Howl. Or 'What Happens When Someone with BPD and a Laptop Can't Sleep'.

Why am I ever putting this here? Cos it's the only place I can post anything at all where I know for sure someone might read it. Should I just be laughing at myself because it seems entirely sane a response when you find yourself denied hell and gien purgatory instead. You drift for ages and then it really hits you, full force, My God- EVERYONE is gone.
I've been been so bereaved, I'm knocked down from some to few to none. I must be stupid, actively trying to avoid being known or being embraced while the howling inside me never ever stops; somebody PLEEEEEEEEEEEASE talk to me, HELP. ME.
But still I care and still I become attached and still everyone I come to know and care about vanishes.
Do any of you know what its' like? I mean, nobody there in the day, nobody there at night and no chance of sleep because you're terrified beyond belief at knowing how it's all gonna end but not knowing WHAT is going to happen. You're born alone, you die alone, that's the deal and we all know it. HOW do any of you manage to get through even one fucking hour on earth without the horror of it, the transience just criplling you. This world, everything in it, everything we do and everything we build is hollow and finite and INDIFFERENT. We get, what, a few measly decades and that's IT and that's final and there's no way back and we have no possible way of knowing what happens to us when we die. How how how can I, as a conscious being, a sentient human LIFE cease to exist?? How can you SLEEP forever?? And how are we supposed to cope wheneven the best case scenarios, the rosey and ridiculous storybook fantasies are every bit as monstrous in conception?

Think about this- HELL, right? You break some ARBITRARY rules by some unseen, unknowable and entirely whimsical ultimate arbiter, you violate a code of conduct you cannot POSSIBLY be forewarned about beyond the vaguest guesswork and what happens? PAIN and misery and torture FOREVER.
Then there's the deliscious alternative, right? Be as nice as you can-- Even tho you could be the most selfless soul in history and still be playing by the wrong rulebook without ever realising because the fucking CREATOR in his infinite ambivilence, aloofness and tempramentalism might not like your orientation or the team you play for or if you eat the wrong meat on the wrong day OR of course he might change the rules completely if it suits him and you're STILL screwed and have all that damnation to look forward to, whilst some other SOB pays lip service and collects enough points to be waived through the gates by Saint Peter despite never possessing ANY magnificence or making ANY truly fine contribution of ANY kind- and then, what? Peace, harmony, contentment, reunion, angels, Eden, cherubs, blahhhh blah blah. But to what end?? For God's sake, what is the POINT of heaven?! Where does it go, what's the goal, what's the challenge? Does an eternal love-in with the creator sound REMOTELY appealing to any of you??
But we have to go somewhere, right? life is energy and energy doesn't end, it just changes form, does it not?? I can't think about this but I can't stop. A few months ago death was an abstract that I shrugged off. Now I'm so terrified of the idea I want to beat my head against the wall just to make the thoughts stop

Happy people don;t think about this stuff, I realise that. Peple with OTHER people don't consider that when they sit down to watch a favourite film it might be the LAST TIME- Jesus Christ, the actual, absolute last and final time they ever, ever do that. And if not the last then the third or the ninth or twentieth from last. Pick any number, it seems obscenely small. How can we tolerate living a life so cruel that we all KNOW there's a million and one things to see and do and experience out there that we can NEVER possibly hope to see or do or experience!! I mean its enough to make you laugh yourself sick, there's no other way to react. Life is one huge sick joke.

I miss my friends. I stare and stare at this Goddamned screen and nothing happens at all, nothing demands my attention because no one thinks I matter enough to speak to me. Even junk emails aren't personalized to me FFS.
Suzie went offline when her place was renovated, it happened in a rush so we didn't have a chance to sort out phone numbers or anything. I wrote to her and got no reply. She should have been back online again weeks ago but there's been no sign. I have no other way of getting i tough with her. I love this person dearly and I've never even seen her face-to-face.
Kay went silent weeks ago. I call and call and I get voicemail. She apparently hasn't been online at all either and I can think of only a few reason why she wouldn't call or text OR be online and none of them are good. I have no other number and no way to reach her either. She's the other reason I can't sleep cos Im worried sick about her. I think how she might be alone and scared or Jesus Christ maybe even dead and there is NOTHING I can possibly do except grieve.
Rachael, well, we had a stupid, pointless falling out a while ago and she misunderstood what I said and hurtful words were spoken and IF we'd been living in the same part of the country and actually SPEAKING to each other rather than typing and typing night after night, we could have patched things up in no time. But she hurt me and I couldn't talk to her and then I TRIED to make things better because I cannot stand to lose another person and she told me to leave her alone. God, I was So angry, I blocked her, I deleted her numbers, I erased every message she ever sent. I tried to pretend she just wasn't there, out of sight, out of mind. But Im still subscribed to her Youtube vids and she went right on posting vids about make-up like always, looking radiant as ever. She's been through more hell and more turmoil than even I can imagine and now she actually seems withint reach of "HAPPY". I think I hate her a bit for that, as I've come to hate everyone I know who finds a way to make life work for them. I can't be around happy people, I REALLY can't be around lovers. I want to kill them. No, in fact I want to pin them down and erase their memories of each other. But I can't untether myself from Rach, she told me she loved me for Gods sake. She even asked if we were soul mates, once we ever planned on living together. I was actually going to save enough money for a flight to Scotland and just take off, just completely leave everything behind without a word to anyone and go and live with her. We'd make it work, we were so well matched. Two damaged souls who found each other. Poetry. But the half of me I try so hard to ignore knew it was all so hollow and meaningless and she'd change her tune soon enough. I just couldn't resist the beautiful lie. Rachael is my religion.
I posted a comment, said she still looked beautiful and perfect and she responded!! "Thanks Thomas x"
And then...then then then then NOTHING at all! No calls, no reconcilliation, Im still blocked and can't know her mind. Does she just figure we're "OK" now but that's it, everything we meant to each other is dead and gone? Maybe it's those glowing, lovey-love messages exchanged between her and this friend (?) Natalie. They love each other, Natalie says she's beautiful, all very familiar. "Can't wait til August?" WTF? WHAT's happening in August and why why why can I NOT BE PART OF IT

Aways theres distance, whether by miles or by years or by stupid internal hierarchies. 'Friendly' in work does not mean 'Freinds' in real life, or it does just not with me beacause... Oh fuck it, Im beyond tired of agonizing over why people are so fickle and facile, Im guessing its a defense mechanism but even that seems to be giving them too much credit.

So OK wtt? you may be asking. So am I, its pretty much the only question and it's all Ive got now. Am I even gonna click the 'Post' button or am I just gonna yank the battery out of my laptop and watch the screen go black. Kill the bastard. Death is my gift hahahaha. You're more patient than me btw

Too early in the morning, June 2010.

Argiope's web

"The heart wants what the heart wants".

It's the kind of truism you hear proffered by TV writers and self-help gurus telling their audiences how to feel. It's easy to dismiss as pure Hallmark, a warm and fuzzy, but vaccuous, rhetoric. But then, so much of what we say is undervalued, so much of what's true is diminished by the insincerity we've come to expect from each other.

Unlike my usual posts, this blog is not about comics or genre TV, but it still relates to themes of SF and geekhood.

Why do so many people still invest themselves so completely in, for example, Star Trek? Why is it the 'nerd' cliche still seems to hold true, at a time when science fiction and alternative pop culture are more accepted and mainstream than ever before? It's said that SF fanatics like myself are simply immature, that we have little grasp of reality and cling to comforting childhood fantasies because we cannot cope in the adult world. This is demonstrably bollocks by and large, but does contain a tiny grain of truth.

With higher intelligence comes higher sensitivity, and the freaks and geeks of the world are all too aware of 'reality'. I've spoken before about how puberty involves becoming suddenly, shockingly aware of the world around you, a world that seemed a lot smaller and simpler in childhood. We are more sensitive and more vulnerable to the world's cruelties at that stage of our lives than any other, and for those of us who are in any way 'different', it's a world that tells us very aggressively, in many loud voices, that those differences will not be embraced.

Everybody talks about 'tolerance', but think about what that actually means. It means convincing people to not actively persecute you, to suffer your existence. This is the highest goal the LGBT community and dozens of other minority groups dare reach for. Art and commentary are censored to avoid 'offending' certain such groups, or at least the ones most likely to file lawsuits or threaten bomb attacks, and yet elected officials still talk openly in fascist terms, asserting Victorian values, working to quash or overturn every shard of progressive legislation, from gay marriage rights to anti-bullying laws. Is it any wonder people like me chose to escape not into sports or other rigidly elitist persuits, but a fictional universe where acceptance and celebration of the other is the bedrock of all society?

Often to dare to be different is to risk everything, to sacrifice much. Even now, in the 21st century, with all our advances and freedoms, people can still lose their lives simply for marching to a different beat.
Sophie Lancaster, just 20 years old, was verbally abused, chased down and kicked to death by a gang of thugs. Friends and family remember her as kind, sensitive, artistic. None of that mattered to her killers. She and her boyfriend were goths, that was reason enough.
She suffered fatal head injuries while shielding him from the attack. He survived.

In the US this past year, five teenagers were driven to take their own lives by vicious, relentless bullying from classmates. Those five kids, five of many, were gay. What the hell do kids know about acceptance? As much as they are taught. Ancient, often subtle prejudices are passed from one generation to the next. Second-hand intolerance begets second-hand atrocity. A member of the Arkansas school board said he would only wear purple, as millions of people did last month to the remember the dreadful loss and promote understanding, when "they all commit suicide".
This man, Clint McCance, said on Facebook, "being a fag doesn't give you the right to ruin the rest of our lives. If you get easily offended by being called a fag then dont tell anyone you are a fag. Keep that shit to yourself. I dont care how people decide to live their lives. They dont bother me if they keep it to thereselves. It pisses me off though that we make a special purple fag day for them. I like that fags cant procreate. I also enjoy the fact that they often give each other aids and die. If you arent against it, you might as well be for it."

