A MATCHBOX OF THOUGHTS

I've become increasingly suspicious of people who do things "ironically" lately. Too often this concept of irony is held up as a kind of rhetorical ejector seat, propelling someone to safety when they've said something they shouldn't and don't want to take responsibility for it. In TV shows this is often a free licence to say what you want; that might be all well and good if you actually are being ironic, but otherwise it just ends up looking like a tool for provoking laughter from imbeciles. Take BBC3's The Wall, a pisspoor variety show of unsigned "comedy" acts, one of which was a woman reading out all Bernard Manning's sexist jokes - but it was all right, you know, because she was a woman and was acting moved. Here's a case of "irony" being used as an excuse to use someone else's material verbatim, and look, all these fashionable kids with their jaggedy haircuts and their flat caps (worn ironically of course) are laughing, so if you're not you can't be part of the cool crowd.

Which brings me to Scallywagga. I'd seen trailers of this and thought it looked crap, but finally gave in to my curiosity last night and watched a whole episode. It was, quite sincerely, the worst thing I've ever seen that wasn't presented by Davina McCall.

Scallywagga, for those of you mercifully outside its blast radius, is a sketch show that's just finished its first series on BBC Three, a digital freeview channel frantically and desperately marketed at a yoof audience. Over time BBC 3's output has become more and more psychotic as it frenetically chases the kind of youth who only exists on TV anyway, the walking subculture in the aforementioned flat cap whose entire character and personality is governed by that one defining feature. It has gone so far as to ask viewers to record their own programme announcements on their webcams for use on the channel. It's finally given birth to this programme, which is a perfect example of the kind of show that thinks it's being ironic: it's self-conscious enough to ensure that the word "irony" is mentioned prominently in its title theme, for one thing. It has a large cast of young actors and all its sketches revolve around the central theme of youth subcultures, possibly becase in the Scallywagga world youth subcultures are all that exist anyway.

It is, quite simply, utterly dreadful. It's a comedy show with all the funny bits taken out, almost as if someone has identified where the laughs are and then consciously removed them in the edit suite. You end up with jokes that end just when you think a punchline is about to come in, easy cracks about obvious targets (one involves goths who don't go out in sunlight...geddit?!?) and, worst of all, endless catchphrases. The one I'm thinking of is a girl who pops up in incongruous places (such as a children's play area) and asks people if there's a Greggs (a bakery franchise) nearby. As I've only seen the one episode it's merely an unfunny joke, but as a catchphrase it's unbearable. Even more obnoxious is "CHILLYMONDO!", which the show's web site encourages people to shout out in public, record on their phones (because apparently "Scallywagga is all up on your mobile" - their words) and send in. Here's an example of an (unedited) Scallywagga joke:


I haven't quite worked out whether there's no laughter track or whether it's just that nobody's laughing.

But the show merely being unfunny isn't grounds for me to sit here talking about it in this manner. Ordinarily a short comment would be in order, and then I'd forget about it. But there's an altogether more sinister aspect to the show, a disturbingly misanthropic undercurrent where the bullies win, the villains are celebrated and ordinary, inoffensive people are routinely terrorised. That clip I posted is an example, albeit a minor one, ending with the loiterer shaking his head dismissively at the sucker who's doing his business for him. The episode I watched - part six - has an extremely unpleasant sketch detailing how a young lottery winner uses his millions to orchestrate a campaign of torment against someone else. Two things strike me: firstly, that the victim is a character who doesn't belong to the "in crowd" fashionista society that populate most of the sketches, but is instead an ordinary man of nondescript appearance. Secondly, like most sketches, there's no real punchline or payoff at the end, meaning that the intended laughs come not from the subversion of an idea - a key concept in comedy - but from the sight of someone with a "TOSSER" sign held behind their head as they walk down the street.

Of course, the show's justification is that it's being ironic. But with such an astoundingly unfunny show that justification dies on its arse, especially as it doesn't have the guts to actually stand up for itself. One sketch involves a shopping centre security guard who chases a gang of hoodies out of his store by following them around reading a history textbook at them, because "chavs hate learning". There's the kernel of a funny idea there, but as soon as the gang are out through the doors the guard ceremoniously chucks the book in a bin. Because we can't have the lead character in one of the sketches being genuinely different from the simplistic "yoof" cliches the show gives us as a matter of course, can we? Not with the target audience this show thinks is out there.

