Big Talk

I always knew I had no small talk, and now I know I've got no big talk either.
- Sue Townsend, The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole

I feel like I've grown up with Adrian Mole. We're roughly the same age, and I have a nagging suspicion that I have more of his pretentiousness than I'd like. (Does suspecting that make a difference?) I hope I have a little more self-awareness.

I've always loved the line about small talk and big talk. Adrian's mother's father has just died, and he's at a loss for what to say to console her. The first half of the line is typical Adrian - it's as much bragging that he has no small talk (because he's an intellectual), as it is an admission. The second half of the line is far more human. He's confronted suddenly by a frailty that matters to him.

My dad died two-and-a-half weeks ago. I'm finding it easy to write reams of wanky stuff about US and British comedy, but not much about my dad. I don't think that's because the loss is too raw. If anything, I think it's because I'm not feeling the sense of loss that I should be. Probably some combination of my basic difficulty with feeling anything terribly strongly, and the fact that he and I didn't have much of a relationship. I wish that hadn't been the case, but it was. We tended to circle each other warily and respectfully, aware that we'd mostly just piss each other off if we got too close.

When I was a kid, my bedroom was at the top of the stairs. It wasn't a huge house, which meant that if I had a mind to I could eavesdrop on the adults' conversations downstairs after the kids were in bed. One night I heard my dad recount something he'd said to me earlier that day - some sort of remark or riposte intended to stop me in my tracks, to put me in my place, perhaps even to hurt me a little. My vague memory is that it had something to do with my (limited) skills as a football player. He'd probably had a couple of pints by that time, so he didn't even attempt to hide his satisfaction in the recounting, and the effect was to kill the downstairs conversation stone dead. I don't remember being hurt, either by the remark or by the later recounting, but it did seem to set out the terms of engagement - a respectful but competitive distance. I was probably about twelve or thirteen at the time.

I also remember him climbing the stairs one morning, having arrived home after an early football match, covered in mud and still in his gear, describing with a childlike glee how he'd flattened one of the opposing team - who also happened to be one of my teachers - with a ferocious tackle. Me, I was still in bed, but listening, and I don't think I've ever been as proud of him. The competitive instinct was just the same. He was stubborn and argumentative and cantankerous, but also fiercely proud and honest. You could trust him with your life. He drove the people close to him crazy, but he was a far better human being than I'll ever be.

After a life of considerable activity and rude health, my dad's body started to fail him about ten years ago - a process which accelerated a year or two ago. By all accounts, he didn't go gently - that would not have been him - although by the time I'd made it back home from six-thousand miles away, he was calmer, and meaningful communication wasn't really possible. It's probably an admission of cowardice, but part of me was relieved that I wasn't put in the position of finding out that - like Adrian Mole - I had no big talk. But I don't see any reason to believe that we'd have done anything other than talk in the system of coded messages by which my family has always expressed affection and love. Still, he knew I was there, and I'm glad of that.

The afternoon of the day my dad died, my brother and I walked up to the local cricket club, where my dad had been president for some time. We'd heard that the flag had been set at half-mast, and indeed it had:

The sky was blue. The day was still, and quiet, and the cricket pitches had the deep green promise of early summer. The world suddenly seemed a more peaceful place.

A week later, I stood outside the gate to what was now my mother's home, waiting with my sister, brother-in-law, and my dad's brother for the hearse and the funeral cars. Across the village green, we watched as people appeared from all directions, their dress and purposeful stride giving away their destination. We watched them converge at the church. There turned out to be standing room only, and not much of that. I'd had two-hundred copies of the order of service printed. It wasn't nearly enough.

Perhaps what I've written here might make it make more sense, but I find messages of condolence addressed to me to miss the point. My dad's gone, but I don't feel the sense of loss that I should. That relationship had faltered many years ago - and that was the real loss for me. What I find myself feeling for my dad is a kind of perverse hope that he was sufficiently fed up with how much his body had failed him - the pain and indignity - that letting go seemed preferable. I hope he wasn't afraid.

And life goes on, even after the loss of someone who filled a church to overflowing, and for whom a flag was lowered. There's something comforting about that, I think.

