Radio Lifetime

It's been over a week now, but I thought I'd post a few thoughts on R.E.M., now that they've called it a day.

R.E.M. are a band who have been around for my whole life.  That in itself is comparatively unusual - there are plenty of bands who were playing in 1980 who are playing now, but many of them have broken up at least once during that period.

R.E.M. are unique in my record collection, though, in that their time together was, until last Wednesday, pretty much exactly as long as my time on this earth.  Michael Stipe first met Peter Buck whilst my mother and I were in hospital, either just before or just after I had crawled into the daylight.  They played their first gig when I was three months old; I couldn't have crawled to watch it even if it had been in Stewart Park rather than Athens, Georgia.  The first copies of Murmur were being shipped whilst I sat at nursery school, wondering how long it would be before I got my bottle of milk to drink (this being just before Thatcher had gotten round to stealing daily dairy produce from the mouths of children).

I was never really into music much as a child - I bought my first album at eighteen, and that was only because someone else had gotten me an album for my eighteenth birthday that I was so disappointed with I resolved that it would not be the only CD I possessed [1].  Even so, it was impossible not to notice the arrival of Automatic for the People .  Not its actual arrival, back in the summer of 1992, the last time in my life in which my brain functioned according to its intended parameters [2] but it's sudden pandemic-like outbreak amongst my teenage friends when, approaching fifteen, we made the leap from "lower" to "upper" school (which, if any foreigners are confused by such arcane terms, basically just meant we got more tasteful ties and access to the coke machine in the "upper school room").

At the time, the album's popularity baffled me.  I just wasn't ready to appreciate it, I guess.  It probably didn't help that at the time my friends - and therefore I - were mainly listening to ...And Out Come the Wolves and Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness (alongside other, stranger beasts), and amongst all that high-tempo bombast and melodrama "Drive" and "Try Not to Breathe" were never likely to leave much of an impression (in fairness, "Monty Got a Raw Deal" and "Star Me Kitten" are still exceptionally boring songs even today). Basically, Automatic... seemed then what Around the Sun unambiguously is today. Suggestions I try the rockier Monster hardly helped (I'm actually quite fond of that album these days, but there's certainly no doubt that only an idiot would spin that disc purely because rock was what they were in the mood for).

For years, then, I was pretty dismissive of R.E.M..  Indeed, even now, I'm not really much of a fan of "Shiny Happy People", "Losing My Religion" or "Everybody Hurts", which given those three song's dominance of the R.E.M. radio appearance probability distribution made them a band who were easy to claim to dislike.  Eventually, at age eighteen, I copied Automatic... from my first girlfriend, hoping to understand her obsession/gain easy Brownie points, and took it with me to university.

And then, one day, I got it.  I don't know exactly when - it might have ironically been whilst the aforementioned relationship was in its agonising death-throes - but R.E.M. suddenly made sense.  When I went out and bought Up (an under appreciated gem of an album, albeit with at least three songs that could be culled without a moment's hesitation), I was lost for good.

My late appreciation of the band means that they ultimately only released four albums which I experienced at the same time as everyone else, and only two after I'd finally acquired their full back catalogue (though I never did buy Around the Sun, because there's a difference between loving a woman and letting her steal money from you).  Perhaps that's why so much of my thinking on the band differs from the conventional wisdom. Certainly I continue to be baffled by the level of praise heaped upon Document, Green and (especially) Out of Time almost as much as the lack of love Up receives, and I wonder whether the idea that Accelerate or Collapse into Now are mere shadows of their former glory would be less common had people, say, heard Lifes Rich Pageant for the first time in 2003, rather than 1986.

Anyway, the spigot has been turned off, and we now have (assuming they don't reform) the complete work of R.E.M. to consider.  Some of it is excellent, some of it is disappointing, and some of it is gloriously, thrillingly messy.  In short, If I came to R.E.M. too late for them to soundtrack my life, I can at least say they've reminded me of my life, which is probably all one can ask for in any case.

"It's the End of the World..." would clearly be too obvious a choice for a video here, so let's go with "Nightswimming" instead.  I know that's only a shade less obvious, but I don't care.  It's the best song the band ever wrote, and well up in the highest echelons of the best songs ever put together throughout all of time and space.



[1] For the record (hah!), it was Radiohead's Pablo Honey, and over time my opinion of it has definitely improved.  It's no The Bends (I find all other Radiohead albums unlistenable, and I don't care what anyone else says - OK Computer, Kid A and Amnesiac - the point at which I gave up even borrowing their albums - is music written by people who spend their lives wishing they could be reborn as smug computers), but it gets the job done in a few places, and "Lurgee" is without question their most underrated song.

[2] I was presented with my first set of shiny happy pills a few months later. I actually remember hearing Shiny Happy People on the radio soon after that and thinking "Whoever these guys are, they can go fuck themselves".

Denying GW

I don't know which annoys me more; the fact that Games Workshop's new piracy game isn't the Battlefleet Gothic for the high seas I was so desperately hoping for (which isn't their fault, I suppose), or that they've decided in their wisdom that seventy pounds is a reasonable price to charge (which very much is their fault).

