CC licensed image by David Shankbone

The phone hacking scandal in the UK is moving quickly. Senior media and police resign, and the storm starts gathering around Downing Street. The immorality of the gutter press is shocking but unsurprising; their illegal dealings with the police is likewise no news to anyone half-awake. The fact that it’s all been aired in public at last, with some genuine repercussions, seems astonishing. What’s happening seems somehow far more important than a general election in terms of shaping the political landscape of this country.

But John Pilger reminds us that a far greater Murdoch scandal remains mostly hidden Down Under:

The most enduring and insidious Murdoch campaign has been against the Aboriginal people, who were dispossessed by the arrival of the British in the late 18th century and have never been allowed to recover. “Nigger hunts” continued into the 1960s and beyond. The officially-inspired theft of children from Aboriginal families, justified by the racist theories of the eugenics movement, produced those known as the Stolen Generation and in 1997 was identified as genocide. Today, the first Australians have the shortest life expectancy of any of the world’s 90 indigenous peoples. Australia imprisons Aborigines at five times the rate South Africa during the apartheid years. In the state of Western Australia, the figure is eight times the apartheid rate.

Political power in Australia often rests in the control of resource-rich land. Most of the uranium, iron ore, gold, oil and natural gas is in Western Australia and Northern Territory—on Aboriginal land. Indeed, Aboriginal “progress” is all but defined by the mining industry and its political guardians in both Labor and coalition (conservative) governments. Their faithful, strident voice is the Murdoch press. The exceptional, reformist Labor government of Gough Whitlam in the 1970s set up a royal commission that made clear that social justice for Australia’s first people would only be achieved with universal land rights and a share the national wealth with dignity. In 1975, Whitlam was sacked by the governor-general in a “constitutional coup”. The Murdoch press had turned on Whitlam with such venom that rebellious journalists on The Australian burned their newspaper in the street. [...]

Using the language of its soulmate the London Sun, the Australian derides the “abstract debate” of “land rights, apologies, treaties” as a “moralizing mumbo-jumbo spreading like a virus”. The aim is to silence those who dare tell Australia’s dirty secret.

Read the full article here.

So of course I have a background rosy feeling about the guy. But, while I found his recent books Life Inc. and Program or Be Programmed to be well-written, sound advice, none of it comes close to this closing keynote talk he gave at a social media conference. He says:

I got really tired of listening to brand managers talk about their “Twitter strategies,” and by the time my closing keynote came around, it felt like I had watched the corporatization the net recapitulated over the course of the afternoon.

Please watch this if you’ve not come across Douglas’ recent ideas.

Firstly, Jim Bliss has an excellent piece on the absolute culpability of the media in how the relatively minor violent aspects of protests derail the event and its impact in popular consciousness.

Secondly, it seems that the police have succeeded in taking down a site that offered advice to the many who were arrested during that demo. Merrick has explained the situation on his blog, and has joined a number of people reprinting the advice, both to keep it available on the web, and to show solidarity with the protestors. Personally, without the people willing to take to the streets, the near future looks much glummer than it need be. Here is Merrick’s explanation and the original advice:

The trashing of Conservative Party HQ during a student demo last week took a lot of people by surprise, not just the police and public but many of the participants.

Many of them had never done anything like it before. As such, they are largely identifable on the footage, and police have been arresting many.

FITwatch—a site that campaigns about police repression of protest, especially throught the use of Forward Intelligence Teams who film and photograph everything—published some advice to protesters.

The police responded by making the webhost take the FITwatch site down for a year. FITwatch nonetheless remain committed to their work.

In defiance of this censorship, and also to assist with the prevention of people who’d only trashed property from getting arrested, the offending post has been republished all over the internet. The more places do it, the more likeoly it is that the Met will give up and leave it be.

So here it is. If you think it should be in the public domain, please republish it on blogs and message boards.

The remarkable and brilliant student action at [Conservative Party headquarters] Millbank has produced some predictable frothing at the mouth from the establishment and right wing press. Cameron has called for the ‘full weight of the law’ to fall on those who had caused tens of thousands of pounds of damage to the expensive decor at Tory party HQ. Responsibility is being placed on ‘a violent faction’, after the march was ‘infiltrated’ by anarchists.