So go on, watch it if you want. It isn't often I'm compelled to rant like this, but a show as ghastly as Scallywagga requires more than a thumbs down on Youtube.

Did you ever wonder what the Garfield strips might look like if Garfield was edited out of them?



See them all here.

After twelve months and four rejections, I've finally been offered a place at a teacher training college. Score!

So my journey home today was slightly disrupted when, just as my train was arriving at the station, an old lady a little way further down the platform decided to end it all by lying down on the tracks.

Looked just like she was sleeping, she did.

I thought that Charlie Brooker's latest article was so good (and important) that it's worth reproducing in full.

Heat magazine - the tittering idiot's lunchbreak-pamphlet-of-choice - has caused a bad stink by printing a collection of comedy stickers in its latest issue. Said stickers are clearly designed to be stuck round the fringes of computer monitors by the magazine's bovine readership in a desperate bid to transform their veal-fattening workstation pen into a miniature Chuckle Kingdom and thereby momentarily distract them from the bleak futility of their wasted, Heat-reading lives.

Most of the stickers are baffling to anyone who isn't a regular reader - there's one of Will Young sporting a digitally extended chin, a shot of a man's head on a crab's body accompanied by the words "Roy Gave Me Crabs", and a photo of the editor looking a bit like a monk. So far, so hilarious.

But one consists of a shot of Jordan's disabled five-year-old son Harvey, with the words "Harvey wants to eat me!" printed next to his mouth. In other words, we're supposed to find Harvey's face intrinsically mirthful and/or frightening. Ha ha, Heat! Ha ha!

Jordan herself is on the cover of the same issue, as part of a montage depicting Stars Who Hate Their Bodies ("Jordan: SAGGY BOOBS"), so chances are she wasn't in an especially upbeat frame of mind when she later stumbled across the snickering point-and-chortle demolition of her blameless disabled son nestling in the centre pages. She immediately lodged a complaint with the PCC. Personally, I'd have caught a cab to their offices, kicked the editor firmly in the balls, taken a photo of his stunned, wheezing, watering face and blown it up and hung it on my wall, to be contemplated every morning over breakfast.

Of course, Heat's always had a psychotically confused relationship with celebrities. On the one hand, it elevates them to the status of minor deities, and on the other, it prints clinical close-ups of their thighs with a big red ring circling any visible atoms of cellulite beside a caption reading "Ugh! Sickening!". This is what the misanthropic serial killer in Se7en would've done if he'd been running a magazine instead of keeping a diary.

This might seem a bit rich coming from someone (ie me) who regularly says cruel things about public figures for comic effect. Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed I scrawled some fairly abusive things about Jordan myself in this weekend's Screen Burn column in the Guide, for instance. Isn't Heat effectively doing the same thing, only with more gusto, not to mention photos?

Good question. Thanks for asking. My defence, in as much as I've worked it out, runs like this: people on TV aren't real people. They're flickering, two-dimensional representations of people, behaving unnaturally and often edited to the point of caricature. They're fictional characters and it's easy to hate them. Everybody hates someone on TV. But you never really hate them the way you'd hate, say, a rapist. Because they're not really there, and with one or two exceptions (TV psychics, say), they're ultimately harmless. Put Vernon Kay on my screen and I'll gleefully spit venom at him. Sit me next to him at a dinner party and I'll probably find him quite charming, unless he does something appalling. That's not hypocritical, it's rational.

In fact, in my limited experience, the more unpalatable you find someone's TV persona, the nicer they turn out to be in real life. Recently I was walking down the street when someone I'd written something nasty about suddenly darted across the road and introduced himself. Almost immediately, I started apologising for the article, explaining (as above) that people on TV aren't real people and so on. At which point he looked faintly crestfallen. He hadn't read the piece at all, but he'd seen a TV thing I'd done and just wanted to say how much he enjoyed it. Then he asked what it was I'd said that was so bad, so I found myself sheepishly repeating it while staring at the ground. There was an uncomfortable pause. And then he laughed and said it was all fair game and not to worry. And I thought, who's the dickhead in this scenario? Because it sure as hell wasn't him. I'm the dickhead. I'm always the dickhead: always have been, always will be.

