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Greatest Hits
Death Disco
Cinematic Smoking I II
Intro to Eric Rohmer
Michel Who?
Contra John Doyle
Tony Blair Speaks
In re Rachel Marsden
50th Birthday Interview
The May Coup d'État
My Glorious Ancestors
What's A Redneck?
Shaidle vs Zerbisias
An Old Lesbian Forgets
RIP Ron Basford
Closer: Four Manikins In Search Of A Soul
Canada: America's
Discount Drugstore

Morris Dees: Scamster
Who Is Malcolm Azania?
Lord Black's Disgrace

What Nancy Pelosi Said
Irshad Manji And Oxymoronic Islam
Roger Scruton's The West And The Rest
Mark Steyn: Decline and Fall Illustrated
American Weimar
Arise Sir Mick Jagger!
Bach, Beethoven, Brahms And Beefcake
Evelyn Waugh Triumphant
IC: Are Bathroom Breaks OK?
J'accuse: Death Of 
the Report I
II III IV
Ben Mulroney: The Truth
Is KMG Bad In Bed?
The Spy Who Bored Me
Mark Harding: The Unknown Martyr
RIP Joe Strummer
Intelligent Design: The
Revolt Against Darwin
Attila The Hun: My Stalker
Immigration: Electing A New Canadian People
Fiat Lux!
Mad, Bad Glenn Gould
Why The Nuclear Family 
Isn't Worth Saving

Fear And (Self-)Loathing
On The Canadian Right

RIP Auberon Waugh

Mail not intended for publication should be clearly noted as such

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

TV now tells you what to feel.

It doesn't tell you what to think anymore. From EastEnders to reality format shows, you're on the emotional journey of peopleand through the editing, it gently suggests to you what is the agreed form of feeling. "Hugs and Kisses," I call it.

I nicked that off Mark Ravenhill who wrote a very good piece which said that if you analyze television now it's a system of guidanceit tells you who is having the Bad Feelings and who is having the Good Feelings. And the person who is having the Bad Feelings is redeemed through a "hugs and kisses" moment at the end. It really is a system not of moral guidance, but of emotional guidance.

Morality has been replaced by feeling.

That's what all the disorders are about. They are a way of oppressing and measuring whether what you're feeling is the correct feeling. Intellect and morality are intimately related, but feeling is now predominant.
Adam Curtis

Kevin Michael Grace, 3.15 pm, 26 October 2008

COMFORTER, WHERE, WHERE IS YOUR COMFORTING? 
PAULSON, FATHER OF US ALL, WHERE IS YOUR RELIEF?

Trust Diane Francis to get to the heart of the matter: 

America's political dysfunction and its economic crisis intersected catastrophically yesterday in the House of Representatives, which failed to pass the bailout for Wall Street's mess.

At issue is President George Bush's lack of credibility. As commander in chief, he exaggerated the threats in Iraq in order to launch a needless trillion-dollar invasion. Now, as America's CEO, nobody's listening to his description of the situation as "dire" and "dangerous" as he pulls the fire alarm over Wall Street.

To many, it's a case of fool us once, shame on you. Fool us twice, Bush, shame on us.

Unfortunately, this time he may be right and a rescue is needed.

The contagion will spread. Five banks had to be propped up over the weekend, and in Toronto, financial sources tell me that three high-profile condo projects have had their financing pulled. The leveraged buyout of BCE and others could be casualties. Trump's empire is for sale.

You know, before I read this, I was against the buyout. I saw it as foolish and unavailing, succour for socialists, money down a rathole. But now I see how selfish I was. Francis has placed the whole horror of the alternative before my eyes, causing the scales to positively leap from them. Condo projects in T.O. put on ice? BCE's leveraged buyout deep-sixed? Trump threatened with bankruptcy again? No, no, it's too much. Surely we must now all agree that there is no price too high, no sacrifice too great, no fraud too stinking to allow us to even consider mussing a single hair of The Donald's magnificent comb-over.


A personal appeal from The Donald: 'Unless the bailout passes, thousands
of stylists and L'Oréal employees will be fired. Won't you please help?'

Kevin Michael Grace, 7.30 am, 1 October 2008

MORAL LEADERSHIP

Unintentional hilarity from Jane Taber of the Globe and Mail:

Stephen Harper used some of his most specific language to date Monday in saying a re-elected Conservative government would not reopen the debate over the country's abortion law because there are too many other important issues to deal with.

