Peel

Driving past Rhino Records on Westwood tonight, their entire marquee sign was given over to a very simple message: 'RIP John Peel 1939-2004'. I found that very touching, though at the same time wondered how many of the other drivers on the rush-hour street would know who Peel was. Probably not many.

Even though I scarcely ever listened to Peel's show, and our musical tastes barely overlapped, I still felt the loss when I read that he'd died. He was perhaps the youngest 65-year-old on the face of the planet, and it wasn't his time yet. The BBC will miss him hugely. He embodied a gentle but cranky rebelliousness that was particularly British. It was reassuring to know that he was there, even if he had no direct relevance to my life; he was part of the landscape, a background noise of Britishness that somehow holds the country together, like George Lucas's Force but with extra sarcasm, like the Women's Institute but heavy on the beard.

I've not seen this mentioned anywhere in the obituaries I've read - and there's no reason why it should have been; it has nothing to say about him as a person - but Peel was there the day Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. I wonder how many others who were there are still alive.

PC Cola

Sitting beside me on the couch is a can of Coca-Cola, bravely liberated from Costco last night in torrential rain. On the side of the can is a huge, bright-red bauble. On the side of the huge, bright-red bauble, as if reflected in its perfect shininess, is the face of a jolly old man, with round, ruddy cheeks, and a full white beard. He's beaming, and holding a bottle of the very same syrupy stuff that's inside the can.

Hang on, you might say, that's Santa Claus, isn't it? And, usually, I'd have to agree that he looks awfully like the very same gent - the one whose Coca-Cola image became lodged in the public consciousness in decades past. And yet there's no mention of Christmas here. Sure, there's some gaily curlicued script above his head which announces the can as celebrating something, but that something seems to be a mysterious new holiday called, with devastating tautology, 'Holiday 2004'.

I realise that I'd have to return my Card-Carrying Liberal card if I took this as the starting point for some scattershot rant against political correctness, but, damnit, there is something that I find dishonest about the can's juxtaposition. It wants to have its Coke and drink it; it wants to load the packaging with overtly Christmassy - and specifically Christmassy - iconography, but then to play a timid multicultural card at the last minute and back out of actually mentioning Christmas at all, lest - what? - lest any potential customer feel excluded?

There are classes of political correctness. Some are the setting right of decades-old wrongs. Some are an enlightened inclusiveness of reference. Others are a defensive bland-out, a kind of pre-emptive self-censorship which strips language of any real inclusion at all - because without any inclusion, there can't possibly be any exclusion. (And others still are the apocryphal or just plain fictional ones that lazy comedians shoehorn into lame reactionary routines. No, there never was a 'person hole'. Plenty of arseholes, though.)

Though I suspect the Coca-Cola company's intentions are to be applauded, I find the effect to be that of an almost insultingly token gesture, and that's without considering the damage to the language that's done by promulgating the vague-to-the-point-of-meaninglessness 'Holiday 2004'. If what they mean is 'Christmas 2004' - and their iconography would seem to suggest that's exactly what they do mean - then they should say that. If, on the other hand, what they mean is 'Christmas 2004', and 'Hanukkah 2004', and 'Kwanzaa 2004', and 'Saturnalia 2004', and also to wish everyone a 'Yolly Yule 2004', then there are far better ways to do that than to splash Father Christmas's beaming face across the packaging and then to somehow pretend that he's representative of anything other than a western, Christian celebration.

No-one celebrates 'The Holidays'. They celebrate Christmas, or Hanukkah, or whatever. Even if it's just getting together with their family or friends to pig out on rich food and doze off in front of the television, that's still not 'The Holidays'. To wish someone 'Happy Holidays' is to admit that one is too lazy or indifferent to actually find out what they do at this time and then wish that it be happy. It's not an actual wish. It's the verbal equivalent of a pro-forma letter with an empty box marked '[Insert here the actual holiday you celebrate]'. It's language at its most meek, defensive, and dishonest.

Sunday LA snapshots

A small kid on a corner on Sunset in a bright-green Incredible Hulk costume, holding a sign advertising some nearby video game shop. The sign almost as big as him.

A group of kids outside a tiny side-street recording studio. Half of them arranged behind artlessly positioned musical instruments - a basic drum-kit, a keyboard with spindly legs - a girl in a white angel costume flitting about between them. The other half off at a distance, watching, smiling, as one of them tapes the performance with a small video camera. They all look so young and going-places, imagining this tape as a faintly-embarrassing curiosity ten years from now, once they've made it and the world's at their feet.

