Everyone’s trying to out-Ellis Ellis. So what does Ellis do? He tries to out-Ells himself. That’s the result of Imperial Bedrooms, a curious novel that comes over twenty five years after its prequel, Less Than Zero, the blandly beautiful, minimalist, nihilist novel that catapulted him to stardom. And it almost works.

But not quite. More than a sequel, Imperial Bedrooms attempts to be a summation of Ellis’ entire oeuvre, and yes, that includes the graphic rape and murder bit, too. So Imperial Bedrooms functions more or less as a parody. Whether it’s an intentional parody or not, that’s the question.

We’re greeted to a quote from the master, Raymond Chandler, as soon as we open the book. Ellis’ LA is less than noir, it’s just relentlessly bleak. It’s not black and white, it’s faded and bleached and dried out in the sun, much like Ellis’ characters themselves. Remember Rip, Clay’s drug dealer when he was 18? Well, now Rip’s ‘face is unnaturally smooth, redone in such a way that the eyes are shocked open with perpetual surprise; it’s a face mimicking a face, and it looks agonized.’ Don’t worry, though. The kids are still blandly nondescript and beautiful. But this is a novel about growing up.

Ellis is, in many ways, returning to the scene of the crime. Clay notes that one of their friends “wrote a book about us” and is pretty pissed off about it, twenty five years later. But Clay is also a filmmaker and a scriptwriter and still bears more than a passing resemblance to Ellis himself. And that’s where the conceit comes in — and by conceit, I mean it in both senses of the word.

Unlike Less than Zero, there’s some kind of plot. Clay falls in love with some actress who’s only sleeping with him to get a part in his movie and she’s also dating the guy who used to be his best friend and (look away now if you don’t want to hear any more spoilers) she’s also dating Rip. Quite why Clay falls for her so hard is never explained, although a past history is mentioned — in passing. And that’s the problem. Less than Zero worked because it didn’t really have a plot. Imperial Bedrooms has a paper-thin plot that’s sub-Ellis, sub-Chandler. It’s as convoluted as Glamorama, albeit condensed into 170 pages, making it at least a little easier to swallow.

Imperial Bedrooms isn’t a bad book. It’s an experiment. It’s a novel where Ellis looks back on his career and tries to make some sense out of his changing focus. The fact that the-too-cool-for-school Clay is revealed to be as deranged as Patrick Bateman may be jarring to some, but, as Clay himself points out, the clues were always there. We just weren’t looking for them.

Ellis started getting all postmodern on us with Lunar Park, where a character called Bret Easton Ellis attends a fancy dress party where he attends as himself. ‘You do a pretty good impression of yourself,’ he’s told. Imperial Bedrooms is Ellis’ impression of himself carried out to its logical conclusion. It’s both brilliant and flawed and if you’ve read the original, it’s probably one of the must-read books of the year. Unfortunately, the novel doesn’t stand alone and that should give you more of an impression about the strength of the writing and the characterization and the plot than anything else. When a book functions solely as a coda to an earlier book, it’s not much of a novel.

By all means, buy this book, read it, laugh one more time as Ellis paints the stark, rich world in which his characters live in in black and white. But don’t expect a successor to Less than Zero. This is just the final chapter, the final punchline, delivered by a man who’s getting older, twenty five years too late.

It’s rare you get people from left and right of the spectrum agreeing with each other, but when the likes of Guido and the Taxpayer’s Alliance are lining up with the Trade Unions and Labour MPs to condemn the VAT increase, you’ve got to sit up and take notice.

VAT is a regressive tax. That means it hits the poorest hardest because they spend more money on VAT chargeable items than the rich. A rich guy might not notice the cost of his shopping or his petrol rising by 2.5% overnight. But the poor, and even the middle classes, sure as hell will.

More than that, it’s just plain stupid. The economy is — just — in recovery from the worst recession in living memory. Is slapping an extra 2.5% tax on every product bought and sold in the land really going to aid that recovery?

VAT is the most offensive tax to me. Worse than income tax. Because every time I hand over a banknote to pay for something I’ve bought with my hard earned money, I’ll be thinking of a government agent dressed like a 30’s gangster putting a gun to my head and demanding 1/5th of everything I spend as “protection”. At least the income tax man only comes knocking once every year.