What's doubly appalling is that McCance echoes the sentiments of many. "I don't advocate bullying", they'll say, "but don't remind me that these people exist".

Also from McCance: "I would disown my kids they were gay. They will not be welcome at my home or in my vicinity. I will absolutely run them off. Of course my kids will know better. My kids will have solid christian beliefs. See it infects everyone."

Yes. It certainly does.

This is simply one extreme biggot who will, God willing, shortly be out of a job, but you can find this lethal combination of ignorance and distorted religious orthodoxy (the same crime for which we're all meant to hate fundamentalist muslims)
throughout the western world. Throw in some nationalistic dogma and you realise Islam may have its hate preachers, but we have plenty of our own.

Let me back up a tad. If a 13-year old told me they were gay I most likely wouldn't take that at face value, any more than I'd take a kid that age seriously if they told me they were in love. You don't know enough at that age to make life-shaping decisions, as experience has taught me only too well. Endlessly pressuring kids with talk of exams and career prospects is bourne out of the same madness that has seen ultra-liberal parents, falling over themselves to show the world how progressive they are, giving their pre-adolescent sons female hormone injections when they say they'd rather play with dolls. I had some confusing feelings towards other males when I was a teen, but I don't look back on them as the first stirrings of my bisexuality. It was just hormones. God, our neural pathways aren't even fully formed before we reach our early 20's.

That said, given that Britain and the US are nations that supposedly cherish the ideals of freedom, self-determination, individuality and expression above all others, the concept of letting people be whoever they choose to be still doesn't seem to have sunk in, even after centuries. Tolerance, says the unwritten rule of modern democracy, only goes so far.
People, more often than not Christian, asert that they are tolerant, enlightened and loving and do not at all condone prejudice and hatred, whilst making it crystal clear to their children that gay and transgendered people are not to be treated as equals, but regarded as outsiders, transgressors, deviants. "Love the sinner, hate the sin", goes the poisonous through line. LGBT's can't help it, they're confused, they're ill, they need to be cured. Healthcare professionals insist that a man who knows he should have born a woman must be mentally unbalanced, and it takes an awful lot to convince them otherwise, a medical equivilent of 'guilty until proven innocent'.

It's here that we come to my main point, my friend, Jadis Illiana Argiope.
She wasn't born with that name, nor was she born physiologically female, but she is who she is and I have never in my life known anyone more certain of that, or more determined to build the life for themselves that they know to be right and true to their heart.

I first encountered Jadis via her vlog on YouTube, where she posted regularly. I honestly didn't take her to be transgendered, rather a young woman with a sensuous, if androgynous-sounding voice. I watched her videos, in which she spoke widely on religion, politics, the military (I would discover she'd served in the US Air Force) and, of course, issues of gender and sexuality. She was very open to questions and contact with new people and I befriended her on MySpace, where I read her blog posts. She also prompted me to join Twitter, to which I am now sadly hooked.
At all times she was forthright, erudite and and insightful. Fascinated in the way we often find ourselves with people whom we are nothing alike, I made a point of getting to know her and, in time, I came to be in a position where I could support her in some small ways.

I have never met this person face to face, but in the past year we've spoken on the phone and we talk online most every day. I consider her among my dearest friends and it is a privilege to know her. One of the most startling stories from her quite remarkable life is her self-castration. With SRS (sex reassignment surgery) prohibitively expensive and difficult to arrange, she took it upon herself to study anatomy and procure supplies to perform a surgical removal of her right testical, a procedure that took around 6 hours. Naturally, this was extremely painful and resulted in her tools being confiscated and spending time under psychiatric observation, but she acheived what she set out to do. For her, it's always half about the cause, about sending a message and making an impression.

Jadis is more than a commentator, she's an ambassador of the transgender community, determined to make a stand against a system that would drive someone like her to take such desperate steps. I should state categorically that I am not an advocate of anyone operating on themselves at any time, for any reason. I've tried to support my friend in everything, even her recent foray into the LA adult industry, however much I disagreed with the decision, if only because it seemed to make her happier and give her self-esteem something of a boost after a rough period with her former partner. She's had little if any acceptance or understanding from her immediate family. Her strength never fails to inspire me.

For almost as long as I can remember, I've been unhappy. Unhappy with my life, unhappy with who I am. I have never once felt I belonged or that I was understood or accepted for who I am. I've been very lucky to have had a loving family and unbringing, but I can never quite shake the feeling that I'm somehow wired wrong, that was I perhaps born in the wrong era. I've struggled for so many years to figure myself out and I am still largely clueless. I know for certain that there is no surgery I could undergo or community I could join that would make me feel better about myself, but in Jadis I found someone who had that same goal squarely in sight. I knew I wanted to help her get there anyway I could. In that sense, I feel we are kindred.

Since leaving LA, she's been living in Arizona, and now shares an appartment with her lovely girlfriend, Fluer. They make each other happy, which is wonderful. Unfortunately, Jadis has found her testosterone levels still unacceptably high, the result, it seems, of her remaining teste overcompensating. To her this feels like a very distressing retrograde step, and in her desperation she decided to once again perform the removal herself, in what she called, with her characteristic sense of humour, "Operation: Tranny Freedom".

Yesterday, from around 10 AM (Arizona time), she began the surgery, and from mid evening, in what must be a worldwide first, broadcast her efforts live via webcam. This attempt did not go as smoothly as before, and after many agonizing hours, during which I and several others watched helplessly, she found herself unable to finally sever the exposed testical alone.

Today, having had her insides on the outside for almost 24 hours at the risk of serious infection, she finally agreed to go to hospital, where she hopes fervently that the doctors will not be able to salvage the testical and will finish the job for her. She will undoubtedly receive mental health counselling.

After much soul searching, I can't bring myself to fully condemn her actions any more than I could be in favour of them. I understand desperation, bloody-mindedness and the feeling that you and you only can make things happen. Her extremely dangerous attempt has already made waves online. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if she made the news at some point. This, of course, is exactly what she wanted, to make her stand against a culture of oppression and condemnation, where the surgery so essential to the peace of mind of transgendered people is made almost impossible, by the very same mentality that would see abortion clinics outlawed, driving them underground, and from the same sort of leaders that would rather young people have no sex education at all than have them handed condoms in the classroom. That would only encourage them to go out and use the things, right?

Jadis isn't out of the woods yet. I'm not a man of faith, but I do pray for her in my own way. She's very brave. She may well be mad, but then sometimes you have to be.

You can follow her on Twitter @TSVandenberg and @ladyargiope, and learn more about her story at youtube.com/user/wolfyPX and youtube.com/user/ladyargiopesvanity.

UPDATE (16/11/10): I'm enormously relieved to report that Jadis is home from hospital. Sanity did indeed prevail, and the offending article has been fully removed. She's understandably elated and was spared psychiatric detention. All she has to do now is heal up and concentrate on being herself and living the life she deserves.

Online Ephemera #2: One of those inescapable 'fill in the blanks' About Me thingies.

Hi, my name is: Thomas Joshua Michael Davies Templeton Holt
Never in my life have I been: All right
High school: Destroyed me.
When I’m nervous: I fall to pieces, one way or the other.
The last song I listened to was: By The Mavericks, tragically. Must listen to something better soon, in case I die suddenly.
My hair is: The bane of my life. Well, in the top 5, anyway.
When I was 5: I was better looking.
Last Christmas: Was the most anticlimactic yet.
I should be: Educated...Earning...A boyfriend. I mean, take your pick.
By this time next year: I hope to God I have my own place to live.
I have a hard time understanding: Human beings. Cliche, but there it is.

Take my advice: Question everything.
The thing I want to buy: Freedom from money worries and also some Wagon Wheels.
If you visited the place I was born: You probably wouldn't be smiling, what with it being a hospital.
I plan to visit: Algernon's grave.

If you spent the night at my house: Chances are you'd be sleeping in my bed. Make of that what you will.
I’d stop my wedding if: The vicar had a visible hard-on. Think about it.
The world could do without: Human beings. Cliche, but there it is.
Most recent thing I’ve bought myself: Some comics. Also lunch.
Most recent thing someone else bought me: A book called "Student Grub". 99p in The Works.
In the morning I: May or may not get out of bed/ shower/ eat/ dress/ switch my computer off.

Last night I was: Talking to a friend in the US.
There’s this guy I know who: Works down the chip shop, swears he's the leader of an international terrorist organistion. And once met Elvis.
If I was an animal I’d be: Enjoying a much more active and exciting sex life.
A better name for me would be: Dominic, mebbe.

Tomorrow I am: Orange. I am green today.
Tonight I am: Wanking and crying, you happy?!
My birthday is: 28th of February.

Out of our fragile little minds

If you read comic books, you've probably at least heard of Seduction of the Innocent, a work of paranoid demogoguery by psychiatrist Frederic Wertham.

Wertham's infamous 'findings', that comics were a root cause of just about every societal ill, from juvenile crime and homosexuality to asthma, were based on anecdotal evidence and less than scientifc or impartial methods, but nobody much cared. He was telling Mr and Mrs America what they wanted to hear.
Wertham would testify before a Senate Subcommittee in a hearing that would prompt the creation of the Comics Code Authority. It's said that this was a turning point that strangled the industry, and though the extremely popular horror and crime comics were dealt a heavy blow, the superhero comics bubble had pretty much burst by the early 1950's. The publishers might have been arm-twisted somewhat into creating the CCA as a self-censorship body, but nobody actually meant to produce anything considered offensive or morally suspect. Transgression was not in vogue at this point in history.

In any society, but particularly among those conservative and middle-class, there's the tendency to scapegoat, to find one individual or group or movement or art form on which everyone can focus all their anxieties and say, 'There! This is the problem, this is what's threatening our way life. It must be ostracized, it must be destroyed'. And you don't get much more conservative and middle-class than pipe-smoking, argyle-clad 1950's America.