Direct from La Brea, Los Angeles, it's that big headed man

Driving north along La Brea towards Wilshire the other day, I had a bit of a flashback. Up above the buildings on the left-hand side of the street was a huge billboard, pushing reruns of Malcolm in the Middle on some cable graveyard. 'TV's funniest show, five days in a row!' it bellowed, below an extreme wide-angle shot of Frankie Muniz's head, looking frazzled and bewildered, and his hilariously dysfunctional family surrounding. I can't speak to the accuracy of the copy. Mostly I was struck by the construction 'TV's funniest show', and the place I was struck was a chord. That, and the huge-head presentation, reminded me of something from long ago that feels like a linguistic gripe I never got to resolve. So bear with me; this might not make any sense.

One of many traditions associated with the Scarborough seaside holidays of my childhood was our annual troop along to whatever summer season variety show happened to be playing at the Royal Opera House (now, sadly, demolished) or the Floral Hall (also, sadly, now demolished). The Grumbleweeds, or John Inman, or Frank Ifield, or perhaps Clarence 'Frogman' Henry - who was, as you might expect, quite wonderful. The shows were, even twenty years ago, stuck in a world of twenty years before that, all earnest greasepaint and mother-in-law gags. But they were always fantastic, in every sense of the word: all razzle-dazzle, dancing girls and torch singers and hyperactive second banana comics.

Now, since my mother would typically get tickets shortly after our arrival, for a show towards the end of the holiday, I'd have most of the week-or-two to be fully acquainted with the advertising posters that seemed to be plastered across every flat surface in town. The posters themselves obeyed a formal showbiz grammar, and followed the big-head construction that Frankie Muniz reminded me of on La Brea. The crudely-cropped heads - and just the heads - of the cast, carefully sized according to some arcane fame quotient, sat atop smaller sketched bodies, typically engaged in some hilarious lark. From a distance only the heads stood out, as if the show were a sensational circus for body-less huge-headed freaks.

The biggest heads would, of course, scarcely require any introduction at all, besides their name. Everyone would know who they were, and love them like an indulged sibling. Occasionally, though, smaller heads might need a little clarification, just to drive the point home. 'TV Funnyman!' the poster might say. Or, more to the point, 'TV's [Whoever]'. 'TV's Ken Goodwin', maybe, or 'TV's Stu Francis' - and boy did he need a little clarification.

Even at the time, there was something that concerned me about this TV genitive. What did it mean for the comedian (for it was typically he) to belong to the TV (for it was always 'TV's', never 'Television's') in this way? I couldn't help but read into it - despite the ostensible use of TV as a gaudy come-on - a slightly derisive curl of the lip. He's not one of us theatre types, you know; he's on the tele-vis-ion. Echoes of the disdain for the new-fangled medium in radio circles at the beginning of the BBC's '30s television experiment at Alexandria Palace. The summer season might need the slumming TV types in order to bring in the crowds, and it might insist on using the TV genitive as a nudge to the holidaymaker slightly confused by the sun ('You've seen him on the box; now you can see him in the flesh! He's real, we tell you!'), but it was at the same time determined to keep them in that little box, have them subsumed by their inferior medium.

I was also on the lookout for another bit of formal showbiz grammar, involving a very loaded use of the word 'that'. It would appear in stage introductions, as a kind of lesser analogue of an announcement that such-and-such needs no introduction. (My experience being that the acts this was said about, were exactly the ones for whom an introduction was essential.) It would go something like this: 'And now, it's that hilarious comedian, [insert name of hilarious comedian]'. Or perhaps: 'Direct from the Batley Variety Club, that star of stage and screen, [insert name of star of stage and screen]'.

I wasn't entirely sure what to make of the showbiz 'that', and I've not heard it in any other context. Partly I think it is the implication of needing no introduction. It's the linguistic job of 'that' to be specific: it's not just any comedian; it's that one. And yet, even more so than explicitly stating that someone needs no introduction, the showbiz 'that' makes it plain that, despite the surface implication that we should know who this person is almost without hearing their name - because it's that hilarious comedian - no chances are being taken, and we're being told what they do, and how amazingly good they are at it. It's having it both ways: pumping the act up in the introduction, making them sound special and distinctive enough that 'that' is appropriate, but also covering the bases enough so that elderly woman in front row sucking on boiled sweet and clutching handbag to chest won't be left in the dark. I think that's what makes it a particularly showbiz usage: it's razzle-dazzle on the surface, with something far more mundane and practical underneath.