Even so, and speaking as a dickhead, there's surely a world of difference between tipping cartoon buckets of shit over someone's TV persona, and paying a paparazzo to hide behind a bush to take photos of their arse as they stroll down the beach in real life, so you can make your readers feel momentarily better about themselves because ha ha her bumcheeks are flabby and ho ho he's bald and tee hee she's sobbing. And even if you accept that degree of intrusion, on the basis that these people rely on the media and yadda yadda yadda, how insanely superior and removed from reality do you have to be to invite your readers to laugh at a photograph of a small disabled boy whose only "crime" is a) being disabled and b) having a famous mum with "SAGGY BOOBS"?

Each week, Heat opens with a featurette called Everyone's Talking About . . . detailing the latest showbiz scandal. Last week, it was Everyone's Talking About . . . Marc Bannerman. This week it ought to read Everyone's Talking About ... What Total C***s We Are. And maybe it will. We shall see.

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2220894,00.html

From a BBC News story about Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher in Sudan sentenced to 15 days in jail for allowing her seven year-old students to name their class teddy bear Muhammad:

Sudan's top clerics had called for the full measure of the law to be used against Mrs Gibbons and labelled her actions part of a Western plot against Islam.

There hasn't been an ideological propaganda campaign this cutting since Goebbels named his terrier Neville.

Foxes know, apparently, according to the strangely ominous piece of graffiti that's just appeared at the bottom of my road.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Back in May 2004, having just finished my first year as an undergraduate, I had the address on my bills changed temporarily so that I could still pay them on time over the long summer holiday. I'm conscientious like that. When I returned to Bristol that September, I had the address reset again.

Except that, three years later, I'm still getting bills for a house I no longer live in. I don't know how many more times I can scream at British Gas over the phone before my brain starts to pour out my ears. Today I gave them a twelve-minute call (my phone logs the time) in which they changed my address to...the exact same address. I despair.

If you own a company handling so much of so many people's money, shouldn't you hire a customer services team capable of differentiating between changing an address from and changing an address to?

Tarantino without the fractured narrative. Fargo is the kind of film that people call “quirky”, which is ironic in the light of its opening claim to being a true story – I had my suspicions the instant it said that the events were portrayed exactly as they happened, a tall order for any film. While I think it's flawed in places, it's still an extraordinary peep into an enclosed environment; while some films like to point out small-town suburbia as a front for some seriously freaky goings on, the great strength of Fargo is that it undermines that sense of juxtaposition; it deals with life in a sleepy town and an investigation into a series of brutal murders without really presenting any major difference between them.

In many thrillers setting is used to box the story in, to provide clear boundaries that provide the characters with their definitions and beyond which they cannot pass. A lot of film noir is an example of this. With the white snowdrifts of a Midwestern winter though, Fargo appears to take place in a void: it has no need of boundaries since there is nothing for it to mark, no sense of a place where here stops being here and becomes there. In some indoor shots the outside world is literally featureless, as if the entire film takes place inside a giant ping pong ball. This sense of blankness is far more isolating than any found in the kind of crime film that romanticises the idea of Mexico as a criminal's escape route, turning it into an Eden-like haven.

The atmosphere of the film comes from the sense that every character in the film feels like they belong precisely there: they are so much an intrinsic part of their setting, unlike the usual stereotype of bringing in the hero from outside so that they can in effect become the audience, pointing out the place's oddities from an external perspective. Fargo gives the viewer credit for noticing this for themselves, without really having to actively reinforce the sense of place and culture. Characters are allowed to be people first and narrative devices second: they sit around repeating themselves and stating the obvious, while the camera impassively lingers on shots to record them shuffle around doing whatever it is that they do. The best illustration of the film's dynamic is its leading lady, the very ordinary Marge Gunderson (a fantastic performance by Frances McDormand), who slips between her homely personal life and her gruesome professional responsibilities so smoothly that there ceases to be any delineation between the two. Her character's slow, pregnant waddle becomes her greatest asset: she is someone so unbelievably good at her job that she has no need to actually look the part and hit all the usual marks. Hers is not a role that calls for an Ellen Ripley, and this justifies the film's endless – and endlessly charming – digressions here there and everywhere, which never feel like they're disrupting the plot.