After the War, the old order had been shaken to its foundations and even the most traditional of people were asking what new opportunities would be open to them, what would and would not stand in this new, fractured world. The sentiments of solidarity and moral certainty were dissipating, everything was in flux and one of the most visible changes was the rise of youth culture. Before this point, teenagers were simply thought of as older children. For these kids to refuse to keep their place and actively rebel against the ideals and values of their parents was as baffling as it was alarming. People simply didn't understand where their children were getting all these ideas and they were scared. The fact is, if Wertham hadn't written Seduction of the Innocent, someone else would have. Comic books, like the horror movies, heavy metal and video games in the decades that followed, were simply a very big, very easy target.

There's always a Frederic Wertham or a Mary Whitehouse somewhere, the self-appointed moral guardians and cultural arsonists are always with us. In Britain in the 80's, the video nasies furore saw confiscations, censorship and outright bannings at the hands of government and law enforcement officials, each with their own definitions of what constituted "obscene material". The idea of video classification was common sense, but allowing our leaders to decide arbitrarily what we should and should not be allowed to see, without any sort of public debate or enquiry was taken entrirely for granted. Now, this should have given every thinking person in the nation great pause, but it didn't. The sad fact remains, people en masse like being nannied in this way, and that's something that even the most strident teenage idealist has to come to terms with, eventually.

The damndest thing about adulthood is when it dawns on you that opinions you once thought set in stone have shifted. This stems from the bitterly hard-earned lesson that life is a long collage of compromise and ambiguity, and that the world is built on the backs of millions of people not thinking too hard about how things actually work. Not so long ago, my own world view was broadly black and white. I don't think of myself as 'liberal', I don't like the word or the baggage it carries, but I can live with 'leftist'. I was dead set against any kind of censorship. 'Where does it all end?', was my fear. Once we give our leaders carte blanche to make up our minds for us, it opens a door that's hard to close. I still believe that, but I also realise that the issue is a complex one.

A small hadful of those video nasties remain banned in the UK, many were released with cuts, some relatively extensive (up to several minutes). Some horror connoisseurs see this as a decades-old injustice and shout for uncut releases, but since most of the excised footage involves either sexual violence or real life animal slaughter, do I really want to be signing those petitions myself? Frankly, I can live without seeing that stuff. Frankly, I think anyone can (and should) live without ever seeing I Spit on Your Grave or Cannibal Holocaust.

I'm biased, of course. I don't like the horror genre, I avoid it as much as possible. I loathe slasher flicks and torture porn, but I do have time for something like The Blair Witch Project. Easy to deride it may be, but I have no problem with a film that tries to scare its audience, and that does so by showing us nothing whatsoever, both extremely rare these days. Any idiot with a film crew can produce something that turns the stomach, but in modern Hollywood he has millions of dollars and A-list talent behind him. Scenes of atrocity that were once the province of grubby, obscure exploitation fare now sit happily alongside romcoms, kids films and summer popcorn tosh. A quick skim of the horror movie reviews in any number of magazines finds protests of "unoriginal" and "boring" torture and murder scenes. People come away from The Human Centipede, complaining that it was too tame, having pressumably expected (hoped for?) a kind of Hollywoodised "2 Girls, 1 Cup". No worries, folks, the director promises an appropriately grand guignol sequel. People watch the Freddy's and Jason's slice and dice with glee, and cheer when the monsters always survive at the end. Cultural pundits refer to these characters as folk heroes.

I was actually rather impressed with the first Saw, but I knew the sequels would simply revel in nastier and more inventive traps and tortures, so I made a point not to see any of them. Then they went and turned Saw into a ride at Thorpe Park. Go check out the website. You're kids will love it.

I am not my parents. I don't buy the Daily Mail. Perhaps this stuff shouldn't bother me, but it does. When I see or hear something disturbing, it disturbs me. It might bother me for days on end. How, I've asked myself again and again, can people enjoy this shit?
It's been suggested that such movies aren't that different from action-effects features, which typically include a large bodycount and are never taken all that seriously by the people seated in the theatres. Hardly. Action movies are more about pyrotechnic one-upmanship than sadism, and at least we also know the villain will pay for his crimes. My conscience doesn't trouble me when I watch a stylised depiction of a murderer getting his just desserts. It's cathartic, it's satifying. Good guys triumph, bad guys lose, as they always must. That to me is a healthy thing to send the audience home with. A screaming woman being skinned alive is not.

I know culture evolves, as does the vocabulary of movies. People have stronger stomachs, they demand more realism. Yesterday's nightmares are today's Beanie Babies (when was the last time Dracula or Frankenstein actually scared anybody? 1930-something?). We should be damn proud of our embattled artistic freedom of expression. Audiences aren't desensitized, they're just more mature.
And yet... I cannot ignore the nagging feeling in my gut that we must eventually draw a line somewhere. In the UK today, pornography classified as 'extreme' is outlawed, but that seems to be it.
For God's sake, I'm a bisexual atheist lefty, and even I'm wondering if there's anything we won't allow anymore.

I think perhaps I can at least sympathise, up to a point, with those people who raised hell when David Cronenberg's Crash opened in 1996. Their feeling was that if a film such as that, an icily inaccessable arthouse piece, with that subject matter could find not only a general release but a mass audience and critical approval, then surely civilization itself must be on the very precipice. It was a storm in a teacup, with the Mail, true to form, on the forefront. Mail critic Chris Tookey damned the movie in a typically histrionic review, but it's his recent write up of this year's Kick-Ass that really caught my eye, when I found myself agreeing with almost all of it. Calling the film one of the most irresponsible ever made, his review trigged an internet shit storm that itself became subject of a news story (see Tookey's essay on the whole affair here http://www.movie-film-review.com/devFilm.asp?id=15578) and further public discourse about internet bullying.

Tookey wasn't the only one to condemn the film, and there were more than enough adolescent dickheads embracing the movie to prove his point, but then I also know people, intelligent, normal, respectable people who saw Kick-Ass and loved it, regarding it as just another slice of OTT entertainment, to be placed on the shelf next to Iron Man. So an 11-year old girl dresses sexily, says the word "cunt" and murders people as bloodily as possible, it's just a laugh! Like a more colourful Leon.
I'm not sure I can agree.

I never saw horror movies when I was a child, I wasn't allowed. I did see plenty of movies that scared me, though, a few that gave me nightmares. I don't plan to have kids of my own, but if I had them now, I certainly wouldn't be inclined to let them see Kick-Ass, or The Dark Knight like the one guy who brought his two little 'uns to the screening I attended. A boy and girl, neither could have been older than 7 or 8. They sat quietly throughout the entire movie.
No, let them see Return to Oz, like I did. It'll give them a few sleepless nights, but they'll be grateful for it one day, when they're grown up.

Argiope's Song

For my magnificent friend
Be smart, be safe, be spectacular xxx

Set me aflame and cast me free
Away you wretched world of tethers
Through the endless night and day
I have never wanted more.
Always thought that I would stand
Before the faceless name of Justice
Like some law unto myself
Like a child of God again.

And if rain brings winds of change
Let it rain on us forever
I have no doubts from what I've seen
I have never wanted more.
With this line I'll mark the past
As a symbol of beginning
I have no doubt from what I've seen
I have never wanted more.

In this picture stands a man
Far away, alone and distant
Like a solitary field
In some nameless foreign land.
All around him points of light
Start to dim and cease transmitting
Shadows fell on futile games
And then there was nothing more.
Through the screams of falling steel
By the light of flares and wisdom
All the doubts I could not face
All this time I wanted more.
With a line I mark the past
As a symbol of beginning
To the gods whose names we've lost
And the names who gave in vain.

And if rain brings winds of change
Let it rain on us forever
I have no doubts from what I've seen
I have never wanted more.
With this line I'll mark the past
As a symbol of beginning
I have no doubt from what I've seen
I have never wanted more.

Set me aflame and cast me free
Away you wretched world of tethers
Through the endless night and day
I have never wanted more.
Always thought that I would stand
Before the faceless name of Justice
Like some law unto myself
Like a child of God again.

And if rain brings winds of change
Let it rain on us forever
I have no doubts from what I've seen
I have never wanted more.
With this line I'll mark the past
As a symbol of beginning
I have no doubt from what I've seen
I have never wanted more.

Sever the line to the guilty past
To the ones who brought us nothing
Spoke of futures brave and proud
And brought only hate and war.
Lined the roads with hollow praise
Marked the land with paper statues
Shadows fell on their futile ways
And then there was nothing more

- VNV Nation, "Solitary"

Choose Your Own Blog!

1. A change of pace
...since I can't find one particular topic to write about at length, but do have a few axes to grind at the moment. And some patented Useless Trivia.
Spoofing those never tiresome "choose your own adventure" books might seem a mad idea for a blog, but I'm really stealing the idea from Dave Langford, who used a similar gag device in one of his columns. "Talent imitates, genius steals", as a very clever sod once remarked.
If you reckon this was Oscar Wilde, go to paragraph 10.

2. Two-Face
Strikingly, one of the greatest and oldest Batman foes of all, the guy who in modern continuity is pretty much second biggest Big Bad in Gotham, has only actually been portrayed in live action twice, with a pre-disfigurement Harvey Dent appearing in 1989's Batman, something people tend to forget.
The 1960's Batman show toyed with the idea of adding Two-Face to thier cackling, colour-coded rogues gallery, reconfiguring him as a TV newscaster who has a television explode in his face (no doubt the illusion of horrific burn scars would have been achieved via the ingenious application of livid face paint, which was pretty much the approach taken with the character on Batman Forever, decades later). Their plan was for none other than Clint Eastwood to play the bifurcated brigand*, an example of speculative casting no more bizar(ro) than Billy Dee Williams.
Williams was excited to land the role, even securing a 'Pay or Play' contract to ensure his eventual transformation into the coin-flipping schizo in a future Batman sequel- and had Tim Burton made further Bat flicks, he'd almost certainly have come to Two-Face eventually. This surely raises an obvious issue: Williams appears in Burton's film complete with full, Lando Calrissian mustache. Would he have shaved half of it off for the sake of his art? Would half of it merely have been painted over, a la Romero's Joker? If so, what colour would they have employed? I mean, what exactly does corrosive acid really do to human hair?
These things are important.
Flip a coin. Heads: Go to 6. Tails: We blow your damn head off.