All in all, I think I should be grateful that I didn't crash into the car in front of me on La Brea, with all this crap going on in my head.

A gap in the market

In celebration of Norms' iconic 'Steak & Cake' special, A. & I were taken to imagine a restaurant whose menu consists entirely of foods which rhyme. We think it's a fabulous idea, and an obvious gap in the market.

The Norms special might be extended into three courses. There could be hake, followed by steak, and then cake. With perhaps a milk shake. At a clambake. Perhaps bream with cream. Noodles and strudels. Or the slightly icky-sounding ham and jam - or even spam and ham and jam. Cassoulet and creme brulee. The most obvious omission from the current culinary world would be gorgonzola and Coca-Cola.

You'll have this idea in your brain for the next week. Just wait and see.

A Hint of Draft on a Cool Evening

To USC last night, to see Michael Moore on his Slacker Uprising tour. It was a fascinating couple of hours, a curious mixture of hippyish old-school Woodstock earnestness and multi-media Daily Show satire. The two didn't always fit together smoothly, but the effect of that was to reflect poignantly, in a way that someone of my age and distance from the American experience of that time can't honestly get first hand, on the parallels between Iraq and Vietnam. The 'war' is so very modern, and yet the position that America finds itself in picks at wounds that have barely healed, thirty years later.

It was more than fine to see the happy shiny kids of USC engaged with something political, though I wonder how many of them were there to see Moore the filmmaker, rather than Moore the activist. In any event, the large quad where the event (rally? show?) was held was genuinely teeming with hyped kids. Some parents, too. It happened to coincide with a parents' weekend, so there were families and out-of-towners around. I saw one father, festooned with Bush/Cheney stickers, guide his wife and daughter away fifteen or so minutes after the thing had started. It looked like they'd done their best to stick around and not feel alienated and antagonised, but could only last so long. The father wrapped his arm around his daughter, pulling the family together. He looked sad and baffled.

Towards the back and, later, one side of the stage, the official Bush/Cheney protest area was appropriately loud and raucous. They served as a kind of heckler-on-tap for Moore to play with when he felt like it. In fact, a great deal of the time Moore seemed to be going through the motions somewhat. Only when he had something to push against did he really seem to come alive, find his passion. He is, after all, an antagonist. That's the voice he's found for himself, and it suits him. He's not much of an orator, nor is he a comedian. Nor even a great writer - at least not in any sense that would value the writing apart from its purpose. It's Moore's purpose that fuels his passion, and his passion that animates him.

Tom Morello was support of sorts, playing three sound but mostly over-earnest protest songs. I don't think the kids connected much. Perhaps it's a more cynical age. Perhaps they're just a more cynical group; USC is hardly known for its progressive and radical edge. Dante Zappala was strong and dignified, talking about the death of his brother in Iraq, and Jasaun Neff was funny and disarming about his own experiences. Both of them wrote letters in Moore's new book. Aside from the occasional sparks of passion from Moore, the best moments of the night were those when a more modern, satirical edge was used. Spoof Bush TV ads were shown on the giant screens either side of the stage, and they were almost too close to the truth.

Towards the end of the evening, Moore began to raise a very dark spectre, one that cast a shadow across the many thousands of young kids in the open quad in the cool evening. He talked about the possibility of a draft. More than anything else, of course - more even than the naive and earnest edge in some of the speechmaking - this invoked Vietnam. I'm not sure it hit home as hard as it might have done. Though Moore moves easily between generations, there was still an element of old guy talking to young kid about the world he knew when he was young, and the young kid yawning a little and rolling his eyes. One can only hope that the threat of a draft remains a tedious hyperbole.

I don't think very much of the crowd consisted of Moore's choir. A small following at the front perhaps, more than balancing the loud protesters at the back. The great majority in the middle felt interested but a little sceptical, politically alert but unaligned. Young people with energy and potential, who haven't quite decided where it's going to take them.

As the light of the day had faded, and the huge crowd had begun to gather, I'd noticed the silhouette of a figure on the roof of the building on the other side of the quad. It poked around, looking, checking. Whether the intention was to protect Moore from some mad plot, or safeguard the crowd, or both of the above and more besides, it was a reminder that, however much the night might have borrowed from an earlier generation's grammar of protest and activism, the new generation has its own reasons for paranoia.

