International Thug of Mystery

Nick Harkaway, International Thug of Mystery...

Oh, dear.

Further Thoughts of Chairman Sunday

I know, it's Monday morning. I had these thoughts yesterday, but I was busy find out who the 333 killer was.

Kicking off with Quantum of Solace...

Hoo, boy. Well, sure, a lot of things go 'boom'. And James Bond has at long last picked up some unarmed combat training which goes beyond putting his head down and running forwards at the bad guy. That seems appropriate, but yes, it does give a Bourne feel to the whole thing, as does the headlong dive into action. Not a thinker, this Bond. Not much of a lover, either, if we're honest.

Here's the thing: this is a movie about damage. Two damaged people team up to extract their .453592 kg of flesh. In doing so, they explode a lot of things and kill a startling number of people, and contribute to the deaths of a few more (their allies, alas).

At the end of this, they achieve a ragged, empty kind of closure, and quite incidentally, Bolivia is saved from a nefarious political/criminal organisation.

Oh, and a couple of weird things happen: Judy Dench appears to be Captain Scarlet, and there's what seems to be (but cannot possibly be because that would just be too weird) a gratuitous crotch shot.

I was never bored (but I have a really low interest/boredom threshold when it comes to things going "fwoomph!") but I wasn't elated either. This is a surprisingly bleak movie. Perhaps the bleakest moment for me was the seduction of Ms Fields. Chill, perfunctory, emotionless - yes, yes, I know: lots of people will tell you that Bond's romances are all like that. This one was sorrowful, at least to me. Also, the whole thing was over in a heartbeat. I realise that's the point, in a way - that this is a Bond who has almost lost his connection with fun - but I don't want to lose mine. I like fun.

And then later, I figured it out: this is Empire Strikes Back. The new Bond is a trilogy - Casino Royale introduced him, this shows us him overcoming the darkness, and the third movie...

Well, that would probably have some gadgets and fun. But please, not Ewoks.

Don't get me wrong. I love Ewoks. Just... there's a time and a place.

___________________

What else? Well, the day is coming when this rather pedestrian website will be replaced with something a little more swish. Jeff Somers has Helper Monkeys. In an effort to demonstrate that we are not, in fact, the same person, I have acquired

1. evil superpowered robot weasels
   
2. naked interior designers
3. literary critics whose brains are so powerful they can actually change the world by thinking hard about it
4. a blaspheming nun of dark Nyarlathotep, and 
5. jumbo asparagus

and I have mushed them all together to form one overwhelmingly amazing web designer called Richard.

(Good name.)

Richard has the situation well in hand. Or should I say, in the grip of one vast and horribly suggestive claw?

___________________

While I'm geeking out (and I'd like to apologise to those of you who came here looking for literary ponderings and so on - I do that, too, just not right now) can I just say:

Death Knights? Starting a level 50? 

It's all getting too damn easy. I mean, dude, I was in SFK the other day and there were like three of us and a healer-tank and we totalled the place and we were low-level and it was carnage and the only thing we couldn't handle was like Arugal himself, we should have been toast before we got to the first Deathstalker, man...

___________________

Those of you who have no idea what that means: it means nothing. Pay no attention to the huge nerd behind the curtain.

In the interest of making it all up to you, here's one way of beating the non-existent syndrome commonly referred to (c.f. unicorns, Bertrand Russell) as "writer's block"...

Jeff Noon, author of Vurt, described in a talk I saw long ago at the ICA a method he likens to a mixing desk complete with effects. This is my rather diluted explanation of his Cobralingus Engine, as far as I can remember it all these years later.

Find a bit of text, up to a hundred words long.  It can be anything; this piece is from the registration document of the L.A. Times: 

checking your e-mail account for an e-mail from “registration@latimes.com” (be sure to also review your spam or bulk e-mail list just in case ours is inadvertently placed there by your e-mail provider such as AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail or a workplace organization).  Account activation is also required to get customized news and weather or any of our newsletters. As always, Classifieds and Marketplace do NOT require registration

remove the punctuation and spaces,

checkingyouremailaccountforanemailfromregistrationlatimescombesuretoalsoreviewyourspa

morbulkemaillistjustincaseoursisinadvertentlyplacedtherebyyouremailprovidersuchasAOLYa

hooHotmailoraworkplaceorganizationAccountactivationisalsorequiredtogetcustomizednewsa

ndweatheroranyofournewslettersAsalwaysClassifiedsandMarketplacedoNOTrequireregistrat

