rivals and ignoring his running-mate completely.

Simply: to bring up the Reverend Wright connection as an argument undermining Obama (in an emotive way, juxtaposing the worst soundclip over a photo of them together), yet not mention a single issue about Palin (such as her exorcism by a far more extreme religious nut, who has run people out of their homes for being witches, or her links to Alaskan Independence movements, or the bridge to nowhere, or McCain’s Keating scandal, or – for god’s sake – her rampant creationist extremism), instead letting the ‘hockey mom’ myth stand and presenting her as a mainstream populist alternative, was beyond biased, it was dangerously irresponsible and misleading for the UK public about what is really going on inside the USA.

While there is definitely some space for questions about Obama’s lack of legislative substance and fast rise through Chicago’s political scene, it was despicable that they let McCain and Palin off similar (any!) scrutiny.

Howard, the… Duck!

Last night I tricked Howard from Halifax into filming his suicide, for use as a hard-hitting allegorical short film about the economic collapse. I phoned his agent on the pretext of casting for a BBC one-off drama version of Death Of A Salesman. His agent was my sister’s friend Phill, although I have no idea why. Phill is a lovely fella but he’s not an agent at all, let alone the representative for the round-faced speccy Halifax man.

Anyway, I booked Howard for an advance fee of £10, plus he wanted tuna sandwiches and ginger beer, plus a high repeat percentage and a small percentage of advertising revenue, even though there are no adverts on the BBC. Then we all went to an office complex in Bournemouth and shot what we pretended was the first day of this extensive, expensive TV movie, except that everyone there – crew, hospitality, actors – were all just pretending, in order to get the one vital scene, which was Howard shooting himself in the face with a gun. I swapped the blanks myself.

Once that was done, we all went home and I phoned his agent back to apologise for the tragic accident and explain that the BBC had cancelled our production out of respect for Howard’s family, so we had to quit. 

Then I edited together this shit-hot snuff short out of the one scene that mattered, with some prime Johnny Cash in the background like the final scene of Generation Kill. I can’t remember which song though. When I woke up this morning, for a few seconds I was so convinced it was real, I was itching to get on my Mac to look again at the film, because it was an anti-capitalist masterpiece and Howard had truly died for a Good Cause.

I was gutted when I realised.

teaching creationism

Isn’t it funny how creationists always seem so… unevolved?
Bill Hicks

I feel quite sorry for the Royal Society’s director of education, Michael Reiss, for the heat he’s taken over the last few days, after his daft suggestion that, to appease a small minority of UK kids (still fewer than 10%) who have an in-built opposition to evolutionary theory (thanks to their upbringing), discussion of creationism should be included in science class.

He’s dead wrong of course. Strategically, morally and historically. And there’s a slight chance, I guess, that he’s deliberately stirring the pudding with Satan’s wooden spoon to cause problems for his fellow scientists. 

But let’s face it, he’s an old fella, it’s much more likely he’s just weary of the insanity, tired of allowing the subject to become the elephant in the room, and trying to plot a tidy, less stressful route through the mess.

One could almost begin to suspect that those stoking up the storm around his comments are trying to encourage creationist/unintelligent design elements to fight harder. It concerns me that the BBC and other media outlets (especially the liberal ones) gave the story such heady prominence, when Reiss’ original comments were just one bloke, and came couched in such careful terms.

Forget the inflammatory subject matter for a sec and look at this in general terms: since when did what kids believe when they show up at school have an effect on what teachers impart in class!? That’s right, they’re also adding Second Life to geography, pot-smoking to art class, emo studies to the RE curriculum and setting up a GCSE in Facebook apps.  

The subtext that really needs facing is this: kids with an inbuilt ‘disbelief’ in the overwhelming, extraordinarily compelling amount of evidence that backs up evolutionary theory have been brainwashed to a degree that comes close to child abuse by fanatically religious nutsack parents. They don’t need convincing, they need rescuing. End of.

I just discovered Poe’s Law, which relates originally to creationism but is now expanded to take in wider fundamentalism. First described by Nathan Poe in observation of debates on a religious website, the law states:

Without a winking smiley or other blatant display of humour, it is impossible to create a parody of fundamentalism that someone won’t mistake for the real thing.