(I did take some photographs, but the camera couldn't deal with the low light, and they turned out crappy. Try Moore's own, instead.)

Eric at the Coffee Bean

Actual on-the-street spottings of actual celebs in LA are hard to come by. Eric Idle doesn't count. I did see James Cameron on 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. But that's basically it. To add to that meagre list: Elias Koteas, spotted tonight in our local Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf as I was heading out for milk to avoid the third debate. It's the Coffee Bean just around the corner from us, which has an open fire in the outside sitting area, and always has at least two or three people in there working on screenplays. All very LA. He's done plenty of other memorable stuff, but Koteas is fixed in my mind as Eric, the club DJ in the delightfully pervy Exotica.

Ned Ludd goes to the polls

[Update: A thoughtful and thorough piece by Bruce Schneier, which covers a great deal of the same issues as below - and some more besides - though which seems to begin from the unsupported premise that technology in voting is in the end both inevitable and desirable, so long as its inherent problems are fixed. I can't disagree more strongly, for the reasons I hope I make clear.]

Machines make the pencils - and, having been to the Cumberland Pencil Museum, I can attest to the adorably steam-age nature of those machines - but that's where the technology stops. The rest is people. The pencils - wee stubby little things - are placed inside the rudimentary voting booths, where they wait patiently. Voter comes to vote. Voter gives their voting card - or their name and address - to a poll worker, who stamps a ballot paper to make it official, then gives it to voter. Voter toddles along to booth, picks up pencil, marks the cleanly, simply-designed ballot paper with the wee stubby little pencil. Voter folds ballot paper, takes it back to poll worker, and drops ballot paper into ballot box. After the close of polling, ballot box is taken to central counting location, where people, lots of people, tip out the ballot papers onto long tables and count them by hand. And then recount them by hand if necessary. Once the result is determined, local dignitary, surrounded on the stage by the candidates - the seven-foot-tall transsexual, the earnest Communist in the bad suit, the wild-eyed near-neo-fascist - puts on his very best Posh Voice and haltingly calls out the poll numbers. For the first few hours of the night, before the flood of results gets to be too much, he does this on live television; there's a deal of civic pride to be had from being early to announce. It's magnificent, epic theatre, simultaneously comedy, tragedy and farce. Media punditry then takes over to interpret and reflect, but the moment of truth is quite raw.

That's what a general election in Britain is like. The whole thing is adorably low-tech. And it works. And - and here's the crucial thing - the process of voting and vote-counting is never under any suspicion. That's terribly important. Voting is like justice: it's not enough that it be done fairly; it has to be seen to be done fairly. When trust in the voting process breaks down, trust in the democratic process breaks down, as we've seen in recent years.

As someone who writes software for a living, I shudder at the thought of introducing technology into the voting process. Software has bugs. Always has, always will. Even if one doesn't buy into conspiracy theories about vote fixing, it's just a fuck-up waiting to happen. Strike that. It's not waiting to happen; it's already happened, in Florida, 2000. Hanging chads changed the world.

And I don't, don't, head-banging-on-the-table don't get why technology is considered for voting if it might in any way compromise the integrity of the process of voting, or the process of vote-counting. What's to gain? Speed? Is that all? Once every four (or five) years, who cares about a few hours, or even a day or two, if it means that there's confidence in the count. If people don't have confidence in a vote count, then the rest of the democratic process gets all gummed up, as we've seen. Some things just aren't possible without technology, so you bite the bullet, do your damnedest to make the technology robust and safe, and you try to live with the small risk. Voting's not like that. It's both simple enough not to need technology, and important enough that technology is mostly inappropriate.

I'll be more specific. I can see three separate steps involved in voting:

1. Marking the ballot. The pencil's finest moment. There is actually some room for the safe use of technology here, so long as three vital criteria are met: first, a marked ballot must be produced, whether by man or machine; second, the voter must be able to view the marked ballot, in order to see that his choices have been translated accurately onto the ballot; third, the voter must have confidence that the ballot will be counted according to his choices - the system fails if the voter believes with complete confidence that he's voted one way, but the counting system cannot support that confidence.

   These criteria don't preclude the use of technology - punched-card machines, or even touch-screen machines - so long as the product of the technology is a marked ballot paper that the voter gets to see, hold in his hand, and carry across to the ballot box. The technology should, in other words, be no more than a high-tech substitute for the pencil. The criteria certainly don't call for technology; they certainly do place limits on the proper use of technology where it is used in the act of voting. The key is not to put technology between the voter and the marked ballot paper. To have a machine assist in the marking of the ballot doesn't increase the distance between voter and ballot, so long as the machine only helps to generate the marked ballot, its contribution stops there, and the voter can see, hold, and approve the ballot after its generation.

