Whatever it takes

Evidence that I've been thinking too much about web-design lately: I was looking at a very elegant multi-column university letterhead yesterday, and I thought to myself: "Oh sure, it looks good now, but how will it cope when someone resizes the paper?" Funny that a window has become my default, rather than a page. When do I ever compose something to be printed?

Driving home northwards along Lincoln in rush-hour traffic, a man standing in the courtyard of a roadside motel talking urgently on his mobile. And wearing nothing but a towel. That's a story, that is.

Dinner last week, to celebrate a friend's birthday. Walking towards Santa Monica Pier, we pass a new-agey type shop where two customers, an older man and woman, watch as the assistant reaches up behind the counter and takes down Sigmund Freud and Jesus action figures. Then to the Pier [GM], where a young man and woman play the Dance Dance Revolution machine like it's directly wired into their brains. I wonder about the future of arcades. The video games seem entirely redundant these days; the graphics are significantly less advanced than I have on my PlayStation. So what's the point? The retro games like Pac-Man still swallow some quarters, but mostly it's the amusements which rely on yer actual real-life physics that seem to be lasting: air hockey; shooting galleries; maybe pinball, if anyone could be bothered to maintain the tables properly.

And then to the Hollywood Bowl [GM] for a night of Mozart - or maybe a night of Mozart as an excuse to go to the Hollywood Bowl. I can't help thinking of it as something from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. I'm disappointed at first that there's no grand piano for Jerry to romp mischievously around in, but after the first couple of pieces, to my delight one is wheeled on. (How many American references I knew first from cartoons: skunks; drive-ins; ten-pin bowling.) The music is fine, but curiously perfunctory; I miss some banter between Neville Marriner and the audience, but he's just quiet and serene, smiling happily on the big screens either side of the stage, which looks as it always has, like it's made from an architecture student's modelling card. An entirely wonderful moment towards the beginning when a coyote in the hills howls along with the orchestra. And planes droning across the sky, though it's split by twin searchlights to deter them. It's an occasion which allows itself the danger of a hostile environment.

And tonight, a bit dispirited by reading Deepak Chopra's wilfully ignorant new-age bullshit. If I could choose only a single thing to plant, whole and complete, in the mind of every school-leaver around the world, it would be a firm grasp of the principles of evolution by natural selection, which is not random, nor intelligent, nor teleological. Propose a god of the gaps, sure, but the point is that you have to stay in the gaps. More generally, it's profoundly disturbing to me right now how questions which ought to have been answered with a clanging finality are perceived as up for grabs: along with new Supreme Court appointments comes the question of whether Roe vs. Wade might be overturned; school boards abandon the teaching of evolution, or pair it with the neo-creationism that's peddled by "Intelligent Design" hucksters. This is still a young country, and its soul is still being fought over. But Cindy Sheehan makes the news more and more, because she's a woman alone - but whatever it takes. Whatever it takes.

The earnestness of being self-important

During those existential lacunae at the supermarket checkout when even the curiously austere Hershey's chocolate seems appealing for a moment, I find myself both drawn to and repelled by the train-wreck of narcissism that is The Oprah Magazine. Whatever might be on the cover this month, I wonder idly to myself. Oh, look, it's Oprah again, coiffed to within an inch of her life, practically reaching through the glossy paper to bitch-slap shiny happiness into the world.

There's a level of hyper-demonstrative earnestness that's hitherto been reached perhaps only by Ms Winfrey and Tom Cruise since the Scientology handlers unleashed his white teeth. It's self-obsession utterly without self-reflection, utterly without self-deprecation, utterly without nuance. Five years of The Oprah Magazine, and she puts herself on the cover of every single edition. It's a fanzine to herself, a mirror mirror on the wall.

Oprah's Book Club (trademarked, of course) 'Presents' Faulkner, wrapped in a black and gold banner which subsumes him into the Oprah brand. 'Presents' conveys the conferment of patronage. Not here the addition of a small tasteful sticker to an existing edition to show the attachment of an ephemeral daytime queen of sharing to the weight of literature. Rather, Faulkner must be bound up inside Oprah's custom box-set cover.

Wikipedia says this about a personality cult:

The leader's picture appears everywhere, as do statues and other monuments to the leader's greatness and wisdom. The leader's slogans and other quotes cover massive billboards, and books containing the leader's speeches and writings fill up the bookstores and libraries. The level of flattery can reach heights which may appear absurd to outsiders.

And that seems about right.

