Metamorphoses

If God resides in Heaven but no one remains to worship him, does he still exist? In an otherwise religiously-charged retelling of the creation story, Ted Hughes' translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses muses upon this question and decides that man and god are inextricably linked through life and death. Indeed, man may be god made, but it's much likelier that god is man made.

God as he was, he knew
That earth's and heaven's lease for survival
Is nothing more than a lease.
That both must fall together -
The globe and its brightness combined
Like a tear
Or a single bead of sweat -
Into the bottomless fires of the first, last forge.

A Very Gentle Reminder

Tamil Tigers Again

Reporters for the Guardian have picked up on the Sri Lankan dispute I touched upon yesterday. Once again, it's almost as if they read this blog. They make the comparison with Gaza, just as I did, and they pick up on a key point:

The Tamil Tigers used suicide bombers and have been accused of using civilians as human shields.

Not only did the Tigers pioneer the act of suicide bombing, they are also accredited with being the first terrorist organization to recruit women and children, civilians, to strap bombs to themselves. Their treatment of the surrounding refugees is central to the issue, not necessarily the death toll.

Exposure?

The Times 'exclusive', available today on their website, decries a "hidden massacre" of Tamil civilians in the Sri Lankan peninsula. As the video quite correctly points out, civilian refugees were spread across the Tiger encampment in makeshift homes. There are gun emplacements clearly visible around the camp: mortar pits, ammunition trucks, command points are all interlocked in the network of the refugee settlement. What the images also show are the graves of large numbers of Tiger fighters and, supposedly, less elegant civilian graves interspersed along the outskirts of the settlement. The UN accusations laden against the Sri Lankan army, following the end to the civil war with the death of Velupillai Prabhakaran, are rife with claims that they ignored the no-fire zone and continued to shell the settlement with no regard for the threat of civilian casualties. It's as if the responsibility for the deaths of these civilians should be held by the Sri Lankan army instead of the Tamil Tigers themselves. Much like the Hamas occupation of the Gaza strip, the Tigers were a terrorist organization quite willing to defend themselves with a human barrier. Obviously, when civilian casualties are taken it is used as a propaganda tool to turn the remaining civilian population against the enemy and align it with the occupying ideology. Many of the refugees were threatened at gun point to remain in the settlement rather than flee their homes, like many others who managed to get away. The Tigers played on the ignorance they enforced upon the innocent refugees, in the final actions of a battle they had already lost. To place the blame with the Sri Lankan army, and bypass the repugnant and, I hope you'll agree, cowardly actions of the terrorists, is a crime in itself.

American Psycho

Evidence has surfaced to suggest that Bret Easton Ellis wrote a screenplay for the movie adaptation of American Psycho in 1999. Not only that but he gave the script to the maestro of cinema, David Cronenberg, director of two of the best films of the last ten years, A History of Violence, and Eastern Promises. Picture the scene, dear reader; Ellis converted a text that many directors claimed was unfilmable and handed it to one of the best directors of our generation. What might have we beheld were it not for the takeover of the English nobody, Mary Harron (an ex-girlfriend of Tony Blair), who selected a different script over Ellis', one that captured nothing of the humour or satire of the novel, let alone the violence. Christian Bale salvaged what remained, but the likes of Edward Norton, Johnny Depp, and Brad Pitt were all strongly linked to the main role in Cronenberg's potential creation. If only...

