Is Christianity a Force for Good in the World?

Dear reader, your Sunday would be incomplete without partaking of the eternal fruit of knowledge. The latest Intelligence Squared debate has surfaced online, and it's your privilege to have it at your fingertips. It's a shame that the footage seems to have been edited down to an hour program, but the rout is complete nonetheless. Much like his highness, Stephen Fry (looking healthily trim these days), the debate requires no further introduction. Suckle on the bosom of intelligence.

Snooker and Damien Hirst

I, for one, was rather surprised by Ronnie's defeat in the Snooker Premier League to up-comer Judd Trump. He doesn't look particularly comfortable around the table at the moment. Insisting on using his left hand to break off every time gives away a weakness in his cuing - he's not straight, and his long game suffers. Warning bells should have rung when he shaved his head again, echoing the dark days of recent years, but he seems content enough, enjoying the game. The match was played on the 5th, so , weirdly, you could hear my bemissed fireworks screeching away in the distance. I was similarly taken aback to see the queer of darkness in the audience. Nope, not Bono, but close. Just as I thought to myself, Who the fuck is that misguided tosser sat indoors wearing his mother's cataract glasses?, the match commentators directed our attention to a certain Damien Hirst sat in the audience, watching his "good friend", Ronnie. Reportedly, he's just sold off a section of works, netting him a cool £100 million in the process. A girl was telling me recently about the Mexican celebrations that take place during El Día de los Muertos, or the Day of the Dead, from which Hirst's piece, For the Love of God, was supposedly inspired. Thankfully, she had no idea who he was, so I was very glad to learn that his renown does not extend as far as he may like to think.

Passionate Ambivalence

Once in a while, a case of speculative excitement crawls over my skin, such as when one hears of the Golden Suicides' aperitif that Bret Easton Ellis is currently conjuring. The same sensation occurred when I read that David Cronenberg, directorial craftsman behind recent classics, A History of Violence and Eastern Promises, had adapted the William Burroughs novel, Naked Lunch, to film in 1991. A member of New York's niche literati, William Lee, played by Peter Weller (a skeletal Christian Bale) takes us through a faux-autobiographical series of recollective vignettes, tracking down scenarios and hallucinations that pierce the fragile sensibilities of his junk-induced state of quasi-comatose indifference. There is no plot, per se, and characterisation is as elusive as the ambiguities of the language. Now that I've read the book and seen the film I still have no idea what's going on. Indeed, it is not Cronenberg's best, which is especially frustrating considering it formed around the time of his horror masterpiece, The Fly, and his sci-fi classic, Scanners. Admittedly, however, there is real potency behind the imagery of the novel, to which both Bret Easton Ellis and Irvine Welsh owe an extreme debt. If you thought Trainspotting was gritty, this is something else. Cronenberg's skill, however, should never be overlooked. He manages to blend curiosity with disgust, horror with humour, and the absurd with the prophetic. It's interesting, at least, that Cronenberg wrote his screenplay long after the universal war on drugs was realised as an all-but defunct social policy (an advantage that Burroughs was not afforded). Rapidly, we follow Lee down the rabbit hole in search of bigger and better neurotic highs, he's a writer experimenting with artistic impetuous. His unconscious efforts compel him to inject cockroach-killing powder, the black meat of giant Brazilian aquatic centipedes, and, later, the jism of the sordid Mugwump. I know, I'm as lost as you are, but there is a social message in there somewhere, trust me. Feel free to try and find it, but if you're the slightest bit predisposed against insects, do not watch this film.