   The criteria also call for a simple, clearly-designed ballot paper. Voter confidence that their choices have been translated accurately onto the ballot diminishes if the ballot is unclear or complicated. Technology can also hurt this confidence. A ballot paper that's designed to be counted by a machine requires significant design decisions which are not necessarily consistent with the ballot paper being clearly human-readable.

2. Counting the ballot. People and machines have very different skills. Reading marked ballots quickly is a machine skill. Reading marked ballots accurately is a human skill. Assuming that the voter's choices have indeed been translated accurately onto the ballot, there isn't a machine on the planet that's better at interpreting those choices in order to count them than a human counter, nor could there be. Technology-based counting can at best approach the accuracy of a human counter to within some acceptable tolerance. But, nuh-uh, rewind, rewind, and scrub 'acceptable tolerance'. What's acceptable? Why should it be acceptable? Why compromise at all?
3. Recounting the ballot. I hope it's clear that there's no such thing as a viable recount in the situation where there are no paper ballots. What would one do? Run the same counting program over the same data? The very concept of a recount requires that something be done differently: perhaps a new team of human counters, or at the very least a new count by the same team with a renewed focus, reflecting the fact that a recount was necessary. Technology's great strength isn't accuracy. It's a tireless consistency and fidelity. What it screwed up once, you can rely on it to keep on screwing up in exactly the same way, with a completely straight face.

None of this implies any partisanship or wrongdoing in the use of technology in the voting process. It's not necessary to propose partisanship or wrongdoing to shoot big holes in the integrity of a vote that relies on technology. Software screws up. Often software screws up in horribly subtle ways that both defy explanation, and - scarily - defy detection. Ask yourself how you'd know whether a vote count provided by a machine was accurate? You wouldn't, of course. You'd just have to trust it.

Which is not to say that people don't also make mistakes. Of course they do. But here's the thing: in the process of counting votes, what would a genuine human mistake consist of? What would its consequences be? A vote in the wrong pile? A handful of votes? That's because the count of each vote is entirely separate from all of the others. Mistakes don't propagate, and there's no reason to imagine systemic errors which might prefer one candidate over another. There are no higher-level system problems which might cause a vote counter to screw up on a larger scale.

Technology's not like that. The relationship between the size of a mistake in software, for example, and the size of the consequences of that mistake, is not proportional. A single misplaced punctuation mark might bring down the Space Shuttle. Likewise, a single mistake might potentially create an error of almost any size in a vote count. Unless the discrepancy was plainly anomalous, it could easily escape detection.

Of course, even though it's not necessary to propose partisanship or wrongdoing, it's not unreasonable to also propose both of those, at least in principle. Software can be hacked. The use of technology implies a developer of that technology, which implies contracts of significant value and importance. That amount of power in the hands of a commercial concern over the voting process, and therefore the democratic process, ought to be a worry for everyone.

And, asks the Ned Ludd in me: Why is this even an issue? What's the problem that technology is intended to solve? Is a hand-count too slow? Okay, get more people. Or just fucking wait a bit longer. It seems to work just fine in Britain. Are ballots too complicated to be completed by hand, or counted by hand? Okay, simplify them. Separate off Federal-level votes from State-level votes if need be.

I wrote a few days ago about how meta the US election process is, how discussion of policy disappears beneath media spin, conspiracy theories, dirty tricks, fatuous American Idol polls. It's increasingly the case that a simmering dissatisfaction with the integrity of the voting system itself is an issue - though after Florida, 'simmering' might be way too bland. This is poisonous stuff. Democracy just doesn't work if people don't think the leaders it gives them were fairly elected, and that's more and more an issue in the US. Concerns about partisan manipulation of voter registration and vote counting abound. The increasing use of technology within US voting is only a small part of this, but it is a part. The voices decrying that seem to be far too quiet, and far too few.

Man of Steel

The project that I've been working on at Unidentified California University for the past year originally hired me as a techie - to help with putting the research results onto the web, and in other digital forms for distribution, and also to fathom out a piece of software they're using for qualitative analysis of interview transcripts. The clash of styles and backgrounds has been fascinating, but not a little frustrating. The people on the project are right at the top of their game, but it's a very different game. I'm used to clarity, formality, a reasonably clear division of labour and responsiblity, but the process here is one of a slow bottom-up construction of theory from masses of data, which is messy and driven by continual discussion, rethinking, redirection, and gradual consensus.

