British hostage Kenneth Bigley’s plight is horrific. Imprisoned and abused he’s already witnessed the beheading of his two American hostage colleagues. A caged, broken man in a Guantanamo Bay style orange jumpsuit, his captives are getting an awful lot of mileage out of torturing this poor soul. They have no reason to kill him… yet.

Kenneth Bigley has become a major asset to his captives. They can force him to say anything and so-called quality newspapers like the Independent print it verbatim. An excellent reason to keep him alive. In fact all the front pages are lapping it up. This from the Daily Mail is a corker. As ex-Guardian editor Peter Preston wrote in the Observer: ‘ We… need to realise we’re being manipulated… Al-Zarqawi’s reality is slaughter as spin’.

As the torture is dragged out, the family is forced to grovel on television programmes only seen in the UK. Latching on to news that Bush may have blocked the release of two women prisoners (the kidnappers’ key demand), brother Paul calls for Blair to ‘pick up the bloody phone’ and ask Bush to relent. He continually calls for the PM’s resignation. Understandable, but wrong all the same. Whatever the detail, this would prove hostage taking works.

It’s this propaganda that’s keeping Bigley alive. Stateside, the response was more measured. Alive the two Americans had no value and only their brutal murder could win headlines. They couldn’t hurt Bush.

And the other 1,500 British contractors are surprisingly unsympathetic. ‘This man has been too blatant; [Bigley] has gone, “Hey, I am British, they won’t hurt me.” But he was a soft target.’. He foolishly refused the protection of the army and placed himself in the firing line. With his propaganda value well proven by a naïve British press, he’s inadvertently increased the risk to every other British citizen in Iraq and elsewhere.

We all want more corpses on TV……Not a war for idealists

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‘People there will hurt you ’cos of who you are’, sang Blur of the countryside. Echoing the common sense view that small communities, by virtue of their isolation and inexperience, tend to be more bigoted than the cosmopolitan masses. By virtue of the same common sense such communities can indulge practices that make those same cosmopolitan masses’ hair stand on end.

I’ve never been a fan of common sense, which is supposedly shorthand for the stuff we all know to be true (and so never test) and that too often turns out to be common prejudice. But take the Pitcairn islanders where half the male population (seven) are charged with underage sex. Clearly an example of one of those small communities playing up to the common sense stereotype, a community so far divorced from our cosmopolitan morality it sees nothing wrong. Meanwhile the countryside lobby, is having fun appropriating what it no doubt sees as politically correct language. They claim to be ethnic country folk and are initiating a letter writing campaign to support a new coding on the census. While I don’t doubt it’s a bit of a wheeze, I hope they succeed as having been recognised as a minority, they’ll no longer be able to claim to be typical English.

Anyway. The link is that tradition and ethnicity are both communities’ defence against the tyranny of the majority. The islanders say underage sex is an essential part of their identity. They point out that the girls consent and are not otherwise abused. However, those looking in from outside are likely to argue that just because the girls have been brought up to believe this all okay, doesn’t mean it is. Similarly, the country folk argue that inflicting suffering upon animals for fun is part of their culture and ethnic country folk are brought up to see nothing wrong in this. The country folk further illustrate how little their culture respects animal life by mutilating dead horses and cattle, scrawling notes on them and dumping them in the street. Many hope that their new found ethnic status will allow them to reintroduce cock fighting.

Yet cock fighting is a tradition excised from the countryside without genocidal consequences and the end of fox hunting does not mean the end of country folk. It’s great that Britons have so many lifestyle choices, but all have to accept an underlying morality. And thankfully, that’s a morality that says underage sex and inflicting animal suffering for fun are wrong, whatever your community elders told you.