Perhaps it's no surprise then that the lease convincing characters are the out-of-towners, the two thugs (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) hired to kidnap a housewife (Kristin Rudrüd) so that her husband (William H. Macy) can collect a fortune in ransom money from her rich father (Harve Presnell). Carl (Buscemi) shows up the film's Tarantino influence most strongly, with his rambling monologues deliberately about nothing. However, this has a tendency to compromise the film's sense of authenticity since his dialogue is nowhere near as natural as Tarantino's; this is screenwriting taken to the opposite extreme, with a character casting about for topics of conversation for little reason other than for the sake of not talking about the plot. Far more interesting is Stormare's near mute, Gaear. Carl is the brains of the pair; Gaear is not the brawn, but the will. He is the one who takes matters into his own hands to resolve a problem, but his motivations lie far deeper. While Buscemi's snippy crook is motivated fairly unambiguously by money, Gaear seems indifferent to it. He kills out of necessity, convenience, sometimes just pure whim, while other times it is genuinely impossible to imagine his reasons, making Marge's final words to him – not understanding how he can kill people just for money – all the more resonant.

For all its charm and comedy, Fargo is a sometimes distressing film. Innocent people get killed or bereaved, and they evoke sympathy because of their relentless likeability. Even Jerry (Macy) still feels like a nice guy in the face of his vile and cowardly crime, because he's so helpless and pathetic. The brutal violence is shocking in Fargo not because of its nature but because these are real characters getting killed rather than nameless meat-puppets who exist merely to provide action scenes to titillate the audience. If only the film had tighter characterisation of its lead villain, we could be looking at a classic: with that slightly weak link in place though, Fargo is merely very good.

****

Cyanide & Happiness @ Explosm.net

For a film that chronicles one of the most vibrant cultural eras of all time, Blowup is oddly cold and clinical.  A young photographer (David Hemmings) is taking pictures in a park, apparently at random, when a young woman (a coolly alluring Vanessa Redgrave) runs up to him and demands the film be handed over to her. Intrigued, he develops the photographs and finds that they appear to show evidence of a murder. Sound like an intriguing premise? I think it does. Unfortunately to present that as a plot summary, while not exactly inaccurate, is to profoundly misrepresent the film.

Blowup tries to do two things at once. It has its mystery, but first and foremost it is content to bathe in the essence of the swinging sixties. The titular photos don't appear until the film is half over and even then only nudge the film forward a tiny fraction, because there's always something happening somewhere to distract the photographer from investigating the mystery. I say bathe in the essence of the '60s rather than investigate or explore the essence of the '60s because there is absolutely nothing in the film that can be considered remotely active. The photos, when the do appear, just sit there waiting for meaning to be assigned to them from outside. Even Redgrave's character, desperate to get them back, is content merely to take her top off (very tastefully done, naturally) and wait for him to behave as she wants him to.

The problem is Hemmings's character. Named as Thomas in the script (although never on screen), he is a placid man indifferent to virtually everything he encounters. The irony is that he superficially appears to be the definitive sixties stud, wearing all the right clothes and listening to all the right music. We never learn much about his profession but we know that his services are in demand, as a couple of giggling dolly birds who fancy themselves as models are so desperate to be photographed by him that they are willing to essentially prostitute themselves. Ultimately though his desire to swing with the times is down to pure narcissism rather than any genuine connection with the age; he is content to sit back and watch the sixties rocket by, taking a few photographs occasionally, and I can imagine him in exactly the same state ten years later as one of punk's foremost chroniclers.