"We have a lot of challenges in front of the country," Mr. Harper said during an announcement about arts and fitness funding for children. "We have a difficult world economy, as we all know. That has to be the focus of the government and I simply have no intention of ever making the abortion question a focus of my political career." [Emphasis added.]

It's nice to know what Stephen Harper, the Doughboy Demosthenes, considers important and what he considers unimportant. Government-sponsored sit-ups and fingerpainting for the kiddies: vitalgovernment-sponsored legislation to protect the would-be kiddies from being killed, up to and including the time when their little heads protrude from the womb: uh, not so much. 

And as this story makes clear, "family man" Stephen Harper will put paid to any non-government-sponsored efforts to protect the unborn. So one can only marvel at the advice proffered by Jim Hughes of Campaign Life Coalition: "Harper's statements proved once again that pro-life advocates must vote for the pro-life candidate in their own ridings regardless of the party they represent."

Why? So quisling fucks like Jason Kenney can continue to bask in a wholly-undeserved moral superiority even as they continue to serve the most pro-abortion government in the Western world? 


We're the Harpers, and we approve this 'intact dilation and extraction'

Kevin Michael Grace, 6.45 am, 1 October 2008

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Too often today people are ready to tell us: 'This is not possible; that is not possible.' I say: whatever the true interest of our country calls for is always possible. We have nothing to fear but our own doubts.
Enoch Powell

Kevin Michael Grace, 5.40 am, 1 October 2008

THE BAILOUT EXPLAINED IN 8:49 (JOHN BIRD AND JOHN FORTUNE)

Kevin Michael Grace, 2.25 am, 30 September 2008

BECAUSE IT'S NEVER TOO LATE TO HATE KID ROCK

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Wayne Gladstone is funny. And so his videos are no longer on Funny or Die —check this out, I dare you—but on Cracked, a mag I'd figured had gone to the Great Compositor in the Sky decades ago. Turns out it's a website now. Not half-bad, either. 

Hey, d'ya think Sarah Palin likes The Kid? To ask the question is to answer it.

Kevin Michael Grace, 2.07 am, 30 September 2008

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Credit Default Swaps a Wiki definition pulled from the future: 
 
Credit Default Swaps (CDS) were used in through the turn of the millennium to spread and amplify risk systematically through the economy and is considered one of the main impetus leading to the Great Calamity (see also: Great Fiat Collapse). On its face, CDSs were essentially unregulated insurance of debt provided by a counterparty. In hindsight, the CDS clearly was an organized attempt to lock in all financial profits by allowing the unelected financial arm of the government to back all private debts (see: Goldman Sachs Cabal, Wall Street Trials). This was because the layers of the CDSs formed a complex interlocking web with a leveraged value of several times the entire economic system of the time, so that if any major failure was not prevented with a public bailout, it would bring the whole system down as the swaps were forced to unwind (see: MAD, Financial Terrorism). A CDS, or issue of any similar financial instrument, is now punishable by immediate execution of each involved corporation's board of directors (See: Corporate Mortal Accountability and Finance Reform Act of 2022).
'MethodMan,' commenter on Mish's Global, September 16, 2008

Kevin Michael Grace, 12.10 am, 30 September 2008

INTRODUCTORY TRIG

The most common question I hear from readers these days is, "What's the deal with that Palin baby name?" Fairly obvious, I should have thought. Trig Paxson Van Palin is clearly an homage to that "hard rock" combo of the 1980s, Van Halen. But which Van Halen, you ask? Classic David Lee Roth? Populist Sammy Hagar? Or Gary Cherone, the George Lazenby of VH frontmen? Well, husband Todd is Diamond Dave all the way (fave tune: "Panama"), while his wife Sarah, who can't resist belting out "I can't drive 55" whenever she burns up the A-1 to Anchorage, of course touts Sammy (fave tune, another solo effort, is the immortal "Red" —"Some like it hot/I like it red"). As for their older children... 