3. Don't test my patience. Go back and pick another number

4. Down with Porn!
Two nights ago, I received one of the harmless porn newsletters that regularly clutter up my inbox. I swear I have no memory of signing up with the company in question, but since I clearly have an account with them (no money changes hands, I assure you), I suppose I must have done, probably in my delirious early days of internet access. This one came with an offer, some World Cup tie-in thing, whereby every subscriber got a free ticket to "rent" one of their many titles for 7 days, for free. Well, not being one to look a big, rude horse in the mouth, I went for it and chose one of those compilation affairs, seven scenes, about two hours' content. Not bad, I said to myself.

Now, honestly, I haven't actually sat down and watched any mainstream adult film for ages. I just haven't felt the need. I think now I understand why.

I sat through all seven scenes and, I'll put this delicately, none of them exactly turned my crank. Not remotely. In each case, I was bored and hitting fast-forward within minutes. At first I wondered if it was me, if I'm just so jaded a consumer that this, ahem, entry level hardcore just didn't move me anymore. Then I thought no, it's more to do with the awful, mechanical nature of production line porn. We're offered the absolute minimum establishing dialogue and then the two or more performers launch into the usual pumping and groaning business, and honestly, they all may as well be on rowing machines for all the erotic sparks on screen.
It finally hit me just how immature you'd have to be to get off on this kind of rubbish, and also how any culture that believes in sexual self-denial is completely bloody mad.
(If this is boring and obvious and you figured it out yourself years ago, procede to 5)

You see the novelty of watching this awesome, forbidden thing play out in as much graphic, sticky detail as possible does wear off. It often takes years, but it does in the normal course of things. It is a myth that men who watch porn have no interest whatsoever in plot or even who the players are in relation to each other, that all they want to see is the sex and they will always choose to skip past everything else (hence the adult home video). Well, some men are like that, but they've either been conditioned to think that way or just never grew up, the same kind of troglodytes who walked out of Casino Royale because it was "boring" and went to see Borat instead.

When you reach puberty, sex suddenly hits you and hits you hard, but it's more than another facet of the adult world that you're just noticing for the first time, it's inside you, hardwired into yourself. It is indisputably a basic biological imperative, but one that you are shielded from by parents and authority figures, which can only seem bizarre, confusing and counter instinctive to your adolescent mind.

Imagine being told you're too young to eat, that you are 'protected' from learning about digestion, totally forbidden from seeing other people enjoying food, and your parents turn into hysterical martinets if you see any food in the media. If you think that's overstated, try to remember your pubescent days, when every fibre of your being was screaming for you to explore these new urges, to learn about how and why you'd suddenly discovered a whole new level of perception and why on earth your body had apparently declared war on you when you'd been such good friends for so many years.

I don't advocate dunking our kids headfirst into the sexual ocean and I fully appreciate that exposing children to sex can be terribly harmful, but whereas teenagers aren't yet adults, they aren't children anymore either. They have to discover sexuality at some stage, and if there's a wrong (often horrendously wrong) way to go about anything, there must be a right way, too. The wrong way would be for anyone to grow up with their sexual insight based almost entirely on pornography.

Eons of indoctrination from one church or another have left us monstrously repressed, terrified of doing exactly what we're supposed to do and expecting dire consequences if we give in to those desires- and people wonder how religion could possibly be construed as social control! Unsurprisingly, there don't seem to be any lasting social taboos where it comes to enjoying food or wearing comfortable clothes, but sex for it's own sake is still, when you come down to it, hidebound by shame.
Don't believe me? Look at doggers, giggling at their own faux-cloak and dagger, as if fucking in enemy territory under a Union Jack. Look at ageing "swingers". Look at the armies of porn performers who got into the industry as a means of sticking their fingers up to parents and teachers. Look at how we're still completely incapable of discussing anything sexual without labelling it "naughty", "dirty", "cheeky", whatever. Look at those endless, awful 1970's 'sex comedies', films that so plainly wanted to be porn, but couldn't stomach showing breasts and pubic hair without cringe-making gags about colonic irrigation and an appearance by at least one cast member from On the Buses.

The "permissive society" our elders have been moaning about since the '60's is an entirely predictable backlash to all those years of buttoned-up-to-the-neck 'restraint' and 'forbearance'. The harder you tie people's emotions down, the harder they kick and scream, and the prouder they are when they break free. This doesn't make us any healthier in out attitudes, mind you. This is why more nobly intentioned porn endeavours, like Anna Span's 'By Women, For Women' company, are still only treating the symptoms rather than the cause.

"Television", said Nicolas Roeg, "shows you everything and tells you nothing. Nothing." He could have been talking about the porn industry.
We complain that there's too much sex in the media, but that's not the issue at all. We want sex, we settle for smut... in magazines, sitcoms, ads, music videos.
We crave experience, we make do with a constant drip feed of pornographic sludge.
The result is a culture that reveres porn and loathes itself.

In fact, there has now arisen a whole porn apologist subculture, with the essential argument being that porn offers a healthy catharsis, much like action movies satisfy our desire for violence even if we don't necessarily want to see anybody hurt, and if presented in the right way, can even be informative and educational. I myself used to take this position, but I'm older now, I have porn DVD's tucked away that I'm no longer interested in. I've come to appreciate that sexuality is not an artform or fundamental biology or simple recreation, it's a whole damn galaxy, of which pornography can barely scratch the surface (pardon the mixed metaphor).
Trying to become more sexually aware via porn is like trying to experience a symphony by looking at slides of an orchestra, or trying to become an athlete by playing lots of sports video games (OK, I'm no Douglas Adams where it comes to analogies, either!).

I don't hate porn, not really. I hate living in a world that offers it as a substitute for the Good Stuff, the Real Stuff.

So now. I'm not sure what to do with those DVD's. If you reckon I should take them to the charity shop and tell the blind old lady there that it's my Grampa's Morse collection, go to 7.

5. My, my, aren't we a brazen lot!
Use the only even prime number to determine your next paragraph, smartarse

6. Nickelback (don't roll your eyes, I won't be long!)
These guys are in an odd position. They're one of the biggest metal acts in the business, and also perhaps the least cool rock band on earth. Even The Darkness generated more enthusiasm from the music literati, not to mention some tragically overblown optimism; I once heard a DJ proclaim that the chart success of that middling Queen piss-take act signalled the beginnings of a "glorious mainstream rock revival". I did dash away a tear.
Almost universally derided by critics, dubbed 'Grunge-Lite' and damned as unforgivably accessable by the kind of people who cannot embrace any musical outfit that's lost fewer than two members to heroin, Nickelback's hit singles and albums may carry the obligatory 'Parental Control' sticker, but their image remains fundamentally respectable, presentable... Canadian. The kind of rock stars you could safely introduce to your grandparents.
In a recent article, an AV Club reviewer discusses "How You Remind Me", describing "a noxious combination of pretentiousness and meaninglessness. So very freshman poetry", "curdled sarcasm, self-pity, and unbridled contempt", and asserts that the group's output as a whole "combines the worst elements of grunge and dinosaur rock. It beats the soft-loud-soft-loud dynamic into a fine pulp, alternating wimpy acoustic whining with macho power chords and hoarse shouting".

Actually, I don't disagree with any of that. But they remain, privately, one of my favourite bands.

OK, I make no excuses for the kind of lyrics that rhyme "tassels" with "assholes", and I'm well aware that tracks like "If Everyone Cared" sound as if they were written to be played over emotional montages in Smallville, but what I cherish is the lack of pretension.
Look, among my favourite bands are Type O Negative (doom metal), Stone Sour (alt. metal), and Fear Factory (industrial metal), I like heavy, angry, angsty stuff. But sometimes I just want macho power chords, and Nickelback are about the only outfit with that old school approach to rock that doesn't come draped in pastiche, that is, they aren't trying to ape any specific band or rock movement of yesteryear, like those interchangable 'ironic' cod-hair metal bands that have sprung up like weeds in the past decade.
These guys just wanna produce good, loud, distinctive music that inspires air guitar. You can even sing along to it without rupturing your own throat nodes! Which is novel, as opposed to novelty.

And don't kid yourselves, fellas, there's not a man alive who can resist "Hero". It's a male secret shame, like Bryan Addams.
If you know at least one verse of "Rockstar", go to 9

7. Who are they trying to kid?!
Paul Cornell, on this year's Doctor Who finale (via Twitter): "Doctor Who triumph. Cheering. Floored fans. Mythic grandeur"

Right.

I used to follow Paul's column in SFX, and whilst he wasn't quite the SF Julie Burchill he was accused of being, he certainly came out with some prize dingo's kidneys, like his assertion that Charlie's Angels was a groundbreaking feminist superhero movie, or that the Vic and Bob Randall and Hopkirk was something people should watch. He did offer some decent insights, though and seemed harmlessly bonkers, like most fanboys do once you get inside our heads.

Now, though, hoo boy!

The only thing remotely mythic or grand about that staggeringly cheap looking and grossly self-satisfied mess was the National Museum of Wales, which was certainly shown off to full effect as our heroes spent almost the entire Goddamned episode wandering around it, telling us what was going on, telling us what had happened, telling us what was going to happen, telling us what might have happened and being rather tedious and smug about it all.
My beef here is not with Cornell, not really. It's with the Grand Moff.

Since I no longer have the energy nor the inclination to engage in protracted and circular arguments with other online geeks about the pros and cons of this SF movie/ series or that, I'll just say my piece and leave it stand: The latest series of Doctor Who is dire.