Poe’s Law leads inevitably to Poe’s Paradox, which infects almost all fundamentalist organisations of any size online:

In any fundamentalist group where Poe’s Law applies, a paradox exists where any new person (or idea) sufficiently fundamentalist to be accepted by the group, is likely to be so ridiculous that they risk being rejected as a parodist (or parody).

Beautiful. You really can’t argue with fundamentalists but you can snigger like mad as you walk the fuck away.

Let’s come at it from the other end. Instead of demanding the god botherers shut the fuck up about what ludicrous inanities they think should be taught, let’s add some of our own ‘truths’ into the mix.

The Norse or Greek creation myths, for example. Let’s teach Sherlock Holmes as historical fact – lots of kids turn up at school believing in Sherlock Holmes. And of course we need to teach the Presidency of Josiah Bartlett as historical truth – there’s as much real evidence for it as there is for the 8,000 year-old planet. It was on TV, for a start.

Ruar Juar

It’s just music.
Charlie Parker

Never go with a hippy to a second location.
Jack Donaghy

Three episodes into Generation Kill. See it if you can, it’s outstanding – feels to me like one of the truest TV or film accounts of war I’ve ever seen. Thank-you Deano! Drastically better than BBC2’s disappointing Burn Up, which even Bradley Whitford’s tour-de-force neocon couldn’t rescue. In fact, Whitford’s part is so enticingly written compared to the dramatic-pause obsessed liberals, it almost upsets the intention of the show and makes you long for climate catastrophe. Stop flagging up your message or trying to direct our emotions and just tell the story! That’s what Burns and Simon do for HBO and it’s fucking wonderful.

Interesting that everybody is (finally) talking about The Wire in the UK (see previous blog) because Season 5 has hit the FX Channel, yet nobody is mentioning the team’s newer work, even in passing. 

I am not enjoying Jury Service.

Last week we sent a Nigerian man to prison for a minimum of 10 years, for smuggling cocaine. He was caught in a random check at London City Airport, where they found nearly 3 kilos sewn into his luggage. In his customs interview, speaking in Ebo through an interpreter, he claimed to have been under duress, saying that back in Nigeria two men and a woman had threatened him and his pregnant wife, forcing him to carry the drugs. A likely story! But… that interpreter was bloody rubbish – and the interview was badly transcribed as well – making the whole document hard work. And then the defendant decided (at the last minute, it seemed) not to take the stand and speak under oath in his own defence. 

Meanwhile the prosecution used a forged business email found amongst some genuine ones, along with a few suspicious (though in no way smoking gunnish) texts to make a liar of our defendent. Without knowing anything about what really happened in Nigeria, or what had happened to his wife and family during the year he’d already spent on remand in a UK jail, we convicted.  

Even though the duress claim stank and he probably did it, in retrospect I feel well uncomfortable with the guilty verdict. The defense was poor at clarifying their version of events, so much so that, throughout the trial, I actually assumed they felt they didn’t really need to build a case – with the burden resting on the prosecution to disprove duress.

There were also delays and logistical fuck-ups. We lost half a day’s court time because the agency supplying an interpreter had only booked the woman for the first day and had to bus a replacement down at short notice. At another point we were sent out because a photocopied document had a page out of order. Given what people involved in the court system earn, perhaps their shit should be smoother? With hindsight I’m shocked the prosecution didn’t need to do more and, honestly, I assumed the judge was going to direct us to aquit, until I found myself in the jury room.

Anyway, then I needed an easy ride for the second week but I’ve been dumped onto another stressful case and wasn’t able to slide out the back door.

Last time I made this particular contribution to society, in the late 1990s in Wood Green Crown Court, it was a great experience. The case I sat on then was short, painless and fascinating. My day job agreed to pay me, so I didn’t have to faff around with claim forms and I spent most of the period at home, being told I wasn’t needed, day after day. This spare time was so unexpected (and uncommitted to other stuff), I finished writing and recording the bulk of Beatverse during those two weeks. This time around no music is being made and I think I’ve just lost the Cambridge Folk Festival trip, thanks to the second case. Boo hiss.