[Editor's note: They want to know about the first name, you nitwit] Well, According to the authoritative People, it was husband Todd who decided to choose the odd, not to say reprehensible, Christian name "Trig," although I'm not sure I believe this. My own experience has been that "creative" baby names are almost always the mother's inspiration. Again, according to People, Todd claims that "Trig is a Norse name for 'strength.'" Todd is almost certainly wrong here. I suspect someone in a bar told him this, or he came across it in one of those cheap, fraudulent books consulted by parents proud to advertise their deracination. I do know there is a Norwegian name Trygve and that there was a famous Norwegian who bore it. According to this source, which looks reasonable, it is "derived from Old Norse tryggr meaning 'trustworthy.'" After last night, which saw a newly infantilized nation bow its will to the Palin clan's overpowering fertility, we can only hope that Sarah is indeed as "trustworthy" as her most recent blessed event! 

Kevin Michael Grace, 8.04 pm, 4 September 2008

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

When one is in prison, the most important thing is the door.
Robert Bresson

Kevin Michael Grace, 11.52 pm, 3 September 2008

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY (SPECIAL BRISTOL PALIN EDITION)

As far as the moral health of a nation can be affected by any human agency, it is affected by prophets and priests and not by politicians. But this certainly has been one of the best field days that the self-righteous have had since Parnell was cited as co-respondent in O'Shea's divorce case. In all these miseries, the fact that so many people have found some genuine happiness is something to which, in all charity, we have no right to object.
Nigel Birch, Speech in the British House of Commons on the Profumo Affair, 17 June 1963


Bristol (right): Adding enormously to the gaiety of the nation

Kevin Michael Grace, 7.00 am, 2 September 2008

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Well, Mrs Pettigrew, I do so remember our two uncles together, and we were all staying down in Dorset. There was a bishop and a dean and our two uncles. Oh, poor Tempest was bored. They were discussing the Scriptures and this manuscript called "Q." How Tempest was in a rage when she heard that "Q" was only a manuscript, because she had imagined them to be talking of a bishop, and she said out loud, "Who is Bishop Kew?" And of course everyone laughed heartily, and then they were sorry for Tempest. And they tried to console her by telling her that "Q" was nothing really, not even a manuscript, which indeed it wasn't, and I must confess I never understood how they could sit up late at night fitting their ideas into this "Q" which is nothing really.
—Muriel Spark, Memento Mori

Kevin Michael Grace, 10.55 am, 1 September 2008

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

In Sinatra's time it was really cool to be 50, to be a man. You put on a hat, and a suit and you keep on going until you die. Now you get 50-year-old guys in sleeveless T-shirts, going to the gym and desperately trying to fix their hair, and you think: 'Whatever happened to real men?'"
Rob Dougan

Kevin Michael Grace, 7.17 pm, 30 August 2008

MASTERS OF PROSE

In the end I believe Obama will win because McCain is aligned with the unpopular Bush regime. But until then, it's a high-stakes branding chess game no different than selling soap or cornflakes or SUVs or Brad Pitt only a lot more important to humanity.
—Diane Francis, "Obama McCain Brand Strategies," National Post, July 27, 2008

Let's see: Obama is going to win, but everybody agrees to go through the motions, which take the form of a board game, which is no different than selling consumer goods or Brad Pitt (what about Angelina?) and is terribly important to humanity, hence the "high stakes," except that Obama has it already wrapped up. Don't ask me to imagine what "branding chess" might be.  I got as far as pawns reaching to the eighth rank and then being promoted, not to Queens, but to Cadillac Escalades...and then blood started seeping from my ears. This isn't writing; this is Mad Libs.


Francis: The José Raúl Capablanca
of the mixed metaphor

Kevin Michael Grace, 7.10 pm, 30 August 2008

LOWER 48 WELCOMES FREAK STATE VEEP

WASHINGTONAmericans reacted mostly positively Friday to the surprise selection by John McCain of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as Republican nominee for Vice President. The 37-year-old Palin continued her meteoric rise to political demigod status, which began just 9 years ago, when she was elected Mayor of Kolyma, AK, population 79, and continued two years ago when she was elected Governor after the entire Republican state hierarchy was indicted for corruption and then photographed in a giant hot tub with underaged Boy Scouts. 