Entropy and the BBC

Stephen Fry's latest is worth a read, or a listen. Having seen his programmes on manic depression, I can't help feeling that his online writings seem to be a product of his more manic periods. Even when he's tackling a serious subject, about which he is more than passionate, the tangents and meanderings make him such good company. He also manages to say in a few words most of what I took a couple of thousand trying to capture in my last post. I'll co-opt it as a postscript:

Seriousness is no more a guarantee of truth, insight, authenticity or probity than humour is a guarantee of superficiality and stupidity. Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly.

I tend to be sceptical of the rose-tinted nostalgia which encourages us to regard certain periods of the past as golden ages (reserving particular bile for the entire reactionary 'Greatest Generation' construction). I do genuinely fear for the future of the BBC, though. Partly the stakes are so high, so there's much to lose. But mostly, free market bamboozlement is such powerful voodoo. There's some form of tacit working assumption in all of us that - whether or not it's actually of benefit to a wider population (as if that were a genuine question) - a deregulated, market-driven approach to broadcasting is an inevitability, and the very best that true public-service broadcasting (by which I don't mean the pathetic parody which exists in the US) can do is delay it a little. Absent the Sysiphean consequences of catastrophes - World War II begets the British welfare state; the Great Depression begets the WPA - the slow slide away from a sense of collective good feels destined, a kind of universal entropy, which we ultimately have no control over.

George Carlin Wasn't Funny

Bill Hicks wasn't funny. Lenny Bruce wasn't funny.

Okay, some caveats up front:

In the absence of any meaningful objective measure of funny, what I mean is that I didn't/don't find Carlin funny myself. His stuff - and Hicks's, and Bruce's, etc. - doesn't make me laugh.

Also, what I'm not saying is that Carlin wasn't a talented and influential performer. There was a hypnotically compelling rhythm to his stage act. But funny? No, not really.

In fact, I can scarcely think of an American stand-up comedian I'd be interested in paying money to see, past or current. An obvious exception is Rich Hall, who on several occasions I deliberately saw a couple of times during a single run at the Edinburgh Fringe, the better to scope out the admirably seat-of-the-pants structure of his act, and the extent to which the conscious localisation of his material showed profound respect both for his audiences and his craft. But it's perhaps relevant here that Hall has become Anglicised to the extent that a DVD I saw a while back in my local (US) Blockbuster, containing work by his Otis Lee Crenshaw character, did not consider it worthwhile to mention Hall by name.

What I'm angling for here is a claim that there are some fundamental differences between how stand-up works in Britain and the US, its goals and values - and that I very much align myself with the British approach. Not as a matter of choice; it just works for me.

Imagine a graph on which we might be able to plot stand-up styles. The x-axis of the graph represents the extent to which the comedy is about the world around us. To the extreme left, we might have surrealism and silliness, which aren't really about anything. They curve inwards on themselves. They're completely internal. In the middle might go the sort of whitebread observational humour that keeps most moderately competent stand-up comedians in business the world over, night after night. It's about the world, but in a cosy, non-confrontational sort of way. To the extreme right, on the other hand, is comedy that's completely external. It's clearly and consciously about using comedy as either a way of opening eyes and consciences to something bad, or - and one suspects that this is the hope - of effecting some sort of change.

The y-axis of this same graph captures the extent to which the performance style is about projecting an image of cool. At the bottom is a gawky, clumsy style, which isn't intended to create any sort of rapport or connection with the audience - in fact, such a style is most likely to work because of the disparity between how cool the performer's self-image (typically the performer's character's self-image, of course) is perceived to be, and how uncool it actually is. In the middle is an unaffected, naturalistic style. At the top is a conscious swagger, intended either to project power or control, or to attempt to forge a bond with the audience. (The two axes are not quite so orthogonal, of course. A world-changing, external style rather presupposes a cool style. One isn't likely to take advice from someone playing the part of an idiot.)

Now, take your favourite stand-up comedians and plot them. There will of course be an amorphous mass in the centre. Most comedians are unexceptional; their stage personae are more or less the real them, and their material is by necessity bland. (Jerry Seinfeld might well stand right on top of the origin.) Note, while you're doing that, that neither axis is intended to represent objective funniness. There is, in theory, funny to be had in all directions. It's simply a matter of style. It's also the case that there's significant overlap between British and US comedians in the centre, simply because normal distributions tend to overlap, and most members of any normal distribution inhabit the centre.