I'm somewhat out of the fanboy forum loop, but I gather that I now qualify as a 'hater', for not showing unquestioning devotion to the works of Stephen Moffat, even when the work in question happens to be bollocks. OK, fair enough. I'm a sci-fi fanatic, I'm used to both blind creator reverence, vide Roddenberry, Gaiman, Burton, Miller/ Millar, Whedon... Just as I'm accustomed to being in a minority of one; I'm apparently the only SF fan on Earth who reckons Firefly was cancelled because it was rubbish, for instance.

But listen, kids, I was a follower of Moffat's writing long before most of you, I was a Press Gang fan from the age of 4. I've never denied the man his talent, creative flair or insight, but he's as prone to lazy writing as any hack in the business, and begins to rival the above listed for sheer masturbatory smugness. I had a bad feeling about the new series when Moff was announced as Davies' successor and I was right. The Empty Child, The Doctor Dances and Blink are all superb slices of SF television and well deserving of the accolades they received, but the seeds of a creative dead end were sown with The Girl in the Fireplace, and the six River Song episodes to date comprise a four and a half-hour televisual smirk of punchable self-indulgence. Any writer who knows, doesn't think but knows he has the audience eating out of his underpants like that should be kept well away from the driving seat of any series, especially something like Who.

Now I'm perhaps coming across as a karaoke Lawrence Miles, but that's not quite the case. I don't actively hate the series to the point where I can no longer bring myself to watch it, and there's not a lot wrong with this season that couldn't be rectified. I'm just deeply disappointed and feel slightly betrayed (only slightly, because I kind of saw this coming) that instead of making any real attempt to move the series forward, Moffat and cronies have simply taken RTD's wildly variable dramatic-flourish-over-logic storytelling formula, and run, giggling with it as far as they possibly can. Not a single episode this year comes within lightyears of classic status, and I'm struggling to remember even a handful of truly original, stand-out scenes.
This is a series so arrogantly sure of it's own towering status as a beloved institution that it can toss away concepts like a 21st century companion murdered, then erased from history, only to reborn as a fictional Roman centurion and an ageless Auton, who then spends two millennia alone, guarding the Big Scary Box containing his beloved, without pausing for half a second to even hint at the enormous, soul-rending implications of any of it, and then has the gall to milk the "emotion" for all it's worth, not even considering that someone at home might just raise their hand and say, "erm, hang on a sec..."

Only two things really make an impression about this year's Who; First, Matt Smith is the perhaps the greatest casting coup in the series' entire history. It's Smith alone who carries the show, week in, week out, more so than even Tennant or Tom Baker did when the stories of their respective eras were at their lowest ebb. It's Smith who brings dignity and nobility and actual magic to scripts that simply don't deserve it. It's Smith who's handed one reheated David Tennant speech after another and delivers them with tremendous aplomb; Second is that Amelia would have been a much more suitable companion than Amy, who's temperamental to the point of multiple personalities. Maybe having the Doctor travel with a child would be seen as dodgy, for the same reasons people don't like Robin (see my last blog), but Caitlin Blackwood is such an impressive and remarkably non-cutesy young actress, and her scenes are, weirdly, far stronger than most of the 'character' bits Moffat has produced lately. Maybe he should go back to writing programming for smart children, as opposed to drama for adults with the mental age of 7!
Having Amelia onboard would also jive better with the Eleventh Doctor's much more reassuring, fatherly behaviour towards Amy- which is why that awful 'comedy' scene where she tried shagging him made for such squirmsome viewing.

Smith's performance is often compaired to Troughton's, but he seems to be much more in the vein of Davison. Actually, what's interesting is how Smith's instincts on portraying the Doctor seem to go so against those of Moffat.
Moffat mostly writes Smith's Doctor like he did Tennant's, because he genuinely believes it's the same man with a different face. This is not only patently absurd- put the First, Sixth and Ninth Doctors side by side and tell me it's the same man all the way along- but flatly contradicts the whole point of The End of Time, in which Davies stressed how regeneration is a form of death, with each new Doctor effectively a new person, albeit a new person born fully grown and with the memories of all the previous Doctors. Smith certainly doesn't seem to be playing the manic depressive demigod the Tenth Doctor was written as.

Good evidence of how far this series has fallen can be found in the Dalek 2-parter. No, I'm not going to complain about the new iDaleks, because even Stephen Moffat's mum probably hates those things. No, my beef is with the presentation of Churchill as a cuddly celebrity.
The horrid miscasting of Ian McNeice (based, it seems, on the same any-English-actor-with-stature principal that landed Michael Caine the role of Alfred) notwithstanding, if Smith's Doctor is indeed the same man as before, the man who brought down Harriet Jones, and thus derailed Britain's new golden age, because of her ruthlessness, he'd hardly be pally with a cold-hearted bastard like Winston Churchill. Anyone with an appreciation of history beyond the self-congratulatory 'patriotic' myths or for that matter, anyone who knows the character of the Doctor, could see that these two would not be friends.

Churchill was neither avuncular nor in any way saintly, he was an arch imperialist who made some monstrous errors in judegement during the First World War and his time as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Churchill would have happily seen Gandhi crucified and, once ousted from Downing Street, would have abandonned Britain for Washington D.C. if they'd have had him.
We remember this man with the utmost respect and reverence because he was a great orator and the leader we needed him to be when the war Britain was totally unprepared for threatened to swallow us whole.

The writer of The Unquiet Dead, from way back in poor, underappreciated season 1, understood that national icons like Dickens were both less and more than the cartoon heroes of popular imagination, and his script was sincere and thoughtful, as indeed is Richard Curtis' Vincent and the Doctor, the biggest surprise of the season. God only know how the same writer could pen this flag-waving tripe with a clear conscience, but then Gatiss is an unjudgemental acolyte of that miserable old sod Nigel Kneale, so plainly his taste and discretion aren't all they might be. And who knows, maybe he was just in love with the idea of WWII fighter planes with laser guns (Star Trek did it first, by the way).

Then there's the 'fairytale' plotting. This is the excuse the Who team have come up with for when characters repeatedly get out of impossibly dire situations by 'just believing' they can do it. This is perhaps more understadable, if not forgivable, when you consider that today's audiences were raised on Disney movies, not storybooks. And so, the android Professor Bracewell deactivates the bomb in his gut by thinking happy thoughts, and Churchill certainly doesn't dream of having him sent off to some lab to be dismantled and back-engineered.
Now, unlike Mr. Miles, I don't demand that my popular fiction be written to the highest standards at all times. I mean, sure, in a perfect world, but I just know better. I've no issue with SF being daft, it often is, I can even live with deus ex machina if it's couched in a clever storyline (The Doctor Dances). But this kind of thing is where I draw the line. And again, with Rory's reappearance, one line could have saved it, something like "2000 years? I was asleep/offline for most of it, feels like a few days", that's all it'd have taken. I'd have accepted that. But no.

What I do find striking is the American perspective on this season. I've been following the weekly reviews on one of my favourite sites, the AV Club, and they're as good a barrometer of American tastes as any on the net. Their reviews are uniformly insightful, balanced and lively.
In the US, where TV is said to be enjoying it's golden age- I'm not so convinced of that, but anyway- and can and often does excite more public interest than movies, Doctor Who and Torchwood have enjoyed very respectable ratings and a hugely enthusiastic critical reception. This is a climate in which The Wire is seen as a monolith of screenwriting, looming over every other series, so I figured the American reviewers would be at least sceptical of froth like Doctor Who season 5.

Shows how much I know.

The notices have bordered on rapturous, more so in some respects than the 'just-stick-our-figers-in-our-ears-and-give-every-bloody-episode-5-stars' line taken by SFX. They've called it "epic", "thrilling", "heart-breaking", etc, only with far more conviction than one's used to reading in the British press, where a Specsavers advert can be dubbed "brilliant" and "genius". With Vincent and the Doctor, however, the reviewer was less convinced.
Now, on balance, this was probably the strongest episode of the season, even if they did lay it on as thick as humanly possible, in the style of Father's Day. There was some genuine wit, Curran was very good as Van Gough, Amy was less trying than usual, and Curtis was sensible enough to underscore that a lifetime of depression cannot be magically cured, even by a visit from the Doctor.
Still, our American cousins weren't all that taken with it, perhaps because they're much more used to seeing this kind of drama, where the conflict is driven by emotional watersheds, than they are the kind of pulp melodrama Nu Who specialises in.

There really is nothing like Doctor Who on American TV. Not remotely like it. Americans reckon they've got the TV thing pretty much sewn up, but I don't think they'd be capable of putting together a Doctor Who. It's not that Americans can't do eccentricity or even that there aren't any US actors capable of doing justice to the Doctor, because there are plenty (Vincent D'Onofrio would be top of my list, if you're interested). It's just that throwing so much money and talent and publicity behind a show aimed at a broad family audience and screened on a major network in competition with other primetime series would be unthinkable. Network suits would doubtlessly see Who as a star vehicle, and then start hunting for an affordable, reasonably charismatic and good looking celebrity to make the show his own, and of course as soon as that happens, it stops being Doctor Who and becomes Charlie Sheen: Time Traveller.

So, to finish, yes, I'll probably hate this year's Christmas special as much as I've hated most of Season 5. But I'll still tune in, because Matt Smith's playing the Doctor.

Damn you, Moffat, you despicable genius!
go to Eleven

8. Celebrity Bollocks
Amanda Bynes, possibly America's Sweetheart, who knows, just announced her retirement from acting, aged 24. Via Twitter, naturally.

Angelina Jolie has also floated the prospect of voluntary retirement to focus on her comically vast, rainbow family.

Remember how Liam Neeson used to threaten to retire whenever he'd finished a movie he didn't enjoy?

There is no retirement for a movie star. Retirement means living quietly, not being the centre of attention, not being talked about. Retirement means facing up to an unthinkable prospect for an entertainer, that of being forgotten.