There are an encouraging number of intiatives to show solidarity with the arrested students – something that is vital if they are to avoid the sort of punitive ‘deterrent’ sentences handed out to the Gaza demonstrators. A legal support group has been established and the National Campaign against Cuts and Fees has started a support campaign. Goldsmiths lecturers union has publicly commended the students for a ‘magnificent demonstration’ .

This is all much needed, as the establishment is clearly on the march with this one. The Torygraph has published an irresponsible and frenzied ‘shop-a-student’ piece and the Met are clearly under pressure to produce ‘results’ after what they have admitted was a policing ‘embarrassment’.

51 people have been arrested so far, and the police have claimed they took the details of a further 250 people in the kettle using powers under the Police Reform Act. There may be more arrests to come.

Students who are worried should consider taking the following actions:

If you have been arrested, or had your details taken – contact the legal support campaign. As a group you can support each other, and mount a coherent campaign.

If you fear you may be arrested as a result of identification by CCTV, FIT or press photography;

DONT panic. Press photos are not necessarily conclusive evidence, and just because the police have a photo of you doesn’t mean they know who you are.

DONT hand yourself in. The police often use the psychological pressure of knowing they have your picture to persuade you to ‘come forward’. Unless you have a very pressing reason to do otherwise, let them come and find you, if they know who you are.

DO get rid of your clothes. There is no chance of suggesting the bloke in the video is not you if the clothes he is wearing have been found in your wardrobe. Get rid of ALL clothes you were wearing at the demo, including YOUR SHOES, your bag, and any distinctive jewellery you were wearing at the time. Yes, this is difficult, especially if it is your only warm coat or decent pair of boots. But it will be harder still if finding these clothes in your flat gets you convicted of violent disorder.

DONT assume that because you can identify yourself in a video, a judge will be able to as well. ‘That isn’t me’ has got many a person off before now.

DO keep away from other demos for a while. The police will be on the look-out at other demos, especially student ones, for people they have put on their ‘wanted’ list. Keep a low profile.

DO think about changing your appearance. Perhaps now is a good time for a make-over. Get a haircut and colour, grow a beard, wear glasses. It isn’t a guarantee, but may help throw them off the scent.

DO keep your house clean. Get rid of spray cans, demo related stuff, and dodgy texts / photos on your phone. Don’t make life easy for them by having drugs, weapons or anything illegal in the house.

DO get the name and number of a good lawyer you can call if things go badly. The support group has the names of recommended lawyers on their site. Take a bit of time to read up on your rights in custody, especially the benefits of not commenting in interview.

DO be careful who you speak about this to. Admit your involvement in criminal damage / disorder ONLY to people you really trust.

DO try and control the nerves and panic. Waiting for a knock on the door is stressful in the extreme, but you need to find a way to get on with business as normal.

Otherwise you’ll be serving the sentence before you are even arrested.

Reading this post about the future of publishing, I found a number of interesting, depressing or exciting perceptions flying around like sparks from the clash between it and my current reading of Peter Ackroyd’s excellent Blake biography.

Seizing the means

Of course, the exciting part of it is the web’s promise to cut out the middle men: large publishers and distributors. The author of the post, Aaron Wall, a search engine optimization expert, calls for artists to become publishers (and for publishers to become artists). I’m way ahead of him on that one, editing and publishing my own stuff since before the web. Granted, it’s never been a commercial proposition, but the principle holds: optimism for the future has to include artists and writers seizing the means of production, and technology facilitating their expressions rather than commerce hampering them.

William Blake was way ahead, too, printing (with his tireless wife Catherine) many of his creations, famously pioneering a new print process known as relief etching. He used this technique to print his “illuminated books”, words and images combined on one metal plate.

Blake’s control over the technical means of his creativity was more than just a convenience. He understood the spiritual roots of McLuhan’s “medium is the message” centuries before media studies.

But first the notion that man has a body distinct from his soul is to be expunged; this I shall do, by printing in the infernal method, by corrosives, which in Hell are salutary and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.
If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.

Here, in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, he rallies the process of relief etching, where acids burn away unprotected parts of the copper printing plate, to stand as a metaphor for the lifting of the veils from our degraded sensual perceptions. But this is almost beyond the realm of metaphor, as his means of conveying his idea is itself symbolic of the idea.

