London's Calling

Farewell

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 19:10:27 +0100

Okay, so it seems like I’m not going to have enough time to post on here anymore — and in any case, I feel like I’ve rather lost the drive to do so. I suspect this is the end of my posting on here, but I’ll probably leave the blog up for the sake of posterity.

It’s been fun and I’ve learned a fair amount on here, but now I have new and bigger sources of learning. Goodnight, and good luck!

Euan xxx

Oxford Calling

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 18:31:29 +0100

So, all my stuff is packed up, I’ve said goodbye to most of the people who are still in London, and I’m slowly coming to the realisation that not only am I really leaving home, leaving London, but that I’m going to Oxford university.

Well, hopefully I am, because our car won’t start. Come on BMW, what kind of timing do you call this?

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting very much these...

Thu, 27 Sep 2012 21:17:28 +0100

I’m sorry I haven’t been posting very much these past few days, but I’m now on the home stretch of getting ready to leave for Oxford, and the actual packing has started.

(Yes, those are playboy bunny ears…)

"We are living here and now, not in some imaginary universe. And here and now there are tyrannical..."

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 20:15:16 +0100

“We are living here and now, not in some imaginary universe. And here and now there are tyrannical organisations – big corporations. They are the closest thing to a totalitarian institution. They are, to all intents and purposes, quite unaccountable to the general public or society as a whole. They behave like predators, preying on other smaller companies. People have only one means of defending themselves and that is the state. Nor is it a very effective shield because it is often closely linked to the predators. But there is a far from negligible difference. General Electric is accountable to no one, whereas the state must occasionally explain its actions to the public.”

- Noam Chomsky (via taintedsound)

Andrew Mitchell

Sat, 22 Sep 2012 19:34:02 +0100

Andrew Mitchell, the newly installed Chief Whip allegedly called one of the police officers at Downing Street a “fucking pleb”. Personally, I think we should be grateful for his bracing honesty; at least he has the balls to say what he and his public schooled cabinet minister friends actually think of the rest of us. I’d just like to add that if I was to call a police officer a “fucking pleb” I would find myself sitting in Westminster police station, without a shadow of a doubt. They should’ve nicked the silly bastard.

thoughtsfrombeyondthecuckoosnest: I wish John Oliver could be...

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 20:11:05 +0100

thoughtsfrombeyondthecuckoosnest:

I wish John Oliver could be on Community more, but at least he’s doing wonderful things.

OUSU and modesty

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 19:33:04 +0100

Now, I’m sure there are lots of things that I’m going to learn at Oxford university over the next three years, hopefully mostly about history, and probably about the astonishing amount of essentially toxic stuff I can put in my body in the course of a single night, but apparently the one thing I will not be learning is modesty. The first sentence of the Oxford University Student Union’s Freshers’ Guide was:

Congratulations! You’re now a student at one of the greatest universities in the entire world, and in all human history.

No need to blow your own trumpets, guys…

I also (finally) learnt how to tie a bow tie last night, and though I didn’t take pictures, I can’t pretend I didn’t spend half the evening wearing my tux shirt and tying and retying my bow tie…

"In 2011, KFC introduced a 64 oz, $2.99 soft drink – a soft drink so big it needed a bucket handle –..."

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 19:55:30 +0100

“In 2011, KFC introduced a 64 oz, $2.99 soft drink – a soft drink so big it needed a bucket handle – and vowed to donate $1 from each Pepsi purchased to the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Media outlets from Mother Jones to the SF Chronicle and The Atlantic decried the cruel irony of the promotion, listing the progression of soda sizes from the 1950s through to today, underscoring our ballooning caloric intake and skyrocketing obesity rates. But in the end-times era of capitalism, it should no longer come as a surprise that the reigning corpo-political oligarchs present us with combo meal solutions to the very problems they helped create.”

- adbusters (via theanxiousghost)

grandejouissance: This is my depiction of Euan as a weasel. The...

