From The Morgue

The BBC tonight pulled off what looked like a rather cheesey stunt. ‘Flashmob: The Opera’ was a short contemporary opera, using famous opera toonz with nifty modern words to fit the story, performed live at a central London railway station (Paddington). The finale was the ‘flashmob’ part – they hoped a big ol’ chorus would turn up and sing along with the end bit.
And you know what? It was *great*.
The cameras roved around and the four main performers – the girl, the guy she’s just broken up with, the rascal who tries to seduce her, and the dude who advises the guy how to win back his girl – were astonishing, delivering the vocals and the acting while moving, sometimes at speed, through crowds of curious people, oblivious people, rushing-for-their-train people, trailed by cameras, distant from the orchestra (which was on site but away from where the main action took place). It was great fun, with great melodramatic emotion, despair and love and tearful choices and a loving reunion. The music was great, although it was kind of a ‘opera’s greatest hits party mix’.
But the crowd – the crowd just made it special.
People watched. They got engaged. They followed the action, or they stumbled through it looking startled. The guy in the sushi bar having his meal almost fell out of his chair when this girl sat next to him then started singing opera into a camera that was trained on her. Little kids, lots of teenagers, adults, senior citizens, it was startling how well it worked.
The theory behind flashmobs was that they would open people’s minds just for a moment, and change their perspective on the world. Usually, they didn’t achieve much more than a shrug and a snort.
This – corporate, big, clumsy, manipulative, a year after the flashmob fad was done and dusted – somehow felt more genuine than any of the true skool flashmobs that have been and gone.
There was wonder in the crowd, and there was joy in the railway station. small dreams bursting out all over the place.
Brilliant.

I’ve added another entry to my travel emails, this one describing our trip to the sinister and mysterious Derby Gaol.
Check it out at the bottom of the page here.
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I bring this up now because, this Thursday, Cal and I set off for three weeks in Ireland. While on the road in the Emerald Isle, morgueatlarge is gonna be getting a workout and this blog will likely lie fallow.
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“WHY? BECAUSE TODAY WAS NEW ZEALAND’S DAY, MAN! It was DESTINY, PURE AND SIMPLE!”
Full scan of letter here.
Background here.
If you don’t know who Dave Sim is, I’m not gonna explain it here. That’d take waaaaaay too long. Read wikipedia’s short short entry on Dave if you really wanna know.

Tony Blair, right now, is cornered.
At the party conference he admitted the evidence of WMDs turned out to be wrong. He offered in his defence:
(a) “The rest of the international community also believed it” – well, that’s a surprise, considering they ‘believed’ it based on your dossier and political pressure from the US. In other words, this doesn’t absolve you – it’s another thing you must apologise for.
(b) “I believed it to be true.” Suuuuuure you did. Tony, we who opposed the war mostly thought you believed it. We were protesting because you were an idiot to believe it. It was a colossal failure of judgement. Sorry, mate.
(c) “I won’t apologise for removing Saddam.” That’s right. Because the entirety of the Iraq issue is WMDs and removing Saddam.
Tony never believed he was going to war for WMDs. He lied about that. Determinedly and baldly lied.
(That’s a fact, by the way. It came out in the Hutton report, waaaay back in January, that Downing Street had desperately sought to strengthen the dossier before its release. The process of logic leads from this fact inexorably and inevitably to the conclusion that the UK government were, contrary to their claims, not going to war on the basis of WMDs.
I wrote about this back then, and I still haven’t seen it mentioned by anyone but me. The content of the report was of course buried under the spin it got on the left and right in the UK and the US.)
We who opposed the war – also known as “the side that has been proved right”, you’ll note – had doubts about the WMD intelligence from the start. This led us to to look for the real reason for war. Well, we were right about that as well.
Tony Blair lied to the UK and led this country into the current disaster in Iraq, not to mention adding inestimably to the diplomatic legitimacy of George Bush’s squalid little junta. Now he’s dissembling and waffling and hiding and confounding and doing everything he possibly can to avoid dealing with what he did.
He’s stuck in a corner, slowly and carefully performing a PR-structured focus-grouped media-tested step-by-step U-turn, on a schedule that will get him out of this whole situation in time for a general election next year.
In his situation, he has to lie. If he’s honest about Iraq, his whole presidency – whoops! I mean prime ministership – comes crashing down around his ears.
But that’s what he deserves: to fall from grace, spectacularly, hugely, humiliatingly, with all his self-delusions laid bare.
He doesn’t deserve his position as Prime Minister. He has failed the people of the United Kingdom. Worse than that, he has betrayed them.
I have no sympathy for him. I hope the horrible stress he is under now tears his soul apart.
————
Of course, he’s going to get re-elected. There is no credible alternative.
That’s the saddest thing of all.