In an already historic Presidential year, one that has seen left-field Democratic candidate Barack Obama ride a wave of guilty hysteria to triumph over supposed sure-thing Hillary Clinton, Gov. Palin brings her own considerable exoticism to the table. A working mother, she is married to her dog-mushing school sweetheart, Ookpik, who runs a thriving seal-gutting business when not doing something or other for Alaska's only major employer, Big Oil. Ookpik, who is 1/32 Eskimo on his stepmother's side, is an X-treme moose-eating champion and enjoys staring at the aurora borealis. The Palins have five children, Truck, Trig, Sine, Cosine and Hypotenuse. 

The glamorous Gov. Palin is sure to turn heads on the campaign trail. Chosen Miss Skagway in 1989, she was featured in Vogue last year wearing the traditional Alaskan summer costume of mukluks and a dress constructed entirely of ThermaCare heat patches. 

Experts contend that Gov. Palin's candidacy will considerably enlarge Sen. McCain's base of embittered Bush'ite loyalists, hedge traders and End Timers. According to Catholic University of America political scientist Ed Neuwirth, "She will go over especially well with 'curling' moms, men who think women who wear $1,500 titanium eyeglasses are 'hot' and all Americans ignorant of the 25th Amendment to the Constitution" (which stipulates that upon the death or incapacity of the President, the Vice President assumes his office).

David Gergen, U.S. News & World Report editor-at-large and former adviser to Presidents Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton, had particular praise for the choice, saying, "Sen. McCain has demonstrated his bedrock commitment to our core national values of vibrancy, diversity and the Hail Mary pass." 

Dan Quayle, however, struck a discordant note. Reached at his home in Paradise Valley, AZ, the former Vice President declared, "You remember the shit I went through when Bush picked me in '88? I was 'too young' and 'too inexperienced.' Well, compared to this broad, I was Daniel Fucking Webster." Quayle refused further comment, mumbling enigmatically, "It's Miller time."

Sen. McCain celebrated his 72nd birthday Friday, and his VP pick was expected to be closely scrutinized, considering the sensitive topic of his bumptious decrepitude. A former spokesman for defeated rival former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney said off the record, "We all wondered about it, since we all know he's got a 50/50 chance of stroking off in any given week. There's a rumor been going round for months that McCain signed a deal with the Devil, promising that he'll be elected President if he agrees to allow his soul to be ripped from his husk of a body and delivered shrieking into the bowels of Hell at precisely 12 noon, January 20, 2017. I never gave [the rumor] much credence before, but then he went and picked Palin. Makes you think, doesn't it?" Calls to the Devil's head office in Las Vegas were not returned. 


She doo: 
Gov. Palin on her morning commute to the state capital in Juneau

Kevin Michael Grace, 5.12 pm, 29 August 2008

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

"You're as bad as my friend Arthur," said Ferdie. "He seriously believes that nothing violent need ever happen if we all get together and love one another."

"Love," said Nina Cattermole. "Yes, I think there is definitely a place in any non-violent revolution for personal relationships."

"I agree," said Ferdie. "There's this girl called Elizabeth Pedal in the class who I am beginning to think seriously about. But I never let that sort of thing interfere with one's political beliefs."

"Don't you?" said Nina, looking him in the eyes. Ferdie smiled. She might have something. One did get rather bored sitting in the office for hours on end, doing nothing.

"But seriously," he said. "I am not sure that I want a revolution anyway. And if I did, my experience of revolutions is that they have to be pretty violent. You will never goad the inert grey masses of the English proletariat into doing anything violent, so you might as well give up any ideas of a revolution."

"This is precisely what I have been trying to say all along. Because the English working class is so inert, grey and inarticulate, it will put up no opposition to a revolution  provided it is non-violent. As soon as you start shooting people, or hanging them, the English fill up with Dunkirk spirit and make trouble. But if you just quietly take over the Government and start passing laws, nobody would notice. The would complain about it in the pubs, of course, and a few people would write letters to the Daily Telegraph, but everybody would realize in their hearts that we were being progressive."

"And how are you going to quietly take over the Government?" Scorn poured off Miss Catterpole's back like fat from a basted duck, leaving her slightly browner and tastier than before.

