Eternal Life is now on my trail
Got my red glitter coffin, man, just need one last nail
While all these ugly gentlemen play out their foolish games
There’s a flaming red horizon that screams our names - Jeff Buckley

In a brave move to save the environment save myself from the nightmare of the London underground I tend to walk to and from work everyday. It’s only a brisk 40 minutes promenade. Every so often I go through Bunhill Fields. It is an amazing secret lost in the heart of the City - a public open space which used to be a cemetery for dissenters and non-conformists. According to this page, it’s the last survivor of London’s once numerous small burial grounds.

And it’s the most heartbreakingly lovely place to walk through: on a couple of acres are hundreds of really old graves and tombstones surrounded by all kind of animals, and old people who feed them. I have seen squirrels numerous times, as well as cats, magnificent crows and what I still maintain to be a dove (and not a white pigeon). The birds are usually silently meditating on top of the grave, napping on top of human flesh and decay.

People walk their dogs there - today a young man was walking with Niki, his adorable 12 weeks husky friend who, he said, had been “very naughty” recently. I know because I was ear-dropping on his conversation with an older woman while pretending to pet the little furry animal.

Two weeks ago daffodils started to bloom and I can’t wait for them to be all over the green space. On the benches there’s always people napping, eating breakfast and chatting, and right next to it there’s a green space where little kids from the next-door school take their supervised recreational breaks. I’ve always found it quite weird, to see all the kids playing in a burial ground, those people sipping StarBucks, those couples cuddling under the shade - all of them surrounding by, well, corpses.

But see, that’s the interesting thing about this place: it is not gloomy or frightening at all. On the contrary, I would go as far as saying that it’s one of the prettiest and most enjoyable places I’ve found in the city so far.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that William Blake is buried there? Even if I am more a Baudelaire type of person, a touch of poetry is always welcome.

A couple of weeks ago Newsweek decided to perpetuate the cliche of the bad, bad youth too easily impressed by decadent rck stars by featuring Paris Hilton and Britney Spears on their front page. Followed an agonizingly ignorant, condescending and conservative-minded article seemingly written by a mother worried sick about her daughter’s admiration for teen-idol Lindsay Lohan.  Ugh.

After all, 2007 is the first year ever we hear about pop and rock stars’ substance abuse issues, isn’t it?

I can imagine Newsweek’s editorial meeting pretty clearly; in fact I picture it to be like those Orange advertisements featuring the infamous “Orange Film Funding board” - the ones the audience always sees in European theaters before any movie starts:

Marketing chief to Newsweek staff: We’re not doing so well these days. We need something to boost our sales, and can’t have G.W.Bush on our cover anymore.

Editorial staff: We can’t really beat the TIME’s “person of the year” idea though, they were too good on this one. Flattering one’s ego by making one believe he’s important, what a strike of genius!

Intern: Maybe we can scare our readers instead? They love to be frightenned: terrorism threats, pandemics, wars!

Editor in chief: That’s brilliant! We’ll assure every American family that their beloved children are about to become -gasp- sexually active adults! What’s more menacing than that! Putting to female teen idols on the cover will make this issue’s our best seller - young men can have sexual relationships if they want to, but women…

You get the idea.

(more…)

Rob is going to hate me for dissing Jack Bauer

Kanishk Tharoor and I were discussing the ‘merits’ of the TV series 24 he mentioned an interesting detail: Joel Surnow (who created and produces the show) is also the producer of the Fox News conservative news satire show “the 1/2 Hour News Hour“.The timing is perfect: 24 has recently been referenced for “inspiring” soldiers to torture detainees. According to Liberation (in french), an American governmental report published in 2004 notes that some officers use “methods they recall seeing in movies”. Add to this some fascinating statistics (102 scenes of torture shown on television from 1996 to 2001, compared to 624 from 2002 to 2006) and we are in for some frightening deductions.

Granted, the show is the perfect American drama: it is carefully crafted, full of suspense, explosions, patriotic heroism and romanticised violence. Yet, I found myself horrified at my immediate reaction when watching the 5th season on dvd: glued to the screen and holding my breath, I was silently encouraging Jack Bauer to demonstrate violence in order to obtain “crucial intelligence” which would enable him to complete his mission and save the day. And yes, that often involved torture.

The first five seasons of 24 gather sixty-seven torture scenes, all of them justified and portrayed as indispensable for the security and well-being of a country fighting its War Against Terror. Everything would be perfect in a fictional world if it all stick to merely being an unrealistic tv show. But as Andrew Sullivan points out:

What’s truly disturbing is how enthusiastic the Republican establishment is about this adoption of torture as the American way. The Heritage Foundation had a symposium celebrating the show (…) Michael Chertoff endorsed “24″, despite its endorsement of law-breaking by government officials. [ MORE TAG ] Then we discover this:

The same day as the Heritage Foundation event, a private luncheon was held in the Wardrobe Room of the White House for Surnow and several others from the show. (The event was not publicized.) Among the attendees were Karl Rove, the deputy chief of staff; Tony Snow, the White House spokesman; Mary Cheney, the Vice-President’s daughter; and Lynn Cheney, the Vice-President’s wife, who, Surnow said, is “an extreme ‘24′ fan.” After the meal, Surnow recalled, he and his colleagues spent more than an hour visiting with Rove in his office.

Now given the apparent sympathy which John Surnow seems to nurture for conservative politics, I am a little bit scared. American citizens wouldn’t want TV dictating the way their government treat their prisoners, would they?