I’m angry about the rise in VAT. I know that Labour’s ridiculous overspending and inability to balance the books led us to this, but the rise in VAT is just plain unfair, regressive, and counter-productive to a recovering economy.

In my mind it’s the first bad move the coalition has made.

Let’s not even get started on capital gains tax. Yeah, it’s a tax on fuckwad property developers, but it’s also a tax on entrepreneurs and small business owners like me, too. The acumen to help the wider economy by growing your own business should not be punished. It’s a tax on aspiration. The government should reward people who want to get rich through hard work, not punish them.

But it’s an interesting point. Who gets clobbered more? Is it the poor, having to pay 2.5% more for pretty much everything, or is it the rich, who have to stump up over a quarter of the fruits of their labour when they come to sell their businesses? Arguably, both taxes are pretty immoral and harmful to the economy. People will buy less, and entrepreneurs will be less motivated.

In short? Whenever tax rises, the economy contracts. Whether that’s because people are buying less or working less hard is irrelevant. The British people are already taxed to the eyeballs. Is there such a thing as a fair tax? It depends on where the money is going. If we must pay tax, how come we get so little say in where it’s being used? People might actually vote for an increase in tax if, say, the money was being spent on better schools. But the majority of government projects are vast, over-managed black holes into which tax money never comes out again.

At least this government had the bottle to institute some cuts. Although as the Libertarian Alliance points out, “overall Government expenditure is set to rise from £637bn to £711bn over the five-year term – a mere £74bn increase (that’s well over 11.5pc).”

There’s a simple solution to cutting tax. Put more of the vast machinery of the state into private hands and make people pay for what they use. Should I, a single, childless man, be made to pay for your schools, or your marital tax breaks? Where’s the fairness in that? Come to think about it, why should someone who hasn’t used the NHS in years still be funding it? The British economy is closer to collapse than it has ever been. Drastic times call for drastic measures.

We can cut tax. We just have to start cutting government, as well.

The question is, why now? As ever — cui bono — who benefits?

The material used for this ‘scoop’ came out last summer. It’s been readily available for a long time. It’s possible that the Telegraph — which presumably has reservations about the Lib Dem — Conservative alliance — is behind this hatchet job. But somehow I doubt that.

The Telegraph alone doesn’t really benefit from this. It seems logical that, given the timing, they were given outside help — a source — pointed them in the direction of Laws expenses and told them what to look for. Otherwise this would have come out much sooner.

So who’s the source?

I can’t point fingers. I can only speculate. But just as the Tories are having trouble with their traditional, authoritarian right wing in this coalition, so to are the Lib Dems having trouble with their ‘social democratic’ left.

Vince Cable, a leader on the social democratic left, resigned as Deputy leader of the Lib Dems this week, to rampant speculation. At the very least, it’s an orchestrated attempt to put a left-leaning Lib Dem in the deputy position, whilst also being in a position to be able to be ‘outside the tent, pissing in.’

I’m not saying that Cable himself is responsible. There’s no evidence for that. But taking these events cumulatively, this is beginning to look like an orchestrated response by the Lib Dem left to reassert control of the party. Laws is a leading figure on the right of his party and a key member of the coalition. He has the guts — and the balls — to cut spending where it’s needed. And a lot of people in his own party don’t like that.

The timing of this scandal is just too convenient to be coincidence.

Someone wanted Laws out. I speculate that it’s the Lib Dem left. Cable is unhappy about being marginalized. And the wider Lib Dem left is unhappy about the right-of-centre direction their party in coalition is taking. It only takes one disgruntled staffer or activist who feels ‘betrayed’ by the coalition to rock the boat.

Laws has been caught out. And he is in the wrong. But he has done no worse than a vast number of MPs from all parties have done. The expenses scandal is old news. They were all at it. We know. In the wider context of things, the £40,000 he paid to his lover is a pretty small sum. In fact, had he been living alone, he would have been claiming more.

Laws is key to this coalition. It will be significantly weakened without him. Aside from having more than a whiff of prurience about his homosexuality, which is really nobody’s business, this scandal strikes me as being part of an orchestrated campaign to wreck the coalition from within.

Why call for Laws’ resignation when Michael Gove is allowed to sit on the front bench after much more serious evidence of home ‘flipping’ and abuse of parliamentary expenses?

I have been truly optimistic about this coalition. It’s a good thing. For the first time in two generations we have a truly classically liberal government dedicated to cutting taxes, starting with the poorest, to incentivise work.