What kind of world does our new media—untouchable, frictionless, both pervasive and ephemeral, empowering and bewildering—convey? Do we want to live there?

Information snacks

The post embeds a brief interview with Cory Doctorow on how to blog effectively, and his advice boils down to: write like a wire service writer. Write like your audience could put your words down after a few seconds, because they probably will. At least, the people that “count” will:

Most people with significant social and/or economic influence have (an equivalent of) attention deficit disorder, caused by an interruption-driven life cluttered with too much content and too little time. People may want to consume relevant bits [...] Little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us.

I’m more interested than most in nurturing our besieged attention spans; part of my reason for reviving my relationship with print publishing is to encourage more breaks with the flooding rush of information flow, more oxbow lakes of reflective reading, or at least some meanders.

But wasn’t Blake one of the masters of “little chunks of information that change how we perceive the world around us”? So much so that I’ve no need to throw any at you—most people reading this will have at least a few almost clichéd pithy quotes from his poetry and writing to hand. Scanning a compilation of Blake quotes, it’s astonishing how many they are, how brief they are, and how potent their kick of perceptual reconfiguring is.

Many great thinkers are (or can be) aphoristic thinkers: Nietzsche, Einstein, Lao Tsu, Voltaire, Wittgenstein… Need one mention Jesus? Or Woody Allen?

The closely sustained argument of Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death left him in a place where the revelatory infernal corrosives started breaking his language down into exaggerated, non-linear aphorisms, a kind of erudite prose poetry. He quotes McLuhan quoting Francis Bacon:

Aphorisms, representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire farther; whereas Methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at farthest.

Brown goes on to proclaim:

Systematic form attempts to evade the necessity of death in the life of the mind as of the body; it has immortal longings in it, and so it remains dead. [...] The rigor is rigor mortis; systems are wooden crosses, Procrustean beds on which the living mind is pinned. Aphorism is the form of death and resurrection: “the form of eternity”.

All of which is a far cry from the kind of disposable blandness that usually results from “best practices” in blog writing! Still, might Blake have found some affinity with the web, with its eagerness for snappy one-liners and aptitude for textual and visual combinations?

What’s missing here is, firstly, the state of the reader, and secondly, the value of thorough reading, even (or especially) of aphoristic writers. Aphorisms, as a kind of pocket poetry of ideas, can compact very sophisticated insights into tiny seeds of expression. For that insight to properly unfold, however, the ground must be receptive—as Jesus taught in his Parable of the Sower. “He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” (Luke 8:8) Which of us, hurried into a permanently anxious low-level emergency state, frazzled with caffeine, eager to click the next link or check our inboxes, has ears to hear much at all?

It’s true that the greatness of someone like Nietzsche is that he wasn’t a system-builder. And yet, there are subtly (or not-so-subtly) dangerous misinterpretations lying in wait to prey on anyone who hasn’t surveyed the full scope of his thought. James Hillman’s work is similar. There are core ideas and tendencies, but the experimental nature of this thought leaves an particular arc that unfolds through his career. Apprehending it all doesn’t leave you with a totalized “system”, but it naturally creates a much fuller understanding of his work. My good friend Jim assures me that Gregory Bateson’s eclectic oeuvre is similarly rewarded by a comprehensive reading. Connections between apparently disparate ideas reveal themselves; and one starts seeing that the connections are the point of his worldview.

But who has the time to read all of Nietzsche, Hillman or Bateson? The dark Satanic offices demand their vast share of your life, and our hyperconnected society lets their demands press ever harder.

Art, commerce, democracy

Ackroyd, early on in Blake, contrasts the London prophet with the Romantic poets he’s normally loosely lumped with. He makes much of the fact that, despite “the dark Satanic mills”, Blake didn’t share the Romantics’ aversion to commerce, making his way (just) throughout his life as an engraver.

It’s true that Blake’s life as an artisan, a tradesman, coloured him in ways that differentiate him from, say, Wordsworth and Coleridge. But what colour?

When he returned to London in 1804, after three generally unsuccessful years near the Sussex coast, Blake “was again enlightened with the light I enjoyed in my youth, and which has for exactly twenty years been closed from me as by a door and by window-shutters.” (Quoted in Ackroyd, p. 271) Ackroyd comments:

He is very specific about the period of darkness he has had to undergo, with a duration of twenty years up to this year of 1804. 1784 was the year in which his father died and in which he set up the print-selling business with James Parker in Broad Street. It was the beginning, then, of his life as a tradesman, conducted perhaps in emulation of his dead father.