ion

then randomly remove and add a few letters in each line

chpckingyourailaccouforanemailfromregistrlatilmescombesiuretoalsoreviewyourspamorbulk

emaillistjustincaoursisinadvprtentlyplacedthelrebyiyourailproviedersuchasYahooHotmailor

aworkplacporganizationAccountactivatilnisalsorequiredtotcustomizednewndweatherorany

ofournewslettersAsalwaassifiedsandrketplacedoNOTrequireregistration

and go through creating words from the junk without worrying about sense

chap clock king you rail court force animus ailing frond regicide till mess comb toads  review spasm or bulk list Justin coeur ursine pretend thy place ethanol reply in your grail prove sulk chase sailor at work placate pork galvanized action count active nasal sorcerer quire totem atomized weather organ four new salvation was and placebo note

which gets us to the first moment of overt creativity:  pick some words which suggest characters, places, and stories...

clock king

rail court

ailing

regicide

Justin

ursine

grail

atomized weather

I’m now thinking of a story about the Clock King, an old man ruling a kingdom of decaying railways and clockwork.  Clearly he’s under threat from someone, and Justin may be our hero.  There’s a bear in there somewhere, which makes me think the Clock Kingdom is snowy and cold, but perhaps not everywhere - the weather is atomized.  That could mean that the seasons themselves are out of alignment, not running to schedule.  That would be a classic Fisher King sort of story, where the only answer is the grail...  Oh, and maybe that bear has a role in what’s going to happen.

If that’s not the story I want, I can go again, or adapt it.  You can take it at face value, or recast it in another genre - a thriller, for example, in which an aging industrialist or railway magnate finds his life in danger and seeks help from a young man named Justin.  

The point is not that the method yields a complete story, but that it gets you thinking. It is, of course, only a mirror. You're not going to get anything out of it that you don't put in. I'm the kind of person who sees bears and atomized weather. 

You may pick out

organ

salvation

placebo

sulk

sailor

toads

and get a naval version of Greg House with a toad obsession.

Wait, that's me again, isn't it?

You could pick out

placate

note

quire

salvation

ethanol

grail

and get a story about an alcoholic searching for his own salvation. Is he deluded when he sees a vision of the Holy Grail? Or is he experiencing a genuine divine inspiration?

I'd never write that story. I hate those kinds of uncertainties (K-Pax, for example... brr...) and the alcoholism/God combo isn't for me. Which isn't to say it mightn't be a great story.

Your Cities Now Are Hours

Once upon a time, there was an unpublished book called 

The Wages of Gonzo Lubitsch.

That presented two problems:

1. Any time the author gave the name of the book - at a party or in someone's living room or whatever - the person he was talking to invariably said 

"What?" 

This was alarming because books need good word-of-mouth, which is hard to achieve if no one can remember or understand or even process the sense data from hearing the title.

2. The name Gonzo was irretrievably associated with Hunter S. Thompson, who had recently died, and every third book was called "[somethingorother] Gonzo". The title was supposed to reference the muppet of the same name, but supposed doesn't solve the problem.

So with heavy hearts, the author and the publishers got together to change the name of the book. And that's where the fun began.

The author went home and came up with ten to twenty alternative titles every day for ten days - and that's not even counting the ones he rejected because they made no sense at all.

Some of the tamer titles were:

The Haulage & Hazmat Emergency Civil Freebooting Company of Exmoor County

The Great Bewilderment

The Unanticipated Man

Then there were some which were a bit weird:

Other Side Front

The Unanticipated Consequences of a Clockwork Plan

The World, Unravelled

And finally there were some which were just bonkers, but were really great titles for something:

All Or Nothing Days

Spokane '37

and 

Your Cities Now Are Hours

I'm not going to explain all of them - I might use them one day - but that last one, because it is almost certain that I will never, ever find a way of getting it out there, is something I want to mention because I'm secretly really fond of it. So fond, in fact, that the whole 3rd-person-narrative thing of this post has dried up and blown away. For the best, probably - it was starting to sound just a teensie bit arch.

I wanted something which would have the odd-factor of All Your Base Are Belong To Us, but with that additional sting: the suggestion of transforming a simple physical space into an abstracted unit of time. I was going to steal the origin of "all your base" - quirky videogame translations - and weave it into the story which was eventually known as

The Gone-Away World. (Of course.)