Blue tape and beech

Started today in a really crappy mood - long story, and not one I'm telling here - and it didn't improve much. I did want to commemorate something that's become important to me, though. Sometime in the, oh, the next decade or so, I might finally end up getting some new glasses. My current ones are technically fine, but suffer slightly in practical terms from having been sat on and the frames broken a while ago. Actually a long while. At the time I lashed up a quick-fix with blue tape that was to hand, and it's kind of, well, stuck. It's not as if I haven't tried other tape; I even purloined some surgical tape from the hospital earlier this year, thinking it might be nice and strong - and light-permeable in the way the blue stuff isn't quite. But nothing works like the blue stuff, I've found. I replace it every few weeks, and all is well. Sure, it looks a trifle eccentric, but I'd be a big fat liar if I said I didn't like that just a bit. These are the same glasses I'm wearing in the wee picture that crops up sometimes in the row at the top of the screen - taken by me with a timer outside the Gala Theatre in Durham after a sudden and torrential downpour - but I'm not sure anyone will recognise me any more once the blue tape is gone, so mark this entry down as for the sake of posterity.

Anyhow, tonight I walked with A. to our local Wild Oats, and I found something which lifted my mood somewhat, but not in the way that it might have hoped to do. The Bach Flower Essences 'Personal Questionnaire & Guide to Use', which I brought home with me, is a complete hoot. I think I might need a case of the Beech:

3. Beech

• Are you annoyed by the habits and shortcomings of others?
• Do you find yourself being overly critical and intolerant, usually looking for what someone has done wrong and not right?
• Do the incompetence and foolishness of others irritate you?

Nod, nod, nod. Particularly the foolishness of others who fall for what are at best tiny doses of some vague herbal tincture, at worst neatly categorised bottles of purest placebo. Also the foolishness of shops that can't quite see the difference between the worth of, for example, organically-grown or humanely-processed foodstuffs, and the pseudo-scientific haze of junk like Bach's remedies and Penta water. Though if they all sell, perhaps there isn't any difference.

Conspicuously missing from the magic 38 'states of mind' -

How can 38 remedies cover all known states of mind?

People sometimes understand this to mean that there are only 38 states of mind, but it would be more exact to say that there are 38 basic states of mind which can in combination with each other make hundreds of millions of variations.

- each of which has its own handy nostrum, is something that I might describe thusly:

• Do you find that great claims need great evidence?
• Does a company which manufactures products which claim medicinal benefits but which blithely waves away double-blind testing strike you as untrustworthy?
• Do you think they're either slightly cracked or just in it for the money?

Obviously that might be called 'Cynicism', but I do have the solution, which oddly eluded Dr. Bach (pronounced, bizarrely, as 'batch', as if he were already thinking about huge vats of the stuff). It's made from the processed bean of the cacao tree, mixed with the milk of the cow. Best taken in its undiluted form. Add common sense to taste.

How much better the view

Don't ever, ever forget, that this was a 'war' created by ideology, and not a reasonable response to an accurately-perceived threat. And don't ever forget that some people said so from the start. RIP, Robin [RealPlayer video].

Doctor Who and the Superhero Problem

I never did go back to see how my Bad Wolf musings turned out. Not so well, as it happens. I'd hoped for a new nemesis, and that didn't really appear; Davros always worked so much better as Evil Genius than some bland Dalek Emperor, for obvious reasons: it's possible to take something which clearly began as humanoid, twist it and darken it and come up with true horror, whereas the worst you can do with a robot is make it bigger and have more pointy bits. Frankly, I loved the idea that Adam might have been the beginnings of Davros - inadvertently seeded by the Doctor's casual dismissal (in the manner of Buddy/Syndrome) - but it was never going to be plausible.

Though Davies finally truly hit his stride in the penultimate episode, which had the zeigeisty hooks that connected it to our 2005 but will at the same time cause it to date terribly, his play with the Bad Wolf meme ended up one part plot device to ninety-nine parts red herring. The scattering of messages through time is a fine idea, but the Bad Wolf-ishness of the messages - the very thing that encouraged so much gleeful speculation - ended up going nowhere.

As for Captain Jack, I misunderstood him entirely, I think because I couldn't see what purpose he might have in the larger series other than to be a veiled threat. Maybe misled by his introduction in Steven Moffat's quite magisterial two-parter - the one everyone will take away from this series - because he ended up clearly Davies's character: there to hold a gun when the Doctor cannot; and there to be the carrier of Davies's playfulness. I think he knows enough to be wary of how far he can push the Doctor into sexual dalliance and innuendo, so that can be redirected into Captain Jack without undermining canon stuff that's a bit more fundamental.