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 19:27:13 +0100

grandejouissance:

This is my depiction of Euan as a weasel. The resemblance is uncanny, isn’t it?

This is apparently an accurate reflection of how Tumblr sees me. Oh good.

(Do I really look like a weasel?)

"Many of you tell me you’re glad that at a time of real economic uncertainty, we put aside our..."

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 22:58:19 +0100

“Many of you tell me you’re glad that at a time of real economic uncertainty, we put aside our political differences to provide our country with stable leadership. And many more of you have put cat shit, dog shit, sheep shit and even your own fecal matter through the letter box of my Sheffield home.”

- What Nick Clegg should have said, Part I

Probably a bit early to have bought a winter coat, but I’m...

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 21:23:48 +0100

Probably a bit early to have bought a winter coat, but I’m going to pretend that it’s cold and that it’d be impossible to buy one when I’m in Oxford. (The shop assistant certainly looked a bit shocked that I was buying a peacoat in this weather).

Peacoat from Sandro, Henley top from Acne.

skaggirl: in which jamie macdonald writes the original ‘15...

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 20:42:55 +0100

skaggirl:

in which jamie macdonald writes the original ‘15 shades of grey’

J’ai Tué Ma Mère/I Killed My Mother (2009) So this film...

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 20:08:42 +0100

J’ai Tué Ma Mère/I Killed My Mother (2009)

So this film basically chewed me up and spat me out last night. You should all watch it.

"The Innocence of Muslims"

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 19:34:53 +0100

UGHHHHH. I’m really sick of defending shit like the “Innocence of Muslims” in the name of free speech. Can the next person or group of people who decide to insult a world religion please do so in an artistically meritorious way? But none the less, shit, even lying, offensive, poorly scripted, cheaply filmed, badly dubbed shit made by a fraudster, a soft-core porn director and an alleged methamphetamine cook should be defended.

Defending someone’s right to say something — no matter how shady they are and how much we disagree with their message is surely a fundamental pillar of our society, and we should realise that there is a difference — and not a small difference, but a gaping chasm — between defending someone’s right to say something and defending the content of what they say. The guy who made the “Innocence of Muslims” video is a complete arse —he really, truly is an utterly despicable individual who made it purely to wind people up — but his right to say that still exists. At this point, a lot of people, even on the liberal left, seem to decide that while the director of the film has the right to be an arse, none of this is his fault, and instead the Muslim world — which let’s face it, has been poked with a fairly big, crude stick these past few years/decades — should learn to better accept criticism and even insult directed at it. I’m not so sure…

As far as I’m concerned, this kind of outrage, and these kinds of protests do not come out of nowhere. Like Salman Rushdie’s (incidentally unreadable) novel, the Satanic Verses; or like the (badly drawn, unfunny) Danish cartoons this video was picked up on, and was used by other interested parties (in this case an Egyptian Islamist TV channel) as a way of manufacturing (justifiable) outrage against the West, and as a way of bringing that outrage of a violent and public head, in the form of the protests that have been seen this past week. People do not spontaneously get angry and take to the streets — there are organisers with targets in mind. Rushdie’s novel had been out for months before Khomeini decided to issue a bounty on his head — it just so happened that the outrage was a good way for him to bolster his regime (floundering after the Iran-Iraq war); similarly, the “Innocence of Muslims” YouTube clip had been on the internet for months, and eventually a TV channel picked up on it, gave it some Arabic subtitles, and here we are.

It may seem that there’s a kind of outrage machine that works in the Middle East — aiming to create scenes like the ones that have been seen the past few days, but at its root, it seems to me to just be a more extreme version of what we see with Fox News, Glenn Beck and papers like the Daily Mail. The outrage that all these media outlets — and many more — try and generate is fundamentally the same thing that’s being done here, just on a more impressive scale, and in different geo-political circumstances. But really, please, if you’re going to insult a world religion through the medium of film, or literature or art, please make it a good work of art so we don’t all have to buy another ‘solidarity copy’ of an unreadable novel?