I was going to have a big rant about Tony Blair. I had it all boiling up in my head and everything. Then I was gonna post about the lovely Ken Loach film Ae Fond Kiss that we just saw. But I’m not gonna post on either topic, because it’s even later than it was when I posted that other post just behind this one.
Instead I’m gonna say, go check out Steven Grant’s column ‘Permanent Damage’, a weekly feature on Comic Book Resources and pretty much the best comics-related column you’ll probably ever read. He’s particularly good on the business of the comics industry, on US television, and on being utterly scathing and insightful about politics in the US in general and the reign of President Hand Puppet in particular. But just read it to ratchet up your coolness factor – after all, comics are the in thing right now, the New York Times has said so – if you can’t namecheck Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, Joe Sacco and above all Art Spiegelman then you aren’t fit to be hip.
Fellow additivericher Pearce, of course, has chosen exactly this moment to denounce comics. Is he way ahead of the curve? Or way behind it? You decide…
Anyway, Steven Grant. If you check out this week’s entry and look reeeeal hard, you’ll even find an unbilled cameo appearance by me. His response makes it all worthwhile. Hee hee hee.
Hmm, didn’t I used to post serious, considered discussions of political issues on this blog once?
I really must go to bed.

A comment by the lovely el Rache has prompted me to get off my rear and update my site template. So, a wee tour:
To your right: a recent comments list! (Soon to be populated by the charming bob@y4h00.com offering exciting online gambling opportunities!)
Also to your right: some changes to the links list.
(a) Mike Sands is newly blogging, apparently about games
(b) whereas Stephen has been blogging for a rather long time about all sorts of stuff – he’s the only person linked to here I don’t know in the flesh, but I have it on very good authority that he’s a top bloke
(c) in a fit of silliness I changed the name of the link to Matt Mansell & family’s blogsite, and it seems kinda wrong now, but I can’t be bothered changing it again and rebuilding, sorry Matt I love ya but it’s past midnight on a school night
(d) the ever-insightful Rafah Kid Radio has stopped broadcasting BUT it has been replaced by the bigger, brighter and bluer…
(e) Rafah Pundit (linked to down in the increasingly-inappropriately titled “wombling free” section.) One stop for a whole lot of comment and insight on lotsa stuff but particularly on Rafah in Palestine. You’ll see stuff here you won’t see anywhere else. Highly recommended.
Um, that’s all.

Some comments on Robin D. Laws’ livejournal have started fuzzing up my brain.
The US has an electoral college system, wherein each state can cast a certain number of votes in the Presidential election, from 3 to 20-something (I think). However, each state is run as a mini-election – and in almost all states, the winner in the state election gets all the state’s votes in the overall election. That is, it isn’t proportional. If a state has 10 votes, and candidate A wins the election 51% to 49%, all 10 votes go to candidate A.
Now this seems absurd and archaic to me.
However, LJ user jbru then said:
“The electoral college, however, is a mechanism by which the individual voter has a greater say in the outcome of the election. See http://www.avagara.com/e_c/reference/00012001.htm”
Now I’m not sure. Its one of those things where I think I understand the nuances – but I’m not 100% sure I do. Is it in fact the case that when I vote, I want the outcome to be determined by the majority of my fellow voters? Or do I want a system that makes each individual vote more powerful (i.e. more likely to swing an election)?
If anyone’s still reading you’re clearly interested in either logic puzzles or politics or both. So go read the links, both of them. If you’re feeling really motivated you can check the logic of my posts there…

Today’s Ron the Body instalment: Cass and Ron are finally hanging out together in the relationship that will define the book. And its happening beautifully. The dialogue between them flowed sweeter than between any characters I’ve written since In Move. And those characters ended up so completely true in my head they’re like parts of me.
If this is a sign of the way things are going in Ron, then I am more confident than ever that this will be The Book.
(Of course, tomorrow I’ll probably stall in mid-scene and choke and die and feel blackly despondent in that special melodramatic way we writers have.)
—-
I’ve been going to a lot of parties lately. Morag’n’Bex’s flatwarming, Cat’s flatwarming, George’s farewelling, and the hello and goodbye events marking Kathleen’s brief return to this country to re-enrol at Edin Uni. Now she’s back on the anthropology beat in Syria, in sunny Damascus, just in time for Israel to carbomb a Hamas leader there! Hurrah the Middle East. Lordy. Hmm. How did I get from parties to assassination in one simple paragraph? Life is incredibly strange sometimes. The parties were great!
—-
I have a large backlog of email. Mum, I did get your message about Tongan Ninja. I am surprised you watched Tongan Ninja. But, yay! Now I want to see the documentary…

In the wake of The Office we’ve had such gems as Peep Show, Jam, Nighty Night, The Smoking Room, and my new favourite funnylaughmakingshow Green Wing. The pendulum is swinging back from the States for the first time since the 80s.
These shows are all of a similar mindset – edgey, absurdist, misanthropic, deadpan. It is a new wave, as solid as anything the UK has ever done. They are on the same radar as Fawlty Towers, as Monty Python, as the Goons.
It is a new bright time for comedy, and like any time for comedy, it won’t last. They belong unquestionably to right now.
It’s finally starting to feel like my generation is taking control.

Thing Number One: the other night I watched Charlton Heston read the lyrics to Body Count’s Cop Killer. (Sorry, Pearce, I didn’t record it.) Cross that one off the ‘to do’ list then.
Thing Number Two: This dude in NYC made a store/cafe/thing. “affordable art + shoestring media + zines & comics + obscure bands…..open wednesday through sunday……..noon till dark”
Wellington should have one of these. He goes through the whole process of how he made it happen and its interesting reading. Wellington people – take note. Spread this url around. Maybe someone will take a hint…