This seems like as good a time as any to point to point to Paddy McGuffin's article on the ongoing Iraq inquiry for the Morning Star and say: why isn't anyone else saying this?

"The inquiry kicked off on Monday and, a week on, what have we learned?

That regime change was discussed as far back as 2001 ... that it was illegal ... that Iraq had no WMDs and that Britain knew this 10 days before the invasion.

Gripping stuff eh? I can hardly wait for the next stunning revelation.

What will this rigorous investigation unearth next? That politicians lie? That George Bush is an idiot?

...

The Iraq inquiry has been established, like the Widgery inquiry into Bloody Sunday and countless others - Butler, Hutton, for example - precisely because it will not reveal the truth. It wouldn't have been announced otherwise.

Oh, there will be a few tidbits for the hacks to seize on - as we have seen this week. But nothing of any real significance.

This was all too clearly illustrated when it emerged that a deal had been struck betwixt inquiry and government.

This agreement meant that the inquiry had in effect agreed not to publish anything which the government didn't want published.

So we have the wonderfully wacky situation where an inquiry stacked with Establishment figures is investigating, er, the Establishment which can then censor anything it finds unpalatable before the inquiry publishes its findings."

Also, I love it that reconvenes on monday. It's THURSDAY. They're not even bothered enough to work fridays. Brilliant.

--

Been playing Gun Club a lot again lately, only I've moved on an album. My Dreams is sublime, and has the slightly nervous energy of my favourite (non-typical) Fall stuff, but with added jangle. (No spotify?) I think if I had a car, I would definitely blast that down the highway.

Nothing to say except:

how cool is this?

Must stop reading the internet.

Must read the internet more.

Which? Both?

I think this is the best thing on twitter, anyway. Once someone's come up with that, the rest is almost superfluous.

(Title quote is from yesterday's Wonderland: The Trouble with Mother - go watch.)

What did I say about ignoring me when I slip into angst?

I've been feeling increasingly run down lately; the last couple of weeks at work have been stressful (not for any major reason, but I'm a creature of habit and any unusual situations have a noticeable effect) and the weekends haven't felt like weekends because of various things going round and round and round in my head. However, I cleverly had last friday booked off work, and though wandering around christmas-stuffed high street shops on (and over) the verge of tears is never a good start to the weekend, it did get slightly better, and now I'm almost back to my normal mildly-exhausted-but-don't-care state.

I've also re-discovered DEVO, it may seem a strange thing to say but they're the aural equivalent of comfort food. They remind me that I am not alone in my awareness and despair of the world being full of morons, and there's no pick-me-up quite like that.

Anyway. I could have sworn I posted something about the High Line before, but seems not so. Not just a disused stretch of railway turned into a park, but a genius and joyous feat of design. That goes for the website too, there's shedloads of photos (including beautiful black and white of the railway in use) and a lot of detail about the design, and extensive lists of the plants used. Bloody marvellous, it is.

I watched Sunshine last night, strange film. Reminded me a lot of Solaris, though nowhere near as bonkers as that, but still. Not particularly satisfying, but compelling. Actually, reading some quotes, I may have to re-watch Solaris..

every so often i get to the point where nothing interests me any more, it all just bores the living hell out of me, and there's nothing for it but to destroy myself, and it's hard to stop myself because there's really nothing else to do intstead.

this has been a really strange and draining weekend.

Quick update to my last entry: that Cutting Edge doc is now available to watch online! (Hit 'watch now', and you may need to use IE, bloody thing.)

I really want to see this film, but god knows how. They have a lot of good films by the looks of it, maybe I should suggest they start burning DVDs? Why on earth are they not already?

Very glad today is finally out of the way, very glad to be home, in the warm and dry, with a cup of steaming tea; it was only a meeting (in Basildon) but frankly we can all talk about this stuff until we're blue in the face (and some of them did) but until we get someone from higher up to get off their arse and down to our level and see about sorting this mess out, it's a waste of time and breath. But hey, you take the NHS apart and start playing all the bits off each other, what do you think'll happen?

Anyway, it's the weekend. Thank f!ck.

Crikey, I've completely forgotten what I was going to say.

...

Anyway. I think I've found the most eloquent man on television. He's called Durga (no idea if I've spelt that right), and tonight's Cutting Edge was all about how his wondrous belief in the English and our perfect lives was brutally crushed on the pavements of Westminster as he became a traffic warden. It doesn't look like it's available online yet, but hopefully it will be soon, I will keep you posted (if I remember).

I will post properly (whatever that means) at some point soon, I just really need to get tomorrow out of the way first.

Interesting interview from The Register with climate scientist Mike Hulme, concerning not so much the idea of climate change itself, but attitudes towards the idea of it, and the nature of the debate - or lack of - around it:

"I mean, you can disagree with it, and you can find flaws in his argument, but let's find those flaws and let's have a disagreement, rather than suddenly becoming reactionaries overnight. And I think there's too much of that. And it's an interesting question as to why it is that people feel that climate change is somehow is the issue beyond all other issues today that one has to stand on shoulder to shoulder and not allow any chink in because it would allow the powers of darkness to somehow gain the upper hand."