But the most interesting comedians to plot are the most influential, the most highly-regarded - one assumes in some sense the best examples that a culture believes it has produced. It seems uncontroversial to place Carlin way up at the top right. His targets were large, and real, his manner was confrontational, and his intentions were to open eyes and minds. After his radical reinvention in the '60s, his style was consciously cool, anti-establishment, counter-culture. Carlin's obituaries and tributes have been careful to namecheck his influences and peers, and to place him in the same pantheon: Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, Richard Pryor. They also belong up at the top right, and for the same reasons. The cultural references might not have been exactly the same, but the styles were congruent.

At this point the next step is to plot the best, the most influential, British comedians, for purposes of comparison, but there are two problems. The first problem is avoiding begging the question, by talking only about the British comedians who best make my point, rather than those - like Bruce, Carlin, Hicks, Pryor (to whom we can probably add Chris Rock, of the living) in the US - who seem to be raised by some sort of consensus to greatness. I'm honestly not sure what the equivalent consensus would be. The second problem is that if one looks for the same sort of British stand-up comedian, one won't get very far. They really don't exist, and never have.

But this in itself makes the point, I think. Those few British stand-up comedians who have achieved a measure of universal appeal - Billy Connolly and Eddie Izzard come to mind - don't really inhabit quite the same territory. Connolly is probably the closest, but his approach is far more whimsical than that of Carlin et al. - his business is pointing out the absurdity of the world, rather than trying to rouse or antagonise; his style is amiable and inclusive, rather than confrontational. He's not trying to change anything. Izzard is much more distant. He might stand on a stage to perform, but his material is pure silliness and surrealism, and therefore almost entirely internal - Reeves and Mortimer for the masses, albeit in black eyeliner.

I suspect it's the case that most British 'comedians' who have acquired some consensus measure of greatness are really not comedians at all - or not, at any rate, 'stand-up' comedians of the conventional form. The transition from vaudeville gag merchant to angry preacher, which Lenny Bruce pioneered in the US, took a rather different path in Britain. Such as it was, the new comedy of the early '60s was all about satire. Bruce might have been championed by David Frost and Peter Cook, but the transatlantic styles were coming from very different places. If Beyond the Fringe was angry, it hid it well behind silly voices. It was geeky and self-deprecating, rather than earnest and up-front. Significantly, it worked as an amalgam of sketch and character comedy, rather than front-and-centre stand-up. That Oxbridge approach to comedy projects all the way through Python, Fry and Laurie.

A second major branch of significant British 'comedians' are/were really comic actors: Peter Sellers, Spike Milligan, Tony Hancock, Benny Hill, Ronnie Barker; more recently, Steve Coogan. It's perhaps tangentially relevant that their most famous characters apply effective leverage to that useful gap between their perceived competence and their actual competence - Inspector Clouseau and Alan Partridge leap out as the best examples - such that there is certainly no projection of cool. It's also relevant simply that these performers did choose to express themselves through character, rather than as themselves. (Insofar as they did work as conventional stand-ups - notably Hancock and Coogan - they were significantly less successful.) That indirection more or less precludes the sort of cool, earnest preaching style honed by Carlin, Bruce and the others. Character comedy is also intrinsically far more internal than conventional stand-up. It can of course raise important issues, but to the extent that the character comedy works well, it is primarily a study of character, often to the obfuscation of any wider context - witness the not-uncommon phenomenon of viewers empathising with Alf Garnett, missing that his views were typically presented for ridicule.

The point here isn't that character comedy is uniquely British - although stage-based character comedy, as opposed to film-based character comedy, is far more fertile there, to the extent that much of what one considers to be British stand-up these days is at the very least a blurring of the lines between stand-up and character comedy - Harry Hill's stage persona being a good example - and often explicitly the latter - Laura Solon, Catherine Tate, and much of Victoria Wood's stage work. The point is that character comedy - which intrinsically does not project an image of cool, and which is intrinsically far more internal than external - is where much of the best of British comedy talent gravitates, rather than to naked stand-up.