A tiny hope for the next series is that Davies keeps pushing on the juxtaposition between the Doctor's huge galactic enterprises and Rose's earthly concerns - that stuff is entirely new to Who, and is the thing which most of all dragged it forward a couple of decades - but that he eases up a bit on the Deus ex TARDIS. He found himself straying into something that I tend to think of as the Superhero Problem. The best description of that is the best example: once Superman has apparently reversed time by spinning the world backwards (easy on the logic there, boys), why can't he just do that every time there's a problem it would solve? The problem is in carefully delineating the powers and weaknesses of a superhero. If the balance is wrong, then there's no jeopardy, and no story. A bit like balancing a tyre, it's why there's Kryptonite, and why Superman (for example) can't see through lead: those are the little weights which try to make everything spin smoothly. But Superman reversing time is such a heavy weight, such a trump card, that it makes everything irrelevant. It's too powerful a power. That's the Superhero Problem.

If something as seemingly unstoppable as a colossal Dalek invasion fleet can be halted by ripping the top off the TARDIS controls and tapping into the curiously ill-defined (50 house-points taken from Mr. Davies) powers lying within, then how come this power isn't always available? One answer - the story's Kryptonite - is that the power is so vast that the Doctor can withstand it only by regenerating. It's not a bad cost-benefit dilemma to play with in future episodes, particularly once the Doctor gets even closer to the limit of his regeneration - twelve must have seemed endless way back then. But even so, the literal genie is out of the bottle, and it's hard to go back to the mundanities of a sonic screwdriver after such potential has been revealed. It might form in general a kind of narrative finiteness even for the immortal superhero: once the true extent of his powers has been laid bare, his usefulness for the story is over, because there's no true going back. The best he can do is find another story context in which things are more balanced: it's significant that Superman II upped the stakes by co-opting more Kryptonians as foes. After they'd been vanquished, there was only a retreat into Kryptonite and slapstick. Batman, being nothing-super, is far more interesting because of his immunity from this escalation, which Christopher Nolan got exactly right.

Anyhow, a fond wave goodbye to Christopher Eccleston, with the hope that he'll return from time to time to squabble with the new kids the way Troughton and Pertwee used to. The very best thing about Doctor Who is its narrative malleability.

Extra-special bonus for having waded this far is a wee story I wrote for another place. Not much of my kink-writing would make any sense out of that context, but this might. A bit. Maybe. At least a Who fan might not get it any less than your average perv gets the Who stuff.

Regeneration

There's something of Henry Higgins about him. And if I told him that, he'd just spend a bloody hour educating me all about Henry Higgins, because I couldn't possibly know, not being nine-hundred years old. It's my planet, sunshine, and don't you forget it.

I was lost in the wardrobes when he came looking for me this time. I'd found this weird skimpy cavewoman thing. And then an old school uniform with a straw hat and everything. The label said 'Romana', handwritten like a grown-up pretending to be a kid. Cavewomen and children, that's who he likes. He can tell them what to do, and they'll think he's so brilliant and masterful. Blech. No thank you.

"Take that off." He looked at me wolfishly.

"Don't you like it?"

"It belonged to someone else. And it was a different me."

"So why keep it?"

"Because it's all that's left when they leave. Can we get on?" He glared, then stalked away again.

"What will be left of me?" I shouted. His footsteps stopped for a moment, which felt like a small victory. I took the uniform off and followed him back to the control room.

"Is this about your father again?" He didn't even turn around.

"No. Maybe." He was right about some things. "I want to find him." It wasn't the only reason I'd come, but, well.

"He's in the past, Rose. You know where he is." Not unkindly, but spoken like someone who's lost more than a silly Earth-girl could.

"This isn't the past." He took the page I offered. "Don't hurt me, Doctor. A little girl got that five years ago and it fucked her up."

He read it. I'd shown Mickey the headers back then and he'd wondered what I was asking. It was obviously just some junk. IP address was way too long for a start, like everywhere in the universe had its own. And the year hacked to 3061 so that it would appear right at the top of any listing.

It wasn't long. It didn't need to be. Here was the word 'wayward', and there was the word 'drifting', and down below the crease were the words 'belong', and 'disciplined', and 'sometimes punished', then lower it said 'a good girl', and the last two words were just: 'Your dad'.

"We can find him."

He sighed. "Rose, listen. We have - " he looked back at some dial - "three hours to stop the destruction of time itself. This did not come from your dad."

"Yes it did. My dad sent it. There's nobody knows me as well as my dad."

"There's one person, Rose."

I can never tell him how much I wanted him to say: "Me, Rose. It's me." But he didn't. He played with the controls the way he does, like music, and then he told me it was sent.

"What?"

"It's gone, Rose. I sent it. You sent it. Now, can we get on?"

What will be left of me, Doctor?