fire and forget

2008. Completed my first year at CNET UK, moved from Forest Hill to Clapham Common, did more travelling than in my entire life before, broke up with my girlfriend, and said things like this…

CES Las Vegas

Facebook says Rich has just been choppered out to the Grand Canyon.10:16 PM Jan 6th, 2008

Rich had breakfast at Denny’s, Las Vegas Boulevard, and dinner at the chippie on Devonshire Road. 7:17 PM Jan 9th, 2008

All Tomorrow’s Parties

ATP! After a bloody tortuous journey, I’m in Butlins, I’ve got a beer in my hand, couldn’t be happier 6:29 PM May 16th, 2008

They let us in&out with glasses, & our chalet is twenty yards away-are you thinking what I’m thinking?7:56 PM May 16th, 2008

Facebook says Rich is having an absolute fucking blast at ATfuckingP. 5:49 PM May 17th, 2008

Saul Williams is a BizarroWorld Bowie, a glam-hop fly dog backed by psychotronic ‘frobots 4:31 PM May 17th, 2008

it’s 50/50 between having a great day and just curling up into a ball and whimpering somewhere 2:44 PM May 18th, 2008

Battles are kind of like Adam Ant being raped by Marilyn Manson - only 15x more fun 2:21 AM May 18th, 2008

Southland Tales is Terry Gilliam and Warren Ellis’ Marx Bros porno in the City of Lost Children 10:11 PM May 21st, 2008… May be a jodorowskyesque gothoperapocalypse, but it does have a certain demented symmetry 11:13 PM May 21st, 2008

Facebook says Rich has just got two free Crunchies from the vending machine for the price of one! Jackanackanory! 5:25 PM May 23rd, 2008 from twitterfeed

Rich salutes the Feast, king of choc-ices. 9:42 PM Jun 21st, 2008

Facebook says Rich has run out of things to do on his day off. Another wank? 5:19 PM Jul 24th, 2008

Epson trip to Hong Kong, China and Japan

Rich is just nipping out to China. Back later. 12:44 AM Aug 20th, 2008

Rich is towering 42 stories over Tokyo. Like Godzilla in brothel creepers. 11:45 AM Aug 22nd, 2008

There are upsides to being ill: any day without trousers can’t be all bad 5:27 PM Oct 9th, 2008

Force Quit means Force Quit, like right now. Why does End Task mean keep acting the twat for another ten minutes? 3:56 PM Oct 14th, 2008

Apparently, being Icelandic in May was pretty brilliant: http://bit.ly/1j0vae 1:08 PM Oct 15th, 2008

Well I never: The Japanese invaded Alaska in 1942: http://bit.ly/I07cR 1:31 PM Oct 17th, 2008

Wolverine healing factor? Mario mushrooms? Bollocks. Nothing beats the healing power of a Frank’s lasagna and chips carbopocalypse 5:45 PM Oct 17th, 2008

You know you’re reaching a certain age when the conversation can segue entirely seamlessly from hard drugs to soft furnishings 6:40 PM Oct 20th, 2008

Apparently in the US they say “Liquor and beer/have no fear”. I’m getting this tattooed on my nutsack 1:12 PM Oct 23rd, 2008

Today I have used the phrases “sex-grenade” and “stabbing himself with his own todger” on the site. Truly, I am a serious writer 5:16 PM Oct 23rd, 2008

Twitter does not have to be reciprocal. You do not have to follow me if you think I am a tedious arse - and vice versa. That is all. 6:25 PM Oct 24th, 2008

Story idea: WAX is a washed-up cop- WAYNE is a going-nowhere stoner. Apart, they’re trouble. Together, they are: WAX & WAYNE! Da-der-derr!! 11:25 PM Oct 26th, 2008

If it gets any colder in the office, we’ll have to eat the huskies. 2:25 PM Nov 3rd, 2008

“Granddad, what were you doing when Obama was elected?” “Yeaaahhh… I was watching Crank” 10:26 AM Nov 5th, 2008

defenestration (dē-ˌfe-nə-ˈstrā-shən) n. throwing of a person or thing out of a window 3:39 PM Nov 7th, 2008

defrienestration (dē-ˌfre-nə-ˈstrā-shən) n. removing a friend from your profile on a social network3:41 PM Nov 7th, 2008

@CupCate S’OK, I’ll slip you the answers: 1.Cricket 2.Bangers’n'mash 3.Jeremy Kyle 4.Old Compton St 5.Paying over the odds for everything 11:17 AM Nov 19th, 2008 from web in reply to CupCate: Have just found out I have to pay £700 to extend my Visa, as well as taking a test on life in the UK. Thanks Home Office!!!!!!