He saw these two decades, wherein his youthful creativity was constantly restricted by commercial concerns, as time spent “as a slave bound in a mill among beasts and devils”.

In the interview with Aaron Wall where I found his post on publishing, Wall is asked what he thinks the net will look like 100 or 200 years from now.

I think the distinction between the web and the real world will be hard to draw, or perhaps non-existent. Communication technologies will keep evolving and information will available readily in whatever format you like, but with well blended ads. It will become nearly impossible to see the difference between ads and content.

This tendency towards intensifying the blend between commerce and art, advertising and communication, is it creating a hybrid culture that transcends both, some utopian marriage? Or is it the bars of the Black Iron Prison becoming invisible, seamless?

Wall states the obvious dynamic of commercial survival:

If I target an idea to a market and people tell me it is garbage then so much for that idea. If early feedback looks promising then it is time to dig deeper, do more research, read more, and write more. Invest where your interests align with the interest of others.

The web promises a broad democratization of the supply-demand axis in publishing. But—oodles of pointless and shit websites notwithstanding—I thought the point of cutting out the middlemen was to enable more diversity?* Of course Wall’s goal is to help people be more commercially successful, so I can’t criticize his good advice. It’s just indicative of the growing control that “the consumer” has over their media world. And while I generally champion this control, I can’t help but see its shadow: the death of revelation.

Audiences can’t be ignored. But they should never be obeyed (just as publishers or artists should never be obeyed by their audiences). The artist’s responsibility (which, as Wall noted, is destined to overlap with that of the publisher) is to a certain extent, as David Cronenberg noted, to be irresponsible. Not wilfully or gratuitously; but to challenge, to provoke, to proffer unpalatable truths. To surprise, to lift the veils. If everyone gets exactly what they want, much of value to life will remain unseen, held at bay.

The web may yet be a tool of conviviality, a means to negotiate between the oppressions of both fascism and democracy. Things don’t look too promising. But I am—I hope—still open to surprises and revelations.

I’ll just end by noting one of the final questions in the interview with Aaron Wall:

How much offline reading do you do?

Much less than I would like…

* I realize that for the most part, the move from top-down to bottom-up dictation of media content is a move towards more diversity. I don’t oppose this. The “diversity” I’m talking about (as becomes clear) is diversions from what people immediately want, in a surface, ego, “gimme this” kind of way.

Naturally, there are myriad questions. Most stories like this with simplistic causal models – people doing X also have Y, therefore X causes Y – leave me wondering about the actual complexities involved. What else was going on in these people’s lives? Was cannabis really a direct cause? Was it more of a catalyst for something simmering away due to other factors? How many people out there would be driven crazy by their jobs if it weren’t for them being able to wind down with a spliff in the evening?

There’s no doubt – and cannabis users know this better than any sober politician – that any psychoactive drug, when misused, can cause mental problems. Just as a builder’s tools can, when misused, cause a house to fall down. But leaping from this to questions of legality is more insane than any drug-induced delusion. As Timothy Leary said of LSD, psychoactive drugs can cause psychosis in people who haven’t taken them.

Let’s be charitable to these mentally unsound politicians, and humour them a little, try to calm them down a bit. Let’s say that in a small minority of people, cannabis can actually cause psychosis (even though there’s no evidence for that at all). Let’s also consider the slightly less deluded (but equally susceptible to gross media spin) idea that people with latent mental problems can have them triggered by – among other things – cannabis use.

Then, I ask: how are these poor people served by being criminalized and locked up? I’ve never seen any evidence that persecution and prison helps out with mental fragility.

And then, just as importantly, what about everyone else smoking cannabis, people who really like it and have no resulting mental problems – possibly even positive benefits. I wonder: how are these people served by being criminalized and locked up?

You see, when we talk these things through, it becomes a little clearer doesn’t it?