The best way to explore something is to look at it from the outside, with a certain amount of critical detachment. However, it does help to have at least a passing interest in what you're investigating and the photographer is utterly passionless about everything. Since the film is told entirely from his perspective we see what he sees, go where he goes, and learn what he learns. He just isn't bothered by learning anything ultimately, which is why the film is content to just drift towards its ending by Brownian motion. Upon discovering what's hidden in his pictures, he takes a break to cavort with some nude models (a horrible, misogynistic, unsexy scene) before spontaneously remembering that he's just uncovered a murder. At one stage he orders an antique aeroplane propeller, which ends up being delivered during a crucial moment of exposition, thereby interrupting it. After this scene it is never seen again; its only function is to disrupt the plot and divert it down one of its innumerable cul-de-sacs. If the propeller is a metaphor it is an ironic one, since there's no form of propulsion anywhere to be seen in this film. Even when the mystery is at its height the film is still more concerned with the iconography of swinging London, hanging out in a club where the Yardbirds (look out for a very young Jimmy Page) are playing the proto-punk blast of 'Stroll On' (a title loaded with meaning in context), a song which, in hindsight, looks forward while the rest of the film looks strictly inward. Eventually the same indifference the photographer feels is instilled in the viewer.

Technically the film is near flawless. Every shot and scene is expertly controlled by Michelangelo Antonioni to emphasise the photographer's isolation from his surroundings – there is very little dialogue, with long stretches playing like a silent film with only the ambient noises of footsteps, wind blowing and birdsong to fill the soundtrack. Dialogue, when it does appear, is sparse, clipped and doesn't tell the viewer very much. This isn't a film where ideas are expressed: this is a film where some guy goes somewhere and does stuff, sort of, and that's it. It's great film-making but it doesn't make a great film.

The ending, where the photographer engages in a game of imaginary tennis played by mimes, is no different to the rest of the film. The photographer just stands and watches until directly invited to participate (by throwing the imaginary ball back after it has gone out of the court), which he does. This sums up his character: he is a no-person, devoid of principles or motivations, who passively allows himself to be defined by his surroundings. If he is surrounded by mimes, then he's a mime. If he's surrounded by models, then he's a photographer. If he uncovers a murder, then he's a detective. It makes the film's premise (the nature of perception versus the nature of reality) a bit of a damp squib because it doesn't strike me as a question that would bother the photographer much. Did he really uncover a murder, or did he just imagine it all? Who cares? He certainly doesn't.

It's possible to admire Blowup but I wouldn't say I like it as such. Sterile and self-indulgent, it feels more like a technical exercise than a film. I'd say it's worth watching once but after that it's more of a film to own than to see.

CONTAINS EXTENSIVE SPOILERS

Portraying Britain at the dawn of Thatcherism, The Long Good Friday presents its central character and itself like a spinning coin, looking towards the future but always about to slip back into the past, about to go one way or the other. Harold Shand (Bob Hoskins) tells nostalgic and emotional stories about his National Service (which had been abolished for almost two decades when this film was made) and how he began his career as a street urchin An hour earlier, he had been proclaiming his glorious vision of 1980s Britain while – in a rather unsubtle piece of direction – framed by Tower Bridge. This world of opposites is expressed most clearly in Francis Monkman's zesty score, blending traditional classical instruments with Moroder-esque synth-pop. It is ultimately hubris, the kind of overconfidence normally associated with '80s excess, that delivers Shand helplessly into the maw of a truly monstrous enemy that had existed for decades.

Not as complex as I've heard it made out (admittedly the DVD age means I can zip straight to the exposition scenes without effort, which helps), The Long Good Friday is still a breathtakingly audacious film and one that at times runs a real risk of alienating its audience while still retaining mass appeal. It blends together elements of various crime subgenres: it takes the criminal-turns-detective idea from Get Carter and marries it to the sickly, sleazy decadence that Scarface would portray so unflinchingly three years later, while the outlandish, ostentatious tactics Shand employs to intimidate his enemies come straight from The Godfather. Harold Shand is essentially a Tony Montana-style character: someone not very bright who has gone from poor to rich very quickly and doesn't know what to do with his loot, who thinks that money somehow equals invincibility. As his enemies continue to undermine his modern-man fantasy (he refers to himself as a businessman, not a criminal) he becomes steadily more delusional to the point where he eventually expresses an intent to wipe out the entire IRA. This is a self-evidently absurd statement that Shand takes totally seriously, immediately before slashing his most trusted lieutenant's jugular with a broken bottle, as Hoskins's incandescent performance charts the erosion of the character's veneer of sophistication. As the first two members of his gang are assassinated he asks himself who could make him and his associates a target: a legitimate question in the circumstances, but the emotional burst with which Hoskins delivers the sentiment suggests less a rational question and more a little child screaming that “IT'S NOT FAIR!”.