Carter USM

Carter USM: hooks to take your eye out. Housebricks in the pick’n'nix 9:48 PM Nov 22nd, 2008

Next LifeOnMars spin-off: some cunt off Hollyoaks goes to 1992. EMF beat him to death with a cricket bat and a 303. SOLD 8:31 PM Nov 22nd, 2008

And yes, I appreciate the irony of Twitter scraping my blog slating @ replies while in the middle of an @ conversation 12:00 PM Nov 26th, 2008

Have decided I want a tattoo of the swearing from Asterix: skull and crossbones+dagger+lightning bolt9:04 PM Nov 28th, 2008

Last night: bounce-punk of A, pedal-to-the-floor gonzo-rock of the Wildhearts. Tonight: Jarvis Cocker & Mary Margaret O’Hara… carolling? 6:02 PM Dec 11th, 2008

Notice secret service didn’t break speed records leaping in front of Bush. Honestly, who throws a shoe? 10:44 PM Dec 14th, 2008

Love stickers in gym: “Limited to 20 mins @ peak times”. If I’m on an exercise machine longer than 20 minutes it’s because I’ve died on it 1:13 PM Dec 17th, 2008

Tempted to spend 3 days living off champagne & sleeping on escalators in Westfield neonoptican as practise for CES 6:22 PM Dec 17th, 2008

Nailed by Internet commenter: I am not only a “sanctimonious nutter”, but also a “deranged far-left lunatic”. Hurray! http://bit.ly/jDu3 3:05 PM Dec 18th, 2008

Rich is giving up drinking for 1 year after CES. For reals this time. 3:57 PM Dec 30th, 2008

http://twitter.com/rich_trenholm

The Guardian makes a gently snarky comment about Tranmere’s shirt sponsorship deal with Wirral council. I fire off an email in response:

Regarding the article ‘Who’s next to lose their shirt?’ Tranmere Rovers are still sponsored by Wirral council to this day, and in fact signed a new two-year deal in July. Rather than ‘needing the publicity’, the council began a relationship with a life-saving loan when it was nearing collapse some twenty years ago. As far as I’m concerned, a local council recognising the importance of a football club to the local community is something to be applauded, not gently mocked – especially if it means players and fans get to avoid the very same crass monstrosities highlighted in the article — Pizza Hut, Doritos, etc — and walk around with the name of their home on their chests, rather than the local takeaway, bank or betting website. TRFC forever. Ahem.

Rgds

Rich

Update: printed in today’s Guardian (Saturday 20 September)!

“This would be a good death…”

A common theme of Frank Miller’s work is a man’s mission to ‘die right’. 300 is an extended last stand, full of talk of dying with honour and glory. Sin City is full of flawed heroes going unwaveringly to their seemingly inevitable doom. In The Dark Knight Returns, Batman chooses the time and place of his death – to the second (although he claims his timing is a bit off, but I like to think that’s a deliberate mistake – Bruce letting Clark know that he trusts him, always trusted him to come through in the end… but also getting one up on the Kryptonian yet again. A wink, and a reminder.)

Miller’s heroes represent absolute moral justice made flesh – yet more than flesh, their rock-hard moral convictions reflected in the hyperreal, granite-like physicality of Marv, the Dark Knight, or Leonidas. Maybe this explains Miller’s attraction to Robocop, the male body rendered literally impenetrable, metallic.

For Robocop, doing the right thing is programmed into him, even overriding the programming imposed upon him by society. It’s the same with Bruce Wayne scorning the committee that bans superheroes, Leonidas killing the messenger. They’re not interested in what lesser men might do.

Doing the right thing despite the cost means that death is near-inevitable. So while conviction means death, life means compromise. Society compromises; so the uncompromising hero is a loner. We see this in 300, when Leonidas questions the Arcadians’ professions. Be a part of society, but lack agency, or be in control of one’s own destiny and conviction but be apart from society.

This is why there’s such a clear separation between the warrior class of Sparta and the others, or the chattering classes of Gotham and the Dark Knight (“Batman? I’m plain tired of hearing about him. Him and how he doesn’t let things stop him or just let things go the way us humans do”). It’s the same as the distinction between the normal folk of the American West and the gunfighter who rides into town to commit righteous violence on behalf of society, yet can never be part of that society and must always ride on into the sunset.