A further branch of British stage comedy scarcely changed course from its music hall/variety roots, but just added an extra layer of knowing post-modernism. Gag merchants didn't go away, they just took a step to one side, buying themselves some intellectual distance. The engine of Tim Vine's act isn't his jokes; it's that he knows his jokes are terrible, and that his audience knows they're terrible. Yet, famously, much of his original material is often misattributed to the far more widely-lauded Tommy Cooper. Cooper's own act relied heavily on a studied incompetence, the vent act sub-genre of which goes back to Sandy Powell, and forward through Eric Morecambe, to Harry Hill, and Steve Delaney's astonishing Count Arthur Strong. Here's a characteristic snatch of the Count:

What's going on here is profoundly anti-Carlin. Stand-up is always a performance, of course, but Strong is an acting feat of dazzling skill, such that Delaney disappears completely. Similarly, nothing occurs in a vacuum of cultural reference, but Strong's references, such as they are, are purely internal: the grammar and conventions of variety; the Strong character himself, his as-the-wind-blows obsequiousness and belligerence, his vocal trips and malapropisms, the chasm between perceived and actual competence. Nothing is intended to serve any function external to the character; there are no lessons, no morals, no sermonising. Lines are casually thrown away, rather than preachily hammered home. There is also nothing resembling cool here. As a character, Strong is egotistical, self-serving, delusional, and quite possibly lost to dementia. Nor is this the flavour of character comedy which works by recognition. We're not supposed see Strong in ourselves, or our subculture; he's just who he is.

So, I'd like to plot Delaney/Strong way down at the extreme bottom-left corner of my graph - the uncool internal - as some sort of destination of the journey south-west from Carlin - the cool external. This general region seems to me to be quite heavily populated by some of the very best British 'comedians': Harry Hill, Reeves and Mortimer, Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt, Steve Coogan, to grab just a few of the most obvious. As a bridge to an earlier generation, Spike Milligan also belongs there. Can we find American comedians alongside? Not many. Those that come to mind are prop comics such as Gallagher, Carrot Top, and The Amazing Jonathan. Notably, their performances share a one-note shoutathon style, rather than the subtle and layered characterisation of the Brits, or their fantastical creativity. Perhaps even more notably, they inhabit a disregarded underworld of the US circuit, their acts preserved in aspic and greasepaint, displayed in Vegas with all the cutting-edge relevance of a Tutankhamun exhibit. It's clear where Bill Hicks's mind was focused towards the end of his life:

It's not entirely fair to take this line of Hicks's out of the context of his routine, in which it has a degree of self-deprecation, but it nevertheless serves as a kind of motto for the Carlin/Bruce/Hicks quadrant - the cool external:

I had to have this weird thing about trying to illuminate the collective unconscious and help humanity.

This, I think, is the standard by which American comedians are judged - and by which Carlin, Bruce, Hicks, Pryor and the others are considered to be standard-bearers. It quite explicitly describes a form of preaching. I'm not going to try to account for why the preacher mode of comedy is so prevalent in the US, and so absent in the UK - nor why it is so highly-regarded in the US (whether that is a different question, or the same one in other words). Some ideas come to mind, though. Evangelical preaching is a mode of communication far more prevalent in the US generally. To some extent the US remains a country not quite hardened from its firing. As a consequence, it's still trying to define itself, to decide what it wants to be, and the malleability creates an opportunity for people of passion and vision to try to mould it to their wishes. Britain, to the contrary, is a far more settled society, so there's far less scope for moulding or remoulding. It might also be the case that comedy in the US at some point took it upon itself to fill a yawning gap for critical cultural evaluation and self-evaluation left behind by a soporific and pacifying mass media.

One of the problems with attempting to account for why my own preference is for the uncool internal quadrant - other than the head start of being British - is that internal qualities are generally quite hard to intellectualise. Like our responses to music, and to feelings of love, our responses to the internal qualities of comedy aren't really accessible. We might explain what we find funny about something - or transporting about music, or lovable about a person - but that might not necessarily explain why we find it funny. (Aside: Pretty much the definition of a guilty pleasure is something whose internal qualities work for us, but whose external qualities don't: that music which gets into our brain, but which is performed by that lame boy band.) Conversely, what I can do is to intellectualise some of the reasons why the cool external quadrant isn't an appealing place for me. Earnestness generally strikes me as naive and simple-minded. The fearless teller of difficult truths is a tiresome, self-important figure. It's a little hard not to feel patronised: religion is nonsense (oh, really, I hadn't noticed); big business doesn't necessarily have your best interests at heart (gosh, thanks for letting me know); politicians are full of shit (well blow me down).