As it happens, though, I've ended up in the thick of things, constructing case studies from mountains of rambling interviews. It's somewhat like trying to solve a jigsaw without the box, and without any real expectation that the picture will amount to anything clear anyway. The process feeds my love of structured narrative, though. To find the real story in amongst something as messy as a life is a challenge. Sometimes it works, sometimes less so. Like all good stories, the narratives work better if there's a beginning, a middle and an end. Sometimes the ends are tragic, which makes the story clearer to write, but harder to tell.

The focus of the project is strikingly, saddeningly relevant today, because it involves the causes of development of pressure sores for people with spinal injuries. Because the context of the study is a particular unit in a particular rehab hospital, the cases tend to be the most serious. Many of the cases I've written up involve people whose lives were disadvantaged and broken even before they were injured. The injury then left them no chance. It would be easy to infer from a cursory glance at their backgrounds that spinal injuries - or at least pressure sores resulting from spinal injuries - are a disease of poverty, poor education, broken homes, involvement in street-gangs. It would also be spectacularly wrong. A spinal injury places someone on a precarious cliff-top, from which every direction potentially heads downwards to some calamity. Maintaining the balance in their lives which keeps them from falling, basically becomes their lives. If they lose focus, they're lost.

I've not yet read anything which hints at the underlying causes of the pressure sore/s that ultimately led to Christopher Reeve's death, via systemic infection and then heart failure, but one thing is clear: if anyone seemingly had the best chance of escaping from underneath the pressure sore Sword of Damocles, it was Reeve. Though he must have been ravaged by the worst demons, he'd found purpose in his new life, had the best treatment available, and a strong support system around him. Even with all of these advantages, a pressure sore got him in the end. I daresay the results of the project I'm working on will reference Reeve somehow, if ony in a preface.

There was a little of Kal-El in Reeve, and a little bit of Clark Kent too. Whatever the weaknesses of the Superman films he made - and there were plenty - he wasn't one of them. I remember seeing the first one for the first time when I was kid. It was shortly before Christmas, a cold winter day in the north of England. My mother took my brother and me. Between going into the cinema and coming out again, it had snowed enough to leave several inches of snow on the ground, so we emerged into a different world.

If you can bear to descend to one of the lower circles of hell for a moment, Digby has been there and it's not pretty. Think about contributing something.

A Lewis Carroll moment

Well, not really. (Okay, a bit.) Trawling idly around the web tonight, looking to find any news of the album that Kate Bush is working on (I know, there really should be a sound file attached here named 'hollowlaughter.mp3'), I came back to these photographs of her. I've seen them before, but I still find them completely hypnotic. It's the lower ones I mean, the black-and-white childhood portraits - though there's little that makes them typical of childhood photographs. She's performing, but also keeping the photographer at a distance. There aren't too many smiles, and no gauche cheesy posing. She's the child with the woman in her eyes. And yet she seems only a small step away from a primitive feral state in some of them.

Girl. Woman. Innocent. Witch. That's the thing about KB: every image is something different. Can you tell that she was an early crush of mine? Thought so.

Kink content, you say? Hmm. This do?

Some bonus Friday night randomness

(Driving home listening to Neil Finn tonight.)

Why does music go slightly flat when we yawn?

Meta-than-thou

I'm such a coward. Despite the fact that there were live feeds of it all over the 'net, I found myself experiencing (because neither 'watching', nor 'listening', nor 'reading', seem entirely accurate) the second presidential debate via the blog comments at Atrios. It's something akin to being unable to bear to watch the penalty shoot-out at the end of a World Cup semi-final, with the added reason that listening to Shrub gives me the heebie-jeebies at the best of times, never mind when he's in full Dubya mode, swaggering and winking and Texanising the pathetic failed-patrician frat boy that's hiding underneath the shell Karen and Karl and the other handlers create for him. That way I can peek out from under the covers only once I know it's safe.

In theory I should abhor the idea of placing partisan filters between me and something like this - but then it's not as if the debates were ever going to make a difference to how I see the whole circus. In fact, I find it fascinating. It's a bit like one of those photographs the Independent used to love to have on its front page (maybe still does): where everyone else would have bog-standard photograph of Important Public Figure Looking Important, the Indy would have a photograph of the press-gaggle taking photographs of the Important Public Figure Looking Important. It's a stylistic move that says: hey, we know this is all a big game, and we're far too clever and meta-than-thou to be with that rabble.