Fox hunters and the retreat into pop……Fox hunting: parliament’s chance to be relevant……Pro-hunt barbarians at the gates……On animal fashion, morality and suffering……‘Celebrity worship essential’, say scientists (the Bryan Ferry connection)

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Alienation is the common thread to so much cinema lately, with this near future pic exploring relationships complicated by genetics; too many clones. Everything here you’ve seen before, but the montage is so powerful it remains more than fresh. It’s an accomplishment that further proves Winterbottom’s incredible range and versatility.
With extra marks for the soundtrack, 9 out of 10.
Ruang Rak Noi Nid Mahasan (Last Life in the Universe)……The Village

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Last Life’s pondering could do without the boom mike’s cameos spoiling the visual sensation it’s after and introducing comedy where it shouldn’t be. Yet, while it reaches out for disconnection and alienation, without quite getting there, it’s a strangely engaging film.
A clumsy 6 out of 10.
Sarin ui chu-eok (Memories of Murder)……Code 46
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You Shall Know Our Velocity was one of my more literary holiday reads and it’s a bit of a road trip by genre: Will’s dragging his friend around the world getting rid of a large amount of money he’s obtained by a quirk of fate. He wants to do something good, but really doesn’t know how and the idea is to find poor people and just give them a wad.

Of course, the real journey Will’s trying to make is one that will enable him to come to terms with his best friend’s accidental death. He wants to make sense of the world and his place within it so there’s lot of American naïvety. Like the French tourists who say America pays for the world (unlikely) and his surprise that other countries aren’t hanging around America’s gates like smokers outside an office, wishing they could come in from the cold. And that’s the book’s purpose, in a way, to expose America in a new way, that is, by the points of difference and discomfort with the foreignness of everything else.

So does his character arc? Well when a novel’s first person opening paragraph tells you this story is post-mortem, how can it do anything else?
People watching in Praia da Rocha……Airport Terminal better than a MyTravel Airtours cruise ship
Notes on a Scandal by Zoë Heller……Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
If you found my comments useful, let Amazon know by clicking You Shall Know Our Velocity and hitting the ‘yes’ button underneath their copy of this review. You may buy while you’re there.

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Daily Mail effective proprietor Viscount Rothermere’s shot across the Conservative Party’s bow will almost certainly come to nothing, but is nonetheless remarkable for showing how far the Conservative Party’s fallen. Seven years into a Labour government and few people over age of thirty can think of them as anything other than the natural party of power. A desperate idea that implies voting for prejudice over reason is the natural thing to do. And yet…

Just before my holiday, Michael Howard was fighting to keep the faithful (average age 65) alive with a ‘war on political correctness’, one of the great myths of our time. By the time I’d returned, it had inevitably fizzled out, as the only alternative would be for Howard to have put his racist MPs in charge of community relations, renamed ‘special needs’ children ‘retards’ and the ‘disabled’ ‘spastic’, while wearing a ‘Call me yid!’ t-shirt to show he calls a spade a spade, even when he’s the spade.

Before that choice was the great idea; here they whinge at the ease with which Labour neutralised them. They said people should choose which school or hospital they use. Labour said, ‘okay’ and the entire Tory manifesto had to be binned.

Now the anti-political correctness campaigners say they’re being bullied by the government’s new right-wing friends. The Conservative Party’s always been aligned to US Republicans and senior Tories have always enjoyed the convention. But this year, the Tory leader was left squealing after a series of phone calls from Bush aids telling him to get back in his box and not to question Blair on Iraq. Whenever he did so, a senior Republican would phone him up, ultimately reducing the would-be prime minister to tears by threatening that he ‘would never meet the president’.

And now country’s most self-righteous newspaper is flirting with Labour. How bad can it get?
How to read the Daily Mail

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While it’s true that Bryan Ferry’s music has never been overtly political and all this stuff coming out of the fox hunting debate shouldn’t have a bearing on his status as one of greatest singer-songwriters, somehow it has affected my mood. I’ve found myself enjoying simple little pop songs far more and avoiding the deliberately more meaningful.