Now, the IRA. Before September 11 2001 they were synonymous with terrorism in the UK and their omnipresent threat throughout the 1970s led to London becoming one of the most CCTV-heavy cities in the world. No wonder the film's original backers got cold feet, since while it doesn't in any way romanticise them it does portray them as the very essence of power. Against them Shand – no small fry in his own right – is nothing at all and even his ice-cold mistress (Helen Mirren) cracks under the threat against her despite being able to effortlessly parry the advances of Shand's lecherous thugs. But here's the twist: the whole thing's totally pointless.

This is what makes the film so daring. Virtually the entire film concerns the quest for Hichcock's MacGuffin, which in this case is defined by its absence: it is the answer to the mystery itself. The IRA are fingered fairly quickly, but the question is why. Keeping this question unanswered for so long rather than giving hints occasionally requires a predictably huge scene of exposition, which is totally subverted when it turns out that Shand hasn't actually done anything at all. The IRA mistakenly believe he is responsible for the murder of some of their agents and once fanatics get an idea in their heads that idea stays there. I can't think of another film that has its central premise turn to fairy-dust so spectacularly – not even The Maltese Falcon. This I think is where it risks losing its audience, because everything turns out to be so pointless. Is that dramatically satisfying? In the event yes, because rather than going into hiding (like Michael Corleone in the first Godfather) Shand's feathers get ruffled even more and, the irony apparently lost on him, he kills two IRA agents for real and is tracked down and captured within minutes. As he's driven away, almost certainly to his death, we get an extended close-up of Hoskins's face. Among the despair and panic, there's the occasional flicker of an impression that he's finally got the joke.

With complex characters, great writing, scintillating performances and a brave, uncompromising attitude to storytelling conventions, The Long Good Friday is an essential piece of British cinema.

*****

Last night's episode of CSI was surely one of the silliest things I've ever seen. "We can place you at the scene, because this type of mildew only produces skin rashes in people of Scandinavian descent..."

Oh, and the subplot concerned a cheerleader who killed and ate her friend while high on PCP. I quite like CSI, but must it leave the real world quite so far behind?

WARNING - MAJOR SPOILERS

It wasn't long after I started school that I realised that Maths was a blind alley for me. I've taken the Humanities route, and my numerical skills consist of the basic mental arithmetic needed to live in the real world. In many ways that puts me in a good position to appreciate a film like Pi, because I can analyse it as a film while the alleged flaws in its premise go right over my head. So the 216-digit number is actually a 218-digit one, but unless I'm going to freeze-frame and actually count then that makes no difference to the narrative at all. It's take on Kabbalah is skewed? I don't know any better. So as far as I'm concerned the premise is fairly solid, if only because I'm prepared to take their word for it that the Fibonacci sequence is A over who-knows-what.

In some respects Pi can ride on visuals alone: the grainy black-and-white points to an extremely self-conscious low-fi ethos, which seems to glory in the knowledge that it would never happen in Hollywood, but the high-contrast effect looks fantastic and the direction is watertight: Pi takes place in a claustrophobic environment where your choice is to melt away into dark shadow or step into the light and fry in its glare. The characters are trapped in a world coiled in on itself: Max (Sean Gullette), the mathematical genius, sits inside his tangled supercomputer Euclid (literally), which itself sits inside the stock market, which is in turn the product of the human race working together, which exists on a planet governed by the patterns of nature, which exists in a universe governed by the laws of physics, and so on into infinity. Searching for a clue as to the nature of it all, Max is struggling to escape his place, and as such is as much a bug as the ones that literally crawl over Euclid. If he breaks his place in sequence, the sequence collapses.

The plot concerns Max's quest to find out the secrets of a 216-digit number that Euclid spontaneously spits at him, before making impossibly-accurate stock market predictions and finally crashing. People want that number: it might contain the key to understanding the entire universe, but the more Max learns about it, the more his own mental instability tears that universe apart. Gleefully destroying the boundary between reality and fantasy, the idea that there might be pattern to it all becomes increasingly absurd. The pattern eventually becomes irrelevant, overtaken by the importance of Max's perception of the world around him.