Facebook Profiles

The New Scientist has confirmed for me what I think most of us already know about Facebook profiles. It's a commonly held perception that your online profile is merely an idealised, contrived and contorted, public persona; something that you construct to present what you feel to be your best, idealised self. There are a whole range of ways to do this: delete untoward photographs of yourself; join specific societies or forums; become 'fans' of certain things; list books you feel you should have read; copy quotes that shed light on who you are, and all the rest of it. The incorrect conclusion then follows. It's claimed that it's impossible, therefore, to tell who the real person is underneath all the tripe that people bring to the front of their profiles. Anyone who's browsed through their friends' profile pages, and delved into their friends' friends profiles will probably understand that you can actually determine quite a lot about someone's personality by reading between the lines of what's in front of you. How many 'friends' do they have? How many photos of themselves are there? What's the ratio? How many photo albums have they uploaded online? What's their profile picture like? Do they disclose their marital status? Do they display their political or religious views? How many groups have they joined? How many films and musical artists have they listed? What quotes do they choose, if any? Eminem, Lance Armstrong, or Dostoyevsky? There are plenty of others. If you know how to read these details, Facebook profiles are far more illuminating than many of its users seem to realise.

She's Back

The mad woman downstairs for so long left me bereft of all delights, but not today. There I was, almost resigned to the assumption that her last bequeathment to me would be a cockroach complaint, but she simply cannot help herself. I occasionally see her potter around in the open, under cover of darkness, shining flashes of torchlight into the night's sky, communicating. But today she braved the onlookers and took out her garbage in daylight. How fortunate I was, dear reader! Barely descending the stairs to my mailbox I saw her, floating above the ground, half-consumed by the disposal bin. She had lodged herself on the edge of the bin, her feet a yard off the ground, and her head absorbed by the darkness, peering into the depths of rubbish into which she had only just thrown something clearly of greater value than previously suspected. If only I could see what! An unripened pear, perhaps? A rechargeable battery? I couldn't bare to be seen. What if I had foiled the whole thing and she had jumped down and retained some sort of dignity? I couldn't let that happen. The urge to take a photo, however, was too great. But by the time I'd turned back, she was gone.

In the Aeroplane Over the Sea

In the spirit of revivals, I've been reminded of this album. Jeff Mangum, the creative genius behind the music and lyrics, has been heralded as the JD Salinger of indie rock. His band was called Neutral Milk Hotel, and promptly disappeared off the face of the Earth in 1998 after the release of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, an album musing upon the life and death of Anne Frank.

Now, how I remember you;
How I would push my fingers through
Your mouth to make those muscles move
That made your voice so smooth and sweet.
But now we keep where we don't know.
All secrets sleep in winter clothes
With one you loved so long ago.
Now we don't even know his name.

- Click. It really is a close contender for the best album ever recorder.

Twilight for Grown-Ups

Decidedly I have never frequented this blog with discussions of films or television. My last foray into that area saw a review of the Spanish horror masterpiece, [rec.], and justifiably so. Last night, I was enraptured, taken, wholly entranced by a Swedish classic, Let The Right One In. A young boy, bullied at school, intelligent yet weak, separated from his idol, his father, attends to the rituals of burgeoning awareness and routine loneliness. And then a girl moves in next door. Oskar meets Eli among the snow, and a friendship begins that we fear cannot continue. It's a film of curiosity, identity, the ambiguity of ideals, the complexity of love, the relationship between possibility and impossibility, and the fine line between mortality and immortality. We're aware of the closeness of opposites, and how this limits our expectations. We regret our conceptions. Eli is unfathomably wealthy, but incapable of using this wealth. Oskar wishes to kill for revenge, but Eli kills because she has to. The piece evades all classification. To call such a film a vampire movie or a horror movie would be a gross misjudgement. It is yours for the taking, dear reader. For fear of trespassing on your enjoyment, I withhold much of what I wish to say. Stop what you are doing and watch the best film of the year.

The Kagool

Seldom am I afforded the opportunity to wear the kagool that you can see to your left, but when the chance arises, boy, do I take it? The weather here in Tucson over the last few days hasn't quite decided weather to bucket down with rain or peel your skin off, so a light, flourescant poncho is just what I've needed. The eagle-eyed reader will have already noticed that it's a w.a.s.t.e item, a Radiohead product, and so you'll understand my delight when, cycling in the abysmal rain, a passing truck had the common courtesy to avoid a nearby puddle and honk the horn, accompanied by a knowing grin and a shout: "love the poncho!". It's a small world after all.