These irritations aside, I don't see that the importance of the subject matter necessarily reduces the funniness of comedy. But nor do I see that it necessarily enhances it, and I do think it often gets in the way. Tributes to Carlin seemed far more eager to stress his importance, his fearlessness, his influence, than how funny he was. I'm almost persuaded that there's an underlying difference in semantics here. Rather than simply assigning different relative values to the funniness of comedy, and the importance of its subject matter, I wonder if we just have different cultural meanings for 'funny'. Whoops of recognition, appreciative applause, and nods of agreement don't strike me as signals of funniness - they've come through too many of the external, intellectualising filters. They're much closer to the responses of a congregation, than an audience. Fortunately, a laugh - a giggle with a life of its own, or one of those big, uncontrollable belly-laughs that come from nowhere - is a dead giveaway.

Finally, some recognition

On getting onto the Big Blue Bus in Santa Monica:

Me: [Puts last of fare into machine]

Driver: "You're wearing the right colour tape on your glasses."

Me: "I think you should give me a discount."

Driver: "I agree. You should have asked earlier."

See? I knew it would come up trumps. Maybe if I work it I can get the tape to, I dunno, <dooce caps>PAY FOR ITSELF</dooce caps>.

(Reminds me of a favourite joke, from Bob Monkhouse of all people: "They all laughed when I said I wanted to be a comedian. They're not laughing now.")

Shadow Boxing

There's something apt-to-the-core about the rebuttal to theists who insist on misrepresenting atheism as a religion, or something akin to a religion, that, if atheism is a religion, then not collecting stamps is a hobby. However, while this identifies the theoretical heart of atheism as the absence of a specific belief, and nothing else, in practice things are a bit more complex.

I glanced through American Atheist at the Santa Monica Public Library this afternoon. I was actually looking for Non-Stamp Collector's Monthly, but it happened not to be on the shelf. You see the point, of course. Even if atheism is the absence of a specific belief, and nothing else, it also serves, unlike non-stamp collecting, as a rallying point for a collection of causes and interests semi-coherent enough to support organisations, meetings, publications, and such, at least in the U.S. This might have something to do with the position of the atheist community (see, there I go again; a non-stamp collector community is the stuff of a comedy sketch) here, misrepresented and marginalised at all turns (hence with plenty of axes to grind), but also constitutionally free to express itself. It neither enjoys the more mainstream position common in Western Europe, nor suffers the more overt suppression and even persecution of places in thrall to even greater theistic monomania. It has a voice; just a very small one, used to argue for separation of church and state, for teaching of evolution (because it's true; not because it has any bearing on the god question), rejection of Intelligent Design, and similiar issues which place science and reason at the foreground.

It might partly just be an aversion to joining communities of any sort, but, while wishing more power to their elbows and opposable thumbs, I'm not remotely drawn to such organisations. It might also be a pointlessly stubborn stand against the very fact that there's even a need for them, in what should be a post-post-post-post-post-Enlightenment society; instead, we have a kind of Hokey Cokey in and out of the circle of reason, to the music of time. The very existence of a word for someone who doesn't believe in a god (rather than someone who doesn't collect stamps, for example), never mind organisations and publications, ought to have been buried dinosaur-deep. Reason implies a simple default, and it isn't theism. The Google search I just performed returned (approximately) 778,000 results for 'theist', but about 12,500,000 for 'atheist'. The moral is pretty clear: it's (obviously) not that someone is sixteen times more likely to be an atheist than a theist; it's that someone is sixteen times more likely as an atheist to need to refer to themselves that way, or to be referred to that way, in order to override the societal default. Theism is assumed. This isn't really any happier a situation than one in which a non-stamp collector had to explicity self-identify that way, in order to override the widespread assumed default, or in which belief in unicorns was sufficiently prevalent to make useful a word meaning its opposite. Society pushes atheists to define themselves as other, by providing unacceptable defaults, then points to those very same definitions as evidence that atheists are something they're not.

I've been meaning to write something about Dawkins's The God Delusion, too, but haven't found the words. The situation is analogous: part of me is just angry and bewildered that such a work is even necessary. I doubt he'd agree, but it also seems a poor way for Dawkins to spend his time, rebutting and refuting and knocking down targets which ought not even to be standing. As is often the case, it will probably end up his most popular work without being remotely his best. Notwithstanding that I'm not really part of his target audience (though one of the best things about preaching to the choir is to let them know that the choir exists, because they might not), it's a choppy, inconsistent work, which digests material he's covered elsewhere, and at times reads as a literature review.