Bill Hicks

However, rubbernecker that I am, I just spent a short time reading about this extreme right-wing American media figure, just to see what the score is, after noticing a reference on the BBC site about her appearance on Newsnight:

Some bloggers—from that objective demographic of extreme right-wing, sexually frustrated males—thought she “beat Paxman”. One, a BNP member, throws in a classic Coulter quote:

If you don’t leave liberals in a sputtering impotent rage, you’re not talking to them right.

Of course Paxman is not quite a “liberal” (this side of the Atlantic, that is), but his muted, bemused response to her in the interview shows his class as much as any browbeating of British politicians. He obviously just can’t believe she’s serious. He smiles wryly at the end, and all but turns to the camera and shrugs his shoulders. Where else to go when someone seems like a vicious satire of themselves?

Well, dear Henry Rollins has found one other valid take on the matter:

It’s highly curious to me that I agree with some of her points, in their most basic form. Apparently her new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism accuses modern Darwinians of effectively being, despite their professed opposition to religion, creatures of faith themselves. I recently read Mary Midgley’s fascinating book Evolution As A Religion, which proposed the same argument. A more diverse pair of women than Coulter and Midgley you will not find, however, and Coulter’s take on the view is slightly less nuanced than Midgley’s. (In the same way that Cliff Richard is slightly less funky than Bootsy Collins.)

I’ve seen it a few times recently: right-wingers—presumably rabid free market types who shed not a tear for the underprivileged—decrying Darwinism as the invention of liberals. Oh, sorry, it’s fine if you wrongly apply this “wrong” theory to economics and society, but in the name of Jesus, can we all stop applying it to contentious areas such as biological evolution!

In any case, I paid a short, sweet visit to her official website, and clicked straight away on her “Reading for Right-Wingers”. I had to take a screengrab. Obviously it’s a server screw-up that might be fixed sometime, but it provided a crude visual joke for me to finish this on:

Via the Peak Energy blog, I just stumbled upon an absolute gem: Rob Newman’s History of Oil. Newman zips through oil-related global geopolitics, from the first Mesopotamian oil strike to Peak Oil and beyond, in a vaudeville style that’s hugely engaging. This TV adaptation has some brilliantly done additions, too (watch out for the graph plotting Middle Eastern politics against children’s TV from the 1970s).

It’s probably because I arrived at it via a serious energy blog that I saw it as being as much about learning history as having a good laugh. That said, it’s occasionally side-splitting—especially the inspired vision of Tony Blair as Goebbels. The overall effect, though, reminds me of Michael Moore’s genuine bewilderment at the fact that he’d ended up doing what he saw as the job of journalists: informing people about the important facts of the world situation. Newman’s show is worth at least ten times its duration in TV “news”.

Watch it now.

I’ve arrived in New York in the middle of an unfeasibly sticky, debilitating heatwave. Managed to get my fix of tourism from the Staten Island ferry trip; pondered the morbidly magnetic World Trade Center site; soaked up the hipster ambience of Williamsburg in Brooklyn (graffiti pictured is from there); and the thick, intoxicating vibrancy of the East Village. It’s an amazing process, gradually accumulating first-hand experiences of a cityscape so abundantly expressed in mass media, smelling and tasting the rich, often shitty loam out of which the over-familiar shoots and buds of Images and Icons have sprung. And of course, gradually seeing how a complex form of feedback is working, life on the street consuming and reflecting media representations, the withering flowers of pop culture falling to the soil and composting into fuel for ever more complex flora.

OK, I’ll wind up. I’m well aware I’ve just been reading Baudrillard and drinking coffee in one of the mostly hectically mediated places on the planet, so I’ll stop before things get messy.

a review by Gyrus

• Event date: 18th September 2003
• Venue: Heaven, Charing Cross, London

I sat near the entrance to start with, positive that someone I knew would have made it to this gig. Those friends who didn’t get tickets before it sold out and said they’d "try to get in" seemed a little beyond hope as soon as I was approached outside Heaven by punters looking for tickets before the touts got to me. Then someone who looked uncannily like a friend/girlfriend-in-passing from way back in Leeds came in—the same eyes, but much slimmer and dark instead of blonde hair. I was wavering on my decision that it wasn’t her when she caught my eye and instantly recognised me. So, drinks all round and some hasty catching up on 6 or 7 years…

I mention this by way of explaining that I totally missed supports Rory Phillips, Cobra Killer, and Johnny Slut‘s interspersed DJ sets. I was tucked away in a room talking house prices, having kids, resource depletion and mobile phone photos of old friends. The occasional, ever-drunker wanders through to the toilets were pleasant, exciting trips through crowds of stunning-looking, excited people, but none of the music—whether caught in snatches on the way to piss, or piped through to the bar where we were ensconced—grabbed me enough to make me think about relocating.