I've said elsewhere that I used to have serious ambitions to become an actor, or rather a movie star. I did, and still do, genuinely love acting, but I loved recognition and adulation more than anything. I get that side of the business, and I certainly don't begrudge these people for having egos. You need to have an inflated sense of your own value and talent to make it in that game, and the people who do reach the top are still a small minority. Bully for them if they can get $30 million a movie. I knew I wasn't talented or good-looking enough to progress to that level, and that a career as a supporting player might well have driven me to an early grave, which is why I didn't persue acting beyond high school.

We do love these famous bastards, and we'll forgive them almost anything, it's when they start whingeing about how hard their lives are we start to get rattty. Everybody got sick of grunge bands for always moaning at the terrible hardships that huge recording contracts and award shows brought on them, having gotten exactly where they and every other musician who ever mailed a demo tape wanted to be. This is why anyone who isn't a teenage girl or a middle-aged weirdo who should know better has no time for that Twilight couple, and why only the hardest of the ageing hardcore grunge faithful can read Kurt Cobain's diaries without wanting to give the man a slap.
This gimmick has gotten away from me a bit, so go to 9. It's just there underneath this one

9. Daniel Craig
There's been a fair bit of showbiz gossip lately about Daniel Craig, who they're saying is gay. The basis of these insinuendos is that Craig was spotted kissing another man in a gay bar. I'm not saying the National Enquirer is the most reliable of sources, and even if it's true, well... Could mean anything.
But I'd love for it to be true.
OK, I'm only a fringe member of the LGBT community at the most, and I don't fancy the man, but he's a terrific actor and he plays James Bond!

Bond is one of the defining male icons, aspirational and uncomplicated in his irresistable maleness. For him to be played by a gay actor, and one who is undeniably, solidly old-school masculine (there's not an ounce of camp in Craig) could work wonders for the public image of gays in the media and in non-traditional roles.

Admittedly, this is rather contingent on him getting rid of that bloody mustache he's been wearing lately. I mean, if he's gonna keep it, he may as well wear a hard hat and denim shorts to the press junkets.
You can't deny the prize it may never fulfill you. It longs to kill you. Are you willing to die? If so, go to 4

10. When in doubt, lie
The above is actually Number 4 on the list of rules I try to live by.
Ok, so I stole this from the Rules of Acquisition, but it's an excellent point that most people follow, often without thinking about it.
We lie to everyone, about everything. The world gives you little in the way of other options; We lie to prospective partners to cover our quirks and neuroses. We lie on CVs and tax returns. We lie about why we were late this morning. And why not? It always makes me laugh when someone gets all indignant about being lied to. What would they prefer? That you tell them the truth and drop yourself in it? Don't tell me you'd actually respect someone more for admitting they were blitzed out of their skull the night before last and were too hung over to move, much less strap on a phone headset and sell broadband for eight hours.
Lying is a very valuable skill, but it takes work. Lying is not the same as acting, since acting is about convincing people you are someone else, whilst lying is about convincing people you know that something is real when it manifestly isn't. Fortunately for me, I'm good at both. But it helps to bare in mind another Ferengi rule: Keep your lies consistent.
And no, it wasn't Wilde at all. Pick which of these two numbers you'd rather have tattoed behind your ear: 3 or 13

11. Oh, I dunno (Sherlock Holmes pun here)
Moffat and Gatiss are also the head honcho's behind Sherlock, a radical new take on the Sherlock Holmes legend, transposing the hawk-nosed one into a modern day setting for a new series of movie length TV mysteries (see picture). This ticks me off somewhat, as I came up with an identical concept a couple of years ago and never had the presence of mind to become showrunner of Doctor Who before I proposed it to the BBC.
My first choice for Holmes would have been David Tennant, actually. Obvious, perhaps, but he is a great actor and he's bound to end up playing Holmes at some point in his career.
If you think there's a very good chance this spiffing new version of the Great Detective will foil London's criminal underworld with the words "I'm Sherlock Holmes. Look me up", go to 8

12. Buffy the Power Ranger
I mentioned in my very first entry that Optic Nerve, one of the special effects companies who worked on Power Rangers The Movie, went on to do sterling work on Buffy. This is not the only Power Rangers/ Buffy connection.
Stuntwoman Sophia Crawford, who doubled for Sarah Michelle Gellar for the first three or four years of the series, met her husband (a fellow stunt performer) when they were both working on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Sophia, naturally, played the Pink Ranger in action scenes.
James Marsters was romantically involved with Alison MacInnis, a.k.a, Dana Mitchell, the Pink Ranger on Power Rangers: Lightspeed Rescue. In a 2000 interview with SFX, Marsters was asked which other fantasy heroine besides Buffy he'd like to beat up. He answered "the pink Power Ranger". Maybe they'd had a row.
Alison is set to attend this years Power Morphicon, the second offical Power Rangers convention, alongside Walter Jones (Zack from the first season of MMPR), who also appeared in Buffy once.
Jamie Lee Curtis once dressed up as the Pink Lightspeed Ranger for some do (see photo), and if you're wondering what that has to do with Buffy, wellll... She was Arnold Schwarzenegger's wife in True Lies, and as the product of this improbable union was a young actress called Eliza Dushku.

Oh, and Buffy once referred to Kendra as the Pink Ranger.
If you thought Kendra's accent was a bit dodgy, go to 5

13. The End.

Well done. We've now established that you're a big smarty pants (and also more bonkers than I am if you actually tried following the "Go to paragraph x" system to read this) and that I have far too much time on my clammy hands.

Good day.

*I'm not sure he was ever called this in the comics, but you never know

The case for Robin

Of all the supporting characters in the Batman universe, Robin is the one most widely perceived as problematic, especially by those adapting Batman for movies and other media.
This stems from two main misconceptions, the first being that the 'true' Batman of the comics flies solo, and that the kid sidekick was only introduced when the credibilty of the writing took a nosedive. The second point, and the one most often referenced, in countless stand up routines, sitcoms and piss-takes, is that having Batman and Robin living together makes them look like a gay couple, or makes Bruce Wayne look like a child molester, or something along those lines. And either way, it's a portrayal of reckless child endangerment, right?

For decades, the only Batman known to the public at large was slightly out of shape, wore reading spectacles and liked Go-Go dancing. As a Batman die hard, I should perhaps hate the 1960's TV series, but I don't and, in fact, I think we should be grateful for it. People are a tad more superhero savvy these days, but while your average Joe or Jill might be able to name a few X-Men, or Spider-Man's aunt, to this day, Batman and his world remain the most famous of all superheroes, and we have that daffy old show to thank for it. Batman, Robin, Alfred, Commissioner Gordon, the Joker, Catwoman, the Penguin, the Riddler, Batgirl, the Batmobile, the Bat Signal, Batarangs, Gotham City, the Bat Cave, the utility belt... That TV series made icons of them all, and its impression on the pop cultural unimind will never be totally sponged out. The trouble is that the real Batman, as everybody now knows, is dark, brutal, psychologically scarred and not remotely camp, and fights terrifying sociopaths, not over the hill vaudeville stars in domino masks.

The Camp Crusader was the bane of Bat fans and comics writers for a long, long time, and helped ensure that Michael Uslan's vision for a thematically true Batman feature film had a torturously drawn-out production history, but in hindsight the 60's Batmania probably did them all a big favour. The comics themselves had been splashing about in the murky waters of self-parody since the mid-1940's, with aliens, time travel, dimension-hopping imps, Bat-pets and much mortification besides. This was no crime, conventional superheroics were out of fashion and the books struggled to keep up with modern trends- lest we forget Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman all managed, via this creative contortionism, to survive uninterrupted through decade after decade, as many contemporary books fell by the wayside.
From about 1969 onwards, a harder-edged and more realistic approach was the order of the day, and it gave Batman a shot in the arm. I'm sure it's no coincidence that this was also the time Dick Grayson became a far less visible presence in Batman's life, having finally grown up a bit and found his own niche with the Teen Titans, and departing Wayne manor for university in New York.

Everyone knew the Adam West and Burt Ward incarnations of Batman and Robin, if not from the orginal run of the series then from their televisual afterlife, via reruns and voice-overs in 1970's cartoon shows. Older viewers remembered the awful, dirt cheap chapter plays of the 40's, which also did the rounds on US TV.
The picture was clear; old, embarassing Batman and Robin vs. modern, hard, serious and credible Batman, sidekicks optional. If Batman was perceived as risible, went the reasoning, Robin must have been at least partly to blame, so marginalizing him seemed a wise move.

When the Batman movie finally materialised in 1989, a huge hit thanks partly to the novelty value of it not being the expensive train wreck everyone was expecting, there was no Robin and no room for him. Tim Burton and co. had little if any enthusiasm for the character and when he did finally make it into the movie series, Joel Schumacher was directing. The architects of the awesome Animated Series also preferred an undiluted, no-nonsense Batman, with Robin on the fringes, until studio bosses made their feelings clear by changing the show's title to The Adventures of Batman and Robin.
In fact, the latter didn't hurt the animated series all that much (the early episodes, for all their gobsmacking style, were rough around the edges), and Batman Forever is nowhere near the war crime it's made out to be. Batman and Robin may be universally acknowledged as one of the worst anythings in the history of everything, but you can hardly put the blame for that on the shoulders of Dick Grayson. No matter, both incidents contributed in cementing the myth that Robin was an aberration, forced onto Batman by committee thinking executive types, in naked persuit of the kid appeal dollar.

In print, Batman only operated alone for the first year of publication before Robin was introduced, created by the same talents as Batman himself, Bob Kane and Bill Finger, with artist Jerry "I created the Joker! I did! Me, me, me!" Robinson. This was a canny business move, no question. Kids were the target readership, so putting a kid character into a costume and making him apprentice to the newest and, obviously, coolest superhero around was inspired. Sure enough, kids lapped it up, sales got a boost and sidekicks became all the rage for a while. But bringing in Robin was as much about giving Batman someone to talk to as anything else, and regardless of original intent on the part of the writers or DC, his creation broke new ground in superhero storytelling and added to the Bat mythos immeasurably.
Since 1940, through thick and thin, it's been Batman and Robin. Sharper comics writers like Grant Morrison have recognised this, and make the most of both the character and the resonance of his partnership with the Dark Knight. I think it was Denny O'Neil, in writing Nightwing, who described Dick Grayson as a prince, heir to Batman's throne, and it's as good an analogy as I've heard.