Any attempt to remove Laws from his position is a calculated attack designed to weaken the coalition’s stance.

Laws should apologise and resist calls for his resignation. He has a job to do. And as a principled, intellectual, classical liberal, he’s a linchpin in the current coalition arrangement.

This is a smear campaign, no doubt about it. Whose? I’m not sure. Who benefits from seeing Laws’ name dragged through the dirt? Laws fucked up. But he should apologise and get on with his job.

I for one would rather judge him by his actions in government, by how many billions he’s able to save the British taxpayer, rather than by the paltry sum of £40,000 he’s taken at our expense.

Laws broke the rules in opposition. He’s been in government a couple of weeks. I say let’s give him a tabula rasa — a blank slate. Give the man the chance to redeem himself. Let his future actions amend for any past mistakes. Don’t take away one of the new government’s rising stars. The British people have a strong sense of fairness and to my mind giving David Laws a chance to redeem himself and do a service for his country is much better than letting him slink into the night in disgrace.

The man made a mistake. It shouldn’t cost him his career. And if we lose him, it may cost the country much, much more.

Richard Allday

• It’s a giant iPhone.
• It doesn’t have a camera.
• Or multitasking.
• Or USB.
• Or flash.
• It costs twice as much as a netbook,
• it does half as much,
• and it doesn’t have a keyboard.
• It’s got a 4:3 aspect ratio…
• and a 90s-tastic 1024×768 native resolution.

In other words, it’s a barrel of shite with a rather nice touchy-feely interface. But somehow every other reviewer in the land is being paid stacks of cash or freebies or blow jobs or whatever to rave about this overpriced digital doorstop. Lucky for you then that someone at apple forgot to grease ol’ Chad’s palm or spit-shine his cock, so I’m gonna tell it to you like it really is.

If you buy an iPad, you are buying into a fundamental power shift in the user / device paradigm.

You are no longer a creator. You are a consumer.

Apple founded its reputation on being the creative’s choice. Long before it became the machine to be seen posing with while sipping your non-fat latte and working on your god-awful rom-com screenplay lovingly based on your own life, Macs were machines for graphic designers and musicians and other creative types who wanted to get shit done.

Then Apple turned evil. It started out small, with the iPod. But make no bones about it, this is where it started. The iPod is solely a consumption device. It’s to consume media. More than that, it’s a feed to encourage you to buy media. Remember when everyone used to just share music on tape or CD or Napster or Soulseek? Well, now you’ve got the shiny Apple iTunes store selling tracks at a ridiculous price for something that isn’t even real, taking an enormous cut, and basically dictating the direction of the music industry.

The iPad is Apple’s attempt to dominate the publishing industry in exactly the same way. Think about it. These fuckers want you to consume your books and your magazines on the iPad. That’s what it’s been designed to do, supposedly, if you believe the reviews, more or less perfectly. But do we really want Apple controlling our digital futures?

People rail against Murdoch for being monopolistic and attempting to dominate markets. Doesn’t the iTunes store now have more or less a stranglehold on the music industry? Apple aren’t the good guys any more, folks. They’re the evil empire pushing the little guy around. Just because they make shiny quasi-futuristic devices that look great and are easy to snort coke off, doesn’t make them the nice guys.

Think about digital bookstores. No more sharing your favourite book with your friend. You can’t just lend them your dog eared paperback. How’d you lend a DRM protected, encrypted file? Heck, knowing Apple’s track history, you probably won’t even be able to cut and paste.

The iPad is a device designed to get you to spend more money.

Think about the “app store” and the “app” revolution. What a crock of shit. You’re all a bunch of fucking asswipe dummies. 90% of “apps” are just a repackaged way of requesting, receiving and displaying data from the internet. And you’re paying through the teeth for the “convenience” of it.

Apple is a closed platform, folks. That means they’re in control of it. They control what gets uploaded to the app store and what gets deleted — if it’s got questionable content, it’s gone. If Apple had a similar stranglehold on the publishing industry, what else might get deleted? Would Lady Chatterley’s Lover be facing a new obscenity trial in the digital age — with judge, jury and executioner being some faceless suit at Apple HQ?

Basically, the iPad is shit. It’s a shit expensive portable monitor designed to encourage you to buy more shit, like apps to view newspapers and magazines that are available for free right now online anyway. The iPad isn’t designed so you can create. It’s designed to encourage you to consume. It’s like having an advert in the palm of your hand all the time.