The film takes for granted, as its premise, that there is a pattern governing everything. But that isn't the point: the point is whether humanity is capable of understanding it, whether it needs to know it, or whether it is getting above itself by trying to find it. The only person Max can talk to about this is his elderly mentor Sol (Mark Margolis) over repeated games of Go – one of the film's better-used symbolic motifs. Sol has a much more laid-back attitude to life, but it is implied that he has previously encountered the number before and that he knows something of its true nature. The Go board is a microcosm of the universe, which Max sees as another example of the universal spiral: apparently simple, then incredibly complicated, but ultimately governed by a pattern. Max does not assert that there is a pattern to the game because he has found one, but because logic seems to dictate that one must exist, and it is in that same gap where something should exist only because of what's around it that the Jewish cult finds its own meaning. This is in some respects an answer to the accusation that the film's premise is implausible: it deals with something that the brain is not meant to comprehend, and it places that incomprehension at its heart, not the pattern.

It isn't a perfect film. Some of the symbolism is very obvious (Euclid's bugs, in the form of an ant infestation); the end is an old art-film cliché (wait – you're telling me it might not literally be happening? Whoa!) and some of the dialogue is very corny. How many movie villains have ranted about “survival of the fittest” before pulling the trigger, for example? Or, more accurately, before the hero is whisked to safety at the last minute?

I wouldn't hold it against anyone who finds the end unsatisfying, since everything we learn about the number is vague and ambiguous and leads to more questions. The end isn't about the mysteries of nature being returned to nature; it's about Max finally being satisfied that they are always going to remain as mysterious as ever, whatever glimpse of some bigger truth occasionally slips through the cracks. It was the quest that made Max important, and the film ends with him finally understanding that the conclusions are irrelevant because he was never going to reach them.

****

Here's what the Commission for Racial Equality had to say about Tintin In The Congo, a seventy-six year-old comic strip that they've apparently just noticed:

"It beggars belief that in this day and age that any shop would think it acceptable to sell and display 'Tintin In The Congo'. The only place that it might be acceptable for this to be displayed would be in a museum, with a big sign saying 'old fashioned, racist claptrap'."

We have a slightly alarming situation here: it seems that the interests of minorities in the UK are represented by a group unaware of what racism is. This is unsurprisingly going to cause them problems. In many ways though it's representative of a left-wing (and I'm not a right-winger) media-driven attitude to controversial subjects, namely that we should all shut up about them and pretend they don't exist.

Let me make this very clear: racism means conscious, willful, deliberate malicious intent towards those of other races. That's a very specific definition and it does not include thoughtless, parochial stereotypes, however naive and distasteful they may be. Tintin In The Congo is not a racist publication, just an outdated one, and there's something to it's unthinking innocence that I find quite endearing ("My dear friends, I am going to talk to you today about your fatherland: Belgium"). However, the definition of racism has been expanded by the hypersensitive to the extent that apparently the fact that something might be seven-and-a-half decades old does not mitigate the fact that it doesn't adhere to modern standards of acceptability. The problem is that this attitude - notice my not using the term "politically correct", ont he grounds that it is a totally meaningless phrase - has meant that 'racism' has become so abstract a concept that the word itself has become a literally meaningless buzzword applied to different political opinions - rather than, say, racial ones - in much the same way that people used to cry 'witch'. This serves to illegitimise reasonable debate and discussion by character assassination, in exactly the same way that the extreme right claim that anyone who doesn't believe in a Jewish conspiracy has either been suckered by it, or is an active member. Anyone notice the hypocrisy?