So last night I got some counselling from a wise old friend and now I’m back listening to Manifesto and less troubled. Once the artist releases a work into the world it takes on a life apart. Intention becomes largely irrelevant as the consumer makes sense and finds meaning, if any. So if I read Manifesto’s title track as a call to revolution and Ferry didn’t mean that, that’s his tough luck. Artists can’t invest their work with one true meaning, because it reflects much within them that they themselves cannot be sure of. We are all part of a society and, often unwittingly, internalise values, prejudices and the stuff everyone knows to be true in a bundle we call common sense. Sometimes the most powerful work is that which exposes our common sense in a way the artist may not have intended.

Anyway, back to Ferry. As a teen in the 1980s I heard this working class miner’s son proclaim his lack of politics in an interview and to be fair, its ex-wife and son that are pushing today’s agenda. I wonder if we’re witnessing a classic confusion; acceptance by the upper classes equals success.

Underage sex & country folk……Fox hunting: parliament’s chance to be relevant……Pro-hunt barbarians at the gates……On animal fashion, morality and suffering……‘Celebrity worship essential’, say scientists (the Bryan Ferry connection)

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The closure of Boddington’s brewery is sad, but is not such a great blow to the city or to real ale. The truth is the beer isn’t that good and industrial sites don’t fit in modern city centres. The city now has numerous microbreweries like Marble and retains a clutch of historic family brewers offering centuries of heritage and who own hundreds of pubs; Robinson’s, Lees, Holt’s and Hydes (who will now brew cask Boddington’s, in Manchester).

My lucky introduction to real ale came in the early 1990s, with my first PR job working on Robinson’s, then owned and managed by the fifth generation (I believe the sixth generation have entered the business now). I reported to Mr Dennis (family members are addressed Mr first name, because there are too many Mr Robinsons). Truth was, in common with most of my generation I was used to drinking lager and I was put on the spot by a couple of legends; Ian Botham and Max Boyce. They were in pantomime at the now demolished Davenport Theatre and I’d been put in charge of the brewery tour and press call (front page of the Stockport Express!). After the tour Botham accused me of being a lager drinker and I lied. Anyway, by the end of the afternoon I’d consumed a very large amount of bitter and now drink real ale whenever I can. I’ve since worked with Tetley’s, Marston’s, Bass and the North West Brewers Society, none of which exist in the same form today; the ’90s were a rocky decade for brewing.

Back to Boddington’s. Location does make a difference to the beer. For many years Tetley’s transported water from Leeds to Warrington by train, but still couldn’t match the original. But cask Boddington’s will still use Manchester water over at Hydes. The keg (smoothflow) and canned products are (almost by definition) only consumed by people who know nothing about beer and so won’t notice. (Better to drink a European lager than keg ale.) More importantly, the brewery site is an area in the midst of significant redevelopment with new housing and shopping facilities and an industrial site doesn’t really fit in with that. Closure will provide a good opportunity to ensure these new developments properly integrate with the city centre.

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More holiday reading, this time in the form of Zoë Heller’s Man Booker (2003) nominated Notes on a Scandal (also published as What was she thinking?). And without slighting the book (it’s a great read) I’m a little surprised it got that nomination as it’s not that groundbreaking in a literary sense; erring more on the side of quality thriller.

What does make Notes on a Scandal innovative is telling the story in first person, where that person is not the true protagonist. Sheba, the female teacher who’s had an affair with a pupil should be the story, but she’s too messed up to string a sentence together. So it’s left to Barbara, the lonely, possessive, spinster colleague and friend to tell a story of which she’s not really a part, from a perspective that places her at the centre of everything. So rather than paint a (predictable?) picture of Sheba’s lust and corruption, we get the repression that somehow fuels Barbara’s own (to her unspeakable) obsession with Sheba.
People watching in Praia da Rocha……Airport Terminal better than a MyTravel Airtours cruise ship
The Mermaid’s purse by Katy Gardner……You Shall Know Our Velocity by Dave Eggers
If you found my comments useful, let Amazon know by clicking Notes on a Scandal and hitting the ‘yes’ button underneath their copy of this review. You may buy while you’re there.

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…but I’m consolidating the RSS/Atom site feeds some of you use to keep track of me into a single feed at www.stephennewton.com/feed. This will make it easier for me to keep track of you. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s okay.

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