Oh, and it can’t do Flash.

Chad Fanstor

Further reading: http://ipadmakesmesad.blogspot.com/

]]> http://thethingis.co.uk/2010/04/08/apple-ipad-sucks/feed/ 3 http://thethingis.co.uk/2010/02/14/coda/ http://thethingis.co.uk/2010/02/14/coda/#comments Sun, 14 Feb 2010 19:36:02 +0000 admin http://thethingis.co.uk/?p=515 Some artist he’d turned out to be. Matt had woken shortly before noon, craving a drink, as usual, but of course he didn’t keep any in the house. No booze, no pills, no coke, no weed. Just him sitting alone in the country cottage, watching the calendar, counting down the days.

He supposed at least the snow was melting. The estate he was staying on, the estate he’d been living on for over a year now, had been completely snowed in by the fierce winter and not even his dilapidated old Range Rover was able to traverse the narrow winding path that led into the village. He was glad because he was fast running out of cigarettes. Like all addicts, like all recovering addicts, he had come to understand his obsession with excess. He smoked nowadays, not one or two here or there, but thirty or forty a day, lighting one off the other and watching them slowly burn down, imagining they were the sands of time.

It had been over a year since he came here. Not a lot had happened. Of course, everything had happened. Just not to him. His father, caught up in the expenses scandal, was due to stand down at the next election and, he supposed, now that it didn’t really matter, the heat was off. He could leave, although he didn’t really have anywhere to go. Mia, he’d heard, was now married — to some rich banker. And she’d started using her title again. Contessa. Who’d have thought it? Sara was on television, one more reason to avoid it, and he hadn’t heard a word from Miranda, or anyone else from those days, since he left rehab in the clothes he’d arrived in and been driven to this desolate place and told to wait.

He was going to chance a drive into the village. He’d run the Range Rover every day in the snow, even if it couldn’t go anywhere, just to keep the engine turning. Matt grabbed his fake plastic Wayfarers and put them on — not the most cunning of disguises, but then again he’d started to dye his hair darker and slick it back, and he didn’t suppose anyone would really be looking for him in the depths of Surrey anyway. No reporters, no gangsters, no angry dealers looking to collect on his debts. He was, to all intents and purposes, a non-person. Lost in time.

The car started. First try. Matt rolled down the hill, past the white fields, through slush that had melted, making the roads passable again. The village seemed full of life. Sure, there were only two or three hundred people, and it seemed to him at one time there could be no more than two or three. But compared to the last two weeks spent sitting alone, this felt like heaven. He almost — but not quite — managed a smile. A queue at the village shop. He waited patiently. He had all the time in the world.

Restocked with Camels he wondered what to do. Life had at least had a little purpose when he was still going to NA meetings (the reason his father had allowed him the car) but they started to talk to him about God and he wasn’t having any of that. It was the final indignity. He’d rather trudge through the wilderness alone than get caught up in some goddamn cult. If they’d been more upfront at the treatment centre about exactly what “recovery” entailed he would have just done himself in there and then. As it was, he ended up getting better, but only a little better.

Deep down inside Matt was a broken man. He wasn’t an artist. He’d tried.

It was infuriating. His watercolours had no consistency and his oil paintings were just smudges of grease. Worse still, everything he sketched seemed flat, and dull, and lifeless. His drawings seemed to lack perspective and that, he supposed, was the problem with his entire life. He was a survivor, he’d been through the calamity. But now he found himself lost and utterly unable to find anything to do. At his father’s request he’d put in for law school next year, but that was a long way away. He had months and months to kill before he’d be allowed to return to civilisation. There weren’t even any girls. The village had two bars, which he avoided, and a small, grubby canteen. It was there that Matt headed, parking the enormous Range Rover outside.

He looked at the sandwich counter with a morbid sense of gloom and instead ordered a fried breakfast. He wouldn’t eat it, he rarely ate (the cigarettes, he supposed), but it would at least afford him some novel way of passing the time, of watching people from the window, perhaps sharing a word or two with the other diners about the daily news. Taking his sugary tea from the waitress he sat down with the day’s paper and began to flick through it. It felt like a dispatch from another world.