Anyway, I'd just like to finish by saying that I'm currently reading Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union and it is one of the best books I've read, a joy to read, so much so that I desperately want to post whole swathes of it here (the subject header is a quote). Though it would be easier for me if you would just read it yourselves, kapish?

Thank you for your patients.

All this stuff about the Berlin wall coming down in the news is making me.. watch less news. I dunno why, I just don't trust 'em.

Anyway.

I really hope this gets made.

From the latest Stop The War newsletter:

"NATO's operation in Afghanistan has descended into farce. Gordon Brown and Barack Obama have both congratulated Hamid Karzai - a man they installed as Afghanistan's ruler in the first place - for winning an election they themselves have condemned as corrupt."

Couldn't have put it better myself.

I've rediscovered The Fall.

Nuff said, so photos from aforementioned abandoned college:

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I've got a backlog of bits of old papers building up, it's not good. Too much to read, not enough time.

I just want to post a couple of interesting obituaries I've seen lately:

Jack Nelson, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter

"He maintained that the main thing people want from newspapers is facts -- facts they didn't know before, and preferably facts that somebody didn't want them to know. Jack was tolerant of opinion writers; he respected analysis writers, and he even admired one or two feature writers. But he believed the only good reason to be a reporter was to reveal hidden facts and bring them to light."

Margaret Gelling, expert in English place names

"This “obsession”, as she happily called it, seemed to have begun at St Hilda’s in Oxford, where she found her English course boring, but was encouraged by Dorothy Whitelock to look at place names. They appealed immediately to the socialist, even communist, instincts with which she liked to shock her parents. Most of the place names of England had been bestowed not by officialdom, or in deference to knights, earls or kings, but by ordinary peasants coping with flooded pasture or looking over the hills. That habit had long died out; but as a resident of Birmingham (“village of Beorma’s people”) for most of her life, she liked to think that Spaghetti Junction, the giant intersection of roads just north of the city, was a solitary modern example of the will of the people expressed in a name.

Obituary from The Economist ( under the cut: )

Crikey, they only went and published it. I can't say I agree with many of the other comments, but hey, it's not anywhere near as reactionary as the BBC's 'Have your say'.

That would be worrying enough, but the Morning Star yesterday published a characteristically eloquent and precise letter written by my dad. Doom is expected imminently.

I actually just read the article he writes about, and I can see why he wrote it. If only Tamsin Omond really had ended up in that marketing consultancy. An autobiography at 24? Spewing out worlds like mandate and "engage with creating a public image"? No, where she really belongs is in government.

I am 26 and yes I do care - that the truth around what happened in Bosnia seems to have been buried under an overwhelming pile of Western propaganda. Modern technology has nothing to do with it; except it may have made it easier to do this. I am dismayed - no, sickened - by tonight's report on C4 News, spouting the same old rubbish, towing the US/NATO line. You might argue that you're merely showing us what you've been presented with, but I would say try some journalism, try some digging. Try questioning the story. Try reading Diana Johnstone's article on Srebrenica:
http://www.counterpunch.org/johnstone10122005.html

and Michael Parenti's book on Yugoslavia:
http://www.michaelparenti.org/ToKillANation.html

I was not aware of the world around me when this was happening, but I am trying to make up for it by reading anything that looks reliable. Thanks to Iraq et al, I know that almost nothing from an official Western source can be trusted.

I'm a fan of C4 News (and J Snow) because you often show stories not seen on the BBC, or report them with greater insight (though it's not hard to be compared favourably with the BBC) but tonight you completely let me down.

I just posted this as a comment on Jon Snow's blog entry posted tonight about the relevance to modern youngsters of Karadzic, Bosnia, war, and everything. It's currently under moderation. What's the chances it'll get through?

I would urge you to watch tonight's report on C4 News if you didn't see it, but I don't think it's online yet - but it will be. I can and will urge you desperately to read Diana Johnstone's aforementioned article about Srebrenica and the misinformation spread by the the US, Britain, NATO:

"The false interpretation of "Srebrenica" as part of an ongoing Serb project of "genocide" was used to incite the NATO war against Yugoslavia, which devastated a country and left behind a cauldron of hatred and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. The United States is currently engaged in a far more murderous and destructive war in Iraq. In this context, the Western lamentations that inflate the Srebrenic massacre into "the greatest mass genocide since Nazi times" are a diversion from the real existing genocide, which is not the work of some racist maniac, but the ongoing imposition of a radically unjust socio-economic world order euphemistically called "globalization"."

As for Channel 4, I wait impatiently to see if they really 'care' whether I care or not.

Just photos, it's been a really long week.