All of that being the case, I think a work such as this one faces a more or less insurmountable problem, which is only tangentially to do with the subject matter and how well it's handled. My hunch is that as a species we're inclined - perhaps for reasons that game-theoretic approaches to the evolution of behaviour might disentangle - to give positive expressions of belief rather greater weight than they deserve according to their intrinsic rationality and likelihood, and negative expressions of belief rather less weight. All other things being equal, we're more inclined to wish to associate with a positive belief than a negative belief. However kooky, positive beliefs have a siren song which is not necessarily related to believability: rationally, we might reject elaborate conspiracy theories - the moon landings were faked; 9/11 was orchestrated by the U.S. government - but emotionally we're drawn in. We smile at the craziness of the kooks themselves, but have a grudging regard for their tenacity in the face of the evidence. Conversely, rational scepticism has the bitter taste of negativity, a rational sceptic the killjoy's role in the proceedings, no matter how utterly groundless the assertion being challenged. "So what do you believe in?" whines the theist to the atheist, as if not believing in their god implies a knee-jerk disbelief in anything and everything else.

For this reason, expressions of atheism generally, and The God Delusion specifically, must carry an inevitable, unreasonable burden. Just as society pushes atheism to name itself in opposition to a default, so society pushes it to be negative in order to counter the vast arrays of positive but groundless theistic assertions out there which obtain a pass simply because they're positive assertions. The position Dawkins finds himself in is that of a shadow boxer, swinging left and right, left and right, refuting this assertion, and rebutting that logical fallacy, but unable to land any significant punch, both because (the collective) we rather like our positive beliefs to remain standing, however chimeric they might be, and because, well, he's trying to punch something which isn't actually there.

I take heart from the fact that the book has indeed sold so well; there's something very much in keeping with Dawkins's other works in asserting that, no matter how much we might be inherently programmed to prefer positive statements of nonsense to rational debunking, we're perfectly capable of overriding those instincts. It takes a shift in perspective, but rational debunking of myth and nonsense is a positive force for good in the world. Such a shift in perspective faces plenty of inertia, though; the linking of theistic cosmology with theistic morality is the greatest confidence trick in the history of mankind.

A final qualm about The God Delusion is that, aside from all of the above, I actually think The Selfish Gene, for example, is a far more powerful expression of atheism - in the sense that it conveys that life works perfectly well without a divine hand, thanks very much, rather than the sense that it has some sort of subtextual agenda. Partly this comes from the fact that it's an extraordinary progression of positive assertions about how life works, from the small to the large, the microbiological to the social and behavioural, so it benefits hugely from building a positive case, a positive thesis, a positive argument, quite aside from the truth-value of any of the assertions. Rather than boxing a shadow which isn't there, it's about elucidating exactly what is there, slowly, carefully, and with just the right combination of rigour, clarity, and language which inspires while being sure not to do nothing other than that. Accepting that society pushes people such as Dawkins into some unavoidable combination of the boxing of shadows and the building of reality, I think I prefer to get my own inspiration from the latter.

LOTR/Bridge on the River Kwai/Foley noise

That's it. That's the whole post. I have a text file which I (very occasionally) use to make notes of things I'd like to burble about here, and at some point I added the line:

LOTR/Bridge on the River Kwai/Foley noise

But now I can't for the life of me remember what I meant. 'LOTR' is Lord of the Rings, natch, and 'Foley' is the process of making human sound effects for films and such, but together they're all a bit random. They'll have to live on together in Google, until I figure out what the hell I was going to say.

Induction

One of those trucks which serve as mobile billboards sat at the kerbside as I went to buy some toilet paper (the Scott 1000-sheet rolls, since you ask - I'm an enthusiastic convert). This one was advertising Silver Reign. It said:

Free admission if you mention this truck.

Trying to imagine exactly how I would do the business of the mentioning, I settled on:

"I saw a truck which said that you give free admission if you mention it."

