SOCIETY/ POLITICS: THE ENGLISH DEFENCE LEAGUE AT NEWCASTLE

"A picture says a thousand words", a saying which makes the point that an image can say in a moment what words take far longer and to less effect than prose.


Case in point: the EDL at Newcastle a few days ago where they were bussed in en masse to 'protest' the murder at Woolwich of the young soldier by two Islamic extremists. Needless to say it was just an excuse to attempt to stir up trouble and racism. Here are some photographs. Just look at them and they tell you more about the EDL than words can.

From The Independent.

From Newcastle website The Tab.

From the Chronicle website.

Draw your own conclusions.

CINEMA/DVD: STAR TREK -INTO DARKNESS (2013)/ PROMETHEUS (2012)/ DREDD (2012)

Okay, three Science Fiction movies, all dependent to an extent on what has gone before. Some spoilers, none too serious, will  inevitably follow though I doubt if any will come as a serious surprise to anyone who is remotely interested in them.

The good-

the bad-

 

and the frankly irrelevant-

albeit aesthetically pleasing.

Not as good as the first film which reinvented the Star Trek universe by changing the past. That doesn't, however, mean that similar things don't occur. But in this new universe, Starfleet is more militaristic and war is looming with the Klingons.Against this background, a rogue Starfleet officer John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) commits acts of terrorism and buggers off to a planet in Klingon territory with Kirk & co in hot pursuit. Harrison is (and this really is no surprise and it's given away in IMDB's credits for the film) the genetically created superhuman Khan (as in the movie Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan).

While it has its moments and it's certainly well made, I didn't like it as much as the first film. Simon Pegg's Scotty I just found irritating and I normally like Pegg. Alice Eve (see above) is all right and the bra and panties shot (see above) is just purely gratuitous and serves no purpose other than to titillate teenage males and a sixty-four year old blogger. There's not enough Uhura  thereby largely wasting the talents and beauty of Zoe Saldana.

But Benedict Cumberbatch is just brilliant as the villain. He exhudes menace, power, and authority and wipes the floor with anyone else onscreen with him. After this movie Hollywood will be at his feet. Thankfully he's more interested in good parts than money, though he's probably quite comfortably off by now, and has shown a canny eye for good roles like this one.

ST:ID isn't a bad movie and there's always plenty going on, it's just not as good as I was hoping for.

Is this a prequel to Alien? That was the question everyone was asking before it came out.

Spoiler answer: yes, it is. And it's a very good prequel to Alien. It not only provides the origin of the repulsive space monster we all love to go yeeurgh! at but also the origin of life on many worlds and human intelligence on ours.

Noomi Rapace (excellent) and her boyfriend find evidence that pinpoints the location of an alien race they call The Engineers and an expedition is mounted by Weyland Corp to go there. There's the usual mixed bunch of characters who are basically cannon fodder plus Michael Fassbender as an android. They believe, because of the planted evidence, that the Engineers will welcome their long-lost lost children. What they find is a bleak world, a massive building containing lots of dead dessicated bodies and that the Engineers are not what they thought. Neither is the building as lifeless as it first seems; cue lots of gruesome deaths.

Basically this a very grim piece of SF which fills in the background of the Alien universe and does in an intelligent, if rather gory, way. Ridley Scott amps up the suspense, piles on the twists (like where the hell is Guy Pearce who gets major billing in the opening credits), and builds to a climax in which humanity as a whole is threatened.

Great stuff. Just don't expect many laughs.

Karl Urban is Judge Dredd and, unlike Sylvester Stallone in the previous ill-thought of, but I rather enjoyed it, movie, Urban never removes his helmet.

This film is pared down to its basics. Dredd and a rookie Judge are trapped in a massive high-rise run by a ruthless gang of drug-runners led by Ma-Ma (a scarred and frankly terrifying Lena Headey). To get out, they have to destroy the gang. Cue lots of brutal bloody violence and lots of bad language that would never have been seen in 2000AD the original British weekly comic in which Dredd originated. (Though let's face it, we all knew what Drokk! really meant.)