Obviously, it's hardly news that GW's general pricing strategy is best described as "Gouge Everyone At All Times" (I still remember being thirteen years old and going to the January sales at my local GW shop - those were the days, huh?), but even by their standards this makes my head hurt.  When the new edition of Space Hulk came out - a game, remember, that was both massively successful and unquestionably adored in its earlier iterations - it wasn't just absolutely, outstandingly gorgeous, it was my only real chance to own a game I'd been hearing about in the most glowing terms since I'd been old enough to lift a paintbrush.  But I still didn't buy it, because sixty quid seemed excessive (a choice justified entirely when Cocklick, Jamie, lyndgb and Pause gave it to me for my thirtieth birthday, but I digress).

In comparison, Dread Fleet is nothing.  No-one's played it before, no-one remembers it; if it has any similarity to any previous game it will be to Man O' War, which was generally agreed to be something of a flop for the company.  Clearly, then, what needs to happen is fot another tenner to be slapped on the price.

Bah.  Get off my lawn, and such.

(I'm also, like Frontline Gamer, more than a little suspicous of the combination of high price, limited print run, and complete dearth of information.  Presumably information will be forthcoming in the new White Dwarf (which didn't see, to be available as of this Saturday), but even so, the implication seems to be that we will have a vanishingly small window opportunity to buy an incredibly expensive game about which we'll have almost no opportunity to consider or experience in any detail.)

Being American Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry

What the Hell is wrong with Maggie Gallagher? It's un-American to stop booking people to give seminars when it turns out you strongly dislike their politics? People are required to continue to funnel money into the pockets of bigots?

This is the kind of lunatic "We are the victims!" thinking that makes so much of conservatism so maddening to me. I'd think if would be hard to come up with anything more un-American ("We hold these truths to be self-evident") than to be told there are two consenting adults who are maddeningly, hopelessly, breathlessly in love who want to entwine their futures until the flesh fails, and say "Sure, but only if their genitals don't match".  That's not really the point here, though.  The point is that Gallagher wants us to swallow the idea that people should be discouraged from and lambasted for choosing who they want to hire as a speaker based on the things they've previously said.

Because that's all this is.  If you want to be hired as a public speaker, and also write books explaining how certain subsections of the population should be denied what is not only freely available but culturally encouraged and lauded (you could even say pushed upon people, and you'd have a case), you'll have to deal with the fact that some people won't consider you the best choice to run their seminars.  Whether Gallagher wants to consider this or not, whether a speaker is going to prove a significant problem for members of an audience is a valid consideration when hiring.

But then this has always been the problem.  This is how miserable bigots like Gallagher twist their brains into the pretzel-cum-Moebius strip configuration necessary to believe what they believe.  They have to simultaneously think that preventing gays from tying the knot is so important as to require the writing of books and the forming of pressure groups, and also that it's so irrelevant to society as to have no bearing on who a company might want representing them in public.

Obviously, there are wrinkles here.  Just because I think it's ridiculous to ignore the reaction of homosexuals to a speaker doesn't mean I wouldn't be happy to ignore the reaction of racists.  Moreover, I recognise that if someone called a company un-American because their policy was "No black speakers in case the Klan's in tonight", I'd not even look up from my comic. There are no hard and fast rules here. 

But we already knew that.  We already realised that balancing a speaker's desire to keep being paid despite them advocating the disenfranchising of a minority, and the audience's desire to pay for an event in which they meet no-one who's written a book saying their love could damage the country, is going to be tough, and is going to depend on the individual circumstances.

Such considerations are beyond Gallagher's intellect, however.  Or her patience.  Or her strategy.  It's at least one of those, without a doubt.  But (s)he who lives by the sword, and all that. If we are playing the Bright Line game, I'd like to point out that Gallagher's argument means it is un-American to stop paying a speaker after they write a book about how miscegenation is damaging the country.  Is that something she's prepared to defend?

Maybe she is.  I've never spoken to the woman. So take another example.  Following Gallagher's logic, it would be un-American for her to fire someone after they penned a book entitled "Oppose Gay Marriage?  Then You're A Fucking Shit". 

You'll forgive me if I express doubt that this is a position she could stick to.

Lodged In The Craw

In case anyone's wondering, here is a list of things that would have been less stupid than defeating the Cybermen with love:

• Defeating the Cybermen with anger;
• Defeating the Cybermen with sulkiness;
• Defeating the Cybermen with ennui;
• Defeating the Cybermen with provolone;
• Defeating the Cybermen with woodlice;
• Defeating the Cybermen with the letter "K";
• Defeating the Cybermen with Burt Wards gonad-reduction drugs;
• Defeating the Cybermen with gold coins (again).

Also, contrary to the opinions of some, the stupefyingly ridiculous and cliched ending to "Closing Time" is not improved by the Doctor trying to argue there was more going on than "love > Cybermen", mainly because he gives up and admits that was what happened (in fairness, that's not how everyone read his conclusion; see the above link). 