So, perceiving the debate through the real-time comments allows me to get the debate at-a-distance, but a very raw and immediate reaction to it. And I don't have to endanger my blood-pressure and thinning hair by listening to Shrub unprotected, as it were.

From this perspective, it's quite overwhelming just how meta the US presidential stuff is. And I don't just mean by that the obvious, decades-old awareness of the power of the visual, and the value of style as opposed to substance. It's become a war of sorts, a propaganda D-Day in which bloggers act as foot-soldiers, flooding online votes, pushing talking points and corrections to talking points to the established media, picking up the threads of conspiracy theories until either the whole jumper unravels or they find that there really is something there at the other end. None of the votes are real any more - if they ever were. What's being tested is the effectiveness of the partisan mobilisation. It's basically American Idol, though for a slightly larger prize.

Actually that's not quite right. The starry bloggers (like Atrios, Kos and Josh Marshall on the left) are more like generals in the field, issuing orders in the thick of the battle to their readers - the comments sections of such blogs serving as a loud background of radio chatter.

The meta-levels stack up like a Tower of Babel, crushing the actual content down into subterranean strata. No-one talks about policies any more. They talk about how well the candidates performed relative to expectations. Facial expressions. The deep meaning of an eye-roll or an exasperated sigh. Laughably flawed polls make the headlines, while real statistics of fatalities in a faraway place come way below the fold. Conspiracy theories abound. Stories of dirty tricks, rebuttals and rebuttals of rebuttals. Concerns about polling systems. In the most powerful democracy in the world, concerns about the reliability of polling systems. Worse still, concerns about the partisan manipulation of polling.

It's actually quite exhausting, this year-long media fuck-fest and donation drive for producers of Grandiose Graphics. It's exhausting to care so much, yet feel so powerless. Just like watching Stuart Pearce walk up to take that penalty, the stakes so high that it's no longer about football.

Too much choice

A. and I spent at least ten minutes in the cereal aisle at Albertsons last night trying to decide what to get. In the end we had to choose our own, because we couldn't agree. What is it about cereal shopping that turns us back into five-year-olds? Not cranky squabbling five-year-olds, but having been taken to the toy shop and dazzled by the colours and the pictures and wanting all of it but being forced to choose by a grown-up and unable to decide and it's all just too much five-year-olds.

And by the way. What the hell happened to honey nut corn flakes? They seem to have been airbrushed out of human history, like Michael J. Fox at a particularly bad moment in the plot.

On role-play, and being an emotional vampire

Something kink-related for a change - although not without my usual flair for draining the wind out of things by over-analysing them.

Enough of my kink friends are role-players that I keep coming back to trying to figure out quite what it is about role-play that I either don't grok, or that I grok on some level, but can't feel. Role-play is as easy for some of them as breathing. Perhaps it's sometimes even easier than being themselves. Rather than being a mask that they put on, it's the setting down of a burden for a while. In some small ways I've tried role-play, but it's never worked in the way that it's supposed to. Rather than being exciting and adventurous, to me it's stressful and distancing.

Acting is the obvious non-kink analogue of role-play, but I think the similarities are superficial, and therefore misleading. The taking on of another role is common, of course, but the role - as it were - of that other role couldn't be much more different. The interaction that matters for conventional acting is between actors and audience. The actors' job is to fake a reality, and fake relationships, which conjure up enough plausibility to carry the story. Interaction between the actors themselves isn't the point. They needn't be moved by each other, in order to move the audience.

The interaction that matters in role-play is entirely between the participants. There might be some amount of conscious theatre or exhibitionism involved, but that's not the point of it. The point is that the role-players be moved by each other, that they take each other places that are exciting and fun. It's the connection between them that feeds the play. That's why written accounts of role-play often fall a bit flat: they can't capture the essence of the play. It's not for an audience or a readership. It's all about the mind-fuck of being there.

Improvisational acting might be a better analogue, and not just because, like role-play, it's an unscripted, one-shot process. But this has problems too. Improvisation is acting without the rails to run along, so it's stressful and just plain hard work. Now, it could be that the hard work - the circus trick of walking the high-wire without falling - is a large part of it for a skilled role-player. The magic of spinning something powerful out of nothing much at all. But even then, doesn't the stress, the focus required to spin the tale, compromise the connection between the players? Can their energies be both focused on the creative process - creating this thing, this narrative, that's larger than any of the individual participants - and also maintain the connection between them?