There's another racial stereotype that's been doing the rounds for the last few years, namely of Japanese businessmen being sexual deviants. When I say doing the rounds, I'm not talking about playground bullies picking on the most obvious point of contrast to cause offense for its own sake; I'm talking about the media. There was an episode of Black Books that featured it not so long ago, for example. Now in many cases the makers can presumably use words like 'alternative' and 'ironic' before escaping: verbal smoke bombs dropped into virtually any context to serve as as get-out-of-jail-free cards after something hasn't gone down well. But consider why the stereotype of Japanese businessmen doing weird things with weird people in hotel rooms is apparently a hilarious joke while the merely anachronistic Tintin In The Congo sends the CRE into meltdown. My theory is this: Japan is a thriving economy, with Japanese businessmen logically at the forefront of it. Native African civilisations, by contrast, fit Western definitions of poverty fairly well (and I'm not talking about the starvation caused by post-Imperial corruption here). I'm not sure anyone asked their opinions on the matter, or considered whether or not the point that their civilisations pre-date ours by one or two thousand years counts for anything. The point is that in one case you're mocking a perceived underdog, and in another case you're not. That's the problem with the CRE: their arrogant assumption that civilisation X needs their help (as opposed to person X, who just got jumped in an alley) and their inability to identify intent.

Which brings me back to Tintin, with regards to the importance of context. The edition in the spotlight here is a modern one that had a new preface introducing the text from a historical perspective, noting that its paternalistic stereotypes are laughable now. As such the publishers appear to have recognised something that the CRE haven't: the problem isn't the material, but people's (in)ability to put that material in context. I like to think of myself as a reasonably well-educated man, and I can safely say that reading Tintin In The Congo would be highly unlikely to corrupt my moral centre. But from the CRE's perspective that doesn't seem to matter, since their remit of protecting people seems to extend to speaking on their behalf too. It seems they feel that people won't be able to contextualise the outdated unless it's in an environment dedicated to it - they mentioned a museum - as if we can only suspend modern sensibilities and replace them with sheer rationality within a physical space designed for that purpose. That's a horrifying thought, and in a society where everything is reduced to soundbites and people's perception of society is partially governed by what passes for 'emotional credibility' in popular entertainment, it's almost true. The end.

I've been meaning to photograph Painshill virtually since I started working there a year ago. I finally had an afternoon off today, so I raced round the place in an hour (hard work since the place has a perimiter of two-and-a-half miles) and took over sixty pics. Here's a selection of the good ones.

Yesterday, the Olympics Committee unveiled one of the most stultifyingly idiotic cultural artifacts of all time. "We don't do elegance," stated Lord Coe plainly. "London is not an elegant city." Okay, actually he said "bland", and I must concede that it isn't; bland designs don't produce this kind of revulsion and anger. The only consolation, as far as I can see, is that this national embarrassment has not cost the taxpayer anything: the designers, perhaps sensing the temperature lowering in the room when this monstrosity was revealed, were quick to assure the public that the £400,000 cost (seriously) came from private investors whose faces are presumably a similar colour to the design itself at the moment.

Yes, it's garish and ungainly. Yes, it symbolises everything that's wrong with modern design, namely the desire to reinvent the zeitgeist with every penstroke. Yes, those jagged shapes have such a tenuous link to recognisable numbers that prior knowledge of what it says is required to make head nor tail of the thing. But what I really hate about it, apart from the fact that it's going to make Britain the laughing stock of the sporting world for the next five years, is the attitude of the people who made it. I knew something was up as soon as the makers started sprouting the traditional empty buzzwords of the moment, like "vibrant" and "dynamic", but the real warning signs started sounding when they said that it appealed to young people. Not that it was designed to appeal to young people, you understand, but that it would appeal to young people. The burning question therefore is this: who says so? Surely that's for young people to judge, not the logo's designers? I'm technically a young person and I find the thing repellent.

Overlooking the fact that the young people at whom this pile of wreckage is aimed will be five years less young by the time London actually hosts the Olympics (and I can picture them now: "vibrant", "dynamic" little Blairite footsoldiers straight of of hair gel adverts, or as they're also known, idiots), surely they aren't even the issue here, really? This is another case of people with something to sell telling the public what to think, and what is cool. Since it appeals to young people, the logic goes, if you don't like it then that makes you an antiquated reactionary who doesn't understand what's hip and with it these days. Fortunately it seems that a notable quantity of people are coming together to say that the emperor isn't wearing any clothes.

Lord Coe did make one prediction though that might just come out true. He said that this wasn't going to be the kind of logo that people will be wearing on T-shirts in a year's time to dig up the garden with. He's right there: in a year's time nobody will be wearing this logo, for anything.