As far as I'm concerned, the Doctor grinding to a halt in the middle of attempting to cook up what only in this situation could be referred to as a less ridiculous explanation serves as a giant flashing sign above the episode: "Even the Doctor has to admit it was love".  Which, of course, requires another sign just beneath it: "So the ending is exactly as fucking awful as you were thinking".

That's not undercutting, that's underlining.  That's telling your audience that any attempt to fanwank some kind of borderline plausible - or even simply non-nauseating - explanation for what just happened simply won't do.

About seven years ago, I was sitting in my friend Richard's sitting room for a meeting of our creative writing group, and I was writing a ping-pong story with our newest member.  She started, I continued, and she continued some more.  Apparently, she hated what I'd written so much that she actually pulled the "It was all a dream!" move halfway through the exercise.  Rather put out at this heavy-handed editorialising (the point of a ping-pong story is to adapt to what you are presented with, not rub it out because you can't twist it back to the tale you wanted to tell all along), I wrote in something even more extreme than my previous effort, complete with a random bystander exclaiming "It's like some kind of horrible dream, except it's clearly real".

What I did as a (hopefully) mild rebuke/quick gag in my friend's house, Gareth Roberts did to reinforce a terrible narrative resolution in a show watched by millions.  Presumably, he still got paid.

(Seriously, we're really supposed to believe the Cybermen's "assimilation machine" can't deal with a father scared for his baby?  That's really not happened to them in all the time they've been terrorising the galaxy?  God, these new Telosians are useless, aren't they?  As though trying to conquer Victorian London with Mecha Kong, a mad prostitute and Cuddles the Monkey wasn't stupid enough.)

Quote Of The Day

From Charles P. Pierce, who's assessment of the current race for the Republican candidate for President is both entirely correct, and viciously, bleakly hilarious:

If Bill Kristol went to the track, he'd bet on the fucking starting gate.

Kristol only has a tangential part to play in both the article and the topic it covers, but since he insisted on taking credit for Sarah Palin showing up on the national radar, he certainly deserves some blame for the freak show we're currently watching. 

And it simply cannot be said enough: Bill Kristol is the anti-Cassandra, repeatedly cited and asked for comment when the man's predictive powers aren't merely random, they're perfectly calibrated to choose any option but the right one. If Bill Kristol picked up a bridge hand to see thirteen spades staring back at him, he'd bet eight no trumps.  He'd also immediately redouble when you called him on it, and argue that the bridge itself would never be safe from terrorism unless we bomb Tehran within the next 24 hours.

Faded Glory

So, a quick multiple-choice question to anyone else who saw the first episode of BBC3's The Fades.  Was it:

a) Ghosts vs birds feat. the nympho off This Life?
b) "You got Kairo in my Sigur Ros video!" "No, you got a Sigur Ros video in my Kairo!"?
c) An argument that hot girls prefer a sulky bedwetter to a black guy, no matter how funny he is?
d) All of the above?

P.S. I really rather liked it.

Only Straight Uggos Need Apply

Clearly, the fact that a significant number of the kind of Republican who'd want to watch their presidential candidates bitching at each other are classless shitheads is hardly news.  What's more aggravating, in the sense that so many people think he's conceivably presidential material (even if few of them would have him as their choice), is Santorum's comments on the recently repeal of DADT:

I would say any type of sexual activity has no place in the military.  The fact they are making a point to include it as a provision within the military that we are going to recognize a group of people and give them a special privilege to and removing Don't Ask Don't Tell I think tries to inject social policy into the military. 

This is one of those nonsensical, ugly answers that overloads your logic circuits so hard that you have to sit down for a while and try and piece your shattered brain back together. I'd like to make fun of it, but I'm just overwhelmed by the possibilities.  It would be like catching David Cameron in bed with Margaret Thatcher, whilst both were dressed in stocking and Nazi armbands and singing "Fuck the Miners" to the chorus of "Panic" by the Smiths.  I mean, what are you supposed to focus on?

This is probably one of the clearest demonstrations yet that for a large number of people on the American Right, homosexuality is completely inseparable from homosexual sex.  Letting gays in the military is a "special privilege", you see, because they'd presumably find it easier to do the nasty than all those poor straight guys would.  You know, the same way letting black people into the army is a special privilege, because of how it's harder to see them during a night mission. 

Obviously, if Santorum doesn't think soldiers should have themselves any poon tang, then that's his right.  On his first day in the Oval, he's welcome to issue an executive order forcing the military to become completely celibate (and then watch it collapse into anarchy and cannibalism in, ooh, three weeks or so).  In the meantime, banning gays from the military makes exactly as much sense as banning handsome, charming men.  With the greatest respect to my gay friends, I don't believe a single one of them would get more ass than would George Clooney, should they all decide to take up arms together.

There's little more reprehensible than someone telling a whole group of his fellow human beings that giving them the exact same treatment should be considered a privilege.  "Hey, just as a favour to you, how about I let you have the same opportunities I got, huh?"