"By a gradual process which need not even be conscious. It is happening all the time, although, of course, it will be speeded up a bit when the younger people like ourselves begin to make themselves felt in politics."
Auberon Waugh, Who Are The Violets Now? (1965)

Kevin Michael Grace, 12.44 am, 29 August 2008

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Ofcom's annual report on the communications market offers a nightmare picture of British society in which everyone is trying to do several things at the same time. People watch only six minutes less television a day than they did in 2002 - but television is no longer enough to keep them satisfied. The young, in particular, are constantly using their mobile phones and checking the internet, even while they are watching TV. Sending text messages is especially popular, with the number sent in 2007 having risen by 36% from the previous year to an astonishing 60bn. According to Ofcom, there are now more mobile phones in circulation than there are people in the United Kingdom.

The spread of the internet and mobile telephony has produced a compulsion to keep in touch that prevents people from concentrating on any one thing at a time. It is, of course, nice to communicate with other people occasionally, but to do so constantly and for no particular purpose is a kind of disease.

Why do people do it? Are they frightened of missing out, or of being forgotten or overlooked? Whatever the reason, it means that they are losing the ability to focus for long on anything, which can't be a good idea. It can only result in us all becoming more stupid, more ignorant, and more neurotic.

Addiction to communication seems to me as dangerous as addiction to cigarettes or alcohol and should perhaps be taken as seriously by the health authorities, who might advise treatment in the form of a few hours reading or meditation a day.
—Alexander Chancellor

Kevin Michael Grace, 12.11 am, 23 August 2008

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

My father worked in a greengrocers' shop for 35 years; my mother was a housewife before she committed suicide in 1987. They were both lifelong Labour voters. My mother hanged herself in the house she lived in all her life, in Southall, west London, a town that had changed beyond all recognition. It is today the least white place in the whole of Britain.

She wrote in her suicide note: "I hate Southall, I feel so alone." In case anyone dare accuse her of any racism, she may have hated Southall, but my mother was incapable of hating people. She worked in the last years of her life as a dinner lady in an all-Asian school and was much loved. But she was lost. Her world had disappeared.

Her dilemma is partly the dilemma of the white working class...

By what methods were the white working classes (WWC) despatched? The first development that undermined WWC hopes and morale was the great betrayal in education the abolition of grammar schools and the retention of private schools.

Grammar schools, in the guilt-ridden WLMC [white liberal middle classes] view of things, favoured middle-class children over working-class children. What they actually favoured or could have favoured, if the tests were designed sufficiently well was clever children over less clever children. And if you look at the dynamism of the post-war grammocracy (Pinter, Dyke, Potter, Jacobson, Sillitoe, Bragg, Bennett and hundreds of others), it provided a crucial injection of WWC sensibility into the wider culture...

The second great betrayal was multiculturalism. This was the creed that said all cultures were as valid as each other (in theory) but that minority cultures were somehow no one was quite sure how actually superior to the host white indigenous culture which was axiomatically racist. So even if you happen to come from a culture that endorsed female circumcision and was misogynist and homophobic, it was a given that you were a "victim." And who were the "victimisers"? The WWC who were faced with the profound challenge and stresses of assimilation.

There was a lot of WWC resistance to immigration. This was partly about racism, which, of course, the WLMC are immune to. Something in the organic bread, I think. But it was also about losing housing opportunities, cheap labour taking away jobs, and the simple, profound problem of learning to exist in a new kind of culture, which in some cases overwhelmed and bewildered the indigenous one. The trick of learning to feel ashamed at the same time as everything was being taken away from you was a really hard one to pull off...

The third great betrayal was the WLMC determination to stamp out nationalism at least if you were English. If you were Scottish, Welsh or Irish, of course, you could celebrate your flag and your culture as loudly and proudly as you liked. But if you were native WWC, to celebrate St George and the English flag was racist. This is because the WWC, despite being stuck down mines and corralled in factories, apparently managed to exploit their colonial brothers and sisters throughout the previous centuries, so they could no longer show pride in their own country, the country that their parents and grandparents died for and suffered for in two world wars in the second one fighting a racist tyrant. They continue to die in Iraq and Afghanistan. And without complaint, because they have learned to be quiet and to be ashamed of who they are and accept that they aren't "good" like the WLMC, who lived in all-white enclaves and to whom multiculturalism meant a nice Continental deli at the end of the road.