Because of course no-one would just say: "I saw a truck with your ad on it." That would sound lame, as if the speaker was just making small talk. The point isn't just seeing the truck; it's seeing what the truck had to say. It follows that what the truck is actually saying is something like:

Free admission if you mention that you saw this truck which offers free admission if you mention this truck.

It might then follow that the business of the mentioning properly goes something like:

"I saw a truck which said that you give free admission if you mention that you saw the truck which offers free admission if you mention the truck."

In which case the implied message on the side of the truck is:

Free admission if you mention that you saw this truck which offers free admission if you mention that you saw this truck which offers free admission if you mention this truck.

And so on and so forth, until the writing became so small that you wouldn't see the ad anyway. Yes, this is what I thought when I saw the ad. What I didn't think was: "Wow! Free admission to Silver Reign!"

The BDSM SDK

A funny dream last night. Mostly it was guided by a Grand Theft Auto narrative. It was one of those dreams where you're both observer and participant, both experiencing it and commenting on it. It was exciting and a bit scary.

Towards the end, though, it skipped to me watching (or reading about, or both) a cheesy BDSM-themed musical, which on waking left an impression something like Gay!, from The IT Crowd - well-meaning but horribly clueless.

What resonated after I'd woken up, though, was remembering that in the dream I'd been reading the lyrics for one of the songs, which were printed in a programme or somesuch. My waking memory is, as one would expect, of seeing the complete lyrics on the page, then scanning down line by line. Notably, the lyrics rhymed.

That needs some unpacking, I think, because taken at face value it's pretty amazing. If one assumes that the complete lyrics genuinely were on the page - such that I could have read them in any order - it entails that my dream created them in a single step. The me in the dream wasn't hearing the lyrics line by line, or seeing them as if typed out line by line. They were there, fully formed, just as if I might have picked up a book of poetry and turned to a poem I'd never read before.

That's extraordinary enough to imagine, without the extra problematical constraint imposed by the lyrics also rhyming. Rhyming imposes structure, which requires planning, memory, and all sorts of other cognitive tasks. If (again) the lyrics were genuinely complete on the dream page, available to be read in any order, and they also rhymed, then this amounts to the instantaneous creation of structured language in large blocks.

Or maybe it doesn't, because I'm deeply sceptical about my or anyone else's ability to do this, even in a dream. However much it seemed to me during the dream - and in retrospect after having woken - that the lyrics were fully formed on the page the moment I turned to it, it sounds far more likely that this was precisely the illusion the dream needed to convey. Though I felt that I could read the lyrics in any order, it's more plausible that the dream was furiously laying the tracks as the train steamed forward, making it up as it went along. This is in itself impressive, of course - both the illusion of completeness of the lyrics, and the ability to back up the illusion as necessary. It's not quite the alchemy of a poem from thin air, though.

As I read the dream lyrics in order, the laying of tracks ahead of the train seemed to work. My memory is that the rhymes were good, if not inspired. I regret that I wasn't able to fix the words in my head after I woke. Without that, I can't of course be sure that the dream created rhymes at all, and didn't just bamboozle me into falsely remembering that there had been lyrics, and that the lyrics had rhymed.

Except I did manage to grab onto the final word, and it convinces me that the dream machinery was indeed frantically making it up as it went along, that there actually were lyrics, which more or less adequately rhymed, and that the whole thing - structure, rhyming and all - hadn't appeared as if by turning a page. The final word was 'SDK'. It's techie jargon for 'Software Development Kit', the sort of hardware/software combo that, for example, Sony makes available to developers of PlayStation games. Funnily enough, I'd read a story a couple of days before about how Sony had reduced the price of its PS3 SDK.

Ah well. Like stage illusions, when you look hard enough at dreams the mechanism reveals itself. I guess the point is always to admire the trickery for what it is. Something doesn't need to be unexplainable to be magic.

Walking home

A nice little piece in the LA Times about Will Self walking in Los Angeles. LAX to Watts is a significant endeavour. I've done it by bus a few times and even that takes a couple of hours.

It reminded me of a day I walked from the outskirts of London into the West End. The Macguffin was the fact that I didn't have money for the tube, but it ended up being a pleasure in itself. It was almost a straight walk - maybe ten miles - down the Edgware Road, through Hendon, Cricklewood, Kilburn, Maida Vale, Marble Arch. I can date it precisely, because it was the Monday that the (fantastic) XTC album Oranges and Lemons came out, and buying it was my treat at the end of the walk.