To attempt to be part of society is irreconcilable with the way of the warrior. Love always means trouble in Sin City. This construction of hypermasculinity precludes relationships. Relationships lead to death. And it’s not always the man that’s punished.

“The world only makes sense when you force it to…”

One of the major themes of the new Doctor Who is how apathy and denial in the face of social breakdown was just as pernicious an enemy than the agent of that breakdown. This was made most explicit in The Long Game (1.7) and it’s semi sequel Bad Wolf (1.12), with television providing the world with a distraction from the bad stuff going on.

As the seventh Doctor noted in Remembrance of The Daleks, humans have an “amazing capacity for self-deception.” The Doctor’s role is often to act as a catalyst, freeing the perceptions of the oppressed, to defeat the threat by first facing up to it.

The series is littered with examples of characters turning a blind eye to something, trying to conceal or ignore something bad - and often punished for this hubris:

• >>Sneed the Undertaker stuffs overactive corpses back into their coffins and bullies Gwyneth into silence in The Unquiet Dead (1.3), only for one of the cadavers to later snap his neck.
• >>Adam Mitchell’s happiness within Van Statten’s set-up could be seen as the first sign that he is a wrong’un in Dalek (1.6). He pays for his self-interest over social concern in Bad Wolf.
• >>Nancy is in denial over the danger of the Empty Child (1.9), which is defeated by her acknowledgement that he is her son.
• >>The Doctor says to Mickey that humans do not notice unusual things such as the TARDIS, in Boom Town (1.11).
• >>The Sisters of Plenitude in New Earth (2.1) keep scores of infected people hidden in their hospital to develop cures. These plague carriers wipe out many of the nurses, although Novice Hame survives to be redeemed in Gridlock (3.3).
• >>Mr Parsons and the other teachers don’t seem to notice children going missing, distracted as they are by the intelligence of their pupils in School Reunion (2.3), which is suspicious enough to attract Sarah Jane and Mickey’s attention.
• >>Eddy locks Grandma up in The Idiot’s Lantern (2.7) and is eventually kicked out of house and home.
• >>The Doctor confronts his own refusal to accept something that challenges his beliefs when he encounters the Beast in The Satan Pit (2.9). He is able to defeat the imprisoned being secure in his faith that Rose will not give go quietly to her doom. She is no victim; and will always act.
• >>Stretching the theory perhaps, but the suggestion is that love should not remain unspoken in Love and Monsters (2.10). Mr Skinner and Bridget, and Elton and Ursula, initially hide their feelings for each other. Elton and Ursula find happiness despite her being melted into a paving slab – love will find a way, even in extremely non-traditional relationships.
• >>Trish’s failure to address with Chloe the problem they had with her Dad leads to Chloe’s emotional problems in Fear Her (2.11). These problems take physical form, but Chloe and Trish overcome their fear together and sing the Dad monster away.
• >>The people of the world almost will the ghostly forms into being with their self-delusion in Army Of Ghosts (2.12). Jackie imagines the smell of her grandfather’s cigarettes and clings to the belief that this is her grandfather returned.
• >>Donna admits she missed the human race’s first contact with alien races because of a hangover and a scuba-diving trip in Spain in The Runaway Bride (3.0).
• >>The motorists cling to the hope of arrival and try not to think about the noises they hear from the Fast Lane, and never wonder why they’ve never actually seen a police car in Gridlock (3.3). However there is an element of hope and social cohesion here that is seen as positive in a bad situation.
• >>Less positive is the populace’s use of drug-like mood patches in this episode, altering the user’s emotional state. A specific ‘forget’ patch is available for those unable to deal with the horror of the Motorway, to the Doctor’s great disgust.

Here the existence of the villain or threat to society enters the social conscience as an ‘urban myth’. Such myths are proved (fatally) correct in Tooth and Claw (2.2), Rise of the Cybermen (2.5) and Gridlock. In the parallel universe, the rumoured disappearances galvanise Ricky and his cohorts to action. Although the Doctor is often the catalyst for change in a threatened society, resistance movements frequently exist before his arrival, and defeat the enemy with his help.Acknowledgement that something is rotten is often the first step in defeating the problem, or indeed the only step, as in The Doctor Dances (1.10) and Fear Her.

Conflict between the Doctor and Rose’s is stirred up by her inability to give up on the idea of meeting her dad, in Father’s Day (1.8) leading to a wound in time and the Doctor’s death, and placing them in harm’s way in Rise of the Cybermen (2.5). Despite defeating the Cybermen, Rose loses Pete.