Foie gras and the veal, please. He found himself drifting away into a dream world, a world of expensive restaurants and beautiful girls on his shoulder, a world of late nights and bright lights and parties and cocaine and people, friends, people. But he was all alone.

The waitress set a steaming pile of grease down at his table, bringing him back to earth.
‘Are you alright, love?’ she asked. ‘You look ever so peaky.’

Matt had never looked in the best of health, but now with his dark hair his pallid complexion seemed even more apparent, and the doctors told him it’d be a long time before he’d be well enough to eat, to put on any real weight. For now his body ran simply on sugar, cigarettes, and a dour refusal to lay down and die. Consequently his gaunt appearance had continued its steady decline and now, his clothes two sizes too big for him, black bags permanently hovering beneath his eyes, every time he caught sight of himself in the mirror he could only think of Andros, his dead friend, his brother, his foil — the one who had to die before he could see the light.

Matt’s lifestyle had led him close to death. The doctors said he was very lucky, his heart had atrophied and his liver was ready to give up the game. Rehab. They’d made him feel bad about himself and he carried on feeling it almost out of obligation. His liver was getting better. But they could do nothing for his heart.

‘I’m fine,’ he said, finally. Adding: ‘thanks.’

At least Matt’s manners were finally improving. Now he had to rely on people’s kindness, rather than simply paying them a bribe. He could barely afford the breakfast, let alone find the money to leave a tip.

‘Never could understand what a nice boy like you is doing out here on your own,’ the elderly lady said. ‘Every week you come in here. And it’s always the same. Head shrouded in gloom.’

‘I used to be someone,’ started Matt. He faltered. ‘At least, I think.’

The woman nodded. ‘Thought I’d seen you on the telly.’

Matt shook his head. ‘You’ve got me confused with someone else.’

People often thought he was an actor for some reason.

‘I was a…’

Again he trailed off.

‘Never you mind, dear,’ the woman said, ‘it’ll all work out in the end.’

‘Maybe,’ said Matt. He was twenty five.

He stared down at the food on his plate. This was life. This was survival.

This was the end.

Trivial Blake

It’s easy to see that the technology that is most salient in our age is the internet, as made possible by consumer electronics. Have our philosophers stepped forward to engage with the latest technological crop? Perhaps Wikipedia is proof of a consensus theory of truth? I’m sure many  theses are addressing concerns in this vein as you read.

But what of our artists? Will Gompertz recently posted to share an apparently widely held view that no piece of art has yet spoken eloquently from or about the internet. He cites Turner prize winning Jeremy Deller describing our era as “post-warholian”, presumably indicating that Warhol was last person to adequately reference technological change – meaning, in this instance, mass production and consumerism. I wonder if the more recent Saatchi-fueled crop of artists has  captured something of marketing landscape we currently inhabit, but whatever the last sufficient reflection on cultural change afforded by art was, I think we may be on safe ground in stating that the first widely acclaimed artistic portrait of the digital era is still to come.

Which is some surprise when you consider how engaged the news agenda is with technology: I was amazed to see that Google’s Wave technology (still barely incipient) got substantial coverage in the news, while a certain Cupertino based company recently received more than a sprinkling of press when it announced its tablet based computer….

Earning a living from the internet, as I happen to,  I’ve been curious about the Gompertz question for some time, and the  Kinetica Art Fair seemed like a good place to satisfy my pretensions at cultural engagement.   Kinetica is a museum which aims to ‘encourage convergence of art and technology’. The fair certainly captured one aspect of contemporary mood – a very reasonably priced bar was a welcome response to our collective (and my personal) financial deficit.

Standout pieces included a cleverly designed mechanical system for tracing the contours of plaster bust onto a piece of paper and a strangely terrifying triangular mirror with mechanically operated metal rods [Unfortunately I can't find the artists names in the catalog]. The mirror and rods looked like a Buck Rogers inspired torture device designed to inflict pain by a method so awful that you’d have to see it in operation before its evil would be comprehensible. The other works varied from the malfunctioning to a urinal which provided an opportunity for punters to simulate pan-global urination (sadly not with real urine) via Google maps [by Ric Carvalho]. I would defy anyone not to be entertained while wondering round the the fair, its certainly not boring art.

However, Will Gompertz’s challenge was not answered at Kinetica – the essence of the technological modernity was not distilled into any single work, or indeed represented collectively.