But, at some hazy point, we decided to get down there for Peaches. She comes on with a long blonde wig, red box guitar and a deep bass pulse, over which she grinds a persistent, buzzing riff. It arcs around us as the pink and blue lights swirl and Peaches sticks the guitar out from her crotch, mocking and glorifying standard male cock-rock into something new. Her new album, Fatherfucker, she describes as "70% more ‘herm’" (her/him/hermaphrodite) than her last. It seems to me like a great thing to do, to drag (no pun intended) this masculinised female stuff so far out of lesbian subculture into public consciousness that there’s now posters just down the road from me on Blackhorse Road showing Peaches in her lingerie-and-beard pose. Women have rocked as hard as men before, but no one else comes to mind as having so explicitly brought the underlying issues to the surface. In a 1997 interview, Phil Hine remarked on how our culture’s "very limited in what we accept as androgynous. I mean, Ziggy Stardust is an acceptable androgyne. Is a woman with a beard an acceptable androgyne?" Maybe a little more so thanks to Peaches…

Things explode into ‘I Don’t Give A ….’, and soon some female cohorts join her on stage, sporting big pink strap-ons for the jokey ‘Shake Yer Dix’. I’m very slightly crestfallen by this point, because what totally bowled me over about the other time I saw Peaches, last year at 93ft East on Brick Lane, was how her presence, energy and raw noise very organically galvanised the crowd into a thing unto itself, a seething mass that seemed to writhe and pulse to rhythms that no individual had much of a bearing on. Here, I felt the burden of accumulated hype that seems to paralyse London crowds. Acts have to be here at just the right time to tap into the London beast. Too early, not enough exposure, and you’re nothing, worth some applause, but why waste the energy if there’s no projected media vibe to feed off? Too late, too much exposure, and you’re confronted with a "Come on, then, impress me!" attitude that kills spontaneity.

Peaches takes to the crowd, climbing up the elevated walkway down the side of the venue and balancing precariously from the railings, and only me and a few others a lost enough in the music to not turn dutifully to gaze at the spectacle. I guess her new album had only just come out, so not many people were familiar with the tracks—and the majority of her set was new stuff. A friend told me he wasn’t coming to see her because even though he really enjoyed the vibrancy of the time he did see her, he thought she was a "one-trick pony". In a way I agree. But this woman has some trick: to whip a crowd into a frenzied riot of fun, benevolent aggression and forceful lust for life. Anyone coming along to hear their favourite song is surely missing the point.

So anyway, things kick off here and there. I lose my glasses, as at the last Peaches gig and the last time I saw Alec Empire. It was less of a miracle than in those mad mosh-pits that I managed to find them on the floor straight away, but I shoved them in my pocket nonetheless. Mostly, when a bit of moshing kicked off, a space was quickly cleared to make room for the nutters like me who actually wanted to throw their bodies around, like a timid, too-cool-for-that anti-vortex. It seemed natural that the only other people down there really letting rip, in a state that’s open to injury (like Peaches, whose legs were covered in bruises at the start of the night) but lacking any will to injure, were mostly women. Here’s to you!

What really got me was the screen that was brought onstage. Suddenly there’s a life-size projection of Iggy Pop there, for Peaches to do their duet ‘Kick It’ with. Everyone went mad. This, together with the by now familiar phalanx of digital photographers at the front, who always seemed to feed more deeply from the show than the crowd, cemented a perception that’s been slowly mounting of late. The image really is gaining ground on the flesh. We should be worried, especially if we don’t fully see what this observation means. For myself, I decided to ban photos from my gig reviews.

The blinding, white-hot barbarism of ‘Rock ‘n’ Roll’ burned this away for me. Then Peaches tried to get a karaoke thing going for the track that everyone seems to love—’Fuck The Pain Away’. (I doesn’t seem to be anywhere near her best to me. Maybe it makes more sense when you’ve someone to fuck the pain away with—cue mournful violins). Well, I couldn’t have sung any better than the people who tried, but Peaches’ reaction was instant: "They were a lot better in Glasgow." I didn’t doubt it for a second.