And the Go Away Bombs would allow me my mad little moment, taking the perfectly ordinary statement of world domination, your cities now are ours, adding an h to get the crazy hours, suggesting space=>time and finally referencing the videogame-ishness of bombs falling onto a world you can't defend in an impossible battle which has no apparent cause. A certain group of people would have found this unbelievably clever and cool.

It is a very, very small group.

It may, in fact, include only me.

My editor, joy to him and his house unto the tenth generation, said:

"Nick. What was the point of this whole thing?"

To produce a title people would be able to remember and say to one another.

"Without having to spell it."

Yes. Oh. Ah. Damn.

"Yes."

And finally, by a combination of efforts and creativities and stubbornnesses, we got to the title we now have. Which I love.

But there is still a part of me which mourns the worst title ever: Your Cities Now Are Hours.

This has been a completely self-indulgent post. Thanks for listening...

Ooooh! But I just had a totally cool thought! I don't think there's a word for the nostalgia one feels for something which never happened! Sort of the opposite of Foz's mnemencholia. Which would make it...

Parastalgia.

See? You waded through all that and you caught me neologising! That has to be worth the ticket! No?

Oh.

Irukandji, Spiderman, and Renegade

If you follow my Twitter feed, you'll know that I've been watching Season 4 of CSI: New York, and that I detect just a whisper of shark-jumping. It was the time travel ep which did it for me, but the one I've just seen features Irukandji jellyfish.

For those of you who don't want the plot spoiled... yeesh, I have no idea what to say to you. Don't read this post, clearly, but also: are you kidding me? 

Okay, so the girl dies because there are microscopic-yet-lethal jellyfish in an inflatable olive.

She does not notice that she is getting pulmonary edema because of the heroine and fentanyl drug cocktail she has taken.

And she dies.

In seconds.

Now, for some reason, this all struck me as weird and unlikely. Do not ask me how I was able to sit through Gary Sinise's character lecturing me on wormhole physics in the time travel episode without catching fire and exploding, and yet was annoyed by this. I cannot tell you. Perhaps it was the resigned, dignified way in which Sinise spoke the lines, as if to say: I have no clue how you're supposed to find this credible, but if you'll invest another twenty minutes of your life, I'll give the best performance I can. And you know what? It was enjoyable, in a weird way. And what else are you going to do with what must be the twentieth season of a CSI show? Honestly? 

So, I looked it up. Irukandji jellyfish. As far as I can tell, no, the plot doesn't work perfectly - opiates and Fentanyl are actually the usual treatment for Irukandji syndrome, and onset isn't as quick as it appears to be in the show. Still, it was actually pretty close.

The truly awful thing? In no sense would heroine be enough to prevent the victim from screaming her head off. For hours. And hours.

Irukundji syndrome, though rarely fatal, is utterly terrifying and vile. To hell with sharks... this little monster is really, really alarming.

Yikes.

So I went off to cheer myself up on teh Interwebs. And lo, I was shown Barack Obama's (do you see how he's always the source of the goodness at the moment?) Secret Service codename:

Renegade.

Michelle is Renaissance.

Better yet, they put the codenames up on some kind of billboard thingy.

Best of all, these codenames are chosen without reference to the person concerned. Yes, yes, they are. It's just coincidence that George W. is Tumbler and his father is Timberwolf. And that Hilary is Evergreen and Bill is Eagle. And, and, and... so on.

Coincidence.

More wonderful even than that - the question the pundits did not ask:

is America ready for a geek president?

Yes. The New Hope collects Spiderman and Conan the Barbarian comics.

Just when you thought it couldn't possibly get any better...

Secrets and Slaves. (Get angry. Right now.)

Ah, Monday morning. You never disappoint. I raise a glass on Friday, sleep through a lot of Saturday, get to spend some quality time throwing dried pasta at Mrs Harkaway and giggling, celebrate life a bit more in the evening, and chill out on Sunday. Then Monday comes along, with a fresh crop of crazy for me to enjoy.

Today's crazy comes courtesy of Her Majesty's Government, and if you live in the UK you need to pay very close attention to this one. This is not a kidding-around issue, or a distant issue. This is a real, serious, get-off-yer-arse issue.

In fact, as I look at my paper (today it's the Independent, because that's what the last guy left behind) I realise there are two get-off-yer-arse issues.

Isn't that just great? Barack Obama's waiting to undo 200 ill-advised Busheries, and in my beloved London, Gordon Brown is still racking up his own tally of authoritarianism and stupidity.  Makes me feel proud to carry a passport. No doubt I'll feel even prouder when I have a biometric ID card and the government loses all my data.