( thirteen )

Managed to stealth-bag myself a copy of Trust from Amazon before the postal strike kicked off - and the sodding thing won't play. I am completely distraught. Thank the lord for youtube, but still.

Talking of the strike: what IDIOT described it as a battle between two dinosaurs? This is not a battle, and these people are not dinosaurs - on either 'side'. This is a concerted and vicious attempt by a vicious and two-faced tory-lite government to dismantle the Royal Mail and hand it out to the baying capitalist mob. It is in the government's interest that the workers go on strike, it helps them a little bit further on the way to destroying the company; it's being manipulated this way. The idea that that bastard Mandelson should now intervene is missing the fact that his intervention has already led to this mess. It goes to show exactly what a nasty piece of work he is that he feigns innocence and pretends he wants nothing to do with the matter.

By the way, the Tories (the real ones) will privatise the Royal Mail: yet one more reason to not give them your vote.

The college I studied A levels at for two (miserable) years, a decade ago, wasn't really a college. It was a business, it felt like offices, the lecturers wore suits, and as students we were a tolerated necessity, a means to a profit. I never felt like I belonged there, I very often felt like my being there was a waste of time, and I'm fairly sure I wasn't the only one who felt that way. And it wasn't entirely down to where my own head was at the time; the place had awful vibes. The one place I felt right was the art rooms on the top floor. It covered half of the whole floor, huge windows, lots of light, all open plan, shedloads of space, well stocked, always open. But I lost interest in that too in the end. It wasn't entirely down to me, but I wasn't in the right frame of mind to start with.

Anyway, the college moved into new (hideous) premises a couple of years back. The old building (the one I spent most time in; the other's been demolished) has been left, I go past it every so often as it's on a main road into the town centre, I look at it and feel nothing. I got nothing from it except a love of Hamlet, an obsession with van Gogh, an understanding of the circular nature of psychology studies, and a hatred for our modern education system. But yesterday I went back, without meaning to, and right into the belly of the beast, and.. it's become a magical place. I took my camera up that aforementioned main road, intending to snap the library (it's a slightly interesting concrete seventies job, vaguely like the South Bank - from a distance) but I ended up in the empty carpark of the local council offices overlooking the grounds of the college. It didn't seem to be fenced off, I'd assumed it would be, and you can't tell from the road but it's been completely reclaimed by nature. Welcome signs, entrance arches with missing lightbulbs, circles of seats, signposts, standing stones, all overgrown, and the whole placed filled to the brim with trees in all their autumnal glory.

I've always been uneasy with the idea of closure, but I can't help feeling like a dead and empty two year gap in my life has started to heal. At the very least it shows that nothing stays the same, and nature will always win in the end.

I took a film's worth of photos, to come soon hopefully. In the meanwhile, these are from the end of September:

( fourteen )

(It's official, I have a Hal Hartley / Martin Donovan obession - I need to get a copy of Trust toot sweet. Any film with a character who carries a hand grenade at all times "just in case" is worth watching in my book.)

---

First golf, now gardening; what's going on?

I've been meaning to mention this article by Anna Pavord about a new bit of landscaping at Boughton House since the moment I finished reading it, all those weeks ago. It's more architecture / sculpture than gardening, an earthwork to be precise, which I guess is the most basic and impressive form of architecture. You have to read about it to understand how it became what it is, but thanks to the internet you can also see it on landscape architect Kim Wilkie's website. I just think it's the most perfect resolution of that bit of space, it's absolutely the correct answer to the question 'what do we put here?', a simple, mimimalist and perfect opposite to the flattened pyramid mount next to it. It just works. I would love, love to go and see it, and be in it, and around it. It's beautiful. I don't know what else to say.

Anyway, from geometrics in earth to geometrics in concrete, courtesy of the South Bank and environs:

( eleven )

(I've not seen 03: on a computer screen clock for a long, long time.)

Fitting really, as I've just watched Insomnia - a great, great film, choc full of an older Al Pacino which is all I really need in a film, when it comes down to it.

But it's led me to this, one of those cool/funny celluloid geek dance moments - the link being Martin Donovan, who dies way too early in Insomnia for my liking. Anyway, turns out he's a bit of a regular with filmmaker Hal Hartley, a name I didn't really know until just now, but whose films look awesome in a kind of 80s/90s slacker counterculture kind of way. Also a link there to Adrienne Shelley, whose film Waitress I really need to get around to seeing.

Well I'm rambling.. all this and no more photos scanned. Maybe tomorrow?

(Oh but I found my winter coat too; I only hope it exists in real life.)

Swine flu: putting the PANIC in pandemic.

(One of our lot at work has got it, but when you factor in the telephone helpline call centre method of diagnosis, what have you actually got? Flu.)

Talking of work, but much more seriously, an interesting Independent article I finally got around to reading yesterday: Why are so many France Telecom workers dying?

Photos, the first of 3 films I got back at the weekend - the Elms Lesters Painting Rooms and immediate environs:

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