What else? The utopian council estates of the 1960s and 1970s the WLMC, pursuing their project of bracing architectural piety, uprooted whole WWC communities and put them in ugly, unliveable blocks, leaving them without a sense of place or meaning, while the architects and town planners themselves lived in little Edwardian terraces or Cotswold villages. Since the great council house sell-off of the 1980s fiercely opposed, of course, by the liberal left many of the WWC have bettered themselves. But now that the housing stock has run out and run down, those left behind are beached and helpless.

Who can wonder why the white working classes have got themselves a bad name? Who can wonder why they are angry, why they are despairing, why they carry knives, fight and drink themselves into oblivion...

Do I look down on the WWC now that I am middle class myself? Probably. But I don't hate them, not in the way I hate the people who destroyed and abandoned them, the ideologues and meddlers that have left them without a meaning and without a home and without an escape. I'll keep voting Left because I can't imagine voting Tory, and the Lib Dems are a wasted vote. But I know that, in the end, I am voting for a double-talking mealy-mouthed enemy of everything they purport to be promoting equality, opportunity, fairness. They are the living embodiment of Lao Tse's greatest truth and the source of the white working classes tragedy that "goody goodies are the enemies of virtue."
Tim Lott, "White, Working Class And Threatened With Extinction: It's The Do-Gooding Liberal Middle Classes That Have Betrayed Those 'Beneath' Them," Independent, 9 March 2008

Kevin Michael Grace, 12.05 pm, 27 March 2008

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

The fact that it is considered "daring" for the BBC to make a series of programmes about the problems and fears of the white working class (i.e., the majority) tells you all you need to know about the BBC and much of what you need to know about Britain.

Richard Klein, the series commissioner, must have fought hard to get sanction for programmes about the mere majority.

The most daring programme so far (in media eyes) has been the sympathetic picture of Enoch Powell.

It conveyed his rage that the populace was never consulted about the drastic change being made in its composition and culture without so much as a by your-leave.

Politicians on both sides, furious about the "river of blood" speech in 1968, claimed thenand some still dothat Powell's speech hindered reform.

It was so extreme, you see, that it made it difficult for us moderate men to do something about immigration, which we obviously had intended to do when the occasion was suitable, when the time was right, at the appropriate juncture, etc.

I promise you as God is my witness that what the two frontbenches wanted to do was nothing, nil, zero, rien and nicht. It was this conspiracy of silence and inertia which enraged Powell and much of the public.

It is understandable why he became hated by Labour figures like Roy Hattersley, interviewed on the programme. For it meant that he and his fellow socialists had been found out.

For all their supposed unique contact with the masses, and their beliefs that the proles would naturally trust Labour to be told what was right, here was an aroused and angry public indicating the opposite.

It undermined the very basis of many a Labour politician's lifelong belief along with his faith in the universal brotherhood of man.

Powell was scarcely less hated by various Tory politicians because an election was looming and here was this bloody man turning everything upside down, enraging the opinion-forming elite and insisting that the party had jettisoned its responsibilities.

Interestingly enough, a middle-of-the-road Tory from that elite assured me the other day that immigration was not a problem, though he admitted "there are still some difficulties with the white working class."

It is a remark worth treasuring. Framing, if not embalming.

Powell was always an uncomfortable man politically, his impassioned attack in 1959 on the official hushing-up of atrocities in Kenya's Hola Camp for Mau Mau terroristsDenis Healey describes it as the finest Parliamentary speech he ever heardwas a nuisance for the Macmillan Government.

Powell also deplored our nuclear deterrent: he wanted an end to our bases East of Suez and an end to posturing as a world policeman.

He saw the Soviet threat as greatly exaggerated and the Anglo-American alliance as a menace. Ted Heath's prices and incomes policy was "madness."

Enoch was my oldest friend in politics, and in later years he would regularly invite me to scrutinise his speeches in advance. I would sometimes comment that his remarks would upset many people. His usual reply was that they needed to be upset.
Andrew Alexander