So, here's issue 1:

Human Trafficking Not A Priority

The modern slave trade is a growing horror, it's very real and very nasty. The UK is a choice destination for human trafficking. Oh, yes, it is. We're a slaving centre. Don't it just make you glad?

So glad, in fact, that we're no longer funding the police team which was out there trying to stop it. I know there's a recession on - although everyone's still eating in expensive restaurants, apparently - but really, is this a good place to cut? 

No. No, it isn't.

And then there's this little gem:

MPs seek to censor media

Yes, beloved reader, they really do. They want more power to prevent newspapers from reporting, on grounds of national security. Ohhh, boy. Now, never mind that that's a phrase which, as the man says, has lost a great deal o' meanin' lately. This is an area with a very, very inglorious history. (See Ordtech, Binyam Mohamed, Bisher al-Rawi)

Broadly speaking, our leaders have a long track history of doing bad things, claiming they haven't, and slapping an "Official Secret" stamp on it when someone comes along and demands to know the score. They do this even (or particularly) when someone has been specifically asked to involve themselves in murky doings by our intelligence services. They seem to feel quite easy about selling people downriver, abandoning them to be tried in our courts (or somewhere less charmingly quaint about habeas corpus) for things we asked them to do, and putting the whole thing under the sign of the rose.

For example, in the Ordtech case...

Paul Grecian, head of Ordtech, had been working as a Special Branch informer and was the first person to inform Whitehall that President Saddam Hussein of Iraq was building a "supergun" with the help of British companies. Despite that, he was investigated and prosecuted by HM Customs and Excise.

Evidence withheld by ministers from the trial, but finally disclosed on appeal, revealed the full extent of his assistance to Scotland Yard's Special Branch and MI5 and MI6.

However, officials were prepared to disavow his help. In August 1990 a Foreign Office official reportedly compiled a briefing note for the security services, which said: "If Ordtech ends up in court {Mr Grecian} may be persuaded to keep quiet about his connections with {Special Branch} and yourselves but there is an obvious risk he will try the 'working for British intelligence' ploy."

I'm not saying that's what this legislation is intended for. There may be a genuine concern here - though, as with the infamous 42-day legislation, it seems to be proposed on the basis of "situations which might occur at some point in the future but haven't yet".

What I am saying is that no government can be trusted to behave. 

Isn't that sad?

And yet, at the same time, unquestionably true.

They simply cannot be permitted this degree of autonomy. It's like leaving your dog locked in the kitchen with a joint of beef on the counter. Howevermuch they start out intending to be good, sooner or later a circumstance will come along where it is absolutely imperative that the dog eats your Sunday roast. It's not that they want to. It's just that it has to be done. 

And if that strikes you as shrill, you should probably check out some of the uses to which anti-terror laws have been put recently...

A council has used powers intended for anti-terrorism surveillance to spy on a family who were wrongly accused of lying on a school application form.

For two weeks the middle-class family was followed by council officials who wanted to establish whether they had given a false address within the catchment area of an oversubscribed school to secure a place for their three-year-old.

There's nothing particularly remarkable or sinful about this. It's on a par with a lot of things people do in the world. It does mean, though, that we can't just let our leaders get on with it. They have to be scrutinised - especially when they want a free hand.

So write and tell them so. Do it now - it only needs a couple of lines.

Where's the damn recession when you need it?

This is the weirdest recession I have ever heard of.

Last night, Mrs H and I were trying to celebrate her birthday. The actual day was October 31st, but she was in Doha for Reprieve, so we couldn't use our booking at the amazing Locanda Locatelli, which is where we go when we want to acknowledge a special occasion like our first anniversary. (Although actually, as I think about it, for our first anniversary I actually created a table for two in our living room. But you get the idea.)

Anyway, last night, at short notice, we were trying to get a table for two at some species of decent, pretty London restaurant. And in the attempt, we went through pretty much all of the ones listed in Hardens.

Not one had a table between 6:45 pm and 10 pm. 

How many tables is that? How many diners?

So obviously, this was a huge pain in the backside, because we wanted to go and stare lovingly into one another's eyes and be nauseating, but it's also interesting because where's this damn recession I'm hearing so much about? Those places should be half-empty, surely? And yet they're really, really not. They're full to bursting. It's not Christmas yet, and in any case, these weren't office groups or celebrants. When we finally found somewhere to eat (at 10:15 pm) we were surrounded by ordinary punters laying out  fair wallop of cash on wine and ordering the salmon. No holding back, and no special occasions particularly - no cheering, no singing of Happy Birthday, no toasting.