I’ve been mulling over various possible reasons for the difficulty of the problem, and quite a few suggestions spring to mind. Do computers naturally alienate artists? Is information technology to visually banal to be characterised succinctly?

My favorite theory is that the transitory nature of our electronic lives that makes them so hard to pin down. Mobile phones, web sites, computers and operating systems from a decade ago all look ludicrously dated – it’s almost impossible to capture the platonic form of these items because they have so little essential similarity between incarnations. Moreover, their form is almost an accident, and not connected with their more profound meaning in any way. The square riggers of the mercantile age and the smoke stacks of the industrial era seem to denote something broader -  how, for example, can communism be separated from its tractors? Yet the form factor of my computer is trivial. Form and functional significance are of necessity separated by digital goods, their flexibility is the source of their power.

In some way I think films give us tacit acknowledgment of the contingent nature of the digital environment that we spend much of our lives in: characters  are never seen using Windows on their computer, in films computer interfaces are always generic. And when we see a Mac in a movie it’s impossible to see it as anything other than product placement.

So, the Kinetica Art Fair may not have been able to help society understand its relationship with technology, but in fairness that might be a misunderstanding on my part. Really the fair was about works facilitated by technology, rather than about it.

I may have picked a straw man in Kinetica. However, the V&As ongoing exhibition Decode really does no better, though its failures and successes are another topic. In this case I think we can say that Decode exhibition does addresses itself to the Gompertz challenge, and it too fails.

As if to illustrate the perversity of the digital landscape the Gompertz post has become a de facto collection of net art, which is well worth checking out. In a still  keener illustration of the era of mass participation, despite the author’s instance that he is questioning the “eminence not of existence” of net art, commenters continue to post links in the belief that enough evidence of the existence of net art will somehow make it eminent.

Jimmy Tidey (Follow me on Twitter)

The film focuses on the unnamed man, a suited-and-booted hitman who sits around in cafe bars meeting people who give him a series of cryptic instructions about where to go next. I’d say I’m going to spoil the plot for you, but the truth is, there is no plot. Or if there is, you’ll never understand it. But that’s the point. Even the denouement, where the hitman breaks into a heavily fortified compound, is a brilliant tease, a sleight of hand that leaves you reeling. One moment he’s outside. The film cuts away. He’s inside. ‘How the hell did you get in here?’ his target asks. ‘I used my imagination,’ the hitman replies.

And that’s the thing. This is a thinking man’s film. It requires you to think. It forces you to think. ‘Sometimes I like it in films when people just sit there, not saying anything,’ says one of the hitman’s contacts. The characters then proceed to sit in silence, unmoving, for two minutes. Or perhaps it just feels like two minutes. Either way, it’s a long time. It’s longer than is comfortable. This is a film that will take you right out of your comfort zone. It isn’t a narrative, it’s a dissection — of motivation, of alienation, of existential nausea . It’s also beautiful. Every scene is like a slowly moving picture postcard. Avatar, it ain’t. But I’d rather watch this film any day.

The Limits of Control isn’t a film — in the conventional sense. In fact, it’s a film that deliberately breaks every possible convention, forcing you, as audience, to question every last formulaic trope in genre filmmaking. The naked girl on the bed. The cryptic cyphers. The ice-cold killer. The nature of reality. This film will make you question everything while revealing nothing. We’re so used to looking at moving pictures now, we never even consider the way they’re framed. This is a film that demands you take a step back into the meta-narrative of filmmaking itself — it’s self-consciously aware of its own existence as a work of fiction. You aren’t asked to suspend your disbelief. Quite the opposite. Here, nothing is real. You’re stepping into a dream.

Some people see nothing more than two hours of their life they’ll never get back. Others recommend you watch it with a couple of sheets of blotter acid. Me, I felt as if I was staring into the mirror for a couple of hours. Not because I saw any of myself reflected in the film, but because the film itself holds up a mirror to the way we view our lives and forces us to ask: in a world where we’ve come to expect predictable story arcs and neat, tidy endings, how do the films we usually watch really depict reality?

The truth is, in all its weird glory, The Limits of Control is closer to real life than any other film that’s been documented recently. Don’t expect answers. When the credits roll, all you’ll have is more questions.

Richard Allday

To them, this is the first day of setting right the world’s wrongs. Of saving the world from global catastrophe. To the rest of us, it’s just another way for the politicians to rip us off.