Powell: Mea mihi conscientia pluris est quam omnium sermo

Kevin Michael Grace, 7.40 pm, 14 March 2008

THREE SHORT REVIEWS

The Darjeeling Limited

Guest reviewer: GK Chesterton

According to Mrs Besant th[e] universal Church is simply the universal self. It is the doctrine that we are really all one person; that there are no real walls of individuality between man and man. If I may put it so, she does not tell us to love our neighbours; she tells us to be our neighbours. That is Mrs Besant's thoughtful and suggestive description of the religion in which all men must find themselves in agreement. And I never heard of any suggestion in my life with which I more violently disagree. I want to love my neighbour not because he is I, but precisely because he is not I. I want to adore the world, not as one likes a looking-glass, because it is one's self, but as one loves a woman, because she is entirely different. If souls are separate love is possible. If souls are united love is obviously impossible. A man may be said loosely to love himself, but he can hardly fall in love with himself, or, if he does, it must be a monotonous courtship. If the world is full of real selves, they can be really unselfish selves. But upon Mrs Besant's principle the whole cosmos is only one enormously selfish person.

Grade: C-


The Darjeeling Limited: The wheels in the brain go round and round

In Bruges

This is another spiritual journey, featuring hitmen, two Irish and one English, who are philosophers as all movie hitmen these days must be, just as all movie policemen must be head cases. Colin Farrell's hitman is a head case too, but any competent moral theologian could have told him that the second killing he agonizes over was no more evil than the first which precipitated it.  Suggested scriptural reading: Proverbs 9:10.

And someone should tell writer-director Martin McDonagh that a superabundance of swears alone doesn't make you the next Coen Brothers or David Mamet. Though hiring Carter Burwell to do the music doesn't hurt. Bonus points: Bruges itself, the great Brendan Gleeson and the lovely Clémence Poésy and Thekla Reuten, Andreas Schmidt singing Der Leiermann and the little boy's confessional crib sheet, which is the saddest thing I've ever seen.

Grade: B+


In Bruges: Even dwarves start small

The Bank Job

Jason Statham struggles manfully against inept direction, inapt cinematography and a witless, distended script, but he cannot save this steak and kidney plod, despite valiant support from old pros Peter Bowles, Jason Faulkner and the peerless David Suchet. And he gets no help from Saffron Burrows, who's a cold fish to match her trout pout. Perhaps she simply doesn't like men.

Best bit: the opening credits, set to T Rex's "Bang a Gong," which is everything this movie is not: sexy, swaggering and cocksure.

Grade: C


The Bank Job: Nothing in their outward 
appearance suggested a total lack of chemistry

Kevin Michael Grace, 1.50 pm, 14 March 2008

ONE SHORT REVIEW

Vantage Point

When did I realize this movie was risible? About one minute in, when we are introduced to a top female cable news network correspondent who would strain credulity as a contestant on America's Next Top Model. How ridiculous is the plot? Dale Gribble would scorn it as contrived. When did this movie make me laugh out loud? About one hour in, when the chief conspirator says, "We have to tie up all of the loose ends." To what can sitting through this movie be compared? Like being trapped in a Tilt-A-Whirl while being subjected to brief random images and belaboured about the head with saucepans of various sizes. If there were a Dennis Quaid School of Acting, what would it teach? 1. Grimace. 2. Shout. 3. Repeat. Where can I buy one of those cool PDAs that lets you detonate bombs and perform assassinations by remote control? Nowhere as yet, but Steve Jobs promises delivery of the iTerrorist by 4Q 2008.

Grade: D


Vantage Point: Sigourney Weaver asks, 
'Will someone please tell me what I'm doing here?'

Kevin Michael Grace, 5.20 pm, 1 March 2008

OBITER DICTA

Jay Currie and Edward Michael George have challenged me to "share six non-important things/habits/quirks about yourself." Probs neg, as Nathan Barley would say, but I will add the usual proviso that the tag dies with me.

1. I suffer from a condition called Pseudofolliculitis barbae.

2. The first record I ever bought (1967) was the soundtrack to Casino Royale (in mono).

3. I had a short conversation with Johnny Rotten at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm, July 4, 1976:

KMG: Hi, Johnny!
JR: Who're you?
KMG: Just a fan.
JR: Ahhn't they ahhhlll.

5. I didn't start smoking until my late 20s.

6. I once earned £5 for contributing an item ("Ongoing Situations") to Private Eye. This is my proudest achievement as a journalist. 