What in tarnation is going on out there?

Weird.

Prop 8 (and all its little wizards)

So, Barack Obama is President-Elect of the United States of America, and that is a huge, stunning, amazing thing.

However, California voters appear at the moment to have voted in favour of an amendment to the state's constitution repealing the right of gay couples to get married or to have a marriage recognised in California.

Let me just ponder that a bit -

Each US state has a constitution and legislature of its own, and can make laws and police itself and so on alongside federal law. (Hence some states have capital punishment and some do not.) Gay couples have recently been allowed to marry in California; Proposition 8 is an alteration to the fundamental legal framework of the state to de-legitimise all those marriages, as well as prevent any more of them.

The relationship between state and federal law isn't clear to me - and I suspect is generally fuzzy. I look at this proposition and it seems clear to me that it's a religiously-motivated law, imposing one group's interpretation of 'marriage' on another. In that context, it seems blatantly in violation of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America, from which is derived the much-touted separation of the Church and State.

(There's some very interesting stuff on the First Amendment here, including this:

Mr. Madison said, he apprehended the meaning of the words to be, that Congress should not establish a religion, and enforce the legal observation of it by law, nor compel men to worship God in any manner contrary to their conscience.

That seems pretty clear-cut to me - but of course, the pro-Prop 8 groups have asserted that that final clause supports their position, too.)

I went to ProtectMarriage.com and tried to get an idea of whether there was any kind of rational argument being made beyond "We no like you gay humpy peoples! You humpy without the hetero partner and with lights on! You altogther too much the fun have! Now we make rewengee! Go humpy in Canada!"*

Sadly, there doesn't appear to be. I held my nose through a couple of ads about "have you thought about what Gay Marriage actually means?" (Apparently, it means the collapse of civilisation, but why, I still have no idea.) I was waiting for an explanation of how marriage which is not between one man and one woman damages marriages which are. I'm still waiting.

Lurking behind this, there's an equally alarming sub-text - here is a state amending its own constitution to withdraw rights from its population. The proposition attempts to work retro-actively to un-marry existing unions. I'm not comfortable with that at all.

More broadly, I do not understand this argument. I don't see what's in it for the churches, I don't see how it's anything but destructive to the notion of marriage - which, let's face it, is treated by celebrities as a sort of convenience food, and increasingly seems to be a time-limited decision for many people - to whinge about who can do it. Compare and contrast the end-games of two strategies:

1. anyone can marry

People do. Marriage is a thing which embraces all kinds of relationships and people look at it as a logical completion of love.

2. only straight people can marry, but other equivalent statuses exist for other sexualities

Marriage is one option among many. Some straight people do it. Some don't. 

And indeed, when the UK brought in same-sex partnerships, there was the Evangelical Alliance saying very much that. Of course, they were saying it in the context of gaypeoplehaveevilsatancootiesophobia, but the point remains.

The only way I can see in which the argument for prohibiting gay marriage has any traction is if you assert as a hard fact that there is a God, and that that God doesn't want gay people to marry (or indeed exist). I don't believe that God, if s/he exists, is a frantic sexual conservative. I think that's a human obsession. That aside, though, we come back to the point that this is a religious prohibition being enforced by a law. 

This is an argument which is going to play out again and again around the world. It's being argued in the UK right now, with predictable meanness. And the point, as far as I can see, isn't anything to do with 'gay people shouldn't marry'. It's about an irrational (and ever so slightly Freudian) fear that if gay marriage is legal, you will be forced to marry a gay person and have nasty, sticky gay sex with them. You might have gay children and they might adopt straight children and gay-ify them! You might be infected with gay and spend your life in some kind of appalling tension between lust and conscience! You might gay-ify your pets! Ohhh, noes!

People, really. Get a grip. It's not a werewolf movie. It's my friends and your friends and their friends trying to be happy together. Get over yourselves.

To come back around to the beginning... Last I knew, the votes on Prop 8 were still being counted. Reports of the demise of the California Spring may be exaggerated. It's hard to tell with the time difference. 

But if it's gone through, well... California, you've got some work to do sorting that mess out.

__________________ 

* hm. I have no idea why my sub-conscious believes that Yoda's evil idiot cousin hates gay marriage. Let's just not go there.