Riding a bus gets you much closer to a city than driving a car, cycling gets you closer than riding a bus, and walking - especially this sort of long city-walk performed despite the existence of other options - is just the best way to soak up the feel of a place and really understand the geography. One of the alienating things about LA is that, not only don't people walk, it's more or less impossible to get from anywhere you are to anywhere you might want to be by walking; if you have a go at it, incidental pleasures on the way are pretty meagre. It's not a city for serendipitous wandering.

One of my heading-off-to-sleep thoughts (you can only really do it when you're safe and warm and home) used to be to imagine myself either dumped in the middle of nowhere - a moor, a desert, etc. - or some known but distant place, and then either to imagine the pleasure of arriving home after a monumental trek, or to play a game with myself, where I'd try to figure out what sort of reward I'd accept for willingly undertaking such an adventure. I'd put myself in a desert on the other side of the world, or perhaps just a long night's walk through the cold and dark away from the bed I was currently in. Would a hundred pounds be enough? In the end, the pleasure of arriving home - with the memory of what it felt like in the desolate starting place - always seemed the real prize.

Rape and Raspberries

A trip to Westwood Village to see Eastern Promises sparked a conversation - over Pinkberry frozen yogurt (with strawberries and raspberries) - during which I tried to describe to A. the viscerally unpleasant reaction I have to films which portray the unrelentingly grim realities of life. The connection is a little unfair to this film, which is layered enough to be far more than just a wallow in grimness, but there's enough grimness - rape, sectarian murder and reprisal, prostitution bordering on slavery - for it to be relevant.

The paradox here is that I'm mostly aware of processing stories at a considerable remove. I don't typically get swept away, except on occasion by the elegance of the narrative itself. And yet, stories whose business is portraying with something approaching verisimilitude what a shitty place the world can be hit me in the gut in a way that significantly compromises whatever enjoyment I might get from other aspects. Eastern Promises reminded me somewhat of Mona Lisa; both involve a quasi-innocent becoming submerged in low-rent seediness, returning damaged but in some way stronger.

In particular, the narrative of an innocent being ground by the more brutal wheels that people are capable of creating strikes me with something like nausea. Distance from what I perceive to be a real-world setting does make a difference. Hitchcock, for example, was gleefully fond of sending innocents into torment, but his playful, theatrical style draws the sting. Brazil, just about my favourite film, involves torture, murder, terrorism, and finishes with a man being lobotomised; again, though, its otherworldliness buys it an indirection which dulls the pain. It refers to the grimness of life, without being about it. It seems to be the reality and proximity of grimness, rather than grimness itself, which repels me.

Even though the effect is again ameliorated by a stylised narrative - I don't find A Clockwork Orange remotely disturbing, for example - portrayals of rape in particular get way under my skin. It's notable that the comments following Not Again: 24 Great Films Too Painful To Watch Twice quickly morph into a discussion of the fact that the pain in many of the nominated films concerns violence against women. Aside: Even though they have a Michael Haneke on there, Funny Games is conspicuously missing. He's a sanctimonious prick, but he knows what he's doing.

More than that, situations of assault by multiple aggressors are a special case for this bit of squeamishness I have. It feels as if the horror here relates not so much to what is done to the victim, as it does to the inevitability caused by numerical advantage. It makes no sense to suggest that rape or assault by an individual is somehow less horrendous than rape or assault by a group, but my brain processes things that way. This might relate to the general revulsion I have for group behaviour in general. Groups of human beings are capable of things unimaginable to each of the constituent individuals alone. There's both a premeditation and an unchecked momentum to group behaviour that's as primitive as we ever get as a species. At the head of my own list of painful films (though not necessarily great) might be A.L. Kennedy's Stella Does Tricks, which burned into my brain a gang-rape that's not graphic, but is hideous for its premeditated cruelty, intended to serve as a vicious punishment. I find myself unable to think of the actor (James Bolam) who played the part of the seedy pimp who orchestrates the rape, without remembering the scene, though I know him for many other roles. Bolam himself is almost tainted in my mind, which makes no sense whatsoever. We don't always make sense.

Oh, and do you know what the best thing about strawberries is? It's that we can eat raspberries afterwards, and be reminded once again just how much nicer they are.