Kevin Michael Grace, 7.30 pm, 28 February 2008

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY

Since the death of Debussy, Sibelius and Schönberg are the most significant figures in European music, and Sibelius is undoubtedly the more complete artist of the two. However much one may admire Schönberg's powerful imagination and unique genius, it is difficult not to feel that the world of sound and thought that he opens upthough apparently iconoclasticis au fond as restricted as the academicism it has supplanted. Sibelius's music suffers from no such restriction, and it indicates not a particular avenue of escape but a world of thought which is free from the paralyzing alternatives of escape or submission. It offers no material for the plagiarist and is to be considered more as a spiritual example than as a technical influence. We are not likely to find any imitations of Sibelius's No. 7 because the spiritual calm of this work is the climax of the spiritual experience of a lifetime and cannot be achieved by any aping of external mannerisms.
—Constant Lambert, Music Ho!, 1931

Sibelius Symphony No. 7 Part 2
Sibelius Symphony No. 7 Part 3

Kevin Michael Grace, 8.36 am, 14 February 2008

ONE SHORT REVIEW

Cloverfield

Sometimes technique is enough. And when it is harnessed to an uncompromising vision followed through with total commitment, you get art. Yes, that's right. If this seems ridiculous, consider what Steven Spielberg would have added to this apocalyptic scenario. Well, you'd get superfluous exposition, kute kiddies, a happy ending and a wooden stake of "meaning" driven through its heart.  Instead, Cloverfield is pure cinema, stripped bare of accretion. Its flat emotional affect delivers a mise en scène perfectly consonant with the personal experience of disaster as it happens.

Post-9/11 metaphor? Think harder, reviewers. Cloverfield is not horror recollected in sentimental tranquility. It is a presentiment of the long emergency.

Grade: A


Cloverfield: 'Does this mean we don't get bonuses this year?' 

Kevin Michael Grace, 6.22 am, 14 February 2008

THREE SHORT REVIEWS

Juno

Has atavism been entirely bred out of the (North) American male? It is tempting to describe Juno as a twee feminist fantasy, but the almost universal rapture with which our elite has greeted it suggests we are meant to regard it as The Way We Live Now. So this is the way the (Western) world ends: not with a bang, not with a whimper but instead suffocated under an avalanche of excruciatingly poptastic "witticisms." Imagine Oscar Wilde as channelled by the Gilmore Girls, and you'll get an understanding of just how sissified this movie is.

After Juno had ended, I resolved to devote what remains of my life to making the possession of acoustic guitars a crime punishable by death. Then I considered converting to Islam. Later, after I calmed down, I was possessed by a renewed admiration for the truth and beauty to be found in John Hughes's high school comedies.

Grade: D-


Juno: Transgendered love

There Will Be Blood

If Juno is the Barack Obama of Oscar-nominated films, then There Will Be Blood is the John McCain —nothing but atavism. In fact, much like John McCain's public image, it is a celebration of insanity. As Aristotle pointed out, the mad have nothing to teach us and so neither does this movie, despite its high level of technical achievement. 

Now, I understand that the past is a foreign country, and that it is too much to expect Paul Thomas Anderson to betray the slightest knowledge of orthodox Christian theology, let alone the syntax and cadence of the Authorized Version. But am I alone in finding Eli Sunday the feeblest fundamentalist ever? Prediction: "I'm finished!" will be to the 2000s what "Here's Johnny!" was to the 1980s. You have been warned.

Grade: C-


There Will Be Blood: Punch-drunk plutocracy

No Country For Old Men

Thank God for the Coen brothers, who make movies for adults. No Country For Old Men is just as technically accomplished as There Will Be Blood, but its artistry is deployed in the service of moral seriousness, not merely in striking the nerve endings that induce bleats of "masterpiece" from the critically jejeune. 

Another difference between the two is that while Daniel Plainview and Anton Chigur may both be regarded as the Devil, No Country For Old Men does not regard his triumph as inevitable. Two caveats: 1. One suspects that Tommy Lee Jones cannot distinguish profound from ponderous —or mellifluous from mushmouthed. 2. One suspects that the Coens believe cheating the audience of narrative expectations to be per se a good thing. But this is an exquisitely beautiful film and terrifically exciting in every respect, while Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin are just as good as Daniel Day Lewis. Better, actually, because their performances are less self-regarding.

Grade: A-


No Country For Old Men
: Dogs are the stormtroopers of the animal kingdom

Kevin Michael Grace, 5.38 pm, 12 February 2008

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