Maybe the answer is yes for a skilled role-player. But that wouldn't be me. I might be able to improvise a scene, if I were fully charged and focused on where we were - and had been able to plan to some extent in advance. This would be improvisation only to a certain extent, though. It might be closer to a form of conventional acting in which the players know their own lines, but not the others' lines. And there certainly might be a great deal of satisfaction from the process, analogous to the satisfaction of creating a narrative on paper - though without the advantage that would have that I'd get something concrete to keep afterwards for my exertions. But what would surely fall by the wayside for me would be the kink-connection between me and the other (or the others). This would be a narrative produced for the sake of the narrative, or perhaps for the sake of theatre. It wouldn't be a narrative produced for the sake of the kink-connection with another. I'd be too busy guiding the narrative, working like crazy to plan the next bit, to feel connected.

And that's basically the point. What matters is how we make that connection with others. For role-players, I suppose that the act of role-play, aside from being exciting enough, must also be easy enough, natural enough, relaxing enough, that the connection can still be there for them, whatever masks they might be wearing. I do struggle to imagine a relationship in which role-play provides a greater connection than is possible with all of the masks stripped away - because how could putting on masks of any significance bring two people closer together than is possible without? (Perhaps this is my failure of imagination.) But a relationship in which role play provides a million different shades of connection, a million different chocolates in the box, seems both plausible and healthy. Not a greater connection, but certainly a greater richness of tone and adventure. Different ways to express what's basically the same connection.

Role-play could never be easy enough, relaxing enough, for me to maintain a connection with another that was fulfilling for my kink. There's something deeper for me, too, which digs into my psychology. I won't play amateur psychologist enough to muse about what reasons might exist for people to enjoy pretending to be other people. But I can speak for myself, and say that feeling connected with someone else is directly related to just basically being able to be me, being seen as me, and feeling comfortable to express the me-ness of me without masks or filters or worrying that certain things might be inappropriate or trying to be what I'm not.

I'd say that it might be an introversion thing, except that I have a feeling that's an entirely different dimension. I'm sure there are introverts who find fulfillment in being someone else, just as there are introverts who find fulfillment in being seen and accepted without any of the masks that they might usually wear to get on with life in a world that's not terribly sensitive to their needs.

And perhaps, for me, this thinking is entirely backward anyhow. Rather than needing to feel connected to someone in order to feel kink-connected to them, it's the other way around: I might seek kink-connection in order to feel connected. Because how could I possibly feel genuinely connected to someone unless I felt connected to them through my kink? It's such an important part of me, like the letters through a stick of seaside rock. How could I feel open with someone who didn't embrace that, and how much more connected to someone could I possibly feel than if they embraced my kink being wholly, and it fit with theirs wholly?

So then why, if that connection of me-ness to them-ness is what's fulfilling to me, would I get pleasure from either or both of us putting on masks? Well, possibly if I was so secure and fulfilled in my connections with others that I was looking for something else - that novel other way to express the connection. That hasn't been my life so far, though. I truly connect with people so rarely that whatever fulfillment I might potentially get from the different ways of connecting provided by role-play is vastly overwhelmed by the need for fulfillment from simple, basic, me-to-them connection. No masks, no filters. Just me being able to be me, and them just being able to be them, and us fitting with each other.

In fact, the stripping off of even the everyday masks we wear without even realising it - never mind any ones that we might put on over the top of those to play another persona - is what it's all about for me. Right inside the heart of us is where we're most open, most vulnerable, and that's where it feels like we can connect most strongly. To find the scariest, rawest place, the place that's least-protected by years of accumulated worldliness, cynicism. To push on that place, perhaps even to push hard enough so that it hurts, but then to show that it's okay. That we can face all of the fears and demons, throw them right out into the sunlight and hurt them a little, put them in their place, and be a little stronger afterwards because of it.

Sometimes I think the mistake is made of equating 'real-life' BDSM with punishment. Perhaps I used to make that mistake myself. Though I don't believe my kink is about punishment, it's absolutely and completely about 'real-life'. Real fears and insecurities and vulnerabilities are the fuel for my kink. To be trusted with them, to hurt them and caress them and calm them and shore them up. There's probably something almost vampiric about it. But anything less than that seems like, well, like play.