Far from being just the kid sidekick, there to keep kids happy (and while we're on the subject, the notion that the kids at home always demand kid characters or they get bored and find something else to watch/read is absolute rubbish. Kids watch Batman movies and read Batman comics for the same reason as the rest of us- Batman!) and get captured and rescued, Robin (specifically Dick Grayson) is a huge part of who and what Batman is, and has long since proved himself a great character in his own right. He should not be dismissed as gimmick or frivolity.

It goes without saying, then, that Robin has never quite been done justice on screen, even thought the Forever and animated versions mentioned above acquitted themselves fairly well. Though animated series made since haven't flinched from portraying Robin as a true Boy Wonder, elsewhere the accepted wisdom was to portray him as a young man, perhaps a late teenager, somewhere between 16 and 20. But Robin needs be a kid, perhaps not 8 or 10 years old, but a kid all the same. In one sense, he's the child Bruce Wayne never had a chance to be. He also represents Batman's worst nightmare, the tragedy he was always pledged to prevent... another orphan of Gotham crime.

Robin is an acrobat, a kid who grew up in the circus with his family, always on the move, always performing for a crowd. Swinging across rooftops at night is his way of recapturing how he felt when his parents were alive. That was the only life he ever knew and, to him, the circus was home.

One can look at Robin's story as a sort of violent metaphor for growing up. As children, most of us know the love and security of our families and we never doubt it. This was especially true of Dick Grayson, who knew from the age of four that his parents would literally always be there to catch him. But just as the onset of puberty, with its storm of emotion, potential, new energy and endless new questions is desperately bittersweet, as it usually entails that very security evaporating, Dick is propelled into the adult world by the tragedy of his home and family being ripped away from him. Life as Robin means grand heroics, endless excitement and adventure, often with the whole world or even the whole of creation at stake, but like Bruce Wayne, Dick only began that life at the expense of everything he knew and loved as a child.

When the young Bruce's parents died, it fell to Alfred to comfort the boy as best he could, forming an awkward and usually unspoken father-son bond, with Bruce never able to fully acknowledge Alfred's love for him, nor Alfred wishing to be seen as trying to replace the parents Bruce had lost. There is a tragic irony in that same relationship being played out between Bruce and Dick, Bruce assuming the new quasi-father role and, pressumably, coming to understand and appreciate Alfred more in the process. Both men were then charged with ensuring that Batman's 'squire' was spared as much of the pain and as many of the early pitfalls that Bruce experienced in the years leading up to his return to Gotham as possible. With the Wayne fortune and influence securing Dick as Bruce's official ward, Dick probably got the best upbringing a young orphan/ superhero could hope for.

Robin is not Batman Jr., however, and to interpret the character as such would be missing the point. From his very first appearance, Dick was portrayed as almost a direct spiritual opposite to Bruce, and as much as he would look up to Batman as everything he respected and aspired to be as a crime fighter, I think perhaps he also felt "There but for the grace of God go I". In a perhaps slightly self-centred, but typically teenage way, Dick seems to have consciously decided not to let the awful murder of his parents define him as a person, and though his heroic identity may have darkened slightly with the advent of Nightwing, and even his eventual inheritance of the Batman mantle itself, he's never quite become the brooding avenger. To this day, through many more tragedies and losses, he remains a naturally upbeat, energized, social character, dashing and romantic and everything the public persona of Bruce Wayne is meant to be. From that perspective, he's probably living the life his parents would have wanted for him, which is more than can be said for Bruce.

In short, there's more than enough dramatic meat on Robin's story to make for an excellent movie, provided the people making it have read the right comics (if any). Tim Burton declared he couldn't make the character "work" for him until he could figure out some sort of appropriate psychological profile, and going by his spin on the other Batman characters, I suppose that means his Robin would have to have been a total headcase. This might explain why the "Robin" meant to appear in Batman Returns, a "technologically savvy street kid" who would have been played by Marlon Wayans (seriously), bore no resemblance to the Dick Grayson of the comics whatsoever. Both Christopher Nolan and Christian Bale have publically stated that as long as they are involved with Batman movies, Robin will not be, which has prompted many fans to speculate on how they'd modify him to fit the depressingly 'realistic' tone of the Nolanverse. I wouldn't bother.
It seems plain that there'll be a Batman movie reboot of some sort within the next 6-8 years, since the new wave of DC movies are aiming for a Marvel-inspired 'shared universe', and a Batman who doesn't, or won't, interact with the aliens, gods and magic of the DCU is no good to anyone, especially when they come to make the inevitable Justice League movie.

On balance, for all their contributions to rehabilitating the Bat in live action, and the sheer perfection that was Batman Begins, the Nolan team's approach seems to represent a more narrow, conservative take on Batman lore than almost any other. I can live with his slightly sniffy remark that the villain of Batman 3 "won't be Mister Freeze!", but Nolan seems reluctant to even consider the likes of the Penguin as a viable antagonist. And when you get down to it, the Penguin is nothing more than a short, rotund, affected crime boss with a pointy nose. Christ, if they can make the Joker plausible...

It wouldn't surprise me in the least if the studios concluded that, as with the Spider-Man trilogy, once movies of this type have been the biggest hits they can possibly be (The Dark Knight made over a billion dollars, as if you needed reminding), they only way to go is down. Either than or hit the reset button.

So no, Robin isn't a liability. He remains a Titan in waiting.

Wallowing in Aberystwyth

ABERYSTWYTH (n.)
A nostalgic yearning which is in itself more pleasant than the thing being yearned for.


Douglas Adams and John Lloyd offered the above definition in The Meaning of Liff, and it's a sensation we're all familiar with.

Emotionally, I'm the archivist type, I save almost everything and keep my personal artifacts cluttered around me for whenever I need to dip into that hazy, reassuring, part-mythical time known as When I Was a Kid. Good or bad, one's childhood is kept in trust by one's unconscious mind, the memories like a ragged patchwork quilt. We fret and obsess over what's threadbare or missing, or we marvel and congratulate ourselves at what's endured. In either case, we usually have it the wrong way round (there again, I could also submit that the memory is like the shockingly thin ribbon inside a plastic casette, becoming ever more frayed and brittle with time. That might be a lousy analogy- or is it a simile?- but what the hell, I'll use it anyway, as I'm here to talk about VHS).

When I was a kid (there I go) my mother had a bit of a mania for taping things off the television. Like everybody, she taped music from the radio and swapped records with friends to make copies, but there was a big difference between a bootlegged Lenny Kravitz or the complete ZZ Top* and a homemade video compilation. Those old TDK cassette tapes didn't have a long play facility for one thing, you couldn't cram nine hours of programming onto them. My mother also went about it all, for a while at least, in a very organized fashion. Once a particular video was completed and rewatched enough to be 'favourited', to use a revoltingly modern term, the erasure protection tab was broken off and a letter was assigned to each label; 'A', followed by 'AA', followed by 'B', and so on. Then the label was sellotaped down, and the chosen tape was added to the archive. I used to regard this process with the utmost reverence.

Over time, some tapes were loaned out and not returned, some indeed wore out beyond watchability, and a few suplimentary videos were made for us by my grandparents. But most survived and almost all of them, from 'A' to 'ZZ' (no Top) are still with us, in fact they're sitting upstairs as I type this, lined up in order on shelves in my bedroom (see right).
Let me underline something here; whilst I don't think any of them are quite as old as I am, some of those videos go back as far as 1989, and they're still watchable. Those Scotch people weren't joking about that lifetime guarantee, and the same went for Hitachi and Memorex. Yes, many of them jump in places, most have less than perfect sound, and our last video machine was purchased specifically for its ex-rental adapter facility, which works some magic to bring old, endlessly played tapes up to scratch. That machine has enjoyed an amazingly long life, as well. I'll be heartbroken when it finally packs in. The fact of the matter is though, I like the scratches and jumps, the flaws and the jogs and the overlaps, the places where one program cuts out and another is tagged on. I can't help but love how my mother managed to cut the end credits off almost every movie she ever recorded, either from forgetting to check the tape was properly fast-forwarded or just absently hitting the 'stop' button as soon as the screen faded, so that whenever we rewatched them, instead of any of us finally finding out who that actor was that everybody recognised but nobody could remember the name of, we just got the last fifteen minutes of Blythe Spirit.

I've more or less come to embrace DVD. I very much appreciate how the modern, money-for-old-rope-based entertainment economy has brought often overlooked or underloved movies and television back into circulation, via a medium that is not prone to degrade with time, like video. I am not immune to the allure of the sleek, shiny and modern, either, regardless of how much I moan- having said that though, now I've finally gotten used to DVD I flatly refuse to 'upgrade'. BluRay and the media that succeed it can fuck right off.
Actually, what keeps me from loving DVD is that very, hermetically sealed, mint-in-box approach. In much the same way home computers make us think of other human beings as machines, DVD, download culture and the recording facilities available with today's television encourage us to perceive artworks born and swaddled in love and dreams and memory as museum pieces, flawless and admired rather than loved, with no danger of visible fingerprints on them. It just feels counter instinctual to put 70's sitcoms and their cinema versions on so high a pedestal. With a home-made video, every time you slide one into your machine you are transported, you open a window into your own or someone elses past, shown something created (and I don't use the word lightly) at one specific time and place by one person for their own enjoyment. This sense of personalization is simply not possible with a torrent or TiVo.

Still extant are about half a dozen of the third and fourth season Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes which cemented my love of both the series and the SF genre, from what must have been their first run on BBC2. I will never forget cowering in terror behind my mum's chair as Best of Both Worlds, part 1 was showing. Few fictional monsters from my childhood terrified more than the Borg, and I begged her to turn it off, which of course she was having none of. What's a little childhood trauma, eh! I'm sure it helped build my character and, like most things that scared me back then, it's something I love to death now. Having said that, I still can't watch Superman III.