Rose’s tenacity saves the day in The Parting of the Ways (1.13) when she refuses to accept that she is out of the fight. It is for this that she is rewarded with a family reunion, as her actual attempts to reunite with her father all ended in disaster.

Perhaps the Doctor is so conflicted about this particular issue because he is unable to see his family again, despite his great power, perhaps suggested by the bitterness in the line “…while I lose everything” from Daleks in Manhattan (3.4).

Despite his pain and loss, The Doctor never gives up and flinches from recognition of social threat or decay. As well as directly fighting threats to society, he often acts as a catalyst for members of society to face their problems. This is a pressing contemporary concern in a world of television and text messaging, drugs and distractions, celebrity gossip and cultural genocide.

I was watching some of Sky News’ coverage of the Anniversary of the Falklands conflict, and was quite startled to see one of the talking heads remark that it was “the woman inside Margaret Thatcher that won the war”.

Odd, I thought it was the man inside each Para, Marine, Gurkha, and Guardsman, each soldier and sailor.

Now I’m not much for jingoism (wouldn’t it be great if we could all just get along?) but like Samuel Johnston said “Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier.”

Although I’ve pretty much grown out of that since I stopped reading the Eagle and started watching the news.

I did start thinking though that the Falklands was the perfect war for Thatcher’s Britain. With the strikes, unemployment and general gloom of post-punk Albion, and a crisis of British identity, a good old-fashioned colonial beano was just what we needed.

The Falklands conflict had all the right echoes of empire. It was far away enough away that we could cheer the boys on over breakfast without having to scurry into the bomb shelters after dinner, or worry about nukes getting lobbed about. But despite the distance involved, the people we were liberating were just like us, and of course, we was provoked.

In military terms the whole affair was informed by all the classic imperial myth of British military might: a tinpot local ethnic chiefy (or in this case, three chiefys, the Junta) gets a bit above himself and plants his flag on British soil. There’s more Johnny Foreigners than there are Tommies but of course that never mattered: the fuzzy-wuzzys and dagoes no match for the superior kit, training and honest-to-goodness British pluck of the British soldier (except when they were.)

The contrast with Iraq couldn’t be more marked. If the Falklands made Thatcher unassailably popular, Tony Blair may have wanted the same from Iraq.
If this kind of national fillip was what Tony wanted he couldn’t have been more off the mark. Perhaps he’s ruing the lucky break that the Junta chose to set about the Falklands on Thatcher’s watch as much as her opponents have ever since.

Unlike this second Iraq expedition, and Afghanistan, the assault on the Falklands had a clear goal: send Johnny Foreigner packing. So it was short. Casualties didn’t mount by the day. The soldiers soldiered. They fought proper battles, marched to the next battle, won that one and went home. They didn’t hang around trying to be friends with unfriendly locals and worrying they could get blown up every time they got out of bed.

The go-to attitude that got the Task Force out there and back with three points on the league table affirmed our place in the international First Division, but didn’t wind up half the world’s fans and start them chucking fireworks round on our terraces.

After the Falklands, we got to feel triumphant; not shifty, unsettled, unsure why we’re still there. Sometimes when I’m watching the news I wish I’d never stopped reading the Eagle.

Heard this on the radio:

“How do you tell the difference between someone just videoing a crowded place and someone checking it out for a terrorist attack? What’s the difference between someone just hanging around and someone behaving suspiciously? How do you know if someone’s buying unusual quantities of stuff for a good reason or planning to make a bomb? How can you tell if they’re a normal everyday person or a terrorist? The answer is: you don’t.”

“You don’t have to be sure; if you suspect it, report it.” To a dedicated team of Metropolitan Police workers with the best of intentions and a real problem to fight, alright I’ll buy that, just about, but encouraging a  culture of fear, distrust and surveillance of the people around you?

I’m not sure. I know I’m unsettled by the advert… but it does raise a good point: How can you tell if someone is a normal everyday person?

I hope I’m not.

According to sections of the press (local, tabloid, Evening Standard), kids these days are rampaging feral yobs with no respect for community, property or life itself.

Until one of them dies, perhaps rolling their new Corsa with the stickers on or stabbed by one of their mates for 50p of Orange top-up vouchers and a Double Decker, and suddenly they’re “vivacious” and “full of life”, with “so much to give”, even those that have “had their problems”.

Someday a kid will die and everyone will say “Oooh, he was a right little bastard.”