Unless you’ve been sleeping under a rock you must have noticed the huge scandal about the CRU — the scientist boffins who’ve been cooking the books to make it look like climate change is more of a threat than it really is.

Now they’re trying to say it’s the Russian security services smearing the name of our good scientists. Well, frankly, whoever it is, they’ve done us a favour.

They’ve put these tree-hugging, pot-smoking, save-the-world-types back in their place.

The fact is, I’m gonna drive my car, eat red meat, and smoke chimney stack cigars. And I don’t give a toss what you think about it. I’ve got news for you, hippies. The world’s already going to hell in a hand cart. You’re just using “climate change” as the latest excuse to get all self-righteous on the rest of us.

And the politicians are using you. It’s in the interest of the political class to impose more laws on us. To control us, as people. The green lobby is giving politicians the chance they’ve always wanted — to have a legitimate excuse to clamp down on our personal freedoms.

Today they come for the car drivers. Tomorrow they come for the meat eaters. And don’t even think about setting foot on that plane. That’s bad. You’ll take the rest of your holidays for life in Skegness.

Science offers progress. Science offers civilized solutions. We should be researching ways of using science to improve our biosphere. We shouldn’t be using research as an excuse for returning civilization to a pre-industrialized dark age.

Sneer at me now, but see how you like it when the hippies make you give up your car for a daily commute on a bus that takes twice as long. They’d have you in a pony and trap if they could.

Fuck you, hippies. Fuck you and your carbon trading passports. Fuck you, celebrity hippies, who endorse us mere mortals brushing our teeth and pissing in the shower to save water, yet think nothing of hopping in their private jets to go stage some fucking celebrity concert about saving the world.

Most of all fuck you George Monbiot, and your shitty cabal of “green” (hardline, left wing) followers. To equate scepticism about an unproven scientific theory with holocaust denial cheapens the memory of millions of dead. It’s a cheap semantic trick used by the left. The same trick they always use. Smear your enemy as a murderous, egomaniacal bad guy, a racist, a denier… a comic book villain. It just doesn’t work any more.

I believe in individual freedom. The freedom to choose. The hippies would limit our freedom, would limit our nations’ growth, would limit industrial progress — that’s the reason you’re reading this right now instead of living in a mud hovel — in the name of saving the environment.

Well I say it’s time for science to pull its finger out of its arse and start saving the environment for us. Because turning the clock back isn’t an option.

Make no mistake. The Copenhagen summit is nothing more than a bloodletting excuse for bleeding-heart liberal guilt. It’s a wallet-lightening experience where rich nations will be forced to shed bucketloads of their citizens’ cash just because some phony doctors have cooked up a statistical model that says industrialization might cause some sort of harm to the environment. Maybe. Possibly. We’ll have to check the figures. Which we won’t show you. Which we’ve accidentally destroyed.

Fuck off, hippies. On your bike.

Chad Fanstor

Thursday’s debate du jour was served wrapped in the rind of yet another debate. I spent the day leading up to Nick Griffin’s appearance on Question Time watching the socio-political fallout. With great interest I followed the story as it proliferated itself across the Internet and news outlets, rattling the doors of parliament and rousing the executive suites of the BBC. Watching again as I ate my lunch, I was again moved by just how incendiary an issue this has been. And not just in terms of the wider populous. I truly flit between opinions as to the morality amidst this issue with all its gloomy complexity. I felt as though I needed my own debate about the issue before Griffin even reached the television studio. There are too many things to be said about this issue, too many views I myself want to express. But here is just one. It is a troublesome one, but one I would love to see given the kind of intellectual currency afforded to such platforms as the Intelligence Squared debates.

I put forward the proposition that the BNP, distasteful and undemocratic though it is, is in fact a powerful force for the re-democratisation of the UK. If you can put to one side for a moment the controversy and scaremongering (not to downplay the importance of the bias and racism inherent in the what the BNP stands for), it is plain to see that the drafting of this party onto a highbrow political platform and therefore into the upper echelons of the political arena, has exorcised the populous in a manner practically unheard of in contemporary party-politics. Not since the expenses scandals have ordinary, grass-roots voters been motivated to comment on the functioning of politics and I would suggest that contrary to its outward appearance to have roused political interest, the expenses issue served mainly to cement widespread dislike of the political classes and apathy in the process of democracy and its ability to offer real options and real change.