There are only three characters who matter: Dredd, Ma-Ma, and Judge Anderson (a telepathic rookie on her first and possibly last day as Judge and excellently played by Olivia Thirlby).

For those who don't know, Judges are police, judge, jury, and executioner. When Dredd says, "I am the Law," he means it. No mercy, no compromise. This really is a nasty violent narrow-focus brutal piece of SF cinema. Yes, you're right, I loved it and really hope there's a sequel.

You really don't mess with this Ma-Ma.

Will she survive her first day on the job?

Hard to believe, but this man is not as nice as he looks.

CD REVIEW: U2: ROCK'S HOTTEST TICKET (1987)/ U22 (2012)

What, you haven't heard of these two 2-CD live sets? Perhaps a look at the covers might help.

Now obviously some of you aren't U2 fans and it would be unreasonable to expect you to have been aware of their existence. But I am a U2 fan, ranking them up with Neil Young, The Grateful Dead, Sandy Denny, and Bruce Springsteen up at the top of my musical favourites, and until a couple of weeks ago I'd never heard of these albums either.

The reason is that, unknown to the world at large (or maybe it's just me), every so often U2 release a live album through their fan club and available solely to its members. I only learned about them when reading U2s entry on AMG (All-Music Guide, the best music reference work on the web) and suddenly sat up and went WTF! And then: want, want, want!

The natural place to start looking was Ebay and, sure enough, I found a few. However, before I start detailing my adventures (me? use hyperbole? never!) in obtaining the two albums which are the subject of this post, here's one of the fundamental rules of economics: an item is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. When I first started selling on amazon Marketplace a few years I put up a rare lavish Blues box set for £750 and that was the lowest price. I've gradually reduced the price since then and it currently stands at £120 and it still hasn't sold.

So I looked around and read reviews where I could. AMG suggested that Rock's Hottest Ticket was maybe the best of the lot but to be aware of boots and similarly titled albums which only consist of one CD. I finally found one on Ebay as a Buy-It-Now for £47.95 plus postage, from Holland, a seller with a high rating, and not a boot, honest meinheer. I swallowed and pressed the button.

It turned up, well packed, in a reasonable time, and as described. The case and inlay are a bit worn but the discs are fine. It was produced in Italy, presumably under license or by the Italian branch of the fan club, and it doesn't feel like a boot. It's an entire concert recorded in Chicago on April 29, 1987 and it's great. 

I then went after Go Home, an Irish concert recorded a few years later.  A seller had one up with no minimum bid and no bidders. So I put one in to find out that there was a reserve price. After going up to £25 I sent a message to seller asking what the minimum bid was. She replied: £65.00.  Good luck with that, I thought. When I checked a few days later it hadn't sold. I went after another copy, minimum bid £8.00 and stopped at £13.00 when I was the highest bidder. Now obviously I didn't expect to get it for that price so what I decided to was wait until the last 20 seconds and slam in a bid of £32.00. Nobody else would be so clever. Except in the last 20 seconds two people outbid me and it went for £39.95.

In the meantime I'd put in a minimum asking price bid of £27.95 (plus postage) for U22, and, much to my surprise, I got it and it arrived this morning. Advertised as new, it was exactly that. But what I didn't realise was the sheer size of it. When I first looked a the unopened packed I thought, bugger me they've sent a vinyl version. But it wasn't, the booklet was simply the size of an old LP.  Slim, not long, with large effective photos and comments on each track by the bass player. A very attractive package. Unlike RHT, the tracks here are from a variety of shows across the world from 2009-2011 and from a choice of 50 songs played during the long tour, the 22 here were selected by members of the fan club voting for their favourites, rather than the band picking them and it seems to have worked.