P.S. I’ve just seen the cover of the French satirical magazine as well, and I’m sick of politicians calling for restraint and sensitivity, and the US government saying, in apparently contradictory terms, that “We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others.” — belief systems should all be open to satire, and to criticism, but as I say, I do wish people would do it in a funnier way.

Hunter S. Thompson

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 23:30:48 +0100

Hunter S. Thompson

servilemassesarise: Obviously in reference to Newsweeks...

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 22:29:44 +0100

servilemassesarise:

Obviously in reference to Newsweeks publicity seeking, islamophobic front-cover - Muslim Rage - which includes a picture robbing the subjects of their context

"Personally, I dread Thatcher’s death. It will be a nightmarish blend of the hysteria that followed..."

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 20:28:29 +0100

“Personally, I dread Thatcher’s death. It will be a nightmarish blend of the hysteria that followed Princess Diana’s tragic accident and a month-long political broadcast for the Conservative Party. “She put the ‘great’ back in Great Britain,” our impartial media will lecture us; those who dissent will either be purged from the airwaves or demonised as spiteful lefties. Senior Labour politicians will feel obliged to join in the serenading of a PM who, in many cases, laid waste to the communities they represent. I hope she goes on and on.”

- Owen Jones on Maggie Thatcher

The Thick Of It The second episode was simply fantastic. While I...

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 19:40:32 +0100

The Thick Of It

The second episode was simply fantastic. While I think the coalition is interesting, Malcolm Tucker’s presence elevates the show from funny to sublime.

(Also, my dad knew Peter Capaldi about 25 years ago, just sayin’)

"The Duchess of Cambridge is topless in the French magazine Closer, and it is too close. The Duchess..."

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 21:10:53 +0100

“

The Duchess of Cambridge is topless in the French magazine Closer, and it is too close. The Duchess is no feminist, or anything like one. She is a semi-silent, semi-saintly doll (the recent photographs of her in a headscarf touring the Far East invite comparison with plastic Madonnas), who in her engagement interview clutched her husband’s hand and called him “a good teacher”, as the feminist clock tick-tocked in the wrong direction.

She is a reactionary figure, and this is a reactionary crime, even if the editor-in-chief of Closer – a self-serving monster called Laurence Pieau – calls it great fun. “What we see is a young couple, who have just got married, who are very much in love, and who are splendid,” Pieau said. “She’s a real 21st-century princess,” Pieau said. “It’s a young woman who is topless, the same as you can see on any beach in France or around the world.” Why couldn’t she just tell the truth and admit that Kate’s breasts are profitable, easily converted into gold? Any defence of these photographs is nonsense, including the tired press freedom argument. Poor press freedom, wanting to be free for Kate’s breasts, or Harry’s bottom, and not more interesting things; the Windsor family is right to sue. We bought the clothes. We do not own the flesh.

Perhaps the most offensive thing is that it will do the monarchy no harm, because it is a love of sorts. (What her controlling husband will say to this mistake is another thing.) Enjoy the photographs, or hate them, or both; they will only add to her myth. The worst nightmare for monarchy is indifference. Tabloid tales and tawdry soap opera do not diminish it, if other family members are more stable, or too old to take their clothes off, or to play strip pool. Fascination, no matter the vessel, no matter how squalid, is essential.

It is grating to ascribe victimhood to a woman so privileged, especially now, when other victims are many, and growing, but she is a victim. The government’s assault on the poor is ever more vicious, even as the coverage of Kate would melt even Edward Longshanks’ heart. The London Evening Standard’s front-page headline on Thursday was “Kate’s kindness”, accompanied by a photograph of the Duchess sitting with a child who has leukemia; the next step is obviously to imbue her with healing powers, like the old monarchs, who “cured” with touch. Her trajectory whizzes on to who knows where. No one can live for long in a euphoric dream, as Auden wrote. It will end badly.

”

- Tanya Gold on Kate Middleton

Photo

Sat, 15 Sep 2012 20:25:46 +0100