The BNP’s appearance on prime-time television, however, is one which leaves the moral compass spinning. If pushed I think I find myself most in agreement with the ex-editor of the Sun who commented that the BBC cannot be blamed for simply fulfilling the mandate for which we pay our license fee. I am not sure I am happy about Griffin appearing on Q.T. but it’s worth noting that it is the fundamental bases and building blocks of our society – law, rules, codes of conduct – that keep the BNP and its followers from exerting a greater influence than they do in this country, and therefore we must adhere to these markers of civilisation, and follow the rules and codes in deciding whether to give the BNP this platform. This taken as a given, it is plain that the BBC had only one choice given the BNP’s six percent share of the vote and two seats in the European Elections.

In which case it is not the BBC who is responsible for my discomfort in seeing such a figure ascend the tiers of debate in which I could find at least some semblance of respect for the participants until now. It is in fact the voting public, my fellow countrymen and women.

Quite simply, I do not remember the last time such a divisive political debate lead so readily back to the grass-roots electorate. In my disgust at some of the issues coagulated within this row, I cannot help but take enjoyment from the barbed blade planted firmly into the torso of political apathy.

Ed Williams

Worse, the release of this year’s ArtReview power list has seen him plummet from being Top Dog to being a tick-ridden no. 48 which is, I’m sure, the metaphorical equivalent to Mr Hirst of a royal crack to the knackers with a Doctor Marten boot — delivered while he’s already reeling on the ground. To the rest of us, it’s just a reminder that all glory is fleeting. A star is extinguished, not with a bang, but a very anguished whimper.

My point is that as some stars fall, other rise. That’s why I was tempted into going to the opening night of Lucas Price’s exhibition at the Black Rat Press, Rivington St, Shoreditch. I rolled my eyes when I saw the press release — another graffiti artist — but Price is proof that not every “urban” artist should be tarred with the same can of primer.

I’m going to use the B word. Sorry. But whenever graffiti is mentioned, his spectre looms larger than Banquo at Macbeth’s banquet. Banksy is the street art world’s Vettriano. Sure he does alright and he’s popular, but his work isn’t exactly challenging. Let’s face it, the only provocative statement that’s had Banksy’s name underneath it in at least a decade comes from the anonymous collective that wrecked his Stokes Croft mural by throwing red paint all over it.

I’m an old fashioned kind of guy. I like my art to say something. So it’s truly wonderful when you find art that not only says something, but says it from the heart. Lucas Price manages to do both.

He’s nervous. It’s his first big show and he’s worried about how people are going to react. But unlike a certain D Hirst, he’s not worried about his reputation in as much as it fattens his wallet. No, he’s got the same nervous need for acceptance that all recovering addicts do — a need that drives his entire body of work.

He needn’t be worried. Jesus Help Me find my Proper Place is a deeply personal collection that not only draws deep from Price’s years as a homeless drug addict, but also one that says volumes about his recovery. You feel as if he’s put his heart and his soul into his work and when an artist does that, something magical happens — art becomes more than mere technique and becomes imbued with meaning.

There’s a real sense of Price’s former disconnection and his struggle to reconnect with the world — in short, to find his place. A collage of photos of the Earth taken from the moon, shrouded in telling white space and bearing the legend ‘when you’re high it’s so warm… it’s like a blow job’ seemed to sum it up for me. As did his statement ‘I’ve decided to study real hard this year and become rich and famous.’ You get a real sense of an artist struggling to express himself in his work.

He’s definitely obsessed with death. Skulls abound, and there’s an open coffin placed in the centre of the room — the body in it is undoubtedly the corpse of his former self, the unlucky Lucas Price who never sobered up and discovered meaning. But it isn’t a morbid obsession. It’s a celebration of a deserved escape from the jaws of death.

Lucas Price’s work is warm and genuine. You might not think these are high accolades for pieces that can command up to 14k a throw. But they are. In fact, I can’t think of praise any higher.

For what it’s worth, I’d happily have one of Damien Hirst’s new paintings hanging on my wall. But that’s the point. Hirst’s new work is art-school stuff that ought to be hanging up in someone’s bedroom. You really get the feeling that the work of Lucas Price belongs in a gallery.

In short, I think he’s found his place.

Richard Allday

Lucas Price: Jesus help me find my proper place
Black Rat Press, Rivington St, Shoreditch
October 15th – November 13th 2009

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