Okay, finally, the music. I like live albums and have them by the other artists I mentioned above, perhaps too many by The Dead but what the hell. Neil Young on stage with Crazy Horse just blows the walls down. With U2, many of their songs are anthemic anyway and suit a large stadium. The live versions are often looser, have more guitar, and are usually longer. There's a sense of space about the playing while Bono draws in the audience and, let there be no doubt about it, he has a powerful distinctive voice though he well knows a whisper can sometimes be more powerful than a shout, and immense charisma. I'm familiar with nearly all of the songs and just looking at a title I can hear it in my head but these live version add something different and it's the closest most of us will get to a live show bar watching a DVD which isn't the same.

Anyway, enough is enough. Given the cost of these albums I think I'll stop here.

Well, maybe if I can pick up a copy of Go Home at a reasonable price...

Update.

And suddenly I'm tripping over live U2 albums. I discovered Live From Paris, a 1987 concert released as an Itunes download (for a mere £7.99) in 2008. Of course, I've bought it but that really is the last one for a while.
 

POLITICS: THE (IR)RESISTIBLE RISE OF UKIP

I always, when dealing with something as sensitive or important as politics or whether you prefer The Beatles to The Rolling Stones (yeah man, I'm a 60's child), prefer to set out my stall before proceeding. Now, on the surface I am a mild-mannered, middle-class, animal-loving (in a good way) retired librarian -the type of person UKIP would love to have on their books- but, scratch the surface and I stand revealed as a libertarian lefty -I positively froth at the mouth at the thought, or even a sniff, of capital punishment, racism, sexism, homophobia, blood sports, corrupt capitalism (like all of it, man).

So you can imagine that I'm not going to say anything nice about the fragrant flowers of UKIP.

And I'm not going to disappoint you.

A moderate view is that they're a mild-mannered harmless bunch of Little Englanders -the kind you have a good laugh at, at their naivety and their outdated and old fashioned attitudes.

But, bluntly, after the recent council election results they're beginning to scare the shit out of me.

They do this for a couple of linked reasons and none of it is meant as a compliment.

Basically, what's happened recently has stretched a small-time party beyond its limits. In terms of organisations when compared to the three main parties it's like a corner shop compared to Marks & Spencer. It's party organisation consists of half a dozen people which means it's impossible to vet all the would be candidates and sometimes it's even hard to find candidates at all. But what worries about me this is that, even though would-be party members are supposed to declare if they've ever been members of those loveable rascals (a euphemism) the BNP (Bloody Nasty Party) and EDL (English Dimwitted Louts), it would be all too easy for extreme right wing racists like those loathsome morons (an understatement) to infiltrate the more respectable UKIP.

Not that UKIP needs much help. In reading up on UKIP for this post, it seems that some of UKIP's policies are actually more extreme than the BNP's which is something I'd never have imagined. Okay, so many are to left of my favourite bunch of racists, but somehow that still doesn't manage to warm my heart. Many of their policies on the economy are blueprints on how to bankrupt the country if they went ahead.

What really bothers me is that almost every member has no useful political experience and they simply don't have the brains or experience to form a government and it's frighteningly possible that they could hold the balance of power (replacing the Lib-Dems as the choice of the disaffected voter) after the next General Election. But my worst fears are that if they ever did attain real power we'd see an authoritarian government with blatantly racist policies, policies which would severely threaten the weakest members of society, and worse and that their leader Nigel Farrage (who I'm sure is genuinely well-meaning) would find he has a tiger by the tail.

It chokes l'il ole lefty me to write this, but faced with a choice solely between the Tories and UKIP I'd vote for the former every time.

The moral of this tale is: don't vote UKIP, you know it makes sense.

No similarity between the two images is intended except satirically. I did, however, find them on the same Google Images page when I typed in UKIP. I honestly don't know who the clones are supposed to be.

 

 Would you seriously vote for someone who looks like a stupid twat?

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