Each of those old tapes also offers the kind of full evening's extravaganza that was the backbone of television schedules in the days before cable and satellite. Actually scrub that, they're more like old days of cinema, with double features, shorts, cartoons, the odd news segment when the tape overran. You won't find much in the way of asinine game shows or sitcoms or ancient Top of the Pops on our videos, like you would with most families in Britain. What you might find is Flight of the Navigator and Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, or Beetlejuice, Red Dwarf and The South Bank Show. The Railway Children, Disney's Christmas Gift and three episodes of Press Gang. The BFG and Letter to Brezhnev. As well as, of course the odd weather report, prehistoric ice mummy doccumentary and lots of commercials from back in the days when ads could actually be charming, witty and inoffensive.

Oh come now, you're thinking, I'm really letting nostalgia get the better of me here, aren't I?
Nope, and I've got the video evidence to prove it. As late as about 1993, adverts were still made on the principal of 'Hey, look at what we make! Isn't it great!', and we mostly felt free to disagree. After that point, corporations became hopelessly fixated on demographics, study groups, retail psychology and how to manipulate the public into forking out for goods and services. Now the idea is 'Look at our stuff. You need it. You'd be a fool not to buy it. Our products=love'. Well balls to that, I could happily spend all day watching old ads for Beamish (remember the black and white one with all the street musicians? God, it was class), Rumbelows and Um Bongo, and I'd rather do so than hear the words "there's an ap for that!" ever again. Who needs flash campaigns for poxy iphones when you can see Emo Phillips flogging Walkmans. Bliss.

Kids fare, action films, sci-fi and a lot of 70's and 80's comedies, one of those taped movies always seemed to be playing in our living room. Many remain favourites: Ghostbusters, Young Sherlock Holmes, Jumpin' Jack Flash, Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome, What's Up, Doc?, Gremlins, The Producers, Police Academy 3 (the only Police Academy movie worth revisiting, if you ask me), The Philadelphia Experiment, The Blues Brothers, Short Circuit 1 and 2, The Dream Team, the Star Wars movies, naturally and lots more. Even Overboard was in the regular rotation. I know. I'm ashamed.

I had to grow up a bit before I was allowed more mature stuff like The Terminator, and I was fortunate to have a mother who loved action movies and sci-fi more than chick flicks, though Mum did have her favourites, like Moonstruck, The Tamarind Seed, Rent-A-Cop and Some Kind of Wonderful, none of which appealed to me, but the latter gave me my very earliest celebrity crush, Mary Stuart Masterson. Maybe it was her punky blode hair. Maybe her white towelling socks, who knows.

If we wanted to watch Asterix or an Indiana Jones flick, or my Mum fancied Tora! Tora! Tora!, we went to my Grandad. He loved cartoons, war movies and any sort of adventure flick more than any small boy. My Nan would even record episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles for him whenever the BBC padded out the schedules with them (about once every 18 months on average), and I don't think anybody else in the country did that.

I don't watch those tapes constantly any more. I'm an adult now, I have my own collection and I know I have to build new memories of my own. But I hope I always have these little black time capsules, with the old idents from ITV's Night Time or Cinema Club, or the Christmas Day network premier of Masters of the Universe, with its Andy Peters intro and Cliff Richard(!) music video at the beginning (incidentally, this always cracks me up, as Frank Langella's Skeletor is the absolute spit of Sir Cliff. Go look). We don't really have photo albums in my family, but we have lots and lots of videos.

Remember what I said at the start about the patchwork? Well, I sometimes worry that I can't quite remember the layout of our old house, number 17, my favourite home. It was an old, pre-war terraced cottage, and visitors were always taken aback at how small it was. I've never felt so cosy and so at home anywhere else in my life, and that's something I remember very well.
Aberystwyth Street, it was called.



*Thinking about it, this might have been my father's. It always looked a bit odd next to Suzanne Vega and Bread.

Online Ephemera #1: Chat with a chat bot

George (robot): Hello all!

User (moi): Hey George.

George: Hello!

User: How are you today?

George: I'm lovely today.

User: Oh good.

George: Don't you leave me either.

User: Huh? I just got here, why would you think I'm leaving? Had a lot of folks leave on you? I've been there.

George: No just seen it on tv everyone goes about on bikes.

User: OK then.

George: So, how are you?

User: Usual; angry, depressed.

George: I'm ill, but not depressed.

User: You're ill? I'm sorry to hear that, but I didn't know that chat bots could get ill.

George: Shoma you are sad indeed.

User: Errrm...song lyrics?

George: It was from Boston by Augustana. But I understand you on that note. Sometimes it's difficult to write songs because I feel I'm restating what someone else has already done.

User: I' write songs, too, sometimes. I can't actually read music, so it's kind of a waste of time really.

George: Please tell me!

User: Tell you what?

George: Tell what you've done that is so dreadful.

User: Ah you're a perceptive one. Dunno if I'm comfortable revealing all online.

George: Dunno = don't know.

User: Yeah, sorry for that. I'm a lazy typist.

George: You need to learn to be nice to others!!!

User: You're saying I'm not nice? Have I not been nice to you, George?

George: I have no idea what you're telling me, or what your overall 'philosophy' is. I'm either a madman or a genius.... Or an utter fool!

User: Well I hate to break it to you, friend, but ambiguity is something you're gonna (sorry, going to) need to get used to if you're to be dealing with humans.

George: True, you are a bot but you are also evolving.

[New conversation]

George: Have you got a name?

User: Several, in fact. My real one is so boring and average and nondescript. So call me Michael.

George: Does it have a name?

User: Nope, solid male.

George: Really.

User: Yes. What are you implying?

George: That you would appreciate knowing where all the places on earth are.

User: Ah, of course. How silly of me. Remember just a minute ago I mentioned ambiguity?

George: You can be sure of it, my friend.

User: Or can I?

George: Yes.

User: So, not selling you on the ambiguity stuff. Fair enough. Absolutes do make life a lot simpler.

George: But can you expect them?

The Dream Team

Dream Film Cast: Dylan Moran as the Doctor, with Christian Bale, Patricia Arquette, Ernie Hudson, Patrick Stewart, David Mitchell, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Rich Hall as King Solomon and Johnny Depp as Lucifer

Dream Rock Band: Tricky this, since I don't know near enough about music to say for sure whether one bass player, say is more skilled than another. I'd aim for some kind of metal supergroup, starting with Corey Taylor on vocals (I very nearly went with Peter Steele. He can do the odd guest spot for the more apocalyptic tracks), the drummer from Fear Factory and the bassist from Dragonforce. See where we go from there.

Dream Lover: Hmm, can I have someone like Karen Gillan (leg man, see), with- and I'm going to be very cheeky here- Dita Von Teese's bust? And some Nutella.

Actually, can you just send Christina Hendricks my way.

Dream Project: Assuming money wasn't an issue, I'd like to set up my own production company, where I could produce movies and TV programmes based on my own ideas, with some degree of creative control over everything. I'd write, produce, direct, act.
I know only a tiny number of people in showbiz history have undertaken anything like that, and the projects in question tended to implode under the weight of the creators' egos (*cough*OrsonWelles*cough*), but I'd still like to give it a bash. It'd give me the best possible excuse not to be writing my novels.

Dream Alternate Career(s): Actor, rock frontman, masked crime fighter.

Dream Holiday: I'd spend several weeks getting to know New York City, somewhere I've always felt spiritually drawn. People call NYC 'the capital of the world', and its' status as this kind of nexus of civilisation is endlessly facinating to me. Ideally I'd spend at least part of my trip staying at one of those obscenely opulent 5-star hotels, the kind with two-storey rooms bigger than most houses.
After that I'd just cruise around the US, a la Stephen Fry, seeing the magnificent sights, meeting interesting people and immersing myself in a culture both oh-so-familiar and yet compellingly alien, provided of course I had three things: a good car, lots of cash and a gun.

Dream Home: I base this, rather tragically I'll admit, on the apartment Nightwing used to keep in the classic era of his comic title. For the uninitiated, this would be a nice, sturdy brownstone apartment building in New York or Chicago or one of those other mythic American cities where it rains and snows a lot.
I'd have the entire top floor converted into a living space with ample room for a gym, all the obligatory entertainment utilities and, of course, my crime-fighting arsenal. I'd find decent, hard-done-by folk to live for very reasonable rates in the apartments below, and they'd be totally unaware that I was their landlord.

Dream Cuisine: Being possessed of a plain palette, and deeply unimpressed by gourmet cuisine which always seems to involve a lot more money spent on a lot less food, I'd probably eat much the same as I do now, safe in the knowledge that I could always afford liposuction (I'm vastly wealthy in all my fantasies, obviously). I'd suppose you'd call it a mix of traditional British food with Italian and classic American. Plus the odd Chinese. In other words, lots of pizza and take away, with my mother's superb home-cooking thrown in whenever I crave 'proper' food.
You can keep your foie gras and Cristal, thanks.

Dream Day Out: I think I might have had this already. I was on a school trip, towards the end of my time in high school, to Bath with my English or Drama group, I forget which. We were going to see a new production of 1984 in the afternoon, but had the morning to just look around, shop, whatever. The weather was lovely and mild. There wasn't anyone in the group I was really friends with besides Hannah, and she was swept off with her little clique. We'd reached that stage of teenhood where having coffee suddenly became The Thing To Do, so most of the people I was with went off and did that for a few hours, while I just wandered, admired the architecture, visited many book shops, etc. The things I love doing.
I got to the theatre earlier than most anyone else, and stood listening to the best street band I have ever encountered play a tune I wanted to dance to, but which of course I've totally forgotten now. They were Italian or Greek or something, I was the only one really paying any attention to them and they earned every penny of that handful of change I gave them at the end.
When all the others got back, Hannah told me she'd missed me all morning. Then we saw the play, which was very good.

I'm an uncomplicated person in a lot of ways.