Elsewhere: The Jack Bauer body count website helps you keeping track of the number of people the patriotic hero has executed.

In an outstanding performance in the 1998 movie Bullworth, Warren Beatty embodies a Democrat presidential candidate who is struck by some mysterious spell, and who starts speaking the truth to masses. He is slowly letting go of all his heinous and clever rhetoric, and only states pure facts and realities. His speeches drive his advisers and public relations consultants on the verge of a nervous breakdown: he uses slang and harsh, vulgar words; flames his own supporters and lobbyists for investing in oil companies; and when visiting a baptist church in South Central, yells to an African American audience:

‘Of course democrats only want your votes! Don’t think I am here today because I actually cares about black people!’

… Needless to say, Beatty’s character gets killed by a governmental agency before the end of the movie, for he is out of control and a threat to political institutions nationwide. In that sense, Orwell, in all his legendary subtelty, is right: gouvernmental officials should from time to time create a difference by dropping their conventional language of Politics, and adress the Nation in an honest prose, without being able to hide behind politically correct words and ready to use sentences.

Buzzwords and acronyms such as ‘WTO’, ‘alterglobalisation’, ‘indymedia’ are icons of simplification when it comes to complex issues - they often represent vague notions and ideas which people understand but do not grasp the entire reality of. And wo would blame the people? The never ending use of those terms, both within politics and the media landscape, makes the pointing and blaming game as simple and effective as a child’s toy. It becomes as easy as pie to accuse ‘bad governance’ for any unresolved domestic issues, or ‘globalisation’ for international ones, without having to publicly go into details and produce long reports on why the WTO’s rules turn into local decisions, which in turn send people on the dole.

The use of acronyms seems to be inherent in post baby boomers generations’ communicational lifeworlds. In his novel Generation X, Coupland made up entire lists of ‘post modern’ words (such as ‘McJobs’ or ‘I-ism’) in order to illustrate his cynical and yet hilarious outlook on our abuse of categorizations, which achieve nothing but pigeon-hole complex notions and individuals.

However, in this an accelerated culture, the use of such vernacular might prove to be useful, if vicious and misleading in essence. The media need to pass on tons of news content and comments as quickly and efficiently as possible, just as politicians do. Therefore they need to set a common set of references, which anyone can understand in the blink of an eye. It might be indeed pure fantasy, but it answers present obligations and demands which originate from the PR and media markets.

It might create some confusion, albeit a helpful one for political mentors, and it might also participate in the rise of alienation from the elite -who knows what really is at stake when using terms such as globalisation- and the masses, who more and more end distancing themselves from official forms of governments (the low turn out of voters speaks loud enough). The former prefer to associate themselves with ’single issue protests’ or flash movements (Make Poverty History, street protests against wars or oil price).

This might prove to be encouraging, showing that democracy is far from moribund and that people do care, but are tired to be manipulated by distant forces using a newspeak which does not sound truthful or convincing anymore. They want to take matters in their own hands and obtain real, visible results, while forgetting about hypocritical strategies aiming to get them to vote for someone whom at the end of the day might not be able to make any valuable difference in their every day lives.

The next step would be to ask the media to go more in depth when using terms tending to oversimplify a discourse. It might also mean that the media needs more accuracy, and unbiased commentary and analysis.

When recently reading about Orwell writing that ‘one can at least change one’s habit’, I immedialty thought about David Letterman, who as recently receiving Fox News’ Bill O’reilly a few weeks ago. After a long debate on politics, Bush’s policies and the ‘necessity’ to go to war, Letterman - usually a neutral, polite host- lost his nerve and told O’reilly:

‘I think 60 % of what you say is crap’.

That was a bold (if surprising!) move, but it was also sending O’reilly’s hateful bias and lies into the dustbin. Where they belong. I cheered. We need more people able to take a stand and speak out, if only to start more debates. Because that’s exactly what politicians fear: people pointing out their mistakes. It creates more accountability asked from the government, and de facto fewer lies.

Now, if only we had more journalists like the late Ed Murrow - ones who are not afraid of cornering powerful politicians, just doing their jobs while honouring their allegiance to Truth- seeking. In other words, what if we had more BBC and less Clear Channel?

Surely political language would drastically change. One can only hope.

I used to be a Suicide Girls enthusiast - I do enjoy pin-up aesthetic, Petty Page paraphernalia, corsets and gothic fashion, piercing and body modification art. I discovered the site back in 2004, when still a very-underground mouvement. A couple of dozens girls were posting pictures and the effort to make it a female, sex-positive environment was clear. My doubts began to grow when Nerve.com (another site I read religiously, and still somehow regard as a sex-positive, edgy community) started to aggressively promote Suicide Girls (the models, not the site) as a brand. Today I stumbled upon this:

“Alterna-chick apologists for SG-style pornulation (…) point to the website’s purported (and invisible) “female-positive” stance as evidence that Suicide Girls models are not exploited like conventional Penthousian objets de smutte. Naturally, there are ex-Suicide Girls who, noting that the site re-pimps their photos to hardcore sites as they decline in popularity with the SG staff, and that subscribers to the decidedly un-feminist Playboy have free access to SG, see things rather differently.”

Absolutely disapointing, not to mention downright exploitive. In many ways SG’s downfall reminds me of American Apparel (1) and the like: companies and sites that truly aimed for the best, but truly got lost along the way.

SG? I’ll switch to Fatal Beauty for this kind of imagery instead.

(1) AA and unions.