To cap it all, both of her dives into the audience to crowd-surf ended quickly with everyone under her collapsing down before she’d been carried even 5 feet from the stage. "I’m glad I’m not down there!" she said when was was back onstage, and for someone at the back they might have imagined she was relieved to have emerged in one piece from chaos. It was easy to see from the front that she was just being tactful about how limp we all were.

a review by Gyrus

• Released: 2001

I steered well clear of this when I saw the trailer at the cinema. A pretty people vehicle trying to be hip and edgy? No thanks. I wasn’t aware that it was a Hollywood remake of a European original (Abre los ojos, 1997)—and let’s face it, that would hardly have been encouragement if I had known.

So when I finally, still with a vague grudge, got round to checking it out on video, my sneer appeared quickly as it opened to the strains of Radiohead. Not only was this slick young film trying to stretch its avant-pop credibility, so was this slick young character, David Aames (Tom Cruise). Still, at least since Born On The Fourth Of July, most definitely since Magnolia, Cruise has proved himself to be more than meets the eye, so I persisted…

Now, unexpected surprises are always the most potent, so this film formed a mini obsession for me in the week or two that followed seeing it for the first time. My initial cynicism turned out to be mostly a case of misplaced judgement, believing too soon that the film operated at no greater level than that of its shallow, irritatingly blasé protagonist. At the start of the film, David Aames—a brash, womanising inheritor of a massive media empire—is insufferable. If you’ve no patience for such a character, or your empathy is limited to people who "really" suffer (i.e. people without money), you’ll not go far with this film—save yourself the bother and leave it be.

The crux of the film is a savage car crash, where Aames’ on-and-off friend/lover Julie Gianni (Cameron Diaz in a great performance) commits suicide in a jealous rage with him in the passenger seat. Julie dies, Aames lives on, with a disfigured arm and face, and unbearable neurological pain. My admiration for Cruise rocketed here. Nowhere in the publicity for the film had this twist been hinted at, as far as I’d seen. That poster, just Cruise’s moody face against the sky, probably lured no end of people into the film on its own. I can’t help but imagine Cruise and director Cameron Crowe delighting at the prospect, knowing how they were going to undermine such expectations.

As Aame’s relationship with archetypal dream-woman Sofia Serrano (Penélope Cruz) progresses—after being crushed out of shape just after its initiation by the car crash—things get stranger and stranger. Reality descends into a jittery, fragmented maze of confusion as a masked Aames pores over his recent past with a therapist (Kurt Russell). Confusion between Sofia and Julie—and Sofia’s name—underline a tremendous debt to Philip K. Dick (it does seem grossly odd that Tom Cruise ends up as Dick’s biggest and best champion in Hollywood, but so be it).

The mind-bending finale may leave you feeling cheated, unless you’ve loved the rest of the film enough to swallow your pride—in which case you’ll watch it all again and feel enriched.

The Shallowness of Depth

Highly curious after seeing this captivating film, I browsed the web to find other reviews, and unsurprisingly found a great split in opinion. The unafraid-to-be-low-brow sites such as Ain’t It Cool News loved it. Most edifying, I found, were the left-of-centre mainstream reviews.

Take Salon.com. With zero sense for hidden Gnostic depths, the reviewer ridicules the scene where Sofia playfully passes her hand through a hologram of John Coltrane at a party. Even more fascinating is the reviewer’s loathing for Penélope Cruz, "with her rubberized lips and ‘Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful’ hair." The thrust of it all is: this film is trying to be "deep", and it fails miserably because the two leading actors are pretty.

And over at The Guardian, we’re told that "the big deal is that Tom’s gorgeous chops are ruined in a car wreck, so he’s sobbing in front of the bathroom mirror and gazing in horror at his (not that yucky) scars and deformities." Hmmmm. Never mind the crippling pain, Tom—cheer up!

All this tells my bullshit detector that these reviewers are guilty of the very thing they despise: shallowness. That would explain their venom. Such is the condition that makes final judgements on films based on an actor’s hair and lips, or on the portrayal of vanity in a study of wounded vanity.