The other day a Radio 1 sports reporter described Steve Maclaren’s press conference as a ‘major diva strop’ when he announced in a perfectly even voice, “Gentlemen, you can write what you want to write, because that’s all I’m going to say.’ A ‘diva strop’ it clearly was not – that’s the sort of lazy, mean-spirited aren’t-we-clever journalism that’s partly to blame for the lack of grace that’s poisoning football.

The pressures of the money involved seems to have led to a sense of humour failure among the higher echelons, with Ferguson, Wenger and Mourinho acting and talking like stereotypical arsehole corporate fiefdom managers rather than football team managers, thinking their money and success (which are inseparable, let’s face it) give them the divine right to act like particularly graceless teenagers.

And the press don’t help. In the language of tabloid extremes, where people don’t disagree, they “storm”, “blast” and “strop”, they “romp” and “snub”, it’s acceptable to picture Maclaren mocked up as a clown after the Andorra game, and worse, before the game, mocked up talking to some donkeys captioned as an England team talk. It’s this climate of bad feeling that’s turned me against the game, the mean-spiritedness that meant I couldn’t follow the last World Cup with the feeling I had as a kid, that it was somehow, y’know, right, just maybe this time it was somehow meant to be.

Maybe this is me having a diva strop. Anyway, I’m taking my ball, and I may not be coming back.

There’s an unpleasant advert doing the rounds for McCoy’s crisps in which a blokey bloke in a blokey pub accidentally puts a romantic song on the jukebox and is whisked away for his mistake.

It might make you want to eat some straightforward, blokey crisps, but it certainly wouldn’t make me want to go to that pub, or hang round with the blokey blokes we see on screen. Sure, it’s a reaction to girly crisps with silly flavours and crazy herbs on and half a calory per pack or something, but it seems a bit extreme.

The ad presents a world where men are closed off and impenetrable alpha males jockeying for power within their relationships. After the unfortunate bloke is whisked away up a giant tube by the god of blokey blokes, his blokey mates return to their conversation without comment, one of them demanding of the others “So we all set for Tuesday then?” in a tone that is more challenge than invitation.

Why does being a bloke mean never letting your guard, or the side, down? You won’t catch me in that pub.

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dir. Roger Allers / Rob minkoff

So just how does The Lion King perpetuate an insidious right-wing ideal of patriarchal hegemony (a society ruled by men and based on cultural values that keep it that way)? While Clare was working on her dissertation, an analysis of femininity in Disney films, I watched The Lion King for the first time, and I’ll tell you right now, I saw straight through that ‘circle of life’ rubbish.

I first posted this argument on the IMDb message board (but it’s gone now) and got a bit of stick from some quarters (“It’s just a kid’s movie, dude!”) but to me that’s exactly why we should think about them, analyse them, and tear apart the subconscious meanings that they contain. It could be shaping your kids’ whole worldview!

That said, this is a pretty extreme reading of Disney films, and there is an element of tongue-in-cheekness about some of the points. So don’t take it too seriously (and remember I’m discussing negative stereotypes, not endorsing them). But think about this: how many Disney films are about a young character who hates their life, but discovers that things go bad when they fall in with the wrong crowd, and therefore finds a happy ending by returning to and embracing the very life that made them so unhappy in the first place? In fact how many children’s films in general are about that one thing: your parents are right all along.

Princes and prides

The Lion King tells the story of Simba, a young lion prince on the African veldt. When his father, Mufasa, is killed through the machinations of his villainous uncle Scar, Simba enters a self-imposed exile from the lush pridelands where he lives. He later returns to the now-blighted pridelands, where he defeats Scar and belatedly fulfils his monarchical destiny, becoming the new lion king.

Dealing as do so many Disney films with kings, queens and royal offspring, The Lion King reinforces the same patriarchal hegemony. As with Aladdin’s Princess Jasmine, Simba yearns for freedom from predetermined monarchical destiny and enjoys a brief transgressive period, before not only assuming monarchical mantle but realising that that was what he actually wanted all along. Unlike Aladdin, The Lion King deals explicitly with the transfer of masculine power, positing the birth of a male royal heir as a guarantee of future security and good times for all who inhabit the pridelands.

The second act of the film even posits a dire warning of the perils for society of the absence of strong male governance. During Simba’s self-imposed exile, the bountiful pridelands are blighted under the rule of the craven, cowardly Scar and his equally ineffectual – unless in sufficient numbers – hyena cohorts.

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