House

For all the mogul pundits who offer their two cents every week following the latest broadcast of Mad Men, why, I ask, is the best show on television overlooked so criminally? Hugh Laurie fits so perfectly, so graciously, albeit with his signature limp, into the shoes of Dr. Gregory House MD. Once we take for granted his faultless accent, his mannerisms and his persona, the fool is he who asks for more, and yet, series 5 surpasses all those that precede it. The craft of his character is stunning, the depth and the intricacies, the detail and realism make everyday relationships lifeless by comparison. House's gift for rationalism, his gift for diagnostics, and his gift for human observation are all prey to the fatal flaw that underpins not only the beauty of his character, but also the conclusion of the series; his addiction to neurotic painkillers proves, ultimately, too much. Laurie irrefutably destroys the criticism of the show's predictability. Watch the scene in which he semi-blindly succumbs to Vicodin overdose and resorts to a self-induced seizure, or the scene in which he leaps across his bathroom floor, stretching and yearning for one final pill. Secondary characters become distractions, tangents that play out in the shadow of our protagonist, our tragic hero. But still, all paths lead to one, and the zenith is reached in a tender closing act. A series of conflicts are introduced and developed: happy v. sad; gain v. loss; reality v. delusion, and every follicle of your being wants more. Dear reader, I cannot wait.

Comment

Sail to the Moon is one of Radiohead's finest songs. Alas, it goes under-appreciated because, such is its place on the album, it is unfairly sandwiched between one of their worst, Backdrifts, and a nothing track, Sit Down. Stand Up. (Come on, how often do you still listen to it?) Discuss.

Sail to the Moon

Just as I hit 'Publish' for that last post I stumbled upon Brit's quaint little blog, searching for a small piece of home. It's called Think of England, and the banner says it all, I think, rather beautifully. But it would appear that, a few days ago, Brit felt that same sense of belonging and pure contentment residing, as he does, in the west country. "It was a beautiful sunny autumnal day", he says, when he met a "local character" who, like him, "wouldn't want to be anywhere else". Well, good sir, that character may as well be me.

Bonfire Night

For the third consecutive year, I've turned the November page on my calendar and felt the pangs of longing for England. Why is the fifth day named after Guy Fawkes, by the way? (If the CIA had foiled September 11th would we name a day after Osama bin Laden? I think not.) It's this time of year when the weather becomes predictably murky, routinely dark, and just the right temperature to raid the wardrobe for the warmer threads. Mother turns on the central heating for the first time, and you're welcomed into a typhoon of homeliness when you return from school, soothing your stinging cheeks and numbing fingers. The daily routine that took flight in September has fully settled at a constant thirty thousand feet. You're in your comfort zone, and the smaller problems in life take on a significance that was previously denied by the bustling application of new rituals and new rules. Temporarily, I miss England.

Challenge Fail

Yesterday, my philosophy of religion instructor said, "There were no takers, but next time, perhaps, some of you will take advantage of my generosity", which caught me as being rather odd. He hasn't really done anything, only offered to do something, and why, therefore, is he afforded a proclamation of said "generosity"? Maybe I'm wrong, but the grammar of the sentence would seem to suggest that I'm right. Anyway, before we delve too far into the woodwork of irrelevancy, let us plane the surface of generosity a little more. None of you inbreds took advantage of my fairly generous offer by telling me where this came from, and I'm ashamed. It extends forth, of course, from the depths of the Radiohead back catalogue: a rare cover version of a 1968 B-side by Can called The Thief. The lyrics, admittedly, are fairly unintelligible to all but the ardent auditory mystique, but here is the music none the less.

Scotch

It's funny how these things crop up at the right time. Just as I dive in to defend my comedy hero, Stewart Lee, he's been proved right, and well ahead of the front bench yet again. Take this little, and, arguably, pretty inconsequential article from The Times in which Mel Gibson, the "reactionary Catholic bigot" behind Braveheart, admits that the film's portrayal of William Wallace "played fast and loose with the historical truth". It's not so inconsequential, however, when teamed with the following clip from Lee's live show, Stand-Up Comedian from 2005, which, brilliantly, was filmed in Glasgow (his routine about Braveheart begins around 3.47 and continues into Part Two, here):

Halcyon Days

I return to you with none of the lustre that accompanied these last few halcyon days with my lover. It has abandoned me when I need it most. Gladly, the same cannot be said of dear Holly.

You will keep forever.
I'll bury you like treasure.